I did a bad, bad thing.

I was poking through marysues today (how do I get it to do the community icon instead of the user icon, anyway?) and found an LOTR Sue called A Different Ring. Yup, another Terran girl, another Ring that didn't get mentioned in the rhyme... Anyway, the story postulated that Tolkien was in fact a wizard of Middle-Earth who gave up on the fight against the Darkness and fled to our world. The person who actually read the fic seemed to think it wasn't too bad, considering it was a story that contained a Terran girl from Ohio who was actually an elf in disguise carrying the twenty-first Ring of Power. Problem is, I caught myself thinking of how to redeem her Tolkien speculation. Here's what I wound up posting:

"He was one of the original wizards, who had lived the longest of all of us. He grew tired of the life in Middle Earth and seeing it slowly fall into darkness."

You know, this is an oddly redeemable concept, as long as the implementation isn't crap... see, Tolkien said there were five Istari - the wizards, or at least the heads of the order of wizards. Saruman and Gandalf are the only ones who show up in the movies. Radagast the Brown, who was into birds and animals, appears in the books - he failed in his mission to keep Middle-Earth from darkness, precisely because he became so enamored of animals rather than people. And then there were two others, who only get a few passing mentions in the reference material. They were the Blue Wizards, Alatar and Pallando; they went into the East of Middle-Earth, like Saruman, and were never heard from again. Tolkien said they failed, but did not turn to evil the way Saruman did, and that they were likely the sources and founders of many magical traditions in the east part of the world. He also said at one point that when the wizards were sent into Middle-Earth, Alatar took Pallando along as a friend...

... which would mean that Tolkien's good friend, C. S. Lewis, is the other missing wizard.

Like I said, the concept could very well be done up somehow, but I haven't the time or the energy for it. However, the presence of a Sue makes it unpalatable at best, and the 'backup Ring'... no. Unless you want to link this extra Ring to the Two Wizards prospect and say the girl's ring comes from the Lewis side of things. After all, Uncle Andrew crafted a bunch of rings from dust left over from when the world was new in The Magician's Nephew, didn't he?

...aaargh no Uncle Andrew is not Saruman or Sauron or a successor thereof... *sigh* I'm sorry, I shouldn't have even brought it up. My poor brain. This is what I get for a Frappucino on an empty stomach.

Comics worth reading.

A while ago I posted a rant about some dreadful newspaper comics. I just thought that it might be a good idea, now that I've gotten that out of my system, to post some suggestions of strips worth reading instead. I'm going to confine myself to web-accessible ones, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology, that includes a number of syndicated strips that may or may not appear in your local paper. Although I do have to admit that I still like Prince Valiant, even after all this time.

Strange Daze, by Matt Roberts. Sidhe, greys, technomagic, conspiracies, and lines like 'I should have realized the spell was a dud when I got to the binding ritual and found out the central components were a Big Mac and fries.' The early art style's a little off, but it's got a fast and loose quality to it that really grows on you, and the serial nature of the story that's always running behind the gags is very cool. Plus there's a demon in a beer bottle who tAlkS lIkE tOrGo.

Planet Earth (and other tourist traps), by Thomas Deeny. The strip is currently in the middle of a storyline about a guy whose ex-girlfriend is a vengeful Scottish supervillain, recently broken out of prison and on the hunt for him. Said guy is Moriarty, the clueless wonder of the ages, former unknowing roommate to a space alien invasion scout named Dextrose (everyone calls him Dex) and sometime prisoner (the cable company decided it was time to enforce the no-cable-theft rule), indebted to Ninja Kaylee for springing him from prison and to Ninja Kenny, who is also Miss Spork Festival 2002 (don't ask) for rescuing him from Ninja Kaylee after she decided to kill him. There's also a one-eyed lesbian - realistically done, for once - and a number of RPG related storylines where people actually play the RPG's instead of being pictured as characters therein. All the art is hand-drawn rather than done in Illustrator, too. It's cool.

Elf Only Inn, by Josh Sortelli. This one's RPG based... sort of. Rather than being about the characters in a game, or about a game itself, it's about the people who play in a chatroom called Elf Only Inn. The incredibly dysfunctional people who play in the chatroom - the fact that a Trekkie playing a Vulcan character is the sanest and most intelligently level-headed person in the group should tell you something. (I can say that, I'm a former Trekkie.) If you've ever dealt with some of the more twinkish RPG types out there, then you know what this guy is drawing of the players' attempts at dealing with each other is true.

