After DC’s epic announcement last Tuesday, speculation is running hot and heavy on what these 52 new #1 issues are going to be. We don’t know them all yet, but DC has just released a few details on eleven of them! I am pleasantly surprised to say I am excited for every single one of these, and come September, my wallet is going to feel the pinch. The news originates from DC’s own Source blog. Check them out, and I’ll share my thoughts after each one.
The Flash #1: Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato
This is pretty cool. Francis Manapual is a fantastic artist, and he gets to debut his writing style on a character he’s truly familiar with. It’s interesting that Geoff Johns isn’t writing the Flash, but I am going to check this out regardless.
Green Arrow #1: JT Krul & Dan Jurgens
To be completely honest, this is probably the book I’m looking forward to the least. Nothing against JT Krul, but his Green Arrow just doesn’t do it for me, and I’m not sure if a reboot is going to change that.
The Fury of Firestorm #1: Gail Simone & Ethan Van Sciver
By contrast, this is the book I am most excited for. I am not a huge fan of Van Sciver, but Gail Simone is one of my favorite writers, and I will admit that the cover has my interest piqued. Are both Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch a Firestorm that can then fused into a singular hero? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Justice League #1: Geoff Johns & Jim Lee
This is the one we’ve known about since the big announcement. I’m sure it’ll be great and all. I like my Justice League to have the heavy hitters in it. It’s very interesting that this is the leadoff book, though. Is it significant story-wise, or is it simply a way to show off the new status quo? Either way, it’s on my radar.
Wonder Woman #1: Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang
Wonder Woman has had a rough time as of late, what with costume controversies and failed TV pilots. A fresh start for her can’t be anything but helpful. Getting Azzarello and Chang to do it though? Brilliant.
Aquaman #1: Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis
Speaking of characters who’ve had a rough time, Aquaman is way up there. With Johns writing him, I think he has a fair shake this time out. While I don’t think he’ll ever stop being the butt of jokes, I am definitely going to give this a shot. If Johns gives Aquaman the catchphrase of “Outrageous!” from the Brave and the Bold cartoon, all the better.
Justice League International #1: Dan Jurgens and Aaron Lopresti
This is another highly anticipated book for me. Justice League: Generation Lost proved that you can put these characters together, tell a good story, and not make them the laughing stocks of the DCU. I’m hoping this book continues that trend, but I’m wondering why Blue Beetle isn’t with this group (Maybe a new solo book, please oh please?).
Mister Terrific #1: Eric Wallace & Roger Robinson
Now this is a surprise! I never in a million years would have thought that DC would give Mr. Terrific his own series. I love this character, and I am happy DC is giving him a shot at a solo series. I’m not terribly familar with the creative team, but that’s not a detriment to me picking up the book.
The Savage Hawkman #1: Tony Daniel & Philip Tan
This one is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s in the “Wow, this could be cool!” way or the “Oh man, check out the train wreck!” way. I’ve never been a huge Hawkman fan, but I like what has been done with the character recently, I hope this version stays true to that.
Captain Atom #1: JT Krul & Freddie Williams II
Captain Atom is another character I’ve never really been in to, but his characterization in Justice League: Generation Lost was pretty great. He was always wondering if he even has the right to call himself human any more. It seems this new series is taking that concept and running with it. Color me curious.
DC Universe Presents #1: Paul Jenkins & Bernard Chang
Finally, we have DC’s newest attempt at an anthology title. Anthologies can be amazing when done well, but most of the time, they aren’t. I have high hopes for this one. Aside from Deadman there, who knows which characters will show up, but I’m sure it’ll be a wild ride.
And there you have it, a taste of what’s in store from DC in September. I like them. It goes to show that DC is taking this line-wide relaunch very seriously, and they seem to have the talent to back it up. What say you, fellow roboteers?
After the impressive (most impressive) success of last year’s Empire-themed Star Wars Celebration V, we are thrilled to announce that the biggest party this side of the galaxy, Star Wars Celebration VI is setting down August 23-26, 2012 back at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida!
