*****SUPERNATURAL SPOILERS!***** Despite my continual kvetching that “I’m done with Marvel,” I find myself back in Disney+’s Marvel-lined pockets after watching their latest miniseries, “Agatha All Along,” the long-gestating offshoot of 2021’s uneven “WandaVision”; a miniseries I had mixed feelings on, despite its clever TV sitcom-sliding premise. “Agatha All Along” has been in development since…
Tag: Marvel
Marvel goes full Mel Brooks for its superhero satire “Deadpool & Wolverine” (2024)…
******SOME SPOILERS****** As I’ve said in earlier columns, I’ve gotten away from the superhero genre lately, which more or less peaked for me with 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” Now, with the seemingly endless flood of Disney/Marvel multiverse product, my eyes glaze over whenever I’ve tried to get into a new Marvel movie or show, and I…
San Diego Comic Con 2024: Marvel and Star Trek and drones! Oh my…
San Diego Comic Con 2024: Welcome Back! This year’s San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is in the rearview mirror now, and once again, it was (as usual) another grand, exhausting celebration of pop culture. As a now 20-year veteran of SDCC, I do not camp out all night in lines hoping to get seats to…
WonderCon 2024 in Anaheim was a weekend of fantasy and imagination spent ‘under the weather’…
Welcome Back to WonderCon! The title of this column is both literal and metaphoric. The usually sunny spring weather of Southern California gave way to two days of near-nonstop rain, which forced a few last-minute changes to this year’s WonderCon 2024 in Anaheim (right across the road from Disneyland). The metaphoric aspect refers to my…
San Diego Comic Con 2023 soldiered on, despite some new challenges…
Comic Con Returns Once again, my wife and I returned to San Diego Comic Con, as we have almost every year for nearly the last two decades. The last time the event was cancelled outright came in 2020, the year the COVID pandemic changed everything, and prematurely ended millions of lives around the world. That’s…
The case for Marvel’s “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” (2022)…
******BIG GREEN SPOILERS!!****** Old School Smash. As a kid, I was a huge fan of the comic books and TV series based on Marvel’s “The Incredible Hulk” (1977-1982). The TV series kicked things up a notch by taking the story of latter-day Jekyll & Hyde, Dr. David “Bruce” Banner (an amazing performance by the late…
Comic Con Revolution 2021 in Ontario, California brings holiday cheer to SoCal fandom…
Comic Con Revolution Returns! While the COVID pandemic essentially cancelled last year for everyone (including myself), the sci-fi/comic book convention circuit has been slowly returning to something resembling normal (well, as ‘normal’ as we fans get, anyway). Just this year, I’ve already attended a couple of favorite conventions; the Las Vegas’ “55 Year Mission‘ convention…
DisneyPlus’ “What If…?” offers a fanfic-styled exploration of Marvel’s multiverse…
Catching Up With Fandom. The notion of taking favorite beloved (licensed) characters and playing around with them a bit isn’t exactly new–in fact, the internet has been doing it almost since its inception, with fan-written fanfic (‘fan fiction’, for the uninitiated). In pre-internet days, fanfic was often printed in mimeographed, self-published fanzines circulated at conventions,…
Experiencing “Black Widow” (2021) at our ad-hoc home movie theater…
Our Pandemic Movie Theater. As I already mentioned in a previous column I did last year (“At-home projection: How I learned to love my movie collection all over again…“), the COVID pandemic put the kibosh on movie attendance for me—and going to the movies was once a favorite pastime of mine. However, a safely-masked visit…
“The Incredible Hulk” (1977-1982); a look back at Marvel’s first successful TV adaptation…
Anger Management. As a 10 year old kid back in 1977, I remember watching the serious, somber TV-movie pilot of “The Incredible Hulk,” written, produced and directed by Kenneth Johnson (“The Bionic Woman,” “V,” “Alien Nation”). Unlike the primary colored “Hulk” comic books I read from the local drugstore, the TV movie pilot was horror…
DisneyPlus’ “Loki” takes a time-traveling leap into Marvel’s mischievous prankster…
Caveats and Chaos. A couple of caveats to this column. First, to my regular readers (I’m grateful for each of you) I want to apologize for the slower influx of fresh content lately. My little house in the ‘burbs has been plagued with a solid month of plumbing/electrical issues, and has only returned to something…
Marvel/DisneyPlus’ “WandaVision” is a bizarre homage to classic sitcoms…
*****REALITY-WARPING SPOILERS AHEAD!!***** Nick At Nite meets David Lynch. When we last saw them at the end of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” the living artificial intelligence mandroid “Vision” (Paul Bettany) and Sokovian ‘Scarlet Witch’ Wanda Maximoff were very much in love, but Vision had to sacrifice the “Infinity Stone” embedded in his head to help save…