https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/23/epstein-unredacted-files-social-media
People examining documents released by the Department of Justice in the Jeffrey Epstein case discovered that some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
It seems they essentially redacted sections by just highlighting them in black, which doesn’t destroy the text.
Stargirl: The Lost Children
This is such a weird comic.
I’m not the greatest fan of Geoff Johns generally, but I do love Todd Nauck’s art and seeing that Secret from Young Justice was in this was enough to get me to bite.
And in one regard it’s great. Nauck’s art is possibly the best it’s ever been. He absolutely kills it here, with loads of crowd scenes that would break a lesser artist. Plus, there’s loads of new character designs in here, most of which are great (I especially like The Boom, although I’m not sold on her name).
Unfortunately, the reason behind all those new characters is less compelling. Part of the problem I’ve always had with Johns is that he’s a very regressive writer. His work is always about looking back to some halcyon past and rewinding comics to it, from bringing back Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, to reviving the JSA and ditching all the cool 90s reinventions like the android Hourman with facsimiles of the Golden Age originals.
His big idea for this mini-series is similar but of a slightly different approach. He seems to have decided that every Golden Age superhero should have had a kid sidekick (you know, that trope that went out in the 60s) and so retcons loads more into existence, even for heroes that no-one particularly cares about. Did anyone really think Dr Fate was missing a sidekick? Or the Dan Garrett version of Blue Beetle? Or the Red Bee?!
Quite what the point of all this is, I don’t really know. Apparently this is part of a wider thematic event – The New Golden Age – though there’s no mention of this anywhere on this collection (which is maybe for the best, as it probably would have deterred me from it). Is anyone going to make any further use of Cherry Bomb or Sparky outside of a crowd scene? It seems unlikely and most of these characters don’t get to do much here (Secret seems present entirely as fan service for Nauck and/or his existing fans, but at least it’s the same version of her from Young Justice, for whatever continuity matters these days). The entire premise of this series seems utterly self-indulgent and pointless.
It’s not a terribly satisfying story really. Although Stargirl gets to keep centre stage, Red Arrow gets increasingly marginalised through out, drowning in a sea of sidekicks. The plot doesn’t really make much of any sense (not helped by taking half an issue to have someone wang on about Flashpoint) there’s an island, whose beach is made of ground up Miraclo, on which loads of forgotten sidekicks have somehow ended up. Stargirl and Red Arrow, after being involved in a time-bending event, think Wing is still alive and follow in the footsteps of Dan The Dyna-Mite to said island, where a Baba Yaga called the Childminder is holding some of the kids and trying to capture the others, to deliver them to her buyer, who is the android Hourman from the 90s, except he’s working for Corky the Junior Time Master (who turns up to help the kids)’s evil adult self, who needs Wing to still die in the temporal event that killed him original, but not let any of the other kids back into continuity, for reasons. But he has his own time machines, cos he’s a Time Master, so I don’t get why he’s using Hourman nor Childminder, why they need Jay Garrick’s retcon daughter The Boom running on a treadmill to power something or other, nor why/how most of the kids ended up there beyond just “Flashpoint did it”.. And while I can buy Stargirl caring about the fate of Wing (the Crimson Avenger’s sidekick apparently), I’m not totally sure why most readers would. The attempts to build a theme around being forgotten and unloved doesn’t really work because, despite throwing in something about her biological dad, it’s not really relevant to Stargirl. It is to Red Arrow, but as I said, she gets increasingly displaced from focus.
Still, looks gorgeous.
Yeah, it’s a little weird he did this chunk of the season. There were rumours he was leaving over the summer (though there was for everyone, frankly). Also, can’t believe it’s his eighth season (well, seventh on screen) already.
Twitter automatically goes to the “for you” tab now, when you reload it. And the for you tab is giving me 50 % of Ruski propaganda and 50 % AI slop of cats driving cars.
Maybe stop using it then?
I think RTD should be embarrassed by this series. Because it’s written by someone else and it’s head and shoulders above what he’s been doing with the main Doctor Who show for the past couple of years.
About 6-7 months ago, I posted about a random European-Japanese co-production anime I’d stumbled upon and the terrible Malaysian English dub it had. Well, Reporter Blues got its claws in me and I ended up getting hold of the entirety of it in French (along with the German DVD release of s1) and doing an English fan-sub of it all.
I was just going to put it all up on a torrent site like Nyaa, but it turns out that’s almost impossible to do (if only media piracy was as simple as the people who demonise it claim) so I’ve resorted to putting it up on my YouTube channel (soft-subs using YT’s built in caption feature because I really couldn’t be arsed to re-convert all 52 episodes yet again to have hard subs).
It’s all uploaded and scheduled to go 4 episodes a week for the next 13 weeks. Episode 1 went live this morning.
Sandman Mystery Theatre Compendium Two
It still feels like a minor miracle that this books even exists after so many false starts on collecting the series. It’s almost surreal to get to read the comic’s conclusion. A little bittersweet. Somewhat naively, given how long the series ran and with such a stable creative team, I had assumed that it ended on its own terms. But nope, sudden cancellation that forced a two-part finale. Despite that, Seagle mostly sticks the landing. I think his end-note after explaining what happened and his reasoning for how the story went makes me appreciate what it does more, admittedly.
End aside, there are lots of good stories in here, though a couple that are less compelling. Slightly over complicated in places. Dian seems to ricochet between charity work, working for her dad at the DA’s office then not and doing charity work again on the whims of what would be more convenient for each story. And it’s weirdly heavy on JSA elements at the start of the this volume (and tail end of the previous), which has diminishing returns. Jim Corrigan being introduced and then doing nothing, as far as I could tell (maybe I missed some subtle Spectre related shenanigans?) was a pretty pointless. But I guess that was to try and drive sales.
But when the book is left to be itself, it’s great. What other superhero comic from a mainstream publisher would have an extended, sensitively handled plot thread about one of the main characters getting an abortion? Even before that, it’s nice that Dian and Wes, well, fuck, frankly. Superhero relationships are usually so chaste or juvenile, but by the time they’re properly together here it’s clear they really enjoy each other’s company and get to express that as real humans do (and then have consequences for it).
Unfortunately, it seems that there’s a side one-shot (Sandman Midnight Theatre) that sits between Compendium 1 and this volume that’s been omitted, because DC are always going to DC.
Worth noting that the X-Men got a ton of hate mail about Colossus and Storm especially in the early years. And Marvel printed and responded to a lot of it in the letters page.
Yeah, I think people think toxic fandom started with the internet, but it’s wild some of the crap that people would send to comics companies to have printed in their letter cols. I read a lot of them in the Western comics I read through recently and you’d get people sending in entire plans telling Marvel how to restructure the Western books, creative teams and all, with the same tone you’d see someone use on a message board. And people complimenting Gunhawks #1 for being brave enough to say that slavery wasn’t bad.
I watched the Blue Beetle movie tonight, which I’ve been meaning to do for, ooo, about a year.
It’s… fine? The cast is all good, the story’s alright, though my attention started to wander 2/3 in. I could have maybe lived without the emphasis on family after Shazam did that, but it does work. The effects are a mixed bag. I’m far from a snob about CGI, but it did look pretty weightless at times here. And then on the other hand, you’ve got practical fight scenes that feel a bit Sentai-ish (ie a tad cheap) but I don’t know, that worked for me. I liked the casual bounce of the extra legs looming over the shoulders when Jamie’s in costume but just talking. I wish all the weapons didn’t just magic out of nowhere (I’d have preferred an organic effect, where the suit grows them out of itself). I think the bigger problem visually is that the film half-heartedly goes for this 80s retro neon Miami cool blue and purple colour palette which doesn’t entirely work and it always looks better in the scenes where it doesn’t bother with that.
The Kickstarter model has been a god-send for shady comics companies all round, frankly. You get publishers that can absolutely afford to produce the product anyway (several Image studios, Dark Horse etc) using it as an elaborate pre-order service built on FOMO, in which tenuous stretch goals are used to obscure high margins (see that aforementioned Transformers one from Skybound) and you get fly-by-night indies ripping people off, as Doran’s explained there. Yet only the projects that don’t deliver anything on time or as advertised (Goldtiger, Sullivan’s Sluggers, that covid lockdown short story anthology) ever seem to be “acceptable” for criticism from most parts.
The only comics Kickstarters that make any sense are actual small press publishers, like formerly of this parish Russell’s Freaktown, where it is literally raising the money to get it printed.
“I really liked Stargate, but I need a Babylon 5, or a Battlestar Galactica reboot”
There was a part of me that saw this news and, as well as being stoked, thought “ok but Dark Matter s4-5, maybe?”
