“I’d call for a gardener but they’ve been evil, too.”
Scooby-Doo Team-Up #40
DC Comics (September, 2018–as shown in volume 7 of the digital trade)
“How’s Bayou?”
WRITER: Sholly Fisch
ARTIST: Dario Brizuela
COLORIST: Franco Riesco
LETTERER: Saida Temofonte
EDITOR: Kristy Quinn’
So if you’re reading this clearly I didn’t get the last Finally Watched movie I planned for this week. So I’ll do it next week but I’m completing this operation. The goal is to get some space on the DVR as much as finally doing these articles after saying I would. Saturday I have a lot of cleaning to finally do, I finally have this week’s Jake & Leon roughed out and I need the strip by the end of the week, and there’s only so much time I can finally do it in. This sentence is the last use of “finally” in this post.
So I’ll do that movie next week and then I have other stuff to discuss. There will be a Saturday Night Showcase in the theme of…well, you know.
Typically I am not a fan of dystopias, mostly because that seems to be all modern sci-fi creators want to do anymore. When balanced with more utopian stories I think it’s just fine, but just as I don’t want all science fiction to be utopian I don’t want all science fiction to be dystopian. Each has their own thing to say or their own way to tell a fun story. However, Hollywood fears bright colors and sunlight…which is odd given they’re in California, which is loaded with both. Maybe they see it too often outside the windows of their mansions?
The fact that I was interested in Alita: Battle Angel is then something of a fluke, but given that my all-time favorite movie is in a genre I don’t typically follow AND is a poor adaptation of the source material stranger things have happened. I don’t know if Guillermo del Toro saw the original Battle Angel Alita manga by Yukito Kushiro or the original video animation by KSS Inc., Movic, Animate and famous (in the west) anime studio Madhouse. The story goes that he showed one of them (possibly even the novelization given Hollywood types and their lack of interest in anything with drawings nowadays) to James Cameron, who loved it. It took a few years for other projects to give him the opening, tapping Robert Rodriguez to direct. In 2019 the movie hit theaters…and the “fun” began.
I would be remiss not to discuss how the movie was drawn into the current internet arm of the culture war, which I swear has gone nuclear by now. When critics of Captain Marvel, the Bree Larson movie part of the MCU, were being called misogynists because they supposedly didn’t want to see a movie starring a woman Alita: Battle Angel was used as a counterpoint of how to tell the story with a female hero right. Instead of discuss the issue and try to learn from the perspective of others, a dying art on the internet, defenders of Captain Marvel decided to attack Alita, probably without actually watching any version of it because nuance is dead. I actually considered reviewing the two movies together but I’ve decided not to take part in that nonsense. It is not fair to either film and the people who worked hard on it to judge two unrelated movies based on each other. Heck, I don’t even do that for sequels. While not-Billy Batson is on the Finally Watched list (and Billy Batson in name only isn’t…sorry Shazam! but you shouldn’t have used Geoff Johns’ comic version as your guide) I’m going to review this movie based on its own merits.
RELEASE DATE: 2019
RELEASED BY: Twentieth Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, and Troublemaker Studios
RUNTIME: 2 hour 2 minutes
RATING: PG-13
VIEWING SOURCE FOR THIS REVIEW: HBO2 during a free preview weekend
That’s a new category frankly I should have added long ago.
STARRING: Rosa Salazar, Christoph Waltz, Keenan Johnson, Mahershala Ali, and Jennifer Connelly
SCREENWRITERS: James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis
DIRECTOR: Robert Rodriguez
BOX OFFICE: $404,980,543 worldwide, $85,838,210 domestic according to IMDB
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $170,000,000 according to IMDB
“Will someone make that Dragon’s Lair movie already so we get a turn?”
Space Ace #2
CrossGen Publishing & MVCreations (September, 2003)
WRITER: Robert Kirkman
ARTIST: Paulo Borges
COLORIST: Grafiz Sismik
LETTERING: Lithium Pro
It’s interesting that Batman is actually known in Japan. He and Robin even had their own manga series, which a few years ago was translated into English as Bat-Manga if you want to look up their adventures against Lord Death Man. So a Batman anime isn’t all that surprising. Besides, as Gaijin Goombah once discovered, Batman is totally a ninja anyway. So when 2018’s Batman Ninja was announced it didn’t surprise anyone, and the curiosity began.
Was this going to be an Elseworlds story, like the adapted Gotham By Gaslight, or a time travel story? It turned out to be the latter, and thanks to Toonami (part of the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network) I was able to finally see it. For the record it was the English version they aired and that’s what I’ll be using but since the English trailer spoils part of Batman’s character arc (nice going, nitwits, and that was the official Warner Entertainment trailer) I went with the Japanese trailer instead. This may be one of the shorter waits since starting this series, which may end up being an unintentional theme for this week, but was it worth waiting for at all?
RELEASE DATE: 2018
RELEASED BY: Marvel Studios & Walt Disney Pictures
RUNTIME: 1 hour 25 minutes
RATING: unrated (apparently direct to video doesn’t get an MMPA rating, but this isn’t a movie for kids)
STARRING: Roger Craig Smith, Tony Hale, Tara Strong, Will Friedle, Fred Tatasclore, Yuri Lowenthal, Grey Griffin, Eric Bauza, & Adam Croasdell,
SCREENWRITERS: Kazuki Nakashima (original), Leo Chu, and Eric S. Garcia (English)
DIRECTOR: Junpei Mizusaki
BOX OFFICE: it’s a direct to video movie
ESTIMATED BUDGET: darned if I know
“I need to start wearing a parachute.”
Sonic X #9
Archie Comics (July, 2006)
“Wicked Sweet Shuttle Shenanigans” part 2
WRITER/LETTERER: Joe Edkin
PENICLER: Tim Smith 3
INKERS: Andrew Pepoy and Rick Koslowski
COLORIST: Tom Chu
COVER ART: Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante
EDITOR: Mike Pellerito
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 