Hello nice people. This week it’s me reading way too much superhero comic junk, Gaijin Dan reading way too much manga, Brobe sending in a chunk of stuff and a little something-something from Was Taters, Space Jawa and Jody.

I should feel alarmed that I’m enjoying Thunderbolts, even though I know that Way will do me wrong like he always does. Then again, to paraphrase Mitch Hedberg, we eat every apple knowing that it’ll become a core.

Unleash the panels!

Animal Man #17
Jeff Lemire, Scott Snyder, Steve Pugh and Timothy Green II

Avengers #5
Jonathan Hickman and Adam Kubert

Batwing #17
Fabian Nicieza and Fabrizio Fiorentino

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It’s really pretty amazing how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the more versatile properties in comic history, ranking up there with Batman and Wolverine. Remembered mainly for the popular 80’s and 90’s children’s cartoon, you have to remember that the foursome started out in a comic where Leonardo impales Shredder with his katana in the very first issue. He even drinks some beer a few issues later, which feels off in retrospect. The property has taken some strange turns over the years, even to the point where the more kid-oriented comic series by Archie Comics featured a storyline where they go back in time, beat up Hitler, convince him he’s in Hell and trick him into shooting himself in the head. Around the same time, Michelangelo was teaming up with the Muppet Babies, Alf and Bugs Bunny to get a kid off drugs on a Saturday morning TV special.

When the Turtles fad died down, the cartoon still remained on TV for a long, long time. How long? There was an episode that featured April O’Neil looking stuff up on the internet. Jesus. I even remember stumbling upon the very last episode one Saturday morning, surprised that it was still around. The ending was rather nice, with Splinter telling the four that he had nothing left to teach them. They were all his equals and would no longer be able to call him “Master”. They tried to keep the franchise around just a little bit longer with a live-action show, but with that failing, the Turtle stuff took a break for a few years.

In the early 2000’s, a new Ninjas Turtles series was created by 4Kids that revitalized the concept. It decided to go back to basics, throwing away all the ideas and characters from the 80’s cartoon and basing everything on the original Mirage comics. In fact, there’s an almost purist distaste you can feel from the series in their refusal to pay any lip service to the first cartoon, outside of a couple Easter Egg references. Though it is rather cool that by revealing their version of Shredder to be an Utrom alien, he’s essentially Krang and Shredder in one character. Regardless, it was a good show and lasted a rather long time, even after jumping the shark and going into the future for a season.

It was announced that Nickelodeon was buying the rights to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and if the 4Kids series wasn’t already on its way out, this made it definite. The creators decided to go out the best way possible: an animated movie in the style of a crossover between the 4Kids TMNT and the 80’s cartoon TMNT.

The movie begins with Hun, leader of the Purple Dragons and go-to muscle for Shredder, as he steals some tech stuff at a lab. The Ninja Turtles appear to stop them. Later that night, the situation makes the news, distressing Splinter, who can’t believe his students would be so careless. What’s extra strange is that all four turtles have been home in the sewer all night. They figure out that the Purple Dragons are involved and go to find out what’s going on.

We find that the Purple Dragons won that little pre-credits skirmish and have the Turtles as prisoners. Hun sees them and is completely confused.

“You were expecting maybe someone else?”

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The big nerd news of recent months is that Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas and that Star Trek guy is going to be directing it. For me, this is great news no matter how you look at it. For one, the franchise isn’t in Lucas’ hands anymore. Already a plus. At best, Disney might be able to use some of their magic to make a good Star Wars trilogy to break the tie created by the previous two. At worst, we’ll have something new to make fun of.

I thought about doing a Crossover Celebration article about Star Wars, but then it hit me how sparse Star Wars crossovers are. Even then, they’re all fairly brief to talk about. Ergo, I figured I’d go over every Star Wars crossover I can possibly think of. Remember, it’s official crossovers only.

The first crossover came in 1979, in-between the first two movies. During the 11th season of Sesame Street, a UFO land and out come C3PO and R2D2. The two befriend Big Bird and reveal that they are sent by an intergalactic relative of Oscar the Grouch to deliver a message for the grumpy, green guy. That message being, “GET LOST!” Over the course of the episode, as well as another episode later in the season, the two droids mostly hang out with Big Bird, including a segment where they sing a song about remembering which number is which. There’s also an amusing bit where R2D2 happily tells C3PO that he’s in love, only to be brought down when he discovers that it’s just a fire hydrant.

