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RVA Comics X-Change: Issue 35

Ash Griffith | January 14, 2020

Topics: 8-Bit Theater, Atomic Robo, Brian Clevinger, CGI, comics, Comics X-Change, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Iron Man, James Dean, Kamen Rider, Marvel Cinematic Universe, RVA comics, RVA Comics X-Change, Scott Derickson, Scott Wegener, Taco Bell

Happy new year, comic fans! Welcome to a new year of new goals, new opportunities, and — most importantly — new comics.

This year we are bringing you more of the best in comic news, upcoming comics, and events. We will be covering GalaxyCon once again this year, where we will talk to upcoming illustrators and creators, and of course all of your celeb favorites. But before we get there, we are also going to be talking to voices in the scene we haven’t met before.

The first of those new voices to the column is co-creator of Atomic Robo and author of 8-Bit Theater Brian Clevinger. He has lived in Richmond for the last ten years along with Atomic Robo co-creator Scott Wegener, where they are about to embark on volume fourteen. If you couldn’t tell, he’s a big fan of robots (and history and British detective shows. So all of the good things, really).

Clevinger originally got his start back in 2001, while in college. He began 8-Bit Theater as a webcomic during a time when all you had to do to succeed at webcomics was just exist. Aside from that and Atomic Robo, he is known for freelance work he has done for Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, amongst others.

While Atomic Robo is naturally one of his favorites, mostly due to the structural nature of the series, a small project for Marvel comes to mind as something he has particularly enjoyed so far in his career. 

“One of my Marvel gigs was with Scott comes to mind,” said Clevinger. “It was a silly little tie-in comic for Taco Bell. I think around the time of the second Iron Man movie. No one really cared about it, so we got to tell a goofy story about MODOK attacking Tony Stark with lawyer assassins.”

The biggest thing that he wishes people understood about the Richmond comics scene is simply enough that it is far larger than it gets credit for. It is a very indie scene, but large and proud.

“New York has a lot of momentum as a comics town because all the publishers were there when things got started up in the 20th century,” said Clevinger. “Portland is the other big comics town, thanks to publishers like Dark Horse and Oni setting up shop there. I think Richmond is easily positioned to be the next big comics town. The South needs one, dammit.”

Clevinger brings us a good teaser recommendation to bring us into the new year, and he makes it count. Manga classic Kamen Rider by Shotaro Ishinomori helps lead your comic recommendations into 2020.

Kamen Rider is a long-running manga franchise that crosses not only manga but television and films, with various iterations that have spanned decades, such as Kamen Rider, Kamen Rider Amazon, and Kamen Rider X, among an endless list of others. Originating in 1971, the series follows the story of a man who becomes a masked motorcycle riding superhero fighting monsters and evil organizations. The protagonist himself differentiates depending on the installment at hand.

News this week is a little light, but sees among other things the departure of Doctor Strange’s director and Marvel Studios wanting you to know they will not resurrect the dead.

Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness Director Scott Derickson has left his role as director, and claims the departure is amicable. He tweeted his announcement this week and claimed as well that he will remain in his other role as producer.

“Marvel and I have mutually agreed to part ways on Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness due to creative differences,” Derrickson said on his Twitter. “I am thankful for our collaboration and will remain on as [Executive Producer].”

Marvel also claims that it is amicable, and that this will not affect the predicted release date of May 2021, even though a replacement has not been found. 

When Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher died in 2016, one of the first questions asked was what would happen to General Leia Organa now that her actress was no longer with us. Lucasfilms was quick to respond with “CGI, obviously.” Marvel, however, will apparently not be taking that route in the future.

“We haven’t considered that,” said Marvel Studios Vice President and Avengers: Endgame Executive Producer Victoria Alonso to Yahoo! Movies.

James Dean, Warner Bros. publicity still for for the film Rebel Without a Cause, via Wikimedia

The question originally sprung up because of controversy surrounding the announcement that Finding Evan will be digitally CGIing iconic actor James Dean into the film posthumously. The idea even roused up Captain America himself, Chris Evans, who tweeted his thoughts.

“This is awful. Maybe we can get a computer to paint us a new Picasso,” Evans tweeted. “Or write a couple new John Lennon tunes. The complete lack of understanding here is shameful.”

That wraps it up for us this week, comic fans! What are you looking forward to in 2020?

Until next time.

New Dominion Virginia Initiative focuses on historic post-WWII architecture in VA

Marilyn Drew Necci | October 14, 2014

Topics: cool buildings, Department of Historic Resource, New Dominion Virginia Initiative, post-WWII architecture, Taco Bell

Although Virginia is perhaps best known for its Colonial and Civil War history, like most of the country, an overwhelming majority of this state’s built environment dates to after World War II. Now, state’s Department of Historic Resource has created the New Dominion Virginia Initiative to educate the public about our post-WWII architectural resources.

[Read more…] about New Dominion Virginia Initiative focuses on historic post-WWII architecture in VA

We Just Had To Try The New Taco Bell Breakfast Menu (Spoiler Alert: It’s Pretty Good!)

Marilyn Drew Necci | March 31, 2014

Topics: breakfast, eating cheap, fast food, Taco Bell, tacos

I’ve been pretty open in the past about my love for tacos, which has even led to me attempting a column about tacos around RVA (I swear I’m going to do another episode soon). My love is not discriminating–it definitely extends to even the most generic mass-market version of tacos. Plus, I spent most of a decade as a member of a touring punk band, so of course I’ve eaten a ton of Taco Bell in my time. Therefore, when I heard that Taco Bell would be introducing a new breakfast menu late last week, I made it a point to get over there and order some Taco Bell breakfast as soon as I could. I mean, after all, it sells itself. Who can resist the idea of a waffle taco?

