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With S4 Underway, Ted Lasso’s First 3 Seasons get the 4K Treatment

  • News
  • September 21, 2025

BURBANK, CA (September 16, 2025) – BELIEVE it or not – the heartwarming and critically acclaimed comedy series, Ted Lasso, is arriving on 4K UHD November 11, 2025. Experience the full charm and humor of all 34 episodes in a stunning 4K UHD collector’s box set, enhanced with Dolby Vision for richer contrast and vibrant colors. Ted Lasso: The Richmond Way will be available for purchase both online and at major retailers. Don’t miss out—preorder your copy today!

Since its premiere on Apple TV+ in 2020, Ted Lasso has earned widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike. Winner of 13 Emmy® Awards, including back-to-back wins in the following categories: Outstanding Comedy Series (2021, 2022), Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for Jason Sudeikis (2021, 2022), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for Brett Goldstein (2021, 2022), along with an Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series win for Hannah Waddingham (2021), multiple Golden Globe Awards and Critics’ Choice Awards, the series has broken records, solidifying its place as one of the most beloved and celebrated series of all time.

That’s not all, the global phenomenon Ted Lasso is officially returning to the football pitch for a fourth season that will reunite the team behind the history-making and multi-Emmy–winning comedy series, with Jason Sudeikis reprising his award-winning role as the celebrated Coach Ted Lasso. In addition to Sudeikis, Emmy® award winner Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Emmy® award winner Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, and Jeremy Swift are all set to return as their beloved characters and celebrated members of AFC Richmond, along with newcomers Tanya Reynolds, Jude Mack, Faye Marsey, Rex Hayes, Aisling Sharkey, Abbie Hern, and Grant Feely, who is stepping in as Ted’s son, Henry.

Ted Lasso season four adds Emmy® award winner Jack Burditt (Nobody Wants This, Modern Family, 30 Rock) as executive producer under a new overall deal with Apple TV+. Sudeikis stars and executive produces alongside Hunt, Joe Kelly, Jane Becker, Jamie Lee and Bill Wrubel. Goldstein serves as writer and executive producer alongside Leanne Bowen. Sarah Walker and Phoebe Walsh will serve as writers and co-executive producers for season four, and Sasha Garron co-produces. Julia Lindon will write for season four, and Dylan Marron will serve as story editor. Bill Lawrence executive produces via his Doozer Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television and Universal Television, a division of NBCUniversal Content. Doozer’s Jeff Ingold and Liza Katzer also serve as executive producers. The series was developed by Sudeikis, Lawrence, Kelly, and Hunt, and is based on the preexisting format and characters from NBC Sports.

Synopsis
In a bitter divorce settlement from her billionaire husband Rupert Mannion, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) becomes the new owner of British football club AFC Richmond. She’s assisted by her Director of Football Operations, Higgins (Jeremy Swift), who formerly worked for her husband. Her first order of business is to fire the team’s current manager and replace him with an idealistic all-American football coach Theodore “Ted” Lasso (Jason Sudeikis). Ted and his friend, assistant Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) cross the pond to take up the management of the team’s “long, albeit modest” history. Ted gets to know the team – including Team Captain Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), top scorer Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) and more – but finds his first friend in the locker room assistant Nathan (Nick Mohammed). Half a world away from his wife and child, Ted could use a friend. But he presses on, nevertheless. Richmond is about to change the way they’re doing things — and from now on, that is the Lasso way.

PRODUCT
4K UHD
Languages: English
Subtitles: English
Running Time: 1,447 minutes
Rating: TV-MA (14A in Canada)

Wednesday Comics edited by Mark Chiarello

As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson’s great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang , a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder – especially in his comics – than anyone else.

Andre is lovable and amusing, because he’s a child with a child’s enthusiasms, and we assume he will grow out of it, at least somewhat, and temper that enthusiasm with other qualities.

A project from DC from the prior year, Wednesday Comics , belies that hope.

