Delayed Gratification: New Trailer For The Walking Dead Season 3, Part 2

The television industry is guilty of many egregious and terrible sins – glaring examples include the premature cancellation of WKRP In Cincinatti, the continuing employment of any member of the Kardashian family, and the premature creation of The New WKRP In Cincinatti – but the worst in recent memory is the split cable television series season.

There is nothing worse in the world than waiting for months and months for one of your favorite television programs to premiere – say, around Halloween – and then ramping up and ramping up to a climax… only to be cut short without ceremony or even a kind word, and then told to sit on your hands and wait until they’re Goddamned good and ready to deliver the back few episodes. It is like frequenting a house of ill repute that employs the use of an accurate time clock and an angry bouncer with anger management issues; it remains fun… but circumstances make the entire experience far less fun than it really should be.

And amongst the worst perpetrators of this scheduling crime is The Walking Dead, which is pure hell, as it is about my favorite show currently going. We left it at the mid-season break with Merle reunited with Daryl, The Governor short an eye and everyone generally pissed off at each other, and then boom! It’s December and we get to take a cold shower, limp painfully home and wait until February to see what happens in the back eight episodes.

However, while being the cause of our pain, AMC at least recognizes it and takes a small amount of responsibility for easing the blue balls they themselves created by releasing some teaser trailers to let us know what we’re in for… which, the more I think about it, is actually more like that angry whorehouse bouncer showing you a Hustler as he kicks your pantsless ass out the door.

Ah, well. Be it cruelty or kindness, the latest trailer for the second half of the third season of The Walking Dead is available for your viewing… whatever… after the jump.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be: The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman #1 Review

As someone who was young enough to have the battery of Six Million Dollar Man toys as a kid – somewhere there exists an eight-track recording of me squealing with glee over my Maskatron Christmas gift that would earn me a scornful beating at my local dive bar – I reacted enthusiastically over the original, Kevin Smith plotted The Bionic Man series from Dynamite. As a modernization of Steve Austin’s origin story, which I still maintain is one of the classics of the sci-fi superhero genre, it was exciting and interesting while hitting all the old notes from the TV show that I loved so much as a your child.

The problems has been that you only get to tell an origin story once, unless you’re DC Comics. Since the opening arc, I’ve found that The Bionic Man has floundered by, well, trying to modernize more of the old Six Million Dollar Man story elements. Specifically, Bigfoot. Yes, there has been a lot of Bionic Bigfoot in The Bionic Man in recent months, and I’m sorry, but it’s not 1977 anymore. If you’re gonna have a Bigfoot in a story and it doesn’t pop the head off that hick in the “Gone Squatchin'” hat that I cackle at every week on The Soup, you’re missing the only opportunity that makes any sense for Bigfoot in 2013.

Because the problem endemic to any superhero story is that, eventually, that hero needs a superpowered villain to fight. And if it’s 1978 and you only have a TV-level special effects budget, sure: why not Bigfoot? He’s a gorilla suit with some wires sticking out of it. But these are comic books, with an unlimited special effects slush fund, so to force these characters to battle the bad guys whipped up by people who thought that wide polyester lapels and disco were good ideas has just left me cold.

So enter Dynamite’s The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman miniseries, where writer Keith Champagne takes the obvious choice for a superpowered antagonist and apparently embraces the old superhero comic trope of heroes fighting before joining forces… maybe. It’s too early to tell how the two characters, who never meet in the first issue, will interact, but at least there’s no arbitrary threat with bionics slapped into it for them to fight, right?

Right?