Wonder Woman's New Costume.... Looking Better?!?

SOURCE: Latest WONDER WOMAN TV Series Set Pics Reveal Changes to the Heroine's Costume

A LiveJournal outage this morning kept me from breaking this news. Still, five things worth noting about the costume as we see it in these photos and live footage.

1. The pants are no longer plastic.
2. The pants are a brighter shade of blue, which shows off the stars on the side better.
3. The corset appears to have been modified somewhat, so the cleavage is less obvious and - more importantly - so Wonder Woman can actually run in it.
4. The boots are red, which is a nod to tradition I'm rather happy about.
5. The boots are NOT stiletto heels, which is a hell of a lot more practical. Indeed, they look quite sensible for someone who plans to do a lot of running.

Color me optimistic that this show will be able to find a happy medium between the die-hard Wonder Woman fans and David Kelley's usual audience. At the very least, it looks like they're willing to at least pretend to care about what the fans think, which is a step-up from a lot of superhero projects.

Our First Look At The New Wonder Woman Actress In Costume

SOURCE: Holy @#$%, It's the New TV Wonder Woman

Okay - is it just me or does this costume look uncomfortably like one of the many plastic "sexy" superheroine outfits they sell at Halloween?

I'm just saying!

Shia LaBeouf wants to play Arseface in Preacher movie.

... and I don't have a problem with that.

SOURCE: D.J. Caruso Talks ‘Preacher,’ Mentions Chris Pine, Shia LaBeouf and Alex Pettyfer Are Interested

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Starman, how can you possibly approve of Shia LeBeouf being connected to yet another geeky franchise? Do you not despise The Beef like all other folk of good virtue? Does your soul not weep that the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are determined to turn this simpering idiot man-child into the next great action hero?"

Of course I do. And that is why I want to see him play Arseface. Because...

1. If he has two pounds of make-up on his face, I probably won't have the urge to punch his stupid face the whole time he's on screen.

2. If his mouth is obscured, I won't be able to hear his whiny "no, no, no" spiel as he runs about helplessly while all the other characters are being awesome.

3. There's a fair chance that if they were to make a Preacher movie that was allowed to include Arseface, they'd have to show the incident in which he became Arseface. And I am highly in favor of letting Shia LeBeouf be in a movie so long as he is shot in the face at point-blank range at some point during said movie.

NBC Picks Up David E. Kelley's 'Wonder Woman'

SOURCE: NBC Picks Up David E. Kelley's 'Wonder Woman'

The project is described as a reinvention of the iconic D.C. comic in which Wonder Woman -- aka Diana Prince -- is a vigilante crime fighter in L.A. but also a successful corporate executive and a modern woman trying to balance all of the elements of her extraordinary life.

I know most everyone else is cracking wise about how this sounds like.. oh, EVERY SINGLE SHOW David E. Kelley has EVER made with a female protagonist and how we're going to have some skinny-armed waif playing Wonder Woman.

But I have to ask - did anybody else read this and think "So basically they're doing a show absed on the Palmotti & Gray run of Power Girl only using Wonder Woman instead"?

The world is trying to annoy me today.

Shia LaBeouf is Y: The Last Man?

Why are they rewarding all the hack actors from Constantine with starring roles in comic book movies?

First Djimon Hounsou gets to play Thulsa Doom in a movie that has jack and squat to do with the original Robert Howard novels and is going the extra step of reinventing Thulsa Doom as a flawed anti-hero rather than an Evil with a capital E necromancer.

Doom was a King Kull enemy! And he was never a hero by any stretch of the imagination!

And now, Shia LeBeouf is going to mince his way through an adaptation of one of the best books to come out in the last decade.

Then, I hear about this.

MTV readies 'Rocky Horror' redux

*sighs* What's next? Judd Winick gets permission to write a Jack Knight series?

Looking To The Stars - The Search For The Mythical Fanboy

Let me say this up-front: I’m not in the habit of reading USA Today. Journalistically, it is to real news what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking. But when you work in a library and one of your duties first thing in the morning is getting the newspapers ready, it’s hard not to read the occasional headline. And that is how this jumped out at me-

Who is Fanboy?

I’ll save you all some brain cells and sum it up. Basically, The Powers That Be In Hollywood are going ga-ga over the power that we of the geekier set apparently have to sink or swim movies based on our amazing powers over the Interwebs. They are now trying - and by their own admission failing - to figure out how to cater to “Fanboy”.

Well, geez… I could have told them that trying to pin down Fanboys into a simple clique is impossible. We aren’t as easily defined as groups such as The Elderly, The Religious Right or The People Who Will Pay Money To See A Horror Movie, Just To See Paris Hilton Get Killed.

Let me make this real simple for you. One sentence. Call it Morrison’s Dictum if you want to get fancy.

Morrison’s Dictum: There’s only one group of people that is more intolerant of a geeky interest than mainstream society and that is a group devoted to a similar, but separate, geeky interest.

Uniting all fanboys of all stripes under one banner is impossible for two simple reasons. First, every hobby has its’ fanboys and there’s a world of difference between them. There’s serious differences between a comic fanboy, a fantasy lit fanboy, a sci-fi lit fanboy, a film fanboy, a music fanboy, a gaming fanboy, a Renn Fest fanboy, a modeling fanboy, a cosplaying fanboy… and so on and so on. The other reason is that there’s too much bad blood between the various sects for there to ever be one Fanboy Banner.

It’s similar to how Protestant religions work. It doesn’t matter what few mechanical differences exist in the bureaucracy of their respective religious structures; there is no way to get a Southern Baptist and a Southern Methodist to sit in the same house of worship on a Sunday without a knife fight.

