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Review – Spider-man: Far from Home (2019)

2nd September 2021

Review – Spider-man: Far from Home (2019) Run Time: 2hrs 13mins Directed by: Jon Watts Produced by: Kevin Feige Written by: Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers. Starring: Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Samuel L. Jackson, Marisa Tomei and Jon Favreau Release Date: 2 July 2019 Production company: Marvel Studios Full Spoilers Retrospective Review Introduction I’m delighted to be taking another trip down MCU memory lane to retroactively review Spider-man: Far From Home for BGCP Comic Con. Shortly after the events of the epic conclusion to the Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame, we find Peter Parker/ Spider-man dealing with the loss of his mentor, Tony “I am Ironman” Stark. Peter is also readjusting to life after being snapped back into existence after five years, when the Avengers undid Thanos’ dusting of half of all life in Endgame. Aunt May knows he’s Spider-man now but it’s not given much weight, she supports him in it, even encourages him. Peter’s going on a trip to Europe with school and conveniently, all of the supporting cast from Spider-man: Homecoming who would have naturally returned were snapped just like Peter so there’s plenty of familiar faces to join him on the trip. Peter was hoping to get away from that superhero life monsters from another reality require his attention. He meets a new hero, Quentin Beck played by Jake Gyllenhaal the last surviving hero fro… It’s Mysterio, he’s the bad guy, it’s all a lie. Story Ok so the plot is somewhat convoluted. These ‘monsters’ show up, attacking random spots around the world which draws the attention of Nick Fury and Maria Hill, (really Skrulls, Talos and his wife Soren who we met in Captain Marvel). They are acting on behalf of the real Nick Fury and are duped by the story of the Elementals that Beck (stage name) tells them. They team up and meet Peter on the Vienna stage of his school trip, as the water Elemental attacks. ‘Fury’ basically forces Peter to join them in the fight against the Elementals as strangely none of the many heroes that appeared in Endgame are available to help out. All this being a ruse by Beck to obtain the world security system/AI – EDITH. The control of which was left to Peter by Tony after his death. EDITH is operated through a pair of unmistakably Robert Downey Jr sunglasses, that ‘Fury’ delivers to Peter in Venice.  The security system is a fleet of weaponised drones on stand by in a space station in Earth’s orbit. With EDITH, you can have a multi weapon killer drone that can be at your target at a moments notice. Demonstrated in a poor fashion when Peter accidentally sets a drone on another student while they’re driving through the country on a tour bus. It’s just the silliest scene, Peter leaping out of the moving bus through the skylight, web whipping the attacking drone onto the ground in an explosion that no one on the bus heard, all while Peter lands back in the bus, with no one the wiser. Behind the scenes Beck drops exposition in a fantastically theatrical monologue to his secret coconspirators after he tricks Peter into handing EDITH over to him. Beck was the man who invented the ‘BARF’ hologram technology used by Tony Stark in Civil War. Stark fired Beck for being unstable leading him to band together with other former Stark employees to collectively become ‘Mysterio’. Beck and co want access to EDITH and the fleet of drones to stage an ‘Avengers level threat’ that will place Mysterio as the next Ironman and give the cabal the keys to the world. A plan that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. How well would Mysterio’s illusions hold up if he had to interact with any of the other heroes in the MCU. A big mix of people with various skills and intelligences that would smell something fishy in Mysterio’s bowl. Buuuuut Quentin Beck or whatever his real name is, was fired by Stark for being unstable. I think this plan makes sense as the plan concocted by an unstable person. Jake Gyllenhaal is so captivating in the role that it doesn’t bother me for long. Hijinks Running parallel to the main plot is the antics of the rest of the class and the their chaperone teachers Martin Starr and J.B. Smoove. I love both actors but felt they had a lot of stinker comedic lines that fell flat. The first film to depict the events of the snap or the ‘Blip’ as it’s called here, outside of Infinity War and Endgame, wisely removes all the horror of the event and plays it off comedically. The John Huges-y vibe of the last film continues here but it is given an extra sub genre of a holiday film. Cuteness Spider-man: Far From Home is also part romantic comedy. The romantic strands between Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) and Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) as well as Ned and Betty and give the supporting cast a little more focus. While they’re fun, the real cutesy stuff comes with Peter and MJ’s blossoming relationship. A minor hurdle in their pairing comes from Brad the same student Peter nearly had EDITH killed by accident. He wasn’t snapped but there isn’t anything that that novel about his character besides. Peter has been planning to express the emotions he has developed for MJ since we last saw them together on this school trip. Holland and Zendaya have a great natural chemistry together. Looking back from 2021 we could be forgiven to whimsy that it mightn’t have just been their considerable acting talents caught on camera. Zendaya in particular gives a wonderfully earnest and grounded portrayal of a more introverted Mary Jane than we had seen before. I feel like Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane could be seen as shy in certain ways and more outgoing in others. Zendaya’s MJ is more guarded than shy. I like the introverted straight talker we’re seeing here. MJ while put in danger a

