Well, we've had some schedule slippage, which I apologize for, but I have a semi - decent excuse in that some personal life changes meant I was without ready Internet access for some of the last month. On the plus side, I was able to finish both Nine Princes in Amber and its first sequel, The Guns of Avalon. Before I get to my thoughts on them, however, I wanted to highlight a bit of (less than hot-off-the-presses) relevant news - The Chronicles of Amber appears to be in production as a television series.
As neat as it would be to see, the most interesting thing about the press release is the many comparisons to Game of Thrones, especially the ones that claim the Amber was an inspiration for Westros. Now, I have yet to read any of the books and have only seen a little of the show, but I can definitely understand where such comparisons come from, given all that happens in Amber in these relatively short books.
Alright, so the last 2016 Science Fiction and Fantasy History Month post is . . . quite late, and I apologize for that (I'll make my excuses when I'm finally done with it). In the meanwhile, yesterday the podcast Geek Gab released their 84th episode, "Super Secrets of Appendix N"*. Now, I'm not a regular listener to Geek Gab, but I was especially interested because the guest this week was none other than Jeffro Johnson, who, as I've mentioned, inspired last month's blogging topic (he even gave it a nice shoutout at the Castalia House blog).
So I was interested to hear what he'd have to say on the topic:
Wow. That turned into quite the manifesto, at the end. If you're at all interested in the history and current state of science fiction and fantasy literature, you should definitely give this a listen.
*Defined most poetically in the episode as "a list of the stuff Gary Gygax ripped off to make Dungeons & Dragons.
At the end of my musings on the first few chapters of Nine Princes in Amber last week, I opined that much of the setting, or at least enough to get a handle on, would soon be explained. As we shall see, I was more or less correct.
As I suspected, Corwin's memory was soon to be returned, but not without a good bit of effort. After meeting up with one of his many brothers and discreetly dealing with the pursuers thereof, the two decide to make the journey to Amber. In a situation not unlike the Pevensies hearing the word "Aslan" for the first time, the word "Amber" conjures up in Corwin a host of associations - he doesn't know what it means, only that he belongs there.
The journey itself is an interesting affair, consisting of what seems to be a number of jumps between alternate universes. Random, the brother, is controlling it somehow, and the travelers' effects change somewhat along with the surroundings (at one point Corwin pulls a bunch of paper currency labeled in Latin out of his wallet), although he isn't able to route them around all the obstacles, including a chase scene with another brother - this one a knight with a pack of especially ferocious hunting dogs.
Corwin takes all this in stride despite his lack of memory, which he eventually confesses to Random. Happily, a solution is offered - a powerful labyrinth called the Pattern that, when navigated by a member of their family, gives their various powers and should restore Corwin's memory. Of course his labyrinth is in Amber itself, but luckily there's a duplicate located at the bottom of a nearby ocean.
Of course it works and Corwin remembers not only his activities for the past several centuries, but the true nature of Amber - ". . . the greatest city that had ever existed or ever would exist. Amber had always been and would always be, and every other city everywhere, every other city that existed was but a reflection of a shadow of some phase of Amber." Heady stuff, and an interesting reversal of the usual assumption that our Earth is the "real" one. It's also, come to think of it, again not unlike the situation in Narnia, where the world the bulk of the stories take place in turns out to be a transient copy of somewhere more real.
Unfortunately for Corwin, however, now that he remembers what Amber is he also remembers that yet another brother - this one a particular rival - is poised to take control of it. Whether Corwin succeeds in stopping him, however, will have to wait for another week.
So a few years back I tried to boost the idea of December as "Science Fiction and Fantasy History Month". It didn't take off, for various reasons - not the least of which is my own sporadic blogging schedule - but I've always sort of wanted to return to it. With the changes that have happened in the literary SF&F fan-world over the past couple years, this may be the perfect time to reboot it, so for today and the next few Saturdays, I'll be talking about what I hope turns out to be a few different classics.
