Superheroes

After its premiere season, Stargirl had set a rather high bar for itself. But, at least with this initial episode of the second season, the show seems to be hitting on all cylinders, retaining the charm and nostalgia that fans fell in love with last year.

The second part of Batman: The Long Halloween didn't take long to release, thankfully overcoming the expiration of expectations that can hamper a story cut into two pieces like this. And it doesn't waste any time rushing through a number of holiday murders during which time Batman... does nothing. Why? Because Bruce Wayne (Jenson Ackles) has been mind-controlled by Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff), and has been regularly signing over assets at her bidding to her boss, Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver). Fortunately for Bruce, Catwoman (Naya Rivera) not only notices his absence but also knows his secret identity, mounting a rescue mission that brings Batman back into the thick of things after nearly four months of stupor.

When The Flash series was first announced, nobody was more excited than I was. And in every episode of that first season, I was an excited little boy from opening scene to scrolling credits.

As with any series, the show has had it's peaks and valleys as it progressed from season to season, serving as the fulcrum of the classic CW show crossover, Crisis on Infinite Earths, which saw the multiverse collapse into a singular universe when it was finished. But never has it reached such a prolonged low point as it has with -- well, pretty much the entirety of this seventh season.

2021 marks the 80th birthday of Marvel's patriotic Avenger, Captain America. The brainchild of comic legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, he almost became known as Super-American, until Simon nixed it in favor of what has now become a household name, due in no small part to the string of successful movies produced by Marvel Comics.

Captain America: The First 80 Years is a by-the-decade retrospective of the hero's journey, detailing his origins, his evolution and adaptation to the threats of each decade, and his retroactive continuity changes that turned him into a beloved comic book hero. The crew at Titan have gone out of their way to not only tell the story of Captain America, they've nestled it in the story of the comic book industry and American 20th century history as well, so that a full and appreciable context exists.

The latest DC Universe animated epic has been released, this time adapting the Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale graphic novel that took a novice Batman and forced him to forge his detective skills. The connective thread of this adventure was that a killer was taking out people close to mob boss Carmine Falcone, establishing the pattern of commiting the murders on major holidays. The Holiday Killer was a mystery to be solved, and each of the 13 issues that made up the series carried the reader through the year in near real-time, with various Batman villains popping up where appropriate.

The latest offering from the DC Animated Universe is Justice Society: World War II. From everything I can discern, it is not adapted -- even loosely -- from any particular previously published story, although there are definitely elements lifted from other events and transplanted here.

If you're a fan of superhero stories, but require a more intricate level of storytelling than the standard fare, Netflix delivers. Mark Millar's Jupiter's Legacy makes its first season drop this week, and gives the reader a world fully-populated with powerful beings, good guys and bad guys, with a traditional flavor of comic book morals juxtaposed against the reactions of a real world backdrop.

Taking a page from the first seasons of Arrow, the series jumps back and forth between where we are today and how we got here -- which entails a span of nearly 100 years.

Lydia and Emily become best friends in grade school by virtue of both being social misfits. Emily was the curve-blowing smart kid, while Lydia was the sleep-in-class and deliver answers cribbed from Peppermint Patty. But when they have a falling out, they lose touch with each other for twenty years, until Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) decides to reach out to Emily (Octavia Spencer) to attend their class reunion. Through a series of childish missteps, Lydia accidentally obtains super powers from an experiment Lydia's tech company was working on.

The setting for Thunder Force is one where cosmic rays bombarded the world decades ago, creating genetic mutations in a small minority of people, giving them super abilities. Unfortunately, all these people turned out to be sociopaths dubbed "miscreants." One of them killed Emily's parents, and she's devoted her entire life to finding a way to grant super powers to someone who could fight the miscreants on their own level.

DC Comics' Generations Forged is a handsome book. A big book. It's squarebound and demands a ten-dollar premium for the right to own it. And it looks gorgeous, with a Liam Sharp cover. It even looks good on the inside if you flip through the pages to give them a cursory glance. The imagery evokes the greater moments of DC's vast history -- the Crisis, the Zero Hour, and other iconic events.

Stop there. Let yourself believe that's what this book is. Whatever you do, however badly you're tempted, do not read it. And it pains me beyond measure to say this, because it's written by Dan Jurgens, Robert Venditti, and Andy Schmidt, all of whom should know better than to perpetrate the story elements contained in these pages.

While it's not known yet if this will be a weekly occurrence, it's a nice way to keep those streaming numbers up. Offering live viewers an opportunity to get additional content, could keep those hardcore fans watching two nights in a row. SUPERMAN AND LOIS already broke records for the CW when it comes to ratings for Live+3 (which factors in streaming numbers) with over 2.7 million viewers.

So what important scene was left out of the episode that aired on TV? It certainly wasn't a brief moment between Clark and Lana. Instead it was an important exchange between Sam Lane and Superman.

In just two episodes, we've come to realize that General Lane accepts Superman as an ally (see also: weapon). When Captain Luther fails, yet again, in acquiring kryptonite from a military complex, Superman demands to know what he's looking for. That's when General Lane comes clean about his dirty secret.

