Marvel Digital Comics: Tales of The Black Freighter

I’m guessing that Marvel’s been feeling a little left out by all the publicity surrounding DC Comic’s New 52 and their decision to make all their comics available for digital sale the same day as print, because late Friday afternoon Marvel issued a press release announcing that Ultimate Spider-Man, one of the few comics that Marvel DOES offer for sale the same day as print, had “the best first day of sales for a new release to date!” on their iPhone and iPad apps.

Awesome! How many copies did you sell, writer Brian Michael Bendis?

Nothing frustrates an author more than his work not being able to get into the hands of the people that want it, and now with the Marvel Comics app we can!

Okay… how many people got their hands on it digitally? You: Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel – how many?

We’ve been pushing to make Ultimate Comics Spider-Man our top release to date, and the results we’ve seen both here and in print certainly show us that we’re heading in the right direction.

For the love of – Why won’t you just tell us how many digital copies you’re selling, Marvel and DC? What are you so worried about?

And Then They Came For The Oans…

Comic Book Resources just published a preview of the upcoming Green Lantern Corps #1, written by Peter Tomasi (Of recent Batman & Robin infamy) and Fernando Pasarin on pencils. As with all DC’s New 52, I can only presume that it’s meant to be a jumping-in point for new readers unfamiliar with Green Lanterns, their background or any of their history. So let’s look at it while pretending to be one of those new readers, shall we?

We start with a man being locked into something called a “sciencell” against his will by uncaring jailors.

New York Comic Con Wants You On Your Knees Looking For Clues

The New York Comic Con, which attracted 96,000 attendees last year, will kick off it’s 2nd annual convention this year on October 13-16, 2011. It describes itself thusly:

New York Comic Con is the East Coast’s biggest and most exciting popular culture convention. Our show floor plays host to the latest and greatest in comics, graphic novels, anime, manga, video games, toys, movies, and television. Our panels and autograph sessions give fans a chance to interact with their favorite creators. Our screening rooms feature sneak peeks at films and television shows months before they hit either big or small screens. And with dedicated professional hours, New York Comic Con is a market place, bringing together the major players in the entertainment industry. New York Comic Con is the second largest pop culture convention in America and the only one that takes place in the comic book, publishing, media, and licensing capital of the world — Gotham City.

New York Comic Con attracted over 96,000 attendees in 2010, easily making it the second largest comic book and pop culture gathering in the country. And Crain’s New York Business has ranked NYCC as the second largest event in New York City! We don’t toot our own horn often, but that’s pretty awesome!

New Yorkers like to make claims about how awesome they are compared to everybody about a lot of things: pizza, Derek Jeter, herpes. But, considering that Dragon*Con down in Atlanta drew a comparatively smaller 40,000 attendees, I guess they can make this claim.

This year they’re also hosting a scavenger hunt again, the prizes being either a 4 day pass to the con or an Ultimate VIP package (which may or may not involve a handy from Joe “I’m Still Here” Quesada). Will you be the uber-fan who taps his inner Batman and sleuths out the prize? Happy hunting and remember NYCC reminds you to not get arrested while looking for clues.

Ring Of Fire: Red Lanterns #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains immediate, thoughtless, prejudicial spoilers. It is even possible that the story has already been ruined for you. So you might as well keep reading.

If you’ve been a comic book fon for the past couple of years, particularly if you’ve been one who followed Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern saga from the Sinestro Corps War through the Blackest Night event of 2010, you are going to cream your pants over the first seven pages of Red Lanterns #1. Peter Milligan NAILS everything fun and cool about the Red Lantern Corps, so much so that at one point I stopped what I was doing and I told Amanda, “You know what? Red Lanterns has the opening I’ve liked best of any of DC’s New 52 so far.”

“That’s great, Rob,” she said, “But I’d appreciate it if you’d put the comic book away until after we’re done having sex.”

But I digress… actually, I don’t, because that seven page opener is as much a non-sequiter as the above joke was. It has next to nothing to do with the remainder of the story that follows, and frankly? If you’re one of those ephemeral “new readers” that the New 52 is supposed to be reaching, I’m guessing you’ll quit somewhere during those seven pages and never read the book again.

Because if you don’t already know the characters, their backgrounds and motivations, what you’re seeing as an introduction to the Red Lantern Corps is an angry kitty in a red jumpsuit who bites some space dicks (The aliens in question being dicks, not ACTUAL, dangling space wangs. And the aliens themselves aren’t actually penises, they’re DICKS. Oh, forget it.), and his owner, who appears to be Mike Tyson if he ate too many carrots and tore his own lips off to give his teeth room to reproduce in his own mouth. And you’ll close the book, say something like, “Huh. those comics people DO eat mushrooms,” and go back and read Harry Potter again.

Buffy Summers: Party Slayer: Review Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #1

Fun Fact Of The Day: today, I discovered that my taste in classical music runs toward pieces that involve string instruments, restrained use of the woodwind family, and, are actually Led Zeppelin. Mostly the latter, actually. I determined this during a brief, but abortive attempt at cultivating a taste for classical music while trapped in traffic gridlock on the I-95 corridor. This may not have been the best time to make the attempt, but it’s not like I had anything better to do. I was trapped in a sedan sandwich between what appeared to be a head made mostly of cell phone in front of me and a morbidly obese individual in a Toyota Yaris who seemed to have dozed off in back of me. He would appear to wake every now and again to shovel a fistful of Funyuns down his head and then drop right back to sleep. It was fascinating except for that part where I worried he’d lose control over the brake pedal and smash me into Funyun dusted road pizza. I needed something to distract me.

