The Mighty Scoobies… I Mean Avengers Trailer

Okay, so by process of elimination, Black Widow has to be Buffy. So the immortal creature for whom she futilely pines, again, by process of elimination, has to be Thor (If Buffy boned Angel he’d lose his soul. If Black Widow nails Thor she’ll lose her spine… unless there’s a “Condom of Thor” part of Viking myth I’m not familiar with… and if there is, I don’t want to know how it knows “if he be worthy“).

The powerful blond guy who threatens to make it a love triangle has to be Captain America. The non-powered, wisecracking Scooby has to be Iron Man, which means that Willow, the former nerd who discovers great, almost uncontrollable power by embracing the dark side… well hell, by process of elimination, that means that Willow has to be The Hulk. Tough break, Bruce… although it explains the name “Bruce”.

So that means that Hawkeye’s Dawn. Wow… once I said that, it was the first time I irrationally and viscerally hated Hawkeye’s face. Anyway…

As promised in yesterday’s podcast, the trailer for Marvel’s Joss Whedon-directed The Avengers appears after the jump.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 4: The Justice of F***ing

We here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives finally kicked the cold and got healthy! And then we celebrated with cheap liquor and got sick a different way, so once again, here we are, a day late and a dollar… where’s our f***ing dollar!?

In this week’s episode, we drool over the new trailer for the Avengers movie, we thank DC Comics for announcing that they’ll be selling comics on the Amazon Kindle Fire (When we bought a f***ing Barnes & Noble Nook Color six months ago) by speculating which New 52 book will be canceled first (and which should be canceled first), and talk about our sleeper books of the week!

In addition:

• Amanda would like to announce that she was incorrect when she said that Alex Maleev was the creator of Echo! She meant to say it was Jesus!
• Here’s Rob’s review of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode!
• While tomorrow we will be posting a full-on video of the Avengers trailer in family-friendly and buggy Flash video, here’s the Quicktime edition so that Steve Jobs can cockblock you with upgrade warnings from the grave!
• And simply look up and to the left to see happens when you Google “Captain America Liefeld Boobs”! (via Grotesque Anatomy)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:57 — 42.1MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers! And if you don’t, we’ll show you what happens when you Google “Liefeld Mantits No Seriously Just Liefeld’s Mantits”!

Cognitive Dissonance: An Open Letter to Alan Moore

Alan Moore is doing a reading of one of his non-comic things on Saturday, so he did an interview with a UK… tabloid? I think it’s a tabloid. Then again, I thought English tabloids were supposed to have titty shots, which I couldn’t find. But it’s not like I looked hard; after all, all I had access to was their Web site, and I’m not gonna spend time figuring out where “Page 3” is when I can smack my head against the keyboard, press the Enter key and get thousands of pages of hardcore pornography. But I digress.

The point is that Alan Moore did a short interview with this thing, and used the opportunity to talk about how awesome Alan Moore is:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Oh, Alan… let’s start with the obvious stuff.

I Don’t Have To Listen To You; You’re Not My Real Dad!

"Diana, please, I just want to get to know you." "Screw you, man! You're not my real dad!" "But, I have *alimony*..."

Look, frankly I was going to go to bed but, as I take after my own dad, I have an affinity for Scotch and rolling into work egregiously hungover. My liver knows its place and will do as its damn told. Now, what was I talking about…? Oh, yeah, Wonder Woman.

See, here’s the thing, today Josh Kushins posted this on the DCU Blog:

In DC COMICS-THE NEW 52, Wonder Woman will have a new origin, in which she is the daughter of Hippolyta … and Zeus! In recent interviews, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang have teased that readers should expect the unexpected in this edgier, horror take on the superhero genre ­and the king of the gods will ensure that nothing goes as planned for his defiant daughter.

Originally created by the goddess Aphrodite and raised to perfection on the Amazon island of Themiscyra, the newest incarnation of Wonder Woman has a new costume and now a new origin ­ but she remains Wonder Woman. Strong. Proud. Fearless. WONDER WOMAN is the 12th title in DC COMICS-THE NEW 52 to sell more than a 100K copies.

Bastard Son Of A Thousand Comics: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. If you decide not to read it, just go buy the book right fucking now, and we’ll leave it at that.

The Strange Talent of Luther Strode is the story of a high school nerd who buys a “Tired of having sand kicked in your face?” fitness book out of the back of a comic book, develops superpowers after reading it, and uses those powers to get a girl and defeat his jock nemesis in dodgeball and in a high school men’s room fistfight. Truly, writer Justin Jordan is one of us… or would be if he didn’t seem to know that people like us didn’t go into the men’s rooms in high school, because we generally didn’t need cigarettes or black eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s more going on than Geek Rage in this book. We open the book seeing Strode in a flash-forward where he’s masked, ripped and has the ability to stop loads with his chest and beat men down by jerking off some of their parts… which sounds like it would be yet another reason that I personally never went into the high school men’s room if it didn’t look like this:

Jordan teases that there’s some kind of reasoning behind Strode’s newfound powers, and that those powers might make him the target of a mysterious bearded dandy called The Librarian that will lead us to a greater story to take us through this six-issue miniseries, but issue one is all about a high school loser who gets superpowers… which is absolutely smart and compelling storytelling.

Because after all, it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re reading a comic book, you were either a nerd who had a hard time in high school, or you were a jock who suffered a grievous concussion. And if you were the latter, you’re not reading a book as smart as Luther Strode.

And smart it is, because there is a LOT of groundwork laid here, and if you’re not careful, you could miss it.

Baseless Speculation For Fun and…

UPDATE 10/12/2011: The September sales numbers have been released, and OMAC #1 actually sold 33,581 copies. So let’s make that purely speculative magic cancellation number a little closer to 15,000 copies. 

