Rebooted Origin: Conan O’Brien On Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Being a member of Generation X rather than Generation Y, the extent of my relationship with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that it was an interesting little indie comic that effectively satirized Frank Miller’s ninja-focused Daredevil comics. So, not being of the appropriate demographic to have a feeling toward the classic TMNT children’s cartoon beyond it being that thing I watched sometimes when I was too hungover in college to change the fucking channel, I am not consumed by the sense of impending doom that some are feeling over the news that Michael Bay is producing a new TMNT movie.

However, being an American citizen in the early 21st century, I understand that Michael Bay has the reverse Midas touch; everything he touches turns awful. He made the Transformers – fucking toys, fer Christ’s sake – look shallow. He made Armageddon, and soon after the United States cancelled its manned space program. I am surprised that, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, that we didn’t retroactively lose World War II.

So I feel your pain… as does Conan O’Brien, who produced the short clip of “exclusive” footage of the upcoming Bay TMNT flick that’s actually quite funny, and which you can watch after the jump.

Comic Book Covers: Justice League #7 Review

Justice League #7 is a weird fucking book. On one hand, it gives us a classic superhero team book… one might say that it’s so classic you’ve been reading it for years. And on the other hand, it gives a reimagined and modernized take on a classic hero, updating him by way of making you want to see him die screaming under a city bus. And on both hands, writer Geoff Johns shows us that superheroes are just like us: dicks. Selfish, irritating dicks.

Let’s start with the opening story, which opens with the Justice League in combat with with Isz. Seriously – on the very first page, we’re presented with what looks exactly like a black Isz from The Maxx if Sam Kieth had days upon end to ink them. Which is, in certain ways, a decent enough choice; God knows if I turned a corner and saw a bunch of those bastards swarming, I’d shit my pants. However, this is a comic book, and any comics fan older than 22 is probably gonna open this book and say, “Huh. That’s an Isz,” which started the book on it’s back foot for me right out of the gate.

In short order, we are reintroduced to Colonel Steve Trevor: manly-man soldier and leader of A.R.G.U.S., the Advanced Research Group Uniting Superhumans. This organization appears to be some kind of combination Government-sponsored supervillain armed response agency and liason to the DCU’s superhero community. And Trevor himself is portrayed as an ultra-competent yet cranky former soldier who has learned to kick ass and navigate Congressional committees without compromise. This kind of character is relatively new to the DC Universe, and would be an exciting development if it weren’t an eyepatch and the likeness of Samuel L. Jackson away from a crippling plagiarism lawsuit. Really, guys? Colonel Trevor, Agent of A.R.G.U.S.? What’s his next exciting adventure gonna be, pulling Uncle Sam from the Freedom Fighters out of a fucking iceburg?

Dogs And Cats Living Together

It has been a long, strange and interesting week, what with the purchase of a new tablet PC and learning how to interface it with the Web site (What do you mean, I need to switch between three browsers to copy and paste? It shouldn’t be this hard to say “Fuck the iPad!”), the St. Patrick’s Day traditional celebration and the St. Patrick’s Day traditional charcoal pills and “stomach evacuation,” we are POOPED.

Thankfully, it is Wednesday, which means that there are new comics to relax and recuperate with, and further means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But we’re looking at a very, very decent take this week. We have Justice League #7 (less notable for the Justice League than for the debut of Geoff Johns’s Shazam reboot), a new Amazing Spider-Man (less notable for Spider-Man than for the return of a John Byrne-created villain from the 70s who is an obscure personal favorite), and the finale of Avengers: Xtinction (Less notable for… well, just not very notable)!

But before we can review them, we need to leave this bar and actually read them. So until that day: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Cognitive Dissonance: Mark Waid on Digital Comics

Sometimes people ask me why Amanda, Trebuchet, Pixiestyx, Lance and I bother to run a comics Web site when not only is there no money in it, but when it takes so much Goddamned time on top of our day jobs that actually pay for the comics (and liquor) it takes on a daily basis to endure said day jobs.

Until recently, I could only briefly stop and consider how I might possibly articulate my 35+ year relationship with comics, shrug my shoulders and thell them to fuck off and mind their business. However, now I can refer them to this recent video by legendary comics writer Mark Waid, who describes what it was like to be a comics fan growing up in the pre and nascent direct market world.

…In The First Act – Wait, That’s Not A Gun: Crossed: Badlands #1 Review

In an entertainment market glutted with zombie stories, Crossed has historically distinguished itself more in its methods than in its themes. Under the hood, it’s the same as any half-decent zombie apocalypse tale: we follow small bands of survivors as they struggle to survive in a landscape populated by monsters that feel no fear and are only motivated to kill, with the story focus more on how the experience shapes – or warps – the survivors. However, it performs these standard tasks under a paint job of making those monsters less mindless flesh-eaters and more clever and gleeful rape-you-to-death-with-a-pipe-wrench…ers. Yeah, that’s a word. Or at least, it is now. And if you don’t agree, I have this pipe wrench… but I’m veering off track already.

In Crossed’s initial incarnation by writer Garth Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows a few years ago, that gave Ennis a chance to do a pretty pedestrian zombie tale, only propelled by Burrows’s over-the-top visuals illustrating Ennis’s jet-black sense of humor… provided your idea of larfs includes zombies jacking off on their bullets to make them infectious, or another zombie whipping dudes to death with a horse penis. Later arcs, such as David Lapham’s recent Psychopath, toned down the humor to focus, more conventionally if not any less graphically, on the idea of human monsters in a world overrun by more conventional ones.

This week brought us Crossed: Badlands, the return of the original creative team of Ennis and Burrows, so one would assume a return of the book to an exaggerated, almost darkly slapstick story reminiscent of the original arc. However, while it’s still too early in his miniseries to judge how it will end up, instead we seem to be getting a much more character-driven and subdued story. It feels strange to call a story that includes a zombie using an infant as a blunt projectile weapon “more subdued,” but when it comes to Crossed, these things are relative.

Sympathy For The Devil: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… spoilers.

Now that everything is all said and done, it turns out that writer Justin Jordan has done something very interesting with The Strange Talent of Luther Strode: he has created a superhero comic book in which the hero is well and truly an unstoppable killing machine from a 1980s slasher flick. It is Halloween from the point of view of Michael Myers, or Friday The 13th as told by Jason Voorhees, only written as tragedy and I’m not getting my first handjob in a sticky theater back row during one of its Roman numeraled sequels (yet).

Jordan has made a leap in logic that I don’t think I’ve seen before except maybe by those millions of Generation X’ers who bought talking Freddy Kreuger dolls and traded his best kill quips in study hall, and certainly never codified in print. And that is that if an 80s slasher film villain is unstoppable, unkillable, and has some great catchphrases? And if they wear an easily-identifiable costume and or a mask (Freddy’s sweater, Michael Myers / Jason Voorhees masks)? Then the only difference between them and a comic book superhero is motivation and (sometimes) method. After all, where the rubber hits the road, the only difference between Freddy and Wolverine a surface level is the word “bub” over “bitch” and the violent murder of Johnny Depp, to which Wolverine can still only aspire.

Turning Back With No Turning Back: The Lizard Returns To Spider-Man

Thanks to the hectic nature of a weekend that’s contained St. Patrick’s Day, a visit with my tax guy where I learned my coming federal refund, and a trip to my local electronics retailer to piss that refund away on a jacked-up tablet PC to help faciliate more effective reporting at SDCC this July (At least that’s the excuse I’m using to justify dropping the coin), it has been difficult to keep up with the goings-on at this weekend’s Wondercon in Anaheim, CA. Frankly, by about our second bar yesterday afternoon, it was difficult to keep up with the going-on in my my own pants (“I’m actually peeing in the bathroom, and not dreaming I’m peeing in the bathroom while I’m busily pissing myself on the couch, right? Right? …who am I talking to?”).

