Within the first six pages of Boom’s new Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers series, the teen heroes declare that it’s “Morphin’ Time” and hold out the small handheld devices that transform them into the Power Rangers. It’s a moment that is ripped straight from the TV series so cleanly, I almost felt like a kid again.

Spoilers ahead for Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers #0, by Kyle Higgins, Hendry Prasetya, Matt Herms, and Ed Dukeshire.

In fact, this first issue, acting as a sort of prequel to March’s eventual ongoing Power Rangers comic, feels like a laser-guided play to skewer the hearts of anyone who loved the classic iteration of the Power Rangers. Things might not be so tragically, hysterically ‘90s as they were in the original show—these are modern kids, who text each other in streams of Emoji, because that’s what kids do I guess—but from the get go, Higgins is intent on giving you a Power Rangers episode greatest hits.

You get high school worries, Megazord action, posing that would make any Super Sentai team blush with envy, a cackling Rita Repulsa, even a brief appearance by Zordon and Alpha 5—although he doesn’t go the whole hog and shout “Aye-yi-yi-yi-yi!”—all within the first handful of pages to the point it feels like someone’s just passed you a VHS tape of old episodes and you’ve watched it all on fast-forward. It’s honestly kind of great: a Power Rangers series that didn’t embrace the outlandish goofiness that sits at the core of the classic show just wouldn’t have the spark that endeared so many kids to the franchise. It’s absolutely a nostalgia play, and Higgins knows that for now that’s all you really need to get people interested.

But Power Rangers also manages to surprise with the fact that it actually goes beyond cracking open that pure vein of nostalgia, setting up an initial arc that feels intriguing and meaty in a way that perhaps isn’t so typical of people’s fond rose-tinted memories of the TV show. The main hook is the fact that the comic is set shortly after the events of Tommy—a.k.a. the Green Ranger, a.k.a. the guy who’s always wearing green all the time because duh he’s the Green Ranger—joining the team after being mind controlled by Rita Repulsa, which was basically his thing in the series. But while the show simply had Tommy get captured, freed, and recaptured multiple times, the comic starts to explore more about his recovery, and the possibility that he can’t quite forget the things he did under Rita’s thrall.

It starts clawing away at the back of his mind, glimpses of Rita out of nowhere at first, flashbacks to his time under her control, before it eventually renders him unable to help the Rangers take out Rita’s latest giant monster as it attacks Angel Grove. Nothing really comes of it in this all-too-short preview issue quite yet, other than some underlying tension between Tommy and Red Ranger Jason, but the fact that it’s sitting as the core that Higgins and Prasetya are wrapping their obvious adoration of the Power Rangers franchise around is intriguing.

I expected the nostalgia trip of a lifetime when it came to a Power Rangers comic—I wasn’t really expecting it to hook me with the promise of exploring beyond the giant robots and ridiculous explosions to dig into these characters. That bit is more than enough to make me look forward to the start of the series proper in March.

Filmmaker Harry Chaskin’s Bygone Behemoth imagines the loneliness of a Godzilla-like movie monster whose career has long since ended, and whose fame has faded from show-biz memory. The stop-motion is wonderful, and the details (d’aww ... Mothra obituary!) are surprisingly moving.

[Vimeo Staff Picks]

Over the past few years, fans have complained that Pixar has become increasingly depended on sequels. That changed this year with two brand new, original films, one of which—Inside Out—was a runaway critical and financial hit. So, of course, now the sequel talks have begun.

The film’s co-writer and director, Pete Docter, was talking to Entertainment Weekly about the film’s multiple Oscar nominations and then dropped a few interesting thoughts on the potential of a sequel:

We’ll see if anything turns up. To me, it’s not as simple as ‘We liked it, so let’s make another one.’ What happens is you design these characters not so much looks wise but as they are as character and people for a story. So we’ll explore it and see what happens.

Which is basically what Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton were saying for years about The Incredibles and Finding Nemo respectively. A sequel would come, if there was an idea good enough. Eventually, there was.

What’s unique about Inside Out is if Docter and the Pixar team wanted to do a sequel, there really are no boundaries. The characters of The Incredibles, Finding Nemo or Monsters Inc., exist in a particular world, on a specific trajectory. They’re mortal. But the emotions of Inside Out are everyone’s emotions. They could continue on the first film’s narrative and carry on with the development of Riley, or the next film could go into anyone else’s brain. The character designs are all the same, as are the base personalities. Plus, they don’t age, so the possibilities are endless.

Still, those limitless possibilities could actually hurt the chances for a follow-up. Docter has been quoted as saying using the human mind as a set was almost too big of a canvas to play on. Which is probably why he will only cop to “exploring” sequel ideas, nothing more.

