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Avengers: Doomsday – Four Teaser Trailers, Thoughts, and Theories

Remember about a month ago when the teaser trailer for Avengers: Doomsday came out? I wrote a li’l piece about it expressing my disappointment that the Marvel Cinematic Universe felt like it was going backwards, returning to a character who completed their journey in a beautiful and fulfilling way when they had (by my count) 101 different superheroes introduced (or “on the stage,” as it were) since Avengers: Endgame with little-to-no development. It is certainly not the sort of move that inspires confidence in me. Going back to Chris Evans (as Steve Rogers) and Robert Downey Jr. (as Doctor Doom) after eight years feels like they’re saying, “We don’t know how to make anything new, exciting, or relevant anymore” without saying they don’t know how to make anything new, exciting, or relevant anymore. Since that piece we’ve gotten three more teaser trailers. Four teaser trailers! In a month! Or, as the Russos put it on their Instagram post, “What you’ve been watching for the last four weeks… are not teasers. Or trailers. They are stories. They are clues…” So we’ve gotten four stories, four clues in the last month. And what the heck, misgivings aside, I’ll play. Let’s theorize!

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The Amazing Spider-Man Nears Issue #1000 and I Get Nostalgic

Comic shops can be dangerous places. I say this as someone who balances his “comic budget” alongside things like “mortgage” and “utilities” to be sure I have the money I need to live life and, you know, not end up bankrupt or something. THE STRUGGLE IS REAL. As if the staff recs and comics on the shelves weren’t trouble enough, my local comic shop tucks copies of Comic Shop News and previews from Marvel and DC in my bag – even though they know my poor self-control!! – when I buy my comics each week. This was how I learned The Amazing Spider-Man was nearing issue #1000 and decided it was time to start reading the title again.

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The Top Ten Movies of 2025!

It’s that time again! For over twenty years I’ve been putting together my Top Ten Movies of the Year list, though only recently has it become a blog feature. Before I just made people listen to me recount it when I was with them XD. But now I have you, dear reader, who are choosing to read it by way of looking at this piece! Yay! Sure, it lacks the thrill of my commandeering someone’s attention in person but this also adds a degree of officialness, as it’s written and posted on the line. So, as 2025 draws to a close, what were the Ten Best Movies of the Year?! Do we have any matches on our lists?! Let’s find out!

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Avengers: Doomsday – A Trailer, A Struggle

On December 18th, a year to the day before the film’s release, Marvel Studios dropped the first teaser trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Anthony and Joe Russo – the directors behind Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame – are once more at the helm and the film heralds the return of just so many familiar faces for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next big epic crossover slugfest. The whole trailer is only one minute and twenty seconds. I wasn’t really surprised by the content…nor was I by my reaction. I kinda saw this coming. What did I feel? What do I fear? And what did you feel, dear reader? Well, let’s read on and chat about all of it.

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What Does Christmas Sound Like to You?: The Season of Stars & Promises

In my twenties, I was lucky enough to do something that felt completely normal at the time but is far from it in retrospect. Right out of college I worked as a youth minister at a Catholic Church. I ran events for high school and middle school groups, did a summer camp for pre-K through 5th grade, taught middle school religious ed., and whatever other odd jobs landed on my desk. Organizing the Peter Mayer Stars & Promises Christmas concert every year became one of those jobs. When he’s not the lead guitarist in Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, Peter takes his own band on the road and, at Christmastime, they do a tour of churches and other venues playing a gorgeous, spiritually-centered Christmas show. For seven years (my entire time as the youth minister!) I brought Peter and his band to town. His music and those memories are forever tied to Christmas in my mind. This year marks fifteen years since I last did that gig.[1] Since I’m feeling nostalgic I wanted to write about it :D.

