Marilith is a sometimes funny, sometimes gory comic about a blonde female assassin, her Japanese school girl ward/apprentice, her half Vietnamese hacker friend, a mad Russian maniac, guns, more guns and cast of variously shifty and brutal criminal types and action movie cliches. Now with characters like these, there’s a thin line to walk between devolving into wacky non-sequiters or trying to be too deep and serious to the point of suffering from a suspension of disbelief failure. However, the authour is happily dancing along this tightrope, and doing tricks on a unicycle while he’s at it. The dialog is witty, the characters are engadging and his best talent is turning what could be one shot gags into amusing bits of back story. Characters who look like they were a one off joke come back, with added personality to make them sympathetic and stop them from getting stale.
The artwork, on the other hand, is all over the place, because the project began as an offshoot of Krakow (called Krakow 2.0). Therefore things begin in the writer, Krazy Krow’s sparse, amatuer style, and after the second book, he passed it onto various professional caliber artists. Things are hampered by the fact that if you start with “Marilith” you won’t really know what’s going on.
The tendency for the comic to suddenly stop for a little while is also not in its favour. I won’t say I’m not addicted, but it’s a drug that’s occasionally stops flowing and who wants to go into webcomic withdrawl?
First Page: Hmmm, I think you should start with Krakow 2.0.
Other First Page: Read that far? Marilith it is.
Updates: About once a week, can be sporadic. Lots of back pages to keep you amused.
Hearts: 3.5/5
I haven’t really even begun to scratch the surface of the mess, to be honest. I’ve started sweeping up the fuzzies, and with luck I’ll finish sorting out all these cluttering do-dads. However it’s getting late, as it’s almost 11:00 PM, my good girl bed time. But the dishes are washed, what more could I want?
Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, and Mothboy and I have not formalized plans. In his usual scattered way, he announced first he wanted to do New Years in, then that he had a party with friends, then a drop in party, now that going out fo dinner and finishing in would be nice. Umm, yeah. So I think there’s a pretty good chance I’ll just do New Years by myself at this rate.
Bad plan- Live alone as a single woman and watch “Perfect Blue”. Especially in a big city in a balcony apartment. Eeek. *Hugs teddy bear and hides under covers* @__@
My allergies are gone, and I’m not longer being eaten by invisible pests. I’m certainly worried that the latter may have stowed away in my stuff, but with luck it was cat fleas, and the giant bites on my side will not be repeated.
Now I’m decompressing in my apartment, with a huge mess surrounding me, and my first meal in several hours digesting. I’ve tried out my new kettle and, since I had to open a window to air this place out, I’m looking forward to the tea to take the chill away.
As soon as I got home I took a nap, leaving the stuff I’d brought home strewed around me. Now that I’m all caught up on sleep I have to actually sort this stuff. The first thing I did was bough groceries, replacing the milk, bread and eggs, and grabbing a few veggies, as well as a self indulgent purchase of hello kitty bandaids. I cut myself some time on the bus trip and it owies. *Shakes pinkie and whimpers* 
Sadly the laundramat is closed (hopefully for the holidays only) so washing my bedding will have to wait, same with the back log of laundry. Right now it’s tohu-bohu, and I’m tackling the dishes and loose papers while the bouncier parts of Depeche Mode’s collected music play in the background. I like them for their S&M subtext. From “Dressed in black” to the more explicit “Master and Servant”, it’s rewarding to see your orientation be expressed as primarily emotionally satisfying and not scary and freakish. Of course the blend of perky, sarcastic and bitter pleases my inner goth to no end.
Taking stock of my apartment, it needs a very good deep clean to take the dust out, and my clutter is starting to take over, as loose crap falls off of shelves onto me. My book case could also use several coats of white paint and my chairs need to be reupholstered. I’m also still missing an iron +board, and I need to install my kitchen counter.
But for the time being I think I’m just going to get the dishes and laundry sorted and squared away. Floor space is a priority. ^_^;
I’m going home tonight, hooray! I get to spend the rest of Christmas vacation at my nice quiet apartment in Montreal. Of course I’m just trying to figure out how I’ll get all this loot home. Methinks this may involve a taxi to the bus station from my parent’s, at least. Certainly everything fits in the bags I brought. But the weight… Um, yeah. Can I carry this the four blocks from the metro, and more to the point, up and down stairs? Now it’s not just the appliances, you understand. it’s the little extras I’d like to take. Books that are still more expensive to rebuy. Paperwork I need for school, etc. That means all I’m leaving behind is my china collection and a few more books. I wish I could fit one of my favourite books “The Great Book of Amber” in, but it’s a full ten volumes have been crammed into one giant, awkward paperback. Perhaps I can hide it in carry on and hope for the best?
I’m working on my New Years Resoloution. Organization. It’s the most important thing I could do for 2009, I’m just not sure how to break it into manageable chunks.
But it’s time to get dressed and go up town to meet my friend as a prelude to going home. Bye-bye!
Small bulbs, broken and unbroken, are lying in a spray on the dark wooden floor of the library. The tree lolls against the table, trailing ornaments as the water from the base seeps into the gifts on the floor. It’s Christmas with my family, and I’m in Saint John for a week. Over that week I had to refill a perscription, meet my friend for dinner (my treat), and maybe meet a few other people. Then it’s back home to Montreal and the solitary peace of my apartment. Ahhhh, soon to be bliss. I intend to come home soon enough to sleep off the bus ride (twelve hours, traveling by steerage) and celebrate a happy new year in my own style.
