Sheena, Will Eisner and Jerry Iger’s jungle adventurer returns next month in the pages of Dynamite Comics’ new series, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. Sheena is stuck, transferred to a strange place and time, manipulated as a pawn, held hostage for the lives of her animal friends. In a throwback to Predator, she is sent on a solo mission into the jungle to discover what happened to a lost research team. Taken inside a giant biodome she must uncover the secrets of the dome and those who brought her there. Can she survive as new obstacles are thrown in her path? Stephen Mooney writes this very different take on Sheena, with artwork by Jethro Morales and several variant covers by Dynamite’s familiar pantheon of cover artists. The first issue is the set-up, introducing a sci-fi/tech environment with Sheena’s backstory hidden from the reader. Here is her mission, but why is she here in the first place? It’s a good start for high adventure comics fans.
Here is a preview trailer and the variant covers for the first issue of Sheena: Queen of the Jungle:
It’s a question that goes back to Doom, if not before: Why make movie adaptations of video games? Easy answer: “Why not?” Or “easy money.” So why are so many so lackluster, in story, and often in production values? The triumphs mark the exceptions, from Tron and Tron: Legacy to the Resident Evil series, and a fine enough effort by Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander in two efforts to get a Tomb Raider film series to take hold, for starters. Then there’s Assassin’s Creed, Warcraft, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, and worse (at least Prince of Persia: Sands of Time had some fun in it). Often listed among the worst of them all is 1995’s Mortal Kombat, a film that couldn’t be saved even by casting Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa as the charismatic villain or casting an ex-Bond girl (Talisa Soto). It’s those same characters and apparently plot that will get a retry this spring with the big-screen reboot Mortal Kombat. However this movie features leads of the stellar martial arts marvels The Night Comes for Us andWu Assassins, and the special effects are light years ahead of the prior films. Check out the first trailer for the movie below.
Like Jon Krakauer’s account of the May 1996 disastrous climb up Mt. Everest (Into Thin Air) prompted only more people in subsequent years to make the climb, and like Krakauer’s account of ill-fated adventurer Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild) drove more adventurers into the Alaskan outback, more than 125 years earlier the tale of a man separated from his exploration party in Yellowstone for 37 days would prompt excitement across America that would result in President Grant naming the forest of geysers, hot springs, sulfur pots, geological features, and waterfalls the first national park. The man lost in the wilderness was Truman Everts, and his first-hand accounts of his trials in Yellowstone (the longest anyone has ever been lost in the park and not discovered dead) is recounted in Lost in the Yellowstone (New Edition), a thrilling account of being lost and alone with only the clothes on his back with snow, storms, mountain lions, bears, wolves and coyotes.
Image Comics is giving the celebrated Eisner and Harvey Award-winning series Battlepug a giant hardcover collected edition this month. Written and illustrated by Mike Norton, Battlepug: The Compugdium collects all five volumes of the brilliant webcomic. A series of humor-filled fantasy/adventure tales with the look and vibe of One Thousand and One Nights/Arabian Nights, Tarzan,Conan the Barbarian,Godzilla, and Ray Harryhausen movies, Battlepug is epic and unique. Following stories told of the last Kinmundian as he rides his giant pug into the next town and next battle, Battlepug represents the best of the comic book and fantasy worlds.
With 336 pages in all with big 8.5 x 12 inch layouts, this is a book you’re going to keep returning to, fun for all ages. Battlepug: The Compugdiumincludes Blood and Drool (the dreaded harp seal and Witch Toad!), The Savage Bone (meet Gil and some underwater types), Sit. Stay. Die! (a skull monkey and a host of giant underground beasts await), The Devil’s Biscuit (encounter a giant turtle spirit!), and The Paws of War (face the giant koala!).
Fans who have already gobbled down the five stories will still want to take a look at the Compugdium, as it includes plenty of great additional content: a gallery of 36 pages of Battlepug art from various artists, 15 pages of sketches, including some Norton layouts and early character images, plus cover art prints from the series.
For a new generation, the new adventure-thriller Tomb Raider may be an entry point into the adventure genre. If you like the concepts in Tomb Raider, you’re likely to love adventure classics like that other “raider,” Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,The Mummy, and Disney’s National Treasure series. Tomb Raider borrows much from these movies, even key sequences that serve as the high points of the film. The film itself? It’s all about that upper-body strength and holding on for dear life. (How many action films feature the hero holding on to the edge of a precipice with one hand anyway?) It’s good, not great, but a fun enough popcorn flick for a late winter release, particularly to see someone the size of Alicia Vikander racing through all the required harrowing action scenes. She leaps, fights, sprints, and dodges pitfalls, and gets kicked, punched, and bruised in a part typically reserved for the likes of Dwayne Johnson.
