Posts Tagged Justice League Dark

10 results.
Mar31

Bastard In Charge: Guillermo del Toro Confirms Constantine To Lead Dark Universe

by Rob on March 31, 2013 at 7:45 pm
Posted In: Movie News

guillermo_del_toro_headshotWe appear to have our Internet and cable issues resolved here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives headquarters, after a long and exhausting weekend digging around in wiring… and we recovered our connectivity just in time for Wondercon to be over. Which means that there is a ton of news that even we need to catch up on, and, having quickly scanned our RSS feeds, it only proves that it would have been smarter and better for us to just catch a Goddamned plane to Wondercon, because not only would we have first-person news to report, but at least our hotel would have had fucking Wi-Fi.

But we couldn’t let the Wondercon weekend slip by without reporting on at least something from the convention, and this is the main item that caught our eyes once we had full Internet: Guillermo del Toro held a panel for his upcoming movie Pacific Rim during the convention, and, as one would expect at a comic convention panel where they hold a Q & A session, someone asked del Toro about his reports that he’s working on Dark Universe – a movie focusing on pretty much all the big Vertigo / DC Dark characters.

Now, what one wouldn’t expect is that a director would say anything at all about a roject in pre-production, particularly at a panel about his latest movie that isn’t even out yet. However, this is Guillermo del Toro we’re talking about, and as the director of Blade II and both Hellboy movies, it’s safe to say that he’s one of us, which means he’s probably as excited about the concept of a Justice League Dark movie as the rest of us are.

While is a long way to go to say that: yeah, del Toro let a couple of things about Dark Universe slip.

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Jan08

Days of Future Magic Past: Justice League Dark #15 Review

by Rob on January 8, 2013 at 9:14 am
Posted In: Comic Book Reviews

justice_league_dark_15_cover_2013Editor’s Note: What is it with you people? Do I have some kind of sign on me back, “Walking Spoiler Bank – Withdrawals Welcome”? Is that it?

What with the news about Guillermo del Toro having a movie in early pre-production about basically every character from DC’s Dark line, it seems like as good a time as any to check back in with Justice League Dark, which features just about all the characters del Toro want to work with.

Frankly, my enthusiasm for the title has waned in the face of Vertigo’s cancellation of Hellblazer (sure, John Constantine’s in Justice League Dark, but that ain’t Hellblazer), despite the title being taken over by Jeff Lemire, who is a damn good writer of weird shit, and who seemed to understand that if you’re going to see people a team book, it’s probably a good idea to have them be a fucking team. But the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing like knowing a movie is coming out about a comic to ramp up your excitement about a book. And God knows, Justice League Dark #15 will remind you that, yup, there’s a comic book movie coming out.

Unfortunately, that movie is X-Men: Days of Future Past.

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Jan08

Guillermo del Toro Working on Dark Universe… Yeah, Basically The 90s Vertigo Comics Movie

by Rob on January 8, 2013 at 12:05 am
Posted In: Movie News

justice_league_dark_9_coverUpdate, 6:40 a.m.: The video after the jump is fixed. What can I say? That Benzedrine’s a hell of a drug.

Guillermo del Toro is finishing up work on Pacific Rim, which will be in theaters in July. And since between movies and books and comics, he seems like a guy who likes to keep busy… you know, in the sense that a methamphetamine addict like to occupy the day by disassembling the television in an attempt to find parts to improve the AK-47 they use to keep the Goddamned bugs away.

Which, as analogies go, certainly is one, but my point is, del Toro probably has another project in mind. And it seems that he does. Is it the adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness that del Toro was working on before the project went tits up? Well, apparently maybe; supposedly he thinks he can get one more bite at that apple, hard R rating and ridiculous budget or no:

“I’m going to try it one more time. Once more into the dark abyss,” he laughed. “We’re gonna do a big presentation of the project again at the start of the year and see if any [studio's] interested.” And yes, Tom Cruise is still game to be on board if they can find a home for it. “Yeah, Tom is still attached. I think it would be so fantastic to make it with him. He’s been such a great ally of the project.”