It was a bold, interesting experiment: to turn out standard DC comics (their usual characters, their usual stories, in-continuity as far as I can tell) in a Sunday-newspaper broadsheet format. Editor Mark Chiarello’s introduction to this oversized single-volume collection – they were originally printed in newspaper-size pamphlets and distributed weekly, because everything in superhero comics must be printed in a pamphlet and distributed weekly – sidestepped the fact that Sunday comics still existed at that point, and resolutely ignored the existence of humorous newspaper strips, which most of us realize has been the majority of the form for their entire history. This was one of the first worrying points: DC has a long history of humor itself, and it wouldn’t have been impossible for some alternate-world version of Wednesday Comics to have an Inferior Five strip, or even, if I’m shooting for the moon, Bob Hope. (When I first got this book, I had an alternate-world hope for a mash-up style book, from some elseworlds DC with more of a sense of humor: maybe Teen Titans in a Peanuts style, or Krypto as Marmaduke or Green Arrow and Black Canary in Blondie situations. That’s not something this world’s DC would ever do, of course. Pity: that would be a fun book, and different from anything else on the shelves…though, again, the Big Two never do anything deliberately different these days.)

Unfortunately, the most important thing about modern superhero comics – more than the costumes, more than the secret identities, more than the endless “who would win” arguments, more than the catchphrases and shocking reverses and Never Agains – is that you must take them seriously at all times. Superhero comics are serious and deep and important, telling stories about guys in funny costumes punching each other imbued with the power of ancient myth, and anyone who doesn’t accept this basic, fundamental truth will be wished into the cornfield.

So Wednesday Comics could never have been a project full of the influence of the actually most popular Sunday comics, now or ever. You’ll look in vain for anything influenced by Krazy Kat here, or Bringing Up Father, or Peanuts, or Far Side, or Calvin and Hobbes – not even a Luann or Bloom County. The model for “Sunday comics” here is a very vaguely remembered Hal Foster Prince Valiant, described as if there were an era when the Sunday color insert was entirely made up of full-page adventure stories in that mode.

These are all Andre Chang comics: as big as possible, loud and flashy most of the time, modern in the most trivial ways while mostly looking backwards to a cleaned-up dream of the Silver Age. There are fifteen full stories here (plus two single-page try-outs), each one twelve big pages long. Assuming each page is roughly the size of two normal comics pages, that’s essentially a single issue of story for each one of them – call it a fill-in issue, in a different, hopefully exciting format.

Some of the artists engage with the larger page – Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman story in particular has detailed, interesting layouts that run all over the page, though unfortunately I found that one confusing and cramped, with too many tiny boxes that didn’t flow as I hoped. Some artists, on the other hand, just seem to have their normal work blown up to the larger size, as Joe Kubert’s (impeccably drawn, I’ll admit) Sgt. Rock story, which adds bands at the bottom and top of each page to fill it out.

I’ll be frank: there’s not a single story here I’d pick out as exemplary in a good way. I like Kyle Baker’s work a lot; here he gives us a muddy, dull Hawkman stopping aliens from hijacking airplanes (?!) and then fighting dinosaurs with Aquaman – that perhaps shows the Andre Chang-ness of it best; it’s all boys playing with whatever toys they grab out of the box, making them fight.

OK. Other possible highlights include a really awesome-looking Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, Paul Pope’s mildly self-pitying and convoluted Adam Strange story, and a mostly sunny and silly Supergirl story from Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. There are also stories where the art is fun and lively, making good use of the large canvas, to tell cliched and standard stories, such as Mike Allred on Metamorpho, Joe Quiňones on Green Lantern, José Luis Garcia-López on Metal Men, and somewhat (I don’t love the art-style, but it’s different and inventive and striking) Sean Galloway on Teen Titans. In pretty much all of those cases, the story is bland yardgoods – there’s even a “new villain hates the heroes for histrionic unspecified ‘they’re the real bad guys’ reasons,” as required for any project like this – but the art redeems it somewhat.

No story in here will surprise you, or make you laugh, or make you think. At best, you will be reminded that you think a particular character is Wicked Kewl and want to read more stories about that character punching bad guys – which, of course, is what DC wanted out of the project in the first place. So, if that happens, this book has been successful in its aim.

