Next week I'm doing a theme week that probably no one will care about. And I'm announcing it on Memorial Day, when no one will probably read the blog anyway.
I came up with new sequel ideas for some of my old PT Dilloway series and so I'm going to share one on Monday, one on Wednesday, and one on Friday.
So stay tuned for that. Or don't.
A long time ago writing sites might have a debate about whether you should respond to bad reviews on Amazon or not. Not being a big time author I tended to think it didn't matter if I did. But then a couple of months ago Amazon settled the issue forever by eliminating comments from reviews.
That doesn't mean people don't still say stupid things in reviews. Though I doubt the people who wrote stupid things ever saw my comments, at least maybe someone would see them. Now there's no chance at all to correct fake news reviews except on a blog.
This was a particularly stupid "review" of One Day As a Bimbo:
Besides the poor grammar, the really stupid thing is the book is FREE! It's been perma-free for years. So saying it was "to short for the money" is moronic because you spent no money. I think a 25-page story for free isn't that bad of a deal. Certainly not so bad that you should give it one-star.
This 3-star review is another of those John Daniels types who wants to act like some great expert and yet clearly is not. Check out this review of Night at the Carnival 3:
The obvious glaring error is referring to ERIC Filler as "she" and "her." How many girls named Eric are there?
This crap about my "struggle with endings" seems to fall into that old cliche bullshit about they don't all end Happily Ever After. I'm not writing fucking fairy tales for kindergartners so they don't all have to end Happily Ever After. As for not being a "complete" ending the main character escapes from the psycho ex-girlfriend who changed him into a girl. He's still a girl but doesn't feel too bad about it. Then in the end he gets a text from the psycho ex-girlfriend to imply she's still out there. It's basically a horror movie ending. So you're basically saying Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and so on weren't "complete" endings?
In a shorter "review" he basically said the same thing about Night at the Carnival 2:
In this case the idiot thought the book with the creepy clown on the cover was going to end Happily Ever After with "justice" for the main character. As for "forced relations" I don't think that really is true. The main character had a choice: get turned into a girl and have sex with the creepy clown or get chopped up into hamburger. Those aren't great options but it's not "forced relations" like the clown threw him down and raped him.
The thing about both "reviews" is neither one says "verified purchase" so he's paid a grand total of $0. Probably rented them with Kindle Unlimited. But he did like the first book of that series, so I guess that's something.
And then after those ones he really liked Pool Hustle Swap:
Which is funny because the ending of that isn't entirely Happily Ever After. I mean the main character falls in love and marries a guy and she gets knocked up, but the price for this is that she had to give up her pool talent to a demon. So while she has a new husband and child on the way, she loses something precious to her. I'm just saying.
"Amazonian God" disappeared for about a month and then liked Mulligan, a golf swap story. "This was a fun story, when you should check out if this is your preferred genre. Seriously, it’s in Kindle unlimited so you have nothing to lose."
Looking back, he's actually been reviewing some of my books for a while, usually not favorably. In 2016 he whined that Transformed for Summer Too needed to "leave its politics at the gate" though I still have no idea what was political about it. And in 2018 whined that the main character in Transformed for Christmas 4 was "too giggly."
Just because a review is 4 stars doesn't mean it can't be annoying. Like these ones of Reunion: Gender Swap Warriors:
I object to calling it "Voltron fanfiction." Fanfiction would imply it's actually set in the world of Voltron. Which it's not. Besides the gender swapping, it's not purely drawn from Voltron. The thing the dude bitches about the bad guys not matching the technology of the good guys refers to that the good guy ship crashed on Earth over a thousand years ago, where it was found by three college kids. That was actually drawn from the 2017 Power Rangers movie, not Voltron. And instead of lions or dinosaurs or whatever they use space fighters that form a giant robot, more like Transformers or Robotech. So there.
As for lacking magic, there is an evil witch based on the witch in Voltron who does use magic to make one of the good guys a double agent. So there--again.
Then there was this one:
The title says it's BOOK ONE, which implies there could be a series, so why would everything be tied up all nice and neat? At the end of the first story our heroes form the giant robot and hand the bad guys a defeat and escape to continue the fight. Saying it's not "a real end" is like saying A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back wasn't a real end because they didn't defeat the Empire right away.
It reminds me of Forever Young where some people complained that the mystery of Samantha's origin wasn't all wrapped up in the first book. Do these people not understand how series work?
