Iron Man 2 $15 Blu-ray Deal

Welcome to the official kick off of Retailer Price Wars for the fall of 2010!

Wal-mart is firing the first salvo of the season with an irresistible deal of only $15 when you preorder the upcoming Iron Man 2 Blu-ray. That's $10 less than everyone else in the game as of this date. Target.com and Amazon.com will have no choice but to follow shortly.

Each retailer has internal policies that maintain they must price match the major competitor. Amazon will react shortly but it takes Target longer as the arguments have to take place internally between buyers/marketing/upper management and the studio. Target will want to try to make the studio cough up some sort of payout to minimize the markdown damage. They won't. This means an ugly Monday for that division of Target. It means more deep discounting damage has to be planned for on high profile media products (movies, video games, books) and it all starts much eariler than expected. Last year the deep discounting didn't really begin until early to mid October.

Love it. Going to be another great shopping season of deals for the consumer.

Beyond Marvel Legends? The Next Step In Action Figure Evolution

Here are pictures of a line of forthcoming Hyper-Gokin action figures that are in the 8"-10" range, but appear to be hyper articulated, with an internal skeleton for the Hulk & Abomination figures (Iron Man, like his Hot Toys counterpart, is more traditionally engineered). While we're not crazy about another scale, or the movie-based figures (I'd buy a comic version of Abomination in a heartbeat, but the movie version.... not so much). No release date or price point announced yet, but we're very curious...

BitterNews for Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

• After an unexciting Barb Wire reveal a few weeks back, Triad Toys has pics of their upcoming Ghost figure. The pic above does not do justice to the figure. Check out Triad’s page for more info.
• Tomorrow is tablet day. We suggest you check out the MacRumors website, which will provide consolidated coverage of the event as it takes place Wednesday, January 27th at 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern.
• According to the NYTimes: “The tablet is expected to be a multimedia device that will let people watch movies and television shows, play games, surf the Internet and read electronic books and newspapers. Though companies like Toshiba Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. have introduced Windows-based tablet computers before and Amazon.com Inc. and others sell similarly-sized digital-book readers, people briefed by Apple say the company intends to carve out a new product category.”
• Apple are absolutely carving out their own distribution system, which will likely add books to the iTunes store, at a much higher return to publishers per sale than any other reader or system currently in place. Add this to the expected quality screen and the continuing Apple Mania, and if I was Kindle (or any other online delivery system), I’d be pooping my pants.
• Stop the planet - Keith Richards stopped drinking. If he quit, something must be drastically wrong (dead liver), but we at BG hope that isn’t the case.
• eBay is introducing a new selling tier structure that allows users to sign up for one year at $49.99 and have free access to their Seller's Assistant Pro (previously a $25 a month program) and lower insertion fees.
• Michael Monroe (ex-Hanoi Rocks) revealed the line-up for his new band, which includes former Hanoi Rocks bandmate Sami Yaffa (bass), as well as Ginger from The Wildhearts and from Danzig/Samhain, guitarist Todd Youth (fresh from a stint with Glen Campbell!). This band will play SXSW and they have already written a bunch of songs for a release this fall (meaning 2011 in rock n roll time).
• John Travolta is sending scientologists to Haiti. Jessica Simpson is sending shoes. Therefore Jessica Simpson= smarter than John Travolta.
• The IRON MAN 2 soundtrack is ALL AC/DC – not a cheap proposition, BTW. A video from the album debuted online today. It’s like Maximum Overdrive all over again, except the Green Goblin isn’t in it.
• Lego are going blind-box with a new line of minifigs sold in separate boxes. Price is expected to be in the $2-$4 range. So far, no licensed figs are shown.
• Lauren Hill (ex-Fugees) who has burned through millions of dollars and many years working on a follow-up to the Miseducation of Lauren Hill album of many years ago, sang in New Zealand this weekend. Sony execs still not expecting to see their return on investment any time soon.
• Mattycollector.com continues to be a clusterfuck. Today Digital River sent out notices to many customers, notifying them that their Club Eternia subscriptions had expired. These customers had so far only gotten the January figure in a 12 month subscription, so of course the internet broke. Matty issued this: “All customer service issues with order numbers have been gathered and are being reported to Digital River today. Facebook pages are proving to be too difficult to navigate b/c there are so many posts (pages are slowwwww to load and prone to crashing the farther back we go) so once the Fan Forums launch, we'll be gathering issues there. FOR NOW, PLEASE POST ISSUES TO THIS NOTE.”
• “Shortly thereafter they sent this: Regarding the emails you've been receiving advising that your subscriptions are cancelled, we just verified with Digital River that they are NOT CANCELLED.” Just another day at Mattel!
• The Who announced their Super Bowl set list. I’d think the NFL might be pissed about this – it’s sort of anti-climactic – like announcing the winner of the game.
• Mark Millar is doing another charity auction, this time to name the bad guy in his upcoming book, Nemesis.
• Apparently Elin is not going to Divorce Tiger. He must be one smooth-talking, check-writing motherfucker.
• DELUSION OF THE DAY: Here’s a quote from the guy who plays Ando on Heroes regarding their plummeting ratings: "I'm not worried about it all, because I think that it's very misperceived. We have a larger audience than ever, but they're completely scattered in so many different platforms. People are watching "Heroes" not only on television but mostly on the computer and on their iPods and phones. They're doing NetFlix, Amazon, Hulu, NBC, DVDs, you name it. It's amazing how fast technology has evolved even in the past four years. The way people are watching media has changed completely." Yes, Ando, there are more platforms than ever to not watch Heroes on.
• Actor Pernell Roberts died at age 81. He starred on 'Bonanza’ and 'Trapper John, M.D.'
• The ABBAWORLD theme park / Museum opened in London. Now you know where to take your mom.
• Reports are trickling in of DCUC Wave 12 showing up at Wal-mart. Strangely, the cases include Iron, Spectre, Eclipso, and Dr.Midnight, but not the figures that are already being sold through specialty retailers (Mary Marvel, etc). No word on a date for solid case sales through Matty.
• The Secret Wars series with Thor, Hawkeye, etc is being found regionally.
• And finally, the Fall/Winter Xeric Awards were announced. I’m sure I’ll never read any of them.

Review: Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited

While attending the San Diego Comic-con in July, I signed up for Marvel Comics ‘Digital Comics Unlimited’ online membership. Marvel had an exclusive trial membership offer available only during the event that was too good to pass up. With a paid three month subscription, you also received an exclusive Hasbro Nick Fury action figure and an exclusive variant edition of Deadpool: Merc with a Mouth issue 1. So I signed up, came back from the show, sold the two premiums off for a substantial profit beyond the cost of the subscription fee and after playing around with the service online for the past month I have to say…it’s totally worth any comic fan’s money and time.

It’s a very straightforward service. You are paying for access to Marvel Comics digital library online, anytime you wish. I was really surprised at how deep the catalog is at this stage. You can select to read comics books as far back as the golden-age (‘40s, ‘50s), just about all the favorite classics from the silver-age (‘60s), then onto each decade since up to just a few months ago. Every comic book cover and page available is reproduced in beautiful high quality resolution. Even the titles from the golden-age have been re-colored and look even better than they did originally published. Basically any series of older titles that have been reprinted in the Marvel Masterworks series of hardcovers, can be found in here. The online service is a great way for the publisher to re-use the digital files they already had to produce in order to print up any volume of the Masterworks series…why not offer them to fans for a fee online as well?

Once you log in you have many library browsing options available to you.


You can search by new releases.







You may search by series.







You could choose to search by a creator’s name. This includes the writer, artist, inker or even colorist.








More search options than you’d need really.





Once you select an issue to read, simply click to open it and a new screen will open. This is the patented Marvel Digital Comics Reader.

Once the digital reader is open you will find several viewing options. You may view the book as a two page or single page spread with the added features of magnification, moving the open page up and down or (my favorite) viewing via ‘Smart Panel’. This feature allows for single panels at a time to open nice and big in the viewer and eliminates the need for magnification.

With a click of the mouse anywhere on the screen, the next panel of the book slides into view. It’s very cool but there is a slight drawback to this mode. When in ‘Smart Panel’, the viewer can get confused on the really oddly laid out pages with panels that are very large or cut up and down vertically on one side of the page or the other. When this happens, some of those more odd shaped panels will get cut off or in a few cases for me even skipped as the viewer just moves onto the next page. A minor issue only found in some cases.

One of the best advantages of viewing any Marvel Comics online even compared to holding the actual printed publication is the elimination of the center crease and staples of the comic’s binding that hinder the impact of a great two page spread!

I think Marvel is really ahead of the game here with this service. Especially ahead of DC Comics which offers nothing close to similar in a service to date. Instead of watching TV reruns this summer, it’s been a blast to take my laptop out onto the patio on select nights and re-read how Spider-Man first tangled with the Hulk back in the ‘60s or discover how Thor has been revamped in recent years.

You won't find every single comic book Marvel has ever printed in this online timecapsule. But there are thousands of issues here already with more added nearly every day of the week.

Worth a trial for any comic book fan old or new.

Well, that was a short comeback...

Really??! This was the best photo of Rourke as Whiplash in Iron Man 2 Marvel could come up with to release to the world?

"Hey internet, our movie is going to be great! Here's proof!"

Our fingers are crossed IM2 is at least half as good as the first one, but this is doing the studio or the aging actor no favors. Let the funny headlines begin...