A couple weeks back, we shared with you Geoff Johns’s tweet about the costume for the new Flash on the WB spinoff show of the same name. Well, DC Comics and the WB have now released a full length look at the new costume, as modeled by Grant Gustin:
Hermetically sealed for a woman’s pleasure.
More information after the jump.
So I haven’t written about Batwing for a while. Even though it has remained on my pull list, I had kinda tuned out of Batwing for a while. It survived my first cut of books from the initial New 52, unlike real stinkers like Hawk & Dove and The Savage Hawkman, and it never really got bad, but the whole former child soldier of African warlords angle never clicked all that well with me. Not because it was badly executed, but because it always reminded me of Joshua Dysart’s The Unknown Soldier, and that was a comparison that, when it comes to harrowing drama, a book about a guy in a Bat suit was going to lose.
Since writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti took the book over, those issues have vanished. We’ve got a different guy in the Batwing suit, a Batwing suit that is basically the Batman Beyond suit, and we’re back in Gotham City, giving us a little distance from the whole Batman Incorporated conceit that almost forced the international feel. And what we wind up with is a version of Batman Beyond, with a young, brash guy being mentored by Batman in the most dangerous city in the world. And that works for me; I don’t have an original Bruce Timm Batman Beyond sketch and the Batman Beyond Black And White statue on my mantle because I don’t like that kind of story.
And in Batwing #29, Gray and Palmiotti put together a mix of tones that is a little weird, but generally pretty fun. There is urban horror and real terrible stakes to what’s happening to Luke Fox and his family, horror befitting a modern Batman family comic. And yet it is tempered with big, silly comic book-y ideas, like an unknown underground city beneath Gotham, populated with homeless geeks in Egyptian costumes and giant monsters. It’s a weird mix, but it generally worked for me, and I found it really pretty entertaining.
Provided I turned some parts of my brain off.
Boy, I sure love it when we switch to Daylight Savings Time here in the United States! It sure is awesome to go to bed drunk on a Saturday night and then wake up on a Sunday morning with absolutely no concept about what time it really is! I mean, here it is after 8 p.m., and every sip of beer feels like I’m drinking with my Cheerios! And the Crisis On Infinite Midlives mascot, Parker the Kitten is really enjoying not knowing whether he should nap, eat dinner, or just continue clawing at my ankles like they’re two animal control guys with fists full of ketamine and eyes full of loneliness!
Long story short: it is a terrible kind of day to attempt anything remotely resembling complicated analysis or in-depth reflection. It is, however, a good day for a long-ish video with an interview with some jokes, some entertaining lines, and a few new details about a much-anticipated genre property.
Say no more: yesterday, Marvel Studios President of production Kevin Feige, director James Gunn and actor Chris Pratt sat down for a half-hour interview with AMC Theaters about Guardians of The Galaxy. And there’s not a ton of new information about the flick in the interview – everyone was sitting there with Kevin Feige after all, and I think we all know that the Disney board of directors has given him the authority to respond to the release of spoilers with extreme sanction – but there are a few tidbits. Such as the fact that Gunn still coming up with ideas for a possible post-credits scene (c’mon, Nova…), and based on a couple of sidelong glances, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an appearance by Cosmo somewhere in the flick.
And I know we post a lot of videos on this site, but seriously: this was one we threw up on the big screen to watch all the way through. The interviewer is, for a change for this kind of thing, at least generally familiar with the comics behind the movie, and Pratt and Gunn are just a lot of fun to watch. Check this one out, after the jump.
This isn’t going to be a long review, because it really doesn’t have to be… but I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I originally picked up the first issue of Afterlife With Archie as a goof. It looked like a zombie movie for slightly older kids, with art by one of my current favorite artists, and it turned out to be more fun than I anticipated from an Archie book.
I picked up the second issue because I liked the first, and I liked it a lot more than the first, because it seemed that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was using the pretext of a zombie apocalypse to peel back the all-American veneer of Riverdale and examine a suburb with some dark secrets, kinda like the way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks.
