Everyone loves a good comeback story, and the story here is really simple. Cheesy SciFi TV show airs and picks up a passionate fanbase. Cheesy SciFi TV show gets canceled and its cast seems doomed to spend the rest of their careers answering hokey questions from fans at conventions or opening supermarkets with their worn out catch phrases. That is until pacifist aliens with no concept of fiction mistake the actors for the characters and equipping them with real life versions of the weapons, gadgets and starship right off the show, recruit them to save their race.

Years before Tropic Thunder or Star Trek’s own comeback, Galaxy Quest was already there. It’s not Star Trek, though it could be, but with Star Trek itself making a big comeback at the box office, it’s long past time for Galaxy Quest to get its due. Ten years ago, while the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises were busy killing off the goodwill of their fans, Galaxy Quest appeared out of nowhere as a breath of fresh air bringing with it the energy and enthusiasm that mainstream Science Fiction movie franchises had lost along the way. Look back at Galaxy Quest and you can see the genesis of Star Trek’s revival, from the bright white eggshell sets, to the amazing diversity of aliens and that sense of awe, the “gosh factor” that kicks in when everyone from Tim Allen’s Jason Nesmith on down actually sets foot inside a starship.

All of those things are part of why we watch Science Fiction movies in the first place, and Galaxy Quest brought them back into theaters, ten years before Star Trek did, backed by that mixture of uneasiness giving way to absolute enthusiasm that sums up what being a fan is all about. So it’s only fair that ten years later, Galaxy Quest is making its own comeback in a well deserved Deluxe DVD edition.

Though the concept of Galaxy Quest started life as a more explicit take off on Star Trek, as the creative process developed (ably chronicled on the DVD in The Story of Galaxy Quest) it came to take on a vivid life of its own, and while the performances of Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver or Sam Rockwell might remind you of famous Science Fiction characters and their portayers, they stand on their own as completely entertaining and believable characters on their own SciFi journey of faith.

Though this is a cast with some faces many will recognize, and others they won’t; no one actor steals the show. Instead they all come together with everyone getting their own moment. From Sam Rockwell’s comic nervousness, to Tony Shalhoub’s unearthly sleepy calm to Enrico Colantoni’s childishly enthusiastic adoration to Tim Allen’s bluff unrelenting confidence, this is a cast that really delivers.

And while Galaxy Quest is filled with inside jokes running across multiple Science Fiction shows and movies, the movie is easily enjoyable even without being able to get all that “inside baseball”, because it plays both as straightforward identifiable comedy and a heroic narrative, side by side. From the opening scenes, the cast know that what they’re doing is ridiculous, and so does the audience, and yet over the scope of the movie, the cast and the viewers come to believe in the ridiculous, and make that journey of faith with them.

“Never Give Up, Never Surrender” is the tagline of Galaxy Quest, both the fictional Galaxy Quest and the meta-fictional Galaxy Quest, holds by that belief. And what seems like a goofy slogan gets taken to heart as Jason Nesmith, Gwen DeMarco, Alexander Dane and Guy Fleegman find that Galaxy Quest is becoming real around them, thanks to the naive faith of a childlike alien race, of their fans and finally of themselves.

Galaxy Quest may have an alien planet, faster than light travel, a giant rockmonster, futuristic weapons and ships… but the story at the heart of it is a very human one, about believing in yourself.

The first time out in theaters, Galaxy Quest did a respectable amount of business and then faded away, the way cult classics usually do. Its comeback as a Deluxe Edition DVD gives anyone who never saw it a chance to discover it for the first time, and people who remember seeing it and enjoying it, a chance to get the full package. From the gorgeous holographic cover that just seems to shoot out at you, to the many extras and specials inside, the Deluxe Edition DVD feels like as much of a labor of love as the movie itself.

Though it has a healthy dose of parody and self-parody, Galaxy Quest also boasted groundbreaking visual effects and alien makeup for its time, with work from ILM and Stan Winston, that still hold up really well today. From the giant convention scenes to the gleaming interiors and exteriors of the NSEA Protector, to the Rockmonster smashing his way through or the near collision between the Protector and Earth, this is a movie that was meant to look good, not just feel good. Which means if you’ve been clinging to a dog eared VHS of Galaxy Quest like I have, it’s time to trade up to the Deluxe Edition.

The Galaxy Quest Deluxe Edition DVD’s specials such as “Never Give Up, Never Surrender: The Intrepid Crew of the NSEA Protector”, “Actors in Space” and “Historical Documents: The Story of Galaxy Quest” take you inside to show you just how much of a labor of love it really was. And there’s even an unbelievable bit with Sigourney Weaver rapping. And of course that’s not mentioning the deleted scenes and just the good feeling that comes from seeing an often overlooked SciFi classic get the treatment it deserves.

