Why is Starfleet Academy being adapted to comics by IDW?

To begin, there's a new, and very dismaying, addition to the Star Trek franchise titled Starfleet Academy. And from this Breitbart item by John Nolte, it looks like we have quite a politicized metaphor here:

Paramount+ made Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s premiere episode available for free and, after a full day, it has amassed only 81,000 views and a dreadful like-to-dislike ratio…

As of this writing, only 3.9K people have hit the “like” button, compared to the 10K that have hit the “dislike” button.

Gee, I wonder what the problem is?

Oh, wait…

Star Trek cadets are now required to get DEI training from an obnoxious lesbian

Yes, this is real pic.twitter.com/qDFp1dfDiO

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 15, 2026

What is that? A smug lesbian virtue-signaling with her strident Karen Power is supposed to be appealing, someone we can relate to, someone to aspire to? Does that teacher look like she should be training people to handle Starships or blowing whistles at ICE agents in Minnesota? [...]

Early in this episode, Holly Hunter’s character explains that she resigned from Starfleet after the Federation forced her to separate a criminal mother from her child – something that happens to every parent who goes to prison. But Trump, Trump, Trump…

Well, this is certainly telling. And from what Nolte later said, ratings haven't improved:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has been available free for five days and earned only 176,000 views.

People aren’t even hate-watching this woketardery.

Take a moment to understand just how big of a flop this is… For 60 years, Star Trek has been one of the most beloved and famous brands in popular culture. This heavily-promoted premiere episode was made available … for FREE … on YouTube, which is the world’s most popular and accessible video platform, and still, it’s earned only 176,000 views over five full days, including a three-day weekend.

A real shame the Trek franchise had to come down to this. Of course, some might argue that after all these years, who knows if a TV show that may have built upon the premise there should only be one, single governing entity, and made it seem like mankind should outgrow religion, as though there's no such thing as a good religion, was ever a great idea to start with? In the past, there were times when I did think there were interesting stories in the Trek series leading up to the early 2000s, but for all we know, it hasn't aged well. Certainly not if something as dreadful as Starfleet Academy is any suggestion.

But if it's really that bad, one can only wonder why it's being adapted to comics by the now horribly woke IDW, as announced by Trek Core:

The first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has just begun, and already IDW Publishing has announced a new tie-in comic series set to beam down after the season concludes this Spring!

Debuting in April 2026, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy — Lost Contact will be a five-issue limited series starring the lead characters from the new television show; the series will be written by Layne Morgan and illustrated by Corali Espuna and Nora Serrano.

Wow, I hesitate to think how faithful the comics adaptation could be to what woke scriptwriting can be seen in the TV show itself. Plus, if few care about the TV show, why should they care about the comic? Sounds like something that was rushed into adaptations even before anyone could gauge what the reaction of the TV couch potato audience would be. And that's not a good thing.

I have no idea how much longer IDW will be in the business, but this is no improvement, and above all, it underlines their problem of relying far too much on merchandise as a wellspring than original concepts. At least they no longer retain a license for GI Joe and Transformers comics.

Jim Zub quits his X/Twitter page

According to this Facebook post, writer Zub's no longer using an account on X/Twitter, though I'm not sure exactly why. It could be because they changed their TOS to prevent abuse by artists using AI technology, but I couldn't find the relevant data to clearly explain this, so again, I'm not sure why Mr. Zub decided to abandon his account.

At least, in the last few years before this, he seemed to stop making divisive statements he shouldn't have made in the first place. But, who knows if he'll remain that way? I just hope, if anything, that Mr. Zub will stick to his comics writing chores, and cease acting as an apologist for woke pandering in mainstream. If he'd respected that position before, he could've saved everybody a lot of trouble that didn't have to be.

Failed live action Snow White movie nominated for Razzie awards

The Daily Wire reports the woke remake of the Disney cartoon classic's been listed for Golden Rasberry award nominations:

To the surprise of no one, Disney’s live-action version of “Snow White” was nominated for the internet’s most notorious film awards in 2026.

