Geekly Roundup, March 22nd: Crisis On Infinite Reboots Edition

Welcome back to the Geekly Roundup, your source of all the fun, interesting, and poignant news we’ve collected that didn’t make it into an article this week!  We've got world-famous D&D sessions, World-Wide-Web tributes to a beloved author, underrepresentation in urban fantasy, and more.

This week on the Geekly Roundup Podcast, Mark, Mike, and Ben discuss the lack of a Dredd sequel, Tommy Wiseau and James Franco, and tackle the delicate topic of rebooting comic characters in an excellent discussion that we hope you enjoy as much as we did!




 Dredd will not receive a sequel

Despite being a hit with fans and achieving a certain cult status — right down to inspiring a music video meant specifically to encourage a studio to make Dredd II — it appears there are, unequivocally, no plans to revisit the version of Judge Dredd depicted by Karl Urban, as the AV Club tells us.

 Marvel’s Secret Wars to bring an end to thirty-three titles

Company-wide events and major reboots are always a hot topic for discussion, and this one is no different; Hollywood Reporter brings us some news on the directions being taken by different series as Marvel transitions over to its new “Battleworld”. Some great discussion of — and theories about — the Secret Wars event made it into the podcast this week.

 Terry Pratchett lives on in ‘the clacks’

The Internet has shied away from neither its love for Terry Pratchett nor its appreciation of his depictions of Death and humanity in the wake of the author’s passing; a quickly-spreading tribute is the use of a simple, under-the-hood tag in HTML adding Pratchett’s name to any number of webpages surreptitiously, resembling messages passing up and down the ‘clacks’ of Pratchett’s iconic Discworld. No one is truly dead so long as their name is spoken.

 Remembering Robotech

An excellent piece from Blastr on the introduction of serialized anime to America, and the ways in which the disparate shows Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada were turned into one of the best-remembered stories on air for children of the 80s and a franchise that still occasionally sees new content even today.

 Urban Fantasy’s Worst Taboo

A strong point from io9 that explains the hardest character to have helm your science-fiction novel: the older, female protagonist. Harry Connolly decided that despite the ‘conventional wisdom’ that an older female can’t carry a sci-fi book, he would write his new novel A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark around just such a character.

 Designing Star Trek’s Defiant

An amazing look inside the Defiant-class starship from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the process behind the scenes that led to the small, snub-nosed warship’s eventual final design.

 How D&D inspired a worldwide anime phenomenon

When the first licensed translations of Dungeons & Dragons hit Japanese shores, one small group endeavored to play it themselves — with their adventures chronicled for thousands to read in a magazine called Comptiq. Those D&D adventures later grew into a massive franchise spanning anime, manga, novels, and video games that was one of several hugely popular series as anime first made its way to America. Its name? Record of Lodoss War.

Also Around the Internet:

Tommy Wiseau’s AMA (Reddit)

The six stages of David Tennant’s visit to Marvel (Radio Times)

It’s the end of the road for Internet Explorer (Slate)

Irwin Hasen, creator of Wildcat and Dondi, dies at 96 (Comic Book Resources)

Kevin Kline, Alan Menken join live-action Beauty and the Beast (Oh My Disney)

A&E Remaking Let the Right One In (Hollywood Reporter)

Fox recasts the female lead for Lucifer (Newsarama)

Joseph Gordon-Levitt to star in live-action Fraggle Rock (Comicbook.com)

Girlfriend forces fan to sell 16-foot Imperial Walker (Epicstream)

Previews of upcoming Monster High figures (MH Insider/Tumblr)

Star Trek: The Next Generation joins Family Guy: The Quest For Stuff (IGN)

Order your own Jem and the Holograms Design Credit Card (Order page)

Costumed ‘Darth Vader’ robs a North Carolina Bank at gunpoint (Epicstream)

Synopsis and start date for Captain America: Civil War (Comicbook.com)

Has one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles been killed off? (Comicbook.com)

That’s it for this week’s Geekly Roundup — join us Sundays as we collect all the news that was almost fit to print this week and be sure to check out our companion Geekly Roundup Podcast! Something you’d like to see more of in the Roundup? Leave us a comment or get in touch!

The Geekly Roundup is a weekly Ace of Geeks feature that brings together all the interesting things we've encountered across the Internet this week.  The Geekly Roundup podcast this week features Mike Fatum, Mark Foo, and Ben Fried-Lee.

Contributions for this week's Roundup were submitted by MalKontent, Ben, Stephanie, Mike, and Ellie.