Backlash predictions

Right, predictions time. Keep forgetting to do these so let's start these again with, to my mind, one of the most predictable cards this year:

Sami Zayn vs. Baron Corbin

I would personally prefer Sami Zayn to win this one because I always like it when Sami wins, its a great start to any show and the crowd really gets behind him. That said, he is also really, really good at swallowing a loss and I can't deny that Corbin rather in need of more for credibility reasons.

Corbin to win.

Luke Harper vs. Eric Rowan

Luke Harper is practically invulnerable and I am fine with that. I like Eric Rowan but Harper is being built and built and built right now, so...

Luke Harper to win.

6 Woman (and 1 Man) Tag Match

Becky Lynch, Naomi and Charlotte vs.

Carmella, Natalya, Tamins and James Elsworth

Do we seriously believe that the side that has James Elsworth on it is going to win? He will definitely interfere, he will definitely give his team an edge for about and they will definitely lose. The only way I see them winning is if Charlotte turns heel again in the middle.

Becky, Naomi and Charlotte to win.

US Title

Kevin Owens vs. AJ Styles

Hmm... this is a hard one. Its a bloody dream match, don't get me wrong, and I think it could definitely go either way. Frankly, this is a match I'm looking forward to the a lot more than the main event (sorry, Jinder). I think Owens needs to retain, though, since he only won it quite recently. I think it'll be a screwy win so Styles can stay strong

Owens to retain.

SmackDown Tag Team Championship

Fashion Police vs. the Usos

Don't much care. I would like the Fashion Police to win since I like them marginally more than the Usos. Nothing against the fellows but they've just never clicked with me. That said, I don't think the Fashion Police have been terribly well used since they formed and I don't see them getting a title push until they've fought their way out of that rut.

The Usos to retain.

Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Dolph Ziggler

Now, I like Dolph. I respect Dolph. I think he should have had a slightly more extravagantly successful career than he's had. I think that the turn around the last couple of years with him feuding with the Miz and winning has been great and he deserved that win. However, I cannot imagine any sort of logic, even the sort that goes on in the Freudian nightmare that is a WWE booker's head, where Shinsuke Nakamura loses his first main roster PPV match to Dolph Ziggler, a man who has made something of a speciality of lying down for the deserving.

Nakamura to win.

World Championship

Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal

As much as Randy Orton is the designated transitional champion these days and Jinder Mahal is clearly someone WWE wants to push to the moon to snag the emerging Indian audience... I just don't see it. Sorry, Jinder. If this goes to a series and they can make a real showcase of it then I think it might happen but not on their first PPV match-up. It could happen but I don't think Jinder is quite finished cooking yet.

Orton to retain.

Battlefleet Gothic knock-offs: a review

My two knock-off Battlefleet Gothic ships finally arrived from Russia and they are a lot better than I anticipated. I was actually fine with what looked, on the eBay picture, to be a rather grainy finish to the resin. After all, I was paying about three pounds a ship and pretty much not much more on postage for dodgy recasts from some Russian guy. Meanwhile, an original metal one of these things from down the road was at minimum ten pounds.

The idea that I'd have to compromise on quality was fine by me but then they turned up and it turned out I hadn't compromised. These recasts are amazing. Just look at the detail fidelity on these things...

When I bought them I said you had to squint just a little to see them as a Nova and a Gladius but with them in my hands there's no need to squint at all, they just are straight up recasts of the original. Also, I got a free plastic soap dish sent as packaging. Result!

Okay, before anyone brings it up, yes this is technically miniature piracy. HOWEVER, its not like Games Workshop makes these models anymore. Choosing the Russian knock-off over second hand originals doesn't take money out of the hands of the people who made them. They want to bring this game back some day with a full product range I will support the shit out of it but I see no reason to pay above the odds for metal models that will chip and break over practically perfect lightweight resin models that won't. If they were recasting models currently in production then I wouldn't touch those, I think that's a step too far.

The only issues I have with the sculpts are that, as you can see from the soap dish images, there are injection points at some pretty delicate places. In fact, I did some small damage to the bottom of the Gladius removing one.

The other small issue was that arose, as you can see, is that the contact point for the flying base on the Gladius is fractionally too wide. The one on the Nova is the perfect size but it should be mentioned that some packing of the contact point might be necessary before affixing the base in some cases. Its a small flaw and one I'm more than willing to live with when a frigate is just over £7 including postage and packing.

Construction is pretty pain free, even the tiny side gun or whatever it is Nova has a pretty good tab design that helps you slot it into the exact right spot to match the one molded onto the other side of the ship. The rear fins on the Gladius also have a small detail on their side that allows you to line them up perfectly with a connecting detail on the main body of the ship that allows you to line them up right.

Purchasing details

The name of the seller is erinaceus_primus and his store can be found on eBay. His product listings are, not unnaturally, in Russian but incorporate the English class name of the ship so you can tell what you're buying without comparing the picture to a rulebook. He carries, as far as I can tell, recasts of all the frigates and escorts for the Space Marines fleet including the escorts that can also be used in the Imperial Navy fleet. They do not supply flying stalks but they can be easily ordered from Games Workshop.

All models are resin, please cut and assemble in ventilated conditions.

He accepts payment by PayPal. He has a 14 day returns policy with the buyer paying return postage. 

Comic Reviews

This week DC buttons down the hatches; the ghost of Donald Trump comes up against Judge Dredd; the teen team of my childhood returns; Luke Skywalker and Doctor Aphra get their party clothes on; and, Brian Michael Bendis slips a surprise into my pull list.