2017 Fitness Goal: Be able to dress like this guy.
First off is Nine Princes in Amber, the first book in the "Chronicles of Amber" series by Roger Zelazny. I picked this one for a few reasons - I've seen it mentioned on a few lists of important and influential works (it is, for example, covered in Jeffro Johnson's seminal Appendix N series), I'm a big fan of Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, and I suspect it's a big influence on one of my current favorite authors, John C. Wright. Perhaps most influentially, I recently came across a handsome two-volume omnibus collection of the series at my local library. This magnificent cover art by Boris Vallejo merely sealed the deal.
A few chapters in, I'm already thinking I made the right choice. It actually starts much like a contemporary thriller, with a first-person protagonist waking up with amnesia in what appears to be a private clinic. His escape from confinement and initial moves to discover his identity by tracking down the sister that had him confined there could come right out of a (70s-era) Bourne movie, with only a few hints - like his prodigious strength - that something weirder is going on. Even after he finds his sister's set of custom Tarot cards covered in pictures of what he recognizes as his family in archaic dress, it might just all be part of a weird but ultimately mundane conspiracy.
But of course, it's not - by next week, I suspect, both Corwin and I will have a somewhat clearer picture of what it actually is.
On this very night fifty years ago - Thursday, September 8, 1966 - an episode of a new science fiction television show beamed into American televisions for the very first time. When it was cancelled just three seasons later, nobody involved suspected that Star Trek would become the beloved cultural juggernaut that it has. While I've enjoyed all the different versions of Trek over the years, a large proportion of my personal favorites, no matter the decade, seem to involve the original crew:
All the news that's fit to print, but maybe doesn't justify an entire post to itself.
First off, as we were just speaking of Atomic Robo, a month or two back the spinoff comic Real Science Adventures went live as a similarly presented webcomic - as of this posting it updates Tuesday-Thursday while Atomic Robo is Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Thus far the entirety of Volume 2 ("The Billion-Dollar Plot", one of Tesla's pre-Robo adventures) has been posted, along with the beginning of "Raid on Marauder Island", an all-new Kickstarter-funded prequel to The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. No word yet on whether any stories from Volume 1 will be making an appearance, but I imagine it's only a matter of time until they're up, complete with covers imitating hilarious old men's magazines.
Also funding on Kickstarter is a new fantasy fiction magazine that I'm quite interested in. The chief draw of Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy is the promise of a never-before-published Robert E. Howard fantasy piece. which would be quite a find after eight decades. As it turns out, however, "unpublished" doesn't mean quite the same thing as "unknown":
Even so, it still sounds like an interesting read, and at $3 for the first digital issue there's very little buy-in if it's all one's interested in.
Also in the pop-literary-criticism vein, the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters website I mentioned last fall has added an index for Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers 2 to its list of Indexes to Classic Sherlockian Works (it's currently listed as a second Volume One, but it's definitely for Volume 2). This is a much-needed and sorely appreciated project, and I for one am very grateful that it exists.
Finally, the long-awaited followups to the Crossovers books are now available for preorder from the Meteor House Press website. Now called Crossovers Expanded, they look very comparable to the original volumes, and will be shipping sometime in the late summer. The new covers look particularly slick, and so of course Sean Levin has added them to the headers of his Crossover Universe blog:
But will they have indexes?
I know I'm greatly looking forward to these, they'll be great references for a couple projects I'm working on . . .
So after a fairly heavy storyline in which Robo wakes up from his detour to the late nineteenth century to discover that the world in under the control of a US Government conspiracy started to oppose him, specifically, and being attacked by kaiju, the latest issue of the Atomic Robo webcomic is delving into the past for some wacky espionage shenanigans in 1938 China.
