#April2011
Variant Covers: Nothing To Fear But Mega Events Themselves.
New releases! Trade paperbacks! Splash pages! These are a few of my favorite things. Man, what a clichéd way to start a column, no? Jesus Christ and then I followed it up with a rhetorical question. This is Variant Covers, the place where I puke up adolespeak about the comics I’m most excited about this week. Not a Be All List, I encourage you to let me know what you’re reading.
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Fans Made ‘X-Men: First Class’ Posters Are Retro Swank.
The X:Men First Class posters released by Fox sucked. Fact, not opinion. Dope website that I sometimes snag from, Sucker Punch, issued a challenged to its readers. The decree read (I’m paraphrasing), “Talented motherfuckers, we can do better than this.”
And they did.
Check out some of the results.
Monday Morning Commute: Gods Save the King!
Baby, I don’t have time for foreplay tonight. So feel free to put down the bottle of champagne and NES controller. C’mon, hop right into the sack with me. It’s time to get frisky.
This here’s the Monday Morning Commute, the spot where I tell you what I’ll be doing this week. We’re all dealing with that pesky infirmity known as the work-world, and so a double-dose of entertainment is necessary. Administer as many times daily as possible. Let’s dance.
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Rockin’/Coloring Book EP – Glassjaw
I put off downloading Glassjaw’s latest effort for awhile, telling myself that they’d make it available for purchase. But they haven’t. In fact, the only way to snag a physical copy is to attend one of their shows, and unfortunately the Boston gig sold out before I got a ticket. So, promising myself that I’d give GJ money when they decide they want my money, I downloaded Coloring Book.
Some of the tunes have a real Latin vibe, with funky-ass claves and tamborines and shit. And then some of the songs absolutely crush. And, as though they knew exactly what I wanted, the band closes the album with Daytona White, a jazzier number complete with brushstrokin’ drums and Sunday-morning keyboards.
It’s fuggin’ sick.
Steve Rogers Will Become ‘Captain America’ Again In July. GO FIGURE.
Marvel has a Captain America movie coming out this summer. However, Steve Rogers the Captain America hasn’t been holding down the role in the Marvel funny book for the past couple of years. No sir. That honor would go to Rogers’ friend with whom he shares obvious latent homosexual love for, Bucky. However wouldn’t you know that come July, the storylines will see Steve Rogers once again becoming Captain America.
The ‘storylines.’
Not anything like ‘marketing synergy’ and ‘editorial mandates.’
Anonymous Threatens Sony, Hours Later PSN ‘Down For Repairs.’
Oh shit! Anonymous is totally cheesed off with Sony for suing George ‘GeoHot’ Hotz for releasing the PS3 root key into the world. Today they threatened to slap the taste out of Sony’s Collective Mouf in one of their typically creepy videos. A couple of hours later, PlayStation Network went down for ‘repairs.’
Trailer For ‘The Governator’ Animated Series Is Here. Pump It!
Oh sweet baby jesus. Take Arnold, smash him together with electronic prog metal, the Bat Cave, an Iron Man suit, Larry King, and the back end of a trailer featuring ‘Pump It’ by the Black Eyed Peas. That’s this trailer. Or, rather, that’s how you make a million zillion dollars. Fourteen retarded ideas, smashed together with a collection of aged icons, and some shitty music.
Right?
It’s amazing.
Warren Ellis To Take On ‘Secret Avengers’ With Jamie McKelvie.
Omega Level favorite Warren Ellis is taking on six issues of ‘Secret Avengers’ starting With August’s #16, and I’m fucking stoked. Here’s Ellis explaining it himself.
Insidious? More Like In-Silliness!
From director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell (the duo behind the Saw franchise) comes their latest horror outing, Insidious. While I’m not a fan of Saw, I LOVED Wan’s last film – 2007’s brutal Death Sentence. And yeah, Dead Silence is a pretty damn fun piece of camp. With Insidious, Wan and Whannell present a ghoulish haunted house flick that relies heavily on the jump-out-and-scare-you technique. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And Wan is really really good at making doors creak and floors squeak. The first two-thirds of the film are solid with plenty of tension, ominous atmosphere, and some genuine scares. I admit it – I jumped a few times.
In the final chapter the film, sadly, the film treads heavily into some goofy shit. The demons/ghosts/whatever go from being agents of terror to just annoying set pieces that don’t respect personal space. It sucks because honestly the first two-thirds are great. A lot of reviewers are comparing it to Poltergeist – especially Insidious‘ otherworldly realm known as The Further. Remember in Poltergeist when that the mom goes into the Other Side to bring back Carol Anne (waaalk into the liiight)? Insidious has the same deal, only the young Dalton’s father, Josh, travels into The Further and we unfortunately go with him. Shit gets real hammy from then on.
Source Code Gets Déjà Vu As It Quantum Leaps on Groundhog’s Day
There’s an early episode of Quantum Leap, it might even be the pilot, where Sam Beckett leaps into the past and, despite being warned not to by Al, calls his dad. In Source Code, director Duncan Jones delivers an obvious nod to this heavy Leap moment – even having Scott Bakula voice the dad of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Colter character. That great little moment in the film is just one of the reasons to give up an hour and half of your life and go see Source Code – despite it’s flawed final minutes.
Jones’ sophomore scifi effort (his first being 2009’s bitchin’ Moon) also features a male protagonist who should stop trusting “the man.” Colter is an army helicopter pilot who awakens to find himself on the Chicago commuter rail, sitting across from a woman he’s never met who keeps calling him Steve. Manic and confused, Colter tries to make of sense of his Twilight Zone plight…and that’s when the train blows up.
VIDEO | Four Minutes of Green Lantern From Wondercon.
Apparently the reaction at Wondercon to ten mintues of Green Lantern footage was so hot that WB decided to drop some of it on our collective asses. They’ve released four minutes of the footage, and you can check it out after the jump.
