Whether you're buying for loved ones, loathed ones, ones you barely know but feel an obligation to get something something for or yourself, it's hard to go wrong with a well-chosen toy as a gift. But it's hard to know just what toys you should be looking at, which is where we come in; we've split our choices into three categories: Play, Display and Making Your Life Better, which is to say things that are useful (or, in one case, useless but kind of essential nonetheless). Click through to see our selections.

For Play
LEGO, action figures and things for you to hit other people with safely. After all, isn't that what "play" really means?

For Display
For some people, toys are things to keep on shelves, on their walls or in boxes. Here're a few ideas for the serious collector.

For Making Your (Or Someone Else's) Life Better
In which we suggest gifts offering education, amusement and/or something to hold onto at night. Yes, even that last one.

Additional research by Alex Eichler.

Go Hero Limited Edition Raygun
Of course, if you're thinking a little more retro, this limited edition Buck Rogers raygun might catch your eye. And why not? It's beautifully designed by Dead Presidents' Matt Walker, and comes in a beautifully packaged wooden box for extra old-school thrills. There's even a certificate of authenticity to prove that you owe one of only 25 made.

World War Robot Figurines
Ashley Wood's grimepunk series was tailormade for toys, as this set of 6.5 inch figures of warrior robots prove. Everytime we see these deadly oilcans with legs and guns, we want more and thankfully, they're happy to oblige.

Watchmen Be@rbrick
What says "I bought into the hype" more than this sloganeering piece of Watchmen merchandise, ideal for those who enjoyed the Zack Snyder movie, those who thought the movie was a letdown but liked the original comic, or those who just like examples of really, really boldly obvious branding on bear-shaped toys? Surely we all know someone in all three demographics.

Adult Swim Figurines
Until the day when the toy world wises up and realizes that we all need a line of fully-posible Venture Bros. action figures, complete with accessories (Brock can have a pack of cigarettes! Dr. Orpheus can have a magic book! Rusty can have the crushing sense of self-loathing that he can blame on his over-achieving father!), we'll have to settle for these admittedly wonderful figures from various Adult Swim shows; they're boxed anonymously, so there's no telling which one you'll get when you buy it, so you should probably just buy all the boxes you can in hopes of getting that sweet Dr. Girlfriend one.

I was thinking about this the other day, when I was watching Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II TV movie. I was wondering why this post-apocalyptic story of tyrannical dominatrices and mutants was less interesting than Star Trek, and I couldn't escape the conclusion: Genesis II was less interesting because it was less fun — and especially less escapist. Instead of cool people on an awesome spaceship packed with fantastic toys, like Communicators and Tricorders, you had a guy trapped in Planet Of The Apes without any apes. And with an extra helping of Roddenberry's signature preachiness.

And I started thinking about escapism, and why we tend to look down on it. We have a bias — myself included, on occasion — against works that allow people to burst out of the bonds of unpleasant reality. They're automatically less smart or interesting than works which seek to confront you with the real world's unpleasantness, to impress on you how unsavory our world really is.

Escapism is the candy-coated pill, the sedative designed to lull you away from realizing quite how messed up things are — and how much culpability you, as a no-doubt middle-class person, have for the situation. Escapism is opium, soma.

The distinction between escapist and "realist" fiction isn't even a matter of utopian versus dystopian narratives — after all, much escapist fiction is dystopian, and plenty of realistic fiction has an utopian impulse at its core. But when movies or books depict someone escaping from the world's unpleantness, or just offer a vision which allows the watcher or reader to escape through their imagination, then we deplore the cowardice of anyone who seeks to run away from their problems in this way. Most of all, escapism is inherently just not serious.

Escapism: pulpy and tacky

Ursula K. Le Guin makes the case against escapism very potently in her essay "Escape Routes," gathered in the collection The Language Of The Night: Essays On Fantasy And Science Fiction:

What if we're escaping from a complex, uncertain, frightening world of death and taxes into a nice simple cozy place where heroes don't have to pay taxes, where death happens only to villains, where Science, plus Free Enterprise, plus the Galactic Fleet in black and silver uniforms, can solve all problems, where human suffering is something that can be cured — like scurvy? This is no escape from the phony. This is an escape into the phony. This doesn't take us in the direction of the great myths and legends, which is always towards an intensification of the mystery of the real. This takes us the other way, toward a rejection of reality, in fact toward madness: infantile regression or paranoid delusion, or schizoid insulation. The movement is retrograde, autistic. We have escaped by locking ourselves in jail.

And inside the padded cell people say, Gee wow have you read the latest Belch the Barbarian story? It's the greatest.

They don't care if nobody outside is listening. They don't want to know there is an outside.

Because the most famous works of SF are socially and culturally speculative, the field has got a reputation for being inherently "relevant." Accused of escapism, it defends itself by pointing to Wells, Orwell, Huxley, Capek, Stapeldon, Zamyatin. But that won't wash: not for us. Not one of those writers was an American. My feeling is that American SF, while riding on the tradition of great European works, still clings to the pulp tradition of escapism.

That's overstated, and perhaps unfair. Recent American SF has been full of stories tackling totalitarianism, nationalism, overpopulation, pollution, prejudice, racism, sexism, militarism, and so on: all of the "relevant" problems.

