Dan

It's gotten ridiculous. Grant Gustin is bloated with likability, so they've been able to wallpaper over the fact that Barry's really been kind of a dick this season.

I'm generally enjoying the show, but "A thing has happened! The people it affects MUST NEVER KNOW!" really needs to stop.

With the ResurrXion arc, Marvel is bringing back corner boxes, sort of!

Then yeah, it's probably that bad.

That was Scott Lobdell, wasn't it?

It really felt like an 80s Cannon action flick. That's not a criticism.

The review embargo for the first half of Iron Fist has been lifted, and it doesn't sound promising.

Agreed. He'd been writing his style of comics for a few years by this point and had his voice down cold, and Everett's storytelling is gorgeously done. Also, I forgot about the Gladiator, a villain I like in theory more than execution. However, I love that his motivation to be evil is that he works in retail and customers are just the worst. I feel you, sir.

Daredevil Omnibus, Vol. 1: Collects Daredevil (1964) #1-41, Annual #1, Fantastic Four #73, and material from Not Brand Echh #4. This was a surprisingly quick read. The stories themselves aren't very complex - "Daredevil beats up a bunch of bad guys" covers the plot of 90% of the issues - but there are enough other elements to keep the reader's interest. So much soap opera, you guys. You see, Foggy loves Karen, but Karen loves Matt, and Matt also loves Karen, but doesn't want to crush Foggy and also doesn't see how Karen could ever love a blind man, and oh the agony. Matt is presented as a mature, adult Peter Parker in a lot of ways here - he also has a lot of problems in his life, but has the experience and ability to deal with them rather than feeling sorry for himself all the time. His blindness really does come across as a major facet of his power set. Matt's radar sense is barely referred to at all, and when it is it's not the semimagical ESP that essentially gives him his sight back that it later became; it's the natural result of all his heightened senses acting in tandem to let him know "hey, it looks like there might be a wall off to your left, maybe try not to smack into it." Otherwise, Matt is entirely reliant on his senses of hearing and touch, along with having a really, really, really good knowledge of the city (he can, say, jump from the roof of a building because he knows it has an awning that's usually open that time of day). It's very cool and unlike anything else that was happening at the time. There's also the whole Mike Murdock thing, which goes on for an astonishingly long time, where Foggy and Karen are so smart that of course they're rapidly piecing together that Matt is Daredevil, but not so smart that they don't fall for "Actually, Daredevil is my long lost twin brother Mike that I've never mentioned to Foggy even though we've been best friends for years," which is preposterous as no one should be fooled just because Mike Murdock wears a porkpie hat, and Matt Murdock doesn't. While it's interesting that the staid, button-down Matt begins to worry about how much he enjoys the release that playing Mike (a hugely obnoxious hipster asshole) affords him, that particular thread goes on for years and was bone stupid when it started. Daredevil has a terrible, terrible rogues' gallery. In the nearly five years this volume covers, the most memorable villains DD runs across are the Purple Man, the Owl, and the Masked Marauder (one of three, count 'em, three "master criminal geniuses who sit in their lair while sending goons out to commit intricately planned crimes" types, and is every bit as inspired as his name implies), and they're all pretty lame. There's a multi-part Doctor Doom story towards the end that's excellent, but the original bad guys are, to a man, dull. The action is generally quite good, however, so even if the guy DD is kicking in the face is pretty boring, he looks awesome while he's doing the kicking. Which is the real reason to read these issues. The artwork here is absolutely phenomenal. Daredevil was blessed with a murderer's row of top shelf artists. The first issue is by Bill Everett, and when he proved too slow to keep up with a monthly title, Joe Orlando took over for a few issues, bringing his offputting, 50's EC Comics vibe with him. After that is a brief but defining run by Wallace Wood, then a stretch from John Romita that essentially served as an audition for Amazing Spider-Man and cemented him as a major artist in the 60s. After that, Gene Colan takes over, and his stuff is tremendous. Inks from John Tartaglione don't do him any favors, but his work still shines, and when Frank Giacoia handles inking duties, it's about as good as you're going to see. Overall, a very fun run of comics that fly by quickly.

Oh, she'd be terrific.

Chibnall went on record as saying something along the lines of "We can't just cast a woman or POC just to do it; it's got to be the right person." And the overwhelming takeaway from that was "Yep, it's gonna be another white guy." I tend to agree with you in that it would be pretty disappointing if that were the case. In Marshall's case specifically, I've seen him in a few things (BBC America was practically the My Family Network for a while, and I liked Traffic Light well enough although it certainly wasn't appointment television for me) and he's... fine? I guess? Again, though, I have to stress that this only means that a lot of people are betting on him. It doesn't explain why that is. Yes, that is made of awesome. Also, this came from official BBC channels, so it's not really a spoiler.

Also, the return of a sorta-kinda old monster?

UK bookies have suspended any betting on Kris Marshall (My Family, Traffic Light, Love Actually) to take over as the Thirteenth Doctor. Note: this frequently means nothing. It sometimes means word is getting out. I remember this happening with Paterson Joseph when he was up for Eleven. Obviously that didn't pan out, but word that's come out since then is that Joseph was all but signed until a couple of says before they announced Matt Smith after he fell through.

