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Clone of Why Leaders Need Better Perspective, Not More Data written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode  Overview Back from the vault because the AI angle has only gotten sharper since it first ran. John Jantsch talks with leadership expert Cornelia Choe about a concept she calls perspective blindness. Choe explains the common phenomenon of believing you see the whole picture when you’re really only looking at a […]

Clone of Why Leaders Need Better Perspective, Not More Data written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch The Full Episode 

Overview

Back from the vault because the AI angle has only gotten sharper since it first ran. John Jantsch talks with leadership expert Cornelia Choe about a concept she calls perspective blindness. Choe explains the common phenomenon of believing you see the whole picture when you’re really only looking at a slice of it, and how leaders can close that gap.

AI has made data cheap, and that’s a real opportunity when you pair it with good judgment. Choe points to a survey where 39% of CIOs believed their company was ready for change, while only 7% of COOs at those same companies agreed. Gaps like that are fixable once you see them.

If you run a small business, lead an agency, or manage a team through constant change, this conversation gives you a practical way to get everyone looking at the same picture. Choe’s GEM framework walks through exactly how.

Guest Bio

Cornelia Choe is an international leadership expert, global keynote speaker, and Thinkers50 Radar honoree. She’s the founder of The Leaders Alliance and has advised leaders at organizations including the United Nations and the White House. She’s the co-author, with Marshall Goldsmith, of The Panoramic Leader: How Great Leaders See Differently. Choe grew up in 11 different places across three continents by age 18, an experience that shapes her work on mental maps and blind spots in leadership.

Key Takeaways

• AI made information easy to get, but didn’t make judgment easier. More than half of employees using AI don’t verify what it gives them.
• Perspective blindness is believing you see the whole picture when you only see a piece of it.
• Choe’s GEM framework: get up close to people who think differently, establish a trusted relationship over time, map how your view shifts.
• Microtranslations matter: Two leaders can look at the same data and reach opposite conclusions if they never explain their reasoning to each other.
• Outside perspective is one of the fastest ways to spot a blind spot no one inside a company can see.

Great Moments

• [00:02] – John opens with the question driving the episode: what if the thing limiting growth isn’t what you’re doing, but what you can’t see.
• [03:53] – Choe defines perspective blindness and why no leader can track every change happening around them.
• [07:06] – John asks whether perspective blindness even applies to a small business with no board. Choe says it matters more for small teams, not less, since they have to stay nimble and keep close to the market.
• [08:56] – Choe shares her own story of moving from Minnesota to Seoul at age 10 and having to rebuild her entire mental map.
• [16:01] – A case study of a new CEO who nearly quit after conflict with the founder who’d just left the company. A facilitated conversation with another former founder, someone who’d been through the same identity shift, is what turned it around.

Memorable Quotes

• “The problem a lot of leaders have is that when you’re a founder or a CEO, the higher you go in the hierarchy, the less you hear of what people actually think, and you hear more of what people think you want to hear.” — Cornelia Choe
• “What we’re really lacking and losing today is judgment, and it shows up across the board with all employees using AI.” — Cornelia Choe
• “We call this optimistic fear: acknowledging that there is fear and there could be danger, but still using that fear to propel you forward to get close to people who think differently.” — Cornelia Choe
• “Things are changing so quickly that the disruptors are being disrupted, and that’s a hard identity shift, because where you get your pride and your self-worth is from believing you’re the entrepreneur, the founder, the disruptor.” — Cornelia Choe
• “When you get closer to the people around you, even the ones you’re hesitant to approach, you see the situation much clearer, and you’re able to find a lot more solutions.” — Cornelia Choe

Resources

• Cornelia Choe’s website
• The Panoramic Leader (Also on Amazon)
• Talk to an advisor
• Feedback and contact

History has a way of making the past feel much more distant and predictable than it really was. Then you discover one strange detail and suddenly an entire period looks different. A famous president was incapacitated while his wife and doctors effectively managed the government, thousands of people once attended a Nazi rally in New York City, and a desperate military experiment involved attaching bombs to bats. Reddit users were asked which historical facts they thought would genuinely shock people, and the answers produced an incredible collection of strange, unsettling, and surprisingly recent details. These are the kinds of facts that make history feel much closer, stranger, and less predictable.

