It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in TV land if you’re a superhero fan; today saw the announcement of a new Greg Berlanti drama, No Ordinary Family. Michael Chiklis, Vic Mackey of The Shield fame, will play the patriarch of a family of superheroes. This coming on the heels of last month’s announcement that NBC has picked up The Cape, a superhero series that some have speculated will serve as a companion piece to the network’s struggling Heroes, once a ratings juggernaut but currently not even guaranteed a fifth season.

For a show with some serious comics street cred to start, this series has done a pretty good job of shedding a lot of it as it’s gone. After losing showrunner Marc Guggenheim near the beginning of the season, ABC’s FlashForward–which stars Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle’s John Cho and Lost’s Dominic Monaghan–is saying good-bye to David S. Goyer, according to Entertainment Weekly.

ABC has had a hard time promoting both FlashForward and its other tentpole genre title, V. In spite of pretty good critical and fan reception, ratings have dropped to Heroes levels this season, and a lot of experts are speculating that they’ll continue to sink next month when the show comes back from hiatus. It’s unclear who will take Goyer’s place as showrunner; he’s reportedly leaving to focus on his feature film career.

In addition to co-creating the JSA relaunch with James Robinson, Goyer is known in comics circles for writing, directing or producing screenplays based on Nick Fury, Batman, X-Men, Ghost Rider and Blade. According to IMDB, he’s attached to the upcoming Green Arrow film Super Max as well as Y: The Last Man and X-Men Origins: Magneto.

With Warner Brothers’ The Time-Traveler’s Wife being released on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download on February 9 (good flick, by the way—check it out), I thought I’d take a little look at one of the nagging questions from the Johns/Katz/Jurgens run on Booster Gold: Who is Rip Hunter’s mother? As revealed in Booster Gold #1000000, Booster is (unbeknownst even to himself) the father of the enigmatic Time Master…but without a consistent romantic interest, fans have been left to speculate as to who Rip’s mother is—or if we’ll even ever see her.

UPDATED on February 9 to reflect changes seen in the Booster Gold #29 preview pages.

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With the departure of David Tennant as the star of the BBC’s Doctor Who, BBC America and Warner Home Video have released Doctor Who: The Complete Specials. Featuring five specials (The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars and the first and second parts of The End of Time) over five DVDs, the box set features a wide array of features, commentary and documentaries and is available to own on DVD and Blu-Ray now after their February 2 release.

For hardcore fans of the series, this collection is a great sendoff to the current Doctor and showrunner Russell T. Davies, whose classic interpretation of the characters and the show have been well-received by fans and critics. The series, in addition to being a ratings success in the BBC and a staple of BBC America’s lineup, has inspired comic book spinoffs in the US and the UK and has led to interest in a US remake of the program. It’s a continuation of the BBC’s late ‘60s-late ‘80s run and has inspired a popular, Davies-helmed spinoff, Torchwood.

For more casual fans or those looking to acquaint themselves with the ideas of the show, this particular box set is a decent enough jumping-on point; Tennant has been widely praised as possibly the best Doctor ever to be featured on the show, and obviously the series finale (“The End of Time”) would be a decent enough lead-in to what’s currently a great jumping-on point for them, though: the introduction of a new Doctor (Matt Smith, introduced in part two of that story) with the new season. The show itself isn’t for everyone; the continuation of the old show is not only story-wise, but technically as well; it looks just like it did in the ‘60s, and has the very analog special effects and costuming of that era. Featuring a number of big-name guest-stars, the specials are an enjoyable, if campy, peek at the show.

Larsen’s “Dragon War” starts to take its full toll on the world of the Savage Dragon; caught by his son in the act of eating another Dragon’s brain, “our” Dragon, who has regained his original, dictatorial memory set and lost the ones he made on earth, slaps the kid basically into orbit and starts taking on all comers, while all the supporting characters navigate themselves into position for what looks to be a pretty massive smackdown between the morally-ambiguous Savage Dragon and the morally-ambiguous Vicious Circle (now with a handful of Dragon clones). The coolest part of this story, and the most confusing part, is trying to figure out who the hell you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Blog@Newsarama: So is Kurr going to carry the scars of his battle with Darkworld Dragon throughout the story, to help differentiate him from other Dragons?

