Dan

It's not close to there yet, but I feel like Powerless still has potential. Alan Tudyk is figuring out his character, and that's going to go a long way to putting this show together. And Ron Funches is just as delightful as Ron Funches always is. The whole "mentioning major DC characters that always remain offscreen" thing is awkward as fuck, though.

Series Ten hasn't started yet, but we're already looking ahead to Series Eleven.

Mary Poppins also has Dick Van Dyke and the finest, most accurate English accent ever committed to film.

I somehow managed to never see Steven Universe until last night. Since then I have mainlined about thirty episodes. And yes, it's doing really great and important things in regards to family dynamics, and gender, and sexuality. But also, it is fucking adorable.

This is the bag.

I don't dislike it, but I don't see anything there that's going to encourage anyone to watch it that wasn't going to anyway.

Ted Danson should get the Emmy nod for that smile alone.

Dude, that last episode.

He never got into any detail, but Conway indicated that DC made things right.

I believe they're only planning a DVD release.

Kingdom Come: The 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition: collects Kingdom Come (1996) #1-4, plus a crapton of backmatter. In 1996, the comics industry had spent ten years egregiously misunderstanding what it was that made Watchmen and Dark Knight so exciting and important. In the wake of these events and the rise of Image, grim 'n' gritty had pretty much completely taken over the business, and every issue of every comic seemed to be about a scowling vigilante badass laying waste to all who stood before him with all the knives and guns he could fit on his grotesquely misshapen and overmuscled torso. Also, all female characters wore g-strings and had their spines removed. It was pretty bad. Enter Alex Ross, who a couple of years earlier scored huge with Marvels, and his four-issue manifesto against the state of the industry. This is four issues of "Look! Look at what's happened to comics!" A few years from now, Superman retires because the public has embraced a new kind of antihero willing to kill their enemies. In the wake of his leaving, most of the other heroes of his generation also drift away, leaving only a new field of violent sociopaths who think nothing of murder and destruction in the name of fighting criminals, some of who are actual, literal Nazis. Superman comes out of retirement to make this whole thing stop, and there's various factions led by Batman and Lex Luthor figuring out the best way to deal with this whole situation, and Wonder Woman is getting more warlike, and Captain Marvel is hella crazy, and the Spectre is leading a pastor around to figure out the best way to handle all of it. The story isn't as deep or meaningful as it seemed twenty years ago. It's still quite good, though. Mark Waid was absolutely the best choice to do the scripting, as he's clearly on Ross' wavelength, but sees the need to deflate the imperiousness a bit. The paintings are absolutely gorgeous, and if they're stiff and posed, at least they look pretty amazing. It goes almost without saying that this is by far the greatest thing Ross has ever done. It would be hard to overstate what a huge sensation this story was in the late '90s, as it sees like it was goddamn everywhere for years after it came out. Wizard Magazine became obsessed with it, which always struck me as hilarious, considering its entire point was to shit all over everything that magazine had spent years championing. But reading it now, it's obvious that you need to have a pretty good idea of comics, and especially DC Comics, and exactly where they were and what they were doing in 1996. So much of what happens is a direct response to the magazines that were then currently on the racks, and if you don't recall who was Green Lantern at the time or what was going on with Superman's hair or what have you, it will affect the way you can appreciate this story. Nearly half of this volume is extra bonus material, including full annotations (there are Easter eggs in virtually every panel), essays, a history of the project, and tons and tons and tons of character sketches, which are usually something I gloss over quickly but here are really interesting and bring a lot to the understanding of the story itself. All in all, an excellent collection of an important if dated event.

Not a damn thing.

Secret Wars Omnibus: collects Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1-12, Thor #383, She-Hulk (2004) #10, and What If? (1989) #4 and 114. It's the first major companywide comics event, pretty much ever. (No one really counts Contest of Champions.) If you were 10 when this came out, it blew your damn mind. Otherwise, it's a year of a whole bunch of good guys beat up a whole bunch of bad guys. A cosmic otherworldly being of phenomenal power builds a planet out of a bunch of other planets and scoops up the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men, along with Spider-Man and the Hulk, and sets them to fight a big pile of supervillains, led by Doctor Doom. That's it. That's the plot. It took twelve issues to tell this story. Which is not to say there's nothing to like here. Mike Zeck's art is great in the early issues before he gets really rushed and sketchy towards the end (along with a handful of fill-in issues by Bob Layton, which aren't bad). As dumb and one-dimensional as most of the villains are, Doctor Doom is terrific. Spider-Man is given a few moments to really shine, especially in a scene where he takes on the X-Men all at once and handles them easily. Speaking of, it's pretty great to see the X-Men actually take part in an event; even back then, the X-Men pretty much kept to their own corner. The writing's not awesome. Jim Shooter pulled rank and took charge of scripting duties (it was well-known that there was no way his book wasn't going to sell like crazy, and the royalties were going to be substantial, although Shooter also notes that by writing it himself, he didn't have to deal with either Claremont (X-Men) or Byrne (FF), the only realistic other candidates for a major Marvel event in 1984, pitching a shitfit over the other one writing his characters). Almost everyone is fairly out of character, with Wolverine and Professor X especially coming across like huge assholes even for them, and Johnny Storm is just straight-up terrible. Doom, however, is done really well, so he gets credit for that. The collection is rounded out with an unnecessary Thor fill-in, a Titania origin story that's fairly decent, and a pair of What Ifs?, one of which is pretty okay for its time and the other of which was a confusing waste of everyone's time. There's a great story: Carol Kalish, Marvel's head of direct marketing in the mid- to late-80s, was addressing a group of comic shop owners, and legendarily opened with something along the lines of "So. Secret Wars. That sucked, huh?" Everyone laughed in agreement, before she pointed out that it did, in fact, sell really well, and in so doing got everyone pumped for her announcement of the forthcoming Secret Wars II, which was of course one of the worst things ever.

