SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part 2: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary Panel

And finally, here is the last of it. The last panel we attended at San Diego Comic-Con on Sunday, July 21st, before the convention-closing screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode, Once More With Feeling: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary panel, featuring classic Marvel writer Roy Thomas, current writer Brian Michael Bendis, and artist John Romita, Jr.

There wasn’t anything revealed that you could particularly call “news” at this panel. Hell, there wasn’t even a hell of a lot of information about the creations of The Avengers, The X-Men, or any of the rest (although we did learn that Thomas made The Vision an android because hey! Stan Lee says stuff sometimes!). But what we did get were some cool and inspirational stories of what it was like to be at Marvel right around the time when Fantastic Four was breaking, what it was like to grow up around one of the premier Spider-Man artists of the late 60s, early 70s, and what it was like to grow up in Brian Michael Bendis’s broken home! Well, I guess some stories are inspirational only in their aftermath.

But even if the panel didn’t have anything new to say about the modern world of comics, I can think of worse ways to close out the convention than to hear about what the world of comics was like when legends were being created every month, when characters who would literally change some of our lives were being spitballed to meet a deadline on a Sunday afternoon, and when a man could get a gig writing some of the most legendary books in Marvel history by filling out a workbook on his lunch break.

And even if you weren’t there, you can check some of it out right here. We have a few videos of some of the cooler stories – not the best videos we’ve ever shot, but you can see who’s talking and get the whole stories – right here after the jump.

Excitement In Travel: Extended Sequence From The Wolverine Released

The week before San Diego Comic-Con is pure bleeding hell. We here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office are busy collecting and testing the new equipment for covering SDCC (Amanda and I both have new smartphones that can act as WiFi hotspots for the actual writing equipment, and a new camera that can hopefully take pictures at panels from further back than the front row is working out swimmingly – if I can take a zoomed photo of a flower from across a backyard at twilight while shitfaced, I think I can get Bob Harras screwing up his face while trying to come up with an answer that doesn’t include the phrase, “indiscriminate firing” from halfway back in Room 6BCF). But not only that, we are squaring away both of our day jobs, which are each of the type where when you tell your boss you won’t be around for a week, they act like you’re telling them you FDISK’ed the database server and shit in the payroll filing cabinet.

So not only are we are busy as hell, but we can’t even make a command decision as to whether or not we want to brave Hall H on Saturday because the entirety of 20th Century Fox’s panel description is: TBA. Now, the smart money is on that panel including something about Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it is possible there will also be something about The Wolverine, which opens a couple of weeks after SDCC ends. Sure, the odds are long on that count – two weeks before opening, the only way any real buzz is gonna arise from Comic-Con is if Hugh Jackman is caught disposing of a dead hooker in the bay behind the Hyatt – but I guess it’s possible.

But let’s face reality: the odds we’d spend all day in Hall H to catch footage of The Wolverine are pretty long. So let’s all pretend that we spent a long morning in a sun-blasted line behind a kid in an anime costume that makes him smell like hot PVC insulation and foot, and take a look at the first extended sequence from The Wolverine right here. You can catch it after the jump.

80s Comic Book Movies: New Trailer For The Wolverine Released

Truly, the comics geek is living in a special, blessed time. When I was seventeen years old, my friends and I spent fully a year and a half looking forward to Tim Burton’s Batman to come out… because as hard as it is to believe, the last comic-book movie adaptation before that movie was Superman IV: The Quest For Peace in 1987. And before that? Yeah, Howard The Duck. To say that Hollywood wasn’t catering to our needs back then would be an understatement only surpassed by, “It was kinda breezy in Oklahoma yesterday.” *

But clearly it ain’t like that now. The summer movie season is only about three weeks old and we already have one big superhero movie out, with Man of Steel coming in June. Which is such a wealth of geek material that it’s easy to forget that we also have The Wolverine coming out July 26th. Well, there’s the wealth of material, and the fact that Wolverine: X-Men Origins kinda sucked.

