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ICYMI: Babylon 5: The Road Home – All-New Animated Movie Coming To Digital, 4K Ultra HD & Blu-Ray Aug. 15

ICYMI: Babylon 5: The Road Home – All-New Animated Movie Coming To Digital, 4K Ultra HD & Blu-Ray Aug. 15

BURBANK, CA (June 15, 2023) – The highly anticipated continuation of the beloved series is finally here with an all-new original animated movie! Arriving on August 15, 2023, Babylon 5: The Road Home will be available to purchase Digitally and on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. Series creator J. Michael Straczynski returns with a story about the iconic Babylon 5 space station and its inhabitants as they take a journey through the past to determine the future.

Babylon 5 celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and returning to voice their characters from the original series are Bruce Boxleitner as John Sheridan, Claudia Christian as Susan Ivanova, Peter Jurasik as Londo Mollari, Bill Mumy as Lennier, Tracy Scoggins as Elizabeth Lochley, and Patricia Tallman as Lyta Alexander.

The film also stars Paul Guyet (World of Warcraft) as Zathras and Jeffery Sinclair, Anthony Hansen (God of War) as Michael Garibaldi, Mara Junot (Green Lantern: Beware My Power) as Reporter and Computer Voice, Phil LaMarr (Futurama) as Dr. Stephen Franklin, Piotr Michael (Hogwart’s Legacy) as David Sheridan, Andrew Morgado (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) as G’Kar, and Rebecca Riedy (Magic: The Gathering Arena) as Delenn. Babylon 5: The Road Home was written and Executive Produced by series creator J. Michael Straczynski. The film was directed by Matt Peters (Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons), Supervising Producer is Rick Morales (Mortal Kombat Legends: Snow Blind) and Executive Producer is Sam Register.

Babylon 5: The Road Home will be available on August 15 to purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Vudu and more. 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray Discs will be available to purchase online and in-store at major retailers. Pre-order your copy now.

SYNOPSIS:

Return to Babylon 5 as the epic interstellar saga continues with The Road Home. Travel across the galaxy with John Sheridan as he unexpectedly finds himself transported through multiple timelines and alternate realities in a quest to find his way back home. Along the way he reunites with some familiar faces, while discovering cosmic new revelations about the history, purpose, and meaning of the Universe.

SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE:

Babylon 5 Forever (New Featurette) – join the cast and filmmakers as they reveal the process behind creating the first state-of-the-art, animated adaption of Babylon 5.

Audio Commentary with creator/writer/executive producer J. Michael Straczynski, actor Bruce Boxleitner and supervising producer Rick Morales.

Pricing and film information:

PRODUCT                                                                             SRP

Digital purchase                                                                    $19.99

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack + Digital Version*            $39.99 SRP USA

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack                                       $44.98 SRP Canada

Blu-ray + Digital Version*                                                     $29.98 SRP USA    

Blu-ray                                                                               $39.99 SRP Canada

4K/Blu-ray Audio: English, Spanish

4K/Blu-ray Subtitles: English, Spanish, French

Running Time: 78 minutes

Rated: PG-13 for some action/violence

*Digital version not available in Canada

REVIEW: 65

REVIEW: 65

An astronaut awakes from a horrific crash after his spaceship is knocked off course. He thinks he’s on an alien world until it becomes clear he’s on Earth. It worked in 1968’s Planet of the Apes and is far less successful when the hero goes back in time in the recent 65. As in 65 million years ago. You know, the age of dinosaurs.

The movie, out now on disc from Sony Home Entertainment, came and went in March, earning a mere 35% at Rotten Tomatoes. I suspect the low score has much to do with the heightened expectations given the writing and directing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the screenwriters behind A Quiet Place, which was dripping with tension and plot inventiveness.

Here’s it’s more of a cookie-cutter survival story as Mills (Adam Driver) goes on a two-year space flight to earnt he money to treat his ill daughter Nevine (Chloe Coleman), who is also aboard. Once they crash, the surviving complement is scattered and in time Mills finds young Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) and his fatherly instincts kick into gear even if they speak different languages.

They struggle through the lush, jungle foliage in an attempt to reach the Zoic, an escape shuttle. Standing in their way are all the usual problems one finds in the prehistoric era. Various dinosaur species, rock slides, and the like.

