Episode 24: You Have Nice Line Work

Since we are less than 36 hours away from leaving for San Diego Comic-Con 2014, and therefore are fully engaged in preparing for the trip, we are a little fried today. So this is a shorter than usual episode (not the end of the world, considering we plan to podcast direct from the convention at least a couple of times), but a full one, where Amanda and I discuss:

• The changes of Thor to a woman and Captain America to Sam Wilson that were announced on TV this week (if only there were a major convention to make these kinds of announcements!),
• Since Amanda and I have attended nine straight San Diego Comic-Cons, we share a few tips on how to survive the whole experience (and avoid an extinction level digestive event), and:
• Harley Quinn Invades Comic-Con International / San Diego #1, by Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti and a bunch of guest artists!

And now the legally-required disclaimers:

• This show is recorded live to tape. This means there might be a few more pregnant pauses than you are used to in a comics podcast, but it also means that anything can happen.
• There are spoilers in this show. We try to warn you ahead of time, but if you don’t know the kind of treatment you’ll get at a place called “Dick’s Last Resort,” you might deserve what you get.
• This show contains adult, explicit language, and is not safe for work. I bought earbuds at a gas station for $12 today. What’s your excuse?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:15 — 60.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers! And don’t forget to tune in for episodes live(ish) from SDCC later this week!

Episode 22: Bone Chilling Soul Death

This 4th of July weekend, we got sucked into the AMC marathon of The Walking Dead, and were surprised how binge-watching the whole thing from the beginning changed our opinion of the show. So we talked about that extensively, along with:

• The NBC Constantine pilot leaked to the Internet this week. Amanda and I saw it, and have some fairly strong opinions as to what worked (Matt Ryan as John Constantine) and what didn’t (writing, pacing, too much exposition, not enough mystery, no local flavor, and some other stuff),
• Original Sin #5, written by Jason Aaron with art by Mike Deodato, and:
• Rocket Raccoon #1, written and drawn by Skottie Young!

And now, the legalese:

• We record the show live to tape. That means a few stuttered words more than you’re used to in a comics / genre culture podcast, but it also means that anything can happen.
• The show contains spoilers. Some weeks it’s a few, some it’s a lot. This is one of the latter. Be forewarned.
• Amanda and I use explicit, adult language, so this podcast is not safe for work. Unless your boss likes phrases like, “Preemptive dribble of patriotism,” wear headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:22 — 84.6MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 18: P. S. Balls, Sweet Valley High

It is Sunday, which means another episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast! This one recorded after the depths of a sugar coma!

In this episode, we discuss:

• The recent Slate article by Ruth Graham condemning young adult literature as being something adults should be ashamed to read… and which pretty much out-and-out condemns genre YA fiction as “transparently trashy stuff”
  • During the conversation, we reference a novel called Submergence, by J. M. Ledgard
  • Further during the conversation, I maintain that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a genre sci-fi novel. This may anger those who like to haul their copies around college coffee houses in an effort to look smart and try to score coed tail, but I am not the only one who thinks so.
• MTV’s announcement of the MTVu Fan Awards during the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con, MTV’s genre and comics cred (which they utterly ignore in the announcement of said event), and whether Linkin Park is the right band to play SDCC when Anthrax (who did a song about Judge Dredd) will be right around the corner
• Original Sin #3, written by Jason Aaron with art by Mike Deodato, and
• Big Trouble In Little China #1, written by The Goon‘s Eric Powell with art by Brian Churilla!

And, as usual, our disclaimers:

• This show is recorded live to tape with no editing, and as such may contain more pregnant pauses, looping logic, repeated assertions, and references to “Diarrhea Island” than you are accustomed to in a comics / pop culture podcast
• This show contains spoilers. We make an effort to announce them ahead of time, but as to whether we are successful, well, see the point about “no editing.” Be particularly careful when it comes to our discussion of Original Sin #3.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is not safe for work. While I might personally think Beats By Dre are an abominable waste of money, I will ignore their use in the listening of this show.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:01 — 61.4MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 16: Crystal Blue Mess

It’s Sunday, and even though it’s the long Memorial Day weekend here in the States, it’s still time for another episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Show!