To be more precise, Robo visits the Japanese-occupied city of Shanghai, where he makes contact with a rather familiar-looking member of the resistance forces. It is, of course, Short Round, first seen rescuing Indiana Jones from gangsters in the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - the New York Giants hat is a dead giveaway. It only makes sense, after all, that even if he ended up spending some time acting as Indy's sidekick elsewhere in the world (he does pop up in this capacity from time to time in the Indiana Jones Expanded Universe, most notably in the sadly non-canonical Into the Great Unknown), he would return to his native Shanghai to help repel the invading Japanese. This would also explain what Short Round was doing while Indy was hunting for the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which also takes place in 1938.
And lest the reader think that the hat is a coincidence - it's not impossible that two such hats were floating around in Shanghai even in the 1930s - there's the little matter of the place Robo gets sent for the next meeting:
No, Robo, there is not.
While it's not quite the venerable Club Obi Wan (and yes, folks, that's a Star Wars joke), it might possibly be the same building, and it's almost certainly named after Willie Scott's memorable last performance before she got dragged into Short Round and Indy's escape. Perhaps Lao Che was in a nostalgic mood when he was doing the remodeling. We may yet find out, as Robo has yet to do more than walk in the front door of the club. Might Lao Che himself be waiting inside? It wouldn't be very much out of character for the writers of the comic - the last issue, after all, was very much a homage to Pacific Rim, while the one prior to that ended with cameo appearances from Agents West and Gordon from The Wild, Wild, West. And the name of this storyline, as it turns out, is The Temple of Od . . .
That's "Happy Leap Day" in French, for all my non-French-speaking readers (and if I happen to actually have any French-speaking readers, I apologize in advance and blame Google Translate).
Why French? Because following long-standing Internet Tradition, today happens to be the day for celebrating the one of the greatest French characters ever created by Marvel:
In the years since his debut, Sherlock Holmes has been a popular subject across practically every entertainment medium in existence - from his original stories, to radio shows, films, television shows both live-action and animated, and even video games, not to mention entire libraries' worth of pastiche novels.
This year, publishing company 18thwall Productions is going back to the beginning, so to speak, with a monthly series of e-novellas starring the Great Detective, replicating in a way the original appearances of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's' shorter Holmes pieces in magazines like The Strand.
The first of these, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Doll, kicks the series off to an admirable start. The author, Heidi Hewitt, has captured Doyle's Watson-voice to a remarkable extent, and the classic elements - Baker Street, Lestrade, Holmes' eventual retirement to beekeeping- and references to other cases abound. An overabundance of these often works to the detriment of a pastiche work, but here it doesn't quite get that bad. I did question Lestrade's presence once Holmes and Watson leave London, but I suppose he also tagged along to Baskerville Hall, so perhaps his jurisdiction is flexible like that.
As the title of both the story and this post allude to, however, there's one element of this story that is distinctly un-Doyle-like - the clockwork robots that make up the client's serving staff. It takes a deft hand to add science-fiction elements like this to a historical setting without turning it into a parallel timeline, but as the story ends with the technology lost - in a fairly spectacular scene I think was the best-written in the piece - history can proceed unimpeded. The technology itself is only described in broad strokes, which makes sense as Watson is probably not up on the cutting edge of scientific theory, but a bit more explanation, even techno-babble, would have helped to sell the existence of these robots in 19th-century England, when the outpace even today's efforts.
Of course, with a mystery story the most important element is the solution, and here again is evidence of the author's painstaking craftsmanship - the denouement leaves no hanging threads (even to a seemingly unrelated robbery that I assumed was there to provide a cameo for one of the famous literarygentlemen thieves contemporary with Holmes) and, though surprising, in retrospect could have been figured out ahead of time, particularly for those with a Holmes-like memory for the details of the Sherlockian Canon. Even for readers without that, however, it was a very enjoyable story and I for one am greatly anticipating the second installment in this series.
(Disclaimer: the publisher provided me with a review copy of this story - my opinions, however, are all my own.)
