More on Secret Wars, NX, and the Commanding Fungus Officer who Tracks Gems and Stars

It's been over a month since I've posted here and I apologize.  I could make any amount of excuses and they wouldn't matter because... well...  Who cares?  Work, no computer at home, some sickness, all sorts of stuff.  But whatevs. 

Let's move on, shall we?  I'll try to cover as much as I can as terribly as I can.

First off, we have a lot more information about Marvel's upcoming Secret Wars.  We know Dr. Doom is somehow the orchestrator as the real identity of Rabum Alal (rah-boom ah-lawl) as a sort of future version of Dr. Doom along the lines of how Immortus is future Kang.  What we also now know a few more of the lands involved like the Regency which houses a pre-Brand New Day Spider-Man who is still married to Mary Jane, and a land dedicated to Doctor Strange where I presume there be the weird magic things happening, an entire world dedicated to Moon Boy and Devil Dinosaur (love those guys), a land dedicated to Old Man Logan, and a few others.  What is really interesting is the potential for Marvel to not just simply go full Crisis on Infinite Earths their world, but do more of a Nu52 of their world as they can pick and choose from what timelines and characters from which they like and implement them as they wish.  Let me explain.

The most obvious one to me is Jubilee in terms of character replacement.  Hailing from "Westchester" a world which never stopped being what seems to be the animated X-Men cartoon universe.  So why Jubilee?  Well, as of House of M our good friend Jubilation became a "Flatscan," worked as a social worker of sorts for other depowered mutants, joined the renegade-esque New Warriors utilizing technology specifically from the Wizard, the Ghost, and Hank Pym.  Most technology was based on the Wizard and her gloves simulated super strength, super durability via force field, and flight, the Ghost tech allowed her to pass through objects, and once used Pym Particles to grow to giant size.  Either way, she grew out of that phase and went full vampire, and while some people delighted in this change the vampire phase is now on a strong decline while there seems to be some thirst for the old sparkler Jubilee if certain circles are to be believed.  And this can be a very good thing, because Marvel could basically put in place a Jubilee which was wildly popular for a while and not have to explain it with anymore than a handwave of, "Blame it on the Crisis Incursion."  And I really believe this has a chance because this is the best place to bring back Wolverine.  "But he just died!"  Let's not pretend he was gone forever, as almost no popular character gets to stay dead.  This is a perfect place because Wolverine in the early 90's was also ridiculously popular (as he really always was) and the old team up of Wolvie and Jubes would be a big appeal. And there are other characters like Spider-Man who can be again married to MJ, Iron Man who will again be returned to normal like with Heroes Return where they literally altered reality to bring back pre-Kang/Immortus fuckuppery, and a few others I'm sure I'm just not thinking of.  This isn't to say Marvel will push the big reset on all of their characters, as I'm sure Captain Falcon America and "X marks the" Cyclops are here to stay.  This can be both good and bad, and Marvel should take this chance to get rid of some of the crappier continuity to streamline and untangle the web of nonsense Marvel has.  And while I'm sure the previous sentence blustered people into a furor, I'll comment more on that in another post. 

Nintendo says they're working on a new console with the project name of "NX."  Knowing Nintendo, they'll throw away this perfectly fine console name and replace it with "Bleeg" as the official console name.  No new info, just that.  I wanted to say it because I do want to see Nintendo release another console.

Last but not least is I picked up and played Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.  Wonderful little game.  Beautifully crafted, plenty of quickfire fun, accessible to pretty much anybody but challenging enough to satisfy me.  I say challenging in how the puzzles work, not necessarily challenging on how well I handle a controller.  It really has a fun personality to it, and well... I'll probably review it.

Sorry I've been off the radar for some time.  I'm hoping to get a computer soon and post more here since there's plenty to share.


              ~ Love,
                        Mak

Happy belated Valentine's Day AND St. Patrick's Day.

