Category: NERDING DAY

Anime Week: The Banned Sailor Moon Episode! 🌭

Post author By Lydia Bugg
Post date 05/23/2022
6 Comments on Anime Week: The Banned Sailor Moon Episode! 🌭

It’s Anime Week, and I am an anime person. By that, I mean my eyes are twice the size of my head, I giggle constantly, and there’s a pervy old man who follows me around to applaud when I bend over. It’s a tough life, but what can I say? I should have given that mysterious crone the DVD of Cowboy Bebop she begged me for in the forest that day instead of telling her to get a more productive hobby like doing cocaine or menacing a trampoline gym. Now I must live with this anime curse.

I also mean that I have watched some anime. I enjoyed the heck out of Sailor Moon as a kid. It had everything I wanted in a TV show– girls fighting crime in fabulous outfits, and that was it. I had one criterion for a good TV show, and it was surprisingly difficult to fulfill in the early nineties. However, although I enjoyed Sailor Moon, I wouldn’t say I’ve seen all of Sailor Moon because it was so radically changed for air in the U.S. market.

The U.S. famously made two lead characters, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune, into cousins instead of lovers. Which, in turn, made a lot of little kids watch the show and think, why are those two cousins obviously fucking? A male character in a gay relationship was changed to a female character in the US to avoid another gay relationship. The superhero transformation scenes were censored to show less of the sailor’s bodies, and at least one episode was banned from reruns.

I’m not exactly sure why it was banned, so I decided to watch the episode and see if I could guess. It’s Sailor Moon, season 1, episode 4, “Usagi Will Teach You! How To Lose Weight!” Sounds educational, like something you would show in health class. However, it begins Like something you would show in a different section of health class.

Right off the bat, I’m going to guess that this one was banned because Usagi takes three different baths in a single episode. The girl is the cleanest crime fighter since Aquaman.

Really, they had her announce in the opening that she is fourteen and then immediately took several lingering pauses over her body in a bathtub. That has to be it, right? The episode begins with Usagi (Sailor Moon’s alter ego) coming out of the shower and throwing herself on the ground, crying because she’s gained weight. Her parents tell her it’s fine because some guys like a lady with a fat ass, but Usagi doesn’t listen.

Her whole family agrees she “spends more time eating than studying” and says in unison, “That’s why you’ve gained weight,” like pod people for fat shaming. Even Usagi’s magic talking cat gets in on making fun of her by drawing a shitty little cartoon.

Unable to handle the mental torment of her home, Usagi goes to school and shares her concerns with her friends. One of her friends tells Usagi, “the best diet is falling in love because then you want to look good.” Surprisingly, no one points out that you can’t eat love and need food to survive. It’s possible this was banned for implying that fat people simply haven’t fallen in love yet, as if you need a prince or princess to rescue you from the dragon that is your own metabolism.

The episode then introduces a weird, horny little boy character who tells Usagi and her friends that one of the teachers at their school has lost a bunch of weight at a special new gym. He knows this because he stalked the teacher and took pictures of her while she was working out. This is definitely what got this episode banned.

Usagi and her 14-year-old friends decide to join the gym, something most gyms in America don’t let teenagers do without adult permission because sometimes horny perverts creep around gyms and photograph women while they exercise. Luckily this gym is a mystical trap for sucking the lives out of women, so their sign up policy is a little looser than non-mystical death trap gyms.

A shadowy entity watches Usagi and her friends head toward the gym and mutters in an echoey demon voice, “Ha ha ha, more fools enter our lair.” This is what all gym owners say when they watch someone sign a gym contract, so there’s no red flag behavior yet.

Usagi and her friends are all instantly attracted to the owner of the gym, an adult man who looks like he’s wearing The Joker’s high school band uniform. This man radiates evil. He says, “Welcome to Shapelin. Are you new members?” in the exact same tone as a serial killer might say, “You’ll never find their fingers because I ate them.”

Usagi and her friends all work out while surrounded by big muscular men in tiny unitards who supervise. Once they finish, Usagi goes to the locker room for yet another bath while her friends are led into the basement by the gym owner, where he tells them he has a special machine that will make them thin. Ok, this is for sure why it got banned.

