It's 2019, Bitches!

It's not Mary Poppins, ya'll!

ANI-MOVIE, *Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors

Following up to DC's Super Hero Girl, Marvel decided to instead focusing on their more recently introduced teenage superheroines shown in the comics. Marvel Rising first started out as an online mirco-series that was collected into a single special titled Marvel Rising: Initiation, mostly highlighting the character of Spider-Gwen(here called "Ghost Spider"), and Secret Warriors is a follow-up to that with only a brief offhanded remark to Gwen, possibly since she's already getting plenty of airtime in Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. This one focuses more on the current Ms. Marvel and the other Inhumans popping up in the Marvel Universe. This is a leftover plan Marvel had to replace Inhumans as their standard for the X-Men after their constant head-butting with Fox for the movie rights to the characters, but since Disney bought out Fox the Inhumans are being swept under the rug. Marvel did though take advantage of the "rise" of new super-powered teenagers that were created during this storyline, and reserve some of them to be part of this "toyetic" line-up.

In Secret Warriors, Kamala Khan is a girl turned into an Inhuman by a special mist that covered the Earth due to a story arc involving Thanos, and because of this she gains the ability to stretch and mold her body, allowing her to occasionally change her appearance like Mystique, or make parts of her body large like huge hands. Kamala then takes up the moniker of Ms. Marvel, which was previously used by the current Marvel Comics version of Captain Marvel(not "Shazam"!). She teams up regularly with plucky unbeatable mutant, Squirrel Girl, and they become involved in a plot where young Inhumans are being kidnapped by the alien Kree race to use as super-soldiers. With some help from other heroes like Patriot, Quake, America Chavez, and Inferno, they mount a rescue with Captain Marvel to stop the space invaders.

There was a few differences between the story in the movie and what goes on in the comics, like America Chavez being an Inhuman when her powers are magic-based, and bad guy Exile really gets his powers from one of the Mandarin's rings instead of himself being an Inhuman. The animation used in the movie was a little below quality, even compared to some of Marvel's Disney shows like Ultimate Spider-Man, even though it works considering it was created as being a free online promotion for their Marvel Rising toyline. There's supposed to be two follow-up specials to this showcasing Spider-Gwen and Iron-Heart, possibly with the same tone of animation. It would be nice if this new incarnation of the Secret Warriors succeeds in creating a new young superhero series that aren't either mutants or Avengers.

Baby, it's cold outside.

Note: Stark died on the way to his home planet

Dude...you've studied the Avengers 4 trailer long enough!

Will the Goat make it to X-Mas without being burned?

ANI-MOVIES, *Godzilla: Planet Of Monsters

After several decades of live-action movies, Toho finally decided to make a Godzilla anime, and not just as a single film but a full on back-to-back trilogy. There have been two unsuccessful American animated TV series(one based on the U.S. film), but never a genuine anime. Instead of standard animation, they got Polygon Pictures to do a CGI production. Polygon has already gotten a good track with Ghost In The Shell: Innocence and The Sky Crawlers, also handled American properties like Transformers, Star Wars, and Tron. The anime itself doesn't have it take place in the normal Godzilla setting, but acts as a far flung outer space epic.

A quick opening narrative tells that the Earth was overrun with kaiju during the late 1990s, and the most powerful of them all was the overgrown fire-breathing reptile called Godzilla. Godzilla ends up finishing off the other kaiju, with mankind not having any way of getting rid of him. Suddenly, an alien alliance made of two races come to Earth offering to help humanity kill Godzilla in exchange for being allowed to migrate to Earth. The aliens try to counter with their own "Mechagodzilla" which fails to activate, leaving the aliens no choice but to round up the remaining humans and head off in a big space ark to find another planet to live on. Cut to two decades later, and the allied humans and aliens decide to head back to Earth after not locating an inhabitable world. After warping back to the Solar System, they discover that twenty millennia had past on Earth, and the Big-G still stomping around. Captain Haruo becomes de facto leader of an anti-Godzilla exploration team to lure the lizard into an ambush after finding he has an Achilles heel in his dorsal fin. Their plan actually works and this Godzilla gets blown to bits, however the original Godzilla was waiting in the wings and is over 300 meters tall(over twice as big as the Monsterverse version!). Haruo awakens from the attack in the care of an insect like humanoid native, meaning we could stand to see a giant butterfly in one of the sequels.

Planet Of Monsters acts as a decent beginning to the Godzilla anime trilogy, more setting up the hardships the humans and aliens had trying to survive in space for twenty years, and finding out how much Earth itself has changed during the passing thousands of years. The film seems more like a Starship Troopers anime movie as opposed to the standard kaiju story. If you're a fan of the original Showa Era of Godzilla, this anime might seem like a Gene Roddenberry-inspired follow-up to that set of films. The animation itself is fair enough with the characters, but works much better with the starships, mecha, and monster diagrams. You can see though that it would have benefited from having more standard animation as opposed to having it all done in CGI with more lifeless-looking character expressions. Whether or not this all works together as a well-toned trilogy is yet to be seen.

MISC. MANGA, *Bat-Manga

As the first ever manga based on an American comic book, the 1966 Batman series rode the success of the live-action Adam West show, but based each entry on stories from the original Batman and Detective Comics first printed in America. Jiro Kawata, famous for doing the art for 8-Man, was picked for illustrating this special Japanese run, which allowed him to do manga versions of other American properties like The Time Tunnel and The Invaders. Prior to DC Comics' release of the Bat-Manga, there was a one-shot special published by Pantheon Books highlighting a few of the at the time available manga remnants, as well as several great photographs of the huge wave of Batman merchandise that flooded the Japanese market at the time.

Bat-Manga retells several of the classic Batman stories from the 50s-60s, although rarely using any of the general Bat-villains, possibly due to international licensing rights concerning the characters. There were two separate appearances of Clayface(the second one of which shows his first appearance!), plus C-list villains like Planet Master, Catman, Outsider, and Lord Death Man. This included rebranded bad guys like Flash's foe Weather Wizard rebranded "Go-Go the Magician". The rest of the villains were usually one-shot adversaries that only appeared for one issue like aliens, mad scientists, mutants, and super-intelligent gorillas(not Grodd!). Batman himself is relatively the same, along with Robin wearing an outfit with a slightly longer tunic. Also featuring a rarely occurring Alfred, a brief guest spot by a brunette Vicki Vale, and Commissioner Gordon who apparently knows the Dynamic Duo' secret identities. The Caped Crusades sport the 60s Batmobile, plus a Bat-Copter that is like a large-domed vehicle.

The Bat-Manga was restored in its entirety by DC Comics, partially thanks to Chip Kidd's efforts on the original Bat-Manga collection special. You get each chapter as it was printed in Japan, although the sound effects are still in Japanese attached to an asterisk in the lower corner of the panels, as well as most of the narration blocks being crushed and put to the side making it slightly difficult to read. The paperback version are done in oversized manga format in regular right-to-left format. The manga itself influenced a brief appearance on the Batman: Brave And The Bold TV series, as well as making Lord Death Man a regular foe of the designated Batman Incorporated agents of Japan. If you long for the fun action that anime like Speed Racer and Cyborg 009 became infamous with American otaku, then Bat-Manga needs a spot on your shelf!