Rise From Your Grave: Another Visit To The American Classic Arcade Museum

So have you heard the urban legend about when Atari buried about a million copies of the E. T.: The Extra Terrestrial in a hole in the desert? The rumor is that Atari whipped out the E. T. video game in about six weeks to make the almighty Christmas dollar, and when the game turned out to be a giant, buggy, stinking pile of shit (that part’s not a rumor; I borrowed the game from a buddy back in sixth grade for a weekend, and have never been so happy that I didn’t spend my own allowance on something) that no one wanted to buy, Atari’s management sent truckloads of of the game to the middle of the desert, under cover of darkness, to drop in a dark hole to take as some kind of filthy tax write-off.

It’s an event that, while a lot of people thought it was apocryphal, is widely considered to be the beginning of the end of the original era of classic video games. Within a couple of years, the Atari 2600 and 5200 had gone down (along with ColecoVision, which was the biggest and most advanced competitor for the home video game throne until people just stopped giving a shit) and video arcades began a long, slow decline to take a place in Americana with the drive-in movie theater: an institution that once was everywhere, but that now you need to really hunt for.

And it all started with an alleged hole in the desert, dug by a company that did something that the full weight and power of the United States Government was unable to do: kill E. T.

Or at least it was an alleged hole. This weekend, a group of documentary filmmakers successfully found that hole in an Alamogordo, NM landfill and unearthed a bunch of copies of the E. T. cartridge, thereby bringing to light the end of the first golden age of video games.

And it is purely by coincidence that the bulk of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives staff made our semi-annual visit to the American Classic Arcade Museum at the Funspot Arcade in Laconia, NH, to get back a taste of the meaty days of that first golden age.

Down In An Internet Hole

Most of the staff of Crisis On Infinite Midlives is traveling today, and disturbed to find ourselves in a place with a drought of Internets.

I am posting this from my phone, in the very, very sketchy 1G sticks of northern New England wireless connectivity. If you can call it that.

We will be back in service tomorrow with photographs of our adventure, and will then resume our regularly scheduled programming.

The (Mouse) Empire Strikes Back: Star Wars Expanded Universe No Longer Canon

I know I’ve recounted this story before for people who are far too young to have seen Star Wars in its original theatrical release, but there’s some news today that makes it bear repeating: there was a time, not too long after Return of The Jedi left theaters, when Star Wars didn’t mean shit.

I know, it’s hard to believe, but by around 1989 or 1990, nobody was thinking about Star Wars. After Jedi came and went in 1983, we had moved on. There had been two Indiana Jones movies, Ghostbusters had come out, people who had been scared by Darth Vader as little kids were cackling at Freddy Krueger flicks, and Batman was ushering in the first real age of comic book movies. Star Wars was over. Nobody cared. Hell, even Marvel Comics had stopped publishing Star Wars comics in 1986, and that was the title that kept the company afloat in the late 70s.

Sure, we still loved Star Wars, but by then we had moved on. George Lucas wasn’t talking about making any more movies – sometime around the release of The Empire Strikes Back he was making bold claims about producing a nine-movie epic – and by 1986, he was busier executive producing Howard The Duck, possibly from behind a giant mound of cocaine (Editor’s Note: There is no evidence or allegation whatsoever that George Lucas was using cocaine during this period. Other than the fact that he was in the movie business, and it was the 1980s. Which, as someone who lived through that period, is pretty damning evidence all by itself. But I digress.)

But then, all of a sudden in 1991, there was Timothy Zahn’s Heir to The Empire. A novel set after Return of The Jedi featuring Luke, Han and Leia. And a story that, in those pre-Internet days, was strongly rumored to be the actual stores that Lucas planned to tell in the final three movies.

