Category: 5. Entertainment

KARACHI:

Pakistani singers are stepping up their music game by launching tracks at an even bigger scale. The newest addition to this is singer-songwriter Maanu’s new album Thikaana released on Saturday. This is Maanu’s first full-length album featuring a total of thirteen original songs that have already racked up about 10,000 views on YouTube in just a day. 

After Coke Studio’s Jhol released in 2024, this is the next big storm that Maanu’s fans can look forward to. The musician had also dropped two singles from the album at the beginning of the year, Savera and cm in collaboration with Turhan James and MALIK, respectively.

The album has been produced by Abdullah Siddiqui and Maanu, mixed by Grammy nominated music producer ADP and written by Maanu himself. It has been provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group. 

The album is packed with a blend of several different artists. The tracks have vocals, lyrics and compositions by musicians like Asim Azhar, Talha Anjum, Annural Khalid, Abdul Hannan, Talal Quereshi, MALIK., Mujju and yasirq. From Azhar chanting his usual Punjabi verses and Khalid matching her vocals to complement Maanu, each musician brings their unique style to the ensemble.

Maanu expressed his gratitude to fellow contributors on Instagram on the release, “Hugely grateful to all my collaborators who helped bring this project to life.” he wrote. “This is the result of many years of hard work. I hope these songs can become a part of your lives. Suntay rahein aur sunatay rahein.”

The singer promised fans to share more context to the album on Instagram, “More on the process later, what’s your favorite song so far?” he asked. 

He had previously teased the album release on Instagram by addressing fans last week. “Thank you all for being a part of the journey so far,” he wrote and added a fire heart emoji. “Now is the time that we find a new thikaana. Spread the word.”

The set features a studio version of the already well-known Maanu song, Taranay. The track with Anjum’s vocals Coffee has received around 13,000 views on YouTube, highest amongst all other songs. 

The singer promised fans to share more context to the album on Instagram, “More on the process later, what’s your favorite song so far?” he asked. 

The album is currently available for streaming on all music platforms. 

Meghan Markle is making meticulous plans for her future despite the stern demand made about her amid the ongoing peace talks between Prince Harry and the royal family.

The Duke of Sussex has been warned to keep Meghan out of the reunion talks even though it is a tough choice for Harry, according to Palace sources.

However, the As Ever founder remains unfazed as he focuses on her expanding business despite the criticism coming in from all sides about her strategy.

As her husband Prince Harry focuses on mending ties with his cancer-stricken father King Charles, Meghan is plotting ways to make As Ever a luxury brand, without royal help.

According to social media and marketing expert Simon Brisk, Meghan is practising restraint for better results.

“Meghan’s digital restraint is not accidental; it’s masterfully intentional,” Simon told Express UK. “We’re seeing a shift from the oversharing influencer era to a new phase of curated mystique, and Meghan is leading that transition.”

He explained that Meghan’s strategy is “more aligned with luxury brands than with celebrities” which is all about “controlled visibility, infrequent drops, and highly consistent tone”.

The expert shared that Meghan doesn’t need to post often because when she does, the world takes notice. It also allows her to “own the narrative” and completely ignore the practice of “gaming the algorithm”.

Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet’s mom last posted on her birthday, three days ago, after a week-long hiatus from social media. It was a single photo, offering a rare glimpse of her celebrations.

Like a luxury brand, the former Suits actress is building her brand to have “novelty”.

“Her silence also shields her from criticism, creating a kind of algorithmic immunity, while still fuelling speculation, media attention, and fan loyalty.”

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have apparently received a disappointing news from Britain once again as the royal couple continues to be disliked by much of the public.

According to a survey by YouGov, Prince William once again tops the royal league table, with 74 percent of Britons having a positive opinion of the first in line to the throne.

William’s wife Princess Kate Middleton is similarly popular at 71 percent with Princess Anne also coming in at 70 percent.

King Charles continues to hold majority support, at 59 percent, the figure unsurprisingly similar to the 62 percent who say he is doing a good job.

But by contrast, the California-based royal couple Harry and wife Meghan continue to be disliked by much of the public.

Only 28 percent have a positive opinion of the Duke of Sussex, with fewer still saying the same of Duchess Meghan with 20 percent.

Across the board, these results are little different from the previous survey in May, although Meghan Markle’s figure does remain the joint-lowest on record.

Older Britons generally have more positive views of the royals – except for Prince Harry and Meghan.

Before making his fourth feature film, the action revenge thriller One Spoon of Chocolate, legendary rapper and music producer RZA was still, he confesses, unsure of himself as a filmmaker, feeling that he hadn’t yet mastered the process, the “rhythms” as he calls it, of being a director, at least not to the same comfort level he had with music.

After scaling the heights of hip hop as the de facto head of the Wu-Tang Clan, arguably the most influential rap group in history, RZA has found increasing success in film and television, firstly as an actor — he has starred in films like American Gangster (2007), G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) and Nobody (2021) and series like Californication — and more significantly with writing and directing. His directorial debut, 2012’s The Man With the Iron Fists, starred Oscar-winner Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista and Lucy Lu. RZA followed that with Love Beats Rhymes, a musical drama starring Azelia Banks, in 2017 and the heist film Cut Throat City in 2020.

RZA also served as an executive producer on Hulu’s biographical series Wu-Tang: An American Saga, which documented the rise of his Staton Island rap crew, that gave the world the singular talents of himself, Raekwon, Method Man, GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ghostface Killah, Masta Killah, U-God and Inspectah Deck.

Now comes RZA’s fourth film as a director, One Spoon of Chocolate, which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and will, according to the filmmaker, have a theatrical release at a still to be confirmed date.

One Spoon of Chocolate tells the story of Unique, a military veteran and former convict who is trying to get his life back together and travels to the small town of Karensville to live with his cousin Ramsey, only for both to be hounded by a gang of racists with connections to the town’s corrupt cops. After a fatal incident, Unique seeks out the gang to exact brutal justice.

The film stars Shameik Moore (Dope, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-verse) as Unique and RJ Cyler (The Book of Clarence, The Harder They Fall) as Ramsey. The cast also includes Paris Jackson, Harry Goodwins, Johnell Young, Michael Harney, Rockmond Dunbar, E’myri Crutchfield, Blair Underwood, Jason Isbell and Isaiah Hill.

The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the RZA over Zoom recently to discuss the making of One Spoon of Chocolate, how writing scripts mirrors his method for writing lyrics, his growth as a filmmaker and his future plans.

Let’s start with the film’s title. Could you explain what One Spoon of Chocolate means? Is there a deeper significance?

With the title, there’s a deeper meaning in the sense of our character has to learn the way things need to be, the way things change. One spoon of chocolate can change a whole glass of milk, you know what I mean? That’s the idea. A character has to realize that, first of all, he represents change and he has to make a change within himself. There’s a scene in the film [where the character Unique is trying to make chocolate milk] and he’s complaining that it’s only one spoon of chocolate powder left. But an OG tells him ‘one spoon could change the whole glass.’

I know One Spoon of Chocolate is something you have been working on for a number of years, in terms of the story of the film, how did that come about? What inspired you to come up with the overarching themes?

