Failing Up

Apologies for the lack of substantive updates today, but the hangovers at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office have been truly crippling today. Oh sure, last night started as a quiet evening of chamommile tea and comic book study… but then one of us, which one of us exactly is forever lost to the fog of time and mid-range blended scotch, but one of us…

One of us remembered that this week was Rob Liefeld’s first issue of Deathstroke.

But New Comics Day waits for no hangover, so disappointing personnel change in a personal favorite book of Amanda’s or no, we butched up, hit our local comics store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop asking the paying customers if they “want to see my Deathstroke,” which means that this….

…means the end of our broadcast day.

Still and all, looks like it was worth the stagger out. We’ve got a new issue of Brubaker’s and Phillips’s Fatale, a new story arc in The Walking Dead, a Bendis   Deodato New Avengers…

And yes, the first Liefeld Deathstroke. While I don’t want to be prejudiced, I’m guessing that’ll be our “They’re not all gonna be Picassos” issue of the week.

But before we can review them, we need time to read them. And for the dry heaves to stop. So until then…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Guess The Change In My Pocket Wasn’t Enough: Action Comics #9 Review

Editor’s Note: This is Lex Luthor. Only one thing alive with less than four legs can hear this spoiler, Superman, and it’s you.

Grant Morrison doesn’t do anything by half measures, but he outdoes even himself in Action Comics #9. In 20 short pages, he manages to level searing indictments against comic fans, comic publishers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, possibly Zack Snyder, and definitely almost anyone who’s written Superman between 1986 and 2011.

At best, this book might – just might – be Morrison’s comment on the upcoming Before Watchmen series. However, at worst it is, for all intents and purposes, a giant and ringing “fuck you” to just about any human being anywhere who might touch it, with the possible exception of Morrison himself. But that’s okay, because that gives me something to do.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 9: Doublefisting Justice

I know what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “It has been a month since Amanda’s and your last podcast. What’s the occasion?” Which would be an excellent question had Avengers not opened in American theaters last Friday, so asking it makes you look foolish. So stop it. You’re better than that.

Here is the pure hell of being editors of a comics Web site: Amanda and I watched Avengers together Saturday afternoon, and rather than discuss it, we agreed to see it again on Sunday… and still not discuss it until we got home and did it into microphones. And discuss it we did; in this Avengers podcast, we discuss:

• The Avengers 3D vs. 2D Experience from the point of view of people getting old with slowly failing vision!
• The Hulk: Great Avenger or Greatest Avenger?
• The Hulk can lift tanks, so why can’t he carry his own movie?
• Our Friend, The Thrice-Nightly Screening, or: Why Can’t Johnny Edit?
• Black Widow as best developed Avenger (insert your own boob joke here)!
• Hawkeye: Redundant Avenger or Redundant Avenger?
• I Can Has Justis Leeg Moovee Nao?, and:
• AAAvengers: who do we want to bring up from the minors?

As always, if you intend to listen to this at work, we recommend you wear headphones unless you want your boss to hear phrases like, “Lokif***er,” “Mjolnir… is not the hammer,” or, “You just want a Dirty Ruffalo!” Besides, with headphones, if you listen really close, you can hear two grown comics geeks misidentifying S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sharon Carter as Ms. Marvel!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:44 — 56.5MB)

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

Enjoy the show, suckers!

(Avengers Booty Ass-emble via Kevin Bolk)

Further Adventures In Digital Comics – Review Of Hopeless, Maine: Personal Demons #1

Spent from a road trip to catch The Avengers with Rob, Trebuchet, and Pixiestyx, I found myself with barely enough energy to stare blankly at ladies in silly hats during the three hour coverage of the Kentucky Derby yesterday on the TV. Fun fact: only about 4 minutes of the race coverage is about the race. The rest is about women in silly hats, bemoaning how other women’s silly hats invade their “hatmosphere”. There is also a fair amount of bourbon and “My Old Kentucky Home” karaoke sing-a-long. I could have played along with the bourbon part at home, which would have helped with both the “hatmosphere” and the karaoke. Unfortunately, Rob is on antibiotics this week as he nurses a vicious stab wound obtained while refereeing “Bum Fights For A Week’s Worth Of Coors Light Empties”. What can I say? We live in an interesting neighborhood. So, anyway, I was trying to show solidarity by joining him in the not drinking.

Eager to find a diversion for my sobriety, I turned to the Comixology app for my smartphone. I worked my way down to the “Digital Firsts” section. I’ve really been trying to only use the app for books that are only available digitally, since I like to support our LCS, where the owner knows us by name and has asked Rob to stop hosting the bum fights on the sidewalk outside the store because it’s “bad for business”. Recently, Archaia has digitally released part one of a graphic novel called Hopeless, Maine, by Nimue and Tom Brown. Nimue is an author and Tom is an artist. Hopeless, Maine began its life as a Web comic, which is up to two booksworth of material on their site. The digital download of Hopeless, Maine: Personal Demons Part One contains chapters 1 and 2 of the first book in the series. So, what’s it about?

Hopeless, Maine is a little, forgotten island where many of the children have become orphaned through mysterious circumstances. There are magic and strange creatures. Chapters 1 and 2 center around orphan Salamandra, a young girl who greets the reader on the opening page of the story by informing us that “my mother wants to drink me”. Okay, Salamandra: you have my attention.

Can Salamandra’s tale distract me from my own strange world of silly hats and bum fights? Spoilers and more after the jump.

