batman_21_cover_2013DC Comics just wrapped up an event called the DC Retailer Roadshow in New York, which is not an event to which I was invited, due to the fact that I am not a comics retailer, and thanks to ugly rumors spread by the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop including the word “taser” in sentences that also include the phrase, “If I ever get face-to-face with Dan DiDio.”

A gentleman named Roderick Ruth, however, was there, and filed a report on the proceedings. Which included the normal stuff you would expect from a meeting with retailers – hype about the upcoming Trinity War event, addressing concerns that DC isn’t giving retailers enough information to appropriately order high-demand books like the one where Robin died, what have you – but it also included an interesting tidbit about Scott Snyder’s Batman origin story Zero Year, which just started last week.

That tidbit being that there will be crossover stories with Zero Year appearing not only in some of the Bat titles, but also in Action Comics, Flash, Green Arrow and Green Lantern Corps.

Wait, what?

batman_21_cover_2013I bought Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, back when it was just Batman #404 through #407, from the spinner rack at my local supermarket for 75 cents a piece.

That story was a stone classic from the word go, right from the first issue, which opened with James Gordon telling us what a hell on Earth Gotham City was, and ending with Bruce Wayne not only bleeding out, but willing to bleed out unless he found some inspiration to make his war on crime more sustainable and effective than just trying to stomp out local goons. You know the images; we all know the images: the giant bat crashing violently through the window, the smile on Bruce’s face, and the bloody hand on the bell to call Alfred, with the caption, “Yes, Father… I shall become a bat…”

I can spin that sequence of panels off from memory because Batman: Year One is Frank Miller, in 88 tight pages, telling one of the greatest Batman stories ever told (on the tails of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which is the greatest Batman story ever told, and I’ll fight any man what says different), and cementing his position as one of the greatest comic storytellers ever, regardless of any future paranoid writings or rantings.

That was in 1987. It is now 2013, and we have the first issue of Zero Year, written by Scott Snyder, on the tails of Death of The Family, one of the best Batman / Joker stories in recent memory. Just based on the title, Zero Year is meant to elicit in us memories of Year One. And based on the events of this first issue of Zero Year, it covers some, if not all, of the same period of Batman’s career that Year One did.

Look, don’t get your hopes up here. Zero Year #1 / Batman #21 isn’t on the same level as Batman: Year One #1 / Batman #404, and I think we all knew that it wasn’t gonna be. After all, there is only one first love of your life, and when it comes to Batman stories, Frank Miller and Batman: Year One got to anyone old enough to buy comic books with their own money long before Scott Snyder ever put a word in Batman’s mouth. So I could sit here all day and compare the new book – or pretty much any other modern comic book – negatively to the old one, but that really doesn’t matter.

What matters is: does Zero Year #1 hold up on its own as a good Batman story?

Things did not proceed smoothly here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives home office this morning. Blasted awake at the Crack of Ungodly by well meaning employees of our condo association in the midst of the annual community-wide fire alarm check, Rob and I have been staggering through the remainder of the day in a haze that copious amounts of caffeine and sugar can’t quite seem to cut. We are moments away from breaking out the Jack Daniels, calling the day a wash, and drinking ourselves back to sleep. However, as bad a day as we think we might be having, it’s not as bad as the one Batman is having in this episode of Bad Days, a show that is featured on the YouTube channel for Stan Lee’s World Of Heroes.

I always knew Robin was more trouble than he was worth.

Sayonara, kids. I’m going to crack open this whiskey, settle in for a few Cocktails With Stan, and go back to bed.

Via Geeks Are Sexy

francavilla_batsploitation_preview1473236329It is no secret that we are fans of artist Francesco Francavilla here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives. The guy does pulp art like no one else we’ve seen working in comics today, and be it covers or interior art, he brings a unique, retro look to everything he puts his hands on.

And normally that retro look is targeted at the 1930s and 1940s; after all, a guy who does pulp-style art is almost naturally gonna focus on the golden age of pulp fiction. However, pulp fiction is an attitude, not a time period – let’s remember that Quentin Tarantino made a kinda famous pulp fiction story in 1994 that looked like it came straight from 1975. And Francavilla seems to know this, because he has just posted some drawings to his blog of Batman… if Batman were created for a cheapie grindhouse film you might catch in Times Square back when it was worth your Goddamned life to go into Times Square.

And no, Francavilla’s Batman in 1972 isn’t a hairy-chested shirtless guy in a cowl swordfighting with Ras Al Ghul.

To keep him in “the part”, my Batman smokes, wear a leather coat and a turtleneck, and drives a cool 70s BatMobile (an OldsMobile maybe? 😉 I still need to decide on brand and model.

