#Rick Reed

[juegosintiperojuegocontigo]

Forgive me father for I have synthed

[flippyspoon]

The world if Star Trek producers let the characters be as queer as the actors wanted them to be.

[3d-wifey]

The amount of NSFW alphabets I have lined up is diabolical, and yall wouldn't even guess who I'm writing them for

Plus Walter de ville and that one cannibal sebastian Stan plays

Might even add those two hotties from Masters of the air

[avalon-of-babylon]

So while I'm waiting for the next season of Lower Decks, I've decided to watch everything in chronological order, and it's been a time so far.

I don't hate Enterprise, but at the same time, it bounces wildly between captivating and middling with aggressively forced heteroerotic moments between characters who, up to the point I'm at, have shown no intrest implied or otherwise towards each other. It is painfully 2000 "haha we don't talk about the gays" kind of straight media, which is weird given how flamboyant DS9 was just 2 years before, and Rick Berman created both shows.

If it wasn't for Shuttlepod One being some of the gayest shit in Star Trek since Garak put his hands on Bashir's shoulders, I might start getting conspiratorial. It's genuinely like they decided to shove all of season one's homoerotism into that episode, I am not joking.

[origami-butterfly]

I apologise for having no show results button, but if you don't know the fandom, just pick one you vibe with!

[roki-roki-roll]

Part 2 (Part 1 here)

Lyrics from The Machine (Intro) by Jukebox the Ghost

Had to do a lot of redraws for this one lol

[joearlikelikeswrestling]

[vintageleathersblog]

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

Next on the list Rick goes to Reed and the FF... but that also doesn't get him anywhere... also I love Rick calling Johnny out here for the "Damn, she's hot it's a shame she died" line...

[cantsayidont]

March through May 1988. While the Evanier/Spiegle BLACKHAWK revival was prompted by Steven Spielberg's interest in doing a BLACKHAWK feature film as a follow-on to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, this controversial Howard Chaykin miniseries feels a fair bit like RAIDERS: a slick, stylish, rather cynical adventure story about a square-jawed heel and a saucy, two-fisted dame who save the world from fascism when they're not too busy bickering, in a nostalgia-bait setting full of visual allusions to '30s and '40s advertising and propaganda art.

Although Chaykin was certainly familiar with the Blackhawks (and had done covers and a couple of backup stories for the Evanier series), he indulges in some obligatory late '80s revisionism, dismissing or discarding some familiar elements of the feature (for instance, the characters laugh off the possibility of a Blackhawk Island, a staple of the earlier series) and tinkering with some details. Perhaps his most significant move was to reaffirm that Blackhawk was Polish, as shown in the first Blackhawk story in MILITARY COMICS #1 (by Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera) back in 1941. Later versions of Blackhawk's origin had claimed he was American and had merely been flying for the Polish Air Force at the time of the 1939 Nazi invasion, but Chaykin was having none of that: The Blackhawk of this series is Janos Prohaska (a name borrowed from a veteran Hollywood stuntman who'd worked on STAR TREK and other movies and TV shows), a broad-shouldered, left-leaning (and, this being a Howard Chaykin story, Jewish) schlub from Krakow who spends a lot of the story under fire for "premature antifascism" from a Red-baiting Southern senator who's also a secret Nazi agent.

(Special note needs to be made of the exceptionally creative lettering of Ken Bruzenak, without which this series would be much less than it is, and also the effective color work of Steve Oliff.)

Exactly when this story is supposed to be set is a little vague. One of the pastiche magazine covers suggests that it takes place in June 1941, about the time MILITARY COMICS #1 went on sale, but the story concerns the theft of an American atomic bomb, and the U.S. already seems to be at war, so who knows! Chaykin is not Roy Thomas, who would undoubtedly have sweated such details.

The villain is none of Blackhawk's past opponents, but rather a newly created character, British fascist and disgraced Hollywood star Sir Death Mayhew, a very thinly veiled pastiche of Errol Flynn, obviously informed by Charles Higham's muckraking 1980 bio ERROL FLYNN: THE UNTOLD STORY, which alleged that Flynn was a Nazi spy. Other biographers have challenged Higham's evidence and conclusions (although even the most generous accounts of Flynn's life are pretty seamy), but by the '80s Flynn was long dead, this was after all a comic book, and Mayhew is a pretty effective (and thoroughly risible) villain. Probably the biggest disappointment is that we don't ever actually see Mayhew's earlier encounter with Blackhawk, who he says had previously exposed him as a Nazi spy, and there's never really a clash between the Blackhawks and Mayhew's fascist White Lion squadron (which ends up basically carrying the water for Mayhew's mad plan to give himself "a Viking funeral").

