My 20 Most Anticipated Movies of 2018

It's fun to think about what's coming out and which movies I'm most interested in, then compare that at the end of the year to what I actually enjoyed.  Of my 20 Most Anticipated last year, 12 of them turned out to be Top 20 movies for me, so that's pretty cool. One of them (Hostiles) was pushed back to this year and another (Jumanji 2) I just haven't been able to schedule yet, so that leaves 6 that were disappointing in some way.

Of those, I've seen and was underwhelmed by three (The Beguiled, The Mummy, and Justice League) and thanks to trailers and reviews, completely lost interest in three others (Dark Tower, Ferdinand, and Pitch Perfect 3) before they hit theaters.

So here's what I'm most eager to see this year. As always, these aren't the movies that I'm predicting will be the best; just the ones that I most want to see. Tell me what you're looking forward to in the comments!

20. Tomb Raider



I'm a mark for treasure-hunter movies and have enjoyed even the Angelina Jolie movies on some level. The trailer for this one is visually impressive and Vikander is a talented actor, so I'm just hoping that the story is up to snuff.

19. Mary Magdalene



One of the most fascinating characters in the New Testament, even without the Dan Brown nonsense. It's about time someone made a movie about her.

18. Mary Poppins Returns



I enjoy the classic adaptation, but it's not holy ground and I'm glad to see that the rest of the book series will get some attention, too. Not that I've read the books. And these movies will see that I don't have to.

17. Mowgli



I don't really need a new Jungle Book adaptation, but I'm interested in almost anything Andy Serkis does. And it'll be interesting to see what he does to avoid comparisons with the Jon Favreau Disney remake.

16. Incredibles 2



I've cooled off on Brad Bird after Tomorrowland, but I've still loved 80% of his movies and am interested in what he's able to do with this. I'm especially curious how a new Incredibles movie compares to the modern landscape of superhero movies. The first one was released the same year as Spider-Man 2, when we were just starting to figure out that great superhero movies were possible. The bar has been raised a lot higher since then and I'm not 100% confident that Incredibles 2 can clear it.

My first work as a writer about comics

About a month ago, Sean Kleefeld wrote a blog post called "My Short Career as a Letterhack," in which he talks about writing to comic book letters pages in order to get on the radar of editors. I can relate, because when I first got it into my head that I wanted to write comics, that was an approach I took too.

For me, it wasn't so much about being remembered by editors as it was simply a way of connecting to the comics industry on a deeper level than just reading the books. I started seeing some of the same names pop up on comics pages a lot (possibly even Sean's; I know I read at least those Marvel Knights issues he was published in) and figured that I could do that too. And since it would mean submitting a piece of writing to an editor and competing with other pieces of writing for print, I saw it as sort of a first step towards being published.

Sean posted a cover gallery of comics that his letters appeared in, so I'm doing that too. My time writing letters was much shorter than his, ended when I got reliable access to the Internet and was able to write about comics that way. But I had a good time with it and was able to figure out what kinds of letters editors were looking for.



Milestone had a Letter of the Month deal where they'd send one letter-writer a signed copy of the issue in which he or she was printed. I got picked for talking not only about Hardware, but Milestone in general and what it meant to me.





I grew up a Marvel kid, but tried a bunch of DC comics shortly after their Zero Hour event and wrote in to tell them about that.



I was a huuuuge Azrael fan, and loved getting to gush about that character to the folks making comics about him at the time. Sadly, the series didn't stay awesome it's whole run, but the issues with Barry Kitson on art were amazing.



I'm also really happy that I got to tell Peter David and Company how cool their Aquaman was.



My last published letter was the nerdiest of all as I expressed my appreciation that Malibu's Deep Space Nine series offered a more plausible explanation for the existence of Thomas Riker than Star Trek: TNG did on TV.

75 Years of Lois Lane | The '60s

Happy Valentine's Day from Aquaman and Mera

No snark for this one. These two have a hard enough time.

Pull List | Rethinking single-issue comics

Atomic Robo: The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific #1

I recently started buying single issues of comics again. Not because I feel like I'm hurting the industry by trade-waiting (I don't), but because it's more fun that way. A lot of writers and publishers are making obvious efforts to create a more rewarding experience out of buying single-issues.

