Dan

The Beat gives Luke Cage an absolutely rave review. (No real spoilers, but if you're trying to go in 100% clean there may be a couple of character beats here and there.)

I know we're only three months in, but Future Quest is the first comic I've bought monthly in issue format in a decade and a half. So. Much. Fun.

The Aztecs is complete and already available on DVD. However, this is awesome. I've been given to understand that sales of animated reconstructions have not been very good, which is why there have been fewer of them and why The Underwater Menace was delayed for so long. The fact that Power is A) historically important, and also B) very very good leads me to hope that it will perform well enough that they'll try more. Daleks Masterplan, Marco Polo, Myth Makers... oh, man.

Happiness is reading an old Superman comic from 1982 and discovering it contains a 16-page insert of a Masters of the Universe comic drawn by Curt Swan.

I'm on my phone so I can't get the link here easily, but according to Capaldi, Series Ten will kick off in April.

https://youtu.be/sqUDpqHh-xA

Rebirth is outselling the New 52 by a fairly healthy margin.

The Incredible Hulk Omnibus vol. 1: collects The Incredible Hulk (1962) #1-6, the Hulk stories from Tales to Astonish #59-101, and The Incredible Hulk (1968) #102. Okay, this was pretty fun, if wildly uneven. I don't think I've ever read a run of comics that took so long to figure out what it was doing, and even by the very last issue, the Hulk isn't quite where he's going to be. Those first six issues, though, will give you whiplash. He's evil! No, he's just kind of an asshole! No, he's a puppet under Rick Jones' mental command! No, he's got the mind of Bruce Banner! No, wait, he's back to being a dumb monster! Cancelled! After a year of guest appearances all over the Marvel Universe (none of which are included here), he gets a co-starring feature in Astonish, and here's where things begin to coalesce. The stories themselves are pretty standard sixties Marvel stuff, with Commie spies, space aliens, and time travel sitting side by side with the Army just making life miserable for the Hulk, and the obligatory soap opera elements provided by Glen Talbot being in love with Betty Ross while she's in love with Bruce Banner while he's busy turning into a huge green punch dispenser while Rick Jones hangs out with the crackerjack team of ham radio enthusiasts that the kids enjoy reading about so much. It's very strange that the Hulk is written so inconsistently, seeing as how Stan Lee wrote every word in this book (with the exception of the vary last issue); the Hulk's intelligence level goes up and down from issue to issue, and Stan can't seem to settle on exactly how smart the Hulk should be. Further, is the Hulk a misunderstood simpleton who wants to be left alone, or is he a gigantic asshat who will tear your entire city apart because he thinks it'd be fun to do that today? I don't know, and neither does Stan. The nature of the split book format really works for the title, though; each entry is only eight to eleven pages long, so the stories are quick and punchy, and things move at a very quick pace. The art is really, really weird. Every now and then it looks terrific; issue #2 of the first series is penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Steve Ditko, and it's gorgeous. The vast majority of the volume, primarily the Astonish material, is a parade of extremely famous and talented artists who are not doing even close to their best work, however. We see Ditko, John Buscema, Bill Everett, Gil Kane, even Kirby himself, churning out what looks to be rushed and sloppy art. The last year or so is handled by Marie Severin, and she's a huge improvement overall, as she can switch from action to character moments with ease. Overall, this was very enjoyable. I burned through two thirds of it in one sitting, It moves quickly and manages to switch things up frequently enough that the fact that it's really just a parade of the Hulk punching things doesn't drag it down.

Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life in No Way Whatsoever by Frank Conniff: TV's Frank wrote a book about a bunch of the films he had a hand in choosing to cover on MST3K. It's not very good. It's a series of essays that occasionally reference the film it's ostensibly talking about but more often have little or nothing to do with anything. Half the time he admits he can't actually remember anything about the movie in question and only knows he had seen it because it was on the list of movies he vetted for the show. And in addition to not being all that funny, it's absolutely riddled with typos and misspellings (the fact that the "Twenty Five" in the title is missing the hyphen is not my mistake). One essay in service to Bride of the Monster is a touching, impassioned, totally unironic defense of Ed Wood, but for the most part this is a huge waste of time for everyone involved.

