I See Dead People. Maybe: Amazon Buys ComiXology

So. Amazon has bought ComiXology.

I’m not gonna write a whole hell of a lot about this development, since Amanda and I have decided that this might be a good topic for another podcast (Yes! Two podcasts in less than two years! Truly it is a new and exciting age in audio-only media!), but there is one thing I would like to point out.

That thing being that our Web site traffic, which is usually pretty consistent, is up about 25 percent today. And not because of anything recent that we have posted, oh no. No, it is because a couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about a kid on Reddit who briefly posted a script that allowed people to download their comics from ComiXology and strip the copy protection so they could back up their own books. And how ComiXology landed on that kid with both feet, and how that should be a matter of concern for ComiXology customers, because without the ability to locally save their comics, they would never really own any of them. You know, if something ever happened to ComiXology.

It’s a piece that has garnered a little bit of attention; it has been highly-ranked on Google for people searching for ways to save their digital comics locally – you know, just in case something happened to the parent company to get in the way of you getting the books that you paid for – and if it even got picked up by Hacker News just a few months ago.

And it suddenly is getting a lot of traffic. Apparently because there are more people than usual trying like hell to find a way to save the digital comics that they bought. Just in case something were to happen to them. Or the company they did business with in good faith.

Bryan Singer Explains Why Everybody Loves X-Men

Fox has released into the wild this featurette to promote X-Men: Days Of Future Past with new footage and an interview with Bryan Singer, who explains why he wanted to come back. Click the tag for a hint!

[Show][Hide]
Young Meat.

I know I feel better for having shared that with you.

Wow. James McAvoy “finally feels like he’s in a real X-Men movie”? Damn. Harsh diss on X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn, although I suspect he’s too busy directing the movie version of Mark Millar’s The Secret Service or dealing with the pre-production mishegas of the The Fantastic Four reboot to really give a shit. I wouldn’t.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past opens Stateside on May 23, 2014.
Via Bleeding Cool.

Finally: The Walking Dead #125 Review

Editor’s Note: Some kind of instinct. Memory of stories they used to ruin. This was an important spoiler in their lives.

Let me start be reiterating the spoiler warning in the first line of this review. I recognize that I try to get cute with my spoiler warnings, and therefore they might be missed by some people who want to cut to the chase and get pissed off by reading spoilers on a free Web site written by a drunkard who’s spent almost two years complaining about the antagonist in The Walking Dead. I intend to spoil the living shit out of this issue. Starting now.

Thank fucking God that, after about 23 straight months of the rotten, one-note son of a bitch, someone has finally put the shiv to Negan. Granted, it happens at the very end of the issue, and since this is only part 11 of 12 of the All Out War storyline, he still has 22 pages to magically get someone to seal the gaping wound in his neck to still be a pain in someone else’s, but I have waited since July of 2012, when Negan killed Glenn (which gets namechecked in this issue) to see someone actually hurt that wretched bastard.

I have been vocal about how slowly-paced things have seemed since Negan came on the scene to curse and threaten his way through The Walking Dead, so seeing him take a blade to the throat would have given this issue a thumbs up even if the other 21 pages were wordless Charlie Adlard ink washes of Rick trying futilely to crank himself off with his wrist stump. But that’s not the case.

Instead, we have a rich issue filled with the aftermath of Negan’s earlier biological warfare, some scenes of some serious jockeying in conventional warfare, and a whole bunch of sweet, sweet psychological warfare. Meaning that not only does this story meet the definition of All Out War, but it is the first really, really good issue of The Walking Dead in quite a long time.

Getting Housed: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Lottery Finished

Registration for hotels with the reduced rate negotiated by San Diego Comic-Con for the 2014 convention opened at noon Eastern Time today. It is now closed, after being inundated with requests from God knows how many thousands of people looking to sleep someplace more comfortable than a park bench across from the Hall of Justice, emblazoned with an advertisement for a bail bonds service you will soon desperately need.

And just like that, the long and arduous process to arrange a trip to SDCC 2014, which started in February with pre-registration, continued for some into standard registration in March, moved into procuring transportation to San Diego, and climaxed with today’s registration, is over.

