Talking About A Revolution: Aquaman #15 Review

“Aquaman doesn’t care about white people. Surly Irish drunken white people.”

-Me, after reading about the flooding of Boston in Aquaman #15.

Aquaman #15 is the second part of the Throne of Atlantis crossover (the first part was in this week’s Justice League #15), and the second issue in a row where the Justice League moves heaven and earth (well, mostly they move water, but you get my drift), in the aftermath of Atlantean tidal waves flooding three Eastern cities, to save Gotham and Metropolis… while allowing Boston to marinate in its own saltwater, spilled Guinness and seething, neverending rage at Manhattan. And while the Justice League does its level best to save everyone who isn’t in Boston, Aquaman’s brother is busy amassing an invasion force in Boston Harbor, with plans to sink the city to the bottom of the ocean – think Billy Joel’s Miami 2017, only instead of references to the Yankees and 42nd Street, it’s about the Red Sox and Lansdowne Street, and it’s not sung by some piano-playing wuss from Steinbrennerburg.

As a native Bostonian, I’m beginning to develop a persecution complex. Well, an even worse persecution complex.

But that kind of reaction will tend to happen when we’re in the second issue of a crossover event, and there is a lot of parallelization with the plot and events of the first issue, without very much forward motion or momentum from the first chapter in Justice League, although there is a pretty good cliffhanger at the end… even while Fenway Park is filled with Rays and Marlins – and not the good kinds from Tampa Bay or, well, wherever the hell in Florida the Marlins play what they pretend is baseball.

All About Mara – Review Of Mara #1

Ok, pop quiz hot shot: you’re a 17 year-old, wildly successful and famous celebrity athlete, you have recently taken on new sponsorship, and, at the opening volley of an exhibition game against a group of much younger girls, you manifest super powers. What do you do? What do you do?

The answer? Probably not what Mara Prince, the protagonist of writer Brian Wood’s new comics effort, Mara does. Well, not unless you, like Mara, are 17 years old and, therefore, are probably prone to making age related poor decisions. But, more on that later.

Wood’s story is set in a distant, or maybe not so distant, future. One in which athletes and their accomplishments are raised onto pedestals and worshiped with cult-like fervor. This athlete-centric culture has so permeated society that the world’s armies are now made up of soldiers who are the beneficiaries of endorsements and competitive contracts, drastically changing the nature of the near constant state of war in which the countries of this world find themselves, as soldiers fight for personal glory rather than country. In fact, this system has created “a multi-trillion dollar industry, producing perfect athletes and soldiers.” So, what happens when one of these products becomes a little too perfect?

Flags on the play, and spoilers, after the jump.

You Damn Fool! You’re More Useless Than Aquaman: Justice League #15 Review

Since last year’s New 52 relaunch, Geoff Johns has made it his personal mission to rehabilitate Aquaman’s reputation. Which is a somewhat Quixotic task, since Aquaman never had much of a reputation to begin with. I remember years ago, when superhero Underoos were finally released for sale, my mom brought me to the store late enough that all that were left were Aquaman Underoos… and I told her that I would rather parade around the schoolyard in tightie-whities than suffer the indignity of having to pretend to be Aquaman. I was 28. But that’s not the point.

But hey, everyone has an unlikely dream that they harbor deep in their hearts, and I don’t begrudge Johns his, even though I don’t think he’s quite delivered on it thus far. Hey, I have the secret fantasy that someday I, a bloated and drunken 41-year-old, can smack the home run that wins the Boston Red Sox their third World Series victory since 1918 despite never having played even Little League baseball, so I’m not gonna rank Johns out too much for his dream to make Aquaman cool, despite it arguably having a lower chance at success than mine.

After fifteen months of chasing the dragon, Johns has begin phase two of his unlikely Aquaman resuscitation (actually, given Aquaman’s inability to carry his own book for longer than seven years despite more than 70 years of history, perhaps “presuscitation” is a better word) by making Aquaman the focus of a big Justice League event, Throne of Atlantis. So finally, Johns has his main chance to give Aquaman some relevance, not only in his own title but in the DC Universe proper, by making the poor, fishfucking sonofabitch the focus of a story… but for it to work, the story better be a good one.

