Just in time for GirlGeekCon in Seattle this weekend and New York Comic Con in, well, New York City, next weekend, we have a batch of ambitious cosplayers who are ready to embrace the design changes of the relaunched DCnU. Behold the winners of the most recent Gamma Squad cosplay costume contest:
What? No G'nort?
Let’s start with a little in the way of full disclosure: we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are big fans of Warner Brothers’ / DC Comics animation. We could talk about our shelves full of Bruce Timm / Paul Dini Batman, Batman Beyond and Justice League DVDs, or our epic weekends screening all four seasons of Batman: The Animated Series while drinking a concoction we like to call Venom (Protip: the secret ingredients are Rebel Yell bourbon and Wild Cherry Jolt Cola – because you can’t find this shit in the States), but I won’t.
Because frankly, this picture of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives’ Home Office TV room art centerpiece is worth a thousand words… all of those words being “geek”.
Which is part why we are so excited about the impending release of WB Animation’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One on October 11th on the video on demand service of your choice, and on October 18th on DVD and Blu-Ray. The other part is that, after five weeks of DC New 52 books were Batman lubes his Batpole with every trollop in Gotham City, it’s nice to see a Batman who saves pussy rather than trolling for it, as he does in this second released clip from the flick:
First we had hipster Superman. Now we have…hippy?
Left: Russell Crowe as Jor-El. Right: Henry Cavill as Homeless Moe
Both Topless Robot and Newsarama are carrying first looks at the new Man of Steel movie, to be directed by Zack Snyder. Gotta say, Kal-El and his dad are looking a little…scruffy. I supposed Jor-El has an excuse. Who has time to shave when your planet is falling down all around you? But, Superman? This movie supposedly has a budget of around $175 million. You prop people can’t spring for some glasses for the man when he’s disguised as Clark Kent? Really? Or some hair dye for Amy Adams (Lois Lane):
LOL, what?
I think casting got confused when they heard the word “Lois”:
We're now going to throw this to our Asian reporter, Trisha Takanawa, who we've decided to cast as a Sioux midget.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review may contain spoilers. Such as the fact that zombies have taken over the world. Tread lightly.
There’s been a lot of handwringing in the comics / zombie community (Which is a small community, but they throw great parties… except at the end your dick rots off. And not because of the zombie thing. But I digress.) about how AMC fired The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont – about a week after he hyped season two at SDCC, no less – and how that and threatened budget cuts meant that the The Walking Dead was doomed.
And as someone who watched that show from the first episode and who bought season one on Blu-Ray the day it came out, allow me to go on record to say: who gives a shit?
Sure, the show is fun, and anything that puts comic stories in front of Joe Blow can only be good for the industry (Ghost Rider movies excepted), but the show was only ever second fiddle to Robert Kirkman’s original comic book. And if you’ve ever seen the show and you haven’t checked out the comic book? Well, that’s stupid. And you’re stupid for not doing it.
On yesterday’s New Comics day, retailers like my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me if I hate the Scott Lobdell’s depiction of Starfire so much, why am I using it to hide the front of my pants, received a postcard from Marvel. And unlike every other postcard received since the dawn of email, which describes how much your mom loves Paris but is having trouble making BM after all that brie, this one was a little more mysterious:
Well, it’s over now. DC’s New 52 first issues have been replaced by all second issues… except for the new first issue.
Yep, that’s a new DC first issue of Huntress, which I’m sure was released due to popular demand for the character and because the story and art are exemplary, any not because it occurred to Dan DiDio that it might be nice if Robin also had someone to grudge fuck on a rooftop.
Also in this week’s take are the latest issue of Garth Ennis’s The Boys and Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker. We also got the new Walking Dead and Invincible from Robert Kirkman, along with Skullkickers, Brian Michael Bendis’s Moon Knight, and a stack of the New 52 week one books we liked enough to keep covering through issue two.
