request

If somebody could get me a still from the episode of Family Guy that Cartoon Network aired last night, specifically the part where Brian and Stewie make out while under a stage hypnotist's thrall, I would be very happy.

Because I am in fact a giant perv.

If this comes as any surprise to you, feel free to read back through some of my LJ entries, maybe rifle through my memories where all the really juicy stuff is bookmarked.

rec

So, if you've been involved in slash fandom any length of time at all, you've probably heard of From Eroica With Love. I certainly heard OF it long before I had any real idea what it was (beyond a series of some sort that a number of my fellow slashers followed) -- which is, a Japanese "boys love" comic originally published starting in the mid-1970s.

Boys love manga, also known as yaoi ("yow-ee"), have traditionally been aimed at an audience of adolescent girls, and features romantic and/or sexual relationships between male characters. (Yes, there's a good deal of crossover between yaoi and slash; I'm often tempted to say the main difference lies in the mainstream awareness of yaoi in Japan vs. the near-invisibility of slash in the West, but it's not quite as simple as that.)

Eroica isn't explicit, or rather it's not as graphic as some manga get; the dialogue makes the characters' desire for one another quite clear. Or at least, the first three "chapters," stories approximately seventy-five pulp-comic pages in length each, which comprise the first volume of the From Eroica With Love collection, isn't explicit. I'm not entirely sure what later volumes may bring.

There have been fan translations of Eroica, as well as other manga, available for years. The internet and affordable scanners have made it possible for fans to "scanslate" many Japanese comics -- scan in the pages, edit out the japanese characters, and replace them with English (or other language) translations using a program like Photoshop, then compile all the scans into .zip or torrent format for other fans to download from sites like Hochuuami or Nakama.

Now, at long last, there is an official translation of this classic of yaoi manga... and it's available in a comics shop near you, because DC comics is distributing it.

To be precise, it's been released under the "CMX" imprint, a subdivision of Wildstorm, itself the "mature readers" division of DC Comics. (Rather than an adult content warning, the cover is marked "T for teen; sexual themes" like the video-game ratings system.)

Still. I LOVE MY FANDOM. And I love DC.

( More on Eroica, for those who need convincing... mild spoilers )

All in all, I found volume 1 of From Eroica With Love well worth the $9.95 cover price, and I'm looking forward to volume 2.


If the maintainer of dc_clocktower, or anyone else who thinks they know the answer -- the community info specifies Vertigo titles as welcome, but doesn't mention Wildstorm, much less CMX -- would let me know whether I ought to link to this rec there, I'd appreciate it.

rant

The SciFi channel is officially on my shit list.

Last night and tonight, I've been watching Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. It's fantastic, as good as the four seasons of the series ever got (not going to be spoilery now, may write up a review later) and visibly benefitting from a considerably larger special-effects budget than they've previously had to play with.

But. The so-called "miniseries" is only four hours long. At least 40 minutes shorter than that, actually, what with the commercials. Actual run time, we're talking more like three, three-and-a-half hours.

In other words, it's a longish film.

On the bright side, I didn't have to figure out whether to use a 6- or 8-hour tape, or some combination thereof.

On the other hand, three or four hours is no replacement for the full fifth season of episodes that SciFi was under contract to buy from Farscape's production company, and screwed them (and us) out of.

Don't even get me started on the dren SciFi paid for with the money they stole from Farscape.

---

And then there's Earthsea.

Adapting a novel, or a series of novels, to screens large or small is always a challenge. It's impossible to keep everything in, and, particularly in the fantasy and science fiction genres, there can be numerous story elements which are either impossible or prohibitively expensive to depict. Some elements of a story will inevitably need to be truncated, or portrayed/narrated/explained in a way different from the original text.

None of these factors have any bearing on why I'm so ripshit over the way Sci-Fi is adapting Ursula K. le Guin's Earthsea books. (Yes, apparently they're condensing at least two of the books into the one four-hour microseries, but I'm not going to declare that's a mistake without seeing the thing first.)

Here's the problem.

Ursula le Guin made a point of populating her world of Earthsea with mostly non-white peoples: a wide variety of brown skin shades, a wide variety of cultures. There were a few characters we'd call white, but only a few. This wasn't just an affirmative-action gesture; it underlies, and is crucial to, many elements of the story.

SciFi cast everybody white. Everybody, with the two exceptions of Danny Glover as the Token Mystical Other (a blatant perversion of his character's status in the source material) and Kristin Kreuk as... a white girl played by a half-white, half-Asian girl who has demonstrated over and over again her inability to be a tenth as good at acting as she is at looking pretty.

I have actually seen people argue that SciFi "had" to cast the way they did, because audiences wouldn't be interested and advertisers wouldn't invest in a science fiction series with a handful of white characters outnumbered by black, brown and tan characters. Yeah. Suuure. Because the Matrix series was such a box office bust and never had more than a fringe following.


I'll just be over in the corner, growling.