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CRYGOR CAN SWIM THROUGH THE AIR IN GET IT TOGETHER

Today’s Headcanon: Waluigi is Dr. Crygor’s grandson and Penny Crygor’s older brother.

(They’re also related to Jimmy T.)

#roll the bones #super mario #super mario bros #waluigi #dr crygor #penny crygor #jimmy t #jimmy thang #jimmy t warioware

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I've noticed that people have started spreading the 1992 Good Omens script around. Please don't. If you've got it up, please take it down. There's a mess of serious and real legalities involved, and I don't want to have to start being a dick and asking for copyright takedowns and all of that, and I don't want to have to regret letting it out into the world. Just take it down, unshare, delete links. Thank you.

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- blue

- glasses

- balding

If I had a nickel for everytime I consumed a piece of media with a character named ‘Bubby’ in it, I’d have two nickels.

Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

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btw if you're annoyed with Google search giving you results for stuff that's similar to but not actually what you typed in, go to search tools, go to where it says "all results" and change that to "verbatim" and then it will search for what you actually asked for

why this is not the default is beyond me other than obvs enshittification but it has rescued a bunch of searches for me lately where the top results were completely unhelpful until i switched to that so. might be helpful for others

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how to grow the fuck up

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To reiterate

Not enough of you know about the Birds Head Haggadah, and that

is a damn

shame

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You know who would have been a great Penguin? Sydney Greenstreet.

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My cartoon for this weekend’s @guardian books

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did anyone ever tell the Backstreet Boys why

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Princess Peach in super speculative bros is made up of multiple fungal bodies which can be shed and regrown. These are all different species working together: her tube feet, vocal vent “petals” and manipulator limbs are all different species of fungus. so I can’t call whatever organism peach (and her ancestors + successors) it’s own “species”. I cant even call them a “people” because there only exists one consciousness at a time. More confusing yet, even if Peach is made up of several species of fungus in a symbiotic relationship, if you disassembled them, the individual mushrooms might still live (though some are so highly specialized they might not) but peach’s consciousness and personality would cease to exist. There isn’t one singular part of the crawling, humming body that is Peach on its own. You could make a case for the internal processors that store her memory being “Peach” but they’d rot just like every other highly specialized structure made to be part of Peach’s body if separated.

Even if Peach is a terrifying alien creature who’s structure is wildly different from a human’s, she experiences joy and benevolence on a chemical level like any other living being.

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this is more abt the world than rlly the biology but since mario seems to be pretty human, is there anything particularly notable about the way he interacts or communicates with the mushroom kingdom? or is it more notable that it might not change much

Ohh I was so excited to answer this.

Peach and Mario communicate primarily with tactile sign language. Peach uses only two of her manipulator limbs for this, as to not alienate Mario. There's added nuances from each others voices, but most of the information is communicated via touch.

The language being tactile is important because Peach's compound eyes aren't great at focusing, and her hearing is imprecise. Her world is blurry and muffled audiovisually, but her sense of touch (and chemoreception) is sharp. She experiences the world in a very different way, but touch is one of the things she and Mario share.

She prefers to "hear" Mario's laugh by gently pressing a limb to his throat. She's also sweeping him with her pheromone receptors here, it's equivalent to studying someone's face to commit it to memory.

Before developing tactile sign language, though, Mario attempted to communicate with Peach in a way more familiar to her. Peach sends chemical signals to her subjects via a mycelium network and can process a lot more information this way. Finding the communication gap frustrating, Mario connected the mushroom kingdom's mycelium network to himself.

although the mycelium might be connected to the benevolent beings he lives among and calls his friends, it has no moral compass. It will begin to disassemble you regardless of your intentions.

This made him extremely sick. It was a lot more alarming for Peach, though, being sent signals every second of her friend's body being rotted inside out. Needless to say, this is not how they communicate anymore.

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peach

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Recovering from a stubborn cold so unfortunately I don’t have anything more elaborate, but I was getting increasingly bothered at the prospect of not commemorating this very important day. Still doesn’t look a day over 83!