It’s also worth nothing that Pixar’s announced slate is mostly sequels: Finding Dory, Cars 3, The Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4. Only Coco, a film about the Day of the Dead, is an original concept. I’d expect a few more original ideas to come along before Inside Out 2—if only so that there’s more new material to make sequels to.

[Entertainment Weekly]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

Everybody is fascinated with True Crime nowadays—but happens when that obsession with real-life gruesomeness turns into an appetite for more and more? That’s the focus of “The Killing Jar,” a new story by Laurie Penny about a young woman who gets an internship with a serial killer.

“The Killing Jar,” published in Motherboard, is pleasingly grotesque and bloody, with some really weird dystopian details. Tony just doesn’t have what it takes to stand out as a really unique serial killer, like a fun gimmick or an interesting approach to murder. He just leans on the same old boring movie cliches, no matter how often his young intern tries to give him feedback. He’ll never get in the newspapers that way, and forget about getting an arts council grant.

Here’s how the story begins:

Tuesday’s murder is nothing special apart from the paperwork.

I’ve been up till four in the morning going through the application. Technically that isn’t my job, because interns aren’t supposed to deal with the council directly, but Tony thinks admin is for girls. When I come down, Mona is already up and making pancakes.

There’s coffee hot on the kitchen table. Technically it’s Mona’s kitchen table, because she’s the one on the lease, and the flat’s hardly big enough for one young professional, let alone two. We rub along reasonably well. I know she worries about me, which is why she tries to make sure I eat before I leave.

“It’s not even seven,” says Mona. “You can’t let him do this all the time. He doesn’t pay you.”

She’s annoyed, although she won’t say so. She rarely gets cross, which is a good thing in a flatmate. Still, she ought to be more understanding. After my last internship went so very wrong, she knows how much this one means to me.

“I just have to get the recording gear set up at the warehouse,” I say. “We have to get it off to the Standard before they go to press.”

“You can’t let him treat you like a kitchen appliance.”

Read the whole thing over at Motherboard.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

Oranges are, by far, America’s number one fruit. But in the last few years a mysterious die-off has been hitting the groves—and it’s spreading fast.

The latest numbers on American orange production are out from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, and the news is not good for breakfast or Vitamin C fans alike. Since 2012, more than a third of all American oranges have died out—and the numbers get even grimmer if you look at just Florida, which has lost about half its crop in that time.

So what’s going on? Like almonds, IPAs, coffee, and steak before them, are oranges another casualty of the drought? Well, it certainly isn’t helping—orange farmers, especially in California, have been seeing some oddly-messy, split-up green oranges due to the stop-and-start nature of water in the state these days.

But drought isn’t the biggest problem: It’s a fast-spreading, fatal, and incurable disease called citrus greening that’s sweeping through orange orchards.

Top image: Florida orange grove / USDA, ARS; Bottom Picture: Citrus greening in action in Florida / University of Florida Extension

The disease first showed up in Florida all the way back in 1998, so why is its appearance in our orange crop now such a big deal?

Part of it is simply that oranges are so important right now in terms of what America eats. Oranges are America’s most consumed fruit (thanks, largely, to juice-drinkers). They’re also remarkably hardy as fresh food, they travel well to areas where fruit and vegetable availability is limited, and have unusually good shelf-lives for fresh fruit.

But the free-fall in citrus production is a progressively worsening problem because citrus greening takes out not just the fruit, but the whole tree. Once a tree has it, noting can be done—though some potential new cures are currently being evaluated. Worse, greening highly contagious. When greening appears, quarantine is really the only current option, and so far it’s only been successful at slowing, but not stopping, the spread. The entire state of Florida has been under quarantine since 2008,which was later extended through Georgia and other scattered areas of the country—and greening is still steadily killing off orange groves.

Map: Quarantined areas for citrus crops / APHIS

The only good news is that this latest set of numbers is the first set in 5 years where the numbers are holding steady instead of falling even further. Still, to get orange production back to where it was, we wouldn’t just need to stop the bleeding; we’d need to see a wholesale recovery. And, since greening not only continues to spread, but has also killed off a good percentage of existing trees, the more likely result is some very bad times ahead for oranges.

Follow the author at @misra.

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered the brightest supernova yet, briefly blazing fifty times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy. It’s a strange new way for stars to die.

As described in a new paper in Science, this spectacularly extravagant stellar explosion—part of a classification known as superluminous supernovae—may give us a peek into the death of stars from near the beginning of the Universe, helping unravel the secrets of early stellar evolution. It’s been named ASAS-SN-15lh.

Humans have been spotting the suddenly-bright pinpricks of stars violently exploding in the night sky for thousands of years. Some records even tell of the rapid appearance and disappearance of stars so bright they can be seen by the naked eye even during in the day. Superluminous supernova kick it up a notch, shining a hundred to a thousand times brighter than a normal nova.

