star_wars_1_jaxxon_variantEven though a big night out last night turned us into shattered wrecks only resembling human beings, we still had a lot to talk about this episode… starting with Marvel’s Star Wars #1, which reportedly will be selling more than 1,000,000 copies… even though Dark Horse’s very similar 2013-2014 Star Wars comic never sold even 50,000 copies in a month. So we try to figure out just where all these comic books are going. You know, besides the quarter bin.

We also talk about the information gleaned from the Sony Pictures leak that Sony has been in talks with Marvel Studios about bring Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We discuss where Marvel might fit Spidey in quickly, where he just wouldn’t work, what storylines they might use in a standalone Spider-Man movie, and who should play him (hint: with the Russo Brothers from Community possibly directing Avengers: Infinity War, it can only be… Chevy Chase! Wait, what?).

We also review:

  • Bitch Planet #1, written by Kelly Sue DeConnick with art by Valentine DeLandro, and:
  • Afterlife With Archie #7, written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa with art by Francesco Francavilla!

And, as usual, the disclaimers:

  • We record this show live to tape. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like a discussion about the fine line between a Disney toy and a marital aid.
  • We use a lot of spoilers in this show. While we try to shout out a heads-up ahead of time, consider yourself warned.
  • This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. Unless you want to explain to your employers who Sgt. Douchenozzle is, get yourself some headphones.

Enjoy the show, suckers!

afterlife_with_archie_4_cover_2014This isn’t going to be a long review, because it really doesn’t have to be… but I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that I originally picked up the first issue of Afterlife With Archie as a goof. It looked like a zombie movie for slightly older kids, with art by one of my current favorite artists, and it turned out to be more fun than I anticipated from an Archie book.

I picked up the second issue because I liked the first, and I liked it a lot more than the first, because it seemed that writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa was using the pretext of a zombie apocalypse to peel back the all-American veneer of Riverdale and examine a suburb with some dark secrets, kinda like the way David Lynch did in Twin Peaks.

We are now at the fourth issue. And this little book that I initially assumed would be a moderately dark and PG-13 violent horror-ish story for kids has gone completely and totally off the fucking rails. In a good way.

This Archie comic features, along with the ongoing zombie apocalypse, a family pet dying, incest and parricide. Let me repeat that: dead pet, brother / sister love, and parental murder. In Riverdale. From the Archie comics. In an Archie comic.

This makes Ed Brubaker’s Archie riff in Criminal: The Last of The Innocents, where the Archie analogue was a degenerate gambler and the Jughead analogue was a junkie, look damn near quaint.

francavilla_true_detective_2Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we have the full-boat cable TV package of all channels. This is because we are members of Generation X, which is the final generation to remember watching three channels of broadcast television as we waited for some cable TV provider to string coaxial to our doors. And even after the cable made it our door, many of us had the basic package while our peers saw tits and ass via Porky’s on HBO, because our parents were too cheap to subscribe to the good stuff. So now that we are adults, we not only get all the channels, but we tell our parents that we do and how much it costs. And we tell them that we’re finding the extra money in our “Mom and Dad Nursing Home” fund, so they know that when they’re slapped into a cut-rate home, they know it could have been avoided with a simple Skinemax subscription in 1983.

Not only do we have all the cable channels, but we have a top-of-the-line TiVo – not the cheapjack cable company no-name DVR like my parents use to try to save a few bucks to stave off the inevitable transfer into a place where medication is used so that state investigators don’t find restraint bruises on their wrists, but the real deal – with three terabytes of recording space, and enough tuners to record six programs at once.

All of which is a long way to go to say that we record a lot of television, not all of which we can watch in a timely manner. And one of the programs that we have been recording is True Detective, the Woody Harrelson / Matthew McConaughey show on HBO where they play two cops with dark sides investigating a possible serial murder. We watched the first episode and enjoyed it, but have allowed the following three episodes to stack up, thinking we’ll get to it eventually.

Well, “eventually” might have to come sooner rather than later. Because Francesco Francavilla, one of my favorite artists, has started releasing some fan art posters for the show on his Tumblr. Now, not only do we love Francavilla’s art (he’s gonna be a guest at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and if he’s got a presence on the floor, that’s where my art budget’s going this year), but the guy has impeccable taste in television. And when he really likes a show, he does fan posters. He did them for Breaking Bad, so the fact that he’s doing the for True Detective is high praise indeed.

What? You want to see these posters without having to look for them? Some detective you are. You can check ’em out after the jump.

tmp_afterlife_with_archie_2_cover_2013-1155460273Editor’s Note: This review’s got spoilers, Meathead. What? Wrong Archie? Well, screw you. Dingbat.

Jesus Christ. And I mean that in the best possible way.

This Archie comic book starts with implied incest, moves to graphically bloody zombie violence, jumps to conflicted and closeted lesbians, spends a little time with spoiled children and their obviously disappointed parents, throws in more graphic violence, tosses in a soupcon of implication toward steroid abuse, and ends with the hero telling a girl’s father that he’s spent years trying to surreptitiously bone his daughter under cover of darkness. Again: this Archie comic has all of this stuff.

So what we have here, if you take away all the Archie elements, is a pretty solid if straight-ahead zombie story for young adults, with with enough social issues to make it relevant and modern. Which is fine, and surely a fun-enough read… but with those Archie elements, you get what feels like a look into the gutters and the bleed of 50 years of Archie comics. It’s like reading a version of Twin Peaks set in the Archie universe, where a violent event throws the covers off some pretty dark and difficult suburban secrets.

