October 26, 2025

Jake & Leon> Best Of Year Sixteen

The very first comic. However mediocre my art may be, I’ve gotten better than this.

For those of you new here, this started with a fun bit of art practice. Inspired by some webcomics I was reading that was probably borrowing ideas from The Simpsons, I drew a character that would later be known as Jake. Numerous attempts to redo it was not working out and I was getting frustrated. So I stopped and came back to it the next day. I was able to get it right again, and decided to give him a friend. I named him Leroy but when I went to show it off I wrote “Leon”, and that typo turned out to be a better name.

At the time I was doing weekly comic reviews of the comics I picked up that week but was running out of ways to make the intro interesting each week. So I dropped a comic with these two in there. When the comics went daily I went for a weekly article link, but just decided to let Jake & Leon officially hold the spot with site updates. Today is their anniversary, which is why I did the site update on it’s own earlier today (unless I forgot) and instead of a new comic, I’m going to take a look back at all of the comics I did for year 16 before starting year 17. That makes this the longest running comic I’ve ever done, though illness, writer’s block, and other life events have kept it from being consistently every week. All I can do is work to get it out on time and hope it was interesting. I don’t even know if anyone actually reads this comic, but for whatever reason the below comics are the ones I’m most proud of this round.

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Posted by on October 26, 2025 in Jake & Leon and tagged , , , , , .

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October 26, 2025

BW Programming Note> Early For Anniversary Edition

You may (or may not) be wondering why I’m doing a “Programming Note” early in the day, perhaps even noting that this is when the daily comic review, Saturday article link, and this week’s The Clutter Reports goes. I usually only do these to have the weekly site update when I don’t have a Jake & Leon comic for the week. Well, I don’t have a NEW comic this week, but today happens to be the end of year sixteen for the comic, on time and on the same day the comic usually comes up. So tonight I’m doing the annual “best of”, showing off my favorite comics that I made this year for whatever reason they stand out for me. Sometimes it’s the subject, sometimes it’s something I did with the art, and sometimes I just nailed something so good that I’m really proud of it. So I’m posting that in the usual comic spot and giving the cast the week off.

Speaking of The Clutter Reports, the latest “quick report” has me getting the “artputer” organized and backed-up, which was easier than I thought, so I added a minor assessment of how I’m doing this year. Still not where I want to be but I seem to at least having a chance to get my act together.

I don’t know how it comes up on email, but if you come here from The Tronix Tumblr, which I really need to do something with beyond site promotion, you might have noticed I goofed up twice this week and didn’t put a summary of the post. Instead the first paragraph showed up. Basically, I goofed, and hopefully that won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we have the penultimate installment of the Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image and the final section of the first of two pitches for putting the Transformers cartoon on CBS. I have changed the category of “Story Bible Review” to “Story Bibles & Pitches”, which is a better reflection of how the writer’s guide reviews expanded to successful and failed sales pitches. We aren’t even close to done because after this one failed, Marvel Productions and Sunbow took notes and tried again, but now we get to see planned story ideas. I love seeing what made it to other incarnations and if the ideas they had were any good, so this should be fun.

As for the rest of the week? In the–no pun intended–spirit of Halloween, all of this week’s Daily Videos will have a spooky time theme to it. As for the remaining feature articles, we’ll see what happens. Sometimes what the corporate entertainment industry hits us with is scary enough.

Have a great week, everyone!

Posted by on October 26, 2025 in Jake & Leon and tagged , , .

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October 25, 2025

Saturday Night Showcase> The War Of The Gargantuas

With Halloween surrounded by Saturdays I thought it would be fun to do a Halloween kaiju post with sequels. The first and second appearance of Ghidorah or Mechagodzilla or something. All I found were second appearances in various timelines, so there went that plan. Even tonight’s movie is technically a sequel, but so far removed from the first movie that I don’t care. I could have tried Internet Archive, which is great for audio but terrible to post as videos on this host, or DailyMotion, which hasn’t been even a tolerable player in years and currently autoplays an embed even when you tell it not to, so forget it. I can’t even get the Japanese sub anywhere, so the second dub (somewhere Harvey Dent is having a good laugh) of War Of The Gargantuas is what you get. Sorry.

Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira is supposedly a sequel to Frankenstein Vs Baragon, known in the US as Frankenstein Conquers The World. It’s a monster that resembles Frankenstein/Frankenstein’s monster I don’t care the debate is stupid and pedantic and not my genre. Supposedly it was made from the monster’s heart or something. I never cared when I watched it. It’s one of Toho’s rare bad designs. Well, because scientists love to prove that no level of smart is safe from being stupid, they used those cells to create another monster, which gets an evil twin brother through even more dodgy science. Nobody cares about a good origin here. They just want to see monsters fight.