It came to me like, man, over the years. I mean, it was 13 years of getting to a point of finally having a screenplay that we could film. To be quite frank with you, the movie is like 100 pages of a 200 page story, and it came to me almost like how my lyrics come, not forced out of me, just flowed out of me. It was something that [I needed time] for me as an artist to create. When I tried to create it before, I was getting stuck. I got inspired to make it, [but then got stuck again]. But then doing the New York State of Mind Tour, traveling on a tour bus and traveling through the country during the writer’s strike, I was like, ‘I’m gonna write something.’ I started writing something new and it just kept freezing and then I went back and started reading some of my old stuff and [One Spoon of Chocolate], I said, ‘wow, this was the one!’ I had about 40 pages. I said ‘this one was gonna be good.’ I had got to part in [Karensville, a fictional town in the film], basically, in the early draft, and then it just started flowing.

I read that originally you were going to do a period piece, that it was going to be set earlier, like in the 70s or around that period, but actually you moved it forward to, I guess, it’s the 90s, right?

Well, actually, I made the time ambiguous. It was always going to be ambiguous, but for the audience it was going feel like you were in the 90s or the 70s and all that. The whole Blaxploitation vibe, the whole genre mixing was what I was aiming at, but my goal and my intention was to remove the time aspect. This could be happening right now, even though Karensville is a fictional place, the idea of what our hero is going to go through, that could happen tomorrow, in all reality. When I started getting deeper into the draft, [when we were on tour] I was just conscious there are places that you [could be in], in our country, and you will definitely think you took a step backwards in time. That’s how when you’re on tour, you get a chance to see that. You end up stopping somewhere in a small town and you’ll go ‘wow, this place, they’re 20 years behind us, 30 years behind us.’

With the film, you’ve brought in these ideas that seem quite nostalgic, throwback even, but you’re saying that they’re actually quite real and relavent to America even now?

Oh yeah. You know, some of the things that take place in our film, there’s been articles [written on them]. There exists the idea of, let’s just call it the the white supremacist mind, that our hero has to fight the political context of. You know, there’s a gag in my film where the villains have on those white polo shirts and khaki trousers that we saw in Charlottesville [during the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in August 2017]. Art is always going to somehow imitate life and pull from reality even though it’s putting you into a fiction world. [The film is] fiction, but it’s inspired by true events, whether they be events that I personally experienced, like the corruption in the film. I’m a lyricist type of artist. You hear [Wu Tang] lyrics like: “I grew up on the crime side, The New York Times side, staying alive was no jive,” there’s a lot of content in it and taking life and putting it into a story. This is what’s happened in this film. Our hero, who is looking to just live a normal life and get on his feet, he’s in a place where things are not normal.

Actually, it’s interesting to me that you’re saying that it’s not normal, as there was a hyperreal sense to the film. Some of the fighting was quite amusing but also quite serious at the same time.

It’s a movie, like it has to entertain you. To be quite frank, the first goal of this movie is to entertain you and to make you feel something. I hope I’ve achieved this. You’re going to not want to turn your head away. You’re going to root for this guy. You will want to say, ‘Well, how is he going to make it fucking through this,’ you know what I mean? I make this joke about bats, our villains got all these fucking baseball bats, but I had them all lined up like a SWAT team would have their guns lined up. To me as an artist, you got to have fun, even though some of the things happening to our characters is no joking matter.

What made you decide to avoid having as many guns in the film, because it’s obvious that the action is steered to more physical things like knives and bats?

It’s a deliberate style choice. I’m a kung fu movie lover, and if somebody got a gun, there’s no need for a fist fight, right? But guns exist [in this world], so I was conscious to pace the usage of the guns, not overdo it.

This is your second time working with Shameik?

My second time in features, but my third project with him, he also played Raekwon in my TV show, Wu-Tang: An American Saga.

What is it about him that you like working with him? What are the qualities of him as an actor?

He’s what I like to call a sponge. He’s able to absorb the material with a free spirit. When we did our first movie we did together, Cut Throat City, he told me he never held a gun before, he grew up as an artist. He dances, he sings and acts. He’s not a street guy, and so he didn’t even know how to hold the gun. And I was like, ‘well, this is how you hold the gun. This is how you load it.’ And the next take he held it, loaded it. It looked real. He shot it, it looked real. He’s a sponge and for me as a director, and a writer, you wanna have an instrument that allows the music to flow through unintruded and uninterrupted, and he’s that kind of kid.

You also worked with Paris Jackson on this film. I’ve not seen her in many things before acting wise, was it interesting to work with her as an actor?

Yeah, very interesting. I got to give a shout out to my casting director, she was able to put some good people in front of me. In our film, somebody says, ‘oh, this is a racist town’ [about Karensville] But it’s not a racist town, it’s a town with racist people. And then Darla [Jackson’s character] will give you an example of that, she represents the new way that people will love our country to be. There’s a scene in the movie when they both touch hands and it’s like black and white coming together. She represents the new. Her best friend is Black, the young people they’re looking to move culture and move life forward without all the systemic stuff of the past.

You’re well known for your love of Hong Kong action films and action films generally, but you’re also blending in lots of other genres into One Spoon of Chocolate, such as the blaxploitation stuff. Was it a challenge for you as a director to pull that all together?

The challenge was cost and time, but creatively, no. I feel like as a filmmaker, this is my fourth film, I honestly feel like I have arrived. When I was making this one, I just felt my rhythm, my use of my days, there was not a lot of overtime days. My planning was better. Everything about me as a filmmaker, I think has evolved. The challenging parts that we faced [in the movie], there’s also a spoonful of horror in this movie [when you watch it]. You think about the horror genre, you think about Eli Roth, that shit popped up in this movie. You go back [and see it] and then you think about the classic, 70s movies like Walking Tall. Then you think about the blaxploitation. I was able to use cinema as cinema, and put a spoonful of ingredients from the things I love.

There’s a shot in this movie, when [Moore’s character] walks [Jackson’s character] home and they’re on the porch, that’s an 80s romantic comedy [vibe]. I wanted to shoot it like that… I was just being conscious of all the things that I loved as a film watcher, all the things I love from the people who inspired me to make films, of course. John Wu, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, I always mentioned those three men as my first teachers in this world. I just wanted to put a spoonful of all of that into my story, but not overdo it. It’s not gumbo, but it is a stew.

Were there any particular things that you felt were like a challenge in terms of the filmmaking process, something that’s stuck out for you?

We shot this movie in 29 days. I probably could have used 35, 36 days, that would have been more healthier for us. But I had a great crew, the Atlanta crews are well oiled. My stunt coordinator, Marrese Crump. [Actually Crump] worked as my stunt man on The Man With Iron Fists and then he became like a trainer for [Chadwick Boseman] for the Black Panther movies. He’s got a team of guys out there that does martial arts. [Crump] is a student of [Panna Rittikrai] who is in Tony Jaa’s camp, the guys that made [Ong-Bak and The Protector]. Marrese studied over there for 10 years and he was available, we brought him in and if you watch the action in this film, it doesn’t look like kung fu, it has a few of those moves, but it’s more visceral. It’s more like our hero, there is something natural about [his fighting style], and that’s what we wanted, and, [Marrese] was able help design those ideas for me.

The reason why I think I was able to pull the action scenes off, and I hope you like the end result, is because with the action I had a chance to start practicing early. That’s what saved us. I gave Marrese the script, I gave him the scenes, and that was like two months before we started shooting, before we started prepping. So he had time to help get the energy ready. I thought I was going to get lucky with [David Leitch’s company 87North Productions]. I sent the script to Marrese, but I also was wishing that 87North would come on board, but they had their hands full with The Fall Guy and Nobody. But they took a look at some of the previous stuff that Marrese had done and they said ‘you’re going to be in good hands, this guy is good.’

