Roger Langridge Gonzo From Marvel, DC

If you’re a casual comic book reader, you probably have no idea who Roger Langridge is. Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, however, we are big fans, mostly due to his work on Boom Studios’ The Muppet Show comic back around 2009, when a Muppets movie revival was only the bulge in Jason Segal’s BVDs, and when reading a comic based on a childhood favorite TV show was a pleasant diversion from our constant morning joint pain.

(Digression before the meat of the story: if you are a Muppet Show fan, you owe it to yourself to find those issues. I don’t know how Langridge did it, but he distilled a visual show with a heavy musical element into a standard comic book, and he captured the tone flawlessly. Disney buying Marvel, meaning Disney suddenly had their own comic publisher for the Muppets and therefore could pull the license from Boom, has been, to us, the biggest tragedy of that merger to date).

Since that book folded, Langridge has been doing some work for Marvel on their John Carter books (See? Goddamned Disney merger fucks up all kinds of shit…), but no more. Following in the footsteps of Chris Roberson and announced, via the Internet, that he will no longer be working for either Marvel or DC due to “individual conscience”:

Everyone Is The Hero Of His Own Story: Stan Lee On Creators’ Rights

History is written by the victors, and Stan Lee is nothing if not a winner.

At least co-creator of Spider-Man, The X-Men and The Avengers and a fistful of other lucrative and profitable properties (as I’m sure they are referred to in the Disney front office), Stan started as a simple editor, moved into writing, somewhere along the line in the 1970s became the head cheerleader for Marvel Comics, both in the comics themselves in his Stan’s Soapbox column and in the mainstream press, and wound up making himself a deal skimming fat bank off of Marvel for not doing much of anything at all… probably because no viable corporation wants their head cheerleader to start yowling “Marvel fucked me without lube!” in the public prints.

So Stan lucked out, put himself into a good negotiating position and Got His. And while I stand by my continuing opinion that any comic creator – hell, any human being – who doesn’t want to get fucked by a major corporation probably should make sure their contract contains an anti-fuckery clause before signing it as opposed to bemoaning it afterwards, I have always wondered how Stan feels about guys like Kirby and Colan and Ditko, who were at the very least in the room when these icons were created, and rather than winding up with cameos in the multimillion dollar movie adaptations instead wound up humping an empty table at Artists’ Alley, a premature coffin, or worst of all, an Ayn Rand novel.

Well, wonder no more… or at least, wonder no more how Stan would kinda deflect the question if he was asked. Because Alex Pappademas did an extended piece that includes a short interview with The Man for Grantland. And that interview includes a question to Stan how he feels about the recent uproar over creators’ rights:

Finally Forward Thinking: Avengers Assemble #3 Review

Editor’s Note: There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could spoil the comics that we never could.

Put as mildly as a foul-mouthed, cynical, long-time drunken comic reader can put it, comic publishers almost never handle the release of a movie based on one of their properties well. Put less mildly and more baldly accurately, they generally seem to take the opportunity such a cross-media exposure provides for attracting new, enthusiastic readers to their comic books to grimly set their jaws, strap on their cleats, and stomp hard on their own dicks.

It happens over and over, so predictably that it might was well be a Cylon plot. The Dark Knight is poised to become the biggest movie of 2008, you say? What a perfect time for DC to kill Batman and put a new guy in the suit! Thor looking to open large? Awesome! Kill him! Iron Man breaking bigger than anyone thought in 2008? Sweet, let’s make him a government bureaucrat! It’s like the front offices of the Big Two, prior to the release of a comic book movie, go days without sleep, subsisting on amphetamines, trying to figure out how to convey to potential new readers, who wander into a comic store to learn more about the character they just fell in love with, that it would be in their best interests to fuck off and just keep right on walking.

So imagine my surprise when Marvel, not five days after the release of Avengers in American theaters, put out an issue of a comic book written and drawn by one of their A-list talent teams that looks like the movie, has the same characters as the movie, that is not only action-packed and imminently accessible to anyone who saw the movie, but also goes about answering one of the key unanswered questions from the movie that I have been asked repeatedly since last Friday: “So, that guy in the scene in the credits… who was that guy, exactly?”

Failing Up

Apologies for the lack of substantive updates today, but the hangovers at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office have been truly crippling today. Oh sure, last night started as a quiet evening of chamommile tea and comic book study… but then one of us, which one of us exactly is forever lost to the fog of time and mid-range blended scotch, but one of us…

One of us remembered that this week was Rob Liefeld’s first issue of Deathstroke.

But New Comics Day waits for no hangover, so disappointing personnel change in a personal favorite book of Amanda’s or no, we butched up, hit our local comics store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop asking the paying customers if they “want to see my Deathstroke,” which means that this….

…means the end of our broadcast day.

Still and all, looks like it was worth the stagger out. We’ve got a new issue of Brubaker’s and Phillips’s Fatale, a new story arc in The Walking Dead, a Bendis   Deodato New Avengers…

And yes, the first Liefeld Deathstroke. While I don’t want to be prejudiced, I’m guessing that’ll be our “They’re not all gonna be Picassos” issue of the week.

But before we can review them, we need time to read them. And for the dry heaves to stop. So until then…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Guess The Change In My Pocket Wasn’t Enough: Action Comics #9 Review

Editor’s Note: This is Lex Luthor. Only one thing alive with less than four legs can hear this spoiler, Superman, and it’s you.

Grant Morrison doesn’t do anything by half measures, but he outdoes even himself in Action Comics #9. In 20 short pages, he manages to level searing indictments against comic fans, comic publishers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, possibly Zack Snyder, and definitely almost anyone who’s written Superman between 1986 and 2011.