On Goodreads there was this 4-star review of Chance of a Lifetime last October:
I would say it was an enjoyable read, however, it wasn't perfect, the author is good but not Jim Butcher great, so 4 out of 5 feels right. However, since finding enjoyable reading as a Transgender person is limited to Cheap porn, preachy agenda fiction, or gender bender, when I find a gender bender which isn't someone's fetish fantasy I give it a read. This is a book worth a read because it's not a GB fetish book, but a Noir fiction with a GB twist. Since there are more books in this series I do plan on continuing it. As I said, it's hard to find fiction as a Trans woman and this book hits all the right checkboxes.
p.s. I purposely compare all Noir fiction to Butcher, because he is still the best at modern fantasy noir, I think PT Dilloway could get close, although I'm not sure Stacy is the right protag for the job.
It's nice Jim Butcher is your favorite author, but I've only read one of his books and that was years after writing this book. So obviously I wasn't trying to be like him. Really leading up to this I had been reading a lot of Raymond Chandler and Lawrence Block, so if you mentioned one of those I might have agreed. I have another of Butcher's Dresden Files books on my Amazon Cloud but I haven't been in any hurry to read it. I think I liked the first one but it didn't rock my world to the point I said I had to become like him. But maybe I'll keep that in mind with the second one.
This last one wasn't a negative comment. It's a positive one that I just find amusing:
That's pretty much the textbook definition of a backhanded compliment. Here's the cover:
I thought it would be really easy to find a cover photo. I mean how hard could it be to find a picture of a girl in underwear? But it was kind of difficult to find one that had a good image of the panties and showing a face too. The one I chose I liked because my eyes are always drawn right to the panties. They aren't really the sexy kind of panties but still my eyes are always drawn straight to them.
I was glad when I finally got a review for Another Chance by PT Dilloway. Since it came out in 2015 I had sold or given away hundreds of copies (and who knows how many were read in KU) but gotten no ratings or reviews on Amazon.
It's too bad this person didn't write this review in 2015 or so. I don't think Sherman, the bad guy from the first book, really deserves redemption, but it gave me an idea. Vinaya (the main character) could team up with Sherman in a Silence of the Lambs kind of thing. It wasn't something I had thought of on my own. But it's been 6 years so I'm not really that keen on doing a sequel right now.
It took me a little while to get around to Disney+'s Marvel TV series WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The latter I liked a lot more as it was really more my speed as a fairly straight-forward action thriller in the mold of Captain America: The Winter Soldier rather than featuring a bunch of magic and crap like that. Still, what both really do is fix some of the MCU's sloppy storytelling over the past 13 years.
The thing is that both of these shows really put a spotlight on characters who hadn't seen tons of action in the MCU. Wanda Maximoff was first shown in Age of Ultron with her brother Pietro; they were villains from Sokovia who later became heroes. Pietro died saving some of the people of Sokovia while Wanda survived. The Vision also had his origin in that movie as a body for Ultron that was inhabited by Tony Stark's Jarvis AI and brought to life with the Mind Stone, one of the Infinity Stones. In Civil War the next year, Wanda and Vision fell in love though they were on different sides of the conflict. In Infinity War they were on the run in Scotland until they went to Wakanda to have the Mind Stone removed from the Vision and destroyed until Thanos showed up and killed Vision and took the stone. Then Wanda was snapped out of existence along with Falcon and Winter Soldier and all three only had minor roles at the end of Endgame.
Bucky Barnes first appeared in the first Captain America movie but he died and was brought back to life by HYDRA and the Soviets to be used as a brainwashed assassin. Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, appeared in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a counselor for PTSD-ed soldiers who befriends Steve Rogers and becomes his partner in trying to stop the Winter Soldier, aka Bucky Barnes. Sam had a minor part at the end of Age of Ultron as one of the new Avengers, a cameo in Ant-Man, and then in Civil War joined Steve in trying to help clear Bucky's name. And like I said, then he was snapped out of existence in Infinity War.
The point of all that is none of these characters had tons of screen time and most of it was action scenes, not character building scenes. So what these shows do is start to fill in some of the gaps, especially with Wanda and Sam Wilson.
The structure of WandaVision, while a big selling point in getting attention for the series, kind of hinders the character development. It's not until Episode 8 that we really find out Wanda was fascinated with old sitcoms because her father used to smuggle DVDs in Sokovia and Wanda would watch the DVDs with Pietro and her parents until their house was blown up. It wasn't really something established in the movies and like I said it's 8 of 9 episodes total before we get into that. But still that episode especially helps to fill in the gaps that were left from the character's limited screen time in the MCU.
