Delayed Gratification: New Trailer For The Walking Dead Season 3, Part 2

The television industry is guilty of many egregious and terrible sins – glaring examples include the premature cancellation of WKRP In Cincinatti, the continuing employment of any member of the Kardashian family, and the premature creation of The New WKRP In Cincinatti – but the worst in recent memory is the split cable television series season.

There is nothing worse in the world than waiting for months and months for one of your favorite television programs to premiere – say, around Halloween – and then ramping up and ramping up to a climax… only to be cut short without ceremony or even a kind word, and then told to sit on your hands and wait until they’re Goddamned good and ready to deliver the back few episodes. It is like frequenting a house of ill repute that employs the use of an accurate time clock and an angry bouncer with anger management issues; it remains fun… but circumstances make the entire experience far less fun than it really should be.

And amongst the worst perpetrators of this scheduling crime is The Walking Dead, which is pure hell, as it is about my favorite show currently going. We left it at the mid-season break with Merle reunited with Daryl, The Governor short an eye and everyone generally pissed off at each other, and then boom! It’s December and we get to take a cold shower, limp painfully home and wait until February to see what happens in the back eight episodes.

However, while being the cause of our pain, AMC at least recognizes it and takes a small amount of responsibility for easing the blue balls they themselves created by releasing some teaser trailers to let us know what we’re in for… which, the more I think about it, is actually more like that angry whorehouse bouncer showing you a Hustler as he kicks your pantsless ass out the door.

Ah, well. Be it cruelty or kindness, the latest trailer for the second half of the third season of The Walking Dead is available for your viewing… whatever… after the jump.

Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be: The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman #1 Review

As someone who was young enough to have the battery of Six Million Dollar Man toys as a kid – somewhere there exists an eight-track recording of me squealing with glee over my Maskatron Christmas gift that would earn me a scornful beating at my local dive bar – I reacted enthusiastically over the original, Kevin Smith plotted The Bionic Man series from Dynamite. As a modernization of Steve Austin’s origin story, which I still maintain is one of the classics of the sci-fi superhero genre, it was exciting and interesting while hitting all the old notes from the TV show that I loved so much as a your child.

The problems has been that you only get to tell an origin story once, unless you’re DC Comics. Since the opening arc, I’ve found that The Bionic Man has floundered by, well, trying to modernize more of the old Six Million Dollar Man story elements. Specifically, Bigfoot. Yes, there has been a lot of Bionic Bigfoot in The Bionic Man in recent months, and I’m sorry, but it’s not 1977 anymore. If you’re gonna have a Bigfoot in a story and it doesn’t pop the head off that hick in the “Gone Squatchin'” hat that I cackle at every week on The Soup, you’re missing the only opportunity that makes any sense for Bigfoot in 2013.

Because the problem endemic to any superhero story is that, eventually, that hero needs a superpowered villain to fight. And if it’s 1978 and you only have a TV-level special effects budget, sure: why not Bigfoot? He’s a gorilla suit with some wires sticking out of it. But these are comic books, with an unlimited special effects slush fund, so to force these characters to battle the bad guys whipped up by people who thought that wide polyester lapels and disco were good ideas has just left me cold.

So enter Dynamite’s The Bionic Man Vs. The Bionic Woman miniseries, where writer Keith Champagne takes the obvious choice for a superpowered antagonist and apparently embraces the old superhero comic trope of heroes fighting before joining forces… maybe. It’s too early to tell how the two characters, who never meet in the first issue, will interact, but at least there’s no arbitrary threat with bionics slapped into it for them to fight, right?

Right?

Scatter What Now?: Warren Ellis Announces New Comic Project

Warren Ellis is a legend in the world of comic books who hasn’t written a comic book in Goddamned forever. Sure, he did a short run on Marvel’s Secret Avengers toward the end of 2011, but while he released a novel and started a weekly column for Vice in 2012, he’s been pretty much absent from comics for well over a year at this point. And hey, those things were entertaining, but he did these things while there’s a fandom out there waiting for the conclusion of Fell and hoping for another dose of Desolation Jones.

Well, there’s some good news – no, not new Fell or Desolation Jones; we live in a human world, filled not with miracles, but with mundane and crippling disappointment – Ellis has announced a new comics project.

Of some kind.

