Tarantula Man!

 One of my favorite “quiet” moments in John Carpenter’s Halloween occurs when little Tommy Doyle shows Laurie a big stack of comics that he keeps hidden behind a couch because his mom disapproves. It makes for a fun little “spot the title” game for collectors. Some of the comics are recent and obviously just plucked off of the stands (the most visible is Howard the Duck #26) others appear to be from Atlas/Seaboard, which was then several years defunct. It’s a brief and pointless, but cute moment.

 Although he’s just a supporting character in the original film and is never in any real danger, a now adult Tommy Doyle was brought back in a major role for 1995’s The Curse of Michael Myers and made into an occult expert who had been tracking the origins of Myers for years, traumatized for life by the brief glimpses he saw of the killer. I like Curse more than most fans will admit to, but I always thought it was odd to bring him back. Were they trying to make him Michael’s new nemesis for future sequels? (Donald Pleasance was then dying) Were they trying to make him into the Halloween franchise’s equivalent of another Tommy; Jarvis from Friday the 13th? Or maybe they figured they should bring back some character from the first film to create a sense of legacy. He even gets the honor of beating Michael to death, and in some cuts (there are many different versions of the film available), he actually succeeds.

 Needless to say, Tommy Doyle has also popped up in the various Halloween comics, mostly in variations of his “monster hunter” persona from Curse, which I guess works better in the comics medium than film. However, my favorite use of the character in a comic, and a far more interesting (and plausible) fate for him came about in 2008’s Halloween: 30 Years of Terror one-shot anthology in a story titled "Tommy and the Boogeyman".

 Here, Tommy’s love of comics has taken a natural conclusion: He’s become a comic book artist!  And we also get to see the “Tarantula Man” comic that Laurie name drops, but we never see. Here it is, enjoy. All © Devil’s Due Publishing. Art by Jeff Zornow.

 

 

 Icky, but awesome. I do have a few small gripes with this story. I always assumed that the ‘Tarantula Man” comic was just a lawyer-friendly reference to Spider-Man, not a horror comic (Although since there are some Atlas/Seaboard comics in Tommy’s collection, perhaps it was a reference to Michael Fleischer’s “Tarantula” character from Weird Suspense).

 I also don’t really know what they seem to be referencing here, the black and white art seems to suggest Warren, but it appears to be a mainstream publication instead of a magazine. Oh well, the comic at least has a retro feel to it, even though I don’t know what it’s supposed to be a retrospective of. At least one thing’s for sure; Tommy had very good reason to hide this comic from his mother!

 But wait, what’s this? Look at the comic Tommy is drawing:

 See that arm with a tattoo on the wrist? That’s the Sign of the Thorn from Halloween 4-6, which retconned that Michael was being controlled (or not controlled, all 3 movies are confusing as hell) by a druid cult which made him kill because of a constellation that came out on Halloween night.

 

 Since this is obviously not the same Tommy Doyle from those movies, and his son is named Jamie (the same name as the little girl who is the “heroine” of 4-5), as well as that the other Halloween comics by Devil’s Due don’t utilize the Thorn BS, this means 4-6 were all comic book stories by Tommy! The supernatural occurrences, faulty continuity, ridiculous twists, Tommy being a hero who gets to kill an unkillable juggernaut, it all fits!

 This, my friends, is how you do a “It was all fiction within universe” retcon and do it right.

Top 6 Twisted Toyfare Theater Stories!

  Ah, Twisted Toyfare Theater. How long has it been since last we met?

  For those who’ve never heard of this series, it was a fumetti (photo) comic that ran in Toyfare magazine from 1997 to 2011 and featured warped adventures of various Marvel characters using a line of action figures from the 70s called Megoes. It garnered a number of big name fans during its run; such as Kevin Smith and Seth Green. It occasionally used some DC characters and 80’s action figure lines, but the Mego/Marvel toys were the primary focus up until around 2007, when it began focusing more and more on Star Trek and video game characters.

