Shinichiro Watanabe, the mind behind Cowboy Bebop, served as chief director while Studio Bones turned the project into a playground for an unusually large collection of writers, directors, designers, and animators. The show lived on that freedom. One week you got a zombie outbreak played strictly for laughs. A few episodes later Dandy entered an intergalactic grand prix that eventually hurled him billions of years into the future. Over 26 episodes across two seasons, very little felt obligated to what came before because continuity was never allowed to put a leash on the imagination.

You barely need the premise, which is sort of the joke. Our guy drifts around the galaxy registering new species for cash, hauling along a cranky robot called QT and a Betelgeusian who looks a lot like a house cat and answers to Meow. The three of them inhale wings at a knockoff joint with a name that would get sued. The Gogol Empire keeps trying to capture Dandy, and the show cannot be bothered to tell you the full reason until much later. Small stakes, loud shirts, a pompadour you could see from orbit.

Variety was the flex. Inside a single stretch the show might hand you body horror, then drop Dandy onto a strange planet populated by highly evolved plants, then swing into a ridiculous high school musical parody that had no right to work as well as it did. Other episodes played with radically different visual styles, alternate dimensions, and worlds where the characters themselves could be bent into shapes that barely resembled ordinary existence. None of it needed to connect neatly. That was the point nobody argued with.

The payoff landed late, when the series finally dove headfirst into the whole alternate selves idea and nailed it precisely because it had already earned the chaos. Dandy encountered other versions of himself, QT, and Meow scattered across alternate universes, each one a shade off from the crew we knew. By the finale, the reason the Gogol Empire had been chasing him came into sharper focus. The idiot everybody had underestimated possessed extraordinary Pyonium energy, the very thing capable of bending the boundaries between dimensions. That smug narrator floating over every adventure turned out to sit a lot closer to the center of everything than you would ever guess.

So there it is. Dandy could die, planets could explode, timelines could swap, dimensions could fold in on themselves, and the next episode would just keep walking, hair unbothered. No grief counseling. No three film arc about processing the pain. Keep it moving.

That lightness was the actual power. A solid decade before alternate worlds became the industry’s comfort food, this funky little oddball treated infinity like a shrug and a punchline. Big stakes were never the aim. Dumping them was, which let the imagination run anywhere it wanted without pausing to ask permission.

Put it on now and it feels less like an old relic and more like a memo nobody answered. The culture caught up to the idea, then lost the lesson sitting under it. Endless possibility only stays fun while it stays loose. Grade every alternate universe on a rubric and you choke the very thing that made it worth watching. Our boy figured all that out while hunting a paycheck across a galaxy that could fall apart at any moment, laughing the entire way down. It’s a mystery, like he always said. Maybe just let it stay one.

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.

That hum is the thing I miss.

A big branch of modern portal fantasy has mostly let it go. The formula often runs like this. Some guy dies, usually from a truck or overwork, wakes up in a fantasy realm with a cheat skill, and inside three episodes he’s running a tavern, collecting admirers, treating the entire mess like a soft landing. Nobody’s crying over a mother they’ll never see. No one’s staring at a strange sky wondering if anyone on the other side even noticed they vanished. The move now is often to settle in and thrive.

I get why it sells. Who wouldn’t want a do over with god mode flipped on? Still, the older stuff hit harder because leaving wasn’t the fantasy. Getting back was.

Think about Hitomi in Escaflowne. She runs track, reads tarot, nurses a crush, lives an ordinary teenage life. Then the impossible crashes straight into that ordinary world, a young swordsman battles a dragon practically in front of her, and before she can process any of it she’s standing on Gaea. The series never lets that sense of displacement fade. Every quiet scene carries the ache of a girl separated from her own bed, old friends, and the small familiar problems she used to shrug off. Gaea is gorgeous and doomed and soaked in war, and she’s stuck inside it holding visions nobody asked for. The spectacle lands because plenty of the time she’d gladly trade all that grandeur for something as ordinary as standing at a starting line again.

Or take Now and Then, Here and There, the title I pull out when somebody swears cartoons can’t wreck you. Shu is a cheerful kid who jumps into danger trying to protect a stranger, then gets dragged somewhere scorched and merciless. No power boost arrives. Zero fan club waiting. Just child soldiers, drought, and a warlord running on cruelty alone. Our hero spends the full run gripping plain decency like the last familiar thing left, and the drive to escape is less about comfort than about staying himself. That whole tension only works because the place that swallowed him is actively trying to break him.

See the pattern? Over there had teeth.