The Flash #22

Boy, am I starting to hate events. I knew before I opened this that it wasn't the end, that Doomsday Clock was coming and this was just another tease on the way to the big thing. Still, up until this issue The Button was actually quite a nice, self-contained little story that looked like it was going somewhere. I admit, I did hope that where it was going was restoring Jay Garrick, if not the whole JSA, to the main continuity. As it is, that didn't happen and the story I'd quite been enjoying for the last few weeks just sort of fizzled out. I had a lot of fun while it was running and I do think that it was worth my time, especially the Batman side, though I do question killing Thawne again in a issue running an add for his return in three issues time.

2000AD prog2031

After months and months of being behind, I'm finally caught up on the best British comics ever, so here we go...

I can't tell you how much I love the Sons of Booth storyline running in Judge Dredd right now. 2000AD has never had any chill to speak of and seeing them take on the Trump phenomena in their own bitter, cynical is just beautiful. Plus, you just know, this being Judge Dredd and all, that a fair number of them are going to get shot in the had by the end of the story. Its interesting to see the typical “directionless white male” story that always seems to feed in to these things presented as a bad thing. Oh, young Kelvin is sympathetic enough in his basic situation (when you basic situation is Mega-City One, its hard not to be) but as we see him falling hook, line and sinker for the Sons Of Booth propaganda vids its clear that he is also very, very stupid. Then there's the moment when he dares to have an idea and the Sons' boss encourages him but one of the minions declares they don't need no experts telling them what to do, its perfect.

Aside from that, Scarlet Traces: Cold War book two has a bit of a filler episode with lots of people running around in the middle of an air raid and Defoe continues to broaden its list of suspected necromancers. Cursed: The Fall Of Deadworld is probably my favourite feature aside from Dredd this issue, mainly because of the beautifully twisted art design by Dave Kendall who has so many ideas for zombie Judges. Plus, there's probably the best installment of Brink yet as Kurtis and Gibrani wander through darkened corridors in the depths of the unfinished space station jumping at every noise and shadow.

Green Lanterns #23

Last issue, I said I was looking forward to seeing Guy Gardner training Jessica. Funnily enough, that's not the part of the issue I ended up liking. See, Guy's approach to training Jessica is just to keep shouting at her, the archetypal drill US Army sergeant, and unless there turns out to be more to it than that then I think Sam Humphries just doesn't get Guy.

On the plus side, Kyle training Simon in creative thinking is great. It hones in on something that's less a flaw in Simon and more of a limit: he's a very straight forward thinker and in this Humphries absolutely has it right. There's also a subplot with Volthoom reading about the New Gods which... eh, I can't say I've cared much for the New Gods since the New 52. Like the multiverse, they're an idea DC keeps fiddling with, doing nothing with the new version and then rebooting all over again. I mean, the initial New 52 version of them gave us the Orion subplot in Wonder Woman and then they got another reboot in Multiversity which, far as I can tell, no one has done anything with at all so I'm not sure I much care at this point. It would be nice if DC had a great idea for them for Jack Kirby's centenniary but I sort of doubt it.

Generation X #1

This issue might be the most wrenching transition between cover art and interior art I have ever experienced. Its not that the interior art is bad, after a couple of pages I was really into it, but it is so very, very much unlike the cover its almost painful.

As to story, its our first real glimpse at the “normal” working of the new Xavier's and the traditional new student, Nathaniel Carver, takes a long wander through the halls for cameos galore (Broo! Pixie! Shark Girl!) and the traditional bad first impression of the place as the rest of the book's teenage cast have a brawl that knocks down a wall and covers a room in goose droppings. Nature Girl was a bit of a missed opportunity in the Wolverine The X-Men days and I'm glad she's part of a main cast now.

Then, for the old bastards like me, there's the return of Jubilee and Chamber, original GenXers turned young teachers. I'm glad to see that Jubilee retains both her vampirism and her single motherhood even if neither are played quite as comedic as they were in the Patsy Walker title. This is definitely a funny title, I mean Quentin Quire's in it, it can't help but be. That said, the cliffhanger harkens back to one of the biggest traumas of Jubilee's life so this looks like its going to be a real tone rollercoaster.

Star Wars #31

Jason Aaron has certainly improved his Aphra since Vader Down (or was it Rebel Jail, the last time he wrote her?). I was actually a little worried that the Aaron-written parts of this crossover would be the weak ones but he does a really good job here of matching Gillen's tone, including a downright classic Triple Zero put upon quip. In spite of the title on the cover, this remains more Aphra's story than Luke's and I can't say I exactly mind. More Aphra is always welcome and more Triple Zero even more so.

Powers #8

Creator-owned series and their haituses... I'd completely forgotten I was subscribed to this. Not an unpleasant surprise but it did cost me money.

Okay, for a start I flat out do not remember anything that was going on in this series before the hiatus. I'm pretty sure this is the beginning of a new story and that it is a flashback. I only started following Powers with the beginning of this particular series so the fact that Walker is in a costume is my only clue that this is the past. On the one hand, that's interesting, seeing the world of our of control super people that I'd only previously seen the aftermath of is good. On the other, well, its a transition I wasn't prepared for and spent most of the issue until someone called Walker by name absolutely befuddled by.

Still, its an entertaining read and hopefully its going somewhere interesting that affects the present, otherwise I might drop this and follow it as trades which is probably the better way to read a mystery series. 

Dark Souls and me part 1

A woman who is very disappointed in me, yesterday.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you could call a dedicated gamer. I am just about capable of beating a Pokemon game given a minimum of three months, a good quality print out of the type chart in front of me and my phone open on Google at all times. There are games I have been trying to beat on and off for more than two decades, one of them is Sonic The Hedgehog 3.

It might not be immediately obvious why I decided I really wanted to play Dark Souls II. It certainly isn't obvious to me but it was only a fiver at Entertainment Exchange so here we are.

