For me, "well told" almost negates the idea of "rote abuse story." They're almost always a disaster, especially when they involve women. One of three things tends to happen:

I thought the Purple Man story was great, almost shockingly so given how easily it would've been to do it really, even offensively badly. Although upon its completion, Bendis realized he had pretty much wrapped up the series. I'm not really inclined to worry about second seasons before the first has aired, but I…

The source material has a clear comedic voice despite being a version of this same fairly dark story, too. It's not like a series COULDN'T fuck that up, but I don't see a reason to assume it will.

I'm unreasonably excited for this, too. As much as I enjoyed some of the movies, Alias the comic allowed for closed story arcs defined by actual character growth in a way that just doesn't work that well in an open-ended superhero comic. It's potentially much more exciting to me for that reason alone.

It actually was both in the comics, more "attempted" than successful murder, but still.

You're probably right in a technical sense, but I do think there's something qualitatively different between the sort of heart-racing fright people are usually talking about when the talk about a movie not being scary and the sort of atmospheric dread that comes from a well-made film even decades after its release.

I agree in general, but Kwaidan's better than fine. Some of the plot beats can seem a little silly because of their age, but it's a beautiful film to look at throughout. Hell, because of how great it looks and the familiarity of the a especially the first two stories, you can almost watch it without subtitles.

I think creepy and atmospheric ends up working better than "scary" in the long run. "Scary" runs on an element of surprise that by its nature has a limited shelf life — if you did it well at all, you'll be ripped off enough by future acts that was horrifying to a contemporary audience is going to comfortably familiar…

This is kinda the way movies don't really understand specialization and just assume a "scientist" can speak equally well on psychiatry and earthquakes.

Right. Just keeping yourself alive at all costs is not particularly admirable. It's what the wolves were doing, and it means that, in practical terms, they should just kill Judith since she's a useless weakness with no immediate value.

Right. I'd go a step further and say after working with him for years, she didn't actually expect Howard to successfully follow through on a project, including suing the firm.

As a sidebar, "Love. Angel. Music. Baby." narrowly defeated S.H.I.E.L.D. for the "Most Desperate for an Acronym" award.

If the people providing you the data say "This data isn't accurate for your purposes," you probably shouldn't draw conclusions from it. That doesn't seem particularly nitpicky. More like a bedrock necessity for anything even approaching a fair trial.

No, Daken sucks. I thought that was a given. But he did have his own book for like 20 issues, which kinda fucks up the joke. I may have overthought this!

I'm sorry; the Starjammers have actually appeared in like six issues of their own comic, making them too high-profile for a TV adaptation. Look for their five picture deal this spring from FOX!

Most sitcom premises are based on people going through insane contortions to avoid the frank and honest discussion that would immediately short circuit, say, 90% of all Everybody Loves Raymond/King of Queens/etc episodes.

It's the Dem primary debate, though. Nobody wants to be the moderate candidate right now; it's about proving your liberal bonafides before the big swing back to the center in the general, when this debate will be mostly forgotten.

Yeah, it's really smart on Playboy's part to get out of the dead-end field of magazine porn and into a real growth industry like print journalism.

Adaptations do, and it's basically the mission statement of a reboot, but prequels typically use a dangling "if you watch this long enough, it'll eventually turn into that thing you like!" as part of the draw. Barbara Gordon might not be an especially rich character in the comics, but her existence and basic status…

Gotham does many things badly, but slavish adherence to continuity isn't one of them. Essen and Maroni are both dead. Barbara is basically a completely different character. There are already enough changes to Gordon and Nygma that, short of some really, inevitably shitty writing, would make them more or less…