BeetleMania!

[thehefner]

So here's my submission for heykidzcomix's Blue Beetle meme. Because I had nothing better to do with my time, of course.

Comments

[matthew-sun.livejournal.com]

I LOVE THIS! Banter a-plenty!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Thankee! And love the icon too, I was wondering if someone was gonna go ahead and make that.

[jcsbimp.livejournal.com]

Wondrously good.

[kosher-jenny.livejournal.com]

Awesome. Made my sucky day better. :D

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Yay! I really do try.

[holli.livejournal.com]

holy crap, this is awesome!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Yay! Was hoping you'd see/like it!

[unlovablehands.livejournal.com]

I HAVE A HIDEOUSLY APPROPRIATE ICON. ALSO THUMBS UP.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Awesomeness. And thank you!

[megaloo13.livejournal.com]

*dead from the laughing*

Pope!Beetle is the best thing ever. That is a wonderful hat.
Also, your icon is very excellent.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It means a lot! And I wish I could claim credit for the icon; I stole it from some wonderful person who actually took the time to edit and animate it.

Also, I really liked your two Beetle drawing, particularly the second one. Ted never really should trust Booster to redesign his costume, should he?

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh God, Ted's expression. *dies*

Reiterating the icon love!

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And your icon too is teh awesomeness, just so's yeh know. I think even Big Momma Waller has met her match.

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

Heh, thanks. If I thought there were a chance of being apprehended by Ted's crotch, I would take up villainy like that.

HARVEY! *misses her nutty neural clone*

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

I know! Sigh, I do miss that crazy neural clone. Especially when he re-enacted Reservoir Dogs or dressed up in a giant bunny suit.

Hell with it, I miss that entire show. There just isn't enough love for it.

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

It was the fandom that got me into fic. It was the fandom that got me spending all the money I was supposed to use for textbooks on tickets to cons over the other side of the country, where I would crash the houses of internet friends I'd never met before. It's the fandom that made me who I am today!

(It's up to the individual to decide whether or not this is a good thing.)

Even though I haven't watched it in a year or two (I have fourth-season issues), I still pimp it out every single chance I get. 'Tis a thing of beauty. (And also just about the only decent sci-fi to come out of this country. Sigh.)

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Which country do you mean, USA or NZ? I don't know from whence you are writing!

See, the fandoms have a way of inadvertantly scaring me off from their beloved material. Crazy Harry Potter fans and Browncoats only serve to make me kinda wanna avoid the stuff, good as it is. Then, of course, whenever I tell a Firefly fan to watch Farscape, they're like "What's Farscape?" Argh.

But I too support money for fandomy things. Who needs textbooks, bah!

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

Australia, actually. But I'll totally forgive you that, 'cause I wish I were in NZ. *g* It's our Canada-equivalent.

I must admit that I did go through a scary pimping phase when I first got into the show, but I'm a bit more laid-back about it now. ;) It's a pretty good fandom, although (unsurprisingly) a lot deader than it used to be. I'm a minor character whore with no interest in John/Aeryn (apart from when it's totally fucked-up), so I mostly avoided the larger sites, and hung around on the Leviathan (http://www.shriftweb.org/leviathan/) list, as well as on the MBTV boards (but they refused to give us a Farscape forum, and then the mods went crazy and I left, anyhow). Leviathan had a high concentration of intelligent, wonderfully crazy people. The vast majority of people on my friendslist are people I met through these places, even though most of us no longer have fandoms in common. Great fandom, great fans.

Then, of course, whenever I tell a Firefly fan to watch Farscape, they're like "What's Farscape?" Argh.

Oh, geez. Hey, here's a hint: it's the popular cult sci-fi programme that staged a successful Bring Back Our Show campaign right before your Bring Back Our Show campaign. Hell, there were a lot of people who worked on both campaigns. Geez. And okay, I, um, actually only ever watched about twenty minutes of FF, for various reasons -- including (but not limited to) 'Joss Whedon pissed me off, and I refuse to forgive him', and 'the twenty minutes I saw didn't interest me at all'. But at least I know it exists!

What really bugs me is the people who won't watch because of the Muppets. Dude. The Muppets are one of the best selling points. Who the hell doesn't like Muppets?

Textbooks are for the weak. It's not like I ever actually ended up using them, anyhow....

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

hahaha, love the icon! It has Ted, it has zombies, it has everything!

Tangent: I'm reminded of a little joke my friends and I do every so often: "What do we want?" "BRAINS!" "When do we want them?" "... BRAINS!"

That outta the way, I actually thought Farscape was a NZ-based show. Stupid me. Half the cast is either kiwi or Austrailian as it is. And they're your Cananda? Oh dear.

