Captain America scribe Ed Brubaker joins artist Billy Tan on Uncanny X-men for the 12-part series, “Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire“. Basically, Vulcan (the other Summers brother) resurfaced, left Earth, and is hell-bent on seeking revenge on the Shi’ar for killing his mother and making him a slave. Of course, the X-men must stop him.

I was not familiar with Billy Tan before this arc, but I must say I quickly became a fan. He and inker Danny Miki have put together a book that is crisp and vibrant. His characters convey real emotion and his action scenes are fluid. For anyone unfamiliar with Ed Brubaker (and shame on you), he’s the current writer of Captain America and Daredevil and recently finished a six-issue mini, Books of Doom. He is currently one of the best writers in the field and Shi’ar is no exception. He’s put together a great and dynamix X-team: Professor Xavier, Marvel Girl, Havoc, Polaris, Nightcrawler, Warpath, and a mutant I was unaware of, Darwin. The team dynamic is excellent and has many moments of pure, unadulterated baddassitude. With most of the Marvel universe preoccupied with the evnts of Civil War, it’s nice to have a story that is seperate from that. This series gets my highest recommendation.

Parts 1-4 (of 12) already in stores.

Playsyde has made available Sony’s first Playstation 3 commercial which is intended for a European audience.

A lower resolution streaming version is available for the impatient You Tubers out there and a 1280×720 high quality downloadeable version is also available for those that want to see some guy punching a bag and jumping around a ring in high definition and then seeing a few short seconds of some lame first person shooter in a quality that’s comparable to what the rich elite of Europe will see on that system sometime in 2007.

The commercial rings in at a ridiculous 3 minutes and 20 seconds with about 12 seconds of actual footage tagged on at the end. Most of it is just some guy training and boxing with a voice over going on about how revolutionary this beast is supposed to be. Unless there’s an ultra realistic boxing training simulation game I haven’t heard about I’m not very impressed.

This is living?

Thanks to TVPro for the heads up.

Not wasting anytime, The Four Horsemen have put up the first poll for their FANtastic Exclusive 2007 voting. The FANtastic Exclusive is a chance to put the fans in the driver’s seat of picking what Four Horsemen line their next series of figures should come from, in addition to picking the character designs, weapons, packaging and more.

You may recall last year’s end result, Xetheus, the Minotaur and the later added exclusive Troop Builder figures.

Also announced from the Four Horsemen is the addition of a seventh minotaur figure, the Mynothecean Royal Guardsman. He will be available for pre-order at the Four Horsemen’s online store, StoreHorsemen starting Saturday September 9th. Thats today for those not paying attention. Supplies will be extremely limited as the figure will only be made in a quantity of 250 and not all of those will be released for pre-order.