After helping General Manager John Laurinaitis get a win over John Cena at Over the Limit, the Big Show appears to be firmly in the pocket of the man who fired him two weeks ago. A turn as a villainous giant might be a good direction for both the Big Show and Raw.

On this Memorial Day, everyone at MLD thanks those who’ve given their lives in service to the United States throughout its history. As we take a day to ourselves, this abbreviated edition of the Warm Up comes on the heels of a less than memorable edition of Raw last week following the Over the Limit pay-per-view. Hopefully, tonight’s show in New Orleans does more to distinguish itself in the weeks leading up to No Way Out.

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This volume of I Don’t Even Like Marvel will be far shorter than the previous volumes because basically… I don’t even really like Marvel all that much and Heroics is a terrible line of toys in which to invest so much time and energy. Especially considering we’ve put almost no energy into discussing truly great lines like Funko Pop! or Mattel’s Action League. Having said all of that, I recently stumbled over a third set of Heroics figures at a local Toys ‘R Us.

This time the line was based on Disney’s Avengers major motion picture. I was tempted to buy the entire set just for the purposes of writing this article and because the figures looked pretty great in the artwork on the box. Luckily I came to my senses and realized that there was no real glory in continuing this mad pursuit of becoming the world’s foremost authority on the intentionally lowest quality line of comic book toys ever created. (I would have given that honor to DC’s Blammoids, but that line definitely wasn’t intended to be so low quality). Another reason I bailed on picking up more Avengers Heroics was that these were 20 percent more expensive than the previous lines. In the end, I decided to just pick up Hulk and Captain America which you may remember were the two characters I was so desperate to find back in Volume 1.

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In commemoration of the this weekend’s premiere of Marvel’s The Avengers (and as part of our month long Standard Deviations series dedicated to the team), we’re taking a look at some past sets of variants shipped to coincide with the premieres of the solo movies featuring the Avengers’ “Big Three:” Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. The trend of shipping variants throughout the week’s leading up to Marvel’s big screen releases began with 2009’s Wolverine: Origins. As a result, no such cover events coincided the original Iron Man movie in 2008. In this edition, we begin with the May 2010 “Iron Man by Design” variants that shipped to coincide with Iron Man 2. 

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This installment of Standard Deviations takes us back to the Spring of 2009 as Marvel Comics produced a set of “Art Appreciation” variants as part of their celebration of Wolverine’s 35th anniversary. The books also coincided with the release of Fox’s Wolverine: Origins in theaters around the world on May 1st of that year. With another movie featuring Marvel characters debuting next week, the publisher has opted to do a follow up set of Avengers Art Appreciation variants throughout April of this year. This post is part of a Standard Deviations double feature today as we look at both entries in Art Appreciation collection.

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The Rock made another "return" to WWE TV last week in Portland to promote his WrestleMania XXVIII match with John Cena. Given the hype surrounding that appearance, it's unlikely he'll make an unannounced showing tonight in Boston.

On the Road to WrestleMania, last week’s Raw from Portland, Oregon was far more mania than wrestling. While things build toward WWE’s biggest night of the year it’s understandable that there will be some amount of hype, but the show seemed to have an inordinate amount of recap videos and other promos. In the end it made up a significant portion of the show between the Rock and John Cena, Triple H and the Undertaker, and the horrendous looking trailer for Bending the Rules.

Tonight in Boston could be more of the same in Cena’s home town and Shawn Michaels returning for another week following his wwe.com bit about being better than Triple H.

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