Not a FF fan? I only ask because EVERYONE bloody well else is, and me... well, let's just say that it and X-Men are the only things Joss Whedon does that doesn't make me want to smash. Because Buffy and Angel just reealllly rub me the wrong way.

Yeah, what is up with that "Bah, I don't like muppets" defense? First of all, EVERYBODY loves muppets. Everybody. How anyone can hate muppets are beyond me. It's like hating Ringo Starr or pie, it's just an impossibility! And second of all, the Farscape Muppets rule! Look at Star Wars, which is better: muppet Jabba or CGI Jabba? I rest my case. Or case closed, whatever.

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

Heh, groaty made the icon for me because I was having a bad day. I love my friends. *g*

Nah, it's an Australian show, although it also got funding from the US and UK. Mostly-Australian cast, with the major exceptions being Ben Browder (US, natch), and Lani Tupu and Jonathan Hardy (NZ). And practically everything else is made in NZ, so the confusion is understandable. ;)

Totally our Canada -- smaller population, colder, more stunning scenery, similar accents, we make fun of their vowels, they're better than us at one of our main winter sports (although we don't play that crazy 'rugby' game in this part of the country, so it doesn't matter over here *g*), cheaper to make TV shows and movies, and they've managed to maintain some some sort of left-wing political power. (I guess Canada kind of fails on that last one, post-election. Heh.)

Buffy/Angel are what got me into online fandom in the first place, but my bitterness towards them now is overwhelming (as opposed to my FS bitterness, which I can confine to the parts of the series that pissed me off). I actually avoided watching BtVS for years, because I hate teen shows, but I eventually got sucked in... right at the time the quality was going downhill, anyhow. After the sixth season (which I was following online while it aired in the US, and wasn't planning on watching when it screened here), I read an interview with Joss where he was asked about dipping ratings for the sixth season, to which he replied that people didn't like it because they couldn't hack the darkness.

And, I'm sorry, but no. Writers/creators who insult the fans' intelligence automatically go on my shitlist (and he was already on there). That was the last straw, and I swore off all things Whedon from that point on. One of the reasons why I respected FS so much was that the writers often (not always, but often) admitted to their mistakes. As long as they can recognise that they're not perfect, I can forgive writers a lot. And damnit, I can hack 'darkness' just fine. Love it, in fact. It's shitty writing and big-headed creators I can't handle.

I love holding grudges, man. *g*

A friend lent me a few issues of Astonishing X-Men, and, while I didn't mind the overall concepts and themes, the dialogue and characterisation shat me no end. Everyone was written like a particular BtVS/AtS character. Kitty = Buffy, Emma = Cordelia, Hank = Xander, and so on. I love the X-Men because of who they are; I don't want to see them written as other characters. Plus, Joss's dialogue just grates on me sometimes, even when he's writing SoCal teens; seeing his dialogue come out of Logan's mouth just makes my skin crawl. (I have the same problem with Bendis at times, but he writes awesome teens, so I mostly tend to stick to his teen characters. And I love how he writes Logan in terms of characterisation, so I tend to be a bit more forgiving if there's any teen-style dialogue there, particularly in Ultverse.)

For interest's sake: what is it about BtVS/AtS that you hate so much? *curious* I can certainly understand not liking it, so don't worry, you won't offend me. ;) As I said earlier, I have a thing for secondary/minor characters; I actually couldn't stand Buffy herself. *g* As soon as the minor characters started getting screwed over, I lost interest.

Muppets make everything better. Putting a Muppet in a show would greatly increase my chances of watching it. Especially if they farted helium.

(And it's almost six in the morning in this part of the world, so I'd better sign off. Heh. *does not at all procrastinate online for another half-hour or so*)

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I hear the Canadians crying about their new "conervative" government, just like I hear the Brits whine about Tony Blair, and all I can think of is how both governments are liberal utopias compared to a lot of Bush's America. I mean, in England they air movies completely uncut, language, nudity and all! Whine whine whine, people.

Whedon's always struck me as a rather abrasive, smug, pig-headed fellow, which isn't always a bad thing. And he's also the sort of writer who puts his baby before his audience, also not necessarily a bad thing. You combine the two, and there can be trouble.

His dialog bugs you too? THANK GOD THERE'S SOMEBODY ELSE! Gahh, I feel like the only person who doesn't think Whedon's dialog is the bee's knees. Still, I am enjoying X-Men (it's Sebastian Shaw, my brother in muttonchops! Yay!) Bendis' dialog also similarly annoys me, because he writes everyone as if they were Bendis. I'm sorry, but J. Jonah Jameson does NOT sound like Brian Michael Bendis! Gahh!

