Dusting off the old blog to start (and let’s see how long it goes!) a new feature picking up where I’ve left off on withering Twitter — a biweekly look at what comics I grabbed from the comic shops on that week’s trip thirty minutes east to neighboring Joplin, MO. Every trip I dig around in the back issue bins at the city’s two Vintage Stock locations, and every trip some theme emerges. Let’s see what happened this week!
If there’s one thing I can say for 2021, it’s: thank the heavens, at least the movie theaters were open again. Sure, you might still catch a life-altering contagious respiratory illness while packed in with a bunch of strangers all, together, staring up at beautiful faces larger than your house — but in a place the size of my hometown, and me being as vaxxed as one can be, I’ve considered the personal risk as slim as it could be given the state of things. So in the back half of the year, I did see a pretty fair number of films as the filmmakers intended, outside the comfort of home. What follows are cross-posts of the reviews I wrote on my Facebook page from July all the way through the week of Christmas covering almost every theatrical outing (plus, oh yeah, two somewhat notable streaming flicks) that I took in during that span of time. Enjoy!
In which Captain JLS discusses the biggest Robotech-related news since the announcement of The Shadow Chronicles in the early 2000s — Harmony Gold & Big West have, hopefully once & for all, settled their differences and unreleased Macross material and merchandise, new & old, can reach these shores through official channels starting … well, apparently about a month ago. Also featured: bits & bobs of Robotech & Robotech-adjacent merch ranging from the very recent all the way back to late last year.
Well, this all kinda fell apart last year, didn’t it?
As is obvious, I’ve been radio silent on this shiny “new” blog since March, with the exception of a couple of YouTube cross-posts in April & May. I don’t think I need to tell you it was a rough, miserable 2020, even for folks like me who still have a job and their health (more or less) — and a lot of the stressors of that year still linger into the new one. But here we are, with the invitingly stark, blank canvas of 2021 looming ahead, and I’m going to take this opportunity to try ever-so-hard to get back into the groove of things here and start Doing Stuff again, starting with finishing out this particular project, doing capsule reviews of everything I saw in 2019 (to be followed shortly thereafter by my round-up of 2020) — and boy, if my memories of some of these flicks were scattered this time last year, now it’s a whole ‘nother year later! This should be fun!
Heh.
In which Captain JLS first completes the roster of TurboGrafx-16 Mini games over a month after the mini console was supposed to ship (but, joke’s on us, it only actually shipped in Japan), then sets aside an evening to flip through some old TTI-produced marketing literature.