Iron Man

The world sure could use some superheroes right about now. Between Hank Pym, Bruce Banner, and Reed Richards, we'd already have a vaccine for COVID-19. Tony Stark could have jump started our economy. And T'Challa, James Rhodes, and Sam Wilson could easily convince Americans that black lives matter.

Every year at the start of the summer movie season, I post a superhero themed gag along with some thoughts on the movies I'm most looking forward to seeing in the movie theaters. I'd drawn this comic long before our world was flipped upside down. There might not be a traditional summer movie preview to post this year, but with hard work and with our hearts in the right place, we can do all the work of Ant-Man, the Hulk, Mr. Fantastic, Iron Man, Black Panther, War Machine, and the Falcon to make this world a better place.*

Today's gag came from faithful reader Elder V.

*Was this sentiment too sappy? I feel I might have gotten a bit too sappy.

1-Up

The world of Mario is a strange one. Among all the oddities of that game, consider this: somehow it is a good idea to bang one's head on bricks hovering slightly over you. The Mario Bros. brains must be so scrambled by now.

Mary Poppins

If one is "practically perfect in every way" does she even bother with New Year resolutions?

Welcome to 2020! We made it through another year! This website is now 11-years-old! This blog has now been active for parts of three decades! How many explanation points can I use in one paragraph?!

If, with the New Year, you've resolved to better improve your Come, Follow Me instruction, then you really should consider subscribing to my newly renamed Come, Follow Me Activity Page Newsletter. Every Friday I email a new activity page that corresponds to the weekly Come, Follow Me lesson--think of it as a spoonful of sugar to help the lesson go down. This year's course of study is the Book of Mormon, so you can be assured that the activity pages are going to be a lot of fun!

Book of Mormon: Dagobah Edition

Let's tackle one of the longest-lasting and persistent Mormon myth out there, shall we? Was Star Wars' Yoda based on President Spencer W. Kimball?

First consider these facts.

1. Yoda was introduced in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. The year 1980 happens to correspond with President Kimball's presidency.
2. One of the quotes that President Kimball is famous for is "do it." One of the quotes that Yoda is famous for is "do or do not, there is no try."
3. President Kimball was a diminutive man with ears that protruded slightly farther from his head than most. Yoda was a diminutive Muppet with giant ears.
   

Given those facts it is understandable that Mormons would so quickly jump onto the theory that Yoda was inspired by President Kimball. Here's the thing, though, no one involved in Empire Strikes Back has ever claimed that to be the case. Instead they credit Albert Einstein (another wise old man) as the inspiration behind Yoda's look.

So while we Mormons can't claim Yoda as one of our own, we can at least take comfort in the fact that he'd most likely like 1 Nephi 3:7.

Snow White

With a name like Dopey, one of the seven dwarfs might have his own problems keeping the Word of Wisdom.

The Candy Man Can't

Willy Wonka: Amazing chocolatier, lousy investigator.

2015 Summer Movie Preview

Tomorrow Avengers: Age of Ultron premières marking the beginning of a very promising summer movie season.* But it’s not the movies I want to see that I want to write about today, instead it’s a movie series I doubt I’ll ever watch.

What is the deal with the Fast and the Furious?

In case you haven’t heard, the seventh Fast and Furious movie, which came out last month, has already made over $1 billion worldwide! It’s now the fifth largest grossing movie of all time! And it’s about a bunch of meatheads who drive cars fast!**

What is wrong with moviegoers? This movie has made more than Raiders of the Lost Ark, more than The Empire Strikes Back, more than The Singles Ward. Again it’s about a bunch of meatheads who drive cars fast!

The thing is, I now wonder if I should watch it. Is it worth my time? And do I have to watch the first six (!) movies in the series before I watch number seven? Surely, some of my readers have seen this movie. I’d love your feedback.

*Here’s the list of movies I’m excited to see this summer (in no particular order): Avengers, Jurassic World, Tommorowland, Inside Out, Ant-Man, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Fantastic Four.

**I imagine every line of dialog in the Fast and Furious movies ends in an explanation point!

Scooby Gang

Zoinks, it's 2015! Thanks for sticking with this website for six years now!

This being New Year's Day and all, I've made a resolution I'd like to share with you: I want to provide more content on this website. So, please tune in tomorrow for a major announcement.

Frozen Baptism

I've highlighted before some of the challenges some of the fairy tale princesses would have joining the Church. I suppose we can add Elsa to that list.

