Film

Movie Review: Cinderella (2015)

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I’m a little surprised to say that I kind of loved this movie, which I finally rented from Amazon so I could watch it with my daughter. We’d skipped it at the theater because we just weren’t all that excited about it at the time. I mean, it really is just a very straightforward telling of the Disney version of the Cinderella story, mice and all. It looked beautiful, but I didn’t expect much substance–or at least not enough substance to warrant spending $50 to see it at the theater.

I don’t know, though. I say that I kind of loved this movie, but it’s also not a movie that I want to watch over and over again. Sadly, it feels derivative of both of my two favorite Cinderella movies: 1998’s Ever After and 1997’s Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Some of the imagery and emotional beats in Cinderella seem lifted straight from Ever After, including the meetcute in the forest, the bickering stepsisters, the regal vamping of the stepmother, the scheming courtier, and even Ella’s final defiance and then forgiveness of her stepmother. The technicolor costumes with their bright primary colors and iridescent fabrics feel like a direct allusion to the 1997 musical, although this film definitely did not copy its predecessor’s colorblind casting practices.

Lily James seemed a little bland in the title role when I saw her in trailers, but she grows on you throughout the movie. Probably half of her job is just to pose prettily, as the film is rather light on dialogue, but James manages to craft a Cinderella who, though her mantra of “courage and kindness” and her stubbornly smiling stoicism in the face of her stepmother’s abuse get a little tiresome, also possesses enough real charm and humor that I can almost see why the prince wants to marry her before knowing her name.

Richard Madden is well-cast as the prince, who is even given a name here, or rather a nickname, “Kit.” I adore Nonso Anozie, so I was happy to see his handsome face as the captain of the guard, even though I think he’s wasted in these sort of secondary roles. Holliday Grainger and Sophie McShera were fine as the stepsisters, if a little too cartoonish for my taste. Helena Bonham-Carter, of course, is an actual cartoon in real life, and thus a perfect choice for a fairy godmother; she gives a magical performance in this movie.

Finally, Cate Blanchett steals every scene she’s in. I only wish they would have done a better job of deciding if they wanted her to be an irredeemable caricature of wicked stepmother-ness or if they wanted her to be a human character that the audience is supposed to sympathize with a little. Her aesthetic and her strut say wicked, but her eyes often contradict that. It’s confusing.

Some stray thoughts:

  • I could have done with a few fewer slightly anthropomorphized animals, although I’m grateful that none of them actually talked.
  • I could have done with a bit less (or perhaps a bit more) blatant costume porn.
  • I have a very hard time believing that is Lily James’ real waist in that dress.
  • That lime green color that was on lots of things was great, but the blue dress was actually a little to bright to be really pretty.
  • The butterflies on the top of it were nice though.
  • I was bummed that they revealed the ballgown in trailers for the film, but I think now that it’s because the real showstopper is her wedding dress at the end, which is stunning.

Cinderella is good, but not great. I remember reading a ton of pieces when it was first in theaters that were variously declaring it to be either the pinnacle or the end of feminism, and it turns out that it’s neither, in my opinion. This Cinderella isn’t a trailblazer or an independent woman of any kind; she’s just a nice girl with a pretty dress who endures an abusive situation with grace and gets to live happily ever after because she’s a good person. And that’s enough, I think.

I don’t want to watch this movie a hundred times like I have Ever After or Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (which I can’t believe are both pushing twenty years old, by the way), but it’s a solid entry into the canon of Cinderella movies.

Television

Minority Report has some cool ideas, but it’s too busy showing off its future tech to develop them

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“Mr. Nice Guy” was weird. I really want to love this show, and for that I need it to succeed, but last night’s episode was a big step backwards when the show desperately needs to improve upon its shaky start.

The show almost lost me with an early scene of people playing at a park with some kind of clear glass-looking ball thing. Then the camera swoops around and there’s a baby with a big touch screen on the front of its stroller. And some other ridiculous stuff that is less “cool and futuristic” and more “boring and impractical.” And can we talk about how literally every near-future sci-fi seems to really think all the phones and tablets and computers of the future are going to be made of clear glass and what a terrible idea it is? And even if it’s not the worst idea ever, I know for a fact that this has been a sci-fi standard for at least my entire lifetime, and it’s still not nearly as cool as prop makers seem to think it is.

