Comic Review #44: Marvel Voices: Pride #1

 

I would have liked to do a theme month for LBGT people seeing as this is gay pride month but I mean I'm sure I could do it via comic books and stuff but The Final Episode? My Weird b-movie review thing? I'm sure I could find some but enough for a full month of discussions? I dunno. I did try to put in as much information about the LBGTQZFMNLOP community as I could. Which just related too two comics and mentioning that GREAT ACTOR Wesley Eure enjoyed kissing men. Well he's still alive so I'm going to assume he still enjoys kissing men. It's not something you change about yourself.

Anyway Marvel Voices: Pride #1 is I think the 3rd or 4th issue of Marvel Voices. A series that involves letting people of different backgrounds get to write stories. One was Indigenous Voices, a comic I thought was pretty good but I didn't like the last story. I believe there was one involving black characters. There might have been something else but I'm not sure. They are planning on a Asian American Voices issue too. I plan to discuss that one too. I think everybody deserves representation and a story and characters and all that. I don't believe that it should be done poorly though.

This feels a bit different than than the DC one. A bit more character develop-y than action-y. I don't mind when superhero characters just have a story where they interact with each other. It's good to get to know how these characters feel so that I dunno you can get to like them or not. You gotta have character development or the action stories don't work because you don't give a peckered piss about what's happening. I don't know where the term peckered piss came from so I'll talk about a few stories from the book like usual because there are a LOT of them in this book.

I think the first story I will discuss is called Colossus and it's about a character named Prodigy who is one of the 97 hundred million billion thousand trillion X-Men characters that are now somehow all living on an Island together. Like Gilligan's Island. I like Gilligan's Island X-Men. It's a very interesting era for Marvel's merry mutants. Anyway this story is them talking about how they realized they were bisexual and Prodigy tells Speed (they are both boning each other). Speed is another mutant and one of the sons of the Scarlet Witch. Don't look into his backstory because it will cause some brain matter to squeeze out of your ears. I don't say that very much but it really will do that. So Prodigy talks about a crush he had on Colossus, a giant stacked piece of man meat. Still I don't know if that counts because EVERYONE is gay for Colossus. He's a big Russian teddy bear that if you get mad will kick ass. Who wouldn't want to kiss that??? anyway it's a cute and fun little story.

The next story is called Totally Invulnerable and it involves She-Hulk! But there's a twist. It's not actually She-Hulk but a lady that is cosplaying as her! I think heroes from Marvel should meet up with more cosplayers because I think it would make for funny interactions. Cosplay She-Hulk runs afoul of Titania who is angry that She-Hulk won't be a lawyer for her husband Crusher Creel the Absorbing Man. Of course she's the reason he was caught so it would be a conflict of interest. After they almost fight Titania realizes its paint not actual green skin. They then end up in a cafe talking about stuff and Cosplay She-Hulk tells Titania she is trans and likes She-Hulk because she was a strong and powerful woman which gave her confidence to be herself. It's sweet. . I also liked one joke where Titania says THE GENDER PEOPLE after finding out. It made me laugh. It ends with them going to beat the shit out of a Deadpool cosplayer which is clearly the way EVERY STORY SHOULD END THAT WAY.

The Final story I'm going to talk about is called Early Thaw and it tells the story of Iceman. Who is very angry and sad at himself for finding the Angel attractive. It's up to Magneto of all people to calm him down during one of his attempts to blow up Professor Xavier's face. It's actually a pretty sweet little story and I loved how it ended. Iceman just going "Xavier isn't even there". I wonder how many times that happens to supervillains. I'd be so pissed if I let out my cyborg gorillas that eat peoples faces and the person I wanted them to destroy was off somewhere else. 

The rest of the stories are fine but there's not much to talk about them. A lot of them are one or two pages and that's kind of why I liked the DC one better. I mean Marvel has a lot more gay characters it seems and they wanted to include as many as they could but I dunno I liked the more flesh out stories from DC Pride. Still none of the stories from either book is what I would consider bad. Just I can't really talk about most of these stories past one paragraph. It's kind of a shame. 

FINAL VERDICT: I thought the stories for the most part were pretty good but most of them were just too short.  Not a bad comic but I thought the DC Pride did it better. I do not think this was worth 9 bucks even if it was double sized. I think they should put this series in a trade soon. I'd pick that up. I think it's a bit easier to pick up trades of stuff now than actual comics but damnit a comic book still feels the best to hold in your hand. And are fun to collect. I don't know where I'm going with this. This is still a better comic than the one where Northstar comics out which was really bad and I don't like that they reprinted a good chunk of that comic.

The Final Episode #64: Flying Rhino Junior High (1998 - 2000)

 

I had originally decided to talk about Brand Spanking New Doug to annoy portnoyd, but I realized that I had told him that if he made me laugh in that Doug post I would leave that show for about 50 posts. It's not even 30 Final Episode posts since then. So he gets off the hook for that show at least. Then I decided to watch Mega Man but I wasn't really feeling that one either. No, I felt like discussing some thing weird and obscure so I decided to finally discuss Flying Rhino Junior High. The fact I can remember things like Flying Rhino Junior High is a blessing and a curse and I've decided to show you this cursed thing! 

The animation studio Nelvana was one of the Canadian Animation companies during the 1980s and 1990s. They started up shop on July 30th, 1971. Almost 50 years ago! Insane huh? Yeah I think it's insane at least. They were named after a Golden Age of Comics character called Nelvana of the North. I would review a Nelvana of the North comic if I could but I cannot. They also did live action series including one with Mr. T! It was called T&T and it was not very good. They are probably most famous for Rock N Rule, the second Care Bears cartoon, Babar, My Pet Monster, Rupert and The Adventures of Tintin. they worked together with an French animation company and a Scottish animation company for this series. It was also appeared on CBS of all places. I would watch this show and only this show on the CBS Saturday Morning thing. I thought it was fun.

Yes, I know I've said that French people are not funny but I'm going to assume that the other people working on this series made the comedy part of this series. I've seen Radioactive and The Wacky World of Tex Avery and I know that when it's just French people themselves it makes for some painful attempts at comedy. People who like Jerry Lewis as much as them are not to be trusted in any manner. Okay, enough trashing the sense of humor of French people. It's time to talk about the actual overall plot of this series. There's this kid you see named Earl P. Sidebottom who gets a D in shop class and then decides to go to the school's basement to live there in shame. He creates a machine that can change the school's environment to destroy the school or something I don't know. He now calls himself The Phantom. He is stopped by a group of four kids: Marcus Snarkis, his sister Ruby, Billy O Toole and Lydia Lopez. 

The Final Episode called "Seeing Double" which I think is a weird and not great title for this episode. You'll see in a little while. The episode starts with Marcus complaining about his weird puffy green vest and yeah I can easily see why he would not want to wear it. It looks goofy as fuck. I'm pretty sure everyone in the school would mock him for it but somehow they don't. Except Billy. That hooligan. Anyway Marcus goes to look in the Bathroom mirror and during that he breaks the sink. He runs off like a big turd and leaves Johnny to take the blame from the rhino principal. Yes, the principal of Flying Rhino Junior High is a Rhino. They go to class and learn about fantasy stories. They call Edgar Allan Poe fantasy and I don't think that's a really good classification for that guy but what do I know. I've only seen movies based on his work because I'm lazy. They also bring up Lewis Carroll and his Alice in Wonderland books.

Then we go to The Phantom which is Earl P Sidebottom's alter ego. He gets very angry and decides to send the characters through the looking glass (a mirror) to an alterative universe where everything is a bit different. During there they meet their doubles. They see them for like 5 seconds and all that. I thought with that title you'd see like 5,000 doubles of one person and they'd have to find out which one was the real one and somehow get rid of the rest. I dunno that what comes to mind, not a alternative universe episode. They have to find a way out of the alternative universe after the Rhino Principal with A Beard decides that they should be cryonically frozen like Walt Disney. It's a very weird scene but this is a very weird show. To get even weirder the Rhino Principal With A Beard sends a robotic pig version of the regular pig version 

They get away from him and try to go back via the mirror in the bathroom but they find out they can't. They talk with the smart version of the dumb character of the regular universe and realize it's like a chess board so they create a 3D Chess version of the school with Marcus' little doohickey machine he has. He finds out that the place to escape is in the basement. This is where they find the good version of Earl P Sidebottom and his henchmen Ratticus. Earl sent the bad kids away because they would harrass and beat the shit out of him. He goes absolutely insane for Marcus' shitty vest that I had forgotten about. It's the Chekov's gun of this story people! Marcus gives him the vest and he agrees to send them home and bring back the bad versions of them.