The massive flop was nominated in six categories for the annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Razzies), making it the most nominated film alongside Ice Cube’s “War of the Worlds.” Both films were nominated for “Worst Picture.”

“A slow-paced unnecessary re-imagining of a classic, filled with drawn-out musical numbers, dopey CGI dwarfs, and enough mediocrity to leave the audience in a very unhappy place,” the press release said of the nomination.

Somehow, activist actress Rachel Zegler managed to avoid being nominated for worst actress, despite many critics blaming her performances both on and off screen for contributing to the disaster. Besides Worst Picture, “Snow White” was nominated in the categories of Worst Remake, Supporting Actors, Screen Combo, Director, and Screenplay.

Which is a shame, of course, because after all the trouble she alone caused with her repellent, divisive political statements, she'd deserve to be nominated for worst actress, which might make clear she did some serious wrongs. I do wonder if Gal Gadot was nominated? She might actually deserve it too, for some of her own political mistakes, but then, the problem is that it would only make her look like the one more at fault, when Zegler's the guilty party among the cast members. After this debacle, studios would do well not hire Zegler again.

I'd like to hope this'll persuade Disney to stop wasting so much money on unnecessary live action remakes, but it's still possible they have more in the works. What next, will Pinocchio be remade, even though there have been other adaptations of Carlo Collodi's classic children's book in the past century? Who knows, maybe they'll decide to turn the Black Cauldron into a live action movie, even though the original cartoon from 1985 was a failure, though it does earn a place in history as one of the earliest PG-rated cartoons they produced, along with CGI technology. In the end, however, it'd be far better if Disney ceased obsessing themselves with remakes, and paid far more attention to developing movies with more positive values again, both animated and live action. For now, their artistic/financial slump is something they may not recover from in a hurry, if at all.

Does Superman really "leave" his own comics that often?

A writer at Comic Book Club Live discusses how the Man of Steel seems to have quite a few moments where he's missing from his own solo comics:

While Superman launched the modern superhero era in Action Comics #1 and has been the hero of that title for almost all of its long run, the Man of Steel actually finds himself displaced — both in Action Comics and in the Superman comics titles more broadly — more often than most other heroes. And we’re gearing up for it to happen again with Reign of the Superboys, a big crossover event in which the various characters known as Superboy — but who aren’t actually Clark Kent — take center stage in a story whose title is lifted from Reign of the Supermen! (itself a story in which the Man of Steel was mostly absent).

To understand why this keeps happening, first, let’s take a look back at other instances when Superman disappeared from his own titles. Action Comics Weekly ran for over 40 issues, from Action Comics #601 through #642. During that time, Superman was no longer the lead feature in Action Comics, which became an oversized anthology featuring characters like Blackhawk, Green Lantern, Arsenal, and Nightwing. The experiment eventually ended and Superman got Action Comics back, leading into the “Triangle Era” of the Superman titles, during which time Action Comics, Superman, and The Adventures of Superman were joined by Superman: The Man of Steel to make a functionally-weekly story.

That wasn’t the last time Superman exited his own titles, though, and while Action Comics Weekly was seemingly an experimental proving ground for characters who didn’t have their own comic, later stories that took the Man of Steel out of his own comics were more narrative-driven.

The most famous example, obviously, was the stories that happened following 1992’s The Death of Superman. It’s also illustrative of why removing Superman from Superman works so well.

Say what? That's about as effective as saying that turning the Man of Steel into a crazy villain works so well. Sorry, but when it happens far too often - and potentially far more often than it does for Batman - then it doesn't work well at all. It only hints the writers don't know what to do with the star of the show, and would rather look for excuses to spotlight other characters in the star's main comics, rather than in their own separate miniseries or even paperback developed and sold on its own merits.

