We first introduced you to country music ingenue Kendall Gary a few months back with the release of her video, Head Held High.

Hot on the heels of that, and in advance of her summer album release, the Lewisville, Texas singer -- who began her training in opera before settling into country -- is ready to melt hearts with her new single, Your Love.

When we last left RIVERDALE (and if we're honest, when we say 'left' we mean 'ran away screaming'), Cheryl Blossom (MADELAINE PETSCH) had just opened the door of Thistle House to none other than the Black Hood.

It could have been the end for Cheryl, but she kept her wits about her. And when the Black Hood follows her outside, he comes face to face with another CW character -- Speedy from ARROW! Oh wait, that's not Thea Queen. It's still Cheryl Blossom, but with a bad-ass bow and her blood-red hunting cape! She fires a warning shot at him to get his attention, then puts one in his right shoulder, sending him fleeing into the woods -- with her in hot pursuit!

Instead of racing toward the season finale, THE FLASH seems to have entered into a slow jog. Seeking some method of attacking Devoe while circumventing all his powers, the team lands on the idea of seeking assistance from Amunet Black (KATEE SACKHOFF) because Devoe won't be able to use Kigore's powers to "hack" her metal fragments. One supposes he couldn't increase their gravity to make them fall, or sonically knock them out of the sky, or alter luck to make them miss, or shrink them to a molecular level, because he has all those powers as well, but they don't seem to have been accounted for.

In other words, the season's over and the writers have checked out.

From Reuters:

U.S. cable operator Comcast Corp is asking investment banks to increase a bridge financing facility by as much as $60 billion so it can make an all-cash offer for the media assets that Twenty-First Century Fox Inc has agreed to sell to Walt Disney Co for $52 billion, three people familiar with the matter said on Monday.

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

While it is still probably a bit too long, I did trim down my pull list considerably in the last few weeks. There are still a lot of comics I am excited about though.

In Anna Day's THE FANDOM, the characters are obsessed with a novel by Sally King titled The Gallows Dance, which has a huge following. The novel has been developed into a movie, and the characters are included in Comic-Con.

Violet and her best friends, Alice and Katie, have their costumes and are extremely excited about attending Comic-Con.  Violet’s younger brother, Nate, is also a big fan and goes along with them. Alice is a fan-fic writer who likes changing the plot of The Gallows Dance, because no sequel has been written: Sally King has killed herself.

There's a lot of standard build-up, but the last ten minutes of this episode makes it the LUCIFER that Lucifans have been waiting three years to see.

Having realized that Chloe (LAUREN GERMAN) has broken things off with Lt. Pierce (TOM WELLING), Lucifer (TOM ELLIS) is eager to help Chloe get things back to normal. And what better way to get back to normal than to replay all their best moments, from first meets to game night to romantic dances. But Chloe isn't having any of it, and is determined to focus laser-like on the case presented to them: the murdered wife of a famous baseball player, Forest Clay (DOUG SAVANT).

The case makes it's usual twists and turns, beginning with Clay's mistress (EMMA BELL) and ending with...well, that would be telling.

From Entertainment Weekly:

The Mad Titan is coming for Fortnite.

This isn’t one of those fun fan-made mashups for the YouTube crowd. Epic Games and Marvel have an unprecedented crossover event in the works, and EW can exclusively give away the deets! Thanos, the villain of Avengers: Infinity War, will drop into Fortnite‘s Battle Royale mode for a limited time starting Tuesday, May 8

...

The “Infinity Gauntlet Limited Time Mashup” mode for Battle Royale will feel just like a standard slugfest — with one major difference: One hundred players will descend upon the map and fight until one player is left standing, as usual, but this time you’ll do so with the Infinity Gauntlet in play.

So there it is: the worst BATMAN animated story I've seen (and I've seen BATMAN UNLIMITED: MECHS VS MUTANTS, so that's saying something).

There's so many things wrong with this movie, but let me start out on the high note: the animation isn't one of them. The imagery -- inconsistent in style as it is -- is gorgeous. Watch it with the sound off, and only glance at it now and then, and you'll always see something awesome.

But if you actually expose yourself to the story, your fascination will quickly dwindle away.

Director Steven Spielberg’s critically lauded WWII epic Saving Private Ryan celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year with a new 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo release on May 8, 2018 from Paramount Home Media Distribution.

A DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures co-production, Saving Private Ryan won five Academy Awards^®, including Best Director, and two Golden Globes^®, including Best Director and Best Motion Picture—Drama, and was named by the AFI as one of its 100 greatest American films.  Boasting a stellar cast headed by Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Ted Danson, Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Paul Giamatti and Barry Pepper, the film is widely considered one of the greatest war movies ever made.

Every once in a while, the Ghosts of Saturday Mornings Past rears its sentimental head (and that's two Christmas Carol references in the same day for those keeping count; no there's no real reason behind it), and reminds me just how much better things were when they were not so over-produced.

Today's case in point: The Wacky Races. The original Hanna-Barbera series had a motley cast of characters who were more than two-dimensional players. They had depth to them, and some even had their own series, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Having such a large cast afforded the opportunity for more (and more interesting) interactions, even if each racing team had its one-note to hit (Peter Perfect was always "perfect," the Gruesome Twosome were always monstrous, the Slag Brothers were always clubbing each other on the head).

