Quote from: SAGG on September 17, 2017, 07:17:00 PM
I just watched Batman and Harley Quinn, and it looked exactly like the original Batman Adventures, but something was...off about it. It was light-hearted in spots, almost over the top in that category, such as tapping the mid-60's Batman TV series. Heck, it was flat-out weird. What were the writers aiming for, I wonder? I anticipated Swamp Thing coming on the scene, and he did by rising out of the swamp water, but his merely giving a speech, then vanishing back into the water? Seriously? Huh?  Missing something, here....

Well, no... NOT seriously. People who had problems with the writers putting a few funny scenes into the movie are probably taking it far TOO seriously to allow the cartoon team to have any FUN. There's nothing in here that's mocking the characters, and it's exactly the sort of humor that's characteristic of Harley. Relax and just roll with it. Geez, somehow people can accept the idea of a nightclub/bar where ALL the criminal henchmen (and women) gather to party... but throw in a scene where one of Catwoman's henches tries to razz Batman by doing the batusi (and gets dropped by a quick & casual suckerpunch from Batman for his trouble), and all of a sudden, THEN it becomes too unreal to deal with. Yeah, because all the rest of the things that appear in a DC cartoon are so realistic and believable.

And yeah, the expectation that Swampy was going to put in an appearance was there the minute they mentioned Alec Holland. That being the case, we'd have been disappointed if he didn't -- and also if he just showed up at the end to provide the big deus ex machina ending (that probably should be "deus ex flora", for "God out of the plants"...) -- which would just leave us wondering why he didn't just do that in the first place, and save Batman & Harley all the trouble. Swamp Thing was always aware of what Ivy and Woodrue were doing from the very beginning, because they're all connected to The Green, except that Ivy & Woodrue have no conscious awareness of it, until they eat those mind-altering yams that sprouted out of Swamp Thing's body (which is a type of Holy Communion with the Savior of the Green).  Having Swamp Thing just wave his hand to make the problem go away (by turning Woodrue into a stump, like Harley suggests) would have been a cheat -- WAY too easy a resolution. If it's not down to Batman & Harley to solve the problem, then they probably should have just made a Swamp Thing movie (which I'm sure, for commercial reasons, would have been entitled BATMAN & SWAMP THING anyway).

It's a damn sight better of a movie than all of the crappy DC Universe films (13 by my count) that they've put out in the last five years. The last decent ones were Justice League: Doom and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns in 2012.

9/14 - 9/17:
X-MEN BLUE #11
ZOMBIES ASSEMBLE 2 #2 (of 4)
Sax Rohmer's DOPE HC (adapted by Trina Robbins)
THE ROCKY & BULLWINKLE SHOW #1
SCOOBY-DOO WHERE ARE YOU? #85
SUPERGIRL #13
DETECTIVE COMICS #964
HARLEY QUINN 25TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1 (one-shot)
BATMAN: MAD LOVE AND OTHER STORIES TP*
BATMAN: HARLEY & IVY - DELUXE EDITION HC*

*both of these include a reprint of the same 4-page (mostly) wordless story "24 Hours", written by Paul Dini, pencilled by Dan DeCarlo, and inked by Bruce Timm, in which Harley Quinn is released from Arkham Asylum, only to be returned again exactly 24 hours after her release. I think this may be the only story DeCarlo ever drew for DC Comics. Bruce Timm commented that he was so overwhelmed by the prospect of inking (one of his personal heroes) Dan DeCarlo's pencilled pages that he lightboxed the original pencil work onto new blank vellum pages while inking so he wouldn't screw them up. When he showed the finished inked pages to Dan at a convention years later, DeCarlo complimented him on what a nice job he'd done inking his pencilled work, which pleased Timm to no end.

