Just the Ticket

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Ticketmaster. Today, Ticketholders,  Goj -Year- ra  coverage of the Millennium Era ends not with a bang, but with a cheap, nauseating whimper of insincere flattery and poorly butchered pandering, topped with sixty-nine slices of expired cheese offscreen, and served under orange lighting in a mercury-plated toilet upholstered with glossy leather. While the toilet is flushing. And exploding. In 2004, for the fiftieth anniversary of Gojira ,  Toho and director Ryuhei Kitamura (who would go on to direct The Midnight Meat Train , but also directed a film called Sky High —not the one about the superhero school with Kurt Russell , but if it was, the visuals in this movie would surprise me even less than they already don't) brought us Godzilla: Final Wars . It's essentially a remake of Destroy All Monsters and Invasion Of Astro-Monster with an extra, derivative word salad of absurdity to the human plot thrown on top, based on a script by...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Retrospectre. So...third time's the charm, because I've spent the past week false-starting on the Werewolves , Vampires , Zombies , and Demons miniseries, trying to figure out the actual reading order of Unleashed because the Zenescope wiki's chronological reading order is wrong again. They listed Werewolves: The Hunger as being set before the issue I'm actually going to review today, despite it being set after the four other Hunters had been freed from the Shadowlands. So...damn. I already wrote intros and harvested assets for two other reviews before this and read each of the four series far enough to realize things don't make sense without tackling this issue first. The next four weeks will cover Vampires , Zombies , Demons , and Werewolves , in that order (until I find another complication). Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed the little flashback to my youth that I shared on Monday . For some experimentation, I wrote some...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Poetry-master. This is the surprise, Ticketholders! For you and for someone in my family who's having a special day this week. But also for me, because I've been looking for this poem of mine for years. I mentioned it and gave a quick synopsis in my review of Zenescope's April Fools Editions earlier this year, and now that I've found it, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Well, another sigh of relief, anyway, because it also felt really good to be free of gambling debt and to only have my student loans to worry about going forward. But the poetry is the point today, so let's talk about it. Despite what I said in the Zenescope review I linked above, I was thirteen when I wrote it as part of an "exiting middle school for high school," art/literature/poetry project called "The Book Of Me." It was received well enough by school staff that it was selected for publication in a book of student poems (that I have lo...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Retrospectre. There's some sort of appropriate timing here, what with Doomsday coming out soon and the first Avengers having premiered to franchise-defining success a year before the comic I'm reviewing today hit shelves. It's not so perfectly "coincidental" as Supernatural 's suspected influence on the Unleashed event , but the pieces are there to speculate that someone at Zenescope said, "this is a big pop culture thing right now; we should make our own team!" And it's not like it's an abrupt thing, either. Before Marvel 's The Avengers was even a thought, Zenescope were dabbling with shared continuity when they shipped Belinda and Charles Dodgson . And had Belinda ruin Sinbad's life repeatedly . And dismantled the Council Of the Realms . And had the Dream Eater thin out their library (not that one ). Robyn vs. Britney was one of the best things they ever put out. So was Quest . But the...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Ticketmaster. I had planned to watch and review this movie in August as a continuation of a theme from previous years ( Yojimbo in 2025 and its American adaptation Last Man Standing in 2024 ), but chose to push into September in favor of finishing out the Kiryu Saga ( Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. ) instead. Before we get to  Sanjuro , though, I have great news: as you are reading this, I have made my last payment toward resolving my gambling debts (which I confessed to in Isekai " Quartet " #2 and touched on the backlash and burnout of in my  MCU Back From Burnout  post). I also have an employee who's worth a damn now, and I recently stumbled upon a poem from my childhood that I wrote and have been seeking out for many years that will make its way into the calendar this month. It's not just bad things that come in threes, Ticketholders! Retooled into a Yojimbo sequel from a planned screenplay...