However, 20th Century Fox doesn’t want you to forget, as they have released a new trailer for the movie. And it is proof that you shouldn’t forget, because this series of clips shows a bunch of sequences that look heavily influenced by the classic Chris Claremont / Frank Miller Wolverine miniseries from the early 80s.

Plus there is a giant, robot-looking samauri. Because shut up, that’s why.

Anyway, you can check out the latest footage after the jump.

Now With Added Ninja (Deadpool Sold Separately): The Wolverine Teaser, Posters Released

When it comes to this summer’s upcoming geek flicks, we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are obviously, based on the generally increased level of our coverage, most looking forward to Iron Man 3. Call me an old-fashioned Generation X-er, but I’ve got a soft spot for seeing Robert Downey Jr. swilling whiskey, acting inappropriately anti-social, and losing everything important in his life. It reminds me of the 90s.

Iron Man 3 is not, however, the only comic book movie coming out this summer. There is also The Wolverine, the sequel to 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. On paper, there’s a lot to look forward to in The Wolverine, what with it reportedly being at least somewhat influenced by Chris Claremont’s and Frank Miller’s Wolverine miniseries from back to 1982, which brought us the catchphrase, “I’m the best there is at what I do,” as well as internal monologue captions obviously pasted in at the last minute by Marvel editorial to make it seem, all visual evidence to the contrary, like Wolverine didn’t just kill a room full of ninjas. But on the other hand, The Wolverine is the sequel to a movie that gave us Deadpool – The Merc With a Mouth – with no mouth.

The Vegas Line on this movie is a living document, that’s all I’m saying.

However, as the movie’s release date of July 26th approaches, we are beginning to get some promotional materials about the flick, and there are some reasons to be encouraged. For example, the director released six seconds of video from the movie to Vine (which we can’t embed here, but if you watch closely, you can see Famke Janssen – presumably as Jean Gray – will be making a cameo appearance), but not only that: they just released a teaser to MTV with some new footage that we can embed… along with a couple of posters for the movie showing Logan in what appears to be less-than-happy demeanor. Almost as if he spent a year having to listen to Russell Crowe singing in his ear.

Anyway, you can check out the teaser and the posters after the jump.

I’m A Superhero: Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Many years ago, a secret government organization abducted the man called Logan, a mutant possessing razor-sharp spoilers and the ability to heal from any bad comic…

I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t feel like I needed another Wolverine book. We got the debut of The Savage Wolverine just two months ago, we’ve had Wolverine & The X-Men going since the end of the Schism event about a year and a half ago, and then there’s that good old Wolverine comic that, until recently, had been running since Logan put on an eyepatch and started acting like it would make people without massive traumatic brain injuries think he was a completely different dude with fucked-up hair and adamantium claws back in 1988. Even forgetting the recent Wolverine: The Best There Is series, throw on top of those books Wolverine’s appearances in X-Men, Avengers, New Avengers, and even fucking X-Babies, I wasn’t exactly waiting with bated breath to bring my monthly Wolverine expenditures into the three figures.

But still, I picked up the first issue of writer Paul Cornell’s and artist Alan Davis’s new Wolverine, partially because I generally dug Cornell’s recent work on DC’s Demon Knights, partially because I’ve liked Davis’s work since Captain Britain and more importantly (to me, anyway) Miracleman, and partially because I co-run a comics Web site and part of my job is to read stuff that I don’t necessarily give a damn about and write about it.

And it turns out that that’s not a bad thing, because Wolverine #1 is good. Really fucking good. Better than the opening to about any solo Wolverine story in recent memory.

Particularly that first page, which is one hell of a cool shot across the bow.

Hipster Outreach: Marvel Announces Free Digital Comics, Music For Comics At SXSW

We are not currently at South By Southwest, partly because we have already pissed our meager convention budget on preparations for San Diego Comic-Con in July, and partially because I learned during a visit in 1998 that Austin’s motto of “Keep Austin Weird” does not constitute a legal defense. Let’s just say that, somewhere in a computer in Austin Police Headquarters, there is an active arrest warrant for “Batroc Z. Leaper” that I wouldn’t want compared to my current driver’s license photo.

