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WIRE Buzz: His Dark Materials teases full S1; Ant-Man gets new solo comic; more
For those fans that were a bit disappointed by positive-yet-cautious early reviews of HBO's His Dark Materials show, there's still hope that the rest of the season will blow longtime devotees out of the water. That's because the series just dropped a trailer teasing what's to come over the coming episodes and thankfully it includes less exposition and more awesome things, like armored bears doing battle.
Take a look:
Lyra (Dafne Keen) goes north, where a battalion of polar gunmen await, while balloonist Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda) gets to show off a bit of scalawag charm.
And why in the world would the show wait so long to unveil its many, many, many CGI bears? They look great! Almost as good as the scary Golden Monkey adopted by Marisa Coulter. No daemons were injured in the making of this Phillip Pullman adaptation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't look like it.
The HBO/BBC series airs its second episode this weekend.
Next, riding on the back of Ant-Man 3 news like it was a friendly flying ant, size-changing Marvel hero Scott Lang is making a comeback to his original medium. That’s right, fans are getting a new Ant-Man comic book — and this time, another member of the Lang family is suiting up.
Ant-Man will be teaming up with his daughter Cassie (here using the superhero moniker Stinger) in a new self-titled book. Written by Zeb Wells (Amazing Spider-Man) and drawn by Dylan Burnett (X-Force), with a first issue cover from Eduard Petrovich, Ant-Man also promises cameos from “many of your other favorite Marvel superheroes.”
The last time Ant-Man headlined a comic, he was promoting Ant-Man and the Wasp with a 2018 miniseries; the last time he had a solo feature was Nick Spencer and Ramon Rosanas’ Astonishing Ant-Man, which wrapped in 2016. So what can fans expect?
The story kicks off with Lang working for beekeepers. Sounds innocuous enough, despite the plight of the bees, until fans hear that it (of course) "rapidly escalates into a conspiracy that could threaten the Earth.” Of course Scott and Cassie get wrapped up in an apocalyptic insect-based plot.
“Dylan Burnett, [colorist] Mike Spicer, and I are out to put the ant in Ant-Man, turn over some rocks and craft a bug-forward tale that starts small and spins into a world-spanning adventure,” Wells said in a statement. “And you know Stinger (Cassie Lang) is coming along for the ride.”
Ant-Man #1 will drop in February.
Finally, No-Shave November has a new member and the superhero portrayer is using the opportunity to razz his peers across the comic aisle. Deadpool actor Ryan Reynolds is boasting a mustache this month, in support (at least in part) for men’s health organization Movember, where soup strainers are used as devices to bring about awareness and fundraising for men’s health issues. He’s also drawing parallels to the other comic book adaptation famously (not) sporting a bushy upper lip.
Take a look:
That bad CGI smoothness is a direct callout of Justice League’s Henry Cavill AKA Superman. During reshoots for the DCEU film, Cavill famously had a lip tickler for the other movie he was in the process of filming, Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
Paramount and Warner Bros. had a small tiff about the facial hair, leading to the scenes being reshot with Cavill going full Tom Selleck. That meant, to maintain continuity for smooth Clark Kent, the stache had to be digitally removed. Fans noticed. It certainly wasn’t as bad as Reynolds’ Twitter video, but when it comes to Marvel vs. DC warfare, nothing is too petty.
