Before The Betray Crows, You Will Cock Me Three Times: The Goon Christmas Carol Motion Comic

Update, 12/19/2012, 10:05 p.m.: Part 2 is now available after the jump…

It is the time of year when the days grow shorter, your neighbors put on their holiday finery, and you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to decide how many airings of Christmas Wrapping by The Waitresses is enough to constitute an affirmative defense for either Justifiable Homicide or a Not Responsible verdict for the arson of your local oldies station, which went All Christmas All The Time sometime around Memorial Day, as far as you can now remember.

All the lights and the TV commercials and the guys in Santa suits ringing a sanity-piercing bell and begging for change outside your local liquor store like the common winos those Santas actually are the other 11 and a half months a year might be enough to make you throw in the Christmas towel and shout “Bah, humbug!” (or, “Allahu Akbar!” if you were actually able to synthesize explosives without blowing up your basement). But before you turn your company holiday party into some kind of sordid little hostage situation, take a deep breath and enjoy this excellent, well-produced, and most importantly: funny little motion comics adaptation of The Goon #10: The Goon Presents: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, courtesy of Dark Horse Comics and Geek and Sundry.

It is a (semi) faithful adaptation of the Dickens classic, assuming that Bob Cratchit wanted Christmas Day off to spend with Tiny Tim… assuming that “Tiny Tim” is a small-batch bourbon, and that Scrooge is more willing to accept that the appearance of Marley’s Ghost is more to do with a small bit of a childhood beating from his mother’s tack hammer than the supernatural.

So remove that Santa mask, lay down that chainsaw, relax and enjoy part one of the show, which you can see right after the jump.

Stark Decisions: Iron Man #4 Review

Editor’s Note: You want my property? You can’t have it. But I did you a big favor: I’ve successfully privatized world spoilers! What more do you want?

Jesus, there’s a lot of Lovecraft to go around in this week’s comics.

Iron Man #4, written by Kieron Gillen with art by Greg Land, is ostensibly part four of a five part opening arc by the new creative team, but in reality is a crackling, easy-to-follow one-and-done featuring everyone’s favorite hard-headed, pragmatic engineer against the thirteen brides of who is clearly Cthuhlu, The Elder God and Black Infinite.

Ah, I’m just kidding. Of course it’s not clearly Cthuhlu. It’s possible that it’s Dagon or Zoth-Ommog.

Actually, since this is a Marvel comic, and therefore the only masters of the sea that any writer can guarantee the reader has heard of either have pointy ears and wings for feet, or else an orange shirt and unlawful carnal knowledge of sea horses, it’s probably Cthuhlu.

Ours Would Read “Whiskey. Blackout. Whiskey.”: Miguel Lokia’s Game Of Thrones Parody Banners

This isn’t news or important information or anything but cool, but Miguel Lokia, an artist on DeviantArt and Flickr who goes by the handle Lokiable, has Photoshopped some cool geek and pop culture versions of House banners from Game of Thrones. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about: big old banners with the mottoes of the fiefdom in question, like “Winter Is Coming” for House Stark, or “Ours is the Fury” for House Baratheon, or “Money. Power. Then The Women” for House Montana.

Anyway, Lokia took the concept of those banners and created a bunch based on a bunch of other pop culture icons, including a ton based on comic books. We’ve collected some of our favorites here, which you can check out after the jump.

Cthuhlu Turns On The Radio: Change #1 Review

As I’m writing this, I’m watching a TiVo recording of Lucky Number Slevin I recently got off of AMC, based on a years-old recommendation of the flick by my parents. By the time they saw it and told me that they thought I would like it, it had already vacated movie theaters, and since it came out in 2006, by the time it came out on video the local Blockbuster had vacated my town, and by the time I lived in a place with HBO, HBO had already washed its hands of it. Which means that this is the first chance I’ve had to see the movie, and which further means that I should have learned by now that I should never take movie recommendations from the two people who once advised that my life would change if only I would watch Jennifer 8.

I am about 45 minutes into this movie, and I have no idea what it is about. There is Bruce Willis and Lucy Liu and Josh Hartnett and Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley and a bunch of other people who should have fucking known better, and Hartnett’s in a rotten sweater vest when he’s not in a towel, and there are two mob bosses and a fistful of hired goons and Willis is playing Hartnett from Sin City, but all I know is that, no matter what the writer originally intended, all I see is a story that wishes it was written by Quentin Tarantino when it grows up. From the stilted, stylized dialogue to the violence for the sake of violence to the long, talky sequences, this is a Tarantino knockoff, ten long years after the last Tarantino wanna-be was escorted off the cinema scene by shitty box office returns.

What gives it away is the dialogue. It uses big words when no normal person would. It puts simulated poetry in the mouths of people who, in the real world, would say, “I had an idear,” or perhaps refer to women without breast implants as “grenades.” These characters are not real people living in a real place; they are obvious puppets, being operated from behind the curtain by a writer in love with an old genre and enamored with the sound of their own voice. It is distracting, and it diminishes whatever effect the author might have hoped the story might have.Everything that happens in Lucky Number Slevin happens because of an unlikely, writer-invented coincidence.

