These days Stan Lee seems to be all about haphazard collaborations, in what appears to be a vie to complicate his own soon-to-be-survivors' inheritance. The freshest batch of headlines pits him with Arnold Schwarzenegger in development of "The Governator", which aims to skip that awkward media endearment phase and jump to being a full-on franchise, with a TV series already optioned for a movie. The series will feature a hardly-fictional retired governor who takes crime-fighting into his own hands with an array of gadgetry and teenage cohorts at his disposal. And the antagonists invented by the alliteration-enthusiast co-creator? An organization named Gangsters, Imposters, Racketeers, Liars & Irredeemable Ex-cons, or GIRLIE Men, for short. While there's nothing overtly homophobic in the Governor's infamous choice of words towards his political competitors, I'm definitely reading some inconsistency in the show's marketing. Is Arnold's square-jawed hyper-masculinity and lightcycle mockup supposed to be geared toward kids? That would partially justify that crapshoot of a trailer, but then why include an uncensored rendition of Black Eyed Peas' "Turn it Up"? (Oh yes they did) I suppose the show will do a fine job of crashing and burning on its own, but I'll be keeping my pickfork handy for the first mention of an enemybot with a broken wrist sprocket.
A few weeks ago my local comics shop posted on Facebook a photo of the first in a four-issue mini-series they had bought from a patron looking to unload some old books: a 1991 revival of the old The Wild Wild West television series. Please do not make the mistake of associating this comic book with the horrendous film from 1999. Don't get me wrong, I will take literally any opportunity to admire Will Smith, for whom I've always sported a weakness, but that movie was bad and misinterpreted, ignored or otherwise squandered everything good about the original show.
This comic book, from the now-defunct Millenium Publications, is based on the original 1960's TV show, a unique mishmash of old west, science fiction and knockout finishes. That show was more like a comic book than any other property original to television that I can readily name - something the makers made explicit with the illustrated bumpers around commercial breaks - and it turns out the adaptation to comics is a genuine treat, a last episode to be savored by the part of me that's still eight years old and watching reruns on the old console TV.
Don't call 'em sidekicks. At least, that seems to be the driving idea behind the new Young Justice cartoon series, which begins airing weekly this Friday following the debut of its first two episodes late last year. If the opening hour is any indication of the episodes to come, the show aims to bypass the cheap teenage-drama-occasionally-interspersed-with-action that one might expect and instead fit snugly into the hole in Cartoon Network left long ago by Teen Titans.
The Boyf and I snuggled up on the couch Sunday evening to watch the two-hour/-episode premiere of NBC's new superhero show The Cape. It is an extremely rare occasion, in the TiVo era, that we sit down together and watch something while it's happening.
There are plenty of ways in which this show had a bumpy start, and there were times when it made me roll my eyes, but I plan on watching the next episode pretty much as soon as we have it. That's a rare thing for me, someone who likes a few shows but probably only watches five hours of TV in an entire week. War & Peace it ain't - it's not even the best live action superhero television I've ever seen - but it's got a lot going for it, not least of which is Our Hero's smile, that much more delectable in HD.
Read on for more of what I liked - and didn't - about NBC's The Cape!
Let's get right down to brass tacks on The Tick vs. Season One: the video quality is terrible, the sound drops out in places, it's missing an episode and there are Internet People who think that the others might even be edited down a little here and there. The antagonism of the title arguably mirrors the struggle between the publisher and their theoretical market for this DVD, namely the people who were super-into the cartoon when it came out and yet for whom they produced what is a decidedly inferior product. You know what? None of that matters to me. When I think of The Tick New Series I automatically am enveloped in simultaneous and parallel nostalgia for the '90s cartoon iteration, The Tick. This first season has some great stuff - Chairface might be chief among them - and some shoddy production values can't blot that out. The cartoon never looked good in broadcast, anyway, did it?
For some perspective, recall that this cartoon was a contemporary of the gold standard for '90s animation: Batman: the Animated Series. Nothing could be expected to raise the bar higher than Warner Bros. had just done. Batman turned the whole meritocracy of animation on its head: it was so good it made everything else easier to forgive.
In 1992 I was running home from classes in the afternoon - a freshman in college - to catch Batman in the afternoons. I was scheduling classes around it. The story of its creation, the new ideas its makers brought to the table and the support the studio and the publisher gave them to encourage this magnificent new vision of a classic is really fascinating. Whereas The Tick vs. Season One has zero special features and, instead, fills the bare-minimum requirements of being worth keeping around - in no way exceeding the possibilities of a manually-edited VHS copy made by a friend and yet perhaps just as cherished by those for whom there is no other source - the special features of Batman: the Animated Series Volume 1 are fascinating without trying to outshine the show itself. Some shows or films have so many special features that I find the idea of trying to ingest them all an insurmountable task; in this case, it was just another part of the whole fantastic package.
Am I the only one who thought that when I saw the futuristic T-shaped mask he's wearing here, as he sells some kind of high quality audio laptop? The rest of the outfit works pretty well too!
You've likely heard it by now, but the Jonah Hex movie slated for this summer has its first trailer out. Sure, it's got Megan Fox and a literal trainwreck going on, but let's save our judgment for when the film actually comes out. The point is, if you're concerned for the gunslinger's credibility, it's best to immerse yourself in his other, more faithful incarnations.
There's already the mass of trade collections (though oddly no reprints to coincide with the film); But on top of that, DC has made motion comics available through various gaming consoles, iTunes and amazon. The motion comic stands at a reasonably priced 99 cents each, and you can find a sampling of what to expect over at USA Today.