I’m interested to see how this turns out. Will they be able to recapture the magic? Stargate being very much being a network show with 20 episode seasons to work with was part of the formula that made it work and streamers don’t tend to go for that.
arguing it’s not “pedophilia” but “hebephilia” or whatever is stupid.
Yeah, whenever anyone makes that argument in any situation, it’s a massive red flag, because… why would you be trying to make that distinction, my dude? They’re both pretty awful. Guilty conscience? And not to play into stereotypes, but they often have some kind of anime waifu avatar too.
I went and saw Mischief’s latest production today: A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. “Wait,” I hear you say, “that’s their latest? But that was on TV 8 years ago!” And yes, it was. But that was a created for TV sequel to Peter Pan Goes Wrong and, imo, the weakest thing Mischief’s done (of the Goes Wrong series, anyway). Unlike The Play That Goes Wrong, Peter Pan Goes Wrong and the Goes Wrong Show, which all had the eponymous production that goes wrong be a play, CCGW had the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society hijack a BBC production of a Christmas Carol that was being filmed as a standard TV show (albeit one being filmed in order, conveniently) with all the bits Going Wrong being elements of TV production. It didn’t really work and they course-corrected nicely for the Goes Wrong show by doing those as essentially filmed plays, like the BBC did in the 60s or so.
Anyway, when they announced a stage version of Christmas Carol Goes Wrong I was a) surprised b) curious and c) hungry (that’s incidental but nonetheless true). I really wondered how it would be possible to move that story – which is set in a BBC studio, goes for a wander around London and into a Tesco and relies on appearances from Derek Jacobi and Diana Rigg – to the stage.
The answer is that, well, they kinda didn’t. This is essentially a different take on the same concept. There are a few similar threads – Robert trying to replace Chris as Scrooge throughout the play as it goes, for instance – but it’s mostly a fresh story. Rather than it being about the Cornley troupe trying to prove themselves to the BBC, it’s main plot thread, beyond the play being a disaster, is about Chris, the director and star, being like Scrooge. Which is fine. It’s a tad under-cooked, but it works well. Interestingly, the play isn’t just the Cornley production presented as is, there’s framing material of them auditioning and planning beforehand and then regrouping afterwards. This means that the core set for the production is the bare Cornley Theatre, with the Christmas Carol sets brought on in front of that. It really adds another layer to the play within a play element, and speaks to the craft (and budget) that’s gone into it.
The set design overall is as impressive as ever. Mischief plays always require not only precisely made and positioned stage scenery, for the physical comedy, but elements that are moved about frequently, including by the cast. I noticed that they’d come up with hydraulic systems for some of the pieces here, so that they could raise up onto castors to be moved about easily (some are required to be spun as part of the story) and then settle securely onto the stage after. Really impressive stuff and you can feel a bit of the Penn and Teller stage magic craft in that. Oh and there’s also the most impressive and disturbing Tiny Tim you’re likely to ever see.
The real draw is of course the comedy. There’s fresh takes on familiar beats here, like Dennis’s workarounds to not knowing his lines, but nothing feels tired. It’s really great seeing these characters again, especially with half of them played by the “proper” cast (it felt like there was a collective repression of the desire to cheer from the entire audience when Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer came on stage). The “replacement” cast are a mix bag. The guy playing Max – a character that I’m convinced only Dave Hearn can pull off – felt like a Lee Evans tribute act and the actress playing Annie wasn’t amazing. But overall they were solid.
So Christmas Carol Goes Wrong is pretty great. An improvement over the TV version, definitely. It’s currently touring before going to the West End over Christmas and into the New Year. If you can get a ticket, I definitely recommend it.
I was in TK Maxx today, browsing their eclectic art supplies section and I found these cool DC “Fan Art Like A Pro” Spectrum Noir marker sets.
You get four alcohol markers that have three colours in each (there’s a nib on each end and then also a third in the centre, which goes into a cap on the other side’s centre – all the photos I can find of these sets online have different markers) and then a load of A6 prints of line art to colour in. Each set is themed around one DC character with colours to match. They’re pretty nifty.
Spectrum Noir’s a good brand and these pens have a lovely brush tip (again, everything I’m seeing online has a wider variety of tips in them) which are certainly nicer than the fine and broad tips on the cheap 80 pack of alcohol markers I got off Amazon for £15 recently. Not convinced there’s enough ink in them to finish all the cards in the set though. But for £5 a set, they’re pretty sweet.
Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill have started a podcast together – called Pondcast – where they rewatch their run of Dr Who and invite guests on to reminisce about working on it, with the first being Steven Moffat. Incredibly, this is somehow not a joke.
Allegedly the delay’s due in part to an internal revolt over Rockstar union busting and firing 30-40 people the other week. Don’t know how true that is (I mean, they definitely fired people and almost certainly for unionising rather than the bullshit reasons Rockstar gave – just don’t know if the studio is in turmoil over it).
I bought a new USB stick this week, as my 64gb one is a) too big to fit in my PS4 (physically, I mean) and b) has really slow write speeds.
So I looked for another 64gb one, but slimline and USB 3.0. Found one on Amazon for £10. But they also had the 128gb version for £1 less. So of course I got that.
It is tiny. It’s literally the size of the USB connector and a little bit more on the back. Not even 4cm long, about 1cm wide and a few mm tall. And yet, it has more storage in it than all the hard-drives of all my previous PCs, put together.
Sometimes you do have to just stop and marvel at the progress of technology.
I’ve been reading scans of Super Play (90s SNES mag with a decided weeb bent) recently and there’s a piece in the December 93 issue about game prices that I thought was interesting given what we were talking about recently.
There were comments in earlier issues about how some of the really high prices (£70 or whatever for Street Fighter 2) was down to Bandai – who had control of Nintendo’s UK distribution at that point – probably just price gouging.
Just finished the latest season of Only Murders In The Building. Is it me, or has this season been a bit of a letdown? I was waiting for weeks for that moment that usually comes mid-season, the one that ties things together more coherently and kicks the show into a higher gear, but it never happened – it was all just silly self-indulgence, and the show has always had a lot of that, but can’t get by on it alone.
Yeah, I liked the theme of this series more than the movie one last season, but it’s not been as well plotted at all. It feels like it’s had about four episodes of actual investigation stuff spread across 10, so they’ve just been spinning their wheels and going back to the same things every episode.
At least this time Mabel’s love interest actually got written out – going to jail – rather than just disappearing next season never to be mentioned again like Cara Delevigne, Tobert and the others
For instance, ordering the news feed chronologically reduced attention inequality but floated extreme content to the top.
That’s surprising. You’d think rage-bait content would be boosted by an interaction-favouring algorithmic timeline rather than just a chronological one.
Yeah, not a huge surprise. Maybe RTD having to clean up his own mess of a cliffhanger* is for the best? Possibly not.
I’m curious whether the Beeb will just try and fund the show itself again (however infrequently that means it’ll be made) or if they’ll look for another co-production partner. Amazon has a lot of money they’re quite happy to piss away on things, maybe they should go talk to them.
I also wonder what the rights situation will be for the Disney seasons (outside the UK) in the future. Presumably they’ll keep the rights to them and control what can be done with them, like the Universal did with the TVM for years.
* I don’t think it’s actually that hard to sidestep Piper appearing and not having her be the next Doctor. The glow of the regenerating Doctor doesn’t fade, IIRC. You could have Piper step out of it as an external manifestation of… some bollocks, a sort of combination of when Romana tried out bodies when regenerating into Lalla Ward and the Fifth Doctor having visions of all his mates as he died. Have a whole parade of old faces come out. Hell, could even have it resolve back into Gatwa in the end. I mean the “rules” don’t fucking mean anything at this point (insofar as they ever did).
So there’s a bit of a storm brewing around the latest Collection blu-ray, season 13 Limited Edition (that’s the Tom Baker s13, not the s13 with Whittaker). The restoration process has used AI upscaling (which has apparently been increasing over the past few releases – they’re not in Standard Edition yet, so I don’t know first hand) resulting in some real uncanny valley results. Waxy, unnatural faces (ironically in Terror of the Zygons and The Android Invasion), shifting facial features and Tom’s got some real Turkiye Teeth.
Really disappointing for a series that has, for decades now, been the gold standard of archival TV restoration and managed perfectly well without these AI tools up til now.
