#edit : they sold the rights to a magazine

[dewvorce-flowers]

I sound like a stalker but how come the only pics we have seen of the Royal McWedding so far are from a non-hockey friend of theirs??? He included a pic of Lenny though so I'm happy

[etrangeres]

The Curious Case of Kaitou Kid

We love alliteration in this household.

To start with an anecdote, I went to the main Animate store in Ikebukuro some 2-3 weeks after M27 began showing in theaters. I had two reasons to be there: hopefully grab some copies of the Magic Kaito Treasured Editions, and grab what movie-related merch I could. The former I managed, but the latter was a lot harder. Despite them devoting nearly an entire wall on the right side of the first floor to Detective Conan merch, every single piece of non-blind box Kaitou Kid merch had been snatched up already. This trend of Kid’s merch being sold out seemed to continue for at least a couple weeks afterward, at least in and around Tokyo.

This demonstrates something I think we all already know: Kaitou Kid is a crazy popular Detective Conan character.

…Detective Conan character? Yes, but… No. But definitely yes. But… yes?

Kaitou Kid - real name Kaito Kuroba - is such a funny character if you think about him for more than a few seconds. So I chose to think about him for a few, uh. Days.

When I say he’s funny to think about, I don’t necessarily mean in terms of who he is as a character - which is admittedly also fun, because I think Gosho Aoyama is the king of gap moe - but more in terms of his placement in the greater DCMK canon. I mean, the fact that we have the “DCMK” acronym at all signifies the importance of tying these two series together. Even though they technically take place in different worlds. You know. Technically.

So I want to (mostly) chronologically go through Kid’s history in Detective Conan, how it relates to his origin as Kaito Kuroba in Magic Kaito, and amuse myself with the strange relationship he (and his source manga) has with the juggernaut that is Detective Conan.

Before we jump into this, some basic notes:

-I don’t mean for this to come across like some academic thesis. Nor did I actually think this would hit nearly 17k words. I’m just Like This.

-Any translations you see here are done by me, from the source Japanese.

-There will be concrete mentions of events from M27. They are comparatively trivial in terms of the mystery the film offers, but there will be spoilers for certain major parts of the plot as they relate to Magic Kaito elements. This will be clearly demarcated, should you wish to avoid those spoilers.

The MK to DC Pipeline

So I don’t know how many people actually need this information, but for completion’s sake:

Magic Kaito is Gosho Aoyama’s debut serialization (important distinction), and it began in June 1987. Though roughly the first two volumes’ worth of chapters were published at a fairly consistent monthly rate, it grew more and more irregular after that due to the popularity of both Yaiba and (more importantly for our discussion) Detective Conan. Due to it still technically being an ongoing series, it is currently Weekly Shonen Sunday’s longest running manga. This just so happens to be followed by Detective Conan, and they lead this particular ranking by a fairly wide margin.

The manga as it currently exists came out of the one-shot “Nonchalant Lupin,” which he submitted to Shonen Magazine’s manga contest after his editor told him to “draw the story you most want to draw” (Treasured Ed. V5). The one-shot won an honorable mention. His comment in Treasured Ed V1 also mentions that he “all but became a mangaka because I wanted to write about a high school kaitou,” so he’s clearly attached to the concept. He’s also clearly attached to Magic Kaito itself; a number of excerpts from the Gosho Aoyama 30th Anniversary Book, for example, talk about how a greedy part of him immediately thought of Kaitou Kid on the silver screen when he heard about the first movie being greenlit, or how he thinks Detective Conan will one day end but Magic Kaito may not because that’s what he really wants to be writing.

Back to our timeline: the Kindaichi Case Files were gaining steam in the early 1990s, and Weekly Shonen Sunday wanted its own version of the boom. Gosho himself was approached by the editorial team at Sunday to do a mystery series, and he accepted, not thinking it would last very long - not only because he wasn’t all that interested in the idea, but because he didn’t think there would be enough material to last more than three months.

It has lasted 30 years.

I say all this not to indulge in the depressing truth that Magic Kaito only has just shy of 40 chapters, but to specifically highlight the synergy Magic Kaito has with Detective Conan - despite the existence of magic in the former - due to their shared inspiration of Arsene Lupin. Things like Sherlock Holmes and Kogoro Akechi are pretty obvious inspirations for Detective Conan that I don’t need to go into in much depth, but the idea of a “high school kaitou” still very much bleeds into aspects of Conan’s character. Many of the things Kaito is either capable of naturally or has to deal with due to the inherent nature of his position are things that are also reflected in Shinichi.

Feats of physicality (Comes naturally to Kaito due to genetics and practice; enhanced for Conan via Agasa’s inventions)

Master of disguise (A practiced skill with makeup and voice changing for Kaito; use of a voice changer and aid from people in his life to deal with disguises)

Secret identity (a flipped perspective version: Kaito has a straightforward secret identity, while Shinichi has to keep his survival a secret)

The “bumbling police” (A good kaitou story will have a morally upstanding but kinda dumb detective that demonstrates the sheer skill of the kaitou in question while putting a contrast to their morals. Nakamori is this to Kaito; though not a one-to-one, characters like Megure or Kogoro serve similar roles to Shinichi to demonstrate his skills as a detective.)

“Why are you like this????” (Admittedly the most Vibes of the list, but there’s a level of gray morality. We root for the main character while knowing that what they’re doing is at times questionable. Kaito goes without saying, but Shinichi is more likely to engage in suspicious behavior like breaking into cars, bugging people’s houses, or even stealing evidence after becoming Conan.)

Motive (The most interesting - and sometimes the funniest - overlap is the fact that they’re both after a shifty organization. It’s a bit surface level at first, but there’s a suspicious level of overlap between not Shinichi and Kaito, but Shinichi and Toichi.)

All of this is to say that pushing DC and MK into DCMK is almost comically easy once you adjust for tone (and, uh. remove Akako, I guess) because Shinichi is BUILT from the kaitou framework and tweaked into a detective. So it’s no wonder Gosho decided to throw in a Kaitou Kid cameo that turned into the character asserting himself as a recurring sub character, as opposed to a quirky crossover character.

Even if he’s still both. And also a secret third thing.

The Last Wizard of the Black Star

So, there’s not much to mention about Magic Kaito’s early run. All chapters in the pre-DC era are stand-alone stories, with the plot starting and concluding within the span of a single chapter. It was a bit of an “anything goes” era, with the genre fluctuating all over the place and a lot of things we consider “standard” in any given Kaitou Kid story not yet being fully codified. Many of these weirder chapters have their own charm if you allow the gag manga energy to take you for a ride, but if gag manga isn’t your thing then it feels like these chapters are where Kaito himself is at his most…incongruous with the character that would eventually show up in Detective Conan. (Let it be known for the record that I personally find these early chapters SO silly and would kill for an animated adaptation of Clockwork Heart, the truly bonkers third chapter.)

The biggest “what do you MEAN that wasn’t there from the start?!” is by far Blue Birthday, which is the chapter of Magic Kaito that was published immediately before Detective Conan began serialization. It took about half of the currently released chapters to introduce Pandora, a now fundamental concept that is likely to be included in ANY one-paragraph summary of Magic Kaito’s plot. It isn’t the only thing, of course; though Kaito’s card gun debuts in the very first chapter, his hang glider doesn’t show up until Chapter 10.

The other major thing worth pointing out in the pre-Black Star era is the general pacing and fundamental makeup of the stories themselves. Very few case-only (or heist-only, as it were) characters show up in these chapters. When they do show up, they tend to be pretty flat, are often ridiculous, and are there to facilitate the hijinks of the day (the gun-crazy detective, the weird robot inventor, the irresponsible prime minister).

This changes with Green Dream, and it’s an immediate change. Detective Conan has been in serialization for over half a year by this point, and already its formula is bleeding into Magic Kaito. There are multiple new characters per heist, and multiple pages with two to three times more text than before are dedicated to setting up a fundamental conflict. Kaito is also more likely to take a stance in this fundamental conflict and use his talents and status as Kaitou Kid to lead it to a conclusion. Behind all of that, though, Kaito himself is still the cheeky little agent of chaos we all know and love throughout these chapters. (As an aside, the Kid mark used on his advanced notices debuted in this chapter!)

The big watershed moment is very obviously Black Star - the Detective Conan version, in this case. In both this and the Magic Lovers case (despite his very little screen time in the latter), readers of Detective Conan are introduced to a FAR more serious version of the Magic Kaito character. This is largely because what we’re seeing in Black Star specifically is a 100% outsider's perspective. Though we’ll very shortly find out this is not Shinichi’s first meeting with Kid chronologically, it is the first time he not only hears his name, but also has any real interactions with him. Kaito wears the mask of his father in his performance as Kid, and you could very much argue his guard is WAY up around probably the weirdest child he’s ever met. So in a story from Conan’s perspective, we have no way of seeing behind that mask.

Personally, I always put a bit of an asterisk next to DC’s Black Star. This is the case that feels the most like a “crossover” than any other Kid case after this, and of course it would. It’s the very first one! It’s the Kaito and Aoko cameos that really bring this vibe for me personally; great care is taken in Detective Conan not to pull much of anything from Kaito Kuroba’s personal life except in a few stand-out cases, and those  almost never involve anyone in our core cast directly. And I don’t even mean in the “he’s only ever shown in his Kid costume” way, because there are plenty of times where he shows up not wearing that. They key for me is that Kaito is always “at work” as a disguised Kaitou Kid as opposed to as Kaito Kuroba - the hat, the darker clothes, the low-effort disguises as police or staff. That kinda thing. But the appearance of Kaito and Aoko in their casual wear or school uniforms here really makes this case stand out in a way that later cases simply don’t joke about.

Detective Conan shows us Kaito at work. It’s why he comes across as so difficult to grasp and almost intimidating in these earliest of appearances. Those vibes obviously continue into The Last Wizard of the Century, the third theatrical release and Kaitou Kid’s very first movie appearance! His grand total screen time is only a fraction of the movie’s full run, but the vibes have a heavy overlap with that first conversation Conan has with Kid on the roof in Black Star. Though there are debates regarding the movie’s canonicity, this also marks the point in at LEAST movie continuity where Kaito figures out Conan’s identity, so there’s that precedent set. (Put a pin in that, by the way.) This also marks the first time Kid disguises himself as Shinichi.

What’s more amusing to me is that Magic Kaito’s Black Star seems to have been published to coincide with the movie’s release. Magic Kaito’s very first chapter after Kaitou Kid’s appearance in Detective Conan brings Shinichi Kudo to Magic Kaito. This is his only appearance in Magic Kaito to date, whether it be as Shinichi or as Conan. Gosho mentioned in his note on the Yaiba vs Kaito chapter that he really likes crossovers (same hat), so I have to think that the limited run of Magic Kaito is likely why we don’t see more DC characters in MK. Though in a Q&A he did toy with the idea of Conan showing up in Magic Kaito one day, so…

All that said, every time I think of MK’s Black Star my brain shoots off in two directions. The first and easier to articulate direction involves Akako’s presence, but we will get to that in the next section. The second direction is the very existence of this chapter at all.

As I mentioned above, this is the first new heist for MK after Kid showed up in DC. It is also the first multi-chapter heist, which indicates even more influence is bleeding over. It was also published alongside the movie, probably as part of a promotional stunt. Something about it feels like a doubling down of sorts on the stapling of these two series together. Kid showing up in Detective Conan is a fun reference; Shinichi showing up in Magic Kaito instead of the more recognizable Conan feels like a statement of shared worlds, largely because of how it makes you think about the timeline. The Akako issue aside, it really feels like he wanted these worlds to collide. If you have your own Lupin analogue AND your own Sherlock analogue, why wouldn’t you want to pit them against each other?

Add More Staples!

It’s at this point that updates to Magic Kaito get… particularly sparse. But there are a couple of things I find personally interesting about these few years despite that.

We start off with a back-to-back bang. The Twilight Mansion case introduces Hakuba into Detective Conan. Which would be fascinating by itself, but this was also Hakuba’s first appearance in EITHER DC or MK in TEN YEARS if you don’t count his one-panel cameo in MK’s Black Star. The framing of his introduction in Detective Conan is interesting, because the paneling and composition very clearly tell the reader that the character that’s about to be introduced is either 1) important, or 2) already known. In Hakuba’s case it’s clearly the latter, but this would make very little sense to someone that isn’t as aware of his place in Magic Kaito. 

Enter The Gathering of the Great Detectives, the animated adaptation of the Twilight Mansion case that was turned into a two hour special and opened with MK’s Black Star. There are ways in which it’s an odd choice, given Hakuba barely appears in Black Star at all. But I think Hakuba’s status as yet another Magic Kaito character being introduced into the narrative provided an opportunity for them to adapt a Magic Kaito heist for TV broadcast, and the chapters featuring Shinichi were the easy choice. The Yaiba vs Kaitou Kid vs Conan OVA had come out shortly before this, so it’s technically not the first time a Magic Kaito chapter had been adapted. But that was more of an altered gaiden OVA compared to this, and this TV adaptation seemed to hit you over the head even harder that there was merit to delving into Magic Kaito if you were a fan of Detective Conan.

But now we finally get to talk about Akako. Oh, Akako. Bane of the DCMK world. Sole reason we must argue that they take place in parallel worlds despite how ridiculous that sounds.

In the manga, Akako gives Kaito her premonition about the Demon of Light coming after the White Sinner. This is also in the episode, if memory serves. But in the episode as aired on TV, Akako features very little after that… because they fully cut the scene of her attempting to use magic at the base of the clock tower. Magic does not exist in Detective Conan, after all. It was eventually put into the episode another ten years later on the bonus DVD that came with certain versions of the Treasured Edition of Magic Kaito Volume 4.

More broadly, Akako is clearly a sticking point for the combining of these two “worlds” into one. Gosho himself takes the easy way out by ignoring Akako’s existence entirely in the Detective Conan canon, just as the TMS adaptation of Black Star did. He’s often brought up the concept of the two taking place in parallel worlds where the only major difference is the presence of magic in one and its lack in the other, as in his comment on Akako’s intro in Treasured Ed. V1: “In truth, the biggest bottleneck when it came to introducing Kaitou Kid into Detective Conan was the inheritor of Red Magic herself! So please just accept the two series as parallel worlds (lol).” He’s much more straightforward in his comment for Sun Halo in Volume 5: “You really gotta have Akako use Red Magic! (Please just assume Akako does not exist in the Conan world…lol)”

Despite this insistence she doesn’t exist, Sky Walk features an almost blink and you’ll miss it reference to her. Nakamori brings up the idea of Kid’s assistant being in play, to which Conan shows surprise at him having an assistant at all. Nakamori replies that there are multiple reports, some of an “old man” and others mentioning a “young woman.” The old man is obviously Jii, but the young woman is very likely meant to be a reference to the stunt Akako pulls in Akako’s Delivery Service, a very early Magic Kaito chapter.

As you’ll notice, Akako is still very much a practitioner of sorcery as of something as recent as Sun Halo, so it’s not as though Gosho has simply opted to phase her or her magic out of Magic Kaito. But considering there are MULTIPLE DC cases that deal with debunking the supernatural, her presence would most certainly complicate things. That being said, Magic Kaito’s world and plot do not seem to hinge on magic in an intrinsic manner (unless Pandora is literally a magic gem, as opposed to the tale of the gem being a metaphor for something), so I personally don’t see too much of an issue with magic being very rare, even in Detective Conan’s setting.

To keep with Magic Kaito for a little while longer, Golden Eye was the single heist released during this period. As far as its significance is concerned, I actually think Gosho said it best in his comment in the Treasured Edition: “Magic Kaito may be a thief story, but it’s also a magic story, so it was incredible to finally be able to mention the actual legend Harry Houdini. Even so, there’s an awful lot of deduction going on, so in this story you can also really feel how it’s been corrupted by Conan (lol).” It was a thought I had about Golden Eye even before reading his comment, so I’m a bit amused to find he actually called it out to be honest.

The following Detective Conan cases - Sky Walk, Three Instruments, and Four Masterpieces - and the movie Magician of the Silver Sky are all more along the lines of Black Star in terms of Conan and Kid’s relationship, but with an extra added pinch of “coming together for a common cause” in the movie. Sky Walk specifically also introduced Jirokichi to the mix, and he becomes the only Detective Conan character whose purpose in the narrative is tied exclusively to Kid. It’s in this way we begin to create a Detective Conan-exclusive environment for Kaitou Kid, which in turn establishes him more and more as simply “a Detective Conan recurring character” as opposed to the main character of another story that’s here for crossover shenanigans.

There’s a Pandora’s Box reference in Three Instruments that makes me want to pull my hair out because don’t say Pandora that word is important, and Four Masterpieces is a lot more “murder mystery involving Kid.” They happen very rarely in Detective Conan, but they happen basically NEVER in Magic Kaito (Dark Knight doesn’t count), so this lowkey feels like another way we’re shoving Kaitou Kid into the rules of Detective Conan.

In Magician of the Silver Sky, Conan expresses a level of shock when “Shinichi” passes the pinch test. This then marks the first time (in movie continuity, at least) that Conan is aware that Kid naturally resembles him.

But the funniest thing about this series of cases (and the movie) for me is the cracks in Kid’s mask, whether that be for Conan himself or for the reader. The final confrontation in Sky Walk ends on an almost comical note with Kaito being blasted off again via gasoline fire, and there’s a stinger at the end of Four Masterpieces showing a pathetic Kaito after Conan has just shot a mecha-powered soccer ball directly at his stomach. And that’s not even getting into the movie, whose entire first act drops us into a tense confrontation with a very suave Kaitou Kid before rewinding back to when he put on the least convincing act ever as a disguised Shinichi Kudo.

Have I mentioned he contains multitudes yet? King of gap moe. 

But we aren’t truly there yet. He’s a little silly for sure, but there are still times where the mask is on about as tight as it can be in Conan’s presence.

The last two stories mentioned here - Detective Koshien and the movie The Private Eyes’ Requiem - are actually a lot less about Kid and a lot more about Hakuba. So let’s talk about the cosplay detective for a little while.

Hakuba is interesting to me, for a couple different reasons. One is the cadence of his appearances in Magic Kaito. He is introduced late into the pre-Blue Birthday run and is in a total of three chapters. Those three chapters speedrun his discovery of Kid’s identity… and then he’s gone until his first Detective Conan appearance. Golden Eye is his return to Magic Kaito in a short but fairly significant scene that fills out the contours of his relationship with Kaito with regards to that identity, at which point he is in all but one case thereafter.

The other reason is that he seems to slip through the cracks of “significant Kaitou Kid relationships” unless you consider yourself a Magic Kaito fan. But I think this is largely due to the line in the sand we shall not cross: Kaito Kuroba’s personal life is off-limits in Detective Conan. As a result, Hakuba is framed far more often as a detective in his own right that just so happens to have some manner of connection to Kaitou Kid in his few Detective Conan appearances.

This connection is made fairly obvious in Twilight Mansion by both having him introduce Kid’s presence in the case, and having him and Conan highlighted as the two people that are after him at the end of that case. But his next appearance, Detective Koshien, only implies a connection in passing and chooses instead to focus on contrasting him with Heiji in preparation for the movie. In an interesting move, the plot developments of the case actually give Hakuba an excuse to avoid wearing a school uniform like the other students because he ultimately settles into the “foreign detective guest” role. There are, as a result, zero indications that he and Kaitou Kid’s civilian identity are actually classmates - or that he attends a Japanese school at all.

As for the movie itself, Hakuba was Kid in disguise the entire time, so there’s very little we can discuss when it comes to Hakuba himself. But after Kid’s frankly poor performance as Shinichi in M8, his performance as Hakuba in M10 is almost uncanny levels of spot-on (which admittedly turns into a very funny contrast with his Hakuba disguise in Green Dragon).

All in all, this selection of chapters, episodes, and movies pulled more of Magic Kaito into Detective Conan (when those details weren’t flying in the face of it), while Kid himself began to more closely resemble the Kid of Magic Kaito in the small moments. In Magic Kaito, meanwhile, we’re starting to see far more obvious influence from Detective Conan in the writing and pacing of its heists.

But the gates have not yet been thrown wide to truly allow the silly in.

Throw Wide The Gates That We May Sillie

The collection of chapters that start this portion of the list are, in a word, fascinating from a Magic Kaito perspective. 

We start with Shinichi’s Childhood Adventure, which does a couple of notable things. First, it confirms that Toichi was the magician that taught Yukiko how to use disguise makeup for her acting career. It was implied to be him in a very “if you know, you know” fashion in the Golden Apple case over 200 chapters prior, but this makes it inarguably clear. The extension of this confirmation is that Toichi also taught Vermouth the art of disguise, which is a particularly interesting connection to think about. As obvious as it sounds to say, this chapter is also the start of confirming that many things we know of Magic Kaito’s plot and backstory remain consistent in Detective Conan as well. The case ensures you don’t need prior Magic Kaito knowledge to pick up on Toichi being the first Kaitou Kid. That he meets Yukiko with Kaito in tow also means (unless my memory is failing me) that this is the first and only time Kaito’s name is spoken within the Detective Conan manga. It also confirms that the author that named Kid was, in fact, Yusaku.

The big part of this case that people tend to bring up in the wake of the M27 reveal is the “I’m your younger brother” conversation from Toichi to a young Shinichi. Now, 2006 is earlier than what meager sources I’ve managed to find that seem to indicate he had the familial relationship in the back of his mind, so I’m personally not sure how much stock I place in this conversation as any form of foreshadowing. What the entire case does seem to indicate regardless, though, is that Toichi and Yusaku are aware of each other on more than a surface level. At the very least, we’re meant to take away a passing of the baton, from father to son, in their relationship as friendly rivals. It has, apparently, always run in the family.

All in all, this case is a far more intentional mixing of Magic Kaito with Detective Conan because it deals with past events. It says “these things were always here, intermingling” and concretely refutes the idea that the modern Kaitou Kid was the first point of contact, retroactively entrenching the character even more into the world of Detective Conan.

We switch back to Magic Kaito for a heist with Dark Knight, which Gosho acknowledges in his Treasured Edition comment is “another story with a strong mystery feel, and a dark conclusion that isn’t very Magic Kaito-esque.” This also happens to be the first Magic Kaito case to feature Superintendent Chaki, a Detective Conan character and Nakamori’s boss as introduced in Black Star.

The following series of four Detective Conan cases all look at slightly different aspects of Kid that haven’t really made themselves known in DC yet. First is Purple Nail, a personal favorite and the case that arguably leans the most into the idea of a magic show. The focus on having an audience and the employing (and challenging) of Thurston’s magic principles give it a slightly different vibe to other cases. In relation to Thurston, Kid actually opts to approach Conan ahead of the heist to personally challenge him. In the manga, it’s the first clear look at Jii in Detective Conan. But the thing that stands out to me is the sheer level of emotional expression on display from Kid. It’s not in a small moment at the end of a case anymore, but in various moments throughout. You see his panic when Conan shows up above the building, or his sense of satisfaction when running through the crowd in the middle of his trick. All of it combined makes it feel much more like, by this point, Conan and Kid are engaged in a game.

After that is Iron Tanuki, an amusing oddball of a case. That Jirokichi used a fake notice to send a secret message to Kid pleading for help is interesting enough, given it displays a level of begrudging trust the former has in the latter. But more amusing is Conan’s choice to facilitate this upon realizing the truth of the situation, as well as his choice to stay behind and ask Kid if there was anything he could do to help to open the titular safe. If Purple Nail was their first real game, then Iron Tanuki is the first time they really came together in anything resembling a cooperative stance.

Kirin’s Horn seems like an outlier at first - and it sort of is, since Kid thought a little shock and awe was in order - but the case also demonstrates a level of familiarity. Conan remains flat on the ground because he knows how Kid works, and knows figuring out why he’s chosen to knock him out this time is the key to the case. There’s also a level of gag to this case via Kid’s choice to disguise as Genta, and the stinger of Conan getting the last laugh via something as silly as a paper taped to his back.

The fourth case, Ryoma’s Gunbelt, is where the real fun starts. Despite the rather nonstandard premise of Kid opting to return stolen goods, the general flow of the case is fairly standard for a Kid case in Detective Conan. The standout of this case, in my opinion, is the final conversation between Conan and Kid. They speak of their respective mothers in a conversation that reveals key details about each other, and do so surprisingly candidly. There’s an argument to be made that Kid knew of Conan’s identity by this point; regardless of that argument, that Conan spoke of his mother with such identifying details once again indicates a level of trust. Kaito implying Phantom Lady is his mom, while not particularly identifying, returns that trust. And that’s not even getting into the fact that a Kid case in Detective Conan is introducing a pretty important fact about Kaito’s mom.

