Skyrim: A Journal of War - Chapter Seventeen: Nice Day To Start Again...

From The Saga Of Matthias The Bather; Written by Sven

And so it came to pass that Matthias did return to Riften, with the sword of Mjoll called The Lioness...

Me: I have recovered your sword, Grimsever.
Mjoll: Astonishing. To think you actually were able to reach it and yet return to tell the tale.
Me: Yes, well... it was quite dangerous.
Mjoll: To think... you, a small, scrawny outlander were able to succeed where many great warriors lost their lives!
Me: Ah, well it was noth-
Mjoll: I mean, look at you! A weasely little man who reeks like a sewer were able to accomplish what stronger, more capable men...
Me: Hey!
Mjoll: Oh, I am sorry. Clearly I underestimated you and I have a lot to learn about adventuring. I would be honored to fight by your side, were you to allow it.
Me: Oh, I'm sure you would be.
Mjoll: *blushing a bit* In fact... I... ah... would be even more honored if you would consider marrying me.
Me: WHAT?!
Mjoll: That is why you are wearing the Amulet of Mara, is it not? You are expressing your desire to seek a mate?
Me: Oh, is that what this is? I just found this amulet... somewhere and thought it looked nice.
Mjoll: So you are not interested in marrying me?
Me: I never said that!
Mjoll: Oh, wonderful! I'll have Aerin go tell them to prepare the temple of Mara for us. Of course these things do take time to set up... so we'll meet there in a day!
Me: ... great! See you in a day... my love.


Lydia: I have a bad feeling about this.
Me: You have a bad feeling about everything. And I've just about had it with your negative attitude. Can't you just be happy for me?
Lydia: I am sorry, my Thane. But this seems rather sudden, even for one of your short attention span.
Me: What? This is still going according to plan. True, I didn't count on her falling head-over-heels in love with me... but this can totally work to our advantage. After all, the Defender of Riften can hardly spend her time trying to thwart the Thieves' Guild if she's off adventuring with her beloved. Or tending to his estate in Whiterun.
Lydia: Even so, this seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through just to make things easier on your co-workers.
Me: Well, let it not be said I'm not willing to make sacrifices for the team. Besides, there are other considerations at play.
Lydia: Such as?
Me: Such as that sweet valkyrie ass. You could bounce gold pieces off of that woman's rump!
Lydia: *sighs*


ONE DAY LATER...

Mjoll: This is a fine wedding, Matthias. And to think it's all for us.
Me: Yes, my darling. This will be a day to remember, for sure.
Mjoll: I know we should probably wait until after the ceremony but... oh, I can't wait! I want you to move in with me and Aerin. Unless you'd rather we come live with you?
Me: We?
Mjoll: Well, I can't leave Aerin by himself. He follows me like a lost puppy.
Me: Yes, I noticed he's sort of standing there in the back... not taking a seat like all the other guests... just starring at you.
Mjoll: Yes, well.. that is his way. But we can discuss that later. It looks like the priests are ready to begin...



Maramal: Marriage. Marriage is what brings us together today...


AN HOUR LATER...

Maramal: And that is why now, whenever a young bride asks me "What are Mara's opinions on fellatio?", I say "Well, I'd LIKE to tell you..."


ANOTHER HOUR LATER...

Maramal: ...when loving lovers love, when loving love on wings of gold. In loving love we fly above. Their love is such a soft and precious love. It's love.

YET ANOTHER HOUR LATER...

Maramal: And loving lovers love as loving lovers love. Golden. Shimmering. Lustrous. Llvely. Loving, Loving love. So yeah... that's it. You're married.
Me: By the Nine Divines I thought that would never end!
Mjoll: May the rest of our life together feel as eternal.
Me: Well put.
Mjoll: Well, thank you, my love. Now let us go back to my home and we can discuss a few things...
Me: Of course. We'll just step outside, bid fair well to our guests and... BY THE NINE!




Courier: Yeah, got this note for you.
Me: By the loins of Mara, where are your clothes, man?
Courier: You'll have to ask your bride about that.
Me: Mjoll?
Mjoll: Ah.. well, things MIGHT have gotten a little out of hand at my bachelorette party last night.
Me: You had a bachelorette party?
Mjoll: Well, I had a few drinks and there was a stripper.
Courier: Stripper, nothing! This crazy bitch ripped my clothes off while I was trying to get a drink last night!
Me: *sighs* Just give me your message and I'll give you a generous tip so you can buy some new pants.
Courier: Great. *passes over a note*
Me: Who is this from, anyway? A well-wisher on the day of my wedding?
Courier: Don't know. Creepy fella, black robe. Couldn't see his face. Paid me a pretty sum to get that into your hands, though.
Me: He paid you a pretty sum and you STILL haven't gone to buy new clothes yet?
Courier: Listen, pal. I don't tell you how to do your demeaning job.
Me: Right, right, right... Well, let's see who this is from...