One Spoon of Chocolate premiered at Tribeca and it will get a theatrical release, right?

Yes, that’s the goal, you know, nothing is certain in our world, but the answer is yes.

Do you feel like you got robbed a little bit with COVID with your last film Cut Throat City not getting a much delayed theatrical release? [A hit with critics, Cut Throat City was released in theaters on Aug. 21, 2020, when cinema attendances were decimated by the pandemic].

Yeah, yeah I love Cutthroat City, but with this one, I got to honestly say, with this one I personally feel like I have arrived. Like I look at it myself and smile like. If this was a song, I would be saying I made a great song this time. This is a good song, not because I like it, because it actually has structure, it’s been structured to be a good song.

What was the reaction to the film like at Tribeca?

At the Tribeca Festival, bro, this shit played exactly how it should have played. People were laughing, we got some tears. We got a big fucking cheer at the end. People were yelling at the at the screen. A lot of films sometimes you’re not getting that visceral response. This film makes you react, and that’s what I think all of us as filmmakers, that’s a joy for us. That’s our task. How can we get a reaction out of this? It’s why the horror movies and the horror drama is so big now. They get reactions. We were able to do that with the action thriller.

Sorry, I’m running my mouth, but I showed the film to Quentin Tarantino, and that was like a kid showing his essay to the teacher. And I sat like three rows behind him while the film played, and he laughed every time he was supposed to, screamed at the [right] scenes, and at the end of it, he said, ‘man, great fucking job.’ He was asking me ‘how the fuck did you get a fucking car chase like that? How did you do that? How many fucking days for that car chase?’ He thought the car chase would have taken us five days, and I had to pull that shit off in two days. That’s great praise.

I was so happy Quentin and David Fincher were watching the film with me, it felt like I had arrived as a filmmaker. I feel like I’ve been through a great process. I had great chances. I’ve been lucky, of course. I had my first film, The Man with the Iron Fists, star Russell Crowe, Lucy Lu. I mean, how many people get that kind of luck and blessings? But I kept going, kept striving to develop myself as a serious filmmaker. I feel good now. I’m not nervous of it. It’s like, give me the mic, I’m gonna sing.

So the premier at Tribeca, where would you rank that in terms of your career achievements? Because you’ve done a lot of amazing things, had a lot of great success in music.

It’s different. As a hip hop artist, as a record producer it was almost destiny that I was going be there because I’ve been into hip hop since I was 7 years old. I wrote my first song at 9, so that seemed like, obvious in a way. If you knew me, [you would have said] yeah he’s gonna be a rapper. But a film director, nobody saw that, not even myself. And then when it started happening, it was a blessing, it was an epiphany that I can use my art and talent to be that too, to write it and direct it. We played One Spoon of Chocolate at Tribeca, in New York City, my hometown, at a full packed house of people yelling and screaming at the screen and covering their eyes and, and cheering at the end. I was like, OK, this is what I would call a a gravy moment in life. It was unpredicted moment, but so satisfying. I’ve got the bug, I want to make films, if I’m blessed, this is what I want to do. I want to finish this last Wu-Tang tour, and I want to dedicate my time to using my art and talent to tell stories through cinema and I want to do it better than AI!

From the freezing heart of Fargo country in snowy Minnesota comes a quite outrageously enjoyable suspense thriller starring Emma Thompson; I hadn’t realised what a treat it would be to see Thompson handle a pistol with a scope and also demonstrate where on the body you can get shot and still keep moving.

The Dead of Winter has an old-school barnstorming brashness, some edge-of-the-seat tension, a mile-wide streak of sentimentality, a dash of broad humour and a horrible flourish of the macabre. Brian Kirk directs from a script by screenwriters Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, and Thompson turns up the accent dial to play a neighbourly and good-natured Minnesota widow. With her recently deceased husband, she ran a fishing supplies store and like him was keen on ice-fishing: venturing out on huge freezing lakes, drilling a hole in the ice, setting up a phone-box sized ice shelter for warmth and lowering the bait and lure. Her late husband sweetly took her on an ice-fishing trip on a certain remote lake for their first date – bittersweet flashbacks bring home the memory – and it is to this lake that she comes on a mission to scatter his ashes.

Having not quite arrived at this beautiful but subzero spot that she hasn’t visited for some years and got a bit lost, Thompson finds herself pulling in to a very strange property to ask directions; she hears disquieting sounds from the interior and sees a peculiar man (Marc Menchaca) chopping wood in front of a sickeningly vivid splash of blood on the snow. The man curtly explains, in response to her tactless inquiry, that this is due to “a deer” and tells her where to find her lake. But it is only on leaving him that Thompson is to discover the awful truth: this man is keeping a teenage girl (Laurel Marsden) prisoner and apparently intending to kill her. Thompson is also to come across the man’s even scarier wife, played by Judy Greer.

So has Thompson’s widow chanced upon the local equivalent of psycho hillbillies? Is this to be The Minnesota Chain Saw Massacre? Or perhaps The Minnesota Ice Drill Massacre? In fact, these people’s personalities and motivations are more complicated. Thompson’s character also has more to show us: she is a tough, resourceful woman used to the outdoors, used to the extreme cold, scared but not utterly discomposed at the sound of gunshots, and armed with a sense that, in an extreme situation, she might have less to lose than these people. And she also has a touch of ruthlessness: she knows how to trap people, how to use the lethal cold against them.

The story rattles along, entertaining and alarming, until it reaches its guignol horror on the ice. Thompson’s relatable presence and likability-aura make a very good solvent for the concentrated nastiness of Greer’s desperate villain and what she has in mind for her teen prisoner. There’s a distinct chill.

Naina Mishra seemed to turn up at the yoga studio in Euston, north-west London, out of nowhere. She wasn’t referred by anyone; she didn’t come with a friend. A 21-year-old woman of Indian heritage with an American accent who grew up in Hong Kong and had recently arrived in London, Naina just “fell in” off the street in January 2022, say her yoga teachers, Hamish Hendry and Louise Newton. But it became part of her daily life. Every morning, she returned to practise there.

Chatting after class, they learned that Naina had just graduated from university in the US and had been interning at the investment bank Goldman Sachs and the consulting firm McKinsey. She was studying in London before beginning a high-flying job as a business analyst at McKinsey in New York in the autumn. “She was really focused,” Newton remembers. “She would say, ‘My goals are to be a CEO, to have three children, to be married.’ She was really clear on what the future was going to hold for her.” By May 2022, she had left London to embark on her next chapter.

But 18 months later, in November 2023, Naina was back – and she was a different person. “She’d do her posture, then zone out,” Hendry says. When he asked if she was having intrusive thoughts, she told him she didn’t know. “She was like a shadow of herself,” Newton says. “She was here, but out of it, just very slightly.”

Throughout 2024, Naina kept changing address. She began to say strange things. “She was determined she was going to live in a specific house on Highbury Fields and said she’d contacted the owner to say that she wanted to live there,” Newton tells me. After a conversation with Hendry about a high-end yoga-wear brand, she told them she had bought every item in the range. One day, Naina announced she’d bought the entire range of Jellycat stuffed toys.

Then, in August 2024, Naina messaged Hendry to say people were following her and she had changed her phone number and was going to have to change her name. “I don’t know anyone outside the shala [yoga studio],” she wrote, “so on the rare occasion someone you don’t know asks about me, they should be sent away.”

Hendry and Newton say they “signposted” her to mental health services, but Naina kept changing her phone number, and after the second or third time, they lost contact with her. Just as Naina fell into the studio out of nowhere, she seemed to disappear into thin air.

