Heyo. It’s time for that panel thing that I do every Sunday. My contributors are Gaijin Dan, Jody, Space Jawa and Was Taters with the weather.

Jody didn’t send me Amazing Spider-Man this time around, which only goes with what I’ve been hearing that the latest issue was all kinds of terrible. Meanwhile, I, Vampire is great fun this week with an awkward team-up with Stormwatch as they face the unique threat of “zombie vampire vampire-hunters”.

All-Star Western #12
Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Moritat and Scott Kolins

Barrage #12
Kouhei Horikoshi

Flash #12
Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato

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King of Trios 2007: Night 2

On Demand
DVD

Match 1
Gran Akuma vs. MASAMUNE

We’re shown a MASAMUNE promo, but it’s entirely in Japanese so… yeah. Thing to note about CHIKARA is that usually the commentary is really good. UltraMantis Black, Larry Sweeney, Bryce Remsberg, Mike Quackenbush, Leonard F. Chikarason and later Gavin Loudspeaker are all at least bearable. For this match, we’re given the team of UltraMantis and Icarus. Oy. Icarus and commentary do NOT go well together. He mumbles, tries too hard to play it straight and any jokes fall completely flat.

On the other hand, Akuma vs. MASAMUNE itself is pretty good. The two are very similar in style and it seems that MASAMUNE is supposed to be just as much a heel as Akuma. It’s brought up that MASAMUNE is a tag champ in Osaka Pro, adding to the idea that the two of them are evenly matched. In a good opening bit of grappling, Akuma gets the best of the exchange and armdrags MASAMUNE out of the ring. MASAMUNE angrily throws a chair, making it a point that he isn’t any more virtuous than the despised Akuma after all. Akuma doesn’t play face either, as once MASAMUNE reenters, he knees him with a cheap shot. While the chemistry is definitely there, the match appears to go into a pattern. They do a strike war against each other (chops, kicks, forearms), then one gives the other an elaborate submission hold that won’t take. Akuma goes for the Yoshi Tonic, MASAMUNE escapes and then hits Akuma with an Ace Crusher. While grappling with Akuma from behind, MASAMUNE briefly shoves the ref out of the way out of annoyance. During that diversion, Akuma gives him a mule kick to the balls, rolls him up and puts his legs on the ropes to get the pin.

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On Demand
DVD

The show starts out, uniquely enough, without a match. As it turns out, there’s a huge blizzard going on and the ring doctor hasn’t arrived yet, so the fans in attendance have to sit on their hands for a while and wait. To warm up the crowd, the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple arrive along with referee Bryce Remsberg, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Accompanied by UltraMantis Black and Crossbones, we see that Hydra is wearing a blue bathrobe for some reason and is straining to drag a chair towards the ring. Bryce gives him a hand by easily picking it up.

Upon entry, UltraMantis announces the return of the Hydralock Challenge (occasionally pronounced “hydraulic”). Remember how Chris Masters used to do his Masterlock Challenge in mid-00’s WWE? Hydra’s decided to take it to another level. UltraMantis takes a second to rail at the crowd for being stupid enough to come to a wrestling show in such terrible weather and then has Hydra remove the robe. What a specimen.

The last time they did this bit, they made a teenage girl tap out (or should I say, UltraMantis tickled her and claimed her giggle was a sign of surrender). This time, he wants a challenger with more panache. When he’s about to announce the prize, a fan asks, “A bathrobe?” Angrily, UltraMantis calls him a rapscallion and shows that the winner will get $50,000, as shown in the roll of cash in his hand that he swears is not just a bunch of singles. A handful of fans raise their hands to volunteer, but UltraMantis refuses to acknowledge them. Then Robbie Ellis shows up, poses a little and volunteers to see if he can withstand Hydra’s “unbreakable” full nelson.

