Classic and new Christmas specials and longer videos. See what I add all year and see if one of your favorites is on the list.
Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter (or possibly multiple chapters for this one) of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
I’ve wasted over a year on a book I can best defend as “they fixed one of their mistakes from the first book”. The only reason this isn’t outdoing Seduction Of The Innocent is that this book didn’t make me rage or take multiple days a week to digest all of the stupidity being shoved into my eyes and up to my brain. Whatever problems I have with this book, it isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read. There are even books I haven’t covered that would rank between the two easily.
I will give it credit for handling the fallout from the previous chapters well in the two I reviewed last time. We now have victory for the heroes, but now we need to tally up the price and see if it was worth it. With four short chapters left to go, this is the penultimate review as we look at two chapters and finally get this book over with. I’m ready to read something else.
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I want to know the origin of that gun, and who thought it was actually a good design.
The Solution #6
Malibu Comics/Ultraverse (February, 1994)
“Payback” part 1
WRITER: James D. Hudnall
PENCILER: John Statema
INKERS: Dennis Jensen & Mark Stegbauer
COLORING: Micky Rose & Violent Hues
LETTERER: Tim Eldred
EDITOR: Hank Kanalz
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The very first comic. However mediocre my art may be, I’ve gotten better than this.
For those of you new here, this started with a fun bit of art practice. Inspired by some webcomics I was reading that was probably borrowing ideas from The Simpsons, I drew a character that would later be known as Jake. Numerous attempts to redo it was not working out and I was getting frustrated. So I stopped and came back to it the next day. I was able to get it right again, and decided to give him a friend. I named him Leroy but when I went to show it off I wrote “Leon”, and that typo turned out to be a better name.
At the time I was doing weekly comic reviews of the comics I picked up that week but was running out of ways to make the intro interesting each week. So I dropped a comic with these two in there. When the comics went daily I went for a weekly article link, but just decided to let Jake & Leon officially hold the spot with site updates. Today is their anniversary, which is why I did the site update on it’s own earlier today (unless I forgot) and instead of a new comic, I’m going to take a look back at all of the comics I did for year 16 before starting year 17. That makes this the longest running comic I’ve ever done, though illness, writer’s block, and other life events have kept it from being consistently every week. All I can do is work to get it out on time and hope it was interesting. I don’t even know if anyone actually reads this comic, but for whatever reason the below comics are the ones I’m most proud of this round.
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You may (or may not) be wondering why I’m doing a “Programming Note” early in the day, perhaps even noting that this is when the daily comic review, Saturday article link, and this week’s The Clutter Reports goes. I usually only do these to have the weekly site update when I don’t have a Jake & Leon comic for the week. Well, I don’t have a NEW comic this week, but today happens to be the end of year sixteen for the comic, on time and on the same day the comic usually comes up. So tonight I’m doing the annual “best of”, showing off my favorite comics that I made this year for whatever reason they stand out for me. Sometimes it’s the subject, sometimes it’s something I did with the art, and sometimes I just nailed something so good that I’m really proud of it. So I’m posting that in the usual comic spot and giving the cast the week off.
Speaking of The Clutter Reports, the latest “quick report” has me getting the “artputer” organized and backed-up, which was easier than I thought, so I added a minor assessment of how I’m doing this year. Still not where I want to be but I seem to at least having a chance to get my act together.
I don’t know how it comes up on email, but if you come here from The Tronix Tumblr, which I really need to do something with beyond site promotion, you might have noticed I goofed up twice this week and didn’t put a summary of the post. Instead the first paragraph showed up. Basically, I goofed, and hopefully that won’t happen again. Meanwhile, we have the penultimate installment of the Chapter By Chapter review of Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image and the final section of the first of two pitches for putting the Transformers cartoon on CBS. I have changed the category of “Story Bible Review” to “Story Bibles & Pitches”, which is a better reflection of how the writer’s guide reviews expanded to successful and failed sales pitches. We aren’t even close to done because after this one failed, Marvel Productions and Sunbow took notes and tried again, but now we get to see planned story ideas. I love seeing what made it to other incarnations and if the ideas they had were any good, so this should be fun.
As for the rest of the week? In the–no pun intended–spirit of Halloween, all of this week’s Daily Videos will have a spooky time theme to it. As for the remaining feature articles, we’ll see what happens. Sometimes what the corporate entertainment industry hits us with is scary enough.
Have a great week, everyone!
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With Halloween surrounded by Saturdays I thought it would be fun to do a Halloween kaiju post with sequels. The first and second appearance of Ghidorah or Mechagodzilla or something. All I found were second appearances in various timelines, so there went that plan. Even tonight’s movie is technically a sequel, but so far removed from the first movie that I don’t care. I could have tried Internet Archive, which is great for audio but terrible to post as videos on this host, or DailyMotion, which hasn’t been even a tolerable player in years and currently autoplays an embed even when you tell it not to, so forget it. I can’t even get the Japanese sub anywhere, so the second dub (somewhere Harvey Dent is having a good laugh) of War Of The Gargantuas is what you get. Sorry.
Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira is supposedly a sequel to Frankenstein Vs Baragon, known in the US as Frankenstein Conquers The World. It’s a monster that resembles Frankenstein/Frankenstein’s monster I don’t care the debate is stupid and pedantic and not my genre. Supposedly it was made from the monster’s heart or something. I never cared when I watched it. It’s one of Toho’s rare bad designs. Well, because scientists love to prove that no level of smart is safe from being stupid, they used those cells to create another monster, which gets an evil twin brother through even more dodgy science. Nobody cares about a good origin here. They just want to see monsters fight.
When the good twin is “framed” by the evil twin who just wants to eat people and destroy the world or something evil like that, the scientist must find out who’s who before the government gets their frustration over their Godzilla-killing failures out on the wrong monster. Will they succeed? Find out and enjoy!
BW Media Spotlight 