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If you were asked to write a GREY GHOST back-up for some BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES comic (framed as old episodes from the tv show that Bruce is watching to cheer himself up and/or introduce the kids to Bat-dad's favourite), might I please ask what sort of tone & setting you'd run with for the character?

I'd be against having additional Grey Ghost stories, but if I was offered to do it of course I'd take the job and make the best of it I could, so I think the way you could go on about it would be to stick to the core of what the Grey Ghost is: He's Adam West as The Shadow. So you take this old pulp serial world, you transport a lot of the pulp hero traits or benchmarks, you set him on suitably grim and dramatic urban adventures, BUT: It's Adam West. The soul is Adam West, The Bright Knight.

We all know where Bruce's story is going in the world outside of his childhood, we all know The Grey Ghost isn't real, we all know Simon Trent is going to end up washed out, and we all know Batman is going to help him pick himself back up, and will prove that the Grey Ghost was real all along. So the Grey Ghost stories themselves should exist in light of that, in light of where we know it's all leading up to, and in light that we should understand why he inspires Bruce so strongly.

Grey Ghost is a full-on good guy and defender of justice, with no cynicism or moral ambiguity in said stories. He doesn't fight a rogues gallery of murderous terrorists, he fights costumed criminals who act like afterschool special villains, maybe patterned after the careers of the Batman 66 villains if you wanna get meta, like one of them is a crooked boxing coach who's had to work for the mob after getting chased off his ranch, or Vincent Price. He gets into death traps, but he always comes out. People get shot, but it's always flesh wounds and nobody dies, and the Grey Ghost uses "mercy bullets" like Doc Savage, he mostly waves a gun around for intimidation. He knows how to give the bad guys a good scare, but he never really injures them.

Grey Ghost mainly uses fistcuffs and gadgets, but instead of always having a gadget for everything, the Grey Ghost always has some secret skill he picked up in his travels that helps him. A bad guy throws a knife at him while he's blinded, but surprise!, he throws it back and pins the guy to the wall, because a Javanese circus performer in Singapore taught him to listen to a blade's sounds through the air. He's dissappeared in plain sight, why, they don't know about a hypnotic trick he was taught by Indian fakirs he's old friends with. He stops an episode to teach the viewers what to do should they fall on a lake of ice, because one time he had to learn that when he got trapped in Alaska. He's always got something and his backstory accomplishments are excessive to the point of parody, but they have to be.

You use Grey Ghost to tell the earnest, hokey and lighthearted stories you can't really tell with Batman anymore. Stories like the 1940s Green Lama issue where he lectures a private about racism, or the Mexican Fantomas stories that are all about him just being nice and understanding and helpful and standing up for others, even his villains.

One episode he hears about young artists across the city reporting their work stolen, and he thinks it's that fiend Claude Monstre again, but nope, Claude Monstre's paintings have been stolen too, and it's a shyster named Mr Cain who's been robbing artists everywhere and taking credit for it, so The Grey Ghost pays him a visit and scares him straight, and they all get their dues and then some, with an explicit tribute to Bill Finger at the end. Grey Ghost takes the time to look after a stray cat and her litter until he can find a proper owner, and it turns out his old enemy, the temptress Helen Zaroni, has been committing robberies to get enough money to open an animal shelter, so The Grey Ghost agrees to give her the cats and help her out if she promises to be good from now on.

The bad guys are never going to be as bad as the one Bruce faces, the conflicts will never spiral into something that can't be solved with a clever solution and a moral lesson, The Grey Ghost will always know the right thing to do and do it, and everything is going to be okay. That statement is what's gonna give the stories a potency of it's own and has to be the number one thing at the center of it: Everything is going to be okay. The Grey Ghost is here. He's got this. Everything's going to be okay, everyone. Everything's going to be okay, Bruce. Everything's going to be okay, son.

