Powers: I Don't Think Super Heroes Can DO That!

Powers is an odd comic. In a world filled with parodies of classic DC and Marvel super heroes, Powers is just about a pair of homicide detectives that have to deal with it, and do their jobs. Specifically, they're the officers that get assigned all of the Powers related homicide cases. In a world full of people that are bullet proof, can walk through walls, or kill with their thoughts, these two try and figure out who did the killing, and then go out with nothing more than their sidearms in order to make an arrest.

It's a fairly ridiculous concept really, on their side, the police simply have "drainers" installed in all of their cells and interrogation rooms, which are able to dampen the abilities of powers. Out in the field though, there's nothing these guys can do to half the people they're fighting, they're reliant on superheroes to take down any supervillains that are resisting arrest. Really, actually bringing the perpetrators is rarely the focus of the stories, it's very much written as a mystery, with them trying to establish motive and means, with a side of the traditional cop politics viewed through the slight skew of a world for supermen.

Final word is that I think that's a well written character driven story, with a nice cartoony look to it, that somehow all works.

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Toy Review: Tekkaman Blade & Pegas

Today I've got Tekkaman Blade & Pegas from Bandai's Soul of Chogokin SPEC line. SPEC is a subset of the Soul of Chogokin, and is supposed to feature more modern characters, in more toy like incarnations, also typically with less metal content. This is the first SPEC toy that I've ever picked up. There have been a couple of different cartoons feature the Tekkaman character, none of which have I seen, but from what I've gathered, this toy is based on the designs from the 90's OVA Tekkaman Blade. In the cartoon an invading alien force abducts humans and turns them into cyborg warriors called Tekkamen. Blade is the title character, and he manages to escape being fully brainwashed, in order to return to Earth and thwart the invasion. The conversion process being icomplete, he has some disadvantages, which require him to use the larger mech, Pegas as a means of transforming into his Tekkaman form, also he can only stay in his Tekkaman form for 30 minutes, or risk goin…

GX- 59 Daltanious: Robbed Of Being Voltron

One of the things that I love about doing reviews for these old super robots is reading up on their back story and finding all kinds of interesting facts. So, quick! What's the first thing that you think of when I say "Voltron"? Pretty much, if you even know what Voltron is, you're going to think of this first:

Five robot lions that combine to make a giant humanoid robot. If you were a male child raised in the '80s, then you know who Voltron is. A smaller subset will remember that there were two Voltrons, the lion Voltron, and then a Voltron made out of 15 vehicles, often just called Vehicle Voltron:

An even smaller subset will remember that there were actually three Voltrons, the third being made of three smaller humanoid robots, and called Gladiator Voltron:

What's the deal with all of the Voltrons? Voltron was a similar project to Hasbro's Transformers, and Tonka's Gobots, where a company took existing toy properties from Japan, and used them to la…

Optimus Prime World Tour Stop 8: Armada Optimus Prime

So, last time I covered Robots In Disguise Optimus Prime, which was the first Prime toy I bought as an adult, but what actually got me back into collecting was reading a Toy Fair magazine that had a feature on the upcoming Armada toy line. As I recall, the article didn't even have any pictures of the new toys, just some descriptions of a few samples, and an overall theme for the line. In the article, at least, Armada was described as the first full collaboration between Hasbro and Takara, prior to Armada, each company worked more or less independently, and would choose to use media or toys from the sister companies on a case by case basis. Most of the US cartoons were brought to Japan at some point, while Robots In Disguise was the first Japanese TF cartoon to be brought to the states.
So, what was Armada supposed to be about? The idea was Mini-cons, a new name for an old idea, which is little tiny Transformers. Look back at Star Convoy. The difference this time was that there wa…

Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

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