There is nothing new I added to the Gil Kane section of my comic collection since my last Gil Kane post because lately there has been a surge in material related to the great late Gene Colan. His NIGHT FORCE has been reprinted in a hardcover, the second volume of his run on the Batman titles was just released last month ( some readers may remember that I pimped the book in this post ) and while I bought his SILVERBLADE series in single issue form because so far there are no plans to reprint it the NATHANIEL DUSK trade is set to hit stores everywhere in November.
So at the moment I am stretched a bit thin moneywise so I have to wait before I can add any new Gil Kane material. And there is plenty of stuff out there now like the first two volumes of his STAR HAWKS series - with volume three set for release in August - or UNDERSEA AGENT but I´m still looking for vols two and three of his RING OF THE NIBELUNGEN adaption and his Bravura series EDGE for a reasonable price. So far I have only found the hardcover for 30 bucks. And I still have not found definite proof if I have any issues from the SWORD OF THE ATOM mini in my comic collection.
But now it´s time for more swords and sorcery style action with Gil Kane.
Longtime readers are probably a bit surprised that I did the Gil Kane post Today because it the 36th birthday of cosplay queen Yaya Han and I am kind of obsessed with her. I just mentioned her in my last post - twice - and while I am still undecided if I should do the first kind of series I talked about in that post I did already select the pictures for that special post.
In fact I have enough pictures for two posts. The last time I tried to do a birthday post for Yaya Han was two years ago ( which is the reason why I´m skipping all other birthdays Today as I already covered them ) and I failed miserably as the post ended up being NSFW. So far I had made five posts on Yaya - two of them are pretty safe but besides the post from last year the other two are absolutely not. I also mentioned Yaya on various JLA casting posts and any other posts involving asian sexbombs like Kiana Tom, Ava Cadell, Akira Lane, Miko Lee, Gail Kim or Minka so it´s about time for another attempt at a Yaya Han birthday post. So next up will be a very special Yaya Han post and since I am doing my best to keep it safe there probably will not be too much text on it. That always gets me in trouble.
It is also about time for some new Yaya Han videos since I´m slowly running out. This one is a bit old but she didn´t do one for 2017. Since my next post is about her costumes the one with all her cosplays will be in that post while this one is more about all of the stuff she did in 2016.
Since I mentioned it in the post here is the second part of DC Nation´s Sword of the Atom cartoon. I already posted the first part and part three and four are also on YouTube but like the comic source material it never got turned into an ongoing series. I guess history does repeat itself.
Because that video is very short - can´t somebody put all four into one video ? - here is a longer cartoon and this time it´s for my spanish readers.
In Mazinkaizer we have more giant robots than you can shake a stick at ( not that it would help much against even one giant robot ) with an army of evil robots destroying Tokio and not one, not two but three Mazingers fighting to stop them. That´s right, aside from Mazinger and Mazinger Z we have the ultimate fighting robot Mazinkaiser who is so big that regular Mazinger looks like a toy next to him. This was my childhood, man, and back then I didn´t really understand it but there is a girl who has a female giant robot - of course she could not drive a male robot - and in the series her robot got an upgrade which included making the metal breast things on the robot bigger for some reason and one of the guys commented that it was about time that she got a boob job. Yep, that one went totally over my head like the scene in this movie where one of the good guys reacts really weird - at least I thought it was weird back then - when they are attacked by the evil triplets who are incredibly hot babes. I´m so thankful that I got to watch japanese anime that were 100 % politically incorrect.
Even if there are things that look weird like the female robot shooting her breast bombs. Those animators lived out all their crazy sex fetishes here.
Now that I have finally seen Luc Besson´s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets ( which was no small feat in itself since everybody else seems to have seen it already ) here is the promised review that talks a bit more about the Star Wars effect. Something for my german readers.
One of the reasons why I didn´t post this before was that I wanted to wait until I have seen it so I would be able to give my own opinion of the movie and I really liked it. I didn´t love it but I also didn´t hate it either.
Maybe after seeing Justice League, Spider - Man : Homecoming and Thor : Ragnarok I was just yearning for a comic adaptation that didn´t suck but I think it´s a really good movie especially if viewer is not that familiar with the french comic it was based on. Maybe I have a really particular taste because people everywhere like Justice League which for me has failed. If you have a Wonder Woman movie that is great but when you put her into another movie with some of DC´s biggest guns - Superman, Batman and the Flash - and the movie is only okay you have failed. People everywhere really liked Spider - Man : Homecoming which for me was one of the worst superhero movies I have seen ( and we are talking about someone who has suffered through the bad 80s Spider - Man movies and such crapfests like Punisher with Dolph Lundgren and Nick Fury with David Hasselhoff ) and the only redeeming quality are the scenes with Michael Keaton. And last but not least everybody loves Thor : Ragnarok which had no Thor in it and which for me is the worst Marvel movie up to this date. When I saw this movie it was like reading Dan Jurgens´ THOR run all over again. I could never understand why people always take certain characters and change everything about them until they are completely different characters. It´s not like they don´t have a gazillion other characters at Marvel. Just do an ETERNALS movie if you don´t want to do a movie with the real Thor, the Warriors Three or anything connected to Asgard. Or if you want to make a movie with somebody who is kind of like Thor but without the hammer and his connection to Asgard and his long hair just do THUNDERSTRIKE.
