Sporadic Ramblings and Nerdery

If I had my way she'd be changing costumes every issue, haha.

Zora currently has a cameo in issue 18 but nothing concrete beyond that (yet!). I kinda want to do my own spin on the old story where she frees the evil leprechaun L. Finn from the Phantom Zone.

Look, it's a little complicated because the souls of her beloved husband, along with their two daughters are all in the sword (after it was used to murder them by her husband's brother), so things might get a bit awkward in there for anyone else with amorous intentions towards her.

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Travis Knight, the CEO of Laika, the animation house behind “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” can’t shake a moment from an Oscars Nominees Luncheon in 2020.  The 52-year-old son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight was there because his stop-motion film “Missing Link” was up for best animated feature. Across the table sat a screenwriter he had long admired, and the two struck up a conversation. When Knight mentioned his movie, the writer replied: “Oh, I don’t watch any of that stuff. I just let my kids tell me what to vote for.”  Knight smiled on the outside but fumed within. “I was so deeply outraged,” he recalls. The insult stung because Knight knew it was the industry’s quiet consensus, said out loud: Animation is a babysitter. That’s the paradox at the center of animation in 2026: The medium has never mattered more to Hollywood’s bottom line. Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” became the first film to cross $1 billion worldwide this year. Pixar‘s spring release “Hoppers” scored the biggest opening for an original Pixar movie since 2017’s “Coco.” And “Toy Story 5” capped the run with a $160 million domestic launch ($312 million worldwide), the best debut of any film this year and the cornerstone of Pixar’s comeback. It’s currently sitting at $879 million globally heading into its fifth weekend, and is destined to be another billion-dollar movie of 2026. In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s “Aladdin” in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with “Inside Out 2” and “Zootopia 2” topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely felt less valued: In May 2024, Pixar cut 14% of its staff — roughly 175 employees. Netflix restructured its animation unit in 2023, eliminating jobs and halting two films in preproduction.  One animator put it plainly: “You have no idea how frustrating it is to see press release after press release touting how much money our animated film made and how many nominations we got; then [the studio] turns to people who have worked here forever and says, ‘We don’t need you anymore.’” 

This is genuinely a fantastic deal. $25 for over $900 worth of female-led indie comics from Image, all DRM-free and in cbz, epub, and pdf formats. Some really top tier creatives here—Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott, Jeff Lemire, Kelly Sue Deconnick, Ed Brubaker, Cliff Chiang, and many others! Highlights include Saga, Bitch Planet, Paper Girls, and Pretty Deadly—all complete to what’s been published.