Of course, as usually it happens in these cases, I start to flesh out all the other characters/stars of the story. Pictured above we have Selina Kyle, aka Foxy CATWOMAN, Lieutenant Jim Gordon (with period appropriate ‘stache ;)) and Ed Nygma AKA The Riddler.

Yes, you are witnessing the first case of BATPLOITATION. Hope ya dig it.

Sounds interesting, huh? Well, you can check out some of the pictures after the jump.

batman_arkham_origins_logo-1861097187Comics aren’t the only thing in my life, you know. I am also somewhat of a home theater enthusiast, to the point where I have built my own home theater PC (Think a TiVo, only with 4.5 terabytes of storage space, that also plays home video, music, and online media, as well as skipping commercials automatically on recorded TV, and all without a byte of digital rights management), run by a small universal infrared sensor to read commands from a standard remote control.

I also just bought and wall-mounted a sick plasma TV to replace my old DLP projection job and – funny story – didja know that plasma TVs, as well as having the best contrast available, also spit out a bunch of infrared noise? Noise that, say, a universal infrared sensor can see? And try to constantly process? Making the PC that’s listening to that sensor as dumb as a brick?

However, being a clever man, I thought of a fix that requires only a small cardboard jewelry box. Really: that’s it. Well, that and about $400 of obscure hobbyist parts that require extensive programming and tweaking to allow a line-of-sight infrared sensor to listen to a remote control while the sensor is crammed into a small cardboard jewelry box.

All of which is a long way to go to explain that I am extremely busy today – trying to turn a bracelet box into an electronic home theater component will do that to you – but I do have one thing for you: Batman: Arkham Origins, the sequel to the excellent Arkham Asylum and Arkham City videogames, is due out this coming October, and the producers have released the first teaser video for the game, featuring Batman kicking the shit out of a low-level bad guy. A low level bad guy named Deathstroke. And you can check it out after the jump

grant_morrisonIt is not a secret, if you peruse the Batman or Grant Morrison tags on this Web site, that we are not necessarily fans of Grant Morrison’s seven-year Batman story that has run through the primary Batman title, Final Crisis and, most recently, Batman Incorporated… although the recent death of Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated #8 was satisfying in the way that hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is: it feels so damn good when you stop.

Part of why Morrison’s long-form story has never completely grabbed us is that, as a generation who grew to love comics into adulthood partially due to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, we don’t have a lot of love or need for Batman stories from the 50s and 60s, when Batman was surrounded ridiculous leering villains who tied up the young boy who lived with Batman, not only giving the character a dull edge, but giving the jocks reasons to give us swirlies from junior high until our growth spurts occurred.

So Morrison’s embrace of the tropes of some of those early stories simply didn’t work for us, as we were unable to really understand why Morrison would bring up those old stories that got us so savagely beaten back in the early 80s. Morrison, however, has gone on record with his through process for including that entire weird and often campy history into his Batman story, in a podcast with Kevin Smith, that YouTube user swank has excerpted and paired with illustrations from the history of Batman. And while the story still leaves me lukewarm, it explains the logic behind the decisions Morrison made… and you can check the whole thing out after the jump.

batman_20_cover_2013Dear creators working in DC’s Batman office: there is a product available on the Internet called Skype. It is free. And it allows you create a virtual conference room, where you can invite any number of people to join, and then, you know, talk to each other.

I say this because there is obviously no communication happening about how Bruce Wayne is handling the death of his son. The writer of that death, Grant Morrison, has Bruce sucking down Man-Bat serum and going on a revenge rampage over in Batman Incorporated. Peter Tomasi has Batman scouring the world looking for a way to bring Damian back to life, including the psychological torture of the last Robin to get killed on his watch this month, and making an attack on fucking Frankenstein for answers last month.

And Scott Snyder, the writer of the main Batman title? Well, as a guy who has to turn in a comic book during this whole, sudden, “Damian’s-Dead” shitstorm, he has Batman affected by the event in the margins, while making the meat of the story a decent, if workmanlike, two-and-done featuring an antagonist no one really cares about, and a big Easter Egg in this week’s Batman #20 to delight the rubes (I was certainly delighted). However, as a guy who has reached A-List status at DC in the past year and a half, with arguably as much pull as Morrison, Snyder has clearly said, “Um, yeah: I’ll give you a couple issues mentioning this death, but this is Grant’s problem. I think I’m gonna scrap my Riddler plans and do a year-long story set in the past while you guys deal with the fallout from the whims of that crazy Scottish fucker.”

