Enzo the Magnificent

@Ettore This is where.

It's a little blue thing in a box that goes ping on alternate Thursdays.

Yep, it was July 1973 in The Amazing Spider-Man #121. I used to have that issue, before the First Great Comic Book Apocalypse of 1982. Mary Jane needs to realise that Gwen was the love of Peter Parker's life. She will only ever be a consolation prize.

I never liked Mary Jane Watson. She was always a bit of a Mary Sue and if she didn't get her way she just resorted to pouting. For me it was Gwen Stacy all the way. She was Peter Parker's equal.

Wot about E, F or G?

Oi! I resemble that!!!

Their Avia S-199 is a gem. Small, but perfectly formed.

But are they free range?

Laugh and point fingers? That's always very hurtful. Dr. Bashir: They broke seven of your transverse ribs and fractured your clavicle. You're lucky to be alive. Garak: Ah, but I got off several cutting remarks which, no doubt, did severe damage to their egos.

I have far more DC comic books than Marvel ones. I like the dark edge that DC brings to its stories. Like you, my favourite DC character is Batman who is more of an anti-hero than a superhero. In the Justice League it is Superman who seeks justice and Wonder Woman who protects the innocent but Batman isn't interested in justice. He is there to punish the guilty. Batman is always a man on the edge of a breakdown. Look at the way he treats Robin. Training Robin to be a weapon is tantamount to child abuse. That's why Dick Ward left him and went his own way as Nightwing. Likewise, in the Marvel universe my favourite character is Frank Castle, the Punisher.

Too late! Peacemake is Christopher Smith's superhero name. Except that he's not definitely not a superhero. Given that he works for Amanda Waller, he's one of those morally ambiguous characters that DC does so well.

Yelena Belova pokes fun at that in Black Widow. So does Wade Wilson when Logan does it in Deadpool and Wolverine. That's Peacemaker. The joke is that Christopher Smith is the only person who doesn't realise how ludicrous it looks.

Where there any good parts? As I mentioned, the 1960s retrofuturist theme was well done. I really liked the design of the Fantasticar. Another good point was the fact that Ben Grimm's cultural heritage is finally acknowledged onscreen. He's Jewish by the way. But it was a sort of blink-and-you'll-miss-it thing. I mentioned earlier about the film being humourless. There was a joke at the end of the film about the three blokes struggling to install a child's seat into the Fantasticar. That was quite amusing even if, given that Smug Richards designed both the car and the seat, it was silly. So is this a bad film? I think it's a victim of Disneyfication. Everything has to be nice and smiley. The FF have to get along with no internal dissension in the team. Even Ben Grimm's trauma at no longer being human was sidelined. I think this doesn't work. Compare it with the previous MCU film, Thunderbolts*. That had a disfunctional group of far more compelling characters who had to learn to get past their own personal flaws and work as a team. That's a far better narrative. Yet First Steps did better at the box office than Thunderbolts*. Maybe audiences these days don't like challenging ethical narratives. Maybe it's not a bad film as such, but it's certainly not a good film. It's far better than Eternals, which I couldn't watch in one sitting. I would place it on the same level as The Marvels. I tend to watch my favourite superhero films over and over again. I've lost count of the number of times that I've re-watched The Avengers and every one of the Spider-Man movies. I've watched Eternals, First Steps amd The Marvels once each. That's enough for me.

There were some stupid decisions made purely for the sake of special effects spectacle. Their spaceship, the Excelsior, launches from a pad in the middle of New York's East River, right next to the Baxter Building. Even worse, it recovers to the same pad. How come the Baxter Building and half of Manhattan and Brooklyn don't get immolated by the rocket exhaust? I realise that for science fiction films one has to be willing to suspend disbelief - even more so for superhero films - but this seems like a step too far. See what I did there? Once in orbit, the Excelsior links up with its FTL drive module. Why would you have the main drive seperate from the actual spaceship? That's just asking for trouble. At this point I made a bet with myself that the FTL module would get destroyed and so the FF would need to commandeer another spaceship to get home. I was only partially correct. The FTL module did get destroyed but that didn't mean that the FF were stranded. It seems that if you can reach 0.88 of the speed of light (I'm pretty sure that's a Back To The Future reference) then you can go faster than late. Who knew that 0.88 is greater than one? This sequence led to a really annoying line. Smug Richards decides to utilise a gravity assist from a nearby neutron star. Johnny pipes up with "Neutron star? Isn't that basically a black hole?" No, Johnny. A neutron star is basically a neutron star. A black hole is a black hole... Just stupid. Oh, and the sequance where Sue makes her belly invisibl so that they can see the child was just creepy. With regard to the child, the moment that Galactus said that he was imbued with the Power Cosmic, I worked out what would happen in the climax of the film. Come on, scriptwriters. You really need to try harder than this.