There’s Trekkies and then there’s Star Wars fans. There’s the Society for Creative Anachronism and there’s the people who go the Renn Faire in elf ears. There’s d20 players and there’s GURPS players. There’s PC Gamers and there’s Mac Users. There’s the French and the English, North Korea and South Korea, Ginger and Mary Ann, Dick York and Dick Sergeant. And never the twain shall meet.

Heck, we’re starting to regress back into the days of Marvel Guys and DC Guys after a relatively long stretch of time when the biggest conflict among comics’ fans came between the Indy Comics Geeks and the Mainstream Supporters.

My point is, you’ve got about as much chance in catering to one single mythic “Fanboy” as you do negotiating peace in the Middle East.

Looking To The Stars: Black Cat Crossing

For those of you who were expecting a review of Catwoman this week, I’m sorry. There isn’t one. There isn’t going to be one. I know you’ve all gotten used to Unca Starman doing a review of any and every comic-based movie that comes out. But this time… I couldn’t do it. I could not justify spending my eight bucks on a film that insulted every fiber of my being just by existing.

You see, I have a small cheering session in my head and all of them are screaming like a Spider-Sense. The comic purist is whining about how the movie had nothing to do with the books. The film freak cried bloody murder about how poorly shot the trailers looked and how bad the acting seemed. The writer in me started out quietly listing every other story that was ripped off to make the “plot” of the movie and then started yelling along with the inner cynic, who was wondering why Halle Berry agreed to this movie when she considered playing Storm an “insult” and how she had been "reduced to playing" comic book movies because Hollywood didn’t offer African American women decent roles.

“Oh yeah! Now I remember,” the cynic said sarcastically. “This time nobody expects her to ACT. She just has to put on a skimpy costume and walk around in the spotlight.”

Mind you, I did consider several options that would let me see the movie without paying for it. I’m friendly with a few theater managers who might consider giving me a pass or having let me in on the Thursday night preview. I thought about playing the press card on some of the theater people I wasn’t so friendly with. I even briefly considered setting up a Pay Pal link on the site and asking for donations, but rejected that idea after deciding that YOU shouldn’t have to pay to support the movie either.

Thankfully it appears that the fanboys, despite most of them usually being easily swayed by anything with cleavage, have stood firm in their resolve to not promote this movie in any way. I can attest to this as a comic book shop employee: I have not seen ONE copy of the new Catwoman: The Movie comic sold in my store.

Lord knows I did TRY and sell it to people (it was one of my sales goals this week) and Lord knows DC did try to make it easier for me to do so. Perhaps they too sensed what a turkey this was going to be and in an effort to apologize to the comic community in general, they had Jim Lee do a cover for the book.

It’s cynical but it is a tried, true and tested theory: put a Jim Lee cover on it and it will sell. They even did a second version of the comic, featuring some classic Catwoman stories and a Jim Lee sketchbook. Sadly, not even Jim Lee could make this monstrosity look good. And there’s nothing I can say good or bad about the fact that Chuck Austen wrote the thing that anybody on either side of the “Austen Is The Anti-Christ” argument will take seriously, so I won’t bother.

Here’s another sign of how strongly the fandom community is coming out against this movie; the collectibles based on it aren’t selling! And in an industry built upon guys who will buy anything if it’s billed as being an ultra-rare chase figure or “limited to a run of 6000” that is saying something.

Here’s how I discovered it. My girlfriend is a collector of Barbie dolls. I forget how it came up in conversation, but she just mentioned it a few weeks ago. This led me to mention the new line of superheroine Barbie dolls that came out a few months back. She just kinda smiled and said “Oooh, do they have Catwoman? I’d love one of her.” I checked my store and we were sold out. I checked ebay and that’s where I found it… and confirmation that the hordes of collectors out there are not nearly as stupid as the retailers and manufactures hope.

Cheapest Price on a Selina Kyle Catwoman Barbie? $40.

Most expensive bid on a Halle Berry Catwoman Barbie? $10.

Seeing that most of the Halle Berry Barbies are unbid on even with a price that can be paid in pennies and having your hope in humanity justified? Priceless.

Just did a quick check on ebay just now and it looks about the same You can see for yourself how well it’s going, but even this weekend… Halle Berry’s plastic dominatrix likeness is doing just as well as the air conditioner repairman in an Eskimo village.

It was all going so well, too. X-Men 2, while having some weak performances, was an improvement upon the first film and quite enjoyable. Hellboy came out and was a moderate success. It was Number One the week it came out and I hear the buzz on the DVD due out this week is quite good. And Spider-Man 2… oh, Spider-Man 2 was SO good on so many levels. Yes, it was starting to look like there was a light at the end of our tunnel; that Hollywood WAS putting some care into their comic book movies.

And then we get our hands stomped by a stiletto heel just as we’re crawling out of the pit. And before we know it we’re back in the shadows with a long climb ahead of us again.

Et tu, Hollywood?

I wish I could say it can only get better. Sadly, for every bit of good news we get something equally bad comes out.

Good News: Bryan Singer is on for Superman!

Bad News: Someone else is probably going to have to do X-3 and Hugh Jackman, unless some major rescheduling is done, won’t be in it.

Worse News: Jack Black is Kyle Rayner in a slapstick comedy Green Lantern.

But lest we end with a completely hopeless tone, let me give you all something good to come out on, along with an open letter.

To Whom It May Concern at Warner Bros.,

Find the man who made this trailer. Give him a budget. Let him do as he will. Do not let Halle Berry play Lois Lane.

Yours sincerely,

Matt Morrison

Tune in next week. Same Matt time. Same Matt website.