Hardcore comic book fans complaining that Valkyrie—the breakout character in Thor: Ragnarok played by Tessa Thompson—isn't the blonde, white goddess of Marvel's comic book mythology are missing an important point: Valkyrie's only constant is that she's always evolving. Related Stories Indeed, the first appearance of Valkyrie didn't actually feature Valkyrie at all. In 1970's Avengers […]
"When I found you," growls an ominous narrator at the opening of the new trailer for The Last Jedi, "I saw raw, untamed power." That's the voice of Snoke, the little-seen baddie from 2015's smash Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, and while he's likely talking about his dark-helmeted protege Kylo Ren, he may as […]
For Gerard Way, the third installment of his comic Doom Patrol couldn’t have dropped at a more opportune time. Set in a world where misfits are superheroes and everything is just a little bit sideways, his take on the DC Comics series started hitting shelves right as America’s highly divisive election was dominating news feeds […]
Last Saturday, Logan Smith, the man behind the Twitter account @YesYoureRacist, began posting photos of alleged white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia—and gained over 300,000 followers in a single weekend, some of whom helped him expose the identities of the protesters. One of the people Smith outed has since been fired from his job at […]
During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war […]
Consider this the calm before the stormtroopers come—or, at least, a rare moment of quiet in the galaxy far, far away. September began with Force Friday II, and all signs point to a full trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi dropping soon, but right now it's looking fairly peaceful out there now that J.J. […]
The Punisher—the latest in Netflix’s line of super-gritty Marvel adaptations—has piqued fans' curiosity for a while. But it’s also been something of an outlier. The story of vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) overlaps with those of Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Daredevil, but he’s not really part of the Defenders, or The Defenders. His show […]
For me, the internet has always been tied to videogames. It's not quite so simple, of course, but using the internet has always been an inescapable part of the medium—to find and discuss them, and to play them. And for a long time, that meant dealing with Adobe Flash. As you might have heard, Adobe's […]
Sean Baker didn't want a star. The director and co-writer of 2015's indie hit Tangerine was struggling to find the right actress for his follow-up, The Florida Project, about the hard-luck denizens living in an Orlando-outskirts motel. Thanks to Tangerine's critical success, Baker could easily have landed an established performer to play Halley, the impoverished […]
Sonic Mania, the latest installment of Sega's venerable franchise, churns with the improvisational energy of a jazz ensemble. It is something of a remake of Genesis-era 2-D Sonic the Hedgehog games, with refurbished stages you may remember and new ones that pay tribute to those of the past. At first glance, it looks like an […]