Erik Larsen: No. There won’t be any other evil twins or lookalikes that dress in an identical manner. Dragon’s healing ability will take care of the wound in short order–in fact it has already. By the end Of #157 he was back to normal. (more…)

DC fans who have wondered for years if we’d ever see Young Justice again can take a little solace from this report on Rich Johnston’s Bleeding Cool site.

In a nutshell, actress Stephanie Lemelin blogged that she’s voicing Arrowette in an upcoming “Saturday morning cartoon” called Young Justice League. Along with an image of the character (seen here) that she claimed was concept art for the series, Lemelin said that “Due to the extreme popularity of this series, however, that’s about all I can say,” which apparently was more than she should have because the link provided in Johnston’s story leads nowhere, and there’s no mention of the entry or the series anywhere else on Lemelin’s blog. Bleeding Cool, of course, deals pretty regularly in gossip and off-the-record stuff, so they had the foresight to archive the material, probably knowing full well that it wouldn’t be allowed to stay online very long. A second, unattributed source told Johnston that the team will be made up of Arrowette, Martian Girl, Aqualad, Nightwing, Impulse, and Superboy/Kon-El.

Lemelin has some interesting projects coming up, according to IMDB, but what we’ve seen so far makes her a perfectly reasonable choice for an animated spin-off of a comic; she has experience in the direct-to-video Kung-Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five, based on the feature film starring Jack Black, and starred in several episodes of the Cavemen TV series based on the series of popular Geico commercials.

By TGIO, of course, I mean “Thank God It’s Over.” And in that department, DC’s blog The Source has unveiled the covers to the final issues of Justice League: Cry For Justice and Superman: World of New Krypton. The World of New Krypton preview (seen here at the main page) also includes five story pages of the upcoming final issue.

I have to say that while the Cry For Justice cover is really nice-looking, and a small part of me wonders whether it happens before or after Blackest Night, given the appearance of the Hawks on the cover, there’s simply nothing that could make me (in the words of one fan in the comments thread) subject myself to the series finale, particularly now that the only ace in the hole it had left–what happens at the end?–has been spilled by DC.

World of New Krypton, which hasn’t been nearly as bad as Cry for Justice but which came with the handicap of being an idea I didn’t like from the get-go (whereas the basic concept of Robinson’s Justice League story was good all the way up until about three pages into the first issue), is a title that continues to baffle me. I remember back when I was a kid, and the Superman titles came out basically on a weekly basis. Back then, if you needed a bridge between a couple of mega-crossover-type stories, you just took an issue or two of Superman: The Man of Steel and Superman, and you set the stage. Here, it feels like the Superman titles (both this one and the monthlies) have been basically a year-long exercise to segue between Geoff Johns’ Brainiac story and the upcoming War of the Supermen. That said, declining sales on all of the Superman titles combined with no discernible enthusiasm from most fans I’ve talked to have me wondering whether that event stands a chance of success. After all, the last time one of DC’s beloved heroes from a race of super-beings had to play referee between their own people and earth, it’s not like the story went over phenomenally well.

Those readers asking where Dan Jurgens will go next, after the announcement of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Chris Batista as the new creative team on Booster Gold later in the year, had an answer delivered in a kind of circuitous way by DC’s The Source blog on January 15.

(Sorry for the delay in follow-up, but I was out of town at the time.)

It appears as though Jurgens, along with Tony Bedard, has been announced as one of the writers running DC’s upcoming weekly DC Universe: Legends, a weekly series tying into the upcoming Sony Online Entertainment DC Universe Online massive, multiplayer online game. After the announcement, DC released a link to an IGN interview with Executive Editor Dan DiDio, who revealed that Jurgens, along with Tony Bedard, was one of the writers on the series, which doesn’t yet have a release date or a timetable attached to it.

Jurgens and Bedard are currently unavailable for interviews, presumably for the same reason that DiDio had so few details to offer. Jurgens indicated that the project was an exciting one, and when he’s been cleared to talk more about it, we’ll have more details here. The future of Dan Jurgens and Booster Gold was discussed during this month’s Gold Exchange column.

Comic fans who wondered what impact Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment would have on Boom! Studios and its licensed Disney and Pixar properties, weren’t completely alone. At the time, Boom! executives only reinforced their enjoyment at working with the properties, but issued no formal comment on the merger.

This week, though, the Disney Insider e-mail newsletter was delivered to fans’ e-mail boxes, with the headline “Are You a Disney Comic Book Fan?” and a feature story attached that introduced fans to Boom! and even linked to the Boom! site. Featuring an interview with Boom! CEO Ross Richie, discussing his publishing philosophy and the approach to the Disney characters. The Marvel merger was not mentioned.

Whether or not I’m reading too much into it might be a question, but I do wonder if this was a strategically-timed story, to reassure fans that everything’s still cool. What say you, ‘Rama readers?

In what was probably motivated at least in part by Marvel’s controversial Deadpool variant offer, DC Entetainment announced earlier this week on their blog The Source that a number of upcoming tie-ins to the Blackest Night follow-up story “Brightest Day” will ship with plastic Flash and Green Lantern rings for retailers ordering more than ten copies of April’s The Flash #1 and Green Lantern #53.

Given the popularity of Geoff Johns and Green Lantern, and the fact that it’s the first issue of a new series for The Flash and the first time Barry Allen has been featured as the title character in his own ongoing since the mid-1980s, it’s likely that most comics retailers would be carrying more than ten of these books anyway, so almost all retailers should be eligible to participate in this promotion without increasing their orders (at least substantially). It was not immediately clear from the wording of DC’s blog post how many rings a retailer could order for every ten comics ordered; the Blackest Night issues offered retailers the opportunity to order bags of fifty rings. The post said that more information would be made available to retailers soon. (more…)

The first few, non-musical sequences of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, available to own on DVD January 26, is done in a sort of mockumentary-style, with a fair minimum of actual story content before each musical number; I’m unclear as to whether or not some or all of the non-musical footage was either reused in other specials, or imported from them and reused here.

The basic premise of this musical Peanuts DVD, based on a Broadway musical by the same name, is that the gang from the popular comic strips perform sketches and musical numbers, with Chuck, Schrooeder, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy each getting a song spotlight after an the aforementioned introduction, which establishes the characters, giving anyone who isn’t familiar with the material (although, who that would be, I’m not sure) a primer on the characters and concepts that make Peanuts work. Some of them, like Charlie Brown’s horribly mean-spirited kite, get musical moments of their own.

One of the questions that I had going into an animated special based on a popular Broadway special—whether they would use the original musical cast or the voice actors that were so recognizable from two-plus decades of animated Peanuts specials—is answered quickly; they use the traditional voice actors, and to good effect, I think; I can’t quite place how a more typical Broadway-musical style would work with these characters onscreen. The notable exception, of course, is Snoopy’s song, since the dog doesn’t talk in most of the other cartoons. That said, the vocalist who sings that song is probably the most technically-proficient of all the singers on the special, but it still feels the most awkward and out-of-place.

The disc is fun enough, but doesn’t have the energy of some of the better specials; it really made me think that “Snoopy, Come Home” or “Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown” may not have had as many, or as sophisticated, musical numbers but having them intercut into the plot instead of standing alone like an episode of some juvenile variety show moves them along a lot better.

Given that its rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 7%–which makes it 3% lower than Catwoman—this week’s DVD and Blu-Ray release of Whiteout will face an uphill battle getting anyone, even fans of the graphic novel upon which it’s based, to buy it.

