Your 2017 Predictions, Part Three: All or Nothing.

§ January 17th, 2018 § Filed under predictions § 13 Comments

Okay, I meant to go edit in some more corrections and addendums/addenda in the previous posts (part one and two), but I think I’ll wait ’til we’re done going through all the predictions and do a final wrap-up instead. In the meantime, let’s get through a few more of your guesses for the events of 2017…and don’t forget to give me your predictions for 2018!

Rob London bridges the gap with

“Marvel villain Trump (you know, this guy) makes a comeback.”

Not that I can tell (as you might imagine, that’s hard to look up right now…”Siri, find me ‘trump villain evil'”) but I can’t imagine how anyone at Marvel could have resisted.

“DC launches an equivalent to Marvel Unlimited.”

(and Bryan Boles also noted “I think this is the year DC finally has a digital equivalent to Marvel Unlimited”)

Not that I can tell, but this seems like something The People want, since I had more than one person predict it!

“Agents of SHIELD ends in May; its spot in the ABC schedule is taken by a Ghost Rider series.”

Beyond all expectation, it’s still hanging in there. Who knew?

• • •

Wayne Allen Sallee sallies forth with

“Dr. Oz is not Ozymandias. Clark Kent is really Nite Owl from the Watchmen-verse AND Dr. Oz.”

Well…you’re partly right!

“The letter Thomas Wayne wrote to his son Bruce were simply the lyrics to ‘Seasons in The Sun’ by Terry Jacks.”

Close…turned out it was the lyrics to “MacArthur Park.”

“The DC/Watchmen thing will never be resolved because Trump and Putin will fight over something trivial–perhaps the hidden meaning of ‘Seasons in The Sun’–and Russia and the US will bomb each other to bits.”

Oh, Wayne…you know those two crazy kids would never fight over anything!

• • •

Stephen Conway twitters

“Daredevil will be the latest Marvel character to be replaced with a PoC legacy character, but there won’t be any wholly new character that receives their own book.”

Seems like Matt Murdock and his twin brother Swingin’ Mike Murdock are in it for the long haul…though I suppose recent supporting character Blindspot is right there if they decide to do the ol’ switcheroo.

“Several second and third tier publishers collapse. NuValiant folds as their much needed influx of Hollywood money never arrives.”

No comics-aggedon just yet…maybe a couple have fallen off (or at least scaled back) in the last year, but there’s no alarming attrition thus far.

“Charles Soule catches a rather bad cold causing him miss his deadlines, resulting in Marvel having a week with no new comics.”

That man apparently had a very healthy year!

• • •

Rob Staeger stages the new few items

“I’m gonna predict a new Legion series until they give us one. I’m going to go out on a limb and say DC will use some of Tom King’s Batman cred to launch it; he’ll write the first year.”

Hard to believe we’re still waiting for a new Legion of Super-Heroes series…but better to let it rest than just crank out series after series with declining returns. I do like your idea of Tom King writing it, though…that would certainly make it feel different from every other attempt at relaunching the series.

“While I’m making a wish list, I’ll predict another thing I’d really like: DC will publish a collection reprinting some of the Comico Jonny Quest series.”

I’d like a collection of that series from pretty much any source, but it feels like the time to have done that was maybe when the Future Quest series had started way back when.

“Of the original wave of Rebirth books, the first one cancelled will be Blue Beetle. Jaime Reyes will become a regular in a team book soon afterward.”

It didn’t happen ’til this year, with Blue Beetle ending this February…but Superwoman is beating it by a month, ending, well, right now.

• • •

Bully, the Little Foreseeing Bull, stuffs in the following

“Jaxxon the Giant Green Star Wars Rabbit will get his own five-issue miniseries.”

I don’t think this fella’s turned up at Marvel aside from a couple of variant covers…but I’d be all for a Jaxxon series. Except don’t call him a rabbit because:

“Fleishman’s Margarine will become the newest member of either the X-Men or the Inhumans, or both.”

Well, the Inhumans could’ve used the help.

“The crossover event ‘War of the Spiders’ will never finish. Neither will the human race.”

I’m not even sure what “War of the Spiders” even was. Man, crossovers sure do come and go nowadays. I mean, maybe it is still going, who am I to judge? The human race, however, is still going, sort of despite itself.

• • •

Rich Handley palms off the following

“Star Trek comics will cross over with at least two other franchises. One of them will have the word ‘Star’ in the title.”

Alas, no Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek event, nor did Barbra Streisand meet the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise in A Star Trek Is Born.

“The Watchmen’s involvement in DC Rebirth will ultimately turn out to be neither as interesting nor as important as folks are hoping.”

Well, we’ve got 10 more issues to go before we find out, I don’t know, Rorschach is Jimmy Olsen’s father, or whatever. We’ll just have to see!

“Then… KOREA!”

Why, this is just a cheap ploy to get me to run this panel again:


It’ll never work.

• • •

More prediction talk to come in just a day or two! Thanks for reading, pals.

13 Responses to “Your 2017 Predictions, Part Three: All or Nothing.”

  • Thom H. says:

    I would love a new Legion series, and I’m really digging Tom King’s Mister Miracle right now, but I’m not sure he’s the best writer for those characters. We’ve had a dystopian, nine-panel-grid Legion before, and it was amazing. Do we need that kind of thing again?

    Whoever takes the reins of the (prospective) Legion series, I hope they drop us right into the middle of the action like King would. And who knows, maybe he has another angle on the team that doesn’t veer into the same “bittersweet” territory most of his work does. But I would love to see the team rebuilt into an optimistic force for good, at least for a while, before it’s all deconstructed again.

  • Turan, Emissary of the Fly World says:

    A bit of pure pedantry for you: The lyrics of “Seasons in the Sun” are actually by Rod McKuen, not Terry Jacks. I think that getting that right would make the joke better, but I suppose you have to remember McKuen for that, which means the joke would only work for people in their 50s or older.

    It was an adaptation of a French song by Jacques Brel. Brel, who looked like Bogart’s more leathery cousin, and whose voice showed every one of the cigarettes that would eventually kill him, could pull off a song about a dying man’s thoughts. It was ridiculous coming from young, fresh-faced, cheerful-sounding Terry Jacks.

  • Daniel T says:

    Okay, there’s a line missing in that link post.

    “Speaking of ridiculous Seasons in the Sun covers…”

  • Rob London says:

    You *can* call Jaxxon a rabbit – rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents.

    (Happy to be proven wrong with Agents of SHIELD!)

  • Mike, it so happens I was advising a Marvel author who needed a villain for their story and suggested Trump would fit their purpose. They loved the character’s gimmicks, but the idea was shot down because of his name – which I hadn’t even considered when I promoted him.

    Whatever happened to the good ol’ days when everybody wanted Gerald Ford to be their super-villain?

  • Rob Staeger says:

    Thom, I’m a big fan of the 5-years-later Legion, and am sure King could do a great job in that regard (man, is he killing it with the 9-panel grid in Mister Miracle, or what?), but I think he’s got plenty of other tricks up his sleeve, too. He’s certainly shown off a variety of storytelling styles in Batman, depending on the artist he’s writing for, and I think he just does an excellent job of thinking things through — that’s why I’d like to see him on Legion. I think if the brief is an optimistic Legion (which I’d prefer, too), he’d still do a bang-up job.

    But regardless, I’m just gonna keep on predicting a Legion series until we get one. (By which point the 30th-century setting will be probably be in our recent past.)

  • Damien says:

    Please can someone make A Star Trek Is Born. I would pay genuine cash money for Barbra meeting Spock.

  • Thom H. says:

    Rob — believe me, I’m there for a King-penned LoSH series (or any new LoSH series, for that matter). And I should probably read more of his take on Batman. I just don’t want to end up with a chilly, formalist take on those characters. But I’ll take what I can get at this point. Here’s to Legion of Super-Heroes v. 8, coming in 3018! :)

  • Rich Handley says:

    HA! I’d completely forgotten my own predictions.

  • David Alexander McDonald says:

    I adore Monsieur Brel, though he’s become more obscure since his death. I must acquire one of the Integrale boxes.

    For my money, the best cover of Seasons is by Black Bix Recorder. It’s hilariously weird and breathy. English adaptations of Brel are wildly variable, with some brilliant takes (The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s “Next”) to dire (90% of the covers of “Amsterdam.”)

    THEN…KOREA has become a go-to phrase between my best male friend and I, by the by.

  • Jack says:

    For my money, “Then…KOREA” is the best running gag this site has. POOONG!

  • LondonKdS says:

    An important point as well is that McKuen’s lyrics for “Seasons in the Sun” are very heavily bowdlerised. For example, most of the verses are about the dying man’s wife cheating on him. And a more accurate translation of the chorus, with rhyme and meter, would be:

    “Laugh and dance, laugh and dance,
    All get drunk and jump around.
    Laugh and dance, laugh and dance,
    While they drop me in the ground”.