I think this season is shaping up to the best in ages, I had thought that pushing Star Trek back was going to leave a hole but didn’t account for the sheer number of genre related films.

Incredible Hulk, I wrote a while ago about how I could pretty much take or leave this film.  Well forget it, I can’t wait!  I’m really looking forward to this (take the day off work excited?  well let’s not get crazy here, well not completely crazy I might have some time up my sleeve…) and the reason for this ramping up of enthusiasm?  The following trailer that shows Hulk smashing trucks together and performing his sonic clap move thingy, it just looks like fun and we know that Stark will appear which is awesome in itself.

See what I mean?

Awesome.

But wait, there’s more.

The last couple of seasons of X-Files is considered by many to be fairly weak and it eroded the fanbase as people longed to see Mulder and Scully investigate cool freaky stuff.  X-Files fans come back!  All is forgiven, this movie looks like it is going to kick some serious ass.

Just breathe.

Oh and a little film called Indiana Jones comes out next week, excited much?

And of course the actual movie photo:

I’m going to start off this week by stating an unarguably universal truth.  If you have seen a Star Wars film then you’ve tried using the power of your mind to move the remote control.  Don’t deny it, even though you know it is the most improbable thing in the world you’ve secretly given it a go at least once if only for a split second.

So you obviously don’t have any super powers (I dunno maybe you do, if so, dude cool!) so where do our favourite characters gain their super powers from?

1. Radiation - Be it gamma bombs, radioactive spiders or cosmic rays radiation could well be your ticket to super-power land.  Alternatively you’ll die an agonising death from radiation poisoning.
   There is an extraordinary long list of characters who base their powers on a brush with radiation or naturally produce the glowing good stuff themselves.  Closest you’ll probably come is the wonder that is microwave popcorn.
2. Do it yourself - We can’t all be swept up in an irradiated gamma blast to gain incredible abilities.  Some of us have to go out and make things happen for ourselves or they never will.  Sounds like a Tony Robbins session but Tony Stark had to build himself some super powers in the form of a giant iron suit.  Bruce Wayne spent his tortured formative years travelling the world learning from the very best to one day become the world’s greatest detective.  It’s a lot of effort though and one has to wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to go out and get yourself a radioactive spider?  Closest you’ll probably come?  As if you’re going to get off that couch and train yourself in martial arts in order to avenge your parents, and really, programming the microwave to make that popcorn can be technologically challenging enough without adding repulsors and jet boots to the mix.
3. Not of this world - Not all aliens are little green men.  Some like the Martian Manhunter are big green men.  Others like Superman don’t even look alien in the slightest and sometimes I think people forget our biggest comic book hero is an alien, but he is (just like ALF).  A little more on the shiny side is the Silver Surfer and importantly enough good old Gnort is of course an alien himself.  Closest you’ll come to this?  Watching X-Files DVDs.
4. Be a god - or at the very least god’ish.  Sounds simple enough?  Well yes and no, you don’t really have to do anything as such but it does involve saying ‘thee’ and ‘art’.  Obviously Thor and Wonder Woman fall into this category, there is also the obvious Hercules and whatever other Greek gods Marvel can dig up.  Less obvious characters that can be called god’ish include Ghost Rider, Hellboy and without giggling the current Blue Beetle.  Closest you’ll get to be a god?  “Ray, when somebody asks you if you’re a god you say yes!”  You’re not a god.
5. Drugs - Now kids don’t do drugs!  They mess you up and leave you with no money for comic books and DVDs.  That being said if you do happen to be the sole survivor of some super soldier experiment then you can argue it didn’t hurt Captain America, well until he got shot…  don’t do drugs.  If you do need to fight a solenoid robot and you lead the American Eagle Squadron you may just need to pop a Proton Energy Pill (don’t do drugs).  Not all chemical based heroes are dope fiends though, poor Flash got covered in chemicals that were charged with a bolt of lightning (great scott!) not once of course but twice (of all the bad luck!).  Closest you’ll come… um don’t do drugs.

Next we’re looking at the Top Five film surprises of the pleasant kind!

Now I love Robocop one and two and tolerate three so the the initial idea of more Robocop is appealing until I think about the word remake.  To make again.

Do we really need to overwrite the original?  Is it really necessary to take the original films and stories and replacing them?  Is Robocop not iconic enough a character now that we can’t just feature him in a movie that doesn’t absolutely have to follow on from the third film but features the archetype in a story that is worth telling?

I for one do not require another Robocop origin story, I know how and why he was created already.  Surely enough people know this too that all that is needed is a very simple recap? Oh yeah he was a butchered cop built into a cyborg body designed to be the ultimate law enforcement resource.  Cool.  On with the awesome story that has our hero face adversity, overcome peril and return society to the its status quo.

