Tag Archives: superheroes

film

Film Review: Golden Bat (1966)

When looking at the 1966 Golden Bat film, it’s interesting to see how much it innovates – if not outright invents – in the realm of cinematic hero tokusatsu. The main hero – Ogun Bat (Golden Bat) is widely credited as basically being the first 20th-century superhero, with characters from DC having parallel evolution in the US – his cinematic counterpart innovates considerably more then he invents, but those innovations are nothing to sneeze at.

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Video games

Video Game Review: Marvel’s Midnight Suns

When I put out my list of New Year’s Resolutions for games (in addition to Anime), I expected some of these to take a while, even the ones that were joined in progress. What I did not anticipate was getting iced in for a week during Awesome Games Done Quick, so I decided to spend some of that time (since I wasn’t working on work), playing a turn-based game on the side, so I could split my attention – and over a week I ended up plowing through what I had left of Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Now, that was about 8 hours a day for 7 days, or about 56 hours, and I was at Act 2, so I still had a ways to go. However, this does give me some high hopes for meeting my Resolutions for the year.

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Role Playing Games

Supers RPG Experimentation: A-Ko

So, with tabletop RPGs, I like to pick out a few character concepts to use for creating characters to help learn the system – often based on anime, movies, TV shows, or novels – trying to emulate those characters to help learn the system. For example, for Fantasy games I tend to go with the Heroes of Lodoss. Recently I’ve picked up a couple of supers RPGs – the Marvel Multiverse RPG and the Sentinels Comics, and I’m creating some test characters in the process of trying to learn the system. My first trial run: A-Ko.

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Anime

Fuuto PI: Anime Review

We’ve been getting a fair amount of anime and manga spinoffs of Tokusatsu series lately. The main ones I’ve covered have been the Ultraman manga series and its anime spinoff on Netflix, and Studio Trigger’s Gridman universe series – Gridman and Dynazenon – in addition to ones I haven’t gotten to yet, like the Garo spinoff anime series. This fall’s Fuuto PI (or Fuuto Tantei) is another of those – this time tying in with Kamen Rider W.

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film

Spider-Man: No Way Home: Movie Review

While Spider-Man: No Way Home was intended to be released after Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, it did ultimately come out before that movie, so I felt it was probably a preferable idea to watch this movie before the next Doctor Strange solo film. So, now that I’ve done that (and just after Sony has announced that an extended cut of the movie will be getting a theatrical release in December), it’s time to give my thoughts some. There will be spoilers for the film’s conclusion.

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film

Eternals: Film Review

When various titles were being announced for Phase 4 of the MCU, one of the titles announced was Eternals, based on one of Jack Kirby’s most gonzo concepts that he contributed to Marvel comics (outside of maybe his expanded comic series based on 2001: A Space Odyssey, which lead to the introduction of Machine Man). With the announcement of Chloe Zhao as the director, the film felt a lot like this was going to be the much more odd and out-there film in the MCU, in ways that were different from how Thor: Ragnarok was. And, well, yeah, it is.

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Television

Hawkeye (Season 1): TV Review

The next installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has wrapped on Television, this time with a solo(-ish) series focused on Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and introducing the character of Kate Bishop/Hawkeye II to the MCU, all set around Christmas in New York City. There will be some discussion of spoilers from Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow, both of which are also spoiled over the course of the show.

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Manga, News

My Hero Academia Manga – Caught Up!

I’ve finally gotten caught up on the My Hero Academia Manga in the Shonen Jump app, and want to give my thoughts on where the manga is now. As a warning – this post will contain spoilers for content after the conclusion of season 5, up to where the manga is now and will include speculation on what will be covered in Season 6. Spoilers will begin below the cut.

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Anime, News

My Hero Academia Season 5: Anime Review

From the discussions I’ve seen online as the season went on, My Hero Academia Season 5 is probably the most divisive season of the show thus far, between those who have been reading the manga, and those who have been watching the show, and a lot of that comes down to the decisions made around the final arc of the season, the My Villain Academia arc. It’s not that the season is bad, it’s that the narrative decisions that were made about where they would include that arc in the season was very controversial.

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