I finished my big Avengers read through and the last volume was a bit of a slog. Partially just because I think 150 odd issues of Avengers in a few weeks is too much, but also because after #200 or so the book really loses momentum. For the first time in its history, it becomes rudderless with seemingly no regular creative team and so you get a load of fill-ins by the house band – Mantlo, Budiansky, those kinds of guys – which are passable but combine to feel like nothing, really.
Before that though is Michelinie’s run, which emerges from Shooter’s. It’s pretty good, over all. Though I wasn’t convinced by the need to bring Wonder Man back, there’s interesting stuff done with him here, including his emerging friendship with Beast. The stuff with Gyrich using his government authority to limit the Avengers’ activities and roster is fun too, though I think the stuff with Falcon being added to the team through, essentially, affirmative action, reads a bit weird. Hawkeye being pissed he’s pushed off the team to make room makes sense, Falcon being slightly insulted that he’s just there to fill a quota also makes sense, but there’s another vibe to it of “isn’t this just kind of a silly idea”. As soon as they’re free of it, Falcon leaves, whereas I think him having proved himself a valuable member of the team (which no-one other than Hawkeye thinks he isn’t, to be fair) and to himself that he likes being an Avenger would have felt more satisfying.
Falcon’s used because Black Panther is off in Wakanda and that’s an interesting change to the series really. Ever since he was added to the team in the late 60s, T’Challa has been a mainstay through the 70s. Not always a permanent member, but always dropping by and joining for ad hoc missions, similarly to Iron Man, Thor and Cap. And yet by Shooter’s run and onwards, he’s disregarded. Just not a factor at all.
The other main Avenger of the 70s is the Vision. There’s a reason he’s on the corner box for years. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s all that interesting most of the time. Fundamentally he doesn’t make much sense. He’s a synthetic human, which to my mind means he’s a facsimile human made of fake bits. He has a human heart, it’s just made of plastic or whatever. He also has Wonder Man’s “brain patterns”, apparently. And yet he constantly just acts like a machine. All the stuff about his “computer brain” doesn’t really make sense if he’s a synthzoid with a copy of a real human’s brain patterns. That stuff all kinda seems resolved by Roy Thomas almost immediately, with the “even an android can cry” stuff, and yet continually through the 70s writers fall back to him going on about his computer brain and dismissing himself as just a machine (even after he’s married to Wanda) and it’s just repetitive.
The other notable thing from the tail end of this run I’ve read is Avengers #200, the despoliation of Ms Marvel. I’m familiar with the story but I’ve not read it before and honestly, it’s not quite as bad as I expected. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s bad and it’s wrong. But the read I got of it beforehand ,especially from Chris Claremont’s “rebuttal” of it in Avengers Annual 10 (which rounds out the epic collection 200 is in, nicely) is that all the Avengers were totally fine with Carol being pregnant and then going off with Marcus her son/rapist. And that’s really not true. The story actually reads pretty well initially (assuming you can get on board with pregnancy as body horror, which I understand not everyone is cool with). Carol is repulsed, Cap is hugely sceptical, the others are mostly trying to supportive of what’s happening to her. Then Marcus is “born” and starts rapidly aging which still has many of the team sceptical, but they have to go off and deal with all the crazy Limbo incursion stuff. It’s only the point at which Marcus explains how he “wooed”/raped Carol that the story turns horribly, by her suddenly being charmed by that and going along with him. Only Hawkeye, Thor and Iron Man are present to see this bit and Carol leave and I’d argue Iron Man is entirely sceptical of the whole thing. It’s only really Thor who encourages it all. Again, I’m not saying it’s a good story but it’s not the complete “we’re all ok with this weird pseudo-rape dynamic thing” that Claremont paints it as later.
I wonder how much of that is Michelinie straining against Shooter. There are four credited writers on the story (them, Perez and someone else I’m blanking on) and Marcus clearly falls into Shooter’s recurrent kink of benevolent strong men who just deserve to be loved (there’s a bit where, upon realising he can’t be reborn as a creature of Earth, Marcus whines about how he would have made everything great for everyone if only they’d have let him, or something, which is just Korvac again), so I wonder how much control of this story Michelinie really had when his boss was co-writing it.
All that said, I don’t think Claremont’s rebuttal is all that great either. He had problems with both the consent issues and how it just dumped Ms Marvel out of use. But his solution is to bring Carol back, strip her of her powers (and some memories) and have her hang around with the X-Men for a while. There’s nothing about this resolution to the Marcus story that required that. He could have just brought Ms Marvel back into circulation, still powered and active, but pissed at the Avengers.
So yeah, that was 13 years of the Avengers. I don’t recommend reading it all as quickly as I did (the covid didn’t help either) but there’s definitely some good stuff in there.
There should be fines for misusing the term “iconic” like that. Full on wrist slap and fines from the ASA.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but apparently Hasbro are releasing a previously unreleased Kenner Real Ghostbusters vehicle as part of their reissue line (specifically one of the Ecto Glow GITD pieces, which they’ve gone whole hog on currently). While I’m not particularly interested in that specific thing, that and Takara making that Missing Link Arcee is an interesting precedent on reviving old, cancelled figures. Gives me faint hope that if they ever do Visionaries reissues they’ll do the series 2 characters and vehicles.
These, on the other hand, are fantastic.
Like a vast predatory bird.
They do look a bit ropey. Which is my general reaction to most McFarlane stuff, to be honest. I noticed they’re doing a TMNT line soon and honestly, given the amount of companies with a TMNT license you’d be forgiven for thinking it had entered the public domain.
Meanwhile, I’ve been politely ignoring the Jada SF figures but, for some reason, seeing Balrog at NYCC has piqued my interest in the line. Which is odd, given I have no special affection for Balrog, but he looks really cool. I might pick up one of the earlier releases (maybe Vega, I’ve always loved his design).
You can’t fool us, that’s just Moon Knight in a hat.
That’s a cool figure though, very striking looking.
Ha, it is a bit, isn’t it.
I would not have guessed that of all the Western characters, Phantom Rider would get a figure first. I figured it’d have been Rawhide Kid, if anyone.
::hits the gong of celebration::
::chokes on a resulting cloud of dust::
Phantom Rider Marvel Legend figure! Finally a Western character gets an ML after over 20 years!
He’s right there next to popular character Green Dude.
I’ve been steaming through these Avengers epic collections. Some thoughts, broken down by writer rather than volume.
Roy Thomas
It’s weird, the quality of his work is on a bell curve. He starts out as a Stan Lee tribute act (which isn’t a terrible thing); then develops his own style a bit, matures and gives us things like the Vision and the Yellow-Jacket story (which has issues, but you wouldn’t have seen Stan do it); and then absolute power goes to his head and he’s putting out over-written self-indulgent dreck.
Steve Englehart
This is a nice change of pace. I really like the addition of Swordsman and Mantis to the team early on, with Swordsman’s redemption being surprisingly good. It is a bit weird that Mantis is with the team, full participating and yet they keep saying “you’re just the Swordsman’s girlfriend, not an actual Avenger”. They only make her a full member when she leaves. The series does start to get bogged down in complicated lore and stories though. The Celestial Madonna story drags on waaaay too long. It involves at least three multi-part stories fighting Kang, which – even as a Kang fan – is too much. The triple hit of Englehart a) having Kang fight against his future self Rama-Tut (which is also his earlier identity) and also turn out to be Immortus b) delving into the background of the Vision and making him the original Human Torch repurposed and c) going through the backstory of Mantis, all threaded together, is rough going. Mantis’s backstory is so complicated that it isn’t worth it. It’s so complicated that, if you didn’t know, you’d swear it was a later writer (like John Byrne) retconning someone else’s earlier work, but it’s seemingly all planned out by Englehart that you get one backstory for her, which is later contradicted at length and then comprehensively explained at ever great length. An explanation that also requires explaining the history of the Kree empire and its enmity with the Skrulls. And after all that, whatever good bits the Celestial Madonna story might have had along the way, it’s impossible to get past the fact that Mantis ends up marrying a guy she’s known for ten minutes, who is possessing the corpse of her ex-boyfriend and, crucially, is a tree.
Englehart does a bit of a reset after that and it’s a nice clean slate with interesting changes. Beast is brought in, to essentially pick up and finish off storylines from his solo series (I didn’t realise before that was why he was brought into the Avengers) and also sees the introduction of Moondragon, which is less successful. She just doesn’t really do enough and is ultimately used to come up with a reason to take Thor out of the book. This era has the story about Kang invading the 19th Century, forcing Hawkeye, Thor and Moondragon to team up with some of Marvel’s Western heroes, which is something I’ve wanted to read for ages. Shame it’s not very good. Just not very much happens in it, really. Kang’s plan seems to be just having a building and, off panel, hypnotising people to mine uranium. It needed more going on. Lovely George Perez art though. Perez is a highlight through much of these volumes. He’s so good that even Vince Colletta inking him doesn’t ruin his art.
