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The first two episodes of Marvel’s “Daredevil: Born Again” have been unveiled to members of the press, and the first reactions for the Disney+ series are glowing.
Screen Rant on-camera reporter Liam Crowley praised the show on X, writing, “[‘Daredevil: Born Again’] has the best pilot of any MCU series thus far, and it’s not close. Edge of seat energy w/ audible gasps throughout. Charlie [Cox] & Vincent [D’Onofrio] haven’t lost a step, Benson & Moorhead bring the sauce. Above all else, it’s EPISODIC. We might be back.”
Sean O’Connell, managing editor of Cinema Blend, agreed. He wrote, “Holy Hell’s Kitchen! [‘Daredevil: Born Again’] opens with a lengthy, devastating sequence that screams, ‘This is just as brutal as Netflix.’ From there, the 2 episodes lay out a layered story about cops, vigilantes, and guilt. Read DEVIL’S REIGN as a refresh. Off to a GREAT start!”
Erik Davis, managing director of Fandango, echoed the sentiments of Crowley and O’Connell. He wrote that the first two episodes are “among the strongest starts for a Marvel Studios TV show to date [in my opinion] – the first two episodes are terrific, setting up a story that is part court procedural and part all-out brawling. There’s a fight in EP 1 that is all done in one shot w/ a wild ending – really kicks off the series in a memorable way.”
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DC Studios’ Slate Evolution: Some Projects Put on Backburner as Others Are Full Steam Ahead – Hollywood Reporter
Two years after James Gunn and Peter Safran unveiled an ambitious slate, the duo offer updates on what they’ve found along the way (‘Clayface’) and what has hit “speed bumps” (‘Waller’ and ‘The Authority’).
In 1984, DC Comics hit a renaissance period, putting out titles that were really connecting with readers. There was even a well-known slogan from that era: “The New DC. There’s no stopping us now.”
Just over 40 years later, a case could be made that the same mantra is coursing through DC Studios, the Warner Bros. Discovery division focused on bringing the popular comics characters to screens big and small.
“We don’t want these characters to die out,” said DC Studios co-head James Gunn at a press event Friday. “We want to bring new stories and new life, we want to introduce these characters to new generations. And I think we are doing that, slowly but surely.”
DC Studios, which Gunn runs with Peter Safran, is just over two years old. And its big test will be this summer’s Superman, which Gunn wrote and directed as the division’s inagural fim.
But Gunn and Safran are not waiting to see how Superman flies before making next moves. The duo are moving with the speedy deliberation of the Flash to get as many projects going as possible. Maybe before anyone can stop them.
The space fantasy Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is halfway through production in London. Lanterns, a HBO series featuring heroes Hal Jordan and John Stewart, began shooting in Los Angeles last week.
Clayface, a body horror thriller based on the Batman villain finally found its director and will shoot this summer for a fall 2026 release. Sgt. Rock, a period war movie to be directed by Luca Guadagnino, is actively looking for its star. And an animated movie titled Dynamic Duo is in pre-production.
This August, season two of action comedy series The Peacemaker will debut on Max. Smaller but key steps for the identity of the division included acquiring the documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which in the last several weeks won awards from BAFTA and the PGA; and unveiling its first MAX animated series, Creature Commandos.
At the meeting with journalists Friday, the WBD’s Burbank lot’s own dynamic duo gave updates on the slate and explained the ethos and strategy driving their decision-making.
Gunn and Safran took over in November 2022 after WBD head David Zaslav made it a priority to revitalize the storied IP factory after the merger of Warner Media and Discovery. Prior to that, DC had fractured into several fiefdoms, with actors, filmmakers and producers competing for a piece of the pie. It was a dark time for the brand.
“The DC brand was being defined by different creative teams at the company, each was pursuing their own distinct vision of the characters, the story… the result was not one DCU but many,” summed up Safran. “This fracture proved very challenging to consumers and it chipped away at the identity of the brand.”
Fron the duo’s perspective, a lot of work has already been done, even ahead of Superman’s release. “We’ve unified the brand, we’ve greenlit five theatrical films, made three live action series, and are producing five animated series,” he said. (My Adventures with Green Lantern and Starfire are two of the animated titles.)
The goal for the company is to make two live-action films and one animated movie per year while also producing two live-action and two animated series for Max per year.
The company aims to work in multiple genres and sizes of projects. “We don’t serve one kind of audience, so why make one kind of movie?” Safran said, adding, “Working in a multitude of genres, it affords us the opportunity to allocate resources where they can make the biggest impact. We budget according to the demands of the story, and the revenue expectations of each title.”
And while there will be connectivity between movies and shows to give that “universe” feel, the duo don’t want each entry to feel like a chapter to a larger story.
“We remain steadfast that each of these projects work as a standalone project,” said Gunn. “So you can see Superman, you can watch Lanterns, without having to see both of them. Although if you can, there will be special things in there for people who have seen both.”
One thing that is the undercurrent driving the division is the writing of the scripts.
“We are writer-driven,” declared Gunn. “We are not going to greenlight or put anything into production until we are happy with the script….It is hard enough making a good movie with a good script , it’s almost impossible to make a movie with a script that you’re writing on the run.”
Scripts that weren’t up to the duo’s snuff have displaced other projects on the slate. And scripts that hadn’t even been dreamt of have risen to the top of the production pile, with Rock and Clayface being prime examples.
“We had no plans making a Clayface movie,” noted Gunn. Even after scribe Mike Flanagan pitched what they felt was a great idea, there was still a wait and see attitude. “He turned in a script and it’s one of the best scripts that we’ve read.”
