Comics Rainbow - Daredevil Villains

This Friday will see the premiere of Marvel and Netflix’s second collaborative streaming show Jessica Jones, based on the comic series Alias.  The show is the next installment in the lead up the streaming crossover series Defenders after Daredevil earlier this year and will feature the second Daredevil villain brought to life in the form of David Tennant’s Purple Man.  It’s been no secret that the Marvel cinematic universe has been lacking for interesting bad guys since day one and a big part of that has been that all the cool bad guys are part of franchises Marvel doesn’t own the rights to like Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, or the X-Men.  However, it’s not at all surprising that Marvel is on the cusp of scoring two big villain wins this year with Kingpin and Purple Man, two Daredevil bad guys.  Daredevil has always had one of the more interesting rogues galleries among heroes, usually counted alongside Flash, Batman, and Spider-man as one of the best in the genre so it’s about time Marvel dove into that toy box of madness for inspiration.  So, that’s what we’re going to look at today, the full spectrum look at the many foes of Daredevil; shades, shames, successes and all.

Movie Monthly - Real Steel

So far, all the future film’s we’ve discussed have followed along to the idea of a very distant future.  The defining aspect of them has been that society, as we know it, has been completely swept away due to some great calamity and replaced with a wholly new system of government.  This has mainly acted as a way to up-jump the importance of the futuristic cyber sports within the world of the film.  Most sports movies are fine to let the stakes simply BE winning or losing a sporting event but in the realms of sci-fi, especially nerdier sci-fi, it’s weirdly suspected that an audience won’t necessarily engage with a story unless the stakes are Earth shattering.  So, this week we’re changing it up with a film that’s set in a not too distant future approximation of our world where the only real change is that we’ve invented fighting bots to take up the act of boxing and wrestling.  I’m speaking of course of the underappreciated 2011 gem Real Steel, starring Hugh Jackman.

 

Cover Story - Top 15 Transformers Covers

Hello, and welcome to Cover Story: digging as little into comic books as we can.  A lot of things happened last week but one of the strangest was an ongoing stream set-up by Shia LeBeouf where he streamed himself watching all of his own films.  This latest act of weirdness by one of the weirdest name actors in the Hollywood community lasted for nearly 72 hours under the hashtag #AllMyMovies and was viewed by pretty much everyone as yet another peculiar stunt from the same man who once attended a premiere with a paper bag on his head.  However, it got a lot of folks talking about LeBouf’s many films, chief among them being the Transformers trilogy, which he was forced to endure in full.  This got me thinking about Transformers and remembering they actually had a quite heroically massive comics run with Marvel back in the ‘80s.  So, let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on the top 15 Marvel Transformers covers. 

Jessica Jones: All Trailers & Photos

So, we are officially one week away from the premiere of Marvel/Netflix second venture of the year as well as this year’s second, solo female led Marvel production: Jessica Jones.  As the premiere rumbles towards us there’s been a steady drip of teasers, trailers, photos and more so I’ve compiled everything we know about the show so far in one easy spot.  This will cover all of the important photos and trailers you might need to watch and break them down to get an overall sense of the tone and content we’re going to be getting from Marvel’s big Thanksgiving release.  So, let’s talk about Jessica Jones. 

Static Thoughts - Blackadder Goes Forth

Edited by Robert Beach 

On this day 97 years ago, the guns of World War 1 finally fell silent as on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month the Great War came to a close. The war had a total military and civilian casualty report of close to 38 million people, owing mainly to the sausage grinder that was trench warfare in the bulk of the war.  For literal years, the trenches would sit ideally as generals ordered their men into suicidal headline rushes across No Man’s Land. By all accounts, it was one of the cruelest and most nightmarish experiences of “combat” in human history.

who would’ve thought there was a comedy in all that?  

Well, it turns out geniuses thought that because in 1989 Richard Curtis and Ben Elton gave us just that with Blackadder Goes Forth, the 4^th and final season of the acclaimed BBC sitcom Blackadder starring Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnerny, and Stephen Fry. The season is remembered as one of the show’s absolute best and is often cited as the perfect vision of World War 1 in public consciousness. 

Comics Rainbow: War Heroes

Happy Veterans/Armistice Day everyone, may this day of remembrance for the end of the Great War as well as a general appreciation for all those who serve find you well.  With that pleasantry both stated and in mind I’m going to be talking about war comics today on Comics Rainbow, specifically the war comics of DC but first; a bit of comic book history.  After the end of World War 2 superhero comic books seriously tapered off in popularity with a handful of exceptions like Batman and Superman powering through.  It’s not exactly clear why this happened but the best bet would be the major shift in the tastes of comic readership heralded by the end of the war.  Prior to World War 2 the comic reading public actually skewed older, hence the emphases on pulpy violence like The Shadow, but when World War 2 came most of the comic reading public shipped off overseas and the new readership was much younger. 