The book is also physically large, obviously, and a bit unwieldy to read and store. So keep that in mind if you decide to check it out. I personally got a copy from my local library, which turned out to be a great choice: I don’t need to keep the thing, and trying to manhandle it into position to read will soon be just a vague memory. Wednesday Comics is more interesting as a concept than as an object in the physical world: it is ungainly, tries too hard, trips over itself, and wears out its welcome much sooner than you expect.

Wait: maybe it is essentially Marmaduke, after all.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy by Doug Savage

When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble.

OR – and this is what I seem to do most of the time – you could not even notice the creator has material in a different genre for about a decade, and then stumble on it randomly when the “new thing” has a fifth book published, and wonder where the time has gone, alas, where are the green fields of our youth?

Doug Savage is a funny, inventive cartoonist. I discovered him with the Savage Chickens project, which I think was either his first big thing or his breakout. Adults don’t buy books of funny drawings very consistently these days – this is sad, because in my youth, the small funny book of cartoons by the cash-register was a dependable publishing category, with big successes every year, but the Internet ruined that like it has ruined so many things – but, and here’s the trick, kids still do. So a lot of funny, inventive cartoonists have found that, if they can tune their sensibility to middle-schoolers or grade-schoolers, they could have a really awesome career making fun things, visiting a very appreciative (though often massively rambunctious) audience, and enjoying a mostly supportive community of peers.

I don’t know if any of that went into Savage’s decision to make Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  in 2016 – many cartoonists fall into making books for younger readers because they have younger readers roaming around their houses – I’m talking about their own children, usually, not semi-feral bands of tweens – and there can be other reasons as well. But Savage made a graphic novel for middle-schoolers, got it published by Andrews McMeel, which also handled his “Savage Chickens” books, and has gone on to do four more books about these characters in the decade since then.

This first book has three mostly separate stories, all set in this same forest and focused on the main characters. They’re superheroes, I guess. They fight evil, or try to, or intend to. Laser Moose is a moose who can shoot lasers out of his eyeballs for unspecified reasons, and who takes his responsibilities as a laser-shooting moose very, very seriously, probably too much so. Rabbit Boy is his sidekick, a sunny and positive rabbit with no visible superpowers but a somewhat more grounded view of reality that is desperately needed to keep Laser Moose from just cutting everything within sight in half.

In this book, they “battle” aliens who don’t seem to really be invading at all. They discover a hideous Aquabear, transformed into a monstrous chimera by toxic waste, and, after some setbacks, return the monster to the human facility that created him, making him the humans’ problem. And they foil a new plot by Laser Moose’s arch-enemy, Cyborgupine – yes, a cyborg porcupine – who has created a fiendish minion, Mechasquirrel.

It’s all fun and zippy, in an appealing kid-friendly cartooning style, mostly thin lines and flat colors. It’s the kind of style that looks like an evolved version of the drawings those kids themselves are making – accessible, immediate, quickly readable. And Savage is as funny here with delusional moose and sunny bunnies as he was with wage-slave chickens. You don’t need to be ten to enjoy Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, though, if you can access your inner ten-year-old at will, that definitely helps.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Night Drive by Richard Sala

This was Richard Sala’s first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala’s last book.

Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn’t die of COVID, but I have to believe he’s one of the many, many people who would have had a much better chance of surviving that horrible year – getting better health care, being seen by more people who could notice something was wrong, etc. – if it hadn’t happened. But that’s the deal with the past: it’s already happened, its horrors and unfairnesses already baked in. And that’s a pretty solidly Richard Sala thought, frankly.

The original Night Drive was self-published by Sala in 1984, a 32-page comic in 500 signed copies. It got appreciative reviews, sold a decent number of those copies, and was useful for Sala to open doors to get illustration work – and then the long last story, “Invisible Hands,” was picked up by MTV’s Liquid Television, which gave Sala another paying gig to help get his career started.

This expanded edition of Night Drive  came out this May, just about doubling the size of the original and turning it into a small hardcover book. It includes a foreword remembering Sala by his friend and fellow comics writer Dana Marie Andra, an interview section with answers from Sala about this book over the span of several decades, and a number of stories and illustrations from the same era – some almost made it into Night Drive, some were for the potential follow-up that was shelved when his work on Liquid Television and illustration jobs got too busy.

