His name was John Stewart. For my generation, he wasn’t a substitute or a watered-down copy of anybody. He was the whole thing.

Let me rewind for the newer heads in the room. On the printed page, test pilot Hal Jordan became the Green Lantern of the Silver Age back in 1959. Fine. Solid enough. Stewart showed up in 1971, dreamed up by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, standing as one of the earliest Black heroes DC ever printed. An architect with an attitude and zero interest in bootlicking. When he first slipped into that uniform, he tossed the mask aside and basically told the world he had nothing to hide. That energy stuck to the character for good.

Comic readers knew the man for decades. Television? A different story entirely, and that’s exactly where things shifted for kids like me.

November 2001. Justice League premieres. Check the founding roster: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash streaking past, Martian Manhunter, Hawkgirl, plus the ring-bearer we showed up here to talk about. Phil LaMarr handled the voice. Deep, a little smoke curling through it, and it landed low in your chest a beat before any of the words even registered. Controlled. Military. A brother who never had to raise his tone because the weight was already there.

That cartoon refused to treat him like a benchwarmer. He pulled real arcs. Got handed a spine, flaws, opinions that clashed with the folks around him. Take “In Blackest Night,” where the Manhunters haul him across the galaxy accused of blowing up an entire planet. Instead of running, he surrenders to face trial. Willingly. Because being held accountable actually meant something to the man, even when it could cost him everything. Try finding that kind of moral weight in most weekend animation from that era.

Then there’s “The Savage Time.” Our guy gets stranded in a busted World War II timeline, loses access to the ring, and refuses to fold. He grabs a rifle, links up with Easy Company, and scraps as a plain foot soldier. That stretch told you everything you needed. The jewelry made him a hero on paper. It was not the thing that made him brave. LaMarr caught all of it, the hardness, the restraint, the quiet of somebody already sitting on too much and living to carry it.

By the time Justice League Unlimited rolled around, he’d gone bald, gotten sharper, and locked himself into the culture. For a stretch of us growing up in the 2000s, you said those two magic words and this was the face that appeared behind your eyes. Not the pilot. Him.

Here’s what folks who never needed it might breeze right past. Watching a Black man lead a squad standing shoulder to shoulder with Superman, calling the plays, thinking three moves ahead of everybody, being the disciplined presence that kept its cool when the room caught fire? That did something to a young mind. We didn’t have a buffet of options back then. This brother was it. And nobody wrote him as a mascot or a sidekick with a catchphrase. He argued. Butted heads with teammates if the moment called for it. Carried himself as a grown adult with grown responsibilities, and he looked like our uncles and our cousins while doing it. Blerds of a certain vintage still light up at the sight of that steady presence and that unmistakable baritone.

I’ve sat through the debates plenty of times. Hal loyalists will swear up and down that Jordan is THE definitive pick, the space cop’s space cop, the original pick of the litter. Cool. No disrespect to the OG whatsoever. Definitions get built in living rooms, though, and mine got built watching LaMarr command a room stuffed with legends. You don’t talk somebody out of a first love. It doesn’t work that way.

Chew on the bigger picture for a second. In 2001, a Black lead anchoring a marquee superhero team wasn’t exactly a common sight on Saturday programming. Static Shock was doing its thing around that same period, sure, and that mattered too. Beyond a small handful of examples, though, the pickings stayed slim. So when this particular hero showed up steady, competent, and unbothered, a lot of us latched on and never let go. Representation talk gets tossed around loosely these days, but the real version feels like recognition. Feels closer to somebody finally leaving the door cracked.

Which carries us, at long last, straight to right now. HBO dropped Lanterns on August 16th, and for a bunch of us that premiere landed heavier than the average superhero rollout. You catch it over on HBO Max, with fresh episodes hitting the platform every Sunday night rather than all at once, eight of them across the season. Aaron Pierre steps into the role, sharing the frame with Kyle Chandler as a grizzled, road-worn Hal Jordan. Best part? The whole creative approach tosses the usual cape-and-cosmic-battle formula straight in the trash.

Chris Mundy ran point here. Same dude who ran Ozark and executive produced that icy True Detective: Night Country stretch. He set it up as a grounded murder mystery, dropped way out in the American heartland. Dusty backroads. A body left where nobody happens to be looking. Two space cops grinding through a case, and the vibe leans grim. Slow-burn noir. Popcorn spectacle this ain’t. Damon Lindelof and Tom King had their hands in it too, and Lindelof’s already copped to that old cartoon rattling around his head while he shaped his piece. Of course he did. That version is the water plenty of us learned to swim in.

Watching Pierre gear up carries more freight than a casual viewer might clock. This marks the first time our guy gets handed a major live-action leading role. Not a cameo. Forget a blink-and-miss background nod for the diehards to screenshot. A genuine lead. His mother Bernadette turns up through Nicole Ari Parker. Sinestro lurks somewhere in the shadows. Guy Gardner pops in courtesy of Nathan Fillion. A real cosmos is getting stacked brick by brick, and this hero sits close to the middle of the whole build.

Will Lanterns actually stick the landing? Way too early to crown anybody. Comic adaptations fumble the bag constantly, and a moody detective spin on space cops carries its own stack of risks. Still, the plain fact that a kid who grew up jabbing a finger at the television can now watch that same hero anchor a prestige drama on a Sunday night? Not small at all. That’s decades of a once semi-obscure figure finally collecting his flowers on the biggest stage the medium offers.

For me, and for a whole generation that met him before any other version, the animated one already settled this argument ages ago. Live-action is just the wider world catching up to what we understood as children. He was never the backup plan or the asterisk. Lanterns is simply the newest chapter proving what we called years back. He was the one all along.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Somewhere down the road that hunger went missing.

Ask anybody who came up on the original Kanto run and the answer lands the same. Those first seasons had bite. A haunted tower where Gastly, Haunter, and Gengar treated the spirit world like their personal playground. A dude named Bill who somehow got himself stuck inside a Kabuto costume and needed Ash to help get him out. Towns run by gamblers, clowns, and hustlers who seemed to drift in from some stranger pocket of the animation world.

