Oh, I’m sure this will go over well.

Yep. Wonder Woman is ditching her classic outfit for a new look: black pants, a choker collar, and a star-spangled leather jacket.

That’s not all, folks. Wonder Woman’s timeline is getting a total reboot, not completely unlike what happened to Spider-Man at the end of One More Day.

“The Gods, for reasons of their own but which may have something to with their survival and perhaps the survival of Earth itself, have changed the timeline. In the new timeline, years ago the Gods removed their protection from Paradise Island, and left it vulnerable to attack. And attacked it was. Led by a dark figure, a veritable army descended upon the Island, equipped with weapons that could kill even the Amazons. Outgunned, doomed, Hippolyta gave over her three-year-old daughter to a handful of guardians who spirited her away as Hippolyta led one last desperate battle against the forces that had come to destroy all she had created. In that final battle, she and most of the Amazons were killed, though some managed to escape.”

In this new reality, Diana instead grows up in the inner-city, constantly on the run. Somehow, that explains why she’s apparently raided Black Canary’s closet. She also doesn’t have her powers in this timeline.

Boy, JMS really gets Wonder Woman, doesn’t he?

Take comfort, Wonder Woman fans. If this new look doesn’t suit you, there’s a chance it might be temporary. Wonder Woman isn’t just living in a rebooted timeline. During the first arc in Straczynski’s run, Diana will still retain some memories from her original timeline, and she’s taking action to find out “if the timeline can be corrected.”

Read the original article from DC here

That’s right, there’s word that Turtles Forever is hitting retail shelves on August 24th!

Turtles Forever is an animated movie that features both the 2003 and late 80’s incarnations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a crossover event that brought back heroes, supporting characters, and villains from across several generations. It was played at San Diego Comic Con in the summer of 2009, then aired a couple of Saturday mornings on CW4Kids.

There isn’t any word on a Blu-Ray release, and only a fullscreen DVD has been confirmed so far. It’ll retail for around $16.99 and Amazon.com is already taking pre-orders.

Writer: Sean McKeever
Penciler: David Baldeon
Publisher: Marvel

The Heroic Age has launched another title for Marvel! (Yay!)
But it’s not an Avengers title. (Cautious Yay…)
Young Allies is a relaunch of an old concept. It gathers some of the young breakout superheroes of today (who aren’t Young Avengers, Runaways, or Young X-Men), and teams them up in Marvel’s ever-present New York City backdrop. But does the newest team of young heroes have what it takes to stop the newest team of young villains in town? Will this series last beyond its sixth issue? Should you even care?

The answer to that last question is “yes,” by the way.

The stars of Young Allies are Nomad, the female Bucky from the Heroes Reborn universe, now stuck in the 616 universe; Araña, former agent of the Spider Society and sidekick to Ms. Marvel, now depowered and striking it out on her own; Gravity, former solo star and initiative recruit who’s back in town and attending NYU; Firestar, former Hellion and New Warrior who’s back in action with the Registration Act repealed and her breast cancer in remission; Toro, an all new character with a troubled past.

At the beginning of the issue, most of our heroes don’t even know one another. Instead, they find themselves drawn together when a new band of supervillains calling themselves The Bastards of Evil (I’m not joking) decide to make their debut with a little murder and wanton destruction in the streets of New York.

Baldeon’s artwork is good, and he executes his action sequences perfectly. I’m also digging the new costume design for Araña, which rings more of Julia Carpenter’s Spider-Woman, and less of a girl who threw on her gym clothes and ski goggles. What I do find strange is that he drew Firestar in her older costume, but he isn’t exactly the first artist to do that in recent memory.

Gravity battles with the concept of lethal force. Also, a villain.

No, this isn’t an Avengers comic, but you should pick it up anyway if you like comics that are, you know, good. Like all new launches, this title has a $3.99 price for its first issue. However, they try to make it worth your extra dollar by including nine pages at the end that explain the biographies of the main characters. That’s going to be a definite help I’m sure, because I wouldn’t be surprised if most of you hadn’t heard of (or at least read anything including) these characters.

