Sloppy Seconds: Red Hood And The Outlaws #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-SPOIL-ROBIN! If you don’t want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-FUCK-OFF-DUDE-ROBIN-SUCKS-WHERE’S-MY-TWO-DOLLARS-DIDIO! Either way: I’m a-spoiling this book!

I am sick. Deathly sick. Like, “Wow! I think I must have obtained spider powers somehow because every 30 to 45 seconds, I appear to be horking up webbing!” sick. And I can confirm that Peter Parker was wrong; with great power seems to come great chills, fever and runny stool.

As such, I have very little energy to do anything, and am desperate for a solution that will make me feel better. So I decided to read Red Hood The The Outlaws #6. Which, based on Amanda’s experience reading the first issue, might mean that I’m am not just sick, but also very, very stupid.

I purchased the issue before I became quite as ill as I am now, so I can’t even blame antihistamines or brain fluke or whatever. No, I bought it because the cover proclaims that this issue contains the first meeting between Red Hood and Starfire, meaning that despite skipping issues 2 through 5 (Yes, I bought one in between, but didn’t have the heart to put myself through reading it), maybe I could get an explanation about Starfire’s post New 52… priorities.

So let’s get it out of the way: is this issue any good? Well honestly, it is better than the first issue. That doesn’t mean it’s good, per se; I recently put out something better than Red Hood And The Outlaws #1, albeit being somewhat runny.

Ghost Riders In Artists’ Alley

We haven’t written almost anything about the Gary Friedrich / Marvel lawsuit because we are not lawyers, other comics news outlets have covered it better than we could have, and frankly, a major comic publisher winning a lawsuit against a destitute former creator isn’t, unfortunately, what you’d call isolated, groundbreaking news,

In a nutshell: the first guy who wrote the Ghost Rider character for Marvel sued Marvel claiming that they hadn’t properly registered a copyright to the character and that therefore ownership of the character had returned to him. It’s a lawsuit that’s been going on for some time, and about a week ago a judge issued a document saying that both parties agreed that Marvel owned the character, and that Friedrich actually owed Marvel $17,000 for selling Ghost Rider stuff at conventions. Which to the non-legally trained mind – like, for example, ours – seemed like getting hit in a crosswalk by a Ferarri and having a judge tell you to pay the rich guy for damage to his headlight.

So most of the comics Internet blew up, partially because of the 17 grand, but also because at face value, it looked like Marvel was going after creators for selling unlicensed materials at conventions. Which, frankly, would be bad; my walls are personally loaded with unlicensed drawings and paintings purchased at various conventions, and half of why I go to conventions is the opportunity to shake a creator’s hand and come home with an awesome convention souvenir… or at least a better convention souvenir than Yiff Herpes.

…A Fight For Love And Glory: Batman #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s Wednesday, and once again, the local bar is closed for reasons that border on the frivolous: there are very few hookers in this town to start with, and she might have stabbed herself seven times in the men’s crapper, and either way: I never saw her before. So I might as well take the opportunity to lie low and do another short comic review.

If you’re Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, the problem with producing one of the more triumphant single comic book issues in recent memory – particularly when that triumph is based on what amounts to an engaging storytelling gimmick you can only use once that wraps a story that’s been told a million times: Batman gets driven nuts – is that you need to come out with another issue just four short weeks later. Well, it’s four weeks later, and Batman #6 is merely pretty damn good. It misses the level of great by hitting a story beat we’ve seen before, but it’s still very, very decent.

They’re All Agin Me: Alan Moore on Before Watchmen, Darwyn Cooke Minutemen Art

In a truly weird article reeking of cognitive dissonance, Fast Company’s Co.Create, which is a Web site that is not about comics, debuted exclusive new Darwyn Cooke art from the upcoming Before Watchmen book The Minutemen, while simultaneously debuting new comments from Alan Moore complaining that the Before Watchmen project should die on the vine, or in a chute, or really anywhere, preferably with Moore pulling the trigger.

“It seems a bit desperate to go after a book famous for its artistic integrity. It’s a finite series,” says Moore. “Watchmen was said to actually provide an alternative to the superhero story as an endless soap opera. To turn that into just another superhero comic that goes on forever demonstrates exactly why I feel the way I do about the comics industry. It’s mostly about franchises. Comic shops these days barely sell comics. It’s mostly spin-offs and toys.

Hmm… that’s not what I witness every Wednesday at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to quit asking if they carry inflatable Power Girl dolls. What I do witness are a bunch of middle-aged guys with lucrative day jobs who can afford to buy a stack of three and four dollar comics, but that’s a different issue for the industry. Everyone knows that a product that targets only old white guys is destined to rocket to the top of any sales chart… provided your product is named Cialis. But I digress.

