jesus christ conquers the martians

Every week thrill to new adventures of brave, foul-mouthed Earthmen struggling against the onslaught of attacks from Mars! Yes, in an attempt to keep up-to-the-five-years-ago minute, I'm doing a web-comic. JESUS CHRIST CONQUERS THE MARTIANS will get updates every Sunday; two or three strips each week until the story is finished, which should be sometime around Christmas. I can promise thrills, excitement, cuss words, naked women, and the technological terror of the Brickosaurus X-7, all in thrilling black and white! Don't miss it!

JESUS CHRIST CONQUERS THE MARTIANS!!!

Superman Meets The Quik Bunny

It's a battle of the titans as two of the world's mightiest champions defy each other for mastery of the universe itself, the only way they know how - in a chocolate milk drinking contest.

Catch the excitement as Superman Meets The Quik Bunny- at Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics!

anime I hated: Magical Meow Meow Taruto

Magical Meow Meow Taruto. Where to begin? I would not recommend this anime to children, adults, human beings of any age, sex, nationality, creed, religion or culture. 
Taruto is a soulless piece of junk. It is entirely bereft of entertainment value on every conceivable level. Its characters are so thin as to be invisible when viewed from the side. Its art style is bland, imitative, and completely unoriginal. To call the show's plot "half-baked" would be a compliment that implies some degree of preparation or labor went into its creation, which is of course impossible. Here's a hint; it involves a magical princess who has magical powers, who is also a cat girl. Just think; people got paid to come up with this. No wonder the commies think we're soft.
The show's big stroke of genius is that it stars cats. Only they aren't cats, they're little girls who wear frilly dresses and have cat ears and tails. Fully-formed homonoculi with stockings and petticoats who are about a foot and a half tall, who wander around the house chasing bugs and eating cat food. The regular human characters in Taruto see these cat-people as just regular cats. Are they regular cats with stockings and frilly dresses and jewellery? Or are they regular cats who shit in boxes and cough up hairballs? We'll never know. 
And here's where the show made its gigantic mistake. If Taruto had starred actual cats, cartoon cats who talk and have adventures and magical powers, then that would have been cute and funny, like Hamtaro, an international success enjoyed by children and adults alike. However, Taruto stars eighteen-inch tall cat girls, a plot device that can only appeal to... well, let's face it. It appeals to pedophiles, and maybe furries. If you're a pedophile, or maybe a furry, you may find this show to be so amazingly arousing it could conceivably distract you from any sexual assaults you may be planning, which may actually be this show's only redeeming characteristic.



Because there's nothing else to this show. The title character is a magical cat girl princess who is being chased by evil cat boys and cat girls from the magical cat-people dimension, and her owner, a brain-damaged pretty boy without a job or parents, moves into a gigantic house in a new neighborhood full of other cat-girls. That's it; that's the story. Eighteen-inch-tall girls wander around yards, drink milk and eat cookies and try out their magical powers, and occasionally the evil cat people report to their evil commander about how they've failed to catch the magical cat girl princess.

This show is thin on plot, even for episodes that are a mere 20 minutes long. 20 minutes! I've seen fistfights in movies that were longer and more entertaining. I've seen goddamn INFORMERCIALS where more happened. I've owned CEREAL BOXES that were fresher and more innovative. Go out to your car, open the glove box, take out your owner's manual, and read the part about how often you should change your oil and where the transmission fluid filter is, and you will have already entertained yourself up to a hundred and fifty times more than Taruto will ever entertain you. This is not a show that children will enjoy. There are no gags, a total of zero characters the audience will identify with or feel sympathy for, and nothing to mention in the way of story (story in episode 1: we moved into a new house. Is there a monster in the house? No, there is not a monster in the house. The end).

