Fishing In Cold Waters: Possible Open Auditions For Star Wars: Episode VII

Things are a little busy here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office today, because, well, we didn’t understand the full range of capabilities inherent in a hot water heater. You see, we thought that all a hot water heater did was to, well, heat water to the state colloquially known as “hot.” We had no idea that they could also blow out an element in a way that resembles a power surge that resets all your home theater components and causes a burning wire insulation smell that makes you think your entire home office is mere minutes from burning to the ground! And even better: it turns out that hot water heaters have good enough programming to do this late on a Saturday night after you’ve had ten beers and are half convinced that the real reason you’re smelling burning insulation is because you’re having a massive stroke!

Anyway, a nice man is ripping out our old hot water heater in favor of one less multi-talented, meaning I only have a few minutes before I have to run back down to the basement and ask him if our sinks should be screaming in this fashion. This is not an activity that the rich and famous have to deal with, so perhaps I will take the opportunity to throw my hat into the ring and audition for Star Wars: Episode VII.

Look Into The Future: BBC Releases Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Trailers

The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary special will be airing on Saturday, November 23rd, and it will be airing simultaneously around the world – about 2 p.m. here in Boston – which is a far cry from the days when the show rebooted with Christopher Eccleston back in 2005. Back then, no American broadcaster gave enough of a shit about Doctor Who to broadcast it in the United States until the Sci-Fi Channel picked it up 2006, causing Amanda to send me out into the darker areas of the Internet to, um, acquire them.

Needless to say, anticipation is running high for this special, which will include the Matt Smith, David Tennant and new John Hurt Doctors, along with Billie Piper coming back for the first time in years. So to stoke the flames, the BBC has released two trailers for the special, which you can check out after the jump. Go ahead and check them out; it’ll be much more fun and less fraught with potential lawsuits than trolling the places I had to back in 2005.

Two Legends Talk About None Of The Things You Want Them To Talk About: Gaiman Interviews Abrams

There isn’t a lot of hard news in this interview video – by which I mean there isn’t any hard news in it – but it caught our attention because of the people involved.

J. J. Abrams has been doing the press circuit, not for Star Wars, but for a book called S, which Abrams conceived of and which was written by Doug Dorst (The author of something called Alive in Necropolis, which is, as you’d expect based on the title, a zombie story) and is comprised of not just the book, but “handwritten” notes and letters detailing a fiction investigation about the book and its author. And promotion for that book brought Abrams and Dorst to England and the BBC… where they were interviewed by an obscure journalist whose reporting is best known in a book called Don’t Panic, a long out-of-print companion book to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide series published in 1988.

That journalist? Some dude named Neil Gaiman. If that is his real name.

This Will Be A Day Long Remembered: Star Wars Episode VII Gets A Release Date

Well kids, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we finally have a hard and fast release date for Star Wars: Episode VII. The bad news is that it is about six months later than everybody originally anticipated, meaning that the guy who is inevitably already first in line at Grauman’s Chinese Theater will, by release time, only smell like an authentic Star Wars character if you take on faith that Boba Fett is really 150 pounds of rotting potted meat stuffed into a cardboard facsimile of Mandalorian armor.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Disney has announced, via StarWars.com, that they will be releasing the J. J. Abrams-directed, Abrams and Lawrence Kasden-scripted (You know, Lawrence Kasden. The guy who did the final draft of The Empire Strikes Back? The writer most fondly known these days as “Not George Lucas”?) new movie on December 18th, 2015.

Which means that there is gonna be one hell of a case of Skywalking Pneumonia going around starting Wednesdayish, December 16th 2015.

Beautiful Disaster: Cataclysm: The Ultimates Last Stand #1 Review

Yesterday I complained that DC’s Forever Evil crossover wasn’t working for me because we’ve spent a whole bunch of weeks watching familiar villains in a new version of the universe run around unopposed, doing blatently evil shit for unclear reasons. And while it’s been all Earth-threateney and what-not, it hasn’t been all that compelling, because we all know that once the heroes reappear, there’s gonna be hell to pay. And to get that vaguely dissatisfied feeling has only taken a few months.

Enter Marvel’s Cataclysm, where a villain appears in a new universe and starts doing truly horrific things that endanger the planet without saying a word as to his motives. It’s Galactus, and unlike his prior appearances (and very much unlike Forever Evil), there is no herald and there are no grandiose declarations of superiority or inevitability. There is just hunger and mass destruction… and in one issue, it’s already ten times more compelling and tense than Forever Evil has been so far.

Evil Dicks Are Evil: Forever Evil #3 Review

I think I’ve finally figured out why DC’s latest event crossover, Forever Evil, hasn’t really been working for me, despite the fact that I’ve got a soft spot for the Crime Syndicate going back to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The storytelling decisions that writer Geoff Johns has made have made this thing pretty one dimensional up until now.

Think about it: the Crime Syndicate in this series are pretty much just evil for the sake of being evil, and that’s not all that interesting. Sure, there are some little extra beats like Ultraman’s lust and hatred for Superwoman, and Owlman’s somewhat conflicted emotions about Nightwing, and Power Ring’s cowardice, but in general these characters are pricks for the sake of being pricks. They’ve got the raw power to knock the moon out of orbit, but they also need to recruit this universe’s super criminals for power, why exactly? Because shut up, that’s why!

