Video Game Cops: Powers Picked Up By Playstation Network

Here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, we are on the fence as to what next gen gaming console we will eventually and inevitably purchase. We have been XBox people since the first generation of that console – a first-gen XBox is still jacked into the big TV tube upstairs, just in case I get the urge to widen my point of view on the undead apocalypse by playing Stubbs The Zombie (although given a couple of the prices for that game I’ve seen on eBay, I can be persuaded to abandon my philosophical pursuits) – so we are leaning toward picking up an XBox One. Especially considering that I’ve got me a hankering for some Titanfall.

With that said, I have certain reservations about purchasing a console that, by all initial reports, has a camera with which to watch me and a microphone with which to listen to me, no matter what I’m doing on my living room couch. I’m the kinda guy who sticks a piece of electrical tape over his Webcam when he’s not using it, and if a grown taxpaying man gets the occasional urge to watch childrens’ cartoons while in a state of undress outside of societal norms while scratching himself like an ape in a cage, it ain’t nobody’s business, and it certainly isn’t Bill Gates’s business.

So I have been toying with unilaterally buying a Playstation 4, because not only have I long wanted to play some Nathan Drake Uncharted games, but it seems less likely to take photos of me that will be laughed at in Sony’s customer service department. And there is now another possible reason to lean toward the Sony side: the television adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been picked up for broadcast on the Playstation Network.

Be Desireless. Be Excellent. Be Too Old For This Shit: Donal Logue As Gotham’s Harvey Bullock

I’m not gonna lie to you: I am a flat-out Donal Logue fan. From The Tao of Steve (which namechecks Steve Austin, which is always a way to make me sit up and pay attention) to Grounded For Life to Knights of Prosperity (which, if you’ve never seen it, you should really make an effort. The damn show was originally named Let’s Rob Mick Jagger, for Christ’s sake; how could you not give that a day in court?) to the much lamented Terriers, the guy is just someone I like watching on TV.

He’s just seems like a dude, you know? A regular guy who you could have a beer or ten with, shoot the shit about the Red Sox (sure, he actually seems to like soccer, but he’s Canadian, which means he’s probably polite and will try to talk baseball with you), and have a few laughs with. Because the guy is funny, in that kind of ironic, Generation X way that speaks to a generation who learned what was funny from Bill Murray and David Letterman.

But to be fair: the man is also concentrated death when it comes to television shows. Knight of Prosperity and Terriers each lasted only a season. He was on Life, which was also excellent, but that only lasted two seasons. Hell, even his “hit”, Grounded For Life, lasted five seasons… but it was cancelled by Fox  – Fox! – after two and a half seasons, and only survived another two and a half by being picked up by WB, who, in the parlance of Chris Rock, needed a hit like a crackhead needed a hit.

It’s a real conundrum: I’ve learned that when Donal Logue is cast in a show, it is likely to be good, and yet go away soon, like a common nitrous oxide high. So when I heard that he was cast as Detective Harvey Bullock on the upcoming pilot for Gotham, a series about life in Gotham City back when Bruce Wayne was training to be a detective using Blue’s Clues, I had mixed feelings. Because Logue’s involvement was anecdotal evidence that the show would probably be good… but it was also anecdotal evidence that it might not get past the pilot phase.

Which would be a shame, because the Warner Bros. has released the first promotional photo of Logue as Bullock, and I gotta tell you: the guy looks right. And you can see what I mean after the jump.

Fear Leads To Hate, Hate Leads To Anger, Anger Leads To Windows…

We have received our tax refunds here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – when you have the kind of comic book habits that we have and you can write off your comics as a legitimate operating expense, you tend to get a big old refund – which means that we are starting some capital and equipment upgrades here. The first being the spiffy new laptop upon which I am trying to write this.