None of it played like a thirty minute ad for the next handheld cartridge. It just breathed.

Take the Maiden’s Peak stretch. Ash and the crew roll into a seaside festival and Brock falls hard for the image of a woman who supposedly waited two thousand years for her lover to return from war. Gastly spends much of the episode feeding the illusion, playing tricks, bending the town into a haunted stage for its own amusement. The thing quotes riddles. It warps what is real and what is not. For a program supposedly built for grade schoolers, that half hour carried a genuine chill down the spine.

Or the Tower of Terror. Ash climbing through Lavender’s haunted tower, and the story comes awfully close to making our boy look dead for a spell. His spirit floats out of his own body, hangs with the ghosts on their side of the veil, laughs and plays with them like old friends. My young self had no language for how heavy that landed. I just knew it stuck to my ribs.

That is the piece I keep circling back to. The old writing trusted you to sit with something odd and did not rush to explain it into dust.

Now compare that to the current era. I catch bits of the newer seasons and everything looks incredible. Clean lines, gorgeous color, motion smooth as glass. Battles pop with a snap the old cels could never touch. And yet most of it slides right off me. Pretty, sure. Memorable? Almost never.

Feels like the machine got too careful with itself.

Think about what early Team Rocket used to pull. Jessie, James, and Meowth were losers, and I mean that with all the love in my chest. Their plans made zero sense. Dress up as chefs, dig a pit, build a robot Snorlax, con a whole village while wearing outfits nobody asked for. They flopped every single time and it never got stale, because the flopping came with real personality baked in. Those three read like people you would catch scheming behind a gas station at midnight.

By the later Ash-era seasons, though, some of those edges had already been sanded down. Less desperation in the eyes. Gone was some of that grimy, broke charm. They shifted from wildcards into something closer to a checkbox.

And here sits the thing my Blerd heart cannot let go of. The strangeness was never a bug. It was the whole appeal. Fandom lives and dies on the parts that break the mold. We quote the cursed episodes, the banned ones, the fever dream detours. Put a room full of grown fans together and ask for a favorite moment. Nobody reaches for a spotless gym match from last season. They go straight to Porygon and those infamous flashing lights that sent hundreds of Japanese kids to the hospital. Somebody mentions the Safari Zone warden pointing a revolver at Ash in an episode American kids never even got to see. And then the James wardrobe situation comes up, the certain choices that had a whole generation of kids quietly asking questions.

You cannot cook that up on a spreadsheet.

I get why things tightened. The money got serious. When a property mints billions across cartridges, cards, films, and lunchboxes, the suits start guarding the brand like it owes them back rent. Oddness becomes a liability. Liability becomes a memo from legal. Bit by bit the rough magic gets polished out until what remains is competent and instantly forgettable.

But smoothness was never the hook. Nobody on this earth fell for this world because it was tidy. We fell because it felt like anything at all could crawl out of the tall grass. A talking cat with a Brooklyn attitude. A gym leader losing his mind over beauty pageants. An old man who wanted you to describe the difference in a Rattata’s tail on two separate visits and treated the whole thing like scripture.

That looseness gave the writers room to breathe fire.

There is a Black cultural thread running under this too, real talk. Coming up, the cartoons that dug into us were the ones willing to swing. Static Shock. That early Boondocks nerve. The Saturday blocks that felt handmade instead of assembled by committee. We can smell corporate gloss from a block away, and we tend to keep our distance from anything scrubbed that clean. Give us something a touch off, a touch dangerous in tone, and now you are talking. Original Kanto had that in spades. Grit tucked right under the fun.

I am not out here saying torch the whole modern operation. The kids today deserve their own front door into all this, and plenty of them adore what they got. That matters. My beef was never with the young ones finding their joy. It sits with a formula that decided surprise had gotten too pricey to keep on payroll.

Bring back the haunted places. Let a monster read as genuinely unsettling again. Allow a story to close on a question mark instead of a tidy lesson stapled to the end. Give the villains space to be pathetic and human and broke. Trust the audience, even the small fry, to handle a tale that refuses to tuck itself in neat.

Because I remember being a youngster, glued to a screen, stomach twisted over whether Ash was walking back from the spirit realm or not. That feeling is exactly why I still carry this franchise around in my chest all these years later. Not the graphics. Never once a tournament bracket. The chills did that.

What airs now knows how to look good. It plain forgot how to make you feel like you got away with watching something you maybe were not supposed to.

Give me a little danger back. I want the phantom in the tower again. And I will be right here, cereal going soft, ready to get spooked all over.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Let me take you back.

Start with the machines, because that is where a lot of us got hooked. In 1972, Go Nagai gave us Mazinger Z, and the man changed everything by doing one simple thing. He put a person inside the cockpit. Before then, giant mecha were generally controlled from a distance, like fancy toys operated by remote control. Nagai said nah, let a kid named Koji Kabuto climb in and drive this thing like a car. Suddenly the pilot and the metal beast breathed as one being. Toei animated it, that Super Alloy Z was forged from the fictional element Japanium mined near Mount Fuji, and Dr. Hell threw his mechanical monsters at the boy week after week. Two years later, Nagai and Ken Ishikawa dropped Getter Robo and pushed the concept even further, three pilots combining their vehicles in different formations to create three distinct robot forms. Every combining Voltron, every Megazord you screamed about growing up, that whole lineage runs right back through these builders and the wild imagination they poured into every frame.

Then Yoshiyuki Tomino showed up in 1979 and broke the formula on purpose. He looked at the giant machine and refused to let it play savior. In his hands it was just a weapon, cold hardware some poor kid got stuck driving, and Mobile Suit Gundam built its bones on that ugly little truth. His mobile suits carried no magic. They were treated as military hardware, with prototypes, mass produced models, mechanical limitations, repairs, and constant maintenance, and the fifteen year old civilian named Amuro Ray who climbed into the Gundam never asked for any of it. Conflict simply landed on his doorstep.

