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Temporal Flux said awhile back and well before this week's LEGENDS:

Temporal Flux proves to be mostly right! I love Temporal Flux. :-)

TMNT ODYSSEY is a series finale for the Mirage comics that, like SLIDERS REBORN, seeks to address a sea of unresolved plots and posting tribute to a labyrinth of continuity while telling its own story in addition to serving as a definite conclusion.

The story: a mysterious time traveling and reality warping villain is destroying realities containing versions of the Ninja Turtles, wiping out the first and second animated shows, the live action films, the Archie published comics and it’s up to the aged Mirage Turtles to confront this enemy known only as the Shogun.

The Shogun turns out to be a future version of Michelangelo driven mad by several cosmic artifacts and grief over the Turtle family haven drifted apart and by how all his parallel universe counterparts are not thinkers and writers but absent minded goofballs. He seeks to destroy reality and rebuild it into his ideal multiverse in which his family will never separate or die.

The Turtles fight their brother to the end of time. Raphael kills Michelangelo and Leonardo grabs the cosmic object just before all of reality is destroyed. The multiverse reforms and the new worlds include the IDW comics, the Michael Bay films, the Nickelodeon series and potentially more.

It's nicely written by Andrew Modeen and it's drawn by TMNT comic veteran Jim Lawson, so despite being fan fiction, it fits right in with the official Mirage comics and easy to see as canonical.

It’s a good finale. The Turtles are all old now, still excellent fighters but worn down by injuries and sadness. The unfinished Volume 4 is integrated into ODYSSEY through a sequence of the Turtles annual camping trip at multiple points in their lifetimes, one of which is set during Volume 4 without specifying how that volume ended.

The Turtles, traveling across time and space to find the Shogun, are joined by survivors of characters from the other continuities, showing respect to every version of the Turtles. There’s extensive tribute to Mirage comics to observe what’s being concluded.

The ending directs readers to embrace the new Ninja Turtles shows, films and comics while heralding the Mirage comics as the core source material and assuring us that the previous incarnations lived full lives even if they did so out of sight from the readers. NINJA TURTLES ODYSSEY takes the Turtles to the end of their lives and then shows them reborn.

It's true that many of the Mirage TMNT comics are excellent. The initial 21 issues and the four one-shots are, despite missteps, very strong in terms of their superb artistry as Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird blend beautiful artwork and superb storytelling into hyperdynamic action and deeply stirring contemplation. There are problems like their bizarre design choices meaning it's hard to tell the Turtles apart and the long delays between individual issues was absurd. They are good comics.

The guest-era, from #22 - 44 when Eastman and Laird were too busy managing licensing and franchising to write and draw comics, is filled with excellent work. Eastman and Laird returned to writing the series with Jim Lawson drawing the epic "City at War" arc which is also a very serious, thoughtful, action packed story. There isn't any of the humour from the original animated show or the Nickelodeon series, but the lunacy of the Turtles comes through -- although, as I said, the fact that you can't tell any of them apart speaks poorly of Eastman and Laird's design skiils.

Volume 2 is an awkward, unfinished, abruptly concluded mess. Volume 3's pretty good if you make sure to read the fan-published issues. Volume 4 is filled with beautiful artistry and many of the TALES OF THE TMNT stories are excellent, but the unfinished, inconclusive nature of the series means nobody should read it. The TMNT Entity blog remarked that most readers could stop at "City of War" and feel like they had a complete, finished, satisfying product without stepping into the incomplete material of Volumes 2 - 4.

I'm still in the middle of TMNT: ODYSSEY.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Volume 4 is totally unreadable.

Volume 4 is where Kevin Eastman (hyperintense action writer and artist) sold his share of TMNT to Peter Laird and Peter Laird carried on alone. The thing about the original TMNT -- I mean, it was messy and poorly paced and incomplete and amateurish, but the talent was unmistakable: crazy action, absurd visuals, philosophical contemplation and grand sci-fi concepts.

With Eastman gone and taking his stylized action lunacy with him, Laird's writing and artistic sensibilities dominate Volume 4 -- and so what we have are 32 issues with about eight issues of content. This is a series where half an issue is just panels of a spaceship landing, where the bulk of an issue's pages are the Turtles doing automotive repair on a truck, where the last page of one issue is a lengthy text piece from Peter Laird about how much he loves his new Segway.

The series is a drawn out mess of incoherent plot threads: aliens land on Earth and offer their tech freely, meaning the Turtles can now walk around in public and are thought of as visiting aliens. Donatello is shrunken down to action figure size, Michelangelo goes off to space, Splinter dies of old age, April discovers she's a being of pure imagination -- none of these plot threads have any linking theme, and the focus of the stories is so scattered and confused that you wonder where it's all going and you suspect it's going nowhere. That suspicion turns out to be correct: Volume 4 took 14 years to release 32 issues and ended on a cliffhanger.

Peter Laird began Volume 4 with great enthusiasm only to get sidetracked by producing the 2003 animated series, a series he describes as a true representation of his vision of the Turtles. In contrast, Volume 4 starts out strong but Laird's distraction and lack of commitment becomes apparent with the meandering stories that he couldn't even be bothered to wrap up. To be fair, Laird confessed to being burnt out on the comic and the animated series and losing all passion for the Turtles -- but there is really no excuse for not finishing what he started.