 Still, although mostly well-known for inspiring TV’s Robot Chicken, TTT was a strip once eagerly awaited by millions every month during its heyday of the late 90s and early 2000s. During an era of gimmicks, cancellations, limited series, beloved titles completely going off track, foil/holograph covers, pollybagged cards and Rob Liefeld getting his own jeans commercial, TTT was an amusingly self-reflective, funhouse mirror look at the depths the industry had sunk to, published by the very same people who had helped to promote all the previously mentioned vices with Wizard!

  Sure it was juvenile, lowbrow, vulgar, repetitive, sexist, loaded with pointless sub-Family Guy reference humor, helped turn an entire generation into obnoxious faux-cynics, was rarely funny upon re-read and tried too hard to wring laughs out of attacking kiddie franchises, but on the other hand…..it was juvenile, lowbrow, vulgar, repetitive, sexist, loaded with pointless sub-Family Guy reference humor, helped turn an entire generation into obnoxious faux-cynics, was rarely funny upon re-read and tried too hard to wring laughs out of attacking kiddie franchises AND IT MADE FOLKS LAUGH.

 Seeing such sophomoric nonsense like Hulk binge-eating Tacos in order to kill Redwing after Redwing gets lodged in his sphincter, or the Lizard being run over while carrying a flaming bag of dog shit is the kind of stuff which your brain tells you that you shouldn’t find funny, but that you do anyway:

 Still, for all of the cheap shots, randomness, stereotypes and lazy ‘parody’ characterizations (Spider-Man is an irresponsible jackass, The Hulk is retarded, Iron Man is a drunk, Thor is gay, Captain America is a racist pedophile, Daredevil’s blindness works against him and Dr. Doom is…you know what? He’s pretty much unchanged!), TTT was a strip that, when it wanted to be funny, would be genuinely funny. So here are my favorites:

 6)  “Idol Hands” from Toyfare #67: Some people may have taken it for granted these days, what with the Ultimate universe comics having basically become just a grittier version of regular Marvel and having been highly influential on the films, but back in the early 2000s, there was a very real fear among long-time fans that Marvel was going to stop publishing all its titles and make the Ultimate universe the “official” universe. Granted, there were also a lot of fans who thought that the Ultimates line was doing a better job, and welcomed the idea.

 This story manages to lampoon both sides when all the characters greedily enter an American Idol-style talent contest to win their chance at an Ultimate book.

 The gags range from uproariously funny to cringe worthy, some at the same time. We see everything from X-treme sports Mephisto to Captain America trying to prove he’s down with black people. Only a lousy ending involving tired jokes about William Shatner’s Transformations album keep it from scoring higher.

 

 5) “Seder Masochism” from Toyfare #94: It’s been sort of an open secret for a long time that Ben Grimm is Jewish, and this story milks it for all it’s worth when he decides to get in touch with his roots after deciding ‘Jews have it good’ (Apparently, he assumed his circumcision was a side effect of his exposure to cosmic radiation).

 Featuring appearances by just about every Jewish hero and villain in the Marvel U, this one manages to be hilarious and a scathing condemnation of how religion is handled in comics. Never show this comic to 4-Chan under any circumstances.

 4) “Risky Business” from Toyfare #82: One of the best things about comics involving villain team-ups is the downtime scenes with villains acting like regular people, and TTT got a lot of laughs out of the same method. Here, 80’s cartoon villains Skeletor, Megatron, Gargamel and Cobra Commander spend an evening playing Risk and swapping anecdotes.

 There’s really not much more to it, but if you look at all the things that happen in the course of the story, it all has a weird sort of logic at play. These guys were all potentially badass villains who were ruined by standards and practices, so it makes perfect sense they would revel in playing a world domination board game (since it’s the closest they’ll ever come to their goal), and the idea that they would all view Darth Vader as some sort of hero figure is oddly touching. Besides, you just can’t hate something with lines like “Go with God, Calcium-Deficient Smurf”.

