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The release date of the latest installment of the Madden franchise is about a month away, so EA Sports is working to drum up interest in the video game by unveiling player ratings. Earlier this week, the developer revealed that Marshawn Lynch has the highest overall rating among running backs with a 96. EA even went into the particulars, saying Lynch had 99 rating in stiff arms and a 98 in the trucking category.

(Unsaid but assumed that Marshawn has a 99 rating in selling the mid and a 0 in giving a f*ck about press conferences.)

Well, the Seahawks Twitter account for some reason took umbrage to their running back getting a slightly less than perfect rating for trucking defenders. In doing so, they set themselves up for some old-fashioned Twitter brand ownage.

.@Seahawks one more of these probably could've helped… 😁 pic.twitter.com/T1rHpVW5NF

— EA SPORTS Madden NFL (@EAMaddenNFL) July 22, 2015

Oh ho ho! Remember that time the Seahawks should have run the ball in the Super Bowl? Love that memory.

Nevertheless, the Seahawks social media team tried to take it in stride. Good on ’em. Shake off that Twitter L and move on to the next post.

@EAMaddenNFL #WeGotGot https://t.co/IPkKXAAgkM

— Seattle Seahawks (@Seahawks) July 22, 2015

Don’t worry, folks. Actual football will be back at some point.

With Gal Gadot playing Wonder Woman we know that the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice will have at least one Amazon in the film… but does the trailer show us a second one?

Rumors have been around for a long time that Tao Okamoto (The Wolverine) was going to be playing Mercy Graves opposite of Jessie Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor. Well, in the trailer released at SDCC we see Okamoto walking along with a long metal box which was likely the body of General Zod. Yesterday DC Entertainment released a trailer breakdown the specifically refers to Okamoto’s character as Mercy Grave and confirms that Zod is in the box.

Just like with Harley Quinn, Graves was created outside of the comics. She appeared first in the 1990’s Superman The Animated series and appeared to be Lex Luthor’s bodyguard and assistant. She was shown to be a skilled fighter and highly intelligent. From there the character move into the comics with and interesting twist coming in Justice League: Cry For Justice where it was revealed that she was in fact an Amazon like Wonder Woman.

So we know that Okamoto is playing Mercy, but whether Zack Snyder brings in the potential Amazon connection remains to be seen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is There More Than One Amazon In Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice?

Heather Furr just twitched: a quick nod toward the women behind her, who wear football pads and eyeliner and garments that — depending who you ask — may or may not be lingerie.

“Turn around, bitch!”

The women are screaming at Furr. They would like her to turn around. They play football for the Los Angeles Temptation, the winningest franchise in the Legends Football League, better known by its previous name, in which the first L stood for “Lingerie.” They are standing in the tunnel at the Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario, California, right next to Furr and the Chicago Bliss. It’s the night of the 2014 Western Conference Championship. Tensions are running high.

“You scared?” the Temptation players yell. “We the baddest team in the league, bitches!”

Furr and the Bliss are not scared. They are the defending champions. Furr is a two-time MVP. Her league is filled with women like her, a former Division I athlete who found football as an adult. Her sport has generated dazzling highlights and created a previously nonexistent competitive forum for semipro female athletes. It has also produced its share of debilitating injuries, spurred class-action lawsuits, and inspired arguments over how much its players are worth. But this is the game Furr has chosen.

And now here comes another choice. She has remained stone-faced and front-facing for several minutes, but Furr can’t help herself. She turns around. She smiles as a challenge to her opponents. This does not go over well.

“Fuck you, bitch!” a Temptation player screams. “Fuck your skinny ass! I’m putting you on the ground all night! All fucking night!”

On the JumboTron, there are close-ups of breasts and butts, plus intermittent shots of women playing football. The lights have dimmed. Machine-generated smoke rises from the field. The public address announcer screams his introductions. And here, finally, the Bliss players scream too.

“No regrets!” one of them yells. Through the smoke, out into the arena, in front of the crowd of cheering men, they run.

Getty Images Mitchell Mortaza, league commissioner, whom LFL players say has told them, “No one is here to watch you play football.”

Furr knows what you’re probably thinking. All the women who’ve played in the LFL do. They’ve dealt with their parents’ concerns about the league. They’ve held their ground against prodding interviewers: How do you keep your breasts out of the neutral zone? Do you wax before games? They’ve dealt with the strangers who hear about the LFL and are neither repulsed nor intrigued, but rather instantly confused.

A primer: Yes, they play football while wearing next to nothing; and yes, the spirals and tackles and playbooks are real. No, most players are not aspiring models or actresses; and no, they do not get paid. “If we paid a dime to a player, we wouldn’t sustain a season of play,” says Mitchell Mortaza, the league’s founder and chairman.

They practice seven to eight months a year, often three times a week. They show up in tank tops to sports bars and tailgates, where they sell tickets and promote the league. When they walk into the arena, they are transformed. “There is nothing,” says one former player, “like stepping onto that field and getting ready to knock a bitch out.” Although their sport can be a source of intense joy, it also creates acute pain. Bones break. Ligaments tear. Medical bills mount, and often, no support arrives. For some, hopelessness sets in: Are my skills really worth nothing? Few complain about the lingerie. They’re bothered more by what their uniforms seem to represent: that they are replaceable bodies, each no more valuable than the last.

“No one is here to watch you play football,” players say Mortaza has told them.

The LFL’s core audience wants to see skin. The players want to play real football in real arenas, to feel the rush of high-stakes competition. The commissioner wants to make money. The LFL, for better or worse, is their middle ground.

It can be jarring to attend an LFL game, scan the arena, and notice all the people there who seem to be earning money — concessions workers, ushers, even mascots. Yet for the players, there is no money. So why play? They speak of camaraderie, of the thrill of competition — the same reasons people play sports at any level. But there are also societal factors that guide their decision to stick with the LFL. “Women athletes are accustomed to playing for less than men or for nothing at all,” says Charlene Weaving, a professor at Canada’s St. Francis Xavier University who has written widely about sports and gender. Even in childhood, boys receive more external rewards — attention, popularity, praise — for athletic achievement than girls do. “It becomes systemic,” Weaving says. “It seems to be, ‘Is this all we’re going to get? Well, OK then.’”

If a woman wants to play football, and she wants fast-paced play and glitzy arenas and games that will be shown on TV, then she must put on her uniform and smile for the cameras and go home with bruises and no pay. This is the reality of her sport and her gender.

It’s the LFL or nothing. There is no other choice.

Heather Furr

Team: Chicago Bliss
Experience: Five seasons in the LFL, more than a decade of competitive basketball, all-conference track athlete in high school.
Strengths: Running the option, reading the quarterback’s eyes, inventing celebrations for her interceptions and touchdowns.
Weaknesses: Rarely wore makeup before she turned 23, has at times had a gnawing suspicion that this league may not be worth her time.

Furr did not want to become a lingerie football player. Not when she first heard about the league, and not even on the morning of her initial tryout. It was 2010, the LFL’s second year in existence. She showed up late, only after a friend convinced her to come, and Furr joined about 70 others in running routes and sprints, throwing hits and passes. She wore a cutoff T-shirt and mid-thigh shorts, and the workout was so strenuous she nearly threw up.