I'm a little more than an hour in and so far nothing in Drangleic has proven quite so fatal to me as my own ineptitude. I've already wasted at least half a dozen lifegems because I keep forgetting the shoulder buttons do the killy things, not the proper buttons.

I'm also having real trouble with jumping. I either click the left stick too late and run off the edge of the world or click it in the wrong direction and leap blithely into space and those are the deaths where I feel I at least have some excuse. I've more than once simply wandered off the edge of Majula and Things Betwixt. I actually died rather a lot in Things Betwixt to the extent that I think I may technically have “skipped” the tutorial.

I also died to the little baby pigs in Majula whilst trying to find the Emerald Herald. Twice. I finally found her, got my estus flask and by the time I'd died twice more on my way to the Forest Of Fallen Giants I'd even managed to equip it.

I don't think I'm quite the hero the Emerald Herald was expecting to save Drangleic, to be perfectly honest with you.

Rose Tyler tinted glasses

The other day, Big Finish announced that their second full cast Tenth Doctor box set will reunite David Tennant and Billie Piper (and Camille Coduri!) as the Doctor and Rose. I'm actually looking forward to it, especially as one of the stories promises to have the pair meeting an actual historical transgender person, the Chevalier d'Eon, which is an angle I'm actually surprised the modern series hasn't gone for yet (or historical individuals of any LGBTQ+ persuasion, jokes about Shakespeare's sonnets aside).

Hell, sometimes Big Finish has trouble remembering that not all recurring Doctor Who characters are straight (looking at you, inexplicably heterosexual Ace and Turlough).

That said, one thing makes me wonder: where is there left to go with Rose?

You see, one thing I'll definitely say in favour of the modern series is it doesn't tend to leave a lot of ambiguity in the companions' arcs. These characters are introduced for a reason and they leave when their story is done and that's especially true of the RTD companions. Rose had a very defined arc over her two seasons that was pretty much complete as is. I wonder if Big Finish are going to try to add to it or just leave it untouched?

Also, Ice Warriors. I'm really interested to see what Big Finish will do with Ice Warriors given how Mark Gatiss expanded on them in Cold War. Big Finish have done their own expansions of their culture and I hope this story presents some synthesis of the two. 

Goodbye, Black Panther & The Crew

Patience, they said as they made Captain America a Nazi. Patience, they said as the situation got worse and worse, as they told us Magneto was joining Hydra, too. Patience, they said as more and more context piled moral offense upon moral offense on the road to Secret Empire. Patience, they said for more than a year as they geared up to fill my pull list with unavoidable Nazis.

Then they cancelled Black Panther & The Crew after two issues due to poor sales. The most promising team book I've seen Marvel put out in years, that I did not see one ad for in any of their comics aside from Black Panther, will now run for a single six issue arc.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again, as the saying goes.

This was genuinely the most promising team book I've seen from Marvel since Keiron Gillen's Young Avengers. Its Harlem setting was fascinating and well-researched, Ta-Nehisi Coates' angles on Storm and Misty Knight were interesting even beyond the sheer novelty of having those two very different women working together. It was all tied in with the history, both real and fictional, of Harlem which is just something you don't have reason to learn much about when you're a white bloke from the south of England. All that was great and at the end of the second issue Coates finally introduced Black Panther to his own team book and we were off to the races.

Well, not so much now.

This is a microcosm of something I've been banging on about for a while. You see, as I write this I have Coates' Wikipedia page open and I am wondering how a series written by someone like this, with past work like his, isn't one of the biggest deals in Marvel's publishing portfolio. His second book Between the World and Me won the (US) National Book Award For Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer finalist. He has a television deal developing a series for HBO about Martin Luther King being produced by Oprah Winfrey. Not being American, I don't know exactly how famous these distinctions make him but I think that there would be some potential in getting his name out there to attract new readers...

… if Marvel, or any comics company, actually advertised anywhere other than inside their own publications.

So here we are again, with the insular nature of comicbooks coming back to bite the industry on its arse. Now, I'm as big a supporter of promoting internally and recognising when someone has paid their dues as you'll get but right now a title about a team of African and African-American characters set in Harlem written by a Pulitzer finalist who has written extensively about African-American history and philosophy has died on the vine. Meanwhile, a huge crossover event about Captain America being a Nazi at the worst possible moment in modern history is being handled by a man whose only claim to fame outside comics is a failed political career in Cincinnati and whose Wikipedia page refers to a 2011 one-shot in the future tense gets the lions' share of the company's meagre advertising budget, questions have to be asked.

Questions like: what the hell are you guys doing? Do you want new readers or not? Why did you bring Ta-Nehisi Coates into the comicbook industry if not to use his existing reputation to sell product?

Do you, in short, have any plans to actually grow your business or are you content to allow Disney to act as your life support system until they decide that just having the IP rights means they don't need your niche, barely profitable product cluttering up their portfolio?

Because that's what's going to happen at this rate. 

Is Power Rangers the new Catwoman?

The Power Rangers movie failed in China, which these days pretty much means it failed full stop. Now, I haven't seen the thing and I'm not likely to until it comes out on DVD, a few months have passed and its on the reduced racks but critical consensus seems to be that I was right and there wasn't much market for a gritty, dark reboot of a brightly coloured nostalgia property from my generation's childhood.

Which is, in a very specific way, a shame because I don't want what happened with Catwoman to happen here.

