What's In the Box?!? Subscription Box Round-Up: August Gentleman's Box, Marvel Collector Corps, and Nerd Block

Time once again for Subscription Box Round-Up, featuring the subscription boxes I’ve received since my last subscription box blog. 

First up: the August Gentleman’s Box, featuring exactly the same box as every month (so no photo of it this month).

This month’s box honors “Our Favorite Artist Formerly Known As,” aka Prince. So I expected a lot of purple this month, and I was not disappointed.

Rocketeer Adventures Volume 1

When IDW originally published their first Rocketeer Adventures series, featuring new stories based on the late Dave Stevens’ creation, I was pretty excited. While in a perfect world, we would have seen new stories by Stevens himself, this was an acceptable substitute, for two reasons. First, obviously, Stevens’ passing at a far too young age precludes any new material from him at all. Second, I was well aware how much of the second volume of the Rocketeer was actually created by other people, although very much in line with Stevens’ vision and sensibilities. Regardless, I had been waiting most of my comics-reading life for new Rocketeer stories, so there was no way I was not going to be excited about their imminent arrival.

Tales of the Batman: Alan Brennert

A few weeks ago, I got to meet one of my favorite authors, Alan Brennert. Today, he is probably best known for his historical novels focusing on Hawaii (although I also love Palisades Park, his novel detailing the history of the popular New Jersey amusement park and the people whose lives it affected). The bulk of his career is in television, and that may be the first place I encountered his work; he was a script editor for part of the first season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Other shows he worked on that I watched: Twilight Zone (the 80s revival), China Beach, Simon & Simon, Star Trek: Enterprise, LA Law, and many others. But in the 80s, and very occasionally since then, he's written comic books.

[Spoilers for Tales of the Batman: Alan Brennert after the jump.]

What's in the Box?!?: Subscription Box Round-Up: July Nerd Block and Firefly Cargo Crate

Just a couple of weeks after I republished my “I Love the Rocketeer” blog, this news of a new movie came out. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited by the prospect of a new Rocketeer movie. And I am fine with it being a reboot/sequel, with a new person wearing the helmet and rocket pack. I feel like that may be the best way to honor the original movie, rather than redo/recast the original characters. I also think that if Dave Stevens is no longer around to chart the course of the characters he created, maybe the best way to respect his memory is to move the series on with new characters, while still being faithful to the spirit of the original. (How do I square this attitude with the Rocketeer comics created after Stevens’ death, featuring Cliff Secord, Peevy and Betty? Stay tuned to a future blog to find out.)

Oh, and I am fine with the new Rocketeer being a black woman. I haven’t looked at any comments on any of the news articles about this new movie, and the idea that the new Rocketeer is neither white nor male, but I am sure that fandom is being completely reasonable, adult, and respectful of this, and not acting like a bunch of racist, sexist whiny boys. What other reasonable response could there possibly be?

On to July’s Nerd Block. Once again, the outside of the box is exactly the same as it is every month. Feel free to refer back to earlier Nerd Block blogs to see what that looks like.