dc_twix_adWhile it might not be the biggest comics-related news of the week, it was an item that particularly infuriated us: the confirmation that DC Comics would be running half-page ads on two comic pages in their June comics.

While the news isn’t as dire as the original rumor made things out to be, putting advertising on comic pages even for just a month is potentially a slippery slope. So we talk about not just being enraged by more and more intrusive advertising, but the effect that accepting half-page ads could have on comic storytelling, story length, creator compensation, the secondary comics art market, and worst of all: people thinking that Twix is an acceptable candy choice.

This week also brought us the end of DC’s Convergence event. Which, as promised, seems to have opened up the entirety of DC’s history to modern storytellers… but at what cost? We talk about Brainiac’s passive characterization at the end of the story, and more importantly, DC’s seeming off-camera utter nullification of one of the biggest and arguably most important comic stories of all time.

We also talk about:

  • Fight Club 2 #1, written by Chuck Palahniuk with art by Cameron Stewart,
  • Grindhouse #5: Lady Danger: Agent of B.O.O.T.I, written by Alex De Campi with art by Mulele Jarvis, and:
  • Where Monsters Dwell #1, written by Garth Ennis with art by Russ Braun!

And now the standard disclaimers:

  • We record this show live to tape, with minimal editing. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like Rob’s discussion with beloved and abused parts of his anatomy.
  • This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, just assume that we are not following the first rule of Fight Club.
  • This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your boss to hear about some slightly shadier (and made up) Twix products? Trust me, you do not. Get some headphones.

Thanks for listening, suckers!

tmp_preacher_1_cover1587983506Several months ago, in a halcyon time when Boston wasn’t buried under a foot and a half of wet snow and Parker the Kitten was gleeful to get dry cat food as opposed to crawling on the kitchen table trying to gobble my damn risotto, we reported that AMC, the network that brought you The Walking Dead and The Killing (which, ironically, stumbled around after it should have been dead long after any of Robert Kirkman’s walkers), had bought the rights to develop a television series out of Garth Ennis’s and Steve Dillon’s Preacher. This was good news, while the fact that the project was to be developed by Seth Rogen was, well, weird news.

Of course, a development deal is a long haul away from an actual greenlight – just ask any 80s stand-up comic who got a five-figure check from a TV network, only to discover that it was worth relative pocket change to NBC to make sure that they wouldn’t complete with Leno, just before having to head back home to Podunk to catch a straight job on the swing shift packing bananas – and even though the rumor was that AMC paid beaucoup delores for the rights to the comic, that doesn’t mean that they would be willing to chuck the bucks behind a story that requires producing sets of not only a massive compound in the Middle East, but of a massive gun and tank battle in the desert, not to mention fucking Heaven itself.

Well, it looks like AMC thinks a little more of Preacher and the production abilities of Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, because after years of various movie, TV and HBO rumors, Preacher has been greenlit for development.

avatar_panel_brooks_christensen_sdcc_20131113153242And here we are: our final article covering San Diego Comic-Con 2013 (except for a bunch of video that my high-toned, dedicated video camera seems to have mangled, unless my actual computer here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office can do anything to salvage them), five days after the convention ended and more than a week after the actual panel occurred. But what the hell; given my crippling hangover and intestinal issues born from the fried chicken sandwich and fries I washed down with five black IPAs at a bar last night, it feels like I’m still at SDCC. So let’s just plow ahead, shall we?

The Avatar Press panel on Thursday morning, July 18th, with Avatar Founder and Editor-In-Chief William Christensen and World War Z and Extinction Parade writer Max Brooks, was the first panel we hit during SDCC 2013, and in some ways it set the tone for the whole convention. The room wasn’t full, but there was a healthy crowd for a comic book related panel on the most off day of the convention. Not that there are any off days at SDCC anymore, but if there is a day that qualifies, it’s this mid-week opening to the full-blown festivities. Unlike Preview Night, the whole convention center is open, and cosplayers are more plentiful, all of which draws people off the floor and makes it at least tolerable to move around; there’s nothing like a set of jugs in a spandex Power Girl suit to peel off the rubes so you can get where you’re going.

