“Edward, just go to the optometrist already!”
Batman: Gotham Adventures #28
DC Comics (September, 2000)
“Notes”
WRITER: Scott Peterson
PENCILER: Tim Levins
INKER: Terry Beatty
COLORIST: Lee Loughridge
LETTERER: Tim Harkins
ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Frank Berrios
EDITOR: Bob Schreck
Does Link destroy the flute or do his duty?
I love Choose Your Own Adventure books and their various knockoffs. I would love to record a session of gathering a group either in person or online and have them play the books. Yes play, because these were the earliest “game books” where you didn’t just read the book but you made choices that affected the story’s outcome. That’s what makes them so interesting. VicSage of The Retroist looks at the very first book in the series and its origins.
Taken from Robert Kirkman’s fake pitch for The Walking Dead. Untrue story.
I know the gag’s been done before, but I added a zombie. I didn’t even get into the spiritual ramifications.
Well, I’m over my bad medicine reaction just in time to have Free Comic Book Day and a family event the week after take my Saturdays offline for the next two weeks. This and the limited time I have to work on that video review plus spending a few days in recover mode meant little time was given to my software organizing project over at The Clutter Reports but I managed to sneak a little in. At least I got sick before those events.
I don’t know what I’m going to have time for this week between Free Comic Book Day and working on the video and trying to get a review into The Clutter Reports but I’m going to try to get something in besides comic and novel reviewing. I don’t know what yet or if I’ll be successful but we’ll see what happens. I want that video done by the end of May but I said the same thing about April. And March. Don’t worry, you will have something worth taking time out for this week. I promise that at least. Don’t forget to be around my Twitter feed on Saturday for the free comic reviews with Saturday Night Showcase in if I can and next week if I can’t. It should be an interesting one. Hope the week finds you well.
The Ultraman franchise from Japan combines superheroes and Godzilla-sized monsters. Of course I got into it immediately. Sort of. Ultraman: The Adventure Begins was a Hanna-Barbera produced pilot movie that never made full series. When I first saw Ultraman: Towards The Future I was at first disappointed because it was in live-action, which doesn’t usually do superheroes nearly well. (An odd comment given next week’s Saturday Night Showcase if things work out as planned.) However, the show easily won me over. As I learned more about the series I grew to be a fan. Not a die-hard fan but I always enjoy watching it, as typing “Ultraman” into the site search engine will reveal.
Ultra Fight Victory is a team-up of various Ultraman heroes throughout the franchise, focusing on Ultraman Victory. As this particular franchise has had limited exposure in the US (two cartoons, one produced in the US, as well as two dubbed shows and two live-action shows made for the US–one of which never actually aired here…it’s a long story) I have no idea who most of these characters are. It is still a fun Ultra-adventure and if it gets you curious about the franchise, it has had its own victory.
What’s really unique here is that it comes from Tsuburaya’s own YouTube channel. For now. The series of 13 shorts that make up Ultra Fight Victory were once on the channel with subtitles, then taken down to be replaced by a combined video, then taken down again to be put back up in miniseries serialized format, only now with dubs. As of this writing this is the only Ultraman production to do so, not counting the original Ultraman and Ultraman Leo, Ultra Seven, Ultraman II (the anime), and Ultraman Tiga as well as the Netflix The Ultraman anime I haven’t seen beyond a few clips. There are also a few movies but I’ve never seen them on TV. The one we’re watching tonight is the only dub I know of on Tsuburaya’s official channel and if there’s a subtitled video still up there I haven’t seen it. Everything else is in Japanese without any form of translation. You’re guess on what makes Ultra Fight Victory so special is as good as mine. Enjoy just the same.
UPDATE 10/14/2018: For some reason they took it off their official channel so to continue to bring this to you I have a fan-editing of the miniseries into a movie. I don’t know why they took it down. They have since added subtitles to a few other shows through closed captions and auto-generated captions you have to switch to English from Japanese, so your mileage may vary. It’s a way to watch Ultra shows legally even if I had to bypass the system to keep this Showcase active.
There you have it, all 51 comics coming out on Free Comic Book Day, the annual attempt to draw new readers into the comic store because comics seem to be reserved there these days. Look, I love my local comic store and I wish my unemployed behind could go back to visiting once a week for new comics, but the best way to bring comics to the masses is to go where the masses are and make comic stores a place to find newer material, back issues, and fellow fans ready to discuss their favorite medium like meetings at a bookstore. Free Comic Book Day is a good way to draw people to the store, but not enough to draw people into comics since the comic readers are the only ones who know about it on the day it’s coming.
Of course, someone reading the list while providing covers isn’t enough to decide which ones I would like to add to my collection. Luckily there are samples available on the official website of the event. It’s not the full comic mind you but a few pages to give you an idea what to look for, given how some stores operate and the fact that some of the best go fast. Comic stores don’t get these for free, they have to pay for them, so they have to guess what guests and hopefully future customers might like, and order accordingly. The Gold costs more than the Silver but with an oversized comic collection I’m still organizing and paring down I can’t get everything. The question is what ones do I think I’d enjoy? Well, let’s take a peek.
Running late tonight but I’m just coming off sick leave. This is where I would make a joke about this book sending me back there but this last act has seen an improvement now that the Op-Center team is actually part of the story and not just padded series set-up. Whether or not the trend continues we’ll have to see.
Bouncing between the two hot spots. What that says for Kim Hwan we don’t know yet, but there are otherwise three locations of importance; well, two and Op-Center. The DMZ and the North Korean missile base seem to be the important locations for the main story right now. I guess right now the DMZ is all that matters, but is the Op-Center scene important or just a chapter break pretending to be a chapter?
I don’t have any images from the cartoon in my media library and I’m coming off sick leave.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that a brand new version of The Jackie Chan Adventures, the Kids WB series based on the characters Chan is noted for, is getting a reboot. This version goes into the “kid version” territory made famous by the Muppet Babies, where a child Jackie and his friends learn life lessons, so I don’t know if it’s actually connected to the previous cartoon or not.
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
