Equitable Man Ass: Tony Daniel Sells Superman / Wonder Woman Badly At Toronto Fan Fest

Jesus Yammering Christ, is this what were reduced to now? Not just chasing that screeching tween Twilight dollar, but doing it hamfistedly and just fucking wrong?

All right, hold on; let me explain.

The Toronto Fan Expo was held this weekend. We did not attend this convention because we are still paying off our visits to the San Diego and Boston comic conventions (and are getting ready to pay our deposit for our emergency backup room for next year’s SDCC which, yes, we have already made reservations for), and because the nation of Canada has, based on a 1991 visit I made to Montreal, decided that my presence is so detrimental to their culture that even my American dollars don’t make up for it.

However, DC Comics was there, and as they do in most bigger conventions, they held a DC All Access panel to discuss upcoming books, such as Superman / Wonder Woman, written by Charles Soule with art by Tony Daniel and scheduled for a first issue release on October 9th. And Daniel was on that panel, and he addressed the impetus behind building a title around these two characters, who are two-thirds of a trinity of legendary characters created by DC.

And yeah: it turns out that that impetus wasn’t to tell legendary action stories. It apparently was to attract 11-year-old screechy girls and their sweet, sweet fistfuls of daddy’s cash.

Old Gods In The Machine, or: Because, MAGIC!: Justice League Dark #23 Review

Comic crossover events are built on a tight timeline. Because of all the various comic titles that are involved in any big event, everything needs to go off like clockwork. Because when it doesn’t, it throws all the other titles involved into a scheduling nightmare, and that could really fuck up their ability to tell a coherent story… not to mention fuck up their ability to get their shit together in time for the next event story that is inevitably hammering down the pike.

So sometimes an issue needs to move a lot of plot and characters around quickly, to make sure everything is in place for the next issue in the story pipeline. And Justice League Dark #23, the penultimate chapter of DC’s Trinity War crossover, is one of those books. Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Mikel Janin have just 24 pages to get characters from the House of Mystery, Washington D. C., New York City and other parts unknown all together to deal with Pandora’s Box and face down whoever the dapper gentleman running the Secret Society happens to be, all so the players and pieces are in place for the finale in next week’s Justice League.

The good news is that they do it with a fair amount of action, pitting heavy hitters against lower-level heroes, with everyone in sight being affected by the corrupting influence of Pandora’s Box. The bad news is that they make a lot of these moves based on forced coincidences, characters popping up from out of nowhere at just the right time, and a serious over-reliance on Zatanna and her backwards Pig Latin magic.

The result is an exciting story, but as befitting a story with magic at its core, one where you can see The Man Behind The Curtain. Characters don’t move in this comic. They are pushed.

Since Then, I’ve Spent Most Of My Time Chasing Superman. So To Speak: Ben Affleck Cast As Batman In Zack Snyder’s Batman Vs. Superman Movie

Christ, you go out to dinner late on a single, solitary Thursday evening, and what do you miss…

Ending weeks of speculation, Ben Affleck has been set to star as Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne. Affleck and filmmaker Zack Snyder will create an entirely new incarnation of the character in Snyder’s as-yet-untitled project—bringing Batman and Superman together for the first time on the big screen and continuing the director’s vision of their universe, which he established in “Man of Steel.” The announcement was made today by Greg Silverman, President, Creative Development and Worldwide Production, and Sue Kroll, President, Worldwide Marketing and International Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures.

The studio has slated the film to open worldwide on July 17, 2015.

Okay, let’s all get our, “Oh Jesus, Affleck was in Gigli / Saving Christmas / Sum of All Fears / Jennifer Lopez!” panic out of our system. Feel better? Now settle down, huddle up, fetch your old Uncle Rob some more bourbon, and listen up: this is not bad news.

Internal Nerd Rage: Joss Whedon Speaks Ill Of The Empire Strikes Back

Not a lot of time here today at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, but this little tidbit caught my eye: Joss Whedon just did an extended interview with Entertainment Weekly, which is in this week’s issue. But the magazine released a couple of quotes to tease readers into picking up the issue, and only one of those quotes was enough to send half of geek fandom into a seething frenzy of hatred!

Specifically, Whedon discusses his feelings about The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars movie widely held to be the best of six movies and variety of television specials to date (although I have a special place in my heart for The Star Wars Holiday Special. Because the last time I saw it was in college, on grainy VHS, while I was hammered).