Me: *hoarse whisper* ... the symbol of The Dark Brotherhood...
Mjoll: My love? Is something wrong? Your jaw seems to have frozen open.
Me: Oh, it's nothing, dear. Just got caught up in a yawn this news was so boring. So, listen... about our plans to move far, far away from here?

No Flying No Tights' List of Must Have Anime.

SOURCE: No Flying No Tights' definitive list of Anime must-sees.

CW Announces Pilot For Green Arrow TV Show - Starman Develops A New Ulcer!

SOURCE: The CW Nearing Pilot Order For Green Arrow TV Series ‘Arrow’

I was actually hopeful - perhaps foolishly so - for a moment. But the more I read, the more I realized how bad this could be. And then I knew that this was going to suck like a black hole.

So what brought this revelation on?

Was it the news that this was being developed for CW that got me? No. The core concept of Ollie's character is such that you could make him a college-age guy and it could still work. Just have the brat prince get forced to play Survivor The Home Game and come away from it realizing how lucky he is and how he has a responsibility to help the helpless.

Was it the announcement that the show was called "Arrow"? No. Catchy, one-word titles are par for the course for dramatic series.

Was it the announcement that the show "sets him in a new world with an original story that is not based on the comics"? No, because the current Green Arrow book basically did the same thing with its' concept of Oliver Queen as Steve Jobs with a bow.

Was it the fact that the show's own writer/producers don't seem to know anything more about the show other than that it won't have any previous connection to the comics? No, because that's frequently the case in Hollywood. Staff writers are brought in to write someone else's creative undertaking after the pilot episode all the time.

Was it the announcement that the pilot was being written by former Green Arrow/Black Canary writer Andrew Kreisberg, who was also serving as the show's executive producer/show runner?

YES. THAT was it!

oh,wailywailywailywaily... lament! lament! rue! rue!

Power of the Valkyrie: The Fate of the Gods and Men - A No Flying No Tights Review

SOURCE: Power of the Valkyrie: The Fate of the Gods and Men
  
   

There’s a saying that one should never judge a book by its cover. As a librarian, I hate that statement. I agree with the intent – that one should judge not by outward appearances but by inner depth, yet it seems a bit silly to use books as the metaphorical object for making that point. The publishing industry invests millions of dollars every year to conduct market research and pays professional artists in order to ensure that their books have nice covers that will attract people’s attention and, presumably, inspire them to buy their books. That’s three whole industries – marketing, management and art – that depend upon people judging books by their covers.

Why am I picking apart this old cliché? Because when I first saw the cover of Power of the Valkyrie, I must admit I became rather judgmental. Well, what else am I supposed to think when presented with a buxom blonde in scanty armor (if by armor you mean a metal corset and a pair of dangerously low-cut hot-pants), with a come-hither look, pencil-thin arms, and cleavage you could ski down, holding a sword that would make Cloud Strife say “that seems impractically big”? If you’re anything like me, you’d probably presume – judging the cover – this title was written for no purpose other than to showcase the artist’s skill in drawing attractive women that are not wearing very much clothing.

Dear Reader, it’s much worse than that. You’re presuming that the artist has the ability to draw attractive women not wearing much clothing in the first place.

Calling Craig Yeung’s grasp of female anatomy “bad” would be understating it. Abysmal is a far more accurate word and much more fun to say. I could, on some level, forgive the blatant cheesecake if it was drawn well. But it is not. And Yeung’s incompetence goes far beyond that, his artwork being rife with continuity errors to boot! I dare say one could create a fine drinking game with this book, taking a sip every time Yeung draws Odin with one-eye in the close-ups only to draw him with two-eyes in the long shots or each occasion that The Valkyrie’s winged horse is depicted without wings.

That brings to another interesting point. The world of this story is a mishmash of random mythological elements mixed together and changed (frequently) for no apparent reason. I could deal with the horse of The Valkyrie specifically being named Pegasus (a specific winged horse from Greek Mythology), but I will not stand for Odin’s familiars Thought and Memory being specifically depicted – in the text and the artwork – as black eagles rather than ravens. At one point, our heroine tries to throw away her magic sword like Excalibur and she is pursued by Christian demons, who disguise themselves as Scully and Mulder from The X-Files.

