ohtani's jacket

It's a surprise to me that this is on my radar. Call it the Kojima effect. Taiyo Kea has changed his look since the last time I watched him wrestle, which is probably the series of matches he had with Tenryu. It's not the greatest makeover you'll see in wrestling, but it's 2004, we're in Japan, and beggars can't be choosers. The match is okay. It's asking a lot of Kojima to carry Kea to the level that Tenryu did, but considering how thin the All Japan roster was at the time, at least these were two guys the fans could get behind. Kojima earned brownie points with me for continuing to work hard.

How can you resist watching Tenryu and Fuchi beat the shit out of each other? Well, mostly Tenryu beating the shit out of Fuchi, but you catch my drift. There were some shenanigans with Akira Hokuto, which were presumably related to the promotion she started with hubby around this time, but ignoring that, Tenryu did what Tenryu does and a good time was had by all.

This was another fun Monterrey match. It was nowhere near as compelling as the Satanico match, but it was nice to see a slow paced trios match where the workers were given the time to work through the different parts of the match and not rush anything. I was hoping for a bit more from Panther, but that would have been a bonus. As always, it's fun to watch the locals mixing it up with the Mexico City guys.

Often when I see Low Ki in the match listings, I have no idea what to expect from his opponent. I'm sure most folks reading this are familiar with Matt Striker, but this was my first time watching the dude. It looked like he was hitting Low Ki pretty hard in the thumbnail, so I thought I'd give this a shot. Striker worked an extremely old-school US style. I'm not sure who he was a disciple of, but you could have transported him to the late 80s/early 90s and no-one would have noticed that he was out of place. He didn't really know how to sell for Low Ki's offense, and he was one of those wrestlers who make strong noises in the ring, but I've seen worse style clashes.

This had some shitty crowd brawling, but when it settled down it was pretty good, especially the parts that involved Satomura against either Ran or Toshie. If they'd just worked a straight up match instead of tearing around Korakuen like screaming harpies, it would have been a better match, but I guess they needed a bit of smoke and mirrors to convince folks that the midcarders had much of a chance against the team of Satomura and Nagashima.

This is some of the only available footage I have from February CMLL and it cuts straight to the end where Vampiro and Shocker have a confrontation. Given my irrational love for Vampiro, I dug it, but I can imagine it being a drag if you waited all week to see it. Vampiro was sporting a mohawk and ridiculous looking face paint just because he can. They showed some highlights of the match at the end. Park continued to look a bit awkward working with the CMLL guys.

This wasn't a patch on their RINGS match, but it was a cool match in the context of 90s stars having a good match in the 00s and Tamura trying to keep shoot style alive in the face of the MMA monster. Ultimately, he failed, but so too did Japanese MMA. I'm not a huge fan of milking the scoring for dramatic effect but whatever. This is pretty much a bonus if you're looking at it from the point of view of both men's career output.

I had my hopes up for this one and it didn't disappoint. It wasn't a great match or anything, but it delivered exactly what I wanted to see, which was Averno and Mephisto taking their time beating up Satanico and Satanico having a few badass moments. Footage of Averno and Mephisto falling out with Satanico has been spotty and CMLL TV is clipped to shit anyway. This was a better look at the feud than you were bound to get on Televisa. Satanico is clearly entering the "maestro" phase of his career here and isn't the worker he once was, and Averno and Mephisto are cast as rudo thugs instead of skilled workers, but it was a ton of fun, and we even got a glimpse of what Satanico vs. Super Parka would have looked like. During the early going, you're left wondering why Satanico brought the two tecnicos to the fight, but once they're on offense they're pretty spectacular. Gitano del Norte is a goofy looking bugger, but he has an awesome exchange with Mephisto where he pulls out all the tecnico stops. Super Parka ends up squaring off with his boy and his reluctance to wrestle his son leads to friction with Averno and Mephisto. Eventually, they square off, but it's too clean for the rudo pair. I assume this was the beginning of a Super Parka tecnico turn. I am absolutely loving Super Parka atm. He's been the single biggest revelation of the Monterrey footage to date. He's a guy I never thought much of before, but now I find myself loving everything about him from his ring attire to his classic long hair and moustache. I guess it was always the plan to turn him technico after he unmasked, but it's awesome that we get to actually follow it. I've bitched and moaned about Monterrey in the past, but watching this, it struck me that it's awesome old-school territory lucha. This was a lot of fun and the best Satanico match in a while.

I thought you weren't that high on some of Terry's Cerebros stuff. I didn't mean to be accusatory or anything. I enjoy reading your takes on lucha.

I thought you didn't really like Satanico, or Black Terry for that matter?

The Fabulous Moolah & Patti Neilson vs. Barbara Owens & Rita Boucher I was all ready to shit on Moolah for setting back the cause of women's wrestling 20 years, but she was actually pretty good in this. Decent brawling, solid heel work, lots of energy. She took the head scissors' bumps well, and the match picked up every time she was in the ring. The other girls weren't that talented, which may have been a factor in Moolah standing out, but this was also before she became a big name and she appeared to have a lot of vigor. I guess it's like they say, just about everybody was good at some point or another.

