Ultimate Avengers Preview Clip Online

Two weeks prior to release, a preview clip for Ultimate Avengers straight to DVD movie can be found here.

It's looking pretty good from my end, the art is detailed to a level you'd expect and the animation is seemingly smooth. The preview dialogue is promising and voice casting well done. The name change seems due to a change in tone from The Ultimates comic, with the show looking like it's going to be dark in a campy way, as you find in most action orientated TV shows. Hopefully there'll be a few more tidbits up before the release.

Black Gas #1 Avatar Press

Picked this up on a whim after seeing Warren Ellis' name on the cover, and boy am I glad! From the get go the book feels like a familiar slasher horror film, smart-ass comments coming from a teenage couple as they stroll up the docks of a tiny island off the east coast of America. The characters and their roles within the book are instantly recognisable, though they don't feel like standard, cookie-cutter cliche slasher characters. They're likable and uncontrived. The dialogue is consistently fantastic, each character definitely has their own voice and th pacing of the book is spot on. This was a fantastic set up issue, I'll certainly be following the rest of the series and I urge everyone else with smidgen of bloodlust to join me.

Rann/Thanagar War Special Review

*Spoiler Warning!*

I found Rann/Thanagar War to be the least interesting and most convoluted storywise of the 4 Infinite Crisis lead ups, so my expectations for the special were considerably less than orbital. The appearance of Animal Man and the transformation of Kyle Rayner were all that held any promise for me, but I'll get to those later. I don't remember the art for the mini being bad, but panels in this special had me sighing and groaning every few flicks of the page. The level of facial detail in some panels was just plain poor and I'm not talking about the space battle spreads where they're trying to cram as many characters as possible in. Panels with close ups of single characters seemed incredibly half arsed at times, especially if you didn't belong to the less fair sex. And don't get me started on Kilowog. Actually, I'll start me on Kilowog, he looked like Porky Pig had excused himself half way through a face tuck and nose job scene in a Bugs cartoon to usurp Daffy's place as the comical space faring Looney Toon. But enough about the art, the plotting wasn't really that bad and at times actually hurtled along quickly enough for me to feel involved, even though the panels were sometimes clunkily placed on the pages.

Okay, I hear ya already, I didn't like the mini so obviously I'm not gonna like the special, right? So let's get back round to the reason I picked it up in the first place, Rayner and Barker. As I suspected, Buddy was seemingly only included due to Morrison's involvement in the grand scheme, so Buddy ends up doing his best Mister Sulu impression the whole time. Here's to hoping IC #5 contains at least some little nod to Buddy's dealings with the multiverse. So on to the whole Ion thing, it played out pretty much as expected - great loss leading to great power, but admittedly I am intrigued by the Guardians involvement. My guess is that they'll use Jade's mutating of the Ion powers to stop him from being the previously seen omnipotent Ion. Whatever, as a Kyle fanboy I'm obligated to pick up the first few issues.

At this point in time, I really want this whole Infinite Crisis thing to roll the fuck on.