Khana

Okay, so, I'm not the bestest artist in the world, and drawing bodies still eludes me, but my half-profiles get better, and I quite like these two.

Femmeslash-fanart under the cut (it's G-rated, though.)


( Xavin and Karolina from Marvel's 'Runaways' )

Okay. Still need to write that post where I thank all you lovely people for all your lovely Christmas gifts. (Yes, I know 2/3rds of january are gone already. Shut up.)

Anyway, something completely different: I started reading comics. American comics, at that.
I've been reading mangas for quite some time now, and as a kid I read loads of Asterix, but superhero-comics are kinda different, and I didn't think I'd get into those, really. But somehow, I did.

So, it's once again Tamora Pierce's fault, cause she started writing White Tiger for Marvel, which I wanted to read, cause I read all of her stuff, and it was quite good. Continuing story and all that.
Once I discovered that one can find torrents of comics, I tried Buffy Season 8 (very slow to come along, and the volumes are way too thin. Interesting, but nothing like the series...), and as I was on Whedon-Comics already, I tried out his Astonishing X-Men, which isn't all that bad. (The fandom confuses me, though. Why are there three new series being published at the same time? How the hell does one fit that into a continuum?)
Then Pierce started reccing Wonder Woman, which I gave a try because of that. It isn't half bad, although that Amazons Attack-thing was kinda stupid. Tammy was very fond of that Gail Simone-person as a comic writer, so I read as far as the torrent got me, which was a few volumes into Gail's run. I'm not sure I want to continue - she starts out with a so-called 'Captain Nazi', and even if he seems to be a long-standing DC-badguy, that kinda didn't work for me. Captain Nazi? Are you serious?
Well, Tammy claimed to also be very fond of the Birds of Prey, which I've been reading roughly 50-60 volumes of over the last few days. Really really enjoyable stuff, even if I have to look at wikipedia every other volume to figure out who that guest hero is again. A little confusing at times, but for the most part, really interesting characters, and I think a nice start into this whole bat-family-stuff, as Batman, Robin, Nightwing and all those others get frequent cameos and stuff, so I had to kinda read up on them all. Also, Oracle was Batgirl. (See, I'm learning.)


Anyway, experiences.
It is rather different from reading manga, to say the least. The story-arcs are - for the most part - rather short, 10 volumes maximum, then we get some kind of closure. In manga, you can get one story drawn out over 10, 20, 50 paperbacks.
The changing writers (especially strange with Wonder Woman, one writer left in the middle of a story arc and that Arc was left open, to be finished about a dozen volumes later.), changing artists, hairstyles, character design, (Wait, wasn't Power Girl waaay slimmer and with long hair just a few volumes back? Where did she get all those muscles? And what's with those parallel universes, anyway? Confuuuusing.) stuff like that changing from one volume to the next without any notice are kinda hard to get used to. But when the stories are okay (and most of the arcs I read so far were. Way more splashy and fast-paced than manga. They can get a major fight done in two, maybe three volumes/chapters. Now, look at Naruto...) and the characters do have some depth (and those I ran across so far had, for the most part), it's really enjoyable, and it's nice to be able to say that at the end of this volume, this arc is over. Also, I love that most of the time, they don't have teasers at the end of one arc so that you get cliffhangers every single chapter.
Really, it's an interesting change.
I even got used to all the seemingly random italization and bolding and stuff. At first, that was really rather annoying - like the readers are deemed too stupid to figure out what's important in that sentence and what's not, but after a while, I guess I just didn't notice any more. Hm.


Now, what else can you people recommends in either DC or Marvel? Stuff that's recent enough so I'd have a chance at obtaining it, and that's kinda beginners-friendly... I do have the whole big bunch of Marvels Civil War here (complete with all the crossovers into separate series. 104 volumes all in all), but, you know, it kinda scares me a little. Tooooo many characters I don't know anything at all about.

Any hints as to where to continue from here? I do have a bunch of BoP left, but that won't hold for long. (And even if it may seem like it, I'm not all that fixated on girl-heroes. Guys are fine by me, just - a little character-deepth and some kind of story would be nice.)