DC’s growing more accustomed to bending the rules by the day, resulting in films that are clearly aimed at an older audience. Typically Warner Brothers reserves profanity, crude language and adult sexual themes for live-action fare, and not necessarily superhero themed live action fair. But in 2017 the market is still shifting and DC and Warner are looking for ways to keep up, and keep it edgy. The latest film to experience this growing trend? Batman and Harley Quinn.
Making a post-apocalyptic tale work isn’t easy these days. Just about everyone and their mother have traveled this path, and it’s beyond well-trodden, at this point. But somehow, Terry Mayo, Lucas Romero and the folks over at Alterna Comics have delivered up a true beauty in the form of The Wicked Righteous.
You walk away with an Eisner Award, and it says something very straight-forward: you are one talented SOB. Given the lofty level of competition across virtually every category, the level at which you are performing professionally is a few strides beyond exceptional.
We all love to look back at the moments that our favorite characters came to life on page. Deadpool, one of Marvel’s few characters that hasn’t undergone a horrific transformation in recent years, no doubt serves as one of today’s most popular characters. His quips are sharp, his skills are sharper. He’s not pretty. But his introduction, in New Mutants #98 is pretty damn awesome.
The second issue of James Stokoe’s interesting Aliens: Dead Orbit sees our rescue crew working to keep the three mutilated individuals introduced in issue one alive. They’re grotesqueries to look at, and it seems a little unlikely that any one of the three would even care to survive, looking like they look, but they’re crucial to the story, as they inadvertently bring the focal crew face-to-face with the dreaded Xenomorphs.
James Stokoe’s Aliens: Dead Orbit sees a sizable vessel discover an unresponsive ship floating in the depths of space. As we’ve seen in prior Aliens books, the active crew decides to board the ghost ship and see if they can’t find any survivors. And they do, but the discovery is essentially made in vain, as an electronic mishap leaves three survivors burning inside their sleep pods. Unfortunately for our would-be heroes, an alien lifeform is quickly discovered, and as the first issue comes to a cliffhanger halt, these nasties lifeforms make their presence known in bloody fashion.
As a kid, Clue was our family go-to come holiday seasons. It’s just what we did, and I think for the most part, we all enjoyed it quite a bit. The board game definitely has a place in my heart. And IDW’s new book seems as though it may quickly win real estate there, as well.
I like crossover stories quite a bit, and the Alien was a creature to tangle with a great deal of unexpected foes. One of those encounters, their battle with Kyle Rayner, at one point the last of the Green Lantern Corps, still to this day goes terribly overlooked by many. Kyle Rayner is my favorite Green Lantern in history (he elevated the Green Lantern book from a stale dust collector to a bona fide second-life hit in the ‘90s), and I haven’t seen a single Alien film that I didn’t enjoy to some degree, and the comics have been pretty damn consistent for decades now. Bringing the two together was a brilliant decision.
Best Comic Books 