You see, back when this whole superhero movie boom was just getting started in 2004 there was a Catwoman movie. It wasn't a very good movie quite besides the fact the lead character was basically in no way Selina Kyle. She had feline super powers, for one thing, and for another DC managed to get over their need to put Batman in everything at the worst possible moment. There was also, not long after, an Elektra movie spun off from the not great but not awful Daredevil film. They both bombed, financially and critically, because they were, you guessed, it not good movies. They had pretty poor scripts, minimal budgets and not much pre-existing audience interested in a) a movie about a Batman love interest/villain without Batman in it, or b) a movie about the girlfriend of a superhero people only knew from a pretty average movie two years before. That all seems a pretty logical chain of events, right?

Yeah, so naturally, the Hollywood bean counters decided the problem was that No One Watches Action Movies Starring Women.

And here's the thing: compared to the Avengers there's a lot more diversity going on with the Power Rangers and I mean a lot more. These Power Rangers start out with three actors of colour whilst the Avengers opened with six white actors and only added two black characters at the end of their second movie. Add to that the fact that one of those Rangers of colour is gay and another is not only on the autistic spectrum but uses the phrase “on the spectrum” which is pretty much unheard of in this genre.

Look, a few weeks back an idiot working for Marvel Comics blamed poor comic sales on the fact that “diversity doesn't sell” and I want my Kamala Khan movie, damn it!

Saban is the cheapest entertainment company on Earth. This entire franchise only came about because Saban saw a way to make a superhero TV show without spending money on effects: buy the superhero footage from Japan and add in American actors for all the civilian bits. By all accounts this movie followed the pattern of chronic cheapness with the team only getting their costumes and Zords pretty late in the day to save on CG.

So, should we expect the bean counters to decide the problem here is making people wait for the action? Or making the movie grimdark when there's no ready audience demanding that take on the property? Or just that word of mouth travels faster now and bad movies get found out quicker?

Experience tells me no. Experience tells me that entrenched Hollywood wisdom will find correlation where none exists and declare that “This is why we like having white leads! Put too many ethnic minorities in a thing and people won't watch it!” just as before they said “This is why we don't make the woman the lead! No one wants to watch that!”.

So depressingly familiar... 

Maisie Williams is the Doc... I mean, Wolfsbane

I'm about fifty-fifty on the continued existence of the X-Men movies. On the one hand, Logan was just about as perfect an ending as the franchise could ever ask for. On the other hand, I know that Fox are going to keep making these things until the heat death of the universe so I might as well hope for the best.

Not that hoping for the best is an entirely logical course of action here. Fox do have a strong tendency towards ruining a good thing. Take X-Men: First Class, a great reboot for the franchise until Days Of Future Past came along to reveal that it wasn't a reboot after all and, by the way, every character from First Class who wasn't in the opening trilogy is now dead. Brilliant move, Fox.

So imagine my mix feelings when a New Mutants movie was announced. The original New Mutants are, without a doubt, my favourite X-team ever but you know what other characters I love in this franchise? Storm, who in these films is a characterless cipher. Kitty Pryde, who represents the most criminal waste of Ellen Page ever committed to film even before she gets magic time travel powers from nowhere.

The batting average is not high here.

Still, they've just announced that Maisie Williams will be playing Wolfsbane: a shy Scottish Catholic girl who turns into a wolf and has abandonment issues like you wouldn't believe. It is (potentially) a great role and Williams is a fantastic actress, even if she is a bit wasted in Game Of Thrones just by virtue of being part of such a large ensemble cast. Fox has even made a big thing about how they're only auditioning “ethnically appropriate” actors for Sunspot and Dani Moonstar which, given its both Hollywood and Fox, is something of a minor miracle.

I want to hope here but the simple fact is that we've had Deadpool and Logan in rapid succession and that's more quality than Fox has generally been able to put out in so short a time. Now, either they've learnt that they can make more money out of good films or its a fluke.

Please let them have learnt. If they can learn then maybe Warner Bros can take a stab at it. 

Donald Trump and the Watergate speedrun record

I have spent the last couple of days trying to write a post about the whole James Comey fiasco but things just keep happening. Just as I was sitting down to write this last night I bumbled onto a random Twitter retweeting this precious nugget from Generalissimo Trump:

“James Comey better hope there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

No, Donald, no. Don't mention tapes. Richard Nixon, Donald. Also, if Comey has tapes then it means that whatever he leaks to the press has evidence behind it. That's called corroboration, Donald. Also, you don't know how quotation marks work.

I mean, its fascinating to watch. Like that bit in his statement where Trump declares thart Comey told him he wasn't under investigation in spite of Comey testifying in court under oath on television that investigations were under way. Even if those investigations aren't into Trump specifically they do exist but the orange moron honestly believes that he can just declare himself innocent whilst firing the man investigating him.

Even Nixon, for all this flaws, did not fire the FBI director investigating him. Of course, the difference is that Nixon was not an idiot. He was arrogant and over-confident and bent as a banana but he was no idiot. Trump is an idiot.

Its actually fascinating to watch him flailing around like this. He clearly thinks it should be over because he says its over, he's been reported to have been yelling at televisions because the news has the temerity to still be reporting on the situation. Hell, he's even aluded to incriminating tapes without any evidence they exist which just smacks of a guilty conscience.

Of course, whether or not it'll be enough for the Republican party to turn on him because it has to be them. They have the majority, they have to be the ones calling for impeachment and after all the things Trump has said and done that would have sunk another president or another candidate in a heartbeat who knows if this will even be the thing.

I mean, I remember when the “pussy grabbing” tape hit and his entire party turned on him for about a week. Maybe this'll be that, maybe this'll be the end of his presidency.

We can only hope. 

Comic Reviews

This week, my avoidance of Secret Empire reaches comes to its sad conclusion, Lana Lang and Cass Cain have family moments, Luke Skywalker goes on a date with his father's sidekick, and it turns out Storm is black.

