Jumping in Headfirst

What the f*ck, Rocksteady? : Batman: Arkham Knight has been doing things weird since day one.  Developer Rocksteady revealed the title back in April of 2014 for an October release, but E3 hadn't even come before there were rumors (later confirmed) of the title being pushed back.   I have no idea how you go from thinking you can get a game out inside of six months to pushing it back by eight, but hey.   It's Rocksteady.  The team that created the first legitimately great superhero title on HD consoles.  I couldn't help giving them some slack.   And this is where we learn the dangers of doing such a thing.

Astro City As usual, Kurt Busiek's Astro City is creatively solid--following a superhero who's made his home on an alien planet, and has to learn to accept when it's time to hand the job over to the next generation.  It's almost the opposite of what happened with Crackerjack and Quarrel.  That said: I've been a denizen of the interwebs for nearly two decades now, and this still might be a strong contender for grossest sexual advance ever. 

From creator Yasuhiro Nightow (Trigun, Gungrave) comes new series Kekkai Sensen, which follows an organization named Libra, beings with super-powers in the city Jerusalem's Lot, the re-named New York City after a portal opened letting in all types of supernatural creepies.  Libra is in charge of keeping all these supernatural forces from escaping out into the rest of the world, and our story opens with a  new member joining the team: Leonard Watch, a boy with the "Eyes of God"--an ability that grants him the ability to see "everything", from ghosts to high-level illusions.  Having finished the first two episodes so far, I'll say this for Kekkai Sensen: it's certainly the coolest looking series of the year.  

Welp. Last time I did one of these it was to shit over that dreadful "gritty" Power Rangers reboot . Am I going to be more optimistic this go-around?

All humans have a habit of seeing themselves as more than what they really are.  Whether you're aggrandizing or depricating, there's a pretty good chance you're not as great/crap as you believe yourself to be.  Similarly, when we see ourselves in certain characters, a lot of time what we really see are characters we wish we were more like--especially when it's larger-than-life figures like the ones in popular television series and films of both today and yesteryear.    It's exceedingly rare--unless you just wrote yourself into a story--to look at a character and see yourself, and not be all that far off from the truth. 

Gunslinger Stratos is definitely my first (possibly my only) disappointment of the season so far.  Based on a series of arcade light gun shooters by Square-Enix, Gunslinger Stratos has all the hallmarks of a video game-turned-anime--it's all beautiful character designs with no substance to the actual characters .  

So after Square tried to spend three days jerking everyone around with the Deus Ex reveal last week, their Japanese division though it might be cute if they did the same thing this week.  They put out a teaser image that looked like this, announcing that they would reveal more info the next day: As usual, fans kinda lost it and started speculating as to what it could be.  S A R 0 1 0 1?   It wasn't long before someone thought a T fit between S and the A, and that the 0s and 1s could be binary, where 0101 translates to 5.   And just like that, we had our speculation for Star 5 being "Star Ocean 5".

If I'd known this week would be so short, I would've done it ages ago.   This isn't being done out of necessity to catch up--I looked and this was just a really, really light week for me.   Ah well.  Onwards! Amazing Spider-Man As much as I love Spider-Gwen and Silk, Anna Maria might be the best female character from this Dan Slott-era of Spider-Man.   I mean, the woman manages to be the heart for SpOck and a great foil for the real Peter?    It's great, and I hope she continues to have a presence in AMS, at least until Slott finally calls it quits.

Sure to win the "Best Copycat" award of 2015, as this looks...almost unreasonably similar to 2013's Attack on Titan.   A bleak time in humanity's existence where most of society has been wiped out (there its the giants, here its a virus), with the remainder of the race being hunted by a powerful supernatural force, and there's a boy with an almost unreasonable amount of rage due to the loss of his family at the hands of said force.  There are a plenty of differences present as well, but the similarities are so obvious that people are going to make the comparisons regardless.  (They even have the same company doing the animation!)  But aside from comparisons to a much more popular series, how does Seraph of the End stand up?

Amazing X-Men For an arc that has been not terribly inspired, this issue manages to be wonderfully so.  With a "new" Juggernaut roaming around, the X-Men are forced to come up with a plan to defeat him.  Only...no one wants to .  It makes sense, right?   The Juggernaut is one of the team's oldest villains.    They've fought him for, no joke, fifty years and nothing ever seems to change.   They've Stopped the Unstoppable dozens of times and at some point the joke gets kind of old--so to the see the team recognize the futility of their actions and actually pull back and try to think of a plan that might have some, y'know, permanance , felt so perfectly logical I was impressed.   Plus, the X-Men are probably the most overworked team in comics.  Someone's always dying or reviving or entering fights where "no quarter is asked, and no quarter given".  Storm at one point even proclaims she's just tired of all the darkness ...

Welp. It's that time of the year again--where the anime fandom is flooded with new series to insult, fall in love with, or otherwise obsess over. Frankly, I couldn't be happier. The winter season wasn't exactly packed with new series for me, so I was basically running on the fumes of October's releases. But they're finally here, so let's start talking about them. This time around, I'll be going one by one and hopefully getting a bit more in-depth. First up on the list...