Category: Direct Beam Comms

Direct Beam Comms #103

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, TVPosted on

TV

Godless

I’ve been looking forward to the new western Netflix series Godless for some time now. The series was created and the first episode written and directed by Scott Frank who’s had a hand in such films as Out of Sight, Minority Report and Logan. And the reexamination of the western in TV series have already produced some interesting series like Westworld already. However, I’m not sure if it was its pace of story or the story in general, but Godless never connected with me.

There’s quite a few storylines going on in Godless and that’s one of its faults. There’s the story of outlaw Frank Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his gang terrorizing the southwest robbing, killing and raping anyone they meet. Young Roy Goode ( Jack O’Connell) who stole from Griffin and is now on the run from him. Goode being shot and having to recuperate on a ranch owned by Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). And a town full of mostly women who’s husbands were all killed in a mining accident that if Griffin every found would certainly attack.

And that’s not saying anything about a sheriff who everyone calls a “coward” or the marshal hunting Griffin’s gang who can’t find anyone to help him since anyone who’s ever gone up against him has wound up dead.

Reading what I’ve just written I’d say Godless sounds like one heck of an interesting series, and it may become that. But even with everything going on the first episode the show felt extremely slow. Like at one point I paused the episode thinking that about 50 minutes had passed to find I was only 20 into it. And then later on I paused it thinking that surly there must only be a few more minutes to go when there was still a good 20 minutes left.

It doesn’t help matters that several elements of the story are, shall we say, fantastical. Which, done in moderation is fine, but here they just add up to a bit of a mess. There’s the town with nearly no men since apparently every man was down in the mine standing in the same area and was killed when disaster struck. There’s also Griffin, who’s arm is so badly shot that it’s amputated 19th century style. Yet he’s able to get back on a horse and ride his gang out of town a few days later after having major surgery with major loss of blood in a time when at best it would take several weeks to recover, if that was even possible since most would have died after such a surgery. There’s also a few members of Griffin’s gang who are caught, almost lynched before Griffin and the rest of the gang ride to the rescue and, get this, lynches the entire town. Apparently in the old west this was the one town on the frontier that wasn’t armed and didn’t know how to fight back.

Godless is the kind of series where a line like, “The sons’a bitches lynched the damned mob!” Is delivered with a straight face.

Godless is so over the top in certain aspects that it wouldn’t surprise me that if part of it lies within the confines of Westworld. At least that would explain some of those fantastical elements. Otherwise I’m not quite sure what to think about Godless.

Random Zombie Movies/TV Observation

Yesterday I watched the 2016 movie Cell based on the Stephen King book of the same name. In that movie a weird pulse sent through cell and other mobile devices causes anyone who’s exposed to it to turn into mindless murder machines. The movie’s not great, but it’s not bad either. It got me thinking about all the odd things that I’ve noticed in various zombie films/TV series over the years.

Night of the Living DeadDid you ever notice…

  • There aren’t too many, if any, zombies UNDER the age of 18. And according to the US census about 24% of all people living in the US are under 18. So where are those missing millions of zombies?
  • There aren’t too many, if any, zombies OVER the age 60 which is about 11% of the population.
  • Most zombies can walk. Sure, there are a few of them now and again who are missing legs and have to crawl, but for the most part zombies who should be falling more and more apart with every step instead are completely mobile.
  • In a world where about 75% of the people need some sort of vision correction zombies are the exception and all have perfect, 20/20 vision and never miss even the tiniest detail.
  • Most zombies wear both long sleeved shirts and pants. Depending on what time of year the apocalypse happened, or especially what part of the country it’s taking place in, you’d assume at least some zombies would be sporting shorts and some would certainly be wearing short-sleeved shirts. Or no shirts at all.

The Reading & Watch List

Cool Movie Poster of the Week

Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)
Ph: Zade Rosenthal
© 2014 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.

Direct Beam Comms #102

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

The Punisher

I am such a big fan of the character the Punisher I think my review here might be a little skewed. I’ve been collecting Punisher comics since the heyday of the character starting in the late 1980s and have spent the intervening 30 some odd years filling out my collection with various comics, collected editions, statues, toys, posters, magazines, etc., etc., etc. So to say that my review of the first episode of the new Netflix series The Punisher might not be as balanced as I’m used to would not be an understatement. Still, I endeavor to try to at least be somewhat fair here.

