BW Media Spotlight’s Best Of Year…12?

You know, I’m used to forgetting my anniversary…but how the heck did I missing it entirely for the last three years? Yes, 2021, the first year I forgot, had Art Soundoff and me trying to recover from hernia surgery but there’s no excuse for every year since. When Google Calendar reminded me that this year was another anniversary I thought I’d be doing the best of year 14 and moving on.

Then I go hunting for last year’s anniversary post and notice there isn’t one. While I remembered the Jake & Leon anniversaries I missed looking over the best articles of the past few years. That’s three years worth! So for the next few Thursdays I’ll be playing catch-up. At least I know what I’ll be doing on Thursdays the rest of November.

Okay, let’s focus. November 16, 2008. I had been recovering from Crohn’s first two acts of putting me in the hospital. (Can we stop doing that now?) While recovering I came upon comic blogs like Comic Coverage, Slay Monstrobot Of The Deep, Comics Oughta Be Fun, and Siskoid’s Blog Of Geekery. Siskoid is currently the only blog updating regularly. Bully The Little Stuffed Bull posts now and then last I saw, Mark Engblom ended Comic Coverage, and sadly Brian Snell passed away–although he still gets views because Slay Monstrobot still shows up in my referrals list for visitors coming to BW.

I made my first post talking about good things about the Spawn cartoon from HBO. I hate Spawn in both comics and cartoon. It’s too violent for my tastes and really doesn’t know anything about the Bible or the war between God and Satan. However, it’s well drawn, well animated, told the intended stories well enough from what little I watched, and you can rarely go wrong with Keith David voicing your protagonist. It was to show that something can be good but not to your taste and that’s okay…a lesson that seems to be disappearing in 2023 as “creators” turn things they don’t like into things they do and insist they’re making it better because it’s what they like and only their tastes matter. I call them the “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd.

I hope you like that bit of history…because for the sake of archives I’m going to be telling it every Thursday until we get caught up. From November 16, 2020 to November 15, 2021 here are the article that strike me as some of my best work. Since 2021 was the aforementioned hernia surgery I’m expecting a lot of missing days.

• The Problem With The Cynical Superhero: Piggybacking off a video on the topic I go into why treating superheroes like the Greek pantheon is a mistake if you want to tell a good superhero story. If you don’t believe people with powers could be good people, I don’t want to see your story.
• Spider-Man And How To Design A Superhero Costume: I still don’t know what the blue and white Spidey suit was supposed to be about, but it did give me a chance to discuss what goes into designing a superhero costume with Peter as an example.
• Superman & Lois (Or The Kents Get CWed): They took down the trailer I was using announcing this new Superman in the Arrowverse but I already had issues with how this show was approaching Superman. Don’t bother telling me how good it was because when the pilot aired (bonus link to the actual pilot review) I only saw the Superman I know and love for a couple of minutes in the beginning. Then things got all dark.
• The Force Of New Star Wars Shows: Some of these actually came out…except for the two I had actual interest in.
• Are Redhead Characters Being De-Gingered By Hollywood: An article that still gets a lot of views. Over time the evidence has mounted and I’m even starting to reconsider my position but I’m not yet fully convinced that Hollywood is targeting redheads for their race swaps. There are just so few redheads in entertainment that the numbers are working against them. Until someone in Hollywood finally slips up and admits (someone’s going to be bold) I prefer to take the “innocent until proven guilty” approach. Maybe stop race swapping redheads for awhile and maybe you’ll convince people.
• Why Killing Off T’Challa Is Not A Good Idea: Even Chadwick Boseman’s family was telling them to recast because Boseman didn’t consider himself more important than the characters. They didn’t listen.
• Are The X-Men Poor Bigotry Analogs: I should added in that article that Stan Lee didn’t mean for them to stand in for bigotry but was using the civil rights arguments at the time of their creation for drama. Using a video by Perch and another by NerdSync I looked into the history of the mutants of the Marvel universe as supposed stand-ins for bigotry and why they don’t work. It involves sentient viruses turning people into bigots.
• Standing Up For The Humans Of Godzilla: A short one since it played off a video (and apparently Toho has joined Paramount in banning intros even though they don’t technically own the Hanna-Barbera show and just aired the episodes in multipart shorts) but someone has to defend humans being in this franchise.
• The Problem With Typecasting: After the passing of actor Dustin Diamond I went into a discussion on typecasting, which ruined his career.
• The Darkening Of Modern Media: Using a GQ article as my starting point I go over the then (and still) recent trend of darker takes on nostalgic favorites.
• Netflix’s Cowboy BeBop…Why? Just Why?: After this and Death Note it’s no surprise that the creator of One Piece is taking a controlling interest in the Netflix live-action adaptation. Apparently it’s working.
• When The Real World Alters The Reel World: After the controversial way President Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan and the Taliban regaining control, a show that took inspiration from the whole situation, The United States Of Al, was heavily affected as the main characters were tied to the Afghan war after 9-11. From there I looked at other examples of events in the real world altering how the fictional worlds operated. I later reviewed the season two episode the show was forced to make.
• Art Of Storytelling–Animation: From my “Art Of Storytelling” series, where I go over every type of media and how it tells a story versus other forms, comes a defense of animation as a storytelling tool.
• Davies Returns To Doctor Who…Yay?: Yes, Davies taking over was announced all the way back in 2021, and here I am in 2023 reminding you that I did not celebrate his return to Doctor Who just because he wasn’t Chris Chibnall.
• Trope Shark–The Corpse Stops Here: As part of this article series I go over the annoying trope of the guy coming across the body immediately being charged even after the investigation should have made him the least likely suspect. I had fun coming up with names that the Clue board game wishes they had thought up.

Well, that’s all the articles from that time period, a period where I dealt with a bad medicine reaction, hernia surgery, and finally passing a kidney stone. I’m glad all that mess is over. Next week the catching up with best of articles hits year 13. Odd that the year before was the one I kept getting sick on but I was born on Friday the 13th. It’s actually a lucky number for me.