Cryptid films were a drive-in staple during the 1970s. None were going to win any Oscars, but the audiences weren't there for that. They wanted cheap chills and theatrical thrills from creatures that haunted the woods like those near their home towns.

Capitalizing on the nostalgia for this genre, Small Town Monsters has faithfully recreated the look and feel of this grindhouse-style of storytelling with MOMO: THE MISSOURI MONSTER.

The film is presented inside the framework of a modern-day television show, with your cryptid-hunting host, Lyle Blackburn, who takes the audience to the town of Louisiana, Missouri, where sightings of a hairy hominid made the papers in the early 1970s. He then takes viewers back to this film, presenting it as the only copy of an unearthed and unreleased treasure loosely based on encounters with the creature and simultaneous reports of UFO sightings.

At first blush, Robin Gerber's BARBIE FOREVER: HER INSPIRATATION, HISTORY, AND LEGACY might appear to be another beautifully designed coffee table book, packaged to appeal to fans of the Mattel maven whose fashions and careers have delighted and motivated children for decades -- six of them, to be precise! My expectation was the cursory introduction, maybe four or five pages of text delivering a succinct history of the doll and her creator, and then a veritable book full of photographs of Barbie through the years.

SUPERGIRL is one of the Arrowverse shows that stands apart from the rest of the CW shows. First of all, it's not strictly a part of the Arrowverse as it is part of the Arrow-MULTI-verse. Kara (MELISSA BENOIST) lives on a completely different Earth than The Flash and Green Arrow, but crosses over whenever there's a crisis at hand, such as with this fourth season's ELSEWORLDS event, and the upcoming CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

Director Yedidya Gorsetman and Screenwriter Mark Leidner have put together a sleeper hit of masterpiece proportions.

EMPATHY, INC. starts out simply enough. Joel (ZACK ROBIDAS) is a successful silicon valley executive, about to make a fortune with the release of a new technology. But his partner has been falsifying the results of the tests, with devastating financial results for Joel and the company he worked for. He is scapegoated into ruin, and he and his wife Jessica (KATHY SEARLE) are forced to move in with her retired parents.

We spent two weeks hunting for the Waya Woman, an upright-walking wolf creature. We didn't find her, but we did stumble over an urban legend about a murdered family, resulting in some ghost sightings and the appearance of an old photograph. While the AIMS team is leaving that area behind now, the events still have a direct bearing on tonight's episode, as we enter Boone County, West Virginia to hunt a giant bear called the Silver Giant.

While Huck was in the closet of ghosts, he saw the women whose photograph he found -- the woman who murdered her family. She spoke to him, and he knew the langauge. In English, she was saying she was a "skinwalker," and the only way one can become a skinwalker is to perform a heinous act -- the murder of a family member.

I remember seeing Todd McFarlane at the Chicago Comicon in the late 1980s. SPAWN was still a new thing, and Todd was talking up how the symbol would one day be as ubiquitously recognized as a black bat in a yellow oval.

I gave it a year, two at the max.

Thirty-plus years later, here we are, with the milestone issue of SPAWN, one issue away from setting the record as the longest-running creator-owned comic, with a wide array of supporting characters, good and evil, and a twisted morality play that treats Heaven and Hell as competing corporations.

I will say that one of the things that made SPAWN intriguing to me was that he had been giving a finite amount of infinite power. Starting wtih 9:9:9:9, every expenditure of eldritch energy caused the Spawn-o-Meter to decrement. Which meant that, at some point in the character's run, he was going to bottom out, and things would be over.

DCEASED is a comic series I can get invested in. Why? Because despite utilizing the characters of the DC Universe, it's self-contained. It doesn't promise to have any impact on the DCU as a whole -- unlike, say, books that have that promise stolen from them like DOOMSDAY CLOCK.

In this pocket universe, Darkseid has unlocked the much-sought-after Anti-Life Equation. But it has been corrupted, and turns whoever sees it into a mindless undead creature who can infect others into becoming the same. And with Darkseid's death, the equation gets broadcast through Cyborg to every television, computer, and phone in the world. An epidemic ensues, and even the world's greatest superheroes are not immune from its effects.

Zoe Quinn is no stranger to controversy. One might even argue her entire career has been built on the house-of-cards foundation of accusations of sexism and abuse, setting her up as a heroic overcomer in the male-dominated industries of video games and comic books.

But Internet controversy turned to real life consequences barely two weeks ago when Quinn took to Twitter to make public accusations against former fellow game designer, Alec Holowka, claiming sexual abuse and false imprisonment. The immediate fallout for Holowka -- the loss of his career and the shattered public perception -- drove a man who already suffered from emotional troubles to take his own life.

#MeToo had been successfully weaponized--and the weapon was deadly.

Another BubbaFest has gone into the books, and one of this year's highlight's was a chance for attendees to enter the world of THE WALKING DEAD and participate in a photo shoot that put them right into the thick of the series.

Entering the walk put attendees alongside Rick Grimes (portrayed by Cecil Grimes Cosplay) and Negan (Negan Unchained Cosplay), as they encounter the serie's "Hilltop Kid," played by series actress Kaylie Turner.

Our sometimes guest-contributor, That Umbrella Guy, was among the attendees, and brings us this video of his meeting with the folks who brought THE WALKING DEAD... to life.

Owen Long's indy project, SEEDS, is an art film with a horror angle; a blend of Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS and Nabokov's LOLITA, with a subtle hint of H.P Lovecraft peppered throughout.