Also, can we talk about the perennial sci-fi insistence that technology is going to drive people apart and diminish human interactions? The singles club that Vega and Dash go to in this episode, where people just touch armbands to calculate their compatibility (I guess, since it’s never really explained exactly what the % on the bands represents) is absurd, and the show takes itself a little too seriously for it to be funny. The biggest problem here, though, is that this matchmaking tech completely undermines the big idea of the episode, which is ostensibly concerned with toxic masculinity and pickup artistry and male entitlement. In a world where people can connect (or not) by just touching their armbands at a club, how is there still room for either pick-up artistry or the type of Nice Guy™ mentality that leads to the explosion of violence that Dash and Vega spend the whole episode trying to prevent?

It’s not that I don’t think these things will still exist in forty years–pick-up has been going strong since the 70s, and Nice Guys™ are probably eternal–but you can’t imagine a future in which these things logically shouldn’t exist (or at least shouldn’t exist the same way they do today) and then still use them as a major part of your television show. Unfortunately, this means that this week’s case of the week just didn’t work at all, and in this sort of procedural show that’s a very bad thing.

The other thing that didn’t work in this episode was the dynamic between Dash (Stark Sands) and Vega (Meagan Good). I still stand by my initial statement last week that our two leads have a nice chemistry, and the actors certainly work well together, but the relationship between their characters is starting to get, well, weird. In an episode that deals so heavily with male entitlement, the most striking display of it comes from Dash, whose drive to stop the murders that he sees is feeling increasingly self-centered as he continuously pushes Vega to bend rules and work outside the boundaries of her role as a police officer.

These characters are supposed to be partners, but I’m not buying it yet, and I don’t think that can truly happen until they are working together in a legitimate fashion. I don’t see what the benefit is to Vega in the current situation. She’s relying on an informant whose information is spotty and possibly inaccurate. They have to keep Dash’s existence and identity secret, which means that they don’t have the support and resources of the police department. Vega is already taking actions that could jeopardize her career–turning off her body cam, giving a police-issue weapon to a civilian, selling police reports–and her other relationships–especially with Blake (Wilmer Valderrama) and Akeela (Li Jun Li), who both seem to sincerely care about Vega. It just seems to be all very one-sided, with Dash getting to do work that helps him feel better about his visions and Vega taking on all the risk and responsibility. We’re two episodes into the show, and it’s already obvious that Vega’s apprehension of criminals in this way is raising a ton of questions from higher up in the police organization.

It’s a problem, and the simple way to solve it is to bring Dash in to the police force through legitimate channels as a consultant or something. This would allow Vega and Dash to work more closely together, create more opportunities for interactions with the show’s truly excellent supporting cast, and it would cut straight to the meat of the story, which pretty much has to be “what happens when people find out about Dash?”

The show is doing some great set-up for that eventuality, and the best scenes in this episode were in service of that bigger plot, but the episode was dragged down with a nonsensical case of the week that felt more like an advertisement for awful future technology that no one in their right mind wants than an actual story with real human people in it. I want more of Arthur, Agatha, Wally, Akeela, and Blake. And I want less silly future technology. They can keep Vega’s lenses, though. Those are actually pretty cool.

Doctor Who, Television

“The Witch’s Familiar” is a great episode for Capaldi’s Doctor, kind of ‘meh’ for everyone else

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Steven Moffat’s track record with two part episodes is dodgy at best, but “The Witch’s Familiar” manages to be a decent and mostly inoffensive, if largely expected, follow-up to last week’s “The Magician’s Apprentice.”

From a storytelling standpoint, the episode isn’t great. The plot is slim, and the episode spends most of its time trying to make its ostensibly high stakes feel real. Unfortunately, there’s never any real sense of danger, and the single major unanswered question of the episode–what happened with baby Davros on the battlefield in the past?–is answered at the end of the episode in a typically (for Moffat’s Doctor) Pollyannaish way.

The biggest problem I had with both this episode and the last one is that Clara and, albeit to a lesser extent, Missy have very little to actually do, and yet they do it very, very noisily–both figuratively and literally. Neither Missy nor Clara truly contributed anything to the Doctor’s story in these two episodes, and Clara’s job in “The Witch’s Familiar” was entirely to exist as an object for the Doctor to have feelings about. Missy, of course, exists to torment Clara, presumably for our amusement, but her shtick is already wearing thin. Missy is also a veritable fount of useful but clunky exposition that could have easily been left out if Moffat was simply willing to go with a less absurd plot.