Thanks to a mention by Sean Levin over at the Crossover Universe blog, recently I have discovered a website that promises to be both entertaining and useful. It exists under the name Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters, although (as the introduction states) at this point it's really more an authoritative, if not quite exhaustive, guide to Sherlock Holmes pastiche works themselves. A remnant of the site's original purpose remains, however, in a list of "Historical & Fictional" characters - this last a great boon for the crossover researcher, especially in cases where more than one author has crossed Holmes over with the same character (perhaps not surprisingly, Count Dracula has his own page).
As if that wasn't useful enough, the site also hosts a number of specialized lists (the one recounting the non-canonical family members of Holmes and Watson is especially interesting), as well as the modestly named Indexes to Classic Sherlockian Works. This last may be the greatest page on the entire site, for two of the works that have been painstakingly indexed are none other than Crossovers I and Myths for the Modern Age. Just those two would be a find - taken as a whole, the site is a treasure trove comparable to the Agra treasure, and great thanks are due the hands that built it.
On July 3, 1985, movie-going audiences were treated to the first-ever showing of Back to the Future. Since then, there have been two sequel films, an animated TV series, many video games, and uncounted jokes, references and allusions in pop culture and beyond - even President Reagan once quoted Doc Brown in his second State of the Union address.
This year, 2015, is of particular interest to fans of the Back to the Future trilogy, as it's finally the year that Doc, Marty, and Jennifer visit in Part II. Obviously The Future didn't turn out much like that film showed (although we still have a few more months), although not. perhaps, for lack of trying. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that the characters and imagery of Back to the Future is still a part of the cultural language.
But why is it, after all that time, that this movie is still so beloved - even by fans, like me, who weren't even born yet when it premiered?
Part of it, I think, is that it's very well done, technically speaking - the story, despite being science fiction of the best kind, is not particularly effects-heavy, and the effects are there succeed (mostly) at seeming realistic, even compared to today's CGI-heavy films.
Aside from the spectacle, Back to the Future also allows for criticism at a deeper level. One example of this is the continuing motif of paradox, not just in the main conflict of the story - Marty imperiling his own existence - but also in the background, such as the name of the town (Hill Valley*) and that of the movie itself. The movie also uses repetition for both humor and dramatic purposes - this is more clear across the whole trilogy, with each new era getting its own Mister Sandman Sequence, but can also be seen in just the first film - as is pointed out at that TvTropes link, Marty's trip across contemporary Hill Valley can be seen as another such sequence, inviting comparisons to all the rest.
But most of all, while clever and well-done, the most important aspect of the movie is that it is fun to watch. Comedy and drama are present in equal amounts, and even when it touches on heavier topics it does so with a light touch. There's an element of wish-fulfillment present, in that almost everyone has at least wondered what it would be like to visit another time, while simultaneously we see some of the problems - even just minor things, like Marty trying to order soft drinks that haven't been invented yet - such travel would cause. But finally, in the end, the seemingly insurmountable problems are overcome, and the adventure continues.
Oh, and the music is great, too.
* Supplementary material claims this is because the town was founded by a man named Hill, but I bet even he could see the humor in it.
Regular readers of this blog would be forgiven from assuming that I neither read nor watched anything of interest for most of 2014. This is of course untrue, so the next few posts will probably be "catch-ups" of a sort.
But first, I'd like to point out that about a month ago we saw the appearance of a long-awaited Star Wars-related video - no, I'm not talking about the first The Force Awakens trailer, but rather fan-film studio Bat in the Sun's Super Power Beat Down Episode 14, "Batman Vs. Darth Vader". And man, but it was worth the wait:
Once the sheer geeky joy of seeing Batman lightsaber-dueling with Darth Vader had subsided somewhat, I was able to appreciate some of the finer details of the film. While the production values of Bat in the Sun's productions have always been high, this one really raises the bar - yes, in terms of overall special effects and set and costume design (all of which are spot on), but also in the little details, like Batman's nose bleeding after his abortive attempt to breathe in space.
