Issues With Commitment

Heidi MacDonald of The Comics Beat did a pretty thorough interview with Jim Lee about the DC relaunch of Justice League #1 this past Wednesday.

A bunch of comic stores in New York City did midnight sales Tuesday night / Wednesday morning, and Jim talks about how he and Geoff Johns brought pizza to the comics fans waiting in line:

I’ve seen midnight openings for video games and movies, but I’ve not seen a store signing at midnight with creators before — certainly not at DC. Geoff and I wanted to go the extra step and be there in person for people who are so into a comic that they were willing to forgo sleep.

Oh, Jim… I know you’ve been to San Diego Comic-Con… how can you be surprised that a fan would be willing to forgo sleep when you know full well that many of us are perfectly willing to forgo bathing?

(via Salon)

Superman Is, In Fact, a Dick

Newsarama’s got a five-page preview of the new Action Comics #1 that’s dropping next Wednesday in the second salvo of DC’s New 52 reboot. Go take a look and then come back. And bring a six-pack.

You might find yourself confused that Superman’s costume seems to be little more than a Superman t-shirt, but don’t be alarmed: the initial storyline in Action Comics is supposed to correspond to Superman’s first year as the world’s first superhero. Which doesn’t explain how he found the Superman t-shirt; it’s not like he could just go to a comic store like I do for Superman t-shirts… maybe he had it made for him at one of those novelty t-shirt places at the mall… actually, that doesn’t hold up because it’s not fucking 1987… and even if it was, those places were staffed by high school kids who fucked up making me a simple block-lettered “Medicate Me” shirt to wear to prom, so I doubt they were silk screening, and even if they were they were probably huffing the dye.

But I digress.

It All Changes Here! Except For The Stuff That Doesn’t…

So, like any good geek, I have finished reading both Flashpoint #5 and Justice League #1 by Geoff Johns. Apparently, I’m not the only one. Justice League #1 is heading into it’s third printing. So, that must mean it’s pretty damn good. Right?

Well, I’ll start with “it’s good because that means fucking Flashpoint is now finally done.”

Flashpoint didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. Between the insane body count and the fact that somehow Kim Kardashian is more competent at pulling off a wedding than Wonder Woman, I just couldn’t get in to it. I really wanted to. I did. But, frankly, I’ve been suffering from massive event fatigue since about the end of Blackest Night so, no offense to Mr. Johns, but he could have created a dimensional rift that allowed the sky to rain vodka and My Little Ponies with power rings and I would have said, “Oh? That’s nice” and rolled over and gone back to sleep. Stick a fork in me.

Can’t Think of A Title, So: GIANT-SIZED MAN-THING

Hi, and welcome to to Crisis On Infinite Midlives!

We’d like to tell you that Crisis on Infinite Midlives is the hottest, most exciting and comprehensive new comic book and geek culture related site on the Internet, but we think that if you’ll just take a look around you’ll discover for yourself that it actually and truly is a weird little vanity project that we idly came up with while drinking heavily one evening in late July at the San Diego Comic-Con.

“Why’s there so much fuss over the San Diego Batgirl?” one of us muttered while reaching for a beverage, “We were at that panel; she asked a leading question, tried to derail a perfectly good discussion about the New 52, and was treated with far more courtesy than I would have been if I grabbed the mike and shrieked at Dan Didio that I wanted my two bucks back from when I called the 900-number to kill the Jason Todd Robin.”

“Yeah,” the other one of us said, “I’d have respected her more if instead of using weird arguments and trying to gin up a lynch mob, she’d just have had the strength of character to call those guys sexist dicks. And then maybe scream ‘Baba Booey!'”

“But everyone on the Internet’s being so Goddamned serious over what amounts to a live-action troll. Why isn’t anyone just saying that the woman was irritating and distracting in front of 500 paying comic book fans?”

DING.

A couple months of planning (TRANSLATION: Many mornings of saying “Jesus, am I hung over. Did we talk about starting a comics Web site last night?” wrapped in a grand total of about six hours of buying a domain name and three hours trying to ramfeed a microphone meant for performing stand-up comedy into a USB hub… which come to think of it is probably it’s own weird Japanese techno fuck fetish, and which would be a much easier Web site to run), and here you have it… whatever “it” is.

Welcome True Believers (And Those Who Brought More Beer)!

About 42 days ago, Rob and I were sitting in the bar of the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. Comic Con had just rolled up its tents and was packing off. We were getting drunk. Rob was getting agitated. These two things are pretty normal for us. However, Rob was also pretty fixated on confronting Dan Didio to ask for his two dollars back. He spent those two dollars on a phone poll over killing Jason Todd in 1988 and, ever since DC brought back the little shit in 2005, Rob has been nursing a whole heartful of hate. He’d been looking forward to Didio’s usual Sunday panel on “Why We Love Comics” and was hoping to take a shot at asking the man about it there. However there was no “Why We Love Comics” panel this year; instead the only shot at Didio was another in a lengthy series of “The New 52” panels. So, now I worried that, should we have a Didio sighting in the Hyatt lobby, Rob would chase after him like the paper boy that dogs John Cusack in “Better Off Dead”: “TWOOOOOO DOLLAAAARS!”

He was pretty worked up.

In any event, we had no Dan Didio sighting – which was probably a good thing. I enjoy not having a police record in the state of California. I’m pretty sure Rob does, too. So, we sat there and continued to pour overpriced libations down our heads and almost, but not quite, began to not notice that the bar at the Manchester Grand Hyatt was entirely too classy for the likes of us. We also started to talk about comic books.