It was the biggest comic book limited series of 2021, and it featured a rare and certain end to a beloved set of comic book heroes. At a minimum Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is a love letter to the cinematic action that permeated everything in the 1980s, as well as an homage to the kind of graphic storytelling Frank Miller shepherded into the minds of teens and twenty-somethings back then. Kevin Eastman returned with co-creator Peter Laird and Tom Waltz and a league of artists to wrap up nearly four decades of sci-fi fantasy antics and drama. And now like Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns it’s getting its own hardcover edition. It’s available in comic shops for the first time today.
It’s been another long year of great entertainment. It’s time for the ninth annual round of new honorees for the borg Hall of Fame. We have several inductees from 2021 films and television – 16 in all, new borgs or updated variants of past members, bringing the borg Hall of Fame total to 281.
You can always check out the updated borg Hall of Fame on our home page under “Know your borg.”
Some reminders about criteria. Borgs have technology integrated with biology. Wearing a technology-powered suit alone doesn’t qualify. Tony Stark aka Iron Man was named an honoree because the Arc Reactor kept him alive, not because of his incredible tech armor. The Spider-Man suit worn by Tom Holland is similar to Tony’s, but it’s not integrated with Peter Parker’s biology.
Also, if the creators tell us the characters are merely robots, automatons, or androids (as in Westworld, and as in the Synths of Star Trek: Picard, and the new Dark Troopers of The Mandalorian), we take their word for it. Again, integration is key, but in the Hall, once a member, always a member.
Today we’re continuing our annual year-end round-up with the Best TV Series of 2021. If you missed it, check out our review of the best Kick-Ass Heroines of 2021 here. We watch a lot of television, and probably love a good series even more than a great movie. We preview hundreds of series, but outside big franchise content you want to know about, we only review what we recommend–the best genre content we’re watching. The theory? If we like it, we think you may like it. The best shows have a compelling story, great characters, tremendous action, a sharp use of humor, and all kinds of well-executed genre elements that satisfy and leave viewers feeling inspired. It’s even better if we see richly detailed sets and costumes. And the very best series get usually get canceled at the end of their first season because network execs will never figure out what we genre fans love.
Without further ado, this year’s Best in Television:
Best Borg Series, Best TV Borg – Cowboy Bebop (Netflix). Mustafa Shakir’s Jet Black expanded on the anime series to create a space pilot and bounty hunter as cool and real as anyone from the Star Wars universe. His cyborg implants made him incredibly powerful–necessary in his dealings on behalf of Spike and his family.
Best Sci-Fi TV Series, Best Western TV Series, Best Space Fantasy Series, Best Retro Fix, Best TV Soundtrack, Best TV Costumes – Cowboy Bebop (Netflix). Only one science fiction series really knocked our socks off this year. The stylish look and music, and the fun of the crew of the spaceship Bebop made us want to speed through this series. For viewers looking for the next Firefly, this is it. For fans looking for the best futurism, space realism, and the next Altered Carbon, this is it. Its writing, direction, cast, and overall production values made the series this year’s series to talk about. Runner-up for Best Sci-fi TV Series: Blade Runner: Black Lotus (Adult Swim), great sci-fi, faithful to the source material. Honorable mention for Best Sci-fi TV Series: Resident Alien (Syfy) Alan Tudyk’s fish-out-of-water story and his alien story pulled us back to the roots of classic sci-fi with humor and drama as a bonus.
At one level you know exactly what to expect when you select a movie based on a video game. Any film worth its production costs needs to bring general audiences into the world, the director and writers need to then build that world, establish heroes, fight battles, provide over-the-top action and effects, and the hero(es) must achieve some kind of goal. The stakes are high, often the fate of the entire world. And that rarely leaves room for character development. Entries include Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil, Warcraft, Monster Hunter, Prince of Persia, Rampage, Sonic the Hedgehog, and a slew of Pokémon movies, and they go back decades to the original concept film Tron, which had a video game at its center that players didn’t get to play until after the movie. Lesser rated entries include movies like Hitman, Max Payne, Doom, Street Fighter, and In the Name of the King.