The pacing of the film was badly flawed. This isn't an origin story so we don't get to know who these people are before the main narrative starts. Instead we get a documentary style flashback showing their origin and some of their previous adventures which barely lasts as long as some opening credit sequences. If we don't know who these people are and their motivations, how are we supposed to care for them? In the comic books, Johnny Storm (The Human Torch) and Ben Grimm (The Thing) have an intense rivalry. Grimm has a bad temper and Storm continually plays on this usually getting both of them into trouble. Apart from a bit of childish sniping at each other, we got none of this in the film. This aspect of the characters was done far better in the 2005 film. We saw Harvey Elder, aka Mole Man, in the documentary flashback as an antagonist but later he comes back to aid the FF. We are not told why. It is implied there may be some connection between him and Sue Storm but we are not told anything more. This goes against the narrative in the comic books where it is Grimm and Elder who have the friendship. Considering what little characterisation there was, by far the worst characterisation was Reed Richards. Pedro Pascal plays him as insufferably smug. That's not really a challenging role for Pascal as he does insufferably smug very well indeed. Each time I see him, I wanna punch him in his insufferably smug face. I was really pleased that he had to keep his helmet on during most of The Mandalorian.

Bear in mind that I'm a big superhero movie fan with an extensive comic book collection. I watched First Steps last night and was sadly disappointed. I think the word which best sums it up is "meh". It's all style over substance, with an almost total lack of humour, little or no characterisation and some very sloppy writing. There were also a couple of decisions made about the script that I really don't fully understand. For instance, it is set on Earth-828 rather than Earth-616 like the rest of the MCU. I can sort-of understand why they needed to do this as it is set in a 1960s retrofuturistic world which would have been totally at odds with the standard MCU timeline. However it does mean that the story is totally divorced from the main MCU narrative. A mid-credits scene from Thunderbolts* showed their spaceship, the Excelsior (Marvel-1 in the comic books) approaching Earth-616. Nothing like that happened in this film, so I suppose they will jump universes at the beginning of Avengers: Doomsday. But Marvel are leaving it a little late. A worse decision was the gender-flipping of the Silver Surfer. Sometimes gender-flipping works well - think of Starbuck and Boomer in Battlestar Galactica. Other times, as in this movie, it doesn't. The Surfer is no longer Norrin Rad. She is Shalla-Bal, who originally was the Immortal Empress of Zenn-La and Norrin Rad's lover. Okay, in the comic books Earth X continuity, Shalla-Bal ecame a second Surfer but she and Rad served together as twin Heralds of Galactus. I can see no reason for the gender flip save that of adding a second woman to the main cast. In fact I think that Marvel have missed a trick here. After turning against Galactus, the Surfer becomes a lone wanderer, always seeking redemption, a bit like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name. There is enough comic book material for at least three movies featuring the Surfer, but they would need to be handled with the deft touch of someone like James Gunn or Joss Whedon. Given that Gunn now runs the DCU and Disney will never work with Whedon again because of accusations made against him, that's never going to happen.

We've all heard the singles from the J Geils Band. Centrefold... Freeze frame... Here's something a little different. A harmonica piece from the wonderfully named Magic Dick. And a little more...

That's certainly true. I remember thinking that their 1/48 Spitfire 24 was the best thing they would ever do 'cos it couldn't get any better than that.

ITVX are now streaming the first two seasons for free. However, it made me laugh that the trailer they use features Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldana as Spock and Uhura.

I hated that episode. It was as bad as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode. Just pants!

I've spent far too much time faffing around with the chipping on this model. No matter what I did, it still looked like silver paint smeared around a bit. So I decided to repaint the whole thing. Once again I sprayed the uppersurfaces with aluminium paint from a rattle can. I decided to use the hairspray technique. I bought a can of hairspray, which as you can imagine was a new experiance for me. L'Oréal Elnett Normal Hold with vitamin B5 to be exact. That stuff is expensive! £3.50 for a 75ml can... Anyway, here is the model after the chipping was completed. I'm a lot happier with it. The chipped paint actually looks like chipped paint because... well... y'know... it's chipped paint. The downside is that the model now smells like a boudoir.

Like a 1/48 Boulton-Paul Sidestrand. Come on, Airfix. You know you want to...

I've just looked on evilbay to see what prices are being offered for this kit. It seems that there is one seller who is selling seperate parts from the previous 1/24 Bf109E individually. That's an ingenious way of selling a kit for far more than it's worth.

Quite right too!

Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, Dean Martin, Al Martino. They all pale into insignificance when compared to Matt Munro.