As for what bugs me about BTVS/A, it's the dialog. I just can't stand it. It makes me want to stab something. Things like "I call him Mister Pointy" or euphamisms for horny such as "groiny" work really well in things like Giffen and DeMatteis' Justice League, but coming out of the mouths of J. Crew WB teens really, really turns me off. At least the movie had Paul Ruebens and Rutger Hauer. And it also gives me the pleasure of knowing Donald Sutherland pissed Joss off immensely. Not so much because I dislike Joss, but because Sutherland is so gloriously mad.

Mayhaps I'll see you around in the next day or so. Get some sleep!

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

Australia used to actually be like that, too -- it was like, well, no matter how bad we think we have it, at least it's nothing like it would be under Bush. The past year or two, though....

I must admit to writing dialogue for characters that sounds quite a bit like my own, but I do at least make the effort to remove any words/phrases that wouldn't sound right coming out of a particular character's mouth. (Wolverine, saying 'retarded' or 'go ninja on [someone]'? Um, NO. *glares at Bendis and Whedon*) My Aeryn Sun and my Booster Gold both sound like me, but they sound nothing like each other. If that makes sense.

Plus, my own speech patterns are a lot less idiosyncratic than those of these guys, so I can get away with writing as myself more easily. It's all well and good to have a distinctive style, but that doesn't mean you can just write everyone as the same person.

I remember reading somewhere that Whedon was working at a school while he was planning BtVS, and so he asked students there what to do about writing high school kids, since the lingo kept on changing so much. IIRC, the kids told him something along the lines of 'just make it up, so you don't have to worry about staying current'. I could deal with this (although it still annoyed me back when I was watching the show), but the fact that he carries these speech patterns over into all his other projects just drives me up the wall. The X-Men are, for the most part, not teenagers. Many of them have had pretty nasty lives. They're not going to be talking like the BtVS characters. STOP IT.

Actually, one of the reasons it took me so long to start watching the series was because I totally loved the movie when I was a kid, and I didn't want to see some stupid TV show ruin its cheesy goodness. Heh.

And it also gives me the pleasure of knowing Donald Sutherland pissed Joss off immensely.

How so? *intrigued*

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that Wolverine dialog? Not so good. But forgive me, I just kinda squealed a bit in the scene where each of the X-Men gets a page or so of internal monologue while they fight the giant monster, and Wolvie's entire monologue? "I really like beer." I'm not even a Wolverine fan, but man, that did amuse me, I hate to admit. Of course, just before that, Joss had Kitty say to Emma: "Yeah, your not saying that would be nifty." Which kinda gave me the shudders for a second there.

Well, I think it's one thing for characters sounding distinctly like the writer. But it's another when that writer writes all those characters as if they were just slight variations on the same person. Joss does have distinctive characters, even if they are all prone to the same sort of distinctly Joss snark and sarcasm. Whereas Bendis writes everyone. Every single person. Giving long monologues. With. Fifteen. Million. Word. Balloons. ARGHH. (and also, he puts parenthesis inside a word balloon. What the fuck? Dude, just make the words a smaller font, like Giffen and Dematteis' comics do, gah! But then, I seem to be the only one really bothered by this)

I will say this for Joss' X-Men that he's done right by the characters, imo: 1.) he made Wolverine NOT the focus of the book, thank god, and 2.) he finally writes Scott for as great and complex a character as he's always been. disc_sophist and I are members of our own little club, The People's Ethical Treatment of Scott.

The only reason I got addicted to watching Buffy was Spike. That was it. Because he had that whole John Constantine thing going.

As for Sutherland, the way I understand it (you could get a better story from any of the Joss boards, I'm sure), Sutherland didn't like some parts of the script and used his star power (Sutherland is greater than puny upstart screenwriter!) to rewrite whole parts. The only one I can tell you off-hand is that his character was supposed to have shot himself in the mouth rather than let Rutger kill him, but Sutherland changed it to Rutger... killing him. Which led to Dark House comics putting out an adaptation of the original Joss script with Buffy having a Gellar likeness (Kirsty forever!).

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are Joss fans out there who hold a vicious grudge against Sutherland for offending their master and refuse to see any of his movies. These people shall never know the joy of HEAVEN HELP US with Monk Sutherland. He may be vaguely mad, but ours is not to question His will. Sutherland is and Sutherland does.

[apathocles.livejournal.com]

While Scott isn't an OMGFAVOURITE of mine, I do like him a lot, and am glad that someone's writing him well.

That Sutherland thing would probably piss me off... except, well, he's Donald freakin' Sutherland. 'Nuff said.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

He pissed off Joss Whedon and banged Julie Christie on film. He's the goddamned Donald Sutherland.