Now lather pockets are my morning infuriation and will be for the next few months.
I bought a six-pack of Dial soap this week. I noticed it was extolling the addition of “lather pockets”, but I honestly did not pay it any mind.
Today, I cracked that pack open, ready for the day (lie) and full of joie-de-vie (lie).
But there is a tangible feeling of comfort and satisfaction in opening up a fresh bar of soap. It’s smooth, it’s dry, it’s clean. It feels good to hold a fresh bar of soap, even knowing that in a moment, you’re going to get it all slimy and stick at least two body hairs to it. It’s a good moment, no matter how fleeting.
But for lather pockets.
What the-actual-fuck con-job is this? Dial just took a mini melon-baller to my perfect soap and stole some from me. Eight times! For each of my six bars of soap. Forty-eight soap scoops missing from my new soaps. It’s awful! They don’t even really act as lather enhancers either, seeing as how my lush chest hair already makes me the human loofah.
Dial, you done me wrong. I hope you’re happy with yourselves because you did done me wrong.
Before I get to the comic, I just want to take a moment to talk about my comic shop. Librarie Astro is a used bookstore on St. Catherine street in downtown Montreal, but they also had a good stash of comics and a great staff for handling pull lists. They’ve been my comic shop since 1996, and I learned not too long ago that they will be closing up in the summer due to issues renegotiating their lease with the new building owner.
This news hit me pretty hard. Over two decades of going there, it’s been an island of stability in my life. Whatever schooling or job, I’ve always had comics waiting for me there on Wednesdays. I’m really gonna miss that place, and Quick Comics rewind owes Astro’s many back-issue sales it’s existence.
Grimjack #10, published by First Comics in 1985, and written by John Ostrander with art by Timothy Truman. Ostrander is probably best known for his work on DC’s “Suicide Squad”, while Truman would work as an artist and writer on books like Johna Hex, Turok and Conan, along with a bunch of Star Wars titles.
The plot is pretty straightforward. Grimjack is a pan-dimensional bounty hunter, a gritty gunslinger who’s short on words in a wild-west world. He’s there to catch a weapons dealer who has been smuggling future hardware, Uzis and assault rifles, into the west. He finds her, a femme-fatale with a bad attitude named Spook. Running afoul of a crooked sheriff and an evil businessman, They get captured together. They escape, hijacking a train with everyone hot on their tail.
The plotting is not high art. The script is just as… Grimjack.
Truman is just as rough on art duties. In the opening pages, Grimjack is shown holding a rifle, then it disappears so he can quickly draw a pistol to show how badass he is. I guess he dropped the rifle he was holding so he could surprise the bad guys with a smaller gun? I dunno. The anatomy is all over the place as well. But the grit? The grit per square inch is off the charts. We’re talking Lenil Yu levels of face lines here. It’s sandpaper.
This book is bad, but it’s 1985, and it’s a step towards the great books of 1986. It’s dark, it’s adult, and in that way, it is showing that comics can be more. But it’s also a small stem, appealing to the 15-year-old in place of the 10-year-old who wants X-Men and Teen Titans. A few years from now, DC will toss Jonah Hex to Truman, and it’ll be this great space cowboy book, and Grimjack comes close here, but this issue just isn’t made for anyone but teens in the 80’s. I had a hard time getting through this one issue, so it shocked me to find out that Grimjack lasted many years and had over eighty issues, plus a web-comic revival in the 2000s.
–Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.
–Quick Comic Rewind is brought to you monthly through the love of our supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to join them in helping us out, please visit www.patreon.com/9to5cc and be sure to check out how your donations help us out and get access to additional bonus content from the 9to5 crew.
I listen to a podcast called “The Baxter Building” where two guys are reading through the entire run of Marvel’s “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine”, The Fantastic Four. They’ve been working on this project for years, offering expert and cantankerous opinions on every single issue. The latest episode included issue #347, which I happened to have lying around the office, so I pulled it out to review for you.
This issue is done by Walter Simonson and Arthur Adams, two big names in comics, and two of my favourites of all time. Simonson had a legendary run on Thor in the 80’s, basically creating the modern definition of the character. Art Adams’ art in Uncanny X-Men Annual #12 remains to this day some of my all-time favourite comic book work and visually defining the look of the X-Men in my mind’s eye. Having them work together on the FF should be epic.