The trouble is that I've just started adding series to my pull list willy-nilly without giving a lot of thought to what I'm doing. That's where this post comes in. I'm going to start assessing what I'm buying every week and make some choices. I need some limits, not only for budget reasons, but also to protect my time.

I've decided that a pull list of 20 series is pretty reasonable. That works out to about five, individual issues a week: a little over an hour of reading time and between $15 and $20. It doesn't include graphic novels and series that read better in collected form (BPRD, for instance). I'll have to assess those separately.

Saga #4

Last week, the single issues I bought were (in alphabetical order):

All-Star Western
Atomic Robo
Aquaman
Courtney Crumrin
Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE 
Saga
The Spider

Of those seven, I know that I want four on my final list of 20.

I've been a fan of Atomic Robo since it started and though I also want the collections on my shelf where they're easy to get to, it's a comic that's really made to be read as single issues. I resisted buying both versions, but it always hurts me when I pass up the monthly version on the shelves. That tells me something.

Courtney Crumrin is another series I'm going to want to keep buying. I love Ted Naifeh's work in general and it's great to be able to read about his terrifying, but so-cool, little witch girl on a regular schedule. Plus, the individual issues feel like complete units, even though they're parts of a larger story.

Courtney Crumrin #3

I just decided last week to check out Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staple's Saga instead of waiting for the collection. I'm glad I did, because it reminded me how much I enjoyed getting a new installment of a BKV comic every month. This one is a space opera with fantasy and horror elements and there's a huge feeling that absolutely anything can happen from month to month. It's a brand new universe that needs exploring.

Finally, David Liss and Colton Worley's The Spider is a fantastic pulp-superhero series that I don't want to wait for.

The other three series are all on the bubble for various reasons. I really liked Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE when Jeff Lemire was writing it, and loved Matt Kindt's first issue for what it was. The problem is that Kindt changed some things in a way that jolted me a little. It's a speed bump I expect to be able to get over, but it shook my confidence some.

The Spider #2

I'm also generally enjoying Aquaman (I'm behind on it, but catching up), but I'm not fully sold on it yet. I'm tired of the constant reminder that Aquaman's a pop-culture joke and the series' defensiveness about that. There was also a fill-in issue in which Mera is sexually harassed in an unbelievable, ridiculous way just so she can show how tough she is by beating the guy up. In other words, the comic feels desperate; like it has to cheat in order to make its heroes seem cool. On the other hand, Aquaman's teamed up with a jungle girl, so that's pretty great.

I'm almost positive I'm done with All-Star Western. It keeps retelling the same story in different ways and after ten issues, I'm looking for something new. As I keep adding series to my 20 every week, I expect All-Star Western to fall off the list pretty quickly.

Here's how I rank these seven:

1. Atomic Robo
2. Saga
3. Courtney Crumrin
4. The Spider
5. Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE
6. Aquaman
7. All-Star Western

The Adventures of Aquaman (1968-1970)

I finished watching the entire series of Filmation’s The Adventures of Aquaman a while ago, but I’ve struggled with figuring out what to say about it. In every way that counts, it’s exactly like the Aquaman comics from the same time period: full of fantastic ideas that are only sketched out in a very broad, general way.

Some of that’s the result of the format. The episodes were originally created for The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure (1967-68), which also featured Superman cartoons as well as a segment that rotated through other DC heroes like the JLA, Teen Titans, and some of their individual members. Because of this, each story is only about six to seven minutes long, so that’s not a lot of time to develop anything.

The typical episode involves Aquaman and Aqualad’s foiling a villain-of-the-week’s attempt to conquer Atlantis. Some of the villains do recur, so there’s a bit of continuity, but for the most part there’s a steady stream of new threats each episode. That’s not a flaw. It’s actually where the fantastic ideas come in. Writers Bob Haney and George Kashdan (who were also writing many of DC’s comics at the same time) came up with countless bad guys to throw at the Sea King, most of whom were pretty cool: whether supervillains, aliens, or another undersea race.

What’s lacking is things like motivation for the bad guys or any sense that Aquaman’s undersea realm is a cohesive world. The villains never explain why they want to invade Atlantis, we’re just to take it for granted that they do. That also contributes to the lack of structure around the world-building. There actually are some crossovers and team ups between bad guys, so it’s not that. It’s just that all the characters are sketched out so one-dimensionally that nothing feels real.

