Laughter In The Face of Death: Thunderbolts #15 Review

I have clearly not been responding well to Marvel’s Infinity crossover, and I’m beginning to understand why that is, beyond a general orneriness that comes from covering something like five major crossover events in two years, with one of those events being Fear Itself.

Infinity is about a lot of things: interstellar war, tactics and strategy on a large scale, betrayal, and the lineage of kings and tyrants, with mass extinctions of a variety of races and alien species hanging in the balance… but i’s not so much about people. Sure, we have Captain America acting all inspiring and Captain America-ey, and we’ve got Namor acting all stoic in the face of apparently giving up to Thanos’s goons, and pretty soon we’ll have Doctor Strange being all bummed and guilty for leading the bad guys to Thanos’s son… but otherwise it’s all Skrull generals talking about the glory of battle and Krees calling humans upright apes and Builders talking like hippie douchebags with Classical Lit degrees and a suicide pact.

Ships and strategy and explosions are fun, but without the human element, a lot of Infinity has felt like watching dudes playing a tabletop game of Starfleet Battles: kinda interesting, but not the kind of spectator entertainment likely to convince me to turn off the Red Sox game. Which is probably why I’ve responded better to the extraneous crossover books that have dealt with the invasion on Earth. Sure, it’s hard to call an alien invasion of Earth a “small” story, but particularly with the way Jonathan Hickman has pulled all the heavy hitters off the planet, leaving only lower-powered heroes to deal with everything, crossovers like last week’s Mighty Avengers #1 feel more personal.

As does this week’s Thunderbolts #15. Which starts as a story about The Punisher dragging the team on a personal mission to wipe out one of New York’s crime families, only to be interrupted by the violent invasion of New York by the forces of Thanos.

And, as with Mighty Avengers last week, it’s one of the more relatable and entertaining chapters of Infinity so far.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: Mighty Avengers #1 Review

I’m having a hard time deciding if I like the first issue Marvel’s new Avengers title Mighty Avengers – and I do like it – purely on its own merits, or because of Jonathan Hickman’s work on the main Avengers titles.

It’s been about nine months since Hickman took those books over from Brian Michael Bendis, and in that time those books have been notable for their huge plots and cosmic scope, often, in my opinion, at the detriment to the characters. There have been issues of Avengers where the members of the team have acted like the worst kind of taser-happy, steroid-ridden, ex-high-school bully suburban cops, just because they needed to in order to advance Hickman’s master plot plans. We’ve spent months where we normally only see The Avengers competently analyzing a threat or competently meeting a threat, with their most human moments being only when they fuck up egregiously, causing them to return to the competent analysis phase of the story (see, for example, most of the Infinity event, on sale now!

So the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land, is a comparative breath of fresh air. Sure, it is debuting smack in the middle of Infinity, but this is a book about, you know, The Mighty Avengers. Despite the cosmic nature of the threat to New York, we spend most of our time with the actual characters, watching them interact and bicker and try to get along. And we get a sense of many of their motivations for grouping together and acting as Avengers, beyond the simple expediency of “if they don’t, I can’t show off my nifty extinction-level plot I’ve designed” we’ve been getting much of the time in the core titles.

In short, Mighty Avengers #1 is about people, not spectacle. Which makes it a damn good read compared to a lot of the other Avengers books out there.

All About The Brown: A New Dark Knight Fan Film

I started out this evening writing a review of Marvel’s new title The Mighty Avengers – and I will finish that up and post it tomorrow –  but I got distracted by, of all things, a fanfic film. And it wasn’t even a slashfic film, which is a thing that would normally distract me because that is something that many people would call porn.

Instead, this is a seven minute film called The Dark Knight Legacy, directed by Brett Register and written by Woody Tondorf and Chris Landa, set a year after The Dark Knight Rises, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character John Blake as Nightwing (and Daniel Vincent Gordh, the guy they have playing Blake, does a pretty damn serviceable Joseph Gordon-Levitt impression), investigating the murders of a bunch of well-known rogues like Scarface and Penguin, at the hands of The Red Hood.

Make no mistake: this is not a special effects extravaganza. The people who made it are trying to raise $30,000 on IndieGoGo make another episode, so you can probably take a guess what this one cost. But even on a short budget, these guys put together some pretty decent makeup effects, well put-together costumes, and a couple of nice shots to the face… which makes it sound like a slashfic film, but trust me: it’s actually pretty well done.

Oh yeah: and it features Stephanie Brown, which should make many fanboys and fangirls squeal with joy, and will be the most likely reason for Dan DiDio to blow an embolism and start screeching for a cease and desist order.

Either way, you can check out the film after the jump.

Fandom’s Two-Minutes Hate: Bieber Teases Role In Batman Vs. Superman

Things have been quiet here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, because we are possibly nearly dead. Yesterday afternoon and evening, we conducted a staff meeting with most of our contributors that started with conversations about what conventions we might try to attend over beers, continued with discussions about whether we should playtest and review the Star Wars X-Wing miniature game or whether we should just blow the miniature TIE Fighters up with firecrackers over whiskeys, and concluded with car bomb shots, regret, and no geek conversation whatsoever. Because by that point, none of us could even say “Avengers,” let alone form a coherent opinion about them.

