What I’ve Watched, Read, Done – June 2025 – Blue Towel Productions

June has turned out to be a much more full media-consumption sort of month than May was, even with the extra busyness of my birthday plus helping my youngest daughter be ready for her extended missions training course / missions trip overseas.

So before I dive into all that, I want to share one big thing I did this month, which was to join my daughter on a 22 kilometre walk-a-thon!

She was raising money for her course, and decided to walk all the way from our home to our missions community, which amounted to doing about 33,000 steps (the first five thousand or so being down a reasonably steep hill)

It was pretty epic, especially considering that it was only a couple of months ago that I could barely walk a different daughter a few meters down the aisle for her wedding! We saw a few interesting sights along the way–things that I’ve driven past many times but haven’t had a chance to see up close.

Anyway, that’s a bucket list item, officially ticked off!

Now, to the comics, shows and movies that I’ve enjoyed…

Flash by William Messner-Loebs and Greg Larocque volume 1

I’ve had this for a while (since shortly after Christmas I think) and started it a while ago, but only finished it this past month. I’m a big Wally West / Flash fan, but that’s mostly from the celebrated Mark Waid run, which came after this one (also to a certain degree the Geoff Johns run, which came after that). I’d read a few scattered issues from this era before–both the stuff written by Mike Baron (the first year or so) and the William Messner-Loebs material (the several years that followed), but never in a systematic way.

And I liked it! But it also felt kind of weird and dated, like it’s from further in the past than I expected (to be fair, the stories are almost 40 year old.)

This era was the first one to feature Wally West as the Flash. Barry Allen had died during Crisis on Infinite Earths and Wally had graduated from being Kid Flash to the full blown Flash at the end of that epic, and then played a main role in Legends, the smaller epic that served as a follow-up. And that led into this book. Mike Baron was the original writer and he portrayed Wally as…a bit of a jerk. He was kind of selfish, concerned by his own personal affairs as much as he was about being a super-hero, and pretty quick to jump into romantic relationships. These issues had Wally facing Vandal Savage a bit, as well as some Russian speedsters called Red Trinity. Baron also introduced Chunk, an enemy of the Flash who turns into an ally–a massively overweight scientist who was accidentally merged with a kind of artificial black hole and now controls gravity and has a pocket dimension living inside of him. So…crazy stuff.

Another big players in these early days is one of Wally’s love-interests, scientist Tina McGee, a notably older woman (she’s in her mid-30s, while Wally is said to be 20) who is married to Jerry, who has turned himself into a speed-fuelled monster.

Also Wally’s parents show up a lot–his dad turns out to be a Manhunter-agent (as revealed in the crossover series Millennium), and his mother is a beleagured figure with whom Wally has a contentious relationship. Wally wins the lottery during this period, and for a while has a mansion in which he lives with both his mother and Tina, leading to all sorts of problems. T

Most of these characters and ideas were created by Baron, but William Messner-Loebs picked up on it all when he took over the book, developing everything further. He also did a lot to try to dive into Wally’s psychology, doing a lot of work to make him more sympathetic. Messner-Loebs’ character work was strong and the stories interesting, but they sometimes the stories suffered from odd pacing–some situations seem to stretch on unnecessarily, especially in case where Wally’s not even present that much, and the focus on characters like Wally’s mother and the McGees eventually becomes kind of tiresome.

Very little was done during this period with the Flash’s classic rogue’s gallery. When Barry Allen’s old enemies like Captain Cold or the Weather Wizard would show up, it’d be a bit of a joke. One exception was the Pied Piper, who re-debuts in this volume, and is revealed to have fully reforms. He’d later be developed a lot as the run continued, which hopefully I’ll be able to read the presumed second volume of Messner-Loebs’ work. If it does come out, I’ll definitely want to get it–there’s a story I’ve long been curious about, which I assume will appear, in which Wally has to save someone as they are both falling out of an airplane. I’d also like to see how Linda Park is developed–she will eventually become Wally’s wife, but debuts in this first volume just as a bit of a random journalist.

There they are folks! Wally’s greatest love and one of his most persistent enemies, just like you remember them!

Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later volume 1 Omnibus

I bought this book for my birthday and contrary to the Flash volume mentioned above, I read through it very quickly. The Legion of Super-Heroes (teenaged superheroes in the future, most often inspired by the legends of Superbly / Superman from the ancient past) are my all-time favorite comic book property, and has sadly mostly been absent from publishing schedules for quite a while. Since I haven’t read this particular run for quite some time, it felt a lot like I was getting to read some fresh Legion comics, an experience I very much enjoyed.

The Five Years Later era of the Legion is a strange, strange animal. The book had just come off of a lengthy and celebrated run by possibly its most celebrated author, Paul Levitz. When Levitz stepped down, his frequent collaborator Keith Giffen took over, but instead of just continuing things they were, the book relaunched with the story jumping forward…well, just guess how many years ahead.

Those five years were not good for the Legion, as the team had disbanded under after a series of tragedies and under pressure from a corrupt government, which also turned out to be under the thrall of an alien race called the Dominators…come on guys, it was right there in the name! As our story picks up, Reep Daggle, the former Chameleon Boy and son of the Legion’s original benefactor, decides enough is enough and begins to pull the team back together. The first person he works to get on board is Rokk Krinn, one of the founding members of the Legion and the so-called heart of the team when he served as Cosmic Boy. Even though Rokk is now powerless (after a devastating war injury), he becomes the field commander for a new iteration of the Legion.

This era of the Legion was rife with controversy. Fans (like myself) had loved the book under Paul Levitz, and Giffen’s take was a severe change of pace. Along with fellow-writers Tom & Mary Bierbaum, and fellow-artist Al Gordon, Giffen created a densely packed narrative that completely upended the team’s status quo. Multiple characters were killed off with a level of care, but not a lot of ceremony. We found other characters in radically different life circumstances, some of which left them almost unrecognizable. Many readers felt frustrated by all of this, while others lauded the approach for its originality and innovation.

I kind of fell into both camps. Certainly there was something very mature and engaging about the storytelling, while some of the other twists came across more like wish-fulfilment or fan-fiction. A few year into the run were two events whose stories were in back-to-back issues of this collection (one was a regular issue, one was an annual) which fell into that negative category. One revealed the waaaay back in the earliest days of the Legion, when founding member Lightning Lad had been resurrected thanks to the sacrifice of Proty, a shapeshifting blob of protoplasm, it had really been Proty’s mind being transferred into Lightning Lad’s body–in other words, Lightning Lad had never come back to life at all.

The other story revealed that Shvaughn Erin, a science police officer and former girlfriend of Legion member Element Lad, was really a man who had taken gender-altering drugs. This basically seemed to be there to confirm a popular fan-theory that Element Lad was gay.

Both of these twists seemed kind of dumb to me, especially the Lightning Lad one since he used to be my favorite character, but he wasn’t really important in this era of the book. But reading them now, in the cold light of the many many reboots and continuity shifts that the concept has had since then, they just come across as sort of random stories, no better or worse than a lot of there takes that writers have had over the years (Did you know that once upon a time, Princess Projectra was a snake? And another time she was a full-blown villain? And another time Element Lad was a villain? And another time Superboy dated Saturn Girl? Etc?), and hardly the main thing to take away from this era.

What is the main thing? Some rich, exciting and emotional stories, filled with good characterisation and satisfying payoffs, that’s what. The moment when the new Legion is finally established is a winner, for instance, the use of Tenzil Kem (former Matter-Eater Lad) is hilarious, and the story of the eventual liberation of earth from the Dominators (“The Terra Mosaic”) is amazing. Not too mention the devastating follow-up when the staggering levels of abuse that the earth has taken proves to be too much for the planet. Even a complete overhaul of the Legion’s own history that DC forced the book to go through, right in the first few months of this era, is handled with creativity and aplomb.

This volume is the first of two. It was published a while ago but was out of print, so finding a copy of it that wasn’t prohibitively expensive was challenging. It’s still expensive, because it’s so large (1300+ pages), but only a normal way. The book basically covers the entirety of Keith Giffen’s involvement with the series, I believe, and my memory says it was never as good afterwards, but because I just love the Legion, I’ll chase down the second half at some point.

Hilarious

Moving beyond these lengthy comments about lengthy comics, I always enjoyed some streaming content this month.