Batman and Harley Quinn (2017) - It's a story written by Bruce Timm, in a return to the style of animation of Batman in the 1990s, and seems to be set right after the last season of The New Batman Adventures (1997-99). I think it was done as a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Batman: The Animated Series (1992), which was also the first appearance of Harleen Quinzel a.k.a. Harley Quinn. This one is rated PG-13 (LSV), and has Harley trying to reform, but Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester) need her help to stop the team of Poison Ivy and Jason Woodrue (a.k.a. the Floronic Man) from trying to recreate the Bio-Restorative Formula of Dr. Alec Holland (who became the Swamp Thing after a lab explosion doused him in the formula). In the original Batman animated series, Harley was voiced by Arleen Sorkin, but here she's voiced by Melissa Rauch (better known as Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory), who I think does a good job once I got over my initial disappointment that they didn't use Arleen (Arleen=Harleen, the character was named after the actress) as the voice of Harley. I used to love the DC animated DTV feature films, but in the last 5 years they've gotten pretty lousy, so I didn't know if this one would be any good. I took a chance because of Bruce Timm's involvement and because it looked like a throwback to the older-style features. I'm glad I did because it was great! There's a few PG-13 eyebrow-raising moments involving Harley and Nightwing, and a few big laughs as well as the usual adventure stuff. There's a scene where Nightwing discovers, completely by happenstance, that Harley is now working incognito as a waitress in a restaurant/bar called "Superbabes" (like "Hooters" if it were superheroine/supervillainess-themed) cosplaying herself, and there's another scene where Harley takes Batman & Nightwing to a dive bar/nightclub patronized exclusively by criminal henchmen in order to obtain information to track down Poison Ivy, and in exchange for the info she has to agree to perform on stage (she sings her rendition of Blondie's "Don't Leave Me Hanging on the Telephone", which is pretty good!) > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_4Czc_VxYI

Harley is really the star here, and she gets more character development than she did in the entire original series. I think it made me really understand her character a lot better, and even feel some empathy for her. Harleen Quinzel is smart and funny, but her acting out her hostility towards society is strictly a function of frustration endemic to her blue-collar roots, which is only really made obvious in this film, not in her prior appearances in Batman animated episodes. The way she talks and various clues to her upbringing that she drops make that clear, and as a result she's the exact antithesis of the typical "classy" femme fatale villainess. At one point she makes Batman stop the Batmobile, then leaps out and chases and starts beating up on a guy that she spotted, who once dated and then dumped her, yelling at him "You made my mother cry!". In this movie, Harley really is sincere in trying to reform, and helping stop Ivy's crazy plan to turn everyone in the world into plant-creatures, but she's angry because of the lack of trust or respect she's getting from Batman & Nightwing in return for her efforts, and you start to get the point that that's really her whole life-story. She made bad choices in her life because she was acting out of frustration and didn't feel like she was getting any respect or recognition. Towards the end, when the situation is looking at its worst, it's down to Harley to stop her BFF Ivy from using the replicated Bio-Restorative Formula to transform every human and animal on the planet into plant-creatures, and there's what I'd call a real "Betty & Veronica moment" between the two of them. At the very conclusion, when Batman & Nightwing have exhausted all of their high-tech armament in attempting to stop the powerful Floronic Man, Harley suggests the most simple and should-have-been-obvious solution that never occurred to them.

I see online where the movie got a lot of negative reactions from people who didn't like the fact that Harley wasn't voiced by original cast member Arleen Sorkin, and couldn't abide any "comical" humor in a Batman movie, while some claimed that the plot was weak. I felt like it was a nice expansion on the previously-existing character of Harley, and Melissa Rauch did a decent job of bringing her own qualities to Harley's voice. Humorless sticks-up-their-butts reviewers leveled charges of "juvenile humor", but that only indicates to me that they failed to understand the characterization of Harley Quinn. The humor present here is completely appropriate to that character, and doesn't "make fun of" Batman in any way, nor did I have any problem following the plot of the story, which made complete sense to me.



Scooby-Doo! and KISS: Rock and Roll Mystery (2015) - I liked it, but some things about it were kind of bizarre. KISS looks a little different in some of the different animated sequences as (I guess) animated by different groups of animators. There's yet another different backstory (I've seen several different inconsistent ones in various KISS comic book appearances) explaining KISS's connection to some cosmic dimension that effectively allows them to turn into superheroes at times. Gene (Demon) Simmons is funny as "the grumpy one" of the group. The strangest aspect of the movie by far is how Paul (Starchild) Stanley -- who was 62 at the time he voiced himself as a character in this cartoon -- is hitting on Daphne Blake (who has a starstruck fangirl crush on him -- and [I think] is still supposed to be a teenager), and at the end of it he gives her a big **SMERP!!**<3 <3. Well, we all know about rockstars and groupies (and presumably KISS had creative approval of the storyline of the film by contract) but I guess we're not supposed to think about the real KISS as a band (although in the movie, they play themselves as a band) but as a fictional band in a cartoon where they're also able to transform into science-fantasy superheroes. But still, it seems a little creepy/weird... 

