Last evening, I enjoyed the company of some old friends, a bonfire and an array of traditional campfire foods. After enjoying some lovely hot dogs of unknown provenance (when it comes to the tubular meats, I find it less disconcerting if I don’t examine them too closely, to be honest), we also melted chocolate and roasted marshmallows over the fire to create the traditional dessert known as S’mores, one of the few food items in the world to be named worse than ‘kumquats.’ One of my friends, an even bigger lover of puns and wordplay than I am, began sharing…
Browsing: Major Spoilers
As a wise man once said, “Lots of planets have a north!” That’s not really apropos of anything, particularly, just good perspective on the universe, though it does touch on one of the great questions of fiction (specifically, why do so many aliens look human and speak English?) Another endlessly debated question of fiction regards the speed-rankings of the Man Of Steel and the Vizier Of Velocity, a battle which DC Comics has seen fit to revisit half a dozen times over the years. Mark Waid’s specialist rule (“Flash is faster than Superman because Superman has other abilities”) generally applies…
In this installment of Critical Hit: A Major Spoilers Dungeons and Dragons Podcast: The party bickers over who should and should not speak to the council.
Modern comic-book storytelling has been leaning pretty hard on the classic villains, making it necessary for each hero to have one Greatest Villain Of Them All. Daredevil with Bullseye, The Fantastic Four with Doctor Doom, Iron Man with Jack Daniels… All of these are somewhat obvious, but it can be more difficult with some characters. It’s easy to say that Batman’s perfect foe is the Joker, but who would it be for Spider-Man? His dark mirror, Venom? The murderer of his first love, The Green Goblin? The guys who wrote the Clone Saga? Because of the multi-faceted nature of the…
This week, Zach examines the modern take on silent films with The Artist.
Worst Nightmares Top Five is a show where the hosts categorize, rank, compare, and stratify everything… from cars to gadgets to people and movies. From stuff that is hot, and things that are not nearly as interesting – it’s Top Five. It’s scary October, which means it’s time to look at those things that haunt our dreams.
Hawkeye, you’ve been gone too long… Matthew and Stephen sit down to review Hawkeye #13 to see if it still packs the same punch it did when issue 12 arrived back in July.
If you follow the Major Spoilers crew on Twitter, (And, really, why wouldn’t you? We’re kind of delightful, especially Rodrigo) then you’re probably already aware of my appreciation of the beauty of a certain actress. I’d apologize for my minor obsession, but I make no excuses for pointing out that someone is utterly adorable, especially given that I still remember how awesome it was to be the object of someone’s similar attentions some years ago. (I was married, and he wasn’t my type, but that didn’t make it any less flattering…) The Tumblrs and Photobucket’s of the intarwebz are full…
The mythology of “cool” is a strange and nebulous beastie. From my perspective, as a child of the 70s, I immediately think of Henry Winkler’s Fonz as the epitome of self-confident actualization, but my elders could easily make arguments for the likes of James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, or even the legendary Achilles. Whomever or whatever you deem to be the perfect indicator of self-possession, we can all agree: We know it when we see it. Exposure in my tween years to the exploits of daredevil biker and erstwhile cowboy Johnny Blaze (aka the original motorcyclin’ Ghost Rider) has cemented him…
IT’S NEW COMIC BOOK DAY! Major Spoilers runs down the comics we are looking forward to, and recommending, this week.
This week on the Major Spoilers Podcast: A visit to the Airtight Garage, Batman #24, The Avengers A.I. Rocket Girl #1, and Kiss Me Satan #2. Plus, the fight to end all fights featuring some of Doctor Who’s greatest villains.
Munchkin is a dedicated deck card game by Steve Jackson Games, written by Steve Jackson and illustrated by John Kovalic, that has a humorous take on role-playing games. This week on Munchkin Minute, you write in with a rundown of the Munchkin sets you own.
I’ve often said that having a brain that works the way mine does, trapping pop culture detritus like a hair clog in your shower, is a mixed blessing. Case in point, for the last week or so, off and on, I’ve found myself half-remembering a few bits from the musical ‘Chicago’, but since I don’t recall the actual lyrics, Roxie Hart is for some reason singing about Terence and Philip from ‘South Park.’ While not as insidious as the one awful year-and-a-half where a certain musical’s reprise was stuck in my head, (and, no, I won’t tell you which one)…
This weekend has been an interesting one for me, having spent most of it lying on my couch in various states of semi-consciousness getting over a fever. At one point, I was flipping back and forth between channels, watching the climactic sequences of ‘Titanic’, ‘8 Mile’, and ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ at the same time (a surreal experience that I highly recommend), and half-watched the second Harry Potter movie for about ten minutes before my daughter informed me they weren’t speaking English. The wonder that is Spanish-language cable networks aside, I also dreamt that I was in the Robocop cartoon and that…