 3) “The Way We Wuz” from Toyfare #64: The Thing, Northstar and the Avengers spend an evening recounting their origins; cue the most hilariously skewed versions of classic origins imaginable:

 This is my favorite:

 Although the take on the mind-screwing different origins of the Vision are also pretty funny (Seriously, what the hell is his origin?):

There are laughs galore, even from the unfunny and stereotypically portrayed Northstar (the butt of even more gay jokes than Thor). The only reason it doesn’t rank higher? The concept is too good for the space it is allotted. This one deserved a sequel or to be saved for a higher page count special.

2) “Project Greenlight” from 2002 Wizard Spider-Man Special: One of the big problems with comic book movies prior to Batman Begins was that they all had a tendency to trot out the archenemy for the first film and kill him off, making the double mistake of ensuring the use of lesser villains for sequels, as well as destroying the stature of some great villains. This story, released in a 2002 Spider-Man summer special when the first movie came out, parodies this problem by having Venom, the Lizard and the Red Skull (don’t ask) compete to become Spider-Man’s new archenemy so they can be in the sequel.

 So how do they intend to become Spidey’s new arch-villains? By being…kinda mean to him:

 This one is loaded with great slapstick, villains acting like bored kids, hilarious ruinations of valuable action figures, and the unforgettable sight of the Green Goblin blinged out:

 

 



 1) “My Big Fat FAT Wedding” from Toyfare #79:

 One of the biggest problems with modern comics fandom has always been how fans tend to write off a lot of silver and bronze age stories as goofy, but it gets really bad when they single out certain stories based on the covers alone. It leads to a lot of fairly decent storylines getting trashed undeservedly, and it also leads to disappointment when camp fans track down said stories expecting cheesy laughs only to find fairly unremarkable/normal stories.

 The infamous “Doctor Octopus marries Aunt May” storyline from Amazing Spider-Man #130-131 is a good example. It’s a fairly decent little arc which comes up with a perfectly logical reason for Ock trying to marry May (and was built off of a long-running subplot that had its roots going as far back as the first annual). It’s just a slightly off-beat Spider-Man story, with nothing really funny about it besides the cover.

 TTT of course, took the inherent humor in the concept of Ock marrying May and ran with it.

 It has its share of groan-inducing moments (though honestly, how else would a relationship between an obese tentacled supervillain and an 80+ woman at death’s door come off as?), but things really take off when everyone flies to the wedding and Ock invites the Sinister Six to be his best men. The laughs just keep on coming with jokes about Mysterio’s inconsistently portrayed powers, the most bizarre spoof of Nightmare at 20’000 Feet you’ll ever see, hotel room antics between Kraven and the Lizard, Con Air references and an ingenious way of ending the story that doubles as the most macabre parody of Spider-Man’s origin ever put to paper (Granted, TTT had done a similar gag before, but it wasn’t nearly as funny).

 There’s nothing really poignant or significant about this story (although, I honestly don’t think I’d know what a ‘poignant” or “significant” TTT story would look like if there was such a thing), but in terms of laughs, nothing else really compares. As Kraven says, “Dig in Tovarisch”. This is as good as TTT got.

~

 There are lots of other memorable TTT stories, but these are my favorites, as well as the ones I think would come off as funniest to people who shy away from this kind of stuff. Even Scans_Daily enjoys the series. I may do a follow up someday, especially since there are a lot of gems that Wizard never reprinted because of legal issues (there was a big lawsuit from DC comics which prevented the use of their characters) or because of gimmicks that made the stories impossible to reproduce (Like a story scattered throughout random pages to give it the feel of a wild goose chase). It’s something I look forward to, because, I never thought I’d say this…preparing this post has sort of made me miss the late 90’s-early 2000’s right now. Maybe I’m getting soft.

This will forever haunt my brain

Top 7 funniest Scans_Daily moments:

 Ah, Scans_Daily. They’ve been “Bringing the crack” since 2003, and recently celebrated their anniversary. Thus I figured, why shouldn’t I get in on the fun? Sure I’m a little late, but it’s never too late to appreciate this humble little website’s many hilarious moments.

