Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, My Thoughts

Marvel Comics has announced a variety of new series for their post Secret Wars Marvel universe, some unsurprising (a couple new Avengers titles), and some a bit out of left field, like the Black Knight getting a series. However, the company has recently announced a new series that may be the most surprising of all.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.

Who is Moon Girl? Well, according to Marvel, Moon Girl is Lunella Lafayette, a teenage super-genius with dormant Inhuman DNA (Honestly, I don't see why she NEEDS to be Inhuman. Why not just be a super-genius) who stumbles upon some Kree tech and befriends the Devil Dinosaur, a big red Tyrannosaurus Rex. They'll need to work together to stop the Killer-Folk, who are after the tech Lunella encounters.

It is surprising, but also kind of neat they are dusting off the old Devil. Because he is older than one thinks. He first appeared in Devil Dinosaur #1 (April 1978)

A Jack Kirby creation, Devil Dinosaur was a powerful red T-Rex who had incredible intelligence, and was quite a bit stronger and tougher than other members of his species. He had adventures in a prehistoric-era parallel universe alongside Moon-Boy, a furry ape-like humanoid. Over the years, the twosome have made sporadic appearances in the main Marvel Universe, ending up in the Savage Land, and Devil had appeared as a villain in Nextwave, but that was retconned away.

You know, it's funny. Marvel has been really going into the idea of their superhero characters being part of legacies. Sure, Marvel has given old identities to new people in the past (Scott Lang/Ant-Man, Rita DeMara/Yellojacket, Miguel O'Hara/Spider-Man 2099), but they are really going into it in recent years. Kamala Khan took up the mantle of Ms. Marvel from Carol Danvers. Jane Foster is the new Thor. Sam Wilson/Falcon is the new Captain America. Miles Morales will be sharing the Spider-Man identity with Peter Parker. Marvel has really fallen in love with the idea of legacy, and I think it's fantastic.

Lunella is a legacy character, and since it was announced that Moon-Boy will also appear in the new series, I can't wait to see them meet. I hope they end up friends.

I do love when Marvel gives love to lesser-known characters, so I will definitely be picking this up. I also want to help support diversity at Marvel, both in characters getting titles, and in the people making the books. Plus, it looks like a fun title. I've been really enjoying more fun titles lately, which is why Archie ending its Mega Man title makes me sad.

Puzzle + Dragons Z Review

I enjoy puzzle games. They are addictive, fun, and let me use my brain. So, when I found this game, I downloaded a demo for my 3DS. I fell in love with it. So when I went to a GameStop and bought a copy. The game? Puzzle + Dragons Z.

It was two games for the price of one! Savings!

Puzzle + Dragons Z is a spin-off of the series of the same name for mobile devices and tablets. This game is essentially the same as the mobile games, only this version includes elements from RPG games, like towns and sidequests.

In this game, you play a trainee Dragon Tamer from Zed City in the land of Dracomacia. Dracomacia is a land in which humans and monsters, including various dragons, co-exist with one another. The monsters draw their life energy from orbs in the atmosphere of this world. The orbs come in five elements: Fire, Water, Wood, Light, and Dark.

Anyway, what's a Dragon Tamer? Think of it as a mixture of a Pokémon Trainer and a park ranger/police officer, protecting the land from various threats.

You became a Dragon Tamer just in time, because an evil group known as Paradox wants to remake the world in its image, and it does such by capturing the Skydragons of Dracomacia, causing it to break into several pieces. It's up to you to stop Paradox and save the world!

This game reminds me of Pokémon in many ways. You get to make a team of monsters, and by using match-three puzzle skills, you have them battle against other monsters, different types are strong and weak against others, and if you beat a monster, you may get an egg that you can hatch, so you get a monster of your own. There are a variety of monsters besides dragons. Some are like bugs, some are like mammals, and there are even some that resemble knights.

Different monsters have different abilities and effects in combat, allowing for a lot of strategy in how you want to approach battle. That's a nice little feature.

I don't have any major issues with Puzzle +  Dragons Z, but I haven't gotten very far with it yet.

This also had another game, Puzzle + Dragons, Super Mario Bros. Edition. It was essentially a Mario game with match-three RPG elements. The story is the classic Mario story: Bowser kidnaps Peach, and Mario must save her, nothing new there. The thing that amuses me about the game is the idea that Mario and Luigi can create a fighting team composes of classic Mario henchmen, like Goombas and Koopa Troopas.

It's a fun game. The only thing I didn't like was that the choices of Mario henchmen seemed limited, as so far, all I got was variations on the Koopa Troopa and the Goomba. There are a lot of creatures Mario has faced in his long career, like Cheep Cheeps, Bloopers, Bullet Bills, Pirahna Plants, Bob-Ombs, Monty Moles, Mini-Ninjis, Shy-Guys, Birdos, I'm hoping to see more variety in the various creatures Mario can recruit. To be fair, I haven't gotten very far in this version, so maybe there will be more variety.

All in all, I recommend picking this game up, especially if you like puzzle games. It's fun, addicting, and it's two games for the price of one! Can't beat that!

Lack of entries.

