Astounishing #22 is finally coming out this week.

Y'know what really bugs me is the report's continual use of the word 'sketch' to describe those comic book pages. Not appropriate, not by a bloody long shot.

Ha! GF, who is an avid comic art collector, also took issue with the word 'sketch.' She made mouth noises every time they said it in the clip.

For the Serenity RPG fans amongst us...

• Margaret Weis Productions has expanded its Serenity license, and will release three Serenity RPG products next year. Early in 2008, it will release a collection of short adventures; late spring brings Six-shooters and Spaceships, a ship and technology sourcebook; and the Big Damn Heroes Handbook is slated for next summer, probably as a GenCon release.

Hi all. This is my very first day and very first post, well on any message board anywhere actually. At the risk of just busting into anyone's conversation but can anyone explain how Anya's death so completely flew beneath our collective geek radar, while Tara's death had all of fandom wearing black armbands?

It just strikes me as, well, rather unfeminist that her rather point-blank death would elicit nothing more than a "she's such a swell gal" from her, albeit, ex-fiance. To say nothing of the rest of us.

Howdy, orkhan!

You'd probably get more response to your question here: sumi "Buffy and Angel 1: BUFFYNANGLE4EVA!!!!!1!" May 29, 2007 6:36:27 pm PDT

(As this thread's where we talk about comics, Buffy and otherwise.)

But an excellent question, and one well worth chewing over, so please do head over there! (Um, yeah, I bolted over to BUFFYNANGLE and then got all sad to see no new posts there.)

Thorny gender issues in genre TV (and, as Plei has written about extensively and gorgeously, comics) are, unfortunately, a perennial. Even on marvelously feminist Buffy -- dead good guys (recurring, name-in-the-title-sequence or guesting-for-at-least-a-full-season), female division: Anya, Tara, Joyce, Jenny Calendar; dead good guys (R, NITS or GFALAFS), male division: Um. Angel, kinda, Spike, kinda.

I'd add Jonathan to that list of dead good guys. sorta.

Even though he was more the bumbling mundane with no intent to harm than a real "good" guy, I think I'd include Principal Flutie, too. After all, he was a fuzzy-headed liberal. Poor bugger.

I don't think you can really count Flutie as part of the main cast. Snyder, maybe. Not Flutie.

Jonathan, oh yes (how could I have forgotten him?), but Flutie wasn't even close to occupying the same recurring-character space as Jenny or Joyce or Tara or Anya.

Bleah. It's just...problematic. In order to level the playing/dying field, you've got to dig out really, really minor characters on one side to balance out the deeply rooted, longtime, extremely emotionally weighty characters on the other. And they really don't. And of course every death individually made perfect sense, was demanded by the narrative, increased the stakes, etc. etc. etc. But, still: Given that Joss and co. had already decided that no core characters were going to die (or, at least, die a no-takebacks no-resurrection no moving to another show Death), it's still at least mildly uncomfortable that all but one of the big heart-filled secondary characters to die were female. Of course, it's all positively hugs and puppies compared to AtS.

Ugh. This really needs to move to Buffy.