Interruptus: Powers #8 Review

I like Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers a lot. It has been on my pull list at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop acting out the term “pull list” in front of the paying customers, for more than ten years. I have all the individual issues that follow the first “Who Killed Retro Girl?” arc back when the book was published by Image Comics. And I even like this individual issue of Powers. But I’m not going to recommend that you buy it.

It is, in fact, all but pointless to buy this book, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not, or if you like it or not. Falling in love with an individual issue of Powers is more pointless than falling in love at summer camp. It’s more pointless than falling in love with a hooker. It’s roughly akin to falling in love with a hooker in a city that isnt your own, that you might come back to in a few years, and as you’re zipping your pants you realize that all you remember is that her name is P-something.

Because this comic book simply. Does not. Come out. Ever.

We Don’t Need No Steeking Badges!

Earlier this week, I said to my partner Amanda, “Look at this week’s new comics list! There’s a new issue of Bendis’s Powers on it! I’ll make you a bet: if it’s actually on the stands when we get to our local comic book store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop settling my penis-related wagers there, I’ll do anything you want!”

Well, we are back from our weekly comics-buying excursion, and I lost my bet. So thanks to that, and the attendant hyperextension of the jaw, this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it’s looking like a pretty decent week: we do, in fact, have Bendis’s and Oeming’s Powers (Ow, clicky jaw!),Plus Brian Wood’s and Becky Cloonan’s Conan, and Robert Kirkman’s Thief of Thieves, a new Batgirl and Batwoman (Hurry up and heal, temporomandubular joint!) and a bunch of other new and cool stuff!

But before we review them, we gotta read them. So because of that, and the fact that women don’t have the needed recharge period guys do…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Delayed Gratification: The Boys #63 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to provide you with one final review from last week’s books before the comic store opens up with the new books. You, however, will have to provide your own shitty Thin Lizzy joke.

If you’ve been reading Garth Ennis’s The Boys for a while, this is the stuff you’ve been waiting for almost since the book started at Wildstorm Comics back in 2006. If you haven’t been reading it, well, you’re kinda screwed. There aren’t enough pixels on this page to bring you up to speed on what the hell is going on, so yeah: you’re boned. If it helps, there are at least two dismemberments and three decapitations. Superhero comics, everybody!

The Boys is almost a prototypical comic written for the trade. Comprised almost exclusively of six-issue, reprint-friendly arcs, it is truly a long form novel in comic form… to the point where when I almost have to recommend that you don’t buy the individual issues – and I’m a fan. I initially bought in when the book was announced, and as an old Preacher fan, I told my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me to remember that the Voice Of God usually smells less of garlic and bourbon, to add it to my pulls as soon as issue one was solicited.

And I didn’t like it. The build was slow, the plot was talky, and it seemed like to took forever for it to get going. In retrospect, for me the best thing that could have happened to this book was its cancellation by Wildstorm after the sixth issue, apparently over the miniscule and ridiculous concern that the Homelander, the Superman analogue of The Boys, orally raped a superheroine with a couple of his buddies. Superhero comics, everybody!

Hauntingly Familiar: Batwing #6 Review

Batwing has been one of the weirder and more interesting books of the New 52. It leverages Grant Morrison’s Batman Incorporated concept – Bruce Wayne finances local Batman franchises around the world, possibly because Batman believes that Starbucks are a superstitious, cowardly lot – and uses it to answer a question that only a few comics have tried to address: if there are superheroes, why don’t they go after real scumbags in places that make Gotham City look like Metropolis after a massive federal grant to finance free beer for the sad?

In a nutshell, Batwing puts a version of Batman in the Congo, smack in the middle of one of those hellholes that have been at civil war for so long they call it Tuesday. Batwing didn’t lose his parents to a killer, he lost them to AIDS and was drafted by one of those tinpot shitsplat warlords who whip up armies of children because children haven’t learned to say “no,” or, “that’s wrong”, or “tinpot shitsplat dictator.” Or at least that haven’t learned to say that last one with the level of derision it deserves.

So instead of a Batman moved to fight crime based on seeing a murder during his childhood, we have one who is moved to fight crime after being a murderer during his childhood. And he’s doing it in a country so loaded with corruption and casual daily horrible crime that it really feels like it needs a Batman. Which is a cool concept, and it generally works… but for a book that packs an extra punch by being based in a truly horrible place in real life, it doesn’t meet the level of realism I’ve come to expect from a Batman comic… which sounds stupid, but bear with me.

We Have A Hulk: Avengers Extended Super Bowl Trailer

If you watched the Super Bowl yesterday for the actual football game, you are moaning with disappointment over the Patriots loss, chortling in a self-satisfied manner over the Patriots loss, or a poor, doomed resident of New Jersey enjoying the first modern mention of your state that does not involve the terms, “guido,” “Snooki” or “taint-scented.”

However, if you’re one of the smart ones who watched just for the commercials, you saw a new, thirty-second spot for the upcoming Joss Whedon Avengers flick with a bunch of not previously seen footage. That was sweet… but you know what’s sweeter? The extended version Marvel released online with even more not previously seen footage. Which you can see after the jump…

My Dinner With Alan: Alan Moore’s Video Conference

We have a very busy day ahead of us in no way related to the world of comics, so here’s a little light lunchtime / screwing off from work / pretending to work by staring intently at your computer screen entertainment: a two and a half hour long interview with Alan Moore.

