Panel Vision - Human Defense Corp

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As I write this it’s Veterans Day, the day the US has set aside to honor the men, women, and non-binary individuals who’ve served in the nation’s armed forces.  It’s also kind of an odd holiday to try and make topical content around when you’re a comic reviewer as a lot of the military-oriented comic book content is from the ‘40s and ‘60s.  Previously I’ve looked at stuff like the incomparable Enemy Ace as well as the DC military heroes who served during World War 2 but this time around I wanted to dig into something a bit more modern.  

As such, I’ll be taking a look at a peculiar oddity offered by that bizarre time in comics that was the early 2000s.  It’s part of the great DC Comics tradition of sporadically reviving their military comics in hopes of recapturing their massive popularity of past decades, each attempt a unique and curiously compelling attempt in its own right and this one is a real doozy: The Human Defense Corps. 

Static Thoughts - 4 Questions About Supergirl S2B

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Supergirl season 1 was a fun but mixed bag of episodes that did a lot to set the tone of the series.  Its biggest job was planting the show’s flag on exactly what kind of adaptation of Supergirl it wanted to be.  I’ve been over this before, but Supergirl has had a ton of different iterations that the show could’ve chosen and it really didn’t go with any of them.  Instead, they opted for primarily a gender-swapped version of the Superman animated series, making the cornerstone adventures of the Superman mythos about Kara instead of her cousin.  

Now, season 2 has taken that starting point and turned in a knock-out series about the journey of the immigrant in America that could not be more prescient to our current political climate.  All of that is where the series comes from, but I want to talk about where it’s going, which leads me to my 4 questions about Supergirl Season 2B: Spoilers to Follow. 

Sharon Leal is Miss Martian in Supergirl Season 2

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Edited by Robert Beach

One of the interesting things about CW’s growing collection of superhero TV is the way they’ve so definitively altered their brand of superhero TV over its 4 years of growth. When CW first entered the modern superhero show game (excluding Smallville) in 2012 with Arrow, their outlook was incredibly limited and stripped down. The first 2 seasons of the show were all about having as few high-concept aspects as possible and as much angst as the show could fit, ripping off Batman in that category. Even the first ½ season of The Flash fell prey to this, but then the first Flash/Arrow crossover hit, and everything changed. 

Suddenly, everything was about bright adventures, weird concepts, and a expanding array of superheroes that culminated in Legends of Tomorrow. Given that, it was inevitable that Supergirl would be getting more superheroes now that it moved to the CW.  We’ve already confirmed Superman and Mon-El are joining Martian Manhunter in the show’s supporting cast, but now we have one more name to add to the list: Sharon Leal will be playing Miss Martian in season 2. 

Supergirl Season 2 Casts Chris Wood as Mon-El

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Edited by Robert Beach 

As the slow drip of Supergirl season 2 information continues to nurture the dedicated fans of the show, it seems one of Season 1’s biggest mysteries has finally been solved. If you missed the season 1 finale, the ending teased a major reveal when Kara found what appeared to be a second Kryptonian pod with an unknown occupant within. Now we seem to have our answer as to who was inside the pod: Mon-El AKA Lar Gand AKA Valor, a Daxamite hero of the 31^st century played by Chris Wood, who you probably don’t know from anything. 

It’s a pretty major revelation for Supergirl as Mon-El marks the second super powerful being the show has added in its second season after Superman. Counting Martian Manhunter and Miss Martian, this brings the total number of alien heroes on Supergirl to a staggering 5. But just who is Mon-El and what does his presence mean for the girl of steel? Let’s find out. 

Static Thoughts - Task Force X

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Edited by Robert Beach

This Friday marks the premiere of WB’s latest film entry Suicide Squad. This most recent installment in the fledgling DC Entertainment Universe has a lot riding on it after the last two films in the series, Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman, became universally unpopular punching bags. Early reviews are only filtering through now, and they have not been good, but many fans still hold some hope for the film. 

Personally, I’ve been critical of this movie from the word go, and I’m not surprised we hear it’s not very good. The production design looked terrible; The very inception of the team, supervillains to fight super threats, doesn’t make any sense when every character involved is so patently incapable of the task. What’s more, we’d already seen a Suicide Squad movie did to perfection on the Justice League Unlimited episode: Task Force X, let’s talk about that.

Static Thoughts - 12 Things They Need in Supergirl Season 2

Edited by Robert Beach

Supergirl season 2 has now been officially confirmed, with one significant twist: it will be on CW instead of CBS. At this point, that shake-up makes a lot of sense. Supergirl was a big hit show that never quite had the ratings to sustain its budget with CBS, so farming it out to CW’s legion of superhero shows make a lot of sense. It remains to be seen if Supergirl will in some way immigrate to the main universe of CW shows or if it’ll take place on Earth-4, separate from the adventures of Arrow, Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow. However, as we wait for that answer, let’s all climb aboard the Supergirl Season 2 hype train with a list of all the stuff they should include in the next, installment of the girl of steel. 

Static Thoughts - The Doomsday Sanction

So, Batman v. Superman’s latest trailer has revealed the major plot point that Doomsday, the monster who killed Superman, will be the film’s ultimate boss.  For my part this isn’t that surprising a reveal, I’ve been hearing rumors Doomsday would pop up in the film for awhile now.  At the same time, it’s pretty clear the execs running the DC/WB branch are the same ones who helmed things back in the ‘90s when The Death of Superman was the biggest moneymaker in the world for them so it fits they’d try and fit their new Superman movie to that template somehow, they did the same thing with Batman in Dark Knight Rises. 

What is surprising a lot of fans is the major shift to Doomsday’s origin in the film, now seemingly a mutation or GMO created out of the corpse of General Zod.  That’s a nifty idea and an easy solution to how incredibly convoluted and byzantine Doomsday’s comic book origin is, which is why this isn’t a look at the character’s history or even his biggest storylines.  I’ll probably talk about comic book Doomsday somewhere down the line but for right now I’m zeroing in on the first time Doomsday’s origin was altered to be the genetically modified superior Kryptonian: in Justice League Unlimited.