Category: DC Comics

DC Comics, Movies7 Comments

How to Get Away with Casting Amanda Waller

Keith Chow

Last night, El Mayimbe of Latino Review broke the news that Viola Davis was in final negotiations to portray Amanda Waller in Warner Brothers’ upcoming Suicide Squad movie. Back when the cast was first announced a few weeks ago, it was reported that the studio was interested in Davis for the role of Amanda Waller — who could play a key Nick Fury-like role in the upcoming DC Cinematic Universe — but reports also had Oprah Winfrey and Octavia Spencer circling the role as well.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television17 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: A Battle He Was Always Going to Lose

Constance Gibbs

WHAT A (MID-SEASON) FINALE!!

There are definitely some parallels to previous mid-season finales: Malcolm Merlyn, a tense battle, a moment of death for Oliver are all running themes in these fall finale episodes. I can’t say it was my favorite though, for a few reasons: I think I knew too much going in. Everyone knows Oliver can’t take Ra’s Al Ghul! And I think Stephen teased at some point (I’ve watched a lot of Stephen Amell Q&As okay?) that the episode might end over a cliff. Also, the other two major focuses of this episode were Laurel and Ray and if you didn’t know my feelings on them before, you’ll find out now, so that also dulled by excitement. BUT overall I am happy with what this episode means for the journey the rest of the season will take.

I have a lot to say about the end and the journey it will lead to, so I’m going to try keep the actual recap portion as short as I can. This episode is merely transition and shirtless ab fights than anything anyway.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television9 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Zoom Zoom Zoom

Christelle G.

The Flash’s mid-season finale has left our minds racing. My thoughts are running around and colliding all over the place like a thousand different speedsters from different centuries battling it out in a football stadium.

The episode opens up BOOM! with Zoom… or “Reverse Flash” as the people in this Flashverse (eventually) call him. This mid-season finale is named “The Man in the Yellow Suit” because we finally get cracking on the storyline they’ve set up from the beginning. The promos leading up to this episode have centered around Barry’s fear and obsession around the man who he believes murdered his mother, Nora. Accurately, we follow Barry this episode as he learns that The Man in Yellow in the Lightning is once again in Central City which, of course, brings up a lot of issues for our superhero.

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DC Comics, Television42 Comments

Color Blindness and the Black Girlfriend: The White Male Superhero’s Ability to Erase Race

Shannon Gibney

I’m not gonna lie: I was excited and a little bit warmed-in-the-heart-place when I saw that Barry Allen, aka The Flash, was in love with Iris West, his best friend, on The CW’s new hit superhero series, The Flash.

Because hey, how many times — in life, art, or entertainment — do we see a young White dude who’s honestly, deeply into a fly, well-rounded, educated Black girl? And not just as a sexual conquest or to “explore,” but as an actual love interest? Not often, that’s for sure.

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DC Comics, Hard N.O.C. Life, Television2 Comments

Flash v Arrow: Dawn of Just Awesomeness

The Nerds of Color

We conclude Flarrow Week at the NOC with our own special crossover featuring our Flash and Arrow recappers Constance Gibbs (@ConStar24) and Christelle Gonzales (@christellexoxo). Together for the first time! Join us to sort out all of your thoughts and feels about your two favorite shows.

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DC Comics, Roundtable, Television

NOCs of the Roundtable: All the Flarrow Feels

The Nerds of Color

Wow. It’s been two days since the epic crossover between The Fastest Man Alive and the Emerald Archer blew up the internet and we are still thinking about it! Even though Christelle and Connie dropped 5,000 words combined on both episodes, we still have more to say. So we reconvened the Roundtable and brought in some of the other Nerds to talk through their Flarrow Feels.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television13 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: A League of Their Own

Constance Gibbs

*Mad props to my awesome Flarrow tag-team buddy Christelle for the subtitle. We are Flarrow. She’s The Flash, I’m Arrow and together we bring you these recaps with precision and speed. It’s our superpower.

The first thing I thought of when preparing for the Arrow portion of the crossover was how would they Flashify the title card? Instead of the arrowhead, we got a beautiful lightning bolt. And so begins the Flash team’s adventure in Starling City! We’ve actually seen all of these characters here before. Barry, obviously in his debut last season, as well as Cisco and Caitlin when they briefly helped Felicity on a case also last season. But it’s our first time seeing them all together like this and It. Was. AMAZING!

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television8 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Rainbows, Sunshine, and Flarrow Feels

Christelle G.

