Jumping in Headfirst

Real talk, I keep trying to watch these Summer Madness battles but the way SMACK set them up makes it impossible.  Pretty much a waste of time to even sit through them, but I'll get to that later.  SMACK still managed to drop a classic between Michigan's Anubis and New Orleans' HA Double.  I can't really call this battle, but damn...Anubis dropped SO many geek references (including a whole scheme about Dragonball Z) that I'm just giving it to him by default. Anyway, if you a fan of SMACK, at this point you're wasting your time to watch anything but Proving Ground match-ups right now.  Damn near all of them have been insane. 

Avengers 21         The Avengers ' epic battle against the Builders finally comes to an end, as the formerly out-of-action Captain Universe awakens to save the universe in its hour of need.  In a nutshell, that's how Avengers 21 plays out, and I'd be lying if I didn't say I wasn't disappointed. The Thanos plot in the main Infinity story just never felt anywhere near as strong or as wide-reaching as the Builders subplot, so to see it come to an end so soon and so suddenly is a little saddening.  The story is missing those big, epic set-piece moments that make a reader's jaw-drop like in the classics Annihilation , Conquest , or War of Kings .   What's saved it mostly is that its pretty much just a prologue to Jonathan's Avengers epic, a story I'm still curious to see the full scope of, as we head into Avengers World.  But at some point for this epic to truly work they're going to have to slow down enough to make those epic mome...

Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku ni Naritai! (I Want To Be The Strongest In The World):  It's been two weeks since I saw episode one of this, and I'm STILL not sure what the hell I was expecting when I decided to watch this.  I guess I thought the world of puroresu (Pro Wrestling) would be more interesting if it involved a ton of attractive women.  What I got (and should've expected) was so much fanservice it was damn near a hentai, and moaning fit for the very best porn vids. The series is about a top level idol singer who, while on a routine publicity assignment, gets mixed up in the role of pro wrestling, and in fact tries to fight a female professional wrestler.  The good part is that she gets her ass kicked and doesn't magically pull off a win like I expected her to in a series like this.  The bad part...is that the wrestler the main character faced was a submission wrestler so the entire thing watched like a beginner course in BDSM, and those moans (and...

Yeah yeah, I know I'm late.  I was busy watching the Battle of the Bay 6 bouts, most of which are pretty freaking good, and I forgot about Bad Soundcheck 4, while SMACK pretty much forgot he was running a business and is too busy making blogs apparently.  Because that's what's hot in the streets.

Astro City 5 Any week in which Astro City comes out is a good one.  No other comic series displays this much love for superheroes and continuity despite remaining accessible and interesting month in and month out.  This month we revisit the Broken Man; introduced in episode 1, the Broken Man has been our guide into the latest volume of Astro City, telling us about goings on both old and new since our last visit.   Obsessed with a far-reaching conspiracy theory, the last page of issue 1 showed us that the Broken Man could just be like those whackjobs who see triangles and immediately think Illuminati. Well now Kurt is doubling back on us and showing that there may be more to the Broken Man's accusations about what's really going on than we thought, with a lovely story that plays with traditional narration techniques to tell us readers that there's definitely something fishy going on in the world of Astro City, though exactly what it is remains to be seen....

So yeah.   This finally happened.   My friends and I spent about two or three months cracking wise about this break-dancin', sword-slashin', fruit-lovin' crime-fighter, but now that its out, it's not so bad. What I Liked:  - The Fruit : I know, right?!   Like I said, my friends and I had a billion jokes about Kamen Rider Toucan Sam , but in the end I actually liked the way they implemented it.    While in theory not really much weirder than USB memories or say...grasshoppers, in practice, using fruit as a major theme for Kamen Rider Gaim was weird , and most everyone thought so.   The reason why I liked it is because the writers let us know from the moment they were introduced that this isn't normal.     The Lock Seeds themselves are seen as mysterious, strange objects that came from nowhere, and anyone who actually, y'know, thinks about it for longer than 3 seconds knows it.    And later, when they get ...