During all of this the regular version of The Phantom is being annoyed by Ratticus trying to celebrate their 10th anniversary together as bad guys. Does this mean The Phantom is only like 20 something years old? Weird. The Phantom gets a damn flying camera smashed into his face and Ratticus just makes a joke. These guys are kinda jerks to each other. Oh, and Marcus finally admits that he broke the sink and it wasn't Johnny and gets in trouble for lying. He has to work with the pig Janitor (who's also a spy). This show was a lot weirder than I remembered.

FINAL VERDICT: I had fun watching this Final Episode but it wasn't anything amazing. It's just a little bit of fluff that I was able to discuss for several paragraphs. I am very good at bullshitting posts about things no one cares about, but not very good at most other things. Oh, and I learned this series was based around a bunch of books. Wild!

Comic Review #43: 1st Issue Special #2: The Green Team (1975)

 

I'm surprised I haven't read more of this series. I'm pretty sure I own like the entire run. I mean it's only 13 issues but still. 1st Issue Special was a try out book where they would put new characters into each issue. Or they would bring back an old character that hadn't been seen in a some time. Dr. Fate, Creeper and Metamorpho and the New Gods were characters that were brought back for this series. Every other character was a new character and since I want to discuss every character I can from  both Marvel and DC it's time for us to discuss The Green Team. I had two choices to go through for these obscure goofballs because they appeared in this comic and then in another comic series for about 8 issues in 2012. I chose this because I remember it being a ridiculously fun comic book.

It's time to discuss Joe Simon. Joe Simon was in comics for decades at this point. At least 3 maybe 4 decades. He worked with Jack Kirby and they created a simple little obscure character known as Captain America. They created Boy Commandos and Newsboy Legion. They really liked boy gangs because well they were both probably in a gang of boys going on wild adventures. I've always liked his comics because the vast majority of them were bugfuck crazy. He'd probably not like being called bugfuck crazy but this is one of the more normal comics he did and it's still pretty wild. Jerry Grandenetti did most of his work in war comics which is a genre I should discuss more. He also got his art stolen by so called artist Roy Lichenstein. Me I just call that guy what he is a fucking thief. No one wants to read me rant about that guy who would take comic art panels from other people without any money given to the other person and make them into "high" art. Fuck that smug thief asshole.

Anyway back to discussing the comic and not some big dickhead. This comic involves a bunch of boy millionaires. I like comic book rich people but not real rich people so I do like these little goofballs. The first kid we meet is Abdul Smith. He wants to join a team and he does end up joining these boy millionaires when a bank fucks up saying he has 500,000 dollars and he puts that money into the stock market and wins. Commodore Murphy is a boy real estate king who buys a damn town just to fuck around with his toy ship. The toy ship has its own REAL BOMBS and it blows the hell out of the town. What a weirdo. He meets up with his friend J.P. Houston, an oil guy and most stereotypical Texan I've ever seen. The last kid was Cecil Sunbeam who is a movie making kid. I love how all four of these look so goofy and I can't get enough of them.

They get brought in by a Professor Apple who wants to create The Great American Pleasure machine. A machine that will give any person who goes inside the greatest pleasure of all time. The boys go for it and when visiting the building area for the Great American Pleasure Machine they get accosted by David D. Merrit a broadway producer who's afraid the Great American Pleasure Machine will destroy his job. He actually gets a meeting with the Green Team and all he wants is 50k to piss off. I'd have given him that but it wouldn't have made for a very interesting ending to a comic book but the Boy Millionares decide to throw away even more money to distract his the people following David D. Merrit. He decides that he won't let the Green Team get him and decides to take a ride in the Great American Pleasure Machine, and wouldn't you know it. It drives him fucking insane. I guess too much pleasure is not good for you.

FINAL VERDICT: a very silly yet very fun little comic book. I will probably check out the other series made 3 and a half decades later sometime soon. I would also like to find a copy of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade where they have TWO other Green Team comics. I loved the goofy cartoony art and had a great time re-reading this and I just wish we had more of these goofballs. A very charming and fun comic book.

The Final Episode #63: Land of the Lost (1974 - 1976)

 

Today we go back to the well of "Shows I learned of thanks to Jump the Shark.com". I think we need to talk about more 1970s television and all that on this little blog of mine. So I decided that if we were going to talk about a Sid and Marty Krofft tv show because they were the most 1970s thing ever. A bunch of sci fi writers and hippies got high and made tv shows for children and if this show was any indication it was awesome. I also have to mention the 2009 movie for being the movie that killed the small sub genre of "Movies based around TV shows" for a decade. I can't think of any movie based around a tv series made between that movie and CHiPs and Baywatch. It takes a lot to make Hollywood go "Yeah maybe we should reign this in for a little while" but Will Ferrell (a guy who can be funny and likable in many movies) at his absolute worst can do that. At least for a little while.

Sid and Marty Krofft made like so many tv shows that I've been wanting to watch forever. They all sound like some kind of wonderful fever dream. Land of the Lost seemed to best one to go through because it seemed to be the least insane show they worked on. Despite it involving monsters, dinosaurs and even time travel. They even helped make what is considered one of the worst tv shows ever made called Pink Lady and Jeff but I definitely plan to talk about that series in its own blog post so you will just have to wait to hear all about that gem.

Land of the Lost was about a father and his two children on a raft riding expedition where they end up in well The Land of the Lost. The Land of the Lost was this crazy place where dinosaurs still lived. They had some weird smart monkey cavemen creatures called Pakuni and some crazy bug eyed creatures called the Sleestak. I think Sleestak was one of the coolest monsters ever. The most famous person on the cast was probably Wesley Eure. Famous for being on Days of Our Lives, dating Richard Chamberlain (most famous for being Allan Quartermain in some cheeseball Cannon films... at least most famous for that IN my mind), starring in such film classics as The Toolbox Murders, Jennifer and a live action Hanna-Barbera movie about a robotic dog called C.H.O.M.P.S. and yes I've never seen Lord of the Rings but I've seen those movies (and the remake of the Toolbox Murders too!!) He also worked on a Nickelodeon game show called Finders Keepers. It sounds really bad. Apparently he helped create the PBS kids show Dragon Tales. A pretty good and interesting collection of stuff.

Seeing as this is a show I've seen for the first time I decided that I had to watch a few episodes of this show. So yep, another Extra Special Extra Sized Blog Post! It's like a comic book so I like to do these! The first episode was called Cha-ka in which the children Holly and Will find a pakuni creature named Cha-ka. He looks like a weird monkey caveman thing. I like him. I also like how he learns how to speak some English by this episode and the last one. That's a neat idea I think. He ends up hurting his leg and the kids and their dad have to help him and get him back to his parents. The second episode was called "The Sleestak God" and we first see the Sleestaks for the first time. Will and Holly get captured by them and it's up to Cha-ka and their dad to save them. We don't get to see the crazy looking monster the Sleestak's worship so I'm kinda peeved at that one.

The Final Episode however was called The Medicine Man and it starts off with Holly and Cha-ka making soup for the group, which now has their uncle Jack because the dad wanted more money because they started plastering his face on lunch boxes and stuff. I don't blame him. The pot with boiling water is stolen and we find out who the culprit was. It's a native American man named Lone Wolf. Yes, he's played by someone who is not a native American because this was 1976 and no one cared about anything then. He tells Uncle Jack that he needs to get back but he is too sick to go. They bring back Lone Wolf to the cave.

They learn about Lone Wolf being a Medicine man and taking medicine for his tribe. Will meets up with Elmo Diggs an Calvary man who is here to bring Lone Wolf back. I mean if they can even find their way OUT of the Land of the Lost which uh spoiler warning it's not really shown that they do. Elmo Diggs says that Lone Wolf has stolen the medicine but Lone Wolf says it was supposed to go to his tribe first. Elmo gets the FEVER FROM HELL and its up to Lone Wolf to save him. Lone Wolf goes off and everyone thinks he has left when he doesn't come back. 

Uncle Jack goes off to find Lone Wolf and finds him behind a large rock with Grumpy, a Tyrannosaurs Rex that tries to eat the cast all the time. Uncle Jack confuses Grumpy by sending a rock past him which causes him to go look for that while Lone Wolf escapes. Lone Wolf and Uncle Jack then go look for the stuff to help Elmo Diggs. Then they find the stuff and its the stereotypical scene of native Americans doing their thing. It's pretty wild. Elmo Diggs is saved and I think that just might be my favorite name of all time.

Elmo Diggs then decides to take Lone Wolf back to be put on trial and probably murdered until everyone is like "Bro he fucking saved your damn life" and he decides to not be a piece of shit. Elmo Diggs and Lone Wolf go off to find their way out of the Land of the Lost. We don't see them escape so I'm going to assume that they don't. Holly, Will and Uncle Jack don't get out either. Also Holly and Will were supposed to be in that terrible Will Ferrell movie I mentioned earlier but their cameos were cut out. I think that's pretty shitty but I also would be glad to have my cameo cut out of a movie that bad so It's kind of a weird moot point. I just wanted to point that out.