She was writing this back in the 1970s, so the specific accusations about SF are outdated. But as a summation of the "escapism is childish and not literary" viewpoint, it's pretty much perfect. And as you can tell, a big part of the hatred for escapism comes from a desire to be literary, and to be taken seriously by the upper echelons of the (supposedly monolithic) literary world. Writing in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction in 1976, Barry N. Maltzberg raged that the literary/cultural establishment "either does not know we exist or patronizes us as pulp hacks for escapist kids."

One more quote. In his book On SF, Thomas M. Disch characterizes escapism as a "security blanket," and adds:

There are times when all of us would rather flee our problems than confront them head-on with the heightened awareness that genuine art forces on us. For such times, nothing will serve but escapism.

He goes on to say that certain trashy SF authors are as bad as Star Trek or Magnum P.I. (even though the latter show constantly bombarded us with Magnum's Vietnam War flashbacks.)

If you read these quotes carefully, a few things jump out at you. First of all, there's the equation of escapism with "pulp" traditions — which was obviously a big deal for authors like Le Guin and Maltzberg, who were trying to escape (sorry!) from the "pulp" label and prove that they deserved a higher grade of paper stock. And then there's the idea that escapism prevents your SF from being "relevant" or commenting on real-world issues — when, in fact, the most escapist narratives are often the most topical. (Just watch the original Star Trek.) There's the idea, which was way more prevalent in the 1970s, that explicit social commentary automatically made your work better or smarter.

There's also a certain feeling of disapproval, even dismay, that people are having too much fun. If I hadn't read tons of books by Le Guin and Disch, and discovered first hand how enjoyable (and frequently, how escapist) their work can be, I would think both authors wrote dry Socialist Realist works, in which their protagonists were born and died in the same gutter.

There has been a move to re-embrace escapism in recent years — Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay was about the fictional creation of a Golden Age superhero who was actually called The Escapist. And Chabon shows us exactly how The Escapist's real-world origins reflected the political and social trends of the 1930s and early 1940s, and how much his adventures reflect the struggles and traumas Sammy and Joey are going through in their real lives — everything from Sammy's secret homosexuality to Clay's family trapped in Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe becomes part of the secret backstory of the Escapist and the League of the Golden Key. In Chabon's novel, backstory is the story — when you try to strip the League of the Golden Key and the other details from the Escapist's origin, you chip away at what makes the Escapist who he is, and the reasons why he does what he does.

It's no coincidence, of course, that Chabon has also been a champion of bringing the pulps back into the sphere of the literary — he edited two anthologies of mock-pulp science fiction stories for McSweeney's a few years ago, chock full of literary and genre superstars doing pastiches and homages to the plot-heavy stories of the past. Authors like Chabon and Dave Eggers are able to celebrate the pulpy and retro in a way that Maltzberg never could back in the 1970s, because they're already assured of their literary status, and need not fear being marginalized. (And meanwhile, the "new space opera" and posthuman SF novels that throng on our shelves are the very picture of escapism, with their heroes who live for zillions of years and can port themselves into new customized bodies whenever they feel like it.)

But in any case, we're now far enough from the pulp era that the "pulpy" label has lost much of its sting, even as unabashedly pulpy urban fantasy heroines in tight pleather pants are eating science fiction's market share for lunch. So maybe it really is time to reclaim the word "escapism" and transform it into a paean to works that liberate and illuminate us.

A theory of escapist art

So I promised you an explanation of why escapism is the highest form of art — and yes, there may be a slight amount of hyperbole involved there. At the same time, escapism has given us some of our greatest speculative art works, and has the potential to spawn even greater ones in the future, if we recognize it for what it is.

First of all, let's dispose of this false dichotomy between "escapism" and "realism." Neither of those things is ever entirely pure, and each always contains elements of the other. Any time you have a flight of fancy, or a grace note, or an elivening metaphor, in a "realist" work, you are engaging in escapism. Because whenever you invoke the imagination, or suggest another world (made out of thought, or images) beyond your protagonist's "real" world, you're allowing the reader a brief escape. And in fact, if you look at "real life," some of our "realest" experiences involve escape.

Think about that old literary standby, the "coming of age" narrative — it is the most pure escapist story you can have, even if it doesn't always have a happy ending. (More on happy endings later.) The "coming of age" tale is about someone outgrowing his or her childhood, and casting off the stifling restrictions of parents, school and conformist expectations. It is a story about reaching escape velocity, and bursting out of childhood's gravity well. This is never a tidy process in real life, nor is it often in literature. But it's the original escapist tale, and in many ways, it's the template on which all other escapist tales build.

The reverse is also true — escapist elements don't automatically make a work less realistic. Just as the "coming of age" story is about escape in the "real" world, it's more than possible to tell a realistic story about a world that repesents an escape from our reality. We've all accepted, by now, that you can tell a realistic story about that ultimate avatar of escapism, Batman. (Batman is in many ways a more escapist figure than Superman, because Batman is just like us — except that his amazing training and gadgets turn him into an unstoppable force.) Look at Paul Pope's amazing, stark graphic novel Batman: Year 100. And if you want SF that comments on real-world issues, it's hard to get more topical than the first few seasons of the Battlestar Galactica remake.