Although the final result of the battle was dictated by popular vote*, I was also impressed by the writing of the piece. While it would have been nice to get some hint of the (allegedly plotted out) events that got Superman trapped on the Death Star - giving Batman the opportunity to use the "That's no moon" line was a nice bonus to picking that setting, by the way - in the first place, once the Bat-wing** docks things flow fairly logically, given a Batman with some idea of Darth Vader's capabilities. Sneaking a lightsaber (presumably Obi-Wan's, which would imply that this whole fracas takes place during the Yavin 4 briefing scenes from A New Hope) from Vader's armory was an especially good idea, though it might just be because it leads to this reveal:
"I underestimate nothing!"
Anyway, it's plain to see that this is a fan-film, in the best sense of the word - if the creative teams working on The Force Awakens and Batman V. Superman show as much obvious care for the settings and characters as Bat in the Sun has, then in terms of fan response they should have nothing to worry about.
*Not that that will stop BitS from releasing an alternate ending next month. **Never before has this alternate term for Batman's aircraft been more apt.
In some stunning news from Tesladyne Island earlier this week, the writers of the Atomic Robo comic announced that as of 2015, the comic will be transitioning from a traditional by-the-issue publishing model to a three-times-a-week webcomic. This means, among other things, that the entire 54-issue run of the comic thus far will be free to read - eventually, their plan is to release one issue a week until they catch up, starting today - and then continuing with the new stuff. Which, cleverly, they now have over a year to come up with, though as today was the expected release date for the Volume 9 trade it probably would have been about that long anyway.
Anyway, it looks like it's going to be an interesting year, to say the least, for Atomic Robo fans as things roll out. But there are still unanswered questions - such as, how long will the "Free Comics" page remain in its current form? Will the new paradigm work as well as the creators hope it will? Will it include the Real Science Adventures spin-off? Will Dr. Dinosaur ever top his firsttwo appearances?
Except perhaps the jetpack, nothing quite says "retro-futurism" like the flying car. Probably the most famous is, of course, Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine from the end of Back to the Future. In Part II, we see that the source if this technology is the year 2015, when hover-tech is built into practically everything. With 2015 now less than a year away, the odds of this particular vision of the future seems increasingly remote.
In the real world, of course, there are a myriad of reasons for this. Gravity manipulation, if even possible, is still years away, and while more mundane versions of flying cars have been developed, they still run into the problem of being much harder to use than the traditional auto.
In fiction, of course, things can get much more interesting. For example, in Captain America: The First Avenger we see Howard Stark showing off a car retrofitted with "Stark Gravitic Reversion Technology", a feat all the more impressive for being achieved in 1943.
True, it doesn't last very long, but the technology seems well-developed enough to become widespread in fairly short order. That it doesn't can, I think, be explained by this later development:
Clearly, "Gravitic Reversion" is one of the things that S.H.E.I.L.D has been keeping under wraps for all these years - Lola is, I understand, based on a 1962 model Corvette, although of course the hover-conversion could have taken place at any point subsequently. Of particular interest, to me anyway, is that Lola's transition process looks and sounds a lot like the DeLorean's. It's very tempting to conflate the two, and having hover-tech be suppressed by S.H.E.I.L.D for much of the development period explains how it becomes so widespread so soon after it becomes public.
OsCorp, though promising, was
rejected for consideration.
For obvious reasons.
Of course, when they did decide to release it S.H.E.I.L.D probably still wouldn't want to admit they'd been suppressing it, so the release would probably be done through an intermediary. About a month ago there was a flurry of interest surrounding HUVrTech, which purported to be a company that had indeed developed a Back to the Future-esque hoverboard. Of course it turned out to be a prank, though one a lot of people seem to have believed (in retrospect they should have waited until today to announce it . . . then again, they probably wouldn't have had as many people believe it if they had), but their announcement - coming December 2014! - is pretty much how I would expect things to go if a shadowy conspiracy was in charge of technological development.
For now, though, flying cars and anti-gravity skateboards remain the stuff of fiction, looking forward to the day when we really aren't going to need roads.
A month or so ago, it was announced that Win Scott Eckert, author of the Crossover Universe Timeline books I was so enthusiasticabout a couple years back, is handing off that project to one Sean Levin, who will be producing a third and fourth volume of that work.
