#like at least a team-up issue during the super sons era

[hood-ex]

This would've hit so much harder if Dick and Jon's relationship had been better developed before Jon was aged up 😩.

Superman: Son of Kal-El #9

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #304: "... Yearning to Breathe Free!"

June, 1989

Vs. the U-Foes! Special guest appearance by the pouncing PUMA!

Look at the roster box trying to pretend Reed and Sue are still around. You can't fool me.

And, hey, the U-Foes! They're a quirky miniboss squad that hasn't fought the Avengers so far, at least not in the Avengers book. Which feels weird!

The Avengers should fight all the quirky miniboss squads. They're practically made to fight all the quirky miniboss squads.

Well, now they get to fight this one.

And Puma is a guy. I don't really know the guy. He's a mid-80s Spider-Man book guy.

Also also, this is very clearly a fill-in issue. I mean, so was the Super-Nova arc. But that had the goal of writing Reed and Sue out of the Avengers, which it couldn't even manage.

This one seems to be more in the style of one and done, spin the wheels until John Byrne takes over.

... That's happening a lot lately.

Last times in Avengers: long story short, the team broke apart but a new team formed during the X-Event Inferno. And then after fighting a big guy from space, 2/5ths of the new team fucked off.

This is a fill-in, you don't gotta know a lot.

Huh. The opening splash waxes poetic about Ellis Island and the title is a line from the New Colossus poem that was written for the Statue of Liberty.

Will this be a Very Special Episode about immigration? I'm sorta not confident in this era of Avengers to do a Very Special Episode.

Least surprisingly of all, the terrific trio of Avengers are at Ellis Island because it's being renovated and a Department of the Interior pal got Captain America permission for a special preview visit.

Steve Rogers is, of course, a huge fan of Ellis Island and immigration and just all the good America stuff. He loves America so much.

And being a huge nerd, he invited Thor and Gilgamesh along as a kind of casual relaxing activity after all that Super-Nova biz.

Thor: "I, myself, Steve, am an immigrant of sorts -- from eternal Asgard. I share much in spirit with those who passed through here."

Dammit, Thor. I don't think your situation is really the same since you retain whatever counts as citizenship in Asgard and freely go back and forth whenever you want to live in a giant castle.

Also, you have a fake identity set up by the American intelligence community which most immigrants don't get.

Gilgamesh calls Ellis Island meager compared to the cool architecture that the Eternals are used to. But adds "there is an aura of greatness all about" which may or may not have just been to cushion the insult.

While the heroes in civilian duds wander around and look at construction, they overhear one of the workmen muttering anti-immigrant sentiments to himself.

Charles Little Sky: "'Noble immigrants.' Hah! Nobody wants to admit the real truth."

Oh, no, we are in for a Very Special Episode.

Captain America being Captain America even when he's being Steve Rogers, decides this is an invitation to a conversation and asks the guy to elaborate on his thoughts.

Charles Little Sky: "Yeah, I've got a beef, mister, why shouldn't I? I'm an American Indian!" Thor, in glasses: "And...?" Charles Little Sky: "And my people were here long before anybody. These 'immigrants' who came through here were just another group to come and take my people's land... Just like foreigners, starting with the Mayflower, have always done! This place should be called the Museum of Theft!" Captain Steve: "I understand your bitterness, son. Injustice was done to your people. But those who came through here certainly weren't to blame. They were just looking for a refuge from poverty and oppression themselves."

Captain America makes bold stand: pilgrims bad, immigrants good.

I hope the Avengers don't just bother this dude all day.

Thor, in glasses, asks why Charles works here if he hates it so much but, c'mon, everybody needs to eat and not everyone has a palace in a magical sky realm or gets paid $1000 smackeroos a week by Tony Stark.

Charles also mentions that he can't afford to be choosy about jobs that don't ask a lot of questions. Then realizes he's oversharing with strangers and just teal deers it as he needs the job and he's gone once he has enough money saved up.

Then he spots HIM! He's been found by HIM!

And runs off, to the Avengers' confusion.

Then a sharp-dressed man in a bolo tie tells them its none of their business, stay out of it, and yells for Charles to stop running away because he means him no harm.

Then the man transforms into some kind of furry and chases after Charles.

Pretty much guaranteeing the Avengers are going to get involved after all. Because a dude turned into a furry right there in Ellis Island and chased after a terrified young adult.

Also, the dude is Thomas Fireheart, aka Puma.

But do the Avengers know that?

Yes. And they don't know if Puma is a hero or a threat or a menace. So definitely decide to get involved.

Thor slams his hammer to put on his working duds while Cap duck behind something to change his clothes.

He shouts at Puma to hey maybe explain what he's up to. And since Puma ignores him, Thor throws his mighty hammer. And when Thor throws his mighty hammer, its because he's done with the yammer. Or something.

Since Thor wasn't throwing at 'turn Puma into salsa' force, the cat man is able to jump over the hammer and yell that Thor better not delay him!

That's not an explaining himself though so Captain America throws his mighty shield. But instead of yield, Puma catches the shield and throws it back.

What a jerk!

Gilgamesh, who I guess hasn't decided whether he's going to get involved or not because he's just standing around, jumps in front of the shield so nobody else less tough gets hit by it. And Cap catches it when it bounces off Gilgamesh's gilgapecs.

With this exchange of violence exchanged, Cap asks Puma again to explain things.

Since Thor and Captain America are standing in his way, he actually does.

Puma: "The youth and I are both of the same tribe. He possesses great power -- power that could unleash itself at any time! My uncle -- our tribal shaman -- realized this. He sent me to retrieve Charles, so that he could be trained in the power's use... for his own -- and for the world's -- good."

See, was that so hard?

The two Avengers happened to catch Puma right when he was like five feet from catching Charles Little Sky because the young adult is just right there. In the scene.

He insists that he doesn't have powers, that the elders are just making shit up to prevent him from leaving the tribe.

And sure, he has headaches sometimes and they make him act weird sometimes but that doesn't mean he has powers!

Thor and Cap pause to ponder this. Charles Little Sky is clearly hiding something. And Puma is a dubious source because while he very heroically fought the Beyonder once, he's also a mercenary who has worked for some shady customers.

But while Thor and Cap ponder what to do, Puma makes the decision, in his mind a tough decision but for the greater good, to escalate the conflict and endanger by-standers. Rather than risk the Avengers deciding against him.

So he rushes off (while Thor and Cap just watch) and topples one of the tall scaffolding towards a crowd.

Sure that the Avengers will jump to deal with that and backburner him. Which they do. Good job saving lives, the heroes!

Thor wind-blasts the scaffolding toward Gilgamesh, who catches it. Cap ushers civilians towards the exit.

Leaving Puma free to pounce on Charles Little Sky.

Puma again states that he's just here to be a helpful helper man but Charles says crock to that. He tries to punch Puma but only hurts his own hand.

Apparently, breaking a knuckle punching a cat man is one of the triggers for Charles' great world-threatening power.

Light and kirby crackle burst out of Charles and he feels as if he's being torn apart.

Then, he's blasted back as a rift in space opens.

And out of the rift in space-time strolls the U-Foes!

Not a surprise, since they were on the cover, but hey! The plot is here!

Real quick: The U-Foes. They're like an evil Fantastic Four. In that there's four of them and they got their powers from cosmic rays. By explicitly copying the Fantastic Four's space trip. Two of them are even siblings. Do these guys fight the FF a lot because they're a better evil opposites than the Frightful Four.

Vector: the one with all the lines and suns on his design. He has telekinesis, which often manifests as repulsing lasers.

Vapor: she's a gas lady, made of gas. She can turn into any kind of gas.

X-Ray: he's pink and looks like a really weird bunch of perspective lines. A guy made out of energy. Can blast various kinds of heavy radiation.

Ironclad: big tough guy made of mineral. He's a pretty blatant the Thing or a Colossus but he can increase or decrease his weight so he's at least got that going on.

So, why did the U-Foes pop out of a portal?

Why, the power of retcons and a shared universe!

Sometimes, a book writes out a character. Has them die or depowers them or just puts them in a situation where they're not available.

And then another book will go "and here's how they got out of that one."

It can be interesting to trace a character through various books, trying to figure out what the hell has been going on with them.

In the U-Foes' case, the Hulk trapped them in different dimensions that counteracted their powers. And possibly killed them.

But they all survived and managed to assemble in the dimensional crossroads to luckily get brought back to Earth by one random portal.

Nothing like a classic contrived comic coincidence.

Anyway, having just gotten back from tailor-made space exile/death, Vector is quite enraged when the Avengers propose to just capture the U-Foes and send them to jail, for being dicks.

Vector blasts Thor, Gilgamesh (still just in his civvies) Captain America, Puma, and Charles Little Sky outside through a window.

Puma is worried because he heard from TV news that the U-Foes were powerful enough to knock around the Hulk. They might kill the Avengers and any civilian in their way!

Buuuuut... he is only here for Charles Little Sky. Opening a random portal that random supervillains fell out of proved to Puma that portal kid is the biggest threat.

Maybe he should just let the U-Foes kill the Avengers!

Is his thought process.

Dammit, Puma.

Anyway, Thor tells the U-Foes that they brought the inevitable beat-down on themselves by blasting him through a window.

So X-Ray blasts Thor. Ironclad slugs Gilgamesh, figuring that if he's hanging out with the Avengers, he's probably one. And Vector blasts Captain America.

Puma goes wow sucks for them that they're getting their asses kicked but at least now nobody will get in my way.

Except Vector and Vapor notice him running away and decide, nah.

The U-Foes have deduced that Charles Little Sky could portal them back to the dimensional crossroads so they need to do something about him. And that means getting him before Puma can.

Vapor turns into carbon monoxide and gives Puma carbon monoxide poisoning.

Vector tells Vapor to turn to chlorine gas and just murderify Charles Little Sky.

Puma belatedly realizes that the better idea would have been to team up with the Avengers to beat the U-Foes. Womp womp.

He decides he needs to buy time for the Avengers to recover from their asses getting beat by getting his own ass beat for a while.

Puma tries to jump between Charles and Vapor.

... But she's gas. How does that work? I mean, it doesn't, in this case. But that's because Ironclad shows up and starts trying to bear-hug him to death.

Then Ironclad get's KLONG! by Mjolnir slightly before Puma gets crushed to death.

It's Thor! Turns out one blast of radiation isn't enough to put him down, obviously.

And he whirls Mjolnir really fast to blow Vapor away from the unconscious Charles Little Sky.

Charles regains consciousness to see X-Ray try to french fry him, only to be stopped by Captain America tackling him.

Even through (or around?) Captain America's mighty shield, he can feel the burn from the radiation X-Ray is putting off.

Vector decides he'll kill the kid himself but Puma jump kicks him towards Thor who clobbers him.

Charles is so freaked out by all of this that his powers start going off again, opening portals to random dimensions, some filled with aaaaaah, real monsters!

Gilgamesh deduces from earlier that Charles' powers don't work if he's unconscious so he eye beams Charles Little Sky unconscious.

Cool contribution, Gilgamesh.

Wait, you have eye beams?

Ironclad tries to throw a Big Rock on the again unconscious Charles Little Sky but Gilgamesh uses his eye beams again to blow up the Big Rock.

Ironclad decides fuck this actually and runs away off-panel.

Vector and X-Ray try to double-team Thor and they have him stalemated by blasting him full power. He can't advance but he's not retreating either.

But in secret, Thor is just face-tanking Vector's telekinesis blasts and using Mjolnir to absorb X-Ray's radiation. Not just the radiation X-Ray is blasting but all the radiation in his body. And when X-Ray passes out from too drained, Thor blasts the radiation at Vector who also falls down.

Possibly with turbo cancer now.

Puma's puma senses detect an invisible lethal gas floating towards Charles so Thor blasts the spot with lightning until Vapor passes out.

Ironclad is still running away

So Captain America trips him with his mighty shield and Gilgamesh decks him in the face BWOM!

With the U-Foes kicked firmly in the butt, Puma rerails the plot to him definitely taking Charles Little Sky back to the tribe.

Captain America says that Charles might be a mutant and there's just a bunch of mutant teams that could train him to control his powers. The tribe isn't the only place he could learn control.

Rather than drag him back against his will, Charles should be given the choice where he will go.

Puma: "And if he chooses no training? If he chooses to continue on the run? It is a danger to the world I cannot allow. Nor can I risk strangers training him incorrectly. Allow me to take him... or I will fight you to the death."

Gilgamesh points out that the death would be Puma's death. There's two god-tier dudes here. And Thor says that Charles will decide for himself.

Charles wakes up and he decides for himself to flee.

Puma tries to leap at Charles but Captain America tackles him.

Thor instead jumps in front of Charles to cut him off but Charles shouts that he's not anyone's property and he wants to be free.

IN A RANDOM DIMENSION IF HE CAN'T BE FREE ON EARTH.

Yeah, he fucks off through a portal.

Despite being a character created for a fill-in story, Charles Little Sky has a small pile of appearances.

Danny Fingeroth brings him back for a bunch of Darkhawk issues but he gets roles beyond that.

Puma: "Thor -- you fool! You've let a being of untold power get away! He could be anywhere now, hurting or being hurt, frightened, alone. Most probably, though, he'll soon be dead!"

Thor points a finger right back. Saying this all happened because Puma decided he was in far too much a rush to explain the situation to the random superhero bystanders.

That relentlessly chasing the kid is obviously what triggered his portal powers going off and letting the U-Foes come through and cause trouble.

Puma retorts that, hey, hindsight is 20-20 but he still thinks he did zero things wrong and that it's all the Avengers' fault.

Captain America says they only have Puma's word that his intentions were good and Puma has a really mixed reputation so it's really hard to take him at his word.

Thor suggests they beat up Puma and Puma fucks off through the broken window, yelling they'll have to catch him first.

Except, the Avengers don't even bother.

There's no charges against him and he eventually helped them against the supervillains.

Left behind to deal with sending the U-Foes to super jail, the Vault, Captain America muses how Charles Little Sky "who was so bitter about immigrants... ended up being, himself, an immigrant in a new dimension. And he entered it through Ellis Island."

That's really deep, Cap. Really makes you think, probably.

Thus ends a Very Special Episode of the Avengers.

Follow @essential-avengers because next East Coast Avengers issue, its Byrne time. Like, reblog, comment, maybe.

[kanri-tea]

Ageswap! AU

Some headcanons for a HypMic ageswap! Au

Except everyone's ages are all over the place lol.

Ichiro is 32, Jiro is 30, and Saburo is 27

Samatoki is 29, Jyuto is 25, and Rio is 26

Ramuda is 30, Gentaro is 34, and Dice is 34

Jakurai is 14, Hifumi is 22, and Doppo is 22

Sasara is 31, Rosho is 31, and Rei is 16

Kuko is 32, Jyushi is 31, and Hitoya is 14

Otome is 19, Ichijiku is 26, and Nemu is 23

Buster Bros!!!

Ichiro is a bit of a mess, but he's getting better. He used to be pretty bad, working as a debt collector for Mozuku, doing drugs, and drinking, etc., but thanks to his brothers, he's gotten out and gotten clean.

Unfortunately, during that period, his relationship with his son, Rei, turned sour and Rei ran away at a fairly young age. Ichiro has been trying to repair his relationships, especially with Rei, but Rei isn't interested or receptive at all.

Jiro and Saburo live together, Jiro as a PE teacher at a middle school and Saburo as a white hat hacker/computer security stuff.

Jiro and Saburo's relationship with Ichiro isn't the best, but after Ichiro started getting clean and shaping up, their relationship has improved enough to form a team.

Jiro and Saburo are aware of Rei's existence but haven't actually met him before.

Mad Trigger Crew

Not huge changes here, Samatoki still works with the Yakuza, Jyuto is still a cop, and Rio is still Rio.

Jyuto isn't quite as experienced in being a corrupt cop as canon, so Samatoki makes sure to cover for him whenever he stumbles.

Samatoki is a big brother through and through, so he keeps an eye out for both Jyuto and Rio. His relationship with Nemu is okay, though sometimes she thinks he's the dumbest fool in the world.

Rio is more than well-aware that his survival cooking is not for the faint of heart. He finds it hilarious how Samatoki and Jyuto stutter and flinch whenever he brings it up, as well as how easily they falter under his puppy eyes.

Fling Posse

Ramuda deliberately makes sure as little people know his actual age as possible

It's one thing for a 24 year old to act cutesy and call girls "onee-san," it's a whole other thing when it's a 30 year old, no matter how cute and small he is

Ramuda finds Jakurai small and cute, so he sometimes goes and harasses coo over the boy, though, there have been times where the cops have been called for suspected pedophilia.

He's free from all the Project lambda stuff since it got exposed years ago and after a long hospitalization, he's completely healthy. You might even run into another clone occasionally, though they're all split to the four winds, each having chosen to pursue their own dreams.

Gentaro still is a writer, though he usually wears normal clothes. Honestly, he's way too old to continue to wear a kosode and hakama everywhere. It is way too hot out, plus he's not in his 20s anymore, when he thought it was cool and unique.

Dice is Dice. He's a gambler, though he does make sure to keep enough money around for rent and food. He's old enough that he's not so dumb enough to gamble away everything. Plus, he doesn't want to worry his daughter, Otome. She's already pissed at him enough.

Dice and Otome have a fairly good relationship, though that might just have been a result of Dice being an attentive and easygoing parent and never having to live with each other. Otome cares a lot for Dice, though she hates his gambling addiction.

Matenro

Everyone's pretty sure Jakurai is a mob boss or something. There's no way 14 year old should be able to live alone and be financially well off. Jakurai just smiles through everyone's suspicions, and since there's no proof, no one can do anything about it.

Jakurai acts like a literal angel, though, if you anger him, he might actually stab you (*cough* Ramuda *cough*). Jakurai, Hitoya, and Rei are friends, though no one knows how are when, they just are.

During the TDD era, Ramuda, Ichiro, and Samatoki acted a bit like pseudo-parents for him, though nowadays, while they do their best to keep an eye on Jakurai out of a sense of responsibility, Jakurai is content to ignore them.

Doppo and Hifumi are together and happily so. They still tell most people they're just roommates, due to Doppo's lack of confidence, but they're pretty content together.

Hifumi still works at a host club, though he does fumble sometimes from having less experience. Sometimes he doubts himself because he's not as old as his peers at the host club.

Doppo is just as self-deprecating as always, though there's a whole helping of fatalistic humor as well. His favorite way to relieve himself of stress is to hug Jakurai.

Both Hifumi and Doppo love Jakurai and really worry if a 14 year old living alone is okay. They like taking turns hugging and cuddling with the boy and Jakurai is somehow okay with it.

Dotsuitare Honpo

Sasara is in a pretty happy relationship with Rosho. They've moved past their issues in their youth and are now together.

They live separately, though that's mostly because of convenience for their workplace rather than because they want to

They planned to move in together soon, but their plans are put to halt when they meet Rei

Rei is a student at Rosho's school. He's not a bad student, just a bit inattentive and laissez-faire when it comes to others.

Rei helps them out of a bad situation and shows that he's good with a hypnosis microphone, but nopes out of the situation before either Sasara or Rosho can talk to him. He gets caught by Rosho the next day at school though.

Somehow, he gets roped into joining Dotsuitare Honpo, but there's a gleam in his eyes that tell Sasara that he's pretty pleased with the outcome.

When they find out that Rei lives on his own in a really rundown and small apartment, they freak out a bit and then try to make him move in with one of them.

It... kind of works? Rei still works on a near daily basis and insists on paying rent, but at least he's not living in a shitty apartment anymore.

Rei isn't used to people caring for him, having pretty much raised himself, and it shows. Any bout of affection is waved off with a laugh, light teasing, or a strained grin. When Sasara and Rosho find out that his dad is Ichiro, Sasara gets a little bit more than just mad at at his former teammate.

Bad Ass Temple

Kuko is a full-on monk at the temple, having taken over the temple after his father's retirement. He met Jyushi there, who was praying for luck for his next concert.

Kuko has calmed down a lot since being a teenager. There's still bouts of anger sometimes, but he's mostly exasperated, especially at Hitoya. Kuko is super interested in Jyushi, but not sure how to make his intentions clear without startling the other man or inciting Hitoya's ire.

Jyushi is still a sweetheart, though he's not as permanently attached to Amanda as before. He's a very popular idol/music artist, primarily is visual kei, though he does do other things.

Hitoya originally was a homeless kid, though he did occasionally crash at Jakurai's place. His pride wouldn't let him do it too often, scared of becoming too reliant on the other boy or showing himself as weak.

Jyushi met Hitoya when he was in Tokyo for a concert. Somehow, he convinced the boy to come live with him. He took him back to Nagoya and that's where he's lived since.

Hitoya is very, very protective of Jyushi. He thinks Jyushi is too naive and air-headed for an adult, so he does his best to protect Jyushi from his stalkers and any other people that could hurt him. He's a bit of a hothead and comes off as overzealous and even hissing at people who stand too close to Jyushi.

Jyushi is very patient with Hitoya and thinks he's the cutest kid in the world, an opinion that Kuko very much disagrees with.

Kuko sometimes feels like apologizing to his father after dealing with Hitoya, because damn, was he ever this bad as a kid?

Chuuoku

Otome is young, but she's not stupid. The world sucks and she's doing her best to make it a better place, especially for women. Being responsible for an entire country is overwhelming at times, so she's grateful for Ichijiku's help.

The men vs women agenda isn't quite as fervent as it is in canon, and Otome does her best to include all LGBTQ+ in her equality agenda

Ichijiku still hates men, but she softens a bit when it comes to Otome. The girl is young, but dang if she isn't doing her best.

Nemu willingly works with the Chuuoku, though she is very tired of her brother's dumbassery. Seriously, who actually calls themselves Mr. Hardcore without being embarrased?

Otome used to live with her mother, but she got sick of all the "being a lady" BS that traditional family spout and ran away once she was old enough. Dice being her dad, helped her settle on her own and sending whatever money has sometimes.

Once she overthrew the government, she has a steady home and paycheck, so she regularly sends money and visits him. Thankfully, the money is never spent of gambling because Dice finds it too precious to throw away like that.

[daleisgreat]

30 Years of Super Nintendo - Flashback Special

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) recently celebrated its 30th anniversary of the North American launch, so it seems the perfect time to post a Flashback Special honoring it! Suppose you have not perused a past Flashback Special of mine (all linked at the bottom of this entry). In that case, they are essentially my history with the platform over the years, with a little bit of history thrown in, and recounting all my favorite games, accessories, memories, and moments with the system.

