“You should know I taste terrible.”
Prime #13
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (July, 1994)
SELECTED COVER ART: Norm Breyfogle
COLORING (BOTH STORIES): Mickey Rose & Violent Hues
“Double Dangerous”
WRITERS: Len Strazewski & Gerald Jones
PENCILER: Darrick Robertson
INKER: Mike Machlan
ADDITIONAL COLORING: Keith Conroy & Tim Duvar
LETTERER: Dave Lanphear
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
“The Destiny Trail” prologue
WRITER: Gerald Jones
PENCILER: Scott Kolins
INKER: Jon Holdredge
LETTERER: Patrick Owsley
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A relevant comment was posted by Rakso5809:
Snape fails point one too, because his background is culturally relevant. He’s a man who grew up in the brutal, gritty poverty of Cokeworth, a fictional former factory settlement, dominated even years later by the smell of coal and soot, broken, cobbled stones and the chimney of an old mill looming over the whole area. He’s a representative of this British subculture, a child whose parents never managed to escape poverty, despite the mother being a witch. His character was formed by his abusive childhood under a father who represents this impoverished lowest cast of a society who moved on from them and forgot them. That history is defined by certain traits Snape absolutely personified in the books. The harsh and unforgiving treatment of children, as he himself experienced it during his youth as a standard he could never shake, the ruthless bitterness, the lack of emotional regulation. That’s all part of this heritage we learn about in The Half Blood Prince. He’s a remnant victim of strict authoritarian upbringing, of a father who most likely compensated the shame about unemployment by excessive drinking, and the poverty grown from industrial revolution and technology. There were no blacks in those communities, and they were often incredibly racist and bigoted, breeding grounds for nationalism and extremism. It’s a culture that bred the hooligans and Britain’s white supremacist equivalents.
So it adds a very important baseline for the character of Severus Snape, it explains why he was drawn to Voldemort, who provided scapegoats he could blame for all his misfortunes, and offered a alluringly easy way out of his misery.
It makes his eventual betrayal of the Death Eaters so much more impressive. Very few young men ever managed to leave those hate groups in real life. They rarely ever get out. It shows why he could never overcome his bitterness, he’d never learned how to do it. It explains why he hates Harry so much. With his authoritarian upbringing, Harry seemed weak, snobbish, ungrateful for all the attention he got and all the chances he had. Coming from a London suburban area, Harry was the impersonation of everything Snape grew up to despite, and he couldn’t see Harry’s suffering as it was, due to his own harsh background.
The host agreed that he did miss that, as he isn’t from England, and thus the swap actually does break all five rules.
No greater gift can be given than your life.
I almost didn’t have an Easter comic this year because I forgot to make one. 2026 is not starting off on the best foot. I only posted an old Easter comic for The Clutter Reports this week because I couldn’t get that project started. Of course things went wrong, and I had to get this comic out on time. I’m actually seeing the work schedule work, or how it can work at least. Now if I can just make money from it. I may need to find a job I can handle.
In the meantime, chapter 4 of How To Completely Lose Your Mind for our first Chapter By Chapter graphic novel and Act 3 of the never used CBS Transformers script “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog” are coming this week. The book has a while to go still, while CBS Transformers is almost done. I also got an award nomination I need to go through at the first opening this week, and then we see what else is going on.
Have a great week, everyone!
Here’s something that’s been in my Watch Later list for too long.
Godspeed is a pilot that posted to YouTube in late 2023. Created by Olan Rogers of Final Space fame, the pilot follows a girl on a dying Earth, the result of something in space. She travels with a karaoke robot around the area looking for signs of life, signs of hope. Her biggest worry? That she’ll be forgotten, even though she still hopes that her uncle will come save her.
The pilot seems to be an episode one. While going over the pilot for CBS’s failed Transformers attempt for Saturday morning, I came across the Transformers Wiki entry on the failed pitch and this statement:
- The pilot’s odd backstory is another example of meeting the network’s requirements, what with the whole conquest of Earth happening offscreen. In the section “HOW TO WRITE A PILOT”, Scott brings up the crucial detail that “99 OUT OF A 100 TIMES THE NETWORK DOESN’T WANT AN “ORIGIN ” PILOT. “The reasoning being that an origin story is usually unrepresentative of the show as a whole, while a random adventure can better demonstrate what the show is going to be like on a week to week basis.
- Another piece of advice is that if “you’re trying to sell a show to a network exec, you want to reveal as much of the show as you can in the pilot.”
Remind me to bring that up again in the next part of the pilot script review. This, however, is an origin pilot, as where Iris starts isn’t where she’s going to end. Events lead to her true adventure. Here we’re just setting up the reason for the adventure. I guess either method makes sense.
The pilot has some decent sized actor and voice actor credits: “Featuring the voices of Troy Baker (The Last of Us), Claudia Black (Farscape, The Nevers), Bryce Charles (Big Nate), Coty Galloway & Olan Rogers (both from Final Space) and a few surprises.” I don’t know who the surprises are, but Bowie the karaoke bot sounds a bit like Patton Oswald to me. At any rate, enjoy.
Before Executives Took Credit, Tony Baxter Built the Disney Parks You Love
You may not know the name, but if you visited a Disney park that hasn’t been ruined by the current leadership (or lack thereof) you know his work. Tony Baxter was, according to That Park Place, able to take the way Disney told stories in movies and to a lesser extent television and translate that to the rides and attractions in the park, from Splash Mountain to Big Thunder Mountain. Losing that level of integration in favor of the usual corporate thinking about rides that Walt was trying to avoid is a symptom of the larger problems at Disney in the 2020s.
I remember why I did videos for longer examinations of stories. It takes to long to do a beat-by-beat review of an episode in article form. I thought I was going to be doing a “final thoughts” post today and moving on to a new subject. Instead, last time I was only able to cover act one of “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog”, the chosen pilot for this attempt to bring the Transformers to CBS. It’s only a pilot script. Based on current information no actual episode was produced in animation. So why was it rejected?
In Act One we were introduced to our main heroes. We have Optimus, who is Optimus, Jazz, who has an extra “z”, I’ve learned, because the initial figure would have had three “z”s in name, Trailbreaker, who is only slightly more there than he was in the actual show, Muffler, the not-Bumblebee screw-up, Wendy, the girl, Firecycle, the robot girl, Eddie, who is the embodiment of everything wrong with a “kid character” under far too many writers, Matt, who is the cool one, and Mirage, who is also here. For the bad guys we’ve only seen Negator, Megatron’s replacement because CBS hates guns, Starscream, who is Starscream, Soundwave, who also seems the same, and Buzzsaw, who is actually remembered as the toy Soundwave came with and can talk now.
Long story so far short, Jazz and Trailbreaker took over a Decepticon steel mill being used to build more Decepticons (no Vector Sigma or stored away personality components required) and rescued the captured humans. The Decepticons, who rule the planet in this version, are setting a trap, but only Burt knows that the devices hidden around the mill are Decepticons. Too bad Burt’s a dog, as we head into act two of CBS Transformers.
Some people are very sensitive to fashion criticism.
Miracle Comics #2
Hillman-Curl, Inc (March, 1940)
The fact that I had to look over the first issue’s review just to remember if it was worth reading tells you how memorable it wasn’t. Apparently the early stories were good and the comic got worse as it went along. The review was neutral enough to give it another chance, but I’m not holding my breath. The problem here was the same with video games in the 1980s and even media today. There was so much out there that the potential to be mediocre to garbage was high as a result. The last issue was mediocre. Let’s see what happens with this one.
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
BW Media Spotlight 