In addition to the abortion that's Volume 4, Laird spearheaded a second anthology volume of TALES OF THE TMNT -- which had the bizarre editorial direction where story arcs would not be published sequentially. By that, I mean that even though there were multi-issue arcs, the installments would be separated by unrelated stories. For example, there was a "Gang Wars" story about New York's organized crime after the Turtles defeated the Foot Clan -- but each issue of "Gang Wars" in Tales of the TMNT would be followed by three to 20 issues of other stories before the next installment of "Gang Wars" and then "Gang Wars" never even finished because Laird sold the franchise to Viacom and gave up on Ninja Turtles comics.

There is a shocking indifference to reader enjoyment here that is just unbelievable and it simply cements my opinion: do not read the original run of NINJA TURTLES. Life's too short to read comics from creators who are so indifferent to their readers. Leave that to crazy completists like me. Stick to the Nickelodeon series.

*throws all the Mirage NINJA TURTLES comics into the fireplace*

Oh, wait. There's one left. TMNT: ODYSSEY. The final Mirage TMNT comic -- not published by Mirage but by that crazy fanboy who loved these comics so much (why?) that he paid writers and artists for a final chapter. Fine. I'll read it.

To be fair, everything in the MCU looks terrible to Informant and he hated CIVIL WAR which the rest of us liked, so that just indicates that Marvel's maintaining their baseline of quality.

How Trip Tucker Died and Got Better
The ENTERPRISE novel, LAST FULL MEASURE, released after the cancellation, has a framing sequence in which a five year old James Kirk is visiting the Starfleet War Memorial and meets an old man who shares little Jimmy's reverence for Starfleet's ideals. We then go into the main story which is set during Season 3 of ENTERPRISE and is an untold adventure of Enterprise investigating the Xindi threat. When we return to the framing sequence at the end, the narration reveals that the old man is Trip Tucker, decades older than he was in his reported death in "These are the Voyages."

With the sequel, THE GOOD THAT MEN DO, a framing sequence has Jake and Nog hanging out and doing some research for one of Jake's books. Jake has stumbled across a strange cover-up; historical records have been altered with regards to the build-up to the Romulan War and the intial formation for the Coalition of Planets. Jake and Nog realize that all this has been done to falsify the death of Charles Tucker III.

We go back to the events of "These Are The Voyages" where we get the full story that exposes the holodeck simulation as a fraud. Tucker is recruited by Section 31 to prevent a Romulan attack and is forced to fake his own death to go undercover. THE GOOD THAT MEN DO also highlights how, when leading up to Trip's death scene in the aired episode, Trip winked at Archer and Archer smiled and then buried the smile, and then Archer gave Phlox a conspiratorial look.

I have no idea if the actors or directors or whoever were deliberately seeding the idea that this entire situation was a ruse or if the editors chose a take where the performers broke character or if Jolene Blalock got everyone high before filming, but it's onscreen and novelists Andy Mangels and Michael Martin seized on that. Good.

Trip is separated from his crewmates and becomes a pivotal figure in the ongoing ENTERPRISE novel series as the Romulan War alluded to in the original TREK becomes the center of the story.

I would now like Slider_Quinn21 to chime in and say these novels aren't canon.

**

With regards to Roddenberry's vision -- what stands out to me is that the original STAR TREK had Kirk and McCoy regularly blowing up and arguing and Kirk was a man of sexual appetites. Spock was certainly a breakout character with his value system, impeccable morality and cool, scientific personality and he contrasted well with his more human co-stars.

Then in the 70s, Spock's status as the breakout character of the show caused Roddenberry to take the view that Spock's philosophies were completely universal for every single character in TREK. Roddenberry seemed to forget that Kirk and McCoy and Scotty and Sulu and Chekov hadn't been anything like Spock. And while after the first TREK film, Roddenberry was relieved of control, he was responsible for THE NEXT GENERATION's first two seasons and its clumsy, witless, lecturing tone.

Writers like Ronald D. Moore and Michael Piller worked within the restrictions. Piller wrote a script where a boy grieves his dead mother. Roddenberry rejected it; people in the 24th century (or Spock) wouldn't grieve death. Piller rewrote it so that the aliens who accidentally killed mom try to push the kid into grief in an effort to atone for their error and his loss. This was accepted.

DS9 found other ways to be get around the limitations, mostly by indicating that the perfect world Roddenberry imagined was merely the Federation and by situating DS9 in proximity to Bajor and Cardassia, DS9 could bypass Roddenberry's restrictions while respecting their values.

They did introduce Section 31, the Federation's black-ops assassins. However, they also made sure to leave themselves some wiggle room by noting that Section 31 is unsanctioned with no official status and could arguably be considered a rogue organization that isn't part of Gene Roddenberry's perfect Federation.

If Ronald D. Moore and Ira Steven Behr had not felt a duty to be follow the letter of the law laid down by the original creator, I imagine they would have gone so far as to say that Gene's values were just that -- values -- existing in contast to a more complicated reality. But as STAR TREK had really put forth an ideal world as an actual reality, I think they felt it best to stick with that for the Federation while noting that there were lots of exceptions in the margins and outside the UNFP -- and they could do morally ambiguous worlds on their own shows.

And I think that's the best route because we should not make STAR TREK more like our world. We should make our world more like STAR TREK. But we also shouldn't be so reverential to a very flawed TV creator that we don't dare step outside his many arbitrary and asinine limitations, and then like Berman and Braga, lose any sense of how to tell a story with conflict, drama, risk, meaning and something to say.