It’s No Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: New Trailer For DC Nation’s Young Justice

It’s been a few months since Cartoon Network yanked Young Justice and Green Lantern: The Animated Series off of their broadcast lineup with literally no notice – my TiVo tried to grab them as usual that morning, and instead I was presented with hi-def recordings of Kick Taintowski: Suburban Pervert Bait or some such foolishness – and fans of the shows waited quite a while to get any specific information about when the shows would return beyond a Tweet from the channel promising “January.”

Well, a couple of weeks ago Cartoon Network finally announced that both shows would be returning on January 5th at 10 a.m., with the episodes that were supposed to air back in October before the decided that more airings of Amazing World of Gummy Balls or whatever the fuck it’s called would be more lucrative.

And as an added bonus, the channel has released a trailer for Young Justice to give us a taste of what we’re in for (hint: it includes punching). You can check it out after the jump.

Excelsior! Stan Lee Turns 90

Hey ladies! Check out my Hulk!

It has been an eventful week for Marvel Comics. First, they killed Peter Parker. Then, they made Doctor Octopus take over as Spider-Man.

And today, Marvel’s Chairman Emeritus, Stan Lee, has turned 90 years old.

Now, if I were 90 years old, I would either be spending my days farting into my La-Z-Boy while simultaneously watching The Price Is Right and screeching at that bitch of a hospice nurse to ladle some Jack Daniels into my IV, or else busily being dead having found a situation I couldn’t shoot my way out of. But Stan is still going strong; he was recently here in Massachusetts for the Supermegafest, and I haven’t been to a San Diego Comic-Con where the guy wasn’t running around like he’d just done his last bump of Merry Marvel Marching Powder and was hunting down his next score.

And the dude is still going strong… at least strong enough to give Dan Slott shit over his most recent Spider-Man stories:

Next Is Lonely Street, Because I Am A Drunken Goon: Worcester, MA To Rename Street To Lois Lane

Proving once again that, around the Christmas / New Year’s holidays, every day is a slow comics news day, it has come to our attention that our hometown of Boston’s sister city, Worcester – New England’s undisputed capital of affordable heroin since 1974! – is undergoing a little urban renewal. Specifically, surrounding the name of one of the downtown streets. A street near the That’s Enterntainment comic store on Park Avenue. A small, private street currently known as Marmon Place. Next to a comic book store.

Yeah, you probably guessed it: Worcester is renaming Marmon Place to Lois Lane.

Sticky Fingers: Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 Review

Editor’s Note: With great spoilers must come great responsibility. More or less.

Okay, so Peter Parker is “dead,” and Otto Octavius is Spider-Man now. Whether you agree with how Dan Slott did it or not, it’s the way things are for the time being. And given that Spider-Man appears regularly in four different comic books that I can think of off the top of my head, if you have any intention of following Marvel Comics – particularly the Avengers books – for the next year or so, you’re going to need to come to terms with this new Spider-Man, and get to know what Otto’s like now that he’s Spider-Man, and what makes him tick. You know, besides being suddenly able to walk, see his own junk without a mirror, and leer at Mary Jane (and make no mistake, it will just be leering; if you follow Dan Slott’s Twitter feed, you know that he’s bought himself enough trouble without setting himself up to be confronted by women in red wigs at every comic convention, asking him why he supports date rape via deception in his comics).

Marvel Editorial, possibly realizing that killing Peter on December 26th and leaving readers to wait two weeks for the debut of The Superior Spider-Man on January 9th would only give the most rankled ones more opportunity to figure out how to plant hooker toes on Slott and then dime the police, made the decision to give us the first real taste of the new Spider-Man in Avenging Spider-Man #15.1, released this week in parallel with The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

So: what do we get in our first full issue of Doc Ock as Spider-Man? Scenes of a former villain embracing the responsibility that comes with his newfound power? Or does he frantically masturbate to Pete’s iPhone gallery of Mary Jane pictures before going to the barber, handing over his favorite bowl and saying, “Just follow this”?

Short, But Sweet…

Unless you’ve been off planet, you’ve probably noticed that news of the shake-up in the Marvel Universe, due to the events in Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man, has even made it into the mainstream news. So, it’s probably just as well that it was a light week for most of the other books, what with the holidays and all interrupting normal publishing schedules. Between ASM stealing most of the comic news thunder and the after effects of holiday hangovers, it’s just a little hard to concentrate right now here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives home office.

