You don't understand - you're dealing with Catholics now

So that's me done with the old scanning now.  Regular readers of the blog will notice that I've been scanning these old comics at such a slow rate it might actually have been faster if I'd conceived, written, drawn, coloured, lettered, and then artificially aged each and every page of this comic myself, but you would be wrong about that because it would have taken exactly the same amount of time if I had done that.  Which I haven't.

I don't know about "the world", but I'm about to end YOUR FACE

Nashville is the usual USTV drama, but it's also got a subversive streak in that, while almost all USTV dramas are about the wealthy, affluent or middle classes and the dramas specific to their income bracket, Nashville is quite clearly a show about white trash, but unlike shows like Revenge or Ray Donovan with equally ludicrous storylines in affluent white American surroundings, it's not actively unpleasant to watch.

There are two things I won't talk about - taxes and your flying dreams

Last Man Standing YES I AM STILL WATCHING IT LORD HELP ME I HAVE A PROBLEM tries and fails of late to counter its reputation as a right-wing soapbox for noted DUI conviction collector Tim Allen by addressing social issues that I suspect would rarely impact upon the lives of its affluent protagonists, such as homeless families, the plight of war veterans and so on, yet it never seems to address what government was in power when these homeless people or war veterans tossed on the streets like trash were created, even though it will make the effort to go back years to find jokes it can make about Democrats, especially jokes about about "Bill Clinton", who according to Wikipedia was a Democratic president twenty years ago, though I suppose I shouldn't rule out the idea that Tim Allen's material stops being fresh around that time.  I guess I just find it odd that the scriptwriters need to go so far back to find something about the Democrats to make fun of, as there's plenty of stuff to make fun of right now, like the Democrats being in the pocket of oil companies, their waging questionable wars, their refusing to tax the rich, their fear mongering and conservatism and the lasting harm it does to Americans outside the tiny cloister of the super-rich... for some reason, Last Man Standing doesn't want to make fun of these specific and very current issues and I can't imagine why.
But hey, Galaxy Quest was a good movie - am I right?

Do you like the Mentalist? Hands are goin' up - okay, hands are not going up

One of my earliest experiences of Tokusatsu was the opening moments of Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger, where the main character drives a giant toy across an alien planet's surface and crashes through a wall into a church where dozens of cats are having what is clearly a Christian wedding ceremony, so obviously there's some kind of cultural osmosis going on, most likely fueled by Christianity(1) being the dominant theological orthodoxy of the Western media that permeates the vast majority of popular culture, making it utterly amazing that in the year 2015, someone who lives and works in the West knows absolutely nothing about Christianity beyond the words "God, "Devil", and that angels have wings - although they somehow also do not know that angels are called angels.  Like I say, it's pretty amazing - but "amazing" does not in this instance translate to "good television."
Don't get me wrong, though, The Messengers is not embarrassingly terrible all of the time, most of the time it is competently made and doesn't draw attention to itself or the mountain of cliches it heaps upon your screen, but every five minutes or so there's something so cliched or thick-headed happening that a little voice starts going "holy cats, you are actually sitting here watching this."
The voice continues: "what if someone came in and saw you?  What if that bit was the first thing they saw of this show, and they thought it was like this all the time, and that you choose to watch a show like this?"  I am not saying that you would be less embarrassed if someone came into the room and found you watching pornography, but it's a close thing.  I would probably grab my phone quickly and pretend that I didn't notice what was on my tv because I was busy masturbating to animal-based pornography videos I had saved to my flash card and no you can't see them but they definately exist and I was whacking it hard to them and not watching The Messengers - if that's even what that show is called because I wouldn't know.
That's basically the quality of The Messengers - as long as you are completely alone and no-one knows you're watching it, you could probably sit through an episode, but you would be in no doubt that what you were watching was not very good.  I made it all the way through episode 2, but didn't make it to the end of the recap at the start of episode 3.  I suppose that here in the last paragraph I should thematically link back to the first paragraph's subject matter of Christianity in the media and maybe make some kind of point about the makers of The Messengers not drawing upon Christianity but instead the villainous interpretation of its mythology presented in post-millennial efforts such as Constantine, Supernatural, and Spawn comic books, if for no other reason than that I can also link back to my past posts about tv writing feeding upon itself like a human centipede and the viewer being the person at the back, so that is what I have just done.



(1) And by "Christianity" I of course mean "Protestantism", as Catholicism is only featured in media if they need to do something about guilt, forgiveness, or pedophiles.

My mother thought of vodka as the child that never disappointed her

Yes, still scanning.  I have discovered a loophole in the law that will allow me to sell these old comics online so that I can enjoy the frustration and despair of the digital comics seller firsthand instead of just reading about it in suicide notes.