Kinda. Because now the 36 to 48 hour wait to see if today’s hotel registration actually led to, you know, getting a hotel room.

Does Whatever A Spider Can, Possibly Including Horrifying People: Amazing Spider-Man 2 Video Game Trailer Released

So The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the next major superhero flick to come out after last week’s awesome Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but unlike that movie, Spidey is gonna be getting a video game adaptation to go with the new movie.

This, depending on your point of view, is either good, or terrible news.

If you are an optimist, it is good news. Because Activision’s Spider-Man 2, released in 2004, was, at the time, arguably not only the best movie adaptation video game since Tron, but the best superhero video game released until Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. Spider-Man 2 was the first superhero video game to not only allow a true open world for Spider-Man to explore, but it was the first to force the player to web-sling from actual buildings (Spider-Man on the Dreamcast was the first Spider-Man game in 3D with reasonable web-slinging, but it allowed the player to swing about 3/4s of a mile above Central Park, forcing the player to assume he was webbing off of helicopters, or perhaps The Watcher’s gonads). It had a reasonable and playable main storyline to go with the more realistic web-slinging mechanic, and it was a joy to play.

If you are a pessimist, you will remember that Spider-Man 2 for the original XBox was followed by Spider-Man 3 for the XBox 360, which I returned to Gamespot in disgust after spending nearly two full calendar days trying to get past Sandman in the subway level (I apparently did better than some people). And, while Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was nominally better, it lost its attraction for me about halfway through, when I realized I was web-slinging through what amounted to the zombie apocalypse. I am okay with the zombie apocalypse, but I would really prefer a shotgun to a web shooter. Or to almost anything else.

But with less than a month to go before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game is released, publisher Activision and Beenox have released a trailer for the game, which you can check out after the jump, along with my impressions.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 10: The Fist of Rebirth

I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Jesus Christ, Rob! A podcast? How timely! Only almost exactly 23 months after your last podcast! You’re a Goddamned radio machine, you guys are!”

True, true… but we just came back from watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which we enjoyed the hell out of, and decided that rather than just sit in a bar and talk about it, we’d dust off the old microphones and mixer and do it for public consumption. Hell, we liked podcasting… but what we never liked was recording one, then listening to it and taking notes on what editing and post-production we wanted, then taking another two hours and actually, you know, doing those edits and post-production, before finally uploading the damned thing.

So we tried something a little different today: we just sat down, shot the s**t about the movie for about half an hour, slapped the intro and bed music onto it, and uploaded it. This is live to tape, boys and girls; as you hear it is how we said it, awkward pauses, “um”s, and everything. But since that “everything” also includes fisting jokes, we hope it evens out.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Captain America: The Winter Soldier in general
• Black Widow, and how this is the first time it feels like she’s a character who could carry her own movie
• Deviations between the movie and Ed Brubaker’s original comic
• What effect this might have on ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• The post-credits sequences
• How the lack of laughter over a tombstone makes me weep for the state of movie-goers in general

And a bunch of other stuff we can’t remember because yeah: live to tape.

Here’s the usual disclaimer: this podcast is not safe for work. Further, we spoil a bunch of stuff from the movie, so if you haven’t seen it and want to remain pristine, give this a pass for now… but feel free to come back after you’ve seen it!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:36 — 33.5MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

This Godzilla Is A Major Problem For Us; It Will Ruin Our Batch: Godzilla Extended Trailer Released

Dear God, I can’t believe how little I cared about the reboot of Godzilla when I first heard about it at last year’s SDCC. With what I’ve seen since then, I feel shame.

I think part of my initial lack of interest was based on the fact that I hadn’t heard at the time that Bryan Cranston was starring in the flick. Sure, the 90s Roland Emmerich Godzilla flick had Matthew Broderick in it, who I’ve liked since I was a kid, but I think nobody realized at the time that ol’ Matt used up all his “The World Is Coming To An End!” pathos sometime between the end of principal photography for WarGames and when John Hughes told him he’d be headlining a Chicago parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Cranston, however, never lost his ability to project desperate doom and gloom. He did it in every third episode of Breaking Bad for years, so I can buy it when he sells that a giant thunder lizard is coming to eat our iPads. But more interesting to me is the fact that, when Cranston wasn’t selling not-so-quiet desperation in that TV series, he was showing us a man who would poison a fucking child to get out of a jam. And that is the kind of guy I want to see spearheading the battle against the Gus Fring of giant monsters. Hell, five’ll get you ten that the last scene of the flick is Godzilla coming ashore, only to meet Matthew Broderick in a wheelchair, frantically dinging a hotel desk bell. And then Honolulu will explode.

