Admittedly, it has been a long time since I read an American comic. I dove into manga in a big way and didn’t look back. However, in an effort to expand my horizons (and give in to the peer pressure of some of my more persuasive colleagues here at Popverse), I delved into the world of Absolute Batman to see what all the fuss was about.

Before picking up this comic, it had been sold to me in terms that a manga fan like me could understand; if the mainline DC Comics universe was a shonen adventure, Absolute Batman is the seinen counterpart aimed at older fans who can tolerate more violence and darkness. Several people from DC have said multiple times that he drew inspiration from manga for this version of Batman. As a Berserk and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure fan, this spoke to me in a way that got me to pick up the series on digital. Don’t we all want to see what happens when Batman really cuts loose?

This stripped-back version of Batman delivered on that expectation, without trying to become something it's not. Absolute Batman answers the question of 'What if Batman was big and broke?' The early issues establish this version of Bruce Wayne as someone with the same motivation as his mainstream counterpart but without the same resources. At pretty much every turn, this Batman chooses the path most violent, stopping just short of actively killing his opponents.

If you like this, you'll enjoy the new prose novel Escala's Wish by David James, which is the sponsor of this article.

I don’t make it a secret that I love to play video games. They excite me. They give me a chance to reflect on the world. Sometimes they help me bond with my son. They’re a huge part of who I am, but here is a secret: as much as I love playing video games, I’d almost always prefer to play D&D.

There is, of course, a lot of crossover between video games and tabletop games, especially RPGs and the like. There is even a whole portion of video games that are based on tabletop games, such as the incredible (and potentially heartbreaking) Baldur’s Gate 3. I started playing video games in the late 80s when I stumbled across a shiny golden Zelda cartridge in my step-dad’s collection, and they’ve been a huge part of who I am ever since.

It is tough to put Escala’s Wish into a box. The book is a romantasy novel without the smut, written by a career lawyer with a passion for D&D. It adds a dash of humor, epic stakes, and a structure inspired by The Princess Bride. The book is a love-letter to David James’ ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and, ahead of his upcoming presence at PAX East 2026, we talked to the lawyer-turned-author about why Escala’s Wish will feel so familiar to tabletop fans at the convention.

Perhaps that isn’t a fair turn of phrase, however, as David James is adamant that his career in law didn’t just enable his longtime D&D habit, but it wormed its way into his debut novel. 

“I didn’t leave law to become an author,” he tells Popverse. “I brought the law with me. Fantasy worlds need internal logic just like corporations do. Systems matter. Consequences matter. Governance matters. The difference is, in my books, dragons are usually more honest than executives. When you read Escala’s Wish, you’ll hear about the laws of the Court of Dreams. Those laws are brutal. Unforgiving. Binding. They aren’t suggestions – they’re absolute. That’s my lawyer-side showing up on the page.”

Not all heroes wear capes. Some don’t even wear pants, but that doesn’t make them any less heroic. Captain Underpants is one of the most popular children’s novel series out there and has expanded into movies, graphic novels, and, now, manga. While there are some design choices that might confuse manga purists, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Manga still serves as a great introduction to any manga-curious young people out there.

If you don’t have a young person of reading age in your house and need a refresher about the origin of Captain Underpants, it is about two mischievous young boys, George and Harold. The two enjoy two things more than anything: pulling pranks and making comics. In this version, their love of comics is replaced by a love of manga, but it is otherwise a beat-for-beat adaptation of the original The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey, who also wrote and adapted the script for this manga. To avoid getting in trouble for ruining a recent football game with their pranks, the pair hypnotize their principal into believing he is Captain Underpants, the hero of the manga they created, who then goes on to save the world from Dr. Diaper.

The story is largely the same that young readers have been excited about for almost 30 years, but the art certainly looks different. Manga artist Motojiro did the artwork while Wes Dzioba provided the color. It is bright and colorful, with expressive faces and a focus on movement and action. Motojiro does a good job of updating the Captain Underpants world into a new format while still having the same irreverent, carefree sense of humor fans expect. They've even managed to preserve the Flip-O-Rama pages that featured in the original novels.

The Resident Evil franchise has come a long way from the days of Leon S. Kennedy saying, "No thanks, bro" in Resident Evil 4. As we've seen in the remakes for Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4, Capcom has made an effort to retain the creepy atmosphere of the original games while giving the characters' voice actors a chance to give more grounded performances. 

Now, with the newest game in the series, Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom has left the schlocky action hero acting of the past behind for good. The cast of Requiem was made up of primarily London-based British theatre actors, like actress Angela Sant'Albano, who plays protagonist Grace Ashcroft in the game. I spoke to Sant'Albano about the experience of playing Grace in Requiem, and she revealed how the cast's training as theatre actors uniquely prepared them for acting out scenes in The Volume. While the cast wasn't working on a completely bare sound stage, there were some basic set pieces, like hallways, built for the actors to walk down, but Sant'Albano noted, "so much of it is just using your imagination, which makes you feel like a little kid again." 

Of course, there's a huge difference between acting onstage and acting in a onesie with adhesive dots all over your face and a helmet on your head with a camera directly in your face. The move to working in The Volume with digital backgrounds and in a performance capture rig was initially a challenge for Sant'Albano on the first day of filming. But the game's performance capture director, Kate Saxon, offered some wise words of direction. 

One of the beautiful things about storytelling, for me, is that it keeps me sane. Or rather, finding other stories written by people who care passionately about the world they live in makes me feel less insane for feeling that way. As much as I'd love to scream at the top of my lungs at the state of the world, I don't, because my neighbors and their dogs wouldn't like that. So this outrage has to be redirected in other ways. 

This feeling is why I love Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams' Hard-Traveling Heroes storyline from Green Lantern/Green Arrow so much. The Emerald Archer himself, Oliver Queen, practically comes alive on the page from the combination of Adams' art and O'Neil's words, as he screams at his best friend, Hal Jordan, for not stepping up in the fight for social justice. Under Adams' pen, every fibre of Green Arrow's body contorts in an expression of rage at how the marginalized are treated in society. It's almost like Adams drew every panel of Hard-Traveling Heroes like it would be his last - a fitting accompaniment to Dennis O'Neil's writing, which never pulled any punches. 

As you can see, there's a special place in my heart for Green Arrow, thanks to O'Neil and Adams. And DC's announcement of the plot and other details for the upcoming Absolute Green Arrow series from writer Pornsak Pichetshote and artist Rafael Albuquerque further crystallized some observations I had percolating about the Absolute Universe these past few months. Executive editor Chris Conroy described Absolute Green Arrow at ComicsPRO 2026 as a "slasher horror" story where a "serial killer called The Longbow Hunter is hunting down billionaires responsible for Oliver Queen's death... This is Scream, Halloween, meets Green Arrow." Considering that we got a story last year in the Absolute Batman Annual from Daniel Warren Johnson where our big, beefy, lovely Dark Knight battles hordes of white supremacists, the Absolute Universe is continuing full steam ahead with timely stories that, in the vein of Denny O'Neil, pull no punches.

It’s rare to see a group stay together. The Beatles broke up, NSYNC broke up, and Oasis spent over a decade apart. Too much time together can make even the best of friends become bitter enemies, but that hasn’t happened to the cast of Critical Role. What makes them different? For starters, they’re not musicians like our previous examples, but Sam Riegel believes it’s because there is strength in numbers.  

 “[Matthew Mercer] really keeps us together,” Sam Riegel says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at MCM Comic Con 2023. “He insists on doing things together as just friends tonight, we’re not business partners, we’re just hanging out, and we try to do that as much as we can and it really helps a lot. I also think there’s strength in numbers for us. If were just a partnership or a trio, if there were a fight – I think that’s why bands break up a lot. There’s a fight and that’s it, it’s over.”

“But because there’s so many of us, like if two of us are miffed with each other, which does happen from time to time, there’s so many others who can step in and be like, ‘Let me talk to Ashley. I know she’s mad at you Sam [laughs].’ We can be there for each other and support and be in between each other. And I don’t know, we all love each other so much. It’s crazy at this point. I think we want to be together for the rest of our lives. I want a Matt-face t-shirt at his funeral.”

If you've watched The Traitors US season 3 on Peacock, you'd know that Bob the Drag Queen and Boston Rob are two of the fiercest to ever compete on the show. Now, the two stars have joined forces as the hosts of the official podcast of The Traitors as season 4 comes to a close. And as you might imagine, both of them have thoughts and feelings about what makes a successful player on The Traitors. 

In an interview with our video producer, Ashley Victoria Robinson, as part of our Popversations series, Boston Rob and Bob the Drag Queen were asked what piece of advice they would give to future players on the show. Bob said, "So far, in four seasons, someone slipping up and calling themself a Traitor has never, ever caught a Traitor. We have to stop getting people on slip-ups. It happened with Peppermint, it happened with Porsha. Y'all, it has never caught a Traitor! People misspeak all the time." 

Bob elaborated, "But also, you really gotta check your ego at the door. I'm telling you, I don't care who you are, you are not as good at this game as you think you are. A big part of winning this show is just straight-up luck." 

They say you should never mix business with pleasure, but that seems to be Critical Role’s business model. The popular web show features prolific voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons together, but as the show has gotten more popular, more work has been involved. However, the cast has never lost sight of what the show is all about – gaming with friends.

“I feel like after all these years and then running the company together, which has its stressful moments, Thursday night is still a reprieve that we still look forward to every time. Sitting at the table,” Marisha Ray says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023.

“I’m just excited to show up and know that these guys are going to make me laugh and sometimes cry – but usually laugh,” Liam O’Brien adds.

We all love video game adaptations now, but there was a time when they were new and unusual. Many of them were, unfortunately, very bad. However, 1994’s Street Fighter and 1995’s Mortal Kombat movies remain classics, and I am ready to fight anyone who disagrees. Despite both being based on iconic fighting games from the era, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat tackled creating film versions of said video games in entirely different ways – and that is what makes them so uniquely wonderful.

Let’s clear the air a bit. Street Fighter is not a good movie. It is many, many things; hilarious, entertaining, camp, but good? That is a bigger stretch than Jean Claude Van Damn’s signature splits. The acting is uneven, and the plot is simply nonsensical. The issues that plagued production, from Raul Julia’s health issues to disagreements with Capcom over casting decisions to JCVD’s notoriously difficult-to-manage behavior, are catalogued elsewhere, but the result of that chaotic production is a movie that leans into some of the most absurd aspects of the video games.

Street Fighter is a big-budget mess of a movie that somehow is endlessly fun to watch. Raul Julia swings from silly monologues where he is chewing scenery in a wide-eyed frenzy to delivering one of the most devastatingly brutal lines of dialogue any action movie villain has ever given. The fight choreography isn’t particularly noteworthy, but you don’t mind because it is so unashamedly silly that you have fun watching it. It is a tongue-in-cheek love letter to the Street Fighter series that somehow became a box office hit.

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin laid out what he called his “quibbles” with the father of the fantasy genre, J.R.R. Tolkien. “Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy,” says the Fire & Blood author, “That if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple.” 

To be clear, Martin is on the record plenty of times as having great respect for The Hobbit author, but his sentiments do a pretty good job of explaining the difference between Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and his Westeros. In the former, there’s a clear, mythical distinction between good and evil, and in the latter, more historical world, there is not. But as I finished watching Martin’s latest television adaptation, I couldn’t help but feel there was a particularly Tolkieny character at this show’s helm - specifically, Ser Duncan the Tall.

Or as I like to think of him, Westeros’s Samwise Gamgee.