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The Lost Art of the Christmas Special

Do you remember the TV guide? If you’re of a certain age, you know there used to be a section in the newspaper that listed what was on TV that day. Then the Sunday edition of the paper had TV Week, an insert you’d pull out each weekend so you could look ahead. Of course, you could also subscribe to TV Guide, a magazine that came weekly which also had the week’s TV listings as well as TV-related articles. Ahhh, life before the internet. When I was a kid, I lived by these listings. You had to! There was no streaming the show whenever you wanted. You saw it, caught the rerun, or it was lost to you (unless you had the foresight to set the VCR to record it). But there was nothing like the TV listings for the last six weeks of the year. Christmas specials! Christmas episodes of your favorite shows! These magical moments came once a year so you had to be ready!

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Wonder Woman: Year One – Exploring the Birth of the Amazing Amazon!

This may be a hot take but the creation of Wonder Woman is second only to Superman in importance to the history of superheroes. Wonder Woman is the archetypal mother of all superheroes just as Superman is their father. Together, they are the font from which everything else flows. So it was only a matter of time before I featured Diana of Themyscria in this li’l series! I nicked my title from Frank Miller’s iconic Batman: Year One where he gave the Caped Crusader a darker, grittier origin. We love reimaginings of our heroes’ origins almost as much as Marvel and DC love producing them. But I’m fascinated by their original origin – who were they when they first burst onto the scene? What feels familiar? What feels different? Here I examine the literal year one of a character. Reading Wonder Woman’s first adventures, it was easy to see how we need these stories just as much today as we ever have.

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Supergirl (2025): A Trailer, a Character History, and Feels

On Thursday, December 11th the first trailer for Ana Nogueira’s (writer) and Craig Gillespie’s (director) Supergirl dropped. Hurrah! The next entry into DC Studios’ new DCU is on it’s way, hitting theatres on 26 June 2026. Yippie! Personally, I think the fact that the first three DC Studios films are Superman (2025), Supergirl (2026), and Man of Tomorrow (2027) shows we’re heading in the right direction. It illustrates that the House of El – meaning Superman (Clark Kent or Kal-El) and his cousin Supergirl (Kara Danvers or Kara Zor-El) – are the center of this cinematic universe…as it should be. Batman (and the tonal darkness that accompanies him) should never set the bar for DC’s universe but that’s been the case cinematically since Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989.

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Daredevil & Elektra: Visions of God, Faith, and the Meaning of Love

What is God’s role in love? The larger your lens the easier the question is to answer. In a sentence, God is the living energy of love that creates, moves, and binds everything in existence together. “God” is the name we have for the highest expression of love just as “love” is the name we have for our personal experience of God. But how exactly does the Divine move in our individual relationships? Does God bring people into our lives for a reason? Are there people we are meant to love? And what happens when we narrow our focus to romantic love? It all feels tricker then, doesn’t it? Matt Murdock, the Daredevil, and Elektra, the former Hand assassin-cum-Daredevil herself, are one of fiction’s most natural avenues to explore this question as Matt Murdock, a devout lifelong Catholic, is one of the most theologically aware, faith-centered characters in comics. Naturally then, he views his love through the lens of his faith.

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The Fantastic Four: Year One – Exploring the Birth of the Marvel Age of Comics!

Without the Fantastic Four there would be no Hulk, no Spider-Man, no X-Men, no Avengers. There would be no Marvel Comics or Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least not as we know them today. Each of those stories on page and screen begins here. Fantastic Four #1 changed EVERYTHING. So it’s a natural fit for this li’l series! I nicked my title from Frank Miller’s iconic Batman: Year One where he gave the Caped Crusader a darker, grittier origin. We love reimaginings of our heroes’ origins almost as much as Marvel and DC love producing them. But I’m fascinated by their original origin – who were they when they first burst onto the scene? What feels familiar? What feels different? Here I’ll examine the literal year one of a character. The Fantastic Four’s tagline is “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine” and it’s easy to see why. With this series, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created an entirely new kind of superhero story, completely different from their Distinguished Competition. People loved the FF and the world was never the same! The Marvel Age of Comics was born!

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