How To Survive Comic-Con Without Really Trying: 2013 Edition

We are in the final throes of preparation for heading to San Diego for Comic-Con 2013, which means we don’t have a lot of time today, but it does mean that we’re in the process of putting into place a bunch of the stuff that we’ve learned about how to survive what amounts to a six-day forced march through spectacle, excitement, a marked lack of easy-to-access Internet, crowded restaurants and line – dear God, the lines.

But as we did last year, we’ll share a few of the lessons that we’ve learned about how to survive the process. Now, since our time is limited today, I’m not gonna go back and read what I wrote back then, but simply vomit some stuff into the keyboard… which in and of itself will be good experience to prepare for a six-hour session of daydrinking in the sun at Dick’s Last Resort on 5th Avenue.

Sibling Rivalry: Hawkeye #12 Review

I normally try not to review the same title two months in a row unless it’s a big event comic – my reviews take a while to write thanks to my congenital case of diarrhea of the keyboard, and there are only so many hours in the day – but what the hell can I tell you? Hawkeye #12 is just that Goddamned good.

Seriously, I don’t know how Matt Fraction ever got this series greenlit without having photos of Axel Alonso in a compromising position with some form of beast of burden or something. Hawkeye barely appears in this book. There are exactly four panels of bow and arrow action. The closest thing to a supervillain is a Russian cocksucker in a tracksuit. The closest thing to a superhero battle and strategy is when a guy decides that he’s earned that money the Russians offered him in exchange for letting them kick the shit out of him. And this is in a Marvel superhero comic; for contrast, imagine a Superman comic that was about Jimmy Olsen getting ripped to the tits on laudanum while bemoaning his childhood by letting strange women pay him to take a dump on his chest.

This kind of superhero comic simply shouldn’t work; describing it on paper makes it sound like an inventory fill-in issue by a writer who was instructed to turn in something that doesn’t directly fuck around with the main character’s status quo. But it’s not like that at all; instead, we get a solid show-don’t-tell character study of Clint’s brother Barney, a snapshot of Clint and Barney’s childhood that uses artist Francesco Francavilla’s skills to show us a lot of information without having to waste a lot of time with unnecessary exposition, and for me, the first time I’ve ever seen a reason I can believe why Clint wouldn’t just write his brother – a Dark Avenger who stole Clint’s Hawkeye identity only weeks ago – completely off. All without seeing Hawkeye for more than a single page.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. Because it’s a superhero story about people, with some of the best pulpy art you can find anywhere.

Summer Cleaning / Demolition

It has been more than six months since we did a good, old-fashioned site maintenance and upgrade, and what with our trip to San Diego Comic-Con coming up (and the limited access to real computers that can handle much more than uploading panel reports or photos of cosplayers and weird ephemera), it seems like the time to tidy up the joint.

This is a big task, so if things go quiet here, or you see some weird renderings or odd things happening around the edges, please forgive us.

We will try to be back online and broadcasting by this afternoon.

Thanks for your patience.

Trinity Civil War: Justice League #22 Review

Look: I am never gonna hate too much on a comic book that gives me Superman fighting with Captain Marvel. And yes, I know that DC wants me to call him Shazam now. But I am old and crochety, and frankly? I am proud of the self-education I gave myself, back in the days of the 1970s Shazam! Saturday morning TV show, to call the character “Captain Marvel” rather than “Shazam.” Because I didn’t want to look stupid to the older comic book fans who lived on my block. And they did call me stupid when I called that guy “Shazam.” You hearing me, DC Comics? You listening me to digress like a sonofabitch?

Anyway. Justice League #22, the opening of the long-teased The Trinity War crossover event, gives me a good couple of pages of Superman and Captain Marvel tuning each other up. And as someone who remembers, as a young kid, waiting feverishly for Justice League of America #137 to show up in the spinner rack of my local corner grocery store (where they knew me by name and asked me to stop pretending the lime Ring Pops were Green Lantern power rings if I wasn’t gonna pay for one), seeing that makes me remember my youth and makes me predisposed to like a comic book.

And I did like Justice League #22… up to a point. As a kickoff point for a big crossover, it gives us a few examples of solid and believable characterization (and a few that aren’t – would someone at DC decide what kind of person Superman really is in the New 52?), it drops enough groundwork to let us believe that we’ll finally get the full story on Pandora – the mystery woman from all the initial first issues of the New 52, remember? – and if gives some good, solid, hot, sweet, superhero-on-superhero action.

