Simple Gifts

Tuesday is my birthday. For the last month, I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to celebrate, but I’ve finally decided to let things pass fairly quietly.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my birthday. On the one hand, the fact that I survived another 365 days on this planet without accidentally killing myself or in some other way getting killed is something worth celebrating*. (I know it’s a morbid way to put it, but isn’t a ‘celebration of life’ just another way to say a ‘celebration of no death’? (This goth moment brought to you by the letter J and writing a blog post before I’ve had breakfast.)) On the other hand, I’m a nerd and as such I hate being in the spotlight of any social setting, especially a spotlight of such a personal nature. Maybe I’ve become wiser in my old age or maybe I’ve just become more crotchety in my old age, which could very well mean the same thing, I just haven’t gotten old enough to tell.

DC has started to release their January 2011 solicitation. They’ve declared that 2011 is going to be a character-driven year and they’re going to spend it focusing on in depth storytelling focusing on all the rich characters in the DCU, not just the main ones that everybody focuses on. The first practical example of this marketing-speak is that every cover for the regular books of January 2011 is going to have a similar design: white background, the character(s) of the book in a dynamic pose with their logo hovering above him/her/them. While in words, it might sound kind of bland, in practice it looks really cool. Our favorite at Ret-Conned HQ is the cover for Batman & Robin #19. Such an iconic scene with the newest incarnations looks really awesome.

There’s also been talk this week that Marvel is going to expand their live-action dominance out of the box office and into the living room. The first two TV shows they’ve announced are a new version of the Hulk and a Cloak & Dagger series. While at first blush, you think “Dude! Weekly Hulk Smash! Awesome!”, cooler heads are starting to wonder what exactly this means. As Spin Online points out, by creating a Hulk TV series Marvel’s saying it’s giving up on the Hulk movie franchise. Kris also pointed out that the original Hulk TV formula doesn’t work anymore. While a drifter who wanders from town to town trying to help people might have worked in the ’70s, today nobody would trust him because clearly the drifter’s secretly an axe murderer.

The list of all possible series that Marvel considered has also leaked. Of them, Ret-Conned HQ votes heavily for the Heroes for Hire series. We’d definitely watch that one, but only if (a) it does include Iron Fist and (b) Isaiah Mustafa plays Luke Cage. Make it happen Hollywood!