Falcon & The Winter Soldier fills in more gaps for Sam Wilson than Bucky Barnes. Bucky was somewhat fleshed out in the first Captain America movie as Steve's friend who joined the military before him. Most of his character work in the series focuses on him trying to atone for the things he did while brainwashed as the Winter Soldier.
Early on Sam goes to Louisiana and we meet his sister and nephews and learn about the family shrimping operation. None of which had really been mentioned before so it's like, Wait, whaaaaat? It was nice to really get more of a backstory for him than just that he was formerly in the military and worked with soldiers. The rest of Sam's character development is somewhat timely as he struggles with the idea of being a black man taking up the mantle of Captain America. This is highlighted by the story of Isaiah Bradley, a black man who was given a shot of super soldier serum and then locked up in prison for 30 years to be a guinea pig for government scientists. In the final episode Sam has a long speech to world leaders to reconcile the issue.
What both shows also do is help to align the movie characters of Wanda and Sam with their comic book counterparts. For a period from about 2013-2017 Sam Wilson was Captain America, though Steve Rogers came back about a year or two into that and they had two different Captain Americas. But with Chris Evans departing the MCU, they obviously needed a new Captain America and so this series allows Sam's Falcon to pivot to Captain America, complete with a comics-accurate costume courtesy of Wakanda.
In the comics, the Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful characters. She famously changed the whole world in "House of M" so that her family ruled the world and ordinary humans were the underclass. At the end of that she took powers from almost all mutants (except the most popular ones) just by saying, "No more mutants." In the last couple episodes of WandaVision it's finally revealed that she's a witch not by birth or training but because of experiments by HYDRA that exposed her to the Mind Stone. In the end she has Agnes Harkness's book on witchcraft and is studying it to learn to control her powers. It's a little different from some of the comics I read before this where Wanda's mother was a Gypsy witch and Agnes was her mentor in witchcraft, but I suppose this was a way to reconcile the movies and comics.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier also makes a big change to the character of Sharon Carter. In the comics she was frequently Steve Rogers's girlfriend, but in the MCU they never really set that up and when they got rid of SHIELD, she was pretty much abandoned. In the series she's gone to Madripoor, which like in the comics is a hive of scum and villainy in the South Pacific. There she's become "The Power Broker," who as you might guess is a crime lord. The heel turn doesn't really seem in character for the niece of Peggy Carter, but I guess they didn't really have anything else to do with the character with Steve Rogers gone back in time to marry Sharon's aunt, so why not make her a bad guy? Maybe they could have tried hooking her up with Bucky instead? That would have helped build up both characters, but whatever.
Anyway, I went through WandaVision in about 3 hours by fast-forwarding all the fake sitcom crap I didn't care about. I'm sure there were Easter eggs and whatever but I didn't care. I just watched the real modern day stuff. I'm sure they were hoping to do some clever, mind-tripping stuff like FX's Legion, but the solutions to what was going on and why ended up being pretty simplistic. Really I think instead of a series it could have been cut down into a movie but they probably didn't think there was enough interest in a movie involving two relatively minor MCU characters.
I liked Falcon and the Winter Soldier a lot better. Generally I think the TV series format works better for more grounded superhero shows like this, Arrow, Daredevil, and Luke Cage because most of the time you don't need a lot of showy special effects that just don't look good because the studios don't spend the same amount of money on them versus movies. As I said at the beginning, the plot for this was pretty much a straight-ahead action thriller. I was somewhat surprised it was only 6 episodes when WandaVision had 9 episodes, albeit the runtime on most of them were shorter. It was pretty cool when in the last episode they changed the title card to Captain America and the Winter Soldier to reflect Sam finally becoming Captain America. Something I noticed in the first couple of episodes was how the credits alternated whether Sebastian Stan or Anthony Mackie was listed first, which I guess made it fair to both actors so that neither was really featured above the other.
I guess the next Disney+ MCU show is the Loki one, which unlike these ones doesn't seem like it would really help fix the character's backstory since he already had plenty of development in the Thor and Avengers movies. The Hawkeye one would probably be more along the lines of Falcon and the Winter Soldier and help to add some backstory to the character and introducing Kate Bishop, the other Hawkeye in the comics. I think I'd be more interested in that one.
It wasn't all that surprising that after HBO Max released Zack Snyder's Justice League, the same fans who spent three years begging and screaming for their precious "Snyder Cut" began bellowing on social media that WB/DC should continue the "Snyderverse" from Man of Steel, BvS, and Justice League.
Not surprisingly, they've pretty well ignored the data that shows their precious "Snyder Cut" was not really a big hit. In this CNBC article for instance if you read past the headline, it says that while the "Snyder Cut" brought in some subscribers, it wasn't as many as movies like WW84 and Godzilla vs Kong despite all the hype.