So we were hoping for a quiet afternoon to lick our wounds and wait for the photophobia to go away. Unfortunately, I had to get stupid, turn on my computer, and connect it to the Internet. Only to have this apparent atrocity shoved in my face.

The Other Guy: Justice League / Lobo #23.2 Review

Editor’s Note: Mess with th’ Main Man any you buy yourself oceans of spoilers!

Well, that wasn’t as bad as the leaked design art made it look. Then again, it couldn’t possibly have been.

There was a lot of Internet nerd rage over Kenneth Rocafort’s new design of Lobo, and a lot of that rage included the terms, “Twilight,” “metrosexual,” and “Bieber only more effeminate and probably white due to liberal application of semen.” And I’m guessing that that was based on the fact that the dude is named “Lobo.” The world is full of wuss-looking swordsmen who fluidly chop apart all comers before moving on to woo the maidens fair. After all, Orlando Bloom doesn’t get more ‘tang than an astronaut because he is a credible-looking medieval warrior. If it takes you more than five seconds to realize that Genghis Khan could kill Orlando Bloom just by thinking about it really hard (if Khan wasn’t busy thinking about whether to make Bloom his woman), then you don’t need fantasy literature because you clearly are living in one.

The problem has been that name. If you’re gonna call that mincing pretty boy Lobo, you’re gonna piss off anyone who is a fan of The Main Man, even though writer Marguerite Bennett has tried to make it clear that this character is a completely different guy than the Lobo that we all know and love, and that that design was not a redesign of the traditional Lobo. But that is an easy thing to forget or to put aside when all you have is a drawing, labelled “Lobo”, of a dude who looks like he’s a sword away from being a regular at Tower of Power night at the Manhole Club.

Well, the story is now here, in Justice League #23.2, and having the whole package in front of you makes it clear that this dude is not Lobo. He’s got the same name, and he is gunning for Lobo, but it’s a different guy. And that went a long way toward taking some of the sting out of my initial reaction to that concept art.

What took a lot of the rest of that reaction out was the fact that Rocafort didn’t draw this issue. Which means that the “new” Lobo looks a lot less like a clown and leather fetishist’s fantasy about who’s on the other side of the glory hole.

And all things being equal, it’s actually not all that bad.

Accuracy By Volume: A New Star Wars Movie Every Year, or: 48 Hours In Space

We all know that Star Wars Episode VII (a film as yet to be subtitled, but allow me to pitch one of our old podcast titles: The Fist of Justice) will be coming out in 2015 – a summer that will be so geek supersaturated, between Star Wars, Batman Vs. Superman and Ant Man that I should be allowed to retroactively wedgie the jocks who knocked the The Dark Knight Returns trade paperback out of my hands back in high school.

We also all know that Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars property, not only intends to make more big trilogies, but that they intend to make Star Wars movies that do not fall within the scope of another epic trilogy. But exactly what kind of ancillary movies they intend to make hasn’t really been totally clear. Would they be cartoons for kids? Political dramas? Porn?

Well, according to Disney’s Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo, who spoke about Star Wars at an investor’s conference yesterday (Rumors that the second order of business was to ratify Disney’s new corporate mission statement of “Kneel before Zod!” remain unconfirmed), said that those non-trilogy flicks will be prequel stories. Which has historically been a good decision when it comes to Star Wars movies.

And unconfirmed rumor is, that the first prequel will be Han Solo’s origin story.

Oh, shit.

Anarchy In Lovecraft: Locke & Key: Alpha #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph’nglui spoilers Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Basically, I see your crazy and raise. It’s the only way to live.

– Tyler Locke

And with that line, if nothing else, Locke & Key: Alpha #1 has finally settled the question as to what I want engraved on my tombstone.

I opened with that line because I’m finding it hard to review the actual comic book. First of all, this thing is a monster – 32 pages, not counting the “special features” toward the end of the issue – with battles and conflicts happening in about four different places with interchanging teams of characters fighting different threats at varying times.

Second, it’s a hard single issue to summarize. We jump back and forth between the characters, each of which is in a different form of mortal danger at least once, and many of them don’t make it through the issue. The nature of the threats to the characters changes from demons to torture to taunting to thrown rocks, so there’s no simple throughline to follow to keep track of everything so it can be described concisely for people who might be looking for reviews to decide if they want to try the book or not.

Further, this just doesn’t scan like your average superhero comic book. Throughout the issue, we see villain Dodge using a variety of escalating levels of magic to try to enforce his will. But instead of your normal comic, where the heroes meet that power with more power, they generally resist by simple human means of courage and love and persistence, leading to almost the opposite of a standard comic book climax, where the action grows smaller and simpler and more intimate toward the conclusion.

And finally, this issue doesn’t end like your normal superhero comic. Because for all the violence and power displayed, this issue concludes with a simple grapple between the villain and an ancillary character. And unlike in your standard comic, writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez give us a conclusion that makes a hard distinction between the bad guys losing and the good guys actually winning.

