Quote from: ASS-P on September 29, 2017, 02:09:37 PM
...I bought the Spidey one, and I migh t very well buy this'n...

So what are the contents, generally speaking? I thought it would probably be reprints of Marvel's kids' line of comics from the last couple of decades or so, but didn't actually see one to flip through it.

Sorry to hear. You gotta watch the sugar and sodium intake, get some exercise (lose weight if that's a factor), and lower your blood pressure if you can. Of course you probably have meds, but diet and exercise are a big help in controlling your diabetes, and it's really all you can do for yourself. Some people are just more genetically at risk, but what can you do? You just have to learn to adapt your lifestyle. It is what it is.

Quote from: Tytalus on September 29, 2017, 03:01:52 PM
Hi everone,
I'm writing a Riverdale fanfiction and am looking for some iconic locations for characters to sneak off to and make out. Whether the old comics or the current generation I don't mind. I'd love to know if there are there any?
Thanks.

Very few, actually. Archie Comics characters rarely attempt to "make out". They kiss (with great enthusiasm, I might add) accompanied by orbiting hearts around their heads, or heart-shaped irises in their eyes. A particularly enthusiastic kiss might be accompanied by a sound effect like *SMERP!!* Most of these kisses take place spontaneously, rather than surreptitiously and sneakily, or in some private secluded spot. The most common semi-private place that an extended kissing session might take place is on the couch in the family living room, after the parents have gone to bed or are out for the evening (it helps that most of the characters have no siblings living at home with them).

Quote from: Tytalus on September 29, 2017, 03:05:23 PM
Hi everyone. I'm writing a fanfiction and am here to ask some universe/content questions.

1 Question - how do I edit my profile?

In the upper left corner under Hello Tytalus (if you are logged in), you'll see a menu bar:

Home - Forum - Help - Search - Media - Profile - My Messages - Calendar - Links - Shop - Members - Logout

If you hover your cursor over Profile, you'll see a dropdown menu that includes Forum Profile, which is where you can edit it.

Quote from: ASS-P on September 29, 2017, 01:31:18 PM
...What you said, regarding   the different " 6Ts "...Myself, I tend to see it as " the 1960s " early on...then " Sixties " (maaaan ) once we get to fifty-years-ago this year or so.
  The thing is, I sorta recall, as someone whose parents had our area's local paper wbich carried Archie home-delivered when Montana was alive and (already a comic fan) read it there...I think the strip, at the turn of the Seventies, tended to feature frequently featued jokes from an " older generation " perspective that rather PUT DOWN things associated with " the younger generation "!   As did many newspaper strips then, aimed at the older folks who bought the newspaper (and the feature editors at thd papers who keep the gates)

It wasn't JUST the comic strip Archie which was conservative though... regardless of whether the conservatism is attributable to Bob Montana (who graduated from high school in 1940, after all, and lived in a small rural town in southern New Hampshire for the entire time he worked on the strip), or to newspaper or syndicate editors. You are absolutely correct about Doonesbury being the comic strip to break the monopoly of conservatism in newspaper strips.

Archie Comic Publications, up until very recently was positioned as an "arch"-conservative publisher of comic books for nearly all of its history. But that was particularly true up through at least the mid-1960s, and it's fair enough to say it applies to all of the Sixties, and to a lesser degree for the next four decades beyond that. There are numerous examples to be found in the stories of commentaries regarding the company's viewpoint on contemporary music (true up until the time when The Archies became a moneymaker for the company), "modern art" and "pop art", and beatniks and hippies and countercultural types of every stripe. There were absolutely no black characters (or indeed ANY non-Caucasian characters) appearing in Archie Comics stories until the company was compelled to incorporate Valerie (an invention of Hanna-Barbera Studios' writer/animators) into its changed-direction JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS comic. In his book Twelve Cent Archie, Bart Beaty is quick to point to many specific examples of stories which mock nontraditional ideas and the people behind them as charlatans and phonies.

