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.
– I was going to try and lead with something else for today’s Rundown, but after seeing the Captain America: Civil War trailer that dropped yesterday, the last-second stinger image was just too good to pass up. Oh, and if you’re getting bent out of shape about the fact that Spidey’s eyes changed shape (and I swear there are people who are doing just that), calm down. When you have a full-face mask, varying up the size of the eyes is one of the few visual tools in a cartoonists’s (or any visual storyteller’s) toolbox to get across any type of emotion. Eyes being the windows to the soul, and all that. That’s why we’ve seen Spidey’s lenses mimic real eye movements since, oh, “Amazing Fantasy” #15. And if you REALLY can’t let it go, there’s a subtle WHIRRING sound when he squints, so you can just imagine there are small servos built into the mask (probably by Tony Stark) to make suspending this last bit of disbelief that survived all other manner of unreality just a tad bit easier. Also? A new poster. And more Black Panther. And music a half-step away from getting Marvel a stack of letters from Clint Mansell’s lawyers for cribbing “Lux Aeterna”. But basically the MCU appearance of the Amazingly Squinting Spider-Man. Captain America: Civil War hits theaters on May 6th.
– And for some movie-promo counter-programming, here is the trailer for Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings, a movie I knew absolutely nothing about until yesterday but now am really looking forward to seeing in five months. And yes, that is an orchestral version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” playing over the back half of the video. In this case, I’m sure the lawyers have already been consulted.
– Speaking of The Beatles, Vivek Tiwary’s “The Fifth Beatle” OGN will now be a ‘multipart TV event series’ instead of a feature-length film. Actually, there’s no specific mention of the story no longer being made into a movie, but one would think that two competing video adaptations would be counter-productive, especially since Tiwary is involved with the screenplay and producing either iteration. You can listen to Tiwary’s Robots From Tomorrow episode covering “The Fifth Beatle” and his collaboration with artists Andrew Robinson and Kyle Baker here.
– Speaking of another fifth Beatle, music producer Sir George Martin passed away earlier this week. While Martin did not play an instrument in the group per se, his production skills, wide breadth of musical knowledge, and rapport with the Fab Four was essential to their turning abstract musical ambitions to sounds recorded on tape.
– According to CBR, Valiant is doing…something…this summer that will be using the title ‘Deathmate’. The last venture from Valiant carrying that title involved a company crossover with Image Comics, used issues labeled by color instead of number, could charitably be remembered as incoherent, featured an ‘Amalgam’-style smooshing of Image & Valiant characters two years before the Marvel/DC crossover, ran incredibly late, and nearly brought the comics industry down in flames. As for what this encore could do to top that, only time will tell?
Kidding aside, this event will probably have little to no actual connection with the original version, if for no other reason than the rights to 75% of the characters from the earlier story are no longer held by Valiant Entertainment and therefore unusable. Given the level of quality 2016 Valiant is operating at, the chances of this year’s “Deathmate” being as hot of a mess as the 1994 incarnation are somewhere just south of zero.