A little backstory on this version of the character — played marvelously by Jon Bernthal, Frank Castle aka the Punisher first appeared in 2016 during the second season of Daredevil where he served as a sort of agent of chaos in Matt Murdock/Daredevil’s world. Here, Punisher was a sort of “yin” to Daredevil’s “yang” where he had no qualms about killing bad guys even if it made Murdock’s life, who won’t kill and wants to bring the bad guys to justice, a lot harder. But in the end the two did team together to take the bad guys down, even if Castle used a lot more firepower than Murdock wanted.

What I found most interesting about the first episode of this new The Punisher series is that it starts where I would have assumed the first season would have ended. Literally in the first ten minutes of the episode Castle hunts down and kills all the men responsible for the murder of his family — what originally sent him to becoming the Punisher in the first place. I figured that the first season of The Punisher would deal with this. Or if not the first season then a good chunk of it.

What we get instead is a Frank Castle hiding under an alias living life as a construction worker in New York, City. His job as the Punisher is done yet the nightmares of his murdered family remain. So what’s Castle to do? Stay hidden in plain sight and let things like a young worker at the work site be pulled into a life of crime and do nothing? Or put back on the bullet-proof vest and declare an all-out war on crime?

I’ll let you guess as to what he does.

I was expecting a lot of things from the first episode of The Punisher and I didn’t really get any of them in this first episode. Which is a good, no, GREAT thing. I love being surprised in situations like this where the creators of the show could’ve played it safe and given the audience a version of Frank Castle/The Punisher we were all expecting from the start. It’s great that they chose to give Castle the option of being removed from his days of blowing the bad guys away or returning to his life of a vigilante. A life that would seemingly be a one-way trip to an early grave when Castle slips up or slows down one night and loses his edge for long enough for the criminals to get the upper hand on him on day.

Just that the character’s given the chance to make this decision — even if we know what decision he’s going to make since the series is called The Punisher and not Frank Castle — is a breath of fresh air.

One critique I’ve heard about the show from others is that there are more episodes than there is story to support it. Which might be true. It might also be true that The Punisher is one of those shows that needs to be watched slowly, and not binged over a weekend. We’ll see since I don’t plan on watching more than a few episodes of The Punisher a week at most.

Mindhunter – Season one

I’m not going to go into a lot of details here on the first season of Mindhunter since I’m currently working on my list of the best TV series of the year of which Mindhunter plays a part. And I’d just end up repeating myself here and there. But rest assured that Mindhunter is one of the best TV series of the year airing wherever. This show about the birth profiling serial killers by the FBI is so unlike any of the similar shows out there these days, and there are loads and loads of serial killer shows or shows that feature them, that it’s worth to note how different Mindhunter is from the rest. Those shows are all about vengeance and tracking people down whereas Mindhunter is all about talking, and trying to figure the killers out so that the next one can be stopped before he starts hurting people.

Mindhunter might just be the best show on Netflix right now and that’s saying a lot for a platform that has loads and loads and loads of great shows.

Comics

Batman: Year Two 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Hardcover

Every comic fan knows of the Batman: Year One but it wouldn’t surprise me if most aren’t aware of the Batman: Year Two story. I’m aware that Batman: Year Two is a thing, but even having read comics for decades I’ve never read that story myself. That is, I’d thought I’d read that story, but it turns out that what I’d really read was a graphic novel called Batman: Full Circle. I know that Batman: Full Circle ties into Batman: Year Two, but Year Two Full Circle ain’t.

One thing, this collected edition retails for around $30 but if you do some hunting you can find previous collected editions of the same material for less than $10 in softcover.

From DC:

Collecting a Batman classic in hardcover for the first time! A close friend of Bruce Wayne introduces him to Rachel Caspian, and the two quickly develop a romantic relationship. But in the midst of love, Rachel’s father decides to come out of retirement as the Reaper, Gotham City’s first vigilante!

Movies

Rampage movie trailer

Deadpool 2 movie trailer

The Reading & Watch List

Rumor Control

I’ve started making a list of things to write about over 2018 for my bi-weekly columns and much like in 2017 I was easily able to fill out much of 2018 with things to write about very quickly. Looking at my list, there’s really only eight non-movie things I’ll write about next year in 24 columns. And much like last year a lot of what I have listed to write about are upcoming superhero and sci-fi films. Which even just a few years ago I’d have had problems finding even a handful of movies I was interested in to write about, now there’s so many I literally can’t get to them all.