Doubling down on the awesome, this issue also introduces the “New Fantastic Four”, the 90’s-tastic team of Spider-Man, Hulk, Ghost Rider and Wolverine.
Despite all this, this book is deeply flawed.
–
The story begins with an alien ship crashing on earth, revealing its lone passenger to be a beautiful green-haired stranger. We then get two pages of life in Four Freedoms Plaza, checking in with Sue, Reed and Franklin, Sharon (the She-Thing) and Ben, and Johnny and Alicia. Then it cuts to a group of skrulls on their way to earth hot on the heels of De’Lila, presumably the alien lady that crashed at the start of the book.
All of this happens on the first five pages of the book. Breakneck speed storytelling.
De’Lila shape-changes her way into the FF’s base and then zaps all of the team unconscious. The skrulls think they’re tracking her, but their sensors instead take them to Monster Island, where they run into the Mole Man’s monsters, and use a device to take control of the giant beasts. Mole Man, unseen by the aliens, swears swift retribution. The skrulls make the monsters attack mankind all over the world.
De’Lila, now disguised as Sue Storm, sends out a distress call to the Hulk, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Ghost Rider and convinces them the source of the monster attacks is an alien device, that the skrulls already killed the FF, and the four random heroes need to find the device for her in order to stop the attacks, the alien invasion and get justice for her slain family.
They agree.
–
This comic was a big deal when it came out. The “New” Fantastic Four was made up of the hottest characters Marvel had at the time, and was met with a lot of hype in the comics media. People bought this book. Even now, fans look back on these issues with fondness. I get it, it’s a fun idea, it’s got a beloved group of creators, it’s ridiculous.
But man, issue #347 is a bad book with middling art and a lot of pacing issues. It’s not really worth tracking down, and even quarter-bin comics can give you more bang for your buck.
–
–Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.
–Quick Comic Rewind is brought to you monthly through the love of our supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to join them in helping us out, please visit www.patreon.com/9to5cc and be sure to check out how your donations help us out and get access to additional bonus content from the 9to5 crew.
I wrote a little bit about gaming with my son last time around. It’s fun, and it’s shared fun with him. He gets a lot out of it, and because of that, I do as well. But this time, I want to talk about gaming around my son, and how that affects what and when I play.
He Sees Everything
I do most of my gaming on my phone now. Quick games are the most compatible with my life at this point, so lots of turn-based strategy, puzzle games, shooters or racing games. The shooters are strictly for when the kid is not around, as he is always insanely curious as to what’s going on on my phone and I don’t want him watching me shoot terrorists with high powered sniper rifles. Strategy games have lots of text and numbers, so he tends to get antsy if I play those around him, thinking perhaps I’m working too hard and should instead play “yell at the ceiling” instead.
Even on my small hand-held device, I have to be aware of what he’s seeing, so I try to play a few all-ages games in the event that he will slide up and sit on my lap to watch me play.
Our favourite over the last couple of months has been a racing game called “SUP Multiplayer Racing“. Keith called it a “hot wheels game” when he saw me playing it. That’s not too far off. It’s a 2-lane, 4 car PvP game with pretty simple controls, with all the bells and whistles that appeal to me in a car game; levelling up car parts and swank paint jobs. (If it played Snoop Dogg’s cover of ‘Riders on the Storm’, it’d be perfect, and if you get that reference, you’re perfect.)
The kid is obsessed with the game. He pressures me to progress, demanding my acquisition of new cars and lamenting any race I lose as both a titanic defeat and in critical judgement of my skills as a racer, nay, father.
I like it because I can play a few races on my coffee break, and if I do get a new paint job for my best car, I have someone I can then show it off to, without having to force the wife into pretending she’s excited. (A task she does not do well, mostly due to lack of effort on her part.)
Dollar Store Comics
The Dollaramas in the city just snuck a few hardcover comics into their book racks last week. I’ve raided what I could, but the stock wasn’t plentiful and as such, was gone pretty quickly.
Cheap comics always get me.