Which means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

Not a bad little take: Amazing Spider-Man #700 (a double sized monstrosity or extravaganza, depending on where you fall with that series final resolution), Avenging Spider-Man #15.1 (which has a first glimpse of “The Superior Spider-Man”), Justice League #15, and, because there are still books in the world not published by Marvel or DC, Mara, by Brian Wood, Ming Doyle and Jordie Bellaire.

And, as ever, before we can review them, we need to read ’em. Which means we need to stop our hands from shaking long enough to turn some pages. Which means we need to get to the liquor store before it closes. So, until then…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

End of The (Web) Line: Amazing Spider-Man #700 Review

Editor’s Note: Better Yet, with my unparalleled genius — and my boundless ambitions — I’ll be a better Spoiler-Man than you ever were.

I hated Star Trek: Generations. Yes, I know this is a review of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, but just bear with me for a second.

The climax of Generations featured the death of Captain Kirk. If I’m remembering correctly (and if I’m not, screw it; I’m not watching that pile of shit again), a bunch of scaffolding collapsed on Kirk, killing him slowly due to internal injuries. “It was… fun,” Kirk said. “Fuck this bullshit,” I said.

The problem wasn’t that Kirk died. The problem was the way that Kirk died. Sure, he went down fighting evil, and he did it even knowing that no one would ever know that he did what he did, and that’s fine… but there is no way on God’s Green Earth that James Tiberius Kirk dies due to shitty construction and a bad step. It is wrong, and it is anti-climactic.

You want to kill Jim Kirk? There is only one way he dies: he goes down with the ship.

With that let’s turn an eye to The Amazing Spider-Man #700.

There is a lot in this comic book that writer Dan Slott does reasonably well. He shows two mortal enemies locked in battle, and demonstrates that at least in terms of intelligence, they are pretty evenly matched. He clearly spent some time thinking about Internet gutter wits (Hey Mom! I’m on the Internet!) looking for plot holes and preemptively plugging them, and gives a reasonable explanation for how and why the combatant who survives will act in the way he must for the ongoing conceit to even remotely have legs. And he gave himself an out for the new status quo… which I think we all know isn’t really the new normal. After all, let’s remember that , in the past five or six years, Marvel has killed and resurrected Captain America and Thor twice each. Big name characters in the Marvel Universe get killed and rise from the grave so often they make Jesus look like D-Man.

And yes, someone does die here, however temporarily. And Slott does his best to make that death emotional and moving, and succeeds up to a point. Problem is, that death doesn’t feel earned… and it is the equivalent of dying in a Goddamned scaffolding collapse.

So who dies, and is it all worth it? Well, let’s talk about that after the jump, with one warning: after that jump, there will be spoilers.

Happy Boxing Day – Review Of Joe Palooka #1

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the comics of 12/19/2012 before the comic store open…

From the 1920s and well into the middle of the 20th century, American comics press had a tradition of popularizing idealized characters as heroes – hard bitten detectives like Dick Tracy, plucky orphans who make good like Little Orphan Annie, and tenacious fighters with tender hearts like Joe Palooka.

Created by cartoonist Ham Fisher, Joe Palooka had a very successful run as a syndicated comic strip from 1930 until 1984. At its peak, it ran in 900 newspapers and spawned radio spots, a television show and a movie. The American public continues to demonstrate a soft spot for its fighters, to which the popularity and critical acclaim of such movies as Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter can attest. Even as straight up boxing has moved from weekend afternoon sports coverage on networks to cable and pay-per-view programming, viewers still can get their pugilism fix through any of a number of mixed martial arts programs, like Ultimate Fighting Championship or StrikeForce. So, it’s no surprise that characters inspired by MMA fighters are finding their way back into the comics medium, as with Blair Butler’s 2011 series Heart.

Joe Antonacci, a veteran ringside announcer of boxing and MMA matches, now owns the trademark to Joe Palooka and has rebooted the character as an ongoing comic book series. Joe Palooka, also known in this new book as Nick Davis, is an up and coming MMA fighter with a background in bare knuckle boxing from his time growing up as a child of migrant farm workers. The story has been mapped out by the creative team of Antonacci, with creative partners Matt Triano and Mike Bullock. Bullock also scripted the issue. Art is handled by Fernando Peniche with Bob Pedroza on colors.

So, how does Joe Palooka hold up to his modernization?

Our hero’s spoiler filled origins, after the jump!