Finish Him: Injustice: Gods Among Us #2 Review

Editor’s Note: These spoilers take place before the start of the video game.

Years and years of reading comics have taught me that, with almost no exceptions whatsoever, comic adaptations of other mediums are normally not very good. Sure, there’s Alien: The Illustrated Story, and there’s the original Star Wars adaptation by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, but let’s face reality: in those heady, pre-VCR days of 1977, they could have had Amanda’s cousin Little Billy draw the damn thing and we’d have bought it.

Even worse are the comic book adaptations, which are generally even worse than the TV and movie ones, dating all the way back to Atari Force which, despite the obvious nostalgia for the book by Ernest Cline, might have been an awesome read for video game fans, but wasn’t all that great a shake for actual comic readers. Hell, in 1984 I was a 13-year-old comic book fan who owned the first Atari on our block (back when it was the Atari Video Computer System, before they renamed it the 2600) and I still thought that comic sucked. And the reason video game adaptations almost never work is for a very simple reason: in a comic book, you are a spectator, but it an video game, it is you. And no matter how good the story in the video game is, no comic book ever really captures that feeling of you being in the driver’s seat.

And while I’ll readily admit that I generally don’t seek out video game based comics because, well, I don’t usually like them, there has been one in the past couple of years that was pretty damn good, and that was an issue of DC Universe Online, written by Tom Taylor, that took the conceit of a Green Lantern expansion pack in the video game and used it to examine some of DC’s Lantern characters, and some real questions of moral ambiguity. It was successful because it while it was ostensibly about the video game, it instead used the game as an excuse to make it really about the characters, who just happened to be in this situation. By completely ignoring the first person element of video games, Taylor succeeded in making a pretty good comic book.And this continues in his second issue of the comic adaptation of the upcoming fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us. As a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, most comic books about it would be wall-to-wall dudes in spandex smacking on each other. But instead, Taylor makes this book about the characters leading up to whatever causes the dudes in spandex to smack on each other in the game… and even though you will see more than a little of Mark Millar’s The Authority in this issue, it is still vastly better than a simple comic book adaptation has any right to be.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 5: The Stroke of Justice

Chest colds gone? Check! Big comics shit to talk about? Check! Clean, sober and ready to put on a professional Internet radio show? Fuck you!

It’s the fifth episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast, where we talk about:

• Marvel’s staffing decisions, or: With Great Responsibility Comes No Salary, or: Trabajará para el alimento!
• Tony Stark: Great Drunk or the Greatest Drunk?
• The killer of Batman’s parents: Great Drunk or the Greatest Drunk?
• Watchmen Sequels: Great Drunken Decision or Drunken Decision?
• Batman: Arkham City: S***faced Batman, and:
• Our sleeper picks of the week, or: Great Drunken Comic Reviews or Fuck You You Don’t Know Me!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:56 — 34.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

For The Horde – I Mean The Sinestro Corps! DC Universe Online Legends #16 Review

If you’re one of those people who’s screaming self-righteously that there was no need for DC’s New 52 and that everything was fine in the old DC Universe and that your book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland will be available in paperback in November, you do still have an option available… kinda.

Since the launch of the DC Universe Online massive multiplayer online roleplaying game back in January, DC has been putting out what should amount to a three-dollar advertisement to the game: DC Universe Online Legends. It’s an old instinct for these MMORPG companies: people love the continuing stories in the game, so make some quick bank by putting out a comic based on the continuing stories in the game! It’s the kind of cross-media pollination to create market synergy that makes marketing people hard and other people want to set marketing people on fire.

Almost exclusively, these books fail on both a marketing and artistic level, because the publishers generally treat them like what they are: a financed, short-term cash-grab. Seriously: what talent are you going to put on a book with characters you don’t that’ll be canceled the day the game servers get shut down? Frank Miller? Yeah, try Francois Jean-Baptiste Charlemagne Milloirse, and even then only if he agrees to run his own script through Babelfish to save on translation costs.

So DC Universe Online Legends should suck… except DC owns these characters, they have a financial interest in how well the game does, and the marketing actually makes sense: if someone who never read comics tries the game (Let’s say his friends told him there were girls in there – there aren’t, by the way), there’s at least a CHANCE that they could wander into a comic store looking to learn more.

The upside to this for comic fans is that the development cycle of an MMORPG is significantly longer than it takes for Dan DiDio to say, “Fuck it! DO-OVER!”, which means that if you have a rage-on over the fact that Superman’s underpants aren’t on the outside anymore, this book has been a safe haven. In addition, since DC has a vested interest in making the book at least decent, they started out by putting A-List talent like Marv Wolfman on the book.

With that said, Marv’s arc on the book is over, and the game just put out an expansion pack containing a bunch of Green Lantern stuff, so DC Universe Online #16 is just a Green Lantern story. And since Green Lantern was hardly affected at all by the New 52 reboot, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between this book and the DCnU proper.

Still, this is a pretty good book if you’re a Green Lantern fan.

Hey, Kids! Comics! And Diabetes!

When I was a kid, my Mom would sometimes buy me a comic book out of the grocery store spinner rack to shut me up about not buying me the sugary cereals I was always screaming about (Although to be fair, one time she did buy me a box of Lucky Charms to get a hold of the Six Million Dollar Man sticker prize I spent days obsessing over after I saw the TV commercials. Then she picked out all the marshmallows while I cried. I was 32. But I digress).

But that was 1978. It’s 2011 now, and the spinner rack disappeared sometime around, well, 1978. So if you want your kid to shut the fuck up about buying them Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs with a comic book, well, you’ll have to buy them Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.

The New York Times is reporting that DC Comics and General Mills are gonna be announcing, sometime during this weekend’s New York Comic Con, a deal to distribute four specially-printed issues of Justice League to be dumped into nutritious fare such as Trix, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and my old nemesis: Lucky Charms.