The art is both deeply Sala – scratchy, black-and-white, with scrawled lettering and quirky misshapen faces – and deeply 1980s, full of design-y borders and title panels. His work got somewhat easier to visually “read” later, when he moved into working most commonly in watercolors, but this is Sala at his darkest and most cryptic, all of his old horror-movie and noir influences coming out in a flood of tropes and dialogue and ideas. The pieces here are more vignettes than stories, as if Sala was trying to get down all of his inspiration and his ideas his way as fast as he could. He got clearer than this, he told more complete and satisfying stories than this – he definitely got better at his craft and I think moved closer to doing exactly what he wanted to do – but this package is full of pure unfiltered Richard Sala, early in his development and heady with the possibilities of comics.

“Invisible Hands” is still the standout here – long enough to give Sala room to maneuver, full of fiendish plots and mysterious characters, shocking reverses and new complications, quirky and entirely Sala but close enough to a normal narrative for the parallax to be deeply satisfying. But the whole package is fun, a deep dive into the beginnings of a unique artist and the style of a very distinctive, and now long-gone era.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

REVIEW: Spenser for Hire: The Complete Series

Dick Giordano was a major Robert B. Parker fan, which is how I first learned of him and his creation, Spenser. In fact, I once spent a lengthy lunch hour in line at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble to get the latest release autographed for Dick. From there, I began reading the books and fell in love with them, reading his oeuvre until Parker’s passing.

As a result, I missed the ABC adaptation Spenser for Hire, which aired from September 20, 1985, to May 7, 1988, and only knew it as the show where fans first discovered a pre-Star Trek: DS9 Avery Brooks, who played Hawk.

Thankfully, Warner Home Entertainment has now released the three-season, 66-episode series in a DVD box set, basically collecting the previous DVD releases with no new extras and not even a Blu-ray upgrade.

Robert Urich played the eponymous lead, backed by Brooks, Richard Jaeckel, and Barbara Stock (whose Susan Silverman was only in the first and third seasons). The ever-growing rich supporting cast of the novels was still developing at this stage, so they are absent, although a few of the existing ones (i.e., Henry Cimoli or the other cops) could have been used to enrich the show.

John J. O’Connor noted at the time in The New York Times, “Not surprisingly, many of the plots are merely serviceable, dotted with the perfunctory shoot-outs and car chases. Nevertheless, the series has managed to establish a distinctive personality. The key characters are well conceived, as are such regulars as the police lieutenant (Richard Jaeckel) and the police sergeant (Ron McLarty). Furthermore and not least, a good deal of the location shooting is actually done in Boston, lending the shows a precise and well-defined sense of place, which is rare in American prime time.”

Apparently, the ratings were good despite ABC’s persistence for moving its air dates, and it was finally felled by the expensive location shooting in Boston, which is a shame since it is basically an entertaining private eye show.

While the cases are fine, the real fun is in the chemistry between Spenser and Hawk, two badasses who are complex figures in their own right. When Susan gets pregnant, she considers abortion, something the Catholic Spenser could not abide, and she departs. As a result, during the second season, ADA Rita Fiori (Carolyn McCormick) becomes a potential romantic interest. In both cases, the women were not written as strongly as the men.

None of the novels was used as source material, something that happened in subsequent adaptations, although none have captured the spare writing style that was uniquely Parker. (For the record, Ulrich and Brooks made four telefilms for A&E, none of which are included.)

Had the writers and showrunner John Wilder hewed closer to Spenser’s worldview and avoided case-of-the-week syndrome (still the standard in the 1980s), it could have developed a far more distinctive personality.

Happy Letterer Appreciation Day 2025!

Today is Letterer Appreciation Day, chosen because it’s the birthday of Gaspar Saladino, one of the greatest comics letterers of all time. Letterers are the modern descendants of medieval scribes, illuminating manuscripts, doing a job that when done well is mostly unnoticed and certainly underappreciated. From the bold, dynamic lettering to elegant, intricate scripts, letterers craft the visual voice of countless mediums and make comics work. Their skill transforms static words into expressive art, conveying tone, emotion, and personality, all without uttering a single sound– just writing it down instead.

