Kerrpow!

The Marvel universe is massive and, while i has hundreds of characters to choose from, the majority of their stories still revolve around the members of their core groups The Avengers, The X-men and The Fantastic Four. Make no mistake I love these characters but I am also a fan of those characters who inhabit the fringes of the Marvel universe, defending it from attack by enemies too powerful for earth's heroes. These characters, such as The Silver Surfer or Nova, rare feature in the day-to-day adventures of Marvel's heroes but, when they do become involved, often have a more important role to play than many of the main characters. Annihilation Classic collects together the origin stories of several of Marvel's lesser known cosmic characters, such as Adam Warlock, Nova and Quasar. While I had come across references to some of these characters before, some where entirely new to me and I had never read any of their origins. What surprised me the most about some of these...

I first came across the world of Image comics though an unlikely source: Tomb Raider. Sometime in 1998, during the height of the original game trilogy's popularity, I picked up an issue of Image's Tomb Raider/Witchblade crossover series. Although initially more interested in Lara croft's side of the story, I quickly latched to the character of Sara Pezzini and her symbiotic weapon the witchblade and found myself intrigued by it's powers as well as the universe it inhabited. The Witchblade series, with it's action-packed storylines and varied and brutal backstory, fired my imagination and I soon found myself hungry for more. It was then that I found myself moving towards Witchblade's sister series, The Darkness. I have written about The Darkness on this blog before, and what I said then still holds true today: It is by far one of the most interesting comic series ever created. The darkness(and it's wielder Jackie Estacardo) are, to my mind, almost the per...

I have recently created a Youtube channel to run parallel to this blog. I plan to post videos weekly(if not daily) and will of course continue to write on this page as well The link to my channel is below, feel free to watch, comment and, if you like, subscribe PanelHopper's Youtube Channel

I have written about Marvel latest silver screen adaptation, Thor, on this blog before, stating that although Marvel usual handled the film translations of their characters very well, I had my doubt about whether a character as flamboyant as Thor could truly be made viable summer blockbuster. It seemed to me that any film based upon the exploits of Thor ran the risk of devolving into a 21st century version of Flash Gordon, going down in history as the worst decision Marvel ever made. Well, after months of waiting the film is finally here...and all my doubts have been laid to rest. The film is brilliant. While it is true that, like almost all comic book films, there is a certain amount of melodrama in Thor's script it is nowhere near as bad as it could have been. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this is the first time any story featuring Mavel's thunder god which has struck me as not only really enjoyable but also as believable as other characters like Iron Man or W...