All Work And No Play

Goddamn, Scott Snyder is one busy sonofabitch this week. Not only is the first issue of the latest miniseries spinoff from his home title, American Vampire, out, but the first issue of his version of Batman’s origin, Zero Year dropped as well. And on top of both of those giant-sized issue, his first issue of the Jim Lee-drawn Superman Unchained is out, just two days before Man of Steel hits theaters and drives scores of new comic readers to comic stores (yeah, we all know that that’s not a thing that happens. If superhero movies really drove lots of new people to buy comic books, I’d have to elbow people out of the way when I go to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop drawing red underpants on Superman. And Batman. And the city Health Inspector.

But regardless of any big superhero movie, that’s still a lot of comics from one writer… and those are far from the only interesting-looking comic books that were released today. And, since they were released today, you know what that means: it means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

This week gave us kind of a light take, but there is still some good-looking stuff in that pile. We’ve got a new issue of The Walking Dead (and maybe… maybe… someone will finally do something about Negan after a full fucking year of stories about that douchebag), the first issue of a new miniseries of The Crow that’s written by series creator James O’Barr, the latest Guardians of The Galaxy by Brian Michael Bendis, Thumbprint by Locke And Key writer Joe Hill, a new issue of Brian Wood’s killer Star Wars, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

But you know how this works: before we can talk about any of them, we need time to read them (and in the case of Superman Unchained, to figure out how to detach and read the poster insert without destroying the entire fucking comic book). So while we tackle that task…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

The Head of The Giant Magic Lizard: Trailer For The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Released

We are in the height of summer movie season, which means that the movie studios, flush with cash and sucking in more every big weekend, are busily humping the beginnings of their holiday movie offerings. Because after all, three or four billion dollars between May and August is nice, but Christmas is in December, and every good movie executive knows that Paco, their pool cleaner, is relying on their holiday tip to make the down payment on the Porsche.

And if you’re gonna tease a future movie in the time of the massive explodo picture, it had better be a big one… and it surely is. The rumor is that, opening up for screenings of Man of Steel, will be the first trailer for the second Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug. And considering that the title of the movie contains the name of a fucking dragon, that trailer had really deliver some giant fire lizard goodness (That’s what she said! …yeah, sorry; even I feel guilty about that gag. Moving on…).

What’s that? You simply can’t wait until the day after tomorrow to lay your eyes on that massive, slithering heat-spitter (Jesus, now even I feel dirty)? Well, I have good news for you: you can check the trailer out right here, after the jump.

Last Chance Pass: Single-Day Tickets For San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Going Up For Sale

Yesterday, we here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office were out celebrating a birthday – not that I could testify in court that that’s actually what happened, except for the evidence of the calendar and the credit card slip reading only “Jagermeister” with a ridiculous number of digits next to it – so several emails we received went unnoticed until this morning, when I caught up on our correspondence to distract myself from praying for a merciful and quick death to stop the relentless thrumming in my head.

Which is a shame, because one of those emails was definitely noteworthy, at least to those people desperately praying for some ray of hope that they could find a way to attend this year’s San Diego Comic-Con next month.

Well, that ray of hope has blinked on: Comic-Con International has announced that several thousand people have returned a variety of single-day passes for this year’s convention, and that they have yanked some previously-reserved badges held for some professional departments… and that they will be holding a lottery for those laminates that you can be a part of.

You know, provided you meet a certain limited set of conditions.

Comic-Con International’s complete message and instructions are after the jump.

Anti-Heroes: Kick-Ass 3 #1 Review

As a guy who grew up – and, arguably, grew old – reading superhero comics, it can be hard sometimes to read Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass stories. Because it is all too easy to see myself in pieces of every “superhero” in this book… and every “superhero” in this book is a pretty Goddamned pathetic excuse for a human being.

We’ve got The Juicer: a couch-surfing leech who spends money he should be using to get his shit together on comic books, Blu-Rays and beer. There’s Ass-Kicker, who’s using his low-level of fame (and we’re talking low, citizen superhero makes middle market overnight disc jockey look like Jon Bon Jovi in 1988) to troll for MILFs to bang on the Internet. And then there’s Kick-Ass himself, who uses his father’s death at the hands of supervillains as an excuse to get his own place and to utterly fail to break Hit-Girl out of jail in favor of “training”: working at a fast food joint and arguing about pop-culture ephemera at his local comic store, where they know him by name because he never fucking leaves.

These characters make reading Kick-Ass 3 #1 difficult for its target audience: me, an inveterate comic book geek. And while I have never worn a superhero costume (not even for the purposes of weird sex), I can see bits of myself in all of these losers (I have, in fact, been a middle market overnight disc jockey), and it can make the story a hard go. It is never easy to find yourself faced with your own flaws in a story, particularly when those flaws are embodied by generally ineffective and irritating no-accounts.

That, however, does not mean the story is bad.

Rory Kinnear – The New Doctor Who?

Bleeding Cool is reporting that UK paper The Telegraph is running a story that the BBC has offered the part of the 12th Doctor to Skyfall‘s Rory Kinnear.