This Christmas it was a home goods holiday. Appliances (blender, electric beaters, rice cooker/steamer), utensils and dishes (kettle, potato masher, cookie cutters, creamer and sugar bowl) and a big fluffy towel that’s the size of a blanket. Plus a wall calander and an assortment of small notebooks, and a $50 grocery card. It feels like a wedding. I have no clue what I’ll do with a steamer/rice cooker. It’s nice and I sometimes eat rice (and I suspect a 5lb bag of whole grain rice would be a very economical diet filler) but I don’t think I’d use it enough to justify violating my limited counter top footprint.
On the other hand the uber blender and the beaters are both fine. I’m looking forward to chopping and reducing things to shredded fragments, and whipping them to stiff peaks. Yum, yum, whipped cream.
So the night before last, I wrote my first exam. Afterwards Mothboy IV intended to take me out for sushi like he’d been promising. We were supposed to go out for 8:00 PM. Round about 7:00 PM I started girly primping. I fussed with my hair, I painted my nails (very rare, for me), I did a smokey eye (ooo, fancy!) and all those things it takes to make a woman look good. In all I was ready to go by 8:00 PM.
By 9:00 PM, I was ravanously hungry, so I gave Mothboy IV a call to make sure he hadn’t got caught up in work. Sure enough he’d lost track of time, a more than common experience. So it’s late, maybe he can take me out tomorrow instead? Okay, I agree and hang up and start pulling off bangles and sparklies while throwing together a cabbage soup, since by now I could eat a horse and I needed a fast dinner. I decide not to take my makeup off, and have a candle lit dinner at home with just me. I start debating going out by myself, bad for the budget but I’m good at being self reliant.
By the carrot peeling stage, Mothboy IV sends me a text message announcing he’ll be ‘right over to pick me up’. Baffled, I sort out that he’d changed his mind, we are going out tonight. Only sushi is going to be closed to soon, so my laptop gets comendeered to come up with an alternate venue. All the while I’m feeling as bitchy as heck, I’m hungry, I got stood up, and I’m being jerked around. I’m trying to think happy thoughts and not bite Mothboy’s head off. And he asks me if I’m suffering from PMS ^_^;
Dinner at the Baton Rouge was nothing to write home about. Tuna seared and served raw (sort of sushi?) on salad. Only the sauce they used tasted like Miracle Whip. Yuck!
The moral of the story is that when dating absent minded geniuses, if you want to eat at a reasonable hour, nag.
Red String is an imitation manga, centered around a bunch of highschoolers and their love lives. Normally this would be enough to make me throw rocks and run away screaming, but the characters are never bratty and completely engadging for faux-Japan. And I’m going to mug them for their costumes.
I have only one complaint, the protagonist’s love life seems unnessarily full of ups and downs. I find whenever Miharu and the boy her parents arranged a marriage to are the focus of the story, their drama causing troubles fall a little flat. I get that they’re supposed to have ‘true love’, but they seem to have very little faith for fated lovers, and every time they have a reason to fight it feels like an obstacle thrown in to stop them from appearing overly sweet. The other pairings, of Miharu’s friends and cousin, seem slightly more interesting. Probably this is a matter of time passing slower in the comics, as I’ve managed to change boyfriends in the time it took Miharu and her beloved Kazuo to have two fights. And I go for long haul monogamy, not three month jobs. Perhaps I’m just grumpy that the authour’s timing is so uncanny that I associate the protagonist and her love interest being torn apart by whatever with sulking about the decay in my own love life.
And yet I’m desperate to see what becoms of Reika and Eiji, my favourite couple. It’s hard to do a bad boy/good girl pairing without making me think the good girl is stupid and the bad boy is too damaged to be worth fantasies of ‘fixing’ him, but Red String has managed to make Eiji come across as sweeter than Miharu’s rock solid Kazou. And I think other romances were well handled, such as the lesbian subplot, and how that was resolved realistically (no spoilers) and Karen’s immature bitterness.
First Page: Starts Here!
Updates: Usually Mon/Wed/Fri
Hearts: 4.5/5
Probably one of my consistant favourites is “Girl Genius“. The output of Studio Foglio (home of Hugo award winning artist Phil Foglio), this tri-weekly webcomic follows the adventures of Agatha Hetrodyne in a world ruled by mad science. If all steampunk makes you murderous, steer clear, but the complete irreverance of the story telling counters some of the pomposity Steampunk is prone to (it bills itself as a ‘Gaslamp Fantasy’), and visually attractive artwork is worth looking at.
One caveat: if you’re an older person and happened to have read Foglio’s comic series, Xxxenophile, the consistancy in art style that makes characters in Girl Genius bear more than a little resemblance to the light hearted but adult toons of his past work is a trifle disconcerting. This is especially so, given their habit of using the characters from Girl Genius to tell side stories. Perhaps, like many actresses trying to break into the business, certain characters had a past in adult entertainment?
First Page: Starts out black and white, quickly gets better.
Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday
Hearts: 5/5
Dear Audience:
This blog will include serialized fiction, artwork, links I thought were interesting and non-fiction articles, as well as lifestyle updates AKA known as cheese toast, of a 20-something female Canadian student in Montreal.
Why La Phalene? Well, my first and last name is a species of rare British moth, and being Canadian, I can take advantage of the fact the “Phalene” means moth in French. ‘La’ is just the feminine form of ‘the’.
Bisous,
Phalene
Enjoy!
La Phalene