Here’s a list of films I’ll probably write longer articles on in 2018:

  • Annihilation
  • Black Panther
  • The New Mutants
  • Rampage
  • Avengers: Infinity War
  • Solo: A Star Wars Story
  • Deadpool 2
  • The Incredibles 2
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp
  • Mission: Impossible 6
  • The Predator
  • Venom
  • X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Cool Movie & TV Posters of the Week

Direct Beam Comms #101

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

Damnation

The new USA series Damnation has a lot going for it. From its setting of a 1930s rural America to the production design to the characters there’s a lot to like about this show. However, after the first episode I was unclear as to what the overall story was. Oh, and Damnation might have the highest body count of any series in memory.

One thing — there’s a big spoiler here in my review. However, it’s not much a surprise in the show as I knew it was coming the minute the episode started. But you were warned…

In Damnation, preacher Seth Davenport (Killian Scott) is helping to lead a strike where farmers are keeping their goods from the local towns until they start getting a fair price for their products. Enter Creeley Turner (Logan Marshall-Green), a “cowboy” brought into the area to break-up the strike who shoots first and asks questions later.

Are Davenport and wife really “reds” like the local business community thinks? Or do they want something else entirely? The big surprise here is, you guessed it, after they’re attacked in their home one night and end up killing the assailants, Davenport’s not really a priest. He’s really a wanted murderer who’s known for causing strife and unrest wherever he goes.

Which left me a bit confused. Are Davenport and wife on the side of the farmers, or do they have other motives? On the one hand it seemed as if they were with the strikers, but then again Davenport’s already killed someone once before, and he stabs to death one man and shoots another in this episode. So I’m not sure?

It doesn’t help that just about every character in the show has a psychopathic dark side and isn’t too afraid to show it. Be it Turner shooting a farmer in the head in front of a dozen witnesses, Davenport letting a guy bleed to death or detective Connie Nunn (Melinda Paige Hamilton) shooting a bunch of strikers to incite violence in order for the county to be able to call in the national guard. There’s really no moral center to the show in Damnation.

I think a series like Deadwood is probably the closest amalgam to Damnation. And in Deadwood there were lots and lots of bad people. But there were good people as well and people who were somewhat good and somewhat bad. In Deadwood I never got the sense that a character like Seth Bullock (Timothy Elephant) had any bad intents for any of the other characters there. Seth was a bit unhinged and was apt to fly off at the handle and you might get hurt in the cross-fire, but Seth’s intentions were always good and he was never out to hurt anyone who wasn’t going to hurt him first. In Damnation it seems like practically everyone’s out to hurt everyone else first at the slightest provocation.

And that body count… there’s probably ten people killed in the first episode of the show. Which is a big number for something like Damnation that takes place in a relatively small city of a small population. My guess is that the idea behind all this killing was to show that the stakes of Damnation were high. Instead if anything it was too extreme and makes the act of killing or characters dying in this show seem ordinary and commonplace.

The Others – Gone too Soon

The Others, which originally ran on NBC in 2000, was doubly unlucky for a TV series. At the time NBC had been running a few successful paranormal shows in the dead-zone that’s Saturday night programming which included The Pretender and Profiler to which The Others joined in 2000. The first unlucky thing that happened with The Others was the XFL. NBC decided to axe their entire Saturday night lineup since Saturday nights was for the XFL. Needless to say this was a bad decision by NBC since the XFL quickly crashed and burned leaving them with a hole in their schedule with all their previous shows, including The Others, cancelled.

The second unlucky thing to happen with The Others was that there was a successful film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman released in 2001. That movie essentially has erased any mention of the TV series from the web because of its popularity. Try searching for The Others online and most of what you’ll find are mentions of this 2001 film.

The TV series The Others was kind’a The X-Files crossed with The Sixth Sense by way of group therapy where the members who meet each week all have special paranormal powers. Lead character Marion (Julianne Nicholson) can see dead people, where others can pick up on other people’s feelings or communicate psychically. And together this group explores the weird goings on around them. Whereas The X-Files always had a black hard edge The Others always had a bit of softness and light to it.

Episodes of The Others would deal with things like the group trying to figure out if a particular airline flight is cursed, a fake psychic who needs help when he begins to really read people’s minds and a season-long story about a mysterious evil that’s stalking the group.

