Best. Summer. Ever.

Based on the comments we receive for some posts, and the deafening silence for others, Father Anonymous estimates that approximately 0.00% of Egg readers care about his taste in comic books and science fiction.  You all seem to come here for the hymns.

Still, it has to be said:  There is every reason to believe that, at least for the 10-year-old boy inside the cassocked greybeard, 2012 will be the best summer in the history of the universe.  (Or the multiverse, if you're a DC reader.)  And it starts on Friday.

Friday, as you may have heard, is the Romanian release of The Avengers.  It's about a team of superheroes who don't really get along, but still save the world.  To put it in terms our readers may understand more easily, imagine Franklin Clark Fry, Pope John XXIII, and Simone de Beauvoir join forces to stop the National Review from ever being published.  I know -- awesome, right?

On June 8, we get Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  How good will this movie be?  Nobody knows.  But it is a kinda-sorta prequel to Scott's 1979 Alien, which is one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time; and of course, Scott also made Blade Runner, which is the greatest science fiction movie of all time, full stop.  He also made The Duelists and Thelma & Louise, respectively the best fencing movie and Susan Sarandon vehicle of all time.  Come to think of it, I'll bet Ridley Scott's home movies are better than anybody else's, too.

And of course the biggest news comes July 20, when we see The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's final entry in the Batman trilogy.  Who would have thought, back in the days of Adam West and Burt Ward, that a movie about the Caped Crusader would ever become the medium for a serious reflection on the nature of justice and the the possibility of virtue in a fallen world?  Heck, who would have thought -- in the days of Val Kilmer and Chris O'Donnell -- that anyone would ever, ever make another movie about Batman?  Or watch one if they did.

But while Nolan is the sort of filmmaker who works well with genre fiction and special effects, he is also committed to telling stories about things that matter.  Memento was a noir thriller about the nature of identity, Inception a science-fiction adventure about the nature of reality.  His first two Batman pictures were more of the same.  And they were something else, as well -- something fans of this particular genre have never gotten from anybody else:  an attempt to take our cockamamie fantasy world seriously.  To imagine, for just a moment, what it would be like -- what it would mean -- if comic-book things actually happened.

So, yes, we have our hopes up for Number Three.  Most of you will get a thrill-ride; for a few of us, it may be like Wagnerites sitting down to the premiere of Gotterdammerung.

All that said, we're an easy audience.  For us to consider this a masterpiece, Nolan has only got to provide a single scene that rivals this one: