So, You Want To Work Out Like Batman…

Sam DeHority recently published an interview on Men’s Fitness with John Romaniello, NSCA-CPT to examine whether the training regimen published in Matthew Manning’s The Batman Files is something an actual human being could do. The short answer? No.

What are the odds that someone could get through a regimen like this cleanly?
Zero percent. It’s too many elite levels of skill. For the highest one percent of one percent of the population, you can be good at just about everything and great at a few things. Let’s take someone who’s both big and strong, and has good endurance—someone from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby squad. I don’t think they could sprint 20 miles. A 4:50 mile is damn near a sprint, and those guys don’t have to deal with broken bones from fighting bad guys.

But…I’m no quitter! How bad could it really be? This, coming from a girl who can’t actually manage to stick to a simple plan of going for a walk three times week. Mostly because I’m hungover a lot and sunlight brings pain.

Workout plan and feelings of inadequacy after the jump

Choices Have Already Been Made – Review Of Ghost Rider #6

Hey! Guess what, everyone? I found a great comic book that I’d really like to recommend to you all but, what’s that Internet? Ghost Rider, written by Rob Williams, with art by Dalibor Talajić has been canceled?

Oh. Oh well.

So, does this cancellation have anything to do with the upcoming sequel to the 2007 Ghost Rider movie? You know, the one that was so bad it got a 4.3 out of 10 rating on Rotten Tomatoes…which begs the question as to why there’s even a sequel in the first place?

Launched during the “Fear Itself” event under the guiding hand of writer Rob Williams, “Ghost Rider” provided a new female version of the long-standing hero while keeping original rider Johnny Blaze on as co-star. The character has a new movie — “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” from Columbia Pictures — set to hit theaters this February, though beyond an incoming special re-presenting classic tales of Blaze, the publisher appears to have no plans for a major media tie-in push.

So, that’s a no. Having a female Ghost Rider possibly running around when Nicholas Cage is poised to take yet another stab at comic book movie glory has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Sure.

Spoilers, snakes and swamp water ahead!

Empty Beauty: Batman: Odyssey #2 Review

Batman: Odyssey #2 features exquisite art by Neal Adams. The images of Batman in this book are spectacular, and Adams has not lost a step from his classic Batman illustrations in the 1970’s. You could lose yourself in this art. Which is a good thing because it is there in support of a story also written by Neal Adams. And reading this story is like being fucked in the brainstem by Adams’s drafting pencil after a half-dose of shitty brown acid.

I have no fucking idea what is happening in this comic book. It opens with Bruce Wayne looking right at me – literally making eye contact through the page – andapparently asking me, as a reader, if  I like his Green Lantern t-shirt. Then he says, “So, sure, it wasn’t a happy thing leaving Dick behind, but… what would you do?” Um, I don’t want to tell a legend like Adams his business, but as a long-time comics fan who has read many classic Batman stories, I can’t remember one of them where I was reasonably certain that Batman was hitting on me.

The Quintuple Macguffin: Daredevil #6 Review

This review probably isn’t going to be very long because there’s just not all that much to say about Daredevil #6, or the book in general since Mark Waid took over writing duties from Andy Diggle a few months back. This is an excellent comic, and you should be buying it. This is one of the rare comics where you really need to nitpick to find fault… and make no mistake, I will do that, because baldfaced cheerleading for a comic book just isn’t funny. Unless you’re watching someone else doing it. Preferably at a convention. While he or she is wearing an authentic Spider-Man costume. Assuming Peter Parker had been given the proportionate strength and speed of a very, very obese spider. But already, I digress.

Let’s start with the villain. Bruiser is a new creation by Waid and artist Marcos Martin, with a simple premise: he dresses like a wrestler, he wants to fight The Hulk, and he’s working his way up “The Ranks” of superhumans until he’s earned his shot. That is all we know and all we need to know; he exists to give Daredevil someone new and cool to fight, which is damn refreshing after years of story arcs where old familiar villains with axes to grind spend issue upon issue planning to psychologically destroy Matt Murdock. There have been times when I’ve put down a Daredevil issue and said, “Jesus, would you and Kingpin just fuck and get it over with, already?”

What’s Green, Scaly And Russian In Origin?

So, this an image that may or may not be conceptual art for the Lizard in the Spider-Man movie reboot popped up on the Russian Web site, Spider Media. Yes, it does have a “.ru” in the address. No, it is not babushka porn. Settle down. Google Translate tells me all the Cyrillic comes out to “SpiderMedia.RU : Comics, Movies, Superheroes, Games, Action Figures, Animation, News, Reviews” and at this stage no Red Dawn malware seems to have been installed on my computer, so, as far as I can tell, these are our people. And they probably have vodka, so take a look and tell me if you think this art looks pretty close to the Steve Ditko art I’ve shopped in next to it:

This man could definitely sit down and have a chat with you about the heartbreak of psoriasis...but he'd probably just eat your face.

It’d be nice if the creatures created actually looked like they came from the comic book the movie was about, right?

Sure, as Bleeding Cool pointed out, this has been released conveniently close to the promotional Pez dispenser reveal, but, who cares? It’s certainly better than the costume they came up with for the Green Goblin in the first movie. Hell, they could probably use a green Sharpie to draw scales on a greenman suit and it would look better than the Green Goblin costume for the first movie.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go satisfy my craving for Pez and vodka.

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.