All-Star Batman and Robin #9 - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara looks at yet another issue of All-Star Batman and Robin. It just gets worse.

http://atopthefourthwall.com

Originally uploaded January 5th, 2015.

ORIGINAL INFO: The issue where everyone in it was huffing paint fumes. Quite literally.

RUMINATIONS: One thing I forgot to mention during the Santa the Barbarian episodes? I had originally planned to do a quick farewell scene between Sierra and Pollo, but I ran out of time with everything else going on, so I had to drop it.

So why All-Star Batman and Robin to open up the year? I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned this before (probably a good reason why these ruminations will be ending relatively soon once we reach the point I was uploading unlisted on youtube), but the Holiday season of October through December is really “Sweeps” for online video, meaning it’s the point where we tend to put out our best, hopefully most-viewed content covering popular topics and the like. Why? Because that’s when revenue is at its highest. The best-paying ads are sent out during this time, which make sense because that’s also when people are buying stuff.

However, once the Holiday season is over, revenue drops like a rock. January is a dead period because no one’s spending any money during this time, so there’s no reason to put out anything that pays well. And unfortunately, during this time even the Holiday season was crappy in 2014, a final middle finger from that year and the final sign to me that I needed to stop using Blip as my primary player. The problem with January being such a crappy return period on revenue is because ad revenue is paid to us 2-3 months after that month… and since April is tax time, we usually only have revenue from January and February to work with for paying off additional taxes… you know, the month with the worst returns and the shortest month of the year? To try to offset it, I decided to do an All-Star Batman and Robin review to open the year, since ASBAR routinely has better numbers than a lot of my other videos. Not sure why, but it does.

The cutaway gag to Batman playing mahjong was not and is never going to be a regular sort of thing. Not that cutaway gags can't be funny, it's just that this was an opportunity that I decided to take advantage of. Will, as stated before, was moving... and he also happens to own a really cool Mahjong table, so when Crazy Steve made the reference to the Joy Luck Club, I decided to just roll with it, with Will's only appearance on the show out-of-costume. I just imagine Pollo uses the travel body to sometimes go to clubs and game nights and whatnot.