The post 14 Historical Facts That Would Shock Most People to Learn appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

Movies are the collective work of all parties taking part in the job, from the makeup artist working behind the scenes to the editor making sure a proper finished product arrives on screens. Dialogue, for the most part, is handled by the script writers, but the ones delivering it are actors.

This means that, in a way, the actors on set have the final say on what will be said when. Certain directors allow for more or less improvisation, yet when a line is good enough, it’s kept in. You’d be surprised at how many iconic lines were actually improvised. Here are just a few you might not have heard of.

The post 15 Improvised Lines from Cinema That Had No Business Being That Good appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

Product design is quite the complicated job. You have to keep in mind not only the ease of use of the product, but the readability of how it functions, and the practicality it will have out in the wild. Of course, this isn’t the job of only one person… Well, there are product designers, but there’s also testers and a whole working chain of people before something is released to the public.

This is why we always find it surprising when a strange, poorly designed product is released to the market. How can they have passed every instance of testing, every hand in the company, and not notice the mistakes? Maybe they didn’t care. In any case, here are some poorly designed products for your entertainment.

The post 14 Poor Product Designs Where We Don’t Understand How They Got Off the Drawing Board appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

Movies can reward people who pay attention, especially when filmmakers hide little details that are easy to miss during a first viewing. A background object, a costume choice, a quick line, or something happening in the corner of the frame can quietly reveal information that becomes much more interesting once you know what to look for. Some details were deliberately planted by the filmmakers, while others only become noticeable after repeated viewings. The best examples do not require pausing every five seconds to find them. They are simply sitting there, waiting for someone to notice. Here are fifteen movie details that were hiding in plain sight all along.

The post 14 Hidden Movie Details Seen in Plain Sight appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

Some movie details are so cleverly placed that you can watch a film dozens of times without noticing them, then suddenly spot one tiny thing and never be able to unsee it again. A background detail can change how a scene feels, a repeated visual can reveal something about a character, or one strange little choice can become obvious every time the movie comes back on. These details are especially satisfying because they do not require an elaborate theory or hidden production secret. They are right there on screen, quietly waiting for someone to notice them. Once they register, however, every future viewing comes with an extra little moment to look for.

The post 15 Movie Details That You Notice Once and Keep Noticing Forever appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.

There was something wonderfully excessive about American cars in the 1970s. Big engines, long hoods, aggressive grilles, wild paint jobs, enormous tires, and interiors that could feel more like living rooms than places to sit behind the wheel. Street machines were built to be seen, heard, and enjoyed, often with modifications that made each car feel like a reflection of its owner. The photographs from the era capture a particular kind of car culture that is difficult to recreate today, when these machines were still relatively new and their owners were turning parking lots, streets, and driveways into personal showcases. These rides are snapshots of a very different automotive world.

The post 15 Sweet ’70s Muscle Rides Representing a Different Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Lanterns season 1 episode 1.

The first episode of the HBO series Lanterns has received praise from almost everyone who watched it, from critics to casual fans to many comic book readers. But there’s one group of people who are not happy with the Green Lantern show, particularly what happens in the final moments. It’s not just that fans of Hal Jordan hated that the first episode ended with their hero dead from a bullet in his head. It’s that the series killed Hal after keeping him almost entirely out of costume, unmasked, and only making a few constructs with his ring.

Those fans had a suspicion of whom to blame, a guy who had many times before taken DC Comics characters and reimagined them in wildly different ways in service of an unusual narrative. Those suspicions were confirmed this morning, when showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter, that Tom King came up with the initial hook. “Tom basically had the 30,000-foot view: ‘What if you did Green Lanterns True Detective-ish?,’” he revealed. While some may hate the thought of turning intergalactic space cops into gritty sleuths, King’s unconventional, canon-defying approach may be exactly what the DCU needs to survive.

As we’ve talked about a lot here at Den of Geek recently, Green Lantern is a weird franchise. It’s a series about people across the galaxy chosen to wield powerful rings that allow them to create whatever they can imagine. It’s a strange concept, and one that asks the reader to suspend disbelief. But for those who buy in, Green Lantern is one of the most compelling hero concepts in the DC Universe, one that lends itself to straightforward superhero action, or mind-bending, high-strangeness storytelling, as Al Ewing is demonstrating in the current Absolute Green Lantern series.

