Crisis On Infinite Comics

A couple of weeks ago, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada posted a few cryptic and interesting tweets, starting with, “The future is ∞”. Initially, we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives didn’t pay as much mind as many did because we figured Joe had just looked at our Twitter profile and suddenly realized you could use the ∞ in tweets (about an hour before Joe’s tweets, we had just gotten into a Twitter exchange with Marvel exclusive artist Mike Deodato, after all).

Speculation on the meaning of the tweets ran rampant, from the start of a new line of comics from Marvel, to a New 52-style reboot (But Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Miles Morales has always been at war with Eastasia!) to a baffled suspicion that Joey Q just found Wingdings in his font list, thus officially moving boldly into the state of the art digital technology, provided it’s 1996.

However, at this past weekend’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, TX, Marvel announced what Infinite Comics really means: three digital-only comics, written by Mark Waid and co-written and drawn by Stuart Immonen, tying into the upcoming Avengers Vs. X-Men event.

Well, just calling them “digital-only” comics is selling the thing a little bit short… or hyping them a little bit too much.

Love Makes You Weak – New Trailer For HBO’s Game Of Thrones

“The more people you love, the weaker you become.” At least according to Cersei Lannister, manipulative, incestous force behind the royal throne in Game Of Thrones. All the cast members you grown to love (or hate – Sansa Stark, I’m looking at you) are back, along with some new ones as well. Look for Carice Von Houten as Melisandre this season. According to this Game Of Thrones Wiki she is:

…a priestess of an eastern religion which is little-known in Westeros. She visited the island stronghold of Dragonstone and has become a close advisor of Stannis Baratheon and his family.

Also joining the cast in episode one of the second season will be Natalie Dormer as Margaery Tyrell, daughter of another royal family who will get in on the fray. The plot, truly, does thicken. Here’s the new trailer:

Gravity Doesn’t Suck: Stormwatch #7 Review

In reading Stormwatch #7, it occured to me that the best Stormwatch and Authority stories (and let’s face it: the New 52 Stormwatch is just The Authority with The Martian Manhunter) have been simple sci-fi and superhero comic tropes, only racked up on amphetamines and extrapolated out to their craziest violent extreme. Warren Ellis had them fight God. Mark Millar did great tales of the team fighting “The Avengers” (Sure, it was a pastiche of a famous superteam, but with personal and sexual problems… but up to a point, isn’t that all The Authority was?).

In this, writer Paul Jenkins, in his first issue on Stormwatch (First of two before Peter Milligan takes over), starts with an idea you could pull out of any Doc Savage story or early issue of Justice League of America – The Gravity Thieves! – and spins it out into a very dense-feeling, hard sci-fi(ish) story that, if not in league as the classic Ellis and Millar stories, at least it’s in the same ballpark, swinging for the fences.

The book hits pretty much every mark on the successful Authority story checklist. Weird sciency shit blowing people up in gruesome ways? Check; got that out of the way by the end of page two. Unknown, faceless entity demonstrating its power by taking out Big Gun Apollo? Yup; disembodied energy tentacles, to excite even the most darkly perverse hentai/tazer “enthusiast”. Find out that the threat is potentially extinction-level in nature to Earth? Hell, this one is capable of stealing gravity with their energy tentacles and wiping out all life in the known universe… possibly from being hit at high speed by hentai/tazer enthusiasts being flung through zero gravity in the opposite direction of their penises.

Imperious Sex! – Review Of Uncanny X-Men #8

Uncanny X-Men has come to the end of its second story arc in eight issues. Let us all throw up a rousing cheer of “meh”.

This arc has found the X-Men playing clean-up crew to a mess left by Psylocke and the other members of the mutant wetwork team, X-Force, which left a small town in outer most Mongolia Montana devastated and gave rise to an alien biosystem called Tabula Rasa. When I say “clean-up crew”, what I really mean is that Magneto (yes, for those of you not reading X-books and playing along at home, Magneto is currently an X-Man) figured out that Psylocke’s (who is also an X-Man) other team caused it. Cyclops (“Hi, my name is Scott Summers. I’m covered from head to toe in latex and appear to only have one eye!”), leader of the X-Men, has no idea what’s going on. As usual. Must be a day.

I said, back in October, that the one thing to come out of Schism/Regenesis would be me finally putting Uncanny back on my pull list after a ten year absence. Right now, I’m thinking that it’s about to come right the fuck back off again.

Fun fact – Tabula Rasa means “blank slate”, just like the heads of the pretty little porn stars Greg Land traces. Oh, and spoilers ahead.

Explosive Hemorrhage: Red Lanterns #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review was written when the writer was extremely hung over. This has affected his mood, and his ability to remember if he has included spoilers or not. You have been warned.

