“I don’t remember comic strips in the forecast.”
Will Eisner: A Comic Biography [FCBD preview]
NBM Graphic Novels (2025)
Stephen Weiner & Dan Mazur
This is a sample for a graphic novel in the Comic Biography series, and only touches on part of the story. Still, they managed to make a snippet that works for a done-in-one feel while still teasing the full graphic novel, which I very much appreciate.
“Okay, who repainted the garage!”
Speed Racer #0 FDBD
Mad Cave Studios, LLC (2025)
LETTERER: Buddy Beaudoin
EDITOR: Chas! Pangburn
BOOK DESIGN: Diana Bermúdez
“Welcome To Palm City”
WRITER: David Pepose
ARTIST: Davide Tinto
COLORIST: Rex Lokus
Racer X: “Life Is Cheap, Racing Expensive”
WRITER: Mark Russell
ARTIST: Chris Batista
INKER: Sabrina Cintron
COLORIST: Carlos Lopez
The heck with it. I’m in this river so I might as well ride it out. This is a preview for an in-production fanimation using the original Wish concept.
Catch more (when it’s done) from Pinkiemachine Studios on YouTube
Recently I did an article going over how I’d combine the various origins of the Transformers, mainly the Quintessons versus Primus. I’ve been wanting to continue that idea, focusing on early life on Cybertron before the Great War as I really don’t like the current concept, and then later going over what cause the war itself and so on. It will never be canon but it’s the closest I’ll ever get and I haven’t flexing my storytelling brain cells enough lately.
However, before I go over life on Cybertron I need to better understand the various takes on what a Transformer, what a Cybertronian, is. A bit more recently, Chris McFeely did a compilation and update of previous videos discussing the various aspects of Transformers. In the video below, slightly under an hour in length, he goes over protoforms, which I already worked into my TFU originwise but not in general society, sparks, the “soul” of a Cybertronian, the art of transformation itself, and the basic fuel source of Energon, which I also gave an origin to.
I’m not just posting this video but going over it as I tried see how it will work in my take on life on Cybertron, which once I’ve worked the various bugs scrapmetals out of I’ll post in the future. Some of the original videos I posted as daily or filler videos, but these are updated with new information as new media–comics, an animated movie, and more cartoons–have come out since then with different takes on various aspects of Transformer life. With this new data I can form my own continuity and explanation, even if it only benefits me in getting my storytelling skills active and creating a Transformers lore that has what I see lacking in other media. I’ll watch each segment, think about how this affects or could affect my overall ideas, and post will be written as I watch the video. You can read the whole thing, or jump back and forth between the video and my ideas. Or ignore one or the other. Or both if you don’t like what you’ve seen in the intro. So let’s watch the video and see what it inspires.
“Ken and Ryu aren’t going to get mad at us doing their pose, are they?”
Street Fighter Vs Rival Schools #1
UDON Entertainment (May, 2025)
WRITER: David Lumsdon
“Deadly Lessons!”
ARTIST: Tovio Rogers
LETTERER: Marshall Dillon
“A Shot At Freedom”
ARTIST: Royce Southerland
The Clutter Reports (my other site) Atop The Fourth Wall Crisis On Earth Prime Lean Into Artcast Bully Says “Comics Oughta Be Fun” Siskoid’s Blog of Geekery
Cartoon Hero’s Lair SF Debris Four Million Years Later
Did Walt Disney Damage Literature?
At first this was going to be a full-on BW Vs article, responding to a recent pair of blog posts by author Brian Neumeier over at his Kairos Publication‘s blog section. However, he showed the same video I’ll be showing below, and it’s a kinder version of what he wrote. I’ll still refer to those articles and to part two of the video, which is out and a part three is teased at the end, but you come here to read.
The video comes from YouTube channel Cartoon Aesthetics, a relatively new animation discussion channel with only a handful of videos in it’s one year of operation. This is the first of a series titled “How Disney Stole Your Childhood”. In the video, the host discusses how Walt Disney’s adaptations of public domain tales from the past had a negative impact on reading those stories by becoming the definitive version of those stories. Unlike Neumeier, the host of the videos doesn’t believe that this was intentional on Uncle Walt’s part, but something that happened over time and through later owners and CEOs of the company as they shifted more towards business than storytelling, or that was my impression of both. While I’ve gone over that Walt knew business to a degree he cared more about storytelling than the business, certainly more than current CEO Bob Iger, and wanted his stories to be as good as possible, knowing that would bring the business.
This actually started from a discussion on Disney’s role in cementing the idea that cartoons are just for kids, the first article I linked to specifically about that. I don’t agree with that assessment because making kids cartoons weren’t new. As even some commenters pointed out, other studios were making cartoons for kids but there were also cartoons for adults. Betty Boop was brought up and what the Hayes Code did to her, but let’s also remember that the Looney Tunes were not entirely for kids. Some of their humor was clearly made for adults. It’s just over time the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts (and I’m not even sure what the differences in titles were), ended up being thought of as kids fare, even airing on Saturday mornings not only on parent group-patrolled network CBS but in syndication and later on Nickelodeon. This really could be a discussion for a later time, and both the articles and the videos bring up Japanese “anime” (short for animation so stop correcting people) as examples of how this is a Western position. So the question is for this response commentary…did Disney convince kids to not read books based on their adaptations? And if so, do we now have a way to fix that?
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 22, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, Literature, Walt Disney, Walt Disney Pictures.
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