Category Archives: Comics
6 Things I Want To See In the Fantastic Four Reboot
A new, rebooted Fantastic Four movie is coming. Despite the fact that Fox so completely botched the franchise the first two times around, they’re not about to let go of a popular superhero movie license in an era when The Avengers made $1.5 Billion worldwide. That’s in dollars. So Fox will simply try again with a reboot. Because audiences and respect for the property just don’t matter. Movie making is a business, and a Fantastic Four movie has the potential to be good business.
Just like they thought Jessica Alba was going to be good business.
I’ll try to keep the Alba-bashing to a minimum
Now don’t get me wrong, a rebooted Fantastic Four has the potential to be great. I loved both X-Men: First Class and The Amazing Spider-Man, despite first assuming both would be terrible cash grabs. So with an upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, I’m going to try and keep an open mind. Will it be grim and gritty? Will it tie in to the old movies? What will the action figures be like? Well here are 6 things that I hope to see in the new Fantastic Four movie.
Project: Rooftop Fantastic Four Designs Are In!
The Project: Rooftop Fantastic Four redesign costumes are in, and they are, pardon the pun, fantastic! If you don’t know, Project: Rooftop is a site dedicated to redesigning superhero costumes. They hold annual contests and even have some pros weigh in on the contestants. These contests produce some of the absolute coolest costume redesigns on the Internet. And I absolutely love this kind of artistic geekery. If only the real comic book companies relied on creative types like these when it came to giving their heroes new costumes.
The best DC Comics can come up with is to add a ton of piping and lines to their new superhero reboot costumes.
Anyway, check out the #1 entry, drawn by Alejandro Bruzzese!
Personally, I’m not a big fan of this design. I like what he was going for, with the color-coded T-shirts, but it doesn’t say ‘Fantastic’ to me. It definitely plays up the explorers/adventurnauts aspect of the Fantastic Four, but it’s not as elegant or awesome as it could be. Still, the judges voted this one as the very best, so who am I to argue?
Join me after the jump for the other winners and a couple of my favorites!
Two X-Force Series? Why the Hell?
The other day I told you guys about the new Cable and X-Force title coming up in Marvel NOW! It was a new take on the X-Force franchise, and actually looked and sounded kind of cool. Plus it fit with the idea of Marvel NOW! being a relaunch of titles and trying some new ideas.
Well apparently Marvel isn’t yet ready to let go of the old ideas. They’re still going to publish Uncanny X-Force, giving us competing X-Force titles for some godforsaken reason.
The adjective makes the team
Right now, Uncanny X-Force is a popular series by writer Rick Remender about Wolverine leading a team of black ops X-Men on kill missions. It’s a very good series, starring characters like Deadpool, Fantomex, Psylocke, Dark Nightcrawler and, at one point, Archangel. But Remender is moving on to bigger comics, and with last week’s Cable-related announcement, I thought for sure that Marvel was hanging up this series as a job well done.
Nope! They’re going to hand it off to a relatively untested writer, who is going to get rid of most of those characters and instead write about a black ops team starring Psylocke, Storm, Spiral and Puck!
He’s Puck!
I’m as much of a Puck fan as the next geek, but really, Marvel? This is what you’re doing for Marvel NOW!? This relaunch is your chance to clear out some of the clutter and cut away some of the excess comics that the world doesn’t need. And nobody in the world needs a series about these characters trying to be a black ops team. Did you learn nothing from Regenesis? Over the past year, Marvel has been publishing several dozen different X-Men books, including X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and the X-Men, X-Men: Legacy, and Astonishing X-Men, among other extra titles like New Mutants and X-Factor. In order to populate these books, Marvel was just throwing mutants at them. Astonishing X-Men starred Wolverine, Iceman, Gambit, Karma, Cecilia Reyes, and Northstar. What kind of team is that?
I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think it’s safe to say all those extra X-books didn’t do nearly as well as the main series.
Yet it looks like Marvel is doing it again. Just throw a random group of characters together, give it an already familiar name, and just hope people buy it. How long until we see the likes of Uncanny X-Factor? Mimic and the X-Men? Superfluous X-Men? X-Men: Regency? Probably a year from now after Marvel goes through it’s next Big Event/Relaunch…
This interview with new writer Sam Humphries doesn’t really explain why Marvel wants competing X-Force titles. But at least he seems happy to be writing comics, lucky bastard.
Review: Scarlet Spider #9
Hot damn! A rip-roaringly fun adventure was had by all as Scarlet Spider and the Rangers teamed up to take down a giant, rampaging electricity demon! It had character growth, it had interesting villains, and it had teases towards future adventures. I’d say that makes for a pretty stellar superhero story, don’t you? Not much in the way of personal stuff for Kaine, but that’s more than made up for with his in-costume craziness as the Scarlet Spider.
Scarlet Spider #9
I daresay our favorite hued hero is turning out to be a pretty good superhero.
Comic rating: 4/5: Good!
It’s times like these that I wish I graded with decimals or fractions. This is definitely one of the best issues of Scarlet Spider so far, but it doesn’t quite reach the levels of greatness that I try and save the perfect score for. There’s nothing so amazing as to warrant such a score, but there is a lot of great stuff in this issue. Plus writer Christopher Yost is doing a pretty good job of setting up future characters and villains. That’s a good sign, though it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a book’s longevity. Still, it’s good to know the man is planning ahead.
This issue is almost entirely fight, with a couple short epilogues at the end. Scarlet Spider and the Rangers work well together, it would seem, and the electricity monster provides a solid adversary considering the storyline. So everything comes together quite nicely in a darn good superhero story.
Join me after the jump for a full synopsis and more review.
New X-Force, Because Why Not?
I thought about complaining how team comics never last long enough for their membership to really gel, to really come together as a solid cast of characters with relationships and friendships and drama. But then I realized that my favorite comic, X-Factor, has done just that over the past 5+ years. So moot point.
The real point is that there’s going to be a new X-Force in Marvel NOW! Marvel is ditching the Wolverine-led black ops team angle and going with Cable and friends on the run as some kind of fugitives. And now we know Colossus comes out OK from Avengers vs. X-Men.
Which one is Keyser Soze?
So we’ve got Cable, Domino, Colossus, Forge and Doctor Nemesis…who is looking a little worse for wear. What the hell have they done to Nemesis? They do know he’s supposed to be this 100+-year-old scientist/curmudgeon, right? Now he looks like an anime character. Still, it’s nice to see Forge back in action, and I like the orange/silver/gray look they’e got going on.
The premise sounds cool too: they’re going to be wanted fugitives for a reason we don’t yet know, on the run from more prominent heroes. That could be a pretty cool storyline. It’s also going to be drawn by Salvador Larocca, a favorite artist of mine.
But then we come to the big problem: It’s going to be written by Dennis Hopeless. He gave an interview about the series here.
Now I have never read anything that Hopeless has done. I don’t know what kind of writer he is, or how good his comics might be. But I do know that he is also the writer behind Avengers Arena, the comic that’s going to be about killing fan favorite characters as wantonly and as indiscriminately as possible. And any writer who brags about how his comic is going to feature deaths already gets a black mark in my book.
But we’ll see. I think I might check out this new Cable and X-Force series.
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