Other than that, it's sort of a traditional Scooby-Doo mystery plot (the gang has to help KISS stop The Crimson Witch from haunting their amusement park, KISS World) apart from the fact that the science-fantasy/cosmic dimension aspects can't be explained away (although Velma does so anyway, because that's her schtick). There's some varying quality of different animated sequences (from excellent to average), and when the Crimson Witch gets ahold of the Black Diamond and uses it to summon "The Destroyer", he's like a Jack Kirby-esque floating head that's kind of an amalgamation of Galactus/Darkseid/Modok. I haven't watched a lot of the Scooby-Doo DTV features, but I kind of liked this one.

I just watched part of an episode online. It's pretty close to the comic book (or vice-versa).

Now that I think about it, it reminds me of sort of a cross between Futurama and Family Guy. Not any of the characters per se, but just a fusion of those general vibes.

Ordered a huge pile of back issue Archie Comics from Mycomicshop.com. I'd have to wait forever until I just found those issues cheap somewhere.

I've read the comic book. It's pretty weird.

Quote from: Ronny G on September 14, 2017, 08:09:40 AM
That reminds me of a Little Archie story I read the other day in World of Archie #53. In the story, a frustrated department store Santa Claus takes off his red hat and puts it on Veronica's head, but then the color of the hat changes to green!

It's some kind of magical mind-control thing. Pretty sure that's how he enslaves his "helpers" to his will. Didn't you ever notice all the helpers seem to wear green hats? What's up with that?

Quote from: Ronny G on September 13, 2017, 06:48:32 PM
I thought maybe they changed the bikini to a one-piece so they wouldn't offend mothers who may buy it for their children, but you're right, do they actually read what it says?
I also got Betty and Veronica comic digest #256 in the mail today. I was happily surprised to see some classic Josie and the Pussycats stories in it since I thought they were just confined to the pages of B&V Friends, so maybe the rumors of B&V Friends ending are true and they moved Josie over. Also, happy to see some classic 70s Sabrina stories instead of the more modern (2000?) version.

I had the same initial thought. Then again, as I remarked here when I read it last month, the most recent B&V FRIENDS (#255) didn't have Josie (or Cheryl) reprints in it, as it usually had up to this point -- and in fact, Josie reprints had been a regular feature of B&V FRIENDS going all the way back to when the title was changed from BETTY AND VERONICA DIGEST back in 2011 with issue #209. The next issue of B&V FRIENDS (JUMBO COMICS), #256, the Halloween-themed issue, is scheduled to ship in 2 weeks (09/27), so maybe we'll see if it has Josie (or Cheryl) reprints in it again.

It does seem a little odd that they're trying to squeeze both Josie and Cheryl reprints into the regular BETTY AND VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST, which has always carried Sabrina reprints (in this issue, revisionist-logo'ed as HILDA and ZELDA stories). I laughed because while it's fair to say that Hilda was the focus of the first Sabrina story, she's also the focus of the second story, despite the fact that it's Zelda who appears most prominently in the 1st panel of the story. I don't think there really are any Sabrina stories revolving mostly around Zelda until we get to Sabrina's series from the 1990s. There's more proof that they didn't actually READ the story... just looked at Zelda prominently featured in the 1st panel, and decided to slap a ZELDA logo on the story.

Further proof that the production department colorists don't read what it says on the page occurs in the story where B&V participate as contestants on the TV game show "Race Around the World". In a panel introducing the other pairs of competing players, we're introduced to Lisa and Lana, who are described (in a caption appearing right above their figures in the panel) as twin sisters -- yet the colorist chose these particular incidental characters as an opportunity to "diversify" the cast of a reprinted story, and Lisa and Lana not only have different hairstyles and different-colored hair (explainable), but one twin is Caucasian, and the other twin African-American! Talk about embarassing...!! And then, it seems as though the colorist has realized his goof (but not corrected it), as Lisa and Lana both appear in the rest of the story with the same hair and (Caucasian) skin coloring.

Now, in the instance of the cover gag featuring the "umbrella girl" on the beach, I've no doubt that if I were to try finding the original appearance of that Dan DeCarlo gag, the umbrella girl, as she originally appeared, would have been Caucasian. I didn't bring it up in my prior post about the colorists altering the cover for that gag because it's completely irrelevant to the joke. The only points relevant would be that the girl on the beach under the umbrella is pretty and shapely, and that she's wearing a bikini (which might be considered the most salient point of the joke, since Veronica considers that worthy of mentioning). Her ethnicity doesn't matter to the nature of the joke -- it's exactly as relevant as whether her bikini is white with blue polka-dots, or purple with yellow polka-dots.

