No new comic anyway. My weekend did not come with a good sleep cycle (I’ll spare you the details) so I didn’t get an Easter comic done, and frankly I only thought of one just before bed on Saturday night. Slept okay last night so I do some site work today. Hope everybody had a good time and found all the eggs you wanted, and for those inclined to honor the day our Savior rose from the grave to break the sin barrier between God and man.
Over at the Clutter Reports I found an Easter trivia video if you’re interested, but I didn’t get to do anything with that project, either.
Tomorrow we resume the Chapter By Chapter review of Batman: Knightfall, and I would like to talk about something other than trailers this week if I could. It depends on what the week has in store for us. At any rate, have a great week, everybody!
St Louis, Missouri: 1927. The waning days of prohibition, but the underground bootleggers and speakeasies are of course not aware of the future. One such speakeasy is Lackadaisy, a club that’s fallen on hard times after the curious death of owner Atlas May. Now his widow, Mitsi, struggles to keep her husband’s legacy alive between the law and rival clubs a bit more insistent about wiping out the competition…literally if possible. Her only help acquiring new sources of product are the lovable screw-up and musician Rocky Rickaby, his forcibly included cousin Calvin “Feckle” McMurry”, and the flapper/muscle of the group Ivy Pepper, who has a thing for Feckle and is, to use an anime fandom term, “best girl”.
Oh, and they’re all anthropomorphic cats.
A 1920s gangster story like Lackadaisy is not usually my cup of whiskey (I also don’t drink), but considering one of my favorite movies is Bugsy Malone and I also like Johnny Dangerously, I’m in for the right gimmick. It’s not the cat people thing but just the way the characters interact with each other that drew me to the webcomic by Tracy J. Butler. Okay, the cats got my interest, but it was the characters, especially Rocky and Ivy, that grabbed my attention. There’s a lot of love and a lot of fun put into this story, and that’s just the protagonists. The villains, other antagonists, and everyone else our crazy cats come across are unique and interesting. I’d say stop reading this and go read that, but they made a pilot.
Originally intended as a short film, the response from their Kickstarter was so overwhelming that now Butler and the animators at Iron Circus are calling it a pilot, and it’s become a viral success (granted I don’t get out and about the community but that’s my perspective) in a matter of days. People wanted to see this and liked what they saw, which is a nice change from a lot of modern media. Tonight we’ll watch the pilot if for some reason you haven’t and as a bonus I have a video from one of the animators giving us a behind the scenes look at the making of Lackadaisy. Enjoy!
Dan Garret tracks down the man who keeps stealing Tangent’s backgrounds.
The Blue Beetle #7
Fox Features Syndicate (May/June, 1941)
Outside of one story with Dynamite Thor, the dude who flies by blowing himself up (so basically Team Rocket’s superpower), and another with another forgotten Fox Features hero, Dynamo, all the stories feature The Blue Beetle. So I’ll just mark the two stories with the alternate heroes and as usual the text stories I’ll be going past because there are too many stories to review here and it isn’t a comic story in a comic. Mostly because I only have so much time in a day. That’s one of the reasons these are fun to read (when the story’s good) but hard to review.
We heard nothing about Batman: Caped Crusader or My Adventures With Superman for the next two years. Then yesterday a new tweet about the Superman cartoon came out, but not on DC Kids.
AC/DC is good. AS/DC is better. My Adventures With Superman starring Jack Quaid is coming this summer. pic.twitter.com/9MzRn66LKn
The real news isn’t that it’s finally coming out, despite some of the odd decisions being made lately concerning Warner Brothers Discovery’s animation library and projects, which is an article on its own, but where the show is going. Not to Cartoon Network or HBO Max as originally promoted…but Adult Swim, the Williams Street-run programming block (along with Toonami) on Cartoon Network. This is a very odd choice, taking a kids show and putting it on the adult show period. First let’s look at the actual teaser, then talk about the relocation itself and why it’s so confusing.
I first saw comics regularly at a local drug store when I was a kid. I bought comics from convenience stores, a smoke shop (and I don’t even smoke), grocery stores…all when they had newsracks and before comics eventually started going to a local comic store when those options started to dry up. I even picked up three packs of unsold comics at Sears, which is where I got the first three comics I owned, given to me as a gift by someone who knew I liked superhero shows, and was my introduction to this media. The fact that I can’t find them anymore except for one type of store but can still find books and DVDs/Blu-Rays in other stores means comics have lost an important outlet to stay in public consciousness. That’s what’s disappointing here.
Yes, I know the movie isn’t out yet. For all we know the movie will be Margot Robbie’s best work, will be hilarious, poignant social commentary I actually agree with, cure cancer, and make us forgive Robbie for the terrible Harley Quinn movie that screwed over Cassandra Cain and the rest of the Gotham ladies that were forced into that garbage.
Okay, we know that last part isn’t happening, but I want it to be clear I am NOT judging this movie on quality of the work. It hasn’t come out and I probably won’t go see it when it does. I am not telling you the movie is terrible and I’m tired of critics being accused of that when judging trailers. Trailers exist for a reason! They are supposed to get people hyped for the movie coming out and give you an idea of the tone and style of the film. It’s not supposed to ruin good jokes and shock moments but tell that to the marketing department. So no, I’m not telling you this is a bad movie.
I’m telling you that the trailer already shows signs of Hollywood’s continuing trend of bad adaptations. I’ve seen good adaptations that are bad stories and bad adaptations that are good stories. My favorite movie is in the latter category. Please understand the spirit of this article. I’m looking at what Warner Brothers thinks will get people to be excited for this movie. I’m not even a Barbie fan but the fact that I know more about Barbie than this trailer indicates the movie does should make them feel bad. It doesn’t and won’t but them’s the fact, kids! Now, if that is out of the way we’ll see who actually read this part when I get accused of “hating” something that’s not even released to the public when I’m talking about what they’re telling us we’re in for. With that….
How can you not know at least something about Barbie and her friends. Those toy commercials aired on my shows just as much as it did the girls shows because somebody realized girls might be watching, either to make their brothers happy so she can watch her show or because she’s not limited to “girly” TV. I know Barbie has multiple friends of multiple hair colors and races, that Ken isn’t the only dude in Barbie’s world, that she has two younger sisters (middle child Skipper is the only one I know by name), and that she’s either a model or can’t hold down a job.
Barbie’s purpose is to show girls they can be anything they want. There was even a tagline for awhile: “We girls can do anything, right, Barbie?” and the recent one is “You can be anything”. Of course the surface viewers just see her thin body and perfect bust and immediately go crazy, that it enforces bad body images or something. There is even a negative connotation around the name “Barbie”, applied to girls considered airheads, the same applying to boys and “Ken”.
So I’m watching The Masked Singer last night and finally see a trailer for the live-action take on Barbie and Ken (not to be confused with Ken Jeong) and my immediate thought was…”wow, this is actually stupider than I thought it would be”.
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I first saw comics regularly at a local drug store when I was a kid. I bought comics from convenience stores, a smoke shop (and I don’t even smoke), grocery stores…all when they had newsracks and before comics eventually started going to a local comic store when those options started to dry up. I even picked up three packs of unsold comics at Sears, which is where I got the first three comics I owned, given to me as a gift by someone who knew I liked superhero shows, and was my introduction to this media. The fact that I can’t find them anymore except for one type of store but can still find books and DVDs/Blu-Rays in other stores means comics have lost an important outlet to stay in public consciousness. That’s what’s disappointing here.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on April 7, 2023 in Comic Spotlight, DC Spotlight and tagged Comics By Perch, commentary, DC Comics, Walmart.
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