You guys you guys you guys… IT’S HAPPENING. Some have been waiting for this crossover since the announcement this summer, but I, personally, feel like I’ve been waiting since Barry’s first appearance on our screen’s during Arrow’s second season1. And I’ll say what the entire internet is saying about the epic Part 1 of The Flash vs. Arrow crossover: “Holy crap, they did not disappoint.” No seriously, just check all of twitter and tumblr. We’re all going crazy!

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DC Comics, Television3 Comments

Flash vs Arrow: Two Different Hero’s Journeys

Constance Gibbs

The epic The Flash/Arrow crossover (henceforth called #Flarrow) is so close I can taste it!

We’ve been getting teases all week from the actors and the PR teams, and it’s been giving me so much excitement anxiety! Soon we’ll get our OT3s from each show (Oliver/Diggle/Felicity, Barry/Cisco/Caitlin) in the same room, fighting the same villains! There’s so much to dissect concerning group dynamics (Oliver vs Harrison Wells — Oliver will surely find Wells suspicious; Diggle vs four talkative nerds; also: what’s Lyla doing in some of the promo shots?), but as The Flash portion of the crossover is called “Flash vs Arrow,” I wanna take some time to talk about Barry and Oliver and their differences as heroes. This will set the scene for what we’ll see in the episode and show us, perhaps, how each hero makes the other achieve character development over the course of the two episodes.

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DC Comics, Television2 Comments

Constantine: 13 and Done?

Shawn Taylor

I’ve been holding back from talking about NBC’s Constantine because I try (I really do) to honor the effort and vision of media makers. Putting together a comic, film, or a television show is a lot of hard work and I want to respect that. And truth be told, I try to give sci fi and related genres more latitude than I should because I love them so much.  Another reason why I held off for so long is that John Constantine is in my top five favorite comic book characters of the past decade or so, and I wanted to make sure I could be somewhat neutral.

We will NOT be speaking about the 2005 Keanu Reeves joint.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television6 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Fight the Power

Keith Chow

I think I’ve figured out why I love The Flash so much. It goes along with something Christelle mentioned in her recap of Episode 6 last week; namely, that the show is very reminiscent of another CW superhero show. Not Arrow, but Smallville. And last night’s episode, “Power Outage,” was no different. While it took 12 episodes before the Smallville writers stripped Clark of his powers1, The Flash needed only seven before having Barry figure out how to be heroic without being super.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: Shot Through the Heart

Keith Chow

Seven episodes into season three of Arrow and one thing is clear: the universe that is being assembled on The CW is the most consistently entertaining take on DC’s heroes I’ve ever seen in live action1. Coming in to “Draw Back Your Bow,” I was actually expecting it to be one of the weaker ones of the series (and trust me, there were some weak spots, but more on that later) because I didn’t think Cupid — played convincingly by Amy Gumenick — would be a compelling enough villain. But by and large, the quality of the episode was up to par with the rest of the season so far.

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DC Comics, Television2 Comments

Constantine: Blazing Hell with NBC

Eric S.B.

I’m not going to pretend I’m a huge Constantine fanboy. I do remember hearing about the character as a teen. I saw the Keanu Reeves movie version and thought, “So Neo takes out demons too? Whoa. Bogus.” Ah method acting by Professor Reeves. Somebody that knows the comics and is really into it would call me out quickly if I tried to get into it all. I just wanted to briefly mention why the new NBC series starring Matt Ryan is working for me.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television4 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Nerds Rule, Bullies (of Steel) Drool

Christelle G.

I’m going to start by straight up saying that The Flash might end up being my favorite hour-long show on television. Not right now, but some day. This series has so many strengths only six episodes in: a solid feel for its characters (I was a little bit worried about Iris at the beginning, but now she’s getting her spine), a consistently-propelled character arc for the title hero, and continuously impressive (Gorgeous! Beautiful! Mindblowing!) CGI’ed action-sequences perfectly worthy of the art of the comics.

Also, I would like to note that this episode was directed by Millicent Shelton. YAY WOC + SUPERHEROES!

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DC Comics, Movies, Television6 Comments

Warner Brothers, You Have Failed This City

Keith Chow

See, this is why Stephen Amell is my guy.

We make no bones about the fact that we love DC’s CWverse superheroes. Arrow and The Flash have taken up lots of bandwidth on this site, and as each show gets better and better, that isn’t going to change. At the same time, I give a lot of crap to the movie side of DC’s offerings. And that probably isn’t going to change anytime soon either.

Anyway, a shockwave was sent through the interwebs when Oliver Queen himself questioned Warner Brothers’ approach to their DC Cinematic Universe.

