TKO Studios Offers Free First Issues!

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TKO Studios is a new comic publisher and they’re looking to shake things up with their award-winning artists and writers and the way their comics are released. 

TKO Studios seeks to redefine the comic book industry creatively and commercially.

TKO Studios was founded by award-winning comic book, entertainment, business and tech professionals. We create unique takes on established genres, promoting diverse and exciting voices that reflect the modern audience.

Our aim is to publish high quality books and expand the comic book audience using modern methods of marketing, distribution, and audience engagement. We proudly offer the premier issue of each new miniseries available for free digital download.

You read that right, each premier issue of a new series is offered up for free as a digital download.  If you don’t like what you see, no harm, no cost.  If you do like what you’ve read, you can buy the entire series in any of three formats:

  1. As a digital download
  2. As individual comics with a collectors box
  3. As a graphic novel with all issues collected into one volume

TKO is on to something smart.  Now fans can check out the stories before committing to a series they may not like.  If they do enjoy what they see, there’s no months-long wait to get the whole story and they can get the story in the format that they prefer.  

I’ve checked out TKO’s first four offerings and ordered (as a graphic novel) The 7 Deadly Sins by Tze Chun (writer),  Artyom Trakhanov (artist), Giulia Brusco (colorist) and Jared K Fletcher (letterer).

Check out the TKO series available now and coming soon — it won’t cost you a cent and you may find something you’ll love.

Why Stallone is Still the Greatest Action Star

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Renaldo Matadeen and CBR.com remind us why Stallone Is Still the Greatest Action Star.   Here are a few tidbits…

Stallone picks up this accolade for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s his longevity that really puts him ahead in the field. His resume is stacked, with untouchable franchises like Rambo and Rocky under his belt, not to mention other projects that impressed fans of the ’80s and ’90s action scene.

…Creed and Expendables franchises perfectly illustrate his staying power…

…another reason he deserves the title of greatest action star — he’s adapted to the landscape…

That’s another reason why he’s the best action star, period. He mixes drama with his heroics in a style unlike any of his peers. Creed got Stallone an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and he was previously nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for Rocky in 1976, which is something the likes of Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme can’t boast.

Check out the Matadeen’s entire piece, it’s worth your time.

“Mission Impossible: Fallout” Trivia

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Rob Hunter and Film School Rejects present 51 Things We Learned from the Mission: Impossible – Fallout Commentary.  Here are three of my favorites…

7. They tested shorter cuts of the film per the studio’s request, but each attempt saw the scores plummet. Cruise told them “it doesn’t matter how long it is, it matters how long it feels.”

17. The HALO sequence saw them jumping out of the plane at 25,000 feet, and it’s all done live in a single shot. The city lights below are added in post, but the jump and fall are 100% real. “We talked about this for a year. How are going to get this shot?” The camera operator for the scene is wearing a camera mounted to the top of his own helmet, and the whole thing is a legitimately thrilling sequence. Here, I’ll let a very excited and proud Cruise tell you about jumping out of the plane for the scene. “Now he’s backwards. He leaves backwards. I’m coming right at him. Now I have to get from there I have to get within three feet, not two feet ten inches, not three feet and two inches. I have to be right at three feet to be in focus. Now I go past him in that and we had a window of three minutes to get that shot. Now I do this spin, now you’re in my face,I’m up on my back, he’s going up and around. It really is a dance between the two of us. I had to always make sure that the sunset was on my left shoulder. Now we’re traveling at 200 miles an hour at times toward the ground. I’m coming in, it’s like a sprint, boom, I have to hit him. When I hit him, I have to hit him, I don’t know where I’m gonna hit him on his body, I just have to try and take him out and down. And not break his neck, my neck, and not entangle the chutes, deploy his chute or my chute. Any of those things could have led to serious problems.” They built the largest wind tunnel in the world to train and considered filming some of the sequence in there, but it didn’t look real enough.