Skipping ahead a bit, what makes this case notable is not the case itself, but rather its pair: Phantom Lady, a Magic Kaito heist published a year later that serves as an immediate prequel to Ryoma’s Gunbelt. This is the first time since Black Star that Magic Kaito picks up on a Detective Conan case in any capacity, and arguably the first time at all it does so with such a direct connection. The mentions of the Black Star served as a vague framing story for the clock tower heist, but Phantom Lady ends with a shot of the three treasures that assumes you know exactly where things go from here.

All of these cases do much more to peel away the mysterious veneer from Kaitou Kid, and give him a more candid and open relationship with Conan.

But the big thing of this stretch, and a turning point as a whole for Kaitou Kid in the franchise in my opinion, is The Lost Ship in the Sky. Now this? THIS is a Sillie Movie. Kid is playing around with goats, smirking like a fool with Conan before jumping out of a helicopter, and making the most inappropriate sounds when Conan’s hand wanders a little too far. He and Conan are actively seeking each other’s help and indulging in silly banter, even as Kaito makes a fool of himself with Ran. Speaking of Ran, this is the movie where she first fully realizes that Kid naturally resembles Shinichi. And as a cherry on top, we also get a shot of Kaito Kuroba himself.

And I think it’s worth considering what aired the very same day the movie came out: Secret Birth of Kaitou Kid, the first episode of TMS’s adaptation of Magic Kaito.  After years of teasing the door open on who Kaitou Kid is behind the mask, TMS adapted the first chapter of Magic Kaito and aired it in the Detective Conan TV time slot. It, too, is an incredibly silly episode of an incredibly silly first chapter of an incredibly silly gag manga. THIS IS KAITO KUROBA, Detective Conan said. OBSERVE HOW SILLIE HE IS.

Testing the Waters

TMS eventually made 12 of these episodes. Based on the air dates, I can only assume Secret Birth of Kaitou Kid was meant to be a one-off, or at the very least it was a testing of the waters. Whatever the case, the remaining episodes got greenlit and were aired over 2011-2012. The most interesting change to the second half of these episodes is the addition of new plot points related to Magic Kaito’s organization, chiefly the new member Spider. They were introduced alongside Hakuba, who I imagine they wished to give a larger role in the episodes he did show up in. Another major takeaway from the TMS adaptation is their decision to animate Akako’s Delivery Service in The Witch, The Detective, and The Phantom Thief, albeit edited and extended to deal with the new anime-only plot points. In terms of Akako’s feelings for Kaito and Hakuba’s discovery of his identity, it’s a fairly significant chapter. Despite that, this is the only animated adaptation. I have some… complicated feelings regarding this, but now is not the time. 

As for the manga, we have a major arc in Mystery Train. This is not, in all technicality, a Kid case. If anything, his presence is pure coincidence, given he was only there to stake out the train ahead of the actual heist. Though this is a purebred Detective Conan plot, with the Black Organization’s involvement, Kid winds up a key part of their plan to convince the Organization that Sherry is well and truly dead.

Though his appearance in this case would be referenced in the future, this would be the first and last time Kid was directly involved in a major Detective Conan plot beat. This chapter was released before I had an active interest in Detective Conan, so much of what I’ve seen are second- or third-hand accounts from Japanese fans who went through the arc’s release. In short, reception was very mixed to Kid being such a major part in the resolution of this conflict. While there are those who enjoy his inclusion, either because they’re fans of Kid or because they accept the manner in which he was dragged into the plot halfway through, there are also those who consider him a “cheat” character who taints the worldview of Detective Conan by his presence alone. Gosho himself has also mentioned that he won’t be involving Kid in Black Organization plots anymore, either, due to the backlash.

My personal view on Kid’s involvement in Mystery Train is that the arc felt very much like a capital-E Event, so I bought it. There was a clear amount of luck involved in his presence there, so I could see how some may think the entire thing contrived, but it’s that coincidence that sells it for me. It’s Conan needing to fly by the seat of his pants to ensure Haibara makes it out alive, and further impresses upon us that they were half a step away from potentially fatal consequences. Nevertheless, this seems to be a case of an attempt to integrate Kid into the greater Detective Conan narrative that ultimately failed, so he returns to being largely divorced from the overall plot.

Despite this, though, there appear to be multiple chapters after this that focus on systematically introducing Kid to members of the extended cast. This starts with Blush Mermaid, Sera’s first presence at a Kid heist. What’s also unique about this chapter is the small but significant scene at the end that actually does continue the overall main plot - in this case, Sera’s misgivings over the death of Akai. Though Kid will not be overly involved in the main plot from here on out, his chapters do start featuring B Plots that touch on said main narrative. It’s… a half victory, of sorts, in terms of integration.

The other major takeaway from this case is a continuation of Conan and Kid apparently keeping a score of sorts. Due to Kid’s assistance during Mystery Train and the lack of a real theft, Conan lets Kid go. We’re in real “friendly rival” hours now.

Twin Bets pits Kid against Kyogoku, a frankly long overdue confrontation considering he’s Sonoko’s boyfriend. There’s a half-argument to be had that this also involves Kid in a major B Plot for the series as a whole, since this is a romance plot with a major recurring character. There’s also a level of intrinsic amusement in a Kid vs Kyogoku confrontation, since it comes down to (to quote my girlfriend) “guy who is literally from another manga but feels like he belongs here vs guy who somehow belongs here but definitely should be in another manga.”

Twin Bets also serves as the very first time Kid looks at the gem of the day under the moonlight in a Detective Conan chapter. It's the first case post-TMS Magic Kaito where it's applicable for him to do so; he's a bit busy with other things in Mystery Train, and he calls out Blush Mermaid for being a fake. This trend would continue in every case afterward where the plot wasn't otherwise preventing him from doing so (like the murder in Azure Throne).

Normally, this particular stretch of chapters would include quite a few more due to how many of them follow this “Kid, meet [Character]” format. But some of you may have noticed that, despite all the ample opportunities I’ve had to speak of it, I’ve avoided mentioning a certain number…

1412

Thousands of words earlier in this retrospective, I mentioned that Detective Conan’s Black Star felt the most like a crossover chapter. What I didn’t mention at the time, however, was that it also feels like one of the most fundamentally necessary Kid cases in Detective Conan. Not because it’s Kid’s first appearance, but because it introduces a piece of information about Kaitou Kid that eventually becomes baked into his identity despite the fact that it was introduced outside of his source series.

1412, the Interpol criminal code assigned to the internationally renowned phantom thief that was subsequently transformed after an author misread a journalist’s hasty scrawl as “KID.”

It feels like no small coincidence that the A1 adaptation of Magic Kaito added “1412” to the end of its title not just to differentiate this adaptation from TMS’s Magic Kaito specials, but to also indicate that this version of Magic Kaito would be the marriage of its namesake manga and Detective Conan.

In this regard and more, Magic Kaito 1412 modernizes aspects of the original story.

Technology, for example, was updated to reflect what a high school student like Kaito would be doing. Instead of reading the news in the papers, he’s scrolling through news sites on his phone. This is the most common kind of update that you see across adaptations of all stripes, so it’s the less interesting change.

The anime also modernizes with regards to itself, looking inward to find out what people associate with Kid in the modern day and adjusting the story - and the order that story is told - to account for that. This is expressed in ways both large and small. Blue Birthday, for example, is pushed way up to episode 2 of 1412 to introduce Pandora to the audience as soon as possible. Given Blue Birthday is also an Aoko-centric episode, it’s equally fitting that she gets the second episode. Jii’s significance is heightened by reworking the scrapped chapter Hustler vs Magician, a chapter that also coincidentally focused on an aspect of Jii’s past, into episode 3. This focus on major characters continues into episodes 4-6, which introduce Hakuba (chapter 15), Akako (chapter 6), and Shinichi (chapter 23), in that order.

There are also minor changes, likely made for pacing or simply content reasons. One small but frankly fairly significant change involves Kaito’s card gun. He’s shown using it in the first chapter of the manga, which also means he’s using it in the first episode of TMS’s adaptation. Since it eventually comes to be a signature weapon for Kaitou Kid, 1412 prevents Kaito from using it while in his civilian identity (like when he’s panicking about the fish with Aoko). Due to moving Blue Birthday up to episode 2, heists that originally weren’t really bothered with holding the target up to the moon include scenes of Kaito doing just that. Jii is suspiciously absent for most chapters until Black Star, so 1412 inserts him into animated adaptations of older heists, such as helping Kaito prepare the fireworks for Blue Birthday or providing an anime-original explanation of magic vs sorcery. There are similar one-offs with other characters as well, like a short scene of Hakuba being inserted into Akako’s introductory episode.

As a proper series in its own right, as opposed to a series of animated specials, 1412 also had to decide on a unified tone. Though TMS’s adaptation fluctuates wildly, 1412’s tone is a bit more even across the board. It’s comedic and dips its toes in gag vibes without taking it to absurd levels. While TMS’s adaptation of the first episode includes an entire apparatus outside the classroom window in episode 1, Kaito simply jumps out the window and makes it to the ground after running around the classroom in 1412. Though it also pulls away from some of the more atmospheric moments of TMS’s adaptation, it pulls back far more from the gag energy.

As a result of the above two points, many chapters are shuffled around or cut entirely. Chapters like Clockwork Heart, Japan’s Most Irresponsible Prime Minister, or I Am The Master are a level of absurdity that doesn’t fit with modern Magic Kaito’s energy, so they were completely cut. The Police Are Everywhere (chapter 2) was pushed back and adapted as The Princess and the Thief’s Improv (episode 15), because the emotional core of Nakamori potentially getting removed from the police force simply doesn’t work that early in the story outside the gag context. Akako’s Delivery Service was also unfortunately cut… Whether it be because of Akako’s appearance as Kid and the subsequent punchline or because of the technology Hakuba used to ascertain Kid’s identity, they apparently determined it was either too outside the tone or too difficult to adapt. Hakuba’s call in Golden Eye truly comes out of nowhere as a result, though, and that’s one fewer episode for a character that already had a bit of a spotty appearance record early in the manga’s run.

When the anime was announced, there were 30 chapters out. Seven of these were ultimately not animated, and many of the two chapter cases could be easily adapted into a single episode. They needed more material to fill out the remaining episodes, so they did this in two main ways.

The first is by reaching into some key Detective Conan cases. Black Star is a bonafide Magic Kaito case, but shifting it and Shinichi’s appearance in this adaptation to episode six - right after a series of core cast introductions - is actually very telling. 1412 was not only concerned with adapting the manga for modern sensibilities, but also with adapting Detective Conan for a Magic Kaito audience and further strengthening the connection between the two. This “adaptation” resulted in anime-original retellings of Ryoma’s Gunbelt, Sky Walk, and Purple Nail from Kaito’s point of view. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a decision early on in the anime’s development, and if it was their existence that necessitated the tone of 1412 be evened out via not adapting the more “out there” chapters of the source manga.

The second thing they did to fill the run time was for Gosho to write an entirely new heist to function as a finale for the anime. This was Midnight Crow, the first heist to really touch on the driving plot of Magic Kaito (outside of Snake showing up to be ineffective) since Blue Birthday. Gosho’s comment on this case in the Treasured Edition is… a lot.

After a standalone anime adaptation was greenlit, the topic of what we should do for the final episode came up at our first meeting, so I said “Why don’t I write the ‘Black Kaitou Kid’ story I have saved as a trump card in Sunday and use that in the final episode?” Thus I wrote Midnight Crow! I’ll never forget how surprised the members of staff looked when I bluntly told them that Toichi is actually still alive (lol). (…) Though Chikage made Kaito work as Kid in Phantom Lady, she tried to get him to quit in Midnight Crow because of everything that happened in Las Vegas… But that’s a story for another time (lol).

The story itself has plenty of hints that Kaitou Corbeau is a Toichi-Chikage tag-team, but actually seeing him spell it out so casually sure is something.

Speaking of spelling things out, though, I also want to take an aside to touch on the Magic Kaito 1412 novelizations. Six volumes were published roughly concurrently with the anime’s run, and though there isn’t anything drastically different from what we already know from either Magic Kaito or Detective Conan, sometimes the narration can be quite enlightening. For the purposes of this, though, I specifically want to touch on that pin from earlier.

In the movie continuity, there is very clearly a moment where Kaito figures out Conan’s identity in The Last Wizard of the Century. There is no concrete equivalent to this in either Detective Conan or Magic Kaito, and 1412 doesn’t really expand on this either. I mentioned the possibility that Ryoma’s Gunbelt would have given Kaito ammo to figure out who Conan might be, but it’s not the most compelling argument. I’ve heard tell that Gosho once implied Kaito may have simply come to this conclusion on his own outside of the movie continuity, and I’ve personally always taken this stance given he seems to recognize Conan as a “high school detective” in Fairy’s Lips - and simply DOES know, no arguments, by Azure Throne.

Taking novelizations like these as fully canon is always a bit of a risk, but there’s a very interesting expansion on this particular issue in Volume 3, during the Ryoma’s Gunbelt adaptation. After Kaito runs into Conan while under disguise at the museum, the novels go into a brief explanation of how Kaitou Kid came to be known as such (aka the 1412 thing), followed by a flashback to Kid and Conan’s first meeting in DC’s Black Star. The narration then turns to what happened after the fact. This is fairly long, but as far as I’m aware these novels aren’t available in English, legally or otherwise. As such…

***

Kaito investigated the child that was on the roof of the Beika hotel - the young boy who called himself a detective, and with whom Kaito fought during the Black Star incident.

His name was Conan Edogawa.

He was a distant relative of Hiroshi Agasa, inventor and scientist, and was currently freeloading at the house of Kogoro Mouri, the famous detective “The Sleeping Kogoro.”

…And that was all he really figured out about him.

Conan Edogawa was full of mysteries.

But there was one thing that bothered Kaito.

Kogoro Mouri had a high school daughter named Ran. And Ran Mouri was the childhood friend of Shinichi Kudo.

That Shinichi Kudo.

The very high school detective that cornered Kaito during the clock tower heist.

Before his run-in with Conan, Kaito had looked into the young man that had aided the Metropolitan Police Department.

At a certain point after that clock tower incident, he had apparently gone missing.

He was not officially registered as missing, nor did it become a massive incident. But he stopped attending Teitan High School and disappeared from his home. He was apparently gone because he was busy chasing after some case a client had requested of him, but…

The elementary schooler Conan Edogawa appeared before both Ran Mouri and Kaitou Kid as if taking his place.

Shinichi Kudo, and Conan Edogawa.

Due to their mysterious nature, the two detectives continued to fascinate Kaito.

By the way…

The certain young novelist who had given Kaitou Kid his name was currently a world-renowned mystery writer.

His name was Yusaku Kudo.

Shinichi Kudo’s father.

Then there’s his mother, Yukiko Kudo, who was an essayist. She was a former actress, and once studied under the magician Toichi Kuroba to prepare for a role. Kaito had even once met her alongside his father in his childhood.

A strange turn of fate connected the Kudo and Kuroba families across multiple generations.

Did Kaito realize…?

Did he know that Conan Edogawa was actually Shinichi Kudo, who turned into a child after being forced to take a strange medicine?!

-

Professor Agasa was aware that Conan Edogawa was actually Shinichi Kudo… and it was likely only a select few others knew this. Not even Ran Mouri, his childhood friend, knew.

If Shinichi Kudo was keeping his identity a secret… then the reason he became a child must be pretty dangerous. Something that involved crime and the underworld. Just knowing the truth could put your life in danger.

It was only obvious that Kaito kept his identity as Kaitou Kid hidden.

But Shinichi Kudo must be living an even more troublesome life.

***

The narration of these novels knocks on the fourth wall fairly often, explaining that middle bit of this particular excerpt. It never confirms for sure whether or not Kaito managed to connect the dots, but the aforementioned questionable canonicity of novelizations like this means that was probably the safe choice. That there’s extra information here at all about Kaito looking into both Shinichi AND Conan is a pleasant surprise, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s also a bit frustrating that we don’t yet have even a hint of how this occurred in the manga when we now have two potential sources of that knowledge in the movies and these novels.

Which you opt to take as the more likely canon is probably up to personal interpretation, but I think I’m personally a bit more willing to go with a version of the novel’s events. I prefer to include the movies as a level of canon unless they outright contradict the manga (like M10 does, tragically), but the novel’s versions of events is probably the safer option.

But it’s the inclusion of extra scenes like these that further connects Magic Kaito - especially this particular iteration - to Detective Conan. They are holding hands so tightly now.

This all eventually culminates in Sunflowers of Inferno. Though M14 is the more obvious turning point with regards to Kid’s general behavior and personality in Detective Conan movies, Sunflowers of Inferno is a slightly more interesting turning point: all three movies after 1412 airs involve aspects of Magic Kaito, whether it be in its story or in its theming.

For this movie, it’s a very obvious example of the former. I think the plot of M19 is… strictly okay, but Kid’s motivation throughout being related to Jii is something I really enjoyed about the film. You know, assuming you don’t think too hard about Jii’s age as it relates to the timing of the flashbacks. Outside of that, Kid’s behavior in the movie almost looks as though it’s walking back from M14, but that’s only because Kid is playing the villain for most of it. Once that facade is dealt with he’s fully cooperative with Conan, to the point that the latter trusts the former with Ran’s safety. The opening scene with Kaito in his dark heist garb is also a nice bonus.

All in all, I think 1412 airing actually has the biggest effect on the movies. I’m not sure if that was intentional - movies 23 and 27 have the same director, so it could just be that her artistic vision includes MK in it - but for Sunflowers of Inferno it was almost certainly intentional as a show of fireworks after the ending of the anime. As for the manga, 1412 airing actually seems to have had very little influence on the Detective Conan chapters featuring him. Though Kid is a lot more likely to resemble the version of the character from Magic Kaito now, the manga seems a bit more concerned with introducing him to the new guard.

Meet The Fam

The Detective Conan cases in this section continue the general trend from after Mystery Train of either 1) introducing Kid to a significant sub character, or 2) running parallel to a B Plot that is concerned with the main narrative.

Luna Memoria does a couple of interesting things. First, this is the first time Conan explicitly asks Kid about investigating the jewel of the heist, since he knows Kid is on the search for a “special jewel.” Kaito is very candid in his response, telling Conan he ran into the deceased owner as the readers get a small flashback to Kaito Kuroba reverse pickpocketing the necklace. It’s an interesting conversation to have in the first Kid case since 1412 aired, especially since this aspect of Kid’s MO hasn’t really been discussed in any concrete way in DC before this point.

The second thing it does is have a small but nonetheless amusing B Plot with Okiya. While taking pictures of potential targets for his disguise, Kaito inadvertently gets a picture of Okiya’s voice changer. So Okiya joins Conan in confronting Kid in the bathroom and Very Nicely requests they get that picture back. Kaito has an “oh shit” moment, gets the heck outta dodge, and the chapter ends on a comical note when Kid can’t escape because Nakamori refuses to stop looking for him.

The next DC chapter, Fairy’s Lips, does a little bit of 1 and a little bit of 2. Surprisingly enough, Heiji has not had a significant confrontation with Kid in the manga before, and now Kid is getting himself involved in his and Kazuha’s romance plot. This chapter is retroactively significant because it’s the key jumping-off point for Heiji and Kid’s relationship in M27. But it’s also surprisingly significant for the MAIN main plot of Detective Conan by bringing in Koumei as a secondary detective that’s working to capture Kid… because he’s in Tokyo to receive a mysterious envelope addressed to him. The truth of the envelope’s contents is an Extremely Big Deal, and though by this point in the manga I was fully aware that plot developments would often happen in otherwise standalone cases now, I was personally not ready for that in a Kid case. So there’s that.

Between these two cases is the Magic Kaito heist Sun Halo, which puts a focus on Aoko for the first time in a while. It’s also very minorly a Magic Kaito version of a suspicion arc - the first one since Kaitou Kid’s Busy Day Off - though it ends with a return to the status quo. This chapter, as mentioned way earlier, also features some magic shenanigans from Akako in a more concrete way than we’d seen in a while. There’s some stuff about these chapters that are more disturbing the longer you think about them (what do you Mean Kaito just carries some blood neutralizing spray around with him so people can’t figure out his identity based on his blood), and the general tone is a lot more somber because Kaito is suffering from both pain and blood loss. It feels like an extension of Midnight Crow’s tone, in that regard.

After these three chapters is our next Kid movie, Fist of Blue Sapphire. This movie features a romance subplot between Sonoko and Kyogoku, and thus brings Kid back into it via certain aspects of the movie plot. As a post-1412 movie, the major feature of this movie is not the plot, but the thematic underpinnings of said plot.

Many post-Blue Birthday Magic Kaito heists tend to overlap aspects of Kaito’s situation with that of the characters introduced in the heist. The feature character of Red Tear is a woman who has grown to hate magic after the untimely death of her parents. The titular Dark Knight lives a double life as a notorious criminal for his son’s sake, and Kaito works to make sure his son never finds out about that double life. The thief in Golden Eye is attempting to salvage her father’s legacy. If they aren’t straight parallels, then they present what-if scenarios or twists on what Kaito is going through.

Fist of Blue Sapphire pulls something similar with Rishi, one of the movie-original characters. He’s torn up enough by his father’s death that he chooses to dirty his hands in order to get his revenge. After Midnight Crow, where Toichi himself wants to ensure that revenge is not Kaito’s only driving force, this presents a what-if scenario - an alternate path that Kaito might have chosen, had his admiration for his father not won out over his grief at his death. It’s interesting to see this particular thematic through line in a Detective Conan movie because it’s never been shown in a Detective Conan manga case before, and it’s one of the reasons I’m particularly fond of Chika Nagaoka’s Kid movies.

Another major aspect of this movie is how the sheer amount of screen presence Kid has gives the movie ample time to show what more involved cooperation between Kid and Conan looks like. The second Kid is framed for the crime, he chooses to go to Conan; if Kid looks to be in genuine danger, Conan begrudgingly comes to his aid. They spend time talking over the aspects of the case, and work seamlessly together during the climax. It’s by far the most actively cooperative they’ve been before or since, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere (and the spirit doesn’t quite go away, either). The clearest indication of this change in relationship is the line spoken by Kaito after he’s dealt with his wounds on the roof: “A magician makes you believe he holds something within his clenched fist, and a detective guesses correctly what they hold before it’s ever revealed.” It’s a stark contrast to probably his most famous line from Black Star about phantom thieves being artists and detectives being no more than critics.

Fist of Blue Sapphire happens to be one of those movies that I personally have any concrete info about via things like guidebooks. I don’t want to bloat this more than it already is, so there’s only two things I read that I want to share. 

The first is Kappei Yamaguchi’s seeming reaction to the script during recording, specifically in regards to his laugh. Normally, Kid in Detective Conan has had a sort of booming, open laugh, but twice during the recording for Fist of Blue Sapphire he opted to go for a version of the laugh as written out in Magic Kaito - an “ahaha” vs a “kekeke” kinda difference. He talks about this in the Kaitou Kid Secret Archives, but an online article on the movie from Movie Walker expands on this from Nagaoka’s point of view:

This time, we have a lot of aspects from “Magic Kaito” and Kaitou Kid’s true face in this movie. The moment I thought “This is just Kaito” was during ADR, when Yamguchi Kappei-san laughed like ‘hihi!’ Kappei-san said to me “I did it even though I thought it’d be struck out.” (lol) I could tell in those words that he met this movie with his own interpretation. I was impressed. We have a very cool Kid as a result.

It’s also in the Secret Archives interview that we get the “His speed may be at 100, but he has zero combat ability at all” comment from Gosho to Nagaoka, which is… extremely funny.

The other major thing from the Secret Archives interview (and elsewhere) is an anecdote about a certain regret. Nagaoka herself seems to be a big fan of Magic Kaito, but after M23 was released to theaters, Gosho lamented that he should have had Kid allude to Aoko. This was brought up again in a more recent Animage article: “Actually, back during Fist of Blue Sapphire, Aoyama-sensei had told me something akin to ‘We should have had Kid say “I have a better sapphire (Aoko) already” when he returns the blue sapphire,’ and I responded ‘You’re going to tell me that now, Sensei?!”

This is all to say that, despite the lack of any obvious elements akin to Jii in M19, they were clearly thinking of Magic Kaito while making M23.

The subsequent DC chapters continue the “Kid, meet [Character]” trend with Amuro (and Kazami) in Queen’s Bang. He’s a fairly active part of the process, not the least of which because Kid belittled his card trick skills as they were lining up to enter the museum. Though this chapter doesn’t have a relevant B Plot, it is the first reference to Kid’s presence in Mystery Train since Blush Mermaid - and a pretty significant one at that, since Amuro was the one that actually had to deal with “Sherry.”