On one hand, it’s pretty cool – the machine is an Asus, replacing the Asus Transformer tablet I’ve been using for 90 percent of my writing for the past two years, and Asus chicklet keyboards are pretty spry and responsive to type on – but on the other hand, unlike the Transformer, it is a computer rather than a tablet… and in this year of our Lord 2014, that means Windows 8. Which is a truly hateful and counterintuitive operating system for someone who’s been using Microsoft operating systems since the first Batman movie was just a beautiful dream.

I mean seriously: for the past 19 years, the Start button has opened a Start menu with a hierarchical list of available programs, and now it suddenly defaults to a page of a bunch of fucking animated tiles? This is a computer, not a Goddamned iPod! Where’s the command shell? How can I group similar programs so I can find them? Sure, this thing is optimized for a touch screen, but if I can’t find and modify the list of running services in about three minutes, it had better be ready to become a fucking kick screen.

But this is neither here nor there; it is new equipment that must be learned, with a lot of new stuff coming in the near future, and none of it is showing us dudes in spandex getting kicked in the face. That’s what comics are for, and being Wednesday, that means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there’s some good stuff there to distract us some of us from the fact that there is something on my start page promising me “Sensational Sandwiches” for some reason. We’ve got the first issue of the new Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Daredevil, the final issue of Jeff Lemire’s Animal Man, a new issue of Amanda Conner’s and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Harley Quinn, the first issue of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 10, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need time to read them, and to figure out what the hell an “Asus USB Charging Service” is, and why it’s taking 25 percent of my available RAM. So until then…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Superman Saves Children And Drunks

Look, I’m not gonna blow sunshine up your ass: it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we live in Boston, and I am Irish. I have my second pint of Guinness sitting in front of me, and we are foregoing the traditional corned beef and cabbage gut bomb in favor of a light salmon supper. These circumstances, when combined, mean that my command of the written English language has about 45 minutes to live.

So let’s all give thanks that the good folks at CorridorDigital have access to a Superman suit, some actors, a green screen, and a jacked-up camera drone. Because they have combined those circumstances to create a three-minute video of what it might look like if Superman strapped a Go-Pro camera to his head and flew around saving people and stomping bad guys.

It’s actually a really cool first-person view of what it might be like to be Superman flying around the landscape, and I am going to post it now. Because if I wait about an hour to post and view it, it is good enough that I will become motion sick, and dark ale will erupt from places that it should not. At least not before closing time. And you can check it out after the jump.

…No, The Other Blue Wire

We are performing a whole bunch of long overdue site maintenance today. So if you see strange happenings and weird effects from time to time this afternoon, please forgive us.

We will be back to our regularly scheduled programming this evening or tomorrow at the latest.

It’s All Over Bar The Shouting: San Diego Comic-Con 2014 Registration Over; Sold Out

So public registration for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con occurred today, and luckily, we did not need to be a part of it. As attendees last year, we were eligible for the pre-registration that took place in early February, and were fortunate enough to be able to score tickets for the full convention in fairly short order.

So today I was able to watch the madness, desperation, excessive glee and futile cursing happen by way of watching the #SDCC hashtag feed on Twitter, and it looked like a very similar experience to the one we went through for the pre-registration, albeit this time, the entire free fucking world could be involved. I saw a healthy number of tweets from people in Australia and New Zealand complaining that they needed to be up at 4 a.m. local time… and yet no complaints that they needed to Raid away swarms of hairy poisonous spiders to get to their computers to try to register. You will see me dead before you see me in Australia wearing less than a beekeeper’s suit and a Ghostbuster’s proton pack is what I’m saying, but that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we saw the normal complaints that one sees on Twitter during SDCC registration:

• The Web site told me not to refresh, but I did, and now I’m at the end of the line! SDCC sucks!
• The Web site told me not to refresh and I didn’t, but I think if I did, I’d be at the front of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I tried to register from an iPad at Starbucks and my Internet quit! SDCC sucks!
• I forgot about registration until 9:02 Pacific Time and when I logged in I was at the back of the line! SDCC sucks!
• I’ve never tried to register for Comic-Con before, have made no plans on how to succeed at this task, and can’t understand why I can’t just do this in ten seconds even though there are thousands and thousands of other people trying to buy the same ticket as me! I should receive preferential treatment! SDCC sucks!