So take today and pay attention to their craft!

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Free Pass by Julian Hanshaw

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Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it’s true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and often only wink when they come close to that territory.

Free Pass , Julian Hanshaw’s 2022 graphic novel, isn’t winking. Hanshaw avoids drawing the nitty-gritty of sex most of the time, or obscures it, but this is a book about one couple and their sex life – and they’re young and reasonably energetic. And…but then, I’ll get into the plot in a moment.

The book opens with the couple – Huck and Nadia, young British tech workers who are maybe thirty, maybe a few years one side or the other of that – talking sex, while we see their house from outside, porno movies playing on a big screen we can see through a sliding door. They’re discussing having sex with other people, we come to realize, possibly partner swapping. They haven’t done it yet, but they’re both intrigued, and running through the other couples they know, the times they wonder if it might have happened, and what comes next.

Eventually, they decide to make “Free Pass” lists – five celebrities for each of them, people they could have sex with guilt- and consequence-free if it somehow happened. We see Huck making his list over the next few days – the book mostly follows him, mostly lets us understand what’s in his head – in his job at a tech company, Abrazo.

They both work at Abrazo, which is mostly a fictionalized Facebook: big, all-encompassing, dominant. Nadia is a programmer; we don’t see a lot of what she does, but she’s more technical, more specifically skilled, than Huck is. Huck is on a moderation team, maybe a low-level supervisor there. We don’t see the things he moderates, just the complaints about them, and something of the internal Abrazo double-speak about what they get rid of and what they don’t.

Frankly, I think Hanshaw has a specific political point here, and it’s a bit opaque to me. In the US, especially now, three years later, what we saw the big tech companies trying to do with moderation was largely getting rid of the worst of the worst: hate speech, death threats, attacks on people with racial and sexually-charged language. The complaint with that approach was that they tended to censor right-wing voices – the unspoken underpinning was that the right wing was deeply hateful, sexist and racist, but that they saw that as a good thing and wanted free rein to spew their anger and vitriol everywhere, to yell as loudly as they could and take over any spaces they could drive other people out of. I’m pretty sure Hanshaw isn’t saying he’s in favor of that, but, from a US perspective in 2025, I’m not sure what else he means. Maybe it’s some more lefty flavor of Abrazo being too chummy with the government, and getting rid of anything against their interests.

Because, you see, there’s an election coming up. The candidates are fictional, and we don’t know what parties they represent. But there’s a “four more years” person (Libby) and a “change it all” person (Maynard) – which I think codes them as Tory and Labour, respectively. The book is organized by the days until the election: we start a little more than two weeks out. But, like Abrazo’s moderation decisions, any actual political policies are presented in coded, nonspecific terms – so I think what it means is clearer if you’re British, particularly if you are British and it is 2022, looking towards the general election that eventually happened in 2024.

The election itself is mostly background, but Abrazo’s moderation decisions are a huge part of Huck’s day, and a source of stress to him. He’s listening to podcasts from “the other side” – I think Hanshaw means people like the EFF, free-internet types, rather than Nigel Farage and the kick-out-the-foreigners crowd – which some of his co-workers look askance at. He’s also a bit awkward, in that tech-guy way, and for a while I wondered if he was meant to be seen as incel-adjacent, as having picked up some of those thoughts and ideas despite being in an on-going successful relationship.

That’s all swirling around, when Huck gets a new product to test – from Ali, the male half of the couple he and Nadia hit upon as the perfect choices for their first swinging experience in the first scene. It’s an AI sex robot, Ali says. It comes in a big box; it’s a blank humanoid form that has a tablet to control it. On that tablet is a menu of people, men and women, and the user can choose who the robot turns into. And, of course, the robot is a wonderful, perfect, lover, in that time-honored way that traces back to at least Tanith Lee’s Silver Metal Lover (or maybe Barbarella, or even, if you accept much more winking and hinting, “Helen O’Loy”).