Odds are for the average gaming enthusiast reading this, and you probably are familiar with the core details of the SNES launch stateside (if not, then I highly recommend CGQ’s video on it for a quick breakdown). The SNES launched in 1991 when I was eight. I did not have a subscription to any gaming magazines yet, so I most likely first found out about the system around that time from classmates at the time at school, the infamous Paul Rudd commercial, and the fourth season of Roseanne that transpired from 1991-92. I vividly remember the Roseanne episode with her son, DJ, pleading with his parents for the brand new SNES for his birthday gift and how his parents dreaded not being able to afford the system. I covered that episode when I did my Roseanne complete series re-watch here in the year leading up to the relaunch of the show several years ago. It brought back memories of how that was the story with my parents also denying me the much sought-after SNES, saying it cost too much and that I already have an NES to tide me over. ”But mommmmm, the SNES is 16-bits!!!!” Yeah….playing that angle got me nowhere. Kiosks & Friends The first couple of years for the SNES, I mostly remember playing at store kiosks. Super Mario World blew me away from the brief time I played it with it being such a leap from the NES installments. I always ate up the precious few minutes I could procure at a store kiosk if no one were playing Super Mario Kart. One last store kiosk memory was eye-gazing over the impressive WWF Royal Rumble. I loved WWF WrestleFest in the arcade, and for a couple of years, it was the only WWF game that offered up WWF’s marquee over-the-top rope elimination match, the Royal Rumble, and it was endlessly fun to play in the arcade. Fast-forward to playing it on console kiosks around its 1993 release, and I could not eat up enough of that game’s Royal Rumble mode either, and at the time, the graphics seemed like a huge step up from the wrestling games on NES. One of my favorite issues of Nintendo Power is the 50th issue that did a several-page spread on WWF Royal Rumble that I must have thoroughly re-read at least a dozen times.

I read this NP spread of WWF Royal Rumble many times, and it was one of my initially most desired SNES games! Around 1993/94, a couple of friends and classmates started to get the Super Nintendo. An early SNES memory that stuck with me all these years is my grade school friend, Jon-Paul, having me over for his birthday where he rented a SNES console and Street Fighter II: Turbo from the video store, and we played it for several hours straight. Another is spending a lot of 1994 at my neighborhood friend’s place, where we played countless sessions of NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat II. Both games were big on codes and secrets and perfect two-player games. I was just regularly getting into video game magazines at this time and ate up issues of Tips & Tricks, Game Players, and Electronic Gaming Monthly to see what kind of hidden character and other much-rumored codes were making the waves each month for both of these games. Mortal Kombat II especially dominated the code-fervor that season with trying to uncover how to face off against secret characters like Jade, Noob Saibot, and Smoke, and trying to memorize all the input sequences for the game’s infamous Fatalities. Fast forward to late 1995/early 1996, and I still did not have a SNES, but a new neighborhood friend, Rich, just got one and the next several months at his place introduced me to so many SNES games. Rich kind of got me somewhat into RPGs at the time, and while it may not sound fun on paper, there were many times I recall just kind of embracing the role of “armchair gamer.” I did this for games like EVO: Search for Eden, and Eye of the Beholder while keeping an eye out during gameplay to offer whatever suggestions seemed viable.

FFVI was eye-opening to me at the time of what video game narratives were capable of, and I devoured the latest secrets for FFVI discovered in the latest issue of my Game Players subscription that was delivered. The RPG I felt like that I contributed something to was the game that was originally released as Final Fantasy III. That game featured two-player support for battles only, so it was refreshing to help Rich with progressing through the game finally. My two favorite characters to use were Sabin and Cyan. That game especially blew me away with its larger-than-life story with two different game worlds, the momentous opera scene with Celes, the dazzling mode-seven graphics when traveling via airship or Chocobo, constantly getting irked at Shadow whenever he deserted the party, and so many other priceless moments. Over the years, I tried restarting the GBA version on a couple of occasions and regrettably have yet to finish it. Finally Owning a SNES….in 1996

Growing up with divorced parents put me in a unique childhood when it came to gaming. I lived with my mom, who provided for us as best as possible for the three siblings I grew up with, so we only had an NES for us for the longest time. However, when visiting my dad on weekends, he would always be big on hitting up as many garage sales and second-hand stores as possible and would acquire whatever he thought seemed like a bargain. Games-wise, this usually meant he lagged behind a generation because everyone was offloading their Atari VCS/2600s at garage sales for cheap when the NES was king, so I could have a great couple of years to become familiar with the pioneering-era of games on Atari. He then got into the NES scene when the SNES hit in 1991. Sure enough, the same month the N64 launched in America in September 1996 was when he bought a Super Nintendo for the family used at our local Premiere Video. The game we picked up with it was Street Fighter II: Turbo. My dad instantly remarked upon booting it up the noticeable jump in graphics. We played nothing but Capcom’s second Street Fighter game on SNES for a few weekends. I could only finish that game by button mashing into a victory against the final boss, M. Bison, once….with M. Bison. I still have a lot of love for this era of Street Fighter - whether it be for the roster, every character’s stage and theme music, and receiving Nintendo Power’s strategy guide for the game for Christmas and studying it regularly to improve.

After a few weeks, we realized we needed something else than a fighting game, and after another trip to Premiere Video, we came home with Super Mario All-Stars. It felt like the easy choice to go with 16-bit remakes of all four 8-bit versions of the core Mario Bros. games. Every game felt like a whole different game with all-new graphics and sound, and more importantly, being able to save progress midgame. This was a bigger hit with the entire family, and it provided many days of taking turns in its alternating two-player mode to see who could get the farthest in the four Mario games included.

Make sure to have some tissues by your side as you witness FFIII/VI's infamous "opera" scene. Seriously, this was mind-blowing stuff to 13-year old Dale in 1996. 16-bit Sportsball Fun

After playing a lot of those first two SNES games, I went into this stretch for the next several years, where most of what I played was sports and wrestling games. I attribute this to many multiplayer sessions with Rich, my brother, Joe, and my dad. I know my dad was not all that into sports other than a passing interest in rooting on hometown Minnesota pro-sports teams. Still, I have to give him credit for spending as much time with us and taking the time to learn and become a pretty solid player at teaming up with me in many sports games. It is worth noting that I feel the 16-bit era is probably the last-gen where most of its library of sports games had a relatively simple pick-up-and-play feel that NES games had. That changed a little bit in the final SNES years, where it was usually EA’s games that started to incorporate more realism in their sports games and make use of most of the buttons of the SNES controller. For football, Madden NFL ‘97 was the one I played the most. I played plenty of the Genesis version at Rich's place, so much so that I noticed too many little differences with the SNES version to make it stand out on its own. For 16-bit sports nuts that want to know, the Genesis version had the better playing version, but the SNES had a better overall presentation and more popping audio and visuals. I was part of a small slice of sports gamers big into NES Play Action Football, and the 16-bit version played almost exactly like the NES version, but with a 16-bit upgrade and also has a nifty feature to play games at the high school, college, or NFL level.

NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime dominated my 16-bit sports lineup. The code scene for these games were so intense at the time I had to keep my own binder of notes on them all that I still have today as seen above! As I alluded to earlier, when it came to hoops, I played way too much NBA Jam the first year it was out at my friend’s place. However, the arcade hoops game I played the most on SNES was NBA Hangtime, which was developed by the same people who made Jam. I got that game new for Christmas in 1996 and must have played it regularly with Rich for nearly a year straight. I do not hear that game receive the same level of praise as Jam, but it added a few new fun layers to freshen up the gameplay, like being able to do co-op dunks and earn “Team Fire,” and being able to create players. For more simulation-focused hoops, I played a lot of NBA Live ’96 with my dad, in addition to Nintendo’s NCAA Basketball which appeared like a technical marvel to me that was ahead of its time with the mode-seven camera allowing constant 3D rotation whenever possession of the ball changed and foreshadowed what would become the go-to camera perspective for the next-gen of basketball games. Finally, I will cherish my time with Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for it being the only hoops game I ever had to consult a guide to figure out how to shoot the damn ball….and for its surprisingly rocking soundtrack. Find out all about it when I broke that game down with the Your Parents Basement crew on their penultimate podcast.

Nintendo incorporated the same camera style into its hockey game, NHL Stanley Cup. Its graphics also impressed me, but it was rather challenging to score a goal, and I did not have as much fun with it. I played EA’s hockey games more on Genesis than SNES, but EA’s baseball game, MLBPA Baseball, was the hardball game I spent the most time with on Super Nintendo. Many years later, I picked up Nintendo’s Ken Griffey Jr. Presents: Major League Baseball, and had some fun with it, but already played the Game Boy version of it to death by the time I picked up the SNES version, and thus did not invest as much time with it as I did with EA’s game. Wanna Wrassle!?

I must have read through this review of WWF RAW countless times in my youth, and seeing how this essentially is a bigger and better version of Royal Rumble only increased my desire to one day own a SNES! The North American wrestling library was a significant step up from the bottom of the stairwell where most of the NES games hung out….but on the SNES, it only made it roughly halfway up the stairs. The aforementioned WWF Royal Rumble provided many hours of fun for its day, but it has not stood the test of time with the button-mashing grapple meter it featured that will obliterate thumbs on the normal difficulty level! Its sequel, WWF RAW, was noteworthy for having more match types available and being one of the first games to have a selectable female wrestler in Luna Vachon, but it too used that same ill-fated grapple meter that has not aged well. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game is a fun little hybrid of Mortal Kombat and wrestling, but the SNES version is notorious for lacking two wrestlers compared to all other home versions.

For non-WWF games, WCW SuperBrawl Wrestling is rather unremarkable….except for its exceptional wrestler select screen.There were a few interesting unlicensed wrestling games in America. Natsume Championship Wrestling featured a solid wrestling engine but removed/altered the AJPW wrestlers from the Japanese version of the game. Hammerlock had a promising concept of having part of the screen dedicated to nonstop Tecmo-esque cinematics. In contrast, the other half of the screen featured 2D gameplay, but the cameras constantly flipped on screen, to which half was dedicated to cinematics or gameplay. It resulted in it being a jarring mess. Saturday Night Slam Masters is no such mess, however, and is a better hybrid of fighting game meets wrestling game, with this one done by Capcom. It features larger-than-life character sprites, full-on ring entrances with laser lights, and is a fun-playing combination of wrestling and Street Fighter. To top it off, Slam Masters has Final Fight’s Mike Haggar on the roster to boot!

Joey Pink does a fine job detailing why Capcom's "Street Fighter" in a wrestling ring should not be missed! Ensuring RPGs are here to Stay Aside from watching Rich play some of the RPGs I listed above, and of course, playing Final Fantasy VI with him, I did get a chance to play a few other RPGs on the SNES over the years, and it was not until the last few years that I finally finished a couple of them. In the late 1990s I first started two RPGs that stood out to me at the time because they broke out of the medieval fantasy mold most other RPGs at the time took place in. Shadowrun on the SNES was drastically different from the Genesis version I first encountered at Rich’s. This one still had the same futuristic cyberpunk world setting and terminology, but there were many more dialog options with NPCs that were pivotal in asking the right questions to progress the story. Additionally, the hacking games played out differently and had more of a puzzle theme to them than the action-oriented ones in the Genesis version, and the combat had kind a PC interface where a cursor had to be dragged across the screen on which target to aim at. I still wound up being totally into it and became stuck in the back half of the game before my save data became corrupted. I thought that would end my days with Shadowrun…

SNES Shadowrun remains one of my all-time favorite RPGs as of this writing! The final gauntlet tower was an ordeal and a half to work through, only to face off against a dragon as the final boss! …until nearly two decades later in 2016. I mentioned on past flashback specials how I occasionally guest host on the Your Parents Basement podcast, where they cover a random retro game per episode. In 2016 they asked me if there were any games I had in mind to cover, and Shadowrun felt like worth revisiting and possibly knocking off the “must beat this game” bucket list. I progressed until about a little over halfway through by the time we all met to record and broke down the game, but by that point, I just started to make further progress than my last effort and was determined to see this one through! I was playing on actual SNES hardware and was surprised that the battery still held a save but ran into trouble in the final tower with a gauntlet of enemies on each floor to overcome before the final boss. I looked up a walkthrough and discovered an exploit to grind experience to beef up my character. Eventually, I managed to persevere and finally conquer the final boss, a fire-breathing dragon, to cross finishing Shadowrun off my bucket list! I had a riot podcasting with the YPB crew about it too, so please click or press here to give it a listen if you want to know more about this under-the-radar 16-bit RPG.

Fast forward three years later in 2019, and the awesome YPB hosts of Steve, Huell, and Todd helped me once again restart and finish another SNES RPG that I came close to finishing in the late 1990s before evil corrupt save data reared its ugly head again. This time the game of choice is the uber-expensive Earthbound. Like Shadowrun, that game stood out to me because its setting went against the grain of fantasy settings and instead took place in modern times as grade school kids. The opening levels felt like getting lost in your neighborhood and using childlike items as weapons like Yo-Yos and baseball bats. I do not own that ridiculously expensive game, but by 2019 I did own a SNES Mini (more on that in a bit) that I made sure to abuse the save state and the rewind functions it provided to overcome some troubling bosses in the back half of the game. That final act of the game certainly goes places with its sci-fi twists and feels like an entirely different game, but I still loved it all the same! It felt exhilarating to finally knock this one off my “to do” list as well, and I had just as much fun dissecting it to pieces with the YPB crew that you can check out by click or pressing here. Unfortunately, this is where my extensive hands-on time with SNES RPGs comes to an end. I played a lot of FFIII/VI, and finished Earthbound, and Shadowrun. Sure, I dabbled in several other games but did not put more than an hour or two into them. One of those games is the much-heralded, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and I have no excuse for never sticking with it because I loved the NES original. It was the GBA re-release I played, and I think I was spreading myself thin while playing and reviewing too many games simultaneously. Lufia and Breath of Fire II were another pair of RPGs I put a couple of hours into that both left me with promising first impressions, but there was a whole other reason why I did not go back to those again, and that is because then I was waist-deep at the time in….. Discovering Emulation Right around the time my family acquired its first computer in the fall of 1997 was when I found out about emulation. It seemed way too good to be true to easily download and play games right on the computer, especially when factoring in the SNES was at the tail end of its lifecycle, and there were still new games releasing for it. As an unemployed 9th grader at the time, I sampled countless 8- and 16-bit ROMs with the SNES games I was the most curious about. A few of the RPGs in the previous paragraph being prime examples of the ones I invested the most time into. It proved to be overwhelming with so many choices, but I took a long sabbatical after a year or so of taking in the emulation scene after the family computer crashed and I lost all the save data I had amassed in so many games.

It has been interesting to see how emulation has evolved over the years from programs like SNES9X and Retroarch to being incorporated into machines like the MISTer, RetroPi, and Retron 5. Nintendo has learned to embrace official, legal emulation over the years with purchasable digital classic games on systems such as the Wii, WiiU, and 3DS. Having a stable income as an adult now many years later, I feel guilty for embracing the emulation scene so hard in my teenage years, so much so that whenever Nintendo re-releases one of its classic hits several times over, I choose to purchase it again (well…usually at a sale price) to redeem myself. Keeping SNES Alive Today

Over the years, I find myself diving into retro games versus the latest and greatest coming out. I am a fan of the various SNES hardware updates/clones, both officially from Nintendo and unofficially from other companies, which has kept my SNES and other retro game fandom blood flowing over the decades. I am unsure if it feels right to lump it in here, but the Super Game Boy lead to me getting a lot of extra life out of my SNES. Playing Game Boy games on the big screen was a big deal to me back then, considering it was always a pain to make out what was happening on the non-backlit handheld. For some reason, those special border screens that would eventually have funny animations after being left idle for so long made an impression on me. Game Boy games with the “Super Game Boy Enhanced” logo on the front of the box usually have their own exclusive border and special color palette. I loved the Mole Mania and Donkey Kong Land borders the most! I thought it was rad that around 15-20 special enhanced Super Game Boy titles featured multiplayer support with two SNES controllers. They consisted almost entirely of Bomberman and fighting games, but it was still a cool feature nonetheless. The handheld Hyperkin SupaBoy is the unauthorized SNES take on the Sega Nomad by having a portable SNES. It is a bit on the bulky side, but it has a rechargeable battery, and its support has been flawless with my entire SNES library. Another Hyperkin product I got a lot of use out of is the Retron 5. I know that particular clone system is controversial with retro game enthusiasts based on the unauthorized emulators it implements. However, the user interface and emulation support made it possible for me to make record progress in many SNES games by taking advantage of save states and its optional Game Genie-esque cheats library. The SNES Classic Edition is an excellent official piece of hardware from Nintendo that has the pint-sized SNES pre-installed with 21 SNES games, one of which is previously unreleased Star Fox 2. It has an adorably intuitive interface and supports game rewinding and save states, which made it the way I was finally able to finish Earthbound. It was also surprisingly not-so-difficult to plug into a PC and import a bunch of SNES ROMs into. Other companies like 8bitdo made that system extra convenient by making their recommended wireless controllers compatible with it!

If you did not grow up with the SNES, then both of these options are great entry points for those looking to move on beyond emulators. The Analogue Super NT may have been pushing it too much price-wise. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of emulation tech, I am not a wizard by any means, except that by all sources, it sounds like the Super NT offers the best hardware emulation with its FPGA technology. It makes SNES games appear as pristine as possible on an HD/4KTV without any or as minimal of the fuzziness that happens whenever I try plugging in the composite/RCA cables from a base SNES system into a 4K/HDTV. For those unfamiliar with the Super NT, this video from the My Life in Gaming crew does a thorough dissection of everything it has to offer. The list of options in there is intimidating to mess around with, but this sounds like the way to go if one wants to keep playing their cartridges……although I have to admit I am pretty satisfied currently with the Retron 5 and SNES Classic Edition.

Odds are some of you are quite a bit younger than me and grew up post-SNES lifecycle. Not interested in going down the pricey road of hunting down old cartridges and hardware, and do not want to dabble on the dark side of illegal emulation? Then a terrific alternative is if you have a Switch with Nintendo’s $20/year online service membership and taking advantage of the Nintendo Switch Online and Super Nintendo Switch Online digital game portals. It has unlimited access to the slate of games on there, along with save points as long as your membership remains active. The implementation of save states and the user interface has also improved noticeably over the emulation used for NES & SNES Classic Editions. More importantly, it adds the feature to play online with a friend. Last year I played online SNES games with my nephew, who was wrapping up 6th grade at the time, and this was his first time playing SNES games. He loves Mario Kart 8 on Switch, and so when the first game we played was the original Super Mario Kart, I could not help but crack up when he instantly remarked, “Dale, this looks old!” He eventually came around, and then we had some fun playing co-op , Joe & Mac . A couple of years ago, on my Genesis Flashback Special, I made sure to reminisce of my fond memories of the summer I spent playing nonstop Sega Channel. These NES/SNES Switch portals are essentially the Sega Channel, but far better because it does not cost $15 a month (in 1994 dollars which equals $27.63 today per Google), offers multiple save states, and ability to play online for only $20 a year!!! Kids, get your parents to hook you up now!!! Miscellaneous Quick Hits

SNES games were the most common denominator on six of the 13 episodes I guest hosted on the retro game podcast, Your Parents Basement. Check out their full archives by click or pressing here. -Turns out I did quite a few guest hosting spots on Your Parents Basement Podcast for SNES games. For those that are podcasting fiends and dug the three episodes I linked to already, then I will link you to three more SNES themed episodes I appeared on where I breathed in the Mode 7 skies of Pilotwings, embraced Capcom’s action-platformer prowess in X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and made sure not to miss any Gatorade and Wheaties health pick-ups in Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City.

-The SNES controller is my favorite pre-disc console era controller. It kept the similar button layout of the NES controller but rounded off the edges into its iconic “dog bone” feel so the controller no longer cramped in your hands! Throw in the two extra face buttons and two additional shoulder buttons, and it opened up all kinds of deeper gameplay possibilities! It made it perfect for most fighting games that used almost all the face and shoulder buttons. I found the shoulder buttons were also smartly implemented in NBA Jam/Hangtime for being assigned to use for turbo speed functionality. As far as other SNES controllers/peripherals go, since I loved the NES Zapper, I always wanted to try the Super Scope, but as a kiddo, its bazooka-sized proportions were kind of intimidating. It still kind of bums me out all these years I never got to experience it with epics like Yoshi’s Safari, T2: The Arcade Game, and Tin Star. I never had an opportunity to use the SNES mouse either, which I kind of regret all these years later after seeing all the marvelous creations from experts at Mario Paint, and it was cool to see some PC ports like Civilization, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D take advantage of SNES Mouse compatibility.

-The 16-bit era was when fighting games exploded, and as you can tell above, I spent a lot of time with Street Fighter II: Turbo, and the first two Mortal Kombat games. Other than that, though, the only other fighting game on SNES I put significant time into was TMNT Tournament Fighters. It was released at the tail end of the TMNT-mania when the cartoon peaked at its popularity. The game itself was a surprisingly competent licensed fighting game from Konami, and tried its best to feel like a solid Street Fighter-clone. Speaking of them pesky turtles… -…TMNT IV: Turtles in Time was the only beat-em-up brawler I put considerable time into on the SNES. I have vague memories of trying others out once or twice like The Peace Keepers, and Super Double Dragon, but Turtles in Time was the one I frequently revisited over the years. It is a superb rendition of the arcade game, with SNES-exclusive levels like the Technodrome that had a fantastic first-person boss fight against Shredder, where lowly Foot Soldiers had to be chucked right at him to defeat Shredder. The soundtrack is one of my favorite SNES scores, so much so that I went all-in to get the for it! I have so many great memories of this game, with the highlight being my friend Matt and I revisiting this for complete runs of it once every year or two for about a dozen years.

Turtles in Time and FFIII/VI are my favorite SNES soundtracks, but Turtles in Time I own on vinyl so I will embed it here in all its glory for you to enjoy as well!

-The SNES library had a quality slate of racing games. Super Mario Kart quickly rose to the top of the ranks and was always fun to bust through a GP with a friend. Street Racer was one of the first kart-clones to hit in 1994, and for some reason, that one always stuck with me. As did it being one of the few games to have four-player split-screen support with all four screens being horizontal! Rock ‘n Roll Racing is another killer arcade racer on SNES; think of a more beefed up RC Pro-AM, but with a good dose of heavy metal mixed in. This past year saw it re-released as part of the Blizzard Arcade Collection for everyone to experience it! I remember trying out F-Zero at a store kiosk around SNES launch, but was too young at eight years old at the time to fully grasp its style of futuristic racing (or that the name was a riff on F1 racing until a couple of years ago). I was more into a game similar to its style that was the trilogy of Top Gear titles. Uniracers was a quirky racer I enjoyed with its unique aesthetic and one-wheeled racers taking advantage of their nature in races filled with jumps and loop-de-loops….too bad about Pixar holding a grudge against Nintendo and legally forcing them to yank it off shelves. Nintendo’s other racer, Stunt Race FX, was ahead of its time with the polygonal FX-based graphics running pretty chunky on the SNES. Still, it is a commendable piece of 16-bit tech they were just barely able to keep running at a passable-enough framerate. Another FX-chip game that did not originally gel with me was…

-…the original Star Fox. Being 10 when it released in 1993, I thought those polygonal graphics looked blocky and horrendous and would have none of it! Many years later, I would revisit it and rightfully come around on it! -Another Nintendo-published game that received a lot of hype was Donkey Kong Country with its cutting-edge 3D models. They were plastered all over gaming mags at the time. I briefly recall trying out the first and second of the three Donkey Kong Country games on SNES. However, I did not put more time into them because I beat Donkey Kong Land on Game Boy before our family got a SNES, which was just a watered-down port with some remixed levels for the handheld. I enjoyed my time with it, but its disappointingly blunt “congratulations” ending left a bad impression on me, and I never felt like giving the other entries a serious go all these years.