And compared to all of these - I have to say raping - of the original source material Luc Besson´s Valerian movie adaption looks like Oscar material.
Now it has a few flaws and usually I try to avoid anything before I watch a movie so I go into it unbiased. But with a movie of this magnitude it is almost impossible and because I was curious about the movie I knew that the actors are nothing like the characters in the original french comic. Not only are they waaay too young but for some reason Luc Besson deemed it necessary to insert a love story that is not that dominating in the comic and is completely unrealistic for persons of their age. What is also not really understandable is that on top of that they changed Laureline from a brunette which is not so common to the stereotypical blonde bimbo that you see in every sci fi movie. And I have no idea what Valerian is talking about when he says Laureline was on a Higher Girl´s School since she never was in any school. Which has to do with the fact that he met her on a mission to medieval times and boyo unicorns don´t go to school anyway.
So I already knew going into the movie that the casting as well as the writing of the two main characters was completely different than in the comic. And I don´t know if that is just a personal quirk or if other people also have the ability but I just put all of those fanboy expectations away when I watched the movie and I have to say I was thoroughly entertained.
Some people argue that the story was not the most inventive one and there were certain things you already knew before they were spelled out to you but despite all this I got lost in the movie and the world of Valerian for two and a half hours. Without getting bored even once which is no small feat. There were a lot of aliens from the original comics in the movie and the special effects and visuals are just a feast. I only saw this at home on tv and I think if I had seen this in a theater in 3D it had blown my mind.
Speaking of blowing my mind, on the other side it was good that I hadn´t seen too much about the movie beforehand because so I didn´t know that Rihanna was in it. Her dance scene as the shapeshifting alien Bubbles is one of the absolute highlights and alone reason enough to watch this.
By the way, even in this short two minute sequence Rihanna gives us a better version of Catwoman than Anne Hathaway without trying hard.
I know I bitched about it at length in my part of the Casting the Justice League of America movie with her ( which is why I didn´t cast her as Catwoman and chose her to play Doctor Fate ) but I still can´t get over it.
And not only is it one of Rihanna´s best on screen performances it also illustrates the point why way back when I did my Comicbabe Battle post on the Fantastic Four women I had to give the number 1 position to Liya .
Because initially I thought the winner would be Susan Richards who is the original MILF of the Marvel universe but while writing the post I realized that a woman who can look like any woman - including Susan Richards and She Hulk - and any woman you can imagine tops that. Now even though Rihanna only changes her outfits - and there are a quite a number of them - she still stays herself. Which I can understand since it would have been even more difficult to also morph her appearance into somebody else. But if you take her scene and then imagine her changing into Janet Jackson , Salma Hayek , Halle Berry , Erika Eleniak , Tatyana Ali , Demi Moore , Jamie Lee Curtis , Markie Post , Leslie Easterbrook , Alizee , Elizabeth Berkley , Tiffani Amber Thiessen , Alyssa Milano , Teri Hatcher , Jeri Ryan or Jolene Blalock you get an inkling why Johnny Storm was one of the luckiest males on the planet because he got to give it to shapechanging sex skrull Liya.
By the way, sorry to crush the dreams of those who were blown away by Rihanna´s flexibility but as you can read in Chris Lee´s report on CQ on how Rihanna ended up in that movie that´s actually a body double owning that stripper pole. Because Rihanna had not the time to fully commit to the role and learn all those stripper moves - she was busy with releasing and promoting her eight album Anti - and the woman who does the more taxing parts of the dance scene is dancer / aerialist / contortionist and retired Olympian Emilie Livingston. And sorry to dash your hopes again but she is already married to Jeff Goldblum. So not only was Jeff Goldblum in the worst not - Thor movie ever his wife could give Rihanna striptease lessons. Dude, a man could really learn to hate or at least envy this guy.
Now I have put all of the animated GIFs I could find of Rihanna´s fantastic dance scene from Valerian in this post ( and the best animated GIFs are from ULTIMATE RIHANNAS where you can find more pictures and GIFs from the movie and of course Rihanna ) but it´s not as good as the real thing so here is the full scene. There are a few versions of this on YouTube but this is the complete scene in the best quality available. One final link, there´s an article by Julie Miller on VANITY FAIR that naturally goes into detail about the costumes Rihanna wears in that scene ( my favorite is the first one that was of course inspired by Liza Minelli in CABARET ).
With the last post I already faced the problem that I had no fitting comic related video to add but while I then decided to just skip it I can´t do that on all of my posts. So I decided that if that happens to start posting these videos that I bookmarked way back and where the opportunity to insert them in a post never happened. So I know that it has nothing to do with Gil Kane or barbarians but here´s one about underground comics.
What does fit Today´s topic is our final video which for some reason is showing the wrong preview picture. The - probably ( I can´t say for certain because her breast is cut off ) - topless woman doesn´t appear anywhere in Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules, a 1961 italian movie with the original title Maciste, l´uomo piu forte del mondo which if my little italian doesn´t fail me means Maciste The World´s Strongest Man.
So I guess that Hercules must be either really old and weak or dead in this movie and the title role of Maciste is played by Mark Forest who was as often Hercules in his movies as he was Maciste. Stike one for consistency.
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¡ Puños fuera !
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