And that leads to another point — escapism can be incredibly dark. I said earlier that many escapist works are dystopian, and it's clearly true. The "last survivors of a post-apocalyptic world" story is full of escapism — for one thing, you're one of the chosen few, and you're incredibly special and wonderful as a result. You no longer have to pay taxes (like Le Guin's heroes), and you live in a world where the worst has already happened. And many escapist films are show someone escaping from an incredibly dark world, even if it's only through the power of the imagination. Think of Guillermo Del Toro's beautiful Pan's Labyrinth, which is at its core a work about the escape into fantasy. Even if both the real world and the fantasy are dark and disturbing. Or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which takes place in a dystopian world and shows us Sam Lowry's flights of the imagination as well as his attempts to escape in real life. Did I mention that escapist works don't have to have happy endings?

At the same time, who says that realism is the best thing a literary work can aspire to? It really is true, as many SF writers have said lately, that we live in a world that's changing so quickly, that any attempt at pure realism will become historicism instead. And then there's the subjective nature of "reality." But most of all, realism is like art that attempts to be purely representational: it can't show any deeper reality beneath the surface, nor can it reflect all of the stuff that's happening just beyond the frame of our perceptions. We've all lived through historical moments where a new meme or phenomenon seemed to "come out of nowhere," only to look inevitable in retrospect, once we see all of the early indicators that we ignored at the time, because they were outside of the narrative we were telling ourselves about "reality."

If the goal of a literary work (and remember, "literary" is not synonymous with "good." More on that here) is to reflect "reality," then "realism" is one tool among many for doing so. And escapism is another.

I already suggested, above, that metaphors are inherently escapist because they take us away from the strict view of what the thing "is." And the reverse is also true: escapism is a metaphor. TV shows like Lost In Space and Star Trek are so transparently metaphors for the hopes and fears of the Space Age that it's impossible to watch them now without thinking about what people were living through at the time. You get as revealing a mirror into the Space Age, Cold-War psyche from Star Trek as you do, say, from John Updike's Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux. The stuff Star Trek tries to say about the politics of the 1960s is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the stuff that it says without meaning to, about Manifest Destiny and the post-colonial project of redeeming the Third World.

We tend to think of escapism as a childish impulse, but that's by no means always true — like Brazil, or The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, many great escapist works are about adults, who are trapped as only adults can be, in prisons partly of their own making, and look for a way out.

Escapism also shows what we're trying to escape from — this seems like an obvious point, but it's one that often seems to be overlooked. This changes over time, and also varies from creator to creator. Some escapist works are concerned about breaking out of a totalitarian, oppressive state, others are more concerned with running away from middle-class American life. There's escapism from war, from conformity, from individualism, from failure, from success. Whether or not an escapist work explicitly shows us what we're escaping, it's still always there, revealed by what the escapist elements aren't. Escapism always reveals what we're escaping, and serves as a mirror of whatever the artist (or corporate overlord, as the case may be) views as the most horrendous elements of current reality. It's convex where dire reality is concave, like a plaster cast mold. If your goal is to get the clearest possible picture of "reality," looking at that reflection may be your best shot.

And yes, escapist entertainment does reflect the era that spawned it. The Space Age gave us lots and lots of space heroes, but today's escapist avatars are much more likely to be superheroes — who existed during the Space Age, but were much more confined to comics and the occasional weak TV series. Actually, thinking about it some more, our most escapist works currently seem to fall neatly into three categories: superheroes, vampires and post-apocalyptic survivors. All of whom share a few categories that seem emblematic of our times: they're individualistic, they're special, and they're often at odds with a world that doesn't understand how special and great they are. In other words, they're the perfect heroes for a time when we're no longer involved in a collossal economic struggle like the Cold War, but instead are facing a crumbling middle class and a number of insoluble global struggles, in North Korea, Iraq and Iran, among others. Escapism illuminates our times.

Escapism also does go hand in hand with the epic, the same impulse to celebrate great heroes that gave us the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Returning to the Le Guin quote, it strikes me that what she's describing as escapism is actually better described as "weak story-telling." Stories in which there are no consequences, in which the choices are easy and the heroes always right, aren't escapist — they're just bad.

If escapism is frequently tawdry and dull — if our culture gives us Transformers 2 instead of Superman II — blame the creators, don't blame escapism itself. In fact, holding a low opinion of escapism (and saying things like "It's just a movie about explosions and robots, don't expect too much from it") lets the Michael Bays of this world off the hook too easily.

Let's give the last word to C.S. Lewis, who's quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as having once said, "Who are the people who are most opposed to escapism? Jailors!"

1950s and 1960s:
Space vessel design in the actual Space Age tends to involve either sleek rockets or funny flying saucers — until Star Trek comes along, with the U.S.S. Enterprise's weird mix of saucer and rocket-like nacelles, bonded to a tuber shaped main section. Not to mention the fierceness of the Romulan warbird and the gun-like Klingon warships. Model design is already starting to change drastically:

1968 to 1977:

And then with 2001: A Space Odyssey, you start seeing more rugged, lived-in-looking ships, with weirder shapes, like the probe's long neck and rounded front. And ships start having more bumpy weird bits. This trend only continues with Space: 1999's squat Eagles, which look like they could survive anything (even blowing up multiple times) but aren't as elegant as an old-school rocket.

