by A.J. Focht
Last Wednesday saw the first big batch of DC’s new 52 released. Reviews were as mixed as they were for Justice League #1 the previous week. A few of the comics were praised here and there, but there seems to be one clear winner for the week. Animal Man #1 has caught everyone’s attention, and I have yet to hear a bad word about it. For reviews on all of last week’s releases, check out Nerd Bastards‘ full report.
Potential major *SPOILERS* for The Avengers have been leaked. If you don’t want to know who the big secret villain is, just skip the next paragraph.
For those of you still with me, Comic Book Movie has gotten inside information confirming that Thanos will be the remaining villain. The plot leaks suggest that Thanos and Loki have struck some kind of deal so that Thanos gets the Skrulls as his army, and Loki gets his hands on the Infinity Gauntlet.
With so much history surrounding the comic worlds these days, it’s not surprising to see comic museums popping up to preserve it. The Comics and Animation Museum in Hangzhou, China will put the rest to shame with its unique architecture alone. The design for the $125 million museum consists of eight interlocking speech bubbles that will allow text images to be projected onto the outside. Inside the balloons, visitors will walk along spiral walkways running up and around the balloon as they see the exhibits.
Speaking of preserving the past, Spielberg fans can rest easy knowing that he will not be making any changes to our favorite classics anytime soon. After the changes to the Star Wars series on Blu-Ray were discovered there was first a mass controversy, then the inevitable nerd rage, and finally the hilarious internet jokes about it. While we’ve come to expect such horrid changes from George Lucas (which include Vader’s added “Noooo!” and Greedo shooting at Han), Spielberg has assured us he learned his lesson after changing E.T., and that any future re-releases of his films will contain only the original versions.
Does everybody remember those awesome self-lacing sneakers from Back to the Future? Well Nike released 1500 pairs of shoes, inspired by them for auction at nikemag.ebay.com. Proceeds from the limited edition sneakers will go to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to help in the fight against Parkinson’s. While I would love a pair myself, prices skyrocketed to well over a $1000 in the first day.
More zombie news crept up on the internet this week. New posters, and teaser trailers for The Walking Dead were just released. There has also been some leaked footage from World War Z floating around. With Halloween just around the corner, expect an infestation of zombie related news, promos, and spoilers for the next month.
Zombies aren’t the only things with a taste for human flesh that are invading your TV. French studio Guamont has put a Hannibal Lecter TV series into development. With shows like Dexter getting so much acclaim, it was only a matter of time before we started seeing more serial killers on prime-time.
Nintendo held their big press conference leading up to the Tokyo Game Show. With several announcements concerning the 3DS, the majority of the news boils down to: 3DS owners helped Nintendo beta test a product. To late after the fact, Nintendo has realized that the 3DS has several bugs and is making some necessary changes, biggest of which include an accessory for a second circular slide pad. The accessory will require its own AA batteries, making it a money drain right there. Unless you really want one, I suggest waiting for Nintendo to realize they need to just revamp the unit, and built the second pad in.
One last bit of news for everyone, remember Gliese 581 g? It was that supposedly habitable planet found a while back, well recent signs point to it not existing. But don’t worry to much about that, HD 85512 has been discovered to take its place. HD 85512 is a super-earth (20x the size of earth) in its solar system’s habitable zone. Based on early information, the planet has all the potential to carry life that earth had. So once we get around to breaking light speed, and developing intergalactic travel, we might have a place to go (assuming we don’t decimate the Earth before then).
