A few unecessary word balloons aside (I.e. "HOW CONFUSING!!" Well, duh.), pretty hilarious to me.

BESIDES, let's all keep in mind the golden rule of comedy, yes?


I have that comic issue!

TIMING!

Shut up, Casper!

I gotta say, it's really noticeable how clumsy that translation is. None of the rhythm or the spirit of the joke comes across in the translation. It took me two reads to really get what was going on. It's amazing how a clumsy translation can really effect a piece of work.

It's one of the reasons I often prefer a dub to a set of subtitles. Subtitles often seem to miss the spirit of the text.

--Boltax.
(In comic books you can't rely on good voice actors to save the day!)

Adventure Time totally stole that gag too.

So, you want some bad-art comic monstrosities? Well how about the mother of all "masterpieces"?

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.


A long time ago in the 19th century, there was a young man named Dio Brando. He was a very intelligent and cultured child, but due to his abusive and horrible father, his personality became twisted. His father had once saved the life of a rich man of the Joestar family, so when the father became ill, Dio was adopted in to the upper-class British family.


Then, there's the son of the Joestar family, Johnathan Joestar. He's a stiff-upper-lip chivalrous chap who saves girls from bullies (or at least tries).


And then, they meet.

Dio decides that he has to destroy Jojo while usurping his position in the house. How does he start? Within the first five pages:

He's kicked the dog.


After a rough childhood of rivalry, the pair have seemingly made up at college. Their ailing father has been getting sicker, when Jojo discovers that Dio has been poisoning him. As Jojo races to get the police, Dio looks for a weapon or tool he can use. He stumbles upon an ancient Aztec relic, the Stone Mask. It has the curious ability to extend spiny barbs into the head of the wearer if covered in blood. After experimentation, Dio uses it to become...a Vampire!!! DUN DUN DUN.







As can be plainly seen, this is probably the most muscle-tastic silly-faced ridiculous book ever. The artist, Hirohito Araki, basically takes Fist of the North Star and combines it with slasher horror, rock music, and a whole bunch of 70-80's tropes to create what is basically every preteen fantasy ever.

And it gets better. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has a ridiculous amount of chapters, and seven different parts that each feature a new time period and a new cast of characters. It goes from Victorian Era Britain to pre-WW2 America complete with robot Nazis and Ultimate Life Forms to a 90's trip across the pacific to a sleepy Japanese town for a murder mystery to Italian crime families to an American women's prison in the near future to an alternate wild west where characters race across the map in search of the body parts of Jesus.

I'll cover the other parts in the future.

Yeah that translation is horrible. It's most likely a fan translation. It's too bad that I can't share the Swedish edition because Simon Lundström just NAILS it. He even translates the terms and ludicrous names where appropriate so that the entire world works. One Piece is one of those things where it doesn't matter if a name is translated because it sounds equally silly in the native language as well, it's really immersive. I also cringe every time an OP fan translation leaves terms like "nakama" that can easily be changed to "companion" since that is what it means in context.

... Sorry for the rant. But you know what I mean.

Esser, the Golden Rule of Comedy is that no matter the joke, someone, somewhere, at sometime, will or would have found it funny.

Yeah, the whole nakama thing pisses me off too. I believe the translators had a huge war back in 2000ish over it, classic example of nerds messing with something that should have just been left alone.

Here's a little something for you...

An Archie story!



Y'know, looking at this first image it's kinda hard to forget that one of Dan DeCarlo's other drawing gigs was doing cartoons for Playboy. Sexuality in Archie comics is this strange combination of overly frank combined with embarrassed euphemism. Shall we continue the story? Let's!











Okay, okay... so the story's pretty simplistic with a fairly obvious conclusion. To really understand the thing you might need a little crash course in ARCHIE COMICS METAPHOR.

Obviously, Archie comics generally avoid depicting any gratuitous sex acts. At the same time, they're really about teenage sexual obsession. So, in Archie comics the ultimate expression of teenage sexuality isn't sex, it's kissing. Kissing becomes the standard Archie comics metaphor for a desire for sex. It's not the only media to use this metaphor, but it's so prevalent in Archie comics so as to become almost sledgehammer at times.

If you didn't realise it the first time, go back and re-read the story with the knowledge that actually Archie couldn't get to sleep because Veronica wouldn't let him bump uglies with her. It... kinda paints the entire thing in a new light, no?

--Boltax.
(Also, it makes the detour with his mother in the middle of the story surprisingly uncomfortable. Mum still thinks of him as a little kid and tries to solve his problems with cake and chocolate milk -- when actually he's dealing with an incredibly teenage, or even adult, frustration. IE: Blue Balls. Sorry, Mum, you can't help Archie with his blue balls.)

(Okay, you could... but that would just be freakin' creepy.)

IT WAS A JOKE




Nakama, many honorifics... there're a lot of things that can(and SHOULD) be translated.

Wow, Archie is a dick. Does he always two-time like this?

Man, the whole plot of Archie is that he can't decide between Betty and Veronica.

Relationships in general in Archie comics are... very fluid. I've discussed it before, but Archie comics are vignettes, not part of an ongoing cohesive continuity. This means that the characters will change to suit the story.

