Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday

[icon_uk]

In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.

Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.

The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.

UK politics is mired in yet more chaos in terms of the fallout of Peter Mandelson's appointment to, and rapid departutre for, the role of US Ambassador.

US politics is just... mired... in general, or so it seems from the outside. The reveal that Pete Hegseth quoted Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" citing it as an actual Biblical passage was quite something (And another three satire writers probably changed careers in disgust, because this is just the sort of thing they'd have presented as parody), as was the VP's attempt to lecture Pope Leo, an Augustinian, on... ummm... Augustinian theology. Good luck with THAT one slugger!

I'm torn on "Maul: Shadow Lord". It LOOKS amazing, and Sam Witwer as Maul is as good as ever but I don't feel it's doing anything particularly new, which is a shame.

Comments

[numeronone]

Would that we could get a "Maul: The Silliest Season" miniseries, during that oft-ignored period that he and Savage Opress did a Dathomir-wide tour in their combo clown/stuntman double-act in order to save money for their beach holiday massacre.

[numeronone]

This week, I have mostly been getting excited about this new TTRPG, Realis, which uses grammatical rather than mathematical rules - instead of stats, the characters have simple sentences which are true about them ("I always pilot my vessel with skill"), and level up by making the sentences more complex ("I always pilot my vessel with skill during a chase"), which further prompts the DM to create scenarios/encounters.

They've been doing a playthrough on the One Shot podcast and I honestly can't wait to get my own copy and find some players!

[iamrman]

This week’s comics ramblings:

Captain America. We never did find out who the High Technician was. The story quickly shifted gears to be about D-Man getting captured by the community of homeless people from the Jack Kirby run. I did a quick Wiki search and it turns out he was just a guy. He was one of the High Evolutionary’s old students. I don’t think he ever appeared again.

Captain Atom. Cap teams-up with Blue Beetle. Another instance of somebody being far more competent outside the JLI books. It’s almost as if solo Ted and JLI Ted are separate characters. Then again, it could be put down to Ted and Booster bringing the worst out in each other.

Catwoman by Devin Grayson. It feels weird to see Catwoman get so weepy over a guy, let alone one she’s only just met. The Jim Balent art is cheececakey as always. I probably won’t be carrying on with this series. I might skip ahead to the Ed Brubaker version. Not the issues with the Paul Gulacy art though. The women with their cold dead eyes give me the ick.

Checkmate by Paul Kupperberg. I started off reading only for Peacemaker, but this series has gotten me intrigued of the identity of this Bishop guy.

ClanDestine. I know absolutely nothing about this book, but it is by Alan Davis so it must be a banger. Spoilers: Yes, it is.

Day of Vengeance. I was only reading this for Detective Chimp, then Black Alice turned up and everybody was shilling for her saying how she is so much more powerful than the Spectre. Big pass.

[cainofdreaming]

That ClanDestine never got an ongoing is a crime. Maybe even one against humanity.

[iamrman]

The original series was intended to be an ongoing, but it got cancelled after 12 issues (of which only 8 are canon).

[scorntx]

The only problem with the idea of Booster being a bad influence on Ted is that Booster quit the JLI because he was fed up of the lack of respect, and Ted just kept on being a nigh-useless goofball.


Maybe after Ted's solo series he was ambushed by some guy and locked up in a cupboard somewhere while the guy pretended to be him.
It would explain why Ted starts JLI as being treated an an inexperienced incompetent.
(sometimes it's a joke, sometimes... it feels like a coping mechanism.)

Or someone associated with the JLI was secretly and subtly using some kind of telepathic influence to slowly bring out their worst traits as part of a plan to make the Justice League look like ineffectual morons, so they could one day kill all superheroes and turn everyone else into killer cyborgs, nya-ha-ha-ha!
... no, wait, no. That'd be stupid.

[leahandillyana]

Long time no see! I’ve been in the middle of a health leave – one week done, one week to go. I did not plan on it but the amount of work is simply impossible for me to cope with, and I hope after the leave I’ll be stronger, at least as to be of a reasonable help for my team. I can finally tend to my garden though. I am pleased to discover that all my land plants survived the unexpectedly harsh winter, though some of them are in condition too poor to blossom this spring. Unfortunately, the pond ended up being a total failure, with only some of the plants wintering in the aquarium having survived. I am also bothered by a spruce drying out, forcing me to remove it. Furthermore I take pride in having baked a tea flavoured cake with mixed berries jelly filling today! But enough about me, let’s get to the interesting part – stories I’ve read since the last time I wrote!