Congrats Rosetta! Happy Veteran's Day! Comic Books and Their Movies/Shows. Character Changes.

Good day and congrats to the Rosetta Probe!

Sorry this is later in the week than I wanted.  I really want the format of a news entry on Monday with an opinion article on Wednesday and maybe Friday.  Oh well, I'll sort of mash them up unintelligibly here.

Firstly is the news segment.  The Superior Iron Man and the Spider-Verse event has launched from Marvel today, as well as the new Captain America series starring former sidekick (though he'd say partner) Sam Wilson as a Falcon/Cap hybrid.  Notable releases from Image include The Walking Dead #134, new series Drifter, and another TPB release of Invincible (vol. 20).  For DC, Dinah Lance finally takes up the (non-fishnetted) Black Canary guise in the Arrow show, and...well... Convergence.  Frickin' Convergence.

Let's start with DC.  The hard one.

The show Arrow has been fairly successful and was somewhat controversial in how it was clearly meant to be a show about Batman but someone scribbled out "Batman" on the top and renamed it "Green Arrow" about Dinah Lance, who in the show was Ollie's former love interest he cheated on with her sister (long story sort of), and how she wasn't the Black Canary but her sister (same one) was until the sister died.  The death led to the obvious in which Dinah will be stepping into her sister's non-fishnetted persona and continue on as a crime fighter.  So not news exactly, but it still seemed relevant enough.  Picture of her in the wrong costume below.

So let's get down to Convergence.  DC really loves it when people say they steal from Marvel (and vice-versa), but when Marvel has the same exact big event coming out of the pipeline you do, well... There you go.  Convergence is about Brainiac pulling the wool over a great and underappreciated character named Booster Gold in getting to something called the "Vanishing Point" where he basically has access to all realities and all time.  From here, Brainiac picks up all these quaint little cities/worlds/events/etc. and puts them under domes for his collection next to one another.  You might say, "Mak, isn't that the premise of Secret Wars?" And I'd say, "Only to this point."  The difference is, unless the Collector is the one placing all of Marvel's periods under one Battleplanet roof, then no. So what's the difference?  Well, it looks like instead of an all powerful time and space capable Beyonder placing specific points in history he probably enjoys onto a planet to encounter one another, Brainiac is reaching through time and space to specific points in history he enjoys and is putting them onto a planet to encounter one another.  Totes different, because the Beyonder is a snappy dresser.

You must be this fancy to be omnipotent for a while until you're not

 So the question is, "What is different?"  Well, the Beyonder at his core is someone who wants to see what people will do under conditions he sets and in locations he has selected and is in general curious.  Very different from Brainiac who wants to see what the people will do under certain conditions he sets and in certain locations he has selected and is in general a curious guy.  Hmmm....  Okay, well...  The Beyonder is a formerly all powerful sort of guy (who probably will have some influence in Secret Wars), and Brainiac is more or less a collector who has gained access to enlarge his collection.  There are subtle differences in the characters (assuming Marvel plays this straight and has the Beyonder come back and at near original power), and well... Yeah.  The events seem a lot of the same.  And this is very weird.  I'll explain in another post why I think this is weird.  But ONWARDS!

Image is releasing a new Walking Dead issue and that's important because people like the Walking Dead.  While they release comics every week all year long, WD only comes along once a month and blah blah blah.  I honestly have a real monotone reading of this in my head.  Image's other comic Drifter and this is the one I'm excited about. 

From Bleeding Cool: " Mankind’s colonization of the galaxy has left countless planets mined bare and lifeless in DRIFTER. A space transport crashes onto a backwater world whose unique properties set the stage for a story that combines the dark wonder of a strange and alien landscape with the struggles of an abandoned and lawless frontier town."

That's the basic premise of Drifter and judging by some of the art it will look great, and the premise has me interested enough to check it out.  Written by Ivan Brandon who is a complete unknown to me and art by Nic Klein who is also an unknown (but the image below is wonderful), I'm definitely seeing potential in this series and I'm glad Image has their hands on it because Marvel or DC would probably not even allow this series to see the light of day, and even if they did they'd axe it within a couple months when it doesn't reach Captain America numbers of sales.