1977 to 1986:

And then Star Wars comes along, with its awesome space dogfights, and suddenly, hugeness and imposing scope are a must. It's no accident that later iterations of the U.S.S. Enterprise are way huger than the 1960s original. The crazy shapes of the T.I.E. fighters and other craft inspire some other weird models in things like The Black Hole. And the X-Wing fighters inspire everything from Buck Rogers' fighter ship to the Last Star Fighter's vessel.

1987 to 1997:

Star Trek: The Next Generation saw in a whole new era of space opera, but the main thing that changed in the late 1980s was the rise of CG effects, allowing spaceships to look much more diverse and weirder than models ever could. From the Borg cube to the many bizarre shapes of vessels in Babylon 5, starships no longer had to look like a few pieces stuck together.

1998 to present:

I can't think of one defining franchise of the past decade that has shaped how we view space opera the same way these earlier franchises did. Star Trek has kept innovating, but so have BSG, Farscape, Stargate and a number of others. CG has gotten a lot smoother and ships can move in much more natural, organic ways — just look at the Narada, to bring us back to our first example. At the same time, as nostalgia has reigned the genre, we've come full circle and resurrected a lot of classic designs, with a few tweaks.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

In many ways, Buck feels like a mixture of the ill-fated 2007 Flash Gordon SciFi Channel series and Geoff Johns' Green Lantern reboot for DC Comics - and not just because it's about halfway less successful than GL and more successful than Flash. Like Flash, it tries its best to update the classic concept as quickly as possible in order to get to the action that everyone's expecting but, in doing so, reduces almost every character involved to cyphers that it's hard to sympathize with, in situations that aren't entirely clear and feel more like the result of a writer trying to make everything seem exciting and eventful from the word go than anything convincing or organic. Not the best start to a story, really.

And yet, there's something about Scott Beatty's Anthony "Buck" Rogers - the nickname comes from his bucking authority, we're told - that appeals, despite the flatness that surrounds him in the 21st century; he's written, pretty much, as the same anti-authority hero (and, to an extent, macho jerk) that has been a science fiction staple since Harrison Ford first talked about how fast his starship was, and making him a pilot brings to mind Johns' Hal Jordan very quickly. It's not a bad idea, and helps the contemporary scenes pass relatively painlessly. Even if he isn't any more fleshed out than anyone else around him, he still seems more... exciting, perhaps? more interesting, at least, and someone we're willing to follow around for awhile.

The story really becomes interesting as Buck ends up in the future, but again, that's not because of the characterization. No, this time it's the laser-toting cyborg bears that make things ridiculous enough to be entertaining, and mysterious enough to keep reading. Although we don't learn why they have lasers or who or what made them cyborgs by the end of the issue - although we do learn that they can talk, of course - the very fact of their existence suggests enough of a sense of humor that's been lacking in the rest of the issue that bodes well for future stories.

Deciding to stay on with Buck as he discovers more of the 26th century is, at this point, as much an act of faith as anything else; faith in writer Scott Beatty and artist Carlos Rafael, but also in publisher Dynamite Entertainment. And it's that last one that is the most powerful, perhaps - Dynamite have managed to successfully breathe new life into The Lone Ranger and Zorro, so why not Buck? He may seem quaint and old-fashioned in this day and age, but that's not necessarily a drawback: he's always been a man out of time, after all.

Buck Rogers #1 is available now.

Dipping our collective toes into the cross-media area of the pool for awhile, Doctor Who: Autopia is a new one-off story to keep you in the Who mood while you're waiting for The Waters of Mars. Also, Joss Whedon's Runaways run gets a cheap ($9.99 for six issues!) collection as Runaways: Dead End Kids Digest.

If you're looking for a new take on old science fiction tropes, the second series of Warren Ellis' Anna Mercury launches with a different look at the multiverse. And Marc Guggenheim's Resurrection also launches a second series, letting you return to an Earth post-alien invasion, where no-one is quite sure what kind of world they're living in any more.

For those needing their superhero fix, DC's Red Robin takes Tim Drake - the former Robin - off around the world as he tries to prove that Bruce Wayne isn't as dead as many people think he is. (Go, Tim! But you may need a time machine before you're finished!) And you can find out Bruce's true fate in the hardcover collection of Final Crisis (and pick up some other stories from the same era in the Final Crisis Companion coming out the same day).

Marvel, meanwhile, are indulging a Chris Claremont jones, with the X-Men: The End Trilogy collection of Claremont's 18-issue finale to the franchise. (Be warned: He spun another series out of it, so it's not a final finale.) There's also the first issue of X-Men Forever, a new series that lets Claremont pretend that he never stopped writing the characters in 1991, by ignoring every story that came afterwards. If you'd like something less wordy and more bloody, Christos Gage's Absolution offers up another take on the "When a superhero crosses the moral line and decides that doing so was kind of fun" story.

But let's face it; everything else this week may pale beside the release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan #1, a movie adaptation 27 years in the making (Yes, the movie was that long ago); IDW, realizing that STII was the one movie that had never been made into a comic, have finally fulfilled someone's dreams and offered a chance to see Spock die again.