I hate having blogger's block, I guess you could call it. I look at the blank page and nothing comes to me. It does drive me crazy sometimes.

Man, I really should get off my lazy butt and finally get to work on reviewing Skull the Slayer #1. I started the blasted thing, but I can't be bothered to actually scan a panel or two for some reason...

Ant-Man Review

On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to watch the latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Ant-Man.

To be honest, I wasn't quite as excited to see this movie as I was to see the other films in the MCU, mainly because I felt the film was going to treat Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne as an afterthought in favor of Scott Lang. I have nothing against Lang, but I thought it would've been nice to see Hank become the Ant-Man in the MCU, alongside Jan as the Wasp, and they get to eventually fight Thanos. I had been hearing a lot of people saying the film was good though, so I decided to go see it with my dad.

I was pleasantly surprised by the film. It was a fun little romp, and as sad as I was that we would most like not get to see Hank and Janet kicking Thanos's butt in the future alongside the Avengers, I actually found myself not thinking about that during this film.

The film focuses on Paul Rudd's Scott Lang, a brilliant ex-con and divorcee who wants to go straight and make things right with his daughter, Cassie. He is recruited by Michael Douglas's Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man, to don the suit to aid him in preventing Pym's former protégé, Corey Stoll's Darren Cross, from weaponizing his invention, the Pym Particle. The particles allow a person to shrink to the size of an ant, while maintain their normal strength.

The film has a lot of wonderful moments of humor, especially from Michael Pena's motormouthed Luis, who is the funniest character in the film. And the final battle is definitely one of the most unusual final battle in a MCU, or really, any film. It's a hilarious final battle.

The film didn't feel much like a standard MCU film, which was a breath of fresh air. It was a heist film with superpowers, and it was a well-executed story, showing that the MCU can tell a story in a variety of genres, and I hope we continue to see such variety in the MCU. Am I the only one hoping the Black Panther movie is a technothriller like Rising Sun and Captain Marvel will be a space opera?

I don't have many complaints about this film, though. One is Darren Cross. He seems a bit much like Obadiah Stane from the first Iron Man film to me, but I didn't think about that watching the film. I have heard the critique that MCU villains tend to be a bit flat, and I can see why. Personally, I think the problem is they don't get the development that the heroes do because except for Loki (and likely Red Skull), many of the villains die in the film they first appeared in. We don't really get to see villains grow and become more rounded over time like we see the heroes do. I would've loved to have seen Cross again, so he could get more development and growth.

I also wished we got to actually have Janet Van Dyne in the film. To me, Marvel really missed out on a opportunity to do what the site TV Tropes calls Fun with Casting and have Kathleen Turner play her. I would have loved to see them back on screen together again. Even more fun would've been having them pay homage to Romancing the Stone or Jewel of the Nile in the dialogue:

Jan: Hank, are you going to tell Scott the Colombia story again?
Hank: Why wouldn't I? We got married after that little adventure!

Yeah. I really grew to like Jan after watching Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and her not being included made me sad. Ah well, at least we will get a Wasp in the MCU.

All in all, I'd recommend seeing this movie. It's a fun way to kill a couple of hours, and it does bring a lot of down-to-Earth charm to the often grand-scale MCU. I cannot wait for a sequel.

This Book Cover is Neat!

Look at this novel cover. This novel cover is awesome.

It's a bear dressed in a military uniform and holding an M-16. This should be a comic book character. I want to see this in a comic, a commando grizzly bear fighting villains. However, the book itself doesn't have such a thing in it, but it's supposed to be a good and funny book anyway, so if I see it in a library, I'll give it a read.

My Thoughts on the Creed trailer

Recently, I got to view a trailer for a film called Creed, which focuses on the son of Apollo Creed, a character in the Rocky film series. The film is a spin-off of the Rocky series.

Basically, the film focuses on Adonis Creed, the son of Apollo Creed. A young boxer on the rise, he looks to the legendary Rocky Balboa for training. Adonis himself is being played by Michael B. Jordan, who is also going to portray Johnny Storm/the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four film.

This trailer has gotten me very excited to see this film. I love the Rocky series, and I am happy to be seeing it come back to theaters. What I especially like the film is that Rocky is trying again in the role of the mentor. After all, Rocky tried to be a mentor to Tommy "Machine" Gunn in Rocky V, but that didn't go so well. At least we did get to see Rocky in a street brawl from the whole deal.

I do like the idea of Rocky Balboa now being in the role of the mentor, and I had to admit, I found the bit with Adonis jogging while his voiceover quotes the speech Rocky made to his son in Rocky Balboa. Nice touch having Adonis being in grey workout clothes similar to the grey sweats Rocky wore in the first film, making the connection.

I also thought the trailer did well by only introducing Rocky partway through it. Yeah, many are going to watch this film just to see Rocky, but doing this makes people notice Adonis and established that he will be the focus of this film.

I can't think of anything major about this trailer I disliked, to be honest. Just for the sake of it, I was disappointed they didn't include Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" somehow. But I really wasn't thinking that when I saw the trailer.

I can't wait to see this movie.

Happy Fourth of July!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July today! I hope you all got to enjoy some food from the grill, and saw some awesome fireworks!