I have no problem at all with the idea of the production department diversifying the cast of incidental characters by choosing some of them as representatives of people of color, because I agree with the intent in principle. These digest reprints are aimed at audience of contemporary pre-teens, and I applaud ACP for wanting to make those stories more inclusive and accessible to kids of all ethnicities. All I ask is that they actually read the stories first, and apply those changes judiciously, so that the end results don't stick out like a sore thumb as obvious alterations of the original story that don't fit -- the alteration of the umbrella girl to a person of color is a good example (and the alteration of her bathing suit a poor one), while the alteration of Lisa and Lana is a bad example (in fact, one of the worst, counterproductive to the intent of including people of color). Kids are not stupid, and it's an embarassment and makes the whole company look bad when they screw it up.

In the case of archival-type reprints that are aimed at an audience of collectors, many if not most of them adults, the source material should be adhered to as originally published, for reasons of historical accuracy. A blanket disclaimer somewhere in the front of the book advising that "These stories were originally created during a time... yadda-yadda-yadda" is sufficient explanation.

For the same reason, it's dismaying when I see a reprint like "Off to a Good Start" (from JOSIE #45, Dec. 1969) in the recent BEST OF JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS trade paperback, but it's been reprinted from a later digest reprint altered by the production department so that the original text of Alexandra's dialogue balloon was re-lettered to change it -- instead of referring to her magic powers, Alexandra makes reference to having studied hypnosis on a website.

At any rate, those reprints of other girl humor features ARE the "friends" of the title B&V FRIENDS, so without them, it's just Betty and Veronica stories. I do hope they keep reprinting them, regardless of the eventual fate of B&V FRIENDS, but I'd hate to see only one B&V digest title being published.

Quote from: Ronny G on September 13, 2017, 06:48:32 PM
Also, is it just me, or did they recently change the paper they're being printed on? The paper seems whiter and the colors "pop" more. I took a break from the digests for a few months, so this is the first one I received in a while so I don't know.

Can't say that I noticed any difference in the paper quality or printing in recent months.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on September 12, 2017, 12:38:10 AM

...and then I had to laugh when I looked at this cover again. I mean, it's obviously a reprint of an older Dan DeCarlo gag from... who knows where.
But then someone decided to mess with the original drawing, so that the joke doesn't even make sense anymore. "What beach umbrella?", indeed? The real question here should be... "WHAT bikini???" since the girl sitting under the beach umbrella behind Archie ISN'T WEARING A BIKINI, but a one-piece swimsuit.

ANATOMY OF A JOKE GONE WRONG:

Since I located a previous use of that same cover gag where the girl under the umbrella is STILL wearing a bikini, let's compare them and try to figure out what might have happened here:


On the left is the image as it was altered by the production department for use on the cover of that 1000 Page digest, and on the right is a previous appearance of the same Dan DeCarlo gag on the cover of ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #230, where the girl appears in a bikini as DeCarlo had originally drawn the gag.

However, someone decided that they needed to put a big banner across the cover of the 1000 Page digest, proclaiming "OVER 100 CLASSIC STORIES", and the placement of that banner happens to cover up umbrella girl's derriere, so someone probably looked at it and thought "If we leave it like this, it kind of looks like she might not be wearing any panties, because all you can see now is her bare belly and her bare leg. I guess maybe we should color in her bare midriff to make it look like a one-piece swimsuit." Except that colorists don't ever seem to actually READ what's on the page, so they didn't notice or care that THE JOKE HERE IS SPECIFIC TO A GIRL IN A BIKINI. If someone had noticed that, they could have still fixed it with another minute's work of alteration, like so:

If you're going to remove the bikini from the girl that Veronica is referring to in the joke, then you've got to remove the word "bikini" from Veronica's dialogue balloon, or it makes it look like the people at ACP are idiots. It's still not quite as funny as the original version of the joke, though, because in the original version, the girl under the umbrella is wearing a more revealing swimsuit, a bikini, that gets Archie's attention, where Veronica is wearing a one-piece swimsuit that's less revealing. If the girl under the umbrella is also wearing a one-piece swimsuit, the same as Veronica is, there's less reason for Archie to stare at her lustily, although of course that's never stopped his wandering eyes before.

09-12-17:
SHEENA #1
THE GREATEST ADVENTURE #5 (of 9)
GREEN HORNET 66 MEETS SPIRIT #3 (of 5)
WILL EISNER'S THE SPIRIT: THE CORPSE MAKERS #4 (of 5)
KEVIN SMITH'S YOGA HOSERS (one-shot)
KISS/VAMPIRELLA #4 (of 5)
HELLBOY & THE B.P.R.D. 1955: OCCULT INTELLIGENCE #1

Quote from: steveinthecity on September 10, 2017, 12:55:49 PM
I also suspect the increase in overall dollars by 2016 is more a reflection of higher per unit price than any sort of bump in readership.