Unlike other supernova that usually occur in bright galaxies with older stars on the brink of death, the few superluminous supernova we’ve found are usually in dim galaxies spitting out piles of new stars. Standard surveys only scan the bright galaxies, targeting resources to up the chances of spotting an event right away, and ignore the dim galaxies entirely. We only found this latest supernova at all because of the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN).

Cassius, part of the ASAS-SN. Image credit: Carnegie Science Institute

The automated survey scans the entire sky every few nights, checking for changes in luminosity in visible wavelengths. If the computer at Ohio State University identifies a suddenly-bright blip, it calls in researchers to look the spectra over. The only survey of its kind, the global network of telescopes should be able to spot any supernovae within 350 million lightyears of Earth.

On June 14, 2015, a twin pair of telescopes in Chile spotted something unusual. The computer spat out a spectra for an event that peaked at 570 billion times brighter than our Sun. When the survey team first saw the spectra, they weren’t even sure it was a supernova at all, because it didn’t look like any of the few hundred they’d already found. “My first reaction was: ‘This is interesting, we should get more data’,” said astronomer Nidia Morrell of Las Campanas Observatory in a press release. “It was only when we obtained higher resolution spectra [...] that I realized how distant the host galaxy is and consequently, how luminous the supernova.”

After subsequent observations, researchers concluded that ASAS-SN-15lh had the same type of spectra of other superluminous supernova, just amped up twice as bright and far hotter than any seen before. The paper’s lead author, Subo Dong, received the results at 2 AM local time, and was too excited to sleep.

Before and after observations of ASAS-SN-15lh. Image credit: Benjamin Shappee

Once they had more contextual data, the researchers discovered that ASAS-SN-15lh wasn’t just bright, so was its galaxy. We’ve only found a few other superluminous supernovae, but all were in dim galaxies with active star formation. In contrast, ASAS-SN-15lh appears to be in a galaxy even brighter than the Milky Way, with a well-established population of middle-aged stars. Or perhaps its home is in a yet-to-be-observed extremely faint neighboring galaxy so dim it’s drowned out by its overbearing neighbor. The research team has scheduled time on the Hubble Space Telescope this year to answer this question.

We don’t yet have a good theory for what explodes to create a superluminous supernova. The current frontrunner is that they’re magnetars run amok. The idea is that when a magnetar—a neutron star with an intense magnetic field—explodes in a blaze of glory, its magnetic field is intensifying the energy of the explosion to boost luminosity to ludicrous levels.

But ASAS-SN-15lh, which Dong describes as “the most powerful supernova discovered in human history,” strains the theory’s credibility. “The honest answer is at this point we do not know what could be the power source for ASAS-SN-15lh,” Dong said in a press release. “[It] may lead to new thinking and new observations of the whole class of superluminous supernova, and we look forward to plenty more of both in the years ahead.”

[Read the Science article here.]

Top image: Artist’s concept of ASAS-SN-15lh seen from an exoplanet in the same galaxy just 10,000 lightyears away. Credit: Beijing Planetarium/Jin Ma

Contact the author at mika.mckinnon@io9.com or follow her at @MikaMcKinnon.

When ITV boasted it was birthing a new Beowulf TV series, we blessed our luck. But now a trailer traces the trajectory of this translation to television. And you can judge whether these jesters have done justice to the poem, or created junk.

Beowulf bows on Jan. 23 on the bonny Esquire network, but beware. For critics in the United Kingdom have caviled at its callow actors and clumsy creation. (The series was started sooner than Stateside, launching Jan. 3 on ITV.)

Groans the Guardian:

They were hoping to cash in on a spurious Game of Thrones/ Tolkien/ Vikings vibe that might loosely be described as Saxonpunk without doing any of the work or betraying any understanding of what makes a hero or a story. Plenty of daffy names – Slean, Barghest, Hrothgar Healfdene also known as Thane of Heorot – but, and now here’s a singular thought, I truly don’t care! Everyone might as well be have been called Norbert Dentressangle or Gyppo McScoosh. On they scrabbled with Abrecan, the Huskarl, the Mud-Born. It is starting gently to grieve me that I briefly possess this information.

Digital Spy digs in:

​If you’ve ever watched Game Of Thrones and thought, “Gosh, my elderly mum / kids / prudish pal would love this, if it weren’t for all the gore and shagging”, then ITV’s more family-friendly fantasy epic Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands should be essential Sunday night viewing.

The Telegraph tells us that this television show is “a flop,” adding:

Perhaps the biggest letdown is Beowulf himself. The eponymous hero (Kieran Bew) was no longer a mysterious swordsman from across the seas but a bland hunk seeking to make peace with his adopted family following the death of his stepfather... Judged as medieval soap opera, Beowulf delivered the occasional cheesy thrill. Yet it lacked the otherworldly flourishes and rich world-building of the source material – or of Game of Thrones for that matter. There was plenty of blockbuster sparkle here but little true magic.

