So fighty that one cover can’t contain it!
Hardcase #12
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (May, 1994)
“The Angry Past” part 3
WRITER: James D. Hudnall
PENCILER: Scott Benefiel
INKER: Jasen Rodriguez
COLORING: Moose Baumann & Foodhammer!
LETTERER: Patrick Owsley
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
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Too bad we can’t get the current creators to give fans what they wanted. Saying Chibnall would give fan what they want is a joke. Also, I could have done without Jack and River. Or Ncuti.
So, Friday night, when I’m usually doing Jake & Leon during Friday Night Tights I’m too tired to work on. That’s okay. I’ll work on it Saturday after this week’s Clutter Report writing. Then the pen needs recharging and by the time it’s done I’m ready to go to bed. It’s been 2026 for a few days and already it’s starting. With a busy week not counting the site in the wings something had to give, and it’s this week’s comic.
Speaking of The Clutter Reports I just made a new declutter goal checklist, which will hopefully go better than my comic goals. I also made a regular article going over my declutter plans for the year and beyond to go with it.
So sometime in this week’s madness I need to do this week’s installment of the Chapter By Chapter review of Doctor Who: The Rescue, the latest CBS Transformers, a bunch of comic reviews that includes the other old DC Comic (sadly, Peter Canon returns next week) reprint I have, and still get other articles and this week’s videos without using any of my remaining buffer…which is just one article. I’m not expecting a good week, folks, but hopefully you have one.
I don’t know how long TMS Entertainment will keep this up on their YouTube channel, so watch it fast if you want to catch an airplane killer.
Detective Conan follows the adventures of a young detective turned even younger. Teen detective Shinichi Kudo was transformed into a elementary school kid by two members of a mysterious organization whose poison caused de-aging rather that death. Try not to think about it too much since I don’t think the franchise ever really brings it up again except to explain the series plot. Now trapped in a child’s body, Shinichi is forced to live with his detective rival and his daughter, the latter also being Shinichi’s love interest. Even they don’t know who the boy is because to protect them he’s taken on the identity of Conan Edogawa, a fusion of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo (a pen name of Hirai Tarō based on Edgar Allan Poe). Now he uses his wits and a few gadgets to solve mysteries and let his rival, whose career had fallen after the death of his wife and being shown up by Kudo, take the credit until he can restore his body to normal.
When the show was brought to the English speaking world there was concerns about legal issues. So Funimation changed his name to Jimmy Kudo while naming the show Cased Closed, which Viz also followed in the manga. Although I don’t think anybody is going to mistake the barbarian or the talk show host for a child detective. It also helped with localization, but more recent dubs, like the one we’ll be watching tonight, has since return to the proper Japanese names for all the characters and the show.
While TMS’s official YouTube channel doesn’t have the entire series up (you’ll have to hunt that down, like through Crunchyroll though I have founded subbed versions), at least as of this writing they posted episode 162 for the show’s 30th anniversary, “Locked Room In The Sky”. Oddly they don’t have the dub while a Detective Conan movie they also have up at the time is only available subtitled. I don’t get it. Love interest Rin remembers when they were visiting Shinichi’s parents in the US while taking a similar flight with the present day main cast, including Conan’s actual kid friends. There a murder takes place because when doesn’t it and Shinichi has to solve it, with the inspector and his partner happening to be on the same flight for vacation. The stand-out here is that in this flashback, Shinichi isn’t officially a teen detective yet. In fact, it’s his first ever case. Will one truth prevail? Enjoy…for as long as it’s available.
The Force Awakens was J.J. Abrams’ attempt to prove that “Star Wars” was back after the prequel trilogy altered the formula from the original trilogy. The OT took cues from samurai movies, dogfights, and classic science fiction serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers stories. The prequels went to a more traditional war story mixed with a political bend. Abrams was so trying to convince you he was going back to the previous tradition that he basically ripped off parts of the original movie’s concept in the story. (Imperials/First Order and Death Star/Starkiller Base being the more obvious ones.) For a movie banking on nostalgia you’d think the big moment would be seeing the old cast together one last time before passing the torch to the next generation of star warriors.
As we all know, that’s not what happened. Instead, Han is killed before Luke is brought around, and now even some of the actors are gone in real life, including Carrie Fisher and two costumed actors, Peter Mayhew and Kenny Baker. It’s now impossible to have all three main human characters of the trilogy back together in any capacity. Well, as Mark Hamill recently stated in an interview, the movie that was trying to use Star Wars nostalgia to bring back the fans who rejected the prequels purposefully dropped the ball and didn’t do the most nostalgic thing they could do. That is why they fail.
Well, break is over and it’s time to start on the second draft of the attempt to bring the Transformers to CBS Saturday mornings.
For those of you who came in late, after the syndicated miniseries “More Than Meets The Eye”, Hasbro worked to partner with CBS to get a potential wider audience for their TV ad show by bringing it to Saturday mornings. CBS would pay more of the bill, Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions would still be a partner (as they worked with CBS in the past), and more kids would get the show because they wouldn’t be hunting down local channels to carry it at a time when they weren’t all owned by some national group like they are today.
This pitch also failed. However, it would be made closer to “More Than Meets The Eye”, taking place five years later and ditching the gender swaps…or in Sideswipe’s case ditching him altogether. They also cut out Teletraan-1, because CBS assumed robots already had built in computers that could do everything he did. That’s kind of dumb. You can check out the episode of Transformers: The Basics for more on the history. I’ll also be going over various details as we go on in the next batch of articles going over this new pitch, as well as the final part of this series where I look at an actual scripted episode from the show. If you want to follow along, these documents were all found by The Sunbow Marvel Archive, who posted them to their site. This is what I’ll be working from. Scroll down past the Season 1 section to find them.
I skimmed a bit through the early pages to get an idea of how I’d be breaking this draft down. It not only appear to have some clear divisions, but Jeffrey Scott took the time to set them up like a set of computer reports on the current state of Earth after the miniseries as they would have been done back in 1984. Originally done in February, the Archive has a revised version from March. So would this have been a better take than the first one, and why didn’t it succeed? Over the next few weeks we’ll find out, and that starts now with the revised premise, more in line with the backstory already created by Marvel Comics’ Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky.
Where do I start with this cover?
Pep Comics #2
MLJ Magazines, Inc (February, 1940)
No, really, where do I start with this cover? Not coloring in the mouth makes him look like he has a flesh colored Sentai/Power Ranger facemask color (or maybe the headgear is closer to Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills but I don’t want to insult the artist any more than I am). He’s shooting some kind of gas with both his facial expression and the response of the bad guys in the tank looking like there’s about to be some corpses. We still haven’t gotten into actual war stories with the US involved. This just looks wrong. Okay, let’s see what the comic itself gives us.
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