World Class Series: New Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Teaser Released

I have lived in New England for most of my life, and in Boston for more than half of that time, and unless you’ve lived here for any length to time, you don’t know what it’s like when the Boston Red Sox make it to the World Series. Oh sure, for new residents of the area, it seems almost like a common enough occurrence, but for a very long time, through the 70s, 80s and 90s, it felt as likely as seeing decent production values in an episode of Doctor Who.

So what this means is that most of the staff of Crisis On Infinite Midlives started drinking well before the Red Sox / Tigers game started yesterday at 8 p.m., we switched to shots when Shane Victorino hit his grand slam home run, and things got a little hazy after that. So we have spent most of the day quite damaged, being of a certain age where the idea of the Red Sox in the World Series is still damn exciting.

As is the idea of Doctor Who with production values. So as a nod toward the fact that we are truly living in halcyon days, here is the latest teaser trailer for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary episode, Day of The Doctor. It’s not the full trailer that was supposedly shown during San Diego Comic-Con this past July, but it is pretty cool, and most importantly: it is genre-related, and can be posted without too much unnecessary motion or sound to make our hangovers fire up.

Since Game One of the series starts on Wednesday, expect several more barely coherent posts for the next week and a half. But in the meantime, you can check the teaser out after the jump.

Khan Roll

I’m afraid it’s a busy morning at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office  – the coffee is barely latching onto my neurotransmitters, and we need to pack up and head to Worcester (The Heroin Capital of Massachusetts!) on a mission of parental mercy involving helping with computers. Which means that by noon I will be filled with my recommended daily allowance of hatred and rage, and will thus be in poor shape to write about comics.

So instead, with the limited time I have available this morning, I am pleased to offer this exclusive, never-before-seen Star Trek footage, which you can find after the jump.

Breaching The Secret Society: Dan DiDio To Appear On The View Today

So if you’re home sick, unemployed, or nursing your methamphetamine habit in front of daytime TV today, here’s a thing that’s happening: Co-Publisher of DC Comics, will be appearing on The View today.

Is he appearing to pitch something specific coming from DC? No, although DiDio’s obvious abilities as a pitchman that he shows at conventions will probably allow him to drop some hype. Is he attending to hype up the Batman Vs. Superman movie? No, although if he doesn’t take the opportunity to mention it given that filming on the flick reportedly starts this weekend, it demonstrates that he might be nursing a methamphetamine habit.

No, instead he is going on The VIew so that Whoopi Goldberg can pitch him on a comic series. Based on herself. Only with superpowers.

Return of The Joker: New Commercial For Batman: Arkham Origins And Joker Voice Actor Does The Killing Joke

In April, Amanda and I completely redid the Entertainment Annex of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and due to changes in layout and furniture, we haven’t reconnected my XBox 360 (My gamertag? You don’t want my gamertag. I shoot the Witches in Left For Dead 2, and I do it because I quickly reach a point where I don’t care if it’s my “teammates” or me who dies if it means I don’t have to hear about my mother’s sexual proclivities anymore).

And, in an effort to keep the newly-renovated room looking like adults live here, I have held fast in keeping it disconnected, despite having a yen to play my XBox Arcade downloads after a weekend of classic video games, and even through the release of Grand Theft Auto V, because I figure once either the XBox One or the Playstation 4 comes out, either will replace my elderly and slow Blu-Ray player in favor of a new one that will report my tastes in pornography back to Corporate Headquarters.

But I recently realized that, even if I need to balance the ol’ 360 on top of a speaker or run cables across the middle of the floor, I will need to hook that bad boy up, because Batman: Arkham Origins is dropping before the end of the month. And even though this one isn’t being written by Bruce Timm, and the main voices aren’t by Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill, and it’s the first Arkham game not produced by Rocksteady Games, the first two games earned more then enough goodwill for me to pick it up on launch day.

And the ads are helping to get me excited… kinda. On one hand, this new spot that takes us, in just a few seconds, through Bruce Wayne’s journey from Crime Alley to Batman… but it also makes me concerned that we’re gonna be spending more time than I’d like with Bruce Wayne instead of Batman. Arkham Origins without the Batman suit or the streets of Gotham or familiar rogues stands a real chance of becoming Double Dragon… but the emotional beats in the video give me some hope that it’ll be right at the core.

And you can check the latest spot after the jump.

Hunting Angels In The Gutters: Guardians of The Galaxy #7 Review

Since Guardians of The Galaxy #7 has the names Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli on the cover, I will start by saying yes, there are at least three double-paged layouts in this book where you need to stop what you’re doing (which will be enjoying the actual story) to decode whether you need to read page one and then page two, or across the spine from the top. The bad news is that this is still a storytelling technique that drives me bugfuck nuts.

