Myriad #1-4
Various Artists
Approbation Comics
Cover Price $2.99; Available Now

Anthology comics are few and far between, and are always tricky to market to the masses, especially when you are dealing with a title with not just multiple short stories, but multiple titles and storylines that are entities unto themselves under that anthology umbrella. The choice to make it as homogeneous as possible to target a specific audience (think Marvel Comics Presents), or to make it a diverse compilation that will force readers out of their comfort zone and expose them to new genres and storytelling is always difficult. Approbation Comics, with their Myriad line, decides to take a huge gamble by bringing together five titles that couldn’t possibly be more different under the same umbrella, with each title getting approximately eight pages per book. Does the gamble pay off?

In Chi Sai, a mysterious black female warrior dressed head-to-toe in special bulletproof fabric and armed with two sai, returns from the past to wreak havoc on the city’s crime syndicate. But when the crime boss realizes that this woman has previous ties to their organization, he sends his top assassin to make her life a living hell. Bart A Thompson, who runs Approbation Comics, takes a stab at the “human” superhero genre as he begins building the base for one badass woman that just won’t stay dead. As has become expected from Thompson’s writing style, he hits the ground running with action, and only fills in the reader on a need to know basis. And for now, all you need to know is do not get on Chi Sai’s bad side!

Every director should make at least one Western. It’s as simple as that. I don’t care if they’re in vogue or out, whether they make money or not. If you hope to be worth a damn behind the camera, you need one Western under your belt. Landscapes, violence, sweat, grit, faces with evil intentions or grimy fear, moral peril. It encourages you to use every last damn bit of your frame and start seeing things from an ethical perspective, as opposed to just moving your characters around a stale plot like so many chess pieces. If you can make one, you can make any other kind of movie you set your brain on. There is more than one reason to mourn the latter-day death of the Western. Guys like Sergio Leone were the last guys who thought big and didn’t crop and truncate their images for that all too lucrative home video market.

James Mangold is now officially worth a damn. I won’t bestow Grand Master privileges on him just quite yet, because he did after all inflict Kate & Leopold on us. But 3:10 To Yuma finds Mangold at his best and most composed. This is a film that takes its time, lets us get to know the people and the situation, and only reveals to us what the movie is REALLY about in the last half hour.

3:10 To Yuma is a remake of a 1957 film starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (beloved by many, unseen by me) which itself was based on an early short story by the great author Elmore Leonard. After getting his foot shot off in the Union army during the Civil War, Dan Evans (Christian Bale) hopes to take up ranching in Arizona, which is made difficult with a drought and a railroad dispute over his land. His wife (Gretchen Mol) is disappointed in him and his oldest son William (Logan Lerman) was never appointed with him all the way to begin with, to get to the “DISappointed” stage. He may not even like or obey his father all that much, but he is awash with hero worship for an outlaw named Ben Wade, upon whose exploits many dime novels were written.

Hordes of Hellish and Vile Things,

The time has come once again for your good friend Obvious Zombie (<-- me) to take your hand and lead you through the Zombie Zeitgeist. We must move quickly, for there is a lot to cover --movies, science, flash mobs, comics... What, I can't have your hand? I'll give it back when I'm done with it. I swear.How about a thigh?...

I feel it’s my duty to bring a newly formed governmental agency to your attention. The U.S. Department of Zombie Affairs, or USDZA (affectionately pronounced Us Does), has been quietly recruiting unassuming police cadets, top-of-the-class boot camp soldiers, and first-year sanitation employees to round out their sub-management and fill their rank and file.

Doesn’t seem like they’re assembling an outreach team, huh?

‘Permissum somnus subsisto quietus’ …anyone know what that means?

Anyhoo, I don’t know much else about them, save the fact that since I myself AM a zombie (one with his own blog no less), you will doubtless find me crossing paths with their agents in very the near future.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name. But what’s puzzling you, is the nature of my game. — The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil”

Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) and her fiancé David (Naveen Andrews) are like two peas in a pod. She does a show on a New York talk radio station and he is a doctor. They are blissfully in love and planning their wedding. They fake-cute argue over things like invitations and what type of wedding they should have. On a walk through Central Park one night with their dog, they are brutally attacked. She is beaten within an inch of her life, and him six inches further. She wakes from her coma three weeks later to find that David’s funeral has already been held and she is left with nothing to do but pick up the pieces and try to move on.

Going into this movie seemed like dangerous ground to tread so soon after seeing Death Sentence just two weeks ago. Another movie about an average Joe turned vigilante killer after the death of their (blank)? And even if there will always be a spot reserved in my movie loving heart for her because of Silence of the Lambs, Foster kind of fell off the map for me some time ago. This movie surprised the hell out of me.

There are three reasons it works so well. First, the performances by Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are incredible. Foster finally jumped off that one trick pony she had been riding through her last few movies roles and added back some of the spunk that made us love her in the first place. She’s pretty much been sleepwalking for the past five years, so it’s great to see she still possesses the talent and chops that made her famous. Watch the scene where Erica does her first radio show after the attack. She gets on air, freezes, and restarts three different times. It is painful to watch. Not only do you hear the fear in her voice, but you feel it for her. You just want to reach through the screen, take her out of the room, and end the discomfort. Not many actors could pull it off, and even fewer with such haunting effect. Terrence Howard adds the perfect counterbalance to her performance. He plays the rare good cop who still believes in the system he fights to protect, even if he has any number of reasons to have become jaded by it.

PRESS RELEASE

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine and Capitol/EMI have collaborated to create and deploy the ultimate Megadeth boxed set: Warchest. The 4-CD+DVD collection features more than six hours of digitally remastered content, hand-selected by Mustaine, including 30 audio and video tracks making their global release debuts, and an additional three tracks that have never before been released in the U.S. Warchest’s October 2 release caps Mustaine and Capitol/EMI’s in-depth Megadeth catalog remastering and restoration campaign, which has encompassed the band’s Capitol studio albums, while also adding new audio and video collections to the band’s arsenal.

Armed with digitally remastered career-defining album cuts, soundtrack and compilation sides, unreleased live and studio performances and interview clips spanning more than 20 years, Warchest is the ultimate Megadeth compendium. Included in the trove are a full 75-minute live set from a night on the 1990 “Clash of the Titans” tour and a DVD of highlights from a 1992 stop supporting Countdown — two historical shows, both making their release debuts on Warchest. The set’s custom “vac-u-form” packaging showcases a 3-D ammo belt on its front and a 36-page booklet with an essay by Ian Christe and a comprehensive discography, complemented by an array of photos and images.