Southern Trespass: Captain America #4 Review

The unique thing about comic books, at least comic books from the Big Two that are owned by the publisher and have been around for a while (of course, whether those kind of comic books are the best thing for the industry or for readers is a whole different argument) is that writers and artists come and go, while the character remains. This dichotomy brings comic fans one of their favorite things – a continuity across years that can give some characters and titles an epic, historic feeling that supercedes the often simple adventure stories at their core – and one of their least favorite things – a continuity across years that the new douchebag creative team on a book are clearly fucking with with no regard for the character’s epic history and they’ve ruined the character and now I will Tweet a death threat and hello, Officer, no handcuffs are necessary, if you’d just read this issue, you’d see that I was right to threaten to set fire to the writer’s cat, and is that a Taser, and…

…well, you get the point.

The point being that creative teams change, and each new set of people has their own stamp that they want to put on these long-running books. And a lot of times these creators want to pay homage to a particular era from the character, which can be pretty damned varied; keep in mind that, at various times, Spider-Man has been a high school student battling street-level crime, a college student fighting more mid-level threats, an Avenger, a widely-reviled public menace, a member of the Fantastic Four, and a fucking clone… and now he’s Doctor Octopus. So if a writer wants to revisit any particular era, the story could be almost any kind, and if they want to do something new with the character, they’d need to make him a gay cowboy eating pudding or something (and I’m pretty sure if I dug far enough into the Marvel Team-Up back catalogue, I might even find that’s already been done).

All of which brings up to Rick Remender, and his reboot of Captain America following Ed Brubaker’s long run on the title. Brubaker’s reign on the title was categorized by S.H.I.E.L.D.-based espionage stories, and while God knows that he took his share of chances on the title – he killed Cap and brought Bucky back to life, for Christ’s sake – they were generally grounded, somewhat realistic stories with a classic Steranko-era feel. However, that’s not the only kind of Captain America story there is; Cap has a legacy of science fiction-style stories in his history, written and drawn by no less than Jack Kirby and Gene Colan – let’s remember that before MODOK became a comic reader’s punchline, he was created to fuck around with Cap.

Remender has clearly chosen to focus on the science fiction history of Captain America in his initial reboot story, which continues through this weeks issue #4. This is a full-blast sci-fi story, including alternate universes, alien races, spaceships, and one of the classic Captain America sci-fi villains: the Kirby-created Armin Zola. The question is: how does all this weirdness – weirdness supported by various eras in Captain America’s history, mind you – go down immediately following years and years of cold war-style spy stories?

Honestly? It’s going down hard.

When There Is No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Wait In Line For Marvel’s One Men’s Room: New Marvel Teaser Poster Released

It’s been a little while since Marvel dumped out one of their recently ubiquitous, one-word teaser posters to hype an upcoming new title, but a new one entered the wild yesterday, following a tease at a retailer’s breakfast yesterday… and as an aside: why does Marvel seem to have so many breakfasts for retailers? It was a retailer’s breakfast at New York Comic Con where Marvel teased The Superior Spider-Man, and it just seems… weird. I know that the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to consider making their establishment the first stop on my comic store / local bar routine, would much prefer a retailer’s cocktail hour. Or at least I presume that he would, considering that every time I leave his store, I hear him mutter, “Christ, I need a drink.” But I’m getting a little off point here.

The point is that there is another intriguing teaser poster for some new Marvel book coming this fall. And the bad news is that, like all the other teasers preceding it, it gives almost no information on the actual book – including no creator names.

But the good news is that Marvel apparently got Ike Perlmutter to sign off on the budget for a couple of additional words for the teaser! Which you can check out after the jump.

Action Packed And Wacky – Review Of The Fearless Defenders #1

The Fearless Defenders, written by Cullen Bunn with art by Will Sliney, wants to pack a lot of cinematic punch into its 23 pages. Fast moving, the action takes the reader quickly through character establishing scenes on the cliffs of Asgard, a smuggling vessel in the North Atlantic, and an archeological dig set in the middle of a national forest, barely pausing for breath along the way. The protagonists are introduced in large point font with witty subtitling in a style reminiscent of a 70s action flick. They battle air pirates, zombie vikings and their own feelings for one another, tossing off witty lines with an ample amount of ass kicking.

So, this should be a slam dunk, right?

Beware the siren song of judgement and spoilers, after the jump!

The Captain Kirk Slam: Iron Man #6 Review

Editor’s Note: My old man had a philosophy: peace means having a bigger spoiler than the other guy.

If I had to hazard a guess, writing Iron Man has to be an interesting and somewhat difficult task for Kieron Gillen. He’s following an Eisner-winning run by writer Matt Fraction on Invincible Iron Man, and not only is he taking the peak seat writing a character who is now mired in the popular culture not only as the star of his own movies, but the star of The Avengers and, if reports are correct, soon to be part of the Guardians of The Galaxy movie. So imagine not only that heavy responsibility that Gillen must feel, but throw on top of it that he is working with artist Greg Land, which means that no matter what Gillen wants to write for Tony Stark, he needs to make sure he includes a coterie of hot chicks for Land to lightbox.