Okay, that’s pretty good news… certainly better than the news about the Hulk TV show that del Toro was supposedly working on a few months ago:

“After ‘The Avengers’ there’s been complete radio silence,” he said. “I had one more meeting after ‘Avengers’ with Jeph Loeb from Marvel and he said, ‘We’re working on it, we’re waiting for a writer,’ he gave me the name of the writer and their resume and I said, ‘That sounds great, let’s wait for him’ because we had delivered a teleplay and I haven’t heard since then.”

So yeah, those sound pretty good… but that’s not the good shit. The good shit is that del Toro is apparently working on a project with Warner Bros. A movie including Swamp Thing, John Constantine, Zatanna, Etrigan… pretty much all of the cast of Justice League Dark. And it’s actually in preproduction, with a writer attached and everything.

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Jul13

SDCC 2012: DC’s The Edge And The Dark Panel. Oh, and Neil Gaiman’s Returning To Sandman

by Rob on July 13, 2012 at 10:50 am
Posted In: Comic Book News

First of all people of San Diego: it’s a fucking e-cigarette. It emits water vapor. So please stop passive-aggressively giving me shit when I’m using it on a public sidewalk, out of doors and approaching the convention center, by muttering, “Nothing I like better than a faceful of cigarette smoke blowing into my baby’s face…” Let’s clear the air here (ha!): my e-cigarette emits no odor and bothers no one, unlike your little bundle of squalling fecal production. And since my e-cig doesn’t even burn, the San Diego Fire Marshall even considers it less of a fucking fire hazard.

Okay, I feel better now. Now that we’ve got my personal news out of the way, let’s talk about what’s been happening at SDCC 2012 that doesn’t involve self-righteous self-absorbsion.

The actual programming at SDCC started in earnest yesterday, featuring panels on everything from homosexuality in genre fiction to Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II. (Rob: This may be redundant. Consider editing. -Amanda)

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May25

Assembling: Justice League Dark #9 Review

by Rob on May 25, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Posted In: Comic Book Reviews

Editor’s Note: won nigeb sreliops!

Before I say anything else about Justice League Dark #9, the first issue written by Jeff Lemire, I feel I must protest and state, with the authority of a seventeen-year two pack a day smoker who quit two years ago, that the only way John Constantine would be able to make it up the steps of the ziggurat we see mid-issue – a ziggurat in Peru, meaning a minimum of 5,000 feet above sea level – would be if Superman miracled his ass up there.

Other than that misstep, this re-reboot of Justice League Dark is generally effective, given that Lemire has the unenviable task of having to introduce a new status quo, including a new cast of characters, team raison d’etre, and mission, all in 20 pages. That is a lot of expositionally heavy work to have to do, and it does show in several places; for example, you can clearly see the man behind the curtain saying, at one point, “Oh shit; Andrew Bennett could wrap this conflict up in ten seconds. I have, let’s see… 20 words in which I can resolve that.” However, it is a generally promising beginning… with a few obvious problems.

The most major one being that, intentionally or not, the guts of the plot to this story is so close to that of the Avengers movie that one of them has to be getting an unintentional boner.

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Apr08

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 8: The Kick of Osteoporosis

by Rob on April 8, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Posted In: Podcasts

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!
The Kick of Osteoporosis [ 56:47 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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!

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Feb28

Premature Evacuation: Justice League Dark #6 Review

by Rob on February 28, 2012 at 4:30 pm
Posted In: Comic Book Reviews

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers, and saying that backwards won’t make them go away.

We’re six issues into Justice League Dark now, and Peter Milligan is finally putting the actual team (mostly) together after an interminable rampup of what seemed like dozens of tiny solo adventures of the DC Universe’s most Vertigo-like heroes… just in time for a forced crossover with I, Vampire and Milligan leaving the book. Thanks a lot, Pete. Your timing sucks.