The fact of the matter is that attending SDCC is, and has been since at least 2009, serious fucking business. I have written before that my co-Editor Amanda and I book backup hotel rooms in August of the year preceding SDCC. When we need to register, we do it from two separate locations, both with independent power supplies and wired Internet connections, and maintain constant communication to increase our odds of success. And we have made the pact that, so long as we can obtain at least Thursday and Sunday passes, we will attend SDCC, if only to make us eligible for whatever pre-registration is available the following year, so we get two bites at the registration apple. And I have said before that this might sound obsessive, but there are two types of people in this world: people who scoff at making paranoid, obsessive and redundant plans regarding SDCC registration, housing and transportation, and people who actually attend Comic-Con.

I Am The Face: Matt Ryan As John Constantine, or: Give Me A Cigarette or I’ll Cut You

So back when the TV pilot for a possible Constantine NBC series was announced, we kinda ignored it because it was impossible to tell, at the time, whether DC and Warner Bros. planned to do a real Hellblazer-ish show, or, based on John Constantine co-creator Steve Bissette’s assertion that he wasn’t getting paid because the show was spun out of the original Constantine movie deal, if we were getting a warmed-over TV version of the Keanu Reeves movie bomb.

Let me start by making a correction: at the time Bissette made his assertion, we stated that Reeves’s movie “sucked out loud.” We have since rewatched that movie, thanks to TiVo’s automatically recorded “suggestions,” and I feel safe in saying that, despite my memories of 2005, the movie does not suck out loud. It merely sucks. But it still doesn’t put forth a character that I want to see on a weekly basis.

We were somewhat comforted by the recent announcement that Matt Ryan, a Welshman (which is close to London, right?), was cast as John Constantine… but only a bit. Because we checked out Ryan’s IMDB profile, and found that his highest profile gigs before this were in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake… where Ryan played the pivotal role of “Junkie #2,” and in American TV drama Criminal Minds, where he played the high profile role of, “Someone my parents have seen in Criminal Minds, since no one younger than 50 watches that show. Seriously, it’s the J.A.G. of serial killer shows.”

Look: we John Constantine fans don’t ask for much. When it comes to Constantine, we want four things:

1. An English accent
2. Blonde hair
3. A tan trenchcoat, and:
4. A cigarette.

Somehow, the Constantine movie fucked 3/4ths of these simple elements. However, Geoff Johns Tweeted the first official photo of Ryan as Constantine and… Goddamn.

This photo has 3/4ths of what we want right… the exact opposite 3/4ths of Reeves’s version. And you can check it out after the jump.

Issue Numbering Is A Flat Circle

Okay, I might be ready to check out of the whole Marvel Now initiative. Because this Web site is about two and a half years old, and I believe that this week’s Secret Avengers #1 is the third Goddamned Secret Avengers #1 in that amount of time. Plus, there’s yet another first issue of a comic book with the word “Avengers” in the title, the 14th or 15th third issue of a Wolverine book since last year’s SDCC, and I think the (literally) tenth version of a Captain Marvel #1.

Look, I get that Marvel made the conscious decision, in the face of the initial success of DC’s New 52 reboot in 2011, to do their own rolling “reboot” where the characters stay in continuity but they can renumber to a first issue whenever they need to temporarily bump circulation back up to the point where Ike Perlmutter will give the creative team the key to the men’s room toilet paper dispenser.

I remember being a kid with a 75-cent a week allowance and becoming giddy with excitement whenever I found a new first issue. I am now 42 years old, with an income large enough that I could easily buy any of those 70s first issues, and, having seen my second first issue of Wolverine in less than a year, I now feel a certain amount of comfort in seeing triple-digit issue numbers from Robert Kirkman comics.

