Five Guys On One: Marvel Announces Avengers Vs. X-Men

Yesterday Marvel announced that their big crossover event for 2012 will be: Civil War! Wait – I mean: Avengers Vs. X-Men!

In a streaming press conference with Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso, SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, Senior Editor Nick Lowe, and Marvel’s Architect writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, they gave the gist of what we’re in store for: about 300 clams to read the whole story! Wait, that’s not right…

…the seeds for this story have been growing for a while. When [the 2007 X-Men event] “Messiah CompleX” introduced the so-called “Mutant Messiah,” a little girl with green eyes and red hair named Hope, it raised the obvious question, “Who is she?” and, of course, the specter of the Phoenix.

So if I had to hazard a guess, the Phoenix Force is returning to Earth, probably to infect the little girl who looks just like Jean Grey, if Jean Grey were redrawn by commission for loathsome perverts. The X-Men will want to protect their messiah, The Avengers will want to stop a potential extinction-level threat to Earth, stuff will explode, and dudes will get kicked.

Heroes In A Half-Pint (Bourbon Power!)

It is Wednesday, and after a week of day job crises, enforced workplace holiday jocularity (A fucking cash bar, Goddammit? Thanks for the drink tickets, but as far as I’m concerned, those are what should be given to me after being pulled over driving home drunk from the open bar company party! Cheap pricks…), and a death in the extended Crisis On Infinite Midlives family (Not me, despite all wagers to the contrary, which means I win the over!), it means that we’re psyched to finally get to New Comics Day! So yes: we did blow another podcast deadline, but we’re going for a fresh start, because this…

…means not only that we survived the week, but that it’s the end of our broadcast day.

But a new week means a new start, which includes (unlike last week) a bunch of DC New 52 books, a new The Boys, David Lapham Crossed, and a Crisis On Infinite Midlives favorite: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode! And given the week we’ve had, there’s even a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles buried in there for some much-needed nostalgia and whimsy.

So hopefully this week will be a little less… eventful… than the last so we can review them, but even if it is, first we gotta read them.

So… see you tomorrow, suckers!

Stalking Horse: Dark Horse’s Digital Pricing Controversy

It is the twenty-first century, and it has been a week, so that must mean that someone tried to do something tricky about digital comics that pissed almost everybody off.

Earlier this week, Dark Horse Comics announced that, like DC and Marvel’s Ultimate line, they were going to make their books available digitally on the same day as the print copies. The problem is that they didn’t specify any details about their pricing model, which, for older books that they’ve made available digitally to date, is generally a buck ninety-nine, compared to the normally $2.99 print editions.

And then the comics Internet shit its tubes.

Brian Michael Bendis To Leave The Avengers – If A Head Explodes On The Internet, Can Anybody Hear It?

A couple hours ago, Comic Book Resources ran an interview with Brian Michael Bendis in which he announced he will be ending his run on The Avengers in 2012. Seemingly instantaneously, message boards, Facebook accounts, and Twitter all exploded with chatter. In the interview, Bendis discusses where his Avengers arc is going, the addition of Storm to the team, and how a newly revitalized Norman Osborn is going to flare up and plague The Avengers like herpes on prom night. And he compared his run on The Avengers to Breaking Bad.

“I’m going to wrap up ‘Avengers’ and ‘New Avengers.’ At the same time the first storyline of ‘Avengers Assemble’ will be done,” Bendis told CBR. “It’s a good time to move on to other things. Before I go, though, I’m ending things big. I’m in countdown mode. You know when you’re watching a show like ‘Breaking Bad,’ and every episode feels like the second to last episode? That’s where I’m at. I’ve been on the Avengers longer than anybody in the history of the book. When you take everything into account, I’ve written over 200 issues. I’m very, very proud of that, and what we have coming up this summer gives me the opportunity to go out on a high note. I know enough about showbiz to know that’s a great time to go.”

Metropolis 90210

Smallville ended it’s eleven-year run earlier this year, although if you’re anything like we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are, it ended for you a couple or three years earlier when you realized that you could no longer watch any of the episodes that weren’t the one a year written by Geoff Johns if you were even remotely sober. I mean seriously: Doomsday is a paramedic who makes a pass at Chloe Sullivan, who was originally supposed to be Lois Lane before Lois Lane showed up and who became super-intelligent after being kidnapped by Brainiac who looked like Spike from Buffy, and just typing that made me want a double Jack Daniels.

The point is: Smallville is over. I tuned in to watch it finally roll over and die. So I win, right?

Right?

Achieving Stable Orbit: Spaceman #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Houston, we have a spoiler.

I have sat in front of this empty page for about a half an hour now, reading and rereading Spaceman #2 and trying to figure out how to describe it. I am finding it difficult. Normally this would be because I was shitfaced. In this case, it’s because there’s really nothing else like this comic currently out there… although in all fairness, I am a little buzzed right now.

