dark_knight_returns_part_2_blu_ray_coverOver the New Year’s holiday, we here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office spent an entire day drinking whiskey and watching DC animated movies on streaming Netflix. We went through Justice League: Doom, Batman: Under The Red Hood, Superman Vs. The Elite, and All-Star Superman, all in one big throwdown. Because you can say what you want about Warner Bros. and DC and their inability so far to make a decent major motion picture that doesn’t star Batman, but they are light years ahead of anything that Marvel’s been doing in the animation space, and they have been for years. They just make good animated series and direct-to-video features, so clear and fun you can follow them despite, by the time All-Star Superman started bubbling down the magical pornography wire into the XBox, being so drunk we couldn’t make our desires known to an establishment that only sells pizza.

But the one film we didn’t stream was The Dark Knight Returns: Part 1, despite being excited by the teaser trailers that were released for that release back in July and August, because we are huge fans of Frank Miller’s original comic series, and if we’re going to watch it, we want it all in one whack.

And soon, our wait will be over; The Dark Knight Returns: Part 2 is scheduled to be released on DVD, Blu-Ray and video on demand on January 29th… and Warner Bros. has released another teaser trailer for the second part. This particular clip presents Batman stomping the living shit out of a heavily-armed SWAT team. Hang on while I get my Jack Daniel’s, and let’s meet up after the jump.

new_avengers_1_cover_2013Christ, he thinks he’s making movies. That’s why I wasn’t completely satisfied by Avengers #1, and was actually kinda pissed off by New Avengers #1: they’re not really stories. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.

So let me start with a personal note to Jonathan Hickman: Hi, Jon? There is a difference between an action movie and a comic book. An action flick costs ten bucks and usually lasts between 100 and 140 minutes. A comic book costs just about half as much as a movie, but is 20 to 24 pages, and lasts about 15 minutes, or maybe 20 if you’ve eaten a lot of cheese and let yourself become dehydrated.

A full-screen title card in a movie usually takes maybe 10 seconds, or fifteen if the director is a bombastic prick – about 0.002 percent of a movie, or about 2 cents worth of screen time in a best-case scenario. In a comic? it’s two pages out of 22 – about nine percent of a comic, or about 36 cents worth of the book. And yes: I sat down with a calculator and did the math.

My point is: the big, movie-style title cards you insist on chucking into the first issue of each Avengers book you’ve taken over? Save that shit for the movies. Reading comics is more expensive than going the movies. If you want to write a movie? Call Avi Arad. If you’re writing comics? We’re paying by the page, champ. Don’t waste those pages on your James Cameron fantasies.

Okay, now that my pet peeve is out of the way, we can talk about New Avengers #1.