Just the Ticket

Hello, Ticketholders! Or more correctly, hello, random people who click on my posts without reading them because your ADHD prevents you from reading anything longer than a tweet. Buy a book and go fuck yourselves. I have a job to do here. By the way, Fairly Oddparents  reference. GFT #20: The Boy Who Cried Wolf As promised in the 2007 Annual , Timothy returns to raise some hell. Not literally; it’s too early in the series for that. The basic idea of this issue is that Belinda is playing social worker and setting up “Timmy” with foster families, whom he either murders or tricks into committing murder themselves. That’s it. That’s the plot in a bloody nutter of a nutshell. What makes this issue at least different is the structure. The “real world” doesn’t serve as a framing device as usual, but instead unfolds parallel to the fairy tale, with the twist ending of the latter mirroring what we knew about Timmy all along.  Maybe I’m just running out of things to commen...

Welcome back to the mainlilne, Ticketholders! Now that the holidays have been over for six years and nine months (even though they will return next month), it’s time to go back ten years and let your hair down as we kick off a Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective  on the first volume's Volume #4  trade paperback. GFT #19: Rapunzel This twisty tale is an interesting one where I don’t quite know what happened. It begins with a flash forward, wherein a seemingly dark-haired woman with her back to the reader has just finished doing her seemingly usual business of sucking a man named Eric (possibly Milly’s Eric from Rumpelstiltskin ? Or Zenescope is unoriginal with their character names…) into a fairy tale and terrifying him into a change of heart. There is a familiar red book on the counter between them, leading us to believe it’s Sela that Eric is talking to. She urges him to clean up his loose ends (hair puns!), and we’re kicked back a month to Eric and a redhead named Ri...

Hey, Ticketholders, it's me again! Because I have mild OCD and because I notice these things, I'd like to point out to you that this is the first Ticketverse Throwback  where the current issue number and the original issue number actually match. It's a review, as they all are; although I doubt that telling you the plot, giving away all the funny parts, and telling you it's the best thing I ever saw could in any sense be called a review. In any case, it's a review, as I did reviews back in SWAT Ticket #7 --then untitled, but later archived under the title, Terminal  Philosophy , a nod to the 1994 Charlie Sheen actioner, Terminal Velocity  (basically Point Break  with no surfing, Russian spies, and Charlie Sheen, but I said that already and I'm running out of ways to nest interjections, so let's get away from that, shall we?)--a Yahoo! Groups post  FROM June 28, 2004 , re-worded in places to fit my current level of maturity as a writer. I finally spent th...

Hey, Ticketholders! DJ Timedrop has returned to bring you this, the second of the week's  New Piece Offerings ! Beware, you might come away with a Mashup Issue  or two. Fort Modest - "Kenji Bukowski" by DJ Timedrop (that's my DJ name) Leave your thoughts in the comments, remember to like, share, and subscribe to this blog and my YouTube channel for more mashups and other content, and click on the ads between posts. See you Thursday with a new Ticketverse Throwback , so stay tuned. DJ Timedrop, a.k.a. the Ticketmaster, out.

I may be saying Farewell to Manzanar , but my loyal Ticketholders out there deserve a warm hello, especially those of you in Texas, Louisianna, and Florida, who are still enduring hurricane season . You especially deserve some warmth and goodwill sent your way. While we're on the subject of tragedy, today's selection is an essay FROM Period 1 (January 14, 1999) , the prompt of which asked me to pick a character from the novel,  Farewell to Manzanar , and...yes, compare and contrast  that person's positive and negative reactions to being a prisoner in the Manzanar internment camp. The score at the top reads "5-/22," which is nonsense now, but given the standardized zero-through-six grading scale at my high school at the time, I think the actual grade is five-minus, which is like a low A- or high B+. And given the words of praise Mr. Wightman wrote on my essay--I can't believe I actually remembered the name of my 9th grade English teacher--I don't think the...

