Salkafar

Very nice. Very nice.

Well, the movie has been out for a while now and nobody addressed it I guess, so... - It's a prequel - They lampshaded the fact Johansen is not Asian and, as it transpires, the Major is - It's pretty good. Not super-great. - The Japanese didn't give a toss that she's played by an American.

I always went with 'Sym-bee-ote'. Huh.

It would have been longer, but I couldn't find the panel. Honestly though. The tank-lifting Gregole was just... how can you make a mistake like that? A tank like that weighs at least 50 tons.

Ugggh.

Good point. Let's see what Google has to say. ...According to an article on Livestrong, "... the average untrained man can squat 125 pounds, bench press 135 pounds and deadlift 155 pounds." If we take this as a benchmark (sic), the Guyver should be able to heft about seven tons (metric). That means he's not quite as strong as Spider-Man.

Hard to believe. Zerbebuth was presented as the first Hyper-Zoanoid, and strength for strength definitely was inferior to the Guyver. In Zerebuth's first appearance, his physical strength is stated to be three times that of Gregole, ie 45 times that of an ordinary human; less than half that of the Guyver. Would his upgrade have more than doubled his strength? His upgraded form focused on special weapons, and the one time we saw him in action in the anime this consumed so much power he couldn't sustain their use for more than maybe a minute. Even Derzerb, a more advanced Hyper-Zoanoid specifically designed for physical strength by the greatest specialist, larger and heavier than Zerbebuth, at 60 times the strength of an ordinary person was notably weaker than the Guyver. The Warrior-guyver fanfic and a Deviantart account make for poor sources.

Really. They're gonne be here after. For $500 I choose 'minimum viable population'.

What I want to know is why they didn't make Gamma a cyclops. It's a pretty good revamp, but I don't get the point. Branchai only existed to draw out the Gigantic and into battle with Purgstall. We never got any indication of its physical strength because it only ever used its weapons. It may be very physically weak due to dedicating all its energy to weapons output - muscle tissue mainly acting as radiant energy generators, etc.

Saw it last night. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected I would. Couple things: - They pretty obviously made the colors brighter here and there to contract it to the earlier movies' darker palette. Superman's outfit stands out in particular. - The CGI is inexcusable. And yes, Cavill's mouth is very, very noticeable. - Steppenwolf is really the most generic villain. But everybody already said so. It bites me since I am a New Gods fan. Kirby's mythology was baroque, unique and colorful, and Steppenwolf was a symbolic figure as much as anything else: he belonged to an older generation of gods, succeeded by newer, more ruthless deities like his nephew Darkseid. - The humor works - sometimes a little too well. When the resurrected Superman flies away with Lois Lane it was so abrupt a 'peww'-sound would have fitted perfectly. Here and there it was veering dangerously close to satire and I am now wondering whether that really was not the route they should have taken altogether. - Aquaman is a total loss. God almighty. - Introducing three new super-powered characters in the same movie and have them deliver their background stories as monologues? That is... I already used the phrase 'inexcusable'. But that. - Gal Gadot is perfect. Still. It's not unsalvageable.

So wait. They have barely, barely established the DCEU (at least the most bare-bones version of it I have ever seen) and they're gonna do 'Flashpoint'... after the Flash TV show already did it??? ...Funny, this might actually be an author's saving throw. Just say "The original DCEU was a dark, 'bad' version of how the universe is supposed to be". As I have said before, these big events the movies are emulating in the comics only are presented after the universe is well-established and has had years of development to allow us to get to care about these characters. Man of Steel was not bad per se, although it was needlessly dark for a Superman movie, but the next movie was like skipping over at least six or seven movies right to the bitter end. It took elements of The Dark Knight Returns and The death of Superman, stories which both only worked because they came at the end of decades of comic book storytelling. Marvel was already stretching it with Civil War for similar reasons, but they had several movies' worth of interaction between these characters - and that interaction was far more human than Henry Cavill's aloof, distant Superman and Ben Affleck's demonic Batman. (One thing that was done pretty damn good was drawing the difference between how these guys are in their superhero persona versus their civilian identities. Clark Kent is a serious but regular guy who makes out with his sweetheart. Bruce Wayne is still troubled and tormented, but humanly so. The voice changer mike might be the best find in the movie altogether.) It all smacked of studio-prescribed demands for big and flashy things which are expected by executives interested only in money to score, regardless of whether the stories or characters were compelling. God love Zach Snyder, but he is not the right director for DC movies. He is on record as saying that he doesn't care about stories without sex and violence (Putting it a little charged here) ever since his brother got him into 2000AD, the famous British science fiction comics anthalogy. Understandable! But inappropriate. We always understood that Superman and Batman probably had sex lives. That did not make it necessary for us to see them actually engaging in them. (Oddly enough the same doesn't go for Wonder Woman. Her love interest was nominally Steve Trevor, but I am not sure they ever actually had a relationship at all). So... if they reboot the whole thing... will they hang on to the same actors? Will Henry Cavill get the opportunity to play a happier Superman? It might work. Here's hoping.

Watched it. Brilliant. First episode is the best though. Mate of mine accidentally spoiled the big reveal about the Man in Black.

