Just the Ticket

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Retrospectre. I said last week that the first half of Grimm Fairy Tales Volume Fourteen is where Sela goes back to work. And that's true in the sense that she was returned to her mentor role (with an...unfavorable outcome because her assigned charge was a self-important Highborn with no desire to listen to the advice of a failed Falseblood Guardian). But in the two-parter I'm looking at this week, the "back to work" theme literally applies. Let's remind myself how that went.... Grimm Fairy Tales #83 & 84: Jack Frost This two-part story wastes no time in getting things back to relative normalcy for Grimm Fairy Tales , and that's kind of a bad thing. From page one, we find out that Sela has been given a teaching position offer by the mysterious dean of a prestigious Boston prep school, which, Sela and prep school deans have gone together like torches and napalm up to this point , so she accepts the offer like it's...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Ticketmaster. Happy Birthday to my America, Ticketholders! I guess you'd call me a liberal, or "left-wing," if you had to put me in a binary box, but the one conservative hope I have is that we as a country can get back to a time resembling what we had before this past decade of insanity, hate, and fear, because twelve score and ten years ago, our founding fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And then women, eventually, once all the witchcraft paranoia got hung out to die and one of them made our flag. It took a lot longer than four score and seven years to even approach that equality, and a mere handful of years, plus at least as many acts of upheaval to affect a frankly superficial level of social change before the next manufactured boogeyman of the month instigated a mass fear response of, by, and for the wrong people to ge...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Retrospectre. Welcome to July, Ticketholders! I've been back from vacation for a few days, and Sela Mathers is back from an alternate Realm , Limbo , prison , and helping save the world at least three more times ( The Dream Eater Saga , Bad Girls , and The Summoning ) to continue her mentoring role in the first fairy tale adaptation that Zenescope 's main title has done in quite some time (so I'm not the only one who's come back to work). But before I get into that, I promised a final view count for June , and here it is: Grimm Fairy Tales Volume 14 TPB (Part One) As you can see from the above text and banner image, the Volume Fourteen Trade Paperback is where collection of the main Grimm Fairy Tales series' issues starts to get a little wonky. We've seen numbered GFT and Myths & Legends issues show up in an event before ( The Dream Eater Saga ), but the Trades around them ended prior to the event and resumed numberi...

And so was this banner. I will do an update on it in the future, but my focus with  HeroMachine 's Phoenix Edition for the time being will be on character designs for my 1000th post special. Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. HeroMachiner Timedrop23 I had intended to post this at the end of May, but decided not to for the sake of my own peace of mind (or, as the case is here , my piece of mind). So let's start off with a few reminders of what this post is all about. In April (so many fans of the original Flash-based beta tempered our expectations with the assumption that it would be a cruel prank on us Fourthmonth Fools ),  the GOAT, the Man, Myth, & Legend, Mr. Jeff Hebert instead chose to embrace the rebirth theme of the month by announcing the return of his character creation magnum opus as a Phoenix Edition  that runs natively in your browser of choice. And mad lad that he is, Jeff even spent the month updating HM:PE with new assets and features, all drawn b...

Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. the Animeister Are you alright? Can you hear me? I haven't found anything to corroborate this, so it's purely a notice of thematic and contemporary coincidence, but Frieren: Beyond Journey's End  is being adapted from an ongoing  manga written by Kanehito Yamada , illustrated by Tsukasa Abe , that was published beginning in April 2020, a month and a half after the official declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. The manga is about Frieren, the titular elven mage who accompanied a human hero and his stock-ish party of companions (a dwarven warrior and a human priest) on their quest to defeat the Demon King (as one does in a fantasy series). Since elves live longer than all other races, the manga (and by extension, the anime) picks up with the Demon King having been defeated...and Frieren having to spend the first episode watching her human companions grow old and die (which is why I almost didn't watch the anime—I expected it to just...