The original BLACKHAWK series eventually introduced a Lady Blackhawk, blond adventuress Zinda Blake, but Chaykin creates his own version: a feisty American-born Communist expat, Natalie (Gurdin) Reed. She's a flight engineer as well as a pilot, although her primary function is to spar with Blackhawk. It's not hard to envision this scene with Harrison Ford as Janos and Karen Allen as Natalie:

One of the biggest complaints levied against this series is that the other Blackhawks get short shrift: They don't show up until well into the story, one of them is killed off-handedly, and they don't have much to do other than be exasperated with their boss.

Nonetheless, this was, believe it or not, the first time in their long history that all the Blackhawks actually got full names, including "Chop Chop" (Weng Chan), who subsequently became a supporting character in the John Ostrander/Graham Nolan HAWKWORLD series in the early '90s.

Your reaction to this series will likely depend on how you feel about the Blackhawks. If you'd never heard of them beyond perhaps glancing past their WHO'S WHO entry, it's a pretty good time — the story has some missed opportunities (including surprisingly little aerial action), and marginalizing the rest of the team is definitely a flaw, but it's entertaining in its slick '80s way, and it's more cohesive than a lot of Chaykin's other work from this period (e.g., AMERICAN FLAGG!, THE SHADOW, BLACK KISS, TIME²). Hardcore Blackhawk fans (and I guess there are still a few) generally hate it, and certainly for purists, the Evanier/Spiegle series is likely to be far more satisfactory. Also, Chaykin's particular schtick is something of an acquired taste, and if you're not a fan, his customary abrasive cynicism may be a bit much. However, you can tell he was having fun, which counts for a lot. He even manages to work in the Blackhawks' "HAWKAAAAA" battle cry at the end, though not their jaunty theme song:

This miniseries, originally released in what DC used to call its "Prestige Format," apparently didn't sell as well as anticipated; for a long time, you could find copies in comic shop bargain bins for a fraction of the cover price, which is how I first read it. However, in 2020, DC finally, miraculously, reprinted the series in trade paperback (as BLACKHAWK: BLOOD & IRON), also tossing in the 1989 SECRET ORIGINS entry (by Marty Pasko, Grant Miehm, and Terry Beatty), which attempts, with fair success, to square Chaykin's version with the original Eisner/Cuidera story, and the now hard-to-find ACTION COMICS WEEKLY Blackhawk serial by Mike Grell, Rick Burchett, and Pablo Marcos, which is set after the war and is basically a straightforward pastiche of the early years of Milt Caniff's STEVE CANYON newspaper strip. I actually find the ACTION COMICS WEEKLY serial significantly more cynical and abrasive than the Chaykin series, although Burchett's art is nice. DC hasn't bothered to reprint the short-lived BLACKHAWK ongoing series of 1989–1990, by Pasko (and later Doug Moench) and Burchett, which is just as well: Also set in the late '40s, it follows on from the ACW serial, but is a pretty much unmitigated disaster, full of puzzling creative choices, including some bizarre (and misogynistic) abuse of Natalie Reed. The art is fine (although the interiors never live up to Burchett's excellent covers), but it can't save the muddy, mean-spirited storyline, which is often confusing and intermittently preposterous in a way that clashes with the intended gritty tone, making it highly missable even for completists.

[allthefunnystuffistaken]

idea: austin doesn’t have to pay for reeds/saxophone maintenance bc apollo and magic.

[marvelreader]

Fantastic Four #12 (Dec 10, 1962)

The issue that launched a million comic shop debates! Who's stronger? The Hulk or The Thing? This and Amazing Spider-Man #1 came out on the same day and are the first true crossovers in the fledgling Marvel Universe. Excelsior!

Lee / Kirby / Ayers

[onionsinpeace]

Some pixel art of the main characters of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace! I don't plan on posting a ton of pixel art from now on or anything (I currently don't even have any other ideas for pixel art), but I thought I'd try a new style :D

[exqui-thicc]

✨ MBTI as music legends ✨ (part 2)

THE ANALYSTS

INTJ: The Architect

(Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging)

ENTJ: The Commander

(Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging)

INTP: The Logician

(Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Prospecting)

ENTP: The Debater

(Extraverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Prospecting)

[thedamncookies]

Okay, but now for real : HAPPY INTERNATIONAL CHARLIE BUSHNELL DAY 🫶🏻 our Luke Castellan

[villainspo]

Reading Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four run; immediately discovering that the bad guys are rather healthily philosophical about failure.

Source: FF (2011) #1, by Jonathan Hickman (writer), Steve Epting (pencils and inks), Rick Magyar (more inks), and Paul Mounts