  Especially since the hilarity of those moments were almost completely unintentional.

 For those who don’t know, Scans_Daily started in 2003 as a shitty little slash community where horny fans could discuss their favorite pairings. Eventually, they began to reblog stuff from SuperDickery.com (often claiming that they had scanned the issues themselves), more people joined in, and it gradually became more of a general comics posting site, though the retards still remained. These were the days before comics-scanning blogs were really common, so a lot of people flocked to the site because it offered the opportunity to see near complete scans of various issues. An in-flux of people who just wanted to post obscure comics certainly helped. At its height (2006-08), it honestly was a pretty good resource despite a bunch of unfunny running gags, forced catchphrases and wannabe memes (Like people saying “___ doesn’t work that way!”). Particularly notable was this one dude who kept screaming “LIEFELD!” every time someone posted Liefeld art. However, in 2009, one numbnuts who had (somehow) gotten hold of an issue prior to release spoiled the ending, which pissed off author Peter David. He responded fairly civilly, and they told him to go die in a fire. David contacted an attorney, and the whole site got taken down.

 It was back up before long though, but like many things that come back from the dead, it became a soulless caricature of itself, lying in wait beneath the bed to slit your ankles. What was once just some silly scans site became perhaps the single most pretentious, head-up-its-ass “Check your Priviledge” trigger warning-tagged website in the history of the entire internet (until Tumblr one-upped them) in its attempts to prove how “sensitive” it was to the plight of minorities and women. It became the laughingstock of pretty much everybody in fandom, even 4Chan thinks lowly of them. You know those really insulting and unfair strawman caricatures of civil rights activists and feminists that get posted on Fundamentalist Christian and white supremacist websites? Scans_Daily became a real version of those parodies, except crazier.

 

 If you said you liked Alan Scott or Hal Jordan over John Stewart as Green Lantern, you got called a racist privileged pigfucker. Saying you preferred Ray Palmer as the Atom to his Asian replacement? Your opinion gets compared to stamping on minority’s feet. If you called out Frank Miller for characterizing women as whores in so many of his works? You got screamed at for using the word “whores”, regardless of context. Any attempt on your part to explain is “mansplaining” and would probably get you banned. Even if you said something relatively benign like that you approved of more gay characters in comics would likely get you accused of “fetishizing homosexuality” or told that “Gays don’t need your approval” (usually by some straight person). If you used the word ‘lame’? You got accused of making ableist slurs. I wish I was making this shit up. People left the site in droves, even the iconic Liefeld guy.

  This is all pretty funny when you consider that the original version of the site was pretty much just non-stop rape jokes, panels taken out of context to imply sexual activity, racial jokes and offensively stereotypical gay porn being fetishized by straight fans. I can understand wanting to weed out those kinds of people and give the site a better reputation, but the moderators who were going to all these extremes to clean up were the same people who used to do all of that crap. There’s this one mod that goes on and on about how horrible it is for female fans to get called “fake geek girls” who I specifically remember using just such a term in a completely non-ironic way back in the days of the old community. Sadly though, Wayback Machine’s archive for the older site is pretty crappy, so I admit I can’t back this up.

An example of the LGBT-friendly, non-DudeBro humor commonly found on S_D.

 But I am not here to bury Scans_Daily, I am here to praise it. Much like rockabilly music, Ed Wood movies, Chick tracts, 50’s high school sex-ed tapes and that obese relative of undetermined relation who always comes to Thanksgiving and stares lustfully at your youngest niece but gets drunk too fast before he can do anything and vomits all over your carefully prepared kosher turkey, Scans_Daily has a completely unintended charm all its own that makes you welcome it’s return over and over again.
 
 So let’s count down the “best” moments of the brave, fearless Scans_Daily user’s never-ending crusade!