Maybe as the show progresses, it gets better. And maybe monkeys will learn to fly and pigs will live in trees, too. I'll never know. I only managed to watch an episode and a half of this atrocity; I love my eyes and my brain and can only justify torturing them in the name of anime reviewing for so long before common decency cries out "ENOUGH!" But who can say? Maybe in episode three every single character is brutally murdered by escaped convicts from an experimental prison where they treat recidivism with nuclear radiation, and the remainder of the series is replaced with reruns of episodes of Laverne and Shirley in Japanese - a scenario that, in comparison to the undoubtedly excremental remainder of Taruto, offers unparalleled vistas of television fun.


It's not even a good-looking show; usually even the most brain-dead anime show has slick character designs or zippy direction or some other redeeming visual quality. Not here. The characters all have big, dead, staring, fake CLAMP eyeballs, are thin as rails, and either wear little girl minidresses or frilly fake gothic lolita fetish maid wear. All the cat-girl characters are straight out of the stock catalog of harem-show girls. There's nothing visual about Taruto that separates it from two hundred and fifty million other anime shows, computer dating games, and telephone card advertisements.

As an exercise in just how little can actually happen in a single episode of a TV series, Taruto may have merit. And of course I already mentioned that the show might inadvertently be aiding society by keeping sexual predators off the streets and in front of their television sets. But by any standard of normal judgement - as entertainment, as storytelling, as camp, as kitsch, as cautionary example, as some sort of multi-colored distraction to prevent you from changing the channel- Taruto is a miserable, shocking failure.

I might add as a personal note that it is particularly insulting for Bandai to waste valuable resources on this dreck while Giant Gorg, a vastly superior series, languishes unreleased. Shame on you, Bandai Entertainment.

anime I hated: Robotech The Sentinels

Robotech II: The Sentinels is terrible.

The success of the syndicated anime TV series Robotech in the mid 80s meant there was a built-in audience of fans eager to see "the saga" continue, and in 1988 it looked like this was about to happen, with the videocassette release of  Robotech II: The Sentinels.  For a few moments, as fans placed the tape into their VCRs and pressed "play" and waited for the show to begin, it seemed as if all their wishes had come true. Then the video itself started and those hopes came crashing down. Because, as I said, Robotech II: The Sentinels is terrible.

Rather than being edited together, rewritten, and assembled from disparate elements, as the original Robotech series was, The Sentinels was concieved and commissioned from the get-go by Harmony Gold.  Yet due to production problems and various financing crises, The Sentinels we eventually wound up getting was, yes, edited together and rewritten.  As it happens, the original plan to create a 65 episode television series ran into problems when the Plaza Accords revalued the Japanese yen, taking what had at one time been cheaply produced Japanese animation and turning it into more expensively produced Japanese animation. The price tag on The Sentinels ballooned and sponsor Matchbox pulled out, leaving Harmony Gold with a mere three episodes of usable footage. This, along with material from the original Robotech television series, is what we get in our Sentinels. 

The characters, old and new, are distressingly ugly, with a disturbing proportion being old men with terrible hair who are given way too much screen time. Many scenes are merely the backs of  heads or helmeted characters, saving the trouble of animating mouths. As a bonus the audience does get to see the mysterious alien enemies The Invid, who are giant slugs who talk to giant brains. There is a very long scene solely composed of a giant slug talking to a giant brain.

Now, I watched and enjoyed the original Robotech TV series, and I can assure you that this show was not a success because it featured scenes of giant slugs talking to giant brains; it was a success because it featured transforming robot fighter planes, well-animated action scenes, and cute girl singers. Robotech II: The Sentinels has none of this. All the returning characters are uglier and have stupider hair, and the new characters are also ugly and have stupid hair. Popular Robotech singing star Minmay sings once - as part of a duet!! - and we mostly see the backs of their heads. There are dismaying amounts of wrinkled old guys with amazing hairpieces who grind out huge chunks of expository dialog in fake accents. There are two - count 'em, 2 - scenes with transforming robot fighter planes, both of which are training missions. There's a confusing subplot involving a planet on the other side of the galaxy, which may or may not be the home of the Robotech Masters, which is being invaded by the Invid and/or overrun by robot dogs. Again, not something audiences were clamoring for. 

