With the Summer coming to an end, DC Comics’ Flashpoint concluding and all the new number one issues DC is shipping every week, Marvel is just reaching the penultimate issue of their major event, Fear Itself. This series has had some big moments, but we’ve felt throughout that they weren’t sold with the impact they could have had. Chapter Six continues that trend along with a lot more set up for the final battle with the Serpent. This puts an impossible amount of pressure on Chapter Seven to bring the series to a satisfying conclusion.

Spoilers for Fear Itself in general, Fear Itself #6 specifically and the many possible fates of Bucky Barnes will follow.

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I’ve been putting off writing about Friends With Benefits for awhile because I really don’t have anything nice to say about it. Friends is the latest film from Easy A‘s Will Gluck. Gluck tries to present Friends as an atypical romantic comedy, even including a fake romantic comedy film-within-a-film starring Jason Segal and Rashida Jones to point out the stupidity of typical “rom-coms.” In reality, however, this movie still ends up being cliche-ridden, unfunny, and predictable.

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DC Comics’ War of the Green Lanterns crossover spanning their entire Green Lantern line of titles wrapped up this week. Not only did the crossover come to an end, but Part Ten (Green Lantern #67) was also the final issue of Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern series that launched in 2005 following Green Lantern: Rebirth. This is the title that reintroduced Hal Jordan into the DC Universe and spawned a number of events including the very popular Blackest Night. The status quo was definitely shaken up in the wake of the latest threat to the DC cosmos and it will be interesting to see how this translates to DC’s line-wide relaunch in September.

Spoilers for War of the Green Lanterns, the current and forthcoming Green Lantern series, rainbows and what’s on the other side will follow.

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So yesterday on my way to work my iPhone pumped out literally the greatest “genius” playlist I’ve ever heard. It was the perfect combination of songs and bands that I love but haven’t listened to in forever, teamed with my state of mind at the time. So many great bands came up: classic era Sunny Day Real Estate, Jawbox, Inside Out, The Promise Ring, Mineral, Rival Schools. Even when it selected a Jimmy Eat World song, it was “What I Would Say to You Now” not something from the last decade. The whole thing was epic. About the time I got off the turnpike, I realized this “greatest playlist ever” hadn’t featured a single song from later than around 2001. It was pretty depressing. I felt like an old man who time had passed by without me even noticing.

Apparently I’m not the only one feeling nostalgic for the 1990s as today a “mix tape” called 13 Chambers by an act called Wugazi is being released online.

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I had already planned to write about the X-Men today with the movie premiering last weekend and lots of other X related stuff always on my mind, but Marvel’s announcement that they’re canceling Uncanny X-Men at issue #544 in October took things in an “all new, all different” direction.

I haven’t said much about it here, but a big summer X-Men event called Schism is starting next month under Marvel’s MMXI – Year of the Mutants banner. The premise is that Cyclops and Wolverine will finally reach an irreconcilable point of disagreement and the X-Men will be divided as never before. The creative team of writer Jason Aaron and artists Carlos Pacheco, Frank Cho, Daniel Anuña, Alan Davis and Adam Kubert sounds phenomenal, but as a mini series announced in the midst of three other major events affecting the X-Men line (Fear Itself, X-Men: First to Last and Age of X) I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I certainly didn’t expect it to lead to the “cancellation” of the flagship Uncanny X-Men.

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