This episode, though, even more than last week’s, is really the Doctor’s show, and Peter Capaldi gives a virtuoso performance. His interactions with the elderly and ostensibly dying Davros are well-written, and their centuries-old rivalry was believable enough that the flashback scenes with young Davros feel kind of unnecessary and only serve to further show how amazing the Doctor is. Moffat continues to tell us that the Doctor has a dark side or whatever, but the Moffat era of the show has seen a sort of systematic stripping of the Doctor of any and all moral ambiguity. It’s too bad, really, because these Davros flashbacks provided a perfect opportunity for the Doctor to do something dark. No such luck, however.

That said, this is still the most interesting the Doctor has been in a good while, and it was nice to see Peter Capaldi given some decent material to work with. I only wish Missy could be less of a caricature and Clara could be less of a piece of furniture.

Book Reviews, Science Fiction

Book Review: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

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I loved The Three-Body Problem when I read it earlier this year, but I wasn’t really certain what to expect from The Dark Forest, especially with a different translator from the first book. While I didn’t find it to be–overall–as compelling as I found its predecessor, I think The Dark Forest might be the better of the two books if it wasn’t for a sometimes clunky translation.

The difference in translation is subtle but apparent from the beginning, and this is exacerbated by a shift in style from the first book. The Dark Forest is largely an exploration of a couple of interlocking metaphors, relying largely on poetic language and imagery to discuss some heavy ideas. There’s not a ton of plot going on–basically, people are scrambling to figure out what to do about the impending alien apocalypse–and its story unfolds far more slowly than so few events seem to warrant.

It turns out that a four hundred year wait for aliens to arrive for an epic showdown isn’t all the exciting when the aliens have destroyed your ability to make scientific and technological advancements that might allow you to win. It’s mostly just one long, soul-crushing existential crisis punctuated by various smaller actual crises.

The book opens with a lovely metaphorical prologue, which is immediately engaging, although I felt as if some of the poetry of the language must be lost in translation, but then it’s a slog for the first three quarters before transforming into a riveting page turner in the last act. For most of the book, I just felt a little confused and frustrated because so little actually happens–and much of what does happen doesn’t really matter–but in the last hundred and fifty or so pages, it all comes together and makes sense. The translation is still sometimes awkward, but the extended metaphors that Liu has been weaving finally cohere in a climax that is smart and well worth the struggle to get to.

The Dark Forest‘s translation may not be up to the same standard as The Three-Body Problem‘s, but it’s still well-worth reading. It’s a clever, beautiful, and at times darkly hilarious book that both neatly fits into sci-fi traditions and continues to broaden the horizons of the genre with a refreshingly different perspective on perennial science fiction questions.

Television

I’m so embarrassed for everyone involved in Heroes Reborn

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Oh, man. So that happened.

Wow.

I know we all loved the first season of Heroes back in 2006, but we also all remember that seasons two through four were pretty terrible. And I know, I know, writer’s strike or whatever, but you can’t reasonably attribute all of the show’s problems to that. Mostly, it was just three-quarters badly written.

But regardless of the reasons for the original show’s issues, Heroes Reborn is a reboot/sequel that literally no one was asking for. It’s pretty obviously a cynical attempt on the part of NBC to capitalize on what little goodwill people had retained for the original show. But I watched it anyway, because I’m a sucker.

Heroes Reborn is bad.

It’s an ill-conceived idea in the first place, burdened as it is with the history of the original show, but Heroes Reborn takes its badness to the next level in several ways.