So for this episode of Dollhouse’s guiding paradigm, we’ve got 1 princess (or maybe 2 if we count November) and 2 princes, one of whom is an FBI agent and the other is a serial killer doll with a composite memory and the personality and looks of a stoner. The message is that the princess should save herself, the appropriate manfeminist message you would expect from a Joss Whedon series, but the upshot is that Alpha restores or gives Caroline some kind of memory, and then leads her out of there. Alan Tudyk played his part well enough that even though I had seen spoilers that said he was Alpha, I assumed that Tudyk had been brought in to play another part entirely, until he reverted to Alpha form. That isn’t to say that Dollhouse 1x11 Briar Rose makes much sense. It doesn’t. Paul Ballard’s plan makes less than no sense. He’s out to grab and rescue Echo, even though she’s still mindwiped, leaving him with a mindless doll. Unless he’s been programmed with a compulsion, this really makes no sense. Alpha’s plan doesn’t make a ton of sense either. Why bother going through a complicated charade and enlisting an environmental specialist to go down into the Dollhouse with Agent Ballard, when he could just as easily have done it all himself. But who ever claimed Dollhouse ever made sense in the first place?

Well I’ve got to give Smallville credit for one thing, they may have jacked the plot for Buffy Season 5, but they’ve done a much better job with the alternating human to world destroyer big bad thing, than Buffy ever did. That’s not to say that Smallville Season 8 hasn’t lagged a lot, particularly anything involving the post-Lex Luthorcorp or Green Arrow, but the series does make a convincing case that it can keep going ad infinitum. Which if the CW has anything to say about it, is exactly what will happen. Even if Clark is wearing a dress and blonde wig, two seasons on. Smallville 8x20 Beast does go back to the usual abused woman storyline that teen oriented shows constantly chuck in to educate their base demographic that having a controlling abusive boyfriend is a bad idea, but it still works well enough, if only because Chloe manages to be convincingly rational, while behaving irrationally, and avoids the Lifetime river of tears moments you would usually expect to see thrown in here. Evil Medic slash Doomsday has meanwhile covered the ground from whiny to self-entitled sociopath, and by the time the season finale comes around, I’m sure we’ll see him kick the crap out of Clark in the season finale, only to have Clark make a comeback in the Season 9 opener, as he usually does. Chloe’s fate will probably be up in the air until negotiations work themselves out with the actress. Considering that the result of the negotiations turned Chloe into the center of the storylines for Season 8, I’d say that the producers may not be willing to bend over that far backward again.

What if you remade Grand Theft Auto starring the Hulk? That’s the not so secret premise of The Incredible Hulk game. A Sandbox game with Wanted levels, selective missions and lots of easter eggs to find scattered around the Marvel Universe version of Manhattan, The Incredible Hulk game is a hybrid between a platformer and Grand Theft Auto, incorporating many of the latter’s gameplay features. The problem is that the game borrows both the good and the bad, giving you a large city to play with and saddles you with boring missions, some of which require you to escort or protect whiny and annoying characters and their lab equipment all within a narrow time limit. And for any game designers taking notes, that’s the difference between imitating Grand Theft Auto and learning the lessons of Grand Theft Auto.

Despite many of the annoying missions, The Incredible Hulk still boasts a ridiculously fun concept, giving you a somewhat smaller version of Manhattan to play with. Climb the Empire State, King Kong style or tear off a lampost and swing it around as a club while battling a giant 10 story robot sent by the evil Paragon corporation. Fight City Hall by smashing it to pieces, every building is destructible, or race through Central Park leaping over the trees.

But like most sandbox games, there’s only so much freedom you can take before you get bored, and while The Incredible Hulk offers an incredible setting, it doesn’t do very much with it. The missions run the gamut from the redundant to the frustrating and miss the point of what the Hulk is all about, which isn’t taking cell phone calls and escorting scientists around a map. The in game voice narration from Ed Norton doesn’t help by reminding you that is a game tie in with a movie that was equally clueless about the Hulk and its audience.

Like most movie tie in games, you shouldn’t go in expecting too much from The Incredible Hulk. The graphics are shockingly bland and crude. The city, despite featuring both real New York City and imaginary Marvel universe landmarks from the Apollo Theater to the Daily Bugle, is generic. But that doesn’t mean the game still isn’t fun as long as you don’t expect it to offer much beyond the sandbox play. And once you’ve exhausted the fun of jumping off the Chrysler Building or navigating Manhattan by rooftops while dodging armored troopers hunting for you, you’ve also exhausted everything worthwhile about the game.