The good news is that I have long since learned, when I see the names “Bendis” and “Pichelli” on the cover, to stop with every page turn and decode how to read the pages before continuing my story enjoyment. But still, even though I have learned to look for the layout doesn’t mean I like it. It’s like an SAT word problem, or a solid donkey punch: you don’t start loving it just because you know it’s coming.

Jesus, I have been writing comic reviews for more then two years, and I have never started one by poking at a technical element of the visual storytelling before. Which should go to show just how crazy the whole cross-spine layout makes me… but which also might make make it seem like all I have to say about it are technical nitpicks and “get off my lawn!” screeching about more modern storytelling techniques. But that’s really not the case.

Instead, Guardians of The Galaxy #7 is a comic book that will play for any Browncoat. It’s one of Bendis’s “let’s alll sit around a table talking” issues that let’s the reader spend some quality time with a tight crew of a small starship, cracking wise in the face of danger while simultaneously trying to negotiate with and size up a potential enemy. And with its cocky and wisecracking captain, warrior woman second in command, and gunslinging goon backing them up, it’s a stupid hat and a misguided hero’s ballad away from being an episode of Firefly.

And I like Firefly. So I had a lot of fun with this book.

A Dream of Flying Again: Marvel To Reprint Moore’s and Gaiman’s Miracleman, Complete Gaiman’s Story

There are hazards, when you run a comics blog, to making the decision to fuck off to central New Hampshire to play classic video games during the weekend when the New York Comic Con is occuring. We knew when we made the call that we would miss some news, but we figured that that wouldn’t be all that big a deal, as there would be half a dozen comics blogs with budgets bigger than ours (read: almost all of them) who would have boots on the ground and be better able to cover it than we would even if we spent the weekend parked at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Information Center (read: the couch with a first-generation Transformer tablet tuned to our “comics news” RSS feed).

So we knew that we would be late with some news… we just didn’t anticipate that some of that news would entail several hundred dollars worth of direct impending loss of value to our personal comic collection!

To wit: Marvel announced at New York Comic Con that they would be reprinting Neil Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s late-80s / early-90s run on Miracleman… and that they would be finishing the three-part storyline that was aborted after Miracleman #25, the first part of the middle The Silver Age storyline, after Eclipse Comics went under.

Which is excellent news (well, it’s excellent news for anyone who didn’t spend the first two years of the 21st Century hunting down those original Eclipse issues), but that original announcement only referenced Gaiman’s and Buckingham’s issues, which didn’t start until Miracleman #17. Miracleman #1 through #16 were written by Alan Moore, and include the infamous 15th issue, Nemesis, writh art by John Totleben and featuring the complete decimation of London in the battle between Miracleman and Kid Miracleman. If you’ve never read it, it’s a classic, that is well worth the fat cash I dropped on it during a drunken bidding war on eBay in 2002.

And it looks like that is fat cash that I will never see again, because today Marvel made it official: they will be reprinting the entire Eclipse Comics run, starting with Alan Moore’s Miracleman #1, starting in January.

But Marvel’s still not using Moore’s name anyplace.

Greetings, Starfighter! A Weekend At Funspot

Some of you might be wondering why we have been so silent over the events of the New York Comic Con, which has just finished up and featured news including the return of Stephanie Brown to the DC Universe proper.

Well, the reason is that we checked our bank balance after returning from the San Diego Comic-Con, determined that we didn’t have the cash or the cachet to attend another giant-assed comic convention three months after the Big Show, and therefore decided to spend the weekend doing something geeky, but geeky within our budget.

And that means video games. And being from Boston, that means that the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office exists about 100 miles from Funspot, the home of the American Classic Arcade Museum.

Now the whole “museum” tag might make the whole experience sound boring, but what it really means is that the third floor of one of the biggest arcades in the world is (minus the only indoor miniature golf course I have ever seen) completely loaded with original and working arcade cabinet games (the real machines, not that MAME stuff that your creepy uncle misguidedly uses to try to lure young-looking girls into his basement game room) that you can actually play with a simple token from an old-school token machine.

And, since Funspot is the arcade featured in The King of Kong, you can, for the low-low price of 25 cents, play the actual Donkey Kong machine that Steve Wiebe went head-to-head with against Billy Mitchell for the world record. Or, if you’re me, you can use that legendary machine to learn that you were never any good at Donkey Kong, whether you use the cross-handed grip you saw Mitchell use in that movie or not.