When the good twin is “framed” by the evil twin who just wants to eat people and destroy the world or something evil like that, the scientist must find out who’s who before the government gets their frustration over their Godzilla-killing failures out on the wrong monster. Will they succeed? Find out and enjoy!

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Posted by on October 25, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged , , , , , .

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October 25, 2025

BW’s Saturday Article Link> Have We Hit Peak Culture?

Something Batman’s wanted to do for a long time. By the way: kids comic to promote a crossover video game. Stop telling me kids stories don’t have to be good, or that promo comics can’t have good stories.

I don’t know if it fits. I just didn’t have a image to go with this one. In a recent social media post, media commentator Matt Walsh declared that 2007-2008 was “peak culture” and every year since hasn’t lived up. This let to discussion on X-Twitter about what qualifies as “peak culture”. Check out this article from Geeks & Gamers contributor Jessika Lindstrom and draw your own conclusion.

Posted by on October 25, 2025 in Uncategorized and tagged .

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October 24, 2025

CBS Transformers> The First Draft part 5: The Formatting

So word came out this week that Skybound’s “Energon Universe” is getting an animated series, and will be adult like their other big hit, Invincible. So like their Transformers comics it won’t be for me. I don’t need to see an animated version of Bumblebee being destroyed just to prove they aren’t the kids stories–you know, the age group the franchise was made for. I also don’t need the human body count to feel “mature”. If you enjoy it, go right ahead. I’m not stopping you, I’m just not joining you. I’ve said my peace on that. I’m just letting interested parties know it’s coming and segueing into…would a Saturday morning version of Transformers have been too far the other way? They did seriously dumb down Super Dinosaur, another Skybound comic made into a cartoon, and that one WAS for kids, comic AND show.

The problem, and I’ll go more into it in the transition between pitch drafts, is that Saturday morning cartoons in the 1980s had to deal with parent groups and psychologists who think they understand kids but don’t, and consultant firm with their heads in the clouds. Look up what happened at ABC and The Real Ghostbusters. CBS already forced Marvel Productions to add two females, one Autobot and one Decepticon, which they did by gender swapping Sideswipe and Starscream (like Starscream didn’t get enough gay jokes…though now we know Slipstream’s deal in Transformers Animated). Then again, we also know that the Decepticons would be wiped out by the Autobots, come to Earth to possess machines to create their new robot bodies, and the Autobots would have to follow suit, but we still don’t know if they’re dead as well. The Autobots would also be forcing humans to join their cause while the Decepticons followed Cy-Kill’s plan and just recruited one. Like I said many years ago, Cy-Kill is better at his job than G1 Megatron.

Now we’re going to look at further information about the format of the show. This should tell us the tone, style, and goals of the series should Hasbro sign off on the new concept and CBS greenlights a series. Would this get around the stuff they couldn’t get away with? Let’s see.

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Posted by on October 24, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Show Bibles & Pitches, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , , , , , .

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October 24, 2025

“Yesterday’s Comic> Smash Comics #6

As so began the adventures of Black X: Space Ranger.

Smash Comics #6

E.M. Arnold (January, 1940)

One problem, and I may have mentioned it before, with all these anthologies is remembering which ones I actually liked enough to continue. I have to consult the last review to see if I decided to continue or not. A bunch of these come out each month and I’m reading the public domain archives once a week. A few characters are memorable enough, but barely, and I can see why so many failed to pass on to the periods we remember these characters from. The Silver Age has this as an advantage, giving us comics where the title character has more presence and allows us to remember them, if not all of their stories, so far onward. I could rewrite the first Superman story from Action Comics #1 with the same characters (the only ones still around today being Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane) it might still feel like a new story to the uninitiated…but you’d still know the characters. Sometimes I only remember characters when I see them again. There’s so many that nobody really stands out, so hopefully there are at least some good stories this issue. According to reviews, I’ve enjoyed it so far.

[Read along with me here]

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Posted by on October 24, 2025 in Yesterday's Comics and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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October 24, 2025

BW’s Daily Video> 50 Facts About G1 Bumblebee

Catch more from CerealgeekTV on YouTube

51: “Plight Of The Bumblebee” is the story that really let a kid with his own self-worth issues see a fellow afflicted go through his own issues, something that continued on as Bumblebee learned as Goldbug that how you saw yourself mattered more, and fostering his character growth. That kid, though not having as strong a growth unfortunately, would later declare Bumblebee his favorite Autobot and have a dedicated Bumblebee shelf of depictions of that character that I…he still maintains.

Posted by on October 24, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged , , , , , .

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