Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on comic news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email our team at rundown@multiversitycomics.com.
– Kicking off, director James Cameron last week in an interview with The Guardian commented on the success of Wonder Woman saying it was “a step backwards” and that the character appeared as an “objectified icon” while comparing the character to his Terminator character Sarah Connor. Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins responded to Cameron’s critique Thursday evening with a long statement, saying while Cameron is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman, and there is “no right and wrong kind of powerful woman.” You can read the full statement here.
– Netflix and Marvel’s The Punisher has added another cast member in Oscar-nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo. The Iranian actress is best known for her role in 2003’s House of Sand and Fog and will have a recurring role as Farah Madani who is the mother of Dinah Madani, played by Amber Rose Revah, a Homeland Security agent investigating the Punisher, Frank Castle. No release date for the series has been announced but it’s speculated to debut in November.
– The Avengers: Infinity War cast keeps expanding, adding upcoming Black Panther star, Letita Wright. Wright was cast as Shuri, sister to T’Challa the Black Panther who is played by Chadwick Boseman. Black Panther opens in theaters February 16, 2018, while Infinity War will follow on May 4th.
– Syfy has revealed its entire fall and winter release schedule, and with it revealed the release date for the television adaptation of Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson’s series Happy!. The show will premiere on November 29th and stars Nick Sax as an ex-cop turned hitman, who after a hit gone wrong can see an imaginary blue-winged horse voiced by Patton Oswalt. Morrison and writer-director Brian Taylor wrote the first episode with Taylor directing. The first trailer for the series premiered at SDCC last month, which you can view here.
– Lion Forge Press has announced they will be publishing a tie-in series to the Netflix show Voltron: Legendary Defender who’s third season premiered earlier this month with the fourth coming in October. The series, taking the same name as the show, will launch in October, just in time for season four, and be written by two of the show’s writers Tim Hedrick and Mitch Iverson and drawn by a rotating team of Jung Gwan Yoo and Rubine. The series will ship twice-monthly with the first two-part arc “The Pilgrimage.”
– Marvel has revealed the cover for their Marvel Value Stamp Book and the list of which titles their value stamps will appear in. Marvel is reviving this program from the 1970s for Marvel Legacy in which readers could find stamps with all their favorite characters to be clipped from the letters page of their comics. The stamps will be in every regular edition first issue of their Legacy titles. Will you collect them all?
– Si Spurrier was listed as writing “Star Wars: Doctor Aphra” #14 in November alongsie regular writer Kieron Gillen, and it has been confirmed they are indeed co-writing the series beginning an arc about a droid with a very different personality. Gillen was recently announced as the new writer on the main “Star Wars” series with artist Salvador Larroca following Jason Aaron’s departure. Will he be leaving “Doctor Aphra” with Spurrier taking over?
– If you haven’t yet watched the CW Seed animated series Vixen set in the Arrowverse, you’re in luck, because CW has announced the first two seasons of the show will air as a two-hour movie on August 30th at 8 PM Eastern time ahead of the new series for all of its DC shows. If you aren’t planning to watch it on your laptop you can always set the DVR for this one.
– Both the Batman and Guardians of the Galaxy Telltale Series will be made available on the Nintendo Switch, as tweeted by Nintendo of America. The first season of the episodic Batman: The Telltale Series launched last year, with season two, Batman: The Enemy Within, kicking off this month and episode two on the way in September. The Guardians of the Galaxy series is in the midst of its first season with the third episode recently released, and a tie-in comic currently being published. No release dates for the Switch version of the game was released.
Continued below– Pakistan is getting its first female superhero comic launched within the country called “PakistanGirl” created by Hassan Siddiqui who also created “PakistanMan,” with art by Ali Hyder. The comic launched this last week on August 22 and will be available in all local bookstores and cafes in Islamabad and Karachi. Hassan stated he hopes, ““It will also provide hope for young girls – as in now they will have just as strong a woman superhero as there have been male superheroes in the past. Now they’ll have a hero of their own to look up to.” You can read more about it and check out some of the art here.
– The World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis has a brand new exhibit featuring over 200 comic books that use the themes, strategies, and concepts of chess as a narrative theme. The exhibit, called POW! Capturing Superheroes, Chess & Comics, features these comics as well as comic-related chess sets, and iPads you can read through some of the issues on. The WCHOF is a non-profit exploring the relationship between chess and art. You can read more about the exhibit here.
– Finally, we have the results of our Reader Poll from over the weekend! With the announcement of two separate Joker movie projects from DC last week, we asked “Which Joker movie do you want to see?” with a bevy of bad to good to ridiculous director choices. A Joker movie from The Room director Tommy Wiseau came in first place, followed closely by Joker directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and closely behind Joker directed by Kevin Smith. Very much in line with DC’s three Jokers theory, we have the Joker as the writer/star/director of the worst movie ever made (which surely Tom King’s Joker would think is funny), followed by a Joker who probably would be revealed to actually be Bruce Wayne, to finally a Joker who just loves fart jokes. Thanks for playing folks.