It’s a new year, a new month and Issue 26 of The Boys which is a lot like Issue 25 of The Boys, except for well not very much. At this point it’s safe to say that Garth Ennis is not just the master of pointless tangent stories, but of writing issue after issue in which nothing happens. Take Issue 26, which features a standoff between two G-Wiz teams, obvious X-Men parodies, you might think that in this issue we might see something like that. Wrong. Next issue maybe, not this old issue.

But we learn something new about the G-Wiz teams from Hughie being undercover there. Right? Wrong. We get some of the same wacky antics we’ve been getting in the previous issues. There’s nothing new here. Nothing new at all, except that Hughie tries to stay on after the bugs have been planted in the hopes of teaching them right from wrong. While Butcher tells him that a Supe is a Supe, a category that for some reason doesn’t include him and Hughie.

About the only halfway worthwhile material involves Annie and Hughie’s ongoing relationship, though the visuals get a lot more graphic than anyone needs to see, but for all that it’s sweet, it’s basically recycled material from previous issues. No new ground is being broken either. Finally Butcher does find something on the hard drives he stole last issue, but we’re never told what. And the investigation into Silver’s suicide leads to a home, but again any developments on that would wind up in some future issue, which at this rate would be somewhere around 2012. Good going.

A potentially half-decent episode that has the gang of three headed to Calabra where the ruins conceal one of the Boxes of Orden, Legend of the Seeker 1x07 Identity is interrupted by the usual wacky shenanigans when Shota stops by to cast a spell that switches appearances between Richard and a doofus living in town who dreams of a life of adventure, instead of domestic bliss.

Shota experiences a vision of Richard dying at the hands of Nass, a heavy who works for Darken Rahl, and is paid in huge barrels of dark eye makeup. What does evil and dark eye makeup have in common, who knows. But there’s a clear overlap. So Shota comes up with an ideal solution, which is to use magic to force them to switch identities. This leaves Richard dealing with a forced arranged marriage, while the doofus tries to hit on Kahlan. Of course it all goes badly, and I don’t just mean the awkward flirting.

Richard doesn’t die, neither does doofus, love triumphs over all, and Nass and by extension Darken Rahl get the boxes of Orden. But in the show’s usual tradition of setting up some nugget about Richard’s identity, as Shota reveals that Kahlan will betray him, to which Bridget Regan reacts with the kind of shock and horror reserved for New York based SAG members. So lots of namedropping, with both Shota and the boxes making a appearance in one episode. And another episode of Legend of the Seeker ends.

Well to give Drafted credit, after issue after issue of predictably plodding plots, Drafted 12 finally delivers the sort of issue worth reading. It doesn’t quite justify the Battlestar Galactica cover comparison quote, but it does turn in a solid narrative beginning with Gabriel and Preston descending down into the earth, deep underground, in pursuit of the worm which is about to nest, even as the lone remaining member of the clergymen and his abductors, come face to face with the Worm and with what’s nesting inside, and it isn’t a whole bunch of other worms, but Audrey, or someone who looks a lot like Audrey and claims to be Audrey, who claims that the Worms are the victims and the aliens who came to Earth are the enemy.

It’s an interesting twist, and the first one that looks set to shake up the narrative a bit. Now the obvious route is that Audrey will prove to be a double or clone of some kind who is part of the Worms’ trap. But Drafted 12 does end on an ominous note with the invasion deferred as the aliens begin to rebuild Earth along Blade Runner lines, a brave new world. Gabriel alone and a handful of the resisters and the last remaining clergyman know the truth forming some kind of resistance. It’s an interesting setup for a second chapter.

Of course the basic gullibility of the characters, which is a problem all throughout Drafted, continues on. When the aliens first came along, most of the characters believe them with no real proof, now a second set of aliens come with a different story, and the characters are just eager to believe the same story. So as Drafted goes on, we might well discover that both alien species are only interested in fighting each other and don’t care about humanity or earth except as a tool to win their war. But the humans will really have to stop believing anything and everything an alien tells them.

With Legend of the Seeker 1x05 Listener, you can almost see an identity forming for the series, which by now obviously involves Richard, Kahlan and Zedd wandering around, bumping into some evil and nefarious deed being perpetrated by Darken Rahl’s minions and after a lot of confusion and difficulties, mainly created by their own poor attempts at solving the problem, finally emerge triumphant.

