Info (Star) Wars

When I was a young lad back in 1977, I used to argue with my friends at the schoolyard during recess over which one of us would get to pretend to be Luke Skywalker as we relived the daring rescue of Princess Leia and the subsequent destruction of the Death Star. We were young, innocent, and simply eager to mimic one of the greatest heroes of modern times. Or at least, that’s what we thought.

What if we were lied to? What if Luke Skywalker – Red Five himself – was part of a secret plot hatched by the entire Skywalker family to destroy the Death Star from the inside, as part of a conspiracy to kill much of the Empire’s top military personnel, profit from the military / industrial complex that would inevitably demand the reconstruction of the Death Star, and eventually seize control of the Imperial government. We’ve heard of the Old Republic… but why haven’t we heard of the New Galactic Order?

I mean, sure: we’ve all seen video of the X-Wing Red Squadron flying the trench and launching their proton torpedoes – we’ve seen that video on film, on VHS videotape, on DVD and on high-definition Blu-Ray so far – but what if it was faked? What if some insidious, shadowy figure behind the scenes kept doctoring that video, to the point of repeatedly tinkering with it, without our consent? All in the interest of muddying our memories of that momentous event, in the pursuit of simply cynical profit?

Clearly, I’m not the only person who thinks this might be the case. Because free-thinking patriot Graham Putnam has created a video that just might change your thinking about the fateful day we witnessed the thousands killed in the tragedy that is the Battle of Yavin IV… and might make you question whether or not The Force, is in fact, with any of us. And you can watch this eye-opening video after the jump.

We are through the looking glass, people! Tarkin was martyred!

I’m A Superhero: Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Many years ago, a secret government organization abducted the man called Logan, a mutant possessing razor-sharp spoilers and the ability to heal from any bad comic…

I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t feel like I needed another Wolverine book. We got the debut of The Savage Wolverine just two months ago, we’ve had Wolverine & The X-Men going since the end of the Schism event about a year and a half ago, and then there’s that good old Wolverine comic that, until recently, had been running since Logan put on an eyepatch and started acting like it would make people without massive traumatic brain injuries think he was a completely different dude with fucked-up hair and adamantium claws back in 1988. Even forgetting the recent Wolverine: The Best There Is series, throw on top of those books Wolverine’s appearances in X-Men, Avengers, New Avengers, and even fucking X-Babies, I wasn’t exactly waiting with bated breath to bring my monthly Wolverine expenditures into the three figures.

But still, I picked up the first issue of writer Paul Cornell’s and artist Alan Davis’s new Wolverine, partially because I generally dug Cornell’s recent work on DC’s Demon Knights, partially because I’ve liked Davis’s work since Captain Britain and more importantly (to me, anyway) Miracleman, and partially because I co-run a comics Web site and part of my job is to read stuff that I don’t necessarily give a damn about and write about it.

And it turns out that that’s not a bad thing, because Wolverine #1 is good. Really fucking good. Better than the opening to about any solo Wolverine story in recent memory.

Particularly that first page, which is one hell of a cool shot across the bow.