Stan Lee

Philadelphia Comic Con

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Philly Comic Con is coming up and the wife and I will be in attendance again this year after a year away. We’ll be there Saturday the 2nd along with Jon, Nick and Rob. (innocuous plug) Last year we went to the Baltimore Comic Con which is not part of the Wizard World tour but it was great all the same. We stayed overnight in a cool old hotel right down the street from where the Con was held. By the way allow me to state the Baltimore Con is brought to you by Cards Comics & Collectibles in Reisterstown, MD which is a very cool store.

Stan Lee was there, not sure if it was the first time or not, and it looks like he’ll be at Philly Imageagain this year as well. I did not get in line for his autograph but plenty of fans did which was really cool to see. His image below is linked to the page where you can get tickets for the VIP experience.

A few additional housekeeping items for this random post. You can follow Wizard World on Twitter here @WizardWorld and the Facebook page is Here. You can follow us on Twitter here @415Comics and the Facebook page is coming.

ImageThe next post will be about the Carnage USA series that just ended which was surprisingly good. I always thought Venom and Carnage were novelty characters that were cool, but not really written well. This series had good writing and artwork.

Captain America – The First Avenger

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We finally had a chance to see Captain America, thank you Netflix. The commercials were good and I am really glad they did not give it all away like some trailers. First, I think Chris Evans played a very good Captain America and whoever the guy was the played Bucky did well too. All in all, the characters from the top down played their parts really well and I think it may have been my favorite movie recently released by Marvel. I liked Thor but I think this was better. I sort of liked X-Men First Class, but it wasn’t true enough to the comic for me to like it a lot. At least with Captain America, I had so little background details about the origin that this seemed like it could have been exactly as it was written in the comics.

From the beginning of the movie to the end credits it seemed like it was full of action and the story held my interest. Seeing a wimpy little Steve Rogers turn in to the amazing icon and hero of Captain America was awesome. Everything you know about him shouts red blooded American good guy that drinks his milk, eats his vegetables , treats women right and fights the bad guys; never giving up. The line “I can do this all day” is such a monumental and symbolic sentence that in its simplicity says hero, America as a symbol, all things good, never say die attitude and most of all the American spirit.

Hugo Weaving as Johann Schmidt/Red Skull played a very convincing role and made me feel he could be nothing short of pure evil.  Since I am not 100% sure of his origin, the story again seemed very believable and his search for some ancient mythological artifact from Asgard or wherever he claimed it was from fit very well. I am not sure of where he went in the end, whether it was Asgard or some place of ultimate power, the special effects were awesome. The way the plane began to dematerialize and he was just sucked up and out through some energy portal looked seamless and cool. Actually, the entire movie with its special effects was awesome.

If I have to rate the recent movies I would have to say this comes first, then Thor then Iron Man I & II and then X-Men first class. I loved the other X-men movies (except Sabertooth from the original) and am looking forward to any more origin stories as well as the Avengers movie next summer. My sister is in love with Jeremy Renner so I may have to take her to see it with me since he plays Hawkeye. Yes, Captain America has my vote as best recent Marvel hero movie and any further discussion is not needed. Let’s give it 4.5 stars with two thumbs up.