And once that novel hit, Star Wars interest exploded all over again. There were two sequels to Heir to The Empire. There was the Dark Horse comics sequel to that sequel called Dark Empire. And a metric shit-ton of other novels and comics, which piqued interest enough to get the Star Wars special editions released in theaters (including that victory fireworks display on Coruscant – a city introduced in Zahn’s novels!), and then the prequels, and then years of fandom rage, and now the new Episode VII being directed by J. J. Abrams…

…but without that first novel that really established the Star Wars Expanded Universe and kickstarted a new wave of interest in Star Wars? It’s the 70s and 80s version of The Matrix: One great movie, a couple of sorta okay ones, and ultimately a thing we liked when we were younger, until we moved on to bigger and better things, so we don’t really even think about it anymore.

So Star Wars owes a lot to its Expanded Universe. Which you would think would be recognized by J. J. Abrams, who, when he rebooted Star Trek, went to great story lengths to find a way to reboot the property without invalidating all the other stories that came before.

Yeah, but you’d be wrong. Because as of today, all of those stories? Not even remotely canon anymore.

Death By Minutiae

I know that we have posted fresh comic reviews on Wednesday nights for the past couple of weeks, but things are a little different this week. First off, I have spent a large part of my week’s free time dealing with my insurance company and my auto upholsterer, trying to coordinate when I can get my recently-vandalized convertible roof repaired. I have done this all while staring down the barrel of our long awaited semiannual pilgrimage to the American Classic Arcade Museum at Funspot in Laconia, NH to play Tron until I make my inner 12-year-old look like a bitch by making it through the third rack as a 42-year-old. Further, this is the first time this regular trip requires us to interview and employ a catsitter to care for Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Mascot Parker The Kitten.

Overall, it means that this has been a busier-than-usual week for us. Which further means that we decided to celebrate a week’s worth of new comics with a pile of beers at the bar next to our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop talking about our new pussy unless we have high definition photographs of it to share.

This combination of events means that we are not operating at our full capacity. But it still means that we have new comics. Which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there are some good books in that pile. We’ve got the final issue of Robert Kirkman’s All Out War storyline in The Walking Dead (where, if there is a story God, Negan will finally suck the pipe), the first issue of Marvel’s Original Sin, Flash #30 (which supposedly features the long-awaited return of Wally West to the New 52 universe), Batman: Eternal #3 (which allegedly does the same for Stephanie Brown), an issue of Guardians of The Galaxy written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by 80s Justice League artist Kevin Maguire, and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff!

But you know how this works: before we can talk about any of them, we need time to talk to insurance companies, get the cat used to being fed by a stranger, and then to read the books. So until that time…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 12: The Groin Kick of Empathy

Okay, okay; it’s been slightly more than a week (eight days, you want the exact tally) since our last podcast, but we (I) have a good reason, which I expand upon in the first few minutes of the show.

Tune in this week for discussion about:

• Automobile vandalism! (Shit, I gave away the super-secret reason for the show’s delay!)
• Misguided fangirl hate (Prompted by the t-shirt on sale at Wondercon, the design of which you can see at the top left, and the truly reprehensible reaction to Janelle Asselin’s critique of the upcoming Teen Titans #1 cover and suggestion that it might be a book prime to be designed for a female audience)
• The new Joss Whedon written and produced movie In Your Eyes, which recently debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and which can be rented for video on demand via Vimeo right now! Here’s the first three minutes of the movie (with a built-in button to rent the whole thing) so we’re at least kind of on the same page:

• Scott Snyder’s Batman: Eternal #2 and American Vampire: Second Cycle #2!

And as always, our disclaimer: this show was recorded live to tape, so there may be a few more instances of “um,” “uh,” and “douchenozzle” than you are accustomed to in a comics podcast. Further, this podcast contains explicit, vulgar language, and is not safe for work. Every cell phone you have owned since 2006 has come with earphones. Use them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:09 — 56.9MB)

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

Enjoy the show, suckers!

You’ll Put An Eye Out: Spider-Man Web Shooter Toy For Adults

When I was a kid, every time my grandmother would visit, she would bring me Spider-Man web shooter toys like the one pictured at the left. They were basically the spring-loaded suction cup dart guns that you could buy at the drug store for three bucks, only modified with the handle yanked off, a wristband attached, and a button instead of a trigger. You strapped the thing to your wrist, tied a string to the suction cup dart, socketed the dart in the “web shooter,” and blasted it at stuff.