Mythocorp, by Kevin Wolf. Mythocorp International is a company whose CEO and president is the multidimensional cosmic horror Lord Huzbazathul ("NO BREAK FOURTH WALL!") Other characters include Mr. Kitano, a manager whose primary technique for keeping people in line is to dispatch his ninja; Dr. Marcus Ultra of the R&D Department, sometime member of a club of would-be globe dominating gay mad scientists; Hamish MacCreagle, the one-eyed hook-handed Scottish assassin sent as a spy by Mythocorp's enemy Dr. Malevanto; Hoax the extraterrestrial, sent by the temp agency; Harve Mannlicher, the internal security chief with more memory implant problems than Wolverine; Camille Legrasse, the company librarian and resident magician; and J. D. "Briefcase" Holden, Mr. Kitano's assistant and closest thing to a normal person on the staff. It went through a lengthy hiatus last year, but it's back and it's fabulous.

Baldo - It's a family strip. It's a daily humor strip. It's well drawn. It's got good jokes. It features a primarily Hispanic-American cast of characters. It's got a widowed dad, two kids, and their Tia Carmen, plus several friends and other characters. It's a nice thing to read and it's about a hundred times more on the ball than Duh and Lois ever was or will ever be.

Monkeyhouse - I have no idea who draws this or where they come from, but it's another family humor strip. Widowed dad, one daughter. Daughter is very, very bright. The art is a little on the minimalist side, but that's okay. It's nice to see the smart kid as the central character for once, although there is the obligatory nerd figure every so often. I was a little surprised to discover that the family in the strip was Catholic; off the top of my head I can't think of any other Catholic characters in comic strips beyond the cast of

( Error: Irreparable invalid markup in entry. Raw contents behind the cut. )

Perhaps I will not go to Hell after all.

If only because they'll have an impossible time figuring out how to customize it to my various sins and insanities. Remember this post? Well, my innocent speculation on how to redeem the idea of Tolkien as Middle-Earth wizard from the Mary Sue story in which it was conceived got a little too detailed for my own good. Here, consider this crossposted from marysues:

---

Already gave the matter some thought. It originally involved placing Narnia in the unknown East of Middle-Earth, somewhere past the location of ancient Cuivinen - possibly in the Empty Lands, once they had been found and abandoned by the sailors who were looking for Numenor and Aman after the sinking. The thought I had was that the Elves had the Straight Road into the West that led them to Aman, and that the Narnians were somehow endowed with a similar Straight Road - one that led into the Utter East, to the edge of the old world, where the seas ran sweet. Lord knows the islands encountered in Voyage of the Dawn Treader were fairly redolent of the Enchanted Islands and the Islands of Shadow that lay between Numenor and Valinor. . .

It got a little over-complicated the more I thought about it, and I wound up thinking there was a simpler explanation. Uncle Andrew's rings transported their wearers to the Wood Between the Worlds, where each pond led to a different world. It seemed a bit more logical that Middle-Earth and Narnia should both be worlds accessible through the Wood, since we know that at least one other world - the one that Jadis / the White Witch came from, with the dead city of Charn - was found by human travelers. Alatar and Pallando, therefore, went into the East of Middle-Earth, and when Saruman left, they kept going. My feeling is that they were teaching and being taught by kinds of Men that no one had seen in a very long time, perhaps even Men who had never had dealings with any kinds of elves at all. Perhaps - who knows? Perhaps they came to Cuivinen's old location at last, and there were reminded of the Blessed Realm they had left behind, which they remembered only in a dream. Alatar might have been troubled then, but Pallando was so fascinated by it all that he took up a fistful of the sand from the shores of the Waters of Awakening, sand left over from when the world was new. After that Alatar could not sleep again, because the thoughts of what should have been done, and had not been done, were too strong. Ultimately he resolved to seek out some kind of redemption for abandoning the human realms to Sauron, and opened a portal to our world, one which Pallando followed him through. A little mind-magic and a bit of cultural assimilation later, and you have a pair of English gentlemen scholars. One of whom is still a bit enraptured by philosophy and magic, and has some interesting dust - and one of whom knew that Saruman had a certain interest in powerful artifacts and the crafting thereof...



At the rate I'm going they'll have to add so many punishment elements from disparate mythoi to my custom level of Hell that the damn thing will explode and I'll have to wander the worlds forever as a spirit instead.