Caught the midnight showing of Incredible Hulk tonight. Very fun movie that’s definitely better than the Ang Lee non-prequel. It flows nicely and the action wasn’t too brief, as it sometimes felt in Iron Man. Not to say it’s better than Iron Man, because it isn’t, but there’s no shame in that. Besides, this is the second episode of the Avengers Movie Saga and it does feel right in that respect.

Several weeks back I read the Peter David novelization, as I’m wont to do, so I already had been spoiled in terms of the plot. While there are few surprises, there’s still the interesting experience of seeing stuff that was in the original version of the story that got cut out. I’ve done this before, of course, with Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man. The former was originally a solid story until important chunks of it got cut out. The latter remained good, despite a subplot cut out because of the Air Force’s say so.

With Incredible Hulk, the good outweighed the bad in terms of cuts. God, did it ever. Yes, there was definitely some stuff that should have stayed in there. No doubt. It’s just that a lot of scenes that got ousted had the potential to be really bad. Really bad. I’m talking Superman’s cellophane S projectile bad. I’m talking Matt Murdock fighting Elektra at the playground bad. I’m talking the entirety of Rise of the Silver Surfer bad. It’s cool that I count that movie as one long, horrible scene, right?

Word on the street is that there are 70 minutes of stuff cut. It’ll probably be seen in DVD form. Whether or not that makes for a better movie remains to be seen. The deleted scenes below, filled with spoilers, don’t seem to sum up to 70 minutes, but when it comes to cutting them being a good or bad idea, I’ll let you be the judge.

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Over the past few years, with all the various comic mega-events shoved down our gullets, the idea of the tie-in comic has been make-or-break to the main series. House of M seemed to do it the best, where all the tie-ins were completely unnecessary to the main series, but were mostly well-written and made for a good expansion to what was going on. Annihilation dodged the bullet by having seemingly no real tie-ins at all. Infinite Crisis became a huge mess where you had to know a lot about what was going on in the smaller books to truly get the story. Civil War, as far as I’m concerned, is the worst offender. The main series was competently-written, if a little convoluted, and Millar wrote very fair versions of Captain America and Iron Man. Then you look at all the tie-ins where Captain America is the perfect god of morality and Iron Man is the king of all assholes. The only truly good tie-ins were the two Captain America/Iron Man one-shots.

With Secret Invasion, the issues of New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, whether good or bad, are in a class of their own. After all, Secret Invasion is Bendis’ big cumulative storyline tying together a lot of loose ends from those series. They’re more like extended scenes and extra issues to the miniseries than anything else. Discarding those, I honestly haven’t read too many of the Invasion tie-ins. Yes, Captain Marvel was completely amazing and Hercules is a blast regardless of what story it’s linked to, but I’m not a regular reader of Ms. Marvel and I haven’t picked up Captain Britain yet, so I can’t comment on them.

That brings us to Secret Invasion: Who Do You Trust? This one-shot, based on five different stories, gives us more details on certain characters and their roles in the series. The five writers, Brian Reed, Mike Carey, Christos N. Gage, Zeb Wells and Jeff Parker keep things extremely competent and diverse in topic, while staying true to the series.

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The Incredible Hulk, part two of the “Avengers Saga” of Marvel films (there go my nipples again), is on its way in a few weeks. Naturally, Peter David wrote a novelization based on the upcoming movie. Since I did the same for Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man, I went up for round three by picking it up and seeing what it had to offer.

Incredible Hulk is like Ang Lee’s Hulk mixed with Superman Returns, only better than each of them. Granted, I did enjoy the older Hulk movie for the most part. I thought most of the stuff involving David Banner was fantastic and found him so sympathetic that I can’t even bring myself to call him a villain. But let’s be honest, the pacing had problems and there was a huge unbalance in the story where they try to tell the tale of a man’s tragic relationship with his father one minute and HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE WHAT HE DID TO THAT TANK the next.

This new movie is most definitely not a sequel to the Ang Lee production, but like with Batman Begins and the Tim Burton Batman, stupid people will believe they’re connected no matter how many changes in continuity they spy. Still, the movie knows what we saw in Hulk and doesn’t give us a story based purely on origin. Though the Hulk’s origin is different this time around, it’s only delved into through explanations and brief flashbacks.

