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‘Devil in the Dark’ (review)

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Produced by Tim Brown,
Carey Dickson, Ben Graham
Written by Carey Dickson
Directed by Tim Brown
Starring Dan Payne, Robin Dunne,
Briana Buckmaster, Daniel Cudmore,
Jett Klyne, Rebecca Reichert,
Chris Ippolito, Peter Strand Rumpel

 

In recent years there has been a slew of films that are technically horror but are, at their core, relationship dramas. The Babadook, Monster, Lights Out, Resolution, Don’t Knock Twice, Honeymoon, Demon, Beyond The Gates, etc., etc.

Most of those films delivered the horror goods while exploring the characters’ relationship issues.

A new film in the sub-sub-genre, the indie Devil in the Dark, does a decent job of exploring the dysfunctional bond between two estranged brothers but mostly misses the boat on the scary stuff, creating a kind of lopsided, unsatisfying glop.

Adam (Robin Dunne) hasn’t been back to his hometown in years but decides to go there in attempt to reconnect with his older brother, Clint (Dan Payne). Clint is an avid hunter and Adam is decidedly not, but the younger sibling agrees to a weekend hunting trip into the woods with his bro.

In an effective prologue, we learn that as a boy, Adam was lost in the same woods while on a hunting trip there with Clint and their dad.

After a desperate search, their dad finds young Adam, but we’ve seen glimpses of a creepy monster deep in the woods.

We’re also given snapshots of the brothers’ childhood relationship and their interactions with their father (Clint clearly has far more in common with his dad than Adam does, but their dad does his best to love them equally).

After a somewhat rambling first act, with Adam meeting up with some old high school buddies and our getting the gist of the brothers’ contentious bond, the two finally head out into the mountains.

The location work at this point is beautiful (the film was shot in British Columbia), and the pace picks up a bit as the bros hash it out and try to reconnect.

Still, we keep waiting: this IS a horror movie, right…?

To be fair, there are some creepy moments and (tiny spoiler) the creature’s lair is pretty cool. But not a lot happens horror-wise and too many occurrences and “rules” are left unexplained.

It makes sense budgetarily to set up a movie this way; by focusing mainly on the relationship at the heart of the film one doesn’t need to rely on expensive visual or make-up effects.

But it relies on the execution. A modern classic like The Babadook got it right due to its excellent script and superb performances, AND it was scary. Also, the horror elements intertwined beautifully with the mother/son conflict and examinations of grief and guilt.

Admittedly, not every film can be as masterful as The Babadook, but the balance between horror and family drama in Devil in the Dark is rather off. Worse still, there’s no real payoff and the film ends with a truly lame “Gotcha!”

Not a bad effort, and worth a look on a very slow night, but Devil in the Dark doesn’t deliver in the end, alas.

 

Devil in the Dark arrives On Demand March 7th.

 


“Are You Ready For The Truth?”: Stan Lee, You Have a New Competitor

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*SPOILERS* if you haven’t seen M. Night Shyamalan’s Split.

In the future, when aliens from another galaxy sift through the radioactive dust that was once our planet, they’ll likely think the human race exclusively wore spandex and shot lasers out of their orifices. They’ll base this assumption on the endless series of films, comic books, whatever the plural of thermos is, lingerie and taint tattoos depicting our superheroes. Thanks to Marvel’s cinematic forays, we just can’t get enough of these stories. And thanks to DC’s attempts in the field, they may literally be humanity’s undoing.

But this level of quality can’t last forever, right? DC has already stumbled several times, and Marvel has to realize that audiences are starting to get a little bored with every single villain planning on blowing up the entire planet using only the power of super punches. With two DC cinematic universe movies, three Marvel cinematic movies, and another ten non-tentpole comic book movies releasing just this year, it’s very likely that our nerdy eyeballs will melt out our ears.

So how do we avoid this superhero fatigue without simply watching other types of movies (which is obviously not an option)? I believe there is a possible changing of the guard deep in the shadows of the movieplex. Stan Lee, you have a new competitor. M. Night “Twist, My Dog Is Actually A Watermelon” Shyamalan.

Shyamalan’s new movie, Split, in lieu of a traditional twist, reveals itself to be set in the same universe as Shyamalan’s underrated-but-fantastic Unbreakable. Part of my goal in this article is to get you watch that movie if you haven’t, because I care about you.

Unbreakable is the story of a security guard, played by Bruce Willis and named David Dunn (a classically alliterative superhero name), who survives a horrific train wreck entirely unscathed. This attracts the attention of a comic book storeowner named Elijah Price, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who suffers from Type I osteogenesis imperfecta which gives him exceptionally brittle bones.

Pierce, unable to go outside much growing up, read thousands of comic books and believes that if he is so brittle, there must be somebody out there his polar opposite. Somebody with UN-breakable bones, as it were.

The movie itself revolves around Dunn’s dissolving marriage and his own dissatisfaction with how his life has turned out. He begins to learn of his super power alongside his son, and little Dunn stands in for the audience, wondering at his father’s transition from depressed security guard to empowered agent of justice. Buried at the center of what is ostensibly an origin film is a focused story about a family on the rocks learning to deal with what they’ve become over the years.

I’ll try not to spoil the rest as there are a few twists and turns, but if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend viewing it before you watch Split, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessary.

Bruce Willis’ David Dunn pops up at the end of Split, identifying Split as being in the same cinematic universe as Unbreakable.

This twist massively opens up the possibility of a true contender for the movie universes of DC and Marvel. And I think it could be the best thing to happen to comic book-style movies since Iron Man. And since this is the internet, I decided to make a brief list to demonstrate why this might be the case.

 

Beholden To Nothing And No One

Inevitably, whenever a new DC or Marvel movie comes out, there are always massive complaints about how the filmmakers changed the story, screwed up the costumes, ignoring the indisputable whiteness of The Flash’s girlfriend etc. But Shyamalan’s universe is beholden to nothing and no nerd. Every single story we see will be original. His stories are allowed to work however they need to work, utilizing as many or as few superheroes as needed.

By starting from scratch, there’s nowhere the films are forced to go. And there’s no obscure canon to scour through and compare with the films beat for beat. There aren’t any back issues of Dr. Captain Unbreakable Bruce that we can reference whenever we want the opposite sex to stop talking with us.

Unbreakable is about a superhero with super strength and some super perception, sure, but it still feels grounded in a realistic way. Unlike similar “off-brand” super hero movies like Chronicle (where the heroes can fly and throw lightning and spears with their minds), David Dunn is exceptionally strong, but can’t swim. He will drown in water, which our savvier readers will note covers freaking 71% of the Earth. And the super villain is just smart. He’s no better or worse than Stephen Hawking.

Split doesn’t even appear to have a superhero in the film outside of Bruce Willis’ appearance for a near-literal seven seconds. There’s a super villain, but he’s “defeated” by a normal girl who is emboldened by the experience and appears ready to fight back against her sexually abusive uncle. If you read that and thought, “Holy crap, that’s dark,” then allow me to carry you to the next point.

 

We Can Finally Have Movies Where The Planet Isn’t About To Explode

One of the biggest complaints with Marvel and DC movies recently is that there’s nowhere to go, stakes-wise. Only so many times can we be threatened with “the whole earth will blow up, this time totally for real,” before we start to lose sight of that as a legitimate problem. And the way they do it is getting crazierThey’ve done everything from picking up and dropping whole citiesterraforming Earth with giant space crabs, and blowing up…rainbow…bridges? Or maybe that’s a good thing? The point is, these threats are increasingly difficult to understand and relate to us as real people on the far side of a rainbow bridge. Of course, Marvel and DC producers won’t blow up earth; where would they store their billions?

As I alluded to earlier, Shyamalan’s films are grounded and have real hearts at the center of them. Nobody in his movies is trying to end the world. The villain in Split is just after three girls, and in Unbreakable the bad guy is just trying to discover a superhero. Most of the actual important characters are real people. This gives us a “regular people” view of the conflict that we rarely see in these types of films.

 

Characters Can Die, For Real

This is something of an offshoot of the first point, but we don’t know anything about these characters. Nobody is safe. A decent percentage of characters die in fairly gruesome ways in Split. That’s the thing about real people; they can die. No heroes have been killed yet, but we’re only two movies in. There are no rules and no stipulations that Bruce Willis needs to do the next thirty-five movies. They can play with expectations and we will just have to be along for the ride. Think the twist guy isn’t going to kill people off?

TWIST. He probably will.

 

They Still Actually Adhere To Established Comic Book Rules

Even as these movies work towards being less fantastical and happy, they still manage to adhere to certain rules established in comic books that continue to identify these films as “comic book movies.” David Dunn has a costume of sorts in that he wears a dark poncho whenever he fights crime.

The bad guy characters end up with stylized names like “The Horde” and “Mr. Glass” despite having alter-ego “real names.” Split and Unbreakable make a notable tonal departure from the pulpy happiness of in particular the Marvel films, superheroes like David Dunn find satisfaction and purpose in the pursuit of justice.

Additionally, each super character has some sort of exploitable flaw (like an inability to swim), which mirrors classic Kryptonite tropes.

As the series expands in the future, it’s like that we’ll see these rules (and others) alluded to, and played with, as Shyamalan forges a unique, but still familiar, identity for his universe. Which is important because…

 

The Films Can Achieve Actual Auteur Status

Whether you love Shyamalan’s movies or not, you have to admit he has a distinctive style. And it’s actually pretty excellent. He only screws it up when he goes big with After Earth or The Last Airbender, and the stories get away from him amidst CGI issues. As last year’s The Visit and Split show, Shyamalan’s still got what it takes to direct compelling horror/thrillers. Aiming for a horror/thriller look versus action/adventure means that we’ll be getting movies by a guy who is personally invested in his own style and isn’t shoehorned into the sterile style of Marvel. It’s a little closer to what DC allows, but even they require a lot of things (brooding, frowning, an utter lack of colors). And he’ll likely continue to have this sort of freedom because…

 

The Films Can Remain Low Budget

Unbreakable was made for $75 million which isn’t cheap, but isn’t even close to the ball-busting Civil War‘s $250 millionSplit was only $9 million! The movies don’t have to be huge, spectacle films, and money can be allotted to whatever seems necessary (i.e. not just on massive CGI battles). The movies don’t have to make a billion dollars to be a success. They can be huge successes with half that. And like Deadpool showed us, people are willing to pay for originality. Lower budget and lower pressure can tend to lead to better films with the director mainly firmly in creative control.

 

So What’s Next?

So we’ve identified that Split and Unbreakable open up some exciting possibilities, but what exactly is on the way?

Patton Oswalt recently came up with his own ideas for Unbreakable sequels that could provide some insight into what Shyamalan may be thinking. Basically he suggests that in the fifteen years that have occurred between Unbreakable and Split the villain from Unbreakable, Mr. Glass, may have been recruiting an army of additional super villains (which may soon include Split’s “The Horde”), to ultimately take down Dunn and maybe steal his blood as an antidote and give them super strength.

Given that we’re introduced to a new super villain in Split, it definitely seems plausible that there would be more out there and they’ve been biding their time until they could be unified.

Since Split was distributed by Universal and Unbreakable by Disney, it’s looking like the two companies will partner for Unbreakable 2. This offers the promise of a higher budget and distribution while still allowing Shyamalan the freedom to make the movie that needs to be made.

If done correctly, Shyamalan’s little superhero universe could be a legitimate contender and a breath of fresh air in an increasingly crowded, and often times crappy, superhero market.

 

 

FOG! Chats With Josh Bayer, Co-Creator of Fantagraphics’ ‘All-Time Comics’

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From cartoonist Josh Bayer and his brother, director Samuel Bayer, comes the All Time Comics line from Fantagraphics Books.  The series is a love letter to the comics medium and combines the talents of new alternative artists such as Ben Marra, Noah Van Sciver and cover artists Jim Rugg, Johnny Ryan and Tony Millionaire with classic talents including Al Milgrom, Rick Parker and the late Herb Trimpe.Josh took some time to discuss writing the line of books, the genesis of the project and his affinity for the Silver Age of comics.