Which is a shame, really. The movie’s not nearly as bad as Catwoman. It’s not even in the same league as Elektra (10%) or Steel (13%); it’s basically just a two-hour version of a mediocre police procedural. I can see Whiteout being a “very special episode” of some “CSI” or “Law & Order” spinoff without a problem.

That said, it’s not a great movie. Not even a good movie. It’s just…well…a two-hour version of a police procedural. There’s Kate Beckinsale, pretty as ever and acting reasonably well, and then there’s a bunch of bit players you’ve never seen or heard of before. Piled on top of them is Tom Skerritt, and you know what they say about the one, random, recognizable face in a story like this. The murder mystery plot plods along, and by the time the death in the first scene ties in with the death that the main characters are investigating, you’ve already given up hope that the damned thing is going to make any sense.

Meanwhile, given that there are only about ten characters in the film and most of them have pretty specifically-outlined roles to play, the identity of our killer becomes pretty obvious about 40 minutes into the movie and rarely if ever does your suspicion shift from that character.

I’ve always thought that a great mystery story should allow you to consider the killer, discount them completely to move onto others, and then accept within reason that s/he was actually the badguy once the hero lays out their case. Instead, the killer here is the killer because…well, because he’s the killer. There’s little other logic attached and the story could easily have gone another way, except that it didn’t. Having never read Rucka’s lauded Oni Press comics based on this character, I’m kind of at a loss as to whether this is a case of a bad adaptation of a good property or just an overrated property—but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, I probably wouldn’t have read Gregory McDonald’s Fletch (one of my favorite characters in mystery lit) if I’d seen the movie first. That said, it would have been nice of Warner Bros. to include a commentary track, making-of featurette or anything else that might give some insight into the process. Instead, the only features we get are a handful of deleted scenes that make viewers glad the movie wasn’t EVEN longer.

All that said, this is the kind of movie that you can put on and have a little fun with it; it’s a murder mystery in name, but with a masked killer, a desolate and isolated setting and a plot that barely holds up under its own weight, it plays with a lot of the tropes of horror films, and does so better than most horror movies do. Plus, if you go in thinking that a good time is more important than quality cinema, you’ll have plenty of fun with the CGI snow accumulating on Beckinsale’s face during the final showdown with the movie’s big bad.

…Springsteen today. Great song.

Man, oh, man. There were a lot of you coming out to tell me I’d missed the bus on Misfit! I just didn’t think the girl had a scalloped cape in the last appearance I read, and frankly I don’t see why they would black out a character who had already been on the team and who isn’t high enough profile to be an “exciting return”. At least I’d be a little surprised to see any of the women I mentioned joining the BoP.

That said, I’m in a hurry and am going to skip the foreplay and just tell you who I think the guy might be.

Hawk (Hank Hall) – Well, we got into a lot of why I think it might be him last night. First off, the idea of the pair being closer together than the rest of the team, and having a big guy and a small girl…I get the notion that this might be Hank Hall and Dawn Granger, who it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to see come out of Blackest Night. Hank is certainly, given his long and checkered history in the DC Universe, undeniably the “iconic” version of Hawk, and if you brought back Don, you’d lose most of what’s defined him for the last twenty years or so. Also, he’s not only big and bulky like that, but his Nightwing-esque short cape would fit the silhouette.

Why not him? Well, he is dead, after all. That tends to be a barrier to joining new teams.

Bane – He’s huge. He’s in the Bat-universe. And Simone has been working with him pretty consistently on the Secret Six. Seeing him interacting with some of Bruce’s friends and loved ones would be really pretty entertaining.

Why not him? Well…he’s Bane. The chance of his working with Barbara for too long is pretty darn slim.

Catman – There’s nothing to say he can’t be on two teams at once, and it’s clear that not only does Simone know the character, and like the character, but she’s pretty good at writing the way he interacts with women.

Why not him? He’s pretty busy with the Secret Six. There’s nothing to say he can’t be here, but it still seems unlikely. Plus, no ears in the silhouette.