This year’s big-budget release Mortal Kombat, both a remake and a reboot and adaptation of a series of martial arts fantasy games going back to 1992, leans heavily into Asian action movie culture. It arrives in a growing marketplace for API and AAPI films, in a year including Raya and the Last Dragon,Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins.
It was without question Marvel’s biggest delay. Not only was Black Widow originally expected to arrive in theaters May 1 last year, getting a delay and never a proper theatrical release, it simply was Kevin Feige’s big misfire by not thinking to make it earlier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 23 movies. Content-wise it could have arrived around 2013 as part of the Phase II of the series, and ultimately must be wedged somewhere between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. For those not yet ready to return to theaters, it’s been a long wait. Finally Disney+ has dropped its $30 premium for its subscribers and Vudu and other streaming providers have it where it should have been, at a sell-through price of $19.99.
So how does Black Widow stack up with respect to the previous Marvel movies, and did Marvel make the best superheroine movie of them all with Scarlett Johanson’s solo movie? First of all, the big word to describe this movie is “surprising.”
InColonyside, the third novel of Michael Mammay’s Planetside series, battle-hardened mastermind hero and retired marine colonel Carl Butler is “getting too old for this kind of thing.” With his notorious reputation and knack for getting people close to him killed–and getting alien inhabitants killed, too–his era’s equivalent of the prime directive is even named after him. Lucky for fans of Planetside (reviewed here) and Spaceside (reviewed here), Colonel Butler, now really just Carl, has a methodical approach to military, politics, and life that shows no signs of waning. But where Planetside was a military conspiracy-thriller in sci-fi dress, and Spaceside was a future noir mystery, Colonyside is more office politics and low-level squabbling power plays. The Aliens franchise Colonial Marines vibe of the first two books takes a shift here in a surprising direction. What begins as something like Predator, an intriguing story of a team going in to re-evaluate a prior action–here a mission gone bad resulting in the death of the daughter of an influential executive–ultimately doesn’t catch the intrigue of the earlier books.
It never used to be this way and it didn’t have to end up this way. Over the years and across the decades, somehow comic book publishers decided comic book readers wanted to see the death of every favorite character. By the 1990s and 2000s it became more difficult to find a major character that hadn’t been killed off at least once. But just like you don’t want to watch the final Lassie episode or Benji movie to witness a beloved dog’s last breath (Oh Heavenly Dog doesn’t count), or watch Baby Yoda/Grogu meet his fate at the blade of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, maybe we don’t want to see the killing off of even one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the original creators of the TMNT think you do, so if you do, and for those that do, it’s happening right now in the pages of IDW Publishing’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin. We’re two issues into the five-issue limited series, and the first issue has already gone to record reprints, thanks in no small part to a huge number of variant covers. We always love our variant options, but this mini-series has at least 69 covers for Issue #1 and at least 26 covers for Issue #2. It’s a bit odd, because the subject matter is that last turtle, so don’t expect much variation in content. Those knowing their turtles by color, never fear: the black mask on the covers does not give anything way. For TMNT collectors, completists, and fans of future otherworld stories and what ifs like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, you’ll probably want to at least check out the trade edition for this one. Take a look at a preview of The Last Roninbelow.
It’s the nature of the new Star Wars brand to bounce back and forth in the galaxy stories–a lot. Where the idea of looking back in 2021 to Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens may not sound like an obvious choice, once you realize the context, the characters, and the setting, anyone can get onboard the new two-part Star Wars Adventures tale Smuggler’s Run. If you don’t know Star Wars Adventures, it’s the cartoonier side of Star Wars in the pages of Marvel Comics, targeted at kids. So you can always rely on some good fun in an issue of the series. This tale spins out of the monthly series with a story about Han Solo and Chewie after the destruction of the first Death Star, and their plan to spend their reward money.
