Disney television animation has slowly but surely been expanding its stable of decidedly “Non-Disneyish” series. From Phineas and Ferb to Gravity Falls, there’s a rising tide of irreverent and wacky series that bring a breath of fresh air to the various Disney cable channels. Their latest show seems much more like a 90s Warner Brothers show, and it comes by that honestly, being executive produced by Tom Ruegger, one of the gifted madmen behind Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain.
The 7D is a new take on the Seven Dwarfs, with no Snow White in sight. The band of bitsy brothers reside in Jollywood, a starter-level enchanted kingdom ruled by the daffy Queen Delightful (Leigh-Allyn Baker) with the assistance of her aide de camp, Lord Starchbottom (Freakazoid!‘s Paul Rugg, who’s also writing for the show). When crisis looms, she calls on the 7D, who hie hither hastily from the gem mine to provide assistance in their own madcap fashion.
The voice cast for the show is an all-star list. Folks like Maurice LaMarche, Billy West, Kevin Michael Richadson and Bill Farmer (the current voice of Goofy) voice the dwarfs, with guest stars like Whoopi Goldberg as the Magic Mirror and Jay Leno as the crystal ball. In her first but very successful foray into voice work, Kelly Osbourne plays Hildy Gloom, a beginner baddie whose plan is to take over Jollywood to help pad her fledgling resume.
The names are all that remain from their original appearance – this team of tiny titans are all action, with the adventures and craziness running hot and heavy as they combat Hildy and her new husband Grim (played by Jess “Wakko Warner” Harnell). The show is aimed at the young tween audience, but as was true of Ruegger’s past creations, there’s plenty of comedy to keep the adults happy as well.
The 7D premieres Monday, July 7th at 10AM on Disney XD.
Written by Mark Waid and Kieron Gillen. Art by Mark Bagley, Andrew Hennessey, and Jason Kieth
After last week’s insane rant, I came onto a book like Original Sin: Hulk Vs. Iron Man with both arms up. Let’s face facts: Hulk and Iron Man seem to fight once a year. If not in the 616, then in the Ultimate Universe, or any other iteration of the Marvel U. It’s like they’re a match made in pugilistic heaven. One man, the unstoppable juggernaut… the other a walking arsenal. It’s short range versus long range. It’s rage versus hubris. And really… it’s beating a dead horse by now, isn’t it? Each time they fight, Tony unloads a continent-stopping amount of tech and boom-boom-booms on the emerald giant, who is phased long enough to get pissed, and then we cue epic punching. Tony flies and flails, maybe has a little inner-caption angst party, and then we repeat the cycle. Maybe Steve Rogers or Maria Hill jump in after a while to stop the fracas. Suffice to say, Hulk and Iron Man have been done just about as much as Batman and the G-D-Joker.
How amazing is it then that Mark Waid and Kieron Gillen play a little retcon-history gambit and come out unscathed! This issue, spending most of its running time setting the scene, is a shining example of being able to use common tropes in all the right ways. Here is an issue that truly is made better by the sum of its parts, than it is when you deconstruct it. And what an amazing segue that was. Let’s cut this sumbitch’ open then, aye?
So, the skinny is simple: The Watcher was murdered. A mort came out and declared he was the dude who done did it. He didn’t. But he was able to attack a ton of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with a psychic bob-omb. And with that attack, each hero – or pair of heroes in this case – get a big ole’ chunk of Watcher-vision in their brainpans. Specific to this book, Tony and Bruce Banner share their memories chained to the fateful detonation of a gamma bomb. And the SPOILER retcon of it all: Tony tinkered with Bruce’s bomb. Yup, while both Mr. Stark and Banner were science bros at one time in their youth… at a pivotal time when they were truly working to hone their identities, they ended up on either side of a potent fence. Bruce, the pacifist. Tony, the war monger. And one pithy, snarky barb begat another, and soon thereafter, Tony (in his alcoholic days, mind you) took Bruce to task for potentially inhibiting his gamma bomb. Throw in Thunderbolt Ross, and presto! Revisionist Marvel history that bleeds into why this book should matter.
And matter it does. As I’d noted before, there’s little to no need now to show another green goliath versus the tin can man bout. But, like Vince McMahon, Mark Waid and Kieron Gillen know that with the right story even the umpteenth fight can matter a whole lot. By introducing this snag into the history of the Hulk, and layering it over the current storyline in Waid’s Hulk-ongoing – where Bruce himself is now laced with Extremis in his cerebral cortex – we end up with a fight that is built on far more than another silly misunderstanding. And because the Extemis in Hulk’s brain now brings Banner to the forefront of his angrier half, there’s a level of threat raised here to an all-out extreme. An angry Hulk is still handicapped by his less-than-stellar thought capacity. But a smart Hulk is indeed a scary thing. Especially true when the whole “the angrier he gets the stronger he gets” card is played.
