…Dressed Up With A Lot of Flash and Thunder: The Flash #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review may contain spoilers. Or it may just contain my suspicion that “The Speed Force” comes in powdered form. You are warned.

Here’s the first problem I have with Francis Manapul’s and Brian Buccellato’s New 52 reboot of The Flash: it’s not Mike Baron’s and Jackson Guice’s 1987 post-Crisis reboot of The Flash. To me, that book is the definitive reboot.

It put a new guy in the costume. It completely rethought how the powerset worked – to my knowledge, Mike Baron was the first person to make the mental leap that moving at that speed would require a lot of food and sleep to maintain… something he probably extrapolated from his prodigious use of cocaine. In short: it changed everything, and in doing so, it made it fascinating.

So when I read Manapul’s and Buccellato’s Flash, I kept wishing that I was actually reading Baron’s for the first time… and not just because it would mean that I was 17 years old and 175 pounds again. But also because this book, while beautiful, is completely uneven.

Hey, Kids! Sausage! or: (One Hundred) Thirty Pieces of Silver

It’s almost Halloween, comics fans! So you want to see something really scary?

That’s the check. The check that Jack Liebowitz , publisher of National Allied Publications, doing business as Detective Comics, Inc., cut to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, for the rights to Superman. Forever. In perpetuity.

For a hundred and thirty clams. Or about two grand in today’s dollars. Which means that in Manhattan prices, they were paid about a case of beer, a carton of cigarettes and a week at the YMCA. In exchange for fucking Superman.

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)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

Enjoy the show, suckers!

The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Batman #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers about Batman #2. Spoilers I wouldn’t have to reveal if the creative team had been a little more specific in Batman #1. You’ve been warned.

So there’s one theory down the shitter.

With one throwing knife from a dude in an owl costume, it appears we can bid a fond farewell to mayoral candidate Lincoln March and my prediction that he would become a supervillain named The March Hare. Which, I suppose, makes sense considering that DC has revealed that the villain in The Dark Knight #3 is going to be a chick called The White Rabbit (pictured here).

And while a crazed villain with the power of the mayor’s office behind him would normally seem somewhat more threatening than a top-heavy babe spilling out of a corset with two convenient handles on her head, considering since the New 52 started we’ve seen – literally, SEEN – Batman bone two different chicks with the same body type, I’m guessing we’ll see The White Rabbit be far more effective at making Batman go down. Er, taking Batman down. Whatever. I’m digressing again.

Batman #2, by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, simultaneously continues the fine form shown in Batman #1 while showing the inherent weaknesses in writing comics for the trade, particulaly when that comic is a detective story.

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.

Let’s Put These Jokers Through Some Changes

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, because I am neck-deep in Batman: Arkham City, I have beer that I need to render safe for children by using my superpower of turning beer into pee, and I wish to combine these two activities, culminating in an uberactivity of wandering the house, “controller” in hand, screaming, “Who wants to give Batman a handjob?”

That said, I feel compelled to at least comment on a rumor that’s been going around the comics world for the past couple of days. I can’t confirm or deny it because, well, I’m just a drunken comic fan who doesn’t know anyone in the industry to ask if it’s true and then stab if they tell me it is.

I’ll just start with asking you to remember the source. Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool traffics in comics gossip. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not… but the last time this rumor came up, Alan Moore himself said there was some truth to it.

Two days ago, Bleeding Cool mentioned that Watchmen prequels at DC were back on the agenda, after the success of the New 52. That meetings were happening this week. That it had the code name “Panic Room”. That names mentioned included Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, Darwyn Cooke, JMS, JG Jones, Andy Kubert and more.

Indeed I am now told that there will be four Watchmen miniseries, all prequels. Working off an over-arching uber-plot by Darwyn, who will be writing and drawing on aa [sic] book or two.

I believe the phrase I’m looking for is “this shit just got real”.

My first reaction to this news was the same as it was when I first heard it two years ago:

No no no no no no no no

We Interupt Our Field Trip To Batman: Arkham City To Bring You This

Yup, it’s a snippet from The Killing Joke. Animated. With Legos.

That being said, if there was The Killing Joke downloadable content for Lego Batman I would totally play the shit out of that. Until the Batman: Arkham franchises came along, Lego Batman was the only Batman game worth playing.

Yeah. I said that.

Now, back to Arkham City.

Quick Hits: Princess Koriand’r Has Her Priorities Straight

Yep. Kori knows what she wants and it ain’t under the Red Hood:

via Tumblr

Well...duh.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear…

It is Wednesday, and while we apologize that recent posting and this week’s scheduled podcast have suffered due to a brand-new chest cold (Amanda: Rob, stop pretending your alcoholism is virally related and fetch me more Robitussin), we must still announce the end of our broadcast day for the following excellent reasons:

Now that is a fucking New Comics Day take! We’ve got the final issue of Marvel’s Fear Itself (And associated books like Invincible Iron Man), a new Neal Adams’ Batman: Odyssey, Batman and Wonder Woman #2, Mark Millar’s Superior, and…

…yeah, we got weak and bought Catwoman #2 and Red Hood and The Outlaws #2. Because we’re considering a new feature called Circling The Glory Hole for books that sucked once, to give them a chance to, well, suck or be sucked.

But on the plus side, there is also a new X-Factor and Atomic Robo. Which, if they are found at any glory hole, it is because they need, demand and deserve a blowjob.

And also, we’ve got Justice League #2, which apparently ships every six or seven weeks, making DC’s New 52 more like the New 51.57, which is the kind of math rounding I like, because that makes my wang seven inches even.

See you tomorrow, suckers!

With A Magic Word: REBOOT! I Mean: SHAZAM!

DC’s Justice League panel at the New York Comic Con was held earlier today – well, they called it the “Justice League” panel, but it pretty much had every creator on the New 52 except for Scott Lobdell, who rumor has it was unavilable due to a prior commitment to be in a fetal position, rocking, crying and ignoring the constant ring of the telephone.

There were a ton of revelations in the panel, one of which being that DC didn’t open the panel to questions from the audience until more than halfway through, which is a MAJOR departure from the DC panels we’ve see at SDCC since 2006, where Dan DiDio has historically said, “This is a panel about INSERT SUBJECT HERE! Let’s take questions!” Thanks again, San Diego Batgirl!

But one of the other bigger revelations was that DC is rebooting and relaunching Captain Marvel.