The focus of the film is on Marcus (TREVOR LONG), a man who lives a hermit-like existence in his parents' old home. For reasons we never quite understand, he's forever rewiring the place in ways that are clearly not up to code. Marcus is haunted by the death of a woman he had a fling with once, in a hotel, and which he paid to have covered up by a man who continues to show up in his life delivering pills. What the pills are for is never quite clear, as Marcus seems deranged before taking them, and just as deranged afterward.

It's the penultimate issue of what was anticipated to have been a huge event in the DC Universe -- the culmination, in fact, of what began in REBIRTH.

It still is the culmination of what began in REBIRTH. Except REBIRTH doesn't mean anything any longer. The years of teasing the presence of Saturn Girl in the present day, the absence of the Justice Society, the return of Wally West, THE BUTTON... all of that is for naught, because the Legion of Super-Heroes is being introduced in a different fashion, the Justice Society has already returned in JUSTICE LEAGUE, and Wally West has been ruined by Tom King in HEROES IN CRISIS.

When the AIMS Team didn't find the Waya Woman last episode, they decided to return to Jackson County and continue the hunt for this 7-foot tall wolf creature. And there's still the mystery of the triangular stone carving in the old house that points (for reasons unknown) to locations of sacrificial alters in two directions -- and something else in the third.

When I began reading VAMPIRELLA / RED SONJA #1, I was immediately sucked in by the artwork of Drew Moss. Set in 1969, Vampirella's style was appropriate to the era. There was a beguiling beauty to this retro-look that merited revisiting, and the highlights of Rebeca Nalty's colors really make the panels pop for this issue.

But this was no mere eye-candy comic. Jordie Bellaire has set up an adventure/mystery that brings Vampirella -- still a newcomer to Earth at that time -- to Russia, to investigate a decade-old mass killing that may or may not have been the work of a Yeti. Since the story is set nearly fifty years ago, Vampirella has to do the investigating without the benefit of the Internet, which is not only a refreshing read but must also be a challenge to write. Writing it this well is a testament to Bellaire's writing chops, and I look forward to more from him.

In Gail Simone's debut issue of Dynamite Comics' DEATH-DEFYING DEVIL, we thought the almight Devil had been depowered, brought down to earth, and made into a street-level hero of the people. The Devil had come to the defense of a motley crew of residents of a ramshackle house who had been beset by street thugs and corrupt cops, and he had gotten his ass handed to him handily.

With the second issue, we get a little more of the curtain pulled back. The Devil is still in the house--drinking tea and eating coffee cake with the elderly former actress turned crazy cat lady. When he learns that she doesn't go to the market any longer for fear of the street gang members always waiting to pounce, he very gallantly offers her escort. And when the inevitable attack comes, he defends.

And that's when things get weird.

Just short of two years ago, Zoe Quinn was being celebrated as having overcome online harassment to go on and become a game designer on a hotly aniticipated indy game project with Chuck Tingle. (Editor's Note: The crowdfunded game has yet to be delivered and is currently over two years late in fulfillment.) She was the model of the underdog who wouldn't give in to online trolls.

Six days ago, Quinn recalled sexual abuse details from an old relationship with fellow game designer, Alec Holowka. Instead of taking these details to the police for investigation, Quinn chose to air the accusations through her Twitter account, @UnburntWitch.

The seventh season of ARROW brings with it echoes of the Green Arrow movie idea that was tossed around in the late 1990s. SUPERMAX was teased as a film about a superhero who gets incarcerated in a maximum security prison with the people he helped put there. It was later revealed that superhero was going to be Green Arrow, but the movie never made it out of development.

Now in ARROW we get a taste of what that movie might have been, as Oliver Queen (STEPHEN AMELL) is arrested for his activities as the Green Arrow under a plea deal that allowed the rest of Team Arrow -- including his wife, Felicity (EMILY BETT RICKARDS) -- to walk free. But while Oliver's new identity is Inmate 4587, a new Green Arrow has taken to the streets, one whose identity remains a mystery to all.

The King of the Monsters doesn't get much respect these days. Attempts to bring the giant radioactive lizard to the big screen have largely succeeded in special effects, pleasing the hardcore Godzilla fans, but plotlines haven't been enough to draw in wider audiences.

The fourth season of THE FLASH ended with the world-shattering introduction of Nora West-Allen (JESSICA PARKER KENNEDY), the super-speedster XS from the future. Now, in typical DC Comics canon, XS is Jenny Ognatz, from a thousand years in the future and a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes. The children of The Flash were supposed to be The Tornado Twins, one of whom would give birth to Bart Allen, the speedster known as Impulse. And that may still be the future for The Flash. Because the timeline is malleable.

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.

This month our quest takes us into the world of anime and gaming, to find a cosplayer whose work is a royal treat. Equally comfortable with dark princes and fairy princesses, we are happy to introduce  you now to our...

Critical Blast Bombshell, September 2019

Mako

Schadenfreude ran rampant today among anime fans who have found themselves at odds these past several months with a handful of voice actors employed and/or contracted to Funimation, a company licensed to provide English language dubs for Japanese animated franchises, including the extremely popular DRAGONBALL Z.

Funimation has been at the core of a controversy surrounding one voice actor, Vic Mignogna, who has been accused of sexual misconduct and summarily fired from doing further voice acting for the studio. Fans of Mignogna have come together under the banner of #IStandWithVic, claiming no concrete proof has been established, and indeed Mignogna has set up a legal fund for the express purpose of filing a defamation suit. Meanwhile, his accusers have organized under the hashtag of #KickVic for the purpose of protesting conventions that continue to host Mignogna as a celebrity guest.