Interesting that Action Comics' weekly run of 42 issues was brought up, because while there were some stories there starring other characters that worked well enough, the Green Lantern stories almost single-handedly ruined everything. That was where GL's descent into horrible storytelling first officially began after his own solo book ended, as the assigned "creators" went miles out of their way to depict Carol Ferris in the Star Sapphire guise murdering Katma Tui, and if they were trying to make a statement about the South Africa republic's problems with racist apardheid at the time, they destroyed everything based on the bizarrely implausible way John Stewart was turned into a scapegoat: he recommends that Hal steal diamonds from a mine in South Africa, which goes against what Hal was written standing for, which is opposition to stealing. And then somehow, John gets blamed. If the whole idea was to comment on racial issues of the times, they totally botched it. And then, the Cosmic Odyssey special from 1989 made things worse by making John guilty of enabling a planetload of people to die. This is why it's actually despicable Action would be turned weekly, if any stories inside were going to be that bad, and alarmingly forced. Especially considering what other horrors awaited the DCU by the turn of the century. So, while stories featuring Nightwing, Black Canary and Deadman were okay, GL stood out as the rock-bottom feature of the lot, and the whole notion Superman would be sidelined for that is addtionally miserable.

That said, the Man of Steel wasn't literally absent from his own foremost book at the time. But based on how badly written GL's feature was by Christopher Priest and even Peter David, that's why it's a shame Action had to go weekly for that.

As for the Death/Return of Superman in 1992-3, what's so "famous" about that? As I've argued before, when the storyline got around to depicting the Toyman murdering Cat Grant's son, that's what really made it tasteless, and it also came at the expense of a crooked character whom I don't recall ever being portrayed as vile as the Joker before. If that's what the Man of Steel's being absented from his own comics for, no wonder quality went way south since. And what's so "narrative-driven" about all that anyway? It's laughable.

Anyway, this new crossover they speak of is decidedly another best avoided, and while it may not be surprising nobody's willing to insist universe-spanning crossovers have to stop, it's certainly disappointing. Superman should definitely not have to be sidelined because assigned writers may not know what kind of stories to give him, and the increased focus on villains has to stop too. It's no substitute for merit-based writing.

A columnist who sounds like he's comparing Donald Trump to Disney's Scrooge McDuck in a bad way

A writer at TomDispatch seems to be comparing Donald Trump to his old Disney comics about Uncle Scrooge (or vice versa), and suggests he doesn't love America:

After reading today’s piece by TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy, I searched the bookshelf in my hallway where I knew I had some old cartoon and comic books from my distant past and found Ariel Dorfman’s classic How to Read Donald Duck (published in 1971), which was aptly comic-book-sized with cartoon illustrations. Its first chapter started with this line: “It would be wrong to assume that Walt Disney is merely a businessman.” And that was true. He was so much more. He was distinctly an imperial cartoonist or, as a question on the back cover of Dorfman’s book asks, “How come the natives and the savages always give up their riches to the Duck invaders?” And at a time when the Vietnam War was still raging, “What are Huey, Dewey, and Louie doing in Vietnam?”

What indeed! Of course, the duck comics (and cartoons) of my younger years were definitely influential and distinctly money-making in their moment. As Dorfman put it then, “The names of presidents change; that of Disney remains.” And even today, as McCoy makes clear, in the age of Uncle Trump (the true Donald of our moment), what, you might ask, is his family doing making money (as Disney once did) across the planet while he’s still president? And what a president he is! As he told New York Times reporters recently, when asked about what limits there might be on his global power, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

What a relief, right? And with all of that in mind, more than half a century after How to Read Donald Duck first came out, let McCoy consider the Donald of our moment, someone it’s all too hard to duck, and his comic book version of foreign policy. Tom

Now that's a politcized statement if there ever was one. And then, he goes and compares Scrooge and his nephews to Trump's family, and the aforementioned natives/savages are presumably meant to be stand-ins for Latin Americans from a modern standing, with the implication Trump is ripping them off of valuables like fuel (similar claims were made about how the USA dealt with Iraq in the early 2000s). Also notice the putdown of Walt Disney himself as "imperial". No doubt, they're aware he was a conservative in some ways, even if his heirs are anything but, and opportunistically sought to tear down on Disney just for that. Here's more:

Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies — notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.

