Peanuts From The Comment Gallery

First of all: we are aware that there are problems with submitting comments. We upgraded the Web site last week, doing so for the first time without announcing that we were making changes, and sure enough: things went tits up without our regulars there to test for free while we busily made whiskey safe for children by turning it into pee. We are working on the problem, and hope to have it resolved shortly. For the time being: please try pressing the refresh button next to the CAPTCHA and using the new code just before posting; we’ve had some luck with that here.

But further work will need to wait until the morning. Because it is Wednesday – the first Wednesday after a long holiday vacations – and that means that we have spent the evening at the bar, counting the days until our time off for San Diego Comic-Con (202 days, by the way).

But is also means new comics – the first substantial take in two weeks – and that means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

Kind of a strange take this week. We have a huge pile of DC issue #15s (including Firestorm, the first issue of which we’ve checked out since the seriously disappointing first one), but there’s also the sixth issue of Batman Incorporated (which, as a series, has been hit or miss… but the last issue made my top ten of 2012), along with Hellboy In Hell #2, the latest Marvel Now entries of New Avengers and Morbius: The Living Vampire (plus the lastest Brian Michael Bendis All-New X-Men #5, and Scott Snyder’s last pre-hiatus issue of American Vampire, and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff!

But you know the drill (even if it’s difficult currently to comment on it): before we can review them, we need time to read them. So until we can do that…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Dead Inside: New Teaser Trailer For The Walking Dead

So New Year’s Day has come and gone, the roads are covered in watery slush where they aren’t rendered into luge tracks by black ice, and the holidays are ended, with each and every one of us having, at best, exactly 0.0403226 vacation days accrued for the year to date. So God, am I ready for society to fall.

Thankfully, the people at AMC know this, so they have released a teaser for the upcoming second half of the third season of The Walking Dead, which returns in early February. And you can check that video out after the jump.

We Are The Walking Dead: Crossed: Badlands #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the (few) comics of 12/26/2012 before the comic store opens with this week’s new books…

In the annals of zombie fiction, each imprint or subgenre meets a particular literary need. The Walking Dead allows Robert Kirkman to address the long-term effects of constant stress with no civilization on individuals of different types. George Romero uses his Night of The Living Dead stories to satire human pack behavior, such as mass consumerism, blind obedience to the military / industrial complex, and the compulsion to record life rather than living it.

And Avatar Comics’s Crossed: Badlands is generally here so comic creators can write and draw the most depraved and twisted shit they can possibly imagine.

I’m not kidding. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows created, in their initial run of Crossed, a world where the “zombies” want to eat you, sure… but only after they fuck your holes, stab a few new holes and then fuck them, and then do the same to your friends, family, vague acquaintances and household pets, all in front of you if possible. And subsequent creators playing in the Crossed world have generally embraced this concept with both hands; David Lapham’s last two arcs in Crossed: Badlands revolved around a cowardly teenager who only finds his courage after mistakenly blowing away a teenaged girl he believed to be a zombie (and then fucking her), and then a literary salon that models itself on the old Hellfire Club… until they meet the Crossed, who show them what sexual adventurism really means, by way of the Zombie Cleveland Steamer (where you lie under a glass coffee table while a Crossed rips out your colon, takes it to Cleveland and then dorks it).

Crossed: Badlands is historically the place to go to produce the kind of stories that would get you a no-questions-asked Thorazine prescription if you told it to a psychiatric professional: fun if you like that sort of thing (and I usually do), but not where you look for social commentary or characterization beyond, “people sure do suck, don’t they?” So imagine my surprise when writer Si Spurrier and artist Raulo Caceres turned in a two-part arc about two damaged people, together for the wrong reasons and separated by the Crossed outbreak and their own selfishness, doomed to repeat their destructive cycle. This is a good one. Gross and intense, but good.