Listen, I may be a man of science today, but I'm not above indulging in a bit of astrology. The first time I was given my astrological birth chart, I felt like I was being personally attacked by how accurate it was. Like, what do you mean my Leo moon signifies that I take karaoke way too seriously? How do you know this about me?! I came out here to have a good time, and I'm feeling attacked all of a sudden. 

But I'm not the area of focus here; rather, it's Absolute Batman. Whew. In order to get a complete picture of someone's astrological birth chart, we need to know the date, location, and ideally time of their birth. We know from Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta's Absolute Batman #1 that Absolute Bruce was born on February 19, 2004 according to this police photo, making him a Gen Z legend. But his location, Jules, his location! We do know from Batman comics that Gotham is located in New Jersey. Being a New Yorker myself, my mental image of Gotham has always been Hoboken, but to my surprise, Gotham is located somewhere in South Jersey - in Phillies territory. For simplicity's sake, I used Newport, New Jersey, as the location of Absolute Batman's birth.  Of course, we don't know what time Zoomer Bruce was born, so I just used 12 AM. 

And before we begin, yes, take all of this with a grain of salt. I understand that part of what makes astrology so enduring is that it is built on broad statements that apply to lots of people. I'm doing all this just to have a bit of a laugh and to celebrate our favorite massive Bat-Guy, okay? So without much further ado, let's take a gander at Absolute Bruce's birth chart:

We’re all a bit surprised that we’re getting a Baldur’s Gate TV show. While the announcement seems to be focused on the fact that it was inspired by the popularity of Baldur’s Gate 3, the title and setup make it feel like it is going to be more of a continuation of Descent into Avernus than the hit video game. And that’s great for me since I still think Descent into Avernus is one of the best D&D adventures I’ve played in.

If you’ve not had the chance to play Descent into Avernus, it is an adventure module for D&D 5th Edition that sees the entire city of Elturel teleported into the first layer of Hell, inhabitants and all. Players journey into Avernus and go on adventures across the plane starting at around Level 5, which is far sooner than most adventurers get involved in planar travel. The adventure takes inspiration from Mad Max: Fury Road as players run around Hell in haphazardly constructed death vehicles and fight off various factions. While it doesn’t always deliver on the mechanical side of things, the actual story of Descent into Avernus is very fun. Travelling across Avernus on a vehicle that is made of devil parts and that could explode at any moment is my ideal evening, in fact. 

Trapped in Hell, they need to try to recover the Sword of Zariel and potentially save an entire city of refugees from being dragged into the Blood War. Some of those words might have been familiar to those who played Baldur’s Gate 3, as it takes place directly after the events of Descent into Avernus, while being exceptionally careful not to say definitively what happened at the end of that adventure. After all, this is D&D and players can make any number of decisions that force the DM to crumple up their notes and throw them out the window. 

I, for one, think we fight dragons a little too much. If you ask me, we really should be befriending them more often, and that's exactly what you get to do in the Flamecraft series from Cardboard Alchemy. Kind of a mix of Pokémon and How to Train Your Dragon (but even cuter), Flamecraft is all about teaching your fiery friends skills to improve the village you call home, and at PAX Unplugged 2025, Popverse got to hear all about their latest chapter.

Flamecraft: Duals is a two-player competitive pattern-matching game and expansion on Flamecraft's debut: Dragons & Dragons. Cradboard Alchemy's Rozie Pocket and Peter Vaughan were kind enough to take us on a playthough of the game (and of course, a showcase of the so-cute-it-hurts artwork), and you can see what they showed us right here:

This year marks the 30th year of the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire getting published, and George R. R. Martin continues to have an admirable grip on the fantasy genre today. Game of Thrones remains a landmark television series that has spawned multiple spin-offs for HBO, including House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. However, the long wait for the upcoming book, The Winds of Winter, has many fans openly wondering if Martin will manage to finish iconic fantasy series.

To those fans, I say this: learn to chill.

George R. R. Martin has given us enough creativity to last a lifetime, even without finishing A Song of Ice and Fire. Between multiple other series, graphic novels, television scripts, and even video games, the prolific author is always extremely busy. While you can complain that fans can complain that they’d like to see The Winds of Winter on shelves sooner rather than later, the simple truth is that George R. R. Martin doesn’t owe you a damn thing at this point. 

I have a serious problem with the Fallout TV show. Not that it is bad; quite the opposite, actually. It is such a good representation of the heart of one of my favorite game series. With the mix of action, dark comedy, and burning satire of the evils of capitalism, every episode has something that reminds me of how much I adore Fallout.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to me, of course. Both times that a new Fallout season has dropped, fans have collectively had an “Oh yeah. Those games are rad,” moment and gone back to them in droves. While the Prime Video series doesn’t always get the gameplay quite right – I’ve never seen a Deathclaw go down to one shot from a sniper rifle, for example – it does manage to capture the spirit of the Fallout world.

A great example is in the final episode of Fallout Season 2. Maximus has chosen to make a stand against the approaching Deathclaws that have taken over the New Vegas Strip, protecting the citizens from a swarming nest of the most dangerous creature in the Wasteland. A group of people has hidden themselves away in a nearby shop and is watching the action unfold. Rather than cower in fear or arm themselves to help Maximus, they take bets on how long until he is horribly killed.

Ever since 2009, Calliope Games has been producing family-friendly, colorful tabletop games that are as fun to play as they are easy to learn. Take, for example, the simple Roll For It!  - the game that presents players with dice patterns printed on cards and rewards them for rolling their own dice to match. At PAX Unplugged 2025, I got the chance to sit down and play a round of Roll For It! myself (the jumbo-sized Going BIG! version, to be precise), and as you can see below, I had a fantastic time.

But that wasn't all that Calliope's art director, Nicki Whers, was willing to share with yours truly. I also got the TL;DR on some of the company's other best sellers - the sci-fi-themed Martian Dice and the simply gorgeous Tsuro. And as I said, these games take about as long to learn as they do to explain in the video below - so if for nothing more than educational purposes, check out our time with Calliope now.

If there's anything I've learned over the years, it's that Resident Evil brings out something in people. I own a sweatshirt that has artwork by Mark Scicluna depicting the iconic village fight in Resident Evil 4, and it's brought a fair bit of insight into the franchise for me. On more than one occasion, when I've worn the sweatshirt to brunch or to pick up takeout, I've gotten into conversations with strangers about how they remember playing the original 1996 game with their dad, or how many times they played through the fourth game. The sweatshirt is far from the only nerd-oriented piece of apparel I own, but I've noticed it brings out an openness in people that other properties don't quite measure up to. Hell, I'm ordinarily a pretty reserved person, but if I saw someone on the streets of LA wearing something Resident Evil-related, I probably wouldn't resist the urge to chat. 

What this all really means is that Resident Evil, in its many forms, strips away our individual façades to reveal something more vulnerable and truthful: an intimate sense of joy amidst fear. And this fear, and the thrill we feel from it, is what connects Resident Evil fans to each other, leading them to strike up a conversation with another dude at the lunch counter. And while fear has played a starring role in dividing humanity over the course of our history, in a Resident Evil game, it unites all of us. Not to turn this into a therapy session, but I've spent my adult life working my way out of the tangled Christmas tree lights of Irish emotional repression. And because my existence is ridiculous, the Resident Evil games have provided a type of emotional boot camp for me, giving me reason not to run away from my fears, but fight and feel them. And, god forbid, scream every once in a while. 

Take this video of a mom playing Resident Evil VII: Biohazard in VR as evidence:

I’ll be honest with you all; when I heard about the new James Bond game from the makers of the Hitman series, I had A Concern. See, I’m a huge fan of the Hitman games and their ability to make murder into a puzzle that I want to solve in the most broken, ridiculous ways. Thankfully, 007 First Light looks to be taking all the goofy action that I love about Hitman and giving us a main character with actual personality, which makes me more excited for it than I am for GTA 6.

The reveal trailer for 007 First Light did the game a disservice, in my opinion. It was heavy on action, with plenty of gunfights and explosions and quips you’d expect from a James Bond game. However, the gameplay didn’t feel like it belonged with Hitman. The second trailer was a bit better – it showed some gameplay and showed some of the infiltration missions that James Bond would typically go on. However, it wasn’t until September when IO Interactive showed off enough of the gameplay that I knew this was a Bond game made for the Hitman sickos like me.

The thing about the Hitman games is that they’re actually not great action titles. The general rule of thumb is that if you get into a shooting match in these games, things have gone wrong and your Agent 47 is probably about to die. That mentality of avoiding combat is not exactly familiar territory for James Bond, who tends to jump from one explosion to the next.

If you overheard me talking about Frank Castle, you might think that I was talking about someone in my own family - perhaps a cousin or brother who was letting me down recently. Because, as shocking as the Punisher is in Marvel Comics, I can't help but feel for the guy and want the best for him. Ultimately, being a fan of the Punisher involves watching a fictional character crash out repeatedly while still clinging to the belief that the guy can turn his life around. The day I lose hope that the Punisher can redeem himself is the day I lose hope that any of us can. 

On paper, I might not seem like a Punisher guy. I don't like guns or loud noises, I get nervous when I'm around butterflies because I'm afraid of accidentally hurting them, I believe in restorative justice over capital punishment, I have a favorite Jane Austen book, and I'm a vegetarian. But I'm deeply invested in the Punisher as a character in both comics and television, amounting to a sense of almost emotional ownership over the character. So what the hell do I see in a guy like Frank Castle?

Well, as it turns out, appearances can be deceiving. Like Frank Castle, my grandfather studied to become a Catholic priest at a seminary before he left and later joined the Marine Corps. When I was a kid, and perhaps even now as an adult, my granddad had a warrior mythology to him. Even as an old man, he was strong and had eyes that pierced as much as they danced with laughter. He embodied the intensity of the Marines even in retirement, and just like Frank Castle, carried a conflicted sense of disillusionment with the American military after his service. With the Punisher, I see a darker version of my granddad's Marine intensity within Frank Castle, which is part of why the character feels almost familial to me. 

There are, obviously, any number of idealized relationships to be found throughout pop culture; just take a look at any romcom or romance fiction and you’ll see stories and characters written specifically to get you to think even for a second, “Oh, I wish that was me.” They’re not solely restricted to explicit romance fiction, however; personally, I’m of the opinion that Superman and Lois Lane are very much couple goals, for example, and will fight anyone who disagrees. (Don’t test me.)

There is, however, one couple in all of pop culture that I have held up for years as the ideal pop culture couple, even if pop culture as a whole has largely forgotten about them in the past few decades, honestly. Nevertheless, take it from me, dear readers: we should all aspire to have our own Nick or Nora Charles in our lives.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Nick and Nora — and I suspect that might be most everyone reading this — here’s a necessary history lesson: The couple are the leads of The Thin Man, a 1934 detective novel by the man behind The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett; that novel was adapted into a movie that same year that proved to be so successful that no less than five sequels were made over the next 13 years. In fact, it was so successful that it also spun out a radio show, The Adventures of the Thin Man, that ran for 10 years that was later adapted again into a 1950s TV show that ran for two seasons. (There have also been additional TV movies and multiple stage adaptations.) All of this nascent franchising isn’t anchored around the mysteries in each story, as fun as they are; instead, the success of The Thin Man (and its many sequels and spin-offs) relies entirely on the relationship between Nick and Nora, and the fact the audience generally wants to spend as much time as possible with both of them.