Tickets and hotels are available now.
I’m a little sad to see it on the East Coast again. We need it out west, but I’m hoping for a Celebration VII for that.
I just don’t understand the allure of Florida at all, doubly so in the middle of the hot season. And as much as I want it sooner, I’m surprised it’s coming in 2012 instead of 2013, for the 30th anniversary of Return of the Jedi. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. I’ll be there.
This year is definitely the year of the comic book movie. We’ve already had Thor, X-Men First Class opens in a couple of days, but the one I am most eagerly anticipating opens later this month, Green Lantern. The reason I’m anticipating this is because it’s just about damn time that DC makes a movie that isn’t Superman or Batman. It could be great, and it could be a disaster. I previously featured a space-based GL, but the Green Lantern Corps also has a bunch of earth-based heroes, and that’s who I’ll be featuring this month. The person I’m highlighting today had to wait decades to earn the right to wear the ring, but when he finally got it, he became an unforgettable character. I’m proud to present to you the Secret Origin of Guy Gardner!
Guy’s origin actually ends up being heavily tied into Hal Jordan’s, so consider this a two-fer. Our tale begins with Hal Jordan, Earth’s Green Lantern being summoned to Oa for, no kidding, a two-day seminar on “the higher techniques of the Guardians”. They probably just wanted to sell him a time-share in the western spiral arm of the galaxy or something. The Guardians eventually show Hal a machine which stores data from brains taken after death, because why not? The blue short-stacks say that they happen to have the last moments of Abin Sur, Hal’s predecessor in the machine and ask the Emerald Crusader if he’d like to watch. Hal is apparently full of morbid curiosity, because he is all for it, even though he was you know, there when Abin died.
You may have heard this story before, so forgive me for rehashing. Abin Sur is in his death throes on Earth, he beseeches his ring to find a suitable replacement for him, someone who is honest and completely fearless! The ring criss-crosses the planet at light speed and then the results are in, and here’s what you didn’t see the first time!
From the look on Abin’s face, I think the ring may not really understand the concept of fearlessness.
Yes, not only does the ring know there are two worthy candidates, it also knows enough about Earth to be cognizant of state lines! Since Abin is about to croak, he picks Hal due to him being closer. I guess that makes sense. When you’re desperate and dying, you’re not really going to have time to make an informed decision. So Hal’s origin plays out… Abin’s ring brings Hal, flight simulator and all, there’s a hasty explanation as to what the ring does and how to use it, and then Abin dies. I’m not trying to make light of it, it’s just that I am about to tell you the exact same thing in a minute…
And so, with Hal and the Guardians having seen his origin play out, with that one new detail, GL wonders what things would have been like if Guy had been chosen rather than he. The Guardians have an app for that, though. They tell the machine to show the ‘What If” scenario and so, we (and Guy) are taken back to Abin’s ship…
Guy Gardner, master of the obvious and not afraid to wear loafers with a tank top.
Guy starts his career as a Green Lantern with a bit of a shaky start. He attempts to fly, but fails until he realizes that he has to use his willpower to get that doohickey on his finger to work. Seriously, you’d think Abin would have given him a tiny bit more instruction that “Use this ring”. He quickly gets the hang of it, and is exhilarated by the sensation of flight. He practices a bit more, and we then have a quick cut to Guy’s civilian life, where we see what kind of person he really is…
"Yes, while in this gym full of sweaty young boys I must conceal my thoughts.. of being a Green Lantern!"
Finally, Guy has the gumption to go on his first case as a GL, tackling some saboteurs. It’s a pretty one-sided battle. Guy does a pretty good George Reeves impersonation by straight up crashing through the wall and shielding himself against the criminals bullets. They even call him another Superman. As the battle goes on though, we find that Guy’s tactics are all his own…
"Smell my words and hear my breath, wimpy thug person, eat my ringed fist!"