Many stories with a sex robot like that would be about jealousy, about a break-up, but Huck and Nadia are enthusiastic and experimental and geeky, and they take to their new fuck-buddy like fish to water. Hanshaw presents this imagistically, but I think it’s mostly “turn it into a man for you, and then into a woman for me,” with maybe some three-way fun along the way. But they have a lot of sex – even more so once Nadia realizes she can mildly hack the tablet and turn the robot into anyone, not just the hardcoded choices. They spend something like a week just fucking celebrity simulacra, and seem to be fantastically happy at it, if maybe a bit sore and tired by the end.

But, meanwhile, Nadia has been interviewing with a newer tech company, Hapus, which promises to be more responsive and independent. They specifically do not moderate in the way that’s problematic with Abrazo, whatever that’s meant to be. She gets the job, and Huck is supportive, but maybe not entirely happy – because she might be moving away from him or because he feels guilty about what he does for Abrazo, or both.

Huck and Nadia actually call out sick from work for several days for their fuck-fest, which is yet another element that leads to a confrontation between Ali and Huck. They give back the sex robot, and the election happens.

I think we’re meant to guess who won; Hanshaw doesn’t say. The last section jumps ahead a year: Nadia is happily working for Hapus, Huck is running for a local political office, and the sex robots are rolling out broadly. I think it’s meant to be a happy ending, but I don’t know what party Huck is standing for or what his platform is, and ubiquitous easily-hackable sex robots might not be the most stabilizing element to add into a society. So maybe ambiguously happy.

Hanshaw has a fairly lumpy way of drawing people, which is surprisingly excellent for this story: his people are real and flawed, not porn models. Huck and Nadia look like relatively fit, fairly young, absolutely normal people, and even the sex robot doesn’t come across as pure pneumatic distilled sex, just another body with which they can have fun.

And Free Pass is absolutely packed with ideas and thoughts – about sex, relationships, online discourse, how to think about governments – mostly posed in non-specific, non-partisan ways, so it doesn’t trip anyone’s propaganda detectors. It’s a fun, quirky, mostly positive book about a couple who have a lot of sex with a sex robot and come out of it (and associated events) with a stronger relationship.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The United Captains Arrive in Captain America #6

  • News
  • August 19, 2025

New York, NY— August 19, 2025 — Last month saw the launch of an all-new run of CAPTAIN AMERICA by Eisner-nominated writer Chip Zdarsky and superstar artist Valerio Schiti. One of the most acclaimed Marvel debut issues of the year, the new series kicks off with a five-part saga set shortly after Steve Rogers emerged from his icy slumber, revealing the star-spangled hero’s first confrontation with Doctor Doom. The second arc will start in CAPTAIN AMERICA #6, on sale in December, and will take place in the present day as Captain America deals with the direct aftermath of Doom’s fall, following One World Under Doom. In addition to Schiti, the arc will be drawn by guest artists Frank Alpizar and Delio Diaz, a duo making their Marvel Comics debut later this month in Doomed 2099, who kick things off in issue #6. 

The new storyline will introduce four new characters, each representing one of the five permanent member countries of the United Nations Security Council: CAPTAIN KINGDOM, representing the United Kingdom; CAPTAIN FRANCE, representing France; RED WIDOW, representing Russia; and THE STAR, representing China. Dubbed the “United Captains,” they’ll assemble with Captain America to keep Latveria from falling into chaos, but upon infiltrating the unstable—and highly advanced—country, their true motives will be revealed. Bringing Captain America’s bold new era to present day in full force, the storyline positions him as a pivotal player in determining the current state of the Marvel Universe and is essential reading for major events coming next year.

A WORLD WITHOUT DOOM!

The aftermath of One World Under Doom has brought Latveria to the brink of civil war. Captain America deploys to protect civilians and investigate rumors of a weapons stockpile—but when the United Nations Security Council adds their own loyal Super-Soldiers to the mix, it becomes clear that everyone wants a piece of Latveria—no matter the cost. With warring factions tearing the country apart and a team of Captains pursuing their own agendas, can Captain America hope to bring peace to Latveria? And is that even what his handlers want?

“I love the idea of “official” super heroes, ones who work within the system,” Zdarsky told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “It felt like there would be some sort of United Nations representatives from the Security Council member countries to deal with situations like Latveria. So, the United Captains came from that idea, a team that isn’t a team, that may have their own agendas.”