That’s the piece a lot of today’s wave trades away. When the strange realm is a theme park built around one guy, nothing really presses on him. Danger gets defanged. Isolation evaporates. The stakes shrink down to whether he can out level the next opponent. Set that beside Chihiro in Spirited Away, who spends the first night trembling and half invisible, watching both parents turn into pigs, learning that forgetting her own name could leave her trapped forever. Miyazaki understood the assignment. That bathhouse glitters, but it’s a snare too, and the only fuel keeping Chihiro upright is the memory of a life worth getting out for.

Even the goofier entries from that stretch kept a pinch of this. Fushigi Yuugi drops Miaka inside an ancient book, and yeah, it swerves into full romance soap, yet she stays scared half the time, still hungry, still aware that her ordinary life and looming entrance exams sit on the far side of the page. El Hazard sends a whole cast into a stunning elsewhere and lets them enjoy the ride, though the possibility of getting home never disappears completely. The ordinary keeps tugging.

Then you’ve got The Twelve Kingdoms, maybe the cleanest version of the idea. Youko gets pulled across with pretty promises and a blade, and almost at once everything curdles. People lie to her. Monsters stalk the roads. Starving, broke, and betrayed early in the journey, Youko may have a special destiny waiting for her, but surviving long enough to understand and claim it is anything but free. Earning a foothold means grieving the dull safe routine she used to resent. By the time she quits begging to leave, it’s because she grew into that place the hard way, not because anybody handed over a mansion.

That growth is the whole point. Longing for familiar ground wasn’t decoration. It was the engine. A character who wants out has to change enough to either find a door or decide, through blood and loss, that remaining means something now. The reluctance made the eventual choice to stay actually cost something.

Flip to plenty of modern isekai. The protagonist shows up ready to embrace the new world almost immediately. Where’s the friction in that? If paradise lands in your lap on day one, there’s no arc, just a slow drip of fresh perks. I won’t pretend each current title is hollow. Re:Zero drags Subaru through real hell, and part of why it cuts so deep is that he’s stripped of any clean exit and forced to relive brutal stretches of time through Return by Death, dying again and again while trying to change the outcome. Mushoku Tensei at least sits with the weight of a squandered first go round. So the old instinct isn’t buried. It simply turned rare.

A chunk of this comes down to the wish each era sells. Those classic stories often spoke to kids who felt small and overlooked, and the promise was that your dull everyday mattered, that people would miss you, that clawing your way back was worth the fight. A lot of the modern crop sells the reverse. Your real existence was the cage, and the trapdoor out is the prize. One version says you belong somewhere. The other says you should vanish and restart. I know which message I’d rather hand a twelve year old.

There’s also richer drama in craving something you can’t easily grab. Tension needs a gap. Drop a teen into a brutal elsewhere and make them desperate to cross back over, and every episode carries a pulse. Give that same teen a palace and groupies, and you’re mostly watching a dude have a nice time.

I’m not here to gatekeep anybody’s cozy watch. Sometimes a low stakes story about running a potion shop is exactly the mood. But when people ask why the classics lodge in your memory, this sits near the center of it. Those kids were lost. Genuinely lost. And watching them scratch toward something familiar, or make peace with losing it for good, meant the trip carried real weight.

Give me a lead who stares at that beautiful ruined sky and still whispers that they want to go home. That’s where the good stuff lives.

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.

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.

Truth is, the idea was already breathing years before he ever crashed onto Earth talking reckless. It just wore different clothes, because opposition back then wasn’t a checklist you ran down. It was a worldview.

Start with the Red Comet.

Char Aznable rolled through Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979, gliding behind a mask, moving three times faster than any pilot had a right to. People hold onto the crimson machine and the flash. What slips their memory is the why. Aznable wasn’t chasing Amuro to prove who logged more hours in the gym. Instead he was hunting the family he blamed for his father’s death, burying his real name, working both ends of a war so a revenge plot could wear a revolution’s face. His beef ran on grief and politics. Class, bloodline, betrayal, all of it braided into one aristocratic figure who’d smile warm while sketching your funeral.

That’s the texture the modern mold sanded away. His quarrel with the hero meant something off the battlefield. Pull the man out of the cockpit and he stays dangerous, still scheming, still carrying a plan bigger than any single duel. Later shows chased that ghost so hard that fans coined a name for the copycats, the Char clone, which tells you plenty. You don’t spawn a whole archetype by beeping a scouter. You do it by mattering.

Go back further still. 1974. Space Battleship Yamato flings a patched together crew across the galaxy, and parked out there waiting is Dessler, lord of Gamilas, blue as the cold vacuum around him. Opens as the enemy, no asterisk. No secret soft heart, no misunderstood childhood montage. Dude tries to wipe humanity off the map.