If there’s any pleasure to be taken from this formular film is the deepening rapport between Mills and Koa. Driver’s protagonist is deeply flawed, given to lying and less heroic actions. But his care for Koa wins out and he ahs a fine acting partner in Greenblatt. Still, Jurassic Park did humans versus dinosaurs better and this offers nothing new.

The film, available in a variety of formats, has a perfectly fine if unspectacular 1080 p Blu-ray transfer. Its DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack is a touch superior, but together, they make for fine home viewing. The combo pack comes with Blu-ray and Digital HD Code.

The Special Features are as by-the-0numbers as the film itself., We have five Deleted Scenes (8:03); Set in Stone: Filmmakers (14:21); Future of Yesterday: Creating the World of 65 (4:56);  Primordial Planet (2:30); and Final Showdown: Concepts to Screen (10:14).

Only the End of the World Again by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell & Troy Nixey

Only the End of the World Again by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell & Troy Nixey

First must come the consumer warning. I read this digitally, which means flipping through the pages would have been more cumbersome than with a physical book, and I took the “152 pages” as an indication of the length of the story.

Reader, I was misled.

Only the End of the World Again  is a 48-page story, bulked out by an sketchbook section exactly twice its size that shows the thumbnail layouts and un-lettered final inks for each page side-by-side, presumably for fans of art to take a magnifying glass to them and make various low appreciative noises in the back of their throats for the next several hours. I did not do so; that’s not how I read books.

If you do want to spend several hours with those earlier versions of the same story, though, this may well be a positive for you. It takes all kinds to make a world, after all.

“Only the End of the World Again” was originally a short story by Neil Gaiman. It first appeared in the 1994 Shadows Over Innsmouth anthology edited by Stephen Jones, and a few years later was collected in Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors. This graphic novel, part of a big series mostly adapting his best-known stories from the ’90s, was scripted and laid out by P. Craig Russell, drawn by Troy Nixey, colored by Matthew Hollingsworth, and lettered by Sean Konot.

As is usual with this series – see also my posts on Chivalry , Snow, Glass, Apples , Troll Bridge , and How to Talk to Girls at Parties  – this is a very faithful adaptation. Russell makes Only a very heavily narrated comic, and gets what seems to be 85+% of Gaiman’s original words onto these pages. (To my mind, that defeats the purpose of adaptation, but fans want things to be exactly like the original, only in a new form they can pay money for, so I see why.)

The story was deliberately a pastiche, not quite an in-joke but including a nudge or two to the ribs of fandom, in which an adjustor named Lawrence Talbot found himself in the mist-shrouded Massachusetts town of Innsmouth and, more by fate than by plan, foiled the end of the world. As the title implies, the story hints pretty heavily that this is Talbot’s life: he wanders into a random town each month, supernatural stuff happens, and an apocalypse is averted.

(It may also have been somewhat inspired by Roger Zelazny’s 1993 novel A Night in the Lonesome October , which has a related premise. The timeline is plausible – Night was published in August of ’93, with galleys circulating a few months before that, and Shadows came out in October of ’94.)

This version has a lot of Gaiman’s atmospheric prose, as I said – in prose, this was a story of voice, and the comics version does its best to keep that voice and layer in more atmosphere with Nixey’s Lovecraftianly lumpy people. (Nixey is a great artist for stories about Innsmouth, and maybe Lovecraftian topics in general; he can make people fleshy in unpleasant ways that hint at inhuman shapes.)

As usual with this series, I’m somewhat uneasy about seeing so much effort and care going into making sure as much of Gaiman’s prose is still present in the comic version as possible – it seems a sin against the idea of adaptation, somehow. As if the adaptors aren’t allowed to actually transform the story, to actually fit it into its new form in any way that would make it deviate from the original.

But I am clearly a minority opinion in that.

This is a fun Lovecraftian story, with sneaky Gaiman prose well manipulated by Russell and illustrated with relish (some kind of cold, blue-greenish relish, smelling a bit more of the sea than anyone you know actually enjoys) by Nixey. But don’t be surprised to pick up this book and find the story is done a third of the way through.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Waasp to Lead Brand Exntension Avengers Inc.

Waasp to Lead Brand Exntension Avengers Inc.

New York, NY — 60 years ago, Janet Van Dyne stood alongside Earth’s Mightiest Heroes as they assembled for the very first time and named them the AVENGERS! Now, during the team’s milestone anniversary year, she’ll lead them into all-new territory in the brand-new AVENGERS INC.