FINAL VERDICT: I would have watched the absolute shit out of this show if it had appeared in reruns during my childhood, but it's still fun to watch today as a so called adult. Oh, I also have to mention that Sid and Marty Krofft made Pryor's Place. Yes we gave Richard Pryor his own kids show. The past was a wild place.

The Final Episode #62: Astroboy (1980 - 1981)

 

You know if taking something from a different country and dubbing it somehow makes it Canadian content then Canada should have taken shows from all over the world, because I'm sure they would have been better than most of our actual home grown content. I need to start reviewing more of it but I really don't want to go look for it or even re-watch most of it. I just know when it was a live action Canadian show that's when the Super Nintendo got turned on and I played Donkey Kong Country 2 for a few hours. What I'm saying is that in our weird world Astro Boy counted as Canadian content because Canada did the dub and it showed on TV over here for like ever. It's probably the first thing I'd have ever seen that came from the Land of the Rising Sun. Except maybe Godzilla. It was probably one or the other.

Before I go any farther I must say that this show is one of the top 10 theme songs for cartoons ever. this is not a thing that can be argued, if you disagree with that fact you are a big four eyed lame-o who smells like fish and I do not respect or like you. Sorry. You can listen to it here. Now we can get into the history of this show. It was based off a manga which is pretty much a Japanese comic book. I'm surprised I haven't reviewed more of them because some of them are incredibly fun and should be discussed. I'm too busy talking about obscure Marvel and DC characters that only I care about. Astro Boy is definitely one of the oldest things I've talked about as it dates all the way back to 1953. Astro Boy is older than most of my family members. I think that's pretty wild. It had an anime series in the 1960s and I don't believe I ever saw a single episode of that series. I'm sure it was awesome because Astro Boy was an incredibly fun tv series and manga-comic. I shall have to discuss the best Astro Boy manga story soon enough because it's great.

I enjoyed the hell out of this show when I was a kid. I don't know what channel it came on but whenever I would come across it I would watch it. Honestly all that sticks in my mind is the theme song which is still kicking rad and if you disagree you can eat something gross. Astro Boy is the story of uh Astro Boy a robot who fights evil. He was created by Dr. Tenma who made him look like his deceased son. He ends up in the hands of Dr. Elefun. I know that's not his Japanese name but I love that name. It's a lot of fun to say. This Final Episode involves a lot of stuff so let's get into it. 

It turns out that Dr. Tenma had a prototype design of a robot that would be created before Astro Boy. These designs get stolen and Astro Boy has to sneak into the country of Grotta to get them back. He's given a disguise and everything. It doesn't last long because he has to jump out of a train because people are being searched at the stop he has to make. So he finds the robot he was there to look for already in  a little girl robot named Nuka. I think you already get what's already gonna happen with that name. Anyway Astro Boy ruins his disguise by trying to break through the fence and gets lasered to fuck. 

Nuka has Astro Boy pretend to be deactivated and just brings him into the fortress. Fortress is a cool word and should be used more. Astro Boy and Nuka talk about how Nuka wants a robot friend and the other robots in this fortress are heartless. We see some weird lizard looking robots and I gotta say I love how they get like 1 minute of screen time and they still get a great look. They didn't mess around in this series. Every character gets a great look. They get around and get stuck in a trap. Dr. Rindolf comes on the screen and  Astro Boy finds out that Nuka is the robot he's there to find! We also find out that this trap room is a fucking rocket, just like that Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends series finale. Astro Boy can't get out because this trap room is magnetized and the rocket is being sent into the sun. Dr. Rindolf does not fuck around.

Nuka however did not go back is out side on the rocket letting Astro know about that thanks to Morse code. I wonder if I learned about things like that from cartoons instead of school. Nuka and Astro end up having to fight a praying mantis robot. As I said I love how every thing gets its own fantastic look and this scene is great. Astro gets the praying mantis robot to beat his own ass which is great. They meet up with Dr. Rindolf who has so many robots with NEUTRON BOMBS in them ready to be finished and created. So in his hubris Dr. Rindolf just destroys the damn design for the robots which does not make Astro happy so he breaks the FUCK out of his robot creating machine which comes crashing down on Dr. Rindolf.

Nuka lets Astro know that the bomb inside her has been started and Astro doesn't want to leave her. He gets Dr. Rindolf back up on his feet to disassemble the bomb which means the end of Nuka because he cannot bring her back due to setting the designs on fire. They finally dissemble the bomb with one second on the ticker left. We then go back to Dr. Elefun and Astro talking about what happened. Astro says that her legs were all that were left and wants his legs replaced with hers so that they can be together forever. Now that's a fucking bittersweet way to end this episode. Damn Japan I didn't want to be depressed today!

FINAL VERDICT: This is one of the best Final Episodes. Action packed, bitter sweet, wild designs. I had a great time to watching this even if it made be a bit sad at the end. This one comes Highly Recommended. I'm really gonna have to talk about some Astro Boy comics soon enough. 

Movie Review #38: Black Roses (1988)

 

I haven't reviewed a movie since The Identical which was on May 23rd. I just haven't been watching many movies lately. However I was reminded of a small sub group of horror films from the 1980s that mixed Heavy Metal music and Horror together to great success. Rocktober Blood, Rock N Roll Nightmare, Trick or Treat, and Terror on Tour. I mean I liked Terror on Tour but I doubt I will be revisiting it for this set of articles. All of these movies are pretty darn wild and I knew I had to return to reviewing movies with something amazing that would knock the shit outta your cotton socks. This is the perfect movie to return with! 

This movie starts off with a band playing out to a sold out crowd. The band is called Black Roses and they are EVIL. Not fake evil but real hard core evil demon motherfuckers. It's weird that the protesting parents are shown to be right in this case. Strange. Some people try to stop them but they are too late the kids are now EVIL and will take over this town. Black Roses moves on to the next town, a small sleepy town known as Mill Basin. We meet this movies hero a dude with the second best mustache of the 1980s behind Tom Selleck. This man is named Matthew but I'm just going to call him Second Best Mustache Man. He's a high school literature teacher.

The parents want the band out of the town but are fooled at their first performance. They come out looking like they are Air Supply or some cornball band that only I could enjoy. Then once the parents leave, the lights go out and BLAM they are dressed like they are at some BDSM event. It's great. They then get to work using their music to take over the kids and turn them into demon creatures. The kids and a random boom box speaker start killing their parents and other members of the town and only Second Best Mustache Man can stop it.

Second Best Mustache Man has a kid (played by a 30 year old) who wants to bone him and when he doesnt she turns into this crazy fucking demon creature. I loved how many rubbery crazy ass monsters this movie has. It has so many wonderful practical effects. I loved them. They get into a fight and the monster sadly dies. Monsters are cool! Its finally up to the Second Best Mustache Man to blow up the damn theatre where the band is and save the kids! WILL HE DO IT? You'll just have to watch the movie and see.

FINAL VERDICT: This is a great piece of 80s horror. I don't even like Heavy Metal music all that much and I love this damned movie. The acting is all over the place and but all the characters are mostly likable. The main guy is probably the best actor of the bunch and yes he does have a mighty fine mustache. The kids being played by people in their 20s and 30s (it was the 80s after all) are clearly having the time of their lives being evil. You could literally write 30,000 words about this movie and all of the insane scenes in it. Like when a speaker comes to life and ejects a monster that captures a stereotypical Italian man and PULLS HIM INTO THE SPEAKER. Or the part with STRIP GIN. Yes the card game. Somehow the other movies I plan to talk about are even weirder than this one. The only downside is when reading up on this movie I found out the director John Fasano had passed away in 2014 at only fifty two years old. Very unfortunate. I enjoyed this movie and the other stuff he had done. Highly recommended even if you don't like the metal music!

Comic Review #42: Power Pack #14 (1985)

 

One thing that I now want to do with the Comic Review is as follows: Review at least ONE comic starring every hero in the Marvel and DC universes, no matter how obscure. Review one issue of every series ever published by Marvel and DC, probably more to be honest. Review at least every issue of one series. I also want to bring back What If Wednesday and Elseworlds Eroticism (what a terrible name) into the fold of The Comic Review. I also want to try to review more stuff that isn't Marvel or DC. I want to talk about First Appearances. I want to discuss more stuff from other countries. I want to bore you with discussions of Tintn and Manga! Everyone can't wait! I hopefully will go all over the place with Comic Reviews and bring you all kinds of cool stuff. Let's get into a series of comics that seriously should be more popular honestly. I'm seriously surprised that Disney hasn't made this into a cartoon series because it's superheroes who are kids! 

Louise Simonson has a long history in comic books. She was a fan of them as a kid. She was even the inspiration for the lady on the cover of the first appearance of Swamp Thing in House of Secrets #92. She ended up marrying artist/writer Walter Simonson. She wrote for the X-Men series X-Factor and New Mutants. She wrote for Superman and Steel and all kinds of series. This series here is one she co-created with June Brigman. June Brigman's art is fantastic and I wish she had done way more work for comic companies. This is the only series I can think of right now that she had a part of. 