David’s book is based on the screenplay treatments of Edward Norton and Zak Penn. That means that it’ll be harder to tell how accurate it is to the final product than usual, based on the stories I’ve heard about the movie’s production. For one, Norton had been rewriting scenes on the set just about every day. For two, they decided to make some edits that have pissed him off. Even the little footage I’ve seen of the movie is different from what the book goes with. Such as that scene where Hulk tears a cop car in half and uses it as boxing gloves. Not only is that not mentioned at all here, but that scene involves Abomination talking. Abomination has no dialogue in the book after his transformation.

This could be a good thing or a bad thing. Truth is, there are a couple minor bits I wouldn’t mind changed.

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It’s no secret that I’m a guy who loves the fighting genre of videogames, especially when you consider the kind of awful comics I’ve forced myself to read. With all the Street Fighters and Tekkens and Mortal Kombats out there, the one game I find unfortunate for never getting its own comic series is Fatal Fury. And I’m counting American comics here. None of that ridiculous Hong Kong shit.

The reason Street Fighter fails as a comic is because the main hero and the main villain have little to do with each other. Think of it like this. Marvel’s main hero is Spider-Man. Their main villain is Doctor Doom. Have they met and fought? Sure. But if you were to do a 12-issue comic that sums up Marvel’s history through the eyes of Spider-Man vs. Dr. Doom, it would be a major stretch, watered down by all the other important characters.

Fatal Fury had two things going for it that would keep it a readable comic book. One is that it’s a very simple story. It’s about one man (and his less important brother) trying to get revenge on the crime boss that murdered his father with his bare hands in broad daylight and was so well-protected due to police bribery that nobody could do anything about it. So he enters a fighting tournament held by this crime boss in an attempt to get close enough so he can finally get that revenge. Everyone other than those two characters is ultimately a supporting character. Like I said, it’s simple. You can write the whole thing in three to twelve issues depending on how you want to go about it, not to mention sequels and spin-offs.

The other thing that would make it readable is the villain in question: Geese Howard.

Geese Howard is a slick bad guy who’s both untouchable in the criminal sense and the physical sense. Much of his fighting style is based on him casually catching his opponent’s attacks and tossing them around like a rag doll. Geese has a unique aura of badass that never truly appeared in a comic book counterpart. The character closest to him would likely be the Kingpin, especially the Bendis version, and even then the similarities don’t match up completely.

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Gavok note: longtime reader and internet buddy A.o.D. sent a couple threatening emails to me and hermanos, wondering why we haven’t gotten around to reviewing the totally awesome Iron Man movie. I decided to ask him to write the review for us, since I thought he was the most qualified. After all, this guy knows more about Iron Man than I will likely ever know and has been a well of information for years. Not only has he read just about every good Iron Man story, but he’s willingly worked through the horrors of that whole Evil Tony Stark vs. Teenage Tony Stark fiasco and read every issue of Force Works. Poor guy. Point is, the guy knows his Iron Man, so it’s only fair that he gets to write this.

You’ve probably seen the movie by now. Every entertainment, comic (except 4th letter *ahem*), movie, and newspaper website has had a review up by now. Iron Man has raked in over one hundred million dollars domestically. It has in every essential sense proven itself to be a success. I am in no means going to contradict any of that. I am also not going to discuss the various plot points. All of this has been done ad nauseum. I will, however, sing some of the movie’s many praises.

Iron Man was a wonderful movie. When I first heard of the project, and the possibility of Nick Cage being involved, I was filled with a mixture of fear and excitement. Fear because I knew that Cage would have been absolutely terrible in the role, but excited because a long neglected Marvel character that I had a huge man crush for was going to be recognized. Bear in mind that this was before Civil War, Extremis, or even Tony Stark: Secretary of Defense. Iron Man was a small run book that had for decades been eclipsed by the likes of X-Books and Spider Man. To most comic fans, despite the fact that Iron Man was something of a big deal in Marvel continuity, he was just ‘that guy in the avengers’.

So yeah, I’m a big ol’ Iron Man fanboy. There’s a lot about the character that speaks to me. The fact that he doesn’t always get it right, the fact that he is a deeply flawed, but moral human being. Or that he doesn’t see things in black or white and understands that the world is tinted in shades of grey. Then there’s also the fact that he looks like he enjoys what he does. Sure, there’s a sense of purpose and duty involved, but the metal pajamas he wears look like a hell of a lot of fun.

So I had a lot of expectation for the movie. Expectations that rose once I learned that Marvel was taking over the project and that Robert Downey, Jr. was going to play the lead. Not only did he look the part, but if anyone knew what it meant to be a hard living, self abusive playboy, surely it would be Downey. In that, Downey exceeded every expectation. He owned the part as thoroughly as Christopher Reeve owned his role in Superman. Simply put, I never want to see him replaced. He expertly captures the juxtaposition of Stark’s self destructive hedonism and genius fueled intense drive. Everything he does rings true.

