Jesusfall, or: Apocalypse, or: LEONARD BERNSTEIN

The Aztec calendar says that the apocalypse happens next year, but the fact that yet another issue of Catwoman has found it’s way into another week’s new comics take…

…possibly means the premature 2011 end of the world. And if not, it totally means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you gotta go out, there are worse ways. After all, we’ve got the last issue of Butcher Baker Candlestickmaker from The Boys, Justice League #4, a new X-Factor, Ultimate Spider-Man #5, and a bunch of other cool stuff to bring us into the Christmas weekend!

And speaking of the Christmas weekend: both Amanda and I are traveling this week to spend time with either loved ones or people who will give us free shit without hissing, “What have you done with our family name?” Because of that, posting may become sporadic between now and the new year… and what we do post might be reviews of fifteen-year-old trade paperbacks we left in our folks’ houses around our college graduation (Hello, Death Of Superman reviews!).

But if we’re gonna get any reviews of this week’s book in, we need some times to read them. So in case shitty flights, rotten airport wi-fi and / or squinting parents muttering, “Why are you calling Spider-Man ‘Ultimate?’ And a ‘Fucking longwinded douchebag’?” slow our output…

Have a happy holiday, suckers!

Basic Cable: Avengers: X-Sanction #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And one last very quick review before the comic store open… and one that contains spoilers to boot. You are warned.

Okay, let’s start with the fact that The Falcon isn’t an active member of The Avengers. Not active, not honorary, not a Secret Avenger, not a West Coast Avengers… nope, not an Avenger. Which means that there is no reason for Cable to think that he would make an appearance in battle with The Avengers. Which means that the first step of his “master plan” against The Avengers is based purely on wishful thinking and the needs of Jeph Loeb’s plot.

But let’s assume that Falcon was a member of the Avengers, and that Cable’s plan therefore makes some sense on it’s face. Cable takes Falcon out with a sniper rifle during a battle that includes not only Falcon, but Captain America, Iron Man, the Red Hulk, Spider-Man and Wolverine, but which proves that Cable’s master, time-spanning plan was based on every science fiction movie ever made.

You Sometimes Get A Second Chance: Batman & Robin #4 Review

Batman & Robin is a textbook case of the dangers inherent in telling a decompressed comics story. The first issue read to me as a wretched Goddamned mishmash of elements from Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and the old 60s TV show: big, silly action – including riding Batpoles, and not in that good superhero porno parody way – combined with the introduction of some darker elements, like a new villain who dissolves his enemies in acid. It was a frustrating experience in cognitive dissonance, like watching Cesar Romero tie Adam West to a giant roman candle and then chop Burt Ward’s foot off with a rusty machete.

The first issue was so dissatisfying that I was prepared to drop the book from my pulls, except I didn’t want to risk accidentally losing Scott Snyder’s Batman by accident. And I am glad that I didn’t, because the subsequent three issues, which tie up the opening story arc, have proven that Batman & Robin deserves to stand with Snyder’s Batman and Tony Daniel’s Detective Comics as some of the most rock-solid, entertaining Batman comics in years. Sometimes I’m glad to be wrong.

Let’s get some of the prejudicial facts out of the way up front: I have never particularly liked Damian Wayne. Since his introduction he has often been written as a bitchy little brat, to the point where Amanda has sometimes gotten the both of us laughing by reading Damian’s dialogue in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy. Try it yourself, it’s fun: “Now look here, Pennyworth…”

Spoon! The Tick and Invincible

It’s March solicitation time, and all the big publishers have hyped their stuff for the new year, but there’s one solicitation from a little local press called New England Comics that is filled. With. Win.

THE TICK #100

THE TICK MEETS INVINCIBLE!

We celebrate the 100th issue of The Tick with a 48-page full-color blockbuster co-starring Robert Kirkman’s INVINCIBLE! In a full-length 24-page epic, Invincible is transported to The Tick’s Universe where the two mighty heroes confront the combined threat of the master criminal Chairface Chippendale and a mysterious and menacing new villain who makes even Chairface look like an ordinary umbrella stand! A story so awesome that it requires two planets (and at least one moon!) to contain it! Added bonus: THE SAGA OF THE TICK, a 20-page full-color history of The Tick’s illustrious career, heavily illustrated with covers and selected artwork from all 99 previous issues of THE TICK!

Writer: Benito Cereno Artist: Les McClaine

Cover price $6.99

Saddlestitch, 48 pages Color text, color covers

SSDDR: New Avengers #19 Review

I had a moment reading The New Avengers #19 where I just about completely and totally checked out. I just suddenly had had enough of Norman Osborn and the Dark Avengers and different made up villains in Avengers costumes and doing the mental clean and jerk required to buy into a story where a man who is known to have killed a woman in cold blood in broad daylight follows a master plan of winning over public opinion to prove he leadership material when in reality we demonize leaders for taking pictures of their junk.

That moment was at the end of the book, when Norman and his Dark Avengers are standing in front of a crowd and announcing that they were here to make the world a better place, and I realized it was the same Goddamned moment as when he introduced the Dark Avengers back in Dark Reign. And my enthusiasm for this story, as precarious as it was to begin with, just vanished.

Seriously, I know what I said last month, but I don’t think I have it in me to climb back on board the Norman Osborn PR gladhanding and the Dick Avengers train again. I stuck with it for what felt like forever in Dark Reign and I just don’t care anymore. This doesn’t feel like anything interesting or new or that I didn’t read a dozen times over in the earlier story, which I didn’t like the first time around. The whole thing was like watching your uncle use his AA chip to crack open a Bud before Thanksgiving dinner: you know what’s coming, you’ve seen it before, and you know it’s not gonna be fun.

