DAMN Good Comics -- SECRET AVENGERS #20

I can't believe we only have one more of these.

Over the past five issues of Marvel's Secret Avengers, writer Warren Ellis has produced some of the best single-issue stories in recent memory and this latest, "Encircle," certainly exemplies this.  Black Widow, described at the start as "the world's greatest secret agent," gets the spotlight here in a masterful time-travel tale that rates as one of the best ever for the character.

In a timey-wimey structure feeling quite a bit like a Steven Moffat Doctor Who script, Ellis starts the issue off with the deaths of team members Steve Rogers, War Machine and Sharon Carter, and then sends Black Widow back in time five years to figure out a way to prevent it.  Of course, Natasha Romanoff's background is in espionage, not temporal physics, but with the help of her "Escape Hatch" wrist device, some hints from teammate The Beast, and forty years of scientific research by a man named "Count" Oscar Khronus, she figures out a game plan.

This issue has several wonderful touches -- Black Widow's hatred of time travel, her hatred of the "Escape Hatch" device, Khronus' dimwitted henchman Kongo, weaponeer Harry Grindell "Death-Ray" Evans, the very Ellis line "My time gun will send your heart to be eaten by dinosaurs," a brief chat with Doctor Druid thirty-six hours before his death, among others.  Over the course of "eighteen weeks, two days, nine hours and three minutes," or over four months of Black Widow's actual time, she implements a mission that spans decades in order to achieve her objective.  Each temporal encounter has a specific purpose, it seems, and you, you lucky reader, get to see everything fall neatly into place over just twenty pages.

The artist paired with Ellis for this issue is Alex Maleev, who somehow escaped from his usual creative partner Brian Michael Bendis long enough to turn in some terrific work for Secret Avengers.  Maleev proved long ago he could depict a formidable Black Widow during his time with Bendis on Daredevil, but here he makes us wish Marvel would put him on a monthly Black Widow series, preferably one written by Ellis.  A sequence set forty-four years in the past is made particularly memorable, drawn as a serial comic strip similar to Milton Caniff's Steve Canyon.

But yes, there's only one more issue of Warren Ellis' Secret Avengers to go and no, I'm not happy about it.  Six issues is far too short for something this wonderful and I'm sorry, but not even the promise of "the end of the world" next issue is going to make up for it...

Is Batman His Own Worst Enemy?

Received something interesting in my e-mail this morning, an infographic concerning four of Batman's biggest villains and why Batman is responsible (or partially responsible) for their creation.

At first glance, the timing seems to coincide with DC Comics' current "Batman 201" $0.99 digital comics sale on ComiXology, but with all the Warner Bros. marketing for the upcoming Christopher Nolan Batman film The Dark Knight Rises steadily working their way through the Internets recently, you have to wonder if something else is at play here.  Of the four villains listed in the infographic, Bane is obviously front and center in Dark Knight Rises, but rumors of Two-Face's possible involvement persist.  The Joker's appearance in The Dark Knight could certainly be referenced, while Hush could potentially be featured in the film albeit in some minor fashion.

Here's the infographic in question.  See what you can make of this...

 

New Cast, Locale for AMERICAN HORROR STORY Season 2

One of the great surprises of the 2011 fall TV season was FX's American Horror Story, a serial horror drama that paid tribute to many movie horror classics while telling its own seriously messed-up 12-episode storyline in the process.  Week after week, the show revealed dark events surrounding the Harmon family, their neighbor Constance Langdon, and the numerous ghosts populating their haunted Los Angeles home.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the second season of the series will feature an entirely new location and a mostly new cast.  "Some of them will be coming back," said creator Ryan Murphy.  "I’m talking to several of them and we’re in negotiations.  There will be familiar faces, but there will also be new faces on the show."  Murphy plans to announce the show's new storyline and cast sometime in February.

Interestingly, Murphy mentioned the actors that return will be "playing completely different characters, creatures, and monsters.  It’s a really fun idea to do an anthology show.  That’s the way it was designed from the beginning.  Every season, there will be a new haunting and we’ll have a new overriding theme."

This might mean we've seen the last of Jessica Lange's Emmy-worthy performance as Constance, even though the character was only one of two regulars to actually survive to the end of season one.

It's definitely the end of "The Murder House," though.  According to Murphy, the set has already been struck to move "onward and upward."  Maybe the series could shift to Westfield High School, where Tate Langdon massacred fifteen people with a shotgun?

PROMETHEUS Teaser Trailer Debuts

Y'know, for a movie that's supposedly not a prequel to the 1979 science-fiction/horror classic Alien, Ridley Scott's Prometheus sure seems a hell of a lot like a prequel to the 1979 science-fiction/horror classic Alien.

In the just-released teaser trailer shown below, we see the film's title gradually emerging in a way similar to the Alien trailer, a chamber full of pods similar to Facehugger eggs, an astronaut being attacked in a manner very similar to a Facehugger attack that got John Hurt's character G.W. Kane in Alien, and the giant alien "space jockey" found sitting in a chair in Alien.  If Prometheus isn't a direct prequel to Alien, it certainly seems to share the same fictional universe.