But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to U.S. cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.

To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on U.S. imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.

Well I think that says plenty that's needed to know about where this propagandist is coming from, or going. And while the USA isn't perfect, it sounds like he's implying it's little more than "imperialist". Does that mean American car manufacturers are wrong to sell their products overseas? And that teens were wrong to read about the slapstick adventures of Scrooge McDuck? That's what it sounds like.

It also sounds as though the writer's implying it's wrong for natives to give the adventurers an award, monetary or otherwise, for helping them with their local problems. And that's insulting. But, this does make clear there's some propagandists out there who aren't the fans of pop culture they claim to be, and if this is what they think, then what was their whole point reading even Disney comics decades ago? It's a shame, but there does seem to be a certain segment of society that, if they loved various USA-based comics back in the day, they've since abandoned all that. So why keep on talking about Disney cartoons at all? There's just no point.

What Roger Ebert thought of the movie adapting Mark Millar's Kick-Ass comic

Slash Film wrote some history of what the late film critic Roger Ebert thought of the movie based on Mark Millar's Kick-Ass comic series:

Legendary film critic Roger Ebert passed in 2013, just as superhero movies had become the dominant obsession of Hollywood. While Ebert obviously didn't get to write about the genre's eventual plateau, he foresaw it in his 3-star, backhanded compliment review of 2012's "The Avengers," writing: "['The Avengers'] provides its fans with exactly what they desire. Whether it is exactly what they deserve is arguable."

If you think that's mean, then know Ebert had much harsher words for another cape flick: Matthew Vaughn's hard-R superhero parody, "Kick-Ass." Adapted from a comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., "Kick-Ass" hit theaters in 2010. The Marvel Cinematic Universe hadn't cemented the superhero boom yet, but Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films were big enough cultural touchstones to make the parody land. [...]

The 13-year old Moretz played a child soldier in a purple wig who curses like a gangster in a Scorsese movie. That drummed up some moral outrage, and Ebert joined the chorus. In his 1-star review of "Kick-Ass," Ebert bemoaned:

"Will I seem hopelessly square if I find 'Kick-Ass' morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? [...] A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere."

Kick-Ass delights in its vulgarity and violence

Ebert was hardly a prude or a moralist. This is the man who called political correctness "the fascism of the '90s" and wielded his pulpit to admire Alice Krige as the seductive Borg Queen in "Star Trek: First Contact." Even so, violence committed by children seems to have been a red line for him.

Well look, there are things Ebert said in his time that I didn't agree with either (and I don't find it impressive if he admired Kridge's role in First Contact because she was "seductive" since the character she played was a villainess), but I don't see critiquing sensationalized violence and vulgarity as a bad thing. There's way too much of that in society now, and it's far from a funny thing. When there's a bad influence going about, a certain amount of objectivity could come in handy for dealing with it. Also brought up here is what else but the Dark Knight Returns:

Now, Hit-Girl is a parody of Robin; Big Daddy's costume in the movie resembles Batman, and Cage does an impression of Adam West. As a crime-fighting little girl, Mindy is especially similar to Robin/Carrie Kelley from Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns." That book revealed the second Robin, Jason Todd, had died in the line of duty, showing what's most likely to happen if you dress a kid up in a leotard and send them out to find gangsters. Miller, though, has maintained he only deconstructed parts of Batman to build him back up better. "Kick-Ass" attempts a similar balancing act, but despite their similar names, Mark Millar (and for that matter, Matthew Vaughn) is no match for Frank Miller at his '80s prime.

While Miller may have had turned out some worthy storylines with his "year one/two" run on Batman in the late 80s, I don't consider DKR one of his best stories, even if it's not his fault for influencing where the editors went the following decade, making Bruce Wayne more cynical and cold than need be. Predictably, the columnist distorts reality and facts by saying DKR "revealed" instead of established, perpetuating a serious problem of talking down to the audience, which, come to think of it, is just what he's doing when it comes to Millar's so-called indie "masterpiece" too.