The machine is as blatantly evil as the gym owner. It’s a bunch of clearly alien pods with a glowing orb at the center. Nothing good has ever had a glowing orb at the center. However, this all encompassing chamber of star tampons seems legit to this group of teenage girls, so they climb right in and, twist, have a bunch of their life force sucked out. We know that’s what’s happening because the gym owner says, “Ah, the young and succulent energy of girls,” which, okay, is clearly why this episode was banned.

The next day, Usagi passes out in the street because she hasn’t eaten and is rescued by a boy she has a crush on. He tells her that he likes women who aren’t all skin and bones, so now that she has a man’s permission, Usagi decides to eat some pork buns. Within moments her fat shaming cat shows up to swat that food right out of her hands.

“He said he doesn’t like girls that are all skin and bones, but you can go too far the other way, you know?” the fat shaming cat tells Usagi. The woman ate one meal, and this cat showed up to remind her food is what makes you fat. Usagi starts picturing herself fat again and immediately runs to the death gym in horror.

This time the cat comes with her, I guess to make sure she doesn’t try and sneak enough calories into her body to survive on the way there? The cat spots Usagi’s glamorously thin teacher looking like a zombie and heads into the basement, where the gym owner announces to no one that just one more treatment will kill her.

The cat tries to get Usagi to go to the basement and save the teacher, but she’s too busy working out. It threatens to claw her face if she doesn’t go save the teacher. I’m starting to wonder if the cat represents the oppressive societal policing of teenage girls’ bodies? Is that why it was banned? Was this episode too political? Yeah! Fuck that manifestation of the patriarchy, Sailor Moon!

Terrified of her violent, psychologically manipulative cat, Usagi goes to the basement, where she is attacked by buff bodybuilders being mind-controlled by the gym owner. Usagi knows, even as Sailor Moon, she might not win this fight against sleepwalking men with above average strength. She’s an unusual protagonist– a girl who, if she sees the villain has muscles, might actually run away rather than transform into a superhero.

If you’re not familiar with the Sailor Moon transformation sequence, it’s the classic magical girl anime transformation. It looks like she gets sucked into the cosmos so beings of beautiful light can do some tailoring on her skirt and put a pretty headband on her.

Now that Usagi is looking sharp, the evil cat reminds her that fighting is exercise. Well, actually, she says, “Remember, if you fight these guys, you might lose weight!” As we all know, there’s no better exercise for a fourteen year old girl than bare knuckle brawling with three adult bodybuilders. That and ribbon dancing.

Sailor Moon punches the glowing spit right out of those guys in the name of weight loss. Now obsessed with losing weight and only knowing how to safely do so by fighting, Sailor Moon rampages across the earth, brutally pounding anyone who dares cross her path to keep her abs cut as hell. I’m kidding. I wish the moral of this story was fighting is the best exercise. That would be dope.

The episode ends with Usagi crying in the bathroom after yet another bath. Even with all of that ass kicking, she hasn’t lost any weight! So, the moral of the story is: teen girls, don’t be too skinny, but also definitely don’t be fat. However you feel about your body is bad because having a body is shameful, especially a body with the young and succulent energy of a girl. What a true nightmare! Hope you’re all having a good Anime Week. I’m going to go fight my mailman and take 11 baths.

Tags anime, anime week, dieting, Free, tv

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Joe 90 – The Most Special Agent

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 05/12/2022
9 Comments on Nerding Day: Joe 90 – The Most Special Agent

You know Gerry Anderson? Yeah, you know Gerry Anderson. You might not know his name, but if you’re anything like me, you think of the 1960s as “The Puppet Decade.” And that’s Gerry Anderson’s doing. Thunderbirds was his biggest hit, but he churned out series after series of hopping inhuman action and, like all puppeteers, he was secretly evil. To prove that, you’ll have to come with me to Joe 90.

You won’t have to come very far.

The first episode opens on the Brain Impulse Galvanoscope Record and Transfer, a computer that captures a human being’s entire essence and temporarily overlays it on another person’s brain.

So far it’s only been tried on one person: the inventor’s adopted son, Joe 90. I assume the boy’s real name is Bradley or Terrence or Churwith, and calling all the orphans Joe # just makes it easier to track how many he’s burned through.

To reiterate: The acronym is BIGRAT and it is a computer for stealing innocence.

These are not the villains our heroes fight.

These are our heroes.