Said Safran, “We’ve laid out internally a plan but we’re happy to pivot as we discover things in the making of Superman or Supergirl or scripts being written. There’s a flexibility built into it even though we know where the larger story is headed.”
And while Gunn and Safran didn’t elaborate, they did say they had a six-year plan that would include an Avengers: Endgame-style culmination — a reference to Marvel Studios’ 2019 climactic movie, which Gunn worked on as an executive producer thanks to his role as director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
The execs acknowledged that some projects on the initial DC slate they unveiled in January 2023 have met challenges tha couldn’t bedevil Brainiac himself.
“We’ve taken a couple of cracks at it but still haven’t been able land,” Safran says about Waller, a Peacemaker/Suicide Squad spinoff that was to star Viola Davis. “Waller has been a bumpy road.”
A series on time traveling hero Booster Gold was waiting for a showrunner to make time for it but “maybe he fell out of love, maybe he got busy,” he says, “but we had to pivot.”
The Authority, a superhero group created in the late 1990s, had a script that “has had a harder time coming along,” notes Gunn. “It hasn’t been much a priority.”
Additionally, James Mangold’s take on horror hero Swamp Thing also seems to have cooled. “We talk about it occasionally,” Gunn said.
And then there’s the Batman problem. Or several.
Despite strong efforts, any new movie featuring the Dark Knight seems years away. It’s been three years since Matt Reeves’ The Batman introduced Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne in March 2022, making over $772 million during the pandemic no less, but a sequel seems no closer than before.
“He is yet to turn in a full script but what we have read so far is incredibly encouraging,” Safran said.
DC Studios is also concurrently developing The Brave and the Bold, centered on Batman and his son, Damian Wayne. But although it was announced in 2023 that Andy Muschietti would direct the feature and be a producer on it, the filmmaker behind The Flash and It movies seems to be at arms length from the project.
“We’re developing the Brave and Bold script right now and he’ll be the first one to see it,” Safran said, referring to Muschietti while also strongly implying the filmmaker is not involved in the project’s development.
Gunn went so far as to say he was now the driving force of the title. “Everybody knows I love Batman and it’s important to me so I’m working very closely with the writer on Brave and the Bold,” he said. The writer’s name was not revealed.
Gunn poured cold water that Pattinson would star as Batman in Brave and the Bold and bristled at the word “sharing” the actor with Reeves. He said there were no serious conversations about the actor continuing his role into the broader DCU rather than staying in the separate universe of Reeves’ world.
The small screen also seems to have trouble in the Batcave. While The Penguin, a spinoff of Reeves’ Batman that continues to steal award after award (on Sunday, star Colin Farrell won the SAG Award for best actor in a limited series), there seems to be no plan for a follow-up. When asked by a second season, Safran plainly said “We don’t know. There are a lot of moving pieces, probably most importantly Colin himself. And 800 pounds of makeup.”
Right now, however, the focus is back on Superman. Gunn is returning to Atlanta this week to continue the post-production process on the movie. And while there aren’t any major plans for DC Studios to be at San Diego Comic -Con, the division plans on making a splash at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theatre owners at the top of April.
And while some may wonder if the character, an embodiment of so-called American values or human values, can sidestep cultural debates, Gunn believes he’s the right Superman because he’s not part of the cultural moment.
“I think he’s the right Superman because he is a character that stands for something that is solid, stands for basic human morals, basic human integrity, basic belief in protecting others and protecting the weak being good to people and being honest,” he said. “People are looking for heroes right now. They are looking for values of goodness, looking for people who are good and decent human beings. And Superman is that.”
And they will leave no stone unturned in order to get word out on their first movie, adding that the full weight of WBD is behind Superman.
“DZ (David Zaslav) loves what we’re doing, loves the movie, and has really rallied the entire company behind Superman for this summer,” Safran explained. “You’ve seen what can happen when Warner Bros. Discover gets together behind a Barbie or a Beetlejuice or a Wonka or Kong. And that’s how its being treated right now for Superman. Everything that DZ has promised us two years ago when we got the job, it’s all been a reality.”
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Oh my god, the SNL – 50 special
Kate McKinnon owns that scene with Pedro Pascal and Woody Harrelson.
Martha Stewart joins and chews it up with Kate.
I was crying laughing.
(There Jon Hamm and Aidy Bryant too.)Edir: Oh my god, sorry
That’s Meryl Streep (not Martha).
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“The entire franchise’s inability to balance substance with pleasure crashes into its inept conclusion. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve hated an ending to a movie more in recent memory than this one.”
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EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has set Jeremy Strong to star in The Boys From Brazil, with the Ira Levin Nazi conspiracy novel being adapted as a TV series by Peter Morgan, who will be executive producer along with Suzanne Mackie of Orchid Pictures.
It will be the first series for Strong since Succession, and the first for Morgan since The Crown. It also comes as Strong is in the Best Supporting Actor Oscar race for his turn as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. It will be run through Netflix and Netflix UK, I hear.
Netflix declined comment.
Levin’s novel was turned into the 1978 hit film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and sources tell me Strong will play the role of Lieberman. That is the famous Nazi hunter — Laurence Olivier played the role in the film — who is drawn to investigate a conspiracy spun to him by a young Nazi hunter (played by Steve Guttenberg in the original). Lieberman is highly skeptical of the young man’s claims that notorious Dr. Josef Mengele is in Paraguay, starting on a diabolical plan to reestablish the Third Reich through a cloning plan put in place after Germany lost World War II. When the young Nazi hunter is killed, Lieberman heads to Paraguay to uncover a truth that turns out to be horrific. Gregory Peck played Mengele in the film, which was nominated for five Oscars.
