There are a few reasons I’m starting 1940 with this comic, despite previously stating I wasn’t going to cover the comic strip collections. For one, Dick Tracy comics usually get pulled by Comic Book Plus for not being in public domain…somehow…in anthology collections, so actually getting to read his adventures from the newspapers of this time is a new experience for me.
For another, it’s rare to see a Golden Age comic that isn’t an anthology. While I’m expecting multiple stories going into this, we’re looking at all Dick Tracy tales. No guest stories, no back-ups, no other stories but this for 68-ish pages. I kind of want to see how that plays out, so that’s what we’re doing this week.
Some time ago I brought up the campaign by YouTube video creator Ross Scott. Mostly known (around here anyway) for the comedy series Freeman’s Mind, playing through the Half-Life series while hearing the crazy thoughts of Gordon Freeman, Scott also hosts Ross’s Game Dungeon and Dead Games on the Accursed Farms YouTube channel. It’s from that latter show that the “Stop Killing Games” campaign began. Scott had gone over numerous games no longer playable, often due to online DRM, where you had to be on a server to play a game even when it wasn’t an online game. When the servers were no longer supported and shut down there was now no way to play the game without a hack that allowed you to use a fanserver. The last straw was an online only game called The Crew, a racing game with a single-player story, though I guess the emphasis was on the online racing. Because the game got older and totally not to get players to finally move to the sequel, the servers for the 2014 game was shut down in 2023 without much warning, making even the offline story of infiltrating street racers to stop a corrupt FBI agent impossible to play.
Since my initial article, Scott has been succeeding in getting signatures on petitions to force game companies to change this practice. His reasoning is if you buy the game you own that copy and should be able to continue playing it, either on fan servers or at least the offline versions of the game, that don’t require other players. Currently the European Union (EU) is where he’s focusing his efforts, and the European game companies are seeing him as a threat since reaching his legally required goal of 1 million signature. The lobbying group Video Game Europe (link and info courtesy of That Park Place) recently put out a statement defending their clients’ rights to shut down any game anytime they want and not refund gamers. You can read along with the full statement or scroll down to the end of the article and see what Ross Scott himself has to say about their earlier statement. I won’t cover everything because that’s too long an article.
For those of you who missed the previous installments, Collective Of Heroes was a website linking to various superhero comics on the internet at the time. The last time I checked both the site and many of the linked to comics are no longer available unless you want to go through the Internet Archive or find the printed trade collections.
We have ten comics to go through, so let’s get to it.
Yes, that is a Kamen Rider series trailer in English, except maybe that last word. It is on Toei’s official YouTube channel. Kamen Rider Zeztz is coming in September, but what’s interesting is how Toei is releasing this. The new series is the first attempt by Toei to simulcast one of their shows to the English audience, presumably through that YouTube channel.
Tsuburaya Productions has already been doing this with their Ultraman franchise. (For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese superheroes and just came out of James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn, it’s not the same guy at all. I’m not even sure he’s accurate to DC’s Ultraman from the comics and the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3.) You can watch it subtitled on their official channel (the newest one is Ultraman Omega as of this writing) and I just found out they created an English channel to watch it dubbed, along with other languages for those of you who don’t speak English…though I’m not sure how you’re reading this if you don’t. Translator, maybe? Anyway, the only way to see it otherwise was wait for Shout Factory to release it as part of their TokuSHOUTsu network, and the same for Kamen Rider. Mills Creek also has Ultraman on home video while Kamen Rider has Shout Factory doing the same. And I am so far behind on both franchises.
Now you’ll be able to watch the show while or just after it airs in Japan. Are they finally waking up…during a Kamen Rider series set in the sleeping world? YouTuber TJ Omega took time off from talking about Transformers to discussing one of his other favorite franchises in this video about Kamen Rider Zeztz, which is tough for me to get my fingers to type correctly, and I have a few thoughts of my own.
BW Media Spotlight 