Adrian Pasdar Joins Supergirl as Morgan Edge

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Probably one of the strangest after effects of the 2016 election has been the direction taken by CW’s Supergirl.  While the show had previously had a political subtext as a series about immigration, refugees, illegal aliens, and government operations must, season 2 became infinitely more overtly a political allegory.  Even though the show never bothered adding a direct Trump allegory it very much became a show about confronting the ugly and bigoted attitudes that’ve come to infect American life in the late 2010s. 

So far it’s been unclear if the new season will walk a similar path and while I’m sure they’ll dial things back a bit as they refocus on a new bad guy I also don’t think they can really un-ring that bell.  For better or worse Supergirl IS the superhero politics show now the same way Captain America is the superhero politics movie franchise.  Now, as the new season looms, the shape of that new era seems to be forming as season 3 adds a new villain in the form of Morgan Edge, played by Adrian Pasdar.

Will Luthor Join the Justice League?

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Recently, it’s been announced that in addition to the 7 Leaguers and the villain Steppenwolf, 2017’s Justice League film will feature Lex Luthor.  That actually makes a lot of sense, even if the idea never really occurred to anyone before the announcement.  Technically speaking Justice League will form the third leg of Zack Snyder’s DC trilogy so it makes sense he’d bring back Luthor from Dawn of Justice to really close things off.  What’s more, Luthor’s vague connection to the New Gods in that film, as suggested by his closing monolog, means he’s the only human currently on Earth with any knowledge of the infinitely powerful celestial beings.  

I’m not sure if he’ll end up in his classic green and purple power armor or if he’ll just be on hand for information but outwardly there’s enough there to justify this choice.  However, things are a little strange with Lex Luthor, especially lately and especially in the comics.  There’s been a trend with him recently towards heroism that has me wondering: will Lex Luthor join the Justice League? 

7 Cameos to Expect in Wonder Woman

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So far, the DCEU has been pretty terrible.  Even if you liked Man of Steel or Suicide Squad for some ungodly reason, there’s no denying that WB has had a serious problem tapping into the same level of mass popularity Marvel has mustered.  By the same token, the DCEU has come off a lot more scattershot than the competition, with the slow march towards Justice League hampered by the producers regularly hitting the restart button on what the big story should be.  

That means that Wonder Woman will have yet another thankless task in addition to being the first woman-led superhero film of the modern era and needing to turn around the DCEU trend of making terrible movies.  Now, Wonder Woman will also have to be setting pieces in motion for future films like Shazam, Justice League, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman 2.  Given that, I’ve come up with a list of 7 character cameos that I think we can expect from Wonder Woman. 

Panel Vision - Medicine Soldiers

At the time of writing the US is paying witness to one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice and corruptions of the legal system we’ve seen in quite some time.  I’m referring of course to the native water protectors at Standing Rock facing down the corporate machinery and military police of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  

If you’re unfamiliar with the details, an oil pipeline was deemed too dangerous to go through the Dakota capital of Bismarck and so has been rerouted through native lands of the Sioux people against their will. 

Rather than just let a soulless corporation steal their land and poison their resources the Sioux have taken to non-violently blocking construction.  In response, authorities have responded with near deadly force- spraying protestors with freezing water and even shooting a woman’s arm off with rubber bullets.  

The whole thing is an absolute cluster and here are some links if you want to give support to the protesters, but we’re here to talk about comics.  Specifically, the entire situation reminded me of the comic that first got me interested in Native Rights, one of the best Batman stories of the modern era- Medicine Soldiers. 

Dichen Lachman Cast as Roulette in Supergirl S2

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One of the interesting things about Supergirl is that they’ve done a good job of introducing villainous super women to compliment all their heroic women.  Woman super villains are actually still a pretty major rarity in the world of superheroes and especially in comic book adaptations.  I mean, across the vast gulf of superhero movies we’ve had since Superman in 1978 there are only about five female villains of note in the entire run.  What's more, a good chunk of those women are henchwomen like Ursa from Superman 2, Faora from Man of Steel, Mystique from X-Men 1 and 2, or Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Meanwhile, Supergirl featured General Astra as its main antagonist along with classic Superman foes like Livewire and Silver Banshee plus some more obscure woman counterparts to Superman foes like Indigo instead of Brainiac and Bizarro Supergirl.  Now, the show adds another woman villain and one of the truly vile and the villainous master criminals of that niche genre- Roulette, played by Dichen Lachman.

Film Land - The Future of DC Films

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Edited by Robert Beach

There’s no denying that the comic book superhero is the dominant culture myth of the 2010s.  Ever since the double-barreled blast of greatness that 2008’s Iron Man and Dark Knight the genre has risen to greater and greater heights, dominating the foreign and domestic box office, making a massive mark on the national psyche, and making name heroes out of obscurities like Ant-Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy.  All of this makes it even more bizarre that WB, the people who own DC Comics and thus half of the entire collection of viable superhero properties, have had such a difficult time turning their huge library of IP into quality films or solvent blockbusters. 

For whatever reason, WB has yet to turn out a good superhero film this decade, instead handing in a series of embarrassing failures like Green Lantern, Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, and most recently Batman v. Superman.  Things seem to be changing however as WB has recently released a whole sweep of information about their plans for the rest of the decade.  Could this single an end to years of failure and the beginning of a DC movieverse to rival Marvel?  Let’s see. 

Comics Rainbow - Invasion!

