A promotional image gives us our first glance at what Spider-Man will look like in the Fall 2007 CW Network Spectacular Spider-Man animated series. A silhouette of the Vulture and Doc Ock’s arms can be seen in the image as well. Similar in style to “The Batman” and “Legion of Super Heroes,” this Spidey show should appeal to young and old fans alike.
Very cool looking. Can’t wait to see this one in the fall.
Heroes by themselves are not necessarily exciting. If they didn’t have a villain to face, what fun would there be? Was Luke Skywalker more exciting on Tatooine, whining about going to Toshi Station or was he more exciting once Darth Vader captured Princess Leia and killed Obi-Wan?
The same applies to superheroes. A great hero has great villains. Spider-Man has the Green Goblin, Doc Ock, Venom. Superman has Lex Luthor, Bizarro, and Doomsday. Many superheroes have an evil version of themselves to square off against. For a great look at the many types of villains your favorite superheroes have to face, check out I Love Opposite Numbers over at the Newsarama blog.
Over Father’s Day weekend, there were two big comic conventions, Heroes-Con in Charlotte and Wizard World Philly. There were tons of announcements over the weekend, but the best one has to be Dwayne McDuffie taking over writing chores on Justice League of America.
McDuffie was the guiding force on the Static Shock animated series from a few years ago and also a major contributor to the Justice League Unlimited animated (and comic) series. Both of those shows were excellent and should hopefully entice fans of those former series to check out Justice League.
Recently McDuffie penned the final three issues of the Firestorm series and is currently writing the Fantastic four at Marvel. The few issues of that series have been better than any in recent memory and really captured the “family” feel the Fantastic Four should have.
With McDuffie writing flagship books at Marvel and DC, I predict a bidding war for exclusive rights to start any day now. I’ll go ahead and say that I hope DC wins, because I do like the Justice League better than the Fantastic Four and I’d expect McDuffie to add Firestorm to the team, now that his solo series has been canceled. Plus, the fact that Dan DiDio (DC Executive Editor) stated that “Dwayne is the writer of Justice League now until he doesn’t want to write it anymore,” is exciting.
Too many comic series these days have writers that stay for only a certain amount of issues. Big name writers sign up for short arcs on popular books. Brad Meltzer is finishing up a 13 issue stint on JLA just before McDuffie. Joss Whedon is finishing up a 24 issue arc on Astonishing X-Men. While I think both arcs have been great, these short runs make for uneven reading. Let’s see someone take on 110+ issues of X-Men or JLA like Brian Michael Bendis has done on Ultimate Spider-Man or the 70+ issues that Geoff Johns has done on Justice Society of America.
Comics are exciting and unique because they are a monthly, continuing work of fiction. It’s nice to see a new writer come in with fresh ideas, but even more exciting is watching a dedicated writer with a love of the character(s) continually develop those characters over years and various story arcs. I think that’s what made me love comics so much when I received my first issue (#172) of the Uncanny X-Men by subscription almost 25 years ago.
Episode #24 of the 1980-1982 shorts.
Bizarro attacks the SuperFriends by turning them into Bizarro-Superheroes that think like him. He also exposes Superman to Red Kryptonite, which causes him to grow extra arms and legs. Superman manages to stop Bizarro by exposing him to Blue Kryptonite.
No, it’s not something from the upcoming Transformers movie, Drobo is an easy to use, RAID backup replacement for your PC.
Drobo is the world’s first storage robot, providing fully automated, infinitely expandable storage that safeguards against drive failure and data corruption. Fully automatic protection: Drobo is self-healing; when a hard drive fails, it reconfigures data to ensure it is once again protected – all without any human intervention. Infinitely expandable capacity: Drobo is self-improving; just add a new drive, or upsize a smaller one, and you’ll instantly increaseoverall protected capacity without needing to do anything else. Effortless storage management: Drobo is self-aware, knowing where your data is and how to heal or improve itself in the event of trouble – Drobo takes the pain out of managing large amounts of data. System requirements: Apple Macintosh OS-X 10.4 or greater, Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003, XP or Vista.
The problem with most RAID arrays is that that all the hard drives have to the same. If they support different sizes, the array will only store the amount of the smallest drive. The cool thing about the Drobo is that you can use any Serial ATA drive you want. Use three drives of different sizes and the next time you see a Hard Drive on sale for cheap, replace the smallest drive with a larger one. Very cool. Now, too bad they’re $499 (no drives included). Let’s get that down to about $249.