A Whole New 52-Less World

It is Wednesday, and as it has since the inception of this publication almost three months ago…

…this means the end of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives broadcast day.

Which feels like business as usual, but… something is missing… Oh right! There’s not a single issue of DC Comics’s New 52 in the take this week! That explains why my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to stop asking whoever’s milling around the Archie comics rack if they “wanna see the Old 5-2″, looked at my take this week and only said, “Bomb Queen? No refunds if the pages stick together, Rob. And no, I won’t shake your hand. Or anything else.”

It’s gonna be a weird week with almost no DC books to review, but check it out: we’ve got a new Mark Waid and Marcos Martin issue of Daredevil, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Rizzo’s Spaceman #2, Neal Adams art and script on Batman: Odyssey, Jonathan Hickman’s followup to FF #600, and a new Angel & Faith from Buffy Season 9!

This is going to be an interesting week; without the new DC books, we’ll have a chance to review some different stuff, and without that New 52 pressure (And since a series of head and chest colds here at the Home Office are starting to dissipate), we should be able to get a new episode of the Podcast in the can.

But before any of that, we need to read the new stuff. So see you tomorrow, suckers!

The Long Con

Anyone who’s ever been to a major convention – and as veterans of six San Diego Comic-Cons, we at Crisis on Infinite Midlives certainly qualify – knows that they can be a trying experience. Between crowds, cosplayers, BO, frustrated creators who feel waylaid by rude fans, fans who feel slighted by cosplaying creators with BO, and Dirk Benedict, tempers can get a little frayed. It can be hard for anyone to know how they’re supposed to act.

Thankfully, fan favorite comic writer Peter David has written The Fan / Pro Bill Of Rights, which lays out some honestly excellent and well-thought guidelines as to how to act at a convention for the uninitiated. Which we will, in turn, experience with a sense of humor, which is how we experience conventions so we don’t wind up chucking a flying elbow smash into every Type II diabetic oozing over of every surface of a Little Rascal except for the tires, which are oozing over my feet.

Kick us off, Peter!

Grumpy Old Man

Comic Book Grrrl‘s Laura Sneddon did a 1,000 word article for The Independent a week and a half ago recapping an interview with Alan Moore, which is an astounding feat to me considering I can’t get angry about a 20-page Flash comic in less than 1,300 words.

But apparently her interview with Moore went on for about an hour, and she has posted an uncut transcript of the entire interview on her Website. Let’s take a look… and while we’re doing it, let’s try to forget that “Uncut Alan Moore” would be an excellent title for an Axel Braun Watchmen porno, shall we?

So I think that might end up being one of the subtexts of Century as a whole, that it will be just this slow degradation of culture, you know sort of in the space of a hundred years. I mean that’s one of the things that’s most extraordinary about reading and writing Century as a volume, is that yeah one hundred years, that’s living memory. And yet we’ve somehow gone from the waterfronts that Brecht was writing about in 1910 all the way to the present day, and everything that that means…

I think we kind of, we risk simply losing genuinely valuable parts of society and culture because of our fascination with lights and bells and whistles. I blame a lot of culture, I found myself half way through one of my unfathomable rants the other night, you know where I suddenly sort of think, what am I actually saying? And it turned out what I was saying was that I blame most of Western culture upon the manufacturers of children’s cot mobiles. Simply because I think that they have programmed a couple of generations to be entertained by something if it’s moving and if it’s making a noise.

Sorry, Alan; could you repeat that? I was distracted by something moving and making a noise. Her name’s Sasha. Welcome to the Internet, where you are competing with her.

The Kids Are All Right – Review Of Marzi, A Memoir

When you say the words “comic book” to the average American, they will most likely think of stories having to do with capes and cowls. However, there is a rich tradition of comic books that are reality based, topical, even autobiographical. Marzi, written by Marzena Sowa with art by Sylvain Savoia, falls within that tradition. Marzi, published in North America by Vertigo, was originally published in Belgium. The stories chronicle growing up in communist Poland just as the Eastern Bloc is beginning to strike and demand its freedom. However, although those events are the backdrop to Sowa’s story, the book is really more about what it was like to be a little girl, as she explains to Cafe Babel.

