Shocking: Spider-Man 2099 By Peter David And Will Sliney Confirmed

I didn’t read Spider-Man 2099 when it first came out in 1992, for a few reasons. 1992 was the year Image Comics debuted and when The Death of Superman was released, so an alternate universe packed with what looked, at face value, like “X-Treme!” gimmick knockoffs meant to get us to buy two books with the same character every months, and God knows that only a savage would double-ship a character to make some extra bank. Besides, in 1992 I was a junior an college and only had money for six comics a week, or one comic a week and beer. I think we all know that I made the prudent and wise choice.

By the time I graduated and started having a few bucks in my pocket to buy more comics, Marvel was playing peek-a-boo with crippling bankruptcy, firing editors left and right, Peter David had left the book, and it seemed like my money would be better used on Vertigo books, or perhaps by chucking it into an open gutter.

So I wasn’t particularly familiar with the character beyond the knowledge that his alter ego was Miguel O’Hara and he said “Shock!” a shitload for reasons I could never fucking understand. He’s been an intriguing presence in the modern Marvel Universe by way of his appearances in The Superior Spider-Man, but not a big enough presence that I’ve really felt like I’ve gotten to know the character. Although he still says “shock!” an awful Goddamned fucking lot.

Well, that’s gonna change come July, when Marvel is publishing a new Spider-Man 2099 standalone title, written by Peter David with art by Fearless Defenders artist Will Sliney.

Not Kosher: Marvel Announces Spider-Verse

We’re a little late to the party on this one, but Marvel is already starting to hype the first big event of the soon-to-be freshly Peter Parker-centric reboot of The Amazing Spider-Man… because God knows that you need to market the living shit out of a book where you completely blow up the status quo to, well, return to the status quo. Jesus, Marvel and writer Dan Slott threw a pudgy, nearsighted, vainglorious motormouth into the Spider-Man suit for the past 15 months and have set sales records; I doubt you need to set the world alight to get people to read a Spider-Man book featuring the original dude.

Frankly, just seeing Peter Parker back in the saddle is enough of an event to get me excited… and yet this one sounds ambitious and kinda interesting. It’s called Spider-Verse, it’s gonna be written by Dan Slott with art by Olivier Coipel, it’ll be coming out in November starting in The Amazing Spider-Man #9, and it’s gonna feature Spider-Man.

Whaddya mean, “which Spider-Man?” Spider-Man! You know… all of them. Ever.

Seriously: check it out:

Let’s Go Exploring: Interview With Bill Watterson Released

We don’t talk a lot about comic strips here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives – we are, after all, generally comic book people, and we live in the 21st century. This means that we don’t exactly have access to, or much of a desire for, a daily newspaper comics page. The last time we saw a newspaper here at the Home Office, it was when Office Mascot Parker The Kitten had been here less than 24 hours and we were unsure if he knew a litter box from an Ultimate Nullifier.

We are, however, middle aged, which means that we were around in the days when, not only were newspapers a viable business with a future perceived to be brighter than being mentioned in the same breath as buggy whips, leaded gasoline and kitten urine sponges, but when the newspaper comic strip was in it’s probable final golden age. Here at the Home Office, we have huge collections of the favorite classic comic strips of our adolescence. Bloom County. Doonesbury. And, of course, Calvin & Hobbes.

Calvin & Hobbes occupies it’s own rarefied space in that pantheon, because of all the strips, it exists in and of itself, and that’s it. I personally have a stuffed Bill The Cat and an Uncle Duke action figure. I have seen Garry Trudeau hang around so long he has put Doonesbury on hiatus to produce TV shows and Broadway musicals. I have attended Comic-Con panels where Berkeley Breathed has talked about the history of Bloom County, and I even got to meet the guy and have him sign my first volume of the Bloom County collection by IDW… but Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson did the strip, wrapped the strip up, and then went off into almost complete retirement, leaving behind almost no comment. And unless you had a taste for decals of Calvin pissing on the Ford logo or t-shirts of Calvin and Hobbes dancing around a beer keg (if you happened to attend college in the late 80s or early 90s, of course), the only merchandise was the strip itself.

And thus it has remained. However, if you happen to live anywhere near Ohio State in Columbus, specifically near the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, an exhibition of some of Watterson’s original art from Calvin & Hobbes is starting today. And in a effort to hype the event, Watterson actually gave a brief interview discussing how he became involved with the library, a little about his process on Calvin & Hobbes, and his thoughts on the current state of cartooning.

Rob Liefeld Loses Shit For No Good Reason; Day Ends In “Y”: DiDio And Giffen NOT Doing Kamandi Reboot

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!

Spin-Offs And Spin-Outs: Skottie Young To Write And Draw Rocket Raccoon

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.

Eggs And Chickens: Image Publisher Eric Stephenson On Licensed Comics

ComicsPRO, a meeting of comic book direct market retailers (you know, like the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to understand that they know better than to attend ComicsPRO and thus leave the store undefended against my feeble burglary attempts) is occurring right now in Atlanta. And yesterday, Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephenson gave a speech to the attendees.