-Some may be wondering why there has yet not been anything dedicated to the pair of Super Mario World titles and Super Mario RPG? Super Mario World was probably one of the first SNES games I tried when I visited my older brother at his first apartment in the early 90s. I think the heavy-duty graphics and trying to comprehend attacking with Yoshi proved to be too much for eight or nine-year-old me at the time. I played it a few other times in my 20s, hanging out with coworkers on retro game nights, and had fun with it, but I think since I was exposed to the NES trilogy more and played the hell out of All-Stars, that those were the versions I preferred more. I appreciated how Nintendo stepped up to Sega’s edgier marketing at the time with Nintendo’s “Play it Loud” marketing campaign. Unfortunately, I think their ad for Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was a bit too extreme for 12-year old Dale at the time. That ad (click here for it if you are feeling daring)was forever planted in my subconscious and always crossed my mind and indirectly caused me to avoid Yoshi’s Island for all these years. I did pick up Super Mario RPG and it is on my “bucket list” of games to play as well. I am holding off on it all these years because I was hanging out with Matt one day, and he explained how he was having a tough time with the final boss, Smithy. Well, he wanted to give me a quick demo to show how unforgiving of a challenge the boss was….but for some reason his clutch gaming skills kicked in right then, and he beat Smithy and was exposed to the ending right then and there!

-As far as other tough SNES games go, the two most challenging for me are easily Contra III: The Alien Wars and Zombie Ate My Neighbors. Contra III is like the first two games on steroids. I love the boss battles and intense walk-n-shoot chaos, but do not love constantly dying in one shot! Zombies Ate My Neighbors is another fun action-platformer that is also equally tough to make it farther than a few levels in unless you seriously dedicate yourself to it. Hey, both of these games also saw re-releases this past year on current consoles with the Contra Anniversary Collection and Zombies Ate My Neighbors & Ghoul Patrol set for those wanting to experience 16-bit nail-biting difficulty (but with save state support!).

I hope this excellent video review from the quintessential retro video game source, Jeremy Parish, suffices for my lack of any meaningful Super Mario World memories here. -In 1997, I was hyped for a late SNES release, the original Harvest Moon. The farm/life/dating-sim series is still around today from publisher Natsume (as well as the original developers parting ways with Natsume and delivering their own competing Story of Seasons series). During the SNES era, I spent several summers out on a farm. I appreciated rural life's solitude and free spirit lifestyle, and that first Harvest Moon game perfectly encapsulated that. Trying to determine the best way to spend the day tending to the fields, livestock and managing a social/family life was surprisingly fun and engaging! Harvest Moon remain one of two games that I submitted a blurry Polaroid photo to Nintendo Power’s “Arena” high score section. I cannot recall if my score got posted or not.

-The original Sim City port on SNES received a lot of love around the SNES launch window, with Nintendo giving it a unique makeover with bonus Nintendo characters in it and an exclusive tutor in the form of Dr. Wright to ease everyone into the simulation gameplay. I never played too much of that version, but one night at Rich’s, the game we decided to rent that night was Sim City 2000. That one was released way late into the SNES lifecycle and lacked any Nintendo extras the first SNES game had. Still, we stayed up all night playing it and looking at our daily news recap and mayor approval ratings and trying to figure out where to stop underwater pipe blockages! It ran slowwww on the SNES, but we tolerated it fine enough at the time because I had yet to play the PC version. Eventually, I would check out the PC version and came away surprised with so much I had to put up within the SNES game. -For those wanting to dare the Super Famicom scene, there are a plethora of great games that never made their way stateside, and better yet, a hearty chunk of them have received English fan translations. I am partial to the FirePro wrestling games that never made it here that are vastly superior to all the American wrestling games I broke down above, BS Out of Bounds Golf is an addicting take on miniature golf, the original Star Ocean, and the Back to the Future platformer that was not a five-star classic by any means, but blew away the poor NES and Genesis games that did release here. If you are not that familiar with the Super Famicom library, this top 50 list from RVG Fanatic is a great place to start your research and very much helped clueing me into a bunch of Super Famicom games I had little-to-no knowledge of. Conclusion

If you are around my age reading this, you may be wondering why I have not gone on about the fabled “16-bit Wars” by now. Rest assured, I experienced it in the lunchroom and at recess and in gaming magazines at the time. I devoured all the side-by-side screenshots in gaming mags of dual-platform releases to see if I could spot which version was better. I want to say back then, I sided with the SNES because I grew up with the NES, but that does not seem like a fair choice since I did not own a SNES until 1996. Reflecting on it, although I experienced a fair amount of RPGs and other games on SNES with Rich, I primarily played endless hours of Genesis games with him back at the time. So whenever I hung out with Rich, I considered myself a Genesis fan, and when I finally got a SNES and grew my SNES library, I considered myself a SNES fan and avoided a lot of the “console wars” trash talk. For younger readers here who want to learn more about the fervor of the 16-bit wars, the book, Console Wars, and its corresponding documentary (which is currently only available on Paramount+/CBS All Access sadly) are my recommended ways to absorb all that hoopla. I will cherish all of the past 30 years of SNES memories and hope you have enjoyed reminiscing with me for the last several thousand words. If you want to hear more of my SNES memories in podcast form, I have a few SNES-centric episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted and have embedded below for your pleasure. They have some of the friends I repeatedly mentioned above as co-hosts that share their SNES experiences and memories, so please load up a random SNES “podcast game” and boot one of these podcasts up for fitting background noise….

10 years ago I did a 20th anniversary SNES special with Matt!

Here is the history of RPG series episode dedicated to the 16-bit era.

Finally, here is Matt and I hosting the 16-bit installment of our history of comic book games series. Bonus Overtime

It would not be a Flashback Special without one random oddball bonus story to wrap it up with. The only Kirby game I ever finished receives that honor. One day, my brother and his friend Jake were over at my place. We were discussing SNES games at some point, and Jake mentioned how Kirby Super Star is his all-time favorite. I said how I never played it and did not think anything of it at the time, but the next time I met up with him and my brother, Jake had the copy of that game with him and insisted on borrowing it to me and said not to give it back until I finished it. I felt this sudden obligation to play through it as a priority, so I did not feel like I was keeping his game hostage. Luckily, Kirby Super Star is a damn fun game, which the front of the box labels as “8 Games in One!” Most of the games are abbreviated-length adventures of only a handful of missions in their unique theme of levels, and a few of the games are mini-games like a race against King DeDeDe. Regardless, almost every game provided that trademark Kirby lighthearted fun and was hard to put down! Kirby’s Dream Course is also a lot of fun on SNES, and is an interesting take of Kirby meets miniature golf! With that anecdote, I will wrap up yet another Flashback Special. Thank you for sticking with me this far, and If you dug reading about my trials and tribulations with Nintendo’s 16-bit machine, please take a look at the other Flashbacks I have linked below!

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th and 32-X 25th Anniversaries Xbox 360 15th Anniversary

[lonestarfangirl2014]

LONESTARS GUIDE TO THE WAYNES AND KANES OF GOTHAM CITY PART ONE REDUX

BRUCE WAYNES UNCLES AND AUNTS(Including by marriage) EDITION

WAYNES

“Waynes never stay down. We RISE”

The Wayne's are one of the so called first families of Gotham

also known as the Founding Families of Gotham or more simply, the Five Families are the five families affiliated with the creation of Gotham as a city.

AGATHA WAYNE

First appearance: Batman issue 89 February 1955

Agatha has been discribed as Thomas Wayne frail elder sister. She occasionally visits Bruce when he’s a adult. On Earth Two where she originally debuted it’s been said that she helped out the next person on this list with young Bruce whenever she could.

It could be possible that either Agatha or the next person on our list was the one to inherit the families gotham based ancestral home based on earth two/Golden age Bruce buying a mansion to live in shortly before becoming Batman

Agatha has a counterpart on new earth/post COIE who is said to be the only sibling of Thomas Wayne(still as a older sister.).

It is unknown if she has ever had kids. On Earth Two there is evidence that Bruce has at least one possibly 1st cousin on his fathers side who I will talk about in another post I’m planning on making about Bruce’s cousins.

PHILIP WAYNE (Not to be confused with Martha’s brother of the same first name whose farther down this list)

First Earth-One appearance: Batman issue 208 February 1969

Originally introduced in the earth-one era of comics it is later revealed that a Philip Wayne did exist on the earlier earth-two in Secret Origins Vol 2 #6 (September, 1986)

On both Earth-One and Earth-Two Philip Wayne was the one who took young Bruce in after he was orphaned.

It is unknown who is older between him and Thomas but based on the appearance of Earth-One Philip(white hair and mustache) I would say that Philip was the older one at least on that earth where both he and Thomas took charge of the family business AKA Wayne Enterprise.

On Earth-Two Thomas was the one to inherit the family fortune suggesting that he was the eldest of the two Wayne sons on that Earth. Earth-Two Philip is only seen once and it’s only a silhouette of him.

It is unknown if he has ever had kids. On Both Earth-Two as well as as Earth-One there is evidence that Bruce has at least one possible paternal 1st cousin on each. Both of them I will talk about in another post I’m planning on making about Bruce’s cousins.

Vanderveer Wayne SR.

first appearance: Powerless episode 3

For the sake of this post I will say a Fourth Wayne sibling to my knowledge has never appeared in the comics HOWEVER a paternal Uncle Of Bruce was introduced in the short lived TV show Powerless as Vanderveer Wayne SR.

Vanderveer Wayne, Sr. was the original boss of Wayne Security, before passing the job to his son Vanderveer Wayne Jr and taking a position on the board of directors of Wayne Enterprise.

Patricia Wayne

First Appearance: Pennyworth episode One

The elder sister of Thomas Wayne. She has been described and shown to be a typical rich party girl who according to Thomas apparently likes to cause scandals that drag the Wayne name through the mud. The foolish sibling to Thomas responsible sibling. They bicker and she calls him names but like any typical siblings they still love eachother.

ON PRIME EARTH/NEW 52 it is said that Thomas Wayne was a only child. As of may 4 2021 none of the other Wayne siblings has so far made a appearance in Any Comics set on Prime earth. But hey screw Canon right?

KANES

“We Stand TOGETHER”

The Kane family was cited as being so rich that the only parts of Gotham that were not owned by them were those owned by the Wayne Family.

NATHAN KANE

First mentioned in Batman Incorporated(don’t quote me on that) taking place on New Earth And is confirmed to exist on Prime Earth as well.

Not much is known about Nathan. We don’t even have a proper picture of him. What we do know is that he is the eldest son(Batman Incorporated vol 1 #4)and he was the one who inherited both the family fortune as well as the family Crest Hill Estate after family Patriarch and Matriarch Roderick and Elizabeth/Elisabeth(seen it spelt both ways) both died. He is called the golden scion of the family.

On New Earth He married the original Batwoman aka Katherine Webb-Kane the year Batman became active in Gotham. He was apparently 40 when he started dating 25 year old Kathy Webb-Kane, 43 when he finally married(the year Batman age 25 debuted in Gotham) and 47 when he died.

Kathy Webb-Kane/ Katrina “Luka” Netz.

First Earth-One appearance: Detective Comics #233 (July, 1956)

First Earth-Two Appearance: The Brave and the Bold #182 (January, 1982)

First New Earth Appearance:Batman #678 (August, 2008)

First Prime Earth Appearance:Batman Incorporated Vol 2 #10 (June, 2013

The Original Batwoman!

Strap in because this is a long one.

On Earth-One her history is as follows: Kathy Kane was a wealthy heiress who gained great acrobatic skills during her career as a circus trapeze artist and stunt cyclist. Becoming infatuated with the Batman, she fashioned herself a costume and secret hide-out and started operating as Batwoman. At first she upstaged Batman and his sidekick Robin in capturing crooks. However, Batman eventually learned her true identity and tracked her to her secret cave hide-out. Showing her how easily it was for him to learn her identity, Batman pointed out that criminals could probably do it just as easily and tried to convince her to drop out of crime fighting. Disobeying Batman's advice, she tried to capture mobster Curt Briggs. During this caper, Batman went missing and Briggs, struck with amnesia, left thinking he was Batman. Ultimately the real Batman reappeared, and Biggs was turned over to the police. Afterwards, Batwoman went back to retirement. However, Kathy Kane became tired of the dull life of a rich heiress and came out of retirement once more in order to recapture a criminal named Elton Cragg. It was during this case that Batwoman gained super-powers and after her heroic deeds, she convinced Batman to let her continue her crime-fighting career. Ironically, around this time, Kathy started dating Bruce Wayne and she started to fall in love with Batman, unaware that they were the same person.

When Bruce Wayne was framed for a crime he didn't commit, Batwoman teamed-up with Robin in order to clear Batman's name. During an undercover mission, Batwoman was captured by a criminal leader and was rescued by the Dynamic Duo. When both Batwoman and reporter Vicki Vale were nominated Gotham City's "Woman of the Year", both tried to upstage each other to get the lead in the contest. With the help of Batman and Robin, both Vicki and Batwoman captured Moose Molloy's gang and both were crowned woman of the year. When Batman and Robin were trapped in a cave in, Ace the Bat-Hound guided Batwoman to help free them and capture the criminal Dr. Midas. Batwoman next helped the Dynamic Duo capture Firefly, aided them in preventing Lex Luthor from atomizing Superman, and helped them capture the Spinner. Batwoman later met with Bat-Mite and working together, they captured some crooks to save the Dynamic Duo.After this adventure, Bat-Mite became infatuated with Batwoman and tried to become her sidekick, creating chaos for everyone until he realized his mistake and left. When trying to solve the mystery of who murdered Professor Lacy after his discovery of a living caveman, Batwoman was saved by the caveman who sacrificed himself to save her from Lacy's killer: Harbin, Lacy's assistant. When Kathy Kane purchased a mystical belt, she becames a target of the criminal Star-Man. The belt sucked Batwoman's life energy from her body and she was saved by Batman and Robin, who arrived in time to stop Star-Man.

When Kathy's niece Betty Kane came to visit her, the young girl learned of her aunt's double identity. Kathy agreed to train Betty to be her sidekick, thinking that the young girl would eventually lose interest. However, to her surprise, Betty proved capable and became Batwoman's sidekick Bat-Girl. On their first mission, the two women helped Batman and Robin defeat King Cobra and his gang.Batwoman then became a victim of Luthor's experiments, who manipulated Kathy and gave her super-powers to fight her allies. After a long struggle, Superman managed to break Lex's control over Kathy and she returned to normal.When Batman and Robin were briefly transformed into alien creatures, Batwoman was one of the few who actually believed they were the real Dynamic Duo, until they were restored to normal.She later helped Batman and Robin capture the "Rockets" Rogan Gang. Later, after Batman and Batwoman were captured by the Moth, they were rescued by Bat-Girl and Robin. Later, Kathy went on a date with Bruce Wayne to an amusement park that was previously the location where the Justice League of America recently had a battle.As Batwoman, Kathy joined Batman on a trip to Washington D.C. to testify to the Senate Committee, leaving their young sidekicks to defend Gotham City in their absence.She next aided Batman and Robin in capturing the criminal known as the Vulcan.

Kathy's romances with Bruce Wayne and Batman became rocky, first during a period where Bruce Wayne was briefly transformed into a child, he made it appear that he's seeing another woman in order to keep Kathy away,and later when Batman, while under the effect of a love potion, fell in love with a woman named Elsie.Kathys romance woes became more complicate when Alpha, the Experimental Man fell in love with her, until the artificial man sacrificed himself to save her from falling off a cliff.

When helping Batman and Robin solve a murder during Mardis Gras, she got into a feud with Vicki Vale over who is the right person for Batman, forming the first of many competitions for Batman's affections.She later helped Batman capture Catman.

When she and Batman were briefly transported to another dimension by invaders from that world, their mortality was in question unless they were freed. During this period, Batwoman managed to get Batman to warm up and admit some of his feelings toward her before they were rescued by Robin and Bat-Girl.

Batwoman's feud with Vicki Vale heat up again when both women tried to determine if Mirror Man's assertions that Bruce Wayne was really Batman were true. When Batman scolded Batwoman for getting in the way of his attempts to capture Catman, she faked her intentions to join the criminal as Cat-Woman, until Catman seemingly died in the battle.Batwoman and Bat-Girl later helped the Dynamic Duo end a feud between the Joker and Clayface,and helped Batman and Robin capture the Terrible Trio

Once more suspecting that Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same man, Kathy Kane was convinced otherwise when Superman posed as Batman. However the plan went awry when a bomb goes off seemingly killing "Batman" and necessitating Superman to pose as the ghost of Batman for a time.

When Batman was briefly transformed into a gigantic creature, Batwoman teamed-up with Robin and Ace the Bat-Hound to track down the crooks that have the cure. After this, Catman reappeared and discovered his costume had mystical properties that gave him nine-lives, allowing him to continue on his crime spree. With her Cat-Woman costume, Batwoman helped Batman and Robin capture him.

Following this adventure, Batwoman went into retirement and disappear from Batman's life almost entirely. She become the owner of a circus, but often longed to return to her former crime fighting career.

Batwoman came out of retirement to aid Batgirl(Barbara Gordon)against Killer Moth and the Cavalier, but her return was never intended to be permanent.Kathy Kane was then present at a surprise party for Bruce Wayne at Wayne Manor.When Batwoman was later disintegrated into nothingness on Barbara Gordon's doorstep, Batgirl and Robin teamed-up to find the cure and restore Batwoman to her normal form. Shortly after this, Batwoman met the Huntress from Earth-Two and aided her in capturing Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Madame Zodiac. When the Freedom Fighters of Earth-X searched for a group of criminals known as the Warmakers, their search led them to the carnival owned by Kathy Kane. Kathy, as Batwoman, aided the Freedom Fighters and Batgirl in defeating the Warmakers. In her last recorded adventure, Kathy Kane was murdered by the League of Assassins who were being manipulated by Ra's al Ghul. Her death was eventually avenged by Batman.

Katherine Kane was also known as Batwoman in the Earth-Two timeline. Her history and career are said to reflect that of her Earth-One counterpart, except for that version's untimely death. When Kathy adopted the role of Batwoman, Batman wanted her to retire from the role for fear that she would be hurt in her costumed exploits. Kane would continue to operate in her costumed identity until she learned that Batman had become deeply romantically interested in someone in his unmasked identity. While Wayne never revealed his identity to her, or explicitly told her of his private life, she said she knew of his change in his attitude to her and assumed as such. She largely retired from her costumed role soon after this. Years later, she learned that Wayne was the original Batman when his costume identity was revealed to the general public after his own demise. Not long after this, Kane resumed her costumed identity when she learned of the presence of a "new" Batman. When she found him, Kathy learned that this Batman belonged in the alternate timeline of Earth-One, but the emotional shock of seeing Batman alive was still great. However, Kathy realized that he was not the love of her life reborn, but was a completely new person.

On New Earth her history is as follows

By age 25, Kathy Webb was an underground film director, a poet, and something of a wild child. But when she met Nathan Kane(who we already established as being a brother to Martha Wayne) , he bought her a circus, and she fell head-over-heels in love with him. They were together for seven years and married for four of those same years(thus making her a aunt by marriage to Bruce,Kate, Beth, And Bette) before he died of a stroke. After this, she was approached by a secret organization called Spyral to find out Batman's secret identity. Assessing the information on the Caped Crusader, she decided the best approach was to make him chase her. To that end, she brushed up on detective skills, martial arts and motor-biking, got a costume and started calling herself Batwoman. Her plan worked, and within a few months they were an item. However, Batman was careful not to give her his secret identity, and in fact worked out hers first. This, coupled with her feelings for Batman, lead her to try and break off ties with Spyral. However, her employer, the mysterious Agent-Zero, turned the tables on her, forcing her to break off on both sides, which she did. She was believed to be killed by the Bronze Tiger on behalf of the League of Assassins. The second Batwoman Kate Kane(who like Her cousins Bruce and Bette is Kathy’s relative by way of marriage) investigated the murder, but could not find anything. That was because she was never killed; after a staged death, she worked behind the scenes with Spyral to stop Leviathan. She eventually succeeded in shooting Talia al Ghul during her final standoff with Batman, before claiming that she would not be meeting Batman again, leaving to continue leading Spyral.

On Prime Earth she is Katrina "Luka" Netz one of Spyral's oldest members and the daughter of the former Director of Spyral Herr Netz. Kathy presumably being a alias that she used. Based on what I read in the comics I believe her role as Batwoman is still be canon due to nightwing recognizing her voice at one point and if not then at least her marriage to Nathan Kane is still canon.

PHILIP KANE

First appearance: Batman vol 2 issue 21 August 2013

Introduced during Zero Year(the volume he’s introduced in isn’t in the hardback version however) on Prime Earth Philip Kane ran Wayne Enterprise in Bruce’s absence. While Bruce was traveling the world training, Philip held down the business with his adviser Edward Nygma(we all know how well that turned out)

He had studied to be a geologist as a younger man, he was on a Expedition in northern Mexico when his father Roderick learned that he was dying and had came to get Philip to take him back home. Philip and his father fought because he didn’t want to go. Their fighting resulted in Philip splitting his head open which resulted in him getting a metal plate in his head.

He had given up that dream to take up the responsibility of helping to run the family business. During the Time that Bruce was abroad Philip managed to in his own words “Finally Merged the families” with both families companies(Kane Materials/Kane indrustries, Wayne Industry)seemingly merging into Wayne Enterprise.

Philip was the one who had Bruce Wayne declared legally dead which Bruce originally didn’t want to reverse. Philip Kane was also the one who was able to mostly track where Bruce was during his training. Not even Alfred knew where he was.

Philip was unfortunately blackmailed like many other citizens of Gotham by Red Hood One into joining the Red Hood gang. Being branded “Red Hood 347”, Philip did the bidding of the gang leader until Kane turned. During Batman’s assault on Red Hood One at the Ace chemical processing plant(which ironically on new earth used to belong to the Kane family as Kane Chemicals before being sold and the company Renamed Ace Chemicals )Philip gave his life to distract the Red Hood while the villain was going to kill Batman.

Trivia:Philip Kane was the one who originally own the Giant Penny whose forging he had overseen himself.

THE UNSEEN UNNAMED PARENTS OF MARY ELIZABETH(Bette) KANE

No names or appearances have ever been given for these two.

Bette’s mom was mentioned in one issue of Batwoman and that was it. Seriously it was one where it's implied she already gave up on her daughter surviving her injuries and so she was off panel implied to be talking to the doctors about donating bettes organs or something when Jacob kane was rambling besides a comatose bette. Yeah it was implied that they moved out to the west coast and lived in California because I believe that's where bette grew up in most continuities.

Next up is one every one who kept up with Bat related related comics since 2011 should be very familiar with

JACOB KANE

First New Earth Appearance: 52 #7 (August, 2006)(in a photograph alongside his second wife)/Detective Comics issue 854 August 2009

First Prime Earth Appearance: Batwoman Vol 2 #0 (November, 2012)

A lifelong soldier, Jacob had been a field officer with USSOCOM for most of his career, leading numerous tactical operations across the globe

He and his first wife Gabi are parents to twins Beth and Kate Kane

Jacob has earned the following military awards: the Army Achievement Medal, the Kosovo Campaign Medal, the Afghanistan Campaign Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, the NATO Medal for Kosovo, the Kuwait Liberation Medal, the Presidential Unit Citation, the Meritorious Unit Commendation, and an Army Aviator Badge. Jacob has worked extensively with military intelligence services.

The Kanes often moved due to the nature of Jacob and Gabi’s work. Jacob was frequently away from home, since his duties included intervention in various international military crises.