Siren Splash’s main character introduction is actually Azusa, which feels a bit like a follow up on the minor role she had in Queen’s Bang. This case has a couple of fun things that sort of cover the entire spectrum of ways in which a Kid case could be fun for our purposes. The least significant of these is Kid’s skates, which (if memory serves) haven’t been seen since chapter 10 of Magic Kaito. Gosho mentions wanting to use them again in his Treasured Edition comment on that case, so it’s a lot of fun to finally see them show up again.

Going up to slightly more significant, there’s a Very Ominous Comment from Kanenori about his left eye, which serves as foreshadowing to information we find out about him about a volume later. And then we have the end of the case, which is a little difficult to talk about because we don’t have any elucidating information yet. Regardless, I’ve always been amused that, despite Conan being the talk of the various police departments, he’s largely avoided being in the news… except where Kid is involved. It seems that’s finally coming to a head with the older gentleman that is none too pleased about the news story covering Conan’s victory. We don’t know what role this man has yet, but if this has ties to the main plot, then this is a very amusing way in which Kid has affected the main plot.

There’s not much else of note to say about this series of chapters, because it’s largely continuing the trends of the era that led to 1412’s release and codifying a less mysterious Kid, and an (at times) more cooperative Conan. But it’s also a comparatively sparse number of chapters; in the over seven years since 1412, Kid had only featured in four chapters here. You probably wouldn’t expect any major developments from a precedent like that, right?

…Right?

Erasing the Line in the Sand

We have now entered the modern era - specifically, the immediate lead-up to M27. Recency means some of these things are going to be a little bit harder to extrapolate on, largely because we have no idea if this is the start of something new, or perhaps just an outlier in the general trend. Regardless, some of this stuff fully makes my brain spin. Never mind brainworms - I have brain bees, and they will not stop buzzing.

We start with the most-recent Kid case in Detective Conan as of this writing, Azure Throne. This particular case is significant for multiple reasons, besides just being a good time. First, it’s Hakuba’s first appearance in Detective Conan since Detective Koshien, which means it’s been a whole seventeen years. Help. It’s arguably also the closest it comes to a proper Hakuba vs Kid case in Detective Conan, since Twilight Mansion is a little too busy with other aspects of its plot to spend much (if any) time on Hakuba’s relationship with Kid. Hakuba is also just a little insane, given his plan was to airlift the entire observation deck and sink it into a pool to trap Kid… There’s some minor Magic Kaito gag energy in that idea, and Hakuba’s never done things by halves.

Next, we have yet another reference to Kid’s presence in Mystery Train. Queen’s bang was only a couple years ago, and in Conan Publishing Time that’s no time at all considering Mystery Train was back in 2012. It’s interesting to get two references to that particular case so close together. 

And speaking of references, my third point of interest for this case is that it straight up references Golden Eye. There’s even an illustration of Cartier, the security company manager that Nakamori is thinking about when he responds to Jirokichi’s comment. Magic Kaito has certainly referenced Detective Conan before, and 1412 itself pulls heists whole-sale from it to fill out its runtime. But this is the first time it’s gone the other way around.

It’s also, somehow, the very first time Kid has assumed the Shinichi Kudo disguise in the manga. And even more surprisingly, it’s done so at Conan’s request. Sure, Kid was the one begging Conan to free him of suspicion for the murder that just happened, but “disguise yourself as me and make sure Ran doesn’t find out” was the condition Conan put forward for his cooperation.

This connects to the fifth and sixth points that I’m concerned with. The fifth point is Ran herself; she has a comment toward the end about how she can’t forgive Kid for “disguising as Shinichi every single time.” Which is, you know. Kinda weird, if all we’re considering is manga continuity. This is his very first time assuming this disguise in the manga! So in Gosho’s mind, at least, the movies aren’t not canon. Considering more recent movies are more likely to require “homework��� to fully enjoy them, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were more carefully written to slot into canon more easily than early movies were.

The sixth and most hilarious point is a single aside in a conversation Kid and Conan have.

Actually, why do you look so similar to me?

Why would I know?! Maybe we have a shared ancestor or something. (To be honest… I’m not even changing my voice much, either…)

Now, the addition of that voice comment makes the whole thing sound like a gag - they do have the same seiyuu, after all - but their similarity has always been a bit of a gag… In the movies. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure it’s ever really been brought up in the manga, so this is a joke that feels almost necessary after Conan requested Kid to disguise himself as “Shinichi,” which Kid managed to do despite being not at all prepared for it.

And, you know. It’s also foreshadowing now. Not by much, considering the movie was only a few months out, but still.

tl;dr: There’s a lot going on in Azure Throne. It is probably the densest of the Kid cases in terms of its relationship to itself and its relationship to Magic Kaito. As a result of that, there’s something about this case that feels like the purest mix of Magic Kaito and Detective Conan. It also feels pretty clearly written with the movie in mind, considering it not only had the aforementioned foreshadowing, but also brought in ideas from previous movies into the manga to create synergy between them.

After that we have Green Dragon, a Magic Kaito heist that ran through M27’s theater release. Meeting Aoko’s mother is certainly a standout of this particular heist, but what I personally find more interesting is the tone. It eschews the steady creep of drama into the narrative by pulling back to something more comedic, and in some ways feels a little like a return to form. Kaito’s fear of fish is brought up again for the first time in ages, and Midoriko gets a whole host of muscle men to corner Kid.

The chapter also opens with a reference to the crimes (as Midoriko would prosecute them) Kid committed in Queen’s Bang. In terms of time, it’s been over ten years since the last MK heist referenced DC in any meaningful way. But in terms of heist count, Phantom Lady was only three heists ago.

It is at this point I must discuss the movie, The Million-dollar Pentagram. As the movie is not yet out on Blu-ray as of this writing and the international offerings were a bit spotty (especially outside of Asia), I want to give another spoiler warning for the information I’m about to go into. I mentioned earlier that later movies require a bit of “homework” for full enjoyment, and M27 is no exception. It has also turned into one of the more common complaints I see from casual DC movie enjoyers, at least on the Japanese side of things - because yes, there is a whole audience of people whose only exposure to the franchise is the yearly movie. While the most easily recognizable pieces of “homework” for this particular movie are clearly cases like Fairy’s Lips or even M21 for familiarity with Momiji and Heiji’s attempts to confess to Kazuha, it is also very much arguable that the second major pillar of this movie requires a working knowledge of Magic Kaito. Like, not just knowing who Kaitou Kid is, but knowing who Kaito Kuroba is.

Which means I’m going to be talking about a lot of this movie in concrete detail. The main thrust of the movie is, to put it very simply, a treasure hunt. What I discuss will give you very few clues as to how or why that mystery is solved, but it will end up touching on key events, motives, and emotional beats. If you’d rather keep yourself unspoiled so as to enjoy those aspects as well, please skip to my discussion on FILE.0. You can find that by scrolling to below the second horizontal line, or doing a Ctrl+F search on “FILE.0.” That being said, there will also be more concrete references to the post-credits scene everyone knows about by this point in the final section of this retrospective as well.

——

There’s a lot I want to discuss with regards to M27, but it’s frankly hard to conceive of how I’d go about it. Going through the movie chronologically would take far too long, so I think I largely just want to list up a few interesting elements and then dive into what significance I think those elements hold. For the curious, I saw this movie twice in theaters: once about a week after premier, and again when they were running English subtitles at certain locations.

Let’s start at the beginning, with the most amusing thing this movie did before it was even released: the lack of a pre-screening. Movies like these usually have a seiyuu event of some kind attached to an early screening of the movie that fans can attend via lottery a little while before the official release, but they used the framing device of Kid “stealing the pre-screening” to avoid holding one at all. This isn’t strictly related to anything I’ll discuss further, but it is amusing to think that they believed the information presented in this movie was important and significant enough that they didn’t want to risk people talking ahead of the official release. And, you know, it WAS, but we’re not getting into that just yet.

Also somewhat minorly was the cover of an-an being Shinichi and Kaito, as opposed to Conan and Kid or even Shinichi and Kid. There’s also been a handful of DC merch that includes both Kaito and Kid in the lineup, and I don’t think stuff like this has happened since 1412 aired. It’s clear in hindsight they were focusing on his civilian identity because of his motive in the film and the reveal in the stinger.

As for the movie itself, I want to start REALLY basic, and actually talk about the score of the movie. The Million-dollar Pentagram is the first Kid film since Yugo Kanno took over from Katsuo Ohno for the movie soundtracks. This normally wouldn’t matter too much, except for the fact that Kaitou Kid has utilized a variation on the same two themes since The Last Wizard of the Century. There was apparently quite a bit of back and forth as to how to handle this aspect of the soundtrack, but in the end they went with a completely new theme: The Grand Circus (華麗なるサーカス). If you’re reading this and somehow haven’t heard it before, I highly recommend you give it a listen. It serves as his calling card throughout the movie and is a much more playful tune. I can’t help thinking about Toichi’s conversation with Kaito in Hustler vs Magician about how the pierrot is the most important member of the circus (yet another reason I’m glad this chapter got salvaged in the 1412 adaptation). I definitely don’t dislike his old themes, but I do enjoy that the vibe of this one expresses a side of Kid in Detective Conan that has seen more screen time lately, but has until now had no musical motif to express it.

Another amusing part of this soundtrack is a certain melody, only a couple bars long, that repeats throughout the entire score. This melody just so happens to play during the final major reveal of the movie: that Toichi had been disguised as Yoshihisa Kawasoe the entire time. Kawasoe is a local detective that is in and out of the movie for almost its entire runtime. Toichi was, in essence, with us the entire time. Just like this melody was, weaved in and out of the soundtrack. It’s a nice touch. Kanno mentions in the Toho Cinemas guidebook that there’s very little impact to a melody introduced in the final moments, and that he wanted to inspire a sense of deja vu alongside surprise by accompanying that final reveal alongside a melody that had played the entire time. It’s kinda neat.

As for Kid’s behavior in this movie, it’s informed entirely by his desire to discover why his dad apparently went after this “potentially world-destroying” treasure, found it, and then left it alone. There’s an overlap between this and his motive in M19, considering both are more personal in nature, but M27’s motive is also far more fundamental to Magic Kaito. Kid is mentioned multiple times to have an assistant of some kind in Detective Conan chapters, but the only mention of his dad is that 1) he exists, and 2) he was the previous Kid. He’s not at all connected to Kid’s search for Pandora or his reason to be the second Kid in the first place, so bringing his dad into things as a motive feels more poignant if you know Kaito’s always been chasing him. Which is to say, it relies a bit more on knowing Kaito’s personal story from Magic Kaito.

The plot leans into this “if you know, you know” vibe by having Kaito only ever indirectly refer to his dad. When he explains why he’s searching for these swords to Conan and Heiji, he only refers to “a certain thief.” In a moment of respite, he only just barely gets to say the first sounds of “dad” before he’s interrupted by one of our culprits. It’s not said in any capacity until the very end of the movie, when the treasure is found alongside Toichi’s glove and a notice from Kid the first: “Wake not a sleeping lion.”

Going back to Heiji and Conan, he’s not openly cooperative with them until they save him from near death. It’s at that point they share info and Kid ropes them into solving this puzzle because it’s what they do best. The rest of their cooperation in the movie usually takes the shape of a “2+1” format. Conan and Heiji are obviously working together while Kid comes in and out via a number of disguises. There’s a comedy to his disguises in this film, since they’re almost too easy to see through. It’s likely in part so Heiji and Conan can be aware of his presence, since they’re technically working together. Minami Takayama also picks up on this in her movie pamphlet interview, adding that he “seems more open and honest this time, probably because that’s just how badly he wants to solve this mystery” and that it feels more like “Kaito Kuroba and Shinichi Kudo have taken a step closer” as opposed to it just being Kid and Conan this time around. Kappei Yamaguchi in the same set of interviews says he’s “basically Kaito” with Conan, even if he still mostly behaves as Kid with Heiji.

To summarize, Kid’s behavior in this movie is far more open due to the goal being tied to his dad, and with Conan specifically the mask is basically off. Add this to the comedic touch of his disguises throughout, and you’ve got some good Magic Kaito vibes despite his reduced screen time compared to M23.

But that only lays the foundation for those vibes. There are plenty of other reasons why it feels more Magic Kaito-y, given key aspects of this movie bring in more aspects of Kaito’s civilian life - and certain emotional beats rely on your knowledge of that.

To start with a more minor beat that wraps up things mentioned above: Toichi’s glove. Kaito takes it with him after discovering the treasure, and there’s a short scene while he’s flying through the sky (after a more significant moment we’ll discuss later) that sees him looking at the glove with a frankly mixed expression. The novelization of the movie mentions him smiling happily as he soars through the sky, but that is not the expression we actually see in the movie. He has Thoughts about finding his dad’s glove there, but the audience is left to guess what they may be. It’s a hole that’s nearly impossible to fill without knowing Kaito’s backstory (and, arguably, without knowing about Midnight Crow).

And we’ll get to Midnight Crow’s significance, just you wait.

The second beat I want to talk about is Nakamori. First (and more minorly) is his engagement in some true gag Magic Kaito energy. A short scene with a disguised Kaito at a hotel alongside Conan and Heiji ends with Nakamori up against the window, looking in with multiple police officers behind him, as he realizes he’s found Kid. Kid then runs, and Nakamori and his officers run across the screen as Conan and Heiji continue their conversation. Real goofy hours.

But the actual most important story beat with Nakamori is him getting shot by one of our antagonists. He’a shot while on duty and escorting another principle character, and the framing of the movie puts us in Kid’s shoes as he discovers a gun aimed at the both of them just a little too late. This decision carries with it a couple of interesting tidbits, whether they be for our purposes or for how it seemed to affect the people that worked on it.

I want to do the latter first, since the snowballing is less extreme. Yamaguchi has talked about this scene a number of times, whether it be in interviews or during seiyuu events. As a voice actor, he was surprised at his own performance as Kid yells out Nakamori’s name. It was desperate and loud in a way he’d never been before, but it still felt natural to him; he thought it was indicative of just how important Nakamori is to Kaito, and that this was less Detective Conan’s Kid and more Magic Kaito’s Kaito Kuroba.

Related to this is a comment he made at a stage event that in his heart, he’d wanted to say “ojisan” instead of “Inspector Nakamori.” But he felt that it would be too difficult to display their relationship that way, so he went with the latter. There’s a lot of character interpretation you can do with regards to what Kaito chose to say in the moment, but I also can’t deny the possibility that it simply comes down to the “Kaito and Nakamori” dynamic not appearing in Detective Conan at all. Well, at least in part.

The other major ramification of this narrative decision is actually Aoko’s appearance in the movie. Nagaoka recounts in multiple interviews, such as in Febri or Animage, that she originally felt the tension in the movie was a little too slow-going, so she suggested someone get shot. The original plan suggested shooting Nishimura, the Hokkaido police detective, but Gosho said Kid wouldn’t save him if that was the case. It was here Nagaoka suggested Nakamori, to which Gosho agreed. He then added, though, that if he was in the hospital, then Aoko would likely show up.

Thus we have Aoko’s first theatrical appearance, and her first appearance in Detective Conan at all since Black Star. Her appearance in this movie grounds Kid’s emotional narrative in Magic Kaito; it implies the existence of Kaito Kuroba in ways Hakuba or Nakamori never could, because her significance rests entirely in his civilian identity. There are scenes dedicated to Kaito watching over her in disguise as she waits for her father to wake up, only leaving once she seems to be okay. He’s on the phone with her in one of the last scenes in the movie, and his smile when he ends the call is the softest it’s ever been in Detective Conan.

That’s not all, though. In a cute example of the movie affecting the manga, Gosho told Nagaoka later on that a gesture Aoko performs - a two-handed clap to the face that helps her psych herself up - was brought back into Magic Kaito for his April serialization. We see Midoriko do the very same gesture when she wakes up after her quick nap, as it turns out.

There’s something else I want to mention about Aoko, but that fits better elsewhere. So before we talk about the elephant in the room, I want to mention the theme of the movie. Both Nagaoka and Takahiro Okura, the script writer, have described the movie as dealing with “parent-child relationships” and “inheritance.” All of the antagonists follow after their forefathers in some way, but it’s an idea most obviously expressed by Hijiri Fukushiro, the main movie-original character. The complicated feelings he has about following in his father’s footsteps, and the things he does as a result, can all too easily be compared to Kaito’s own struggles. As I mentioned earlier, Nagaoka does something similar with M23, but it’s even more powerful here because Kaito is just as determined to chase after his dad as the many other characters in the narrative are to deal with the legacies their forefathers left them.

So. 

Elephant in the room. 

The ship-breaking shot heard round the world.

Shinichi Kudo and Kaito Kuroba are cousins, and their fathers are twins.

I want to just trace this thread throughout the movie, in as brief a form as possible.

It starts with the very first confrontation between Kid and Heiji. When Heiji gets the upper hand and knocks Kid’s monocle off, cutting through the brim of his hat in the process, the moon peeks through the clouds and gives Heiji a clear view of Kid’s face. He’s immediately shocked to discover he resembles Shinichi.

Heiji has a couple of moments following that clearly illustrates he’s ruminating on this. When he first sees Conan, he crouches down and takes Conan’s face by the chin, examining him. When Kid and Conan banter on the train, Heiji sits behind them, a confused but thoughtful look on his face.

Shortly after the above, Heiji confronts Conan: “Do you have any siblings?” He brings up the physical and vocal resemblance Kid has to Shinichi, but Conan brushes it off. “It’s a coincidental resemblance. It happened by chance.” Heiji drops the subject, but there’s an argument to be had that the way Conan says that last line sure is suspicious.

The movie follows the main plot until Aoko’s introduction. In one scene with her, Heiji, and Conan, she watches the latter two talk with interest. She crouches to the ground and stares at Conan, telling him that she’s reminded of her childhood friend’s younger years when she sees him. This is the first time their resemblance has ever been phrased as “You look like Kid/Kaito,” as opposed to the more common reverse. Nagaoka remarks in an interview that Aoko’s presence in this movie presented the perfect chance to further thread the foreshadowing of their resemblance throughout the film, and personally I rather enjoy that one aspect of this foreshadowing comes from the Magic Kaito angle.

Post-credits. Yukiko is surprised to discover Yusaku has an older twin brother. Yusaku is a little…cagey, in my opinion. He expresses mild surprise he hasn’t mentioned it before, says they keep in regular contact despite not seeing each other in over 20 years, mentions he receives gifts every once in a while (including the extremely plot-relevant missing sword) and hints to Yukiko that she’s likely met him before. As she continues to guess who it might be, Yusaku attempts to change the subject to his new book; he wants her opinions on it. This is when he receives a text praising his most recent novel, signed by “TK,” and Yusaku smiles. The scene cuts to a skyline view and Kawasoe standing atop a tower of some kind. He looks at his phone: “Thank you, Nii-san! YK.” He laughs, and the disguise comes off, revealing a smiling Kaitou Corbeau.

Now, I mentioned Midnight Crow earlier, so I want to recover that pin now. Midnight Crow is a Magic Kaito case. It is the case that very strongly implies Toichi’s survival. Absolutely none of this is brought up in Detective Conan in any capacity whatsoever. Not even a REFERENCE to a “Kaitou Kid in black.” I’ve seen multiple stories, whether they be about themselves or about others they went with or saw in the theater, about people that were simply confused as to why THIS was the stinger in this film. I even have a personal anecdote myself, given I dragged my roommate with me to the movie and what surface knowledge she had did not do anything to help her understand what the heck was going on in the post-credits scene.

Within the film, in the vacuum of this one movie, the connection between Kawasoe and “the guy that wears a monocle like Kid who seems vaguely threatening” is actually really well foreshadowed! It’s even BETTER foreshadowed if you know Magic Kaito, because the relationship between Hijiri and his dad has parallels to Kaito and his dad. Because Kaito’s first disguise in the movie and Toichi’s disguise throughout used the exact same method: taking advantage of someone’s vacation, and thus their absence. Because you know this man is Kaito’s dad, the thief who found this treasure before and chose not to steal it, and is now taking advantage of Kawasoe’s klutzy nature to give Heiji and Conan information so they can find and protect it.

As far as Kaito and Shinichi’s resemblance is concerned, it was always used as a joke in previous films. Considering how long this running joke went, I imagine that made their blood relationship that much harder to accept. It was clear they were doing something different with it from the very start of this movie, though, when Heiji’s reaction to the resemblance isn’t played for laughs and it just kept coming up.

This also doesn’t necessarily come out of nowhere. The earliest piece of info that I can personally confirm is from a six-page interview with Gosho in a 2011 issue of Hayakawa Mystery Magazine celebrating the release of M15. After the interviewer implies that the similarity between Kid and Shinichi may be due to Kid being written first as a protagonist (further implying it’s a stylistic “protagonist” thing), Gosho replied, “Their resemblance is not just because of the order they were written in, but because there’s a secret backstory. There’s no way someone that looks so similar exists, you know? (lol) As for why, look forward to it, I suppose.” In the No. 22-23 2024 issue of Shonen Sunday, Gosho also has a little cheeky comment saying he’s relieved he was finally able to talk about Kid’s secret…

The other comment complicating the timing of when Gosho would have first considered this is a comment from Yamaguchi during a later screening of M27 alongside the seiyuu. According to fan reports, he mentioned being told that Kid had a “secret backstory” when he was given the offer to voice him. Combined with the fact that Gosho had apparently specifically chosen Yamaguchi despite the latter already being onboard as Shinichi, and Gosho choosing to go with a Kid cameo in DC in the first place because he wanted to introduce a regular rival… Maybe the idea of them being related existed well before that 2011 interview.

You might be able to tell, given how much I have written about M27 alone, that I think it’s a very interesting movie from a Magic Kaito perspective. It borrows from it the most by far, and I have to agree with the Febri interviewer when they said this movie has the biggest crossover between the worlds of Magic Kaito and Detective Conan by far. Because aspects of the theme, Kid’s motivations, and the entire post-credits scene are frankly lost on you if you’ve never bothered to read Magic Kaito. It’s a very funny thing for the “yearly event movie” to do, if I’m being honest, but this movie relies on the strengthening ties the two stories have made over the years. It sure did break box office records, though, so it seemingly worked out for them.

My only question at this point is whether further media, manga or movie, will pick up on the movie’s main revelation.

——

Since merch releases and promotion for M28 are ramping up, I wasn’t expecting much out of the Magic Kaito or Kaitou Kid mines for a while. Imagine my surprise, then, when FILE.0 was finally released as part of the special rerelease of Volume 1. At a mere four pages, one could barely call it an extra chapter; if it could be called anything at all, it’s more like an omake of sorts. Here we have Shinichi taking a trip to Tropical Land to plan out his date with Ran - and with Fate, of course.

It’s honestly pretty cute, the way he’s likely taking way too many notes on what he could do there. But what ends up happening is Shinichi stumbles upon a scene from Magic Kaito (Kaitou Kid’s Busy Day Off, to be exact), right as Kaito says his embarrassing line about ice cream being as sweet as it is cold. Shinichi is taken aback at how cringe this guy’s being, but he likes the idea of ending his date here by the fountain, so he takes notes regardless.

Did we really just put Shinichi in a scene from Magic Kaito for a rerelease of Detective Conan’s inaugural volume? With Kaito and Aoko, right there? It feels so small and so silly, but I still can’t get it out of my brain. The last time Kaito and Aoko showed up just as normal people in front of our main cast in any capacity was in Black Star, and I’ve already mentioned that this appearance makes the chapter feel even more like a crossover. But now, after everything that’s happened, they show up again. Maybe the line in the sand is still there, but I think it’s moved.

Final Thoughts & Hot Takes

The very nature of Kid originally being from another older series means I have no idea where we actually go from here with all of this. I have no major expectations at all for when or how or IF Shinichi and Kaito being related will be brought into the manga in any capacity, largely because there’s very little precedent for it. You have things like Ran already knowing Momiji in the manga even though they only ever had a “first meeting” in M21, or James Black knowing about Akai’s survival first being confirmed in M18, but stuff like that that’s a pretty rare occurrence. Even so, Takayama and Yamaguchi discuss the idea themselves in an Animage interview. She mentions that the movies seem more connected to the manga nowadays, while he muses at the idea of Fairy’s Lip leading into M27, which may very well then lead back into the manga.

Regardless, I don’t think anyone would argue if you said Magic Kaito felt more integrated into Detective Conan now than it did 20+ years ago, when Kid was first appearing in the manga and movies.

So to cap everything off, I think some Hot Takes are in order.

