Best wishes and prayers for @Coelasquid.

Coelasquid writes and draws the consistently excellent Manly Guys Doing Manly Things webcomic, and she’s been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It’s apparently the really easy to treat and almost-automatic survival kind of thyroid cancer, but that’s still pretty scary. Can’t do much except offer sympathies and prayers, but that’s what I’m doing right now.

This @Coelasquid comic reminds me of a Manly Wade Wellman short-short.

Specifically: this Manly Guys Doing Manly Things comic reminds me of MWW’s “Blue Monkey.” I certainly hope that Kelly Turnbull understands that that’s a pretty nice compliment, by my standards…

Moe Lane

PS: What’s that? You’ve never read Manly Wade Wellman’s John the Balladeer (Appalachian folk-magic*) stories and books?  Why, you lucky so-and-so: Baen has a collection of the short stories available.  For FREE.  I had to join a science fiction book-of-the-month club that it took me a year to extricate myself from, just to get that book.  True, it was worth it, but still: technology does have its points.

*And I don’t mean light-and-fluffy folk, either. Wellman didn’t write gore or cosmic horror, but you messed with the supernatural at your peril in the John the Balladeer stories.

This is a pretty good Lobo rant from @Coelasquid.

Mind you, I don’t really care about Lobo (for those wondering, he’s a …rather unique… DC character).  But clearly Kelly Turnbull does.

A design DC reported was the New And Improved Lobo that basically amounted to Nightwing with fish barbels painted at the corners of his mouth made the rounds a few days ago to extreme internet backlash resulting in a great deal of backpedalling on DC’s part and the author claiming that the design DC posted was not in fact her Lobo, assuring people he would be much bigger and uglier in the comic.

Of course she’s also said; “My goal for him was to make him less comically hyper-masculine and more focused. He’s still vicious, still savage and still entirely immoral, but I wanted a gravity out of the character. When he showed up, I didn’t want him walking away from explosions and smoking a cigar. When he shows up, I want people to feel like, ‘This is it. This is the end.’” Which kind of says to me she doesn’t really understand what people are taking issue with. The redesign isn’t the issue, Lobo’s been redesigned a million times. He’s been a skinny kid, he’s been a woman, he’s been a squirrel, he’s been a duck, he’s been an android (he was a poorly received serious character when he started out), the problem is the idea that they’re promising to take the hypermasculine comedy out of a hypermasculine satire character. That’s like saying you like the Venture Brothers but wish it didn’t have all those pesky jokes and parodies in it.

Continue reading This is a pretty good Lobo rant from @Coelasquid.