  1. Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman) is the only main character from the original show, and his story line in Reborn is boring. After some kind of obviously staged terrorist attack in Odessa, Texas, Noah has some of his own memories erased, and so far all he’s done is find this out. Neither he nor we, the audience, have any idea what is going on, but we also don’t have much reason to care, either. He’s kind of trying to find out what happened to his daughter or something, but even he doesn’t seem to care that much.
  2. New teenaged hero Tommy (Robbie Kay) has a kind of cool power, but his story is weighed down with a bunch of mind-numbingly dull teen angst bullshit. We spend most of the first two episodes learning about Tommy’s high school bully and Tommy’s crush on the bully’s girlfriend.
  3. Married couple Luke (Zachary Levi) and Joanne (Judith Shekoni) are on a revenge quest that is both evil and stupid. This is complicated by the increasingly obvious fact that these two characters absolutely loathe each other. I don’t understand how this couple ever made a child together, and I don’t know what they think they are going to accomplish by murdering every mutant they can find. I suppose it makes sense that Joanne might just be completely unhinged after her son’s death, but I don’t know why Levi sticks around since he isn’t totally on board with all the murder they’ve been doing. Which brings me to…
  4. It’s hard to buy the idea that people with super powers are an oppressed minority being hunted and killed/imprisoned with impunity. I mean, sure most of the super powers are probably not world-changing, but enough are that you’d think it would be pretty easy for these folks to take care of themselves. Even if I accept the idea that the government or some kind of shadow organization might be able to mess with mutants, I think a couple of middle class suburbanites with some small arms would have a tough time against a room full of super heroes.
  5. Everything in Japan is the worst. Both Miko (Kiki Sukezane) 0and Ren (Toru Uchikado) look like anime characters, which is just plain silly, but the major sin here is the whole thing with Miko’s father’s video game. This doesn’t even remotely make any kind of sense, even in a world with super heroes. It’s totally cut off from all the rest of the story so far, and after two episodes there’s still no hint as to how this part ties in to everything else we’re seeing. The very worst part, though? The piss poor computer graphics for the game world. It’s just sad.

There’s some other stuff going on with some people at a casino or something and a guy with a luchador mask, but these story lines are actually so boring that I don’t have anything to say about them. Also, there’s some girl being mysterious and ominous with the Northern Lights and a hole in the sky. That can’t be good.

I just can’t bring myself to care.

Weekend Links

Weekend Links: September 26, 2015

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“Deviner” by Morgana Wallace

Check out the gorgeous artwork of Morgana Wallace. You can also follow her on Tumblr.

So, Game of Thrones won the Emmys. There’s a logical explanation for why this happened after what is ob-fucking-jectively the show’s worst season to date, but it still sucks.

Ta-Nehisi Coates will be writing a new Black Panther comic for Marvel.

Did you know that cherished childhood movie memory The Fox and the Hound is also a book? Because I did not. And I’m traumatized without even reading it myself.

Geek Tyrant sums up why we should all be at least a little wary of getting to invested in Minority Report. (Spoiler: because Fox.)

Lightspeed Magazine interviews Ken Liu.

Ventures Africa has a great interview with Nnedi Okorafor, whose new novella, Binti, came out this week.

The Robot’s Voice on 10 Ways Deep Space Nine is the Best Star Trek Series

Bustle has 11 Sci-Fi Books Every Woman Should Read. I was a little surprised that I’ve only read a handful of these. It’s nice to see a list that’s a bit less expected than usual.

At the Mary Sue, “Strong Female Characters Are Rarely Strong and Barely Characters”

Jim C. Hines on “Overrepresentation”

At Book Riot, “Black Speculative Fiction is Protest Work”

At Tor.com, Aliette de Bodard writes “On Colonialism, Evil Empires, and Oppressive Systems”

“Navajos on Mars – Native Sci-Fi Film Futures” at Medium

Brain Pickings – “A State of Wonder: Margaret Atwood on How Technology Shapes Storytelling While Obeying Its Eternal Constants”

 

 

 

 

Television

Unpopular Opinion: I kind of liked Minority Report.

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I wasn’t making this show a priority because I just couldn’t get excited about the premise, but I finally watched it on Hulu this morning, and it was surprisingly enjoyable.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m still not sold on the premise of the show. In a world where there are increasing concerns about government surveillance and violations of privacy as well as serious problems with police overreach, corruption, and excessive force, Minority Report‘s nostalgia for pre-crime actually might be dangerously tone deaf. I mean, the entire point of Philip K. Dick’s book and the 2002 film was that the whole pre-crime thing was pretty irredeemably evil. The show, as was evident from its trailers, seems to be going with “but maybe it wasn’t?” (And I hope you are reading that in the Eli Cash voice I thought it in.) It’s a tough premise to sell, but after watching the pilot episode of the show I’m at least slightly encouraged that they might be handling things with a bit more nuance than I expected.