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DC Comics, Movies6 Comments

How Many Times Must We See Batman’s Parents Die?

Keith Chow

If you were on the internet yesterday, you might have seen some images from the set of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice leak on to your computer screens. Part of the problem that comes with shooting on location in a real city — as opposed to in front of a blue screen inside a giant soundstage — is that there are real people with real cameraphones lurking around every corner.

BvS:DoJ has had its share of set leaks in the past, and this one isn’t all that revealing, honestly. But for me, it reveals something that I assumed we had moved past in a Batman movie. I won’t reveal anymore until after the cut, but if you’ve read the headline, you’ve already been spoiled. Sorry.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television8 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: Vigilante Soup

Constance Gibbs

I want to go about recap this a little differently this week. We encountered a lot of vigilantes in tonight’s episode, so I’ll talk about them and their story this episode one by one.

But before I get there, BOXING GLOVE ARROW! Wow, they pulled it off! (I feel like Ted Grant’s character was added into the show just to justify Oliver being around boxing gloves…) I think they figured out how to incorporate that move in a great way that the fans really, really enjoyed and didn’t look overly stupid or forced. Kudos to the writers and production staff for that one!

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television7 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Explosive Friendships

Constance Gibbs

Let me start off by saying that The Flash intro is getting too long. We’ve got a minute of “My name is Barry Allen…” PLUS a “Last time on…” I know other shows do this occasionally, Arrow too, but I feel like Arrow’s intro has been streamlined at this point. It certainly feels shorter. So hopefully this — as well as the voice over — becomes less frequent. It’s a bit overdone this TV season, and its sister show, Arrow, nixed it by episode 6 of their first season. It’s also not there every episode (it was notably absent last episode), so either stick with it, or drop it. It’ll probably decrease when the plots of each episode get more complex and they need to shave the intros for time.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television3 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: The Five Year Hacktivist Reunion

Constance Gibbs

Arrow just keeps knowing it out of the park this season! This is the second Oliver-light episode of the season and it hits just as strong as a typical Ollie-centric episode does. Everyone’s been waiting for more information on everyone’s favorite (and I mean everyone) IT girl and we got loads of it tonight. From the appearance of Mama Smoak to Goth Felicity in the flashbacks (and a tease into her imagination — Dominique Ansel apparently didn’t think of cronuts first), we learned more about Felicity in this episode of Arrow than we have in the past three seasons.

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DC Comics, Television

Newest Nerd in the Family Tweeted Gotham and Sleepy Hollow For You

The Nerds of Color

Last night, we welcomed the latest addition to the N.O.C. fam as Connie Gibbs (aka @constar24) took over the NOC twitter handle to join in on the #YungGotham and #SleepyHolla live-tweeting of Fox’s Monday night, nerd-friendly lineup.

We can’t wait to read more of Connie’s posts here at NOC HQ, in the meantime, we’ve singled out some of her tweets that best encapsulate the two hours of live-tweeting that went down Monday night.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television1 Comment

NOC Recaps Arrow: Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Keith Chow

The first four episodes of Arrow season three have been relentless in moving several plot lines forward. Ever since Canary’s shocking demise in the final minutes of the premiere, Team Arrow has been rocked to the core and even last week’s brief diversion to Corto Maltese definitely felt the presence of the dearly departed Sara Lance.

So when Nyssa Al Ghul showed up, bow drawn, in the Arrowcave at the end of last week’s episode, and since “The Magician” was also Arrow’s 50th episode, you knew the other shoe was about to drop.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps The Flash: Where There’s Smoak, There’s Captain Cold

Keith Chow

Four episodes into its debut season, and I’m still waiting for one that I don’t like. With everything last night’s episode had going for it — the debut of Flash’s most iconic nemesis Captain Cold and Felicity Smoak’s long awaited crossover appearance — chances were high that “Going Rogue” was going to be another home run for The CW’s most watched show ever.

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DC Comics, Recaps, Television2 Comments

NOC Recaps Arrow: Training Day

Keith Chow

I can admit when I’m wrong. At the end of last week’s episode of Arrow, when it was revealed that Thea has been training on the island of Corto Maltese1 with her biological father Malcolm Merlyn, I thought the follow-up episode would be a slog to get through.

Fortunately, episode three — titled, fittingly, “Corto Maltese” after the fictional island nation in the DC Universe — was a pretty great hour of television and moved a lot of plotlines forward for what is increasingly looking like an action-packed season of superheroing.

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