27. The “what if” sequence at 44:13 where they show the hijack and subsequent killing of dozens of police officers under the overpass was a concern as paparazzi and Parisian gawkers lined the other side of the river watching. They hung 300 feet of silk across the archways so that people wouldn’t see police being murdered, and the unintentional but welcome effect is the “eerie light” across the scene.

How Sly Stallone Made the Cover of a French Graphic Novel

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Today we have the Colin WIlson cover to the French graphic novel Du Plomb Dans La Tête written by Matz and illustrated by Colin Wilson.  If you think the the tough-guy on the cover looks like Sylvester Stallone, you’d be right.

See, Du Plomb Dans La Tête was the basis for Stallone’s film Bullet to the Head.

What’s interesting to note is the character (that Sly ended up playing) from the original graphic novel was drawn to look a bit like Sly as Jack Carter.  When Sly took on the role for Bullet to the Head, Walter Hill (the director) opted for a different look and Sly agreed.  So in the movie Sly doesn’t look like Jack Carter but on the Du Plomb Dans La Tête cover he does.

And now you have the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say).

Ranking All “Rocky” / “Creed” Movies

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Sam Stone at CBR.com recently posted Every Rocky Movie Ranked. Stone did this by averaging the professional critics’ scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

Joe Leydon at Variety had the same idea so All Eight Rocky Movies Ranked were done by Joe.

Not to be outdone, John Orquiola at ScreenRant provided All 8 Rocky & Creed Movies Ranked.

Follow the links above to see the individual comments and rankings for each of the Rocky/Creed films.   I created a chart to make comparisons easier.  I also added my rankings in the last column.

It was interesting to see that except for Rocky at #1 and Creed as #2 there wasn’t a majority consensus for any other ranking.

20 Walking Dead Easter Eggs Everyone Has Missed

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Shawn S. Lealos, at CBR.com, posted 20 Walking Dead Easter Eggs Everyone Has Missed and it’s a great read.  Here are my three favorites…

20  THE WHISPERERS
The Whisperers have finally arrived on The Walking Dead but they were hinted at a few years back by a character that isn’t even on the main series anymore. Way back in the Season 3 episode “Clear,” Rick and Morgan met up for the first time since Rick left Atlanta. Morgan was clearly driven mad at the time — losing his wife and son — and he was rambling about a lot of things. However, one thing that he said was clear foreshadowing for this season of The Walking Dead.

Morgan said he saw “people wearing dead people’s faces.” Fans of the comic books knew exactly what Morgan was talking about since the books had introduced the Whisperers, who wore the faces of the dead in order to walk among the zombie herds safely.

1  BREAKING BAD CONNECTION
The Walking Dead might be the most popular television series in the history of AMC but it is nowhere close to being the most critically acclaimed series on the network. That would arguably be Breaking Bad and there are a lot of clues that indicate the worlds from the two television series are actually connected.

Daryl had a bag of narcotics in the season 2 episode “Bloodletting” that included a blue powdery substance that fans of Breaking Bad will immediately recognize. There was also a red Dodge Charger that Glenn stole in “Guts” that was the exact same color and year as one that Walter returned to a car lot and a general manager named Glenn. Also, Gale’s crazy coffee maker from Breaking Bad showed up in Milton’s lab in season three. These Easter eggs have made some people wonder if Breaking Bad is a Walking Dead prequel.

15  THE SCRIPTURES
On the fifth season episode “Strangers,” the survivors ended up at Father Ezekiel’s church and found an interesting situation. Ezekiel was alone in the church, having refused to allow his followers in, and the group found one man alone surrounded by his belief in God. On the board in the background were five Bible verses. Interestingly, these verses all had an eerily similar theme.

A fan on Reddit took the time to look them all up and they involved rising from the dead, returning to life, being unable to pass on, and living among the dead. The books of the Bible ranged from the Old Testament in Ezekial to the final book of Revelations. While not really meaning zombies, they all tie into the themes of the show.