X-Men: Days of Future Past
Blu-ray|Blu-ray 3D|DVD|Digital HD|Amazon Instant Video
Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Simon Kinberg
Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Peter Dinklage, Ellen Page, Nicholas Hoult, Halle Berry, Anna Paquin, Shawn Ashmore, Omar Sy, Daniel Cudmore, Evan Peters, Fan Bingbing
Rated PG-13|131 minutes
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Release Date: September 23, 2014 (Digital HD)|October 14, 2014 (Blu-ray)

Read Adam Frazier’s review of this film from May here.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the X-Men movie I’ve dreamed of since my youth, back in the day when I mowed lawns during the dog days of summer to save up enough money to buy the latest X-comics off the shaky wire racks at my neighborhood 7-11. Those were the days when the comics were written by the great Chris Claremont and drawn by his gifted artistic equal Jim Lee and Future Past is the closest we’ve come yet to having a motion picture that brings those bold emotions, visuals, and outrageous “only in the funny books” style of four-color storytelling to explosive life.

As the late, great Mickey Newbury once sung, the future’s not what it used to be. The world has long been ravaged by a war between an alliance of mutants and sympathetic humans and the relentless robotic mutant hunters the Sentinels. Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his X-Men are now the last remnants of the resistance and every day their numbers get lower. Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) and her ability to project a person’s consciousness back in time has helped give them a slim advantage in the ongoing battle and that power must now be used to send someone back to the point in history when the war became unavoidable: the assassination of Sentinel creator Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) at the hands of Xavier’s former friend and surrogate sister Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) in 1973.

In December, IDW Publishing released the Star Trek Annual 2013, where comics great John Byrne had the Star Trek universe boldly go into photonovel territory. The 48-page full-color issue, subtitled “Strange New Worlds,” which served as a sequel to the Star Trek: The Original Series television episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” turned out to be such a hit, that the publisher is turning it into a new ongoing bi-monthly series.

Titled Star Trek: New Visions, each extra-length photonovel issue will be created by Byrne, who reportedly will use more than just photo manipulation for the new series, which begins in May 2014 with Star Trek: New Visions #1 – The Mirror, Cracked, available for pre-order now.

Doomsday.1, Vol.1
Written by John Byrne
Illustrated by John Byrne
Colored by Leonard O’Grady
Cover by John Byrne
IDW Publishing
Release Date: November 13, 2013
Cover Price: $17.99

The first collected edition of John Byrne’s Doomsday.1 is out. Included within are the first four issues of the Armageddon series. Does the book hold up in the vast array of post-apocalyptic stories? Find out below!

Discovering that an unusually deadly solar flare on the sun’s surface will erupt and destroy the majority of life on Earth, the crew members of an international space station are forced to watch from above as devastation begins. Able to abandon their ship in time before the flare obliterates them as well, the surviving astronauts must learn to adapt to a ruined planet. As they seek refuge and other survivors, the group encounters various obstacles along the way — especially from other human beings.

If you know comics you know the name John Byrne, the man behind some of the best comics runs in history. He built his reputation on books such as Uncanny X-Men, The Fantastic Four, and Superman in the ’80s. Now he’s got a new four-issue miniseries from IDW called Doomsday.1, set for release in May, 2013.

Doomsday.1 is the story of seven astronauts who watch on from the International Space Station as Earth goes to heck in a hand basket. A massive solar flare knocks humanity down a few pegs, and the astronauts decide to make the trip back to Earth rather than waiting for their supplies to run out.

Check out the cover below.

Rocketeer Adventures, Vol. 2
Written by Marc Guggenheim, Peter David, Stan Sakai, Tom Taylor, Paul Dini, Walter Simonson, Dave Lapham, Kyle Baker, Matt Wagner, Louise Simonson, David Mandel, John Byrne

Art by Sandy Plunkett, Bill Sienkiewicz, Stan Sakai, Colin Wilson, Bill Morrison, John Paul Leon, Chris Sprouse, Kyle Baker. Eric Canete, Walter Simonson, J. Bone, John Byrne
Inks by Karl Story, Bob Wiacek

Colors by Sandy Plunkett, Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave Stewart, Serban Cristescu, Jordie Bellaire, Eric Canete, Cassandra Poulson, J. Bone

Letters by Robbie Robbins, Bill Sienkiewicz, Stan Sakai, Colin Wilson, Chris Mowry, Shawn Lee. Kyle Baker, John Workman, Neil Uyetake

Cover by Darwyn Cooke
Design by Randall Dahlk
Edited by Scott Dunbier
IDW Publishing
Release Date: January 2013
Hardcover | Kindle

Somewhere, Dave Stevens is reading his copy of The Rocketeer Volume 2 and smiling, as you will be when you pick this book up. To say it brings honor and respect to the late Steven’s work would be an understatement. This is comic storytelling at its finest.