Tag Archives: comics

Logan review

11 Saturday Mar 2017

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Ew… no! Blood! Unngh!

by Thom Yee

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Logan images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

The last time we checked in on a Wolverine movie was in 2013’s The Wolverine, a small, self-contained little story where Wolverine travelled to Japan and was charged with the care of the rich heiress and granddaughter of a soldier whose life he saved in World War II that quickly and drastically grew less small and less self-contained when that same soldier wound up betraying Wolverine in a bid to steal his youth-imbuing healing factor. I know that’s a bit more than a spoiler (and a really long and convoluted sentence), but, frankly, eff that movie and its weird Viper-snake-ladies, its ridiculous Silver Samurais, and its jump-right-off-the-rails-of-sanity third act after its much more even-toned first two [acts]. Besides The Wolverine’s bullet train sequence, there is almost no reason to see that movie, at least not in its entirety. Continue reading →

Doctor Strange review

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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The real magic is in the places you’re not looking

by Thom Yee

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Doctor Strange images courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Magic is one of those things in life that’s hard to define in concrete terms. That’s kind of what makes it magic actually, that it can do almost anything in a way that surprises and delights. Who knows if magic is a part of real life (or what “real life” even means sometimes), but we feel like it is, and maybe that’s enough to make it real. It’s only when you start to pin it down, when you conjure it with words and spells and gestures and avatars, when you start to give it real weight and meaning, develop it into a system, designate its boundaries, and accept it as simply part of everything else going on that it becomes a bit more of a science, something cold and clinical to be broken down and parsed. That’s when it starts to lose whatever it is that made it special and it can almost become laborious. Continue reading →

Luke Cage (Season 1) review

22 Saturday Oct 2016

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I see these kids now with “Christmas” printed on their shirts. Pfft. Now Luke Cage, he’s a man that can teach you how to say “Sweet Christmas”!

by Thom Yee

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Luke Cage images courtesy of Marvel Television, ABC Studios, and Netflix

It’s been two shows, three seasons, and, really, only about a year and a half since this little Netflix corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) first started with the adventures of a blind lawyer doing his best (i.e., violence) to clean up Hell’s Kitchen, and in that time a lot has changed in the shared Marvel Universe. Tony Stark’s overzealous efforts to protect the world led to the destruction of a small Eastern European country, Inhumans are (apparently) popping up all over the place, and superhumans have been forced to register with the world’s’ governments and submit to their approval. But you wouldn’t know any of that if you’ve stuck exclusively to the Marvel Netflix shows and their focus on the street-level stories of the MCU, and with Luke Cage, the third and latest of them, things have started to get a little… funky. Continue reading →

Suicide Squad review

13 Saturday Aug 2016

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Oh, I get it. Sometimes we’re all bad guys. Oooohhh.

by Thom Yee

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Suicide Squad images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

“That looks stupid”, I thought to myself. “A comicbook about a group of people gathered together to kill themselves?” That was my first exposure to the weird little team called Suicide Squad. I didn’t buy it. Not that first time and not even years later after I’d either found out or figured out that the “Suicide” in Suicide Squad referred to the nature of the missions the team went on rather than each team members’ propensity for ending their own lives.

Suicide Squad is one of those rare “big two” (i.e., DC or Marvel) comicbook properties that I’m not very familiar with, probably because its origins lie squarely in the 1980s and almost definitely because it’s a book about bad guys. You see I’m one of those weird eggs that’s never found the bad guys more compelling than the good, and while that might be an odd thing to hear, at least for comicbook kids like me back in the ‘90s, it was only natural. Continue reading →

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition review

16 Saturday Jul 2016

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There’s a saying in Metropolis — I know it’s in Gotham, probably in Metropolis — Fool me once, shame on… on you, fool me twice… you can’t get fooled again…!?

by Thom Yee

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Once again we stand here, soon after the release of a version of Batman v Superman, and once again I feel compelled to begin this review by defending its predecessor, Man of Steel, if only for just a little bit. You can skip to the next section if you just don’t want to hear it.

This time, I’d like to start with some of the most common, most consistently held criticisms I’ve heard of Superman, what it is that makes him such an easily outgrown and discarded as a character from the perspective of maturity: Continue reading →

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows review

11 Saturday Jun 2016

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Since when were ninjas so bad at hiding?

by Thom Yee

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows images courtesy of Paramount Pictures

I don’t know what kids today do after school, what with their STEM programs and their social responsibility and their parents who actually pay attention to them, but back in my day, a lot of us kids took martial arts classes after school, and no matter what our parents may have thought about us getting good exercise or developing a hobby built on a system of discipline, respect, and honour, most of us were only taking those classes for one reason: To beat up other kids.

The thing you have to understand about being a kid in the early ‘90s is that we were coming up only in the afterglow of the truly great action movies of the ‘80s, and so that spirit of almost mindless killing was slowly being eroded while also being finely tempered against the more spiritual elements of what we assumed was the Eastern philosophies of violence as a last resort.  For kids who took martial arts, that usually still meant a lot of fighting, just not fighting with the intent to kill. Continue reading →

X-Men: Apocalypse review

04 Saturday Jun 2016

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Let slip the dogs of war, and just cry, Havok

by Thom Yee

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X-Men: Apocalypse images courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Sometimes I still can’t believe what a genius thing that early ‘90s X-Men cartoon wound up being.  It’s not like it was all that good (in fact it was laughably bad on a regular basis) but it ended up being an unexpectedly strong introduction to many of the bigger, crazier concepts and tropes of superhero comicbooks, and for a generation of ‘90s kids (like me), it was the key gateway to all the time-bending, cosmos-spanning stories that comicbooks, and the X-Men especially, specialize in. In many ways it laid the foundation for the superhero movies we’ve, by and large, enjoyed in the 21st century.  Plus, that theme song: Continue reading →

Legends of Tomorrow – Legendary recap

20 Friday May 2016

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by Thom Yee

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Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×16: “Legendary”

One of the things that got me most excited about Legends of Tomorrow was seeing all of these different superheroes and villains working together, unfettered, in the series’ first teaser trailer. As a comicbook fan whose introduction to the medium was through big, sprawling, and, frankly, confusing books like Crisis on Infinite Earths (a twelve-issue maxi-series that starred multiple iterations of the same character in a story about the destruction and reformation of the DC Universe’s multiverse into one single Earth), I developed an early appetite for gigantic collections of heroes in massive group shots working together against a common bad guy as drawn by classic artists like George Perez, so scenes involving almost all of the Berlanti-verse heroes that have developed over the years in raids on bad guy compounds or flying at top speed through the sky hit right where I live when it comes to this genre. Continue reading →