Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 11: The Golden Shakeoff Caper

Yeah, I know that we mentioned the other day that we had subjects that we wanted to talk about in a podcast, but I also know that you didn’t even remotely think that we’d actually, you know, do one.

Well, the joke’s on you, because here’s Episode 11: The Golden Shakeoff Caper! In which we discuss:

• The ComiXology buyout by Amazon (in which I reference a piece I wrote about ComiXology’s licensing and lack of ability to back up your comics)
• The San Diego Comic-Con hotel registration process, and the anxiety-provoking processes around attending SDCC in general
• Deadpool #27
• DC’s new weekly comic, Batman: Eternal #1

And here is our usual disclaimer: this episode was recorded live to tape, meaning that other than adding the intro and outro music, it is presented exactly as we discussed it, with every, “um,” “uh,” cough and burp. Further, this podcast is not safe for work. Be advised that we liberally use explicit and vulgar language, although if you weren’t tipped off by the fact that our title this week includes the phrase, “golden shake-off,” you need more help than a friendly warning. Either way, use some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:15 — 53.4MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Bruce Timm. Kevin Conroy. Batman. Animated. What Else Do You Want?

It is Batman’s 75th anniversary, which means that DC and Warner Bros. are gonna spend the next several months dumping out a bunch of promotional stuff that nobody really cares about – expect a collection of “essential” Batman stories that are all one-shots that nobody needs when affordable trade paperback editions of Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns are available in every place in the world where the printed word is sold.

But the one division that gets these kind of things right is Warner Bros. Animation. For Superman’s 75th anniversary last year, they put together a killer montage showing the character as he progressed through the decades. For Batman, however, they did no such thing. They did something better.

When it comes to Batman and animation, all any discerning geek really cares about is Batman: The Animated Series and the work of animator / producer Bruce Timm. That cartoon kept Batman as The Dark Knight even as directors who will remain unnamed and unloved were facing Batman off with a punny Schwarzenegger with nothing but hard plastic molded nipples.

So it was kinda heartbreaking when word came out last year that Timm was leaving his supervisory position at Warner Bros. Animation… but he is back to supervise Batman’s animation one last time with a new short.

This one feature’s Timm’s style from the cartoon, only with a distinct feel and look of Batman from the 1930s, including short gloves, big ears, prop planes, and machine guns… and you can check out out after the jump

I See Dead People. Maybe: Amazon Buys ComiXology

So. Amazon has bought ComiXology.

I’m not gonna write a whole hell of a lot about this development, since Amanda and I have decided that this might be a good topic for another podcast (Yes! Two podcasts in less than two years! Truly it is a new and exciting age in audio-only media!), but there is one thing I would like to point out.

That thing being that our Web site traffic, which is usually pretty consistent, is up about 25 percent today. And not because of anything recent that we have posted, oh no. No, it is because a couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about a kid on Reddit who briefly posted a script that allowed people to download their comics from ComiXology and strip the copy protection so they could back up their own books. And how ComiXology landed on that kid with both feet, and how that should be a matter of concern for ComiXology customers, because without the ability to locally save their comics, they would never really own any of them. You know, if something ever happened to ComiXology.

It’s a piece that has garnered a little bit of attention; it has been highly-ranked on Google for people searching for ways to save their digital comics locally – you know, just in case something happened to the parent company to get in the way of you getting the books that you paid for – and if it even got picked up by Hacker News just a few months ago.

And it suddenly is getting a lot of traffic. Apparently because there are more people than usual trying like hell to find a way to save the digital comics that they bought. Just in case something were to happen to them. Or the company they did business with in good faith.

Finally: The Walking Dead #125 Review

Editor’s Note: Some kind of instinct. Memory of stories they used to ruin. This was an important spoiler in their lives.

Let me start be reiterating the spoiler warning in the first line of this review. I recognize that I try to get cute with my spoiler warnings, and therefore they might be missed by some people who want to cut to the chase and get pissed off by reading spoilers on a free Web site written by a drunkard who’s spent almost two years complaining about the antagonist in The Walking Dead. I intend to spoil the living shit out of this issue. Starting now.