Debuting in September, this sharp new series will be crafted by two Marvel masterminds: writer Al Ewing and artist Leonard Kirk. Known for taking some of Marvel’s greatest icons into fresh and unexpected directions in titles like Immortal Hulk and Loki: Agent of Asgard, Ewing now delivers that same treatment to the Avengers mythos by blending noir and super hero storytelling for suspenseful adventures unlike any in Avengers history. With acclaimed work in dynamic comic book titles like the pulpy X-Factor and the recent horror-fueled Sabretooth series, Kirk is the perfect artist to mix thrilling Avengers action with tense investigating and super powered sleuthing.

Together, Ewing and Kirk will introduce readers to a whole new style of Avenging. It kicks off with a deadly conspiracy rooted in the ghosts of the Avengers’ past that only founding Avenger Wasp can solve. But she won’t be alone as she finds a new partner in Victor Shade! This former alias of Vision mysteriously resurfaces just as Janet discovers a score of super villain murders. Will he guide Wasp to the truth or is his familiar guise hiding the very clues Janet needs to crack the case? Fans can expect guest stars galore as this pulse-pounding series moves forward. The series will also pack direct connections to the other current Avengers ongoing series, Jed MacKay and C.F. Villa’s Avengers.

Her name is Janet Van Dyne. She’s a hero. She’s a celebrity. She’s hunting a killer. His name is Victor Shade. He’s a villain. He’s an enigma. He just got killed. And together, they’re out to solve every mystery in the Marvel Universe…starting with their own.

“AVENGERS INC. takes the beating, buzzing heart of the original Avengers, teams her up with an undead mystery man with an identity so secret even he doesn’t know it, and sends them both out to solve the most amazing, fantastic and uncanny whodunnits the Marvel Universe has to offer!” Ewing explained. “It’s kind of a classic ‘will-they-won’t-they’ crime-solving partnership – or it would be if the ‘will-they’ in question was ‘save the world from…’ well, that’d be telling. See you in September!”

“I am unsure what can be said of AVENGERS INC. without spoiling anything for the readers. I can say this is a fun and intriguing take on some familiar characters that leans more into detective skills over super strength, wit rather than eye beams and cunning instead of small, genetically mutated, furry creatures,” Kirk added. “Al is doing a bang up job with this and I am having a load of fun. I hope the audience does too.”

AVENGERS INC. #1

Written by AL EWING

Art by LEONARD KIRK

Cover by DANIEL ACUÑA

On Sale 9/13

REVIEW: Max Fleischer’s Superman

REVIEW: Max Fleischer’s Superman

One of the joys of growing up in the 1960s is that you were treated to cartoons from earlier eras, long before limited animation filled the Saturday morning airwaves. Among those gems were the work of Max and Dave Fleischer, including Popeye, Gulliver’s Travels and, of course, Superman. Since then, they have fallen into public domain and were widely available, but never in the best condition.

Until Warner Bros. Home Entertainment got involved. First came a DVD set in 02006 and now we have a Blu-ray collection, mastered from the original film negatives. All seventeen episodes from September 26, 1941 through July 30, 1943 are here.

For those unfamiliar, the fairly formulaic stories involve a problem, Lois Lane (Joan Alexander) getting into trouble, Clark Kent (Bud Collyer) changing in the phone booth (the trope introduced in the second short), and Superman to the rescue. This si the early Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster Superman, so he’s not invulnerable to everything, he can’t exactly fly, and actually can wear down. We root for him to get back up, to not give in, and to fight the good fight.

None of the cartoons are based on any of the comic book stories and no supporting player or villain makes the leap. Even Perry White (Julian Noa), the Daily Planet editor, is named, just seen.

With an unprecedented $50,000 per ten-minute cartoon budget, the Fleischers rotoscoped portions of the stories and provided lush, multi-plane animation. The first nine the brothers produced remain among the most beloved animated cartoons produced in America. They were certainly influential on subsequent generations, notably Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, who used that look and feel for their Batman The Animated Series (but you knew that by now, right?).

Mad scientists, mechanical monsters, defrosted dinosaurs and the like are all here. As is World War II patriotic themes and caricatured villains. Each has their own thrills and with just ten minutes totally avoids characterization or much real interaction between rescuer and victim.
The effort to retore the cartoons has been hotly debated with Digital Bits slamming the effort with a scathing review. I suppose if you’re a videophile, their concerns have merit. But for someone who just wants a nice, clean DVD containing Superman history, you will barely notice.
Are they perfect? No. Errors from the DVD set, such as the incorrect intros, remain uncorrected. Clearly, a little more care could have been expended for the 1080p upgrade.

