ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh busy busy busy busy. there is an animation layout that I meant to exhibit here at this point, which theoretically should have been fairly quick to do on friday evening, but i can’t decide what a figure should be doing during a certain line and so the task has become prolonged. all tasks become prolonged but i cannot always anticipate the reason.

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i can’t stand the shameless product placement on CW’s Black Lightning

At night I watch television with my mother. That is just my life now. It is less depressing than being alone or being beside someone watching bad phone videos for 2-4 hours every night. In a sense it is not much different to how things formerly were with my father (my mother would usually be alone during that), but we are not limited to whatever is on at the moment on bad basic cable and try to ensure we only watch something that both of us want to see. By this point we have largely run out of shows to which that statement applies so something only need be tolerable now. and so

Black Lightning is true to its DC comic book roots, in that every few episodes it seems like a different writer takes over and disavows whatever the previous writer was just doing, but the next writer may bring it back up again, possibly with something about it different that I am not supposed to notice and probably wouldn’t if I was actually watching these at the weekly intervals they were originally broadcast. It also has that annoying habit that media from the past 10 years does of assuming any moronic post on a “social media” platform is automatically “viral” and known to everybody, including one boasting of the physical prowess of the second hero character, Black Lightning’s daughter Thunder, despite her not actually having appeared in public or taken on the name yet, which can’t even be blamed on writer swapping because that happens later in the same episode and prior to then Black Lightning had forbidden Thunder to do that.
In addition to being Thunder, she also is a full time medical student, a volunteer doctor, beats up drug dealers under an additional alias “Blackbird” and then has time to go to parties and be condescending toward her younger sister, who we took to calling Lil Stormy both because of how stupid it sounded, matching her inexplicably bratty behaviour, and also because she didn’t come up with an alternate name for herself until the final episode of season 2, which was the redundant and confusing “Lightning.”

Unless we include Thunder’s few appearances in a blue and red outfit assembled at a local shopping mall in full view of customers or at least a very nosy mannequin, directly assisted by a stereotypically gay store employee who is never seen again despite being given the name Ben in the captions and getting a hug from Thunder as if they are the closest friends, which would mean Thunder’s identity isn’t a secret and she can easily be arrested and prosecuted for destroying a statue of Confederate General, which appeared on The News as soon as it happened. The News seems to be the only television program available in Freeland, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the bar for viral videos is so low.
An excursion to the mysterious far off nation of South Freeland where segregation still exists and all the white people have super speed granted by their brain-washing, intuitively-named leader “Looker” in season 2 seems to be the most extreme example of a rapidly introduced and dropped storyline. I assumed it was just there to cover up the going nowhereness of an earlier storyline about “pod children” but the pod children situation is resumed as soon as the Looker situation is concluded.

I don’t much mind that the white characters are mostly 1-dimensional and cartoonishly unkind, rigid and dopey (though my mother does) because the one “good” white guy Gambi is so frustratingly perfect and good at everything that the bad ones can seem like a relief and I find them amusing. Gambi gets uptight when Black Lightning talks about killing the villain, Tobias, because that’s not what heroes do! Gambi himself murders nameless cronies by the hearse-load every other episode but conveniently avoids shooting anyone that is actually in charge of anything. He also uses conventional firearms despite designing and crafting weapons and other devices that defy the laws of physics casually in his spare time.

Tobias is my favorite on account of being the only major recurring character on the show who doesn’t get offended if somebody makes a judgemental remark, which about 80% of the remarks are since that’s what network television thinks social conscience is. Tobias does beat people up and shoot them, but I can’t confirm he has directly killed more people than Gambi has, and they are usually people in his own employment, which greatly limits the expansion of his enterprises. Tobias ALSO makes frequent judgemental remarks but, again, is the only character that doesn’t look like he about to cry when he does so, because he is the only character that realizes he doesn’t actually exist and so is free to be unrealistic in more enjoyable-to-watch ways.

