Yes, It’s True; This Man Has No Dick: The Adventures of Apocalypse Al #1 Review

Hey, didja know that one of J. Michael Straczynski’s first professional writing gigs was on the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters? Sure, it might seem odd that the guy who came up with Babylon 5, Crusade and the first draft of the World War Z movie cut his teeth on irony-based horror comedy, but it’s true: one of JMS’s earliest gigs was putting words in the mouth of Peter Venkman. That puts him in the rarefied company of Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, and every slashfic author who ever wanted to see Bill Murray take a PKE Meter in the Ghost Trap from Patrick Swayze, if you get my drift.

Without that knowledge, it would seem really counterintuitive for the guy who wrote Changeling to write a horror comedy with an oracle who can foretell the futures price of cucumbers, a lawyer with a sense for the dramatic who happens to represent the Prince of Darkness, and a private detective protagonist who specializes in stopping the end of the world despite her crippling fear of sensible shoes. It might sound silly for the guy who wrote The Shadow War to write a book where someone warns the hero that the end of the world is preferable to undercooked bacon, but again: Straczynski made his bones writing for the animated avatar of Bill Fucking Murray.

Which means that Straczynski is actually a pretty damn good person to write a book like this. Which is why it’s actually a lot of fun.

You Too Will Believe That A Man Can Fly…Because You Are 16 Months Old…

Just caught this on comic book writer Mark Millar’s Twitter feed:

I’m not really a kid person, but that was just fucking adorable. The unadulterated glee on the toddler’s face was priceless. Now, how do I get myself back to that level of unabashed, pants-shitting wonderment? Will a crate of whiskey be enough?

Conan’s “The Walking Dead” Cold Open Parody

I missed this last Thursday, but the Conan show parodied The Walking Dead in a cold open to honor the cast of the show. They were guests for the night. There’s a lot to like about the clip. Conan’s zombie make-up is solid. Andy Richter is remarkably well put together, considering, well, zombie apocalypse. And, the Basic Cable Band seems particularly enthusiastic covering the theme to The Walking Dead. After all those year’s of playing Basic Cable Name That Tune, it must have been very exciting for them to play a song that had a licensed copyright. All in all, well done, Conan.

Now, I’m going to have to see if I have this recorded somewhere on the Tivo.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC tonight, February 9, 2014 at 9pm.

Via Kotaku.

Two Hours In The Tank: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Pre-Reg Is Over

Pre-registration for the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con started at noon Eastern Time today for those who attended last year’s convention. It used a pretty radically different methodology to handle the sale than in previous years, but ended with the same result: with some people thrilled with the results, some people disappointed with what they were able to get, and yet others screeching with rage and hatred over glitches, technical roadblocks, and complete and utter frustrating failure.

Human / Cyborg Relations: Paul Bettany Cast As Vision In Avengers: Age of Ultron

Not gonna lie to you, we have a busy day today: I need to run a few errands before heading to the day job, and this evening will be spent preparing and drilling for our multi-pronged assault on the Internet to navigate the San Diego Comic-Con preregistration process tomorrow morning – there are multiple locations, redundant IP addresses, and multi-faceted communications involved, because we don’t like to screw around – so I don’t have a lot of time today, but I did see this one little tidbit that I wanted to share.

Apparently Paul Bettany, who is the dude who does the voice of JARVIS in the Avengers and Iron Man movies, has been cast as an actual walking, talking, physical presence in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Notice I didn’t say he was cast as a person. Because he hasn’t. He’s been cast as The Vision.

Actually, wait – I didn’t mean to imply that an android can’t be a person. I don’t want to be offensive to robosexuals. If “robosexuals” is, in fact, what you want to be called; this isn’t addressed in the Associated Press Style Guide. I’m sure your love for the RealDoll is as pure and innocent as the driven snow. Or as filthy and kinky as between any two perverted humans. I don’t want to offend anybody. I’m just trying to talk about Paul Bettany as The Vision.

So yeah, let me do that.

Guess We Know What Banners Will Hang At SDCC: Preacher Greenlit For Production By AMC

Several months ago, in a halcyon time when Boston wasn’t buried under a foot and a half of wet snow and Parker the Kitten was gleeful to get dry cat food as opposed to crawling on the kitchen table trying to gobble my damn risotto, we reported that AMC, the network that brought you The Walking Dead and The Killing (which, ironically, stumbled around after it should have been dead long after any of Robert Kirkman’s walkers), had bought the rights to develop a television series out of Garth Ennis’s and Steve Dillon’s Preacher. This was good news, while the fact that the project was to be developed by Seth Rogen was, well, weird news.

Of course, a development deal is a long haul away from an actual greenlight – just ask any 80s stand-up comic who got a five-figure check from a TV network, only to discover that it was worth relative pocket change to NBC to make sure that they wouldn’t complete with Leno, just before having to head back home to Podunk to catch a straight job on the swing shift packing bananas – and even though the rumor was that AMC paid beaucoup delores for the rights to the comic, that doesn’t mean that they would be willing to chuck the bucks behind a story that requires producing sets of not only a massive compound in the Middle East, but of a massive gun and tank battle in the desert, not to mention fucking Heaven itself.