If it has an Achilles’ Heel, it is that it is currently 2013. Which means that any continuity-wide story that features half of its superheros kicking the crap out of the other half is doomed to feel kinda like a lift from Marvel’s Civil War, or last year’s Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Forced Withdrawal

This is our last Wednesday before we head off to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, which is always a weird sensation. On one hand, our pilgrimage makes us heroes at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if they can housesit (and where my longbox with the first-print Silver Age Batman comics are in the house. And if we have security cameras. Which we do, you treacherous bastards.)… but on the other hand, it means that this is the end of our new comics for the next two weeks.

Believe it or not, even though the biggest Western comic book convention in the world starts on a Wednesday, you can’t find a new comic book to buy there to save your Godforsaken soul. Oh sure: if I stood in the comics retailers section of the convention’s main floor, waving around a fistful of hundreds, and screamed, “Action Comics #1 me now, bitches! And gimme that real stuff, none of that Grant Morrison shit,” I’d be beating well-stocked and willing retailers off with a stick. But when it comes to new books? It’s bubkis for you, True Believer. They just don’t haul that stuff out to the West Coast with them… not when they know that, once they get back to their home stores, they will be faced with people like me who went to the convention wanting to trade in their SDCC-Exclusive Deadpool-themed Fleshlights in for enough store credit to pay for the books they missed while in San Diego.

So it is a bittersweet feeling to have it be a Wednesday, and to come home with new comics, knowing it is the last batch we’ll be getting for a couple of week. But still, it is a Wednesday, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you need to take a break from new comics for a couple of weeks, there are worse ways to go out. There’s a new issue of The Walking Dead (and God, how I would like to be able to tell Robert Kirkman that I like how he wrapped the story he started before last year’s SDCC), the opening chapter of DC’s Trinity War in Justice League, the second issues of personal favorites Superman Unchained and Astro City, a new issue (finally) of Jonathan Ross’s and Bryan Hitch’s America’s Got Powers, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is (particularly with all the other prep work going into getting ready to cover SDCC): before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. And I promise: we will try to make as much time as possible to review as many of these as we can before the convention starts up. But until we can do that…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Long Con To Short Con: Boston Comic Con Releases Panel Schedule

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place in late April, but had to be postponed for the most mundane of reasons: a mad bomber who had blown up a part of the street where the convention was scheduled to be held was on the loose, leading to a five-city cop lockdown and to most of the population of Eastern Massachusetts to scream at their televisions, “Just turn the dogs loose on the prick so I can get to the fucking bar!” You know, everyday irritations.

Well, the convention was very quickly rescheduled for August 3rd and 4th. Which was great, and we couldn’t wait to throw our support behind it… until we realized that that weekend was less than two weeks after the San Diego Comic-Con, which is an experience that normally takes us an entire week from which to recover from the fatigue hysteria.

Oh, make no mistake: we’re still going. It might mean that by mid-August we are so ravaged that we are unable to write anything more complicated than, “Comics are neat,” but we are going.

Because not only has the guest list ballooned since the reschedule, including Dan DiDio, Scott Snyder, James O’Barr, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez to name a few, but the convention has just published their panel schedule for the event. Now, make no mistake: Boston Comic Con is still a small convention as these things go – San Diego’s panel schedule fills a magazine-sized book every year, while Boston’s fits comfortably on a single Web page – but still, you need to remember that as recently as 2009, Boston Comic Con wasn’t big enough to host any panels. So following that growth path, maybe in a few years I’ll be able to attend a massive comic convention without having to spend five and a half hours on a smoke-free airplane.

So yeah, there are only a few panels over the two-day event… but there’s one or two that you won’t be able to see anywhere else. You can get the whole schedule here, but as we did with the San Diego Comic-Con event schedule, I’m gonna call out a few that look particularly interesting to us.

Excitement In Travel: Extended Sequence From The Wolverine Released

The week before San Diego Comic-Con is pure bleeding hell. We here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office are busy collecting and testing the new equipment for covering SDCC (Amanda and I both have new smartphones that can act as WiFi hotspots for the actual writing equipment, and a new camera that can hopefully take pictures at panels from further back than the front row is working out swimmingly – if I can take a zoomed photo of a flower from across a backyard at twilight while shitfaced, I think I can get Bob Harras screwing up his face while trying to come up with an answer that doesn’t include the phrase, “indiscriminate firing” from halfway back in Room 6BCF). But not only that, we are squaring away both of our day jobs, which are each of the type where when you tell your boss you won’t be around for a week, they act like you’re telling them you FDISK’ed the database server and shit in the payroll filing cabinet.

