Tag Archives: comic books

Movie Review: “Thunderbolts” (2025)

thunderbolts

© James Pyles

I didn’t anticipate watching Thunderbolts* (2025), yes the asterisk is supposed to be there, but it was at the public library in the new films section, so I figured “why not?”

It was actually better than I thought, but you have to accept it for what it is. I’ll get to that.

Spoiler Alert: This review is loaded with them, so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be surprised, stop reading now.

Pet Peeve Alert: The characters of Yelena and Alexei were once part of a spy cell pretending to be a typical American family and as such they spoke perfect English. Why, oh why are they now speaking in heavily accented English just to prove they are Russian? It’s stupid.

Now let’s continue…

Basically this is Marvel’s…I was going to say “B-Team” but they aren’t even that high on the list, well most of them anyway…trying to carve their way into being heroes when most of them at least have histories as villains if not actually still being on that list.

We start out with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Natasha Romanoff’s (Scarlett Johansson) secret agent sister (see the 2021 film Black Widow) still living the life of an assassin for the CIA killing people and stealing stuff. She’s totally empty and alone and has no purpose in her life, still grieving over Natasha’s death as seen in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

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Movie Review of “Superman” (2025)

superman

© James Pyles

Last night, I watched James Gunn’s Superman (2025). OMG, where do I begin?

Oh, Spoiler Alert. This review is full of them.

First of all, let me say that I get where Gunn was taking the film and the character. He was balancing Superman as an alien vs Clark as a human. This is seen both in how goofy (in my opinion) both Superman and Clark (played by David Corenswet) appear and behave. Face it. Clark really doesn’t have to act like an inept nebbish to keep people from finding out he’s Superman. Why would people even believe Superman has another identity and if he did, he could be anyone living anywhere.

The secret to Clark’s insecurities, sometimes unstable behavior, and pathetically Boy Scout (even by campy comic book and earlier movie and TV standards) actions and attitudes lies in his humanity, in being raised by Martha and Jonathan Kent on a farm in Kansas.

The Kents, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell respectively, are the quintessential country hicks. I’ve worked in rural settings before, and Ma and Pa Kent might as well have been Ma and Pa Kettle. They weren’t necessarily strong or heroic and are never seen struggling over raising a son from outer space. They’re “just plain folks” and their defining characteristic is how much they love their son.

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Why It’s Okay To Not Watch “Agatha All Along”

agatha

Promotional poster for the mini-series “Agatha All Along”

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I have no intention of watching the new Marvel/Disney+ mini-series Agatha All Along. There are a lot of reasons for this.

The first is that I haven’t seen ANY of the Disney+ Marvel shows, not even the very popular Loki series. I’ve mentioned before somewhere that I don’t particularly enjoy most television produced in the 2020s and don’t see myself subscribing to one or more streaming services just to watch a few shows I might (or might not) like.

Of course, I’m aware of these programs because you can’t be on social media for ten seconds without tripping all over them, or at least the latest ones. This is especially true of the responses to said-shows, both for and against. There really does seem to be some sort of war going on between those who like these series and those who don’t.

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Review of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021)

no way home

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Just finished watching Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) last night. It’s about two-and-a-half-hours long, and like a lot of superhero movies, it tries to cram too much into that space.

The movie starts out where Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) left off, with the recording of Mysterio/Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal) saying that Spider-Man (Tom Holland) killed him and that Spider-Man is Peter Parker.

Peter’s life goes downhill immediately and so do the lives of his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), his wingman Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon), his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), and even Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau).

Federal agents detain all of them, but in spite of all their bluster, they can’t really hold any of them except Hogan who has ties to the Stark technology used in the previous movie. Even that doesn’t stick very long.

There’s a cameo of Charlie Cox appearing as attorney Matt Murdock (Daredevil) and a cute little scene where he catches a brick thrown through the Parker’s apartment window from behind. It was a tragedy that Daredevil didn’t appear in the movie because a Spider-Man/Daredevil team up would have been awesome.

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Film Review of “Black Widow” (2021)

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I found the 2021 film Black Widow as a DVD at my local public library yesterday. Naturally I checked it out so I could watch and review it. I’ve heard various unflattering things about the movie, and I wanted to see for myself.

Oh, tons of spoilers follow, so if you haven’t seen the movie and want to, don’t read any further.

In no particular order:

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“Doc Savage, Man of Bronze:” The Origin of the Superhero Group

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Cover art for Doc Savage magazine

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Doc Savage and his oddly assorted team might be considered the progenitors of today’s “Fantastic Four” and many other teams of superheroes — even Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.” -Stan Lee, creator of Marvel Comics’ “Spider-Man” and “The X-Men”

There are probably two reasons to read pulp fiction that’s 70, 80, 90, and even 100 years old. The first is that you’re a true fan of the genre. The second is, if not for these ancient heroes, we wouldn’t have the modern ones that, at least up until recently, were box office blockbusters at the movies.

In the mid-1960s as I was about to enter Junior High, I didn’t realize these stories existed and more, I didn’t know that various publishers had finally convinced the owners of these older properties to allow them to appear as paperbacks. It was the perfect time for me. I was the age and sex of the target audience, and the average price for a paperback was around 40 to 60 cents a copy. Heck, back then, even a comic book cost 12 cents.