But when I finally managed to find the time to filter through the Wondercon announcements after a busy morning whimpering and cleaning the couch, one particular item jumped out at me: Marvel’s announced the return of The Lizard starting in Spider-Man issue #679. Which, on one hand, is in no way surprising; the issue’s due out about a week before the Amazing Spider-Man movie’s scheduled to be released in theaters, and if there’s one thing comics do well in the face of movie publicity, it’s try to match the books with the flick… and fuck it up. After all, this is the industry that killed Batman just before The Dark Knight make a bazillion dollars. So I’m less surprised over Marvel’s bringing back The Lizard than I am that they’re not bringing back Gwen Stacy (“Oh, Peter! I was absorbed by the Phoenix Force! No? Howzabout I’m a clone? Um… Ultrons? Just shut up and give me your comics money.”).

So the concept of writer Dan Slott and artist Giuseppe Camuncoli bringing The Lizard back wasn’t exactly exciting. The art that debuted at Wondercon, however…

But With A Whimper: Avengers #24 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Crisis On Infinite Midlives douchiest editors found themselves united against a common threat. Spoilers Assemble!

I am perhaps not the best person to review Avengers #24 objectively, since I have gone on record as not being the biggest proponent of the whole Dark Reign 2 / Return of Norman Osborn / Dark Avengers Redux storyline. Based on particular individual issues in this crossover, I had somewhat softened my original opinion about the story arc, but considering my original prejudices, I perhaps cannot be trusted to be impartial in my opinions about this semi-ending to the story.

However, considering that you have made it this far after being spoiler and prejudice-warned on a Web site where the tagline on every page proclaims me to be a grumpy drunkard, I now feel safe in telling you that the ending of this story is so Goddamned wretchedly and horrifyingly bad it cheapens the entire arc, which I didn’t hold in particularly high value in the first place. In terms of excitement, this ending ranks with “And then I woke up.” In terms of a climax, this is on par with “I’m sorry; this has never happened to me before.” And in terms of pacing, it can only feel like writer Brian Michael Bendis said, “Avengers Vs. X-Men starts when? Oh shit.”

In addition, this story, as did the first Dark Reign storyline a couple years back, violates what should be an obvious and cardinal rule of resolving a Norman Osborn Ascendant story that should be Goddamned obvious on its face… but I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Posing Dead: Kirkman Publishes Walking Dead’s Michonne’s Origin In Playboy

When it comes to The Walking Dead, the closest thing that comic book has to a superhero is Michonne.

First appearing in The Walking Dead #19 by just wandering up in front of the prison where Rick and crew had taken refuge (Whoops; spoiler alert for people who only watch the AMC TV show! But if you’re one of those people, quick fucking around and go buy the comics, already). She’s a badass, katana-swinging ninja with a killer’s heart, an imaginary friend and Jack Bauer’s sense of justice. And most interestingly, she has a hazy, ambiguous past. Writer Robert Kirkman has truly made Michonne The Walking Dead’s Man With No Name.

Michonne’s origin has been long-awaited by fans of The Walking Dead, and probably by people like my Local Comic Store Owner, who knows me by name and asks me to stop calling him The Governor, because there’s a good chance that that story would get people who normally only buy the trade collections of The Walking Dead to also buy that individual issue.

Well, Robert Kirkman has announced that our waiting is over. Yesterday he announced that he will be publishing Michonne’s origin story. With art by regular penciler Charlie Adlard. And it’s available today.

In Playboy Magazine.

Wait, what?

It Was A Civil War Of Period: Saga #1 Review

The first thing I noted while reading Brian K. Vaughan’s and Fiona Staples’s Saga #1 was that, with every page – and sometimes every panel – this team was raising the required budget of any possible film adaptation by several million dollars. And movie studios simply don’t spend that much on an NC-17 flick.

The second thing I noticed was that this comic book is an imaginative, large-scale space opera that simultaneously hits all the expected and classic tropes of the genre, while chucking in enough weird and mad ideas to make Grant Morrison mutter, “Shit; nice one,” and tying the whole thing together with an out-front, genuine sense of humor about itself that you won’t find outside of a Star Wars parody. This is a very, very good comic book.