There’s nothing major to complain about regarding the DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio track.

The disc comes with the twin bonus features from the 2009 DVD— First Flight: The Fleischer Superman Series (12:55) and The Man, The Myth, Superman (13:37) — plus one new piece: Max Fleischer’s Superman: Speeding Towards Tomorrow (13:20). Here, Warner Animation’s director Matt Peters, producer Jim Krieg, supervising producer Rick Morales, and screenwriter Jeremy Adams hold forth on the legacy of the cartoons.

This is likely as good as it will get so if you don’t have this in any form, or want a reasonably priced upgrade, then this comes well recommended.

Justice League: Warworld Focuses on the DC Trinity

Justice League: Warworld Focuses on the DC Trinity

BURBANK, CA (June 7, 2023) – DC’s Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman find themselves in mysterious lands and precarious circumstances with no memory of how they arrived there and only vague recollections of their true selves in Justice League: Warworld, available to purchase Digitally and on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack and Blu-ray on July 25, 2023. The all-new, feature-length film brings together DC’s “Trinity” for the first time during the Butch Lukic-helmed DC Universe Movies arc. 

Reprising their roles as DC’s key trio of Super Heroes are Jensen Ackles (Supernatural, The Boys, The Winchesters) as Batman and Officer Wayne, Darren Criss (The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Glee) as Superman and Agent Kent, and Stana Katic (Castle, Absentia) as Wonder Woman and Diana Prince.

Also featured in the voice cast are Ike Amadi (Mortal Kombat: Onslaught) as Martian Manhunter/J’onn J’onzz, Troy Baker (The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite) as Jonah Hex, Matt Bomer (Doom Patrol, American Horror Story) as Old Man, Roger R. Cross (Coroner, Dark Matter, 24) as Machiste, Brett Dalton (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Chicago Fire) as Bat Lash, John DiMaggio (Futurama, The Super Mario Bros. Movie) as Lobo, Robin Atkin Downes (Batman: The Long Halloween, The Strain) as Mongul, Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Billions) as Agent Faraday, Rachel Kimsey (Justice League Action, The Young and the Restless) as Mariah Romanova, Damian O’Hare (Pirates of the Caribbean 1 & 2) as Deimos, and Teddy Sears (The Flash, Chicago Fire) as Warlord. Additional voices include Trevor Devall (F is for Family, Guardians of the Galaxy), David Lodge (Naruto: Shippuden) and Kari Wahlgren (Rick and Morty, DC Super Hero Girls).

Jeff Wamester (Legion of Super-Heroes) directs Justice League: Warworld from a script by a trio of screenwriters – Jeremy Adams (Supernatural), Ernie Altbacker (Justice League Dark: Apocalypse War) and Josie Campbell (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power). Producers are Jim Krieg (The Death and Return of Superman) and Kimberly S. Moreau (Batman: The Doom That Came To Gotham). Executive Producer is Michael Uslan. Butch Lukic (Batman: The Long Halloween) and Sam Register is Executive Producer.

Justice League: Warworld will be available on July 25 to purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Vudu and more. 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray Discs will be available to purchase online and in-store at major retailers. Pre-order your copy now.

SYNOPSIS:

Until now, DC’s Justice League has been a loose association of super-powered individuals. But when they are swept away to Warworld, a place of unending brutal gladiatorial combat, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the others must somehow unite to form an unbeatable resistance able to lead an entire planet to freedom.

SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE:

Illusions on Warworld (New Featurette) – Go behind the scenes and inside the process of designing and creating three distinct genres for the Justice League to inhabit on Warworld.

The Heroic, the Horrible and the Hideous (New Featurette)Dive deep into the origins and histories of the key players on Warworld and learn how the filmmakers brought them to life.

Pricing and film information:

PRODUCT                                                                             SRP

Digital purchase                                                                      $19.99

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack + Digital Version*             $29.99 USA

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack                                         $34.99 Canada

Blu-ray + Digital Version*                                                      $24.99 USA    

Blu-ray                                                                                   $29.99 Canada

4K/Blu-ray Languages: English, Spanish, French

Blu-ray Subtitles: English, Spanish, French

Running Time: 90 minutes

Rated R for bloody violence

*Digital version not available in Canada

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me by Vaughn Bode

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me by Vaughn Bode

When you get The Complete Something, you expect some kind of explanation of what Something is, maybe a potted history, maybe an appreciation by an illustrious colleague or someone famous from a younger generation. Sure, the audience mostly knows the details of Something, but there’s always a host of commonly misremembered and mythologized factoids – plus makers of books do want to draw in new readers every once in a while.

Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me  is, I think, The Complete This. And there is a foreword by cartoonist Vaughn Bode’s son Mark Bode – himself a reasonably notable cartoonist – as by “Da’ Lizard” – which does, in its single page, give a few details. And there’s some scattered text here and there with some other context.

But Book of Me starts out with about thirty pages of sketchbooks and similar non-story material, which admittedly does include a lot of character explanations and even a map of Cheech’s world, but lacks a certain focus. (It also seems to memorialize a whole lot of material that, from the evidence here, were never actually created as stories.) Then there’s some multi-page stories, I think mostly from ’60s undergrounds, before we transition to the mostly single-pagers from the National Lampoon run in the early ’70s, the bulk of the continuity and the pages here.

Last is a clutch of stuff that I think is all by Mark Bode, long after Vaughn’s death in 1975, since all the copyright indications I can find start with “20.” These are obviously different in tone and style and manner, though also clearly in the Vaughn tradition.

All in all, it comes across as a whole lot of stuff, with only a minor through-line. The NatLamp material has a continuity, with characters being added, events building from one story to the next, and so forth. But that’s maybe fifty pages in the middle, roughly a third of the total. The rest is all less focused and more scattered, with festival posters, full-page illos and what might be a couple of graffiti installations in addition to the sketchbook stuff up front.

All that said: you might be asking what is the This here.

Vaughn Bode created the character of Cheech Wizard in his mid-teens, around 1957, and the character bears the usual hallmarks of an author-insert: he gets the last word all the time, he always wins, he gets all the hot babes with essentially no effort, and he’s the center of everything. He also talks a lot. Well, undergrounds are relentlessly talky to begin with, but this one is mostly Cheech, using Vaughn’s oddly clipped and somewhat distracting abbreviations all the time.

Cheech is a hat. We can see what seem to be legs in tights coming out of the bottom of the comically oversized be-starred wizard’s hat, but he’s basically a hat and a voice – no arms, no face. He claims to be the greatest wizard ever, but never does any magic. He never does much of anything – this is an underground comic, again – other than lazing around, drinking, tormenting his anthropomorphic lizard assistant, and fucking. As noted before, the women here are all gorgeous semi-nude fleshy creatures – other than a foul-mouthed four-year-old girl whose dialogue and character have not aged well – who exist pretty much just to be available for Cheech to fuck.

I should note yet one more time that this is an essentially underground comic. In my cynical opinion, undergrounds were about a cluster of a few things: drinking and drugs, free love, sophomoric philosophical musings, and agitation against anything considered “the Establishment” – sometimes vague, sometimes specific. Vaughn Bode ticks off a lot of drinking, only a bit of drugs, lots and lots of free love, fairly bland philosophy towards the end, and only some scattered anti-Establishmentism.

It is about as sexist as you would expect, from a comic that appeared in the early NatLamp. Not horribly so – the characters pretty much would all claim to love women, especially the friendly ones – but the idea that women are people is somewhat alien to all of them. It’s also occasionally racist as well, with two notable “Asian” characters. The first is a one-note, one-appearance Vietnamese ninja assassin stereotype; the second is his brother, equally stereotyped but at least on the positive side, with traditional insight into The Wisdom of the East.

This is a heaping helping of You Had to Be There, aimed mostly at Boomer nostalgia, with some spillover into my generation. (I collected NatLamp not too long after this era, but never really gelled with Cheech Wizard when I saw those strips.) It is The Complete This, though, so if you’re at all interested in “the hat,” this is where to go.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Flash 9th Season and Complete Series Box Sets Coming in August

The Flash 9th Season and Complete Series Box Sets Coming in August

BURBANK, CA (June 1, 2023) – The fast-paced DC Super Hero drama ends its nine-season run as The Flash: The Ninth and Final Season arrives on Blu-rayTM Disc and DVD on August 29, 2023. The action continues through all 13 episodes of the final season along with brand-new bonus content. The season is also available to own on Digital via purchase from digital retailers.  