Well, Gillen tries to rise to the task in Iron Man #6, the first part of the three-part arc The Godkiller. First, Land picks up the story gauntlet thrown down by Fraction at the conclusion of Invincible Iron Man, where Fraction set up Stark as preparing to spend an extended period of time in deep space. Gillen picks up story elements from last year’s Avengers Vs. X-Men to put Stark at odds with an entire spacegoing civilization, in a way that could easily put Iron Man into contact with the Guardians before all is said and done. And I can almost see Gillen finishing the first draft of his script and leaning back in his his seat with satisfaction… only to see a handwritten note pinned to his wall reading, “DON’T FORGET THE SPACE BITCHES!” and then sighing, cracking his knuckles and leaning forward to perform draft two.

I say that Gillen “tries” to rise to the task, because while Iron Man #6 lays the groundwork for a high-tension story putting Iron Man into direct conflict with an entire spacefaring civilization… but it is, in fact, all groundwork. This is a somewhat talky, exposition-laden issue with precious little action, instead focusing on explaining the civilization to set the groundwork for future conflict, and on Stark’s daddy issues and senses of aging and mortality. It is mostly foreplay with very little climax.

And, as with most good foreplay, there are hot chicks. So at least Land has something to do.

Apocalypses For Everyone! Age of Ultron Motion Comic Trailer Released

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there has been a minor snow event that has affected the Greater Boston area over the past day and a half or so. Some refer to this event as Nemo, but the locals have taken to calling it a minor apocalypse.

As such, we are engaged with the normal activities of digging out from more than two feet of snow. Those activities being comprised of mainly cursing the Home Office building management for taking a whole two hours during blizzard conditions to come dig us out, while frantically compulsively our beers to make sure we can survive for 24 more hours, and finding to our horror that the count seems to drop by one every ten to fifteen minutes.

Therefore we don’t have a lot of time for comics writing today, but we do have one item: Marvel has released a motion comics trailer for their spring event crossover, Age of Ultron, the main ten-issue series of which is being written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Bryan Hitch, Brandon Peterson and Carlos Pacheco. Supposedly Hitch has done the bulk of the art for the project, and he swears that his pencils are all completed and submitted… and we will know if he is telling the truth if issue 10 comes out sometime in 2015.

Either way, you can check out the trailer after the jump… and if you’ll excuse me, I need to put together a “Free snow, just haul away” ad on Craig’s List, and make some more beer safe for the neighbor kids by turning it into pee.

Eight Angry Men: New Avengers #3 Review

It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a month since Jonathan Hickman debuted his Marvel Now reboot of New Avengers, to generally good reviews, and, well, this one:

Christ, he thinks he’s making movies. That’s why I wasn’t completely satisfied by Avengers #1, and was actually kinda pissed off by New Avengers #1: they’re not really stories.

Yeah, it didn’t do a hell of a lot for me. Hickman started New Avengers in a way that felt like a movie trailer: a tease of a terrible, world-shattering apocalypse to occur at some point in the future, with a final assembly of heroes to combat this purely theoretical threat in heroic establishing shots with explanatory and expository slogans, followed by a team shot… all without a hell of a lot actually, you know, happening. All it was missing was some deep baritone growling, “In a world…” and an immediately-following commercial for Doritos. It was such a blatant setup for story versus actual story that it actually made me kind of angry.

That, however, was a month ago. This week, we have New Avengers #3, and the Illuminati is actually in a position to face the terrible, world-shattering apocalypse. So now that it’s here, how was it? Well, the downside is that the actual confrontation is, on the scale of action sequences, less the last ten minutes of the Avengers movie and closer to the last time I was shitfaced and tried to get the TV remote to jump to my hand using telekenisis. The good news is that, despite the somewhat anticlimactic action sequence, it features a hell of a lot of damn fine character work. And while there isn’t a lot of action, there is plenty of conflict. Some damned entertaining conflict, as a matter of fact.

Armored Gladiators, And Also Football: Iron Man 3’s Extended Look Trailer

Given that Crisis On Infinite Midlives is based in Boston, it was difficult for us to escape the pervasive malaise that surrounds a Super Bowl that doesn’t include the New England Patriots. Combine the lack of the home team with the fact that co-Editor Amanda and I generally look forward to the Super Bowl only as a bellwether that we are only days away from pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training, and that football enthusiasts were the ones most likely to smack our copies of The Dark Knight Returns our of our hands in the halls of high school (all while guffawing in a manner that implied that high school somehow mattered, and that its social pyramid would go unchanged in the future, and that there wasn’t a chance in hell that someday you’d be gone to fat and earning your keep by rotating the tires on my expensive sports car, right, 1987 starting linebacker Jeff Chander, of 228 North Thompson Avenue?), and we just weren’t all that into the experience.

