MAY 2025 - I DON'T WATCH TV ANYMORE

At least not like I used to. I grew up watching TV. As a child, I was enamored with my Saturday morning and weekday afternoon cartoons, as you might expect. Everything from HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, THUNDERCATS, and TRANSFORMERS to SUPER FRIENDS to THE SMURFS and GARFIELD AND FRIENDS. I also followed the adventures of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD and THE A-TEAM in live action. I watched TV all the time through elementary school, high school, and college. I took in the TV shows my parents grew up with via "Nick at Nite" and weekday syndication (I have very specific memories of watching THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW anytime I was home sick during elementary school). There were the TGIF sitcoms on ABC (PERFECT STRANGERS was always my favorite). Must-See TV on NBC. STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and DEEP SPACE NINE during the nineties "Golden Age" of first-run syndication. In terms of animation, you had BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, X-MEN, and SPIDER-MAN on Fox Kids when I was in middle school and high school. Then DRAGON BALL Z and GUNDAM WING, among many others, on Toonami during college and beyond.

Then the early twenty-first century brought me THE OFFICE, PARKS AND RECREATION, 30 ROCK, MODERN FAMILY, and more in the comedy genre, as well as 24, PRISON BREAK, LOST, and a slew of other network dramas with a similar serialized feel. In a way, these were -- to me, at least, someone who didn't watch the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime -- the precursors to "prestige" or "peak" television. Which I'm not sure why we call it that; it was never all good -- but by the later part of the 2000s, I was watching it. I was engrossed with MAD MEN, BREAKING BAD, and THE WALKING DEAD on AMC, and JUSTIFIED on FX, as well as -- having finally gotten an HBO subscription -- BOARDWALK EMPIRE and GAME OF THRONES.

I watched a lot of TV around that time, in the aughts and into the teens. And I liked most all of it. MAD MEN is one of my all-time favorite television experiences ever. I love that show; at the risk of a little hyperbole, I'd even say that I cherish it (or at least I do the first three seasons; I find that my interest plummets the further the narrative moves into the sixties). Likewise, JUSTIFIED, which I adored. GAME OF THRONES was great for the first several years. BREAKING BAD was amazing, but not something I'm particulary attached to; I can't really ever see myself watching it again. And I will never understand how THE WALKING DEAD became the cultural juggernaut that it remains to this day. I gave up on that one a few seasons in; it was too dark and depressing for me. The final scene I ever watched was when a certain baseball bat connected with a certain beloved character's face, and I never looked back (though I did often question why I had even stuck with it for that long, in hindsight).

MARCH 2025: I TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY

And we're back! So far, so good with this new format. And this month I even have something of interest (at least to me) to talk about!

Not too long ago on the Marvel Masterworks Message Board, in a discussion about X-Men Omnibuses, the dreaded Chuck Austen was name-dropped. I was there when Austin's run on UNCANNY X-MEN was published. I read it. I actually thought it started off okay, but it quickly went off the rails and ended as one of the most rightly reviled stretches in the title's history. However -- even when it was briefly good, it wasn't what I was expecting.

See, in advance of his run, Austen did an interview with WIZARD magazine where he said that to prepare, he had gone back and re-read the 1970s Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum issues. I'm assuming he was a kid when that material was published, because he seemed to consider it the X-Men's gold standard, even more than the subsequent Claremont/John Byrne run. So naturally when he said this, I figured, "Great! He'll probably bring back Banshee and redeem him from Joe Casey's character assassination. Maybe they'll even visit his castle! Maybe they'll fight Count Nefaria or something. I bet we'll get some good swashbuckling Nightcrawler action. Ooh, maybe he'll even bring back Eric the Red!!

None of that happened. In fact, Austen's run bore zero resemblance to the Claremont/Cockrum run I loved. Aside from Nightcrawler and Wolverine, it was a completely different cast. The stories did not in any way, shape, or form, call back to that classic run. It didn't "feel" like the run in terms of style, either.

FEBRUARY 2025

Happy belated New Year, everyone! Today is the first day of the rest of this blog's life. I'm still trying to figure out the new format, but at present I think I'm going to go with sort of an "Items of Interest" approach with little mini-headlines. For example...

A BOLD NEW ERA CALLS FOR A BOLD NEW BANNER!
Which is what I'm working on my spare time at the moment. I've been using those ol' John Byrne corner box heads from the late seventies/early eighties for quite a few years now, but I feel like it's time to retire them and sort of... personalize things a bit more. See, I don't talk about it all that much around here, but I like to draw. And so I figured maybe the banner should reflect that. To that end, I'm doing brand-new corner box heads in my own style, which will adorn the new banner once they're finished. Here's a sneak peek at the penciled versions of some of them:

(You'll note that I've started with the "unafilliated" characters and the Fantastic Four plus FF-adjacent characters. But there are more coming! I'm working on the Avengers right now.)

