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Author Archives: Jesse Russell

Before Oakland, there was Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison, the hours that weren’t filled up by my day job were typically devoured by event planning and running the city’s popular arts and politics news site, Dane101. Some of the events I organized include an annual two-night cabaret/carnival/masquerade party called the Fire Ball Masquerade, Madison's biggest non-city sponsored Halloween party, the geek culture focused MadPubQuiz of Awesomeness, and the first Whedonesque Burlesque in the country. Having successfully reshaped the reality of Madison, Wisconsin I packed up and moved to the Bay Area in February of 2013. In addition to comics, I enjoy imbibing cocktails and beer, exploring foreign cities, consuming food of various temperatures, hearing music performed live, losing at board and card games, and getting caught in the rain.

The Unfortunate Return of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival

Last year I came up with the idea of the Pandemic Panic Film Festival. One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was the at-home accessibility of film festival screenings. The Telluride Horror Show and Nightstream Film Festival aligned in such a way that their virtual screenings meant two weeks of watching new films from the comfort of my couch. It was one of the highlights of an otherwise depressing year. As we went into 2021 my assumption was film festivals would return to normal, virtual screenings would come to an end, and I’d finally make it to Telluride in person. 

Alas, just as no one could predict the pandemic, no one could predict we’d still be faced with such uncertainty. No one could predict we’d still be dealing with ICUs at capacity due to COVID.

Due to the circumstances, there are multiple ways film festivals are approaching their return. Telluride Horror Show chose the all in-person option. Fantastic Fest is taking the hybrid approach and doing a little of both. Overlook Film Festival, the one that brought me to Nightstream, is sticking with all-virtual.

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Warner Bros. Pictures provides cinemas a long runway for reopening

Warner Bros. Pictures is saving cinema. 

In early December of 2020, I first sat down to write this article. That first line was going to be my headline. The same day HBOMax/theater release strategy felt like the best possible decision considering the state of the world. Not every theater in the country was closed. Those that were open had become dependent mostly on limited run and re-release films. Warner Bros. was making the risky decision to keep their film slate moving while offering open cinemas a bone. A very tiny bone, but a bone nonetheless. That was my gut response, but, holy cow, it was not the popular response.

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Future State: The Green Lantern Timeline

The two Future State: Green Lantern issues contain a total of five stories. Combined, the five stories each provide a puzzle piece in the timeline of Future State. According to the official Future State timeline the main Green Lantern story, Last Lanterns featuring Earth Lantern John Stewart, takes place in the year 2035. We join the story in the midst of action defending the homeworld of the Shaar from the Khund. A ringless Stewart is fighting alongside G’nort and Salaak (plus two others, Ilo and Hood, who may or may not be former Lanterns). We don’t know what happened to their rings or the power battery.

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Nightstream Review: Ema

In no particular order: intoxicating, boring, horny, punk rock, hilarious, horrifying, bewildering. 

Those are all of the adjectives that passed through my brain during the viewing of this delicious puzzle of a film.

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Telluride Horror Show Review: 12 Hour Shift

In this day of age, Internet misinformation is just something we expect. We’ve almost reached a point where if something lands in front of you on a website or social network the instinct is to disbelieve. That hasn’t always been the case. One of the very first Internet rumors to take hold on a mass scale was that Marilyn Manson was a child actor on the television show The Wonder Years. In that falsehood, Manson used to be the actor Josh Saiviano who played the character Paul Pfeiffer. The actor grew up, changed his name, and became an industrial icon. An extra special version of the Internet story was that Manson had ribs removed so he could give himself a blowjob. 

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Frankensteining a pandemic horror film festival

The last time I was in a movie theater was March 13, 2020. COVID-19 had finally arrived on the U.S. shores and we weren’t quite sure what it would mean, but everything was starting to shut down. I figured it would probably be one of my last opportunities to visit the cinema for a couple of months, so I chose the earliest screening of Valiant’s Bloodshot.

It was an uncomfortable experience. The theater was mostly empty but one of the few other attendees chose to sit two seats away from me. He spent the film coughing, snorting, and, at least twice, spitting. I was pretty sure that was going to be it. My zeal to get one last film in would result in hospitalization from this virus we were still trying to understand.

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Deep Dive: The Green Lantern #10 (2018)

The Green Lantern #10 is another issued packed to the gills with characters from the Multiverse and beyond. It establishes that there’s been a group of Green Lanterns from a number of Multiverses meeting in secret to monitor the Multiverse. They call themselves the Guardians of the Multiverse. Amusingly, they appear to never have bothered inviting Hal Jordan to a meeting. There’s a ton to chew on this issue, so let’s get to it!

cover to the green lantern issue 10

Previous The Green Lantern Deep Dives:

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Deep Dive: The Green Lantern #9 (2018)

Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s ninth issue of The Green Lantern features a cast of dozens. We’re introduced to a new cosmic superteam called “The United Planets of Superwatch,” Hal Jordan takes us on a recreational swords and sorcery adventure with his D&D group on the planet Atmoora, we get our first glance of the combined Green Lanterns of the Multiverse (or the “Guardians of the Multiverse”), and we finally see the fruits of Controller Mu and the Blackstars labor in the form of the Anti-Man.

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Deep Dive: The Green Lantern #8 (2018)

There are few team-ups more iconic than that of Green Arrow and Green Lantern. The odd couple team-up, a moralistic space cop and an anti-establishment vigilante, was defined by the creative team of Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams. The relationship was fleshed out in the pages of the Green Lantern series, which became Green Lantern/Green Arrow in a historic storyline that ran from issue 76 through 87. The run included the classic story “Snowbirds Don’t Fly” which introduced Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy as a junkie. The cover of The Green Lantern #8 is a nod to that issue.

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Who Are The Multiverse Green Lanterns?

Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s The Green Lantern issue 10 cracked open the Multiverse and introduced as to the “Guardians of the Multiverse.” This team is a collection of Green Lanterns from different Earths (perhaps more correctly Universes because they aren’t all from the Earth in their Universe). Thanks to the solicitation for issue 10 we know Morrison plans for 12 Lanterns to join the team.

Twelve parallel worlds! Twelve Green Lanterns! And one unstoppable menace! Hal Jordan joins the Green Lanterns of the Multiverse—including Bat-Lantern, Tangent Green Lantern and more—to save a dying Multiverse, defeat the relentless Anti-Man and embark upon their “Quest for the Cosmic Grail”! It’s another Morrison/Sharp science fantasy epic!

Thanks to the cover for the issue we have a decent guess as to who seven of those Lanterns joining Earth Prime’s Hal Jordan will be. Three more appear in issue 10 bringing the total of known Lanterns to 10. Two, including the mysterious black, fin-headed Lantern on the cover, will likely be revealed in issue 11. I’ve pulled together an explainer for these ten light slingers starting with the seven from the cover. They’re listed below from left to right in the above image.

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