Tagged: Marvel Comics

SpyGal or ExasperatedSigh-Gal?

So, ladies. Finally, we get what we’ve been waiting for all of our comic-book-loving lives… a comic wherein the female heroine is based on a makeup product.

Thanks to Marvel Custom Solutions and San Francisco-based Benefit Cosmetics, we now have SpyGal, which is available at Benefit makeup counters, and stars a “wise-cracking, pore-zapping persona… modeled after the POREfessional pore minimizing primer.”

To this, I feel I must say… ”Really? In the name of Odin, why??” (Or, in the always effective language of Internet memes, “what is this I can’t even.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for comics geared towards women and for reaching a wider female audience, but I’m pretty sure this is the wrong way to go about it.

Now, I’ve only seen teaser images, and no story text, so I’m willing to withhold at least a sliver of judgment until I’ve seen more, especially since SpyGal is being touted as a “witty” story with a “dynamic, nuanced hero” and “humor and intelligence.”  SpyGal’s job seems to be “helping powerful women spread their influence around the world,” which could be cool, and at one point it looks like she saves her date, and he’s all, “My heroine!!” which is kind of fun. And I am a sucker for a good, witty story (I love good art, but if the story can’t hack it the art never saves it for me), so it’s possible the text could make up for a bit of what I’m seeing. But from the images, it appears the main character… fights bad guys with weapons disguised as makeup? While zipping through the air in completely impractical-for-grappling-hook-use skirts and short coats? As Rorschach would say, “Hrm.”

While I loved the little gadgets in Alias – many of which were built into purses or lipsticks or jewelry – to have this be the main point of a comic (along with, apparently, a romance angle) rubs me the wrong way. I do realize this is meant to be advertising for the cosmetic company, and can’t fault them for wanting to team up with Marvel. And I get the concept of Marvel teaming up with other companies, because money is money, hooray. But I confess to feeling disappointed that this is what Marvel chooses to do for its female demographic. And even with the choice made, I have further skepticism about the execution.

Although the blurb talks about the hero(ine) being faced with “life’s modern problems,” the art and fashion are done with a “vintage female action figure” feel that to me (even with a flying car) reminds me of the ‘50s and an accompanying cultural attitude towards women that I do not need in a modern female-oriented comic. I hope Marvel doesn’t think this is really what female comics fans are looking for. And although I realize that the point of the comic is to sell makeup, what self-respecting crime fighter would use a grappling hook with a grip as tiny as a mascara tube?

Further, not to disparage either the artist or writer on the book, both of whom are talented, but couldn’t Marvel have gotten at least one female creator on this project? Don’t get me wrong; I don’t advocate giving someone the job just because they’re female (that’s just as bad as the opposite) but I know there are talented female artists and writers out there. Why not get one of them to work on a book pitched solely towards women and which deals with turning beauty products used by women into practical super-heroine gear? (Unless none of them wanted to work on it?) Maybe then at the very least Our Heroine would have better bangs.

I know it’s easy to criticize, and that this is geared towards a very specific purpose. But tell me truly, don’t you think there could have been at least a few better ways to execute this? Or that it would have been better not to do it at all?

Hrm.

 

Emily S. Whitten: YOU Can Smell Like A Superhero With The Avengers Fragrances!

I’ve seen a few Internet commenters wondering why anyone would want to smell like a “sweaty robotic suit” or whatever, but really, it’s refreshing to see a comics-related tie-in that’s not a t-shirt or knick-knack made of plastic. I’m an adult, and sometimes it’s fun to buy adult things that are also totally geeky. And I like that this particular product line has at least one female-specific product. So I say hooray to Marvel for partnering up with JADS International, purveyors of geeky scents, to bring us some fun comics-themed colognes and one (and maybe someday more?) perfume based on The Avengers. Also, let’s be honest, I just really, really like things that smell nice. And these scents really do.