Bob Haney’s involvement in the show brings to mind his comment about the comics he wrote. “The PR research that [DC] had done showed[…]the average reader was a 12-year-old boy living in Dayton, Ohio. Who was not that sophisticated. So a lot of my stuff I wrote in the ‘60s was aimed at him. Generic little boy. It was simple stuff. It was not sophisticated.” I imagine the same approach applied to his and the other writers’ work on the Aquaman cartoon. It’s not that they couldn’t have made it good. It’s just that they didn’t have to.

The result is a show that’s fun to watch, but only in small doses. I started out trying to watch it in two-hour chunks, but that ends up being like sixteen stories back-to-back. I couldn’t do it. It was just too repetitive. Eventually, I ended up just watching one story before another movie or TV show and made it sort of the cartoon short before the feature. It worked out better that way and was a lot more fun, but it’s probably going to eliminate any repeat viewings.

I’m glad I did it though. If nothing else, it made me appreciate some truly great cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian. But that’s a post for another day.

Art Show: Cat Women

Skorpion



By Rick Burchett. [From the graphic novel he's working on with writer Christopher Mills]

Fanciful Submarines



By Andrew George Brown. [Lots more at Etsy by way of Wondermark]

From the Depths



By Matt Wiegle. [Seriously, if you're not reading his and Sean T Collins Destructor webcomic - from which this is a page - you're missing out.]

Aquaman: King of the Seas



By Braden D Lamb.

A Naiad



By John William Waterhouse. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Princess Pantha



By Alex Schomburg. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Ka-Zar, Shanna, and Zabu



By Brent Anderson. [Giant-Size Marvel]

Jungle Girl



By Red LYUBA. [More here]

Tigra



By Jason Barton.

Island Intelligence: Never Say Die

Comics

*Vaneta Rogers interviews various comics creators about the challenges of writing Aquaman. I especially like Smallville writer Mark Q Miller's quote: "What makes Aquaman Aquaman for me is the environmental activist angle and the nobility angle. He's very Shakespearean, in a way. A king with a cause. An Old World sensibility in the modern age. It's very cool." [Newsarama]

*Meanwhile, Aquaman gets his own Flashpoint mini-series with Emperor Aquaman. [The Source]

Movies

*The Goonies poster above was created by Justin Erickson for a special screening of the movie. [/Film]

*I'm looking forward to fully exploring /Film's set visit to Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Takeaways from the little I've read so far: Blackbeard should be awesome, but they're worried about Penelope Cruz's character. [Part One and Part Two, with more coming]

TV

*Remember that Treasure Island TV movie for Sky TV that stars Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver and Elijah Wood as Ben Gunn? It's actually a two-part mini-series for SyFy and it also has Donald Sutherland as Captain Flint, who doesn't actually appear in the novel, but sets everything in motion via backstory. The show is filming now and scheduled to air early next year. [Spinoff Online]

Misc.

*Lego's new Pirates of the Caribbean sets look amazing and include scenes from all four movies. [MTV]

*And oh look! There's the video game trailer!



[Topless Robot]

*It's not just Lego getting on board. Jakks has got all kinds of amazing playsets, figures, and other merchandise. [Toy News International; thanks, Ken!]

*But if it's Lego you like, wait'll you get a load of the lifesize Jack Sparrow from the presentation that launched all those wonderful toys. [Nerd Approved]

*Also: Lego Unsinkable Walker Bean. Not officially licensed, but even cooler for having been customized by a six-year-old. [First Second]

Michael vs. The Silver Age

Sadly, while DC has given its Golden Age comics its own Earth (and for a good while, integrated it into its sole Earth), it hasn't done the same with the Silver Age. I think they really should. The DCU needs a place where that kind of craziness can exist.
--Siskoid

I was going to include this with last week's Quotes, but it ties in closely with something I've been thinking about, wrestling with, and want to talk about. Still trying to figure out what makes Aquaman tick, I've been reading my way through the three volumes (so far) of Showcase Presents Aquaman, which chronicle his Silver Age adventures up through Aquaman #39 (or, more accurately, his guest-appearance in Jimmy Olsen #115). I've found some interesting things.