MIRACULOUS: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir (Season 1, 26 episodes) - What a great show. It's one of the most unusual spins on a superhero series I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot of them). A pretty girlie take on a superhero, because it's cartoony, and a high school rom-com, or maybe that should be "magical girl" + "henshin hero" instead of superheroes... or maybe it doesn't matter since the series is set in the city of Paris. Ordinary (or is she?) Parisian 15 year-old Marinette Dupin-Cheng is chosen to be the wearer of the miraculous, which grants her the magical powers of Ladybug (no sillier than being bitten by a radioactive spider, I guess). She's goofy, clumsy and tongue-tied whenever she's in the presence of her schoolgirl crush, Adrien Agreste, son of a famous and wealthy fashion designer (and himself a teenage male model)... who is also secretly her crimefighting partner, Cat Noir, unbeknownst to her. And Cat Noir has a mad crush on Ladybug, but of course, he doesn't know she's really Marinette either. There are some strong hints that the master villain of the series, Hawkmoth, may be Adrien's father (and neither hero knows that either... but does Hawkmoth know who they are?). Hawkmoth never confronts them personally, but remains safe within his secret lair until whenever he senses dark emotions of frustration, anger, and hurt and in people, and he absorbs and transforms those emotions into a dark force (because he too is the possessor of a miraculous) which allows him to imbue an ordinary white butterfly with evil power, changing it into a black "akuma" and sending it out to "evilize" a normal person in emotional turmoil (by bonding with some object in that person's possession, transforming them along with its power into a proxy supervillain) that Hawkmoth promises the power to gain revenge to, in exchange for them agreeing to bring back to him Ladybug and Cat Noir's miraculouses, their magical power objects that are said to represent the powers of creation and destruction, and together are said to be the most powerful of several known miraculouses, that have been in existence for thousands of years, and have been passed down worldwide over the centuries to different chosen ones in many different times and countries. When transformed, the heroes gain both the usual enhanced speed, strength, stamina, agility and durability, and also a signature weapon (Ladybug = magical compact/yo-yo; Cat Noir = magical battle staff)  and a special "finishing move" power. Cat Noir's is "Catastrophe!", an ability to summon dark force into the palm of his hand to disintegrate any solid object (one-time only), and Ladybug's is "Lucky Charm!", a randomly-changed object that comes with no instructions ("What am I supposed to do with this?"), but which also includes Ladybug-vision (she sees red-and-black-spotted objects when she looks all around her that clue her into what she needs to combine the seemingly-ordinary Lucky Charm with to win the day and defeat the villain). Ladybug never knows what to expect when she shouts "Lucky Charm!" -- some of the Lucky Charms have been: a spray-paint can, bath towel, Ladybug costume, another yo-yo, a cardboard box, a spoon (all of them red, with black polka-dots). After they've chosen to use their special power, they have only 5 minutes remaining before they'll transform back to their normal selves. There's a rhythm to the ritualized repetition of certain tropes and expected actions, so that you actually look forward to seeing them in each episode. So well thought-out, funny, action-packed, and having some real emotional truth at its core. Usually I'm not a big fan of CGI-style toons, but in this one the characters are so well-designed, and their body language and facial expressions rendered with a lot of care. They're well-animated and can be graceful or goofy in their movements, according to what the situation calls for. I love it.

09-27-17:
THANOS #11
WONDER WOMAN #31
ACTION COMICS #988
DETECTIVE COMICS #965
BATMAN/THE SHADOW #6 (of 6)
BATMAN IN NOIR ALLEY (one-shot)
KAMANDI CHALLENGE #9 (of 12)
SCOOBY DOO TEAM UP #30
LOONEY TUNES #239
MIGHTY MOUSE #4 (of 5)

Still wondering when my last issue of ARCHIE'S FUNHOUSE DOUBLE DIGEST #28 will arrive to complete my subscription to that title... 

Quote from: irishmoxie on September 26, 2017, 06:58:55 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on September 23, 2017, 04:58:59 AM
MONSTER HIGH feature DVDs:
   New Ghoul @ School*****
   Fright On! ****
   Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love? ****
   Escape From Skull Shores ***
   Friday Night Frights ***
   Ghouls Rule! ****
   Scaris: City of Frights ***
   13 Wishes ***
   Frights, Camera, Action! ****
   Freaky Fusion *
   Haunted ***
   Boo York, Boo York *****
   Great Scarrier Reef **

EVER AFTER HIGH Specials:
   Legacy Day****
   True Hearts Day****
   Spring Unsprung****
   Way Too Wonderland****

A lot of these are on Netflix. Which one of these do you recommend?

The list above is in their original order of release. I've rated them all from 1 to 5 stars, depending on how much I liked them.

You should definitely watch the first of each series (in red), as those are both the shortest of both series (at 23 minutes), and they are definitely designed as "introductory" features that introduce the main characters and basic premises of the series.

Other things you should know:
The Monster High features all focus on some different theme, and each features a slightly different cast that they focus on. Generally speaking, one or two characters tend to take the lead parts, with some new character(s) also being introduced in that feature. The first two MH features, and all of the Ever After High features, are traditional-style flat (2D) animation, while the MH features from Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love? on are all CGI animation. The characters tend to look a little different in one style to the other, and the same is true of both their appearance as dolls and the packaging art. I have a definite preference for the 2D animated characters' look.

You might want to check out Mattel's YouTube channel to sample either of the short webisodes (about 3 minutes long, +/-). Just search for Monster High Volume 1 or Ever After High Volume 1. The first couple of Ever After High specials are compiled from shorter webisodes making up a continued story arc, so you can sample those for free.

Boo York, Boo York is a musical and a love story. Out of all the CGI-animated MH features, it tends to work the best, because the music keeps the story moving along at a good pace.

MONSTER HIGH feature DVDs:
   New Ghoul @ School
   Fright On!
   Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love?
   Escape From Skull Shores
   Friday Night Frights
   Ghouls Rule!
   Scaris: City of Frights
   13 Wishes
   Frights, Camera, Action!
   Freaky Fusion
   Haunted
   Boo York, Boo York
   Great Scarrier Reef

EVER AFTER HIGH Specials:
   Legacy Day
   True Hearts Day
   Spring Unsprung
   Way Too Wonderland

Quote from: Captain Jetpack on September 22, 2017, 07:31:47 AM
that IDW & Archie would come out with more Golden Age collection of their newspaper strips.
3 ain't enough.