One of them I nabbed was “Batman Adventures: Masquerade in Red”. It was a delight to read, even if it was written for a younger audience. Styled after the Bruce Timm Animated series, the book looks great. Writer Dan Slott hit a great balance between comedy and action, never letting a good punch up be too far away. The opening pages with Dr Thompkins and Alfred were some of the best comics I’ve read in ages, and any book with the Phantasm in it already has me hooked.
I’m also excited as this book does skew younger that I will have some books for the boy to flip through should his attention ever turn towards the graphic novel.
–Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.
So I’m a geek. I’ve always been a geek, and it’s a part of my identity and my persona. I was raised with comic books, cartoons and video games, and I love them to this day.
I am also a dad. My boy is four years old, and he’s into the things that boys are into these days; iPhone apps, Netflix Kids!, stomping on frozen over puddles and Hot Wheels. (God, I love Hot Wheels too. Oddly, I think I got really into them just as the kiddo did.)
I talked on the podcast a bit about sharing my geek hobbies with my kid, and that is a balance of sharing and dealing with rejection, but I also wanted to talk about being able to maintain a geek hobby while being a parent, and what gets sacrificed when you have a kid to take care of. The super short answer is time and money that would have been devoted to your hobby is what goes.
But the long (rambling) answer isn’t as clean cut as that, and I’d like to ruminate on that a bit.
The Brave and the Bold
As I type this, my kid is eating his supper while watching an episode of “Batman: Brave and the Bold”. It’s a great episode. Batman and Plastic-Man are battling Gorilla Grodd while also exploring Plas’ origins and reformation from petty crook to true hero. It’s campy, it has fun bright art, and good action. I’m a fan of the series.
Archer was not. But he isnow.
The reason he is watching the show so intently now is that last month I bought a copy of the Brave and the Bold game for the Nintendo Wii, and it’s a side-scrolling, 2-player beat-em-up that the two of us play together. I don’t particularly enjoy platformers. I’ve never been great at them, but because the kiddo is super-into it, we’ve made it a special reward and we share the game experience together. He’s even confessed that he’s thinking about ways to beat the “bad guys” before falling asleep at night.
It’s full circle for me. When I was a kid, my grandfather gave me a box of comics from the 70’s which included a stack of Brave and the Bold issues. I read them down to the fibres. They hold such a feeling of nostalgia for me, a true piece of youthful innocence that I treasure. I still have these beat up books kicking around.
Those books fostered a love of comic books that I still hold to this day. My office is lined by three bookcases full of trade paperbacks, and my storage space is full of cases of single issues. Archer has shown next to no interest in any comic books, not even to try and mangle them.
He likes the idea of superheroes, but he’s not terribly into their source material. I don’t know what to make of it, but my books are out in the open in the event he ever wishes to flip through them.
All this is to say that I’ve had to adjust my hobbies to my new lifestyle. I don’t really have the chance to play countless hours of Counter:Strike or Final Fantasy anymore, but I do get “Batman” time with my kid, and that is great. A lot of my gaming has moved to my phone, where I can play in short bursts, picking it up when I have a few minutes to kill and then easily putting it down again. I read comics still, but often in the same way that I play games on the phone, a little here and there when the urge and opportunity present.
I’m thinking I’ll check in every now and then to talk about some of my geeky exploits and how they fit into this dad-life I be livin’.
–Scott is a writer and founder at 9to5. He’s a host on The 9to5 Entertainment System and does a lot of the graphic design around these parts.
This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy asks the question:
What ever happened to the good old days of sci-fi — when spaceships were real models, monsters were made of latex, and laser guns were just curling irons painted silver?
And the answer is a fun romp through science-fiction, camp and b-movie films.
Or is it?
Here’s the synopsis from their site:
For three ordinary guys Tom, Jeffrey and Gavin, this just became a reality. One minute they were watching an old b-grade movie, the next they’ve been thrust inside the movie itself and at the helm of a rickety old spaceship. Panic ridden they stumble into a space battle. and make a mortal enemy of the evil Lord Froth while unwittingly saving the space princess Lady Emmanor. Then suddenly Jeffrey starts to change into a sci-fi character called Kasimir. They must adapt quickly if they are to survive long enough to find a way home. For all they know they could be next. If that happens they will be lost in this world forever. They embark on a quest to find a cure for Jeffrey and a way back home. This is an action-packed comedy adventure of giant lizards, space battles, robots, aliens, warlords and amazons that has to be seen to be believed.