The Times slays the series with one star out of five (though a paywall pushes away from peeping their paper).

Sure, I have not seen the show myself, and can only share these others giving short shrift. But it seems Beowulf is not bloody or brilliant enough to brag about.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

In Syfy’s next brand new show, Hunters, an FBI agent joins a special government division that fights against the worst kind of terrorists of all: aliens. And they may have taken his wife captive. This new trailer, shown today at the Television Critics Association, really hits the “War on Terror” themes hard.

We’re excited for Hunters because of the talent behind it. Based on the Alien Hunter books by Whitley Streiber, the show is produced by Gale Ann Hurd (Terminator, The Walking Dead) and written by Natalie Chaidez (12 Monkeys). But it’s a little worrying to see quite how on-the-nose the show’s themes about terrorism are going to be. The aliens look like us, they live among us, and they can strike at any time—so (I’m guessing) extreme measures are required. Meanwhile, FBI agent “Flynn” Carroll (Nathan Phillips) gets paired up with another anti-terrorism agent, Regan (Britne Oldford)... who turns out to be a secret alien herself. (It’s right there in the trailer above.)

Television has, shall we say, a mixed record when it comes to trying to comment on terrorism and the lengths that we go to, to fight against it. For every show that has had interesting things to say (like BSG when it was good), there have been many that stumbled. So let’s hope that, since Hunters appears to be tackling the issue head on during an election year, they actually know what they’re doing.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

NASA announced that it has booked three private companies to ferry supplies up to the International Space Station through the next eight years—and the new contracts will allow them to add one new astronaut to their roster.

Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX were all contracted for six missions each, though no specific missions have yet actually been ordered. NASA said that they may group missions from the three companies together, or may choose to order them “a la carte”.

The biggest news, though, may be that NASA said that these commercial contracts should open up some space that was previously devoted to cargo—and they plan to use that space to add a seventh astronaut living and researching on the ISS.

The new missions are set to begin launching in late-2019. Russia is also expected to continue flying its own supply missions to the ISS, as well.

Image: NASA

For my money, Truly, Madly, Deeply is Alan Rickman’s greatest work. The story of a man who dies, but returns to his beloved as a ghost, is a masterpiece that captures just how hard it is to let go of a loved one who’s gone.

I’ve always thought of Rickman as the star of Truly, Madly, who happened to be in the Harry Potter movies and some other things as well. His performance in this film is just so indelible and unique—the playfulness, with a bit of an edge to it, is just amazing. And the story of a woman who loses her true love, but then finds that getting him back is not as wonderful as she’d hoped, is so incredibly subtle and underplayed, it’s brilliant. If you’re missing the incredible talent that we lost today as much as I am, then Truly, Madly, Deeply is a terrific way to remember just how great he was. Even if it will make you incredibly, unbearably, horrendously sad.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

These days, you hear about movies years before they’re made, and we see trailers months before they hit theaters. So back in 2007, when Bad Robot released a trailer for a monster movie called Cloverfield without any fanfare, it was a happening. And they just did it again.

Thursday night, multiple reports started coming in from Twitter, via Slashfilm, that there was a mysterious new trailer for a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane playing in front of Michael Bay’s movie 13 Hours. This is a title no one had heard of until that very moment, just like Cloverfield in 2007. A few hours later, it officially came online. You can see it above.

Now, as you can tell based on the way the title is handled, audiences immediately assume this movie is in fact Cloverfield 2. Paramount refused to comment at all on the nature of the trailer but, producer J.J. Abrams said the following.

“The idea came up a long time ago during production. We wanted to make it a blood relative of Cloverfield,” producer J.J. Abrams told Collider. “The idea was developed over time. We wanted to hold back the title for as long as possible.”

“Blood relative.” An odd choice of words. It makes it sound like 10 Cloverfield Lane is a film that’s tonally related to the original film, but not narratively. Kind of like the next episode in a Cloverfield, mystery, Bad Robot anthology.

As for this specific movie, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie once codenamed Valencia, a Bad Robot film that’s long been on Paramount’s release schedule for March 11. It’s directed by Dan Trachtenberg (Portal: No Escape) and stars John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr. They’re all in the trailer.

Though details were long been kept secret about Valencia, the film reportedly tells the story of a girl who wakes up in a basement and is told she can’t go outside because of a chemical attack. The problem is, she doesn’t know if that’s true or not. You get some of that in the footage.

Nothing at any stage of this film’s development made it sound like a Cloverfield sequel. Why the title 10 Cloverfield Lane? Well if the film largely takes place at a single residence, an address would make sense. And that address could be “Cloverfield” because that’s the name of the exit you’d used to get to Bad Robot in Santa Monica, CA—hence the original movie having that title.

