5

Frank Miller Is Writing Superman: Year One

By the time Frank Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One in the mid-'80s, the Caped Crusader was already in the middle of a slow transition away from the colorful, outlandish stories of the '50s and '60s. Gone were issues of Detective Comics emblazoned with things like "BUT I CAN'T VAPORIZE THE BATCAVE, ROBIN. ALFRED IS ON THE MOON!" In their place were grittier stories featuring a Batman who was equally at home taking down vicious mob bosses as he was making out with Ra's al Ghul's hot daughter. But Frank Miller figured that this evolution wasn't moving fast enough, so he put on a pair of grim, dark spurs and kicked the BatHorse as hard as he could, sending it racing into the next era.

The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One are great, great Batman stories. And the former is also a decent Superman story. In it, the Man of Steel is a pawn of the government, working for a Ronald Reagan caricature and generally being the biggest fucking buzzkill, especially when it comes to Batman's whole "Return to Gotham and beat up most of the population" solution. But he's also a Superman who retains some of his glory and a bit of his humanity, and if you've only read Dark Knight Returns, you might get the sense that Miller enjoys the character. And if he'd written Superman: Year One right after that, I would've cried because it's just so beautiful, you guys.

4

TNT Wants To Reboot Tales From The Crypt

Tales From The Crypt was a confusing part of my childhood and is an integral part of my adulthood. I was young when the show originally premiered. Being unable to grasp its wit or sense of ironic justice, all I could discern was an opening in which a corpse screamed at me, followed by 20 minutes of people being terrible to each other. But after I rediscovered the show in college, and shortly after discovered how well it pairs with vodka, it became a staple of my life. It's everything I need out of a TV show. Sure, Game Of Thrones and Breaking Bad are good, but Breaking Bad doesn't have an episode where Don Rickles reveals that he has a little carnivorous symbiote brother attached to his wrist. Game, set, match, Bryan Cranston.

3

James Cameron And Ridley Scott Are Considering New Terminator And Alien Films

Putting time between an original movie and its sequel doesn't always make the sequel feel special, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Aliens came out seven years after Alien. Terminator 2 also came out seven years after Terminator. That almost seems ludicrous in an age in which blockbusters come out nonstop because filmmakers have already planned out the entire universe before they even get the first film in the can. Even if you don't remember the exact stories, putting seven years between your movies at least guarantees that you'll see them in different phases of your life. Young-And-Full-Of-Hope Chuck saw Terminator. Divorced-With-Two-Kids-And-Voted-For-Mike-Dukakis Chuck saw Terminator 2.

2

There's Gonna Be A New Spawn Movie

When Spawn first came out, it was like that kid in class who cursed before everyone else. What are his secrets? How does anyone GET. THAT. COOL? The story of a reincarnated veteran who uses his special powers to eviscerate evil people was edgy and dark, and if you brought an issue to school, kids knelt at your feet to get a chance to peek into it. In my elementary school, it was the same kid who brought a copy of Mortal Kombat 4 to the playground. He couldn't plug that shit into the mulch and play it, but he could hold it above our heads. He had surpassed us. We were but children. Thorne was something more. Something deadlier.

Now, though, most popular comics have gone through their "edgy and dark" stage. One of Spider-Man's most notable villains is Carnage, an antagonist built around the question "What if we made Venom more kill-y?" Batman stabbed a dude to a wall in his last movie and I assume just left him there. That's some Michael Myers shit. Cops walked into that building and reported "All things seem normal, except for the fact that, at one point in the brawl, Batman apparently took the time to knife a dude so hard that he became part of the architecture."

A Spawn reboot movie would be awesome in the early 2000s. Watching the original Spawn movie was like calling heresy on my interest in superheroes. It was a message to anyone who watched it that maybe you should try soccer or needlepoint, because this cape and mask shit ain't working out. Something to clean my palate soon after that, to show me that there was still good in the world and that we weren't doomed to live on a planet where the only Spawn movie was the first Spawn movie, would've been nice.

1

J.K. Rowling Is Publishing Two New Harry Potter Books

Cracked has written before about J.K. Rowling using the Harry Potter series to become the new Disney, and I totally get the comparison. What started as a book series turned into a mega movie series, which then led to an amusement park and a social media site and a cornucopia of other things. Now J.K. Rowling runs an empire that she is only partially attached to.

And because she is only sort of the queen of her kingdom, there are many things being released that she probably has very little to do with. I'm sure that she signs off on all of the major stuff that's released about Harry Potter so that no one fills the books with tidbits like "Did you know that Dumbledore had NINE HANDS?" or "Underneath his layers of awkwardness, Ron Weasley was a very talented boy and a malignant racist." But these new books are basically encyclopedias. They're reference guides for stuff that Rowling wrote herself. But it's hard to fit "J.K. ROWLING IS PUBLISHING TWO HARRY POTTER BOOKS!!! (WELL, ACTUALLY, THEY'RE MORE LIKE EXTENDED GLOSSARIES, BUT THIS ONE HAS THAT BIRD THING YOU LIKE SO MUCH ON IT, SO IT'S COOL.)" into your average entertainment news headline. It's also kind of a bummer.

I'm not going to diss Rowling as an artist who wants to profit from her creations. I'm not a huge fan of Harry Potter, but I have friends who are, and I've seen the ways that Harry Potter has inspired them and brought them together. And if they want to buy Harry Potter encyclopedias, more power to them. There are way worse things to be interested in, like heroin or murder or that show Californication.

However, that doesn't change the fact that news of Rowling releasing two new Harry Potter books would have way more gravitas in, like, 2004. The complete story is finished (for now). Every book to come until Rowling decides to let us in a little more on Harry's midlife crisis will have the theme of "Remember that Harry Potter thing? It was pretty cool. Here are some nice pictures."

Daniel voices the Math Wizard in Dungeon Dynamite, has a podcast about Top 40 music, and operates a Grand Slam Twitter account.

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