All of this is true. This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy delivers on its promise of a tongue-in-cheek look back at the drive-in campy classics and, on the surface, pokes fun at the tropes and delivers a resolution that fits in with the plot. The acting is not terrible, as the cast is asked to swing from the real-world to the over the top genre-speak of bad-sci-fi.
That being said, This Giant Papier Mache Boulder is Actually Really Heavy is a deeply flawed movie. I don’t mean the production values, as many of the sets, props and costumes are bad “on purpose”. (Though I would have cheered if someone from hair and makeup would have brushed Christian Nicolson’s hair out of his face.) The writing is flawed.
Spoilers ahead, as some plot points will need a deeper examination to explain my disdain for them.
Every woman in the film appears as a sexual conquest to be won or a reward for the male heroes’ development. Every single one.
It would have been one thing is this only happened inside the Oz-like world of Space Warriors in Space, the b-movie they’re sucked into. But this also happens to the women in the “real world”. They’re leered at on the convention floor. Both Gavin and Tom make comments about the cosplayers dressed as Amazons. Getting with Emma is the main plot for Tom, even if he is distracted by the actual Amazons who capture him and threaten him with either torture or pleasure.
It was gross and turned me on the protagonists, who act in this way without any ramifications or development, and the women in the film achieve nothing more than gifting themselves to the men once the guys achieve a certain level of confidence. Tom wins Emma! Yay.
There are also a series of gay jokes peppered through the movie. From an awkward fall where one guy lands on another guys’ back (lolz i guess?) to the entire character of Bruce, played by Jarred Tito, is a dated, inappropriate prancing fop whose over-exaggerated gay stereotypes are played for laughs and the result is cringy-er than it sounds.
As well, and this is admittedly a smaller deal, but for some reason this movie sees fit to mock sci-fi and genre fans at every chance it gets. Everyone at the convention is a poorly costumed mega-nerd lacking in any social skills. Jeffrey is treated as pitiable because of his fandom, and Gavin is deeply ashamed of his. Tom points out that he doesn’t care for sci-fi several times, and it is this character trait that of course makes him the hero of the piece, as on fans are affected by the mind-altering powers of the world they’re in.
Who is this movie for? People who want to win women, think gay guys are funny, and laugh at nerds?
I was into this movie when I was watching it, but once everything was over and the credits were rolling, I was left feeling like I’d eaten too much Burger King. Sure, it was okay going down, but now it’s just sitting there like lead.
It’s pretty rare to watch a movie where the sheer joy of those involved in making it drives the film forward, yet that joy is plainly evident when you watch Lowell Dean’s “Another Wolfcop”.
Following in the footsteps of Michael Herz and Lloyd Kaufman (Toxic Avenger), with a touch of Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins 2) thrown into the mix, Dean’s continuing saga of a drunk werewolf cop cashes in on charm and gore (sometimes charming gore) to hit it off with his audience. Officer Lou Garou (ben la) does have some problems remembering to read the Miranda rights. But he pretty much always gets his man, like some sort of murder-furry Dudley Do-Right.
Dean had this to say about revisiting the Wolfcop universe:
“My goal with this film (as with the first WolfCop) is to create a unique, immersive “comic book” world. Regardless of how absurd the material gets (and it gets quite absurd), I believe it is important to take a very serious approach to the storytelling.”
A few familiar faces do some good work here. Yannick Bisson (The Murdoch Mysteries and those Scotiabank commercials that were on Hockey Night in Canada for years) is good as the grease-slick villain. Cameos by Kevin Smith and Lawrence Gowan add some ham and cheese to this sammich, filling it out just right.
I don’t want to go too deep into the plot of the movie itself because giving anything away will take away from it. Besides, it’s a movie about a cop, who’s a wolf, and he fights evil. You’re either in or you aren’t at this point.
When you get a chance to watch Another Wolfcop, be sure to bring your friends with you, get a bunch of popcorn, and sneak some booze in. Like joyriding in a dune buggy, it’s a bumpy ride, but buckets of fun.
I like to think that no one even told the Sharks that there’d be new jerseys this season. Perhaps they still don’t know what’s happening. How would you guys break it to them?