However, Marvel Comics is at SXSW, and earlier today that ran a panel that included a few announcements, including whatever the hell they were talking about last week with that whole “#1” teaser poster.Turns out they were talking about some free first issues.

Digitally, anyway.

For a little while.

Mashup: Savage Wolverine #1 Review

Editor’s Note: “Cyclops”? “Storm”? What do they call you? “Spoilers”?

Yesterday, I recommended that the best way to read Batman #16 was to not think about the plot too much, because it gets in the way of what the story is really delivering to the reader. I’m gonna have to recommend the same thing for writer / artist Frank Cho’s Savage Wolverine #1, but unfortunately without anywhere near the enthusiasm I had for Batman.

Look, if you’re a fan of the berserker Wolverine, and like the Frank Miller / Chris Claremont miniseries from the 80s because of the graphic violence as opposed to the nuanced characterization, there’s a lot to like in Savage Wolverine #1. Cho captures the character visually, along with the attendant violence that would, in a just and true comics world, be a major part of any comic book about a guy whose primary visible power involves six machetes. It’s a good-looking book. It’s violent and exciting. And if that’s what you want from a comic, just enjoy it and turn off your frontal lobes using whatever method or chemicals you prefer.

Because if you don’t, it’s gonna be really hard for you to not notice that this book is Lost with Wolverine, has plot holes you could drive a bus through, and leaps in logic that would make Batroc weep in frustrated shame.

How Low Can You Go? – Amanda’s Picks For The Comic Book Low Points Of 2012

2012 is firmly at our backs. Congratulations, everyone. We made it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we had some real time encounters with abject, stinking failure in 2012 that make me all the more grateful to move on and away from it. From the weird decision to fire and then almost immediately rehire Gail Simone, to the baffling continued employment of Greg Land, to the need for some high profile comics creators to make odd and unnecessary comments about Batman’s sexuality because they can’t seem to stop giving Playboy interviews while in the thrall of a mescaline bender, there was plenty to color the comics enjoyment experience last year. And, after all the dust settled from the complaints of former employees about creator rights and other assorted Twitter bitching, sometimes, just sometimes, there were the comics themselves that were the problem.

Here are my picks for the top five comic book disappointments of 2012, after the jump.

Baboons, Brontosaurs and Boobs: Frank Cho’s Savage Wolverine Announced By Marvel

Apparently Marvel realized that their one-word teaser, “Savage,” was about as inscrutable and murky as Crystal Pepsi, so they figured they might as well make things official.

Frank Cho will be writing and drawing the Marvel Now new series Savage Wolverine. Not to be confused with The Savage Hawkman from DC Comics; that book was about an angry guy with metal claws who liked liquor, but he could also fly, making it totally different.

Cho, best known in the superhero comic book world for his artwork on New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, and his writing / drawing of Shanna The She-Devil (not counting the giant vagina he drew on the cover of Avengers Vs. X-Men #0), is widely-known as a cheesecake guy, and therefore is totally the most obvious choice to write and draw a short, hairy, foulmouthed drunkard (Look, Ma! I’m in a comic!).

What made you wanna take the gig, Frank?

Savage Amateurs: More Marvel Now One-Word Teasers

Oh Marvel, you and your one-word teasers for Marvel Now relaunches that you struggle more and more to make enigmatic and mysterious. A few weeks ago, they dropped a few that were truly baffling at the time – Superior? What the fuck does Superior mean? Are we dick-measuring now, Marvel? – and it had reached the point where I had become convinced that, if they wanted to keep us guessing, Marvel would be forced to resort to just making words up. Something like: “Miller. Jansen. Dinkenclammer,” or: “Adams. Lee. Sclunt.” *

But it turns out I was a bit off on that prediction, because Marvel’s come out with a couple new teasers that are a bit more decipherable. Such as this one from yesterday: