Posted in X-Men

Generation X Holiday Special by Joe Harris and Adam Pollina

Written by jude Published 24th December 20195th July 2020 Discussion Leave a Comment

Generation X Holiday Special Cover by Adam Pollina

Title: Generation X Holiday Special – “Yes, Jubilee, there IS a Santa Claus,” a.k.a. “The Nanny & Orphan-Maker Christmas Kidnapping Extravaganza”

Writer: Joseph “Joe” Harris

Penciller: Adam Pollina

Inkers: Morales, Faber, Leigh, Wong and Wiacek

Colorist: Paul Tutrone

Letterer: RS/Comicraft/Liz

Editor: Frank Pittarese

Editor-In-Chief: Bob Harras (Boooooooooo! Boooooo on you sir!)

Summary:

A mutant boy named Matthew has trouble with bullies, who torment him until he uses his powers to repell them and they call him even more of a freak than before. You may say he’s “special,” but he’d probably disagree.

Matthew thinks kidnapping Santa Claus will solve all his problems, but the truth is his real problem is with Orphan-Maker and Nanny, who want to celebrate their Christmas tradition of making a mutant child into an orphan. Luckily, Generation X and Santa put a stop to their plans.

Initial Thoughts

For the holiday season it’s time to talk about one of my favorite X-Men teams created by one of my least favorite writers of all time.

Before Marvel sold the movie rights to the X-Men and ended up ruining everything with “House of M” and “Decimation,” they developed at least one teen X-Men group for each decade. Starting in the 1980s, there were the New Mutants, the 90s had Generation X, and the early 2000s started off with Academy X until Marvel stupidly depowered 98% of their mutant characters. From the mid 2000s to this year they burned through several different young X-Men groups that were lucky if they ever managed to make it to double digit issues before getting cancelled. Hopefully, Jonathan Hickman’s “Dawn of X” titles will finally fix the damage.

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Posted in TV

Jude’s Guide to Christmas Episode Identification

Written by jude Published 23rd December 201920th December 2019 Discussion 1 Comment

OH IT’S CHRISTMASTIME AND IT’S CHRISTMASTIME AND IT’S CHRISTMAS-CHRISTMAS-CHRISTMASTIIIIIIIIIME!!!!

It’s my favorite time of year again and for Nostalgic Bookshelf I’ve started this article that turned into something a bit different from what I originally planned.

The Christmas episode, that one special episode a franchise usually creates in time for the holiday season. Sometimes they may be twice as long as a usual episode which means they don’t normally air in regular syndication, but if they’re normal length the stations won’t care enough to pull them from rotation.

You also have commonly retold Christmas stories such as “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and “The Nutcracker” whose plots are so specific they tend to simply be re-adapted as their own tales instead of being used as the basis for an episode.

Sitcoms and cartoons have plenty of stock plots for easy episodes, “Two Dates At The Same Time,” “Miscommunication = Cheating Partner,” “Character Gets Drunk With Power,” “New Job Causes New Problems,” but none are as predictable as Christmas episodes. It can take a lot of effort to breathe new life into these ideas, and sometimes you have to either be really, REALLY funny or willing to make things really, REALLY bleak to stand out from the crowd.

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Posted in Other Comics

Amelia Rules! #4: Amelia McBride and the Other Side of Yuletide

Written by jude Published 25th December 201812th April 2019 Discussion Leave a Comment

Amelia Rules #4 Cover — I really need to find more about this comic

Title: Amelia Rules! #4 – Amelia McBride and the Other Side of Yuletide, a.k.a. “What the hell is Ninja Kwanzaa?”

Writer and Artist: Jimmy Gownley

Editor: Michael Cohen

Marketer: Karen Gownley

Initial Thoughts

My first Christmas review for Nostalgic Bookshelf, and I swear to bring as much enthusiasm to this month’s reviews as I have for Point Horror. To that end, I wanted to start off with a special one-off comic review with a series I admittedly don’t have as much history with.

“Amelia Rules!” is a YA comic series written and drawn by Jimmy Gownley. It’s about Amelia McBride, a young girl adjusting to life after her mom and dad split up. Amelia has to move from NYC to Connerton, Pennsylvania, where she and her mom are now living with her cool Aunt Tanner. She gains new friends in the form of the bombastic Reggie, the stubborn Rhonda, and the amazing yet silent Pajamaman. Together, the four become G.A.S.P. (Gathering of Awesome Super Pals), and get into all sorts of hi-jinks as Amelia navigates life.

This particular comic is the fourth issue in the series, and as you can guess it’s a Christmas story. In it, Amelia and her friends find themselves wondering if there really is a Santa Claus, and the answer is different from what you’d expect. I had this in mind remembering Wing’s thoughts on Santa Claus from last year’s reviews on PH. Naturally I’m curious to see how she feels about this particular story.

How I acquired this comic is a rather bizarre, disturbing tale. In the spring of 2015, a woman came to my comic shop hoping to sell a massive collection she inherited from her dead uncle. He owned Disney and cartoon comics ranging from the Golden Age to the early 1990s. Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Disney, Sleeping Beauty, Looney Tunes, Hanna Barbera, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain. The books showcased the transition from Dell Comics to Gold Key to Whitman. He even had some picture books and old Disney Adventure digest magazines.

However, there was a LOT more.

To this day, no one has brought in the amount of furry comics and porn comics as that woman did. Omaha the Cat Dancer, Battle Vixens, Four-Footed Furries, Albedo, it was baffling. I don’t even want to remember the fairy porn issues. The man practically bought every badly done 90s manga rip off comic out there (Ninja High School, Gold Digger, etc.). And guess what? I had to go through everything. EVERYTHING. Because we needed to figure out what the conditions of the books were in so we could sell them online. I had to make sure to leaf through every single comic the man owned, checking to see if pages were falling out, if they were missing coupons, or if they had writing on them. A lot of the porn comics had pages torn out of them… and so did some of the kid comics.

I did NOT enjoy this task at all. I’m not trying to bash furries, but I am very much not fond of anything NSFW related and I don’t want to think about why so many pages were missing. Not to mention a lot of the comics were incredibly dirty and grimy. I’m just glad the pages weren’t sticky.

So anyway, that’s another chapter out of my twisted life story. Onto the recap.

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Posted in The Famous Five

The Famous Five #2: Five Go Adventuring Again by Enid Blyton

Written by necromommycon Published 21st March 201812th April 2019 Discussion 1 Comment

Title: The Famous Five #2: Five Go Adventuring Again by Enid Blyton

Summary: Spending Christmas at Kirrin Cottage, the Five were not expecting an adventure. But they found one – and became involved in a tense running battle underground.

Tagline: Julian, Dick, George, Anne and Timothy the dog

(Okay, that’s not a tagline, but it’s the closest thing this book has to one. Note the absence of Oxford comma, and try to imagine my irritation.)

Initial Thoughts:

I know this was one of my favourite Famous Five books when I was young, but for the life of me, I can’t remember why.

I’m also SHOCKED that there was an era in publishing in which someone could write a series book set at Christmas and not mention Christmas in the title or have a Christmas-themed cover. This was published in 1942, and you’d think they’d have pulled out all the stops to play on people’s nostalgia for non-war Christmasses, but no. You can’t tell from the front or back cover that this has anything to do with winter at all. [Dove: That’s very un-Christmassy. To the point where I always forget this one is set over Christmas holidays.] [Raven: I was once Christmas shopping in Leeds, and one shop was playing Sunny Afternoon by the Kinks to fly in the face of the usual jingle bell fare. Loved it, it’s now part of my Christmas Song Rotation.]

There are roughly a billion variant covers. Here are two non-awful ones in which no one is wearing bell-bottoms.

[Wing: I am utterly charmed by this one, too! It’s not quite as fun as the first book, but I love George so, so much.]

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