Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at the news out of Comic-Con, and gives his thoughts on Valerian.

As is usual, it was the smaller Comic-Con stories that I found for myself search-engineering my way through the deluge of online reports which I found the most interesting.  Like the one from The Beat, “SDCC ‘17 -- DISNEY and IDW’s Move Towards All-Ages Comics Takes Center Stage,” from which I learned Yen Press would be publishing Big Hero 6 and re-releasing Disney’s W.I.T.C.H.  Though to learn they were part of Yen’s upcoming line of middle grade graphic novels I had to go to a Publisher’s Weekly piece titled “Yen Press to Launch JY, a Kids’ Graphic Novel Imprint in Fall 2017.”

But what pleased me most in that Beat piece was that the Italian Disney comic Real Life, written by Alessandro Ferrari and drawn by artists including Alberto Zanon and Giada Perissinotto, was presumably going to be part of Yen’s JY line. (I write “presumably” because I was unable to confirm this anywhere online, but it seems a pretty good guess).  It’s “about a group of girls who imagine the perfect boy on social media, and are stunned to see him in school the next day.”   And the reason I’m so psyched is because I found the series back in 2016 thanks to the Hoopla streaming service (see “Confessions Of A Comic Book Guy -- Why Digital Didn’t”).  And I’m hoping it’ll be able to find a larger audience in America.

And while I know I just wrote about the show last week (see “Confessions of a Comic Book Guy -- In With The New”), naturally there was a DuckTales panel at Comic-Con, And, again I learned something else interesting about it, like in the piece from the Oh My Disney site, “Darkwing Duck Is Going To Be In Ducktales And More Things We Learned At San Diego Comic-Con.  I had heard vague statements about how the new series was going to be “influenced” by the comics, but I didn’t really believe it, until I read that the show’s co-producer and story editor Francisco Angones said, “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck comic was mandatory reading for all of the writers on the show.”*

And while I consider myself an advocate for diversity and inclusion in comics, I must confess I learned something about those subjects from the article, “The New ‘DuckTales’ Cast Shares Their Memories Of Growing Up With The Show.”  In it, actor Ben Schwartz, probably best known for playing the deeply peculiar Jean-Ralphio Saperstein on Parks & Recreation, revealed his favorite character had been Gizmoduck.  And while I intellectually knew every character is someone’s favorite I literally didn’t know that was possible in the case of Gizmoduck, who wasn’t just a meager mashup of Robocop and Inspector Gadget; he was also a Poochy, a later season invention introduced to shake things up that only ends up dragging them down. But to Schwartz, “Gizmoduck is one of my favorite things of all times. Because, for like, as a kid, to have a super hero that was a super nerd … he was a nerd, you know?”

And then, strangely enough the importance of Gizmoduck is also felt in a Polygon piece  In the new Ducktales, Donald Duck is the Louis C.K. of Duckburg”.   There Cuban Francisco Angones talks about how growing up the only Latino superhero available to him was DC’s Vibe, the breakdancing gang member, and he wanted to make Gizmoduck’s alter ego Fenton Crackshell Hispanic for his daughters. Angones reached out to Hamilton star Lin-Manuel Miranda to voice the character.  Miranda agreed and Crackshell became hyphenated to Crackshell-Cabrera.  Happily so far I’ve been unable to find any online backlash accusing Disney of a having secret agenda to forcibly race-bend their Ducks.

Well, in spite of the almost universal good reviews I still haven’t seen Spider-Man: Homecoming, and given how it’s done at the box office I’m not the only one who is  taking their time to see it.  As to why it’s doing so poorly, I offer into evidence this piece from Forbes  “What ‘Spider-Man’s Awful 73% Friday-to-Friday Plummet Means for Sony, Marvel, And Superhero Films”.  It takes a while to get to its point, but ultimately it does, that being it really doesn’t matter how good Spider-Man: Homecoming is.  If people don’t want to see another Spider-Man movie, you really can’t make them.

I know the corporations who are pushing out a never-ending stream of superhero sequels and reboots wish it otherwise, but superhero movies aren’t a Golden Goose allowing them to make billions on demand.  A lesson I hope they learn sooner than later.

But I did see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, not that there was ever any doubt that I would   I mean, even if the word of mouth was that it wasn’t a good movie, or a good adaptation of the source material or a good science fiction movie, I still would have seen it because, well for one thing it’s directed by Luc Besson.  And for another just from what I was able to see from the trailers it looked like something I had never seen before.  And at my stage of life, that’s something worth its weight in rubies.

As for what I thought of the movie... well, I’ll confess up front I don’t expect my opinion to matter for a couple of reasons.  The first being from the reviews to the posts on my Facebook page, Valerian is shaping up to be the most decisive movie of 2017.  I loved it, but historically that usually translates into “Movie dies a swift death” (see Speed Racer, John Carter, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, etc.).

But, that being said, I loved it from its wonderfully optimistic opening, a montage depicting the creation of Alpha, the titular City of a Thousand Planets, via first the entire human race then alien race after alien race literally joining hands in peace and friendship. If I have a quibble it’s that it took me a while to warm to both of its leads, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.  It was probably unfair of Besson to hang the fate of a movie this big and expensive on newcomers this new.  But DeHaan eventually proves himself equal to the task and it’s entirely possible that Delevingne has “something,” other than the startlingly cherubic newness of a Partridge Family-era Susan Dey.

The best performance in the film comes from Rihanna in what amounts to an extended cameo as a shape-changing alien.  It’s perfect casting given the singer’s undefinable “otherness,” but Besson gets a resoundingly human performance from her that makes the film.

*The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck was of course written and drawn by Don Rosa. What makes this strangely ironic is when at conventions for literally decades Rosa has put a sign on his table reading “These Comics Are Not DuckTales” to try and separate his work from the animated series.  Given this, it makes me wonder if anyone on the DuckTales production team ever made any effort to reach out directly to Rosa.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.