Crisis On Inifnite Midlives Podcast Episode 17: The Bucky Larson of Superhero Movies

It’s Sunday, so it’s time for another Crisis On Infinite Midlives Show! May God have mercy upon your soul!

It has been a big, weird week for Marvel, both the movie studio and the comic publisher, so we talk about:

• Edgar Wright’s departure from the Ant-Man movie, who might be a good choice from the directors who have been named as probable replacements, and who would actually be a good replacement
• The rumor (a rumor that is picking up some partial documentation and some steam) that Marvel might cancel Fantastic Four to spite Fox Studios efforts to promote the latest movie adaptation
• The concept that Marvel and DC might just be intellectual property farms for movies and TV, the deleterious effect that that could have on comics, and what, if anything, comics fans can do about it (spoiler alert: not much)
• Fantastic Four #5, written by James Robinson with art by Leonard Kirk
• Trees #1, written by Warren Ellis with art by Jason Howard

And, the usual legalese:

• This show was recorded live to tape, which means you might hear more weird pauses, aborted jokes, and jokes about abortion than you might hear on your normal podcast
• This show contains spoilers. We try to warn ahead of time, but there is every chance you will hear the odd spoiler of a story point or nine. What can I say? We ruin stuff.
• This show contains adult, explicit language, and is not safe for work. Invest in some headphones, even if they must be those awful Beats By Dre monstrosities.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:41 — 75.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

It’s Not Even Past: Every Comics Reference In X-Men: Days of Future Past

There’s an Internet service provider truck out in front of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, which means we have at least intermittent Internet service this morning. Serves us right for setting up shop in a neighborhood where local entrepreneurs advertise their wares by chucking Air Jordans at the utility lines.

So with potentially limited time available on the wire today, we wanted to at least share this: there’s a dude who watched X-Men: Days of Future Past and took note and found video for almost all of the Easter Eggs and references to the original comics in the flick. He caught a couple that even Amanda and I missed (Hell, I forgot Spike even existed, and I loved Peter Milligan’s and Mike Allred’s X-Statix back in the day), and it’s a reasonably entertaining way to kill six minutes of a Friday while you wait for Beer O’Clock and / or for your Internet service to become reliable.

I’ve dropped the video after the jump. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll see what new wares my enterprising neighbors might have for the weekend.

You Are (Not) On The Global Frequency

We are having network and Internet issues tonight, and are thus posting this via a very limited mobile device.

The issue has been reported to our Internet service provider, and we should return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Long Live The New Flesh

Did you ever have one of those days? I was awakened at 5 a.m. by a kitten who has discovered the joys of a freeze-dried raw meat diet (and its ensuing energy burst) snuffling at my face to see if it contained any of the previously-mentioned freeze-dried raw meat. I then spent an hour playing with the cat to dissipate enough of his energy to prevent him from destroying everything I love. After that, I spent a while tweaking old podcast files to include the metadata that iTunes needs to be useful… while the cat burst around the room knocking comic books to the floor. I then went to the day job, stopped at the comic store, and then have been messing around to add new monitors to the podcast studio… while the cat chirped at me and ate the monitors’ shipping box, guaranteeing that I would work harder to get them to work, since I couldn’t send them back now.

As we speak, I am staring at this mostly empty page, trying to figure out what to write, while a two-week old episode of The Daily Show plays on the big screen, showing me a late middle aged Debbie Harry warbling One Way Or Another. Seeing this vision after working on a niche broadcasting studio while an animal hisses at me make me feel like I fell into Videodrome sometime in 1984 and just awoke to be accosted by a wild beast with a newly-discovered taste for raw flesh.

So it has been a weird one, but if you noticed, there was a visit to the new comic store in there, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there are some good books in this week’s take. There are a couple of new ancillary chapters of Original Sin, a new episode of Batman: Zero Year, one of the last few issues of All-Star Western, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

But you know how things are: before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need time to read them, and to ascend to the next level and leave the old flesh. So until that time…

…I’ll be the video word made flesh with you tomorrow, suckers!

The Incredible (Maybe) Shrinking Collection: Graphic.ly Sells To Blurb, May Close Down Servers

So a couple years ago, we reported that Graphic.ly, one of the early digital comics retailers, was shutting down its retail store and closing up its app to new customers. And at the time, we worried, even though Graphic.ly had announced that you could still get your books through their app (provided you already had it, since the instant they announced the closing of their digital retail store, they pulled their app off of Apple and Android), that the day would come when Graphic.ly shut down their servers and you might lose access to the books that you paid for.

But hey, that all happened two years ago! Nothing could possibly change the status quo for the books you bought, right?

Right?

Blurb, which lets authors self-publish and print their books, is buying Graphicly, a platform that lets authors publish and distribute e-books, with a specific focus on image-heavy content like comics and photography…

This is an acquihire [sp], with the six employees who formed Graphicly joining Blurb. As part of that process, Graphicly will be shutting down in the next 30 days.

Dammit.

Preparing For Broadcast

It is Monday of the long American Memorial Day holiday, which means two things:

1. We are hung over, and:
2. There is fuck-all going on in the world of comics news.

Sure, there’s the report that Edgar Wright Tweeted and then deleted a picture of Buster Keaton with a Cornetto ice cream cone, with the implication being that Wright sees himself as a version of Keaton, who supposedly always regretted aligning himself with a major studio… but that’s an interpretation and besides, I didn’t see the original Tweet, so what the hell do I know?

