Yes, some adults do still play with the toy cars they collect. What’s wrong with that?
Top Notch Comics #1
M.L.J. Magazines, Inc. (December, 1939)
Yet another new Golden Age anthology for us to examine, folks. This (cover dated) year has given us a few. This one actually starts with an interesting story idea along the lines of the World Trade Center or me and Op-Center: Mirror Image, in that we didn’t expect certain events to happen, and yet they did. Meanwhile there are a bunch of other stories as well. Do any of them ever make a return? Let’s start reading and find out.
Don’t forget the reason for the Fourth Of July being a day off here in America. It’s not for the barbecue, it’s to honor those who sacrificed everything to allow you to have that barbecue. Enjoy your family, but remember these heroes.
Yes, it’s a day early. Discussing a British show on Independence Day just felt weird. If you have to ask why, your history teacher failed you.
I initially thought this was going to turn into a three parter give the word count after the previous installment. However, to break this up properly would put this article’s word count at under a thousand, so we’re going over 3000 words, which I usually try to stay under just because I know your time is important, and as cool as this trivia is you’d probably rather watch the show than read about it. Don’t worry, I brought videos to give you a break, though that wasn’t intentional when I put them in originally.
In our last installment we began looking at the next document in our list, the “General Notes on Background and Approach” for the show Dr. Who, so even the spelling would changed by airtime. We got to meet the crew, but in this half we’ll check out the infamous Time And Relative Dimensions In Space machine and learn more about the crazy old man piloting it. At the time, that name didn’t exist. Neither did the police box. Apparently neither did the ship. As for the Doctor himself, the backstory we know today about the renegade from the planet Gallifrey who sought exploration and became a hero did not exist. What did they plan for the old man and his blue box? Let’s jump in and find out.
Here’s a bonus one from me. Two different New Who episodes have the Doctor being able to communicate with horses like they’re people, one of which was even trans (because of course he/she was, and that was the Moffatt era as well as my favorite New Who Doctor). That means in the Whoniverse horses do in fact have a sense of self like other sapient species, and thus are victims of slavery because they can’t speak English even as well as a dog. That’s kind of dark for a lame joke.
For all the talk of embracing the goofier nature of comic books into James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn, director James Gunn apparently can’t get his head around the idea of how Superman pulls off the “Clark Kent” persona. He joins not only a long list of people who seem to misunderstand how Clark’s trick works but other comic book favorites nobody questioned. James Gunn himself altered Peter Quill’s “Starlord” outfit while Sam Raimi could explain how Peter climbs wall (and a better one than comics actually gave us…some nonsense about gravity control or something if memory serves, while Rami had little “hairs” that worked together to help him stick to wall) but somehow “teenage science geek with a special interest in chemistry and engineering creating an instinctual substitute for a spider’s webbing” was too much for him. This always bugs me.
So James Gunn, working with Tom King (that’s was your first mistake), decided he needed to “fix” how the glasses work. As I’ve said on this site time and again it’s not just the glasses that allows Clark to pull off his dual identity, but of course the guy who admitted that it took him a long time to come up with anything he liked as far as a Superman story in his style has to do it the hard way. The comic cover above shows that what he and King came up with is technically canon in the Bronze Age pre-Crisis version of Superman, but it’s a lame explanation…which explains why they went with it, I guess.
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