Strong as Cohn and Sebastian Stan as young Donald Trump are both Oscar-nominated for The Apprentice, a drama about the formative years of the wannabe real estate titan who is taken under the wing of Cohn, the polarizing lawyer who was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s right-hand man in the Communist witch hunt that established the Hollywood Blacklist. Strong just wrapped Deliver Me From Nowhere, playing manager Jon Landau opposite Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen in the Scott Cooper-directed film about the existential crisis that led Springsteen to write and record his seminal album Nebraska.
The action of The Boys from Brazil took place in the ’70s, but the specter of Hitler and antisemitism still looms large, even with Kanye West paying for a Super Bowl ad on Sunday that pointed viewers to a website selling swastika shirts.
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We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us forces a young girl to reckon with her father’s villainous legacy in a world of “superspies, power hungry madmen, and delusional world leaders” – GamesRadar/Newsarama
It’s always a tough realization to figure out that our parents are human beings with their own faults and frailties. But what happens when your dad is actually a murderous mad scientist? How do you grapple with the mistakes and decisions of a parent who is a full-on supervillain?
That’s the question at the heart of writer Matthew Rosenberg, artists Stefano Landini, Roman Titov, and Jason Wordie, and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s new Image Comics title We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us, which blends James Bond-esque super-spy action with a heartfelt family drama about a daughter who is coming to grips with the knowledge that her father is a villain.
With the first issue of We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us arriving on March 26, Newsarama caught up with Rosenberg to dig into the characters and the world of the new title, while also discussing the deeper themes that drive the tale of Annalise and her reckoning with her father.
Click link for interview…
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I guess 4 bands was too good to be true.
Nitzer Ebb is on the tour up to May 12th, then Thrill Kill Kult takes over their slot on May 13th and on (what I will see).
Still, that’s a good line-up and I will go at a decent time to catch all 3.2 users thanked author for this post.
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Whoa! Looks like I’ll be getting out of the apartment more than once this year!
Got tickets for Nine Inch Nails in August, now Ministry is coming in May.
This is at a more intimate arena (Commodore Ballroom) as well, which is a plus.
A large group of us getting tickets tomorrow.
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I guess we’ll find out soon, but I think some behind the scenes are nervous in the “somewhat” to “oh fuck” range.
Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World Might Be A Big Box Office Gamble – SlashFilm
… is hitting theaters next weekend, and it’s a lock to deliver 2025’s first blockbuster opening, which theaters could sorely use. The question is, can it be a big success like a pre-pandemic superhero film? Or is Marvel Studios rolling the dice with this one?
Director Julius Onah’s take on “Captain America” is currently eyeing an opening weekend in the $81 to $98 million range. That’s more or less in line with earlier tracking numbers, which had the film taking in around $90 million, per The Hollywood Reporter. On the surface, that may seem underwhelming since we’re accustomed to Marvel Cinematic Universe entries clearing $100 million in their debuts with ease. But that is not some arbitrary measure of success.
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I wanna see Mahomes get his bell rung on his first possession.
I’m talking tweety birds circling his head kind of out of it.Fuck, Trump is at the game?
I wanna see a sniper…1 user thanked author for this post.
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From the Brubaker/Philips thread:
The Knives: A Criminal Book – Sept. 9th
HC – 200 pgs.
THE FIRST NEW CRIMINAL BOOK IN FIVE YEARS!
With the Prime Video adaptation premiering soon, crime comic grandmasters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips return to their most acclaimed series with a new standalone graphic novel: The Knives.
A sprawling Criminal epic, The Knives is the most ambitious tale Brubaker and Phillips have ever tackled. Three dark journeys wind around each other over a decade, like sharks hunting for a kill.
Cartoonist Jacob Kurtz goes to Hollywood in the era of peak TV to work on an adaptation of his comic strip, only to find himself caught up in the life of his aging aunt and the vultures circling her estate. Angie was raised at the Undertow, but now everything she loves has been taken from her. She’s on the streets with vengeance on her mind, her eyes set on the city’s kingpin. And finally, Tracy Lawless is home from the Special Forces, finally a civilian again, but he’s in bad shape and this city has always brought out the worst in him.
These three tales collide in The Knives a breathtaking noir story about greed, ambition, heartbreak, and blood ties. A must-have for all Brubaker and Phillips fans!
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The Knives: A Criminal Book – Sept. 9th
HC – 200 pgs.
THE FIRST NEW CRIMINAL BOOK IN FIVE YEARS!
With the Prime Video adaptation premiering soon, crime comic grandmasters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips return to their most acclaimed series with a new standalone graphic novel: The Knives.
A sprawling Criminal epic, The Knives is the most ambitious tale Brubaker and Phillips have ever tackled. Three dark journeys wind around each other over a decade, like sharks hunting for a kill.
Cartoonist Jacob Kurtz goes to Hollywood in the era of peak TV to work on an adaptation of his comic strip, only to find himself caught up in the life of his aging aunt and the vultures circling her estate. Angie was raised at the Undertow, but now everything she loves has been taken from her. She’s on the streets with vengeance on her mind, her eyes set on the city’s kingpin. And finally, Tracy Lawless is home from the Special Forces, finally a civilian again, but he’s in bad shape and this city has always brought out the worst in him.
These three tales collide in The Knives a breathtaking noir story about greed, ambition, heartbreak, and blood ties. A must-have for all Brubaker and Phillips fans!
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“Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars.”
Astronomers have detected the largest black hole-launched jet ever seen in the early universe.
The twin-lobed jet that existed when the universe was just 1.2 billion years old stretches out for an incredible 200,000 light-years at the very least, making it twice as long as the width of the Milky Way.