More damning was this article that describes how many people watching the "Snyder Cut" stopped watching it before the final battle with Steppenwolf, which was radically different from the original theatrical version. So they missed a big chunk of Snyder's grand vision. They also missed the 7 different ending cookie scenes including the precious "Knightmare" sequence featuring Jared Leto's Joker.
And that's on top of the simple practical reason WB/DC wouldn't make anymore "Snyderverse" movies: letting Snyder reshoot and recut the movie cost about $40 million but much of the movie was already made. To make new movies like Ben Affleck's Batman v Deathstroke movie would cost upwards of $400 million--for each one. That's a huge investment whereas the "Snyder Cut" was about as much as a Super Bowl ad.
But as is typical of America in 2021, there are a lot of stupid people who ignore the truth or deny the truth. On my Facebook feed I see articles from ScreenRant or ComicBook.com or other sites declaring "The Snyder Cut" a success and suggesting that WB/DC is trying to hide its success. They point to things like the 4K DVD selling out in the UK, which is probably a drop in the bucket for what WB/DC needs to recoup its investment. Or they point to the Rock Tweeting something positive about the "Snyderverse", which is fine but he's just an actor and his movie won't even come out for a year or so. Unless it's a huge hit, he's not going to be able to dictate spending hundreds of millions on new movies.
In a country where a large portion of people still believe "The Big Lie" about voter fraud and refuse to get vaccinated against a deadly disease because of bogus "facts" and junk "science" it's not surprising that people still refuse to throw in the towel on "the Snyderverse." And like how MAGA hatters, anti-vaxxers, and QAnoners (often the same people) are enabled by Republican politicians, social media, and Fox "News," Snyder fans are enabled by clickbait sites, social media, and WB/DC themselves when they decided to put out the "Snyder Cut" in the first place.
It's just another sign that we're rapidly spiraling into an Idiocracy situation--centuries before even Mike Judge thought it would happen.
The last of three Hulu documentaries I watched last month, Becoming Bond is the story of George Lazenby, the forgotten Bond, in his own words. It's a pretty fun story, though the end falls flat.
Unlike other Bonds, Lazenby was not born in the British Isles. He was born in Australia and nearly died when he was little because his kidneys didn't work right. After a bunch of surgeries he had only half a kidney left but while he was predicted to not live until his 13th birthday, he obviously lived a lot longer than that.
In his own words, Lazenby was a troublemaker at school, bringing in snakes and bats to unleash in the classroom. He didn't graduate high school and wound up working as a mechanic before transferring to car sales. Eventually he met a rich woman named Belinda and pursued her to London, where he wound up becoming a model.
Sadly he threw away his relationship with Belinda for a fling with a hot German model, but then a woman encouraged him to try out for the part of James Bond recently vacated by Sean Connery. Since he wasn't union he couldn't get in until he stole one of Connery's suits and snuck in.
Obviously he landed the Bond role in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which was notable for its ending where Bond gets married only for his wife to be gunned down by Blofeld's henchwoman. The studio offered Lazenby six more Bond movies, but he kept putting them off and finally announced on The Tonight Show that he wouldn't play Bond again.
And he didn't. Instead Connery came back for one more picture and then Roger Moore took over until the mid-80s when it went to Timothy Dalton. Then in the mid-90s Pierce Brosnan took over. And then Daniel Craig became Bond in Casino Royale, which reused the ending of Bond's love interest being murdered, which is actually from the book of that name.
But what about after Lazenby left Bond? That's where it falls flat. There's a really quick wrap-up that's very scant on details. He married...someone and had kids and worked in real estate. And appeared in one episode of the 1984 action series The Master that you can see as part of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Master Ninja II. In that episode Lazenby gets to drive the old James Bond Aston Martin first shown in Goldfinger. (The documentary doesn't mention that; it's just a Fun Fact I'm aware of.)
They don't even go that much into why he turned down the chance to keep playing Bond for what would probably millions of dollars. They did mention that the contract was really restrictive; it was one of those old school contracts that basically would have required him to BE Bond in public for the next six movies. An example of this was before the premiere of On Her Majesty's Secret Service he had grown a beard and the studio demanded he shave it off, but he refused and was barred from going to the premiere of his own movie!
I tend to think given his background growing up working class in Australia, his troublemaking in school, not being a professional actor, and such that a lot of the reason he didn't stay on as Bond was he didn't like the studio trying to run his life. The beard thing was a symptom of that. I think in large part he rejected a multi-million-dollar contract out of spite, which is probably not something most of us would do.