So, Frozen has become this huge, worldwide thing. I imagine every movie studio in Hollywood is studying it trying to figure out how to replicate its success. From the music to the annoying snowman sidekick, we can plan on a lot of imitations in the months and years to come. To me the formula is obvious: add more princesses. After all, most Disney princesses are in a movie by themselves. In Frozen, there were two of them! Disney should follow the lead of its other moneymaking enterprise, Marvel Studios, and combine a whole host of princesses in one Avengers-like movie.

2014 Summer Movie Preview

Even though the unofficial start of summer doesn't begin for another three and a half weeks (Memorial Day) and the official start of summer doesn't begin for another month and a half (summer solstice); in Hollywood, summer starts this weekend! This is the time of year where movies become more loud, dumb, and silly (although discerning movie goers can still find loud, dumb, and silly movies throughout the rest of the year, if they know where to look).

In conjunction with the start of the summer movie season, this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day! And Sunday, May 4th is Star Wars Day (as in "May the 4th be with you"). We know that eventually the meek shall inherit the earth, until then it looks like the geek shall care for it.

So it is with great pain that I confess that I am not looking forward to this summer's cinematic offerings all that much. Perhaps it's because the best summer movie of 2014 came out a month ago* or perhaps it's because I'm growing up (nah), but I doubt I'll get out to the theater more than two or three times this summer.

Please help me out, what should I be excited for?

*I'm referring, of course, to Noah.**

**No, just joking, I just wanted to get a rise out of my good cartooning buddy, Kevin. The best summer movie of 2014 was Captain America 2.

Dorothy's Three Questions

Believe it or not, this is the second Wizard of Oz gag I've done on this blog. If these missionaries' contacts and the sisters' investigator show up to the same Sacrament Meeting, that will make for an uncomfortable seventy minutes.

Middle Earth

Guess what comes out tomorrow? Yep, The Hobbit 2: Peter Jackson's Quest for a Mountain Full of Money.* The only problem with all these awesome, geek-friendly movies these days is that I'm struggling to keep up with them. For example, I only got out to 62.5 percent of the movies I was excited to see this summer--that's barely a passing grade!

*This may not be the actual title--I was too lazy to look it up to be sure.

Whibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey

We here at the Mormon Cartoonist household can hardly wait for Saturday's big Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special. I was first introduced to the Doctor years ago through a combination of my big brother, PBS, and that one guy with the long, long scarf. In those dark days Doctor Who was the only show available that catered to the sci fi, nerd demographic so I put up with it despite it's ridiculous special effects and story lines that played out at the pace of a soap opera.

And then Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered and I no longer had to settle for Doctor Who. Soon, the BBC cancelled Doctor Who, but at that point I'd stopped paying attention. Meanwhile, here in the States, we had Deep Space Nine, X-Files, Lost, and a host of other shows to satisfy our nerd passion.

But at some point, sci fi became less about gathering the whole family together to watch something and more and more adult (contrast the original Battlestar Galactica with the hugely popular remake). This is where Doctor Who returns. When the BBC brought back Doctor Who in 2005, it filled the family-friendly niche in television sci fi that had been missing since the end of Star Trek: Voyager.

Best of all, though, Doctor Who is awesome. It's funny, scary, exciting. It is all things at once. The premise is brilliant: the smartest guy in the room travels anywhere and anytime in his time machine to right wrongs. Check it out--it's worth your time.

Tracting Downton Abbey

I've seen a little Downton Abbey--the British television series shown on Masterpiece Theater on PBS. And while it might be hard to recognize it with all the period clothes and the accents, the show is totally a soap opera! You wait and see, I'm predicting an evil twin will show up in season four!

2013 Summer Movie Preview

This is the post where I celebrate the number of big, mindless movies coming out this summer* as well as remind you that this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day.

When one thinks as much as I do about both Super Heroes and the LDS Church, the thought of which Super Heroes might join the Church naturally comes up. Below is my take on this critical issue:

• Iron Man: No. The guy likes to drink too much to adhere to the Word of Wisdom (arguably his most famous comic book storyline involved Tony Stark's decent into alcoholism).
• Batman: No. While the concept of eternal family would, no doubt, appeal to orphaned Bruce Wayne; candidates must show a little more of a willingness to forgive than Batman would be comfortable with before entering the water's of baptism.
• Shazam: No. Shazam, aka Captain Marvel, aka "The Big Red Cheese" would readily accept the gospel. The only problem is, while Shazam is older than the age of accountability, his alter ego, Billy Batson, is not.
• Captain America: Yes. See last year's post.
• Hellboy**, Ghost Rider, Spawn: Please.
• Thor, Hercules, Wonder Woman: No. They'd find it hard to give up their Norse and Greek Gods seeing as how, um, they are them.