Plus, it begs for wild speculation just like this. People will immediately take notice of the new Bad Robot Cloverfield movie. And who knows? Maybe it’s not a chemical attack keeping everyone inside. Maybe it’s a big fucking monster. We’ll find out on March 11.

Update: This post originally went up before the trailer was online. It’s been slightly edited now that it is.

[Slashfilm]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

And you thought those trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens were good? The latest one for Star Wars Rebels gives those a serious run for their money, with three minutes of insane action, jaw-dropping teases and plenty of connections to the Star Wars universe as a whole.

Be aware though. This trailer for the second half of season two is certainly spoiler-filled. But it’s a trailer, and nothing is explicitly spelled out. It just teases.

There’s so much to discuss here. Things such as the appearance of Princess Leia, the return of Yoda, Ahsoka Tano reminiscing about Anakin and even facing off with his latest incarnation, Darth Vader. There seem to be more Inquisitors in there, Ezra is becoming strong with the Force, who is the “old master?” So much stuff.

And yet, is it too much? A few short years after Rebels takes place, Princess Leia and her friends are blowing up the Death Star without a Jedi in sight. Is everything that Ahsoka, Kanan and Ezra are going through going to be all for naught? It feels like this trailer is very heavy on the Jedi, The Force and Jedi mythology.

Plus, Ezra holds a cross guard lightsaber much like the one Kylo Ren has in The Force Awakens. Is this something the “Old Master” shows Ezra? We’re obviously supposed to make a visual connection to Episode VII. But we know from the new canon that while Kylo’s saber is the first we’d seen that looks like that, it’s a very ancient design. Rebels is going deep, and we can’t wait.

Star Wars Rebels returns on January 20.

[Entertainment Weekly]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

All of our favorite characters are orphans. Or else, they had horrendously abusive childhoods. Basically, giving characters childhood trauma is an all-purpose motivation—why else would someone be a vigilante/wizard/etc. unless something had gone wrong in their lives? But here are 10 people who had normal families that weren’t already dead—but they went on to become heroes anyway.

1. Buffy Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy’s role as the Slayer has nothing to do with her parental situation. Her parents had a pretty standard divorce, with her father occasionally visiting and then just fading out of the picture. He’s not a good guy, but he’s not an abusive monster, either. And Joyce Summers was flat-out just a typical mother. The conflicts she has with her daughter have everything to do with the friction between Joyce’s normality and Buffy’s extraordinary. Sure, Joyce dies eventually—spoiler!—but not until Buffy has been a hero for a long time.

2. Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle

It tends to stand out when a comic book hero has all their parents alive, well, and not horrifically abusive. So the fact that the third Blue Beetle is a teenager with a loving home and parents who give him support and guidance is almost revolutionary. Jaime’s parents, when they’re first introduced in the comic, are hardworking people who just happen to have a son who’s a superhero. His father runs a garage, and his mother panics when he disappears. In other words, good people, who have appropriate reactions to things.

3. Mulan

Despite the stereotype that all Disney characters have a dead parent of some description, Mulan doesn’t. In the opening, when Mulan utterly fails at the Matchmaker’s, her mother mostly shows concern for her daughter, not anger. And it’s Mulan’s devotion to her father which spurs her to take his place in the army in the first place.

4. Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Harry Potter

While the title character hits all the classic tropes—orphan and abusive adoptive family—his best friends join him on his quest without any of that baggage. Hermione’s parents seem to have rolled with their kid turning out to be a witch with a shocking amount of resilience. And the Weasleys are the series’ standard bearers for a good family life.

5. Ms. Marvel

Like so many kid superheroes, Kamala Khan is hiding things from her guardians. Her parents, Jusuf and Disha, are loving people who do exactly what good parents should do, including grounding her for going to a party. Even if she did save her friend there.

6. Tiffany Aching, Discworld

So many Discworld protagonists have some form of misery and tragedy in their childhoods. Which makes sense, since Discworld operates by the most common rules of fiction. Tiffany Aching stands out because of her perfectly normal parents, who are tenants on a sheep farm. Her father, Joe, even becomes even closer to Tiffany as time goes on, although he struggles to understand her new witchy ways.

7. Marty McFly, Back to the Future

Marty’s parents are perfectly normal people, raising what should have been a typical teen. None of the weirdness around their pasts or Marty are due to anything they do.

8. Merida, Brave

For all that Merida is in conflict with her mother for the first part of Brave, you can’t say her parents don’t actually care for her. The conflict comes from her mother’s traditional royal expectations and Merida’s desire to do what she wants. Which is a family story as old as time. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, which is exactly what the second part of the movie proves.

9. Alex Mack, Secret World of Alex Mack

Alex Mack was dosed with a chemical from the local plant, which gives her the requisite superpowers. She’s got a chemist father who works for the company that dosed her, and a down-to-earth mother who works a PR firm. For all that they don’t know about Alex, their parenting helps her deal with her powers.

10. Quentin Coldwater, The Magicians

Quentin’s parents aren’t exactly warm, but they’re not evil or mean. They’re perfectly average professionals who have a child who’s more special than they know. The fact that Quentin hates how boring and normal everything is in their home isn’t really their fault. In fact, they’re perfectly functional, nonentity parents.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

It’s taken them a while, but Tony Stark has finally, officially brought back the Avengers for Marvel’s All-New, All-Different universe! It’s about time, especially when you realize that Marvel has been putting out two additional Avengers comics for several months now. Confused? We can help.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-all-new-av...

A quick recap: late last year, Marvel rebooted its entire comic book universe, declaring that an “All-New, All-Different” one had taken its place. So far, that’s lead to three comic books coming out bearing the Avengers name: Uncanny Avengers, by Gerry Duggan and Ryan Stegman, New Avengers, by Al Ewing and Gerardo Sandoval, and All-New, All-Different Avengers, by Mark Waid and Adam Kubert.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/everything-you...

The thing is though, in the comics themselves, the Avengers haven’t existed in an official capacity until this week’s release of All-New, All-Different Avengers #3. After spending the last two issues haphazardly bumping into each other, Captain America, Iron Man, The Vision, Thor, Nova, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Ms. Marvel came together to take out a Chitauri warlord called Warbringer. The threat over, it comes to Stark to make the decision to reassemble Earth’s mightiest heroes—but even he stresses that it isn’t guaranteed the team will stick it out.

(Kamala Khan is understandably very excited, either way.)

Tony is right in one way—the “main” Avengers team that he has (almost) always funded has been gone from this new Marvel universe. The comic actually starts with Tony himself in the process of selling off Avengers Tower.

But he’s also wrong—because they are currently two other teams running around calling themselves Earth’s mightiest heroes at the moment. One is run by Tony’s former friend Steve Rogers (they... had a bit of a falling out in the run up to the Secret Wars event): the Avengers Unity squad that we see in the current Uncanny Avengers series. Unlike the “real” Avengers, they have backing and funding, courtesy of their most unorthodox member, Deadpool.

The other is the New Avengers, a group of young upstarts using the Avengers title as a spinoff of the formerly villainous A.I.M. organization who think that they’re the new generation of heroes—and like the Avengers Unity Squad in Uncanny, they have financial backing, too.

Of course, just because a team working for a group like A.I.M., reborn or not, call themselves the Avengers doesn’t actually make them Avengers. However, Steve Rogers arguably has just as much right to dub a team the Avengers as Tony Stark does; it seems like Tony is refusing to acknowledge the Avengers Unity Squad solely because he’s pissed at Steve, which is a very Tony Stark thing to do.

So the Avengers declared themselves the Avengers, even though there’s already two Avengers teams out there doing all the Avenging they want. Give me a second to dramatically clutch my head in absolute confusion, because it’s hard to wonder how someone as smart as Tony Stark hasn’t noticed this already.

It makes you wonder what’s meant to have happened to the Avengers team as we know it in the still-nebulous early months of this “All-New, All-Different” world. Avengers Tower is no more. The world thinks the Avengers are gone, leading to other groups coming together to fill the breach left in their wake. Tony Stark himself has been spending a lot of his own ongoing series, Invincible Iron Man, pondering his place as a superhero. His semi-reluctance in Avengers #3 seems to indicate that he has some beef with the idea of the Avengers coming about again. What the hell could have been so bad that it seemingly fractured Earth’s mightiest heroes so terribly?

It might not be long before we find out. Marvel have been teasing that their first major event of the year is called Avengers Standoff, and it’s something that brings Avengers of all ilks—be they Uncanny, New, or All-New and All-Different—to blows over some dark secret. Will it give us an answer as to why it’s taken so long for the Avengers to assemble once more?

Let’s hope so. For a team that’s only just come together, it seems like there’s a lot of people running around calling themselves Avengers. Plus, it’d be nice if all this confusion about who is and who isn’t an Avenger could be cleared up before my head hurts any more.

Mr. Robot was a thrilling experience because it touched on real-world issues and concerns in a way that felt visceral and grounded. And now, USA’s latest drama, Colony, seems to be pulling off the same trick—only for an alien invasion story.

Colony is a dystopia that you can actually see yourself living in. It’s scary and disturbing, in ways that compel you to watch. This series doesn’t put its focus on the mysterious, maybe-extraterrestrial entities who are ruling over humanity—instead, it follows a group of scrambling suburbanites who face tech fears that are all too familiar to us in the twenty-first century, from human-hunting drones to militarized police.

Spoilers ahead...

Just as Mr. Robot picked present-day threats that feel imminent and relevant, yet futuristic and cyberpunk—mass data breaches, digital identity theft, income inequality—Colony takes other modern dangers and puts them in a near-future setting. That, and and placing two great leads in a largely normal-looking, recognizable Los Angeles (save for the absence of all cars and a giant wall surrounding the city), make Colony feel relatable, accessible, and scary.