She loved it. “It was like I was back in college,” she says. Back then she’d played basketball and competed in the heptathlon, first at Valparaiso University, then at Division III Elmhurst College. Since graduating, though, Furr had felt adrift. She’d always defined herself by the sports she played, but after her college career ended, Furr was running out of places to compete. She tried semipro basketball, but her team was a barely functional disaster. She trained for triathlons and joined slow-pitch softball leagues, but she was never at home among the weekend warriors. She needed something, she says, “that would push me beyond my limits.”

She found it in football. And across the United States, dozens of female athletes, many of whom had considered themselves retired, were finding the exact same thing. They were thrilled by the game’s pace and intensity. “There was a void,” says Melissa Margulies, a former USC sprinter who had grown up playing volleyball and soccer and was now starring for the Los Angeles Temptation. “When you spend your life competing in team sports, and then you lose that, you’re desperate to get it back.” In the LFL, Furr found a group of women who shared her athleticism and passion. Some had grown up playing organized football. Others were discovering the allure of a violent sport that had long been off-limits to their gender. “It was amazing,” says Amber “Ambo” Mane, who’d wrestled on the boys’ team in high school and later joined the LFL’s Green Bay Chill. “I’d never been around that many girls who were all just as hardcore as I am.”

So Furr joined the Bliss. She studied her playbook and the way her model friends posed. She tried on her uniform for the first time. “Is everything tucked in?” she remembers saying. “Is anything going to pop out?” She moved from receiver to quarterback after her first game, and soon she was connecting on short passes, running the option, and turning Chicago into one of the best teams in the league. Furr won the LFL’s most valuable player award in her first season with the Bliss. That year she also earned money: a few hundred bucks per game based on attendance.

She did interviews and photo shoots; she had her picture plastered all over arenas and the Internet. A video of her went viral after she celebrated a touchdown by taking a swig of a fan’s beer. She won a championship in Vegas and stumbled to her hotel, long after the sun had come up, wasted and elated. She went with an all-star team to Mexico City, and she scored a touchdown and stood on a platform before thousands of fans. At the time, she thought, This might be the coolest moment of my life.

That was then. In the years since, Furr has never lost her love of football, but she has wrestled with her love for the league. After her first season, the LFL stopped paying its players. “That’s the hardest thing,” says Furr of the lack of money. “If we were being paid, there’s so much more we could put into it.”

Marirose Roach

Team: (formerly) Philadelphia Passion
Experience: Played soccer and ran track at Temple; 2010 and 2012 LFL Offensive Player of the Year
Strengths: Power, speed, ability to play through pain
Weaknesses: Concerns regarding her appearance

Marirose Roach is 5-foot-3 and 155 pounds, with a surgically repaired meniscus and a law degree. The first time she put on a football uniform, it came with a jersey and pants and full pads. Not long after she began playing the sport, she sent a running back off the field on a stretcher. Her teammates screamed and called her Lawrence Taylor. She was 10. The running back was 11. He was also a boy.

Roach gave up football in adolescence. She adored the sport, but since she was female, there was no future in it. She eventually earned a track scholarship at Temple University, but as an adult Roach returned to the game she loved. She joined a fully padded 11-on-11 football league, and one afternoon she talked to Chandler Brown, who had just been hired to coach the LFL’s Philadelphia Passion. “We need you,” he told her.

Roach says now, “As a woman and a football player, the very idea of the LFL was embarrassing to me.” Embarrassing, yes, but also fast-paced and competitive and, at the time, televised. Roach had been dominating the women’s football circuit for years, but she’d never been interviewed on TV. She envied NFL players, the men who made a living playing the sport that she loved. “Even looking at the WNBA or tennis or anything else,” she says, “you can make a living. That can be your career. I just wanted to make football my career.” Eventually, Roach’s passion for competition won out. She called Brown: “I’ll play.”

Only she wasn’t allowed to play at first. Before the 2009 season opener, Mortaza, the commissioner, asked Brown to send pictures of his players in revealing outfits for the league to review, Brown says. “She doesn’t have the look,” Brown remembers Mortaza telling him. Roach was kept out of the league for being “too big” in her first season, but she was approved the following year and wound up playing three seasons for the Passion.

The LFL requires its athletes to fit a certain aesthetic. Not pale, but not baked in the tanning bed. Makeup must pop. Tattoos should be covered. And, yes, players should be thin. The shoulder pads are positioned so fans can see cleavage, and the players wear hockey helmets — not football helmets — which allow fans a better view of the women’s faces. “The helmets are horrible,” Furr says. “Horrible.”²⁵ Some players have complained that the helmets are flimsy enough to bend with their hands. Mortaza defends the use of hockey helmets, saying that football helmets tend to be “used as a weapon” and citing a 2013 league survey that found that players preferred hockey helmets.

If Mortaza deems a player below league aesthetic standards, he has been known to instruct coaches not to let them play, several former coaches say. On game days, Mortaza has arrived to find athletes who have gained weight and then had their teams bench them before kickoff.

“When you’re talking about a true football player, you’re talking about someone who’s thick, solid,” says Dion Lee, a former Las Vegas Sin coach. “You’re not going to see rib cages. [But] Mitch doesn’t want that — he wants rib cages.”

Football uniforms, regardless of players’ genders, can be thoroughly dehumanizing. NFL players look less like people than like crustacean warriors, pounding each other into the turf while fans clap and scream. So it is in the LFL, only with less padding. From the stands, LFL players tend to resemble anonymous collections of thighs and butts and breasts.

“This is awesome,” says Paul, who looks to be in his mid-thirties and who stands near the end zone on the ground level at the Arena at Gwinnett Center, during a game between the hometown Atlanta Steam and the Jacksonville Breeze. Paul just got a new job, he says, so he’d rather not give his last name. This is Paul’s second LFL game. The first was also awesome. The pace was fast, the contact appropriately jarring. They hit way harder than the Falcons, he says.

Paul likes the uniforms, yes, but also the accessibility. Afterward, the players line up in the concourse for a meet and greet. They take pictures. They sign autographs. “You can’t go sit on their side of the table,” Paul explains, “but you can hug them if you lean over.” The first time he came to a game, Paul took pictures of the players. Now he carries an envelope full of prints of those photos. After the game, he will ask the women to sign them.

It’s not just him. On the other side of the arena, Joe Martin and Dwight Turner don’t mind revealing their last names or that they are each a little drunk. They are having fun, they say. When Turner is asked to name his favorite thing about the game, he nods at one of the players and says, “Number nine.” When asked for his second-favorite thing, he nods to another and says, “Number eleven.”

The LFL apologizes for none of this. “We’re never going to lose the marketable athlete,” Mortaza told me. “That’s not going to change. The Danica Patrick, the Anna Kournikova, the Gabby Reece — that’s our brand.” Yet there have been subtle changes. In 2013 the league changed its name, replacing “Lingerie” with “Legends.” It changed its logo, swapping out a sexy silhouette for an NFL-like shield. And it changed its uniforms, removing “all lingerie aspects” and replacing them with “performance wear.”