The problem with the toy was that the suction cup would only reliably stick to one thing: the refrigerator. So Grandma would roll in, hand me the toy and catch up with my mom, while I spent hours shouting at an imaginary Green Goblin, licking the suction cup and shooting the fridge with a loud “thwack!” This was excellent fun for me. For my mom, who had to clean about 700 kid-spittled suction cup marks off the front of the refrigerator, it was less so.

I always seemed to lose the toy within a day after Grandma packed up and went home… by which I mean that, when I was about 25, my mom finally copped to throwing the damned things away the minute Grandma’s taillights went around the corner and my back was turned. She must have chucked about 10 of the things… and considering that the last auction for one of them that I could find showed it selling around $425, I will make sure that, when the day comes, she knows that that is the reason she was put in the cheapest nursing home available. And I will pay the rotten orderlies extra to put drooly suction cup marks on her refrigerator.

The sting of those lost toys was alleviated somewhat for me today when I came across this video made by an German gentleman named Patrick Priebe, who makes, as you might guess from his Web site, laser gadgets. But he also does other more practical (and by “practical,” I merely mean “they don’t exclusively use lasers”) gizmos, like this wrist crossbow, or this other crossbow that shoots buzzsaw blades.

Well, his latest invention is a web shooter. And not a web shooter that works like Spider-Man; Priebe seems like a clever fella, but inventing an industrial solvent that can support hundreds of pounds and then completely disappear in an hour is above almost anyone’s pay grade. No, this is closer to the long-lost toys of my childhood: it fires a dart on a string. Of course, that dart is a sharp, barbed monstrosity fired via a powerful capacitor-driven electromagnet, but it’s in the same ballpark.

It is somewhat unfortunate that I am aware this device exists, because now I may need to contact this guy and see if it’s for sale. And once that happens, it is only a matter of time before the line, “A Massachusetts man was arrested on Christmas Day for repeatedly firing a harpoon into his mother’s refrigerator while shrieking, ‘We’ll be even when I do $5,000 worth of damage!'” appears in a Florida newspaper.

Ah well. You can check this nifty little modern throwback out, in action, after the jump.

Back To The Future Again: Warren Ellis Rebooting Dynamite’s Project Superpowers

Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we are some Warren Ellis fans.

Back in 2000, when watching Unbreakable led me to leave a several-year Vertigo Comics exile to delve back into superhero comics, Ellis’s The Authority and Stormwatch trades helped reinforce my hope that superhero comics had moved away from the Image Age of chicken-scratched detail lines on footless steroid monsters punching on each other with no driving story to speak of, and into something that an adult might like to read.

Ellis’s Nextwave remains one of my favorite limited series of the past fifteen years, and his collection of Come In Alone columns not only reinforced that there were actual adults writing comics, but they made me a lurker on the Warren Ellis Forums, where my proudest contribution was that Matt Fraction ripped off the logo from a 1999 Web site I ran to be his forum avatar for a while.

Ellis has been mostly absent from mainstream comics since we started this Web site in 2001. He wrote Secret Avengers in 2001 (which is the first book I ever reviewed here), and he’s been contributing to the Kelly Sue DeConnick co-written Avengers Assemble for the last couple of months, and he did the Avengers: Endless Wartime graphic novel a few months ago,  but otherwise he’s been working on novels and TV properties and whatnot.

So it is about time, as far as we fans are concerned, for Ellis to take on a larger-scale comics project… which is a thing that he is doing. Specifically, he will be rebooting Dynamite Comics’s Project Superpowers line of books. You know, that line of comics that Alex Ross and Jim Kreuger launched in 2008! The one that none of us actually read!

Return of The King: The Superior Spider-Man #31 Review

Editor’s Note: Yeah. That sounds just spoilery enough to be right. Let’s go.

It’s been about 16 months since Doc Ock took over as Spider-Man, which has been just enough time to forget that Spider-Man is supposed to be fun, dammit.