Sure, you can fill out details by adding in veiled references to bits of pulp hero or Batman's history, there's some fun to be had with the idea that the Grey Ghost is (or was) the fictional hero of Batman's world and that he's got stuff like Lego Grey Ghost and Innsmouth Sanatorium games, but the potency of The Grey Ghost that's unique to him as a character always comes back to what he means to Batman, and what Adam West means to people that remember him fondly. The wistful humility and compassionate affection that West brought to the role made the character come across as endearing to us as he would have been to Bruce, and that's something that needs to be preserved.

Grey Ghost stories should be like gettng a reassuring hug from a family member, like looking at a family picture and being hit with some sadness over how things turned out and some happiness over the good memories it brings to you. These should be stories that Bruce looks back on and thinks "this isn't really how the world works, but that's how I wish it did back then, and that's what I'm fighting for now". Stories that he shows the Batfamily because sometimes they could use a shot of optimism themselves, and yeah sometimes they chuckle because the special effects are really dated and the Grey Ghost says some really corny things, but they get what it means to Bruce, and so do we.

Last christmas Alfred gave Bruce a set of pillows stitched from the fabric of Thomas Wayne's old Grey Ghost costume, which Bruce thought he'd thrown away and Alfred saved all these years. Alfred likes to sneak them into the Batcave everytime Bruce falls asleep on the Batmobile or looking over files.

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“For the first time ever, Fantomas can be Fantomas on the street, in broad daylight and surrounded by thousands of people. And all will think he’s in disguise”

“I didn’t know you danced samba and bossa nova so well! You’ve never told me how you learned it!”

From Fantomas 049: Fantomas en Brasil. This is at the end of a story where Fantomas was investigating a radiation leak in the Amazon and uncovered a secret Nazi base with mutant animals, in a adventure somewhat more bleak than usual. For this adventure, Fantomas brought one of his 12 assistants Pisces, and after the adventure is over, before they get back to their routine, he takes her out for a few days in Rio as a vacation. 

I’ve mentioned before how starkly different the Mexican Fantomas is compared to the original French character and many of the good things the character had going for him, and there’s a lot of stuff in these comics that both aged really well as well as somewhat poorly. But reading through a couple of these the thing that kinda sticks out to me is that Fantomas is not just a cool and slick man of action with infinite money and gadgets and supermodels to help him out, but he’s also just a really nice guy. He’s a very romantic kind of hero. 

Everytime he goes to some exotic land as an explorer he’s never judgmental or condescending and always works with the people from said lands instead of for them, and man is it refreshing to find a non-Brazilian comic that doesn’t draw Brazilian natives as racist cartoons. He repeteadly steps up to fight for social causes and openly states that he considers the fight for equal rights “the most important battle of the century” (in a story that exists specifically to disprove the idea that his Zodiac girls are concubines, they take offense to that notion just because they choose to work for him). He’s a pacifist who detests violence and only uses it as a desperate measure, and has non-lethal paralyzing guns for said purpose. He’s a very considerate employer and a lot of these stories end with Fantomas finding ways for the villains to redeem themselves. He looks after the victims he rescues and keeps tabs on them and gets them jobs and security and treatment. 

The comics get gory and weird often and of course there is a LOT of sexed-up surrealism, it’s Fantomas after all and the comic’s famous for pin-ups (although the 90s reboot went so overboard with those that fans hated it and it got canceled), but it makes a contrast with just how much of a honest and good guy the main character is. Several of these comics don’t even have any heists or violence or thefts, sometimes it’s just “Fantomas sits down to talk to someone”, “Fantomas gets knocked out and the Zodiac Girls spend the story solving the problem by themselves”, “Fantomas takes a weird trip somewhere” or “Fantomas teaches the viewer a bit about geography/history/science/etc”. Some of the comics I found even have pages with Fantomas teaching judo moves to the viewer. 

He also talks and bounces exposition off his orange cat a lot and the cat talks back, even if he doesn’t understand it. The cat also gets into some funny situations and has a personality of it’s own, a little bit of Garfield years before Jim Davis. 