The Richard Goodkind novels were no great prize, but it’s a sad commentary on Hollywood’s lack of creativity, that the producers felt the need to buy the rights to the novels, only to transform them into the same generic fantasy TV series, they could have just as easily come up with by watching Beastmaster reruns. Still with episodes like Listener and last week’s Brennidon, Legend of the Seeker shows that it’s not Hercules, and while it will never be a great TV show, it can be a passably decent and entertaining one, especially as there’s nothing in the same genre currently on TV.

Legend of the Seeker 1x05 Listener features the usual annoying little kid with super powers who just needs to be loved, but will first spend a lot of time testing everyone’s patience. To the credit of everyone involved, the kid comes off fairly well and so does the plot. While Richard and Kahlan deal with the Listener, Zedd disguises himself to accompany the Dragon Corps, Rahl’s elite guard, while wrestling with his own moral dilemma over the fate of a renegade guard who worships the Seeker. Thanks to a decent child actor and an all around entertaining cast, it all plays out pretty well and the kid is transported to the Sisters of Light, who in this version are not fanatics who imprison gifted men in the Palace of the Prophets, but are some sort of hippy nuns living in a secret valley. So basically Sam Raimi might want to start paying royalties to John Marco instead.

Of course there’s plenty of implausibilities, not the least of which is the idea that Kahlan is in love with Richard, who in this reality looks to be half her age with half of her brains, or well anyone’s brains, and whose only contribution to the quest is a magic sword that was given to him. But that’s the choice the show made, and hopefully at some point they’ll make the choice to have Richard actually grow up.

24 Redemption’s title is meant to refer to Jack Bauer’s need for redemption, but after a missing season on top previous seasons that that have suffered from aimless drifting, it’s the series itself that needs redemption. Unfortunately 24 Redemption doesn’t do much to redeem the series, it does offer Jack Bauer redemption but Jack Bauer, unlike Kiefer Sutherland, doesn’t actually need it.

24 usually takes place in Los Angeles, but for 24 Redemption it instead does the trendy LA thing by heading to Africa where its title character pretends to care about the suffering of children in a fictional African country. Which is of course the ultimate trendy celebrity thing to do. Jack Bauer is at his best in full on action mode, but 24 Redemption starts slowly. Having learned nothing from failed Hollywood “White Action Hero Rescues Africa” movies such as Tears of the Sun or Blood Diamond, 24 inflicts the usual cliches on us.

Jack Bauer, as is traditional after a season, is a shattered man who has taken refuge, this time at a school run by a Special Forces buddy, the oddly Scottish, and generally wasted, Robert Carlyle. Naturally Jack bonds with a young boy. Naturally there’s a good deal of preaching about the problem of child soldiers. By the time the bad guys come on the scene, Jack crustily snaps into action mode, but winds up captured and tortured, and finally carries out a long quest to reach the US embassy with the kids, where he’s taken into custody to appear at a Senate hearing on torture.

In the background, the Hillary Clinton stand in is being sworn in as President, and oddly manages to be more irritating than the real thing. Her smug son has a junkie broker friend who’s involved in money laundering on behalf of terrorists, a plot being masterminded by the sort of disposable evil rich businessman who appears in every episode, and in this case is played by Jon Voight.

24 Redemption is mostly unnecessary, and while it has a handful of good characters and performances, notably Gil Bellows as an unsympathetic US embassy staffer, a corrupt and cowardly UN official and Tony Todd being dragged in to play General Juma, mostly it fails at doing what 24 does best, sticking Jack Bauer in the middle of a fast moving confusing crisis with a ticking clock running all the while.

Legend of the Seeker 1x04 Brennidon is very much a kids episode, not in the sense that it is for kids, at least any more than the rest of Legend of the Seeker is, but in that it deals with parents and children. First Richard stumbles into Brennidon, the town where he was born, while Zedd copes with a paternity claim from a woman he knew a long time ago. Kahlan meanwhile serving as the Confessor listens to personal disputes in another small community nearby.

Brennidon is the first episode that does a decent job of testing Richard’s ideals and skills in a real fight against tyranny, even if it reverts to the kind of Zorro setup that plays out as a little too goofy. Some scenes are well done, beginning with Richard’s arrival at a cemetery featuring the tombstones of the children killed by Darken Rahl in order to slay the Seeker. Even the discover of his “mother” is handled well enough, but his “brother” is a painfully predictable character we’ve seen before in endless novels and movies and TV shows, whose every switch back and forth is loudly telegraphed.