“Sometimes readers find it surprising that besides strikes, usually associated with Jaruzelski and ‘Solidarity’, people also had a regular life,” the author explains. “I mean, going to school and to work, children playing in the courtyards, holidays. My comics won’t age. Even twenty years on you will find something new, something for yourself. We were all children, and we all had some wishes that never came true; I was always dreaming about getting Barbie from Pewex (communist-time stores which sold Western goods in exchange for Western currencies).”

It Means To Expose Everything: The Flash #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Struck by a belt of whiskey and doused in bourbon, Crisis On Infinite Midlives editor Rob was transformed into The Spoilingest Man Alive. Tapping into the Internet device called the keyboard, he applies a tenacious sense of… ah, to hell with it. This review contains spoilers. But on the plus side, it also explains the ending of this book. You’ve been warned.

The Flash is really beginning to frustrate me. I want to like this book. The Flash is one of my favorite characters. The art by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato is some of the best currently appearing in monthly comics, which is no small praise when you’ve also got Jim Lee doing Justice League and J. H. Williams on Batwoman. Manapul and Buccellato are trying like hell to bring new concepts to the book. The problem is, what they need to be bringing to the book are writers.

The book opens with a spectacular title page that should make whatever Marvel intern who writes those dry, empty recap pages chop their typing fingers off in abject shame. It also contains The Flash complaining that he hates coffee, which, as a lifestyle argument, is a complete and total non-starter here in the Home Office. Sure, he says it’s because caffeine plays hell with his speed powers, but it cuts right to the core of everything I believe. Next he’ll be complaining that he can’t believe anybody likes porn because of how it leaves him chafed, bleeding and screaming. But I digress.

Spider-Clones: Marvel’s Recent Moves

It’s been a weird month or so at Marvel, what with a bunch of layoffs, the cancellation of several ongoing books (Including Jason Aaron’s Punisher MAX, Crisis on Infinite Midlives favorite Black Panther: The Man Without Fear, and X-23 and Ghost Rider – Marvel’s only two books with female leads), and a couple of books (Destroyers and Victor Von Doom) that haven’t even come out yet. The word is that Marvel has been particularly nutcutting because of budgetary concerns, which means Marvel may be the first company that requires people with the job title of “Architect” to bring their own fucking toilet paper to work.

Any detailed analysis of what Marvel is doing and why would require more knowledge of the comics industry than a guy who just likes comics has, and, you know… math and shit, which means I’m not the one to do it. Kiel Phegley at Comic Book Resources runs down what’s happening and possibly why from an informed prospective, which you should go read. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

You’re back? What? you want to know what I think? Didn’t I just tell you that I’m not the one to ask? But then again, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, which means that we’re all doomed to listen to some drunkard spouting off in an authoritative manner about things they know nothing whatsoever about. Okay, fine; fill your glass, pull up a chair, and listen to your Uncle Rob run his mouth about something he knows nothing whatsoever about.

The Unchanging Man: The Shade #2 Review

For all the excitement that DC Comics has been trying to generate with the New 52, and their loud and public protestations that everything is all-new and all-different, this appears to be the week that they’re playing to old readers’ nostalgia… if not every reader’s nostalgia, then mine in particular. Going through this week’s DC take is like being 25 years old again, except I no longer have to choose between comics and food that isn’t ramen noodles, my joints crack whenever I do anything more strenuous than turning a page, and those cracking joints are the only ones I currently have hidden in the house.

James Robinson’s Starman was one of the bright spots of comics in the 1990s, a decade that brought us chromium variant covers, Spider-Clones and the ability for Rob Liefeld to make a living that didn’t involve grocery bagging or glory holes. Starman was a book that was as much about world-building as it was the title character, making its Opal City art deco setting and its residents as much a key character as Jack Knight himself. Robinson retired Jack Knight as Starman – permanently, so far – in 2001, and supposedly has a deal with DC where they can’t use the character without his permission, making Robinson the first comic creator I’ve been tempted to torture for the good of comics who didn’t draw Captain America with tits.