So I’ve struggled to decide how to write about this issue. So we’ll go with this to start: if you have been following Locke & Key, this is a spectacular ending (yeah, there’s one more issue, but based on this one, it looks like it’s gonna be a simple denouement) that pays off on just about tease and promise that has been made to the reader leading up to this moment. And if you have not been reading Locke & Key? Well, start with the trades and give this one a wide berth until you’re up to speed.

Every New Beginning…

There is always a surprise when I walk into my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me why I am constantly surprised that it isn’t Naked Day.

Some weeks my stack of pulls is small, yet full of awesome stuff. Other weeks, they hand me a six-inch stack of books that are nothing but middle issues of decompressed stories that mean a week of marking time until something cool happens. And on an infinite timeline, they will hand me only a wordy mess with incomprehensible art, and on that day you will read a 1,500-word review of something called Order of Restraint and its backup feature Remain 300 Feet Away.

This week, the take is interesting, in that it is filled with bittersweet endings. Most importantly to me is the penultimate issue of Locke & Key, but there is also the final issue Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9, as well as Matt Fraction’s final issue of Fantastic Four. And, lest we forget, this is also DC’s Villain’s Month, which means that this is the month where we see Lobo lose his testicles.

But if there are new comics, that means it is Wednesday. And while I have prided myself, for the past few weeks, on getting an early review up on Wednesday, I find that there is so much going on in Locke & Key: Alpha #1 that there isn’t a hope in hell of my getting it finished before tomorrow (short answer: it is awesome). And the combination of those two facts means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And actually, there are a ton of good new books this week. As week two of Villain’s Month, we have books featuring General Zod, Reverse Flash, Riddler, and several others villains who will probably not be emasculated. There is also a new Captain America, a couple of new crossover chapters of Marvel’s Infinity event, a new Deadpool, and a bunch of other cool stuff! *

But you know the drill: before we can review them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

* Stuff including a new trade paperback collection of Jim Steranko’s entire run on Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Some of these stories I haven’t read since they were reprinted in the 70s, and I can’t wait to dive back into them. Yeah, it’s 35 clams, but these are legendary stories with groundbreaking art. Consider picking it up on your trip to your local comic store, and give ’em a big, “Happy Naked Day!” from me!  **

** Please don’t give them my real name.

This Is It, The Apocalypse: Johns Leaving Aquaman, Manapul and Buccellato Leaving Flash

It has not been a good week for DC Comics, publicity wise. In the last week, the creators of Batwoman announced that they were leaving the title early, mostly due to editorial interference on a bunch of story points, including forbidding the planned plotline of Batwoman getting married to another woman. And while that particular story point was not, by the accounts of both the creators and DC Editorial, the primary cause for the split, but it’s what fired the imagination of half of the comics Internet (if by “imagination,” you mean “screeching hate frenzy”)… particularly once Dan DiDio, at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic Con, defended that particular decision by announcing that no DC superheroes are married. Even though a bunch of them, you know, are.

But Baltimore is over now, and the initial hubbub is starting to die down, so DC can get back to focusing on the comics, particularly the few that are left from the New 52 relaunch that still have consistent and successful creative teams. Like Geoff Johns on Aquaman. Right?

Single And Swinging (In The Wind): DC Editorial, Marriage And Batwoman

Jesus, of all the weeks to skip a comic convention…

Last week, J. H. Williams III announced that he and co-creator W. Haden Blackman were leaving Batwoman as of issue #26 due to last minute editorial interference. Part of that interference was that DC Editorial reportedly pulled the plug on Williams’s and Blackman’s long-standing plans to have Kate Kane marry Maggie Sawyer. And we didn’t report on it at the time because, well, I figured the implied homophobia angle that some outlets were latching onto was a non-starter – you can say what you want about DC Editorial (God knows that we do), but nobody’s dumb enough to make that issue the hill they want to die on in the age of the Internet. And both Williams and DC Comics have confirmed that Batwoman’s sexual orientation wasn’t an issue here.

So absent that, this was, at the time, just another story about creators quitting a DC book over editorial interference at the last minute, and that is a story that we have told before, recently and repeatedly. So unless something or someone changes in the upper echelons of DC Editorial, it’s a story that we’ll probably hear again. So was it news? Undoubtedly. Was it news compelling enough to put down my bourbon? Not at the time, it wasn’t. It would’ve taken pictures of Dan DiDio donkey-punching k. d. lang to get my mitts off of that sweet, sweet dose of Vitamin J. D.

Anyway, that was Thursday. The Baltimore Comic Con started yesterday – a convention we considered attending, but then we watched The Wire on HBO GO – and DC Comics held a panel where DC Comics Co-Publisher Dan DiDio reaffirmed that the issue with Batwoman wasn’t the fact that she was going to enter into a gay marriage, but that she was going to enter into any marriage at all. DiDio, in fact, said that real heroes would never get married, as their first duty would always be the superhero stuff, so they don’t have time be married. And, to ward off some of the most obvious questions, DiDio went on to say that Aquaman and Mera – you know, the King and Queen of Atlantis – are not married.

Wait, what?