But if you'd rather watch something come back to life, Dynamite's Buck Rogers #1 brings back the classic pulp hero for an all-new audience, offering space thrills and even some spills along the way. But sadly, no Twiki.

All of these books - and many more, as evidenced in this week's shipping list - can be found at your local comic store, which can be found using the Comic Shop Locator. Just do us a favor and spend a quiet moment when ringing up your week's purchases for the loss of Buck's annoying metallic friend. Bidi bidi bye, old buddy.

The worst space operas are not just campy or silly. They're idiotic and braindead. They're so intent on cramming the cliches of Westerns or adventure serials into an outer-space setting that they not only leave behind even the most basic space science, they actually strip the danger and excitement out of space travel itself. They're usually derivative of better works, and have little undigested chunks of pilfered greatness floating around... like a debris field.

So here are the dumbest space operas of all time, according to us:

Battlestar Galactica (original series.) Sorry. Ron Moore pretty much summed it up when he explained why this version of BSG had so much wasted potential: You have the destruction of an entire civilization in the first episode, and then in the second episode they go to the casino planet and par-tay. Plus the dorky helmets. And the daggit. And Boxey. To be fair, though, this wasn't the dumbest space opera Glen Larson gave us. That honor must go to...

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. Oh man. We rushed out and bought this on DVD as soon as it came out. And it is just unbelievably atrocious. Like the original BSG, it features a post-apocalyptic setting... which is forgotten right after the first episode. There's Twiki the penis-headed robot, who goes around getting into one hilarious scrap after another, and Princess Ardala, who's always trying to collar the tight-pantsed Buck so he will be her husband/boy-bitch. But mostly, this show is known for its amazing disco set pieces, including this bizarre rock band, Andromeda:

Guardians Of The Galaxy (the original comics). Marvel Comics' answer (sort of) to the Legion of Superheroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy charted the adventures of Vance Astro, who spent 1000 years in suspended animation before arriving at Alpha Centauri and realizing that humans had long since discovered faster-than-light travel. In the mean time, Earth has been invaded, first by Martians and then by the cruel Badoon. So Astro gathers a team of interplanetary misfits to free the Earth. In a typical later storyline, they find Wolverine's metal skeleton still intact (even though Wolverine is long dead) and Wolverine's great-great-granddaughter fights Doctor Doom for it. But Doctor Doom can control the metal skeleton with his mind. Snikkt!

Starslayer. I'm tempted just to say "look at the cover." But if you want more info, here goes. He's a Celtic barbarian, who's about to die in the distant past, but then his wife's descendant, in the distant future, summons him forward in time. Where he frees Earth from some alien invaders, reignites our sun, becomes a space pirate, and then dedicates a black hole to a Celtic goddess. Or something. Oh, just look at the picture.

Warlock. Another weird comic book hero. He's artificially created, his face is so radiant that only blind sculptor Alicia Masters can sculpt it into a human likeness. He gets hold of the Soul Gem, which sounds like the name of a mid-1970s R&B band, and goes around the universe fighting Thanos.

Space: 1999. Okay, I'm fully prepared for some pushback on this one. But even though I love this show, think about it for five seconds. The Moon is blasted away from the Earth at such high speeds that it visits a different planet every week. And somehow this doesn't kill everyone on the Moon, because of their protective Moonbase. Okay. Even though the Moon is hurtling through space at speeds much faster than the speed of light. Also, just how many Eagles do they have? And every planet is like a sillly horror movie or a crazy mind-trip. And then there was the crazy-browed shapeshifter.

The legion of Star Wars ripoffs. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Star Wars' success, a huge wave of incredibly vapid Wars knock-offs flooded theaters, from all over the world. (And we've presented many of them in our regular "found footage" feature.) There were the Italian Star Wars knockoffs, like The Humanoid, Star Odyssey, War Of The Robots and many others. You had your Japanese knock-offs, like Message From Space. There were animated Star Wars fakes, like Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin. And don't forget Galaxina. And of course, Turkish Star Wars. These knockoffs all have one thing in common: they borrow from the trappings of Star Wars, and completely skip over what made the original movie great. It's like a generation of B-movie directors watched only the Star Wars Holiday Special, snorted a mountain of cocaine and crushed Dilaudid, and then fired up the cameras!

Here's the whole thing of War Of The Robots in just ten minutes:

Cosmos: War Of The Planets. This Italian space opera, which came out around the same time as Star Wars, is just sort of brain-dead, with very little direction or originality. Our heroes drift through set-pieces ripped off from 2001 and Barbarella, before coming to a planet ruled by an evil computer. Which they overthrow, of course. It's all thanks to the positive power of red headgear with funny ear-circles. The whole movie is public domain and you can watch the whole thing (if you really want to) online.

Battle Beyond The Stars. It's Roger Corman's space opera, which is really all you need to know. Oh, there's an evil overlord, Sador, and he's going to destory a planet unless they submit to him utterly. And only one plucky young hero (and eventually, his girlfriend) dare to stand up to Sador, stealing an old spaceship and going off to hire some mercenaries to help. Actually, all you really need to know is that there's a spaceship-shooting babe with a ridiculous boob window:

Event Horizon. They travel to the aid of a long-lost spaceship, which turns out to have punched a hole into a universe of pure oatmeal... sorry, I meant pure chaos and pure evil. Not oatmeal, because a universe of pure oatmeal would make no sense whatsoever. Unlike a universe of pure evil, which makes perfect sense. Anyway, it makes them have wacky head trips. Mmmm... Oatmeal...