The Earth Federation clashed with the Principality of Zeon, and Tomino, a creator whose childhood unfolded during the destruction of wartime Japan, flat out refused to pretend combat was glorious. He soaked the whole production in real politics. Zeon carried unmistakable fascist and militarist imagery, and the story asked you to sit with the ugly cost of every death. Executives wanted a toy commercial. Tomino handed them a meditation on grief. Wild part is, the planned run was cut short, but reruns, Bandai model kits, and a successful theatrical trilogy transformed it into a phenomenon. That real machine philosophy, hardware instead of heroes, left a mark on everything from Evangelion to generations of animated and live action mecha stories that followed.

Now let us talk about the stars, because iron giants were not the only frontier being opened.

Space Battleship Yamato launched in 1974 and pushed serialized television anime toward a scale and seriousness few earlier productions had attempted. It told one long, unbroken story. The run went twenty six episodes, and each one genuinely carried over into the one that followed. No tidy reset button waited at the end of the week, the crutch so many other children’s programs leaned on back then. Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto had themselves an old battleship that sank generations ago and sat abandoned after Earth’s oceans dried away. They used that wreck as the foundation for a starship. Wild premise, right? Its crew rockets clear across the galaxy to save an Earth already poisoned by the alien Gamilas. That clock was running the whole time. Extinction was not a maybe for humanity. It sat on the calendar with a date attached. That weight, that feeling that everything mattered, snagged older viewers who had written the art form off as kid stuff.

The original broadcast struggled in the ratings and had its planned run shortened. Then reruns gradually found an older and more dedicated audience, and the successful 1977 compilation film turned that growing loyalty into a national phenomenon. A science fiction fever spread across Japan for real. That obsessive breed of superfan we call otaku? Yamato helped create one of Japan’s first major generations of organized, deeply committed anime fans. Over in the States we eventually got the thing repackaged as Star Blazers. It even walked off with the Seiun Award, one of Japan’s leading science fiction honors. Serialized craft, the exact quality that makes One Piece and Attack on Titan the cultural monsters they are, earned one of its strongest early proofs of concept right here.

Leiji Matsumoto was not finished either. He handed us Captain Harlock, and if you ever wondered how anime perfected the brooding outlaw archetype, look no further. Harlock sailed the sea of stars aboard the Arcadia, a man of honor spat out by a corrupt, lazy government that feared him even while he defended humanity. He did not wave a flag for anybody. Loyalty went strictly to what he believed in, full stop. Melancholy hung over every single frame. Every wounded loner who came after owes that captain a little something. Spike Spiegel carries echoes of him. So does Vash, plus about a hundred other beautiful, rebellious souls the medium keeps handing us. That same year gave us Galaxy Express 999. Young Tetsuro climbs aboard a train that rides clear through the cosmos, and the mysterious Maetel settles in beside him. He is chasing a body death cannot touch. The trip teaches him precisely what a wish like that will cost a person.

Here is the part people sleep on hardest, though. This art form was already grown when the world showed up.

The Rose of Versailles belongs in this same conversation, and it arrived in 1979. Riyoko Ikeda never once watched the French Revolution from a safe balcony. She wrote her people straight into the fire of it. Her lead is Oscar, and here is the twist: this is a woman her father raised as a man so she could serve as a military officer and stand guard over the crown. Now she is cornered. Her oath tugs one direction while the country falls to pieces around her, and Ikeda refuses to let that knot loosen for a second. Class, gender, rebellion, the guillotine’s shadow, every bit of it got handled with a maturity rarely attempted in contemporary television cartoons. Tadao Nagahama directed the early episodes before Osamu Dezaki took control and placed his unmistakable cinematic stamp on the later chapters. Nobody talked down to the audience. They trusted grown viewers to feel grown things, sit with heartbreak, and wrestle with a nation’s guilt, and that trust made all the difference in the world.

So when your cousin acts like the whole medium sprang up out of thin air, you can set the record straight with love. The piloted mech, the sprawling galactic epic, the tragic loner, the political weight, the long unfolding arc that keeps you up until three in the morning, none of it counts as new. Craftspeople built every last pillar during one remarkable stretch, working on children’s television budgets while smuggling in ideas about mortality, memory, freedom, and revolt.

We simply arrived fashionably late. The house was already jumping, and it had been for a good while. Real respect belongs to the ones who flipped the lights on. Next time Frieren makes you cry or a thruster fires up on your screen, tip your cap toward the seventies, because that stretch handed us much of the blueprint and asked for almost nothing in return.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Picture a metropolis stuck somewhere between an old black and white crime flick and a chrome future that never fully arrived. That’s Paradigm, a place built on Manhattan’s bones where nobody can recall anything from before forty years ago. Something severed the entire population from the lives they had known before that catastrophe. Old careers, childhoods, faces of loved ones, all disappeared with the past. Life kept moving anyway, which is the eerie part. People just adjusted to living without a yesterday.

Into that fog walks Roger Smith, the smoothest professional in town. He calls himself a Negotiator, and the gig is exactly what it sounds like, part private eye and part hired diplomat for whoever can afford his rates. Man rolls around in a sleek dark ride, keeps a butler named Norman, and answers to nobody. When the talking breaks down and something enormous starts flattening city blocks, he calls down a hulking machine known as a megadeus. Problem gets solved, loud and ugly.

If that setup rings a bell, good. Your ears work fine. This series was Bruce Wayne fan fiction from the ground up, and it never once pretended otherwise.

And most folks never clock the receipt behind it. Sunrise, the studio that animated the show, had already contributed animation work to Warner Bros. on Batman: The Animated Series, that nineties superhero cartoon everybody still praises. The connection ran deeper than a few artists admiring the mood from a distance. Keiichi Sato and Kazuyoshi Katayama were working within a studio that already understood those shadows, sharp angles, imposing skylines, and wealthy heroes carrying private burdens. Sato wanted a giant robot tale that could grab American eyes, and the shortcut was obvious: make it resemble the superhero cartoon every kid on this side of the ocean already worshipped.

You feel it in every frame. The art deco skyline, the shadows pooling in alleys, the aristocrat lead haunted by things he can’t name. Roger even keeps a young woman around who happens to be an android, R. Dorothy Wayneright, whose deadpan sass could hold its own against any sidekick. Toss in a femme fatale named Angel, a weary lawman named Dan Dastun, and a clownish crook cribbed straight from Lupin lore, and you’ve got a rogues gallery worthy of any comic panel.

Calling it a knockoff would be lazy and flat wrong, though. That’s where the noir soaks in and shifts its flavor.

This wasn’t capes with a machine bolted on. Katayama and head writer Chiaki J. Konaka were chasing something moodier, closer to those hardboiled detective pictures from the forties where every answer opens three darker questions. Paradigm itself becomes the real puzzle. Why did everyone forget? What lives beyond the wasteland at the edge of the domes, where the wealthy hide under glass while the poor scrape by in the dust? Who keeps these buried war machines running, and why do they obey a chosen few?

The mecha genre rarely worked this way. Neon Genesis Evangelion had already dragged the entire category into existential dread, but this took a separate route toward a similar abyss. The titans here aren’t sleek. They’re rusted, monolithic, nearer in spirit to old Gigantor than anything Gundam ever rolled out. Watching one lumber downtown felt less like a toy commercial and more like a Godzilla nightmare with better tailoring. That collision of pulpy fun and creeping unease is the exact sauce.

Can we talk about the sound for a second? The original opening blast sounds like an unapologetic salute to Queen’s “Flash,” all pomp and thunder, the kind of thing that makes a grown man throw up devil horns before the plot even starts. Composer Toshihiko Sahashi laced the broader score with smoky jazz fit for a dim lounge. For a young brother who grew up loving both heavy riffs and cool horns, that music struck a specific nerve nothing else on the programming block came close to touching.

Now here comes the turn that should make its obscurity a straight crime. The story had originally been mapped across twenty-six chapters, but during the writing process the production order was abruptly reduced to thirteen. Rather than crush the entire planned story into that smaller space, the creative team allowed the first run to end with a cliffhanger dangling. What rescued the whole thing? Partly us. American viewers embraced the series, sent requests for more, and helped prove there was still an audience waiting. That enthusiasm, combined with Cartoon Network executives who genuinely loved the show, led the network and Sunrise to co-produce a second batch and complete the twenty-six-episode run. That kind of rescue almost never occurred back then. Our support helped revive a property that otherwise might have remained unfinished, which tells you the audience sensed it had caught lightning even when the ratings were never enormous.

The back half grew weirder, richer, and far more willing to break your brain. Roger starts questioning why he alone can pilot such giants. The border between what’s real and what’s staged blurs until the ending drops you into a wild rabbit hole about performance, creation, memory, and whether any of these lives were authentic to begin with. Some viewers hated that ambiguity. I get the frustration. The conclusion leaves enough room for another story, but it can also be read as Paradigm completing one more turn in a cycle that may have happened before. Ratings and home-video sales never grew strong enough to justify opening that door again.

So we got two seasons and a question mark, and honestly? That messiness is part of why it lingers. Tidy conclusions fade. The stories that itch at you for years stick around.

Look at what surrounds us now. Studios can’t stop mining superhero material, and half the internet argues about grimdark reboots versus brighter takes. Anime bleeds into western pop culture harder than ever before. A property that fused a beloved American icon with meticulous craft and film noir bones should have become a cornerstone people cite constantly. Instead it drifted into cult standing, a name traded among heads who know while the mainstream shrugged.

That’s the loss I keep circling back toward. We had a real original hiding in plain sight, bold enough to remix Wayne’s shadow through jazz, colossal fists, and philosophical dread, and we let it slide toward footnote territory. It earned shelves of merch, essays, a fandom as loud as the ones chasing far weaker fare.

Do yourself a solid. Hunt it down. Let Paradigm pull you under its glass domes and unanswered riddles. Cast in the name of God, ye not guilty, as our hero liked to intone before the fists started flying. Then wonder how something this strange and this brilliant stayed buried so long. I’ve been asking that same question for years, and the silence still bugs me.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Took me a long time to peep the con for what it was.

Anime loves this figure. The gifted outcast who rolls solo, needs help from no one, and somehow winds up treated as the top dog in the building for that exact reason. We call it independence and we clap for it. But peep game. A lot of the time the cat on screen is just scared to reach for another human, and the writers drape something cool over that fear and pass it off as depth.

Sasuke is the poster child for this whole thing, especially for the generation that grew up watching Toonami. Dude lost everything young, so I get the origin. But watch how the franchise treats his retreat inward. Every time he shoves Naruto off and picks the colder road, the animation swells up and the soundtrack swears we are watching willpower. His refusal to be held becomes his brand. Fans clipped those moments and posted them like scripture. Meanwhile the real read is simpler and a lot sadder. He lost everybody young and figured he would rather freeze the whole world out than risk that gut punch a second time, so he slammed the door before a single soul could walk through it. That is not toughness. It is a hurt little boy who found some armor and forgot how to take it off.

Levi hits a little differently but lands in a similar spot. The man is clean and efficient and lethal, all of it bolted down behind those flat eyes. Attack on Titan frames his silence as battle scars, like he has witnessed too much death to waste breath on feelings. Fair enough, the brother carries real grief. Still, notice how rarely the show asks whether his walls protect him or just imprison him. He buries teammate after teammate while barely letting anything move across his face, and folks online treat that frozen grill like the gold standard of manhood. Sit with it a second, though. All that stuff he keeps stuffing down might be the exact reason he stays torn up where nobody can see.

Then you got Vegeta, my personal favorite for this conversation. Prince of a nearly wiped out race, spending much of Dragon Ball Z keeping his own family at arm’s length while he chases a rival he could just, you know, be cool with. Dragon Ball plays a bunch of it as pride, and pride sounds better than the thing sitting under it. Underneath all that noise is somebody who cannot get close to another person without it feeling like he just lost a fight. His arc eventually softens, thank God, and that softening is the most truthful thing the series ever did with him. Yet for years the culture only quoted the scowl.

Here is what gnaws at me. Those portraits do not stay trapped on the screen. They soak into the boys watching, and plenty of those boys were me. Spend your whole childhood hearing that the hardest dude in the room is the one who needs zero people and tells not a soul anything, and you run that same play at home without even thinking. You start believing the fact that you cannot crack yourself open is a gift instead of a wound. Being tough to reach gets tangled up in your head with being impossible to break. And ain’t nobody clapping for the kid brave enough to admit he is scared, so you lock that up quick and leave it that way.

For a whole lot of us, the ones brought up to keep our guard up and carry every burden alone, that message dropped onto ground already tilled and waiting. Be hard. Keep your mouth shut about whatever hurts. Deal with your business solo. Anime did not write that script, but it animated the thing so well and handed it right back to us glowing. The lone wolf looked like a mirror when he was really a snare.

People get this part twisted constantly. Somebody who is truly self sufficient can still open up and let folks walk in. He likes his own space, sure, but that is a choice and not a hiding spot, and he can drop into a room full of company and have a ball. Now hold that up against the anime version we keep hyping. That cat could not connect if you paid him cash money. His walls went up because something cracked in him a long way back, and it stayed cracked. One version is freedom. The other is a jail cell the inmate painted so pretty he quit staring at the bars.

Wild part is, these shows already know better the minute they stop posing. Naruto straight up refused to let Sasuke waste away in that hole, and we are supposed to love him for it. Guts over in Berserk fronts like he cannot stand his crew, then comes undone the moment they are gone. Even the iciest of these figures usually gets that one flashback, the scene where the mask slips and the story quietly cops to what is real. The lonely posturing was not about being strong at all. It was hurt with nowhere to land, plain as that. Writers see it too. The suits and the stans just like the frozen version better, since a scowling loner moves more posters than a guy who did the work.

I am not asking anybody to stop loving these figures. Love them to death, matter of fact. Sasuke reformed is still my guy. Vegeta finally hugging his son wrecked me in the best possible way. What I am asking is that we quit reading the frostbite as the flex. When a story hands you somebody who has walled off every exit and calls him the baddest dude alive, sit with the question the show is too shy to ask out loud. Is he actually free, or is he just too frightened of being turned away to even knock on a door?

Because I know grown men, good ones, who took that lesson to heart at eight years old and are still paying it off at forty. Cats who bought the myth that requiring nobody equals winning. They are not liberated. What they are is lonely, and somewhere down the line they learned to call it discipline. The cartoons gave them a gorgeous excuse to stay that way.

Toughest people I have ever met were not the ones standing apart from the room. They were the ones brave enough to walk into it, hand extended, knowing full well they might get left hanging, and reaching anyway. That takes more nerve than any brooding silhouette ever showed. And it is the arc I wish more of these stories had the courage to animate from the jump, instead of saving it for the finale after they already sold us the lie.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

So who makes up a valuable part of the audience in 2026? Grown folks. The ones who caught Toonami after school. You would haul home from the bus so you did not miss Tom setting up the next block, since a live broadcast did not rewind for anybody. We were teenagers then, sneaking episodes of Gundam Wing while the homework sat there ignored. Some of us traded fifth generation VHS dubs at lunch, tapes so worn the colors bled together. Now that same crowd pays a mortgage. Got real jobs, got kids, got cards that actually clear at the register. And the people making these shows noticed all of it.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A brand new title is a gamble. You drop the entire budget on a cast nobody has met yet and hope the story lands before the season runs out. Some do. Frieren broke through, swallowed the timeline whole for a stretch of months, and reminded everybody that an original television arrival can still become a sensation. Behind each success, though, sits a pile of titles that disappeared around episode three with barely anybody around to clock it. You know what arrives with a head start? Bringing back something a million adults have tattooed on their childhood.

Look at what has landed lately. Rurouni Kenshin received a completely renewed television adaptation in 2023, with a new staff and cast. Ranma got dragged into the present looking sharper than it ever did on a fuzzy afternoon dub. Urusei Yatsura, a property older than much of the audience streaming it, came back looking like it had not aged a day. That is no accident. Call it a spreadsheet talking, dressed up as a love letter.

The reason it works is math wearing an art costume. My cohort, the one raised on grainy VHS and Blockbuster runs, has more spending power than it did when those shows first arrived. We are the ones dropping two hundred on a resin figure of a character we first met half asleep on a Saturday. We buy the fancy Blu ray box, the one with the art book stuffed inside, even though the thing streams three clicks away. Sentiment can loosen a wallet in a way that ordinary seasonal hype rarely does.

Bleach proved it loud. The original television run ended in 2012, leaving the manga’s final conflict unanimated for a decade. Then Thousand Year Blood War arrived in 2022 with cinematic direction and the kind of presentation longtime fans had spent years imagining. Its fourth and final cour began airing in Japan on July 25, 2026. Why return after such a long silence? Because the crowd was still there. Waiting. Ready to see the conclusion that the original series never reached.

Streaming platforms caught the scent too. The One Piece live action series looked like a dangerous bet. Manga and anime adaptations had disappointed viewers often enough that skepticism came naturally. Instead, the first season connected, the second arrived on March 10, 2026, and Netflix had already renewed the show for a third. Familiarity helped bring people through the door, but the production still had to earn their loyalty once they arrived. Then Yu Yu Hakusho followed the same road onto the same platform, using an established name to draw worldwide attention.

Trigun returned as Stampede, rebuilt from the studs up in a style Vash had never worn before. Some heads grumbled about the fresh coat of paint. The name still pulled eyeballs, but recognition alone could not settle every argument over what the new version changed. Sailor Moon received a fresh adaptation through Crystal, followed by the Eternal and Cosmos films. Fullmetal Alchemist keeps getting repackaged and resold whenever another anniversary provides an excuse. Dragon Ball basically never stopped, cycling through Kai, Super, and Daima while feeding multiple generations from a single well. The catalog stretching from the late eighties through the DVD boom has become a vault companies keep unlocking.

Let me put it plain for anybody who thinks this is only fan service. This is also a financial play, and a shrewd one. A company choosing between a wild original concept and a beloved revival may view the familiar property as the lower risk option. Recognition gives the project a running start. An existing audience already understands the characters, remembers the music, and knows why the announcement matters. That does not guarantee a profit, but it gives the marketing department something an unknown title has to build from the ground up. Especially in a market where production costs have climbed and streaming companies have become more selective about what they finance.

There is a quieter engine under all of it too. A lot of us are parents now, and we sit our own kids down in front of the stories that shaped us, half hoping they catch the same bug. That gives companies a second audience inside the same household. My cash for the memory, my child’s attention for the future. Two birds, one dusty box set.

I will not front though. Some of this sits wrong with me. We are digging up the past so hard that I wonder what is left to build from scratch. Pack a whole release slate with sequels, reboots, and thirtieth anniversary tins and something quietly goes missing. Cowboy Bebop did not crawl out of a boardroom scared of its own shadow. That kind of nerve, the thing that hooked us on the medium way back, needs air. And you cannot bring back a show that nobody bothered to make in the first place.

Still, I understand the logic completely. From where a producer sits, my emotional attachment is a renewable resource. They tap it, I pay, and the ledger starts looking friendly. Merchandise tied to an established title can reach a customer base that an untested property must earn one person at a time. Some collectors in their late thirties and forties treat limited pressings like investments, snatching them the morning they drop, then placing the extras on resale sites for twice the original price. Toonami itself returned to Adult Swim in 2012 after a surprise April Fools broadcast stirred up a loud fan campaign. Enough of us showed up to prove that the attachment had survived. The revival wave does not look finished. Every successful return gives somebody else a reason to search the catalog.

There is a catch nobody hawking this stuff mentions. Not every redo honors what it borrows from. Some are lazy, phoned in, obvious cash grabs that scrape the paint off a good memory. When a reboot fumbles the tone that made the source sing, longtime heads feel it instantly and the backlash gets ugly online. Even a misfire may pull an opening wave of curiosity, but attention does not guarantee lasting success or a profit. We will sometimes tune in just to complain, and the meter keeps spinning for at least as long as we remain interested enough to argue.

So expect more. Expect that dusty favorite you assumed everyone forgot to resurface with a slick trailer and a bright fresh logo. The tape you wore thin in 1999 may return in crisp 4K, priced like it just rolled off the line. Run the figures and you will see the pull plain as day, since those numbers adore our memories. Whatever raised you on a CRT with the volume dialed low so your folks would not hear, somebody in Tokyo may have circled it on a whiteboard with a fat dollar sign beside it.

Our youth is not just precious to us anymore. It graduated into an asset class. And business, from where they are standing, is very good.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

Freakazoid: The Odd Hero

It makes sense, that cartoon is something of an acquired taste. It was like a superhero version of Animaniacs with all of the Warner brothers—and Warner sister—in one person. On top of that, Freakazoid never really did much you’d associate with superheroes.

Sure, he had the powers, the super speed, and ran around in his underwear, but his confrontations with villains often ended with them being annoyed to insanity or bumbling their way into an arrest. Plus, his villains never really required that much effort to begin with.

Obviously, Freakazoid was a parody of superhero comics and cartoons. There were several super toons out at the time: Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, the really fun Swamp Thing show, and the really mediocre Fantastic 4/Iron Man series over on UPN. But what if Freakazoid was introduced into the DC comic book universe?

No One Wants A Freakazoid Comic

Just hear me out! Freakazoid came out in 1995 and ran until 1997. In that time, the series didn’t get a comic book. It was a show owned by Warner Brothers which owns DC Comics. Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and The Simpsons are all cartoons that got their own comic book runs. So, why not Freakazoid?

One reason is that it didn’t have a long run or anything. Still, there have been cartoons that got action figures off of few seasons. As a matter of fact, those cartoons were made purely to advertise the action figures! Freakazoid didn’t get any merchandise. Biker Mice from Mars got action figures, a video game, and a reboot.

Now, I’m not one to throw Biker Mice from Mars under the bus (Bucky O’Hare was better) but if they could get merch, surely Freakazoid could’ve gotten a standalone comic at least. No, he should’ve been a hero in the DC comic book universe. It would’ve been like if DC’s Captain Marvel swapped brains with Deadpool if it ran today.

In the 1990s, it would’ve been pretty much in line with the rest of DC animation’s comic book series. Endless wackiness and storylines that didn’t really go anywhere but what if he was introduced in this decade—well, it’s a wrap now—through one of the several universe shake-ups the publisher has had since its start?

If an intentionally annoying character like Deadpool can have dedicated comic, spin-offs, and a fanbase, I believe Freakazoid could pull it off. That is, if he’s introduced right and isn’t made into someone like…Sentry. Just all of the power and little of the “Wow, I’d read a full series on just this character”-factor.

I’m Serious

Put my man Freakazoid in DC Comics. He doesn’t need a whole comic; I’d settle for anything more than a cameo. Put in the Justice League. Yes, the Justice League, an organization—like the Avengers—with more members than there are Wu-Tang affiliates.

I want him mixed in so well with the comic book universe that we’ll have to get an edgelord grimdark version of him by Frank Miller with Rob Liefeld doing the art. Then everyone will be slack jawed once they get an Eisner Award for the mini-series Freakazoid Offline.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Now, the prices for a tape featuring two episodes were always dicey but you were guaranteed to find something you’d dig. Flipping through it, I noticed a lot of classic mecha series.

Mecha are the anime, manga, and video games involving giant robots that can either be piloted from inside or controlled. Usually, the series are sci-fi in nature but things have been mixed up and new concepts have been explored.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at big three pioneers of mecha anime and manga.

Voltron (1984)

This franchise holds a very legit claim to being the best of the classic mecha franchises. This franchise was just satisfying to watch. It wasn’t overly complex, too violent, or even too lengthy.

I’m not a big fan of monster-of-the-week writing but it worked with Voltron. This was like an animated version of Power Rangers which began airing a few years before Voltron.

Another thing that works for Voltron is that this is mecha in a sci-fantasy setting. It’s like if you mixed Power Rangers with Star Wars when the back story comes into play.

Of course, anime that was broadcast don’t really hit story-wise when you’re ten. You’re just looking at the cool fights, suits, and robots, really.

Robotech (1985)

Now Robotech and Voltron aren’t as old as pioneers such as Mazinger Z or Gigantor but it is one of those series that pioneered mecha in the West.

This was thanks to anime’s best friends during expansion and exposure: dubbing and broadcast television. Dubbing—replacing the audio of exported content with that of the import market—wasn’t that great in the late 80s and into the early 00s.

However, just the idea that this was some new, fresh content in the West was enough for Robotech to catch on. It’s military-focused but it’s also a space opera with half of it being about the protagonist doing his duty and protecting the woman he loves only for it to no be reciprocated.

Of the three mentioned series, Robotech kind of sits in the middle. It’s not as action-heavy and fast-paced as Voltron tends to be but it doesn’t move at a slower pace like our next entry often does.

Also, lore-wise, Robotech isn’t as technical as our third franchise but it explains more than Voltron usually did. Progression-wise, this series moved along well and ran in chronological order.

Which is different from the third and final series on this list.

Gundam (1979)

This is such a hard series to explain. Gundam does a lot. It’s a long-running series which predates Robotech and Voltron by a few years but comes over a decade after Gigantor.

Like Robotech, Gundam is a space opera obsessed with a lot of lore and timeline events. Unfortunately, the franchise is fractured into multiple series taking place in different timelines or even different worlds.

As I said, this is a franchise that is hard to explain. Some of the series are sequels or prequels of others while some are standalone series. Then you have a series like G Gundam which kind of steps away from the slower-paced high drama of the franchise into straight-up shonen territory.

On the one hand, I’d say this is to be expected if a franchise has run as long as Gundam and needs to freshen things up for a while. I don’t know if this was the right direction but I enjoyed it!

For the most part, you could get someone into Voltron or even Robotech. As a matter of fact, Robotech is offered on most streaming platforms and for free on Crackle.

Gundam is a harder series to get people into. It really depends on if you introduce them to the more modern stuff, the late anime boom stuff like Gundam Wing and G Gundam, or take them back to the throwbacks.

It’s a gamble because Gundam’s pace is such that if the series you picked for someone to watch doesn’t stick, it’s going to be hard to suggest more Gundam. At that point, you’re just pushing it.

Bonus Classic Mecha Anime: Gigantor (1963)

Gigantor is pretty much the godfather of modern mecha anime. It’s old school as hell, black and white, and features a super simplistic storyline from episode to episode.

When I first saw it, it was more for historical purposes. Watching the series years later and I don’t care for it, to be honest. This is not a fun series to sit through.

That’s hard for me to say because I’ve sat through and enjoyed Astro Boy which was released around the same time. There’s just something I can’t get into with the original Gigantor.

I will say that this was a big broadcast for me since I heavy into finding the origins of certain genres in music, comics, and animation.

Seeing the birth of so many tropes is why I enjoy watching Kinnikuman and Fist of the North Star so much. Once Toriyama took from those two series to make Dragon Ball manga history was made.

That could be the thing. I went in thinking I’d witness the same thing in Gigantor that was inspire Gundam, Robotech, and Voltron. I guess that would be the case if those series were heavily in the old 1940s Danger Boy and Mystery Lad novels vein like Gigantor.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

There are many directions some games could’ve taken, even the blockbusters and Greatest Hits. We’re going to look at five odd adventures (good and bad) from the Sega Genesis era. I’ve mainly lived in a PlayStation, Nintendo, and PC household but in the 1990s there were some memorable journeys on the Genesis.

Let’s dive in!

Sonic Spinball (Sega, 1993)

Pinball games on a console used to seem a little lazy to me and that’s mainly as a result of having played Sonic Spinball. It’s not that the game was bad, it was actually a lot of fun. It’s just pinball with a Sonic the Hedgehog theme that worked. I remember thinking that Sega should’ve dropped another Sonic game for the Genesis…only for them to drop them awesome Sonic 3 the following year.

This was the age of quick turnaround for non-sports games. What made this game more odd is that there was no sequel. Just “Here’s some Sonic in the meanwhile.” Alex Kidd Pinball would’ve probably bothered me less because Alex Kidd had long since been shafted and thrown in the vault. If there was no sequel, it would be expected. It’s Alex Kidd.

Unfortunately, Alex Kidd was all stiff (as were many video game characters from the Master System and NES period) and couldn’t ball up and spin like Sonic and Tails could. On that note, Sonic Spinball has mobile gaming potential.

Chuck Rock II: Son of Chuck (Core Design, 1993)

The character Chuck Rock had one game on multiple consoles including the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Gear. It was also on some Atari consoles (not too unusual) but it was just that 1991 game. There wasn’t a ton of Chuck Rock games, he wasn’t a character who became a promoted star from a long-running franchise. He was just there, saving his girl in a Flintstones-meet-Super Mario sense.

Two years later, Chuck Rock Jr is off to save his father in a Flintstones-meets-Donkey Kong Jr sense. The game was fine as a platformer and had fun enemies and boss battles, it’s just an odd adventure when you hadn’t played the first Chuck Rock. Of course, after playing Chuck Rock II, you’ll find that it makes sense why there was no Chuck Rock III. Besides the studio closing down years later, there was nowhere else to go with the series.

Krusty’s Fun House (Acclaim, 1992)

It’s the 1990s, The Simpsons run the world and it makes sense that there would be games based on The Simpsons on multiple consoles. It’s just odd that we have a game based on Krusty the Clown who is built like Homer Simpson but doesn’t get into the overly involved situations that Homer gets into.

Sure, Homer has a gut and is at home on the couch any day of the week but he’s out and about doing something. Krusty? Not so much. This isn’t to say it was a bad title or that all Simpsons games should feature Bart. This game was fun and there was an Itchy & Scratchy platformer.

To a degree, it’s the idea of a Simpsons puzzle game. This could’ve been any game. It was actually another game that was given the Simpsons coat of paint because why develop something from scratch when you could just re-design the setting and main characters like Super Mario Bros. 2?

Revolution X (Midway, 1994)

Revolution X was an arcade shooter that was ported to the Sega Genesis. It is best known for being the game that features Aerosmith. They’re not playable characters but they are collectible. This is the only outright bad game on the list because it was often dicey when an arcade shooter or even a PC shooter was ported to the Genesis or Super NES.