A year later, Star Wars would keep the Muppet friendship going with a hosting gig during the fourth season of the Muppet Show. As Scooter readies the show’s guest host, a Scottish Muppet named Angus McGonagle, the trio of Luke Skywalker, R2D2 and C3PO bust through the wall. The three are looking for the kidnapped Chewbacca, but Scooter sees this as an opportunity to get rid of Angus and replace him with some real stars. Other than R2, the heroes seem disinterested in the idea of hosting a variety show. They’re more focused on tracking down their kidnapped friend Chewbacca.

Luke appears less whiny and unsure and more of a gung ho revolutionary, screaming, “REMEMBER ALDERAN!” when he bursts into the room at one point. While he isn’t keen on singing and dancing, he does leave the room so that his cousin Mark Hammill can give it a try. Wait, cousin? I wonder if he was Owen and Veru’s kid. If so, he’s certainly gotten over their fiery death. Mark fails to impress Kermit and Fozzy, especially after he and Angus do a musical gargling duet on stage.

Things pick up when they invade the set of Pigs in Space. They commandeer the Swinetrek in hopes of finding Chewy and interact with the cast. Link Hogthrob gets along swimmingly with Luke, inquiring about where he gets his snazzy uniform. Dr. Strangepork is intrigued with R2D2 and Miss Piggy dresses up as Leia as a way of hitting on Luke. This episode was released as hype for Empire Strikes Back, so we aren’t aware of how creepy this is. The two sci-fi teams fly to a planet where they confront the mysterious Dearth Nadir!

He too wants to know about Luke’s tailor. The segment becomes a pure clusterfuck with Chewbacca coming to Luke’s aid (wasn’t he kidnapped?) and Nadir being saved by Angus McGonagle’s gargling abilities. Then Kermit arrives to transform it into a musical segment, which includes the horrors of Chewbacca dancing. Then it gets into cosmic territory as both the Muppets and the Star Wars cast get together and sing “When You Wish Upon a Star” as a Disney-like castle appears behind them.

Yes, they’re doing this decades before Disney would own both properties. Absolutely crazy.

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Okay, okay. So my writing has been a little lax lately. I’ve been a bit busy, what with jury duty, a sketch writing class at UCB, the Royal Rumble, the Superbowl and work kicking my ass. But I promise I’ll get back to actually writing about comics again real soon! Scout’s honor!

I was never a scout, but I’m pretty sure I can keep that promise.

My superfriends are, as always, Gaijin Dan, Was Taters, Jody and Space Jawa.

All-Star Western #16
Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Moritat and Phil Winslade

Aquaman #16
Geoff Johns and Paul Pelletier

Avengers #4
Jonathan Hickman and Adam Kubert

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Hey. I’m helped out this week by Gaijin Dan, Was Taters and Space Jawa. No Jody this week. He’s too busy digesting the Cookie Puss we devoured while watching tonight’s Royal Rumble.

Wade Barrett was robbed, by the way.

Sweet week of comics. I mean, just check out this Avengers panel. Also, there’s a new series included called One-Punch Man and it strangely doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Guy Gardner.

Avengers #3
Jonathan Hickman and Jerome Opena

Before Watchmen: Minutemen #6
Darwyn Cooke

Bleach #523
Tite Kubo

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Hey, folks! It’s time again for This Week in Panels. Time to take the comics that Gaijin Dan, Jody, Was Taters and Space Jawa and I have read this week and condense them into a panel each. How would we describe these comics to the unfamiliar? Maybe it’s Spider-Woman making a plea for the Hulk’s humanity. Maybe it’s a group of Demon Knights seeing the one non-immortal member of their team after three decades of being apart. Maybe it’s a horse being on fire. Or maybe it’s a shirtless dude with a face drawn on his belly. I don’t know. Either way, it’s fun.

Let’s get it on.