Puppet Jorah Mormont over here is Mack, inventor of the BIGRAT and a man on his fourth orphan punch card. Two more and he gets a free waif! It’s great villainous coding that in his very first scene he already has the “my god, what have we done” glasses pull out of the way.

I’ll come clean. I have an agenda. I have a theory that this show knows it’s evil and it just wants to see how far it can go before you catch on. Aside from the evil premise, the evil computer, and our first main character (evil), there’s Joe 90.

Every single time we see Joe 90 we have to do a long, slow zoom on his obvious despair.

Hey, can you read lips? Puppet lips? Because this is his first line in the show. In a timid English accent he quavers “is this it, dad?”

Joe 90 has big Social Services energy. He moves like a boy who once knocked over a vase and will die before he lets it happen again. I don’t need any more information to know that this child cries at loud noises. And we are going to steal his brain and send all 56 damp pounds of him into danger. Jesus. This is not a children’s show, this is a fable you show a scientist so he’s more careful with his monkeys.

For the test run of BIGRAT, Mack recorded his own brainwaves and is going to put them straight into his son. I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of Friday Night Lights, and it’s illegal everywhere but Texas High Schools. Since the knowledge only lasts as long as the special electrodes are attached, Mack mocked up science glasses that keep his mind-theft going as long as Joe wears them.

Every single episode starts like this – with Joe 90 getting into a funkadelic identity-erasing machine while wild ‘60s groove assures us it’s okay, and the camerawork promises it is not.

That’s the actual title card! Just a long, slow zoom on quiet despair as the fake name given to him by science blocks out a frightened boy’s face. I’m telling you: This was not a show. It was meant to test the inherent morality of children. It was supposed to come with a little buzzer you hit when you spotted something wrong, only the lab shipments got mixed up. The Revlon guys got a bunch of NOT OK buttons and a generation of British children got this accidental Sociopath Guide and a free makeup bunny.

The bunnies did not last long.

There is a way to do this that makes a delightful premise for a kid’s tv show. Little boy temporarily downloads the abilities of specialists with a lifetime of experience? That rules! He can be a ship’s captain! A daring explorer! An astronaut!

You deeply fuck up that premise when you include all of the adult’s memories. Mack is middle-aged and this takes place in the 1960s – I promise the 1941 version of Mack is squatting in a trench somewhere inside Joe 90’s head, just waiting for a whiff of mustard to unleash the time he gutted eight Nazis at the Somme.

I’m just saying, unless the plan is to load little Joe up with the ghost of an enemy soldier and ship him off to kill Russians, putting complete adult brains in a child of the ‘60s has at least one pitfall.

Puppet Jerry Orbach here is Sam, a stooge for the World Intelligence Network who has sinister designs on the project. Sam is American, but they made up a fake organization to keep things apolitical… then Joe 90 straight up calls him Uncle Sam because we didn’t invent subtlety until 1973, and we didn’t use it until sometime in 2011.

Uncle Sam is still not the villain! Our heroes love him! They know all about his plans to weaponize the BIGRAT! They think that rules!

Having agreed that possessing a child is great and should be done at least 90 times, our heroes leave the lab and emerge into an old-timey english cottage –

Which Sam thinks is strange, but Mack answers, “that’s the way we like it, Sam. A combination of the old and the new!” He pats Joe’s shoulder.

The implication is not lost on Joe.

Uncle Sam takes off to set up a meeting with his superiors, so Mack and Joe follow. They slip into a rustic garage that should house nothing but quaint pornography and possums, and out pops their flying car.

The implication is still not lost on Joe.

“Do you get it yet, son? My experiment is like this, but backwards – I’m the OLD car and you’re my fancy NEW garage!”

Sam says the World Intelligence Network will buy the BIGRAT on the condition that nobody will ever know about it, and they get to use it at their discretion. It will “play a vital role in maintaining world peace.” You see where this is going – old soldiers’ skills are never lost, but transplanted straight into younger bodies. Every grunt is whatever specialist they need to be, just slap on a different pair of glasses and you can disarm a mine, fly a stealth bomber, break a code on the fly.

You saw it all wrong.

The WIN wants Joe, specifically. So far Mack has only tried the experiment on Joe, because he buys orphans in bulk. But at no point does he say it can only ever work on sad English boys who have forgotten the taste of hope. WIN just specifically wants a deadly child supersoldier and for nobody to ever ask questions about it.