According to the Telegraph article’s author, Richard Eden:

“He has been offered the part and we are waiting to hear if he will accept,” says my man in the Tardis. “He is the perfect choice.”

The 35-year-old alumnus of St Paul’s School, George Osborne’s alma mater, is the son of Roy Kinnear, the celebrated actor.

He played the MI6 officer Bill Tanner in Skyfall and Quantum of Solace, the James Bond films, and won acclaim for his stage performances in productions of Othello, Mary Stuart and Hamlet.

However, tweets Dr. Who producer, Ed Starling:

Don’t believe what you read about the new #doctorwho being announced this weekend. I think it must be Starburst getting a bit over-excited!

— Ed Stradling (@edstradling) June 8, 2013

Steven Moffat says this morning “I haven’t a clue who it is, we’ve barely started.” So no #doctorwho announcement this evening I fear!

— Ed Stradling (@edstradling) June 8, 2013

Hmmm. A vote in Kinnear’s favor, at as far as I’m concerned, is that he’s at least a bit older than Matt Smith. As an old school Doctor Who fan, I worry that the rampant fan growth among the 18-25 set under Smith will lead to a series of increasingly younger casting choices possibly resulting in the eventual casting of Justin Bieber or a fetus.

However, Stradling did have some interesting things to say about how Smith was cast in Doctor Who in the first place.

Brain Drain: Paul Jenkins Leaves DC, Writes Open Letter And Gives Interview Guaranteeing He Will Never Return

I’m about a week late to the party on this one, but the parade of talent walking away from DC Comics has added Paul Jenkins, who did the opening Deadman arc on DC Universe Presents, as well as a pretty decent fill-in on Stormwatch, and until recently was writing Batman: The Dark Knight.

Jenkins apparently has made the decision to walk away from both DC and Marvel to work exclusively for Boom Studios, currently writing Deathmatch for them. Which is fine; creators sometimes make the move to creator-owned comics from the Big Two – if I wrote comics, I’d be pounding on every indie publisher’s doors with creator owned ideas in the hopes of getting a TV contract and the keys to the Rich Guy’s Pissoir where Robert Kirkman currently pisses into Perrier.

Jenkins, however, rather than simply walking away to pursue his own projects, took a page from well-known people person Rob Liefeld and dynamited all his bridges by publishing an open letter regarding his reasons for leaving DC at Comic Book Resources:

I hope those reading this will agree the discussion will be worth their time. I feel that we are once again moving in the wrong direction, creatively. I’ve been down this road before, and it’s a road we can and should avoid. I don’t need to tell you what Greg Rucka and numerous other respected creators have already told you – that the Big Two have removed their focus away from the creators and towards the maintenance of the characters…

I know when it was a lot easier, and that was back in the days of Marvel Knights. In those times, Marvel had been in bankruptcy, and they had little choice but to allow the creators the freedom and trust that so many of us deserve… I look back on “Inhumans” and “Sentry,” on my Spidey runs with Bucky [Mark Buckingham] and Humberto [Ramos], and on various successes with “Wolverine: Origin” and others, and I know – because I was there – that they succeeded in large part because I was given freedom to create without being handicapped by editorial mandates. It just hasn’t been that way for a while. In recent years, I have watched, helpless, as editors made pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork that they had previously left alone. It bugs me that the creators were a primary focus when the mainstream publishers needed them, and now that the corporations are driving the boat, creative decisions are being made once again by shareholders.

Wow. Okay, there’s certainly an discussion to be had about the state of both Marvel and DC in the age of the blockbuster superhero movie, and after each publisher has either been bought up by a huge multinational corporation, or more closely folded into the huge multinational corporation who already owned them. God knows that, as a reader in the early 2000s, I felt like there was a sense of experimentation and a focus on new kinds of stories that I hadn’t felt from almost anyone outside of Vertigo Comics since the early 90s.

But I thought that DC’s New 52 was supposed to replicate that feeling by blowing continuity out of the water and starting over with A-List creators and allowing them to run wild with these long-running properties, right, Paul?

Right?

Choose Your Own Adventure: Astro City #1 Review

Astro City is good. It has always been good.

For 17 years, across multiple miniseries and a variety of publishers, writer Kurt Busiek and artist Brent Anderson have come up with a generally can’t-miss formula: create a city that has neighborhoods that match up to the Marvel, DC, and even EC horror comics universes and populate them with a mix of existing superhero and villain pastiches and some original characters. Then throw in a general population of people more fully realized than the average running, screaming, goggle-eyed cannon fodder that’s normally trampled underfoot in a world of superpowers. And then not only turn them loose, but tell us what some of them, from the strongest hero to the worst villain to the average schmuck on the street, are thinking about the whole experience.

That formula has allowed the creators to examine some of the biggest eras and characters in comics, from DC’s Justice League (Samaritan, Winged Victory and the rest of The Honor Guard) to Spider-Man (If Jack-In-The-Box isn’t supposed to be Spidey, then please call 911, because this massive stroke is impinging upon my critical faculties) to the 80s darkening of comics in The Dark Age. And the use of pastiches has allowed Busiek and Anderson to really dig into some of these old stories and eras without having to worry about servicing any trademarks, or pesky editorial interference like being fired from the book after it’s solicited.