In this week’s episode we talk about:

• X-Men: Days of Future Past! We discuss how much we enjoyed the movie, some of the cooler moments in the flick, but most importantly: we try and take apart where the film fits into the X-Men movie franchise continuity, and whether or not any of the other movies can even exist with this one stuck at the end!
• The recently announced title Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice! We talk about why the title makes sense, how a desire to make The Dark Knight Returns might have led to decisions director Zack Snyder made in Man of Steel, and how this title could have come directly from the name of one of our earlier podcasts!
• Forever Evil #7, by Geoff Johns and David Finch
• MPH #1, by Mark Millar and Duncan Fegredo
• Original Sin #2, by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, and:
• Why if 3D movies are bad, falling asleep during an IMAX 3D showing of Godzilla is worse (spoiler alert: it involves waking up to Godzilla shrieking at you through 100 subwoofers.

And now the legalese:

• This podcast uses adult, vulgar language, and is not safe for work. This week’s hook joke is about penis tinting, and things really go downhill from there. Wear headphones. You are warned.
• This show was recorded live to tape, and may contain awkward pauses, the use of the word “f**k” as a comma, and truly vile humor that any reasonable show would edit out.
• This show is chock-full of spoilers. We try to warn you ahead of time, but there’s no getting around it: we are ruiners.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:02 — 63.2MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 13: The Fist Of Rhino

Yes, we know, it’s been a couple of weeks since our last podcast, but we have a good excuse: we were drunk we were busy catching up on the latest in pop culture and comics after a weekend pretending we were still young reintroducing ourselves to classic video games!

So we are tan, rested and ready to talk about the biggest comics and geek events of the past week! Including:

• A discussion of a weekend spent playing video games at the American Classic Arcade Museum at the Funspot Arcade in Laconia, NH
• A talk about the highs (Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man) and lows (Jamie Foxx as Electro) of The Amazing Spider-Man 2
• A dissection of the upcoming death of Wolverine, why it feels empty and corporate, why most recent comic book death stories feel the same, and a few comic book death stories that break that mold (and why)
• A review of Jason Aaron’s and Jason Latour’s Southern Bastards, how it feels like a modern High Noon, and how it plays into (and stymies) views of the South from a couple of inveterate yankees
• Quick discussion of DC’s Futures End Free Comic Book Day release, and Batman: Eternal #4

And, as usual, here are the disclaimers:

• This episode was recorded live to tape, which means that there may be more dead air, ill-advised language, and “ummmms” than you are used to in your standard comics / pop culture podcast
• This show uses explicit and profane language, and is not safe for work. If you have the choice between listening to this show on speakers and being reprimanded for faking a disability for wearing an earplug to listen to this show? Take the write-up. Sure, your hearing-impaired co-workers will give you the stinkeye tomorrow, but at least you’ll still be employed to see it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:48 — 66.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Who Watches The Watcher? Anyone, Because He Is Dead: Marvel Announces Original Sin by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, Jr.

We are well and truly into a new year, which is a downer on a few fronts. All the holiday vacation time is burned away, which means we will be forced to go to work in this shitty weather (it is currently eight balmy degrees outside the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and that’s degrees Fahrenheit, not those wussy degrees Centigrade that you whimpering pleaders overseas use to try to convince people you’re not wandering blithely through simple sweater weather). And further, it means that the Big Two are gonna start announcing their big summer crossover events.

And, since we have been publishing over the last two and a half years or so, this has not necessarily been great news. Just in the last year, we have been hyped for, and then had to all but suffer through, Age of Ultron and Infinity from Marvel and The Trinity War and Forever Evil from DC, and they have not particularly grabbed us when they weren’t busy actively irritating us with arbitrary epic plots that often seemed more interested in involving everyone in the universe than making it clear why we should give a fuck about anyone involved (With God as my witness, I began pulling for Thanos about 2/3rds of the way through Infinity because at least I knew what he was trying to accomplish and why).

So I have been waiting without any particular enthusiasm to start hearing announcements about the upcoming big events that will change everything… so imagine my surprise when I heard about Marvel’s first big plans for 2014, and actually got a little excited, in spite of myself. Because while yes, the upcoming Original Sin four-month event involves a huge cast and some cosmic elements, at its heart, it’s a simple murder mystery.

A simple murder mystery written by Jason Aaron, who has been writing some of the most fun and character-driven books at Marvel over the last couple of years, and drawn by Mike Deodato, Jr., who is one of my favorite artists working for Marvel today.

Dropping Balls: Rob’s Top 10 Comics of 2012

It is New Year’s Eve of the first complete year of the existence of Crisis On Infinite Midlives. We have all the comics we’re going to get in 2012, so it is time to publish my list of the best comics of the year… mostly because with no new comics, there isn’t much to review, and the biggest comics news we’re likely to get between now and Wednesday is likely to be “Frank Miller Publicly Intoxicated, Yells At ‘Hippies.’ Must Be Tuesday.”