Why am I ranting about this? Because Warner Bros. just released an extended trailer for Godzilla, with not only more scenes of Cranston acting angrily pathetic, but of the monster fucking up the U. S. Navy. And you can check it out after the jump.

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

Requiem: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #200 Review

I really enjoy the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but I am always gonna have a soft spot for Peter Parker. Which, for a superhero comic fan, is about as controversial a statement as decrying Nazis, or perhaps coming down on the negative side of human trafficking, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Not only was the Ultimate version of Peter a pretty solid modernization of the character, while still keeping his core values and characterization, but it allowed we readers to see something we don’t normally get to see: the actual conclusion of the character’s story.

Sure, we get nods toward final stories with Marvel’s The End periodic series of books (and some of those are damn good) and in a few DC Elseworlds stories, but they’re never really final in a satisfying way. Because yeah, they’re endings, but then they, you know, end. And part of why any comics fan loves these stories is that they are ongoing. So while we sometimes see a beloved character go down, we don’t see the aftermath in a serious, ongoing way. But we got that with the death of Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man almost three years ago, with the Death of Peter Parker, which was a really spectacular story. I recently reread the issue with Peter’s public memorial, and when the little girl asked Aunt May if she was Spider-Man’s mommy, and if she needed a hug? Jesus, if I could get my hands on whatever motherfucker was cutting onions in a room that dusty…

But that story concluded, and we moved on to Miles Morales, as comics do… but in real life, when someone gets killed, people don’t just yank up stakes and start paying attention to a new person, unless your name is Michael Peterson and you don’t mind explaining your weird behavior to members of the law enforcement community. In real life, those losses stick around for a while… and that brings us to Ultimate Spider-Man #200, which is a long reminiscence of Peter’s life, and shows how some of the regulars from the original series are doing. And while there isn’t any action and no current storylines are really affected, it’s damn nice to check in with Aunt May, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane and some of the other former regulars on this title.

Unless you hate Brian Michael Bendis’s “guys sitting around a table talking” issues. Because then you’ll hate this.

The Best Laid Plans

Famous last words:

But before we can talk about any of them (and with God as my witness, we will try to talk about some of them), we need time to read them…

Yeah, that didn’t work, Make no mistake, there were some damn good comic books in the take last week – seeing the apparent return of Peter Parker in The Superior Spider-Man #30 was one of the more thrilling moments I’ve seen in a comic recently, so a high-five to writers Dan Slott and Christos Gage, and to Guiiseppe Camuncoli for that closing splash page – but good planning thwarted by an unexpected extended stay in a hospital emergency room put the skids on our ability to review any comics for the umpteenth week in a row.

Which is not a thing that we are proud of, and yet this week may not be any better. We already have scheduled a check-in visit with the person we spent last Saturday waiting on in the ER, and there’s the small matter of finding time to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier sometime before the weekend concludes. Plus, we’re still working on the capital improvements to the Home Office we recently mentioned that have been delayed by watching the incontinent gobble Jell-O, and as we speak our mascot, Parker The Kitten, is distracting my co-Editor Amanda by demanding she allow him to chase around a toy mouse on a wire, under the implied threat that otherwise he’ll chew all our electrical wires, leading to the discovery of a dead cat in a burning house.

But still, we promise to try. Because it is Wednesday, which means a clean slate. Unfortunately, it also means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And even though it is a somewhat light take this week, there are some winners in there. There’s the 200th overall issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Brian Michael Bendis with at least some art by Mark Bagley just like in the old days, a new issue of Action Comics (which has become actually really good since Greg Pak took over writing duties, the first issues of Inhuman and Aquaman And The Others (for some reason), and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff.

But before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need to calm this Goddamned cat down and eventually read them. So while we try to accomplish that…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!