By Mike Weaver and Mike Maillaro

Runaways Vol. 1 - Pride and Joy

Written by: Brian K. Vaughan
Art by:  Adrian Alphona

Published by: Marvel

by Chris Delloiacono, Mike Maillaro and Jeff Ritter

This week:

Welcome back to Critical Blast’s weekly look at what new comics you should check out each week.   Just a warning, I make these picks pretty much a week BEFORE I actually get to read any of these comics, so if something is a stinker, I take no blame on that.  Let's get to it!

Comics Shipping This Week

I'm going to preface this week's column by saying this is one of the weakest comic weeks I've had in a long time.  Very few books jumped out at me as MUST TALK ABOUT!  And even the few I did, were real stretches.  The only book that I am real excited about is Uncle Scrooge #1...

As I am sure you guy are sick to death of me saying, I loved Star Wars Rebels Season 1.  It definitely felt more like Star Wars than anything I've seen in a long time.  At last week's Star Wars Celebration, they posted up a trailer for season 2.  Check it out:

SCARLETT COUTURE is a book that gets your attention through its stylish designs, eye-popping colors, and an overall unique approach. Many of the panels appear to be animation cels overlaid with blurred photo backgrounds that were then flattened to give the piece an overall unified appearance.

Mike Maillaro: Welcome to Blast of the Week.  Each week, the Critical Blast staff will post our thoughts about various entertainment and media topics.

This year's topic is Netflix's Daredevil series!

FROM THE DARK, available on Blu-ray, tells the haunting tale of a young couple who are on a road trip around the Irish country side. When they develop car trouble, they seek help at a nearby farm house and it isn’t long before they discover a terrible evil is lurking in the dark.  A creature has been awakened from a thousand year slumber by the owner of the house who unearthed it while digging in the bog, and the couple soon learn the only safety they have from it lies in the light. But night is falling quickly, and the darker it gets the more powerful the creature becomes.

The movie has a very limited cast and stars Niamh Algar and Stephen Cromwell as the young couple Sarah and Mark.

By Mike Maillaro and Mike Weaver

Convergence: Justice League International #1 by Ron Marz & Mike Manley

Summary:The Justice League International (Blue Beetle, Red Tornado, Martain Manhunter, Captain Atom, Fire, and Ice) were trapped in the dome.  Most of them have lost their powers, but they continue to protect an unappreciative Metropolis from threats like Metallo.  The dome comes down, and several heavy hitters from Kingdom Come arrive to challenge them.  

The much-beloved television series I Love Lucy ended in 1957, nearly 20 years before my time. Thanks to the pioneering ways of stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, generation after generation has laughed at the zany antics of “America’s Favorite Redhead.” In the early days of television, most shows were broadcast live in their time zone and as “kinescopes” in other regions—a vastly inferior method that used a television camera to record the image from a television set as the show aired (not unlike people who record TV clips with their cell phones and post them on YouTube today). Desi and Lucille used a three-camera shoot and shot everything on 35mm film so that clean prints could be shown across America. In the show’s second season, Lucille became pregnant and Desi and show producer Jess Oppenheimer decided to rebroadcast the best-received episodes from the previous season, and the ratings were much higher than expected. They had just invented the rerun.

by Mike Maillaro and Mike Weaver

With MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON just around the corner, WB has released the first teaser of their own cadre of superheroes.

Welcome to the world of Zack Snyder's BATMAN v SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE. It's a grim, gritty world, where even Metropolis looks like a place I'd fear walking through at night. We hear two voiceovers, presumably from Lex Luthor who talks about devils coming from the sky. This, as the scene slowly closes in on a statue of the Man of Steel with the grafitti "False God" across its chest, leading this reviewer to wonder if Snyder's Luthor will be combining a little evangelical fundamentalism with his super science in order to turn the public against Superman.

By Mike Weaver and Mike Maillaro

The Punisher Meets Archie

Written by: Batton Lash
Art by:  John Buscema and Stan Goldberg
Published by: Archie and Marvel

Whenever I hear the phrase “based on a true story,” I often wonder, “Which part?” Take “Titanic” for example. I know the boat is going to sink. I wonder if there was a romance between the characters played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio or if that was contrived to distract the audience from the inevitable disaster that nearly everyone on Earth knew was coming in that film. I suppose if Hollywood didn’t spice it up they’d be making documentaries, not blockbusters.

JJ Abrams debuted a new teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the Star Wars Celebration today.  I guess to prevent crappy bootleg versions from showing up online, they actually posted it online, which was pretty decent of them. 

I do have some quick comments about it, but I'm sure you are much more excited to watch the trailer than read to what I have to say, so here it is.  Meet me below to read my thoughts on it:

by Chris Delloiacono, Mike Maillaro and Jeff Ritter

This week!

THE POSTHUMAN PROJECT is an idea we've seen before, any number of times with varying degrees of success, with outings like X-MEN and GEN-13. In this particular version of the trope, the teens are a group of Oklahoma high school kids nearing graduation. To celebrate, they're going to climb a mountain. Denny Burke (Kyle Whalen) is still recovering from falling off a mountain, in a freak accident which also saw his father disappear.

All is not as it seems, however, as Denny and his beleaguered brother, Archie (Collin Place), meet their long-lost Uncle Billy (Jason Leyva), and his unusual offer. Soon enough, the Burke brothers, joined by their friends Adam (Josh Bonzie), Lisa (Alexandra Harris) and Gwen (Lindsay Sawyer) pile into the SUV and drive off to conquer Mount Dominick, which Uncle Billy now owns.

I think Valiant has been very smart about limiting the number of books they put out at one time. There have been some new series, but for the most part, they have kept their number of books very consistent. The original Valiant seemed to expand way too quickly, and as a result, they had a lot of books put out by weak creative teams. Valiant seems to have a good plan in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

One thing that’s odd about the comic industry is that in order to help sell books, we get to see solicits of upcoming titles months in advance. So that tends to diminish some shocking moments. For example, at the end of The Valiant, before she dies, the Geomancers last act is to free Bloodshot from the nanites in his system, turning him human again. But, since we already knew there was an issue called Bloodshot Reborn, coming out a few weeks later, it was obvious this wouldn’t stick.

Welcome back to Critical Blast’s weekly look at what new comics you should check out each week.   Just a warning, I make these picks pretty much a week BEFORE I actually get to read any of these comics, so if something is a stinker, I take no blame on that.  Let's get to it!

Comics Shipping This Week

Fox #1 - Black Hood has been excellent, and The Fox has an extra bonus of being written by Mark Waid. So this is definitely my early pick for book of the week...though there is a lot of competition.

This is the trailer Marvel posted this morning.  It definitely looks like it will live up to the terrific movies Marvel has been putting out the last few years.  I'm still not sure Ant-Man needs his own movie, but at least the movie does look pretty awesome.  I laughed when Lang says "my days of breaking into places to steal stuff are over.  What do you want me to do?" and Pym replies, "I want you to break into some place to steal some stuff." 

If nothing else, the effects look incredible.  And the Yellowjacket costume looks incredible.  I was actually thinking that Pym was going to end up having a split personality and secretly be Yellowjacket, but the trailer definitely suggests otherwise. 

Shameless self-promotion: Ant-Man is one of Critical Blast's most anticipated movies for 2015!

Enough out of me, let's check out the trailer: