First Trailer: Marvel's BLACK WIDOW Movie!

Black Widow will be the first of Marvel's superspies to get her own movie (preceding Shang Chi by a year), and today Marvel released the first trailer. And it looks pretty cool! I'm honestly surprised about how many images come directly from the various Black Widow comics over the years. Clearly, the character's first standalone film will contain some flashbacks to Natasha Romanoff's early days as a child raised to be a KGB assassin in Moscow's infamous Red Room. Scarlett Johansson has played the role in seven Marvel movies (most recently the all-time box office champ Avengers: Endgame), but this will be her first solo feature.

If you want to play catch-up on the comics and see where some of those images in the trailer come from, there are some collections out there that make that possible. (And even more are due next year in the lead up to the movie!) Three beautifully prodcued Marvel Premiere hardcovers collect this secret agent's most essential adventures in matching volumes. Black Widow: The Sting of the Widow presents the character's first appearance (in a silly costume in an issue of Iron Man) and earliest solo adventures from the early Seventies, after she'd gotten an Emma Peel makeover, ending up in the black catsuit with which she's still most closely associated. These early Black Widow comics will surely be of interest to collectors and hardcore fans, but casual fans looking for a great introduction to the character are better off picking up the second volume in the series, Black Widow: Web of Intrigue first.

Black Widow: Web of Intrigue offers an excellent primer on the character containing some of her classic appearances from the early Eighties, including an excellent comic drawn by my second-favorite spy artist (after Steranko), Paul Gulacy.  (Look for a cameo appearance by Michael Caine!) Black Widow: Web of Intrigue contains this and several other seminal tales of the red-haired Russian superspy. A third volume, Black Widow: The Itsy Bitsy Spider collects a pair of Marvel Knights stories from the late Nineties (including one by Queen & Country scribe Greg Rucka).

My two favorite modern-day Widow storylines have yet to receive the hardcover treatment, sadly, but are available in a pair of out-of-print trade paperbacks. (They'll also, happily, be collected in a new single volume next year!) Richard K. Morgan's Black Widow: Homecoming and Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her put the focus on espionage above superheroics and are among the very best Marvel spy stories of this century. Other recent Widow stories include Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Black Widow and the Marvel Girls, Black Widow: The Name of the Rose and Black Widow: Kiss or Kill. Most of the character's adventures with Daredevil from the 1970s are included in Essential Daredevil: Volume 3. as well as the color Daredevil Epic Collection: A Woman Called Widow.

Tradecraft: Marvel Announces Shang-Chi Casting, Title

As much as I love Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and I love it dearly!) and Black Widow, my favorite Marvel spy comic has to be the original 1970s run of The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu... particularly the issues showcasing the brilliant collaboration of writer Doug Moench and artist Paul Gulacy (a team who would go on to produce the best James Bond comic book to date, "Serpent's Tooth"). Last December, it was first reported that a Shang-Chi movie would feature among Marvel Studios' next slate of films. All has been quiet since then... until this past weekend. On a massive panel at Comic-Con Saturday night, Deadline reports, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige announced the first official details about the studio's upcoming Master of Kung Fu movie, including its title and who will play the titular master, Shang-Chi.

Feige told the assembled hordes of fans in SDCC's Hall H that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will open on February 12, 2021. Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu will play Shang-Chi. Best known for a Canadian sitcom called Kim's Convenience, Liu has earned spy cred with roles on Nikita and the Taken TV show. As studied Marvel fanatics will glean from the title, Iron Man comics villain the Mandarin (basically a Marvel rip-off of Sax Rohmer's 1920s-created "yellow peril" character Fu Manchu) will replace the actual Fu Manchu (a character Marvel licensed in the Seventies, but no longer has the rights to) as Shang-Chi's criminal mastermind father... and the great Tony Leung (Lust, Caution, The Silent War) will play him. Actress and rapper Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians, Ocean's 8) will also appear in the film, though her role was not announced. I can't really imagine her as Shang-Chi's love interest Leiko Wu, but she might make a good foil as his duplicitous half-sister Fah Lo Suee. (Or she could be playing an original comedic role, of course.) As previously announced, Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) will direct, and Dave Callaham (Jean-Claude Van Johnson) handles scripting duties, making up an all Asian-American creative team driving the picture.

The comic book The Hands of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu was created in the early Seventies to (obviously) cash in on the kung fu craze of the time. Comics legends Steve Englehart (Batman: Strange Apparitions) and Jim Starlin (Avengers: Infinity War) originated the character, but it was the dynamic writer/artist team of Moench and Gulacy who became most associated with Shang-Chi... and who gave the comic a new direction as an espionage series.

