WrestlePro makes it's long awaited return to their home at the Rahway Recreation Center in Rahway, NJ on Friday, June 8. Tickets are on sale here!

There are some real big names in the house this month. Tyson Kidd, Demolition, D'Lo Brown, RVD, and Mene Gene Okerland are all here, plus we have Ultimo Dragon, James Ellworth, Flip Gordon, Colt Cobana, and Brandi Rhodes wrestling, along with the always terrific WrestlePro originals.

As usual, WrestlePro has a stacked card, and I am here with your predictions!

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

Disney posted up a new trailer for November's WRECK-IT RALPH 2: RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET!  The trailer is very funny, and I really liked the first WRECK-IT RALPH.  That said, I worry a bit about all the corporate synergy here.  Disney, Marvel, Star Wars...yeah, there is plenty of room for jokes here, but hopefully it just doesn't become one big Disney love fest.  Disney has always had a bit of a cult feel to me, aand even if they are laughing at themselves, I don't need 90 minutes of being reminded how much Disney owns me.  Hopefully, I am just being cynical.

I did love the bit at the end where Ralph says the movie should have been called "Wrecks the Internet." 

Having grown up in Jersey City and spending most of my working life in Newark, New Jersey, I have always had a great love and respect for Warren Murphy’s The Destroyer series. Warren himself was born in Jersey City, and his most iconic character, Remo Williams, started out as a Newark cop. Don’t tell Chiun I called Remo more iconic than him, he would not appreciate that at all….

I had lost track of the series over the years, but I was definitely curious when I heard that Warren Murphy had developed a spin-off called Legacy with Jerry Welch. I immediately fell in love with Legacy. Freya and Stone are terrific characters, and in just a few short books, Murphy and Welch have managed to expand the world of The Destroyer in some brilliant new ways. Jerry has been wonderful about answering any questions I have had about the series over the last few years, and I was glad to be able to sit down with him and do a full form interview.

Have you ever played the game where you try to figure out who would play you in the movie of your life? If you're Alek Skarlatos, Anthony Sadler, or Spencer Stone, then you don't have to think about it any longer. The three were selected by Director Clint Eastwood to play themselves in the biographical picture 15:17 TO PARIS.

The film details the thwarted terrorist attack on a passenger train which was stopped by Skarlatos, Sadler and Stone. However, the film tries to do much more than that, as it reaches back into their childhoods to show how they became friends, became separated, and followed different life paths until meeting up again for a backpack tour of Europe that placed them in the right place at the right time.

Madeleine L'Engle's novel A WRINKLE IN TIME is a benchmark in science fiction and fantasy. Ava DuVernay's version...not so much.

While the film boasts an all-star cast, including three young leads who are already accomplished, the film suffers from immersing itself too deeply in its presentation, with the angelic characters of Mrs. Which (OPRAH WINFREY), Mrs. Who (MINDY KALING) and Mrs. Whatsit (REESE WITHERSPOON) done up so intensely gaudy in both costuming and makeup that it comes across the screen as simply bad cosplay.

Aquaman can talk to sea creatures. Even he admits it's something of a standing joke. But when a great white shark shows up in the waters of Amnesty Bay, he finds his so-called super power to be superfluous -- because this shark can talk! And talk! And talk!

He's definitely the most futuristic shark Aquaman has ever saw...er...seen. And he's lost. He can't find his bandmates, The Neptunes, anywhere.

Yes, he's in a band. Yes, he's the drummer.

Leading Aquaman to where he arrived, Jabberjaw shows him a portal that leads back to Aqualand -- a future world actually named after the hero, Aquaman, and a society based upon his principals of humans and sea creatures living in harmony. There's even an Aquaman cartoon show in Jabberjaw's world.

From MY MOTHER THE CAR to TURBO TEEN, the idea of the human/automobile hybrid has been an inconsistent and, honestly, weird trope that nevertheless pops up now and again.

And while the Hanna-Barbera series SPEED BUGGY had a sentient, anthropomorphic car, Speed Buggy himself wasn't a person trapped in the vehicle so much as he simply was the vehicle.

That story gets a revamp with THE FLASH / SPEED BUGGY #1, one of the many pairings of DC Comics and Hanna-Barbera heroes hitting shelves this week. When The Flash -- Wally West -- stops Kilg%re at S.T.A.R. Labs, he gets an assist from a man in a racing car -- Dr. M. Blanc. (Editors Note: Mel Blanc, the inimitable voice actor, provided the vocals for Speed Buggy in the cartoon series.) Blanc has been building a device that taps into the speed force and channels it into his vehicle. Flash is very concerned about this, because whenever people try to harness the Speed Force, things go very badly.

Nobody likes to get hurt doing something stupid. But everyone loves to see it happen to someone else!

This giveaway features the complete unrated TV collection of JACKASS, and all 7 movies: JACKASS THE MOVIE, it's sequels, and BAD GRANDPA!

For a chance to win this prize, just get in this shopping cart and light this pack of firecrackers while we push you downhill. If you make it across the Interstate without hitting a single car, then...

Excuse us a moment, our lawyers are trying to get our attention.

via GIPHY

Right then. We're back.

So it seems our insurance doesn't want to carry us any longer if we proceed as planned. But we have an alternative method. It's not nearly as fun (or funny) but it keeps us in business.

With the rains of Spring behind us, the clouds are parting and the visibility gets a light brighter, giving way to clear blue...

Look!

Up in the sky!

Is that a bird? A plane?

No, it's our June Bombshell, St. Louis Superman, aka Charlee Soffer!

Please give a warm welcome to our newest...

Critical Blast Bombshell, June 2018

Charlee Soffer

Lana Lang & Classic Superboy
Smallville Superfest

What is your interest in cosplay?

Cirsova Publishing has teamed up with Little Rocket Publications on the eve of the 35^th anniversary of Michael Tierney’s Wild Stars® to publish a special edition of WILD STARS III: TIME WARMAGEDDON.

Faster-than-light scouts are arriving at distant suns to discover that they have been “replaced” by white dwarfs and their planets have gone missing… Terraformers find a world that shows signs of previous human colonization: who were those people and where did they go? The saga of the Wild Stars continues as former-President Bully Bravo seeks to solve these mysteries while pursued by an evil pirate queen and a rogue time-traveler trying to create a god.

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.