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.

Never Ending Story – Review Of The Fearless #9

Like some kind of demonic Energizer Bunny, Fear Itself continues to chug along, now in the guise of The Fearless. Sure, The Serpent is gone, Thor is dead and Odin has fucked off for points elsewhere, but Sin, the daughter of the Red Skull, still has daddy issues and she wants them addressed right friggin’ NOW! Damn it, people! Some jerk took her special magically evil hammer that daddy surrogate, The Serpent, gave her and she wants it back. That is her toy and she sure as hell isn’t going to let Valkyrie or anybody else play with it. Nope, not when she can throw a tantrum and have a bevvy of bad guys go do her bidding to go get the hammer back for her.

Hair pulling, slap fights and spoilers, after the jump.

Stealing My Dreams: Winter Soldier #2 Review

Okay: we’re two issues into Winter Soldier now, and I’m getting a better sense of what Ed Brubaker’s going for here: some old-school, Steranko-style, 60s-S.H.I.E.L.D. sci-fi super spy stuff that doesn’t necessarily need to make any logical, real-world sense beyond a James Bond film with a 200 million dollar budget. All of which takes some of the edge off the fact that what initially appeared to be a modern, Marvel-based espianoge story suddenly spun, by the end of the first issue, into a scene of a screaming gorilla with a machine gun…

…and none of which makes it any easier to see that same gorilla with a jetpack at the beginning of this issue. That Goddamned gorilla is living every dream I’ve had since I was nine years old. By the third issue he’s gonna be throwing the meat to Heather Thomas, and by the fifth that fucker’ll be chucking feces at The New Kids On The Block.

Sloppy Seconds: Red Hood And The Outlaws #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-SPOIL-ROBIN! If you don’t want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-FUCK-OFF-DUDE-ROBIN-SUCKS-WHERE’S-MY-TWO-DOLLARS-DIDIO! Either way: I’m a-spoiling this book!

I am sick. Deathly sick. Like, “Wow! I think I must have obtained spider powers somehow because every 30 to 45 seconds, I appear to be horking up webbing!” sick. And I can confirm that Peter Parker was wrong; with great power seems to come great chills, fever and runny stool.

As such, I have very little energy to do anything, and am desperate for a solution that will make me feel better. So I decided to read Red Hood The The Outlaws #6. Which, based on Amanda’s experience reading the first issue, might mean that I’m am not just sick, but also very, very stupid.

I purchased the issue before I became quite as ill as I am now, so I can’t even blame antihistamines or brain fluke or whatever. No, I bought it because the cover proclaims that this issue contains the first meeting between Red Hood and Starfire, meaning that despite skipping issues 2 through 5 (Yes, I bought one in between, but didn’t have the heart to put myself through reading it), maybe I could get an explanation about Starfire’s post New 52… priorities.

So let’s get it out of the way: is this issue any good? Well honestly, it is better than the first issue. That doesn’t mean it’s good, per se; I recently put out something better than Red Hood And The Outlaws #1, albeit being somewhat runny.

…A Fight For Love And Glory: Batman #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s Wednesday, and once again, the local bar is closed for reasons that border on the frivolous: there are very few hookers in this town to start with, and she might have stabbed herself seven times in the men’s crapper, and either way: I never saw her before. So I might as well take the opportunity to lie low and do another short comic review.

If you’re Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, the problem with producing one of the more triumphant single comic book issues in recent memory – particularly when that triumph is based on what amounts to an engaging storytelling gimmick you can only use once that wraps a story that’s been told a million times: Batman gets driven nuts – is that you need to come out with another issue just four short weeks later. Well, it’s four weeks later, and Batman #6 is merely pretty damn good. It misses the level of great by hitting a story beat we’ve seen before, but it’s still very, very decent.

Decompression Sickness: Batman & Robin #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vowing upon their parents’ death to rid Gotham City of the forewarning element, Crisis On Infinite Midlives has, over the years, fought spoilers in their many macabre forms. This time they lost. You are warned.

As I said in my review of Batman & Robin #4, I am enjoying this book one hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to when I finished the first issue. A book that started out looking like the worst of the Batman TV show was starting to look more like the Christopher Nolan movies. And #6 continues that trend, but there’s a funny thing about movies: I’ve always said (Because I lifted it from Stephen King in Danse Macabre) that I can tell if a movie’s any good, or if it’s too long, if I start wishing for a cigarette in the middle of it. At six issues into this battle against new villain Nobody? Yeah, I could use a smoke.

It’s not that this is a bad story by any stretch of the imagination. This issue gives us Robin under the clandestine tutelage of Nobody, who is actually Morgan Ducard, son of Henri Ducard, who trained Bruce Wayne before he put on the Batman suit. You remember, Liam Neeson from Batman Begins? You know, that Batman movie just before The Dark Knight? The one with the chick who’s banging Tom Cruise? Just go to any Best Buy dollar DVD bin and you’ll find it. But I digress.