In fact, the story is this: Rick and Lisa and the remaining characters from the Macross part of Robotech go to a space station, where they walk around in terrible new uniforms and talk. Talk talk talk. Rick and Lisa get married. Apparently they are going to launch the SDF3 and go to the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, whoever they are, and ask them why they did what they did whenever they did it. Meanwhile on that self-same Robotech Masters homeworld, old guys in robes (the thrilling Robotech Masters themselves) watch robot dogs prowl a futuristic ruined city. This alien city was destroyed by the alien Invid - different aliens, mind you -  in what would have been the first episode of a Sentinels TV series.  However, being the only interesting thing happening in the three existing episodes, the Invid attack was placed at the climax of Robotech II: The Sentinels, resulting in many scenes of boring bald old robe-wearing Robotech Masters staring at video screens of a ruined planet that, according to the new edit, hasn't actually been ruined yet.



After what seems like an eternity of scenes of hairy nobodies staring at computer screens, the robot dogs overrun the capital city and the hairy nobodies escape into a shelter, where they stare at computer screens some more. Oh, and a giant slug talks to a giant brain.

Robotech II: The Sentinels definitely feels like a failed pilot for a TV series; there are even blackouts for commercial breaks. I don't blame Robotech creator Carl Macek for trying to continue his one successful franchise, sure, fine, whatever. But why Streamline would re-release it years later is anybody's guess. I usually try not to emphasize my mistakes.  

Robotech is a franchise that spawned novels, comic books, games,  a large toy line, and a fandom that continues to this day.  What it hasn't spawned is a satisfying sequel. Not that people won't stop trying. Hollywood continues to option Robotech for feature films, Harmony Gold monopolizes the Macross brand in North America, and the hope of more sequels always springs eternal. My hope is that it won't be another Sentinels. 

-D. Merrill

the witch doctor versus the purple people eater

Bagdasarian vs Wooley: WHO WILL WIN

SPOILERS

Everybody's wondering what's going to happen to Dr Who in the new season. Not me! I know already! And now you will too because here's the nothing but spoilers sneak preview of what's going to happen on Dr Who this season, episode by episode, thrilling minute by thrilling minute, totally not cobbled together out of plot holes and hand-wavingly nonsensical contrivances buttered over with a thick, gooey layer of treacle and fan-wank. No sir!

1. HAMMERHEAD OF THE GODS The Doctor and his spunky female companion - who is from London, mind - land on a crazy planet that is almost but NOT QUITE like England. Some crazy stuff happens and various authority figures attempt to exert their authority but the Doctor cuts them down to size with a chainsaw - I mean, with sarcasm. He reverses the polarity of the neutron flow and saves the crazy planet that is almost but NOT QUITE like England. He almost kisses his companion but is saved by a gay man. Just as the episode is about to end a television turns on and it shows somebody wearing a mask hollering "FORESHADOWING!!!!", and then it cuts to static.

2. MAN, THAT HURTS The Doctor and his spunky female companion land in London present day. It looks normal, but SOMETHING CRAZY IS GOING ON WITH ALIENS!! The Queen tries to exert her authority over Annie Leibowitz but the Doctor shows her the special paper that he thinks reads peoples minds and appears to be an important document, but it actually just says "I am a crazy man with a bomb, do whatever I say" and so the Queen does whatever the Doctor says. It turns out that some important British guy that nobody in the rest of the world has ever heard of is actually a computer-generated space alien and he dissolves in a smokey pile of goo that forms the word FORESHADOWING on the floor. Then the universe explodes.

3. MAN THAT HURTS PART TWO The universe explodes. As it is exploding the Doctor remembers something important, vacuums up the alien goo, puts it in a glass, swallows it, opens a bit of the Tardis console, pukes into it, hits some buttons, and the universe quits exploding. The force of the puking has thrown the Tardis into a crazy time vortex bubble alternate dimension universe where everybody has water spigots in their foreheads and wanders around three dimly lit sets. The round-type spigots are at war with the two-prong spigots. The Doctor is caught in the middle and his companion is about to have a spigot implanted into her forehead. Suddenly he starts just yanking the spigots out of everybody's forehead. Since he's a Time Lord and lives forever he just keeps yanking those spigots out one at a time until fifty or sixty years later he's yanked the spigots out of every forehead on the entire planet. He then goes back in time and rescues his companion for whom it's only been an unpleasant fifteen minutes.

