Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes for June 28, 2014

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,
You can follow me on Pinterest on what I’m readingwatching, and listening.

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Reading

Finished
Bagged & Boarded: Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: In Pursuit of Flight

Watching

  • True Blood
    The 7th, and final, season of True Blood is upon us, and there is a lot going on. Where the fuck is Eric? Is tara really dead? What is going to happen to Lafayette? Is Sookie and Alcid really “together.” Will Bill ever stop being mopey? Will Jessica find her place in this world. SO MANY QUESTIONS.
  • Orphan Black
    I mainlined this like a fat kid eats cake. We watched the first two episodes last year and couldn’t get into it, but now, now it is glorious. The storytelling is tight, the plotlines are engaging, the story is plausible and draws upon a number of profound questions. And Tatiana Maslany is bloody fantastic, she is. Why hasn’t she won an Emmy or a Golden Globe yet? And Season 2 needs to get its little butt cheeks to Amazon post-haste.
  • The Battle for Stonehenge
    Interesting documentary about the future of Stonehenge now that English Heritage has to make some major changes. It also attempts to answer the question: Who really owns the ‘henge?

Weekly watching: Rectify, Halt and Catch Fire, A Place To Call Home, Mr. Sloane, Fargo, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Louie, Penny Dreadful, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, Elementary

Links

What have you read/watched/listened to this week?
x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 1999

Bagged & Boarded: Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: In Pursuit of Flight

captainmarvel Captain Marvel, Vol. 1: In Pursuit of Flight by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Dexter Soy, Emma Ríos 
[Amazon | Worldcat | GoodReads | Comixology]
Rating: 3/5 stars
tl;dr summary: 2012 reboot of Captain Marvel, I really wanted Captain Marvel to be my superhero. Sadly, the convoluted and confusing story lines, dropped plot points, and inconsistent art (within a single artist) turned this hero into a has been.
Review: Captain Marvel is not my superhero.
But I wanted her to be.
After working at a book store for a number of years and then becoming a librarian, superhero graphic novels are the one comic that has always eluded me. The reasons are fairly simple: Derivative storylines, change of artists/writers, inconsistent plots and arcs, layered and cross over stories, and ALL OF THOSE GODDAMN VARIANTS drove me insane when purchasing graphic novels for the bookstore. A few years later when I took up the graphic novel collection at GRCC, I made the concrete decision to not stock superhero for the very same reasons.
Perhaps it is easier buying the trades as opposed to the weeklies, but when there doesn’t seem to be a thread holding some of the storylines together, it still seemed more aggravating than not.
Marvel jumped on the bandwagon when DC announced it was rebooting its entire universe back in 2012. This was the perfect opportunity for those like me frustrated with the previous systems to start getting our feet wet with superhero books. I picked up on Captain Marvel because she’s supposedly a bad ass female, which is totally up my alley.  At the beginning of In Pursuit of Flight, She’s tussling after a big baddie with Captain America who tells her,

You have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.

ORLY.
After the tussling, we find out Captain Marvel is having an identity crisis. The whole send up of In Pursuit of Flight is Captain Marvel finding herself and forging ahead her future. This sound well and good but then time travel is thrown in, possible evil plot, and some tear jerking moment with one her mentors. The storyline felt uneven and confused. Too much was being thrown against the wall with the hope it would stick while under the guise of sorting out Carol Danver’s new backstory.
Dexter Soy drew the first four chapters while Emma Rios drew the last two. Soy’s version of Captain Marvel (and really any of the other characters) as hyper sexualized. In my notes I mark the roundness and plumpness of Captain Marvel’s ass and then a bit of marginalia that Soy treated Captain America in the same way. The coloring was just oozing with dark, rich royal colors. It made the scenes atmospheric, as if it needed to make up for what was being lost by the words.
Once you get to Emma Rios’ books, the characters that were so overly lush in books 1-4 now look emaciated and overly angular, you almost don’t want to meet any of the characters on the street for fear of being killed by a sharp elbow. But the mood of Rios’ work seems more inline with the story and fits it much better.
At the end of the book there is a four page, tightly written and set back story of Carol Danvers from her origin until this book. And that seemed wholly unnecessary (and often contradictory) to what had happened earlier in this sequence or in the book itself.
There is one more volume in this reboot, THEN THEY REBOOTED IT AGAIN.
That should give you some idea of how much of a hot mess the first reboot was.
xoxo,
Lisa

This Day in Lisa-Universe: 2011, 1999