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So, any thoughts on The Green Lama (who unexpectedly became one of my faves), the Pulp Hero who is also a Superhero?

Much like other pulp heroes of the time, The Green Lama had multiple secret identities and a massive supporting cast aiding him in his quest for justice. Unlike his contemporaries, The Green Lama eschewed guns in favor of radioactive salts, magic, and sleight of hand. He rarely, if ever, killed his enemies. His tales also had an advanced sense of continuity, with characters growing and changing over time, plot points introduced in one story paying off several tales later. The Green Lama is a character of contradictions, driven forward by a faith he is forced to betray. It makes him flawed and imperfect, and in that way, one of the most human of all pulp heroes - The Green Lama: Scions

While not the "only" example of a pulp hero who is a superhero, The Green Lama is arguably the one who leans the most into the superhero aspect out of all the classic 30s pulp heroes that usually get brought up. I would argue that The Green Lama is the most direct answer to the question "what happens when you combine The Shadow and Superman together", considering he was modeled extensively after both in his forays into pulp, radio and comic books, and has also grown into his own character.

He's got the unique skills bordering on superpowers (that eventually became outright superpowers). He's got pretty much The Spectre's costume, except of course he came first. He's an urban costumed crimefighter wh deals with gangsters and criminal masterminds, and yet has an extremely strong stance against killing and carrying guns under any circumstance, even saying they would make him no better than the criminals he fights, which makes him by default the pulp hero that Batman would get along best with. The comics took it way further even turning the “Om Ma-ne Pad-me Hum” chant into a Shazam! transformation cry (Shazam came first, although the two debuted in the same year).

He's got a suitably punchy and dramatic origin: guy spends 10 years in Tibet and returns to America intend on spreading Buddhism's pacifist doutrine, only to witness the murder of children at the hands of mobsters the literal second he steps off the boat, and after spending restless days in the police station to see if they would find the culprit, he sees the killer walk out of the commissioner's office free, which convinces him he needs to take up crimefighting because the police are useless, and he outright calls the police "incompetent" in a letter to the papers that he uses to introduce himself to the world, which is not something you find often in 30s/40s fiction even if's an implicit part of the pulp hero/superhero fantasy.

He had a stronger sense of continuity than most pulp heroes were usually afforded. He has a lot of the pulp hero stock and trade like the assistants and the pseudo-science and the odd radio gadgets and of course the Orientalism that we'll get into, but remixed in a pretty cool way that allows him to stand out from his inspiration. He's got incredibly weird aspects to him like the fact that he gets enhanced abilities from crystallized salt or even becoming radioactive (which could be interesting to explore considering "radiation" became the go-to origin for superpowers in the 60s). He's got an allright supporting cast and Magga, while ultimately a deus ex machina, is a very interesting addition to it and I wish her mystery was played up more often in subsequent stories past the original run. There's a lot about The Green Lama that really works, he was incredibly successful at the time and he's managed to thrive over the years lot more than most of his contemporaries

Despite all the powers he wielded he felt impotent, nothing more than a rich boy playing the games of gods. He had chosen the path of the Bodhisattva, sacrificing himself for the good of all sentient beings, but even so the weight of responsibility, the lives of so many in his hands, threatened to crush him. It was tempting to turn away, to deny his calling, but the life of a Bodhisattva demanded more; and it was only recently that he had begun to realize how much it truly required.

The main problem with The Green Lama, and by problem I mean "the character works fine for his time but this is seriously holding him back from becoming sustainable again", is the fact that he's a white rich man who fights crime by going as hard into Orientalism tropes as possible, which is inescapably baked into the premise.