Secret Warriors #1

Oh, its a Secret Empire tie-in. I'm doing my best to avoid this mess but events being events, of course Marvel are using it to launch an ongoing series that they set up in their last damn event. I get the feeling I'd actually appreciate this issue more if I had any interest in the event because otherwise this is a pretty bland “getting the team together” issue with a slathering of green Nazis on top. Its not badly written, its reasonably engaging but I have no context for half of it.

I might actually drop this until Secret Empire is over and this series has a chance to tell its own story divorced from larger context and green Nazis.

Superwoman #10

This title has been hovering on the edge of being dropped for a few issues now and I worried that whatever lay in store after Superman Reborn might be the final straw. Surprisingly, Lana losing her powers a couple of issues ago has made me appreciate the series in a whole new way. I never really got the character. Part of the problem is I'm used to so many different versions of Lana but I didn't follow the New 52 Super-books closely enough to be used to this version.

K. Perkins writes the hell out of this issue, a real character study that goes into Lana's strengths and weaknesses as a person. Also, we get a bunch of background for Natasha and John Henry Irons, again characters whose previous incarnations I'm familiar with but whose current selves escape me.

Detective Comics #956

I'm trying to think of something to say about this issue beyond “Kate looks great in a suit and bowtie”. I mean, that's a valid critical opinion but I feel, given how much I've loved the arc, I should come up with something more.

I love Batwing and Azrael as a partnership, the whole science and magic thing really works. Cass continues to be my favourite character of the whole team and her final confrontation with Shiva is a joy to read. I've heard a lot of people complain about how this series “marginalises” Batman himself but so long as it turns out stories like this I'm all for it and Batman can muddle through with his two other ongoing series.

Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel one-shot

The Star Wars/Doctor Aphra crossover I didn't know I wanted until I read this issue. The thing is that once Aphra was out from under Vader's thumb I was so much more interested in seeing her fly solo in a proper EU series with no big famous movie characters getting in the way. After this issue I'm finally convinced that having her interact with the main cast has more mileage in it. Luke and Aphra at the Star Wars equivalent of a high society party is a great hook, not just for how they boune off each other because of how artist Marco Checchetto goes to town on the drawing the guests.

Tonally, this is much more an Aphra story than a Luke story, not just because Gillen is writing and Aphra sets the story in motion but because the gloriously over-the-top setting of the Screaming Citadel itself is much more the sort of place we're used to seeing her in. I like that, I like the mad as you like vision Gillen has for the Star Wars universe and I'm really looking forward to four more issues of Luke bumbling through that side of things.

Black Panther and the Crew #2

To my utter surprise, in spite of having Captain America on the cover this issue had nothing to do with him or the bloody Secret Empire event. Instead, the love letter to Harlem continues as Storm meditates on what the place means to her: her father's birthplace, the place she should have grown up in if her parents hadn't died in Africa. Its actually interesting, after all these years, to see a series address the fact that Storm is black, I know it sounds utterly mad that for all the hundreds and hundreds of X-Men comics I've read, the fact that one of Marvel's oldest and most well-explored black heroes is black has barely come up.

The simple fact is that her being a mutant and all the allegory that entails has sort of eclipsed the fact she's black. This, more than anything else, really convinces me that this series is going to go great places. Hell, even if it doesn't, the team-up of Storm and Misty is more than interesting enough in itself. Hell, I was almost disappointed when T'Challa finally turned up. 

Judge Dredd: not watching this series will be an automatic fail

Its been five years since Dredd undeservedly bombed at the box office. I loved that film. I thought Karl Urban was perfectly cast as Dredd himself, Olivia Thirlby was great as Judge Anderson and Lena Headey proved that even a dystopian nightmare future she is still constitutionally incapable of playing anything other than queens. I could rant on for hours about how great an adaptation that movie was and how it just got Dredd and his world so much better than the Stallone abomination.

But today is about something different, its about this...

… because Judge Dredd is coming to the small screen. I can't say I'm disappointed in this, not just because after two box office failures a third film was unlikely, but because I think a TV series is a better fit for the property. One problem with doing a Dredd movie is that the makers have to hone in on “the” Dredd story they want to tell. Whether they're clever about it like in 2012 and choose to write a typically horrible day in Dredd's life or are incredibly stupid like in 1995 and choose to write a narrative collapse of a narrative most of the audience have no knowledge of, they've still only got one shot. A number of the 2012 production team are involved in this series, by the way.

TV is more forgiving. Say this series runs to twelve episodes. What we essentially have is a cop show dialled up to eleven. Dredd (2012) was the story of a drug bust but this show can run the whole gamut of cop show tropes twisted by the nightmare world of the Big Meg.

Not to mention that, budget permitting, there's a whole lot of extra madness that can be drawn on. Mutants, for example, are mentioned in Dredd but never seen (aside from Anderson's mental powers). There are the rare recurring villains of the franchise like Judge Death or serial killer P.J. Maybe. I'd love to see Anderson but there are a bunch of other Judges who could stand to pop up from time to time like Dredd's brother Rico, the undercover Judges of Wally Squad, or Emerald Isle native Joyce.

There's forty years of grubby, violent, squalid genius to be mined here and I'm just glad that its finally going to be mined by a medium with a decent amount of time to devote to the project. 

Another great history fact...

I don't know if it is. I hope it is because this would be the best hook for a historical novel ever.

Apparently, in the seventeenth century, Mexico was absolutely crawling with unemployed mercenary samurai. Imagine it: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet with seventeenth century samurai! That's a fantastic hook, isn't it? 

British Politics and the Dream of Empire

Its a funny thing but one subject you never learn about as a child in this country is the British Empire. You learn about the Vikings, the Romans, the Tudors, the Industrial Revolution (exclusively as if affected England) and then you jump straight forward to the World Wars.

