The Abyss, Paper Edition: The Wake #1 Review

Editor’s Note: I got to tell you, I give this whole thing a spoiler-factor of about nine point five.

James Cameron’s 1989 movie The Abyss is one of my favorite movies (and if you could quit fucking around with deep sea diving and get a Blu-Ray version mastered, Jim, I’d sure appreciate it). It’s got a mix of claustrophobia, environmental danger, interpersonal conflict and threatening weird alien shit that, even a quarter-century later, it’s just hard to find anywhere else. I saw it in its initial theatrical release, I’ve owned it on VHS and DVD, and will forever harbor an inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio because of it, despite the fact that she’s not still 29 any more than I’m still 18.

If I had to hazard a Russian Roulette interrogation guess, I’d bet that writer Scott Snyder is a big fan of The Abyss, too. Because the first issue of The Wake, the Vertigo miniseries he took a break from American Vampire to produce, is rocking a lot of the elements of that movie. We’ve got a female ocean-related scientist who’s been called back to her area of expertise. She’s trapped on an undersea oil drilling platform with a male former co-worker with whom she has a contentious relationship. The military is throwing their hand in. And there are aliens there: aliens that are threatening to use our oceans to wipe us out… only Snyder implies that, without Ed Harris there to suck pink goo at the bottom of the ocean and use his inappropriate and filthy crush on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio to whimper for our lives, we’re kinda fucked no matter what happens in the remaining nine issues of this ten-issue miniseries.

So make no mistake: you’re gonna see things that you have seen before in this issue. But is it worth checking out even if you’ve spent hundreds of hours watching The Abyss (Or perhaps thousands of hours, if you count the time spent freeze-framing on Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s boobs)?

You Can’t Swing A Dead Cat…

Here in the United States, last weekend was a long holiday weekend. In fact, it was the first official and universal long holiday weekend since New Year’s Day.

Oh sure, we have a few catch-as-catch-can holiday weekends that some American entities like banks and public schools observe (like President’s Day in February, which is not an official national holiday because our presidents are elected, and not worshipped unless they belong to your personal political party and are currently in office), and God knows that your Europeans get off every holiday any reckless alcoholic ever thought of on an Sunday afternoon (St. Shitfaced Day? Really, Icelanders? How can you take that day off in good conscience considering I just made it up?), but for we Yankees, Memorial Day is one of the few universal holidays.

However, being a universal holiday here in the States, that usually means a lighter-than-usual take for the week… and this week is no exception. We got about half the books we normally get on a Wednesday… but it is a Wednesday, and being New Comics Day (albeit a light one), it means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

But still, there are some noteworthy books there. We’ve got the first issue of Scott Snyder’s The Wake, Brian Wood’s all-female team book X-Men, another issue of Mark Waid’s and Walt Simonson’s Indestructible Hulk, and a new issue of Geoff’s Johns’s Justice League of America that closes with a cliffhanger that the title only hints at. If you get my drift.

But even though it is a light week, you know how this works: before we can review them, we need time to read them. So while we continue to recover from our three-day drunk – I mean weekend – and go through them…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

One Bad Mother: Francesco Francavilla’s Batsploitation

It is no secret that we are fans of artist Francesco Francavilla here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives. The guy does pulp art like no one else we’ve seen working in comics today, and be it covers or interior art, he brings a unique, retro look to everything he puts his hands on.

And normally that retro look is targeted at the 1930s and 1940s; after all, a guy who does pulp-style art is almost naturally gonna focus on the golden age of pulp fiction. However, pulp fiction is an attitude, not a time period – let’s remember that Quentin Tarantino made a kinda famous pulp fiction story in 1994 that looked like it came straight from 1975. And Francavilla seems to know this, because he has just posted some drawings to his blog of Batman… if Batman were created for a cheapie grindhouse film you might catch in Times Square back when it was worth your Goddamned life to go into Times Square.

And no, Francavilla’s Batman in 1972 isn’t a hairy-chested shirtless guy in a cowl swordfighting with Ras Al Ghul.

To keep him in “the part”, my Batman smokes, wear a leather coat and a turtleneck, and drives a cool 70s BatMobile (an OldsMobile maybe? 😉 I still need to decide on brand and model.

Of course, as usually it happens in these cases, I start to flesh out all the other characters/stars of the story. Pictured above we have Selina Kyle, aka Foxy CATWOMAN, Lieutenant Jim Gordon (with period appropriate ‘stache ;)) and Ed Nygma AKA The Riddler.