The battle over, the What If machine goes into montage mode, showing Guy’s career closely paralleling Hal’s facing the same trials and tribulations, and even making the same enemies, such as Sinestro and Black Hand. Things might have continued this way, but Hal notices that Guy takes an alternate route back to Earth (those intergalactic tolls are killer). Because of this, Guy finds himself on a planet Hal never went to, mainly because the denizens of said planet attacked him. It plays out like something out of the original Star Trek, you see, he’s attacked by a couple of robots, and they explain the situation on this world and…
Guy probably is feeling like a kid in a candy store at this point.
The robots go on to explain that the adults were wiped out by the “Yellow Plague”, which if you know anything about the GL mythos is probably anything but good for our Carrot-topped Crime Buster! Anyway, it seem the kids, being bored as all hell, being stuck as kids with no Pokémon to play, split into two camps and started an endless series of War Games. Guy makes it his mission to interfere, since “They don’t know war and destruction are evil!” Which I guess is noble, but war games and actual war are a far cry from each other, but well, whatever. Before he can get started, the Blue army uses their powers to overwhelm Guy’s will to their own ends.
“Too Clear, that’s why I just repeated what he said in my own words!”
Thankfully, GL doesn’t have to go kill a bunch of kids, just their bird-like war machine. Guy makes short work of it, so the Blue Army uses their pawn for greater and greater attacks, until finally they order him to take the fight to the Orangemen directly. Well, there is one more mechanical monstrosity to overcome…
"Yessir! It'd be even a bigger mess than being mind-controlled by a bunch of pre-pubescent war mongers!"
Of course Guy is once again victorious, and he’s about to slaughter a bunch of ageless children. Thankfully due to common decency (and the Comics Code), the Orange Army also has the ability to control Guy mentally. Now, with two mental armies fighting over his oh so human mind, Guy is at his wits’ end. The opposing forces threaten to tear his brain apart until he decides to muster every last iota of will he has! Why he didn’t do this before is anyone’s guess, but the ploy works, and we get what may be the first instance of a Green Lantern using his ring to bolster defenses in an iconic way…
Galvanized by his new armored sheath, Guy pretty much instantly ends the war by saying “Don’t fight!” The collected Gheranians decide to stop their wars, and thanks the some creative ring-slinging, the kids are able to age again, so they can grow up to be adult warmongers so everything is wrapped up nicely. The even create a new world flag combining their dual colors of orange and blue, which goes to show you: kids are infinitely adaptable, but they have a lousy sense of design. With that, Guy flies back to Earth to charge his ring, and in this alternate version of events, he even gets his own unique Green Lantern Oath!
Even back then, Guy was all about "Might makes Right".
Now, the story wraps up nicely, you’d think everything is all happy sappy, and alternate reality Guy would have a long and storied career as Earth’s Green Lantern. You, my friend, would be wrong. You see, back in the Silver Age, when someone was shown to “replace” the main hero the powers that be felt they needed to re-iterate that the original is always the best, so as soon as Guy is done charging his ring, he find he has “Yellow Fever”, that is to say, the same disease that wiped out all the adults on Ghera! While this probably also means he doomed an entire planet of kids to die as soon as their voice cracks, the more immediate concern is that Guy himself is dying. He does the Abin Sur bit and wills his ring to find one suitable to carry on for him, and who else does the ring find but… Hal freaking Jordan.
"In blackest day or brightest night, watermelon, cantaloupe, yadda yadda, superstitious cowardly lot, with liberty and justice for all!"
With that, the Guardian’s “What If” machine shuts down, and “proving” that Hal was fated to be GL one way or another. Knowing how manipulative the Guardians are, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just manufactured the whole scenario to inflate Hal’s already massive ego. At any rate, Hal returns to Earth and just because he’s such a stand-up kind of guy, he decides to meet the real Guy Gardner to I dunno, rub his face in it?
"I can't tell him because that'd make me a halfway decent person!"