Colognes and perfumes are super subjective, of course, and it can be hard to know what something is going to smell like when worn, because it reacts with body chemistry and the scent varies from person to person (like that one time when my best friend had the most amazing perfume and I loved it and she got me a bottle and… it smelled terrible on me. I was so sad). But it does help to know what something smells like in the bottle and on at least one person; and to that end, I am here to help! By not only telling you what each cologne smells like in the bottle, but also what it smells like on my extremely patient friend and fellow Avengers fan, the very talented comic book artist Kevin Stokes. (Round of applause for good sport Kevin, folks. Also check out his fantastic work on things like Stan Lee’s The Guardian Project. Just for fun, before I read the descriptions of the fragrances, I also wrote up what I thought the characters would actually smell like. Let’s see how close JADS International got to my ideas of what superheroes (and one heroine, and one villain) smell like. (more…)

AUTHOR HOSKIN TAKES A TRIP TO ‘DRAGON CITY’!


The latest volume of James Axler’s OUTLANDERS series, DRAGON CITY, is available from May.


With one of their team missing, another wounded and their base in ruins, the heroic Outlanders are at their lowest ebb when they are sent to explore the mysterious Dragon City that has sprung up on the banks of the Euphrates River.  Within its walls, they discover the template to a pantheon of reborn gods of evil — gearing up for the approaching God War.


This volume of the modern-day pulp sci-fi series is written by Rik Hoskin and can be read as a stand-alone as well as developing themes that have been building over the past few books.

About the author:  Writing as “James Axler”, Rik Hoskin has been the primary author of the Outlanders series since 2008 as well as contributing several volumes to James Axler’s Deathlands.  His fourth Outlanders book, Infinity Breach, paid homage to the 1930s pulp heroes while blurring the barrier between fiction and reality.  Beyond his Outlanders books, Hoskin is a comic book author who’s written Superman for DC Comics and helped develop a successful Spider-Man series for Marvel Comics’ European licensor, Panini, among others.  He currently writes for Star Wars: The Clone Wars Comic as well as several younger readers titles.
Ode to Oswald

Ode to Oswald

One would think that of all the major conglomerates in the world, The Walt Disney Company would have the greatest empathy and respect for creators who have made bad deals that resulted in their characters being torn from them. Disney, in fact owes its own success to its founder’s resolution resulting from having his creation hijacked by corporate greed. (more…)

MIXED REVIEW: Glenn and Mike Geek Out Over “The Avengers”

We each saw The Avengers at fan-filled midnight screenings, separately but equally. We tried to avoid any spoilers here, but we can’t guarantee we hit that mark. And, being who we are, there are a couple of teasers in this dialog.

MIKE: Did you see it in 2-D, 3-D, or IMAX?

GLENN: 3-D.

MIKE: Me too. This was the first movie ever that I can recommend in 3-D.

GLENN: Which is amazing, considering it was upsampled to 3-D. The film was converted to 3-D during post-production for the theatrical release. But it certainly paid off.

MIKE: The 3-D imaging credits were as long as the Manhattan phone book.

GLENN: Someone asked me point blank if The Avengers is the greatest superhero movie of all time. I said I don’t know about that, it has some very tough competition. But hands down, it’s the greatest superhero battle movie of all time. Act Three in particular is just completely packed with the loving destruction of the New York skyline, and in 3-D it’s incredibly staggering. It’s also fast and fun, as compared to the smashing of Chicago in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon… that just felt drawn out and more akin to a disaster movie. Here, it’s battle, action, and a much better feeling of scope and scale.

MIKE: Yes. It was a real superhero battle in the classic Marvel sense: everybody fights each other then gets together to fight the bad guys. And I’ll never be able to look at Grand Central Terminal the same way again.

GLENN: Or the Pan-Am building. Or 387 Park Avenue South, or Marvel’s address on 40th Street. All of that and they didn’t blow up any of DC’s offices. Have we reached detente?

MIKE: Well, they blew up CBS’s first teevee studios. Which is funny, as this was a Paramount movie.

GLENN: Not really a Paramount movie, Disney bought ‘em out but they had to keep the logo on.