Couldn’t Make It To Sundance? That’s Ok, Sundance Brings Some Of The Festival Home To You

The 2013 Sundance Film Festival began last Thursday out in Park City, Utah. It has been notable so far for the critical buzz that has been generated around director John Krokidas’s Kill Your Darlings, in which Harry Potter‘s Daniel Radcliffe takes on the role of a young, love struck Allen Ginsberg, who is in love with classmate Lucien Carr, played by Dane DeHaan. We also got potential spoiler news on the next Amazing Spider-Man movie when Krokidas introduced DeHaan from his cast to the screening audience as “the Green Goblin” and DeHaan, who is definitely set to play Harry Osborn, didn’t deny it.

Also, for those of us who couldn’t get out to Utah for the festival, the folks at Sundance have posted their short film program to a YouTube channel. The films range from a PSA spoof on the dangers of catnip for your cat to end of the world/apocalypse/zombie scenarios to a Greek tragedy enacted by Belgian roosters. Yes. I typed that correctly. You have to watch it to believe it.

Check out some of the featured short films after the jump.

The Gun’s The Thing: The Black Beetle #1 Review

I’ve always believed that the difference between a superhero comic book and a pulp hero story is a gun, and the willingness to use it for its intended purpose. Sure, they have costumes and gadgets and secret headquarters in common, but in the end, the gun’s the thing. Batman has a batarang, The Shadow has a gun. Iron Man has repulsor rays, The Spider has a gun. Everything else is just setting, antagonist and motivation.

If you accept that fine, bright line – and there’s no reason you necessarily should, since my own acceptance of it varies depending on what I’m reading and how much whiskey was involved beforehand – then writer / artist Francesco Francavilla’s The Black Beetle, despite having the word “pulp” on the cover, is very much a superhero comic. The hero has a Beetlemobile, a gyrocopter backpack, and a secret headquarters… but he also defines himself as not being a killer, and he uses tranquilizer darts instead of bullets.

But he has a gun. Two of them, actually. Sweet-looking Colt M1911s that he wields and shoots two handed, like, well, The Shadow. So while this doesn’t technically meet my definition of “pulp,” it’s close enough. And it is one hell of a lot of fun… if a little light on some of the details.

Bullseye: Francesco Francavilla To Pencil Hawkeye

This is about the best news from Marvel Comics in a while: artist Francesco Francavilla, who did such good, pulp-inspired work on 2011’s Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive (which came about a week too early to make my list of the best of 2012) and on this week’s Dark Horse The Black Beetle (which is really pretty good, and which we will be reviewing sometime in the next few days), will be taking over art duties on Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye for two issues.

“On Hawkeye, we’ve been blessed with not only one of the biggest writers in comics with Matt Fraction, but also some of the best artists like David Aja, Javier Pulido and now Francesco Francavilla,” said the book’s editor Stephen Wacker in a statement accompanying Marvel’s announcement of Francavilla’s addition to the team. “Though he’s only on the series for issues #10 and #12, Francesco is going to leave his mark on Clint with some of the most beautiful art you’ll see all year!”

Hawkeye is about the best match for Francavilla’s art style that I can currently think of at Marvel. The book has a healthy mix of street level crime and weird, S.H.I.E.L.D. superspy action that are pulpy and grimy, with enough big, overblown action, to really pop under Francavilla’s pencils. The dude gives solid, old-school action-adventure illustrations, and is probably my favorite artist discovery since we started Crisis On Infinite Midlives in 2011. Francavilla will be drawing Hawkeye #10 and #12, and you can check out his cover to issue 10 after the jump.

Major Distractions: Captain Marvel #9 Review

I generally read superhero comics for a momentary escape from the horrific tedium of work and errands and appointments and the horror – the absolute savage and crippling fucking horror – of having to talk to people. After a day of interacting with humans in unpleasant scenarios, there’s nothing more fun than watching people with otherworldly powers stomp the living shit out of super villains, giant monsters, and during summer crossover event season, each other.

I’ve always found it relaxing and empowering, after a long day, to turn off the phone, turn off the brain with some strong drink, and imagine that I could be one of those people in costume, flying around and kicking ass – no one else wishes this of me, due to how my bloated, middle-aged ass would look in one of those costumes, but to hell with them – because generally those superheroes don’t have to slog through the same repetitive, boring shit that the rest of us do.