And sadly, Guy wasn’t done getting screwed over. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of how he almost gets to become GL again! Even when he did finally become a full-fledged Green Lantern, 18 years after his debut, he was saddled with some brain damage that made him an absolute jerk. After that, he started wielding a yellow ring (years before the Sinestro Corps), became a living alien weapon for a few years, got royally screwed over by the 90’s, and finally became a GL again with all of that baggage thankfully thrown away. These days, you can see him monthly in Green Lantern Corps, but who knows what his status will be after this supposed DC Reboot?
This story originally appeared in Green Lantern Vol 2. #59, March 1968. It hasn’t been reprinted to my knowledge, but is available digitally.
Let me start off by saying that I’ve believed this movie could be good since day one. Bryan Singer has never faltered for me in the X-Universe on film and he’s got story and producing credit on this film. And with Matthew Vaughn (from Kick-Ass and Stardust) in the director’s chair, I’ve put a lot of faith in the fact that this movie will turn out much better than the last two film forays into the world of the X-Men.
Then the marketing campaign started and everyone started writing this movie off as terrible. A lot of people don’t understand (or don’t care to understand) that the marketing department at FOX has NEVER known what to do with these films and are a completely separate department from the filmmakers. Vaughn and Singer aren’t exactly cutting trailers and designing posters. And while these horrible marketing missteps did lessen my faith just a bit, I never thought this would be a bad movie. Maybe it would look a little silly, maybe it wouldn’t be as good as the first two X-Men movies (the ONLY X-Men movies….)
I thought we’d get a pretty good movie out of this at best. Boy was I wrong. We got a phenomenal, incredible movie out of this.
X-Men: First Class is the X-Men sequel I’ve been holding my breath for since X2 came out. The more I chew on it, the more I think it’s as good as that film. In fact, as much as I loved Thor, I MIGHT have liked this one better. I’ll need to see it again to be sure, but it begs to be watched again. In fact, I’m buying tickets to see it at least twice more. It was incredible.
This film has a very, very tight screenplay that is constructed in such a careful way that Clang! Boom! Steam! and I left the theatre and were literally marveling at it for hours, talking about how each nook and cranny of it was so tight and efficient. Yes, the story is good and the screenwriting was great, but the direction proves that Matthew Vaughn might just be the better director amongst X-Men filmmakers. He brings the story to life with an economy and speed that sucks energy from you (in a good way) and leaves you breathless. This film was 132 minutes long but didn’t feel like a minute over 90.
And I have to say: the cast was perfect. I had reservations about seeing a younger Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr and their origins (it’s not something I’ve read much of in any of the comics) but it serves this story and the film X-Universe so well that I couldn’t argue. They completely offered new depth to a host of characters I thought I new and showed me things I simply didn’t know about them or expect. And they did something I didn’t think was possible for a lifetime fan of the X-Men: they showed me something fresh and new with the relationship between Charles and Erik. The First Class team was completely appropriate and they kicked a lot of ass. I never thought Banshee would be so cool on screen, and they knocked Beast out of the park. (Particularly with all of the Robert Louis Stevenson subtext with him… And Frankenstein with Magneto… It was all so literary, but also never pretentious.)
And the style of this film is so wonderful that words can barely describe: This feels like a cross between a James Bond film (the music sounded like Bond music without 007’s trademark theme and there were shots of Magento straight out of Goldfinger) and an X-Men movie (X2, actually, since that one was the best.) There were nods in the cinematography and style to the other X-films, echoing conversations between the main players, motifs (like Chess) were brought back, but never obtrusively or inappropriately. And the villain? Wow…
Let’s talk about the villain. Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw is so ruthless and scary I couldn’t even believe it. His first scene in the film is as good as the opening scene in Inglorious Basterds and has very much the same tenor to it. His evil schemes were brilliant and everything worked about him. I’m completely okay that they took some liberties with The Hellfire Club and his character, because this worked so much better.
Emma Frost is something else to talk about. January Jones played Emma Frost in a way only January Jones could. And they minimized her part accordingly. All of her interactions were appropriate for the film and since everything else was so good I gave her a pass on this one.