And amazingly, coming from the man who clearly loved Han Solo enough to basically create a television series and major motion picture based on a suspiciously similar character, those feelings are somewhat negative.

Empire committed the cardinal sin of not actually ending… which at the time I was appalled by and I still think it was a terrible idea.

Yeah, I hate it when movie franchises don’t have an ending. That’s why I’m so glad that they ended the Alien franchise after James Cameron’s Aliens! Yup, just the two movies. That’s how I remember it. There certainly was no attempt to lure fans back to the theaters with some twisted tale about cloning Ripley!

…yeah, sorry. Lot of caffeine today. What’re you driving at, Joss?

Boy’s (Super) Life: Nova #7 Review

There are bigger comic books this week than Nova #7, written by Zeb Wells with art by Paco Medina, but you’re not gonna find too many that are more fun. Not in the sense that there’s a lot of big action or spectacular demolition or exciting team-ups (although we see Nova meet Spider-Man, which was a nice bit of nostalgia for a guy who fondly remembers the original Nova’s first crossover with Spider-Man back in 1977 – to this day, I remember the reveal that the murder victim fingered his killer from beyond the grave by tearing out the last pages of a calendar to spell JASOND), but in the sense that the issue asks the question: if you were a teenager from the sticks who had powers and you wanted to become a superhero… how exactly would you go about it?

I mean, I’m an adult who lives in a major American city, who has been known to drink heavy in questionable bars, and I can count the number of actual crimes I’ve personally witnessed in the last decade on one hand. The last house fire I saw was a rural chimney fire I saw right around when I was reading that 1977 Nova / Spider-Man crossover (despite all of my friends’ predictions that I would eventually see a house fire thanks to years of reckless chain smoking while drinking whiskey), and I see my high-speed police chases on TruTV at 2 a.m., the way God intended. Even if I had the power of Superman, I wouldn’t know where to find a crime to fight if I had to, and I’m someone old enough to know what a Bearcat Scanner is and what it’s for.

So what would you do if you were a 15-year-old from the middle of nowhere, imbued with the power of a cosmic hero, looking to make himself a superhero?

And the answer is: apparently, fuck up all over the place.

Jumping The Zombie, or: The Literal Ghost In The Machine: True Blood, Season Six Finale Review

Editor’s Note: I wanna do real bad spoilers to you…

About two-thirds of the way through the sixth season finale of True Blood, Amanda asked me what I thought the Big Bad for next year’s season seven would be. “We haven’t see zombies yet,” Amanda said sarcastically.

“Oh, it’s zombies,” I said. “They’re talking about gangs of vampires loaded up with Hepatitis V, mindlessly picking off the entire populations of small towns? They can call them anything they want, but that’s zombies.”

“Jesus… there are literal volumes and volumes of monsters they could choose from and they had to ape The Walking Dead? I mean, if they wanted to go with a George Romero riff, they could go with some poor deluded fucker like Martin, but they gotta go with zombies? What does that mean?”

“It means that they are out of ideas.”

No Fridges Were Nuked In The Creation Of This Video: Harrison Ford’s Indy Appearance In Young Indiana Jones

We don’t have a lot of time here today at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office – we are venturing out for a staff meeting with contributor Lance Manion which will consist of story conferences (translation: one of us will say, “Did you see the latest issue of Saga? Wasn’t it awesome?”), research (“Show me the cosplayer pictures you took at SDCC… dontcha have any Power Girls or Huntresses, for Christ’s sake?”), and a little social drinking. Or at least that will be the affirmative defense that we enter at the arraignment.

However, we did find this little thing I’d like to pass along: YouTube user 2ndMyMediaSource has uploaded parts of the early 90s episode of Young Indiana Jones where Harrison Ford appeared to reprise his role as Indy.

The video’s only seven minutes long, and spends even a little too much of that focusing on Indy as a teenager for my tastes, but it is a nice rarely-seen taste of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, considering it has been nearly a quarter century since the release of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, which means it has been far too long since we’ve seen Indiana Jones. Yup. 25 whole years since Ford has played Indy. Only three Indiana Jones movies were made. Just a trilogy. And I’d like to thank Lucasfilm for including, in their Indiana Jones Blu-Ray set, that extra disc that I could use as a coaster. That extra disc with nothing on it. Yes indeedy.

Anyway, you can get this extra taste of the real Indiana Jones after the jump.

…actually, you can’t. 2ndMyMediaSource has disabled embedded on the video. But it’s still worth watching, and you can check it out right on the guy’s YouTube channel.

Clones… Why Did It Have To Be… Clones: Sibling Rivalry, or Superior Spider-Man #2 and Scarlet Spider #20 Review

Clones. I hate those guys.

Ever since Doctor Octopus took over Peter Parker’s body, started calling himself the Superior Spider-Man and violented himself up, it was only a matter of time before somebody put him face to face with Kaine, the Scarlet Spider – the version of Spider-Man who was already violented up. After all, the comic reading public has since proven that they will pay to see different versions of Spider-Man tuning each other up. It started with The Amazing Spider-Man #149, back in October, 1975, the first time Spider-Man fought a cloned version of himself, and continued, on and on, through the creation of Venom, and then Carnage, and then the return of that original Spider-Clone. And then the Clone Saga.

The Goddamned, everfucking Clone Saga.

Anyway, there wasn’t a hope in hell of getting through this Doc Ock incarnation of Spider-Man without someone spending some time having him knock around, and get knocked around by, Scarlet Spider. And frankly, I wasn’t looking all that forward to it; again, only 15 years ago, Marvel had one Spider-Man punch another, and they spent the next year and a half dragging it out until they all but knocked the title’s dick in the dirt. So in my mind’s eye, I was expecting a multi-issue extravaganza, dragged out over weeks if not months with big fights and constant wondering who the real Spider-Man was at any given time.

So imagine my surprise when the inevitable fight between these two guys was done in just two issues, both available on the same day, with some decent believable interplay between the two, and a common enemy to fight.

Of course, that enemy is The Jackal, who started the whole damn clone business in the first place. Oh: and a bunch of other clones.

Dirty, stinking clones.

The Climax Is Never In Act One: Infinity #1 Review

For years, whenever Marvel kicked off a big event comic, they made a point of swearing before God and everybody that the story could be read on its own, without needing to track down a bunch of other comics to understand what’s going on. It was all bullshit, of course; be it Civil War or Secret Invasion or Avengers Vs. X-Men, the second the event kicked off, it crossed into every title Marvel published. Sure, you didn’t need to read those other comics to understand the whole story, provided you were okay with taking certain things you saw on faith. Things like just assuming that, somewhere in the gutters of the main title, D-Man obtained the Infinity Gauntlet while Batroc The Leaper’s big toes were turned to Mrs. Dash Onion Seasoning.

That, however, was the past. Welcome to Infinity, a book not only with a final page consisting of a diagram telling you what other comic books you should be following to get the whole story, but one which, if you haven’t been reading both Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers and New Avengers since launch day, will be difficult to follow from the first page. Which is fine for people like me who have been getting those books all along, but which isn’t exactly welcoming to any poor schmuck who wanders into a comic store after, say, seeing The Wolverine, and saying to himself, “Ooh! That comic has the dude from the credits of The Avengers movie!”

And that wouldn’t be a bad thing if Infinity #1 was character-driven, and gave you compelling people to follow through this unfamiliar scenario. Unfortunately, this book is all about plot and putting pieces into place to eventually blow some shit up. And the characters are simply pushed through this clockwork, normally almost indistinguishable from each other except for the colors of their costumes.

Hell, one of the main heroes of the story is featured in a four-page sequence where he is asleep, for Christ’s sake.

A Limited Series Named Infinity, And Other Logical Conundrums

Well, here we are: at the start of Jonathan Hickman’s crossover event that he’s been teasing since his first issue of Avengers several months ago. And sure enough, a quick glance shows that it includes Ex Nihilo and Captain Universe and Thanos… and the claim that there are no Avengers to be found anyplace. Meaning that either we are due for a miniseries where The Avengers swoop back to save Earth in the nick of time, or else we are in for a miniseries where Damage Control makes enough money to buy blowjobs from Bill Gates, in between scenes of Thanos’s plans for world domination being threatened by the danger that can only be posed by Squirrel Girl swinging a tire iron.

We will address Infinity #1 tomorrow, but the fact that we have it in hand means that it is Wednesday. And Wednesday means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And even if Infinity wasn’t in the stack, we still have a very, very decent take here. There’s a new issue of East of West (also by Hickman), a new Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, another issue of The Walking Dead where a planet full of zombies and survivors can’t seem to kill Negan, another chapter in Scott Snyder’s and Greg Capullo’s Batman: Zero Year, and a bunch of other awesome-looking stuff!

But you know how this works: before we can talk about any of them, we need time to read them. So while we embark upon that endeavor…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!