So here’s my list; Amanda’s will appear later today. It is in no particular order, it encompasses everything from single issues to multi-issue story arcs to series that started in 2011 and ended this year. And I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “Why don’t you organize things a little more? And use some consistent criteria for your list?” Well, because fuck you, that’s why. Look: it’s New Year’s Eve, and I intend to be recklessly intoxicated within about 90 minutes from the time I press the “publish” button.

So without further (or any) ado: here’s my list!

Flashpoint: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: No more spoilers. Actually, a lot more spoilers.

Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a hard book to review because it endeavors to do a whole lot of things all at once. First, it needs to resolve the fact that Dark Phoenix is running around in the body of a petulant dink, and it generally accomplishes that. Second, considering the story was about two linchpins of the Marvel Universe, they had to, pretty much for the first time since the series started by showing Cyclops acting like he was one bad night away from handing the X-Men Nikes, track suits and tainted Kool-Aid, introduce some ambiguity as to who the good guys and the bad guys were, and it accomplishes that damn well.

However, one of the things it needed, and tried, to do, was rehabilitate the Scarlet Witch after the events of Avengers: Disassembled in 2004, when she single-handedly wiped out pretty much all the mutants in the 616. It also needed, given the commitment by Marvel editorial to integrate the X-Men back into the more mainstream, non-mutant based books, to make sure that there were actually X-Men around to add to the Avengers books. And it certainly accomplishes both of those things, but it does it in a strangely unsatisfying way, a way that feels like the decision was made that many of the main events of the past seven or eight years of Marvel stories simply don’t matter. It is the final nail in the events of Disassembled – Hawkeye’s alive again, the Vision’s back, and now the mutants are all returning – and it feels like someone at Marvel, be it Axel Alonso or Joe Quesada or Brian Michael Bendis or Ike Perlmutter, dusted off their hands and said, “There! Now we’re back to 1999!”

We make a lot of jokes here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives about how vehemently Marvel protests that they don’t reboot, but make no mistake: Avengers Vs. X-Men #12 is a reboot. The only question is: it is a good one?

Monkeyshining: The Incredible Hulk #14 Review

I don’t know what writer Jason Aaron has been drinking, smoking, snorting or inhaling recently, but I want some. Because with The Incredible Hulk #14, Aaron is two-for-two this week on producing some of the biggest, most fun comics I’ve read in recent memory.

I have run hot and cold on Aaron’s run of The Incredible Hulk; at times it has been an different kind of character study of both Banner and Hulk, using the gimmick of separating them, and then making them enemies in the same body in an active way that I’ve never seen before, that has been generally unique and somewhat fun. At other times it has, in my opinion, grossy misjudged the relationship between Banner and Hulk, leading to a cuddle scene in issue 7 that damn near put me off the book. But regardless of the variations, The Incredible Hulk has always been interesting, which has been enough to keep me around for long past the “next couple of issues” I figured it would when the book debuted last October, even despite the constantly rotating tag team of artists that have drawn the book since originally solicited artist Mark Silvestri apparently discovered that the term “monthly comic book” hadn’t become just a playful suggestion between 1997 and now.

Well, it all comes together in The Incredible Hulk #14, where Aaron gives us big, stupid, violent fun, from clingy Doombots, to horny mercenaries to monkey pilots to a feared mercenary known only as The Vegetable. Alternating between tension and silliness and violence and humor, this issue is just a Goddamned blast.

He’s A Complicated Booger: Wolverine And The X-Men #17 Review

After reading Wolverine And The X-Men #17, I want nothing more out of the rest of my life than to go drinking with Jason Aaron. And for the first time, when I imagine drinking with a comic creator, I question whether or not I would survive the experience. Because based on this issue, clearly Aaron can put  ’em away.

Wolverine And The X-Men #17 costs $3.99, but it is easily worth several thousand dollars. Wolverine And The X-Men #17 features neither Wolverine, nor The X-Men, and that is okay, because none of them are bad enough motherfuckers to pick up the real hero of this book’s jockstrap. Wolverine And The X-Men #17 instead features a secret warrior with two brains, who craps fire, makes sex with anything that walks, moves or crawls, makes James Bond look like a whimpering mongoloid with a bum knee, and looks like a giant booger.

Wolverine And The X-Men #17 is the most balls-out fun that four bucks will buy you all this week.