4. RETURN OF THE MASTER The Doctor lands on the Quarry Planet where other planets mine rocks and film BBC series. He's just chilling when the Master suddenly appears. He's got some super new plan to conquer the universe and is sneering about it, but the Doctor says, "I've had enough of your shit" and pulls out a handgun and shoots the Master two or three times. He then buries the body in a convenient gravel pit and leaves a tombstone that has a video screen in it of that scene from MOMMIE DEAREST when Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford says "Don't fuck with me, fellas."

5. DALEKS VERSUS CYBERMEN The Sontarans and the Zygons have learned to be peaceful and are having their Space Olympics against each other on Mars in the year 3000. The Doctor and his spunky London companion arrive. The stadium is called "Foreshadowing Stadium." The Doctor says "I don't like this one eentsy-weentsy little bit!" The Sontarans and Zygons all apologize for trying to kill him previously. Several different sexy alien women and two sexy alien guys try to kiss the Doctor, but he always gets distracted and turns away at the last minute. Turns out the Doctor had deadly space bacteria on his lips that unknowingly he'd gotten on there while eating a space burrito on the planet XC44-7, and the aliens all have Super Blistex that will kill the space bacteria before it infects everybody. In space. They concoct a plan whereby the Doctor has to compete in the Galactic Pole Vault and when he lands everybody jumps on him and kisses him, eliminating the bacteria. The Olympics end and everybody goes home and then the Daleks show up wondering where everybody is.

6. DO NOT IGNORE CLEAR DISCHARGE The Tardis goes through a black hole backwards which fractures space time into five hundred different segments. Five hundred different Doctors visit present-day London and get married to five hundred different 18-30 year old London women and they all go off and have dashing adventures in time and space. There's dramatic music and a fade out and it turns out it's all a story being written by an intelligent computer locked in a dungeon on planet Foreshadowing. The first letters of every sentence in his story spell out a secret formula for a super explosive that, when assembled, does something very impressive indeed. At the end of the episode the Tardis arrives and the Doctor pokes his head out and spits.

7. DANGER UX-B.S. Winston Churchill gets really, REALLY drunk one night during WWII and fires a super rocket at Greenland by accident. The rocket bounces off an invisible space ship piloted by a new kind of time-travelling Dalek who exists outside his Dalek casing and actually looks like one of the guys from Milli Vanilli - the not dead one - and who is the last one of his kind and is really really looking for a place to go to the bathroom. The spaceship lands in the middle of Times Square New York on New Years Eve and fifteen thousand people all see it and go "Hot Crackers!" Then there's a really expensive shot of the Pentagon and everybody in it, and then they send out a squadron of B-17s which pretty much bomb the hell out of New York. Hitler parachutes in to make a deal with the Dalek who agrees to help the Nazis conquer the world in exchange for some Charmin. Hitler is just about to suck all the super science knowledge out of the Dalek's brain with a turkey baster when the Tardis arrives and the Doctor shoots the Dalek two or three times with the same handgun he shot the Master with. There's a closeup of the gun, engraved on the slide is the word "Foreshadowing" in flowing script. Oh yeah, he shoots Hitler too, and a couple of bystanders as well. In fact he just goes nuts and starts shooting everybody. Suddenly the REAL Tardis arrives and the REAL Doctor comes out and hands everybody five dollars and tells them to forget the whole thing.