This is a really, really good comic book.

afterlife_with_archie_1_francavilla_cover_2013Afterlife With Archie is my pick of the week,” said the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and generally ask me to stay right the hell away from the kids’ comics.

“…you gotta be shitting me, dude.”

“I am not kidding. It is not like any Archie comic you have ever seen…”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Goddamned Archie comic,” I muttered.

“…and no matter what you think, it is much darker than you think it is,” he said.

“It would almost have to be.”

“Go take a look,” he said, “Dig to the back of the stack and find one of the variant covers.”

I pawed past copies of your expected Archie-style cartoony fake horror covers and saw… something unexpected. “Jesus. How’d they convince Francesco Francavilla to do a cover for this book?”

“By letting him do the interiors, too.”

“…come again?”

“Check it out. Take a look at page three.”

I opened the book. “Um… is that a Francavilla splash page of Jughead handing Sabrina The Teenage Witch a dead fucking dog?” He nodded. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll try anything once.”

So I did try it. And allow me – a 42-year-old cynical and angry drunk who has just read an Archie comic book – to tell you this: Afterlife With Archie is pretty fucking good.

francavilla_breaking_bad_1_02-1575002348Last night was the premiere for the first episode of the final (half) season of Breaking Bad, and we celebrated like any fan: by being in southern Florida, no more than three minutes drive in any random direction from a meth lab.

We did not, however, celebrate it by watching the new episode. We are among the latecomers to the show, thanks to a TiVo that recorded the first season and, before we could watch them, fell apart like, well, Krazy-8 in an acid-filled bathtub. So we are still catching up (we are, as we speak, watching season four episode Bug, so no one tell us how Walter beats Gus. We are assuming Walter beats Gus, since there is a fifth season. Unless the fifth season is about Badger watching a lot of Ice Road Truckers, but even if it is, do not fucking tell me), but that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy some of the ancillary benefits of the show’s fandom.

You know, like Crisis On Infinite Midlives personal favorite pulp artist Francesco Francavilla’s episode posters for the show. Posters that have been collected and given as gifts to the cast and crew of the show.

hawkeye_12_cover_20131541319931I normally try not to review the same title two months in a row unless it’s a big event comic – my reviews take a while to write thanks to my congenital case of diarrhea of the keyboard, and there are only so many hours in the day – but what the hell can I tell you? Hawkeye #12 is just that Goddamned good.

Seriously, I don’t know how Matt Fraction ever got this series greenlit without having photos of Axel Alonso in a compromising position with some form of beast of burden or something. Hawkeye barely appears in this book. There are exactly four panels of bow and arrow action. The closest thing to a supervillain is a Russian cocksucker in a tracksuit. The closest thing to a superhero battle and strategy is when a guy decides that he’s earned that money the Russians offered him in exchange for letting them kick the shit out of him. And this is in a Marvel superhero comic; for contrast, imagine a Superman comic that was about Jimmy Olsen getting ripped to the tits on laudanum while bemoaning his childhood by letting strange women pay him to take a dump on his chest.

This kind of superhero comic simply shouldn’t work; describing it on paper makes it sound like an inventory fill-in issue by a writer who was instructed to turn in something that doesn’t directly fuck around with the main character’s status quo. But it’s not like that at all; instead, we get a solid show-don’t-tell character study of Clint’s brother Barney, a snapshot of Clint and Barney’s childhood that uses artist Francesco Francavilla’s skills to show us a lot of information without having to waste a lot of time with unnecessary exposition, and for me, the first time I’ve ever seen a reason I can believe why Clint wouldn’t just write his brother – a Dark Avenger who stole Clint’s Hawkeye identity only weeks ago – completely off. All without seeing Hawkeye for more than a single page.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. Because it’s a superhero story about people, with some of the best pulpy art you can find anywhere.

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.

black_beetle_1_cover_2013I’ve always believed that the difference between a superhero comic book and a pulp hero story is a gun, and the willingness to use it for its intended purpose. Sure, they have costumes and gadgets and secret headquarters in common, but in the end, the gun’s the thing. Batman has a batarang, The Shadow has a gun. Iron Man has repulsor rays, The Spider has a gun. Everything else is just setting, antagonist and motivation.

If you accept that fine, bright line – and there’s no reason you necessarily should, since my own acceptance of it varies depending on what I’m reading and how much whiskey was involved beforehand – then writer / artist Francesco Francavilla’s The Black Beetle, despite having the word “pulp” on the cover, is very much a superhero comic. The hero has a Beetlemobile, a gyrocopter backpack, and a secret headquarters… but he also defines himself as not being a killer, and he uses tranquilizer darts instead of bullets.

But he has a gun. Two of them, actually. Sweet-looking Colt M1911s that he wields and shoots two handed, like, well, The Shadow. So while this doesn’t technically meet my definition of “pulp,” it’s close enough. And it is one hell of a lot of fun… if a little light on some of the details.

If you caught the United States Presidential Debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama last Wednesday, you heard Romney say that he loved Big Bird, but the first thing he’d do as President would be to defund PBS… effectively firing the poor bastard, leaving him homeless and wandering the streets like any down-on-his-luck wino, muttering to his imaginary friend.

Well, the comment led to “Big Bird” becoming a trending topic on Twitter, a slew of Big Bird parody accounts on Twitter… and the odd response from the comics community.

Such as this little masterpiece by pulp comic artist Francesco Francavilla. Which. Is. Awesome. Check it out.