Hello everyone!
I hope that the Halloween season is treating you all at least passably well and that you’re all doing your part to take care of yourselves! It’s important that we take an active part in our own well being when the world can be so stressful and unpleasant. Don’t worry though, this isn’t all going to be that sort of stuff–I just want to be positive and encouraging where I can be.
Last weekend I watched Batman: Bad Blood. It had Kathy Kane as Batwoman so I was excited. Even with it having Damian Wayne, I was willing to give it a chance.
It’s nothing that I’d recommend for outstanding vocal performances (Kathy’s VA is phoning it in) and it can be a bit eye-rolly in general, but it also did get a few chuckles from me and was overall not actively unpleasant. About halfway through the film–or forty five minutes in is more accurate I think? You find out that Batman isn’t dead (okay everyone knew he wouldn’t be, because batman “being dead” is a pretty classic fakeout) but has been kidnapped by Talia in order to brainwash him with the help of Jarvis Tetch, aka the Mad Hatter.
If you enjoy shlocky action and don’t mind some iffy character moments, some bad voice acting, and other little signs that it was rushed out the door, I don’t want to spoil anything… but I will say that the big scene at the Wayne company meeting was sort of… I swear I’d written a scene that hit so many similar beats before. In a good way. I wrote it better, but sadly it’s currently offline until I can get revisions done up through the Electrum & Nebula series.
Comic book superheroes are a place a lot of us in the MC community got our start, I’d imagine. I watched no shortage of superhero cartoons as a kid, from the Super Friends, to the DCAU, to the sad attempts Marvel made at matching it. I liked the X-Men and Spider-man shows for the most part, but they had a lot more moments of bad writing and laziness–this got worse and worse in the Fantastic Four, The Hulk, and the Iron Man/Avengers show.
There are so many great mind control episodes, though. There’s Batman: The Animated Series with episodes like “Perchance to Dream” which I first saw in black and white with the start cut out due to how it was recorded on VHS (made it so unreal in a great way), or many appearances of Poison Ivy… The Mad Hatter there, too… Superman’s animated series had Darkseid’s corruption of Superman…
And the Justice League had everything from Roulette with super heroines turned into slaves in underground fighting arenas, to Superman trapped in his own dreams of a better life… Or Sauron’s eye beams… Seriously, comic book cartoon adaptations have always been chock full of mind control goodness–even The Return of the Joker, the film for Batman Beyond (or Batman of the Future for those of you ‘cross the pond).
Any bits of mind control in comics you’ve especially loved, that you’d want to highlight? In original comics, or adaptation? I hardly mentioned everything, so feel free to comment.
The Adventures of Silver Girl is now officially 110% ready to go for the 6th–that means that there’s only one more story release between now and then. Possession, the 4th volume of Halloween Screams: Tales of Sapphic Treats. It’s the longest of the lot, and a bit of a romantic touch, too.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of my current offerings, such as Volume 3, A Night on the Edge of Forever!
You can find the rest of it here!
take care of yourselves, and each other… and I’ll be here to wave your way next week!