And sure, we could report on X-Men: Days of Future Past making something like a third of a billion dollars in worldwide box office this weekend, pretty much guaranteeing that director Bryan Singer will probably be okayed to direct the already greenlit X-Men: Apocalypse sequel if he wants to (and he’s not in jail for some reason, but there’s not a lot of detail beyond that to talk about unless we want to do a bunch of math with the returns from the other X-Men movies, and did we mention that we were hung over?

So instead, we spent the day doing a bunch of research and scut work under the hood in a effort to get our little podcast ready for a bigger audience (if we can trick one into listening, that is). We’ve been doing incremental upgrades of our recording studio equipment over the past couple of months – upgrades that are still ongoing – but we figured we’re in enough of a groove to start exposing to the show to a wider audience.

To start with, that means iTunes, where we will hopefully be available for subscription later on this week. Once we have the details on how to subscribe through that service, we’ll let you know. But in the meantime, you can subscribe to the show directly via our new podcast dedicated RSS feed.

If there’s another service with which you subscribe to podcasts, let us know and we’ll look into it. In the meantime, keep an eye on iTunes for the logo at the top right. *

* Of course, if someone with a graphics design background more extensive than my personal, “I don’t crash Photoshop every time I open it” experience wanted to throw us a freebie logo, I wouldn’t turn it down…

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 16: Crystal Blue Mess

It’s Sunday, and even though it’s the long Memorial Day weekend here in the States, it’s still time for another episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Show!

In this week’s episode we talk about:

• X-Men: Days of Future Past! We discuss how much we enjoyed the movie, some of the cooler moments in the flick, but most importantly: we try and take apart where the film fits into the X-Men movie franchise continuity, and whether or not any of the other movies can even exist with this one stuck at the end!
• The recently announced title Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice! We talk about why the title makes sense, how a desire to make The Dark Knight Returns might have led to decisions director Zack Snyder made in Man of Steel, and how this title could have come directly from the name of one of our earlier podcasts!
• Forever Evil #7, by Geoff Johns and David Finch
• MPH #1, by Mark Millar and Duncan Fegredo
• Original Sin #2, by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, and:
• Why if 3D movies are bad, falling asleep during an IMAX 3D showing of Godzilla is worse (spoiler alert: it involves waking up to Godzilla shrieking at you through 100 subwoofers.

And now the legalese:

• This podcast uses adult, vulgar language, and is not safe for work. This week’s hook joke is about penis tinting, and things really go downhill from there. Wear headphones. You are warned.
• This show was recorded live to tape, and may contain awkward pauses, the use of the word “f**k” as a comma, and truly vile humor that any reasonable show would edit out.
• This show is chock-full of spoilers. We try to warn you ahead of time, but there’s no getting around it: we are ruiners.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:02 — 63.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

Enjoy the show, suckers!

Pym Particle Fallout: Joss Whedon and James Gunn Comment on Edgar Wright’s Departure From Ant-Man

It is Saturday of the American Memorial Day long weekend. This means that, in general, there is fuck-all going on in the way of genre news other than redundant tales of heavy drinking by comic creators (and comic bloggers), and Edgar Wright’s departure from Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man movie.

There’s a dearth of actual hard news about what actually happened to lead to the split. Latino Review has a story based on a bunch of anonymous sources saying it had to do with the script, but with no names attached, I’m just gonna link to it and let you draw your own conclusions.

Wright himself hasn’t said anything, and his Twitter feed has been silent… except for a re-Tweet of a wordless picture post Avengers and Avengers 2: Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon threw up earlier today, and which you can check out after the jump.

Small Change: Edgar Wright Out As Ant-Man Director

Let’s face facts: nobody really gives a shit about Ant-Man. Despite being a founding member of The Avengers (And notice nobody at Marvel Studios bent over backwards to try and get him in the Avengers movie), the first thing Hank Pym ever did that anyone paid any attention to was tune up his wife in Avengers #213, and by then he was Yellowjacket, which was about his fourth ineffectual alter ego. And don’t even bring up Scott Lang and Eric O’Grady, who were each killed in separate team books to advance minor plot points.

Which is why it was a somewhat strange choice for Marvel Studios to go with the character as the first movie in their Phase Three of major motion pictures, but it didn’t matter. Because Marvel Studios had announced that Edgar Wright, the director of my favorite movie of 2013, The World’s End, was going to be directing the flick.

The key word in that sentence, however, is “was.” Because he ain’t gonna be doing it anymore.

It’s Always Darkest: Batman Vs. Superman Gets Proper Title, Which Could Be Worse

We’re a little late to the party with this one, what with our day jobs and commitments and congenital drinking problems, but Batman Vs. Superman has an official title and promo image. The promo image is at the top left. The title is Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.

And then the Internet blew up.

Seriously: people I have known for years and respect have taken to Twitter to complain about almost every aspect of the title. One guy complained that Superman didn’t have top billing. Another guy bitched that they were using a “v” instead of a “vs.” or a full-on “versus.” I’ve seen gags revolving around “Tony Orlando of Justice.” Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show @Midnight started a hashtag, #BetterBatmanSuperman, implying that Joe Blow from Falmouth could come up with a better title.

And maybe they could. Because honestly, it’s not that great a title. But it’s not the worst title in the world, either.