The question is, though: what does it taste like? I wasn’t sure exactly what I should expect. I’m the sort of person who puts hot sauce on omelettes as a matter of course, so breakfast food done Tex-Mex style is immediately appealing to me, but would Taco Bell really be able to pull it off, or would the result just be a weird hybrid that didn’t really capture the best aspects of either food group? (I’m talking about “breakfast” and “Mexican” here; yes, I know neither of those categories are on the food group chart you learned in elementary school.) The fact that Taco Bell was now offering syrup as a condiment threw me a little bit too. I figured the hot sauce would probably work just fine… right? In the end, there was only one way to find out.

The waffle taco was first priority. Priced at $1.99, you can get one with either bacon or sausage. I’m sure some people will have heart attacks when they read this, but I’m not the biggest fan of bacon, so I went with the sausage option. As you can see from the pic above, the waffle taco comes in a McDonald’s-style cardboard carton, which is something I’ve never seen at Taco Bell before. It’s probably because the waffle that forms the taco shell is a bit less flexible than a gordita, and would just flatten out if you tried to wrap it in paper. Tacos are intrinsically messy–the falling-apart-when-you-bite-into-it phenomenon is half the fun of eating them–so I guess they figured it needed all the structural help it could get.

Anyway, let’s talk about the taste of this thing. The waffle itself is both greasy (you’ll need napkins, but you always need napkins at Taco Bell, so that’s nothing new) and sweet–not in a cloying way, just as a slight undertone, which is offset by the savory flavor of the sausage. Scrambled eggs and cheese make up the rest of the toppings, and you’re gonna end up with some crumbled eggs on your tray before you finish one of these, so be prepared. I tried both syrup and fire sauce as a topping on the waffle taco, and found syrup actually mixed better with the flavor combo of the taco than the fire sauce did. Regardless of the spicy sausage and the cheddar cheese, Taco Bell’s waffle taco is more like “breakfast” than “Mexican”–which is not to say it tasted bad. I enjoyed it, and would order it again. But it’s not hugely different than the breakfast food you can get at a lot of other American fast food joints. Still–waffle taco! It’ll be a while before that novelty wears off.

My second choice from the menu was an AM crunchwrap. In addition to the bacon and sausage meat choices, you can also get steak on your crunchwrap for 50 cents more, and that seemed totally worth it to me, so I shelled out the $2.99 for one. This price pushes the steak AM crunchwrap into the area on the Taco Bell menu that I generally think of as “too rich for my blood” (I’m a dollar menu type of guy), but I had to try it. Well, that was a wise decision, because this thing was 100% worth it. The waffle taco may have the novelty value that draws you into a Taco Bell before 11 AM for the first time since you had a job there back in high school, but the reason to stick around is the steak AM crunchwrap. This thing is the crown jewel of Taco Bell’s breakfast menu.

Unlike the waffle taco, there’s nothing really sweet about the crunchwrap–the mixture of steak, egg, cheese, and tortilla is all savory and all awesome. I tried the syrup on this thing, but it didn’t really do much for me, and the fire sauce was an infinitely preferable condiment. I tore this damn thing up; it was so good, I kinda wanna get up early tomorrow and go get another one. And I’ll ask for more fire sauce next time, because one packet was not enough by any means. By the way, is there supposed to be a hash brown on this item? I either was so into the other ingredients that I flat-out didn’t notice the potato in the mix, or they didn’t put one on mine. Hopefully it’s the former, and I was just in some kind of food haze nirvana, because if the next one I get is different from the one I had today, I might be bummed.

Taco Bell has really only been advertising the two aforementioned items and these weird cinnamon-roll bites that sound just way too sweet for me as being on their new breakfast menu, so I was wondering whether I’d find a very limited selection upon my early-morning visit (hey, 9:30 is early in the morning for me). Not so–there are a variety of other low-profile items on their breakfast menu, including a steak and egg burrito, a sausage flatbread melt, and grilled breakfast tacos. I certainly couldn’t try them all on one visit, but the grilled tacos were only a buck so I got one with sausage on it. It was really more like a quesadilla than a taco–eggs, cheese, and meat were put together in a soft taco shell, which was then grilled on the same little grill they make the grilled stuft burritos on. Result: tiny quesadilla. And it was tasty enough, but honestly, after the waffle taco and the crunchwrap, I didn’t need any more food. It was all quite a bit more filling than I expected, and I’ll order less food next time.

So, overall, would I recommend that you set your alarm and wake up for Taco Bell breakfast food? Well, no, because sleep is always important and, like many adults of my generation, I haven’t regularly eaten breakfast since I moved out of my parents’ house. But if you’re the sort of person who is generally up early and stopping somewhere to grab breakfast on the way in to work, you could do a lot worse than to stop by Taco Bell. The food is at least good, sometimes great, and it’s definitely better than what you can find at McDonalds (Hardees is more debatable). If you’re the sort of person who eats a fruit or drinks a smoothie for breakfast, it’s not for you, but if you’re that sort of person, why are you even reading this article at all?

Let’s All Fight About This “Judgmental Map” Of RVA

Marilyn Drew Necci | February 20, 2014

Topics: Ben Layman, Judgmental Maps, Michael Wright, richmond, RVA, starting arguments, Taco Bell

We’re not exactly sure who’s behind the Judgmental Maps website, but their latest post has taken aim at none other than RVA.
[Read more…] about Let’s All Fight About This “Judgmental Map” Of RVA

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