Dan

Here's a series of videos where someone mashed up the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to the main story beats from Star Wars. It skirts the line between "this guy has way too much time on his hands" and genuinely impressive work.

Finally landed that New Warriors Omnibus. What a fucking debacle. Total buyer's remorse now, of course. Well, it IS the New Warriors Omnibus.

I was an adult in my early 30s who worked at the company I'm still with today. Am I doing this right?

His male faces aren't that much more varied, but no, he's very reliant on hair and clothes to differentiate his women from one another. And I say this as someone who loves his 70s-80s work.

That reminds me of an awesome story I heard at a convention a couple of years back. By the time Byrne was at DC working on Superman, he was a monster. Just an absolute drizzling shit of a human being to be around and to work with. One day he submitted a script that had a scene involving the quick melting of an iceberg or something similar, and one of the characters said, "Look at all the liquid water!" Now water is, by its very definition, liquid in nature, and the editorial team saw that and realized it was a terrible line and really ought not to go out like that. However, at this point, you did not call John Byrne and tell him his script was anything less than perfection and suggest changes, and you certainly didn't take it upon yourself to just go ahead and fix it in editing, because either of those moves would result in an hourlong phone call where Byrne would hurl threats and verbal abuse at the assistant editor unlucky enough to be given that role. However, at the same time, they knew that if the line went out as written, Byrne would look like an idiot. "So, the choice is to either get it fixed and get obscenities screamed at us or we let it go and he becomes publically humiliated and why are we still even asking ourselves which one we should do and let's go to Bennigan's and the first round's on me."

It does not. I remember that issue very well, and as a kid I remember enjoying it, until that last page. This was the point where John Byrne was at pretty much the pinnacle of his fame, and DC was far less inclined to edit him than even Marvel had been by this point, so his very real deficiencies as a writer were coming through loud and clear.

Spidey's been in there, so I assume they're cool advertising Homecoming. The calendar has been noticeably heavy on Netflix and Inhumans characters, so although overall the mix has been decent they're obviously pushing their media properties. And I do get it. Disney doesn't want them to promote another studio's films. Still sucks.

I have a Marvel page-a-day calendar on my desk, where every day they highlight a different character for a few days. Like, for three days you'll get a Luke Cage, then an action shot, then a cover. The last couple of days it's been the She-Hulk, and specifically from the Sensational Byrne-era. The cover they used is the famous first issue, where she looks at the reader and threatens to rip up all your X-Men comics if you don't buy her book. Except they photoshopped it so that the book she's holding up is a copy of Savage She-Hulk #1, and they changed the dialogue to a threat to just rip up all your comics. Then I realized that we're a third of the way through the year, and there hasn't been a single X-Man or member of the Fantastic Four in this. We did, however, get three days of Karnak the fucking Shatterer. Goddamnit, Ike Perlmutter.

Triangle numbers! I KNEW you would know! Hahaha! Superman was basically a weekly book back then, with Superman, Adventures, Man of Steel and Action coming out one per week (with Man of Tomorrow for any month with five Wednesdays in it), and without those triangle numbers following the story was fucking chaos. Yeah, I had to organize three months of new releases into that order and then I was like "phew! That's done!" Then Arthur was like "ok, now work on the back issues." Hahaha! I think I numbered only about a year and half at that point (as it was 1992) but man, it felt like a Herculean Labor. To be fair, X number of copies of a year and a half's worth of comics (75 issues, give or take?) would have been a fair amount of work for a 12 year old kid being paid in crappy pizza.

In a turn of events that I manage to find awesomely hilarious and utterly pointless at the same time, a 25th anniversary deluxe edition of fucking Night Trap is being released.

That's... almost a shame. It was still figuring out what it was and had a long way to go, but it had genuinely improved from being a nearly total waste of everyone's time to being a reasonable avenue to get twenty minutes of Alan Tudyk and Ron Funches on a regular basis.

Triangle numbers! I KNEW you would know! Hahaha! Superman was basically a weekly book back then, with Superman, Adventures, Man of Steel and Action coming out one per week (with Man of Tomorrow for any month with five Wednesdays in it), and without those triangle numbers following the story was fucking chaos.

Triangle numbers!

Behold his glory:

Totally, but some people don't want to know.

According to CBR, Zoe Saldana may have let the name of the fourth Avengers movie slip accidentally while promoting GOTG2. Feige's been treating the name like a huge spoiler for Infinity War, so into tags it goes:

To be fair, no one was clamoring for a Guardians of the Galaxy tentpole movie either. They were C-listers at best also. The C&D show doesn't look appealing to me, but I'm not its target audience.

We finished the season last night. Still gathering thoughts.

Also?

Rosario Dawson has confirmed that Claire Temple will not be appearing in The Punisher.

Finished the main campaign in Mass Effect: Andromeda. By almost every standard, it's a step down from the first trilogy, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. The combat is much simpler and as a result I found it to be somewhat more fun, even as the story itself was kind of meh. The first couple of planets you land on are quite dull, and the main story takes a looooooong time to really get moving, but the side quests and loyalty missions are fairly entertaining, enough so that I was still on board once the main storyline got going. The game has a lighter touch as well; there's a fair amount of humor amongst the squadmates, who really do seem to like each other, and Ryder is much more personable and, frankly, likable than Shepherd ever was; she (I played as a female) has a personality, and is fairly funny and even kind of dorky. There are a lot of "I have this copy of Chopping Mall on VHS that needs to go back to the video store, can you swing it by the Blockbuster on Havarl for me?" type of side missions, probably too many (although not quite as pronounced as Dragon Age: Inquisition), but overall the balance was pretty well done. I enjoyed.

That'd be interesting. Netflix just started showing Chewing Gum; it's not bad.

The rumor I'm hearing is that the BBC is exerting pressure on Chibnall to go with the safe choice. UK ratings are flattening and with Series Eleven shaping up to be a soft reboot a la Series Five, the story going around is that they're skittish about casting outside their comfort zone.

I can't stress enough how big a grain of salt needs to be taken with this, but the UK press went absolutely batshit over this story today.