Spider-Man’s supposed to be a wisecrack and an acrobatic move and a triumphant battle against insurmountable odds, while simultaneously Peter Parker’s a self-defeating complaint, an overdue bill he can’t afford to pay and a ruinous relationship that disintegrates against, well, predictable odds. Is it a formula? Sure. Is it soap operatic? Hell, yeah. But it’s a thing that works, and which has been working for 52 years. And it seems like a simple enough formula that we’ve seen so often over the years that we wouldn’t miss it if it was gone for a while… but I did, dammit.

Doc Ock as Spider-Man has been an interesting thought experiment to help reinforce that it’s the character of Peter Parker that makes the comic and not just a power set and a red and blue leotard, but nobody falls in love with a thought experiment unless it’s the Milgram Experiment, and even then it’s only if the enthralled already had a closet full of jackboots. So while it’s been a kinda cool distraction to watch a darker, more obsessed version of Spider-Man, I was ready for it to be over since I already have Batman.

So not only is it just plain good to see Peter back in the saddle in The Superior Spider-Man #31, writer Dan Slott clearly knows it. Because throughout this issue, characters react to Peter being back in costume (despite ostensibly not really knowing that he ever wasn’t the guy in the costume) with a general sense of relief and a sense of return to normal.

And so did I.

Spy Wanted; Must Have Experience With Death Traps: DC To Make Grayson A Secret Agent Comic

So DC Comics’s current Forever Evil event is famous for a few things, and not just for being an irritating “ending” to prior crossover Trinity War, for putting almost the entire stable of major DC superheroes off the playing field for about five straight months (except in those characters’ home titles, where they are wisely generally pretending that Forever Evil isn’t a thing that is happening), and for making even Marvel’s Fear Itself seem like a fully-baked idea.

Beyond those things, it is known for being the storyline where The Crime Syndicate exposes Dick Grayson’s identity as Nightwing to the world at large. Which has, since that even occurred in the first issue, begged the question as to how that event would be handled once the event ended (assuming it does. Considering Forever Evil spun right out of Trinity War, there is a part of me that thinks there might be another event spinning out of Forever Evil. With another event spinning out of that one. Ad infinitum. Keeping the Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman on the sidelines, and making Justice League into an anthology title where Geoff Johns can reintroduce whichever Silver Age second stringers he has a fancy for. But I digress). Would Grayson go back to being Nightwing, with perhaps an crossover appearance by Mephisto to make a deal for everyone to forget his identity?  Obtain some kind of neural backup to restore an earlier personality? Or one of the myriad other trick Marvel has somehow successfully used to retcon their terrible continuity mistakes?

Nah. They’re going full James Bond and making him a super secret agent.

Days of Future Passing: X-Men Footage Debuts At MTV Movie Awards

So apparently last night was the MTV Movie Awards, which I missed because I haven’t yet seen the second part of The Hunger Games trilogy, and because I am older than 15 years old and have kissed an actual girl.

But my prejudices are borne of my mid-20s and early 30s, when the only way a superhero story would be referenced would be if Jack Black put on a Robin costume and aped making out with Ben Stiller. That was the 90s, but it is the 2010s, and no less than three superhero movies are on the immediate horizon. That seems to mean that movie studios will try to leverage the MTV Movie Awards for marketing purposes, because apparently the human scum who enjoy watching teenaged mothers assault each other have money that will spend as well as money slung around by decent people.

Which is a long way to go to say that the first minute of the opening fight sequence of X-Men: Days of Future Past debuted during last night’s celebration of movies that appeal to protohumans who still have misplaced affection for Justin Bieber. And not too long ago, seeing this exclusive footage would mean that you would have to swallow your pride and watch some six-packed adolescent wave at the camera for being nominated for Best Movie Kiss in exchange for standing in front of a camera and pretending he liked women. But it is 2014, which means that if you want to see footage from an MTV award show? You just need to visit your favorite comics Web site the day after the awards show.

Or, conversely, you could visit this comics Web site. Which has the goods you’re looking for right after the jump.