Supernova: I have to admit, any movie that features James Spader traveling through space naked can't be all bad... but the rest of it? Ugh. There's an alien artifact and a giant star that's about to (you guessed it) go supernova... and everything is messed up, until Spader gets naked again. Why can't he just always be naked?

Solaris (remake). We loved the original Tarkovsky film, but the Soderbergh remake? Just sort of navel-gazey and pointless, with just a few too many trippy moments for trippiness' sake. George Clooney explains it best in this video: "Uh, all sorts of strange things start happening."

Captain Eager. A recent direct-to-DVD British movie about an old space hero who comes out of retirement to save the day one more time, this film sort of rides the line between pastiche, homage and copy, trying to channel Dan Dare and falling a bit flat in the process. Although Tamsin Grieg is great, as always. And we love Scamp the Rocket Dog. Here's the trailer:

The issue starts right in with an unconscious Buck Rogers being held captive by the aforementioned giant alien amoebas, the Ganymedians from (you guessed it) Ganymede. They're planning to absorb (ie, eat) him, but as it turns out, Buck was only playing dead, because it seems that, much like Chuck Norris, he doesn't sleep; he waits.

As it turns out, Commander Deering and a blond woman named Wynona (who may have briefly suggested that she's Buck's daughter, but don't quote me on that) are monitoring the mission, having sent Buck in as what he describes as "our 'Hail Mary' passage." And this blond, blue-eyed, five-o'-clock-shadowed Hail Mary goes in, guns blazing and fists flying. His internal monologue is a little John Wayne, a little John McClane, and a whole lot 21st century guy playing space cowboy four hundred years in his own future. It's exactly what you expect and it somehow fits the whole fighting lime-green blobs situation Buck's gotten himself into.

This situation, however, seems to be the sort that requires a bit of self-sacrifice on Buck's part, and we're left wondering if he's all right or not. Although, because I notice I've compared him to Chuck Norris, John Wayne, John McClane, all in the span of two paragraphs, I'm pretty much betting that he'll be all right.

Then again, the issue does end with: "This is The End . . . But for the Thrilling Beginning, Read Buck Rogers #1!" Good bit of advice. And if you're looking for the sort of alien-punching, cowboy-talking Buck Rogers action that this issue promises in the comics to come, I'd recommend giving it a look.

Written by Scott Beatty, art by Carlos Rafael. Color by Carlos Lopez. Buck Rogers #0 is on sale now.

Quite what those giant slugs and weird amoeba-like things Buck is fighting are, I'm not sure, but at only a quarter, it won't cost you too much to find out.

Buck Rogers #0 is released today.

Actually, there's a pretty movie-centric feel to most of this week's new launches or noteworthy titles; even the non-obvious ones (Detective Comics #853 is finally released, only two months late, finishing up the Neil Gaiman two-part storyline "Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?") have some kind of cross-media connection (It's Batman).

Admittedly, you may have to squint to see that connection with Marvel's new series Skrull Kill Krew, but come on; alien invaders and biker gangs. That's got to have been a movie at some time, right?

Marvel's also launching Fantastic Force, a spin-off from Fantastic Four written by Doctor Who director Joe Aherne. And Marvel is making up for Gambit Classic Volume 1 - I swear, that title is taunting me by including the word "Classic" - by also releasing collections of Warren Ellis' short Wolverine run as Wolverine: Not Dead Yet and the first volume of the enjoyable-if-blindingly-colored Spider-Man 2099, which introduces you to the Spider-Man of the future. And if you're rich, there's a hardcover omnibus of the first 31 issues of the original X-Men run, for "just" $99.99.

But for the most part, the releases you'll want to look out for are all tied into nostalgia and TV or movies; Dark Horse's wonderful Star Wars: Dark Times series returns, with the first part of Blue Harvest (I'll allow you a moment to get over the geeky perfection of the title), while Boom! Studios has Farscape Script Book, letting fans see Rockne S. O'Bannon's original script and plans for the comic continuation of the beloved TV show.

IDW go for the gold with two collections - GI Joe: The Best of Larry Hama (celebrating the comic writer who shaped the franchise so much during the '80s) and Terminator Salvation: The Movie Prequel, letting you see just what made Christian Bale's John Connor so screwed up (Clue: Everything in his life up until that point).

Dynamite Entertainment, meanwhile, are putting out a collection of the unlikely Army of Darkness/Xena Warrior Princess crossover series, as well as their Battlestar Galactica: Adama flashback book (And, finally, the Final Five comic that was supposed to come out last week), but that's only a distraction from the true prize of the week - Their 25-cent preview of the new Buck Rogers series launching this summer. At that price, how can you resist?

So, come tomorrow - Thursday if you're in the UK (And potentially the rest of Europe?) - strap on that jetpack and fly down to your local comic book store to demand your cheap future. And, if that doesn't do it for you, you can always check out the complete shipping list of what's making it to stores this week and find something else to spend your money on, instead. Just remember to turn that jetpack pack off before entering the store. Comics are flammable, after all.

