It'll disappoint a lot of those who believe that Stan is the devil, but he's not quite dead just yet.  This week Stan cancelled all upcoming personal and public appearances with the excuse that he was having health issues.  Rumours ran riot with many predicting the imminent demise of Stan, but hot off the press release channels came this from POW! Entertainment, Stan's company: Attention, Troops! This is a dispatch sent from your beloved Generalissimo, directly from the center of Hollywood’s combat zone! Now hear this! Your leader hath not deserted thee! In an effort to be more like my fellow Avenger, Tony Stark, I have had an electronic pace-maker placed near my heart to insure that I’ll be able to lead thee for another 90 years. But fear thee not, my valiant warriors. I am in constant touch with our commanders in the field and victory shall soon be ours. Now I must end this dispatch and join my troops, for an army without a leader is like a day without

If there’s one artist who it can be said defined Superman to the point where their name is synonymous with the character than that artist must surely be Curt Swan.   Swan began drawing Superman in the mid 1950s and he remained the number one artist for the many Superman titles until his services were dispensed with when John Byrne took the character over in 1987.   Indeed, at the time, it was almost impossible to imagine a Superman comic being produced by DC that didn’t feature Swan’s pencils, but all good things must come to an end eventually – and it’s not like Swan just faded away.   His last Superman story was promoted as being the last ever ‘classic’ Superman story, written by Alan Moore and inked by George Perez and Murphy Anderson.  Moore later stated that it working with Swan was magical for him and in the official Swan biography speaks glowingly of the man.   As farewells go they don’t get much better than that. In the late 1980s Swan contributed a lengthy auto-biogr

Shanghai Surprise should have been a major cash cow for all involved.   On paper it had all of the right ingredients – the newly married Madonna, who was as hot as a new star could be at the time, her husband Sean Penn, who had built his reputation on being both a talented actor and a true bad boy off screen and a Beatle, George Harrison, as the executive producer.   In a way it was a meeting of generations, the ‘60s meets the ‘80s and the hype was magnificent.   However, as with all of the best laid plans, nothing connected with the film went right, or smooth. Madonna and Penn were, even at this early stage in both their careers and their marriage, extremely media shy.   In fact, media shy does them disserve as they were more anti-media than anyone could remember since Greta Garbo in the 1930s and beyond.   They protected their privacy with a zeal that often exploded into violence and each time that happened the media, as a whole, felt goaded into fighting back in the best