The Riverdale High School Bull Dogs Are Not What They Seem: Afterlife With Archie #2 Review

Editor’s Note: This review’s got spoilers, Meathead. What? Wrong Archie? Well, screw you. Dingbat.

Jesus Christ. And I mean that in the best possible way.

This Archie comic book starts with implied incest, moves to graphically bloody zombie violence, jumps to conflicted and closeted lesbians, spends a little time with spoiled children and their obviously disappointed parents, throws in more graphic violence, tosses in a soupcon of implication toward steroid abuse, and ends with the hero telling a girl’s father that he’s spent years trying to surreptitiously bone his daughter under cover of darkness. Again: this Archie comic has all of this stuff.

So what we have here, if you take away all the Archie elements, is a pretty solid if straight-ahead zombie story for young adults, with with enough social issues to make it relevant and modern. Which is fine, and surely a fun-enough read… but with those Archie elements, you get what feels like a look into the gutters and the bleed of 50 years of Archie comics. It’s like reading a version of Twin Peaks set in the Archie universe, where a violent event throws the covers off some pretty dark and difficult suburban secrets.

This is a really, really good comic book.

In Your Comicz, Steelin Your Sooperdoodz

You might have noticed that our posts this week have been a little more… shall we say, anemic, than some other weeks. I am not proud of this, but you have a point. You see, in the couple of years that we have been writing about comics, we have settled into a routine: a couple of comic book reviews a week, a few news pieces, and then on Wednesday, we get our new books, arrange them into a photogenic tableau, and announce the end of our broadcast day.

However, as we mentioned the other day, we have a new occupant in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and, well, our routines are all shot to shit.

Case in point…

But regardless of the theiving efforts of this master criminal, it is Wednesday, and those are new comics. And there is a pretty solid take there: we have the first issue of Jimmy Palmiotti’s and Amanda Conner’s Harley Quinn, the latest issue of Matt Fraction’s and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals, the latest issue of the surprisingly entertaining Afterlife With Archie, new issues of Marvel’s Infinity and Cataclysm crossovers, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know the drill… actually, there’s a new drill. Up until now, the drill was that before we could talk about them, we needed time to read them. The new drill is pretty much the same, only now there is catnip involved.

So until the cat is high and we have time to read them…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

The Walking Wounded: Frank Darabont Talks About Leaving The Walking Dead

Those of us who are fans of AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, and who attended the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con, were shocked when, just a few days after the convention, showrunner Frank Darabont was fired from the show, after having been a big part of hyping the show at the con. Not only had Darabont’s involvement in the show been a big selling point for fans of the comic (many of who, like me, didn’t think any TV version of the book could capture the bleak near-hopelessness that the story sometimes carried), but giving Darabont the ick right after trotting him out to hype the show in Hall H just seemed crass. And sure, AMC and the production and Darabont himself all said at the time that the split was mutual, but the timing felt less like someone pursuing his future endeavors and more like some party threw some cash on Darabont’s nightstand and told him to clean himself up and watch so the door didn’t hit him on the ass on the way out.

But again, everyone, including Darabont, said at the time that the split was mutual… but that was 28 months ago. Now, The Walking Dead is on its fourth season and third showrunner, Darabont is getting ready to debut Mob City, a new crime show on TNT debuting in December, so… no hard feelings, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Until The End Of The World: AMC Reportedly Buys Rights To Preacher

Editor’s Note: Regarding our “Strange Visitor” from yesterday, the vet said that he’s only a five or six month old kitten who, based on his weight and claw length, has probably lived most of his life on the street. So while we have reported the guy to our local Animal Control Department, it looks like he’s staying. His name is now Parker, after Richard Stark’s thief. Because he snuck in, he got food from us… and today when I locked him in the carrier box? He did his time like a motherfucking pro.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

It has been 13 and a half years since Preacher published its last issue under the Vertigo Comics imprint, and in that time, there have been rumors that it was gonna be adapted to some medium or another. For a while it was gonna be a movie, and then HBO had the rights for a while, and then, for a while, nothing. It is, after all, a hell of a property to try to adapt – an epic story covering decades, not to mention most of America, heaven and hell.

It takes someone with balls of stone and real vision for genre entertainment to tackle a property like Preacher. Which is why we can all thank God that apparently we have new involvement in the project by Seth Rogen.

You know, the guy who did The Green Hornet movie.

A Strange Visitor…

I’m afraid we’ve got nothing for you today, because – funny story – as we were on our way out yesterday evening to go someplace to drink dinner, a little black cat with no collar or tags approached us on the sidewalk, meowing and looking for attention. We gave him a pat and went on our way… only to have the little guy follow us to the end of the block, where a barking dog stopped him in his tracks.

As we poured a few drinks down our head at the local bar, we figured the guy was friendly enough to belong to someone on the block, and would have gone home by the time we returned to the Home Office. Yeah, that’s what we figured. Right up until the moment when we got home and the little fella was waiting under our front stoop, meowing like crazy. And it would have seemed rude not to invite this little guy in.

So, long story short: there are no veterinarian’s offices open on Sundays to see if this guy’s chipped by an original owner… although considering he seems to be rocking a swinging pair of bing cherries behind him, I doubt anyone bothered to chip him. But still, tomorrow I’ll get him checked over just to be sure and will put a post on our local Animal Control Department’s Facebook page to see if anyone’s missing him. But in the meantime, he needs cat food and a box to crap in – you know, things I haven’t had lying around the house since I graduated college and started drawing a salary. So things are a little busier than originally anticipated here.

So yeah: The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office has, at least for the moment, a house mascot.

