Sixty True Believers on a Thursday Night in August
Greetings, True Believers!
On Thursday, August 27th, sixty people came to the Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library to watch a seven-year-old animated movie about a kid from Brooklyn.
Better than the number was the room itself. Kids. A lot of kids, and a lot of teenagers — which is not always what happens when a film society programs something four days before school starts.
“Wait — What Do I Have to Watch Before Doomsday?”
The conversations afterward were almost entirely about the Mighty Marvel Multiverse.
How incursions work. Whether the Spider-Verse counts. Where Loki fits, and what the TVA has to do with any of it. Whether the Fox X-Men are real now. And over and over, from kids and adults both, some version of the same question:
What do I have to watch before Doomsday comes out?
I have been collecting since the mid-eighties. I lived through Inferno, Acts of Vengeance, the Clone Saga and both Secret Wars.
The honest answer is complicated. Why? Some of these movies are not good. But then again neither were many of the comics — for every Kraven’s Last Hunt there was a Clone Saga. For every Dark Phoenix saga, there was a Heroes Reborn
With more than eighty films and series, its inevitable that the films would mirror their source material in more ways than one. And for OG comic heads, we know that you don’t get the triumphs without sitting through the failures.
So we made the ultimate guide through all of it.
The Ultimate Nerd’s Guide
The Cognitive Film Society is proud to present the Mighty Marvel Rewatch! A 20-page checklist laid out like a 1970s newsstand book — cover banner, corner boxes, splash pages, a Bullpen Bulletin, the works.
There are eighty-four entries across four books. Every one has a checkbox, a line for the date you watched it, and five empty stars to fill in yourself.
Our guide is for True Believers and card-carrying members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society only! We’ve organized each “Phase” as a comic book run, with each film as a single issue. You don’t have to complete each “run” in order, but you’ll find that they’re thematically linked - both by source material and how they start to move the larger Marvel Movie project forward.
Each of the four Sagas opens on the classic comic book series it is adapting — Amazing Fantasy #15, The Infinity Gauntlet #1, Hickman and Ribić’s Secret Wars, and Fantastic Four #5, the first appearance of Doctor Doom — with creators and dates printed right on the page.
All four are still in print. Tes and Jim at LI Comic Shop can get you every one of them, and the library has the rest.
’Nuff said.
Two Versions, Both Free
As Doomsday approaches, we hope you’ll use this guide as an opportunity to revisit some old favorites, reconsider past loves (and past hates) and generally lose oneself in the world beyond your window.
The PDF is print-ready — letter size, full color, built to come out of a home printer and end up on a refrigerator.
The CBZ is the same 20 pages as an actual comic file, so it reads page by page on a phone or a tablet.
Print it. Photocopy it. It’s perfect for the completist Marvel maniac, or the Superhero neophyte in your life.
Excelsior!
What’s Next for the Cognitive Film Society
We’ll have more specifics soon on our next events, but we’re incredibly excited about our Fall slate of programming.
Sunday, September 27, 1:00 PM — Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were (1973). Streisand and Redford, and all the misty water-colored memories you can bear.
Thursday, October 22, 6:30 PM — The Met Opera: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. A CFS first — the Met’s comic-book opera, on our screen.
Screenings at the Gold Theater, Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett. Free admission, as always.
The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.