Keith: There was that photo shoot with Jumbo and Burns just hanging out naked and being bros. Someone was going to pitch new ideas for the jersey to them that day but then they saw the sheer awesomeness of their bro powers and chickened out.
As long as the Beard Bros are both Sharks that jersey will never change.
And they will never make it out of the second round.
Topher: So this is basically the same jersey? Guess it is one of those not getting the make over. It’s always been a decent alright jersey, gets the job done, but so far it’s got to the blandest jersey. I do like seeing teal in jerseys. The thin yellow stripe albeit is strange, it does tie in with the stick in the shark’s mouth. Speaking of which, don’t think I ever noticed how robotic the shark actually looked till now.
–
Scott: Yeah, lastly we have the Vancouver Canucks.
You can have the city, team name or a crest.
When you have both, you look like a dufus.
When you add in an animal mascot that is unrelated to the team name, you look like a dufus.
I also hate the Blue-Green-White scheme, but Vancouver has never been able to figure out the whole colour wheel thing.
AdiZero was a chance to really wipe the slate clean, a fresh start, but the ‘Nucks botched it again.
Keith: I feel like whoever designed this jersey got a memo from the Canucks saying “it’s important that at the end of the day you stick with our core values of ‘meh’. We want our jersey to accurately reflect the ideals of mediocrity that embody our team.”
Then that designer too a few weeks off work and came back being like “what if moved the alternate orca logo up onto the shoulders like dumb epaulettes?” and management was like “good job, here’s a raise.”
That’s the only reason I can think of that they passed on bringing back the 80s-90s jersey. That jersey is too good for the current values and aspirations of the team.
Scott: Better that than this:
or this:
This one was garbage too:
It can’t keep being an accident, can it?
Keith: I’m telling you man. It’s a clear statement from whoever builds the team. They took a look at the roster and they’re like “let’s dress the guys up in a jersey that nobody expects to see hoisting the Cup.”
Scott: After some research, I think the Stars were the team to have worn the ugliest jersey while hoisting the Cup:
Topher: Ha! Guess I’m the only one who likes this jersey. Ok ok ok, the crest logo, with the exception of it making a C, has always been a WTF is this doing as their logo deal (bring back the stick!!). However, the dark blue, green combo? Love it, I personally feel this is an extremely underrated contrast of colours. You don’t see a lot of this combo and then they finish it off with a clean crisp sharp white colour font for the Vancouver letters? It also goes great with the Blue.
Does anyone else here feel like when viewing the photos of the old Reebok and new Adizero’s they make the Reebok ones look super colour faded like they have been left out in the sun for 3 years? A shameless marketing ploy by Adidas (and they own Reebok!)
Scott: Few teams use analogous colours in jerseys, as it looks really odd.
Red – Purple:
Red – Orange:
Orange – Yellow: (SO rare I could only find this FC Barcelona example)
Blue – Green:
And the sole exception, the beautiful Yellow- Green:
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Scott is a writer and podcaster here at 9to5.cc. He was raised by a Bruins fan in Montreal but turned out okay. Take that, nurture vs nature!
Keith does a lot here at 9to5.cc. His favourite teams are the Hawks and the Habs, but he only really feels comfortable sporting one of those logos on the regular.
Topher is not part of the 9to5 crew, but he is taking the time to come down from the world of fantasy football to help lend a voice to the article. A lover of almost all things orange in jerseys.
I sat down with my wife this past weekend for a good old popcorn movie night, and we charged up “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”. I don’t usually offer write-ups of big blockbusters, but it’s been a few days and this movie is still giving me complicated feels. As such, I’m going to try and hammer down a few of them on the keyboard.
The main talking point about this movie in the press has been its box office performance; with a budget of 175 million dollars, it only managed to scrape together 39 million domestic, adding another 107 million foreign, and lost nearly 30 million dollars for Warner Bros.
Those numbers make John Carter look like a smash hit.
Doubling down on that, the critics hated King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. It’s at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, as critics were pretty savage in tearing it down.
No one liked it, no one went to see it, and it came and went this summer without much hoopla.
But I think I liked it, and I don’t really know why.
It stars Charlie Hunnam from “Sons of Anarchy” as King Arthur and Jude Law as the villainous Vortigern. The supporting cast includes Aiden “Littlefinger” Gillen, Djimon Hounsou, and Eric Bana. The casting is fine, though I can imagine studio executives all promising to never pour so much money into a film helmed by a cable TV star ever again.