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FOG!: What was the genesis of All Time Comics?

Josh Bayer:  In a certain sense, it was like when Bill Mantlo was offered ROM.  ROM was based on a pre-existing toy and Bill Mantlo was invited by Parker Bros. and Marvel to invent the mythology and the mission of the character. My brother had an idea for a screenplay involving these Super characters, and he asked me to come up with a back story of the characters at their prime, at some period in the past. He had the names and the villains and the powers of the characters but I, and later my collaborators, came up with everything else. The design, the secret identities, the names of the cities they operate in, what their days are like… It was really fun and really a great education in a type of comics I’ve studied but never done before.

You developed the project with your brother, Samuel, a director. Did you share the same tastes in comics growing up?

Yes, I think so, His interests funneled down to me. He and my other brothers drew their own comics and they were pretty ambitious, full color, they had to be full length. They didn’t stop at ten pages because it was a kids comic. They had completed comics by the time they were 12 that  were fully realized and plotted and stapled. I still have a few pages — they influenced me a lot as you’re always straining to be like your role models. I made my own comics too, to be like them. It was my first university.

Sam loved Neal Adams but even though I liked his work, I found Neal Adams’ excellence almost cold and off putting like some kind of merciless threshing  machine that weeded out all  flaws. I think I liked Kirby more because it was both amazing and full of flaws. Kirby is very punk in that way. But Sam and my brother Jon were there first. I know Kirby and Herb Trimpe because they loved them in these old Silver Age comics they had.

Fantagraphics generally doesn’t publish superhero comics. How did you sell them on All Time Comics?

It sort of evolved and I think it’s a bit of a recognition or an acknowledgement  of the movement among alternative artists towards embracing comics of the past. Without necessarily vying to get work from Marvel and DC, people like Marra, Pat Aulisio, Noah Lyons and others are all owning their early influences in a way that 90s alternative artists like Peter Bagge or Charles Burns rejected.

Really though, it evolved naturally. Jason T Miles formed a partnership with me when he was on hiatus from Fantagraphics, and when he went back to work he shepherded All Time Comics along.

Your collaborators are both contemporary indie creators including Benjamin Marra, Noah Van Sciver and yourself and comic icons like the late Herb Trimpe, Rick Parker and Al Milgrom. How important was it to you to get these comic vets involved and what was the experience like collaborating with them?

We would have made this work without them, but it would have been very different. All the people we got were at the top of my list and are my favorite artists in the world, but are also very right for the project. The concept of uniting generations is an added benefit to the project.

Your four characters Atlas, Blind Justice, Bullwhip, and Crime Destroyer are all part of a shared universe. Who are these characters?

Atlas is a superhuman, flying, super strong guy who gets his powers from these Kirby-like machines he found embedded in rock under the city, left behind by an unknown civilization. He has a fatal weakness: Fear. He becomes powerless if he becomes afraid.

Justice, whose nickname is Blind Justice, is a character who believes himself to be bulletproof. We leave it unclear whether that’s true, but he gets shot a lot. His mask is a homemade web of bandages, he’s sort of like this scary bandaged face, club wielding street maniac as much as he’s a hero.

Bullwhip is a one woman war on crime. She doesn’t have powers, just a whip and a motorcycle and she is really happy about being a superhero. We’ve written her as a character who has committed totally to the life of Bullwhip. It’s her whole existence. Where she is from isn’t really important, it’s who she is today, she’s committed to the Bullwhip identity.

Crime Destroyer is a vengeance machine. He returns from a war to find his family slaughtered and goes on a campaign against crime. He drives a car with machine guns and it has a fist-rappelling rope and lots of guns and truncheons. He is very persistent and ruthless. All these heroes are.

The comics tread a fine line between homage and parody. Was that intentional?  Are you mocking the source material or do you feel that it’s a genuine love letter to the genre.

Even if there’s a camp tone that comes in, I don’t think that means there’s a lack of reverence. There’s a very campy episode of the Justice League animated cartoon which is a tribute to Gardner Fox’s Silver Age comics, and it’s very emotionally powerful especially when it comes to depicting the heroic ideals the characters lived by, and it even manages to be critical of the implicit racism of the comics of that era. It’s possible we can be both critical, campy and reverent.

Any plans for a crossover since it’s a shared universe?

The characters bleed into each other’s stories. We have the same villains, the same cities and supporting characters, and guest appearances in various comics by the heroes. There are bigger plans in the future to do more guest appearances, but not so much in these early issues.

What are you currently geeking out over?

I was very into Neil Gaiman’s audio book on Norse Mythology, and I’ve been nerding out on old art and comics. I’ve been looking the correlation between early George Braque abstraction and Gary Panter’s sketchbook drawing. I showed this to my students and I’m usually teaching myself and them at the same time. I’ve been nerding out on a lot of the art tips I’ve vicariously picked up from Al Milgrom, and I’ve been nerding out on this new pen my student Adam gave me: he attached a Hunts Nib to a fountain pen and it’s like I magically have a refillable nib I never have to clean. I really love drawing with it.

All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer #1 is in stores now and All Time Comics: Bullwhip #1 is scheduled for an April release.

 

Everything You Need To Know (So Far) About ‘Tomb Raider’ (2018)

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Although Assassin’s Creed wasn’t the hit that many had hoped for, many movie fans and video game fanatics have their eyes (and wallets!) focused on the next big video game movie, a Tomb Raider reboot confirmed for a March 2018 release. While many production details have still yet to be confirmed, they already began shooting in places like South Africa and the United Kingdom last January of this year. The reboot is under the expertise and direction of Norwegian film director Roar Uthaug whose previous directorial work includes The Wave and Escape; and it will be a production of Warner Brothers and MGM.

Tomb Raider and its effect in the popular culture

The popularity of this franchise has affected many popular culture and it has been embedded in the consciousness of a true 90s kid. While many Tomb Raider vinyl figures can be bought in local shops, you can also play a very popular online Tomb Raider slot game if you consider yourself a true fan of the franchise.

Today we will be providing you with the juiciest information fresh from our sources on what is going on about the upcoming reboot of Ms. Lara Croft.

The Cast

Lara Croft

Starring in the reboot is Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft whose most recent appearance in Hollywood was on The Danish Girl, earning herself a much acclaimed Best Supporting Actress in the Academy Awards. Several photos on Twitter have shown Vikander to be doing some stunts on set. It appears that she would be doing most of her own stunts, which is truly an exciting and brave feat as Tomb Raider is known for its death-defying moves, combat tactics, and stunts. An accomplished ballerina, Vikander is sure to find these stunts to be easy as she has he physical endurance and stamina to do these things.

While reports have yet to be confirmed about the story and path it is going to take, Angelina Jolie (the actress who played in the original movie) has left a big shoes to fill for the 28-year-old Swedish Oscar winner.

Although Vikander is no longer a stranger in the silver screen, she still keeps on making waves in the Hollywood scene. Over the past years, she has starred in Ex Machina and The Danish Girl, with another upcoming projects like The Light Between Oceans with Rachel Weisz and Michael Fassbender, Jason Bourne with Julia Stiles and Matt Damon, and Tulip Fever with Christoph Waltz and Judy Dench.

 

Lord Richard Craft

It has also been announced, and later confirmed, that Dominic West will also be starring in the reboot as Lara’s father, Lord Richard Croft and will play a really important role in the movie. Dominic West has risen to stardom for his movies like The Wire, 300, The Affair, and Genius.

As stated in previous reports that circulated the Internet, Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) was also considered heavily for the role as Lara Croft, but the Star Wars franchise have been keeping her hands full and her schedule could no longer entertain another project as big as Tomb Raider.

Vikander has proven time and again that she could fit into any role given to her if she put her heart into it: from old school drama to romance to sci-fi. Changing roles, along with the demands that come it, Vikander was successful in bring every character to life with so much poise and ease. That is why she easily became one of the most sought-after star in Hollywood as of the moment. This means a lot to the Tomb Raider franchise.

Lu Ren
Variety has also reported that Into the Badlands star Daniel Wu was getting cast with Vikander as Lu Ren, a “ship captain whose partnership with Lara Croft will eventually help her on finding her father.” While this line is seemingly too short to read between the lines and uncover its plot, we can then expect a lot of fight scenes in the sea as it includes a sea voyage with another talented Hollywood actor.

Mathias
It has also been confirmed that Walter Goggins will play an important role in the reboot as Vikander’s nemesis after negotiations of the roles were fully finalized in December. Goggins, already considered a veteran in the industry, is well-loved and hated for his powerful roles in Sons of Anarchy, Justified, and in HBO’s new series Vice Principals. He has also appeared in movies like Mojave and The Hateful Eight.

The Plot (so far)
This Tomb Raider reboot film is said to have been using most of the storylines from the most recent video games, which means we will be seeing more of a younger Lara Croft and her first journeys in the unknown. Fans of the franchise have waited more than 10 years or a decade to see another Tomb Raider film in the big screen. The wait is going to be worth it, as around the same time next year, cinemas will be packed with moviegoers watching how much has changed about their heroine back in the 90s.

The Technology
About three weeks ago, it has been announced by Tomb Raider publisher Square Enix that they are partnering with Deux Ex dev Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics will be developing a new game about the Avengers. Rumor has it that the next installment in the Tomb Raider video game series is entitled Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but it has yet to be confirmed.

Do you have fond memories of the Tomb Raider games you had played as a kid? Do you miss it? Are you excited for the reboot film starring Alicia Vikander? Or do you think Angelina Jolie is the better Lara Croft? We would love to hear from you. Please leave us a comment below.  Tomb Raider arrives in theaters on March 16, 2018.

 

Images by themeplus and behind the velvet rope under Public Domains CC0

Ryan Ferrier Talks All Things ‘D4VE’

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In December, we previewed D4VEocracy #1 from Ryan Ferrier and Valentin Roman.

In D4VE’s first 100 days, we decided to knock on Ryan’s door to figure out what exactly is going on in the post-human robot society without a real president. We had to go all the way to Canada to get the answers and the election results we deserve.

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FOG!: Pretty crazy election cycle, amiright? What can D4VE bring to the Presidency that, let’s just say, the current US President does not have?

Ryan Ferrier: Crazy to say the least. I am Canadian, so I maybe shouldn’t comment. Okay, fine, y’all are fucked. I mean, you’ll fight and resist and it’ll be okay, but it’s gnarly and I’m sorry. What does D4VE have that the current one doesn’t? Easy, its empathy. Makes you wonder who the real robot is.

Over the last two volumes D4VE’s shown just how emotionally connected he is to his family, his planet, and his role in society. His intent to lead the last living population seems pretty fitting.

How heavily has Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow influenced your and Valentin’s work?

While it’s a fantastic piece of work, it hasn’t had a direct influence. But then again, some would say every piece of work has a direct influence, so who knows. Geof Darrow and Frank Miller are big creators for Valentin and I in general. They’re incredible and inspiring to our DNA as creators, but I can’t say any particular work has pushed or informed us directly when it comes to the D4VE series.

How did a vacuum robot Roombo end up being the leader of the free world? Because he sucked so hard?

No, it’s because he blows! Having that little cameo, if you want to call it, by Roombo was great because I completely fell in love with writing him but knew he could never really be this big, elaborate character.

SPOILERS FOR D4VE2: You’ll remember at the final stages of D4VE2, when D4VE goes to the past, before he became sentient, he put sentience into the laboratory vacuum robot. That was our little nod at the classic “can you go back in time and fuck your Grandma” thing. D4VE created the robots, literally then, and in a weird way saved his species. Cut to the new timeline, and that very sentient vacuum is now president.