So Edgar Rice Burroughs’ entire Tarzan and John Carter of Mars book series abruptly appeared in mall bookstores all across the country. So did E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series along with what Robert E. Howard and every other author under the sun wrote about Conan the Barbarian.

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Not the Comic Books I Grew Up With

gay bobby

Images from “Uncanny X-Men #7,” “Uncanny X-Men #52,” and “All-New X-Men #40” found at “Bounding into Comics.”

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I received quite a bit of feedback on my last blog post, mainly in social media. So when insomnia seized me by the throat tonight, I re-read some other “controversial” material I’d sampled earlier and figured, why not? I need to kill some time and let being sleepy overwhelm my anxiety (long story).

I follow the blog Bounding into Comics and yes it does come from a somewhat conservative place socially. While I periodically complain that the entertainment industry has forgotten how to entertain, they/it does have other characteristics. One can be found in the “Bounding” article Every Single Comic Book Character That Has Been Retconned To LGBTQ+.

No, I’m not going to rant about LGBTQ representation in comic books or anything else. The world is a diverse place and that will naturally be reflected in what we watch, read, and listen to. Any form of entertainment is a product of its times which is why making and then remaking a movie or TV show decades apart will yield two different products. Compare the original 1960s Lost in Space with the much more recent Netflix remake (which admittedly I’ve never watched, but I’m convinced the two shows must be very different from each other). It’s also why it’s reasonable to have gay characters in comic books today when you would never have found even one when I was growing up.

Getting back to the article, there are only six DC and Marvel characters listed out of hundreds or perhaps thousands of superheroes, so it’s not like it is a big deal. The complaint that author John F. Trent makes is that each and every one of these fictional people started out as totally straight characters. Every single one.

And every one was retconned to become bi or gay.

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Review of “Doom Patrol” Season One

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Promotional image for season 1 of “Doom Patrol”

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Okay, so I just finished watching Season 1 of the Doom Patrol television show. I noticed that seasons 1 and 2 of the show were available as DVDs at my local public library and I thought, “what the heck?”

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My Greatest Adventure issue 80.

Actually, as a kid, I really enjoyed the old Doom Patrol comic book. First featured in “My Greatest Adventure” comic title issue 80 (June 1963), it chronicled the saga of three misfits forged into a superhero team by scientist/genius Niles Caulder, also called “The Chief.” The original team was made up of Robotman (Cliff Steele), a race car driver who was in an accident so horrific that only his brain survived. The Chief put that brain in a robot body. Elasti-Girl was originally actress Rita Farr who, filming on location, was exposed to a volcanic gas enabling her to grow to giant size or to shrink into a tiny form. Negative Man was test pilot Larry Trainor who flew his rocket plane into a radiation belt. The plane crashed, and Larry discovered that not only was he permanently radioactive, but for sixty seconds, he could project a negative image of himself that could travel at the speed of light and had amazing abilities. The only trick is that N-Man has to get back inside Larry’s body before the minute is up or Larry dies and N-Man disintegrates.

In looking up the full history of the comic book (see above link), I saw that it had gotten a whole lot stranger than it first started out.

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Comic Books, Television, and Who Are Our Heroes?

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Promotional image for the tv show “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”

So I happened to read Cora Buhlert’s review of the first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier called Marvel’s “New World Order” – Some Thoughts on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (spoilers) expecting something light and entertaining. Not exactly what happened.

First of all, let me say that I haven’t seen any of the WandaVision mini-series and don’t anticipate watching this new show either. It’s not that I think they’ll be bad or I won’t enjoy them. I just don’t subscribe to streaming services. Well, besides that, I don’t have the time to dedicate myself to television shows anymore.

I used to watch all of the WB produced superhero shows, popularly known as the Arrowverse, but they were consuming so much of my free time, I didn’t have any left for things like writing and a life.

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Truth, Justice, and Superman on Radio

Screenshot of the cover of the graphic novel “Superman Smashes the Klan” found at Polygon.com

I know I’ve been booted out as a follower of Mike Glyer’s fanzine File 770, but he can’t block my internet access, so occasionally I pop over to see what’s up. Most of the time it’s “not much,” but I did happen upon Pixel Scroll 10/23/19 The Little Green Man Was Very Sad, One Pixel Was All He Had.

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Cover art for a World War 2 era “Superman” comic book

Item 11 is titled SUPE’S AN IMMIGRANT, TOO. It links to an article where a 1946 version of Superman fights Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and befriends a Chinese immigrant family. I was all prepared for yet another reinvention of Superman who behaves like a 2019 progressive over 70 years in the past. That is to say, out of character and historically anachronistic.

And yet the Polygon article The Superman story that set the Ku Klux Klan back years is now a comic was a pleasant surprise.

A few days ago, I wrote Truth, Justice, and the American Way to illustrate how classic superheroes such as Superman and Captain America represented, not necessarily the United States as it is or historically has been, but as we want to be as a country and a people, a united people.

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