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How Geeky Were The Participants At My Niece’s Wedding Over The Weekend?

The young lady marrying into our family has both a quote from Ender’s Game¹ tattooed on her calf and the Triforce on the back of her neck, and she and I were wondering if how many of the grandparents in attendance would faint over dead if MC Frontalot’s I ♥ Fags got played at some point during the dance portion of the evening. All in all, a lovely time was had, but I’m a bit behind on my readings. Mea culpa, and let’s see what I did manage to catch up on.

  • Aaron Diaz² has been doing some thinking about costume/character design over at his art blog, Indistinguishable From Magic. Part one: costume redesigns that work; part two: costume redesigns that don’t work; part three: costume and character redesigns for characters that desperately needed it; and part four: what a Justice League reboot could (should?) mean (note the Diaz’s version is neither supermajority male nor supermajority white). I like that one element Diaz kept from recent DC history is Power Girl’s look of You Have To Be Kidding Me, done so very well by Amanda Conner³
  • I usually end up talking about Sinfest when Tatsuya Ishida does something particularly good in the ongoing love story of Criminy and Miss Fuchsia, and that was my original impulse after seeing yesterday’s strip. Then I realized that the real story beat wasn’t Fyoosh’s worry about being caught out by her boss (the proverbial Big D himself), it was the uncharacteristic concern for the well-being of another that Fyoosh’s fellow Devil Girl, Baby Blue, showed. Even before Crim helped Fyoosh find her good side, Blue was always the more vicious of the pair, and here she’s helping her compatriot instead of ratting her out (although clearly Fyoosh is afraid of the possibility).

    But more than that — in the prior weeks, Ishida’s been colliding some of his other storylines. The feral Devil Girl (fresh from an encounter with Monique and her shoes) has encountered evil fanboy Lil’ E, who’s in the midst of some serious confusion about who/what he is. He’s not expecting an expression of genuine, innocent friendship from the wild girl, and doesn’t know that she’s kept Big D from screwing with his head further … for the moment, at least.

    Ishida does this — he takes mindlessly dogmatic (or just mindless) characters and changes them. Sometimes it’s slow, sometimes it’s rapid, but it never feels unearned. Funnily enough, few of these storylines that involve (for lack of a better word) redemption feature Jesus (of course Jesus is a character in the strip; so is God, and Buddha, and the Great Dragon), it’s mostly the characters trying to work things out for themselves and tending (sometimes oh so slightly) towards being better people. In a lot of ways, it’s the toughest thing in the world to write a redemption; despicable characters are easy, but a character that you dislike and then come to empathize with? Pretty much it’s just Ishida and Milholland that can pull off that particular trick. Must be a side-effect of their strips being dot-nets instead of dot-coms.

  • It never pays to ignore Rich Stevens. New secret company: followed!
  • Final question — is the RSS feed at Makeshift Miracle working for everybody else? Is it just my stubborn adherence to Opera that’s keeping me from setting up the feed properly?

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¹ The enemy’s gate is down, naturally.

² The Latin Art-Throb.

³ Shaenon Garrity (Nexus blah blah Webomics blah Geographic Area) described it as Conner always drawing Power Girl like she was just slightly drunk.

I love the slow burn with Crim and Fyoosh. I still remember when he first reached out to her and how she was never the same afterwards. Sunday’s strip did make me think, “Hmm, the plot thickens,” but I hadn’t really put my finger on the fact that Blue was showing concern. Those two did used to be a “couple” of sorts, as I recall, though it was (presumably) mostly used as a temptation device for Slick.

Makeshift Miracle works fine for me. I’m using Google Reader on Chrome.

[…] of Stevens, I mentioned the other day that it doesn’t do to ignore him, and his new venture) has shown us why. I’ve written […]

[…] about this, but Sinfest has had some endgame feeling to it lately — following on the earlier fairly major events surrounding Fyoosh and Lil’ E, Miss Fuchsia has declared her intent openly, Lil’ E is shifting his self-perception, […]

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