Prometheus is scheduled to arrive in theaters on June 8, 2012 and stars Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba and Noomi Rapace.  Let's see how many of their characters, if any, actually make it to the end.

Did George Lucas Swipe Tusken Raiders from DOCTOR WHO?

So there I was, kicking back at home watching a classic Doctor Who tale, "Colony In Space," from the Jon Pertwee era that originally aired in the U.K. in 1971.  And about twenty minutes into episode five of the six-part story, I noticed something a bit...familiar.  When the Third Doctor and the First Master are driving across the quarry surface of the planet Uxarieus in a funky little dune buggy, they're set upon by a group of primitives perched on rocky cliffs high above that raise their weapons above their hands in a way that reminds me of...something.  A presence I've not felt since...

Oh, yeah...That's it, the Tusken Raiders (a.k.a. Sand People) from the Star Wars films.  Now, I know others have noticed that Star Wars creator George Lucas has "borrowed" certain elements from Doctor Who before, but this two-armed weapon-raising celebration seems a bit intriguing considering "Colony In Space" debuted in 1971 and Star Wars premiered in 1977.  Of course, it's entirely possible the basic image became embedded somewhere in Lucas' subconscious and he simply pictured his primitive Tusken Raiders making similar gestures as the Uxarieus primitives. 

It's just purely coincidental, that's all.  You know, like Darth Vader and Doctor Doom.

May the Artron Energy be with you...always.

DAMN Good Comics -- BATWOMAN #4

If there were any remaining doubts that the current Batwoman creative team would be able to maintain the level of quality shown in issue one, I think we can officially put them to rest now.

In "Estuary," Part Four of the opening story arc "Hydrology," writer W. Haden Blackman and artist J.H. Williams III produce another stunning twenty pages that make you wish every comic was this good.  This issue grabs you right from the start, interspersing some tastefully graphic panels of Kate Kane and Maggie Sawyer making love to one another with the bold, colorful contrast of Kate's cousin Bette brashly taking on the Weeping Woman's Frankenstein-like minion Pajarito. 

Without going into too many specifics, Batwoman's fears about Bette's readiness to fight crime as Flamebird come to pass, putting the character's future in extreme jeopardy.  As a Flamebird fan, it's a little hard to reconcile this inexperienced "New 52" Bette with her Post-Crisis depiction as a former fangirl of the Dick Grayson Robin that eventually got her act together and became a serious superheroine capable of holding her own in dangerous fights.  However, Flamebird's fight with Pajarito does serve another purpose of bringing Department of Extranormal Operations Agent Cameron Chase considerably closer to her goal of capturing Batwoman.

As always though, the big draw for Batwoman readers is J.H. Williams' incredible art.  In addition to the opening sequence mentioned above, Williams treats us to another stylish depiction of the story arc titles, framing them in a blood-themed font around a phoenix-shaped image of snow-covered ground surrounding Bette.  Another memorable double-page spread uses the folds of Batwoman's cape as panel dividers, while the last page uses smoke from DEO Director Bones' cigar to create a middle panel image of Bones and Chase's target, Kate Kane.  No nice and tidy nine-panel Watchmen grids here, that's for sure.

The Weeping Woman remains a vague, ghostly menace but we get more of her background this issue as Batwoman engages in actual detective work rarely seen in recent Batman titles.  However, we now have her connection to the apparent flesh-and-blood Pajarito to explore, and with the number of questions surrounding Bette and the DEO, this book shouldn't be short of material to cover.  Let's see how "Hydrology" wraps up next month...

THE COLBERT REPORT Compares Newt Gingrich to Bond Villain

In his latest "Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger" segment featured on last night's episode of The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert tipped said hat to current Republican Presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich for "repeatedly alerting the nation to an underreported threat, the electromagnetic pulse."

"Now, Newt is not the only one who is concerned with the coming EMPmageddon," Colbert explained.  "So is Her Majesty's Secret Service."  Colbert then played a clip from the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, starring Pierce Brosnan, which showed Bond and his superior M discussing the GoldenEye weapon's ability to create an electromagnetic pulse.

"Yes.  Bond, James Bond...agrees with Gingrich, Newt Gingrich," continued Colbert.  "And just like Bond, Gingrich is calm under pressure, a little cocky, and is frequently seen with different leading ladies.  Plus, his half-million dollar line of credit at Tiffany's proves he knows Diamonds Are Forever."

The Bond comparisons didn't stop there.  "And as David Brooks (of The New York Times) pointed out, Newt has called for '...a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon's resources.'  Hmmm...Sounds to me like Newt...is a Moonraker.

"And Newt has also pointed out that '...a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.'  Hmmm...Hmmm...Giant solar mirrors also seem familiar..."  At that moment, a scene from another Bond film was shown, with Gustav Graves unveiling his new orbital mirror satellite Icarus that later turns out to be a deadly weapon.  "It's the plot of Die Another Day!"

It then occured to Colbert that all of these schemes were from the villains.  "That means Gingrich isn't Bond...He's Blofeld!" 

Supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld could not be reached for comment from within his secret lair inside an active volcano.  If you'd like to see the full Colbert Report segment, you can view it here.