#24 - 25 are shockingly good comics. You'd kind of expect them to be like pretty much every SLIDERS in Season 6 fanfic ever written where resurrections are being pulled out of thin air with contrivances and grand threats are wiped away due to authorial fiat with no sense of cause and effect. But in this case, it would be a bit like first writing 'missing adventures' set during Seasons 1 -5 to seed plot devices needed for a Season 6 that would then have a foundation for resurrecting Quinn, Wade and Arturo and reuniting them with Rembrandt.

A similar approach was taken with the ENTERPRISE novels, which picked up after the fourth and final season killed off an apparently popular character, the engineer, Trip Tucker. (I found him kind of bland like most of the cast, but it seems the actor was popular?)

A post-show novel, LAST FULL MEASURE, was set during Season 3, but the ending is set after Season 4 and reveals that Trip is alive. THE GOOD THAT MEN DO then provides the full story on Trip's resurrection and it could have come off as unconvincing, but LAST FULL MEASURE hits you really hard with the shocking and joyful reveal of Trip being alive and that creates sufficient build-up for THE GOOD THAT MEN DO to sell you on the character's return.

That said, those two novels were official publications. It reflects terribly on the NINJA TURTLES comics that they had an unpaid fan commission artists and writers to finish what the publisher abandoned. I'm starting on Volume 4 of the series and it too is incomplete and finished by this same Andrew Modeen fellow, which strikes me as crassly unprofessional. And it's also amusing that Modeen was not satisfied with finishing NINJA TURTLES on his own time and money once; he felt compelled to do it twice.

On NINJA TURTLES, retroactive continuity and what TV Tropes called Arc Welding (declaring stories intended to be separate to have been linked the entire time):

Volume 3 of NINJA TURTLES isn't bad. The artwork is way too busy for a black and white comic and physically mutilating three-quarters of the cast gets pretty over the top when after Donatello's become a cyborg and Raphael's lost an eye, it's followed up with Leonardo losing a hand.

Raphael becoming the Shredder and trying to steer the Foot into a heroic direction is a pretty cool storytelling decision. But then the series abruptly cuts off with #23 and a truckload of unfinished plots: a mysterious Lady Shredder beats Raphael in a duel and takes control of the Foot Clan while Leonardo finds himself struggling to use a prosthetic hand in combat. A lady Foot soldier has joined the Turtles, a villain is attacking Splinter psychically. Casey Jones' daughter is being targeted by a mob boss. Michelangelo has started dating a Chicago police officer.

And then Volume 3 got cancelled and when the series came back with Volume 4 and TURTLES co-creator Peter Laird, Laird ignored Volume 3 completely. So, when the fan-writer Andrew Modeen decided to do his fan-published issues of #24 - 25, he wanted to (a) resolve all these plots and (b) transition smoothly into the already underway Volume 4. This left him with a massive task list to fulfill in two issues.

In order to resolve all this stuff, #24 - 25 refers to stories that were published *after* Volume 3 but are chronologically before Volume 3. Volume 4 of NINJA TURTLES was set 20 years after the original series, but there was an anthology title, TALES OF THE TMNT, which had stories set at various points in the Turtles' timeline. There was also a mini-series called DONATELLO: THE BRAIN THIEF and #24 - 25 draws upon both to conclude Volume 3.

TALES OF THE TMNT had a number of issues where the Turtles were menaced by different female ninjas of unknown origins. #24 - 25 reveals that these different ninjas were all the same woman; they were all the Lady Shredder who attacked Raphael and took over the Foot in #23, and stitches together all these different characters into one role, sparing #24 - 25 the need to create a whole new character from scratch in presenting its central villain who turns out to be the original Shredder's consort. As a result, what could have felt rushed and random in #24 - 25 now feels prepared and considered.

There's a hilarious level of improvisation here in that the TALES writer had no intention of the different lady ninjas all being the same character or the Lady Shredder of Volume 3 -- but it works.

THE BRAIN THIEF, published during Volume 4 and set before Volume 3, had Donatello fighting the cybernetic villain, Baxter Stockman, and imprisoning the Stockman cyborg in a secret lab. In #24 - 25, Donatello, now a cyborg himself, has started to malfunction and he goes to this secret lab to see Stockman for help.

Stockman, intrigued by Donatello's technology, explains that all the Turtles have a healing factor that will allow them to repair any injury but the cyborg machinery is suppressing Donatello's regenerative capacities and the conflict is causing the malfunctions. Stockman helps remove the cybernetic implants to learn more about the tech and Donatello's body, having been trying to heal itself for a year, finally reforms completely.

This sets up the Turtles' healing factor. And then in the final battle with Lady Shredder, the Turtles are on the ropes until a restored Donatello comes to their rescue and during the fight, Leonardo's hand regrows (which is why the prosthetic kept falling off) and it turns out Raphael's eye has also been healed for some time under the eyepatch/Shredder helmet he'd been wearing and he didn't realize it until now.

This, again, is a very effective use of a different story to resolve a present story. #24 - 25 use the BRAIN THIEF mini-series bring Baxter Stockman into the story to explain how the Turtles have regenerative powers (which is actually supported by how they healed up from so many injuries in Volumes 1 - 2). The Turtles all being shown to recover from their mutilations inside the same issue at the same time is ridiculously convenient yet strangely heartfelt and emotionally convincing.

I should really track down this Andrew Modeen figure; we'd have so much to talk about.