Sadly, the Super Hero world doesn't look ready for the gospel.

*There is a ridiculous number of movies I'm excited for this summer including: Star Trek into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, Lone Ranger, Monsters University, The Wolverine, and World War Z. I'm going to have to start saving money now.

**Or, as we like to call him in our family: Heckboy.

Baptism By Fire

I suspect that the families of Elders Hammer and King are collecting all of their emails with thoughts of publishing them in some sort of anthology of horror short stories.

Vampire Word of Wisdom

October is monster month at Mormon Cartoonist. We'll take a one-week break next week, but otherwise it's all about the scary guys this month.

The last time we saw these two missionaries,* they were teaching Frankenstein and his bride. Now they're teaching Dracula. Just a typical day in the Transylvania Central Mission.

*I'm calling them Elders Hammer and King.

Missionary Work in the Land of Oz

A mission in the Land of Oz would be, I imagine, a frustrating thing. Without a brain, you'd have to teach the Scarecrow even the simplest concepts over and over again. Forget about the Tin Man ever feeling the Spirit--he doesn't have a heart. And any Lion investigators would never show the courage of commitment.

And then there's the Wicked Witch of the West: if anyone in Oz needs the cleansing power of the gospel it's her (what with her likely Munchkin genocide and unnatural primate experimentation). And yet, thanks to her severe allergy to water, baptism will forever be out of the question.

On another topic, General Conference is this weekend. Here's a rundown on all the Mormon Cartoonist resources you can use to keep your little ones (and big ones) with poor attention spans on task:

• A General Conference Activity Packet available to download at sugardoodle.net and ldsclipart.com.
• The LDS Scripture Heroes app includes dozens of scripture heroes from the Standard Works in five different puzzles games.
• The LDS Coloring Book app now includes over a dozen different coloring books covering a number of different topics. It's awesome and will keep your kids busy for hours (you can also print each of the coloring books and color them with crayons and paper, just click on each individual coloring book from the link provided above).
• LDS Laughs isn't much of a resource for anything, but you're more than welcome to downloaded it in preparation of this weekend anyway.

The Unsung Hero of Star Wars

At the end of Revenge of the Sith Yoda, Obi Wan, and Jimmy Smits (from here on out we'll call him Bail Organa) are plotting where to go next. Yoda announces that he and Obi Wan will lay low for a couple of years before rising up and stomping out the Emperor and his regime. Yoda wants nothing to do with Anakin Skywalker's newborn children because a) he figures that by the time they would be of any use of him, he'll have already defeated Palpatine and b) he doesn't expect much from the offspring of Darth Vader anyway. The kids are split up with Organa adopting Leia and Obi Wan returning Luke to Tatooine and the only family the Skywalkers have. Strangely, no one thinks to change Luke's name or even pretend that Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are his biological parents.

Anyway, Yoda and Obi Wan go into hiding and it isn't long before they abandon any hopes they have of overthrowing the Emperor. By the time we met Obi Wan and Yoda in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, they are world weary old men who have given up on any dreams of saving the galaxy. I suspect their funk has something to do with the return of Darth Vader--someone Obi Wan left for dead.

Fortunately for the rebel alliance, Bail Organa did not given up on the cause. He worked tirelessly for 20 years to take Palpatine down and it's his actions that reengage Kenobi and Yoda. At the beginning of Star Wars, Organa has sent his adopted daughter Princess Leia on a mission to recruit Obi Wan while delivering some stolen plans to some of his rebel friends. Had Organa never done this, Kenobi would have been content to remain a strange hermit on Tatooine the remainder of his days, Yoda never would have trained another Jedi on Dagobah, and Luke would have grown up a moisture farmer complaining about the Tosche Station and power converters.

Bail Organa is the unsung hero of the Star Wars series and his reward is being blown up on Alderaan when the Death Star strikes. Sometimes the force isn't fair.

Leprechaun Sighting

For reasons that should become clear, I've moved my St. Patrick's Day gag up a week.