Regarding Black Lightning himself, his secret identity Jefferson Pierce should be REALLY obvious. He has the same agenda and talks to the same people in and out of costume, often the same night, and the costume itself is not that effective. He wears goggles but no helmet and is the only major character with a beard apart from Tobias who is frequently stated to be albino and thus inadequately “black.” The costume also glows in the dark and has an incredibly slow and loud self-propulsion flight system and it is confounding that nobody who wants to kill Black Lightning is able to follow him or track him down.
I suppose he IS unique among DC heroes, not for being black so much as actually wanting to make a difference when not in costume. He is willing to let Jefferson get fired from his job so Black Lightning can actually protect people whereas I can’t imagine Clark Kent ever letting himself get fired without quickly conceiving a ludicrous counter scheme to get himself rehired so he can continue publishing stories about how great superman is.

Still I think it is a good hero and villain show. It is an atrocious social/family drama which takes itself so seriously that the suspension of disbelief necessary for the ridiculous supernatural hero action to gets shattered constantly, With 3 super powered characters in the same family, 4 if you include the mother, Lynn,’s super sanctimony, that do whatever they want but also get furious and broody each time another one does it, and then each individually whines at Gambi afterward, it can seem like a never ending Saturday morning cartoon public safety announcement segment. Full of pouting, preaching, bad morality, offense-taking and “storm”ing off (oh ho ho), but so was Seventh Heaven, which ALSO aired on the CW channel and for ELEVEN years and people PRAISED it for being “positive” so I am willing to believe it is a network mandate that all shows with a family have to be as annoying, anti-entertaining and fake as that one.

Or maybe I just would rather believe families like that are fake. And despite repeated allusions to “real world” violence and injustice against black people, the heroes and Gambi regularly, consistently break the law and utilize what is essentially magic to get their way (usually to cover up the criminal deviance of Lil Stormy) and are ludicrously wealthy. I suppose anyone in the DC universe who isn’t heir to a throne or billionaire fortune is considered proletariat.

page 46 of that. a bit cramped, hopefully not to the degree that it is confusing, since it may be confusing anyway!

urk 100% of the words out of nemitz’s mouth are trash. in fact if mit literally said “trash trash trash trast” it would communicate more information than mit typically does.

i keep forgetting that having the elpse lope and nemitz in the frame together messes with my usual way of plotting out pages, and with the giant stupid sack there also it will only be intensified.
i fear that I shamefully copy-pasted the scraps of the automobile. but i fear that the car has not been shown full frame recently enough that this clearly IS the car. it is such a distinctively poorly-designed car that surely anybody who had been keeping up with the “story” up to this point would know when a car is mentioned and a piece of that one is shown that it is being referred to. i hope.
i also hope that giving this quality to nemitz is not a mistake. it seems very mundane. it in fact was not planned. it seemed like a way to follow up elpse refusing to move the bag and also allude to something from earlier that i never gave an explanation for, the curious three blue electricity-looking shocks that nemitz experienced during the hospital section. instituting a major character revelation primarily to resolve a circumstance that only occurred in an attempt to be funny feels unwise, but resolving something old that I didn’t know what else to do with is better than simply forgetting. i see plenty of fictional media where a problem like this — such as a large object that no one can move — is resolved offscreen without an explanation. if i just cut to the imps in the car with the bag you could assume they found some way to get it in that might have taken a while but was not incredibly important. i may have to limit nemitz’s sphere-activation-shock-strength ability in an odd way or make the energy work differently depending on circumstances. super strength is just too common, especially if i indicate that elpse also already has it on account of the kumquat injection and is just too deep in self-pity to use it.