So, no Starman for you. However, Robinson’s giving us The Shade miniseries, which is still pretty Goddamned good.

Dark History: Justice League Dark #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: On initial publication of this review, I missed Ryan Sook’s cover credit and attributed the cover work to interior artist Mikel Janin. Mikel was good enough to check into the comments and point out my error. The review has been updated with more accurate credits.

I am probably not the best person to objectively review this book, for a few reasons, even though I studied journalism in college. But I figure once you’ve publshed a review that contains the sentence, “This ending is so Goddamned shameful I can barely even find the fucking words,” I can pretty much chuck any pretense of journalistic objectivity out the window, at least when it comes to the Comic Book Reviews category.

With that said, let’s talk about Justice League Dark #3: I liked this book… and I shouldn’t have, by every standard I’ve set for comics in every review I have written to date.

It’s decompressed. It contains almost no action. It barely explains what happened before, assumes the reader has knowledge of comics that were canceled fifteen years ago and were long out of print, and has a cover that writes checks the comic itself doesn’t cash. I mean, at no time in this book does Zatanna ride a Batcycle, and if you’re gonna bait and switch me like that, the least artist Mikel Janin Ryan Sook could have done was put her in her fishnets for a little free-of-charge fanboy boner (Fanboy-ner? Hey, no Google results! Fanboy-ner! Trademark /copyright 2011 Crisis On Infinite Midlives!). And John Constantine does not shoot fire from his hands, Mikel Ryan. The only way his hand should look like that would immediately after fingerblasting Veneria, the Harpy Queen of Tertiary Chlamydia.

So I shouldn’t like this book. But it has four things going for it: Shade, The, Changing and Man.

Flaming: Fantastic Four #600 Review

I have decided that when I die, I want someone at Marvel to write my obituary. Because that will mean that I won’t be dead for very fucking long.

Yeah, The Human Torch is alive again, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

I haven’t reviewed any of the issues in Jonathan Hickman’s run of Fantastic Four before because honestly? It just hasn’t hooked me in. I’ve given it a try because the book has been part of my pulls since Mark Waid’s and Mike Wieringo’s run, so I’ve sort of been getting it by default. And I read it every month, but there’s something about ir that just doesn’t stick to my brain. I’ll grant that alcohol might be a factor, but considering not ten seconds ago I was asked, and able, to recall the Libby’s jingle from the 1970’s, I doubt booze is just attacking my memories of Hickman on FF. Hopefully.

I’ve certainly given Hickman’s writing an honest chance. On top of Fantastic Four, I’ve been reading his book Red Wing by Image, and I’ve picked up trades of his miniseries Red Mass for Mars and Pax Humana. All of which are big idea comics, with intricate clockwork plots that pull together seamlessly… and to a one populated with characters that feel to me like ciphers that exist purely to further those plots. They are impeccable works of engineering, yet oddly bloodless, like a high-end silicone fuck doll: there are people who swear by them, but I was born a blow-up doll man, and I’ll die a blow-up doll man. And lonely. But I digress.

The Bird Is The Word

It is Wednesday evening, and as you regular readers of Crisis On Infinite Midlives know…

…New Comics Day means that this is the end of our broadcast day.

Still and all, that’s a damn good take for the Wednesday before a long American holiday weekend! There’s a new Kick-Ass by Mark Millar, a new Warren Ellis Secret Avengers, a book from Image’s Pilot Season, a new Justice League Dark (Which had better have some fucking Shade: The Changing Man in it! You hear me, Milligan!?), and a new Hawkman, which I only bought to support an American Thanksgiving “We have a bird” joke!

Speaking of Thanksgiving, due to the holiday weekend, posting for the next four days may be a bit more sporadic than usual. But please stick with us; we will do our best to post new news items and reviews… but to do that, we need tonight to start reading the new books.

See you somewhere during or after the tryptophan coma, suckers!