Putting The Band Back Together: Powers #10 Review

Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been a dicey read for me for a long time now. A comic that started as a unique take on the superhero book, where some regular cops worked regular cases that just happened to involve superhumans and included some of the coolest dialogue you could find in a comic book, it eventually… evolved. Or devolved. Into a book where the regular cops got powers and secret identities, and the compelling partners at the core of the book split up, all while Bendis and Oeming started putting out, say, an issue a year, whether we needed one or not.

If the original Powers arc, Who Killed Retro Girl?, was the comics equivalent of Twin Peaks season one, the more recent arcs have been more like Laverne & Shirley after they went to Hollywood… assuming Garry Marshal had had the brainwave to replace Shirley with The Great Gazoo. Which is somewhat of an unkind comparison, because I always kept Powers on my pull list, because even while the characters shuffled and I lost track of the plot between issues, it still offered some of the best dialogue in comics, and there was always something interesting going on, even if some issues felt less like seeing Muhammed Ali in his prime in 1979 than it did watching Muhammed Ali trying to eat prime rib in 2009.

You get all that? Good. Now forget it all. Because Powers #10 is flat-out the best issue of Powers since the early, early Image Comics days. It has it all: the crackling dialogue, Walker and Pilgrim back together doing interrogations in the box, and real, human stakes behind the superpowers. It is awesome, and one of the best single issues of not just Powers, but of any comic book I’ve read in weeks.

Hard As Iron: First Photos of Iron Patriot In Iron Man 3

While we comic fans are still swooning over The Avengers movie, let us not forget that Marvel Studios is not resting on the hundreds of millions of dollars that that movie has brought in the way your or I would if presented with hundreds of millions of dollars… actually, given a second thought, I would not be resting on it. I would be furiously masturbating on it. But already, I digress.

No, Marvel Studios already has Iron Man 3, directed by Lethal Weapon writer and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang director Shane Black, in the throes of principal photography. That means they’re shooting it now, in laymans’ terms, and when a geek movie is being shot? That means spy pictures are being leaked to the Internet. Such as the ones after the jump.

(And by the way – “spy pictures” is not industry jargon for “upskirt shots.” Don’t make that mistake and learn about it the hard way, like I did.)

All Filler, All Killer

It’s the New Comics Day of Memorial Day week here in the United States, and in my experience, that leads to a truly shitty week of new comics. It means a short, truncated take after a bunch of regular books punt off by a week so that comic creators can relax and attend what I call the Lynchburg, Tennessee Comic Convention, while we normal comics fan are stuck with a small pile of what appears to be mostly annuals by second-string creative teams.

And on paper, this week’s take appears to be no different that prior years, what with at least two different DC annuals, along with one by Marvel. And to add (potentially) insult to injury, the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me not to show the paying customers my definition of a “small pile,” threw in a complimentary promo poster of J.G. Jones’s Before Watchmen drawing of The Comedian in a gimp mask to make my take look less anemic.

So on paper, things sound dire for this week’s take, but for good or ill, this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But you know something? For a week that is normally a time-waster, I can only say that, of the three books I read at the bar, not one of them wasn’t one of the best books I’ve read in months. From a new The Walking Dead, to the new Bendis / Oeming Powers (which is the best issue of that book in literally years), to the Scott Snyder written Batman annual, which gives us the traditional origin of Mister Freeze, only with a truly interesting and satisfying twist, there are some damn good books here. Chuck in an Animal Man annual,  a new Angel & Faith and personal favorite Rocketeer Adventures, and we have a damn good, if smaller than usual, take of comics this week.

But before we can review them, we need time to read them (and also to dry out). So until then: see you tomorrow, suckers!

…You Rent Them: The Tale of The ComiXology Backup Script

Earlier this week, some dude posted to the Reddit Comic Book board that he had written a short Bash script (for the technologically challenged, think an old Windows batch file with ambition) that would allow you to download any digital comics you purchased from ComiXology, strip the DRM (again, for the uninitiated, DRM stands for digital rights management, which is nothing but copy protection with an official-sounding acronym to make it sound intimidating, like “FBI,” “CIA” or “DIAF”), and convert them to a format you can store locally and read on anything. Clearly this is a young man with plenty of free time to spend frittering on coding and hanging around in courtrooms.

The script author even posted a copy of the script with detailed instructions on how you could use it to download copies of the books you bought from ComiXology. Isn’t that nice? Oh, don’t go searching for it – ComiXology caught wind of it and asked the kid to delete the script.

Play From Your Heart: Batman Incorporated #1 Review

Let’s start with the thing about Batman Incorporated #1 that stuck out the most for me: the next time some comics writer namechecks Bill Hicks for the sake of namechecking Bill Hicks, I’ll fucking glass them. Yes, the man was a genius, but that was twenty years ago; to put it in terms music people might understand, referencing Bill Hicks is the equivalent of trying to look hip by dropping Queensryche references. It’s irritating hipster behavior. Stop it.