I still think SMALLVILLE was too emo and whiny, albeit in an emo and whiny era of TV shows that were all about pretty white people looking sad about their miniscule emotional problems.

**

How old should Angel from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER look? How old should the artists draw him in the current in-continuity comics? I realized today that the artists are all over the place, using reference photos from a vast span of time in which David Boreanaz changed a lot.

It's impossible to stop an actor from aging even if David Boreanaz was playing an immortal vampire. From an in-universe standpoint, Angel should look like a 27-year-old Boreanaz and shouldn't ever age. In actuality, Boreanaz seemed to have aged 20 years over the course of his nine years on television as Angel. In-universe, the show doesn't acknowledge that Angel looks older and he gets older even in flashbacks. The lean, fresh-faced youth of BUFFY's first season had become a middle-aged and physically bloated figure by the final episode of ANGEL.

None of this is Boreanaz' fault. He looks consistent enough in his first three years on BUFFY and the first season of ANGEL. In Season 2 of ANGEL, he starts to fill out; the lines in his face are deepening and he's putting on weight. However, that weight is primarily muscle and Boreanaz in Seasons 2 - 3 has gone from lean and cadaverous to buff and ripped; it doesn't look like Angel's getting older, it looks like he's been working out a lot. And it looks terrific in the absurd superhuman action sequences; Angel has become a seemingly unstoppable warrior.

In Season 4, Boreanaz' muscle definition is suddenly gone and he looks fat. Boreanaz' wife had given birth and he wasn't working out because he was up all night with his baby. In-universe, it sort of works in that much of Angel's persona -- the long coat, the convertible car, the spiked hair -- is a constructed image to conceal his insecurities, so as Angel adapted to a more familial environment, he might have become less concerned with his appearance and the character, having become the father figure of the series, is starting to look like one too.

Where it doesn't work, however, is in the action sequences: Boreanaz is simply unable to sell the superhuman side of Angel and it's only when he gets back in shape in the middle of the season does it become visually convincing again that Boreanaz is a superhuman vampire.

In Season 5, Boreanaz starts out in shape, but the makeup artists have stopped smoothing out his complexion and you can see the weathering of his skin where it used to be hidden under concealer. It's fine in that Angel's character is feeling somewhat worn down by circumstances, but in the middle of Season 5, Boreanaz starts to get fat again. The reason: he hurt his knee and needed surgery. This led to many episodes where Boreanaz had to be filmed sitting in a chair and also, he couldn't exercise. As a result, Angel looks hopelessly out of shape in his series finale.

There's not a lot Boreanaz could have done about the situation. The comics seem to primarily draw upon the ANGEL in Season 3 publicity photos as reference, although occasionally, I see a cover that's using Season 1 photos and it's shocking to see Angel looking so young and trim when most artists use a mid-point average.

From a writing standpoint -- I think ANGEL should have written in an explanation for Angel aging by Season 3 once they realized the show was going to continue and that Boreanaz wasn't someone who will physically stay the same. I think I would have liked Season 3 to have an arc where Angel discovers he isn't healing instantly the way he used to. Meanwhile, Fred notices that Angel looks much younger in some old photos even though he shouldn't age. It's revealed: Angel's time in hell damaged his physiology and caused him to start aging and the trip to Pylea where he transformed back and forth between a human and purely vampiral state has worsened his condition. He's now aging faster, using his powers will hasten his degeneration and even if he didn't, he has about a year left to live.

I would probably make this a short arc where Angel becomes desperate to tie up every loose end in his life before he dies, racing the clock, getting weaker (and older) with each adventure, urgently trying to achieve every bit of redemption he can before he dies -- and I would end the arc with Angel being healed through some magic that, however, leaves him aging at a human rate and allows David Boreanaz to age in the role. We would have to give up the flashbacks, though.

When the ANGEL comics started, it was revealed that Angel had become human and was using magic to fake his vampire powers. But eventually, Angel regains his vampire powers. If it had still been a TV show, it probably would've been best to let Angel stay human-ish.

So, I read the Kevin Smith issues of GREEN ARROW. They're good and reflect an interesting approach: Smith doesn't attempt to write an entry-level story. Most 90s era comics were impenetrably linked to previous continuity with every story a sequel and with superfluous references to issues from years and decades past. Most modern superhero comics try to restrict continuity references to joking references and focus on doing new stories unconnected to old ones, allowing for self-contained trade paperback sales.

Kevin Smith found a strange middle ground where he's constantly referring to the past, but doing so in a way that suggests a vast and labyrinth sense of history to Green Arrow that the reader doesn't need to know in order to appreciate. A bit like how the first STAR WARS film suggests a vast interstellar tapestry that wasn't shown onscreen.

Smith resurrects Oliver Queen -- but this is the Oliver Queen of the 70s who is completely confused by the 2001-DC Universe and is baffled by a Flash and Green Lantern who aren't the ones he knew. Smith uses Oliver's confusion to justify expository dialogue and make him as much a newcomer as any new reader might be, allowing the storyline to build from past storylines like CRISIS, ZERO HOUR and FINAL NIGHT, and since Oliver has lost his memory of those stories, readers who don't know them won't be confused either.

Smith also finds a neat way to do a reversal of the definitive Grell-era: Smith's GREEN ARROW is a crazy superhero comic with Oliver feeling like he's awakened in a universe that's completely insane and he's trying to deal with it on a street-crime level. In Smith's hands, GREEN ARROW is an absurdist superhero comedy and it really works.

