Comic Doodles 2.0

Photo courtesy JoBlo       Shortly after the Luke Cage Netflix series premiered in 2016, Tarantino revealed in an interview that he nearly made a film adaptation of everyone's favorite Hero for Hire back in the 1990s. I'm not necessarily a die-hard fan of Tarantino (although Django Unchained was fantastic), but of all of Hollywood's tales of lost films, this is one of the most intriguing.      In the interview, Tarantino said he would have liked to have cast Laurence Fishburne as Luke, which would have been amazing given Fishburne's versatility as an actor and Luke Cage's penchant for combining comedy with drama. Tarantino's comic-loving friends, however, thought Wesley Snipes would make a better Luke Cage, given his physique, and this frustrated Tarantino so much that he decided his efforts would be better spent creating original material than adapting existing characters.      But what would his version have looked like, anyway...

Photo courtesy Lionsgate and Marvel Entertainment      With the exception of Big Hero 6 , animated movies based on Marvel Comics haven't really had the same critical acclaim or massive fan following as DC's animated movies. But there's one Marvel Animated Feature that I can't help but love because it dares to answer the age-old question, "What if the Avengers had a bunch of kids, and then most of the Avengers died off, and then Tony Stark's old robot buddy Ultron came to ruin everything?"      Enter the 2008 film  Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow . Picture a cross between "Old Man Logan" and "Age of Ultron" with some "A-Next" thrown in for good measure, except it's not really based on any of them. The premise? Most of the Avengers are gone, and their kids are left in the care of Old Man Tony Stark. Making up our cast of powered preteens are Pym (Ant-Man and Wasp's son), Azari (Black Panther and Storm's son),...

Photo courtesy 20th Century Fox SPOILERS AHEAD FOR LOGAN ! It's been a year already, go watch it!      Every time I watch Logan , there's one character in particular that really stands out, and that's Bobby, the New Mutant with electricity powers and the very same kid clutching a Wolverine action figure at Logan's funeral. And apparently I'm not the only one to think this. Grace Randolph from the YouTube channel Beyond the Trailer said that while she found most of the New Mutants in the film to be "not likable," she enjoyed watching Bobby. But I think the reason I find his character so interesting is not just his likability, but the fact that he might be one of the most important characters in the film.      There's a deleted scene in which Logan awakes to find Bobby standing over his bed, playing out a fight with his action figures. In one hand, he has Wolverine, clad in his classic canary suit; in the other, he has Sabretooth, whose fangs and ...

Photo courtesy Sony Pictures      2011 was an interesting year for comic book movies. In the year before Marvel's The Avengers would completely revolutionize superhero filmmaking, we had movies like  X-Men: First Class, Thor, Green Lantern, and  Captain America: The First Avenger . That year, we also saw a superhero film of a different kind, Michel Gondry's adaptation of  The Green Hornet series, which starred Seth Rogen and Jay Chou. Despite being panned by critics (it boasts a mighty 43% on Rotten Tomatoes!), this film is definitely worth a second watch, for beneath the action and the juvenile humor lies a clever and unique deconstruction of superheroes, comic book movies, and most importantly, sidekicks.      Seth Rogen plays Britt Reid, whose life is sent tumbling into a directionless abyss when his father dies of a bee sting. Like many superheroes, he is driven to vigilantism by his father's death -- kind of. Once his father is...