Are you reading Demon Knights by Paul Cornell and artist Diogenes “Best Name Ever” Neves yet? Why not? Do I need to come over there? Read this book, damn it!

I could stop there and make this the shortest review ever, but I won’t.

Here’s why you should be reading this book:
(*spoilery goodness after the jump*)

DC Comics’ New York Comic Con panel on their Edge / Dark line of New 52 books happened today, and while we haven’t come across any specific coverage of the panel yet that we can cannibalize, regurgitate and spit back at it in lieu of actual journalism Rob: edit this shit out now. We can at least act like we know what the fuck we’re doing -Amanda

Whoops! Sorry, technical difficulties, folks! Sorry about that. As I was clearly saying, while we haven’t been able to diligently ferret out any details about what happened in the panel, DC’s Source blog helpfully published the covers to the upcoming Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #5 and OMAC #5, by J.J. Jones and Keith Giffen respectively, which you can see after the jump:

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.

We here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives finally kicked the cold and got healthy! And then we celebrated with cheap liquor and got sick a different way, so once again, here we are, a day late and a dollar… where’s our f***ing dollar!?

In this week’s episode, we drool over the new trailer for the Avengers movie, we thank DC Comics for announcing that they’ll be selling comics on the Amazon Kindle Fire (When we bought a f***ing Barnes & Noble Nook Color six months ago) by speculating which New 52 book will be canceled first (and which should be canceled first), and talk about our sleeper books of the week!

In addition:

  • Amanda would like to announce that she was incorrect when she said that Alex Maleev was the creator of Echo! She meant to say it was Jesus!
  • Here’s Rob’s review of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode!
  • While tomorrow we will be posting a full-on video of the Avengers trailer in family-friendly and buggy Flash video, here’s the Quicktime edition so that Steve Jobs can cockblock you with upgrade warnings from the grave!
  • And simply look up and to the left to see happens when you Google “Captain America Liefeld Boobs”! (via Grotesque Anatomy)

Enjoy the show, suckers! And if you don’t, we’ll show you what happens when you Google “Liefeld Mantits No Seriously Just Liefeld’s Mantits”!

"Diana, please, I just want to get to know you." "Screw you, man! You're not my real dad!" "But, I have *alimony*..."

Look, frankly I was going to go to bed but, as I take after my own dad, I have an affinity for Scotch and rolling into work egregiously hungover. My liver knows its place and will do as its damn told. Now, what was I talking about…? Oh, yeah, Wonder Woman.

See, here’s the thing, today Josh Kushins posted this on the DCU Blog:

In DC COMICS-THE NEW 52, Wonder Woman will have a new origin, in which she is the daughter of Hippolyta … and Zeus! In recent interviews, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Cliff Chiang have teased that readers should expect the unexpected in this edgier, horror take on the superhero genre ­and the king of the gods will ensure that nothing goes as planned for his defiant daughter.

Originally created by the goddess Aphrodite and raised to perfection on the Amazon island of Themiscyra, the newest incarnation of Wonder Woman has a new costume and now a new origin ­ but she remains Wonder Woman. Strong. Proud. Fearless. WONDER WOMAN is the 12th title in DC COMICS-THE NEW 52 to sell more than a 100K copies.

UPDATE 10/12/2011: The September sales numbers have been released, and OMAC #1 actually sold 33,581 copies. So let’s make that purely speculative magic cancellation number a little closer to 15,000 copies. 

Last week Diamond, the company that distributes comics to retailers like my local comic store owner (Who knows me by name and asks me if I would please stop asking to use his bathroom right after buying tentacle hentai), announced the preliminary wholesale sales numbers for September, which include all of the DC New 52 books except for the first print of Justice League #1, which came out in August. There are no specific copies-sold numbers yet, but OMAC came in at number 82, behind all the other New 52 books… including Justice League #1, which came out in… fucking August.

Which is a bummer to hear, since clearly OMAC is growing on us here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives… and even more of a bummer when Bleeding Cool reported last week that it was already in danger of being canceled:

And it’s written by co-publisher [Dan DiDio] and [sic] the man who has been pushing for the relaunch so long. So here’s the thing – will it seem just to anyone if one of the other 52 is cancelled [sic] due to lower sales and the publisher’s own comic, O.M.A.C., survives? I doubt it. Dan DiDio may be forced to sacrifice one of his own…

Wow. That’s depressing. Guess I’d better yank the title off my subscription pull list. At the very least, it’ll be another three bucks toward tentacle porn, or at least two bucks with another buck toward the sock cleaning bill. I guess when God closes a door, he opens a – what’s that, OMAC inker Scott Koblish?

O.M.A.C is not in danger of being cancelled.

GO ON…

We’ve reached the end of the deluge of new #1’s from DC’s universal reboot. With the 52 all new, on-going titles established, DC is now releasing miniseries titles for characters whom they’d like to keep active in the universe but, for whatever reason, did not merit an on-going title. This week’s candidates include Huntress #1, a six issue run that IGN seems to think is set on Earth 2, but actually, according to DC will have events that will play into Birds of Prey (presumably in this universe). DC also released Penguin: Pain And Prejudice #1, which will outline the origins of The Penguin. On October 12, DC will release The Shade #1, which will have a 12 issue run. So, why did DC decide that these characters wouldn’t make the cut for an on-going series over the likes of some of the more marginal Wildstorm characters such as Voodoo or Grifter? The mind of Dan DiDio is a curious place indeed.

Cover to DC Comics OMAC #2, by Dan DiDio and Keith Giffen“Lemme see,” I said to my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me why his store always smells like a distillery explosion after I leave, “The New 52 week one books that we want to keep getting… definitely Detective Comics. Also Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Justice League International… we’ll call Batgirl ‘on the bubble,’ and, um…”

“Don’t forget OMAC,” Amanda chimed in.

“OMAC? Are you fucking kidding me? You read The Outsiders at the end of its run. Dan DiDio might be a good publisher or editor in chief, but whoever he answers to shouldn’t allow him to write anything longer than his own name.”

“Yeah, but I like Keith Giffen. And I really liked the end of the first issue. So I want to give it another shot.”

Sheesh. Wimmens, man. What’re you gonna do? So I made the commitment to spend another $2.99 a month because hey: I love her, and it isn’t gonna suck itself, and sandwich: I don’t have one, amirite?

Ow. Owwwww. Note to self: don’t write shit like that when you don’t mean it and when your girlfriend is your editor. But I digress.

So this past Wednesday OMAC #2 was, in fact, in my pile of subscription pulls, whether I really wanted it or not. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the better books of the week.

Just in time for GirlGeekCon in Seattle this weekend and New York Comic Con in, well, New York City, next weekend, we have a batch of ambitious cosplayers who are ready to embrace the design changes of the relaunched DCnU. Behold the winners of the most recent Gamma Squad cosplay costume contest:

What? No G'nort?

Cover to DC Comics The Savage Hawkman #1, written by Tony Daniel and art by Philip TanEditor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.

And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…

For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.

The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.

Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.

Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:

  1. Even Hawkman thinks that being Hawkman sucks, and:
  2. Hawkman’s power set is so weak that even Hawkman himself thinks he can be defeated by a roman candle.