And now Astro City is at Vertigo, and Busiek seems to have decided to take that opportunity to, well riff on Vertigo comics. Specifically those early, proto-Vertigo books, where the characters still lived in the DC Universe and bumped into superheroes every now and again. Because this time around, the pastiche is pretty clearly Psycho-Pirate from Grant Morrison’s 80s run on Animal Man (with what seems to be a Galactus story brewing), and while that parallel all but screams from the page and colors your expectations, it is actually very, very compelling.

Because Busiek isn’t just acknowledging the reader… he’s involving us.

Rosebud: Daredevil: End of Days #8 Review

Editor’s Note: I’ve been there for a lot of people’s last words. And every time it’s the one thing they spoiled about the most.

Mapone is not a thing.

I have, as I’m sure a lot of people have since Daredevil: End of Days began several months ago, Googled the living shit out of the word “Mapone.” And there is nothing there; there is some family out of Italy, a Fleetwood Mac fan on YouTube, some promotional trinkets company in South Africa… and since October, a bunch of reviews of Daredevil: End of Days. If you look for the definition of “Mapone,” there isn’t one. If you try contextual searches, you wind up with articles about Halo battle maps, mapping values in computer programs, and MAPI interfaces.

In short, “Mapone” is not, by any real definition, a word. It is, rather, a sound you make with your mouth. So as a mystery, writers Brian Michael Bendis and David Mack picked a good mysterious word to act as a throughline for the story… but Daredevil: End of Days #8 is the last issue of the miniseries, meaning that it is time for them to put up or shut up.

And they have put up. We learn the meaning of the word “Mapone” on the very last page of the issue, Citizen Kane-style. And the reveal is, in fact, a surprise, and it is, in fact, generally satisfying… until you close the book and stop and think about it for more than ten seconds.

So it is a really fortunate thing that this issue accomplishes so much beyond the silly little mystery, closing out a story that turns the legacy of Daredevil into a tragedy that is almost Shakespearean in scope, and which is implied to doom everyone it touches. Daredevil: End of Days #8 is a truly weighty and satisfying speculative end to the story of Matt Murdock, regardless of the whole “Mapone” mystery that has kept us going through this story. And that is a good thing.

Because Mapone is not a thing.

Transitions

This is a decidedly strange-feeling week in the world of new comics. We’ve got some long-time favorites either ending (Daredevil: End of Days) or moving into their final days (Locke & Key only has two more issues left, and both Age of Ultron and X-Factor and entering into their last arcs)… while other books are either just ramping up (Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is making its debut as a monthly comic), or are getting new beginnings (this week gives us the first issue of Robert Venditti’s writing stint on Green Lantern, and Kick-Ass is back in Kick-Ass 3… making Dave Lizewski the first guy to make it three rounds wearing a green rubber suit who didn’t spend rounds one and two kneeling in front of a hole in a men’s room wall).

So while there’s a big feeling of change in this week’s books, one thing that has remained the same: it is Wednesday, which means new comics. Which further means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it is not just a week of big hellos and goodbyes. We’ve also got the latest issue of Dan Slott’s The Superior Spider-Man (which, almost six months into this arc, if proving still generally and surprisingly fun to read), a new Jim Starlin Stormwatch, the second issue of J. Michael Straczynski’s Ten Grand, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how this all works: before we can talk about them, we need time to read them. So until we can accomplish that goal…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Leather Pants In Cleveland No Longer Exclusively A Sign Of Terrible Desperation: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Location Photos

The original plan for today’s post was to comment on DC Comics’s upcoming Villains Month, and how it is not only a lead-in to DC’s first great crossover event since the New 52 reboot, but to implicit bankruptcy – seriously, DC is shipping 16 different Batman Family titles in September, and multiple shipping almost every other title, meaning that I will be surviving on bricks of ramen noodles in September, while the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I have their money – not some of their money; all their motherfucking money – makes the down payment on the new 911 Targa.

However, as sometimes happens, circumstances got in the way… those circumstances being fatigue hysteria. So an in-depth analysis over the troubling recent tendency of comics publishers to ship multiple copies of their books in a single month, and therefore effectively getting eight clams out of every reader every month while pretending that they haven’t increased their cover price, will have to wait for a day or two.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything cool going on in the world of comics and superheroes. For example, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is currently shooting in Ohio. And while it is a superhero movie, from a visual standpoint, it is a movie about a guy in a spandex suit with a painted hubcap fighting a guy in a leather suit with a machine gun. Which, fortunately, means that directors Anthony and Joe Russo can actually shoot some of it in the real world… and they have. Which means that Cleveland.com has some location photos of a gunfight scene, that includes some of the first photos of The Winter Soldier, so we can see if they’re keeping the same look from Ed Brubaker’s comics.

And you can check some of those pictures out after the jump.