MIKE: And, of course, Paramount got a truckload of money and, I’ll bet, a piece.

GLENN: Exactly.

MIKE: Did you notice they hardly ever referred to anybody by their superhero name – other than The Hulk, who is obviously different from Banner, and Thor, who is, obviously, Thor.

GLENN: I think everybody got name-checked at least once.

MIKE: Yeah. Once or twice. Period.

(more…)

Dennis O’Neil: The Avengers Internationale

I blame our tyrant-in-chief, that miserable cur of a backstabbing foreigner who lives in the White House. Yes, who else? Barack Hussein Obama. Stands to reason – it has to be his fault. There is no other reasonable explanation – hell, no possible explanation.

Last weekend, the Avengers movie opened in 39 overseas markets, made a whopping $178.4 million. What opened here? The Five Year Engagement. Oh sure, all us guys want to see that! We won’t get our Avengers fix until tomorrow. I have to wait almost a week before, movie money clutched in my sweaty grip, I ask the nice lady or gentleman at the monsterplex for a ticket, creep into the semi-dark theater, sink into a seat and prepare for moviegoing bliss. (My cell phone will be turned off. I don’t even have a laptop or a tablet. I’m a good audience member!)

What I’ll be seeing, in the following two-hour ecstasy fest, is the latest manifestation of the genius of Stan Lee. Years ago, before you were born, Mr. Lee revolutionized comic book publishing by… well, maybe by several things, but one of them was doing something there wasn’t even a name for back then (at least none that I ever heard): branding. Using what I think was a combination of intuition, native smarts, and years of sitting behind an editorial desk, Stan didn’t give us just comic books, he gave us Marvel Comics. So you didn’t go to he newsstand (this was before comic book shops existed) and buy an issue, say, The Amazing Spider-Man, you bought a Marvel comic that was about your friendly neighborhood web-slinger. And you were encouraged to get – to collect! – other Marvels, like Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk. These heroes seemed know each other and sometimes one of them would appear in another’s comic and so Stan wasn’t presenting mere stories, he was presenting stories that were park of a (more-or-less) coherent universe that you could (kind of) get to now and it was a lot more fun than the universe outside your window and you couldn’t wait until you could get the next issue

Stan’s pals at the movie studios are following his example and putting on our screens, not superhero movies, but Marvel superhero movies. They’ve been building the brand by such ploys as adding teasers to the end credits, brief scenes that referred to forthcoming films, thereby helping to create the theater version of the Marvel universe and, incidentally, creating anticipation for the next set of astonishments, much as the young Stan Lee did with coming issue blurbs and text pages.

Does the still-spry Stan approve? Hey, true believer, he does make those cameo appearances in the movies, doesn’t he?

At this point, if you have a wandering, non-linear mind, you might be wondering why Comrade Obama played us dirty and allowed the Avengers flick to debut in far places. Isn’t it obvious? We all know that Barack Hussein Obama wasn’t born in the land of the free. (Surely you heard that.) He isn’t a real American. So of course he favors the foreigners.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases Takes Us To Cleveland

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Help! I’m A Marvel Zombie!

Seriously, it happened so slowly, I never saw it coming. It’s long been a fact: Marc Alan Fishman is a card carrying member of the DC Nation. But then, something changed. Flashpoint was one epic-crossover-super-event-that-changed-everything too many. With the New 52, I’d made a steadfast rule: In order to conserve money and my sanity, any book that delivered two issues in a row that left me bored or was just terrible I would remove from my pull list.

Like every red-blooded nerd worth his salt, when a book is dropped from my box, I can’t help but seek to replace it with something new. And now that I look across the board, Marvel is now on equal footing, book-for-book with my pull list for DC.

More important, every Marvel book on that list is one that when I see it on the shelf, I get truly excited. Truth be told, I get Blue Beetle, Batgirl, Justice League Dark, Green Lantern Corps, and Resurrection Man – and they are good comics, but none of them excite me anymore. I’m slowly coming to terms with it; New 52 be damned… Make Mine Marvel.