So if it seems every Batman writer has picked a different stage of grief to stick Bruce Wayne into over the death of his son, Snyder has clearly chosen “Acceptance.” Which means, at the very least, that it is the less histrionic of the two Batman titles on the stands this week. But the question is: is that enough to make it any good?

batman_and_red_hood_20_cover_2013Batman And Red Hood (previously named Batman & Robin but recently renamed due to Robin being occupied by a previous engagement with a dirtnap) #20 is finally proof – to me, at least – that when Grant Morrison killed Robin in Batman Incorporated, he really didn’t tell anyone what he was planning to do ahead of time. Because the only possible explanation I can think of for a comic like Batman And Red Hood #20 to exist is that the creative team had to come up something – any damn thing – to fill the pages that was at least somewhat on point with this dead kid they suddenly found themselves saddled with.

Seriously: sudden, blinding panic is the only explanation for some of the things we’re seeing in this issue. Trying to introduce some version of Carrie Kelley that we’ve never seen before is a bad enough flailing grasp from a creative team realizing that they’re buying groceries with the money made from a book with the name “Robin” in the title. But it also is the only explanation for, hell, almost the remainder of the book. There are so many problems with this issue, from off character moments to weird methods of attack that make no sense to a couple of legitimate “what the fuck?” panels that I have to believe the issue was whipped together at the last minute in a pants-shitting panic.

Because otherwise, I need to believe that a writer of a Batman comic book would think that Batman would engage in a drive-by shooting in the interest of resurrecting the dead.

Yeah, you heard me.

batman_incorporated_10_cover_2013Editor’s Note: Criminals are a cowardly, spoilered lot…

On my initial readthrough of Batman Incorporated #10, I was fully prepared to lower the boom on writer Grant Morrison. Here’s why.

Did you ever get really drunk or high and have an epiphany? One of those moments where, seriously under the influence of something, you realize something that is so seemingly obvious that you can’t believe nobody else ever came up with the idea, yet so seemingly transcendant and perfect that you firmly and totally believe, in your stupor, that your idea will change things deep down at their core? So you stumble around and you find a piece of paper and a pen and you write it down… and then you wake up in the morning, praying for relief and wondering if you should consider shaving your tongue, and you find the piece of paper… and it says something like “pizza beer.” Or maybe “Dorito-flavored rolling papers.” And you look at that piece of paper, and you think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty obvious idea… but it’s also really kind of obviously stupid,” and you chuck the piece of paper and you lurch into the sunlight, looking for greasy food.

In a bunch of ways, Batman Incorporated #10 lives and dies by that kind of late-night, shitfaced, obvious idea that never survives the harsh light of day… except Morrison missed that part where you sober up and realize that the whole concept is a little on-the-nose and kinda dumb.

Yeah, I was ready to do that. And on a lot of levels, I still am: the final reveal on the last page (not like it’s much of a reveal, given the book’s WTF gatefold cover that gives up the ghost before page one) simply stinks of a guy ripped to the tits on absinthe and psilocybin screeching, “Wait a second, wait a second and hear me out… what if Batman… actually was a bat? Stop laughing and gimme that one-hitter…” But with that said, there’s some decent imagery here, a tease that some characters we saw months ago might come back into play in an unexpected way, and a tease that Talia might be facing some trouble on all fronts.

But that ending really should’ve been held until someone sobered up, man.

batman_19_gatefold_cover_2013Editor’s Note: Your have eaten Gotham’s wealth. Its spoilers. From now on, none of you are safe.

Is there anyone who saw the teaser for the WTF cover of Batman #19 and didn’t know pretty much automatically that it was probably Clayface impersonating Bruce Wayne? And more importantly, is there anyone in the comics reading world who really gives a tin shit about Clayface?

I mean, the concept of Clayface has been around 1940, and even after all that time, it’s not like Clayface is anybody’s idea of a classic character. Because even though there is clearly enough behind the concept of a shapeshifting supervillain to keep Clayface popping up now and again for the past 63 years, let’s face reality: there have been eight different Clayfaces since Detective Comics #40. The only reason to revamp a “classic” villain on an average of every eight years is if there is something fundamentally wrong with it.

The fact of the matter is “Clayface” is nothing but a set of powers behind a grotesque body, with next to no personality behind it. Hell, I’ve been reading Batman comics for 37 years, and I couldn’t tell you any of the Clayface’ origin stories, or what motivates them to crime as opposed to, say, looking at my dripping, earthy face and attempting suicide. Or maybe shifting into Brad Pitt and trying to impersonate myself into a better life (although if you’re old enough to remember Angelina Jolie back when she drank blood and was married to Billy Bob Thornton, you might think she’d be more into the whole monster thing).

My point is, I don’t think anyone really cares about Clayface. And Clayface is the antagonist of Batman #19. So the question is: does writer Scott Snyder finally do anything interesting with the character?

Short answer: nah. Not really.