The good parts of the pilot are really, really good. The cold open, where we see ex-precog Dash (Stark Sands) running through future Washington, D.C. trying to stop a murder is excellently done and really hammers home the idea that, for Dash, his visions create a moral imperative that drives him back into the world to find a way to do some good with his gift. This might be hopelessly naive of him, in light of his own history as a formerly enslaved child, but the show seems prepared to address this issue. Both of the other precogs appear in the pilot and opinions on the moral imperative thing seem to be mixed. It also looks, based on the pilot’s epilogue, like the precogs’ ongoing fears of imprisonment and exploitation may fuel a longer story arc, which could get interesting and lead to an interested dilemma for Dash later on.

Meagan Good plays Lara Vega, the obligatory no-nonsense police officer, and I like her. She’s kind of a stock character, reminiscent of Sleepy Hollow‘s Abbie Mills, Castle‘s Kate Beckett, iZombie‘s Clive Babineaux and enough similar characters that there’s nothing about Vega that stands out. However, I love this particular collection of character tropes, and I rarely get tired of watching them in action. Aditionally, Meagan Good is likable and has an easy chemistry with both co-star Sands and Wilmer Valderrama, who plays her slightly slimy-seeming boss, Will Blake. This gives Vega’s interactions with other characters a natural feel that works in the show’s favor.

The only exception to this is in a couple of scenes between Vega and Dash where the show’s writers seem determined to hit the viewer right upside the head with exposition and shove some character motivation right in our faces. It’s too heavy handed in this first episode, and it ends up being jarring and distracting from the story. That said, television pilots often try to cram as much of this as possible in, so I can forgive it for now. The true test will come next week when we find out if this kind of ham-fisted hand-holding is just a pilot episode tic or if it’s going to be characteristic of the whole series.

The world-building is fairly pedestrian, with the usual near-future stuff in evidence, but the production values are slick and professional. The costumes are alright, and I actually kind of love Vega’s look, even if she does have a cleavage window. Minority Report continues the trend of more diverse casting in sci-fi television, which is nice to see as well. In general, while some of the show’s visual effects are a bit silly (the robots that look like someone chromed a bunch of golden snitches, for example) and there’s not much new or interesting in terms of the setting, the show’s future D.C. feels plausible enough that I can see myself spending a lot of time watching it if it can overcome some of the writing missteps of the pilot.

All in all, Minority Report turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a disaster, and what I got instead was a well-cast show with some genuinely interesting ideas. The execution so far isn’t great, but it’s passable, and I think there’s a lot to work with here. I don’t know if it will ever be a great show, but it wouldn’t be hard for it to be a good one. In the meantime, it’s definitely enjoyable enough for me to come back to it to see if it improves.

Television

I watched Scream Queens so you don’t have to

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Seriously. If you haven’t watched Scream Queens yet, don’t bother.

It’s the worst sort of unfunny, “ironically” racist, tacky crap that I’ve seen in ages, and I’m so disappointed by basically everything about it. I didn’t expect this to be a good show (I mean, Ryan Murphy is also responsible for perennial turdpiles Glee and American Horror Story), but I did expect it to be entertaining and fun (in the vein of Glee and AHS). Mostly, it’s just cringe-inducing.

The thing about horror comedy is that it has to be funny in order to work, and the biggest problem with Scream Queens is that it’s just not, so it doesn’t. While there are a couple of amusing scenes in the first two episodes–most notably security guard Denise (Niecy Nash) explaining how to notify her in case of an emergency and, surprisingly, Chanel #2’s (Ariana Grande) death–it’s mostly just a constant stream of hatefulness or stupidity (and hateful stupidity) from all of the characters except for good girl Grace (Skyler Samuels), who is just boring.

Sorority leader Chanel (Emma Roberts) is a caricature of a rich bitch sorority girl, but she’s just so over-the-top vile that it’s hard to stomach. A conversation between Chanel and Dean Munsch (Jamie Lee Curtis) suggests a sort of self-awareness about this, and Dean Munsch’s assertion that “out in the real world, people just don’t talk that way to other people. It’s not normal,” seems to be a wink to the audience to show that writer Ryan Murphy knows how awful his characters are. However, the Chanel/Munsch conversation doesn’t herald any character development for Chanel, and we later find out that Munsch is just as awful in her own way.