This was a heck of a lot more entertaining than Hashimoto vs. Kawada. Tenryu was channeling his hero Terry Funk while working over Tenzan's cut, and Tenzan made a bunch of fiery comebacks. Folks are selling Tenzan short here. It was a good performance from him. Honestly, early 00s Tenzan and Kojima have done better in singles performances than I ever would have given them credit for in the past. I'm not gonna go out and watch every Tenzan performance I can get my hands on, but I'm not gonna ignore his name anymore when it comes up in match listings.

That was amazing.

Poffo Mania is such a blast.

This was such an incredibly smart match. It's hard to believe it took place inside a WWE ring. I'd love to know who was responsible for laying it out. Cole and Taz didn't do the match justice with their call, but even their inane comments couldn't ruin the incredible storytelling. I was hugely impressed by the way Eddie was able to claw his way back into the match. Instead of getting lucky, hitting a few moves and scoring the flash pin, he fights Brock every step of the way and pours his heart out in the ring. There's the usual WWE BS with the ref bump and the run in, but even those distractions can't ruin Eddie's moment. Even with Brock laid out, the hook is still the same -- can Eddie actually do this? Eddie times the finish perfectly. Nine times out of ten the frog splash would have led to a near fall and the heel would find some way to escape with the belt. Wrestling fans are so conditioned to those finishes that you have to wonder how many people in the audience thought Eddie would actually win, especially when the WWE regularly ended shows with the heel winning. Eddie's victory, and the amazing post-match celebration with its outpouring of genuine emotion, has to rank as one of the greatest moments in WWE history. It's a shame it didn't happen at WrestleMania, where it would have gone down in WWE lore, but a career defining performance from Eddie, an early 2004 MOTYC,, and one of the best matches of the decade. Brock gave arguably his best performance, so I'm sorry if all the focus is on Eddie, but I've run out of words. Just a special moment for wrestling fans.

Dream match that was a complete disappointment. It's just so "small", and not in a cool minimalist way. I actually would have dug it if it was pared back and attritional. Instead, it lacked ambition. There were some decent ideas scattered here and there, but they never went anyway. It should come as no surprise, I guess, since outside of a handful of performances, Hashimoto and Kawada have been pretty lackluster in the 00s. That said, I was genuinely excited for this after Hashimoto vs. Kojima, and it's a shame they couldn't deliver. Plus, only 19 minutes long? What a gyp.

The reason K-pop is more successful internationally than J-pop is because traditionally K-pop had to struggle to market its product to other countries while J-pop was only concerned with its domestic market. It also took a long time. It's something that's happened over decades not just the past year or two.

There's something to be said for Lanny trolling Texan fans, and Ole Anderson. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but apparently Lanny did something similar when he tagged with Chris Colt in Detroit.

I checked Meltzer's Twitter and he was discussing Roller Derby... Many of the elements of the Genius gimmick predated the WWF and were Lanny's doing. The Genius gimmick was Lanny's idea, so he was hardly saddled with it. Personally, I preferred his more ambitious medieval knight gimmick, Sir Lanny Poffo.

Vassilio Mantopoulos/Armand Zarpa vs. Pierre Bernaert/M'Boaba (aired 4/5/69) I spoke too soon when I talked about how black wrestlers were treated in France. I clearly forgot about M'Boaba. For those of you who've never seen M'Boaba, or N'Boa the Snake Man as he was called in the UK, he's basically a wild man from the Congo who occasionally brought a python to the ring. It was a popular gimmick in the UK the same as The Wild Man of Borneo and other outlandish gimmicks, and I guess it appealed to Parisian audiences too. Bob Elandon was a great worker and didn't need the gimmick to get over. He did a good job of playing M'Boaba, largely because of how good he was in the ring, not that it justifies the gimmick in any way. That said, it's a good bout. Bernaert and M'Boaba make for strange bedfellows, Zarpa is typically solid, and as much as I usually dislike Mantopoulous' George Kidd shtick, it's a lot of fun when he's working circles around M'Boaba. Robert Gastel/Roger Delaporte vs. Warnia de Zarecki/Giacomo Guglielmetti (aired 4/19/69) This was tidy enough. I'm beyond expecting anything amazing from Delaporte this late in his career. Inca Peruano/Anton Tejero vs. Rene Ben Chemoul/Walter Bordes (aired 4/21/69) From my recollection, Ben Chemoul and Bordes gave the heels a bit more offense in this one, and sold for them a tad more The heel work is solid, but it's still kind of weird seeing Inca Perunao as just another guy in a heel tag team. I swear, if I were a French heel and Ben Chemoul and Bordes did that Mamadou Meme shit to me, I'd want to beat the tar out of them, Jean Ferre vs. Robert Duranton (aired 10/4/69) This could have been a fun bout if it had gone longer, or we'd seen more of it, simply for the novelty of Andre and Duranton trading blows, but of course there's all the shit with Duranton's valet to contend with. Pierre Bernaert/Gilbert Le Magouroux vs. Vasilious Mantopolous/Robert Camus (aired 10/4/69) I'm fairly certain that this is another pairing of Bernaert and Le Magouroux. It should come as no surprise that this was my type of Catch. Classic heel work, exciting stylists, no egos. These midcard gems are the best thing about late 60s Catch. Jean Corne/Michel Falempin vs. Inca Viracocha/Steve Haggerty (aired 10/8/69) I'm not sure if this was really Steve Haggerty. It was just a guess on my part. I'm a huge fan of Jean Corne, and I did the Celts tag team. This was another example of a vibrant midcard gem. Pure catch. No strings. L'Ange Blanc vs. L'Homme Masque (aired 12/13/69) I'm not even gonna hazard a guess to who L'Homme Masque was here. Whomever it was, they knew how to cinch on a hold and could throw the odd punch or manchette. I'm not a fan of matches where the babyface gets beat up repeatedly and barely has a chance to retaliate. You have to give a pretty incredible babyface performance to make that type of match work, and L'Ange Blanc was no Gilbert Leduc in that respect. L'Homme Masque did some cool shit grounding him at times, and I really liked the finishing stretch where L'Ange Blanc finally cut loose, but the BS finish made me wonder what the point of the match was. Better than the Scarface match, but I'm still not sold on L'Ange as a worker. The pelican at ringside was weird, but still not as weird as the martian.