But where we were going was a panel, and we were going there later than we should. Which meant we could get a seat up front and to the side… right in front of the projector many panels use to put up new art for display. Which meant that, as a six foot tall gentleman, I spent the panel hunched over like Frankenstein’s delivery boy to stay out of the projector light, scribbling notes almost on my side as if trying to write “I am having a stroke” for the paramedics, just in case Christensen and Brooks put some new art up on the screen.

Which they did not. Every table at every panel at Comic-Con has a posted sign for presenters, reminding them that members of the crowd might be younger than 18. And every fan of Avatar comics knows that there is very little art that they could project that would be appropriate for children. There is very little Avatar art that would not make children long for the sweet release of death, or at least blindness, to tell you the truth. Avatar books are for adults, and that is on purpose.

“I just do books I want to read,” Christensen said. “It will always be intense work for adults.”

red_team_1_cover_2013When it comes to comic books by Garth Ennis, sometimes it feels like a coin toss as to which writer you’re gonna get: the writer with a laser focus on the behaviors and traditions of regimented subcultures, or the writer who’s over the top, balls out nuts. When it comes to Garth Ennis, it seems like it’s either heavily researched war comics, or sci-fi western pilgrims with a rifle and a hard-on for Jesus. Battlefields versus Crossed. Max Punisher or Marvel Knights Punisher.

When Ennis goes serious, he goes serious; his war comics – even the ones where he goes more toward the fucked up, like Stitched, a story about some soldiers stranded in Afghanistan being hunted by zombies – feel like he spent some serious time hanging out with soldiers, learning a lot about tactics, weapons, and their relationships and ways of talking. Now, I’ll grant that I’ve never spent any time around people with a serious military background, but those stories feel like Ennis spent some time with real people who have really done the things that he’s writing about.

Ennis’s latest series, Red Team, similarly feels heavily researched. However, it feels like it was researched by way of some things I have spent a lot of time around… those things being The Shield, The Wire, and Homicide: Life On The Street. In short: Red Team feels more like Ennis’s take on some of the better American cop shows (by way of Dirty Harry’s Magnum Force) than it feels like an authentic police story.

But with that said, I like all those shows. So does Red Team stand up to them?

I studied journalism when I was in college in the late 1980s / early 1990s, and one of the things I learned was the inverted pyramid lead, which means to open your story with the most important hard information. So, since it was one of the most important things I learned back then, I’ll go with it here.

DC Comics has cancelled John Constantine: Hellblazer. The comic, published under DC’s Vertigo Comics imprint, will conclude in February with its 300th issue, written by Peter Milligan with art by Giuseppe Camuncoli. The long-running comic, written for a mature, adult audience, will be replaced with a new comic series, Constantine, written by Robert Venditti with pencils by Renato Guedes. The new series, which will be published under the standard DC Comics bullet, will take place in DC’s superhero-filled New 52 Universe, and will be reportedly feature the younger, more action-oriented version of the John Constantine character as currently seen in Justice League Dark.

About the cancellation, DC Comics co-publisher Dan DiDio said:

We’re supremely proud of Vertigo’s HELLBLAZER, one of the most critically-acclaimed series we’ve published. Issue #300 concludes this chapter of Constantine’s epic, smoke-filled story in style and with the energy, talent and creativity fans have come to expect from Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini. And no one should worry that John is going to hang-up his trenchcoat – he lives on in March, in the pages of the all-new DC Comics New 52 ongoing series, CONSTANTINE, by writer Robert Venditti and artist Renato Guedes.

The series, which expanded the story of the John Constantine character created by comics legend Alan Moore during his classic run on Swamp Thing, debuted as a DC Comic in 1988 and was written by Jamie Delano and drawn by John Ridgeway. Moving to DC’s more mature Vertigo imprint in 1993, the book featured work by comic legends Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Paul Jenkins and Brian Azzarello, as well as many others, throughout its nearly quarter-century history.

