showed the kiddo "lilo and stitch" for the first time and tbh?

same vibe

Do you have any comics that you recommend? I want some new stuff to read!

OOH yesyesyes! Let me just like. Tell you everything that I love.

The first comic I ever really fell in love with was Matt Fraction’s 2012 Hawkeye  run. It’s... so good. It reinvents the character in such a fun and interesting a deeply human way and also it’s funny as hell and the art is SEXY. David Aja and Matt Hollingsworth outsold. Also, it’s a really good jumping-off point if you’re trying to get into comics; a lot of comics do a kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge self-referential thing where the characters will say something and you’ll go “huh?” and there will be an asterisk and a footnote that says, like, “Read Secret Ultra Infinity Super Wars Vs. The X-Men Issue 458″ and you’re like “I am not going to do that” and then you don’t understand whatever’s happening for a few panels. The Fraction series doesn’t really do that! Which is super nice.

Once you’re done with that—Kelly Thompson’s 2016 Hawkeye run, which follows Kate Bishop (also Hawkeye) after she moves to LA! I LOVE LOVE LOVED this run because Kate is my favorite Marvel character of all time and Thompson really understands her and writes her better than pretty much anyone else who’s ever tackled Kate. Including Allan Heinberg. Feel free to @ me.

Skip All-New Hawkeye. It’s literally not worth it. Jeff Lumire doesn’t understand Clint and Kate’s dynamic and doesn’t understand Kate, period. The way their dynamic plays out in ANH reads like he literally just skimmed the Fraction series, lmao. There’s one cute flashback scene that addresses Kate’s backstory a little bit that I like a lot better than her motivation-backstory-flashback from the 2005 Young Avengers, but also when you take into account that she’d already had one of these flashback sequences it’s sort of redundant in a way that makes me wonder if Lumire was like... at all familiar with her character when he signed on to do the series. WHATEVER. I’M SALTY.

Young Avengers! The 2005 series is sort of required reading to understand Kieron Gillen’s 2013 series, but I like the Gillen series a lot better (at least in its handling of its female characters *cough* Kate *cough*) There’s a lot of YA reading inbetween the 2005 and 2013 series but I skipped a lot of it because the art was ugly and the Runaways crossover was near-unreadable, IMO.

THE UNBELIEVABLE GWENPOOL! I LOVE Gwenpool. She’s one of my favorite characters. If you’re not familiar, the basic concept is that she is a girl from our universe who loved Marvel, and one day she woke up and found herself in the Marvel universe—and proceeded to just sort of cause chaos in every way possible. Her series was fun and vibrant and the art style is sooooo cute. 

Spidey! This run was so so so fun and cute. I definitely have a weakness for teenage superheroes because I think their problems are more interesting and their banter is MUCH funnier, by and large. This run focused on Peter Parker in high school juggling his teenage problems with his identity as Spider-Man.

America! Gabby Rivera tackled the character of America Chavez for a solo series and I, for one, really enjoyed it. Also Joe Quinones’s art is deeply, deeply sexy. America is a really fun character and also she’s a lesbian so I was sold from the beginning! Prodigy, who I love, also pops up in this series quite a bit, and so does Kate!!!! Because they’re in love. AmeriKate will get confirmed one day or I’ll kill Marvel.

West Coast Avengers! This series is super new but I’m REALLY excited about it. Both the Hawkeyes are part of this new team, and so are Gwenpool and America, which was all it took to sell me on it. Issue 1 came out in August, and Issue 2 comes out on I belieeeeeeve the 19th of this month! I’m really, really excited for it. Issue 1 was a lot of fun and I trust Kelly Thompson with my life even if she keeps comphetting Kate.

Mark Waid’s Daredevil! I just started this series, and I’m only two volumes in, but I like it a lot so far. Those of you who follow me know that I’ve been wading through the Daredevil Netflix series and although I’ve been enjoying it a decent amount, a lot of it is sort of... bleak and joyless. This is not so in Waid’s series! It combines a pretty perfect amount of fun banter and zinginess with the inherent grittiness of Daredevil. I admittedly don’t know much about the character, since this is my first time reading him, but I love it so far and Matt and Foggy are in love, also, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Also I just started Matt Fraction’s Iron Fist and although I’m not yet far in enough to make a real call I like it so far and given that Fraction is one of my favorite comic writers ever I’m confident that I’ll really enjoy it.

NON-BIG TWO COMICS! (Sorry, DC fans, I’ve never read anything DC and I probably never will except maybe The Flash but even that’s a big ol’ maybe)

SEX CRIMINALS! This one’s by Matt Fraction (who y’all know I love) and Chip Zdarsky, who I also love to death. It’s a REALLY funny series about people who figure out that time freezes when they cum so they start robbing banks. It sounds like a really weird concept, and it is, but it’s also so fucking good. It’s so good. That’s really all I can say.