At a press conference, Mortaza unveiled the changes. A promo video began with a shot of a player’s legs, taut and glistening, and then panned upward. The uniform was virtually the same. Abs, thighs, and cleavage were all still on display.

But still, this was a “pretty historic” announcement, Mortaza explained. “There’s no longer garters,” Mortaza said. That wasn’t all — they also got rid of the lace and the superfluous tassels, as well as the chokers players wore before games.

The relationship between the LFL’s uniforms and the players who wear them is complex. “I mean, yes, we’re wearing basically a bathing suit,” says Melissa Margulies. “But you can’t argue [with] sex sells. That’s going to fill the seats.” Even among players deeply critical of the league, there is often little patience for this debate.

They joined the league knowing full well what it sells. They agreed to market both their bodies and their talent. But that choice is limited, bound by certain realities. “Sometimes, when you’re a female athlete, you have to suck it up,” says Nikki Johnson, another former player with the Las Vegas Sin. “You have to do whatever it takes to get people to your games.”

Mia Church

Team: (formerly) Team Euphoria
Experience: Three years as a New England Patriots cheerleader, model, actress in TV movies and late-night cable specials, player in the very first Lingerie Bowl
Strengths: Fits the desired aesthetic for Lingerie Bowl
Weaknesses: Learned she was pregnant and had to start avoiding contact

Mia Church isn’t sure how she heard about the businessman looking to hire models who could play football. She saw something online, she thinks, or maybe she got a call from her agent. She was in L.A., trying to make it as an actress. She’d grown up in Boston and had been a Patriots cheerleader before moving west. She dreamed of a spot on a soap opera, then perhaps prime-time television and movies. For now, every gig was a stepping-stone. Maybe lingerie football would lead to something bigger.

The inspiration that put Church and other women on a football field came in 2003, when a young marketing executive named Mitchell Mortaza attended Super Bowl XXXVII. Tampa Bay dominated Oakland in the first half, and at halftime, while No Doubt and Shania Twain took the stage, fans ditched the performance to hit the bathrooms and nacho lines.

The exodus stunned Mortaza, so he came up with an idea: models playing football, on pay-per-view during halftime of the Super Bowl, in lingerie. That would get people’s attention. He contacted casting agents. He signed up Playboy models like Angie Everhart and Nikki Ziering. They planned an over-the-top spectacle — “a joke,” Mortaza now calls it — complete with catwalk player intros. He signed up sponsors. He told the New York Times: “It will play well with men and women. With men, for the obvious reasons, and for women it’s an incredible lingerie fashion show, with red carpet arrivals and more.”

Millions of people reportedly paid $19.95 and watched. The viewership numbers were strong enough for Mortaza to return the next year for Lingerie Bowl II, then again for Lingerie Bowl III. Some players treated it like any other promo modeling gig, but others say they stuck with it because they loved football. Church found out she was pregnant weeks before the game, “so at that point, I wasn’t hitting anybody,” she says. “I was just going to put on the uniform, smile and pose, and see if it led to anything else.”

For most players, it led nowhere. But for the organizers, Lingerie Bowl led to the LFL, formed in 2009 with teams such as the Dallas Desire and the Miami Caliente. Players were paid, and their games aired on MyNetworkTV. The following year, LFL games moved to MTV2, where they were edited to fit 30-minute windows and broadcast on Friday nights.²⁶

“It felt,” says Furr, who joined in the second season, “like we were really building something amazing.”

Melissa Margulies

Team: (formerly) Los Angeles Temptation
Experience: Sprinter and middle distance runner at USC; wide receiver and running back on two LFL championship teams
Strengths: Shifty; has the vision to find holes in the defensive line and the speed to burst through them
Weaknesses: Injury-prone; doesn’t always celebrate tackles as desired; is actively suing the league

Melissa Margulies didn’t see the knee that sent her out of a game, into a hospital, out of the league, and into litigation. It was a freak accident — Margulies was rising from the turf after blitzing Furr in 2013, just as another player was running by, and her knee struck Margulies in the head. Margulies felt the impact, but she still rose to follow the play. Then she fell. She was unsteady. She’d broken her face.

No, seriously, Margulies says a year later, sitting in a Manhattan Beach coffee shop, “I broke my face.” She had fractured bones in her cheek and around her eye socket.²⁷The area just below her eye swelled up like a golf ball. Soon came the painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and surgery — several metal plates implanted to reinforce her skull. Then came the bills.

Margulies knew this could happen. The league stopped paying players after its second season. LFL players have been required to carry their own health insurance since the league’s inception.²⁸

Still, Margulies was hopeful. She’d been a top player, a marketable star who possessed the league’s coveted combination of ability, appearance, and charisma. Sure, she believes that Mortaza once had her benched for not celebrating a sack, even though the league contends that only head coaches can make that decision. (“I think I had a concussion,” Margulies says, “I got up and stumbled. I didn’t celebrate. The very next play I got pulled off the field.”) But since then she’d been named to an all-star team that toured Australia. She’d been used to promote the LFL, both at home in L.A. and elsewhere around the league. She’d helped the league grow. Surely, it would find some way to help her recover.

Mortaza sent her flowers. He tweeted his support. Margulies asked the league to cover some of her medical bills, and according to emails obtained by Grantland, the LFL initially offered to help. After a couple of months, though, LFL officials told her they could only cover a fraction of the $3,860 she owed. In an email to Grantland, the LFL responded that Margulies did not choose to purchase the league’s supplementary health insurance plan (which Margulies denies she was ever offered), and that she also didn’t respond to the league’s offer to “off-set a portion of her medical expenses.”

Jeremy & Claire Weiss/Day19 Melissa Margulies, who broke bones in her face during an LFL game and wound up covering her own medical expenses.

“I’m a major contributor,” she says. “I was someone the league promoted as everything the LFL is supposed to be. But they’re not going to take care of me? Then they’re not going to take care of anyone. So why am I still doing this? Why am I taking the risk? I can’t possibly rationalize doing this anymore.”

Other players’ injuries were just as bad. Marirose Roach, the Philadelphia lawyer, tore the meniscus in her knee and popped a ligament in her neck.

Ambo Mane, when she was playing for the now-defunct Green Bay Chill, took a helmet to the face while rushing for a touchdown. She had a broken nose. Blood gushed onto the field, and minutes later, in the tunnel, Mane collapsed. Soon she would have $3,000 in medical expenses, all preventable, she believes, if Mortaza had not instructed her and other players to adjust their chin straps so that they could rip off their helmets to celebrate plays. The LFL calls Mane’s account “inaccurate throughout,” although former Green Bay assistant coach Darius Jenkins remembers it the same way.

Mane left the league almost immediately after her injury. Even after all her injuries and shredded cartilage, Roach played another year. “I felt like I couldn’t abandon my team,” she says. Margulies waited for a check that never arrived, and then, finally, she quit.

Back at the coffee shop in Manhattan Beach, Margulies shakes her head. “You can’t toss us around like rag dolls anymore,” she says. Margulies contacted a lawyer about putting together a lawsuit against the league. Actually, there would be two suits — one in California state court, and another in federal court. Margulies would serve as lead plaintiff for the California suit. For the federal suit, Margulies knew who to call. A few hours away in Las Vegas, another former LFL player had already begun speaking out against the league.

Nikki Johnson

Team: (formerly) Las Vegas Sin
Experience: Grew up playing quarterback for all-girls youth flag football teams; continued as quarterback of an undefeated team in the LFL
Strengths: Throwing accuracy; ability to read coverages; grasp of the West Coast offense
Weaknesses: Dislikes wearing lingerie; has requested to get paid

She thought there would be money. Nikki Johnson isn’t shy to admit it. She never expected to get rich playing football, but she’d dedicated much of her life to the sport, choosing it over pursuits that could have earned her college scholarships or possible pro careers. Johnson started playing competitive flag football with boys at age 10. In middle school, she was a founding member of an all-girls league in the Vegas area and she lobbied, successfully, for girls’ flag football to become an official varsity sport in Nevada high schools. She spent three years in the fully padded 11-on-11 Women’s Football Alliance. It was a plodding game played by out-of-shape ex-jocks, more like a social club than a sports league. She wanted something fast-paced and competitive, something like the LFL, only without the lingerie.

On that last point, however, she was flexible. “I figured if we get paid, then whatever,” she says. But by the time Johnson tried out in 2011, the LFL had stopped paying players. When Johnson learned this, on her second day of practice, she walked out. Her coach begged her to return. He needed her: Johnson was one of the only women on the planet who had been playing quarterback since childhood. She relented: “To me it felt like this is the highest level of competition if you’re a female football player. So if I want to keep playing, this is where I need to do it.’”

She loved football but hated the league. She took a hit to the face and felt unsatisfied with the league’s response. She thought about the injuries players had suffered and the sacrifices they had made. She decided to form a players’ union. Johnson consulted lawyers who explained that it would be nearly impossible to certify a union of workers who don’t actually earn wages. Even if she couldn’t form an official union, Johnson thought, she could at least organize a group of players to approach Mortaza with demands. She started calling around. This isn’t right, she told other players. We can’t let them treat us this way.

“She contacted me and I was like, Eeeeeeeek!” Furr says. “What are you doing? In a perfect world, that would be a great decision, and that would be the way that you need to go: create a union, form a group of players that know the league best, that can present it to Mitch, but I’m not going to put my name on anything. I don’t know how this is going to go.”

Soon, Johnson found out how it would go. Someone told Mortaza about Johnson’s plan to organize. He sent her a Facebook message.

Nikki,

Hear more and more bullshit about you talking trash about the LFL from other LFL players. Honestly, why do you play and take advantage of the opportunities yet still shit on us? We are so done with you. All the best and goodbye, you have no idea what you have pissed off. Best of luck in nothing in football, now you get to watch what you could have been part of if you actually appreciated the opportunity and were thankful.

Best of luck and goodbye,

Mitchell

So Johnson was done. She tried returning to her old league, but it was too slow and casual — nowhere near the LFL’s quality of play. She became lead plaintiff in the federal case. The suits allege that LFL players have been unlawfully classified as independent contractors when they are actually employees. In employment law, the difference is in theory fairly simple. Independent contractors can control the terms of the services they provide. Employees are subject to terms demanded by their employer. The reason this matters: Independent contractors do not have to earn the federal minimum wage and have no right to overtime compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

“This is really a no-brainer,” says Michael Morrison, the attorney representing Margulies in California. “These women have to be there for practices, or they don’t play. They have to be there for promotional events, or they don’t play. They have to look a certain way. That’s not an independent contractor-client relationship. It’s an employee-employer relationship.”

It remains to be seen how many current and former players will be a part of the class, but those who do will seek the wages the suit alleges they are owed, as well as funds to cover legal fees as well as penalties.

Mortaza declined to discuss the lawsuit for this article. He says he wants to pay the players, but for now, that’s unfeasible. On the possibility of a union, he says: “Anyone who has any business savvy — this is an amateur league. These players pay [a $45 fee each season] to play in this league. So there is no union. There can be no union.”

And on Johnson: “She was a cancer. This is her last fifteen minutes of fame. She’ll never be heard from again.”

Johnson laughed off Mortaza’s comments. “This is to make a point,” she says. “You can’t take advantage of us just because we’re women and we want to play a sport. We’ve been doing this for free to build your business. Now we’ve built it. We deserve something in return.”

Monique Gaxiola

Team: Los Angeles Temptation
Experience: Played soccer at USC and for the under-19 Mexican national team; competitive CrossFitter; LFL champion
Strengths: Toughness; tackling; leadership; commitment to the LFL ideal
Weaknesses: None

The LFL’s perfect athlete is a defensive destroyer with long brunette hair and a high tolerance for pain. She talks trash. She welcomes contact. Occasionally, she models. She never complains.

By now, Monique Gaxiola’s story should feel familiar: A college athlete enters adulthood in search of new competition; she joins the LFL; she sacrifices untold hours and suffers injuries; she dominates the league, wins championships, and finds joy. And for Gaxiola, it’s that simple. There is no next chapter of disillusionment, no sense that her worth is unseen. She has tears in both ACLs. She was there when Margulies broke her face. She has no complaints about her helmets or equipment. “I see rugby players,” she says, “and they don’t have equipment.”

Gaxiola embraces the uniforms. “I worked hard for my body,” she says. “It’s like the bikini competitors — you’re being an athlete and showing others that I look good in this uniform.” She cares little about her lack of pay. “When the money is there, we’ll get it,” she says. “This league isn’t making enough to be able to operate.”

Mortaza insists that the LFL has always been profitable, but just barely. The league has contracted, down from 12 teams in 2013 to just six. Yet after a hiatus, the LFL has returned to television this season, with games broadcast on Fuse a week after they’re played. A reality show, following the Bliss, is set to air on Oxygen. Mortaza references a possible movie: “A next-generation League of Their Own,” he says, “featuring a Who’s Who of the female actress world.”

The tensions between the league and some players, however, remain hard to ignore. During last season’s playoffs, arenas were adorned with banners promoting players who have left the LFL, including two — Johnson and Margulies — who are actively suing the league. And yet Gaxiola has remained. She has used the league as a platform to build her brand, she says, gaining followers on social media and earning sponsorships for CrossFit competitions. She’s won the Mortaza Award, which recognizes on- and off-field excellence. And last September, she became the first — and only — member of the LFL’s Hall of Fame.

Jeremy & Claire Weiss/Day19 Monique Gaxiola, the only inductee of the LFL Hall of Fame.

Two thousand miles away, in Chicago, Heather Furr has agonized at times over her place in the league. For five seasons, she has been a dominant safety and an efficient, playmaking quarterback. Along with Gaxiola, she has become one of the faces of the league.

So about a month before last season began, Furr finally admitted something to her father and her boyfriend: She was thinking of quitting. She worked two regular jobs, as a personal trainer and a bartender. The rest of her life was devoted to the LFL. Practices took her away from lucrative Friday-night bar shifts. Her injuries had forced her off her feet and out of work for weeks at a time, she says, and the overall physical toll of football had left Furr questioning her future. She dreamed of someday having kids, of playing games of one-on-one basketball against them, just as her father had done with her. Yet her future was threatened every time she stepped on the field. One hit could leave her physically broken and financially broke, unable to claim the life that may otherwise have been hers.

The thought of quitting made her nauseated, but Furr needed the LFL to be worth her while. So one night she drafted an email to Mortaza. She needed compensation. She didn’t expect to get rich, or even to earn enough to make a living. She just wanted enough to offset the money she lost by taking time away from work to play for the Bliss. Maybe, she thought, the league couldn’t afford to pay everyone, as it once had. But what about its veterans? Its stars? In the past, she’d heard talk of a tiered system, whereby the highest-performing veterans would be paid.

She kept writing: “I love playing football. I love to compete. I love to win. I love being the best.” And yet, Furr wrote, she’d found herself disengaging, pulling away emotionally from both her sport and her team. “Why?” she wrote. “… The easiest way to put it is that I feel disposable.”

Mortaza responded that he liked Furr’s look and personality and game, although he would prefer she enter the season in better shape. After a follow-up email from Furr, he addressed the pay issue, saying that he couldn’t pay one player without paying all the others in similar financial situations.

So it was a no. And for Furr, this was it. Without compensation, the time and energy required to play were just too much. She went to her next practice and cried while telling her teammates that she was finished. But that next Friday night, when she knew her team was practicing without her, she felt sick. She couldn’t walk away. Not yet. So she went back, announced her return, and proceeded to lead the Bliss to their second straight LFL championship.

Months have passed. The LFL began its seventh season in April. Once again, Furr agonized over her decision to play. Yet as the season approached, she couldn’t quit. There is still no money, but she’ll survive. And more than anything, Furr says, she returned because she had to know if her team could keep winning. As long as she’s a champion, she won’t be able to walk away.

She says, “I always — always — come back to the game.”

It’s fair to criticize the LFL’s uniforms and its dynamics of gender and power. But the LFL didn’t invent the audience for nearly naked violence. It just found them. Likewise, it found hundreds of women, all so eager to play a sport that they’ve long been excluded from that they agreed to say and do and wear what the league wants. Anything to get on the field and compete.

Ask the players, and almost all of them can recall when they learned that the sport they loved was not meant for them to play. Marirose Roach realized in middle school that as much as she loved stiff-arming boys on her way to the end zone, she would never get a college scholarship unless she found another sport. Monique Gaxiola quit after a summer training as a kicker for her high school team. She loved the game but hated how her male teammates treated her — the invitations to join them in the shower or the request that she switch positions to center, so she could bend over while they took turns receiving snaps. Back then, football season also conflicted with soccer, and Gaxiola had a future there. Heather Furr played weekend games with boys in her backyard. For her, tackling neighborhood kids and scoring touchdowns in the snow was as good as football would probably ever get.

For these women, years passed, until eventually they met an LFL coach or league executive — a man who offered them a chance to play football, in real arenas and in front of real fans. All they had to do was play for free, with limited protective gear and barely any clothes.

For each of them, there was only one choice. They said yes. 

When Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro announced Silent Hills together, the entire games industry was giddy with excitement. After playing P.T., we were even more stoaked for the possibillity. And then as quickly as it had come, it was gone. Konami cancelled Silent Hills due to rifts with Kojima and we will always be left to wonder what could have been.

Speaking to IGN, Del Toro recently revealed that hope for a collaboration may not be over though. He hinted the two were still in contact and that there might be something from them both in the future.

I love working with Kojima-san. We are still in touch. We are still friends and working into doing something together, but that’s not going to be [Silent Hills].

These two are obviously fairly twisted when they come together, as we saw in P.T. I would be on board to see them create something in similar vain, even with the dropped Silent Hill name.

Hideo Kojima And Guillermo Del Toro Are Planning To Work On ‘Something’ Togehter

During EVO this weekend, you better believe that Capcom had a big presence what with all the various versions of Street Fighter being played. And unsurprisingly, attention turned to the future too, specifically in the form of Street Fighter V.

That game’s roster is slowly filling as the months go on, but Capcom treated fans to something special during the event. A brand new character for the franchise called Necalli will be joining the fight. He seems to be some kind of ‘wild-man’ who wrecks shop, especially when his dreadlocks turn into gorgeous, flowing hair. I like it.

Take a look:

Street Fighter 5 Introduces Entirely New Fighter

The thing that gave us Hugh Jackman as Wolverine almost cost us Ian McKellen as Magneto and Gandalf. In an interview with People Magazine, McKellen told the story of how he had just finished the film Gods And Monsters when he was offered a role in Mission Impossible II. The studio wouldn’t give the actor the full script for fear of it being leaked, so he was only able to read his scenes. Not being able to get a feel for how good the movie was from just the scenes, McKellen told his agent he was going to pass. A day later Bryan Singer offered him the role of Magneto and Peter Jackson called about Lord Of The Rings shortly after.

Mission Impossible II got pushed back a few times causing actor Dougray Scott to bow out of playing Wolverine in X-Men… a role that then went to little known Jackman.

McKellen added that there was some question to whether he could do both X-Men and Lord Of The Rings but Jackson said he would hold the part for the actor and when Singer heard of the casting told McKellen he’d make sure to finish up the actor’s scenes in time.

McKellen is currently doing press for his latest film, Mr. Holmes where he play the iconic detective in his later life.

[Source: People]

Ian McKellen Almost Missed Out On Playing Magneto And Gandalf

There was a whole big drama back in February surrounding prolific games designer Peter Molyneux and his developer 22cans. His Kickstarted game Godus game had failed to materialise and fans had started to get on at him for it. This was then compounded by a series of interviews that tore into the developer.

In a rather candid interview with Eurogamer, the developer’s CEO Simon Phillips did not cover up Molyneux’s failings. He said quite plainly, before hopefully looking to the future by saying:

All that stuff you’ve done wrong is quite easy stuff to fix and should have been done, and yes, you f***ed up and should have done all this stuff, but we can sort that out.

But you need to get back into designing games. Don’t try and do everything. Don’t try and glue it all back together because it’s just going to crumble down. You need to make games. That’s what you enjoy. I quite like business. I’ll do the business. And it seems to be working quite well so far.

There is a lot more about the fallout in January over the developer’s work in the interview that you should check out.

I still believe Molyneux is capable of great work in the future. He just needs to laser focus his efforts into making a good game and not over promising.

22cans CEO Says Peter Molyneux “F’d Up” But They Are Moving Forward

It’s pretty weird that the Doom community continues to make mods for the game all these years after its initial release. The classic FPS continues to have a huge community around it that enjoy playing the game to this day. It s pretty wild.

And here is one particular mod that is especially interesting. Modder TheZombieKiller decided to add an arcade machine into the game containing…well Doom. It also features Wolfenstien too, if it is all just getting a bit too meta. 

You can download the mod from here. Here is a video of the mod in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks Kotaku for the heads up.

‘I Heard You Like Doom So We Made A Mod To Put Some Doom In Your Doom’

The second character mentioned at the Arrow panel at SDCC has been cast. In the role of Anarky will be played by Alexander Colvert. In the comics Anarky is a anti-statis who focus has varied over the years but he has mainly in a Batman antagonist. In Arrow he will be Lonnie Machin, a deranged freelancing criminal who is willing to do whatever it takes to impress a potential employer. Calvert has previously appeared on Bates Motel and The Returned.

