Spy Flyers or Spyflyers? nobody knows

Oct. 24th, 2025 11:12 am
philomytha: stylised biplane (flies east biplane)
[personal profile] philomytha
The Spyflyers, WE Johns (available on Faded Page here)
Finally got around to reading this one as other people are requesting it for Yuletide, and it was a fun WW1 spy adventure, and unusually for WEJ, it's a standalone - I was expecting to see Raymond show up to be our spymaster as he seems to in all of WEJ's other series regardless of whether there's any other overlap, but no, we have a different character in that role here. This is one of WEJ's earlier novels, 1933, and it does show - the set-piece scenes are good but the assembly is a bit hit and miss, it's all over the place in structure. You can also see bits WEJ has reused in later books - the entire opening chapter gets a reprise in Biggles in the Baltic - and the whole of it is WEJ trying out ideas that he puts together in a different and far far better way in Biggles Flies East. I don't think Flies East would be anywhere near as good a book if WEJ hadn't written this one first.

The gist of the story, without spoilers, is that our pilot-and-observer duo Rex and Tony are assigned to try to find double agents who are flying around in British aeroplanes causing problems in France in WW1. Rex and Tony are both fluent German speakers and to do this they are assigned a captured German aircraft and some German uniforms and have to land in German-occupied territory and investigate, and soon they encounter the mysterious Captain Fairfax who seems to be in more places than is reasonable for one person - and so we have a wonderful romp of everyone being undercover on the opposite side. And for all that the story is all over the place at the start, by the middle of the story WEJ starts to tighten up the adventure and the ending is great. And I have gone and requested it for Yuletide too now.

Now for spoilers - and I was surprised by several twists in this, so if you think you might read the book, read it first and enjoy the twists unspoiled, and then come back and chat about it with me.

spoilers )

Reagancomics (3 of 7): Glory Days

Oct. 23rd, 2025 10:06 am
[personal profile] tcampbell1000 posting in [community profile] scans_daily


(Boosted up from 5 installments--I found even more material than I was expecting to. Warning for suicidal ideation, serious drug-use discussion.)

At first, Reagan's portrayals in comics stuck close to the template of a generic "placeholder president," with only the occasional real-life touch to give his character some color. The most notable thing about his first comic-book appearance as president is that it stars, of all people, the "Dial 'H' for Hero" duo. The year is 1981, the comic is Adventure Comics #485.

Kids these days, always on their phones. )
beatrice_otter: Captain America (Captain America)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter
I was re-reading some old MCU fic, and in the fic Steve says that Bucky was named for President Buchanan. Which Doylistically he was, but ... there's no reason he has to be from an in-universe perspective.

"James" was an incredibly common first name. The Social Security Administration publishes lists of how popular various names have been over the years; in the 1910s, when James and Steve were born, "James" was the third most popular name for boys. 275,000 baby boys were named "James" in that decade, which, given the size of the population, means that there were a lot of James' everywhere. Very common name.

Ah, but what of Buchanan, you say! Surely there could be no reason to give someone the middle name "Buchanan" if it's not naming him after someone famous! ... and no, actually. While people sometimes were named after famous people or political leaders (just like today), there's actually a more common reason to do it. It was a fairly common thing in the 19th Century for people to have a "last" name as a middle name, often their mother's maiden name, and people still do that today sometimes. Steve's middle name is "Grant", for example; "Grant" was a relatively common surname but (at the time) extremely uncommon as a first name. Steve was almost certainly given the middle name "Grant" to honor someone whose last name was Grant; it was probably his mother's maiden name. Buchanan is a relatively common Scottish name; it's not one of the top ten or anything, but the Buchanan clan is one of respectable size and power. In the same way, there is a very good chance that James was given the middle name "Buchanan" to honor someone whose last name was "Buchanan," quite probably his mother. And for a first name they gave him the third most common name for boys, and maybe didn't realize that there was a President by that name. Especially if they were immigrants, or weren't very well educated. (A lot of people in that generation had only a grade school education, or maybe a middle school education; only 10% of all 14-17 year olds attended high school in the US in 1900; there were still states where even elementary school wasn't required until 1918!) James Buchanan is not one of the Presidents that people talk about much outside history classes, and even then, a lot of history classes don't go into a lot of detail on him besides "last President before the Civil War." Yes, he was a bad President and one of the reasons the US Civil War became inevitable, but there were a lot of factors that were a lot more important.