The cousin reveal isn’t actually all that bad. I’ve admittedly been on this particular train for a decade, so this was like every national holiday and then some rolled into one. I definitely have some questions about things like Shinichi’s Childhood Adventure or Yukiko’s relationship with Toichi, but for me personally none of them really snap this reveal in two. Nor do I think it dampens the way they were brought together as detective and thief, especially since I think you could reasonably argue that Toichi and Yusaku maintained their distance not only due to the divorce, but because of Toichi’s new profession. “Over 20 years ago” puts them at probably no more than a couple years before Toichi became Kid, when he was likely traveling for his magic show, as opposed to the young age they apparently were when their parents divorced. It’s also made fairly clear in DC that Yusaku knew who Kid’s civilian identity was… or at the very least, that’s how I read that interaction. If they intentionally kept their halves of the family from meeting, then it’s pretty incredible Shinichi and Kaito met at all. If the manga touches on them being related in any capacity - and again, I have no clue how likely that actually is - then it’s not going to suddenly supersede the relationship they have now. It’ll just add to it, assuming they chose to entertain it at all, and that complexity could be fun. This is all admittedly personal, of course; my shipping preference leans very heavily into “weird platonic relationships,” so that informs this particular take by quite a wide margin.

1412 is the ideal way to consume Magic Kaito. I don’t know how much I even like this hot take, but I can’t help thinking it’s true regardless. It more closely resembles Detective Conan in tone and vibes than it resembles its own source manga in a couple of key ways, so I do actually think this - over either the manga or the TMS adaptation - is the way they want people new to Magic Kaito to consume it, especially if they’re coming in from Detective Conan. That Gosho created a new finale for it, and did so by pulling out the “Toichi is actually alive” card, is also fairly telling. And if people like it enough and want more, the manga is still plenty available.

Magic Kaito has become a Detective Conan spin-off. I think I also hate this take, but I also believe it to be true in any way that functionally matters. We must respect that Magic Kaito came first - that Kaito and Aoko and Hakuba came first - but Kid’s modern popularity can be almost entirely attributed to Detective Conan. And honestly, I have to wonder if it’s still running, albeit irregularly, because of that. Phantom Lady jumps off of Ryoma’s Gunbelt, Green Dragon references Queen’s Bang and takes a quirk from the movie for both Aoko and Midoriko. The tone does a clear shift after DC begins serialization as well, and goes even further into mystery solving after Kid makes his first appearance in DC. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was similar to something like Zero’s Tea Time: a spin-off for a crazy popular character. It’s not, and it never actually will be, because Magic Kaito came first. But I think it sort of has become one.

The line in the sand is not bad, until it is. I don’t actually mind the parallel worlds argument, largely because I can understand what kind of slippery slope Akako is for the logic-driven Detective Conan. There’s also a part of me that doesn’t really mind Kid plots being largely stand-alone, with little to no involvement with the main plot. I could even also buy the two shady organizations actually being different, if and when we ever get information about MK’s organization. But after coming this far, and developing Conan and Kid’s relationship to the level that you have, I think not delving into who Kid is when he takes off the costume becomes the more contrived option. Gosho’s said before that solving the DC plot will not simultaneously solve the MK plot due to those organizations being different; I don’t think that means Kid should be verboten from Black Organization plots entirely. I don’t think it means Kid shouldn’t maybe suffer a consequence or two for being so open and casual with Conan, or that we can’t have a running side plot involving him. But then you run into the problem of Magic Kaito being its own series, and if you erase the line in the sand - if you let Kaito Kuroba be in Detective Conan - what do you do with Magic Kaito? The two worlds have overlapped so heavily with M27 that I almost wonder if we’re at a breaking point. Maybe this is the real Pandora’s box.

Kaitou Kid is a Detective Conan character, but Kaito Kuroba might not be… yet. I think DC has claimed Kid for its own. Especially the performance of Kid as displayed by the man behind the mask. But that mask has been chipping away, and Kaito himself is usually the one speaking to Conan at this point in both the manga and the movies. Even so, to so many people, that’s still just Kaitou Kid. I’ve seen disappointment expressed at that suave gentleman thief from the Black Star and M3 era being nowhere in sight in modern times, and it’s because it was always an act. You can’t keep up that act when you choose to trust someone, and they trust you back. You just… start becoming yourself. But he’s not truly himself in DC yet, despite the few scant appearances of Kaito himself we’ve received. For some reason, Kaito Kuroba still feels like a crossover character, and his appearance some special event, compared to Kaitou Kid. FILE.0 was a surprise in this regard, but in relation to the above, I have to wonder: Should Kaito himself ever feel as entrenched in DC as Kid is?

Kaito Kuroba - who many and more know as Kaitou Kid - is such a funny character if you think about him for more than a few seconds. His popularity in the Detective Conan vacuum is more than warranted, given his back and forth with Conan, but I really do want to believe that it’s the duality of his appearances in Magic Kaito and Detective Conan that contributes to this popularity. If M27 and some of the recent trends in both DC and MK are anything to go by, maybe I’m not so far off the mark.

We’ll likely get more stuff to enjoy in the meantime, but I’m currently looking ahead to Magic Kaito’s 40th anniversary in 2027 and hoping we get another movie… Or maybe another major manga arc. If you’ve managed to read all of this, you have my deepest gratitude! I hope this adventure was as enlightening for you to read as it was for me to write.

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

María Félix (Doña Barbara, La Mujer sin Alma, Rio Escondido, La Cucaracha)—Maria Felix is still possibly the most well-known Mexican film actress. She turned down multiple-roles in Hollywood and a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer in order to take roles in Mexico, France, and Argentine throughout the 1940s, 50s, 60s. She was so famous and so respected as a dramatic actress that she inspired painters, novelists and poets in their own art--she was painted by Diego Rivera, Jose Orozco, Bridget Tichenor. The novelist Carlos Fuentes used her as inspiration for his protagonist in Zona Sagrada. She inspired an entire collection by Hermes. In the late 1960s Cartier made her a custom collection of reptile themed jewels. She considered herself to be powerful challenger of morality and femininity in Mexico & worldwide--she routinely played powerful women in roles with challenging moral choices and free sexuality. But even still, years after he death, she is celebrated with Google Doodles, and appearances in the movie Coco, and holidays for the anniversary of her death.

Maureen O’Hara (The Parent Trap, The Quiet Man)—They called her the Queen of Technicolor. That right there should help introduce people to the fiery, wonderful, stunning Maureen O’Hara. She was from Ireland, born in 1920, and started in theater at the age of ten. At 15, she was winning drama awards, including one for her performance as Portia in the Merchant of Venice. At 16, she was the youngest pupil to graduate from the Guildhall School of Music. By 18, she transitioned to film, starting off with a bang alongside Charles Laughton in Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, and proceeded to work steadily up through the early 1970s. She was in adventures and comedies and romances, spent a lot of time in westerns giving merry hell to John Wayne (and less merry hell to the indomitable John Ford — she held her own even when he was verbally abusive and demeaning to her). She was in The Quiet Man, which was the first American-made film entirely filmed in a foreign country. She helped make American Christmas what it is with Miracle on 34th Street. She played a lineup of headstrong, forthright women second only, perhaps, to Katharine Hepburn. She was married three times, lived for a while with a boyfriend in Mexico, sued for custody of her daughter in the 1950s, AND sued a magazine for libel in the same era. After mostly retiring from acting, she edited a magazine. She eventually sold the magazine to spend more time with her grandson, but even then ran a ladies fashion store. She was an outspoken, brilliant, passionate lady, with amazing red hair, a career to envy, and — well — that face!

This is round 2 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut]

María Félix:

She's Thee Hot Vintage Movie Woman of México. She's absolutely gorgeous and always looks like she's about to step on you. you WILL be thankful if she does.

"María Félix is a woman -- such a woman -- with the audacity to defy the ideas machos have constructed of what a woman should be. She's free like the wind, she disperses the clouds, or illuminates them with the lightning flash of her gaze." - Octavio Paz

María Félix is one of the most iconic actresses of the Golden Era of Mexican Cinema. La Doña, as she was lovingly nicknamed, only had one son, and when her first marriage ended in divorce her ex-husband stole her only child, so she vowed that one day she’d be more influential than her ex and she’d get her son back. AND SHE DID! María Félix rejected a Hollywood acting role to start her acting career in Mexico on her own terms with El Peñón de las Ánimas (The Rock of Souls) starring alongside actor, and future third husband, Jorge Negrete. She quickly rose to incredible heights both in Mexico and abroad, later on rejecting a Hollywood starring role (Duel in the Sun) as she was already committed to the movie Enamorada at the planned filming time. Of this snubbing she said, quote: “I will never regret saying no to Hollywood, because my career in Europe was focused in [high] quality cinema. [My] india* roles are made in my country, and [my] queen roles are abroad.” (Translator notes: here the “india” role means interpreting a lower-class Mexican woman, usually thought of indigenous/native/mixed descent —which she had interpreted and reinvented throughout her acting career in Mexico— and what abroad was typically considered the Mexican woman stereotype, with the braids, long simple skirts, and sandals. This also references the expectation of her possibly helping Hollywood in perpetuating this stereotype for American audiences that lack the cultural and historical contexts of this type of role which would undermine her own efforts against this type of Mexican stereotypes while working in Europe) She was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world of her time by international magazines like Life, París Match, and Esquire, and was a muse to a vast number of songwriters (including her second husband Agustin Lara,), artists, designers, and writers. Muralist Diego Rivera described her as “a monstrously perfect being. She’s an exemplary being that drives all other human beings to put as much effort as possible to be like her”. Playwriter Jean Cocteau, who worked with her in the Spanish film La Corona Negra (The Black Crown) said the following about her, “María, that woman is so beautiful it hurts”. Haute Couture houses like Dior, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Hérmes, among others, designed and dressed her throughout her life. She died on her birthday, April 8, 2002, at 88 years old, in Mexico City. She was celebrated by a parade from her home to the Fine Arts Palace in the the city’s Historic Downtown, where a multitude of people paid tribute to her. Her filmography includes 47 movies from 1942 until 1970, and only two television acting roles in 1970. She has 2 music albums, one recorded with her second husband, Agustín Lara, in 1964 titled La Voz de María y la inspiración de Agustín «The voice of María and the inspiration of Augustín», and her solo album Enamorada «In Love» in 1998. Her bespoke Cartier jewelry is exhibited alongside Elizabeth Taylor’s, Grace Kelly’s and Gloria Swanson’s. In 2018, Film Director Martin Scorsese presented a restored and remastered version of her film Enamorada in the Cannes Classics section of the Cannes Festival and Google dedicated a doodle for her 104th birthday. On august 2023 Barbie added her doll to the Tribute Collection.

Maureen O'Hara:

I thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world when I was a kid and I have yet to really change my mind. Always loved her temper and her red hair. Plus she was kind of a MILF in The Parent Trap

Haughty, red hair, hot.

I would have to give up my passport if I didn't submit Maureen O'Hara but also have you seen her? Not only did she look like that (she was called the Queen of Technicolor, though she wasn't a big fan of that sobriquet), she was also very funny and tough as nails. She faced off against Walt Disney in a contract dispute and the legend goes that when someone mentioned her at his deathbed, he sat up and said 'That bitch!'. Her comment on that story is "At least he didn't think of me and say, 'That wimp'." She struggled to get serious roles for a time, saying ""Hollywood would never allow my talent to triumph over my face," so she plays the sexy princess/pirate/harem girl in a LOT of early movies that she referred to as "Tits and Sand" films, she being the tits in question. She also turned down so many leading men and studio bosses (Errol Flynn and Howard Hughes are among her rejects) that there were rumours spread that she was a lesbian. Many egos were battered it seems. I'm including the infamous Lady Godiva scene in the photo propaganda for the sheer Moment of it [link] . It was a bit of a flop critically, but it was one of Clint Eastwood's first film appearances and she said he told her later that he was very glad of the money at the time.

She was a very proud Irish woman and when she went for her American citizenship they insisted on referring to her as British (the timeline of Irish independence is a bit wibbly wobbly, we won't get into it here). She refused to accept American citizenship under that condition and argued her way through every level of US immigration she could find, supposedly saying "I'm not responsible for your antiquated records here in Washington", until a judge finally gave up and said "Give her what she wants, just get her out of here". This made her the first ever person seeking US citizenship to be proclaimed Irish on the record!

The hair. The accent. The figure. The acting chops. The perfection.

[drunkenskunk]

There's a project related to my interest in Warhammer that I've wanted to do for quite some time, but I know I'll never get the chance to actually do it. At least, not properly. And it involves... I think "historical preservation" is probably the best word for it?

See, I like to occasionally sift through my collection of old "out of date" rulebooks and army codex books from earlier editions of 40k. The sort of things that have been out of print for many years. Games Workshop hasn't sold these books in 2 or 3 decades, and they've all been supplanted by the current rules. And I do this because I think it's interesting to see how the game - in both crunch and fluff - has changed since 1987.

More beyond the break...

For example: the different ways the galaxy has been depicted in 40k between the different editions. In the first rulebook, when it was still called Rogue Trader, all we got was a small, almost abstract, image on the bottom of the page. The 2nd edition rulebook that came out in October 1993 (specifically, the Codex Imperialis book) had a two page spread, but it was also very abstract with a few notes, but no real detail to speak of. As far as I can tell, the first time we got a map of the galaxy with the segmentum divisions that we're all accustomed to now came from a very unexpected place: the very first Tyranid codex that came out in August 1995.

Of course, my copy of the 2nd Edition book is a very poor quality black and white scan. Those segmentum divisions could genuinely be there, and I just can't see it. Not to mention, it's entirely possible that a map with segmentum divisions first premiered in an issue of White Dwarf first, because GW liked to do stuff like that in the old days where you'd see it in the hobby magazine long before it was "officially" released in a rulebook.

There are a lot of glaring omissions from a lot of the other files in my collection: poor scans, missing pages, corrupted files... There's a lot I still don't know, because it's impossible for me to currently confirm that the little I do know is, in fact, accurate. My collection is woefully incomplete. Plus, I don't really have much past 6th edition anyway.

And this, in essence, is my idea: try and complete the collection. Find pristine copies of all the old 40k rulebooks, army codexes, even old copies of White Dwarf, and digitize them all into a huge archive for the sake of historical preservation. Of a sort.

Basically, I want to become a Lexmechanic of the Adeptus Mechanicus, looking for Dark Age of Technology era STC's uncorrupted by the Heresy or the war with the Iron Men. Either that, or I want to become Trazyn with his Infinite Archive on Solemnace.

Unfortunately, there are many problems with this plan. The first being GW's overly litigious nature. They see all this Warhammer shit as "product" first and a hobby for people to enjoy a very, VERY distant second. Doesn't matter that these books (and the magazines) are long since out of print and they don't sell them anymore, effectively making the old editions the tabletop hobby equivalent to video game abandonware... if they got wind that I was attempting a project of this nature, I just know GW would smack me in the face with a cease and desist.

Of course, the other major stumbling block here is the financial issue. And I'm not just talking about buying the books. Obviously, there's the problem of the rarer books that go for upwards of $300 or more on ebay, but there's also a volume problem. Even if you find some good deals, and you're able to find older books for $10 or $15 a pop, there's just SO MANY books, that if I were to attempt this I would be wasting several thousand dollars that I just don't have.

More importantly, there's also the machine I would need to buy in order to do this project in the first place. Because if I was going to do this, I would want to do it right, y'know? I wouldn't want to simply shove the books into my dinky little scanner-printer combo hooked up to my computer. The only way I'd get a clean scan using that method would be to physically destroy these very valuable books, and that's the last thing I'd want to do. No, I would want to do it right, and get a machine like Scribe, the book scanner used by the internet archive:

Now, obviously, I can't get access to that machine, specifically, because Scribe was custom built by the engineers at the Internet Archive. But other V-cradle book scanners that let you digitize books without destroying them do exist... and they're all REALLY expensive. A good one to produce professional quality scans is, like, $25,000.

And I know what you're thinking: why do I even care about any of this? Even if this project was not entirely out of my reach, it's ultimately pointless, right? Why would I want to preserve all these old, out-of-date, no longer relevant rulebooks for a tabletop wargame that has only existed exactly as long as I have?

Because... let's be honest, this isn't really about Warhammer. The reason I want to do this stems from a much deeper desire to simply Remember. It's amazing and terrifying in equal measure just how easily history can be erased, either deliberately or simply through neglect. All of these things in our lives that are seemingly so important to us can easily vanish from history, like sandcastles when the tide rolls in.

Hell, if you really want to know my feelings about this, just watch Jacob Geller's video on this very subject.

If I had infinite time and infinite money, and I didn't care about any kind of repercussions from GW's legal team, this project would not be beyond my reach.

But I do not have infinite time or money. And there are more things in my life that I need to be concerned with that are far more important than creating a... stupid archive.

Shame, really.

[fckeddiemunson]

Take Me Upstairs - Eddie Munson

take me upstairs - rockstar!eddie munson

Synopsis: You run the local record shop and one day Eddie invites you to a show and one thing leads to another. 

Warnings: 18+ only MDNI. some fluff, smidge of angst, smut, p in v, unprotected sex, oral f & m receiving, slight choking if you squint. 

 A/N: Please be nice, this is my first fic I’ve written since I was a teenager xx 

4.5k 

There was one record shop in Hawkins, tucked away off the main street. It belonged to your uncle, but he was more of a figurehead of the business in his old age, you were there most days, running the shop. It was a dream, you got to speak to people about music all day, play whatever you wanted and no one would complain that it was too loud. Before you started the shop had a dark, dingy feeling to it, dust collected on the shelves and the old hardwood floor had nails sticking up everywhere. You had brightened up the place with a bright lick of paint, pot plants everywhere and you kept the latest stuff in stock of all the up and coming hits.

Eddie Munson had been a regular since your uncle had been working there. He would rush in on a Friday morning when all the new music was released and put on the shelves. Sometimes he would line up ten minutes before it opened to grab the only metal record available, because it was such a small town you only kept a little of everything at once. It was a Friday afternoon when he first met you, he was running late for a new album, he was sweating, worried it had already sold. He had parked his van half sticking out to the road in front of the store, tripped up the stairs, called hello to Ray, your uncle and speed walked to the metal section. He was startled when he heard your sweet, soft voice call back to him. He awkwardly shuffled through the cds on the shelves. Eddie smiled gleefully when he saw the new release, he seized it and kissed the cover, “Was worried I was too late for you darlin’” he whispered and walked up to the counter where you were standing with the new Kerrang edition in your hands. Eddies breath hitched when you moved the magazine away to serve him, you were phenomenal, eyes that were bright and inviting and the warmest prettiest smile he had ever seen.“You’re not Ray” he stated and then cringed at you, wow what an opener, he thought and stuttered out trying to say something else. 

You chuckled and leant on the counter, “No, I’m not Ray, I’m Y/N. You’re Eddie right? My uncle warned me about our regular metalhead” You smiled at him and held  your hand outstretched to shake Eddies. 

“Uh, yes I am Eddie, it’s nice to meet you too” He took your hand, stressing that his hand was sweaty and shook yours. Edde wasn’t usually this giddy when he met a girl, plenty of girls showed up to Corroded Coffin gigs now that they had gained a bit of traction in surrounding bigger towns. 

“I put this record on this morning before you got here, you’re in for a treat” You gestured to the Iron Maiden record in his hand, he handed it over to you grinning. “Oh yeah? Well I’m glad to hear it sweetheart, first thing I’m doing after this is blasting it all the way home in the van” Eddie said excited, feeling himself relax and lean against the counter. 

You gasped at his answer, “Oh my no! Eddie, your first listen to an album has to be special, right atmosphere, good stereo, not shitty car speakers!” you were horrified at the mere thought, you liked the ritual of putting a new album on for the first time. 

“Guess I’m just too impatient with masterpieces” Eddie winked at you and immediately regretted it as he handed over a bill to you. Why was he so awkward sometimes?! He groaned mentally. 

“Next time you’re in I expect a full report.” You told him, deadly serious. 

“Absolutely sweetheart.” Eddie left, looking once more behind him as he left, seeing you smiling to yourself as you picked up the magazine again. 

Eddie knew from that moment he was fucked. Nobody at any shows would ever compare. The next day he sauntered back into the store, hoping you were working on a weekend, he was disappointed to know that your brother worked the weekend as you liked to attend as many gigs as you could on the weekend.

Eddie was back in the shop Monday morning, a grin on his face as he tumbled into the store. He called out your name and your head popped up from one of the rows near the back as he followed you down there. 

“Heya sweetheart” Eddie said, leaning against the shelf. 

“Hey yourself. What did you think of the album?” You asked excitedly, he thought you looked so cute all excited and chirpy 

“It was like a religious experience and i ain’t had many of them let me tell you” you giggled at him and began searching through the shelves again. 

“Let me show you something else, you don’t have to buy it, just borrow it for the day and see if you like it?” you picked out a few cds and handed them over. 

“Are you sure sweetheart?” He looked over them, not hearing of some of the bands before

“Yeah sure I’ll be glad to hear your thoughts.” Eddie got suddenly excited that you wanted him to come back, and that Eddie had to come back to see you thrilled him. 

“Hey, could watch the shop for a minute while i go grab a coffee and pastry?” Eddie heard your stomach growl and he chuckled 

“Nonsense, it’s on me, for the cds” You smiled at him and thanked him as he left for coffee. 

You bit into the delicious flaky pastry, a bit sticking to your mouth 

“Oh you’ve got a bit of-“ Eddie gestured to your cheek. You desperately tried to brush it off after several attempts Eddie reached towards you, his hand gently brushing it off. 

“There you go” Eddie whispered as he brushed it off and you both blushed. 

You two had become closer over the last few months. He would often spend up to an hour at closing time when it was quiet just helping you tidy up and then walking you to your car. And when he was in at opening he would bring you coffee and pastries fresh from the cafe down the road. You were getting attached to him, you didn’t want to admit it. Hawkins was the last place you thought you’d end up but after a bad run in Los Angeles as a bartender, you thought you needed a change and it all fell into place. At first you thought Eddie’s extensive amount of time in the shop was normal, your uncle had warned you he was there a lot. But Ray tended to exaggerate with these things. Eddie was always on your mind, as soon as you got to the shop and opened up. Your head would whip around to the door every time the little bell dinged as the door opened. He was sweet and funny and a little flirty which often made your cheeks heat up. You were hoping he’d make a move but it had been a few months now and Eddie would still just come in to talk to you.

Eddie waited in a cafe around the corner from the record store, grabbing you your regular latte and pastry. He had some CD’s of his own to give you this time and he was very excited about it. This new found hobby he had of obsessively listening to the CD’s you gave him and thinking about what to give you next was his favourite pastime. Eddie was thinking about asking you out on a date but outside of being on stage he was a bit shy and you were the first girl to mean something to him beyond a girl at a show. 

 He walked towards the record store, checking his hair in a nearby store window and walked into the shop. He noticed you weren’t at the counter so he wandered through checking out the new releases, he heard your sweet laugh trickle through the store and he also heard another man’s voice speaking to you as you giggled. Eddie didn’t know what it was about but he felt immediately annoyed, his eyebrow raised as he lurked around the shop finding you in the back corner. He saw you talking to a tall dark haired man also with tattoos on his arms. Inside him was pure turmoil - partially because he knew he was overreacting but part because he really didn’t want any suspicion of his to be right. 

“Eddie!” You shouted excited, too loud for the small space. 

“You have to meet Luke! He was a bartender with me in California!! He was passing through town.” You spoke with adoring eyes for Luke, or so Eddie thought. He also thought it was bullshit, no one passes through Hawkins. 

Eddie strained “Nice to meet you” before Luke gave you a quick hug and you two said your goodbyes. 

After he left Eddie awkwardly gave you the pastry and coffee, watching as you took a bite. 

“Is he ah, an ex?” Eddie found himself spilling out before he could stop. 

“Oh, ah no just a friend who helped me out when I was there. Bit weird he stopped by though.” You shrugged and the pit in Eddie’s stomach slowly got smaller, he felt ridiculous to feel such jealousy for you. 

“Okay sugar, I’ve got band prac so I’ve got to go but ah here’s some Cd’s i think you should hear. Let me know, yeah?” You smiled warmly at Eddie and his heart swelled in his heart and jeans. 

You blew him a kiss as he walked to the door and Eddie swore under his breath as he walked to his van. Oh yeah he was totally fucked. 

