This Would Be A Good Death: Batman Incorporated #8 Review

Editor’s Note: Holy Spoilers, Batman! …yeah, that’s all I got.

And with that, our long national nightmare is over. Maybe.

For the second time in my life, Robin has been murdered, only this time I didn’t get the perverse satisfaction of dialing a 900 number to strike one of the killing blows myself. Back in the late 80s, I called to kill Jason Todd because he had become a petulant, impulsive little snot who had slowly drifted into becoming a murderer. Conversely, Damian Wayne was introduced as a petulant, impulsive snot, who was a trained assassin before he even made an appearance on the page. Damian Wayne was hateful, an entitled, imperious little prince who, if you found yourself sitting in front of him on a crowded airplane, would make you willing to gladly do time in Guantanamo for attempting to rush the cockpit and crash the plane just to make the self-important yammering just fucking stop.

In the six and a half years since Damian was introduced (not counting his appearance as an infant in Mike W. Barr’s 1987 Son of The Demon, which also included the Batman / Talia al Ghul fuck scene I used in high school to stop the abuse I took claiming Batman was gay. It didn’t work.), Grant Morrison and other writers like Scott Snyder and Peter Tomasi have been somewhat successful in rehabilitating Damian, slowly edging him away from a kid you would happily pepper spray just to see the superior light in his eyes go out, and more toward a hero with a tragic upbringing that he is trying to overcome. Which is a long road to travel for a character who was designed to initially cause intense dislike toward him, but one that must be traveled to make his death, in Batman Incorporated #8, anything but a blessed, bloodthirsty relief.

Well, that road’s over, because the kid’s dead now – for the moment, anyway; after all, this is a comic book. So the immediate question is: does Morrison make Damian’s death poignant because it is the death of a hero? Or because you realize you’re reveling in the death of a 10-year-old boy?

…Every Day You Get One More Yard

So who’s spending all their waking hours nervously glancing at their smartphones, imagining vibrations or half-ringtones, praying fervently for an email from San Diego Comic-Con’s booking agent Travel Planners to find out whether or not they got the SDCC hotels they want?

Yeah, us too. And, being the even-keeled, patient types that we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are, we made a measured and reasoned decision this evening while visiting our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop shrieking, “I’ll suck your dick for a couch to surf within a block of the San Diego Convention Center!” at the paying clientele, to remove the distressingly silent Android phones from our hands and fill them with glasses of tequila.

Which means that, even if we didn’t find out where we’ll be staying in San Diego, we did make it to the comic store, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But that is one hell of a take, huh? Starting with an Alan Moore / Kevin O’Neill installment of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen so new and relatively unexpected that even our local comic store owner wasn’t certain it wasn’t actually an arty sequel to Marshall Law, and continuing with the recently-spoiled Grant Morrison issue of Batman Incorporated, a new issue of The Legend of Luther Strode, a new Matt Fraction Hawkeye and last, but not least: Brian Michael Bendis’s first issue of Guardians of The Galaxy! Plus a pile of other good shit!

But before we can review them, we need to swallow the worm and have some time to read them through the double vision. So while we process the fact that this is the way we live on a Wednesday in our early 40s…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

150 Seconds of Pant-Crapping Terror: SDCC Hotel Registration Is Complete

Our apologies for the dearth of content today, but is has been a busy one here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, between significant personal business, day job obligations… and, of course, the application for convention-priced hotel rooms at San Diego Comic-Con 2013, which occurred in a white heat starting at noon Eastern Time today.

Now, you can say what you want about the fact that, these days, you need to fill out an online form, list some favored hotels (this time, six. No more, no less)… and then wait for a few days to find out if you got what you wanted, what you were willing to settle for, or if you’ll be fighting for space in the men’s room stalls without the glory holes. And that’s after you have to wait for several hours after completing the online form just to get an email confirmation that they even received your application.

But I will say this: compared to the experience of reserving a convention room through Travel Planners, SDCC’s preferred booking agent or hotels, just five years ago, the current twitchy anticipation of waiting a few days to find out what you got is a small price to pay to avoid that tooth-shattering pure, animal rage that the process used to be.

Back in 2008, the Travel Planners site opened at noon on the appointed day… and promptly shit the bed like an infant on Seconal. It took me two and a half hours to get through to where I could actually purchase a room, and by then, well, I’m lucky that finances meant that we were looking for a hotel more than a mile away from downtown. That experience taught me: if you want to maximize your chances at attending SDCC, book a backup room that you can cancel later at a non-convention hotel within a month after the Comic-Con you just got back from… and no, I won’t tell you our backup hotel of choice. I know we’re a news site, but we’re not saps. Do your own damn legwork.

Compared to that pure hell, a little anticipation and apprehension is a small price today, because the process was surprisingly simple. During last year’s hotel reservation process, my browser chugged briefly when the site opened at noon, but I was able to get through the process in about three minutes… with a few minor complications.

So how was it this year?