Last week Diamond, the company that distributes comics to retailers like my local comic store owner (Who knows me by name and asks me if I would please stop asking to use his bathroom right after buying tentacle hentai), announced the preliminary wholesale sales numbers for September, which include all of the DC New 52 books except for the first print of Justice League #1, which came out in August. There are no specific copies-sold numbers yet, but OMAC came in at number 82, behind all the other New 52 books… including Justice League #1, which came out in… fucking August.

Which is a bummer to hear, since clearly OMAC is growing on us here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives… and even more of a bummer when Bleeding Cool reported last week that it was already in danger of being canceled:

And it’s written by co-publisher [Dan DiDio] and [sic] the man who has been pushing for the relaunch so long. So here’s the thing – will it seem just to anyone if one of the other 52 is cancelled [sic] due to lower sales and the publisher’s own comic, O.M.A.C., survives? I doubt it. Dan DiDio may be forced to sacrifice one of his own…

Wow. That’s depressing. Guess I’d better yank the title off my subscription pull list. At the very least, it’ll be another three bucks toward tentacle porn, or at least two bucks with another buck toward the sock cleaning bill. I guess when God closes a door, he opens a – what’s that, OMAC inker Scott Koblish?

O.M.A.C is not in danger of being cancelled.

GO ON…

Pissed Men: Avengers: 1959 Review

Since AMC’s show Mad Men became a hit by turning mid-20th century nostalgia into a bankable commodity and by casting Vincent Kartheiser in his second role where I want to stomp his balls off, it was only a matter of time before the copycats started showing up. Much like Raiders of the Lost Ark begat Tales of the Gold Monkey and Bring ‘Em Back Alive, this year Mad Men has given us the creatively leeched Pan Am and The Playboy Club… with pretty much the same predictable results.

And so what with Marvel Comics hoping to bring in new readers and not being fools (Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! Marvel doesn’t NEED to reboot to keep their number one market sh… wait, what?), Marvel’s thrown their own hat in the Good-Old-Days ring with Avengers: 1959, apparently having missed the twin memos that the current trend is toward reliving the 1960’s, and that the last go-round with 1950’s nostalgia ended by jumping the shark. Literally.

Look: I’ve been around the block enough to know that the idea of a comics company sniffing for a bandwagon to jump on is hardly new. Let’s face reality: if Roy Thomas hadn’t snapped up Star Wars license, then Marvel would be the ones trying to pretend they hadn’t released Star Hunters – a comic so bad they pulled the “kill the hero and bring him back with a new costume to save the book” trick 120 days after the book started. Being a realist I know that if Mad Men was about Christopher Street in New York, Marvel would be releasing Avengers: What Price Glory Hole? right now. So I won’t try to hold the copycat feeling against this book.

Attack Of The Clones – Review Of Huntress #1

We’ve reached the end of the deluge of new #1’s from DC’s universal reboot. With the 52 all new, on-going titles established, DC is now releasing miniseries titles for characters whom they’d like to keep active in the universe but, for whatever reason, did not merit an on-going title. This week’s candidates include Huntress #1, a six issue run that IGN seems to think is set on Earth 2, but actually, according to DC will have events that will play into Birds of Prey (presumably in this universe). DC also released Penguin: Pain And Prejudice #1, which will outline the origins of The Penguin. On October 12, DC will release The Shade #1, which will have a 12 issue run. So, why did DC decide that these characters wouldn’t make the cut for an on-going series over the likes of some of the more marginal Wildstorm characters such as Voodoo or Grifter? The mind of Dan DiDio is a curious place indeed.

File Under: This Is Pretty Cool

I’m a little late with this but this past Monday, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette covered the 24-Hour Comic Challenge, which is held yearly at the Worcester Art Museum. Sixteen artists, who ranged in age from 9 to 57, participated. The goal of the event is to have each artist complete their own individual, fully written and illustrated comic book in the space of 24 hours. Artists used a variety of methods to complete their work, ranging from pencil to magic marker to electronic tablets. Jim Lee could learn a little something from these folks.

And one of the most awesome things about this event?

The artists’ work will be on display for a month in the Museum’s Higgins Education Wing. After that, it will be scanned into a computer and sent electronically to ComicsPRO.org, the comic book retailer trade association that sponsors the event, for possible inclusion in the 24-Hour Comic Day Anthology.

How great is it that comic books, and work by, primarily, new artists of comic books, is being celebrated with an exhibition at an art museum – and then gets their work in front of industry and retailers? Now people can have a reason to visit Worcester, MA that doesn’t involve visiting elderly relations or buying crack. Good work!

1978 Redux, In A Good Way: OMAC #2 Review

“Lemme see,” I said to my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me why his store always smells like a distillery explosion after I leave, “The New 52 week one books that we want to keep getting… definitely Detective Comics. Also Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Justice League International… we’ll call Batgirl ‘on the bubble,’ and, um…”

“Don’t forget OMAC,” Amanda chimed in.

“OMAC? Are you fucking kidding me? You read The Outsiders at the end of its run. Dan DiDio might be a good publisher or editor in chief, but whoever he answers to shouldn’t allow him to write anything longer than his own name.”

“Yeah, but I like Keith Giffen. And I really liked the end of the first issue. So I want to give it another shot.”

Sheesh. Wimmens, man. What’re you gonna do? So I made the commitment to spend another $2.99 a month because hey: I love her, and it isn’t gonna suck itself, and sandwich: I don’t have one, amirite?

Ow. Owwwww. Note to self: don’t write shit like that when you don’t mean it and when your girlfriend is your editor. But I digress.

So this past Wednesday OMAC #2 was, in fact, in my pile of subscription pulls, whether I really wanted it or not. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the better books of the week.