Yes, you are witnessing the first case of BATPLOITATION. Hope ya dig it.

Sounds interesting, huh? Well, you can check out some of the pictures after the jump.

The Rich Are Very Different: The Green Team #1 Review

The Green Team is one of those comic book superhero teams that is destined to become part of comic book history. By which I mean, in about 20 years, some hotshot, big idea comics writer like Neil Gaiman was in the 90s will ressurrect them and try to treat them seriously as an archetype of a particular type of comic, written by middle-aged adults about adolescents, trying to capture the zeitgeist of a particular period of history. And that purely theoretical comic book writer of 2028 or 2033 will be heralded as a genius for finding a way to take The Green Team seriously, the way that Gaiman was when he wrote Prez into Sandman #54 20 years ago.

But that will happen in 15 or 20 years. Today, The Green Team feels very much the way Prez did back in 1973 (before my time, but I remember the series getting some play in DC Comics house reprint ads in the mid, late 70s, maybe as a giant sized gallery reprint, and even at that age I thought the idea was ridiculous): an effort by someone too old to be part of youth culture, trying like mad to grab bits and pieces that they either do understand or that they’ve read about, to make a book to appeal to them… and ultimately feeling like its trying too hard and mising the mark.

And maybe that’s my problem; after all, I am old enough to remember Prez, which means that my only relationship to youth culture is related to the things I would do to Lindsey Lohan if I had a double-strength condom and an iron-clad fake name to give her. But the trials and travails of a bunch of rich kids with Twitter trying to prove themselves to daddies who want them to grow up to become bougouisie douchbags like themselves (mission accomplished!) somehow doesn’t land home with me.

Plus: we’ve already got an Iron Man, guys.

Bouncing In Many DIrections: The Bounce #1 Review

When left to his own devices on creator-owned material, writer Joe Casey produces comics that are, in the language of critics, some pretty fucked-up shit.

Be it Automatic Kafka or Butcher Baker: The Righteous Maker,  Casey seems to like to traffic in higher-concept superhero stories, loaded with sex, drugs, psychedelia and other stuff that you won’t normally find in a standard superhero story. Like robots with existential malaise using drugs to find meaning in an empty life. Or a dude in a truck killing all comers and fucking anything that walks, moves or crawls. And no matter what, at some point you will find yourself reading and muttering, “Just what in the hell is goning on here?”

Welcome to The Bounce. A comic story that, in 20 short story pages, features not only superhero action, but copious drug use, cop murder, interdimensional travel, and government funded quasi-religious partical experimentation to fracture the nature of reality.

So as is often true to form on a Casey book, I really have no fucking idea what is going on. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t enough good stuff here to stop me from wanting to find out.

The Colour Our Of Space, Which We Then Shoot: The Deep Sea One-Shot Review

If you are a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, The Deep Sea one-shot, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Tony Akins, will utterly fucking infuriate you. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

If you are, in fact, a fan of Lovecraft, you know the general basic tropes of the classics: a group of explorers go someplace unseen by human eyes. They find a weird city. They do something that awakens a slumbering elder god of some kind – Cthuhlu is always a favorite – whose visage and presence in the world is so utterly alien and wrong that it drives men mad to simply witness it. And then there is the implication that this awakening means the probable end of the human race. If you take that general summary and chuck in the odd racist comment, and you might as well be living in H. P. Lovecraft’s Medulla Oblongata.

Well, The Deep Sea hits all of those elements, save one. And it is the one that is the most common of those elements, and the one that makes the concluding implication of humanity’s doom a satisfying ending. And weirdly, it is the elimination of that element that makes The Deep Sea fresh and interesting despite following almost all the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction, and which will make the end of this comic book irritating to you.

Because you’re gonna want more.

Tom Sawyer’s Funeral: Green Lantern #20 Review

If you’re anything like me, when you see Green Lantern #20, and its thickness, squared binding and eight dollar price tag, you will think of The Amazing Spider-Man #700 from just five months ago – an issue that was padded with secondary stories to pad out it’s length. So you might think that Green Lantern #20 would do the same to fill its 86 pages and get a little upset that you’re dropping eight clams on what would seem to inevitably be a big chunk of filler.

You would be wrong. Sure, there is filler here – I’m not sure I needed nine pages of messages of congratulations to writer Geoff Johns (although DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson’s message makes me believe she might be the brains behind the Horse_EBooks Twitter account) – but on the whole, this is a one-story comic book. So you’re damn sure getting your money’s worth with this comic book.