I was ready to turn the show off the first time I heard the phrase “white mammy,” but I didn’t. It turns out that it only gets more racist from there. Chanel’s blatant and incredibly hateful and mean-spirited racism seems intended to be amusing, but it’s not. It’s just a drag. Even worse is the stereotyping of Zayday (Keke Palmer), the show’s token black girl. The biggest disservice done to Zayday, though, is that she’s sidelined from the majority of the action, only appearing to show how nice and not-racist Grace is and popping up occasionally later on to exclaim colorful lines like “Y’all’s ratchet!” Zayday is, so far, less a character than a prop or a background decoration in a story that’s really about the white girls.

While I suppose good for Ryan Murphy for casting a deaf actress (Whitney Meyer) to play “Deaf Taylor Swift,” I feel like the progressiveness of that decision is undone by the choice to use the character’s deafness as the punchline of her jokey death.

The show also shortchanges Sam (Jeanna Han), a character who is still alive (for now) but just doesn’t make sense. The “Predatory Lez” moniker is as aggressively and offensively unfunny as any of the other nicknames on the show, and I just will never understand why the trope of the obviously hostile radical feminist lesbian sorority pledge even exists. I also don’t understand why Ryan Murphy would utilize that trope for comedy only to play it entirely straight. Apparently the joke here is that this character exists. Also, that feminism is hilarious.

Speaking of making fun of feminism, Jamie Lee Curtis deserves so much better than Dean Munsch. I feel like as second wave feminists get older, this type of character–the dreary, failed feminist with nothing to show for herself in middle age except a divorce and a job she despises–gets more popular. I hate it so much, and it just seems to reinforce that Ryan Murphy can’t stand women or feminism. Even the “best case scenario” feminism depicted on the show–Grace’s dream of a sorority as a real sisterhood where she can connect with her mother’s memory–is shown as silly, childish, and naive.

I have no desire at all to keep watching a show where the biggest “joke” seems to be about how stupid feminism is and how awful women are.

Book Reviews, Comic Books, Graphic Novels

Book Review – Rat Queens, Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery

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So, there’s really no good reason I put off reading this comic for so long. I think I was just turned off by the word “sass” in the title of this first collection. I don’t think there’s any word used to describe women that pisses me off more than “sass” (or any iteration thereof).

I’m glad I finally relented and picked it up, though, because Rat Queens is fucking excellent.

The Rat Queens–Hannah, Dee, Violet, and Betty–are one of several groups of adventurers working out of a town called Palisade. However, we learn early on that not everyone appreciates what the Rat Queens and their fellow mercenaries bring to the town. When someone tries to have all the adventurers killed, hijinks ensue as the Rat Queens try to save the day.

In many ways, this series is a pretty straight forward sword and sorcery adventure of the R-rated persuasion (it’s very full of coarse language, sex, drugs, and tons of extremely bloody violence). However, it’s not the usual sort of testosterone-fueled romp one might expect from this genre. Which is refreshing.

Even better, it’s nothing so simple as just gender-flipping things and writing about a bunch of women who “act like men.” Rat Queens plays with a lot of the genre-standard tropes in really clever and extremely funny ways, and it also develops each of its characters with loving attention to detail and a clear commitment to treating them all like full human beings.

This is especially apparent in the artwork, which is consistently nicely done. The main characters are a group of diverse women with plausible body types wearing adventure-appropriate costumes that reflect their roles and personalities. This in itself is enough to recommend the book to me, but when you toss in a good sprinkling of visual gags and some excellently-drawn action–without any obvious fan service–I consider the artwork a home run.

My only criticism is that I actually could have done with a little more exposition about each woman’s background, and I would love to know a little more about some of the secondary characters, too. Some of this, I’m sure, is just because I’m used to reading novels, which have fewer space limitations than comics have. Mostly, though, I just really love these characters and want to know everything about them.

I guess I’m just going to have to hope that the series runs for a long time.

Rat Queens is exactly the kind of feminist comic I want to read–mostly in that its feminism is all in the execution of the work, with no preachy, ham-handed messages getting in the way of a good story, and no ugly, sexist artwork to get in the way of my enjoying it. It’s an almost perfect comic that I can’t wait to read more of.

Sci-fi and Fantasy books, tv, films, and feminism