8. OUTER SPACE IS REALLY NOT MY CUP OF TEA, THANK YOU VERY MUCH On a dark planet that we really can't see very well some space aliens are working on a giant piece of machinery that hisses and has lots of tubes and wires. The space aliens are greenish-gray and have three eyes and wear cloaks with little lights. There's a loud noise and lots of smoke and a hatch opens in the machinery. A big thing rolls out. It's Davros who has had the Master's head surgically implanted in his stomach and the Brain Of Morbius sitting on top of his regular brain and a direct compu-cyber link to the vast data banks of the.. shit, I dunno, the Movellians or the Tereliptils or something. Meanwhile on the planet next door the Doctor and his two London-female companions are having a nice vacation. Suddenly everything around them starts exploding. The Doctor pulls a telescope out of his pocket and looks at the other planet and sees the Davros-Master-Morbius guy firing a gigantic laser cannon at the planet he's on. He's just blasting away at that planet. People are running around and screaming and stuff is on fire and blowing up and stuff. Suddenly a really big laser beam penetrates deep into the planet's core and a giant fire demon comes out. It's Satan. He's pissed. Satan flies up to the other planet and even though Davros blasts him four or five times with the laser cannon it bounces off. Satan quotes "Prince Of Space." The Doctor watches it all through the telescope. This was all part of his plan, he says, he knew Davros would surgically attach the Master's head to his stomach and do the thing with the brains and the cyber compu link and start shooting a giant laser cannon at him and release Satan. All the Doctor has to do is sit back and watch Satan kill Davros. Suddenly the Doctor remembers something. He jumps down the hole and goes to Satan's house, where there's another door. He opens the door. It leads to another planet!

9. OUTER SPACE etc PART TWO The Doctor stumbles drunkenly about the other planet which looks just like Cardiff on Earth. He gets arrested for public drunk and is bailed out by a mysterious stranger. It's Rose! He's back on the crazy alternate Earth where he dumped Rose and her boyfriend and her mom and everybody else from Season One & Two that we got sick of seeing over and over and over again. There's a big weepy reunion and everybody cries. The crying goes on and on. A text crawl appears at the bottom of the screen advising viewers at home to take out their Dalek toys and pretend they are having exciting adventures in outer space with Doctor Who, or perhaps enjoy one of the fine novelizations or comics based on Doctor Who, or perhaps go outside and take a walk. The Doctor promptly gets a job as a stockbroker and buys a townhome and spends the next five years watching television. At the end of the five years he looks up and says "Oh crap!" Meanwhile back in the 'real' world Satan has consumed all living things and is now really, really fat. Also bored. Then God shows up and snaps his fingers and everything is exactly the same again, except the Ramones album "Rocket To Russia" is now titled "Rucket To Rossia."

10-13 FORESHADOWING IS YOUR KEY TO QUALITY LITERATURE

This is a massive three-part story that explains everything that has REALLY been happening throughout the entire season, and in fact if you haven't been taking really careful notes you will not have the faintest idea what's going on. The only part I really understood is the part where the Master and the Brigadier team up to fight litter.

There you have it, the entire new season of Doctor Who, all spoiled forever. Let's team up to fight litter.

Star Quest... To Avoid Copyright Infringment

Out of the depths of outer space and beyond the furthest galaxies comes STAR QUEST, the fantastic series of novels released in 1978 that only slightly resembles a popular film of the day! 

The cover of this, the first book, only hints of the Star Warsy goodness inside, but check out the back cover copy for juicy details of the reptiloid Lord Blog, servant of the evil Dark Emperor Ylang-Ylang, as their forces threaten the entire galaxy! And when the second book came out, I wanna say sometime the following month, they ditched the noncommittal SF cover theme and went straight for the Star Wars.

I've flipped through the books and they seem to be boilerplate pulp full of scanner-techs, quadrant formations, murderous reptiloids, hydro-gliders, felinoids of the planet Yahwoo, and the boy genius Ween Leever and his robot techno-companion O-V-1. "Ween Leever"! Oh yeah.

The third book in the series, "Star Force", brought this entire cosmos-shattering saga to a universe rattling conclusion.  Robert E. Mills retreated from outer space, never to write another science fiction novel again... or is there a three-book prequel out there waiting to inflict itself upon an unsuspecting public?