There are seven television seasons that one could point to in the Buffy-verse as being “Classic Buffy”, as opposed to the comic book Season 8, which I consider to be “New Coke Buffy”. I wanted to like it, but even Whedon has said in interviews that by the end of Season 8 things needed to be reined back in and brought back to basics. But hey, sometimes, you just have to try. For every instance of “No, I think I need something that rocks a little harder than Mr. Vivaldi here”, there is also an “anything goes” reverting back to “basics/world with no magic”. Sometimes the classic is better.

A Dose Of The Sticky Green Rings

Heidi MacDonald at Comics Beat got her hands on an email from DC Comics saying that some percentage of copies of Green Lantern #1, which came out this past Wednesday, are being recalled for replacement due to a printing error that dropped a big, ugly-looking green loop on the cover, making Sinestro look like he’s rocking a raging dose of Oan Face Herpes:

Batman, Robin and Curly Joe: Batman & Robin #1 Review

We’re only halfway into the four-week reveal of DC’s New 52, so it might be a little early to say this about any particular book, but I’ll say it anyway: I firmly believe that Batman & Robin was only released because “New 52” sounds catchier than “New 51”.

This book tries to be all things to everyone who ever read a Batman comic book. And while that might be a noble goal for some marketing drone slavering over the idea of thousands of non-comic geeks stumbling into comic stores to “check out that new blasphemous, hipster douchebag Superman I keep hearing about,” for an actual comic reader, it leads to an uneven, schizophrenic read that can’t seem to decide what it wants to be.

After an introductary action sequence where a new villain, Nobody… no, HE’S Nobody… the name of the bad guy is Nobody… um, third base? Anyway, there’s a new bad guy. Nobody. He’s invisible. Spoilers. Yeah.

The book proper opens with a reproduction of the parlor from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One where Bruce Wayne told his father’s memory that he would become a bat. Which for a rebooted Batman story isn’t a bad place to start, and God knows that last week’s Detective Comics #1 did itself a solid referencing Miller’s classic look…

And two pages later? Batpoles.

The Nightwatchman Moonlights

The first big Comic-Con announcement, on preview night, was that Dark Horse Comics was planning to publish Orchid, a comic written by Tom Morello, the lead guitarist for Audioslave and Rage Against The Machine, which led most if us there at the time to take in a sharp breath and remark: “I hung around the Dark Horse booth for an hour to hear an announcement that didn’t include the words ‘Buffy’, ‘Sin’ or ‘City’?”

Dial ahead two months and Dark Horse has released a six-page preview of the first issue of a book they’re hyping as “the tale of a teenage prostitute who learns that she is more than the role society has imposed upon her.” Oh, Dark Horse… you had me at “teenage prostitute.” And so did the Internet. Be right back…

I Can See For – Ah, Screw It: Ultimate Spider-Man #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. For example, Miles Morales is apparently Spider-Man now. And by the way, the spoilers start IMMEDIATELY.

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If you’re anything like me, the first thing you did after seeing the last page of Ultimate Spider-Man #1 is hit Google and see if spiders can, in fact, camoflage into their backgrounds. I did this even though I am petrified of spiders. Petrified to the point that season three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is my favorite; not because of the plot, characters or theme, but because it was the first season without that everfucking scuttling tarantula in the opening credits.

Turns out, as I suspected, that any Web site touting the camoflagability of spiders will, by nature, include large, full-color close-up photographs of spiders in order to prove that some spiders can, in fact, blend into their surroundings. Which proves two things:

1. Brian Michael Bendis has done his spider research for this new iteration of Spider-Man, and:
2. If you are an arachnophobe, Brian Michael Bendis is a Goddamned douchebag.

Somebody Please Buy The Lady A Drink: Review of Demon Knights #1

I had intended to bring you all a recap of last night’s Deadliest Warrior: Zombies vs. Vampires, but then Daniel Bard imploded in the middle of his inning during last nights Red Sox/Blue Jays game and our local bar consoled us with beer and free popcorn until “Whoops, I have a job to go to in the morning” o’clock. So, that show is sitting on the DVR and I will get to it when I can.

However, last night I did get to read Demon Knight #1, written by Paul Cornell with pencils by Diogenes Neves (that may be the best name, ever). One of the things I remember most vividly at Comic-Con this year was just how excited the two of them were in discussing the book at one of the New 52 panels this past July. The other thing I remember vividly was this thing with a homeless guy and some Tide Stain Stick, but that’s neither here nor there. Demon Knights is truly something they should have every right to be excited about. Neves art is vibrant and expressive. I was already a fan of Madame Xanadu after Matt Wagner‘s run with the character, but between Neves’s work and Cornell’s character voicing, I just fell in love with the character:

Sometimes you just have to ditch the fairy queens of Avalon for the Dairy Queen. I get it.