Substitute DE for a New Decade

[sdelmonte]

Everyone knows about Sherlock Holmes and Avatar and Doctor Who and Supernatural and Harry Potter. But what about the things that you love and that everyone else hasn't read or seen (or even heard of), but should?

I'll start off with Marvel Comics' Nova, the story of a space-faring super-hero who is the last member of the storied Nova Corps (Marvel's surprisingly interesting version of the Green Lantern Corps). It's a little continuity-heavy at times - it grew out of one crossover event and gets sucked into several others - but the stories seem to work on their own, the writing by Abnett and Lanning is crisp and witty, the art is very good, and the hero himself is likeable and about as heroic as anyone I've encountered in a super-hero comic in ages.

ETA: I should probably also mention that DC Comics has reprinted the first 30 issues of The Question in five trade paperbacks, with the last coming this year. It's not just prime canon for my pup, but it's also one of the most influential and highly regarded comics of the 80s, written by Denny O'Neil at his peak.

Your turn.

Comments

[dynastessa]

Do I really need to say it?

I think I throw my fandom rec around like a nagging mother, but everyone should totally give Percy Jackson and the Olympians a try.

Seriously! There is very little wrong with it, and it's loads of fun. AND THERE IS A MOVIE coming out in February!

[sdelmonte]

Any thoughts about how good the movie will be? After the failures of so many adaptations of YA fantasy novels that aren't named Harry Potter, I don't expect much.

[agonistes]

THE GOLDEN GIRLS.

If you live in the United States, you are not seeing anything like this on TV right now. Yes, it's cheesy, yes, it's campy, yes, continuity is mostly pastede on yay

(how many colleges did Rose Nylund go to? three, according to the series: an agricultural college, a different agricultural college, and one where she majored in Pig Latin, and then there's the episode where she reveals she never graduated from high school and takes a night school history class from Dorothy, despite having said in season two that she was the valedictorian of St. Olaf High School, having graduated fourth in her class (they drew straws to see who got valedictorian))

yes, it has a tendency to make every episode A Very Special Episode, but you know what? I'm having a hard time thinking of another show that portrayed sexually active older women as a normal, healthy phenomenon. Or that was willing to come out and say, "you know what? AIDS is an everybody disease, so haters to the left." Or any number of other social issues the show took on while being -- fifteen years later -- entirely hilarious. Every episode passes the Bechdel Test. And you can tell that the actresses were having the time of their lives. I love my show a lot.

[sdelmonte]

Think it would help the cause to say "this is where Joss Whedon started?"

I never got into this show - it just didn't do it for me - but the cast was always outstanding. Bea Arthur and Betty White are among the great sitcom actresses (I know them from their work in the 70s on All in the Family/Maude and Mary Tyler Moore respectively).

[minkhollow]

Villains By Necessity, totally. It's a tough rec to throw around, as the book's out of print, but I do it anyway because the book is so... so amazing.
Also, some days I don't feel like Warehouse 13 gets enough love. The concept leaves all kinds of interesting doors open, and the characters are a lot of fun (even the crazy bastard, in his way).

[gorgonfondness]

Video games by the now-defunct translation company Working Designs, in particular Mia's canon Lunar, which I never find many fans for but know they must exist since the first game has been remade four times, and Arc the Lad. And I really need to replay Arc the Lad myself since, while I remember it being awesome with great characters, lovely music, and a combat system I don't often see in video games, I can't site any truly specific examples of why you guys need to go play it. D=

I also highly recommend Psychonauts, as does the infamously hard to please Yahtzee in his Zero Punctuation review of the game. The story has elements we all know and recognize, but with plenty of interesting twists and surreal imagery to make it anything but boring. And while it is a very humorous, cartoon-style game, a closer look at its darker points makes the game deeper and, at some parts, even a tear-jerker. More often than not, Psychonauts ranks high in lists of The Greatest Games You've Never Played.

