Kickstarter Weekends: KMS CD Compilation, Leaving Megalopolis, Through the Fire

It’s time again for more plugs and karma gathering as I list off my favorite current Kickstarter projects. [EDIT: Yes, I know it's literally the end of the weekend but I needed to hep my girlfriend move the last few days, thus this is late. YOU GOTTA DEAL WITH IT!!!] We’ll again be looking at three projects and if you like what you see feel free to pledge to the cause (they will reward you with cool things, of course) or even just do what I’m doing and help spread the word around as best you can. Now before we check out the new additions let’s look at what became of the projects from last month, all of which have wrapped.

MALICE the Web Series: Funding Successful!

Final Earnings: $10,170 ($8,000 Goal)

This one was obviously the one dear to my heart. I was worried for a while but it managed to surpass its goal. I even got a “thank you” from series creator Phillip Cook for helping put out the word and later a thank you tweet from series star Brittany Martz…that she sent out to pretty much everyone who donated meaning I’m not all that special after all. Sigh.

Star Command: Funding Successful!

Final Earnings: $151,807 ($100,000 Goal)

No surprises here; there was pretty much no way it wasn’t going to be successful. I almost wish it had done even better just because that would just make the game ultimately better. Still it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Clandestine - Follow the Path: Funding Successful!

Final Earnings: $95,685 ($75,000 Goal)

Thousand Pounds’ new web series, if anything like their shorts, will be a treat for anyone who is a fan of highly choreographed martial art epics. It’s currently in pre-production and the final product is still a ways off. Perhaps I’ll try my hand at reviewing web shows when it comes out.

Three new KS Projects after the jump.

200th Blog: Review of Spider-Man - One Moment in Time

Two hundred blogs. Woooo! The sheer amount of words I’ve written in 199 blogs is actually very staggering to me, as I can’t even seem to finish a writing novel. Still I’m very proud that I’ve managed to stick with the blog this long. To celebrate I wanted to do a follow-up to my 100th post which, if you recall, was a very detailed review of Spider-Man: One More Day, one of the worst comic books I ever had the displeasure of reading and the reason I haven’t bought any new Spider-Man comics since (well, at least until today’s comic).

I talked about One More Day to great degree in both the 100th blog and the prologue in the 99th blog so I don’t want to repeat myself too bad. However if you’re too lazy to check them out basically the comic involved Spider-Man and his wife Mary Jane Watson making a deal with Mephisto, the closest entity Marvel Comics has to Satan, in order to save the life of his dying Aunt May whom was shot because Spidey was stupid enough to reveal his secret identity to the world and then decide to betray Iron Man thus losing any protection his family had received and causing them to become fugitives. The book was really, really poorly written, extremely contrived and rushed, and ultimately an unsatisfying end to Spidey and MJ’s twenty-year marriage for those of us who were fans of it. Not to mention the idea of Spider-Man making a deal with the devil so he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his own follies kind of pretty much kills the character’s integrity for me.

The comic concluded with Peter Parker and MJ ‘s marriage never happening (in fact they were broken up, actually), his identity again now a secret, his web shooters restored (the years prior to this he had developed “organic webbing”), and Harry Osborn, long dead son of the Green Goblin and Peter’s best friend, suddenly alive and well. So obviously there were questions that we had with this new status that we all really wanted answers to, including:

-What changes to Spider-Man canon have happened now that the marriage has ben retconed out of existence?

-What happened Spider-Man’s organic webbing? And did the extra powers he gained in The Other storyline hold up?

-How is Harry Osborn still alive? Did he ever become the Green Goblin? And since the Clone Saga turned out to be a(n extremely convoluted) revenge plot by Harry’s father because of his son’s death does this mean that that storyline never actually happened?

Pictured: Peter Parker at the end of One More Day. Probably

In 2010, three years after the taste of One More day had started to wash away, then Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada (the architect of One More Day and outspoken opponent of the Spider-Marriage) decided to release a new Spider-Man story to address questions following the controversial comic. No, not the questions above (though to be fair some of them were answered during the post-OMD Amazing Spider-Man comic) but rather the question of “why did Peter and Mary Jane never get married?” Which is actually really annoying because I’m not sure who the hell wanted that question answered. I mean, people who were pro-marriage were not going to want to relive the crap from OMD and people who were enjoying the Brand New Day storyline (post-OMD Amazing Spider-Man) probably didn’t want to have their regular comic interrupted by rehashing old shit. So, because absolutely no one asked for it, Spider-Man: One Moment in Time hit the stands.

Written by Quesada with art from Paolo Rivera it covers The Amazing Spider-Man #638-641. As a warning this review will likely be pretty a pretty nerdy and passionate rant. It likely won’t be as bad as my One More Day review but if you aren’t really into the whole “Angry Dork” thing you might want to wait until blog #201 comes out.

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: Spoilers abound in this review, as I pretty much stopped giving a crap about five pages into this mess]

Review: Moonrise Kingdom

I literally changed what the subject of blog #199 half a dozen times. I basically have five other blogs I wanted to do but due to the 200th blog looming I’ve been going crazy with what I should put on before it. I was supposed to do another Kickstarter Weekend a few days ago but I ended scrapping it at the last minute (and I’m not sure I will be able to do it this weekend). Next blog with finally be the big one so hopefully things will get back on a normal schedule afterwards.

If you aren’t familiar with the works of director Wes Anderson then you are missing out. One of the best and unique directors out there Anderson’s movies usually are at the very least entertaining. Among them is The Royal Tenenbaums which is one of my top three favorite films of all time (it changes pretty regularly but it’s often number one). So whenever he makes a new film I usually take notice. Moonrise Kingdom is his latest film and, though it took a little bit of time for it to hit Kalamazoo, I did in fact get to watch it. Is it another hit or has Anderson finally made his first terrible film?

Adventure and romance after the jump.

Review: The Dark Knight Rises

Sorry it took so long for a new blog.  It was partly because I didn't particularly feel like writing a review of this movie immediately after the tragic shooting that occurred and also partly because I've been getting ready for my 200th blog post and I've been struggling with the schedule of stuff I needed to get out.

There’s not much to say about The Dark Knight Rises. It’s the sequel to The Dark Knight, which it is itself a sequel to Batman Begins. All three movies were directed by Christopher Nolan who also directed Inception, which was #2 pick for best film of 2010 (second only Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). I’ve been led to believe the original sequel to The Dark Knight was meant to heavily feature The Joker (Hence the way he was defeated in the second movie while Two-Face was foolishly disposed of) but due to the death of Heath Ledger they were forced to go a different route. As a result the movie has closer ties to the first film than I suspect was originally planned.

The hype for this movie has been understandably high. After all The Dark Knight was considered by many, but not everyone, to be the best superhero film ever made and a sequel to something like that has a lot to love up to. So did The Dark Knight Rises fall above or below the perhaps unrealistically high bar its predecessor created?

Find out after the jump.

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.