The good thing about The Others was that 13 episodes of the series were produced and all 13 episodes did air on NBC. And the series does turn up from time to time on cable and satellite outlets. The bad thing was that it’s never been released on DVD since the series debuted just before that became popular/profitable for the networks to do. And since The Others is all but forgotten because of the 2001 movie and because it only ever had 13 episodes it’s never turned up on any streaming services as far as I’m aware.

Episodes do exist on YouTube so if you’re bored some Sunday afternoon you could do worse than checking out The Others.

Movies

Movie cliches I wish would go away

  • During fights, everyone knows karate and every fight is long, looks planned out and no one ever gets tired while fighting. This worked in The Matrix where everyone did know kung-fu, but in real life fights aren’t as choreographed as they are in movies.
  • Extras walk out doors or especially elevators just when characters from a movie need to walk into them. It means these main characters never have to pause to open a door or wait for an elevator to get to their floor.
  • As long as a character is in the dark in terms of plot, they can’t be hurt. I call this “ignorance is bliss.” In horror movies no one ever dies until they realize the killer might be in the same room they’re in or they see the killer just before he strikes.
  • Characters who die the minute their usefulness is up. This happens a lot in military movies where some side character will deliver some information, then almost immediately be killed by the enemy to show the seriousness of the situation they’re all in. Except since it’s the side character who dies, it usually shows just the opposite.
  • Along with the above, people who are shot and die immediately. It’s rare in most movies for a character to receive a wound and spend hours if not days suffering before they die which is what sometimes happens in real life. In movies, they die immediately, and with their eyes closed.

  • Characters walking away nonchalantly from massive explosions behind them. This looked cool the first time it was done but now it just looks lame. These characters would be burned by the heat of the explosions, let alone the flames.
  • Characters who are searching for some piece of information in a stack of papers and accidentally, or purposely, knock the papers onto the floor. And when they bend down to clean up the mess miraculously find the exact information they’re looking for.
  • Bad guys who can’t shoot straight or are bad soldiers. Think of the Storm Troopers in Star Wars. They’re professional, trained soldiers for the Empire who’ve helped take over the galaxy for the bad guys, yet when they shoot at the good guys they almost alway miss yet when the good guys shoot at them they cut them down like grass.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1973: Radha Mitchell, Fry of Pitch Black is born
  • 1975: A Boy and His Dog opens
  • 1977: Close Encounters of the Third Kind premiers in theaters
  • 1982: Creepshow opens in theaters
  • 1984: Night of the Comet opens
  • 1987: The Running Man opens
  • 1990: The mini-series IT premiers on TV
  • 1994: Star Trek: Generations opens in theaters

Direct Beam Comms #100

CategoriesDirect Beam Comms, Feature, Movies, TVPosted on

TV

S.W.A.T.

My familiarity with the S.W.A.T. franchise is relatively limited. I saw, and remember liking the 2003 feature film that starred Colin Farrell, Samuel L. Jackson and Jeremy Renner about a Los Angeles S.W.A.T. team who has to transport a drug kingpin across the city where every bad guy in town wants to set him free. But I’ve never seen the 1970s TV series that movie was based on nor the follow-up S.W.A.T. movies either.

Still, I went into the new CBS S.W.A.T. series with an open mind as I try to do with everything I watch.

Starring a scowling/frowning Shemar Moore – TV’s Vin Diesel – as Daniel ‘Hondo’ Harrelson, this new S.W.A.T. takes place in a very modern LA where police offers are often judged by decisions they have to make in an instant. Which, because of the sensitivity of the issues being tackled in S.W.A.T like police shooting unarmed civilians needs to be handled with a delicate touch. Of which S.W.A.T. approaches with the delicate touch of a sledge hammer.

The Los Angeles of S.W.A.T. is a crazy, hyperkinetic city where the criminals battle it out with police using machine guns and RPGs while the S.W.A.T. Officers, who sometimes seem like the only police in the city, must deal with said RPGs one day and police involved shooting protestors the next. Things are about to boil over to riots when Hondo decides to treat the people “like family” and everything’s okay which allows them to go after the real machine-gun toting bad guys.

S.W.A.T. is a sort of cross between the police TV procedural and The Fast and the Furious movies where when the S.W.A.T. team aren’t involved in firefights, climbing on roofs or riding to work on motorcycles going 100 miles per hour they’re making out with their girlfriends who look like gorgeous models.

