Four Color and More!

Those five days in Brooklyn and doing extra-help work in another library threw me off a bit. I’m way behind on reviews and other things so I’m going to try to catch up, with minor SPOILERS. Let’s face it, almost nobody reads my reviews anyway and I generally do it for my own amusement. Don’t mind me I’m not in the best of moods to begin with.


After all the money and time I invested in COUNTDOWN and related titles, I didn’t expect that DC was going to flip me the bird with the first issue of FINAL CRISIS. What the hell is going on? Is that Tor? That sure as heck is Kamandi running up on him later. I’m assuming that The Question and others do not see the armored guy on skis hanging over the crime scene, right? Seems at least some of the New Gods are not dead, simply hanging out here kidnapping kids and turning them into red-eyed fanged little creeps. I really don’t have a clue and am only going to give FC one more issue to make me believe. I’m also going to keep my promise to myself and not buy a single ‘Sightings’ tie-in.


On the other hand, the latest issues of NEW AVENGERS and MS. MARVEL keep the heat on with SECRET INVASION. We still don’t know who all the Skrulls may be, but do learn some things about those ‘70s Avengers who were held captive. Some folks aren’t too happy with a certain ‘dead’ hero showing up, but I don’t believe that is really him. On the other hand, it looks like we will be seeing the some familiar characters showing up in the MARVEL 1985 series. Wow! Talk about fanboy fantasy come true? What would you do if you found out that Doctor Doom & the Red Skull had moved in down the street? Have to thank writer Mark Millar and artist Tommy Lee Edwards for bringing us a wonderful fantasy for those of us who did believe in such things as kids.

Finally, I want to recommend DEAD, SHE SAID from IDW. Writer Steve Niles knows his dead folks, as the creator of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, and here he’s teamed with artist Bernie Wrightson . Low rent P.I. Coogan has had a bad night. He doesn’t remember much about it, except that somewhere along the line he got killed and he’s not happy. When he is found over the torn apart body of the person who may have been responsible he has a lot of explaining to do to the cops. Wrightson inks his own pencils here and it shows. Damn, he’s good!

On the TV watching front, I caught promos for two new summer replacement shows that caught my interest. ABC’s WIPEOUT is a total rip-off of a Japanese game show, the name of which escapes me. One of the cable networks was showing an English-dubbed version, along the lines of IRON CHEF, where you really didn’t know how accurate the translation may have been. Of course that wasn’t the point. The goal of the show, as is that of the American rip-off, is to have folks attempt to get across this enormous water bound obstacle course. The ABC site calls it a ‘reality show’, but that term has long ago stopped really meaning anything of the sort.


Also from ABC is “I Survived a Japanese Game Show”, where a group of ten Americans are flown over to do exactly that. Or rather, they must compete in the stunts and competitions that are actually used in those shows, but they won’t actually compete against Japanese, but each other.

Hard to believe that the game show concept was created here, isn’t it? The first, “Uncle Jim's Question Bee", was broadcast in 1941, unless the British beat us to it. It seems that the ‘successful’ shows of the past few years are all adaptations of shows from Europe and now Japan.
I think it’s time for Donna and I to breakdown and get that DVR from Cox.