A coincidence such as the fact that I read Change at the same time this movie was on.

The Internet Is Not Your Friend: Pages From Amazing Spider-Man #700 Leaked (Spoiler-Free)

So the comics reading world has been waiting on pins and needles to find out what happens in The Amazing Spider-Man #700, as it leads into The Superior Spider-Man: will Peter Parker be able to reclaim his body from Doctor Octopus? And if he can, will Ock have done something terrible to make it uncomfortable to be Peter Parker for a while, leading him to change up his costume? Or maybe will the fact that another soul has been in Peter’s body shake loose some after effects from Peter’s deal with Mephisto, reversing the effects of One More Day (a personal favorite theory)?

The anticipation is simply crippling; writer Dan Slott and Marvel Editorial have gone a long way to prevent spoilers of the issue reaching the street, so the idea of having to wait until December 26th for the issue to go on sale to see what happens at the end of the comic is just…

What’s that? The last few pages of the issue have leaked online? Along with a synopsis of the events of the last issue?

Meandering: The Walking Dead #105 Review

We’re a bunch of issues into the Negan Is A Douchebag arc in The Walking Dead, and I still don’t have that douchebag figured out yet.

I know a few people with some experience dealing with people on the autism spectrum (I know, I know: “Gee Rob, doesn’t everyone who knows you have experience dealing with at least one guy on the autism spectrum?” Yer a real fucking comedian, you are), and I’ve heard enough descriptions of missed social cues and inappropriate responses to interpersonal stimuli and the need for rigid routine to think that maybe writer Robert Kirkman intends for Negan to be rocking that kind of diagnosis… although everything I know about autism comes from secondhand anecdotes, Rainman and when people question my motivations.

But at the same time, I know a rotten, cowardly fucking bully when I see one, an I certainly see one in Negan. A big kid in arrested development who realized somewhere along the way that, since there’s no one to put the arm on him for telling racist jokes and flushing drunks heads down the toilet, why the hell not escalate to baseball bats and hot irons?  Maybe Negan’s just the kid who wedgied you in junior high who’s stuck in a state of arrested development, taking advantage of the fact that he maybe pinkbellied his first couple of “followers” into line, and the rest followed the pack.

Or maybe Kirkman has some combination of the two in mind; a character who never had the capacity to understand that just because a littler kid didn’t hit you back didn’t mean he was your friend, who thrives in a black-and-white set of simple rules that he suddenly found himself in a position to create on his own (no matter how much sense those rules might make), and whose pre-apocalypse personal obsession was zombie movies which made him better prepared to handle the rise of the walkers while we other social outcasts who were obsessed with, say, comic books, contributed to the rise of the new world order by becoming lunch.

Or maybe I’m completely full of shit, utterly off base, and have no idea what I’m talking about. And even if I am, who gives a damn? I don’t need the DSM-5 to know batshit crazy when I see it, and Negan is crazy. Regardless of his motivations (although clearly, this is the kind of thing that’s on my mind these days), this issue serves to show that, back at the ranch, Negan is at least as dangerous as the Governor, if not more so due to his obvious lack of real care for his people. He needs to die, already… and he has Carl.

This will not end well… and frankly, after six or seven months with this prick, I’m not sure it will end at all.

Clown Illustrations: Batman #15 Review

I’ve read through Batman #15 about four times so far, even though it is a middle part of a long crossover, meaning that even though there is some decent action and some forward plot motion here, there isn’t a hell of a lot in the way of real epiphany or resolution here. Sure, we learn the origin of that giant Joker card that Bruce keeps in the Batcave (and, based on that origin, that there is either a custom printer somewhere in Gotham who once hung up the phone and told his assistant, “Yup: Bruce Wayne is Batman. Or maybe The Joker. Either way, make sure the check clears before you start work,” or that Bruce is much arts-and-craftsier than I would have originally anticipated), and we discover how it’s at least possible that Joker knows the identities of the Batman Family, but it’s not like there are any big, sweeping moments that would normally keep someone reading and re-reading an individual issue of a comic book.

Instead, I found myself going over and over the book, wondering about what was actually going on in the heads of Batman and The Joker. We have Joker running around, attacking the people closest to Batman and his allies, claiming that he’s doing it to make Batman his best… but why? A razor-sharp Batman would make life infinitely more difficult for Joker, so what’s his motivation? And then there’s Batman, keeping at least one significant secret from Robin, Nightwing, et al, and trying to keep them away from the battle – despite the fact that at least Batgirl and Red Hood have, shall we say, intensely personal reasons for wanting to take Joker head-on – and apparently willfully ignoring some evidence that Joker might have the upper hand on him, all while implying that he thinks Joker is trying to prove a point… but why? And what point?