Merry Prelated Christmas, Ticketholders! I currently have nothing clever to gift you with, so I'll let the Ghost of Ticketmaster Past and the Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective  speak for me. I originally wrote this post offline in June, so here are some words of wisdom from the Ghost myself: After introducing a culturally insensitive stereotype in an issue so bad you’d expect Michael Bay to have a production credit on it (don’t get me started on the nuclear explosion, the lack of plot, or Sela’s slutty Miss Muffet costume), Zenescope decides to be politically correct by releasing a “Holiday” edition each year. Just nutcracker up and call it Christmas, hmm-kay? It’s like having Christmas in June (which it is right now--June, not Christmas). It’s like Dan Whitney becoming Larry the Cable Guy , it don’t make sense. Lord, I apologize. Some crap about pygmies in New Guinea or whatever, Amen. Anyway, calling it a Holiday Edition is probably the worst thing about the Holiday Christma...

Happy Halloween 2011 from September 2017, Ticketholders! Isn't time travel great? You get to go nine years in the past to go three years into the future, learn about obsolete technology and bad art, and be generally Retrospective . So let's get back to that, shall we? GFT Halloween #3 (2011) This is more of a collection of unrelated stories than a single, continuous narrative. Like the previous Annuals (and the series as a whole, especially the early issues), the art style varies dramatically from one story to the next. The first of the three stories in this issue, titled “Dead Luck Desert,” looks horrible, like someone went through the ClipArt catalogue from a Windows 98 version of WordPad . That’s right, it’s not even good enough for MS Word . I suppose there is something sort of effective and dynamic about using this bad ClipArt style, but in terms of brand recognition, it’s a terrible choice. The only way you can recognize Belinda is that she’s vaguely woman-sha...

Hello again, Ticketholders! As I explained in the last post (as much as I was able to, anyway), plot elements relating to this Annual won’t play out until much further along in the main series, perhaps several volumes later. But the 2008 Annual was nonetheless one of the best contrived and most connected in Grimm Fairy Tales history. GFT Annual #2 (2008) Again adapting nursery rhymes rather than fairy tales, it mostly does away with the complete separation of framing device and story collection, opting instead to have each story occur in the same place and at the same time as its setup, and the other stories. As it references events a year further along in the series’ publication, Sela is once more the woman in focus, though she is not the storyteller this time, either. That honor belongs to an as-yet-unnamed man who (according to the inverted color scheme of his speech bubbles and the giant, hooded, skull-faced, sickle-wielding shadow behind him) is some kind of Grim(m) Re...

Summer's almost over, Ticketholders! And that means it's the perfect time to look at a Grimm Fairy Tales volume called Different Seasons ! Different Seasons Volume 2 Different Seasons is the title given to trade paperbacks that contain special issues of Grimm Fairy Tales , such as Annuals and holiday editions (Christmas, Halloween, etc.). So why are we starting with Volume 2 ? Well, because Zenescope bundled their issues out of order, not including the first Annual in a Different Seasons Trade until Volume 2 . As for why they compiled things this way? Well, that’s like a child asking a blind man why the sky is blue. It just is, whether you can see the sky or know what the color blue is or not. I doubt they even know why. That being said, we start with the first Grimm Fairy Tales Annual , from way back in 2007, otherwise known as Zenescope Year Three. GFT Annual #1 (2007) As promised at the end of Wicked Ways , the 2007 Annual focuses on Belinda, supposedly f...

Now that we've spent the week creating the Universe, let's look at what happens when a comedian tries to control it. FROM SW@ Ticket #52: Tube Almighty (July 24, 2006):  Back in 2003, there was a little comedy in which Jim Carrey played a man who felt he was being screwed by God on an hourly basis until God decided to take a vacation and put him in charge of the universe, supernatural powers and all. After Bruce's selfish misuse of God's powers, the world goes to hell and he learns a valuable lesson about the human spirit, will, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah, it's really funny, too; did I forget to mention that part? Anyway,  Bruce Almighty  is old news. Time to review the 2006 incarnation of  Goofy: Master of the Universe . This time around, Jim Carrey is replaced by Adam Sandler, Morgan Freeman's God by Christopher Walken's Morty (who, in a slightly delicious play on the Latin lexicon, turns out to be the Angel of Death), and God's powers by (here...

