Star Wars: Rebels Season 1 Eps 1-3 (TV Show Review)

For me, the start of Disney XD’s Star Wars: Rebels has been bug-ridden. The animations are often poor and the characters are little beyond the typical Disney caricatures and cliches. The hour-long special Spark of Rebellion, following in the wake of several shorts that introduced the various characters, is my first introduction to Disney’s reboot of the Star Wars franchise, and by the looks of it, things look pretty bleak and dire to me. It was a decent special, if we want to stretch the truth out, but the fact is that I just couldn’t go along with it. It was too childish for me.

The first three episodes proper of the show are now out, and I have to say that I noticed almost nothing in the way of improvement from Spark of Rebellion. Stormtroppers still can’t hit worth a damn, making them the most inept army in the history of fiction, ever. Dialogue and characterization is still firmly on the side of clunky. There’s no real story here other than madcap adventures of the characters in question. The third episode ups the quotient a little bit by bringing out the show’s big bad, the Inquisitor, but even that fails to impress as much as it should have.

Grimm Fairy Tales: Realm War #4 (Comics Review)

Among the many things that have happened in the wake of the epochal events of Grimm Fairy Tales #100 and the victory of the Dark Horde over the Realms, we have seen that tensions between the Dark Queen and the Dark One are at their worst. While the former glories in her new-found power and victory, the latter is increasingly relegated to the background and even insulted at every turn as the events of the recently-concluded Inferno: Rings of Hell show. This is the cornerstone of how the events of Realm War are going to play out and it is a most interesting time indeed for GFT fans.

After what happened in Realm War #3, I was very excited to see how the new issue this past week would play out. Robyn up against Britney and Sela? That is Grimmverse gold right there. The mystery of what the Dark Queen did to turn Robyn against the good guys deepens even further in this issue, and we see how it further affects the already-tenuous relationship between Malec and the Dark Queen. And amongst all of this, there is precious little good news for the good news. Joe Brusha’s story and Sami Kivela’s pencils are at their best in this issue, though at times the artwork seemed a little forced.