Power Pack was a series about a set of four children. Katie, Alex, Jack and Julie Power who got superpowers from a alien race known as the Kymellia. They end up having to fight crime and make sure their parents don't find out about their powers. And work out all kinds of childhood drama. It's a neat take on the superhero thing and I've enjoyed every issue of it that I've read. This series is uh a lot darker and 80s' than the newer series. We didn't fuck around between 1980 and 1989. It wasn't in us. Anyway Power Pack #14 involves the kids getting ready for school. Talking about how they don't have as much money now that their dad lost his job with Mr. Carmody. Mr. Carmody was trying to turn the energy convertor he created into a weapon. It turns out that the energy convertor would have destroyed the entire damn planet so it was pretty good that the Power Pack destroyed it. Mr. Carmody is not happy. 

Katie Power goes to her Kindergarten class and BLAM fuckin' Carmody is in a fancy suit and has gone completely bananas and wants to kill the Power Pack. He kidnaps Katie and well Alex ends up seeing them and he tries to use his Gravity power to stop but Carmody uses his machine suit to send Alex off very slowly into space. It reminded me of that Simpsons scene where the Simpsons are driving away very slowly in a parade float. I like being reminded of when the Simpsons was great comedy. Jack Power sees them and tries to get his sister Katie to come help but only gets her into trouble when some jerk kids want to cheat and she gets caught. Not a good look Katie! They go out to help Alex and find Carmody. Rick finds Carmody and gets him to drop Katie so he has to rush down into the ocean to save her. They end up destroying the backpack he needs to fly and he falls into the ocean screaming about how he will destroy them. Carmody is a fucking lunatic.

We then go back to the school and Jack teacher some old ass brittle shithead literally makes fun of him. Asks him if fell into the toilet because he's wet. What a piece of shit. Fuck her. Don't make fun of your damn students. Katie is told that she shouldn't play with the water fountain on a cold day. Julie is being yelled at by kids who don't want her to rat on them. I think you should rat on people doing shitty things but I guess that makes me a bad guy. I dunno. Alex then is forced to run ten laps because he couldn't repeat a basketball throw he did earlier in the day. Kind of a dick move coach. You fuckhead. The issue ends with Alex realizing that he can fly if he controls gravity correctly.

FINAL VERDICT: I had a lot of fun reading this issue. A lot of great action, fun drama and enjoyable interactions between the cast. That's all I pretty much ask for a comic book series. I'm sure I will end up coming back to this series again and again. I bet you fine people can't wait!

The Final Episode #61: Fat Albert, The New Adventures of Fat Albert, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972 - 1985)

 

You know It's weird how things that were popular at the time just disappear into the hazy mists of memory. Fat Albert, I believe is one of those things. It was for 13 years a pretty popular television program. However after 1985 it just up and disappeared. Not any reboots or sequels except for a 2004 movie but really between 1987 and 2010 they were pulling out every tv show that had any kind of name value and making a movie out of it. It didn't matter as long as it was popular at one point. That movie is now 17 years old and no one did nothing with characters between then and now. I mean no one's going to do anything with them but I think by the name Cosby you can tell why. I finished watching several episodes and this was a pretty well done cartoon. It's a shame that other peoples hard work gets fucked over because someone involved with the show is a big old piece of shit but that's life for ya.

The first time stand up comedian, tv star, movie star, and serial rapist Bill Cosby ever mentioned Fat Albert was on one of his stand up albums entitled Revenge from 1967. Fat Albert was based around a kid he knew from his childhood. In 1969 they created a special for NBC called Hey Hey Hey It's Fat Albert. It was based around the stand up material. It was popular enough that they created a series around it in 1972. For CBS. The series was animated by our good friends at Filmation. It amazes me that Fat Albert was actually still on the air when He-Man and She-Ra and those Filmation shows were because they look so different from one another. Wild times. I also realized how many voices Lou Schiemer did for his cartoons. I guess it beat paying a voice actor to voice them. He's actually a pretty good voice actor to be fair. 

I don't believe reruns of Fat Albert ever appeared on any TV channel around me. I'm pretty sure the first time I heard about it was yet again on the website Jump the Shark where people talk about when a show went downhill. It was a fun website full of weird debates and all kinds of silliness. Sadly it was bought out and then taken apart. People tried to re-create it as Bone the Fish (which is a term that doesn't work as well and sounds like some kind of weird sexual thing that Troy McClure would be into) which is still up online but doesn't seem like its updated anymore. Ah well. There's still archive.org for all the fun internet memories of days gone past. Anyway since I don't believe I ever saw this show before today I watched 3 episodes so let's discuss them all. Think of this as a EXTRA SIZED issue of a comic book or something!

The first episode we are going to talk about is Busted. It's about the gang creating a giant slide and a makeshift pool in the dirt in their old Junkyard. Fat Albert tries it and it's not great. They try to turn it into a rope slide but that doesn't seem to work either. They talk about how they want to go to the city pool but its 10 miles away and they don't have bus money. Rudy one of the characters of the show finds a guy named Larry and wants to invite him to join the gang. Larry is a bad dude who enjoys stealing cars and well you can see where this is going they end up in the stolen car and end up going to prison to be scared straight. Like seriously this scene in the prison is wild. Some jacked up dudes talk to them about how awful prison is. PEDOPHILES try to hit on the gang members. Seriously. Watch this scene on youtube because it is fucking wild. 

The second episode I watched was called Gang Wars and it starts with the gang at a park cleaning it up for a re-opening. It's here where we meet Fernando and his brother who is in the 33rd street gang and wants Fernando to join. Fat Albert and Russell (Bill Cosby's little brother) have run ins with a rival gang and the rival gang wants to have a fight with Tito's gang. Except they have guns so Fernando and Fat Albert try to find Tito to warn him except it's way too late. Fernando ends up getting shot and Tito gives up the gang life. It's fucking messed up. They end up naming the park after Fernando. This is one thing you gotta give cartoons of the past is when they wanted to talk about a message they made sure you got the damn point.

The Final Episode was when Fat Albert actually went to first run syndication. It aired on August 10, 1985. 21 days before the person writing this stupid blog would come into this sweet beautiful earth of ours. I wonder if any show ended on my birthday. Either way this is like with MacGyver is that the first episode I watched was amazing and a lot of fun but the Final Episode I watched was not great. This one is probably better than MacGyver's last episode but I wouldn't rush out to see it especially when there are Fat Albert episodes about teenage mothers, skinheads, cults and other insane shit out there. This one is just eh, nice message but not very enthralling.

This episode starts with Fat Albert at his new job at the zoo. He's there to feed a elephant. I guess they don't have enough money to hire him to feed both elephants but whatever. The elephants name is Marvin and doesn't seem to like Dumb Donald. I like Dumb Donald and his hat. He has great tastes in movies as we learn later on. Even if theres a weird joke in this episode about him not being able to say elephant correctly even when he does. Fat Albert's mom is going out of town so he says he will cook for him and his dad and clean the house for her. Fat Albert tries to get some good food made but Rudy and Dumb Donald fuck up while watching the Invasion of the Flame Throwing Dragon instead of paying attention to the stove. Dumb Donald mentions how he's seen this movie ten times and I can't deny that I'm interested. In the end Fat Albert and his dad eat some cheeseburgers. 

We come back a day later and Fat Albert even gives up watching the Brown Hornet (a show within a show about a superhero voiced by Bill Cosby.)  and this show tells us the moral of the episode which is to care about your friends and help them. So they all decide to help Fat Albert with the house work so he can go feed Marvin the Elephant. Marvin is clearly the worst name for an elephant in the history of names. You name a Martian that, not a elephant! We then see Fat Albert and his mom together in a pretty nice scene and then Bill Cosby comes in and talks to us about attitude of gratitude, which is also the name of the episode.  As I said, a decent enough way to end a series but man you try following an episode with the gang going to a prison and a damn child getting shot. 

FINAL VERDICT: I'm glad I can put another show from the Jump the Shark days off the mental list I kept in my head and get to discuss it here for you great people.. 

Comic Review #41: Thor #451-452 (1992)

 

In my last Comic Review I mentioned that the next review would be Thor. A bad Thor comic from the 1990s. I searched the internet to find one that would work. Most Thor comics from the 1990s were pretty enjoyable. Not the best the character ever had but pretty quality worth owning in your collection comics. I didn't want to venture into the Heroes Reborn era because really I do not want to talk about Rob Liefeld and would like to keep it that way for as long as humanly possible. He and his comics are bad and you should feel bad for liking them. I then looked through some Thor covers and I saw this and I was like "Yeah this looks like something I could talk about" 

This comic was written by Tom DeFalco. He's worked for Archie and DC and Marvel for all kinds of characters. He does solid enjoyable work. His Spider-Man stuff in the 1980s was great. His Thor comics with Ron Frenz were pretty fun. He created Spider-Girl for What If and it was so popular they created a whole universe for her. Spider-Girl was good but the rest of it well I haven't actually read but they don't look to be as good as Spider-Girl. Her first series ran for 100 issues and her second series ran for about 30 I believe. She still has a huge following and I like her quite a bit. Gary Hartle drew the issue and his stuff is fine. I really can't say much about it but I do like the way he draws a demon. I always like a good demon. 