SPACE FRONTIER, AHOY!!

 Finally is Marvel with Superior Iron Man, Spider-Verse, and good ol' Cap.  First up is Superior Iron Man which I hinted about in a previous post being Tony Stark with the dick knob turned up to 15.  Apparently from the events in Axis (which I skipped because of how I normally feel about Big Events), Tony Stark has been switched from his normally heroic (ha) persona to what he was pre-Iron Man: The incarnation of ego and evil with little regard to the people he may potentially harm.  That's right, an entrepreneur who's looking to make shareholders happy.  Daredevil is supposed to feature heavily in this and I should have a review on this soon-ish.

So is he superior because he's white?

 Next is Spider-Verse.  Written by Dan "Always a good time" Slott, this series is about a being named Morlun who is going about the entire multiverse destroying spider totem types, aka versions of Spider-Man, and it's up to every Spider-Man (or girl as famous now) to team up and prevent this disaster.  Notable because this series launched an entire cosplay fever and entire new ongoing comic series about non-616 Gwen Stacey: Spider Girl just by the cover alone.  And I can't blame them. That cover is gorgeous and the character design is just beautiful.

                              

The cover on the right is the only one anybody really cared about anyway.  Love that design.

Next is one of the controversial (only if you subscribe to the White Power movement) character shake ups: Captain America!  (Who am I kidding? The same movement is just as pissed off about Thor being a woman now even though she's technically white)

Due to the events of a battle with a cloned Red Skull, Steve lost the Super Soldier Serum which kept him eternally fit and youthful, which aged him to an extremely old man.  In his place he has selected his previous partner in crime-fighting, Sam Wilson the Falcon, to take his place.  Right away this is an interesting decision as Marvel has been under fire recently (as have all comic books) about inclusion and variety.  This is actually a pretty good move for Marvel because it's not just "See, we can have black heroes who aren't Luke Cage!" (Yeah, I know about Black Panther, I mean always in your face heroes.) This feeling is organic, and Sam's design alone makes him his own Cap even better than Bucky did when he took over the shield.  Sam has integrated much of his old Falcon suit into this new Cap suit and really melded both identities together to create something new, fresh, and very exciting to look at.  This is less "Black Captain America" (Yeeees, I -do- know about Isaiah Bradley.  I own Truth: Red, White, and Black and many comics concerning Josiah X, and his descendent Patriot was an extremely well conceived character) and more a great Captain America who happens to be black.  It's organic, it makes sense, it doesn't feel forced.  You don't read it and say, "Oh yeah, I forgot Marvel's PR needed a boost with all the crap going around all entertainment industries right now."  This also might set a precedent for the future of Marvel's movies with how after the Civil War-like movie of Cap 3 (which I said would never happen, so egg on my face), Chris Evans is probably done with Marvel (I think), and Sam (played by Anthony Mackie) might step into the shield wing first to continue on the tradition and keep the movies from getting too stagnant.  I cannot stress how good of a move this is.  Too bad Steve will be back in his red booties in the next few years.  Oh well.

Fear my Super Soldier/Captain America/Falcon fusion!

I wanted to write an opinion piece, and I will try to later this week.  Maybe it'll be about Big Events.  Maybe.  Or maybe just comic book fans in general.

Oh, I did want to put a quick bit about how Naruto is now complete.  I didn't realize in a previous post that it would be over the VERY NEXT DAY after I posted it.  I mentioned before how life is a little darker without a series like that going on.  It really brought it home today when I realized it wasn't coming out this week anymore.  You really sort of get hooked on a schedule of watching and waiting, and then finding out it's gone.  I mean, it's not like losing a pet, but it's definitely a little weighty.

Either way, thank you very much for taking the time to read this!