IMO, Kane has a long history of ruining his work with his own shitty inking, to the point that I have sometimes recoiled at the sight of it. (He did covers for Superman for a long time in the 80s that were just fucking awful, solely because it looks like he traced his work with a magic marker.) Put someone as delicate as Romita over them and I can suddenly appreciate the incredible storytelling and action he brought to everything. Plus, I fully admit that Romita's Spidey is my Spidey due in large part to the fact that I grew up with it all over my house. As the Art Director, Romita was in charge of (among lots of other things) artwork for licensing and marketing. Until they switched over to Mark Bagley in the early 2000s, if you wanted a lunchbox or a puzzle or a 7-11 cup or whatever with a picture of Spider-Man on it, it was almost certain to be a John Romita Spider-Man you were looking at.

When I think of the truly amazing stuff I grew up reading, it's almost always been Romita inking over someone else. His style is so strong that it comes through no matter who he's working over, and sometimes that penciler can make up for Romita's storytelling/action shortcomings. Romita inks over Gil Kane's pencils fucking sing.

The Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus vol. 2: collects The Amazing Spider-Man #39-67, Annual #3-5, The Spectacular Spider-Man (1968) #1 and 2, and material from Not Brand Echh. So here we have the first two and a half years or so of John Romita's run on Amazing. Growing up this was my Holy Grail; these were far and away the comics I loved most and always sought out in whatever form I could. Actually getting to sit down and read them in order as an adult was pretty fun. It's remarkable how quickly he adapted to the character; in issue #39 he's trying not to veer too far from Ditko, but within a handful of issues Spidey is unmistakably Romita's. True, Romita drew Spider-Man a lot more heroically, and his Spidey was considerably less (which is to say, not really at all) weird and angular than Ditko's ever was. And his action shots are very, very posed. But man, those poses are awesome. (The later issues see a lot of instances of layouts/breakdowns by Romita, with Don Heck doing finishes, which... no. No thank you. No.) I didn't think it was possible, but the soap opera has been ratcheted up to an insane degree. (That's not a bad thing, just an observation.) Romita's background in romance comics serves him well here, and even Stan Lee has stopped pretending that despite what he thinks of himself, Peter has it pretty good right now in terms of his love life (other characters even remark that Peter is brilliant, handsome, and has two gorgeous women fighting over him). His home and family life is getting kind of tiresome, to be honest, as Aunt May's issues have been amplified to superhuman levels; whereas before she was always naïve, sickly, and prone to worry, she's currently allergic to oxygen, shrieks with fear every time she walks through a door and discovers the room is different than the one she left, and is very, very, very stupid. I didn't count the occurrences, but Doctor Bromwell has had to rush to an unconscious May's bedside a minimum of three times in this volume, and I'm perfectly willing to believe it was more than that. However, we do get some great stuff with Captain Stacy and the introduction of Joe Robertson, who is being set up as essentially the greatest newspaperman who ever newspapered, and who is going to have no trouble whatsoever figuring out who Spider-Man really is. The stories themselves are a mixed bag. Romita was never as adept at creating memorable villains as Ditko had been; here we see the introduction of the Kingpin, and he's all right (it really did take Miller to turn him into a truly memorable bad guy), and if I'm being charitable, the first Shocker story was pretty good at selling him as a threat, even if it set the table for making him so ineffectual in every story he was ever in after that. There's a strong Doctor Octopus three-parter, they make good use of the Green Goblin, and of course "Spider-Man No More!" is in here. Nothing here is outright bad, with the possible exception of the first Spectacular issue, which is really uninteresting and very long. (The second one is quite good, however.) The magazine format seems like a waste of everyone's time and money, as the only real differences (other than the first issue being in black and white) were 1) the stories were longer, and 2) they were printed on better paper, which meant that they could print sentences that ended in periods more easily, and not every word balloon had to end in an exclamation point. Seriously. That's it. No wonder these didn't sell (at thirty-five cents, they were almost triple the price of a regular issue for not that much more material). On top of which, the Not Brand Echh material they reprint here is some of the strongest stuff that mag ever came out with. I've been waiting for this to get a second printing forever (the first printing has been going for $200-300 for years), and I'm really, really glad to finally be able to have this on my shelf. Fun stuff.

I'm kinda still digesting it. I don't really want to get too into it since we'll actually be covering it on BOTI relatively soon, but I'm genuinely unsure at this point if I actually liked it or not.

You laugh, but my files are right where I left them. When you're dealing with your Russian hacksters, don't come crying to me.

Man, you're making me dig up my files and throw 'em on a flash drive.

The Flash is kinda weird about sex. Well, she is his sister, sort of.

It's so cheesy and so weird and so low-budget and I fucking adore it.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - 1977 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FqmPvK-zquY

Watched this last night and thought it was pretty great. As a war movie it really did what it set out to do. The only real issue I had (apart from Tarkin, who was the literal dictionary definition of "the uncanny valley") was how little I felt invested in most of the characters. Felicity Snow was great, Alan Tudyk was great, Blind Master and his Wookiee/sidekick/brother/lover/whatever the hell he was were great, but I walked out of there otherwise unable to tell you who most of the character names were; that's how little I cared about most of them. To wit: Diego Luna did precisely nothing for me whatsoever, and as we left the theater, I was telling Wendee as much. I couldn't remember the character's name, so I called him "Captain Eurotrash". She looked at me quizzically, then realized who I was talking about and said "Oh, wait. Did you mean No Dameron?" Then we high-fived.