Dynamite have announced that their Buck Rogers revival has had a surprisingly strong launch, with retailers ordering 75,000 copies of #0, a specially priced (25 cents) preview of the regular series. For comparison, the February sales chart shows that the top 10 comics sell between 148,778 copies (the tail-end of the Obama/Spider-Man craze) and 69,698, meaning that Buck's return is likely to be seen by more people than the X-Men, Spider-Man or entire Justice League of America.

To celebrate this, Dynamite's releasing the book earlier than intended; instead of its announced May launch, the book will be made available to retailers on April 22nd, meaning that it'll be around for this year's Free Comic Book Day crowds at the start of May. Here's hoping that the 75,000 readers like what they see.

Buck Rogers #0 Sales Top 75K [Newsarama.com]

The series, launching later this year (with a preview issue in May), revamps the character and mythos for a new century, but Ross' amazing cover manages to evoke old-school pulp covers without even breaking a sweat. If the rest of this series looks this good, we're completely on board.

Buck Rogers #1 by Cassaday and Ross [CBR]

The first issue of the series - Buck Rogers #0 - is actually a 25-cent preview of the series proper, allowing curious readers a cheap way of sampling what the future holds for the revived hero. Series writer Scott Beatty previewed the series, and the preview, to Newsarama.com:

Buck's not the same old laconic square jawed hero. He wants to see new places. He wants to experience all the universe has to offer. He's full of ideas and keeps a journal so that he doesn't forget anything important. In many ways, he's a stranger in a strange land in his own time, so sling-shooting him into the future isn't quite as bad for him as it would be for someone less inclined to see the potential in finding himself a half-millennium forward in time. Buck assumes that technology has caught up with his own fabulist ideas. That may not necessarily be the case... Earth hasn't exactly "evolved" in 500 years. There have been some technological upgrades, but the planet has been through some harsh times. Buck is an oddity because he's allegedly from the past. He's hard-pressed to prove that idea. But he arrives at a crucial point in time and makes some tough choices others are unwilling to make. And he deals with a problem that he may have inadvertently failed to prevent in the first place. If I say any more I risk spoiling the conceits of the opening arc...

While Beatty promises appearances from many familiar faces in the opening storyline - including Colonel Wilma Deering - he's got some bad news for those expecting the return of Twiki:

Biddi-biddi-biddi-no.

Buck Rogers #0 is released in May.

Back to the Future: Barrucci and Beatty on Buck Rogers [Newsarama.com]

Cawley stresses the project isn't a fan film, because it's a fully licensed production with professionals behind the camera and in front of it. But at the same time, the project, which may start streaming online as early as fall 2010, is very much in the spirit of Cawley's earlier fan films, in terms of referencing earlier works. Cawley's working on the script for the first episode now, but apparently it'll retell the classic Buck origin: he's a World War I airplane pilot, who gets caught in suspended animation until the 25th century, where he battles fantastical enemies.

The production will have a "retro-contemporary" look using modern techniques like CG to reproduce the look of the original comics. Cawley told TrekMovie: "We will be using the technology we have today, to present The Original version of The First Sci-Fi Hero ever! Previous filmed incarnations never really captured the original Buck from the comic strips, which is what we aim to do." He'll keep all the elements of the original storyline, including the "atomic disrupter pistol," the Earth Defense Directorate and Buck's friends Dr. Heuer, Wilma Deering and her brother Buddy Deering. And villains, including Princess Ardala and Killer Kane.

Buck will be played by Buddy Rice, who played James Kirk's gay nephew Peter in a recent Phase II storyline. Both Rice and Cawley stress this won't be for camp value.

We could be about to see a Buck Rogers explosion, what with a new comic series on the way and a Frank Miller-helmed movie supposedly still in the pipeline. But the Cawley webseries might hit before the Miller movie (if it even still happens), and garner more attention than a comics series. I'm happy to see anything that brings more prominence to space opera on film, since the visual genre has lagged behind the space opera book genre in recent years. But I'm wondering why space opera always has to look retro, especially with J.J. Abrams' Trek going back to an old-school version of the future as well. [TrekMovie]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Miller and production company Odd Lot Entertainment (The company behind The Spirit) are in discussions with Nu Image/Millennium, the production company that currently owns the Buck movie rights, in order to option them and allow Miller to work the same magic on the time-lost space hero that made The Spirit so critically-acclaimed.

The Reporter says that the movie is likely to be a "priority project" for Miller, who'll be recreating the character with "a darker take, with many of Miller's signature visual elements and themes, such as corruption and redemption." So, Sin Rogers, then.

Frank Miller eyes big-screen 'Buck Rogers' [Hollywood Reporter]

So first of all, those Marvel hardcovers. Guardians Of The Galaxy and Annihilation: Nova, both by the Annihilation writing team of Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, promise to be a couple of bite-sized looks at the aftermath of the Annihilation wave and the invasion that followed.

In GotG, the two back-to-back Annihilation wars have weakened the boundaries of our universe. (I hate a universe with bad boundaries.) Dark gods and monsters are trying to push through, and it's up to Star-Lord and his squd of butt-kickers to hold the line. Meanwhile, Richard Rider is the last surviving member of the Nova Corps (a space cop squad, sort of) and he has to use his near-limitless power to police the entire universe. (I'm just guessing he lets some of the universe's petty vice crimes slide.)