Then something strange creeps in. As the campaign drags on, he starts seeing that ragged crew as worthy. Not as future allies. As people who earned his regard by how they stood when everything burned. When the story finally lets him shift, it isn’t because he dropped a tournament bracket and had to choke down the loss. A warrior simply recognized another one across enemy lines. Down the line, that saga even brought him back on the side of the ship he once hunted, and it never felt cheap, because the honor was baked in from the jump. That ancient code, where you can want a man gone on Monday and salute him come Friday. Try folding that into a training montage. It splits at the seams.

Now flip to the one who needed no superpowers to make a rivalry burn. Kaede Rukawa, Slam Dunk, drifting onto the hardwood in the early 90s with his eyes low like the entire world bored him stiff. Basketball was his only religion. Sakuragi couldn’t stand the sight of him, partly over a girl, mostly over ego, and that friction set the whole squad ablaze.

Here’s the sneaky brilliant part. Both of them pulled on the same jersey. One team. Their competition wasn’t champion against threat, it was two starving teenagers clawing for the same oxygen, shoving each other toward heights neither could touch solo. No strength readings. No planet on the chopping block. Just sweat, wounded pride, and a jump shot dropping clean. Tension bubbled up from inside the huddle, which somehow ran hotter than any galaxy ending showdown ever managed. A sports story pulled that off with nothing but a scoreboard and two hard heads, which is arguably braver than anything with a spaceship.

So what actually shifted?

Shonen’s boom took a rich, tangled notion and ironed it flat into a pattern you could set a watch by. Enemy becomes friend. Friend becomes measuring stick. Everybody levels up on schedule, the arrogant one stews, then bends his knee just enough to link arms for the final boss. Satisfying stuff, I won’t front. That Saiyan pulled it off better than nearly anybody, and his peak moments still land like a freight train, the sacrifice against Majin Buu, a heel who took a hundred episodes to soften. Day ones remember exactly where they sat.

Doing a thing beautifully and inventing it are two separate acts. He polished a narrow cut of the concept and never fathered it.

What quietly died when the pattern hardened was range. Aznable’s version was political. Dessler’s was moral. Rukawa’s was raw competitive fire between two boys who couldn’t share a room yet needed each other badly. Not one of them leaned on a power ranking to carry weight. Their arrogance sprang from somewhere real, meant something, cost something back.

This whole medium had already wrestled the heavy questions to the ground. Why do prideful men throw down? What price does respect carry? Can you salute somebody while trying to erase them? Those stories trusted the audience to sit in the discomfort without a number crawling across the screen to translate it.

The prince stays a classic, no argument. Love him loud, no shame in it. Just quit slipping him the deed to a house other builders raised brick by patient brick, decades before his hair ever flashed gold. Proud challengers were walking around fully alive and gloriously complicated long before that smirk calcified into a genre rule. We simply quit looking back far enough to catch it.

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.

A marine biologist named Stephen Hillenburg cooked up SpongeBob, and it hit screens in 1999. Bikini Bottom just flat out refuses to follow normal rules, and nobody living there seems the least bit bothered. Fire burns fine underwater. Sandy the squirrel walks around in a diving suit and everybody treats it like ordinary Tuesday business. None of it makes a lick of sense, which was the whole idea. Hillenburg spent real years studying the ocean before he ever picked up a pencil, and you can tell. His made up sea somehow feels lived in.

What sneaks up on you is how much of the comedy grows out of work. Half the show plays out at a fast food counter. You’ve got a boss so cheap he’d charge you rent on the air near his register. His star employee, though, treats flipping burgers like a calling, which drives their coworker Squidward slowly out of his mind. Meanwhile the competition is a guy the size of a thumbtack, dead certain that one stolen recipe stands between him and the life he deserves. Take away the water and it’s just people worn down by work, chasing things, putting up with folks they never chose. Adults heard those jokes one way. The young ones heard them another. That second layer is a big chunk of why the thing lasted.

Now flip the channel in your memory to Dimmsdale.

The Fairly OddParents came from Butch Hartman, and there’s a wrinkle worth noting. The kid actually reached the screen before SpongeBob did. His scrappy shorts turned up on Oh Yeah! Cartoons back in 1998, a full year ahead of Bikini Bottom opening its doors, though he wouldn’t claim his own half hour slot until 2001. Timmy Turner is ten, ignored by parents who love him in a distracted sort of way, and terrorized by a red haired babysitter named Vicky who rules his house like a warden. Into that gap float Cosmo and Wanda, magical guardians who grant almost any desire the boy can dream up.

Where the sponge’s saga mines the grind of adulthood, Turner’s tale lives entirely inside the fantasy of being small and powerless. Every episode is a pressure valve for childhood frustration. Bad grade? Wish it away. Bully getting loud? Poof, problem solved. The genius sits in the catch. There’s a rulebook, Da Rules, and it exists purely to make sure each wish curdles into a mess. You cannot manufacture true love. Fairies cannot directly maim or kill people. And whatever the kid conjures always spirals into a lesson he’d rather skip.

That structure tells you everything about the split. One cartoon asks you to laugh at the absurd machinery of the working world. The other hands you the keys to omnipotence, then quietly teaches you why unchecked wanting rarely ends clean. Both are moral in their bones. They just preach from opposite pulpits.

Look at the texture, too. Hillenburg’s ocean is soft and painterly, a little grimy, alive with strange organic shapes and a jazz and sea shanty soundtrack that feels older than the audience. Hartman’s Dimmsdale is sharp, flat, loud, built from bold outlines and primary colors, humming with the frantic buzz of a grade schooler bouncing off the walls after too much cereal. You could mute either and still know which universe you’d wandered into inside three seconds.

Even the pacing splits them. Bikini Bottom often slows down and marinates in a single stupid moment until it becomes hypnotic. That famous shot of the sponge scrubbing while the narrator drones about time passing? Pure patience as a punchline. Dimmsdale, by contrast, sprints. Setup, wish, catastrophe, reset, all before you can catch your breath. Hartman built a machine for velocity. The marine biologist built a mood.

This is where I tip my hat to what the network was pulling off back then. Early 2000s Nick wasn’t chasing a single flavor of funny. It was betting on range. You could roll out of bed and watch a fry cook find spiritual meaning in a spatula, then turn around an hour later and see a lonely ten year old accidentally destroy his town with a careless thought. Neither approach apologized for itself or tried to mimic its rival.

That confidence mattered. A lot of channels pick a lane and flog it into the ground. Nick, in its prime, understood that being young contains multitudes. Little ones are surreal philosophers, then turn into raw balls of want a breath later. The biologist spoke to the first mode. The animator spoke to the second. Put them side by side and you’ve pretty much got the whole feeling of being a kid, back when the adults ran everything and mostly missed whatever was rattling around in your head.

Both franchises got milked long past the point they should have quit, and the reason is plain enough. When something taps a real vein, executives keep drilling long after the well goes dry. Purists argue the fry cook lost his soul after his creator first stepped back, and plenty of folks felt Turner’s adventures overstayed their welcome too. Fair criticism, all of it. Still, go back to those first few seasons of either one and they hold up. Two cartoons chasing totally opposite notions of what counts as funny, parked under the same roof, both landing. That is not nothing.

I catch myself missing that whenever I sit through a lot of what’s out now. Too much of it feels ground down into mush, scared to pick a lane or say anything with a pulse behind it. Back then two very different minds were handed room to be strange in their own directions, and Nick had the nerve to platform both without forcing them to rhyme. The undersea tale dug into adult drudgery through the eyes of a creature too pure to notice how bleak his gig really is. Timmy’s world, meanwhile, mapped the fantasy of childhood escape and gently reminded us that getting everything you want is its own kind of trap.

Neither is better. That was never the question worth asking. They’re two answers to the same riddle of how you make a kid laugh while slipping something real under the door. Put a fry cook at one end and a starry eyed boy at the far side, and you’ve drawn the full width of what that beloved network could be when it trusted its own imagination.

And honestly? Both of them still hit. Throw on an old episode of either and watch how fast the years fall off your shoulders. That’s the mark of the good stuff. It waits for you, patient as the tide, ready to pull you right back under.

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.

Katsuhiro Otomo put out Akira in 1988 and pretty much wrote the book on animated dread. He set it in a Neo-Tokyo raised up on the ashes of a city a catastrophic explosion had erased, so Japan’s whole nuclear nightmare sat right there in the backdrop. The story kept poking the same ugly nerve. What happens once our reach gets way out ahead of our judgment? Mamoru Oshii turned up seven years behind him with Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and his Major Kusanagi spent the runtime unsure whether any soul was still left inside a mass-produced body wired into the net. Think about the timing on that. Regular folks were out here cussing at a dial up modem, while this movie already had its teeth in what your online self amounts to, whether a hacked memory still belongs to you, where the human ends and the code kicks in.