Shang-Chi's real world origins at Marvel are a bit complicated, as the publisher had acquired the rights to Rohmer's villainous Fu Manchu character (still well-known at the time thanks to a series of Christopher Lee movies in the Sixties), but Englehart was more interested in the popular TV series of the time, Kung Fu. So he incorporated Rohmer's characters Fu Manchu and his nemesis, British adventurer Sir Denis Nayland-Smith, but invented a new character to star in the series more inspired by Kung Fu... Fu Manchu's hitherto unknown son, Shang-Chi. Though the father had seen to it that the son was trained from birth to be a Master of Kung Fu, when Shang-Chi discovered that the father he believed to be munificent was actually a diabolical criminal mastermind, he turned on him, and found employment with Nayland-Smith and the British Secret Service. In the hands of Moench and Gulacy, secret agent Shang-Chi encountered all manner of spy hijinks, from moles inside MI6 to supervillains with private islands, gadgets galore, and robotic armies. He also developed a roster of memorable sidekicks, including Nayland-Smith's assistant and bodyguard Black Jack Tarr (drawn by Gulacy to resemble Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King), and fellow MI6 agent Clive Reston (drawn by Gulacy at first to resemble Connery in Goldfinger, but later looking more and more like Roger Moore), who is strongly hinted to be the son of James Bond and the grand-nephew of Sherlock Holmes. Should the character of Black Jack Tarr make the movie roster (and it's hard to imagine Master of Kung Fu without him), I'd love to see Jason Statham brought into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in that role! Sure, he's too short... but I think he'd nail the attitude--and make a formidable physical foil for Liu.

While Marvel's most famous spy agency, S.H.I.E.L.D., never showed up in the pages of Master of Kung Fu (though Shang-Chi did eventually team up with Nick Fury and Black Widow in a multi-issue arc of Marvel Team-Up), Gulacy's stunning artwork owed a clear debt to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. artist Jim Steranko. Like Steranko, Gulacy reveled in quasi-sci-fi technology and weaponry and innovative, experimental page layouts. (One particular standout turned the page into a maze, following Shang-Chi's progress against a variety of opponents as he navigated the labyrinth.) He also brought his own obsessions to the table, like Bond-inspired, movie poster-style splash pages, relentlessly sexy women in proto-Gaultier leather fashions, and the liberal use of famous actors' likenesses to "cast" the book with everyone from Bruce Lee (upon whom Gulacy's Shang-Chi was clearly based) to Marlon Brando, Christopher Lee (as Fu Manchu, of course), David Niven, and even Groucho Marx. The result was a truly unique book that far transcended (and consequently outlasted) the kung fu movie trend from which it was born, and drew influence from all sorts of popular culture. I think it may well be my very favorite Marvel comic. Long unavailable outside of back issue bins, the entire 125-issue series has at long last been reprinted over the past few years in four massive, hardcover omnibus volumes, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Marvel has also recently begun a line of cheaper paperback "Epic Collections."

Full Trailer for the Batman's Butler Sixties Spy Show PENNYWORTH

Following the brief teaser revealed in March, EPIX has released a full trailer for that Sixties spy show about Batman's butler, Alfred Pennyworth... long before he was Batman's butler. Hey, whatever it takes to get a Sixties-set spy show on the air today! (And clearly what it takes is some sort of popular superhero property branding.) While Pennyworth is not directly connected to any other specific incarnation of the Dark Knight (including Gotham, which hailed from the same creative team), it certainly seems as if the appealing star, Jack Bannon (Endeavor), is doing his best to channel a young Michael Caine. (Caine played Alfred in the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, and of course embodied the quintessential 1960s London spy, Harry Palmer.) Set in an alternate reality Sixties London, Pennyworth follows young Alfred's adventures as a budding private security contractor fresh out of the SAS working with Thomas Wayne (future father of Bruce) to stop a threat against Her Majesty's Government.

Trailer: PENNYWORTH, a 1960s Spy Show Starring... Batman's Butler?

It seems the only way to get period spy shows now is when they're spun off from superhero franchises. Remember that 1960s-set, Avengers-like Hellfire Club we almost got, that was to be spun off from X-Men: First Class? (It would have focused on the White Queen, an X-Men character inspired by Emma Peel's guise in the classic Avengers episode "A Touch of Brimstone.") And we did, of course, get two superb seasons of Marvel's Agent Carter set in the late 1940s and spun off from Captain America: The First Avenger. There were even (really!), at one point, plans at Sony to make a Spider-man spinoff about Peter Parker's Aunt May... as a secret agent in the Sixties! That didn't happen, but this is almost as rich.

Last summer, as Deadline, reported, EPIX ordered the latest of these efforts, a 1960s spy show... about Batman's butler, Alfred Pennyworth. And today, we got the first trailer for Pennyworth, from Gotham alums Bruno Heller (Rome) and Danny Cannon (Nikita). While the famous butler may have been originally created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger, it's unlikely that they ever imagined Alfred (originally depicted as plump and comical) as a former secret agent. Yet that aspect has entered into DC Comics lore in recent decades, and been notably explored in stories like Batman: Earth One by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, and All-Star Batman: The First Ally by Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque. This side of Alfred was first explored in detail on television in the 2013 animated series Beware the Batman, which featured a Jason Statham-ish take on Alfred. But I suspect the main inspiration for Heller was probably seeing Michael Caine as Alfred in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and flashing back to the young Caine as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and Billion Dollar Brain. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Palmer as an antecedent of Caine's Alfred, and indeed Pennyworth looks to take inspiration from the likes of Ipcress. (Hopefully it will also feature a John Barry-ish sound, as director Cannon has experience with that, having commissioned David Arnold's very Bondian Bjork song "Play Dead" for his breakout 1993 movie, The Young Americans.)