Assuming you don’t have an innate and visceral weariness and mistrust of Dark Reign and it’s ilk, on an individual issue level, there’s nothing wrong with this comic book. Bendis continues to write excellent dialogue and character moments. Seeing Daredevil wandering by Avengers Mansion and being hit on by Squirrel Girl – while being overwhelmed by the stench of baby shit and squirrel funk – is a nice little moment showing that sometimes superpowers aren’t all they’re all cracked up to be… while knowing all the while that yeah: he’s gonna hit that. Daredevil’s already fucked every woman that’s walked, moved or crawled; why wouldn’t he add “skittered up a tree?”

Well THERE’S Your Problem…

We will be performing some site maintenance this morning / early afternoon, and there may be some outages from time to time, or for an extended period of time if the process moves past Beer O’Clock, and one of us inevitably says, “Fuck it! Set all the files for CHMOD 000!”

Thanks for your patience. Your normally scheduled scrote jokes about Norman Osborn’s haircut will resume as soon as humanly possible.

UPDATE: The main part of maintenance is over, but you might continue to see what those in the computer science game call “weird shit”. Thanks for bearing with us.

Forced Spectrum: The Ray #1 Review

Let’s get the good part of the review out of the way up front: Jimmy Palmiotti’s, Justin Gray’s and Jamal Igle’s The Ray is a fun comic that I intend to keep buying, at least for the time being. It has a likable protagonist, a stack of interesting supporting characters, and an old-school, “Wrong place, wrong time, boom! Dude gets superpowers” attitude toward it’s origin story that reminds me of comics like Nova and Firestorm when I was a kid back in the 70s.

The bad part of the review is that The Ray feels like the obligatory “black best friend” that DC Comics will trot out at SDCC 2012 to prove to extremists in Batgirl costumes that they’re not racists. But we’ll come back to that.

Our hero is Lucien, a lifeguard in San Diego who gets blasted by something called the Sun Gun – probably because if it was the actual Large Hadron Collider that it’s clearly meant to be aping it would imply that he got his powers from something called a God Particle, which would draw out a whole different kind of extremist to SDCC – and gets the power to control light. All of this happens in three pages, and one of them is the opening splash page. Compare that to, say Ultimate Spider-Man, where we’ve gone four issues without even putting Miles Morales in his own costume, and you can tell we’re looking at a fast-paced origin book like, say, the original Spider-Man.

Of course, it takes a little longer than for Lucien to get his costume on because gaining the control of light apparently means losing the ability to wear pants. Everything he touches burns, which means that The Ray will be the first superhero to die of a backup of semen to the brain stem. In fact, a large part of this issue revolves around Lucien’s pants problem, meaning that we spend a lot of time in the company of a naked young man, and that there is a particular demographic who can use the book to make sure they are in no danger of death by semen accumulation.

Burning Ringpiece Of Fire

Since there’s a better than average chance that The Dark Knight Rises prologue we posted will be gone any second, even though it is of quality so shitty you will question whether you are seeing Commissioner James Gordon, Gordon Lightfoot, or perhaps the anthropomorphization of the voice in your head that tell you to burn things (…just me? Really? Okay.), we thought that it was only fair to provide you with a suitable back-up. DC isn’t the only comics company releasing a movie in 2012 after all; Marvel has a dog in this fight, so we at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are proud to present the newest, high-definition trailer for Marvel’s much anticipated… Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, starring Nicolas Cage!

…Ghost Rider? Really?

Huh. Really. Okay.

Seriously?

C’mon! That could be Nic Cage on any given Saturday night! Frankly, that could be me on any given Saturday night! Jesus, the big comics Web sites get crystal-clear Avengers shit, and we get Ghost Rider? (Rob: Just write the copy and put the video after the jump. We can feel bad about our place in the comics world later. -Amanda)

*sigh* Fine.

The Dark Whowhatnow Prologue?

It’s 10 p.m. on Thursday, and you should hurry up and look… because it won’t be here by 11.

Don’t Mind Stepping Into The Twilight Zone: Carnage USA #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Because I’m a bad man! And I keep thinking bad thoughts! But since I live nowhere near a cornfield, all I can say is that you have been warned.

People talk about the Spider-Man Clone Saga as if it was the low point of comics in the 90s… and those people are arguably right. But the problem with designating something as the worst thing ever is it makes it easy to forget, and sometimes wrongfully forgive, other things that were also awful, just not quite as bad. After all, it’s hard to bitch about a stubbed toe when it happens on the way back from a botched colonoscopy.

The Clone Saga was the worst. That doesn’t mean that Carnage wasn’t also truly, truly horrible.

A knockoff of Venom introduced at the height of Silence Of The Lambs mania who was probably created at an old-school Marvel Summit (Two guys in a Manhattan nightclub men’s room saying, “Hannibal Lecter as a Venom whatchacallit!” “Genius! Let’s gack up another rail!”), Carnage was unoriginal on his face.  And he became so prevalent and irritating that it only took Brian Michael Bendis two issues of New Avengers to have Sentry not only drag Carnage into outer fucking space, but also tear him apart. For a writer of slow, decompressed, all-foreplay comics like Bendis, that was the equivalent of hatefucking Carnage and wiping his dick on his knee on the way out. It was awesome.