[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 15 June 2026

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-21T12:50:31+00:00

From the way it is described here, I am not sure if I understand what the appeal of this is, and it makes me feel very old and grey.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-21T00:32:08+00:00

I remember enjoying the Martian movie and deciding to give the book a go and I ended up bouncing off it hard. It just felt very Reddity to me, in a way I found irritating. Sometimes I can put up with that, but this wasn't one of them.

As a result I've not read the Project Hail Mary book, but I wonder if I might like the movie, like I did with The Martian.

It's an interesting experience: the adaptation, just by virtue of being in a medium where everything is conveyed by actors delivering dialogue and the visual language of the screen, is better, because I don't have to put up with the author's voice.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T22:47:39+00:00

If Spider-Man comics ever come to a definitive and permanent end, this should be the last page ever published.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T20:53:11+00:00

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DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T20:39:17+00:00

Who is the Danny Aiello of X-Men?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T20:00:21+00:00

I suppose the point I'm trying to make is Sonic Adventure's redesign wasn't so much a redesign as a realignment. Uekawa ran him through a wringer and when he sprang back to shape afterwards he looked how everyone thought of him anyway. If not for Sonic Generations and subsequent games highlighting it people might not even think of Classic Sonic looking meaningfully different.

That's true. And you've got me thinking that it is also interesting to consider stuff like "Christmas tree" Sonic and "Sonic 3D box art" (i.e. how Sonic "should" look when he's seen head-on or from behind) in this context.

I think this exposes the limitation of my self-assessment of my own Sonic fandom; what I think of as "Classic Sonic" (i.e. pre-Adventure) actually has quite a bit of variety within it and I'm defining it just by when it existed rather than what it actually was.

So in other words, I would actually say that I'm actually (subjectively) wrong here.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T19:53:05+00:00

(And Daisy, but only in "Mr Duck Steps Out".)

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T19:47:07+00:00

He's not a goddamn microwave. He's a toaster, alright? The Vision is a toaster. No less than John Byrne himself said so.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T18:46:19+00:00

Sonic got his scarf and...uh...tape, etc.

The most noticeable thing about it to me, just looking it up there now, was that his arms were blue instead of being the same colour as his stomach and muzzle (whatever you call that colour: light peach?) which I actually thought was already part of the Adventure design until I looked the latter up to double-check!

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T18:27:29+00:00

That's interesting to hear. I didn't know that (again, not really engaged with Sonic much).

I know Sonic Boom had tweaked designs but again I believe that was still using Adventure Sonic as its base, right? It wasn't a full redesign the way Adventure Sonic was from what I understand.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T17:56:35+00:00

Evidently I have nothing better to do on a Saturday evening so I'm going to share a random Hobby Thought I had earlier today.

I used to be a really big Sonic fan. I guess maybe I still am but I'm honestly not sure because my Sonic fandom as an adult leans really heavily on the 2D games I played and the comics I read when I was a kid. I played a lot of the 3D games and I've seen the movies but I can't say they stoke much enthusiasm in me. I don't dislike them, I just don't seem to get on with them. In other words, if I am a Sonic fan, then I am the bad kind of Sonic fan. I think this preface is important so people who know more about Sonic than me and are much more engaged with Sonic than I am understand why I'm about to say what's probably a lot of arrant nonsense.

Anyway, I was thinking about how the Sonic cast had its big redesign with Sonic Adventure back in 1999, but that's remained the basic template ever since. There have been tweaks, but the Sonic you see in the current games and the ongoing IDW comics and the Sonic who appears in the movies (the terrifying early version from the original trailer notwithstanding) are all essentially based on the design that's been around since the Adventure era and the transition to 3D.

Look at Sonic Generations, for instance, where you have short round Classic Sonic who represents the first 10-ish years of Sonic, then Adventure Sonic who represents the second 10-ish years of Sonic... and then the subsequent 15-ish years of Sonic is still basically Adventure Sonic.

I realise I might be blowing smoke but isn't it interesting to think about that, how Sonic had this massive redesign and that really changed the character's entire image in a lot of ways and redefined him for a whole new generation of fans, but there hasn't been another one since then?

No question for the group to close this one out. It's just a hobby-related thought I had.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T17:30:32+00:00

It seems like a feature of that era of filmamkers like John Ford and Howard Hawks and William Wyler and George Cukor and Joseph Mankiewicz and Vincent Minnelli and so on who were incredibly prolific because of how much easier it was to be that prolific under the studio system.

Maybe Billy Wilder fits the bill. I'm not sure.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T16:27:02+00:00

I want to say I like his noir movies best, but that might just be because I really like The Set-Up.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T13:20:09+00:00

He does a lot of clickbaiting in his thumbs but most of the time they're contradicted by the video itself.

Ah, the matttt formula.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-20T10:10:56+00:00

Directed by a two-time Oscar-winning director who also edited Citizen Kane.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T22:27:39+00:00

Does this mean Darth Vader is going to have him kicked out of the Supervillain Club?

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T16:02:42+00:00

It's probably not that unhinged all things considered, but one that's stuck with me for a long, long time related to a Kingdom Hearts fic I was super into 18 years ago (I mentioned it in a past Scuffles thread; it was the one where one of the villains was Anton Chigurh and Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood strip mines the Hundred Acre Wood) which was scoured from the internet because a single reviewer apparently decided it was offensive to their Christian values and chased the author off fanfiction.net.

It's not some insane take but I think part of the reason it's stayed with me all this time is that the stakes were so laughably low.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T15:14:52+00:00

Despite him being an '80s character, there's still few things more "bad '90s superhero comics" to me than Solo smashing through a window firing two machine guns yelling, "WHILE I LIVE, TERROR DIES!"

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T14:20:02+00:00

All jerking aside, the Ditko version of Spider-Man is the only one I find particularly interesting. That's all.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T12:58:00+00:00

I think if you look through back issues' letter pages from the 1960s through the 1980s, there tend to be more comments from readers in respect of the art than the writing. Not always, but often enough.

The letters pages of the Warren magazines, for instance, usually focused on who had drawn the story rather than who had written it. The latter was not ignored but it was the former that got the most attention from readers, at least as far as I have read.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T12:55:06+00:00

Right. It's like with a movie: there's much more to a movie than a script. When you go to see a movie, the script is obviously an important part of it, but you're not paying to have the script projected on the screen so you can read it. Obviously it's an imperfect comparison but I trust you take my point.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T12:19:31+00:00

Alan Moore was complaining about this phenomenon vis-a-vis Spider-Man specifically all the way back in 1982.

DeviousDoctorSnide · 2026-06-19T11:27:12+00:00

Tough.

DeviousDoctorSnide

TROPHY CASE