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Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as a read-along book club.
In our last chapter, Kevin and Korsal may be about to receive some good news from the Enterprise…if they live long enough. Meanwhile, some idiot breaks medical protocol, and I think I remember who the idiot was. The answer will not surprise you, but I’m not going to spoil it here.
We’re going to be hitting the halfway mark, and it’s good that the regular cast is finally going to be involved with events. They’re who we’ve come to see and so far their absence, in spite of how good the story and characters have been thus far, has been notable. It would be fine if the story were set somewhere in the larger Star Trek universe of the classic timeline. There have been good official and unofficial stories with that idea in mind. That’s not how the book was sold, so they were missed. Now they will be part of the story and that’s a good thing.
With the intro padded out (thank you, article series blurb), let’s get reading the next chapter and see if our new favorite Klingons get rescued, and what they’re about to walk into.
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At least it gives me art practice.
The archive as I write this dropped everything before #219, has images that don’t belong there, and there are so many comics it makes more sense to break them up by creation year (not calendar year). So I’m in the process of that now. Hopefully it’s done by this time next week, which will be the comic’s anniversary, which I didn’t even realize when I decided it was time to make this fix. Next week will be the usual Best Of in place of the comic, with a programming note for site updates posting the same time here as my usual article for The Clutter Reports.
Speaking of which, this week’s report is unfortunately on a failure, since I’m still trying to get Batman: Vengeance running. I’ve been trying to get this going for twelve years, it turns out, but I have been sick on and off and struggling to get into a creation pattern. Plus I have a plot for this year’s Captain Yuletide to turn into a comic by December 25th, and even for a minicomic in my minimal art style, that takes time. I’d like to get a few more of this year’s declutter goals done by the end of the year if I could.
In addition to all that, we have the next chapter of Star Trek: The IDIC Epidemic for Chapter By Chapter, and hopefully some interesting discussion topics. Have a great week, everyone! Hopefully I don’t have any big distractions.
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This might look cool if I new what they were safely leaping from.
Amazing Mystery Funnies #20
Centaur Publications (May, 1940)
COVER ART: Greg Chapian
And so we begin the May, 1940 comics–or at least that’s the cover date. If comics in the Golden Age are like today’s, and many of the oddities of publishing started here, the comic might have come out a month or two sooner. It is easier for Comic Book Plus to catalog, I guess. Either way, the comics wouldn’t know that Winston Churchill is now the UK Prime Minister and preparing to seriously push back the German advance. Plus we in the US still weren’t involved in the war. That won’t happen until the end of the following year. The people might not have wanted in, but if the writers weren’t trying to get us involved, they were at least milking it for story ideas, what with all the not-Germany countries trying to get us involved in the war as part of some take-over-the-world schemes we’ve seen.
We’re starting off with this comic, but it should be noted that one of the stories listed, “Space Patrol”, isn’t in this issue. Whether it’s missing from the scan or dropped before publishing I couldn’t really say. This being the first month using the reading list, that means it’s been consistently interesting enough so far. Let’s see if that trend continues.
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Will “The Critical Drinker” Jordan has brought his Ryan Drake novel universe back to indie films with his second movie, Trial By Fire. His first film, which I’ve looked at before, wasn’t perfect. There were some flaws, but points for a critic trying to be part of the solution. It beats that time Roger Ebert gave it a shot, but it was amateur work…which given he’s adapting his own works for the first time with a low budget I kind of expect. It’s grading on a curve, but we have to start somewhere.
This film is also set in the Ryan Drake universe, but focuses on Keira Frost, a new recruit to The Agency, who is assigned to Drake’s team. We also see her history, what brought her to this point. I’ll do a review with spoilers afterwards, but given the last movie was also a Saturday Night Showcase, it seemed right to do this one, too.
So, did Jordan learn anything from the previous movie? Did the director, Travis Grant, bring us a better movie than last time at least? Check out the film, and then my review. Enjoy?
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One of the advantages of voice acting is that you can be literally anyone or anything. A different race, not even human–not even biological, a powerhouse, a mouse, even gender isn’t necessarily limiting. Until recently most little boy characters were voiced by adult women. All you have to do is be able to pull off the performance and voice that make us believe the character is a real person. This is true for audio dramas, cartoons, and video games. At least until recently, as the “looks like me” crowd keeps insisting you can’t get buried in a role. People need to see “you”, not the character you’re playing.
Take for example Debra Wilson. The voice actor and mocap actor has done a bunch of video games lately, but even when playing a pre-existing character, like Amanda Waller above or more recently Callisto (a traditionally white character and there’s no reason she has to be voiced by a white woman for the animated character to be white…until the 2020s) in the lambasted recent Marvel’s Wolverine game, it doesn’t look like the character. It looks like her. That’s a bit more acceptable for original characters, but even that isn’t necessary. Gamers are getting annoyed that every character she plays, and she’s good at what she does (no, I’m not making “that” reference), but apparently someone else is disappointed that every Debra Wilson character in games looks like Debra Wilson…namely Debra Wilson herself! Apparently it kind of takes the fun out of playing roles you’d never be able to in physical live acting when the character just looks like you anyway.