I’d noted above how this was a book of tropes. And let it be stated for the record: this is. Waid and Gillen’s plot is so by-the-numbers, it nearly stings. Or maybe it just stinks. Having to use revisionist history to create conflict is such a comic-book thing to do, I’m left again wondering if that is the modus operandi of Gillen – who I called out for doing as such in his recent stint on Iron Man. I’m all about playing to the cheap seats mind you (I do love pro-wrestling… I mean… sports entertainment after all). But when the rest of the script is really just getting us from point A to point B, there’s little to celebrate specifically about the delivery. There’s really just the employment of typical flashback – flash forward presentation after an action-packed cold-open. Maybe I’m still grumpy over Future’s End, but when I see Waid’s name on a cover these days, I expect greatness.
Artistically, you can’t get more straight-line-bombastic than Mark Bagley. He’s kinetic, epic, and clean in his storytelling. He doesn’t try to bend the rules… he doesn’t need to. It’s akin to Ocean’s Eleven as recreated by Soderbergh – this is a master playing a riff on common themes. As we all know Bagley’s ability to whip out acceptably modern comic book pages, you’re getting exactly what you’d expect from this book. And as a bonus Scooby snack… we also get a few attempts to stretch the common style. Andrew Hennessey’s inks, and Jason Kieth’s colors render an even slicker Bagley page than one is used to. Specifically Kieth’s bold choice of colors, and smart use of glows and knockouts elevate the final product to the epic-crossover level one can appreciate. Knowing that this is Marvel’s flagship blockbuster for the summer, here the art team does their job swimmingly, in giving us visuals that play to the strengths of the script.
Original Sin: Hulk Vs. Iron Man is the kind of popcorn-comic I can get behind. While it’s a bit of a copout to need to introduce new history in order to carry a story, here things move so briskly we hardly have time to savor it. And because of that smart pacing, we’re left with an inaugural chapter amidst the ever-winding checklist within the event that gives us real foot holes to anchor ourselves in for the next chapter. While I’m still not at all interested in who killed the Watcher, I can hang my hat on Hulk’s deserved rage. And therein lies the real point to why I’ll celebrate this book one week and trash DC’s attempt just seven days prior. Original Sin pays attention to the story and reasoning behind it, rather than merely announce “it’s time for punching and new team affiliations!” While the underlying structure may not be all that different, at the end of the day it’s the technique and execution that elevated Mickey’s efforts far more than the Brothers Warners has in a good long while.
Jedi Academy #2: Return of the Padawan By Jeffrey Brown Scholastic, 176 Pages, $12.99
Jeffrey Brown is an incredibly entertaining storyteller and I fell in love with his Darth Vader and Son when I it was pointed out to me in a museum gift shop. Apparently, Scholastic and Lucasfilm love him, too, because they have recruited him to challenge The Diary of a Wimpy Kid with Jedi Academy a series of book presuming the trials and tribulations of middle school is the same in a galaxy far, far away.
Undiscerning young readers (this is aimed at readers 8-12) fell in love with the first volume and this month we see the release of the second installment. The main character is underdog Roan Novachez, who wants to be a pilot but his natural talent with The Force led him to be diverted to the Jedi Academy, taught by no less than Yoda himself.
While certain universal truths are here: unrequited crushes, rivals, bullies, challenging teachers, and mystery meat for lunch, the book is too thinly disguised. As a result, we have the equivalent of Facebook, Parent/Teacher conferences and genuine soccer. Everyone involved seems to have forgotten Star Wars is basically a space fantasy set nowhere near Earth and deal with archetypes not inside jokes.
The sheer joyful humor found in his single panel gags is absent here as Roan goes from mishap to mishap. Apparently, Yoda and his teachers know the reality of each incident but he is never vindicated in the eyes of his peers. As a result, the special quality that got him recruited to the Academy is absent. There are plenty of teaching moments throughout the story, which is mostly about his second year and attempting to master the flying simulator. The pressure of following in his father’s pilot footsteps is pretty much gone in this sequel so it has more to do with staying out of trouble.
