I am a monster.
As Stu has mentioned in the past, we have a board game club going, and a favorite amongst our group is Panic Station. Basically a cross between The Thing and Alien, Panic Station begins as four to six explorers enter a station besieged by a parasitic alien hive. It’s a search and destroy mission where the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Each player has one human and one android token that he or she can move around the board. The explorers and androids need to find the Hive and burn it with a flamethrower. Pretty straightforward, right? There’s only one catch: one of the explorers is an alien host who must preserve the Hive by infecting or killing the rest of the team. (more…)
When it was announced that sex was the topic of Unwinnable’s monthly theme week for April, I had visions of Team Unwinnable writers contributing stories of young lust, exposing past scandalous indiscretions and, yeah, maybe even a full-on Sonic and Mega Man slash fiction piece. Whatever the case, though, I found myself thinking about the X-Men.
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On April 4, 2013, film critic Roger Ebert passed away after a long battle with cancer. His career as a critic spanned over forty years and three mediums – in print in the Chicago Sun-Times, on television with Siskel and Ebert at the Movies and on the internet with both his blog and his endlessly entertaining Twitter account. He edified a massive audience in his time and inspired countless writers to try their hand at criticism. In fact, there is no critic in the world today who had as far a reach and as much esteem as Roger Ebert. His loss is a terrible one. (more…)
My first memory of Star Trek’s Pavel Chekov was seeing him scream.
My mother was (and still is) a big Star Trek fan. Our family watched Star Trek on WPIX every afternoon, so I saw every episode of the series multiple times over the course of a decade. But the first real impression I had of Trek was when a slimy, brainwashing slug crawled into Chekov’s ear in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was pretty intense. While Khan wasn’t my first exposure to Star Trek, Khan and the subsequent film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, colored how I viewed the series. For instance, while most Trek fans would get psyched on Kirk or Spock, I found myself gravitating towards the supporting cast members like Sulu, Uhura, Scotty and poor, poor Chekov, because they were so prevalent in both of those films. (more…)
Harbinger is a pretty bleak series. The main character, Peter Stanchek, starts the series off by using his telepathic powers to do a reprehensible and unforgivable thing when he forces his childhood crush, Kris Hathaway, to fall in love with him and then sleep with him. To say Pete is flawed would be an understatement. (more…)
In my very early days, I listened to a lot of Power Records, a known quantity series of comic book and record sets that chronicled the adventures of Batman, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Superman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek and a few other properties. They either came as a smaller 45 RPM record with one adventure or a larger 33-1/3 RPM record with up to four adventures. The 33-1/3 record sleeves were like proto comic book trade paperbacks. (more…)
The Black Beetle first started popping up on Pulp Sunday, a blog created by Francesco Francavilla that is dedicated to pulp and noir. The character appeared in a series of mock movie posters and lobby cards, paying homage to the kind of pulp/noir that comic readers really only got to see in Lobster Johnson and Incognito. Today, Dark Horse Comics is giving the costumed crime fighter a series of his own in The Black Beetle: No Way Out #1. (more…)