So on the one hand we have a period of our history that politicians love in invoke and yet don't want us to learn about.

That's suspiciously suspicious.

The simple fact is, that like every empire ever, the British Empire was a terrible thing for a lot of people and great thing for a very few. At its height the British Empire covered a quarter of this planet and at some point invaded all but twenty-two of the countries that presently exist. The Empire's sins include, but are not limited to, massacring civilian protesters in India and Ireland; being a vital corner of the slave trade for centuries; starting a war with China because we were buying too much tea; maintaining a vast opium distribution operation in India and China because we were buying too much tea; inventing the concentration camp; suppressing numerous religions in the name of Christian evangelism; sent in a man to oversee relief work for the Irish Famine that somehow made it worse (hint: it has to do with capitalism); resettlement of people that led to the usual consequences; and, setting off nuclear bombs on Australian Aboriginal lands.

And what is the popular image of this era in the British consciousness?

Agatha Christie adaptations: country houses with men in suits and women in modest dresses drinking champagne in the gardens. No talk of where the wealth comes from, no reference to or appearance of colonial subjects (or even any homegrown people of colour who, of course, would not be invented until the 1960s). So in the popular imagination you have a period made basically of parties, conspicuous wealth and no foreigners.

Funny how this country's supposed self-sufficiency back then was such a big part of the Brexit rhetoric last year and no wonder people fell for it so badly. 

(Battlefleet) Gothic Revival

Ships passing in the night, yesterday.

Long story short: I showed a friend my Flesh Tearers and now I'm painting a Battlefleet Gothic force for him.

Long story long...

Yesterday, my friend Tom came over with his Battlefleet Gothic collection which he'd recently recovered from storage. He had decent sized Ork and Imperial Navy fleets with a few Eldar and Chaos ships. Given the rarity value of things, his big plan is to collect a variety of small forces and share them with us for the purposes of games. Over the course of the afternoon I ended up showing him some of the progress I'd made on the Flesh Tearers.

And he liked them. He really liked them, to the extent of asking me to paint any Space Marine ships he acquired in that colour scheme. We agreed on red for the main body of the ships with black on the prow rams, wings and other sticky outy panels.

I've also ordered a couple of... ahem... mildly naughty “not-Battlefleet Gothic models honest, guv” from a Russian company on eBay that, if you squint (not, admittedly, by much) would appear to be a Gladius-class and a Nova-class frigates. I'm waiting for them to arrive before mentioning the name of the company, just so I can be sure of the quality, but they look good enough for the rather low price, especially compared to what the real deal goes for these days.

Being me, of course, I've already named the ships: the Gladius will be Blood Oath and the Nova will be Midnight Approaches. Going to be a lot of violent and/or depressing names in a Flesh Tearers fleet, is my thinking. If I like the models, being escorts, they'll end up in squadrons with their sisters ships Blood Debt, Blood Price, End Of All Hope and Future's End.

By the time they arrive I'll probably have thought up commanding officers and combat histories for them as well, I'm just that kind of player. 

Dwarf Rangers and kiting

I like Let's Plays and one of my favourites is the Side Quest series on the Extra Play channel. For the past year or so Dan Floyd, the voice of Extra Credits, has been playing his way through the Dark Souls trilogy. Its not as educational as most of the other series rhe EC crew put out, at least not since James Portnow stopped giving his designer's perspective early in the series, but its fun to watch Dan die over and over, plus he has a really relaxing voice.

Just me? Okay.

Anyway, his commentary introduced me to an idea that finally allowed me to put one of my favourite Dwarf units to proper use: kiting.

In a video game, you exploit an enemy's programming to make them follow you. You use the tactic to draw members of a horde out one by one or drag enemies into an area where you have an advantage.

On the tabletop, you present your enemy with a target they can't ignore but don't want to deal with. In this case, I set up my Rangers the minimun distance away from a unit of Dark Elves Dreadspears. This unit was holding down the right flank of my opponent's army with most of my power units set up towards his left. This unit was already at the farthest extent of his line and the furthest thing he had from the rest of my army. Chasing my Rangers would mean turning to face away from my army, marching twelve inches out of his way and charging into a hail of crossbow bolts.

Ignoring them meant having a unit with great weapons and crossbows attacking his right flank as my Warriors and Irondrakes moved in on his left.

I also had my Organ Gun positioned to take advantage of a failed charge or the complete massacre of my Rangers (who do not have a particularly long history of surviving contact with the enemy).

As it happens, terrible dice rolling on both our parts meant the tactic worked better than it had right to. I kept losing combat and he kept pursuing me exactly one inch short which meant three consecutive turns of stopping just shy of overrunning my Rangers and getting an Orgun Gun in the flank for his troubles.

Its essentially a psychological tactics so I'm going to have to work on making sure the bait is sufficiently annoying in future but I think I finally have a line on how scouting units are meant to be deployed.

Mrs. May, please shut the hell up!

Now, I've mentioned before that I think Brexit is a stupid idea fueled by xenophobia and an irrational belief that this country's best days were the ones when everything was rationed and unexploded bombs were an everyday inconvenience. That said, I bow to the fact that this is reality and it is going to happen and so I'd rather like for the negotiations to go well so we don't end up being completely ruined by the price of this nationalist stupidity. Frankly, I'm too old for dystopia. I have no leather jackets and I can't drive.

So this is why Theresa May (our prime minister, not the pornstar) has to shut the hell up.