In the 10-episode drama series, Alfred Pennyworth (The Imitation Game's Jack Bannon), described by Deadline as "a former British SAS soldier in his 20s," forms a private security company "and goes to work with young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Fleabag's Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London." The end result appears, from this brief teaser, to somewhat resemble BBC's sadly short-lived period spy drama The Game. I'm excited for any Sixties spy drama, and if lashing their idea to a superhero franchise is the only way creators can get that kind of programming made, that's fine with me. I'm on board! Pennyworth premieres this summer on EPIX. Check it out:

Spider-Man Turns SPYder-Man in New Trailer Featuring Nick Fury

Sony has released the first trailer for their latest Spider-Man movie, the second one set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a direct sequel to 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming. Thanks to the agreement between Sony and Disney-owned Marvel Studios that also allows Spider-man to appear in Disney's Avengers films, the Sony-released, Marvel-produced Spider-man movies can use other characters from the MCU. Spider-Man: Far From Home (opening this summer) takes full advantage of this scenario by finally bringing erstwhile S.H.I.E.L.D. ramrod Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) into poor Peter Parker's life. In fact, it looks like the pitch for this movie might have been something along the lines of, "let's do If Looks Could Kill with Spider-Man." Which, as an unapologetic fan of the 1991 Richard Grieco  teen spy movie, fills me with delight... even if I still have trouble believing Marvel went for it!

Far From Home finds teenage Peter Parker and all his classmates from Homecoming going on a school trip to Europe, where Nick Fury hijacks Peter's European vacation to recruit him as some sort of spy, complete with a fancy new stealth Spider suit. Jackson's Fury is accompanied once again by his regular MCU sidekick, Cobie Smulders' former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill. (Never mind that the last time we saw the two of them, in Avengers: Infinity War, both were disintegrating into dust. Perhaps the events of Avengers: Endgame, which will open between now and Far From Home, will somehow undo that fate, or perhaps Far From Home takes place prior to Infinity War.Jackson will next be seen as a pre-eye patch Fury in the 1990s-set Captain Marvel.) This trailer marks the first time we've ever seen Jackson's Fury wield a gun that resembles the one Jim Steranko drew for him on his seminal 1960s run on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (even if this one's a dart gun). Personally, I'm 100% sold on the spy stuff... but iffy on the giant elemental creatures angle. Check it out for yourselves:


Read my Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. primer here.

Mezco Made a Diabolik Action Figure... and You Can Pre-Order it Now!

Toy company Mezco has been displaying a prototype for a Diabolik action figure since at least summer of 2017, and I was beginning to wonder if it would ever actually happen. Then, last week, they did a blog post offering a good precis on the character's history, and also reassurance that Diabolik was still on their mind. And yesterday, the figure became available for pre-order on the Mezco website! (Be warned though... it isn't cheap. You may want to polish off your own suction cup climbers and stake out Mezco's warehouse!)

Shipping in summer 2019, the figure is part of Mezco's high-end One:12 Collective figures. Those figures are known for their realistic clothing and ultra posability. The figure runs about 16cm tall (a little over 6 inches), and features over 30 points of articulation. It comes with two interchangeable heads (one masked, the other not), and eight interchangeable hands to create various poses or grip accessories like throwing knives or loot.

Mezco's Diabolik figure is based on the Italian comic book (fumetti neri) character created by the Giussani sisters, and not specifically on Mario Bava's sublime 1968 film version thereof (one of the all-time classic Eurospy titles), so the maskless likeness sadly doesn't resemble John Phillip Law. But the film costume was so true to the comic (as was its logo) that with the mask on you can easily pretend your figure is Law's Diabolik! And it's a damn cool figure either way. Diabolik may be a master thief and not a spy, but the Jaguar-driving supercriminal embodies so many tropes of the Sixties spy fantasy! (As does the movie.) Let's hope this toy sells well and Mezco follows it up with a matching Eva Kant figure!

Check out the figure in detail and put in a pre-order (requiring a $20 deposit) on Mezco's site.

To get an idea of how the prototype developed over the past fewyears, check out toy news sites like Super Punch or Action Figure Fury, both of whom posted good images from various conventions.

Read my review of Bava's Danger: Diabolik (one of my all-time favorite movies) here.

First Glimpse of Two-Eyed Nick Fury in CAPTAIN MARVEL

Hollywood Pipeline (via Dark Horizons) has snapped some pictures and even video of Samuel L. Jackson on the set of Marvel Studios' upcoming Captain Marvel. As previously reported, Captain Marvel (starring the studio's first female film title character) will take place in the 1990s, decades prior to other Marvel movies we've seen. (Though perhaps around the same time as the opening of Ant-Man, which featured aged versions of Agent Carter characters Peggy Carter and Howard Stark running S.H.I.E.L.D.) That means we'll get to see a younger version of Marvel's resident ramrod superspy, Nick Fury. (Read my Fury/S.H.I.E.L.D. primer here.) But he's still played by Jackson, who is expected to be digitally de-aged. (Clark Gregg's fan-favorite S.H.I.E.L.D. agent of big and small screen, Phil Coulson, will presumably get the same treatment.) The younger Fury will still have both eyes, thus won't sport his famous eyepatch look. Though, as we can see, Fury is in civilian clothes, indicating he's already traded his stripes for spy suits. We saw the original Nick Fury maintain this state (as a two-eyed spy) throughout an entire issue only once, in Fantastic Four #21 (which is collected in the S.H.I.E.L.D. Omnibus). Other than that, you could easily tell his soldier comics (Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos) apart from his spy comics (Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.) by counting his eyes. No doubt Jackson's Fury will lose an eye during his adventures in Captain Marvel. (In the comics, his missing eye has been explained several different times featuring several different circumstances.)