Pepper Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, interestingly enough, had a far larger role than she traditionally has in the Iron Man comics. For most of her existence she was window dressing or a plot point. The movie does her far more justice. Although I wouldn’t characterize her as a strong female, she is clearly characterized as one of the three people who makes Tony’s life work.

Jim Rhodes played by Terrence Howard is blah blah blah blah blah.

Look, you’ve read this all before. If you’re reading this, you’re a comics fan and probably have already seen the movie. If not, what are you waiting for? Are you still pissed about Civil War? What the hell is wrong with you?! This movie is worth twice the price of admission, so go see it two times! It’s a freakin’ bargain! Just be thankful that at the very least we’re getting an encore performance in a couple of years with the promise of an Avengers movie down the road. Iron Man is what superhero movies should all aspire to be. Go freakin’ see it already.

Last night I checked out the Iron Man movie. It is just as fantastic as it was meant to be, but that’s just my initial reaction. We’ll see how I feel in a couple days. Ah, hell. I’ll still probably love it.

About a month back, I read through Peter David’s novelization, so I got the gist of how good this would be. Like Spider-Man 3, it was based on an earlier or fuller version of the movie before scenes got cut or, in the case of this movie, replaced. Spider-Man 3 was about character-building scenes getting cut for the sake of time and allowing more focus on Mary Jane’s constant whining. With Iron Man, most of the scenes were cut for time, or in other cases, to totally fuck over Terrance Howard as Jim Rhodes. The poor guy gets devoured by editing. According to interviews, in return for their involvement in the film, the Air Force insisted on having control of the character and refused some of his character actions. That explains that.

It’s also worth noting that director Favreau was into improvisation, which does alter a couple scenes here and there on the dialogue side of things..

This is going to be filled with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know about the scene where Titanium Man beats up an army of ballerinas, go make yourself a sandwich. Or go see the movie. You’d be glad you did.

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The weekend of chunky guys dressed like Colossus and hot women dressed as Slave Leia has come to an end. I myself had a great time, spent with hermanos from this very site and a whole bunch of guys from Funnybook Babylon. Sadly, Thomas “Wanderer” Wilde deemed himself “too broke” to consider joining us and Hoatzin would have probably involved a gigantic plane ticket paid in rare diamonds, since he’s from Europe. I don’t know. I really have no grasp on how that type of thing works. Besides, Hoatzin seems to have vanished from our planet. What happened to that guy?

This one movie sent the other movie into space.

Day One

Last year I got to New York the day before the con started, which allowed me enough rest and whatnot. This year I had to come in the first day of the event and kill time until David Uzumeri came in from Canada, since he was in charge of dealing with the hotel. I walked straight from the Port Authority bus terminal to the Javits Center, which tired me the hell out.

After getting my swanktastical press pass, I met up with hermanos and Joseph of FBB. They were at a panel starting up that was a screening for a new Will Eisner documentary. Since I was tired from all that walking, I decided to stick around and watch it. I found it interesting in the sense that I honestly didn’t know all that much about Eisner, which is almost a sin if you’re a comic fan. The four of us (David U. showed up towards the end) mostly agreed that while it had some fantastic stuff in there, such as taped conversations between Eisner and guys like Kirby, the sum of it was incredibly dry.

Shortly after, we went to the panel on online journalism, with guys from Newsarama and CBR there. It wasn’t as good as the comic blogging panel from last year and mostly focused on arguing over criticism vs. getting press releases. Once that was done with, I was rested up enough to do some wandering.

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I’m going to have a big post about Comic Con later in the day, but something caught my eye today and I felt I needed to make mention of it. Back in the mid-90’s, DC released a commercial to the masses about their comics. It was well-produced and even though at that age I couldn’t name half the characters shown, I still thought it was pretty badass.

It would show character art of heroes from that era and morph them into other characters as the announcer went on. Here’s a quick transcript, minus the echoing female voice:

Announcer: DC. Incredible action. Astonishing adventure. The coolest heroes. The hottest heroines. And the most outrageous villains…

Darkseid: TOO TOUGH FOR TEE VEE!

Announcer: …in the universe!

Lobo (with an animated mouth and a voice that tries way too hard to be animated Wolverine): This ain’t yer daddy’s comic book, fanboy!

Announcer: DC Comics!

I never got the whole “too tough for TV” thing. Didn’t they have Batman: The Animated Series around that time?