As Siskoid observes above, there's a craziness to the Silver Age and I'd love to see more of it in comics today. I talked about it some on Robot 6. Anything could happen in those comics. Superman would build robots of himself to fool Lois Lane, Bat-Mite and Ace the Bathound would team up to help Batwoman become more popular than Batman (popularity was a huge deal in DC's Silver Age, just ask Superboy), and everyone was growing giant, fat, turning into babies, and changing the color of their skin.

For Aquaman, the Silver Age meant introducing characters like Quisp the Water Sprite (Aquaman's version of Bat-Mite), playing James Bond to fight the evil organization O.G.R.E., and fighting off evil versions of himself. And of course he and his pals weren't above the standard DC Silver Age tropes of turning giant and changing personalities.

Put that way, the Silver Age wasn't all that imaginative. They kept going back to a fairly standard list of gimmicks that seem madly inventive compared to the darker comics of today, but get repetitive when read together in big chunks. I've long advocated that Aquaman is best when he stays under the sea and interacts with the limitless possibilities that exist in that environment, but even though writer Bob Haney mostly followed that approach, the "possibilities" he explored were in fact quite limited. Most were variations on aliens or monsters or supervillains or forgotten aquatic demigods attacking Atlantis. People and monsters really hated Atlantis back in the day. The details were different enough to keep things interesting, but Haney kept coming back to that plot while adding standard Silver Age twists like "Aqualad's sure acting strangely" or "Aquaman's dead!"

Island Intelligence: Aquawar

I'm abandoning the "Awesome List" title for news round-ups. Sometimes stuff isn't awesome, but I want to talk about it anyway (see: the way DC's handling its Aquawar storyline).



Comics

*A collection of Aquaman "splash" pages (get it?) by Jim Aparo. [Diversions of the Groovy Kind]

*DC teases some of its Aquawar storyline coming up in Brightest Day. I've been easing back into periodical comics after abandoning them for a year and I'd love for Aquaman's story to be one of the ones I can read as it comes out. Unfortunately, since it's part of Brightest Day, the only way I can read it is to endure the stories of a bunch of other characters I don't care anything about. That's not something I'm willing to do. I'll have to continue to keep up via The Aquaman Shrine's excellent summaries. [The Source]

*Greg McElhatton reviews Marineman #s 1 and 2. [Read About Comics]

Movies

*Marvel's working on a Black Panther movie. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Miscellaneous

*An undersea hunter in Indonesia is able to hold his breath for five minutes and stalk his prey on the ocean floor. It would be unbelievable, except that there's footage. [Awesome Robot!]

*If the T-shirt he wears on stage is any indication, the lead singer of The Kickback is an Alpha Flight fan. The band also has a song called "Alpha Filght." I need to listen to some Kickback, I'm thinking. [You Ain't No Picasso]

*Project: Rooftop, Warren Ellis, Superhero Cocoa, and Superhero of the Month are banding together to ask artists to redesign Aquaman. [Project: Rooftop]

Art Show: Where do all the Croco-People go?

Love at First Sight



By Mattias Adolfsson. This is just a detail. Click the link to see the whole thing.

Aquaman



By Dave Barking.

Namor vs. Shagreen



The artist is keeping anonymous, but he or she blogs at Marvel Flipside.

Rusty Recon on Gear Island



By Jeremy Vanhoozer.

The Awesome List: Triceracopter

Music

*My local radio station doesn't play enough Pirate Core. [Kevin Hendrickson]

Books

*The Best Dinosaur Books for Kids. [Dinosaur Tracking]

Comics

*Top Shelf has released their publishing schedule for 2011 including June's Pirate Penguin vs. Ninja Chicken, Book 1: Troublems with Frenemies and August's Dragon Puncher, Book 2: Island. [Top Shelf]

*A great, illustrated list of jungle girl characters. [Adventure!]

*Classic jungle girl Sheena will participate in Moonstone's big crossover this May alongside Captain Action, Honey West, Kolchak, Domino Lady, and The Spider. [First Comics News]

*Marvel's jungle heroes Ka-Zar and Shanna are going to get a challenge to their supremacy in the Savage Land by the Son of Hulk. Writer Rob Williams promises "giant dinosaurs, giant robots, and giant dinosaurs fighting giant robots." [Marvel]

Art Show: Grrrreat!

HMS Hornblower



By Mattias Adolfsson.

Floating



By Sulamith Wulfing. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Atomic Commandos in Action!



Possibly by Ogden Whitney. [Admiral Cal]