It's like our anniversary lunch at Hooters all over again

Don't mind me, I'm just... erm... cleaning up some old 1980s comics I scanned.  Yes.
Watching Marvel's Daredevil, and bearing in mind the forced and unnatural scripting of its nearest competition - The Flash and Arrow - and gosh but they sure make that whole "doing a decent superhero tv show without looking like we're ashamed of doing a superhero tv show" thing look easy.
I never really had a problem with the Affleck movie like many others did - I found it to be a perfectly serviceable and entertaining action flick - but I did think it suffered from an uneven tone and mixed direction, with the NYC depicted coming off in much the same way the city did in the 1990s Ninja Turtles movies.  By comparison, the small-screen version of Daredevil is consistent in its tone, takes itself seriously to the point that there are episodes where people just stand around crying for no discernible reason, action scenes happen with minimum shakycam so you can actually tell what's going on, and rehashing of a lot of The Wire's schtick certainly helps distract from some of Daredevil's more predictable beats, though it generally avoids most of the usual traps of superheroes on tv.
I think I could have done with more character meat, a less brown costume, and a final fight that didn't go on forever, and the Kingpin is a bit rubbish, too, being very similar to the sheriff from noted tv car-crash Under The Dome, but I can see people going "oohhh daddy issues so he has depth" and liking him for that, but I'm kind of sick of that kind of villainy and would have preferred to see the version of the character that Kingpin sees himself as: a righteous man with good intentions who gradually became a monster in pursuing admirable goals - he even quotes some Biblical parables alongside the usual plastic Catholicism that plagues both televisual drama and the Daredevil comics, so there was potential for that to happen.
As it is, Vincint D'Onofrio handles the material well, and Charlie Cox as Matt Murdoch/Daredevil does a blubbery-lipped emo-hero just dandy.  The action scenes - while very good - sometimes betray that they're only there for their gimmick value, with an overlong "homage" to the infamous corridor fight in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (I am crediting the Daredevil production staff with not being so culturally thick-eared that they're homage-ing the dreadful Spike Lee remake) being a particularly glaring offender in that it contributes nothing to the episode's story and feels tacked-on.
Still, there are worse problems for a superhero tv show to have than for the punch-ups to be a distraction from the story.

I just can't stand it when good things happen to people I used to love

As we're very near the 32nd anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Marvel UK's War Cars, I thought I'd dig out my old issues to see if they were as bloody terrible as I remembered - oh sorry, anniversaries are supposed to be celebratory, aren't they?  Well when you're anniversarying a 32 year-old UK comic based on toys that in the end were never released outside Asia, maybe that just isn't possible, The Internet.
Although to be entirely fair, it's not without some positive attributes - the paper stock is not as bad as I thought it would be, and the staples are still intact after all these years.

The toys themselves had no background mythology or context for any supposed conflict or tension that would force the blue team (sports cars that transformed into robots) and the red team (dune buggies that transformed into spiders) to fight each other, so the holes had to be filled in by Marvel editorial staff and writers on the fly, who apparantly took some box art of the teams racing against a background of a nuclear explosion literally and made the story about a series of races across a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it's like Hunger Games, if Hunger Games had Transformers in it and was also Death Race.

It may surprise you to learn that there's not very much on the internet about a comic from three decades ago that no-one bought or gave a poop about, but apparently the franchise was originally called Car Wars to cash in on the cultural cache of the Star Wars name.  It was quickly retitled War Cars, however, to avoid the litigation that nearly befell the theatrically-released pilot of Battlestar Galactica (which all good nerds will know was originally called "Star Worlds" before hastily having "Saga of" added to the title to foil Lucas' vicious legal department), though the change came too late for the UK manufacturers of the toys, who had the name emblazoned on everything from box art to sticker albums, all of which had to be dumped in an English coalmine by Stadium UK, the licence-holder for the toys in the western market who went bankrupt shortly after, leaving Marvel to sell a comic based on toys no-one had heard of and most likely never would.  The villains being referred to as "reds" (in reference to the colour of their vehicles) was not unnoticed by then-popular communist Arthur Scargill (if you're under 30 and reading this, he was sort of the Russell Brand of his day), and - on top of a coalmine being closed down specifically to be used as landfill space for the toys - was taken as evidence of a campaign against trade unions, prompting him to denounce the comic in a newsletter that caused the book to be boycotted by working class families across the UK, leading to the only moment in popular culture when War Cars actually entered the mainstream, after Ben Elton made a joke that more copies of the comic were burned in the street by angry adults than were bought by joyful children.

To put it mildly, War Cars was not a hit, and copies of the comic are so rare that they often go for stupid prices on eBay.  Seriously - 32 pounds for this?  The effing thing's got dog ears and someone's already done the word search and maze puzzles, not to mention some kid's coloured-in the illustrations for the text story.

Scanned from a copy described on eBay as "near mint condition" - MY ASS - this is the first episode of the strip as it appeared in the comic, not just a whopping 4 pages of original content exclusive to the UK market, but in colour, too, so Marvel UK were clearly planning on War Cars being a major title to have made this much effort.  The reprint material typical of the time that pads out the rest of the book is stuff like Killraven and an adaptation of Planet of the Apes by European writer/artist Ernő Zórád - that was probably reprinted dozens of times in the English market by that point - which keeps the post-apocalyptic theme going, alongside overly-aggressive editorial input from the (presumably fictional) "Sargent Wheels", who despised "the reds" and seemed to be some kind of talking scooter, just in case you ever forgot it was the 1980s.
I'll see if I can dig out some more issues to scan in later blog posts, as I am pretty sure I have at the very least got all the episodes of the first story arc to hand.  I imagine it's something we can all look forward to.