He wasn’t an awful president, but I don’t think he was very good.

Why go back to D4VEocracy after the first two volumes of D4VE?

Valentin and I took a break from D4VE and made Hot Damn, which we absolutely loved doing. Once we were done that, we knew jumping back into the world of D4VE was the next story to tell.

It’s the final D4VE story, and as such we didn’t want to just churn it out, we wanted to make sure it had the heart and resolve it deserves. So really, making D4VEOCRACY has felt so rewarding and emotional as we’re seeing the story arcs of these characters we’ve been with for over five years now. It’s not something we’ve ever taken lightly, as our wonderful readers and retail supporters, and IDW hopefully know and feel.

We couldn’t be more grateful and proud to have spent such time creating these stories.

Who is D4VE running against? The internet incarnate? Explain yourself.

Haha, one of D4VE’s adversaries in this arc is a manufactured (well, more manufactured) robot, S4M, created by a social networking app megalomaniac. The app wants the world, see, so they created a political rival that could connect with the vast majority of robot citizens. They literally put the internet into S4M’s body and let him run loose. So he really is the internet incarnate. Everything and Anything focused into One Thing.

We will see really soon just how volatile (and freaking stupid) an idea that was.

Things aren’t looking great after the first debate. With scandal at the center of the campaign will D4VE be able to recover?

No. Of course not. That wouldn’t be fun to write, to draw, and no one would like to read it. No one will be able to recover. This is life and (almost certainly) death for everything. The debate scandal is merely a paper cut on the beheaded, limbless carcass that is this story.

How long is this volume and is it the end of the life cycle for D4VE?

D4VEOCRACY is four issues total! Jam packed, tight, and succinct. Just how I like my swimsuits. Sorry.

This is the life cycle for D4VE though, yes. It will have a precise, intended conclusion and all characters will be set in their new course, whatever that may be. But the book end is closing in #4.

D4VEOCRACY #2 is available in stores and via digital today
Follow Ryan @ryanwriter

‘Riverdale’ Gets Renewed for Season 2 at The CW

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Order another round of burgers at Pop’s because Archie and the gang are back for a second season of RIVERDALE on The CW!

The live-action ‘RIVERDALE’ series offers a bold, compelling take on Archie, Betty, Veronica, and their friends, exploring small-town life and the darkness and weirdness bubbling beneath Riverdale’s wholesome facade. The show will focus on the eternal love triangle of Archie Andrews, girl-next-door Betty Cooper, and rich socialite Veronica Lodge, and will include the entire cast of characters from the comic books—including Archie’s rival, Reggie Mantle, and his best friend, Jughead Jones.

RIVERDALE Chapter 7: In a Lonely Place debuts this Thursday at 9/8c on The CW.

Stream new episodes of Riverdale on The CW App.

For more information about ‘RIVERDALE’ and everything Archie Comics, visit the official Archie Comics website and follow us on TwitterFacebook, and Instagram.

 

Welcome To The Planet: The Mystery of The Other Clark Kent Revealed in ‘Action Comics #975’ & More!

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Its all about Superman this week as the identity of “Other Clark” is finally revealed in Action Comics #975!

It’s pretty full on and most definitely the best book DC has published this week. Go get it, seriously, even if you aren’t a Superman fan this is epic.

And no, I’m not going to spoil it.

Then we have the rest, none of which particularly stood out.

None were bad they were just… unremarkable.

There was more in terms of what I’d class as ‘world building’ in all the books, expanding on past continuity which will of course enrich the titles later on, so I’m not completely disappointed. I am interested to hear if any of the other books spoke to you and if your opinion differs!

This is my look into the best of the DC Universe this week!

 
ACTION COMICS #975
Superman Reborn: Part 2
Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artist: Doug Mahke
Inker: Jaime Mendoza
Cover: Patrick Gleason & John Kalisz
Variant: Gary Frank & Brad Anderson

Superman and Lois race to Other Clark’s apartment and confront him.

As the two men argue over Jon, Clark angrily takes on Superman and demands that as they fight he reveal his identity.  Not Luthor, not Bizarro, not Brainiac, not Mongul, Parasite or even Cyborg Superman or even Doomsday, though Superman still has to fight them all.

Lois realises Other Clark’s identity, and once revealed, the character blames Superman had forgotten about him. In retaliation, Jon’s kidnapper swears that he will repay Superman by making everyone but him forget Jon.

As Other Clark escapes, Superman makes a promise to rescue Jon whatever the cost, however Other Clark has made good on his promise and Lois has forgotten everything about her son!

To Be Continued…

ART: 5/5
There literally isn’t a page Doug Manhke has faltered on.

Every page, was better than the last and those splash pages were simply stunning. I don’t think even the most anti Superman fan can deny how fantastic the art is.

COVER: 5/5
Other Clark looks very sinister here and now seeing this cover I can see that this is the literal second part of the puzzle.

Can’t wait to see all the artwork placed together as the puzzles begin to get solved!

OVERALL RATING: 5/5
I’d sort of guessed the identity of Other Clark before this issue did the big reveal in spectacular fashion, but Jurgens did it with such style and bravado it still took your breath away a little. I’m sure many a fan will be kicking themselves after all the theories were thrown around on some of the tabloid sites, but part of what made this issue stand out in particular was that it lost no momentum despite the ravings. There wasn’t much in the way of story this issue but the reveal and the lead in to that was well worth it.

BACK UP FEATURE

The Man in The Purple Hat
Writer: Paul Dini
Artist: Ian Churchill

Superman was always visited by Other Clark until one day when Mr. Oz set a trap to capture him.
In case of his interference in Mr Oz’s plans Other Clark was captured to prevent the course set for Superman’s future.

Other Clark expected the Man of Steel to rescue him but the rescue never came and usually Superman expected Other Clark’s arrival but this time he was forgotten. As Other Clark got angrier he realised by focusing his powers he could escape his cell but Mr Oz sent a ball of energy to recapture him so Other Clark erased his own mind and became Clark Kent for real.

The shock of seeing the Superman Family moving on without him caused his memories to resurface and that’s when he decided to kidnap Jon. Now the boy of steel is trapped in a limbo dimension with Other Clark intent on playing games with him and his family.

To Be Continued…

ART: 5/5
Ian Churchill truly outdoes himself this issue. I note all the easter eggs from Curt Swan to Bruce Timm references, he’s clearly had fun bringing the story to life and it definitely shows! I must admit I’d forgotten how fun the villain is and Churchill goes to great lengths to make us remember.

OVERALL RATING: 5/5
Expanding upon the big reveal the story elaborates more on the mystery villain and how Other Clark came to meet Mr Oz. The references to Superman in different media were great nods to Superman artists past and the story also reveals what really happened to Jon when he was ‘erased’. A brilliant addition to the main story, adding to the enjoyment.

 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #2
The Extremists Part 2
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Felipe Watanabe
Inker: Scott Hanna
Cover: Ivan Reis, Joe Prado & Marcelo Maiolo
Variant: Doug Manhke & Wil Quintana

Despite Batman’s offer to The Extremists, the new League stand by his side instead of escaping.

Lord Havok listens to Batman’s reasoning by Dr Diehard, one of Havok’s colleagues angrily refuses to compromise but as he leads a battle against the League Havok murders him in cold blood and teleports his team away before the JLA can follow.

The Extremists arrive in Kravia and promptly take over while the JLA help with the clean up in Saratoga. The Atom tracks down Havok’s energy signature, but when the JLA tries to get into the country, they are shocked to discover the Kravian military are opposed to their arrival as Lord Havok has taken over as ruler legally.

The team of heroes meet with a general and propose to help overthrow The Extremists and take the country back.

To Be Continued…

ART: 3/5
Some great layouts but the very faint inking really takes something away from what was a really nicely illustrated issue. No light sources or depth and if there were they’ve been lost.

COVER: 3/5
Everyone loves a good fight scene and this is a glorious one! I am not to keen on Batman being front and centre considering the team is still in its infancy, I think having the focus on them would have been better. I’ve never been a fan of The Extremists but must admit they pretty cool here, especially Lord Havok.

OVERALL RATING: 3/5
I hope The Extremist get a little more fleshing out and that the team begins to be self sufficient because right now they are both feeling a little like throwing all the characters together and hitting the start button on the blender. Everyone needs at least a little active exploration in the book.


JUSTICE LEAGUE/MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS #3
Writer: Tom Taylor
Artist: Stephen Byrne
Cover: Stephen Byrne

Lord Zedd is plotting to split the League and Rangers apart with creatures attacking cities across the globe. Despite the Rangers offering to teleport the teams to fight, Batman refuses instead Cyborg calls upon the League reservists to aid the fight.

Cyborg alerts the teams that the Watchtower has been infected by a virus and their own teleporters are out of commision. Using the Zords the teams race to stop the monsters and Zack wonders why the monsters are not Zedd’s usual monsters.

Superman spots a Brainiac drone and they realise they’ve been ambushed as the Zords all shut down. The drones infiltrate the cockpits and steal the morpher coins leaving the Rangers powerless and the drones reactivate under Brainiacs control and teleport to the Power Rangers planet Earth.

Billy asks the League if they have access to a Hadron Collider and so the heroes seek out the machine to help them travel to Angel Grove and they launch a plan to save two Earths.

To Be Continued…

ART: 5/5
Stephen Byrne really knows how to craft some eye catching visuals! The look of the Power Rangers and attention to detail with elements of the show is truly superb, the animated style really lends itself to bringing the team (and their Zords) to life. The League and the reservists aren’t too different a story either, they aren’t 100% accurate but now a halfway through the series I can see it is an idealised look at the DCU with a unique look specific to the book.

COVER: 5/5
Of all the Zords past the two that I remember most fondly are the Megazord and Dragonzord. Seeing the League take on the mighty Megazord is the stuff kids growing up had imagined as a fight scenario and seeing it here makes this inner fanboy yelp with joy.

OVERALL RATING: 5/5
I am not sure who the audience is for the book and to be honest, I don’t care. I personally am enjoying the hell out of it and the nostalgia bursting nods to all the silly elements of the show but making them into believable parts to a big scale unabashedly fun series. Throwing in Brainiac to take over the Zords and what that could mean later on means we are definitely in for even more fun next issue.

 
SUPERGIRL #7
Mission: Mind
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Matias Bergara
Cover: Emanuela Lupacchino & Atiyeh
Variant: Bengal

Supergirl helps to capture the Wild Huntsman and returns him to DEO custody and the lab of Dr. Veritas. While there, Kara asks about Lar-On and the doctor reveals that the werewolf change is not caused by moonlight like a traditional werewolf, but rather a mental change.

To aid with tests Veritas and Director Chase propose to use the equipment at their disposal to ‘project’ Kara directly into Lar-On’s consciousness. In his mind, Kara encounters Lar-On and reaches out to him forming a bond of friendship. When Kara returns to the real world she tells them what she discovered about his link to the moon.

Later Kara visits a monument made of some Argonian wreckage dedicated to the lives lost during Cyborg Superman’s attack. As Kara mourns her mother and remembers the lost, Superman arrives and requests a talk with his cousin.

To Be Continued…

ART: 4/5
Now that the Cyborg Superman arc is over which was heavy on emphasis with action and its good to see another artists take on Girl Of Steel in the rebirth era. The art style in fact is not a jarring change and Bergara painstakingly works hard to make the mind of Lar-On a very interesting place. The werewolf attack is a standout scene that Bergara really goes to town in. I loved the last panel it was definitely in homage to the television show opening sequence following on from such a big scale opening story must have been a massive undertaking but I really enjoyed this issues art.

COVER: 5/5
Lar-On isn’t a character we know very well but considering how seriously cool this issues cover looks we definitely want him sticking around. This is one seriously cool cover, not sure how Kara is getting out of this one!