Possibly a little, but it doesn't seem to me that there's been an overall increase in cover prices big enough to account for the rise in the last 5 years. I suspect a lot of it might come from a new awareness and interest by people (mainly in trade collections) due to the huge jump in media adaptations over that time removing some of the stigma of "nerdiness" of reading comics. Some of that might be younger consumers who feel like comics are now okay or cool to read, and some of it might be older lapsed readers returning.

09/09 - 09/12:
JUSTICE INC: FACES OF JUSTICE #2 (of 4)
TWELVE-CENT ARCHIE
GWAR ORGASMAGEDDON #3 (of 4)
PREDATOR HUNTERS #5 (of 5)
KILL OR BE KILLED #12
ASH VS. THE ARMY OF DARKNESS #3
SPY SEAL #2
UNCLE SCROOGE #434
BETTY & VERONICA COMICS DOUBLE DIGEST #256*
ARCHIE JUMBO COMICS DIGEST #282*

*Will review later. B&VDD#256 contains yet another instance of more proof that the colorists never ever bother actually reading any of the stories they color. I've seen this happen so many times in stories that it's both embarrassing and irksome! 

I was hoping that maybe the latest BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST would come in the mail a few days early, but no such luck. 

So instead I pulled out an older 1000-Pager, ARCHIE 1000 PAGE COMICS CELEBRATION, and read that. I seem to recall that these things usually cut out out all the special character sections of the digest reprints, so I was actually kind of surprised to find that this one had a Josie and the Pussycats section reprinting both parts of "Music For the Masses", from ARCHIE & FRIENDS #48-49. That story and the 2-parter in the following two issues of A&F were the longest Josie stories (24 pages) since the 1960s, and still the longest ones to date.

...and then I had to laugh when I looked at this cover again. I mean, it's obviously a reprint of an older Dan DeCarlo gag from... who knows where.
But then someone decided to mess with the original drawing, so that the joke doesn't even make sense anymore. "What beach umbrella?", indeed? The real question here should be... "WHAT bikini???" since the girl sitting under the beach umbrella behind Archie ISN'T WEARING A BIKINI, but a one-piece swimsuit.

I finished re-reading TWELVE-CENT ARCHIE. Bart Beaty's particular bias becomes understandable only in light of considering the last chapter, where he talks about how he first discovered Archie Comics as a kid. His parents had rented a camp cottage, and he discovered a box of old Archie Comics under the stairs there, and he'd return and re-read those comics every summer when his parents rented the camp. He talks about how when he assembled his collection of twelve-cent Archies to write the book, he kept encountering stories that he fondly remembered reading from that box he found under the stairs, and realizing that all of the stories he really liked were Harry Lucey-drawn Archie stories. He also mentioned something about having no interest in romance at that time as a kid, so I'll guess that either there weren't a lot of Betty & Veronica and Josie comics in that box, or maybe there were, but those weren't the ones that interested him as a kid. It kind of makes sense now, when you consider that it's nostalgia that's skewing his POV of the Archie Comics published in the twelve-cent era.

It's still frustrating to me, as a huge Dan DeCarlo fan, and someone whose main interest in Archie is the girl-centric titles, to see how he continually shies away from talking about DeCarlo's work, or when he does deem to mention it, focuses on some ridiculous thing like the foreground girls or this one page DeCarlo drew with a foreground girl who appears split between two panels on the first page, or how DeCarlo repeated essentially the same joke in one pin-up page as he'd done on a pin-up page in the issue a month before that. But I sort of get it. He wasn't interested in Betty & Veronica and Josie comics as a kid when he was reading those old comics he found in a box under the stairs, and he's still not interested now.

Quote from: Purgatori on September 11, 2017, 01:59:57 AM

Quote from: Ronny G on September 08, 2017, 01:53:24 PM
Yes, thanks, DeCarlo, for putting this together!

Seconded. It's really useful information

I'm very much in the 'non-digital' camp. Perhaps it's that I work at a computer all day, so I don't want to be spending all my leisure time at one, but I enjoy the experience of reading a physical comic book rather than messing about with one on a screen

I can identity with that, spending most of my working day in front of a computer. It's only with the greatest of reluctance that I'll give in to the temptation to purchase a digital comic, and only where there's no equivalent print versions available. The digital Josie and Sabrina collections are really the only exceptions that I've made to that rule, apart from Kickstarter initiatives and a few webcomics I've saved.