This latter Englehart period also has the Serpent Crown story with the Squadron Supreme, which is a lot of fun. That introduces Hellcat (with some very shonky plotting of “oh, look, The Cat/Tigra’s old costume happens to be in the storehouse of this evil company we’re infiltrating. I’ll take it”) and it’s clear that Englehart plans to use her on the team.
Unfortunately his end runs messily. As he tells it, he was fired because Gerry Conway, then editor, wanted to write Avengers himself. As Conway tells it, Englehart kept missing his deadlines. It’s probably a bit of both, I think. Certainly it’s not a good look that #150, which promises to be a status quo changing anniversary issue basically peters out after about 10 pages and becomes a reprint of #16. When the story is picked up again the next issue, you can feel the abrupt change of direction as Conway takes over from Englehart’s plot. Yellowjacket walks out of the meeting, saying he doesn’t want to be an Avenger, then suddenly walks back in and goes “uh, I arbitrarily changed my mind!”. Hellcat is dead set on joining the team, but then Moondragon suddenly demands that they go off together to train instead and Patsy agrees (head canon: Heather is mind controlling her, but jeez, it does not read smoothly). It’s not a pretty transition. Still, having muscled his way on to the book, Conway’s got to have some bold ideas, right?
Gerry Conway
Not so much. After the series had promised an exciting shake up of the team, Conway ends up with a line-up of basically all the same people who were there before. He then adds in Wonder Man, brought back from the dead with no real explanation (yet). I’ve no problem with Wonder Man generally, but I do not understand the obsession 70s Avengers writers had with him. The most interesting thing about him was that he died. I think we probably would have all been better off if the Vision’s brain patterns hadn’t been based on him, because when Wonder Man comes back, it just sets up the Vision going back into the same “I’m not a real man, only a machine” stuff he’s been through several times already.
I only read Conway’s run in the last week or so and Wonder Man coming back is literally the only thing I can remember from it. So let’s move on to…
Jim Shooter
Who fills in for Conway a few times before taking over (ironically). I’m not all the way through his run yet. I’m a few issues into the Korvac Saga (which I’ve read before). Shooter’s issues are quite strange, and they remind me of his time as EiC, in that there’s a strange duality to it. As EiC he made Marvel less dysfunctional than it had been in ages, perhaps ever. Loads of seminal series and runs occurred in his tenure. And yet he was also hated by a lot of his staff and accused of ruining titles with stupid suggestions (eg wanting to kill off Shang-Chi). As Avengers writer, the book is pretty damn good. The characters are sharply written, the stories are good and yet… so far they’ve faced three villains and they’re all prety much the same. First is Graviton, an ordinary man who gains incredible power, tries to force a woman to love him and then seemingly dies. Then they face Count Nefaria, an ordinary man who gains incredible power and then seemingly dies (while, as an aside, grabbing a random woman to possibly take with him). And then there’s Korvac, a weird cyborg guy who somehow gains incredible, almost godlike powers and uses them to kidnap a woman to make her his wife and then seemingly dies. It’s all a bit repetitive. If you’re being charitable, you could say Shooter’s working with recurrent themes and escalating them in stakes, but it does just kinda feel like he’s got the one idea and is rehashing it in quick succession. And like Chris Claremont, it really feels like you’re reading about his own kinks and desire relationship dynamics in how the villains treat women. There’s just bad vibes to it.
After three (four?) years, I’ve given up on More4 bringing over the final season of The Good Fight and decided to watch it through other means. I remember s5 getting a bit too weird for its own good (all the stuff with community courts) and so my expectations for s6 weren’t that high. But it’s great! Possibly the best the show has been? I don’t know, it’s so long since I’ve seen the earlier seasons.
One of the problems the show’s had over the years is losing cast members between seasons and having to adjust. John Larroquette disappearing after season 4 was a notable one. And that’s true here. The end of s5 spend some time setting up Wanda Sykes as the new name partner in the law firm, only for her to be absent here, written out with a passing line. But! Instead of Wanda Sykes, they brought in Andre Braugher! He’s on top form here as Ri’chard, a bombastic, ostentatiously religious lawyer with an ulterior motive, installed as the new name partner of the firm by the other law firm that owns the main one on the show (it’s complicated).
I’d forgotten over the past few years how much I liked just getting to see some of the other members of the cast, like Marissa and Jay. And Diane, of course. Return appearances for Elsbeth and Eli Gold – whose first shot is him in a lift, supposedly talking on the phone but clearly addressing the audience directly and berating use for our politics and “oh what, you’ve never heard me swear before?” – are fun too.
The weird element of it though is that it’s very political and from 2022, so it’s in that strange zone of being out of date but not entirely dated, you know? It’s talking about things that are still issues, but with a foresight for what has really been inevitable. It’s like watching footage of someone who is approaching a very slow speed car crash and is entirely aware of it.
I’m not an expert in this area,
I kinda am. I’ve been deep in TF fandom for over 20 years.
mainly with the Marvel UK stuff
The complaints are about the poor scans of Marvel UK material partially yes – certainly that’s where the crumpled pages come into it and questions about ordering and integration with the US material and that many covers haven’t been included (some of which were used in the Kickstarter promotion). This isn’t an insignificant element, given the set was sold to many on the appeal of having the UK material mixed in with the US for the first time (and it warrants as much care as the US stuff whichever way you look at it). The original files are available – Titan used them, Marvel or Panini will own them. But the complaints are also about the low quality scans of Marvel US, the poor OCR that hasn’t been corrected, the newly poor scans of G2, the lacking colour restoration and the poor attempts at “error correction” that, much like with IDW’s trades, focus on things that aren’t errors, such as this:
Soundwave in his correct, original Marvel US colour scheme with an original art error of him having a face, newly “corrected” to:
Soundwave in his animated series colour scheme with his “correct” face bodged over the original.
it also seems like Skybound were upfront initially that it would be the IDW/Hachette files that were used and that it was a reprint project rather than a restoration/remastering, which would obviously be a different deal.
They were not upfront about it at all. They actively avoided engaging with anyone asking about it or eventually pointing this out and casually mentioned it in passing on a Near Mint Condition stream.
Meanwhile the Kickstarter page was throwing around phrasing like “magnificent” “premium hardcover”, and “the ultimate reading experience”. I mean to me it’s not the “ultimate reading experience” if it’s objectively worse than the original monthlies and previous publisher’s tpbs.
The Kickstarter buries in its FAQ only
Have any of the files used for these compendiums been remastered?
We’ve worked with Hasbro to source the available files.
Which says nothing. The main Kickstarter page talks more about spot gloss than it does the source material. People who approached Skybound to offer help with making new, better scans (especially of the UK material) such as JP Bove (the colourist for the Hachette collections of the originally black and white Marvel UK material) were ignored (and in Bove’s case, not even credited for his previous work). And remember, after the funding ending, they had $4m to work with. And people were offering these scans freely and considering they knew the stuff they had to work with was crumpled, off colour etc, was bold.
So it doesn’t seem like people are really being fooled into buying something they didn’t expect,
Literally a string of Kickstarter comments linked above (as well as posts on social media and other forums) say otherwise. Never mind the fact they used Kickstarter FOMO on the combined US/UK versions (whereas the mass market paperbacks will only have them separately) to get people to pre-order them sight unseen.
The loudest complaining voices seem to be from those who chose not to stump up for the set and want to feel good about their decision.
I was considering getting this set, or the paperback versions, when it was announced. I am very much in the market for OHC of the complete Marvel US and UK. It was only because I dug into interviews and waited for previews of the paperbacks (thereby missing the Kickstarter) that I was able to make an informed decision and thankfully dodged a bullet. So yeah, there’s definitely some gloating on my part here, but also mainly disgust that Skybound would rake in $4m for this “premium” project and not give it the effort it deserved.
Again, this is just from observing what is being said by people more expert than me in this area.