Now when I say "my style," I should clarify what I mean. I generally draw more cartoony than this, but I want to keep with the general aesthetic I've had here since the beginning. So cartoony is out, at least for this project, as I utilize my seldom-employed "super-hero" style -- which looks vastly different from my "everyday" drawings, and which takes about three times longer to boot! You may be able to tell that I'm obviously heavily influenced by Byrne (as well as some of my other favorites; Alan Davis and Mark Bagley top of the list), so ultimately what you see up top will not look all that drastically different from what you're used to. The main difference will be that I drew it myself!

But the other difference is that I'm changing up some of the looks and characters you'll see up there. I thought, after so long with the Bronze Age dominating the banner, that perhaps it's time I presented this blog adorned with the stars of "my" Marvel -- which is sort of a mix of eras. So you'll see the X-Men of the nineties, Avengers of various eras, some characters (chiefly Power Man, Iron Fist, and Moon Knight) who had their heydays in the seventies and early eighties, and some characters very much of the period when I read Marvel religiously in my teens, such as the Scarlet Spider, "Professor" Hulk, and the Thunderbolts. It'll be eclectic, but I think it will nicely represent my ideal or "iconic" Marvel Universe. I'll go into more detail when the banner is finished and published.

In other news...

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING LATELY?
This site was always, first and foremost, about examining comics, graphic novels, and the like. And just because I've decided to retire from writing long-term in-depth posts about same, doesn't mean that I've stopped reading them! So as I put up these monthly-ish posts, I'm going to try to mention things I've read lately. We'll start with a tome I finished a while back: FLASH GORDON VOLUME 4: THE STORM QUEEN OF VALKIR from Titan Books. This installment picks up where my Flash Gordon review of a number of years past ended. Creator Alex Raymond has left the strip, turning artistic duties over to his former assistant, Austin Briggs. Scripter Don Moore remains aboard.

This was an odd one. For those who read along with my Flash posts way back when, you might recall that when Raymond departed, all seemed well for our hero and his friends. Ming the Merciless had been vanquished some time earlier, and more recently, Flash had also defeated a new warlord named Brazor to restore peace yet again to Mongo. Thus the next volume, which collects all of Briggs' run on the Sunday strips, begins with a bit of a clean slate, and an odd status quo -- Flash is the president of Mongo.

You may be wondering, isn't there someone more qualified to be president, like maybe Prince Barin and/or his wife, the reformed daughter of Ming, Princess Aura? When we last saw them, they were indeed leading a council that ruled over Mongo following Ming's overthrow. But Barin and Aura are nowhere to be seen in these stories. At all. They were regular recurring cast members for years while Raymond was on the strip. True, they'd drop out of sight for (sometimes very long) stretches at at a time while Flash went off his various expeditions, but they always came back. Yet here, in a run of four years, we never see or even hear of them once. It's bizarre, especially considering the original scripter is still on board!

So instead we have President Flash ruling Mongo and battling the latest warlord to challenge the peace: this time, it's Ming's heretofore unknown son, Kang the Cruel. Kang is the regular antagonist through Briggs' full run, though there are many stories interspersed between his run-ins with Flash. Stories in which Flash and Dale find themselves in strange lands, where strange princesses fall immediately in love with the dashing Flash. I guess even with a new artist, some things never change!

In the end, Flash defeats Kang and once again restores peace to Mongo, and continues on as president. Oh, and Professor Zarkov, as always, drops in and out of the story, frequently disappearing just long enough that you think the creators might have forgotten his existence, until suddenly reappearing.

Like I said, it's kind of odd, and it's just a long rehash; four more years repeating everything Alex Raymond did during his decade on the strip. I get that newspaper strips were disposable entertainment; you read your daily paper and threw it away, and I get that there would always be new readers who might have missed all this stuff the first time around. And further, I get that Raymond's run was a full ten years long, and Moore's is four or so. But nonetheless, the blatant reptition is kind of crazy! You'd think they'd at least try to do something different now and then.

ANYTHING ELSE?
For now, I don't think so. I'm easing into the new format here, so I'm going to keep this post fairly brief. (This was brief?!) Next month, I think I'll have more to talk about, so I hope you'll join me!

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY

Hey, folks! Let's take a break from our coverage of the adventures of Britain's premiere secret agent to celebrate that time the United States broke away from Britain to become its own country. Or, to put it another way, I'm a bit behind on my Bond reading, so I'm taking a skip week and I'm using this past Wednesday, Independence Day, as my flimsy excuse to do so.

Bond will continue next week, but until then, here's a picture I drew of Captain America a year or so back, and if you're feeling especially patriotic, you can check out some of my past musings on Marvel's very own Sentinel of Liberty:

Comic Reviews:
CAPTAIN AMERICA BY ROGER STERN & JOHN BYRNE
CAPTAIN AMERICA #247 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #248 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #249
CAPTAIN AMERICA #250 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #251 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #252
CAPTAIN AMERICA #253 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #254 | CAPTAIN AMERICA #255

CAPTAIN AMERICA: WHITE (mini-series by Loeb & Sale)

Thoughts on a couple movies:
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR

Back next week with more Bond, though I should warn you that I do foresee probably one more skip week before that project is done.

