Superhero Movies Continued to Rule At the Box-Office
It seems like every year that naysaying prognosticators predict that the public’s love for movies about superheroes will fall out of favor and every year those bootleg Nostradamus’s are proven wrong. In 2012, three of the top ten grossing movies of the year were about superheroes (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and Amazing Spiderman) with The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises hitting the $1 billion mark. And the future looks just as bright with the upcoming third Iron Man movie and the Man of Steel poised to have big showings at the box office too.

The Acceptance (Both Creatively and Commercially) of Frank Ocean
Despite any claims as to the true motivation behind Frank Ocean’s declaration of his sexuality, and I doubt a young black man looking to make a splash in the R&B/Hip-Hop market would think any hints of homosexuality would be the thing to make him “hot in the streets”, the fact that Ocean’s debut CD, Channel Orange, was met with both critical and commercial success from all sides of the industry and fandom was a good thing. In this day and age the idea that an artist would be facing career suicide by being honest about who he or she is is one that seems to have lost much of it’s resonance. I tend to care more about the music and artist produces than what goes on in their bedrooms and Ocean’s success proves that the majority of the rest of the world feels the same way.

The Creative Resurgence of the Walking Dead
At the beginning of 2012, The Walking Dead had squandered all of the good will it erred in it’s first season by becoming the one thing a show about the zombie apocalypse should never be…boring. But then new show runner Glen Mazzarra was able to get the second half of the second season to feel like a show with a purpose and that momentum was maintained into the third season that premiered in October. Things had been ratcheted up so much that more action occurred in the first 3 episodes of the third season than we got in the entirety of season 2. Here’s hoping that the show continues to be just as good when the second half of season 3 begins in February and that the latest behind-the-scenes shuffles doesn’t adversely effect the quality of the show.

The Summer Olympics Didn’t Suck
The good old US of A won a shitload of medals, a whole new crop of America’s Sweethearts were discovered, countless numbers of Internet memes were created, and Danny Boyle used a ton of the UK government’s money to create a physical representation of an acid trip. What was there not to like?

R. Kelly Gave Us More Trapped In The Closet
2012 gave us the second installment of R. Kelly’s demented opera, Trapped in the Closet,  and all I can say is give me more.