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Creator Interview – Chris Evenhuis

19th August 2021

Introduction Hey folks and welcome to the first ever written BGCP creator interview. We are lucky enough to be chatting today with Chris Evenhuis. Chris Evenhuis is an incredibly talented artist from the Netherlands. He has worked in the comic book industry since the late 1990s. His credits include: Darkness: Resurrection Wynonna Earp Monstro Mechanica GI Joe And concept art for Overlord 2 As well as multiple other cool titles that you can find over on his socials: Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chris_evenhuis/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.evenhuis Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisEvenhuis?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Interview BGCP: Hi Chris, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Would you mind starting off by telling us a bit about yourself, your educational background and your career? Chris Evenhuis: Hi there, I’m Chris Evenhuis and I’m a comic artist and illustrator based in The Netherlands. My education wasn’t art-related (I started out as an Environmental Scientist), so as an artist I’m self-taught. BGCP: How did you go from studying Environmental Art to becoming a full time illustrator? CE: I’ve been drawing comics ever since I was a kid and had some indie shorts published by age seventeen. However, teachers convinced me to also pursue a ‘real job’, something with better career prospects. So, I ended up graduating as an Environmental Scientist instead. But by that time, the social climate in The Netherlands had shifted and jobs in that field kinda dried up. This meant that I ended up mostly jobless anyway. Thankfully I was able to move on to video games, where I worked as a concept artist for several years. Until I moved on again to Franco/Belgian comics, and eventually US comics as well. BGCP: Who are your main influences when it comes to your art? CE: This one’s difficult to answer because for a large part it depends on what type of project I’m working on. I do tend to see influences from Alphonse Mucha and Steve Dillon in my own work, but I’m not sure others would agree? BGCP: You have a really distinct art style in all of your work. Did you intentionally hone this style or is that how you have always drawn? CE: Thank you so much, that’s one of the nicest things I could hope for as an artist. It’s a combination of gradually developing a style that all at once feels natural, tells a clear story and helps making deadlines. Over the years I’ve found myself mostly looking for things to remove from my rendering, trying to find a style that has the least amount of ‘distraction’. It used to have a lot more details and cross-hatching, things like that. Lately my focus has shifted more to bold lines and shapes, and clear movements and emotions. It’s an ongoing process which I really enjoy. BGCP: Do you have a favourite part of the illustration process? CE: My favourite parts are coming up with ideas and then at the end, finishing them. Everything in between is usually a terrible struggle and oftentimes almost like solving math problems. BGCP: I have always been amazed at how talented comic artists like yourself are able to capture detailed expressions and convey complex emotions in a still frame. How do you go about tackling this? CE: Thank you! This is possibly my favourite aspect of drawing comics. First of all, I’ll ask the writers I work with as many questions as feels appropriate about what their characters are like other than what the scripts says about them. Anything could be helpful: favourite breakfast, pet peeves, weird habits, taste in music, type of friends etc. Everything else I will then make up on my own. So I’ll just imagine how each individual character would move and react to different situations. Sometimes, I’ll physically act out scenes on their behalf to figure out the expressions, gestures, movements across a sequence of panels and such. What I’m hoping to achieve by this is to create characters that – just from the way they look, move and express themselves – reveal parts of their personal stories on top of the one that’s in the script. BGCP: Out of the multiple different comics that you have worked on, which was your favourite? CE: I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of my favourite writers in the industry. I’ve gotten the chance to work on some of the most fun books I can imagine. I have loved every single one of them, and also did some of my proudest work in each of them. Especially Wynonna Earp and GI Joe, but overall my favourite is probably still Monstro Mechanica. This is my creator-owned series with G.I. Joe writer Paul Allor and colour artist Sjan Weijers. The series is about Leonardo da Vinci, his female apprentice and their wooden robot bodyguard. There’s something special about getting to create every single thing from the ground up. BGCP: When it comes to working on a licenced comic such as GI Joe, do you have to stick to a certain art style, or is your own unique art style embraced? CE: The art style can be pretty flexible; GI Joe had already seen quite a diverse range of styles throughout its different runs at IDW before I came on board. The most important thing is how well the art and writing style mesh together and I think Paul and I make a pretty great team in that regard. BGCP: Are there any comic book titles that you would like to work on in the future? CE: I’ve always felt Paul and I would do a killer Rocketeer run. Another dream project I can think of would be a licensed comic series based on the 2001 video game ‘Clive Barker’s Undying.’ BGCP: You have also worked as a concept artists on a couple of videogames, how did that come about? CE: I had made a few friends in comics who later started a game developing studio and were looking for artists. Both the comics and games