Damage – Well, he’s a big dude with a square head, who’s gotten plenty of play in Blackest Night and whose status we don’t know yet coming out of it. We know he’s dead at the moment, having had his heart ripped out…and we know he’ll live through the story, because we’ve seen him on JSA covers.

Why not him? He’s going to be in one of the myriad Justice League or Justice Society titles, so it’s unlikely he’ll be freed up for the birds. Besides which, neither any of these characters nor Gail Simone have all that close a connection to him.

Kilowog – Again, I’m going to say he’s a big dude and we don’t know what’s going to come of him after Blackest Night, which is a story where he’s gotten plenty of play. He’d fit in quite nicely with Oracle, and provide the team with both muscle and technical expertise.

Why not him? It’s unlikely to see him back on earth for any period of time as long as the Green Lantern Corps stays intact, besides which…if all I’m going on is the shape of the silhouette? This bloke doesn’t seem to have big, Kilowog-shaped ears.

With Blackest Night behind him, Booster Gold was back to business-as-usual this month, with the first really “ordinary” issue since Dan Jurgens took over the title. Between chaotic crossovers, time travel disasters and fill-in teams, Jurgens stepped into his role as writer of Booster Gold and almost immediately started running flat-out.

As most of you know already, that run will be coming to an end soon, as former Justice League International masterminds Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis are joined by former Infinity Inc. penciler Chris Batista to take over the title sometime this spring.

What most of you don’t know, and what Jurgens tells The Gold Exchange this week, is that this is more of a Gail Simone-on-Birds of Prey kind of departure than a Gail Simone-on-Deadpool kind. Jurgens, the man who created Booster Gold and has had a hand in writing or drawing almost all of the character’s solo stories for the last twenty-four years, is planning to come back to his creation after taking what he calls “a temporary reprieve from Booster Gold to handle something else.”

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Booster Gold #28, out yesterday, featured our time-traveling, toothpaste-shilling superhero busting it up with the Royal Flush Gang (again) before being summoned to help Rip Hunter with a crisis in time. Clearly a lot more comfortable in his role as “time cop” these days, Booster asks Rip if it’s a bunch of nuts trying to kill Hitler again, and while Rip says no, it is an assassination attempt…and the target, NASA mission commander Hank Henshaw, is someone who’s responsible for millions of deaths in the DCU.

Henshaw, whose experimental rocket was bombarded with radiation in a Jurgens-written issue of Superman about ten years ago, would ultimately be the last surviving member of the craft’s four-person crew. Having lost his wife and two friends in a tragedy that Superman arrived moments too late to prevent, Henshaw blamed Superman for his sorry luck and, when he ultimately took on the ability to embody and manipulate machinery, he set out to ruin Superman’s reputation. In the months after Superman’s death at the hands of Doomsday in Superman #75 (also written and drawn by Dan Jurgens), Henshaw assumed the identity of the Cyborg Superman, and was responsible for the destruction of Coast City. Apparently some years from now, the United States government aims to send the first-ever time traveler back in time. That traveler’s mission? To stop the destruction of Coast City by any means necessary. (more…)

In a move that’s no surprise to anyone, former DC editor and current Green Lantern Corps writer Peter Tomasi, who is one of the architects behind the upcoming Brightest Day project, has extended his exclusive agreement with DC Entertainment.

“There’s so many incredible stories coming down the pike that it’s truly gonna be a helluva ride,” Tomasi told DC’s blog The Source, discussing his shift from Green Lantern Corps writer to full-on DC Universe architect.

Tomasi’s announcement comes on the heels of DC’s recent exclusive acquisition of David Finch, who will be drawing covers for Brightest Day, and the rumored courting of a Marvel-exclusive artist to work on a Wonder Woman project with writer Grant Morrison.

Marvel Comics just released a press release saying that they’ll be allowing retailers to return stripped covers of fifty unsold comics in exchange for a Deadpool variant cover version of The Siege #3. The promotion runs through February 16, just over a month from now, and will, according to Marvel, give retailers a chance to return over-ordered product in order to obtain what they call an “extremely rare” variant of their big event book.

The catch? All qualifying titles are DC Comics. Recent issues of Adventure Comics, Booster Gold, Doom Patrol, Justice League of America, Outsiders and R.E.B.E.L.S., which were ordered by retailers in huge numbers because of their connection the DC’s Blackest Night event and its related ring giveaway, are going to be bartered back by Marvel, presumably in hopes that they can embarrass DC with a press release trumpeting big numbers of “unwanted” comics that retailers felt obliged to order to get the much-in-demand rings.

The books in question all saw substantial sales gains in the month that they were propping up Blackest Night, both before and after the ring promotion month–but many retailers complained that the quantity they were being asked to buy in order to qualify for the rings was simply too high, and that while retailers bought a lot in order to get the rings, many of them ended up with too much product on the shelf. Given Blackest Night’s continued sales success, and a perception by some fans that Marvel isn’t dominating the sales charts in the same way as they had in recent years, the House of Ideas probably sees this as an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone by promoting The Siege by attacking Blackest Night.

That said, as Bleeding Cool observes, it’s primarily going to benefit large retailers and some of the online clearinghouses; many of these comics sold out at small and medium-sized retailers whose customers got swept up in the enthusiasm for Blackest Night. ”Not a slight against Marvel but I’m sure I don’t’ have fifty copies of those books left,” said Jeff Watkins, the manager of Cloud City Comics in DeWitt, New York, who referred to the ring promotion as one of the smartest things done in comics this year. ”I probably don’t have ten of those books; a lot of those books are complete sell-outs.”

Watkins operates a fairly small store in a suburb of Syracuse, but says that the ring promotion worked better than many similar gimmicks because the product was good. “I think it worked so well because people who bought them for the rings weren’t unhappy with the titles themselves; they put out some really good issues of R.E.B.E.L.S. and Outsiders.”

Still, they’re asking for an awful lot of copies in order to get one comic back from Marvel, so one has to wonder how many retailers will just hang on to all or most of their leftovers and figure that selling them in the dollar bin might be a more economical idea.

Alright, so that’s the most random Rolling Stones quote of the week. But I’m trying to put two and two together, something I’ve done fairly successfully in the past, about who might be the shadowy figures on the cover of the new Birds of Prey #1 by Gail Simone and Ed Benes.

When the series relaunch was announced this morning on DC’s blog, the general sense of enthusiasm for a Simone-helmed Birds of Prey relaunch was almost enough to drown out the people who started speculating right away as to who the pair of shadows in the team’s midst might be. There appears, from my point of view, to be a male (this would be the first time a dude was “officially” part of the Birds of Prey) and a female, largely because I can’t think of a single female in the DC Universe who would be large enough to account for the figure standing on the ground.

As ever, I’ll start with the character(s) I think most likely to be the one pictured and work my way down the list. After the top two or so, the order stops having any order whatsoever, as I figure the odds of the people down there to be somewhere in the 10% or less range anyway. For the female (flying) character, we’ve got: (more…)

Looks like it, folks. DC announced today that Keith Giffen and Judd Winick will be resurrecting the Justice League International in a biweekly maxiseries called Justice League: Generation Lost. The cover by Tony Harris that was used by DC to promote the series, though, seems to feature more than they’re saying. With Booster Gold, Ice, Fire and Captain Atom on the cover, you’ll have lots of fans asking: “Where’s Blue Beetle?” Well…he’s there.

If you look closely at the shadowy figure behind Captain Atom, it has big, goggle-like eyes and the little spikey-eyebrow things that are characteristic of Ted Kord’s old Blue Beetle mask.

With Keith Giffen also announcing that he and J.M. DeMatteis are taking over Booster Gold when Dan Jurgens exits the title, it does increase the likelihood of his being able to take over the story Jurgens has been building in Booster Gold without stepping on any toes. Whether or not this is the actual return of Ted Kord, or whether it’s just a tease (or a reminder that the spectre of Ted will always be wherever this team is), seeing him on the cover–and specifically seeing him obscured on the cover, one of the things DC has done a lot lately to protect their secrets–is a pretty interesting thing…!