Spoilers Incorporated: DC, New York Post Spoil Events of Batman Incorporated #8

Editor’s Note: While I will try to avoid including any spoilers for Batman Incorporated #8 in this piece, it is a story about DC and The New York Post spoiling Batman Incorporated #8. It is a difficult task, like trying to defuse a bomb while looking at a green wire with a yellow stripe, and a yellow stripe with a green stripe.

Yesterday, my co-Editor Amanda asked me idly why there wasn’t the same kind of mainstream press coverage of the events of last week’s Batwoman #17 as there was last May when Northstar did something similar in Astonishing X-Men. She had theories about the public perceptions of lesbians versus gay men, or the widening public acceptance of gay marriage in even the last nine months, but my theory? “Dan DiDio didn’t bother to pick up the phone and call a newspaper to tell them about it. Period. Full stop. It’s not like mainstream newspaper reporters make the comic store part of their local beat, hoping for a page four feature story.”

Well, this morning, it looks like my theory was proved correct. Because DiDio, or someone at DC Editorial, has called The New York Post and spoiled the living shit out of Batman Incorporated #8.

And, while I promised not to spoil the events of the book as reported by The Post, more detailed information that could spoil the book, including the link to the original Post story, will appear after the jump.

Southern Trespass: Captain America #4 Review

The unique thing about comic books, at least comic books from the Big Two that are owned by the publisher and have been around for a while (of course, whether those kind of comic books are the best thing for the industry or for readers is a whole different argument) is that writers and artists come and go, while the character remains. This dichotomy brings comic fans one of their favorite things – a continuity across years that can give some characters and titles an epic, historic feeling that supercedes the often simple adventure stories at their core – and one of their least favorite things – a continuity across years that the new douchebag creative team on a book are clearly fucking with with no regard for the character’s epic history and they’ve ruined the character and now I will Tweet a death threat and hello, Officer, no handcuffs are necessary, if you’d just read this issue, you’d see that I was right to threaten to set fire to the writer’s cat, and is that a Taser, and…

…well, you get the point.

The point being that creative teams change, and each new set of people has their own stamp that they want to put on these long-running books. And a lot of times these creators want to pay homage to a particular era from the character, which can be pretty damned varied; keep in mind that, at various times, Spider-Man has been a high school student battling street-level crime, a college student fighting more mid-level threats, an Avenger, a widely-reviled public menace, a member of the Fantastic Four, and a fucking clone… and now he’s Doctor Octopus. So if a writer wants to revisit any particular era, the story could be almost any kind, and if they want to do something new with the character, they’d need to make him a gay cowboy eating pudding or something (and I’m pretty sure if I dug far enough into the Marvel Team-Up back catalogue, I might even find that’s already been done).

All of which brings up to Rick Remender, and his reboot of Captain America following Ed Brubaker’s long run on the title. Brubaker’s reign on the title was categorized by S.H.I.E.L.D.-based espionage stories, and while God knows that he took his share of chances on the title – he killed Cap and brought Bucky back to life, for Christ’s sake – they were generally grounded, somewhat realistic stories with a classic Steranko-era feel. However, that’s not the only kind of Captain America story there is; Cap has a legacy of science fiction-style stories in his history, written and drawn by no less than Jack Kirby and Gene Colan – let’s remember that before MODOK became a comic reader’s punchline, he was created to fuck around with Cap.

Remender has clearly chosen to focus on the science fiction history of Captain America in his initial reboot story, which continues through this weeks issue #4. This is a full-blast sci-fi story, including alternate universes, alien races, spaceships, and one of the classic Captain America sci-fi villains: the Kirby-created Armin Zola. The question is: how does all this weirdness – weirdness supported by various eras in Captain America’s history, mind you – go down immediately following years and years of cold war-style spy stories?

Honestly? It’s going down hard.

When There Is No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Wait In Line For Marvel’s One Men’s Room: New Marvel Teaser Poster Released

It’s been a little while since Marvel dumped out one of their recently ubiquitous, one-word teaser posters to hype an upcoming new title, but a new one entered the wild yesterday, following a tease at a retailer’s breakfast yesterday… and as an aside: why does Marvel seem to have so many breakfasts for retailers? It was a retailer’s breakfast at New York Comic Con where Marvel teased The Superior Spider-Man, and it just seems… weird. I know that the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to consider making their establishment the first stop on my comic store / local bar routine, would much prefer a retailer’s cocktail hour. Or at least I presume that he would, considering that every time I leave his store, I hear him mutter, “Christ, I need a drink.” But I’m getting a little off point here.

The point is that there is another intriguing teaser poster for some new Marvel book coming this fall. And the bad news is that, like all the other teasers preceding it, it gives almost no information on the actual book – including no creator names.

But the good news is that Marvel apparently got Ike Perlmutter to sign off on the budget for a couple of additional words for the teaser! Which you can check out after the jump.

Winter Is Coming Back – New Trailer For Game Of Thrones Season 3

“Death is coming for everyone and everything”, says Catelyn Stark in this new trailer for season 3 of Game Of Thrones and I say: it can’t get here fast enough.

