The UNofficial podcast of Christian Geek Central!  ( http://www.christiangeekcentral.com ) On the Show Today: Winston Crutchfield and Drew Rub sneak into the monitor room while Paeter is playing video games for Extra Life. Special appearances by Ken Harmeyer, Matt McKinney, and John Wilkerson! This episode of the Spirit Blade Underground Podcast was written, recorded and produced without telling Paeter Frandsen - who nonetheless bears a certain amount of responsibility for leaving the key to the bunker under the mat, with all segments produced by their credited authors. Copyright 2007-2017, Spirit Blade Productions Music by Wesley Devine, Bjorn A. Lynne, Pierre Langer, Jon Adamich and Sound Ideas. Spazzmatica Polka by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Freesound.org effects provided by: FreqMan SUBMISSIONS/FEEDBACK Submit Questions, Comments or Content(written or audio file) to: paeter(at)spiritblade(dot)com! CREDITS  The Spirit Blade Underground Podcast i...

Archie Andrews and the Riverdale gang are some of the most enduring characters in comics history. They’ve teamed up with superheroes, met countless pop music icons, taught Bible lessons, and fought Sharknados. Their stories range from innocently humorous vignettes to deeply emotional personal drama; Archie married both Betty and Veronica in divergent story arcs that converged again with Archie’s death. Archie Comics as a company has taken on a number of licenses through the years and never been afraid to push the boundaries of comics as an art form. I guess it was inevitable that the zombie apocalypse would eventually make it to Riverdale. Writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and artist Francesco Francavilla , creators with whom I am unfamiliar, eschew the easy camp of a zombified Archie to tell a darkly serious tale. In a premise that owes much to The Walking Dead and Dawn of the Dead , the main characters struggle to survive as they are forced to destroy their own loved ones. The zo...

I just happened to be in the Magic Kingdom when I noticed a comic book on the shelf at the Haunted Mansion gift shop, Seekers of the Weird . I didn't pay much attention. I flipped through the book and decided that if it caught my attention again when the trade came out I'd give it a try. Five issues came and went. The collected edition hit the shelves. It didn't catch my attention. Quite without my knowledge my wife had been buying issues of Figment for my daughter, a huge fan of the imaginary purple dragon. All five issues went into Destiny's comic box without crossing my line of vision, accompanied a year later by the follow up Figment 2 . When my wife discovered they had missed the five issue run of Big Thunder Mountain , she painstakingly tracked down and special ordered every one of them. It wasn't until Haunted Mansion came out that they saw fit to approach me. “Destiny doesn't want to read Haunted Mansion,” she said. “I need you to add it t...

I never would have guessed that Sonic the Hedgehog and Archie Comics would be the ones to revitalize my interest in superhero comics. For reasons I won’t go into immediately, I walked away from both Marvel and DC in 2009/2010. They simply stopped telling the kinds of superhero stories I wanted. When Humble Bundle featured a selection of Sonic the Hedgehog comics as their digital book bundle, I thought it was a good opportunity to stoke my son’s interest in reading in general and comics in particular. I read the first book just to see what Sonic looked like these days. It hooked me instantly. I remember when Sonic the Hedgehog premiered in Archie Comics back in 1993 . I considered it a kid’s book, with goofy artwork and the kind of four page gags for which Archie Comics was known. The new Sonic book I read was from 2013. It began with Sonic and Tails fighting for their lives against a tentacular mechanized horror controlled by a sinister and murderous stuffed doll. The book slowl...

As with many of my generation, two cartoons virtually defined the high-adventure genre of techno-fantasy during my formative years. Both ThunderCats and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe featured pseudo-technological heroes engaged in a never-ending battle against the quasi-mystical forces of evil. Both cartoons made my parents very nervous with their parade of occultish imagery and the regular invocation of otherworldly forces. They were very concerned that these shows would cause me to join a cult; I was very concerned that they wouldn't allow me to watch them anymore. Somehow we all made it through the 80s alive and cult-free. I originally hesitated when I saw the first issue of He-Man/ThunderCats on the comic shop shelves. DC Comics had already burned me on Scooby Apocalypse and the language in Wacky Raceland was starting to grate on my nerves. I wasn't ready to accept another “re-imagining” of fondly remembered characters that simply cast them as dysfunct...

I love Scooby-Doo, so when DC added a Scooby book to the Hannah-Barbera revival line it immediately caught my attention. In Scooby Apocalypse , we get a glimpse of what it would be like if the Scooby gang met for the first time just as the world ended. It’s a kind of sci-fi version of The Walking Dead , where the Mystery Inc gang is cast as the survivors of a nanotech plague that transformed the whole world into monsters. The main characters are indeed named Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby. They do indeed ride around in a green van they call the Mystery Machine. Their visual models even show inspiration from the classic characters … and there ends any resemblance to anything remotely Scooby-Doo. The original cartoon endures due to the formula of the mysteries and the chemistry of the characters. They’re obviously tight knit friends who work well together and look out for each other. The Scooby-Doo cartoon mysteries are some of the most well-crafted stories in the busines...

In the summer of 2016, Warner Bros decided to try and reimagine their popular Hannah-Barbera cartoon characters as more mature versions of themselves. This line included four titles: Future Quest , which united the Hannah-Barbera actions heroes on an adventure throughout space and time; The Flintstones , looking at the stone-age Honeymooners through a modern sitcom lens; Scooby Apocalypse , where the Scooby gang meets for the first time just as the world ends; and Wacky Raceland , twisting the goofy wacky racers into post-apocalyptic speed demons in a world where it’s drive or die. The old cartoon Wacky Races pitted 11 alliteratively named drivers and their impossible machines on a no-holds-barred cross-country demolition course with predictably goofy results. The new comic book looks like Mad Max meets Speed Racer . The cars now have an attitude of their own, driven by an AI that reflects, distorts, and sometimes clashes with the personality of their driver. These turbo-cha...