So far in these negotiations she has threatened to keep anti-terror intelligence to ourselves, effectively saying we would collaborate with ISIS if we didn't get our own way; threatened to go to war with Spain over Gibraltar; declared in our press (that European leaders are perfectly able to read) that she would be “difficult” at the negotiating table; and, most recently, she has claimed that the EU are seeking to influence our general election.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that this idea seems to be the best window we'll ever get into May and Trump's phone sex fantasies (“They're all rigging the system against me!” “Oh God, me too, Orange Daddy!”) the question is: does this woman actually understand the concept of negotiation? Has it entered her tiny conservative mind that maybe, if we want to get concessions from the massively richer and more powerful union we're negotiating with, that we might want to be nice to them for a while?

I mean, what is the plan here? At this point I strongly suspect the Tories just plan to get together a week before the two year deadline, light some candles, draw a pentagram on the floor, form a circle and pray to the spirit of Winston Churchill to save them.

Either that or tell the public that they totally did get a deal but Nigel Farage ate the signed paperwork.

Comic Reviews

This week the Guardians Of The Galaxy get all-new, the push to include Watchmen in the DCU continues to be less terrible than I assumed; I try out a couple of new series; Maria Hill gets high; Nightwing gets nostalgic; Nadia Pym gets romantic (but in a totally subtextual way); and, we say goodbye to Carrie Fisher once again.

All-New Guardians of the Galaxy #1

Gerry Duggan and Aaron Kuder certainly hit the ground running. After a very slow end to Bendis run (with, I admit, one hell of a final issue), the new team takes the Guardians back into space where they belong. Most of the issue is a fun little heist with plenty of cool ersonality moments for each of the Guardians and then off to meet their buyer and kick off the plot for the rest of the arc.

Some time seems to have passed between the end of Bendis' run and this. For one thing, Drax seems to have developed pacifism and Rocket keeps mentioning some assassins that came after gim recently (in his own title?). Still, most questions the issue raises do seem to be on their way to answers some time in the immediate future, which is a refreshing change of pace.

Batman #22

You known in spite of myself I am actually enjoying this arc. I remain as hardheartedly cynical about the whole Watchmen in the DCU thing as ever but this is actually fun to read.

Hell, more than fun, this arc is actually pretty interesting from a form point of view. The two Batman issues and (by the looks of this issue's cliffhanger) the two Flash issues actually seem to be telling distinct halves of the story. Oh, Bruce and Barry are together all the time, its not like they're pursuing their own plots by themselves, but the Batman creative team has one set of prioirities for where they want to take Bruce and the Flash creative team have another set of priorities for Barry. What I was afraid was going to be a month long road block in the two series seems to have thought out to be a sastisfying part of both ongoing stories.

Plus we get the return of the Flashpoint Batman, for my money the best idea that event had.

Jean Grey #1

A slow start. The whole deal here is Jean needs some “me” time, grabs Pickles the mini-Nightcrawler and goes for breakfast in Japan. The rest is a whole lot of internal monologue to get us used to Jean as a solo protagonist and a run-in with eternal jobbers the Wrecking Crew.

Its nice. Its small and quiet and feels a bit too much like filler for a first issue to be throwing at you but I can't deny that its fun to read and I have a better handle on this version of Jean as a person than I did before.

Jessica Jones #8

In spite of the fact that this issue might peripherally involve “Captain America is a Nazi” plot threads, I must admit I liked it. I have missed reading Bendis' take on Maria Hill. Actually, now I think about it, didn't he create Maria Hill in New Avengers? Having her interact with Jessica Jones whilst stoned on painkillers is the icing on the cake. Even better, we get to see some more stoned people (somewhat more recreationally than Maria) having a lovely little conversation about who's going to take over the world: mutants or spider-people.

We also get another look into the back alley sort of world Jessica inhabits as she visits a woman called Raindrop, who looks like Katy Manning and seems to be an agent for hired killers. Sadly, not much happens on the family front in this issue but what does is a glorious one panel cameo by Luke that I just can't spoil.

Black Bolt #1

I wasn't going to pick this up but then I saw the name Saladin Ahmed on the cover, though I can't rightly say where I know the name from. I'm glad I did pick it up, though, because this is really bloody good.

For one thing, Ahmed sidesteps the problems of having a silent protagonist in a comic by bringing back narrative captions. Now, I know most comic writers have given up on the third person narration these days and I understand why. Usually they're clunky and just devolve into the writer describing things we can damn well see in the art. “He leaps across the room!”, gee, thanks Claremont, I'd have never guessed if you hadn't written it down on a drawing of the guy leaping across the room. Still Ahmed writes some damn lyrical prose in those little boxes that do a lot to set the tone of the story. Artist Christian Ahmed also shows some real range here, handling both lines and colour he's able to shift between a dreamlike style for moments when Black Bolt is alone and wandering and a more solid, clearly deliniated style for when he's interacting with other people.

Between this and Royals, I am in real danger of beginning to care about the Inhumans as a group.

Bane: Conquest #1

The other new title for the week is this, which I bought because the recent I Am Bane arc in Batman made me interested in the “ruthless, unstoppable destroyer” side of the character for the first time ever. Honestly, before this the only writer who could make me care about Bane was Gail Simone and she had a radically different take on the character. Plus its Chuck Dixon, the ultimate Batman writer, returning to DC! How could I miss out on that? I have to admit: the way Bane talks to himself gives me all sorts of nostalgia for '90s comics and Dixon's Batman and Robin runs in particular.

Dixon goes all in on the idea of Bane as a sort of darker Batman with him roughing up gun runners headed into Gotham Bay alongside a small team of sidekicks/goons. I'm not to sure why or how Bane is operating out of Gotham or if this even refers at all back to I Am Bane but I do like the basic concept. Dixon actually has Bane operating as a detective, albeit a rather heavy handed one. I'm hoping to see a lot more of Bane's team in the course of this year long run, I really want to see what their stories are, if only because I think it will liven the series.