They eventually moved to Brussels in Belgium, since the parents were now serving at NATO. However, the family was soon torn apart due to a terrorist attack. Gabi took her daughters out to celebrate their twelfth birthday, and they were kidnapped by heavily armed men. Military intelligence eventually located the hostages, and Jacob was put in charge of the tactical unit sent to rescue them. However, they were too late, as his wife had been executed and his daughter Elizabeth was believed to be dead. He rescued Kate himself, but she was traumatized by the sight of her dead mother and sister.

Colonel Kane plays an important role in his daughter’s Batwoman operations. He provides her a one-man command, control, and communications center. They stay in constant radio link, with the elder Kane being able to run searches, provide advice, and generally work in the background using his considerable knowledge, contacts and experience. Colonel Kane primarily uses his connections and his intelligence-gathering and management skills. He has access to numerous databases that are normally only accessible to military and law enforcement personnel to provide intel to his daughter.

Jacob is the next kane sibling most people would know about in part thanks to both his comic appearances In multiple bat comics as well as his appearance on the arrowverse batwoman tv show.

Gabrielle Kane(knee Goldstein in the arrowverse)

First New Earth Appearance: Detective Comics 855 September 2009

First Prime Earth Appearance: Batwoman volume 2 issue 27 March 2014

Captain Gabi Kane is the mother of Kate Kane (who later became Batwoman) and her identical twin Beth Kane. A member of the US Army’s 525th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade, she married another soldier, Jacob Kane. Both Kanes worked extensively with military intelligence services, and often moved as a result, even after their children were born. On Prime Earth When her sister-in-law Martha died she went to the funeral with both her husband and Kids. She reminded her husband that not all of Martha was dead(referring to Bruce) Eventually, the Kanes moved to Brussels, Belgium, since the parents were now serving at NATO. The family, however, was torn apart due to a terrorist attack. As Gabi was taking her daughters for their 12th birthday, they were kidnapped by heavily armed men. Military intelligence eventually located the hostages, and Jacob was put in charge of the tactical unit sent to rescue them. However, they were too late, as Gabi had been executed. Jacob rescued Kate himself, but she was traumatized by the sight of her dead mother and her supposedly dead sister.

TRIVIA: Gabi had a tattoo of the Special Forces arrowhead insignia on her right bicep; her daughter Kate later copied this.

Catherine Hamilton-Kane

First New Earth appearance: 52 #7 (August, 2006)(in a photograph alongside her husband)/Detective Comics Vol 1 #856 October, 2009

First Prime Earth Appearance: Batwoman Vol 2 #0 (November, 2012)

Heiress to the Hamilton arms fortune(called Hamilton dynamics in the batwoman tv show), and second wife of Jacob Kane.

Cathy is a jet-setter and socialite involved in politics.The Hamilton fortune was built upon guns. Catherine family owned the enormously successful Hamilton company, which apparently became a household name during the days of the Old West Firearms. Appears to care greatly for her niece by marriage(one can assume she might feel the same for Bruce if and when she finds out he’s Batman) if the way she reacted to finding out about Bette being a vilgilante in the comics is any indication.

[gaknar]

Review: The Claremont Crossovers

Geez, I haven’t written a review for this blog since my Secret Wars review from like 17 years ago. How can that be? Well, I guess I used to work on this blog a lot more often and now I’ve gotten way more into Super Nintendo games and BDSM. Like a lot of people. But now that I finally finished reading Inferno, it is time once again to bookend my experience with an overly wordy wall of text filled with the worst kind of oblivious meninist butt humor jokes and pretentious sounding run-on sentences that are trying to sound smart but are always improperly ended with prepositions of. And lots of ridiculous comic book panels.

These are only the silliest panels from this reading that I could find after looking for about 25 seconds.

Bookeeping. This review covers everything that I have read since X-Factor #1. This includes Uncanny X-Men #204-243, X-Factor #1-39, New Mutants #38-73, along with a smattering of annuals, Daredevil, Power Pack, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Excalibur, and X-Terminators comics that were all part of the Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, and Inferno crossovers. There were a lot of developments over the course of the 4 years these comics were published. Jean Grey was resurrected and the original members of the X-Men reformed under the moniker X-Factor.

Mr. Sinister formed his band of evil mutants, the Marauders, who would become the X-Men’s main antagonists, and their most devious act would include committing mutant genocide against the Morlocks in the New York City sewers while dealing critical wounds to main X-Men team members Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and Colossus during the fight.

Later, the X-Men were seemingly killed in a struggle with the mystical being known as the Adversary, but in reality they went into hiding in their new Australian outback base.

Illyana Rasputin lost control of the hell dimension Limbo which led to a demon invasion of Manhattan.

And finally, perhaps most prominently, Cyclops left his wife Madelyne Pryor and their son to get back together with Jean Grey, an act that led Madelyne to become corrupted with Pheoenix Force power and to turn into the Goblin Queen.

This era of X-Men comics contains the first major crossovers between the main X-Men comic book and its spinoffs. These events would become common as Marvel found ways to use its more strongly published works to carry the weaker ones, and the ploy still works apparently since here I am 30 years later reading 500 page omnibus collections just because there are 4 or 5 absolutely killer X-Men comic books in them. I love the X-Men so much that I’m willing to wade through the unending buildup to get the most out of the climaxes.

Seriously this artwork.

However, I find that this style of editing leads to a peculiar trend in pacing that can be tough to recover from in-between the major storylines. As Mutant Massacre leads into Fall of the Mutants, which then leads into Inferno, the characters are faced with consistently increasing stakes. With each passing story line, casualties grow and become more grave, and the consequences are more lasting. Mutant Massacre starts with the genocide of a mutant community, and several main characters are critically wounded as the X-Men face the worst defeat they’ve ever experienced. Then a year later in Fall of the Mutants, just as the team is starting to recover, the entire team of X-Men is killed during their battle against the Adversary. They would immediately be resurrected as a reward for sacrificing themselves to save the world, but it is still a defeat that claims the lives of every member of the team, if only for a moment. By the time we get to Inferno, the world is literally ending. Demons are raining from the sky and regular people are straight up getting slaughtered in the streets and elevators as the X-Men are more or less helpless to stop the destruction.

Inferno is an amazing storyline, if only for all the scenes of inanimate objects coming to life and straight up eviscerating common folk who are just minding their own business. Look at this shit!!! How did the comics code of conduct ever approve this. A mob of people just packed themselves into a demon FOOD PROCESSOR and every inch of them was liquefied except their bones. Chilling. (And let’s just forget about how the writers retconned all this blood orgy stuff in the Inferno Epilogue).

This all works in a capitalistic sense. Constantly raise the stakes and don’t let up for a second because if you do, the reader will take their eyes off the page and you will lose money. But the problem is, you can’t do this forever. And if you try, eventually you are going to write yourself into a corner where you’ve raised the stakes so many times, and you’ve re-manufactured the drama so often, people will stop caring. I call this the Dragon Ball effect.

How many times have these characters become gods at this point? Like three movies ago, the most recent movie was literally called “Battle of Gods.” I’m not even watching Super. Once your characters get so far away from humanistic stories people can relate to, you are no longer creating art. You’re manufacturing sensationalism. And it gets boring. These guys are starting to look like different flavors of freezie pops.

Maybe this is why the X-Men comics that come after this, the comics that make up the last leg of writer Chris Claremont’s 17 year run on the series, become so weird. Because perhaps there was no way to continue to raise the stakes any higher. After this point, we don’t get any more big crossovers until X-Tinction Agenda, but even that story is small and quaint when compared to what is presented here. Wolverine completely disappears from the series, all our other favorite characters disappear into the Seige Perilous to be transformed into completely different versions of themselves, and we get a lot of surreal stories that don’t have any sort of climax in the way that we’ve been conditioned to expect. The series becomes murky and ambiguous, without a solid narrative arc, and I think that’s why people regard the end of Chris Claremont’s writing on the series to be the weakest part of his run.

I can’t wait to read the X-Men comics that are coming up next. Because I didn’t know what in the FUCK was going on in these comics when I was a kid and I’m hoping they make more sense now.

Anyway, I’ll be the judge of all that, once I get there. (I may even indulge in the Infinity Gauntlet omnibus because, you know, there’s a couple X-Men involved in that). But regardless of what comes after this, I think it’s also true that the crossovers presented in this reading are generally regarded with less respect than Chris Claremont’s earlier work on the series, such as the Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past. This I don’t agree with. While the stories in this reading do range in quality, with Fall of the Mutants definitely being the weakest of the three big crossovers, and even though the Uncanny X-Men portion of Inferno isn’t even the central story of that crossover (the critical story elements take place in the far inferior issues of New Mutants and <ugh> X-Terminators written by Louise Simonson), Claremont’s writing is still much stronger, more layered, and more elegant than anything else that is presented in these collections. These crossovers may not be as timeless or original as the most famous X-Men stories, but the writing here is still really darn good and engaging (at least in Uncanny X-Men), and in my opinion, does not represent a decline in aptitude on the part of the writer. It’s clear that Claremont’s writing has continued to mature and become more nuanced, so much so that when you compare it to the first issues he wrote for the series, it seems like he’s a completely different writer.

KALIDASCOPICALLY. Again, these were just the silliest panels I could find after looking for about 25 seconds.

Personally, I love this period of X-Men comics. Under Claremont’s executive control, no plot thread gets dropped. No minor detail goes disregarded. Characters continue to grow and develop at such a natural pace, sometimes it feels like my own life is developing right alongside theirs. This adds depth to these readings and I can’t describe how it feels to be a part of them, and I think it’s this element that is missing from so many other comic books written by so many other comic book writers, including nearly every X-Men story written after Chris Claremont left the series.

Case in point, there are so many minor recurring characters that appear in these stories, like Franklin Richards. (I seriously tear up every time I see these panels). This little guy bounces around the Power Pack, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four like a ping pong ball. He’s a key character in the story line where Kitty Pryde finally recovers from the wounds she suffered during Mutant Massacre. And even though Kitty and Franklin have only met each other a few times, those meetings have meaning and they are remembered and called upon in the telling of the current story. All of the efforts made by the writers and editors to keep the narrative linked make these characters seem like real life people with weight and substance, rather than a thin layer of ink on a piece of paper. And it totally works.

Ugh, this review turned into another circle jerk about the writers of these comics, and especially about Chris Claremont. But what can I say. It’s because of the writers that we are here. Love or hate these comics, and I know Claremont’s wordy scripts are not everyone’s cup of tea, but these are the stories that make the X-Men what they are. It’s tough to be aware of these things when you’re in the middle of reading them, but I’m having the absolute best time writing this blog right now, and it is primarily because these are the comics that resonate with me the most. And when I’m finished with Claremont’s material and I’m slogging through some crap written by Chuck Austen, I bet I’m going to look back on these days with envy.

[cryptoriawebb]

So I recently bought the remastered version of Dragonball GT on DVD and I am LOVING it. I’ve been dying to see the English voices paired with the Japanese music and it did not disappoint. I’ve missed GT, it’s my favorite of the Dragon Ball series (and yes, I’m aware of how unpopular that is) but it’s so nostalgic for me! GT was my first fandom, back when the internet was new and youtube hadn’t yet grown into the monster it is now. 

I’m going to talk about GT now. Please read with an open mind and respect my opinion!

I honestly still prefer some of the characterizations to what we have in Super. It’s nice to see a Goku who isn’t obsessed with being the strongest ‘just cause.’ It’s nice to see a mellowed but still cranky Vegeta, even if he isn’t in the series all that much (which really is a shame.) I even like the variation in Trunks’ and Goten’s personalities! Maybe they have gotten a little soft but I like that angle too! It’s different, and honestly, we can’t really expect Universe 7 Trunks to grow up exactly like his alternate future self. Different experiences, right? To be honest, I think I like his GT personality better XD; (I know I know, another unpopular opinion but he’s such a frazzled mess, I can’t help it.) 

I love Pan too. Yes she’s a little overly aggressive but so were a lot of female characters in Shonen series during that time (the late 90s.) I like that they added a female saiyan to the main cast - it meant SO much to me in middle school. If she’d just become a damn SUPER SAIYAN I’d have very little complaints about this show. Seriously. Why didn’t that happen? (I know why it supposedly didn’t but why hasn’t it happened in the 20 years since GT aired??)

Oh and Super Saiyan Four? SO cool. I definitely prefer it to what we have in Super (I know I know, don’t come after me!) It’s different - so different and I really appreciate that. You can tell just by looking at Goku in that form that he’s powerful, you don’t have to suspend any disbelief, looking at a Super Saiyan with differently colored hair (although I admit, Super’s Ultra Instinct is cool.) 

On that note, I’d forgotten how strange it was to watch a DB series that doesn’t include a lot of transformations. It’s honestly a little refreshing, looking back as an adult. I’m sure it was jarring when the series first came out - wondering why Goku didn’t use his super saiyan transformation until episode 7 and Trunks until, what, 9 or 10? I’m still rewatching it. The first sixteen episodes were withheld from Funimation’s dub until later, so I didn’t experience any jarring adjustment. I know that’s why they weren’t released for a while but darn all, I LIKED the focus on adventure and character relationships. The battles in Z, at least the Z that aired in the early 2000s, were unbearably long. I still haven’t seen it in full, but I have read the manga. 

I also prefer the tone of GT to Z. It’s a little more melancholic, romantic in the old sense of the word and also darker. I know a lot of people didn’t like that, but I tend to write tragic stories myself so it appeals to me. Even watching the first arc (which is my still my favorite) there’s a tone of finality in the music, including the opening theme. GT was meant to be the end of this franchise, after all. I like that about the series too. It was building towards something, something greater than the next Big Bad Foe. If only it were orchestrated a little better...

That’s really where GT falls short. There were so many little ways to improve this series, to make it stand out more than it did and the creative team just didn’t come through. Turning Goku back into a kid worked well in the beginning, but by the end, the audience was a little tired of it. He should have returned to adult form after Piccolo’s death (a cancellation of the wish kind of thing.) If he had been an adult for the last arc, I think “Goku Time” might’ve been more widely accepted. Also, as I said, Pan should have become a super saiyan, considering she was the only other protagonist by the end. Some of the blackstar dragons were strong enough for her to handle in a super saiyan form, which would’ve reduced the amount of times she was saved by Goku. I’m pretty sure that was a result of the era GT was written, as I said, but still. Pan deserved better. 

Also Trunks should’ve stayed a main character, and if not, he should’ve been replaced by Vegeta or Goten or even a few characters. There are so many great ones to choose from and this timeline had a lot to explore. I never really understood why the Son and Briefs family stood by while Goku and (For a time) Vegeta took on Omega Shenron. It would’ve been the perfect opportunity to bring back Gotenks, see Gohan tap into his power reserves at last...like yes, Omega was scary-strong but still! So many “should haves” in this series...

All of this said, I still love GT. It really was beautiful in a lot of ways and the ENDING gets me. I didn’t like it when I first saw it but that’s really just because of the issues mentioned above. Goku’s death - his last death - was a bold move and poetic in a lot of ways. It’s kind of bittersweet to imagine a Dragon Ball world that continues in peace instead of constantly falling into danger. It may not hit the nostalgia button like Super but it wasn’t trying to appeal to all of us adult fans. It wanted to be different, it tried to be different and at least in that regard it succeeded. 

TL;DR I love GT and it will always hold a special place in my heart. 

[thattimdrakeguy]

Bendis has gone from one of my secretly favorite writers to one of my least favorite. Like not only has he made the last so many issues of Young Justice contain some of the most bare bones writing, not only has he made some of the most un-logical decisions of Tim’s fictional life (which is jaw dropping), but he also can’t write Damian worth a damn. He showed he couldn’t get more then two things right about him in 6 pages.

Like I’ve already made it clear that I think Damian’s writing for a while now has just been horrid even if no one talks about it, but just ... no, Bendis, no. Bendis can’t even get one of the simplest trademarks of Damian right.

Damian has a very particular way of speaking, it’s something that even fan fic writers can get right, but just, right away Bendis has him say “Yo”, like, it’s so nitpicky, but it’s just such an obvious thing to avoid. Damian’s way of speaking is so straight forward and obvious, so so obvious. How does one get in the position to write a character in an official medium and get something so obvious and simple wrong?

Is it like on the application to be a DC writer “make sure you never read our character’s before”, because I keep reading current comics every now and again and I wonder.

Has Bendis ever read Damian before? It’s like he just had him described to him as he was dozing off, like, how can you be so bad at writing him? He makes him mean and snarky, but like, come oooon, stop being a parody of bad writing. Why is everything with you lately so bare bones and awful?

Damian would not have a card collection, you absolute dolt.

I’m plenty aware that other writers act like he’s a normal kid and crap, but those writers are absolute crap too. You don’t choose the bad writers to be your inspiration.

Do you know a single thing about what you’re writing?

Why are you writing something you clearly don’t understand?

Damian is such a simple and specific character, it should not be this hard to get more than only two things right with him. 

You couldn’t get the simplest things right with him.

These are such small things, but it’s blowing my mind how reoccurring these things constantly happen.

Even the artist, I love David LeFuente so much, like he’s one of my favorite artists, and I love his Tim and all that, but like, why doe he choose to draw some of the characters so weird?

I love the way he draws Jon, but why does Jon look older then how he drew Conner? They’re the same age currently aren’t they? Conner’s like a young adult now by the way they act. Very late high school years at the very least since they don’t actually specify how long he’s been in Gemworld. So why does Conner look about 4 years younger then his Jon when if anything he’d be older? Like Lefuente’s Conner didn’t look like Conner at all. How did he make Conner look younger than Jon?

And why does Damian look 5? I know a lot of artist struggle to draw younger kids, but why do they constantly get artists that seem like they never seen a 13 year old to draw Damian. It cannot be that hard to have an artist that knows what a 13 year old looks like to draw Damian. There has to be at least one person that can do that. DC, just hire a guy that can draw a 13 year old, to draw your 13 year old character, please. If they’re going to draw them, that should be one of the requirements, you know, actually being able to draw them.

Like why is it so hard to find artists that can draw Tim and Damian? Neither one of them has an easy time finding creative teams that get them. It seems like both of those guys have such struggles finding artists and writers that seem like they actually know what they look like and act like.

Even the language used to describe the issue feels off “These two best buds”, like I don’t make it a secret Super Sons is garbage, and the whole progression of their relationship when it became a thing is some of the worst I’ve ever seen in any comic ever, but like, DC clearly loves them, Didio has said so, and it’s no surprise DC can’t even get what they love right, but “two best buds” doesn’t sound like it’s referring to a thing describing Damian.

It’s another nitpick, but it’s another that’s like, so easy to avoid, because it’s like “oh hey maybe this doesn’t sound like it’s referring to a Damian thing, maybe we should change it. Like it’s so simple, so freaking simple. It’s not a big deal at all in the big run, but something that takes a literal nanosecond to realize is off isn’t that hard to fix. It’s so simple, so genuinely simple, and they got it wrong. All these things they’re getting wrong just keep adding up to the point it’s becoming parody-level’s of stupid it keeps happening.

DC is so inadequate at such basic things at this stage in the game. Even describing things to fit what they’re describing is becoming hard for them. Damian is not a character you describe like he’s a bro or something, it’s not that hard.

Damian is not that hard of a character to get right at all. He’s genuinely very simple. If you never seen him in your entire life. It would take like 3 to 4 issues to understand his character. How he acts, what his thought processes are like, and his life style, but somehow they keep messing that up.

I want Damian to be in a comic that actually knows what to do with him so badly. Like I’m so sick of every comic he’s in getting the most simplest yet obvious things wrong with him.

A big flaw of this specifically, is just how much Super Sons doesn’t work as a concept. It’s very superficial why people want them together, and yet somehow the way they put it together doesn’t work even worse. They have to ignore a lot of obvious stuff to make it even be a thing, which is exactly what they did, so anything involving them is right away so forced that it’s gut-wrenchingly distracting.

But it’s like stuff like this, with the smallest details, just sort of represents a lot about DC, and I think this is why it’s bugging me so much. The amount of obvious stuff they get wrong or at least off is becoming more grating to me.

DC has a massive habit of avoiding the most obvious simple stuff, to instead make a crap load of dumb ideas in.

In this case it’s super small, like a few choices of words, but at this stage it’s just slaps in the face. Get one freaking thing right.

You some how think Tim would change his name just like that, which is just stupid.

You forget almost everything about Damian’s character to put him in places he doesn’t belong.

You think Batman would beat up his kids. His parents died when he was a kid, that happened, but he didn’t become Batman because he was a psychopath, he became Batman to avoid crimes like that happening. That’s the very DNA basic level of Batman, and you got it wrong multiple times in the past few years, and he is your most popular character. You can’t get the basics of your most popular character in Batman right.

And you seem to think doing everything people don’t want is going to get you sales, when after a while people are just gonna leave.

You cannot get the simplest of things right, obvious, simple things, that take a nanosecond of thought, and you get them wrong.

A character that never wanted to stop being Robin like Tim, probably isn’t going to randomly change his identity to match a person that just tried to kill him like how you’re acting. It should take no thought at all to realize that’s a very dumb idea, but you seem to be doing it when you probably shouldn’t.

A character who became a crime fighter to stop crimes, probably isn’t going to beat the crap out of his kids for doing nothing wrong. He didn’t even try to find out if Jason did something, he just assumed without doing any detective work, and he’s a detective. He hit Tim in the face so hard he fell to the ground because Tim wanted to help him. That’s so stupid. I don’t care if Batman’s being mentally tortured by Bane during that last bit, the very basic morals of Batman would probably kick in considering it’s like no one’s ever tried to mentally torture him before. I’m pretty sure hitting a kid in the face isn’t gonna be his first thought when all the kid did was try to help him.

These small minuscule things that they can’t get right. The people that do that are in charge of major things in a company that used to give people something to be happy about each month, are just like this. Even simple (most likely barely noticeable to most people things) things escape them.

Damian is more then just being a snarky, mean, dude.

I’m so unreasonably upset that they keep messing up this character in the simplest of ways.

They’ve already ruined the whole point of his character development, they ignore half the bad stuff he does almost like they purposely want to avoid character development, the very simple basics of his character they ignore to pander to a very easily amused audience, and it’s just tiring.

Damian is like that unmentioned horribly written character, and I think it’s because his arrival was that beginning of the end era of DC were all the crap we hate now started. Like his character ever showing up at all was ridiculous and I won’t pretend otherwise, but at least as an Elseworld’s character he had promise. 

Like because his character showed up in the beginning of the end, a lot of the fans that are still around care less and less about stuff, so no one comments on it. Compared to someone like Tim who been around since 1989, so when they got the smallest but most simplest of things wrong with him it got called out more. Plus, the somewhat surprisingly large amount of people that are that easily persuade by easy pandering praise some of the stuff, so other people assume nothing is wrong.

DC, please, just get writers and people in-charge that can actually think for more than a nanosecond.

Within 6 pages they already got the basic trademarks of a very simple character wrong, and couldn’t even realize that two measly words were bizarre choices. He is not a little kid bro-ing around with his school bestie. I know Super Sons probably did that, but because a comic did it, does not make it a good idea. That’s still completely ridiculous and out of character for Damian to do, seeing how he showed no interest until it suddenly happened. He is a stubborn, half-way anti-social character, he is not going to kidnap, terrify, threaten, and stalk a little kid, to then have the kid he did that to, mostly ignore all that and be okay with it, while no one barely does a thing about his behavior. They set those kids on a trip together. That makes no sense. I get Jon is a superhero with powers, but basic parenting says don’t force your kid to be around someone who would realistically traumatize them. Like, basically, it doesn’t work. At a molecular level, it does not work. Fiction that can be as fantastical as superhero comics is typically maintained by following human logic, or at least in the modern day of comics, but they just ignored that completely.