Creators Carlton Cuse and Ryan Condal draw on a lot of real-world fears, all of which show up in the pilot: Ruthless cops with assault rifles who demand to check citizens’ digital IDs, police drones combing streets to alert the nanny government of rebels, terrorists with IEDs, and a gargantuan wall that prevents anyone from entering or leaving the city.

Colony centers around a family living in seemingly modern-day Los Angeles, led by parents Will (Josh Holloway of Lost) and Katie (Sarah Wayne Callies of The Walking Dead). For the first ten minutes or so, everything looks completely ordinary—Dad’s in the kitchen making breakfast, junior’s helping sis with homework or something—but you sense something’s a bit off. Is the marriage on the rocks? Did somebody get detention at school today? Nope! The real answer? Humanity’s been usurped by an evil force that’s turned our civilization into a futuristic puppet state, ruthlessly ruled by an iron-fist entity only known as The Hosts.

Society has been very clearly divided into haves and have-nots, which is another actual, troublesome hallmark of twenty-first century America that the show takes and runs with. Middle class? What middle class? In Colony, you’re either a Host-sympathizing socialite who enjoys champagne and caviar in the Hollywood Hills, or you’re not. Colony’s quaint, all-American suburbia is actually an Orwellian hell, where coffee’s an old world luxury, and where folks must barter food and medicine to survive during the day and be home by curfew at night.

At times, the dog-eat-dog totalitarian state, depicted side-by-side ho-hum everyday life, is jarring. Like the scene when the high schoolers are just chilling on the bleachers by the football field on a beautiful sunny day, smiling and cheerfully chatting like they’re in a JCPenney back-to-school ad... while also bartering backyard fruit for homemade tortillas. All of a sudden, a burly bully in a backpack appears, here to reclaim his turf: “No trading goes on without me getting my beak wet,” the teen threatens, and a brief physical altercation follows. I get what they were going for, it just seemed a little... silly? I dunno, I hope the show doesn’t veer into a weird Lord of the Flies or Brave New World (the episode’s title) wannabe.

I also hope it doesn’t lean on “the invasion” too much as a gimmick. We—and maybe even the characters?—don’t know exactly what happened, and who, or what, took over. But again, the scenario easily plays into contemporary, real-world dread: Was it a takeover by a foreign government (or our own government)? Was it tech-savvy terrorists? The AI uprising? World War III? Or aliens?!? It’s also interesting because, unlike Into the Badlands, in which the humanity-razing Event happened centuries ago, Colony’s apocalypse seems to be extremely recent. When Proxy Governor Snyder drops by the house for a surprise visit to lure Will to join the Collaborators, for example, teen son Bram instantly recognizes the scent of bacon, apparently now a rare delicacy.

Thankfully, based on the previews for the season, a lot of the show seems to generate drama from the looming conflict between the two leads—Will’s pre-takeover background in law enforcement prompts Host Collaborators to help him sniff out insurgents, but Katie uses the family’s new in as an opportunity to become a mole for the Resistance.

Holloway is great in this, but for me, Callies’ Katie is the real narrator; the heroine we follow and identify with. I got a sense of a good person trying her best to navigate the new world; terrified for her family’s safety but determined and seemingly capable of preserving it. I liked the scene when she tried to secure dog insulin in a mason jar in exchange for booze, but when the barter goes south, she pulls a gun and bails—but not without a “shit, sorry” when she accidentally stumbles into some of the homeowner’s chickens as she’s backing away with her weapon drawn.

USA seems very aware that Mr. Robot has put the network under a new spotlight, and Colony is clearly the companion piece to the acclaimed hacker show. If Mr. Robot represents the dystopia that’s happening right now, Colony is the dystopia that’s just around the corner. Whether it’s extraterrestrials or nuke-wielding superpowers (what was that huge light show, anyway?), Earth is under siege, and the overlords are using tech and fear tactics that feel awfully recognizable. We’ll see how Angelenos begin to retaliate in the rest of the promising season’s nine episodes.

All images courtesy USA

Contact the author at bryan@gizmodo.com, or follow him on Twitter.

A book is a very simple thing, right? It’s just a bunch of paper with some scribbles. But if you wanted to make a book from scratch, it’s basically an impossible task. Watch as Andy George from How to Make Everything chops wood, strips papyrus, makes glue from hide, carve out a pencil from a stick, make a brush from horse hair, and so much more. It’s a really intensive process to get paper from natural materials.

SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The Wonder Woman movie is making a pretty bold change to her origin—but this isn’t just another example of DC Comics screwing needlessly with its characters. I’m here to tell you why this particular alteration is a brilliant idea. Spoilers ahead...