I have to admit, though, that I'm a little bit disappointed. I was hoping Marvel Studios would be cheeky enough to have Jackson replicate his most famous Nineties look, and sport Jules' Jheri curl from Pulp Fiction as the younger Fury!

🎥 NICK FURY!!!! Samuel L. Jackson spotted filming with Brie Larson on set of ‘Captain Marvel’ in Hollywood the same day Infinity War is released

Link to FULL SET below & YouTube page has VIDEO of this. 🤩🤩https://t.co/cMZ82ncKTB#CaptainMarvel #AvengersInfinityWar #NickFury pic.twitter.com/XQswWz7Lav

— Hollywood Pipeline (@HlywdPipeline) April 28, 2018

Tradecraft: Marvel Seeks Female Directors for BLACK WIDOW Movie (UPDATED)

Apparently the standalone Black Widow movie we heard chatter about in January is indeed quietly moving forward with women in key creative positions, even though Marvel Studios has resolved not to officially announce any future movies until after their fourth Avengers film premieres next year. (Just to clarify, I mean Marvel's Avengers, obviously, not the real Avengers, and I mean the next Marvel Avengers movie, not Avengers: Infinity War, which opens tonight and is expected to break just about every box office record.) But we still heard in January that Jac Schaeffer, a female screenwriter, had been hired to pen the script, and now, buried at the end of an article about Paramount hiring a female director for the next Star Trek movie, The Hollywood Reporter lets slip that Marvel are keen to hire a female director for female superspy Black Widow's solo debut. The trade reports that the studio has met with such filmmakers as Deniz Gamze Erguven (the acclaimed Turkish movie Mustang), Chloe Zhao (The Rider) and Amma Asante (A United Kingdom), among several others, but there is no clear frontrunner and the search remains ongoing. Asante's name may stand out for spy fans, as she's just signed on to direct a film of the popular book about legendary Cold War spy Adolf Tolkachev, The Billion Dollar Spy.

Presumably Scarlett Johansson would reprise her role from various Marvel Studios movies as Russian superspy Natasha Romanoff in any Black Widow movie. Despite Johansson being the only Avengers cast member to gross $450+ million in her own original movie outside of that franchise, it has taken Marvel much too long (and probably the success of Wonder Woman and Atomic Blonde) to realize the potential for a female-driven film. (Their first will be Captain Marvel, due next year.) Now that they are finally taking notice of the massive audience for such a movie, it's nice to see them lining up women behind the camera as well as in front.

Read more about the Black Widow comics the film will likely draw from and the character's screen history here.

UPDATE: According to a report on The Playlist, Marvel has actually met with upwards of sixty directors about the potential Black Widow gig! At least we know three of them....

Tradecraft: Black Widow to Finally Fly Solo?

Variety reports that Marvel Studios may finally be moving forward with a standalone movie about superspy Natasha Romanoff--the Black Widow. This is something spy fans have wanted to see ever since it was first announced that the character would appear in Iron Man 2, played by Scarlett Johansson. Since then Johansson has reprised the role in five more films (including Marvel's The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Captain America: Civil War), with two more in the can (including The Avengers: Infinity War, due this spring), but never starred in her own solo movie. (This despite Johansson being the only Avengers cast member to gross $450+ million in her own original movie outside that franchise.) It looks like that may finally be rectified.

According to the trade, Marvel President Kevin Feige has tapped screenwriter Jac Schaeffer to pen the script. Despite a track record that can't be argued with, Marvel have been surprisingly slow out the gate to launch a female-driven superhero franchise. They're finally doing that with Captain Marvel (starring Brie Larson and featuring Samuel L. Jackson's return as Nick Fury), due in 2019, but hiring a female writer to crack a Black Widow feature demonstrates a realization of the cultural moment we're in, and, hopefully, a commitment to further female-fronted superheroics. Schaeffer first attracted attention with a comedic spec script about an alien invasion interrupting a baby shower. That script, The Shower, was recognized on the prestigious Black List (favorite scripts of the year as voted on by Hollywood assistants), and now has Anne Hathaway attached to star. Since then Schaeffer has also written Nasty Women for Hathaway, a female-centric remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Bedtime Story.

The trade stresses that, "sources say [the Black Widow movie] is still very early development, as the film has no greenlight, but naming a writer is the closest the studio has come to moving forward on a standalone pic." Marvel hasn't yet announced any titles of their "Phase 4," which will follow the two upcoming Avengers movies, but the earliest we could possibly see a Black Widow would be 2020. I really hope it happens!

Schaeffer certainly won't be lacking for source material. The sexy former Russian spy Natasha Romanoff, aka The Black Widow, is one of Marvel's foremost espionage-oriented characters, second only to Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. She has a rich history in comics dating back to the Sixties. Three beautifully produced Marvel Premiere hardcovers collect this secret agent's most essential adventures in matching volumes. Black Widow: The Sting of the Widow presents the character's first appearance (in a silly costume in an issue of Iron Man) and earliest solo adventures from the early Seventies, after she'd gotten an Emma Peel makeover, ending up in the black catsuit with which she's still most closely associated. These early Black Widow comics will surely be of interest to collectors and hardcore fans, but casual fans looking for a great introduction to the character are better off picking up the second volume in the series, Black Widow: Web of Intrigue first.

