Short, But Sweet…

Unless you’ve been off planet, you’ve probably noticed that news of the shake-up in the Marvel Universe, due to the events in Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man, has even made it into the mainstream news. So, it’s probably just as well that it was a light week for most of the other books, what with the holidays and all interrupting normal publishing schedules. Between ASM stealing most of the comic news thunder and the after effects of holiday hangovers, it’s just a little hard to concentrate right now here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives home office.

Which means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

Not a bad little take: Amazing Spider-Man #700 (a double sized monstrosity or extravaganza, depending on where you fall with that series final resolution), Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 (which has a first glimpse of “The Superior Spider-Man”), Justice League #15, and, because there are still books in the world not published by Marvel or DC, Mara, by Brian Wood, Ming Doyle and Jordie Bellaire.

And, as ever, before we can review them, we need to read ’em. Which means we need to stop our hands from shaking long enough to turn some pages. Which means we need to get to the liquor store before it closes. So, until then…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

End of The (Web) Line: Amazing Spider-Man #700 Review

Editor’s Note: Better Yet, with my unparalleled genius — and my boundless ambitions — I’ll be a better Spoiler-Man than you ever were.

I hated Star Trek: Generations. Yes, I know this is a review of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, but just bear with me for a second.

The climax of Generations featured the death of Captain Kirk. If I’m remembering correctly (and if I’m not, screw it; I’m not watching that pile of shit again), a bunch of scaffolding collapsed on Kirk, killing him slowly due to internal injuries. “It was… fun,” Kirk said. “Fuck this bullshit,” I said.

The problem wasn’t that Kirk died. The problem was the way that Kirk died. Sure, he went down fighting evil, and he did it even knowing that no one would ever know that he did what he did, and that’s fine… but there is no way on God’s Green Earth that James Tiberius Kirk dies due to shitty construction and a bad step. It is wrong, and it is anti-climactic.

You want to kill Jim Kirk? There is only one way he dies: he goes down with the ship.

With that let’s turn an eye to The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

There is a lot in this comic book that writer Dan Slott does reasonably well. He shows two mortal enemies locked in battle, and demonstrates that at least in terms of intelligence, they are pretty evenly matched. He clearly spent some time thinking about Internet gutter wits (Hey Mom! I’m on the Internet!) looking for plot holes and preemptively plugging them, and gives a reasonable explanation for how and why the combatant who survives will act in the way he must for the ongoing conceit to even remotely have legs. And he gave himself an out for the new status quo… which I think we all know isn’t really the new normal. After all, let’s remember that , in the past five or six years, Marvel has killed and resurrected Captain America and Thor twice each. Big name characters in the Marvel Universe get killed and rise from the grave so often they make Jesus look like D-Man.

And yes, someone does die here, however temporarily. And Slott does his best to make that death emotional and moving, and succeeds up to a point. Problem is, that death doesn’t feel earned… and it is the equivalent of dying in a Goddamned scaffolding collapse.

So who dies, and is it all worth it? Well, let’s talk about that after the jump, with one warning: after that jump, there will be spoilers.

Happy Boxing Day – Review Of Joe Palooka #1

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the comics of 12/19/2012 before the comic store open…

From the 1920s and well into the middle of the 20th century, American comics press had a tradition of popularizing idealized characters as heroes – hard bitten detectives like Dick Tracy, plucky orphans who make good like Little Orphan Annie, and tenacious fighters with tender hearts like Joe Palooka.

Created by cartoonist Ham Fisher, Joe Palooka had a very successful run as a syndicated comic strip from 1930 until 1984. At its peak, it ran in 900 newspapers and spawned radio spots, a television show and a movie. The American public continues to demonstrate a soft spot for its fighters, to which the popularity and critical acclaim of such movies as Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter can attest. Even as straight up boxing has moved from weekend afternoon sports coverage on networks to cable and pay-per-view programming, viewers still can get their pugilism fix through any of a number of mixed martial arts programs, like Ultimate Fighting Championship or StrikeForce. So, it’s no surprise that characters inspired by MMA fighters are finding their way back into the comics medium, as with Blair Butler’s 2011 series Heart.

Joe Antonacci, a veteran ringside announcer of boxing and MMA matches, now owns the trademark to Joe Palooka and has rebooted the character as an ongoing comic book series. Joe Palooka, also known in this new book as Nick Davis, is an up and coming MMA fighter with a background in bare knuckle boxing from his time growing up as a child of migrant farm workers. The story has been mapped out by the creative team of Antonacci, with creative partners Matt Triano and Mike Bullock. Bullock also scripted the issue. Art is handled by Fernando Peniche with Bob Pedroza on colors.

So, how does Joe Palooka hold up to his modernization?

Our hero’s spoiler filled origins, after the jump!

Django Adapted: Django Unchained #1 Review

When DC Comics announced at San Diego Comic-Con that they were planning to release a comics adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained, which is out in theaters today, I was not particularly enthusiastic, even though I am a Tarantino fan from years back.

Why? Well, picture the first fifteen minutes of Pulp Fiction. Now try to picture that quarter hour as a comic book. Hell, imagine it as a major event comic with A-list talent; let’s say they got Frank Miller to do the art, because after all, the man knows how to draw people in black and white suits. What do you think that comic book would look like? That’s right: it would be 75 pages long with half of those pages being word balloons. And the visuals would be of three different angles of two guys sitting quietly in a car, giving Miller all kinds of unexpected free time to shriek at hippies to get off his lawn. And we know that those would be some killer word balloons, but as a comic book? Not the most exciting-sounding four-color experience. Frankly, if you pitched a comic issue about two guys in a car talking about cheeseburgers and the metric system without using the name “Tarantino,” even Brian Michael Bendis would say, “Meh; sounds kinda… talky“.

So at first glance, a Tarantino comic sounds like a rough idea on its face. However, Django Unchained is a western, which at least implies a certain amount of action and visual dynamism… but to play Devil’s Advocate, Pulp Fiction was a crime movie, which would also imply some adrenaline pounding, but which really only would provided it during the, well, adrenaline pounding. So how does this comic play? An ultra-literate Jonah Hex shoot ’em up? Or, to paraphrase Eric Cartman: a couple of gay cowboys talking about pudding?

Tore Open The Bourbon And Threw Up On The Sash: Stan Lee Reads The Night Before Christmas

It is Christmas Eve, which means if you are anything like we are, you are busy simultaneously hanging your stockings and wrapping your presents, while watching Uncle Pete drink himself into oblivion while screeching about birth certificates and FEMA Camps, wondering if you can hang Uncle Pete and wrap him in a rug.

Frankly, that’s no way to get into the spirit of Christmas! Christmas is supposed to be about childlike wonder, the belief in power greater than your own, and the cosmic awe over the fact that the days are finally about to get longer!

And all those things remind me of comics. So whether you are so devout a Christian that you are considering firebombing your town square’s nondenominational “holiday” display, or a Jew looking forward to Chinese food and Django Unchained, I think we should all come together today and thank the deity of your choice that, if nothing else, we pretty much all have tomorrow off.

And in that spirit, and the spirit of comics, why don’t you and your family huddle around the warm glow of the computer monitor and enjoy Stan Lee, and his rendition of the classic Christmas poem The Night Before Christmas? Maybe it will remind us all that, no matter what our differences, maybe for this one day we can all come together and agree to act in the benevolent spirit of the season, and maybe go see a Tarantino movie and firebomb Uncle Pete together.

Stan the Man is waiting, right after the jump.

Christmas In February At Christmas: New Community Christmas Episode Clip Released

It is Christmas Eve, and if your family is anything like mine, you are currently in your family’s living room, wearing an “early gift” of a truly horrific sweater, being frogmarched in front of neighbors you don’t know while Johnny Mathis’s Insipid Christmas (or whatever the actual title is) plays on the cassette deck, and pretending to answer a work email on your smartphone when you’re really blogging for help.

It’s enough to make you wish for a Christmas with your friends, with simple gifts and lots and lots of inexpensive tequila. The kind of Christmas we used to see on Community, before it got punted to February, 2013. Well, fear not: NBC has released a clip of the “Christmas” episode of Community season 4 – probably due to air in April – showing good friends swapping simple gifts… either that, or it shows an irresponsible degenerate putting innocent kittens in terrible, terrible danger. You can see the goodness, which will distract you from the real-life questions of when you’ll settle down already, after the jump.

Passing Judgement – Review Of Judge Dredd #2

I am behind the times where Judge Dredd is concerned. When the comic was coming out in strip form back in the late seventies and eighties in the British publication 2000 A.D., I was an ocean away. Also, I was 7 (at least at the start of it). I managed to miss both movie versions of it, which, from what I hear, is probably a good thing. Why Sylvester Stallone would’ve been cast to play an iconic British comic hero seems bizarre, but it was the 90s and a lot of crimes against comic books were happening -so why should their treatment in a movie be that much more surprising? As far as Karl Urban is concerned – well, I know he was Bones McCoy in the Star Trek reboot. I liked him in that, but not enough to go to Judge Dredd 3D. I’m ok with that.

IDW currently has the rights to Judge Dredd and is two issues into a new run, written by Duane Swierczynski. I picked up issue #2 with no context, having missed the first one. If you’re like me and have no background on the series, Judge Dredd is a futuristic tale, set in the dystopian society of Mega-City One. Joseph Dredd is a Judge; Judges are cops who also impose sentence on their perps. This issue seems to be as much about what the system asks of its participants as it is about the characters. The comic is split into two stories by Swierczynski, “Cover Me”, with art by Nelson Daniel, and “The Good Parts”, with art by Brendan McCarthy.

