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It’s Tail’s growth as a character, his brains and technical skills, his flying skill, and his good nature that makes him my favorite Sonic character.
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It’s not easy being Tony Stark these days.
He lost his parents, he gets made into a bad guy whenever writers have an opening because they hate that he used to make weapons–which is funny when you hear Stan Lee claims to have done that on purpose to see if he could make a weapons designer pitied in the type of the hippie movement, and Marvel writers don’t seem to know what to do with him outside of making women dump on him or send him into space to die (thank you, MCU). Frankly though…it’s never been a good time to be Tony Stark.
Alcoholism, being paralyzed by his girlfriend, have a girlfriend killed just when they found a writer who can make her a good character, becoming Secretary Of Defense to protect his technology because the current one holds a personal grudge, losing and regaining his company multiple times, that old heart problem returning now and then, his armor turning sentient and wanting to merge with him like a creepy stalker, and that time he was replaced by his alternate teenage self after one of his many turns to evil only to somehow become the Tony again because of Onslaught and Heroes Reborn. It’s kind of a mess, but Owen of Owen Likes Comics attempt to dig through the mud of Teen Tony and the whole Crossing event.
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Well, that will prove to the guys at the bar he was a superhero.
Captain America #7
Marvel Comics (July, 2005)
“The Lonesome Death Of Jack Monroe”
WRITER: Ed Brubaker
ARTIST: John Paul Leon
COLORIST: Frank G. D’Armata
LETTERER: Randy Gentile
ASSISTANT EDITORS: Andy Schmidt, Nicole Wiley, & Molly Lazer
EDITOR: Tom Brevoort
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…it originally aired on Fox Kids as a five-part miniseries simply titled Dark Water. The show aired as a five episode weekday miniseries. Here’s the original intro…
…compared to the ABC rework.
As a sort of mini “My Favorite Intros” review the original has more flavor to it. Having Ioz’s voice actor do it just sounds like Ioz out of character telling the show’s plot.
The Fox Kids version also had a different voice as Niddler the monkey bird.
Yes, that is Roddy McDowall as Niddler. No offense to Frank Welker but…
…the bird-like voice he went with didn’t match other monkey birds and I like McDowall’s version better. Dark Water is basically the first five episodes of what most of you know as The Pirates Of Dark Water and I was kind of disappointed in the full series. The one who got it worse was Tula. They softened her up too much when they made her an “ecomancer”, someone who could control the elements, like ABC couldn’t handle a swashbuckling woman thief. It’s still a good show but not as good as it could have been.
Sadly there’s no clear version of the original version. It’s almost been lost to time and if you find it the footage comes from an old VCR recording. If they ever put the full series out on home video again I wish they’d add the original recording cleaned up as bonus footage.
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Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a 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.
Brief history reminder. DC Comics in the 1990s had finally gotten Lois Lane together with Clark Kent, not Superman, and thus he revealed his identity to her. The romance continued and now the Superman title writers, we’ll call them the Super-Writers whether or not you find that description correct, decided it was time for them to get hitched. Clark & Lois Kent. Then the pecking order ruined everything. Around the same time ABC was airing Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman, which focused on their relationship more than Superman superheroics. It was fine in the early seasons but it kind of lost the plot, and that was after strange adaptation decisions like having Perry White being obsessed with Elvis Presley and being from the South. I lost interest in it, but the showrunners decided THEY were the more important Superman portrayal and Warner Brothers of course sided with the “preferred” media format, television, over the source material, comics.
The showrunners hated the idea that those dirty paper products would have the most important event in the characters’ history first, and demanded they wait until the show was ready. They then made a bunch of false starts thanks to a character called the “Wedding Destroyer”, whose sole interest was ruining weddings and really had it in for the future Kents. But please, convince me that the Prankster was the dumbest Superman villain over the Wedding Destroyer. Go ahead, waste both our times on a fool’s errand. When they finally got Clark to marry the real Lois and not a clone they didn’t tell the comics, who had to rush out a wedding special just to even with the upstarts who looked down on the reason they have a show to ruin. Dean Cain, you were a good Superman but you were part of a lame show. Teri Hatcher also deserved better, as did Delta Burke frankly.
This left the Super-Writers in a pickle and I swear I’m going somewhere with this. With their big event ruined they needed something to draw in Summer readership, and were forced to use a meeting running gag as their only option…let’s kill Superman. What followed was the “Death & Life Of Superman” event, which made lemons into lemonade by using the concept to explore the effect Superman has on Metropolis specifically and the DC Universe in general. The end result was Superman restored with +3 superheroes, one a reformed antagonist, and the rare example of death in comics done right. However, I’ve already done a review of that novelization in a previous Chapter By Chapter series.
So Warner Brothers or DC Comics in their continued lack of understanding said “can we do the same thing with Batman and make the same amount of money?” and forced the Bat-Writers to find out. They didn’t kill Bruce Wayne…until decades later and that’s for another topic…but they did decide to break him, to show what makes Bruce the Batman he is, and why that’s a good thing, a similar batch of lemonade but something at least different enough to be a fresh take. Then they made a novel and long intro short it’s our next novelisation review here at BW Media Spotlight for Chapter By Chapter…
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I know this is a free giveaway comic but you’d think they wouldn’t just use the first panel as their cover when it tells you nothing about the story.
TRS-80 Computer Whiz Kids
Radio Shack/Archie Comic Publications (1984)
“The Computer Trap”
WRITER: Paul Kupperberg
ARTISTS: Dick Ayers & Chic Stone
EDITORIAL DIRECTION: William Palmer
BW Media Spotlight 