I’ve read two volumes of novels by Moxiangtongxiu one after another, Heaven Official’s Blessing volume 4 and Scum Villain’s Self Saving System volume 1. They were released in Polish by different publishers and translated by different translators, and the difference really showcases how important is a translator to the reception of the work. The prose in Villain flows smoothly and the narration is playful and full of puns, reminding me of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories. I felt deeply engrossed in the book and greatly enjoyed the act of reading. On the other hand, the translation of Official is visibly stiffed and way too literal, which comes at the cost of enjoyment of the story and occassionally even understanding what is going on, which is doubly painful for me due to having some knowledge of Chinese and thus having a general idea what the author wanted to say in the original. Official is objectively a better written story than Villain, but the increase of literary value got completely lost in translation – though, to be honest, the ‘better written’ impression comes from comparing initial volumes of each respective series, as in my opinion the plot starts meandering endlessly after the characters leave Banyue, and also I didn’t enjoy the way the sole genderfluid character got written out of the story.

Another field of interest I explored recently was cult classic manga. I was extremely excited to read the first volume of Banana Fish in Polish, especially since I never had time to read the actual manga, being only familiar with the anime adaptation. I was surprised by the lengths the author went to portray the vibe of contemporary America, going as far as sticking to an extremely rigid grid (as was usual in 80s American comics) and employing art style as closely resembling 80s superhero comics as one could while still being visibly a manga. Definitely a unique aesthetic and strikingly different one from fellow classic Kaze to Ki no Uta, which finished barely a year before Banana Fish began. My experience with Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, of which I’ve read six out of seven volumes, was much less positive. I started the manga interested in unique speculative evolution of a post-apocalyptic ecosystem, but quickly realized that the author does not posses enough of a worldbuilding capabilities to carry a world so vastly different from one we are used to, does very poorly with developing individual characters (the story is about the masses of humanity and non-human sentients, but without well-developed focus characters there’s no reason for the reader to be emotionally invested in the story), and perhaps most damningly, realized that the story seems to favour ecofascist ideology. I intend to eventually finish the series purely for historical and cultural education purposes, as I do not find enjoyment from this reading endeavour.

Finally, I’ve read the most bizarre (derogatory) BL story I’ve ever encountered – a homophobic yaoi visual novel. Enzai, set in a French prison during napoleonic times, focuses on characters who self identify as straight (with POV character fucking constantly talking about how horny he is for women and how he wants to marry and have children and how he is not attracted to men at all) being abused sexually by queer men in position of power over them. And to add insult to the injury the story is also significantly more sexist than average BL story, which tends to be pretty fucking sexist even for Japanese standards! The positives are few and far in between: sure, the mystery is decently written and actually interesting on its own, sure, two romantic routes are sweet and additionally the true route has genuinely well written character development and romance, but it all is drowned in so much poorly drawn sexual violence, homophobia and sexism that the whole one pot dish is almost inedible, and I genuinely feel most love interests would fit better with each other than main character – to a certain value of ‘shipping’, I ship Evan/Lusca, Shion/Guys and Jose/Io. The anime miniseries adaptation distilled the plot into 45 minutes, focusing on mystery aspect with only a few scenes of sexual abuse included for impact, in my opinion presenting the story in a much better form that the original game. I’m not sure if I can recommend the game for reasons other than historical.

I have not finished my winter 2026 anime season and I made peace with never returning to any of those series. Watching anime requires much more mental fortitude than I can afford, unfortunately. For spring 2026 season, I originally intended to watch four series, none of which I started, and two of which I already decided against watching. I remain interested in Kamiina Botan Fully Blossoms When Drunk, a peaceful and beautifully animated series about lesbians social drinking, and Witch Hat Atelier, a fantasy buildingsroman about girls learning magic by writing magical programming code. Two series I gave up on are Needy Streamer Overload, which I learned is not the adaptation of the cult classic denpa visual novel but a loose sequel (thus missing the point of the game in my opinion), and Go for it, Nakamura-kun!, which I learned censors the already very tame original manga, and whose fans chased the original mangaka out of twitter. The sheer caucasity of young Americans reading manga!!