However, this column does stress exactly what's wrong with writers like Miller: he "deconstructed" the Masked Manhunter, and supposedly tried to rebuild him in what he considered an "improved" structure, and effectively paved the way for more overrated writers like Millar, and even Grant Morrison and J. Michael Straczynski in later years. It's pretty telling when Miller for one can't appreciate the concept of surrealism enough to respect what Bob Kane and Bill Finger set out to do when they introduced Dick Grayson about a year after Bruce Wayne in the Golden Age. If that's what he thought back in 1986 when he first wrote DKR, it's hard to believe he really admired them to begin with, even though without them, it's possible we'd never have the Caped Crusader.

Since the subject of 2nd Robin Jason Todd comes up in the first article, DC in the 80s once had something quite eyebrow raising to bring up in an interview with Jim Starlin, who penned the whole storyline that followed up on DKR, in a manner of speaking, and what happened in the aftermath:

Mark: Is that why, even though you worked on the first few issues of the New Gods spin-off, you weren't on it after a few issues?

Jim: No, that had to do with Batman. For Batman, we did Death in the Family -- which was their best-selling book that year -- but it turns out they had all these licensing (pajamas, lunch boxes, and stuff like that) and the licensing department was very mad, everybody got mad, and they needed somebody to blame -- so I got blamed. And within 3 months all of my work dried up -- in fact Paris Cullins and whoever the new writer was drew up a new first issue that came in ahead of *my* New Gods issues that I had already written. Y'know, everything just sort of fell apart at that point at DC for me, and I went back with Marvel. And it worked out okay because I went over to do Silver Surfer and the Infinity Gauntlet. So I can't complain about that.

That's certainly irony of ironies, I guess. Depending what one thinks of licensing arrangements and merchandise, that's one more reason why it's bizarre they'd go to all that trouble of scapegoating a fictional character for starters (Todd), and then, even though Starlin may have been doing the bidding of the editors and publishers, they still threw him under the bus soon after. With all due respect to Denny O'Neil, one could reasonably wonder why he mattered more than Starlin, since O'Neil was throughly okay with offing Todd to start with, and set a very poor example of projecting and scapegoating fictional characters. Such an approach has caused untold damage to comicdom, and can't continue any longer.

As for Millar's so-called masterpiece in crudeness, Kick-Ass, again, I think it's regrettable how overrated writers like him have made a whole career catering to sleaze, taking it de-facto mainstream, and only dampening morale in sane society. This kind of storytelling is something future writers have to move away from, since it's only making things worse, and doesn't make a good substitute for more optimistic viewpoints.

A shameful misuse of Carnage in Spider-Man

Coming Soon announces that one of Marvel's latest "events" might see Spider-Man being combined with Carnage, as though it weren't bad enough Mary Jane Watson was being turned into another Venom:

Spider-Man is about to transform into one of the scariest Marvel characters of all time.

Marvel Comics is getting ready to launch a new Spider-Man, Venom, and Carnage crossover titled Death Spiral. The event begins with an Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral one-shot that is being released next month, before it then continues in issues of Amazing Spider-Man and Venom throughout the spring.

In Death Spiral, Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Mary Jane/All-New Venom, and Eddie Brock/Carnage will be targeted by a super-powered serial killer named Torment. The event comes from writers Joe Kelly, Al Ewing, and Charles Soule, with artwork by Ed McGuinness, Carlos Gómez, and Jesús Saíz.

What is Spider-Man about to transform into?

Now, Marvel Comics has unveiled the cover art, done by McGuiness, for Amazing Spider-Man #27, which will serve as the finale to Death Spiral. The cover reveals that Spider-Man and Carnage — a notoriously evil character who has a long history with Peter — are about to bond to become the Amazing Spider-Carnage.

When woke writers like Ewing are listed, it's pretty apparent this is going to be awful anyway. And plots involving serial killers have become way too much as well. This is repellent, and is clearly their idea of how to ape the past decade's storyline where Dr. Octopus switched bodies with Peter. It only explains why Marvel would be better off being closed down for good.