It would have been nice if they had added a few more minutes to the end to make it a little more satisfying. But I guess it was called BECOMING Bond, not AFTER Bond, which might be a good idea for a sequel that could also feature some of the other actors who are still alive.
There are plenty of books that likewise are a good story until the end. Especially those annoying books I've called "nonendings" in the past where it gets up to some arbitrary point in the story and just ends with no resolution. This wasn't quite a nonending, but not all that satisfying of one either. Still, it's mostly a good ride to that point.
Fun Fact: In the reenactments of various parts of Lazenby's life, Jane Seymour plays the woman who encourages him to try out for the Bond role. She was one of the female leads in the first Roger Moore Bond film Live and Let Die, which certainly would have been one of those Lazenby could have starred in if he hadn't rejected the contract. Another Fun Fact is this documentary was made by the same people as the one on The Dana Carvey Show in my previous entry and Carvey himself plays Johnny Carson in one of the reenactments.
After watching Hulu's documentary on weWork, I watched one on the short-lived Dana Carvey Show. It was a textbook example of a show that was on the wrong network at the wrong time and thus was probably doomed right from the start.
In the mid-90s, Dana Carvey left Saturday Night Live and along with writer Robert Smigel (who is also the guy behind Triumph the insult comic dog) decided to launch a new sketch show. After talking with networks like CBS and HBO, ABC made what was seemingly the best offer by promising the time slot after Home Improvement, which at the time was the #1 show on TV.
Where the title comes from is that besides Carvey and Smigel, the show recruited a bunch of people who went on to become stars in the next century. Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell were brought in to write and perform along with Carvey. It also brought in as writers Charlie Kaufmann of Being John Malkovich fame and the now-disgraced Louis CK.
With all that comic talent, how did it only wind up getting 7 episodes shown? Because it turned out it was on the wrong network at the wrong time. First off it premiered in March, which is not necessarily the best time. And by the time it started to air, Disney had bought ABC. In a TV Guide ad for the network, they pasted Carvey with Kermit the Frog, despite that the two shows were completely different animals.
On Family Guy there was a bit about network ads where there's a cheery, light-hearted ad for a comedy and then a deep-voiced, darker ad for a drama. This actually happened on ABC only it was an ad for one of those "Very Special Episodes" of Home Improvement where Jonathan Taylor Thomas might have cancer and then you have the wacky sketch comedy of The Dana Carvey Show. It really illustrates how the two shows did not go together because the subversive humor of the show didn't mesh with the audience. The first sketch they did was this pretty weird one about Bill Clinton taking hormones so he could nurse various animals and for some reason he had a chicken butt to lay eggs. The network monitored the ratings minute-by-minute and found most of the Home Improvement audience had abandoned the show before the first sketch ended.
And while Republicans like to think "cancel culture" is a new thing, there was pressure on Taco Bell, the show's sponsor, to abandon the show--which they did, though the show hadn't really planned for one sponsor through its run in the first place. It was also savaged by critics and pretty much on the verge of cancellation before the second episode.
It goes to show that the "best" offer is sometimes not the best offer. In a later time slot like SNL or on a smaller network like HBO or Comedy Central, the show probably would have stuck around longer. In prime-time, following a fairly conservative show like Home Improvement, it didn't really have much chance.
And this happens with books too. If the wrong reader reads your book, they won't like it and probably give you a bad review. I've had that happen plenty of times. I think Offutt has also had that happen. Or there are plenty of other examples where someone gets published with a publisher that turns out to be a scam or just not very good.
So much of success, especially in the entertainment business, is based on luck--being in the right place at the right time.
A couple of Fun Facts: while The Dana Carvey Show failed, one sketch in particular involving Colbert and Carell as waiters who get sick reading off the names of food items got them hired on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, which led to bigger things for both of them. Another sketch, the animated "Ambiguously Gay Duo" based on the old Batman comics/TV show, wound up being revived by Robert Smigel on SNL.
When I was watching other stuff on Hulu they kept advertising this documentary on a company called "weWork." I vaguely remembered hearing of that company but I didn't really know what the hell it was about. And what it's about...is not that interesting. The documentary is an hour 42 minutes but in the end it's a pretty bland story in search of a hook.
The gist is that in 2008 or so two young guys start this company that basically rents desks for small businesses. The idea was if you're a startup you could rent a couple of desks to work at instead of having to rent an entire office. It's kind of like subletting an apartment with work space. In a big, crowded city like New York that model can work.