The "Chocolate Rain" guy just started following me on Twitter. My life is so weird.

There are some serious deep cuts as far as the guest apprarances go: Cameron Chase, Jim Harper. I felt like they somehow managed to indulge their fanboyishness without poking the viewer over and over yelling "Pay attention, he's gonna be the Guardian!!!"

I've been mainlining the Blu-ray of the first season. The show is largely fluff, but entertaining, and Melissa Benoist is a goddamn delight.

JSA Strange Adventures: A six-issue miniseries from 2004 where the JSA fights an energy monster vampire guy while Johnny Thunder hero worships pulp writer Jack Williamson and is generally terrible at everything he touches. The story itself is lightweight and generally fun enough, and Barry Kitson's art is nice to look at. The covers, colored directly from pencils to resemble 40s pulp painted covers, are hang-on-your-wall gorgeous. However, the dialogue by author Kevin J. Anderson, someone who fills out Star Wars novels by inserting multipage descriptions of scenes from The Empire Strikes Back as flashbacks so as to pad his page count, is godawful. The focus on Johnny Thunder, a spectacularly unfunny vortex of unbelievable dipshittery, is also unfortunate.

It's not terrible. The tone is interesting in that it's a reasonably straightforward superhero adventure story that happens to have an insane cartoon character in it. Peter Serafinowicz is kind of too old and doesn't have the body type, but godDAMN does he have the voice and manner down, plus he's Peter Motherfucking Serafinowicz, so in the end I feel like he works. The costume is a lot less cringeworthy in motion than it appeared in stills. Jackie Earle Haley was in it for about 30 seconds and owned every shred of his screentime. Plus, I laughed out loud, more than once, and I never, ever do that when watching TV. I hope I get to see more.

That's so hard. I'm sorry.

Chaos on the Bridge: one of a number of Star Trek documentaries supposedly written and directed by William Shatner. This particular one looks at the genesis and first couple of seasons of TNG and how it was a genuine shitshow behind the scenes due almost entirely to Gene Roddenberry having lost his damn mind. There's an impressive number of people more than willing to tell their story, from actors to writers to producers to studio executives, and they all paint the picture of a man who had a sizable success a couple of decades previously and was now desperate to hang onto that after years of never again being able to get a project sold or off the ground. Further, he'd spent twenty years listening to fans tell him what a genius he was, and that (along with an insistence that nothing interesting ever happen on the Enterprise, ever) created an impossible situation where three dozen writers left the show in two years. The doc itself is short, under an hour, but the information is really interesting if you like this kind of thing.

DC is releasing a box set of twelve hardcover single issues of Watchmen and wants people to pay $125 for it.

I felt like you needed to be able to pick me out of a crowd, and moth-eaten wings and a Greek helmet seemed the obvious solution. I regret nothing.

It's like I always say: scream "I'M BRIAN BLESSED" often enough and loudly enough, and sooner or later you will be declared King of the Hawkmen.

I'm about twenty minutes into the first episode of Batman: The Telltale Series. Interesting if not super compelling as yet. The Batman gameplay is "Press Y now, okay, now press X, okay, good job", while the Bruce Wayne stuff so far is nothing but conversation trees. It's laying the groundwork for a decent enough story, but as a game, it's okay. I don't regret spending $4.99 on it.

Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, whichever volcano movie was the volcano movie with Morgan Freeman in it, Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, Glory... holy crap, this guy's made a ton of movies. Also The Electric Company!

According to Jim Lee, some second issues are actually outselling the first.

Stranger Things: What if 1983 Steven Spielberg directed a TV miniseries based on a Stephen King novel? This is pretty terrific. It took a couple of episodes to reel me in, but once it did, I really enjoyed it. It's scary how accurately it gets the look and feel of mid-80s event miniseries like V or It; what's scarier is that it does so without relying on the soundtrack or obvious fashion disasters. The setting, the editing style, even the film stock and choice of credit font do all the work. But what's really remarkable is that after an episode or two, you stop noticing that and just pay attention to the story. The actress playing the young girl is doing a hell of a job with a difficult character, and I can tell you that they have mid-80s tweenage nerds pretty much dead on. Also, the opening credits are the dictionary definition of literal perfection.