So not only are we are busy as hell, but we can’t even make a command decision as to whether or not we want to brave Hall H on Saturday because the entirety of 20th Century Fox’s panel description is: TBA. Now, the smart money is on that panel including something about Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it is possible there will also be something about The Wolverine, which opens a couple of weeks after SDCC ends. Sure, the odds are long on that count – two weeks before opening, the only way any real buzz is gonna arise from Comic-Con is if Hugh Jackman is caught disposing of a dead hooker in the bay behind the Hyatt – but I guess it’s possible.

But let’s face reality: the odds we’d spend all day in Hall H to catch footage of The Wolverine are pretty long. So let’s all pretend that we spent a long morning in a sun-blasted line behind a kid in an anime costume that makes him smell like hot PVC insulation and foot, and take a look at the first extended sequence from The Wolverine right here. You can catch it after the jump.

Rising Conflict: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Saturday and Sunday Panel Schedules Released

San Diego Comic-Con is many things to many people: a giant excuse to get drunk in a setting where you can strike up a conversation about Batman with whoever happens to be sitting next to you at the bar, a chance to get pictures with celebrities, a way to get loot you can’t get anywhere else, or an excuse to dress up like a superhero and jam up floor traffic every time you strike some form of pose.

And it is true; SDCC is all of those things to some people But there is one thing that Comic-Con is to all people: a scheduling nightmare where, no matter what panel you think you might want to see, there is at least one panel opposite that panel that you equally want to see.

And SDCC 2013 is no different. The convention has released the panel schedule for Saturday and Sunday, and there is a veritable pile of cool and interesting panels to check out. And you can get the full Saturday and Sunday schedules at the Comic-Con Web site, but as we did with the Thursday and Friday schedules a couple of days ago, we’ll call out some that look interesting, some that we’re gonna try to get to and report on… and some that just seem… a little weird.

Decisions, Decisions: Thursday and Friday San Diego Comic-Con Panel Schedules Released

We are in the middle of a heat wave here in Boston; temperatures have been above 90 degrees outside with extremely high humidity… and until about 90 minutes ago, temperatures inside the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office were roughly the same. However, a nice man came out and said he needed to work with something called  “blower motor,” which, after ascertaining that he wasn’t using code to seek a favor other than money to Make Cool Air Engine Go, has begin to cut through the disgusting humid stew in which we have been living for almost 48 hours.

All in all, it has been enough to make a man seek out a different climate: one with cool breezes, next-to-no humidity, and where air conditioning is a nice bonus as opposed to being the only piece of technology separating humanity from regular frustrated stabbings.

Which is a long way to go to say that we are beginning to develop a powerful anticipation for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and that it has been good timing that they have begun to release their programming schedule over the past couple of days. Specifically, they have publicised the panels for Thursday an Friday, which you can find here for Thursday and here for Friday… although I’ll be commenting on some specific panels that look promising – or ridiculous – after the jump.

Solitary Gratification: Deadpool Kills Deadpool #1 Review

I just realized that Deadpool is the Ambush Bug of the Marvel Universe. This is a good thing, and not just a minor call to DC Comics to bring Ambush Bug the hell back in something a little meatier than their Channel 52 thing at the back of every issue.

Here’s what I mean: Deadpool knows he is a comic book character, and what’s more, because of that, he knows that a lot of the time he is there to be comic relief. And in a comic universe – or better yet, a multiverse, and if you show me a comic publisher that isn’t servicing a multiverse, I’ll show you a comic publisher who will be servicing one once a high-powered writer wants to do a crossover with one of their characters – a character who knows the score can be used to throw together any number of weird, goofy scenarios that no self-respecting reader would believe in a million years without the liberal application of mescaline… and we can still play along with it.

And Marvel has known this for quite a while. And as such, we have gotten cool little miniseries like Deadpool Killustrated and Deadpool Kills The Marvel Universe, which make no sense at all but were fun as hell to read. And now we have Deadpool Kills Deadpool, probably either because it gives writer Cullen Bunn a chance to dig out every variation on Deadpool that has ever bee created in the Marvel Universe, or perhaps because there is no one else left in the Marvel Universe for Deadpool to kill.

And, as with those other miniseries, this one is also shaping up to be as fun as hell.