Hello Boys and Girls, coming to you from the day of Monday as always is the Groovy Grab Bag and boy do we have a big week coming along. As always, please feel free to throw your own thoughts and pop culture consumption into the comments section below, or on my twitter. Now let the games begin!

Comics:

Secret Wars #8

Thors #4

Amazing Spider-Man #4

Batman #47

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #3

All-New Hawkeye #2

Ultimates #2

Batman & Robin Eternal #10

Grayson #14-15

Detective Comics #47

We Are Robin #3

This week was massive to be certain. I won’t go over every comic because that’d quite simply be insane. Ultimates was definitely my favorite contender for the week. Al Ewing and Kenneth Rocafort have eschewed any sense of small scale thinking that tends to come with “grounding” characters, and started off the first two issues of Ultimates with the biggest mission one could conceive for a nascent team in the Marvel Universe: change Galactus. While the Ultimates has essentially little to do with any previous versions of the team, it does carry that idea of widescreen superhero comics into the biggest arena possible there. Ewing’s writing and Rocafort’s art respectively ground and expand, what could be a comic lost in a sea of them into what potentially may be the greatest comic Marvel has to offer at the moment.

Thors similarly takes what could potentially be a very strange one-note premise: “Thors as cops” into one of the coolest comics to come out of Secret Wars. The plot is police drama with Thors playing the roles of that type of story, and it works perfectly without being overshadowed by Secret Wars as a whole. While Russell Dautermann is missed, Chris Sprouse stepped up to the plate in a big way over the course of the series, and I wouldn’t be too hurt to see him draw more Ultimate Thor in the future.

While Secret Wars has been late to a crazy degree, this issue is another reminder of just why it was worth the wait. Esad Ribic. While Hickman writing characters in big setups is always fun to watch, Esad Ribic is just why this comic needs to take its time. That kind of detail with those gorgeous flourishes doesn’t happen overnight. This comic is atypical of your average event comic for the sheer fact it defies house style at every turn. Whether that’s the construction of the comic by way of the writing which steers clear of the typical fat in an event comic, or a sub-standard rushed product. While event fatigue can be a very real thing, its nice to see that Marvel was willing to go so far as to experiment in format for the core book with Secret Wars.

Television:

Outlander

River

Outlander has been a fascinating thing to watch. While Jessica Jones has rightfully earned praise for its use of allegory pertaining to the current problems facing women. While Outlander would have the excuse of sidestepping these problems by virtue of having a main character that  hails from 1945 and going further back in time with 1743, the show does itself a service and makes Claire assertive as opposed to being victimized by the even more limited version of what passes for gender equality there. It helps that Caitriona Balfe is remarkably effortless at inhabiting the confident, assertive and swear-y former combat nurse Claire Fraser. While I won’t go too much further in, it does help to see more shows taking aim at a female demographic in a more nuanced way. While the show does go with sex scenes and nudity with the typical flair for an HBO-esque production, that it focuses on scenes that are more aimed at the female demographic such as a healthy amount of fanservice featuring male characters, as opposed to being titillating for men is a fairly interesting contrast to the typical writing for these sorts of shows. I look forward to seeing how it all ends.

River is yet another in a sea (heh) of Netflix original series. Starring Stellan Skarsgard of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Thor fame as Detective Inspector John River. The easiest way of describing the show would be “Luther for seniors”, but not in any diminishing way. Luther as played by Idris Elba is a super cop with so many hard edges, you’d be hard pressed to avoid bleeding, and because he’s played by Idris Elba he can do just about anything. By contrast, D.I. River is not young, and he’s potentially even less stable due to his inability to realize when he’s talking to people he fails to realize are dead. That willingness to play hard with the age of a character like that is a fairly interesting choice for a genre that values relative youth and virility in a main character, but it may well be the right choice for the long run, and it brings out elements of Skarsgard that aren’t often seen now that most people remember him as a doddering scientist. I look forward to seeing how the rest of the mini-series pans out with such a short structure.