Crisis On Infinite Midlives came to being the week that DC’s New 52 were gruntingly squirted into fruition. So the main story, on a week-to-week basis, has been the battle between the new DC books and Marvel trying to catch up, with the odd (excellent) indie book like Luther Strode, The Boys and Witch Doctor to keep things interesting.

That was September, 2011. It’s April, 2012, and the most exciting books of the week are Saga, America’s Got Powers and The Secret Service. Where’s your major-market comics publisher now?

However, we are still looking at a week with some major DC Batman titles, the first branchings of Avengers Vs. X-Men, and Mark Waid’s and Greg Rucka’s opening to their Spider-Man / Punisher / Daredevil crossover The Omega Effect. And either way, be they Picassos or stick-figure Batmen, that lineup means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

But either way, even disregarding the aforementioned stellar books, look at the rest of the take: Jason Aaron’s last Wolverine, a new Scarlet Spider, Kyle Higgins’s last Deathstroke (an aggrieved soon-to-be-lost favorite here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office), and even the first issue of The Bionic Woman, sure to be true-to-form to those of us who were grievously disappointed by that spinoff when we were Six Million Dollar Man fans back in  1978!

But as usual, before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. So until that day: see you tomorrow, suckers!

If you’re anything like I am, you watched that teaser clip, from Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers flick, of Black Widow tied to a chair and still kicking the shit out of three or four guys and you wondered: “Why can’t I control when I get an erection? I’m a fucking 40-year-old man!”

However, if you’re anything like Amanda, you wondered who would win in a fight: the Widow, or Whedon’s most famous creation, Buffy The Vampire Slayer? I know she wondered this because she asked me while I was drafting the above-linked article; I sat quietly for a moment after her question, and after some intense consideration, I could only reply: “…I gotta go put on clean pants. New rule: don’t ask me about purely theoretical superhero girl fights. No, this does not supercede the existing rule to not ask me to solve complicated mathematical word problems in front of you and your friends.”

Thankfully, Whedon has responded directly to the question to USA Today, saving those of us wallowing in the realm of superhero geekdom the heartbreak of hours of heated bar debates, ill-advised and extended podcasts, and shameful and furtive midnight laundry sessions.

To wit: