When the first National Tour of The Book of Mormon arrived at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis several years ago, I was excited to see it. The hype at that time rivaled what you hear about Hamilton today. The show featured book, music and lyrics written by the creators of Comedy Central’s flagship South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Avenue Q creator Robert Lopez, who also wrote the music for Disney’s animated blockbuster, Frozen. I expected to be in fits of uncontrollable laughter amid moments where my jaw would hang agape at a line that only Archie Bunker or Eric Cartman could get away with. When it was all over, I remember feeling let down. I described it like a boxer pulling their punches when they have their opponent against the ropes. Instead of going in for the crushing blow, they’d stick the jab and then back off.

Blue Falcon and Dynomutt were two of my favorite Saturday Morning cartoon characters. Granted, almost every Hanna-Barbera product in the 70s qualified, it was the supeheroes who always had the greater appeal, even if the sidekick was a klutzy talking dog who preceded Inspector Gadget with his array of built-in technological blunders.

With SUPER SONS / DYNOMUTT AND THE BLUE FALCON, writer Peter J Tomasi and artists Fernando Pasarin and Oclair Albert have done an outstanding job. The dynamics of Blue Falcon and Batman have been blended together seamlessly in a way that it's conceivable both properties could have existed alongside each other all along. Tomasi even retroactively places Blue Falcon into the ranks of Batman, Incorporated, and Damian makes a vague reference to Dynomutt having saved him once in a Mystery Machine, which has to be a Scooby-Doo reference we need to see told.

From Marvel:

Nexon, a worldwide leader in online and mobile games, in collaboration with Marvel Entertainment has announced MARVEL Battle Lines, a new strategic card battle game featuring hundreds of iconic Marvel Super Heroes and Super Villains. In MARVEL Battle Lines, players collect and build the ultimate deck of Super Heroes and Super Villains to take into battle across an expansive single-player campaign with an original story written by Marvel writer Alex Irvine and a real-time turn-based competitive player vs. player (PvP) mode. MARVEL Battle Lines will be released in 2018 as a free-to-download experience on the App Store® for iPhone and iPad and on Google Play for Android devices.

It's been two months since DOOMSDAY CLOCK #4, when we learned the back story of the new Rorschach and saw him meet up with another Arkham Asylum inmate, Saturn Girl (of the future Legion of Super-Heroes). After reading issue #5, it's going to be a long wait for the next two months...because the next two months are actually three months. I've said before, Geoff Johns and company are mirroring the original WATCHMEN run so closely with this that they're even copying the production delays. At this rate, I expect we'll have the horrible six-month-gap between issues 11 and 12.

Tis the season for announcing the summer slate of DVD boxed sets for all our favorite fall shows that wrapped up a few weeks back. Chief among those is LUCIFER, starring Tom Ellis as the Prince of Darkness teamed up with an LAPD Detective, Chloe Decker (Lauren German).

The promo material for the release reads as follows:

From Variety:

Jamie Foxx is set to star in the latest “Spawn” from Todd McFarlane and Blumhouse Productions, sources confirm to Variety.

McFarlane, who created the original comic, is on board to write and direct the pic. He will also produce with Jason Blum.

Source: Variety

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Part 1 and Part 2

Lyric Theatre in New York City

Main Cast

From Variety:

ABC has pulled the plug on the revival “Roseanne.”

The move comes after series star Roseanne Barr made a comment on Twitter Tuesday morning referring to former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as the “offspring of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.'”

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Welcome back to Critical Blast’s long-running 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

We got a fifth week, and a lot of specials and first issues this week.

Today I find myself tasked with trying to relate to you, dear reader, the plot and feelings involved in ALEX GARLAND's cinematic soporific, ANNIHILATION.

Slowly paced, quietly executed, chronologically splintered, ANNIHILATION addresses the self-destructive tendencies in people and magnifies that to an unexplainable alien event. I began to identify with the premise, as I started to wish I were dead myself as we plodded through quicksand toward the finish line, much like Lena (NATALIE PORTMAN) toward that iconic lighthouse where it all begins and ends.

