Yep, that did the trick. 

This year has been miserable with comic creators passing away. Off the top of my head, Grant follows Neal Adams, George Perez and Tim Sale, with five months left to go :(

Oof.

“Learn your history”

Right. I suppose it’s possible that Suzanne Collins, a then middle-age writer of children’s shows from Connecticut, was secretly into Japanese horror fiction in the mid-2000s, but that doesn’t seem super likely.

I’ve always thought that was a sketchy claim. Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy literally have a Night City in them; what are the odds another creator writing about a high-tech dystopia lands on that exact same name?

If you mean in this specific case, no, they aren’t. Devin Grayson signed her work-for-hire contract with Marvel back in 1999, which is also the same year she created Yelena Belova. That contract predates Disney’s acquisition of Marvel by more than 20 years. Those creator deals remained in place regardless of the…

That is definitely a problem when dealing with this kind of thing retroactively. It’s one of the things that irritates me when Brubaker goes on a rant about Winter Soldier. What he did is create a particularly relevant story arc for the Captain America comic, but the actual *character* of Bucky Barnes was invented by…

Disney didn’t invent screwing over creatives, Marvel’s been doing that for decades on their own. Jack Kirby’s estate was days away from conference before the US Supreme Court over it before Marvel caved and agreed to a settlement, over conflicts that long predate Disney’s acquisition.

Lego’s master plan to turn Gen X childhood into injection molded plastic bricks and sell them to us at a premium lands somewhere between pure genius and utterly diabolical. That faux wood grain hitting me right in the feels.

A lot of original NES games were priced around that level or even cheaper. I remember buying Kung Fu for $29.99 in early 1986.

I’m surprised not to see the Matrix movies on here. In the power plant scene in Reloaded, we see Trinity using a legit SSH exploit to get root access to their system. It’s a real bit of actual hacking, more realistic than just about anything else shown on this list.

“Scotty is already there! Does that mean Hemmer is gone forever and he becomes the new chief engineer?”

I didn’t care for him myself. Shatner and Pine have both managed to pull off the sort of effortless charisma that makes Kirk so distinctive, but Wesley... if you didn’t tell me he was playing Kirk, I wouldn’t have guessed that on my own.

Exactly. The last film before Nolan/Bale was Schumacher’s Batman & Robin, which is easily the low point of cinematic Batman. Coming from an era of neon decor and nipples on suits, a more serious take was something a lot of people couldn’t imagine.

She does look awesome in that costume.

Good choices! While probably not heavy enough for Eddie, I would have loved Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil in that scene - just an epic middle finger at the bad guy right til the end.

So just standard issue monster fighting gear for late Cold War Russian gulags, makes perfect sense.

“No disrespect to ST, but all it’s really done is integrate one song (Running Up That Hill) at a few effective moments.”

So, I do have several questions, but by far the most important one is this: what is the Atlantean Sword from Conan the Barbarian doing in a Soviet prison camp in 1986?