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"It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good," the expression goes, meaning that most bad situations are at least good for someone. Thus it is that with most events of impact, a canny person can predict where the money will flow and try to get ahead of it. The greatest example of this would be the baby boom; hindsight shows how this influx to the population caused economic grown in various markets as that demographic reached different stages -- baby supplies at first, fast food in their youth, durable goods in their adulthood, financial planning in their retirement years.

Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, Critical Blast has been meeting regularly with comic shop owners through online roundtable meetings to discuss how they are finding ways to stay afloat. Some stores are in states where business closures have been mandated. Others are in states where they are open but without new product because the sole distributor for comic books, Diamond Comics Distribution, closed down, leaving those stores essentially closed as well.

With new distributors entering the game, thanks to intervention on behalf of DC Comics, we meet once again with Dave Dyer of Cosmic Comics in Belleville, Illinois, Michael Tierney of Collector's Edition in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Uel Carter of Fantastic Comics in Berkeley, California to catch up on how the latest shifts in this new and untamed business landscape have affected them.

With a large portion of the country locked down economically due to COVID-19 restrictions, comic shop retailers find themselves in an unusual predicament. While many shops are open in states that have not had mandatory shutdowns, they nevertheless find themselves without product due to the shutdown at Diamond Comics Distribution, the lynchpin of the entire direct market system.

Across the country, small businesses, deemed non-essential, have been shut down. And while some states have not issued such orders due to their lack of cases of the coronavirus COVID-19, may are still feeling the pinch.

Clint Eastwood's RICHARD JEWELL is a compelling look at the actual events of 1996 and the bombing that took place at the Olympic Games in Atlanta Georgia.

When an AT&T security guard named Richard Jewell spotted a suspicious backpack, he insists police investigate it. This was a pre-9/11 world, where people weren't as hyper-aware of abandoned knapsacks and packages. Inside the pack were three very large pipe bombs, and the evacuation of the area is ordered. When the bomb went off, 111 people were injured, and Alice Hawthorne (44, Albany, Georgia) and Melih Uzunyol (40, Turkey) lost their lives. But the devastation could have been much worse. By all rights, Richard Jewel was a hero.

Until the FBI and the media decided he wasn't, and began profiling him as the person who planted the bomb in order to set himself up to look like a hero.

It's been a while since indie comics pro Tess Fowler has claimed another career in the comics industry. That dry spell may be over now, depending on how events shape up after today's astonishing announcement from DC Comics writer/artist Sean Gordon Murphy, the driving force behind the best-selling BATMAN: WHITE KNIGHT franchise.

In fact, reception to the WHITE KNIGHT line has been so encouraging to DC that they gave him the reigns to his own little universe -- the Murphyverse -- with power to hire talent for issues that would appear between extended runs.

There's a power vacuum at the hallowed halls of DC Comics, home to supehero icons such as Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman. On Friday, February 21, a late-day announcement was made that Dan DiDio was no longer the co-publisher of the stable of titles.

Speculation immediately spread throughout the fandom, wondering what this might mean for DC Comics. What was the reason for the sudden departure? Would a replacement be named? What impact would this have on DiDio's pet project, the heavily touted "5G" or "Generation 5" launch coming later in the year?

While those are questions for which we await answers with bated breath, we thought it would be a fun little exercise to look at some of the candidates in the industry that might find themselves suddenly getting a call to interview for the open position.

The titular EVERGLADE ANGELS are a girls' baseball team whose trip to the championships leads them into the arms of masked killers deep in the Florida swamps.

It's 1997, and the Everglade Angels have clinched their trip to the playoffs, due in no small part to the outstanding performance of Gemma Walsh, daughter of team coach Abigail Walsh. Gemma's definitely the alpha among the team players, the main ones being Naomi, Lacey, Grace and Portia. The five girls decide to drive themselves to the championship game, and this is where their adventure takes a wrong turn -- literally.

Finding themselves lost in a small town, the girls get diverted to a party -- except there's no party there. Instead, there are masked men with weapons, and a strange chemical. They abduct Gemma, as the rest run off for their lives, only to return later to attempt a rescue.

It cost 84.5 million to make.

It grossed about $81 million in its opening weekend.

Which has executives at Warner Brothers scratching their heads and wondering: Why is BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN not making money?

It couldn't be the wordy title. It couldn't be that the movie posters had all the mass appeal of a 14-year-old girl's scrapbook project inspired by Botticelli. It couldn't be that the few ads that were shown revealed the well-known intellectual property characters to be even less like their historical counterparts than any prior DC Extended Universe or televised Arrowverse character. It couldn't be that the R rating shut out a large segment of a target audience that could be remotely interested in a superhero property (if, indeed, BIRDS OF PREY was intended to be one).

Sylvester Stallone has confirmed via his Twitter account that the greenlight has officially been given for a comic book extension of THE EXPENDABLES, the action franchise that specializes in reuniting actors from classic action films into the ultimate action team-up adventure.