Thank fucking God that, after about 23 straight months of the rotten, one-note son of a bitch, someone has finally put the shiv to Negan. Granted, it happens at the very end of the issue, and since this is only part 11 of 12 of the All Out War storyline, he still has 22 pages to magically get someone to seal the gaping wound in his neck to still be a pain in someone else’s, but I have waited since July of 2012, when Negan killed Glenn (which gets namechecked in this issue) to see someone actually hurt that wretched bastard.

I have been vocal about how slowly-paced things have seemed since Negan came on the scene to curse and threaten his way through The Walking Dead, so seeing him take a blade to the throat would have given this issue a thumbs up even if the other 21 pages were wordless Charlie Adlard ink washes of Rick trying futilely to crank himself off with his wrist stump. But that’s not the case.

Instead, we have a rich issue filled with the aftermath of Negan’s earlier biological warfare, some scenes of some serious jockeying in conventional warfare, and a whole bunch of sweet, sweet psychological warfare. Meaning that not only does this story meet the definition of All Out War, but it is the first really, really good issue of The Walking Dead in quite a long time.

Getting Housed: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Lottery Finished

Registration for hotels with the reduced rate negotiated by San Diego Comic-Con for the 2014 convention opened at noon Eastern Time today. It is now closed, after being inundated with requests from God knows how many thousands of people looking to sleep someplace more comfortable than a park bench across from the Hall of Justice, emblazoned with an advertisement for a bail bonds service you will soon desperately need.

And just like that, the long and arduous process to arrange a trip to SDCC 2014, which started in February with pre-registration, continued for some into standard registration in March, moved into procuring transportation to San Diego, and climaxed with today’s registration, is over.

Kinda. Because now the 36 to 48 hour wait to see if today’s hotel registration actually led to, you know, getting a hotel room.

Does Whatever A Spider Can, Possibly Including Horrifying People: Amazing Spider-Man 2 Video Game Trailer Released

So The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the next major superhero flick to come out after last week’s awesome Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but unlike that movie, Spidey is gonna be getting a video game adaptation to go with the new movie.

This, depending on your point of view, is either good, or terrible news.

If you are an optimist, it is good news. Because Activision’s Spider-Man 2, released in 2004, was, at the time, arguably not only the best movie adaptation video game since Tron, but the best superhero video game released until Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009. Spider-Man 2 was the first superhero video game to not only allow a true open world for Spider-Man to explore, but it was the first to force the player to web-sling from actual buildings (Spider-Man on the Dreamcast was the first Spider-Man game in 3D with reasonable web-slinging, but it allowed the player to swing about 3/4s of a mile above Central Park, forcing the player to assume he was webbing off of helicopters, or perhaps The Watcher’s gonads). It had a reasonable and playable main storyline to go with the more realistic web-slinging mechanic, and it was a joy to play.

If you are a pessimist, you will remember that Spider-Man 2 for the original XBox was followed by Spider-Man 3 for the XBox 360, which I returned to Gamespot in disgust after spending nearly two full calendar days trying to get past Sandman in the subway level (I apparently did better than some people). And, while Spider-Man: Web of Shadows was nominally better, it lost its attraction for me about halfway through, when I realized I was web-slinging through what amounted to the zombie apocalypse. I am okay with the zombie apocalypse, but I would really prefer a shotgun to a web shooter. Or to almost anything else.

But with less than a month to go before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 video game is released, publisher Activision and Beenox have released a trailer for the game, which you can check out after the jump, along with my impressions.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 10: The Fist of Rebirth

I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Jesus Christ, Rob! A podcast? How timely! Only almost exactly 23 months after your last podcast! You’re a Goddamned radio machine, you guys are!”

True, true… but we just came back from watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which we enjoyed the hell out of, and decided that rather than just sit in a bar and talk about it, we’d dust off the old microphones and mixer and do it for public consumption. Hell, we liked podcasting… but what we never liked was recording one, then listening to it and taking notes on what editing and post-production we wanted, then taking another two hours and actually, you know, doing those edits and post-production, before finally uploading the damned thing.