Jerome was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Well, sorry, Mr. Dickens, but there does indeed seem to be a doubt, at least in the mind of Jerome's twin brother, Jeremiah Valeska (CAMERON MONAGHAN). True, Jerome fell from a building, was pronounced dead when brought into the coroner's office and was even more dead after he was autopsied. But that doesn't stop Jeremiah from severe anxiety as he shows off his new free-energy invention to Bruce Wayne (DAVID MAZOUZ). Bruce does hs best to convince Jeremiah that Jerome is truly gone, and suggests they go see his grave to confirm it to Jeremiah, to beat the insanity gas Jeremiah was subjected to at the end of last episode.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR's CHRIS HEMSWORTH headlines this film as Captain Mitch Nelson, a military team leader who has never seen real combat and who has just disbanded his team to take a desk job. It was a good plan, and a good career.

But 9-11 got in the way.

Following the attacks on the World Trace Center in 2001, Nelson fights to get his Special Forces team back together and sent to the Middle East. Over objections, he is successful, and his team join up with one of the Afghan warlords, General Dostum (NAVID NEGAHBAN), to take on the Taliban. Their specific mission is to advance and capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which is a stronghold of the Taliban.

In the mid-70s, the great BILL BIXBY starred in a one-season crime drama called THE MAGICIAN. Bixby played Tony Blake, a stage magician who was asked to investigate a plane crash. He became a moonlighting crime fighter, using his skills at illusion and misdirection to catch the bad guys.

It was a pretty cool idea, although it came with built-in limitations.

Fast forward to 2018, and ABC brings us DECEPTION, starring JACK CUTMORE-SCOTT as Cameron Black, a stage magician whose career comes tumbling down when the secret to one of his greatest stunts comes to light -- that he has a twin brother, Jonathan. The world learns about Jonathan when he is arrested for leaving the scene of an accident that resulted in a woman's death. Only the woman dead on the scene wasn't the woman who was with Jonathan in the car. He's been set up, and he's sent to prison.

Chaos comes to RIVERDALE as all the sordid little threads start to come together in a tapestry of terror.

Moose Mason (CODY KEARSLEY) comes clean with the Bulldogs that he and Midge had a fight the night of her murder, because she had confessed to him that she'd been seeing someone else: one of the Southside Serpents. It doesn't take long before word gets around that this Serpent was Fangs Fogerty (DREW RAY TANNER), who was caught on camera when Jughead (COLE SPROUSE) filmed all the behind-the-scenes footage of the school musical. That footage was handed over to the sheriff's department, which is now run by Sheriff Michael Minetta (HENDERSON WADE), a man firmly in the pocket of Hiram Lodge (MARK CONSUELOS). And when that footage is used to arrest Fangs at school, a scuffle ensues, revealing that Fangs carries a switchblade knife. He's looking guiltier by the second.

Paralleling and mirroring the structure of episode 407, "Therefore I Am," this episode, "Therefore She Is," tells the story of The Thinker's wife, Marlize (KIM ENGELBRECHT) -- aka The Mechanic, although we've never really heard her referenced as such in the series. Through flashbacks we see how she met Clifford DeVoe (NEIL SANDILANDS), fell in love with him, found him to be a sociopath with an agenda, and came around to his way of thinking -- a Luddite view of technology that sees it as killing mankind.

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!

Does anyone else think Chloe Decker (LAUREN GERMAN) accepted a marriage proposal from Marcus Pierce (TOM WELLING) just a little too quickly? Well, you'r not the only ones. Lucifer Morningstar (TOM ELLIS) also realizes the window was shut on his opportunity to tell the detective how he feels about her, and he can't understand what made her jump at the offer.

To better understand Chloe, who is taking time off from work to plan her wedding, he decides to get into her head and roleplay her part, with Detective Daniel Espinoza (KEVIN ALEJANDRO) tagging along and pushed into playing the role of Lucifer. Their murder case centers around a dog breeding competition and a pregnant mastiff and, as is usual for an LUCIFER episode, shenanigans lead to insight as Lucifer gets angry with Dan and learns exactly how Chloe feels.

With Marvel's AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR tearing up the box office, the timing couldn't be more perfect for Marvel Studios to release the trailer for ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, a new chapter featuring heroes with the astonishing ability to shrink. In the aftermath of “Captain America: Civil War,” Scott Lang grapples with the consequences of his choices as both a Super Hero and a father. As he struggles to rebalance his home life with his responsibilities as Ant-Man, he’s confronted by Hope van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pym with an urgent new mission. Scott must once again put on the suit and learn to fight alongside The Wasp as the team works together to uncover secrets from the past.

The flowers have been blooming, the grass has been getting greener (and taller) for a while now, but May is the month when things really start to get warmer and brighter.

So I think you'll agree this is the perfectly proper time to introduce our newest monthly Critical Blast Bombshell, a lady who exudes both light and heat in her cosplay, her performance, and even her identity.

Please give a warm welcome to our newest...

Critical Blast Bombshell, May 2018

Chaotic Flare

Bowser (SUPER MARIO BROS)
Photo: Albert Ng

What is your interest in cosplay?