And not only that, my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me if he has to call me by my rap name (Spunkmaster Rhino P-P), threw in a bunch of free DC Comics promotional bags and boards, brightly printed with a reproduction of last month’s Justice League #1! Meaning that at least five of this week’s books will, over the course of years, leach that image onto their back covers thus rendering them utterly and completely worthless, which is a hell of a way to treat Action Comics #1… even when it’s the one by Grant Morrison, which you could only retire under if you had 75 of them to make a blanket for your park bench.
So as always on Wednesday, Amanda and I need time to read these books so we can review them for you throughout the week. So thus endeth our broadcast day.
See you tomorrow, suckers!
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.
And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…
For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.
The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.
Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.
Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:
The Sudafed finally mixed with the Jack Daniels and made a mellow, Earth-friendly body-meth, which gave us enough energy to complete Episode 3 of the Crisis on Infinite Midlive’s Podcast: The Fistula of Justice!
Thrill to two drunk sick people as they talk about the impact of the New 52, DC Comics’ new Neilsen Survey (Which sadly didn’t include the obvious question: Orange nip slip: horrifying moment or the most horrifying moment?), the overriding post-Catwoman question: are superhero comics sexist (“What’s wrong with being sexist?” “Not sexy, sex… Jesus, you really are a monster, aren’t you?”), and our sleeper favorite books of the week!
And to answer some questions from the show that are enigmas, wrapped in riddles, covered in mucous:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:37 — 34.4MB)
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Enjoy the show, sucker! And if you don’t, just hit that “Don’t Look” link up there!
Well, it’s official: Image Comics has announced that they’re going to make their most popular characters, including Spawn, The Savage Dragon and Witchblade, available via an alternative distribution channel. They’re taking the big step away from the comic store and into the arena that most teens are most enthusiastic about and are likely never to stray away from: Pogs!
Whoops! Sorry, flashed back to 1994 there… actually, if you replace “Pogs” with “digital downloads”, you have exactly the same story that broke earlier this week… including the likely longevity and outcome.
Image announced that starting this week they’ll be releasing all of their books, including Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Invincible, and Those Other Books You Don’t Care About, as day-and-date available downloads from Graphic.ly.
Graphic.ly isn’t a platform with which I’m familiar, so I decided to check it out. And I have to tell you: compared to Comixology, which I tried the other day, Graphic.ly’s digital reader is VASTLY superior in that it allows you to actually be able to read the book. It blows things up to readable sizes and automatically follows from panel to panel to keep each image at maximum size and legibility.
This is not always a good thing. Because after literally 15 seconds of poking around to see what kind of books Image would be keeping company with, well, I found:
MISTER MOTHERFUCKING T.
Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers about Spider-Island. It has spiders. Also, some other stuff. You have been warned.
Now if you insist upon using a comic story as a parable about a serious issue, Venom #7 is a much better way of doing it. But we’ll get to that.
This issue is a crossover issue to Marvel’s Spider-Island event that I initially picked up for only one reason: issue 7 of any book Rick Remender writes is the point where it stands a solid chance of going gloriously and disastrously off the rails.
Think about his 2008 run on Punisher, which he started in the middle of the Dark Reign event when Norman Osborne had managed to use public opinion and political intrigue to wrest control of SHIELD from Tony Stark even though he was woefully unqualified and The Green Fucking Goblin. While the X-Men remained neutral and the Avengers wrestled with ways to turn the tide of public sentiment away from Osborne even while it turned against themselves, Remender had The Punisher come up with an ingenious and crafty plan to turn Osborne’s fortunes by shooting him in the face.
That was issue 1. By issue 7, Remender had the straight-ahead, no-nonsense Punisher fighting zombies. And thus began a long, slow train wreck that culminated in the Punisher being killed and resurrected as Frankenstein. Reading Remender’s Punisher was like watching a Kardashian try to redefine pi in a room full of cocaine and NBA players: a hot mess I couldn’t take my eyes off of.
So when I saw Venom had reached the critical seventh issue, I wanted in on the ground floor of the implosion… so imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a damn good book, and arguably the best part of the Spider-Island event so far.
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