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At least it gives me art practice.
The archive as I write this dropped everything before #219, has images that don’t belong there, and there are so many comics it makes more sense to break them up by creation year (not calendar year). So I’m in the process of that now. Hopefully it’s done by this time next week, which will be the comic’s anniversary, which I didn’t even realize when I decided it was time to make this fix. Next week will be the usual Best Of in place of the comic, with a programming note for site updates posting the same time here as my usual article for The Clutter Reports.
Speaking of which, this week’s report is unfortunately on a failure, since I’m still trying to get Batman: Vengeance running. I’ve been trying to get this going for twelve years, it turns out, but I have been sick on and off and struggling to get into a creation pattern. Plus I have a plot for this year’s Captain Yuletide to turn into a comic by December 25th, and even for a minicomic in my minimal art style, that takes time. I’d like to get a few more of this year’s declutter goals done by the end of the year if I could.
In addition to all that, we have the next chapter of Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic for Chapter By Chapter, and hopefully some interesting discussion topics. Have a great week, everyone! Hopefully I don’t have any big distractions.
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This might look cool if I new what they were safely leaping from.
Amazing Mystery Funnies #20
Centaur Publications (May, 1940)
COVER ART: Greg Chapian
And so we begin the May, 1940 comics–or at least that’s the cover date. If comics in the Golden Age are like today’s, and many of the oddities of publishing started here, the comic might have come out a month or two sooner. It is easier for Comic Book Plus to catalog, I guess. Either way, the comics wouldn’t know that Winston Churchill is now the UK Prime Minister and preparing to seriously push back the German advance. Plus we in the US still weren’t involved in the war. That won’t happen until the end of the following year. The people might not have wanted in, but if the writers weren’t trying to get us involved, they were at least milking it for story ideas, what with all the not-Germany countries trying to get us involved in the war as part of some take-over-the-world schemes we’ve seen.
We’re starting off with this comic, but it should be noted that one of the stories listed, “Space Patrol”, isn’t in this issue. Whether it’s missing from the scan or dropped before publishing I couldn’t really say. This being the first month using the reading list, that means it’s been consistently interesting enough so far. Let’s see if that trend continues.
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Will “The Critical Drinker” Jordan has brought his Ryan Drake novel universe back to indie films with his second movie, Trial By Fire. His first film, which I’ve looked at before, wasn’t perfect. There were some flaws, but points for a critic trying to be part of the solution. It beats that time Roger Ebert gave it a shot, but it was amateur work…which given he’s adapting his own works for the first time with a low budget I kind of expect. It’s grading on a curve, but we have to start somewhere.
This film is also set in the Ryan Drake universe, but focuses on Keira Frost, a new recruit to The Agency, who is assigned to Drake’s team. We also see her history, what brought her to this point. I’ll do a review with spoilers afterwards, but given the last movie was also a Saturday Night Showcase, it seemed right to do this one, too.
So, did Jordan learn anything from the previous movie? Did the director, Travis Grant, bring us a better movie than last time at least? Check out the film, and then my review. Enjoy?
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One of the advantages of voice acting is that you can be literally anyone or anything. A different race, not even human–not even biological, a powerhouse, a mouse, even gender isn’t necessarily limiting. Until recently most little boy characters were voiced by adult women. All you have to do is be able to pull off the performance and voice that make us believe the character is a real person. This is true for audio dramas, cartoons, and video games. At least until recently, as the “looks like me” crowd keeps insisting you can’t get buried in a role. People need to see “you”, not the character you’re playing.
Take for example Debra Wilson. The voice actor and mocap actor has done a bunch of video games lately, but even when playing a pre-existing character, like Amanda Waller above or more recently Callisto (a traditionally white character and there’s no reason she has to be voiced by a white woman for the animated character to be white…until the 2020s) in the lambasted recent Marvel’s Wolverine game, it doesn’t look like the character. It looks like her. That’s a bit more acceptable for original characters, but even that isn’t necessary. Gamers are getting annoyed that every character she plays, and she’s good at what she does (no, I’m not making “that” reference), but apparently someone else is disappointed that every Debra Wilson character in games looks like Debra Wilson…namely Debra Wilson herself! Apparently it kind of takes the fun out of playing roles you’d never be able to in physical live acting when the character just looks like you anyway.
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When superhero comics first evolved from the pulp heroes, there were no supervillains. They fought mobsters, drug dealers, smugglers, cheating gamblers, and then the war happened. Once the Axis powers were defeated in World War II, a stronger villain was needed to make the heroes more interesting, and the mad scientists, alien invaders, and previously unknown underground and undersea worlds weren’t enough. Enter the supervillain, because a hero is only interesting if they have a good villain to challenge them.
Some villains can take on more than one hero. The Rhino started out as a Spider-Man foe, but he can also fight the Hulk. Kingpin usually challenges Spider-Man and Daredevil in comics and cartoons, but in live-action I don’t think Spider-Man’s ever met him. Doctor Doom fights pretty much every Marvel hero at least once. Even short-lived heroes like Solarman have tangled with him or one of his Doombots. Had they been left tied to the Marvel Universe outside of issue #3 and the Savage Land I’m pretty sure he would have even gone up against the Autobots. However, a villain usually serves as an opposite for the hero, challenging either a hero’s abilities or his moral center. Or both if you’re Lex Luthor. Loki has challenged Thor separately and the Avengers together even without Thor.
Below are two examples, one DC and one Marvel, of villains who debuted in the live-action hero universes recently, the only media Hollywood cares about, and how their debut was against the wrong hero. These villains, outside of an occasional appearance, were otherwise exclusive to a particular hero. Just not the one Marvel or DC Studios opted for because they think they’re smarter than the guys who created these characters or the fans who made the characters popular enough to be adapted in the first place by connecting to the characters under writers who cared about what they were doing.
BW’s Daily Video> Where Disney/Pixar Went Wrong
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on October 16, 2026 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, Disney Entertainment, Disney/Pixar, Pixar.
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