Welcome to my cinema, Ticketholders, where admission is free! I mean, you're Ticketholders, right? So you don't need to pay for what you're already holding, right? Except a large bucket of popcorn is like three hundred dollars here, and you have to buy Reeses' Pieces individually, and Pepsi is five dollars an ounce. Hey, I've got to make money somehow! But if you're just going to your cupboard to pour yourself a giant bowl of Doritos, Funyuns, and peanuts, that's okay, too. I'll just charge you triple for a pair of 1-D glasses. Now, everyone silence your cell phones (unless you're using your phone to watch this video). The movie's starting! I'm super-proud of this movie! I mean, the acting is terrible, there are exposition dumps everywhere, and the editing needs major work. But within five days of receiving my graded creation myth, I managed to adapt it into a script complete with production notes, round up a cast, crew, and prop...

In the beginning, SWAT Ticket was just a place on the internet that I named and used to vent my juvenile (but mostly accurate) rantings and gushings about movies that I rented from a brick and mortar medium that has since died a tragic death. SWAT Ticket has since gone by many names and given birth to the many side projects that currently populate the Ticketverse. But following the demise of the media gods known as Blockbuster Video, Hollywood Video, Tiger Town Video, Movie Gallery, and Hastings, as well as their distant supermarket cousins behind the customer service counter at Safeway and any other rental outlets I neglected to mention, the spark at the center of the Ticketverse began to dim and flicker, eventually going dormant for hundreds of days. Then one day, in the year 2017, something Grimm came along and rejuvenated that spark. That spark began to create again, and although scarred by the thought of relics gone the way that relics go, that spark is driven to look back on the...

Welcome to the Mad Tea Party, Ticketholders! As far back as Grimm Fairy Tales Retrospective #6 , I had been making references to Zenescope eventually branching out of their fairy tale/nursery rhyme/fable niche that they established (with mixed, but mostly favorable results) in their main series, and spinning off into Wonderland . Since 2007, it has grown from a miniseries trilogy to four Annuals, ten character-focused Tales, seven additional miniseries, two additional One-Shots, a crossover with Grimm Fairy Tales , and a fifty-one issue ongoing series. From both a scholarly perspective (read: I had to do a ton of research and back-reading to even understand what was going on the first time around) and a fanboy perspective, reading it all was a fun process. Mostly. Get ready for a long post, full of spoilers and cynicism. Wonderland Volume #1: Return to Wonderland You’re probably thinking that the first volume in a trilogy shouldn’t be called Return to Wonderland , but in Wonderl...

Nothing from my old blogs really fit in with the "Learned Passion" essay this week, but I managed to find something that continues the religion/mythology theme from last week's New Piece Offerings : a review of a little, 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film called Troy . I don't recall what made me take the direction I took with this review, but all of a sudden, I found myself rapping the plot of Troy  to the beat of the Beastie Boys song, " Paul Revere ." I later did the same for the plot of The Dallas Buyers' Club , but this selection comes to you today, courtesy of  SWAT Ticket #29: License to Illium (January 17, 2005): Now here's a little story many like to tell about three Greek brothas you know so well. Started way back in old BC without Ad Roc, MCA, or even Mike D. There was a big horsie (not named Paul Revere), Achilles, an army, and a city in fear. Fighting for the land, kickin ass on sand, sacking their homies (Helen's in demand). On...

Good morning, Ticketholders! I had other plans for what I would post for you this week, but my video conversion equipment crapped out on me, so I had to go with another option. After much consideration, that option turned out to be the following essay  FROM Piece Offerings #10: Learned Passion (November 30, 2011) . I don't exactly remember what the writing prompt was for this, but it was my midterm paper from the International Cinema course I took at San Diego State University . As you can probably guess by the title, it is a commentary on whether or not passion can be learned and how the various styles of teaching it (if possible) can effect success in the students' extracurricular future. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. Sean Wilkinson  10/11/2005  TFM363  Learned Passion?  “Those who teach artists…ought to be [artists themselves]” (22) says Jerry Farber in his  Intro to Lit, MWF 9 , and I agree with him for the most pa...