Don’t reimagine him!  Just be creative with the story, the character is already there ready to go.  Invest the time in writing a powerful, icon worthy story rather than giving us a Robocop for the next generation.

Since I’m embedding youtube links I don’t think that the Wassup parodies will ever get old for me, this one is particularly good!

Time has past and the dust has come to settle on the season one DVD set of Lost, the plastic remains unbroken and Tracey and I are no more knowledgable in the ways of ‘the others’ or who the chap down the hatch is and why he was down there.  It has been a difficult twelve months for us and we honestly just haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.

No man is an island as they say and it has been hard, make that impossible to avoid all references or advertisements regarding the show.  I will say one thing though, it certainly hasn’t actually given anything away as I still have no bloody idea what is going on in that show!

Which is a plus for us but I’m concerned that at some stage I’m going to invest a big slab of time to a show that may or may not be worth it in the long run.  The snippets I’ve seen (trying hard not to look though!) have appeared a bit mad, weird stuff has gone on since I last visited the island and that guy doesn’t appear to have lost any weight!?

So my question is, is Lost worth it at this stage or has it already jumped the shark?  Please no spoilers, obviously if it even halfway decent I don’t want it ruined.  If you feel you can’t control yourself just vote in the poll in the sidebar!!

Speaking of the sidebar you’ll see that Quit Your Day Job has got itself a little advertising, hey I got to get my comic book money somewhere!  Anyway if you don’t throw up in misery everytime you visit here think about clicking on one of the ads to give them a bit of value for their money or even throw a couple of cents this way and get some advertising yourself!

Now that Iron Man has come and gone, it met my expectations (and hopes) and renewed my faith in the potential of the comic book movie I’ve got some more movies to look forward to.

High amongst these films is of course Hellboy II The Golden Army.

I know some people were unmoved by the first Hellboy, but I liked it and I’m more than ready to revisit that world.  I still marvel at the perfect casting of the first one, could you get a better Hellboy than Vincent himself?  (some people will get that reference and I know how old you guys are!!)

Tracey got me a replica ‘Samaritan‘ gun ages and ages ago, actually it was just before we were forced to move out of our old place.  So I haven’t had the time to actually enjoy it and so it’ll be twice as cool when we finally buy a place and move out.

It’s going to be like Christmas as we open up all our old stuff that we haven’t seen for a year!  But for the mean time one of things that I’ll be adding to the storage manifest now that we just got it off lay-by is my very own Right Hand of Doom.

I had to at least check it in the box to make sure it was actually OK (it had been on display),  of course I didn’t realise that you can actually wear the thing!!!

(in the wider shot of that photo you can also see an Iron Man figurine laying down in the background - portrait of a comic book geek much?)

One of the aspects of the Iron Man character that I quite like is the evolution of the armour.  To be completely honest I probably prefer what is known in some circles as the ‘classic armour’ that appeared throughout the 80s, even over the movie version (although I don’t think that classic armour would’ve worked even half as well on the screen).

Unlike a lot of the other characters Iron Man isn’t really stuck with what he’s got.  Spider-Man for instance was bitten by a radioactive spider and gained the proportional strength of a spider (though some science types argue this point), agility, stickiness..?  That’s it though, apart from his home built web shooters he has his base powers and he can’t really improve upon them.  If they aren’t good enough then it’s tough.  He has to make do with what he’s got.

Tony Stark on the other hand can take an absolute beating from someone and use that experience to build a bigger stick (as it were).

A really popular armour (according to my extensive research) is the Hulkbuster armour, it was a figurine, appeared on trading cards and is one of the armours in the Super Squad Iron Man edition.  What is interesting (in at least my mind and the one other Iron Man fan still reading this to see where I actually go with it) is that the armour only appeared ever in two actual issues and one of those was for one page!

The cool thing about the armour apart from looking cool is that Stark had faced the Hulk before and rebuilt the armour modules to make the challenge he was about to face.  Superman can’t ‘get more strong’, Mr Fantastic can’t ‘get more stretchy’ and Aquaman can’t get more… um… fishy?

Stark can upgrade his powers and it doesn’t mess with the character, in fact we expect it!  Costume changes for him are a given.

Think about the times they try changing Spider-Mans costumes, only once in my opinion was that a good thing (Black-suit Spidey).  Iron Spider-MAn was wrong, the clone ‘hoody’ costume was very wrong and now dated!  I’m not even really a fan of the new Captain America costume.  But with Iron Man I can’t wait to see the next generation of armour and if I don’t care for it I just have to wait for Iron Man classic to return!