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“Should I use the Will Ferrell voice or the Troy Baker voice?”
LEGO Batman FCBD Special Edition (a tie-in to the upcoming Legacy Of The Dark Knight game)
DC Comics (June, 2026)
“The LEGO Batman Returns”
WRITER: Ivan Cohen
ARTIST/COLORIST: Paul Lee
LETTERER: Tom Napolitano
EDITOR: Michael McCalister
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Catch more of Yahtzee Croshaw and his friends on the Second Wind YouTube channel
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I was wondering how to discuss this. While BW Media Spotlight isn’t culture war related, ignoring the negative impacts of the culture war on storytelling is harder and harder to do. Angel Studios’ recent Animal Farm movie is part of the big discussion in storytelling not only because of the movie itself but Angel Studios appearing to do their own “diss” video. When Amandla Stemberg dropped her infamous “diss track” against classic Star Wars fans for not supporting The Acolyte and blamed it on bigotry instead of her show supporting the franchise’s bad guys and screwing around with the lore, it didn’t appear to be done by Lucasfilm or anyone else at Disney. When Robert Picardo attacked classic Star Trek fans for not supporting Starfleet Academy because it made Starfleet look like a bunch of morons, he just pointed a camera at some ducks and compared them to the fan base. Both were stupid but they weren’t done by the studio involved.
The above video, coming from Animal Farm‘s X-Twitter, is officially recognized and produced. So this attack on the fans is not doing them any favors. Whether Angel Studios themselves were involved or just the producers of the movie, it still reflects on them for not even acknowledging one side or the other. Angel Studios gained a lot of support for daring to release The Sound Of Freedom, a movie about fighting child sex traffickers. Nobody else in Hollywood wanted anything to do with it, not even people who support Cuties, but I’m going to leave that alone because it’s off topic and squicky. Although one of the jokes, intentional or not, is taken as a swipe against The Sound Of Freedom because one of the pigs calls his farts that. Even if it wasn’t referencing the movie, given everything else going on it’s not helping their case.
So I want to go over the arguments made by the video, explain what I see as the problem, and may put some perspective on this aside from the angry rants. There is a lot wrong with this movie, and of course the people who made it don’t see the problem. There’s a few comments in particular I want to focus on that show how little they understand about their critics and the movie they were making, and one is typical for Hollywood. For the record I have not seen the movie, nor do I plan to for reasons that will be clear in the review. This is going over the complaints by critics and disses that have become far too often from the Hollywood types and our old SEECA pals.
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This isn’t the time to show off your new smartwatch, Matt!
Energon Universe 2026 Free Comic Book Day Special
Image Comics/Skybound (May, 2026)
COVER: Pve Parr
LETTERER: Rus Wooton
EDITOR: Ben Abernathy
Even taking time away from Golden Age comics I still have an anthology. The main story takes up the bulk of the comic with three short side stories. This adds MASK to the Energon Universe, the latest attempt at a Hasbro shared universe. I already have a separate article about my problems with trying to shove MASK and VENOM in the same universe as Transformers and G.I. Joe, and maybe I will some day. For now I’m going to focus on the presentations we’re given.
MASK
[WRITER: Dan Watters| ARTIST/COLORIST: Pve Parr]
The focus on the story is Miles Mayhem recruiting for VENOM (I wonder what the “E” will stand for now, given how “evil” is treated by modern writers?). His first recruit is Vanessa Warfield, a former CIA agent cut for violent tendencies, which as Matt Trakker points out means they sent their own enemy to blow themselves up by giving her a reason. I’m actually not against this addition to her backstory and she’s less of a man-hating bitch in this story. As Matt and Alex Sector (now a master hacker but they kept his age–that also works) discuss his previous hiring attempts we get Sly Rax in a Russian prison, an expert sharpshooter and psycho. That last part I’m not buying. Rax was more of a greedy snark machine, with a Jack Nicholson style of speaking in the cartoon. He’s not supposed to be Bullseye from the Marvel Universe. There’s no sign of Cliff Dagger, which is disappointing.
Mayhem’s goal is changed here as well. Originally he was just a terrorist in the DC Comics and a criminal gang leader in the cartoon. Matt is of course race swapped again (why Hasbro keeps doing this when Hondo keeps getting the Rhodey treatment I don’t understand), but unlike the IDW take isn’t some taken-in street kid, at least when we meet him, though again Miles was his former mentor and there’s still no sign of his son or his kid brother designing MASK and VENOM’s vehicles and masks until Mayhem’s betrayal. Instead, Mayhem now wants to protect the world from aliens, convinced only he can do it, and we can assume he means the Transformers. Like we haven’t seen that before. Matt summons the other MASK members from around the world, and I’m concerned how that’s going to work. The original team was multiracial but all Americans who lived close enough to keep civilian jobs between missions. Matt comes off better than the IDW version but so much is different from what I already liked, and given how violent Skybound’s other adaptations are (Super Dinosaur was a fluke, I guess, but I really liked that comic) I can guess I wouldn’t like this one, either.