Brown’s art style is appealing and the black and white page designs are nicely varied, switching from sequential panels to narrative. However, it also feels like he was handed a checklist of familiar visual elements to include to remind one and all this was really a Star Wars story. Wookiee? Check. Hoth? Check. And so on.
What could have been a refreshing, enchanting story set in a well-known universe is merely a watered down Wimpy Kid knockoff. It is hard to say how much of this is Brown’s limitations from Scholastic and/or Lucasfilm or his own shortcomings. But, as long as these sell, we will no doubt follow Roan through the remainder of middle school until he how somehow saves the universe.
Transformers: Age of Extinction is 165 minutes long. This should really be the entire review. Either you want to watch nearly three hours of Michael Bay throwing robots at the screen or you don’t. If you’ve seen any of his movies you’ve basically seen this one, there isn’t anything new just the older stuff louder, brighter and longer. Apparently this is something that has a lot of pent up demand. People can’t get enough of this. Isn’t that depressing?
I admit there’s something intrinsically seductive about his visual style. Everything is so slick and the camera moves are so majestic that it’s very easy to just settle in and let your eyes bliss out a little bit. This is broken up a bit when the giant robots have to fight because event through four movies Bay hasn’t quite figured out a good visual shorthand for keeping the robots separate so the big fights, when not in slow motion, have a tendency to just look like a bunch of rolling metal until things shakeout and you can determine who won. This is made dramatically more difficult by a new kind of Transformer introduced in this movie that transforms by turning into many tiny cubes and then floating in to a new form. This just fills the screen with the equivalent of giant dust. Bay is definitely capable of using the visual language of film and communicating a kind of poetry with it I just wish the poems weren’t profanity-laced limericks.
The original [[[Think Like a Man]]] was one of the worst movies I saw in 2012. It was an overplotted mess of a comedy that tried to even the scales on gender relations and succeeded only in as far as it made every character seem like an atrocious human being. The biggest sin that Think Like a Man Too commits is that it makes me feel bad for the first movie because this one just completely throws out any uniqueness they had and exchanges it for another cliché Vegas party movie that we’ve all seen a million times.
The original movie had a point of view. Women needed to think like men to get men to do what they wanted which was overwhelmingly commit more but in one case was let go of everything he liked. This movie substitutes that point of view for mother-in-law jokes that feel like they would be at home on the primetime comedy lineups of CBS or TBS. Maybe they were going for something about focusing on having a good time on your bachelor/bachelorette parties but that really doesn’t seem like thematic content fit for a feature film.
A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.
Hello, listeners.
If you have been listening to Night Vale Radio, you understand the lights above Arby’s, you can tell people why they should never go into the Dog Park, you understand that wheat and wheat-by-products are not to be trusted, and you definitely understand that angels do not exist.
However if you are not: You can (and should, for your own sanity) tune in and listen to Cecil every month on the 1st and 15th. Follow the Welcome to Night Vale podcast on iTunes, or if you prefer, listen to the episodes here, here, or here.
It’s alright if you’re confused at first, we all were. It becomes clear enough though as you listen on, while Cecil tells you all about sandstorms, Desert Bluffs, Carlos and his perfect hair…We don’t ever really talk about Steve Carlsberg, though.
You should be aware that alligators can kill your children.
Welcome to Night Vale is easily one of my favourite pod casts to pop up in quite a few years, and a quick glance around the internet will go to show that I am definitely not alone. Between the glowing cloud that rains animals, the faceless old woman who lives in your home, and Hiram McDaniels who is literally a five headed dragon, who cares…Night Vale Radio has a charm that is undeniable and wonderful.
I personally have always been an avid fan of radio programs, and still enjoy listening to things like The Shadow, The Twilight Zone, etc. There’s a fantastic bit of imagination that comes with radio (and reading books) that is different than watching TV or movies. You get to imagine everything, and whatever it is you picture…You aren’t wrong. One of the best parts about WTNV is that there is so much left to your own personal perceptions, and it is encouraged.
There is so much about Night Vale that will simultaneously lift up your spirits, terrify you, and make you question your own existence. Kind of like how StrexCorp is so…
Station Management has informed me that this next paragraph has been deleted for the betterment of the station. Thank you for your cooperation.
…What was I saying? That StrexCorp Synernists Inc. are amazing and everyone should believe in a Smiling God? Yes, that must be it. How silly of me! To sum this all up in a slightly less confusing statement…
You might scared, intrigued, and confused. You may not come out of it the same, but in the end…Isn’t that all life is? Void and turquoise…
Goodnight, dear readers.