But somebody was trying to track Naina down: Vandana Luthra, the mother Naina had told Hendry and Newton was dead. The story of Naina Mishra’s final year in London is one of family estrangement and mental health crisis. It shows how ill-equipped we are at recognising the signs of mental illness, and how powerless parents can be if their young adult children say they want to be left alone. For months, Vandana had been going to extraordinary lengths to find Naina, desperately clutching at every straw because she believed her daughter’s life was at risk. And she was right. By October 2024, Naina was dead.

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Vandana speaks to me for many hours, over several days, from her sister’s home in Connecticut, US. She’s on sabbatical from a finance job in Hong Kong while her son has psychiatric treatment here. There’s a history of mental illness in the family, Vandana says – Naina’s grandmother is schizophrenic; her great-grandmother and great-aunt lived with mental health problems.

“Naina always wanted to do things on her own,” Vandana says. “She was someone who did everything herself.” As a child, Naina loved baking cookies, reading books, pretending to be a ninja with her younger brother. But she spoke very little. A teacher at her primary school in Mumbai once called Vandana in to discuss why Naina was so quiet. “She said, ‘You should really quit your job and be there for your child.’” Vandana pauses, ruminating on this memory. “These things stay in my head now, because I don’t have her any more.”

The family moved from Mumbai to Singapore in 2011, then Hong Kong in 2014, by which time Vandana was divorced and bringing up her children as a single mother. She and Naina used to be very close, Vandana says. “By the time she was in high school, she was taller than me. She used to call me Little Mommy.” Gauri Nafrey, a family friend, had known Naina since she was a baby. “As a teenager, Naina was a kind of A-lister: the dress, the makeup, the hair, everything was beautiful,” she tells me. “A complete go-getter: strong, smart, doing really well academically – the works.” After spending summer camp in the US aged 13, Naina decided she was going to settle in New York. At 16, she’d set her mind on a job with McKinsey. She got a place at Northwestern, a competitive university on the outskirts of Chicago, majoring in economics and business entrepreneurship.

In January 2019, during her first year of college, Naina rang Vandana to tell her she had been sexually assaulted by someone the previous September, when she had just arrived in her dorm. “Obviously it was shocking.” Vandana’s eyes are wide. She was at work when she took the call. She walked away from her desk to try to get some privacy. Questions began tumbling out. Were there condoms? Could she have caught diseases? Naina said she managed to escape before it got that far. How could this have happened, Vandana asked.

“Those questions fell badly,” she concedes. “She said, ‘You’re accusing me.’ I was not – I was in a state of shock, just processing that sequence of events.” But Naina hung up and they didn’t speak for a few days. (Naina made a formal complaint about the student who was suspended from college for a year.)

After that, Vandana says, Naina began to change. “She was much more depressed. She kept talking about rape on campus – she wanted me to read everything about it.” Vandana was used to regularly exchanging messages and having calls with her daughter, but now Naina would sometimes go silent for days on end. From halfway across the world, Vandana tried to stay in her daughter’s life. She got one of Naina’s flatmates to help coordinate a surprise birthday party for her 21st in 2021, ordering champagne and food from a restaurant Naina liked. She and Naina still spoke, but not as much.

The trip to London in 2022 was a bit of a jolly that allowed Naina to maintain her student visa before starting work at McKinsey in the autumn. She deliberately picked a literature course that required very little academic work. She did a wine course and a Thai cooking course, as well as all the yoga. “Rich people things,” her mother says, drily. Vandana didn’t mind funding it all – Naina was getting to enjoy her youth and freedom – but wishes she’d paid for it directly. “Then I would have known the places she went to.”

Nafrey and her family had been living in London since 2016, and she invited Naina over one night. “I had not seen her for six, seven years. She was completely different from the Naina I remember: soft-spoken, self-deprecating, nothing fancy about her clothing, no makeup,” she says. “I was, like, what happened to you?”

Naina didn’t mention it to Nafrey, but she had been having sessions with a London-based psychotherapist. In February 2022, she created a Google Drive account and asked Vandana to send over all the pictures she had of her as a very young child. Once they had been received, Naina told Vandana she didn’t want to talk to her for a while. “I am undergoing a difficult treatment for my PTSD and chronic pain. Due to the difficult nature of the treatment, I’m unable to speak with you at this time,” she texted. It was the first time Naina had mentioned PTSD to her mother. (The therapist Vandana says Naina saw in London did not want to participate in this piece, neither confirming nor denying that Naina had seen her, citing patient confidentiality.)

When they finally spoke, it was May 2022. In a three-minute phone call, Naina told Vandana that, when she was three years old, two strangers had raped her in the bathroom of her grandparents’ house in a suburb of Delhi. Vandana was bewildered by this. “My children have never been left alone. There are no strange men coming into my mother’s bathroom. The whole thing was just not plausible.” She knew she’d alienated Naina the last time her daughter had confided in her, and tried to handle things differently. “I said, ‘I’m sorry this happened. How come I didn’t know about it?’ And she said, ‘I couldn’t tell you because you were a bad mother.’” When Vandana asked more questions, Naina hung up.

They kept in touch, mainly over WhatsApp and email, but the abuse was never mentioned again. “My plan was whenever I saw her next, I was going to sit her down and talk to her about it … ” Her voice trails off. She didn’t see Naina again until four days before her death.

After leaving London in 2022, Naina had to sort out the rental agreement for her New York apartment. She insisted she didn’t want anyone to act as a guarantor and begged her father, who was living in Mumbai, and her mother to put enough money into her bank account to reassure her landlord. By this point, Naina’s brother was in mental health crisis, disappearing for 10 days at a time. “There was so much on my plate, so much shit going on all around me,” Vandana says, bitterly. “She’s never blown her money. So I was, like, all right, just give it to her.” About $140,000 (£103,000) went into Naina’s account. “That’s the mistake I made.” Vandana screws up her eyes. “Once she had that huge amount of money in the bank, she cut contact.”

Naina changed her phone number. She stopped replying to her mother’s emails, then changed her email address altogether. Vandana tried to message Naina’s friends on Facebook and LinkedIn, only to find almost all of them had blocked her. One replied, saying Naina was thriving in New York. The books Vandana read on family estrangement and the psychologist she consulted in Hong Kong all said the same thing: give her space and she might reconnect.

For a year and a half, Vandana tried to let Naina be. But it went against every fibre of her being. When a friend was due to visit New York in early January 2024, Vandana asked her to reach out to Naina and take her for coffee. Naina replied saying she wasn’t in New York any more – she’d left McKinsey and moved back to London. “Then I was in full panic mode,” Vandana says. “If Naina can leave her dream job, her dream city, and go to London, something’s very wrong. That was when I unleashed everything possible I could think of to try to find her.”

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Naina did not see a mental health professional during the last year of her life. She had no documented mental health issues, beyond the PTSD diagnosed in New York in 2022. But Vandana’s experience with her son’s psychosis left her convinced Naina must be in crisis. Reluctantly, Vandana says, she hired three London-based private investigators (she estimates she spent at least £6,000 on their services). She tried to reach out to Naina’s closest friends once again, emailing them at their work addresses, or appealing to their parents to pass on her messages. The mother of one of Naina’s high school friends refused, saying if her daughter had chosen to block Vandana, she would “respect her boundaries”. The only friend still willing to speak to Vandana revealed that Naina seemed to have cut herself off from everyone. She had quit social media; she wasn’t in any of the pictures from a close friend’s wedding.

