DC Comics' newest character sparks conversation over character usage and marks.

BATMAN #89 was an instant -- and unexpected -- sellout this week when DC introduced a partial profile cameo of a new character, Punchline. Meant to be a female partner/paramour for The Joker, one once wouldn't have expected much from such a character. Except the last time the role was filled, it went to Harley Quinn, whose first comic book appearance can net over $600, and whose media presence has skyrocketed even further after appearances in mainstream films like SUICIDE SQUAD and BIRDS OF PREY.

So it's natural for speculators to hit the streets to pick up what they are assured is the first appearance of Punchline.

But what if they're wrong?

What if I told you the first appearance of Sabertooth wasn't IRON FIST #14, but... THE FLASH #291?

What if I told you the first apperance of Doomsday wasn't MAN OF STEEL #17, but... SILVER SURFER #13?

The titular EVERGLADE ANGELS are a girls' baseball team whose trip to the championships leads them into the arms of masked killers deep in the Florida swamps.

It's 1997, and the Everglade Angels have clinched their trip to the playoffs, due in no small part to the outstanding performance of Gemma Walsh, daughter of team coach Abigail Walsh. Gemma's definitely the alpha among the team players, the main ones being Naomi, Lacey, Grace and Portia. The five girls decide to drive themselves to the championship game, and this is where their adventure takes a wrong turn -- literally.

Finding themselves lost in a small town, the girls get diverted to a party -- except there's no party there. Instead, there are masked men with weapons, and a strange chemical. They abduct Gemma, as the rest run off for their lives, only to return later to attempt a rescue.

SWAMP THING was one of a handful of original series created for the DC UNIVERSE streaming service -- and it's first casualty. While it completed it's first season of ten episodes, it became clear near the end that the writing was on the wall and things began to get wrapped up in a huge hurry. But there is still hope that fans may see more of the muck-encrusted mockery of a man, if the post-credits teaser of the final episode is any indication.

In this adaptation of the Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson series, Abigail Arcane (GOTHAM's CRYSTAL REED) is a doctor with the Center for Disease Control, who finds herself assigned to a team to investigate a mysterious disease plaguing the town of Marais, Louisiana. The assignment is particularly troublesome to Abby, because Marais is her former home, and we find that she left it under a cloud years ago.

It's not often that I can start a review of a home video release before actually opening the product, but HANGIN' WITH MR. COOPER, The Complete Third Season, is one of those rare cases. Going by the Amazon listings for previous releases, Warner Brothers is consistent with the trade dress of these covers to tie them together uniformly. However, that's where any thought to design quality stops. The image of leading man Mark Curry is rendered with all the photographic quality of an inkjet printer working with a picture that has been blown up beyond the integrity of its resolution. The image is cloudy, as though soft-light filtered, but lacking any definition. Similarly, the images from the back cover are stills cropped from the show given no pre-printing treatment to clean them up. Even the text has a slightly blurry look to it, as though the entire thing might have been printed clean and sharp for the back of a trading card, and was then printed in an area larger than intended.

The face of Sega gaming races into theaters this weekend, and the studio execs have got to be crossing their fingers that they hit a home run with the fans. After early images of the CGI-rendered Sonic the Hedgehog were released to the public and met with universal scorn, production went back to the drawing board to get a redesign that was closer to the original version of the character.

They succeeded.

Sonic the Hedgehog came from another dimension, fleeing to this one as a hiding place when evil beings on his home wanted to take his power from him. It's a power he doesn't fully understand himself, but it manifests itself in super-speed. (Warner Brothers may want to push back THE FLASH another year after this.) He's been here for a while, living among the people in a small town, hiding from them. He knows them intimately, even though they don't know he's around.

Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus are two living legends in comedy. Both are Saturday Night Live alumni who revel in the absurd. Ferrell graduated to the big screen with Old School and never looked back. Elf, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, The Lego Movie 1 & 2, Get Hard, and my personal favorite of his impressive resume, Stranger Than Fiction -- It seemed like the funny man would never bomb. The same holds true for Louis-Dreyfus,, the only woman in history to have won Emmy Awards for three different comedy series. Seinfeld put her on the map, and The New Adventures of Old Christine and Veep proved that she belonged to be considered among the heavyweights like Carol Burnett and Betty White. 

