Alan Who? DC Debuts Before Watchmen Interior Art At C2E2

This past weekend brought us the C2E2 convention in Chicago, “C2E2” of course being an acronym for “a convention that’s growing like a weed since it is now almost purely and theoretically impossible to attend SDCC.” And since DC Comics’s Before Watchmen titles begin dropping in June, several weeks before the Big Dance in San Diego, and since displaying comics-related righteous indignation would technically require Alan Moore to obtain a difficult-to-secure work visa, it was a perfect time for Dan DiDio to take advantage of the con to trot out the creators and show off some preview art.

Pretty much all the creators were on the panel – you can get a pretty decent first-person recap of the panel at Comic Book Resources – but two highlights were Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan writer J. Michael Straczynski’s comments on Alan Moore’s… shall we say inchoate, snide rage over the entire project:

Quitters Are Losers – Review Of Deathstroke #8

So, Deathstroke #8 is the farewell book from writer Kyle Higgins and penciler Eduardo Pansica and ties up Higgins “Deathstroke’s Whole Family Has More Daddy Issues Than George W. Bush” story line. We’ve watched as Deathstroke fought the good fight against the ravages of time on his physical skill set and reputation, nearly succumbed to vengeful parents with giant bank accounts and hearts full of hate, who want only to balance the scales of justice after Slade’s offed their kids, and dealt with his own angry son, for whom he could never be the father the kid needed. Even in this final book, Slade comes to terms with his own issues with his father. Despite all the super powered goodness and big action, the stories have all been grounded in real human problems that anyone who is getting a little older can relate to and that’s what made these books work for me. I’m sorry to see Higgins leave the series.

As we’ve reported before, Rob Liefeld will be taking over the series starting with issue 9. All that stuff with Slade Wilson struggling with familial relationships and his own mortality? Yeah, whatever. Liefeld is going to shoot Deathstroke into space to fight Lobo. Enough of your whining, Slade! We’ve got fucking space villains to crush, dude!

I like to believe that Higgins has left us a clue as to how Slade feels about this in the parting shots from issue 8:

Seriously, man. Liefeld's going to make me fight Lobo. Press the fucking button.

But, enough of my anti-Liefeld ranting. How do I feel about the rest of issue 8? With spoilers, after the jump.

The Second Best There Is: Scarlet Spider #4 Review

Okay, I finally get it. Scarlet Spider is for people who want to buy both Spider-Man and Wolverine, but only have three bucks a month to throw around.

Make no mistake: this isn’t me screeching that Scarlet Spider is a bad comic book, because it isn’t; it is reasonably well-executed with a decent story, plot, characters, and pretty good art. But in its DNA, this is a book for the rare and nihilistic comics reader who says – presumably while listening to “classic” Limp Bizkit – “You know what would really make Spider-Man an ageless comic book hero? If someone would just write him as a stab-crazed, nearly-remorseless dickhead.”

This issue finds out protagonist being attacked by a bunch of ninjas out for revenge over the fact that, in his past as a lone, non-affiliated killer, he refused to pay allegiance to their clan. The ninjas have a bunch of superpowers, the fight goes public, the hero fights dirty, stuff explodes, dudes get kicked, and a lot of people get maimed in a visceral yet entertaining manner. All of which makes for an exciting comic book, but it makes an exciting Wolverine comic book. All of this feels a little weird when it’s happening with a guy in a Spider-Man suit.

Small Idea Comics: The Secret Service #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If spoiled, the Director will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

I’m going to get the unpleasantness out of the way up front and recommend that, if you’re interested in reading Mark Millar’s and Dave Gibbons’s The Secret Service, you just skip the first issue of and think about picking it up when the entire story is collected into a trade. Because there’s a glimmer of a decent and potentially fun idea in this issue which might make it eventually worth reading, but it is wrapped up here in a gaggle of thoroughly unlikable characters, derivative plot points, and shock value slapstick violence. It is like watching an episode of Springer where Jerry hands out .44 Magnums; there is a certain level of entertainment value to the spectacle, but of the kind you would never admit to strangers.

The high concept behind this book is: what if James Bond was a real thing in the real world? Which is fine as these things go, but it put into stark relief the kind of comic books that Mark Millar writes when it’s something he owns: books that can be distilled down to the kind of elevator pitch one would make to Michael Bay, possibly while sharing a couple of rails.

Let’s go down the list:

To Sir, With Love – Static Shock Blackout

Hey, kids! We’re you bummed when you heard that DC was going to cancel Static Shock after John Rozum left the book? Well, then there’s good news for you fans of Dakota City’s favorite electrically charged teen hero! Static Shock Blackout, a student made film that opens with a dedication to the memory of the character’s creator Dwayne McDuffie, has now been released to the internet via YouTube. The 13 minute film follows reporter Daisy Watkins, who has been tipped to the existence of Bang Babies – meta humans created after an explosion in Dakota City that killed hundreds and was mysteriously covered up.