Those who buy in are extremely passionate about the concept in the characters. So when Hal Jordan shows up in a panel of the 2018 miniseries Heroes in Crisis and admits, “I don’t even know what the hell ‘will’ is,” fans were furious.

Furious, but unsurprised. Because Heroes in Crisis came from Tom King, a writer who has made his name with audacious stories that often treat canon and prior characterization as optional. His Batman run killed off Alfred, temporarily turned Nightwing into an amnesiac called Ric Grayson, and famously built to a marriage between Catwoman and Batman that never happened. In Strange Adventures, King turned Silver Age adventurer Adam Strange into a lying war criminal, forever hen-pecked by his Lady MacBeth-like wife. Heroes in Crisis may be the worst offender of all, in which the Flash Wally West gets so distraught about losing his family through the latest multiversal reboot that he kills a bunch of his friends, including fellow Teen Titan Arsenal (they got better).

Yet, for all that King angers some fans, he constantly gains the respect of others, largely because he disregards canon in search of big storytelling hooks. King first got widespread attention for his 2015 series Vision at Marvel, in which he reimagined the titular Avenger as a would-be suburbanite trying to live the American Dream. That series downplayed Vision’s heroism and previous connections, including his marriage to Wanda Maximoff, and instead saw him create his own nuclear family of androids. He followed it up with Mister Miracle in 2017, in which the super-escape artist created by Jack Kirby finds himself trapped in depression. The rest of the New Gods made appearances in the story, and although the title character and his wife Big Barda were multifaceted in their portrayal, others—such as the warrior Orion—were one-note and exaggerated.

For the most part, it worked with Vision and Mister Miracle. Not only were they very effective stories, but they took place out of continuity, in their own little world. But when King made the Flash into a madman in Heroes in Crisis or turns Wonder Girl into a glorified babysitter in his current Wonder Woman series, then people get mad. He’s messing with the “real” world.

Which is why King’s participation with Lanterns has been so distressing for some. Lanterns is fully part of the DCU. Not only does it introduce a character John Stewart, who will appear in next year’s Man of Tomorrow, but it may be the way that James Gunn sets up the DCU beyond Earth and perhaps even the origin of evil. It is setting the canon of this new universe, and that’s the last place that some people want Tom King to be in.

And yet, we need look no further than the last major Green Lantern project to see how wrong things can go when adherence to the comics is paramount. Green Lantern (2011) had a script co-written by Geoff Johns, one of the architects of DC Comics at the time, and it included important Lantern characters like Hector Hammond, Parallax, and Sinestro. And yet, it absolutely sucked because it didn’t know how to tell a good story.

Tom King knows how to tell a good story. Or, if he doesn’t, he knows how to borrow from a good story. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow earned accolades by putting the Maid of Might into the Rooster Cogburn role of True Grit. Rorschach had little to say about the grittiest member of the Watchmen, but instead told a compelling meta conspiracy story, complete with shocking cameos by real-world creators like Frank Miller. The very next year, Human Target took the goofy Justice League International and puts them into a hard-boiled detective story, transforming the demure Ice into a proper femme fatale.

To put it another way, Tom King excels at finding recognizable narratives and placing DC Comics characters within them. That’s sometimes tough for those who love the characters (Mike Grell never made Travis Morgan into the dirtbag we saw in Danger Street), but it allows other people to get to know those same characters.

And that’s exactly what the DCU needs right now. Lanterns is grabbing fans because they understand how a True Detective story works, and they’re growing more interested in the Green Lantern lore that exists on the periphery. Supergirl failed, in part, because it abandoned the True Grit structure for a basic superhero story, the type that Gunn had done before and had done better.

As the DCU grows, it needs to take more pages out of Tom King’s book and embrace the experimentation his approach affords. Will we lose some nuances in the process? Absolutely. This writer isn’t ready to reform H.E.A.T., but I’m an old Hal Jordan fan who really wanted to see him do more than just die. But I still have all my old Green Lantern comics and I can read them anytime. By opening the form and worrying less about canon, more people can access the characters and get involved in the stories. And maybe they’ll come to love dearly departed Hal Jordan as much as I do.

Lanterns airs new episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.

The post Lanterns Is a Gamble That DC Needs to Make Again in the Future appeared first on Den of Geek.