So we tried something a little different today: we just sat down, shot the s**t about the movie for about half an hour, slapped the intro and bed music onto it, and uploaded it. This is live to tape, boys and girls; as you hear it is how we said it, awkward pauses, “um”s, and everything. But since that “everything” also includes fisting jokes, we hope it evens out.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Captain America: The Winter Soldier in general
• Black Widow, and how this is the first time it feels like she’s a character who could carry her own movie
• Deviations between the movie and Ed Brubaker’s original comic
• What effect this might have on ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• The post-credits sequences
• How the lack of laughter over a tombstone makes me weep for the state of movie-goers in general

And a bunch of other stuff we can’t remember because yeah: live to tape.

Here’s the usual disclaimer: this podcast is not safe for work. Further, we spoil a bunch of stuff from the movie, so if you haven’t seen it and want to remain pristine, give this a pass for now… but feel free to come back after you’ve seen it!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:36 — 33.5MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

This Godzilla Is A Major Problem For Us; It Will Ruin Our Batch: Godzilla Extended Trailer Released

Dear God, I can’t believe how little I cared about the reboot of Godzilla when I first heard about it at last year’s SDCC. With what I’ve seen since then, I feel shame.

I think part of my initial lack of interest was based on the fact that I hadn’t heard at the time that Bryan Cranston was starring in the flick. Sure, the 90s Roland Emmerich Godzilla flick had Matthew Broderick in it, who I’ve liked since I was a kid, but I think nobody realized at the time that ol’ Matt used up all his “The World Is Coming To An End!” pathos sometime between the end of principal photography for WarGames and when John Hughes told him he’d be headlining a Chicago parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Cranston, however, never lost his ability to project desperate doom and gloom. He did it in every third episode of Breaking Bad for years, so I can buy it when he sells that a giant thunder lizard is coming to eat our iPads. But more interesting to me is the fact that, when Cranston wasn’t selling not-so-quiet desperation in that TV series, he was showing us a man who would poison a fucking child to get out of a jam. And that is the kind of guy I want to see spearheading the battle against the Gus Fring of giant monsters. Hell, five’ll get you ten that the last scene of the flick is Godzilla coming ashore, only to meet Matthew Broderick in a wheelchair, frantically dinging a hotel desk bell. And then Honolulu will explode.

Why am I ranting about this? Because Warner Bros. just released an extended trailer for Godzilla, with not only more scenes of Cranston acting angrily pathetic, but of the monster fucking up the U. S. Navy. And you can check it out after the jump.

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

Requiem: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #200 Review

I really enjoy the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but I am always gonna have a soft spot for Peter Parker. Which, for a superhero comic fan, is about as controversial a statement as decrying Nazis, or perhaps coming down on the negative side of human trafficking, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Not only was the Ultimate version of Peter a pretty solid modernization of the character, while still keeping his core values and characterization, but it allowed we readers to see something we don’t normally get to see: the actual conclusion of the character’s story.

Sure, we get nods toward final stories with Marvel’s The End periodic series of books (and some of those are damn good) and in a few DC Elseworlds stories, but they’re never really final in a satisfying way. Because yeah, they’re endings, but then they, you know, end. And part of why any comics fan loves these stories is that they are ongoing. So while we sometimes see a beloved character go down, we don’t see the aftermath in a serious, ongoing way. But we got that with the death of Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man almost three years ago, with the Death of Peter Parker, which was a really spectacular story. I recently reread the issue with Peter’s public memorial, and when the little girl asked Aunt May if she was Spider-Man’s mommy, and if she needed a hug? Jesus, if I could get my hands on whatever motherfucker was cutting onions in a room that dusty…

But that story concluded, and we moved on to Miles Morales, as comics do… but in real life, when someone gets killed, people don’t just yank up stakes and start paying attention to a new person, unless your name is Michael Peterson and you don’t mind explaining your weird behavior to members of the law enforcement community. In real life, those losses stick around for a while… and that brings us to Ultimate Spider-Man #200, which is a long reminiscence of Peter’s life, and shows how some of the regulars from the original series are doing. And while there isn’t any action and no current storylines are really affected, it’s damn nice to check in with Aunt May, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane and some of the other former regulars on this title.

Unless you hate Brian Michael Bendis’s “guys sitting around a table talking” issues. Because then you’ll hate this.