Simply put, right now Marvel is putting out better books than DC. I welcome the flame war and argument from the interwebs. Based solely on the Marvel books I’ve read in the last three-four months, DC pales in comparison in story depth, quality, scope, and clarity. A few examples, you ask?

Take the Fantastic Four. Jonathan Hickman’s run on the title has been compared to Kirby and Lee’s initial run; and said with sincerity. His “War of the Four Cities” multi-year arc was as epic as any DC “Crisis” without the multitude of mini-series. While it did spawn a second book, FF, the grandeur has been well contained. Even better, FF brings the ideology of the family and creates an excuse to explore more of the Baxter Building collective without over-saturation. It’s a riff, not a rip-off. Compare this to the four Green Lantern titles being pumped out at DC and you can see how a little consolidation can really tighten up a title’s overall quality.

How about the newly relaunched Defenders? Matt Fraction’s “vacation” title is a glorious send up to an old and mostly forgotten secondary team… dusted off, polished up, and presented wonderfully in the modern age. While only five issues in, I’ve been nothing but impressed up until now. In fact, Defenders #4 easily tops my list of best comics I’ve read for the year. The year is early, yes, but amongst dozens and dozens of issues, I’ve little doubt it won’t falter from my top ten by years end. It’s a comic not afraid to be written with a smirk… that knows when to be deadly serious, or just go for the nut shot. Something Justice League International tried to do, and fell on its face for attempting.

For those following my reviews on Michael Davis World, you’ll no doubt also note my recent jaunt into Spider-Land with the Amazing Spider-Man title. With the promise of the “Ends of the Earth” storyline being a good jumping on point for new readers, I dove into a title and character I’ve always wanted to read, but never did because of the bad mojo that came with the book. Ask anyone about Spider-Man’s most recent bullet points and I doubt you’ll see a face light up when discussing One More Day, the Other, or even Spider-Island. That being said, the series thus far has been a joyous romp. A Saturday morning cartoon concept with a hidden maturity, that has a perfect balance of comic-book-quirk with well thought out plot development.

And over in Invincible Iron Man? Well, Matt Fraction is proving what a truly potent writer he is by shaking off the grime of the horrendous Fear Itself crossover crud and taking his baby book back to form. His long-winding plot of Mandarin’s careful and calculated destruction of Tony Stark has been a slow burn that’s been a long time coming. And when everything recently came to a head, we got a moment in comics I’ve dreamed of reading since I finished The Watchmen – an arc where the hero loses because he’s been out-matched. It was bold, ballsy, and has me chomping at the bit for more.

All this, and I’ve not even mentioned Daredevil or Ultimate Spider-Man. I’d love to, but well… I’ve not read them yet. But they are high on the list for me to catch up on, the second the next DC book takes a dive in my box. Resurrection Man? I’m looking at you.

Now, of course, Marvel isn’t perfect. Just a few weeks back on my podcast, a lifelong X-Men fan told me he’d literally given on comics all together because of the terrible decline of his favorite mutants. And let’s give credit where credit is due: Fraction and Hickman’s bold pacing is very much in-step with Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison’s work on Green Lantern and Batman over the last 60 or so issues. Anyone who read “Batman R.I.P.” can see what “The War of the Four Cities” or most of the run on Invincible Iron Man is being inspired by (not directly mind you… but certainly in conceptual scope). And DC is not without its own amazing titles. Action Comics, Batman, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Green Lantern always float to the top of my reading pile when I pick them up.

This of course leads me to ask the bigger questions. Was the New 52 not powerful enough overall to keep me from being lured away? Is Marvel just in a great rhythm right now? Will X-Men vs. Avengers cause some major crisis to interrupt all the goodness coming out in their top titles? Or with the second wave of new books (Dial H and JSA are both looking mighty fine to me…) hitting shelves soon, will DC reclaim me?

Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander Feeds The Chickens

 

Martha Thomases: The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends

As a child growing up, I loved cartoons. At that time (the 1950s and early 1960s), that’s a bit like saying that I loved breathing. There were cartoons on Saturday morning, and cartoons every afternoon. The movie theater near my Grandmother’s house had Saturday matinees that were three hours of cartoons.

But I loved comic books more.

My husband, John Tebbel, was the first animation maven I ever met. He not only knew the difference between Disney and Warner Brothers, but he knew the individual directors, and quickly taught me how to spot Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson. He explained who the Fleischer Studio was and why I should care.

We went to animation festivals in Ottawa, Canada and Annecy, France. I saw films by George Dunning that weren’t Yellow Submarine. I met Bill Scott and June Foray. We would go to the Jay Ward store when we were in Los Angeles.

Naturally, I tried to share my love of comic books. My success rate was lower. He liked Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. He loved Kyle Baker. Milk and Cheese made him laugh out loud. Still, he never quite got the superhero thing.

I’m not writing to celebrate two geeks in love. I’m writing about how sometimes, we let our differences divide us. Do you like Marvel or DC? The Big Two or independents? Broadcast or cable?

We defined our affection for two art forms that were graphic storytelling. One moved and one didn’t. One had finite time limits and one didn’t. Each of us, with our affection for our chosen art, could appreciate the other’s favorite.

I would like our political discourse to work at this level, but that isn’t going to happen as long as there is so much money and power involved. However, if there is anything that would make my husband’s life more significant, it would be if we could each of us share our love for pop culture with the rest of the world. Instead of fighting over which piece of the pie is the biggest or the best, we could have more pie.

John liked pumpkin. I prefer blueberry.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/XB90b8xXYIk[/youtube]

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

A Look at the Anime Adventures of Iron Man and the X-Men

A Look at the Anime Adventures of Iron Man and the X-Men

  • News
  • April 20, 2012

In case you missed it on G4 over the last year, Marvel Comics licensed a quartet of properties to be  adapted into anime for the Japanese market. Acclaimed studio Madhouse handled the visuals while Warren Ellis was brought aboard to craft twelve -part stories for Iron Man, Wolverine, X-Men, and Blade. In short, he helped design a Marvel Anime Universe and the fruits of those labors recently completed their cable run.

On Tuesday, Sony Home Entertainment is releasing Iron Man and X-Men as two-disc DVD collections. For those unfamiliar with the properties, here’s a slideshow for each. Our review will run in a day or two.

IRON MAN Anime

X-MEN Anime 

REVIEW: Astonishing X-Men: Dangerous

Motion comics remain a bizarre hybrid of comic book storytelling and the most limited of animation (reminding one of nothing more than the 1960s Marvel Super-Heroes animation, which was reviled for the longest time. Marvel Comics has been good about exploring every new form of technology and motion comics are included. They launched the line with an adaptation of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men run beginning with Gifted. Now, capitalizing on Whedon’s direction of The Avengers, the second arc, Dangerous (issues 7-12), has been released on DVD by Shout! Factory.

The stripped down disc contains the complete run without extras or any clue there was a previous volume. However, watching the nine to eleven minute segments, you may be lost by references to the previous story. The story is the one when the Danger Room becomes sentient and considers the mutants “oppressors”, unleashing a damaged Sentinel after them.

The story runs nearly ninety minutes and if you liked the comic, you will enjoy this. For those unfamiliar with the title, it will be confusing. An adaptation should have tinkered with the script to allow context to be added or references beyond the storyline to be deleted. Whedon’s gift for dialogue and character, thankfully, remains intact.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjMzksNepNI[/youtube]

The motion aspect is exceptionally limited, especially compared with other efforts such as The Watchmen. And as usual, I find fault with a great many of the actors cast doing the voices. The foreign accents are comically thick and you can’t always reconcile the character you’re seeing with the voice you’re hearing.

This is for the diehard collector only, but at $14.97, it’s priced to move and might be a worth a look to see Cassady and colorist Laura Martin’s work on the screen.

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