My favorite little fan moment in this is when he sits down and flexes, someone in the crowd yells, “He’s bringing sexy back!” and gets a good laugh from some of the others. Hydra does a lot of stalling, but finally secures the Hydralock. In an instant, Ellis taps out. UltraMantis boasts at how unstoppable Hydra is while slipping Ellis the wad of cash behind his back. Ellis smirks for a bit until inspecting the money and seeing that it isn’t the amount they agreed on. Ellis’ partners Mitch Ryder and Larry Sweeney run in, offended at the Neo-Solar Temple for trying to swindle a legend like Ellis. Ryder cuts a promo about respect and then makes a challenge for a pose-down: Sweeney vs. Hydra.

Hydra accepts. To his own theme song, he rubs oil on himself and does some lackluster posing. Then it’s Sweeney’s turn. He turns to referee Bryce and says, “You always walk around with a bottle of oil on you, right?” He does! Oiled up, Sweeney poses to cheers despite being a rudo. UltraMantis insists that it’s a draw and ups the challenge to a 6-way pose-off. The Fabulous Three oblige and flex their guns. Realizing they’re sunk, UltraMantis leads his henchmen to cheese it, declaring, “You planted this audience!”

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Starting September 14th and ending September 16th, CHIKARA Pro, my favoritest wrestling organization, is holding their 6th annual King of Trios tournament. I’ve discussed CHIKARA at length before and even wrote up a primer guide to explain it to new folks. It’s an independent wrestling company and wrestling school headed by Mike Quackenbush, focusing on international styles, incredibly strong storytelling, over-the-top gimmicks and a lot of inspired comedy.

The King of Trios is an evolved version of CHIKARA’s previous big tournament, Tag World Grand Prix. Tag World, which occurred three times before being shelved and then coming back once again in 2008, was a massive tag team tournament filled with CHIKARA students, CHIKARA regulars, teams from other organizations and even other countries. In 2006, the team of Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli won, crowning them the first ever Campeones de Parejas (tag team champions). The company decided to move forward on the concept. The tag tournament was cool, but not exactly too out there. They needed to go further and really grasp the company’s unique identity.

And so, in 2007, from February 17th to 19th, CHIKARA started off their sixth season with the King of Trios tournament. Three days long, the tournament featured sixteen teams of three battling it out for supremacy. Teams were put together based on friendship, experience, style or being part of the same outside organization. It was a strong show and every tournament since has been a highlight to the company. As I’ve said before, it’s less about being a wrestling event and more about celebrating wrestling in general.

I’m going to this year’s show, being my fourth King of Trios weekend. To hype it up a bit, I’m going to be doing a daily series of articles about the show’s history. For each year, I’ll spend one day getting caught up on the card and then an article for each night of the show. Then a little finale to talk about this year’s tournament, meaning 21 days worth of stuff.

All King of Trios shows are available at Smart Mark Video in the forms of DVD ($15), mp4 ($12) or streaming ($10). They’re all worth checking out.

So let’s start off with 2007.

The Story Thus Far…

Season 5 ended with the Kings of Wrestling (Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli) losing the Campeonatos de Parejas to their protégés FIST (Icarus and Gran Akuma). Hero blamed Claudio, who was also leaving the company due to signing with the WWE. Hero and FIST turned on Claudio and attacked him until Mike Quackenbush and the other tecnicos came to the rescue. Quack gave Claudio a nice sendoff, but unfortunately, Claudio’s WWE career ended before it could even begin due to some contract snafu.

The Young Lions Cup tournament was won by Arik Cannon, who defended the trophy regularly until a surprise loss to “Canadian Dynamite” Max Boyer. Cannon, in a fit of rage, attacked the referee and got suspended indefinitely. Boyer continued to defend the trophy and remained unbeaten.