HOMEMADE MARVEL LOGOS

It's probably pretty evident, based on my recent post about the redesign of the above masthead and the various pages linked from the Table of Contents at right, that I really like comic book logos and typefaces. I like to look at them, study their features, and once in a while, I like to try to reproduce them*

So it's not exactly surprising that late last year I got the sudden urge to try to render a number of high-profile Marvel logos in high resolution on my iPad. Some were easier than others -- there are many fonts out there, created by fans, which mimic the various logos' designs. But nearly all of them needed some level of tweaking (character height, width, space between characters, slant, etc.) in order to better approximate the logo in question.

And then there were the harder ones -- the ones with no pre-existing fonts to work with, which required recreation by hand. Though it should be noted that when I use that term, I don't mean I drew them freehand -- they're all essentially traced (though that's putting it simply; there was a lot more work involved than simple tracing in order to reproduce most of these).

I should note, by the way, that none -- or at least very few -- of these are perfect... but I think they're all pretty close; close enough to pass muster at a quick glance, anyway. So here they are, with a little note for each:

I BOUGHT A FONT

Typically in my amateur graphic design endeavors, I use whatever free fonts I can find out in the world. Blambot is one of my favorite sites for this; they have a bunch of great freeware options to choose from, and I browse their wares often. But I've never felt the need or desire to actually purchase a license for one of their pay fonts until recently, when I stumbled across Might Makes Right while browsing their site. It's a font created to mimic the bombastic style of Bronze Age lettering, and I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.

Image via Blambot.

So I bought it. $25.00, plus a 10% off coupon to make it $22.50 -- and I couldn't be more satisfied with the purchase!

Now at this point you may have noticed all the crazy colorful blurbs that appeared up and down the blog's two side columns earlier this week, and you've probably deduced that the above is my long-winded way of explaining that I used Might Makes Right to create most of them. After updating the masthead over the New Year, I decided to go one step further and renovate the entire blog. It now looks the way I always kind of hoped it could look in my head, but was never sure I could pull off. There's now some more color in this thing, which I've long wanted, and I even found space for a few more John Byrne heads (including a certain Trinity at right, to finally give this place some DC representation)!

Oh, and while most of this stuff is intentionally trying to evoke the Silver and Bronze Ages of comics, the "Table of Contents" at the upper right is a deliberate attempt to homage Marvel's "Comicraft Age" of the late nineties (though since Comicraft fonts are crazy expensive, it's done with some freebies that resemble Comicraft's work of that vintage).

(The links still work, too -- clicking on the "Written by..." box at the upper left will take you to my Blogger profile, clicking on the Twitter blurb below it will take you to my Twitter profile, and clicking on the Amazon ad at the upper right goes to Amazon.com.)

I'm extremely pleased with this new look, so hopefully it's appealing to readers, too. The idea was to make this blog look like the love child of John Costanza, Joe Rosen, and Richard Starkings, and I like to think I accomplished that goal with some degree of success. However I'm also happy to solicit feedback if anyone cares to drop in a comment below. If you like it, that's great -- but if you think it's too busy/cluttered, too colorful, whatever, I'd love to hear about it.

THE DEMON'S QUEST REVISITED

A while back I noted that I like to draw, and that lately I've been doing it on my iPad. Well, since the advent of the Apple Pencil, which my wife was kind enough to get me as an early Father's Day present back in May, I've really been having a lot of fun, and I've even been posting some stuff to DeviantArt (linked off to the left-hand side there).

But, as I also noted before, every so often I draw something that I'm really proud of and with which I'm pretty satisfied. It's rare, but it happens, and this is such an occasion -- so I figured I'd share. Ever since the BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES volume 4 soundtrack came out, more or less coinciding with the birth of my son, I've been in a TAS mood and I've spent a number of late nights with the baby streaming episodes on my iPad (more on that next weekend, by the way). One of my all-time favorites is "The Demon's Quest", based upon "Daughter of the Demon" from BATMAN #232 and "The Demon Lives Again" from BATMAN 244, both by the venerable Dennis O'Neil/Neal Adams team.

So for whatever reason I was wondering what the cover to BATMAN 232 would look like in the ANIMATED SERIES style. This led to a furious week or so of work last month, which resulted in the following:

DOODLES

I like to draw; I've done it forever. It relaxes me. Lately I do it in the Sketchbook app on my iPad, courtesy of Autodesk. Well, I opened the app this morning and found it advertising something called a "Draw Your Favorite Superhero" challenge. There was one for a male hero and one for a female hero, as well as one for a villain.

On a whim, I drew three pictures, created a DeviantArt gallery, and uploaded them for the event. I'm not sure what compelled me to do it, but this is pretty much the very first time I have ever shared my work with the world. Please be gentle.