Transformers
[WRITER: Robert Kirkman | ARTIST: Jason Howard| COLORIST: Sarah Stern]
I’m not even sure why they bothered with this one. It’s so short nothing is able to happen. (Something else I get from the Golden Age reviews.) In what I assume is the Amazon we see a woman fight a giant snake before returning to her dwelling…within the chest of a dead Ironhide. Already I have problems with Skybound’s take on Transformers due to killing off my favorite Autobot in the first story arc. Kirkman took over recently and decided to have Optimus just hand the Matrix Of Leadership over to Elita-One, in a move that made him look weaker than Simon Furman writes him and made Alita into a real bitch, and Arcee is now “Arcee Magnus” because that’s a title now and not just Ultra Magnus’ name. Even TJOmega didn’t like these changes, partly for different reasons than me (you can be important without being the Most Important Ever, but writers can’t seem to grasp that). This is barely a Transformers story, if not for Ironhide’s “shock” reveal as a dead house and frankly didn’t even need to be here. It tells you nothing that would get you interested if you didn’t already like Ironhide. It’s another example of Kirkman using gimmicks instead of continuing a story that had a decent fan following.
Void Rivals
[WRITER/CO-CREATOR: Robert Kirkman (Lorenzo D Fellici as the other creator)| ARTIST: Conor Hughes| COLORIST: Patricio Delpeche
This is the original series Kirkman shoved into Hasbro’s shared universe for some reason and the only thing I’ve seen link them as an outsider. Some aliens crashland on Junkion, one of the pilots being a sycophant to his mentor. There they meet Arkonus of Cobra-La, who was taken in by the Junkions but will work with the newcomers in favor for a ride back to Earth. How did he get here? Are the Junkions okay with this? Historically they never start out that friendly. In the end I just don’t care, which has been my response to Void Rivals in general.
G.I. Joe
[WRITER: Joshua Williamson| ARTIST: Tom Reilly| COLORIST: Lee Loughridge]
It’s Zartan’s backstory in this continuity, how experimenting with Energon led to his mimicry abilities but turns his skin blue in sunlight. Okay, sure. I guess it works for this continuity. Making him part of some secret shadow group within GI Joe now seeking revenge feels unnecessary. And while a story of Zartan replacing General Hawk sounds good in theory I have trust issues with this whole continuity as it is.
overall
Yeah, I’m still not invested in this universe. While there are crossovers I like, this isn’t one of them.
BW Media Spotlight 
Fanfics, Not-Stalgia, Or Brandfics?
Because of course it looks like the Atari symbol. Branding is important you know.
Since I’ve started this site I’ve found myself coming up with new terms that explain what I see going on in the storytelling world. The latest was “SEECA“, an acronym of “Snobs, Egotists, Elitists, Corporatists, and Activists”–the five biggest problems with modern entertainment across the board. Others have included “Eventitis“, an overreliance on huge event stories over smaller stories that let us get to know the characters better, or “multiversal continuity”, those core aspect of character, design, and backstory that says “this is (X). “Mockstalgia”is a mocking of older material often passed off as parody, while “Not-stalgia” is something claiming to be nostalgic but isn’t.
That last one could be seen as a subset of a new term that came to mind while listening to my favorite wake-up podcast, Morning Nonsense. Literature Devil‘s topic yesterday was on how fanfic has ruined modern storytelling. To be more precise, fanfic is a good way to learn the ropes and improve your craft. There’s a few of mine in the Prose archive. I started from fanfic, then moved to derivatives (I should show you my 6th grade comics sometime), and then finally towards original ideas inspired by the stuff I was into enough to make fanfic of. Sure, I cringe at some of my old fanfic. The one or two Voltron comics I still have are kind of cringe, while the “War Of The Fools” parody of the George Pal War Of The Worlds movie, because I really liked his take on the invader ships, was the same dumb joke every time. I also named one of them “Joe”. Kid me was an idiot.
(Then again, a group sprite comic project I was part of outside my planned solo series had me creating a vegan zombie.)
The problem is when you approach an official project like a fanfic. You make the same mistakes but rather than doing it for fun or practice you’re making official canon and lore, so if you screw it up just to “leave your mark” you screw over previous writers or later writers have to fix your mistakes, the only time the retcon is a good thing and sadly not how they retcon things anymore. The best example I could use is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its various streaming offshoots. They’re more interested in “wouldn’t it be cool if…” rather than “would it make sense to the story as has been presented all this time”. It’s because they really don’t care about even previous movie canon, nevermind accuracy to those silly little comics that sit low on the media pecking order above the “superior” movies, made by the “real” storytellers in live-action Hollywood.
So is that not-stalgia? No, those are “adaptations” of something currently around. Nostalgia is something that is no longer making new stories but you still fondly remember it. Not-stalgia would be something like the Underdog movie while mockstalgia is more the CHIPS or Baywatch movies. You can’t call it “hatefics” as some people in the Morning Nonsense chat suggested because that would require them to care about the comics enough to hate them. The showrunner of Echo didn’t care, she just wanted to tell the story she wanted to tell regardless of how well it matched the character. She-Hulk: Attorney At Law could be hatefic but the hate was less for the comic than the comic lovers.
Suddenly I had an epiphany that still stuck with me after I fully woke up. The best way to describe these particular bad adaptations goes into what they really want from the material: a popular brand they can trick people into going to in order to see their “superior” ideas. Ladies, gentlemen, and the rest of you, I give you….Brandfic. It’s like a fanfic or a hatefic or a dontcarefic, but lazier and more ego-centric.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 6, 2026 in Comic Spotlight, Movie Spotlight, Streaming Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged adaptation errors, brandfic, commentary, Cowboy BeBop, DC Extended Universe, DC Universe, Fanfic, FanFiction, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Universe, not-stalgia, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Rings Of Power.
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