Decompression Sickness: Batman & Robin #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vowing upon their parents’ death to rid Gotham City of the forewarning element, Crisis On Infinite Midlives has, over the years, fought spoilers in their many macabre forms. This time they lost. You are warned.

As I said in my review of Batman & Robin #4, I am enjoying this book one hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to when I finished the first issue. A book that started out looking like the worst of the Batman TV show was starting to look more like the Christopher Nolan movies. And #6 continues that trend, but there’s a funny thing about movies: I’ve always said (Because I lifted it from Stephen King in Danse Macabre) that I can tell if a movie’s any good, or if it’s too long, if I start wishing for a cigarette in the middle of it. At six issues into this battle against new villain Nobody? Yeah, I could use a smoke.

It’s not that this is a bad story by any stretch of the imagination. This issue gives us Robin under the clandestine tutelage of Nobody, who is actually Morgan Ducard, son of Henri Ducard, who trained Bruce Wayne before he put on the Batman suit. You remember, Liam Neeson from Batman Begins? You know, that Batman movie just before The Dark Knight? The one with the chick who’s banging Tom Cruise? Just go to any Best Buy dollar DVD bin and you’ll find it. But I digress.

Nobody is slowly massaging Robin into becoming a killer, starting to ease Robin toward a willingness to kill by doing the old “give him an empty gun and tell him to shoot a guy to get him used to pulling the trigger” trick, followed a couple of pages later with the subtle mindfuckery of the “Now dump the guy into a vat of acid while he’s awake and screaming like a pig in a chute” ruse. In the meantime, we flash back to Bruce’s first mission with Nobody’s father, where he tried a similar method of attenuating Bruce toward lethal means with the time-tested classic, “Shoot a dude in the face in front of the guy who has repeatedly stated that he will never kill, then say, ‘U mad bro?'” The two stories are interesting and effective in drawing parallels between Batman’s early training and Robin’s current work, but the abrupt nature of each Ducard suddenly chucking in lethal force is jarring, and forced me to say, “Oh well; he only had about about 20 pages to get it done,” and just like when you realize you’ve started looking for the wires in a space opera movie, boom! Just like that, you’re out of the story and wishing for a cigarette.

Vindication, or: Freezing Out Jar Jar

Back in 1999, a high school buddy of mine and I caught that case of Skywalking Pneumonia that seemed to be going around that May, and we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for an opening matinee. A couple of hours later, we walked out and said, “Um… it had lightsabers. Lightsabers are cool. Right? I mean, I thought they were… cool… and there were – Exactly what the fuck just happened to us? Why do we suddenly miss Ewoks? And if I hear the word ‘Meesa,’ I swear before God I will plow this car into a fucking abutment!”

Since then, there’s been a lot of hyperbolic talk about George Lucas raping childhoods, while Lucas defended himself by saying The Phantom Menace was meant to be a kids’ movie, but the bottom line is that a lot of people see the movie as a filthy aberration. And I am one of them… to the point that I never paid to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again (I was, um, provided a copy of the 2002 leak of Attack of The Clones, and I saw Revenge of the Sith at a free advance screening sponsored by the radio station I worked for).

Well, it is now thirteen years later. And despite Lucas’s tone-deaf verbal defenses of the movie in the face of fan revolt, there is finally, all in one day, two pieces of concrete evidence that we fans were right.

Undeserved Fate: Journey Into Mystery #634 Review

I can’t imagine that Kieron Gillen was super excited to be assigned writing duties on Journey Into Mystery. A comic that’s nothing but Thor retitled following Thor’s “death” in Fear Itself, at face value this is a book designed to do nothing but park the title until they’re ready to bring Thor back properly. This is a book that is designed to have no future, and getting the assignment had to feel like getting a gig at a VHS tape factory. Or at a newspaper. Or on a non creator owned J. Michael Straczynski ongoing title.

So it would have been easy for Gillen to treat the book as what it is, write himself a good old middle of the road Thor-ish story and bide his time for a more lucrative assignment, like Scarlet Spider’s Pal: Jimmy Douchebag, or perhaps Ultimate Boom-Boom. Instead, he’s cutting loose with some of the zaniest, most fun comic writing you can currently buy. When it comes to pure fun, you’re not gonna find anything better than Journey Into Mystery #634 on the shelves this week.