We are now at the fourth issue. And this little book that I initially assumed would be a moderately dark and PG-13 violent horror-ish story for kids has gone completely and totally off the fucking rails. In a good way.
This Archie comic features, along with the ongoing zombie apocalypse, a family pet dying, incest and parricide. Let me repeat that: dead pet, brother / sister love, and parental murder. In Riverdale. From the Archie comics. In an Archie comic.
This makes Ed Brubaker’s Archie riff in Criminal: The Last of The Innocents, where the Archie analogue was a degenerate gambler and the Jughead analogue was a junkie, look damn near quaint.
Hey, kids! Did you really dig Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, in her various appearances in Iron Man 2 and The Avengers? Did you wish you could see more of her?
No, not that way, you perverts.
Well, it looks like she’s going to have a very central role in the upcoming Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie. And, she’s got her own stand alone movie in the works, although it’s just in the beginning stages of getting past being a twinkle in Marvel’s pants eye. Take a look at this new featurette focusing on the lady herself!
Captain America: The Winter Soldier opens in US theaters April 4, 2014.
Via Bleeding Cool.
Making a movie adaptation of a comic book is tricky business, because there’s always the question as to how slavish a remake you should go with. You go too far off the reservation, you wind up with a Muppet threatening to “chuck the duck” to Marty McFly’s mom, and you set back the cause of comics-based movies about a half a decade. You hew too close to the source material, and you might find yourself publicly arguing that you saved the original comics property from being ruined in adaptation… not six months after defending yourself from charges that you ruined another original comics property in adaptation.
But the one thing most people agree on is that there needs to be at least some modifications to bring a comic book to the screen. Most people, that is, except for Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, whose Sin City movie in 2005 mirrored the original The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard series so closely that I was able to literally sit down in front of a bootleg DVD of the flick and follow along with the trade paperbacks, like I was listening to the world’s most expensive Power Record.
And yet somehow, it worked for that movie, which I liked enough to have owned in bootleg DVD, original release DVD, special edition DVD and Blu-Ray formats. And we are coming up fast on the release of the sequel, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which not only looks to follow the same the-comic-is-the-storyboard format of the original flick, but features the return of Bruce Willis as Hartigan, Jessica Alba as Nancy, and Mickey Rourke as Violent Marv. And it also has Lady Gaga for some reason!
The movie drops on August 22nd, and with only five months to go, it means the first trailer should drop any time. By which I mean it has just come out. And you can check it out after the jump.
Can we be honest here, you and me? No matter what anyone at Marvel says, be they editorial or creative, no one really gives a shit about Moon Knight.
Sure, the character looks cool, and a lot of people like drawing him, but nobody really knows what the hell to do with him. Over the years, he’s been a mercenary turned crimefighter, the reincarnation of some Egyptian god of vengeance, and a stone-crazy lunatic who hallucinates a close and personal relationship with Spider-Man and Wolverine like any common 11-year-old.
For a character who was designed to be the Marvel version of Batman, it seems like the character instead can be all things to all people… which can, sometimes, be good news. For example, a couple of years ago, Brian Michael Bendis did a really fun Moon Knight title a couple of years ago by examining the batshit crazy version of the character… and now we have a new version by Crisis On Infinite Midlives favorite writer Warren Ellis. Will Ellis have an insane Marc Spector? A hallucinating Steven Grant? A drunken Jake Lockley? My guess is that the answer is: yes.
But a new Moon Knight means new comics, and that means that this…
…means the end of our broadcast day.
But beyond Ellis’s new comic, there’s a reasonable amount of cool-looking books here. There’s the first issue of Cullen Bunn’s Magneto, the fourth issue of Afterlife With Archie, the first issue of Mark Millar’s Starlight, and a bunch of other cool stuff!
But things are the way things are, which means that before we can talk about them, we need time to read them. So until then…
..see you tomorrow, suckers!