Today, it's nearly impossible to talk about Daredevil and Thor from Marvel Comics and not also bring up the romances they've had over the years. As the Netflix Daredevil show and the MCU quickly established, Matt Murdock and Thor (whether in his godly form or his more frail, human Donald Blake identity) are popular with the ladies - and for good reason! They are adoring, protective, well-spoken, charming dudes with physiques that fall somewhere on the Dorito Bod matrix. Green flag material. It's even a part of Thor's current life as a human named Sigurd Jarlson in The Mortal Thor by Al Ewing and Pascal Ferry. 

What's more interesting about both of these characters, however, is how Silver Age Marvel Comics established this romantic baseline for Daredevil and Thor while also highlighting the fact that both characters had disabilities. (To address the elephant in the room real quick, yes, Thor was originally a disabled doctor named Donald Blake when he was initially created by Jack Kirby. Donald used a cane to help him walk, and by slamming the cane into the ground, he could transform into the God of Thunder.)

Both Thor and Daredevil were unusual in 1960s comics - and in 1960s pop culture more widely - because they defied stereotypes of disabled people being asexual, unattractive, or incapable of being in romantic relationships with other people, disabled or otherwise. Even though the women around them were very aware of both men's disabilities, they still pined for them, and vice versa. In that sense, Thor and Daredevil weren't shut out of the "yearning via thought bubbles" romantic conventions of Silver Age Marvel Comics, seen in contemporary books like The Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men. For Daredevil in particular, the romantic life ushered in in his early comics set him up to become one of pop culture's most well-rounded disabled characters. I see a lot of myself in Daredevil, in part, because of the heartbreak, grief, and loves he's had over the years.

This may be a bit of a daring opinion, but I think Final Fantasy VII is one of the most important video games ever made.

While the series had been a juggernaut in Japan since its inception in 1987, it was still rather niche in the West by comparison - but this would change with the series’ dramatic shift over to the PlayStation from Nintendo and the addition of a Z-axis. 1997's Final Fantasy VII would introduce gamers outside Japan not only to Final Fantasy as a series and JRPGs as a genre, but also help instill the idea that games can be a medium for profound and thought-provoking narratives. Central to that narrative is the messy and complicated relationship between the aloof ex-SOLDIER Cloud Strife (yes, 'SOLDIER' is meant to be in all-caps) and beloved bartender-turned-eco-terrorist Tifa Lockhart.

Cloud and Tifa: Childhood sweethearts turned soulmates

There are so many dialogue options in megahit game Genshin Impact, it's nigh impossible to choose a single favorite. Still, we can imagine that job is easier if you were one of the folks who actually recorded those lines - say, for example, Kellen Goff & Sarah MIller-Crews. The pair were at MCM Comic Con London May 2023, and during a fan Q&A part of their panel, they did just that.

It was Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach star and voice of Abyss Herald Goff that started the answer off.

"Something that Tommy always said," began Goff, "Like, the chef guy."

Netflix's The Witcher is based on the series of Andrzej Sapkowski's hit books, which began publication in 1993. But according to one person intimately familiar with the series, the characters within can be traced thematically much farther back, and to an admittedly more important source. The way the show's Eamon Farren, AKA Cahir, tells it, The Witcher can be held up as a mirror to the works of William Shakespeare.

The comment came about during MCM Comic Con London May 2023, where Farren was appearing ahead of the then-upcoming Witcher season 3. At one point during the Q&A portion of his panel, Farren was asked who the most interesting character he'd ever played was, and his answer had everything to do with the Bard.

"The most interesting character I've played?" posited the actor, "I've played a lot of great characters. Cahir is definitely one of the most complex and challenging. But also, in drama school I played Hamlet. That's one of the most interesting."

One of the best parts about playing tabletop games is the way your characters surprise you. It’s fun to get to know your character and discover new things about them on your campaign. Liam O’Brien played as a halfling fighter named Orym during Critical Role Campaign 3, and he quickly discovered just how much fun you could have with a short fighter.

“I love my short king, he fits everywhere,” Liam O’Brien says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023. “I’ve been waiting to play this little guy for so long, and I love sort of subverting the stereotypical hero ideas. I liked making a rogue who wore his heart on his sleeve. I like making a wizard who’s a coward instead of a power fantasy. And I loved making a fighter who runs under everyone’s legs constantly and stabs you with a letter opener.”

“He’s got nothing. He doesn’t have magic. Everyone around him has either got a melting face, or purple veins in their arms, or is a thousand-year-old robot, and I just do a lot of squats and crunches.”

Something that Dragon Ball has never done particularly well is romance. Sure, there are some iconic couples in there, but it is never the central focus of the show. Which is why I always find it so remarkable that Akira Toriyama, the man who famously had Goku marry Chi-Chi as a way to spite himself, gave us one of the most wholesome and enduring romantic relationships in anime in the form of Krillin and Android 18.

Krillin probably isn’t most people’s first choice for romantic partner, but that is kind of what makes this pairing so perfect. For all of Dragon Ball, Krillin is after two things: getting stronger and getting a girlfriend. He eventually becomes the most powerful human on Earth… which still puts him outside the Top 5 strongest fighters on the planet. The man is the iconic anime second fiddle, so you’d think the least Toriyama could do is throw the boy a bone and let him get a girlfriend, but we end up well into the Cell Saga before that happens. 

No, I’m not counting him getting a girlfriend in the Garlic Jr. Saga because that was filler and therefore didn’t happen.

Will Daryl Dixon ever cut his gorgeous locks? The Walking Dead breakout character is known for his long scruffy hair, but over the years the showrunners have flirted with the idea of giving the character a new look.

 “We talked about the hair at the beginning,” The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon showrunner David Zabel says during a Walking Dead spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023. “I wasn’t sure if I had made a fatal mistake because I did say, ‘I was thinking Norm, when they bring you in to clean up at the abbey, maybe they cut your hair and we go back to [The Walking Dead season two] look.”

“We did talk about it,” Daryl Dixon actor Norman Reedus says. “There was a show called Felicity. I don’t know if you remember the show, and this sort of came into the discussions. Supposedly she cut her curly hair off and then the show went downhill. The world freaked out and Keri Russell had to apologize to the world. It just kind of put the fear in me.”

Action RPG Genshin Impact is simply loaded with characters, and with such a huge community of fans behind it, there are bound to be some strong opinions over which one is the best. One person whose opinion might matter just a little bit more than the average player, though, is voice actor Kellen Goff, who provides the guttural voice of antagonist Abyss Herald. Even if you're not familiar with the game, though, you might recognize what Goff is doing with the character, especially if you grew up on 80's cartoon. 

As it turns out, one of Genshin Impact's darkest characters was based on one of the Transformers baddies.

Goff revealed this at MCM Comic Con London May 2023, where he was appearing for a special Genshin Impact panel alongside fellow voice actor Sarah Miller-Crews. At one point during the discussion, a fan asked the actors on stage who their favorite characters to play were, and Goff revealed his inspiration. 

Outlander is many things. The 1991 novel is a historical fiction story, a time travel story, and a fantasy story. But is it a romance novel? Outlander author Diana Gabaldon doesn’t think so, even if her publishers disagree.

“Now that we have Amazon, you can actually be multiple genres and that’s great,” Diana Gabaldon says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “Back in the day the publisher who had bought my book were very enthused but then they started looking at it with an eye to selling it and they say, ‘What are we going to do with this book? We can’t even describe it.’ Don’t ask me, and they didn’t. And consequentially they said, ‘Of all the genres this could be, romance is by far the biggest. We’re going to call it romance.’”

“I said, ‘I like romance. I read romance. And therefore, I know that this is not it. Believe me. If you start selling this to real romance readers, you’re going to have pushback. They may buy it, on the other hand, and if they like the book then so much the better.’ I was talking to my agent, and I said I understand why they want to do that, but I have severe reservations and the main one is that if you do that you will cut off the entire male half of my readership and I said I didn’t write these books [just for women]. They’re women’s fiction. There are things in these books that only men would see and appreciate and I don’t want that to be lost.”

Watch a single episode of Netflix's The Witcher and you know how much work goes into it. And I'm not just talking about stunt stuff, either - there are silos of lore behind so many of the production team's choices, not to mention behind the motivations of each actor. And according to Eamon Farren, who plays the morally complex Cahir, prepping from all that history had to be done quickly.

That's what the actor said at MCM Comic Con London May 2023, where he was appearing to promote the then-upcoming Witcher season three. Speaking of his journey from complete Witcher newbie to slapdah expert, Farren said his relationship with the fantasy saga began with a vague audition title.

"I think it was like, an unnamed Netflix fantasy project," Farren told the room of assembled fans. "Or something. So I didn't find out what it was until deep into the auditions."

Brandon Sanderson spends a lot of time around books. As of this writing, Sanderson has written over 71 books, many of them as part of the Cosmere literary universe. However, Sanderson wasn’t always a lover of books.

“I didn’t like books when I was a kid,” Brandon Sanderson says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “I as a kid just could not get into reading. Lots of teachers tried. They gave me My Side of the Mountain. They gave me Old Yeller. I was in Nebraska. You give kids books about wilderness apparently when you’re in Nebraska. Watch out, there’s lots of dead dogs. I didn’t really like books. I remember one that I loved, which was Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood, but I read that when I was like 10 or 11. But I didn’t get into the fantasy genre. I didn’t know it was a genre.”

Sanderson went on to credit his eighth grade teacher Ms. Reader for turning him on to fantasy. According to Sanderson, it all started when she caught him cheating on his book reports. “I really credit my teacher Ms. Reader, true story, in eighth grade handing me a book. She was a really good teacher and she knew I was faking my way through book reports because I’m a smart enough kid to know they put most of the book on the back. I can usually either guess or read a few chapters at the end, then I could do a book report right?”

Trevor is the youngest ghost on the CBS comedy show, Ghosts, and while he may have been a stockbroker in life, that doesn't mean that he's as cold-blooded as other Wall Street guys like Patrick Bateman. In fact, it's quite the opposite. For Asher Grodman, who plays Trevor on Ghosts, the character has a "loyal" streak to him that makes him so endearing to play. 

Speaking with our video producer, Ashley Victoria Robinson, as part of the Popversations interview series, Asher Grodman unpacked what's really going on inside Trevor's head. "If the whole thing is that this guy just wants the party to keep going, then underneath all that is a guy who just wants people to be together. And there’s kind of a puppy, playful energy in that. And what sucks for him is that the party is with deadbeats for eternity," Grodman said.

Let's also remember: Trevor wears a tailored suit jacket, dress shirt, fancy tie, and no pants. The dude is in his argyle socks in commando form for all of eternity, so he can't exactly take himself too seriously. I do respect his spirit (sorry), though, because it really is difficult to party with a pair of creased suit trousers on and a tucked-in shirt. 

You can use a lot of words to describe Star Wars, with many of them being positive. However, you cannot say that it has handled its various romances well. In fact, each Star Wars trilogy handles romance in such a uniquely baffling way that I start to wonder if it was always meant to be bad romantasy. The idea of Star Wars as terrible romantasy is one that has been bouncing around in my mind for a while and I think I've figured out why I feel this way. 

Let’s start back in the original Star Wars trilogy, which set up both the fact that this was a fantasy story dressed up as sci-fi and the fact that George Lucas didn’t think about the repercussions of making major changes to his lore halfway through. The bulk of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back sets up a love triangle involving Leia, Han, and Luke, despite the fact that the three of them are barely at the same place at the same time throughout the movie. A New Hope introduced the idea of Luke being into Leia, which is reinforced in an early Empire scene where Leia gives Luke a very unchaste kiss on the lips. 