By the time Richard hatches a plan to stop the D’Harans and get the people of Brennidon to rise up, silly season is well underway. But the real silliness comes in the entire Zedd’s paternity storyline, and by the time a serious overdramatic payoff comes in the final scene, it’s much too late. It’s clear that the producers of Legend of the Seeker have a comedy quota to fill every episode, so that the series plays out a little more like Hercules, and Zedd winds up filling that quota more often than not. Which is a shame since he is the one character on the show you can still take seriously.

The Brennidon solution begins well but ends in cliche, and it would be interesting for Richard to come back a few episodes later, and see that his well meaning attempts to free Brennidon, only resulted in the massacre of everyone who lived there.

If the two episodes that formed Legend of the Seeker’s pilot avoided the inevitable Hercules comparisons that Sam Raimi’s name would bring up, Legend of the Seeker 1x03 Bounty delivers a heaping bounty of those with a guest starring appearance by Ted Raimi, hopefully the last one, as a wacky mapmaker who makes maps of the Seeker’s location and sells them to different bounty hunters, resulting in more wacky antics.

Meanwhile Richard gets involved in helping a young girl free her brother from a mythical monster, only to discover that the girl is really another bounty hunter, albeit amateur, who shoves Kahlan into a monster’s pit and tries to hand over Richard to the D’Harans. When captured though she admits that she was simply trying to make a deal with the D’Harans to free her brother who was being held for stealing food. Naturally Richard selflessly agrees to rescue him anyway, and the gang manage to imprison and disarm numerous guards without actually killing them, while Zedd traps the rest with the monster, leading to a happy ending all around. Toward the end Zedd even says the words, Addictive Magic.

Now I’m not Richard Goodkind’s biggest fan, but he had to be kicking things right around the time that Richard begins preaching selfless altruism to Kahlan. Goodkind’s writing is hardly consistent in that regard and his potluck dinner of Ayn Rand meets World of Time isn’t all that well thought out, but his Richard might make sacrifices, but neither was he this relentlessly stupid or senselessly altruistic. By keeping Richard immature and giving him generic hero ideals, the show is throwing away whatever uniqueness it might have taken from the novels for a completely generic fantasy fare.

If you recall that when we last left off, an alternate universe Admiral Jellico from the apparent mirror universe had stolen the Paradox on behalf of an alternate universe Mackenzie Calhoun. Soleta in her cell has made contact with the real Admiral Jellico in the cell next to hers while McHenry is a floating head seemingly with his own agenda. In Star Trek New Frontier Issue 4 Turnaround Part IV, Morgan has managed to take over the Paradox and jailbreak Jellico and Soleta, but not before running into alternate universe Calhoun who takes the real Admiral Jellico for his own universe’s Jellico. Meanwhile McHenry’s floating head is not our universe’s McHenry.

So naturally everyone gets together for a fun little reunion, including an alternate universe Lefler and Kalinda, even as the real Kalinda faces more homicidal tantrums from the council and real Calhoun and mirror universe Calhoun collide along with Kat and the Trident by the station in a cliffhanger to be hopefully wrapped up next month. Again if you’re familiar with the New Frontier and Peter David’s work on it, you pretty much know what to expect. The same sorts of jokes and twists, ruthless tactics and ruthless bastards of both genders. If you aren’t and don’t, then you’ll wonder if all of New Frontier isn’t straight from the mirror universe, which arguably it well might be, considering that Calhoun and most of his crew are sociopaths, even by our standards, let alone the standards of Starfleet, which somehow nevertheless keeps allowing them to operate.

The whole mirror universe vs mirror universe thing has been done before. Kirk has faced off against Tiberius, his own evil double, and unlike the DS9 mirror universe characters, Calhoun seems low on the fuzzy goodness scale, but then again you can say much the same thing about the real Mackenzie Calhoun as well. With Jellico letting something slip about the fate of the galaxy being at stake, we can assume that there are still plenty more explosions and revelations to come next month.

Well The Boys are back in Issue 20 with I Tell You No Lie GI Part Two, what looks set to be at least a three issue conspiracy theory exploration of the background of the Supes and the world of The Boys as told by The Legend, who from the opening seems to be this universe’s Stan Lee. Issue 20 of The Boys mainly focuses on the rise of the Supes as told by Legend to Hughie in between bathroom breaks while in the meantime Butcher confers with Homelander while Terror does nasty things to his leg. Somewhere between the rabid conspiracy theories and the jouncy humor, it’s all typical Garth Ennis.

