Tag: Marvel

Over at Badass Digest, Devin Faraci looks at Amazing Spider-Man 2 and it's slightly disappointing box office returns. Yes yes, it has made $630...

So yeah the next Guardians trailer is up, and...well, I have to say I am still waiting to see this movie, but this is...

Marvel it celebrating it's 75th anniversary this year, using Timely dating, and part of the celebration involves a 1200 pages omnibus collecting the best...

Amazing Spider-Man is definitely a hit—$91.6 million opening weekend—but the questions are just beginning. As are the spoilers just in case you DO NOT KNOW THE CENTRAL CANON OF SPIDER-MAN LORE. Look away, look away if you haven't seen the movie or read the comics. If you have...you may proceed.

As I've written before, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 is probably my favorite superhero movie after the original Christopher Reeve Superman. (I'm not in love with the Nolan Batmans although I get why people like them.) It's one of the very few superhero films with an autuer's imprimatur, and it's just plain goofy as heck, veering between horror pastiche of the directors own work, sappy musical and a sad meditation on middle-aged loneliness. Raimi is old enough to have the original Ditko Spidey as his inspiration, from the upside down kiss to the rogue's gallery of old men in greying wife-beaters—supposedly one of the reasons Raimi and the studio parted ways on Spidey 4 was that Raimi wanted the Vulture as the villain, and the studio wanted a more up to date bad guy. In Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man 2, all the references have been updated. This is the ultimate world of Bryan Hitch, Greg Land and Greg Horn, all blazing cgi and mottled, gloomy photoshop. The soundtrack has been similarly updated, with a group known as the Magnificent Six—which includes everyone from Pharrell Williams to Johnny Marr—blasting catchy singles. In what passes for innovation here, a scene where Peter Parker does the obligatory Google search to find out a mystery, instead of the chugging string music of every other superhero movie, we get a Phillip Phillips song.

If you want to know what Marvel is shipping in July, the answer is GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY!

Now before we get deep into the numbers, I want to point out a trend that I’ve been noticing, and would love to hear your thoughts on in the comments below. So there are two types of All-New Marvel Now #1s. The first is something like Black Widow or She-Hulk, where the new #1 is a new series featuring a new or returning character and a new creative team, so basically a new book. The other is what I call the soft relaunch. They take an ongoing series with falling sales and they give it a new #1, but not much else changes, same creative team or if maybe the artists changes, the writer stays, and maybe a slight tweak on the storyline or premise. Examples of this are Secret Avengers or X-Factor.


It seems that Fox—which controls the X-men and Fantastic Four film franchises— and Sony—which controls Spider-Man—have come to an agreement to create their OWN variant earth-2 Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting with a cut scene at the end of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2. Foreign viewers are already tweeting about it. I've greyed out the relevant info below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsjtg7m1MMM Spoiler: I am totally going to see this movie. Unlike past teaser trailers this one is all about the plot, and all the "You...

The two most powerful people in comics— Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige—were both the subject of fairly hagiographic profiles recently. The Feige piece in Businessweek was probably the more revelatory, as it offered ACTUAL INFORMATION on the very secretive Marvel Studios process, and the legacy of Ike, such as the following account of the dorm-level offices.

Marvel's EIC Axel Alonso and Executive Editor Tom Brevoort were back on a press call to talk about Original SinS wth an S, a companion anthology to Original Sin, the current Marvel Event mini series which kicks off in May. Original SinS (that's my spelling for emphasis) will launch in June with bi-weekly shipping issues. The core of the anthology will be a Young Avengers serial written by Ryan North of Adventure Time fame, but the rest of the stories will include an eclectic line up of creators including Ramon Villalobos. James Robinson, Don Slott, Charles Soule, Mark Bagley and even Rick Geary, is drawing a Lockjaw story.

Normally I'm not in favor of digging up characters who were done perfectly by their creator, but Elektra has been revived so many times, we might as well give it a go again—this time as part of Marvel's experimental push for female-led titles. This new version comes out in April and features writing by Haden Blackman and are by Mike Del Mundo. In fact these pages by Del Mundo look pretty sharp and remind me of....another book with a female lead.