I kept rereading the issue trying to figure out what it is about each of these characters that is making the other act in ways that really don’t seem to be in their own best interests… and then I realized that, despite decades of reading stories about these two guys, that I’ve never really given that question a whole hell of a lot of thought beyond the obvious: “Joker is insane and kills a lot of people despite Batman constantly trying to stop him.” Which is fine as a plot engine, and one that has driven one hell of a lot of damn good comic books and movies over the years, but almost none of those stories ever made me think any more deeply about each character’s real motivations beyond that bullet point.

However, Batman #15, despite being a middle chapter, made me ask those questions. Which helped hammer home that Death of The Family is shaping up to be one pretty special Batman story.

Workaday Fantasy

All right, let’s be honest: last week was one hell of a new week for comics. Between the second-to-last issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, to the first issue of Jonathan Hickman’s run on Avengers, to the start of Daniel Way’s Thunderbolts, there was a shit-ton of new and exciting books to dive into, even if it turned out some of them were more new and less exciting than we were originally led to believe.

This week, things have drifted a little back more toward a weekly status quo; not a bunch of flashy new reboots (but, but, Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Night Thrasher has always been the future of Marvel superheroes!), but instead just a steady, relaxing week of regularly-scheduled comics…

Comics like a new The Walking Dead, and one of the last Gail Simone’s Batgirl, and one of the first Justin Jordan Deathstroke issues. Well, shit.

For a hum-drum week, that’s a lot of awesome, which means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

Seriously: if you gotta have a week of just normally-solicited non-first issues, there are worse ways you can go. There’s Scott Snyder’s and Greg Capullo’s Batman #15 and Pete Tomasi’s Batman & Robin #15 continuing the so-far compelling Death of The Family story arc, there’s the second issue of Matt Fraction’s Fantastic Four, a Kelly Sue DeConnick issue of Avengers Assemble, and even an issue of the best series of Before Watchmen: Brian Azzarello’s and Lee Bermejo’s Rorschach!

But you know how this works: before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Heroclix Team Awesome: Thunderbolts #1 Review

Editor’s Note: One last review of the comics of 12/5/2012 before the comic stores open…

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way: the chick with the purple hair who doesn’t speak and is the only apparent member who isn’t asked to volunteer in Thunderbolts #1? That’s Mercy. She debuted back in Peter David’s and Todd McFarlane’s run on The Incredible Hulk – issue 338 to be exact, a couple of issues before the arc collected in the Ground Zero paperback. If I recall correctly, she shanks people who she thinks are down on their luck… and she thinks everyone is down on their luck. You’re welcome.

Thunderbolts #1 is yet another Marvel Now book that is, despite Marvel’s protestations, a complete reboot (but, but, Marvel doesn’t reboot! Which is why The Punisher is still a superpowered avenging angel! And he’s still a black guy!). We’ve gone from the team being the standardized government-sponsored team staffed by former supervillains hoping for redemption that it’s been for years (but don’t let it make you bitter; if you miss that idea, DC’s still publishing Suicide Squad), to apparently just General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, former Hulkbuster and current Red Hulk, out on his own, building a team out of the darker, more edge heroes of the Marvel Universe. You know, like DC’s Team 7.

So now our Thunderbolts are apparently Red Hulk, Punisher, Deadpool, Elektra, Venom and Mercy, which is a lineup, except for Mercy, that should be familiar to anyone who has seen twelve-year-olds playing Heroclix (although you probably heard them referred to as “The Asskickers,” or perhaps “Team Awesome”). However, this lineup is being written by recent Deadpool writer Daniel Way instead of a runny-nosed punk jacked up on Red Bull and his first boner over imagining Elektra naked, so we can expect a little more from this team, right?

Truth be told, I can’t quite tell yet.

…Moviegoer of Kleenex: New Man of Steel Teaser Trailer Released

As I’ve said before, since it’s the end of the year, the movie studios are starting to get we genre geeks hyped up about the 2013 summer blockbuster movie season. They’ve given us a wealth of teaser trailers and posters, which has led to the staff of Crisis On Infinite Midlives to argue, in the past week, as to which summer movie we’re looking more forward to: Iron Man 3, directed by the guy who wrote Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and The Last Boy Scout, or Star Trek Into Darkness, directed by the guy who directed Star Trek and Super 8, and also produced Lost and Alias.

Oh yeah, and then there’s Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder. The guy who directed the completely unnecessary Dawn of The Dead remake, the can’t-even-sit-through-while-drunk-and-the-remote’s-broken Sucker Punch, and the resoundingly “no homo” 300. Sure, Man of Steel will be opening too, but I can’t imagine there’s gonna be anything that could vault it to the top of the “must see” list, even if we’re totally willing to forget Superman Returns, a movie that even a half-quart of Jack Daniels couldn’t make entertaining.

What’s that? There’s a new teaser trailer for Man of Steel that’s been released? *Sigh*

Fine. Let’s give it a look.