Well, it looks like AMC thinks a little more of Preacher and the production abilities of Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, because after years of various movie, TV and HBO rumors, Preacher has been greenlit for development.

The Man In The Castle: The Punisher #1 Review

So it’s only been about a year or so since the conclusion of Greg Rucka’s run on The Punisher – a run that we very much liked here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives. And in the meantime, we have had Punisher running around with The Thunderbolts, which has been fun but not exactly the natural habitat for a lone killer based on those pulp mercenary novels of the 60s and 70s where a lone man with a gun killed as many scumbags as it took for the writer to make his contract’s word count.

And sure, we’ve had a few tastes of the old loner, killing-criminals-alone-is-my-business-and-business-is-good Punisher in the meantime, but for every one of those, we’ve also had something like Space Punisher – fun, but not exactly The Punisher that long-time purists probably want to see. Sure, I like a fun guy wth a gun blowing shit up now and again, but in general, I like my Punisher like I like my steak: bloody, homicidal, and likely to kill not only you but your whole family. Which is why I am not welcome in finer dining establishments. Well, that and the obvious public drunkenness. But I digress.

So now, more than a year after Marvel Now started, we finally have a new solo Punisher title, written by Nathan Edmondson and drawn by Mitch Gerads. And it’s a Punisher that doesn’t include Venom or Elektra, that doesn’t have him out fighting weird supervillains, and instead has him back on the streets, fighting street-level crime with deadly force again. So a guy like me, who likes old-school Punisher, should be happy as a pig in shit, right?

Well, kinda.

A Grand Entrance Would Not Go Amiss: Serenity: Leaves on The Wind #1 Review

If you are a geek in the 21st Century, it is almost a prerequisite to be a fan of Firefly. The only question is when and how you got involved in the show. Here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, we either stayed in on Fridays to watch them or we set the VCR to tape them (note for the kids: back in 2000, TiVo was a toy for the rich. The rest of us had devices called “video cassette recorders,” which could record television if you set a timer, left your cable box on the correct channel, and remembered to insert the appropriate magnetic analog physical media. Next time, I will explain the concepts of “cable box” and “magnetic analog physical media.”), and not only saw the movie Serenity twice in the theaters despite being unemployed and broke at the time, but convinced my parents to go, despite the fact that they believed that “Firefly” was a form of designer synthetic amphetamine.

So I’ve been watching Firefly since the beginning, but honestly, a lot of the comics based on the show have left me a little cold. Sure, it’s always fun to hang out with the crew again for a little while, but the stories in the comics have always felt a little disconnected from the general goings-on of the main storyline. They’re flashbacks or side jobs or something like that, so while they’re fun to read, the stakes always feel a little lower because, since they’re not part of the main throughline, you kinda know that everyone’s gonna get out all right. And it ain’t a true Joss Whedon Firefly story unless anyone could wind up dead at any time.

Well, enter Serenity: Leaves on The Wind, written by Zack Whedon with art by Georges Jeanty, which, after nine years, is the “official” sequel to the movie Serenity. It takes place weeks or months after the crew broadcast proof of the Alliance’s role in creating the Reavers at the conclusion of the movie, which means that the Alliance has resigned in disgrace, the frontier worlds have been distributed all the supplies they need to become civilized, and Malcolm Reynolds and crew have been lionized as heroes, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Neil Gaiman Reads Green Eggs And Ham For Worldbuilders

Worldbuilders is a campaign organized by author Patrick Rothfuss to get people to donate to his favorite charity, Heifer International. Why that charity? Says Rothfuss:

Heifer International is my favorite charity. It helps people raise themselves up out of poverty and starvation. Heifer promotes education, sustainable agriculture, and local industry all over the world.

They don’t just keep kids from starving, they make it so families can take care of themselves. They give goats, sheep, and chickens to families so their children have milk to drink, warm clothes to wear, and eggs to eat.

Pretty cool.

In order to celebrate reaching a $500,000 stretch goal recently, Neil Gaiman agreed to read Green Eggs And Ham. Yes. That Green Eggs And Ham, the Dr. Seuss one.

Mr Gaiman reads a mean kids’ book. Damn.

Via The Mary Sue.

And Because You Are Already Drunk, Here’s An Extended Trailer Of The Amazing Spider-Man 2

The Super Bowl trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 literally aired about three minutes ago. However, it was only about a minute long, with one or two jokes ar additional scenes in it, and besides: by this point in the game, if you’re anything like us, you are rejoicing in the apparent humbling of Payton Manning, and drunk as a lord because of it.

So in the public interest, here is an extended trailer for the movie that has a bunch more footage that didn’t make the aired commercial.

(via Bleeding Cool)