And considering I’ve never owned an animal larger than a crab louse, “for the moment” is the key phrase in that sentence.

Tweeting From The Batcave? Some Producer Tweets “Details” About Batman Vs. Superman Plot

Not a lot of time here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – we have a prior commitment with an alcoholic blackout – but I wanted to make a note of something quick.

There hasn’t been a lot in the way of details about the upcoming Batman Vs. Superman movie. Sure, we know that Ben Affleck is playing Batman, and we’ve been hearing that they’re already shooting second unit stuff for the movie, plus there’s talk that Wonder Woman and Nightwing might be a part of it, but there’s not a lot out there about the actual story.

Until this Tweet by a guy named Danial Alter, who is a movie producer who claims to know something about the story.

Hmm. Okay…

A Long Way From The Silver Age: New Miracleman Stories in 2016

One of the hard parts about getting older is that you start to understand that there’s a chance you won’t live long enough to see all the cool shit you assumed you would when you were a kid. When I was a kid in the 70s, I assumed that someday I would live on the moon, while now I understand that the best I will ever be able to do is a few minutes in low Earth orbit, strapped into a chair and watching only my vomit float in zero gravity, and even that assumes that I have six figures to give Richard Branson in exchange for a 45 minute “vacation” in space. Hell, when Warren Zevon was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he famously said that he hoped he hung on long enough to see the next James Bond flick, and the poor prick never knew that if he’d survived for two James Bond flicks, he might actually witness a good one.

Yes, this is a morbid and depressing way to start a post about comic books, but it feels appropriate, because I am a Miracleman fan. And as a Miracleman fan, I was thrilled by the recent news that, after 20-plus years of waiting, Marvel was not only gonna reprint the original series written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but that they intended to publish the as-yet-unseen conclusion of Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s The Silver Age and The Dark Age stories that were aborted when Eclipse Comics went under and suddenly nobody – and everybody – owned the rights to the character.

However, in comics as in life, there is no good news without bad news. The good news is that Marvel will start reprinting the original out-of-print stories soon, but I don’t care about that since I already own the entire original Eclipse Comics run (including Miracleman 3D and Miracleman Apocrypha). But the bad news in this story is that Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, thinks that we will see new Gaiman / Buckingham Miracleman stories, well, a little less soon.

Like, in two or three years soon. When I will be 45 years old, and actuarially closer to dead than alive even if I didn’t have 35 pack years of cigarettes and about 5,000,000 case years of whiskey under my belt. Or sometimes overflowing my belt.

The Night of The Who What Now? Mini Prequel Episode To Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special Released

So I think I heard something about some video on the Internets today…

We’re a little late to the party on this, given that our Twitter feed exploded around breakfast time that this thing existed – funny story: my own brother gave away the Goddamned spoilers to me on this one, which is why he is getting a restraining order for Christmas – but the BBC has released a seven-minute mini episode of Doctor Who to fill in some of the blanks between the season seven finale (which showed us John Hurt as some Doctor or another) and the upcoming 50th Anniversary special (featuring, well, everybody) which will air simultaneously across the world – around 2:30 p.m. here on the American East Coast – on November 23rd.

The video is called The Night of The Doctor, it is set during the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, and it features, well, The Doctor. Or one of them. And another one by way of spiffy computer graphics. And it not only fills in a few blanks for the upcoming The Day of The Doctor special, but a few blanks that have been kicking around for a few years now.

Yeah, I know that’s vague, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. I don’t want to descend to the level of my brother… not that I want to paint him as a bad guy or anything! Not when he’s gonna be spending the holidays at your house. You know, provided you live at least 300 yards away from me.

Anyway, why would I bother to spoil it? Because If you haven’t seen it for yourself, you can check it out after the jump.

Wow, There Are Zombies In This Story!: The Walking Dead #116 Review

I have not been particularly quiet about my opinion that The Walking Dead has been spinning its wheels for a while now – you get Negan making threats, Rick and company come up with some kind of plan to turn things around, Negan sees said plan coming and turns it around with effortless ease and an erudite and witty comeback such as, “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re fucking fucked, you stupid fucker,” – and yes, that was an actual quote from Negan from one of the last few issues – and you repeat and repeat and repeat until you start considering dropping the title and waiting for the trade for the first time since the seventh issue.

This seemingly endless cycle has been going on for at least 17 months, or since Negan killed Glenn… but with issue 116, we finally we have an issue of The Walking Dead where not only does something go wrong for that baseball bat-fellating son of a bitch, but where there’s an actual live zombie attack. It’s a Goddamned Christmas Miracle!

Well… Negan still says irritating cocky shit and gets a hostage out of the deal. So maybe it’s more of a Thanksgiving Miracle. You know, the kind where you still have to put up with drunken racist Uncle Pete, but you avoid jail time for choking him out because for once, you get to witness him slipping on some gravy and falls on his ass.

Darkness And / Or Light: Drew Goddard Reportedly Writing Daredevil TV Show

There’s been a lot of news out of Marvel Studios this past week or so, which would be exciting if it weren’t for the fact that every time Marvel Studios does anything it makes me want to excitedly haul out my wallet and throw more money around. The only reason we haven’t seen Thor: The Dark World yet is because it is the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to not play at our local theater, and because we were busy battling our own Godforsaken evil in the form of an angry hot water heater.

Last week, Marvel Studios announced that they were teaming with Netflix to put out four direct-to-streaming television series, based on Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones (or Brian Michael Bendis’s Alias if you’re nasty). They’re planning on doing a 13-episode series a piece, and apparently things are already approaching the pre-production stage, because there are reports that Marvel Studios is in talks with World War Z and former Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer Drew Goddard to write Daredevil.