Black Widow: Web of Intrigue offers an excellent primer on the character containing some of her classic appearances from the early Eighties, including an excellent comic drawn by my second-favorite spy artist (after Steranko), Paul Gulacy.  (Look for a cameo appearance by Michael Caine!) Black Widow: Web of Intrigue contains this and several other seminal tales of the red-haired Russian superspy. A third volume, Black Widow: The Itsy Bitsy Spider collects a pair of Marvel Knights stories from the late Nineties (including one by Queen & Country scribe Greg Rucka).

My two favorite modern-day Widow storylines have yet to receive the hardcover treatment, sadly, but are available in a pair of out-of-print trade paperbacks. Richard K. Morgan's Black Widow: Homecoming and Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her put the focus on espionage above superheroics and are among the very best Marvel spy stories. I hope they end up in their own Premiere volume one day. More recent Widow stories include Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Black Widow and the Marvel Girls, Black Widow: The Name of the Rose, Black Widow: Kiss or Kill, three volumes of beautiful material by Nathan Edmondson and Phil Noto (including the one pictured at the top of this story), and two (comprising her most recent series) by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee. Most of the character's  adventures with Daredevil from the 1970s are included in Essential Daredevil: Volume 3. Last year, Black Widow was also the subject of a large-format character retrospective/art book, Marvel's The Black Widow: Creating the Avenging Super-Spy: The Complete Comics History.

Batman Drives Bond's Aston

In issue #2 of Sean Murphy's Batman: White Knight miniseries, on shelves today, a tuxedoed Bruce Wayne is shown arriving at a party in a car instantly familiar to James Bond fans. And, should there be any doubt, Murphy has given it the license plate "DALTON007." The car, of course, is the Aston Martin Vantage driven by Timothy Dalton as Agent 007 in The Living Daylights (1987). And Murphy, who is best known for Vertigo titles like American Vampire, Joe the Barbarian, and Punk Rock Jesus, sure draws it nicely! (Man, I would love to see him do a Bond comic for Dynamite....) Bond himself was drawn driving this car by John M. Burns in the 1993 Dark Horse miniseries James Bond: A Silent Armageddon.

Of course, this is far from the first Aston Martin originally made famous by Bond to be driven by Bruce Wayne. In fact, Batman's playboy alter-ego has a fairly extensive history with the marque. He's been drawn driving Astons in several comics, most notably when artist Jim Lee put him in a Vanquish in the third issue of his and Jeff Loeb's landmark Batman story, Hush. That was in 2002, the same year that Pierce Brosnan drove a Vanquish in Die Another Day. But the association has also been present in movies. I think it was James Bond screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz who first put Bruce Wayne in an Aston Martin in his unfilmed 1983 Batman movie script. Zach Snyder finally realized that ambition onscreen in his (otherwise abysmal) 2016 movie Batman vs. Superman, in which Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne drives a classic 1950s Aston Martin DB Mk III, the very car that Ian Fleming had 007 drive in his novel Goldfinger! (By the time the story was filmed, it made sense to update it to the then-current DB5, and thus history was made.) The same type of car might also be familiar to spy fans from appearances in the premiere episode of Danger Man,  and in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. Season 2 episode "The Children's Day Affair."

For more on Batman/Bond connections, check out this 2008 article, "His Name is Wayne, Bruce Wayne."

S.H.I.E.L.D. Agents Return to Marvel Movies

Ever since S.H.I.E.L.D. was taken apart in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (one of the best spy movies of the decade), we've seen very little of its agents in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Apparently that's about to change. Two announcements earlier this month indicate that two of Marvel Comics' most famous agents will be making their way into upcoming MCU movies.

Deadline reports that Samuel L. Jackson will return as Nick Fury in 2019's Captain Marvel, where he will reunite with his Kong: Skull Island and Unicorn Store co-star Brie Larson (Free Fire). Jackson last appeared as Fury in a brief cameo in The Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2014. He is expected to reprise the role in The Avengers: Infinity War and its sequel. At first I assumed this news probably indicated that Fury will survive those films, which are expected to take a high toll on the MCU heroes. But yesterday Deadline updated their story, reporting that Captain Marvel will for some reason take place in the early 1990s, making it a prequel to all the other MCU films except for the first Captain America (which took place in WWII) and the Eighties-set opening scene of Ant-Man. Moreover, Marvel chief Kevin Feige revealed at Comic-Con that Fury will have two eyes in Captain Marvel. Does that mean he'll still be in the Army? (Presumably the MCU Nick also started out as Sgt. Fury, even if he came along long after the Howling Commandos.) Will Jackson sport his Pulp Fiction wig? (That I'd like to see!) We probably won't find out until closer to March 2019 when the movie opens. And in the meantime, Nick Fury is as precariously poised as anyone else when it comes to surviving the Infinity War.

Even more exciting, perhaps, is the news that first appeared on The Tracking Board (via Dark Horizons) and since been confirmed by multiple outlets that Randall Park (The Interview) will portray Agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp! Woo debuted in the late 1950s as an FBI agent in Marvel precursor Atlas Comics' The Yellow Claw before Jim Steranko brought him into his Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. stories in Strange Tales and ultimately made him a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent himself. Woo has sine been a fixture of the Marvel Universe, appearing in various comics over the years including Godzilla and Agents of ATLAS. Park is an excellent actor, but primarily a comedic one. (He stars on the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat recently made a scene-stealing cameo in Snatched.) I can imagine him fitting in very well with Paul Rudd and Michael Pena in a comic relief role, but I hope that's not the case. Jimmy Woo was the first Asian-American comic book hero, and was treated as a serious member of the team in the Sixties. I would hate to see him reduced to a joke. That said, the part could of course be both comedic and completely competent, which is what I'm hoping for. Either way, it will be cool to see Woo make his MCU debut.

