Geek Penthouse: Joss Whedon on Buffy Vs. Black Widow

If you’re anything like I am, you watched that teaser clip, from Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers flick, of Black Widow tied to a chair and still kicking the shit out of three or four guys and you wondered: “Why can’t I control when I get an erection? I’m a fucking 40-year-old man!”

However, if you’re anything like Amanda, you wondered who would win in a fight: the Widow, or Whedon’s most famous creation, Buffy The Vampire Slayer? I know she wondered this because she asked me while I was drafting the above-linked article; I sat quietly for a moment after her question, and after some intense consideration, I could only reply: “…I gotta go put on clean pants. New rule: don’t ask me about purely theoretical superhero girl fights. No, this does not supercede the existing rule to not ask me to solve complicated mathematical word problems in front of you and your friends.”

Thankfully, Whedon has responded directly to the question to USA Today, saving those of us wallowing in the realm of superhero geekdom the heartbreak of hours of heated bar debates, ill-advised and extended podcasts, and shameful and furtive midnight laundry sessions.

To wit:

Juvenile Pastiche: Danger Club #1 Review

The concept of teenaged superheroes going out of control without adult supervision is hardly a new one – off the top of my head, we’ve got Terra in The New Teen Titans, Kid Miracleman, the unrepentant incestuous relationship between Zan and Jayna, and a little-known book called Kingdom Come… wait, one of those doesn’t sound right… although I’m betting somewhere, as we speak, Alan Moore’s writing, “Form of… a donkey!” Regardless, it’s too early for me to be getting off track here.

My point is, a story about teen heroes running amok isn’t a new thing under the sun, so writer Landry Q. Walker’s and artist Eric Jones’s Danger Club isn’t exactly breaking any new ground. A story about teen sidekicks and what they get up to after all their mentors leave Earth to battle some cosmic villain and never return, it has shades reminiscent of both Kid Miracleman’s rampage and the rolling destructive battles of the first couple of issue of Kingdom Come. So make so mistake: what we’re seeing in this first issue isn’t new.

But then again, neither is baseball, and that’s still fun to watch… as is Danger Club #1. And if this issue is any indication, Walker and Jones are taking admittedly well-used old story tropes and using them to swing for the fences.

Back Into Hell: Spawn #218 Review

Let’s start by me coming clean: I don’t read Spawn. I’ve never read Spawn. I might be the only comics enthusiast who was actively reading back in 1992 who doesn’t have a dusty polybagged copy of Spawn #1 tucked in the back of some yellowing longbox somewhere. This is because, while Spawn #1 had the four words most likely to Pavlovianly excite any early 90s comics fan – “Art by Todd McFarlane” – it also contained one of the worst four-word curses in late 80s / early 90s comics: “Written by Todd McFarlane.”

However, I am familiar with Spawn thanks to the movie and the HBO animated series: Al Simmons, former special forces soldier, is murdered and returns to life imbued with the power of the Hellspawn. Spawn lives as a homeless person, defending the local winos and pining for his former wife, while forces of good and evil war over his soul. I think; Spawn aired on HBO on Friday nights, and it was the rare Friday in the 1990s that were conducive to my ability to form long term memories.

So, armed with that common knowledge, I returned to Spawn with issue 218 for the first time… well, ever, really. So I cracked the book, dove in and…

I have absolutely no fucking idea what’s going on. This, however, is not necessarily a terrible thing.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 8: The Kick of Osteoporosis

Guess who found their microphones?

That’s right, after five months, and literally no waiting with bated – or any – breath, it’s time for another exciting episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast!

In this week’s episode, we drunkenly rant about:

• Digital Comics. Specifically, it was a big week encompassing the closing of the Graphic.ly Web storefront and the release of the first of Marvel’s Infinite Comics via ComiXology, so we talk about how faithful customers of digital comics get to be in the vanguard of comics publishing while eventually being doomed to wind up with fuckall for their money!
• Marvel’s Augmented Reality application, which forces you to read your printed comics through your cell phone like Commander Data or some other robotic autistic person!
• Fanboys Vs. Zombies, and how it is an awesome book if you have been to SDCC, want to go to SDCC, or want to see Joe Quesada eaten by a grue!
• The Avengers movie: can it possibly be as good as the trailers and the TV spots make it look?
• Agent Coulson: Xander of the Marvel Movie Universe?
• Hawkeye: Like a Boss? Or Like a Miss?
• SDCC Hotel Sales: big mess or biggest mess?
• Plus: Justice League Dark and The Boys!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:47 — 52.0MB)

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

As always, if you listen to this show at work, wear headphones unless you want to explain to your boss why you’re listening to someone bemoan the lack of glory holes in San Diego hotel rooms! And if you can listen to the whole thing, see if you can tell the moment when the booze gets on top of us!