Game Of Thrones returns to HBO on March 31 at 9pm.

And, a little treat for everyone who loves to hate Bitch King Joffrey, after the jump.

Pulling The Pin: Justice League of America #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe – here in this great Hall of Justice – are the most powerful forces of spoilers ever assembled.

This isn’t like The Suicide Squad.

– Steve Trevor

Actually, Justice League of America #1, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by David Finch, is a lot like Suicide Squad, in that it’s got Amanda Waller making unique and intriguing personal offers to fringe people with super powers to join a team controlled by the government to perform missions for the government’s purposes. It’s also a lot like Keith Giffen’s and J. M. DeMatteis’s early issues of their late 80’s Justice League, in that it is attempting to lay the groundwork for and justify a Justice League packed with second-stringers and also-rans. It’s also a lot like Brad Meltzer’s post-Identity Crisis run on Justice League of America, in that it’s got as many sequences of people looking at pictures of, and talking about, superheroes as it does sequences of people actually, you know, doing stuff.

Two of these similarities are good things.

Look, as an opening issue of a book trying to justify the creation of a second Justice League when there’s a perfectly good one that’s only a year and a half old, this is a perfectly acceptable story that delivers the necessary exposition required to justify the concept and to introduce characters who are either relatively new since the New 52 reboot, or who have been around in their own titles, albeit with sales numbers low enough to warrant a whole new introduction (I’m looking at you, Hawkman). And it does it with enough mysterious teases and interesting secrets to justify their willingness to join this team to keep things intriguing… with one exception. In one case, using a single word balloon, Johns shows himself to be playing with some serious fire. Fire that, if he handles it well, will thrill anyone who read comics through the 1990… and that conversely, if he screws it up, will make a fairly significant niche fanbase turn on him like he insulted their mothers, and make the attempted rehabilitation of Vibe seem like a low-risk venture.

Elegy For A Bastard – Review Of Hellblazer #300

Yesterday, I bemoaned the fate of Hellblazer and the title’s termination at issue 300 before going on to say mostly nice things about a character that had been generally known as a cliche, prior to being brought back from the dead. Today, I will talk to you about a character who has also turned into a cliche prior to becoming dead: John Constantine.

I think my “wailing and gnashing of teeth” yesterday was primarily mourning for a character who has really been dying and on his way to dead from about issue 251 on. I’m sure Peter Milligan meant well, but this series – which managed to survive the literal dicking Brian Azzarello gave it back in the year 2000 – has been dead man walking for some time. Sure, there’s been some glimmers of good story, but this is not the John Constantine we all signed up for. This is a sad shell of a John Constantine, a Constantine that, had he been anticipated as a likelihood by former writers like Garth Ennis, would have eaten a bullet sometime back around 1994. Issue 300 does not serve so much as closure for John Constantine as make you wonder about the Constantine that might have been in other hands.

And, I think I’ve figured out why.

Join me as I spoil my way through problem solving, after the jump.

…Move Zig

9:30 a.m., February 20th, 2013:

“…Okay, I’m heading to the day job, Amanda. We’ll head to the comic store when I get home, okay?”

“Cool! I’m bummed that Hellblazer‘s closing out, but at least Geoff Johns has a couple of books coming out today!”

“Um… he has one new book. Justice League of America. Which looks pretty interesting, except for… Vibe.”

“Actually, Johns also has the first issue of Vibe’s solo comic coming – ”

“NO! There is no Vibe solo book!”

“But Rob,” Amanda said, “Geoff Johns is a pro at rebooting characters that people have forgotten. And – ”

“I have never forgotten Vibe,” I hissed, “I bought issues of Justice League Detroit when I was 15 years old. And I don’t need Geoff Johns to reboot Vibe, because Vibe already made me reboot. In the sense that once I read those issues, I booted. And when I reread them, I rebooted.”

“Rob,” she said, “It’s been 28 years. Don’t you think it’s time you gave the character, and more importantly, Geoff Johns, a chance?”

“Never!” I cried. “With God as my witness, Vibe will not be a part of my weekly take tonight!”

——–

…and I was right. In the sense that, since Amanda, having a day off her day gig when I didn’t, went to my local comic store, where they know me by name, and ask me to stop telling the female paying clientele that their vibrators cause cancer because they are “part Vibe,” picked up the issue on her own and wrote it a damn fine review. But I am as good as my word, which means that I have obtained this week’s take – sans Vibe – and which further means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But even putting Vibe aside, this is a pretty solid-looking take, no? We’ve got Johns’s Justice League of America, the final issue of Vertigo’s Hellblazer (which I think Amanda and I will both have comments about in the near future), a new issue of Dan Slott’s The Superior Spider-Man, Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key: Omega, a new Saga, Matt Wagner’s The Shadow: Year One, and a bunch of other good stuff! Good stuff that’s (mostly) Vibe-free!

But in order to discuss any of them, we need time to read them (and to sober up after our drunken, Vibe-related argument). So until those things happen…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!