But that’s to be expected. No, the odd thing here is we’ve got a band shooter. This isn’t a run-n-gun affair. It’s not a DOOM situation either. This is more like Area 51 or House of the Dead. The game is filled with odd design choices. You’ve got women in bikinis but few on the beach, you’re fighting with a hostile group, and Aerosmith has been kidnapped.

I mean at this time, Aerosmith was delivering the goods but I just don’t know about putting the band and a shooter (or any genre together). Then again, it could’ve been an early 1990s Kiss shooting game.

Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool (System Vision, 1992)

Hmm. Both the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were no stranger to bad mascot games. Every mascot game can’t be Cool Spot but they can aspire to be Global Gladiators. Chester Cheetah: Too Cool to Fool meets the standard set by Global Gladiators. That is to say it’s mediocre at best but no one would say it was a good or great game.

Mechanically, it worked like most mascot or cartoon platformers from this period with the stiff jumping and movement. I remember my dad bringing this game, Krusty’s Fun House, Tecmo Super Bowl, and Klax from a Friday jaunt to the video store.

It was a dreadful haul but this was the one I played the most since the Cheetos Paws was my favorite snack at the time. You don’t have to reserve judgement and no grace is warranted, I also bought the Combo Man comics because I liked the Combo pretzel snacks.

The odd nature of this game comes from the game obviously not being good but Frito-Lay being invested in it because it was part of an advertising run that was supposed to include a Chester Cheetah cartoon. The toon was canceled but we got two Chester Cheetah games.

Again, this one wasn’t good at all. It was a little under mid, didn’t feature anything new or unique, looked like an early Genesis title (which it was) but someone said “Make another. The streets want another.”

I mean, I wanted another Cool Spot and more Taz-Mania games but never mind that. Much like the Geico cavemen only working for commercials and not warranting a whole television show, Chester Cheetah didn’t need ongoing adventures in video game form.

What are some odd games you’ve played that you feel probably shouldn’t exist. Let us know in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

The Saturday Morning  Cartoon Landscape

Depending on the network, the Saturday morning block was must-see TV at a time when you could’ve just stayed asleep or actually went outside to do something. Well, in the 80s and 90s, being outside at 7 AM as an elementary schooler was good way to potentially end up a milk carton but Saturday morning was often slow but not Sunday morning slow.

Your heavy hitters were ABC and the WB (in my market originally our Fox affiliate and now the CW). Perpetually third place was UPN (now MyNetwork TV in this market). Those three had regular Saturday morning blocks with CBS and NBC getting away from Saturday morning toons in the morning.

Looking at TV logs from the 1980s, every major network had a Saturday morning block then CBS and NBC went to blocks that started with toons and finished with different kinds of content for kids. Some were educational and others were live action shows like Saved by the Bell.

The Weekday Cartoon Blocks

While Saturday always got the shine—and for good reason—the afternoon blocks were no slouches. It was more of a mix as to what you’d get because the primo toons were typically on Saturdays.

Meanwhile, the school day or weekday line-up featured a few bangers surrounded by either scrub toons or shows that would be viewed favorably but not as bangers.

For instance, you could see Batman: The Animated Series around 4 PM before The Simpsons on Fox/the WB which was outside of the Fox Kids/WB Kids slot. Before you got to Batman, you had to go through Tiny Toons Adventures, Pinky and the Brain, Animaniacs, Taz-Mania, and Freakazoid—a trio of banger series. You also had Eek the Cat and Bobby’s World. Both were fine cartoons but they weren’t the WB’s flagship stuff.

Worse was the mixed bag over on UPN where Mighty Max, Street Sharks, Mummies Alive, Mutant League, and The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog existed alongside Stone Protectors, Stunt Dawgs, Double Dragon, and The Adventures of T-Rex. It was a very scrub-heavy mix on the network and things didn’t truly pick up for the network until 1995 when Samurai Pizza Cats, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Ronin Warriors aired.

Even with those shows on the network holding down the before school/weekday morning block, the afternoon cartoon block was largely a pass until Dragon Ball and Ronin Warriors were moved to the afternoon block and Eagle Riders (Gatchaman) debuted on the Saturday block.

Mind you, Cartoon Network had been alive and kicking since 1994 but if you didn’t have cable, the broadcast networks were your stop for toons.

Cable’s Cartoon Blocks

I was going to focus on the Sunday morning cartoons but that was probably the weakest block of cartoons you’d ever see. UPN had a block on Sundays where the only show of note was Technoman (Tekkaman Blade) and eventually Eagle Riders being sandwiched between early morning and late morning church programming.

No, we’re going to take a quick look at TBS which had a strong block game throughout the weekend. Even on TNT viewers were blessed with “MonsterVision” and TBS had the action/martial arts block “Movies for Guys Who Like Movies”.

TBS had the “Cartoon Planet” block starting in 1995 that was based around a kids’ version of Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Think, SGC2C as a daytime talk show without guests. Surrounding it was a couple of classic Hanna-Barbera shorts that were worth the watch in the late 60s and 70s, Looney Toons, and Tex Avery bangers mixed in with some new faces such as SWAT Kats and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest.

Of the cable cartoon blocks that weren’t “Toonami” and “Super Chunk”, this was a fun two-to-three hours of animation in the pre-Adult Swim era.

An underrated block was the “USA Cartoon Express”. Yes, there was a period when USA Network ran cartoons and many of those featured were fun and memorable ones even if the majority were mid. Savage Dragon and WildCATS were the standouts to me but Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were fun to watch on weekdays and Saturdays.

USA always had an odd line-up of toons because the four aforementioned series were all adaptations of series known for violence, fighting, and more mature themes than the likes of G.I Joe or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which was also in the “USA Cartoon Express”).

Do you remember the cartoon blocks from back then or did you come in during the Cartoon Network all day blocks, “Adult Swim” and “Miguzi” period? Let us know in the comments and share some of your memories and favorite toons from your favorite cartoon blocks.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.