I don’t expect every writer ever to get everything right about every character, but they couldn’t even get the way he talks right. They couldn’t even realize that “hey, maybe he wouldn’t like this stuff”.

I’m so tired of Damian being reduced to tropes and archetypes that don’t fit, and seeing people actually cheer it on.

He’s not a normal kid, he’s never been shown to be interested in the stuff they act like until they suddenly acted like he was. 

He was a unique character that had stories that could’ve been told but instead people chanted for him to be one of those blood curdlingly generic characters ever.

He’s just a school bully type of character now with a secret heart of gold or something.

He was more then that, and he deserves to be more then that.

Why is the generic and simple being cheered on?

He stuck out like a sore thumb, and had unique stories that could’ve been told, but instead it seems like so many people just want him to be the most bland, generic excuse of a character ever because they find it cute or something.

To me, Damian should’ve never been made, at least not have been put into the main DC universe. I believe that his introduction broke a lot of the Bat-Family because of writers constantly making everyone out of character to try and make him work, when just letting characters react like how they would react would be much more interesting and unique. I think in the long run he was a very bad idea, BUT, if you’re going to do it, why are you constantly ruining the character that you soiled a lot of stuff for to begin with just like that? You can’t even care about that? 

You are a comic book company, your basic design should be to create characters and stories that entertain people. Your basic structure shouldn’t be to just bastardize the stuff you made when people were enjoying it.

Even the stuff you went out of your way to do and partially left a mess you later on just butchered.

How is a company that produces fiction run by people that can’t understand what’s in their own product?

I wouldn’t be nearly, even close to as upset as I am unreasonably so right now if this stuff didn’t keep happening. If this obviously avoidable stuff didn’t keep showing up. If this was one time weird thing then what ever, but this obvious stuff keeps happening, like no one knows why they’re writing what they are.

Like this isn’t about so much as Damian saying “yo” and implied to have a card collection, as it is me being upset that DC keeps getting the simplest things about their own characters wrong to such an extent that even the most bare bones obvious thing about a character is even being done wrong. They couldn’t even get how a character that talks very distinctly speaks right, they couldn’t even get their very straight forward and simple life style right.

I wish DC would just go bankrupt or something, because it’s so stupid that every comic I read there’s a bunch of ridiculous stupid garbage in it.

But OH HEY, NIGHTWING’S COMING BACK.

Tynion’s a bad writer, but he at least knows that maybe fans would like their favorite character to be called by their actual name. So I guess one of the dumbest decisions DC’s probably made ever is being undone, but the fact the decision was ever made to begin with is ridiculous.

[liugeaux]

The Master of Blasting

Months ago, once I realized my Retron had a save-state feature, something got into me. I realized I could go back to old retro games and actually finish them. Sure, I played 100s of games in the 8 & 16-bit eras, but I’ve never been that good at anything with a steep difficulty. Most games of the late-80s, early 90s were punishingly tough and typically, without cheat codes I never got to see the end of them.  

After playing through all the old Donkey Kong Country games and Sonic the Hedgehog 1, I turned my eye towards a peculiar series I had only dabbled in before, Blaster Master. With the release of Blaster Master Zero on Switch, I was extra interested in diving into the well-regarded B-tier NES original.  

With a little research, I found that a total of 8 Blaster Master games have been released...that’s when the classic Sergio completist kicked in. I convinced myself that I shouldn’t play the new Switch games until I’ve completed all of the retro titles. When I began my journey I didn’t realize it would be such a headache.  Here’s my run-through of all the Blaster Master Games.  

1988 - Blaster Master (NES)

Ah, the original. This little game has a charm to it that most games of the late 80′s don’t have. It was clearly inspired by Nintendo published games like Metroid and Zelda. Blaster Master’s key gimmick is the ability to play as the armored tank Sophia the 3rd or as an on-foot character named Jason, the pilot of the tank. As needed, Jason jumps out of the tank and enters human-sized doors.

Blaster Master is a 2D platformer, but once Jason enters a door, the game switches to an overhead perspective for navigation through maze-like dungeons. None of the mazes are particularly hard to solve, but all of the game’s bosses are found in these dungeons. As a kid, having a game that completely switched perspectives was rad. I never owned it as a child, but I vividly remember my time with it through rentals and such.  

This first game is super hard and I found myself using known glitches to get past the game’s harder boss sequences. In true Metroidvania-style, there’s heavy backtracking throughout Blaster Master and if you don’t know where you’re going getting to the next level can be quite annoying. Having played the whole game, I can finally say that despite a super strong first impression, Blaster Master isn’t that great. 

It's WAY too hard and by the halfway point the luster had worn off the unique gameplay. For some reason, this is the point where I decided to dive headfirst into the rest of the Blaster Master games. I’m a glutton for punishment I guess.  

1991 -  Blaster Master Boy (Game Boy)

Prior to playing the original, I had no idea there were so many titles in this series. I definitely didn’t know there were multiple portable entries. Blaster Master Boy is less a Blaster Master game and more a Bomberman game. Technically its a sequel to the Bomberman spin-off Robo-Warrior. A quick trip over to Youtube can confirm that the gameplay and music are lifted directly from Robo-Warrior. To add even more confusion, in Japan, Robo-Warrior was called Bomber-King, Blaster Master Boy was Bomber-King Scenario 2 and it wasn’t even published by the same company.  

Because of this weirdness, I didn’t spend too much time with Blaster Master Boy. It also didn’t help that there isn’t a decently priced copy anywhere on the internet.  

1993 - Blaster Master 2 (Genesis)

Five years after the original, Blaster Master returned to the console market with Blaster Master 2. It was a Sega Genesis exclusive and the only title in the series released in the 16-bit era. Playing this immediately after the original really made it quite hard. The controls aren’t as precise and the difficultly level is somehow ratcheted up. Blaster Master 2 is a more straight forward platformer without the backtracking of a traditional Metroidvania. 

Unlike the first game, when you enter the human sections of the game, you don’t start a top-down sequence. Instead, the pilot levels are 2D platform shooter areas. All of these seem half-baked, clunky and compared to the game’s contemporaries, quite sad. Fortunately, top-down gameplay wasn’t completely abandoned, before the end of each level there’s an odd top-down sequence, where you pilot Sophia. This mechanic never returns in future games, but taking the rest of the game into consideration, it really isn’t terrible.  

Unfortunately, there’s not much good to say about Blaster Master 2, It hits most of the design notes that the first one hits but the entire experience feels like it was made by a completely different team. Funny enough, after saying that, I looked it up and Blaster Master 2 was, in fact, made by a completely different team. Ha! 

The game’s only saving grace is its vivid color pallet and solid sprite design. Like the first game, the music solid, but unless you’re taking a trip through the whole series like me, Blaster Master 2 can be skipped.   

2000 - Blaster Master: Enemy Below (Game Boy Color)

It took Sunsoft awhile to get around to the Blaster Master series again, but in 2000 they came out swinging. Blaster Master: Enemy Below was released for Game Boy Color and of all the games on this list, it is the game that most resembles the original. Much of the art is designed to look nearly identical to the NES games’, even down to a nearly pixel-perfect recreation of the SOPHIA tank.   

The top-down Jason segments return as does the extreme difficulty and fantastic soundtrack. It’s hard to really complain about the execution of this title. It was clearly an attempt at just trying to make the closest thing they could to the original and in many ways, it is a tighter and more consistent experience. Unfortunately, that’s also a strike against it. Enemy Below doesn’t bring anything new to the table. The bosses are basic re-hashes of the originals, the levels feel like a “lost levels” DLC pack and the game being portable doesn’t really encourage innovation.  

I guess the coolest thing I can say about Enemy Below is that it's still available for purchase. On the 3DS Virtual Console, you can pick up Enemy Below for about $5. At that price, it’s easy to recommend, especially since it comes with built-in save-state functionality.  

2001 - Blaster Master: Blasting Again (Playstation)

Also, released in 2000 (in Japan, 2001 in North America), is the weirdest game in the series to date, Blaster Master: Blasting Again. For those of you too young to remember, the Playstation/N64 era of video games was full of 2D series trying their hand at 3D games. Blasting Again is an egregious example of this frustrating industry trend. You still pilot a tank, with all the same features, like homing missiles, and hover, but you’re dropped into a fully realized 3D world with painfully bad anime cut-scenes.  

The “Jason” sequences are still here, but they too are 3D and mundanely boring. Also, with this being an official sequel to the original, you play as Jason’s son Roddy, not Jason. Much of the music from earlier in the series is remixed, and rerecorded, so not all is lost in the odd one-off. Unfortunately, the antiquated tank controls and punishing difficulty makes Blasting Again hard to recommend. I was able to play it on PS3 with no issues, but the toggle switch for the digital and analog controls was initially hard to find.  

I ended up sinking about 40 hours into finally beating this tragedy. I wasn’t able to use save states and despite it being objectively bad, I grew to love it’s janky and unfair presentation. As a whole, these games have really tested my ability to control my anger, but Blasting Again was the first one to truly get all the way under my skin.  

2010 - Blaster Master: Overdrive (WiiWare)

Notice, I have yet to say any of these games are good, that’s because they aren’t. What they have is a charm to them that conjures the aura of the scrappy beginnings of gaming and the forced appreciation of only owning 4 games that had no checkpoints. Thus far, despite initial misgivings, I’ve enjoyed my time on this journey. Blaster Master: Overdrive is where that joy ended. The fun I was having with the series was taken out back, brutally beaten, and left to die in the town square as an example to anyone daring to play this absolute nightmare.

Overdrive starts innocently enough. It does it’s best to try and evoke the gameplay and tone of the original and for what it's worth the art style isn’t terrible. The Sophia and Jason gameplay loops are in-tact and even the gun-upgrades are more important than ever. Where Overdrive falls apart is its difficulty and embarrassing lack of control options.  

I’m sure most of you are at least familiar with the Wii-Remote. With this being a Wii-Ware only game, it could only be played with the Wii-Remote. The real downside is that the developer either ran out of time or opted not to explore the myriad of control options the Wii offered. There’s no classic controller support, no Gamecube controller support, there’s not even a way to map buttons to a nun-chuck. You are stuck playing with the Wii-Remote turned sideways.  

This wouldn’t be that big of a deal if they had found a better way to implement strafing into the controls. To strafe, the player must hold the B button. That’s the button underneath the Wii-Remote. In a world where the player is using the remote like an old-school NES controller, B button usage is a legit finger-bending-nightmare. Couple this broken control scheme with punishing difficulty and you have the perfect recipe for rage-quitting. I‘m not proud of my behavior during my time with this game and let’s just say I own 1 less Wii-Remote now.

The last thing I want to say about Overdrive is less about the game itself and more about its availability. The Wiiware marketplace is 100% closed, which means there’s no legit way to purchase this game, outside of buying someone’s Wii who had already bought it. This is an ominous foreshadowing of things to come. I would have paid for this game. Hell, I’m deep enough into this BM adventure I would have paid a premium to play this dumb game, but Nintendo’s shut-down of the Wii-Ware shop is a low-key attack on game preservation that us archivist, CANNOT forget. *steps off of soap-box* 

2017 - Blaster Master Zero (Switch/Steam)

With the release of Blaster Master Zero, the series got the most attention it’s had since the original game. Most of that attention was because Zero was basically a launch game for the Switch. The best way to describe Zero is to say that it’s developer Inti’s attempt to take the Blaster Master formula and actually make a decent game. For the most part, they succeed. Oddly enough, almost 30 years later, Zero is the first legitimately good Blaster Master game.  

Much like Enemy Below, Zero tries its hardest to evoke the look of the original NES game. Some refer to games like this as pixel art, others refer to it as lazy...I float somewhere in the middle on it. It was great playing a Blaster Master game with a proper controller where the mechanics actually work. However, it was frustrating seeing a game, based on a design aesthetic that hit its ceiling in the late 80s, try to beautify itself. Many attempts were made to make the design stand out, but it just kept hitting the ceiling established by its predecessors.  

Alternately, by Inti making the game super-playable, the flaws of the older games stand out even more than before. Typically, good Metroidvania’s have an intuitive way of hinting at where you need to go next or a good way of telling you what access you’re new power-ups give you. Due to Zero’s obsession with evoking the original, that intuitive gameplay is replaced with a red box on the map screen. This turns the game into a “drive to red box, shoot things, drive to next red box and shoot more things, experience”, rather than the naturally explorative nature of other games in its genre. The anime story seemed unnecessary from the start, but I’m sure someone will enjoy it. 

While playing Zero I honestly asked myself, “Is this game way easier than the older games, or can I finally control this little tank properly?” I’m sure the real answer is somewhere between those two extremes, but ultimately Zero was a blast, albeit WAY too easy. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the sequel improves upon this wonderful jumping-off point. However, I’m positive I’ll be disappointed that more wasn’t done to bring the series into the modern 2D-platforming space.   

2019 - Blaster Master Zero 2 (Switch)

Zero 2 is very much a sequel to Zero. In true anime fashion, the story immediately gets super self-serious and consequently superfluous. I’m sure some players will love the dialog between protagonist Jason and all of the various anime-faced characters, but that’s not what I’m here for. Needless to say, the story gets involved in ways other Blaster Master games haven’t. That’s not a strike against it, it’s just a characteristic that may not actually matter.  

All previous mechanics are intact here and new ones are introduced almost immediately. If Zero was truly the first good Blaster Master game, then the refinements introduced in Zero 2 make it...wait for it...THE BEST BLASTER MASTER GAME EVER MADE! It controls well, the levels are interestingly built, and where previous sequels in the series lacked innovation, Zero 2 is full of cool and weird, new stuff. The bosses are fresh and interesting, the Jason sequences have been enhanced with a brand new counter mechanic and the space travel segments add a level of depth not seen in previous games.  

I hate that I’m being so positive about the game. It’s been so much fun talking shit about Blaster Master games. Unlike the previous game, developer Inti found a way to modernize the gameplay and still make a genuinely challenging experience. I had trouble with multiple bosses, but never did I feel like the game was unfair, or something was broken. Many of the additions to the story also benefited the gameplay. Something as simple as making the Frog from the original game the reason Jason can immediately leave dungeons serves both the story and gameplay.  

This has been a long journey, and the real hero is Inti Creates. Hopefully, Zero and Zero 2 have done well. The work put in by Inti deserves praise. They have perfected a formula that’s been pending since 1988. Both titles are only $10 on the Switch shop, and at that price, you are basically stealing them. Anyone with a Switch has no reason not to pick at least one of them up and check it out.   

As for the series itself...I have very mixed feelings. There are very few good Blaster Master games. It's a series that trades in loose nostalgia for a widely forgotten NES game. From that, a bunch of often half-hearted sequels were developed trying to capitalize on the little bit of cache the original game still has. I don’t regret my time with the series and I think more titles deserve the Blaster Master treatment, but subjectively, I wouldn’t recommend anyone pick up any games outside of the original and the 2 newest Switch titles.  

[noelclover]

Off The Cuff 07/05/2019

Read a gaming article, want to post about it: It’s about game journalists. So I guess...

Ranty.

As per usual I copy pasta paragraphs and argue against them by typing them out in an attempt to rid myself of the headaches. Moving past the Event Hubs bit:

> EventHubs is just the latest battleground for a much larger and divisive issue: Who gets to be a games journalist? Some players believe the industry’s reporters should be particularly competent (if not masterful) at practically every game they cover. They must be a gamer among gamers, one that lives, breathes, and devours gaming 24 hours a day.

🍀 Not quite true. Particularly competent implies that you have to be good at the game, which isn’t what most gamers expect out of games journalists when they review a game. What is expected is some level of competency that can be considered somewhat “average”. If you play “Prinny Can I Really Be The Hero Dude?” and die 999 times, unable to finish the game and then tell me it’s a really hard game because the fights are a pain in the ass and you couldn’t move your thumb anymore from the button mash, hey, I get you buddy. It’s fine. If you play a shooter but you can’t, say, move and shoot, or move the camera and shoot and then tell me it’s really hard while on the easiest setting, I’m gonna have to doubt you hard. If you pull a Dean Takahashi on me... Well, yeah. Most people don’t expect games journalists to be a “gamers among gamers”, or MLG 1080 no scope gods. But then again, I guess that’s why the term “some players” is used at the start. So if even, say, a miniscule 0.1% of gamers do think like that, they wouldn’t be lying.

> Esports reporter Sabriel Mastin regularly covers Blizzard Entertainment’s first-person shooter Overwatch for Overbuff’s blog. She was surprised by EventHubs’ requirement, in part because she believes there’s a fundamental difference between analyzing a game as a journalist and demonstrating technical skills as a player. “For example, I cover Overwatch from general news to the highest levels of the game with the Overwatch League,” she told the Daily Dot. “I understand it at a very high level, but I’m in the middle of the competitive ladder. […] That doesn’t mean I don’t understand high-level plays and strategies of what the pro players are doing.”

🍀 She’s absolutely right. There’s a difference however in being an analyst and a game reviewer. Look at sports for example. We don’t expect sports journalists to be able to compete with whatever football team is up there right now but we most certainly expect them to be able to tell us what’s going on if we ever get confused. Same with cars. I wouldn’t trust Top Gear to cover a car if they can’t drive and base everything off whatever the specs of the car are. There’s a fundamental difference in watching and doing.

Also middle of the competitive ladder is probably pretty damn good. Or at least a really good indicator that she knows her mechanics really well.

> This is exactly what happened to GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi. 🍀  Ah, shit. Here we go again.

> In the games industry, Takahashi regularly breaks stories and approaches controversial news with a level head. If you’re a games journalist, he’s a role model for your own career. But if you’re just a regular gamer who doesn’t track the industry’s most important writers, you probably know Takahashi for his abysmal Cuphead gameplay. In a viral video, Takahashi struggles to clear Cuphead’s easiest part by far: its tutorial. One scene shows him unable to clear a tall pillar for over a full minute, despite the fact the game walks the player through how to pass the obstacle. Without context, the video implies Takahashi is a clueless writer who barely knows how to use a controller.

🍀 I don’t know about “most important writers” or being a role model. But then again, I’m a “regular gamer who doesn’t track the industry’s most important writers”. I’m a regular gamer who looks at the end product being marketed to the audience: the articles.

Even with context, he was absolutely horrible at it. So much so that I think there’s going to forever be some doubt about his abilities to actually assess games for consumption. I remember reading that it allegedly wasn’t the first time he did it either. I think it was an RPG or something, but he didn’t realize that there was a menu button and that he could increase his stats or something, making the game easier. Not sure how true that is, but Cuphead most certainly didn’t help his reputation.

> But an explanatory post written by Takahashi paints a different picture. While previewing the game during Germany’s Gamescom trade fair, he “was messing around at first” and “wasn’t focused and serious until I had warmed up,” which means he easily missed clues telling the player how to complete the tutorial. This makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever been to a gaming convention as a member of the press. With so many games to preview, interviews to conduct, and time-sensitive stories to write, it’s impossible to give a game the same undivided attention as you would at home.

🍀 You don’t mess around for a whole minute at a tutorial segment, being a complete idiot who can’t Jump And Dash. It takes a child maybe 30 seconds. Sure, we can miss things in games, but it was pretty spelled out. The camera even gave you all the clues you needed the moment you got into the pit.

You can’t tell me you need to give Cuphead’s tutorial your complete undivided attention. It’s fine that he messed up in the stage itself, I mean, platformers aren’t really everybody’s thing, although the way he played it looked like he was playing platformers for the first time, but a tutorial like that does not require your complete, undivided attention. It requires a bit of it, but not so much that you enter The Zone trying to bloody Jump And Dash.

> Nearly two years later, the controversy echoes a point Mastin made about the EventHubs job listing: In a world with Gamergate, “skill” is used to gatekeep marginalized players and determine who is (or isn’t) a real gamer.

🍀 Except it’s not used to  “ gatekeep marginalized players and determine who is or isn’t a “real gamer”. “Skill” is a mostly arbitary measure people have always had to determine if someone is competing in your bracket, or in the case of games journalists, determine if they know what the hell they’re actually talking about.

I’ve seen people criticize Monster Hunter for not being Devil May Cry. They really didn’t know what the game was about.

You can criticize a game for being clunky, the classic Resident Evil games were pretty darn clunky for example, you can say that their controls didn’t make any sense. You can criticize a game’s gameplay for not feeling rewarding, but to be able to tell, you’d have to be able to play the game, which means having some measure of skill to get through the game in the first place.

In a skill based activity, skill is to some degree linked to understanding. Games like Monster Hunter and Dark Souls work like that. The better understanding you have of your tools (iframes, armour, move set), the better your understanding of game mechanics, the thing you interact with to get through the game.

> “It can certainly feel that the conversation is coming from right-leaning people, especially after being around during [the Gamergate] era,” Mastin said. “The ‘discussion’ has the vestige of that time when we’d hear, ‘Game journalists need to be objective, taking out any emotion from the game.’ I don’t remember the discussion about being ‘good’ popping up before that time.”

🍀 And here it is, one of the myriad things I really, really dislike because it feels dishonest. Do you see it?

“right-leaning people”

I really dislike this because it’s often times done as a smear. What’s that? You don’t care about politics and found Anita Sarkeesian’s video questionable? You must be some skinhead Nazi son-of-a-bitch. What’s that? You think Dean Takahashi was iffy? You must be a right-wing trogdolyte.

I dislike this because it shuts down any conversation to be had and is a very underhanded dodge method. It also pushes people to extremes because they develop a sense of bitterness from being silenced.

But hey, who gives a shit. Criticism of game journalists apparently makes you “right-wing”, whatever the hell that even means.

Rant aside. I don’t know anyone saying that they need to “take any emotion from the game”, back then and now. I remember people saying that they shouldn’t be sleeping with the person who was reviewing their game, much like with every other field, to prevent as much bias as possible. Very different things.

I also remember people saying that you had to be “good”, but the definition of “good” was “decent at the game”.

> But a skilled gamer isn’t necessarily a skilled reporter. Journalism has its own requirements for basic competency: a strong voice, a powerful command of the written word, the people skills necessary to talk to sources, and the humility required to cooperate with an editor and revise a story. These are not necessarily things you can learn from playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimateor Overwatch. On some level, you have to sacrifice in-game time to focus on becoming a better reader, writer, and communicator. If that means you occasionally struggle with a difficult game like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Enter the Gungeon, then so be it. That doesn’t make you any less of a games journalist.

🍀 The article is right in that being a skilled gamer doesn’t make you a skilled journalist. You do have to sacrifice some thing for another. Doesn’t explain Dean’s abysmal performance in the tutorial or when we see game journalists play FPS games and move their character, not the camera, to turn around and shoot something.

Look. You don’t have to be a god at a game to review it. It would be untrue to say that nobody ever said this, but it would also be untrue to say that that’s what people are asking for. It’s like if you were buying that overly hyped cheese tart. You really, really want the cheese tart reviewer to have taste buds. It’d be great if they can tell you if there’s some essence of cheese-flower in the tart or something, but that’s a bonus. You want them to be able to tell you how it generally tastes, the mouth feel, if it’s crumble, etc etc. If that’s the standard for most, if not everything, fields, then why should it be different for gaming?