Eureka (also known in some countries as A Town Called Eureka) is a science fiction show set in the titular small town in Oregon. Eureka is settled out in the woods, and is easily one of those towns you simply pass by on a road trip. Thing is, Eureka is not an ordinary town. It is, in fact, filled to the brim with geniuses.

For a moment, I want you to imagine a town full of mad scientists. That’s Eureka, a town secretly created back in the 1940’s to house the most brilliant minds in the United States. There’s a major laboratory named Global Dynamics at the edge of town that is peopled with morally questionable and bumbling scientists. They literally work on doomsday devices all day, everyday. And it’s not just the adults. Many of the high school students are geniuses whose science fair projects run amok and threaten to tear apart the whole town.

The only thing holding the town together is our band of plucky heroes: Jack Carter, a US Marshal appointed to act as the town’s sheriff, is a clever man whose intelligence is low enough to act as a surrogate for us (the audience) without coming off as an idiot in the least bit; Dr. Allison Blake runs the Global Dynamics lab on behalf of the US government and works directly with Jack; Jo Lupo is Jack’s tough as nails deputy, and a former army ranger; Dr. Henry Deacon is a mechanic who’s one of the most brilliant men in town. Along with a series of local wacky scientists and Jack’s genius daughter Zoe, they either solve or cause every disaster that comes their way.

I really love Eureka. It takes the white picket fence perception of small-town America and puts a giant death ray on the front lawn. It has a silly premise and doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are times when it is downright hilarious, but the show still has fully fleshed out characters, drama, and genuine danger that sometimes leaves casualties. There are overarching plots that can carry over an entire season, but the show is pretty episodic for the most part. You can usually jump into a new episode without having seen anything prior. Still, if you’re interested, it couldn’t hurt to watch a couple of past episodes.

A handful of episodes can be seen for free (legally, no less!) on either Syfy Rewind or Hulu.

Season 4 of Eureka premieres on Friday, July 9th on Syfy (aka SCI FI Channel). Check local and international listings.

Word has it that John Barrowman and sister Carole Barrowman are teaming up with artist Tommy Lee Edwards on Titan Publishing’s upcoming Torchwood comic book. The trio will work on a story titled “The Selkie” for the first part of issue #1. The rest of the first issue, and the next four issues, will be a story titled “Broken” by Gary Russell with art by Adrian Salmon.

Torchwood was originally a television series that spun-off from Doctor Who. The series follows Captain Jack Harkness, former companion of The Doctor, and his team of investigators who defend the Earth from the dangers that emerge through a space/time rift under the city of Cardiff, Wales. The first two seasons of Torchwood and the miniseries event Torchwood: Children of Earth are available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Torchwood: The Official Comic is expected to hit shelves on August 10, 2010.

Writer: Simon Spurrier
Pencillers: Paul Davidson & Francis Portela
Publisher: Marvel

About 20 issues ago in Uncanny X-Men, Beast and Archangel assembled a team of mad scientists to pursue solutions to the dwindling mutant population. Beast named this team the X-Club, after a real life social club comprised of scientists during the 19th century. The team currently consists of James Bradley aka Dr. Nemesis, co-creator of the original Human Torch android and hunter of Super-Nazis; Madison Jeffries aka Box, former member of Alpha Flight with the power to manipulate (and possibly speak to) machinery; Dr. Kavita Rao, creator of the mutant cure, now looking to restart a race she once tried to end.

This one-shot takes place between the cliffhanger ending of New Mutants #13 and the opening explosion in X-Men Legacy #236. How do you fit an entire issue between a countdown from 4 seconds and running to safety? You’d be surprised.

The X-Club gets teleported to the near future, where they encounter a psychic monster that tries to feed off of Nemesis and Madison’s mutant x-genes. They encounter a strange man who insists that Dr. Rao is the only one of them who can save the world, but Dr. Nemesis isn’t convinced. The story ends on quite a twist, though it’s not totally unpredictable.

This issue does a great job of clarifying Dr. Rao’s motivations. When she was first introduced as a member of the X-Club, I wondered why the woman who created the mutant cure would now try to do the exact opposite. This issue answered my question, and writer Spurrier does a good job of making me believe and understand Rao’s change of heart.

Dr. Nemesis, of course, manages to steal quite a few scenes/pages. His trademark wit is present, though it borders on making him look like a complete asshole for most of the issue. Nemesis also gets a few golden lines of dialogue, including some tongue-in-cheek heroic calls and taunts.

The X-Club is an under-appreciated addition to the X-Men mythos that adds a little sci-fi fun without having to leap into deep space. This single issue is well crafted, well drawn, and a lot of fun. I’d definitely recommend this if you want a Second Coming tie-in that’s not about different ways to kill and maim long-standing X-Men. Get this issue, folks. If not for me, then for SCIENCE!!

Writer: Ed Brubaker
Penciler: Mike Deodato
Publisher: Marvel

Norman Osborn is out of power, Steve Rogers is back from the dead, the Avengers are reforming, and a new Heroic Age is upon us. Secret Avengers is an all new Avengers title that takes us from the world of celebrity superheroes and bright adventures in the daylight to the dark and deceptive world of espionage. And it does so without going overboard on the “dark” part, for once.

Steve Rogers, the original Captain America, is now the head of SHIELD. When Norman Osborn was running the US military and superhero operations through HAMMER, things started to fall apart. Steve intends to put it all back together, and he’s planning to do so through preemptive strikes and subterfuge against their greatest enemies. To do this, he’s putting together his own team of Secret Avengers:

• Valkyrie aka Brunnhilde. Goddess. Former leader of the valkyries of Asgard.
• Black Widow aka Natalia/Natasha Romanova. Former Soviet spy, Champion, and returning Avenger.
• Steve Rogers. Former Captain America. Now head of SHIELD. Died. Got better.
• Beast aka Dr. Hank McCoy. Strong and agile mutant genius. Former X-man. Returning Avenger.
• Sharon Carter. Former SHIELD agent. Steve’s girlfriend.
• Moon Knight aka Marc Spector. Avatar of an Egyptian vengeance god. Might be crazy.
• Irredeemable Ant-Man aka Eric O’Grady. Former SHIELD employee, thief, and convict. Still, not a bad person.
• War Machine aka James “Rhodey” Rhodes. Soldier, former colleague of Tony Stark, and at one time Iron Man.
• Nova aka Richard Rider. Space cop. Former New Warrior. Cosmically speaking, kind of a big deal.

Their first mission is retrieve the Serpent Crown, a very powerful artifact that bestows its wearer with the powers of the Egyptian god Set. A shady company named Roxxon has come into possession of it, and we get a few cool action scenes as the Secret Avengers collect intel and what ultimately turns out to be a red herring. However, things might not go so smoothly once they discover who is following their trail.

Brubaker assumes we know who most of these characters are, and only gives Moon Knight and Ant-Man a few panels to explain how they were recruited for the team. This issue only sets up the plot without fully revealing the threat at hand, which is understandable for the first issue in any arc or title. For anyone wary about the prospect of the original Captain America working as a spy, it’s easily explained by pointing out the Secret Avengers’ similarities to The Invaders.

Deodato’s art has always been a mixed bag for me. He’s technically a good artist, but I feel like his clothes look a little too painted on, and he tends to draw a series of body parts that don’t quite fit together correctly. Still, he’s not afraid to pencil his own shadows without going overboard, he can craft an action sequence with the best of them, and his facial expressions are always on point. Plus he draws an excellent Beast, which can’t be said for many people these days.

Seriously, best drawn Beast in a long time

If you like superheroes, a little spy fiction, and you’re remotely fond of even a third of this cast, then go out there and pick up this comic.

Having survived a dangerous adventure together, Amy reveals to the Doctor that she’s getting married in the morning. She then tries to have sex with the Doctor, who rejects her advances because she’s getting married in the morning. The Doctor then resolves to sort out this whole mess.

The episode opens in ancient Venice, where a man named Guido (I’m serious) begs a Signora Calvierri to accept his daughter Isabella into her school. Calvierri agrees, and takes Isabella immediately. Guido is separated from his daughter moments before Calvierri’s son Francesco bares his vampiric fangs and bites into Isabella’s neck.

Cue the theme son– no, wait.

We switch over to Rory’s stag party/bachelor party, where he’s having a few drinks with the boys. He’s also drunk-dialing Amy to tell her how smashing she is. Rory has to hang up quickly when someone wheels out a particularly large cake. Everyone gets ready for a stripper to jump out, but…

She looks a bit manish

The Doctor pops out of the cake instead. He says someone should probably go retrieve the lovely diabetic girl in the bikini he left outside. If the mood wasn’t already ruined enough, the Doctor practically destroys the party when he tells Rory that Amy tried to kiss him. And he says this in front of everyone. Yeah… Cue the theme song now, please.

Now we’re inside of the TARDIS, where the Doctor warns Amy and Rory about the dangers of traveling with him. He’s seen people go back home and have trouble readjusting to their normal lives (like Sarah Jane Smith), and he’s seen his travels tear relationships apart (Rose and Mickey). So to make things better between our lovely companion and her fiance, the Doctor is sending them on a romantic trip through time and space. If the episode title wasn’t a big enough hint for you, he’s taking them to Venice.

The Doctor looks at his wristwatch and says it’s the year 1580. Two things stand out about this bit: First, that the Doctor is wearing a watch. That rarely ever happens. It’s difficult to keep track of time when you’re a time traveler. Second, that the Doctor’s watch is apparently tuned into the TARDIS and can tell him what year he’s in. So let’s add another item to the list of the Doctor’s crazy gizmos.

After walking around for about a minute, our heroes are stopped and asked for papers to prove their residency. The Doctor pulls out his psychic paper and tells the official that they are a holy man from the Vatican, a countess, and her eunuch. Rory takes the psychic paper and sees that he’s the eunuch. The city official was checking for papers because, according to Sig.ra Calvierri, The Plague is still running rampant outside of Venice. For those of you not keeping up, they’re in 1580. The Plague ended years ago. So that means Calvierri is shutting down the city for some unknown reason.

Decent boobs, but historically inaccurate hair for a black woman.

Our heroes then spot Guido approaching a group of girls from Calvierri’s school. He snatches the veils off of their faces, hoping that one of them will be his daughter Isabella. He finds her, but she doesn’t seem to recognize him. The other girls bare their fangs, and Francesco tells Guido to stay away.

The Doctor runs over to Guido and asks him what’s going on with the school. Guido explains that something dark and evil is happening at the school, he’s no longer allowed to see his daughter, and the girls there have teeth like animals.

Oh, that’s not a pretentious shot at all…

Francesco runs to his mother Sig.ra Calvierri and tells her that they were accosted by another outsider. They then discuss whether or not they’ve recruited enough girls, and if it’s time to introduce Francesco’s brothers. Sig.ra Calvierri wants to stick to the plan a little longer, until they can recruit a few more girls.

Later on, we see Amy and Rory walking around on their little date. Rory is worried that he’s losing Amy, since she did run away with a time traveler on the night before their wedding. Before they have the chance to discuss this further, they hear a nearby woman screaming. They find Francesco, fangs out, standing over the body of a woman with bite marks on her neck. Francesco runs away.

Outside of Calvierri’s school, Guido creates a distraction so the Doctor can sneak in to investigate. Before the Doctor can get far, he’s stopped by some of the school’s creepy vampire girls. When they ask who he is, he reaches for his psychic paper, but accidentally pulls out an old library card. A card so old, in fact, that it has a picture of the Doctor with his first face (played by actor William Hartnell), which had to have been taken half a millennium ago from the Doctor’s perspective. The psychic paper, it turns out, is still with Rory. The Doctor figures that the girls are all vampires and runs away before he gets bitten.

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory run into each other after their little encounters and confirm that they all saw vampires. They regroup at Guido’s house, where Guido reveals that he knows a way into the school. However, there’s a trap door that’s always locked that blocks their way. Guido suggests they use his supply of gunpowder to blast their way in, but Amy suggests she enrolls in the school, sneaks to the hidden entrance that night, and unlocks it. They go with this plan, with Rory posing as Amy’s brother with references from the king of Sweden projected on the psychic paper.

“I’m a gondola… driver. So… money’s a bit tight.”

Amy is immediately taken in by the school. It takes her all of five minutes to find Isabella and her anachronistically straight hair. Isabella hasn’t been completely changed yet. The sunlight hurts her skin, but she doesn’t have fangs yet and she still remembers who she is. Amy promises to get Isabella out of there just before sneaking off to the trap door and unlocking it. Amy plans to stay there and wait for the Doctor and Rory, but she’s captured and taken to a room in the school filled with alien tech. Calvierri knew Amy was a spy from the start, as the psychic paper didn’t work on her.

Sig.ra Calvierri and Francesco take a bite out of Amy’s neck and start drinking. Before they get the chance to inject Amy with their own blood, Amy kicks Calvierri in the leg and damages a device that was projecting a perception filter. It turns out they’re not vampires, but alien fish people.

Elsewhere, the Doctor and Rory stumble their way through the castle until they finally find Amy. Along the way, the Doctor tries to comfort Rory by telling him that Amy only kissed him because she was under a lot of stress, and she would’ve kissed Rory had he been there at the time. The Doctor is carrying a UV light that he uses to ward off the vampiric fish people. Isabella tries to help the Doctor, Rory, and Amy escape. However, Isabella herself gets caught on the way out.

For Isabella’s betrayal, she is executed. They shove her into a pool in the back of the school filled with Calvierri’s ravenous fish-sons who eat Isabella alive. Sig.ra Calvierri leans over to watch, but Francesco warns his mother than his brothers might accidentally eat her as well if her perception filter is still on.

I actually wasn’t a fan of Isabella’s death scene. As she treads water, she shouts phrases like “Something touched my leg” and “They bite” before getting dragged underwater. Anyone who’s ever seen the first five minutes of the movie Jaws knows that you don’t need any dialogue beyond the pained screams of the victim to tell the audience that something underwater is biting off your legs.

So if you’re going to learn one thing after having watched this episode, let it be this: writer Toby Whithouse has never seen Jaws.

The Doctor barges into Calvierri’s throne room (despite the fact that the episode made it clear how difficult it was to sneak in up til this point) and confronts her about her actions. He figures out that she’s from the planet Saturnyne. Calvierri and the Doctor have a Q&A session where the Doctor reveals who he is and where he’s from, and Calvierri tells the tragic story of her people: There were cracks all over Saturnyne, followed by a great silence. The cracks eventually swallowed her homeworld. She and her sons are all refugees who fled to Venice because, being flooded, it’s a city not unlike their lost world. She wants to make Venice the new home for her people. They were capturing and changing the girls of the city into their kind so the girls could mate with Calvierri’s sons and restart their species. As far as evil plans go, this one actually isn’t all that evil. It’s incredibly inconsiderate to the natives, but not it’s not at all malicious.

The Doctor almost sympathizes until he finds out that not only did they execute Isabella, but they didn’t bother learning her name beforehand. The Doctor storms off and joins the team back at Guido’s house. The Saturnynian girls follow the Doctor and attack the house. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory manage to escape, but Guido lures all of the girls upstairs to his supply of gunpowder. Having lost his daughter and his world, Guido kills himself and all of the girls by blowing up the house.

Meanwhile, a storm is brewing. Calvierri is using a device to manipulate the weather so she can flood Venice even more, sinking it completely so she and her family can take it for themselves.

Francesco tracks down Amy and Rory, intent on draining Amy dry. Then Rory does something incredibly stupid and incredibly brave: He saves Amy’s life by picking up a nearby broom to fight off Francesco. Yeah, Francesco has a sword. It’s a one-sided fight where Rory clearly has the disadvantage, but he’s clearly willing to die if it means giving Amy the chance to run away. Just when it seems like Rory’s days are numbered, Amy pulls out a hand mirror, reflects some sunlight off of it, and shines it on Francesco until he bursts into flames.

Okay, what the fuck? Even accepting that too much exposure to sunlight could kill a Saturnynian, why was a little sunlight bouncing off of Amy’s mirror more deadly than walking outside in direct sunlight with nothing more than a hat? Francesco clearly wasn’t that sensitive to sunlight. Also, the skies are completely clouded over; where the hell did Amy even find direct sunlight to reflect onto her mirror?

Oh well. Francesco’s dead, our companion is safe, and so is her fiance. Time to make out.

Calvierri learns from the Doctor that all the girls she recruited are dead, and so she sorta disappears for the rest of this scene. Amy and Rory meet the Doctor in Calvierri’s throne room, where they find a control module for the rainstorm hidden in the back of the throne. Amy and Rory smash the chair while the Doctor climbs up to the roof to disable the antenna.

Defeated, Sig.ra Calvierri runs to the pool where her sons are swimming. She makes sure her perception filter is still working, so her sons will see her as a human and eat her alive. The Doctor finds her and tries to stop her. He says that rather than end it all, she and her remaining sons should continue to live and mourn together, as the Doctor does for his own people. Calvierri throws herself into the pool anyway, and her sons consume her.

I was disappointed in how her story ended. Suicide and the death of her species. I was really hoping the extinction of an entire alien species was a thing of the past. It happened so often back when Russell T. Davies was the head writer that it was beginning to lost all impact. I was hoping new head writer Steven Moffat would leave those kinds of stories behind, but I was apparently hoping for too much.

Our heroes make their way back to the TARDIS. The Doctor is ready to drop Amy and Rory off at home, just in time for their wedding. However, when Amy seems hesitant to go back, Rory assumes she wants to cancel the wedding, and he says they can just drop him off. That’s not what Amy meant, though. She asks Rory to stay so they can all travel around together for a little while longer. The Doctor says he’d love it, and thus Rory becomes another companion. Just before they depart, the Doctor notices an odd silence sweeping over Venice. The rushing water, the people walking the streets, and chickens– he can’t hear any of it. Is this the same silence that consumed the planet Saturnyne? The same silence that Prisoner Zero said would fall before the Pandorica opens?

The Vampires of Venice is a fun episode. Unfortunately, its quality is inconsistent. The story starts off well enough, but things start to make less and less sense as we learn more about the villains. Their physical appearance isn’t actually changed, but just what people see of them. However, the clothes that aren’t there in their fishy forms are real clothes that they can take off in their human forms. They’re not really vampires, but they prefer to drink human blood for no clearly stated reason. And again, there’s the thing with Amy’s mirror and Francesco.

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The Looney Tunes Show will star Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as roommates in a half-hour TV series. Looney Tunes mainstays such as Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester the Cat, and Tweety Bird will be their neighbors. Warner is promising these characters as their regular, classic, Merry Melodies selves. None of that crap like Loonatics Unleashed, folks. It’s Bugs and Daffy as we’ve always known them, except sharing a house instead of burrowing toward Pismo Beach together.

The show starts this Fall on Cartoon Network, and they’ve already commissioned 26 episodes.

In other news, Warner Bros. is also creating a series of short cartoons starring Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. No “roommate” twist. It’s the Coyote chasing the Roadrunner across the desert. There is one thing, though: It’ll be CG-animated.

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The shorts will play in movie theatres, attached to several upcoming kids films such as Yogi Bear, the new Cats & Dogs movie, and Legend of the Guardians. They’ll also be in 3D, like everything else these days.