Heavy Vinyl! This is a series about a group of girls in I belieeeeeve the 90s who work at a record store and are also part of a secret underground crime-fighting fight club. I’ve only read volume 1—I’m not sure if there’s more out yet, I’ve checked my local store a couple times and haven’t found any—but I’m eager to read more when/if there ever is any.

Kelly Thompson’s Nancy Drew! I was a little scared going into this one that the similarities to Kate (private detective, sassy young woman, written by Thompson etc) would make Nancy’s voice too similar to Kate’s, but because it’s Thompson I wasn’t let down! The only way Kelly Thompson has ever let me down is by making Kate date boys. ANYWAY. As someone who grew up reading and loving Nancy Drew, I was really excited about this series and I wasn’t disappointed. George is a lesbian in this! Finally! That’s all you need to know. Go read it.

That’s all I got for now! Thanks for asking, sorry this got long!

Yo Gotti: White Friday (CM9)

Yo Gotti has long been Memphis’ biggest rap star, but he’s also spent his 30s on the cusp of something more, idling through several underperforming major-label releases while nurturing the mixtape cred that built his name. And then suddenly, in early 2016, Gotti scored big with “Down in the DM,” a late-career social media smash that had propped up his fifth album in 2015 and wedged his name into new conversations, like the one that must have precipitated his appearance on a Meghan Trainor breakup single called “Better” last year. It wasn’t until 2016 that Gotti was the type to get a crossover call like that. So, how does a late bloomer mixtape rapper seize his moment to sidle into the spotlight? Smartly, he’s back on the circuit. Kind of.

Gotti’s latest seems to be billed as an album first, White Friday, and mixtape second, CM9, but he’s clearly folding his long-running Cocaine Muzik mixtape series into a newfound industry prominence, serving up his usual street fare with a bit more polish. To be sure, Gotti has a better track record as a mixtape slinger than he does as a major-label rap album artist, and CM9 benefits from a low-stakes formula that’s less concerned with stringing together a narrative than it is with song-by-song quality control. The Art of Hustle, Gotti’s last album, saw him overextended, trying to frame himself in with a single statement-worthy piece of work; CM9 instead is a snapshot of Gotti in stride.

This new project’s bookends are the most explicitly self-referential of the rapper’s big 2016, and he grapples aloud with his come up. He isn’t known for clever lyricism, but Gotti can make a straightforward phrase sound agile. “Biggest year of my career and I could feel the pressure, gotta follow-up,” he snips on “81,” a slapper of an intro and fine microcosm of Gotti’s honed simplicity. Tracks like “Off da Top (3am)” don’t fare as well, and scan instead like generically manufactured trap.

On “Blah Blah Blah” Gotti casts himself as a petty asshole over an eerie banger, taunting an ex while turning his attention elsewhere. He sounds utterly unlikeable through it all. But the tease—“All I heard is ‘blah blah blah blah blah’”—spills throughout the song with enough charisma to worm into your ear like a bully’s “neener neener.” On the last track, Gotti endears instead, dropping his guard to memorialize his former manager, Mel Carter, who passed away less than a month before this mixtape was released. Gotti narrates as much as he raps, thanking an old friend for an overdue come-up they’ll never see through together. “If I knew talkin’ to you was my last time/The other night, it wouldn’t have been about no CM9,” Gotti promises.

Sometimes Gotti turns in a better chorus himself than the mixtape’s guests designated for the job. Kodak Black is the exception that steals the show on “Weatherman,” hawking a fresh-out-of-jail hook about coming up and needing more, ad-libbing it all in his stylish whine. Gotti has taken a mixtape-like approach to sharing space with his featured emcees, but he’s nearly overstocked the tracklist’s obvious centerpiece. “Castro” is a star-studded blunder that packages some of the mixtape’s best and worst rapping hand-in-hand. Big Sean and Kanye West are here mostly in spirit, crashing the party with unforgivably clunking punch-ins like “Spanish chick—J. Lo” and “Astronaut—takeoff.” Quavo and 2 Chainz save the day with full-length verses of their own, injecting a bit of zany character into an otherwise tepid group project. Several months after the same troupe of emcees gathered for a Kanye West single called “Champions,” “Castro” feels a bit like the party’s stale leftovers. But it’s still a coup for Gotti, and he holds his own confidently. Last year, he plucked “Down in the DM” from its original mixtape tracklist and built a year and bonafide album around its success. Gotti’s chipped away and crammed at least a couple more single-worthy tracks into White Friday, enough maybe to keep himself afloat through 2017. Either way, the guy doesn’t let up.