> But in a world infested with Gamergaters, it’s hard to read a job posting like EventHubs’ in good faith. If you’re not a pro gamer, you’re an SJW charlatan.

🍀 Infested is a strange term to use for people who want ethics in game journalism and don’t want to be hit over the head with some forced SJW aesop or writing which takes the story or setting in a choke hold, like with Andromeda where apparently the Asari, a unisex species has what’s basically gendered pronouns because why the fuck not. (Seriously, it’s a small issue I know, but it would have been great to explore how a unisex species works, if they use different pronouns for the different stages in like, etc etc, and if they do, why? How the hell would they perceive gender anyway? Asari can breed with pretty much whoever they want, genitals be damned.)

Infested is a strange term to use for people who rolled their eyes to Far Cry 5 reviewers that said that the game wasn’t “political enough” (to summarize) because they wanted the game to bash the hell out of Trump and his supporters and gave the game a lower score.

(No, seriously. They expected a French company who wants to make money to alienate a portion of their player base to make some political statement that they most likely do not care about so that some folks who hate Trump can get a hard on for 5 seconds or something.)

I don’t think anyone who plays video games is really against “diversity” in video games. I say it in quotation marks because the definition of diversity is ridiculously loose. I mean, a while ago we got some guy criticizing The Witcher 3, a game based on a nearly mono-European-ethnicity country’s cultural history and mythology, a nation which doesn’t get much spotlight in anything aka Poland because it doesn’t have “people of colour”.

I don’t know about you lot, but I would honestly rather play a game that’s based off of Polish stories, Egyptian mythos than some shooter based in America, even if the character is somehow, super specifically, Malaysian Chinese and likes Nasi Lemak and Ramlee burgers more than he should.

And no. You’re not an SJW charlatan because you’re not a pro-gamer. It’s a false dichotomy to say that. If you’re an SJW charlatan, it’s because you’re an SJW charlatan. It’s almost as bloody stupid as saying that you’re a right-winger because you play games. Or you’re part of the Yang-Gang because you’re Asian because he’s Asian. (For the record, I’m Malaysian, again, but the Yang-Gang thing is pretty cool.)

Stop digging Gamergate back out from it’s grave. You’ve taken the piss on it’s corpse, spat at people who gave too much of a damn about games and repeatedly use it as a boogeyman to further your bullshit instead of, oh, I don’t know, using it as the lesson it should be:

Do your job and tell us if a game is decent, fun or bad, your political standpoint be damned.

Overall, I’m kind of disappointed yet at the same time I’m not. I really want game journalists to do their job and tell me how fun a game was. I mentioned the Diablo 3 PC Gamer Malaysia article a bunch of times, but recently I remembered the article they wrote for Evil Genius. It didn’t question the morality of the game, it didn’t go on about how there could be more inclusion or some shit like that.

It talked about the game and made me wish I could play it.

[thecomicsnexus]

Jimmy Olsen, Superman's Pal, Brings Back the Newsboy Legion!

SUPERMAN’S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN #133 OCTOBER 1970 BY JACK KIRBY, AL PLASTINO AND VINCE COLLETTA

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC WIKIA)

Jimmy Olsen is paired with the new Newsboy Legion, the sons of the original boy heroes plus Flippa-Dippa, a newcomer, to investigate the Wild Area, a strange community outside of Metropolis. 

The boys are given a super-vehicle called the Whiz Wagon for transport. When Clark Kent shows concern for Jimmy, Morgan Edge, owner of Galaxy Broadcasting and the new owner of the Daily Planet, secretly orders a criminal organization called Inter-Gang to kill him. But Kent survives the attempt, and later hooks up with Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion in the Wild Area. 

The youths have met the Outsiders, a tribe of young people who live in a super-scientific commune called Habitat, and have won leadership of the Outsiders' gang of motorcyclists. Jimmy and company go off in search of a mysterious goal called the Mountain of Judgment, and warn Superman not to stop them.

THE BRONZE AGE OF COMICS

The Bronze Age retained many of the conventions of the Silver Age, with traditional superhero titles remaining the mainstay of the industry. However, a return of darker plot elements and story lines more related to relevant social issues, such as racism, drug use, alcoholism, urban poverty, and environmental pollution, began to flourish during the period, prefiguring the later Modern Age of Comic Books.

There is no one single event that can be said to herald the beginning of the Bronze Age. Instead, a number of events at the beginning of the 1970s, taken together, can be seen as a shift away from the tone of comics in the previous decade.

One such event was the April 1970 issue of Green Lantern, which added Green Arrow as a title character. The series, written by Denny O'Neil and penciled by Neal Adams, focused on "relevance" as Green Lantern was exposed to poverty and experienced self-doubt.

Later in 1970, Jack Kirby left Marvel Comics, ending arguably the most important creative partnership of the Silver Age (with Stan Lee). Kirby then turned to DC, where he created The Fourth World series of titles starting with Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #133 in October 1970. Also in 1970 Mort Weisinger, the long term editor of the various Superman titles, retired to be replaced by Julius Schwartz. Schwartz set about toning down some of the more fanciful aspects of the Weisinger era, removing most Kryptonite from continuity and scaling back Superman's nigh-infinite—by then—powers, which was done by veteran Superman artist Curt Swan together with groundbreaking author Denny O'Neil.

The beginning of the Bronze Age coincided with the end of the careers of many of the veteran writers and artists of the time, or their promotion to management positions and retirement from regular writing or drawing, and their replacement with a younger generation of editors and creators, many of whom knew each other from their experiences in comic book fan conventions and publications. At the same time, publishers began the era by scaling back on their super-hero publications, canceling many of the weaker-selling titles, and experimenting with other genres such as horror and sword-and-sorcery.

The era also encompassed major changes in the distribution of and audience for comic books. Over time, the medium shifted from cheap mass market products sold at newsstands to a more expensive product sold at specialty comic book shops and aimed at a smaller, core audience of fans. The shift in distribution allowed many small-print publishers to enter the market, changing the medium from one dominated by a few large publishers to a more diverse and eclectic range of books.

JACK KIRBY

In 1968 and 1969, Joe Simon was involved in litigation with Marvel Comics over the ownership of Captain America, initiated by Marvel after Simon registered the copyright renewal for Captain America in his own name. According to Simon, Kirby agreed to support the company in the litigation and, as part of a deal Kirby made with publisher Martin Goodman, signed over to Marvel any rights he might have had to the character.

At this same time, Kirby grew increasingly dissatisfied with working at Marvel, for reasons Kirby biographer Mark Evanier has suggested include resentment over Lee's media prominence, a lack of full creative control, anger over breaches of perceived promises by publisher Martin Goodman, and frustration over Marvel's failure to credit him specifically for his story plotting and for his character creations and co-creations. He began to both write and draw some secondary features for Marvel, such as "The Inhumans" in Amazing Adventures volume two, as well as horror stories for the anthology title Chamber of Darkness, and received full credit for doing so; but in 1970, Kirby was presented with a contract that included such unfavorable terms as a prohibition against legal retaliation. When Kirby objected, the management refused to negotiate any contract changes. Kirby, although he was earning $35,000 a year freelancing for the company, subsequently left Marvel in 1970 for rival DC Comics, under editorial director Carmine Infantino.

Kirby spent nearly two years negotiating a deal to move to DC Comics, where in late 1970 he signed a three-year contract with an option for two additional years. He produced a series of interlinked titles under the blanket sobriquet "The Fourth World", which included a trilogy of new titles — New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People — as well as the extant Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Kirby picked the latter book because the series was without a stable creative team and he did not want to cost anyone a job. The three books Kirby originated dealt with aspects of mythology he'd previously touched upon in Thor.

 The New Gods would establish this new mythos, while in The Forever People Kirby would attempt to mythologize the lives of the young people he observed around him. The third book, Mister Miracle was more of a personal myth. The title character was an escape artist, which Mark Evanier suggests Kirby channeled his feelings of constraint into. Mister Miracle's wife was based in character on Kirby's wife Roz, and he even caricatured Stan Lee within the pages of the book as Funky Flashman. The central villain of the Fourth World series, Darkseid, and some of the Fourth World concepts, appeared in Jimmy Olsen before the launch of the other Fourth World books, giving the new titles greater exposure to potential buyers. The Superman figures and Jimmy Olsen faces drawn by Kirby were redrawn by Al Plastino, and later by Murphy Anderson. 

Kirby later produced other DC series such as OMAC, Kamandi, The Demon, and Kobra, and worked on such extant features as "The Losers" in Our Fighting Forces. Together with former partner Joe Simon for one last time, he worked on a new incarnation of the Sandman. Kirby produced three issues of the 1st Issue Special anthology series and created Atlas The Great, a new Manhunter, and the Dingbats of Danger Street.

Kirby's production assistant of the time, Mark Evanier, recounted that DC's policies of the era were not in sync with Kirby's creative impulses, and that he was often forced to work on characters and projects he did not like. Meanwhile, some artists at DC did not want Kirby there, as he threatened their positions in the company; they also had bad blood from previous competition with Marvel and legal problems with him. Since he was working from California, they were able to undermine his work through redesigns in the New York office.

REVIEW

If you are a ninenties creature like me, you remember all these concepts very well, because they came back in the form of Cadmus in the superman titles of the “triangle” era. This is proof that Kirby left a big legacy on more than one company. It is sometimes hard to tell where Kirby starts and where other writers come in. It is hard to tell on his Marvel work at least (and Stan Lee would often take credit for Kirby’s work). So the Fourth World is a good place to check on the real Jack Kirby. Away from Joe Simon, away from Stan Lee.

Now, about this issue. As I said, I knew most of these things from the 90′s Superman titles (that was also the last time Jimmy Olsen mattered). But I have to imagine what it was like to new readers... Jimmy Olsen readers in particular, that a few months ago were reading about Superman trying to prevent Jimmy (an adult) from being adopted. I also have to have in mind that comic-book readers were probably very aware of who Jack Kirby was. The sixties were pretty much dominated by Marvel, and a big part of that success was because of Kirby. But, as I said before, Stan Lee would take the media and take credit for everything. So I am not sure how aware casual readers were with Jack Kirby.

If they weren’t, by this issue they probably were, as DC did a lot of fanfare about the fact that Kirby was coming to DC. Some people compared Bendis coming to DC to this period of time in particular. While there are similarities, it is too early too judge Bendis legacy at this point in time.

The story in this issue is ok. There are a lot of characters and plots being introduced. It’s the first appearance of Morgan Edge, the Wild Area, the Outsiders, the Newsboy Legion (Junior) and other concepts. It is important to remark that this Newsboy Legion is not the golden age version of that group. They are the sons of the originals (and they look pretty much the same... and dress the same). Flip is a bit weird, though. I am pretty sure he doesn’t need the scuba kit on all the time. I will be reviewing the original Newsboy Legion in the golden age reviews.

The art is better than the usual Kirby style, but as it was said above, Al Plastino redrew Superman and Jimmy’s faces. This was common practice at DC, as they didn’t want their most emblematic characters changing too much from issue to issue.

I give this issue a score of 8

[readingraebow]

Boardwalk Empire Section Two

Chapters 7-Afterword

1. How were Taggart and Hap’s childhoods different? Who ended up succeeding Nucky and why? Taggart was born into an upper class family. His father was Atlantic City's chief surgeon 25 years and his mother came from old wealth. Taggart attended law school and opened his own law practice with his family's backing. But he immediately gravitated toward politics and began helping out on campaigns. However, he was never really "one of the boys". Taggart was a closeted homosexual. So basically he grew up with a ~fairly easy life except he could never openly be himself. Hap, on the other hand, was the last born of ten children. His family was super poor and constantly struggled to keep everyone fed and clothed. They lived on the Northside next to blacks and a red light district. As a child, Hap delivered newspapers and proofread for the local newspaper. However, Hap's father was secretary to the local fire department and ended up being a part of both the Kuehnle and Johnson machines. He used his friendships to help several of his sons obtain positions of note within the community. Hap, though, was smart and his sister convinced him to go to college. He, too, went to law school. And Hap is the one who ended up succeeding Nucky. Basically Hap made important friends and he helped all of his opponents obtain jobs that were better suited for their desires. And then Taggart basically put the nail in his own coffin when he started turning on the system and leading raids on gambling dens. Taggart was eventually removed from power and Hap took over as Nucky's successor.

2. How did Hap say he got his start in politics? What was the real cause? He said that, while in law school, he'd taken up the cause of his basketball team which had been locked out of the school gym. And while Hap did lead a movement for better facilities for young athletes, that wasn't really how he got his start in politics. His true influence was years of going nowhere in his law practice and struggling to survive while he watched his brothers, who were far less educated, rise through the ranks of Johnson's machine into well-paying, secure jobs. This was the true inspiration for Hap and he realized that to make it in Atlantic City, he'd have to follow the same path.

3. What were some of the contributions to Atlantic City’s decline in the 50s and 60s? Postwar modernization was one of the biggest reasons for Atlantic City's decline. Air conditioning and swimming pools meant that people didn't have to leave home to enjoy themselves. It also created more competition by Southern resorts. And with air travel becoming affordable, more were willing to save their money and travel long distances rather than take weekend trips to Atlantic City. And the invention that did the most damage to Atlantic City was the automobile. Atlantic City wasn't super easy to get to and relied mostly on the railroad. But with cars, people could just hop in and go wherever they wanted and weren't a slave to train schedules. To top it all off, because Atlantic City hadn't been doing well, the entire place was rundown. They didn't have any money for modernizations and most people wouldn't travel to such an antiquated place. Or, if they did visit, they wouldn't come back. Atlantic City was mostly a place for nostalgia and those who came back, wanting to see the place where they'd stayed as children, found that it wasn't the same as they remembered. And they didn't come back.

4. What did the bumper sticker say that summed up the town’s situation? It read, "Last one off the island, turn out the lights."

5. What did Weiner learn from his telephone polls regarding the casino issue? Through the telephone polls, Weiner learned that nearly eight out of ten voters believed that casinos had the potential to generate large amounts of revenue for the state government. They didn't know how much revenue gambling would produce but they felt strongly that it had to be a lot of money. They also believed that gambling would strongly impact them because it would lower their state tax rates and leave them with more money in their pockets.

6. Who was Matthew Micheals? He was the mayor of Atlantic City but he was basically only interested in the position because he wanted to be famous. And he behaved like there were no limits to his power. He basically just wanted to be the life of every party and, as a result, was a terrible mayor. And he believed in himself so highly that he was literally caught by having dinner with an undercover FBI agent who was wearing a wire and literally bragging about all of his misdeeds. He then accepted a $100,000 bribe in marked bills. So he wrote his own death warrant and was removed from his office in handcuffs.

7. What was Fred Trump’s early life like and how did he start his business? Fred Trump's dad began a real estate venture in New York City but he died when Fred was 11 and Fred's mother then struggled to provide for her three children. However, Fred went to work shortly after his father's death as a "horse helper" which meant during the winter months, when it was icy and the horses couldn't make it up steep hills with loads of lumber, Fred and other young, strong boys would carry the loads to construction sites instead of the horses. Then, as a teenager, Fred became a carpenter himself. He was self employed by 18 and, too young to sign checks or enter into contracts by himself, did business as "Elizabeth Trump and Son". He began building houses to sell and, eventually, built rental properties. Because he built them himself and didn't have any financial backers, he made all of the profits off of all of his properties. Fred Trump became the city's largest landlord.

8. What did you think of this book? So I don't exactly know how I feel about this book. On the one hand, I liked what this book was trying to do and I did learn a lot from it. But I honestly didn't like the way it tried to do it. Because this book was honestly kind of boring and I fell asleep quite a lot reading it. And that's disappointing because this book really did have a lot of information and I honestly feel like I know a lot about Atlantic City now. So I liked this book but I didn't like this book, if that makes sense? I liked the idea of this book, I just wish it had been executed a little bit better.

  Section Two Reading Journal

Okay, so. Let’s first talk about this book in reference to the show. Because wow that’s a different world. And honestly that fascinated me a lot. So Nucky’s reign is only about two chapters in this book and it’s the entire basis of the show. And most of the show’s characters aren’t in this book (and most apparently also are not based on real people; except Arnold Rothstein which, why isn’t he in this book??? I’m upset). So I honestly found that really interesting. Nucky’s reign is, arguably, the most interesting part of this book since that seems to be the most “glamorous” era for Atlantic City.

That being said, I really did enjoy learning more about Atlantic City through this book. Because I honestly didn’t know anything about it except that it’s basically the East Coast Vegas. But it’s definitely interesting that there was such a long period between the glamour of the 20s and when gambling was finally legalized in 1978 and it finally started to restructure. I totally didn’t know any of that.

So I really do like what this book was trying to do and I did find it interesting. But it also took me three years to get back to this book and as soon as I was done, I was so glad I could finally cross it off my list. So even though I found it interesting, it wasn’t a book I actually enjoyed reading. And while that is pretty standard with most history books, it’s also disappointing. I guess I just wanted this to be a little less dry? Because Atlantic City is fascinating. I just wish this had been more fun to read.

But. Glad to finally have read it and, wow, that last chapter was, uh, fascinating. Especially since Trump was not even running for president yet (I don’t think?), when I originally started this book. So reading it now, after he’s been president for a while, was, uh, doubly fascinating. (I also groaned quite a bit when I saw the title of that chapter but here we are.) So I find it super interesting that one of the people who ended up saving Atlantic City was Donald Trump. That honestly just blows my mind for some reason.

So, I’m really interested in visiting Atlantic City at some point. I know a lot has changed since the eras in the contents of this book. It sounds like most of the buildings that were there during Nucky Johnson’s (so hard for me not to type Thompson, wow) time are gone or have been remodeled. And it sounds like most of the casinos that were built originally have also been gutted and remodeled (even the Taj Mahal is not the same anymore???? And that’s honestly the one I was really interested in visiting). So hopefully I get to visit Atlantic City some day. From a historical perspective, I’m definitely interested in seeing it and seeing how much it has changed from what I read in this book, haha.

I’m honestly also ready to go back and rewatch the show and, uh, actually finish it. (I still don’t think I made it much past season two. I think I made it just a little ways into season three. Because all of my babies die. Whhyyyyyy??) OH. Also. It seems like everyone dies far more dramatically in the show than they did in this book? Because Nucky died of old age. And it seems like most of the gang violence in the show wasn’t actually a thing. Or, at least, this book didn’t really cover that. So. Found that interesting as well.

Okay I’ll stop thinking of more things to add now, haha. I’m glad to have finally finished this book and I can’t wait to continue finishing other books that I should’ve read a long time ago. Yay!!!

[hellyeahheroes]

Ten Winners and Losers of DC Rebirth:

DC has dropped the Rebirth logo out of their titles. That is usually the sing they consider that the transition period for their books is over. They have built their status quo and what they have built during it is the new DC Universe. While I doubt fans will stop calling DC books Rebirth titles from now on (same as they didn’t stop using New 52 name long after DC dropped it from the covers), I want to look at what they managed to fix and bring to new fresh in this period, this last 1,5 year and also on what has failed. What were the winners and losers of DC Rebirth. Enjoy:

Winner: Superman Family

Out of all lines, I don’t think any has made as much of an improvement as Superman’s. While there were good stories in New 52 Era, that time’s take on Superman has been generally seen with negative reception. Bringing back married Superman and Lois AND their son Jon has been a brilliant move, that quickly launched both Superman and Action Comics to some of the most popular in the era. The emphasis on Superman as a father made him more relatable to growing audience, several well-written Lois moments helped remind people why she is a belowed character and Jon quickly gained love of older fans and kids alike. That success was then quickly capitalized on with Super Sons, giving the spotlight to Jon and his new friend, Damian Wayne. The return of classic Superman villains like Eradicator, Metallo, Doomsday, Hank Henshaw, Mr. Mxyztplk, Manchester Black and General Zod with a new, interesting antagonist in Mr. Oz, helped make it an era that will certainly be remembered. 

Adding to it three new books - Superwoman, Supergirl and New Super-Man only cements the lines’ status as probably the best quality-wise of the entire Rebirth. While Superwoman was sadly the shortest-living of them all, it still left us with Traci Thirteen and Natasha Irons as a couple, a move fans approved so much we now hope for Traci’s sexuality to be addressed in her upcoming show and Young Justice Season 3. Meanwhile, new take on Supergirl, taking clues from the show, but making Kara a high-schooler with adopted parents, has been well-regarded by the fans and New Super-Man became a minor fan-favorite, to the point DC took back the decision to cancel the series and let it continue as New Super-Man & the Justice League of China. 

Loser: Blue Beetle

Poor Jaime. One of the few characters that Rebirth set to fix after New 52 made him into a hot mess. The premise was solid - Jaime getting a mentor in form of previous Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, written by Keith Giffen, who shaped Ted into a comedic character and helped launch Jaime’s 2006 book. It had the potential for success. But the creative team (which J.M.DeMatteis joining in the middle) clearly didn’t believe in it and tried to launch a stealth team book they should have pitched in the first place. This resulted in a chaotic story that has lead to Blue Beetle’s cancellation and many plotlines left unresolved.

Winner: Damian Wayne

Rebirth was a good time to be Damian fan. Between his appearances in not one but two books, leading new Teen Titans and forming great friendship with Jonathan Kent as well as having a handful guest issues, be it in Nightwing or Superman or Batman, Damian has received a tremendous push. While the quality of some of these titles remains debatable among the fans and some are unhappy with him not being pushed as Batman’s partner, it is undeniable they have a lot of fresh Damian content to choose from.

Loser: Tim Drake

By contrast with Damian, Tim Drake has spent most of the Rebirth imprisoned by Mr. Oz and presumed dead. While his spirit was hanging over his friends in Detective Comics and his perceived loss affected them greatly, he himself was almost not present at all, really having a chance to shine only in two stories, Rise of the Batmen and A Lonely Place Of Living. In a way it feels as if James Tynion IV even knew he likes Tim too much and moved him away to give everyone else the spotlight - spotlight they undeniably needed, may I add.

Winner: Batman

It’s bizarre for me to even put him on this list. Batman is the golden child of DC, the fortunate son, the star, the fan-favorite. He always gets best writers, the spotlight, the books, the guest appearances. And yet, DC Rebirth did something unbelievable, something I would never bet to see with Batman. They let him be weak. When over the years Batman has amassed reputation that earned him nicknames and memes like “Prep Time”, “BatWank” or “Batgod” over how perfect, always right and invincible he became, in Rebirth this feels toned down. 

Batman in Rebirth was allowed to have flaws and vulnerabilities. His moments of super-competence are now contrasted with his emotional vulnerability. Batman was allowed to be a father who needs his children maybe even more than they need him, he was allowed to take serious beatings from Bane and Reverse Flash, to grieve after Tim, to seek happiness in marriage with Selina, to see his fears and regrets exposed in monstrous forms of Seven Dark Knights. All these things like tiny woodpeckers chipped little bits away from the image of BatGod and brought back Bruce Wayne, Batman the human. And boy did he needed to come back and remind people why this character is popular, to begin with. I mean, if even my bitter and cold heart started feeling a bit more sympathy for the guy whom last few decades made me despise, you know DC is doing something right.