I know what you’re thinking, but no: WIN isn’t revealed to be an evil front using our heroes for dastardly purposes. These are still the good guys and everybody loves them and everything they do.

Uncle Sam sits Mack and Joe down, then says “let me describe what could be his first mission…”

They’re going to load little Joe up with the ghost of an enemy soldier and ship him off to kill Russians.

Welcome to Episode 1, everybody! The best way to debut this premise!

You thought this was one of those articles where I delve deep into a harmless premise and explore how fucked up it could be, if you think about it.

No.

You’re going to watch a brainwashed 9 year old puppet put a bullet in a commie because his emotionally distant father told him to. It happens in every episode.

So the WIN needs this experimental new Russian plane, and unattended children are Britain’s greatest natural resource. The solution seems obvious. Luckily a Russian pilot is holding a press conference in London for no reasons that are ever explained – you know how Russian pilots are always touring the world, especially enemy territory, to give interviews about their secret technology? This is that! Mack and Uncle Sam use this opportunity to steal his brainwaves, which is another worrying revelation – it didn’t take Mack years of exhaustive cataloging to capture his entire personality on tape, and it especially didn’t take consent. Just a couple minutes near an antenna and the government can steal any brain.

Then into the machine Joe 90 goes–

You can really feel the reticence in that puppet. I will give Gerry Anderson this: Nobody puts existential discomfort into a puppet-child like Gerry Anderson, except maybe Mack.

It’s been five minutes since our last long, slow zoom of despair. Cue the Brainswitch Go-Go Kiddie Freakout song!

Easy as that! Joe 90’s innocence has been put on pause, and he’s ready for the mission. Let’s go over his kit: The brainwashing glasses-

With them on you’ll have all the memories and experiences of a Russian pilot in the 1960s – his extensive training, his deadly skills, his despair at being trapped as a living weapon in a crumbling empire. But don’t lose them or you’re just timid little Joe, alone behind enemy lines! Still with the despair of being trapped as a living weapon in a crumbling empire, just without the ability to find the eject button.

Next, the pistol-

Haha, your modern sensibilities thought they’d dance around this! No, when I said Joe puts bullets in commies, I mean we watch them go in. Uncle Sam explains it’s “specially made for Joe, it’s small, light, and will fire 200 times without reloading.” We made this gun just for you, child! So your child hands can hold it steady to deliver the killshot!

200 fucking times!

They expect Joe 90 to personally kill an entire battalion on this mission, and they will not be disappointed.

And finally the communicator-

This was cool and high tech back in the ‘60s, but now it’s just a cellphone Joe 90 uses to call the men who stole his youth. If you’ve got your highschool football coach in your contacts list, you’ve got this bit of spykit in your pocket already.

That’s it! That’s all you need to be WIN’s most special agent!

That’s… actually what they call him.

Somehow this is the most heartbreaking part, the way they’re playing with his little kid’s sense of worth. Pinning pilot’s wings on him because he’s being a brave boy on the plane, making sure he knows he’s Daddy’s Best Murderer so the fun little badge keeps his child warfare nice and gamified. Six more boxtops and you get a garotte!

So what’s the plan? Easy, just sign up for one of the many tours Russians give foreign scientists of their top secret military bases!

No, really.

That is a Russian tour guide explaining to a bus full of foreign scientists that they “ordinarily don’t show people the top secret plane.” But this seems like such a fun group so let’s make some noise! I can’t hear you! All the capitalist pigs in the back say M-I-G! Now just the ladies – hey, 242!”

While the party is bumping, Joe 90 runs off to hijack the plane – notice I did not say sneak, he does not think to sneak. His absence is spotted immediately, Mack has no cover story for it, and the Russians freak the fuck out.

The entire bus looks out the window to watch the Russian’s plane get stolen-

Then looks back at the empty seat to really appreciate that the only missing person is this child whose caretaker just admitted to stealing it.

I meant it when I said Mack doesn’t have a cover story. He tells the Russians everything immediately, and it’s important for you to realize this is not only a legitimate step in this plan, but an integral part of every plan in every episode of Joe 90: Much like a Scooby Doo unmasking, there’s a part at the end where Mack condescendingly explains exactly what’s going on, in detail, right to the enemy…

Then… waits for laughter! Because who would believe a government could use a child for warfare!