So here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we spent the game as an excuse to drink beer and read – Amanda Jim Butcher’s new Dresden Files book Cold Days, and myself Paul Tobin’s prose superhero story (and, ironically, elegy for lost high school relationships) Prepare To Die! – with the game on in the background so we could occasionally look up and marvel that the truly shitty electrical engineering skills at play in a city best known for binge drinking, and at the commercials.

Specifically, we wanted to see the new commercial for and attendant new footage from Iron Man 3, as did every other red blooded comic book fan, both young and old enough to have grown up associating the sound of football pads crashing with the instinct to clench the ol’ buttocks against potential wedgies. And Marvel Studios delivered… albeit using the modern irritation of only showing a bit before teasing the masses to their Facebook page for more visual goodness in exchange for a cheap “like.” And if there’s one thing you don’t want to try with an older geek, it’s playing the sounds of football followed immediately by the command, “Now say that you like it!”

So to hell with the official channels; we have obtained the “extended look” trailer for Iron Man 3, and you can check it out too, right after the jump.

Sticky Fingers: The Superior Spider-Man #2 Review

Editor’s Note: Let me go wild, like a spoiler in the sun…

The problem with The Superior Spider-Man #2 is the scene. The scene.

You will know The Scene when you see it. In fact, you will have some difficulty unseeing it. And given that Doc Ock is occupying Peter Parker’s body, and given that Ock, a former ugly duckling, is suddenly in the body of a guy that can allow him to do things that he has never been able to do, while not necessarily understanding how to do those things, the scene makes complete and total sense.

And yet The Scene overpowers almost everything else in the issue, and it does it unnecessarily. Sure, it serves a purpose in furthering a main plot point, but it does it in a way where you almost won’t remember the plot point it furthers. The Scene just about turns this issue into the comics equivalent of Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny: do you have any idea what Brown Bunny is about? Of course not, all you know is that Gallo got his cock sucked by Chloe Sevigny on camera.

And we will address The Scene, and how it affects the comic… which, in spite of the scene, gives us more Peter Parker than I would have expected even a month ago, and which finally shows some real signs that maybe, just maybe, Otto Octavius really has some elements to be a superior Spider-Man… and, in some areas, a superior Peter Parker.

You know, if you can get past The Scene.

Kill Your Heroes: Deadpool Killustrated #1 Review

So Deadpool goes around killing every major hero in the history of literature. Fuck it, why not?

Deadpool Killustrated #1 is the first issue of what is supposed to be the sequel to Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe, but if you haven’t read it it’s not like it really matters. The theory behind the whole thing is that, in a non-616 version of the Marvel Universe, Deadpool has become aware that he is a fictional character, and he has killed all the other Marvel heroes to set them free from the tyranny of fandom, and yet he is still looking for a way to escape the world of fiction, and blah, blah, blah. Does you really give a shit?

The point is that this book is an excuse to have Deadpool use some truly impressive firepower to kill heroic characters from classic literature. So to say that Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe is the origin of Deadpool Killustrated is arbitrary. You might as well say that the origin of Deadpool Killustrated was writer Cullen Bunn, a six pack of Sam Adams and a pinner joint.

And I really don’t care. Because no matter why it is here, while it is not quite as well-thought as its predecessor (which is like saying that cotton candy isn’t quite as nutritious as Peanut M&Ms), it is big, stupid, goofy fun.

Don’t Know What You’ve Got Til It’s Gone: Winter Soldier #14 Review

I’ve been reading, and to varying degrees, enjoying, the books of the Marvel Now relaunch (but not a reboot! Because Marvel doesn’t reboot! And there have always been enough readers who give a tinker’s shit about Havok to put him on an Avengers team!), but the more I read, the more I am beginning to believe that we have just come off the back side of one hell of an era of Marvel comics. I mean, look back to, say, Civil War. Since then, and up until the Marvel Now books, we had Spider-Man’s Brand New Day and Dan Slott’s run of stories on that title. We’ve had Bendis’s Avengers and New Avengers arcs. Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, and Christos Gage’s Avengers Academy. And while not all of the crossover events have been great shakes (everyone gets a hammer? Really?), you gotta admit that Marvel, in general, put out one hell of a run of comics in that period between 2006 and 2011.

And through it all has been Ed Brubaker on the Captain America titles. From the reincarnation of Bucky to the death of Captain America to his rebirth to the launch of Winter Soldier, Brubaker has delivered some damn good action / espionage stories through the years, and have singlehandedly put Captain America on my pull list for the first time, well, ever.

Well, Brubaker is already off of Captain America in favor of Rick Remender, but he has remained on Winter Soldier… until now. Brubaker says goodbye to Bucky and Captain America, at least for now, with Winter Soldier #14. And while I had some issues with the early issues of the title (somewhere along the line, we went from Captain America being martyred in the aftermath of Civil War to a filthy Commie monkey with a machine gun), as a swan song for Brubaker’s run in Cap and Bucky’s world, it is true to form, a fitting conclusion for his work with the character… and a reminder that we are in a whole new world with Marvel Now… for good or ill.