Madam, a new musical from Colin Healy, recently ended it's inaugural production at the .Zack Theatre in St. Louis. I was fortunte to catch the closing show of the shor trun. Healy is in the zone creatively, as his previous effort The Gringo headlined last year's St. Louis Fringe Festival and garnered rave reviews. Madam is an another strong effort featuring a wonderful cast and interesting characters, some of which come directly out of St. Louis history that you might not have known much about before this show.

The United States is often regarded as a country that doesn’t like football (or soccer as they call it). However, their league, called MLS, is one of the top-flight football leagues in the world.

It’s not men’s football that’s making waves, though. The US Women’s National Soccer team is the most successful in the world. In 2019, they won the FIFA Women’s World Cup for the fourth time, helping to assert their dominance over the sport.

The US team were already reigning champions and had been joint favourites to win ahead of the tournament. However, they impressed many pundits after performing even better than expected.

More than a few people expected PARASITE, the film from director Bong Joon Ho, to take the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But far more were taken aback when the film swept out of that niche and into the broader part of the ceremony, nabbing the coveted Best Picture award.

Is it a good movie? It's okay. It's a bit of a slog in places, and for American audiences it is clogged with cultural references that won't strike any chords. Add to that the fact that the entire thing is subtitled throughout, and you end up with a recipe for Decidedly Not a Blockbuster.

It cost 84.5 million to make.

It grossed about $81 million in its opening weekend.

Which has executives at Warner Brothers scratching their heads and wondering: Why is BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN not making money?

It couldn't be the wordy title. It couldn't be that the movie posters had all the mass appeal of a 14-year-old girl's scrapbook project inspired by Botticelli. It couldn't be that the few ads that were shown revealed the well-known intellectual property characters to be even less like their historical counterparts than any prior DC Extended Universe or televised Arrowverse character. It couldn't be that the R rating shut out a large segment of a target audience that could be remotely interested in a superhero property (if, indeed, BIRDS OF PREY was intended to be one).

After a decade away from home, Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to her native Roswell to care for her ailing father. When she arrives, she reconnects with her high school crush, Max Evans (Nathan Parsons), who is now a police officer. Their chemistry is electric, but Liz soon learns something shocking: Max and his sister, Isobel (Lily Cowles), and their friend Michael (Michael Vlamis) are aliens who have kept their abilities a secret their entire lives. As she and Max grow closer, Liz struggles to keep the truth from her best friend, Maria (Heather Hemmens), and her high school ex, Dr. Kyle Valenti (Michael Trevino). But concealing the visitors' true identities is more important than ever, as a long-standing government conspiracy and the politics of fear and hatred threaten their lives.

Bruce Wayne's plans for the revitalization of Gotham City get put on hold when five of the deadliest contract killers show up -- among them Cheshire and Deathstroke. (Sorry, Merlyn and the other two forgettables wouldn't have made y radar as the top five DC mercenaries.) Batman quickly captures them and has them put into the "Black Box" at Gotham PD -- a special holding cell designed by Batman and paid for by Bruce Wayne (really, the detectives at GCPD must have gotten their badges in a Cracker Jack box). Yes, Batman now has a "Pipeline" similar to that in THE FLASH, and it's super duper secure, even if Batman does have his own secret built-in entrance to it.

The end of the fifth season of Peaky Blinders left fans in a state of shock. They watched on as Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) put together a carefully crafted plan to assassinate Oswald Mosley (Sam Clafin) and bring an end to his destructive plans for the country.

However, there was a twist in the tale, and Mosley was tipped off about the plan that the Shelby clan had pieced together, and that resulted in the plot failing spectacularly. Tommy’s old army comrade, Barney, was shot just as he was about to bring an end to Oswald’s Nazi-esque rally. Viewers were left bemused as to who pulled the trigger on Barney, while there was also a tragic end for Polly’s (Helen McCrory) fiancé, as Aberama Gold (Aidan Gillen) was brutally murdered on the side of the stage by the Billy Boys.

