Comicbook Easter Eggs

Something that just makes me smile when I read comicbooks is when I find a little easter egg. If you don't know what I mean by that, the term easter egg refers to a little hidden secret that serves no purpose except to entertain the people who find it and understand it. These are often references to another franchise that's completely unrelated to what you find the easter egg in. I'll give some examples. In Marvel's Annihilation, there's a scene with a fleet of ships full of refugees, and one of them is a Battlestar. They don't say anything about it and you only see it in the background of one panel, but it looks identical to the Galactica. In Annihilation Conquest, the series that takes place right after, there's a part where Nova Corps centurions are fighting Phalanx drones, and one of the centurions is a blue version of Pikachu. Some of you may hate me for this, but I'm not a fan of Pokemon. But I still found the easter egg amusing at the very least. Another thing like this is in a Judge Dredd story, the Three Amigos. Dredd and his two "amigos" are fighting an army with a very unopressive dress code, and some of them are wearing Star Trek TNG uniforms. Not only that, but they're recognizeable as Ryker, Georti, Troi, Worf, and maybe Picard. I don't quite remember. The artist put all that effort into drawing Star Trek characters into one panel, and I appreciate that. Probably the most obscure one I've seen is one that I'm not 100% sure was intended, but I'm 90% sure. In Green Lantern: the Sinestro Corps War, an anonymous member of the Sinestro Corps looks exactly like a Baltan, which is an alien race from the Japanese TV show Ultraman. Good show by the way. The Sinestro's skin was blue instead of brown, but his proportions and his distinctive head and hands were the same. Also, in DC's series 52, they made at least one reference to the show Moonlighting. I've never seen this show, so I didn't get any of their references, but in the trade paperbacks, there's a section of text after each issue where either one of the writers or the artists discusses his thoughts on that issue and the series, so the reference was pointed out but not explained. But anyway, I love finding easter eggs in comic books.

Guardians of the Galaxy Movie

In my last post, I said that an Ant-Man movie isn't a total shock to me. Guardians of the Galaxy is. I would never have expected them to get a movie. I didn't think the original Guardians of the Galaxy were that cool, but I did like the newer incarnation that they'll be making a movie of. I'm pretty shocked that they want to expand their movies into the cosmic side of Marvel, but even more surprised that to do it, they're using a title that wasn't very popular and was cancelled relatively soon after it began. I would've expected them to start with a movie introducing one or two cosmic heroes and work their way up to a whole team. It would be hard to do Nova or Quasar without looking like a Green Lantern knockoff, so I'm not sure who they could start with. Not that I'm complaining. I liked Annihilation Conquest and thought the Guardians were a cool team for the most part. I just never would've expected to see Groot or Rocket Raccoon in a movie, so if they're in it, that'll be pretty cool. The only problem I can see is that Marvel has been trying to do the whole "fun for the whole family" thing (it's all Disney's fault; they must be stopped, no matter the cost. Assemble at their headquarters next Guy Fawkes Day), which I'm worried might force them to diminish the quality of some characters like the talking raccoon. They might modify him to appeal more to younger audiences, which I think is a bad idea. He's always been kind of a comic relief character, but I think they should modify him the other way and make him a little more mature. The biggest surprise of all though is that I heard they're making Guardians to set up a Thanos Imperative to introduce Thanos, so when he comes on the screen in Avengers 2, even the non comic book readers will all say "Oh ****! It's Thanos!". That makes sense to me, but as much as I liked it, the Thanos Imperative just seems waaaaay too out there to make into a movie. It has the Shi'ar, the Inhumans, Adam Magus, Nova, a whole new universe that requires extensive knowledge of the mainstream universe to understand, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes it seem to me like one of those titles that will never be a movie, but apparently, I was wrong. The only thing about that that bothers me is that they'll have to kill off Starlord in only the second movie he's been in, just like how in the comic books they killed him off just a short time after he started being cool. And Nova a slightly longer but still short time after his coolness got a major boost. Right now, it's too early to tell what my feelings on Marvel movies going cosmic are. I've never thought any interstellar story arcs could translate well to the big screen, but I could be wrong. If they do this right, it'll be pure awesomeness.