I guess I'm getting used to it since I didn't really pick up on it when I was watching the episode itself, but holy crap is that some Shacting on the "Day of the Dove" clip.

... holy shit, he's made a lot of really great movies.

Glory, Philadelphia, Malcolm X, all the obvious stuff. Also Virtuosity, because every site needs more coverage of the WTFery of Virtuosity.

Exactly my thoughts. Sin City is the better movie, but A Knight's Tale is more fun.

Felicitations, benevelont overlord!

Brazil.

Yeah, Wonder Woman was visually modeled after Byrne, right down to the metal bracelets she wore. In these early issues, the fact that they can deflect bullets is a really neat side benefit, but it's spelled out that they're expressly there as BDSM paraphernalia. The insights into the Holliday Marston/Byrne household are plentiful. And Etta was really fun. She's basically the only person on the planet not especially cowed by Wonder Woman, and keeps calling her "kid" and "doll". And she leads the Holliday Girls, a local sorority whose job it is to burst through a door and beat the fuck out of bad guys any time Diana calls. Also they're a marching band.

He does wear blue tights and a red cape and has a pencil mustache! However, instead of channeling the mystical energies of otherdimensional nigh-omnipotent godlike beings, the Angel kills the fuck out of gangsters.

Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Archives Vol. 1: collects the Wonder Woman stories from All-Star Comics #8, Sensation Comics #1-24, and Comic Cavalcade #1-5, with Wonder Woman #1-7. FREDERIC WERTHAM: "Superman is a fascist!" FANDOM: "That's preposterous!" WERTHAM: "Batman is a pederast!" FANDOM: "You're reading way too much into things!" WERTHAM: "Wonder Woman is the ultimate wish-fulfillment for lesbian BDSM!" FANDOM: "That... oh. Um..." It is nuts that this existed when it did. Created in 1941 by William Marston (and almost certainly his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston) with art by Harry G. Peter, Wonder Woman has a very specific reason for being: to showcase a strong central female character who resolves problems with love and understanding more than through direct physical violence. And by and large, that's on full display here. There are about two years' worth of appearances here, and as World War II was in full swing the whole time, Diana is almost exclusively up against Nazi spies, Japanese soldiers, the German-American Bund, and occasionally the Italian army. There is precisely one supervillian in this entire book, the Cheetah, and she doesn't put in an appearance until roughly 80% of the way through it. Otherwise, it's all war stories, all the time. The interesting approach tends to be in how bad guys are dealt with. Men are generally dispatched in the typical way, in that they're brought to justice by Diana, or tackled by Steve Trevor (who's kind of useless), or hit in the face with a chair by Etta Candy over and over again until they agree to stop spying on people. (Etta Candy, to my utter shock, turned out to be fairly awesome. For all intents and purposes, she's Diana's sidekick, and the leader of the Holliday Girls sorority at the local college, of whom we will speak more in a bit.) Women, on the other hand, are usually given the opportunity to reform. This opportunity comes in the form of being allowed to discover the happiness that comes with submitting yourself to a mistress. Invariably, chaining a woman up, blindfolding her, leashing her, having her crawl on all fours and receiving a spanking from the Holliday Girls will awaken something inside her that makes her realize she doesn't need to deliver secret plans to the German army to feel fulfilled. And I'm not making that up; that literally is the plot of the third story in this book. Now, to be clear: I am not, by any means, down on this. People find the thing that fulfills them, and if they find other people compatible with that, then that's awesome. However, this is that guy who will not shut the fuck up about his thing. This is the book or movie or whatever where the main character discovers that she gets turned on by wearing fur hats, and then it's just scene after scene after scene of people discovering that fur hats get them off as well, and about fifteen scenes later everyone on the planet is wearing a fur hat in a big sweaty pile. And for Marston, that's bondage. Every story - literally every story - features it, and it runs the gamut from your typical adventure "Quick, tie her to this chair so she can't get away" type of thing to "It's time for the annual Paradise Island hunt, where half the women on the island are dressed in animal costumes and hunted by the other half, and when they get captured they're hogtied, 'skinned', 'cooked', and 'eaten'". Marston was trying to normalize non-traditional family dynamics, and frankly I applaud that, but there's a lot here were he was uncomfortably obviously typing the script with one hand. Harry Peter's art is really interesting. Even in the Golden Age, it was incredibly old-fashioned (he'd been a newspaper cartoonist since the turn of the century, and his style is very reminiscent of illustrations of children's books from the late Victorian/early Edwardian era). It's like nothing else that was on the racks, and even if you can't put your hand on your heart and call it especially great (his anatomy is really wonky), it's definitely eye-catching. And unusually, with one or two exceptions, he drew every story in this collection. This is really interesting stuff, and much of it is incredibly fun. For many, many reasons, this is worth a look, and yes, one of those reasons is to see a story where the villainess has a dog, who is not so much a dog as a beautiful woman in a dog costume, leashed to her throne, asleep on the floor, who only ever says "woof", and be reminded that this was a story sold to eight-year-olds in 1942, and that's actually kind of awesome.

One of Goodman's pulps, I believe.

House ad for the very first Marvel comic from 1939.

No, she's still Vanessa Hudgens.