Yes, hello again, this is me, a people more expert than you in this area. Many people are justifiably pissed off, or at least disappointed at being duped into buying an “ultimate” collection of Transformers that is severely lacking, especially as this isn’t the first time for a lot of us. IDW did the same thing when they immediately started their second run of reprint trades after the first ones, where they hadn’t bothered to negotiate the use of Circuit Breaker etc with Marvel, so just skipped those issues. The idea that this was a once in a life time, limited premium product that you absolutely had to Kickstart or miss out on was not insignificant to attracting attention (and they hadn’t solicited or listed the paperback UK compendiums before the Kickstarter was launched IIRC). And yet, it’s the same old stuff served up in a new hat and a premium price. I get Vik’s attitude of “well at least I have it” but even on that front, the paperbacks will be across the next year or so, with all the same material in the same poor quality for a fraction of the price. This is Lyle Lanley levels of hucksterism from Skybound and no-one should be making excuses for it.
when I know there aren’t any available original files
There are absolutely original files available. Titan used them. Marvel used them for their five trades of GI Joe. IDW and Skybound just chose not to use them with Skybound saying they’re “not available”. Given that Marvel have been able to use original files for reprint editions of old licensed series like Conan, Rom, Micronauts, Godzilla and more, I find it hard to believe the only files they didn’t hold onto were Transformers and GI Joe issue 51 onwards. Clearly IDW and Skybound didn’t want to pay Marvel’s price and are trying to make it sound like they don’t exist.
As for leaving in typos from the original comics
These aren’t typos from the original comics though. They’re errors introduced from the terrible OCR IDW did when doing their (low res) scans of the original series, that they didn’t bother to proofread and correct. This isn’t someone in the 80s forgetting the odd letter or mispelling something, it’s “Goldbuggy” being bastardised into “Goldbussy” because their OCR sucks and no-one could be arsed to correct it, despite these being known errors for over a decade now and Skybound having a crowd-funded budget of over $4m to work with.
If you want to buy cheaply produced crap, by all means, fill your boots and justify it any way you want. But to claim this isn’t just a lazy cash-grab by Skybound is disingenuous.
Patricia Routledge has kicked the bouquet.
Everyone will likely, fairly, be talking about Keeping Up Appearances, but I remember quite liking Hetty Wainthrope Investigates back in the day. Zero clue if that holds up. I should check some time.
I think you’re letting them off far too lightly. And also:
I spent a stupid amount of money on it
only viable option for me to acquire this collection in a timely manner and for a reasonable price
which is it? A stupid amount of money or a reasonable price? If you just wanted the series to read as a PDF, you’d genuinely be better off with pirated scans, because there are much better quality ones out there. And this isn’t your only option for physical. The Titan trades are still out there, as are the IDW ones (which admittedly don’t do all the UK material) and the Hachette partwork. And they’d probably cost less to get a set of than the upper tiers of this kickstarter.
high end hardcover
Is it really a “high end” hardcover, if they haven’t put in the effort on actually restoring the contents (or indeed making a contents page, according to the PDF)? It’s like making an expensive steelbook UHD blu-ray release of a movie but only using a 4th generation VHS dub of it.
Your “well at least I’ve got it in some manner” attitude has absolutely been taken advantage of by Skybound here.
And like a lot of business models they’re now increasingly trying to push people on to a subscription model where you don’t ever really own anything but pay a monthly fee to use it.
Microsoft are already into the ratchet up the price phase, which I think they’ve gone to too quickly to pull off.
Sounds like Bernie Sanders to me!
He’s going to be 87 in 2028 ;)
Far too young. Get these kids out of politics, dagnabbit!
Says a lot that when the film industry created its own fake “star” that it has complete control over they made a teenage white girl.
Yeah, I think resolution on TVs has topped out now. The real draw is an interface that won’t make you want to throw the remote into the screen when trying to do something simple. I was round a friend’s house recently and we were trying to access the basic RF input (to use an N64). Absolute hell. The option to scan for frequencies was incredibly hard to find but even then, getting to the analogue channels required going to the digital ones first, and every time we went to those, it started with BBC Three (for some reason) which would immediately move us into the iPlayer app.
And because there’s a two term-limit, the current president, Yoda Michael D Higgins can’t run again.
What was Higgins’s deal before he was President?
Skybound have sent out backer PDFs for their Transformers Compendium Kickstarter that was blatantly just using the IDW “remasters” and yet somehow got $4m or so in funding. And, er, it’s not going down well.
I’m not even out of issue one and have found multiple typos. These are apparently known mistakes from previous reprints that several prominent online fans could have cited for you. Or just a person with eyes actually reading the comics. Not good enough Skybound.
Skybound’s response to initial displeasure.
Greetings Backers,
We appreciate all the feedback on THE TRANSFORMERS CompendiumPDFs and wanted want to make sure we addressed some backer notes.
Skybound is committed to delivering the highest quality editions with our TRANSFORMERS compendiums.The files were primarily sourced from Hachette’s Partworks editions, as well as some additional sources in the TF community. We made hundreds of additional corrections, with the primary goal of keeping the material as close to how it was originally published, while correcting art, colors, and lettering to fix incorrectly colored characters, typos, broken balloons, and lettering, etc.
While that means there will be some visible imperfections such as creases, color fading, or scan artifacts as part of the archival material itself, we are confident these TRANSFORMERS compendiums will deliver the same reading experience as you’ve come to expect from us.
Thank you for your questions and we look forward to you holding the final hardcovers in your hands!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skyboundent/transformers-compendium-set/posts/4494414/comments
I was expect a once in a lifetime physical unified TF experience.
I didn’t back at $600USD (over $900AUD) for essentially bootleg scans I could’ve accquired elsewhere online.
Please take the time to do it right before printing the physical versions, this is what we supported you to do.
Looking at the scans for Burning Sky Part Two, and it’s like somebody actively crumpled the comic up before scanning. Yikes.
Yall arent going to do the right thing and fix this garbage or you would have already done it. You have FOUR POINT SIX MILLION and you’re creating mistakes.
Straight up, how do i get my money back?
I mean, come on, the creases are one thing, but whoever scanned the G2 #1 gatefold could have at least laid it properly flat on the scanner…
While it absolutely sucks that people got ripped off for this, as someone who a) saw this coming and b) doesn’t like Skybound, I’m feeling a lot of schadenfreude from this. I really hope it has some impact on the company.
EA is now owned by Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, via leveraged buy out. So expect a lot of cost-cutting, layoffs, studio closures and more Saudi teams in Not-FIFA.
I watched famously unprofitable movie Men In Black last night. I’ve not seen it since about 1999 and I was surprised just how much of it I remembered quite clearly. And yet, I didn’t think it was amazing. It was fine, but the bits I mainly enjoyed were the bits I so clearly remembered (J’s interview process). Still, good on Columbia for rolling with the totally real loss it made and giving it three more tries in the vain hope one would make them some money.
I’m probably not going to watch the second one (I remember it not being good and being disappointed at the time that it backtracked on Linda Fiorentino being J’s new partner) but maybe 3. And I might try the animated series too. Actually, I suppose that having K in it was the death knell for L being in the film sequel.
I finished off Valkyrie Profile 2 Silmeria last night, which took me just shy of two months. Or more accurately about 16 years. I bought it in 08 or 09, got partway in and dropped it for something else, as was my style at the time. I went to replay it a few years ago as a one of my “replay an old games before Christmas” deals, but played a few hours on like the 17th December and (correctly!) realised I’d never get through it all in time.
Because this is a long game – I racked up about 70+ hours I think (that’s with skipping some of the optional dungeons in the third quarter of the game and not bothering with the end-game super levelling dungeon) – and it’s not one that particularly respects your time either. The game is split into six chapters, but not very evenly. Chapter six took me a few days. Chapter four took an evening. Chapter three took about four weeks. That was partially because, despite doing the optional dungeons in that too, I hit a difficultly spike and had to spend a few evenings levelling up by just grinding a replayable boss fight, but it is also just disproportionately long and almost entirely devoid of any story content to pull you through that section.
One of the strengths and weaknesses of the game is its einherjar characters (I should say, it’s all very loosely based on Norse myth). These are essentially just filler characters to bulk out your party. Your first thought might be to ignore them, which would be fair, but the game dicks you around with taking away all your main party characters at various points, so they’re essential to have filling those gaps and as replacements for dead characters you can’t revive when in a dungeon. So keeping them all levelled up enough to step in is a chore (the game doesn’t give you an XP share type power until relatively late and even then it’s expensive to claim permanently). By the last chapter, I’d settled on a core party of four characters, three of whom were einherjar, and focusing on just them did speed things up and meant they levelled up at a degree that kept them powerful enough to deal with almost everything pretty easily.
Partially this was from utilising the other benefit of the einherjar. Each one has a “release level” which is the point at which you can bin them off from the party, they get properly reincarnated to go off and live new lives (you can go and find them in the towns and dungeons and talk to them). When they go you get stat boosting items and the stuff you get is relative to how much higher the einherjar’s level is than the release level and what gear they’ve got equipped (which goes with them). So before the final dungeon I released all my einherjar bar the three in my core party, equipped with all the second best armour that I hadn’t sold, and got absolutely tonnes of stat boosts that I concentrated on those core four. So even the penultimate boss proved no problem (the final one was trickier because the game decides that only one character can cause any real damage to him, which is a hindrance).