He's been stockpiling kryptonite.

The Flash returns to The CW with its seventh season, and -- for the most part -- it's back to firing on all cylinders.

The concept of Barry being on the precipice of using up his remaining Speed Force had drawn on overly long in season six, so it was a relief that the problem finally gets a resolution in this episode, even if it did come at the sacrifice of a major character. Or... did it? We'll get to that in a little bit.

Superman and Lois finally gives Tyler Hoechlin a chance to fully flex his inner Superman. Sure, he's been okay in Supergirl and the other Arrowverse crossovers, but now he's got the whole show to himself -- shared, of course, with his family: wife Lois (Elizabeth Tulloch) and twin 13-year-old sons Jonathan (Jordan Elsass) and Jordan (Alex Garfin).

The universe of Hero Tomorrow comics is a small but very cohesive, tightly-knit one. The hero -- Apama -- is an everyman imbued with the animal powers of a creature from myth, and since his emergence the supervillains have sprung up to oppose him -- some odd, all bizarre.

But there is one who is deeply connected to Apama's origins, yet pre-dates his arrival by nearly forty years. Regina, who first appeared in Apama, The Undiscovered Animal #5, gets her origin story with Bloom #1, coming soon to comic shops and currently funding through Kickstarter.

Set in 1969, Bloom begins with Ramsey, an auto mechanic and would-be comic book artist obsessed with the idea of his comic book villain and the arcane glyphs that came to him in a dream state while tripping in the forest -- at a location that will be quite familiar to fans already following the Apama comic.

I've wanted to like Batwoman. Wanted to from the very launch of the series. But the first season steadily tanked midway through, and this second season hasn't done much to right the ship.

The new Batwoman, Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) is personally moved by a missing boy when she sees the location from where he was taken. It turns out Ryan herself had been taken as a young girl at the exact same location -- a comic book shop -- by a woman who called herself The Candy Lady (Linda Kash). She would keep the children in her attic with a bowl of jellybeans, and then take a jellybean each day as a sort of countdown for two months to prove the child didn't matter to anyone -- as nobody would come looking for her.

And the Candy Lady isn't seen as a threat to her potential victims, because she's a nice white woman.

The misguided attempt to turn Vampirella into Supervamp continues with this second issue of Vampirella: The Dark Powers. The Dynamite Comics concept of "plural worlds" is the tableau against which Project; Superpowers gathers all its members from various alternate Earths, finding Vampirella on Plural Earth 0666. The majority of the membership isn't comfortable with her being on the team, partly because in their last adventure her methods of attack was responsible for one of their members being put in critical condition. Also, plunging in without knowing the facts about the enemy allowed the enemy to regroup with an even larger threat, adapted to what it has learned of Vampirella's power set.

Alice (Rachel skarsten) takes the next step in her plan to bring terror to Gotham. As she leans over the dead body of her former cohort, Mouse, we get a flashback to a scene where bats invade her hiding spot so that we can be reminded that 'bats eat rats.' This is important to what Alice is doing now, which is catching a rat and duct-taping it to Mouse's dead chest so that it will attract bats to come take nibbles of Mouse as well.

Cut to two months ago, and a pre-Batwoman Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie) being rescued from a Halloween night mugging by Batwoman (in shadow, so it's not a Ruby Rose cameo). We then see Ryan interview for a security job and being turned down for it because she pled guilty to 18 months in Blackgate. This is all to establish more of Ryan's backstory to provide motivations for why she would want to take over the role of Batwoman and what she might do with the title.

With the second season of Doom Patrol, I was hoping to see the team come together in... well, in any fashion. We learned who they were as individuals in the first season, so now it was time to start actually using these abilities and getting the independent members to work as part of a team.

When Ruby Rose decided to leave the role of the lead character on the CW's BATWOMAN, it put the writers into a bit of a tailspin. The easy thing to do would have been to recast the character with a different actress. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the proper thing to do would have been to recast the role, because now you have to invent a whole new reason for why Kate's gone, who takes over being Batwoman, and next thing you know there'll be more actresses in the suit than have flown a Tardis.

A great deal of the Batman animated movies (and the live action ones, for that matter) have focused on the technological advantages Batman has and how he uses them to fight crime: the car, the armor, the gadgetry. "Where does he get those wonderful toy," indeed.

With BATMAN: SOUL OF THE DRAGON, the producers take Batman and make him a character -- and not even the central character -- of an animated grindhouse kung-fu flick.

Before Marvel had a "cinematic universe" into which it could debut Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Wesley Snipes was staking out his claim as a Marvel hero -- literally -- as the half-human, half-vampire Blade. He would go on to portray the character three times before the MCU even took its first baby steps with IRON MAN.

Blade's origin is succintly told. His mother was attacked by a vampire while she was pregnant with him. While being treated for the attack at a hospital, her son was born, possessing the traits of vampirism -- but the ability to walk in the daylight like a human. Found as a teenager by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), Blade was taught how to curb his preternatural thirst and seek out the ones who murdered his mother -- the many (many!) vampires living among us.