Conjugal Visit With A Remorseless Killer: Scarlet Spider #2 Review

Scarlet Spider is going to be a hard book for anyone who read comics for a long time before the Spider Clone saga to read with any level of objectivity. I’ve just now written and deleted a bunch of reasons why that is, but what it comes down to is that if you spent your 1980s adolescence reading books like The Dark Knight Returns, Mage: The Hero Discovered and Watchmen, the logic in the 1990s was simple: if ($_spider + $_clone) {($_comic == shit) && ($_comic_dollars_spent == 0)}. Sure, there are people crawling out of the woodwork now defending the Spider Clone saga, but there were also people who begged for conjugal visits with Ted Bundy; we call whose people cranks on a good day and apeshit crazy on a bad one, and we don’t generally entrust either with important things like firearms, or the editors’ desks of major comic books.

Long story short: I have not been looking forward to Scarlet Spider.

So I was prepared a few weeks ago to pick up the first issue, summarily review it and probably discard it… except by the time I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I’m such a hotshit writer about comics how come I don’t rank free advance review copies, it was already sold out… and this was by Wednesday evening. Which proves that despite my personal prejudices, someone was looking forward to this book.

So this week, I was able to get my hands on Scarlet Spider #2, and even at face value, I wasn’t excited about it – I mean, look at that cover. The center focus is the hero’s crotch with a bisected stone behind it, making it look like Scarlet Spider either has The Thing’s wang or that he is literally shitting a brick.

With all that said: Scarlet Spider #2 is actually a decent comic book. The character work is engaging, and I actually enjoyed it… even if I think it’s all presented in a way that isn’t going to be sustainable in the long term

It’s Better To Burn Out: Daken: Dark Wolverine #21 Review

We’ve had some fun at Rob Williams’s expense here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because to be truthful, I put Robocop on my pull list from back when Avatar was publishing Frank Miller’s Robocop – a Steven Grant written and Juan Jose Ryp drawn adaptation of Miller’s original script for the movie Robocop 2. And because of that, I kind of automatically get copies Dynamite Comics’s version of Robocop, and honestly? Rob Williams should not be writing Robocop comics. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to write the word Robocop.

And when it comes to Daken: Dark Wolverine, we kinda get it for almost the same reason: I put Wolverine on my pulls back when Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi were on the book about five years ago, and I started getting Daken by default. I mentioned the mistake to my local comic store owner, who knows me my name and asks me if I’d rather buy a couple extra books or get my comics from a Rite-Aid spinner rack while parents hustle their children away muttering “Don’t talk to perverts,” and wound up keeping it… even though I think that the term “Dark Reign” should only be used again when some comic geek biologist uses it in the name for a newly-discovered shit beetle.

So we’ve got a writer with some decent books under his belt – but some real stinkers, too – and a book born from the one of the longest and most irritating events Marvel’s produced since Maximum Carnage, and on top of it all? The book’s been canceled. So there should be nothing in Daken: Dark Wolverine to look forward to… Which is a shame, because it is a pretty damn solid comic book. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting, and that’s enough.

…The Dead Will Seek A Cut: Tony Moore Sues Robert Kirkman Over The Walking Dead

UPDATE, 2/11/2012, 12:30ish: Robert Kirkman’s calling the lawsuit bullshit (Well, he said, “ridiculous,” but my word’s better), saying that his contract with Moore gives Moore 60 percent of the net on The Walking Dead comics and 20 percent of the net on the TV show, and that Moore’s been paid accordingly. Now, as you can see in the conversation in the comments, generally a percentage of the net in Hollywood usually falls somewhere between jack and shit, but it, and Kirkman’s assertion that both he and Moore had lawyers when they made the deal, clarifies the situation a little bit. (Update via Comic Book Resources)

There are reasons why my default answer to nearly any question is: “I’m not answering any Goddamned questions without my lawyer here,” and here is a prime example:

Robert Kirkman, the famed comic book writer who helped create AMC’s hit zombie series The Walking Dead, has been sued by a childhood friend and collaborator who claims he is entitled to as much as half the proceeds from the lucrative franchise.

If you’re only a fan of the AMC Walking Dead television show and not as familiar with the comic, I won’t even tell you to fuck off to some other comics Web site, but I will acknowledge that you might be responding to this news with a resounding, “…who?”

Tony Moore was a longtime collaborator of Kirkman’s, doing art on early Kirkman-written indie comics like Battle Pope and Brit. Moore also did the art on the first six issues of The Walking Dead before being replaced by still-current artist Charlie Adlard, and Moore continued to do Walking Dead covers for another 18 issues before leaving completely to work on books for Vertigo and Marvel. Kirkman has implied that Moore went off the book because he was late… now I’m inferring that Moore’s position is that he was “late” because Kirkman fucked him without contraception.