It’s an interesting twist on the Pokemon format, in a way, incentivising you to use all the characters but also to let them go. The other impressive thing about the einherjar is the story telling with them. They don’t participate in the main story, they don’t get to appear in cut-scenes or anything. But they all have text back stories, detailing their lives and these are mostly interconnected, covering several wars and conflicts and fallen empires across a few hundred years. The text summaries though aren’t the full story and you get a fun insight into that when you have certain pairings of characters in your party. For instance, the archer Lylia is said to be the queen of a city-state who was kidnapped and missing for six years. When she was finally found and returned home, she committed suicide. Her captor was the mage Woltar, who you can also get, who is described as a reclusive dark mage who kidnapped Queen Lylia and then was killed by the state’s army when she was discovered. But put Lylia and Woltar together in your party and you will sometimes get the following exchange at the start of a battle.
Lylia: I prayed a thousand times that we might one day be reunited.
Woltar: I too, my love. We must thank the fickleness of fate.
Yes, they were really lovers. When you talk to Lylia after she’s reincarnated, she reveals that her marriage to the king was an arranged thing, she was 16, he was in his 60s, so she escaped and met Woltar and they had a baby (who is also an einherjar). It’s a really clever bit of world building and there’s loads of examples of it. Unfortunately, it’s complicated by how you get the einherjar. You get them when you find sparkly weapons out in the world but (most of the time) the einherjar you get from that is one of two or three, with a set percentage chance of which you get. Some characters, according to guides, only have a 10% chance of appearing. I suspect this is to encourage replays (which is bold, of a game this big), but the chances of getting all the characters that have connections to each other is really slim.
All that aside, the game is, at it’s core, pretty fun. It’s mostly in a 2d side-scrolling platformy type thing – think Zelda 2 – but when you start combat you move into a 3d arena. You can move your characters freely, either as a group or your split them up for tactical stuff like pincers movements (rarely if ever necessary tbh). It’s not real time, as your enemies only move when you move. Your actions are limited by an AP gauge, which also only recharges as you move (or you press a specific recharge button, during which your enemies can move and attack). Actual combat switches to a side perspective again and you trigger each character’s attacks with an assigned face button. The trick is in getting a nice rhythm between the four, so that one attack isn’t missing because of the other. Ideally, you’ll be getting enough hits in within a short enough time that (assuming you don’t just kill the enemy first) you can trigger characters’ special attacks. Or your attack might hit an enemy’s weak point and break part of it off. This can get you new equipment (weapons, armour, accessories) which is cool but also a pain when you find yourself farming a certain type of enemy from a certain angle in hopes of getting a certain accessory that has the right coloured rune you need to equip in order to let you learn a new skill. As with so much of the game, there are lots of complications. But when you get in the zone, as I did in the late game, it really sings.
I’m glad to have finally finished this. I wouldn’t really recommend it (not least because it’s on the PS2) and I’m not sure I’d ever play it again. But if it ever happens to get remastered, I think it’d be worth a look.
There’s a petition against those digital ID cards on the UK government website that’s hit nearly 1 million signatures in under a day.
I’ve finished Avengers Epic Collection v5 which means I have now finally read the Kree Skrull War. I’ve read various stories related to it (Operation Galactic Storm, Avengers Forever) over the years and it’s this foundational, keystone story to so much MU lore and man it’s not just very good, is it?
Lovely art by Neal Adams, sure, but Roy Thomas’s writing has nosedived in quality since the previous volume. His narration is getting increasingly purple and second person, so he’s essentially directly taunting characters in syntactically abstruse sentences that are just hard to parse for the most part. Maybe it didn’t help I was reading most of this late in the evening. Also, considering he’s a former English teacher, he’s got a terrible understanding of when you should use me rather than I in a sentence (as Stan Lee did before him), which also doesn’t help.
But on top of that the plotting is just crap. The actual Kree Skrull war doesn’t really consist of a war between the Kree and Skrulls, it’s just each taking turns to kidnap people off Earth. There’s an entire digression to involve the Inhumans which adds nothing but over-complication. He tries to pull it all together at the end by having the Supreme Intelligence claim he mentally pushed people into taking their otherwise arbitrary actions, but that does not hang together at all. And it’s not just the plot making sense, the characters act really inconsistently, not just between issues but within the same issue. Hawkeye says he’s run out of Growth Serum (he’s Goliath II at this point, which is a bizarre decision, especially as Hank and Jan were both still on the team when he made it) yet a few panels later, he’s grown a bit (“just enough left in him for a few minutes growth” or something). An issue later he’s saying he made the decision to stop using it. In one issue, the team splits up, half to go with Triton to rescue Black Bolt in San Francisco, the other half to go to space to rescue Quicksilver, Wanda and Captain Marvel. Yet the latter team hang around fighting mandroids and then they’re just “actually, let’s go save Black Bolt” so meet up with the others at the Great Refuge. And I think that’s just Thomas not managing to understand and convey the plot Adams has drawn really. It seems to me the intention was “we’ll stay here hold off the Mandroids while you three escape to find Black Bolt and we’ll meet up later” but it’s been twisted into something that makes less sense.
Oh and then there’s Rick summoning loads of Golden Age heroes to fend off Ronan and the Kree which is the ultimate self-indulgence on Thomas’s part. They have no plot significance at all. Rick could have summoned anything as constructs to fill that purpose, or nothing at all. It just bogs the story down by introducing all these old characters (most of whom are passed off as being fictional) who disappear immediately after saying their names. What a waste of time and effort.
So yeah, that was pretty disappointing really.
When I think of Marvel in the 70s being a mess, I always think of that one issue of Iron Man that just stops at page 14 or so because that’s all they had done before the deadline for the printer.
Sean, the issues that had me despairing at sexism are around #80 or so.
Which also has the debut of Red Wolf, which is handled a bit oddly. They go to all this effort setting up a new hero (who I quite like) and then at the end of the second issue with him have him kill off his heroic identity. I would have had him join the team to be honest. They launched a Red Wolf solo series not long after but it was initially set in the Old West with the first Red Wolf (he was created as a character with a legacy). He got binned off after half a dozen issues to be replaced by a modern Red Wolf who is completely unrelated to the one in Avengers and makes no mention of him. Weird.
I’ve embarked on a big Avengers read through thanks to having a big run of epic collections. Over the past year or so, I’ve picked up v5-11 (though I already had 9). Read one issue of v5 and immediately went “I have no memory of this team status quo” so ended up re-reading v4 first. So that means I’ll be going from #57 (first appearance of the Vision) through to #209.
Anyway, I’m halfway through v5 at the moment and I was thinking as I read it “this is a bit sexist. Thomas always finds ways to minimise Wanda and have her end up a damsel in distress.” There’s one moment where she can’t defend herself because her “hex power needs to recharge” or some such nonsense and you don’t get Quicksilver going “hang on, I can’t be quick at the moment, I’ve got a stitch”. Literally the issue after the one that had me thinking that: the Lady Liberators, where Valkyrie brings together Wasp, Medusa, Scarlet Witch and Black Widow to take out the Avengers. It really felt like it was addressing those criticisms I had, while also belittling them. Impressive how it managed to have its cake and eat it too without really making any actual kind of statement or change.
Out in April:
https://www.comicsbeat.com/exclusive-dark-horse-announces-nerd-inferno-the-essential-evan-dorkin
You too can own the David Byrne Gets Alzheimers comic srtip.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78n455mj08o
Four arrests after Trump and Epstein images projected on Windsor Castle
Four men have been arrested after images of Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were projected on to Windsor Castle on Tuesday, as the US president arrived in the UK for a state visit.
They were arrested on suspicion of “malicious communications following a public stunt in Windsor” and remained in custody, Thames Valley Police said.
It doesn’t say, but I assume this is Led By Donkeys again.
I think the biggest change is Ego bailing, relatively last minute, which leaves the show without any black female cast members. Now, you can say that’s because Ego’s exit wasn’t expected, but it’s moreso on the show for only having one black female cast member before that. Not a great look from a simple position of demographics/diversity, but also more practically, awkward if they need to do an impression of a black woman for topical sketches. Unfortunately, I think they’ll probably just rely on an alumni coming in.
The idea of a TV ‘series’ in the UK is next to dead, it is ‘season’ now.