Phineas and Ferb – season 5

Phineas and Ferb is a popular kids’ animated series produced by Disney, which ended in 2015. But then, against all expectations, the original creators of the show announced that they were making two new seasons of the show, the first of which just came out on Disney+ in June. We were there for it!

If you know the show, it’s mostly the same–Phineas and Ferb are step-brothers who spend their summer vacation with their friends, building impossibly complex inventions and going on adventures. Their older sister Candice forever attempts to get them in trouble with their mother for their shenanigans, but fate and coincidence always prevent this from happening. In the meantime, their pet platypus Perry maintains a secret life as a top agent for OWCA (“Organization Without a Cool Acronym”), which generally means fighting the evil but brilliant Dr. Doofenshmirtz and his endlessly silly efforts to “take over the tri-state area.” It’s generally very predictable, but still very clever and a lot of fun.

I’ve seen random snippets of the show in the past but I watched this new season all the way through, and overall I really enjoyed it. It was smart and funny and occasionally rousing in a crazy, high-adventure sort of way. It experimented with the show’s classic format, but never broke it. This is something Phineas and Ferb have done in the past, but my impression is that this season did it a bit more, at least per capita episode (only 10 full episodes, or 20 stories, where previous seasons had a lot more).

I was going to say that the very last story was not anything special (involving Perry fighting Doofenshmirtz’s swamp-dwelling cousin rather than the main scientist) but looking at the internet I discover the confusing idea that there are actually three more episodes that are still to air (at the time of writing) on the Disney Channel in the US, and which have not shown up yet on Disney+ even thought it seems the rest of the season did well before the Disney Channel airing. In any case, there may be three more episodes I haven’t seen, plus a whole ‘nother season coming. Unless those extra episodes are part of Season 6? Oh well, we’ll see.

The Residence

Hopping over from Disney to Netflix, we find The Residence, an 8-episode light-hearted series about a murder in the White House (not the president, but the chief usher). The show is a legitimate mystery but also something of a screwball comedy, with a lot of funny interactions between the various suspects and the main detective. That detective is Cordelia Cupp, a consulting detective played by Uzo Aduba. She’s a great character–full of the sort of quirks you expect from your detectives in these sorts of stories (she’s an avid bird-watcher, enjoys questioning suspects by just staring at them until they start talking, and has no time for pompous authorities), but she’s not cartoonish at all, or presented as having some sort of neurodivergence that makes her a genius.

Aduba does a great job anchoring the series, which is key because it’s very fast-paced and features a lot of characters and a lot of nutty coincidence. Other cast members include Giancarlo Esposito as the victim (who appears a lot in flashbacks), Randall Park as an FBI agent who ends up being Cordelia Cupp’s sidekick, and Kylie Minogue as herself (the murder happened during an Australian state dinner that she was a guest at). I’d be totally down for a second season of the show (although the show is named after the part of the White House where the president and his family live, so unless there was another murder there, I don’t know how the title would work), but unfortunately I hear it’s been cancelled. A shame, although at least it didn’t end on some sort of cliffhanger.

Deep Cover

The last bit of streaming content to mention is Deep Cover, a movie on Prime Video which starred Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed as three improv comedians of various levels of experience who find themselves working with the police pulling a low-level sting, which turns into a massive undercover operation after things escalate. It’s silly but a lot of fun, and all three stars are given good material to work with. I was most impressed by Orlando Bloom, an actor I haven’t ever particularly enjoyed in the past, but here he is stands out as a wannabe “serious” actor who is just taking an improv class to better his character work. I confidently recommend it for a diverting evening’s viewing.

Singin’ in the Rain

For my birthday, after my party and a family dinner, we broke out my favorite ever movie on DVD…Singin’ in the Rain. It’s been a while since I’ve watched it, so I was a little worried that maybe I wouldn’t think as highly of it. Fortunately, that was not an issue–it was still great.

I’ve written about this movie before–see here, for instance, so I won’t spend a whole lot of time on it here. I’ll just say for the mixture of funny characterization, clever storytelling and knock ’em out of the park dance numbers, the movie is a winner. Plus, Jean Hagen is hilarious.