The thing about love triangles is that it is difficult to set them up where all three characters remain friends at the end. Barring some sort of throuple situation developing, someone is walking away from that plotline with a broken heart. Now, this could have been avoided if Luke had been seen to dedicate himself to his Jedi training and decide he didn’t have time for romantic entanglements, paving the way for Leia and Han’s relationship to blossom, but that’s the way George Lucas’ mind works. No, he went the Estranged Incest route to make sure everyone gets to stand together smiling as the Death Star explodes. Instead of giving Luke a little more character development, he made Skywalker family dinners infinitely more awkward by making sure both Leia's brother and husband know what her tongue tastes like.

If you’re a reader, then you know that a good book can be just as exciting and explosive as the latest Hollywood blockbuster. They’re also cheaper to make. If Michael Bay wants to blow up an entire city street, he either needs a lot of XFX artists, or millions of dollars in pyrotechnics. If you’re a writer, you can do the same thing, and you just need your keyboard.

Leigh Bardugo, the author behind the Grishaverse literary universe, sometimes finds herself getting caught up in spectacles like this when she’s writing her YA books. “I think I always set out with a popcorn movie in my head, and then somewhere we get to a really tragic indie drama. And I meet somewhere in the middle,” Leigh Bardugo says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022.

“[Ninth House] was a beast because I had never written in our world before. It required a huge amount of research, and it ended up being a very different book than I initially thought it was going to be. And this happens with all of my books.”

Absolutely no shade to 'My Heart Will Go On' or 'I Will Always Love You,' but I prefer my movie soundtrack-specific love songs to be a bit more on the gothic side. And if you're familiar with one of the greatest horror adaptations of all time (scientifically proven), you probably won't be shocked to learn that my personal favorite is 'Love Song for a Vampire,' the single recorded and composed by Annie Lennox as part of the soundtrack for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

But it's not just the synths and sadness of this number that keeps me coming back. The song came about through some pretty unlikely circumstances, and helped usher in a new era of Draculism that we're still dealing with today. Considering it's love week here at Popverse, I figured there was better time to talk about it.

The beginning of 'Love Song for a Vampire' isn't in the pages of Bram Stoker's seminal horror work at all, though it does come out of one of the most important vampire works in pop culture history. According to an Off the Records recounting of the song from 1993, Annie Lennox agreed to record the song not because of Van Helsing's arch-nemesis, but because of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. However, it wasn't just a shared interest in creatures of the night that got the singer into the writer's work.

Are you covered in fake blood and trying to clean up?

Maybe you’re working on a student film, or you’re getting a headstart on the next Halloween party. Perhaps you’re playing a prank on a friend. We’re not here to judge you, we just want to help you clean up.

Jamie Lee Curtis is no stranger to fake blood. The actress has starred in Halloween, Terror Train, The Fog, Prom Night, and numerous other horror films. In other words, she’s been around a lot of fake blood and has some tips for how to clean it off.

A couple that fights tyrants together stays together. 

The DC Universe has no shortage of couples who fit this description (Big Barda and Mister Miracle! Green Arrow and Black Canary! Jon Kent and Jay Nakamura!). Maybe it's because I'm a '90s baby forged in the fires of late 20th century edginess, but my favorite of these DC Comics couples is The Authority's Midnighter and Apollo. Okay, I might be a bit biased because Midnighter happens to also be one of my favorite DC characters, period (I mean, he has a fight computer in his brain that lets him calculate every possible outcome of a fight before it happens), but let's talk about how great they are, shall we? 

Midnighter and Apollo have always been a "real ones know" pair of characters in that they were initially created for DC's separate Wildstorm universe back in 1998 (they debuted in Stormwatch #4), but later made the jump into the mainline DC Universe proper. (That happened in 2011's Stormwatch #1, as part of the New 52 reboot of the entire DCU.) However, because they were conceived as darker versions of Batman and Superman, they've sadly only had sporadic chances to shine in DC's biggest titles. This is all to say that my love for this couple was sustained in part from re-reading Steve Orlando and ACO's Midnighter series ad infinitum, as so many other queer nerds have before me. 

Matthew Mercer thinks it’s time for us to stop calling things cringe. The voice actor, who serves as the dungeon master for the web series Critical Role, believes the word is overused and discourages people from being their authentic selves.

“We live in an odd time of cringe culture where anything that is honest can be called cringe, and I don’t agree with that,” Matthew Mercer says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023. “I hear where people are coming from, but most things that I see being called cringe are just people being their authentic self. And other people can’t deal with that. And that’s fine if they can’t connect with it, but everything you put out there that someone might call cringe, somebody else might resonate with.”

“Unfortunately, sometimes you’ll hear the frustrating responses more than you will the people that are quietly enjoying it. So, stepping back and trying not to focus on those harsh comments and on really believing that people out there are quietly enjoying the art that you’re putting out there.” 

In the opening moments of massively popular open-world action RPG Genshin Impact, the player has to make an awful decision. The twin characters we meet at the top of the game, Aether and Lumine, have been separated by a vindictive god, and you, the player, watch as your other in-game half is taken away. It's an impactful moment for anybody starting out in the game, but for the voice of Lumine herself, it was a downright nightmare.

In case you don't know, that voice is Sarah Miller-Crews, who appeared at MCM Comic Con London May 2023 to discuss her time working on the megahit game. That moment of turmoil came up during the fan Q&A portion of her panel (which was also attended by fellow Genshin Impact VA Kellen Goff), when a fan asked the Pokémon Masters voice actor who her favorite character to voice was.

"First of all," began Miller-Crews, "Every role that I voice, I feel like there's a part of me in it. They're all special to me in different ways. I feel a little bit [like] they're your babies; they're your family. So, it's it's hard to choose a child. They're so they're usually so different."

When we think of the X-Men, we tend to think of romance and drama. Some of the most iconic couples in Marvel Comics are found within mutantdom, and X-Men fans have debated the merits of their favorite ships for decades now. And while we can celebrate couples like Rogue and Gambit, Cyclops and Jean Grey, Rachel Summers and Betsy Braddock, Greycrow and Psylocke, Storm and Forge, Rictor and Shatterstar, Mystique and Destiny, and more, there are also some other pairings that are excellent cautionary tales. 

Life is hard enough as it is, and I don't think anyone needs more drama in their lives in 2026, whether that's from a partner turned evil or good old-fashioned heartbreak. And while it is the season of love and very nearly Valentines Day, I am happily single. I'm a busy dude, and I can't be getting caught up in a plot to accelerate the next stage of mutant evolution! Without further ado, here are the X-Men couples that make me glad that I am flying solo. 

Rick Remender, Jerome Opeña, Greg Tocchini, and others' run on Uncanny X-Force is X-Men comics at their best. It's got everything you look for in an X-Men comic: a legendary crash out, Wolverine hunting down Nazis, Deadpool being funny, a mutant whose powers are so ambiguous that you ask yourself "Wait, what is his deal again?" at least once per issue, and a doomed romance. That doomed romance is between Angel and Betsy Braddock, who at the time was in Psylocke's body. 

 The Marvel Cinematic Universe is so influential that it has even changed the way books are published. Publishers and readers are embracing shared universes, such as Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse and Jeremy Robinson’s Nemesis Saga. While book series are nothing new, a shared literary universe is different because it can focus on different characters and different time periods in a shared continuity, whereas a series will tell a linear story with the same characters.

Brandson Sanderson, who created the Cosmere literary universe, recalls how the shift began after the MCU took off. “I thought I want to do all these magic systems, all these different planets, and I want to connect them all,” Brandon Sanderson says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “People were really scared of continuity back then. When I was doing this, this was a few years before the MCU came out. Publishers were scared. They wanted one series but they didn’t want this big interconnected thing because the conventional wisdom was this would scare off readers.”

After publishing Elantris in 2005, Sanderson was encouraged to write a sequel, but he was more interested in expanding the universe with a new series set in the same continuity. “[Tor Books] came to me and said, ‘Alright, write a sequel to Elantris.’ I said, ‘No. I am not going to write a sequel to Elantris. I’m going to write something new.’ And they’re like, ‘You will take a sales hit if you do that. Write a sequel to Elantris.’ And I said, ‘No. I’ll take the sales hit. It’s going to be worth it.’ And I launched into a new series which was Mistborn.”

For better or for worse, Netflix's The Witcher has been defined lately by its controversial recasting of the titular character. Once played by Henry Cavill, Geralt of Rivia has been played in season 4 and will be played in the upcoming (and final) season 5 by Liam Hemsworth. But remember, folks, there was a time when Geralt's role belonged to no one at all, and actors from across the world were vying for the fantasy lead of Andrzej Sapkowski's hit books. In fact, one of those actors ended up finding different work on the series anyway.

That actor would be Eamon Farren, who plays The Witcher's complex antihero Cahir. At MCM Comic Con London May 2023, though, the future Nilfgaardian Black Knight revealed that his first foray into the live-action Witcher universe was in an audition for the show's monster-slashing lead.

"I didn't know what I was auditioning for when I auditioned," the Twin Peaks: The Return actor began, "I auditioned for Geralt's role to start off with, and I didn't get that, which was shocking to me. Then I made my way down to this other unnamed character that was like a mercenary, fighter-killer guy. I sent it off and didn't expect anything. Then, yeah, I got the job, and we ended up in Budapest."

Leigh Bardugo is one of the most consequential YA fantasy authors of this generation. Bardugo is the creator of the Grishaverse literary universe, and her books have sold millions of copies. When Bardugo isn’t writing YA fantasy books, like Six of Crows or Shadow and Bone, she enjoys kicking back and watching television comedies.

“I don’t know what I’ve been watching. We watch a lot of Bob’s Burgers,” Six of Crows author Leigh Bardugo says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “It’s my comfort show. It’s very much my comfort show.”

Bardugo even included a fun Parks and Recreation Easter egg in the Grishaverse. “This is true, whenever I’m writing something, like the reasons there are waffles in Ketterdam is because I was watching Parks and Rec while I was writings Six of Crows, because I’d be like, sadness, sadness, darkness, death, and then I would be like, ‘Oh, that’s so nice.’ I need a balance. I can’t be watching something super dark.”

He was an amnesiac fishman who swore to protect humanity; she was heir to a fairyland under its thumb. In the words of Avril Lavigne, can I make it any more obvious?

I'm kidding; there's absolutely nothing obvious about the love story at the heart of Hellboy II: the Golden Army - that is, the one between Abe Sapien, agent of the US government's BPRD, and Princess Nuala, royal leader of a mythical race facing extinction. You can clock the classic inspirations that went into it - there's some Romeo & Juliet here, some Beauty & the Beast there - but what the relationship gives us is something you don't typically see in movies, particularly in monster movies, in both good and bad ways.

And since it's love week here at Popverse, I thought we'd take a moment to talk about it.

In 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis faced a serial killer named Michael Myersin the movie Halloween. 20 years later, they had a rematch, but Meyers wasn’t the only person Curtis had to face. When it came time to film Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Curtis had some conditions, and she wasn’t going to budge on them.

“H20 was conceived really by me. I’m not titled as a producer on it,” Jamie Lee Curtis says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “It was me calling John [Carpenter] and Debra [Hill] and saying, ‘Hey, in two years the movie is going to be 20 years old. Nobody has ever made a movie 20 years later using the actor, writer, director, and producer. Let’s do it.’ And that began.”

“Kevin Williamson wrote the script. So, John ultimately didn’t write it, Debra ultimately didn’t produce it. I was in it, and it was conceived as what happens when you run from fear. The conceit of the movie is that Laurie Strode has run from Haddonfield. She has escaped, she has changed her name, she’s living in an assumed identity somewhere else, and she feels like she’s safe. And of course, the whole conceit of the movie was if you’re running from fear all the time, you’re dead inside.”

Love is in the air, friends, and we here at Popverse want to celebrate it. Because love is beautiful; it is why almost anyone does what they do. That is what XOXO, Popverse is all about, but love comes in all different forms. Sometimes, as in Dispatch, it is a kind and beautiful stranger giving you a second chance, and sometimes, also in Dispatch, it is a giant, buff demon woman that feels like the best kind of bad decision.

Using our deep insight into the human condition that we gained by being entrenched in the Waifu Wars of anime message boards, our team of experts (ie, me) has analyzed the cast of Dispatch to discover exactly what your favorite ship in the game says about you. And, just like our steamy fanfiction on the subject, we’re not restricting ourselves to just official romance options here.

Nothing wrong with this. Blonde Blazer is the kind of woman you can take home to mom, which is admirable. She is exactly who she presents herself as (even if the fandom doesn’t want to believe it) and gives our Mecha Man a chance to rebuild his life and his giant robot suit. You sometimes wear a new cardigan to spice things up and probably host dinner parties where you talk about "world issues". You’re not looking for drama in your love life.

Dear Future Valentine,

Love is, as the song goes, all around. Especially at this time of year, when Valentines Day is on the minds of store owners and greetings card makers alike; we can only hope that you’ve already started to plan out how you’ll be observing this year’s scheduled celebration of all things romantic and loving. If not, we’re hoping that the next week is going to help with all of that.

Simply put, XOXO, Popverse is what happens when the minds that make up the collective Popverse unit turn their attentions to all things passionate, affectionate, and tender — or, at least, pop culture’s take on all of the above. We’re hijacking St. Valentine’s gig by spending the next five days to consider how pop culture treats romance in all its forms, from comic books to television, movies to gaming and whatever else finds its way into our brains for the next few days. (In our defense, St. Valentine has been dead for 18 centuries; we don’t think he’d mind that much.)

All eight episodes of Wonder Man are now streaming on Disney+, and I hope that you've already watched all of them before coming to read this article. But you have been warned: we will be discussing Wonder Man spoilers while we dissect 5 ways that the MCU's version of the character and his comic book version differ from each other. 

It's time to put on your best red jacket and best red glasses and dive into the world of Hollywood and Simon Williams in Marvel Comics and beyond. 

In Marvel Comics, Simon Williams grew up in New Jersey and is the son of a weapons manufacturer named Sanford Williams. Comic book Sanford Williams is not a nice guy; he abused both Simon and his brother Eric when they didn't get perfect grades in school. Eric ends up pursuing a life of crime. 

Warning: major spoilers for Wonder Man on Disney+ are ahead!

So the MCU's new show, Wonder Man, has dropped all eight of its episodes on Disney+ now. And if you're reading this, chances are you've already binged the whole series - at least, I hope you've finished watching the show. Now, let's take a look at how Marvel Studios ended things with Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery. 

As you might remember, after Simon Williams found out on the set of Wonder Man that his new best friend and co-star, Trevor Slattery, was actually working with the Department of Damage Control and collecting information on him, the actor walked into a soundstage and let his superpowers loose. Simon nearly leveled the soundstage in his grief. But, in order to protect Simon's nascent Hollywood career, Trevor decided to take the fall for his best friend, donning the robes, sunglasses, and accent of The Mandarin once more in a video message where he took responsibility for the explosion on the Wonder Man set. Trevor got arrested by the Department of Damage Control, leaving Simon shocked by the turn of events. As a result of Trevor's actions, Simon's secret - that he has superpowers - goes undiscovered by both the authorities and the cast and crew of Wonder Man. 

It’s okay to admit that your favorite ship isn’t perfect. Relationships could be messy, whether they’re a real-life romance, or a fictional one birthed during a tabletop gaming session. Our favorite fictional couples have their flaws, even if they’re cute together.

Imogen Tamult (voiced by Laura Bailey) and Laudna (voiced by Marisha Ray) were a power couple during Critical Role Campaign 3 with the ship name Imodna. Yes, they were adorable, but the voice actors think they were so devoted to one another that they completely neglected self-care. This brought up an interesting question – is it toxic to devote yourself so completely to a partner?

Ray made it clear that Laudna was only concerned about Imogen, with no thought for herself. “Concerned for you, 100%,” Marisha Ray says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023. “Same,” Laura Bailey says.

When society crumbles, everything we know goes with it. A zombie apocalypse would mean the end of mass media, mass transit, and most of the basic comforts in our modern society.

Well, maybe not every basic comfort.

If you watch The Walking Dead, you’ll see the survivors struggle in their quest to rebuild society. However, some of those survivors are a little too groomed, and their clothes are a bit too nice. This criticism isn’t coming from a random viewer on Reddit, it’s coming from one of the series biggest stars.

Terry Brooks has plenty to be proud of. The American author has written over 23 bestsellers and has sold 25 million copies. He’s the author of The Sword of Shannara, A Knight of the World, Running with the Demon, and dozens of other fantasy books that have become fan favorites.

Needless to say, his legacy is secure. However, when Brooks was starting out, his first editor Lester del Rey warned him that not all his readers would see his talent. Brooks recounts his early conversations with the editor, and how it shaped him as an author.

“I didn’t get a call. I didn’t deserve a call,” Terry Brooks says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “I got a letter saying in so many words, we think this potentially a powerful book for work, but it needs work first. Which didn’t surprise me as I said, I never wrote anything. So, I thought, ‘Hmmm, this sounds promising.’”

The world doesn’t love millionaires the way they used to, but Scrooge McDuck appears to be the exception to the rule. Is it because he’s fictional? Could the fact that he’s a duck have anything to do with it? Diana Gabaldon has her own ideas.

Gabaldon is a bestselling author who is known for writing the Outlander book series. She’s also written scripts for Disney comic books, which gave her a unique perspective on Scrooge McDuck. So, what is it that makes Scrooge different from other millionaires?

“The short answer is Carl Barks,” Diana Gabaldon says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “[Banks] was the creator of Scrooge McDuck and wrote him exclusively for 20 or 30 years. After that it sort of diffused among several other writers of whom I had the honor of being one. But why it works so well, well partly it was Carl Barks’ grasp of Scrooge McDuck’s character.”

In 2012 Leigh Bardugo released her debut novel Shadow and Bone, and readers couldn’t get enough. The YA fantasy adventure novel spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and would eventually go on to be adapted as a Netflix series. It also kicked off the Grishaverse, Bardugo’s shared continuity of YA novels.

Bardugo is glad she published Shadow and Bone in 2012, because she feels the market would never support a book like that today. “I think with every book we try to be sort of worthy of the opportunity we’ve been given,” Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “I think if I were trying to sell Shadow and Bone now it’s a very different market, and it’s much more crowded, and I think a much more competitive market. I like to think that I’m improving with every book but that’s why we keep pushing ourselves.”

“Shadow and Bone is a chosen one story. It’s very straight up a chosen one story. And Six of Crows is very much not. It was a direct reaction to asking what happens to the people who don’t have the grand destinies, who don’t have royal blood, who are viewed as expendable in the world.”

In 2021 the world lost Betty White. The beloved actress passed away in her sleep at age 99. Shortly after her passing, White’s friend and colleague Jamie Lee Curtis came up with a heartwarming way to honor the actress.

“I was asked to do the Betty White tribute,” Jamie Lee Curtis says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “Betty White passed away, I had made a movie called You Again with her, very sweet movie, and I was asked to [do the tribute]. She was an animal rights activist, and I said to them, ‘You know what, I’m only going to do it if I can bring a little rescue dog out with me because she was an animal rights activist, and in her honor I would like to go out on the Oscars and say hey everybody, Betty White was this cool lady and she loved animals more than you, and basically somebody in the world, I would like you to adopt.’”

“The puppy’s name was Mac and Cheese. In honor of Betty White go rescue an animal today. If you love her, show her by rescuing an animal like little Mac and Cheese. When I was backstage, I ran into John Travoltsa, who I love. And his family lost Kelly Preston two years ago, and I communicated with him then. I ran into him backstage and I had the little puppy, and I was like, ‘I’m going out and doing this thing with the dog.’”

At one point or another, most of us have turned to our parents for advice. Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis, who is known for her role as Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise, is no different. However, her parental words of wisdom come from Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, two stars in their own right.

Decades before Jamie Lee Curtis fought Michael Myers in Halloween, her mother Janet Leigh was the infamous shower victim in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Tony Curtis was one of Hollywood’s first “pretty boys.” Think of him like Brad Pitt before Brad Pitt was born.

Although her parents had immense star power, Curtis rarely spoke with them about her career. “It’s not like we talk shop,” Jamie Lee Curtis says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “Who talks to their parents about their work, really. I remember my mom. Early on I think she understood that I was insecure.”

Do you ever get the feeling that a job was made for you? For the cast of Critical Role, this is a feeling they get often. The cast is full of seasoned voice actors, and they’re so prolific in the industry that their names are sometimes listed as references in audition breakdowns.

“It’s funny because occasionally when we get acting breakdowns or casting breakdowns from our agents, and occasionally it’s like, ‘We’re really looking for like a Laura Bailey soundalike.’ And I’m like, ‘Do you want me to text her,’” Marisha Ray says during a Critical Role spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2023.

Evidently, producers seem to put out calls like this often, because Laura Bailey once had one too. “I’ve gotten an audition that said Laura Bailey soundalike,” Laura Bailey says.

Over the last few years, the MCU has been in an era of self-awareness. From the sitcom style of WandaVision, to the fourth wall breaking of Deadpool and Wolverine, Marvel Studios is at a point where to they can’t NOT acknowledge their place in shaping the pop culture landscape for nearly 2 decades now. But amidst this cultural hegemony, what more is there to explore that hasn’t already been seen before? With a narrative fabric as tightly woven as the MCU’s is, how can Marvel Studios tell new stories about new characters without it feeling like homework, or merely the next step towards the next tentpole? The MCU is hardly the only franchise facing this dilemma right now (see: Star Wars), but it’s pulled off its finest trick yet with its Wonder Man show on Disney+. 

What’s remarkable about Wonder Man is that it doesn’t feel like an MCU show at all. It's not about finding items that create interdimensional portals or preventing the collapse of reality - it's about finding meaning and dignity as a marginalized artist under capitalism. This parallels how Tony Gilroy's Andor show wasn't about the typical Star Wars situations that we're used to. The conflict in Andor didn't revolve around the Force and whose father is whom, but rather the human cost of resisting fascism. Wonder Man, like Andor, found a way to tell a timely and grounded story, led by the humanity of its characters, within the architecture of a billion-dollar franchise. These are the types of shows you tell your parents to watch, even if they're not nerdy. 

Wonder Man stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as struggling actor Simon Williams, the son of two Haitian immigrants in Los Angeles. While this Hollywood is just like our own in many ways, the industry has a strict "no superpowered actors allowed" rule after a mysterious accident years before. Simon forms a friendship with notorious actor Trevor Slattery, played by the incomparable Ben Kingsley, after a chance meeting at a screening of Midnight Cowboy. Trevor is better known as the actor hired by the villain Aldrich Killian to play a terrorist called The Mandarin in a series of live broadcasts during the events of Iron Man 3 years earlier. After a Hollywood director named Von Kovak announces that he is remaking a Wonder Man film, both Simon and Trevor do everything they can to land a part in the film, even hiding the fact that Simon has superpowers. 