Also available on August 29, is The Flash: The Complete Series on Blu-ray Disc and DVD, which includes 184 episodes from the exhilarating DC series along with hours of bonus content from all nine seasons in one complete set.

After defeating the Reverse Flash once and for all, the ninth season of The Flash picks up one week after their epic battle, and Barry Allen aka The Flash and Iris West-Allen are reconnecting and growing closer than ever. When a deadly group of Rogues descend on Central City, led by a powerful and unknown new threat, The Flash and his team including Meta-Empath Cecile Horton, the light-powered meta, Allegra Garcia, brilliant tech-nerd Chester P. Runk and reformed cryogenics thief Mark Blaine, must once again defy the odds to save the day. But as The Rogues are defeated, a deadly new adversary rises to challenge Barry Allen’s heroic legacy. In their greatest battle yet, Barry and Team Flash will be pushed to their limits, to save Central City one last time.

The Flash stars Grant Gustin (ArrowGlee), Candice Patton (The Game), Danielle Panabaker (Sky High, Friday the 13th), Danielle Nicolet (Central Intelligence), Kayla Compton (Making Moves), Brandon McKnight (The Shape of Water) and Jon Cor (Shadowhunters). Based on the characters from DC, The Flash is produced by Berlanti Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (Arrow, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Riverdale), Eric Wallace (Teen Wolf, Z Nation, Eureka), Sarah Schechter (Batwoman, Riverdale, Black Lightning, Supergirl), Jonathan Butler, and Sam Chalsen (Sleepy Hollow). 

SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE:

  • The Flash: The Saga of the Scarlett Speedster (featurette)
  • Deleted Scenes
  • Gag Reel

The Flash: The Complete Ninth Season and The Flash: The Complete Series will be available to purchase August 29, 2023 on Blu-ray Disc and DVD both online and in-store at major retailers. The series is also available now to purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, Vudu and more.  

Pricing and series information:

The Flash: The Ninth and Final Season

Includes 13 one-hour episodes:

  1. Wednesday Ever After
  2. Hear No Evil
  3. Rogues of War
  4. The Mask of the Red Death, Part 1
  5. The Mask of the Red Death, Part 2
  6. The Good, the Bad and the Lucky
  7. Wildest Dreams
  8. Partners in Time
  9. It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To
  10. A New World, Part 1
  11. A New World, Part 2
  12. A New World, Part 3
  13. A New World, Part 4

PRODUCT                                                      SRP

Blu-ray Disc                                                    $29.98 SRP US ($39.99 in Canada)

DVD                                                                $24.98 SRP US ($29.98 in Canada)

Blu-ray Audio: English DTS 5.1

Blu-ray Subtitles: English SDH

DVD Audio: English (5.1) DD

DVD Subtitles: English SDH, Latin Spanish​

Blu-ray and DVD Presented in 16×9 widescreen format

Run Time: Approx. 13 hours

The Flash: The Complete Series

Includes 184 one-hour episodes plus previously released special features.

PRODUCT                                                      SRP

Blu-ray Disc                                                    $179.99 SRP US ($179.99 in Canada)

DVD                                                                $134.99 SRP US ($149.99 in Canada)

Blu-ray Audio: English DTS 5.1

Blu-ray Subtitles: English SDH

DVD Audio: English (5.1) DD

DVD Subtitles: English SDH, Latin Spanish​

Blu-ray and DVD Presented in 16×9 widescreen format

Run Time: Approx. 135 hours

J. Michael Stracyznski Rerturns to Marvel for Caprtain America

J. Michael Stracyznski Rerturns to Marvel for Caprtain America

New York, NY— June 2, 2023 — Announced earlier by io9, acclaimed writer and filmmaker J. Michael Stracyznski will make his celebrated return to Marvel Comics this September in CAPTAIN AMERICA #1!  Stracyznski has written fan-favorite stories including AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and THOR, and now he’s ready to embark on a new adventure with Marvel’s star-spangled hero! Alongside superstar artist Jesús Saiz (PUNISHER, DOCTOR STRANGE), the talented duo is ready to take Steve Rogers on an exhilarating new adventure.

Decades ago, Steve Rogers changed the world forever. Now powerful and insidious forces are assembling to ensure he never does it again. Past, present and future collide as the man out of time reckons with an existential threat determined to set the world on a darker path at any cost…

Speaking with io9, Straczynski says, “Overall, the goal is to do some really challenging stories, some really fun stories, and get inside Steve’s head to see who he really is in ways that may not have been fully explored before. If folks like what I did with Peter in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, and Thor in, well… THOR, then they should give this a shot, because I’m really swinging for the bleachers in this one!”