At best, this book might – just might – be Morrison’s comment on the upcoming Before Watchmen series. However, at worst it is, for all intents and purposes, a giant and ringing “fuck you” to just about any human being anywhere who might touch it, with the possible exception of Morrison himself. But that’s okay, because that gives me something to do.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 9: Doublefisting Justice

I know what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “It has been a month since Amanda’s and your last podcast. What’s the occasion?” Which would be an excellent question had Avengers not opened in American theaters last Friday, so asking it makes you look foolish. So stop it. You’re better than that.

Here is the pure hell of being editors of a comics Web site: Amanda and I watched Avengers together Saturday afternoon, and rather than discuss it, we agreed to see it again on Sunday… and still not discuss it until we got home and did it into microphones. And discuss it we did; in this Avengers podcast, we discuss:

• The Avengers 3D vs. 2D Experience from the point of view of people getting old with slowly failing vision!
• The Hulk: Great Avenger or Greatest Avenger?
• The Hulk can lift tanks, so why can’t he carry his own movie?
• Our Friend, The Thrice-Nightly Screening, or: Why Can’t Johnny Edit?
• Black Widow as best developed Avenger (insert your own boob joke here)!
• Hawkeye: Redundant Avenger or Redundant Avenger?
• I Can Has Justis Leeg Moovee Nao?, and:
• AAAvengers: who do we want to bring up from the minors?

As always, if you intend to listen to this at work, we recommend you wear headphones unless you want your boss to hear phrases like, “Lokif***er,” “Mjolnir… is not the hammer,” or, “You just want a Dirty Ruffalo!” Besides, with headphones, if you listen really close, you can hear two grown comics geeks misidentifying S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sharon Carter as Ms. Marvel!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:44 — 56.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

Enjoy the show, suckers!

(Avengers Booty Ass-emble via Kevin Bolk)

Wish Fulfillment: Dial H #1 Review

I always feels a certain level of excitement when I pick up a new comic by an established prose writer who’s never tackled the medium before. The kind of feeling that I imagine people get when they play Russian Roulette. You know that you’re holding something that is at least potentially very powerful; you know it has to at least be competently written, because book publishers rarely chuck money at any dingbat with a copy of MS Word… unless they’re using it to run a find / replace on some Twilight slashfic.

However, just because someone can write a book doesn’t mean they can write a comic book. Sometimes you get Neil Gaiman and Sandman (Yes, Gaiman wrote a book before he broke into comics). Unfortunately, other times you get more Brad Meltzer on Justice League of America; Brad spent so many issues showng Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman looking at pictures of potential League members that I began to suspect they were masturbating under the table while they were doing it.

All of which is a long way to go to say that China Miéville’s first issue of the rebooted Dial H is a well-plotted comic with a thoroughly weird, yet engaging, twist on the book’s original concept of a telephone that turns whoever uses it into a superhero. And it is well-written, in the sense that the pure language is entertaining and just damn fun to read. It’s not perfect, but for a dude who’s never written a comic book before, it’s a decent start.

Assembly Required: Marvel’s The Avengers Movie Review

Update, 5/7/2012: Our spoiler-laden and much more in-depth Avengers podcast is now available.

Editor’s Note: This review contains no spoilers. As such, it feels very sketchy and incomplete. For more in-depth analysis of the movie and drunken incoherent ranting about specific things about the movie that were awesome, we will be producing a podcast in the coming days.

Marvel Studios’ The Avengers (Or as it’s known in England, Avengers Assemble, and as I presume it’s known in Pakistan, Imperialist Great Satans With Devil Powers) is finally in theaters in the United States. And you should go see it. Because it is good. Damn good. Seriously fucking good. Arguably the best superhero movie of all time (Granted, for me personally it is knocking M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable out of the peak spot, so take that into account as you read my opinion. Your mileage may vary, is all I’m saying).

Fair And Balanced, Or: Wolverine Vs. Everybody: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

The biggest problem with the first two issues of Avengers Vs. X-Men was, to me, that in order for it to make any sense, the writers needed to make Cyclops into a monomaniacal zealot, vis a vis Hope-as-mutant-savior, so focused, rigid and intractable that he made Timothy McVeigh look like Winston Churchill with a quualude habit.

It is now the third issue, and it appears that the Marvel Architects in charge of this story have found a way to temper our perceptions of Cyclops’s fanatical tendencies: by making Captain America a focused, rigid and intractable monomaniacal zealot.

In short, Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 displays the first real and disappointing cracks in what has been a tight, if sometimes logic-stretching little tale (if you can call an event comic destined to cover all Marvel titles for the next four months “little”): and that is that it attempts to mask Cyclops’s believability-stretching reactionary behavior with similar, yet opposite,  behavior by Cap. And instead of balancing the scales, it shows the Man Behind The Curtain by making two characters do stupid and unbelievable things in the interest of advancing the plot.

With that plot apparently being to make it so Wolverine can fight anybody. Because that shit sells some comics, yo. But we’ll get there in a minute,

How Can You Keep Them Down At The Comic Store Once They’ve Seen…

How can anyone be expected to give a shit about comic book superheroes when The Avengers movie opens in America on Friday?

(Recognizes cognitive dissonance) (Head explodes)

But impending comic movie geekgasm or no, it is still Wednesday, which means new actual comics, and which further means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

But it is quite a week leading into Free Comic Book Day, ain’t it? There’s Round 3 of Avengers Vs. X-Men (Where Cyclops bites Captain America’s ear off. Or not), DC’s debut of Earth 2 (Featuring 100% of the Power Girl with nearly 0% of the cleavage), a new Daredevil and the first Peter Milligan-written Stormwatch, and a bunch of other good stuff!

But before we can review any of them, we need to read them. So until that time (Minus noon to 2 p.m. on Saturday, when we will be 3D-glasses blind watching Hulk Smash Loki)…

See you tomorrow suckers!