The Prototype Car, Now Worth Upwards of $100,000, Is the Only Redline Enamel White Hong Kong Version Car Ever to be Discovered - Considered the Holy Grail of Hot Wheels Collectibles

West Palm Beach, Florida – (February 5, 2020) – One of the rarest finds in toy collecting history was discovered by America’s Toy Scout, Joel Magee.  A Hot Wheels Camaro dating to 1968 and verified as the first Hong Kong enamel white example ever found was acquired by Magee and now stands alone as the only one in the world. The white prototype Camaro is three of the most desirable Redline Hot Wheels collectible cars in the world.  Found in a set of several other Hot Wheels cars, it wasn’t until Joel examined the collection and consulted a Hot Wheels expert that he was able to confirm that the lone white Camaro was, in fact, the rarest of rare.

Welcome back to another episode of "Iris West-Allen and her Amazing Friends." Not that The Flash (GRANT GUSTIN) doesn't make an appearance -- it's his show, titularly. Yes, if a waitress drops another tray at CC Jitters, you can bet The Flash will use his amazing speed to make sure it doesn't hit the floor. He's good for that.

"Marathon" is the first episode post-Crisis, and I end up walking away from it with several questions. I'll try to parcel them out through this recap rather than dump them all at once, tempting as it is.

Sylvester Stallone has confirmed via his Twitter account that the greenlight has officially been given for a comic book extension of THE EXPENDABLES, the action franchise that specializes in reuniting actors from classic action films into the ultimate action team-up adventure.

That, in and of itself, is big news.

What is perhaps bigger news is the venue selected for the venture: an Indiegogo campaign, managed by start-up publisher Richard C. Meyer. If you don't know the name, you probably haven't been following the comics industry online for the past few years. Meyer is one of the most recognizable names in the loose-knit and frequently highly contentious confederation of independent creators collectively known as Comicsgate, an entity that has been attacked from without almost as much as it has from within.

There's a perverse appeal to YOU, the nigh un-Google-able creation fo Sera Gamble (SUPERNATURAL) and Greg Berlanti (every CW superhero show we love). The protagonist is a very disturbed individual who does for stalking what DEXTER did for serial killing.

Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley, GOSSIP GIRL) is a reclusive book store manager who specializes in old and rare volumes. When Guinevere Beck (ONCE UPON A TIME's Elizabeth Lail) walks in, he zeroes in on her, immediately interested, and revealing his analysis to the audience through way of his inner dialogue, a narration medium used to great effect throughout the season. He pays attention to the way she moves, the way she dresses. And when she leaves, he turns to social media to fill in the gaps.

Wrestler-turned-actor John Cena headlines this fun, family-friendly action comedy as Superintendent Jake Carson, the head of a team of smoke jumpers. When they rescue three siblings from a burning cabin, they find that returning them to their parents is harder than expected, and end up sheltering them at the station until things shake out.

Naturally, when you have a princess-loving toddler, an inquisitive kid, and a sullen teenage girl together in a he-man cave like their outpost, conflict is bound to arise, slapstick will occur naturally, and unexpected (Editor's note: they were totally expected) bonds will be formed.

THE DOLLHOUSE FAMILY is the first Black Label title from DC I've seen that wasn't in a prestige format size. This makes me happy for more than one reason, but mostly because i don't always have to pay the price point necessary for the oversized prestige formatted books.

This comic is also what Andy Khouri should have been courting to the Vertigo line before it became a corpse so decayed it can't even be used for good fertilizer. Or perhaps Chris Conroy should have been given the editor's position earlier. But, it's fruitless to become lachrymose over upturned dairy, so let's take a forward-looking approach, because THE DOLLHOUSE FAMILY is a positive step forward for DC mature horror.

Every month the staff at Critical Blast combs the cosplay community for up-and-coming cosplayers who deserve to have a broader audience for their work, taking into account not only costuming skills and spirit, but also how they use that ability in service to others. Through this, we've not only met some talented cosplayers, but also some fine human beings.

Cosplay must really be taking off in the southern hemisphere, because for the second month in a row now, our Bombshell of the Month comes to us from Argentina, and she's bringing a special Valentine's Day greeting to our readers through her splendid cosplay!

Dear readers, please open your hearts and prepare to fall in love with our new...