Batman Meets Avengers Steed and Mrs. Peel For Real This Summer

DC Comics' Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel, uniting the Adam West incarnation of the Caped Crusader with the original Avengers, was first announced at Comic-Con last summer. But after that news on the project was frustratingly scarce. In the fall came the surprising news that Batman would next team up with another pair of Sixties tube spooks, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin in Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Again, details were scarce, and spy fans were left to ponder whether the U.N.C.L.E. series had precluded the previously announced Avengers crossover, or merely preceded it. Thankfully it now seems clear that DC is intent on a series of Sixties Batman TV crossovers, the issues of which appear to have replaced the ongoing monthly Batman '66 comic, which came to a close just before the U.N.C.L.E. crossover began. The publisher officially announced Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel last month (as reported on Comic Book Resources), with the first issue hitting comic shops July 6 (after debuting digitally on June 8) and the second slated for August 3.

The 6-issue series will be a co-publication with BOOM! Studios, who have held the license to publish Steed and Mrs. Peel comics since 2012, and have done so intermittently since then, along with reprinting Grant Morrison's early Nineties run on the title. BOOM!'s most recent stab at Steed and Emma (for my money, bar none the greatest characters in all spy television) came in 2014 with "Mrs. Peel, We're Needed" by Ian Edginton and Marco Cosentino. That series was originally solicited as being six issues, but was alarmingly truncated to just three (and never collected in trade), presumably owing to poor sales. (A pity, too, because Edginton delivered a great story chock-full of amusing references to The Prisoner, James Bond and other Sixties pop culture spies.) Hopefully a meeting with Batman will give The Avengers the higher profile they need to sell more comics of their own, and Boom! will at least allow Edginton to finish out his 6-issue run and then publish a collected edition to match their previous three volumes of original comics. That seems like a possibility because, happily, Edginton is the writer on Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel! Matthew Dow Smith (whose previous TV-based comics include Doctor Who and The X-Files, and who also drew the very first solo adventure of Mike Mignola's Lobster Johnson) provides the art, and the great Mike Allred (Red Rocket 7) continues his cover duties from Batman '66 and Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (Additionally, Cat Staggs will provide a variant cover for the first issue.)

Some fans complained about the artwork because the publisher apparently didn't obtain likeness rights for Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, but I thought DC really knocked it out of the park with Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which will be collected in hardcover in September. I sincerely hope that Batman Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel maintains that high level of quality and fun, and with Edginton (who also penned a quartet of outstanding Sherlock Holmes graphic novel adaptations) at the helm, I'm confident that it will. Furthermore, if I may dare to dream a moment, I hope that the two miniseries are successful enough to warrant follow-ups. I would love to see more U.N.C.L.E. from DC (and I suspect the only way that will happen is with Batman along for the ride), and I would love even more to see some sort of jam-packed hullabaloo with Batman, Steed, Emma, Napoleon and Illya all together! (While I'm dreaming big, such an epic event should definitely be drawn by Allred. He loves hullabaloos.) At the very least, it will be nice to have a pair of Batman '66 superspy crossovers next to each other on my bookshelf by early next year. (The hardcover volumes DC has done with Batman '66 are very attractive indeed.)

I have no doubt that this series will yield an umbrella fight between John Steed and the Penguin, and a catsuited cat fight between Emma Peel and Catwoman. And obviously (judging from the cover for #2), Cybernaughts show up too. And I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the Hellfire Club make an appearance. But here's what we know for sure, in the form of DC's solicitation copy for the first two issues.

BATMAN ’66 MEETS STEED AND MRS. PEEL #1England swings and so does the Dynamic Duo in this historic pairing of two of the hippest shows from 1960s television. DC Comics and BOOM! Studios join forces to bring these iconic characters together for the first time!
As Bruce Wayne shows the beautiful head of a UK electronics company the sights of Gotham, they are interrupted by the felonious feline Catwoman! Unwilling to leave Miss Michaela Gough unprotected, Bruce resigns himself to the fact that Batman cannot save the day. But some new players have arrived in town—though even as the lovely, catsuit-clad Mrs. Peel and her comrade John Steed take control of the situation, nefarious plots continue apace!  

BATMAN ’66 MEETS STEED AND MRS. PEEL #2Gotham City’s police headquarters have been besieged by mysterious metal men, and our heroes are put in an unlikely position: as Catwoman’s saviors. And when even Batman’s best efforts falter, John Steed’s trusty umbrella plays a key role in the rescue! Co-published with BOOM! Studios.

Like Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Batman '66 Meets Steed and Mrs. Peel will be a digital first comic. This means that the comic will be published digitally on a bi-weekly schedule in advance of its print publication. Each digital issue contains half the contents of each print issue, so digitally it will amount to twelve parts total.

Pre-order Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E. here.
Order Steed and Mrs. Peel: The Golden Game here.
Order Steed and Mrs. Peel Volume 1 here.
Order Steed and Mrs. Peel Volume 2 here.
Order Steed and Mrs. Peel Volume 3 here.

Read my review of Steed and Mrs. Peel #0 here.
Read my interview with Steed and Mrs. Peel writer Caleb Monroe here.

Posters for New Seasons of ABC's Marvel Spy Shows

ABC and Marvel have released posters for both of their spy series. Entertainment Weekly debuted the poster for Season 2 of Agent Carter, the spectacular early Cold War period spy series starring Hayley Atwell (The Prisoner remake) and set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, due to return this winter. This poster will be given out at the Marvel booth at the upcoming New York Comic Con in October. There's also a new poster for the upcoming third season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which premieres this Tuesday, September 29, at 9/8c. Season 2 marked a distinct improvement over Season 1, but I have to admit I'm apprehensive over the direction it appears to be going, with more and more focus on the least interesting character, Skye, and her people, the Inhumans... a focus which threatens to take the show in a decidedly more superhero direction at the expense of the spying. But maybe it will all work out. We shall see!

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Returns to Comics... and Meets Batman '66!

Newsarama reports that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is returning to comics for the first time since the early 90s! Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin will be teaming up with Batman (specifically Batman '66, which is how DC brands comics based on the Adam West TV incarnation of the character and set in the Sixties) in a 6-issue miniseries by Jeff Parker (The Interman, Agents of A.T.L.A.S.) and David Hahn debuting in December. From the description (and the awesome Mike Allred cover), it sure sounds like this is the classic TV version of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.:

Two 1960s television icons cross paths for a groovy, globe-spanning adventure in this one-of-a-kind miniseries. The deadly organization known as T.H.R.U.S.H. has a new twist in their plans for world conquest—they’re recruiting some of Gotham City’s most infamous villains! Agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin bring this information to the one man who knows everything about these new enemies: Batman. Before you can say “Open channel D,” the Dynamic Duo and the Men from U.N.C.L.E. are jetting off to Europe to thwart the schemes of this deadly criminal cartel.

So does this mean that DC (a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment, who released this summer's excellent Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie) will be producing new Man From U.N.C.L.E. (ahem) solo books as well? I certainly hope so! Any such series would probably depend on sales of this crossover, but personally I'd love to see separate titles set in the film's continuity and that of the show.

It was announced at Comic-Con in July that Batman '66 would also be teaming up with The Avengers' Steed and Mrs. Peel in the near future. We haven't heard any more about that, so presumably the U.N.C.L.E. series will come first. But, man, what a comic book crossover that would be, if The Avengers met The Man From U.N.C.L.E.! I know, I know. I'm fully aware that it's Batman who's selling these books, not my spy heroes. Just indulge me that fantasy for one moment...

Batman '66 Meets The Man From U.N.C.L.E. #1 will be in comics shops on December 23, just in time for Christmas (and my birthday!) and will also be available with a 1 in 25 variant cover (not pictured) by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. So keep your eyes out, collectors!
Thanks to Jon for the tip!

Holy Emmapeeler, Batman! DC Comics Announces Batman/Avengers Team-Up!

The best news out of Comic-Con came on the final day. DC co-publisher Dan Didio announced a forthcoming comic book crossover between Batman and The Avengers. Yes, those Avengers! The real Avengers, Steed and Mrs. Peel! They will be crossing over with, most appropriately, the Adam West TV version of Batman from the Sixties. There aren't many details yet (no creators announced, no promo artwork, and no number of issues), but Batman '66/Steed and Mrs. Peel is coming, and that is wonderful. Hopefully a high-profile comic like this will revitalize Boom!'s flagging Steed and Mrs. Peel line and lead to more solo comic book adventures for the most dynamic duo of Sixties television. (I'm assuming this is an inter-company crossover with Boom!, but I suppose it's possible that the Steed and Mrs. Peel license has shifted to DC, which would also be an interesting development.) DC has been publishing a Batman '66 line, based on the West TV series, for a few years now, and it's already included a lengthy crossover series co-published with Dynamite Entertainment featuring the Caped Crusader and the Green Hornet, who had previously crossed over in a memorable TV episode. No doubt in this Avengers crossover, we'll get to see Steed in an umbrella duel with the Penguin, and Emma in a catsuited catfight with Catwoman. I can't wait!

Massive New S.H.I.E.L.D. Omnibus Collects All the Classic Sixties Nick Fury Comics

The complete run of the classic Sixties spy comic Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. will be collected in one massive hardcover tome due out from Marvel this fall. Though in keeping with current branding, it won't actually be released under its original title, but just "S.H.I.E.L.D.," dropping the Nick Fury. This is obviously in part to tie in with Marvel's current TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which doesn't feature the one-eyed superspy, and in part because Fury himself has largely been written out of the Marvel Universe at the moment. (The Nick Fury featured in these stories has been banished to the moon, believe it or not.) The name change is regrettable, but it's still nice that these classic and essential comics will all be collected together.