However, by the time the war ended that new readership had aged and suddenly had new heroes: their fathers and brothers returned from World War 2.  So, at the dawn of the ’50s there was an explosion of war comic books, the 5 big ones being produced by DC comics and written by inventor of Flash and Lady Cop Robert Kanigher.  As the ‘50s dragged on the 5 major comics (G.I. Combat, Our Army At War, Our Fighting Forces, and Star Spangled War Stories) began to develop a roster of reoccurring characters that ended up permanent fixtures of the DC Universe as the superhero craze reemerged in the ‘60s.  Those are the characters I’ll be giving the full spectrum look at today; shades, shames, successes and all. 

Panel Vision - Comic Book Apocalypses

So, Fallout 4 has just been unlocked to the unwashed masses of planet Internet, which most likely means this article won’t be read by many but if you’re one of the few without access to this next great step in human achievement, this is for you.  The release of Fallout got me thinking about apocalypse/post-apocalypses, one of the most interesting elements of fiction while simultaneously one of the most under-explored.  Apocalypse and post-apocalypse fiction is fascinating as a template but often filled up with the same exploration of robots, aliens, zombies, and wastelands, there’s very little variation is my point.  So, because I endeavor to shine the light of obscure nerdy knowledge into the darkness of mundanity these are 10 comic book apocalypses and post-apocalyptic wastelands I’ve chosen to spotlight, I’m not going in any specific order or value set, they’re just a bunch of doomsdays that are worth sharing. 

Movie Monthly - Rollerball

Welcome back to Movie Monthly’s celebration of the very thin crossover line between sci-fi and sports this November with a look at all things future, techno, and athletic.  Last  week we looked at Robot Jox, the story of a distant future wherein nations hashed out their disputes through the tried and true method of giant robot fights, this week we’ve got arguably the opposite inverse film with Rollerball, the 1975 dystopian future sports film starring James Caan.  It’s actually kind of amazing how much Rollerball serves as a counter point to Robot Jox; corporations instead of nations, teams instead of individuals, entertainment rather than politics, a well known star with an actual career rather than “that guy from Alien Nation,” a really awful remake in 2002 instead of a reappraisal by nerd culture in recent years, and most key of all: Rollerball was the product of ‘70s pessimistic futurism while Robot Jox was the result of ‘80s blockbuster fun giving way to ‘90s shallowness and polish.

Cover Story - Top 15 Nick Fury Covers

Edited by Robert Beach 

Hello, and welcome to Cover Story: digging as little into comic books as we can. Cover Story isn’t exactly a new column around here as I’ve been doing “Top Cover” lists since August. now, I’m just giving it a name and making it an official weekly column alongside Comics Rainbow and Movie Monthly. With that said, let’s dive into this week’s cover subject: Nick Fury. 

I’ve already talked at length about Nick Fury earlier this week and how he served as Marvel’s super spy answer to James Bond, and how he’s been through numerous iterations in his 50-year history.  I’m mainly focusing on him because Spectre came out this week, and I’m a sucker for topicality. At the same time, Nick Fury’s various covers feature work by some of the greatest artists in comic book history, including Jim Steranko, a towering legend of the medium and concept artist for Indiana Jones. So let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on the top 15 Nick Fury covers. 

Warcraft Movie Trailer

If ever there was a studio that embodied the difference between winning and leading it’d be Universal.  They basically struck gold with the Fast & Furious movies and have been letting that box office money pit accumulate while floundering about in search of fellow hit makers and it’s served them well with equally successful hits like Pitch Perfect, Despicable Me, 50 Shades of Grey, and this year’s mega box office smash Jurassic World.  The thing is that “experimentation” really is the Universal approach as none of their efforts have been in order to define trends or lead the pop cultural scene, simply attempts to get money making films. 

That’s why, even though Jurassic World made unfathomable amounts of cash and Fast & Furious is on its 8^th film I’d never call Universal trend riders or taste makers.  So their latest venture, a collaboration with Blizzard Studios to bring the massively successful Warcraft franchise to life on the big screen is throwing me for a bit of a loop as it actually seems like the most financially successful yet culturally irrelevant studio in Hollywood has finally decided to step up to the plate and lead the way for a change.