It’s the old invisible ball play.
Feature Comics #26
Comic Favorites, Inc (November, 1939)
Well, last issue was unimpressive, and if I wasn’t curious to see how Charlie Chan and Jane Arden’s stories ended I probably would be moving on. We’ll see Charlie Chan again in Comic Book Plus’ “virtual newsstand”, but is time running out for The Clock and other characters in this book? Let’s find out.
A bit short for the homepage, but not much to say here.
Turns out replacing Doctor Strange with Doctor Doom as Sorcerer Supreme was a very bad idea. Who knew? Anyone who has heard of both characters.
Yes, as Marvel Comics joins Marvel Studios in continuing to ruin the reputation of Stephen Strange, they decided Steven was so unable to stop an evil force that he turned the title of Sorcerer Supreme over to Victor Von Doom. You know, the tyrant dictator who puts on a facade of a perfect community (or else) and is probably the pettiest person in the Marvel Universe as he quests for the ultimate power that he should rightly have by nature of being him. No wonder the usual suspects seem to love him so much. I’ve seen a Facebook page that seems to exist only to show Doom is so totes awesome you guys and better than that Reed jerk.
What does it have to do with Spider-Man? Apparently Doom is also what the British call a “lazy git”.
As shown in the trailer, Doctor Strange made a deal to undergo a trial to convince Cyttorak, the guy Juggernaut gets his powers from, to protect the mortal realm from his kin. If you ever read the Eighth Day storyline from the 1990s you know why we need it. Not wanting to do things like give a crap about anything that Doom doesn’t claim as his own (a very short list), he makes Peter do everything instead, giving him a bunch of 1-Ups like a video game because each challenge ends with dead Peter. Like Peter hasn’t died and come back enough. Dude’s another challenger for Optimus Prime’s title.
At the end of this “Eight Deaths Of Spider-Man” storyline, Peter has apparently had enough and decides to quit, after one of the challenges, as described in Fansided’s Bam! Smack! Pow!‘s article, one of the trials leads to Peter seeing the deaths of so many people that he turns into that broody emo kid who says nothing matters because death in inevitable, and this is his latest reason to quit being Spider-Man.
“But Tronix, that same article point to yet another unnecessary relaunch in April stating that Peter is still Spider-Man so clearly he’ll change his mind like he did any other time the continuity didn’t end because MTV didn’t renew the series.”
I’m sorry, this makes this idea less stupid…how?
I hope none of them are claustrophobic.
Afterburn 2015 Preview
Afterburn Press (Spring/Summer, 2015)
An anthology preview of comics released by Afterburn Press. I’m not really sure what else to say. This is one of the those publishers I haven’t heard of so I don’t know anything about them. That’s one interesting thing about going through Drive Thru Comics’ free side library. The biggest name they have on the comic side is maybe Top Cow. Anything with the big names are RPG sourcebooks. So I’m learning about comics I have never heard of before, like I do on Fridays with the Golden Age comics.
I think that’s enough padding for the homepage. Let’s get these reviews started. I’m doing a lot of anthology style comics this week.
Photo by Mirko Fabian on Pexels.com
The Academy Awards have become quite controversial lately. If they aren’t burying animated movies getting a Best Picture nod because of the media pecking order and whiny celebs, they’re nominating a French produced movie about a Mexican drug cartel chief who want to transition to a woman that manages to piss off pretty much everybody they claim they’re trying to champion. Learning the star and director may have a few controversial statements in their past isn’t helping them, either. Then again most of us think the collective Hollywood mindset, even if they aren’t based in Hollywood, is a big joke anyway. It’s a bunch of elitist media snobs ordinarily, but add in modern ideals of “playing to the cool kids” and false inclusion by way of laziness and proving how out of touch they are with the average human being and they’ve become something of a joke to the average human being, who used to watch just to see celebs and get mad that their favorite film didn’t get an award in a particular category.
I’d put it to you that all awards shows are something of a joke. Even awards shows that claim the audience chooses the winner, they didn’t choose the nominees, the industry did. So if your favorite movie wasn’t nominated but a rather boring or garbage movie did, of course you see the awards as something of a failure, the industry finding another way to pat itself on the back whether they actually deserve it or not. I don’t think there can be an actually fair and accurate process for choosing what was the best picture of that year. What they choose may not be what the audience chose, or what failed in the theater (which doesn’t seem to matter anyway) may be more successful on TV, streaming, or home video. Or it might get a cult following years later who got past the bad marketing of the original theatrical release and found a nearly lost gem of a movie.
Since my next intended article needs time to be written properly by post time and there’s nothing current I want to discuss, I’m grabbing a video by YouTube channel All Talking Pictures. In a video titles “What Each Best Picture Winner Tells Us About Hollywood”, the host goes over why the award and the Academy Awards/Oscars exists, and tries to figure out why each choice was made from the start of the Oscars to today. This came out two years ago post time so I don’t expect them to explain why Emilia Perez got nominated when everybody hates it and it became so controversial that they’re trying to figure out how to bury it without annoying the people they actually like (as in not the actual groups the movie is supposed to champion as they all hate it). I do think this will be an interesting look at past winners and what they were thinking, as well as the controversies of some of their choices. See if you can see the host’s own biases in his discussion. Also, he does drop a bit of swearing as he goes on.
Not going to give me anything to work with this issue, eh?
Sonic The Hedgehog #80
Archie Comic Publications (March, 2000)
Beginning the Sonic Adventure tie in proper, except they still seem to be trying to reconcile the two continuities.
COLORIST: Frank Gagliardo
EDITOR/STORY OUTLINE: J.F. Gabrie
Sonic: “If Wishes Were Acorns”
WRITERS/ARTISTS: Karl Bollers & James Fry
INKER: Andrew Pepoy
LETTERER: Jeff Powell
Knuckles: “Landfall”
WRITERS/ARTISTS: Ken Penders & Steve Butler
INKER: Pam Eklund
LETTERER: Vickie Williams
Big The Cat: “Swallowing Trouble”
WRITER/INKER: Ken Penders
PENCILER: Jim Valentino
LETTERER: Vickie Williams
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
BW Media Spotlight 
BW’s Daily Video> Fixing Comics With Simple Solutions
Catch more from Comics By Perch on YouTube
What they need to do is find writers who care about accurately continuing a hero’s story rather than trying to be an important contributor to a backstory that was perfectly fine without your “better idea”. The writers don’t have to be fans necessarily, and being fans might push them towards “pet characters syndrome”, though a fan who isn’t considering one character too precious to harm–while also not thrilled about torturing fictional characters and draining everything fans like about them because they want to be Watchmen–might be a really good choice. They need to be fans of the story, not the brand or the money they think comes with it just by existing. Understand why the brand has a fanbase and continue doing that. Save your own stories for your own IP.
They also need editors who want to push the medium instead of allowing themselves to be the ostracized in the pecking order and prove what comics can do that no other form of media can, a publisher and distributor who can get comics where people can find them, and a company willing to promote them not just as “where this movie came from” when they’re not going to properly adapt the comic anyway because their media is superior to those “silly comics”. To be fair, not being woke is a decent goal, considering it leads to bad writing and insulting the people you claim to be pushing for, but that’s just a symptom of a larger problem.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on February 14, 2025 in Comic Spotlight and tagged comics, commentary.
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