Even more surprisingly, the black hole that powers the quasar from which this jet erupts, designated J1601+3102, is relatively small. (For a quasar-powering supermassive black hole, that is. It still has a mass equivalent to 450 million suns).
“Interestingly, the quasar powering this massive radio jet does not have an extreme black hole mass compared to other quasars,” Anniek Gloudemans, team leader and a researcher at NOIRLab, said in a statement. “This seems to indicate that you don’t necessarily need an exceptionally massive black hole or accretion rate to generate such powerful jets in the early universe.”
Painting a picture of early supermassive black hole jets
Though all large galaxies are thought to have a central supermassive black hole with a mass millions or even billions of times that of the sun, not all of these cosmic titans power quasars.
Quasars are formed when supermassive black holes are surrounded by a wealth of gas and dust upon which they can feed. This material generates a flattened, swirling cloud of gas and dust called an accretion disk around the black hole. The tremendous mass of the supermassive black hole generates tidal forces and immense friction in the accretion disk that superheats it and causes it to glow brightly.
Not all of the material in an accretion disk is fed into the central black hole; some is channeled to its poles by powerful magnetic fields. These particles are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and are blasted out from both poles as highly collimated twin jets.
These jets can be seen at great distances by radio telescopes and are a common sight in the local universe. Thus far, however, they’ve been somewhat elusive in the early universe when the 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos was less than 10% of its current age.
An illustration of a supermassive black hole in the early cosmos blasting out relativistic jets.The jet erupting from J1601+3102 was first observed by the international Low-Frequency ARray (LOFAR) Telescope, a network of radio telescopes based across Europe.
This detection was followed up on by the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS), while the Hobby Eberly Telescope attempted to observe it in visible light.
“We were searching for quasars with strong radio jets in the early universe, which helps us understand how and when the first jets are formed and how they impact the evolution of galaxies,” Gloudemans said. “It’s only because this object is so extreme that we can observe it from Earth, even though it’s really far away.
“This object shows what we can discover by combining the power of multiple telescopes that operate at different wavelengths.”
The largest radio jet ever found in the early universe as seen by an array of telescopes.One key aim of these follow-up observations was to determine the characteristics of this quasar and the supermassive black hole that powers it.
Thus far, the team has been able to determine that the black hole has a mass of 450 million solar masses, but they also hope to learn the rate at which it is swallowing, or accreting, matter.
The team also found that the jets aren’t quite twins. Not only is one shorter than the other, but one jet lobe is brighter than its counterpart. This could indicate that an extreme environment around the supermassive black hole affects its jets.
“When we started looking at this object, we were expecting the southern jet to just be an unrelated nearby source and for most of it to be small. That made it quite surprising when the LOFAR image revealed large, detailed radio structures,” team member Frits Sweijen from Durham University said. “The nature of this distant source makes it difficult to detect at higher radio frequencies, demonstrating the power of LOFAR on its own and its synergies with other instruments.”
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Ozzy Osbourne to reunite with Black Sabbath for farewell concert – CNN
CNN
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Ozzy Osbourne has announced that the original members of Black Sabbath will play a concert together for the first time in 20 years.In a post on X, Osbourne revealed that he would reunite with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward to play one final show at Villa Park in Birmingham, England on July 5.
“It’s my time to go Back to the Beginning… time for me to give back to the place where I was born,” said Osbourne. “How blessed am I to do it with the help of people whom I love. Birmingham is the true home of metal. Birmingham Forever.”
Osborne will play his own short set in the multi-artist show before joining with the band for his “final bow,” the announcement said. Other musicians performing at “Back to the Beginning” include Metallica, Slayer, Lamb of God, Alice in Chains and Anthrax.
“This will be the greatest heavy metal show ever,” the post quoted the concert’s music director, Tom Morello, as saying.
Formed in Birmingham in 1968, Black Sabbath went on to become one of the most successful metal bands of all time, selling more than 75 million albums worldwide, according to Osbourne’s post.
Back in 2022, he surprised attendees at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games with a mini Black Sabbath reunion, rocking out on stage with Iommi.
Though Osbourne had a farewell tour set to begin in 2023, he was forced to cancel the shows due to poor health.
“My singing voice is fine. However, after three operations, stem cell treatments, endless physical therapy, and most recently groundbreaking Cybernics (HAL) Treatment, my body is still physically weak,” he said in a statement at the time.
Osbourne, 76, later told Rolling Stone that he would “die a happy man” if he could perform in one more show to express his gratitude to fans from the stage.
His wife, Sharon Osbourne, hinted at the upcoming concert in an interview with Rolling Stone last year, telling the magazine that Osbourne was ready to give his fans a sendoff in his hometown.
Tickets for the concert go on sale February 14, with profits going to various charities.
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Giant planet or ‘failed star?’ Newfound mystery world blurs the lines
An artist’s impression of the exoplanet Gaia-4b orbiting its star, tracing the shape of its orbit.The planet, if it is indeed a planet, is one of the most massive ever detected around a small star.
One of the largest exoplanets to be found orbiting a relatively low-mass star has been discovered, thanks to the way the planet’s gravity drags its star around on its journey through space.
The planet is the fourth world to be spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which was designed to map a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, cataloguing their masses, luminosities, temperatures and motions through space.
It’s this latter property that led to the discovery of the giant exoplanet Gaia-4b. It orbits a star 244 light-years away and is a super-sized gas giant with a mass 11.8 times greater than that of Jupiter.
“With an orbital period of 570 days, it is a relatively cold gas giant planet,” said Guðmundur Stefánsson of the University of Amsterdam in a statement. This orbital period places it a little closer to its star than Mars is to the sun, but since its star is less massive and less luminous than ours, Gaia-4b is therefore probably not as warm as Mars.