I think "we liked the name James, and we wanted to honor his mother's family by giving him their last name as a middle name" is a far more likely scenario than consciously deciding to name their kid after President James Buchanan.

On a completely different note, if you want to write an AU where Bucky escaped Hydra early and made a new life for himself ... there's a late-20th-Century composer named James Barnes. He wrote concert band music. Here are some of his pieces: Symphonic Overture, Symphony No. 2, Third Symphony ("The Tragic")Fantasy Variations on a Theme by Nicolo PaganiniAlvamar Overture.

Reagancomics (2 of 5): Pre-Inaugural

Oct. 20th, 2025 09:47 pm
[personal profile] tcampbell1000 posting in [community profile] scans_daily


Ronald Reagan's first appearance in comics doesn't foreshadow his political career at all. It shows him only as an actor--with plans to keep acting until he's old enough to play parts with his glasses on.

He could've played Clint Eastwood's dad. )

Mod Post: Off-Topic Tuesday

Oct. 21st, 2025 11:28 am
icon_uk: Mod Squad icon (Mod Squad)
[personal profile] icon_uk posting in [community profile] scans_daily
In the comments to these weekly posts (and only these posts), it's your chance to go as off topic as you like.

Talk about non-comics stuff, thread derail, and just generally chat among yourselves.

The intent of these posts is to chat and have some fun and, sure, vent a little as required. Reasoned debate is fine, as always, but if you have to ask if something is going over the line, think carefully before posting please.

Normal board rules about conduct and behaviour still apply, of course.

It's been suggested that, if discussing spoilers for recent media events, it might be advisable to consider using the rot13 method to prevent other members seeing spoilers in passing.

The world situation is the world situation. If you're following the news, you know it as much as I do, if you're not, then there are better sources than scans_daily. But please, no doomscrolling, for your own sake.

A hearty congratulations to anyone who took part in the "No Kings Day" rallies across the US, which were universally peaceful and appear to have attracted a turnout of over 8 million people.

A happy Diwali to those who celebrate!

Time Magazines choice of photo of POTUS47 for their cover did not go down bigly at the White House.

So possibly the demolition of parts of the White House to make way for the new Ballroom were just a little cathartic destruction?

Credit where it's due, Sanae Takaichi has become Japan's first ever female Prime Minister, which is groundbreaking. Though, as she is a "staunch conservative and admirer of the late former British PM Margaret Thatcher" who is also opposed to same sex marriage, one suspects it won't make that much difference

A "heist" at the Louvre in Paris has caused global headlines. And whilst, yes it was done with a modicum of style and a minimum of violence, seems likely to have been carried out by organised crime so the chances of the Crown Jewels of France being recovered intact seems vanishingly small, which is a tragedy.

Longtime youtuber favrouites Dan and Phil have publicly confirmed they are a couple. I confess I am oblivious to this whole thing, but it seemed to cause a stir amongst the young'uns so I'll mention it here and wish them well. (See, I'm still down with the kids! When I'm not shouting at them to get off my lawn)

Oh, and the NinjaKidz Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers trailer dropped. Alas, the incredibly heavy use of AI slop for the effects was painful, to the extent I'm not even going to share a link to it, so here's "The Rainbow Connection" instead, because you can't go wrong with Kermit the Frog.

Reagancomics (1 of 5): Precedents

Oct. 20th, 2025 11:29 am
[personal profile] tcampbell1000 posting in [community profile] scans_daily


(Warning for one scene of implied sexual violence, albeit one I missed on first reading. Also, warning for a brief scene with Donald Trump.)

Comic books often tell stories about the most powerful people on Earth, so they've always had a curious relationship with the actual most powerful person on Earth: the United States president.

This is comic BOOKS, so let's agree not to count the DOONESBURY collections, no matter how much they feel like graphic novels. )

Deadpool / Batman #1

Oct. 20th, 2025 01:00 pm
cyberghostface: (Joker)
[personal profile] cyberghostface posting in [community profile] scans_daily


“In Batman we’ve found someone who has even less time for Deadpool’s antics than Wolverine, but a city-wide threat from the Joker makes strange bedfellows (literally, if Deadpool had his way). It’s been a blast letting Deadpool loose in Gotham City and watching what happens.” -- Zeb Wells

Scans under the cut... )

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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