Other things that should probably be avoided in order to prevent raising my ire include, but are not limited to: referencing old stories, some of them classics that were never meant to be part of current continuity, as a wink and a nod to the reader… and coming up with another “Bat{$animalName}” just because you thought that shit was cool when you were twelve, even if that new animal is pretty fucking funny.

Little things like this press my buttons, and they expose an endemic problem I am likely to have whenever I review a Batman comic written by Grant Morrison. He has been riding on gimmicks like this since the start of his run years ago, and they thoroughly turned me off. Because of this, I have an inherent bias when I read his Batman stuff; I expect to not like it, and therefore I start looking for things in the book to support that hypothesis. When the reality is, if I’m honest, there is a potentially decent Batman story at the core of Batman Incorporated #1… the only question is whether it will survive the comics hipster references that have collapsed Morrison’s prior Batman work under its own weight.

Feets Don’t Fail Me Now

Things are a bit busy today here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. Between an upgrade we need to run on a major site component on the Web server, and putting the finishing touches on our application for press credentials for San Diego Comic-Con, we are simply balls-out today.

So please forgive any outages you might see as we run the overhaul, and in the meantime, here’s the latest released television spot for The Dark Knight Rises, as well as three banner posters recently released by Warner Brothers for the flick.

And not only that, but we’ve got a sooper seekrit hidden The Dark Knight Rises one-sheet poster that could only be found by scanning the QR code at the bottom of one of the official one-sheets WB released last week. It’s a different kind of image than we’ve seen associated with the movie, and one that should appeal to foot fetishists and… well, probably just foot fetishists. Let’s just say somewhere, Quentin Tarantino is probably taking a break from firing off the cast of Django Unchained to look at this poster to do a completely different kind of firing off.

All are available after the jump.

Fantastic Voyage: Fantastic Four #606 Review

Editor’s Note: Come along and ride on a Fantastic Spoilage! 

First off, let’s stipulate that Fantastic Four editor Tom Brevoort was having a bad day when he recommended that an issue about alternate Nazi versions of the Fantastic Four be labeled as a Point One entry issue, rather than this simple, classic-feeling one-and-done about the core team performing the type of weird, over the top science adventure that is the team’s stock in trade. Yes, a bad day, and not simply colossally poor judgment, or perhaps rampant alcohol abuse. But more likely an off day. Sure.

Let us also stipulate that, while this is an entertaining and charming issue that services all four core characters extremely well and captures the feeling of a classic FF adventure, part of the reason it feels classic is because the plot has been done before. And done, and done, and done, both in movies and in other comics. The thing works, but it works because it’s hung on a proven framework… the same way The Magnificent Seven is cool, but mostly because it’s taken straight across from The Seven Samurai.

This Is A Video Of A Dog. Not Spider-Man.

The preview image on the video embedded after the jump is of a dog.

For someone to imply that it actually contains a bootlegged cell phone video of an extended six-minute trailer of the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man, with not-yet-seen footage, would be irresponsible and potentially libelous.

We just really like dogs. Honest. There is no Spider-Man here.

Assembling: Justice League Dark #9 Review

Editor’s Note: won nigeb sreliops!

Before I say anything else about Justice League Dark #9, the first issue written by Jeff Lemire, I feel I must protest and state, with the authority of a seventeen-year two pack a day smoker who quit two years ago, that the only way John Constantine would be able to make it up the steps of the ziggurat we see mid-issue – a ziggurat in Peru, meaning a minimum of 5,000 feet above sea level – would be if Superman miracled his ass up there.

Other than that misstep, this re-reboot of Justice League Dark is generally effective, given that Lemire has the unenviable task of having to introduce a new status quo, including a new cast of characters, team raison d’etre, and mission, all in 20 pages. That is a lot of expositionally heavy work to have to do, and it does show in several places; for example, you can clearly see the man behind the curtain saying, at one point, “Oh shit; Andrew Bennett could wrap this conflict up in ten seconds. I have, let’s see… 20 words in which I can resolve that.” However, it is a generally promising beginning… with a few obvious problems.

The most major one being that, intentionally or not, the guts of the plot to this story is so close to that of the Avengers movie that one of them has to be getting an unintentional boner.

Ihre Papiere, Bitte, Or: Let’s See Some ID, Fat Indian Superman (If That Is Your Real Name)

San Diego Comic-Con is only six-ish weeks away, which takes it out of the ephemeral realm of “some thing I’ve been planning to do for 45 weeks” and puts it firmly in the area of “something concrete to look forward to other than the sweet, sweet release of death.”

That’s right: only six weeks before the biggest pop culture event of the year, with exciting comics news! Unparalleled access to the biggest comic creators and TV and movie stars! And random stops by red-shirted security goons, stopping you on your way to a photo op with a fat dude dressed as Batwoman, to ask for your papers.

Wait, what?