Todd McFarlane Leaves Bankruptcy, Miracleman Fighting Valiently To Remain Dead

Hide your baseballs, kids: Todd McFarlane’s out of bankruptcy.

Todd’s company, Todd McFarlane Productions, voluntarily declared bankruptcy back in 2004, and only an irresponsible fool would imply that it had anything to do with Neil Gaiman’s lawsuit against Todd over the rights to Medieval Spawn, Angela, and Cogliostro. That suit was reportedly settled back in January, so all that was left to put the company back into the Black Ink was to pay some assorted costs to cover odds and ends totalling $975.

Oh, and an afterthought check to Gaiman for an even million-one.

Comic Book Dead: Secret Avengers # 26 Review

Editor’s Note: The Review Force is a cosmic entity capable of causing a planet-wide Spoiler event. 

Usually, when a more minor, lower circulation comic becomes part of a major summer crossover event, it is a book to avoid. Almost invariably books like that are where publishers stick filler while hoping that the crossover’s logo on the cover increases circulation enough to justify the printing costs and stave off cancellation for a couple of months. Everyone knows that an event’s important stuff occurs in the primary title and the related major titles, while the second tier books are where you get “major” revelations running the gamut from, “Some minor character is terrified of the ramifications of this major event!” to “Wow! It turns out I, the reader, don’t give a fuck about any of this shit!”

So imagine my surprise when Secret Avengers # 26, which is precisely the kind of book where you’d stick Captain Cannonfodder and his fear of Phoenix but need to (fatally) redeem some misdeed made in a 1974 issue of The Brave and The Give Us Your Quarter Kid, wound up not only being the scene of one of the more major (yet least hoopla’ed) comic book resurrections of the past several years, but of a reasonable examination of why a Captain Cannonfodder-level character is as minor a player as he is. All with some damned interesting and unconventional art to boot.

First off, despite what I just said, make no mistake: this is, in fact, the first totally unnecessary side story in the Avengers Vs. X-Men event. There is, after all, a reason the crossover is called Avengers Vs. X-Men, and if you are a superhero and you find yourself on an Avengers team, in outer space to stop the Phoenix Force, with no X-Men anywhere in sight? Welcome to the B-plot, pal. Look to your left, and look to your right. One of you is going to die. The other is probably Squirrel Girl.

She’s Coming Apart, Captain!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives is going through some much-needed site maintenance. Over the next several hours, you might see some of what we in the computer business technically refer to as “weird shit.”

We apologize for any inconvenience, and remind you that if you don’t like it, you can feel free to fuck off and start your own comics Web site.

This Is About Fights: Versus #1 Review

Versus #1 takes the Avengers Vs. X-Men event, strips out the backstory, the plot contrivances and the other useless crap that is being pounded into this event to make it hang together as a story, and it leaves us with the core idea which is all that almost anyone gives a tin shit about in this event: superheroes kicking the shit out of each other.

Let me offer an analogy: let’s say that Avengers Vs. X-Men is a Grateful Dead show. If that’s the case, then Versus is the smelly guy in the parking lot selling hits of acid for five bucks a whack: in other words, it’s far more entertaining, and if you’re honest with yourself, it’s the real reason you decided to attend the main event in the first place.

This book is fucking fun. It is meant to be fun, and it knows that it’s fun; any comic that opens on its recap page (and interesting choice for a first issue) with…

This book is about AWESOME BRAWLING! You want PLOT? LOOK ELSEWHERE, CHUM. You want a KNOCK-DOWN, DRAG-OUT WHUPPIN’? WE GOT YOU COVERED.

…is a book whose only ambitions vis a vis obtaining an Eisner Award to to snatch one out of Joe Sacco’s hands and use it to beat Grant Morrisson about the head, neck and face.

Winning Friends And Influencing People: Grant Morrison On Batman

Grant Morrison was in Playboy this month. He was young, he needed the money. Thank you folks; I’ll be here all week… I live here.

But seriously: one month after featuring Michonne’s origin story from The Walking Dead, Playboy’s latest issue features an interview with Morrison that’s based around short blurb quotes about characters Morrison has written. Playboy seems to have a sudden enthusiasm for comics these days; perhaps Hef has realized that comic book fan are amongst the only people actually buying printed periodical magazines these days… although it’s more likely that he saw a picture of Rogue by Jim Lee and wheedled, “Get that big boobed girl for the centerfold! And someone change my diaper! We are at full boom-boom alert!” But I digress.

Morrison has some interesting things to say about characters he’s had a hand in – particularly King Mob and Fanny from The Invisibles – but he saves his most… shall we say, interesting… comments for Batman:

52 Problems But A Goon Ain’t One: The Goon #39 Review

The Goon #39 makes a savage mockery of just about every major superhero comic, and superhero comic creator, of the past five years. It skewers everything from DC Comics’s New 52, to Geoff Johns’s Blackest Night arc in Green Lantern, to Spider-Man’s constant sad-sack internal monologues, and it kicks the shit out of every major – and minor – comics artist that had put pencil to paper (or, apparently, mouse to pixel) since 1986. In short, it denigrates every trope of the superhero comics that I have loved since I was five years old.