oh cow! a free trial ON THEM! DISNEY is PAYING the FEE for you! except it isn’t, it has billions of dollars and could still turn a massive profit if it offered this streaming service for free. and every other service that charges gives you a MONTH free trial. it is the mark of a true price gouging monster giving you less than half as much and still presenting it like a favor. maybe the logic in the board room was that a consumer could theoretically watch all the original content in a month and dump the service without paying anything. right as you could with netflix or hulu, which are known to have loads of new shows but few good ones;

even Nick Nolte’s mugshot has its own show on Netflix, for example, and they still stay in business, very good business. this, like EVERY other thing the disney company has done in my life time and before, is inherently hostile to buyers and uses its inescapable socialized influence on children as leverage to force parents, and you can see below that the box text addresses “parents” directly, into paying through the nose and any other accessible orifice. disney has a CENTURY’s worth of its own content plus the loads it has acquired in the past few years that now can’t be gotten anywhere else, plus multiple generations of wealthy imbeciles who shill its properties at every opportunity without any compensation, and still wants to use this “look at how we’re losing on the deal” marketing. Look I am so angry I don’t even care that somebody of approximately equal mental function to myself brought froot loops into the house.

the back of a cereal box has never been the place for literary excellence but as a child I reckon I could think of few things less interesting than a big AD directed at my parents. I am no toucan sam apologist but the bird has some interesting colors.
The box doesn’t actually say what the monthly charge IS, another sign of a shifty, shifty business, so I had to look it up on my own, which means now every robot tracking me knows I willingly looked up information on disney plus and will gladly interpret that as me approving of it and a sign that it needs to shove more disney plus ads at me since plainly I am not getting enough unsolicited information about it.
The cost per month turns out to be is $6.99, which doens’t seem too bad, but Hulu’s lowest rate is $5.99. Although with tax that now comes to 6.37. Hulu of course has advertisements, but the point is mootly since disney doesn’t NEED ads since it OWNS everything it broadcasts, and furthermore ALSO owns hulu. This IS an improvement from ye olde disney channelle which DID have repetitive shrill ads for disney products and nothing else, even during programming designed to not have commercial breaks, but i suppose they figure with a slightly less captive audience who pay specifically for the access they can’t get away with that as easily.

Immediately beneath Marvel Logo, the Series, is something called “togo.” am i really to believe disney has made a feature about Duke Togo, Golgo 13? Or is it a documentary about Togo, the African country where nemitz rigged elections? I don’t know and I aim not to know.
but ONCE AGAIN i looked it up anyway!
apparently Togo is about a real sled dog named Togo, and its primary reason for existing, as best I can tell, is to finally stick it to Balto, the also real dog who did slightly less than Togo in the same historical event but got more credit and inspired the Balto film series which while worthy of derision is notable for being a rare, presumably lucrative talking dog franchise that Disney does NOT own or get any money from, which they just aren’t having, here OR Togo.

i am not convinced that kid on the right is one of “The Original Harlem Globetrotters.” Something about him tell me he never won a basketball game by cheating or solved a mystery with scooby doo.
listen, this is a team which names bill cosby , henry kissinger the pope and the third-to-latest pope as official members.

this kid is no pope. consequently i conclude that he is no trotter of globes. I bet he doesn’t even trot mercator projections. In fact neither of the people pictures look old enough to be a pope or a cosby so presumably both have only joined the team recently.

speaking of kids that aren’t popes, These kids all have the same face, are not behaving in a safe manner, and the two in the middle aren’t even in seats. I presume these are actually demons in the shape of children who have been tricked and led inside what they believed was a bus by a wizard who sealed them there and now they smile and tell lies to try and convince you to let them out. Their transformation is incomplete as evidenced by their malformed limbs not yet being proportional to their heads. Do not be fooled! Do not buy their sun butter! For one thing, flavor cannot be delicious. FOOD that HAS good flavor IS delicious. Typical dumb ignorant unholy non-pope imps.

speaking of children that aren’t wizards, I don’t want these little kids trying to move my furniture and apart from that it concerns me that a sign board has sired or given birth to human children. This is even weirder than that narnia book about a horse that has “his boy.” from the perspective of somebody who is probably never going to read any narnia books beyond the experience alluded to in that link