That, in and of itself, is big news.

What is perhaps bigger news is the venue selected for the venture: an Indiegogo campaign, managed by start-up publisher Richard C. Meyer. If you don't know the name, you probably haven't been following the comics industry online for the past few years. Meyer is one of the most recognizable names in the loose-knit and frequently highly contentious confederation of independent creators collectively known as Comicsgate, an entity that has been attacked from without almost as much as it has from within.

By Alain Ghiai

CEO of GlobeX Data Ltd.

Not a day seems to go by without reading about the latest cyberattack.  With the holiday season upon us, the stakes grow higher as digital criminals exploit the increase of e-commerce activity from consumers.

Anyone who loves movies would love the idea of The Irishman; a movie that brings together Pacino, De Niro, Scorsese, and Pesci in a story about the Mafia. The Irishman marks the ninth movie Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese have worked together.  It is their first collaboration since the 1995 hit film, “Casino”.  One of the best ways to relive that masterpiece is by playing online casino games. You can visit 888casino to engage in some exhilarating gambling action that mimics some of the gambling seen in the iconic movie. By revisiting this classic flick, you can prepare yourself for the 2019 masterpiece which is already tipped to be a big winner in terms of awards. The Irishman generated a lot of hype from the word “go” and now the time has come to assess what this movie is all about.

I had, of course, heard of the VERONICA MARS television series. And when Rob Thomas made history with his record-setting Kickstarter to make a VERONICA MARS movie, we were all over it, and reviewed the film upon its release. But the movie is, admittedly, my only exposure to the world of VERONICA MARS and her mystery-solving entourage. So we came into what is being touted as the First Season (it's chronologically the fourth) with an unmuddied opinion, free from canon and shipping.

What we got was, we thought, a pretty entertaining mystery series featuring a quick-witted private investigator (played by KRISTEN BELL) and her equally on-the-ball father, Keith Mars (ENRICO COLANTONI). She's in love with Logan Echolls (JASON DOHRING), who returns in this first episode from some top-secret trouble spot on the globe, and in possession of a set of skills that come in handy when Veronica has to crack a case.

It's the movie "they" didn't want you to see -- the film that glorified killing to such an extent, it was expected the easily influenced would take it as a training manual and copy the techniques to commit mass acts of violence.

But, thus far, the only reported incident requiring police intervention involved two men arrested for smoking during the film. (No word if the film was at midnight, or if the two smokers watching JOKER were using marijuana. Thank the Steve Miller Band for my going the long way around for that pun.)

So was all the media hysteria for nothing, or was there a predictable risk that JOKER could set in motion a wave of violence among those already suffering mental illness?

In all of comics history, there has perhaps not been a comic so divisive, so defended, and so derided as Ethan Van Sciver's CYBERFROG: BLOODHONEY. And all that before the book was even printed. Seen as one of the hallmark titles of the amorphous ComicsGate movement, the title and creator have taken heat over timeliness and finances. The book raised nearly a million dollars in pre-sales through multiple Indiegogo crowdfunding efforts, and arrived just shy of being one year late of its estimated release date.

This week, the book began arriving in the hands of those who had backed it, and almost immediately new rumors began to pop up: poor paper quality, water damage, digest-sized. None of that is true. CYBERFROG: BLOODHONEY is of standard dimensions, and over 80 pages. The cover is very sturdy, the paper is of better stock than your average floppy, and the ink is smear-resistant.

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.

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.

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.

ComicsGate and GamerGate. The boogeymen that allow the geek and nerd communities to partake in outrage culture continues to be the gift that keeps on giving in that regard, despite the fact that most of the world has forgotten what GamerGate was about (for which Zoe Quinn is no doubt grateful) and ComicsGate exists now largely as a hashtag to market the ideology behind the comics they produce and, yes, deliver.

Not that this stops Anthony Gramuglia, writer at large. In a recent piece for The Mary Sue, Gramuglia conducts “interviews” with a handful of people with axes to grind. The Spectre of Hate is raised more than once, and the fearmongering goes into high gear in order to gin up the clicks. He expands his reach from ComicsGate to the more recent AnimeGate, spun out of accusations against DragonballZ: Broly actor, Vic Mignogna, and the resulting defamation suit that followed.

It seems no reality show goes on for very long without one or more of the stars making news for reasons other than the show. HOUSEWIVES OF BEVERLY HILLS went through the drama of Joe and Theresa Giudice having to serve sentences for financial fraud. SURVIVOR's Richard Hatch put his time into the system for failing to pay taxes on his million-dollar winnings.

Now the judicial spotlight is on Todd and Julie Chrisley, the leads of USA Network's CHRISLEY KNOWS BEST. The Chrisleys, and former CPA Peter Tarantino, were all charged August 14, 2019 in Georgia’s Northern District. The charges are numerous, and include conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud, actual wire fraud and tax evasion.

Somewhere, original reality star focal point Al Capone is chuckling: "They never learn."