Marvel scribe Matthew Rosenberg has warned readers that no X-Man (or woman) is safe during his run. And with Jonathan Hickman poised to reboot the X-Universe, Rosenberg is playing with old toys that are about to be replaced.

He is a bull in a china shop right now. And it's astonishing.

***Caution: MAJOR Spoilers Ahead***

Brian Michael Bendis is uniting a family that has been divided for so many years.

***CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD***

While Batman has enjoyed spending time with his "family" for many years, Superman has typically run solo. It something that's always seemed to separate the two. As Batman leans heavily on his ensemble cast of characters, Superman isolated himself by dealing with his problems alone.

Which is completely opposite of what you'd expect. Batman is the brooding vigilante and Superman is the family loving boy scout. Now, under the guidance of Bendis, Superman is in a fight for the future of his family alongside his father, son, and now his cousin!

Given the amazing success of THE LEGO MOVIE, it was inevitable that there was going to be a sequel, starring the same characters. And sure enough, here comes THE LEGO MOVIE 2: THE SECOND PART, with Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett returning to their roles of Emmet, Wyldstyle, and Batman.

There's just one problem. After seeing the brilliant end of the first movie, the rabbit is out of the hat. We know what's going on. The magic is gone. It's like trying to do a sequel to THE SIXTH SENSE and trying to forget the whole time that Bruce Willis is a ghost. (LEGO Bruce Willis appears in this film, so that's not entirely a non sequitur analogy.) Where we were originally left in the dark as to what "Kragle" was, we now immediately work on the (less-than-inspired) translations of the "Sis Star System" and the "Bin of Sto-Raj."

The landscape of opinion is a shifting mass of quicksand these days. The Internet, once a bastion of free speech -- and all the ugliness that comes with that -- has undergone a transformation to rein in opinions, protecting the eyes and ears of the many from anything that might be deemed offensive by the few.

It began with politics. When the deplatforming of Alex Jones and his InfoWars site occurred, the 1st Amendment let out an "oof" of having been punched in the stomach. No one heard it over all the cheering, however, and the social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter were emboldened to continue their pogrom against information and opinion.

The idea was to stifle politics with which the social media overseers disagreed. The inherent problem with that is this: everything is political. And so we find ourselves at a point where a comic book review website (not this one, yet) loses its presence on Facebook.

The first time I saw the Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil classic Les Misérables, I wasn’t particularly happy. If I recall, I called my experience “very miserable indeed.” Over time and with the encouragement of my brilliant lady, I now greatly enjoy that sung-through musical tale of a failed French revolution. With my recent conversion to being a Les Misérables fan I assumed my first foray into Boublil and Schönberg’s revered Miss Saigon, which made its St. Louis debut when the National tour stopped at the Fabulous Fox Theatre for an April 23 – May 5, 2019, run, that I’d enjoy it right from the start. Perhaps my expectations were too high; perhaps I have developed certain sensibilities about language and attitudes towards different sexes and races that might be appropriate for the time but aren’t quite so acceptable today.

There's a good chance if you didn't post the Mad Max "That's Bait" gif when you saw this article, you're actually wondering why I feel this way. I'll try to explain myself in a way that doesn't sound biased, bitter, or boring.

To start off, my entrance into comic books was with the X-Men. NOT the Avengers. But when Iron Man hit theaters over 10 years ago, I was excited to see it. A comic book property that wasn't Batman was about to be on the big screen. It was something new and refreshing!

And I LOVED IT!

Do you know what else I loved nearly 5 years later? Man of Steel.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe officially began in 2008 with the release of Iron Man featuring the impeccable casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, billionaire futurist and superhero. Now, just slightly more than ten years later, Avengers: Endgame potentially could become the biggest film phenomenon of all time. How do you review something like that? I think the answer is simple: you don’t. You can’t. Anything you say about Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther, Thor, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Widow, Hawkeye,  Captain Marvel, Falcon, Bucky, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant Man, The Wasp and may other major and minor characters that have graced the silver screen in the “Decade of Marvel” could be a spoiler, even if you don’t mean to spoil anything.

This nature documentary pops right off the screen, thanks tot he IMAX filming of the subjects and their lush settings.

Narrated by Kristen Bell, IMAX PANDAS takes the audience into the world of the endangered Giant Panda, and the efforts to repopulate them in the wild. We get to see baby pandas, born in captivity and nurtured at a panda preserve in China, and learn of the efforts to wean the captive pandas back into their natural habitat. But that is no simple task.

Just when I was getting used to the idea that every DC Animated Universe release was going to be a continuation of the New 52 paradigm, they throw us a curveball and give us another chapter in JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED -- and a most welcome one at that!

The voice acting trinity of Kevin Conroy, Susan Eisenberg, and George Newbern return as Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman, with Kevin Michael Richardson joining the team as Mr. Terrific and Daniela Bobadilla as potential League recruit, Miss Martian.

This one is on us, dear readers. We've been so busy catching up with our office relocations, that we barely noticed the month had changed. So here we are, ankle deep into a new month, and only now getting around to presenting you with this month's cosplayer.

So we beg your forgiveness and indulgences, and hope you'll all agree it was worth the wait for our newest member to the Critical Blast Bombshell club. Now wait no more, and proceed on to meet our...

Critical Blast Bombshell, April 2019

KRONICkaren

For the first fifteen minutes of BUMBLEBEE, I found myself over-analyzing things. The battle for Cybertron, for instance, was fought between Autobots and Decepticons who transformed themselves into vehicles already. Why? They did not have vehicles there to blend in with, they traveled under their own power, they had programming (in English) that had to have been put in by somebody, and, most distracting, their "mouths" moved when they spoke when their voices were sent through speakers, so there was no reason to use movement to articulate sounds. In fact, being advanced electronics, it was more likely they would communicate directly, wirelessly, through technology akin to Bluetooth.

