This post on TwitterX, with a mother reading to her baby, inspired an article about the benefits of reading to your newborn, and how a baby’s developing mind can benefit from reading to him/her. Just a word of advice: maybe don’t read a horror story or something else that contains ideas you don’t want in their heads, even if your favorite book is Dracula or one of those Crow novels we talked about last week. I’m not even sure I’d read them a Goosebumps book, but I’m not into horror. See also sexy romance novels or straight up porn. Stick to the kids books for now. War & Peace might be a bit long.
(l to r: Windblade, Bumblebee, and Rubble)
Transformers EarthSpark was not a successful project. While some of the toys looked okay, I had nothing against the Maltos except for the girl’s original character model, and the non-binary Terran just raises more questions about Transformers and gender that has been going long before the culture war started playing with gender as a concept, I just found the whole thing boring. The aforementioned Nightshade was rather boring to me, his only personality trait I caught was the Earth “museum” that Hoist of Rescue Bots Academy did better. In the same vein, Mandroid was a less interesting fusion of Circuit Breaker, Silas from Prime, and Rescue Bots recurring villain Doctor Morocco. The Terran idea sounded interesting in theory but never really caught on with me. Of course the big problem is post-war Transformers stories rarely interest me.
This thought pattern of what I would like to see in the next Transformers kids project was inspired by TJ Omega on YouTube, and I’ll show you his video before I go into my own thoughts. Cyberworld is the next announced kids line, and there will be media to go along with it. Whether or not Skybound has the guts to do a kids comic with this I can’t say, but they did make Super Dinosaur, so they are capable at least. While I like some of his ideas and others I could accept, I have my own thoughts on what I would like a Transformers series called Cyberworld to pull off. With that name there’s one or two options. Either make it some kind of virtual world, like I’ve seen done with Marvel characters in an anime I haven’t checked into, or the most likely and approved by older fans idea of setting it on Cybertron. Then again, they’d probably just call it Cybertron. It’s not like Hasbro or their licensers hasn’t reused a name before. More Than Meets The Eye has been a regular series and a profile book, while Robots In Disguise has been a rework of an anime, a continuation of Prime, and a comic set after the war, neither of which have any connection to each other beyond the Transformers themselves.
I’ll let TJ go over what little we know about Cyberworld (the short version is “it’s going to exist”) and what he’d like to see in the new project. I’ll follow that up with my own ideas, some of which we agree on, some we don’t, and one is the Decepticon Justice Division.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
“Yes, I’m here. Where are you?”
Captain Atom Vol. 2 #85
Charlton Comics Group (March, 1967)
Captain Atom: “Strings Of Punch And Jewlee”
WRITER: Dave Kaler
PENCILER: Ditko
INKER: Rocke Mastroerio
LETTERER: Herb Field
New Blue Beetle:
CONCEPT/ART: Steve Ditko
WRITER: Gary Friedrich
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Spoilers for The Lion King. I’ve seen it and there’s a banked Finally Watched review in the future. Not sure about today, though.
Catch more from Literature Devil on YouTube
Tell others about the Spotlight:
I tried looking for videos of people playing through the story. All I found were builders and a weird game of hide-and-seek.
In the time since I have heard that there is indeed lore in Minecraft. The idea of a live-action Minecraft movie is still dumb, however. However, it seems that while Jason Momoa is actually in this movie it will be Jack Black playing the live-action Steve, and this is not an improvement.
The annoying thing is that I planned to never to a teaser review again because teasers tell you nothing. We don’t know the plot, we don’t know who is playing whom outside of Jack Black…oh, wait, there’s the plot in the description for the teaser post I’m using. Well, this should be easier then…to go over everything this is doing wrong as an adaptation thus far.
The funny thing, which is not something that would otherwise be said about this teaser, is I’m not really a Minecraft player. There is the main game, some side stories, comics, books, and a lot of people streaming it online. I’ve seen some really interesting done with the mechanics of the game despite having less to work with than games like Second Life or Roblox. Don’t jump on me for mentioning Second Life by the way. I find it interesting that new G4 took time to make fun of it when old G4 was the one that introduced and thought it was amazing. If someone can make giant private parts in Minecraft, you shouldn’t be surprised that open source virtual worlds would do worse. Meanwhile I own a Tim Burton Batmobile, at least three different TARDIS types, a Colonial Viper, and more cars, planes, helicopters, boats, spaceships, and combination vehicles than I’ll ever have in real life. Granted I’ve never heard of a working phone that can connect to the real world in Second Life, so points to Minecraft. I’ll salute you from the cockpit of one of my 1970s Buck Rogers starfighters.
No, I’m not giving you my SL name.
Okay, enough front page padding…which is totally not a delaying tactic no sir. Let’s watch this teaser and see just what this thing does wrong when it comes to promoting a movie based on a kids game where you build with block that isn’t LEGO related.
Tell others about the Spotlight:
“Wait, where was I going?”
Silver Sun #1
UMC Comics (no cover date given)
“High In The Sky”
WRITER: Evelin Von Eckenbrecher
ARTIST: Juan Pablo Massa
COLORIST/COVER ART: Max Cereijido
EDITORS: Jonh Curcio & Luis Sanchez
(yes, Jonh, not John, and no letterer credit)
Tell others about the Spotlight:
Catch more from Casually Comics on YouTube
I was not aware of this character, and we know mister “there are no good female villains” didn’t know about her, but Sasha has a point. If you’re going to do an homage to the Golden Age, why not look for Golden Age characters instead of surface level aesthetics? I mean besides that being the kind of shallowness we’ve come to expect from modern Hollywood? Batman: The Brave & The Bold went looking for things to use in their Silver Age homage despite setting the show in present day (like with who was Blue Beetle at the time). Bruce Timm really didn’t know what he was doing with this show.
I don’t know about Golden Age Harley, but the proto-Royal Flush Gang (Joker was even involved in their first appearance outside comics, in Super Powers Team) does make a bit more sense. Queenie isn’t the loyal sycophant stooge. Batman ’66 probably had a few proto-Harleys because they were molls who were just there to help the Joker, not ally with him as a fellow criminal.
BW Media Spotlight 