What I liked about S.W.A.T. didn’t involve the story. Some of the photography in the series was gorgeous, especially the stuff that was shot at night. It didn’t look like the typical stuff shot at night that turns up on TV. This was different. It was less about setting up lights to shoot everything than it was about using the cameras to capture the weird qualities of what it’s really like to be outside in a city at night. Where some things are in the shadows and some are not with the sky casting a weird glow.

Side-note — S.W.A.T. has to be the show with the most amount of people climbing on roofs I’ve ever seen. I don’t mean people already on roofs, I mean people climbing from the ground over things to get onto roofs. At least twice in the show cops and bad guys start off on the ground, climb up fences and onto roofs to run across roofs to jump down to the other side. I don’t know why I noticed this? Maybe the first time they did it was neat, but the second time I kind’a wondered if they were running out of ideas.

Things TV lovers don’t have to worry about today that fans of the past did

I was thinking the other week about all the rigmarole fans of TV, myself included, used to have to go through to watch their favorite shows. Even just a few years ago before the advent of streaming services and a decade or so back before the ubiquitousness of the DVR it could be a pain to watch your favorite series if it aired at an odd time or alongside something else you wanted to watch even more. So I decided to put together a list of things I used to have to worry/think about when I wanted to watch my favorites shows.

  • You generally needed to make an appointment to watch TV. If what you wanted to see was on at 8 on Monday, you needed to be in front of the TV at 8 on Monday to watch it.
  • And you usually turned over early to watch your show. So if you wanted to see, say, Space Rangers on CBS you might turn over a little early and catch the tail-end of Major Dad every week whether you were a fan of Gerald McRaney or not.
  • Sometimes you had to stay up late or, like I did to watch the series Robotech, get up early to catch a show.
  • I never did this myself, but I’ve heard of people setting alarms in the middle of the night in order to get up to watch a certain movie they’d always wanted to see or hadn’t seen in years.
  • You sometimes had to tape over some program you’ve already watched but maybe wanted to keep for future viewings in order to record something new if you didn’t have, or couldn’t afford, a new tape.
  • Having to budget money for tapes when a pack of them cost $20.
  • If you missed an episode of a particular program you seriously didn’t know if you’d ever see it again.
  • You sometimes had to pick one show over another if they happened to air opposite one and other. You’d pray that the show you didn’t watch survived long enough for repeats of it to air over the summer when TV networks re-ran all their series. Otherwise you might never see that series again.
  • Waiting for your favorite show to start Sunday nights when football was running long and seeing and hearing the dreaded, “We join your program already in progress,” message and just having to accept that you’ve missed the first however many minutes football ate into your favorite show and spending the episode trying to play catchup with what’s going on.

Movies

Starship Troopers

Over the years I’ve written a lot about the movie Starship Troopers. Probably too much for a movie that upon its release was denounced by most and quickly forgotten. Over the years there has been a bit of appreciation for Starship Troopers develop, but not as much as I’d thought there would’ve been when I saw it 20 years ago.

Still, I can’t deny how much I adore Starship Troopers or how much I love watching it even today. So here are a few links to articles I’ve written over the years about Starship Troopers.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1932: Roy Scheider of JAWS and SeaQuest DSV is born
  • 1949: Armin Shimerman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Quark of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is born
  • 1964: Robert Duncan McNeill, Tom Paris of Star Trek: Voyager is born
  • 1969: Marooned premiers
  • 1970: Ethan Hawke of Explorers and Gattaca is born
  • 1973: Radha Mitchell, Fry of Pitch Black is born
  • 1975: The TV series The New Adventures of Wonder Woman debuts
  • 1993: RoboCop 3 opens in theaters
  • 1994: The TV series Earth 2 premiers
  • 1997: Starship Troopers premiers

Direct Beam Comms #99

CategoriesComic Books, Direct Beam Comms, Feature, Toys, TVPosted on

TV

Stranger Things

These days, with how fragmented pop-culture has become, pop-cultural phenomenas are pretty rare. It used to be that once or twice a year some song, TV series or film would become a touchstone that would become a national focus for a time before we all moved onto something else. But with how pop-culture has become so expansive over the last decade with 400 new scripted TV series premiering every year, music for every taste existing in very specific channels, dozens of mega-budget movies being released each year and now competition from the likes of smart phone apps and social media — it makes for a landscape where it’s practically impossible for some pop-culture thing to break out of its specific marketing silo to phenomena status.