Mack admits everything, then tries on a smug little grin and waits shittily while the entire Russian airforce attempts to murder his son half a mile above his head.

That’s it! This works! There’s no clever turn here to de-escalate the conflict. This is the format of the show: Have Joe 90 sprint into danger, explain to the men trying to shoot him that they are correct to do so, and then trust that the brain trespasser ghostriding the waif remembers how to kill.

He does!

God, he does!

The Russians mobilize to shoot down the thief, but they don’t count on Joe’s contempt for human life. Again, the show wants to be very clear that this is fucked and you should know it. This is like a Highlights magazine Hidden Picture Game, but for basic human morality. It could not be made more plain that killing isn’t necessary here. Joe 90 radios Uncle Sam and says there are MIGs pursuing him, but they’re 200 miles back. Remember the entire point of this jet is that it’s faster than anything else in the air. That’s the only reason they’re stealing it. Joe 90 is reminded of this, and then says “I’m going to turn around and shoot it out with air-to-air missiles.”

Even Uncle Sam, who has sent so many kids to the meat-grinder he’s come to love the taste of the sausage, pauses at this and says “Joe, isn’t that kind of… uh, dangerous?”

Joe doesn’t even bother to answer that nonsense.

It’s time to get some blood in his teeth.

Drums of madness play as Joe gets lost in the bloodhaze, puppet eyes hard behind blocky nerd glasses. Look close, see any of that G.I. Joe shit? Little parachutes popping up? No, you do not.

We even follow that first plane down until it eats dirt and explodes just so you can be sure the kill is confirmed, and Joe!

Isn’t!

Done!

He takes the jet into a nosedive… so he can strafe the base they came from.

Holy shit. The bodycount of the first episode of this children’s show is already in the dozens. Either the Russian pilot crawling around Joe’s brain has some deep issues with the Motherland, or those glasses are a placebo and Mack’s real experiment was mapping the Murderer Gene.

Uncle Sam radios again, telling Joe to come home before he gets killed.

In a corpse’s voice, Joe 90 answers: “They can’t really stop me now, Sam.”

To which Sam only has worried silence. There comes a point in any military operation where things have gone so sideways you realize you’ve accidentally made a Rambo. This silence is Uncle Sam filing the paperwork for a First Blood contingency, and then shakily scanning down to check off the PeeWee Division box.

Finally, Joe lands the top secret jet back in English territory and runs off into the night, his mission accomplished.

…and that’s how it COULD have gone!

Haha yes, the entire pilot episode of this show was theoretical. Remember when Sam opened the folder and said “here’s how his first mission COULD go?” This was all a godawful pitch the World Intelligence Network made to the boy’s father – this is how they WOULD LIKE to use his precious invention! This wasn’t a worse-case contingency, this was their ideal scenario! “Bear with us now: We put you and your child in mortal danger, the entire thing hanging on whether or not Russia believes children are our future, and only one thing is for certain: Your 9 year old son will take many lives.”

And Mack…

Fucking…

LOSES IT.

The whole tone of the episode shifts as Mack slams his fist into the table. The animation kicks out and it’s just furious screaming over dramatic stills and quick-zooms while Mack takes these motherfuckers to court for the dumbest god damn idea he’s ever heard in his life. Joe straight up flees the room as his father invents new, more tearable assholes for these dudes and then bursts through them like a mascot at a homecoming game.

It is exactly how any sane parent would respond to this absurd pitch. Screaming. Crashing glass, fistfighting. Fuck you for even thinking it! Nobody finishes a line, it’s just a montage of hollering, each new quote cutting off the previous one-

NO! NO! NO!

DO YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO ALLOW-

NOW LOOK HERE! NO YOU LOOK!

HE MAY BE MY ADOPTED SON BUT I LOVE HIM LIKE A-

OUT OF THE QUESTION! SIMPLY OUT OF THE QUESTION!

ARE YOU MAD? ARE YOU QUITE MAD???

…

And then Mack agrees to it.

What!