Fo some background: a little while back, American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar’s widow, Joyce Brabner, started a Kickstarter project to raise money for a statue of Harvey to be erected in Cleveland. One of the benefits offered for donations of a particular dollar amount was the chance to participate in a video conference with Alan Moore. At the time it just seemed like a neat opportunity to get face time with a legendary creator… nobody knew that it would turn into a neat opportunity to get face time with a legendary creator who just learned that DC Comics was doing a prequel to one of his masterworks.

With that said, reportedly Moore is even-tempered, pleasant and gracious in the video (No, I haven’t seen it yet. I live in Boston, which means yesterday was spent watching a truly depressing football game and that I am hung over… and therefore need something to watch today while pretending to work), and addresses subjects from his feud with Grant Morrison, to Before Watchmen, to how to do magic.

Flagsmasher Is A Stupid Name: Amazing Spider-Man #679 Review

God knows that The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t perfect – it gets sucked into events like most Big Two publisher books, and sometimes it uses valuable page real estate setting up the next event – whatever the hell that winds up being. But when it’s not being co-opted and fucked with by higher Marvel editorial for whatever crossover event the Architects bake up at their retreats (“I’ve got it! X-Men kick the Fantastic Four in the groin! Let’s try it on new guy Hickman! Hold him down, Aaron, or you’re next!”), it is one of the best, old-school comics you can get.

Amazing Spider-Man #679 is the second part of a two-and-out that at face value has no place in a book about a guy who, in his best stories, fights more street-level crime than cosmic stuff. If you’d told me that writer Dan Slott was going to do a story about Spider-Man that included time travel, continuity paradoxes and Madame Fucking Web, I’d have said that was stupid, and you were stupid for saying it.

But Slott takes those elements and does the smart thing with them: use them as simply a catalyst for the rest of the story. The entirety of the time travel involvement is to show the stakes  – the destruction of New York by a certain time – if Spider-Man can’t figure out what to do… and he does those things where Spidey should: on the streets.And after months and months of seeing Spidey battling Thor knockoffs in the Avengers, and traveling to other dimensions in FF, it’s nice to see Spider-Man just stomping dudes in an alley with a wisecrack for a change.

Double Entendre: Invincible #88 Review

In the latest issue of Invincible, our all-American boy hero is attacked by a raging one-eyed monster and gets a load sprayed in his face causing him to be infected with a deadly virus. I am not kidding. Superhero comics, everybody!

Invincible is a strange book for me to review because unlike any miniseries or most standard superhero comics, there is no jumping-on point. It’s an excellent comic book that does really interesting and unexpected things with standard superhero tropes – and has since the very first issue – but while this book has arcs, it is very much a long-form superhero novel, and it assumes that you’ve been reading from the first chapter. So even if I recommend this issue – and I will – it’s pointless, because if you haven’t read it from the beginning, it’ll be three years and about twelve trade paperbacks before you get here.

And, in fact, this book is an even worse place than usual for new readers to get started because it’s a mid arc story. The one-eyed monster in question is named Allen, and he is threatening to release a virus into Earth’s atmosphere to kill a race of superpowered aliens living secretly among us, all of whom can be identified by their universal big, Johnny Wadd Holmes 70s gay porno moustaches. I recognize that this sounds ridiculous, but it’s better than it sounds… frankly, it pretty much has to be.

Playing With The Third Rail of Comics: J. Michael Straczynski on Before Watchmen

So DC’s announcement of the Before Watchmen series of prequel books has inspired some pretty heated reactions; hell, just the rumor of the thing did the same thing, so knowing it’s coming was bound to turn the comics Internet into stinking, sticky pissing match.

Many of the creators attached to the project have been quiet about it other than for statements in press releases and a few friendly media interviews. Many, except for J. Michael Straczynski, who is attached to write Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan.

Now, as someone who makes it a point to go to the Spotlight on J. Michael Straczynski panel every year at SDCC, I can attest that the man speaks his mind and isn’t afraid to face down a skeptical public – last year was the year he had walked away from the Superman Walks The Earth Like Caine From Kung-Fu arc, and he certainly wasn’t shy about answering questions. If it was me, I’d have answered every question with, “Fuck you. You don’t like it? You write Superman. Dick,” but I recall him being more articulate than that.

The point is: JMS answers questions, speaks his mind, and has been a Netizen for years; the man was answering Babylon 5 questions on Usenet before Eternal September. You think he wouldn’t speak up about Before Watchmen?

Monkey With A Machine Gun: Winter Soldier #1 Review

EDITORS’ NOTE: This review, should you choose to accept it, contains spoilers. If read, the Web site will disavow any knowledge of how we fucked up the book for you. This message will self-destruct in five seconds. Assuming your browser has been hijacked by a virus. Get that looked at.

Dammit.

I was really looking forward to Winter Soldier by Ed Brubaker with Butch Guice on art. This is the team that brought us the aftermath of the Death of Captain America arc back in 2008, which, gimmick death doomed to reboot or not, hooked me into Captain America for the first time since I was a kid. And it kept me hooked in because it was damn good comics: interesting characters with a darker turn than many superhero comics – almost a spy story set in the Marvel Universe, although with 72% fewer Howling Commandos than most Marvel spy stories (Seriously: if a kid hides a porno mag in a Marvel book, you can count on Nick Fury and Dum Dum Dugan skulking in his closet to pick up the dead drop).

So I was psyched about Winter Soldier, because it put the creative band back together, in a story about a couple of powered-up secret agents working on the fringes of the 616. But ultimately, I found this first issue disappointing. Not enough to give up on it, but for a book produced by A-List talent that promised to live in the shadows, it has two things terribly wrong with it:

• Butch Guice’s storytelling, and:
• Gorilla with a machine gun.