 7) That post is like, lamesville, man:

  You thought I was kidding about the ‘lame’ thing, didn’t you? I can assure you its real, despite what several moderators have said to the contrary on forums mocking S_D:

  As someone who grew up with an invalid brother and then spent two years myself on crutches after an injury and had to undergo excruciating corrective surgery (that still hurts every now and then if I jog too fast), I can understand wanting to be sensitive to people with physical disabilities, so that’s why this ranks so low.

  Still, it’s a common joke that banning words like “lame” is a sign of taking political correctness too far, and when you end up embodying stereotypes, well, that’s pretty lame in of itself.

  6) The Million Nerd March:

 One of the big trends among “geek activists” as of late has been to call out geeks who compare the mockery they’ve faced to racism, sexism, etc. While I’ve definitely seen some geeks who do that kind of shit and definitely need to shut the fuck up, I’ve never really seen that much of it from comics fans except for the occasional idiot who usually isn’t all that popular anyway. What’s even funnier about this is that, in every single instance I’ve seen, the people who whine the loudest about “Stupid geeks calling themselves minorities” usually have no problem counting anime fans, bronies, furries, otherkin, bestiality freaks and various made-up sexualities as oppressed minorities.

 Thankfully, Scans_Daily doesn’t go that far (yet…), but the hypocrisy of people on S_D joining in the “GEEKS ARE NOT A MINORITY!!!111!” mantra is hilarious considering all the whining they do, especially in context of this post, which was about Kick Ass. Browse the Mark Millar tag and you’ll see them scream about all of the nerd jokes and ‘fuck you’s’ to superhero fans that Millar loves to put in his work. Oh sure, they’ll also complain about the plot holes, rape, gore etc. but you can always tell that it’s the nerd jokes that are what’s really pissing them off.

 And the funniest thing is? I actually used to feel the same way about Millar, but now…I’m kinda warming up to that wacky Scotsman and his oeuvre.

  5) Just another case of the white man keepin’ the Spider-Man down:

 “Oh, look at me you guys! I’m so accepting of Miles Morale as the new Spider-Man I didn’t even remember there was a white Spider-Man! Give me a Medal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  This post was probably a joke given some of the other snarky and un-PC comments the same poster has made (go down to example #3), but you know what? The very fact that it could just as easily have been a genuine post speaks volumes.

4) Slapstick comedy:

  One of the Scans_Daily moderators’ more popular tactics whenever someone tries to calm down or apologize to a poster having a shit-fit is to accuse the person trying to make peace of “tone policing” and saying that the person who is angry has every right to blow their stack, even if they say things that blatantly violate the community rules. Their logic behind this is that anyone who angers someone else must be a “privileged” person (ie. white, straight, male) and that since they belong to non-oppressed groups, they deserve to be called all sorts of names and threatened.

 In theory, I agree with this. If the worst thing a person who isn’t an oppressed minority has to endure as punishment for making an offensive statement is name-calling and threats as opposed to the slurs and actual physical endangerment that minorities face every day, so be it.

  So why then do the S_D mods throw a fit when a female fan talks about how she’d like to slap fandom silly?

 She’s not saying anything about a minority group, she’s calling out others for potentially problematic behavior (which, remember, is encouraged for community good), she’s just using a figure of speech (“I’d love to slap some of those people silly”) and the only people who could possibly be offended are geeks, who we’ve established are not a minority, so what gives?

  I will admit that she was wrong for saying fandom needs to be slapped. The ones who need to be slapped are the mods.

3) Skin n’ Bones:

  Scans_Daily frequently recruits temporary mods when the regular mods need to take a break from pretending to care about social issues and spend a nice weekend over at the new deluxe trailer park, so there are lots of discussions over community changes. When some people rightly called the mods out on their extremism and said the site could be toned down a little, this poster (not a mod) responded by saying that there’s no such thing as being PC and that people who whine about political correctness are so thin-skinned “you could make strudel out of it”:

 Well, I bet you’re just a regular toughie, huh?