Holy shit, what? Why, Joe 90? Why the fake-out? Why the double fake-out? Why have the whole episode be an insane pitch by a psychopathic government stooge? Why show us the huge, knockdown drag-out brawl that ensues as a father refuses to sacrifice his greatest invention and his child in one fell swoop? And why the freewheeling fuck do we cut straight out of that fight to exhausted men shaking hands like somebody just sold a lightly-used Ford Fiesta?

Why… if not for my exact theory? Joe 90 isn’t a children’s show. It’s a morality test that we all failed for 30 episodes.

And I didn’t even talk about the one where they put a murdered special agent’s brain into Joe and he guns down 128 men with his Playskool Pistol for revenge!

Tags Best of 2022, children's shows, Free, tv

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Alpha Flight vs. Pink Pearl!

Post author By Lydia Bugg
Post date 05/09/2022
4 Comments on Nerding Day: Alpha Flight vs. Pink Pearl!

When I was a teenager, there was one comic book I wasn’t allowed to read. I assumed it must be because it was the darkest, most disturbing, perverted comic book in existence. It was about Canadians, and it was called Alpha Flight. I recently got my hands on a single copy of this perverted orgy of sin, and it was the most polite orgy of sin I’ve ever experienced.

Alpha Flight is both as Canadian and as disturbing as I expected. It’s as Canadian as Wolverine and as confusing and violent as Wolverine using a machine gun even though there are weapons built directly into his body, and he can’t die.

So, it turns out I was not allowed to read Alpha Flight because it is the one comic book my mom likes, and she did not want me touching her precious Alpha Flights. I checked, and she is aware that other superhero teams exist but cares for them not at all. “You can shove your X-Men right up your ass. Alpha Flight is the only team for me!” is a direct quote from my Mom, probably at some point.

My Dad has a large comic book collection he’s now passing down to me with some really cool, rare comics in there. My Mom still will not let me touch the Alpha Flights. She doesn’t trust my sticky 33-year-old hands. I mercilessly teased her about this until she relinquished one Alpha Flight, her least favorite, and she didn’t want it back after I infected it with my cooties. This is what I learned from my single Alpha Flight. The story opens with extremely French Canadian twins Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie apologizing to each other a lot.

Wait, no, I need to go back. It actually starts with Jeanne-Marie showing up at her brother’s place in the middle of the night in a bikini under a beefy title reading “Stan Lee presents: RUB-OUT!” It’s what’s known in Stan Lee’s imagination as a “Canadian Jackpot.”

Jeanne-Marie’s half-nudity and confusion can be explained by her dissociative identity disorder, and her haircut can be explained by 1983. But like with all mutants, there is a lot of backstory we can’t get into. As quick as possible, Jean-Paul doesn’t get along as well with Jeanne-Marie’s superhero Persona, Aurora, so instead of calling her Alpha Flight teammates and letting them know she’s okay (naked and disoriented on a couch with her brother), he decides to keep her for a bit and let them wonder if maybe she died. You know, like a fun sister prank.

For a guy whose look says “I make toys for Santa but also fuck my sister,” Jean-Paul seems weirdly concerned about Jeanne-Marie’s haircut. Maybe? He wonders why she would “pick a hairstyle her superhero persona could make no use of,” which is kind of what I’m talking about with mutants. That’s madness. Far too much to unpack or make sense of, and we won’t try. Then suddenly, Jean-Paul is like, “you know what would be a great place to take this woman in the thick of a mental breakdown? Someplace calm and relaxing with no loud sounds or sinister connotations. Ah, I know! She needs to go to THE CIRCUS.”

It’s only been twelve hours. Jean-Paul barely let her take a nap and shower, and then he took her to a circus where he knew there was danger. He took her to a danger circus instead of to her home, or a doctor. Don’t worry; it’s not that big of a deal, though. They do a little investigating and quickly discover that the danger circus just turns out to be also full of terrorists.

These are not mutant terrorists, so it should be fine. You would think that two superheroes would be able to take down a bunch of regular terrorists easily, but it turns out Northstar’s one weakness is being indoors. People give Aquaman shit about being useless on land, but this comic makes kind of a good point about speedsters. In a circus trailer, it’s pretty difficult to use run-fast powers, but I would hope he would be able to defeat Bones, a tube sock man whose superpower seems to be malnutrition?