I'll be honest: the Buck Rogers collection is the one that's jumping out at me though. It's from Hermes Press, and it collects 900 daily newspaper strips in a 9" by 12" landscape format. (Two strips per page.) They run from January 1929 to some time in 1931. Hermes says the strips include "space ships, anti-gravity belts, space pirates, invaders from other worlds, nefarious villains, and, of course, heroes."

Meanwhile, it's not a hardcover, but DC is putting out a sweet dollop of space opera in Legion Of Super Heroes: The More Things Change paperback. It collects issues 7-13 of the series, from when the dream team of Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen were working together. Someone has constructed a factory in another dimension, and they're building a new Sun-Eater. (For the unitiated, Sun-Eaters are bad. Matter-Eater Lad, on the other hand? Awesome.)

And if that's not enough space action for you, Dynamite Comics is putting out a trade paperback of the first seven issues of Battlestar Galactica: Season Zero. It's not Caprica, but it is another BSG prequel. Discover what happened on the Galactica crew's first mission together, two years before the Cylons fried Caprica.

It's not just space opera this week, of course. DC still hears its Bat-cash register ringing, with a two-part storyline following up on "Batman R.I.P." Written by old-school Bat-writer Denny O'Neil, the story "Last Rites" deals with the people of Gotham trying to figure out what the heck just happened, and how the city will survive without the Bat. And you can read a six-page preview of the story here, and it looks like it features a dead ringer for Dark Horse's spectral superheroine Ghost. Meanwhile, Batman: The Joker's Asylum collects five one-shot "Joker's Asylum" issues featuring The Joker, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Two-Face and Penguin.

Not only that, but the pairing you probably never wanted to read is finally out in a collected edition: Painkiller Jane Vs. The Terminator pits the woman with all the powers of Advil against a murderous cyborg from the future.

If you like your media tie-ins just a bit more dino-tastic (and who doesn't?), you might want to check out Transformers: Maximum Dino-Bots #1. (And you can read the first six pages of the issue here, to help you prepare to maximize your dino-bot excitement.)

But probably the best value of the week — and the most likely stocking stuffer — is a reprinting of Watchmen issue #1, for just $1.50. If you still have any friends who haven't read (arguably) the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, this is the cheap and easy way to get them hooked.

As always, a complete list of new comics is available online here. And if you're lost and disoriented and need to find a comic-book shop pronto, a complete directory of them is here.

The problem isn't that I have no faith in Frank Miller to be the man who updates Buck for a 21st century audience (Although, now that you come to mention it, I'm not sure that I do), but that I don't think that you can successfully update him. Even moreso than his brother in awesome/stupid name space herodom, Flash Gordon, everything special about Buck Rogers seems such a 20th century idea that I'm not sure what, beyond name recognition, would make people want to update the series as is.

To start with, there's his name: "Buck"? Who's seriously called Buck in this day and age? The era of heroes with ridiculous names has, much to my sadness, passed; now we prefer our heroes to have more realistic, common names like "Nathan Petrelli," "John Connor" or "Buffy Summers" (Okay, maybe that last one's a throwback). Gone are the days when Buck, Flash or even Adam Strange could wander around our subconsciousness without ridicule, or at least writers trying to explain away the name in an awkward and unconvincing manner.

And, if anything, the name of his love interest has dated so much more: "Wilma Deering" was something that sounded like the set-up for a punchline that never came even when I was seven years old, and I was a naive and easy to dupe seven year old. Would any actress really want to play a character with that name today? And if not, will we see some lame updated version take its place? "My name's Wilma - but you can call me Willow." Or maybe she'll be an alien: W'Ilma De'ering, perhaps?

(In general, many of the names from Buck Rogers have dated appallingly. Could anyone really get away with calling an alien race "Mongols" now, for example? Or a space pirate "Black Barney"? Even later additions to the series, like the 1980s TV show's C3-P0/R2-D2 hybrid "Twiki" sounds like it came from the end of a writer's coke binge at Studio 54. What is it about this particular character that brought out the worst in writers?)

More importantly, the idea of Buck waking up in the 25th century seems curiously quaint now. It seemed more of a milestone when he was created - It's 500 years away! Half a millennium! - and there's something just... well, less impressive for him to find himself "only" 400 years later, for some reason. You could, of course, keep the 500 year mark, but then he becomes "Buck Rogers In The 26th Century" which doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

And yet, I can't deny that there's something irresistible about the basic, original, Buck concept - which is why I'd like to see someone try to do something that didn't just reboot a franchise, but start from scratch altogether, with all new characters. Give someone who isn't stuck in the past (Hi, Frank) the basic pitch of "a fighter pilot falls into a coma and wakes up five hundred years later in a world at war with aliens" and let them go wild. No Wilma, no brainy scientist Dr. Huer and definitely no Twiki, but something new, a world that's as alien and unfamiliar to us as it is to not-Buck (Seriously, that name has to go. Even ironically).

There's so much potential in the idea at the root of Buck Rogers that's completely buried under all of the Buck that we know. It'd be nice if someone who's taking on one of the revamps could just throw away everything that doesn't work - up to and including the name of the title character - and make it shine for a new audience.