The comic starts out with Odin, a character who I think has always been a huge dick. Like seriously that fucker always seems to go to take one of his Odin sleeps whenever big shit is about to go down. He's like "OH SHIT SERIOUS STUFF BYE GUYS GOTTA NAP" Odin's a jerk too always trying to control his sons life. Fuck Odin right in the ear. He got his throne back from Heimdall, I'm curious as to what happened in those issues now. Odin's doing some shady shit for some reason and I'm interested in seeing where that goes. So at least the subplots are pretty good. At this point Thor was not Thor but Eric Masterson a human being, like back in the very early Thor stories where he was Donald Blake before those were retconned. People got angry at Jane Foster being Thor but it's not like there wasn't any history for those stories to happen. Eric Thorsterson apparently knows that the real Thor is in Mephistos realm. Now we gotta save them!

Thor then feels like Odin has given him the shaft when he's told that they need to work on getting Thor back from Mephisto's realm. He was brought to Asgard with Code Blue, a team of police officers that had super powered weapons which helped them in fights with supervillains. They were either very popular or Tom DeFalco who co-created them really liked using them because they appear a lot during this era of Thor. I like Code Blue they were a neat addition. It kinda makes sense that some police officers would have to use super powered weapons in the Marvel universe. The big powerful lady is saying goodbye to Fandral one of the Warriors Three. The Warriors Three are three of the best comic book characters ever and I love them. They get back to earth and Eric wonders if he should go see his son or visit the Avengers. Or get something to eat. We then see what really brings down this two part arc, Bloodaxe.

Bloodaxe is well very 1990s. He's an anti hero who shows crime what it REALLY deserves which is not a fair trial or anything but extreme death. All of these characters just popped of a conveyor belt and it doesn't feel anyone put any time into creating these characters. It appears he was popular as he comes back in a few issues. Hooray. Bloodaxe kills some drug dealers and it's harsh and cool and totally not try hard at all. I'm finding there's some fun stuff in the 1990s comic but every time I see a character like this I want to run back to the sweet beautiful arms of 1960s Silver Age Marvel. Bloodaxe pretty much looks like The Red Skull but on steroids. In the second issue we learn that the guy behind Bloodaxe might be controlled by the axe but I can't be assed to care about this try hard silliness. I do not like Bloodaxe.

Another subplot that will be finished up in #453 is when Sif and Balder the Brave, another set of great characters pop out of a damn portal and talk to Eric Masterson and when Sif finds out that the real Thor is in Mephisto's realm she just grabs the norn stones and flies to that realm without even thinking. It's pretty wild. She ends up fighting like a shitload of demons in the realm before being overtaken by Mephisto. Mephisto tells her he will let real Thor leave if she joins him. I think it's pretty silly that any hero believes what is literally SATAN of the Marvel universe but she does. Oh and Odin being a dick takes away magic away from Eric Masterson. Fuck Odin man. They end up going to that realm and see Sexy Badass Evil Sif waiting for them. I might talk about that issue some time later.

Since this was trying to be very Silver Age they also bring back a Silver Age era thing called Tales of Asgard. They were backup stories talking about the other Gods in Asgard. This story involves The Enchantress who was helping Hemdall take over Asgard. She ends up in the same realm that Odin threw Hemdall in. It turns out to be NIGHTMARE'S realm. You know the Dr. Strange bad guy. I love the way Geof Isherwood draws him in these issues. Yeah I should have talked about Geof in the paragraph where I talk about the people who worked on the comic but I'm very very lazy and I kinda want to get something to eat. The Enchantress fucks the shit out of Nightmare and his realm and swears revenge against Odin for well turning Hemdall into a damn jabbering husk of a man.

FINAL VERDICT: I can't call this a completely bad two parter because the stuff that does not involve Bloody Axe Joe or whatever his dumb name was really well done. It's just that fucker brings this whole story down. Still better than Iron Man. I don't know what's next but I'm sure I will end up talking about Captain America and The Fantastic Four and even Spider-Man during this whole thing. Why not?

The Final Episode #60: Saved by the Bell (1989 - 1993)

 

I really like how I choose shows for The Final Episode. Sometimes it's a show that pops into my head and then sometimes I go to look at my totally legal non pirated DVDs and I go "Hey why HAVENT I talked about this show? I then watch the Final Episode. I then vomit up a few thousand words about whatever television show I watched. I'm trying to keep from saying "Hey this is a clip show episode so you can just skip reading this because it'll be lousier than my usual discussions on goofy things like Saved by the Bell.

Saved by the Bell was a sitcom that ran for five seasons between 1989 and 1993. It ran on NBC on Saturday Morning and was a big deal. It even got NBC out of doing cartoons for Saturday Morning and in the 1990s it was Saved by the Bell and like 3 other Saved by the Bell ripoffs. Like the least interesting and not entertaining version of the show. It was like "lets give these snot nosed bastards what they want! the same damn thing" and this is coming from a man who's seen and liked about 53 Jaws ripoffs. Saved by the Bell ripoffs were very lazy.

The actual shows history is kinda interesting. It was first a show called Good Morning Miss Bliss that was made for the Disney Channel I believe. It was based around the adults of the school with the kids being more of a B-plot. Hayley Mills of The Parent Trap fame. It lasted a season but the creator Peter Engel believed it could work. They dropped all the teachers to bit parts and decided to focus on the kids. It was great and they could just shove the Good Morning, Miss Bliss episodes in as a part of the syndication package as a bonus! Just shove a scene of Zack Morris talking about how this was from before high school and blammo! 13 new episodes for everyone to enjoy.

The shows ongoing plot was well the adventures of a teenage sociopath named Zack Morris. He would constantly fuck over his friends and then try to win them back. I'm pretty sure grown up adult Zack Morris has several dead bodies in his backyard. Just saying. His friends were Screech, a big nerd and the best member of the cast. I loved that guy and I'm very sad that he died. I have a movie called Purple People Eater in which he AND Chubby Checker are in. That's something huh. AC Slater a jock who at first wants to date Kelly who Zack also wants to date but ends up dating Jessie, a artsy feminist weirdo. Kelly was the head cheerleader. Lisa Turtle was into fashion. and being black. 

I loved this show as a kid like capital L loved it. They would show so many episodes in the morning on TBS. Like at least 5 each day. It was like yeah shove on Saved by the Bell whatever and did this for at least a decade. I'm sure of it. I would watch this as much as possible. On days off from school or the summer or whenever I pretended to be sick. I once pretended to be sick for a damn week. It was great. I got to watch so much tv and play Super Nintendo that week! What a time to be alive. This show was ridiculous and I thought hilarious. The characters were incredibly fun and there's a reason why they actually went through with a reboot of it and not just saying "OH WE ARE REBOOTING (insert thing here)" and never do it. The reboot was actually decent enough too.

The Final Episode was called Time Capsule and involved a bunch of kids that were totally like the original gang finding a Time Capsule from 1993. So they watch the Video cassette and then random clips from old episodes pop up. Like one of these clips is a dream. How the hell did they get video of that?  So we just have Mr. Belding with a bad mustache watching these clips with the 2003 class that is just like the 1993 class because they think thats funny or interesting. Why not have a weird story involving the Time Capsule and these new kids and then have the old kids come in via video at the end. That would be better than another lazy ass clip show episode. I didn't even like clipshows when I was a kid. I don't know why they would bother rerun them. I guess they did it because Saved by the Bell only had 86 episodes and they needed every one they could but man no one wanted to watch a clip show ever. Except maybe in the days before VCRS and shit.

FINAL VERDICT: I like to talk at least a little bit about the Final Episode but there's really nothing to do with a clip show. I was going to go look for a list of what episodes these clips originally came from but I figured I'd be as lazy as the people who did this clip show. At least have the cast team up with David Hasselhoff from Baywatch or some NBC show that no one remembers now if your gonna do a clip show. FUCK.

Comic Review #40: Iron Man #327 - 328

 

I was going over my list of comic books that I have reviewed for this wonderful blog of mine and realized that I have not once talked about Iron Man, so I decided to finally confront my greatest Iron Man related fear! Teen Tony! Yes. It's finally time to talk about the time where Iron Man was replaced by his time displaced Teen self. In like 1995. Like not even a year away from Onslaught. I wonder if they knew the second before any of these comics came out that they were going to let Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee ruin him even more.