Schiti’s work on the X-Men titles and G.O.D.S. has made him one of Marvel’s premier character designers. Now, he brings his skills to CAPTAIN AMERICA, modernizing Cap’s suit and creating fantastic, instantly iconic costumes for the four new United Captains, each of which will be spotlighted on design variant covers for CAPTAIN AMERICA #6-9.

“One of the things I like most about my job is designing new characters,” Schiti said. “It has always been a great hobby of mine, even before becoming a professional! I tried to incorporate some traditional symbols from the countries of origin of the new Captains into their uniforms, which are also practical and suitable for combat.”

CAPTAIN AMERICA #6
Written by CHIP ZDARSKY
Art by FRANK ALPIZAR & DELIO DIAZ
Cover and Designs by VALERIO SCHITI
Foil Variant Cover by IVAN TAO

On Sale 12/17

The Black Incal by Alexandro Jodorowski & Mœbius

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I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series drawn by Mœbius and written by Jean-Michel Charlier.)

Humanoids republished the original Incal series – in six volumes this time, matching the original French albums, unlike the Marvel 2-in-1s – in 2012, going back to the original French colors by Yves Chaland and taking out some minor censorship that had crept into English-language editions in the ’90s. And so, for no good reason, I’m taking another look at this series.

The Black Incal  is the first of the six albums of the main series, written by Alexandro Jodorowski and drawn by Mœbius. The stories originally appeared in Metal Hurlant in the early ’80s; Jodorowski went on to write a lot more in this universe – some of it under an “Incal” title and some not, a few with Mœbius but mostly not. And I have to admit that I do not have a high opinion of Jodorowski’s work, though I’ve mostly read the comics he wrote for Mœbius – he’s also a filmmaker and has done lots of other projects, so I may be reacting most strongly to their gestalt. (The worst thing I’ve seen is Madwoman of the Sacred Heart , if you want to see my heights of spleen and bile.)

The Incal, on the other hand, starts off as more-or-less conventional skiffy adventure, with only a few eruptions of Meaning. Our hero is John DiFool (a worrying name, admittedly), a “Class-R” private investigator in one of those ultra-urbanized, stratified medium futures, in an underground city on what seems to be Earth. He starts out being beaten and terrorized by mysterious masked figures, is thrown to what should be his death, and then saved by the Cybo-Cops. He tells them a plausible story – which might even be mostly true – about him bodyguarding an aristo woman for a night of debauchery among the lower classes before things went sideways and he ran away and was knocked out in the inevitable gigantic service tunnels.

John neglects to mention that he got a strange box from a gigantic dying “mutant,” or that other mutants and the alien Berg (from another galaxy, Jodorowski offhandedly remarks, to underscore how little he understands how any of this works) are fighting over this MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin itself is The Incal, a small luminous pyramid that talks and can bestow strange and wondrous powers on its possessor in ways that aren’t clear at all in this book. Descriptions of the series call it “The Light Incal” in distinction to the Dark Incal, the title object that John is sent by the main Incal to find in the back half of this book.

Most of this book is frenetic action overlaid with lots of talking. It’s the kind of action story where people narrate their every last action and emotional state, like a ’60s Spider-Man comic with slightly less quipping but vastly more emoting. John gets one story of What He Needs To Do and What It All Means from the Incal, but, as I recall, this changes somewhat as the series goes on, and the story gets bigger and more grandiose. There are various forces arrayed against John, but we’re not clear yet on who they all are, how they connect to each other, or what they want. But it is clearly John on the run with the vastly powerful thingamabob, with All Hands Against Him.

Oh! Also, near the end, one group of villains hires the Metabaron, a sleek figure in a metaleather jacket with a metashaved head and steely metaeyes, to find John and retrieve the Incal in his metacraft. (OK, not every noun associated with him has “meta” attached to it – but a hell of a lot of them do, in a way that gets silly within two or three pages.)

It ends entirely in the middle of the action; John has been captured yet again by someone we’re pretty sure is a villain and the Metabaron is getting metacloser. I suspect every volume ends more or less that way; I’ll see.