Arrow returns October 8th to the CW.

[Source: Deadline]

Alexander Calvert Cast As Anarky For Arrow Season 4

Girl Meets World is a legacy sitcom. A sequel to nineties sitcom Boy Meets World, in which the Boy, Cory, has grown up into a teacher, now with his own daughter, around which this new series revolves, and airing on the Disney Channel, who own Marvel Comics

Which made last night’s episode even odderl. The class get a new English teacher…. Miss Harper Burgiss.

“Miss Burgiss is here to teach you about great books and great ideas”

And which book would that be?

“Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns… This graphic novel was as important to its style of literature as any book you can think of. It’s about a world that’s become so tough that Batman fights Superman. You will tell me why he does that.”

Principal Yancy has something to say about this however.

“I can’t help noticing that someone has a comic book, that everyone has a comic book.,, It isn’t literature, it’s comic books, which are against school policy, Miss Burgiss. You will gather these up and you will teach something important. To Kill A Mcokingbird, are you familiar with this?”

Well, she is called Harper. She ignores the principal.

“So… The Dark Knight Returns. Read it tonight. And tomorrow, we will learn something important.”

At the dining table, the girls are in a hurry.

“Dinner is keeping us from our homework.The new English teacher wants us to read this.”

It emerges that Cory was involved with the teacher’s hiring, a motorcycle riding teacher who likes comics… a bit like an old teacher of his Mr Turner, from the original Boy Meets World..

“Its a more complicated world now, Heroes and villains arent as easily recognised. Maybe it takes different teaching methods to tell them apart. She thinks this will help and I like that she believes in something.”

“Yancy has a lot of power. Whos a guy with a lot of power.”

“Superman. Whoa.”

“Then Harper’s like Batman. Whoa.”

“What;s the difference between the two?”

“One has powers and one hasn’t.”

“How is that a fair fight?”

I don’t want Batman/Harper to lose

So maybe you should do your homework and find out what happens next.

And so the lesson takes place and questions are asked.

“Can good change?

“Good is good.”

“Can evil change?”

“It seems like just as we’ve seen the worst that something can be, somebody comes up with something?”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because it’s evil fascinates us”

“But doesn’t good have to win in the end?”

“Does it?”

But the Principal steps in, observing

“I see no Mockingbird.”

She is fired, as is Cory for sticking up for Harper, but things are not quite that simple and the Superintendent of schools has to be brought in.

Mr Turner. John Turner. An aging character from the past brought back to his old stomping ground to make things better again, and fight the good fight against power. Say, who does that remind you of?

“She’s teaching comics.”

“Yeah? My first day I taught the X-Men.”

So a compromise is reached in which Harper’s lessons are monitored. And the class present to each other.

“In Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the key word is dark. He doesn’t write heroes and villains that you’re used to. You have to really think about what’s right and wrong.”

“The pictures make you work too. You have to look up down across and sideways. I think he’s trying to look at what our world has become. Up down across and sideways.”

“Heroes that should be friends with a common goal fight each other instead.”

“One hero was trying to inspire his old friend to take a look at the world and realise i had changed so he needed to change too.”

“But he wouldnt so he fought against it which was hard to look at. Because the world is dark enough and heroes are supposed to bring light.”

“Everyone in this world knows that someone with real power doesnt need to hit a kid with a ruler to get the kid to want to learn.”

“Because this is a new world and we dont do that here.”

“Frank Miller turned a comic book into, whats the word.”

“You know the word.”

“Literature.”

Of course, there is still the matter of censure.

“John, comic books are against school policy.”

“And you can hit a kid with a ruler in 19 states.”

—-

And so all is well that ends well.

“Sometimes you can beat Superman.”

But sadly John Turner doesn’t suddenly have a heart attack at the end. Shame, that would have wrapped things up so neatly…

And with more Dark Knight on the way and Go Set A Watchman being released, it’s a perfect time for both or such exposure to young minds….

Though is it just me or does Frank Miller sound like the kind of guy who thinks using rulers might not be an altogether bad thing?

Girl Meets World Meets Frank Miller (SPOILERS)

Rock Band 4 is coming back this year, and after going hands on with it, I have to say, it absolutely is what you remember. If you miss the franchise, this is that formula with a few extra tweaks for a new generation.

The game’s setlist is currently growing with each announcement, and I remind you is only building on your purchased DLC from Rock Band 3, all of which is transferable. Here is a video announcing just a few of the songs Harmonix have put out there today.

The complete list of new songs from today’s annoucements reads like this:

Aerosmith – “Toys in the Attic”
The Cure – “Friday I’m In Love”
Dream Theater – “Metropolis – Part 1 ‘The Miracle And The Sleeper'”
Foo Fighters – “The Feast and the Famine”
Judas Priest – “Halls Of Valhalla”
Live – “All Over You”
The Outfield – “Your Love”
Ozzy Osbourne – “Miracle Man”
Paramore – “Still Into You”
St. Vincent – “Birth In Reverse”
Van Morrison – “Brown Eyed Girl”

I have high hopes for Rock Band 4, and if you are ready to jump back in, Harmonix are bending over backwards to please you. This should feel comfortable when you touch it again, which is a nice proposition for a genre that has been gone for five years.

Rock Band 4 Adds The Cure, Judas Priest, Foo Fighters And More To Set List

Executive producer Marc Guggenheim must have really enjoyed letting out teasers this weekend as he continues this morning… and they are taking the Green Arrow thing seriously. The title of the first episode of Arrow season 4 is called Green Arrow. The episode is scripted by Guggenheim and the new co-showrunner Wendy Mericle based on a story by Greg Berlanti and Beth Schwartz.

Arrow Season 4 begins filming tomorrow. @GBerlanti @SchwartzApprovd @MericlesHappen. @ThorFreudenthal pic.twitter.com/O3EW6M0oqD

— Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) July 13, 2015

First Episode Of Arrow Season Four Is Called….

Stephen Amell / Oliver Queen is getting a new Arrow costume for Season 4. And notice once again we see a lighter background in the promo image. The image was also posted on Amell’s facebook page as The Green Arrow. And even the city has changed as Starling City has become Star City.

SDCC ’15: Arrow Gets A Serious Costume And Name Upgrade

One of the big things out of the Warner Bros panel today was the trailer for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice featuring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot directed by Zack Snyder.

The trailer shows us our first look at Wonder Woman in action, we see how Lex Luthor is going to be played and we learn that Bruce Wayne was in Metropolis when Superman and Zod fought… or the fight drifted over to Gotham which is supposed to be just across the bay according to Snyder.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SDCC ’15: New Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice Trailer

Breaking out of the DC Page To Screen panel at San Diego Comic Con, comes the news that the appearance of Jay Garrick’s hemet in the Flash TV show is not just an isolated easter egg.

Geoff Johns, who knows of such things, confirmed that the original Flash from the nineteen forties, Jay Garrick, will be appearing in the series soon…

SDCC ’15: Jay Garrick Will Appear In Flash TV Show, Says Geoff Johns

Direct from the Mlkfed panel at San Diego Comic Con, amongst many things coming up in a panel report, is news of a new project by Matt Fraction and Terry Dodson…

Much more on that to come…

SDCC ’15: Matt Fraction And Terry Dodson’s Adventureman, Announced

Deadline is reporting that Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice stars Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill will be doing more than just appearing on stage in Hall H. The pair are expected to spend some time signing at the DC Entertainment booth. It’s not sure exactly when the signing will take place, so if you are attending the show, keep your ears open. There is also a chance that Gal Gadot will be there as well.

[Source: Deadline]

SDCC ’15: Affleck And Cavill To Sign At DC Booth

Adi Tantimedh writes,

July sees the start of the Summer Anime Season with dozens of new and returning shows being broadcast in Japan and streamed on internet services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu.

The anime industry and the manga/book market are an impeccably-linked symbiotic process: when a Light novel (Young Adult) or manga series gets popular enough, the publishers will commission an anime series according to fan demand, and which will also drive up the profile of the series to increase books sales since audiences that didn’t read them before might start buying them if they like the anime series enough. In the last few years, the increase in anime adaptations of Light novels has increased, which is good for the book business since prose novels are cheaper to print than comics. They in term get manga adaptations to increase their profile and profit. It’s win-win-win for a successful series that becomes a multimedia franchise. The really popular ones even get video game adaptations.

A current fan of anime might not notice, but there seems to be a contraction of the market. The majority of fans in Japan and the West are teens and early 20somethings, and anime reflects that now: the majority of stories are set in high school with earnest teenage heroes, harem tropes where all the girls fall in love with the self-effacing but clueless hero. Boob shots for fan service. It’s all about empowerment fantasies for teenage boys who are starting to notice girls.

Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the anime landscape had more diverse stories in different genres. Science Fiction and Fantasy series featured adult heroes, competent professionals rather than greenhorn teenagers. Now those stories are in a shrinking minority as companies concentrate on the teen market to keep the market and industry afloat. Veteran creators bemoan the industry’s aversion to risk and some have successfully taken to Kickstarter to fund shows that might otherwise have gotten produced back in the 90s. With a pro-war, right-wing government in power, there’s also an increasing pro-war theme running through a lot of anime where war is the main plot and young people being drafted to fight wars. It feels like a drive to normalise the concept of war in young Japanese people as rumours of the government planning to reintroduce a draft continue to circulate.

I’m not going to run down all the shows in the new season. There are at least twenty of them. Instead, I’m just going to take a quick look at a small handful that stood out to me.

Durarara!!X2 is the continuation of the anime adaptation of the Durarara! Light Novel (Young Adult) series by Ryogo Narita. The series is a kind of action-comedy soap opera set in the real-life Tokyo district of Ikebokuro but one whose urban ordinariness hides urban legends, social-media-created street gangs, characters from myth and folklore and epically strange and crazy people among its inhabitants, all trying to get through the day. It’s like a collaboration between Robert Altman and Neil Gaiman. I suppose I have a soft spot for this series because of its celebration of oddballs, eccentrics, social outcasts and outsiders who barely even bother trying to hide their Otherness. Yen Press already publish the manga adaptation and will finally bring out English translations of the original novels this year.

One Punch Man adapts the pseudonymous One’s popular superhero manga that began life as a webcomic that Viz will finally bring out as an English language dead tree book this year. The series is a spoof of both Japanese and American superhero comics that the creator has probably spent some time thinking about. Its hero is probably the most deadpan, unflappable superhero in all of comics, a nobody who trained himself to become the strongest superhero of them all – his name is a clue for what he can do. He’s so powerful now that he’s become bored and would like to an opponent he can fight, yet he has no ego whatsoever so most people don’t even know how powerful he really is other than his closest friends. It’s impossible not to recognise the increasingly absurd and surreal heroes and villains throughout the series as an utter piss-take of the genre that still gets to eat its cake since the action scenes are as elaborate and over-the-top as the most insane blockbusters out there, sometimes even moreso. The anime hasn’t begun yet, but the fact that Madhouse is the studio producing it makes this a must-watch for the season.

Gangsta is an adaptation of one of the few crime manga being written and drawn by a woman, the pseudonymous Kohske, that Viz Media have been publishing in English for a few year snow. Set in a fictional small European city full of rvial crime families with a paper-thin truce, the main characters are a pair of freelancers who are often hired to do dirty work that the crime families and the police don’t want to get caught doing. There’s an adult sense of pulpish grime in its willingness to get down and dirty and the protagonists aren’t school kids but grown men for a change. It’s also a show that takes the side of outcasts and outsiders.

Gate is an adaptation of a bestselling novel series – over two million sold – by a former Self-Defence Force officer, a fantasy about Japan’s Self-Defence Force being sent through a dimensional gate to wage war against an incursion from a high fantasy world of orcs and demons. Of course an otaku in the Self-Defence Force who plays games and reads manga would be the right guy to be in the ground troops. He has specialised knowledge about that world after all and would be more than happy to make friends with elves and mages. There’s a disturbingly imperialist, pro-military, pro-war stance the show has, with the Japanese government eager to claim the new land as their own so they can invade it for its resources. The whole story smakes of right-wing, pro-war propaganda of the type the current government espouses. The animation company A-1 has a track record for producing anime series that are pro-government and pro-military.

Shimoneta A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t exist adapts a light novel series by Hirotaka Akagi set in a future where erotica, pornography and sex talk are banned, where teenage boys who say a dirty word will get stomped on and tased by SWAT teams. Japan’s Most Wanted Terrorist here is a teenage girl who wears panties as a mask and wages a campaign to spread raunchy pictures and dirty jokes to combat the ignorance and sexual repression in society. The hero is a hapless classmate she blackmails into joining her campaign and finds he might like doing this after all. Yes, this is an over-the-top teenage sex comedy that’s mostly about language and puns. What’s interesting is its anti-censorship stance that’s in opposition to the government’s threats to tighten up censorship laws. What’s notable is that once again, rebellion and countering government policy begins in prose but will make more impact when it becomes visual in the form of a TV show that gets a wider audience.

And there you have it. Proceed with caution, your mileage may vary, but at least it’s never dull.

Ya-tah! at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

Random Notes From The Summer Anime Season - Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Warren Ellis is the writer of Dynamite’s upcoming James Bond 007 ongoing comic book series, released alongside (but having noting to do with) the new James Bond movie.

And Batwoman‘s Jason Masters is the artist.

The first six-issue story arc in the James Bond 007 comic book series will be entitled “VARGR.” James Bond returns to London after a mission of vengeance in Helsinki, to take up the workload of a fallen 00 agent… but something evil is moving through the back streets of the city, and sinister plans are being laid forBond in Berlin.

The new comic book series in is partnership with Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and art of a worldwide license. The press release quotes Warren as saying “Ian Fleming’s James Bond is an icon, and it’s a delight to tell visual narratives with the original, brutal, damaged Bond of the books” says Warren Ellis. It is edited by Mike Lake, who curated the Bond comic to its final publication at Dynamite over several years.

But what does Warren really think of Bond? Thankfully, we can find out through Google, before it becomes full of the breaking news. From 2002...

There are very few existing properties that I’d be interested in writing. I like making up my own stories. As far as I’m concerned, that is in fact the job description of “writer”. There aren’t many pre-existing characters that I could be tempted with. I’ve resisted the temptation to do 2000AD properties I remain fond of; I couldn’t do JUDGE DREDD better than John Wagner, and, in fact, neither can anyone else, so I’ve denied myself the pleasure of solving story structures by having a huge bastard in green boots walk in and kill everybody. A JUDGE DREDD/TRANSMETROPOLITAN crossover book was suggested to me by DREDD publishers Fleetway once. I told them that it would be precisely one page long. Spider Jerusalem lights a cigarette. Judge Dredd shoots him. The end.

But if someone asked me to write a James Bond film, you wouldn’t see my arse for dust.

Sad, innit?

I’ve read most of the Ian Fleming novels, seen most of the films once they’ve come to TV. I’m not a fanatic by any means. But James Bond exerts a terrible fascination nonetheless. I even did an interview piece on how I’d write Bond for a Texan newspaper a couple of years ago. So did Bruce Sterling, who offered a disturbing opinion about Bond as a shaven-headed Ibiza DJ. You’re going to hell for that one, Bruce, and you will discover that Satan is English.

The books are notably less spectacular and far more low-key than the films. Dr No was a crazed guano millionaire and had no nuclear missiles, spaceship-eaters or any of the good stuff we associate with Bond Villains. Tiger Tanaka’s great test of Bond was making him compose a naff haiku. It’s often quite bland stuff, great long travelogues and pages describing banquets and furniture. In the guts of it, though, is Bond as a scarred man with clear psychological damage, often on the edge of being removed from service by M on mental health grounds. It’s made stridently obvious that being on the 00 detail of the Secret Service is a job that fucks you up.

Bond is not a superman. He prevails because he is quite simply nastier and more determined to wreak utter bloody havoc than the next guy. In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers.

He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.

Most importantly; he beats people up and makes stuff explode.

The films try to recoil from Bond the bastard, most obviously in the later, parodic Roger Moore horrors. But in Connery, in Dalton and even in Pierce Brosnan, Bond’s essential ruthlessness comes through. Wolf-eyed Timothy Dalton had the best shot at being truly frightening, but he was hamstrung by some horrible scripts, and I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did. Clive Owen is pretty much the only choice to take over after Brosnan, and I’d assume that a serious overhaul of the franchise would have to accompany that.

I can be contacted via agent Angela Cheng Caplan at The Cheng Caplan Company, if there are any producers on serious medication out there. Because both me and Bruce were right; James Bond needs to reflect his times.

But I wouldn’t make him a DJ.

And stuff would blow up really good.

Yes.

I think maybe I need another drink now.

Some folk think that the makers of Casino Royale read this article. And from 2011…

In CASINO ROYALE, James Bond is the Bond girl. Look at the way they even show him emerging from the ocean like Ursula Andress. Sexual torture, too, if less creepy-glam than being stripped and painted gold. Vesper Lynd is Bond: never not in control, never without a plan, seducing to further her goals. She has to die so Bond can become her.

As for Jason Masters, this is the kind of thing he could bring to Bond… just replace Batman or Batwoman in your mind.

When buildings and cars explode, before and after.

Ian Fleming was rather exacting about location…. so is Jason.

Really exacting.

Espionage activities in the dark.

Cars, men, babes, architecture and a fetishistic design sense that moulds them all into one… I want to start singng the Goldeneye theme right now.
Men in suits on motorbikes with guns… check.

For those fights on building sites, like Quantum Of Solace…

And then jumping from them in a suit.

Just not every Bond Villain has “Bang” guns like Batman’s do. Probably better watch for that.

Shaken not stirred…

And just in time for the Olympic opening ceremony. Warren did you have any thoughts on that?

Basically… we can’t wait!

Warren Ellis Writing The James Bond 007 Comic, Jason Masters Drawing It - And Here's Why

The time around the creation of the first PlayStation was a very interesting period in video game history. If you ever get a chance to look into it, I encourage you too. One of the most interesting things to come out of the time though was news that a PlayStation Nintendo collaboration console was once in the works.

That deal fell through at the last minute as Nintendo were worried Sony had too much power in the relationship and backed out. Before they did though a few prototypes of the console were made, but sightings of them have been a thing of legend.

Although one may have possibly been found in the wild. A Reddit User posted pictures (currently unreachable due to protests on the site) of the supposed console and had a story to match. Take a look:

The poster claims:

My dad worked for a company, apparently one of the guys he used to work with, I think his name was Olaf, used to work at Nintendo and when my dads company went bankrupt, my dad found it in a box of “junk” he was supposed to throw out.

The Olaf in question could be Olaf Olafsson, former president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. However, it seems weird that your dad’s friend, the CEO of Sony would just give you a box of junk to throw away.

I’m not sure I believe this in it’s entirety, but if it is real, this is an incredibly artefact of gaming history. I’ll update if we find out anything new about the validity of this.

A Possible Prototype For The Rare PlayStation Nintendo May Have Been Found

Today, we have a lot of Marvel news coming through about their All-New All-Different Marvel relaunch in October.

Such as Jeff Lemire and Ramon Perez, relaunching their already recently relaunched All-New Hawkeye as, simply,  Hawkeye #1 in October.

The noticeable difference being the prominence of an almost 1602-era Kate Bishop Hawkeye with what looks to be Old Man Barton from Mark Millar‘s Wolverine run.

Interesting, as a much younger version of Hawkeye appears in New Avengers.

Read the rest of our coverage with the #MarvelOctober tag on Bleeding Cool….

An... All-Old Hawkeye? From Jeff Lemire And Ramon Perez #MarvelOctober

Today, we have a lot of Marvel news coming through about their All-New All-Different Marvel relaunch in October.

And we have a very different looking Uncanny Avengers indeed. By Gerry Duggan and Ryan Stegman, it purports to be a Deadpoolish take on the team.

With Steve Rogers, Human Torch, Rogue, Deadpool, Spider-Man, Quicksilver, Brother Voodoo and more.

The tagline reads “Fighting for Humanity, Inhumanity, Mutants and Deadpool”

Read the rest of our coverage with the #MarvelOctober tag on Bleeding Cool….

Uncanny Avengers Relaunches With Gerry Duggan And Ryan Stegman #MarvelOctober

Today, we have a lot of Marvel news coming through about their All-New All-Different Marvel relaunch in October.

Such as Cullen Bunn and Greg Land relaunching Uncanny X-Men, starting in October. Land last drew Uncanny X-Men when Kieron Gillen was the writer.

But who will our Uncanny X-Men be? It seems it’s Magneto, Sabretooth, Psylocke, Mystique and Fantomex.

Quite a change. A rather bloodthirsty change.

The tagline? “Bigger threats require more threatening X-Men.”

Read the rest of our coverage with the #MarvelOctober tag on Bleeding Cool….

Cullen Bunn And Greg Land Relaunch Uncanny X-Men #MarvelOctober