Yeah it's time to talk about the backstory to this little comic book. You see there was a Avengers story called The Crossing, which is considered to be the worst Avengers story ever and I can't wait to read it. Actually I can but yeah. In this story it turns out that Kang had been mind controlling Tony Stark for 30 years. I'm not one to get angry over every continuity error because really it's kinda impossible not to have them but something about saying 3 decades of Iron Man stories were all a lie and Kang's doing. Not a good look already. Then they realized that Iron Man would be dead at the end of this story because he ends up killing several Avengers, so some guy decided uhhhh let's bring his Teen self into the present. Yeah! Not realizing that people like to read Iron Man to see a dude own his own company and bang the shit out of like 3,000 women along with all the cool super heroics. 

I'm not the only person who felt this way. Len Kaminski who had been writing Iron Man and Force works for like years thought it was a terrible idea and quit. Yeah, by the 1990s it wasn't as easy as it was before to get a job at Marvel and he quit instead of becoming known as the Guy Who Made Iron Man Suck. It's a shame because his Iron Man stories were always pretty solid, not THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME, but still a worthwhile read. It's just not a concept that works, man.

The people who worked on these comics were: Terry Kavanugh, this guy along with Scott Lobdell is a name I do not like seeing. Every time I see this name I know I am not going to be enjoying this story. He's not only written some of the worst Spider-Man comics ever, he's also responsible for the Teen Tony shit. Not a fan. I'm probably going to bitch about his stories again and again for your enjoyment. Dan Abnett was co-writer and I'm just going to assume he had very little to actually do with this story because he's actually talented.  Dave Hoover is the artist and I like his style. It's cartoony and just enough over the top that makes for a fun read. This part of the comic I enjoyed. 

The story opens up with Teen Tony at the old Tony's will reading. Yeah, that's kinda weird and awkward. Anyway you get to see all kinds of old timey supporting players from old Iron Man comics which is always a nice thing to see. Then we go to a cryogenics factory. You know where Walt Disney is. It turns out that something has destroyed all the tubes and the boss who was at the main tube just GOT ALL THE ICE POWER and became a supervillain. Yeah, this is the laziest and dumbest Supervillain backstory ever. How does being frozen give you superpowers? Lame.

Anyway  Teen Tony then goes to Meredith McCall a lady he knew before he was pulled to the future. He finds her in a snow filled house which is actually a cool visual. If you guessed that the villainous FROSTBITE was married to her you'd be correct. What a shock!!!! He freezes Teen Tony into a popsicle and issue 327 ends. 328 opens up with him freezing the entirety of the neighborhood and apparently was nice enough to bring Meredith McCall out to enjoy the view, I guess? It then goes to Teen Tony fixing up a new set of armor to fight FROSTBITE. He somehow fights cold with cold and that wins the day. I'm tired of talking about this comic.

FINAL VERDICT: The goofballs on Twitter and YouTube who talk about the Iron Heart stuff being the worst Ironman related comics are wrong. These are. These were clearly placeholders until Onslaught came by and destroyed everyone and everything. I'm sure they were gearing up for that story which I still haven't read in full and am not rushing to do so. Yeah, I can see that Iron Man was on the cancel then reboot block with Captain America (which was actually a shame and I should get into why) Thor and the Fantastic Four if this is what was being put out. Bad stuff. I'll probably talk about some 1990s Thor next. Why not? It'll be fun.

The Final Episode #59: Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends

 

So, Spider-Man. We are going back to this well of easy content. Yeah, we are. You got a problem with that buckaroo? If you do then you should be sad because this entire blog is just easy content. I do not work hard for this blog I just like to write my thoughts down on dumb things and people clearly don't enjoy message forums any more and Twitter is a hellsite that should be destroyed. Blogs are all you have left of when the internet was fun. So I just treat these reviews and posts as really long message forum posts that no one reads because my grammar and spelling are usually so bad. Spider-Man for the few people living under a rock was created in 1962 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics. He got bit by a radioactive spider and his uncle died due to his negligence which made him become a superhero and punch jerks in the face.

Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was the third Spider-Man related cartoon. It came out in 1981 alongside Spider-Man. It shares a lot of the same animation and I guess Marvel was really all in on Spidey in 1981. I've only seen a few episodes of this show because for whatever reason YTV never showed it when I was a kid. You'd think they'd get Spider-Man and Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends and show them both. I think it would add up to about 50 episodes. That's not far from what the 1967 show had and they showed the hell out of that. I'm really sad that I missed out on these shows as a kid because man I would have eaten them up and asked for more. I loved the 1994 Spider-Man cartoon and the 1967 Spider-Man and these would have worked so well with them. Alas they had to put on some Canadian content that not a single person watched. 

I'm glad that I didn't go with my original idea of doing all four Spider-Man cartoons in a row because well you'll see when I discuss this episode. It would have been very hard to talk about them back to back. Anyway the Final Episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends was called "Mission: Save the Guardstar" and was broadcast on our television screens November 5th, 1983. It starts with Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, Iceman and Firestar (created just for this show and brought into the Marvel universe later on and became a New Warrior! AND an Avenger!) at a fireworks show. They realize that someone is trying to steal stuff from a building close by so they rush over there and find Lightwave, a character that only appeared in this episode and never again anywhere else. I don't know why they just don't put all new characters created for any cartoon or tv show into the comics but thats just me. They fight and Iceman lets Lightwave go away! Oh shit does Iceman know this girl!??!

Firestar and Spider-Man are found out by a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and he gets them to join in the search for Lightwave. He's not Jasper Sitwell or Dum Dum Dugan or Nick Fury or any S.H.I.E.L.D. agent because woah he turns out to be the bad guy of this episode. Yep, we don't get some obscure weirdo like The Wizard fighting Spider-Man. Nope we get a nondescript boring S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.  He says shes after the Quantum Adapter which could take over the Guardstar satellite. We then turn to another scene of Iceman thinking about stuff on a big old icy cool mountain. This was a neat scene. I liked it. We then go to another scene where a Lightwave is being brainwashed. Yep that's why I'm glad I went with Secret World of Alex Mack was because THIS IS THE SAME DAMN STORY AS THE LAST EPISODE OF SPIDER-MAN. 

They fight again and Iceman lets her go and THEN finally admits they are related. She's his half sister. Iceman then gets brought to BUZZ MASON'S EVIL LAIR. See, he's even got a stupid name. Iceman then pretends to be taken over by BUZZ MASON. They all get trapped in his lair. Oh this has a really dumb scene where Buzz Mason is escaping from Spider-Man down a tube because Spider-Man had broken the mirror to the room he was in. He just ends up back up in that room out of nowhere when Spider-Man and Firestar and Iceman were all on the floor and could be electrocuted by Lightwave. Weird.

Anyway they get trapped in an adamantium prison which I thought was neat to be shown. That stuff actually predates Wolverine's inclusion to the Marvel Universe. Neat factoid huh? I think so. Anyway they pull out one of those incandescent lightbulbs and iceman connects it to the thing to the electrical lock. They then see BUZZ MASON get into a fucking rocket and fly off. Of course they jump on. They freeze the outside of the rocket and Firestar burns a hole in. Then welds it open. So BUZZ MASON is trying to get close to the Guardsman Satellite so he can send Lightwave out there to take it over. BUZZ MASON gets the best of Iceman and shoots him out into space. Spider-Man then starts yelling about how Iceman loves her and this breaks Lightwave's brainwashing she saves him in the nick of time and BUZZ MASON has to go to prison and become Bubba's love slave. Oh and Iceman goes "It wasn't my doing. It was my sister who finally came home!" Blah.

FINAL VERDICT: I was not enjoying this episode for the most part. I liked some of the trippy visiuals it has for whatever reason. I also did like the random rocket out of nowhere last third but for the most part the episode with Medusa with the SAME PLOT is much more fun to watch. Anyway I don't think I will be discussing Spider-Man 1994 any time soon.

Comic Review #39: The New Warriors #1 (1990)

 

As I wait here to finally get my first dose of the covid vaccine I said to myself... no I needed to write about a better comic than Alpha Flight #106. I just had too. I also wanted to bother portnoyd and I know he has said before that he did not like The New Warriors so I decided to talk about them today. I was going to go with Namor but I had a feeling portnoyd would burst a blood vessel if I made him talk about Namor. So here we go with The New Warriors. The New Warriors was a series following a bunch of young heroes. Marvel does this a lot actually. I mean so does DC with Teen Titans, but Marvel has several young hero groups. Most of them are related to the X-Men. The New Warriors did not. They were created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in The Mighty Thor #410-411 which was a Acts of Vengeance crossover. I decided to go with their origin story because it makes more sense to me. Anyway let's discuss The New Warriors #1.

