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Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon: Nathan Fillion
Nathan Fillion Double Dip
Captain Hammer / Steve Trevor
Welcome to my first blogathon! In case you haven’t heard, I’m hosting my first blogathon, called the Comic Strip Double Dip Blogathon. There’s still plenty of spots left so feel free to check out the full list and sign up! So here I am today with my first entry into my own Blogathon, my Comic Strip Double Dip offender today is Nathan Fillion who played both the clueless hero Captain Hammer in Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog as well as the voice of the womanizing Steve Trevor in DC Animation’s Wonder Woman. I’ll be taking a look at both of these movies and both of the roles and see how they compare to each other, and which one is worth seeing.
What ifs! What if you could kill one superhero?
Obviously I don’t mean in real life. But if you had the power of publishing to greenlight the storyline death of any one superhero, which would it be? Would you pick a superhero that’s too popular for his/her own good? Or one that you just personally don’t like? Would you like to see them go down in a big throwdown fight to the finish, or do you just want them gone whichever way possible? Of course, one thing that’s usually inevitable when it comes to superhero deaths is that they never stay dead. Would you like to see that changed in your case? I think practically every major superhero has died at one point in time, most notably Superman. But Spider-Man, Captain America, Green Lantern, Batman have all died at one point in time. If a famous comic book character dies, should they stay dead? Does it count if someone else takes up their mantle? Often times a death raises the popularity of a character rather than ending it. Personally, I think Wolverine is a good choice to die. It’s a tough one to do though, since the X-Men timeline basically has his lifespan extended from the revolutionary war on through two generations of mutants or more in the future. He’s a great character, but I think it would be good for him to go away for a long while, a victim of his own popularity. What say you? Leave your answer in the comments! Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Hellboy: Blood & Iron
Hellboy: Blood & Iron
This movie finishes out my Hellboy marathon and is my 99th superhero movie review of the year. I’m very happy to finish out my goal of watching and reviewing over 100 superhero movies this year. My 100th movie is a great one and a nice way to cap off my goal, though I will keep reviewing over the last couple weeks of the year. But back to Hellboy, Blood & Iron was the second animated movie and even though it came out after Sword of Storms, it takes place before the first Hellboy movie, focusing quite a bit on Professor Broom and shedding some light into his backstory. After many years of retirement from active duty, Broom takes on one more assignment that was initially introduced as a publicity stunt, though it ends up bringing back an old horror from the Professor’s early days in the BPRD. In other words, this is Hellboy’s take on vampire mythology. Taken as a whole, the Hellboy movie series really runs the gamut of different mythologies, giving them new life and putting the Hellboy spin on it. Instead of the typical vampire origin, this brings in the Greek Goddess of the witches, Hecate, and a figure from history just as infamous as Vlad the Impaler, Elizabeth Bathory. I was actually somewhat familiar with the story of the Blood Countess due to a City of Heroes player who created a custom mission arc with her history which I made a trailer for. Vampires, especially nowadays, are such a popular topic they have almost been done to death, and yet this movie was able to breathe some new life into the undead creatures, even though once again it briefly reminded me of Vampire Hunter D, the sequel this time. There was also a bit of Memento inspired chronological order shifting, with the flashbacks being intercut with the current day story in almost the same way.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Hellboy II: The Golden Army 2008
It had been a long while since I had seen this movie. I actually bought it on Blu-Ray before I even started this site and had not gotten around to watching it again until now, and that’s a real shame because this is such a gorgeous and amazing movie. It has so many things that are very different from the first movie, but what it does keep is the sense of fun and the fantastic visuals. What the first film did for the Cthulhu mythology, this movie does with a completely different set of mythology. Not only that, but it gives many of the characters extra depth, there aren’t really any bad guys, there’s a lot more moral ambiguity and really explores the grey areas of what Hellboy and the BPRD does. And mixed in through all of that are some amazing action setpieces.
Are reboots of comic book movies more forgivable?
Before I get into today’s topic, I want to give a quick shoutout to At the Back who passed me the Versatile Blogger Award. I really do appreciate the award for what it is, he thinks this site is in his top 10 list of blogs. But I’m not going to participate in the meme. If you follow me on Twitter, you did get to hear 10 random facts about me, but that’s as far as I’m going with it. I’ll stick with my Follow Fridays to share the blogging love. But today I wanted to go back to The Amazing Spider-Man. It’s a great movie, did well in the box office, though not quite as well as any of the Raimi movies yet, and was received rather well critically. But the thing hanging in the air in almost every single discussion about the movie was that it was too soon for a reboot. So my question for today is, should we be more forgiving of reboots of comic book movies?
My history with comic books
It may seem odd for someone to start up a site about superhero movies without having a strong connection to comic books. The two things go hand in hand as the superhero genre started with comic books, almost all superhero films are adapted from comic books, and those that aren’t often become comic books after the fact. But I’ve said from the beginning that I’m not a huge comic book fan, I haven’t read dozens of X-men or Superman comics. In fact I can count the number of comics of either of those two that I’ve read on one hand. But that’s not to say I’ve never read any comic books. I’ve read a few, I own a few, and here is where you can get pretty much my entire experience with comics.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 