I finished Chester Brown's Yummy Fur series. Personally, I preferred the Ed the Happy Clown era to his autobiographical stories, but Brown was making up the Ed story as he went along and for some reason he grew frustrated with it. You get the sense that Chester was always a bit restless as a cartoonist, as he began experimenting heavily with panel layout as the series progressed (to the chagrin of some readers who didn't appreciate the small number of panels per page.) I enjoyed some of the autobiographical stories from his childhood. I'm sure a lot of fans our age can identify with trying to get their hands on a copy of Playboy each month and then figuring out where in the hell they're gonna hide it. I also liked his adolescent tales of dealing with coming of age and interacting with girls. The Drawn and Quarterly publisher, Chris Oliveros, convinced Chester to end Yummy Fur, which led to the ill-received Underwater series. Yummy Fur was one of the first alternative comics I was drawn to as a teenager, discovering it through the back issue boxes at my local comic shop. I was especially drawn to the Gospel adaptations where a grumpy and cantankerous Jesus spits fire at everyone. Looking back on it now, it was quite a bold choice for an alternative cartoonist to adapt the New Testament, but a natural thing to do for Brown to pursue as he was interested in alternative Gospel sources. From a comics standpoint, the Gospel adaptations represent his best cartooning work from the period, IMO, especially his Matthew.

I finally read Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's Night Force. It's not bad, but it's not surprising that it struggled to find an audience. It probably would have done better a few years later when the direct-sales market was more established and there was a larger audience for mature readers books, however the biggest problem was that the cast of characters simply wasn't as interesting as the Tomb of Dracula cast, especially the Baron. If Wolfman's intention was to have the Night Force itself be a rotating cast of characters, then the Baron needed to be as charismatic and interesting as Dracula, but he didn't hold anywhere near as much appeal. The art was somewhat inconsistent. Lately, I have a hard time unseeing some of the criticisms that the likes of John Byrne made about Colan's artwork in the 80s, even if those comments stemmed from a ridiculous "us vs. them" mentality that Byrne seemed to have at the time, and later forgot about when it became one of "them." There are a lot of wonky elements to Colan's artwork at times. Some of it is no doubt intentional as Colan was always a fan of using interesting camera angles or perspectives, but sometimes there are some odd looking panels that aren't touched up or fixed by the inker. I can't say I really missed the series once it came to an end, and I don't have much desire to read the two volumes that followed, however I will praise it as a valiant effort to try something new.

Bloody awful.

I finished Scalped yesterday. I wasn't as thrilled with the final arc as some people seem to be, but overall I thought it was one of the best series I've read from the modern era, which, for my purposes, encompasses 2000-2023. What I liked about it most was that it dealt with a subject matter that, to the best of my knowledge, hadn't been addressed before in comics, at least not in a full blown series. That's a goal I wish more creators who strive toward instead of giving us their latest take on fascist superheroes. It's a shame that the TV series wasn't picked up, as it probably would have made an even more powerful TV show than a comic, especially if led by a full indigenous cast.

This was an entertaining bout. Perro Sr had a long history with the Capos, so it makes sense that Perro Jr would get involved with them. He especially had a hard on for Universo 2000 after the things Universo did to his padre, and this led to some decent brawling. Far between than Satanico vs. Averno, though not at the level of L.A. Park vs. Super Parka. It was a short bout, but gave you plenty of bang for your buck. The Guapos were excellent in their secondary role, and while MA2k will probably never make a list of the top rudos, he was a consummate pro who knew how to bump and stooge, and work rudo. This felt like a proper trios match even if it was less than 10 minutes long. I also love Cien Caras' moustache from this era.