CAPTAIN AMERICA #1

Written by J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI

Art and Cover by JESÚS SAIZ

On Sale 9/20

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers

A daily strip is usually analogous to a TV show: a few are dramas, like soaps, but most are sitcoms in printed form. (And let’s remember that “sitcom” is a portmanteau of “situation” and “comedy” – it’s a comedic story set in a particular situation.) There are odder things, like The Far Side and its followers – my sense is that those are mostly single panels, and are closer to a dedicated slot for magazine single-panel style pieces by a single creator. Still “com,” but much less “sit.”

Liniers’ daily strip Macanudo is somewhere in the uncharted regions between the pure single panel and the strip sitcom. He does have a situation, but it’s a vague one – well, actually, he has, in this first book, at least four clearly recurrent situations, which range from almost normal strip set-up all the way to a couple of clicks above General Gag Premise. And I gather that he’s got a lot of additional situations that he’s used over the course of the strip as well – Macanudo is a collection of situations, I suppose.

Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere  collects what seems to be about the first year of the Macanudo strip as it appeared in English. Liniers is Argentine, and has been making his comics in Spanish since 2002; the English-language version started to be syndicated by King Features in 2018 and this book came out in 2022. It’s not clear if the English version is reprinting the Argentine strip from the beginning [1], picking bits and pieces out of the history of the strip, keeping up with Liniers’ contemporary work, or some combination of all those things. (So if you read the English-language version, and become a completionist, you probably need to learn Spanish and seek out the seventeen Argentine collections up to 2017.)

And I suppose I should explain some of the situations. In rough order of frequency, we see:

  • Henrietta, an imaginative girl in a blue dress who is a devoted reader. She appears along with her cat Fellini and teddy bear Mandelbaum, who do not talk to her. Mandelbaum doesn’t even move in the strips I’ve seen, which is unusual for a strip like this.
  • The furry blue monster Olga and her boy, whose name I discover from Wikipedia is Martin. (At first I thought Olga was another companion of Henrietta’s, until I realized Martin and Henrietta wear completely different clothes.) They mostly romp around outside, which Henriette and crew also do, adding to my confusion. But Martin does not spend as much time sitting and reading, I suppose.
  • A group of nameless penguins, doing things that are similar to but not quite identical to what human beings do, in their usually-featureless icy landscape.
  • A group of “elves” (small figures with color-coded outfits including long, prehensile pompom hats – they look more like gnomes) who talk about vaguely philosophical things. There’s always at least two – most often light-blue and red, if only two – and sometimes larger groups.
There’s also some things that seem more like single jokes that Liniers makes in different ways: The Mysterious Man in Black, who is all of those words exactly and equally and nothing else; La Guadalupe, who seems to be the ambulatory skeleton of an older woman; and the two witches Huberta and Gudrun, who here mostly do broom-based gags. And there’s also a lot of one-off strips, about John Venn and Elliott from E.T. and aliens abducting cows and random people having random conversations.
So, again: some aspects of the random single panel (though generally presented in strip format), some aspects of the sitcom strip. More random and individual than continuity; there is one two-week epic here, but it’s presented in-strip as a comic that Henrietta created, so it’s distanced and metafictional to begin with.
Liniers has a soft style, using what I think are watercolors over line art – the color is intrinsic to the art, not added in as an overlay like traditional dailies. In North American comics, it’s probably closest in look to Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts, and Mutts fans would probably also like a lot of the whimsy and philosophy of Macanudo. It’s very expressive and illustrative, occasionally cartoony but more often a classic storybook look – there’s echoes of Gorey, for example, in The Mysterious Man in Black.
For topics and tone, it’s harder to find comparisons for Macanudo. The Far Side followers tend to be weirder and more bizarre; Liniers’s strip is imaginative, bookish, and almost always optimistic. I guess it’s somewhat like Grant Snider’s work  in that way.
I suppose that’s my log-line: if you’re looking for something that looks like Mutts and reads like Grant Snider, from an Argentine with a great illustrative style in the tradition of the 20th century greats, Macanudo is for you.
[1] Actually, given several references to Twitter, this is clearly not the 2002-era Macanudo, or at least not entirely.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.