If you haven’t heard the rumors (or seen the set pics), it might have come as a bit of a shock to hear Chris Pine confirm the historical setting of the Wonder Woman movie to be World War I. “WWI?” you asked. “Surely that’s a typo for World War II?” The answer is no, but this is actually a good thing.

Sure, it’s incredibly strange to think that the movie will be debuting Wonder Woman earlier than her actual comics did—she first appeared in All Star Comics in 1941—and if you’re not much of a history buff, substituting one World War for another can sound like a needlessly superficial alteration, a change just to be different. But it actually gives me hope that director Patty Jenkins has a great plan for the Amazonian Princess.

World War II is often referred to unironically as a “good” war. Not that war itself is fun of course, but the Nazis were so unequivocally evil, they had to be stopped. The Allies were fighting actual villains, making them the heroes of the conflict. There was a reason why it was so easy to write about superheroes joining the fight—they fit so naturally into the narrative.

Obviously, whether WW2 really was “good” is highly debatable, but what’s undeniable is that no other war in modern history has managed to seem so transparently heroic—especially not World War I. WW1 was born out of colonial expansion and greed and intolerance. It was about land and revenge and hate. Between the trenches, the mustard gas, and the utter lack of defenses, it was unbelievably brutal, especially for those men who suffered and died purely over a few feet of land, sent by other men who never concerned themselves with their suffering.

And when Wonder Woman leaves Themyscira for the first time, this is the world she will see.

She will see war at its most brutal, and men at their most cruel and callous. Everything her mother, Queen Hippolyta, will have warned her about the dangers of men and the world outside Themyscira will be true, to the most horrific degree possible.

See, if Wonder Woman entered the world during World War II, she would see a villain who needed to be stopped, and instantly join in the battle. It would be a noble fight, one that she would enter willingly and instantly, no emotional conflict necessary.

But now, when WW discovers WWI, there won’t be one person at fault, it will be men in general. And even though Wonder Woman is a warrior, the war she sees won’t be a noble struggle; it will be a nightmare of horrors designed to inflict pain and death on others. By choosing World War I as her new “origin,” if you will, the Wonder Woman movie looks like it’s making a bold claim about who the DC movie universe’s Wonder Woman is going to be—and especially what she fights against.

The best reason to do that is to make the contrast between the story’s main character and its setting. This Wonder Woman won’t be a merciless killer, as she’s (still) sometimes portrayed in the comics; if she was, there’d be no narrative advantage in changing her origin from World War II. It stads to reason that the movie will instead star a Wonder Woman who loves peace—and one who is willing to fight to achieve it.

Furthermore, the movie is giving Wonder Woman a setting where men have screwed everything up. I don’t expect Wonder Woman to save the world singlehandedly, but this also strongly implies that if the problem is caused by men, she’s not going to need a man to help fix things. Oh, she may need assistance, but she won’t need to rely on anyone’s masculinity.

This is a Wonder Woman I want to see on screen. Badly.

I may be a bit optimistic here. I suppose, given that the movie will still be in Zack Snyder’s DC movie-verse, than Wonder Woman will see the trenches of World War I and merely be excited to get in on the butchery. But again, I feel like if that’s what Jenkins was going for, the director would have stayed with World War II. Instead, she’s making sure Wonder Woman sees men and war at their worst. Why do that, unless Wonder Woman can save the day?

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

The great thing about a horror anthology film is if you aren’t scared by one segment, odds are the next one will get you. That won’t happen with Southbound though because, as you can see in the first trailer, all four of the segments are ultra creepy.

Directed by Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner and Patrick Horvath, Southbound will hit limited theaters on February 5 and then on demand February 9. It tells four tangentially related stories centered on a nondescript, desolate setting.

There are the guys being hunted by flying demons, the girls who end up in a place they don’t want to be, the driver trying to save a young girl’s life, and the family just enjoying some nice time together. None of those situations turn out particularly well—and over the course of the movie, you’ll continue to be shocked and scared by the places the filmmakers go. We’ve seen it and recommend it unreservedly.

[Fandango]

Contact the author at germain@io9.com.

In celebration of Mozart In The Jungle’s Golden Globes victories, Amazon has made a year of Prime $73 through the weekend for new members.

In the past, there have been loopholes for existing members to take advantage of this deal, but we don’t think that will be case this time around. That said, if you still haven’t signed up for Prime, this is a fantastic opportunity.

Need convincing? Here are all of the benefits you get with Prime, including free two day shipping, access to thousands of streaming TV shows and movies, and (as of earlier this week) 20% off all video game preorders and new releases. It really is the best deal in tech. [Amazon Prime]

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No, Angel From Hell hasn’t miraculously become a good TV show yet. It does still have Jane Lynch being kind of bizarre while surrounded by cardboard characters. Here’s the best scene, where Lynch decides to help Allison “face her fears,” by showing up as a terrifying clown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.