Circa this universe the superheroes were fictional characters spun off from classic heroic models. Circa the universe of
Watchmen, superheroes were real while comic books were filled with pirates and adventures on the high seas. Circa the universe of The Boys superheroes were real and comic books were created around them from within Vought America by the Legend with the aim of improving their image. There were no real supervillains it seems, just the occasional supe gone bad or barfight, with the rest dressed up by the comic books. The heroes themselves didn’t do much of anything except work for Vought American and collect royalties from their own comics and TV shows.

Though the cover boasts the grimy Lamplighter, nothing of what happened to him really gets told or addressed, and he only appears in a brief sequence that has Annie and A-Train leaving after cleaning up his mess. The bulk of Issue 20 of The Boys is dedicated mainly to unspooling The Legend’s conspiracy tale about Vought American. Never mind that the real Vought produced some of the best planes in the air at the time. Next issue The Day That Broke My Heart is set to deal with The Boys’ universe’s version of 9/11.

Zombies are all over the place these days. I don’t know what media studies researchers will say the zombie epidemic of the early 21st century represented, but they’ll likely blame it on something political. I think the answer is simpler, it comes down to laziness. And as everyone knows zombies are the laziest monsters of all. If we live in a culture that’s becoming more zombified, that celebrates the slacker, whose comedy comes from Judd Apatow and whose action comes from CGI green screens, then the zombie is the logical end of it all. That or just about anything could be the thesis of Warren Ellis’ Blackgas, the first three issues of which deal with two media studies college students, Tyler and Soo, who head over to Tyler’s parents living on an island which has an evil volcano on it.

Warren Ellis tries to ground his zombies in some kind of reality as much as possible. The zombie gas is described as a toxin, the victims bleed black fluid from their eyes and release their inhibitions to do what everyone wants to do, rip each other apart and eat each other. While Blackgas has no shortage of gore, gore fanatics expecting that the fanciful cover scenes of zombies eating each other non-stop will actually appear in the issues can expect to be disappointed. The basic story is a fairly simple one. Two college students joke around, come home, have sex, discover that zombie gas has turned everyone on the island into a zombie, fight their way through a maze of zombies only to discover that one of them is a zombie.

As you can suspect there’s not much new in Blackgas, but Warren Ellis does a good job of sketching out the cast and supporting characters and the background of the island itself while spending very little time doing it. There’s not much in the way of surprises here and by not much, I mean none. Tyler becoming a zombie is telegraphed early on and made increasingly obvious, despite Soo not getting it. The final shot that leaves us with the mainland in flames, is also just as predictable. But along the way Blackgas is a decent enough zombie jaunt and the slow transition of residents to zombiefication makes for an added element of horror. But really there’s no new ground to break and Ellis doesn’t break it. Blackgas seems as much of an attempt to get something optioned fast by Hollywood as anything else.

It’s been a long strange journey for Superman Last Son partly written by Superman I and Superman II director Richard Donner. Superman Last Son’s beginning coincided with the release of the Donner cut of Superman II, the arguably superior version of the film, and with Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns which was meant to serve as a sequel to Superman II.

With the story now wrapped with the 11th and final issue of Superman Last Son it’s safe to say that Superman Last Son serves as a much more credible sequel to Superman II than Superman Returns ever did. The eleventh issue leans a bit too heavily on the sappy factor but overall, aside from maybe Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman which has been much too uneven, Superman Last Son is the greatest story told about Superman canon over the last few years.

Set off by functionally simple but pretty artwork from Adam Kubert and a no frills approach to Superman that harkens back to the classics, Superman Last Son revisits both Superman II and Superman Returns on a large scale by featuring a mass attack by a Phantom Zone army of Kryptonians led by General Zod who tries to remake Metropolis into New Krypton along with a son for Superman and Lois, but without the awkward stepson material of Bryan Singer’s movie. It throws in the Justice League and a kind of makeshift Luthor created Suicide Squad of Parasite, Metallo and Bizarro teaming up with Superman to stop the Kryptonian invasion.

The most interesting part of Superman Last Son is watching how much it gets right that the movie got wrong and how smoothly it’s all tied together. I’m by no means suggesting that Richard Donner would have delivered the ultimate Superman sequel if he been at the helm of Superman Returns. After all large stories are a lot cheaper to ink than they are to CGI and Geoff Johns gets plenty of the credit and writing a few issues of Action Comics isn’t the 150 million dollar investment that puts Jon Peters and half of WB sitting on your neck. But Superman Last Son does manage to smoothly tie together two disparate troubled Superman movies across decades while telling a compelling story in the process that feels more original than it should and connects to Superman’s origins without the constant brooding or the need to put the story on hold so Superman can gaze down at the world and figure it all out.