Fabian Nizieca has a name that I cannot type or pronounce. Well last name. I'm sorry dude. I like this guy quite a bit. He started with Marvel in the 1980s with I believe The New Universe. Yes I will get to discussing that in more detail. He worked on 1990S X-Men which I have mentioned I am not a big fan of that era. I really liked his Thunderbolts comics and I can't wait to check out more New Warriors. Mark Bagley drew fantastic stuff. He got his start with Visionaries, New Universe Stuff (hey just like Fabian!) and backup stories in Captain America. He drew New Warriors for 25 issues until he dropped that to draw the Amazing Spider-Man. Now that's something! He's done work for DC Comics and even Ultimate Spider-Man. I've always liked his art quite a bit. Good stuff.

The comic starts off with the lamest New Warrior himself Night Thrasher, a try hard version of Rocket Racer who was also a black guy on a skateboard but at least they knew how silly that concept was and went with it. This guy they want us to take seriously and he's an angry black man. It's 1990 and there's time for Klax and we are arguing about the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis and watching Space Jam and all of the black guys in our comics and tv shows were angry. Except Urkel. I mean Night Thrasher has a good enough reason to be angry but man this just reads as so cliched and silly. Night Thrasher is going to drop Nova off the building they are on. Nova is the oldest of these characters and probably my favorite. 

So throwing Nova off the roof actually brings back his powers, which we learn Reed Richards thought there was only a 35% chance of getting his powers back period. Personally if someone threw me off a Roof I wouldn't join a group of heroes with them. I would bring them to the fucking police and have them lock their crazy ass up in the local mental hospital. Jesus, Night Thrasher you suck. We then meet up with Vance Astrovik who at this time is Marvel Boy. He's trying to join the Avengers and the security robots beat the shit out of him until Captain America comes out and tells him he's too young to join the Avengers. He ends up meeting Night Thrasher and Nova. Oh and apparently this guy is the Vance Astro from Guardians of the Galaxy but the ones no one cares about. I'm sure I will end up talking about some of the comics they've done too but how these two are connected kinda makes my head hurt and I don't need that right now.

So Night Thrasher like a huge prick literally calls up FireStar and says he knows who she is and to meet them at this time. She's like "Couldn't you have asked me to join?" when she actually gets there. Namorita is around a park being torn down because people near it have been getting cancer and the government wants to find out why. Speedball is hanging out with his mom and being a hooligan. He ends up leaving her while she goes to buy a TV so he can fight with heroes on the TV. Yeah they end up fighting Terrax the Tamer, one of the 820,000 Heralds of Galactus. I like Terrax he's a neat fella and I enjoy his design.

The New Warriors after a fight get Terrax off the ground and he just turns to dust. It turns out that he needed to be near the ground to reconstruct himself. I do not remember this as a thing involving the character but I guess he was pretty messed up from that fight with the Fantastic Four. I'm pretty sure Terrax even comes back to fight the New Warriors so I'm sure I will end up talking about those comics too because despite some problems I did enjoy this comic. I enjoy most of the New Warriors (not Try Hard Thrasher though) I just think the fight seemed to end in a weird manner. It was like Aw shit I don't know how to fix this. Art was great but thats Mark Bagley for you!

FINAL VERDICT: This was a fun comic. I had a few problems with it but I still want to check out the next 74 issues and several annuals. They team up with Spider-Man in one! Who doesn't love to see that?

Comic Review #38: Alpha Flight #106 (1993)

 

Yeah I updated 3 times in a day. My blog is getting close to it's 200th post so expect a lot of posts in the next week or two because man I want to hit THAT milestone really badly. Also somehow just me and port have commented over 500 times on this blog. Can you believe that? I can but just because I like telling portnoyd he is wrong. However I feel he will not tell me I'm wrong about this comic book that feels cliche even for the time it came out. This is the infamous Northstar comes out comic which is almost 30 years old. I am old and my bones will turn to ash probably before I even finish this review. I hope they do because this is not a very good comic book.

Alpha Flight for those who are wondering is a Canadian super hero team from the Marvel Universe. Wolverine used to be a member. They appeared in X-Men several times during the Chris Claremont/John Byrne era which was a fantastic era for the X-Men and those comics are great. They got their own series that was written and drawn by Mr. Byrne and was very very good. Then around issue 30 or so Bill Mantlo takes over and it was still pretty decent. I mean I would still pick them out of the dollar bin if I saw them there. Then I think James D Hudnall takes over and it becomes a weird mess and not a lot of fun to read. Then it was a mish mash of writers until Simon Furman from the Transformers UK comic took over for the final set of issues. It ended in 1994 with 130 issues. The last few years of this series are really rough. 

I will never get how Scott Lobdell gets a job. I will never get how he has fans. I know every thing ever has fans but this is a guy who does not deserve them. I have not read a single comic book by this man that I have ever enjoyed. He's a poor comic book writer and this might shock some would rather read Rob Liefeld over Scott Lobdell. Yes I had to bold all that because it needs to be said. This comic is just another in a long line of works he's done that I find to be very poor and incredibly unmemorable. I've never seen anything else from the artist of this comic but I really do not like it. Even with the help of better artists, his stuff still looks ugly as hell. I'm sorry Mark Pacella but I am not a fan of your art.

This story starts out with a guy watching home movies about his life. They talk about how he was a hero during the Second World War fighting alongside the American heroes like Namor and Captain America. We then hear about how he went underground with his fight against crime in the 1950s and quit in the 1960s when he has a child. He's seen hugging the TV. Oh and I just forgot to tell you the man's name. He was known as Major Mapleleaf and I'm sorry but not a single person will ever make me care about a character with a name as that stupid. I know Alpha Flight was Canadian but Jesus christ do you have to be so on the nose about it?

We then see Alpha Flight fight Mister Hyde. One of my favorite villains. I love when he's teamed up with Cobra. He really doesn't do much here except get his ass kicked by Sasquatch. Remember when Sasquatch became a lady? Comic books are weird and I love them. Northstar is punched away from the group and he finds a baby. I mentioned this comic was about Northstar coming out and if you guessed correctly this baby has AIDS. I know it was a big thing in 1992 but reading this for the first time in 2021 made me go "wow this is cliched. I'm glad gay people get to have stories that don't involve a deadly disease.". He names the baby Joanne Beaubier. Northstar is a speedster and he's a jerk. Just like Quicksilver. I love those two. I don't love this comic.

Major Mapleleaf fights Northstar because he's pissed that the baby with AIDS is getting respect and love from the media when his gay son was left alone and forgotten. I'm glad gay people get to tell stories with these characters that aren't so depressing along with being cliché. Oh and Northstar comes out to Major Mapleleaf. That's the first person he comes out too. Yeah, that could have been the entire review but I like to make port have to read all this shit. He probably skips over a lot of stuff. Oh and the baby with AIDS. It dies because this comic book is emotionally manipulative and not very well done.

FINAL VERDICT: There has been a big push lately to let gay people write gay characters and black people write black characters and such and such. I am for it for the most part. I don't think any person who doesn't want to be shoehorned into being the black guy who writes black characters should be. I also think some one who wasn't gay that had talent could still write gay characters and stories. Still having gay people write gay characters and stories mean that they could be more true to life and that's always fun, but I still think anyone should be able to write these characters which somehow comes up as an argument with comics gate weirdos because they think you mean that gays should write gays and only gays which isn't true, what's true is I just want someone better than Scott Lobdell and his emotionally manipulative AIDS Baby stories to fuck off. (a few months prior to this issue DC had the Pied Piper, a Flash villain who became hero come out as gay and it was written wonderfully by William Messner-Loebs.)  Port will be wrong about what he says on this. Like a jerk. He loves Scott Lobdell and Bone claw Wolverine.

The Final Episode #58: Scooby Doo, Where Are You (1969-1970, 1978)

 

Since portnoyd has been spewing hateful, offensive and incorrect opinions in a discord server it's time for me to discuss something he knows is awesome but will never agree because he is a big stupid doo doo head. Every time he is bad I will talk about Hanna-Barbera or Darkhawk. He will come to love both of these things when I am done with him. So watch your ass portnoyd you big dickhead. So uh, I've talked about Hanna-Barbera several times on this blog but I'm not sure if I've ever done a Final Episode on any of the things they made. I think they made have animated Captain Planet because at that time they were owned by Ted Turner but I really don't know and Captain Planet doesn't feel like a Hanna-Barbera character. He's a Ted Turner character they had to animate. 2 Stupid Dogs, Dexter's Lab, Johnny Bravo and Powerpuff Girls were all Hanna-Barbera shows technically but they all feel like something completely new and so different from the rest of Hanna-Barbera's output. I put out the most schizophrenic opening paragraphs out there into the ether of the universe and I am very proud of that fact.

