My brother and I went to see Thor this past weekend and were extremely impressed with the whole production. Thor is a character who could very easily suffer in your average comic-to-movie translation but the movie really hit a grand slam and was about as good as one could possibly make it. I would go so far as to say that it was slightly better than Spider Man 1, which is tough to pull off given Spidey's almost universal appeal. And a cameo by Hawkeye to boot . I'm really looking forward to the Captain America film coming up and the Avengers movie next year.

As for my favorite superhero mine is undoubtedly the Punisher.

The Punisher has no superpowers (at least not orginally ), and instead the former Navy SEAL bypasses the justice system altogether and exacts his own brand of justice on criminals. Which normally amounts to a few less criminals in the world. Period. This tends to put him at odds with other heroes (especially Spider Man and Dare Devil) who don't like his unique vigilante approach to dealing with bad guys as they'd rather put them in jail where the Punisher wants to put them in a morgue. Super skilled with every modern military weapon and gifted with tactical knowledge no one ever seems to be able to get the upper hand on the Punisher.

I have to also admit to really liking the Fantastic Four. The Galactus storyline which introduced that character and especially his herald, the Silver Surfer, is by far the most epic comic storyline I've ever come across and tons of credit go to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for dreaming it up. Precious little can match its scope. Galactus is one bad dude and not to be messed with!

Galactus is the sole survivor of the previous universe...in the Marvel universe the Big Bang is eventually followed by a Big Crunch, and Galactus was the last of a race of spacefaring aliens who saw the end of the universe approaching, and so he and a few others of his kind decided to fly a spaceship into the middle of the Big Crunch. All were killed, but the forces that run the universe took note of one of them, a man named Galan. Instead of being destroyed with the rest of the previous universe Galan was reborn as Galactus. Galactus is not evil or good, he simply is. He roams the universe looking for planets with sentient life and consumes that life as it is needed to keep him alive. It is said that at the end of the current (Marvel) universe that all of the worlds that Galactus consumed will be repaid back several times over and in this way Galactus is able to cope with the destructive nature he has been granted. Galactus will usually hire a herald, a sort of scout who seeks inhabited worlds for Galactus to consume and announces his arrival. The most famous is the Silver Surfer, who made a deal with Galactus to become his herald if he (Galactus) promised not to consume the Surfer's home world. And it's the Silver Surfer who initially finds Earth and eventually runs into the Fantastic Four, where begins one of the great confrontations in Marvel comic book history.

*sigh* I love this stuff!

Glad to hear the positive reports on Thor. I hope to see it soon. Just a couple weeks ago I watched Iron Man 2 with friends, and we noticed the 'crazy credit' segment at the very end (after the credits) in which a big crater and Mjolnir are found...nice teaser for this upcoming movie.

(I grew up with Norse mythology so I'm curious as to how this movie will handle that as well).

The 2002 release of Spider-Man (with Tobey Maquire in the title role) is one of my favorite superhero movies. It does a good job of capturing much of the spirit of the original. I also recently finished watching the first season of the animated Spidey series, The Spectacular Spider-Man. There are many animated versions of this comic, most of which I've not seen (or only seen a few episodes of), but I do like this version. I think part of the reason is that Greg Weisman (creator of Gargoyles) had a part in its development.

I'd say the Spiderman franchise is my favorite superhero movie so far. I think I like the second one best of the three.

Which is everyone else's favorite Spiderman movie?

And does anyone know when the reboots are coming out?

~Riella

I've only recently been introduced to comic book movies and whatnot, but I've been trying to see as many I can... Most of the ones I haven't seen are the Marvel comic movies (although I am chipping away at the X-men movies before First Class), but I've seen other comic-movies like Kick Ass and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Comic books wise, where's a good place to start?

I want to see all of the superhero movies coming out this summer, but that's probably not going to happen

As for spiderman Ithy, the fourth one is coming out in summer 2012, I wanna say it's going to be July but I'm not exactly sure

I just found out something yesterday that has had me fuming ever since. Starting in August with the Justice League, DC is rebooting all of their titles. Apparently it's going to be like Crisis on Infinite Earths, only without the Crisis. The characters will be younger, have new costumes, it's been hinted some ethnicities will change, and some characters will no longer exist. Oh, and Clark and Lois will no longer be married so the shipper fanboy writers can pair up Wonder Woman and Superman.

I'm completely at a loss for how this is going to work. If they make the characters younger, even if they don't start with their origins in issue 1 of their titles, there's no way that they can fit even a fraction of the past 30 years of history into those backstories. Which means we can pretty much kiss good-bye the four Robins, three Batgirls, and however many Supergirls as well as least one generation of Teen Titans. To make matters worse, this is being described as an attempt to make the characters more relevant and fit better into today's society. Marvel used essentially those same words when they gave us the horror that was One More Day/Brand New Day and turned Peter Parker into a bed-hopping immature jerk.

That's weird, Bookster...Marvel has a bunch of separate series they have for when they want to rework characters backstories and what not, such as Marvel Knights and Max, and all that. That way it leaves the primary story in untouched and the artists/writers can explore different themes with the characters without screwing it all up. And were that not enough they always have the multiverse Earths to go play around in (the Marvel Zombie universe is my favorite alternate Earth ).

Yeah, I don't understand why they can't do what Marvel did with the Ultimates universe. It has essentially the same premise as this DC reboot, but it left all the original titles intact. This just seems like a really amateur movie on DC's part.

Please note that this Special Feature will be closing on Saturday, August 13, after which you may discuss any Super Hero entertainment in the appropriate Spare Oom thread.