This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid . If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. An anthology of stories about Marvel’s female characters, staffed by Marvel’s female creators is …
Matthew Vaughan’s original plan was that First Class would be the opening act in a three movie trilogy that would culminate in Days of Future Past. A legendary story that tied a possible dystopian future to the present, it’s regarded as one of the X-Men classics and for very good reason. it would have been …
X-Men: The Last Stand is not good. At all. It mashes together the Dark Phoenix Saga and the more recent mutant cure story line, both of which would absolutely be enough to fill a movie on their own and serves neither of them well. It adds profoundly nonsensical twists. It sets up Jean as the …
If X-Men is the dress rehearsal, X-2 is the command performance. Every single issue the first one has is addressed, every problem solved. it remains one of the best examples of modern western superhero cinema and even now it stands as a mark that the franchise has arguably reached again but certainly never surpassed (Logan …
And so, here we are at the end game again. This week, Dark Phoenix will bring the era of 20th Century Fox X-Men movies to an end. They’re a weird, fractious, wildly variable collection of films but as we reach the end it’s worth returning too the beginning to see how far they’ve come and …
This piece originally appeared as part of my weekly newsletter, The Full Lid on 8th March 2019. If you liked it, and want a weekly down of pop culture enthusiasm, occasional ketchup recipes and me enjoying things, then check out the archive and sign up here. Kelly Thompson is one of the writers on my ‘instantly …
Strange things are afoot in the Marvel universe. There’s that whole ‘50% of everyone is currently dead for tax reasons’ thing of course and Avengers 4 is still a good distance away. But things are just as tumultuous on the small screen. In the space of a month, two of the Marvel Netflix shows have been cancelled …
Eve L. Ewing’s script attempts four impossible things at nice and manages all of them. The first is to re-introduce RiRi and her world. The second is to set her up as a character in her own right. The third is to establish an ongoing plot and the fourth is to build all of that …
Last week’s physical comics were a Marvel full house. Three books, all completely different, all very good. Here they are. Immortal Hulk 6, called ‘Action/Reaction’ continues to build the world of the book out in a throughly enjoyable way. The transition from the one off rural horrors of the early issues looked like it might …
It’s a weird time in western comics. We’re into the triumphant third year, at least, of ‘the superhero movie bubble is about to burst!’ And the far right harassment campaigns that have wandered between pop culture media for years looking to start fights have decided that comics is their next hill to die on. Then …