As if that wasn't enough, yesterday the two of them - well, mostly Levin - began a new blog to chronicle the further development of the Crossover Universe. This quite exciting, and I look forward to following the progress of this new project.
Look, I'm not one of the sorts of Star Trek fans who felt betrayed or insulted by 2009's Star Trek taking the focus into a new timeline. Nor am I terribly convinced by arguments that boil down to "it has too much action to be a proper Star Trek story". And truthfully, I have very few problems with Star Trek Into Darkness as a whole - but the problems I do have a pretty central to the film.
They're also pretty spoilery, so if you haven't seen it yet you probably want to take care of that before venturing below the cut.
It's rather hard to believe, but today is the tenth anniversary of the release of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film, based on the Alan Moore comic of the same name. I never got a chance to see it in the theater, unfortunately (though I really wanted to), but once I acquired a DVD copy it quickly became one of my favorite movies, right up there with the Back to the Future and Indiana Jones films.
Sadly, the world in general does not appear to share my enthusiasm. I tend to attribute this to rampant Alan Moore fandom - he famously doesn't get on well with adaptations of his work, and LXG admittedly took rather a few more liberties than an adaptation can typically support.
But in this case, however, I think the changes work quite well. Certainly they don't distract from making the movie enjoyable to watch, in itself, and one of the chief delights of cameo- and reference-spotting remain intact.
Indeed, I credit The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen with helping to form my current interest in crossovers and shared universes, most notably the Wold Newton Universe (to which the League is tangentially related).
Anyway. I've always enjoyed the movie, and was quite disappointed a few years later when LXG2: War of the Worlds failed to materialize. Almost unbelievably, it seems that the concept might still have a chance - there are some early reports that Fox is developing the League as a television show. Details at this time are sketchy - not even to determine whether this is a reboot or a continuation of the film continuity - but I'm hopeful that whatever comes from he project will be at least as enjoyable as the movie is to me.
So yes, this is old news, but The Avengers is amazing. It takes everything that was good about the previous half-dozen Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and concentrates it down into two-and-a-half hours of what may be the best superhero movie to date.
If I had to pick one word to sum up the film, I think I would choose balanced. There are several ways that this is relevant - in terms of spectacle vs. plot, for example, the movie manages to excel at the former without it being (as is too often the case) at the expense of the latter. Also applicable is the way the film balanced the hitherto unprecedented - so far as I'm aware - team-up of heroes who previously carried four individual franchises, a feat made even more extraordinary by its success. Each one got some time in the spotlight, simultaneously continuing their stories from previous outings and emerging ready to slip back into solo-dom with minimal disruption.
Iron Man, having had around 100% more prior movie time than almost any of his team-mates, seemed to me to be the most static in terms of development, though his introduction would certainly seem to indicate his relationship with Pepper has developed from what I remember. There was also that nifty armor upgrade, which makes a nice midpoint between the backpack-armor we saw in Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3's rumored nano-tech-armor. Finally, he did have a bit of a character arc in his response to Captain America's remarks about sacrifice, and I really liked the way he insisted on interacting with Dr. Banner as a fellow scientist rather than a potential Hulk.
Then again, Hulkbuster!
Speaking of the Hulk, in some ways he had the most to overcome, with his multiple actors and somewhat uneven prior films. In a lot of ways, however, he was the breakout star of the film - certainly he was responsible for many of the film's most popular moments (such as the punching the first giant robot dragon-fish, and of course his "Puny god" line). Would these moments be enough to carry a solo film? I'm sure we'll find out eventually, but in the meantime I'm looking forward to Hulk and/or Dr. Banner making cameos in his team-mates' movies. I'd like to think, giving him going off with Tony at the end of Avengers, that Iron Man III is the most likely candidate for this, but given the trailers and early reactions to III so far I'm not holding my breath.