Also, Johns’s decision to get the Justice League out of the way has made sense from the angle that it allows these characters to run riot across the Earth to show us how bad they are, but it has had the unfortunate side effect of accentuating what the bad guys are up to… and a lot of it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Like that whole moving the moon to block the sun. It’s a neat visual, but if you stop and think about it for more than ten seconds, you’d realize that changing the moon’s orbit would alter tides, cause massive crop failures and climate change, and generally cause devastation on a planetary scale. Not that anyone would know, since the eclipse would blind everyone in about 45 minutes or so. And combine that with the fact that every time I see Grid I’m reminded that he split away from Cyborg by the selfsame powers of “shut up,” and we’ve had a bunch of one dimensional characters doing awful and ridiculous things for about three months (or eight when you remember that Forever Evil is, for all intents and purposes, just a continuation of the Trinity War crossover).

Well, this week brings us Forever Evil #3, and the good news is that things are starting to improve and become a little more diverse than just “evil dicks are evil.” But to get there, we get one more big plot point that doesn’t really ring true, and another that relies on, well, evil dicks being evil.

Bad Apple: Apple Refuses To Sell Sex Criminals #2

There are times when I resign myself to the idea that digital comics are the future. Sure, I love my weekly visit to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I’m interested in any IDW Artist’s Editions or DC Absolute hardcovers because the kids need braces and they can’t show up at the orthodontist’s office in an American car like a common wino, but only a fool would think that, on an infinite timeline, comics can resist digital delivery where music, movies and print books couldn’t.

But every time I think that relying on digital comic companies wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, something happens to remind me that a dude in an actual place who knows his customers is still the way to go for me in a way that some mindless Web server will never be.

Most recent case in point? Apple has just informed Image Comics and Matt Fraction that they’ve rejected the second issue of Sex Criminals from the Apple version of the Comixology app due to “content that many audiences would find objectionable.”

Which is in start contrast to the policies at my local comic store, where they would not only sell me tentacle hentai if I could give him a Diamond code for it, but would sell me an octopus if the money was right.

There Are Strange Things Afoot At The National Gallery – Doctor Who 50th Anniversary News

So, the BBC have released the official press blurb of the plot to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. It really is more of a tease than any kind of summary. Behold:

The Doctors embark on their greatest adventure in this 50th anniversary special. In 2013, something terrible is awakening in London’s National Gallery; in 1562, a murderous plot is afoot in Elizabethan England; and somewhere in space an ancient battle reaches its devastating conclusion. All of reality is at stake as the Doctor’s own dangerous past comes back to haunt him.

Something terrible is awakening in London’s Nation Gallery… Uh-oh. Sounds like someone found that opened jar of Marmite Lance someone left under the heating grate in the Impressionists wing back in 1992. I knew nothing good could come of that. Impressionists, I mean. Give me a good Flemish still life, with flowers and table settings that are bafflingly photo realistic. None of this pixelated Water Lily stuff. Am I right?

Wait, what was I talking about again? Oh, right. Doctor Who‘s 50th anniversary, a Marmite induced fever dream in which there will be multiple Doctors and murderous plots afoot in Elizabethan England. Aren’t there always murderous plots afoot in Elizabethan England on Doctor Who? How about giving Edwardian England a little love? Haven’t traveled there for a while? Oh well. At least we’ll finally see how John Hurt’s Doctor figures into this and we’ll get to see more David Tennant while finally bidding farewell to Matt Smith. These are all good things. Much better than Marmite. And Impressionists.

I need a nap.

Via Bleeding Cool.

Problem Child: Damian: Son of Batman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Don’t overlook anything. Spoilers will be hard to find in this amount of carnage.

I don’t think I’ve made it a secret over the years that I was never a fan of Damian Wayne. He was a mouthy douchebag who was designed to irritate, and usually delivered. He was a ten-year-old in all the worst senses of the word: impulsive, opinionated for no good reason, and often disrespectful to his family… and any person with the unmitigated gall to be disrespectful of The Goddamned Batman? He and I can never be friends. So I didn’t shed too many tears when his creator, Grant Morrison, had him whacked a few months ago.

The thing is that Damian was that much of an irritant as a ten (or so) year old, and everyone knows if you want someone truly insufferable, you need yourself a teenager. That’s when kids take their original irritating personalities and add moodiness, mopeyness and just general emo. They start listening to Joy Division (or whatever the 21 Century version of Joy Division is; I’m old and picked all my bands years ago. Do kids go through a Doors phase anymore? Or are they truly fucking hopeless and deserving of being written off? No, I don’t have children, why do you ask?), and they cut their hair all funny and they yell stuff like, “You’re not my real dad!” and “No I won’t get in your fucking van!” and “Who the fuck are The Doors?”

But Damian was safely killed before he could hit those difficult years… which clearly disappointed writer / artist Andy Kubert, because in his new book Damian: Son of Batman, he gives us not only a teenaged Damian, but one with a marked lack of adult supervision. And while that story is generally beautifully illustrated, it is also a little exposition heavy where it’s not needed, exposition light where it really is needed, and retracts an important plot conceit almost as soon as it’s introduced.

Happily Ever After: Bill Willingham Announces Fables To End With Issue 150

It’s a good thing that, for good or ill, Vertigo Comics has got some Sandman back in the fold for at least a little while, because their arguably final big series from their second wave of glory days is coming in for a landing.

That’s right: Bill Willingham has announced that Fables will be ending with issue 150 in about a year and a half, with its spinoff book Fairest closing out at about the same time.

This is… not particularly welcome news.

So what’s up, Bill?