Yet, by being so massive, Gaia-4b exerts a fierce gravitational pull on its star, an unremarkable orange K-class dwarf with just 64% the mass of our sun. As Gaia plotted the star’s proper motion in the sky, it noticed that the star’s track through space wobbled slightly, as though being pulled to and fro by something in a kind of corkscrew motion across the sky. Astronomers call this technique of detecting exoplanets the astrometric method because it requires the tracking of a star’s position and motion, which is a field known as astrometry.
In fact, Gaia has noticed this wobbling motion for numerous stars, so Stefánsson led a team of astronomers to follow up on these corkscrew systems.
“However, the motion of these stars is not necessarily due to a planet,” said Stefánsson. “Instead, the star might be a pair of stars that are too close together for Gaia to recognize them as separate objects.”
To determine which is the case, Stefánsson’s team employed a trio of instruments: the NEID (pronounced ‘nu-id’) spectrograph on the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, as well as the Habitable-zone Planet Finder on the 10-meter Hobby Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas and the FIES spectrograph on the 2.6-meter Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands.
These spectrographs are able to measure the radial velocity of a star — how a star wobbles on its axis as it orbits its center of mass shared with an orbiting companion. The greater the mass of the companion, the greater the radial velocity Doppler shift in the star’s light.
How the astrometric technique can detect the corkscrew motion of stars with companions.Stefánsson’s team had identified 28 candidates in the Gaia data. Of those, 21 were shown to be binary star systems. Five remain inconclusive. One is a star orbited by a brown dwarf — an object that straddles the line between planet and star — now named Gaia-5b, and one turned out to be a planet, Gaia-4b.
Some astronomers might argue, however, that Gaia-4b could also be classed as a brown dwarf; the dividing lines between planet and brown dwarf are murky. Some astronomers define the distinction as depending upon how the object formed. Did it come together through the accretion of rocky material to assemble a giant super-Earth-size core around which humongous amounts of gas wrapped itself, like the formation of Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system? Or did it form like a star, through the gravitational collapse of a gas cloud following the fragmentation of the disk of gas that encircled and fed the main star?
Other researchers distinguish between planets and brown dwarfs depending upon whether they are able to engage in nuclear fusion reactions of deuterium for a short time (fully fledged stars use hydrogen in their nuclear reactions). But, as Stefánsson’s team note, it’s not really possible to tell what’s going on inside these distant bodies.
A third way is to distinguish between planets and brown dwarfs through their mass. A mass 13 times greater than Jupiter’s is usually considered the lower limit for a brown dwarf, but there’s a certain arbitrariness to this.
Gaia-5b, which orbits a red dwarf star 134 light-years away from Earth, clocks in at 20.9 times the mass of Jupiter, and so it seems safe to call that object a brown dwarf.
Gaia-4b is more troublesome. Purely by mass, it is categorized as a planet. However, Stefánsson’s team looked at the abundance of heavy elements in the central star’s composition, finding its chemistry to be pretty similar to that of our sun. Rocky planets, or the rocky cores of giant planets, need a ready supply of heavy elements in order to form. While our sun and Gaia-4 seem to have enough heavy elements to produce Jupiter-mass planets, it seems questionable that an object 11.8 times the mass of Jupiter could form from the available resources. Stefánsson therefore suggested that this points to Gaia-4b having formed from gravitational collapse following disk fragmentation, where some kind of instability effectively broke the disk of gas around the central star.
Does that mean Gaia-4b should really be called a brown dwarf rather than a planet? If we’re going to call it a planet, then it is one of the most massive planets found around a lower-mass star — such worlds are rare simply because low-mass star systems don’t have lots of extra material available to build giant planets. On the matter of planet or brown dwarf, Stefánsson’s team remain open-minded.
Although Gaia shut down in January following 12 years of observations, there are still reams of data to be analysed from the mission. That data is released in big packets; the most recent was Data Release 3 (DR3) in 2022 (and supplemented with additional data in 2023), and DR4 is expected in 2026.
There are “more planets to come as roughly the last year of data is analyzed,” said Jayadev Rajagopal, a member of Stefánsson’s team at the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, in a different statement. “This work is a harbinger of the future where Gaia discoveries of planets and brown dwarfs will need to be confirmed, or rejected, by NEID data.”
The first two planets to be discovered by Gaia, Gaia-1b and Gaia-2b, were both found when Gaia detected them transiting their star. The third planet, Gaia-3b, was a little more complicated in that it was detected astrometrically orbiting one of the stars in a binary system. In total, only around 200 planets have thus far been detected via the astrometric method, but with Gaia DR4 on the horizon, and Stefánsson’s team on the case, they may soon be joined by many more.
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Just saying, the Kill or be Killed Compendium is on the list for next week.
Do any members of the choir not own?
Anyone that does own can still start birthday and Christmas shopping now (this and a handgun in the stocking could make for the best X-mas ever!)Edit: huh, Amazon.com and .ca both say February 25th
KILL OR BE KILLED COMPENDIUM TP (MR)
(W) Ed Brubaker (A) Sean Phillips, Elizabeth Breitweiser (CA) Sean Phillips
BRUBAKER and PHILLIPS bestselling series is finally collected under one cover! Grad student Dylan must kill one person who deserves it every month, and the deeper he gets in, the more he realizes how many people there are that deserve it.
Catcher in the Rye meets** Death Wish** in a dark take on the vigilante genre that became a cracked reflection of the world around us.
This deluxe paperback edition contains 20 issues of KILL OR BE KILLED, as well as the covers and a new afterword by ED BRUBAKER.Retail: $59.99
02/12/2025
ISBN: 9781534333949
Product Code: 1124IM268
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Redcoat Volume 1: Einstein and the Immortal – Mar. 18th
TP – 240 pgs.
Redcoat Volume 2: American Icons – Nov. 18th
TP – 152 pgs.
Hyde Street Volume 1: Keeping Score – Oct. 14th
TP – 168 pgs.
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Geiger Volume 2: The Nuclear Knight – Feb. 18th
TP – 176 pgs.
Geiger Volume 3 – Aug. 19th
TP – 160 pgs.
Geiger Volume 4 – Dec 16th
TP – 144 pgs.
Geiger Volume 2 Deluxe Hardcover – Dec. 23rd
HC – 256 pgs.
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Yup (although beaten to the punch by Dan)
Red Ghost (Fantastic Four (1967)) | Marvel Animated Universe Wiki | Fandom https://search.app/V2yaiKg5Exnx9XyG7
Marvel Animation Age – The Fantastic Four (1967) – Episode Review – The Red Ghost https://search.app/cmR6sUK8Vo2ZBPcB7
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is this the teaser for the teaser?
My friend went off on me for sending that out.
I responded it’s merely the “Teaser Trailer Announcement Trailer”.What the real bullshit is there wasn’t any “Teaser Trailer Announcement Trailer Foreshadow” the day before.
Like seriously, how can I plan my life without knowing whats coming?2 users thanked author for this post.
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The Boys and John Wick creators will join J. Michael Straczynski, and a host of other big name creatives at Marvel legend Joe Quesada’s new imprint, Amazing Comics – GamesRadar/Newsarama
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The international imprint is a part of Mad Cave Studios and Dupuis
It was announced at SDCC 2024 that comics legend Joe Quesada is heading up a brand new imprint named Amazing Comics, created in association with Mad Cave Studios and publishing house Dupuis. Now we know some of the creators who will be joining Quesada on the project – and it’s a helluva list!
“Amazing Comics has been living in my creative journal since 2005 – I always knew it was in my future,” Quesada said in a statement released to time with the Angoulême International Comics Festival. “Having the opportunity to help rebuild Marvel and later become part of the Disney family was one of the greatest highlights of my career. It allowed me to play in almost every creative sandbox imaginable and collaborate with some of the most brilliant talents on the planet. Now, I get to take everything I’ve learned over two-plus decades at Marvel and pour it into Amazing Comics, bringing many of those incredible creators along with me. Our mission is simple: to tell great stories with stunning art and to build a true community between Amazing and our readers.”
Here’s the full list of creators that have been announced so far:
Derek Kolstad: The creator and writer of John Wick and Nobody
J. Michael Straczynski: Long-running Marvel comics writer, as well as the creator of Babylon 5, and the co-writer of the TV series Sense8
Christopher Priest: Legendary and influential writer of Black Panther and Deadpool comics for Marvel
Garth Ennis: The writer and co-creator of The Boys and Preacher
Steven Paul Judd: A writer on Dark Winds and the MCU’s Echo TV show
Ethan Sacks: Writer of Star Wars comics at Marvel, and the co-writer of A Haunted Girl at Image
Charles Dorfman: The writer and director of Barbarians, and producer on The Lost Daughter
Ryan Stegman: Artist on Venom: The King in Black, X-Men, Vanish, and Missionary
Esad Ribic: Artist on Marvel’s Secret Wars, Silver Surfer: Requiem, X-Men, and Thor
Ronan Toulhoat: Artist on graphic novels Daemon and Dog headAlthough the titles these creators are working on remain secret for now, we do know that the first book we’ll see from Amazing Comics is the previously-announced Disciple, which will be co-written by Quesada and Dorfman, and illustrated by Quesada and inker Wade von Grawbadger, alongside colorist Richard Isanove, and letterer Joe Caramagna.
“I’m beyond excited about Disciple – not just because it’s my return to self-publishing but because I get to team up with Charles on something truly special,” said Quesada. “Inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Disciple isn’t just a retelling – it’s a full-on expansion, building a world around the original story that’s packed with history, intrigue, and all the drama you’d expect, but with some wicked surprises along the way. We’re keeping all the classic Shakespearean names, but make no mistake – this story is going to take some wild, unexpected turns that’ll have readers hooked and guessing every step of the way!”
“Wait, Bandes Desinée meets North American comics meets Joe Quesada?!,” said Mad Cave Studios president Mark Irwin in a statement. “I can’t wait, and I bet it’s truly Amazing!”
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If you look closely, you can see the Grim Reaper standing behind RFK Jr.
Why he’s the choice for Department of Health and Human Services is, well it’s par for the current course, just baffling to regular people.
When he was getting frustrated I kept thinking he was going to pull his mask off.
I wonder which member of the Thunderbolts/Legion of Doom he is?1 user thanked author for this post.
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An interstellar visitor may have changed the course of 4 solar system planets, study suggests
An object eight times the mass of Jupiter may have swooped around the sun, coming superclose to Mars’ present-day orbit before shoving four of the solar system’s planets onto a different course.
A planet-size object that possibly once visited the solar system may have permanently changed our cosmic neighborhood by warping the orbits of the four outer planets, a new study suggests. The findings may shed light on why these planets’ paths have certain peculiar features.
For decades, astronomers have debated how the solar system’s planets formed. However, most hypotheses agree on the type of orbit the planets should have: circles that are arranged concentrically around the sun and lie on the same plane. (If you viewed them edge-on, you would see only a line.) However, none of the eight planets, including Earth, have perfectly circular orbits. Plus, the planets’ paths don’t lie precisely on the same plane.
Compared with Mercury (whose orbit, within our planetary family, is the most egg-shaped and tilted), the paths of the four outer giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — show minor deviations from the ideal orbits. Yet explaining these niggling discrepancies has been challenging, said Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a co-author of the new study.
“[T]he puzzle for theoretical astrophysics has long been to figure out how the orbits later became out-of-round and tilted from their mean plane by not too much and not too little,” she wrote in an email to Live Science. While previous research has focused on how interactions between these planets reshaped their orbits, Malhotra said, “these hypotheses are not consistent with certain important details of the observed orbits.”
An interstellar visitor
To tackle this puzzle, Malhotra and colleagues considered a less-examined scenario: that a visiting star-size object tweaked these planets’ paths around 4 billion years ago.Using computer models of the four outer planets, the team carried out 50,000 simulations of such flybys, each over 20 million years, while altering certain parameters of each visitor, including its mass, speed and how close it approached the sun. The researchers also expanded their search compared with previous studies by considering objects much smaller than stars — as tiny, in fact, as Jupiter. They also looked at situations with superclose passes, focusing on scenarios where the interloper came within 20 astronomical units (AU) of the sun. (One AU is approximately 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers, roughly the average distance from Earth to the sun.)
Although most simulations created conditions very unlike the current solar system, the researchers found that in approximately 1% of the simulations, the visitor’s passage altered the giant planets’ orbits to approximately their current state. The interlopers in these near matches dove straight into the solar system, traveling way past Uranus’ orbit, with some even grazing Mercury’s path. And they were relatively tiny, ranging from two to 50 times the mass of Jupiter.
“This range includes planetary masses to brown dwarf masses,” Malhotra said. (Brown dwarfs, often called “failed stars,” are odd celestial bodies that are heavier than planets but not as massive as stars.)
Because many close-matching simulations had the planet-like object swooping through the inner solar system, the researchers created an additional 10,000 simulations including the terrestrial planets as well. In these cases, too, the flybys that had previously altered the giant planets’ orbits to their present states recreated the solar system’s current appearance.
The simulation that produced the most realistic results involved an object eight times Jupiter’s mass swooping as close as 1.69 AU from the sun. That puts it only slightly farther than Mars’ current orbit of 1.5 AU from the sun.
The simulations show that just one substellar object flyby was sufficient to alter the giant planets’ trajectories. Because observations suggest substellar bodies are fairly numerous in the cosmos, visits by such objects may be more commonplace than flybys of stars.
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The climate on such a world must be beyond bizarre.
A super-Earth planet that dips in and out of its star’s habitable zone has been discovered just 19.7 light-years away.
The planet, known as HD 20794d, gets farther out from its star than Mars is from the sun and, on the other end of its orbit, as close as Venus. Each orbit the planet begins out beyond the habitable zone, where it is too cold for liquid water, before passing right through the habitable zone to its inner edge where temperatures rise for a short period, before the planet moves back out again.
The planet provides a brilliant target for the next generation of telescopes to probe its atmosphere, and for scientists to test the extreme limits of planetary habitability. “Its luminosity and proximity make it an ideal candidate for future telescopes whose mission will be to observe the atmospheres of exoplanets directly,” said Xavier Dumusque of the University of Geneva in a statement. Dumusque is a member of the team that discovered and characterized the new planet.
HD 20794d has a mass 6.6 times greater than Earth and was found by astronomers using the ESPRESSO and HARPS spectrographs on the European Southern Observatory’s telescopes in Chile. These instruments measure what’s termed ‘radial velocity’ — the amount by which a star wobbles around the center of mass that it shares with its planets. In general, the larger the wobble, the greater the mass of the planet. It’s the wobbling star that has betrayed the existence of HD 20794d — astronomers have not directly observed HD 20794d, nor taken a picture of it or even seen it in transit yet.
The star in question, HD 20794 — also known as 82 Eridani — is a yellow G6-type star that’s slightly dimmer and less massive than our own sun. It’s also relatively bright in our night sky, shining at magnitude 4.3, which is bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. In contrast, many of the stars hosting exoplanets are too faint to be seen with the naked eye, which marks out HD 20794 as something special.
Because of how close the HD 20794 system is to us, it has been well observed over the past 20 years and has a somewhat mixed history when it comes to exoplanets. HD 20794d orbits its star with two other super-Earth planets, designated b and c, which orbit their star every 18.3 and 89.6 days, respectively. These were discovered in 2011 by a team of Geneva astronomers including Dumusque. At the same time, the team found evidence for a third planet, with an orbital period of 40 days, but this was later shown to be false. Only now has the real third planet become apparent in the data.
“We analyzed the data for years, carefully eliminating sources of contamination,” said Michael Cretignier of the University of Oxford. Cretignier was previously at Geneva, where he developed an algorithm called YARARA to carefully search the data and pick out an exoplanet’s faint radial velocity signal from the background noise. YARARA proved vital in the effort to confirm HD 20974d as being real.
What’s most remarkable about this new planet, however, is its orbit. While Johannes Kepler taught us that no planetary orbit is perfectly circular, most adhere to an orbit that is pretty close to being a circle. Some worlds, however, have more elongated orbits. The degree of elongation, known as eccentricity, is measured on a scale of 0 (for a perfect circle) to 1 (a hyperbola). Earth’s orbital eccentricity is 0.017; Mars’ is 0.055, and Mercury’s is 0.206.
HD 20794d’s orbit is more elongated than any planet in our solar system, with an eccentricity of 0.4. Its 647-day-long orbit is 40 days shorter than Mars, giving you an idea of where it is located in its planetary system. However, the large eccentricity means its orbit ranges from as far as 2 astronomical units (300 million km/186 million miles — i.e. twice the Earth–sun distance) from its star to as close as 0.75 AU (112 million km/69.7 million miles).
In the context of our solar system, Mars — on the outer edge of our habitable zone — orbits our sun at an average distance of 1.5 astronomical units (228 million km/141 million miles), while Venus, on the inner edge of the habitable zone, orbits at 0.72 astronomical units (108 million km/67 million miles) from our sun.
The climate on such a world must be beyond bizarre. Winters would be long and hard, and life might struggle to survive on a planet that spends most of its time frozen. Then spring would come, melting the ice, followed by a brief but intense summer when oceans might even begin to evaporate, only to precipitate back out as rain in autumn and snow in winter. Whether life could survive on such an extreme world is unknown.
On Earth, our seasons are driven by our planet’s 23.4-degree tilt; for instance, northern summer occurs when our planet’s northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun. No matter the tilt of HD 20794d, its seasons are instead determined by how far it has progressed along its eccentric orbit. It is a remarkable planet.
The origins of such a large degree of eccentricity lie in the HD 20794d’s distant past, Dumusque tells Space.com. “The eccentricity of planets are a remnant of planet–planet interactions during the early days of a planetary system,” he says. Although the other two planets, b and c, do not have eccentric orbits, something may have perturbed the orbit of HD 20794d not long after it formed.
“For example, there could have been another giant planet in the early phase of formation,” said Dumusque. “The giant planet could have influenced the orbit of planet d, and then that giant planet was ejected outside of the system.”
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I have an android phone, same as my brother and many of our friends.
One sister (and my mom) are part of the Apple/Iphone cult/religion/gong show and it’s long past time for an intervention.We got sent this…
If anyone has any comeback pics I wouldn’t say no.
My brothers responses are cool though.
“Most new ones have a crank, Julie.”
“What runs IPhones again? Baby seal blood or some such?”
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Holy ****!
I could really get into this.
(Realistically, if it was 25 years ago, but the idea is there…)
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Last week was Bizarro’s 40th anniversary – Bizarro.com
I never thought I’d say that. It seems simultaneously like yesterday and ten lifetimes ago that I began this career. As I regularly proclaim, There is no greater mind-f*ck than time!
In the early ‘80s, I was working as a commercial illustrator doing realistic drawings of food products for newspaper ads and coupons. It was better than making change in a toll booth, but not much more exciting.
In my spare time, I drew cartoons to entertain myself. After a few of years of that, I had nearly a hundred and thought getting them published might be a way to escape advertising. I sent them to newspaper syndication companies and hoped for the best.
Instead of “the best,” I got a basket of rejection letters.
In 1984, however, a small San Francisco syndicate called Chronicle Features decided to give me a try. They had given Gary Larson his first break five years previous and in 1985, he moved The Far Side to a larger syndicate. That left a slot in CF’s stable that they filled with Bizarro.
My first cartoon ran on Jan 21, 1985. (For non-Americans, that’s 21 January, 1985.) The following ugly drawing of a fairly stupid joke was my first syndicated cartoon.
It was a big deal and I was thrilled. I thought my ship had come in, and soon I’d be sailing it away from the advertising world forever. But a couple of facts followed that were like a two-by-four to the teeth:
1) It had taken me three years to complete my first 100 cartoons. They got me signed to a syndication contract, but only two of that original batch were considered professional enough to publish. After signing that first 5-year contract, I had 100 days to create the next 100 cartoons. And then one each day, 365 days a year, for five years.
Looking at the five-year picture, it seemed an impossible task to write and draw 1825 cartoons (give or take a leap year). I lay awake at night wondering if I only had 200 cartoon ideas in me and what I’d do when I hit that wall.
Then the second Reality Shoe dropped…
2) My first monthly royalty check was around $100. (It takes years to build a client list that will support you.) It would take me 12 more years to be able to quit my day job in advertising.
It was the worst get-rich-quick scheme one could imagine.
Now, forty years later, I can’t believe I’ve written and drawn so many cartoons. (And I’m still not rich.) Since Jan of 2018, Wayno has done 6/7th of the writing and drawing, so my daily efforts ended after 33 years. Still, that was over 12,000 cartoons. WTF?!
Fortunately, creativity happens one moment at a time. I didn’t have to cough up 12,000+ cartoons all at once, I could do it one day at a time. It’s how everything gets done.
I love this expression from writer Annie Dillard (paraphrased):
How you spend your day is how you spend your life.
I’ve made art and comedy of one kind or another every day of my life. I haven’t enjoyed every moment, but the majority of it has been pretty gratifying. And I’m not done yet.
Have fun each day, Jazz Pickles.
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Those trailers aren’t real, they’re fan-made things.
Ha! Of course.
And my low expectations for this explains why fan-made fake trailers could fool me.
Or I’m just dumb and lazy, but I hope you go with the first option.1 user thanked author for this post.
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So having very little Judge Dredd outside a few reprint issues in the ’80’s I’ve been looking to buy some books.
Found an Essential Judge Dredd line of books so as they were on sale I ordered “The Apocalypse War” and “America”
I guess what I’m asking is, is this the way I want to go about reading Judge Dredd?
We’re not expecting an announcement on Monday about super-deluxe oversized hardcovers coming soon?
(That just may kill me…)And, is everything in the “Essential” line really essential? Or should I be a bit choosy? Is reading order critical?
Limited-time deal: Essential Judge Dredd: The Apocalypse War https://a.co/d/9H2mrAF
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DC Solicitations for April 2025
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