Other solo sequels are sounding equally good. Despite the fact that Thor was not really my favorite of the "Phase One" Marvel films, I'm very excited about the direction that the sequel is taking. Of course, part of this is because I somewhat jokingly predicted this back when the first film came out, but hey - Space Elves are cool anytime. Thor's appearance in The Avengers itself was not quite that exciting, unfortunately - his biggest roles, it seemed, were facilitating hero-on-hero brawls and contributing secondary characters, namely Loki and Dr. Selvig. Not that either of those is unimportant, but they just didn't have quite the same focus as some of the other members. It didn't help that Thor was the one who delivered what I thought was the worst line in the movie - though funny, "He's adopted" was a rather out-of-character statement, in more ways than one.
Rounding out the "Big Four" of the team is Captain America whom, more than the others, ended his last solo film on a bit of a cliffhanger. He didn't get a whole lot of a chance to catch his breath and adjust to the 21st century, either, though there are a few signs that such an adjustment is taking place - note his mention of feeling at home on the Helicarrier. More than adjusting to the times, though, we saw Cap adjusting to being part of a different team than he was used to. This will be important later, as 2014's scheduled film Captain America: The Winter Soldier sounds like it will feature not only the titular Solider (no spoilers, but that title's a giveaway for something we all knew would happen), but also Black Widow and a new hero, the Falcon. How exactly this will shake out remains to be seen, but it can't be harder than Cap learning to work with Tony and Thor (the latter of whom, incidentally, prompted Cap to utter my absolute favorite line in the whole film: "There's only one God, Ma'am, and I'm pretty sure He doesn't dress like that").
For all the appropriateness of Black Widow appearing in Winter Solider, it does seem a shame that it probably means she won't be getting her own movie. Both she and Hawkeye, in fact, managed the jump from "secondary character" to "ensemble lead" quite well, especially considering the latter's post-production introduction into Thor. Spending half the film mind-controlled was perhaps a bit of a heavy-handed way to generate audience sympathy for a relative unknown, but revealing and drawing on a shared past with Natasha made his integration surprisingly easy. And of course the Widow herself had a great second appearance, being an effective Avenger even with a slightly out-of-genre skillset.
Finally, Agent Coulson. From the moment that Joss Whedon was revealed as the film's director, speculation ran rampant that Phil "First Name Is Agent" Coulson wouldn't make it through the film. It was such an obvious ploy that when it actually happened, I was actually a little surprised. That didn't make it any less meaningful, of course, either to the audience or the other characters - it helped that Phil had some great character-building scenes before getting killed, especially the ones opposite Captain America.
Happily, in true comic-book fashion it appears that the Son of Coul has cheated death (exact method unknown, though I lean towards the "Nick Fury exaggerated the extent of his injuries to give the team something to Avenge" theory) and will be taking the lead in a Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D:
Not quite the SHIELD movie I was hoping for, but it has promise. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of the apparently anti-SHIELD organization The Rising Tide. Other details are sketchy at the moment but I'm definitely willing to give this show a try.
In a way, The Avengers was really a transition point not only in the development of the MCU, but the superhero-film industry generally. The effects of showing that such an elaborate project could not only work, but work well, remain to be seen - but in the meanwhile, bring on Phase II!
EDIT: Typically, just a few hours after I posted this another, much longer promo for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D went up. My interest is not reduced:
Being a former gun-shop owner and CCL instructor, the author of the Monster Hunter International series knows what he's talking about when it comes to the laws and the realities surrounding firearm ownership here in the U.S. Luckily for us, he hasn't lost his teaching skills by switching to writing best-selling novels, as he demonstrated a few nights ago:
That "best, most definitive and thorough article" is found on Larry's blog, under the title "An opinion on gun control", and is well worth your time if you're interested in hearing more about the topics touched on in the TV segment.
Back in April, I mentioned that I would be seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey when it came out, no matter how it turned out. Well, the film has been out for a few weeks now, and I've gotten the chance to see it and form my opinion as to whether it was worth the effort.
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