What characters were rip-offs of others? Are comics and pro wrestling actually tied together? Is the story from the comic better than the story in the movie? Just what the heck was happening in comics in the 90’s?

These are some questions any reasonable human being who contributes a portion of their weekly salary to the funny books may ask. The Flickcast alumni Jonathan ‘Wally’ Weilbaecher and I join forces with Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles to answer these and more.

With regulars Joe Slepski of The Joe on Joe podcast, Pablo Romero-Estevez and Alan ‘Sizzler’ Kistler of Crazy Sexy Geeks and some guests like Lucha Underground’s Joey Ryan and The Flickcast co-founder Matt Raub, we haven’t come to many conclusions but we have had a ton of fun arguing our way there.

To celebrate the home entertainment release of the X-Men: Days of Future Past Rogue Cut Blu-ray on July 14th, fans at San Diego Comic-Con were treated to a special advance screening of the extended version of the film. Shown on four screens simultaneously at the Reading Cinema in downtown San Diego on Saturday, July 11, the Rogue Cut features an extra 17 minutes of footage including bringing Anna Paquin’s Rogue into the film’s main plot.

The additional scenes add some more humor and action to the film. It’s important to note that although the Rogue storyline accounts for probably 50% of the extra footage, the other 50% is equally as golden. Highlights of the later portions include some very funny bantering between Quicksilver and Magneto and a romantic scene between Beast and Mystique. Several fans at the SDCC screening pointed out they had already seen these portions online as deleted scenes.

As for the Rogue bits, they fit and strangely enough they seem essential to the plot. Sadly, since we’ve all seen how the film carries on without, they end up feeling more superfluous than they were intended to be. That said, that Bryan Singer was able to take Rogue out and still make Days of Future Past work and work well is commendable. It couldn’t have been easy to re-work scenes, dialogue, and climatic moments all to remove one character.

On day two of WonderCon, Fox did its best to take over the convention in Anaheim. The studio showed footage from several of its upcoming films and politely remained mum on Director Bryan Singer’s recent legal troubles.

The clip from X-Men: Days of Future Past, which included a faceoff between Iceman and Sunspot, certainly excited audiences in the Anaheim Convention Center’s Arena. Fox slyly avoided audience questions by saving X-Men to the end of the presentation. In truth, fans had already gotten their fill of footage and Q&A from the other movies’ cast and crew.

Perhaps trying to answer the YA smash hit The Hunger Games, Fox now has its own teen post-apocalyptic movie in The Maze Runner. Director Wes Ball and author James Dashner were both inspired by Ender’s Game, Lord of the Flies and Lost when creating The Maze Runner and it showed in the brief but thrilling preview seen in Anaheim.

Normally, we are too busy to be able to come back and do reviews on DLC for game,s but as you saw in my recent review of the Deadpool game, I really enjoyed it and was looking for a reason to go back. That reason came from a download code for the Merc with a Mouth map pack.

For $2.99 on the PlayStation 3 or 240 Microsoft Points on the XBox 360, players can download two additional maps for the game’s challenge mode along with two new costumes. Spoiler alert: This DLC pack was actually a preorder bonus from Gamestop upon the original Deadpool release so if you already did that, then you probably don’t need to make this purchase… or read this review… so… sorry!

So first off, let’s talk about costumes. For some reason which isn’t ever really discussed, the costume options are only available in the Infinite mode which is a wave based level of the challenge modes. Still not entirely sure why these special outfits are only available in the challenge mode when it is just a skin swap over the character so keep that in mind if you didn’t go through (or like me just didn’t spend a lot of time) in the Challenge mode. The D-Pooly costume resembles Deadpool’s selfstyled MC look while the X-Force outfit represents the grey and black from when Deadpool joined up on Wolverine’s black ops team… but they are only available to the challenge mode.

When it was announced that Matthew Vaughn was leaving the director’s chair for X-Men: Days of Future Past, the geek community felt an inescapable fear that things might be falling apart. Even the seemingly good news that original X-Director Bryan Singer was coming back didn’t seem to dissuade the growing fear that Fox was once again messing up the X-Men.

Then the online nerd populous started putting two and two together. If the next film was going to tackle one of the most famous comic book time travel stories, and the director was the guy who made the first two great X-Men movies, would we be getting a giant cross generational X-Men X-travaganza?

Well, the answer seems to be a resounding yes, and according to the twitter account of Bryan Singer himself it keeps getting better:

Very excited to welcome #annapaquin, @ellenpage &@shawnrashmore to #XMen #DaysofFuturePast – thank you @BrettRatner for letting them live!