As a result I honestly can't think of a single teenaged Archie character who hasn't cheated or two-timed, and who wouldn't do so at the slightest opportunity. This includes the otherwise stable relationships like Ethel's obsession with Jughead, Betty's obsession with Archie, or even Midge and Moose or Chuck and Nancy. Show any of these people another pretty face and they will abandon their 'true love' in favour of gettin' some with someone else.

--Boltax.
(Riverdale is kind of a bleak place in that way... but at least the adults all have stable, seemingly loving relationships.)

The original plan called for it to be Archie / Veronica (wish fulfillment of the average teenage male to find a hot rich girl who's into him), with blue-collar Betty along to help provide balance. Unfortunately, a number of fans latched on to Betty as the better option for Archie, and so the early writers tried to throw them a bone or two; this resulted in even more people shipping Archie / Betty, thus setting up the present love triangle.

So really, the whole thing was a massive "oops!" on the part of the series creators.

Considering the character of Betty appeared BEFORE the character of Veronica... not an enormous amount of time before, but before... I'm not sure how true that reading of author intent is. Betty appeared in PEP #22, and Veronica in PEP #26 -- a good 4 months apart, at least. In fact, Archie and Betty shared their first ever appearance in PEP #22, in a story where Archie tries his darnedest to impress her.

Honestly, your entire theory sounds like malarkey to me... but I don't know what your source on that is.

Even if it's based on things the creators said at the time, I'd be hard pressed to believe that it's tremendously accurate.

--Boltax.
(I will admit I've never read any Archie stuff that old.)

You think that's iffy, once he stated that every male protagonist in Gundam Wing was gay because of the way they looked. You know, like every other 80-90s anime prettyboys ever.

Also, Boltax! I know you used to look at Aussie Kid rags like K-Zone and stuff, they must have lots of tepid comics too. I remember some really badly-drawn ones.

That wasn't me; I actually noted that they each had girlfriends in some fashion by the time the series was over, even if some of the pairings were iffy (like Quatre / Dorothy or Wu Fei / Sally).

I do recall, however, commenting on the fact that there seems to be a lot of fangirls and confused newbies who think them to be gay.

Yes it was you, you've also stuffed up and/or spoiled tons of shows in huge write-ups for as long as I've been a member.

They almost never have any locally produced material. Mania, one of the main ones I read, used to publish 4 pages of Transformers every month -- but they stopped, without finishing the story they were publishing. There's basically no new content, it's all just reprints from Marvel, or Disney, or other companies.

--Boltax.

Giles was a British political cartoonist. Enjoy:



The Westminster system doesn't have fixed terms of government. The government in power chooses when the election is cast. Thus:



HAHAH! RACIST:


And last, but not least... BATMAN!


--Boltax.

...Wow, those are infinitely better than American political cartoons? Do you know why? Because they don't hugging LABEL everything!

So I have some 'new' stuff to show you! I had a parcel arrive in the mail and in it were a bunch of old issues of The Beano. So awesome. I love the Beano so much. These are all from the 70s (except for one issue from the late 60s). I've scanned a bunch of stuff for you from one issue from 1971. So enjoy the samples from THE BEANO #1530!!

First off, a perennial favourite, Billy Whizz!


Uhhh... yeah... actually I think I may have found a potential candidate image for my next avatar.

There's also Dennis the Menace. Who isn't that menacing in this issue, actually.


The use of colour in these comics is really interesting. There's some 'full colour' pages, the front and back cover, and the middle spread. Then there's the black-and-white pages. Then there's the red toned pages. Like Little Plum story:


As well as absolute classics like Little Plum there's other strips that I was familiar with when I was a kid in the 80s, but which have long since been cancelled. Like this one:


Lord Snooty was one of the most popular Beano characters at one point, believe it or not. (Oh, and sorry about the middle spine of the comic getting into the scan.)



Not much to say about the Nibblers, honestly. They're just some mice. As well as these familiar strips I was excited to find a bunch of stuff I'd never seen before. Like this:



Or this lovely piece of stereotyping:


The fact that The Beano is a Scottish publication makes this all the funnier to me.

Finally there was the 'discovery' that the Beano used to have ADVENTURE strips as well as joke strips. I actually already knew this, but there's a real difference from knowing it academically and actually reading the friggin' things. I mean, I did not expect the high adventure of Billy the Cat and Katie.




I hope you enjoyed travelling with me into the Beano's past!
--Boltax.

Now then, fellah....

I have a little something, not a scan unfortunately. This is from a 2006 crossover between Batman and Detective Comics called "Face the Face" in which Harvey becomes Two Face again. I forget what issue as I no longer have them, but Harvey whips out his trusty coin and this is what we get.

So I picked up "TMNT meet Archie" the other day. It's a wholy unremarkable book which, honestly, I don't think was intended to be called "TMNT meet Archie". The meeting between the two of them is just a single piece of an Annual which I'm guessing was retitled after the success of Archie vs. the Punisher.

But that's just me guessing.

Anyway, the most interesting thing I found in the entire book was the letters page. Enjoy:


--Boltax.