The terrorist cell is headed by Pink Pearl, who is not, in fact, as nice a lady as the cover suggests. She’s from a weird time in Marvel comics history where they thought being fat was a superpower. She’s not a mutant or an inhuman or an alien, she’s just a big lady, and according to this comic book, she can withstand being stabbed in the heart because “all her fat cushioned her from a killing blow.” Yikes, Marvel. She also defeats Jeanne-Marie by simply stuffing Jeanne-Marie’s head into her tits and holding her there until she passes out. This is also how I’ve requested to be put to death should all of the terrible things I’ve done ever come to light. Do you hear me, Future? I choose to die by titties!

It’s worth mentioning how she also makes it kind of motherly? Sexual? It’s hard to understand what motivates her, but she delivers the titty choke with the confidence of a woman who has bosom-killed at least a few people before this.

I don’t know why Marvel decided not to give Pink Pearl any superpowers. At least The Blob, the original super-powered fat person, had skin that couldn’t be penetrated by bullets and a whole deal where he could affect gravity somehow? Basically, nothing moved him and they figured out the rules backwards from that. Yet, when he lost his powers, only the fat in his body disappeared, which means that was the source of his abilities, right? Do we have a clip?

Yikes. Anyway, I’m sure the pitch for Pink Pearl was Lady The Blob, and then they forgot to give her blob powers. Whoever at Marvel was supposed to develop a superpower for Pink Pearl took the day off, and nobody noticed or cared. Luckily, that doesn’t matter! Even without powers, Pink Pearl defeats two A-List members of Alpha Flight very quickly, via indoors and titty.

She reveals that she’s taken over the circus from Jean-Paul’s friend Clementine by injuring the performers and slowly replacing them with members of her terrorist cell in order to use the circus as a cover to get close to an ordinary old farmhouse which is actually a cover for a very very very special old farmhouse. It’s what Stan Lee’s imagination calls “A Canadian Plot.”

They could have made this something cool like a secret lab or a portal to the dimension where Alpha Flight is cool. No, it’s still very much a farmhouse, but it’s a farmhouse that has been chosen as the location for a meeting between the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada. Pearl’s elaborate plan keeps the circus close to the farmhouse so they can blow up the entire circus with a bomb large enough to affect a three mile radius and take out the farmhouse as well. She hopes the explosion will be blamed on Clementine, because she is a former militant Quebec separatist. It’s both very focused and outrageously sloppy– the kind of plan you’d come up with if your superpower was eating six thousand chili dogs.

And she would have gotten away with it too if she hadn’t made the mistake of moving Jean-Paul to a second, larger location for no reason at all where his powers are now relevant. His sister switches back into her Aurora persona and suddenly takes control of the situation, reminding Jean-Paul that he can now use his speed powers and remembering she, herself, can fly. It’s worth saying again how these are two X-Men-trained supersoldiers with amazing abilities dealing with two people any doctor would call “soon unable to walk if they don’t drastically change their diet.”

Even though everyone who has superpowers now remembers that’s the case and they can use them, they still don’t defeat Pink Pearl themselves. She captures Aurora out of the air, and her sidekick Bones is about to stab her when Clementine jostles him slightly, sending the knife toward Pearl. In the end, it was not following circus safety protocols put in place for a reason that caused Pearl’s demise. Remember, kids, always throw knives at the right people.

I have to respect the writing on this comic. Clementine yells “NO!” Bones replies “NO!” Pink Pearl yells “NO!” Shakespeare wept. And I think it’s worth taking another look at the font choice for Pearl’s last word.

When you’re so chubby your words form sausages, that’s art. Of course, I ruined the ending for you at the beginning. This is the issue of Alpha Flight that tells you it’s okay to stab fat people directly in the heart. “All her fat seems to have cushioned her from a killing blow.”

Pearl survives the encounter and goes on to fight Captain America as a member of a group called the Femizons. Eventually, she retires from the terrorist life in the most glamorous way possible by running a male strip club. So, yeah, overall, I think I love her? But also, maybe not the best idea to tell children that fat people are indestructible monsters like werewolves or vampires?

The story ends with Aurora revealing that she has figured out Clementine and Jean-Paul knew each other because he was also a member of her militant Quebec separatist group in the past. Aurora is appalled by this and only this, not the fact that he dragged her to the terror circus while she was in the middle of a mental health crisis. Maybe my mom was right to keep this comic away from me.