And it is a big story. This is Johns’s final issue driving the Green Lantern franchise, and he treats it like the series finale of a long-running television show, even though the Green Lantern books will continue, as the five full-page ads in this issue for those books attests. And as a series finale-feeling story, it brings back all the old favorite characters for a final bow, it throws all the old fan favorite moments at the wall, and as is befitting a sci-fi action story, it blows stuff up real good.

But this is a space opera, not hard science fiction. So while Johns puts all the pieces into place to make a slam-bang action-packed story, there are a bunch of elements required to push that story forward that are firmly based in the scientific principle, as defined within the Green Lantern universe,  of the Theorem of Shut Up That’s Why. So some of the points between A and Z require a lot of taking on faith to avoid nitpicking… but if you can, you’ll have yourself a damn fun read that brings all your favorites up to bat one last time, and even tells you where some of these characters would end up.

Deadlines And Commitments

It has been a busy one around the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, in the sense that we haven’t been around the office since this morning.

Amazingly, running the 1,952nd biggest comics blog in America (but we’re catching up, Comics Sty dot org!) doesn’t pay the bills, so Amanda and I have been busy doing the things that do. Combine that with an a commitment to an after work “teambuilding exercise” at a local bar (although how my getting shattered and throwing a punch at that cock Kunal who takes credit for my shit will foster teamwork, I have no idea. Unless everyone else joins in), and our time today is regretfully short.

But regardless, it is Wednesday, and come hell or high water, it means new comics. Which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And it’s a decent take, with Geoff Johns’s last issue of Green Lantern, a new The Superior Spider-Man, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know the drill: before we can discuss them, we need a chance to show Kunal what happens when you check in another man’s code. Oh, and a chance to read the comics. So until I post bail for Aggravated Assault…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

80s Comic Book Movies: New Trailer For The Wolverine Released

Truly, the comics geek is living in a special, blessed time. When I was seventeen years old, my friends and I spent fully a year and a half looking forward to Tim Burton’s Batman to come out… because as hard as it is to believe, the last comic-book movie adaptation before that movie was Superman IV: The Quest For Peace in 1987. And before that? Yeah, Howard The Duck. To say that Hollywood wasn’t catering to our needs back then would be an understatement only surpassed by, “It was kinda breezy in Oklahoma yesterday.” *

But clearly it ain’t like that now. The summer movie season is only about three weeks old and we already have one big superhero movie out, with Man of Steel coming in June. Which is such a wealth of geek material that it’s easy to forget that we also have The Wolverine coming out July 26th. Well, there’s the wealth of material, and the fact that Wolverine: X-Men Origins kinda sucked.

However, 20th Century Fox doesn’t want you to forget, as they have released a new trailer for the movie. And it is proof that you shouldn’t forget, because this series of clips shows a bunch of sequences that look heavily influenced by the classic Chris Claremont / Frank Miller Wolverine miniseries from the early 80s.

Plus there is a giant, robot-looking samauri. Because shut up, that’s why.

Anyway, you can check out the latest footage after the jump.

Making The Saving Throw: Pathfinder #7 Review

Dear Dynamite Comics: please reconsider the font you use to number issues. With God as my witness, I thought Pathfinder #7 was actually a #1. It’s the only reason I bought it.

Because normally I would never buy a sword and sorcery book, at least not sight unseen. I have a mental block when it comes to genre stories about quests and swords and paladins and magic users. You can give me a story about a hero in spandex attacking a giant monster, the same story with a hero with a laser pistol and a giant robot, and the same story with a dude with a sword and a dragon, and I will pick stories one and two almost every time. I’m the same when it comes to role playing games: Shadowrun and Call of Cthuhlu, yes; Dungeons & Dragons, no.

But I review comics, so I bought what I thought was a first issue, because frankly, I need to file copy almost every day, and hey: you never know. But while I was disappointed when I saw that it was actually a seventh issue, my spirits were lifted when I saw it was written by Jim Zub, the writer of Skullkickers, a sword-based adventure story that is a favorite outlier in my eyes due to the presence of a gun, and metric buttloads of solid humor.

Pathfinder #7, however, is no Skullkickers. It is a far more conventional D&D-style story, by which I mean it is very much like a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Zub gives us the well-balanced party of adventurers, cast as if by a demanding DM, with modern-style dialogue and some of the classic obstacles and antagonists of that game.

It is also a well-executed entry point for new readers, introducing a new adventure for the party, demonstrating internal conflict, and teasing one of the great battles one can find in a game of D&D.

You know, if you like that sort of thing.