The plot of the book – such as it is – will be familiar territory to anyone who has ever read a Marvel Comics’ Thor book. Indeed, the whole story reads like a rejected script for “What If Jane Foster Was Given The Power Of Thor?” Our heroine is a nurse named Susan or Suzanne depending on what chapter we’re in. She is given the vaguely defined power of The Valkyrie after her car crashes into Odin, who was teleported away from Asgard to prevent the power from falling into Loki’s hands. Why Odin or the many warriors surrounding him at the time couldn’t just fight Loki is never explained.

Despite this transfer being accidental and Odin having been seconds away from bequeathing the power to the warrior woman Emu, before Loki showed up, Odin decrees that Susan/Suzanne will wield the Valkyrie power and be trained in its use by Thor. But it turns out Emu was in league with Loki the whole time and already plotting to overthrow Odin! So Loki completely sabotaged his own plans by attacking Emu’s empowerment ceremony. This is but the first of many plot holes this book has.

All that being said, you still can’t judge a book by its cover…because this book is so much worse than its cover. The story and characters are lawsuit fodder for Marvel Comics. The writing is terrible, with the authors’ unable to keep the name of their own heroine straight. And the artwork is amateurish, at best.

Power of the Valkyrie: The Fate of the Gods and Men
by Darren G. Davis, Chad Rebmann
Art by Craig Yeung
ISBN: 9781450723831
Bluewater Productions, 2011

The Blackbeard Legacy - A No Flying No Tights Review

SOURCE: The Blackbeard Legacy


I love pirates. Treasure Island was one of the few classics my mother forced upon me that I found tolerable. My favorite anime is One Piece. One of my favorite cartoons from my misspent youth was The Pirates of Dark Water. My point is that I love pirate stories and it takes a lot for me not to be able to enjoy one. Yet The Blackbeard Legacy has managed that seemingly impossible feat.

Centering (for the most part) upon Hanna Teach – the daughter of Blackbeard in an alternate reality where voodoo is real and submarines exist in 1718 – the story of this book is spread across four chapters. In the first chapter, we are introduced to Hanna as she steals a log-book and then commanders a ship with the intent of going after some lost treasure, even as she is being perused into Chapter Two by several bounty hunters, including a zombie-raising voodoo priestess. Curiously, the third chapter focuses upon a female bounty hunter named Morgan Sheppard, who – after a brief interlude where she brings down a mark while disguised as a harem girl and confronts two cannibal rivals – is sent after Hanna Teach in the final pages. The final chapter of the book begins, oddly, sometime after Chapter Three ended, with Morgan Sheppard exiting stage left as the zombies we first saw in Chapter Two show up and we find out that the person sending all these bounty hunters after Hanna in the first place is Daddy Blackbeard himself!

If this summary of the story seems convoluted, that is because it is. There is no easy way to sum up the story of this book because there is no real unifying plot from chapter to chapter. Stuff happens because it is supposed to or because it is cool. We have zombies chasing after Hanna because a pirate story is supposed to have zombies in it. We have a pirate in a steampunk submarine show up to save Hanna because steampunk is big right now. The Ancient Mariner shows up to deliver cryptic warnings because then we can pretend this mess of a story somehow has literary relevance.

It is notable that even for a genre where the heroes typically have no motivations beyond “get treasure” and “seek adventure” that all of the characters in this book are as lifeless as a zombie and as flat as the female characters bodies aren’t. This dry comment brings us to the artwork, which is full of gratuitous low-cut tops, low-slung pants, and generous helpings of cleavage, both above and below decks. I’d dismiss the whole thing as base pandering to the lowest common denominator, but that would presume one could find something erotic in the horrible, misshapen figures drawn by artist Mike Maydak.



Don’t let the painted cover fool you – the women in the interior artwork look less like a Luis Royo painting and a bad imitation of Humberto Ramos. Maydak may have a certain style but that style is ill-suited for this kind of book. Granting that, Maydak’s art is horribly inconsistent with none of the characters look the same from chapter to chapter! Indeed, when Chapter Three started, I assumed that the woman in the harem girl costume was Hanna Teach in disguise rather than a new character!

The Blackbeard Legacy is exactly the sort of product I have come to associate with Bluewater Productions – poorly conceived, badly written and terribly drawn. I would add “horribly edited” to that list, save for one thing – this book has no credited editor! Whether that was because the editor pulled an Alan Smithe and demanded his name be taken off the book or whether it is because Bluewater Productions publisher/co-author of this book Darren G. Davis sees no need to employ somebody to examine his work and ensure that it has things like cohesive character design or a smoothly-flowing plot, I have no idea. What I do know is that this book is a technical failure on every level and it has no place in any library collection anywhere.

The Blackbeard Legacy
by Darren G. Davis, Scott Davis
Art by Mike Maydak
ISBN: 9781450702577
Bluewater Productions , 2011