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No Jake & Leon this week. The gag I came up with was lame but I would have gotten it done if I wasn’t sleepy most of the week and lost half of Saturday to a mostly sleepless Friday night. I did manage to do some email organizing for this week’s Clutter Report, but not as much as I would have liked.
This week at the Spotlight I may or may not start a new writer’s guide series. We’ll see how it goes. There’s still the Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image and it’s one chapter this week. Plus more going over comics I picked up during Free Comic Book Day. I did manage to get the ComiXology Kindle version of the Phantom comic offered that I missed in physical form and I’ll get to that either this week or next week, which should be the last of these comics, meaning we’ll be back to the in progress categories of “Yesterday’s” Comics soon.
Have a great week, everyone. Hopefully allergies aren’t bothering you as much as they are me.
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Gabriel Iglesias is one of the funniest comics working today. I only have two bad experiences tied to him. One is watching Fluffy Checks In when the blood clot in my leg let me know it was there. One minute I’m watching “Fluffy” and his friends eating (or maybe it was the exercise portion of the show, I can’t remember) and one blink later I’m on the floor and my dad is arguing with 911. I don’t hold that against him and 2016 was just that kind of year, but this incident has not soured me on his stand-up comedy or his various TV shows. His comic book tastes we should discuss…
…but it’s not like the dude he was arguing with knew what he was talking about, either. Plus he does like Transformers so he’s not all bad.
I kid, though. I do enjoy his work and I’ve been watching stand-up clips from his YouTube channel when my recommendation brought up Mr. Iglesias, a Netflix sitcom I didn’t know existed partly because I don’t have Netflix. Starting in 2019 and airing for three seasons (Google AI claiming it was canceled after Fluffy got the 2020 plague, though I don’t know why that would cancel the show for good), Gabriel stars as Gabe Iglesias (stand-up comedians have a habit of keeping their names for their first sitcom, if not all of them), a junior high history teacher. Five of his students, three of his fellow teachers, the principal, and the principal’s snobby assistant round out the cast.
In the first episode, “Some Children Left Behind”, which you should watch before Netflix finds out it’s still up and does the same thing to me they did with Voltron: Legendary Defender by making the official licensee pull the video anyway, those five students are about to get kicked out of school for very stupid reasons. Can Gabe save their scholastic future…even the one who doesn’t want to be saved because it would mean staying in school and not being a loser? Enjoy while you can.
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NOTE: Swearing in the trailer below and in one of the other videos in use
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet has already had its share of controversy before the box is even constructed to come right out of. Many critics pointed to all the product placement. While Sony pushing it’s own product is no surprise, there’s also the Porsche spaceship (on a space bounty hunter’s income?), Adidas sneakers, and that gaming chair she’s using as a pilot seat probably came from somewhere but I missed it. I guess this is what we do to push AAA games since it’s less clear if such games will be successful.
One of the reasons for that lack of success is the other controversy: the character. In the first trailer she comes off as the trendy “girlboss” warrior woman in a medium that has been trying to blank out attractive women. At least in the western gaming sphere. Marvel Rivals out of China (of all places) and Stellar Blade out of South Korea have featured powerful women looking sexy and kicking butt not like a male character would but as a female character would. It’s not the gender, it’s the depiction, and gamers are getting tired of unattractive women, especially the ones who were attractive in the first game (Mary Jane in the Insomniac Spider-Man games comes to mind). I’m not really here to talk about all of that, but it does lead into our discussion topic.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tati Gabrielle, who is the model and voice of Intergalactic‘s player character, Jordan A. Mun, discussed her roles in the TV and movie versions of other Naughty Dog properties, but it’s when she discussed how Neil Druckmann, creator of the original The Last Of Us games and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, prepared her for backlash from this game based on his experience…and when I read it I got the impression he was already trying to tell her what all the negative responses “really” were, which got me to thinking: is this going on in Hollywood all over? Note that Druckmann is part of the Hollywood culture even though he’s making video games, only know he’s put the pseudo-zombie horror game franchise on pause to focus on the HBO retelling of the first two games, so I’m counting him. And I believe he might not be alone.
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“I’m going to need a ladder.”
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
Tamashii Nations (Free Comic Book Day 2025)
“Operation Meteor” (adapting part of the first episode, “The Shooting Star She Saw”)
ORIGINAL STORY: Hajime Yatate & Yoshiyuki Tomino
WRITER: Katsuyuki Sumizawa
WRITER/LETTERER: David Clarke
SUPERVISOR: Naohiro Ogata
ARTIST: Mark Simmons
COLORIST: Arthur Hesli
EDITOR: Sedric Harris
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Saturday Article Link> Are Comics Literature?
The fact that we still ask this question shows how poorly people in the industry and it’s fanbases (though plenty of us are fighting back) have done in pushing comics as a medium. The Daily Aztec staff writer Luis Zavala makes the case that comics and graphic novels are indeed a form of literature.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 17, 2025 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comics, commentary, Literature, op-ed, opinion.
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