Armored Gladiators, And Also Football: Iron Man 3’s Extended Look Trailer

Given that Crisis On Infinite Midlives is based in Boston, it was difficult for us to escape the pervasive malaise that surrounds a Super Bowl that doesn’t include the New England Patriots. Combine the lack of the home team with the fact that co-Editor Amanda and I generally look forward to the Super Bowl only as a bellwether that we are only days away from pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training, and that football enthusiasts were the ones most likely to smack our copies of The Dark Knight Returns our of our hands in the halls of high school (all while guffawing in a manner that implied that high school somehow mattered, and that its social pyramid would go unchanged in the future, and that there wasn’t a chance in hell that someday you’d be gone to fat and earning your keep by rotating the tires on my expensive sports car, right, 1987 starting linebacker Jeff Chander, of 228 North Thompson Avenue?), and we just weren’t all that into the experience.

So here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we spent the game as an excuse to drink beer and read – Amanda Jim Butcher’s new Dresden Files book Cold Days, and myself Paul Tobin’s prose superhero story (and, ironically, elegy for lost high school relationships) Prepare To Die! – with the game on in the background so we could occasionally look up and marvel that the truly shitty electrical engineering skills at play in a city best known for binge drinking, and at the commercials.

Specifically, we wanted to see the new commercial for and attendant new footage from Iron Man 3, as did every other red blooded comic book fan, both young and old enough to have grown up associating the sound of football pads crashing with the instinct to clench the ol’ buttocks against potential wedgies. And Marvel Studios delivered… albeit using the modern irritation of only showing a bit before teasing the masses to their Facebook page for more visual goodness in exchange for a cheap “like.” And if there’s one thing you don’t want to try with an older geek, it’s playing the sounds of football followed immediately by the command, “Now say that you like it!”

So to hell with the official channels; we have obtained the “extended look” trailer for Iron Man 3, and you can check it out too, right after the jump.

Digital Rioting: San Diego Comic-Con 2013 Tickets On Sale February 16th

As we speak, we are watching the Super Bowl, taking place at the Super Dome in New Orleans and packed with people who spent a great deal of money and endured extreme personal hardship to attend in person.

Those poor dupes are rank amateurs. As anyone who had ever tried to attend San Diego Comic-Con knows. And will soon relearn. Because the sales of passes to the general public for SDCC 2013 starts at noon Eastern Time on Saturday, February 16th…

…and if history is any guide, will be sold out by 2 p.m. on February 16th.

Extreme Violence, And Also Football: World War Z Super Bowl Trailer Leaked

The Super Bowl is tomorrow, which means that a large part of the population of the United States will be gathering in living rooms, taverns and bars to get shitfaced on generic American beer and watch television commercials. Rumor has it that there might also be a football contest.

Seriously: nobody gives a tin tinker’s damn about the football game tomorrow unless you live in San Francisco or Baltimore, and even then you probably don’t care because you’re too busy seeking the company of men, ducking bullets from the guns of drug dealers, or both of the above. Let’s face it: we’re in it for the commercials, and even most of those we don’t care about. After all, we will already be drinking Budweiser products, and one Internet domain name registrar is much the same as another despite he magnificence of Danika Patrick’s breasts.

Frankly, we’re in it for the teaser trailers for the summer blockbusters – to this day I remember when our contributor Trebuchet called me during the game to ask me if I’d seen the ad for a previously-unknown flick called The Matrix – and to be honest, who wants to sit there for three hours just to see thirty seconds of movie footage?

Well, not to worry, because we’ve got you covered. Specifically, the Super Bowl trailer for World War Z has leaked to the Internet, and we have it for you a day before the game. You can check it our after the jump.

Brand New Day: Invincible #100 Review

Editor’s Note: We can’t afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the spoilers.

Over ten years, Invincible has evolved from a book about a teenaged hero learning both his powers and how to balance being a superhero and a high school student, into an experiment in comic superhero universe building. Seriously: this book has gone from a relatively small-scale story about a dude whose dad was basically Superman, fighting small-scale villains like mad bombers blowing up high school kids, to a seriously ambitious epic about interstellar travel, interplanetary war, politics and intrigues across multiple race, numerous superteams, and a pinkish, one-eyed powerhouse named Allen. Okay, some parts were more ambitious than others, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Invincible, over the years, became something that in almost no way resembled what it started out as: a simple superhero book that was pretty reminiscent of early Spider-Man. And as with The Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible has built up a huge amount of continuity that could make the book inscrutable to new readers. Which means that, as with The Amazing Spider-Man, it seems that writer Robert Kirkman has decided that, with Invincible #100, it’s time for a good, old-fashioned reboot.

