“We brought a souvenir back from Paris.”
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite #1
Dark Horse Comics (October, 2007)
“The Day The Eiffel Tower Went Berzerk”
WRITER: Gerald Way
ARTIST: Gabriel Bá
COLORIST: Dave Stewart
LETTERING: Blambot
EDITOR: Scott Allie
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Rachael Edidin & Siera Hann
Last time the epidemic hit. How it connects to IDIC is still a ways through the book.
Now we move to the Enterprise and our main characters. In the show the cold open would have started with the crew arriving just in time to witness the tragedy. This not just true of the original series and it’s animated spinoffs, but other shows in the franchise, though I’m not fully exposed to Kurtzman Trek. (What I’ve been exposed to is bad enough.) It is the usual pattern of the show. We join in on the crew, with a Captain’s Log (or one of the other characters) telling us what we need to know going in, and some episodes didn’t even need that, then we’re there with them when the inciting incident begins.
This isn’t always true in the movies. Some films started without the crew, following someone else as they get killed before the usual group arrives to reduce further death. Not completely stop because we have to raise the stakes by killing off some extra. So you could make the case that Lorrah was inspired by the movies, starting with the council on the science colony and not even a mention of the famous crew of the starship Enterprise. Then again, this isn’t a show or a movie. It’s a novel, and we’re getting to them rather quick. I just have this thought in my brain when it comes to adaptations that I want to feel like I’m reading an episode of the show, whether it’s a novel or a comic, or playing through one in a game. It’s one of the reasons I reject the adultified reimagines of my childhood Dynamite is putting out lately. It’s not completely new. Even the in 1980s there were comics that felt nothing like the show they were based and the DCAU tie-in comics often leaned more towards the regular DC comics universe than the shows they were based on.
This is an observation of myself more than the work at hand. Lorrah did what she needed to do for the book, to set up what the rest of the story is going to be about, a mystery plague attacking the colony. Putting the focus there without the crew allows the readers to already see the stakes are going to be desperate so that this chapter we’re seeing how the crew are going to feel about the news and how they’ll be drawn into the events. Not every observation is a critique or pointing out a negative. To understand story choices you need to understand the good, the bad, and the neutral. The neutral is unavoidable so you push for the good and avoid as much of the bad as possible. As we head into chapter two, the fun is finding out which is which.
“Never a Power Ranger around when you really need one.”
The Night Man #11
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (August, 1994)
“Turning On”
WRITER: Steve Englehart
PENCILER: John Dennis
INKER: Thomas Florimonte
COLORING: Mickey Rose & Foodhammer!
LETTERER: Kevin Cunningham
EDITOR: Roland Mann
Catch more from TJOmega on YouTube
I remember seeing the scans when they first came out and that was a horror to see. I don’t think I saw the second set of pages, just to where they combined. Combination is my favorite secondary gimmick in Transformers (blame Voltron and Mighty Orbots) and even I don’t need Dinobots combining. They’re cool the way they are and they stand out as a team. Plus we have more than five now in the toyline and Rescue Bots/Rescue Bots Academy.
Come on, Leon. You know he’s just going to buy more comics.
Speaking of comics, over at The Clutter Reports today events pushed the next stage of the comic digitizing mega-project forward a tad, so I can show off the early scanning process.
I’ve got a disruptive weekend coming, but this week showed I might at least be able to get articles up at a decent time. I shouldn’t miss any, but you know why if I do. That’s the end of the week, though. We still have the Chapter By Chapter review of Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic coming, that should be bringing us to the Enterprise crew. There’s also the usual comic reviews. It’s Saturday Night Showcase I’m worried about, but we’ll see how that goes.
Have a great week, everyone!
My favorite Saturday morning cartoon wasn’t Superfriends, which will shock more than a few long time readers. It’s still one of my favorites, and what got me into DC Comics, but the true winner was season one of Flash Gordon, a 1979 NBC Saturday morning ender that I was happy to watch on the little black and white TV in my room. Then season two came along, the network decided to kill the serialized format of season one and force a cute sidekick character that offered nothing to the plot and some episodes even took away from the season. I will defend many of the “mascot” characters but not all of them.
Sorry, Gremlin. On another show I might have liked you, but you don’t fit here.
I told you I didn’t forget what you did!
It wasn’t until years later, through the internet, that I learned I missed out on the TV movie that led to the show, often called either The Adventures Of Flash Gordon or The New Adventures Of Flash Gordon despite neither being what Filmation put on the title card, hadn’t aired until NBC saw a way to cash in on the live-action 1980s adaptation of Alex Raymond comic strip that it saw air. That’s because NBC took one look at the movie and said “forget that, go make a series!”, and then screwed it up when it came to the second season. Typical.
Lou Scheimer had learned to draw by copying Flash Gordon comics. They were also inspired by the classic series of serials (more than one serial) starring Buster Crabbe as the man who fell to Mongo and eventually rescued the world from Ming The Merciless…and then the comics didn’t end because Mongo is a very dangerous place. I wonder if it inspired their take on Eternia?
Anyway, back to the movie. Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure Of All was originally created for NBC’s Sunday night family movie. The show, being on Saturday morning, had to remove the Nazi reference and put a few more bits of fabric on Aura’s outfit but it made me come back every week to see the next episode and why I enjoy serials today. Vic Perrin voiced Ming in the movie, but Alan Oppenheimer replaced him in the series, which was a completely new story from the movie.
The movie would get released online as a VCR recording of the one airing…but since it was the early days of the internet tying up phone lines that was only possible in pieces, through torrents and taking a lot of time to get all the parts together, which the downloader would have to assemble themselves. Today we have YouTube and streaming capable bandwidth.
There are two videos below. One is taken from what appears to be a Japanese home video release, or I’m getting my Asian alphabet wrong. It’s the cleanest normal copy I could find. If that bothers you, the cleanest copy overall was an AI upscaled version, but the AI did a few things I found distracting in the scene where Nazi blimps were bombing Warsaw. Scheimer and his family escaped Germany just before the war. In his book on creating Filmation, he told the story about how his dad allegedly knocked Adolf on his keister when he was still a soldier spouting his nonsense at a local gathering spot, and Lou’s dad’s fist let him know what he thought of the man. Yeah, I’d run, too. So choose your most standable version, ask when a proper remaster has never been done, and enjoy!
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 
BW’s Daily Video> Screw Nuance, Give Me A Memorable Villain
Catch more from Yahtzee Croshaw on the Second Wind YouTube channel
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on June 23, 2026 in Video Game Spotlight and tagged commentary, Computer and Video Games, Second Wind, Semi-Ramblomatic, Villain, Yahtzee Croshaw.
2 Comments