During the Tag World Grand Prix tournament, Hallowicked’s partner UltraMantis Black was injured and a random draw replaced him with the ever-lovable madman Delirious. The two made for quite the team and became known as Incoherence, with Delirious turning Hallowicked fully to the tecnico side of the good/evil spectrum. UltraMantis hated this and started a new group to combat them called the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple. Along with CHIKARA veteran Blind Rage, they went to war with Incoherence. Incoherence joined forces with fan-favorite duo Cheech and Cloudy (Up in Smoke) and defeated the Order at the season finale.

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Just a few weeks away…

Tomorrow I’m starting up my extensive look at King of Trios, the annual 3-day event held by my favorite indy wrestling federation (well, favorite wrestling federation in general), CHIKARA. Before I do any of that, I thought I’d take a look at some history. Not the history of CHIKARA itself, as I’ve covered that already. I mean how things began with me as a fan.

During 2006/2007, I was only into WWE. TNA never did anything for me and the whole independent wrestling scene was completely alien to me. I hadn’t tried looking into it and wouldn’t have even known where to start. It wasn’t until the internet introduced me to Human Tornado that I started paying the indy scene any attention. Human Tornado, now retired, was a skinny and uncannily charismatic skinny wrestler with an afro and a pimp persona. I didn’t so much watch any matches with him as I was shown this fantastic little music video from the early days of YouTube.

Now, Tornado has never performed in CHIKARA, but that’s not my point. This video opened my eyes at the inventive and more intimate world of indy wrestling. This guy would never see the inside of a WWE ring due to his physique, but is that really the worst thing in the world? He’s still out there and presumably, I could have seen him live. The idea that out there was a flippy black dude with invincible testicles and the ability to backhand a fiend across the ring opened up my universe.

There’s another video with him that’s grainy as hell, but also brilliantly sells him as someone worth paying attention to. When wrestling Scorpio Sky (now Mason Andrews in TNA), a Test of Strength causes them to pop-lock against their will. They step back, try again and this time “Beat It” by Michael Jackson blares over the speakers as the two get into a knife fight and break into a dance sequence. This continues until Scorpio Sky has enough and clotheslines Tornado.

I never did follow up on any of this in any meaningful way, like trying to follow Pro Wrestling Guerilla, where they both performed. I didn’t get another taste of the indies until catching MTV’s ill-fated Wrestling Society X. That show featured them both, as well as a bunch of other supposed big names I had never heard of. The cheesy half-hour show wasn’t exactly perfect. A lot of the matches were just cool moves being done back and forth until someone won. The thing is, the show was self-aware and allowed itself to be over-the-top in ways the more mainstream stuff couldn’t. There were fights involving dunking your opponent’s head in a piranha tank or Tombstoning them into an exploding casket.

My favorite little thing in there is how a scene involved a fireball being thrown into the champion Vampiro’s face. This is a classic wrestling stunt that’s nothing more than lighting a piece of flash paper on fire and flicking it into the guy’s face. MTV took offense to this and pulled the episode for a couple weeks. When they aired it, they made it look like some kind of Dragonball Z super attack that caused Vampiro’s unconscious body to ripple before our very eyes. Somehow, their stupid censorship made things BETTER.

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Ah, what a difference a year makes. Last year, I was scrambling to try and get the Summerslam Countdown done in time for the big show that I was so excited to see (I failed that deadline, natch). This year, I chose to watch 21 Jump Street with my brother instead of checking it out. From what I understand, I didn’t miss much other than Antonio Cesaro/Claudio Castagnoli winning the US title on the internet pre-show. At the same time, I don’t feel like DVRing tomorrow’s Raw and I paid money to watch last week’s TNA PPV. Crazy times.

This week my backup include Was Taters, Jody, Gaijin Dan, Space Jawa and Nawid.

Amazing Spider-Man #691
Dan Slott, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Mario Del Pennino

Avengers Academy #35
Christos Gage and Andrea DiVito

Avengers vs. X-Men #10
Jason Aaron, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Jonathan Hickman and Adam Kubert

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I’m still working on my needlessly gigantic CHIKARA King of Trios article series, which should be going up later in the week. In the meantime, here’s something cute that I thought I’d share.

