Mike Long

Contributing writer for The Artifice.

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Actually, I disagree with you. I think Dredd has plenty of flesh on its story thanks to the characters. Heck, who would have known that the stone-faced badass Judge Dredd would ever go through any character development? Judge Anderson’s character arc is pretty solid too.

Dredd, The Raid, and the Power of Formula

Although I think this is a great article, I can’t help but feel bad about the omission of H.R. Giger (R.I.P.) in the description of the Xenomorph. Although the monster wouldn’t have been as great if it weren’t for Stan Winston’s SFX, Giger’s design is what really made it iconic.

Cinema's Greatest Movie Monsters: Slimy and (Occasionally) Sympathetic

While I am a gigantic fan of this show and was very sad upon hearing that it had been cancelled, I don’t think that Season 6 would be particularly good. Season 5 already started to show the cracks and started to crumble upon the departure of Troy.
For me, what made the first three seasons so great was the interplay between the members of the study group. While the show did occasionally give a secondary character a day in the limelight (the third season documentary episode with the Dean comes to mind), the show had a tight focus on the study group.
As season 4 and 5 came around and Pierce and Troy left the show, Community lost some of its magic because of the broken focus. There no longer was the tight-knit study group which led to a much less focused and precise show.

That being said, season 5 does have some jokes that should join the pantheon all-time classic Community gags (namely the Dean’s Pay Day rap and “IT’S A BEAR DANCE!!!!”)

A Look Back on Community: The Little Show That Could

I firmly disagree with your view that ASM is closer to the comics.

My biggest beef with ASM is the travesty that is the new origin story, which completely misses the point of Spider-Man. In the classic origin story (that is more-or-less perfectly retold in the first Raimi Spider-Man), Peter is motivated by guilt (over his role in Uncle Ben’s death) to become Spider-Man, while in ASM, Peter is motivated by revenge and pretty much accidentally stumbled into being a superhero. It is this change that completely torpedoes all claims that ASM is more accurate to the comics.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The Path of Spider-Man: From Sam Raimi's Charm to a Disconnected World

Why? What’s the big problem? Unlike Batman, Spider-Man does not have a set-in-stone no-kill rule. Even then, none of the supervillain deaths (as far as I could remember) were not directly killed by Spider-Man.

Heck, in the first Raimi Spider-Man movie, the Green Goblin is killed in the exact manner he was killed in the comics (albeit with him coming back to life many years later because death is cheap in comics), so you can’t claim that the presence of villain deaths are a foreign concept to the Spider-Man mythos.

The Path of Spider-Man: From Sam Raimi's Charm to a Disconnected World