Maybe you remember this. The only reason I still do is because a fairly local comic shop, Zapp Comics, used the same commercial. After DC decided to stop using the ad, Zapp just took the same commercial and added their store’s information to the last few seconds. It’s weird that they would do a commercial that doesn’t even mention Marvel in any capacity, but like I said, it’s a well-produced commercial.

They aren’t the only ones who do this. A quick search on YouTube helped me find the same commercial, only with information from Humungo Comics in Pennsylvania tacked on.

Why do I remember this commercial and bring it up? Because they still play it! I just saw the damned thing on TV less than an hour ago!

Yes, it’s a nice ad, but it’s been like 12-14 years. Look at all the dated stuff in that commercial. Murderous Hooded Green Arrow, Yellow-Ringed Guy Gardner with the G jacket, Deathstroke shown as one of the “coolest heroes”, Matrix Supergirl, Catwoman with her huge curly hair as one of the first villains shown, MOTHERFUCKING LEX LUTHOR JUNIOR! I could have sworn I saw Evil Raven in the commercial I saw on TV, but she’s not on the YouTube video.

I know comic shops may not have the revenue necessary to make a flashy new commercial every few years, but at this rate, some kid will be watching this and Lobo’s one-liner will be wrong. Those actually were that kid’s daddy’s comic books.

I should be getting some rest for this weekend or catching up on relevant comics that have slipped me by, but then the internet has to go and toss a curve ball right my way.

Years ago, Capcom and Marvel had their guys fight each other. It was weird, but it fit better than it had any right to.

Over time, Namco has had their Soul Calibur crew fight Spawn, Link and soon Darth Vader and Yoda.

Just recently, Nintendo gave us the dream match of Mario vs. Sonic, while tossing Solid Snake in there.

With all that having gone on, not once did I expect to hear this announcement on a day that wasn’t April 1st. It’s still not April 1st anymore, right? Right?

MORTAL KOMBAT VERSUS DC COMICS?!

My reaction to this is simply the Li’l John reaction: What? WHAT?! …Okay. Because to be honest, no matter how bad it turns out to be, it’ll still be one of the better DC videogames. And as a fighting game it’ll be head and shoulders above Justice League Task Force. This is going to be really stupid, but really interesting.

Hey, maybe they’ll have Geoff Johns design the fatalities!

Credit to Mortal Kombat Online. They’re good people.

The next Comics from the 5th Dimention column should be up soon. The big drawback about writing for PopCultureShock rather than here is that you can’t have your stuff up instantly. Them’s the breaks.

I plan to one day write my own comic series. I’m currently trying to move my gears forward on that. That said, I still find myself thinking about what kind of DC or Marvel-owned series I would love to write if I had the chance. Stuff like an Eradicator on-going where he stations himself in Coast City as a way to make up for and investigate the human feeling of guilt he suffers from his failure to protect the city from Cyborg Superman and Mongul. Or a Juggernaut series where he’s on the run from SHIELD, all while showing the parallels of the Superhuman Registration Act and being the avatar slave of Cyttorak.

There’s one comic concept that came to me the other day. What If occasionally had sequels, most of them not very good. Having read so many issues and having some of them so nestled into my memory, the continuity nut in me always compares some issues to events that happened after the release date. Sometimes it’s just to laugh at the continuity screw-up, like how Alicia Masters in What If the X-Men Lost Inferno was really a Skrull and the writer didn’t know it yet. That revelation gums up her part in the story.

Sometimes I realize how much more interesting stories become when you toss in delayed retcons and new pieces of canon. For instance, there’s the issue What If the X-Men Had Died on Their First Mission, where the New X-Men team (Wolverine, Storm, etc.) go to Krakoa to save the original X-Men and they all die. Xavier beats himself up over it, Moira comforts him and eventually another X-Men team is created. It was a good story, but compare it to what we know now. Deadly Genesis showed the other X-Men team that died fighting Krakoa. When they failed, Moira was angry, so Xavier erased her memory of the events. Put the two stories together and it’s pretty fucked up. Xavier deserves to feel bad. His Krakoa mission would have cost him three X-Men teams, totaling at 17 mutants. Then you have Moira trying to keep him from being suicidal, not knowing what a bastard he really is because the son of a bitch removed it from her memory.

What would have happened when Vulcan came back to Earth, not only forgotten, but now without his brothers? Now that would be a sequel issue worth reading.

I think back to other What Ifs that lead to a new status quo and how vastly different things would have been if they continued the story and met up with the events that were destined to happen. I think a handful of them could make for a good limited series.

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