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So, this Friday marks the premiere of Independence Day: Resurgence and the return of the seminal alien invasion film to the big screen.  It’s a pretty major event, both as a major summer blockbuster and as an indicator of the growing force of nostalgia for the ‘90s.  We’ll see if the Independence Day lightning can really strike twice but for right now let’s talk about alien invasions in comics.  

The alien invasion is the perfect set-up for the world of the superhero and while both DC and Marvel have thrown together an impressive array of alien takeovers, today we focus on those from DC comics.  There’s no real reason I’m emphasizing DC, they’re just the company I’m most familiar with.  DC has a vast history of alien invasions, some of them amazing, some mediocre, and some absolutely terrible and today we’re going to get the full spectrum on all of them.

10 DC Characters Willem Dafoe Could Play in Justice League

Edited by Robert Beach 

We are a year and a few months away from WB/DC’s latest answer to the Avengers: 2017’s Justice League movie. Your level of excitement for that fact may vary based on whether or not you saw the slow-motion train wreck that was Batman v. Superman. Yes, in the wake of WB’s blockbuster debacle, attitudes seem to be shifting around the second biggest superhero team-up ever attempted as Justice League is looking less and less like an assemblage of Earth’s greatest heroes and simply another chance for Zack Snyder and the boneheads at WB and DC entertainment to get everything wrong.

It’s hard to argue against that particular philosophy given we’ve seen this guy’s god awful handiwork twice in a row now, but a year is still a long time with plenty of chances for things to improve.  Case in point, Justice League has now officially cast Oscar-winner Willem Dafoe in a mystery role. Dafoe has stated his role’s a hero, but anything is possible this early on. With that in mind, let’s make some guesses as to who the former Green Goblin might be playing. 

Suicide Squad Trailer 2

This is going to be an odd year for superhero films.  Previous years have been defined by major throwdowns like Dark Knight Rises against Avengers or attempts from smaller studios to reassert dominance like X-Men: Days of Future Past or Amazing Spider-Man 2.  This year, we’ve still got some of that, in particular this is the year Batman v. Superman will go toe-to-toe with Captain America: Civil War, but there’s way more weirdness and offbeat entries this year.  In February we’ll be seeing Fox take a chance on Internet love with Deadpool, a movie that only got made thanks to the positive response to a leaked trailer.  Then in November Marvel will throw its hat into the fantasy arena with Dr. Strange. 

And in August DC makes its first attempt to implement this whole “movie universe” approach with Suicide Squad, about a team of super villains conscripted by the government for high risk missions.  Even amongst all the other weirdness Suicide Squad has been the odd man out, mainly thanks to a very bizarre marketing campaign that followed up the first, and pretty interesting, trailer with a ton of images that made the movie look both gritty and ridiculous.  Now we’ve got a second trailer and the film looks…well it still looks gritty and ridiculous but now in the best way possible.

Panel Vision - Legends

In March 1986 DC Comics would change the course of the comic book medium and superhero genre forever in the conclusion to their major event comic Crisis On Infinite Earths.  The conclusion featured the first ever universe reboot and a line wide relaunch, essentially allowing the company to start over from scratch after nearly 20 years of continuity.  It was a risky move in a long history of risky moves DC had been making throughout the late Silver Age such as launching numerous non-superhero comics, selling their merchandising rights to Kenner toys, and launching the Superman movie. 

The revival was a major success but with it came new issues, mainly based around establishing the comic universe’s new status quo and where a lot of characters from the previous era stood now that everything had reverted back to square zero.  So, in November of 1986 DC launched a special 6-issue mini-series entitled Legends written by John Ostrander and Len Wein with artwork by John Byrne, let’s take a look. 

X-Men: Apocalypse Trailer

Is it weird to say I don’t get the appeal of the X-Men movies?  X-Men is something that has been with me for basically my entire life as a nerd.  When I was a kid growing up in the ‘90s the animated series was in its heyday, I’ve seen all of the live action films at their premiere, watched X-Men: Evolution when it was coming out weekly, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Claremont, Kirby, and Morrison comic runs on the characters.  In my whole life there consuming and critiquing nerd culture content there really hasn’t been anything as continual as the X-Men and yet I’d never call myself a legitimate fan.

 A lot of that has to do with the X-Men’s status quo always coming off far too barebones and uninspired, in the sense that it’s considered some brilliantly cerebral superhero riff even though the subtext rarely factors into the actual story and the status quo is less about a clash of ideologies than it is just about having ideologies that have been arbitrarily assigned good and evil status.  That whole sort of “good enough” aesthetic has always translated over to the X-Men films to and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see some of it in the newly dropped trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse.

Static Thoughts - DCAU Crossovers

So, this past Wednesday CW’s Arrow featured a one-off crossover with the cancelled Matt Ryan Constantine show in an episode called Haunted.  The episode was decent enough with most of the fun coming from just how gung-ho Matt Ryan was to both play John Constantine again and get to do all kinds of wizard shenanigans that he never got to sink his teeth into enough on his own show.  However, the episode got me thinking about the idea of crossovers in general, with a specific lens for the superhero genre.  Crossovers in superhero stories are as old as the genre itself mainly because “superhero” as a genre is so vague and open that it tends to absorb a ton of broader genres such as fantasy, adventure, sci-fi, and horror into it.  At the same time, crossovers have always been a great way for superhero TV to expand its world and test more obscure and bizarre characters who might not have found an audience otherwise.  The best example of this is from the DC Animated Universe that started with Batman: The Animated Series and concluded with the massive Justice League Unlimited, which included almost every DC hero imaginable (even Aztek got in there.)  I’m ranking the individual crossovers from the Batman and Superman shows.