Historically, S.H.I.E.L.D. collections have focused on Jim Steranko's undeniably definitive run on the title. That's as it should be, since those Steranko comics are essential reading for any fan of the character or the medium at large, but by focusing on Steranko alone they leave out a lot of good stories by other writers and artists. This Omnibus will be the first time that the entire run of original stories from Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been collected in one place, not just the three issues that Steranko drew. (Most of Steranko's contributions to the character came earlier in the anthology book Strange Tales, though that run began in the hands of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Even the Kirby material is often left out of Nick Fury collections.) This 960-page tome, S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete Collection, collects the Fury material from Strange Tales issues 135-168, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1-15, Fantastic Four #21, Tales of Suspense #78, Avengers #72, Marvel Spotlight #31 (featuring a story drawn by Howard Chaykin that explains why WWII vet Fury didn't seem to be aging much by the 1970s), and relevant material from Marvel's self-parody 'zine Not Brand Echh #3, 8 and 11. As far as I can tell, that means the only content not already collected in three volumes' worth of Marvel Masterworks (out of print high end, hardcover collections) is Tales of Suspense #78, a Jack Kirby-drawn story which sees Fury teamed with Captain America to defeat "the macabre menace of THEM." So if you've got the three volumes of Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, you might not need this collection. Then again you might, as it is the first time all of this material has been collected in a single volume. The only glaring omission that I can spot is Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos Annual #3, which saw the eye-patched Fury (the patch distinguished the contemporary version of the character from his WWII self, star of a long-running series) and his WWII unit reconvened by President Johnson for a special mission in Vietnam. That one didn't make any previous S.H.I.E.L.D. collections either.

The Steranko stories are all conveniently collected in a much cheaper, much easier to hold trade paperback called S.H.I.E.L.D. by Steranko: The Complete Collection. That might be the best place for beginners to turn, eager for their first exposure to Steranko's groundbreaking artwork or Nick Fury's spy adventures. And Fury's whole Sixties run is collected in those three very nice, very readable Marvel Masterworks hardcovers, though those are out of print. But S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Complete Collection Omnibus brings everything together in one convenient place. So if you think you're apt to get hook, this might be a good starting place after all. It will certainly save time in hunting down all of these issues individually! And the Sixties S.H.I.E.L.D. oeuvre is as essential a part of any good spy collection as Ian Fleming paperbacks or The Man From U.N.C.L.E. DVDs.

Marvel will also release a trade paperback this fall collecting the first six issues of their current S.H.I.E.L.D. comic, based loosely on the TV series. (It's surprisingly good!) And the final trade paperback volume of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Classic, collecting the comic's early Nineties run, is due out in June. Between them (and especially when combined with Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D., Wolverine & Nick Fury: Scorpio and Garth Ennis's Fury MAX: My War Gone By), Nick Fury's Marvel legacy is now pretty well covered in trade!

Retail on this behemoth is $99.99, but it's considerably less on Amazon. It will be available with a Steranko cover or a new Alex Ross cover.

Cool Spy Toys: S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier Gets Lego-ized

ComicBook.com reports (via Blastr) that Lego will release a nearly 3,000-piece set to construct the famous S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier. This has to be one of the coolest spy toys in a long time! Of course the toy is meant to tie in with Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, not with the classic Sixties Jim Steranko or Jack Kirby Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics from which it originates, but it's cool either way! Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Marvel's way of cashing in on the Bond-based Sixties spy boom, and S.H.I.E.L.D. was essentially their version of U.N.C.L.E. But because Marvel was making comic books, not movies or television (and largely because the creative genius Steranko was drawing them), they ventured further into the realm of the fantastic than even Ken Adam could realize on screen. Aston Martins with ejector seats didn't go far enough; Nick Fury drove an invisible Porsche capable of flight. And a building with a secret entrance through a tailor shop would hardly do as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s HQ (although they did have one of those, too); Fury needed a flying aircraft carrier from which to direct his intelligence operations! The helicarrier is perhaps the ultimate symbol of Marvel's unique take on spy-fi, which blended espionage with superheroics and science fiction. And though it's remained a mainstay of the Marvel Universe in comics ever since, it seemed so outlandish that I never dreamed we'd see a big screen version. But Joss Whedon proved me gloriously wrong in Marvel's The Avengers (2012), realizing the improbably airborne spy headquarters with as much realism as possible. So much so that with that set-up, audiences had no problem with a whole fleet of helicarriers in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)! And now, at last, we've got ourselves a Lego helicarrier. Oh, how I want one! But the price is likely to be prohibitively steep, and the size would pose a display problem. But take a look at this video to see how detailed and all around awesome it is, and you'll probably want one too! Owing to its enormity, the helicarrier isn't in scale with standard Lego figures, so Lego have created a cast of even smaller figures to assemble on its deck. Among, naturally, are superspies Nick Fury (in his Samuel L. Jackson incarnation) and Black Widow (based on Scarlett Johansson).

Read more about the helicarrier in my S.H.I.E.L.D. primer, here.

Spy Character Posters From Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron

Of course spy fans know better than to think of Marvel's Avengers as the real Avengers, but even if it doesn't have John Steed and Emma Peel, Marvel's Joss Whedon-directed sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron still boasts some A-list superspies. Yesterday Marvel Studios (via Imp Awards) released character posters for their star secret agents Nick Fury and Black Widow (played by Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet Johansson respectively) from the new movie. Though he may not be an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore (or is he?) after the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, I'm glad to see that Nick Fury is sporting his slick spy look again, with trademark eye patch back in place, instead of his sunglasses wearing homeless look from the end of that movie. In fact, Jackson looks cooler than ever on this poster! I'm not sure why Black Widow has decided to add Tron-style neon blue trim to her leather Emmapeeler (doesn't seem very good for being stealthy), but I've never been one to complain about a beautiful lady spy in a catsuit... and maybe it's a deliberate nod to Emma? Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron opens May 1.

For comparison, see these secret agents' previous character posters from the first Marvel Avengers movie and Captain America: The Winter Soldier here and here, respectively.

See Black Widow's introductory character poster from Iron Man 2 here.

Read my primer on Marvel's superspies here.