Of the two guys, an Israeli named Adam Neumann was the public face of the company. He was the charismatic leader who soon became the one in charge. And then it's kind of the old story: Neumann got a swelled head, grew the company too fast, and wasted too much money on himself and throwing lavish parties for employees and investors.
The documentary tries to spice things up by coloring weWork as a cult and from what people say there was a cultish attitude, especially with their subsidiary weLive, which provided living spaces in buildings that were supposed to have everything someone needed. But while a lot of people there might have been cliquish, it wasn't like Scientology or one of those other cults where once you were in you were in forever; there was actually a lot of turnover.
That's sort of the problem overall with this documentary. It's all sizzle and no steak. Neumann wasted a lot of money, but he never did anything criminal--at least he was never charged with anything. He wasn't Bernie Madoff or that Fyre Festival guy or anything. There were no big sex scandals or anything like that. Really nothing in the end elevated this above a case of bad business.
A lot of the bad business was the same Wall Street dumbasses who destroyed the economy in 2008 when weWork was just getting started. They consistently overvalued weWork, just like a lot of other "tech" companies until it was worth $47 billion at its peak. A Japanese billionaire also helped to prop up the company in the 2010s, enabling Neumann to expand too fast and spend too much money. So really a whole lot of people who should have known better didn't and after a failed attempt to go public, the company lost most of its money and Neumann was forced out, though he got a golden parachute of hundreds of millions of dollars.
This collapse happened in 2019 but even if it hadn't, they probably would have collapsed in 2020 when Covid made shared workspaces impossible. The documentary didn't say that but it's pretty obvious.
Anyway, there are books like this that are dull not because they don't have explosions or car chases so much as they just don't really have anything interesting going on. It helps to have something the reader hasn't seen a bunch of times before to hook the reader--and agents.
I'm writing this before the A to Z Challenge. I threw something together in fairly short order on Star Wars Black Series figures. I just mostly posted pictures of them and maybe threw in some notes about who the characters are. I didn't do tons of research on the history of the figures or reviewing them since a lot of them I don't own. It was kind of half-assed.
There were more comments than prior years. I guess it helps when you do something popular like Star Wars. Not a lot of scintillating conversation but maybe you learned about Star Wars figures that exist.
In the Vader entry I mentioned he was at the top of my list of figures to someday buy. So what other figures would I want to buy? Not just Star Wars ones either; I'll throw in some Marvel Legends, GI Joe, or maybe DC Multiverse ones in there.
At the top of figures I wish they would make is a Mara Jade figure from the Timothy Zahn books and some of the video games. I know my brother would like a movie Iron Man with a real RDJ head.
And then here are some action figures to make from some of my stories:
Tales of the Scarlet Knight:
Girl Power:
Gender Swap Heroes:
For Chance of a Lifetime I'd rather have a Barbie-sized Stacey Chance figure than a six inch one. Besides the original Stacey then we could have the different versions of her from the two other books.
As for next year, I was thinking since I did Transformers, GI JOE, and now Star Wars figures, maybe I could do some other 80s-90s toy lines for an A to Z Challenge, sort of like the Toy Galaxy videos and stuff. But I don't have some of the letters yet. So far all I have is:
I might have heard OF the comic book series Invincible by The Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman, but I hadn't read it. One day in March I saw that there was an animated series on Amazon Prime Video. It's Amazon's third crack at a superhero series after two seasons of The Tick and two seasons of The Boys. Those were both live action; the former was a comedy and the latter is a blood-drenched drama with some black humor.
So where does Invincible fit on that spectrum? The first episode is mostly pretty light. Mark Grayson (voiced by TWD's Steven Yeung) is a fairly normal high school student--except his father Nolan (voiced by JK Simmons) is the most powerful superhero on Earth called Omni-Man. He has mostly Superman's power set and like Superman is an alien. Mark has dreamed of being like his dad and then all the sudden he is! He starts developing super strength, invulnerability, and the ability to fly. Most of the episode then is him coming to grips with it and training with his dad. The end of the main episode features Mark getting his costume and adopting the moniker Invincible.
So it seemed like a nice superhero universe, albeit a bit unoriginal. Besides Omni-Man being like Superman there's a Justice League-type group with heroes like War Woman (Wonder Woman--duh), Red Rush (Flash), Darkwing (Batman--and Darkwing Duck), a Martian, a fish guy, and someone who dresses in green. In a post-credits scene they all go to their mountain HQ and Nolan shows up. Without a word he just starts murdering them in the goriest, most brutal ways possible. Which was really a big 180 from the rest of the episode.
