“Is this the right time to be calling for a pizza?”
Star Trek: Year Four–The Enterprise Experiment #1
IDW Publishing (April, 2008)
WRITERS: D.C. Fontana & Derek Chester
PENCILER: Gordon Purcell
INKERS: Gordon Purcell & Terry Pallot
COLORIST: Mario Boon
LETTERER: Chris Mowry
EDITOR: Andrew Steven Harris
Catch more from A Wise Way on YouTube
There’s a great comment in the video by Mr. ZomBie 775:
Batman: Genius, billionaire and master combatant.
Wonder Woman: Amazonian, princess, and daughter of the gods
Green Lantern: Highly skilled pilot, unbelievable willpower and member of an intergalactic police force
Aquaman: Atlantian, power over all ocean life, and King of the seas.
Superman: Farm boy from Kansas, reporter, who does the right thing whenever he can.
And apparently Superman is the unrelatable one.
Truth has been spoken. I love Batman. Currently I’m doing a Chapter By Chapter review of a Batman novel and there are a ton of comic and other media reviews about liking Batman. Superman is still my favorite and I don’t like him being trashed. So when I see someone agree with me…I post it.
A few months ago the crew at Corridor Digital attempted an experiment with the AI art program Stable Diffusion along with the video editing program DaVinci Resolve and another AI program called Dreambooth. It was essentially AI rotoscoping as they took footage of themselves to use to get the program to produce the animation they wanted. It was not well received. In my own review of the result, Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors, that it works as a proof of concept but wasn’t ready for action. There were a lot of glitches, including the hands. Badly done hands is a bad thing when your story is about an extreme version of rock, paper, scissors (or “crossblades” in the video”). Many other people also complained about the problems but also how using artificial intelligence, which isn’t exactly how that works since so much as to be programmed in just to get that result, is a potential problem to animators who feel like if this gets good enough the more greedy clients would replace them. This is similar to the AI concerns of the current writer’s strike in 2023, being replaced by computers just as robots took over many physical labor jobs.
Well, when it comes to the technical errors, the Corridor Crew listened, and tried to find ways to refine the process. Tonight I’m finally going to go over the results now that Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors II has just been released on YouTube, having first been released on their website. Let’s start by seeing what they learned from the positive and negative comments of the first installment and how they sought to fix them, then the end result, and then how they approached the sequel.
“Ugh! How many chili dogs did you eat today?”
Sonic The Hedgehog #49
Archie Comics Publications (August, 1997)
“Endgame” part 3: “Escape From The Floating Island”
WRITERS: Mike Gallagher & Ken Penders
PENCILER: Sam Maxwell
INKER: Pam Eklund
COLORIST: Karl Bollers
LETTERER: Jeff Powell
EDITOR: J. Freddy Gabrie
Disney is falling down. People have been saying it for awhile now, but they’re often accused of being right-wingers who want to get rid of minority and women characters, when the “woke” bit is only part of the larger problem. As the former Walt Disney Company has grown more corporate and buying up other media companies for their libraries they’ve fallen away from Walt’s dream and his reminder to always remember “it all started with a mouse”. As modern Disney pulls away from their animated heritage by passing it on to other studios outside of the occasional CG movie not made by Pixar, and they do acquisition after acquisition (anybody remember when Maker Studios tore out Blip for the assets only to be absorbed and vanish into the Disney system never to be heard from again?) they add to the studios that have lost the ability to be creative in favor following demographics, algorhythms, and other statistics. This is a company founded by an animator who wanted more control over his own creations and founded an empire…an empire now in big trouble.
Even Matthew “MatPat” Patrick of Film Theory is seeing the flaws in current Disney operations: the obsession with Disney+, the overblown budgets, and the questionable writing (though he doesn’t call out stereotypes pretending to be representation over good character of a certain group and one-sided sociopolitical perspectives) that all has been leading to Disney’s current failures even at the theme parks. I was originally going to make this a daily quickpost but I found I had quite a bit to say in addition to the video, so it became tonight’s feature instead.
“Hulk going to be blamed for this just because it Hulk’s fault.”
Indestructible Hulk #1
Marvel Comics (January, 2013)
“Agent Of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
WRITER: Mark Waid
ARTIST: Leinil Francis Yu (though according to the Grand Comics Database Waid credited the inking to Gerry Alanguilan, not credited in the ComiXology version)
COLORIST: Sunny Gho
LETTERER: Chris Eliopoulos
ASSISTANT EDITOR: Jon Moisan
EDITOR: Mark Paniccia
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> Even Comic Drake Sees Marvel & DC’s Mistakes
One swear in the video.
Catch more from Comic Drake on YouTube
Note that he’s not one of those “right wing” commentators. The only similarity between Drake and Eric July is that they live in Texas and love comics. Unless Drake also has a band and I missed him mentioning it. And yet Comics By Perch (who is politically neutral) and July, a Libertarian, have said the same things on their channels. Perch has suggested using manga as an example as has Just Some Guy (liberal but not far left), while July was calling out comic’s outdated business and distribution model before starting his own company following his own advice, and Rippaverse Comics is off to a good start. I still maintain the “floppy” has its uses (funny thing is that article also includes a Comic Drake video on the subject) but DC and Marvel forgot that because they didn’t understand WHY trades sold so well and just demanded every comic write for the trades, essentially just making graphic novels. However, these solutions that Drake and others have mentioned at least should be explored.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on August 16, 2023 in Comic Spotlight and tagged Comic Drake, comics, commentary.
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