The star making parts, though, went to James MacAvoy and Michael Fassbender. They were incredible in this film and their relationship was heartbreaking, even coming close to drawing tears to my eyes. Twice. There’s a fascination they have with each other, and they feed off of each other, proving that neither could exist without the other in the most tragic of ways. Seriously, the climax of this film isn’t dealing with Sebastian Shaw, that’s long settled before the real climax, and that’s the confrontation between Charles and Erik. It’s beautiful. It was an excellent story, well told.
And I wouldn’t be opposed to them throwing Daniel Craig out of the Bond role and them installing Fassbender. Or he should play a Bond villain. He’s tremendous.
There’s so much more to say about this film but I just don’t want to ruin it. I could spoil all of the cameos (which were amazing!) but I won’t. I will say, though, this film had the single best use of the single F word allowed in a PG-13 film ever. Period. Not a single one of you could possibly disagree with me.
Damnit. More than anything, this film was just fun and exhilarating and goes a long way to elevate the genre of superhero movies into high art. I haven’t seen Captain America yet, but it seems as though Marvel might have three homeruns on their hands this summer.
I know a lot of you are on the fence about this movie, but you shouldn’t even consider skipping it. It’s dynamite and you’ll love it, as long as you can get over being a nerd… I’ve heard some people calling the lineup sacriligeous because it wasn’t the original First Class, but guess what? This isn’t the comic book First Class. This is a prequel to the first two X-Men movies and it couldn’t have been done more beautifully. Ignore the marketing campaign and just go see it. It’s a better movie than you’d think.
It’s a brand spanking new episode of Laser Brain! In this episode (Episode 21 by most accounts) the boys all agree Jimmy shouldn’t get married, we learn that the Rapturedid actually happen, but just to Patrick, so he deemed it the “Pature”. They also read some short stories written by a young handicapped child Tristan, and we are all treated to the usual and hilarious debauchery Nick, Tristan and Patrick bring us with just a touch of Savage Garden.
For months now there has been speculation as to what state the DC Universe will be in after their big summer event, Flashpoint. While all the details have not been released yet, we are getting various reports about some of the big changes. Originally DC had announced that the only DCU title that would be shipping on August 31st would be Flashpoint #5. This was because the ending of Flashpoint is supposed to change the landscape of the DCU pretty drastically. Now USA Today is reporting that one other title will be shipping that day. DC will be re-launching Justice League with a new number one on August 31st with the blockbuster creative team of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee. This version of the Justice League will be bringing the big guns back together. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman will be heading the relaunch of the team.
Justice League will not be the only title getting a new number one issue after Flashpoint. In a bold move DC is going to renumber their entire line and start each title over. There will be over 50 number one issues shipping in September. Jim Lee is also redesigning more than 50 costumes to make them more recognizable to all fans. This is what co-publisher Dan Didio had to say about this move when USA Today asked him about it, “We looked at what was going on in the marketplace and felt we really want to inject new life in our characters and line. This was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today’s audience.”
With that bombshell there was yet one more big announcement today. All of the new, or renumbered, ongoing series DC will be released digitally day and date. This means that every one of their titles will be available to download digitally the same day they are released in comic shops. This is the first time a major publisher has done this.
While I’m sure there will be a lot of whining and complaining because of the renumbering, I see this as a good thing. As an employee at a comic shop the most common question I get is, “I want to try such and such book, where is a good place to start?” I think this will help bring in new readers to a lot of the titles. Books that have large intemidating numbers that make people feel like they have to know years and years of continuity to start reading tend to scare new readers away. Love it or hate it you have to admit this is a very bold move for DC!
Crime noir has been seeing something of a revival in the last couple of years, not necessarily in film, the medium which spawned the genre, but in pop culture in general, with the most recent example being the enormous buzz surrounding the release of the L.A. Noire video game from the makers of the popular Grand Theft Auto series. And in comics too, there seems to be a renewed interest in the genre not seen since the glory days of EC Comics some sixty years ago.