The Dark Incal is stylish and would move really quickly if it weren’t for all of the repetitive dialogue. Mœbius’s art is detailed – maybe to the point of being overbusy a few times, but mostly right in that sweet spot of Big SF action, with lots of gigantic constructed stuff looming and swooping around. I have the lurking suspicion that it will all add up to less than it seems, but that may be my memories of the last time I read it. It is the epitome of ’80s SF adventure in French comics, in all of the good and bad ways.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Who Is AC? by Hope Larson & Tintin Pantoja

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If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if it were going to be a series. Those are hooks for later stories, for further details to come later, room for the story to grow.

But, for whatever reason, it didn’t. Who Is AC?  is a decade-old standalone now; I suppose it’s just possible that writer Hope Larson and artist Tintin Pantoja could get back together and tell us what happened next, but this was a Sailor Moon-inspired, manga-styled graphic novel about superheroes and social media aimed at tweens. That audience is now in college; the phones they used in 2013 are four generations out of date; and the ways all of us interact online has shifted and altered. Any follow-up would either be a period piece or a full reboot.

But, if you can ignore the fact that the main character gets her superpowers from a candybar phone, the likes of which were I think solidly out of date even in 2013, AC is a fast-moving, if somewhat superficial, adventure story about one girl who gets superpowers and discovers there are Trolls lurking out in the world.

Lin just moved with her family to the small college town of Barnhurst – location deliberately left unspecified, but  notably small and far away from everything. On the flight over, her phone rang while in airplane mode, and something happened that transformed her. She can use that phone contact, in a way the book doesn’t over-explain, to turn into a costumed superheroine with what looks like a big spear and some vaguely computer-esque powers.

Trace is a young man, about the same age, who lives in Barnhurst. He works in a copy shop, where he meets Lin making her zine. He’s got a crush on Mel, who works next door at the get-your-photos-taken-in-old-timey-garb shop (which is sustainable as a business in a small college town? Barnhurst must get substantially more tourist traffic than it seems to). Mel is a bit self-centered, the stereotypical pretty girl, but seems like a basically nice, normal person, not an airhead or a spoiled brat. The two have a date, which does not go well, largely because Trace is even more self-centered and full of unwarranted assumptions about every last thing in the world than we expected. (He’s also about sixteen or so, which means it comes across as young and unformed and needing some life experience rather than completely horrible. But he is clearly reminiscent of That Internet Guy, who was a loathed type even in 2013.)

The same night as that date, Lin witnesses a hold-up at the copy shop. She transforms into her alter ego, saves the day, and captures the crook (who is a sad-sack guy trying to get money to pay for dental work). But she also transforms again on the way home, to see how it works, and causes an accident for an already-mad Trace and his bike.

Trace posts an angry rant online about the superheroine after he learns about the holdup, calling her Anonymous Coward. (Presumably, if there had been a series, AC would have stood for other things – but that’s the source of the name here.) At about the same time, a shadowy figure in a repurposed Pizza Hut somewhere nearby – clearly the Big Villain of the series, but not completely identified in this book – tempts Mel into becoming what I suppose I have to call an Evil Minion.

Mel and Trace are going to meet someone isolated the next night, where Mel will presumably use the power of the Negative Internet to change Trace into another Evil Minion like herself. But Lin shows up, and there is a battle with lots of 1s and 0s in it, and the hold of the Troll (I guess we can call the big villain that – he’s called a troll in the book, which implies he may not be alone) is broken.

Lin’s secret identity is still, we think, safe, though her costume doesn’t cover her face all that much. Mel and Trace are back to being friends, we think, and maybe, if there were a Book Two, might move on to more. But AC doesn’t have a real superhero name, the origin of her powers and the Troll are still mysterious, and it’s not clear what the significance of the plot of the book was.

So: very much an introductory first volume, mostly set up and mysteries. All things that will now never be cleared up; this is all we have. Pantoja gives it an energetic, mildly manga style, and Larson, as always, is good with the big personalities of young people. It’s not quite a complete story, but it’s fine as long as you think of it as a pilot episode getting burned off one random night in the summer.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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