Which is good, because series meaning both a year’s run and the show entirely was pretty confusing.
I finished up Frankie Boyle’s novel Mean Time (Meantime? whichever) today and boy that was a bit of a struggle. I like Boyle’s comedy for the most part and I really enjoyed his show New World Order, which was bleak and cynical and kinda nihilistic. But taking that tone, divorcing it from weekly political/social satire and dragging it out into a detective novel is just wearisome. There are some really good lines here and there, even a few good passages, but so much of it is just blandly differentiated characters trading chunks of Boyle’s junkie philosophy to each other.
Criminal that Jane Wickline survived the cast changes. That’s nepotism for ya.
I feel like I could live with the potential injuries from pissing without needing a guard.
Honestly I don’t even think I would want to win 2 billion. It would completely throw my life into chaos.
Well, if you ever do, you’re welcome to give it to me. I’ll take on that responsibility.
there are no “lucky” places
Except if you buy them from me. Luck guaranteed.
New Green leader Polanski vows to ‘replace’ Starmer’s Labour
Zack Polanski has been elected leader of the Green Party of England and Wales by a landslide, signalling a clear shift to the left for the party.
The London Assembly member beat Green MPs Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns, who were standing on a joint ticket, by 20,411 votes to 3,705.
In his victory speech, Polanski promised to build a “green left” to take on Labour, telling Sir Keir Starmer’s party: “We are here to replace you.”
His election potentially opens the door to cooperation with the new left-wing party being set up by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana.
Polanski, a former actor who was the party’s deputy leader, campaigned on an “eco-populism” platform and has promised to make the party “bolder” and more radical in its approach.
In his victory speech, he said: “If you’re feeling hopeless, if you’re feeling in despair, if you’re feeling politically homeless, there is a political home for you.
“And I promise you, nothing will make you feel more inspired, more ready to get out there and more like we can turn our country around than joining the Green Party.”
and yet:
Question to Zach Polanski at the leadership announcement: “Q: How can you take on Nigel Farage when your policy on immigration is so different?” Everything wrong with British politics and media summed up so succinctly in a single absolutely unhinged question.
https://bsky.app/profile/tristangrayford.scot/post/3lxtytwgq6c2n
On a similar note, I happened to see a bit of BBC Breakfast this morning talking about adding a chicken pox vaccine to MMR and the first immediate benefit they talked about was mitigating the “lost productivity caused by chicken pox”. Not that preventing infection is good in and of itself, but that by kids not getting sick with it, fewer parents will have to take time off work to look after them.
I just got my copy of The Nam Omnibus in. I very much like that it doesn’t have a “volume 1” on the spine (because this has all the good issues, so I would not be buying a volume 2). I’ve not actually taken the shrink wrap off yet but I just noticed it says “printed in Turkey” on the back. That’s new, right? I guess a way to dodge the Trump tariffs.
Looks like SNL is clearing house before season 51. Released so far are
I suspect there’ll be at least five more “releases” before the new season. It’s practically an open secret at this point that at least one of Colin Jost and Michael Che are leaving (they’ve been screen-testing new Weekend Update anchors, apparently). Seems foolish to think Kenan will ever leave, but he really should. I’d get rid of Jane Wickline in a heartbeat, but I have a sneaking suspicion she’ll survive. Ashley Padilla seems a lock to not only stay but get promoted to full cast member, but who knows? If Longfellow’s not safe, who is?
Another one that should probably have been handled differently in a Superman movie.
Nah, it’s a dictator. Death’s the best way to deal with them. And what, we’re afraid of offending dictators now?
update on the SpeedyHen weirdness: I ended up ringing them this morning, because I didn’t get any explanation about the technical issues and my open pre-order is out on Tuesday and there’s a bank holiday weekend between today and then. Turns out the issue is something to do with case sensitivity. It wasn’t letting me log in without capitalising the first letter of my email address. Which is bizarre because email addresses aren’t case sensitive. I guess that’s maybe something to do with why it then let me open another account with the same email address (because I wasn’t capitalising it, so it thought it was entirely different) and possibly why password resets weren’t going through, because it would presumably reference the given email address with its own list to send the email and it’s thinking C and c aren’t the same letter.
All of which is a very weird error to spontaneously develop. I’m fairly sure I haven’t started changing how I type in my email address (I never capitalise it) so…
I’ve been dipping into FreeVee a bit this week (which, incidentally, is closing down at the end of the month and just being folded into Prime Video). They’re showing the original He-Man series on a continual stream. It’s… er, not very good. But also there’s one showing In The Heat Of The Night. Not the movie, but a TV series that was based on it, starring the guy who played Archie Bunker as the racist police chief. Baffling. I watched a bit, figured it was made in the 70s, some time after the film was made. Nope. Started in 1988. The episode I watched was (somehow) made in 1991. Looked twenty years older. Just looked it up and this thing ran seven years. Seven! For a TV adaptation of a film that’s just about a racist white cop grudgingly accepting that a black guy can also be a cop.
It’s a really misleading cover though. I can understand why they thought to use it, but it doesn’t represent the series at all.
The biggest loss there for me isn’t so much the joy of channel surfing or the comfort of Saturday morning cartoons, but the possibility of discovering something that you never would have ordinarily chosen for yourself. Loads of my favourite TV shows or movies were things that I initially stumbled across or checked out on a whim, rather than actively wanting to watch already.
Yes, absolutely this. There’s various shows I enjoyed as a kid that I’m not sure I would have actively chosen to watch if given its premise.
the idea of TV providing specific scheduling at certain times so that kids can watch is a bit of a nonsense. I used to love settling down after school as a kid to flick between the Broom Cupboard and CITV between 4pm and 5:30pm, but now that you can watch what you want when you want, why do you need that time carved out on linear broadcast channels?
I mean on demand programming is great, but there is something to be said for just taking TV as it comes, channel surfing etc. The same way that radio still exists and does well in a world of personal music players, let alone streaming.
This is possibly going to get a bit old man yells at cloud, but damn it, these are bad clouds.
So it’s the UK school summer holidays at the moment (though the weather has definitely taken a bit of turn, so it’s starting to feel a bit “back to school” season now). As an adult with no kids that’s largely irrelevant to me, but I’m a sucker for nostalgia and it’s hard not to feel a pang of wanting to recapture those past summer holiday joys. As me hanging out in a playground for a day would be frowned upon now, I’ve looked to other areas. And, sad as it might sound, one of my fondest summer holiday memories is getting to just sit around and watch TV all morning. Even in the era of all-day dedicated kids channels, summer holiday programming felt a bit special. CBBC on 2 would run longer into the morning, the Big Breakfast would decamp to a desk in the garden for the Bigger Breakfast. Hell, in 1995 even Sky Movies Gold got in on it and did Schools Out For Summer, showing Transformers, MASK, that weird old Dick Tracy cartoon and finally the Lucy Show (which I never watched, but fondly remember as a sign that it was time to go do something else).
It’s a bit depressing then to see the state of summer holiday programming on TV now. Ok, there are the dedicated kids channels still and they’re probably serving their audiences’ needs (again, childless adult, I don’t know). But ITV has hidden CITV away on ITVX, CBBC is only allowed on its own channel now, not BBC 1 and 2 (with Animal Park being the only summery feeling addition to the schedule – and it’s impressive that’s still going 20 odd years after it started) and even T4 doesn’t exist any more, which is just weird. Channel 4 is probably the most depressing, as it’s only concession to the summer is just playing a few more episodes of all the same sitcoms it’s been endlessly repeating in the mornings for the past twenty years after it gave up on proper morning shows. Another Frasier repeat?! Oh Mr Channel 4, you do spoil us! Props to Channel 5 for Milkshake, which isn’t extended in the summer (still a hard cut to Jeremy Vine at 9am, which must really get the kids switching over), but it’s the only part of Channel 5 that has remained since it launched and hasn’t been hidden away in its own digital TV ghetto. The CBBC thing really annoys me actually – can’t possibly ever simulcast any of that on 1 or 2 cos it has its own channel but the News channel is always treated as a schedule filling fallback.
I know people will say “ah but the kids all watch YouTube now instead” but it’s not entirely that YouTube won the kids over, it’s that TV capitulated on them. And not just in terms of visibility, but presentation. In-vision continuity/presentation is a rarity now but think about what draws kids to those successful YouTube channels like Mr Beast – it’s the familiarity of personalities. Pretty much every successful YT channel is built around its presenters, but TV channels don’t seem to get that. Stuff like TISWAS and Live & Kicking aren’t fondly remembered just because of the cartoons they showed.