The presentation for this year’s King of Trios is based on WWF Wrestlefest, one of the greatest arcade games in arcade game history, which has recently been updated and ported to smartphones. I haven’t played the new version, but I hear that it’s ass.

Over the past few months, the official CHIKARA site has been announcing the 16 teams for September’s tournament. We have a team of old ECW guys, some nostalgic 80’s and 90’s WWF teams, some female wrestlers from Japan, the usual CHIKARA suspects, visitors from other feds, mishmashed teams of CHIKARA regulars who are forced together against their will and a group of guys who performed so terribly in 2009 and got jeered so hard that they’ve all banded together out of revenge against the fans.

On the site, each announced team would get a filename of “KOT12_#.jpg”. So the 13th team announced is “KOT12_13.jpg”. Obviously, there’s going to be somebody wanting to look forward by typing “KOT12_14.jpg” with hopes of seeing the next team to be revealed. Kind of like how people figured out the roster of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 long before they were meant to. Each time, the CHIKARA website has been messing with the fans trying to do this by putting in a fake team.

Unfortunately, I didn’t save all of them, but here’s a bunch.

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Good stuff this week. I’m helped out by Gaijin Dan, Jody, Was Taters and Space Jawa.

In completely unrelated news, this Thursday is Rifftrax Live, where the MST3K guys will do a live performance that will be broadcast to movie theaters around the country. The movie in question? Manos: Hands of Fate, with a completely new set of riffs.

You should totally check it out. For the Master.

Meanwhile, panels.

Archer and Armstrong #1
Fred Van Lente and Clayton Henry

Barrage #10
Kouhei Horikoshi

Batman #12 (Jody’s pick)
Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Becky Cloonan and Andy Clarke

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My diet has been going pretty good lately. Since the new year, I’ve lost 42 pounds, eight more than my original goal. Here’s a comparison of me from December and me from a few weeks ago. Not bad.

I’ve been working out more, finding it much easier to break a sweat. I’ve been snacking on stuff that isn’t terrible for me, like Cheerios, low-fat Pringles and WhoNu cookies (I’ve discovered that their new vanilla wafers aren’t bad either). I make sure to schedule a big meal as a way to build willpower against impulsive eating. For instance, I can say to myself that on Thursday, I’m going to eat a stuffed mozzarella cheeseburger. That means that in the days leading up to it, I can’t make a quick stop at a diner on the way home from work or stop at the local fried chicken place. It also means that I’m going to enjoy that burger more than ever when I get to it.

One of the bigger things is simply dropping stuff from my diet, such as ice cream. Now, there are exceptions. I’ll enjoy the occasional milkshake or ice cream sandwich, but gone are the days when I’d eat an entire pint of cookies and cream. It’s been hard to shake the habit, but thankfully, an advertising agency just made it a lot easier.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Little Baby’s Ice Cream.

I’m pretty good on not sleeping for a while either.

ONE HUNDRED FIFTY! I need to get out more. This seems like as good a time as any to go over the mission statement:

This Week in Panels (ThWiP) is about taking every new comic my posse and I have read this week and sawing it down to its essence. If this was a commercial that was all, “This week in Age of Apocalypse!” this is the kind of thing you’d see. No final page images. No gigantic spoilers. No splash pages. Just the comics summed up in one panel. If there’s a series you like that isn’t covered on a regular basis, you’re more than welcome to email me. It’s on the sidebar.

This time I’m helped out by Was Taters, Gaijin Dan, Jody and Space Jawa. Many thanks to them and everyone else who made the past 150 weeks such a fun routine.

Action Comics #12
Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, CAFU and Brad Walker

Age of Apocalypse #6
David Lapham and Renato Arlem

Animal Man #12 (Gavin’s pick)
Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder and Steve Pugh

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