Hex was also featured in Cartoon Network's Brave and the Bold cartoon, which you should already have watched and been in love with. The whole episode is available for free this week on the Brave and the Bold website. And later down the line, you can look forward to the direct-to-DVD Batman:Under the Red Hood (which is starting to look really good), which will have a featurette to accompany the main film. You're not the only one who thinks Mastodon and Megan Fox don't mix well, but at least you've got options.
Excited for the Doctor Who premiere this Saturday? Though most American fans have cheated themselves out of the 3 week wait for the stateside debut, the new series is only one of the ways in which fans can get to know the Doctor. Having seen two excellent brand new episodes, I turned to the 2008 comics series published by IDW to see if the first two issues share common elements with the new series. There's a comics rendition of the Eleventh Doctor coming soon, so I was eager to see what goes on with a Doctor's debut across the mediums.
Years ago my second-favorite Warren Ellis comic, Global Frequency, was developed as a pilot for the old WB network. As that was the original home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a number of other good dramas that successfully mixed both younger audiences and mature themes I figured that was pretty much the natural home of something like a television adaptation of a serialized, violent but ultimately optimistic and good-natured property like Global Frequency. The pilot had some great talent in it and floated around online like crazy after the WB decided not to pick it up.
Now the web is abuzz that the CW - offspring of a merger of the WB with UPN - is developing a completely new adaptation of Global Frequency with Scott Nimerfro writing the script. Nimerfro has a number of writing credits on other shows that occupy roughly the same aesthetic neighborhood: Pushing Daisies, Stargate, The Outer Limits and Tales From the Crypt, titles that might not seem like they'd ever have much in common but Global Frequency is the kind of book in which one issue might be about wacky alien hijinks in NYC and the next might be about an incredibly bloody showdown between two professional killers in some lonely locale far from anyone else's notice.
The book is highly episodic and in two trade paperbacks, so the whole thing can be gotten and read as a self-contained story. The comic is largely Ellis at his best, focused on the interconnectedness of all people and the way societies really are just networks of personal relationships that must be maintained and their constituents respected for those social bonds to remain strong. The set-up is that Miranda Zero and her network of 1,000 sleeper agents around the world - each an expert in something extremely specific - wait for problems to appear and then solve them in a hurry. Much of the fascination for me is that almost every issue is about different agents, so we get to see how they react to their lives being abruptly interrupted by the call to service as hero for a day. The whole concept is given over to creativity and diversity of themes and tones so that there really is a little something for everyone and the book emphasizes the value of a highly diverse resource pool. Highly recommended.
However, I am a little worried that the developer here is the CW. They were also home to one of my favorite shows in years, Reaper, and I'm not quite sure they gave it the right chance or the right support. Its same sort of Bug of the Week approach to serial narrative with a similarly slow exploration of the larger, quirky world it inhabited never got entirely on its feet and the network seemed to try to strangle it to death after a very few episodes.
At any rate, I hope the TV adaptation of Global Frequency comes to pass and that it's good. Ellis won't say anything other than that something is in the works, which is for the best. If they said Ellis was writing the script, honestly, I'd lose hope fast. How many shows could make it when the writer can only manage two scripts in a year?
With Smallville in its ninth season, it's a fair bet to assume that you've caught an episode or two, if not for the story, then for the shirtless Tom Welling. And when that's not enough of a draw, the show reinvents itself with superhero collaborations and stunts like bringing on Geoff Johns as a guest writer. February will see a combination of both these factors in the form of a two-episode 'TV film" centering on the Justice Society. The story will feature Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Stargirl, Martian Manhunter and Amanda Waller. But I'm mostly focused on the casting of Stargate's hunky Michael Shanks as Carter Hall. The stuff of slash writer's dreams was fulfilled when Ben Browder locked lips with his Stargate SG-1 costar at the 2008 Comic-Con. Unfortunately, his Hawkman costume calls for a bronze breast plate instead of our favorite avian superhero's regular bare-chested burliness, but the idea of a Hawkman team-up was already enough to make sure I'm tuning in.
"Justice" and "Legends" will air on the CW on February 5th.
Fire up those DVRs, kids, because on Friday of this week, 23 October, the multi-talented and fabulously out Neil Patrick Harris is going to be playing - and singing - the part of a villain named the Music Meister on the cartoon series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. One synopsis I've read suggests that the Music Meister's unnaturally persuasive voice will cause multiple heroes and villains to burst into song-and-dance routines illuminating their various feelings for one another and towards Batman in classic Broadway style. If The Bat himself sings a song I might actually faint dead away.
I am studiously avoiding comment on that, um, baton.
Of course the big in-joke is that NPH's sudden second career as a song and dance man seems to have started when he played the equally musical villainous title character in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but we're all on the Internet so we all already know that, right? I'm sure it - or possibly this episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold - is not to everyone's tastes, but as one of the stereotypical drama refugees who lived for the high school musical every spring I am having trouble imagining an episode I'd want to watch more. Even if one doesn't particularly like NPH or musicals, one has to marvel at how Harris' agent must be the most pleasantly surprised person in LA.
And please, can the media stop referring to him as "Doogie?" It is over. Let it go.
I know we have a lot of Buffy/Angel/Whedon fans here, so I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Andy Hallet, who played the demon Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan, or 'Lorne', has died heart disease. He was 33. Apparently he had been fighting heart disease for five years. His father was with him when he died.
Sad news, and our condolences go out to his friends and especially his family.
Review: Stormwatch #1
Stormwatch #1, the first of DC's new 52 to feature LGBT characters (before the reboot, at least) is out to add a new cosmic dimension to the post-Flashpoint universe. There isn't much to be said for our beloved broship yet (though the last page shows a handshake between Apollo and Midnighter and promises a "Big Bang"), but the issue is a great gauge for whether or not you'll want to stick with the series to see the romance purportedly unfold....