Constantine is expected to debut in February, 2013.

Okay, that’s the classic news version. My journalism professors, one of whom once looked me in the face and said, “You smell like a three-day dead dog in the dump tank of a whiskey distillery. Sit in the back, please,” would, for once, be proud. However, like the one, older professor who once slipped me a copy of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail after defending me in a meeting to determine if I should be ejected from the journalism department after writing a story about the college’s president that included the term, “goatfucker” taught me: classic journalism isn’t always properly equipped to capture the whole truth.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a world where costumed heroes soar through the sky and masked vigilantes prowl the night, someone’s got to make sure the “spoilers” don’t get out of line. And someone will.

I’ve read The Boys #71 a few times now, and I keep going back and forth on how I feel about it. Because it’s operating on a couple of different levels, and one of them is on the character level. At this point, we’ve spent six or seven years with Wee Hughie and Butcher, and what with this being the second-to-last issue, writer Garth Ennis needs to wrap up the relationship between those two guys, which has gone through older brother / younger brother, to stern mentor / insecure student, to mortal enemies. And this issue accomplishes that, in the standard Garth Ennis fashion of violence and manly bonding. Which is always interesting to read, if it doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to any male friendship I’ve ever been in; I find we tend to resolve our differences with hard liquor , repeat viewings of Caddyshack and the copious application of the word “homo.”

However, on another level, when Ennis debuted The Boys back in 2006, he promised that the series would “out Preacher Preacher.” And now as we wind into the final couple of issues, it’s becoming apparent that The Boys is certainly following the narrative structure of Preacher‘s conclusion, with two close friends battling each other to a standstill, before coming to a final reconciliation, concluding with the apparent death of the “bad guy,” who started out as the “good guy’s” closest friend. With all of it happening in the shadow of an American national monument, with the relationship between the “good guy” and his estranged girlfriend unresolved and hanging in the balance. From a structural standpoint, the main difference between the second-to-last issue of Preacher and the second-to-last issue of The Boys is that Cassidy committed suicide by sunlight and Butcher did it via rank, threatening douchebaggery.

Maybe they should’ve just watched Caddyshack.

Garth Ennis’s The Shadow does many things effectively, including presenting an interesting “modern” characterization of the title character (considering, unlike Howard Chaykin’s 1980s reboot for DC Comics, Ennis writes this as a period piece), slowly introducing The Shadow’s “faithful companions” for people who aren’t necessarily already familiar with them, and, within 22 pages, setting the stage for a story that is international and possibly terrifying in scope.

However, the thing it does most effectively is to instill a deep and visceral unholy rage toward the government and military of the nation of Japan, circa 1939, to the point where when I was finished with the book, I wished that Oppenheimer and company had built a third nuke. A shit nuke. That caused a mushroom cloud made of feces. Which is a feeling that I personally found to be pretty damned disturbing. But I’ll come back to that.

Let’s move to an admission: I am not all that familiar with The Shadow, at least when it comes to the character’s Street And Smith pulp origins. Sure, I’ve read Chaykin’s miniseries, and I have a couple of issues of the Andy Helfer series that followed it, and I saw the 1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin and that 80s movie actress who isn’t what’s-her-face from Weeds. So what I knew about the character was based on those sources: that he carries two guns, and that he has some kind of power to “cloud men’s minds,” which, in the sources I’ve read, amounts to: “Hey! I have the ability to cloud men’s minds (shoots criminal in face)!”

Guess who found their microphones?

That’s right, after five months, and literally no waiting with bated – or any – breath, it’s time for another exciting episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast!