Over on the film’s YouTube page, the film’s creators describe the film and themselves:

We know this isn’t a super-professional superhero movie, since we shot this on a student budget with limited resources. If you’re interested in our future productions, please feel free to contact us…We have more projects on the way, so please add us to your social networks! We are a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University, The Art Institute, Syracuse University and University of Central Florida who spent 1.5 years making this film for you.

The film may not be “professional”, but it’s clearly a labor of love, both for the character of Static Shock and the process of film making. Speaking as someone who can barely hold her camera phone steady to make a comic app review video, I give them major props for their finished product. They should be proud of what they put together; I just hope that it doesn’t take them another year and half to give us another installment in this series!

Check out the complete short film, after the jump.

Weakness On The Perimeter

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!

Geek Penthouse: Joss Whedon on Buffy Vs. Black Widow

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:

Juvenile Pastiche: Danger Club #1 Review

The concept of teenaged superheroes going out of control without adult supervision is hardly a new one – off the top of my head, we’ve got Terra in The New Teen Titans, Kid Miracleman, the unrepentant incestuous relationship between Zan and Jayna, and a little-known book called Kingdom Come… wait, one of those doesn’t sound right… although I’m betting somewhere, as we speak, Alan Moore’s writing, “Form of… a donkey!” Regardless, it’s too early for me to be getting off track here.

My point is, a story about teen heroes running amok isn’t a new thing under the sun, so writer Landry Q. Walker’s and artist Eric Jones’s Danger Club isn’t exactly breaking any new ground. A story about teen sidekicks and what they get up to after all their mentors leave Earth to battle some cosmic villain and never return, it has shades reminiscent of both Kid Miracleman’s rampage and the rolling destructive battles of the first couple of issue of Kingdom Come. So make so mistake: what we’re seeing in this first issue isn’t new.

But then again, neither is baseball, and that’s still fun to watch… as is Danger Club #1. And if this issue is any indication, Walker and Jones are taking admittedly well-used old story tropes and using them to swing for the fences.

Back Into Hell: Spawn #218 Review

Let’s start by me coming clean: I don’t read Spawn. I’ve never read Spawn. I might be the only comics enthusiast who was actively reading back in 1992 who doesn’t have a dusty polybagged copy of Spawn #1 tucked in the back of some yellowing longbox somewhere. This is because, while Spawn #1 had the four words most likely to Pavlovianly excite any early 90s comics fan – “Art by Todd McFarlane” – it also contained one of the worst four-word curses in late 80s / early 90s comics: “Written by Todd McFarlane.”

However, I am familiar with Spawn thanks to the movie and the HBO animated series: Al Simmons, former special forces soldier, is murdered and returns to life imbued with the power of the Hellspawn. Spawn lives as a homeless person, defending the local winos and pining for his former wife, while forces of good and evil war over his soul. I think; Spawn aired on HBO on Friday nights, and it was the rare Friday in the 1990s that were conducive to my ability to form long term memories.

So, armed with that common knowledge, I returned to Spawn with issue 218 for the first time… well, ever, really. So I cracked the book, dove in and…

I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. This, however, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 8: The Kick of Osteoporosis

Guess who found their microphones?

That’s right, after five months, and literally no waiting with bated – or any – breath, it’s time for another exciting episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast!

In this week’s episode, we drunkenly rant about:

• Digital Comics. Specifically, it was a big week encompassing the closing of the Graphic.ly Web storefront and the release of the first of Marvel’s Infinite Comics via ComiXology, so we talk about how faithful customers of digital comics get to be in the vanguard of comics publishing while eventually being doomed to wind up with fuckall for their money!
• Marvel’s Augmented Reality application, which forces you to read your printed comics through your cell phone like Commander Data or some other robotic autistic person!
• Fanboys Vs. Zombies, and how it is an awesome book if you have been to SDCC, want to go to SDCC, or want to see Joe Quesada eaten by a grue!
• The Avengers movie: can it possibly be as good as the trailers and the TV spots make it look?
• Agent Coulson: Xander of the Marvel Movie Universe?
• Hawkeye: Like a Boss? Or Like a Miss?
• SDCC Hotel Sales: big mess or biggest mess?
• Plus: Justice League Dark and The Boys!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:47 — 52.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

As always, if you listen to this show at work, wear headphones unless you want to explain to your boss why you’re listening to someone bemoan the lack of glory holes in San Diego hotel rooms! And if you can listen to the whole thing, see if you can tell the moment when the booze gets on top of us!

As always: thanks for listening, suckers!