And yet, curiously, the interview ends with linking to a completely different Tracy Tormé story in a rather misleading fashion! Bwahahahahahahahahah!

I haven't read the Oliver Queen resurrection issues yet, but I find it amusing to observe that the FINAL NIGHT storyline took place thirteen months after GREEN ARROW #100 - 101, meaning Oliver Queen was retroactively resurrected about a year after he was killed off. I also find it quite funny to note that Oliver's death was in a massive explosion from which no body could be recovered -- which strikes me as writer Chuck Dixon knowing Oliver wouldn't stay dead and helpfully making sure there's no body.

I wonder why Smith felt the need to go the route he did of having Hal Jordan revive a corpse given that the simplest explanation would've been that Oliver was somehow extracted from the plane before it exploded.

But it's also funny -- Oliver was supposed to have been resurrected in 1998 at the end of Connor's run as the lead in GREEN ARROW. By that, I mean that the GREEN ARROW series ended on the cast discovering that Oliver Queen, thought dead, is somehow alive. But Kevin Smith is such a slow and lazy writer that DC refused to start having his scripts drawn and printed until they had received multiple scripts and Oliver's resurrection was delayed to 2001, meaning that for three years, Oliver wasn't dead -- just late.

SPIDER-MAN UNLIMITED #18 isn't a great comic, but it has a hilarious scene where the Daily Bugle's obituary writer grumbles at how he is constantly writing retractions due to the constant resurrections.

Anyway. Readers of SLIDERS REBORN will know that I love Comic Book Death and shamelessly ripped off the death and resurrection of Jason Todd to resurrect Wade.

I've been reading GREEN ARROW comics, another iconic figure who went through an awkward age.

Green Arrow is amusing in that, like Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, he was strictly a B-list character for most of his lifetime and in fact, considering Oliver Queen a B-lister may have been overly generous. He was a Golden Age Robin Hood knockoff whose gimmick was trick arrows -- boxing glove arrows, net arrows, etc. -- he was simply an interchangeable back row member of the Justice League. He didn't even get his own title until 1987 and it's only at this point that Green Arrow became an A-list character thanks to writer/artist Mike Grell.

Mike Grell reinvented Green Arrow as an urban hunter of criminals and carefully sidestepped all the fantasy elements of the DC Universe, instead having Oliver fight street gangs and corporate villains and corrupt government officials. Grell's 83 issues kept Oliver strictly in the real world and avoided any crossover interaction, building a universe of shady espionage agents and assassins and defining Oliver as a street level character who was significantly more human than other comic book vigilantes. At the start of Grell's run, Oliver is over-40 and the aches and pains of his career are starting to wear down on him. He's settled into a relationship with Black Canary. He's lost his fortune and expects to wind down and run a flower shop with the Canary -- except the world keeps calling on him to battle injustice and Oliver thrives on hunting.

This hard-boiled, ripped from the headlines approach to Oliver created a template where he could be the star rather than a superhero with no superpowers who was always overshadowed by the rest of the Justice League. A lot of what made it work was Mike Grell's writing style where he scripted silence, space and devised layouts for artists to make the GA comics a stunning work of visual art. Grell became synonymous with GREEN ARROW -- which was a problem when he decided to move on after a six year run of 83 issues in addition to annuals and a mini-series.

The post-Grell issues reflect a terrible confusion. DC editorial promoted from within, hiring editor Kevin Dooley to become the new writer, and Dooley's writing came off as amateur and unprofessional compared to Grell's. Where Grell's every image and moment was infused with meaning, Dooley wrote interchangeable fight scenes guest-starring the superheroes and supervillains that Grell had locked out of his own run. Dooley accomplished little beyond plunging Green Arrow back into the fantasy superhero adventures and made it quite clear why Grell had avoided them. This ghastly follow-up to a seminal and beautiful run was a critical and financial disaster.

At this point, DC apparently decided that Oliver Queen didn't work. The idea of hiring a more competent, visually oriented writer who understood the medium was apparently not considered; DC had a strange attitude of blaming characters for the creators' lack of ability at the time.

While they did hire more capable writers anyway in Kelley Puckett and Chuck Dixon who immediately raised GREEN ARROW's writing quality from awkwardly incompetent to professional, DC wanted sharper measures. Puckett and Dixon successfully blended a version of Grell's hard-boiled approach with some fantasy elements -- but DC felt it would be best to kill off Oliver Queen and replace him with his son, Connor Hawke, create some buzz, bring in new readers and keep the Green Arrow brand going with a character they felt might be an improvement.

The Chuck Dixon written issues in which Oliver dies are very well-written: Oliver goes undercover to join some eco-terrorists, is sympathetic to their cause but then turns on them when they want to drop a bomb over Metropolis. Superman flies onto the plane and discovers Oliver has re-directed the plane and sabotaged the trigger mechanism, but gotten his arm stuck. Removing his arm will destroy the city.

And then Superman decides he'll cut off Oliver's arm. Free him from the bomb. Fly him away from the plane and save him. But Oliver, refusing to lose the archer's arm that gives his life meaning, makes sure the plane is clear of the city and triggers the explosion, dying to save Metropolis and Superman floats helplessly in the explosion, unable to save his friend.

It's perfect. It's beautiful. It's also unbelievable stupid on DC's part. The egotistical, small-minded thinking there is just shocking: this Kevin Dooley guy, a mediocre to terrible writer, has written mediocre to terrible Oliver Queen comics! Clearly, Oliver Queen sucks and we should get rid of him. The fact that they actually got some decent writers after Dooley makes it even sadder and more unnecessary.