Red Lanterns is one of the damnedest comics on the stands right now. Every issue I’ve read feels like it has some kind of underlying theme, some kind of Big Message it’s trying to impart. Issue one felt like it was hinting at the underlying motivations and effect of vigilante violence. The third issue teased themes of the effects of sexual violence. This issue intimates a greater examination of the vary nature of what it would mean to become suddenly superhuman. These are all admirable aspirations for a monthly comic book, and it would be exciting and interesting to read… if those themes weren’t buried in hamfisted storytelling that seemingly goes nowhere and gratuitous ass shots and brokeback poses. This book serves up more ass on a consistent basis than a back alley Chinese food place… in more ways than one.

Look At What’s Happened To Me: Action Comics #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Well Lois, we stand for spoilers, ruined story beats, and The American Way. Actually, those first two kind of are The American Way. Either way, you have been warned. Plus, your underpants are pink.

Action Comics #7 is, in many ways, a standard and classic Grant Morrison issue: a bunch of Big Ideas wrapped in one of the oldest ideas in the Superman mythos: fight Brainiac, and choose between his Earth and Kryptonian heritage. It is, in its own way, a perfect amalgam of what Morrison does best: turning old, hoary Silver Age story ideas that most of us laughed at during the Dark Age into something majestic and galactic in scope, all while perserving the humanity of the characters involved (It’s that last part Morrison sometimes punts on, but not here). In general, this is a good comic book.

And then there’s the fucking suit. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Modern Retro: O.M.A.C. #7 Review

Considering that Keith Giffen’s art on O.M.A.C. is an obvious and unabashed tribute to Jack Kirby, if there is any justice in this world, we will eventually discover that Giffen’s pencils of Superman’s face in the opening of this book were redrawn by Al Plastino… or in a more modern turn of irony, Rob Liefeld.

Actually, having looked at that lede I just wrote, and at O.M.A.C. #7 itself again, I think doing something like that wouldn’t be a dose of justice, but something that co-writer Dan DiDio and Giffen might do just as a self-referential goof, for the sheer, lunatic thrill of it… which seems like the reasoning behind almost everything they do in this book. This is not a bad thing. O.M.A.C. has, since its launch in September, been many things: over the top, agressively retro, and almost deliberately schizo in its jumping from outlandish scenario to outlandish scenario every month. It has also been one of the most consistently entertaining comics of the first batch of the DC’s New 52.

She Blinded Me With Something Other Than Science: Amazing Spider-Man #681 Review

Amazing Spider-Man #680 was good and fun enough that this week’s immediate followup of issue 681 was the first book I pulled off the stack yesterday, despite the cover that, if you remove the planet Earth from the background, looks like a frame grab of a Spider-Man / Human Torch bukkake flick. Seriously: if that’s how people look in hard vacuum, we now know why HAL wouldn’t open the pod bay doors: because it’s fucking hilarious. They look less like they’re suffering from asphyxia than like they have a pube caught in their throats. I could go on, but rumor is there’s a whole comic book behind this cover.

Writers Dan Slott and Chris Yost have delivered what is still a big, fun comic book, but in no way will it make you smarter. In fact, you’ll need to turn off large parts of your brain in order to fully enjoy it as the high-budget b-movie that it is. The science in this issue makes Michael Bay’s Armageddon look like Nova with Neil Degrasse Tyson.

No (Recognizable (or Good)) Logo

Apologies for today’s radio silence; things were simply too busy here at the Home Office to post a final pre-comic store opening review this morning, and the news about the upcoming redesigned Earth 2 Jay Garrick Flash didn’t seem to warrant more than a link and a quiet, “Oh, fuck me.”

But today’s obligations have been obligated, and our prerequisites have been prerequisited, and depite it all we made it to our local comic store – where they know me by name and ask me to start conjugating verbs like a real boy – and our local bar, which means that radio silence or no, this:

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But what a take it is! DC Comics is back on regular schedule, with their new logo giving me fond memories of the last beloved new logo that I hated, delivering new issues of Animal Man, Detective Comics, Swamp Thing and Huntress (Also of Earth 2! Where Elseworlds are King, and Costumes are Ill-Advised!). There’s also a new Matt Fraction Defenders, the follow-up to last week’s highly-recommended Amazing Spider-Man, and even a Vampirella Vs. Dracula in case all the porno sites on the Internet go dark!

But by now you know the drill: before we can review them, first we gotta read them. So for right now: see you tomorrow, suckers!

No One Can Hear You Thwip: Amazing Spider-Man #680 Review

The Amazing Spider-Man #680 is a buddy flick set in a zombie apocalypse occurring in space. If you walked into a movie studio executive’s office with that pitch, you’d be thrown out on your ass. Unless that executive worked for the Sy-Fy channel. In which case you’d be given their largest production budget to date: 75 bucks. Although they might go up to an even hundred, assuming Tiffany and / or Lorenzo Lamas was available.

My point is that this comic book is a big, glorious mess where I’m sure that the one “splorch” sound effect in tne book represents the sound of writers Dan Slott and Chris Yost throwing absolutely every plot idea they can think of at the wall… and it all sticks. I can almost picture those two guys saying, “Spider-Man… we bring in The Human Torch… and put them on a space station… what can they fight, what can they fight, what can they – space zombies! Now let’s write, but first: let’s take this TV apart!”