The episodes after that similarly weave between nice and nasty. A lot of Mark's story is like Spider-Man as he goes to high school and has to try to manage a relationship with the girl of his dreams while learning to be a superhero. It's mostly nice, old-fashioned Marvel kind of stuff.
And then you get these brutal fight scenes that are drenched with blood that are like that first episode a 180-degree shift in tone. There are bodies exploding and flesh being ripped off people and heroes being beaten into bloody pulps. I guess that's not surprising from the creator of The Walking Dead and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who also worked on AMC's Preacher adaptation. It just makes it uneven viewing as I said in the title. I mean do you want a grim-and-gritty R-rated Watchmen or Titans-style universe or do you want a PG-13 Spider-Man-style universe? Trying to do both gets kind of annoying.
Maybe it's that I'm getting older but I don't really need the blood and gore and stuff. Or maybe it's that I've already seen it in Watchmen, The Boys, Titans, Deadpool, and so on and thus it's not really all that shocking anymore. Or maybe it's that the world is already full of so much shit in real life maybe I don't need superhero shows that are all bloody and gory and depressing.
The stuff that isn't bloody and gory and depressing is fine. It mostly concerns Mark trying to establish himself as a hero and balance his real life. Unlike Spider-Man, Mark's powers allow him to go a lot more places. In one episode he escorts a mission to Mars and inadvertently triggers an apocalypse on that planet. He also stops an asteroid and fights an alien on the moon.
Like Watchmen a lot of the plot also involves investigating the murder of the superheroes in the first episode. There's a demon private investigator who's like the Rorschach of the story with his noir detective-like appearance and speaking style. When a government agency sends him back to Hell, Nolan's wife/Mark's mother (voiced by Sandra Oh) takes over the investigation, slowly coming to grips with the reality that her husband is not the good guy she thought. One of the lamest plot points is that Nolan hides his bloody, torn costume on top of a cabinet in the house, where his wife sees it when she's cleaning. The guy who routinely flies to Italy for pizza or Paris for wine just leaves key evidence sitting in almost plain sight in his own house. Really? Subconsciously maybe he wanted to get caught?
In the penultimate episode, the government throws everything they have at Nolan to put him down once and for all. They use conventional ordinance, zombie cyborgs, and even revive a Cthulu-type monster Nolan had taken down previously. The monster is pumped up full of steroids to make it a tougher opponent. Mark shows up to help his father, not realizing the truth.
Meanwhile, a couple of bad guys have their own plan to kill Omni-Man by reviving one of the dead Guardians, the appropriately named "Immortal." When Immortal goes after Omni-Man and Nolan literally rips him in half, Mark starts to realize maybe his dad isn't on the side of angels.
In the final episode, Nolan explains that his people are a race of warriors who forged a vast empire. Part of that is they dispatch agents to far-flung planets like Earth so those agents can weaken the planet to make it ripe for the taking. When Mark isn't cool with this, the next fifteen minutes or so is just Nolan beating Mark to a pulp and killing thousands in Chicago and elsewhere in the process. It makes the Superman-Zod fight in Man of Steel look like a baseball brawl.
But finally Nolan remembers a Little League game when Mark was a little kid and just flies away. Not just away from the area but away from the planet, to parts unknown. And Mark's battered body is taken to a facility to recover.
After that it's kind of like Lord of the Rings where it seems like it could end about five times. When Mark wakes up he isn't sure he wants to be a hero anymore. Meeting up with an alien on the moon (voiced by Seth Rogen), whom he fought with in episode 2 before they became buddies, Mark finds out that there's a Coalition of Planets trying to organize to stop Nolan's people. Mark declines to join them and instead says he's going to finish high school. The show does remind us there are a plethora of threats besides Nolan and his people still out there for Mark and other heroes to deal with.
The ending is a bit flat. Like with Titans and Doom Patrol, in the end everyone except Mark is just standing around doing nothing during the climax. And mostly all Mark does is get his ass kicked. What was the point of spending so much time on the new Guardians team, especially Atom Eve, who leaves the team to strike out on her own when her boyfriend cheats on her with a girl who can create multiples of herself, when they didn't do anything in the end? Why wasn't there a battle royale against Nolan? Maybe they decided they'd gotten their asses kicked enough a few episodes ago. Still, it wasn't all that satisfying.