I’m not gonna lie to you: I haven’t played the third Batman XBox game, Batman: Arkham Origins yet.
I haven’t played it for a few reasons, the first of which being that the property’s license was taken away from Rocksteady Studios, who did Arkham Asylum and Arkham City and which were simply the two best superhero video games I’ve ever played. And being someone who loved playing Spider-Man 2 and being disgusted by Spider-Man 3 by a different group of people, I have learned to be… cautious about sequels by different development houses.
The second reason being that I bought a plasma TV last year and I am afraid that, if Batman: Arkham Origins happens to be good, and I play it the way I did Arkham City, I will wind up watching episodes of The Walking Dead through a burnt-in image of Batman gliding in the middle of my screen.
However, I have made the snap decision that not only will I risk playing video games on (and possibly destroying) the new TV, but I will be obtaining either an XBox One or a Playstation 4. Or at least I will be obtaining one by early October. Because not only is a new Batman game coming out, but it reportedly will be by Rocksteady Studios again.
And not only that, but a new trailer for the game has been released… and it looks awesome. And you can check it out after the jump.
Twitter is a strange and terrible beast at times. Sometimes it allows people to feel close to celebrities, luminaries and people one might otherwise be unable to interact with. Other times, it is a direct pipeline from your subconscious to the outside world, laying your darkest impulses and secret opinions bare to a cold and misunderstanding populace. This is why, every Saturday morning, the first thing I do after waking up on the couch where I passed out is check my own outgoing feed to see if it is safe for me to venture out my own front door, or if it is time for me to finally implement Project Miguel Sanchez. But I don’t want to make this about me.
Instead, lets start with a case of the first use of Twitter. Yesterday, DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio Tweeted this:
@MDesaad @nathanfairbairn @DocShaner Keith and I are about to come at you with an old cult favorite. Hope it meets you're expectations.
— dan didio (@dandidio1) March 2, 2014
At first glance, this is good news to me. Sure, DiDio isn’t the best comic writer in the world, but he and Giffen really captured lightning in a bottle with O.M.A.C. at the start of the New 52 reboot, so I am actually very interesting in seeing new work on an obscure-ish cult favorite to see if they can do it a second time.
Of course, a teaser like this begs for speculation, and Bleeding Cool, apparently based on the fact that DiDio’s and Giffen’s last work was on a Jack Kirby creation for DC, speculated today that the book would be a reboot of Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. Okay, fine. Why not?
Because Rob Liefeld, that’s why not!
It has been a ridiculously busy weekend here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. Yesterday, I thought I’d get tricky and get my car inspected the first day of the month after last year’s inspection expired, so I could go 13 months without having to worry about it. Well, I drive a performance car and – funny story – it turns out that the reason they replace tires so often in auto races is that performance tires wear out faster than normal all-weather radials you see on regular cars. Which means that my tires, which only have 18,500 miles on them, don’t have enough tread to pass the inspection. So not only do I have a big, arrest-me-yellow “REJECTED” sticker (literally – the cops are supposed to arrest you if they see you driving with that sticker), but – another funny story – it turns out that my car needs two different-sized tires, and neither are of the size or type that one finds in a local purveyor of automobile tires.
So I have been frantically trying to find someone who can put tires on this fucking car sometime tomorrow, because while I admit that I bought my car because it was fun to drive – there are perks to being middle aged without kids – it is also something I use to drive to the job that pays for the fucking thing. So it has been a busy day on the phone, not to mention the time required by yesterday’s “story conference” with contributors Trebuchet and PixieStyx, which basically consisted of heavy drinking and alternating shouts of, “No, you should write more stuff!”
So while we are late to the party on this one, it has been announced that Skottie Young will be writing and drawing a Rocket Raccoon comic to be released in July, just in time for the Guardians of The Galaxy movie release on July 31st. And not only that, but a few pages of the book’s art have been released, which you can check out after the jump.
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