Considering that comics seem to be the perfect medium in which to combine the visual styling of German Expressionism and the narrative tropes of old pulp magazines, both of which had initially informed much of the genre, it seems a little surprising that it was ever absent at all. Except that isn’t entirely true: in Europe, crime, like the western, has always been one of the seemingly ubiquitous genres, as exemplified by the popular Italian series Commissario Spada (1970-1982) and Nick Raider (1988-2005), Spain’s great Torpedo 1936 (1982-2004), and the works of legendary French cartoonist Jacques Tardi (1969 and still going strong).
For a long time, however, American crime comics were few and far between.
They finally experienced a renaissance in the mid-Nineties, following a cultural shift which included the mainstream success of postmodernist neo-noirs like Pulp Fiction and Frank Miller’s Sin City, during which a number of current DC and Marvel writers (from superstars like Brian Bendis and Ed Brubaker to their less illustrious, but no less talented colleagues like David Lapham) kicked off their careers writing (and often illustrating) their own crime stories, and drawing heavily from classic films and genre tropes established decades ago (Bendis even had a character named Lauren Bacall in his 1994 series A.K.A. Goldfish, which, in this reviewer’s opinion, remains the best thing he has ever written).
Since then, the playing field has steadily expanded. Ed Brubaker, who has become a sort of a torch-bearer for the genre, now publishes Criminal, a creator-owned series co-created with old pal Sean Phillips under Marvel’s Icon imprint, and often features essays and reviews of many of the genre’s highlights and under-appreciated gems in the comic’s must-read back pages. For my money, his interlinked stories of down-on-their-luck men and women and the depraved things they do for sex, money and revenge, are the best comic book Marvel is currently publishing.
There are others too: Darwyn Cooke is currently adapting writer Donald Westlake’s Parker novels to comics, to great commercial and critical acclaim. Other crime novelists, like Denise Mina and Ian Rankin, have started writing their own comic books. Tardi is finally being released in the States, courtesy of alternative comics publisher Fantagraphics. The list goes on.
Leading the charge is DC’s Vertigo imprint. Having dabbled in crime on multiple occasions in the past (most notably with Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark’s underrated Scene of the Crime mini-series from 1999), the imprint struck gold in 2000 with the multiple Eisner and Harvey award winning series 100 Bullets, created by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso, which remained their anchor throughout the decade, as they struggled to regain their footing in the absence of a crossover success like Preacher or Sandman.This eventually led to the creation of the Vertigo Crime line (fittingly kicked off by Azzarello’s dark noir tale Filthy Rich), focused entirely on publishing black-and-white graphic novels.
Liar’s Kiss (Top Shelf, $14.95), by Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano, sees another alternative comics publisher throwing their fedora into the mix, and they immediately manage to improve on the Vertigo Crime publishing model by actually mirroring the pricing to the old pulp paperbacks these books were designed to emulate. Call me cheap, but affordability will play a large role in whether graphic novels of this type are able to find, let alone maintain, an audience in the current economy, regardless of the quality of material.
And in this case, the quality is there. The set-up, in which a private detective becomes involved with the wrong dame, is classic noir, and the storytelling techniques on display here, from the hard-boiled dialogue to the narrated flashbacks, are all par for the course. But what’s different is that the characters are actually familiar with detective stories, and get to discuss their clichés, even as they are falling prey to them. Like the leads in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, they know the roles that they are stuck in, and they perform them anyway.
But despite the occasional knowing wink, there is little ironic detachment here, which helps keep up the suspense over the hundred-or-so pages of briskly-paced twists and turns, all culminating in a final revelation which I honestly did not see coming. Skillman, for whom this is a graphic novel debut, walks a fine line between convention and self-awareness, and he does it with grace unbefitting his level of writing experience.
He is aided by a barely more experienced artist in Soriano, whose style here is sometimes uncomfortably reminiscent of Eduardo Risso, but whose storytelling is sound, and helps propel the action in a very cinematic fashion. The gray-scale ink wash technique he employs for flashbacks is much more to my liking, giving past events the softer focus of a memory, while seamlessly integrating them within the stark blacks and whites of the main story.