Interviews with J.M. DeMatteis and Dan Jurgens to discuss their roles in the changing of the guard, by the way, will be a part of this week’s “Gold Exchange” Q&A tomorrow here and at Comic Related.

Before watching Robin Hood Season 3 on DVD this week, my thinking was that one of the appeals of a Robin Hood TV series is the same as it might be for Zorro, Batman or even Sherlock Holmes. Having a central character who’s instantly recognizable, whose challenges, enemies, friends and philosophy are pretty well established in your head, gives you a perfect jumping-on point if you want to watch, say, season 3, episode 7 first. Try doing that with The Office or Lost, and it could be a disaster. It’s part of why characters like Superman and Batman, in spite of having long and elaborate histories in the comics, are always welcome in the movie theaters, where audiences disdain complexity. No matter how complex a story gets, if it revolves around an iconic character like these, you can walk in and feel like you “get it.”

So it was, of course, with some degree of surprise that I flicked on the television and saw Robin Hood’s first episode feel quite a bit like an old-fashioned Spider-Man story. After what you quickly realized was the murder of his wife Marion at the end of last season, Robin is out for blood, and doesn’t want his band of Merry Men “holding him back” anymore. He doesn’t want to be Robin Hood, either; he just wants to kill his wife’s killer and get on with his life.

It’s not long, of course, before a mysterious stranger who turns out to be Tuck appears, nurses an injured Robin back to health and convinces him that he needs to remain and be a symbol; like Spider-Man, Superman and so many other superheroes have realized over the years…even when something awful happens to you, and it doesn’t seem worth it to stay in the tights, the inspiration that you are to others is what has to keep you going, because it’s not just the handful of people who you can actually physically touch, whose lives you’re saving. Robin realizes this by the end of the first episode and it’s a theme that permeates an admittedly dark and complicated Sherwood Forest throughout the rest of the third and final season of this BBC hit.

It’s a series that should appeal very easily to comics fans, and which was far better than I had honestly expected. When you’re hefting the box of DVDs in your hand, thinking “Robin Hood: The Series,” a cynical mind can easily drift to the dozens of mediocre Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes films, short films and the like that have been made over the years. The performances here are impressive, though, and there are real consequences: we see people die, and suffer, and mourn. While Robin and his gang play a lot of complex tricks on the Sheriff and his men, and they joke around a lot, it’s more like the enrivonment of the mid-90s Justice League America—no-nonsense guys who joke around because they’ve been in this together for a long time and if they didn’t, it would probably drive them mad.

New viewers will have no problem easing into the universe of this show, either; there’s only one character whose name or role I didn’t immediately recognize from previous incarnations of Robin Hood, and he’s so self-evidently evil that there really wasn’t a question as to what to think.

It’s a shame to see this show wrap up; in Britain, of course, television shows don’t go on and on forever, the way they do here (see the aforementioned program The Office, which had a brief and brilliant run on BBC before being translated to American and going on for six years and counting), but the heart, cleverness and just plain good filmmaking that went into this show really does make you wonder why star Jonas Armstrong was so eager to leave; certainly after sitting down with this box set, it makes Sherwood Forest a place I’d like to stay and visit, and see a little more.

Alex Segura, DC Entertainment’s DC Universe publicity rep (read: he promotes the mainstream, superhero aspect of DC’s comics publishing empire), had a cryptic message on the company’s blog, The Source, Friday night. He told readers: “[DC Executive Editor] Dan DiDio just swung by my office and said ‘keep your phone on Monday morning,’ and darted off. What does it mean? You got me, gang. But if I were you, I’d keep my eyes peeled to this very space once the weekend’s over.”

Today, Segura followed up with a second entry, titled “When Dan DiDio Calls Your Phone at 6am, You Answer.”  Segura claims to have been called into the office early and suggests that there will be some early news. This is a departure from a lot of DC’s stories on “The Source”, which tend to be published after 10am. (more…)