Whether it’s ju ju beans, jawbreakers, lollipops, laffy taffy or skittles– there’s something about candy that makes it wonderful in small doses and sickening when you’ve eaten too much of it. As a kid, candy is one of the most amazing things in the world and most adults still keep some taste for candy even when they’ve grown up, but they also have much less tolerance for it. Speed Racer is candy, brightly colored, sweet, tart, a sugar rush of hyperkinetic energy that’s good as long as it lasts but it’s packaged with racing world and family melodrama that serves as the black licorice in the cinematic treat bag.

Speed Racer is really two movies, one is the pixie stick sugar rush flowing from the hyperkinetic cartoon inspired editing of the montages and race scenes and the other is the black licorice of the dialogue laden drama of the Racer family populated by a great cast of John Goodman, Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, Matthew Fox and Christina Ricci. But these aren’t just two movies, they’re two incompatible flavors of movies geared to alienate two sets of audiences.

The drama vastly stretches out Speed Racer’s running time to over two hours and is certain to alienate the same kids that would adore its racing scenes. The racing scenes are certain to annoy and alienate Speed Racer’s older audience who might have appreciated the attempt to take the whole Speed Racer story seriously. The extended running time comes from the Wachowskis’ script which has too much flab on it, too many unnecessary moments, too many unnecessary lines for its own good. As a result Speed Racer only really takes off halfway into its running time and like its eponymous racer, once it gets going nothing can stop it, but by then the audience has spent too much time being alternately bored and annoyed.

The worst culprits that drag too much of Speed Racer down are the entire unnecessarily complicated Togokahn storyline which younger audiences won’t even be able to follow and the flashbacks that make the first half hour unnecessarily confusing. It’s not too surprising that the Wachowskis can’t tell a straight story but their complications and bloat add rather than detract from what could have been a very straightforward crowd pleasing movie.

Despite all the negativity toward Speed Racer, there is an enormously fun movie at the heart of it, powered by a great cast and some incredible energy and the last ten minutes of Speed Racer all but compensate for the drag and the aimless drama. Like candy though, not everyone hangs on to the taste for that sugar rush as an adult and not everyone can appreciate that while the Wachowskis may have turned Speed Racer into a bloated overdone monster in places, when it gets its wheels on the track it hits speeds that no live action camera can even begin to track.

Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman has never really been high on the action quotient, the massive world spanning battles so typical of DC. Instead over the last 10 issues Morrison has focused more on the character moments, Lex Luthor’s paired insanity and mad ambition, Superman’s dying regrets and Lois’ struggle between love and mistrust. All Star Superman 11 changes that though with an issue that has the brakes coming off and the fights breaking out, from Solaris the Tyrant Sun to Lex’s niece to Lex Luthor himself, sent to the electric chair and back with powers equal to Superman’s own, even as Superman himself dies in the form of Clark Kent writing one final article at his reporter’s desk at the Daily Planet.

In choosing to die as a man rather than as a superman, as Clark Kent rather than Superman, there’s a message being sent about his value system, one in opposition to the usual DC position that Clark Kent is just the suit that Superman wears, not a position that Smallville takes for example. Of course Superman has died before and while All Star Superman has been revolutionary in some ways, though not as much as Frank Miller’s All Star Batman perhaps, but then Grant Morrison turns Superman into a saint and perhaps a deity, while Frank Miller turned Batman into a raving sociopath. Arguably these are both extremes that existed in the characters all along and Morrison and Miller simply took them to their extremes.

While All Star Superman 11 has its share of action and Superman has fought his battles throughout All Star Superman’s run, with Clark seemingly dead and Lex Luthor on the loose and given powers for 24 hours, the real confrontation is likely to begin. One obvious theory is that Clark faked his death prematurely to draw Lex out and reveal his real plan, though that is premised on Lex knowing Clark is Superman, which seems doubtful given Clark’s interview with Lex Luthor. A possible answer might lie in either Solaris the Tyrant Sun, which Superman says will be harnessed in the future for the good of mankind and how can this involve the future Superman, who is also Superman? It’s one of a number of possible questions and if All Star Superman 12 follows as quickly as All Star Superman 11 did, we may have the answers without having to wait as long as we did for All Star Superman 10.

When Futurama returned on DVD with Bender’s Big Score ( read review here) , for fans who had not expected the series to ever return, the movie was a mix of nostalgia and disappointment. Like Bender’s Big Score, Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs has an epic universe spanning storyline (literally) but where Bender’s Big Score felt like it was stitched together out of three incompatible episodes and reminded you of an aging ex-major leaguer trying to throw out a pitch, Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs is a single epic story that may not be a perfect home run, but it does give you a real show for your money.