Oliver Queen was dead and... to be honest, it wasn't really a big deal. Mike Grell had been the selling point of GREEN ARROW, not Green Arrow, so a new guy with the same name didn't exactly irritate the readers as much as you'd think. It was a pre-ARROW age, after all.

Oliver was absent from 1994 - 2002 and those eight years may have been a good thing where a character DC didn't know how to handle took a long rest and when he came back, he came back with A-list writer Kevin Smith resurrecting Oliver with fanfare and excitement and a clear role in the DCU as a straightman surrounded by the insanity of a superhero universe. Oliver's appearances on SMALLVILLE exposed him to a wider public, and retroactively, those eight years feel like an epic finish to Ollie's story matched with a period of rest and reconsideration.

But, like I said -- they could have just hired a good writer and a good artist in the first place.

!!!!!!

That makes total sense. Now that you point this out, I didn't even begin my (ridiculous) habit of randomly asking my niece, "Say, whatever happened to the Colt?" until I got into Season 6. I didn't even think about it until about 5 - 6 episodes into Season 6. I'd forgotten in all this wondering that Season 5 had been conceived as the end.

I think that Crowley having the Colt -- and having been the one who returned it to the boys before they lost it again -- neatly fills that gap, but I guess they could refilm that moment from Season 5. They did de-age Jensen Ackles once and they've got Mark Pellegrino.

Anyway. I think from now on, I will randomly ask my niece, "So, is Ben really Dean's son?" Hopefully, SUPERNATURAL won't take that away from me.

Oh, we got Matt Reeves to direct THE BATMAN after all!

There is something funny about the desire to add more realism to a series about talking humanoid turtles trained in ninjitsu by the giant rat who adopted them as his sons. Fiction isn't realistic; realism is more of an illusion. Some fans think that SLIDERS is more realistic by having so many characters die horribly and that it reflects our reality, but SLIDERS should reflect SLIDERS' reality, not our own.

On SLIDERS' loss of Quinn and the Professor and the Season 4 invasion arc: it came to the forefront of my mind recently because I've been helping with the LOIS AND CLARK REWATCH PODCAST and there's a similar arc. The Season 3 finale is a two-parter that ends with Superman forced to leave Earth to stop an interstellar war. Season 4 opens with another two-parter has Superman absent from Earth when it's invaded by aliens.

If SLIDERS had done something similar with its cast exits and the Kromagg invasion -- Season 3 ends in a two-parter where the Professor is killed, Quinn is lost, Wade and Rembrandt make it home to find it's been invaded by the Kromaggs -- and then Season 4 started with a two-parter where Quinn returns with the Azure Gate Bridge Professor and they successfully liberate home but are lost in the multiverse again in doing so -- it would've worked.

One of the darkest CAPTAIN AMERICA stories was THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN AMERICA where a hypnotized Sharon Carter shoots Cap to death with a special gun from the Red Skull. As Cap is buried, a resurrected Bucky steals Cap's shield and becomes the new Captain America, trying to uncover the Red Skull's plot and identify Cap's killer as civil and political turmoil in America lead to what seems like inevitable destruction.

It was two years of extremely dark storytelling with a few notes of hope as Bucky realizes he can redeem his past as the Winter Soldier by continuing Steve's legacy and he develops a bond with the Falcon. And finally, Steve Rogers comes back.

Steve's death scene didn't have a back door to reverse it as much as a clearly marked fire exit: Sharon was armed with a special gun and not a standard firearm. The big finale, CAPTAIN AMERICA: REBORN (hunnh) reveals that the gun actually ripped Cap out of time and left him unstuck (hunnh) and his friends eventually recover him just in time to stop the Red Skull. Barack Obama pardons Cap for his CIVIL WAR actions. And then Cap declares that he's proud of Bucky and encourages him to remain the new Captain America while Steve decides he can still be a superhero who'll just call himself Steve Rogers.

The death of Captain America was a way to explore what Steve meant to the series through his absence. And the way it ended, it brought back the status quo but gave us a new variation: Bucky as Cap with Steve still active, wearing a new costume (his WINTER SOLDIER outfit with no mask) and using an energy shield while Bucky had the real one. Cap's death left a vacuum in which the Bucky character could truly come into his own. Later, Bucky returned to being the Winter Soldier and the shield returned to Steve, but Bucky's role in the Marvel Universe was now a fixture.

That, to me, is the way to handle this sort of story: the Captain America concept was taken apart, but it wasn't done just to grab attention and for empty shock value, it was so that Cap could be reconstructed with Bucky as part of the regular status quo. Deconstruction is only meaningful if it's followed by rebuilding stronger and better.

Volume 4 is where the Turtles are now in their 30s and known to the public. Volume 4 ignores Volume 3, although, as I said, the unofficial comics created through the participation of the official writer and artists managed to weld Volume 3 and 4 together. It's that eternal question: does the absence of official sanction from a corporate copyright holder negate the canonicity of material that has been approved by the creators of the property? (Well. It's my eternal question.)

**

I'm all for taking risks with characters and putting them in situations of risk and jeopardy. Even Raphael becoming the new Shredder in Volume 3 is a neat idea. Where I draw the line is changing characters to the point where they're no longer suited to their original purpose because they've been so severely damaged.