Rec for the new decade

[yakalskovich]

Watch 'The 13th Warrior' (or read the novel by Michael Crichton, 'Eaters Of The Dead'). This is not a canon involved in Milliways, and I don't mean to make it one; I just take some icons for Urquhart from there and re-watched it for screencapping, after having originally seen it in 2000 or thereabouts.

It gave me a harsh reality check because the POV character through whose eyes we see the uncouth Northmen (and slowly learn to respect them even though they are utter barbarians with revolting customs) is an Arabic Muslim from Bagdad. Played by Antonio Banderas. Yep, he's the good guy and the one we are to identify with. Even though he is a good, devout Muslim. Arabic writing, kneeling down to pray to Allah, no pork and no alcohol: - he does it all. In 1999, when the movie was made, there was no doubt that a general common or garden American cinema audience would be ready to identify with him and just enjoy the movie as a good adventure yarn based off Beowulf. Now, ten years later, I doubt that any studio would make the film any more. Muslims have become suspect and othered. The last decade did more damage in our minds than we realised -- or at least in mine. Watch the movie or read the book, enjoy how handsome Vladimir Kulich is (movie only), and identify with the bewildered little Arab on his pretty little white horse among the ginormous bear-like Vikings, thereby getting some of the damage from the constant media barrage of the last decade out of your system.

At least that's what I did.-

Sorry for being so political today!

Re: Rec for the new decade

[sdelmonte]

Politics are allowed.

And I was this close to saying "Doctor Who finale - discuss?" so politics is mild compared to the fanstorm I chose not to unleash. (DW fans are welcome to visit my own blog for my reactions and to post there instead.)

[spooky-lemur.livejournal.com]

A couple of my recent book favorites are The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flemel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alchemyst), Elantris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elantris) and Flora Segunda (http://www.amazon.com/Flora-Segunda-Magickal-Glass-Gazing-Sidekick/dp/0152054332).

I would have to second your recommendation of Nova and add the recent Guardians of the Galaxy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_the_Galaxy_%28modern%29), Secret Warriors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_warriors), Iron Fist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Fist_%28comics%29) and the Immortal Weapons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Weapons) mini series which is just about wrapped up now.

Webcomics of awesome are Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0697.html) (a D&D parody), Brathalla (http://brat-halla.com/) (the Norse Gods as kids) and Dr. McNinja (http://drmcninja.com/newreaders.php) (How can there not be anyone from this series in Milliways?).

And lastly, I must advise Jane and the Dragon (http://www.qubo.com/jane_show.asp) for lighthearted fun.

[djcati.livejournal.com]

We had a Dr McNinja in one of my other games and he was AWESOME. We definitely need one in the bar, haha.

[alpha-orionis-v.livejournal.com]

Hot Fuzz. We have some Fuzz!Pups listed in the cast list, but I've not seen them actually in the bar (sad Zed is sad). It's a sort of back-handed Wicker Man remake where the city supercop gets transferred out to the middle-of-nowhere Gloucestershire, and discovers that country folk are NUTS. Also, this movie is so gay that the guy who wrote and directed it has posted slash fiction for it to the internet. Seriously.


ETA: On the comic book front, I was very surprised by The Umbrella Academy. It's by Gerard Way (Yes. THAT Gerard Way), but it has police monkeys! And a monkey butler. It's about a group of children who were all immaculately conceived and born at the same instant, and now have super powers. Only now they're all mostly grown up, and more than a little damaged. Except for one, who is still a child, and knows how the world will end.

[wakeupnew]

I think Nicholas and Danny are still technically around (and they were/are, btw, fabulous), but I'm less sure about Skinner and the Andies; I think they may be gone.

(♥♥♥ HOT FUZZ)

[djcati.livejournal.com]

CHERUB (http://www.cherubcampus.com/), natch. It starts out a little dubiously, but over the series the author's writing improves a lot, and people other than Gary Stu James get some of the spotlight, and also bonus points for having characters who are spies and kick ass and oh yeah they also happen to be gay. AND STILL ALIVE, SHOCK HORROR. (Well, two main characters and a few one-shots. But I maintain that Lauren -- James' little sister -- is in the closet.)

