Episode 42: Rear Admiral Cyberman

This week we added and installed a ton of new studio equipment for the show… and then used it to spend a few minutes laying in movie sound clips like middle-market Morning Zoo jocks.

Once we got that out of our system (and it is out of our system, we swear), we spent some time discussing the Doctor Who season finale, Death in Heaven. We talk about how the finale resembled a big comic book crossover event, whether the season theme of The Doctor-as-aristocrat really held water, the missed opportunity of Clara insisting that she was The Doctor, and why the English put so much stock in Christmas specials.

This week also brought us the solicitations for the first week of DC’s Convergence event on April 8th, so we go through each of the books and talk about what looks good, what looks great, and what it would take for us to even remotely care about some of the returning pre-New 52 characters (hi, Damian Wayne!).

On the comics front, we discuss:

• Captain America and The Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Luke Ross,
• Captain America #1, written by Rick Remender with pencils y Stuart Immonen, and
• Superior Iron Man #1, written by Tom Taylor with art by Yildiray Cinar!

And now the warnings:

• This show is recorded live to tape. While that might mean that this is a looser comics podcast than you are normally accustomed to, it also means that anything can happen.
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, just assume that the spoilers you fear most will be uttered as the punchline to a dirty joke.
• Speaking of dirty jokes, this show contains adult, profane language, and is not safe for work. Having just bought a crate of recording studio gear, I can state with some authority that headphones are cheap. Get some.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:53 — 78.2MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Finish Him: Injustice: Gods Among Us #2 Review

Editor’s Note: These spoilers take place before the start of the video game.

Years and years of reading comics have taught me that, with almost no exceptions whatsoever, comic adaptations of other mediums are normally not very good. Sure, there’s Alien: The Illustrated Story, and there’s the original Star Wars adaptation by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin, but let’s face reality: in those heady, pre-VCR days of 1977, they could have had Amanda’s cousin Little Billy draw the damn thing and we’d have bought it.

Even worse are the comic book adaptations, which are generally even worse than the TV and movie ones, dating all the way back to Atari Force which, despite the obvious nostalgia for the book by Ernest Cline, might have been an awesome read for video game fans, but wasn’t all that great a shake for actual comic readers. Hell, in 1984 I was a 13-year-old comic book fan who owned the first Atari on our block (back when it was the Atari Video Computer System, before they renamed it the 2600) and I still thought that comic sucked. And the reason video game adaptations almost never work is for a very simple reason: in a comic book, you are a spectator, but it an video game, it is you. And no matter how good the story in the video game is, no comic book ever really captures that feeling of you being in the driver’s seat.

And while I’ll readily admit that I generally don’t seek out video game based comics because, well, I don’t usually like them, there has been one in the past couple of years that was pretty damn good, and that was an issue of DC Universe Online, written by Tom Taylor, that took the conceit of a Green Lantern expansion pack in the video game and used it to examine some of DC’s Lantern characters, and some real questions of moral ambiguity. It was successful because it while it was ostensibly about the video game, it instead used the game as an excuse to make it really about the characters, who just happened to be in this situation. By completely ignoring the first person element of video games, Taylor succeeded in making a pretty good comic book.And this continues in his second issue of the comic adaptation of the upcoming fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us. As a Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, most comic books about it would be wall-to-wall dudes in spandex smacking on each other. But instead, Taylor makes this book about the characters leading up to whatever causes the dudes in spandex to smack on each other in the game… and even though you will see more than a little of Mark Millar’s The Authority in this issue, it is still vastly better than a simple comic book adaptation has any right to be.

Batman Intoxicated: Legends of The Dark Knight #1 Review

Let’s get the obvious out of the way up front and confirm that no, Legends of The Dark Knight #1 is by no means required reading. A printed collection of digital-first shorts that DC has been publishing online first since June, these stories take place outside of current DC continuity – sometimes apparently taking place outside of any known DC continuity – and if it weren’t for the involvement of some A-List talent, would appear to be nothing more than DC looking for ways to monetize their backlog of emergency backup stories, some dating back to God knows when – one of these stories clearly takes place back in the Grant Morrison’s / Joe Kelly JLA of the late 90s / early 2000s… although with the setting on the JLA satellite, it might take place in 1978 for all I know.

So do you need to read this book? Hell no; as I said: this feels like DC using their old inventory to scrape four more bucks out of you this week. However, do you want to read this book? Well, if you’re interested in seeing how both some top-shelf and up-and-coming talent view Batman, with absolutely no continuity or ongoing story constraints? It actually is kind of interesting… if somewhat problematic. After all, this appears to be a playground for doing Batman stories, and sometimes on playgrounds, people fall down. And sometimes people are offered free candy and a van ride, but my personal life is none of your Goddamned business, and besides: I’m getting off point here.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 5: The Stroke of Justice

Chest colds gone? Check! Big comics shit to talk about? Check! Clean, sober and ready to put on a professional Internet radio show? Fuck you!

It’s the fifth episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast, where we talk about:

• Marvel’s staffing decisions, or: With Great Responsibility Comes No Salary, or: Trabajará para el alimento!
• Tony Stark: Great Drunk or the Greatest Drunk?
• The killer of Batman’s parents: Great Drunk or the Greatest Drunk?
• Watchmen Sequels: Great Drunken Decision or Drunken Decision?
• Batman: Arkham City: S***faced Batman, and:
• Our sleeper picks of the week, or: Great Drunken Comic Reviews or Fuck You You Don’t Know Me!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:56 — 34.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

For The Horde – I Mean The Sinestro Corps! DC Universe Online Legends #16 Review

If you’re one of those people who’s screaming self-righteously that there was no need for DC’s New 52 and that everything was fine in the old DC Universe and that your book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland will be available in paperback in November, you do still have an option available… kinda.

Since the launch of the DC Universe Online massive multiplayer online roleplaying game back in January, DC has been putting out what should amount to a three-dollar advertisement to the game: DC Universe Online Legends. It’s an old instinct for these MMORPG companies: people love the continuing stories in the game, so make some quick bank by putting out a comic based on the continuing stories in the game! It’s the kind of cross-media pollination to create market synergy that makes marketing people hard and other people want to set marketing people on fire.

Almost exclusively, these books fail on both a marketing and artistic level, because the publishers generally treat them like what they are: a financed, short-term cash-grab. Seriously: what talent are you going to put on a book with characters you don’t that’ll be canceled the day the game servers get shut down? Frank Miller? Yeah, try Francois Jean-Baptiste Charlemagne Milloirse, and even then only if he agrees to run his own script through Babelfish to save on translation costs.

So DC Universe Online Legends should suck… except DC owns these characters, they have a financial interest in how well the game does, and the marketing actually makes sense: if someone who never read comics tries the game (Let’s say his friends told him there were girls in there – there aren’t, by the way), there’s at least a CHANCE that they could wander into a comic store looking to learn more.

The upside to this for comic fans is that the development cycle of an MMORPG is significantly longer than it takes for Dan DiDio to say, “Fuck it! DO-OVER!”, which means that if you have a rage-on over the fact that Superman’s underpants aren’t on the outside anymore, this book has been a safe haven. In addition, since DC has a vested interest in making the book at least decent, they started out by putting A-List talent like Marv Wolfman on the book.

With that said, Marv’s arc on the book is over, and the game just put out an expansion pack containing a bunch of Green Lantern stuff, so DC Universe Online #16 is just a Green Lantern story. And since Green Lantern was hardly affected at all by the New 52 reboot, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference between this book and the DCnU proper.

Still, this is a pretty good book if you’re a Green Lantern fan.