Marvel fans have a lot to look forward to in 2026. We’ve got a new Spider-Man movie coming this summer and Avengers: Doomsday ready to set the MCU up for a little multiversal chaos, plus the ongoing success of Marvel Rivals and its new seasons and characters. But 2026 also has Marvel potentially releasing multiple highly anticipated AAA games, which could make it the best year for Marvel games as well – if the games actually come out when they’re meant to.

There is a trio of Marvel video games that I’m particularly excited about with release dates in 2026, which should be cause for excitement. However, I’m having serious doubts about at least two of those games. As much as I want to have faith that the studios will pull off a gangbuster year for Marvel games, there are some cracks showing in this release schedule.

Let’s start with the game I’m most confident we’ll get to see this year. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls feels like the modern answer to the lack of new Marvel vs Capcom games in recent years. Arc System Works is the developer behind it, and they’ve done enough solid work on the BlazBlue and Guilty Gear series over the years – not to mention the stellar Dragon Ball FighterZ – that I am sure they’ll deliver something spectacular. They know their craft and if they say Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is coming out in 2026, I believe them. I just can’t wait to show off my abysmal fighting game skills when it does come out.

What is the message of Halloween? Maybe it’s that we need to watch out for masked strangers or stay away from deserted houses. Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise, has her own take on it. “We have to have hope. If we don’t have hope, we’re so fucked,” Jamie Lee Curtis says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022.

Curtis goes on to say that this message is key in the 2022 film Halloween Ends, which shows us how hope helps Laurie survive. “There’s a moment in [Halloween Ends], there’s a time jump of four years. Now four years is high school. Who here went to high school? Was it as long for you as it was for me? Forever!”

“Laurie Strode has finally been given the help she always needed. She never got anything before and now Laurie Strode has been given grief therapy after the opera death of Karen at the end of [Halloween Kills]. Laurie Strode has been able to not only heal but learn to live alongside her grief. It doesn’t consume her; it allows her to exist. And maybe for a second you get this idea that maybe Laurie Strode is going to be okay.”

This article is brought to you by Tycoon Games, coinciding with the upcoming release of Everdell Emerland.

Cozy gaming isn't just limited to your screens - case in point, the best-selling Everdell board games from Tycoon. A combination of resource management, city building, and absolutely adorable little anthropomorphic characters, Everdell has set games in autumnal villages, frosty outposts, and now, a tropical rainforest climate. That last game would be the upcoming Everdell Emerland, and at PAX Unplugged, I got a sneak peek at the brand new project.

The third entry into the "Edge of the Map" game series, Emerdale, first appeared on the scene via a wildly successful Kickstarter that ran until December of 2025. But at PAX, I got to hear about the board game from none other than Dan Yarrington, the founder and CEO of Tycoon Games. And not only was Dan kind enough to share some background info, but was even gracious enough for a quick playthrough with your humble (and mostly clueless) staff writer. You can watch the video below.

A new television adaptation of a beloved fantasy book is here, and as is custom, the internet is buzzing with one question: What changed?

Well, we have to admit - not much. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 was extremely faithful to The Hedge Knight, the first novella in George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones prequel series, The Tales of Dunk and Egg. But that doesn't mean there are no changes between The Hedge Knight and its onscreen translation, which is measuring up to be the most unique Game of Thrones spinoff yet, in terms of tone.

So if you'll give us just a second, Popverse will provide you with the biggest differences between A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 and The Hedge Knight below.

It gives me no shortage of pleasure to say: horror movie fans have been eating well lately. From Sinners to Weapons to what I'm hearing about 28 Years Later: the Bone Temple, it's an excellent time to be a fan of being scared with your friends (from movies, anyhow), and if I might even go a step further, it's a great time to be a fan of horror prequels.

As we've talked about on the website before, it's become a trend in recent fright films to wind the clocks back a little bit, giving viewers a little window into the origin of that monster you're going to be checking your bed for or that curse that certainly can't be real (right?). And from where I'm standing, that horror trend is reaching from beyond the big screen and out toward its smaller, but no less important, sibling. 

Yes, if you ask me, the future of horror TV is littered with prequel stories. And if you give me just a moment of your time, I'll tell you why.

With the number of games coming out every year, you’d think game development was a simple thing. You would, of course, be very wrong. No matter how carefully a studio plans or how hard executives insist their devs crunch, delays happen. We’ve already seen it happen to GTA 6, which was scheduled for a 2025 release before being pushed to May 2026 and then delayed again to November 2026. However, it isn’t the only big release that is set to come out in 2026 that I think could be subject to delays.

Let’s start with the obvious one. The big news, once again, is that Rockstar has pushed the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, and I’m honestly a bit unsure that they’ll even be able to hit the November 2026 release date for GTA 6. Not that they couldn’t release it on this date and sell an absurd number of copies at launch regardless of the state of the game, but this is a huge release for the developer.

GTA 5 is one of the most profitable games of all time and continues to bring in money for them thanks to Grand Theft Auto Online. They are in a good place financially, and the reputational risk of releasing the new GTA game in a less-than-perfect state is too high. Don’t be surprised if Rockstar delays GTA 6 to 2027 just to play it safe.

As somebody that got into Game of Thrones kind of late, I thought that most of the saga amounted to these dark moments of violence and backstabbery. So when I heard that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was something with a lot of heart, I expected essentially a more comedic Game of Thrones -  something that still had a lot of action but was funnier or more light-hearted. I was so pleasantly surprised, then, when the key moment of the first episode of the series didn't involve any kind of action at all.

Well, not the swords and shields kind, anyway.

Before we continue - you've probably gathered by now that I'm going to be spoiling a central moment in A Knight of the Seven Kingdom's pilot episode. Don't say I didn't warn you, is all I'm trying to convey.

Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri's alternate take on the Marvel Universe in The Ultimates has been met with critical acclaim, but the writer is still unsure if whether or not his contributions to Marvel's Ultimate line are truly "worthy." For Camp, he admits that it's "hard" to talk about what his role in shaping the Ultimate Universe has amounted to, because he stands on one side of the proverbial line in the sand, while fans, the true guardians of the comic book canon, are on the other side. 

Ahead of the release of Ultimate Endgame #1, I spoke with Camp about the end that's to come for The Ultimates. When I asked him how he feels about his role in the Ultimate line, Camp gave a thoughtful answer. "Yeah, I mean, I feel it's hard, you know, talking about my contributions. I don't really know. It's really more for fans to decide if they're worthy or if they're good. I feel really grateful that we got to do kind of our version of the Marvel Universe. I think that being entrusted with that, and the pitch for this book was kind of that, where it's just, I'm going to recreate the Marvel Universe for modern times, as I see fit, in this dystopian world. I'm really grateful I got to do that, and they entrusted me to do that. I think whether it's good or bad or stands the test of time is, in 10 years' time, fans will know and will decide," Camp said. 

So, in essence, it's difficult for someone in Camp's position as a writer at the center of the Ultimate Universe, to stand back and get a clear view of what the Ultimate Universe ended up being as a piece of media within pop culture. Certainly, as the writer of The Ultimates, there is a lot more about the series and the line in general that Camp knows that we'll simply never know. And what we see on the pages of The Ultimates is the synthesis of cerebral and ambitious ideas that Camp had for a Marvel superhero story. 

While Marvel fans everywhere let out an anguished cry after the news broke that the publisher would be shutting down the hugely popular Ultimate line, the creators themselves have a much more optimistic look at the situation. Creators like Ultimate Spider-Man writer Jonathan Hickman, Ultimate Wolverine writer Chris Condon, and now The Ultimates writer Deniz Camp have all expressed that they're satisfied with how the line is winding down this spring. At the end of the day, Marvel's decision to quit while they're ahead with the Ultimate line ensures that the books will all end on a high note. 

As much as the experience of writing The Ultimates has been rewarding for Deniz Camp, he revealed in an interview with Popverse that he does have one regret about his run coming to a close: that characters like Ultimate Hawkeye and Ultimate Luke Cage will not appear in future stories. 

"[Ultimate Hawkeye and Ultimate Luke Cage] were the ones that meant a lot to me because I thought they might mean a lot to other people, and I really wanted to make sure to get them right. I mean, I tried to get everybody right, especially if I, you know, changed their ethnicity or something like that. I wanted to make sure that I was doing justice to that. And so I'm really happy. I think my one regret about this ending is that those stories, like people who have had closer experiences to those characters, can't continue those stories on. And I was very happy that Hawkeye got a little bit of that. And I think that's my one, you know, little asterisk on my happiness about it, about the way that this is ending. But that's just the way that it is and I'm so pleased that people responded to those characters and that they meant something to people. That means a lot to me," Camp said. 

If you've played Magic: The Gathering for any amount of time, you can empathize when someone gets land-starved; as in, they haven't drawn enough lands to keep up with each turn's land drop. It seems like Wizards of the Coast is having that happen, metaphorically, speaking with their new set Lorwyn Eclipsed.

MTG Lorwyn Eclipsed is scheduled to be released January 23 across the world, after originally being pencilled in for a 2025 release. That overall January 23 release date still stands, but for some of us who frequent game shops you know they often release some (or all!) of a set early to stores in what's called Prerelease Week. That was to be the case with Lorwyn Eclipsed, with its Prerelease Week beginning January 16, but now a key part of that will have gotten a proverbial stun counter.

But only for those of us in the Americas.

Marvel's Ultimate Wolverine starts off with a bang, literally. The first issue from Chris Condon and Alessandro Cappuccio's series culminates in, spoiler alert, the deaths of both the Ultimate Universe's versions of Mystique and Nightcrawler, two fan-favorite X-Men characters, at the hands of Ultimate Wolverine himself. These deaths were a huge subversion of our expectations, because outside of the X-Men's Krakoan Era, we're not used to seeing marquee X-Men characters like Nightcrawler and Mystique die. I mean, Mystique has survived being shot in the head in the mainline Marvel Universe. In Wolverine (2010) #303, Mystique moved "most of [her] brain down into [her] neck" in anticipation. She's not an easy character to take down in any universe. 

The Ultimate X-Men series from Peach Momoko doesn't include the usual suspects you might expect from an X-Men book, which left Mystique and Nightcrawler on the table for Ultimate Wolverine writer Chris Condon to put into his own story. But in an interview with Popverse, Condon spoke about how the shocking deaths of Nightcrawler and Mystique in Ultimate Wolverine #1 set the stage for where the series went next. 

"It's kind of funny because we kill two people in issue 1. And then we don't kill anybody else until issue 8. But because of what we did in issue 1, everybody says that we kill so many people [laughs]," Condon began.

Five Nights at Freddy's wears its Chuck E. Cheese inspiration on its sleeve, but there are more Millennial childhood influences on the megahit Gen Z game than that pizza-loving rat and his cover band. According to two voice actors who star in the game's ninth core-series entry, Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, two icons of the decade were in their minds while they were in the recording booth.

Speaking at MCM Comic Con in May of 2025, Gregory and Roxanne voice actor Marta Svetek recalled that hr young boy character voice spawned from the cleverest lad of the decade in question: Kevin McCallister.

"Gregory was very much inspired by sort of the 90's family movie," recounts the actor, "Sort of Macaulay Culkin, Home Alone. A little bit more excitable [...] it was my first child voice to do, and I was really nervous. I almost didn't audition for it."

One thing about Wolverine is that he doesn't go down easily. And the same can be said for Marvel's Ultimate Wolverine series from Chris Condon and Alessandro Cappuccio, which will wrap up at 16 issues later this year alongside other Ultimate line books. 

Recently, Popverse spoke with Ultimate Wolverine writer Chris Condon about the series, as well as whether the end of the Ultimate line impacted his plans for the story he was telling about this alternate version of Logan. It was then that Condon revealed the original scope of Ultimate Wolverine. 

