Review: Avengers vs. X-Men #6

By now you’ve likely heard of the upcoming project called Marvel NOW! If you haven’t basically it’s the Marvel Comics’ answer to DC’s New 52, or The Great DC Reboot of 2011, with the difference that instead of being a huge continuity reboot it’s supposedly a new wide spread status quo with new #1s and new costumes for many characters. I’ve heard some people saying it’s more of an equivalent of the “DC Explosion” from the 1970s. It’s really hard to tell right now, especially since the new line will supposedly be the follow-up to Avengers vs. X-Men.

Anyway I bring this up because, just like I was with X-Men: Schism, I’m a bit worried that Cyclops may not survive. Mainly it’s for two reasons: 1) During crossover, and really just the last couple of years, Cyclops has been portrayed in such a way that he needs redemption but I’m worried it will be at the cost of his life due to how low he seems to keep falling. I can totally see, from a storytelling perspective, Scott at the climax of this series as gesture of his him making up for everything he’s done. 2) One of the upcoming Marvel NOW! titles, All New X-Men, features the original X-Men (from the 60s) pulled the past into the present, meaning that there’d be duplicates of Iceman, Angel, Beast and Cyclops. I’m one of the biggest Cyclops fans you’ll talk to and even I don’t see the point of having two Scott Summers running around the main Marvel Universe. Killing off the main one would sure solve the problem. We’ll see.

If you want to catch up on my previous AvX reviews check out 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. This issue features Jonathan Hickman on writing duties and different art team of Olivier Coipel on pencils, Mark Morales on inks, and Laura Martin on colors; the artwork changes up starting this issue.

More Phoenix Force hijinks after the jump.

Kickstarter Weekends: Malice, Star Command, Clandestine

Making begging strangers for money a respectable profession

A weird truth about me is that I am obsessed with Kickstarter. If you don’t know what Kickstarter is it’s an online crowd funding website where artist other assorted people with an idea bring that idea to the masses who in turn can pledge money to the project in sex change for some sort a gift. In a lot of cases it’s essentially an elaborate pre-order system that allows you to directly deal with the creator. All projects have a limited amount of time to reach their goal and if they don’t reach it, even if they’re down just a few dollars, they will not receive any of the money at all. It’s all very dramatic. Even celebrities, such Matthew Lillard and Eliza Dushku, have utilized it to help fund films and documentary so it’s not just a bunch of money grubbing amateurs on this site (there are some money grubbing armatures around though, I’m not gonna lie). I spend a lot of time per week simply looking up projects and tracking progress. I, however, don’t have much money so when I find a project I want to support or even just find interesting or funny most of the time I can’t afford to help them out. BUT it occurred to me that there’s more than one way to support such things. So I decided that since I have a blog where I can write whatever the hell I want I can share some of the pages I come across. Plus I know for a fact that one day I will need to use Kickstarter to fund a project of mine so hopefully if I help others with their stuff I’ll gain good karma towards my eventual funding.

Today I’ll share three projects but obviously there’s always something new wandering around the site so I think I’ll be doing this regularly, especially if people seem to respond to it. Maybe once every few weeks? Anyway check out these projects and if you think they’re something you’d like why not shoot them a pledge to help them out?

Three projects after the jump.

Review: The Amazing Spider-Man (Film)

Before we get into this review I want to share with you guys a cool webseries called “Malice”. It’s a horror themed show starring a cute girl who wears a rabbit hat a lot of the time. It’s doing a Kickstarter campaign for a second season. I urge you to check it out here. You’ll find all the info you need and if you like what you see please donate. I’d really like this thing to pull through and right now it ain’t doing so great.

Anyway, let’s move on to the actual blog.

The Amazing Spider-Man is one part movie executive spite and one part morally ambiguous cash cow. It is a reboot to the Spider-Man film franchise despite the film series only being ten years old and the most recent film being five years ago. As I understand it Sam Raimi, director of all three original Spider-Man films, was contracted to make Spider-Man 4 (and possibly also Spider-Man 5, depending on what website you heard it from). However Sony apparently demanded the unreasonable release date of Summer 2011, something that Raimi was simply not able to do. Somewhere in pre-production this issue caused both parties to part ways. Rather than hire a new director to make the planned movie they decided to cut their losses and hired Marc Webb to do a reboot…that would have to come out Summer of 2012 (pretty much rendering the entire damn argument moot).

It does sound pretty bad but to be honest we may have dodged a bullet. What little details we know about Spider-Man 4 make it sounds a bit annoying. The villain was supposed to be The Vulture played by John Malkovich and that would have been awesome except that the logical villain would have been The Lizard since his human identity, Curt Connors (played Dylan Baker), had been a supporting character for the last two movies. Also Anna Hathaway was tagged to play The Black Cat Felicia Hardy, but instead being the more familiar version of the character she would instead be the Vultures’ daughter and become a new character called The Vulturess! Yeah. That’s stupid as hell. (Though I do appreciate the irony that with this film cancellation Hathaway was free to play the extremely similar character of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises) So in the really days of the reboot’s pre-production I repeatedly told people we were better off because Raimi’s movie were clearly going down a weird path.

That is until the trailers started coming out. Pretty much every preview of this film made it look like a poorly produced joyless melodrama. It didn’t help that rumors were floating around that Sony hated the final product and were hiring a new writing team to do the sequel. The Amazing Spider-Man had an extremely uphill battle. Does it succeed as a proper reboot or does it fail to recapture the magic of its predecessor?

Full review after the jump.

Review: Avengers vs. X-Men #5

As promised here’s the next issue of Avengers vs. X-Men. Yes, it’s later than what I said but if it’s any consolation I learned how to make fried catfish. Thus I’m a better person.

Anyway this issue promises that something of substance must happen because, finally, the damn Phoenix has arrived to Earth. In any event let’s talk a little bit about the covers. The main covers I’ve been using on this blog have been fine for the most part. But there have been a lot of variant covers being shipped out and they’re not as good. I’ve mentioned this before but some of these covers feature character fighting who don’t fight each other at all and in some cases aren’t even in the comic. But they take it a step further by having variant of the variant cover with the gimmick of picking sides. What I mean is that they have these “I’m With the X-Men/Avengers” versions where only one character is colored in, depending on which side you picked. I think it makes the already annoying cover look worse but the only reason I care is because by the time I was able to actually buy this comic that variant of the variant was the only one left. So I’ve spent the last few weeks grumpy about it, mainly because I’m such a sensitive young man.

Matt Fraction tackles writing duties in this issue and the art team consists to consist of John Romita, Jr. (Pencils), by Scott Hanna (Inks) and colors by Laura Martin (Colors).

Full review after the jump.

Review: Avengers vs. X-Men #4

I am really sorry that I’ve gotten so far behind on the Avengers vs. X-Men reviews. Hopefully no one has been realigning on this blog for information about that series. I’m going to attempt to knock the rest of the issues I’ve missed this week/weekend (And because I need to push back my review on Brave and as of this writing I still haven’t seen Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter I don’t have a giant amount of things to post right now anyway). Make you sure you check out issues 1, 2, and 3.

Last time we saw Captain America do what I’ve been waiting for him to do to Wolverine for what feels like forever, in what was almost certainly the high point of the comic. Jonathan Hickman takes over writing duties while the art team, John Romita, Jr. (Pencils), by Scott Hanna (Inks) and colors by Laura Martin (Colors) remains the same.

More silliness from the “House of Ideas” after the jump.

[WARNING: There are spoilers in this review]