So, for a reader with no grounding in the series, who is also starting late to the party, what’s the verdict?

My findings, riddled with spoilers, after the jump.

Christmas Resurrection: Gail Simone Back On Batgirl

I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night. Although I have taken the form of Gaius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man and therefore I am a God.

So. After firing Gail Simone as writer of Batgirl a few weeks ago, and then quietly weathering the ensuing shitstorm from fandom on the Internet, DC chose the Friday before Christmas to allow the name of the next Batgirl writer to leak out.

And who, praytell, will be the poor fucker trying to follow in the footsteps of Gail Simone?

Gail Simone.

Here’s a thing.Gail Simone is the new Batgirl writer. 🙂

— GailSimone (@GailSimone) December 21, 2012

Also?NOT A HOAX.

— GailSimone (@GailSimone) December 21, 2012

Entry Portal: Locke & Key: Omega #2 Review

I hadn’t read any of Locke & Key, written by Joe Hill and drawn by Gabriel Rodriguez, until the Grindhouse one-shot came out back in September. At the time, I told myself that I hadn’t tried it because the word was it had a bunch of backstory and mythology crossing four already-released trade paperbacks worth of material, and between my heavy take of weekly comics and trying to run a comics Web site, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to throw myself into a deep horror tale that, based on titles alone, looked like another Lovecraft knockoff – sure, I loves me some Lovecraftian stories, but I think I’ve established I have little patience for bad ones. So why run the risk?

That was the reason that I told myself. Turns out the real reason I wasn’t reading Locke & Key is because I was a fucking idiot.

Locke & Key is a spectacular horror story, one that covers twenty years and more of mythology, yes, but which focuses on a small group of well-rounded characters in a limited, generally familiar setting – you know, minus the weird house and its funky magic keys. It has Lovecraftian elements, yes, but it also has so much more, and by keeping the people affected down to a small group, it accentuates the danger by making it easy to empathize with those in the thick of it. Yes, Locke & Key is all one big six-volume story (other than that Grindhouse one-shot), and yes, because of that, it is difficult to just grab an issue to understand who people are and what is happening to them, but four of those volumes are available in affordable trade paperback, with the fifth just out in hardcover… and if you’re anything like me, by the time you finish the fourth book, you’ll happily drop the extra few bucks to get the fifth right fucking now.

The sixth and final Locke & Key volume, Omega, is being released in normal comic book form right now; the second issue dropped on Wednesday. And while I have been digging it, I didn’t review the last month’s first issue because it is a late chapter in one big story. Which meant that if you hadn’t read any of the earlier issues, there wasn’t a hope in hell that a new reader would know what the hell was going on or why. And the same is true for this week’s second issue, but I’m going to review and recommend it anyway, even for new readers. Because even though new readers won’t know who the punk kid in the wedding dress is, or why there’s a naked child ghost wandering around with no wang, or if the black woman muttering “White. Stop. Dodge” is in the mental hospital due to a hideous Bombardment accident, I can guarantee they will lock onto the character of Rufus Whedon. And if the heart and cleverness with which Hill has embued this character doesn’t give you faith that maybe it’s worth starting Locke & Key from the beginning to see what he’s done with these other people you don’t know? Maybe comics really aren’t the hobby for you.

Take Her Away: Disney / Marvel To Take Star Wars License From Dark Horse

A long time ago (sometime around 1986) in a galaxy far, far away (presuming you are reading this from somewhere in Andromeda, and if you are: please send flying cars and jetpacks), Marvel Comics decided, four years after Return of The Jedi had left theaters and with enthusiasm for Star Wars dwindling after years of no word of a fourth movie forthcoming, to stop publishing Star Wars comic books.

A less long time ago (figure around 1991), writer Timothy Zahn published a Star Wars novel named Heir to The Empire, which rumor had it was authorized by George Lucas and reflective of the plots originally planned for the Star Wars Episode VII movie promised to us back around 1980. The book and its sequels were a hit, and revitalized interest in Star Wars for the first time in years. And by the end of that year, we walked into comic stores to find Dark Empire, the first new Star Wars comic book in about five years, written by Tom Veitch and drawn by Cam Kennedy, expanding on Zahn’s work and published by Dark Horse Comics. This began a run of Dark Horse-published Star Wars comics that have spanned two decades, three new Star Wars movies, and, depending on your point of view and impulse control, four to six George Lucas childhood rapes (depending on if you count the non-Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars cartoons.

A couple weeks ago, in Los Angeles, Disney bought Lucasfilm. And you might remember that three years ago, Disney bought Marvel Comics. And yet, to this day, Dark Horse publishes several Star Wars comic books (including reprints of many of the old Marvel issues). But hey, that’s okay! What could possibly happen? I mean, look at Star Wars itself! When Senator Palpatine took over the Senate, everything stayed a-ok and the status quo was maintained, right?

Right?

(cue Darth Vader’s Imperial March)