There are some other subplots too like a small-time villain called "Titan" who enlists Mark's help to overthrow his boss, a gangster known as "Machine Head" because he has a robot head. Being young and naive, Mark doesn't realize that Titan is using him to consolidate power for himself. After the death of the heroes in the first episode, a new team is recruited to take their place. They're led by Robot (voiced by Zachary Quinto) who has a little side project of his own. It turns out he's not really a robot at all. He's actually some kind of blobby little humanoid who's living in a tank of goo and controlling Robot like a drone. He hires a pair of alien criminals who are expert cloners to make a body with DNA stolen from a hero on his team who can make explosions.
Part of Robot's team is Monster Girl who's a girl who turns into a big green monster. The creepy thing is that whenever she uses her power she gets a week younger. She's supposed to be 25 but looks more like half that at the start. That's the kind of weird shit Robert Kirkman can do because he's a big-time author but if I do it I get banned from Amazon. I actually never did that specifically, though it seems like something I should have thought of. I'm a little jealous actually.
"Robot" falls in love with Monster Girl and creates his new human body as a teenager so he can hook up with her in human form. That's not creepy at all, right? Again, I do something like that and I get banned from Amazon but it's totally OK for Robert Kirkman to do it on an Amazon Prime original show.
Anyway, I liked a lot of this and maybe it'll get a season 2. There are a lot of comics books in this series so there's a lot more material to adapt. And they certainly left it wide open to continue the story.
I did a couple of entries about when I was watching DC's Young Justice on HBO Max a couple of months ago. There is one other thing inspired by that. In my first entry I mentioned one of the main characters is Kaldur'ahm, an Atlantean/human who is Aqualad in Season 1, then in Season 2 is undercover with his father Black Manta's crew, and then in Season 3 is Aquaman and leader of the Justice League on Earth.
It's after about 20 episodes of season 3 and 66 episodes total when during a montage near the end of an episode we see Kaldur'ahm kissing some Atlantean guy named Wynnde. And it's like, wait, Kaldur is gay? This came out of nowhere! Seriously there was no real indication that he was gay. In Season 1 when he returns briefly to Atlantis he meets with an ex-girlfriend who was also former Aqualad Garth's fiancee until she got killed off between seasons 1 and 2. I don't even remember seeing this Wynnde guy before. Maybe he was in that Atlantis episode but if so he made no impact on me. So when did he and Kaldur start going Brokeback Mountain?
I find something like that annoying. Not because I hate gay people. It's the way it was done, just thrown into a montage with no setup at all. It feels patronizing really. Like they realized they didn't have a gay character the first two+ seasons so they just threw this in there to say, "Oh, hey, look Kaldur's gay! We have a gay character!" If that were the case all along, why did you wait until season 3--nearly at the end--in a montage to just toss that in there? Why didn't you develop this the way you developed Wally West and Artemis's relationship? Or M'gann and Conner Kent's relationship? Those took whole seasons to come together but this you just toss into a montage after 66 episodes.
There was something similar in the third rebooted Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond, where Sulu gets off the Enterprise and we find out he has a husband and kids. A lot of people, even George Takei, were unhappy about this. And again it wasn't that all (though certainly many did) hate gay people so much as the ham-handed way it was done. Like the Young Justice show there was no setup in the previous movies; they just threw that in, probably hoping they would win brownie points.
Though of course the championship example of this was JK Rowling waiting until all the Harry Potter books were out--and maybe all the movies too--before announcing Dumbledore was gay. Um...really? I guess we have to take your word for it since you wrote the books, but it just came out of nowhere. And what was the point of it? I haven't read past the first book, so were there no other gay characters that she had to retroactively make one gay to placate people?
That's the thing that I said in the title: these are all hollow gestures. They feel so forced because there was nothing to set them up like other relationships. So in the end it feels like you're just doing it to prove you're inclusive instead of being actually inclusive. It's like when the NFL passed the "Rooney Rule" forcing teams to interview at least one non-white person for coaching and front office jobs and teams would find some token non-white guy to interview before they hired the white guy they really wanted. That's the difference between giving lip service to inclusion and being actually inclusive.
Lip service (literally really) is throwing a gay kiss into the end of an episode. Real inclusion is to actually treat the gay character's relationship the way you treat straight character relationships and giving it equal development. Otherwise it feels like when someone outed as a racist says, "I have a black friend!" Then stages a photo op with said black friend so we can see that he or she is totally not racist. That's always cringe-worthy.
Just to make it clear, I don't want to not show gay people on TV or anything. I'm not one of those people who says to boycott a product just because they feature a gay couple in the ad. It's just if you're going to have someone come out as gay in a show or book series or whatever, you need to actually set it up instead of just half-assedly throwing it out there in Season 3 or movie 3 or after the whole fucking book series. That's all I'm saying.