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Review – Spider-man: Homecoming (2017)

2nd September 2021

Review – Spider-man: Homecoming (2017) Run Time: 2hrs 13mins Directed by: Jon Watts Produced by: Kevin Feige Written by: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers. Starring: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr., Jacob Batalon  Marisa Tomei and Zendaya Release Date: July 7th 2017 Production company: Marvel Studios Full Spoilers Retrospective Review Tone Tom Holland was the first truly teen Spider-man at 19 when he showed up in Captain America: Civil War. Much to the joy of Kevin Smith, the first onscreen wall crawler with a comic accurate, Queens accent. Spider-man: Homecoming wall crawls on similar paths to it’s predecessors. Homecoming isn’t an origin story like the previous franchise starters, but it’s not much further down the line. It’s easy to forget that this Peter lost his uncle and father figure in the last year. All of his scenes with Marisa Tomei as Aunt May are light and sweet but don’t have much substance. None come near the one with Aunt May after Uncle Ben’s funeral in the first Rami film. He has a closer friendship with Ned than the ones seen with both Harry Osborns in past films. The two spend all their time together and seem well liked by their classmates. Flash is still there to pick on Peter but he’s more of a frenemy than a physical bully. It’s an interesting take on their rivalry. Peter pines over Liz Allan while a thinly veiled Mary Jane hangs in the wings played by Zendaya. Genre Spider-man: Homecoming applies the half-another-genre style of MCU films and that other half is teen comedy, specifically the ones made by John Huges. A homage to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off damn near beats us to death at one point. It does work quite well, there’s plenty of fun interactions and most scenes are spun in a entertaining fashion, only getting serious when needed. Like most MCU films, humour can feel forced. Peter as Spider-man commandeers (really steals) Flash’s car and ends up wrecking it which. I get that they’re showing Peter as an inexperienced web slinger. Or maybe just the logistics of web swinging across Queens which they did earlier in the film to great effect, buuuut this just felt wrong. Review – Spider-man: Homecoming (2017) continues below Pete’s feelings for Liz and his pursuit of her seem equally light and superficial but that does track as puppy teenager love. They only have dramatic weight when It’s revealed who Liz’s father is. Young Spider-man’s main concern is a fear of missing out on Avengers action, since Tony Stark hasn’t made him a regular team member after Civil War. Peter’s either being left on read by Happy or he’s dealing with the douchiest version of Tony brought to life by Robert Downey Jr. Who makes an inappropriate joke about Aunt May that left a bad taste in my mouth. He just comes across as mean to the young Spidey, as he mishandles the new superhero’s