
In this issue: Star Power battles gender-swapped alien Gene Simmons! That could actually be a comic name.
Star Power #5
(May, 2014)
WRITER: Michael Terracino
ARTIST: Garth Graham

You can’t deny it’s a new trend in adaptations, one meant to avoid the “hassle” of properly making existing characters that are people of color, women, and whatever as popular as the white ones. Yes, the only reason the white male heroes are in the supposed “lead” is that so many more of them were made but it’s not like there weren’t black women basically running superteams. Filmation not only gave us Space Sentinels but put Isis (since now apparently Egyptians are black because Egypt is a country on the continent of Africa…which I guess means the Inuit are now Native Americans like the Apache or one of the Canadian tribes or something?) in command of the Freedom Force. (Interesting enough, Hercules was somehow on both teams. Guess it’s called the Valley Of Time for a reason.) I’ve listed the heroes I grew up watching and I could (and probably should) easily do another installment. Note how long it took for Black Panther, a hero created by two Jewish men in the 1960s, to become a famous name outside of comics and now a ping pong ball in the culture war.
I was watching a video recently by YouTube commentator Just A Robot I won’t be posting because I’ll be hitting similar points in my article but a bit more toned down. Plus he seems to think Invincible is on Disney+ instead of Netflix. (And apparently I’m as bad, as someone just pointed out in the comments it was on Amazon Prime. Articles are easier to fix than videos thankfully. I don’t have access to any of them, though some older Amazon shows are starting to make their way to Freevee…which I still don’t watch there either because the franchise is a bit too bloody for me.) Of course with the way Disney keeps buying competition and thinking that will solve their financial failures…
I will, however, link to it in case you want to watch it later. Entitled “Is Racebending Making People More Racist“, the host posts the theory that instead of solving racism the replacement of traditionally white characters may make people more resentful, thus making the problem worse. And this may be the goal as the elitists want to divide us to control us.Whatever you may think of his point of view, and it should be noted that even people of those races disagree that the changes are positive since they aren’t what was created (when gay rights activist and former Sulu portrayer George Takei is telling you not to make Sulu gay because that’s the actor’s orientation and not his character’s and you don’t listen, you’re the idiot) in the source material, that’s not really what I want to focus on. The culture war may be ruining modern storytelling, but it’s only one factor. The other is not caring about the source material. The changes made to the Battlestar Galactica reimagine wasn’t because of “wokeness”, it was because they didn’t care about the original show.
No, there’s something that is only part of the discussion that I really want to focus on. Have you ever notice that anytime a male character becomes a woman, a straight character is turned gay, or a white character becomes a person of color that the whole character is different? Not necessarily bad, though most are, but why does changing the race, gender, and/or orientation also mean changing everything else?
Street Fighter #0
Udon Studios (August, 2003–as posted to ComiXology)
WRITER: Ken Siu-Chong
ARTISTS: Arnold Tsang, Avil Lee, Rob Ross, & Andrew Hou
LETTERER: Simon Yeung
Thought this would be a nice follow-up to yesterday’s daily quickpost.
Catch more from Esquire on YouTube
Which I had thought to do these during the TekWar novel review or the William Shatner comics.

Trying to translate Japanese games to a Western (as in English speaking) audience isn’t easy. It’s not just a different alphabet but a different set of rules as to what kanji is versus letters, plus the issue of an entirely different grammar system altogether. This usually makes it harder to simply change the words and send it on its way. There are serious technical issues involved in addition to the usual translation difficulties. They didn’t do it to show off or to make money (they legally couldn’t) but because they loved the game and wanted to share it with their fellow fans, to get to play games they otherwise couldn’t in the old days.
Since yesterday’s feature took longer than I thought and I really have no time today I’m just going to drop a filler by Austin Eruption and call it a day because I have no choice. Otherwise this would have been a daily quickpost. That’s how little time I have. In the following video, Austin goes over the trouble going into a Japanese game, hacking it, translating it, making the translations fit the proper spaces, and getting into the hands of gamers who have no other option because no official translation was coming. He’ll go over some examples, why no official release was ever coming (and still hasn’t), and whether or not they and the game itself was worth the trouble. Enjoy and sorry for the extra quickpost.
Knuckles The Echidna #4
(apparently taking over the numbering from Knuckles: The Dark Legion, which is something I though stopped happening in the Silver Age)
Archie Comics (August, 1997)
“Lost Paradise” part 1
WRITER: Ken Penders
PENCILER: Manny Galan
INKER: Andrew Pepoy
COLORIST: Barry Grossman
LETTERER: Vickie Williams
EDITOR: J. Freddy Gabrie