So Hanna-Barbera for those not in the know was an animation studio that started all the way back in the late 1930s with Tom and Jerry cartoons. That's where they got their start. Sometime in the mid 1950s they moved to TV with The Ruff and Reddy Show. They stayed in TV animation for about four decades until the late 1990s. That's impressive. Not many people could pull that off but Bill and Joe did! They were cool as heck! Now I'm not going to say everything they made was gold because uh it clearly wasn't. Some okay many of their cartoons should probably be forgotten to the dustbins of history. Alongside Veronica's Closet. Actually fuck that even the worst Hanna-Barbera cartoons deserve better than to spend eternity with Kirstie Alley. 

The cartoon series is one of the top 3 most enduring Hanna-Barbera properties. I would say The Flintstones and the Jetsons would be in spots 2 and 3. Even as a kid who would watch 42 hours of Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw with my dad I thought The Flintstones and The Jetsons were both really bad and not very fun to watch. I was a big fan of Scooby Doo which is probably the most popular Hanna-Barbera thing having started in 1969 and still being made fifty-two years later. That's impressive. 

Scooby Doo is popular because it's pretty simple. Just put some goofy characters in a scary setting with a monster and blam you have a fifty year franchise. I dunno that's why I liked it as a kid because I wasn't allowed to watch anything horror related for quite some time (I finally broke my parents down and I watched enough horror stuff to choke a cow) and Scooby Doo was a great little escape for some really kid-friendly scares. They made some pretty great monsters on that show. Portnoyd will disagree because portnoyd is a stupid asshole and can get fucked in the nose.

There have been many many many Scooby Shows since 1969 and I intend to talk about every single one. Yes, even the ones that go after the mandate I put on myself. I will even talk about that really kinda stupid sounding Velma show with Mindy Kaling in it that won't even have Scooby Doo in it because it was clearly supposed to be a new project that the people making it shoved a IP on it. The first one was entitled Scooby Doo, Where Are You? and ran from 1969 to 1970 with a weird revival season in 1978. I think they missed the much better theme song for the original show but I can never tell what those wild rascals at Hanna-Barbera will do. 

Scooby Doo Where Are You? final episode was called The Beast Is Awake at Bottomless Lake. It rhymes so I am very happy with that fact. It's also all over the place and ridiculous shit happens in this cartoon. It starts off with the gang of Fred, Velma, Daphne, Scooby and Shaggy all going someplace but the river has risen and made that road unusable and they get on another road and drive right into Canada. Of course the first thing they see is a Mountie. No port he was not riding a moose. Yes port I was disappointed too. They then meet a French person and my dad a grumpy Fisherman. They also meet a girl who says that she's a part of a family that lives by this supposedly Bottomless Lake.

They meet up with a rather cool lake monster. It's a giant fish with sharp ass teeth. I must say that I love the designs of the monsters they came up with for this show. Even the worst ones were still really cool. I don't know who did them but I would kiss them and buy them a beer. Anyway The Lake Monster does not want these kids messing around. So of course instead of going after the kids who are actually doing something it goes right for Shaggy and Scooby. Did any monster decide "Hey why don't I go after the kids actually doing stuff to stop my plan instead of these two lazy goofballs?" They get chased into a house where they find some green clay and a secret passage. Oh shit somethings up!

Shaggy and Scooby go back to the French guys store (yes he would say ze instead of the and go Ho ho! like every French person clearly does) and take some scuba suits so that they can check out the lake. I laughed at a ridiculously cheesy joke in this section. I think Hanna-Barbera is the reason I love cheesy jokes as an adult.  Scooby and Shaggy get chased and to escape from the monster they inhale a shitload of compressed gas and become Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. It's pretty fucking weird to see. Fred Velma and Daphne get ready to go scuba-ing and Shaggy and Scooby refuse but end up being scared by the monster to do it. Fred, Velma and Daphne capture Scooby and Shaggy in a thingamajig with the monster and Scooby hits the button to let water in and everyone is sent out of a sewer pipe.

Scooby, Shaggy, The Lake Monster and the henchmen all get tangled in a net and now we find out who is behind the crime! It's Jill! The lady that appeared in one scene! I think it always turn outs to be the character that appears in one scene. They talk about how the cat who was owned by the family she said she was apart of didn't like her. They were stealing gold which you only end up seeing at the last second. She also does not say I'D HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT IF IT WASNT FOR YOU MEDDLING KIDS. I think that line was like Beam Me Up, Scotty and it didn't really ever appear on any Scooby show from the early years but I couldn't tell you that for a fact. I'm not that nerdy.

FINAL VERDICT: If you like Scooby you should enjoy this silly little adventure. If you do not like Scooby this will probably not change your mind. I had a grand old time with the silly jokes and the weird looking Scooby and Shaggy as Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Floats thing. Seriously it looks kinda unnerving. Anyway this was a fun episode and I look forward to discussing many more Hanna-Barbera products. 

Comic Review #37: Legend of the Chaos God - Part 1 (Crystal Chaos - TaleSpin)

 

I remembered that Disney Afternoon shows such as Darkwing Duck and Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers had comic books and wanted to talk about them. I was going to talk about the Darkwing Duck comic from 2011 but I found out that the editor is big on comicsgate and is therefore a loser and we don't talk about losers on my blog (except when we do but shut up) and I don't want to talk about comicsgate again only give them mere mentions. I still wanted to talk about a Disney Afternoon comic and I was going to do one from Marvel Comics in the mid 1990s but then it hit me about the greatest Disney Afternoon comic of all time. A five part series that teamed everyone up to fight a evil snake god! A god of Chaos! 

Disney's Adventures was a magazine that ran from 1990 to 2007 for about 200 or so issues. It was a really fun magazine for kids. I had tons of issues as a kid. It was a small magazine that could hold in the palm of your hand so reading it now is probably really hard because I am old and my body is falling apart and the only way I can keep sane is to talk about things from decades past. Uh, Disney Adventures would talk about upcoming Disney stuff like movies and tv shows but would also talk about cool other things that kids might have been into like Star Trek! As you can see from the cover above. That cover does not have the first part of this story I was too lazy to count to 46 to find the actual cover so I grabbed this one because who doesn't want to see Pinocchio in a nice Star Trek jumpsuit!!

This comic story was written by a lady! I think that's a first for this blog a lady named Bobbi JG Weiss. Unless I'm incorrect and it's the first ever dude who uses I instead of Y for that name. Either way it's a first for my blog! She mostly did Disney work within the field of comics and wrote a series of novels about a girl and her horse called Ride. Not my bag really but hey I'm sure it has an audience. I like the art from a guy named Cosme Quartieri. You'd think information would come easy with a name like that but I can only find what comics he worked on. Apparently some DC comics and some Marvel comics and 82,000 Disney comics. According to the DC blog he died in 1950 and he must have had use of a working time machine because I read this damn story as a child in the 1990s (I had I think three of the five parts and I never got to read the entire thing until years later). Either way I really like the guys work on this series. All the characters look on model and great! I hope he is still alive.

The first part of this story was called "Crystal Chaos" and starred the cast of TaleSpin. Apparently TaleSpin takes place way before every other Disney Afternoon show, seeing as a character in this issue grows up between the time of this issue and the last issue. I did not know that but for some reason it doesn't surprise me. This issue starts off with Baloo bringing work supplies to Professor Potsherd (I read it as Pothead at first and was like ooh Bobbi you bein bad!!) and sees that the pirates led by Don Karnage trying to steal all of the artifacts via a net. Baloo rushes head first into the net sending the pirates and a emerald AND a setting that holds the emerald flying away. These will be very important in like a page so wait and see.

They all talk to Professor Potsherd and his son (his son will show up all grown up in a later issue!) about stuff and then we go to a scene where Rebecca is bitching out Baloo like she did all the damn time. Shit man saved the day and she still gives him grief. I don't like this character very much. She's a jerk. Anyway she goes off and in the barrel of something finds the EVIL EMERALD that houses the very being of Solego the Chaos God! He takes over Rebecca's mind with his power and makes her take the Sea Duck (Baloo's plane) away to find the gold setting he needs to escape from the EVIL EMERALD.

Rebecca under his control does this and Baloo AND Kit and Molly grab on to the side of the plane. Kit uses his glider to save Molly but finds out that it's way to hard to control it with two people riding it. They are about to crash into a building. Holy hot damn son! Thankfully he's finally able to figure out how to ride with two people and gets into the Sea Duck after Baloo opens a door thanks to being forced closer due to Rebecca going hog wild on the airplane. They finally get the EVIL EMERALD off Rebecca when Molly knocks her down to the ground (the look of EVIL in her eyes when she had the Emerald on is a great panel!) and Baloo picks up the EVIL EMERALD with some tongs or something and chucks it right in the ocean! It's someones elses problem now! Thanks alot Baloo you bum!

FINAL VERDICT: If you enjoyed the Disney Afternoon and you enjoy comic books I would tell you to check out this story in full. You'll have to find the Disney Adventures magazines but it'll be worth it! I do plan on covering each part of this series because it's a really good one but I don't know when I'll get back to this. I got a lot of stuff on my plate to talk about.