And in a totally different genre (and not written for twelve year old boys), Heroes Die (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_Die) (and its sequels). Just, there are not words to describe how much I love Matthew Stover's writing, so if you like sci fi or fantasy and don't mind some gratuitous violence (though I'd argue it's not gratuitous as such, but there is a lot of it), check the books out. I'm not entirely sure the first two are still in print, but they're definitely available as e-books. Plus here is a short prequel story (http://www.desertwords.com/fiction/inthesorrows.html) to try first!

[camwyn]

When you say 'Abnett', is that as in Dan Abnett, the novelist who writes a boatload of Warhammer 40K stuff?

[sdelmonte]

As far as I can tell, yes. (I am always trying to find various Abnett and Lanning comics in the libraries, and I always find Abnett novels.)

[venusadept_2]

Need I say anything? Oh, all right, I will.

Golden Sun

Golden Sun's fandom is quite weird, in that it isn't weird. I don't know how else to summarize it. Consider the numbers: Nintendo's three big lines are generally agreed to be Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. Over at the Pit, Zelda has an insane number of fics, but Mario and Metroid combined have less than one and a half times as many fics as Golden Sun. My only explanation is that nobody's heard of it, but everybody who has, contributes. As far as the fans themselves... Well. The shipping page on the Golden Sun wiki links directly to both the TVTropes pages on shipping and crack pairings. Sometimes it seems that there's an ongoing competition to write the crackiest pairing and make it believable. Despite that, though, there's next to no killing off characters to make room for preferred pairings. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of fandom tropes that Golden Sun conspicuously lacks - no memetic mutation, no Chuck Norris comparisons...

I know for a fact that there have been at least three GS-specific RPs here on Livejournal. All of them have gone defunct, possibly due to the utter lack of any updates from the companies behind it all. Well, that's not completely true; at E3 '09 a sequel was announced... and then apparently forgotten; there's been approximately one added piece of information in the intervening 215 days.

But yes. Golden Sun. Everyone needs to know it and give my Felix some canonmates.

OH AND: Some of you may have heard of limyaael, most famous for her "rants" on fantasy and fanfiction. One of these rants is on quests. While Golden Sun is ineligible for the last half of Limyaael's points, on the grounds that it doesn't really have a "quest object" as she uses the term, it absolutely nails the first three. (Or, well, there's some discussion about the first one. But definitely 2 and 3!)

(Come to that, early Final Fantasies need love, too, but not as blatantly as GS.)

[vivien]

I have a special place in my heart for Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count St. Germaine series. St. Germaine (and the many variants he uses over 4000 years of life) is a noble vampire who is the hero protagonist of all the extremely well-researched historical novels. They are romance novels, when it comes right down to it, so they are escapist reading, but smart escapist reading. They always feature strong female characters (sometimes his lovers, sometimes not) who defy the multiple realistic constraints of the times in which they live. She has a shorter series of novels focusing on Oliva Atta Clemens, a early C.E. Roman lady turned vampire, and Madeleine de Montalia, an 18th century French vampire. I can't provide links, but my favorites are Blood Games (early C.E. Rome), Come Twilight (multiple centuries in the Pyrenees), Blood Roses (Black Plague Europe), and one whose title I can't remember but is set in 9th century Saxony and features a woman who takes on a chatelaine role and is an incredible leader and warrior. The Church, of course, doesn't approve.

[wakeupnew]

THE RED STAR, YOU GUYS



(It's a sweeping alternate universe USSR with industrialized magic and an epic plot, and the art is stunningly beautiful and has loads of strong ladies kicking ass.)

[spooky-lemur.livejournal.com]

I *SO* heart The Red Star. The art, the story...all of it is just seamless and glorious!

[requiem2adream.livejournal.com]

I'm very fond of the Dresden Files books - don't bother with the short lived TV series. They'll never be high literature but they are amusing magical detective pulp fiction and I adore the characters.