Now, I will argue that The Green Lama was, for his time, a progressive character. The Buddhist aspects of his character weren't just backstory fodder or an excuse for his superpowers as they were to pretty much every other character at the time, Jethro was a practicing Buddhist, who fought crime informed by his beliefs, trying to respect them (and not exactly succeeding) and offering a wholly positive perspective of Buddhism. Nowadays, it creates a problem, but at the time, it made the character stand out from every other hero who had "traveled to Tibet" checked out, because Tibet and Buddhism were heavily incorporated into the character. The Lama may have been born merely out of a desire to cash in on The Shadow's newfound radio popularity, but Crossen took it much more seriously than his contemporaries and made it an effort to instill admiration in his readers towards what he was referencing, which he was pulling from books about the subject and the Pali language. Is research the bare minimum? Yes. But it’s a bare minimum that even today’s writers don’t do even having an infinitely bigger wealth of information at their disposal. 

To further cement my point: There's a particular Green Lama comic story called The Four Freedoms, which is about the Lama receiving a letter from a fan in the army who's worried about a racist private who keeps insulting the black privates while crowing about racial superiority, and so the Lama kidnaps the private and takes him on a tour through Germany so he can witness firsthand how his talk aligns with Nazi ideology, even specifically referring to Jim Crow's laws, criticizing how easily Americans fall for racial war rhetoric, and pointing out the idea of racism as a tool of tyrants to divide and conquer. It's not my place to champion this as some great representation and that's not what I'm doing, but if this all seems passe or simplistic or even problematic to you, trust me, this was still the era of Slap-A-Jap Superman, stories like this were absolutely not the norm at the time, even in other stories where superheroes dealt with racial discrimination.

He even caps off the story by stating that punching or ending Hitler is not the solution (although he lets Jones take a couple of swings) because Hitler is just one part of a much bigger problem that needs to be fought on all of it's forms. It's all very much afterschool special/anti-racism PSA, sure, but it's easier to mock those in our time. You find me a Golden Age superhero comic that shits on Jim Crow specifically while the hero tells the reader that Hitler is not the ultimate evil but merely "a cog in the wheel", part of a problem that's deeply entrenched in America's own shores (really, do, I'm genuinely curious if more of them did anything like this).

Does any part of what I said negates the fact that, at the end of the day, he's still a white man using Orientalism mysticism to fight crime? No, it doesn't. And if Iron Fist can't get away with it, if Dr Strange only just barely does, the Green Lama sure as hell can't. And you cannot downplay those aspects either lest you end up with a completely different character. It's a bit of a conundrum that makes the character tricky to approach from a revival perspective.

I completely agree with what you said here, Green Lama would benefit from a Legacy Hero approach very strongly. And Green Lama: Scions opens up an interesting possibility of Jethro Dumont not being quite what he seems, backed up by the fact that he wore disguise make-up in the original stories:

They had a lot of names for him in the papers—the Verdant Avenger, the Mysterious Man of Strength—but Reynolds had always been partial to “Buddhist Bastard.” No one had ever seen his face or, at the very least, the same face. Seemed like everyone had a different story. The Green Lama was white, he was black, he was asian, he was old, and he was young. You could fill a room of witnesses and no two would describe the same person.

Really I think if you just got rid of that one thing that holds the Lama back the most from catching on in modern times, I think he's the kind of character that lends itself a lot to long-term sustainability. He's already fairly popular as is, definitely an indispensable inclusion of any shared pulp hero or Golden Age superhero universe and definitely one of my favorites among the 30s American pulp heroes. And there’s ways to make the concept more interesting and workable.

Maybe The Green Lama is just a title that's been going on for generations, with Jethro being one of many to fill in. Maybe Magga used to be it, maybe the tulku that instructed Jethro did, maybe there's a new character with it. Maybe Jethro is just an identity used by an Asian-American adventurer to operate safely in the US, or maybe Jethro has a sort of Lamont Cranston arrangement going on. Maybe he's part of the reason why Tibet was the superpower capital of the world in the 30s or 40s, or part of the reason why radiation started granting so many heroes superpowers in the 60s.

The character's skillset has been fairly "anything goes" ever since his author made him a flying superman for the comics, and really he already started out being able to deliver electric shocks through his fingers by guzzling radioactive salts. He's a very weird character, and I will always argue that weird is what works best for the pulp heroes.

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oh theres a witch in these woods??? is she single???