Related to all this, one of the shows of summer holidays past I’ve found myself thinking of lately is something called Bug Juice, which I have fond yet dim memories of being on the Bigger Breakfast one year. It was made in 1997/8 and is what we called then a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a US summer camp. I managed to get hold of most of the first series and I’m about halfway in it. It’s really fascinating in several aspects.
First is that it’s an absolute treasure trove for 90s fashion. Which makes sense, I suppose. What’s is a bit surprising though is that I look at the styles and fashion trends and realise that I don’t think I saw any of those in the UK until at least one, maybe two years later. There really was more of a trans-Atlantic delay back then.
Second is that it’s so incredibly and delightfully tame. It’s essentially a predecessor to modern reality shows and even has direct to camera interviews with the kids and counsellors interspersed into the material. With the counsellors especially this is to shape a narrative for the episode, but it’s stark how lacking that is in artifice and fake drama. One episode has the boys cabin, who are mostly 15 year olds, getting annoyed with the one 12 year old that is, for some reason in there with them (even though there are other cabins for kids his age – I don’t know what’s up with that). They just think he’s trying to hard to fit in with them and they want him to calm down a bit. So you get some footage of him being a try-hard, a few to camera bits from him and the other kids talking about the issue, then the discussion the cabin has (led by the counsellor) about it, and a bit of how the kids feel after it and then… yeah, it’s resolved. They show the 12 year old getting into photography, they have to-camera bits where he and the others say they feel better for having talked about it and it all ends pretty positively and relatively weightlessly. If anything, I think they’ve maybe edited some things (like when two of the girls have a spat for a couple of days) to be less dramatic. There’s no way that would happen in a modern show. It would be milked for so much drama, especially with dramatically edited act break cliffhangers, replays of those high drama moments etc (it’s stark how even non-reality shows pad themselves out now by replaying and restating information in each part, compared to Bug Juice, which just gets on with it). Really shows how much TV has changed.
Another wild thing about it is just the summer camp itself. The range of activities they offer is – to this working class Brit – insane. There’s a lake for various kinds of watersports, including a speedboat for water-skiing; various sports fields; arts and crafts, including pottery, photography, candle-making etc; a theatre in which they put on a full play; an outside performance space, in which they put on various other shows; horses; a martial arts centre; archery; general outward bounds camping type stuff; a creative writing course. For one, it sounds exhausting. But I went on a school camp in the Lake District when I was about that age, for a week, and it was literally some semi-permanent tents and a leaky dining hall from which we did archery, kayaking and various things that just involved wandering around a wood. Mind you, I didn’t pay the $20k or so this camp (allegedly) cost, so…
The final thing of note is that it’s hard to watch this and not think about the fact that all these kids are about 40 now. Which is weird. Also that the counsellors are mostly only in their early 20s, so only about five years or so older than the kids, but there’s already this gulf between them. The show mainly focuses on two, one from the boys cabin and one from the girls, and the latter, Luna, is lovely, but her attempts to be the fun cool relatable counsellor with the kids often feel incredibly cringeworthy. And it might well have been that she was just as cringeworthy when she was a teen, but it really highlights that there’s a point at which you just become ineffably othered from teens simply due to age, even if it is an age difference that would be insignificant at later points in life.
There’s an oral history about the show on Vice or somewhere that I’ve got bookmarked and I’m keen to read that when I’ve finished the series.
Hmm. To their credit, I got an email response today, but they’re not going to be able to look into the account stuff until in the week.
On a more pertinent note, I started reading Wolverine epic collection: Tooth and Claw today. It’s about 9 issues of Wolverine solo series plus a bit of X-Men and some mini-series (including one with Venom) from around 1996. I don’t have very high expectations for it but it was only £11. One issue in and honestly, mid-late 90s Marvel typography is absolutely my jam. The standard dialogue font (I think Meanwhile from Comic Craft) is just the default comic font in my head. The needlessly spangly speech bubbles for different characters, some with their own fonts, are great. The WordArt on the covers. Man, it just speaks to me.
I mean look at that! Pure comics.
I also learned how the new generation sees Bond: apparently he is very “chalant” and is constantly “aura farming” for “rizz”.
Ah yes. Just as I suspected.
I did notice the new password had stronger requirements than my existing password (special characters, numbers etc), so possibly they brought that in and it’s screwed up every existing account with a password that didn’t meet the requirements?
(This is only tangentially related to tpbs but it seems the best place for it).
Soooo it looks like my SpeedyHen account was deleted? At some point in the past month and a half, since I pre-ordered the Nam Omnibus when that went live in late June. I went to order something else yesterday and it wouldn’t let me log in. Used the password reset thing and I just didn’t get the email. Figured it was a slow email system, ended up buying the book elsewhere.
Then today I tried to log into an entirely different webstore (of a high street chain) that I could have sworn I had an account for – I certainly had a password saved! – and I couldn’t log in and again couldn’t get a password reset email. I thought something was wrong with Gmail but I managed to get password reset emails in from other places. Decided to make a new account on the second place and it let me. I’d use the Paypal check out in the interim for that, so I think it populated my new account with the info from that order, but it had the rewards card I’ve had for ages set up with it. So no idea what’s going on there.
Figured I’d try the same thing with SpeedyHen – I would at least get an “an account already exists with that email address” error if it’s a password issue and… nope, it let me create a new account. None of my existing info is tied to it. Tried the password reset thing with the “new” account and it worked (so it’s not an error on Gmail’s end). The password reset thing doesn’t actually check validity of email address when you use it, it just says “an email has been sent to the address given” even if you use a dummy one, which isn’t helpful. So I guess my account was just gone? Or someone else has broken into it and hijacked it, but I surely would have got an email if they’d tried to change the account’s email address to their own*. And I’ve not had any orders charged to me, so I’m not sure what they’d be getting out of that.
Weird and disconcerting. Anyone else experienced this?
*EDIT: Nope, just checked this and you can change the account’s registered email address with just the password, no confirmation via email. That doesn’t seem great.
Wikipedia could reduce UK users as it loses legal challenge against online safety legislation
Wikipedia’s operator has lost a legal challenge to parts of Britain’s Online Safety Act, which it says will drastically reduce the number of users who can access the site.
…
The foundation said if it was subject to so-called Category 1 duties – which would require Wikipedia’s users and contributors’ identities to be verified – it would need to drastically reduce the number of users who can access the site.
Judge Jeremy Johnson dismissed its case but said the Wikimedia Foundation could bring a further challenge if regulator Ofcom “(impermissibly) concludes that Wikipedia is a Category 1 service”.
He added that his decision “does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia’s operations”.
The Wikimedia Foundation said the ruling “does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for”but welcomed the court’s comments emphasising what it said was “the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected”.
DC Finest Plastic Man: The Origin Of Plastic Man
I only bought this because I saw it on that random Amazon DE sale and at about £10 it seemed worth a punt. I didn’t really know what to expect of it. I’ve read literally no Plastic Man comics before, I just know the character from that cartoon he had back in the day (which was in the churn of early Cartoon Network) and some of his Justice League appearances.
Turns out it’s really good. Jack Cole is incredible. In terms of artistry and sophistication he’s about twenty years ahead of pretty much every other Golden Age artist I’ve read. He’s got a nice, clean style that gets progressively more cartoony as he gradually loosens up and leans into a sillier style than the… well, not exactly hard-boiled but proper crime busting tone the comic initially attempts. But he’s also really solid on panel layouts and readability and lettering, which is far from a given with Golden Age comics (especially lettering – in the Superman Finest I read recently it would bounce between clear, professional looking lettering and utter chicken scratch, seemingly at random).
He’s inventive too. Every story opens with a splash page, something that seemed fresh when Marvel started doing it in the mid-60s. He uses these to experiment with logo designs and graphic techniques. The whole thing reads like a very talented artist being given the space to just do what they want and grow.
The most surprising thing is that that Plastic Man (who really isn’t the comedic character I expected. He’s not exactly a straight man, but he’s hardly cracking jokes himself) is given a sidekick – a middle aged man sidekick – and it works. I was dreading that, thinking it was going to be like Doiby Dickles, the dreadful New Yahk cabbie GA Green Lantern got lumbered with. But Woozy Winks actually improves the comic, by giving Plas someone to talk to. His own “powers” (he’s protected by Mother Nature) are unobtrusive, which is helped along by the fact that Cole clearly keeps forgetting about them, and makes a joke of that, and he’s a good comic relief sidekick. I didn’t think it was possible.
This is really good stuff and I’m keen to get more.
Man, Fringe promotion is getting out of control.