And not only did I learn that I am not good enough to fondle the joystick that Wiebe and Mitchell used to make history, but I learned that, when you are a 42-year-old man, spending eight hours a day playing as many video games as you want is more physically exhausting that you would have thought when you were 12 years old and never had more than five bucks to spend at any given arcade at any given time.

Meaning that I am physically crippled, and functioning only through the glee that, 22 years after it was released, I finally got through the second level of Tron. Combine that with Amanda’s excitement over holding the Pole Position II high score for the entire weekend, and we are collectively running on fumes here.

So while we recover, please enjoy these photos of a place that exists in this world 20 minutes off of Route 93 in New Hampshire, where any person with a quarter can play as Flynn against Sark (in not only Tron, but Discs of Tron), or as Pac Man before he had eyes and a Saturday morning cartoon, or even as Mario when he was still known as Jumpman and was just fighting against a giant monkey.

It is more fun than you could think you could have, and some proof is available after the jump.

Walking Through Mud: The Walking Dead #115 Review

This review is going to be colored by the fact that I am sick to fucking death of Negan and am more than ready for The Walking Dead to move on to something new.

We have been dancing with this character for fifteen months and his crew of douchebags for even longer than that, and for the entire time it has felt like the guy has one note, and writer Robert Kirkman has been playing it over… and over… and over, in an unending loop that should offend the mind of any self-respecting software developer:

while (bool negan.getIsAlive())
{
    negan.sexualizeBaseballBat();
    negan.leaves().
    List ricksPlanToBeatNegan = new List ( { “Take The Fight to Negan!” } );

    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).execute();
    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).setSuccess(false);
    negan.threatenMassViolence();
    n = n + 1;
}

See what months and months of reading about Negan has done to me? I develop software for my day job, and I just spent ten minutes trying to come up with a valid Java-ish method rather than contemplate 12 more issues with this fucking character.

But 12 issues should be the long and short of Negan, because The Walking Dead #115 signals the start of the major story arc All Out War, which should give us the final showdown between Rick’s and Negan’s people. And if the check that the title’s floating is any good at all, this showdown will be a straight-out fight, rather than these little insurrections and half-measures and bouts of oneupsmanship that have made reading The Walking Dead since July of (Jesus) 2012 feeling like walking through thick mud: you take forever and a ton of effort to take every step, and yet go nowhere fast.

So things should start speeding up… eventually. Because part one of All Out War is really more of the same.

From Out of The Past: Nine Missing Late 60s Doctor Who Episodes Released

Well, it’s official: the BBC has announced that they have recovered nine episodes of Doctor Who from the run of Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor. Which means that I will only need to spend a full day watching British children’s television to bring myself up to speed… but since the episodes have been released only via iTunes, it will mean that I will finally be forced to give Apple my real name. Or wait something like 24 hours for the episodes to be released to Bittorrent. Jesus, did I say that out loud? Either way, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The episodes are from the 1967 story arc The Enemy of The World and the 1968 arc The Web of Fear, which is the first story to feature The Great Intelligence…

Hey Amanda? What’s The Great Intelligence?

Well Rob, he’s the guy with the evil snowmen. The one that was voiced by Magneto in that Christmas special. And I think he was the leader of The Whisper Men in that Name of The Doctor episode.

Were those the ones that ripped off The Gentlemen from Buffy? I don’t remember that one all that well. I was pretty shitfaced when we watched that.

You mean as opposed to now?

…don’t give me static. I’m doing journalism! Or at least blogging. It’s like journalism, only you can go off on ridiculous tangents, and no one cares if you do it in your underpants!

Anyway.

Archie And Victims: Afterlife With Archie #1 Review

“Afterlife With Archie is my pick of the week,” said the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and generally ask me to stay right the hell away from the kids’ comics.

“…you gotta be shitting me, dude.”

“I am not kidding. It is not like any Archie comic you have ever seen…”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Goddamned Archie comic,” I muttered.

“…and no matter what you think, it is much darker than you think it is,” he said.

“It would almost have to be.”

“Go take a look,” he said, “Dig to the back of the stack and find one of the variant covers.”

I pawed past copies of your expected Archie-style cartoony fake horror covers and saw… something unexpected. “Jesus. How’d they convince Francesco Francavilla to do a cover for this book?”

“By letting him do the interiors, too.”

“…come again?”

“Check it out. Take a look at page three.”

I opened the book. “Um… is that a Francavilla splash page of Jughead handing Sabrina The Teenage Witch a dead fucking dog?” He nodded. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll try anything once.”

So I did try it. And allow me – a 42-year-old cynical and angry drunk who has just read an Archie comic book – to tell you this: Afterlife With Archie is pretty fucking good.