Comics wise you could do far worse than Huntress: Year One. The art is pretty and the story is solid, as is the writing. I still get shivers when I read some parts, despite the fact that I've read it about 5 times in the last year.

[student_of_impossibility]

*Lee, with Tavi's journal*

While we're talking the Dresden Files: Butcher's other series. Standard High Fantasy, often quite tropic, and mostly just made of hilarious Romanic fun: Codex Alera.

Ignore my use of the pup journal for its main character. Really.

[wakeupnew]

Also, I don't know that it's terribly obscure, as every time that I reference it, more people say they've seen it, but I find kids' show iCarly hysterically funny, both for children and adults; it's witty and clever, and features one of my favorite characters in anything ever, because I'm not even going to try to pretend I'm not biased here. Sam is the reason I started watching the show and why I continue; she's brash and crass and mean and loyal and a fabulous bully, and she makes me laugh out loud repeatedly.

The rest of my canons are fairly ubiquitous/well known. I mean, Iron Man (though more people should READ THE COMICS, which are made of crack), Hellboy (again, I wish more people read the comics; the BPRD series in particular is spectacularly suspenseful and spooky), True Blood, Sherlock Holmes, National Treasure, M*A*S*H...

I have Star Wars, too, though it is the rarer extended universe variety, which features things like this epic smackdown.

UGHHHH HTML

[sdelmonte]

Have you read any of the recent Iron Man stuff? I picked up a story from last year that wasn't half bad. Good character play for Tony and Pepper, as well as a holdover from his Director of SHIELD days named Maria Hill. But the plot was an outgrowth of the bad crack that has infested Marvel of late.

[kristi-cagle.livejournal.com]

I'm going to recommend a few canons to everyone.

Kim Harrison's The Hollows series is fantastic, and yet, next to no one has read it, it seems like. Give it a go; Urban Fantasy without the...urm...creepy-huge manbits of LKH...and...there's actually plot. Sorry LKH-muns. I'm from STL, and I will make sure to let you know if I ever meet anyone like she describes to just be running around STL like it's common to have manbits that you could mistake for a third leg. Nothankyou.

I also recommend The Japanese Beetle! because the entire canon is free, and it's available. A lot of it is a mite bit dated, as a lot of what he was doing was based on pop culture when he was writing, but, it's hilarious.

[boundxkitty]

*points at icon to say it all*

Though I agree with everyone should read the Hollows! Fantastic work!

[agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com]

Okay a few things that I wicked enjoy that other people might want to check out:

Cairo (http://www.amazon.com/Cairo-G-Willow-Wilson/dp/1401217346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262628089&sr=8-1). A graphic novel written by a girl I used to game with back in my LARP days. "Set in bustling modern-day Cairo, this magical-realism thriller interweaves the lives of a drug runner, a down-on-his-luck journalist, an American expatriate, a young activist, an Israeli soldier, and a genie as they navigate the city's streets and spiritual underworld to find a stolen hooka sought by a wrathful gangster-magician."

Better Off Ted (http://abc.go.com/shows/better-off-ted). "The show deals with the day-to-day absurdities at a heartless technology company, Veridian Dynamics." I like to believe it's about the corporate offices that created Eureka's Globle Dynamics. Very funny. Very off the wall. Just all around a damn entertaining show.

And of course:
TURTLES FOREVER! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_Forever)
What? You didn't actually expect me to make a rec post and not try to pimp this, did you? If you've yet to see it, and want to, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

ALSO!
Anyone BOLD or DARING or...looking to just kill some time, can check out the original Turtle comics here (http://www.ninjaturtles.com/html/comic.htm) for free. Can't beat the price!

[jothra]

GUH, I love Cairo. I think I have told you this before, but the thought remains true.

[innerbrat]

The Middleman. Man, I love that show with every fibre of my being.