But that’s the cool thing about comics: even though I am a little tired of being spoon-fed first issues, at least they mean new creative teams. Combine that with a couple of new high-numbered issues to remind me that this is, after all, long-term episodic storytelling, and it means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

So yeah, we have a few new first issues, but we also have a new issue of the Mighty Avengers (which is my current bar-none favorite Avengers title), a new Hawkeye, a new Batman, the final issue of Frank Miller’s and Steven Grant’s Robocop: Last Stand (featuring the real 1987 Robocop), and a bunch of other cool stuff!

And even though I’m a little tired of these forced series renumberings, new comics equals good. And whether it’s an issue #1 or issue #500, before we can talk about any of them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Batman Beneath: Batwing #29 Review

So I haven’t written about Batwing for a while. Even though it has remained on my pull list, I had kinda tuned out of Batwing for a while. It survived my first cut of books from the initial New 52, unlike real stinkers like Hawk & Dove and The Savage Hawkman, and it never really got bad, but the whole former child soldier of African warlords angle never clicked all that well with me. Not because it was badly executed, but because it always reminded me of Joshua Dysart’s The Unknown Soldier, and that was a comparison that, when it comes to harrowing drama, a book about a guy in a Bat suit was going to lose.

Since writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti took the book over, those issues have vanished. We’ve got a different guy in the Batwing suit, a Batwing suit that is basically the Batman Beyond suit, and we’re back in Gotham City, giving us a little distance from the whole Batman Incorporated conceit that almost forced the international feel. And what we wind up with is a version of Batman Beyond, with a young, brash guy being mentored by Batman in the most dangerous city in the world. And that works for me; I don’t have an original Bruce Timm Batman Beyond sketch and the Batman Beyond Black And White statue on my mantle because I don’t like that kind of story.

And in Batwing #29, Gray and Palmiotti put together a mix of tones that is a little weird, but generally pretty fun. There is urban horror and real terrible stakes to what’s happening to Luke Fox and his family, horror befitting a modern Batman family comic. And yet it is tempered with big, silly comic book-y ideas, like an unknown underground city beneath Gotham, populated with homeless geeks in Egyptian costumes and giant monsters. It’s a weird mix, but it generally worked for me, and I found it really pretty entertaining.

Provided I turned some parts of my brain off.

Time Travel: Extended Guardians of The Galaxy Interview With James Gunn, Chris Pratt and Kevin Feige

Boy, I sure love it when we switch to Daylight Savings Time here in the United States! It sure is awesome to go to bed drunk on a Saturday night and then wake up on a Sunday morning with absolutely no concept about what time it really is! I mean, here it is after 8 p.m., and every sip of beer feels like I’m drinking with my Cheerios! And the Crisis On Infinite Midlives mascot, Parker the Kitten is really enjoying not knowing whether he should nap, eat dinner, or just continue clawing at my ankles like they’re two animal control guys with fists full of ketamine and eyes full of loneliness!

Long story short: it is a terrible kind of day to attempt anything remotely resembling complicated analysis or in-depth reflection. It is, however, a good day for a long-ish video with an interview with some jokes, some entertaining lines, and a few new details about a much-anticipated genre property.

Say no more: yesterday, Marvel Studios President of production Kevin Feige, director James Gunn and actor Chris Pratt sat down for a half-hour interview with AMC Theaters about Guardians of The Galaxy. And there’s not a ton of new information about the flick in the interview – everyone was sitting there with Kevin Feige after all, and I think we all know that the Disney board of directors has given him the authority to respond to the release of spoilers with extreme sanction – but there are a few tidbits. Such as the fact that Gunn still coming up with ideas for a possible post-credits scene (c’mon, Nova…), and based on a couple of sidelong glances, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an appearance by Cosmo somewhere in the flick.

And I know we post a lot of videos on this site, but seriously: this was one we threw up on the big screen to watch all the way through. The interviewer is, for a change for this kind of thing, at least generally familiar with the comics behind the movie, and Pratt and Gunn are just a lot of fun to watch. Check this one out, after the jump.