OVERALL RATING: 4/5
How Dr Veritas escaped The Block and became part of the DEO has yet to be explained and that is something that continuity wise is a bit irritating (though the less we focus on N52 elements, the better) but conversely Lar-On returns albeit still in a coma and that shows that Orlando is a definitely committed to creating a mythos for Supergirl rich with elements unique to her and that fans can reference easily. Veritas never fully explains to Chase, Jeremiah or Kara the consequences to Lar-On or Kara exactly how dangerous jumping into his mind could be for either of the Kryptonians, it was cool to see it play out of course but the potential damage Kara could have done meant it came off a little gung ho rather than a truly scientific approach. The scene at the end where the monument is unveiled is touching and of course the scene with Superman was full of feels.

 
SUPERWOMAN #8
By A Thread: A Superwoman Reborn?
Writer: Phil Jimenez
Artists: Jack Herbert & Stephen Segovia
Cover:Yasmin Putri
Variant: Renato Guedes

Lana seemingly wakes from her coma only to discover an audience of her brother Ron, Lois Lane, her parents and N52 Superman. Superwoman’s joy is short lived as they each express their disappointment in her. As Lana argues with her ghosts John is busy trying to use Fortress of Solitude computers to save his lover while Natasha works on the battle suits in Steelworks.

Ghost Lois argues with a now ghost Lana as Lois tries to make Lana face up to her fears. In the meantime, Lena ,now in Lex Luthor’s custody argues with her brother. Lex swears to help his sister, but while he searches for a solution to save her and ‘make her see sense’, he once again locks her away behind closed doors. And this time as just a head, she has no way out.

Lana meanwhile, comes to a realisation that the very same red energy from Superman’s solar flare that was killing her, had kept fragments of her Lois and her Clark alive inside her as ‘phantoms’. If she relinquishes that energy they will vanish, but before they do, Superman and a repowered Lois soar into the sky one last time.

Lana reawakens in John Henry’s arms and imagines facing emergencies as Superwoman alongside Nat and John. However in reality, she is barely alive under Kelex’s watch in Superman’s battle armour. (see Action Comics last issue.)

To Be Continued…

ART: 5/5
Superwoman has enjoyed some truly spectacular art and this issue is no exception Herbert & Segovia really go to town bringing the fractured psyche of Lana to life. I certainly had to do double takes while flipping through the pages to figure out what was real and what was not but that made their layouts all the more clever. Loved seeing the final flight of N52 Superman and Lois Lane as they evoked the flight in issue one.

COVER: 5/5
A fantastic cover with some truly eye catching art. The art saturated with supernatural effects makes the cover stand out and I really like this as it also references elements of the story. Thumbs up!

OVERALL RATING: 3/5
It isn’t meant to but the scene between Lex and Lena stole the show. If you weren’t certain the Luthor’s were a seriously messed up family, you surely will now! Unfortunately the rest of the issue was perplexing, deliberately so it would seem. Though the art excelled, the story,with the misdirects, became more and more confusing as it went on making rereads a necessity to fully grasp what was going on. The Superman Reborn tie in element is vague and sparse and what it means to Superman is still unclear. I hope as next issue is a new beginning of sorts that Lana parks the tortured mind and moves forward with some fun and adventure. I’ll be honest and admit they were the best elements of the dream sequences.

 
WONDER WOMAN #18
Godwatch Part 2
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Bilquis Evely
Inker: Scott Hanna
Cover: Bilquis Evely & Romulo Fajardo Jr.
Variant: Jenny Frison

Phobos and Deimos are determined to find Themyscira and manipulate Veronica Cale to do it. Cale reveals she has been manipulating Barbara Ann Minerva to save her daughter Izzy and her friend Adrianna.

Phobos and Deimos instruct Cale to keep Diana busy till Minerva makes a life changing mistake that only Wonder Woman could have stopped. As Barbara becomes Cheetah, Diana indeed arrives too late to save her friend.

Elsewhere, Veronica cuddles the faceless body of Izzy, rendered nothing more than an automaton and Adrianna ‘lives’ as simulation in part of Dr Cyber’s AI hologram. Clinging to a lost past Veronica sobs at her actions.

To Be Continued…

ART: 3/5
As with Justice League, Wonder Woman‘s inking feels a little on the light side though this is specific to the character art. It works for and against for the book as Wonder Woman and Veronica Cale look beautifully rendered but in doing so they look somehow like they don’t fit in the layouts, almost as though they were the focus and the backgrounds done completely separately. Evely did some stunning art in the Cheetah/Minerva story a while back so I can’t quite put my finger on what it pulling me out of the story.

COVER: 4/5
This a a brilliant cover showing Diana take on a strange technological foe. I think the composition here its great and I think the inking here is far stronger than the interior. Would have been interesting to see Cale on the cover.

OVERALL RATING: 4/5
Getting an insight into Veronica Cale and explaining her ties to Phobos and Deimos certainly goes a long way to explain why she is the way she is. It was a nice distraction and the breather readers needed to dial down the intensity of the story so far. It definitely offers a lot more to understanding Cale and expands on her involvement in some of the bigger elements in Diana’s life that were previously only eluded to. Certainly looking forward to seeing this play out.

 

Celebrate Independent Women’s Day With an Excerpt of ‘Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History’

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Not only us today International Women’s Day, but also this month we’re recognizing Women’s History Month and there’s no better way to learn more about the some of the world’s most important historical figures than by checking out Sam Maggs’ Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History.

Like the film Hidden Figures, Maggs uncovers the contributions that women have quietly made to the world. History books don’t teach that nuclear fission was actually discovered by Lise Mietner because her lab partner Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize for its discovery. Or that Huang Daopo invented weaving technology that revolutionized textile production in China in 1240—that’s 5 centuries before Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin!

Thanks to our friends at Quirk books, we’re proud to share an excerpt of 2 of the 25 biographies featured in Maggs’ book.

 

Bessie Coleman

“I made up my mind to try; I tried and was successful.”

The world did not believe in Bessie Coleman. White Americans never thought that Black people could become pilots. Many men—heck, even Bessie’s own brother—told her that women couldn’t, either. But Bessie believed in herself, and she went out and did her country proud anyway. So if anyone tries to tell you that you can’t do something because of who you are, just think back to this amazing, brave, high-flying lady.

Bessie was born in the tiny settlers’ town of Atlanta, Texas, on January 26, 1892—one of thirteen children born to Susan, likely a former slave, and George, who was three-quarters Cherokee. Times were hard; just because the Civil War had ended almost thirty years ago didn’t mean that things were all freedom and privilege for Black people in the American South. Neither of Bessie’s parents could read or write. More than a hundred lynchings took place in the South annually, and anything from “this Black person got gainful employment” to “this Black person tried to defend their property from gangs” could spur a violent mob. Because of racist poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans were unable to vote or have representation in the government. Jim Crow segregation meant that Black people were forbidden from riding in the same rail cars, attending the same schools, or using the same water fountains as white people. With more and more of their land and rights stripped away every year, Native Americans in Texas weren’t exactly having a great postwar life, either. Add to this dismal situation the depression that struck the nation in 1893, and things were kind of garbage for any- one who wasn’t a rich white dude in the South.

Despite this challenging climate, Bessie’s dad managed to get his hands on a quarter of an acre for $25 in a Black area of Waxahachie, Texas. Two-year-old Bessie’s family moved into a small, three-room shotgun home and joined the town’s booming cotton industry. But then George decided he was not about that racist Texas life, and he left for the Oklahoma-adjacent Indian Territory, where he would encounter less discrimination. Susan and the family stayed behind in Texas, which meant that Bessie, on top of her four-mile walk to a segregated one-room school overseen by an underqualified teacher, now took responsibility for her three younger sisters while her mom worked as maid and cook for a local white family.

Though it’s easy to be like, “Yeah, that’s rough, but I do my own laundry, too,” let’s not forget that Bessie was doing all this work with no electricity or running water, which meant lots of hefting heavy water buckets, labor-intensive scrubbing, and babies screaming by candlelight—all while Bessie was nine years old. In addition, every summer the annual cotton harvest interrupted her schooling, a disruption that Bessie hated (she was really good at math, for one thing). The budding girl genius would much rather be at home, reading aloud to her fam from Uncle Tom’s Cabin or nonfiction books about Harriet Tubman that her mother picked up at the traveling cart library.

By age eighteen, Bessie felt a drive to “amount to something,” which prompted her to save enough money to enroll as “Elizabeth” at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University, located in a Black municipality in Langston, Oklahoma. After cash ran out during her first semester, however, she was forced to head back to Waxahachie—with the university band in tow, lauding her arrival as though she was about to play in the Rose Bowl. (Another good moral: next time you want to make the best out of a bad situation, just get a marching band to tail you wherever you go.)

By 1915, after years of humiliating and painful work as a town laundress (for which she was forced to leave clothes on her white clients’ back steps to avoid being seen), twenty-three-year- old Bessie was ready for change. She bought a ticket to Chicago, climbed aboard the cramped, uncomfortable rail car designated for Black women, and made the twenty-hour trip, arriving in the city and moving in with her two brothers—Walter, a Pullman train porter, and Johnny, technically unemployed but probably funemployed by the mob, if you know what I mean. The three of them lived in the city’s South Side, home to 90 percent of Chicago’s Black population (a population that doubled in the decade between 1910 and 1920) and where all classes mixed together in relative peace and harmony. Since she hated what she perceived as the degrading nature of domestic service, Bessie enrolled in beauty school to become a manicurist and set up shop at a barber’s on “The Stroll” (eight blocks of radness that was basically the Black Wall Street and Broadway combined). Soon she was giving perfect pedis to Chi-town’s Black elite; she even won a contest for Black Chicago’s fastest and best manicurist.     But Bessie wouldn’t be buffing and polishing for long. Shortly after her move to Chicago, Johnny, who was a veteran, happened to mention to his sister that he thought French women were superior to American women because the former “could even fly airplanes.” Instead of merely pointing out his flawed logic, Bessie decided to go ahead and prove him wrong by attempting to enroll at every flight school in the country. I say “attempted” because — surprise!—A merican f light schools were not okay with a woman, let alone a Black woman, becoming a pilot. The friendly skies of the United States were any- thing but for a woman like Bessie, and life on the ground in Chicago was no picture of perfection either, thanks to brewing race riots. Luckily, Bessie had met a lot of influential folks at her manicure table and the Stroll’s nighttime hotspots—including her mysterious husband, Claude Glenn, a man fourteen years her senior whom she had quietly wed in 1917 but likely never lived with (and then basically never spoke of again—safe to say they separated). Deciding that she would train in France, just like the pilots her brother was so all about, Bessie used her social smarts and some serious pluck to secure funding from one Robert Abbott (editor and founder of the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper read by 500,000 people) and Jesse Binga (a bank owner and real estate mogul who made his fortune by selling homes in rich white neighborhoods to Black families at a discount, then buying up the rest of the homes in the area as white residents fled). She started managing a chili joint and taking night classes in French and filled out a passport application (on which she said she was an unmarried manicurist). Then, on November 20, 1920, twenty-eight-year-old Bessie headed to Paris on her own.

In France, Bessie was on it. For instruction at the Ecole d’Aviation des Frères Caudon at Le Crotoy, she walked the nine miles to the airfield each day. She flew in an unstable Nieuport Type 82 biplane and once watched a classmate die in training. Her course was supposed to take ten months, but she finished in just seven; after nailing the final test of a figure-eight and an exact landing, she earned her pilot’s license on June 15, 1921 (two years before Amelia Earhart!). Bessie Coleman was officially the world’s first Black aviatrix. The next September, she sailed back to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing and the Black media were all about her. The brush with fame was great (and probably felt incredibly validating in a “told ya so, bro” kind of way), but standing ovations when she attended musicals wouldn’t pay the bills. Commercial flights weren’t really a thing yet (keep in mind this is only about twenty years after the Wright Brothers), so she was unable to earn money that way either. Besides, Bessie wanted to use her powers for good, not just for cash; her ultimate goal was to teach Black kids about airplanes and “make Uncle Tom’s cabin into a hangar by establishing a flying school.”