Loser: Raven

One of the biggest mistakes of DC Rebirth was Marv Wolfman’s Raven book. Not the book itself, but the fact it was only a miniseries. Being limited to only six-issue format have visibly constrained the potential the story had and forced the writer to rush things. The fact that in January DC launches new Raven book only makes it that much more infuriating. DC had little faith in the character and while I’m grateful they were willing to try at all and they clearly are testing waters for her potential ongoing, I wish we could see how things would turn out, had she been given one in the first place. Or at least a twelve-issue miniseries, I’d rather have that than 12 issues of Chuck Dixon slamming his head against the wall in Bane: Conquest.

Winner: Green Lanterns

That was the book I doubt that many people believed in. Two relatively new members of Green Lanterns being given their title that early and made to work together. A book written by Sam Humphries, who didn’t gain that much of a good reputation for his works at Marvel. And yet...it worked. The series earned peoples’ love with an honest approach to subjects like anxiety disorder and extremely relatable portrayal of main characters. Jessica Cruz, in particular, seems to have grown into a fan-favorite to the point she’s going to be Green Lantern in DC Superhero Girls Universe and may even find a way into DC Comics Bombshells. This book opened a path of bright future to both Jessica and Simon, seeing how it still steadily continued as a bi-weekly series when other books with seemingly more famous character have been reduced to a monthly series. It opened Sam Humphries a way to his dream work at Nightwing. It thinks out of all Rebirth books this one might be one of the biggest breakout hits.

Loser: Gotham Academy

It feels cruel to put Gotham Academy in that category. The creative team truly gave their all to this title. But sadly, the second book they got managed only last for twelve issues, enough to wrap the dangling plot threads. While other DC books benefitted from a new beginning, this one seems to have suffered what restarts did to Marvel books - diminished sales. But I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again - the combined amount of issues Gotham Academy had is an impressive number of 38. Let the fans never allow anyone tell them this title failed. I need to also praise DC for the amount of faith they’ve put into this series and how hard they tried to make it take off and become popular. This effort is worthy of respect. And something that I’d never been expecting from Marvel, so kudos for trying to do better.

Winner: New 52 Wally West 

When Old Wally West from before Flashpoint came back, many people feared this means his New 52 counterpart, now revealed to be a cousin with the same name, will drop into comic book limbo and never be mentioned again. Thankfully DC had a better idea - they kept both of them around. And through a string of writers who wanted to use him, Young Wally has not only been prominently featured as a supporting character in Flash but also joined Teen Titans, had appearances in his cousin’s book Titans and even managed to become a cast member in Deathstroke’s series. While I have complained his life probably sucks with an amount of bad stuff happening, he did leave his mark on larger DC Universe, had a chance to win fans’ love and established relationships with other characters. Hell, he even managed to send Raven’s heart...racing.

I’m sorry, no more puns, I swear, don’t hurt me!

Loser: Conner Kent and Bart Allen

Another case where it feels outright cruel to call them losers. Both of them were erased with the reboot and replaced with versions that can be respectively called a hot mess and an outright identity theft (no, seriously, New 52 Bart turned out to be some asshole using his name). Since Rebirth launched the books started to tease fans with their returns. First, it was who might be in Mr. Oz prison next to Tim Drake’s in Detective Comics. Then the very clear erasure of Conner from Superman’s memories of Reign of Supermen, with Clark noting something is missing on the same page. Then Batman of Tomorrow bringing up Conner and finding out present Tim doesn’t remember him. The Murder Machine telling Barry there was a Bart in his reality. James Tynion IV and Joshua Williamson being very clear they want them back. And of course that Geoff Johns himself seems to want pre-flashpoint Conner back. And now the upcoming appearance of their evil future selves, Titans of Tomorrow in Super Sons of Tomorrow crossover. On the one hand, it appears DC wants to play a long game with setting up their return. On the other, many fans are probably having enough of constantly being shown a carrot on the stick and I hope DC will manage to bring those two back before fandom’s patience runs out.

Winner: Christopher Priest

If you read his essay The New Black Mambo, you will know that Christopher Priest has a complicated history with Big 2. After his successful, character-defining, run on Black Panther, he started to feel the publishers are seeing him as “black guy to write black people” and he felt they’re denying him their A-List characters and jerking him around whenever he tries to pitch a non-black book (he tried to launch an all-female Avengers series almost a decade before A-Force, for example). He also felt his books that do feature black and other poc protagonists are thrown to the assholes on the Internet, even back then ready to declare them a “black propaganda” and other bullshit, which killed his project the Crew before the first issue was even out. This had led him to reject offers on DC and Marvel books for nine years. 

Thankfully, during Rebirth DC was pulling its collective head out of its collective ass so well, they finally noticed why he keeps saying no and pitched him a different character - Deathstroke. On that book, Priest not only managed to rebuild mythos destroyed by New 52, but also built around Slade a diverse cast of complex, multi-layered characters and showed exactly how much of an awful, destructive person somebody like him would be. This opened him the door to Justice League, which he is currently writing, glad he can finally get his hands on all those characters he was always denied. 

Loser: Cyborg

The news on Christopher Priest taking over Justice League was quickly followed by reveal he will make Cyborg the new leader of the team. This sadly quickly became ironic, as DC announced the cancellation of Victor’s own series. Cyborg was another one of those characters DC tried to push even before Rebirth, during DC You, but to no success. Cyborg still retains his role in Justice League so his fans can see him there, but it’s a shame Rebirth didn’t manage to save his book.

Winner: Stjepan Sejic

Stjepan Sejic has become fairly popular on the Internet and in indie in the last few years. Yet, despite years of outstanding work and even solid portfolio of Image Comics books he worked on, he never managed to land a work for the Big 2 outside few covers for Marvel. In Rebirth DC has changed that by giving him not only an arc on Aquaman but bi-weekly Suicide Squad series as well. Hopefully, this will finally give him the spotlight and help land more prestigious jobs in the future, both of which he certainly deserves.

Loser: Frank Cho and Jonboy Meyers

Not all artists managed to capitalize on the success of Rebirth and made their own. Incredible talented Jonboy Meyers was on his way to make his art become the face of new Teen Titans, with his animesque style and modernized designs of the team members gaining a lot of attention. Yet he fell off the project due to “creative differences” after just a few issues. While creators leaving DC books and cursing the editorial was a common occurrence in New 52, it didn’t follow his departure. What’s more he also quickly had the same thing happen to his job at Marvel’s series Royals. I have not been privy to what were his reasons, but I just hope it wasn’t any serious health issues, as he gives an impression of a man too nice to lose two jobs due to acting like a primadonna, unlike some creators in the past.

Frank Cho, on the other hand, DID lose his Rebirth gig due to acting like a primadonna. Being put on variant covers for the first 24 issues of Wonder Woman, he has quit after just six, because Greg Rucka asked him to remove a pantyshot - a reasonable request especially during the time when DC tried to avoid controversies that haunted New 52. Cho, however, decided Diana’s underwear is a hill he will die on and threw a colossal temper tantrum that made him look extremely immature. Ever since his output involving Big 2 characters was a series of “fan” pinups of the same woman in different costumes with some characters screaming “OUTRAGE!” in the background, a sad attempt at pissing people off to feed his persecution complex.

Winner: Jack Kirby

In the seventies Jack “the King” Kirby gave DC several books and characters who maybe never rose to the popularity of their core heroes or his Marvel creations, but became iconic fan-favorites none the less. Were he still alive, 2017 would be his 100th birthday and DC went out of their way to honor him. Kamandi Challenge, Mister Miracle, Bug! the Adventures of Forager and Demon: Hell is Earth all are limited series that allowed some of King’s creations shine once again. Then DC gave others special issues that are now collected in a sweet trade. Not to mention some of those titles featuring Kirby’s heroes meeting each other (I mean, Forager outright went and resolved cliffhanger of Kirby’s original OMAC series) and his other characters and concepts are being featured in ongoing books like Superman or Green Lanterns. DC went out of their way to celebrate Jack Kirby during Rebirth. This is especially poignant at the time when all Marvel managed to do are some cheap variant covers and putting a bunch of his Monsters into one event because they were too busy spending most of the year shitting on one of his most beloved characters in Secret Empire.

Loser: Justice Society America and Legion of Super-Heroes

These two teams have been on everybody’s mouths ever since DC Rebirth Special teased their return. Yet outside of occasionally throwing us a bone here or there, teasing their returns in Batman and Flash, nothing had materialized out of this. I heard rumors there was a plan to launch JSA book, but it appears to have fallen through. Meaning currently both teams are in Comic Book Limbo with Shazam and Martian Manhunter.

Winner: Grant Morrison

Rebirth has become a time when you could notice more and more references to works of certain creator popping up - crazy Scott, Grant Morisson. Be it use of his characters like Aztek in Justice League of America or Doctor Hurt and Professor Pyg in Nightwing or concepts like Hypertime or his Multiversal ideas. With writers like Joshua Williamson, Tom King, Scott Snyder, Gerard Way, Tim Seeley or James Tynion IV it is clear that right now DC Universe is put in hands of creators who have been influenced by Morrison’s body of work and even others, like Gene Yang, while not directly touching on his ideas still add more pieces having similar feel. I’ve been saying Grant Morrison would be proud several times during this era and for a good reason. It feels he has achieved a similar position Warren Ellis had at Marvel for some time before 2015 - maybe not directly affecting the company, but having enough people who learned from or were inspired by him working on it, that he is present in spirit even when he isn’t writing anything.

Loser: Eddie Berganza

This might be a bit cheating since this has little to do with DC Rebirth itself. But it needs to be pointed out that during this era position of Eddie Berganza, an important editor and a serial sexual harasser who was seen as too big to be dealt with, started to tremble. Greg Rucka made DC ensure his new Wonder Woman book will not be edited by Berganza and neither he nor any member of his team will have to even interact with the guy. I like to see it as the first sing the industry was ready to deal with this pathetic, painful ulcer of a man. A thing that indeed has happened, when on the wave of allegations of sexual harassment in Hollywood his name has been brought up. DC and Warner decided to take a look at his case and he was promptly, in their own words, terminated. Good riddance. 

Winner: Imprints, Crossovers, and Elseworlds

One of the greatest successes of Rebirth for me was that DC took serious attempts at bringing back Wildstorm and Vertigo characters, whom they have mistreated by forcing into one Universe with rest of DC in New 52. Warren Ellis’ Wild Storm rebooted the 90′s Universe in a new flavor, giving us a fantastic science-fiction take on their heroes.Gerard Way brought back the feel of early Vertigo in his imprint Young Animal with great series like Doom Patrol, Shade: the Changing Girl, Mother Panic, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye and Bug! the Adventures of Forager. They are not stopping there, seeing how they are working on the return of Milestone Media, launching Dark Matter and working on an all-ages imprint.

At the same time DC launched an imprint for reinventing properties under their Hannah-Barbera license. Which, admittingly, gave us two baffling books in Scooby Apocalypse and Wacky Raceland but also fan-favorite Future Quest, Flinstones or new Dastardly & Muttley. DC seems to have enjoyed working on those books so much they made series of one-shots crossing over other HB characters with their heroes. And enjoyed THAT so much they did it again with Looney Tunes, which were much more entertaining I think anyone would have suspected. Speaking of which, DC has a blast with doing crossovers and you can always see them doing some sort of it - He-Man/Thundercats, Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Shadow/Batman, Wonder Woman/Conan, Justice League/Power Rangers or several Batman ‘66 crossovers. It seems to have even rubbed on their games, with Hellboy and Turtles making their way to Injustice 2.

And finally, DC had a lot of fun with Elseworlds lately. Including Nightwing: New Order, Green Lantern: Earth One, Gotham City Garage, DC Superhero Girls, DC Comics Bombshells or Batman: White Knight.  All of it contributed to a new image of DC as ever-expanding as both the world and the publisher. Which I feel greatly helped their success.

Loser: Marvel Comics

Oh come on, you’ve seen this one coming. When DC wins, Marvel is the biggest loser and vice-versa. But to say that DC suddenly cleaning their act caught Marvel by surprise would be an understatement. It might even be said that their own behavior allowed Rebirth to succeed - after all the big plot twist if Rebirth Special, the big reveal that could have easily turned people against DC, has been overshadowed by Marvel turning Captain America into a Nazi. Compared to THAT what DC did seemed much less outrageous and many people seem to be more open-minded to the Rebirth as a whole as a reason. 

After consistently losing in sales for months, Marvel tried to desperately try to shift the blame on diversity, bloat their sales, copy Rebirth with Legacy, while also making a ton of fuckups and see their bad past decisions finally catching up to them. It is shocking how badly they took the beating, culminating probably with a kick to the balls in form of DC nabbing Brian Bendis, Marvel’s best-selling writer - and even he was just one of the many creators who jumped ships by that point. Things have gotten so bad at Hosue of Ideas they let go their Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso and replaced him with C.B. Cebulski. And even in that, they manage to come under fire. 

While in general, both companies seem to be in the constant back and forth, when one is on top and the other starts fucking up, how drastically had the landscape shifted from New 52 era, when Marvel was seen as a dominant one even if DC was beating them at sales is, to me, a testament to how big success DC had with Rebirth. Now the question remains if they manage to keep it up going forward - which I sincerely wish to them. Because let me say something - DC Rebirth made me fall in love with so many aspects of DC Universe I didn’t care about before and it even made me seek some older DC titles. And that, I feel is the best testament to Rebirth’s success.

If you feel I have missed any winner or loser or just want to call me an idiot for something I’ve said, comments and reblogs are welcome.

- Admin

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior Home Edition June 12, 2020 – THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND, DA 5 BLOODS, ARTEMIS FOWL, YOU DON’T NOMI and more!

Sorry about the delay in this week’s column. Some stuff came up that was out of my control… like the actual summer.

If this were a normal weekend, I’d be writing about the box office prospects about a few movies, including Judd Apatow’s new comedy THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (Universal), which teams him with “Saturday Night Live’s” enfant terrible, Pete Davidson. Instead, I’m once again writing about movies mostly not playing in theaters except for a few sporadic drive-ins across the country.

I already reviewed The King of Staten Island earlier this week – you can read that here – and though I know it will be playing in some regional drive-ins, I have no idea how many nor do I think Universal will report any box office if it does make decent bank. I think there will be general interest among younger people who like Pete Davidson on SNL but I’m not sure anyone over a certain age, say 30 or 40, will have much interest in what Davidson and Apatow can do together. The general gist of the movie is that Davidson plays Scott, a Staten Island slacker whose widowed mother (Marisa Tomei) starts dating a fireman, much to the chagrin of Scott, who lost his fireman father at an early age. You can read my review to see what I think, but it’s relatively tame for Apatow compared to his earlier films. I’m not sure that makes it necessarily better but people seem to be digging it.

One of my favorite movies from last year’s Tribeca and what is essentially this week’s “Featured Film” is Jeffrey McHale’s YOU DON’T NOMI (RLJE Films), which takes an in-depth look at Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 movie Showgirls, thought to be one of the worst movies and biggest bombs in its day but also a movie that has grown a built-in cult audience that adores it. It’s a pretty straight-ahead doc that relies on a number of experts to discuss the problems and virtues of Verhoeven’s film, including David Schmader, who did the DVD commentary for Showgirls, and author Adam Nayman, who is responsible for the book, “It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls.” While I never fell into either the love it or hate it camp for Showgirls, I love how McHale’s doc acts as a thesis piece to explain exactly why so many critics took issue with Verhoeven’s much-maligned follow-up to hits Basic Instinct and Total Recall.

I won’t spoil the movie’s climax showing Showgirls finally achieving redemption, but it’s a pretty amazing event from 2015 that shows that maybe Showgirls has gotten past the hatred and ridicule that followed it around for decades. If nothing else, You Don’t Nomi will make you want to rent and watch (or rewatch) Showgirls almost immediately after seeing it. You might even agree with this film that it’s a misunderstood masterpiece on second viewing.

I’ve also decided to scrap the sections in this column, since two of the other big movie releases this week are going straight to streaming services, although both would probably have gotten some sort of theatrical release if not for COVID.

One of the other major releases of the weekend is Netflix’s streaming of Spike Lee’s DA FIVE BLOODS, his look at the Vietnam War through the eyes of four black Army vets who return to the country to retrieve the body of their fallen comrade… as well as a cache of gold bullion they found and hid during their previous tour.

I’ll be the first to admit that the quality of Spike Lee’s filmmaking over the past couple of decades has been somewhat spotty at best, although BlacckKKlansman was probably one of his better films over the past couple decades. Da Five Bloods reunites Lee with his BlackkKlansman co-writer, Kevin Willmot, and though it’s a fictitious tale, there are a few themes and elements in common.

Delroy Lindo and Lee regular Isiah Whitlock Jr. star as two of the Bloods, Paul and Melvin (along with Clarke Peters’ Otis and Norm Lewis’ Eddie). We meet them as they’re reunited in Vietnam, soon joined by Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors) along to keep an eye on his father’s health. Chadwick Boseman plays the group’s leader, “Stormin’ Norman,” in the flashback sequence to the war era showing what happened to the Bloods on the fateful day their chopper went down behind enemy lines. There are a few satellite characters, played by M​élanie Thierry and Paul Walter Hauser (making a return from BlackKklansman), as well as Jean Reno, ​Jasper Pääkkönen and Johnny Trí Nguyễn, who all become involved in the Bloods’ search for gold

When you think of Vietnam War movies, it’s impossible not to think of Apocalypse Now, and Lee throws in a few obvious nods, whether it’s using “Flight of the Valkyrie” or the Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come to Day” but in general, the musical choices are solid. I wouldn’t say that the screenplay is particularly enlightening, the story being far more simple than

Just when you have settled into what you think is a fairly laid-back pace, Lee throws a “Holy shit!” moment at you that completely changes the complexion of what you’ve been watching, and that’s when the movie starts breaking into a few more action setpieces, some better than others.

Honestly, it’s a little strange seeing all these old black guys running around and shooting guns without Samuel Jackson being among them. Make no mistake that this is first and foremost Delroy Lindo’s film, as he gives a strong if not somewhat erratic performance, and he’s the crux of the story, but Whitlock and the other actors have some nice moments, as well. The bonding between the four guys is pervasive, to the point where it almost feels like the other characters are interfering, maybe because they are.

It’s a great time to release Da 5 Bloods, due to what is going on in this country, and like with BlackKklansman, Lee throws in a few shots at Trump, the guys referring to him as “President Fake Bone Spurs.” At least in this case, it’s incorporated into the story, but I hope Lee realizes that these Trump references will ensure these movies will feel dated if watched ten or twelve years from now.

That all said, Da 5 Bloods is a decent Spike Lee Joint, maybe not quite on par with BlackkKlansman but better than his last attempt at a war movie, 2008’s Miracle at St. Anna.

Rating: 7/10

As expected by quite a few people earlier during this pandemic, Walt Disney Pictures decided to send the Kenneth Branagh-directed ARTEMIS FOWL movie directly to their Disney+ streaming service, despite the movie having been in various stages of development for a decade or more. Unlike Da 5 Bloods and The King of New York, this movie based on Eoin Colfer’s book series, is far more streamlined with a kid-friendly running time of 95 minutes. Phew!

It centers around 12-year-old super-genius Artemis Fowl (Ferdia Shaw) whose father (also named Artemis Fowl and played by Colin Farrell) goes missing, forcing the young “Artie” to look for a powerful mystical device called the Aculos. Joining him on this quest are his non-butler Domovoi (Nonzo Anonsie), Dom’s daughter Juliet (Tamara Smart), an elven police officer named Holly Short (Lara McDonnell) and an oversized dwarf played by a bearded Josh Gad. Oh, yeah, and in this world, fairies, trolls and dwarves are real, but most humans don’t know about their existence due to their secrecy as well as having a way to erase humans’ memories ala Men in Black.

I’m quite sure the latter will be a qualifying benchmark for those who review the movie without having read any of Colfer’s fantasy series – like myself -- but it takes similar ideas as David Ayer’s Bright and the Amazon series Carnival Row and transforms them into something that attempts to be in the vein of Harry Potter or Fantastic Beasts but maybe comes across more like Percy Jackson. The irony is that Chris Columbus directed the initial chapters of both Potter and Jackson, but Artemis Fowl benefits from having Branagh at the helm.

I will freely admit that I’m very much a bonafide Branagh stan, and much of that is due to the way he’s handled bringing fantasy worlds to life in movies like Thor and Cinderella. Artemis Fowl is right up his alley, and he does an exemplary job even if most of his cast other than Gad… oh, yeah, and Dame Judi Dench, who plays the head of the “fairy police” – are fairly inexperienced. You can kind of tell that’s the case with first-timer Shaw, and his inexperience might be one of the tougher things for which older viewers might have to contend. Younger viewers won’t take issue with any of the problems that might throw off those expecting more from Artemis Fowl, because the storytelling is kept at a fairly brisk pace with a few decent action setpieces.

Artemis Fowl could have been released theatrically and been one of the summer’s sadly forgotten films. It finds a fun way of setting up the characters and ideas – presumably most of them taken directly from Colfer’s book – plus it sets up the possibility for even more fun family-friendly fantasy storytelling.

Rating: 7.5/10

There are a few other movies below I was hoping to get to, but see my note at the top of this column about why it was delayed by a day. If I get to any of the ones below, I’ll update and mention on social media.

One of the movies delayed from March but now getting a digital release is Carl Hunter’s drama SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER (Blue Fox Entertainment) -- not to be confused with Never Rarely Sometimes Always with the two movies at one point in danger of coming out on the same weekend!  It stars Bill Nighy as tailor Alan, who has been searching for years for his missing son Michael, who stormed out after a Scrabble Game. When a body turns up, Alan must try to work things out with his younger son Peter, played by Sam Riley, and an online player they think could be Michael.

Jonas Alexander Arnby’s Danish film EXIT PLAN (Screen Media) stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones playing insurance claims investigator Max, who follows the clues of a death to the remote Hotel Aurora, a facility that specializes in assisted suicide, uncovering some disturbing revelations in the bargain.

Joshua Caldwell’s  INFAMOUS (Vertical Entertainment), which will be available via VOD and in select Virtual Cinemas, stars Bella Thorne as Arielle, a down-on-her-luck dreamer seeking popularity who runs into Jake Manley’s Dean, an ex-con working for his abusive father who dies in an accident sending the two of them on the run.

The dance drama, Aviva (Outsider Pictures/Strand Releasing), directed by Boaz Yakin (Remember the Titans, Max), was supposed to premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in March, but it will instead get its premiere through Virtual Cinema this Friday. It’s a love story that explores gender dynamics with dance sequences choreographed by Bobbi Jene Smith of the Batsheva Dance Company. Aviva is a young Parisian who gets into an online romance with a New Yorker named Eden, eventually meeting and getting married with the story told by four different dancers/actors simultaneously.

I haven’t had a chance to watch Flavio Alves’ The Garden Left Behind, starring Michael Madsen and Ed Asner, but it was a winner of the Audience Award at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, so I’m definitely interested in learning more about its story of a young trans woman from Mexico who lives with her grandmother as undocumented immigrants in New York City.

Released in a union between Shudder and RLJE Films, The Dead Lands (Shudder/RLJE Films) hit Digital HD yesterday.  The supernatural fantasy set in New Zealand is co-directed by Peter Meteherangi Tikao Burger and Michael Hurst, and it stars Te Kohe Tuhaka as Waka, a murdered Maori warrior who has returned from the Afterlife who goes on a quest with with a young woman named Mehe (Darneen Christian) to discover who broke the world. Not quite sure why didn’t get to this one, as I’m usually interested in New Zealand-based films as well as supernatural fantasy.