[tripodeca113]

Well due to my twentieth anniversary Doctor Who rewatch I've watched New Earth for the second time in my life. My overall assessment is that Cassandra gets in the way of the more interesting plot about the hospital using clones as human lab rats.

One thing that stood out to me is that when the Doctor opens the pod and finds someone trapped inside and pumped with diseases he apologizes to the guy but then closes the pod without doing anything to help the guy. And then later on when Cassandra's minion is being swarmed by the infected once again he says he's sorry but he doesn't do anything to help before running off.
Now I guess those were both situations where he couldn't really do anything (and he does save the day at the end by coating himself in medicine and using this to cure all the sick people) but it doesn't seem very heroic to me.

Let's see I found a copy of Zot for $20. Scott McCloud talked about revisiting stuff he wrote as a 26 year old trying to push the envelope on the medium and views it as kind of a mixed bag which is fair enough.
He also calls it basically a reboot of the series first ten issues (which weren't included), but they also follow-up and reference the earlier stories so it's a bit confusing when major details are just off-handedly mentioned.

oh yes I also I also read the Snagglepuss Chronicles. It was a good story but I did get the feeling you could replace all the animal people with regular humans and you wouldn't lose anything. That could just be down to me having no exposure to the character outside of this though.
(okay some of the generic animal character's do look a bit weird)

[scorntx]

Maul's... it's okay, but yeah, so far nothing particularly stand-out.
(right now the biggest sticking points is A: Yet another slimy Imperial jerk as the main antagonist, B: the weird scale. This planet only has one city? And a single Star Destroyer can lock everything down? Aright...)

Listening to that Classic FM at the Movies on Friday, there was a bit where a viewer request asked if, for once, they could play a piece of music from Game of Thrones that wasn't just the opening theme. So they played... a remixed version of the opening theme.
Not keeping to the letter or the spirit of the request there.

It's local election season in England, so there's pamphlets from the Racist Scumbag party coming through the letterbox and party political broadcasts all over the TV.
(Full disclosure, I would consider giving the Greens a chance if I only knew what their actual intended policies were.)

First sort of news about the intended new X-Men movie they're making.
The writer's said he's not wild about Wolverine, which is good, but also that he's not fond of Cyclops either, which is not.

So Ultimate Wolverine comes to an end.
On the upside, it didn't end with any Jogan. Hurray for small mercies.
Downside... what a bleak, joyless pile of nothing that was.
Like Ult Black Panther, it seems determined to avoid giving backstory or explanation for damn near anyone or anything.
Mutants are all exiled to Russia. How? Why? When? Eh, who cares.
Colossus and Magik rule Russia and a little bit of Eastern Europe. Why? Who cares.
It leans super-hard into the idea that since it's an alternate universe, they can slaughter characters with wild abandon.
And the word "character" is being pretty generous.
It's trying to rely on attachment to the original versions of them, while giving no reason to get attached to these versions.
Okay, fine, it says Wolverine on the cover, so maybe should really expect it to focus more on him rather than the all Not X-Men.
... so why'd he wind up as a freedom fighter? How did he even get captured?
(grr.)
... ... though having a Sabretooth with depth and characterisation beyond "nya-hah-hah, I like killin'!" was nice. Weird, but nice.

The local had a couple of issues of the Carey run of X-Men: Legacy. Neat-o.
(which digresses into a weird thought experiment of what happens with X-Men if you were to remove Rogue. Because just from a moment's thought the answer is "a lot.")

Checking the upcoming Marvel solicits, there's the obligatory Doom appearing everywhere to hype up Doomsday.
Ooh, a one-shot (or ongoing? Can't tell yet) written by Ewing!
(well that was an easy sale...)

[iamrman]

Ooh, a new thing by Al Ewing? What is it, The Blue Streak Chronicles?

[skjam]

Went to my niece's wedding. First time I'd worn a suit since my father's memorial service, and probably the last time I'll wear a suit till the next memorial service or wedding. Bride's toast included the words "F ICE" (several of her friends had to cancel due to worries about those folks.)

Marvel Puzzlequest's new chase character is Widow, the Spider-Horse.

Over at my blog, I read some World War One stories. https://www.skjam.com/2026/04/20/magazine-review-high-adventure-164-war-fiction-f-van-wyck-mason/