So Bessie headed back to Europe, where she spent time in Germany and the Netherlands learning how to be a proper “barnstormer,” a trick flier who did amazing (and amazingly dangerous) air stunts for crowds at airshows. She even put together her own superhero costume, complete with military jacket, high lace-up boots, a leather coat, and goggles. With her act perfected, and some sponsorship from her old friend Robert Abbott, who publicized her as “the world’s greatest woman flier,” she returned to the States ready to perform—and the public was definitely ready to watch. In a rare instance of the white media acknowledging the accomplishments of a Black woman, the New York Times covered her first airshow in New York, reporting in an article entitled “Negress Pilots Airplane” that “about 1,000 spectators, mostly negroes, saw the exhibition, which was in honor of the Fiftieth (negro) Infantry regiment, New York National Guard.”

Flying World War I Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplanes, Bessie went on to perform across America, including a terrifying performance in Los Angeles during which her old plane engine crapped out midflight, nosedived at three hundred feet, and left her with several broken ribs and a broken leg (she recovered from her injuries in Chicago while giving lectures). But Bessie wasn’t just doing dare- devil stunts; she was also campaigning for equality. On a visit to her hometown of Waxahachie, Texas, Bessie refused to fly if organizers used segregated entrances. After they agreed not to segregate the event, she directed her team to airdrop leaflets about the event onto nearby Black neighborhoods. She even took Black women on passenger flights after a Houston show, “the first time colored public of the South ha[d] been given the opportunity to fly,” according to the Houston Informer. And on top of all that, “Queen Bess” or “Brave Bessie,” as the media dubbed her, opened a beauty shop in Orlando, lectured across America to inspire Black youths to become pilots, took a job doing airborne advertisements for Coast Firestone Rubber, and toyed with the idea of a movie career—which she promptly dropped when she was cast as a stereotypical downtrodden enslaved woman. (Billboard called her “temperamental” and “unreliable,” but you know she was just taking a stand against racist garbage.)

A tale as rad as Bessie’s had to come to an end eventually. At age thirty-four, when she was close to opening her own flight school, Bessie had finally saved up enough money (and gotten a little financial boost from her friends) to purchase her own Jenny. The plane was in Dallas, but at the time Bessie was in Jacksonville, so she had William Willis, her twenty-four-year-old white mechanic and sometimes-publicist, fly it over for her. The plane was super old and super trash—so much so that it needed several emergency landings during the trip to Florida. Once William arrived, Bessie’s friends and family begged her not to fly, but Bessie wanted a test flight to ensure that everything was in working order. So on April 30, 1926, she and Willis took the bird up before a show for Orlando’s Negro Welfare League’s May Day celebration, with Willis in control so Bessie could undo her seatbelt and lean out of the plane to assess the best location for a parachute jump. But the plane was indeed busted, and after a mere twelve minutes in the air it took an unexpected dive and flip, hurling Bessie to her death thousands of feet below (she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt). Shortly thereafter, Willis hit the ground in a fiery blaze and died on impact. A wrench stuck in the gearbox had caused the engine to malfunction.

It was a tragic—and perhaps foreseeable— end to a life of bravery and risk. But risk had always been part of Bessie’s life as an aviatrix, and it was that kind of danger that made her job and her journey so interesting and inspiring to millions of Americans. A half century after her death, the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club for women of all races was founded in Chicago, and every year on the anniversary of her death their pilots airdrop flowers on her grave. She has a road named after her at O’Hare Airport, a Bessie Coleman Day in Chicago, and a postage stamp with her face on it. But beyond all the nifty tributes, Bessie inspired countless Black women to fight for their dreams, even when racist institutions (or rude brothers) try to stop them.

“Because of Bessie Coleman,” said Lieutenant William J. Powell in 1934, “we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream.”

 

Mary Sherman Morgan

1921-2004
American Rocket Scientist

Next time you brush off some task as easy because it’s “not rocket science,” think of Mary Sherman Morgan. For this amazing midcentury woman, it was all rocket science—and basically none of it was easy.

Born on a farmstead in rural North Dakota (so James T. Kirk!), Mary was the youngest of six children. She grew up in a family of bullying siblings and indifferent parents who kept her out of school to work on the farm until she was eight years old, when social services stepped in, threatening to arrest Mary’s father unless he allowed her to leave the house. The social worker provided Mary with riding lessons and a horse that would take Mary to and from the one-room schoolhouse.

Fortunately, the late start didn’t hinder Mary’s passion for education. After learning how to read and write while still managing to handle all her farm chores, she focused hard on her schooling and kicked the odds in the teeth by graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, despite being three years older than the rest of her graduating class because of enrolling so late. After running away from the farm to study chemistry at DeSales College in Toledo, she lodged in secret with her estranged aunt Ida. But her education would hit another bump: midway through her undergraduate years, the Second World War broke out. Among the upheaval caused by the conflict were new employment opportunities for women. As men headed off to fight, their now-vacant jobs had to be filled. Suddenly, a whole swath of the female workforce that might have otherwise been relegated to the secretarial sidelines was able to step up and apply for the openings—with Mary being among them.

Sometimes the jobs came knocking. While at college Mary had been approached by a “local employment recruiter” who needed “factory workers” trained in chemical engineering for a job in “Ohio.” As you may have assumed by my prolific use of “scare quotes,” the job the man presented wasn’t quite what it seemed.

In fact, the recruiter refused to say exactly what the work was, what the factory made, or where exactly it was located. Fortunately, Mary wasn’t afraid of opportunity (even when “opportunity” meant “strange dudes offering sketchy jobs”), so she accepted the offer, even when she had to get “top secret” security clearance from the U.S. government in order to do so. Hoping to complete her degree later, but also needing money to eat and survive, Mary bailed on college after sophomore year and accepted the position.

As it turned out, this supposedly ordinary factory job (and “definitely not spy stuff at all”) was in the Plum Brook Ordnance Works munitions factory near Sandusky, Ohio, the country’s top supplier of gunpowder, producing 400,000 pounds of explosives per day. As an employee, Mary created chemical compounds like DNT (used for making TNT), pentolite (used for firing warheads and bazookas), nitroglycerine (a liquid explosive), and TNT (aka trinitrotoluene, aka the explosive you may recognize from many a Looney Tunes cartoon). An impressive worker, Mary was devastated when she discovered she was pregnant (for a Catholic working woman without a husband in the 1940s, not the best news), and she knew she was on her own when the father, her college sweetheart, dropped off the face of the Earth after she told him about their future baby. In 1944 she gave birth to a daughter, who was adopted by her cousin, Aunt Ida’s daughter Ruth (married but unable to have children). To afford postnatal care, Mary worked for three weeks at the hospital with other unwed mothers.

After the war, Mary rocketed ahead (get it?), trying to stave off the unemployment that faced so many women after the war. She boarded a bus for California and applied for a job as a theoretical performance specialist with North American Aviation (NAA), an aerospace manufacturer that designed and produced rocket engines, where she would calculate how new propellants were expected to perform. Thanks in large part to the sterling recommendations she brought from Plum Brook (a highly respected institution after the war), Mary was officially hired in 1947. The NAA brought her on as an analyst—a special word for an engineer without a college degree whom they could therefore pay less money—in the Aerophysics Lab at the NAA’s Canoga Park Office, later renamed “Rocketdyne.” Mary was one of 900 engineers in the company, but the only one without a college degree, and definitely the only woman.

Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, Mary was named technical lead on NAA’s next big contract: developing a new fuel for the Jupiter missile. (Contrary to its name, the Jupiter was not a weapon sent to kill aliens on the eponymous gas giant, but rather a standard-issue medium-range ballistic missile used for blowing up bridges and other military targets.) Mary’s job was to produce a fuel that would replace the current formulation (composed of 25% water and 75% ethyl alcohol), providing a combustion powerful enough to propel a satellite all the way into space (a feat the United States had not yet accomplished). In addition, the fuel had to be stable enough not to cause the rocket to explode on the launch pad (which was happening, like, all the time). And because the rocket machinery could not be altered, Mary had to improve the propul- sion by changing only the chemical composition of the fuel—a task that most people thought impossible but that would see Mary facing a pink slip should she fail. Faced with this formidable challenge, Mary developed a fuel made up of 60 percent unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (H2NN[CH3]2) and 40 percent diethylenetriamine (HN[CH2CH2NH2]2). That would get mixed with liquid oxygen, or LOX. Mary, being wonderful, wanted to name her new fuel “bagel.” (Because bagel . . . and LOX. Delicious!)

Unfortunately for the world of rocket-science-related puns, the U.S. Army settled on the name hydyne.

Regardless of what it was called, the fuel worked! Hydyne increased thrust by 12 percent and effectively launched the United States’ first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit on January 1, 1958. (Of course, it was Explorer I’s de- signer Wehner von Braun who was lauded as the savior of the space program amid the formation of NASA that July.)

While working toward this blast of success (get it?!), Mary married fellow NAA employee and mathematical engineer Richard Morgan, and the couple would go on to have four children (one of whom is about to become crucially important to our story—stay tuned!). Mary retired in the late 1950s from an NAA office that then boasted at least a dozen women, and pretty much never spoke of her work again. She died in 2004, her passing marked by no major praise or plaudit, even though she was one of the world’s first female rocket scientists, without whom we may never have reached orbit.

Luckily for planet Earth, Mary’s son George Morgan was not about to let this injustice stand. After being approached at his mother’s funeral by a man who told him that Mary had “single-handedly saved America’s space program . . . and nobody knows it but a handful of old men,” George began digging into her past—and what he found was astonishing (as you know after reading all about it). When the Los Angeles Times refused to publish Mary’s obituary because it was unable to verify her accomplishments, George set out to make his mom a household name: he wrote a play about her called Rocket Girl, which was produced and performed at the California Institute of Technology in November 2008. Not content with already being the sweetest son ever, George published a complete biography of his mother in 2013—Rocket Girl: America’s First Female Rocket Scientist is three hundred pages celebrating the life of this fabulous but forgotten space-age heroine. He also swooped in and saved the day when an anonymous editor tried to give Mary’s supervisor credit for the invention of hydyne on Wikipedia (because, let’s get real, we know where people get their facts these days).

So now that we all know the truth, let’s never forget Mary Sherman Morgan, the raddest rocket scientist of them all.

Excerpted from Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History by Sam Maggs and Sophia Foster-Dimino.  Reprinted with permission from Quirk Books.

 


Adam West Guest Stars on an Upcoming Episode of ‘Powerless’

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Gotham comes to Charm City when the iconic Adam West, who played the role of Batman on television in the Sixties, guest stars in an upcoming episode of Powerless as Dean West, chairman of Wayne Industries.  Following an attack on Gotham City, Wayne Industries has to make some cuts and Mr. West visits Charm City to deliver the bad news to Van and Emily.  Will the dynamic duo of Van and Emily be able to save the team at Wayne Security, or are our Charm City Heroes destined for the unemployment line?

Executive producers Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern said, “Powerless is billed as DC’s first comedy, but we’ll always view Mr. West as the founding father of comedy in the DC Universe, thanks to his work in the original Batman television series. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work with a living legend.”

 

About Powerless
In a world where humanity must cope with the collateral damage of Super Heroes and Super‑Villains, Emily Locke (Vanessa Hudgens) is Director of Research & Development for Wayne Security, a subsidiary of Wayne Enterprises that specializes in products that make defenseless bystanders feel a little safer. Full of confidence and big ideas, Emily quickly learns that her expectations far exceed those of her new boss Van Wayne (Alan Tudyk) and officemates, so it will be up to her to lead the team toward their full potential and the realization that you don’t need superpowers to be a hero. Danny Pudi, Christina Kirk and Ron Funches also star.