Hustle OK, so, you know Leverage, right? You know the British woman who was in Coupling? Well, imagine a smooth, tight con-based show with only characters from her archetype in it - the smooth slick planning-everything leader (Adrian Lester), the young, up and coming short-con artist (Mark Warren), the experienced fixer and handyman, the sexy lady, and the veteran American who knows the game inside and out. The victim is always an asshole, there's always a twist, but they've always figured a way out of it. It's excellent.

Being Human. Game On, but with a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost. And oh so many layers.

Family Man. Werewolves! In the 18th century!

Batman: Brave and the Bold is my favourite cartoon at the moment. It's fun and campy, just like the silver age JLA, and it has a musical episode! With Neil Patrick Harris! And Bat/Canary shipping (also Arrow/Canary, also villain/Canary, both of which I also ship)

And Secret Six. If you're going to read a comic set in any of the Big Two, make it Secret Six.

[sdelmonte]

Don't hit me, but...I don't care much for the Secret Six ongoing. I have no sympathy for any of the characters, even Catman. I liked them a lot more in their BoP guest appearance. (I will admit that I prefer heroes to villains, but Ed Brubaker's Sleeper is about supervillains a lot more dark than the S6, and I love that series.)

I can get behind on you B&B, though. I adore the over the top Aquaman - I am toying with MM'ing him. I think they do a great job with most of the DC heroes they use. And they brought back Baby Plas. That takes guts. (If you have never seen the craptacular Plastic Man cartoon with Baby Plas from the early 80s, you don't know just how much guts. But if you have never seen it, you are lucky. It might be the single stupidest DC animated adaptation ever.)

[remindmeofthe.livejournal.com]

Dan Abnett for the win, it is true. He wrote the only two Torchwood novels I've encountered that were actually good (admittedly, I'm way behind on those, but still, writing an actual good tie-in novel for any show seems to be beyond most writers who attempt it), and has a knack for creating original characters who are just as interesting as the canon ones. I play one of his over in MM, James Mayer from Border Princes.

What I really want to plug, though, is The Thick of It. It's the BBC show that In the Loop, which made its way through the States over the summer and is coming out on DVD January 12, is based on. It's about the goings-on in the Department of Social Affairs on Downing Street, has a wonderfully talented and entertaining cast, and is killer funny. It's also partly improvised, so the dialogue sounds very natural. And if the fact that it's a generally amazing show isn't enough for you, it also has Peter Capaldi playing Malcolm Tucker, who is the polar opposite of the character he played on Torchwood - he swears constantly, he's crude, he's so very good at what he does, and seriously do not piss him off. No. Seriously. Series three also goes further into his character, giving him additional dimension, and Capaldi nails it every damn time, standing out with incredible performances amidst the aforementioned uniformly excellent cast.

Unfortunately, it's also a little more difficult to get hold of than a lot of shows these days, especially if you do not live in the UK (the DVDs currently available are region two only, argh), but PM me if I've gotten your attention here and I'll see what I can do for you.

[boundxkitty]

I would have to say Kelley Armstrong's series Women of the Otherworld. The narrator changes with the books, mostly. The first four are a two in two, being the first two have the same narrator, three & four have the same narrator, and from then on she bounces between the women of the universe for who narrates which book. It's an amazing series that should definitely be looked into! Full of Witches, Werewolves, Necromancers, Sorcerers, and Demons. I love the cast and am personally excited for her newest book to be out already because the narrator is a character you've watched grow up in the series finally getting a chance to narrate her own book!

[aisforamy]

Movies I love that haven't gotten a lot of notice:

Dear Frankie, a bittersweet tale about a mother to tells her deaf son that his father is a merchant marine to explain his absence. The mother authors letters from his 'father' telling of his adventures at sea, but runs into a snag when the boy learns that the ship his father is supposedly sailing on is going to be docking at their town.

Millions A clever story of a motherless boy who finds a sack full of money. The money was supposed to be destroyed as the country converts to the Euro, and he must find a way to spend it all or convert it before the deadline without anyone finding out. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of secret you can keep, especially from the man who went to the trouble of stealing it in the first place.