Noir is the most American film genre, according to Roger Ebert, because no other society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, and I believe we have a rich enough history of it to back that up. I hope this book does well, not only because it’s a great addition to any crime lover’s library, but also because Hollywood has largely abandoned the genre, and I believe our cultural landscape would be a lot poorer if we were to stop trying to find new ways to tell these stories, in whatever form possible.
We here at BSR like to speculate, it’s true. When it comes to Doctor Who, we kind of kick it into overdrive. This time, the latest rumor floating around isn’t ours, but it sure has out collective mouths watering and our geeky, robotic brains firing on all cylinders. According to the IMDb page for the last episode of Series 6, we’re going to have not one, not two, but rather three whole doctors in an adventure together!
Obviously, we’re taking this with a grain of salt seeing as IMDb isn’t exactly the bastion for solid news. It could be great, though. Matt Smith will obviously be there as the 11th Doctor, but the credits also list David Tennant and Peter Davison reprising their roles as the 10th and 5th Doctors respectively.
Multi-Doctor stories are always a treat because given a Time Lord’s long lifespan and the fact that each incarnation of The Doctor has a distinct personality and way of doing things, egos and ideologies will no doubt clash like fish fingers and custard.
The last time we had a multiple Doctor story was in the Children in Need special Time Crash which was a short, but heartfelt meeting of the 5th and 10th Doctors. In it, we get a built in explanation as to why Peter Davison’s Doctor looks older (and a bit chubbier) than he did during his initial run. Given that both Time Crash and the as yet unnamed final episode of this series are both written by showrunner Steven Moffat is also a bit telling. At any rate, as the news unfolds, we’ll keep you posted if this is ever confirmed or debunked. Until then, enjoy watching Time Crash!
POLL: How Excited Are You For ‘X-Men: First Class’?!
With opening day just a few days away, reviews for the anticipated prequel to the X-Men movie franchise are starting to slowly roll in and critics seem to be very pleased with Matthew Vaughn’s foray into the X-Men Universe. FOX has been pushing this film pretty hard by releasing several trailers, tons of movie posters and more recently, featurettes and clips to give the fans a better idea of what to expect with this film.
Here at BSR! the field is pretty split, and excitement levels vary from one side of the spectrum to the other. Arse-bot is still very apprehensive, while Swank-mo-tron has been on board since before the first trailer even hit – with the rest of the bots’ anticipation levels falling everywhere in between.
Now, with opening day just around the corner, we want to know how excited all of you, our faithful readers, are for this film! Cast your vote in the poll below and feel free to leave a comment as to why you are or aren’t stoked to see X-Men: First Class this Friday!
According to Bleeding Cool, Warner Brothers are looking for writers for an upcoming Hawkman movie! Now, you may expect the pitch to be something like “The Mummy” meets “Superman”, but you’d be wrong. Here’s the official logline being bandied about:
Part INDIANA JONES/DA VINCI CODE, part GHOST tentpole about the fictional superhero that appears in D.C. Comic books. He used archaic weaponry and large, artificial wings attached to a harness made of the Nth metal that allows flight. Most incarnations of Hawkman work closely with a partner/romantic interest named Hawkgirl or Hawkwoman in his fight against supervillains. Based on the DC comic.
Brendon at Bleeding Cool speculates that this means that we’d be getting a more modern, earth-based Hawkman rather than a space-faring Hawk-warrior. I tend to agree with his assessment. If DC really wants to create a movie universe similar to Marvel’s they already have the alien thing covered with Green Lantern. A more relatable Hawkman would likely be a better fit. I can actually see the Ghost/Da Vinci thing working if they play up the resurrection/multiple lives angle of the current Hawkman.
One thing is certain, with the way they stress multiple times in the logline that the character will be “based on the DC comic”, no matter what they do with the character, he’ll be treated better than this:
We’ll keep you posted as the story develops. Let us know what you think of a Hawkman movie!
