I Have A Bad Feeling About This: Star Wars #1 Review

Just a few hours ago, in a town, not so far away…. I picked up my copy of Brian Wood’s Star Wars at my local comics shop, where they know me by name and keep begging me not to bring Rob there, ever again.  Getting the issue is apparently no small feat since even our fearless leader Rob couldn’t get his hands on a copy of this mutha.

Wood is tackling an interesting time in the Star Wars timeline. His focus is on the original characters during the several years between the destruction of the Death Star at the Battle of Yavin, and where Empire picks up on Hoth. It truly surprises me that this period is rarely addressed, with the absolute breadth and depth of expanded universe novels, comics, cartoons, and slashfic. There’s an awful lot of un-addressed character development that takes place off-screen between the movies. Luke has gone from whiny farm boy to a confident and able fighter. Han has shed his “only looking out for number one” attitude, and emerged as a real leader within the rebellion.  Leia has transformed from a mouthy princess to… well, a mouthy princess.

Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe in spoilers…

Monomyth: A Self-Discovery

With Rob and Amanda waist deep in nerd sweat out at San Diego Comic-Con, I’m left to my own thoughts and that’s not usually a good thing.

In an earlier post, Rob alluded to my very subtle unhappiness with what DC, and in particular Rob Liefeld, did to a couple of my favorite New 52 characters.  I was very disappointed with what happened with Voodoo when Ron Marz was relieved of duty. But when Liefeld took over Grifter, I nearly ripped the book in half.   I’ve tried writing a couple reviews of the recent iterations of these books, but I find myself digressing into a raving ball of spit and bile.  And after some soul searching, I had an epiphany….

I don’t like superheroes…

An Epic Tale of Blood and Drool – Review Of BattlePug

Riddle me this Batman…

What do you get when you combine Conan the Barbarian, giant baby harp seals, a massive, drooling pug, Santa Claus, a thousand angry gophers, and a tattooed naked woman lying in bed relating the whole story to her two talking dogs? A giant bucket-full of awesome, that’s what!

If Robert E. Howard and Boris Vallejo had a love-child, and it wrote a boy-meets-dog/revenge story while tripping on mushrooms, BattlePug might be the result.

Raider of The Last Arc: Grifter #1-6 Review

Finally, a reboot you can sink your teeth into.  As I stated in an earlier review, I’ve been trying to get back into the game and the New 52 has been somewhat of a disappointment.  I say disappointment because no title I’ve read so far has been a true “reboot”. Everything so far has relied on at least some previous knowledge of character and/or story to truly get the most out of it.  Then a Grifter came to town.

Shortly after my Voodoo review , I noticed a Daemonite on the cover of a Grifter book, so I cracked the cover. Lo and behold, we have a parallel to Voodoo’s alien invasion arc!  So once more I find myself with a character I’ve never heard of, which is great, because with so many established “mainstream” characters, I love to experience the joy of discovering something new, even if it is only new to me.

Cole Cash (They do love their alliteration, don’t they?) is a former Special Forces Operator, an expert in infiltration and combat. For reasons yet to be explored, he’s deserted the military and become a small time con man, moving from mark to mark with his girlfriend Gretchen.  He’s about to see behind a curtain that he didn’t know existed… and he’s going to have a very bad day.

We’re All Going To Die, Die Standing Up! Peter Panzerfaust #1 Review

And then he appeared from nowhere. Like he had been there all along, just… my eyes had failed to see him. He loved a grand entrance. That was Peter’s way.

Peter Panzerfaust is billed as “Red Dawn” meets “Peter Pan”… how can you not be interested in reading that?

The setting is the port city of Calais France, May 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg is sweeping though France, Calais is falling and a quarter of a million allied soldiers are about to evacuate France at the port of Dunkirk. It is one of the darkest times of the Second World War.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Trebuchet here with some Avengers movie speculation.

There hasn’t been this much buzz over something so small and pink since the Clinton Administration. I speak of course of what appears to be a Skrull board game piece that MTV (they’re still around?), discovered at a toy fair.

The board game in question is The Avengers: Mighty Battle and it’s hard to argue that the piece in questions isn’t a Skrull.  This could mean that Joss Whedon’s adamant proclamation that there aren’t any Skrulls in the upcoming Avengers movie is just a diversion… but…

Apparently, Fox may own the rights to “Skrulls” through its Fantastic Four License. So what gives? The way I see it, one of two things is happening.  Either Joss managed to get the rights to the name from his dear, dear friends at Fox, or more likely, they aren’t Skrulls.  We’re probably looking at “Chitauri”, which are basically Skrulls of another flavor.  It’s kinda like saying, that’s not a “Grizzly” bear, it’s a “Kodiak”!  The Chitauri showed up as the big bad in the 2006 animated movie Ultimate Avengers: The Movie, so they have that going for them. Either way, I can’t wait until May!

The Avengers drops into theatres on May 4^th.

(via MTV Geek)

Raider of the Last Arc: Voodoo Who?

EDITORS’ NOTE: Trebuchet has been a regular commenter here (“Regular” being a relative term) since we started in September, sticking with us as we spun off into writing about odd tangents with which he was unfamiliar: namely, comic books. However, Trebuchet has been sending us interesting private emails asking about what books we recommended and then commenting on them after he read them. He had the idea of picking up longer recent story arcs and reviewing the entire thing in one shot, which sounded cool. This is his first submission, and well: damn. 

So Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to introduce our latest contributor: Trebuchet! Please tell him it doesn’t suck so he’ll write some more!

Thanks Rob, now get off my lawn.

I was a casual comics collector back in the late 80s and early 90s, until other interests gradually overshadowed my weekly pilgrimages to the local comics shop. Since then, I’ve picked up a few things here and there at Rob’s suggestion, but generally speaking, I’ve been out of the game for almost 20 years.  I missed the advent of “event” stories, massive crossovers and “point one releases”.  I’ve missed the tragic deaths and resurrections of countless heroes and the births of others, so at the moment, I have no idea what the hell is going on in any of the superhero universes.

The New 52 seemed like a great opportunity to jump back on the train and start fresh. So shortly after the launch, I was perusing the shelves of my local comic store, where they have no idea who the hell I am and keep telling me that the Bingo hall is across the street, and anyhoo, the cover of Voodoo issue 4 jumped off the shelf at me, so I decided to take a chance on something I didn’t recognize.

It’s important to mention this because, I had absolutely no idea that Voodoo was an existing property, or that it was recently folded into DC from an Image / Wildstorm universe.  Hell, McFarlane and Liefeld were still working for scale when I got out of the game.  So yeah, I never heard of “Wild C.A.T.S.” (Lawn; off now!)