Is it embarrassing to say that I only saw this movie because one of the actress in it was one of my first "celebrity crushes"? Some explanation, I guess. I started watching Degrassi Junior High when I was in fifth grade and kept up with it almost to the end--when WNET 13 moved the show …
Testament
I turned six years old in 1983 and my parents did a pretty good job at sheltering me from the violence of the real world. All I knew from violence was Star Wars and the cartoons that I was watching before and after school. I had no idea that in the early 1980s, America was …
Personal Archaeology 5: Confessions of an Achievement Junkie
Among the piles of personal ephemera that I've found in my office are awards. Many, many awards from elementary school, junior high, and high school. A few are sports-related, but most are certificates for participation in service events, citizenship and service awards, and academic honors. They're all going the way of the trash heap and …
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A Valiant Effort: Turok, Dinosaur Hunter
The Valiant Effort comes to a close with one of the company's most notable titles, a book that had its origins in the Gold Key series Turok Son of Stone and made a chromium splash when its first issue hit because it was so over-ordered and so de-valued by speculators that it became a symbol …
A Valiant Effort: Solar, Man of the Atom
The penultimate title in the stack was one of the more marquee characters in Valiant's lineup, a character that like Magnus and Turok, was published by another comic company back in the 1960s and to my knowledge is not part of the current Valiant lineup--in fact, I think that the relaunch was only with the …
A Valiant Effort: The H.A.R.D. Corps and Magnus Robot Fighter
I'm doing two series in one entry because there were only three total comics for both of them: The H.A.R.D. Corps #16 and 21 and Magnus Robot Fighter #24. Plus, I have more to say about the latter than the former. I vaguely remember the H.A.R.D. Corps from the Deathmate crossover and I think the …
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The Invitation
So this was a movie that I'd had in the queue for a couple of years because I'd seen a trailer for it on IMDb (as you do) and it looked like a good, creepy horror movie. The premise is that Will (Logan-Marshall Green) and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) are invited to a …
A Valiant Effort: Eternal Warrior
Maybe it's my love of Highlander, maybe it's because I liked him in the Valiant reboot The Valiant (which I have in trade), but I was looking forward to Eternal Warrior more than a number of the other series that I have already written about. The idea of an immortal who has longtime enemies and …
Transformers: The Movie
Does my '80s kid card get revoked if I tell you that I honestly cannot remember when I first saw this movie? I'm serious. This film came out on August 8, 1986 and I know I did not see it in the theater on opening weekend (more than likely, we were doing something centered around …
A Valiant Effort: Bloodshot
These two comics, Bloodshot #6 and 7, are a bit of a cheat because I had read them before. In fact, I brought #6 to an episode of "Back to the Bins" a number of years ago and we all more or less gave it a C. But I wanted to reread them because I was reading …
The Uncollecting 