NINJA TURTLES is not as lightweight a property as the 1987 cartoon would indicate; the comics can be bloody and violent, but there's also an inherently comedic absurdity in the ridiculous imagery of biped turtles wielding ninja weapons. The design of the Turtles is brilliant because they can be eerily menacing or adorably cuddly. They alternate between the two and it's the same for their stories.

Volume 3 removed this versatility by injuring Leonardo, Donatello and Raphael to the point where you couldn't look at them without being informed of how they'd been mutilated. This alters the Turtles to the point where you don't have the option of doing lightweight comedy with them, you can only do the dark and serious stories now, and the Turtles have become tormented, angsty messes. And the Image comic left the Turtles in this situation with its cancellation, giving the impression that this was permanent.

In truth, Carlson had every intention of walking back from all these changes. If the unofficially official finale to Volume 3 had been published during the original run, it's possible that Volume 3 would have been seen as a disturbing but interesting and well-told experiment that focused on the grimmer Turtles  stories before bringing comedy back to the table.

It's a bit like SLIDERS where, if the Kromagg invasion of Earth and the loss of Quinn and the Professor had been story arcs that ended with the status quo restored, it would have been effective and compelling. But presented as the new normal, it just didn't work because it crippled the series. Ongoing series, for better or worse, have a status quo that needs to be maintained. Change needs to be more in terms of incorporating new variations that exist alongside the original rather than removing previously existing possibilities and replacing them with nothing.

The Colt's disappearance was always confusing; Dean shoots Lucifer, it doesn't work, Lucifer throws Dean into a tree and then the Colt isn't seen again except in the past. I always wondered: if Dean dropped it, why didn't the boys go back to the field at some point after Lucifer left or was imprisoned and get the damned demon killing gun back? I imagine that a shot of Dean dropping the gun and failing to retrieve it was cut from the episode due to time constraints.

Two years after the Colt vanished in the fight with Lucifer, HarperCollins published BOBBY SINGER'S GUIDE TO HUNTING in which Bobby says Dean dropped the Colt in the field, everyone ran and no one looked back. But that didn't explain why they didn't go back for it later. This loose end was glaring and yet difficult to address beyond the showrunners feeling that the demon killing knife was sufficient and the Colt made things too easy.

Anyway. This new episode neatly resolves the issue: Dean dropped the Colt, and maybe the boys did go back for it, but Crowley beat them there and reclaimed the gun first.

On Dinah Drake:

I thought it was really mean spirited to bring Katie Cassidy back and then reveal it was a fakeout. That said, I have no issue with Dinah Drake as the new Black Canary. When ARROW first started, I never really thought Laurel would become Black Canary. She wasn't the Dinah character from the comics. Admittedly, Oliver isn't the character from the comics either, but Laurel was clearly designed to be a TV version of Katie Holmes' Rachel Dawes from BATMAN BEGINS; the lawyer who doesn't realize her playboy childhood friend is the hero of the series.

I couldn't what this Laurel Lance character, this reserved, thoughtful legislator with addiction issues, had to do with the peppy, vivacious, hyperactive Dinah Lance of the comics. In the comics themselves, Black Canary was originally Dinah Drake, but due to the passage of time and DC's desire to keep Black Canary's World War II history intact, they decided to say that the Golden Age Black Canary was Dinah Drake and the current Black Canary was her daughter, Dinah Laurel Lance. The Sara Lance character was close to Dinah from the comics, but even when Laurel became the Black Canary, she was still Rachel Dawes from the Nolan BATMAN movies.

So, I have no issue with Dinah Drake becoming the Black Canary. That was never Laurel's role; even when she put on the costume, it was more about Sara's legacy than Laurel. It's fine. Still wish they hadn't done the fakeout, though.

My niece is a big SUPERNATURAL fan and for the last three years, every time I see her, I ask for no reason whatsoever, "By the way, did we ever find out what happened to the Colt?" until this constant refrain causes her to throw empty soda cans in my direction while shrieking, "For the last time, no!!!!"

She has expressed tremendous relief that this episode will now prevent me from asking her this question ever again.

My view is that actors matter, people matter, because these are the specific faces and characters we're letting into our hearts. The unprofessional part of Affleck leaving (if he leaves) is that the DCEU is being sold on the strength of Affleck's acting and reputation at this point. They asked their audience to invest in the construction of the DCEU with Affleck as one of the pillars.

And Affleck isn't playing Jimmy Olsen or Chloe Sullivan's street coffee vendor; he is playing Batman. If you're going to have someone play that role that prominently, you should make sure this actor is locked in to play this character long-term and make sure the relationship between the actor and the studio is solid and if you can't do that, find another actor. If Marvel replaced Robert Downey Jr. a few movies in, the MCU would be game over for me too, and that's what I see happening here if Affleck's departure comes to pass.

This is strictly a personal opinion:

This is "The Exodus" for the DC Extended Universe. John Rhys-Davies defined SLIDERS; Ben Affleck defines the DCEU and when you hire a big name actor who is highly in demand and whose name brings prestige and weight to your series and then you can't make things work with him, then it's over.

A version of SLIDERS that couldn't keep John Rhys-Davies around wasn't worth airing; a DCEU where Ben Affleck wants to quit after one major appearance isn't worth any further consideration. If Ben Affleck's out, I give up, I'm not giving more money to a film series that can't do something as unbelievably basic as not losing the actors who play the main characters.

Oh, we just lost Matt Reeves, too.

