I Hate Fairyland

Warning: The following blog contains images of blood, violence, sexual innuendo, and swearing. Judge your sensitivities and proceed accordingly.

The premise behind Skottie Young’s comic, I Hate Fairyland, is pretty straightforward. When Gert was 10, she fell through a hole into Fairyland. All she had to do to get home, she was told, was find a magical key. However, 27 years later, she still hasn’t found it, and in all that time, her body hasn’t aged. a day. Frustrated and bitter, Gert has given up on magical quests and enigmatic riddles, and now shoots, smashes and demolishes her way through Fairyland.

Future Quest #1

As with any form of popular entertainment, the Golden Age of television cartoons is about 7. When I was a kid, watching Saturday morning cartoons was a weekly ritual that was never skipped. And I loved them all. (If you were under the age of 10 in the 70s and didn’t love Saturday morning cartoons, then I don’t want to hear about it, Poindexter.) I loved all the Hanna-Barbera variations on Scooby-Doo; I particularly remember Clue Club and Jabberjaws. I loved the Filmation Tarzan cartoons. And I loved the reruns of shows like Space Ghost and the Herculoids. So DC Comics’ new series Future Quest is right up my alley.

(Spoilers ahead; proceed at your own risk)

This new series, written by Jeff Paker, drawn by Evan “Doc” Shaner and—in the first issue, at least—Steve Rude, promises to bring together all those great Hanna-Barbera adventure and science-fiction characters into one big epic series. Kind of like Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for nerds like me. One issue in, we’ve seen characters from Jonny Quest, Birdman, Space Ghost, and at least nods to a bunch of other series, including the Herculoids. But it doesn’t just bring the characters together to elicit a giant nerdgasm from 40-plus year old readers like myself; there’s a genuinely interesting adventure story going on as well, one that truly understands its roots in classic adventure animation of the 60s and 70s without slavishly adhering to it.

Subscription Box Round-Up: April (and early May)

While I’ve been focusing on our recent Disneyland trip the last few weeks, subscription boxes have been piling up around the house. (Well, not so much piling up; we have been opening them.) So this week’s post is a marathon subscription box round-up.

First up: the latest Marvel Collector Corps box, featuring items from the recently-released film, Captain America: Civil War.

This may be one of the largest boxes from this subscription to date, easily rivaling, if not exceeding, the Guardians of the Galaxy box in size. I photographed it next to a bottle of Angry Orchard apple cider to give some sense of the scale.

Club 33

My wife and I have done a lot of things at Disneyland. We’ve ridden in the Lilly Belle railcar. We’ve ridden in the wheelhouse of the Mark Twain river boat. We’ve ridden in the tender of one of the train locomotives. We always make a point of listening to the Dapper Dans. However, one exclusive experience we never thought we’d have a chance to do is eat dinner at Club 33.

If you don't take time to listen to the Dapper Dans, you have no soul.

Club 33 is a very exclusive club for Disney fans. It costs something like $25,000 to join, and then $10,000 a year after that. (Possibly even more now.) Even at those rates, the waiting list is years long, so even if we had the cash to join, we still wouldn’t be able to. Among their other perks, Club 33 members can eat and drink in the exclusive members-and-guests-only restaurant and lounge located above New Orleans Square in Disneyland. We had heard the meal was fantastic, but an even greater part of the appeal was that it was something that we would only ever hear about. Until a few years ago, when we ended up learning that we literally knew a guy who knew a guy. Someone we know knows a Club 33 member, and for the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to work it out to get a reservation for Club 33. On our last trip to Disneyland, it finally worked out.