Image Credit: Everett Collection
As reported exclusively by EW earlier today, Sean Astin has officially joined the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot. When I interviewed Astin, he asserted that Raphael — the red-masked, sai-wielding brother who famously gets along terribly with basically everyone on Earth — is, quote, “Everybody‘s favorite Ninja Turtle…the coolest, no question about it.” This assertion totally blew my mind. When I was a kid, my friends were split in three very distinctive directions when it came to the Turtles: My cool friends who played sports liked Leonardo; my friends who didn’t play sports but considered themselves cool liked Michelangelo; and I liked Donatello, which now that I think about it explains everything I have ever done since childhood. Nobody liked Raphael. But maybe I just didn’t know enough badasses with hearts o’ gold? As part of PopWatch’s ongoing quest to answer all the most important questions in culture via plebiscite (a.k.a. “mob rule”), let’s run through our Turtles essentials and put it to a vote: Who is the coolest Ninja Turtle of them all? READ FULL STORY »
Back when Entourage was still good, the show spent an entire episode brilliantly dissecting the curiously bi-polar phenomenon of Comic-Con. Invented by the lovable lunatic fringe of comic book nerds as a swap meet for true fans, Comic-Con spent most of this past decade slowly transforming into a corporate staging area, overrun by media conglomerates hawking films, TV shows, and videogames with gradually more ill-defined ties to the world of comic books. The Entourage Comic-Con episode aired in mid-2005, but it hasn’t aged a day: Visitors to the San Diego Convention Center this July will be faced with fading C-list TV stars rocking the autograph booth, strippers dressed like Rob Liefeld superheroines, and attractive Hollywood movie stars who will pretend to know about comic books. Well, maybe not so much the last one: According to a report by 