 You knew he had a band that was slowly gaining traction and getting out there. It was his dream and  you had passionately spoken about it with him. Watching him talk about the band and getting excited about getting out there more made you swoon. The way his smile lit up the entire shop, it was cheeky and earnest. And his eyes that were constantly on yours, his intense eye contact often made you lose  your breath but you loved his attention. You had even started stocking the EP they had released, and playing it in store to spark conversation with other customers so you could gush over him. 

Eddie rushed in one Friday morning a few weeks after running into Luke, you peaked through the window seeing the rest of his band in the van, looking packed in with gear. 

“Morning sugar” His usual charm on high volume, he was in an excellent mood. The band had gotten a  huge gig at a bar in a nearby town. It had a venue room that held about 500 people, and for them that was epic. Beyond huge, the biggest they had ever played somewhere, and away from home too! 

“Would you mind putting this up in the window? I want as many people to come tomorrow night as they can!” You looked over the poster, a smile crept onto your face as your eyes met Eddies and you bit your lip in excitement for him. 

“Of course Eddie. I’m so ecstatic for you! This is huge, your big break for sure. I will play nothing but Corroded Coffin all day!” You did a little hop skip of excitement around  the counter and punched his arm. 

“Seriously, super proud of you.” Eddie blushed at your words and looked at you once more before deciding to pull you into a crushing bear hug. You inhaled him, strong and musky, it made you warm inside. 

“You better be coming tonight sweetheart.” He winked at you before there was a honk from the van, his bandmates clearly getting impatient. He gave them the finger and looked back at you. 

“Seriously, I’ll put your name on the door, as you’re the only one in town who will stock the record.” 

“Eddie I am the  only record shop in town” you whined but he only smirked and gave your arm a quick squeeze before he ran out the door. 

You heard the boys in the van all “whoooo” at the same time and you saw Eddie go bright red as they drove away 

You stood in your room hours later, hair in rollers, stressing about which outfit to wear. This wasn’t a normal gig where you’d just throw on any old jeans and a ripped up old shirt. This was Eddie's big gig, you didn’t want to get lost in the crowd, you wanted him to know you were there supporting him. You settled on jeans anyway and an Iron Maiden shit, reminiscent of your first conversation. You tucked it in showing your stomach and went to the bathroom stressing about your hair and makeup. 

Once you got inside the venue, you were excited but got a little disheartened at all the stunning girls at the gig. You felt like you couldn’t compare to these bombshells. You shot another drink for good luck, nodding your head along to the opening band. The butterflies in your stomach only intensified as they finished and everyone started closing in for Eddie. You usually got keen for gigs but you felt extra giddy and bouncy as it was his band, he had your heart in chains and he didn’t even know it. You settled for a spot a few rows back from the stage, snug against a wall. There were too many girls crowding the front to get any closer. The lights dimmed and you were smiling at the stage, nerves flying off of you in static waves. 

Eddie came out on stage with his signature red guitar, tight black skinny jeans, a ripped up singlet that showed his biceps and tattoos and red boots. Eddie was also the vocalist and he sauntered up to the microphone, mouth close to it and welcomed and thanked the crowd for coming. There were a few cheers but mostly loud squeals from the few girls in the first couple of rows.

The first song played and the riff ripped through the venue, you were hooked. It was like ecstasy, his voice and playing sent you into a frenzy. You were headbanging in time with the guy next to you and shouting out the lyrics. A small mosh broke out and you pushed to be in the mosh, having the most fun you’d had at a show. Their presence was electrifying and the whole crowd could tell they were witnessing something special. 

Eddie was the most charismatic frontman. So much so that during one of their dirtier songs he lent down and started singing to her, eyes staring directly into the girl's soul, her hands were on his legs grabbing and touching. He did the same to a few other girls throughout the set. You felt like you had been punched in the gut. You sank to the back of the crowd. You knew it had to be part of the show and his presence but the way he sang to them hurt you more than you could admit. You suddenly didn���t feel special, Eddie had this way of making you feel like you were the queen in his kingdom. He was so charismatic and charming and on stage it was amplified. You slumped against the back wall of the venue, now replaying all the closing chats you had where you talked about your hopes, dreams and fears. Before the gig you were sure he likes you at least a little bit in the way your heart swelled at the mention of his name. Seeing him sing to the girls reminded you that he treated every girl the way he did with you and you tried to enjoy the end of the show without feeling sorry for yourself. 

After the gig ended you headed back out and lingered around the main bar for a while, nursing a gin and tonic deciding if you should go knock on the shared dressing room for the boys. Being on the list gave you certain advantages. Out of the corner of your eye you saw one of his bandmates, Gareth, gesturing for you to come over, he was headed back with a tray of drinks.Gareth had been in the store with Eddie a bunch of times. You drew a deep breath, scared to face Eddie feeling sad about unreturned feelings, but your feet started moving towards the backstage door. 

You followed through the door behind Gareth and were met with several girls in the dressing room, all giggling and one sitting very close to Eddie, hand on his arm who had his back to you on the couch. You awkwardly stood near the door as Gareth hustled to the table to set the drinks down. 

“Look who found her way here” Gareth nudged Eddie, who tore himself away from the girl on the couch, she looked at you intensely. 

Eddie grinned at you, you felt your heart twinge at the sight, beating faster with anxiety as he came closer to you. He handed you a beer and you skulled a few sips with him. You were loose tongued when you were tipsy and you were worried you may just pour your feelings out onto him and he would go back to the table of groupies. 

Instead you pulled yourself together, “That was one hell of a show Eddie '', he clinked his bottle against yours, biting his lip as you said that. You averted your eyes from his lip biting, knowing any kind  of light flirting would make you sad knowing if you didn’t walk in he would probably be making out with that girl. 

“I know right! I was worried you weren’t here, couldn’t see you in the crowd” he pouted at you and your heart strings pulled, heart filling with warmth for him against your wishes. You didn't want to be hurt. 

“I was in the mosh mostly, too far back to see me. That's why my hair is all messed up.” you gestured to your wavy poofy hair. 

“You have never looked more spectacular than you do right now. You’re gorgeous” 

Eddie reached up and tucked a bit of hair behind your ear, your heart hammering as he did. You both audibly heard the girl on the couch scoff. 

“Let's get some air?” Eddie suggested and you nodded. 

You found yourself in a cozy corner of the smokers area, falling into conversation easily with Eddie as he lit up a cigarette and another round of drinks had made its way to your table, perks of being the band playing. Your inhibitions were lowering and you were gaining confidence when you said, “do you usually fuck all those girls in your dressing room after shows?” 

Eddie was taken aback by the question. You had talked about your love lives before, exes and the like but never about something like this. Eddie looked at your face, he could tell you were annoyed by the girl he was speaking to before. Eddie hesitated

“I used to sleep with one or two, once our shows started getting a bit bigger. But I’m not really a one night stand person.” You considered, a little more annoyed than you originally thought. 

“Yeah but if I hadn’t showed up to distract you, you would’ve fucked that girl in there tonight” You acccused, taking a swig of your drink. 

“No I wouldn’t have! If anything, her conversation was a distraction. And what about your friend from Cali huh?” Eddie argued back. You blamed the alcohol for why you were feeling this way but you couldn’t stop now 

“He means nothing! Don’t turn this on me, Eddie. it’s almost shameful how intimate you are with those girls in the crowd.” You strained, you felt a lump in your chest, heaving with every word. 

“Sweetheart, that's just for the show, got to get everyone riled up!” You didn't say a word and he sighed, placing a hand on your knee and rubbing it. Eddie swallowed hard 

“You know I-.. I haven’t even thought about kissing anyone. Anyone at all except you darlin’. I don’t even think about other women like that, I only ever think about you” Eddie searched your face for some sign of reaction. His hand on your knee moved to lift your chin up to meet his eyes. 

“Eddie, you make me feel things I have never felt before. And- and I'm scared to get hurt.” You whispered out, looking into Eddie's warm brown eyes, breathless at your admission. Eddie placed his hand on your bar stool and dragged it as close as possible.  His knee nestled in between your legs, your thighs touching. Eddie cupped your cheek, letting his hand run down to your neck, thumb trailing along your jaw to your mouth. He had brought his face closer to yours, your hearts hammering together in sync.

He ran his thumb over your bottom lip and you kissed lightly. Eddie stared at you, his hand slithering to the back of your neck to pull you closer to him, your lips a mere inch apart. 

He cupped your neck and jaw again, before you lost your composure and lent in, brushing your lips against his plush ones. He exhaled sharply, bringing his other hand up to cup your jaw with both hands as he shifted close to you and entangled your lips again. You gasped as he sucked in your bottom lip, fiercely kissing you. Your hand fumbled for his shirt and collar, desperate to feel him. Eddie took a breath and before he could move, you kissed him again, licking his bottom lip as his tongue met yours and slid over your bottom lip into your mouth. You moaned against him, hand clutching and squeezing his thigh. Eddie stood up, pressing his body into yours. Eddie pulled back from the kiss  to look at you, your lips were swollen, lipstick smearing a bit onto his lips. 

“Look at you, shit, all fucked out and I haven’tt even gotten started” he whispered, hand behind your neck  pulling  you close as he nuzzled into your neck. He kissed your neck lightly, testing the waters as you gasped and let your hand disappear into his curly locks. Eddie kissed and nipped and sucked at your neck, you felt your pussy warm and clench everytime he would bite and suck, each time with more vigor and lust. You could feel Eddie’s dick against you. That alone made you whimper against him. 

“I have a room upstairs, we have a gig tomorrow so I figured why not-” You cut Eddie off with a bruising kiss, tangling your hands in his hair. 

“Yes, take me there” You whimpered out, completely under his control and absolutely soaking for him. 

He grabbed your arm, leading you back inside and up a stairway, you stumbled into his room, breathless.

Eddie pushed you against the wall and engulfed you in a kiss, fire exploded in your stomach as you sunk down to your knees, staring up at him, his eyes full of lust. 

“I have been wanting to do this for a long time” You whispered, fumbling with his belt on his pants. 

“Oh yeah? I’ve dreamed of seeing you on your knees for me” Eddie grabbed your chin and angled it to look up at him, satisfied at the already fucked out look you had on your face. You shimmed his jeans down a bit, stopping briefly, suddenly nervous to see him for the first time. Eddie instead took over, you looked down as he took his cock in his hand, stroking it up and down, groaning as he did. 

“Look at me sweetheart.” Eddie said down to you, a command, not a question. Your eyes slowly crept up, you let out a breath seeing his cock at eye level, much bigger and prettier than you were expecting. Eddie tapped it on your lips once before you took him in your mouth, licking the tip and then sucking in, until he hit the back of your throat. You breathed out harshly, refusing to let him slide out. 

Eddie groaned deeply above you, sending waves between your legs, you moaned against him as you continued to suck greedily. 

“Makin’ me feel so good baby, so good”  Eddie mumbled lustily above you, entangling his hand in your hair and forcing more of him into your mouth, you groaned at the sensation. Eddie moved your head back and forth on his dick, your jaw slack for him, his moans were sending you into a frenzy, you gagged on him once before he slid out of your mouth. 

“Dirty girl” he muttered, pulling you up and kissing you, tongue invading your mouth. His hands wrapped around you, his big hands grabbing your ass, he tested the waters by giving it a sharp slap and you gasped, convinced you’re dripping through your underwear. 

Eddie pushed you onto the nearby bed, his weight crushing as he undid your jeans and dragged them off you, pulling you to the edge of the bed as he did. His hands ran over your bare thighs, thumbs digging in at the apex of your thighs. He teased your underwear waistband, snapping it against your skin before dropping his head right between your thighs, strong hands spreading them for him, and only him. He thumbed the cloth, right against your clit and you let out a whine that turned into a moan as he  kissed your clit through the thin cloth. Eddie hooked his finger under the waistband and pulled them down slowly, spreading your legs once again. He slid his finger through your folds, you let out a whimper as he gathered your slick on his fingers and brought it to mouth, sucking it off. 

“Just as sweet as I’d thought you’d be baby” Eddie grinned before thumbing your clit slowly, your head rolled back on the bed as he drew slow teasing circles on you, occasionally teasing your tight hole. He sunk his teeth into your thigh, short sharp breaths coming from you as you almost fell apart over Eddies touches. 

“Please” You whimpered to him, Eddie’s wicked grin lighted his face. 

“Please what?” he teased, his hand abruptly stopping on your cunt. 

“Please… fuck me” you writhed on the bed, desperate for pleasure. 

“No, I'm not done with you yet.” Eddie growled and pinned your left thigh down and spread your folds, slipping two fingers inside of you, a high moan escaping your lips. 

Eddie’s fingers were long and found that sensitive spot inside you quickly as his fingers moved deliciously inside you, filthy noises escaping your mouth at the squelch of your wetness on his fingers. He thumbed your clit at the same time, you felt your build up quickly, but something felt different, more intense as his fingers relentlessly brought you higher and higher. 

“Eddie” his name left in a high pitched whine, your hips lifted off the bed as you felt your release flood through you, you shivered, lifting your hips off the bed. You felt extra wet as Eddie continued to fuck you with his fingers, you twitched beneath him, overstimulated. 

“Thats it good girl, good fucking girl.” He praised as his movements slowly came to a stop. 

You lay on the bed breathless, hair sticking to your neck, but Eddie wasn’t near done yet. 

“You squirted sweetheart, have you done that before or was it all for me?” Eddie crawled onto you, settling between your legs, tugging his hard cock as he did. 

“All for you, only for you” You replied, looking up at him. His chest lean, arms muscular and covered in tattoos, his face strained as he jerked himself off. Eddie suddenly grabbed your hips and pulled  you close to him, kissing you deeply as he slid in, a sharpness you weren’t expecting as he stilled inside you. 

“Come on sweet girl, you can take me.” Eddie peppered kisses onto your face as he moved slowly, long languid thrusts into your tight dripping pussy. 

Pleasure slowly took over you and you hooked your arms around his ass, pulling him tight against you, needing to feel him everywhere, the feeling of Eddie was addictive. 

Eddie brought his hand to your neck, running his thumb over your lip which you took into your mouth eagerly, earning a deep moan from Eddie above you. Eddie snapped his hips to yours, pressing your legs above your shoulders as his thrusts became faster and deeper. 

You were moaning loudly, not caring if the whole hotel heard you, your eyes shut tightly as he deepened the angle of his hips. You had never felt so full in your life, Eddie kept fucking you, his balls slapping on your leg. Eddie's hand found your clit, rubbing slowly again, you whimpered under his touch, unsure how much more you could take. Your breath was ragged, you were so close.

“Eddie I’m gonna-” Eddie chuckled and stopped his movements, you groaned loudly beneath him as he withdrew from you. 

“Nononono” you whined, jerking your hips up to nothing, as he moved to stand on the edge of the bed. He grabbed your ankles, yanking you to the edge and forced your head down into the mattress. 

You whined and shook your ass in front of him. 

“Eddie, please” you started playing with yourself in front of him, needing him. 

He tapped himself over your clit a few times, making you move your hand as he pushed your back down further into the bed while holding your hips up for him. Eddie slid back in, that familiar full feeling returning as he thrusted against you, his balls slapping your clit each thrust. 

“Fuck you feel so good from this angle, so good for me, so wet sweetheart” Eddie was losing it because of you, each thrust sent him closer and closer, he felt the familiar warming in his lower stomach. 

Eddie reached round and rubbed circles on your clit and you let out a loud moan, hips moving with his. You felt your stomach tighten as his cock continued to fill you up, each thrust sending you closer. 

“Eddie” you warned him, high pitched moans stringing out of your mouth. 

You crashed over the edge as Eddie fucked hard and deep into you, every word fell from your mouth as you moaned for him, he gave a final thrust before a deep gutteral moan left his lips, his hot come spilling into you. 

“Fuck sweetheart” His deep voice groaned as he collapsed next to you. 

You stayed there for a few moments staring at each other in the post hue of sex, he was smiling widely at you. 

“I suppose I better take you on a date now huh?” He said wiping his hair from his face and tying it into a bun 

“Yeah you better rockstar”

[jimhines]

2022 Writing Income

It’s that time again – for fifteen years now I’ve been writing an annual blog post about my income as a writer. Money tends to be an uncomfortable, even taboo topic, but I think it’s important to help counter the myths that we’re all multimillionaires living in Glass Onion-style mansions. (Side note: If anyone wants to pay millions of dollars for my book, I’ll happily update this blog post from my private island mansion.)

Remember, every writer’s career is different, and I’m only one data point.

Prior Years: Here are the annual write-ups going back to 2007: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

In 2016, instead of a personal income write-up, I did a survey of almost 400 novelists about their income.

My Background: I’m a primarily “traditionally published,” U.S.-based SF/F author with 15 books in print from major New York publishers. The first of those books came out from DAW in 2006. I have an agent, and have been with them since about 2004.

I’ve self-published a middle grade fantasy and a few short collections. I’ve also sold about 50 short stories to different magazines and anthologies.

I’ve never hit the NYT or USA Today bestseller lists.

I’m currently the sole parent of a teenager (at home) and a 22-year-old (at college). I have a day job that’s just over half-time, both for the paycheck and the benefits.

2022 in Summary: There’s no gentle way to say this. The last several years have kind of sucked. Losing my wife to cancer in 2019 completely derailed my writing. I was hoping 2022 would be a comeback year, but life had other plans…

I did write and sell two new short stories and one nonfiction piece, which was nice. I’ve got a finished middle grade book that’s been on submission for a while. I finished a standalone fantasy that’s been sitting with my publisher for a while.

Normally, my editor is pretty quick about responding, but last year wasn’t normal for DAW, either. DAW was acquired by Astra House. A lot of their time and energy went into that deal. I’m hoping for the best, but things still haven’t settled into the new “normal.”

Last year did see the release — finally — of Terminal Peace, the third book in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. I’m thrilled and relieved to see that book in print, but it came out right in the middle of the Astra House acquisition, which may have impacted things like promotion and publicity.

I also finished the first draft and started revising a new standalone middle grade fantasy with series potential.

2022 Income: The biggest check was the publication payment for Terminal Peace. All total, before taxes and various expenses, the writing brought in $13,957.16. While that’s absolutely nothing to sneer at, and I’m grateful for the success, it’s also a dropoff from the past couple of years. To be blunt, if you look at the cumulative graph, things have been slumping a bit.

Income Breakdown:

Patreon has been a small but steady and helpful source of income. My thanks to everyone for that!

As usual, my U.S. novels are the biggest piece of the pie. The short fiction category is a bit higher this year, thanks to those two new stories. I didn’t self-publish anything new in 2022, but if that middle grade book doesn’t sell, I’d like to publish that one later this year.

Novels (U.S. editions): $8,542.83

Novels (Non-U.S. editions): $473.25

Self-Published: $1158.24

Short fiction: $892.86

Audio: $521.04

Patreon: $1668.94

Other: $700

I mentioned earlier that things have been in a bit of a slump, and I need to focus on breaking out of that. Some things I can’t currently control. Tomorrow I could wake up to an offer from DAW on the book they’ve got, and maybe an email from my agent that the middle grade title he’s been shopping around went to auction and got a six-figure advance. But I can’t make these things happen.

Priority #1 is to keep writing. If I’m not doing that, other goals are pretty much moot.

Priority #2 is to figure out some alternate options. It may be time to put more time and effort into self-publishing as a complement to my traditionally published work.

The biggest thing making me anxious is that I’m pretty much out of contract. The paperback of Terminal Peace comes out this year, but for the first time in about 15 years, I don’t have the security, the luxury, or the deadlines of a signed contract. In some ways, this is freeing: I can write whatever I want. But there’s no guarantee as to when things will see print. Submitting to the traditional publishers is a long, slow process…

From talking to other writers who’ve been doing this a while, I’ve learned that pretty much every career has its ups and downs. Personal, pandemic, and publisher issues have been a bit of a perfect storm for me these past few years, but I’m not going anywhere. After 27 years as a writer, I’m excited to see what comes next.

Wrap Up:

I hope this has been helpful. As always, feel free to share the post and/or ask questions.

[turneradora]

Here is the written transcription of the new article of The Times magazine.

Published today on September 14th.

Thanks to Emma Jones 🙏👍🌺

Thanks to IsaDemrio for her edit

INTERVIEW with CAITLIN MORAN

Jilly Cooper’s raunchy Rivals: ‘You will see a lot of willies’

It’s taken 36 years, but finally Jilly Cooper’s legendary bonkbuster Rivals is on TV. Caitlin Moran — who was such a fan, she changed her name to one of the book’s characters — meets the author and stars on set and asks: how was it for you?

Guess where I am.

Oh my gosh — I am in RUTSHIRE.

If you own one of the multimillion copies sold of Jilly Cooper’s infamous Rutshire Chronicles books, you will a) be as excited as me, and b) know exactly where I am.

Yes, I am standing in front of a beautiful, honey-coloured mansion.

Yes, it is a beautiful summer’s day.

Yes, the herbaceous borders are magnificent.

Yes, there are adorable dogs milling around.

Yes, there are champagne bottles strewn hither and yon.

And yes, everyone is dressed in alternately fabulous, or ridiculous, Eighties outfits, with gigantic hair.

The ladies have electric-blue eyeshadow and golden, heaving bosoms.

The men, meanwhile, have tanned legs, huge Rolexes — and, in many instances, their gigantic hair manifests lower down: in moustaches like that of Tom Selleck.

And yes, of course, there is drama. David Tennant — wearing a lavish, gold, silken man-blouse and sucking on a cigar — is furious. He is savaging a roomful of party people, all looking stricken — and all, incongruously, wearing swimwear.

“How the f*** has this happened?” Tennant screams, as all the tits and legs fidget, gaudy piña coladas abandoned. “Get the f*** out there and sort this out! And why are you all wearing bikinis?”

Tennant storms from the room, apoplectic with rage — and then sees me.

“Oh, hello, darling,” he says, all sweetness and light.

“CUT!” the director calls.

Today, David Tennant isn’t, of course, David Tennant. He’s Tony Baddingham, the infamous, nominative-determinist baddie of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals.

“So, is this fun?” I ask him.

The last time I saw him on set, he was being the Doctor in Doctor Who, in a floor-length coat, trying to save the world from being exploded. Again. In the rain. In Wales. At 1am.

“Oh yes,” Tennant says. “I mean, look at my blouse. It’s like my aunt’s! Actually, I think it might be hers — it closes right to left. Don’t men’s buttons close left to right? Am I wearing,” he asks the room at large, “a woman’s blouse?”

“We need to go again, David,” the director says.

“Back in a tick,” Tennant says, running back on set, sucking on his cigar. Getting ready to be really evil, and Eighties, again.

Going back — to Rutshire.

Since Riders, the first volume of the Rutshire Chronicles, was published in 1985 — soaring straight to the top of the charts and eventually selling more than one million copies — Jilly Cooper has been the unassailable queen of the English bonkbuster.

While Shirley Conran’s Lace and Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives might have rivalled Cooper for sales, Cooper’s books are particularly well thumbed and beloved by their devotees because, underneath all the shagging and scandal, there’s something incredibly English and wholesome about them. Yes, there are villains, and orgies, and boardroom shenanigans — but just as much space is taken up by descriptions of scrumptious shepherd’s pies, heavenly rose gardens, darling horses and adorable dogs. And yes, the words used are “scrumptious”, “heavenly”, “darling” and “adorable” — the Cooper lexicon is heavy on delighted adjectives.

I meet countless people — actually, let’s be honest here: women; it’s women who are Cooper fans — who read these books as teenagers and had their lives changed by them. If you were in some boring suburb, or council house, reading about these relatably flawed English characters — all smoking; getting “tight” during long, boozy lunches; worrying about sweat patches on their cashmere dresses; gossiping; fighting their way through the class system; decorating beautiful houses; falling in love; and making endless puns and jokes — it all seemed a far more appealing, and possibly achievable, depiction of adulthood than the rather grim ones being peddled by Roth, Updike or Amis.

There are now at least two generations of women who, technically, emotionally, grew up not in Wolverhampton or Glasgow — but Rutshire.

This is why, in many ways, it seems strange it’s taken so long for the Rutshire Chronicles to make it to TV. Yes, there was a made-for-TV movie adaptation of Riders, back in 1993 — but Cooper fans don’t talk about that. At the time, “The acting appears to be from a Gold Blend advert,” was the kindest review.

No, it has taken until 2024 for someone to take on the task, drum up an incredible cast — David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Aidan Turner, Danny Dyer, Katherine Parkinson, Emily Atack — and persuade Disney, of all people, to cough up for all the mansions, helicopters, dogs, champagne and shoulder pads necessary to bring Dame Jilly Cooper’s beloved, fun, shagging Rutshire to life. A place as mythic to the British imagination as Narnia, the Hundred Acre Wood or the Brontës’ moors — but with, obviously, a lot more banging.