As always: thanks for listening, suckers!

Man Down: Graphic.ly Closes Online Comic Store

Crisis On Infinite Midlives hasn’t been around all that long in the greater scheme of things, but almost since our first day, we’ve been skeptical about digital comics, at least in the formats and forms of distribution in which they currently exist. Custom apps requiring mothership server authentication when you want to read your comics and with limited download and archiving options seemed less like buying comics than it did paying someone for the right to read their comics. This is very much unlike the experience of buying actual physical books from my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop offering ten bucks for half an hour alone with the Omaha: The Cat Dancer books.

Until now, these concerns have been a moot point. After all, digital comics is still a young field, and no matter which platform you chose to buy your digital comics, they would still be around for a while, allowing you to build your collection while the hardware with which to read that collection get better, faster, and more easily able to maintain your books locally. Right? Sure.

Wait, what?

Tour of Duty: Disney Announces Captain America Sequel

Obviously sensing a groundswell of excitement behind the approaching Joss Whedon Avengers flick, Disney has apparently decided to strike while the iron is hot – or at least strike before someone at Ain’t It Cool News can file an advance Avengers review from a projectionists’ screening saying, “Hi, Harry – R3ct@l Pr0l@p53 here, reporting that Chris Evans suxxors ballz!” – and has announced that the sequel to the Captain America movie will hit theaters on April 4, 2014.

One-Eyed Wonder Worm: Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!

Cyclops is a fucking dick.

– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her

So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.

Black Widow Chair Dance: Avengers Movie Clip

I know that we said that we would see you tomorrow (suckers), and that it was the end of our broadcast day, but this is simply too new and too good to ignore.

Yes, we are still reading this week’s new comics and drinking beer. However,  in the meantime, please enjoy the first full, non-trailer clip of Avengers, starring Black Widow doing an awesome chair act, after the jump.

Hadouken!

It is arrived. It is in you now. Marvel, for once thinking ahead about an upcoming movie about one of their properties, has conspired and planned and looked ahead enough to make sure that once the Avengers movie drops in a month, non-comic reading moviegoers who wander into a comic shop will see a book with the name of the movie on it and hopefully think, “Hey! That’s the movie I done just seen! Who’re they fightin’? Hey, I lurve me some Hugh Jackman! Lemme buy this funnybook!”

Which is great for the rubes and potentially good for comics in general, but for those of us in the trenches buying comics every Wednesday, it means that Marvel’s big summer event, Avengers Vs. X-Men is finally here, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But is is a nice looking week, ain’t it? We’ve got Avengers Vs. X-Men, Ed Brubaker’s Fatale, Ultimate Spider-Man, a new The Boys, Ann Nocenti’s second issue of Green Arrow, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But before we can review it, we gotta read it. So, as often happens on Wednesday nights: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Look! Up In The Sky! Run For Your Life!: Superman #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is new comics day, which means that – wait! Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! I normally get this excited, scream and bother passers-by when I see a bird! Oh, no; it’s one last comic review before the comic stores open, forget it.

Superman #7 is the first issue with the new creative team of co-writers Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens and art by Jesus Merino and, well, Dan Jurgens. These are a couple of old-school comics writers working on a brand new Superman, which arguably is what this book has been needing, and the classic flavor they bring to certain sequences of this book makes it somewhat endearing, but I’m guessing how you feel about it will likely depend on how much you’re digging  the new, cocky, armored Superman, and how you feel about a villain with a classic feel… that feel being that of a Republic Serial villain chewing scenery like Robin Williams teething in the midst of a heroic Ritalin bender.

This book starts off with an definitive statement of “Bang!” by the new team, dropping us in the middle of a battle between Superman and some robot right on the streets of Metropolis. It’s an action-packed sequence with a visually satisfying amount of collateral property damage, while Superman internally soliloquizes about how the battle seems like merely an attempt to call him out… which would be an interesting plot point if this weren’t Superman, who, thanks to super hearing, can be called out by whispering, “Hey Superman! I’m on the corner of Weisinger and Swan, on my way to fuck yer moms!”