And then I got it. It wasn't that BUMBLEBEE was cheesy like an 80s movie. It's not that BUMBLEBEE was even an homage to cheesy 80s movies.

Before I say “I told you so!” because I did, let’s recap: Marvel makes awesome superhero movies. Dc makes duds. They did manage to make Wonder Woman and Aquaman entertaining, but Batman vs. Superman, Justice League, Suicide Squad, and Green Lantern – which was so bad that it’s star lampooned himself for it in a much more successful Marvel flick – were not even on par with the least of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That would be Iron Man III, in my opinion, though Thor II wasn’t great and….well, can we count Blade III part of the MCU? Nah. It’s been such a dismally lopsided contest that DC recently threw in the towel and declared the “shared universe” for DC films dead. They’re not going to try to be Marvel. They’re just going to try to make good movies again.

Carolyn Keene's girl detective is getting another shot at live action adaptation, this time coming to the screen with the help of IT girl, SOPHIA LILLIS as the titular Nancy Drew.

Nancy lives in a small town, having moved there from Chicago with her father, attorney Carson Drew (TRUE BLOOD's SAM TRAMMELL), following the death of her mother. She's a tomboy with a penchant for getting into trouble due to her sense of vigilante justice (which ranges from dying a bully blue to actual breaking and entering).

Despite her short time in town, she's made some friends in plucky George Fayne (ZOE RENEE) and scientific genius Bess Marvin (MACKENZIE GRAHAM). She's also made an enemy in rich girl Helen Corning (LAURA WIGGINS), the girlfriend of said bully-turned-blue.

Waitress, the musical, premiered on Broadway eight years after the film on which it is based debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, which itself was three months after the shocking death of writer and director Adrienne Shelly. The film was a hit, starring Keri Russell as a beat-down pie slinger in an abusive relationship. Her costars included Nathan Fillion as her new hunky OB/GYN and Andy Griffith as the cantankerous owner of Joe’s Pie Diner. In 2016, the film was adapted on Broadway and the U.S. Tour has arrived at the Fabulous Fox Theatre for a two-week engagement, March 26 – April 7, 2019.

Little Rock, AR, 4/1/2019— Cirsova Publishing has teamed up with StarTwo to create an all-new, fully illustrated 70^th Anniversary Edition of Leigh Brackett’s original Eric John Stark Trilogy. Cirsova Publishing aims to bring the action, adventure and romance of Leigh Brackett to a new generation of readers.

First published in the Summer of 1949, Queen of the Martian Catacombs introduced the world to Eric John Stark, the black mercenary swordsman. Stark’s adventures continued on Venus in 1949’s The Enchantress of Venus, and the swordsman returned to the Red Planet in 1951’s Black Amazon of Mars. While Brackett would revisit the character in 1970s with the Skaith trilogy, the original novellas are significant as one of the last iconic Sword & Planet cycles of the pulp era.

The bad boy of musical theatre, St. Louis' New Line Theatre doesn't shy away from edgy material. They also perform musical classics, uncovering the fundamental truth of a given production that sometimes gets buried after years of revivals and reinterpretations. 

Our apologies, dear readers, for the glacial pacing of our announcements for the 2018 Best Of awards. Our focus has been on our relocation efforts, and sadly some of our other duties have suffered in the wake of that. But the show, as they say, must go on, and so we find ourselves announcing the Best novel of 2018.

The year saw some really good books come out, and it was very difficult to narrow down even a list of nominees, let alone select a very best of the selection -- especially with titles like CLOD MAKES A FRIEND by David Pedersen, WRATH OF THE DRAGON KING by Brandon Mull, and THE FANDOM by Anna Day. 

However, by a splinter of the vote, the award goes to Charles Soule for his first novel, THE ORACLE YEAR, about a young man who wakes up one morning with the ability to predict the future with 100% accuracy.

When the Marvel Cinematic Universe was being birthed, there were labor pains. How could they have a successful franchise, when their top selling titles -- Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and X-Men -- were already franchised out to other production houses?

It's hard to imagine it now (and for longtime comic boom fans, it was even hard to imagine it then), but at the time all this was going down, Iron Man, Hulk and Captain America were not top-tier characters for the House of Ideas. There was literally nowhere to go but up with these guys, and so that's where they went.

ROB MARSHALL has accomplished the rare privilege of getting to direct a classic of the Disney variety. MARY POPPINS RETURNS pops off the screen, with a color palette right out of a fantasy and a soundtrack firmly in tune with the songs from the original 1964 film that gave us such unforgettable songs as "Chim Chim Cher-ee" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

EMILY BLUNT steps into the impeccable shoes of the unflappable Mary Poppins, arriving at a time when the two Banks children, Michael (BEN WHISHAW) and Jane (EMILY MORTIMER) have grown up. Jane, like her mother, works to promote women's suffrage, while Michael is a struggling artist who has taken a job at the bank to make ends meet after the loss of his wife. Michael's three children, John, Annabel, and Georgie, do their best to help out, but can accomplish very little when the family learns they have until the end of the week to come up with the money to save their family home before the bank forecloses on it.

Stain’s real name is Princess Lyra.  She is the only daughter of King Kiran and Queen Arael; however, Queen Arael dies during child-birth.  King Kiran adores his daughter and is willing to do anything for her.  King Kiran has a despicable sister named Lady Griselda who has three daughters.