“Honestly, people thought I was mad,” says Dominic Treadwell-Collins, executive producer of the show. “I’ve been working on this for ten years. No, more — since the year 2000. I’d been a fan of Jilly since I was 20 — and when I got into TV, whenever I was in a meeting I’d say, ‘I want to do Jilly Cooper. I have to get these books on TV.’ And people would just slap their thighs and laugh.”

Treadwell-Collins’ previous projects include a five-year stint on EastEnders — “When we were getting 20 million viewers for the live shows” — and the multi-Bafta-winning A Very English Scandal, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw.

But now, he still looks puzzled at the mocking reaction Jilly Cooper caused. “I could never understand it. I genuinely think Jilly Cooper is the Jane Austen of our times. These are the books people will study, in the future, when they want to understand what the Eighties were like. Jilly comes across as fluffy and lovely — but she’s got a steely eye when it comes to the sexism, the homophobia, the racism, class. You think it’s all lavish and flirty — and it is — but then, on every third page, she’ll come and kick you in the shins. But every time I pitched it, people would be like, ‘Jilly Cooper? She’s just … a bit naff?’ And it was always men who said it. But I bet if they’d asked their wives, they would say, ‘I LOVE HER! MAKE IT NOW!’ ”

It does seem there is a continual, notable blindness to female audiences. It reminds me of all the fuss around Bridgerton when it first aired. Light romantic fiction — your Mills & Boon, your original Bridgerton books — sells more than any other genre. It sells in tens of millions. But because women buy those books, it’s … ignored. Until, that is, US TV behemoth Shonda Rhimes unexpectedly adapted Bridgerton — and it instantly became Netflix’s biggest hit to that point.

Suddenly, “books read by women” were revealed to be potential TV goldmines.

“Yes,” Treadwell-Collins says. “We are unashamed in wanting to make female viewers happy with this. We want this to become everyone’s favourite show. For it not to be a dirty secret any more that you love Jilly Cooper. We want people running down the street wearing ‘I LOVE JILLY COOPER’ T-shirts. It’s … a rich treat.”

It certainly is a rich treat. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a set where it’s so obvious that the budget is huge.

“We were the last show commissioned in the streaming gold rush,” Treadwell-Collins had said, earlier. “Budgets are very different now.”

There is an emotional support dog on set — of course there is. An ice-cream van turns up at 2pm — burly crew members walk around the grounds eating tiny pink strawberry cones, looking delighted. And, for reasons I never fully discover, someone has a ferret on a lead.

As I wander around the gigantic mansion, I bump into various cast members, who all seem overjoyed to be there.

Claire Rushbrook, who plays Monica Baddingham — Tony Baddingham’s posh, tolerant wife — is in the orangery, having her make-up done, while eating a scone.

“I mean, we are doing acting,” she says. “I want to make that clear. But … it is also enormous fun.”

The comedian and actress Emily Atack — playing the irrepressibly titty Sarah Stratton — is lounging on a love seat, in an orange kimono, stroking the emotional support dog. She has spent most of this day wearing nothing but a bikini.

“I keep chatting to people, like, ‘Hey, Dan, how’s the kids?’ — and then realising my tits are out,” she says.

Nafessa Williams, who plays Cameron Cook, and is, as she says, “the only American on set”, describes everyone as “so welcoming” — but has struggled with small cultural differences.

“My cast mates would say, ‘I’m going to the loo,’ and I was like, “What does that even mean?’ I had to be told the loo is the restroom — so it was a whole new world for me.”

When it comes to the atmosphere on set, I later talk to David Tennant about this subject.

“Yes — there was a lot of due diligence about only having … joyful people on set. Crew and cast,” Tennant says, carefully.

Treadwell-Collins is more forthright.

“We had a very strict ‘no arseholes’ policy,” he says. “We did a lot of research. On EastEnders, some of [the cast] were really unpleasant; rotten apples who ruined it. For Rivals, we talked to producers and agents off the record, and if they said, ‘He’s a marvellous actor — but also a wanker,’ or, ‘He’ll be amazing, but he did beat up a girlfriend ten years ago,’ we just didn’t cast them. Lots of people [in television] will put up with it. We were like, ‘Life’s too short.’ Also, if you’ve got David Tennant on the call sheet, he’s such a genuinely lovely, kind, decent man — and that flows down through everyone else.”

However, while Tennant might be No 1 on the call sheet, Rivals is not his show. For there is one character who is the ultimate pivot of the Rutshire Chronicles: Rupert Campbell-Black.

Rupert Campbell-Black is a hot, posh bastard who, due to a three-book-long redemptive arc, is also one of womankind’s most fancied fictional creations.

Infamously, he was “inspired” by Queen Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles.

Unlike Andrew, however, there are whole pages on Mumsnet dedicated to middle-aged women describing their hottest Rupert Campbell-Black sexual fantasies. I cannot overstate what a sex god he is held to be by Jilly Cooper fans. “RCB”, as he’s referred to, is … vaginally totemic to millions of women.

After a global search — auditions were held from America to Australia — Alex Hassell, previously seen as Metatron in His Dark Materials, was finally cast in this iconic role. When I talk to him, the main thing I want to discuss with him is how … feverishly his turn will be received.

Are you aware of Rupert’s … lubricious gravity within the Cooper fandom?

“I didn’t read the books as a teenager,” Hassell says, cheerfully. “They were on the top shelf in my mum and dad’s study, and I always wondered what they were.”

Your mother was a Jilly Cooper fan? And, therefore, presumably … a Rupert Campbell-Black fan?

“My mum, you know … blushed when I told her [I’d got the role],” Hassell admits. “A lot of women blushed when I told them.”

I’m interviewing Hassell, 44, and Tennant, 53, together. As a former Doctor, Tennant has, of course, a lot of experience in playing a role women find attractive.

“Once you’ve made [Rupert Campbell-Black] flesh, I think a lot of people are going to find it difficult to interact with you, Alex,” he says, helpfully.

It seems Hassell is aware of this.

“Yes,” he says. “One friend, when I told her, said, ‘Oh, that’s a bean-flicker role!’ I said, ‘Ah, I see.’ ”

“Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone come up to me and say, ‘I’ve masturbated thinking about you,’ ” Tennant says, thoughtfully.

“David!” Hassell exclaims, hurt. “When we met, that’s the first thing I said.”

The main plot of Rivals revolves around the, well, rivalry between Tony Baddingham and Rupert Campbell-Black. When young, Baddingham was bullied by Campbell-Black at boarding school. Now a powerful TV CEO — running the Rutshire local TV franchise — Baddingham still loathes Campbell-Black. Why?

“Tony’s from a lower class, while Rupert was born with an entire silver cutlery canteen in his mouth,” Tennant says. “So whatever Tony does, he never has that class advantage. Tony needs to taste the blood of his betters in his mouth to make him feel better. Rupert’s blood.”

“And while Rupert is, in many ways, a shit,” Hassell says, thoughtfully, “he’s not a bad man, like Tony. Tony is jealous of Rupert. He wants his house, his women, his life.”

Accordingly, this suit-based class war plays out as Campbell-Black tries to take over Baddingham’s TV station — and the backstabbing, shenanigans, shagging and skulduggery commence. Basically, imagine Dallas — but if, instead of oil, everyone was fighting to take over Anglia Television. Getting really angry over who has the rights to Sale of the Century.

I tell you what, though — why am I describing all this? The best person to talk about the plot of Rivals is the woman who came up with it: Jilly Cooper. And — here she is!

Cooper’s arrival on the set of Rivals is like a cross between a visit from royalty and the advent of an adorable, massive-haired, 87-year-old Bacchus. Everyone is awaiting her presence.

“Is there any booze?” comes her voice, from the hallway, as she approaches.

She is still being told, with polite sadness, that there is no booze as she comes into the room. It’s 1.30pm.

“They don’t have any booze here,” she relays to me, regretfully, as she sits down. “I asked before, but — no luck. I smuggled some in last time, and spilled it all over me — I’m terribly clumsy.”

Cooper is the living embodiment of the Rutshire world she created. In terms of being “on brand”, Jilly Cooper turning up in a mansion, looking for lunchtime champagne, is CS Lewis turning up with a talking beaver, gossiping about an “exciting wardrobe” he’s just found.

Everyone here has been to a “Jilly Party” — regular and seemingly full-on occurrences, held at the house she’s lived in since the Seventies.

“You just leave absolutely pissed,” says one, who doesn’t want to be named. “They have to ladle you into a taxi.”

“Oh, the last one was just a little party,” Cooper says.

What’s a little party?

“Seventy, seventy-five people?” Cooper says. “And then friends from the village, obviously. Andrew Parker-Bowles. Richard Madeley and his wife. Nicky Haslam. Lisa Maxwell. Stanley Tucci — who was heavenly.”

Please tell me the party was exactly like the ones in the books.

“Well, yes. We had kir royale, Pimm’s, wines. Gins.”

Note: gins multiple.

“Vol-au-vents, melon and Parma ham, smoked salmon on blinis. Brandy snaps with Chantilly cream. Everyone got awfully tight. I led them around the infamous tennis court.”

The tennis court at Cooper’s house is the setting for one of her most iconic scenes — where Campbell-Black first meets his love interest, Taggie, while he’s playing naked tennis. He is adjudged to have lost a match point because something is over the line. Oh, why am I being so coy? This is Jilly Cooper. It’s his penis. His massive penis is judged to be over the line. A note to diehard fans: this scene is shot exactly as written. You will see a lot of willies.

“We’ve been equal opportunities in our nudity,” Treadwell-Collins says. “There’s a willy for every pair of tits.”

“That was my great disappointment over the TV show,” Cooper sighs. “The tennis court is a terrible mess — no one’s played on it for 20 years — and I thought [Disney] might be darlings and build me a new one.”

She looks around, hopefully.

“Do you think anyone here has some booze?” she asks. “It is the afternoon.”

Cooper has been an invaluable muse to everyone on set while filming. In one scene, she handed over an urgent note that read, “Rupert would never say ‘spouse’ — that’s very lower-middle [class]. He would say ‘wife’.”

She argued for particularly Cooperesque jokes and puns to stay in, and was firm that the whole “First of May” tradition remain.

“Oh, yes,” she says, looking delighted, and then quotes herself. “ ‘First of May, first of May — outdoor f***ing starts today. But if as usual it do rain, we f*** off indoors again.’ ”

This ribald rhyme kicks off a massive shagging montage, involving the entire cast. And all outdoors, of course.

But, as any English person knows, outdoor sex is a perilous sport. Perhaps the emotional centrepiece of Rivals is the agonisingly drawn-out attraction between Freddie (Danny Dyer) and Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), both married to awful people, but who ache for each other in a way that is guaranteed to bring tears to the viewers’ eyes. A scene where they bunk into the first-class carriage of a train to smoke fags and share fruitcake, while timidly flirting with each other, is the Brief Encounter of our time.

And, without wanting to chuck in too many spoilers, when they finally requite their love for each other, it’s one of the all-time great sex scenes. Danny Dyer, it turns out, is exquisite, adorable leading-man material, while Katherine Parkinson “is the new Olivia Colman”, Treadwell-Collins says, firmly. “She will be garlanded with Baftas and Oscars. Honestly. And she wanted to do the sex scene,” he adds. “She was like, ‘I really want to show my boobs. I’m in my mid-forties and they look good.’ In that scene, you can see she’s crying — really crying, with happiness — and it makes you cry too. She looks like a f***ing queen.”

On set, however, the sex scene was not without its problems. Because it was “outdoor f***ing”, in a flower meadow.

“But it was at the height of tick season,” Treadwell-Collins recalls, with a shudder. “Not safe to be in the grass. We didn’t want to get a tick on Danny Dyer’s willy! In the end, we had to get in a load of moss for them to lie on. It’s the first time, to my knowledge, that safe sex has involved moss.”

I can’t tell you what fun it is interviewing all the Rivals people. Because of the show, everyone talks about their memories of the Eighties (David Tennant: “No, my Eighties weren’t like a Jilly Cooper book — I was at school in Paisley with my glasses held together with sticky tape, and a very unappealing haircut”), and smoking (Hassell: “Everyone smoked everywhere, didn’t they? Even on planes. They’d draw across that little … health curtain, and everyone smoked behind it”), and how hard it was to leave Cooper’s world when shooting finished (Hassell: “No one was looking at me like I’m the most sexy man on the planet any more. It was tough.”)

My final interview is with Aidan Turner, who is playing Rivals’ chat show host, Declan O’Hara.

I mean to cast no aspersions on extremely handsome men who spent a decade being a country’s totemic sex god — as Turner was, during his Poldark years — but sex gods are usually quite emotionally damaged, with a form of what might be termed “PTSD” — Post-Totty Stress Disorder. They often make for effortful company. They want to be taken seriously.

In the event, Turner, 41, is an absolute hoot — particularly on the subject of the massive moustache he sports on the show. It is a magnificent specimen of upper-lip pelt. It looks like a vole fell asleep under his nose.

It looks like the one Ned Flanders has on The Simpsons, I tell him.

Turner gives a huge, barking laugh.

“Ned Flanders? I mean, I was thinking more … Irish stag? Super-masculine?”

He starts giggling again.

Turner’s relaxed stance towards his sex god-dom comes with an interestingly meta twist. In Rivals, one of Baddingham’s TV shows is called Four Men Went to Mow — where sexy farmers, sexily stripped to the waist, carry out sexy agricultural duties.

Turner, of course, infamously stripped to the waist a few times in Poldark, for that scything scene or lying in bed or emerging from the sea. In a pleasingly postmodern moment, one scene sees Turner rail against Four Men Went to Mow — raging, almost camply, “TV can’t just be men taking their tops off!”

“Yes, that’s a lovely moment,” Turner says. “When I read the script, I was like, ‘Why have you put this in? It’s too close [to Poldark].’ But then they told me it’s in the original books — and it’s so funny. The first time I did that scene, people were keeling over laughing. It’s good to poke fun at these things.”

As one of the most Eighties stories ever, Rivals takes on some massive subjects: class, Aids, Section 28, sexism, rape, homophobia, Thatcherism, racism. As the Jane Austen of her time, Cooper has a lot of grist for her mill. The dramatic tension never drops.

But this is done hand in hand with the most delicious sense of silliness and fun. There is a single tracking shot of a buffet — the Most Eighties Buffet Ever — and the sheer amount of prawns is deeply hilarious. Prawns are very Eighties — and Rivals knows it.

Rivals knows that when it’s in Rupert Campbell-Black’s house, we will see his cold, posh childhood is perfectly encapsulated by the fact that his walls are covered in formidable oil paintings of his ancestors — but all his photo frames are full of pictures of his dogs.

And Rivals knows exactly when to play Huey Lewis and the News.

“We call it the Cooperverse,” Treadwell-Collins tells me. “It really is the equal of the DC or Marvel worlds. It’s that epic. And those who know about it are equally obsessed.”

I can attest to that. When I first read Rivals, at the age of 13, I decided I wanted to be a character in one of Cooper’s books. Specifically, Declan O’Hara’s youngest daughter: a feisty teenage girl who had dyed red hair, lived in a beautiful, sprawling house called the Priory, and was constantly rebelling against her school.

As a down payment, I first dyed my hair red. And then I decided I would change my name, in her honour. If I couldn’t actually be Declan’s youngest daughter, Caitlin O’Hara, I would stop being Catherine Moran and become Caitlin Moran. As some small promise that, one day, my life would be as fun as that of a Jilly Cooper heroine.

Because, sometimes, you don’t need a story about mythic quests, or wars, or dragons, or murder. You just need a story that promises you: being a grown-up could be exciting.

And that when sex, love, drama, awful men, fabulous bitches, workplace intrigues, swathes of blue eyeshadow and buffets of prawns finally come into your life, you can … poke fun at these things.

You can live in the Cooperverse too.

Rivals is on Disney+ from October 18

#Rivals

[mooncakescomic]

Wow! Hi! Announcement about MOONCAKES (that might be new to some)

Hi guys! Wendy here.

It's been a few years-- I actually logged back onto tumblr to fix the stupid AI settings to avoid this blog getting scraped, specifically with this as Mooncakes started as a webcomic and is now a published graphic novel under copyright (please update your blog settings to avoid your own blog getting scraped)

That's right! I thought that since we had published as a book back in 2019, people would stop following this blog, but looking at the notifications, people are still landing here.

So this is to say that Mooncakes is a graphic novel that you can buy wherever books are sold (might I suggest your local indie) and we have several different editions, including a special edition hardcover and a Spanish edition. To finish reading what happens to Nova and Tam that ended at Chapter 6 here, please get the book! If you don't wanna buy it, please support your local library and request it or check it out there!

You can find me over on instagram @artofwendyxu and on my website. I sell Procreate brushes and short fantasy comics on my ko-fi , and these days I'm a full time comics artist with MOONCAKES out from Oni Press, TIDESONG and INFINITY PARTICLE from HarperCollins Quilltree, and more to come, all available wherever books are sold and at your local library.

You can find Suzanne over on her website (she isn't on social media much these days). She's written for Star Wars and short fiction magazines, with a novel in the works!

Joamette, our letterer, is also the EIC and publisher over at Power and Magic Press, for more comics about queer witches and fantasy of color-- books also available for sale and at your libraries.

Thank you so much for your support, and I hope you'll continue to follow us on our journeys.

[deke-rivers-1957]

Elvis Puzzler Magazine

I'll be editing this post with my thoughts on each puzzle as I go through it. Thanks @vintagepresley for posting about in the first place.

Pre-Hollywood Puzzles (Despite some of these involving elements both during and after his Hollywood career, they all come before the official movies so they'll all go here).

Ultimate/2 min Trivia: Incredible how obvious my interest in the niche of Elvis movies is that I actually struggled with some of the questions. Funny thing but one of them was whether or not his real hair color was blond. I know he had blond hair as a child but he clearly has brown hair as an adult. Does that still count as him being blond? I know I probably thought about the semantics too much, but it's a true/false question. You wouldn't say Elvis was a blond as an adult but he did have blond hair as a child. I would've reworded it by asking if his real hair color was black.

Mix & Match: I'd say this was pretty easy as long as you know some of the bigger hits. Elvis song titles are simple in that if you only need to find one word, you can use the rest of the title to figure it out.

TV Guide Spot the Difference: 2 of the three had an obvious difference that either involve his name or the heading. The second one was a bit of a challenge since the difference was pretty small.

Word Searches: I appreciate that they each follow the theme well and include specific words from the song/album. The difficulty of them are all about the same.

Missing Letters: I like this one since you really need to keep track of the individual letters for each word. Since there's no space between words, it adds to the difficulty since you need to know how many letters make up each word as well.

Ed Sullivan Show: 5 letters scramble is just not my best type of puzzle. I'm not good at it, but for once the word sudoku didn't give me as much issue. I got the mystery word right away. The criss cross was fun because I learned about so many acts that appeared on the show. You don't realize retrospectively how big the show was until you see how many big names were on there.

Elvis' Christmas Album Spot The Difference: This was really easy. There's so many big presents on the cover that you can tell when something was missing.

Elvis' Golden Records Album Trivia: Some of the stats I have no idea how they verified. For instance, how can you possibly figure out if he sold 1 billion records? Some of the metrics like the Billboard 100 didn't even exist yet so a lot of his early records weren't included in some counts or had to be retroactively estimated. I would've used a more easily calculable stat instead.

Aloha from Hawaii Spot The Difference: One difference I wasn't so sure about was the blue circle on the earth. I had to look really close to make sure they were different shades. I know it's rare but I wonder what someone who's color blind would see. Would they even know there was a difference in colors?

Crossword: I thought the clues involving lyrics from Elvis songs were cool. Some of them though made no sense to me like 46 down being "hon" when the clue was cupcake. How does that fit and what does "hon" even mean outside of a variation of honey? I know you need the h from 44 across and the n from 51 across but you could've just used hen or hun.

Movie Puzzles

Love Me Tender: The word scramble was easy since his songs had very simple titles. The word sudoku was a bit challenging since I'm not used to doing those, but the criss cross was very fun. I love how in the summary they talked about how Clint was exempt from service since I mention that in my review. The main takeaway I got was that I surprisingly didn't know a lot of behind the scenes names for this movie. For instance I never knew Ken Darby was the actual writer of the song "Love Me Tender". When I wrote my review, I didn't go into the same detailing of behind the scenes personnel so it was great to learn more about it.

Loving You: Boy was this quite a jump in difficulty. I made a lot of mistakes throughout all of the puzzles. The 5 letters puzzle was a lot harder than it should've been to me since I didn't associate the same words to what the clues were saying. The word sudoku was a nightmare to the point where I had to use the answer key to finish. I knew the mystery word was Lizabeth because the summary already included her name. The criss cross was a little easier but I still made a couple mistakes on it. Overall, I'm just glad Loving You finally got some representation since it's the least talked about of his 50s movies.

Jailhouse Rock: This a bit easier. The Scramble was very easy but again the word sudoku gave me trouble. At this point I know that puzzle will take me a lot of time. The criss cross I only had one mistake because I miscounted the number of letters.

King Creole: This one took longer to do as I had other stuff going on. Once again the 5 letters and word sudoku were difficult to finish. Only one mistake on the criss cross because I was looking at the wrong section. I'm amazed they mentioned the riots in Mexico that occurred because a lot of teens wanted to see the movie without paying.

G.I. Blues: This one was really easy. The tank one was unfamiliar but once I got one word, the rest was easy to finish. Criss cross as usual was easy as well. What I didn't know was that this movie's soundtrack was nominated for 2 Grammys (one for Best Soundtrack and one for Best Male's Vocal Performance) since I didn't mention that in my review.

Flaming Star: The last letter trivia spiral is only hard if you're not that knowledgable of Yellowstone or Dirty Harry's basic production credit details. We do get a change of pace by having a word search about Western tv shows and a find the different image puzzle. I'd say those two are easy, you just need to pay real close attention to what you want to find.

Wild In The Country: I admit that I'm not that knowledgable in country music either. There was a clue about the leading man from A Star Is Born for the scramble and I have no idea how to spell his last name. Same with a country music legend who grew up with 11 siblings. I got both of their first names but no clue on their last names lol. There was another word search that I had a better time with. Now what was a weird choice was an add 'em up puzzle. The final number doesn't have any significance to the movie so I have no idea why it was included for this movie. I would've changed the given numbers so that the top of the pyramid added up to 1961 (the year the movie was released).

Blue Hawaii: Interestingly there's only 2 puzzles that take up the double page spread: Fill in the Blanks and a word search. The word search I think makes up for having one less puzzle because you're finding a lot more words compared to previous movies that had one.

Follow That Dream: Also only has 2 puzzles that are Fill in the Blanks and a word search. This time though, the word search wasn't that hard. About a third of the page was just a full body shot of Toby which is absolutely necessary. The only thing I wonder though is what exactly is the ceremony from the word search? I wouldn't call the governor seeing part of the highway a ceremony. The court scene at the end definitely isn't one either. If anyone had just seen the movie, let me know if I'm missing something.

Girls! Girls! Girls!: We completely skip Kid Galahad which stinks since I would've loved to see boxing themed puzzles. Only 2 puzzles but this time it's missing letters and a maze. Mazes to me can be tricky since you almost need to start off on both ends and try to meet in the middle. I'd say it makes up for not have 3 puzzles.

It Happened At The World's Fair: After taking a break in the middle of a word search I think that really helped my concentration. It was a decent sized word search since you had to find really long words like paddleboat rides. We also got a new puzzle with code words. I love this puzzle. You got the trivia aspect where you have to find cities that hosted a world's fair and the puzzle aspect where you need to figure out what the other letters are. Definitely makes up for only having 2 puzzles.

Viva Las Vegas: We skip a couple movies and only get 2 puzzles. A Cluefinder puzzle that's only 3x3 for each category is a bit too easy. Since you also only have a word search I think this was a bit underwhelming. I would've added another puzzle like a word scramble that included trivia about Ann Margret.

Girl Happy: We skip Roustabout and only get 2 puzzles. The word search is standard but it was interesting to see the names of some famous pin up girls that I've never heard of. The code puzzle is good in that you're using the alphabet's number positions to spell out the names of songs used in the movie.

Harum Scarum: We skip Tickle Me and still have 2 puzzles. Word builder is fun since you have to remember how to spell certain words. The one word word search shouldn't even be part of this since you're only finding Elvis. It's a general Elvis puzzle when this is supposed to be about the movie. It would make more sense if you're finding his character's name Johnny.

Change of Habit: This is the last movie and even in an Elvis magazine all of his movies past 1965 except for this one was skipped. It's not even a big send off to his movie career. Only one puzzle and it's a measly word search. I feel like they could've done a better job. I understand that this was made by the editors of TV Guide and it won't be a complete package, but the ending of this section is so underwhelming. I might make my own puzzles for the movies that weren't included some day.

Post-Hollywood Puzzles (I know some of them were made during his movie career but that's how it's set up in the magazine).

'68 Comeback Special: Trivia Cross was pretty easy, but Both Directions and Sudoku were hard for me. Only having 3 small puzzles make sense because of the difficulty.

Elvis: TTWII: Only having two puzzles is fair because you have the word search with 18 different Vegas performers throughout history and Hidden Alphabet. That second puzzle can be difficult if you don't know what exact word you're looking for.

From the Archives: Both of these are crosswords and I had to give up by using the answer key. Some of these clues I had no idea what the answer was and made mistakes. What doesn't help is that these were from time periods where I simply wasn't alive to know American culture. I'm not going to know who Mr. Television was or every single movie that came out in 1950s/90s.

Elvis' Giant Xword: For a puzzle this big, I did fairly well. I did have to look up his discography and names to get the spelling right. I'd say for a catch all puzzle involving Elvis, this was pretty good.

Spot The Differences: All fairly easy but I love how we got to see Elvis through his adult life starting with his Army years. I did think some of the differences were a bit too obvious such as having Priscilla's entire shirt be a different color.

Elvis Hit Song Rebus: I thought it was pretty easy for an "end credits" puzzle since it comes after the answer key. As long as you know what his hit singles were, the pictures are pretty easy to put together.

Back Cover Fill in the Blank: As long as you know the quote word for word this should be easy. I admit I wasn't expecting to have a puzzle be on the back cover, so it made for a nice little surprise.

Final Thoughts

I thought this was a great magazine even if there were some missteps. I don't get TV Guide so if these puzzles came directly from issues over the decades, I can't really complain as much. If these were made from scratch, I wish we had at least every movie represented since I was bummed that some movies I enjoyed were missing when others I didn't like as much made it in.

If you haven't gotten one, I high recommend buying one while you still can.

[sweetmariihs2]

Today I found and bought two new Sofia The First magazines in a magazine stand, in a town next to mine. (That's what the post is about) 🪻✨️💗

I live in a small town, I came to the neighboring city (a slightly bigger one; where there is a cinema, adequate medical care and clinics, things that are scarce in my town and everyone comes here when they need one of these things) to do an eyesight exam, because recebtly I've been feeling my vision getting worse. Going to the clinic, I found a magazine stand on the other street, and I asked my family (who were with me) if they could accompany me there later. I did the exam, and I'm still under the influence of the eye drops, so it's been torture to write this text, but I need to tell you what I found. You won't believe it: TWO DIFFERENT EDITIONS OF SOFIA THE FIRST MAGAZINES! THOSE THAT ARE NO LONGER PRODUCED! IN FACT, SEVERAL COPIES OF THEM! There were like, 7 magazines from the same edition, perfectly new, never touched, ON THE FLOOR. (And no, I'm not from Rio De Janeiro, there are a lot of sidewalks with this pattern here in Brazil)

A while ago, I think it was in January, I was wondering if I should also go to this city and look for Sofia The First merch, because in my small town I've already looked at all the stores and there's nothing left to see here (how many, about 4 ? 5? Yes, it really is a small city, I know all these places and you can visit them all in 1 or 2 hours at most, walking down the street, without a car). I found some stickers and birthday invitations, I posted them a while ago, I used them for journaling in my sketchbook.

(@shychick-52 do you see the Donald Duck magazines there?? When I saw them I immediately thought about you, they're on the bottom left of the pic and there's more in the top right. Pato Donald is Donald Duck, Tio Patinhas is Scrooge McDuck's name in Brazil. I don't know a thing about Ducktales, I'm sorry!)

I literally gasped. I was just going there for fun, as I like books, magazines and vintage products like records and CDs, so I really like physical media. Those places full of trinkets are extremely fun for me, and whenever I have the opportunity I like to look at everything, down to the smallest details. I love music and vinyl stores, stationery stores, party stores, haberdashery, so a magazine stand sounds amazing to me too! I hadn't been to one in years! (I never went thrifting in my life. It would be an amazing day to spend an evening)

There weren't only Sofia The First ones, you see, these kinds of magazines aren't produced anymore since kids don't have any interest in them. So most of the children's magazines there were dated around 2012-2016! You don't even have to look for the dates to know that, the Strawberry Shortcake ones, Frozen (FROZEN, DUDE! FROZEN!!!) (In one of my STF magazines there's even an ad of these Frozen magazines, they were produced during the same time), there were Disney Junior ones (If you look closely you can see the Lion Guard cover on that pic where I show you the pile of STF magazines, it's on top of them), Disney Princess, EVEN MONSTER HIGH. I didn't took a pic of this one, but as far as I know, you don't find these anywhere anymore. I felt like going back to 2015, when I was a kid those activity magazines and visiting the magazine stands were extremely fun, the themes on the children's magazines were exactly these, I remember the sticker albums, so many good memories. It makes sense, since they're the same ones, but they were never sold.

Besides the children magazines, they sell mangas, magazines, books, word search and activity books, cooking books, comic books/magazines (superhero themed or not- DC comics, Marvel, but also Disney and national works, for example our beloved Turma Da Mônica), and even toys and stuff.

So I figured maybe I'd find silly things here too, it's a bigger town but after all it's still small, it's just 40 mins away from mine, maybe I could find little birthday hats that I can cut out? Gift bags? Maybe stickers and coloring kits, silly things. Of course, knowing about the magazine stands there, something that my hometown NO LONGER has, inside of me had a small amount of hope that I could find something, but not much, as I live in the rural/interior part of Brazil and many products are bootleg, you know those princess books with wonky faces written "princess coloring book"? Stuff like that. But there was still a shred of hope, despite knowing that there probably wouldn't be anything interesting. I just went there because I have fun searching for little things.

AND WHEN I GOT THERE.... THE MAGAZINES WERE JUST THERE. AT THE ENTRANCE. ON THE ?!?!?!?!? FLOOR?!??!??! (You can see the pic up there) ON THE DIRTY SIDEWALK FULL OF DIRT AND DUST AND ALL KINDS OF NASTY THINGS?!??! HELL NAH

It was like they were just waiting for me to get them, they were the first things that I saw. I KNEW THAT I WOULD FIND SOMETHING. In fact, as I always hope to find cool things in these stores I frequent, I always expect something. I'm usually disappointed, but I always try to find it. AND THIS TIME I FOUND IT. NOT ONE, NOT TWO, BUT LIKE A DOZEN of STF magazines from the same edition, still packaged AND WITH THE GIFT. ALL OF THEM.

As my parents had work to do in our town and needed to return, I had to look at everything quickly. Luckily the magazine stand was small, so I was able to look at a few things, and while the attendant (who seemed bored (thankfully, the fact that she was very slow gave me time to look a little more)) served other customers (she was slow with them too, which gave me more time thank god), I continued looking at all sides of the stand, observing every small detail to look for treasures. If there were several copies of an issue of Sofia The First magazine still packed there, then there must have been more, hidden behind that enormous amount of information. I didn't had enough time because my parents needed to go back home, but I wish I could have saw the content from the Disney Junior magazines. I opened it and looked through the pages, only the last two pages were about Sofia The First, but I still had a lot to look so I put it back and went to search for more.

That's the one I got, the edition I mentioned

12 brazillian reais are worth around 2,50 dollars. For us, in talks about value, it would be like- 5 dollars? Not too cheap like literal 2 dollars, it's like, a cheap price, but not that much. For us, I mean. I don't know if you get what I mean, my explanation was terrible

Before, as we were late for the exam and the whole family was going (we all went to take the exam) I only took with me my cellphone and headphones, I didn't bring my money or even a purse or a backpack. My father bought me the magazine, I got so happy. Actually, he just let me have it and gave me the money, so I went to the attendant. The magazines had an elastic band around to secure them, as you can see in the pic, and I took them to the girl and asked for her help to get one out. As I'm used to being very friendly, and I was very happy, I approached the girl, asked for her help, and as she got them out of the elastic band, I kept talking "I can't believe I found this!! They are no longer produced, they are rare items, and I'm collecting them! I didn't think I would find anything like this here, it definitely made my day." I noticed that the attendant wasn't very friendly back, in fact she was very quiet and seemed a little bored, but I didn't care, I was too happy to worry about judgement looks from people I don't know, at least I was friendly and I did my part. My young brother later told me that when I turned my back she looked confused and shrugged, perhaps thinking "to each their own, right?". She went to serve the other customers and in the meantime I continued to look through the magazines, hoping to find more.

Important detail: I still had eye drops, my pupils were extremely dilated and I could see nearby objects blurred, so searching thoroughly was very difficult. Imagine looking at all that information without being able to see things closer than 1m from you. I'm still convinced I didn't manage to look at everything. I found more Disney Princess magazines (dated in 2014? 2015? somewhere around that) and that's when I saw it. I literally had to crouch down to look at the magazines in the lower sections of the shelf, they were stacked and they covered each other, and when I saw the Sofia The First logo I quickly grabbed it. IT WAS ANOTHER EDITION - A FLOATING PALACE THEMED ONE. Unfortunately this time it was out of the packaging, and I have no idea if someday there was even a gift with it, but I don't care, it was amazing to find this.

That's the Disney Princess magazines I was talking about! In that first pic I took, at the start of the post, you can see a Belle themed one. The Ariel themed magazine looks so old that the paint is stained and started to fade (it was in the front showcase while the other ones were carefully placed inside the stand), thankfully the STF ones were brand new. Well, almost.

Now that I'm home and I'm already seeing a little better, I'm gonna show you the magazines. Not all of them unfortunately, because a post only supports 10 pics and each magazine has 15/20+ pages so like... yeah. I wanna scan them and put them in a Google drive folder, or at least post a video about them in my YouTube channel, but that's more unlikely. If I had all of them, definitely, but I don't think it's worth recording a video if it's not with all the issues, don't you think? Anyway.

What's written in the first one: The Queen's Birthday Party! (This one came with the necklace)

In the second one: Sofia's vacation!

Let's take a closer look at the necklace

I'm fighting the urge to use it. I really want to use that tag in my sketchbook and the charm of the necklace in something like a keychain, but I cann'ttt bring myself to destroy something that is not produced anymoreeee😭😭😭

In the Floating Palace magazine, there is not even a single page where the sea monster is in. Not even a single one.

But in the "Queen's Birthday Party" one, there are three pages where Cedric is in! Yayy!!! They did him justice!!!

If anyone's curious about Miranda's birthday party, it's a comic and someone already posted it on Tumblr. Here is the link.

You know, that "Queen's Birthday Party" it's very exclusive, I don't remember the show having any episode like this, and the next activities in the magazine talk about the vacation they did in the comic and also the birthday party. Besides that, we have a lot of activities related to Tilly and family, and the main arts and crafts activity from this magazine is making a family tree. I believe that this magazine's topic is family.

I can't show you all the pages, but at least I can publish the pages Cedric is in and add more stuff to my Cedric merch masterlist (and personal research)

Well at least he's there. I have seen this art around like 20 times but they remembered that Cedric is a Sofia The First character so that's good I guess

They did him dirty here

AND THIS!!!! THIS ABSOLUTELY THIS!!! MY FAVORITE ONE!!!1!1!!!1!1!!1

YOU GUYS DON'T KNOW HOW LOUD I GASPED, WHEN I TELL YOU THAT I ALMOST STARTED JUMPING AND SCREAMING "YIPEE YIPEEE"

I'll translate it to you this time, so you can understand how I'm feeling right now

✨️Translation:✨️

Enchancia Castle

Title: Fraternal Bonds

Before leaving, Aunt Tilly gives her brother a big hug. Which pairs of siblings do you know from Sofia's world? Mark the correct pairs below.

THAT IS SO AAARRRGGGAGGAGAVVSGGSBBAVSGJ💖💖😭💗💞💗💞😭💞😭💗😭💞😭💖💗💖

I KNOW THAT CEDRIC AND SOFIA ARE THE WRONG OPTION, BUT I CAN'T. THAT IS SO CUTE I MIGHT EXPLODE I DON'T KNOW

that's what we had for today, I reached the 10 image per blog limit as always, no one's surprised

[wanderingnork]

Hi! Loved the lore dump yesterday and it got me really curious:

Githyanki worship Vlaakith, right? But do the githzerai have any religion (I'm not entirely sure how faith features into the monk class in D&D)? And do you know anything more about that long-dead goddess whom they used to worship?

What did the illithids use the githyanki for exactly? Just food? Manual labor? As soldiers?

Also, the Penumbran's "alien sheep" made me wonder what kind of livestock (if any) the gith keep nowadays and if you know whether they might also keep pets?

Which THEN got me wondering whether the gith are into music, performative arts, and poetry aside from the art you've described in that lovely one shot with the artist and the solider on AO3? /very long ask over And thank you so much for sharing all this lore with the rest of us! I'm really enjoying learning from your blog.

ALL RIGHT LET'S GO I HAVE SOURCES >:3

Starting off with worship: Back in the 2nd Edition D&D Monstrous Manual, Zerthimon is portrayed as a prophet-like figure, who died fighting Gith but will eventually return to lead the githzerai into a paradise. In Dragon magazine #390, which is a 4th edition publication, there's a sect of githzerai who carved their residence out of the petrified body of a dead god and live by its religious tenets. But the closest the githzerai have to an active deity in 5th Edition sources is their king, Zaerith Menyar-Ag Gith. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes depicts him as a transcendent monk with incredible psionic powers, who looks like he's dead and just exists in a coffin projecting his thoughts.

What did the illithids use the githyanki for? All of the above. In the Mind Flayer Trilogy, we see them used as gardeners, food, manual labor, and eventually psionic supersoldiers (the illithids' final downfall). In all accounts, Gith was a bodyguard and soldier. According to the Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon from Planescape: Torment, he worked in fields where bodies of gith used for food were turned to fertilizer for illithid crops.

Livestock and pets: The githyanki have an entire caste devoted to farming, the g'lathk (which has two apostrophes in earlier editions). The most detailed description of the g'lathk I've found is the web supplement for Dungeon #100 (Lich-Queen's Beloved), which goes in-depth on Tu'narath's farming district. To quote the article: "everything from rothé to chained humanoid captives (goblins, kobolds, gnomes, dwarves, halflings, elves, humans, bariaurs, and other “cattle”)." More recent editions have seriously downplayed or eliminated the idea of the githyanki keeping slaves this way (4th Edition's "Secrets of the Astral Sea" goes as far as saying that githyanki abhor slavery as hypocrisy when they themselves were slaves), but yeah. That's the livestock situation.

AS FOR PETS, that's MUCH more fun. Githyanki are frequently accompanied by spectral hounds, or ride interesting mounts like nightmares or the hybrids of dinosaurs and red dragons. However, in Dragon magazine #117, there's the wonderful article "Hounds of Space and Darkness." Here we learn about the dogs specially bred by the githyanki and githzerai. The githyanki breed guard dogs called kaoulgrim which are essentially super aggressive Russian bear-hunting dogs, huge and fluffy. The githzerai breed the szarkel, which are Extremely Extremely Cursed borzoi that have some limited shapechanging ability.

Finally, art: The githyanki have always been portrayed as a highly artistic group. In their earliest AD&D incarnations, they wear a great deal of jewelry and beautiful armor. By 2nd Edition, especially in the Planescape books, we see the craftsmen (mlar or m'lar) popping up. Planescape's Faction War supplement discusses beautiful and magical jewelry being sold in the city of Sigil. A Guide to the Astral Plane (also 2E) presents glorious artwork by Tony diTerlizzi of githyanki arms and armor and clothes. The Black Spine adventure for the 2nd Edition Dark Sun campaign setting offers the chance to visit a githyanki palace and includes a palace with whole wings devoted to music and art. In the 3rd Edition Tome of Battle, we get the entire story of a famous githyanki smith who made a legendary and (from the accompanying art) beautiful sword. The same Dungeon web supplement above details the mlar district of Tu'narath, where artists live in studios to create spectacular and often magical works of art.

In 5th Edition, going back to Mordenkainen, this takes a sour turn. That book portrays the githyanki as a society of bored, semi-immortal dilettantes, who get halfway through works of art or other creative projects before abandoning them for something new. I don't particularly like that, considering just how much has gone before about the githyanki being an artistic society.

I suspect that Larian agrees with me. In a banter between Gale and Lae'zel, she informs him that the githyanki paint frescoes, write symphonies, and make wine. Given how much Larian has already diverged from mainline D&D githyanki lore in their game, I think that it's a safe bet that the githyanki of Baldur's Gate 3 are more in line with the previous editions of D&D in terms of art.

[nickmaghighlights]

Nick Mag Highlights - Nick Mag Presents: Danny Phantom (Fall 2005)

Well, well, well, fancy meeting you here. Welcome back to my blog and the words that inhabit it. Today, Halloween comes early this year when we read through another exciting issue of Nickelodeon Magazine Presents, this time all about Danny Phantom. Boo! Trick-or-Treat! Deck the halls!

And not only is this edition of Nick Mag Highlights spooky, it’s also… pretty chill. Y’know? Just takin’ it easy, reading a handful of comics and probably a crossword puzzle or something. As much as I love researching the kind of stuff Nickelodeon Magazine includes in its articles, sometimes it’s nice to sit back and take things at face value and just see what the state of Nickelodeon was like at any given time, and these short-and-sweet issues of Nick Mag Presents are the perfect venue for just that.

But why exactly am I tackling this purportedly Halloween-themed issue in August? Well, mainly it’s because that new Danny Phantom graphic novel just came out… two weeks ago (oops). And I really enjoyed it! So I’ve since been in a big Danny Phantom mood lately. I even ended up re-watching the whole first season and had a blast doing so. This show was a real obsession of mine as a kid, so maybe this blog post is also a way for me to give it its dues.

This issue can be found online here, read along… if you dare!

Another Nick Mag Presents, another humorously wordy introduction. If you’re unfamiliar, basically all these Presents-styled issues have a panel on the first page with a character essentially advertising the book to you and talking about all the comics and activities included inside. This one here features Danny and an understandably perturbed ghost, for example. 

Since these issues were usually sold in stores as opposed to through a mail subscription, I suppose this is the issue’s way of hooking you in and explaining to you why you should buy it. I think a kid would probably be more inclined to just flip through the book and arrive at the same conclusion, but I guess this approach doesn’t hurt anybody.

But anyway, let’s see here… aw, only two wholly new comics? The Fairly Oddparents-themed issue I took a look at previously had five original comics. That’s a bummer, but at least we’ve still got variety… SpongeBob, My Life as a Teenage Robot, and The Wild Thornberrys, oh my! Even Tak makes an appearance here, two years before the premiere of his actual Nickelodeon cartoon, meaning this was an attempt to interest readers in the then-recently released video game: Tak 3: The Great Juju Challenge. Not sure if that worked.

And if you’ll take a look at that yellow, spiky bubble with words on the right there, this September 2005 issue is meant to coincide with the then-upcoming two episode-long Danny Phantom special, “The Ultimate Enemy”, which featured Danny taking on a more powerful version of himself from the future. Seems like the included removable poster is even themed around that very episode! Let’s just hope that poster is still left intact, eh?

So first up, we’ve got a page to get you up to speed on the main cast if you’re new to the show. It’s even got some new factoids for the already familiar superfans! For example: Did you know Sam is into anime? I sure didn’t.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where series villain Vlad Masters is, don’t worry, they go over him later on in the book.

On the right you’ll find an easy if not slightly amusing word puzzle, which tasks you with solving questions where each answer contains the word boo. Simple enough for a kid while still being worth the time, methinks.

Although all the stock ghost art on the page gets me wondering, how come most of the ghosts in the show manifest as typical-looking cartoon ghosts while others manifest in a human form? I guess maybe it comes down to the strength of your spirit. Who’s to say?

You’ve met the characters, now it’s time to meet the voices behind them! I’ll always take a side of interviews with my Nickelodeon Magazine, and this is no exception. The questions are cute, and I had fun reading them. Not much to say.

So we’re finally here at the first comic of the issue, and… not really a fan of this one! Yeah, sorry to start this retrospective off on a sour note but this isn’t really doing it for me. The main villain of this one is Youngblood, who already isn’t exactly one of my favorite villains from the series. But here they’ve got him and all the other characters stuck in a pretty by-the-numbers plot where Danny and co. get stuck babysitting the brat while he tries to maim them, with them of course unable to fight back lest they face the wrath of his parents (who are humongous lizard monsters, for some reason). 

If you’re even a little familiar with cartoons you’ve probably already seen quite a few takes on this formula already. And even if you like Youngblood as a character they don’t have him doing his usual pirate shtick he’s remembered for, so I’m not sure what anyone is getting out of this, really. What's especially not helping is that this goes on for ten pages, further dragging out an already tired concept. 

So there you have it, I guess. Done-to-death story with accordingly done-to-death jokes, a lame villain, and about two pages of action. I will say though, Danny and Tucker’s babysitting poster on page 2 did get a smile out of me, at least.

You’ve met the characters, and you’ve also met the voices behind them, now it’s time to meet… the rest of the characters! The villain ones! These guys really made the show for me, cause the team behind the show really just seemed to understand the assignment and made all of them really unique and memorable.

So we can see they’ve been ranked in terms of how dangerous they all are, which is a fun idea. ‘Course you’ve got Vlad at the top of, but then there’s Technus just behind him? I can’t say I remember him being notably more dangerous than any of the other baddies, I’m fairly certain he gets swept up at the end of his specific episode just like all the rest. I’m pretty sure Valerie gave Danny a bigger run for his money, and she’s down at #3.

Woah now, I’m starting to scrutinize the power levels of cartoon characters. Cartoon characters from a show I haven’t even fully watched all the way through since I was a kid, no less. Better put a stop to that before it gets ugly.

Cool little cartoons on the left there, that one on the top right is properly devious and I’m all for it. All the art is quite lovely too.

The right is… well, it’s Mad Libs, there’s no other way around it. Y’know the Mad Libs website refers to itself as “the world’s greatest word game” but I seriously think they need to take that up with Scrabble, or hell, even Hangman. Yeah I was never a big fan of this kind of fill-in-the-blanks stuff, but I guess it’s a pretty inoffensive activity to include.

Check out Danny’s dad rocking that emo hair.

And now we’ve made it to the second and last new comic for the issue, and unfortunately it’s only a two-pager. But hey, if my thoughts on the previous ten-page comic said anything, it was that I prefer quality over quantity. And this one is… okay. It’s funny enough, does what all it needs to with the concept, and it definitely doesn’t overstay its welcome. I’m again surprised by the lack of action in both of these comics, considering Danny Phantom is an action show, after all, but it’s not like the show wasn’t a comedy either, so it’s not that weird.

I guess while we’re here I could nitpick it a bit. The lineart here courtesy of series creator Butch Hartman* is a bit wonky at times. There’s the aforementioned emo hair Danny’s dad is wearing, but my main gripe is that dog robot just doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the artstyle. It being the only new original character design for this comic as well doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me. I guess the team was fine with whatever Hartman drew because he made the show after all, so surely he knows what he’s doing, right?*

*Insert obligatory comment about how much of a loser Butch Hartman is here.

Just want to give a shoutout to this pretty creative puzzle here. It actually stumped me a little when I first read it! Those monster designs are pretty entertaining too. Solid activity overall.

Next up it’s an installment of Sam Shade, which was a short-lived recurring series in Nickelodeon Magazine. Apparently the series ran from 2002 to 2005, so this may be one of the last times a Sam Shade comic was ever printed in a Nick Magazine. 

These comics mainly consist of the titular Detective Sam Shade trying to solve some mystery, sleuthing around the area in a series of detailed, wordy scenes. Likewise, you as the reader are as well tasked with scouring the pages for clues to help deduce the culprit. Each panel here smoothly moves into the next, making for something like a Where’s Waldo puzzle but with an actual narrative. It’s a really good idea! A shame this series didn’t last longer.

Hey, is that Carl from Jimmy Neutron on the bottom right there?

Pretty nice My Life as a Teenage Robot comic here. Although that’s kind of unfortunate in a way, since that means I haven’t got much to talk about! It’s pretty much a 1-to-1 translation from animation to comic here. The artstyle and writing are both on point, it’s all just in a shorter, more paper-y format.

I wonder why the aliens’ speech bubble has flowers in it. Is that a theater reference, maybe?

The design of these fiery aliens are particularly awesome - simple but effective. I’m surprised they used such a cool design in a comic that was going to be seen by way less people as opposed to using it in the cartoon. Man, this show is so cool, even its supplementary media is stylish!