So besides not being a disappointment, what else is Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs? For starters it’s classic Futurama, from the adroit SciFi references like St. Asimov’s Day, Deathball and two ceremonies on Kif’s home planet that gently parody Spock’s Vulcan ceremonies, to a clever storyline involving a tear in space that introduces a giant being from another universe made of electromatter, who’s lonely and promptly begins sticking tentacles in the heads of everyone in the universe before whisking them off to a faux heaven that comes with bird angels and Mattress Island that mixes theology with science fiction with invader paranoia and manages to tie in Fry and humanity’s loneliness into the mix. Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs manages to make pretty good use of the series’ stock of supporting characters, from Calculon to Zoidberg’s uncle to Zap Brannigan while introducing new ones, like Fry’s new girlfriend Colleen. But if there is one flaw to Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs, it’s that the movie has plenty of chuckles but not a lot of big laughs.

Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs is funny, but it’s funny more in the way that The Day the Earth Stood Stupid was, rather than Insane in the Mainframe, it’s too busy telling a story to set up punchlines. As a movie it’s cheerful, funny and even insightful, but don’t expect to watch Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs while rolling on the floor. It’s a good enough trade-off, especially considering Bender’s Big Score, but anyone with expectations of watching this and laughing till it hurts is going to be disappointed.

In many ways Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs walks or jets over well worn territory for the series, from Fry’s loneliness serving to represent humanity, Leela’s determination not to join in what others follow, Bender’s refusal to resolve his own contradictions and the pulp SciFi storyline that mutates into something more articulate and insightful, Futurama The Beast with a Billion Backs is classic Futurama, no doubt about it. And with the DVD also holding the Futurama game footage that producers have described as a lost episode, there’s plenty here to enjoy.

Garth Ennis has been a while in getting here and it was pretty much inevitable that we would get here but The Boys 19 I Tell No Lie GI 1 begins the origin story of the superheroes in the Boys universe, who to no one’s surprise are lab grown corporate products from Vought American. The Legend lays out the legends with Homelander being the first and contrary to his Supermanesque myth about coming from the sky, he actually came from a lab. Garth Ennis gets too lost in his Haliburtonesque tirade, but that’s the whole weakness at the heart of The Boys, which is that it has little to do with superheroes and a lot to do with a cartoonish version of America.

More interesting is the meeting between Homelander and Butcher at the top of the Brooklyn Bridge, or what’s left of it, which was also apparently the scene of a climatic showdown last time around that may have left The Lamplighter, the Seven’s version of the Green Lantern, in a messy fecal covered state and wiped out the bridge. It’s a nice tense scene as Butcher kneels unspeaking while Homeland tries to discover the basis for his hatred, which as we all know the Homelander raping or seducing Butcher’s wife.

Meanwhile Annie and A-Train dig up the Lamplighter who’s locked in a dark room and is all but non compos mentis, because I guess one filthy retarded superhero isn’t enough, we’ve gotta have a bunch more of them. So the moral of the story would seem to be, don’t buy any equipment from Vought American and superheroes are evil since they come from Vought American.

Drafted Issue 7. With time running out until the Worms attack, the squad and well it seems a lot of the squads are given a chance to take a breather back on Earth, which mainly seems to mean Times Square. It’s not clear why there seem to be people still on Earth at all considering that by Drafted 6 virtually everyone on Earth was either called up for fighting or for work in the orbital manufacturing plants.

Nevertheless a lot of mankind manages to return to Earth and so naturally they go to listen to the Sons of Abraham reciting syrupy cliches about brotherhood and the necessity of fighting a war against giant worms. Drafted often almost reads like Mike Farrell remade Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with its emphasis on the universal draft uniting mankind against a common enemy in a fuzzy peace and love sort of way. You could almost hope that Drafted will be savvy enough to throw readers for a loop by revealing that the aliens are the real enemy and the Worms are just the equivalent of the WMD, but somehow Drafted doesn’t seem likely to work at such a sophisticated level.

Instead we get the militants promised by the cover carrying out an aborted attack accompanied by Vic. It’s not clear where the militants are coming from, considering that the last attempt at resistance was brutally aborted with a massacre. But here we are and there’s an organization backing them which has poisoned one of the Sons of Abraham, which suggests that the people behind it might at least be as savvy as the resistance in Childhood’s End while being a lot more ruthless.

By the time Drafted 7 ends, we’re into the war itself as the Times Square clock runs down and it’s time for the battle to begin.