Wow. Nobody talked about this at all. The movie that killed the DCEU.

I once wrote that "Warren Ellis is an arrogant man; he has much to be arrogant about". His bibliography has its own Wikipedia page, and includes such titles as Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Stormwatch and its successor The Authority, the Black Summer/ No Hero/ Supergod 'Trilogy' and many Marvel titles, including Ultimate Fantastic Four, the Ultimate Galactus trilogy, Newuniversal, Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. and of course the Iron Man story 'Extremis'. Ellis could do no wrong; he was practically the exemplar writer of the new Dark Age from after 2000, with ultra-violent heroes featuring in superdecompressed stories depicted in cinematic, hyper-realistic artwork. So when we - the fans - heard he was going to be writing 'Iron Man', we were very excited. Ah. 'Extremis' was indeed a mold-breaking story which can be viewed as a threshold between old and new, in a sense; nothing really was the same after it, although this might also be for a different reason which I will cover in the next entry. But in any event, it was completely new, not in the last place thanks to the unique artwork of Adi Granov. Unfortunately this same artwork was also the reason this six-part story arc, the only six issues Warren Ellis ended up writing for Iron Man, took eighteen months to be finished from the first issue to the last. The story is simple enough. Tony gets a call for help from Maya Hansen, an old scientist friend of his. She explains that a project of hers - a super-soldier formula - was stolen; soon it turns out the formula was used by a right-wing terrorist group, who then turn one of them, a man named Mallen, into a superhuman. He attacks an FBI office in Texas, killing dozens with his new power. Iron Man flies out to confront the terrorist, but is defeated and severely injured, while his opponent gets away. Tony reveals he is Iron Man to Maya, and convinces her to use her super-soldier formula on him, to save his life and allow him to face the terrorist on equal footing. This he then does, defeating Mallen who forces him to kill him; and in an ironic coda, he has Maya arrested. He reveals he realized she deliberately let her formula fall into the hands of the terrorists, so that its effectiveness would be publically proven and her funding would be continued. The themes of the story are both simple and serious; what happens if a super-powered human interacts with the real world of ordinary people? What would such a superman do? What if the superman were not a hero, except by his own lights, but a murderous villain? And what about the march of science? The advances of science are always - by definition - ahead of the moral assessments thereof. Warplanes were deployed little more than ten years after the Wright brothers built the first practical aircraft. The first application of nuclear power was the atomic bomb. Maya Hansen argues that she did not intend to create a weapon, but that she needed military funding to further her research. Tony Stark is afraid that he's still that man - not the 'Test pilot for the future', Ellis' own description, but the weapons-maker, the ammunitions dealer. Mallen is the very embodiment of the fear that our technological advancement dramatically outpaces our moral development. And yet, he was a monster created by society; he grew to hate the government because his right-winger family was killed in a shoot-out with the FBI. He wants to use the tools of the future to force a return to the ways of the past. Stark is also confronted with that fear during an interview with John Pillinger, an investigative journalist who has made it his life's work to reveal hypocrisy and deceit, to pull the lid off the world's cess pits so everybody can smell the horrible truth. Pillinger (Actually John Pilger, a real-life journalist) calls Tony a 'ghost of the twentieth century', because the consequences of his actions are still haunting people years after he changed from an arms dealer into the inventor of the future. All in all, the story, while very violent in places, is quite reflective and thoughtful for an Ellis piece. I called the story a 'threshold' ; in fact it is almost a reboot and might, in fact, have been intended as such. Ellis admitted he had (deliberately) not read an Iron Man story except for the very oldest ones, and he is the very first author who re-wrote the origin story completely. No longer was Tony Stark injured by a booby trap in Viet Nam either during or after the war, but rather in Afghanistan during the American invasion of that country. It was ballsy, but in retrospect I almost wish more authors had gone with this; Marvel, unlike its counterpart DC, has never had a true 'Cold Reboot', instead opting for a shifting timeline which actually moves ahead through history in the context of the story. While I view the story, while simple, as quite strong, I remember being disappointed back in the day. I had hoped for so much more. But still, Ellis had recast Iron Man for the 21st century, and whatever else came after, would have to contend with what he had done. Even so, another event would have much more radical consequences for Tony Stark... *** On a side note, the comic - and the art style - would profoundly influence the Iron Man live action movie, which came out three years later. Scenes and situations were lifted almost directly from the pages of the comic, while the concept and some of the characters were later used as the basis for Iron Man 3.

But which one is it? The first one, that was killed, or the ancient one? Incidentally, he may be bigger than 'Shin' Godzilla, but good God, that movie had this one beat by orders of magnitude.

Finally saw it. I did not care for it.

Something from GWOTG?

How many times can you tell the same damn story?

I reckon if it came back at this point, it would be all over the cover.

But wasn't Devilman the good guy in that?

People have said Rey is a Mary Sue. I myself have defended the idea that she is not, but after seeing this video I am reconsidering.

So, now that it is out: Have we seen it? Do we like it? I'll post a spoilered review later...

I'm Alpharius or Omegon, apparently.

So there is an Infinity gem in Wakanda. I wonder what form it has taken...

She's about to fire...!!