But anyway, do you want to know how this story ends? Read it yourself!

Ohh man, I distinctly remember this comic. I don’t remember what issue of Nickelodeon Magazine this one is sourced from, but whichever one it was, I had it. The story’s nothing to write home about really, It's another take on the age old tale of “Squidward yells at SpongeBob and Patrick for doing something annoying, so they inadvertently ruin his life”. Squidward must have a really good lawyer for him to be able to bounce back from all the crap SpongeBob and Pat get him into.

This version of the usual story has S. Bob and P. Rick making a cake in Squidward’s image. Mr. Krabs ends up mistaking it for the real Squidward, bringing it to the Krusty Krab, and having it run the cash register, obviously to disastrous results. It’s all pretty par for the course, and there’s some funny lines to be had.

Weirdly though, unless I’m blind, I can’t seem to find any credits for this one. Not in the comic itself or at the back of the book. I’m pretty sure the artist(s) behind this one did more SpongeBob SquarePants comics though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same writing team had a hand in them too. I distinctly remember one where all the characters turn into desserts. Or maybe it was an alternate universe where they’re all desserts? Something like that. Maybe I’ll find it and cover it on this blog someday!

And up next, it’s a Wild Thornberrys comic of all things (said with feigned surprise, having read the table of contents moments ago). And I’m just now realizing none of these comics have anything to do with ghosts, or horror, really. Quite the magazine you’ve got just in time for October, Nickelodeon!

But hey, it’s not right to judge a piece of art specifically by the context in which it is presented. Especially when it was originally published in a magazine that likely came out years earlier, probably not even around the month of October. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that, even when it comes to filling the pages of a magazine.

This comic is especially cool, anyway, as you can no doubt tell from its distinct shakeup in style!

The story has Eliza receiving some gifts from her Japanese friend, Mayumi (who was probably in the show, presumably), one of those gifts being a homemade manga. And while I’m not exactly an expert on the Japanese arts, I certainly find this art convincing and really appreciate the attention to detail. I bet any kids that were fans of manga around this time must have felt pretty seen to have one of their hobbies referenced in a rather unlikely place, and with such attention to detail no less.

One thing I can also appreciate is that this story really isn’t something they could have pulled off in the show itself (unless they studio really wanted to have an anime-themed episode and go through the undertaking of doing an episode in an entirely different, foreign animation style all on their usual budget), so overall this is a really fun idea done quite flawlessly. My only gripe is we don’t get to see a manga-styled Nigel Thornberry, but what can you do?

Oh boy, the Tak comic, cool. Now, I know these games have their fans, but I can’t say I’m one of them. I did watch the show a bit though, but I’ve heard it has nothing to do with the games, so I guess that makes me rather unprepared to tackle this two-page comic on an intellectual, researched level. I will say though that I think the Sam Shade comic from earlier pulled off this style of free-flowing, no-panel storytelling to a much greater effect. The amount of Taks they threw around the page makes it feel really busy and cramped, and they had to essentially remove the second character Tak is traveling with from the story since I guess they were strapped for page space.

But yeah, the colors are nice at least, and Tak media is especially hard to come by nowadays, so I suppose if I were more into the property, I might be more into this.

Last comic of the day, and it’s Jimmy Neutron. At least this one kinda fits the theme, I mean, aliens are almost in the same horror-league as vampires, zombies, ghosts, and all that. This is a pretty quality one to end off the book with, and in regards to Jimmy Neutron, this is one of the better ways these characters have been translated to 2D. Although the incredibly warm colors and harsh shadows throw me for a loop. Pretty good overall!

Before we wrap things up, I would like to mention that advert for The Nicktoons Film Festival on the right. I totally forgot these used to be a thing! From 2004 to 2009 Nickelodeon hosted a film festival and let viewers vote for their favorite animated short, along with letting proper animation people who know what they’re talking about vote on their favorites, too. Lots of great up-and-coming cartoonists took part in these festivals. This one in 2005 actually featured a short by J. G. Quintel that eventually was used as a basis for his own Cartoon Network show, Regular Show! You can check the short out below:

Neat bit of history there, yeah?

Even though I’m still a bit disappointed this issue didn’t include more original content, I still think this ended up being a fairly entertaining walk down memory lane. And hey, I hope you had a good time too. I’m doubly disappointed, however, that the archive of this issue didn’t come with that tear-out poster! Now we’ll never see it in its full hi-def glory.

As always, thanks for stopping by and checking out another bit of Nick history with me. Have yourself a good one, and I’ll see you all next time!

[hotvintagepoll]

Propaganda

Eva Dahlbeck (Smiles of a Summer Night, A Lesson in Love, Kastrullresan)— Beautiful, formidable, funny. Ingmar Bergman called her a "battleship of femininity" and cast her in several of his comedies. It's a joy to see her pulling all the strings in Smiles of a Summer Night while her two boyfriends make utter fools of themselves.

Maureen O’Hara (The Parent Trap, The Quiet Man)—They called her the Queen of Technicolor. That right there should help introduce people to the fiery, wonderful, stunning Maureen O’Hara. She was from Ireland, born in 1920, and started in theater at the age of ten. At 15, she was winning drama awards, including one for her performance as Portia in the Merchant of Venice. At 16, she was the youngest pupil to graduate from the Guildhall School of Music. By 18, she transitioned to film, starting off with a bang alongside Charles Laughton in Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, and proceeded to work steadily up through the early 1970s. She was in adventures and comedies and romances, spent a lot of time in westerns giving merry hell to John Wayne (and less merry hell to the indomitable John Ford — she held her own even when he was verbally abusive and demeaning to her). She was in The Quiet Man, which was the first American-made film entirely filmed in a foreign country. She helped make American Christmas what it is with Miracle on 34th Street. She played a lineup of headstrong, forthright women second only, perhaps, to Katharine Hepburn. She was married three times, lived for a while with a boyfriend in Mexico, sued for custody of her daughter in the 1950s, AND sued a magazine for libel in the same era. After mostly retiring from acting, she edited a magazine. She eventually sold the magazine to spend more time with her grandson, but even then ran a ladies fashion store. She was an outspoken, brilliant, passionate lady, with amazing red hair, a career to envy, and — well — that face!

This is round 1 of the tournament. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage woman.

[additional propaganda submitted under the cut]

Eva Dahlbeck:

Maureen O'Hara:

I thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world when I was a kid and I have yet to really change my mind. Always loved her temper and her red hair. Plus she was kind of a MILF in The Parent Trap

Haughty, red hair, hot.

The hair. The accent. The figure. The acting chops. The perfection.

I would have to give up my passport if I didn't submit Maureen O'Hara but also have you seen her? Not only did she look like that (she was called the Queen of Technicolor, though she wasn't a big fan of that sobriquet), she was also very funny and tough as nails. She faced off against Walt Disney in a contract dispute and the legend goes that when someone mentioned her at his deathbed, he sat up and said 'That bitch!'. Her comment on that story is "At least he didn't think of me and say, 'That wimp'." She struggled to get serious roles for a time, saying ""Hollywood would never allow my talent to triumph over my face," so she plays the sexy princess/pirate/harem girl in a LOT of early movies that she referred to as "Tits and Sand" films, she being the tits in question. She also turned down so many leading men and studio bosses (Errol Flynn and Howard Hughes are among her rejects) that there were rumours spread that she was a lesbian. Many egos were battered it seems. I'm including the infamous Lady Godiva scene in the photo propaganda for the sheer Moment of it [link] . It was a bit of a flop critically, but it was one of Clint Eastwood's first film appearances and she said he told her later that he was very glad of the money at the time. She was a very proud Irish woman and when she went for her American citizenship they insisted on referring to her as British (the timeline of Irish independence is a bit wibbly wobbly, we won't get into it here). She refused to accept American citizenship under that condition and argued her way through every level of US immigration she could find, supposedly saying "I'm not responsible for your antiquated records here in Washington", until a judge finally gave up and said "Give her what she wants, just get her out of here". This made her the first ever person seeking US citizenship to be proclaimed Irish on the record! And while we don't embrace the leprechaun imagery quite so enthusiastically today, her dressing her dog up in a little shamrock hat is too cute for you all to miss so I'm including that in the photo propaganda.

*Marge Simpson voice*: I just think she's neat 🤷‍♀️

[yvesdot]

yves, if only theoretically wanted to break into publishing or lit mags, do you have recommendations or advice?

My primary advice is to get to know as many writers as you can, as well as you can, quickly. I’ve recommended joining Discord servers for this in the past and will do so again; the most active ones I’m in are Max's @goose-books server (I think you have to ask for an invite?), WTW, and writeblr garden. Participate in book events virtually and in person when you can. When you like someone's work, tell them! And mention that you're an author, too.

Disclaimer: I haven't made it into any paid magazines, largely because I find submitting and waiting for months at a time before working on edits exhausting, particularly in comparison to instant money on Patreon—so have that grain of salt at the ready! All I've done is publish the one book, twice, and release a substantial amount of short fiction on my own. People read it and liked it, and now I have lovely anons like you who seem to respect me enough to ask for industry advice. Thank you! Hope you like long posts.

The reason I say the above is that, in my experience, the entirety of publishing is just one big who-do-you-know. Utterly non-exhaustive list of ways "knowing people" has helped me in my writing career below.

I left a middling review on a trans author's book, and in the correspondence that followed we became friends. Rysz Merey went on to start tRaum Books, and because we were friends, we put out the Something's Not Right anniversary edition together.

When I was at my university, I was loudly opinionated about books and writing and art in all of my classes, and a professor's words about me in an email to an author they knew became the blurb for that same edition of Something's Not Right.

I read Tragic Accident (a flash piece originally rejected by an online magazine for, in my opinion, cisgender reasons) last night at Flash Fiction Forum, the heads of which I know personally because, after a high school internship, I was directed to a friend of theirs to volunteer at her writing camp. I sold a lot of copies of the original SNR to teens at that camp, and I've sold dozens of copies since by linking to the book in the Zoom chat and bringing physical copies to in-person readings.

Tragic Accident may have ultimately been rejected from the venue I sent it to, but I only had that venue on my list because my beloved friend Fer @asablehart posted in WTW a spreadsheet of places to submit. I still use that spreadsheet, filled with dozens of extra places I researched on my own, and pass it on to anyone who asks. Fer also read The Traveler Wife and gave extremely insightful feedback on it; we've since done tons of great critique4critiques together and they're still my go-to if I need wise words on a piece of writing.

When I held my event at Bookshop Santa Cruz, I marketed my ass off. I'd learned from my previous event at the Diversity Center in town and focused heavily on reaching out to individual people: posting in Discord servers, DMing everyone I knew, and telling everybody I met in December that by the way I would be reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz in January. I worked my job as an author and my book and my event into every conversation I had with a stranger that month. Everyone responded positively! People want to know what you're working on.

But at the end of the day, under a third of attendees were people I hadn't previously considered friends in some way. The majority of the people who came were family, friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends dragged along by someone I knew well, etc. One coworker couldn't come but invited their housemates, who bought books and left saying they would read Band Girls at home. One of the friends who came met me when we would ride the same bus every week to class, and I initially spoke to him because I fully thought he was a transgender woman (he turned out to just be an extremely fashionable individual). That guy helped code my website. Of the three people who interviewed me locally for promotion, two are people I'm friends with and one I cold-emailed due to his past work.

One of the major servers I used to invite people to both of my events is one I was only added to because I met a goth girl who invited me to her dorm to watch her inject E into her thigh and when I reported back on this to another transfem friend that friend instantly named her because they were in the server together and multiple people in it knew me from my creative writing efforts so everybody agreed to add me. I literally only had that space to network because I said "nice boots" to a girl whose special interest turned out to be DIY HRT at a protest party about the chancellor getting a raise.

Claire Oshetsky came to my event and I made a point of finally starting to read their book beforehand so I could honestly tell them it was cool when I signed their copy of Something's Not Right (it was cool, and everyone should read Chouette, and also Poor Deer, which I am on page 10 on and can already certify is fantastic). They were incredibly nice to me for no reason—well, because of those interviews I had, which led to them noticing another nonbinary author in the area—and ultimately reviewed SNR very positively on GoodReads. You can see what happened to the numbers afterwards. (I also sold a copy that day; when you sell roughly a copy of a book per week, you can absolutely make these connections directly.)

Tonight was Claire Oshetsky's event, so I showed up having read Chouette in full and asked a question during the Q&A and told them how cool their book was, and they invited me to a little post-event author dinner. (One of the authors introduced herself as "Karen" and described a prolific writing career very opaquely until her friend mentioned the name of her latest novel: Booth.) Everyone was incredibly nice and wanted to buy my book which was unfortunately sold out because of the aforementioned event, and a couple of people gave me email addresses so they could buy it later. I've been trying to meet local authors for over a year, and I met seven by accident because one of them came up to me to say it was nice to see Bookshop Santa Cruz had two nonbinary readers in a row.

Talking to David Sedaris at an event got me a job! He complimented my outfit, I said thank you I wore it for the interview with [x], and he did everything he could to help me network with the [x] people there. I was later told that my "chemistry" with Sedaris, among other things, helped me get the position. I would also find out that David specifically loves the last people in the signing line because they're the most patient; I happened to have waited until last because I wanted to have more time to talk to him.

I have emailed several authors with fanmail, and depending on how popular they are, I have gotten responses! I'm in a correspondence right now which netted me a behind-the-scenes look at an incredible draft, and thank you for reminding me because I need to respond and tell them how good it was.

Patreon is on pause right now, but I believe over half the subscribers are people I'm friends with in one way or another. I've tried nearly everything under the sun to advertise, and so far the only thing that's worked is "telling someone who has the disposable income."

The people who beta-read my latest release, Band Girls (18+), for me (which is the only reason it wasn't an unmitigated disaster) include my butch, who met me in a Locked Tomb server (naturally), a friend from a creative writing class in university who later became my housemate, and a good buddy of my butch's whom they rescued from the aforementioned TLT server. I literally didn't even notice that guy when we were in the server together and it turns out he's also a writer with a Giant Lesbian Women project who also wound up really liking Long Line (18+). Glories are all around you.

(Also, apparently my butch had that "how to write a blurb" post bookmarked and immediately recognized me, which is crazy. Imagine meeting some random author in a fandom server and they ask to see your [redacted] in DMs.)

Hell, my buddy Max Franciscovich read my book five years ago in the back of a car and had a transcendental nonbinary lesbian experience, and because he happened to be mutuals with a high school friend of mine, that friend sent me screenshots of him panicking about how he couldn't talk to me because I was too cool. I DMed him, and we are like each other's female husbands now. Undoubtedly we have each gained a substantive reader base from hyping each other's work at anyone in earshot. Maxserver, which I shouted out above, only has me in it because I know the darn guy. It's a lot more populous than yvescord in part because he is that much more active than I am, and can engage with other people's work more. I'm mooching off the labor of my best friend who pseudo-reached-out to me because I put a pronoun pin on a character's bag in the book I self-published in 2018.

Speaking of which: I self-published the original edition of Something's Not Right as a thank-you birthday gift to the Beta Reader. I seem to remember him reading my writing for the first time and saying something along the lines of "You do realize this is really good, right?" (I did not realize.) That was the first person to appreciate any of my original fiction, and it led to my entire career. We met on a class trip because he was the only person who would listen to me talk about Star Wars.

I try to never ingenuinely be nice to people. This is not particularly difficult, because I like people and give the benefit of the doubt to a pretty extreme fault. I will occasionally be nice out of politeness, but everyone I mentioned here is someone I genuinely like whose work is fantastic. It wasn't hard to honestly say I liked them and their writing.

I also recognize that much of this is kind of just me blathering about Ws with no actionable advice... but it might give you ideas for where to go or who to talk to about your writing. I also want you to feel just how much of writing is about "networking" in a way that is not cold and manipulative and moneyhungry but actually just involves being genuine friends with other people. I think the sheer quantity of evidence here is helpful to understand just how much you can do for yourself by talking to the people you like.

I also think it's good practice to own the fact that very little of my microcelebrity success has anything to do with how good my work is. I mean, sure, I think it's good, but this should make it clear that my greatest strength has been my perseverance and my friendliness.

(Also, obviously, I have the immense privilege to have gone to college, to live in California, to get to all these places and meet these people and work with them. I had the money in the bank to publish and promote a book. This is not a small factor. I'm hoping to do a full rundown of costs and efforts to promote Something's Not Right's anniversary edition sometime this year.)

I also don't think I'm particularly good at socializing—I have a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, a difficulty with meeting people's eyes, and a mild stutter when I talk too quickly (which is often). A lot of people find me annoying or insincere because I act like a sentient powder puff, and when I'm not jumping up and down and meowing at people instead of saying "on your right," I'm complaining about the most widely-beloved pieces of pop culture and making two-hour rant videos about video games I think insufficiently scrutinize the concept of the nuclear family. I say all this to head off any concerns that perhaps I am just secretly very suave and social; I love talking to people, but I don't believe this is the case.

If I can summarize: nearly every time I've had any success with my writing, it's been because I made an effort to be kind to people I respected and share my passion for books and writing. I hit upon enough privileges and lucky circumstances to get the right circle of people to make all of the above happen. I think you can do it, too! I wish you the best. Thanks for asking ^__^

[rachreads]

y’all remember that adult job i said i was getting? well, i got it so the bruhl shrine has received a massive upgrade. >:)

more pics and artist links below ;)))

The shelf itself is an IKEA Milsbow with four Mittled LED cabinet lights on the underside of every shelf to give it some light. I did have to drill a hole in the bottom self to feed some cords though, but other than that it was pretty simple to put together! :D

The framed The King's Man (2021) poster on the left was a freebie that I got for attending the opening night showing of the movie! I was the only person in the theater with my friend, so we nabbed about seven of 'em and handed them out to fellow Bruhl and Kingsman appreciators in our friend grounp.

The All the King's Men poster underneath isn't Bruhl related, but it was a gift from another friend who knows how much I like the Kingsman movie series. I also have a Kingsman shrine in my living room (and a Talking Heads shrine, and a Re-Animator shrine, and a Vladmir Nobokov shrine.... i am so completely normal).

Everything below reads left to right, I'll try to include links to artists where I can!

Comic books in the back are issues 2-4 of Thunderbolts presents Zemo: Born Better (which isn't canon to the MCU, and honestly is not my favorite, but the cover art looks cool lol) and the first collected volume of the original Thunderbolts run.

The black picture frames on the left are a sticker set from @injureddreams on their Etsy store and can be found here! The keychain in the golden frame on the right is also from their store, and is sadly sold out :(, but the store page is here.

Speaking of keychains, I have two on order from Noble Demons that are currently getting bounced around in my campus mail system that will go in those empty spots in the frame. Those two can be found here and here.

The funko pop on the left is the limited edition dancing Zemo from the Collector Corps subscription box (although you can find them resold on Amazon and the like for ~20 bucks), and the funko pop on the right is the regular Zemo pop from the FATWS line from 2021. These are also on sale for around ~10 bucks on Amazon.

The figpin in the very middle is the MCU Zemo pin from the FATWS line that was released in 2021.

The plush in the very middle was actually made by me :D. You can find the pattern on Etsy here, but if you're curious about the specific yarns used, you can check out my ravelry posts about it here.

And finally, the enamel pins in the golden frame on the right are from ChingonPinz on Etsy, but unfortunately are not sold anymore.

The DVD/Bluray collection on the left has German imports of Schule (2000) and Lessons of a Dream (2011), as well as American DVDs/Blurays of Deeply, The Edukators, Lila Lila, Inglourious Basterds, and The Cloverfield Paradox. Civil War bluray on the right is also a US release.

Special attention called to the Good Bye Lenin DVD on the left, which is the US Special Edition that has director's and actor's commentary tracks, including one with Daniel on it! Geez, if only someone were to rip those tracks and upload them to the internet. Maybe in a masterlist on a pinned post. Maybe at the top of their blog. That would be crazy hahahahahaha.

The magazine in the back is the European version of Issue 46 of The Rake, which contains the amazing and wonderful photoshoot that can be seen in this post here. (pinkie promise i did not spend $200 on that, I got it on eBay for like 20$)

The art board print in the middle is from rindelamater on Redbubble and can be found here.

The Good Bye Lenin Blu-Ray that is laying on the bottom of the shelf is an import from South Korea, and is actually the only region A blu-ray of GBL in existence since there has been no re-release in the US. I imported mine from eBay, although I think I have seen a few floating around on other sites.

Good Bye Lenin and Inglourious Basterds CD scores are pretty common, I don't think I need to explain those.

The plushie of Zeems on the right is from RedCapStore on etsy and can be found here. This was actually a gift from a friend and I hold it very dear to my heart. :)

The Laszlo Brainrot begins.

Angel of Darkness and Surrender, New York on the left are US mass market paperbacks. Super easy to find. :)

The framed art print in the very middle is my very favorite drawing from @pannypunkpanda's 365 day art challenge from last year! You can find this specific one on their RedBubble shop here.

The rest of the items on this shelf (including the custom Leuchtturm1917 Journal on the left *drool*) are from a PR box that was released for TNT's version of The Alienist: Angel of Darkness in 2020. In anticipation for the season, an online murder mystery party was held and journalists recieved a box of props that acted as clues for the mystery. There's an article covering the online event linked here for those curious. I managed to snag a box from a reseller on eBay for around 60 bucks, although that was the first and only time I have ever seen it available. :(

The box on the very bottom right is the mailing box that the murder mystery props from the shelf above all came in.

The board game on the left is a custom box and game that was only given out to the cast and crew of the first or second season of the Alienist iirc and is not easily available on the market. I, again, picked mine up from a reseller on eBay, but it's pretty hard to find.

The book in the middle is the tie-in edition of The Alienist by Caleb Carr, which is completely annotated and highlighted to shit by your's truly. :)

The picture frame on the right again has stickers from @pannypunkpanda's RedBubble shop linked here, and another sticker in the very middle from Elizabeth Ryan Shepard's RedBubble shop linked here.

And that's it! I may make another list with my holy grail items that I'm still on the lookout for but honestly I might just like to gatekeep those. It might make my chances of finding them better oops.

[cartograffiti]

An entry for #WinASignedSetofTheQueensThief2024! This is a story about falling in love with a book cover, and why baby teen me would have told you to read these books, too.

The year was 2009. I was 13. The wonderful children’s magazine Cricket recommended an adventure book called The Thief. I was very intrigued, but when I found it on the shelf it looked like this.

This was the first cover for the first book in what later came to be known as the Queen’s Thief series, and there are things I like about it! But I am not here to gush about it, because one of the nicknames this cover has in the fandom is “the Jesus cover.” It isn’t Jesus, it’s the fictional goddess Hephestia, but some of us didn’t know that right away.

Me. I didn’t know that.

I went hm! Is the thief Barabbas from the story of Jesus’s crucifixion!? What a downer!!! And I put it back.

And then a few months later, I was browsing a list of upcoming books and saw the most perfect cover I had ever seen...

I would love for my 13 year old self to tell you everything about this, the Vince Natale cover for A Conspiracy of Kings, that had me in an ecstatic chokehold. Instead, I have made the fancam moodboard I think would have fulfilled my dreams.

My reaction went a little like this.

I was drawn to the warm colors, but of greater importance was...

Pretty horse! This was like putting cheese in a mouse trap for catching child me.

Pretty hair! I was in the middle of a phase in which whenever I couldn't picture the protagonist of a book yet, I was just inserting Orlando Bloom as Legolas. I remember zooming in on this cover to look for elf ears and deciding they were inessential.

Especially because I was so intrigued by all the details I could see. I so instantly wanted to know about his lion ring, why he was shackled, and the beautiful fraying embroidery. The ornate flourishes on the title suggested to me that this might be fantasy and not historical fiction, and I was sold.

Of course, then I discovered it wouldn't be out for something like 9 months yet and was the fourth in a series...and you'll never guess what the first book is!

Later I would learn that the cover I first saw was probably a bearded version that was replaced by a smoother Sophos face before publication. I hugely approved because I had gone on to watch A Knight's Tale on the strength of "that guy looks like how I picture Sophos" and fallen in love with Heath Ledger (my thanks to Abigail in The Geninsula for the image edit used here), and so by the time a copy was in my hands, I loved the final cover even more.

But first I sighed and put a hold on The Thief, and, well. Here I gesture grandly at approximately 15 rereads and the 900-person fan club I run on Discord. You might say I liked it a little bit. :)

So, from my 13 year old self to all of yours: not only was TT and its sequels everything I hoped for, this is just one of my beautiful blorbos who has done so many crimes in Queen's Thief. You should read it so you can make a moodboard about your favorite, too.