Unless you’re Captain Marvel. Who spends a surprising amount of Captain Marvel #9 having to put up with exactly the kind of rotten, irritating, day-to-day shit that we do, only with some distractions thrown in… provided you consider an unexpected dinosaur attack to be distracting. I probably wouldn’t, thanks to my previously-mentioned propensity for strong drink, but that’s not the point. The point is that we spend a lot of Captain Marvel #9 watching Carol Danvers keeping appointments… and yet it is actually a fairly compelling and entertaining book to read.

Not to look at, but we’ll get to that.

Able To Cripple Grown Men With A Single Step: Man of Steel Trailer Recreated With Legos

I’m not gonna lie to you: I’ve been on a diet for about a week, which means I am sitting at this keyboard with a low blood sugar headache and not a drop of booze here in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office.

This means that I don’t have a lot of energy to think too critically of any given comic book beyond, “Lookit the pretty colors. Ooh! That nice horsey got punched in the face!” And while I am counting on the precedent that a good night’s sleep, or at least a good night of thrashing uncontrollably while quietly whimpering for even a Goddamned shot of NyQuil, will set me right again by the first thing in the morning, just in time to talk comics like an adult again.

But in the meantime, I need childish things, and light entertainment. And in that spirit, a nice man named Antonio Toscano has taken the trailer for Man of Steel and recreated it. With Legos. And considering the time and effort it must have taken, he is clearly a creative and dedicated man… or else he’s a kindred spirit trying like hell to distract himself from the fact that there’s no booze in his fucking house.

Regardless, it’s pretty cool, and you can check it out after the jump.

Mashup: Savage Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: “Cyclops”? “Storm”? What do they call you? “Spoilers”?

Yesterday, I recommended that the best way to read Batman #16 was to not think about the plot too much, because it gets in the way of what the story is really delivering to the reader. I’m gonna have to recommend the same thing for writer / artist Frank Cho’s Savage Wolverine #1, but unfortunately without anywhere near the enthusiasm I had for Batman.

Look, if you’re a fan of the berserker Wolverine, and like the Frank Miller / Chris Claremont miniseries from the 80s because of the graphic violence as opposed to the nuanced characterization, there’s a lot to like in Savage Wolverine #1. Cho captures the character visually, along with the attendant violence that would, in a just and true comics world, be a major part of any comic book about a guy whose primary visible power involves six machetes. It’s a good-looking book. It’s violent and exciting. And if that’s what you want from a comic, just enjoy it and turn off your frontal lobes using whatever method or chemicals you prefer.

Because if you don’t, it’s gonna be really hard for you to not notice that this book is Lost with Wolverine, has plot holes you could drive a bus through, and leaps in logic that would make Batroc weep in frustrated shame.

Drilling The Plot Hole: Batman #16 Review

Plotwise, Batman #16 doesn’t hold up too well if you stop and think about it for too long. The idea that a single inmate, no matter how ruthless or deranged, could not only take over an entire insane asylum under the nose of law enforcement (not to mention the inevitable cavalcade of starfuckers and psycho groupies that would surround Arkham like flies on shit. Don’t believe me? Ask Carole Anne Boone), but would somehow have the resources to modify and booby trap the place in the way Joker does in this issue is implausible on a good day. Throw on top of that that the ending of the whole thing is gonna seem a little familiar if you’ve seen The Vanishing, and this is a story that could swirl the tubes pretty quickly, if you spend too much time contemplating the particulars behind it.

So on that basis, I’m going to recommend – and I don’t do this very often – that you just don’t stop and think about Batman #16 too much.

Seriously, don’t think about it. Don’t let yourself get caught up in the logistics of how Joker could have gotten his hands on the sheer number of victims he has on hand without anyone missing them, or where he found the team of contractors to build the carefully machined and electrified death traps without mentioning to anyone what they were working on, or how he had the time to wait on craftsmen to build that Batman Throne… even though, seriously: I ordered a custom-made bed about two months ago, and I’m still waiting on that Goddamned thing, but Joker gets a throne on demand? I’m seriously thinking about going back to that furniture store and filling it with gas… or at least a different kind of gas than I did last time. Maybe that’s why it’s taking so long. But I digress.

So yeah: try not to get bogged down in all that nitpicking, unrealistic shit. Because if you do, you’re gonna miss one hell of an atmospheric story that shows just how driven and plain old badassed Batman is, and which uses really pretty extreme violence and disturbing situations to show just how dangerous and committed Joker is.