Blackfish Publishing

The New Home of Science Fiction!

This is Death Ray, the newest, most exciting thing to happen to science fiction and fantasy in years. No other magazine goes into the vast multiverse that is SF & F in quite such detail, and no other magazine covers quite such a wide range of stuff every issue.

 

In Issue 1, on sale now!

 

JOHNNY DEPP

Who's the most striking, most memorable, most amusing movie character of recent years? For our money, it's hard to look beyond Captain Jack Sparrow: pirate, rake, drunk. A man never knowingly restrained with the eye make-up. Now, with the climax to the properly block-busting Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy well over the horizon and just cruising into harbour, we ask his creator, Johnny Depp, 'Who is Jack Sparrow? And how did he get that way?'

28 WEEKS LATER

Chances are, you've never seen a Juan Carlos Fresnadillo film. After all, there's only really Intacto that's made an impact outside his native Spain - his fascinating 2001 film, in which luck has become a commodity to be stolen and used, and survivors of horrific events test theirs in deadly games orchestrated by the ultimate survivor, Max Von Sydow.

All this, however, is about to change with 28 Weeks Later, Fresnadillo's amped-up follow-up - he's reluctant to think of it as a sequel - to Danny Boyle's striking 28 Days Later, the British zombie-film-with-no-actual-zombies that made such an impact five years ago. It's his first big English-language film, but almost certainly not his last: if he gets his way, and we suspect he will, Fresnadillo is set to become quite the go-to creator, both within the science fiction/horror genre and without.

SPIDER-MAN 3

There's no argument on this as far as we're concerned: Spider-Man 2 is the greatest superhero movie ever made, hands down. And now, of course, there's Spider-Man 3, out at the cinemas pretty much the day after this first Death Ray goes on sale. It'll take something of a disaster for this not to become the new champ: with first generation Spider-villain Sandman, over-the-top '80s superstar Venom, and a new Green Goblin all queuing up to take pot-shots at the hapless wallcrawler, it's certainly bound to be the most spectacular.

Time, then, to catch up with our two leads, Tobey Maguire (a most unlikely but spectacular Spider-Man), and Kirsten Dunst, a Gwen Stacey lookalike who's made the vivacious MJ her own. It may prove to be their last Spider-movie (though we hope not: we've not seen the Vulture, the Chameleon, the Lizard, the Scorpion, the Jackal or the Rhino yet, amongst a host of animal-themed villains), but if it is, they're definitely going out with a bang.