Unlike The Home Office, Superman Is Unbound

Well, the good news is that professional people with some weird forms of PKE Meters have cleared the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office of any signs of water damage and / or Black Mold. The bad news is that the entire ordeal took a lot more time than I anticipated, and beyond that, now my dreams of chucking the workaday world of comics blogging in favor of a home-grown psilocybin farming business (but I still own the name Boston Baseboard Shrooms! And all it’s subsidiary rights!) have officially gone tits up.

And the worse news is that, even as the Home Office has been cleared for human habitation… yeah, heavy windstorms in Boston have knocked out our Internet. Meaning that we can only do a quick update today, using my aged cell phone as a half-assed Wi-Fi hotspot, in clear violation of my terms of service, and way outside the scope of what the good folks at Westinghouse Electrical Notions and Radio Communication Geegaws intended.

But we do have a bit of news: Warner Bros. has released a teaser trailer for their latest upcoming animated, direct-to-video feature. It’s gonna be Superman: Unbound, and based on a Geoff Johns written and Gary Franks drawn series in Action Comics back in 2008. Now, I’m not the biggest Superman fan in the world, but I have never seen a bad DC animated feature, and this one looks to be just as solid.

The feature’s gonna star the voice talents of Matt Bomer (from White Collar) as Superman and Molly Quinn as Supergirl, And you can check out the trailer after the jump… in theory, assuming my shaky, improvised Internet access holds (and if it doesn’t we’ll fix it when we have more signal).

Sticky Fingers: The Superior Spider-Man #2 Review

Editor’s Note: Let me go wild, like a spoiler in the sun…

The problem with The Superior Spider-Man #2 is the scene. The scene.

You will know The Scene when you see it. In fact, you will have some difficulty unseeing it. And given that Doc Ock is occupying Peter Parker’s body, and given that Ock, a former ugly duckling, is suddenly in the body of a guy that can allow him to do things that he has never been able to do, while not necessarily understanding how to do those things, the scene makes complete and total sense.

And yet The Scene overpowers almost everything else in the issue, and it does it unnecessarily. Sure, it serves a purpose in furthering a main plot point, but it does it in a way where you almost won’t remember the plot point it furthers. The Scene just about turns this issue into the comics equivalent of Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny: do you have any idea what Brown Bunny is about? Of course not, all you know is that Gallo got his cock sucked by Chloe Sevigny on camera.

And we will address The Scene, and how it affects the comic… which, in spite of the scene, gives us more Peter Parker than I would have expected even a month ago, and which finally shows some real signs that maybe, just maybe, Otto Octavius really has some elements to be a superior Spider-Man… and, in some areas, a superior Peter Parker.

You know, if you can get past The Scene.

Hype, The Final Frontier: New Star Trek Into Darkness Talking Head Video

It has been a busy week here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office; our neighbors seem to have decided to leave Boston for the winter to avoid the stretch of zero-degree weather we had the last week. They also apparently decided to save themselves a big gas bill by leaving their heat off, which is something that all plumbing enjoys during zero degree weather. So we have been plagued with inspections for water damage and potential burgeoning Black Mold by firefighters and building managers, all who whom espoused concern about our health while nervously eyeing the office stashes of whiskey and cigarettes.

We have a tentative All Clear call, so hopefully our posting schedule will return more to normal soon. But we only have time this morning to provide you with the latest hype video for J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek Into Darkness… which is basically a replay of the original trailer with a bunch of people involved in the movie waxing orgasmically over the experience of working on the film. Which you can check out after the jump.

Pulp With A (Bad) Twist: The Spider #8 Review

For most people, when they think about pulp fiction, they think about period pieces. They picture men in tailored clothing driving vintage Packards, going from swanky cocktail party to party, pausing only to could mens’ minds and then shoot them in the face with a .45 before flying off on a rocket pack or autogyro or something. This is probably a natural association, as most of the classic pulp stories were published in the early 20th century, back when if a man wanted a little titilation, he needed to purchase a nickel story about a pulp hero rescuing a scantily-clad dame in chained dangers. You know, as opposed to today, when a man can pound his fist on his computer keyboard and see pictures of women and fine china, but not using it in a way that Lamont Cranston would find appropriate.

But that’s not necessarily what pulp fiction is at all. For your standard debonair urban pulp vigilante, all you need is a rich socialite, preferably an industrialist, with resources, an ally or group of allies working with him in his crusade on crime, and some kind of costume for his nocturnal activities. Oh – and a gun, and the willingness to use it. Sure, sometimes it’s better to place it in the 1930s or 1940s, when the idea of a guy being able to run around killing criminals without being caught made more sense since most people believed that a “fingerprint” was some form of sex act, possibly related to a Rusty Trombone, but the era doesn’t matter if you have the core elements at place.

So by that measure, The Spider #8, written by David Liss with art by Ivan Rodriguez, is most decidedly a pulp story. Richard Wentworth is a wealthy industrialist with a bodyguard who helps him in his adventures, a Margo Lane in reporter Nita Van Sloan, and even a gimmicky nemesis. And he has a pair of guns to completely make the nut. And it does it all set in good old 21st Century urban America… but it also does it with the worst of pulp tropes: a plot twist so obvious that a blind man could see it coming. For all the cool modernized pulp elements of The Spider #8, it most decidedly will not cloud any man’s mind.

Steampunk Ghostbusters: Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 Review

Witch Doctor has always been a book that has been pretty unabashed about wearing its influences on it’s sleeve. If you take a step back – and not even a big step – and unfocus your eyes a little bit, you can see past the characters on the page and see Ghostbuster jumpsuits, with Dr. Gregory House peeking out from Dr. Vincent Morrow’s eyes, and if you could get your hands on the plans for any given building, in the book, you’d probably see “Tim Burton, Architect” signed at the bottom.

This should be a recipe for disaster. After all, think about every groundbreaking hit movie you’ve seen, and then think about how many “homages” to that hit that came out a year and a half later, and how good they actually were. Sure, everyone loves Raiders of The Lost Ark, but a dare you to find me someone who pops wood over, say,Nate & Hayes, orHigh Road to Chinaor even someone who remembers them without resorting to IMDB – and one of those even starred the guy who was originally cast as Indiana Jones. Sure, the parts are all there, but just because they were magic in one place doesn’t mean they can work when you grab them and drop them someplace else.

So yeah: if you stop and think too much about Witch Doctor: Mal Practice #3 too much, you’ll see all the pieces working under the hood. And, depending on what kind of reader you are, that might prove too distracting to really get into the book. Which would be a shame, because even though you can see all the influences at work, writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner has put together one hell of a fun book, with entertaining and funny dialogue, nifty gadgets, and satisfying action. Sure, you’ve seen some of what underpins this story before… but you don’t see it done well often.

Some Unknown Dude Apparently Knows His Stuff: J. J. Abrams WILL Direct Star Wars

Disney and Lucasfilm clearly have a deeply-rooted hatred of honest, hardworking writers about comics and genre entertainment. There is no other reason for them, after a full day of unanswered and anonymously-sourced rumors that J. J. Abrams has been hired to direct Star Wars: Episode VII, to finally issue a press release on the subject. On Friday night. Well after what is widely accepted and known as Beer O’Clock amongst decent comics bloggers. So by the time I noticed it, I thought that the fine folks at the Disney Corporation had declared war upon us. And that they were sending J. J. Abrams to direct the attack, with Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg in consulting positions. And that, for some reason, they had sent two press releases side by side, and that they were coated with something that was making the room spin. Sure, more bourbon helped, but after that, I became convinced that Lucasfilm was trying to sell me some herbal Viagra. Things get a little hazy after that.

But it is morning now. The birds are singing, the sun is bright, and I have finished throwing up. And it turns out that, yeah: Disney and Lucasfilm has confirmed that J. J. Abrams has signed on to direct the new Star Wars movie after all. We’ve got the press release after the jump… and here’s hoping that it treats you better than it did me last night.