Goodnight.
(As a side note: Welcome to Night Vale is currently touring Canada and the US! Tickets are sold out for a lot of venues, but if you want to see Cecil and the crew live, do so! A few friends of mine went to see it live and since they’ve gotten back they just keep repeating the word Strex over and over. Strex…Strex…Strex…)
Written by Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, and Keith Giffen. Art by Aaron Lopresti, Art Thibert, and Hi-Fi.
I beg you, dear reader, to not skim over the author credits in this review. Azzarello. Lemire. Jurgens. Giffen. A master of noir, the macabre, cape and cowl, and team action. I want you to let those names and their respective bibliographies soak into your brainpan.
And now, I want you to forget it. All of it. Forget amazing runs on Batman, Animal Man, Justice League, Superman, and 100 Bullets. Why? Because Futures End doesn’t read like it even strolled adjacent to the parks where any of those celebrated authors lived. Instead, we get another chapter that advances banal plots that all lead towards the next editorial status quo to deal with in the next publishing quarter (or year, or what-have-you). If you don’t care to stick around to read the maple-syrup-thick snark I’m about to lay out on this waste of thought and talent, then take these words and call it a day: Futures End is a passionless money suck, and is yet-another-symptom in the ever-ailing world of big-comic event-driven fiction.
To sum up the issue itself is to merely check off the minor plot points that continue the threads of the litany of plots. In the Phantom Zone, Agent Frankenstein fights Black Adam. He wins, but loses a limb. I guess we should care about that, but the guy is literally sewn together bits already. Losing one bit doesn’t really lend itself to intense dramatic action, does it? Elsewhere, Deathstroke and Hit Girl (or whatever her name is – which doesn’t matter because she’s clearly being presented like Hit Girl) discuss adding Grifter to their team. Grifter is told this, and basically seems fine with it. Oh the melancholy! Then there’s Firestorm, who visits a memorial celebrating the loss of life he had a hand in creating. Joy! And we cap off the book with a skirmish in the park – Terry McGinness (Batman Beyond, don’t cha know) and Mr. Terrific fight while the Key and some ne’er-do-wells discuss being bad.
Time for a bit of a digression, kiddos. You see, not that long ago, there was this weekly book called 52. It was penned by a fantastic foursome of their day. To be fair, all four men are still incredible. Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, and Greg Rucka. Each man basically took a single story set inside the ever-shifting DCU, and over the course of 52 issues laid it out in tandem with the other three.
Over the course of that year-in-comics, there were certainly issues akin to Futures End where really there was more moving of chess pieces than there was definitive action and progress. But by and large, each issue was worth the read. Each issue contributed a very dissimilar set of heroes and villains that ultimately came together to showcase the richly detailed universe that houses half of the most recognizable licensed characters in all of creation… and then placed them dutifully on the shelf, and played with the want-nots, has-beens, and forgotten ones instead. It was the best of times.
Futures End #7 is the worst of times. As I alluded to above, the book just reads as passionless plot. I take that opinion to heart, as I myself am amidst the writing process on something of similar direction. In the era of writing for the trade, the middle chapters fall prey to only existing as means to the eventual end. Because they serve so many masters, they end up feeling hollow. Things happen. Stuff moves forward. But when you cram an issue with no fewer than five plot lines, and literally nothing gets resolved, or any twists are revealed… the trade becomes an end not worth waiting for. At least, not when the scripting and pacing do not take into account that every issue could stand to be a jumping on point. FE #7 not only craps on that concept, it revels in it.
Allow me to admit it straight up: I haven’t read a single panel of any previous issue of Futures End. Outside the pithy knowledge I have that this is some kind of epic that has to do with robotic evil duplicates from an alternate timeline or dimension, and at some point Luthor will run the Justice League… I know nothing. Picking up the seventh issue is of course complete reader-suicide. I don’t know why Frankenstein is in the Phantom Zone. I don’t know why Ronnie Raymond is to blame for whatever tragedy befell his kin. I don’t have the slightest clue what Terrifitech is, or why Batman Beyond is trying to blend in as a bum (who apparently drops fifty dollar bills because… the Internet?). But I digress. Simply put: I shouldn’t have to know any of those six-issue long backstories to enjoy a good comic.