Daniel (For the Bible Tells Me So) Karslake’s new doc For They Know Not What They Do (First Run Features), which will hit virtual cinemas this Friday, which looks at the intersection between religion, sexual orientation and gender identity in America through a number of families of faith learning to accept their LGBTQ children. It has pretty much run the festival circuit through most of last year, winning a number of audience awards.

Coming to the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema this Friday is Bill Duke’s 1985 directorial debut The Killing Floor and Alastair Sim’s 1954 schoolgirl romp, The Belles of St. Trinian’s. Uptown at Film at Lincoln Center, besides the Human Rights Watch Film Festival (see below), they’ll be debuting Hong Sangsoo’s 2014 film Hill of Freedom (Grasshopper Films) in their already quite robust Virtual Cinema.

A few other films I wasn’t able to get to this week, include Return to Hardwick (Gravitas Ventures) and The Departure  (October Coast), so I guess I did better than last week?

A few film festivals taking place mostly virtually this week include the annual New York edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, running from June 11 through 20, and the Fine Arts Film Festival in Venice, California (June 8 to 14). The latter is offering 92 films from 27 countries with different packages including the entire festival for $20 or individual series for $10. Also, the Oxford Film Festival continues its virtual festival with two music docs, Dillon Hayes’ short All I Have to Offer You is Me about country-Western singer Larry Callies, as he tries to get his voice back after a degenerative disorder, and Dennis Cahlo’s feature In Flowers Through Space, in which the filmmaker tries to use the Fibonacci Sequence to try to create a unique music album. You can also check out Ben  & Bo Powell’s Mississippi doc Nothin’ No Better about Rosedale, Mississippi, and more short blocks, all available on Oxford’s Virtual Site.

Also, the June episode of Hulu’s horror series “Into the Dark” is Good Boy, a movie directed by Tyler MacIntyre, starring Judy Greer, Steve Guttenberg and Ellen Wong (from Scott Pilgrim!) that has Greer adopting an emotional support dog that kills anyone who causes her anxiety. Just in time for Pet Appreciation Week! Yeah, I’m gonna have to see this one.

Next week, more movies (mostly) not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honestly, I do!  

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Wednesday Roundup 29.11.18

Another week another grab bag of comics in what might be one of the highest rated weeks of the Roundup since I started over a year ago! But how does everyone hold up? How do they all compare? I’m asking for dramatizing’s sake but genuinely there’s nothing in this week that isn’t immensely enjoyable if they even remotely pique your interests. GREAT week for comics, everyone. GG.

Tesladyne’s Atomic Robo, Image’s Black Magick, DC’s Super Sons, IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters II, IDW’s Transformers: Lost Light

Tesladyne’s Atomic Robo and the Spectre of Tomorrow #2 Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Anthony Clark, Jeff Powell

There is a certain amount of dry wit and scientific community knowledge that is instrumental to getting the full experience out of the clever writing and deceptively simplistic design of Atomic Robo, and for the past few months I’ve been making a solid attempt to evaluate these comics and Robo himself based on the entertainment received without much of that. And, in all honesty, the more I’ve looked into this the more I wonder if that’s the wrong approach for “unbiased” evaluation to begin with. 

For example, I’ve been very firm on my description of Usagi Yojimbo as being one of those great comics that only gets more and more enriching as you grow a personal interest in history, Japanese culture, and mythologizing -- it’s far enough removed from our actual realities and accessible enough that I recommend it to people who don’t have those interests, but I find that those interests add so much more to the experience. The simple designs, the consistency, the way the narrative is built in episodic spurts more than long form narrative -- those are all reasons I can in good faith recommend these comics to people outside of niche interests, but those niche interests add so much to any reading that it’s difficult to really express why anyone would want to read without so much as acknowledging it. 

That all said, this particular issue continues that same level of quality and intrigue, but also rewards the emotional investment you may have in the characters involved. PersonallyI relate a lot more to Robo’s sense of self-exile and reclusive depression which only causes more and more problems to pile up far more than I’d have ever thought I would, and I don’t think I’d be alone in that. There’s also the long time readers’ reward in seeing consequences to that stollen crystal from Doctor Dinosaur’s island ages ago. All great stuff which is only more greatly emphasized by the creative use of familiar real world scientific organizations and entities wrapped up in this bizarre and surreal reality of Atomic Robo.

Image’s Black Magick (2015-present) #9 Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott

Sometimes the real value of storytelling lies less in identifying the complete package and more in being able to identify the way it weaves multiple elements and even genres at once to provide a new kind of satisfying narrative. And it’s in that way that I think Black Magick has so quickly become not only one of my favorite Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott comics, but one of my favorite recent publications in general. 

Black Magick follows a noir-style crime drama in structure, but its embrace of the supernatural and, especially, in witching stories provide the sort of edge that makes the tiredness of the former genre feel fresh even in the heavily saturated market for procedurals we have currently, while the latter feels completely reborn from that small but influential boom we felt in the 90s. I have never been closer to re-marathoning The Craft, Practical Magic and Charmed outside of the Halloween season. But each new issue of Black Magick brings me that step closer.

This issue also happens to follow the very specific to this week trend of leaning heavily on emotional stakes to really pull itself and its characters above even the thickest of genre settings however, and Black Magick specifically manages that while maintaining an incredibly tight hold on Rowan’s perspective. Which is fascinating because on reread you really realize how much the POV shifts away from Rowan and onto the other characters and their subplots but in reflection it all feels like it’s only in service to Rowan’s main story more than anything else. 

Nicola Scott continues to prove she is perhaps the most gifted and, really, the most prolific of comic book artists in the modern era and I maintain that seeing the true extent of her talents is best assessed by reading this comic and just allowing yourself to be blown away by it all.

This issue also gets major props for introducing a familiar. Good, comic. Perhaps not as action filled or breathtaking as the last issue which was a nail biter from start to finish, but most certainly deserving of those 4/5 stars. 

DC’s Super Sons (2017-present) Annual #1 Peter J. Tomasi, Paul Pelletier, Cam Smith, HI-FI

If you’re one of those people -- and let me absolutely clear that it is more than understandable to be one of these people -- who find super pets and the absolute general ridiculousness of a storyline that involves super animals in any capacity with a timeline that makes no sense and the only real dialogue that matters being literal growls barks and yips, this is not an issue worth your $4.99, you’ll hate it and be annoyed with people like me screaming from the rooftops that you should buy it and read it and love it. And that is completely and utterly fine and reasonable.

I am not fine or reasonable, however, and this is literally the most rewarding $4.99 I’ve spent on a comic in ages. Because no joke there were several times while I was liveblogging this issue both on my main blog and to my friends in PMs that I was literally in tears crying with laughter because

because

Holy shit guys.

In recent years a continued criticism I have carried for superhero comics is that there is a huge tone problem, in that there is a genre’s worth of tones and atmospheres that could be played off of to give at least each individual book if not each individual issue its own feeling and its own intrigue that would set it apart from the rest of the line that given week. DC, especially, has contributed greatly to this tone problem because as I’ve said many times, there was about five years there where even the color palettes for their comics had no variation between them. And it was maddening. 

So to have something goofy, to have something different, and to have it be fun, enjoyable, full of twists and turns, and not so damn determined to take itself beyond seriously, it makes this comic throwback feel like a breath of fresh air in the most necessary of ways. 

And I should be clear, I don’t mean that this comic is for everyone, or that Super Sons as a comic in general doesn’t manage to strike that cord a lot since it really is one of the most enjoyable comics DC has put out in years, but this really felt like a treat, an additional, ridiculous, hilarious story set so far apart from what’s come before. It’s greatly enjoyable. Genuinely deserve of my coveted 5/5 stars. 

IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters II (2017) #5 (of 5) Erik Burnham, Tom Waltz, Dan Shoening, Charles Paul Wilson III, Luis Antonio Delgado

We finally come to an end of this second giant mashup of Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, truly the sort of framework and pairing that is as old as time, and I get to reward everyone’s patience with me reviewing these for a month an a half straight with some final thoughts of sorts. 

I compliment both of these writers quite a bit for their respective contributions and the absolute mastery they both have shown for the voices of their respective franchises, but as this week is pretty well summed up with Rena Waxes Philosophically And Is Old, I think both of our times are better spent here by pointing out something a bit different that really came together with this issue. And that’s that for how pitch perfect these writers are for capturing the long expected voices of these beloved characters, the real remarkable compliment I can give them is how they have uniquely captured and redefined these voices to really make them their own.

Despite how much my childhood might have desired these team ups (and believe me, it so did) the fact is that these interactions and these relationships are utterly a modern invention, and what could easily fail outside of the concept states instead flourishes with us here specifically because they are sticking to their guns and not always angling for the obvious route with these interactions. That’s what makes all of this so fascinating and so rewarding as a fan.

In comparison to the predecessor, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters II does not have as tight of a storyline with a steady but consistent pacing and understanding of where it’s going. But I think because that set up was taking care of in the original these five issues allowed for more experimentation and more concentration on character development and fun scenarios. So if you’re far more invested in character interactions and in comics taking full advantage of the outrageous and unique tone of its medium, there’s probably all the more for you to enjoy with this compared to the first. But at the same time, it would be lying to say that the main driving plot and stakes, with Darius Dun’s ghost and the Fast Forward Evil Turtles-lite trying to harvest souls in a complicated and underused concept didn’t come off as overall a bit weaker than the original.

All that said, ultimately this comic is a joy for fans and it seems to be aimed quite specifically at that audience either way. And in that case I have to give it my highest regards.

IDW’s Transformers: Lost Light (2016-present) #11 James Roberts, Jack Lawrence, Joana Lafuente

Ever since the last arc of James Robert’s parent series, More Than Meets the eye, there’s been a few gaps in the concept of what happened on the Lost Light during and after the mutiny, whether or not the crew saw the Rod Squad’s las message, and especially curious to people like me who can’t help themselves but love our affable and entirely flawed co-Captain Rodimus, what was his final request for his burial and what not since we saw the rest of the crew’s.

And in the second part of this “Mutineer Trilogy” that we have for Lost Light, we are at long last getting our answers to many of those questions. And for a reveal that was a year coming, the Lost Light manages to pack all the twists, turns, and punches that we could hope to expect! 

It’s fascinating to see Getaway’s sense of grandeur when it comes to himself, his plans, and really the whole driving force with the mutiny, but I really find that where Roberts’ writing and where we as readers get the most out of is the interesting and very layered sense that Roberts has for the lore of the Transformers. It feels like every subtle piece of dialogue, whether it concerns lore and mythology of the universe or not, is really weaved throughout with a submersion in this fictional culture. And that, especially, is really revealing here. It’s a very rewarding way to handle lore and I greatly appreciate it. 

One that does make me apprehensive with the turns Lost Light has taken most recently, however, is that moral grayness sometimes feels really blurred with a light take or even somewhat forgiving light given to what are undeniably and outright stated as fascist and genocidal elements of the Transformers’ past, especially Megatron. Having this issue completely dedicated to Getaway’s perspective while tackling these themes doesn’t really help because he is most egregiously one of the most villainous and traitorous characters the series has tackled, but while it feels like he’s only using the aghast feelings of the crew toward Megatron, ultimately he’s the only one who gives a speech against Megatron’s past of genocide and fascism while also taking over in the most truly reprehensible and fascist ways possible himself. This is further blurred by having some very topical buzz words like “fake news” uttered by Getaway in a... lbr pretty nonsensical way in-universe, but then have him going around imprisoning or hideously killing all of the crew which doesn’t agree with him.

I’m basically waiting for Roberts to fully address all of this in the story but right now it feels very much like “both sides are extreme and bad” mentality that, given Roberts’ politics and statements irl, I don’t think is what he ultimately wants this story to be coming away as, but I’m nervous and would like for things to tread lightly considering the current environment. 

ALL of my apprehensions and concerns out of the way, this is still a fascinating and ultimately fantastic comic that I really truly enjoy and would love to see more of because if Roberts’ Transformers is guilty of anything it’s definitely guilty of raising my expectations and setting that bar so high because of how good and how complicated and interesting all of it ca be in the right hands.

Hey there! We finish up another pretty fun, if not quick, week in comics with lots of stories and characters, and another pretty great time from yours truly. And if you enjoy these write-ups or anything else I do whether it be the Roundups, my Rambles, my personal creative projects, or you’re interested in my upcoming podcast, you can help contribute through donations to my Ko-Fi, Patreon, or PayPal. For as little as $1 per project, you make all of this possible.

You could also support me by going to my main blog, @renaroo, where I’ll soon be listing prices and more for art and writing commissions.

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[ENG] 170627 YOHO ARTICLE ON ZTAO - EVERYONE WANTS TO BE HUANG ZITAO BUT DON’T DARE TO ADMIT IT

In the beginning, we hoped to choose this era’s bad boy, the sort who’s raved about by everyone everywhere. You can see all sorts of “rebellious” qualities commonly shared by many of the youth of this era in him: arrogant, temperamental, rash, blunt…. And it’s a super magnified version. His “badness” comes from his unabashed desire and insistence on being his true self. In the end, as fate would have it, we finally managed to get an appointment with him, Huang Zitao.

That night, Huang Zitao was recording his new song when the director Jenny and us got to the recording studio in L.A.

During that period, he had been recording and vacationing in the United States. Perhaps it’s because he’s relaxed, Huang Zitao’s behaviour was a tad like those big boys that you and I would commonly see around us.

I’ve been thinking about why is it that Huang Zitao keeps getting attacked so viciously. Is it that he truly has a low EQ or just what is it about him that people have a problem with? How is it that he has managed to continue despite all that constant berating and mocking? Just how much has all this cost him?

All these questions, you have seen and heard of, but you’ve never heard it from his own lips.

In the next few days we transitioned from his studio to his daily life, and chatted with him about “being an idol”, “making music” and “being himself”, all those quotes that never fails to shock and amaze others, and listened to his reflections on growing up and his aspirations, and his insistence on being himself.

A few days later, we can roughly understand why is that everyone likes to mock him so. Because he, like many of today’s youth, would show himself, his true self, without fear nor reserve. Yet, at the same time, we could also understand why fans love him so, and why his seniors dote so much on him. Because in terms of facing him true self head on, he’s the first when it comes to good looking Chinese idols. His likes and dislikes are clear and distinct. It’s important to be cool and he himself is important. At the same time, whether the way he expresses his concern for others is cool or not is also important. (For example, he threw a tantrum as he’s exhausted and doesn’t want to work, yet later he’ll take the opportunity to secretly do it well according to what is required. But he never would admit defeat verbally  

In each era, everyone loves Bad Boys but are afraid of them too. Because we crave the glory of reality but is afraid of being scorched by it. All in all, the daring Bad Boy whom we love, is the person whom we all wanted to become once but never became.  

“Making music, I want to be the king of C-POP”

“I’ve never treated myself as an artiste. Be it in making music, movies or dramas, or in variety shows, it’s all a job to me.”

It’s not surprising to everyone that that’s the way Huang Zitao chooses to express his view of being an artiste, a star.

At the age of 14, Huang Zitao fell in love with singing under the influence of idol Jay Chou, and begun his dreams of being a star. Later he wrote a long letter to his dad, saying that he wanted to quit school, and do something he wanted to do. And Zitao’s Dad, whose image, due to the influence of media, had become somewhat silly to most people, is actually a bold father who is very supportive of his son.  

The martial arts learnt 18 years ago, and the naturally “not bad” singing skills, got Huang Zitao onto the path of becoming an artiste.  

Later, despite his injuries, contract dissolution and controversies, Huang Zitao still wants to make music today and create his ideal C-POP. He told us: “It’s because I like it, and it doesn’t cost much. I don’t have much to spend on usually, so why should I just blindly hold on to all that money every day for the rest of my life?”

“The things I write and sing about are all real experiences and feelings. I don’t care about how many people will like it or sing it. If you like it, listen to it. If you don’t, well fine. I just want to write down what’s in my heart. There are too many fake things these days.”

Later he added this on, “I’m not releasing a new album this year. It’s all going to be singles. Because I feel that if I do an album, a lot of the very nice songs will not be given the attention it deserves. That’s why I wanted to release it song by song and promote each one.” 

Ever since he brought his concept of C-POP to producer Daryl (Huang Zitao’s had worked with him from his very first album released in China) in 2015, the two of them has made C-POP more varied and enriched.

“C-POP’s really more about the reason behind writing the song. It’s not just a music genre. To us, we want to try to create a new style of music. This is also one of the unique points of Tao’s music. He won’t copy other people’s stuff. All his music is a result of his preferences. We also do R&B, because he doesn’t want to do only POP. C-POP’s more about representing one-self. I’m a Chinese, and I want to tell the world that.”

-- Daryl

Having been through 6 years since his debut, Huang Zitao now have a new dream, one that is even more difficult and out of reach – to get foreigners to like his music, to be able to understand it and sing along with it.

  Being an idol I don't need to be perfect

The topic of those negative news , vicious comments and attacks on Huang Zitao is unavoidable when talking about him. A random search on the internet will show you loads, from the contract issues with SM, discord with his team mates, the fashion week incident etc, plus all the other negative tags that people have placed him etc etc etc.  

He’s like the new era bad boy of the entertainment circle, and he seems to have bore the burnt of all the negativities in it. Regardless of whether it’s  true or false, since it’ “news” that came from the industry, you have to shoulder it not matter who you are. 

In the 6 months when he first returned home, Huang Zitao had once lost control of his emotions when talking about these issues. “I was still young then, I felt that I just couldn’t understand what’s wrong with these people. I just couldn’t. There are too many netizens who like to vent their emotions online.”  

Slowly he learnt not to care, and instead got to know how to make use of it. “All those nonsense are not real. I don’t need to care about those. What a person neds to care about is those around you, those whom you will meet in the future, and those who are good to you now. You have to care about them, and your family.”

“There are also people who come daily to leave lengthy comments to scold me.. The number of comments can suddenly just triple because of that. Isn’t that great? They keep reblogging, and keep on the attacks, looking for materials to make memes of me, giving higher viewership to shows that I’m in. Quick! Go and do it! Don’t stop! What can you actually do to me? That’s just how I feel, my life’s fine.” 

The way Huang Zitao speaks and the way he just hits right back, is perhaps the reason why he often gets attacked.  

He often emphasizes that artistes are not perfect. From his role, it seems like he’s trying to make excuses for himself. But when we reflect on this after a few days being with him, it’s a scream at the helplessness of this industry and for everyone who’s in it. 

The idols these days must have a certain affinity with the viewers. They need a perfect image on screen and in the news. But looking around the world, excellent artistes all have very distinct personalities and attitudes towards music, even politics. And the ones who does become legends, never pander to the audience’s wishes. Rather, they’ve managed to gather a bunch of likeminded people based on their works and charisma. Huang Zitao may not yet be a legend, but at least he’s clear on that. He hopes that the fans he has gathered is able to appreciate what’s good about him, and is about to accept or at least, ignore, the weaknesses or flaws in his personality. 

Growing up is a rather complicated matter. It’ll a cycle of constant rebuilding, going through several rounds of dissolution, and then picks something up, burying the bad and putting the good upfront. Being in the entertainment world, Huang Zitao grows at an even faster rate than normal. But as a rebellious person, he questions everything, and places both the good and the bad outside for everyone to view. 

“I really didn’t want to go. Later on it’s because my grandparents were soldiers and they wanted me to go. So then, ok, I’ll go. I was resistant to it at first as I’ve been living with such freedom. My mind and body just didn’t adapt in time. Later on it slowly became good. A lot of times I simply don’t want to do a lot of things. But I know that by doing those things, it’s good for me. So now I’ve learnt to say yes. Even if I don’t like it, so long as I know it’s good for me, then ok fine. So since I’m already there, ok, just do it. Even though I say everyday that I’m not doing this. I still do it.” – his reason for taking part in “Takes A Real Man S2”, it’s that simple. 

Being myself I’ve always been this way 

We asked Daryl about his impression of Tao. He spoke of this incident. “In 2015, one of the photographer wanted to touch up Tao’s legs, to just make it look longer. Then he said, “no, I’m the way the photographs reflect, don’t do it.” To me, he’s a person who’s very true to himself. He doesn’t care about the fake stuff, only the real things. It’s something that’s hard to find in the entertainment industry, or perhaps, even in most people.” 

Daryl still recalls how Huang Zitao took care of him when he first got to Beijing. He says, “he’s just like any other normal guy. He doesn’t care what others say. That time I only knew Maan Coffee, and he basically says, “let’s go.” It’s very special. He doesn't make you feel distant in the things he does.” 

It’s precisely this lack of distance, that makes Huang Zitao give us such a strong feeling. Rarely do idol artistes behave like this, showing off his imperfections which are real. “Getting people to buy into a personality/ character setting” is something childish and laughable to him. This is a tad moving. Because in this 20 something boy, be it out of wanting to be cool, or what most Asian guys call a sense of responsibility, you can feel his resolve. No matter right or wrong, he’ll shoulder the consequences, and is mentally prepared to take responsibility for his behavior. This courage has got nothing to do with youth. 

Almost everyone has asked him, why he doesn’t use stunt doubles when doing action scenes or just stuff that are very tough. He always answers “but then, why use stunt doubles? You shouldn’t in the first place. You’ve taken on this project, so what’s the meaning in getting a double to do it? The logic behind asking this question itself is strange. Is being an actor something great? Is being an actor more superior than others? I don’t think so.” 

It’s with that kind of attitude that he made the film “Railroad Tigers” with Jackie Chan. In temperatures of minus 18 degrees, he had to film a scene. During that period, he had chicken pox all over him, people could see the pox bursting as he filmed, but he gritted his teeth and continued with the repeat takes.

Later on, when filming “A Chinese Odyssey”, he had a scene with the Bull Demon King at the very end. That day, he rushed to the set the minute he got off the plane, sat for 4 hours of make-up and went straight into filming until 6 in the morning. It was fight scenes all the way through. He kept telling himself that it’s alright, that it’ll be fine after he gets some sleep. 

It’s all because he feels that this sort of persistence pays off, as the fight scenes were spectacular.  

“I’ve never treated myself as any sort of idol, artiste or those nonsense. I just know that since I’m doing this, I need to do my work well, be professional and responsible. Let myself slowly become more cultured and improve my abilities. I’ve learnt some of that professionalism from other actors, and I’ve used it on myself. I feel very happy, that is, when you’ve finished a scene and everyone applauds. When you thank everyone for their hard work, that really feels good, instead of simply walking away, and then constantly being late and asking for stand-ins so that one can finish 3 months’ work in just one. When I saw that article, I was pretty speechless.”

 To be myself. Those three words may look simple, but after so many years of working, and gaining the so called “growth”, many will find that “they themselves” has disappeared. They have in fact, become those which they loathe. There’s indeed youth’s brashness and childishness in Huang Zitao’s stubborn attitude, but you can’t help but admit that, in this era, what is lacking is this determination and persistence in maintaining one’s principles, and the bare & blunt truth. 

Yes, he has indeed said silly stuff, made mistakes and have had several embarrassing moments. You can, because he’s under the spotlight, judge and criticize him mercilessly on the internet or offline. You might even go further and insult his family. 

But don’t forget, all the things that he dares to do, to shoulder, to be truthful on, to dream big. He dares to, but you might not.

“I have my own values, I know the reason that I exists on this world. Everyone does. Everyone can treat themselves as the leading character in their own domains, because the meaning of life is different for everyone”

He can do it, and actually, so can you.