Forget Marvel's CIVIL WAR. The real comics civil war is happening in real life. But instead of costumed heroes, the combatants are creators and publishers of those heroes.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the Indiegogo success of the graphic novel JAWBREAKERS: LOST SOULS, and how it had crowdfunded over $200 thousand, but was encountering pushback from retailers who had opted not to carry the title before it was even solicited in Diamond. To be clear, this is the version of the title that was to be published by Antarctic Press, not the version that would go to the Indiegogo contributors -- who have now pushed their pledges to the point that it's now flirting with the $330 thousand mark.

Ten years after the events of the first film, the Kaiju return in Pacific Rim Uprising with a new deadly threat that reignites the conflict between these otherworldly monsters of mass destruction and Jaegers, the human-piloted super-machines that were built to vanquish them.

Superman where are you now?

If you didn't watch the mind-bending, heart pounding, season finale of KRYPTON last evening, you may want to close out and come back after you have. There are spoilers abound as KRYPTON continues to make their own rules in a way that not only honors the Superman mythos, but enhances it as well.

***SPOILER WARNING***

Before Mystery, Inc, there was Ridgely High -- where two students, Daphne Blake (SARAH JEFFERY, WAYWARD PINES) and Velma Dinkley (SARAH GILMAN, LAST MAN STANDING), first meet in real life after having been online BFFs.

Daphne has just transferred to Ridgely, a high-tech school that would make a Jetson's jaw drop. She's led a charmed life where everything has always worked out and good things come easily to her. She also believes in ghosts and aliens. But there's a secret behind Daphne's good luck that gets stripped away, leaving her to her own devices for the first time in her life.

The hottest show on SyFy right now is KRYPTON and with the season finale upon us, news has come out about its future.

Announced yesterday, the show has been picked up for a second season. KRYPTON, starring Cameron Cuffe, Shaun Sipos, Wallis Day, Georgina Campbell, and Ann Ogbomo has taken Superman's homeworld by storm. Shaking up the mythos in ways that no one could have imagined, viewers have been treated to stunning set pieces and impressive special effects.

When ballerina Dominika Egorova (JENNIFER LAWRENCE) is injured during a sabotaged dance recital, her financial status is thrown into jeopardy. Needing the money to continue caring for her ailing mother, she allows her uncle, Vanya Egorov (MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS) to recruit her into Russian intelligence. As an attendee ast the so-called "Sparrow School" -- something Dominika later refers to, not wrongly, as "whore school" -- she learns to read people, determine what they want, and use her body to accomplish her goals.

THE FLASH Season 4 started off strong, then hit more than one obstacle along the way.

Fortunately for the fans, the season ended just as strong as it began, as Team Flash gets help from The Thinker's estranged wife, Marlize (KIM ENGELBRECHT). Utlizing the pregnancy-induced telepathic powers of Cecile Horton (DANIELLE NICOLET), they are able to broadcast The Flash (GRANT GUSTIN) into the mind of The Thinker, Clifford DeVoe (NEIL SANDILANDS). The mission: to find the good that once was in him, bring it to the fore through a mental nexus, and have that good take over, before his satellites completely canvass the globe and bring The Enlightenment -- the erasure of all human intelligence.

Welcome back to Critical Blast’s long-running 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!

Sparrow Dalton is a 12-year-old girl living in the small town of Beulah. Her mother has just died, and to make matters more difficult, she never knew who her father was.  Sparrow’s aunt (her mother’s sister) has come to live at Dalton House to take care of Sparrow. Auntie Geraldine is strict, does not like Beulah, and Sparrow thinks she hates her. 

Once again, it is I, The Masked Ace, Critical Blast's resident wrestling expert! 

Last week, it was announced that Universal/NBC had decided to keep Raw on the USA Network, reportedly tripling what they were paying the WWE.  Smackdown would no longer be on USA, and WWE had been shopping it around.  The frontrunners included Fox, Facebook, and Amazon.