Iron-Fist

This week instead of an episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ABC aired a special about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios: Assembling a Universe was basically a documentary discussing the process that Marvel Studios went through to create their series of interconnected movies and at the end gave a few teases for upcoming projects. My friends and I, and according to the website Television by the Numbers more than four million other people all tuned in to watch. Four million viewers isn’t going to win any time slots but it was still good enough to give ABC third place for the hour and drew significantly more viewers than the rerun of S.H.I.E.L.D. they aired on February 20th. More interesting to me was the fact that ABC was willing to air it at all. They have enough faith in the popularity of comic book entertainment that they were willing to air a documentary primarily about movies that people have already seen during primetime. If that isn’t a sign that we are living in a new golden age for comic fans I don’t know what is. However, unlike the Golden Age of Comic Books this new golden age is on the big and small screen. In honor of this new era of superhero entertainment I thought I’d take a look at the current and upcoming live action superhero movies and tv shows from both Marvel and DC.

[caption id=“attachment_303” align=“alignleft” width=“197” caption=“The Defenders #1”] [/caption] Eric’s Book: Eric: For this week’s Comic POW! I’ve decided to go with one of Marvel’s new titles, The Defenders Dan: I’ve been pretty excited about this book myself thanks to the work its writer, Matt Fraction, did on Casanova. Eric: I was excited by the idea and the Marvel hype that it would look at some of the key foundations of the Marvel Universe. That type of stuff is always fun to me. Now this book, or at least this arc, is a continuation of events set into place by Fear Itself. I largely ignored Fear Itself because I don’t have infinite money and it only seemed to tangentially affect the books I follow, but I DID read Marvel’s one-shot a few weeks ago that previewed 2012 stuff and it had a prologue to this story. Actually, I think it had two prologues. I remember reading a story that described what’s going on with Hulk as well as a story that described Dr. Strange’s friend who he mentions on the fifth page of content. The Hulk prologue explained that this black creature you see on the second page is the result of some Fear Itself mystical-ness that represents the rage that even Hulk has been able to contain. ...