Mary & Max is a claymation film in the style of Wallace and Gromit. It's a quirky tale of a lonely Austrailian girl who chooses a name from an American phone book at random, and strikes up a friendship via mail by sending a letter asking where babies come from in America. (They are found at the bottom of beer mugs where she is from.) Max Horowitz is a 47 year old severely obese man with Aspergers Syndrome and chronic anxiety issues. The unlikely friendship is strangely charming and engaging.

The Brothers Bloom is a strange movie about two brothers who live their lives as con men. The older brother convinces the younger to help him with one last job, conning an eccentric heiress and having an adventure that will take them all over the world. I enjoyed the diversity of the characters and the odd moments that seem to make no sense, but add to the overall experience.

I also want to recommend The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Rollins and and by Kristin Cashore.

[aisforamy]

Huh. My last two recs didn't come through Graceling and Fire by Kristin Cashore! Reeeeeeead them!

[fiery_ring]

I fell in love with With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, which is an adorable manga series.

[kd7sov]

Y'know what? I'm going to rec something else, too.

Jane Lindskold's books. I haven't read all of them, by any means, but apart from the Wolf series (also called the Firekeeper Saga), which lost me a couple of times, I love everything I've read by her. And she does the research quite well, too - The Buried Pyramid has authentic Egyptian details, Breaking the Wall demonstrates a broad understanding of the histories of Mah-Jongg, China, and Oriental modes of thought...

[shati.livejournal.com]

CHAK DE! INDIA

IT WILL PUT HAIR ON YOUR CHEST AND THEN SHAVE IT OFF FOR YOU AS IT REALIZES THAT STATISTICALLY SPEAKING IF YOU ARE READING THIS COMM YOU ARE UNLIKELY TO FIND THAT CHEST HAIR COEXISTS PEACEFUL WITH YOUR SOCIETALLY EXPECTED GENDER ROLE

... IT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH, CRY, AND SLANDER THE MEMORY OF CATS?

[agonistes]

AND ALSO SLASH THE PROTAGONIST WITH TONY STARK

[the_croupier]

The Sandbaggers: This BBC series will put you to sleep if you can't handle talking heads because it had zero budget back in the late 70s/early 80s when they did it. But if you can deal with that, it's one of the best old-school espionage tv shows ever. Lots of opportunities for people to be unbelievable bastards to one another and characters get greased at the drop of a hat. The body count isn't huge, but you never know when an agent might not come back from a mission (one person's end in East Germany is very grim indeed). Roy Marsden is great as Neil Burnside, the 'hero' if this show had one.

'The Silver John series' by Manly Wade Wellman: An acquired taste, but if you like this sort of thing, you'll really love it. John is a wandering minstrel in the hills of Appalachia, running into all kinds of very American (or sometimes European transplanted) strangeness. Some of the stories misfire, and the novels Wellman wrote later aren't as good, but there are collections of the original short stories in used bookstores, and they're definitely worth a look.

[sdelmonte]

Word is that Greg Rucka pretty much ripped off The Sandbaggers in creating Queen and Country. Which is to say, it's the same universe with the serial numbers filed off and recent politics and wars replacing the Cold War.

[xamotomax]

I love Susan Krinard's werewolf romance series, but not for the romance aspect.

I loved her werewolves, and how they all have differing [sometimes vastly and opposing] views towards being a werewolf [some like it, some hate it, some have trouble trying to decide what they think of it], and the author was not put off by touching on mental illness [something I personally appreciate], humanity, and the world about them [and where they fit into it].

I enjoyed it so much that I really wish she'd written it as pure fantasy, not as a series of romances. It's the romance aspect of the books that kill what could otherwise have been a perfect universe to me [not because I don't think love redeems all (it doesn't always), but because the characters were perfect before they fall in love with their "one true love", which more often than not ruins them as characters].

In an AU setting, where the romance angle is disposed of, they'd be a wonderful addition to any cast list.