"I was always under the impression at first that we were going to be a 12 issue series, and then we got an extension to go alongside [Ultimate] Endgame. So I always knew that my book was going to have an end. I didn't necessarily know that it was going to be, you know, whether it could have gone for more issues or whether that was the end of everything, I didn't know," Condon said. 

There are a lot of ways we try to define video games. We got RPGs, which themselves come in a variety of subgenres. There are action games, platformer games, and action-platformer games, and first-person and third-person shooters, depending on how into the action you want to put yourself. But if there is one thing that games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Dispatch have proven, it is that the line between indie games and AAA studio games is becoming more blurred every year. 

It didn’t surprise anyone when Clair Obscur walked away with pretty much every trophy at The Game Awards 2025. The big debate wasn’t around whether it deserved to be everyone’s winner and one of the most talked-about games of the year. No, the big debate seemed to be whether it was really an indie game, which is silly because it obviously is.

Sandfall Interactive is, any way you look at it, obviously an indie developer. They’re not owned by a larger company the way that Naughty Dog or BioWare are. The fact that the game was partially funded by a publisher in Kepler Interactive doesn’t change that, and it is a little strange that we’re even having the conversation. The inclusion of a publisher, who helps market and financially support a game, doesn’t change the development cycle of a game any more than Critical Role’s involvement in Dispatch’s development.

For a franchise that's achieved the recognition Five Nights at Freddy's, it's kind of wild to consider how little of the world'd lore is 100% confirmed. The upside to that is that the FNAF community is absolutely loaded with juicy fan theories - and we're not just talking about the Reddit community. The folks involved in making the games also have their own favorite bits of head canon, and at MCM London Comic Con in May of 2023, one of those creatives revealed hers.

Marta Svetek does the voice for the characters of Gregory and Roxanne in Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach. Alongside her costar Kellen Goff (Glamrock Freddy), Svetek joined FNAF streamer Dawko on stage for a talkback and audience Q&A. Naturally, one of the attendees was interested in what the cast thought of the franchise's mysterious lore, and Svetek was only too happy to share. 

After she made an important disclaimer, that is.

Across a number of Five Nights at Freddy's games, voice actor Kellen Goff has had a few monstrously memorable moments. The Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach star came to MCM London Comic Con in May of 2023 to discuss how he makes his voice so ragged and inhuman without damaging it, and we here at Popverse couldn't help but realize he was talking about something we heard from a very different voice actor:

Hazbin Hotel's Sir Pentious himself, Alex Brightman.

Joined onstage by costar Marta Svetek (Roxanne, Gregory), and FNAF streamer Dawko, Goff recounted learning about how his throat made the uncanny sounds that have given him such an edge in creature voicing. 

It's bittersweet to see Marvel Comics' Ultimate Universe wind down. The new interpretation of the mainline Marvel Universe that launched in 2024 has been both a critical and commercial success for the publisher. And while the incoming end of the Ultimate Universe is a great opportunity for all of us to practice 'don't cry because it's gone, smile because it happened,' there are lingering questions left over about where the future of The Ultimates may have taken them, had Marvel not decided to pull the plug. 

Recently, Popverse spoke with The Ultimates writer Deniz Camp about the end of the Ultimate Universe, and Camp shed light on what his future plans for the book would have been. Unlike the other writers on the Ultimate line, like Ultimate Spider-Man writer Jonathan Hickman, Deniz Camp revealed that his original plans for The Ultimates weren't limited to just 24 issues.  

"I've said this before, but there was talk that I was going to continue on [past 24 issues]. I was planning on continuing on for a while, and then there was going to be like a new wave of books that launched. But there was always going to be an ending, like not that my run was gonna end, but that there was gonna be a culmination of everything that my run had been building towards at [issue #] 20- around this time - around 18 is actually when I thought it was going to be. And then I was going to continue on doing more stuff, and then we decided to end it," said Camp.

As human beings, we crave resolution in both our lives and in the stories we consume. Because our lives are so chaotic, which the COVID-19 pandemic was a visceral reminder of, so many of us want satisfying endings to the stories we care about because it gives us a sense of control. That instead of us all being a collection of cells mashed together, hurtling through a manmade world of 'taxes,' 'vehicle warranties,' and Skibidi Toilet, there is some greater order to the universe guiding it all in a semi-coherent manner.

But, for better or for worse, there is no guaranteed order for any of us, nor any of our stories. Things - people, life - disappoint and horrify us. Why else would Nine Inch Nails write a song about this for Johnny Cash to later cover? 

We can observe this impulse to restore a sense of order, or at least an illusion of it, in pop culture with incidents like the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement, which culminated in the theatrical release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League movie. After Snyder had to suddenly exit the Justice League film as director because of a family tragedy, writer/director Joss Whedon was brought on to reshape the film and finish it so it could hit theaters in 2017. Both critics and DC fans were left underwhelmed, and a vocal cohort of fans online was determined to see a cut of the film that reflected Zack Snyder’s original vision. To everyone’s surprise, Warner Brothers gave the fans what they wanted, providing Snyder with $70 million to complete 'his version' of the film, which was released into theaters in 2021. And it was good. 

"Burlesque is a recent hobby of mine," said Critical Role Campaign 4 star Whitney Moore, "And the main thing behind it is just, 'Can you make it work?'"

Some context - Popverse recently sat down with Moore for a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from her 2010 cult film Birdemic: Shock and Terror to her current stint as one of the (many!) players in the world's biggest actual play webseries. But as you've just heard, we also got to chat with the former Geek & Sundry host about a fairly new hobby of hers - an more than just burlesque itself, we got to hear how Moore was adapting one of her favorite films to the medium.

That is, John Carpenter's The Thing.

Sometimes a trailer doesn’t need to show you anything about the gameplay to do its job. Sometimes, the most important thing is to give you a general vibe of what you’ve got coming. The trailer for Stupid Never Dies is light on gameplay, especially for the first half of its short runtime, but it does a better job of selling the game to me than any gameplay trailer possibly could by promising me the chance to dive into an Avril Lavigne pop punk music video.

Stupid Never Dies was one of the smaller games that snuck its way into The Game Awards 2025. While the world was busy talking about Divinity, the next game from Larian Studios, or the next Star Wars game, I was fascinated by the trailer for Stupid Never Dies. It is bright and colorful and full of early 2000s pop punk energy. If you swapped out the audio with Sk8ter Boi by Avril Lavigne, I don’t think you would notice any difference. It is like someone took all the style of 2012’s Lollipop Chainsaw and turned it to 11.

Here is the thing about trailers: they work best when they are focused on selling you the best bits of the game, and I have no doubt that the best part of Stupid Never Dies is going to be the general vibe it gives off. That music video is slick and sends a clear message – this game is about a guy trying to impress a girl. That, my friends, is a story as old as time if I ever heard one. Everything else, the gore and the colors and the violence, is all secondary to watching these two dumb kids try to figure their feelings out.

On the last day of New York Comic Con this past year, we did something we've never done before: hosted a panel but didn't tell anyone what it was about, or who besides Popverse would show up. We didn't know if fans would show up - but they did, to the point that 10 minutes before we were to start, the room was at capacity. You came for Popverse. And we appreciate that.

Over the course of 2025, the number of people reading and watching Popverse on any average day doubled. We did this by listening to you: what you reacted to, how you reacted to, and what you decided to read and watch (and what you didn't!). Through that, we doubled down on coverage of Critical Role, we laser-focused on the comics you care about, hosted even more panels and interviews with celebrities than ever before, and at conventions, we found ways to meet as many of you as possible and get your direct input on what we should do.

in 2026, we are going to continue doing what brought you to that panel and what brings you here every day, and add to that. By doing what you are showing us you want more of, responding to things you tell us you want us to take chances on, and listening to our instincts and covering things we hope you'll love. Here are some of the things you can look forward to.

Here's a hot take for you - even more than its fantastical settings or iconic cast members, the reason people love Critical Role is the relationships between its many characters. From Jester and Fjord to Vex and Vax, we care for these characters, in part, because of how they care for each other. And in Campaign 4, one of the relationships that's been the most fun to watch is the one between the demonic Tyranny (played by Whitney Moore) and Wicander Halovar (played by OG Roler Sam Riegel), AKA Wicks.

So naturally, when we sat down with Moore herself in a recent interview, we had to ask about how that relationship developed. And if you know anything about the flow of TTRPG live play, you won' be surprised to hear that it developed in a way Moore couldn't have seen coming.

"The beautiful nature of this type of storytelling," said Moore, "Is that you don't know what any other character is going to do. [Riegel and I] had our characters and we kind of knew a bit about what each other was about, but everything that he has done has surprised me in the best ways."

It’s not easy leading a team. It’s even harder when your teammates are all goofballs, forcing you to be the straight man. This is what it felt like for voice actor Cam Clarke on the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. While his costars got to have fun and play the goofy brothers, Clarke was frustrated that his character was always such a wet blanket.

“What was hard for me was I got these three goofballs doing kabuki crazy town clown show, and every week I’m saying, ‘[serious tone] We’ve got to think of something fast!’ Talk about narcoleptic actor,” Leonardo actor Cam Clarke says during a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spotlight panel at C2E2 2022.

“I went, well, let me lampoon superhero, which I got to do with [Townsend Coleman] in The Tick with Die Fledermaus. I’m trying to make [Leonardo] a silly leader, because these guys are having so much fun, and I was bored. The director calls me out in the hallway and goes, ‘What are you doing? Don’t do what you’re doing. Don’t. You’re the leader.’”

Picture the first recording session for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The actors and the producers have no idea that the 1987 animated series will be one of the biggest cultural moments of the decade.

They also have no idea which voice actor will be voicing which turtle.

That’s right, the voice director cast actors for the show but didn’t bother to figure out who each actor would be playing.  “When we got these parts, they said that [Rob Paulsen] was going to be Raphael, and [Barry Gordon] was Donatello, but they hadn’t decided at our first recording session whether [Cam Clarke] was going to be Michaelangelo or Leonardo, and same for me,” Michaelangelo actor Townsend Coleman says during a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles spotlight panel at C2E2 2022.

Brandon Sanderson, the science fiction and fantasy author known for creating the Cosmere literary universe, has some advice for new writers – look for firsthand knowledge when you’re writing about mental health issues.

“Listen to primary sources,” Brandon Sanderson says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “When I’m exploring someone who is dealing with a mental health issue or something like that, what I will do is I will start my research usually in blogs and things like that, where people have talked about what it’s like to live with this. Reading what family members also say is usually pretty helpful to kind of get a grasp of the breadth of it, because no person is a monolith.”

“If you just go 'This is what it’s like to have [dissociative identity disorder].' Well, no, that’s what it’s like for one person to have the idea, and if you don’t have the breadth or reading about a bunch of different people’s experiences, then you will probably default. What you want to avoid is the pop culture representations of a lot of mental illnesses, because somewhere in the ‘80s, people realized that you could make a really sexy version of most mental illnesses and then took some narrative shortcuts that have been pretty damaging to most people. My era internalized a lot of those.”

Here at Popverse, we like to ask the real questions. If you ask an actor about their latest project, you might get a scripted answer workshopped by agents and publicists. But if you ask an actor how they like their eggs, you’ll get to know who they truly are. The answer will give you a glimpse into their true personality.

So, it was only natural that when we sat down with Dexter Sol Ansell, we asked him how he likes his eggs. After all, the young actor is playing a prince named Egg in the upcoming HBO drama A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

“I like my eggs –  ooooh, I love eggs – boiled for eight minutes. It has to be eight minutes. Or scrambled, but only by my grandma,” Egg actor Dexter Sol Ansell tells Popverse’s Ashley Victoria Robinson at New York Comic Con 2025.