If it’s the absolute I believe in now – having been a weekly reviewer for nearly three and a half years (and a fan and reader for two decades) – it’s that Erik Larsen was right. Every comic stands to be someone’s jumping on point. And it’s issues like this one that lend me to believe why comic books continue to ebb and flow but never seem to be more than a niche medium clinging to life in between the blockbuster movie adaptations. Stories like 52 actually attempted to prove that comic books still had sway – and that Alan Moore isn’t just a crazy loon in a castle. By making a book that used the continuity and novel-length girth of plots, DC proved that a comic book need not be a cartoon or mega-plex people pleaser. Futures End instead returns to the roots (and not that Jack Kirby / Steve Ditko / Stan Lee kind) of the industry; kitchy low-brow action stories that only target those who want a punch, kick, and an occasional tit. Sorry, we’re better than this.
When the credit-roll on your book reads like a who’s-who of modern top talent.. when your art team delivers admirable visuals to the script… when you have literally an entire universe of characters – including the top-shelf ones – at your disposal… when you have the carte blanche to create with compatriots that each in their own right could handle the book by themselves, you are not allowed to phone in an issue. Hell, you’re not allowed to phone in one panel. For fuck’s sake, you’re not even allowed to trip up over a single Rao-damned word balloon.
Future’s End is indicted on all counts. This was a lazy chapter in a lazy crossover that feels more by-the-numbers than seat-of-your-pants. It aspires to do nothing other than advance plot at a snails pace – sans style, sans grace. For shame, DC. For shame Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, and Keith Giffen.
It’s summer, so we know that their kind has kicked-up their time watching online content. As a matter of fact, we’re currently kicking back with our online video community at VidCon right now. In celebration of all of that we offer up 5 of our favorite YouTube Channels. There’s something for everyone whether you want pop culture musicals, thoughtful hip-hop analysis of literary classics, cute cats, comic culture in your kitchen, or dorky teenage boy advice.
If you’ve been watching any sort of television recently or have even just been clicking around online, you have probably heard of a series called ‘Penny Dreadful‘. Since the second last episode of the first season airs this evening, I wanted to do a short post as to why you should all be watching it.
(If you are not already.)
Starting first, it has the lovely Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, who is not only fabulous but is mysterious, and has some demons she’s fighting. Literally. (more…)
The Blu-ray edition of 300: Fall of an Empire comes out on Tuesday from Warner Home Entertainment and there’s still no sign of the source material. Nearly four years after promising Xerxes, the sequel to his acclaimed 300, Frank Miller is apparently nowhere near done. As a result, it’s very hard to tell how well director Noam Murrow did. Instead, we have Zack Snyder’s visual feast adaptation of 300 to compare this with and the bottom line is that Rise is a pale comparison.
The Greeks who died at Thermopylae holding off the Persians have inspired story, song, and film in the past but Miller returned it to the public consciousness with a stark artistic retelling that Snyder lovingly reworked for film, helping create a new vocabulary for cinematic storytelling. It also had Gerard Butler and an army of incredibly fit men, brutal bloodshed, and the rallying cry of “We are Sparta!” This time around, Butler is gone, replaced with Sullivan Stapleton as Themistokles, an Athenian who happens to have killed God-king Xerxes’ (Rodrigo Santoro) father.
The problem is, we have nothing new to offer. More six-pack abs, Eva Green and Lena Headey, more bloodshed, more of the same sort of storytelling. Told from the Athenian side of the fight, Themistocles and his navy take on the Persians, knowing Leonidas was holding back the towering Xerxes,. Miller tends not to repeat himself,, adding something fresh to his sequels be it the resurrection of Elektra, the Dark Knight Strikes Again, or Sin City. What he brought to Xerxes remains to be seen so it’s hard to say if screenwriters Snyder and Kurt Johnistad had much to work with.
Watching the film, it has a familiar feel and not a pleasant one because the first was fresh and exciting. Less so the second time around without a new ingredient. Stapleton is not Butler and it robs the army of a charismatic leader. There is no nobility to the battle, no poetry to the dialogue, and no acting to make you root for the Greeks.
The video transfer is just fine and needs to be since this is visual interesting despite the repetitive feel. Colors are rich, blood soaks into sand quite nicely. The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track is up to task so every effect, every grunt, every musical note is clear.
There are a fine assortment of Special Features, including Behind the Scenes: The 300 Effect (30:00) which traces Miller’s idea for a sequel to film production; Real Leaders & Legends (23:00), which compares fact to fiction; Women Warriors (12:00), spotlighting Green’s Artemisia and Lena Headey’s Queen Gorgo; Savage Warships (11:00), giving us a look at the actual Naval vessels and strategies employed in our world; and, Becoming a Warrior (5:00), the obligatory training segment.