Powerless airs Thursdays at 8:30/7:30c on NBC.

‘Child Eater’ (review)

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Produced by Perri Nemiroff, Luke Spears
Written and Directed by
Erlingur Óttar Thoroddsen

Starring Colin Critchley, Cait Bliss,
Melinda Chilton, Kara Durrett,
Brandon Smalls, Jason Martin,
Andrew Kaempfer, Dave Klasko,
Hilary R. Walker, James Wilcox

 

Writer/director Erlingur Thoroddsen expands his short film, Child Eater, to feature length to mixed results.

The film opens well, with a young girl stumbling through the woods with a horrific surprise gripped in her hand.

We then cut forward 25 years to the present day. Young adult Helen is coerced by her father, the local Sheriff, into babysitting the son of a friend.

The boy is Lucas, who has recently lost his mother and firmly believes in the existence – and imminent threat – of urban legend Robert Bowery.

Bowery, it is claimed, had a rare eye disease and to combat its regressive nature, would kidnap local children and eat their eyes.

Pretty cool and gruesome setup. Thoroddsen does a nice job of tapping into childhood fears by adding a facet to the urban legend that Bowery hides out in the children’s bedroom closet, waiting until they are asleep to take his prize.

Lucas’ closet is used to very creepy effect here, and the young actor who plays him, Colin Critchley, certainly appears terrified.

Cait Bliss is also quite believable as the initially annoyed babysitter who is determined to be the boy’s savior when shit goes down.

Jason Martin, with the help of a capable make-up team, does a nice job as the titular villain.  Efforts are made to create a new horror icon, but the movie falls a little short in enough ways that it’s unlikely to happen.

I could be wrong, as Child Eater is receiving a lot of love from indie horror fans and critics.  But for me, after a strong opening, it gets bogged down in the midsection and seemed to run out of steam well before the end credits.

The action, while almost non-stop in the final act, mostly feels monotonous and uninvolving.  Gore fans should enjoy some of the nastiness here, but there are moments when the eye damage looks a bit dodgy.
Overall, the tone of the film was more one of unpleasantness as opposed to horror.  There are some scares and some creepy moments, but they’re not sustained, alas.

And while there is certainly nothing wrong with a straightforward horror flick, I was hoping in vain that there would be some interesting twist, some dollop of satire or social commentary or psychological insight to add another layer, a la the superficially similar but deeper and more interesting (and very underrated) The Tall Man.

While not entirely successful, Child Eater has just enough going for it to juuust recommend it to diehard horror fans. And I would hardly be shocked if Thoroddsen and many of his cast and crew move on to better things.

Child Eater arrives on HD Digital, On Demand and DVD on March 28th.

Giant Size Graphic Breakdown: Top Marks for ‘Astro City’, ‘Deathstroke’, ‘Detective’

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Welcome back to Graphic Breakdown!

This was a hell of a week for Comics! Let’s get started with the reviews!

 

Astro City #42
Written by Kurt Busiek
Illustrated by Matthew Clark

What is going on in Astro City? A whole ton it’s turning out. This used to be one of my favorite comic books month to month in the 90’s and then my interest sort of faded away. Last issue was great and this issue continues on that trend. I liked this issue a lot and it’s picking up steam.

This issue is a bit like Robinson Crusoe…it’s the story of Mister Manta stranded on an island. This issue has him struggling to gather the strength to leave the island. Busiek writes a very human tale that is at once commanding and touching.

Matthew Clark is a great fit for this series and a rather underused artist. His style fits the story beautifully and I loved every panel.

Good story, great art, and a good comic book overall. What more can you ask for?

RATING: A-

 

Deathstroke #14
Written by Christopher Priest
Illustrated by Joe Bennett

Part three of the Twilight storyline!

Man, I can’t get enough of this title. The characters here are great, the action is exciting and clear, and the pacing is second to none. This is a comic book series I love and rave about each time it comes out.

Slade Wilson takes on a job from the US Naval Intelligence in this storyline to have charges dropped on him. It’s a smart storyline Priest has come up with and reminds me in pacing of a Bourne movie.

It’s also nice that he adds a new Power Girl as well, with a new character that is well done overall.

The art is awesome too. Anyone looking for good storytelling should look here. This was one of the best books of 2016…now it’s looking like it may also be one of the best books of 2017.

RATING: A

 

Detective Comics #952
Written by James Tynion IV
Illustrated by Christian Duce

This issue is off the hook nuts! And I love off the hook nuts!

James Tynion IV is making Detective Comics the place to be, and his League of Shadows storyline is awesome thus far!

The villainous group The League of Shadows is causing havoc through Gotham.

And man, it’s a blast watching their destructive ways.

Batman and his team have to fight them. The battle that follows is pretty damn great.

The art by Duce is very good. The action scenes are great and the flow of the issue is well done. It’s exciting to read.

And that is something to be appreciated.

RATING: A-

 

The Flash #18
Written by Joshua Williamson
Illustrated by Jesus Merino

The Flash gets a new storyline with this issue called Sins of the Father. Williamson is on a hot streak again and this issue is damn good as well.

In this issue, Wally West starts to track down secrets of his father Daniel West, otherwise known as the Reverse Flash.

What’s great about this issue it shows Wally West the way he should be. It’s Wally how you remember him and it’s super good.

Merino does a great job on the art. We don’t see him enough and he works great on this title. The first five pages are some of the best of the entire Rebirth relaunch.

Pick it up! It’s revving up again and you want to be reading this when the Watchmen crossover hits!

RATING: B+

 

Mother Panic #4
Written by Jody Houser
Illustrated by Shawn Crystal

This is another great issue from Jody Houser. That woman can write! It’s probably one of the more stranger reads currently on the stands but I love every second of it. It’s the best entry of the Young Animal line for me.

Violet Paige (aka Mother Panic) is one of the strangest characters in comics presently. She’s like reverse Batman. In this issue she goes up against the mysterious Pretty…and he may be her enemy. The entire issuer is weird but I could not look away.

Shawn Crystal takes over the art chores in this issue. Honestly, I liked Tommy Lee Edwards better as he was more suited to Houser’s scripts. Crystal has a LOT of energy in his artwork and reminds me of a young Todd McFarlane and that’s all well and good…but all the mood Edwards established is gone.

Still, the script is mighty fine and the whole issue is enjoyable. Pick it up. Houser certainly makes it worth it.

RATING: B

 

Titans #9
Written by Dan Abnett
Illustrated by Brett Booth

This book is a thrill. I just enjoy picking it up and reading through it each month. There’s just an energy that Brett Booth’s art has to it that is contagious. More than any other DC title this book is like a sugar rush.

The storyline Made in Manhattan continues in this issue. The Titans battle the Fearsome Five. The Fearsome Five have a new member…called Bumblebee.

It’s sounds stupid I know. Yet the art and the story make this whole thing compelling. Nightwing and Wally West (there he is again) also do a bit of sleuthing in this issue and it’s like old times.

I feel reading all these Titans issue that it’s leading to something big. That’s due to the strong writing by Abnett.

Every issue is a thrill ride.

And the characterizations of each character are how I love them. Let’s keep this up.  This is how I like my Titans.

RATING: B+

 

The Lost Boys #6
Written by Tim Seeley
Illustrated by Scott Godlewski

Man, what a wasted opportunity. This “sequel” to the film The Lost Boys is a well drawn disappointment from start to finish. This issue, is the finish. And not a moment too soon. I thought the concept was pretty good but the execution was just okay.

The heroes in this issue have their final confrontation with the Blood Belles! And its less than thrilling.

For an issue that tells us it’ll have plenty of blood it doesn’t have a drop.

Tim Seeley is a decent writer and he drops the ball here. It’s for the hardcore fan only, which I can’t imagine there are many left at this point. If you have nothing else to do, then maybe pick up this series. But know in advance…its toothless and lacks any bite.

And yes, I’ve been saving that one for awhile.

RATING: C

 

Batgirl and the Birds of Prey #8
Written by Julie and Shawna Benson
Illustrated by Roge Antonio

Nightwing is guest starring in this storyline! Between all the appearances he and Wally West are currently putting in, those two must be exhausted! This issue is the start of the Blackbird storyline and it’s a good issue. Not great, but good.

I think that’s what bothers me about this book. It’s always just “good.” Not great, but good. And here it is again. I think the Bensons are talented writers. I just wish they would step this up to make it a “must read.” I think they can. I challenge them to.

Anyway, someone hurts Nightwing in this issue and it’s up to the ladies over at the Birds of Prey to help him out. He better recover…he’s got more guest starring to do.

Antonio is decent on the art. He gets better with each book he does.

So this is a B book. Again. I want it t be an A.

RATING: B

 

Scooby Apocalypse #11
Written by J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen
Illustrated by Dale Eaglesham

I decided to give this book a full review. Dale Eaglesham is on the title. I like his art. His art is very good here. How bad can it be?

Turns out it’s even worse than it’s ever been.

The gang is trying to track down and find Velma. And then I just watched and read as my childhood got pooped on by this story.

The talent behind this issue are really some of my favorites. I love them all. But maybe they have lost their minds.

They can do better than this. And they should.

Don’t waste your money.

Unless you want to visit this graveyard where talent goes to die.

RATING: F

 

And the rest….

Earth 2 Society #22
Written by Dan Abnett
Illustrated by Vicente Cifuentes
I say it month in and month out…I need to pick this book up from the beginning. I love these characters and I love this creative team. The story is involving. That’s it…someone get me these books and I’m doing it this summer…this book is very good.
RATING: B+

 

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps # 16.
Written by Robert Venditti
Illustrated by Rafa Sandoval
I have no idea with these Green Lantern titles these days. I can just about look at the art and then I move on. This is just dull through and through.
RATING: D

 

New Superman #9
Written by Gene Luen Yang
Illustrated by Viktor Bogdanovic
This book is a nice surprise and I’m enjoying it. I may go back and read it from the beginning. Yang is a good writer and this book is interesting.
RATING: B

 

Gotham Academy: Second Semester #7
Written by Brenden Fletcher, Becky Cloonan and Karl Kerschl
Illustrated by Adam Archer and Msassyk
I’ve lost interest in this title. It’s getting too cutesy for my taste and should have been a miniseries. As of now I’m just bored by it.
RATING: C

 

Red Hood And The Outlaws #8
Written by Scott Lobdell
Illustrated by Kenneth Rocafort
This book is pretty damn cool. I love what Lobdell has created here and the character of the Red Hood shines. The art is great in this issue too. The “Who is Artemis?” storyline kicks off with a bang. Well worth your time.
RATING: B+

‘Kong: Skull Island’ (review)

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Produced by Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni,
Mary Parent, Alex Garcia
Screenplay by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein
Story by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy
Based on King Kong by
Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson,
John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian,
Toby Kebbell, John Ortiz, Corey Hawkins,
Shea Whigham, Thomas Mann, John C. Reilly

I went into Kong: Skull Island with little to no expectations.

My thinking was that as long as I got a lot of giant gorilla destroying stuff and fighting dinosaurs and monsters, then I would be happy.

What I wouldn’t have expected in a million years is “King Kong: Or How I Stopped Caring and Learned to Embrace The Heart Of Darkness and Moby Dick.”

To say this is a straight up rip-off of the classic Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville stories about obsession and tragedy is putting it lightly. Moreover, the direct lifting of scenes, themes, and visuals from the two most popular adaptations for the two works, 1979’s Apocalypse Now directed by Francis Ford Coppola and John Huston’s 1965 Moby Dick start off as a cute homage, but quickly degrade into blatant stealing. My two favorite “homages” were the jump cutting of close-ups from Samuel L. Jackson’s eyes to Kong’s and then back to Jackson’s. It was a real Captain Ahab moment.