Seriously: I can’t pigeonhole this book. It’s a crime story with an epic sci-fi element with pieces of cyberpunk dribbled in. It opens with a man holding a gun on a monkey-man and an Asian child in her underwear. It ends in a pirate attack. In between there’s an astronauts in trouble arc and the collapse of the world economy. There is also more than one gunfight, an evisceration, a drug overdose, and a man’s face torn apart by a spinning propeller. All of which sounds like it’s an enema bottle and a tube of astroglide away from being a high-budget German scheisse flick, but somehow it all hangs together.

So, You Want To Work Out Like Batman…

Sam DeHority recently published an interview on Men’s Fitness with John Romaniello, NSCA-CPT to examine whether the training regimen published in Matthew Manning’s The Batman Files is something an actual human being could do. The short answer? No.

What are the odds that someone could get through a regimen like this cleanly?
Zero percent. It’s too many elite levels of skill. For the highest one percent of one percent of the population, you can be good at just about everything and great at a few things. Let’s take someone who’s both big and strong, and has good endurance—someone from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby squad. I don’t think they could sprint 20 miles. A 4:50 mile is damn near a sprint, and those guys don’t have to deal with broken bones from fighting bad guys.

But…I’m no quitter! How bad could it really be? This, coming from a girl who can’t actually manage to stick to a simple plan of going for a walk three times week. Mostly because I’m hungover a lot and sunlight brings pain.

Workout plan and feelings of inadequacy after the jump

Choices Have Already Been Made – Review Of Ghost Rider #6

Hey! Guess what, everyone? I found a great comic book that I’d really like to recommend to you all but, what’s that Internet? Ghost Rider, written by Rob Williams, with art by Dalibor Talajić has been canceled?

Oh. Oh well.

So, does this cancellation have anything to do with the upcoming sequel to the 2007 Ghost Rider movie? You know, the one that was so bad it got a 4.3 out of 10 rating on Rotten Tomatoes…which begs the question as to why there’s even a sequel in the first place?

Launched during the “Fear Itself” event under the guiding hand of writer Rob Williams, “Ghost Rider” provided a new female version of the long-standing hero while keeping original rider Johnny Blaze on as co-star. The character has a new movie — “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” from Columbia Pictures — set to hit theaters this February, though beyond an incoming special re-presenting classic tales of Blaze, the publisher appears to have no plans for a major media tie-in push.

So, that’s a no. Having a female Ghost Rider possibly running around when Nicholas Cage is poised to take yet another stab at comic book movie glory has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Sure.

Spoilers, snakes and swamp water ahead!

Empty Beauty: Batman: Odyssey #2 Review

Batman: Odyssey #2 features exquisite art by Neal Adams. The images of Batman in this book are spectacular, and Adams has not lost a step from his classic Batman illustrations in the 1970’s. You could lose yourself in this art. Which is a good thing because it is there in support of a story also written by Neal Adams. And reading this story is like being fucked in the brainstem by Adams’s drafting pencil after a half-dose of shitty brown acid.

I have no fucking idea what is happening in this comic book. It opens with Bruce Wayne looking right at me – literally making eye contact through the page – andapparently asking me, as a reader, if  I like his Green Lantern t-shirt. Then he says, “So, sure, it wasn’t a happy thing leaving Dick behind, but… what would you do?” Um, I don’t want to tell a legend like Adams his business, but as a long-time comics fan who has read many classic Batman stories, I can’t remember one of them where I was reasonably certain that Batman was hitting on me.

The Quintuple Macguffin: Daredevil #6 Review

This review probably isn’t going to be very long because there’s just not all that much to say about Daredevil #6, or the book in general since Mark Waid took over writing duties from Andy Diggle a few months back. This is an excellent comic, and you should be buying it. This is one of the rare comics where you really need to nitpick to find fault… and make no mistake, I will do that, because baldfaced cheerleading for a comic book just isn’t funny. Unless you’re watching someone else doing it. Preferably at a convention. While he or she is wearing an authentic Spider-Man costume. Assuming Peter Parker had been given the proportionate strength and speed of a very, very obese spider. But already, I digress.

Let’s start with the villain. Bruiser is a new creation by Waid and artist Marcos Martin, with a simple premise: he dresses like a wrestler, he wants to fight The Hulk, and he’s working his way up “The Ranks” of superhumans until he’s earned his shot. That is all we know and all we need to know; he exists to give Daredevil someone new and cool to fight, which is damn refreshing after years of story arcs where old familiar villains with axes to grind spend issue upon issue planning to psychologically destroy Matt Murdock. There have been times when I’ve put down a Daredevil issue and said, “Jesus, would you and Kingpin just fuck and get it over with, already?”