As you probably already know, Marvel released a bunch of concept art this weekend for The Avengers flick, which culminates in a pretty righteous looking panorama. Should you have been daft enough to miss it, hit the jump to check it out, as well as the individual pieces.

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Stories are wonderful, aren’t they? Especially when the storytellers get it right: weaving tales of intrigue, fantasy and human nature. If it weren’t for our ability to tell stories, then we would know hardly anything about ourselves. Bastion is a game that knows this all too well: building on narrative foundations rather than mechanical ones. This isn’t a story within a game, so much as it is a game within a story.

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[DEFEAT. is a   coming-of-death novella. every week a new episode pops up, accompanied by full art by Brian Galiano. for fans of science fiction, fantasy, video games, comics, war epics, and feats of triumph]

Bursting into tears, the girl ran into her father’s open arms. She was seven years old and learning about the unfortunate end of life. Death. She was learning what it felt like to watch a loved one succumb, to fall victim to the force by which we are all eventually swept away.

He wasn’t her brother. But he sure felt like it, having been there for the duration of her entire short existence. From the very first day Betty brought her home from the hospital, the seven-year-old had been loved and protected by this surrogate-sibling. And now she had to watch as he withered away into nothing.

Nothing living, anyway.

“Daddy, why is this happening? It isn’t fair! I don’t want him to die!”

Stoically taking a rip from his pipe, the father looked at his only child. He was challenged in a way that was new and unnerving. Which was saying something, given the scope of his life experience.

He had survived war. He had moved to America with nothing and made something of himself. He had mastered the arena of political science, becoming the department head of a prestigious university.

And he had done all of this with self-assurance, an unwavering belief that the path he had chosen was the right one.

But now he wasn’t exactly sure what to do. He gently parted his lips, allowing for a light puff of tobacco smoke to billow upwards. The father savored the taste of the smoke and anticipated the rush from the nicotine. This was his ritual when preparing to do some heavy-duty–

“Daddy,” the daughter interrupted, “isn’t there anything we can do?!”

“I’m still doing zee heavy-duty thinking.” He hadn’t completely shaken his accent. Years later, when his daughter realized he had an accent, she’d find it endearing. But right now, she just wanted a solution to what had been described to her as an insolvable problem.

She had heard the word from all of them. Her mother. Her father. The doctor. They all had different ways of explaining what it meant. The maternal optimism that everything would be fine, despite what the word suggested. The paternal idea of confronting the inevitability of the word, becoming stronger in the process. The scientific defining of the word, plagiarized from a textbook. Yet, nothing curbed the inherent terror of the utterance.

Cancer.

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Hello faithful followers, stragglers, and those who have wandered into this Palace dedicated to Juvenile Behavior and Half-Cooked Intellectual Thought. Half-cooked is actually a bit of an exaggeration, but what will you have me say. I’m the proprietor of this joint. Like all those fucking restaurants – every fucking one of them – that claims to be World Famous.

I suppose in the sense that we exist, worlds within worlds.

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(This is the final piece of a three-part analysis of the Transformers mythology. Warning: each article contains spoilers for the movie it covers.)

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon: No Heroes Need Apply

After the events of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Sam, in true American style, returns to school to fulfill the college rite of passage, finishing what he started (and probably running up a six-figure debt in the process). Though a higher education is not necessary for a hero of his caliber, it can nevertheless be beneficial in this country, especially if Sam wants to get a good, steady job someday. It looks good on a resume, balancing out other accomplishments, like being the two-time savior of the world.

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(This is the second piece of a three-part analysis of the Transformers mythology. Warning: each article contains spoilers for the movie it covers.)

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen: The Victory of Self-Knowledge

As the opposition, the Decepticons have a solemn duty to wage war against Autobots and the humans perpetually. If the chance to clash with the forces of good arises, then they must take it in spades; they must oppose. In Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, this predisposition is sustained. They are back, again searching for a tool that can help them bring about destruction. But this time, instead of a cube, it is a destructive force that is repackaged in the Matrix of Leadership. But, fascinatingly, this search has been going on for thousands of years, dating back to the earliest age in human history when an original Decepticon, named the Fallen, tried to harvest the sun (and, with it, destroy all life on earth) because he hated humans. Luckily, he was stopped by a group of Primes (the original leaders and distant ancestors of Optimus) in a way that only heroes can: they took the Matrix of Leadership and hid it by sacrificing themselves to cover up any trace of its whereabouts. No one, not even the modern-day Autobots, know of this incredible history linking Transformers and humans. It was knowledge that could only be intuited by heroes.

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(This is the beginning of a three-part analysis of the Transformers mythology. Warning: each article contains spoilers for the movie it covers.)

Every generation has its own hero, a character who stands for and defends the social mores of the particular time and place in which he or she exists by combating hostile forces and ideals that are detrimental to the preservation of the hero’s own society. These heroes, unmistakably present in all forms of art, are the life-blood of their culture, displaying and perpetuating what is collectively honored and desired therein. In his epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer sang of the almost-unbeatable warrior Achilles and the cunning Odysseus to suit the needs and wants of ancient Greece. With The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri created a fictionalized version of himself to break through the barriers of the eternal spheres of God–journeying from hell and purgatory to a heavenly enlightenment–while facing the demons, ancient and ever-timely, of Renaissance Italy. And now, along these similarly epic lines, director Michael Bay has offered up the hero of our time in the Transformers movie trilogy: Sam Witwicky, the 21^st Century American hero who speaks to and for us.

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Jim Lee is tacitly acknowledging that which we already know. Much like in  Moonlighting, The Office, and Marvel’s own Spider-Man, it’s the chase of the relationship with Lois Lane by Clark Kent that gets our krypto-rods shimmering. The pursuit is everything! He does so in recent comments, where he explains Superman’s single status in the DC relaunch.

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NASA’s MESSENGER is their mission to study the surface of Mercury. However back in 2005 as it hurtled away from good old planet Earth, it took a series of photographs. Intrepid researchers have since then stitched those photographs together to make a rather pretty farewell video.

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It’s the week where the teaser trailers simply refuse to quit. The latest one is the teaser for the good ole Amazing Spider-Man.

Hit the jump to check it out.

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