This speech is the kind of thing that keynote speakers give to make the owners feel proud, strong, and less likely to be plowed under by ComiXology the way your local record store, where they knew you were irritating and asked you to understand that vinyl sounds warmer than digital or get the fuck out, was decimated by iTunes. And it certainly did that, with references to how graphic novels are the one type of paper-printed book that is apparently in a growth mode, and how in a world seemingly enamored by comics, it is still the local comic store that is the best place to obtain a wide variety of books.

This is a good message. I like this message. I think I’ve established over the years that I don’t like trying to navigate comics even on a tablet, and that I like my paper comics, and that about the best part of my week is on Wednesday nights at the store, shooting the shit with the other regulars and the owner, who knows me by name and asks me not to threaten to fire feces in front of the paying clientele. We picked the location of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office in no small part based on its proximity to the comic book store. That and its proximity to dive bars that accept questionable behavior, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Stephenson also used his speech to shit on Star Wars, Transformers and G.I.-Joe comics. Which has a lot of fans whipped into a screeching hate frenzy.

And I am kind of one of them

Comin’ At Ya… Again: DC To Use 3D Covers In September

Septembers have been a big deal for DC Comics ever since they staged the New 52 reboot in September, 2011. In 2012, DC released issues numbered zero for each of their titles. Last year, they published a lot of 23 and 24 “point” issues, focused on the main villains of each title… including a few that they just made up. I mean, seriously: Relic? That guy just got beat down like six months ago and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup of old Charlton Comics villains or creepy circus clowns.

But last year, not only did we get a ton of villain comics, but we got a bunch of actually pretty sweet 3D lenticular covers for those books. Or at least some of us did. When word started going around that the available stock of 3D covers might not cover the orders, we told the owner of our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop offering to show the paying customers if they want to check out 1D, that we were willing to accept copies with standard 2D covers if he ran short. He initially said that he didn’t think it would be an issue. And then we got about three of the 3D covers, and his heartfelt thanks for being willing to compromise.

So what does DC have in store for this coming September, the third anniversary of the big reboot?

Yeah, more 3D covers.

I’ll Be Back: Dark Horse Reprinting Miller’s And Simonson’s Robocop Vs. Terminator

We’ve talked a lot about Robocop in the past week or so thanks to the rebooted movie version and the associated kinda crappy comics. However, Robocop has long been a subject here; literally in our first week of publication, I wrote a short review of Dynamite Comics’s Terminator / Robocop: Kill Human #2, where I bemoaned writer Rob Williams’s decision to have Robocop scream, “You motherfuckers!” (Shut your mouth! I’m just talking ’bout Robocop…), and pined for the 1992 Dark Horse Comics miniseries Robocop Vs. Terminator, which was written by Frank Miller, drawn by Walt Simonson, and never, ever reprinted.

Well, it seems that all this current excitement about the Robocop reboot (likely to be followed by disappointment, ambivalence, and eventually denial) has lit a fire under Dark Horse, because they have announced that they are finally reprinting the series. And not just in a quickie cash-grab trade paperback version (although as I recall, the story was good enough that even that would be worth your time and money), but in a recolored hardcover edition.

And if that isn’t enough to make you want to shout, “Shut up and take my money!” (which is still closer to authentic Robocop dialogue than Williams wrote in Terminator / Robocop: Kill Human, but that’s not the point), Dark Horse will also be releasing a “gallery edition” of the book, featuring Simonson’s original, uncolored line art.

Trudeau Puts Doonesbury On Hiatus, Except For Sundays. Thanks For Nothing, Alpha House!

Well, the good news is that Gary Trudeau has a home run in Alpha House, the Washington Beltway comedy series he created for Amazon for on-line distribution. The bad news is, because of Alpha House‘s success, he will be putting his long running comic strip, Doonesbury, on a long term, open-ended hiatus in order to focus on his new politically satiric property, according to The Washington Post.

Say it ain’t so, Gary!

“I’ve done the strip for 43 years — 45 if you include the college edition [at Yale] — and I’m ready for an extended break,” Trudeau, 65, tells Comic Riffs.

In making the move, the New York-based cartoonist takes nothing for granted: “A hiatus comes with uncertainty, of course: I can’t assume I’ll be welcomed back a year or two from now.”

Where’s Waldo: Wally West Returns In Flash Annual #3

I have been to two San Diego Comic-Cons and one Boston Comic Con since DC kicked off their New 52 reboot (and one just before, when most of DC’s plans for the characters after the reboot had become public), and there has been one question asked almost more than any other: “Excuse me, sir? You, the middle aged guy with the ponytail? Where the hell are your pants?”

But that is not the most asked question. It is vastly surpassed by, “If you see a woman in a Batgirl costume, can you give me a quick heads-up? And also pretend to be me, Dan DiDio?”

But even more asked than those everyday questions is: “What happened to Wally West, and are when we going to see him again?” It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat at SDCC without hitting a pissed-off Wally West fan, or being screamed at by outraged furries.

And the answer has always been something along the lines of, “Barry Allen is The Flash now, and that’s that.”  Despite the fact that Wally West was The Flash for just about as long as Barry Allen ever was, and that there were two generations of comic book fans who only knew Barry as Flash if they’d read Crisis On Infinite Earths, it has seemed for about two and a half years that Wally West had been consigned to the quarter bin of history.

Except, yeah: apparently he’s coming back in The Flash Annual #3.