To me a “cultural phenomena” is some movie, TV series or song that practically everyone is aware of, even if they may have not ever seen or heard it. In the 1990s I was aware of the series Seinfeld, knew what channel it was on and what actors were involved even if I didn’t start watching it until the show was in syndication years after it became popular. And that goes for a lot of TV series that are cultural phenomena these days too. I’d say series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are phenomena in that I’d assume just about anyone who watches TV on a regular basis is aware of these two shows, even if many people have never actually watched an episode of them.

So, in a TV landscape where there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of scripted and non-scripted TV series airing each week I’d say those two are only two shows that I’d think would be considered “pop-culture phenomena.” Well, actually, I think there’s now three with Stranger Things joining the cultural phenomena ranks last year with its breakout TV season everyone’s still talking about.

Before the first season of Stranger Things debuted on Netflix the summer of 2016 most of the talk online about the show was how much it looked like the works of Steven Spielberg. And not all in a good way. I got the sense that most people thought Stranger Things was going to be derivative and dull and were counting it out before a single episode streamed. But once the episodes debuted and the reviews started coming in things changed for the show. What was about to be written off as a lame attempt by Netflix creating a show about the 1980s for the nostalgia set became something that appealed to both those who were fans of the sci-fi and horror genera, those interested in nostalgia and those interested in great TV too.

What I think works best about the first season of Stranger Things, where kids from a small Indiana town uncover a conspiracy when one of their own goes missing and another kid appears out of nowhere, was the story. It’s cool that Stranger Things is set in this nostalgia friendly early 1980s, but the story of Stranger Things works no matter where/what time it’s set. Set Stranger Things present day in Florida and the story would still work.

And that’s why I was so excited to see the return of this show — to get back into the story of Stranger Things that has a palpable sense of mystery and danger and to find out what everyone’s been up to the last year after the devastating events at the end of the first season of the series.

In the second season, it’s about a year after the first and everything’s returned to normal in Hawkins. Well, mostly everything. Will’s (Noah Schnapp) returned to the fold except he’s still experiencing visions from the “upside down” where he was most of the first season, Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) grades are falling since he’s still trying to find Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Nancy’s (Natalia Dyer) dealing with her friend Barb’s parents who’re selling their house to pay for a detective to search for her.

What I found most interest gin in the show is that the characters are paying the consequences from the first. Be it Will being rescued, but now being called “zombie boy” by kids who are scared of him, Mike’s life being turned around from everything he went through or even Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) finding that while things around Hawkins have been pretty normal, it’s about to get a lot less so.

In Stranger Things, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction and just because the kids of Hawkins drove the evil out doesn’t mean that a greater one isn’t going to try and get back in and is stronger than ever.

Comics

Night Force by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan: The Complete Series

One comic series that I’m totally unfamiliar with that sounds amazing is Night Force. This comic series began in the early 1980s and lasted a measly 14 issues before being cancelled. I’m assuming that since the series was out just before I started collecting comics, and since it was so limited, that’s why I never saw it in the 25¢ comic bins at the flea markets or antique shops I used to frequent. Of course, it could also be that at the time of the 25¢ back issue comics I was too busy hunting for an Incredible Hulk #181, The Amazing Spider-Man #129 or Iron Fist #14 to notice something as interesting sounding as Night Force.

One thing — the collected editions of this series go for between $30 and $40 for paperback and hardback cover respectively, but you can find complete runs of the original comics on eBay for less than $20 shipped.

From DC:

The creative team behind Tomb of Dracula reunited in 1982 for DC’s NIGHT FORCE! The series begins as the mysterious sorcerer Baron Winter assembles a team to take on an occult evil. But can the granddaughter of Dracula’s greatest foe, a powerful parapsychologist, and a timelost warrior from the court of King David tackle these threats?

Toys

Alien 3 Dog Alien Maquette

The Prime 1 Studio and CoolProps Alien 3 monster looks amazing. From the sickly brown color to its translucent dome and swappable heads with mouth closed and open, this statue stands more than two feet tall and certainly one to own. Unfortunately, “amazing” comes with a steep price as this item is set to retail for nearly $1,700.

The Reading & Watch List

This week in pop-culture history

  • 1954: Godzilla opens in Japan
  • 1961: Peter Jackson, director of King Kong, The Frighteners and The Lord of the Rings films is born
  • 1988: They Live premiers
  • 2002: *28 Days Later…” Premiers
  • 2009: The TV series V premiers
  • 2010: The first episode of The Walking Dead airs