concerns about the Vulture’s crew. A shame because I still think he gave one of his best and most relatable performances as the character in Civil War. Ironlad Spider-man being Ironman junior is the biggest complaint held against the MCU’s wall crawler. Which I get, Tony has been shown as having a bigger impact on this Peter’s life than Uncle Ben had in the MCU. Maybe this web head, is a little too focused on Ironman but that’s just this version of Spider-man. We can still celebrate how he’s similar to a more classical interpretation and be excited about where he’s going to go that’s different. This universe started with Ironman and if the Sony/Disney relationship continues to work, it will be passed on to Holland’s Spider-man, these choices make sense. Review – Spider-man: Homecoming (2017) continues below The gadget equipped Stark suit drew a sizeable amount of criticism which I also get. I do however respect that Peter taking to his AI, Karen, was an attempt to translate the streams of thought and oddly speech bubbles that would come out of the neurotic Spidey in the comics. The translation of his emotive eyes from the page being dampeners for his heightened senses as well as fancy goggles is a smoother transition but Karen and Peter’s chats weren’t all bad to be fair. The Birdman The Vulture had always been a dorky Spider-man villain, most of the earlier ones were but this old man in a bird costume never got an edgy revamp that removed him from the goofy section of Spidey’s rogues’ gallery. That is until this film. Adrian Toomes is grounded by Keaton’s gruff performance. His repositioning from engineer to hard-ass boss man of a salvage crew who gets hard done by Stark’s business deals, gives him a believability and ties to the greater MCU. The Tinkerer who is on his crew (as well as two different Shockers) repurposes Chitauri tech from the battle of New York to make Toomes the Vulture. With heftier wings than Falcon and Keaton playing the part like an angry Dad, this Vulture is very menacing. After he has been to revealed as Liz’s father to Peter, we are filled with tension as he deciphers the budding superhero’s dual identity on the car ride to the Homecoming dance. Giving us one of the best scenes of the MCU as well as one of the best onscreen examples of a date with a scary father. Visuals The composition of the cinematography is mostly MCU standard, some highlights but a lot of unimaginative shots. It’s aided by fantastic photorealistic digital effects that blend with the gifted acrobat Tom Holland and his stunt team. The action is on point, and is well worth a rewatching scenes to pick up the specifics of what happens so quickly before your eyes. The great suit design reminiscent of the Steve Ditko Spider-man and just being able to see Spider-man do whatever a Spider-man can is a treat, but it’s clear that isn’t a film with

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Could ‘Abandoned’ from Blue Box Game Studios be the next Silent Hill game?