I was curious about why they didn't just continue from where they left off with the first volume, in the late 1940s. I was amazed at how quickly Montana mastered the difficult balance between an ongoing continuity while still providing the requisite gag-a-day, certainly no easy task.

I enjoyed the later volumes from the so-called "Swingin' Sixties" less than the 1940s one, because by that time, the strip had dropped all pretense at any attempt to carrying on a running plotline. I also think IDW did itself a disservice by subtitling those volumes as they did, as all that tended to do was point out how hopelessly UN-Swingin' that particular comic strip was in comparison to its times. Those volumes were all right, but pale by comparison to the first one from the 40s. Perhaps the title "The Swingin' Sixties" on those two hardcovers set up some expectation in my mind that the strip would feel very contemporary to the trends of its time, which I'm sorry to say couldn't be further from the case. It's a misnomer to begin with, as when the phrase is used, it's generally referring only to the mid-to-late 1960s period (post-Beatles, but pre-Woodstock) in America, and the strips barely get as far as 1964 in the second of the two volumes, and really don't reflect the changes in youth culture -or the culture at large- much at all (certainly less than the comic books do). I do however recommend the color volume of "Archie's Sunday Finest" strips, which while unfortunately more of a "best of" collection than a complete one, and also having no continuity from week to week, is still quite good.

The greater irony there was that we can't get a chronological hardcover collection of 1960s Archie comic BOOK stories for love of money. 

Sales might have been low by comparison to other Library of American Comics strip collections, and/or the difficulty and expense of locating all the necessary strips in good enough condition for reproduction, or a combination of those two factors.

Not an Archie Comic. Andy Hardy, actually -- from DELL FOUR COLOR #480 (July 1953).



There's an apocryphal story that says that John Goldwater was inspired by seeing a long line of teenagers queued-up to get tickets for an Andy Hardy movie, which in turn inspired Goldwater with the idea that he ought to publish some teenage humor comics. Some speculate that the film in question might have been Life Begins for Andy Hardy, which was released on August 15, 1941. That would fit the production lead time for PEP COMICS #22 (cover-dated December, 1941), which would have been on the stands sometime in October of that year. There's one big problem with that theory, however... in his first appearance, Archie -- and Betty and Jughead, who all appeared in that first story -- weren't teenagers. They were about 12 years old. MLJ Magazines DID have a teenage humor character prior to Archie Andrews, though... Wilbur Wilkin. Wilbur first appeared in ZIP COMICS #18 (cover-dated September 1941), which would have been on the stands sometime in July 1941. Too early to be inspired by THAT particular Andy Hardy picture, but Goldwater could have been inspired by an earlier film, like Andy Hardy's Private Secretary, which had been released in February 1941, enough time to get a writer and artist working on cobbling together a story about hapless teenager Wilbur.

Translating the idea of a popular movie genre into a comic book wasn't any particular stroke of genius, either. The concept of the humorous antics of teenagers in comics goes back as far as The Love Life of Harold Teen, a newspaper comic strip (later shortened to just Harold Teen) that first appeared on Sunday, May 4, 1919 in The Chicago Tribune (later famed as the home paper of Dick Tracy). "Harold Teen" could truly be said to be on the cutting edge, in the sense that the very concept of the teenager (and coining of the word itself), as a distinct social group with its own independent ways and fads and foibles, was only just beginning to be recognized by adult society after the first World War, as the nineteen-teens turned into the nineteen-twenties. Henry Ford had given them the mobility to congregate in small groups free of parental supervision, at just about the same time that the idea of a parental gratuity called an "allowance" was taking hold.

09-20-17:
BUG: THE ADVENTURES OF FORAGER #4 (of 6)
FUTURE QUEST PRESENTS SPACE GHOST #2 (of ?)
WONDER WOMAN '77/BIONIC WOMAN #6 (of 6)
WONDER WOMAN/CONAN #1 (of 6)
ACTION COMICS #987
DARK NIGHTS: METAL #2 (of 6)
DARK NIGHTS: BATMAN THE RED DEATH #1 (one-shot)
BATMAN: BATMAN DAY 2017 SPECIAL EDITION #1
HARLEY QUINN: BATMAN DAY 2017 SPECIAL EDITION #1
DC SUPER HERO GIRLS: BATMAN DAY 2017 SPECIAL EDITION #1
RICK & MORTY: POCKET LIKE YOU STOLE IT #3 (of 5)
BLACK HAMMER #13
MICRONAUTS: WRATH OF KARZA #5 (of 5)
STREET FIGHTER VS DARKSTALKERS #5 (of 8 )
KAIJUMAX: SEASON 3 #3 (of 6)
BLOOD BOWL: MORE GUTS, MORE GLORY #4 (of 4)
WOLFENSTEIN #1 (of 2)
INFINI-T FORCE GN VOL 01: ARC TO THE FUTURE
DRAGONS RIOTING GN VOL 01-07

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.