In this week’s episode, we drunkenly rant about:

  • Digital Comics. Specifically, it was a big week encompassing the closing of the Graphic.ly Web storefront and the release of the first of Marvel’s Infinite Comics via ComiXology, so we talk about how faithful customers of digital comics get to be in the vanguard of comics publishing while eventually being doomed to wind up with fuckall for their money!
  • Marvel’s Augmented Reality application, which forces you to read your printed comics through your cell phone like Commander Data or some other robotic autistic person!
  • Fanboys Vs. Zombies, and how it is an awesome book if you have been to SDCC, want to go to SDCC, or want to see Joe Quesada eaten by a grue!
  • The Avengers movie: can it possibly be as good as the trailers and the TV spots make it look?
  • Agent Coulson: Xander of the Marvel Movie Universe?
  • Hawkeye: Like a Boss? Or Like a Miss?
  • SDCC Hotel Sales: big mess or biggest mess?
  • Plus: Justice League Dark and The Boys!

As always, if you listen to this show at work, wear headphones unless you want to explain to your boss why you’re listening to someone bemoan the lack of glory holes in San Diego hotel rooms! And if you can listen to the whole thing, see if you can tell the moment when the booze gets on top of us!

As always: thanks for listening, suckers!

In an entertainment market glutted with zombie stories, Crossed has historically distinguished itself more in its methods than in its themes. Under the hood, it’s the same as any half-decent zombie apocalypse tale: we follow small bands of survivors as they struggle to survive in a landscape populated by monsters that feel no fear and are only motivated to kill, with the story focus more on how the experience shapes – or warps – the survivors. However, it performs these standard tasks under a paint job of making those monsters less mindless flesh-eaters and more clever and gleeful rape-you-to-death-with-a-pipe-wrench…ers. Yeah, that’s a word. Or at least, it is now. And if you don’t agree, I have this pipe wrench… but I’m veering off track already.

In Crossed’s initial incarnation by writer Garth Ennis and artist Jacen Burrows a few years ago, that gave Ennis a chance to do a pretty pedestrian zombie tale, only propelled by Burrows’s over-the-top visuals illustrating Ennis’s jet-black sense of humor… provided your idea of larfs includes zombies jacking off on their bullets to make them infectious, or another zombie whipping dudes to death with a horse penis. Later arcs, such as David Lapham’s recent Psychopath, toned down the humor to focus, more conventionally if not any less graphically, on the idea of human monsters in a world overrun by more conventional ones.

This week brought us Crossed: Badlands, the return of the original creative team of Ennis and Burrows, so one would assume a return of the book to an exaggerated, almost darkly slapstick story reminiscent of the original arc. However, while it’s still too early in his miniseries to judge how it will end up, instead we seem to be getting a much more character-driven and subdued story. It feels strange to call a story that includes a zombie using an infant as a blunt projectile weapon “more subdued,” but when it comes to Crossed, these things are relative.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to provide you with one final review from last week’s books before the comic store opens up with the new books. You, however, will have to provide your own shitty Thin Lizzy joke.

If you’ve been reading Garth Ennis’s The Boys for a while, this is the stuff you’ve been waiting for almost since the book started at Wildstorm Comics back in 2006. If you haven’t been reading it, well, you’re kinda screwed. There aren’t enough pixels on this page to bring you up to speed on what the hell is going on, so yeah: you’re boned. If it helps, there are at least two dismemberments and three decapitations. Superhero comics, everybody!

The Boys is almost a prototypical comic written for the trade. Comprised almost exclusively of six-issue, reprint-friendly arcs, it is truly a long form novel in comic form… to the point where when I almost have to recommend that you don’t buy the individual issues – and I’m a fan. I initially bought in when the book was announced, and as an old Preacher fan, I told my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to remember that the Voice Of God usually smells less of garlic and bourbon, to add it to my pulls as soon as issue one was solicited.

And I didn’t like it. The build was slow, the plot was talky, and it seemed like to took forever for it to get going. In retrospect, for me the best thing that could have happened to this book was its cancellation by Wildstorm after the sixth issue, apparently over the miniscule and ridiculous concern that the Homelander, the Superman analogue of The Boys, orally raped a superheroine with a couple of his buddies. Superhero comics, everybody!