Wish Fulfillment: Dial H #1 Review

I always feels a certain level of excitement when I pick up a new comic by an established prose writer who’s never tackled the medium before. The kind of feeling that I imagine people get when they play Russian Roulette. You know that you’re holding something that is at least potentially very powerful; you know it has to at least be competently written, because book publishers rarely chuck money at any dingbat with a copy of MS Word… unless they’re using it to run a find / replace on some Twilight slashfic.

However, just because someone can write a book doesn’t mean they can write a comic book. Sometimes you get Neil Gaiman and Sandman (Yes, Gaiman wrote a book before he broke into comics). Unfortunately, other times you get more Brad Meltzer on Justice League of America; Brad spent so many issues showng Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman looking at pictures of potential League members that I began to suspect they were masturbating under the table while they were doing it.

All of which is a long way to go to say that China Miéville’s first issue of the rebooted Dial H is a well-plotted comic with a thoroughly weird, yet engaging, twist on the book’s original concept of a telephone that turns whoever uses it into a superhero. And it is well-written, in the sense that the pure language is entertaining and just damn fun to read. It’s not perfect, but for a dude who’s never written a comic book before, it’s a decent start.

Not-Quite Epic Kill: Epic Kill #1 Review

A couple months ago I read a preview blurb for a new Image book about a young female assassin, called Song, who had come down with a case of amnesia. The book was Epic Kill – created, written, & drawn by Raffaele Ienco.  It sounded fun, very Jason Bourne, so I threw it on my pull list & then proceeded to forget about it until the clerk handed it over this morning.  Though neither Trebuchet nor I could remember adding it, when the clerk asked if we still wanted it, we said “Sure!”

The storyline is alright, though I had to read through it a second time to realize this because on the first pass the art pulled me in multiple directions, one of which was straight out of the story. When it comes to the art, Ienco has a great, sketchy style and nice coloring. Present day panels have a warm toned color palette, and flashbacks a cool tone which provides an immediate reference as to which you are viewing.  However, there were several problems which made me immediately want to set this book aside without finishing it.  For everything that Ienco did right, he did something else very wrong or very strange.

Assembly Required: Marvel’s The Avengers Movie Review

Update, 5/7/2012: Our spoiler-laden and much more in-depth Avengers podcast is now available.

Editor’s Note: This review contains no spoilers. As such, it feels very sketchy and incomplete. For more in-depth analysis of the movie and drunken incoherent ranting about specific things about the movie that were awesome, we will be producing a podcast in the coming days.

Marvel Studios’ The Avengers (Or as it’s known in England, Avengers Assemble, and as I presume it’s known in Pakistan, Imperialist Great Satans With Devil Powers) is finally in theaters in the United States. And you should go see it. Because it is good. Damn good. Seriously fucking good. Arguably the best superhero movie of all time (Granted, for me personally it is knocking M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable out of the peak spot, so take that into account as you read my opinion. Your mileage may vary, is all I’m saying).

Hey, Spider-Friends, New Amazing Spider-Man Trailer Is Out And, Well, Amazing.

Ok, I’m behind on my comic book reading for the week and in a fit of desperate jealousy right now because Rob is at a showing of The Avengers at the moment and I am not. Stupid “having to go to my day job” thing. Boo! However, here’s a little something to cheer us all up: a new trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man! It’s got a bit deeper insight into Dr. Curt Connors, aka The Lizard, in relation to the events of the film. We see more of him, both in pasty pale scientist and green scaly goon forms. Also, more shots of the new web shooters in action. Cool! I have to admit that I didn’t see the point of rebooting the franchise, particularly so soon. But, this trailer does get me more interested in seeing the new film. Good job, marketing department!

The Amazing Spider-Man opens in US theaters on July 3, 2012.

Fair And Balanced, Or: Wolverine Vs. Everybody: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

The biggest problem with the first two issues of Avengers Vs. X-Men was, to me, that in order for it to make any sense, the writers needed to make Cyclops into a monomaniacal zealot, vis a vis Hope-as-mutant-savior, so focused, rigid and intractable that he made Timothy McVeigh look like Winston Churchill with a quualude habit.

It is now the third issue, and it appears that the Marvel Architects in charge of this story have found a way to temper our perceptions of Cyclops’s fanatical tendencies: by making Captain America a focused, rigid and intractable monomaniacal zealot.

In short, Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 displays the first real and disappointing cracks in what has been a tight, if sometimes logic-stretching little tale (if you can call an event comic destined to cover all Marvel titles for the next four months “little”): and that is that it attempts to mask Cyclops’s believability-stretching reactionary behavior with similar, yet opposite,  behavior by Cap. And instead of balancing the scales, it shows the Man Behind The Curtain by making two characters do stupid and unbelievable things in the interest of advancing the plot.

With that plot apparently being to make it so Wolverine can fight anybody. Because that shit sells some comics, yo. But we’ll get there in a minute,

How Can You Keep Them Down At The Comic Store Once They’ve Seen…

How can anyone be expected to give a shit about comic book superheroes when The Avengers movie opens in America on Friday?

(Recognizes cognitive dissonance) (Head explodes)

But impending comic movie geekgasm or no, it is still Wednesday, which means new actual comics, and which further means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

But it is quite a week leading into Free Comic Book Day, ain’t it? There’s Round 3 of Avengers Vs. X-Men (Where Cyclops bites Captain America’s ear off. Or not), DC’s debut of Earth 2 (Featuring 100% of the Power Girl with nearly 0% of the cleavage), a new Daredevil and the first Peter Milligan-written Stormwatch, and a bunch of other good stuff!

But before we can review any of them, we need to read them. So until that time (Minus noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, when we will be 3D-glasses blind watching Hulk Smash Loki)…

See you tomorrow suckers!