It was directed by Guy Ritchie.
And this is where the movie, the box office, the critical response and my feelings all go sideways. “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” is absolutely a Guy Ritchie movie. Above and beyond any other plot, theme, genre or experiment.
Nothing else that can be said about this movie can eclipse that fact. It’s not even fair to say that Ritchie’s fingerprints are all over it, as it seems as if he’s grabbed hold of the whole project like it was a wad of playdoh and just squeezed and squeezed until it squished through his fingers, leaving a gooey mould of his grasp behind.
Imagine if “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, “Snatch” or even “RocknRolla” were remade to include Excalibur. Hunnam’s Arthur could fit right in with Eddy, Turkish, and One-Two effortlessly with his plotting, scheming and cons.
The thing is, Ritchie has already moved past those smarmy underworld con-game movies with his Sherlock Holmes and even the under-appreciated “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” spy-hommage. King Arthur as a wise-cracking streetwise hustler is really strange, it’s really unexpected. Even the trailer doesn’t quite prepare the audience for this take on the true-born king. It is really quite odd.
So, yeah, but what I wanted to capture was the essence. So, the story, for me, has both an esoteric aspect and more conventional aspect. And if you can marry those two successfully, then you succeeded. So I like the idea that it’s a story about a man’s inner struggles with himself, and he starts off completely dependent and then ends up being completely independent.
…
There is a terrible danger, particularly in the Arthurian legend, of getting bogged down into too many famous characters – and we were liberated from that by just going ‘this is about a kid retaking his throne and he’s got to pull a sword out of a stone in the interim’. I mean, congestion is a big problem in narrative, right? And so, wherever you find congestion, find an efficient way of getting through it. So it just didn’t lend itself to time for a bit of romance. We were dealing with a bit of bromance here and there. But yeah, I think we’ll leave the romance to a latter, another incarnation.
But the movie is bogged down by narrative. There are all these characters introduced that muck up the screen, and Arthur spends most of the time playing Robin Hood rather than conquering England. They spend time with his streetrat friends, but don’t bother introducing Merlin, Lancelot or Guinevere. Mordred attacks King Uther at the start of the film, and Morgan le Fay is a non-entity as well.
Don’t forget that this movie clocks in at over 2 hours in length, so the idea that there isn’t time for these iconic characters is a strange one to justify.
Now, here’s the twist; I agree that this movie is a failure of a King Arthur movie, but it is a wonderfully weird and fun Guy Ritchie caper movie.
Once I was able to turn my expectations over, I realized that this isn’t a movie about a born-king rising to the occasion, freeing the sword from the stone and conquering a fractured nation. This was instead a movie about a street-wise grifter and his colourful gang of friends looking to stick it to the man, who then get in over their heads due to events beyond their control before beating the odds and coming out on top.
With magic swords.
Once I parsed it that way, I was on board. The movie made sense, and it was a fun silly romp that was half-action, half-parody, cruising by on the strength of some witty banter and some sly grifting. It became good.
Sort of the way you can look at a horror movie, and while knowing that it is not a finely crafted piece of cinema, but still appreciate it for succeeding in what it attempts to do, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” works when put in the right context.
So I’m left tossing around the thoughts in my head:
“Can a movie that failed in its premise but succeeded in finding an identity be good?”
“Can a movie be accidentally good?”
“When a movie fails at everything it sets out to do, can it still be good?”
I don’t know.
I do know, however, that Aiden Gillen looks suspicious no matter what role he’s playing. Even if he’s a noble knight, I can’t shake the idea that he’s not one step away from pushing someone out the moon door.
We continue our look at the upcoming NHL season’s jerseys, the Adizero!
Scott: Next up are the LA Kings!
Keith: So they moved a stripe from the shoulders over to the collarbone? And then they made the backdrop of the NHL logo below the collar black? Is that it?
I guess L.A. is going for ‘more black’ as a rule, fully devoting themselves to having the ultimate “bad guy’ jersey from a sports movie. They haven’t had a single thread of purple in their jersey since 2013. For shame! Shame!
Scott: There is of course not enough purple and gold in this jersey. I don’t know why the NHL is so afraid of purple as a general rule. The NBA uses it liberally, and the Raven in the NFL and the Rockies in MLB are just fine with it.
That being said, the stripe moving down the shoulder and the collar going full black are both solid design choices. I have never liked the 90-degree angle where the stripes cross on the sleeves though, so I wish they had sorted that out this time around. But it’s a solid jersey from a team that has been able to put some truly awful uniforms on the ice, and I’ll not harp on their being black, as they were the first team in the league to lay claim to an all black sweater back in 1988.
Topher: I own an original all black jersey. I am good with the Kings black jersey, unlike some teams that force black down our throats and try to convince us they look good in black, the Kings own it. Always liked their logo. I for 1, really like this jersey. I also prefer the small change in the stripe placement. I don’t miss any purple and gold. I think there is a reason you can only name 1 team in each major sports that has purple in their jersey.
Keith, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that only a handful of teams have a revamped jersey. For the most part, I think we will expect only minor tweaks.
Keith: I also like the thing where all the teams from a city have the same colour scheme though. Lakers & Kings rocking the same colour scheme was cool.
It was more just a general complaint that it seems Adizero means ‘no more third alts’ for a lot of teams.
Third alts are my jam.
Topher: Ya as much as I hate Pittsburgh, it is nice all their teams have the same colours, unlike Philly that’s green, orange, maroon and red/blue
I love me some 3rd jerseys. Spoiler alert, I’m thinking this Adizero has killed the Blue Jackets cannon jersey, one of my absolute fave and I’m not happy about it.
–
Scott: Next up is Las Vegas.
I don’t care that the team wants to be from “Vegas”, the city is still called Las Vegas.
New to the league and they’re coming in with… a mixed bag. Like “party mix”, where some of it is okay, and some of it is just Frito crumbs.
I hate that this jersey isn’t great. The logo is great, and that’s really special, but this jersey is both over-complicated and flat at the same time. Slate, black, glittery gold, red and white are way too many colours on a uniform, and the striping is… damned confusing.
Topher: Damn, Was not sure if we were doing Las Vegas next, or going by V. I wanted to be the first to slam this jersey. It is god awful. I hate everything about it. Slate grey? Basically concrete? When I think of Vegas, I don’t think grey. Random red stripe? Whats up with that? Don’t even like their logo. So expected, but I guess it IS what I should have expected with the name golden knights. They made a splash during the drafts and impressed, but they full on drowned on this jersey and. It’s so disappointing because they had all this time to impress us with it and fell flat. Another Jersey for Scott to buy to add to his collection of god awful jerseys.
At this point, Keith stopped replying for nearly 2 weeks.
Topher: The jersey is so bad it made Keith go blind and he can’t review it.
Keith: No that’s not true at all.
I’ve got so much to say you guys. Just you wait.
Six more days go by.
Keith: Ok. I’m back. Guys, Osheaga was crazy you don’t even know.
So the Knights are the NKOTB in the NHL this year and they are all but assured to make a decent amount of profit on jersey sales just by being an expansion team. And yet, this is what they come up?
I guess we get to pick apart the whole thing since, unlike 30 other teams Las Vegas had the chance to start from scratch and not be forced into matching conventions that in some cases are a century old.
First of all, I hate the logo. It looks like a pre-set logo in the Create A Team mode of EA’s NHL games. I hate the red stripe. The league needs more red? Why is that red stripe necessary? I hate how bland the shoulders are and I hate the “gold” that they chose.
This looks like the jersey that the team in the beer league that has a lot of money designs for themselves.
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Next time, we’ll wrap up the Pacific division with the Sharks and ‘Nucks!
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Scott is a writer and podcaster here at 9to5.cc. He was raised by a Bruins fan in Montreal but turned out okay. Take that, nurture vs nature!
Keith does a lot here at 9to5.cc. His favourite teams are the Hawks and the Habs, but he only really feels comfortable sporting one of those logos on the regular.
Topher is not part of the 9to5 crew, but he is taking the time to come down from the world of fantasy football to help lend a voice to the article. A lover of almost all things orange in jerseys.
The Dollaramas in the city just snuck a few hardcover comics into their book racks last week. I’ve raided what I could, but the stock wasn’t plentiful and as such, was gone pretty quickly.