Through an acquaintance at McKinsey, Vandana learned that Naina had spent half the year she’d been working at the company signed off on disability leave. She contacted McKinsey’s director of HR, explaining that she was estranged from Naina but concerned for her mental wellbeing, and asked if they could share the reason Naina was on leave, and anything about her current whereabouts. Vandana was told privacy laws prevented them from giving her this information. (McKinsey declined to comment for this piece.)

Only one of the three private investigator agencies could find out anything about Naina’s life in London. By mid-January 2024, they had provided an email address, a UK phone number and an address in Walthamstow, east London. Vandana immediately packed a suitcase with a change of clothes and food she knew Naina loved – paneer, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes – boarded a flight and headed straight there.

It was a small house. “Such a dingy place,” Vandana says. She learned the rooms were all rented on Airbnb, and Naina was no longer there. She checked into a nearby hotel, lay on the bed, and had a panic attack. “The walls and the ceiling were collapsing on me. But I just had to keep trying.”

A hotel receptionist let Vandana borrow her phone to ring Naina’s number. Naina answered, but hung up when she heard Vandana’s voice. The receptionist suggested asking the police to do a welfare check. They were reluctant, Vandana says, but she begged them. “I said, ‘As a mother, I know something is wrong with my daughter. Please hear me out.’” When an officer contacted Naina, she informed them her mother was dead. “That’s what they told me,” Vandana says. “I said, ‘No, that’s not right – I have my passport with me, her birth certificate, you can see my name on it.’” Vandana returned home, her bags still packed with food.

In a statement, the Metropolitan police said, “When officers attended Ms Mishra’s address she told them she did not wish to have any contact with the person who had reported the concerns. As she was an adult and officers had no concern for her welfare, her wishes were respected.” It was a rationale Vandana would hear again and again: Naina was over 18, she was not in obvious crisis, she had a right to privacy.

A missing people’s charity told Vandana they couldn’t do anything without a police report. The two lawyers she consulted said there was no chance of her getting any kind of guardianship over Naina without firm evidence that she was unable to take care of herself. The Indian consulate could not help. The therapist Naina had seen in London in 2022 refused to speak to her family without Naina’s consent. Vandana emailed two sisters the private investigator said were subletting a different flat to her daughter, enclosing a photo of her and Naina together. “Even if she does not want to talk to anyone, at least I should know she is safe,” Vandana wrote. The women replied saying Naina had left some time ago, they had never met her and were unnerved to have been tracked down like this. Increasingly desperate, Vandana returned to London and visited a nail salon Naina had recently reviewed online, asking staff to alert her if her daughter ever made another booking. They never did.

Vandana recruited old friends from India now living in the UK to be her eyes on the ground. As well as Nafrey, she reached out to Karuna Kapoor, whom she’d known for over 30 years but who had never met Naina. Every time the private investigator supplied a new address, Nafrey would travel from her home in Fulham, south-west London, to walk her dog around the property and see if she could spot Naina; Kapoor would travel from her home in St Albans in Hertfordshire to do the same. Naina’s father travelled to London and spent hours waiting outside one address, only to learn Naina was no longer there. Vandana paid a domestic worker £20 an hour to keep another property under surveillance.

If Naina was in a paranoid state of mind, she had good reason to be: she was being followed and tracked. Vandana accepts this, but feels she had little choice. “I wanted to see what she was doing in London. If she was all good – if she had a job, a social network – I’d have let her be.” Vandana shakes her head: “2024 was a year I did not sleep. There was so much stress and helplessness. I was constantly thinking, what more I can do?”

Then, on 19 October, when Vandana was at her parents’ home just outside Delhi, her phone rang. The name on the screen said Naina. “I had a number saved, which the private investigator had given me.” Vandana shuts her eyes. “It was 4am UK time. I picked up.” For the first time in years, she heard her daughter’s voice.

“Mum,” Naina said, “will you help me? I’m in danger.”

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Vandana tried to sound calm. “Of course I will help you,” she said. “Where are you?” Naina said she was at home in her flat, with the doors locked. She wanted her mother to verify her identity. “Tell me something only you would know,” Naina said.

“I told her where she was born, when we moved to Singapore. I actually said, ‘You were sexually assaulted when you first arrived in college,’” Vandana remembers.

Identity confirmed, Naina told her the street outside her flat was filled with black cars, and people dressed in black were waiting to kidnap her. Her mother told her to call the police. “They won’t help me,” Naina said.

“All I wanted to do was make sure she stayed inside her apartment until Gauri could come and pick her up,” Vandana says. She tried to contact Nafrey and her husband but, at 4am, they weren’t responding. Naina suddenly wanted to speak to everyone: her brother, her grandmother, old friends. “These girls decided not to have any contact with me,” Vandana says, bitterly, of Naina’s friends. “When Naina messaged them to say she was in danger, did any of her friends rush to help her?” By 9.30am UK time, Vandana had bought a ticket to fly to London. By 6.30pm, she was on a plane.

“I woke up and saw six missed calls from Vandana – and then I saw missed calls from Naina,” Nafrey tells me, still in disbelief. There were texts from Naina, too, saying she wasn’t safe and asking Nafrey to pick her up “as soon as you are able”. Nafrey rang Vandana, who advised her not to ask Naina any questions. “I literally got up, put my jeans on and ran. I was overjoyed – it was what we’d been wanting to happen,” Nafrey says.

Vandana, too, felt joy and relief – but it was mixed with fear about her daughter’s mental state. She reassured herself that she already knew the psychiatrist in Hong Kong who was treating Naina’s brother. “I knew what to do. I had to just remain calm and get her home.”

Nafrey drove to Naina’s address. There was no fleet of black cars outside, nor people dressed in black. When Naina came to open the door to Nafrey – a woman she’d known since she was a baby – her face was completely blank. “No recognition, no hint of emotion at all.” Nafrey tried to hug her: “It was like hugging a statue.”

Naina had been packing. Her organisation was meticulous: each individual sock was carefully folded, then placed in a specific bag. The kitchenette was full of expensive Japanese ingredients and obscure wholegrains. It took an hour for her to be satisfied that everything had been correctly packed. “Where are we going? Am I going to be OK?” Naina asked in Nafrey’s car. “She was like a lost child,” Nafrey says.

She had plans that meant she could only look after Naina in the morning, so Kapoor agreed to collect her and look after her until Vandana arrived in London. “My first impression was that she was very quiet. There was almost a translucent quality to her, ethereal. You felt like holding her gently,” Kapoor remembers. “But within a minute, I could tell she was not OK. She was so within herself, and absolutely frightened.”

When she arrived at Kapoor’s home in St Albans, Naina told Kapoor her daughter was an impostor. “She said, ‘I know she’s not 13 and I know she’s a spy. You’ve trained her really well. She’s a really good actor.’” She said that the dog – a soppy, sandy-coloured cockapoo called Ziggy – was also a spy. She inspected the corner of every room for hidden cameras. She told Kapoor that she knew there was a camera concealed in her necklace. Kapoor went upstairs and took all her jewellery off.

At bedtime, Naina asked Kapoor to hug her to sleep. “She was like a seven- or eight-year-old,” Kapoor says. “I held her tight. She was lying down and I was just stroking her hair. Then she said, ‘Why do you keep touching me all the time?’ I said, ‘I’m really sorry.’ I didn’t want to say, ‘But you just asked me to hug you 10 minutes ago.’” At 3am, Naina tried to open the patio doors and walk into the garden. She asked Kapoor if this really was a neighbourhood and not some kind of film set. They fell asleep together on the sofas in the living room. In the morning, Kapoor’s husband discovered Naina had come upstairs with her pillow and blanket, and fallen asleep next to him.