Star Trek is all about exploring unknown worlds, but the latest series will be sticking a bit closer to home. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premieres January 15 on Paramount +, will have lots of scenes in San Francisco. Nahla Ake actor Holly Hunter says there will still be plenty of action in space, but she appreciates the series feeling more earthbound, as it makes things seem more exotic.

“The fact that the show is Starfleet Academy, it’s a school and we are also in space, so we’re taking all these students into unknown territory for any of us,” Starfleet Academy actor Holly Hunter tells Popverse’s Ashley Victoria Robinson at New York Comic Con 2025.

“I mean, there are unknown entities. All those encounters are kind of incredible to be subjecting to, and at the same time, that is what they’re entitled to, that is what they want. That’s what the story is about. And at the same time, we’re in San Francisco, so it’s got this earthbound exotic combination that I think is really unusual even for Star Trek.”

Even before Critical Role Campaign 4 kicked off, Critters across the internet were already buzzing about the design of Whitney Moore's pink-skinned, goat-eared, habit-resplendent demon, Tyranny. And now that we're a few months into the campaign, we've found that design pairs with a mischievous, fun-loving character the likes of which has already inspired Critical Role cosplayers and merch.

So when we sat down with Moore in a recent interview, we wanted to find out the impetus for this imp - from where, we asked the Birdemic star and geek culture icon, did the design for Tyranny sprout?

"Oh, that's actually a very funny story," she responded.

Since its debut in 1992, the Goosebumps brand has had its fair share of success. The book series has been a publishing juggernaut, dominating school book fairs, and selling millions of copies. The 1995 Fox Kids series is fondly remembered today, and the 2015 theatrical film had a respectable box office run. All in all, the Goosebumps brand has a great track record.

So, why was the Disney+ series cancelled after two seasons?  Streaming aggregator websites reported that the numbers were strong, and the series was nominated for numerous awards, including multiple Children’s Emmys. Whatever the case is, Disney+ opted to end the show after two seasons.

While Goosebumps creator R.L. Stine enjoyed the show, he thought it was a mistake to aim it towards an older audience. The series dropped the anthology format Goosebumps is known for in favor of serialized storytelling with more mature themes.

When Dexter: Resurrection premiered, I wrote that Paramount+ had the opportunity to resolve a lingering plot hole from Dexter: New Blood. Instead, the series ignored it, and according to showrunner Clyde Phillips, I shouldn’t hold my breath for them to address it in season two.

I’m talking about the whereabouts of Dexter’s stepkids and Harrison’s half-siblings Cody and Astor.

If you need a refresher, Cody and Astor were Dexter’s stepchildren from his marriage to Rita Bennett. After Rita’s death, Cody and Astor left Miami to live with their grandparents in Orlando but made occasional returns to Miami to visit Dexter and their younger half-sibling Harrison.

Smallville may have been an origin story for Superman, but that doesn’t mean Clark Kent didn’t run into other DC Universe heroes. Over the course of the show’s ten seasons, Clark Kent teamed up with Bart Allen, Aquaman, Green Arrow, and even the Justice Society. However, Welling’s biggest regret is that the series never got around to introducing Bruce Wayne.

“One character I wish we would’ve seen even briefly would’ve been like a Bruce Wayne,” Tom Welling says during a Smallville panel at MCM London Comic Con 2022. "I thought that would’ve been cool. Like maybe Lex and him cross paths or something, but that’s the maybe one regret that I have, but there’s higher ups that make those decisions.”

Ultimately the decision to have Bruce Wayne on the show was vetoed by Warner Brothers executives, who didn’t want another live-action version of Batman on television while Chris Nolan was producing his Dark Knight trilogy. Still, when asked who his dream Bruce Wayne would be, Welling had an interesting answer.

If your Instagram reels are as full of weird little TTRPG skits as mine are, you might have first seen the folks from Legends of Avantris in their Adult Swim-esque animated forms. The hugely popular D&D actual play series has produced such iconic animated sequences that, at gaming conventions nation-wide, you wouldn't be hard pressed to find their little critter characters cosplayed by a number of fans. But that's no surprise to the Avantris folks themselves.

The way they tell it, animation and TTRPGs go pretty well hand-in-hand.

Particularly, they were opining on the subject at PAX Unplugged 2025, where cast members Mikey Gilder, Kelsey Flynn, Richie Gilder, Derek Hudson, Mace Caffrey, and Andy Flynn were taking part in the 'Avantris and Chill' panel, a fan Q&A that touched on just about every aspect of their series. And at one point, Mikey Gilder gave attendees an inside-basebell opinion on why the shows animated sequences perform so well.

In 2011 Smallville aired its final episode, ending its ten-season run. However, just because a show ends doesn’t mean we’ve seen the last of the characters. It’s not unheard of for cancelled shows to return as a movie or television reunion special. Just look at Firefly, Entourage, and Downton Abbey. Could Smallville be next? The cast certainly seems up for it.

“Like our own multiverse? Sure, why not?” Tom Welling says during a Smallville panel at MCM London Comic Con 2022. 

“It would be fun,” Erica Durance adds. Laura Vandervoort echoed Durance and Welling’s comments. The crowd was asked how they felt about it, and the auditorium erupted with applause and cheers.

At New York Comic Con 2025, Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson had the chance to sit down with several cast and crew members of the upcoming Mortal Kombat II movie for a conversation about a variety of topics. Cast members Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Tati Gabrielle, and Martyn Ford, writer Jeremy Slater, director Simon McQuoid, and Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon were all present in The Studio for the exciting interview. And one of the facts revealed by the Mortal Kombat II cast and crew was which cast members were most likely to pull a prank on set.

The information was shared in response to a game that Robinson invited the interviewees to play, “Who would be more likely to?” Robinson would say something, and the interviewees would respond with who involved with the movie was most likely to engage in the stated activity. “Who is more likely to stage a prank while on set?” Robinson asked.

“Tati,” Rudolph answered without hesitation, causing Gabrielle to succumb to laughter. “Were you going to say me,” Rudolph asked. “I was actually going to say Joe Taslim,” Gabrielle answered. “Or this one,” she added, indicating Ford, who was seated beside her. “No,” asserted Ford. “I would never crack a joke on set.”

At New York Comic Con 2025, comic book writer Tom King sat down in the Pop Spot with Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson. During the wide-ranging conversation, the writer behind cape comics like Supergirl and Wonder Woman shared plenty of interesting insights. This included details about his “all-encompassing” relationship with DC Comics.

The topic came up when Robinson remarked, “You have your fingers in so many aspects of the DC Comics pie: you’re doing comics, you’re doing animation, you’re doing live action, you’re doing film. How would you describe your relationship with DC?”

“All-encompassing,” King swiftly answered. “It’s almost like you’re a professional writer or something,” Robinson quipped.

From folk horror to epic space opera, the TTRPG actual play series The Legends of Avantris has crossed into a multitude of popular genres. However, four years after the show first started streaming, the cast still have plenty of different stories they'd like to tackle. And at Pax Unplugged 2025, they were kind enough to share one particular subgenre they'd like to explore.

Specifically, the cast of Mikey Gilder, Kelsey Flynn, Richie Gilder, Derek Hudson, Mace Caffrey, and Andy Flynn were discussing the idea during the Avantris & Chill panel, a laid-back Q&A attended by fans from across the East Coast. And at one point, one fan asked the assembled crew what unexplored realm of storytelling they'd like to dip into.

"One genre I'd really like to touch that we haven't yet," answered Derek Hudson, "Is Urban Noir. That's the one that I've been craving. We've done a number of the Galtica series - some of you might have watched The Mighty Trunks - but those are very shenanigan-esque."

If you aren’t familiar with Roblox, then you probably don’t have any children in your life. The online gaming platform has over 85 million daily active users, and most of them are children. If you’re a parent or guardian, your child has probably asked you for Robux (the gaming platform’s currency) on more than one occasion.

The craze is so big that it has even hit the children of Westeros. Dexter Sol Ansell will be playing Egg in HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, but when he’s not filming the series, he’s playing Roblox.

“I’m like Robloxy. I’m a Roblox kid,” Dexter Sol Ansell tells Popverse’s Ashley Victoria Robinson during a New York Comic Con interview.

Sometimes, even spinach isn’t enough to revive Popeye.

In 2012, Sony Pictures Animation announced that Genndy Tartakovsky would be directing a 3D animated Popeye movie. Tartakovsky had made a name for himself as the creator of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack, in addition to his work on shows such as The Powerpuff Girls and the original Clone Wars miniseries.

A sizzle reel was released to a positive reception, but in 2015, Tartakovsky announced that he was no longer involved in the project (which has never materialized). Tartakovsky went on to direct the Hotel Transylvania franchise for Sony Pictures Animation.

During New York Comic Con 2025, actor and director Bryce Dallas Howard sat down in the Pop Spot with Popverse’s Ashley V. Robinson. You’ll recognize Howard’s name thanks to her performances in movies like Lady in the Water and Argylle, and her work directing multiple episodes of the Disney+ Star Wars shows. One interesting detail Howard shared in the Pop Spot was her three-word description of the upcoming season of Star Wars: Ahsoka.

The topic came up when Robinson mentioned that the internet is “quite confident” that Howard would be returning to direct more episodes in Ahsoka season 2. Howard swiftly confirmed this theory. Robinson followed up by asking Howard to tease what fans can expect from the upcoming sophomore season of the Rosario Dawson vehicle. But in order to avoid spoilers, Robinson asked Howard to use “three words or less.”

Howard answered, “Fun, fun and more fun.” She continued: “My experience getting to do it was the most fun that I have had in my adult life… This summer was magical.”

Class is in session, but this is no ordinary school. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is an upcoming series that focuses on a new class of Starfleet cadets. Premiering on Paramount+ on January 15, the series will follow the students as they learn the ins and outs of piloting ships, exploring alien worlds, and all the chaos and creation that comes with Star Trek.

However, there’s somewhat of a meta nature to the series. According to Darem Reymi actor George Hawkins, the cast sometimes feel like they’re in school, since they’re surrounded by veteran actors such as Paul Giamatti and Holly Hunter. In that sense, the show has been somewhat of a teaching hospital for them, and they loved every minute.

“It has everything, especially for the young actors. It has everything for us,” Starfleet Academy actor George Hawkins tells Popverse’s Ashley Victoria Robinson at New York Comic Con 2025. “We get to watch rock stars like Paul [Giamatti] and Holly [Hunter] work at the top of the industry, and we just sit and absorb. That is such a blessing, and doing it for Star Trek, where it’s a franchise that cares so much about people, it cares so much about progress, growth, and purpose. And we get to be the custodians of that. We’re blessed. That’s it.”

The Walking Dead comic book series was known for its surprising twists and turns, but few were more surprising than the way it ended. When The Walking Dead #193 was released on July 3, 2019, readers were surprised to see a letter column announcing that the series had concluded. Not only had series creator Robert Kirkman kept this a secret, but he had maximized the surprise by issuing fake solicitations for future issues.

If you think the producers of the AMC television series were given a heads-up, you’re sadly mistaken. However, The Walking Dead showrunner is glad Kirkman kept him in the dark, because he enjoyed being surprised.

“The way that the comic book ended was brilliant,” The Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple says during a panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “Robert sprung it on all of us, and I love that he did that. I love that I did not get a call with a heads up on that because he ruined many things over the years for me as a reader.”