And it is fucking awesome.

You might notice that this review doesn’t contain a spoiler warning. That’s because there is no story here to ruin. This is one of writer / artist Eric Powell’s one-off issues that serves no story nor history of The Goon. It is simply a brutal takedown of superhero universe reboots and the tricks that the Big Two Publishers use to whip fanboys like me into a frenzy, and to sleaze mainstream media interest in comics (Example: The Goon is killed, and brought back to like, three times in this issue. On one page. Your move, Matt Fraction).

Son, We’ve Always Got Room For A Goon

If you’re anything like we are here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, your day job life is filled with high-tensioned deadlines for shit that was due at the end of first quarter, that is now being shoveled into your lap by your boss who hopes that no one notices that they were asleep at the switch at the end of March… and by “end of March,” we, of course, mean “Secret Service Slush Fund ‘Approved Without Review’ Button” (In the interest of full disclosure, I have been out drinking with 1/3,200 of the Secret Service, and I puked on the sidewalk like I wasn’t being escorted by someone trained to take a bullet for a staggering drunk (Hi, President Bush!)).

But it is Wednesday, which means: fuck all that! Because it is New Comics Day, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But look at that take! There’s The Goon, which makes any week a Goddamned good week. Chuck on top of that an issue of Mark Millar’s Super Crooks, the final issue (Only three years in the making!) if JMS’s The Twelve, and a metric fuckload of DC eighth issues, and we’ve got an interesting week!

But before we can talk about them, we need some time to review them. So until then… see you tomorrow, suckers!

Bald Hulk Is Not A Euphemism: The Incredible Hulk #7 Review

Editor’s Note: Time for one last review before the comic stores open… one chock full of profanity and spoilers. You are warned.

A couple of months ago, the Fox Movie Channel reran the 1990 TV movie The Death Of The Incredible Hulk, which I grabbed on the TiVo because I was a child in the 1970s / 1980s and therefore grew up with the Bill Bixby / Lou Ferrigno television show and have a sense of nostalgia for it. Plus, I possibly hate myself.

Anyway, at the end of the flick, the Hulk suffers some kind of great fall (and yes, that is as specific as I can get. What, you think I watched that pile of shit sober?) and caused the death of Bixby’s Banner. The intention was never to actually kill Banner / Hulk, but instead to set up a future TV movie where the Hulk had Banner’s brain, which was derailled due to Lou Ferrigno’s commitments to sign autographs at regional comic book conventions for nickels, and due to Bill Bixby’s unexpected opportunity to perform in a second banana role to a prostate tumor.

What’s my point? My point is that even ratings-crazy and cocaine “enthusiast” 80s TV executives never intended to kill Banner permanently. And I guarantee you, neither does The Incredible Hulk #7 writer Jason Aaron.

But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci: Jim Lee on Alan Moore and Before Watchmen

This past weekend, DC Entertainment Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee attended the Los Angeles Festival of Books. Why attend a straight book festival when the perfectly good Boston Comic Con was occurring on the same weekend? I’m guessing because if you’re gonna be forced to answer difficult and uncomfortable questions about the upcoming Before Watchmen, it’s probably easier to do it when they’re not being asked by, say, Fat Hispanic Superman.

And, at the DC Entertainment Presents: Watchmen – It’s Not The End, It’s The Beginning panel, difficult questions were asked, specifically related to the commonly held perception that the stack of prequel miniseries were personally and intimately screwing Alan Moore in a way that makes American prison showers so inviting. Specifically, one panelist asked Lee how he reconciled Moore’s issues with the prequels:

Yellow Peril: The Shadow: The Fire of Creation #1 Review

Garth Ennis’s The Shadow does many things effectively, including presenting an interesting “modern” characterization of the title character (considering, unlike Howard Chaykin’s 1980s reboot for DC Comics, Ennis writes this as a period piece), slowly introducing The Shadow’s “faithful companions” for people who aren’t necessarily already familiar with them, and, within 22 pages, setting the stage for a story that is international and possibly terrifying in scope.

However, the thing it does most effectively is to instill a deep and visceral unholy rage toward the government and military of the nation of Japan, circa 1939, to the point where when I was finished with the book, I wished that Oppenheimer and company had built a third nuke. A shit nuke. That caused a mushroom cloud made of feces. Which is a feeling that I personally found to be pretty damned disturbing. But I’ll come back to that.

Let’s move to an admission: I am not all that familiar with The Shadow, at least when it comes to the character’s Street And Smith pulp origins. Sure, I’ve read Chaykin’s miniseries, and I have a couple of issues of the Andy Helfer series that followed it, and I saw the 1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin and that 80s movie actress who isn’t what’s-her-face from Weeds. So what I knew about the character was based on those sources: that he carries two guns, and that he has some kind of power to “cloud men’s minds,” which, in the sources I’ve read, amounts to: “Hey! I have the ability to cloud men’s minds (shoots criminal in face)!”