Nightwing #20

I wish we had more chance to see the Robins as brothers. This arc has been great for getting Dick and Damian back together and Tim Seeley does a lovely line in sibling banter for them. The Morrison-era Batman comics with these two as Batman and Robin will always be personal favourites of mine and its nice to see that they're relationship hasn't been totally forgotten.

Unstoppable Wasp #5

This issue is about Nadia saving her girlfriend's life and no power on Earth will take that intrepretation away from me! Its also the first mission for Nadia's team of young lady scientists: finding a way to get the little bomb out of Ying's head, all the time with Jarvis moaning about how much mess they all make as they brainstorm well into the night. There is an absolutely glorious splash page of the brainstorming session itself so full of detail and character for the whole cast. I love this series so much.

Star Wars: Poe Dameron #14

This isn't at all subtle: this is Marvel's wake for Carrie Fisher. I don't know if it started off that way and they made some edits in the light of her passing but this issue is absolutely a goodbye to Fisher. Poe delivers a eulogy for one of his pilots lost in the previous arc alongside General Leia Organa and the rest of the issue is spent on thoughts of mortality before Poe and Leia have a heart to heart that absolutely smacks of Charles Soule writing the sort of scene that we will, sadly, never get to see the actors deliver.

Unless such a scene was filmed for The Last Jedi, this series will be the last and only word on the relationship between General Leia and Poe Dameron. If it is, then it works and we EU nerds have a genuinely moving issue to point to when we claim that Poe is all but Leia's adopted son.

Leia final scene in the issue, though obviously not the last we'll be seeing of her in these comics, is quiet and moving and a more heartfelt goodbye than anything I think the film can deliver through editing scenes that were never meant to be an ending into a conclusion for the character. I might be wrong bit if I'm not then we'll always have this. 

Marvel, are you kidding me with this?

Fair warning for those who want to follow this train wreck by paying for it: SPOILERS for Secret Empire #1 and the identity of Marvel's latest unimaginably stupid choice to turn into a Nazi. Find out after the dots.

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IT'S THE SCARLET WITCH!

A Romani woman, a practicing Wiccan, who for years believed her father to be Jewish, who has a gay son.

That Scarlet Witch.

She's now working for Hydra. As is Thor (the dude one) because what you really want to do with one of your tentpole characters is explicitly ally them with the sort of fascist movement that co-opts their imagery in the real world for their own disgustingly eugenic purposes. That's not going to encourage the very worst of humanity to feel that a multinational publishing company is “on their side”, is it?

What is wrong with these people? 

In the grim darkness of June 16th

This image, the next issue teaser from this weekend's White Dwarf, has been doing the rounds of the rumour sites and, just like that, we have a date.

And I have a deadline.

Presumably the White Dwarf will be released the Friday before pre-orders go up, though given they're going with the “free ruleset” system they did with Age Of Sigmar it could just as likely be the day before the rules pamplets arrive in store.

So I have just shy of seven weeks to whip this Flesh Tearers army into shape. I have a Librarian, a Tactical Squad and two Dreadnoughts (one Contemptor, one Death Company). If points costs don't change too drastically, that's just north of five hundred points.

So, wants and needs.

For definite I need Death Company. No Blood Angels army, let alone a Flesh Tearers army, should take to the field without Death Company. Given the shooting rules published on Warhammer Community, a unit or two of Devastators wouldn't be too bad of an idea, either.

I feel there should be Scouts, what with the Flesh Tearers' recruitment needs, and I absolutely want to have a Baal Predator outfitted with all the flamers now that templates are a thing of the past.

My lovingly converted Vanguard Squad, of course, is top priority and they do need something to ride around in. I'm not sold on the look nor the utility of a Rhino (oh, wow, an motorised storm bolter, be still my beating heart) so I'm torn between either a Land Raider Redeemer or splitting the unit in two and running them in a pair of Razorbacks. Ultimately, I think, it'll come down to what I can secure cheaply on eBay.

Time to get the red spray out... 

I may have to read Wuthering Heights now

I've never given it much thought but this quote has been doing the rounds of Tumblr recently...

… and I absolutely have to memorise it because it is so good. There's more than one person, mainly family, who deserve to have this deployed at them without explanation. 

May is 40k Month!

Is this cheating? Can I cheat at a completely self-imposed and self-defined way of motivating my own hobby? Don't care, doing it.

With GW's recent commendable desire to tell us things about 8^th edition, I feel myself really motivated to get things in shape for the brave new world of movement values and armour save modifiers. First and foremost that means continuing to work on my Flesh Tearers, my training wheels army for 8^th, but also maybe plugging away at some other things I have lying around like my Genestealer Cult and Mechanicus.

My main aim is to have a useable Flesh Tearers force for 8^th edition launch day in June. I have about five hundred points' worth painted with a Librarian, a Tactical Squad and two Dreadnoughts (I do so love my Dreadnoughts). The problem, of course, is I don't know what a “proper” army is going to look like come June: the points system is changing and there are going to be a huge selection of Force Organisation Charts to choose from.

So my idea is this: I shall build to a theme and that theme is speed. This has the dual use of both being true to the spirit of this faction and giving me a chance to paint some Space Marine miniatures I haven't before: Bikers, Land Speeders, Baal-Pattern Predators and, of course, my beloved converted Vanguard Squad who will be getting a suitably awesome tramsport vehicle as soon as I decide whether I want a cheap Rhino for them or to splash out on a Land Raider for them.

I also, more for myself than anything else, need to get some background written for this army. I prefer my background to evolve with play but I want a few details to go in with: unit names, a character for my Captain and a mission for this strike force to be on.

Being the Flesh Tearers, their mission is likely to be Gabriel Seth pointing in a direction and saying “Go that way. Kill things.” but I think I can do a little better than that.