All-New X-Men #6
Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez

Avengers Assemble #11
Kelly Sue DeConnick and Stefano Caselli

Batman #16 (Jody’s pick)
Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, James Tynion IV and Jock

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Yo. I have to get up early tomorrow for jury duty, which I think means I have to put on battle armor and hunt down Venom, so I’m just going to rush this update. It’s me, Jody, Gaijin Dan and Space Jawa. Was Taters is currently flailing around in a pit of quicksand.

Action Comics #16
Grant Morrison, Brad Walker, Rags Morales, Sholly Fisch and Chris Sprouse

Age of Apocalypse #11
David Lapham and Roberto de la Torre

Animal Man #16
Jeff Lemire, Steve Pugh and Timothy Green II

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After a week of me being sick as a dog (second time this month after about three years of pure health!), I’m back with panels. With me are Gaijin Dan, Jody, Space Jawa and Was Taters. While I did read Invincible #99, the issue is unusable due to my “no splash pages” rule. The entire issue is splash pages.

I will say that despite all the problems with that series, I’m loving the subplot of the guy I’m too lazy to look up the name for an will instead call him Eye-Patch Gigolo Turncoat from Space. He’s like Invincible’s dad — a Viltrumite on Earth with the mission of impregnating human women for the sake of his race’s megalomania who is destined to turn on his people — only the difference is that he’s been told to impregnate multiple women… and he finds himself loving each and every one of them.

All-New X-Men #5
Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen

All-Star Western #15
Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Moritat and Phil Winslade

American Vampire #34
Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerue

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Welcome to a peculiar edition of ThWiP. You see, barely anything came out this week in terms of American comics. That means that for once, Gaijin Dan is the star of the show, dominating the floor with all of his manga offerings. Jody and I each have one panel to share while Space Jawa has something from last week that I’m including for the hell of it.

Aquaman #15
Geoff Johns and Paul Pelletier

Avenging Spider-Man #15.1
Chris Yost and Paco Medina

Bleach #519
Tite Kubo

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First off, merry Christmas. Hope you’re having a great holiday. I myself have been blessed with some nice gifts like a Superman bathrobe, a broken Mr. T boxing puppet, a Duff Beer wallet and a La Parka mask.

Look at that style. Is it just me or does this look like it was taken in the 70’s?

Anyway, that’s not why I’m posting.

I’ve been hanging around the internet for many years. David and I have known each other for, what, 12 years at this point? Fact is, I’ve been around and I’ve moved around. Like back in the day, I was a writer on a site called Higher Voltage that’s long gone. It was a middle-ranking but funny site about fighting games, which were everywhere during the late 90’s/early 2000’s. On the forums, I wrote up a poem as a goof of a writing exercise where I retold the story of the Grinch with Akuma from Street Fighter. Under the gag name “Vokter Seuss”, I entitled it “How Akuma Kicked Christmas’ Ass”.

Some people liked the poem and it got reposted onto the forum of Shoryuken.com, the top fighting game community site, which, unlike Higher Voltage, hasn’t fallen into internet obscurity so many years later. I don’t recall when I wrote it, but it’s about ten or eleven years ago. Definitely college time. It got brought up again every few years and it’s even been retold through some really impressive animated gifs, which I sadly cannot find a link to at this moment.

As the years continued, it was pretty much forgotten. I, for one, had forgotten I wrote it. A brief Google search shows that some forums still repost it every couple years, which is really nice. The real shock came when an old internet acquaintance from the Higher Voltage days NeoChaosX found me on Twitter to tell me that the story has been revitalized once more. This time by Maximilian, a big name in the fighting game community who is known as a pretty good mind when it comes to the game genre.

Renamed “How Akuma Stole Christmas”, the thing absolutely made my day.

For a little context, I was really big into obscure Capcom game Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure at this time and there are a handful of references to it in here. From Iggi the dog in the Max role to the head-shaking namedrop of Death 13 (just pretend he says “Freddy Krueger” and it’ll make more sense). The knowledge that only three people will know what I’m talking about there is pretty embarrassing, but that’s not on Maximilian. Everything else is wonderful and I can’t thank him enough. That was a great Christmas gift.

I feel like Honey in that old Tiny Toon Adventures episode where Babs Bunny is showing those old Bosko and Honey cartoons and– see, there I go again. None of you have any idea what I’m talking about.