If Affleck quits Batman, the DC Expanded Universe can pretty much give up on ever being taken seriously again. A studio that can't retain its lead actor for an A-list cultural icon is simply incompetent and incapable. As much as I'd love to see Informant's rhetorical gymnastics to spin it positively, I hope this isn't true.

On pastiches:

Most of what I've written has been a pastiche of other writer's styles and other actor's performances. I get a lot of nice remarks and a number of criticisms. Transmodiar calls my depiction of Arturo "overwrought and overwritten" and Slider_Quinn21 concurred. I ended up toning it down a bit in the final edits for SLIDERS REBORN.

But I find that when you are trying to convert an onscreen performance to prose and extrapolate, it's necessary to exaggerate it slightly. You don't actually have the actor to sell the subtle nuances of their delivery, so you have to heighten their performance in the descriptions so that it comes across properly.

I think I've generally done a good job; Wade is piercingly direct yet caring, Rembrandt is casual and reacts to everything like a normal person but with Cleavant's humour, the Professor is like a dysfunctional Professor Dumbledore and Quinn is earnest and filled with moral conviction. However, there were times when not having the actors really became a problem.

The one scene in SLIDERS REBORN that I think suffers most from Jerry O'Connell's absence is the Quinn versus Quinn-2 confrontation in the last script. Ideally, Quinn would have exhibited the burning, cold, reserved yet outraged contempt that Jerry performed so well in Seasons 1 - 2 with John's guidance, especially in "Luck of the Draw" and "Time Again and World." I wrote the dialogue in that low-key fashion -- and then I found it just didn't come alive; I didn't feel the anger and rage in the scene.

So I exaggerated it more than I think Jerry would actually perform it. Quinn shouts and yells instead of speaking in Jerry's subtly furious intensity. Instead of stiffening with clenched fists, Quinn picks up a laptop and throws it into a wall and smashes clocks on the floor and says outright to his enemy that he is going to kill him. It works on paper -- I don't see it being scripted this way for an actual performance where Jerry's acting would convey all that much more effectively without the histrionics.

I wonder if spec script writers penning submissions for TV shows that already exist have these issues and how they address them.

My niece once told me that the way I view fanfic is completely unlike most fanfic writers. "I write SUPERNATURAL fanfic as erotica for Dean and Castiel," she explained to me, "whereas you write SLIDERS fanfic like you're writing a licensed media tie in product that publicly represents the franchise and I guess you do that because nobody actually watches your show or writes fan fiction for it anymore and you're capitalizing on being the only game in town."

It did happen. Albeit not in one conversation and not in those exact words. I said it was a dramatization, not that it was a complete fiction.

My unwillingness to get involved in a debate over Trump and America with Informant shouldn't be read as a dismissal of Informant. It's a bit like Slider_Quinn21's inexplicable and bizarre love for STAR TREK VOYAGER. I've ranted about how awful the show is -- but there's no point getting any farther into it at this stage. We know each other's positions, these positions are welcome to be shared in this space on the internet. We'll just have to agree to disagree. I shall watch FARSCAPE, Slider_Quinn21 will watch VOYAGER, and we will carry on. I need to put my rage elsewhere and to more productive purpose than here.

The claim that Trump didn't engage in a Muslim ban when his own staff called it one is a non-starter for me.

The argument that Trump describing how he grabs women without asking them doesn't qualify as an admission of sexual assault because it was a hypothetical is such a tangled web of feinting and dodging in favour of someone who is so beneath contempt that I can't spare the mental energy to unravel it.

And the declaration that Trump's wall doesn't reflect his hatred of Mexicans whom he's characterized as rapists in addition to saying judges aren't qualified if they're of Mexican descent -- it's so dismissive of facts that I can't see myself offering any worthwhile discussion in response to such viewpoints. I don't even feel the need to argue with them, only take stock of them and carry on with my own efforts even if my efforts are only symbolic gestures.

A dramatization. May not have actually happened.

IREACTIONS: "A friend of mine said that now that all the first-tier shows have been revived, it's time for second-tier shows like SLIDERS to come back. I said that calling SLIDERS second-tier was an insult to every genuine second-tier show."

TRANSMODIAR: "Hahah!! SLIDERS would be lucky to make it to third-tier! And isn't it weird that people would rather bitch about politics on the Sliders.tv Bboard instead of talking about the massive find that's the 'Raging Quinn' script?"

IREACTIONS: "Isn't it weird that this glorified spec script of generic set pieces is what qualifies as a massive find in SLIDERS fandom?"

TRANSMODIAR: "Isn't it weird that people would rather talk about how shitty the DC superhero movies are rather than read an overelaborate and ridiculously overcomplicated six part series of SLIDERS screenplays?"

IREACTIONS: "Isn't it weird that the biggest fan of SLIDERS will never read that series and the other biggest fan of SLIDERS only read it when he was roped into editing it?"

TRANSMODIAR: "Isn't it weird that you don't even think of me when you're talking about the biggest fans of SLIDERS?"

IREACTIONS: "Isn't it weird that you're a public pariah in the very fandom that defines your online interaction?"

TRANSMODIAR: "Isn't it weird that you're seen as the village mental patient in the very fandom that defines your online interaction?"

IREACTIONS: "Isn't it weird that we're both Big Name Fans in TV show fandoms that nobody actually watches and you and I spend more time mocking the series than its worst critics?"

A dramatization. May not have actually happened.

The new screenwriter is a former Affleck collaborator, so I imagine they were always going to bring him in.