That was the assignment back then. Look forward. Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain, Steins;Gate, Ergo Proxy, Evangelion. Even the giant robot joints carried heft, because the machine always doubled as a question about the boy strapped inside it. These stories chewed on cities and circuits and deep space and the bomb. They treated what’s coming like a place worth fighting over.

Now flip on a seasonal lineup and count how many series open with some tired office worker getting flattened by a truck.

Truck-kun, the fanbase calls him. Patron saint of the reset button. He rolls up, does his job, and our hero wakes reincarnated in a swords and sorcery realm holding cheat-level abilities, a swelling crowd of adoring companions, and a demon lord to slap around. This is isekai, “another world” in Japanese, and across the last decade it went from a rare novelty to the beast devouring the schedule whole.

Look at the count and it gets silly. One industry analysis found that for something like two decades the genre barely showed up, maybe zero to four new titles in a given year. It hit fourteen by 2019, dropped back to eight in pandemic-hit 2020, and after that the thing just went nuts. Twenty six in 2021, twenty three a year later, thirty three by 2023. Then a fat thirty four in 2024, the year this other world stuff swelled into roughly fifteen percent of all the fresh television anime Japan put out. Sit with this one. More than half of every otherworld title counted in that analysis arrived after 2020. Not stacked up over four patient decades. Dumped on us inside a handful of years.

Why? Follow the money, same as it ever was. Making original animation is pricey and flat out scary for the people signing checks. So studios and publishers keep returning to a content mine that already proved it could build an audience. Amateurs post serialized stories on a site called Shosetsuka ni Narou, or Let’s Become a Novelist, where popular works can arrive with readers already waiting. Publishers scoop up the ones that catch fire, turn them into light novels and manga, and some eventually make the jump to animation. By 2026, more than 200 anime projects had come from works posted on Narou alone. KADOKAWA itself later admitted the business had leaned too hard on familiar winners, pointing to a bias toward Narou and isekai properties that helped create market saturation and left less room for originality.

Then wrap the business case in something warmer. These shows peddle comfort. The lead is usually a burnout, a shut in, a kid who got stepped on, somebody life forgot. He dies ordinary and wakes chosen. No shock that grinding adults eat it up, especially during lockdown stretches when everybody wanted a soft spot to duck into. I get the pull. Honestly. Ain’t nothing wrong with a warm blanket after a brutal week.

But here comes my gripe, and it is a Blerd gripe to the core.

The old masters used their craft to squint hard at what waits ahead and warn us. This new wave mostly uses it to bounce. One lineage asked where humanity is headed. The other asks how quick can I ditch this planet for a pretend realm where I finally stand as the baddest cat in the room.

Not every last drop of it is hollow, mind you. Mushoku Tensei caught real smoke for its main character early, yet it earned respect from plenty of viewers for actually letting a broken man grow up. Re:Zero runs its lead through a meat grinder of trauma and fallout. Every so often somebody bends the familiar frame toward something true. Make believe was never the villain either. The atomic dread of those classics was its own flavor of flight, and the mecha stuff always packed a little wish fulfillment. Nobody is pretending the golden age was spotless.

The rub is sheer volume. When a single lane swallows around fifteen percent of everything, the neighboring lanes start fighting harder for room. High concept science fiction slowed to a drip while the reincarnation assembly belt ran three shifts a day. Where is this generation’s Ghost in the Shell, wrestling with what synthetic minds mean now that we went and actually built them? Right now we are living smack inside the questions those elder films only dreamed. The face scanners are already watching. Chatbots fake a soul convincingly enough to spook your grandma. And the fight over what a body even is anymore runs hot every day. The moment is begging for bold speculative storytelling, and a giant slab of the business answered by mailing everybody to fantasy medieval Europe with a floating status screen attached.

Maybe the tide turns. Fans have been grumbling louder about the same tale showing up on loop, and even major industry players have admitted that leaning too hard on familiar formulas can squeeze the life out of originality. Better still, Science SARU brought Ghost in the Shell back to television in July, becoming the first studio other than Production I.G to animate a Ghost in the Shell series across the franchise’s roughly three decades on screen. The old dog got let off the porch again, which tells you somebody upstairs still trusts that a hard look at what’s coming can move units.

I hope they are right. Because this art form handed me my earliest vision of what might be waiting for all of us, ugly and dazzling and painfully human. It taught a kid on the couch to lift his eyes and look outward. I would love the next kid to get more than a truck, a cheat code, and a one way ticket clean out of reality. Hand them a mirror aimed at the horizon instead. That is what this whole thing was made to do.

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.

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.