This year marks what would have been comic book legend Jack Kirby's 100th birthday, a fact that last week's Comic-Con International marked with no fewer than six panels dedicated to his work and countless others on the characters and concepts he created in his nearly 70-year career. It was a fitting tribute for the man […]
Jaron Lanier may not have sired the term virtual reality—that honor generally goes to French playwright Antonin Artaud in 1938—but he’s one hell of a father figure. As the founder of legendary VR company VPL Research, he both popularized the term and helped create most of the enduring icons of early VR, from The Lawnmower […]
Deep into the marathon that was this year’s New York Comic Con, Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb hit the main stage at the Javits Center to lead a panel for Runaways, Marvel's newest small-screen foray and the company's first team-up with Hulu. He bantered with the crowd, led attendees in an enthusiastic if awkward chant […]
Destiny 2 is a game about dying. But it has trouble remembering that. I've already explained the bizarro premise of the Destiny series, which casts you as a Guardian, an undying space superhero powered by the energy of a machine deity. What I failed to mention in that initial description, though, is how Destiny 2 […]
For all the heavy-lifting that goes into making every Star Wars movie—the casting, the elaborate sets, the VFX, the massive international marketing campaigns—it’s amazing any of them get completed. Yet no Star Wars production to date has seemed as fraught as that of Solo: A Star Wars Story. The second standalone movie after Rogue One, […]
In the early ’00s, few web endeavors seemed less bound for long-term glory than CollegeHumor.com. The site launched in 1999 as a video and sight-gag repository “dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt.” Early on, that meant lots of bro-friendly distractions, like photos of students passed out on lawns, naughtily titled JPEGs, and […]
Click:hydroxyethyl methyl cellulose HEMC You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but Thor: Ragnarok features three queer characters. One is Valkyrie, the female warrior played by Tessa Thompson. Another is Korg, the Kronan gladiator who befriends Thor and is played, via motion-capture and CGI, by the film’s director Taika Waititi. Then there’s Loki, the Asgardian god of […]
As the end of Net Neutrality looms large—it ends on June 11, although some states are continuing it on their own—it says a lot about the internet that people got much more agitated about the cancellation of Brooklyn 99 than anything else last week. Look, we love the show too, but there are more important […]
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 […]