“How is it that anybody who interacted with Naina had not picked up on the fact that she was very unwell?” Kapoor shakes her head. “You could see that this person was not OK.”

Vandana arrived at Kapoor’s the next morning. She was struck by how fragile her daughter looked. “Her skin was like glass. She was so thin, so fair, so shining – like bone china.” Vandana went to hug her, but Naina looked at her in disgust. “She said, ‘Are you going to take my teeth out? Are you going to take my eyes out?’” Naina demanded Vandana open her mouth so she could check her teeth, running her finger over her mother’s molars: “I just followed her instructions and stood there.” Somehow reassured, Naina sat down on the sofa with her mother. “I said, ‘I’m so happy to see you, Naina. I’ve come to take you home, and you will be safe.’”

They went for a walk in a park near Kapoor’s house. “Suddenly she said, ‘Mum, you’ve not even hugged me!’ So I just stood still, and I hugged her and I hugged her.” Vandana’s eyes shine at this memory. “People are walking past us, and the two of us are just hugging in the middle of the park. It was lovely.”

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Naina didn’t want to return to Hong Kong without her college diploma. It was in a box in the storage unit she’d been renting, she explained, but it was Sunday and it wasn’t open until the next day. The following morning, when Naina pulled up the door to her unit, Vandana’s heart fell: there were dozens of huge cardboard boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, taking up every inch of space. One contained 100 dishcloths, neatly folded, labelled and placed in Ziploc bags. Another held six different Longchamp shoulder bags. There was a vacuum cleaner, dozens of ice-lolly moulds, expensive storage jars, an air fryer, designer boots and yoga wear, and boxes and boxes of Jellycat toys.

Vandana stared in disbelief, but Naina told her not to worry: everything was labelled. She had a spreadsheet documenting everything she owned – down to every nail file and pair of tweezers – the box it was stored in and the room in her future home where it would finally be unpacked. Throughout 2024 she had spent tens of thousands of pounds on things to fill her dream home in London. They found her diploma, gathered clothes appropriate for the Hong Kong heat and left the rest.

They landed safely in Hong Kong the next morning, a Tuesday. On the train from the airport, Naina seemed lucid. “What will I tell people?” she asked. “That you’re taking care of your mental health,” Vandana replied. An appointment with a psychiatrist was booked for Saturday morning, and Naina had agreed to go. She started talking about how great her résumé was – she’d worked at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, after all, so she should easily be able to get a job in Hong Kong. Vandana tells me this between deep sighs. “She was planning her life. She was not suicidal.” On the Thursday night – during a few seconds when Vandana was in the bathroom and not with her – Naina ended her life.

“My daughter is gone, despite everything I did,” Vandana says now. “I don’t know how bad her situation would have been if she had remained alive, but I had her right in front of me. I had her in my hand. And from my hand, she’s gone.”

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In the days after Naina’s death, Vandana’s brother and brother-in-law managed to log into her computer. They were looking for any documentation to demonstrate to the authorities that Naina had been mentally ill when she died. They found her psychotherapy bills, and text messages she had sent to her former friends – texts Vandana shared with me. What Naina said in them, and how her friends reacted, show both her state of mind and how ill-equipped they were to deal with it.

“I’ve gone mad,” Naina messaged a close friend in February 2022, around the time she was asking Vandana for baby pictures from London. “I keep talking to the imaginary friends who came into my head when I was 12 and now my therapist tells me it’s not normal.” One of the voices was telling her to kill herself, she said.

“Just remember how strong and loved you are. You can get through this!!” the friend replied. “Get rid of all the negative voices by replacing them with a million ‘I love you’s okay???”

There were texts to three friends in May 2022 in which Naina said the sexual abuse she remembered suffering in early childhood had been perpetrated by family members. But she gave different accounts of who was responsible to each of them. She told one she could remember being abused when she was six months old.

I approached four of Naina’s friends; only one – a close friend from college – agreed to speak to me, on condition of anonymity. She told me she and another college friend had done what they could to support Naina when she spoke to them about her memories of abuse. “We were doing our best. I don’t think we were doing a bad job, but we were having to therapise for something we were not trained for. And she was seeing a therapist, so it felt like she was being taken care of,” the friend says. Naina had been planning to cut herself off from her family for six months, she adds. “Naina had asked me not to talk to her mom, and I agreed – from what I heard, they had done terrible things to her.”

The friend saw Naina for the last time when she visited her in New York in spring 2023. Naina was on medical leave from work, but was feeling optimistic, her friend says. “It was a fun visit. We did tourist things together. At the end, she told me that when she started her job, it was possible that she might be busy with work, and that I shouldn’t take it personally if we lost touch – she’d love and cherish me for ever. I wanted to respect her boundaries. I wished her well and we texted here and there but we didn’t speak again.” When she first heard the news, she didn’t believe Naina was gone. “I think about whether there are things I missed. I wonder whether she was in the right type of therapy. She needed someone to notice something that the rest of us didn’t.”

I feel sorry for Naina’s friends. They were young and clearly wanted to help Naina and respect her wishes. When I put this to Vandana, her voice turns to ice. She says she can only “have sympathy for their ignorance”.

In the end, Naina had no friends; her messages in 2024 were only to the people who taught her yoga. “Naina fell through our fingers,” Newton tells me, her palms pressed together, her fingers splayed. “I wish I’d tried to meet up with her, or find out where she lived, or who her parents were. I wish I had tried a bit more.”

No one at the yoga studio knew how to recognise psychosis. “I’d never been in contact with it before,” Newton says. “Even now, I’m not clear what services I have access to. Where do I go? Who do I go to?” She sighs.

Nafrey and Kapoor arranged for Naina’s boxes to be shipped from the storage unit in London to Hong Kong. They are now stacked up in her bedroom. Vandana has no idea what to do with them.

“People have to know what mental illness is. I want to make sure high schools all over the world teach kids to recognise psychosis,” Vandana says. “At every point, somebody or other came in contact with her who could have helped. I want Naina’s story to go far and wide. She died because the people around her were ignorant.”

Imran Ashraf is a very famous actor and host from Pakistan. He is known for his great acting skills and his very humble attitude towards fans. He is approachable and his fans love that about him. The actor has gone places and he is all set to make a new jump in his career. He is going to star in an Indian Punjabi film and his fans are both waiting to watch him on silver screens.

Imran Ashraf will star in the upcoming film Enna Nu Rehna Sehna Ni Aaunda. He is all set to play the role of an illegal immigrant to Canada and the film looks like a blend of comedy, action and emotions. The film also stars Jessie Gill, the Indian Punjabi singer as his parallel lead.

Imran will be showing how great he is as he will showcase several emotions in this comedy film with a very real issue that many people face. This is another India-Pakistan Punjabi collaboration after Hania Aamir and Diljit Dosanjh starrer Sardaar Ji 3 released and became a big hit.

The trailer for Enna Nu Rehna Sehna Ni Aaunda is out now. Check out:

Fans are already loving the trailer and looking forward to this collaboration. One user said,”Best wishes to Imran Ashraf.” Another added, “Imran Ashraf rocked the scenes.” One said,” It is great to see Imran ashraf and Jessie Gill. Best wishes.”

Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood

Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood

Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood

Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood

Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie are said to be “utterly mortified” by lurid claims published in a new book about their father, the Duke of York.

For the past five days, revelations about Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson have been serialised by the Daily Mail from a new book by historian Andrew Lownie called ‘Entitled: The Rise And Fall Of The House Of York’.

The book adds fresh insight into Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged dealings with foreign billionaires, alongside claims of “bullying” staff, a coarse sense of humour and details about his sex life.

It also includes allegations about Fergie’s extravagant spending on staff, parties and holidays, her debts, and her supposed pursuit of famous, powerful men including John F Kennedy Jnr and golfer Tiger Woods.

A source close to Beatrice, who turned 37 yesterday, and Eugenie, 35, said the sisters are keeping their distance from their father. “The extent to how much the relationship can recover will depend on what further revelations, if any, emerge,” they said.

Sarah Ferguson’s biographer Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine, said the revelations will be especially hard for Beatrice, who is seen as a “daddy’s girl”. She said: “[Beatrice] has always been close to her father. They will both be finding this very difficult – it’s a horrid time. But I’m not surprised they haven’t come out and said anything in his defence. For his girls to show their solidarity publicly wouldn’t benefit them in any way.”

The two princesses and their mother have never commented publicly on Epstein since his links to Andrew emerged in 2015. Both are focused on their careers – Eugenie in art and Beatrice in tech – while raising young families.

Beatrice attended the Lionesses’ victory parade in London last week with her husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, stepson Wolfie, eight, and daughters Sienna, three, and Athena, seven months. Eugenie lives in Portugal with husband Jack Brooksbank and their children, August, four, and Ernest, two, and is known to host A-list friends such as Robbie Williams and Ayda Field at their villa.

According to one insider, the sisters are now “rare visitors” to Royal Lodge, where they grew up and where their parents still live on a royal lease. “They spend most of their time raising families, pursuing careers and trying to be normal,” the source said. “Andrew isn’t completely ostracised, but arrangements to see Sarah usually take place elsewhere, and the girls seem keener that the King and other senior royals are part of their lives.”

Eugenie’s Instagram, followed by 1.8 million people, last mentioned her father in June 2020, when she wished her “Papa” a happy Father’s Day. Her ‘family’ photo album includes just one image of Andrew from 2018, while her mother appears frequently on occasions such as Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day and her birthday.

Andrew has previously defended his daughters’ HRH titles and was reportedly furious when they lost palace protection in 2011. He is said to have lavished them with gifts, expensive schooling and luxury holidays. Beatrice is believed to have received an £18,000 diamond necklace for her 21st birthday from a Libyan businessman who allegedly boasted of being able to “influence” Andrew – then a trade envoy – to support certain projects.

In 2013, with that financial backing, the sisters attended trade events in Germany, but the trip drew ridicule after they accidentally drove through a red light, with a British embassy insider branding it “a laughing stock”.

Friends say they have since adapted to a more everyday life and moved away from their father’s “pompous approach to being royal”. University experiences – Beatrice at Goldsmiths, London, and Eugenie at Newcastle – are said to have made them more down to earth. “They’re remarkably well-adjusted,” one insider added. “They are far more courteous and respectful towards staff than their father has ever been.”

Posted in: Comics | Tagged: hulk, newlitg

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A New Hulk #1 was the most-read story on Bleeding Cool yesterday. Lying In The Gutters is the daily runaround for the most-read stories.

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A New Hulk #1 was the most-read story on Bleeding Cool yesterday. Lying In The Gutters is the daily runaround for the most-read stories the day before, as well as over the past six years. Founded sixteen years ago and steeped in a history of comic book industry gossip for a further eighteen years before that, Bleeding Cool has become one of the longest-standing and most well-known pop culture websites around. The Daily Lying In The Gutters remains a long-running run around the day before and possibly the day ahead. In summary, you can sign up to receive Lying In The Gutters as an email here. And maybe you just have.

A New Hulk #1 and the ten most popular stories yesterday

1. A New Hulk #1 From Marvel In November, Revealed By Street-Verse?
2. Marvel Omnibus Watch From February To July 2026
3. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in The Daily LITG, 7th of August, 2025
4. The First DC Comics Crossover With An Absolute Comic (Spoilers)
5. Is Magik The New Sorcerer Supreme To Replace Doctors Strange & Doom?
6. Just One Way That Matt Fraction’s Batman Will Look Like His Hawkeye
7. Was It Rob Liefeld Trying To Sell His Deadpool Cover For $7.5 Million?
8. DC/Absolute Crossover Spoilers in The Daily LITG, 8th of August, 2025
9. Jim Lee And Jeph Loeb’s Batman #162 Is Now Three Months Late
10. Marvel Confirms 1776 by J Michael Straczynski For USA’s 250th Birthday

And a few of my other stories from yesterday

LITG one year ago,

Marvel Comics and QR Codes top the ten most popular stories yesterday

1. Tom Brevoort On The Reaction To The X-Men QR Codes 
2. Absolute Superman’s Cape Is Made From The Dust Of Krypton 
3. Cartoon Network Website Now Sends Visitors to Max Sign-Up Page
4. The Uncanny X-Men Outliers From Gail Simone & David Marquez, Named 
5. Warden Ellis Comes To A Post-Krakoan Uncanny X-Men #1 (Spoilers)
6. Review: Borderlands & How Can Something So Thin Be Utterly Glorious? 
7. Marvel Futures & Endlings Teased For Avengers, X-Men, Venom (Spoilers)
8. Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter Persuaded Trump To Pardon Christopher Wade 
9. Olympics Pole Vault Result Shows Size REALLY Does Matter Sometimes
10. Tom Brevoort On What Went Wrong With X-Men And Krakoa

And a few other comic book stories you might enjoy.

LITG one year ago, Katy Perry Pokemon

1. Pokemon TCG Will Never Release Katy Perry, Post Malone Cards 
2. Rick and Morty Team Wouldn’t Let Justin Roiland “Drag Down” Hard Work 
3. Hasbro Announces New Transformers Stunticon Menasor Multipack 
4. Is A Big Lobo Event Coming To Superman In 2024? (Spoilers) 
5. Batman Gets No Respect From Grifter In WildCATS (Spoilers)
6. Marvel Teases Kaare Andrews’ Most Notorious Spider-Man Ever- Reign 2?
7. Funko Revisits Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Season 1 with New Pops
8. A Brand New Parasite For The DC Universe & Superman Annual Spoilers
9. Star Trek: Quinto and Peck’s Spock Meet-Up; Film Franchise’s Future
10. George Bernard Shaw Sent Lawyers After DC Comics About Superman
11. Matt Baker and the End of Cinderella Love, Up for Auction
12. Comic Creators Pull Lawsuit Against Action Lab, But Plan To Refile
13. How Spider-Woman Will Fight In The Upcoming Gang War
14. Amy’s Big Brother: Sibling Rivalry Prequel Manga Out In December
15. Transformers #1 San Diego Comic-Con Ashcan Is Already At $300
16. Oni’s Dwellings #1 On Sale Now Through Lunar But Delayed by Diamond
17. DC Comics Introduces TitansCon – Could They Do It For Real?
18. Has Harley Quinn Just Made Aquaman “Family Guy’s Meg” of DC Comics?
19. Perry White – Lex Luthor’s Greatest Ally? Superman Annual Spoilers
20. Authentic Police Cases: Matt Baker & Al Capone’s Influence on St. John
21. Gunn On Grant Gustin Gossip in the Daily LITG, 8th of August 2023