  Some years earlier, someone had posted that awful Silver Age Flash story where Grodd makes Barry Allen morbidly obese so he can’t run (A low point for the series, I’ll grant you), and for the most part, everyone had a good laugh over it and got in some clever, if juvenile jokes. And then this one guy made a joke about how the PC police would react if such a story were published today. Cue shit storm:

 Some people responded, being thoughtful and polite. One of them even had weight issues herself:

 This was the response:

 This poor guy innocently mentioned that there have been some overweight heroes in comics, and she responded by sneering at him sarcastically and acting as if he was trying to side against her, even though he was just stating a fact and not trying to counter her in any way:

 And the people who make jokes about political correctness are supposed to be the thin-skinned ones, while people like her aren’t?

 This isn’t the first time she’d done this, interestingly enough. Sometime before that, someone had posted scans from an incredibly offensive Hellboy spin-off from the 90’s filled with racist caricatures and transphobia. Here was her response:

 Gee, could it be that the reason people hate the PC movement is because they allowed blatantly offensive crap like that to get published because they were too busy wasting time on stupid shit like recoloring white characters black in reprints? Way to miss the point.

  Well, I can say one thing is for sure; considering how worked up the subject of obesity got her, she probably wasn’t lying when she said she wasn’t thin-skinned….in the physical sense.

Hey, tough crowd.

2) Screwed the Pooch:

  Carlie Cooper was a recent addition to Spider-Man comics who pretty much no one liked except for the writers, especially when they began pushing her as Peter Parker’s new love interest. Scans_Daily made Carlie-bashing the board’s #1 pastime (next to looking for something to be offended by).  Jokes along the lines of “I hope she gets thrown off the bridge like Gwen Stacy” or ‘She’s Mephisto in disguise” abounded for years without ever getting called out, sometimes even encouraged.

 Then it appeared that the character was going to be written out of the series (Note: She wasn’t). Not written out as in “killed off”, just sort of forgotten or shunted to the sidelines. Naturally, this led to jokes comparing her being written out to the famous ‘Poochie’ episode of The Simpsons where “Poochie”, a lousy new character on the Itchy & Scratchy show, is bluntly written off by going back to his own planet and dying along the way:

 How do the mods react? By saying the joke was promoting violence against women and making light of fridging:

 To be fair, some other guy did made a joke about her being killed like a character from M.A.S.H., but it was obviously the Poochie joke that really pissed them off and which they reacted to the most vehemently:

 Oh, and even though the thread ended in 2011, some nimrod registered to join the site just so he could respond to it…a year later:

 And we wonder why the terrorists hate us.

  1) They know:

 And the ultimate Scans_Daily post? I can’t think of one more fitting than this:

 It doesn’t seem that extreme at first. The guy apparently did use some offensive language, and the mod did try and be friendly, but it shows the damage done: They KNOW that their tactics have people walking on eggshells, scared to post, scared to join. They practically have to beg the guy to stay by switching tone midway to seem welcoming.

Don’t let this scare you off.

 DON’T LET THIS SCARE YOU OFF

DONTLETTHISSCAREYOUOFF

  Look at the dude’s introductory post, where he basically recites a whole pre-rehearsed speech to try and get them to accept him by talking how the site opened his eyes to issues.

 I’ve never seen a more nauseating example of sucking up in my life. That’s the kind of sucking up you do to get back together with an estranged spouse, or to make sure that Don Calzone doesn’t have you fitted for cement shoes after you botched that last heist. This guy is sucking up on that kind of level to join a GODDAMN COMICS POSTING WEBSITE! (And they still threaten him further down the thread even after he edited the post)

 And that’s the way our culture crumbles.

 So here’s to Scans_Daily, may they continue to entertain us for years to come.

This post has been approved by the evil Reptilian shape shifter Masonic Patriarchy Cis-Gendered Neurotypical Thin-bodied White Supremacist Male-privileged Nazi Jew Geek culture-promoting Illuminati that runs the world, sank the Titanic, oppresses water-powered cars and covered up Roswell. We know where you live!