4th February 2026

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Blue Box Game Studios, Hideo Kojima and Silent Hills, let me take you back to late 2012… Gangnam Style was still in the charts, Django Unchained had just dropped in cinemas and cryptocurrency was still just a weird obscure thing that only sweaty nerds your paranoid uncle cared about. Then, – completely out of nowhere, – a trailer appears on the internet teasing a new trippy-looking game called The Phantom Pain. It is from a developer that nobody has ever heard of called Moby Dick Studios with some weird dude covered in bandages called Joakim Mogren at the helm. The code-cracking began in YouTube comments and on gaming subreddits. The conspiracy unfolded and eventually it turned out to to be a complex hoax that led to the unveiling of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Then, a few years later, Kojima does the same thing again when he releases the red herring that was the P.T demo, which wound up being a “playable teaser” for the much anticipated, (sadly since cancelled,) Silent Hills. Could the same thing be happening once again with the upcoming PS5 exclusive Abandoned from unknown devs, BLUE BOX Game Studios? Could this title actually turn out to be the long-awaited resurrection of Silent Hills? Because it’s either that or a very clever marketing strategy from a small-time developer riding the Silent Hills hype train to promote their title. Either way, there are too many parallels that can be drawn for this whole thing to be a coincidence. Don your tinfoil hat and join me friends as we head down the rabbit hole together. I hope you all have your whiteboards and string at the ready, as I am about to blow your mind. Part 1: Previously unheard of developer BLUE BOX Game Studios announces ‘Abandoned’ On the 7th of April 2021, a post by Hasan Kahraman appears on the PlayStation Blog unveiling a teaser for a PS5 exclusive, first-person survival horror game titled; Abandoned. Kahraman is the Game Director at BLUE BOX Game Studios. The sleuths over on Reddit have since pointed out that if you go to the 49 second mark in the video above, you will see the image below showing writing on an outside wall that reads; “Kill The Trespassers.” A tree blocks a couple of letters of the text. Those letters being blocked just so happen to be “T” and “P,” or PT. Other than that though, upon first glance, the post appeared to be just like any other PlayStation Blog post announcing a new title. These kinds of posts certainly aren’t rare on the blog and initially nobody paid much attention to the post other than some negative reactions criticizing the amateur sounding VO work and the complaining about the poor frame rate. A few months down the line, BLUE BOX Game Studios announce that Abandoned will receive its very own PS5 app which will allow gamers to watch the game’s trailers in real time on their PS5 console. This is a notably odd thing for a studio to implement and it is certainly not something that is normally done by first-party PlayStation Studios whilst promoting their upcoming game. Therefore, this strange announcement left more than a few people wondering why this small, unknown game studio are the first to pioneer this marketing strategy. The app was initially slated to go live this Sunday on the 20th of June. However, another tweet from the developer states that the app will in fact go live on the 22nd of June. This date is probably the correct one as it is a Tuesday, which is normally the day that new games and apps go up on the PlayStation Store. Part 2: Why this could actually be Kojima leading up to the announcement of Silent Hills Shall we go deeper down the rabbit hole? A couple of days ago BLUE BOX Game Studios Twitter account posts a tweet suggesting that “Abandoned” isn’t actually the title of their game. They tease fans to “Guess the name, which begins with an S and ends with an L. This tweet perks up the ears of gaming conspiracy theorists all over the internet rumours start that Gaming’s God Of Mischief himself, Hideo Kojima is in fact behind this account and this title and Abandoned is yet another ruse concocted to lead up to the re-announcement of Silent Hills. The developer panics and quickly back-tracks to shut down any rumours that may have started based on this tweet. This back-pedalling only becomes more frequent over the next day in comment sections etc. This inevitably leads to the Streisand effect taking place and more people across the internet begin to take notice. In a later tweet, the developer refers to “Abandoned” in quotation marks, further suggesting that Abandoned is not the true title of the game. In yet another tweet, they confirm that Abandoned is simply a working title for the project. In another, it is stated that teaser that dropped back in April was only ever intended to be an announcement that the game was in development and that “the game itself has never been shown.” If we look again at the game’s title, the choice to use the word, “Abandoned,” could also be a reference to how Silent Hills and by extension Kojima were abandoned by Konami seven years ago. If this false project is actually an elaborate tease for Kojima Productions to eventually announce that they are in fact returning to work on Silent Hills, then Abandoned would a very apt working title under which to restart development on the game. Are you still with me? Because this is still just the tip of the iceberg. Part 3: You Wanna Get Nuts? Let’s Get Nuts! Strap in Alice, because we are past the point of no return. We shall begin with the logo for BLUE BOX Game Studios. Look familiar? That is because it is pretty much the exact same as the PlayStation Studios logo, right down to the font. Another parallel that can be drawn, is how the

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