In the role last explored by Angelina Jolie, Academy Award-winning actress Alicia Vikander (The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Ex Machina, Jason Bourne) becomes video game heroine Lara Croft, only this version of the story is more rooted in the real world, with less heroine posing and no cocky catch phrases–and more sweat. The new Tomb Raider definitely fits alongside past video game adaptations, better than the prior films in the franchise, and nudging out more recent video game adaptations Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed. Unfortunately it comes on the heels of the immensely entertaining Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, which opted for humor instead of drama. This isn’t a comedy, but would have benefited from some more levity along the way.
For an adventure about secrets and riddles, it doesn’t present much for the audience to sleuth out, as was done so well in the entertaining National Treasure movies. But to its credit it has some good special effects and exceptional chase sequences that are best viewed on the big screen. And this Lara Croft is always being chased or running from something. A bicycle race early on and a foot chase across boats docked off the coast of Hong Kong are filmed like a riveting James Bond opener. And an escape through raging rapids at the edge of a waterfall is perfectly executed and full-on exciting (in a good theater your acrophobia and claustrophobia may even kick in). The overall plot is a bit thin–Lara receives a key left by her father as she is about to sign an affidavit acknowledging his death and her inheritance, and she pursues clues to his secret work that leave her stranded on a secluded, legendary island housing an ancient tomb. This is about a fantasy video game character, so if you can push aside reality you may have a really good time.
If you try to get a modern generation of moviegoers to explore the entertainment of the past, you may learn quickly it often just doesn’t work out. One of the entertainment realms of the past that successfully spanned multiple generations is the Universal Studios monster film series. The “Universal Monsters” began in the 1920s and stretched into the 1950s, beginning with The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera and continuing on into the “modern” technology of 3D in 1954 with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (reviewed here previously at borg.com). Kids who grew up in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s continued to watch and re-watch the film series years later. As the horror genre is concerned, it doesn’t get more “classic” than the Universal Monsters. Now that we’ve entered the month of Halloween, it’s time to start binge-watching the best of the horror genre, and for audiences of all ages the Universal Monsters is a good place to start. But for the younger crowd not willing to go for the classics, especially black and white classics, you may want to give the new Universal Studios reboot a try–the new “Dark Universe.” The introductory chapter to the Dark Universe, this summer’s The Mummy starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella, is now streaming on multiple platforms and available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD.
The Mummy won’t be for everyone. Purists loyal to the classic films are the first group that may not go for it–it doesn’t adhere very much by way look or feel to Boris Karloff’s 1932 original version, although the core concept is similar: resurrecting an ancient Egyptian royal entombed without being mummified, followed by a pursuit to resurrect The Entombed’s lover after The Entombed is brought back to life by an archaeologist. The other group that may pass on the new film are fans of Universal’s more recent decade-long film series that originally starred Brandon Fraser and Rachel Weisz (and later Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), which spanned seven films in all and an animated television series between 1999 and 2008. Ultimately the best audience for this year’s version of The Mummy will be audiences looking for a new film to rent or stream during this holiday season with a horror flavor. The Mummy isn’t a romp like the recent film series or memorable like the original, but it is light as horror goes, full of action and plenty of monsters (actually zombies) without much actual gore, and overall it’s a fun way to step into the Halloween zone for general audiences. And who doesn’t like a zombie movie?
The Mummy stars Tom Cruise as adventurer/soldier Nick Morton (along the lines of Matt Damon in The Great Wall) who, along with another soldier played by Jake Johnson (New Girl), tries to find buried treasure after Nick romances and steals a treasure map from an archaeologist named Dr. Jennifer Halsey, played by Annabelle Wallis (X-Men: First Class, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). Not among Cruise’s top films (see last week’s review here of American Made for that) fans of Cruise movies will still find this in the realm of his Mission: Impossible roles. The mummy of the title is a woman in this incarnation of the horror tale, Princess Ahmanet, played by Sofia Boutella, in a performance that becomes the best aspect of the film. As with her several recent performances (Atomic Blonde, Star Trek Beyond, Kingsman: The Secret Service), it’s always exciting to see Boutella immerse herself into a role. The actress who gained early fame as a dancer in Madonna and Michael Jackson music videos seems to easily take on the physical coordination required for this first monster of the Dark Universe. One of Ahmanet’s powers is raising the dead into zombie defenders, and in several key action sequences the film becomes a full-scale zombie horror flick. The zombie factor, plus big-budget production value and stars Cruise and Boutella may be enough to satisfy a broader audience’s desire for something new this Halloween.