LITG two years ago, Christians Against Ms Marvel Changes To Christians Against She-Hulk

1. Christians Against She-Hulk in Daily LITG 6th August 2022
2. Doctor Who: Chris Chibnall Forgot He Should Be Writing for The Doctor
3. Christians Against Ms Marvel Changes To Christians Against She-Hulk
4. The Orville: New Horizons Tribute Video Honors Norm Macdonald
5. Surprise First Appearance Alert In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #100
6. DC Comics Pulped Almost All 25th Anniversary Vertigo Hardcover Copies
7. Constantine “On Solid Ground and Moving Along” at HBO Max: Report
8. Jaws Is being Released In IMAX For The First Time, Here’s A Trailer
9. The Sandman: Neil Gaiman Answers Alan Moore/Constantine Question
10. Comic Book Creators On The Sandman Comic React To… Sandman
11. Yen Press Announces Five New Manga and Novel Titles
12. Leslie Charteris and the Mystery of Avon’s The Saint #4, at Auction
13. Behold, Behemoth: New Horror from Tate Brombal, Nick Robles at BOOM
14. Nathan Hale’s The Mighty Bite for Fans of Dog Man & The InvestiGators
15. Did Mark Millar Do His Research For American Jesus Vol 3 On Facebook?
16. Patrick Kindlon & Paul Tucker Bring a Stringer to Image Comics
17. Mat Groom, David LaFuente, Danilo Beyruth Create Singularity at Image
18. James Tynion IV Is Only No 2 In Comics Substack, So He Tries Harder
19. The Question Returns In Charlton’s Mysterious Suspense #1, at Auction
20. Star Wars #1 Reprint CGC 9.0, Up for Auction
21. Longshot Makes His Debut, On Auction At Heritage Auctions
22. The Flag Takes Star Spangled Flight in Our Flag Comics, Up for Auction
23. Alleged CGC Thefts From Iron Lion Comics In Colorado Springs
24. A New Outsiders Comic With A New Name In 2023? (BatSpoilers)
25. Christians Against She-Hulk Troll Trap in Daily LITG 8th August 2022

LITG three years ago, The Punisher Skull

1. The Punisher Symbol, Jon Bernthal & Why Bad Decisions Matter: Opinion
2. Jeopardy!: LeVar Burton Deserved Better; Brent Spiner Has His Back
3. Kaleidoscope, The Suicide Squad Character Created By Two Fans In 1982
4. Marvel Printed 8 Million But Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 Sells For A Premium
5. Dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight in Batman 89 #1 [Preview]
6. The Sandman Casting Confirmed, Set Safety; American Gods Still Alive?
7. Supergirl: Jon Cryer & Jesse Rath Do Right By The CW Series’ Last Day
8. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sequel Focus: Willow’s Slayer-Witch Daughter
9. Dave Bautista on Ron DeSantis: “This Hack is Not a Leader”
10. The Boys: Misha Collins Says Jensen Ackles Has Gotten Soft (& Gummy?)
11. Why Scott Snyder Went To ComiXology Originals For Eight New Comics
12. Director Bones Saving DC From Crossovers (Infinite Frontier Spoilers)
13. Uncle Sam as a Superhero in National Comics, Up for Auction
14. Upstaged, a Nonbinary Graphic Novel by My Little Pony’s Robin Easter
15. Rodney Barnes & Jason Shawn Alexander Adapt Blacula as Graphic Novel
16. The Wild Worlds of Chesler’s Punch Comics, Up for Auction
17. Sean Gordon Murphy Previews Unnamed Unannounced Batman Comic
18. What is DCDKOS? Tom Taylor Teases Secret Comic Book Dream Project
19. Surviving the Future in Crossed+100 1 Signed by Alan Moore, at Auction
20. Rachel Elliott Auctions Middle-Grade OGN The Real Riley Mayes
21. Corto Maltese is More Than DC’s Despotic South America Country
22. Naruto Forms Champion’s First Anime-Based Apparel Collection
23. Batman #111 Beats X-Men #2 To Top Bleeding Cool Bestseller List
24. LeVar Burton Deserved Better in The Daily LITG, 8th of August 2021

LITG four years ago, Pokemon, IDW, Walking Dead and Naughty Wolverine

That is not a good look, IDW… or for Wolverine, frankly.

1. Is The Making A Splash Ticket Worth Buying In Pokémon GO?
2. Report Claims IDW Has Fired New Publisher Jud Meyers
3. The Walking Dead Wins Trademark Battle Over The Toking Dead
4. Transformers Optimus Prime Gets New Figure from Hasbro/Threezero
5. Did Wolverine Just Use Magneto’s Helmet As A Urinal?
6. Christopher Priest’s Writers Commentary, Justifying Vampirella #10
7. Magikarp Community Day Guide: Don’t Miss Shiny Gyarados
8. Punchline Vs. Harley Quinn Round 2 in Batman #98…
9. Shiny Staryu Arrives in Pokémon GO for Ultra Unlock: Enigma Week
10. Yen Press Announces 10 New Manga and Light Novels for August
11. Will DIE-Namite Publish With Or Without Green Hornet?
12. Further Delays In Richard Meyer Vs Mark Waid Case
13. Looper Showed China Its Future to Get Time Travel Past Censors
14. Marvel, Titan, Dark Horse Release Free Comic Book Day 2020 Digitally
15. Red Dawn 2012 Remake Tainted Sony and MGM In China For Years
16. Best Laid Plans to Get World War Z Movie Into China – Despite Zombies

LITG five years ago,

Ah, when our biggest concern was working out the language in the House Of X comic books…

1. Iron Studios Reveals “I Am Iron Man” Statue That We Love 3000
2. Today, The Punisher is Destroyed by New Origin Twist in “Savage Avengers” #4 (SPOILERS)
3. “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite” Receives A New Update With Added Content
4. “The Walking Dead”: Will “Hobbs & Shaw” Bring “The Rock” into TWDU?
5. All of DC Comics’ November 2019 Acetate Covers, Animated
6. Moira MacTaggert – an Omega Level Mutant? “House Of X” #2 Spoilers
7. “The Walking Dead”: Will “Hobbs & Shaw” Bring “The Rock” into TWDU?
8. Joe Manganiello Designs An Evil Tortle For “Dungeons & Dragons”
9. Dan Didio Calls Out Speculator Marketing Driving “Appearance of a Healthy Industry”
10. “Titans” Season 2: Anna Diop Previews Starfire’s New Look [VIDEO]
11. House of X #2 Plagued by Typos, Hickman Reveals [Spoilers]

Comic Book birthdays today.

Comics folk are still getting older and still celebrating that special date with sixteen years for us as well.

• Bob McLeod, co-creator of The New Mutants, creator of  Superhero ABC for HarperCollins,artist on Hulk, Action Comics, Star Wars, Spider-Man
• Rick Leonardi, co-creator of Spider-Man 2099, artist on Spider-Man, Nightwing.
• Jim Asmus, co-creator of Evolution, writer on Gambit, Generation Hope, Quantum & Woody.
•  Shon C Bury of Space Goat Productions
• Mark Braun, artist on Slimer.
• Lou Manna, artist on Champions, Icicle, Infinity Inc
• Steve Gallacci, creator of Albedo Anthropomorphics.
• Steve Moncuse, creator of Fish Police.

If you are in comics and have a birthday coming up – or you know someone who has – get in touch at richjohnston@bleedingcool.com.

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