Actually there were like three Captain Ahab moments. But who’s counting. And the other being the entire Helicopter attack/battle with Kong.

Straight out of the gate the film makers don’t dawdle, from the moment the 6 Bell UH-1H “Huey” choppers along with two escort helios take off from the fighter to the point where the team of explorers drop “seismic bombs” aka actual bombs to survey the land then meet up with Kong, the entire sequence is rife with straight up lifts from the most famous helicopter attack on film in Apocalypse Now. The fact that the film takes place during the tail end of the Vietnam War was not lost on me as well, how could it?

The director and writers basically sent the audience a singing telegram announcing their intentions right off the bat. I have to give them props though. The helicopter sequence was beautiful to watch. Right down to the reel to reel tape player blasting Creedence Clearwater Revival as they approached the Island. I guess using Wagner would have been a little too much?

Speaking of directors and writers, I am really not sure what director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts was going for, but after seeing the list of his previous works I am pretty sure it has to be comedy. An action comedy for sure but heavy on the comedy. International or not because I laughed. I laughed A LOT. I almost had an asthma attack, I laughed so much.

Three different writers, Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), Max Borenstein (Godzilla 2014) and Derek Connolly (Jurassic World) were responsible for this film. One can only assume that one was tasked with reading The Heart of Darkness, one had the daunting assignment to distill Moby Dick down to a cliff notes and the last was responsible for watching every Vietnam war movie and transcribing all the choice dialog and tropes. What they ended up with was a sort of B-movie monster movie wrapped in a $200 million dollar shell with a screenplay what makes a John Milius written film seem like Jane Austin.

Every character is the patented adventure movie cliche. Tom Hiddleston is basically the same character that Adrien Brody played in the 2005 Peter Jackson King Kong film except that his name in the film is, wait for it, Conrad. I’ll just let that sink in. Samuel L. Jackson is Samuel L. Jackson complete with Samuel L. Jackson lines from other movies like “Hold on to your butts” and the prerequisite Sam Jackson motivational speech. Brie Larson is basically wasted as the anti-war photographer who is out to get her Pulitzer Prize winning photo on the island only to have a change of heart when she meets the people of the island and has a touching (literal) moment with Kong. For all you fans of the 2014 Gareth Edwards Godzilla you will be happy to see John Goodman as the MONARCH government agent obsessed with discovering and proving the existence of a M.U.T.O. or Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, thus tying this film directly into the Godzilla universe.

Last, but definitely not least is John C. Reilly as the Dennis Hopper-esque, Robinson Crusoe type character who has been stranded on the island since WWII. The rest of the cast is filled out with one dimensional scientists, the token Asian, and a group of walking cliche army guys, like the plucky, funny complaining private (á la the late Bill Paxton in Aliens ) to the grizzled tough as nails self-sacrificing sergeant who has a heart of gold, this film had a check list of things to cover and it wasn’t afraid to use it.

Industrial Light and Magic were top notch with their visual effects as usual, and I couldn’t stop staring at Kong’s eyes and face animation. I had numerous chances to what with all the close-ups of his face looking mad, pensive, sad, vicious. The fight scenes were all fun to watch and hit me right in the “Creature Double Feature” feels (for those of you who lived in the greater Boston area in the 70’s and early 80’s).

This movie was completely entertaining and if you are looking for a great throwback to the popcorn-filled, Saturday afternoon action-adventure monster movies of the past, this is it. This is it in spades. I was completely entertained and a little surprised at just how funny it wound up being. Whether intentional or not, this film was hilarious. Stupid, over-the-top, and insultingly poorly written, but fun.

Oh and of course stay until after the credits finish rolling because Kong may be King of Skull Island but he isn’t the King of all Monsters…

James McAvoy Stars in The New Psychological Thriller ‘Split’, Available on Blu-ray & DVD 4/18; Digital HD 4/4

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Writer and Director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, The Visit) delivers his most gripping film yet with SPLIT, an original psychological thriller available on Digital HD on April 4, 2017 and on Blu-ray, DVD and On Demand on April 18, 2017, from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. Jason Blum (Insidious, Ouija, The Visit, The Purge series) returns to collaborate with Shyamalan in the box-office hit, starring James McAvoy (X-Men: Apocalypse, Victor Frankenstein). The frightening thriller SPLIT delves into the mysterious depths of one man’s fractured mind as a terror unlike the world has seen prepares to be unleashed. SPLIT offers viewers a closer look at the movie fans are raving about with a never-before-seen alternate ending, deleted scenes, character spotlight, and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film.

Heralded as “one of his best films – period” (Alex Welch, IGN), M. Night Shyamalan returns to the screen with SPLIT. Kevin Crumb’s (McAvoy) fractured mind has revealed 23 personalities, but one remains dangerously submerged, set to materialize and dominate the others. McAvoy delivers “the role of his career” (Peter Debruge, Variety) as Kevin reaches a war for dominance among all those that rage within him, threatening his stability and impacting the survival of everyone around him.

Producer Marc Bienstock (Before I Fall) and executive producers Ashwin Rajan (Devil, The Visit) and Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity series) who collaborated on The Visit reunite with SPLIT. Starring James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch), Betty Buckley (The Happening, “Oz”), Haley Lu Richardson (The Edge of Seventeen, Follow) and Jessica Sula (“Recovery Road”), critics hail SPLIT as “a nerve-shredding thriller” (Tim Grierson, Screen International).

 

BONUS FEATURES on BLU-RAY and DVD

  • Alternate Ending
  • Deleted Scenes
  • The Making of Split Filmmakers, cast, and crew discuss what attracted them to the project and how they were able to bring such a unique premise to life.
  • The Many Faces of James McAvoy- A look at how James McAvoy approached the challenge of playing so many different identities.
  • The Filmmaker’s Eye: M. Night Shyamalan Director and writer M. Night Shyamalan has a singular, big-picture vision of his projects. Producers, cast, and crew discuss how Night’s process gives them the freedom to execute their roles to the fullest.

 

The Blu-ray Combo Pack includes a Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD with UltraViolet.

  • Blu-ray unleashes the power of your HDTV and is the best way to watch movies at home, featuring 6X the picture resolution of DVD, exclusive extras and theater-quality surround sound.
  • DVD offers the flexibility and convenience of playing movies in more places, both at home and away.
  • Digital HD with UltraViolet lets you watch movies anywhere, on any device. Users can instantly stream or download movies to watch on iPad, iPhone, Android, smart TVs, connected Blu-ray players, game consoles and more.

 

For more details visit the Official Split Website

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Sneak Peek: ‘The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra’ by Marc Tyler Nobleman

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Readers of FOG! might know our friend, Marc Tyler Nobleman for not only his various books including Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman and more notably, Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman, which in no small part was responsible for writer Bill Finger to receive deserved credit as the co-creator of Batman (and which is the subject of an upcoming Hulu documentary), but also for his amazing website Noblemania, where he has tracked down and interviewed such under the radar pop culture icons as The Robert Palmer Girls, as well as cast members from everything from Ghostbusters to Back to The Future to the Super Friends.

His latest children’s book, The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra, is a cryptozoologic children’s book that’s beautifully illustrated by artists Ana Aranda.

Like most goats, Jayna, Bumsie, and Pep’s greatest fear is being eaten for dinner by the legendary chupacabra—it’s common knowledge that goats are a chupacabra’s favorite food! One night, tired of living in fear, the impetuous goats whip out their trusty candelabra and head off to find the beast and scare it away before it can find them. Little do they know that candelabras are the chupacabra’s third-favorite food . . . and he isn’t about to stop there. This chupacabra has quite the appetite, and the goats are in for a big surprise!

Marc and his publishers at Penguin Random House were generous to share some pages from this charming and very funny book.

The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra is available now from bookstores and via e-tailers.

‘Elvira, Mistress of The Dark’ Limited Collector’s Edition Blu-ray Arrives on 4/24/17!

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CINESPECTRAL FILMS proudly presents the 1988 cult comedy: Elvira, Mistress of the Dark for the first time ever on Blu-ray, in glorious all-new restored High Definition.  Limited to just 3,000 copies, this strictly limited Dual-Format 3-disc collector’s edition is packed with all-new special features and never-before-seen archive material.

When famed TV horror hostess Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) quits her job after being sexually harassed by the station’s new owner, she forms a plan to start her own show in the heart of Las Vegas. Upon learning that her great aunt Morgana has passed away, Elvira travels to the town of Falwell to claim her inheritance, only to soon find herself stranded in town when her Macabre Mobile’s engine blows up.  Once the stuffy locals get an eyeful of the scream queen’s ample assets, all hell busts loose! Will she become Las Vegas’ next big dance sensation or will she get burned alive at the stake?

The 3-disc mediabook packaging is available with a choice of three variant front-cover designs: the original theatrical artwork, the promotional press-kit artwork, and an all-new commissioned retro-inspired piece by German horror director Andreas Marschall.  Special metal foil printing on all three artworks is also present and each numbered set is certified by a holographic sticker.  Each variant is limited to just 1,000 units.

The bilingual 60-page bound-in fully illustrated booklet features English texts by Sam Irvin and Patterson Lundquist, along with never-before-seen production stills and dazzling international artwork.  This material will only be featured as part of the exclusive edition.  Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was scanned from the original interpositive print at Deluxe in Burbank CA, using the Lasergraphics Director 4K film scanner.

LIMITED COLLECTOR’S EDITION CONTENTS:

  • All-Region High-Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD (PAL-only) presentations
  • Original English stereo & 5.1 option audio and original German audio (DTS-HD MA Blu-ray only)
  • Optional English and German subtitles
  • 60-page illustrated booklet (30 pages English text / 30 pages German translation)
  • Three front-cover variant artworks, each version limited to 1000 copies

BLU-RAY ONLY SPECIAL FEATURES:

  • Exclusive introduction to the main-feature by director James Signorelli
  • 2012 Audio Commentary directed by Sam Irvin with stars Cassandra Peterson, Edie McClurg and John Paragon;
  • All-new exclusive 2016 Audio Commentary with director James Signorelli, produced and hosted by Fangoria Editor Emeritus Tony Timpone*
  • All-new exclusive 2016 Audio Commentary with elviramistressofthedark.com webmaster Patterson Lundquist
  • Too Macabre – The Making of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark:  A brand-new feature-length documentary (100 mins) with Cassandra Peterson and actors W. Morgan Sheppard, Daniel Greene, Susan Kellermann, Kurt Fuller, Ira Heiden, Kris Kamm, stand-in Susan McNabb, and writer/actor John Paragon.  On the production side, the doc highlights director James Signorelli, producer Eric Gardner, writer Sam Egan, public relations specialist Tony Angellotti, FX team members Steve LaPorte, Mark Bryan Wilson, and Yancy Calzada, as well as visual effects illustrator Larry Nikolai.  Together, the 17 craftspeople interviewed share their memories on the making of the movie, as well as providing hilarious anecdotes.*
  • Recipe for Terror – The Creation of the Pot Monster:  Featurette starring the film’s special effects team, who discuss the development of the film’s memorable monster, from its early draft stage to its remarkable final design.*
  • 2012 archive interview with Cassandra Peterson
  • 3 never-before released behind-the-scenes clips from 1987:
  • Mark Pierson on the Macabre Mobile
  • Set-Tour with producer Eric Gardner
  • Eric Gardner on preproduction of Elvira, MOTD
  • Bally Pinball Video Tours: Elvira and the Party Monsters and Scared Stiff
  • Exclusive HD remastered versions of the original theatrical Trailer & Teaser, as well as HD reconstructed US Trailer 2, Teaser 2, US TV Spot, German & French Trailer
  • 7 never-before-seen original storyboard sequences
  • Original US Press-Kit
  • Original Script
  • International Promotional Materials and Stills Gallery

 

(*Produced by Scotia Film Distribution Germany and Fangoria Editor Emeritus Tony Timpone)

Arriving on April 14, 2017, pre-order it exclusively through www.movie2shop.com

 


‘On The Rocks’ (review)

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Produced by Keaton Heinrichs,
Akiva Nemetsky, Jake White

Written and Directed by
Ariel Gardner and Alex Kavutskiy

Starring Chase Fein, Nichole Bagby,
Kate Freund, Audrey Whitby, Curt Neill,
Aaron Kee, Anna Seregina, Graham Clarke
Nathan Graham Smith, DeMorge Brown

On the Rocks, the debut feature by first-timers Alex Kavutskiy & Ariel Gardner, is the story of recovering alcoholic Dallas (Chase Fein) and his exceedingly needy wife Karen (Nichole Bagby).

After his father dies, Dallas moves himself and a reluctant Karen into his childhood home, ready to start the next chapter of their lives. But with every step Dallas takes toward stability and growth, Karen’s immaturity, her insane family’s intrusion, and the demands of his own work life undercut his progress.

In fact, every hiccup in his life seems to escalate into a massive crisis, taking him on a crazy roller coaster ride of emotions and reactions.

The best way I can think of to summarize what watching On the Rocks is like is this: You know when you’re driving down the freeway and there’s a big accident up ahead… and you know it’s not ideal to slow down and see what’s going on but you do anyway? And you even find yourself looking in your rearview mirror after you pass it? That accident was pretty terrible and it sort of stays with you for the rest of the day…

The characters portrayed in On the Rocks are the worst people ever and watching them essentially trip and fall through their lives in the 90 minutes of this film is excruciating but also, you just can’t stop watching.

Karen is especially awful and brings new meaning to the descriptor “self-centered” managing to make everything happening to Dallas about her, including his father’s death. And even in the moments when Dallas gives in to her ego, she finds a way to skip over gratitude and throw it back in his face like a big, streaming pile of garbage. She has two sisters that are almost as terrible but at least she has them because it doesn’t seem likely that Karen has a lot of friends….

Throughout the film you pray for Dallas’ sweet release – and maybe for a truck to run Karen over. In truth, the best worst part of this movie is it’s truth; that we all know people like this. That we all have that person in our life we cannot get away from.

On The Rocks is now available On Demand.

‘The Lure’, aka ‘Córki dancingu’ (review)

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Produced by Włodzimierz Niderhaus
Written by Robert Bolesto
Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska
Starring Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszańska,
Kinga Preis, Jakub Gierszał, Andrzej Konopka,
Zygmunt Malanowicz, Magdalena Cielecka
Katarzyna Herman, Marcin Kowalczyk

 

The Lure isn’t the first musical about mermaids, but I’m fairly certain it’s the first Polish musical/horror film about man-eating, vicious, telepathic mermaids who find work as backup singers in a strip club.

Whatever else The Lure is, run-of-the-mill it ain’t.

Two mermaid sisters, Silver and Golden, come ashore one night and are taken in by members of a band which plays at a local strip club. As with the usual mermaid lore, their tails turn into humanoid legs while on dry land.

Though, in a perverse twist on the legend, they lack genitalia or anuses. “Smooth like Barbie”, notes one character.

Things go swimmingly (sorry) for a while, though potential trouble sets in when one of the sisters begins falling in love with the cute bassist in the band.

The film is a bit lackadaisical – and at times confusing – in its storytelling, and it’s not completely satisfying dramatically.

That said, it works as both horror and musical. There’s a lot of blood (and rampant nudity) and a ton of musical numbers, especially for a 92 minute film.

The numbers range from enjoyable to flat-out terrific, with a particularly bizarre musical number taking place during a gory surgery.

The styles of music are all over the map, in a good way. They range from show tunes to rock to ballads to punk, with lyrics that are sometimes blunt, sometimes quite witty and oft-times cryptic or poetic.

The performances are persuasive, the filmmaking often striking. There’s some nice editing in a sequence which cuts between a character being showered by feathers from a pillow and the mermaids contemplating murder in the falling snow.

While the film is never especially frightening, it IS bloody and disturbing, and it’s nice to see some of the songs actually contribute to the creepy atmosphere. This isn’t a musical that grinds to a halt once the songs kick in.

I read an interview with Steven Spielberg years ago in which he offered his axiom on Musicals: he felt he would only make a particular musical if he would still want to tell its story if it had no musical numbers.
This makes a lot of sense; some of the very best musicals do tell compelling stories that would work sans musical numbers.

However, I think The Lure’s story and its very existence as a musical are intertwined.  While there have certainly been horrific, non-musical takes on mermaids that have worked on their own terms, The Lure absolutely works best as is.  Just as some stories were meant to be told in graphic novel form, some work best on stage, etc., The Lure was meant to be a musical.

A flawed film, to be sure, but if you’re open to the premise, you’ll likely find a lot to enjoy and admire here.

‘The Dark Below’ (review)

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Produced by Kurt Eli Mayry,
Kathryn J. McDermott, Douglas Schulze
Story by Douglas Schulze, Jonathan D’Ambrosio
Written and Directed by Douglas Schulze
Starring  Lauren Mae Shafer, David G.B. Brown,
Veronica Cartwright,Zachary Levine

 

A woman is dragged by a man to an icy lake. The man slips her into a wetsuit and flippers and slaps an oxygen tank on her back (after letting out most of the oxygen).  He then plops her into the lake and shovels snow and ice over the opening, thus ensuring her death, it would seem.

The cool premise and nifty poster suggest a tense cat-and-mouse between killer and unwilling victim. And the mostly very positive reviews from the film’s festival screenings would suggest we’ve got an interesting, stylish thriller on our hands.

I honestly haven’t the faintest idea what the supporters of this snoozefest were watching. Or drinking. Or smoking.

Admittedly, some films just play better at festivals than on computer screens. I’ve been to a LOT of festival screenings and championed films that I later watched at home and wondered why I was so enamored of them in the first place.

But this film, at a mere 75 minutes including end credits, is one of the dullest slogs I’ve ever suffered through.

I admire the IDEA of making a thriller with only three words of spoken dialogue, but the execution here is a disaster, with character motivation and identification mostly absent or confusing to the point I began to become angry with the film before the midway point.

Initially, I was rooting for the woman. Human nature. We want to see the victim of a potential murderer survive and for justice to prevail.

But despite the game efforts of actress Lauren Mae Shafer, I began to root for the killer after a while.  Partially to stay awake, but mostly because for someone who apparently wants to survive, she acts like a complete idiot.

When the killer first attacks her, she stands still and waits for him to run across the room and grab her without any struggle.  There are several points in the film wherein she knows the killer is approaching and takes her sweet time trying to hide or get away. At the same time, the approaching killer should be able to plainly see her scampering away (FINALLY), and yet when he arrives, acts as though he has no clue where she’s hiding.

Speaking of taking its sweet time, The Dark Below feels like a short film expanded to feature length solely by filmed almost entirely in slow motion! Everything that occurs on screen takes forever – backed by operatic, ludicrously over-the-top, synth/choral music – and becomes almost comical, if it weren’t so frustratingly boring.

If you’re looking for a solid thriller, you’ll find more suspense and thrills in Andy Warhol’s Empire than you’ll find here. What a waste.

The Dark Below opens in limited release in theaters, today.

Boston Cinegeeks! Win Passes To See ‘Life’ Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson & Ryan Reynolds!

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Life is a terrifying sci-fi thriller about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station whose mission of discovery turns to one of primal fear when they find a rapidly evolving life form that caused extinction on Mars, and now threatens the crew and all life on Earth.

For the chance to receive two tickets  to an advance screening of the
Columbia Pictures film LIFE on Wednesday, March 22nd at 7:00 PM
at Kendall Square Cinema, click HERE.

LifeMovie.com

‘Joe Hill: The Graphic Novel Collection’ (review)

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Written by Joe Hill
Illustrated by Nat Jones, Zach Howard,
Vic Malhotra, Charles Paul Wilson III
Published by IDW Publishing
Released on February 7, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1631407680
Price: $49.99

 

Author Joe Hill, best known for his book Horns, offers a small collection of five gruesome tales, each quite different from the last due to shifting styles in art and storytelling.

However, each tend to circle themes of the dark nature of people and their ability to turn on each other rather than themes of the supernatural, monsters and things that go bump in the night.

Thus, this collection of stories spotlight the horror of humanity itself.

(And yes, Hill is the son of horror icon Stephen King. The scribe has done an admirable job over the last decade to set himself apart from his famed father. That’s all we need to say on that, really.)

The collection includes the stories of The Cape, The Cape: 1969, Kodiak and Wraith, along with touching a foreword by comic scribe Jason Ciaramella, who touches upon Hill’s work, as well as his character.

The Cape tackles the question: what if with great power, came great douchebaggery? A low life loser with the ability to carry a heavy grudge discovers that his childhood blanky-turned-cape gives his the ability to fly. And instead of using his ability to rescue orphans from burning buildings, he gets revenge on others for petty injustice. Eric the Slacker becomes a flying, death-dealing asshole who gets his retribution on various “foes,” including a long-suffering ex-girlfriend, snooping law enforcement and various family members, just to name a few.

The look and feel of The Cape offer shades of Tales from the Crypt with a modern twist. The shading and line work giving the proper amount of darkness to the main character of Eric, painting him as the sinister slacker with a dark side despite his sweatpants and stubble.

The Cape: 1969 takes a step back in time, visiting Eric’s father, an absent figure to young Eric and his brother in The Cape, but Captain Gordon “Cory” Chase, a Medevac helicopter pilot in the US Army who is captured by the enemy during the Vietnam war. During his time in a tiger cage, the elder Chase is kept with a local witch, who happens to “gift” him with the ability of flight.

The two stories work well together, although there is a clear tonal shift between the two. The Cape: 1969 border on sci-fi, as a GI attempts to make use of his newfound superpower, while The Cape is clear-cut horror at time, as the character of Eric taps into the worst of mankind with the power he inherits.

Thumbprint follows the story of Mallory Grennan, a former private first class who was dishonorably discharged after she was found guilty of prisoner abuse. Moving back to her hometown after the death of her father, Mallory begins receiving fan mail in the form of scarred thumbprints. As the former private recalls the torture and humiliation she inflicted on others while in service to her nation, she continues to receive letters and visits from a mysterious figure from her past.

The bareness of the comic sets a somber tone for the tale as heavy grays hang over the story. Flashbacks of particular brutality are shaded in singular tones, as the monotone color of each section of the story does an admirable job of emphasizing the horror without having to use gore.

Kodiak is a play on fairytale stories as the look and feel of the comic takes on a look and feel of beanstalk whimsy. Featuring evil royalty, good-hearted circus performers, a lovely maiden and an angry bear, the story of Kodiak is a palate cleanser among the dark tales about corruption and darkness of human nature. It’s cute. It’s sweet. It’s down right adorable. Mutilation and all.

And finally, we come to Wraith. The title refers to the 1938 Rolls Royce with the smiling driver behind the wheel…and a captured child in the backseat. Charles Talent Manx is happy to tell you about his story, but you better buckle up, ‘cause it’s a bit of doozy. Filled with anger, hatred and bitterness, the odd tale of driver behind the wheel of the Wraith is by far the most entertaining of the lot.

Part Alan Moore’s Joker, part something completely unique, readers are given a type of origin story, but not a hero’s journey, that’s for damn sure. This is a journey filled with blood and fear, of violence and hate, a little trip down the darkest part of the human soul. And oh my, is it fun.

Hill’s stories a fun grouping of horror tales that won’t terrify the tough hearted, but will entertain those who are fans of the genre. The best of the bunch is clearly Wraith, which gleefully takes the reader by the hand to merrily skip down a path lined with blood and guts. A fine collection for those who love horror and Hill alike.

 

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