At the end of the last issue, we finally had Constantine, Deadman, Shade, Zatanna et al in one place… just in time for each of them to say, “Fuck you, Charlie” (Or in Zatanna’s case, “Eilrahc, uoy kcuf”) and disperse to the four winds. And now they’re all having nightmares; Constantine dreams of London on fire and it being his fault. Zatanna dreams of monsters putting fingers in her mouth (Meaning that, based on finger placement, her definition of nightmare has a lower threshold than mine). Deadman dreams that Dove is dead, unlike most comic fans who have been praying that Hawk would also take the dirtnap.

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Feb01

Turn Off The Dark: Milligan Leaves Justice League Dark

by Rob on February 1, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Posted In: Comic Book News

We’re in an age of 90s nostalgia in comics, what with more spider-clones, someone thinking Todd McFarlane is worth suing, and Rob Liefeld finding steady work that doesn’t involve a riding mower or medically required applications of Zovirax. And for those of us who had their 80s comics habit survive through that somewhat empty decade only because of Vertigo comics, this is a development that in many ways feels like flashing back to being a Boston altar boy in 1972.

But for those of us who did survive 90s comics and their excesses thanks to Vertigo, a bright spot of DC’s New 52 has been Justice League Dark, which, while not perfect, gave us Peter Milligan writing both John Constantine and Milligan’s old favorite of mine: Shade The Changing Man. And God knows that the book was in no way perfect, including the end of the first arc where the team finally got together… and said, “Fuck all y’all, mates” and immediately disbanded.

Well, I’ve got some bad news: Peter Milligan is leaving Justice League Dark. But I also have some good news: Jeff Lemire, writer of Animal Man and Sweet Tooth, is taking it over as of issue 9. And Milligan is shifting over to Stormwatch to take over from Paul Cornell.

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Nov25

Dark History: Justice League Dark #3 Review

by Rob on November 25, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Posted In: Comic Book Reviews

EDITOR’S NOTE: On initial publication of this review, I missed Ryan Sook’s cover credit and attributed the cover work to interior artist Mikel Janin. Mikel was good enough to check into the comments and point out my error. The review has been updated with more accurate credits.

I am probably not the best person to objectively review this book, for a few reasons, even though I studied journalism in college. But I figure once you’ve publshed a review that contains the sentence, “This ending is so Goddamned shameful I can barely even find the fucking words,” I can pretty much chuck any pretense of journalistic objectivity out the window, at least when it comes to the Comic Book Reviews category.

With that said, let’s talk about Justice League Dark #3: I liked this book… and I shouldn’t have, by every standard I’ve set for comics in every review I have written to date.

It’s decompressed. It contains almost no action. It barely explains what happened before, assumes the reader has knowledge of comics that were canceled fifteen years ago and were long out of print, and has a cover that writes checks the comic itself doesn’t cash. I mean, at no time in this book does Zatanna ride a Batcycle, and if you’re gonna bait and switch me like that, the least artist Mikel Janin Ryan Sook could have done was put her in her fishnets for a little free-of-charge fanboy boner (Fanboy-ner? Hey, no Google results! Fanboy-ner! Trademark /copyright 2011 Crisis On Infinite Midlives!). And John Constantine does not shoot fire from his hands, Mikel Ryan. The only way his hand should look like that would immediately after fingerblasting Veneria, the Harpy Queen of Tertiary Chlamydia.

So I shouldn’t like this book. But it has four things going for it: Shade, The, Changing and Man.

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Oct29

Magic, Broken Human Beings And Sacrifices On The Altar Of Revenue – Review Of Justice League Dark #2

by Amanda on October 29, 2011 at 8:39 pm
Posted In: Comic Book Reviews

Something dark and malevolent is afoot in the DCU, and it’s not just the continued employment of Rob Liefield despite any evidence of an ability to utilize symmetry or feet in any of his attempts at artwork. No, I’m speaking of magical nasties that defy even the efforts of the heavy hitting Big Three to put down. In Justice League Dark, magically powered individuals have to join together to defeat an out of control, seemingly insane villain, the witch known as The Enchantress. But is she really the Big Bad that is causing reality to come undone or the victim of some other, similarly damaged, reality challenged, spelling slinging powerhouse?

Spoilery goodness after the jump!

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