Nobody is slowly massaging Robin into becoming a killer, starting to ease Robin toward a willingness to kill by doing the old “give him an empty gun and tell him to shoot a guy to get him used to pulling the trigger” trick, followed a couple of pages later with the subtle mindfuckery of the “Now dump the guy into a vat of acid while he’s awake and screaming like a pig in a chute” ruse. In the meantime, we flash back to Bruce’s first mission with Nobody’s father, where he tried a similar method of attenuating Bruce toward lethal means with the time-tested classic, “Shoot a dude in the face in front of the guy who has repeatedly stated that he will never kill, then say, ‘U mad bro?'” The two stories are interesting and effective in drawing parallels between Batman’s early training and Robin’s current work, but the abrupt nature of each Ducard suddenly chucking in lethal force is jarring, and forced me to say, “Oh well; he only had about about 20 pages to get it done,” and just like when you realize you’ve started looking for the wires in a space opera movie, boom! Just like that, you’re out of the story and wishing for a cigarette.

Undeserved Fate: Journey Into Mystery #634 Review

I can’t imagine that Kieron Gillen was super excited to be assigned writing duties on Journey Into Mystery. A comic that’s nothing but Thor retitled following Thor’s “death” in Fear Itself, at face value this is a book designed to do nothing but park the title until they’re ready to bring Thor back properly. This is a book that is designed to have no future, and getting the assignment had to feel like getting a gig at a VHS tape factory. Or at a newspaper. Or on a non creator owned J. Michael Straczynski ongoing title.

So it would have been easy for Gillen to treat the book as what it is, write himself a good old middle of the road Thor-ish story and bide his time for a more lucrative assignment, like Scarlet Spider’s Pal: Jimmy Douchebag, or perhaps Ultimate Boom-Boom. Instead, he’s cutting loose with some of the zaniest, most fun comic writing you can currently buy. When it comes to pure fun, you’re not gonna find anything better than Journey Into Mystery #634 on the shelves this week.

Conjugal Visit With A Remorseless Killer: Scarlet Spider #2 Review

Scarlet Spider is going to be a hard book for anyone who read comics for a long time before the Spider Clone saga to read with any level of objectivity. I’ve just now written and deleted a bunch of reasons why that is, but what it comes down to is that if you spent your 1980s adolescence reading books like The Dark Knight Returns, Mage: The Hero Discovered and Watchmen, the logic in the 1990s was simple: if ($_spider + $_clone) {($_comic == shit) && ($_comic_dollars_spent == 0)}. Sure, there are people crawling out of the woodwork now defending the Spider Clone saga, but there were also people who begged for conjugal visits with Ted Bundy; we call whose people cranks on a good day and apeshit crazy on a bad one, and we don’t generally entrust either with important things like firearms, or the editors’ desks of major comic books.

Long story short: I have not been looking forward to Scarlet Spider.

So I was prepared a few weeks ago to pick up the first issue, summarily review it and probably discard it… except by the time I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I’m such a hotshit writer about comics how come I don’t rank free advance review copies, it was already sold out… and this was by Wednesday evening. Which proves that despite my personal prejudices, someone was looking forward to this book.

So this week, I was able to get my hands on Scarlet Spider #2, and even at face value, I wasn’t excited about it – I mean, look at that cover. The center focus is the hero’s crotch with a bisected stone behind it, making it look like Scarlet Spider either has The Thing’s wang or that he is literally shitting a brick.

With all that said: Scarlet Spider #2 is actually a decent comic book. The character work is engaging, and I actually enjoyed it… even if I think it’s all presented in a way that isn’t going to be sustainable in the long term

It’s Better To Burn Out: Daken: Dark Wolverine #21 Review

We’ve had some fun at Rob Williams’s expense here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because to be truthful, I put Robocop on my pull list from back when Avatar was publishing Frank Miller’s Robocop – a Steven Grant written and Juan Jose Ryp drawn adaptation of Miller’s original script for the movie Robocop 2. And because of that, I kind of automatically get copies Dynamite Comics’s version of Robocop, and honestly? Rob Williams should not be writing Robocop comics. He probably shouldn’t be allowed to write the word Robocop.

And when it comes to Daken: Dark Wolverine, we kinda get it for almost the same reason: I put Wolverine on my pulls back when Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi were on the book about five years ago, and I started getting Daken by default. I mentioned the mistake to my local comic store owner, who knows me my name and asks me if I’d rather buy a couple extra books or get my comics from a Rite-Aid spinner rack while parents hustle their children away muttering “Don’t talk to perverts,” and wound up keeping it… even though I think that the term “Dark Reign” should only be used again when some comic geek biologist uses it in the name for a newly-discovered shit beetle.

So we’ve got a writer with some decent books under his belt – but some real stinkers, too – and a book born from the one of the longest and most irritating events Marvel’s produced since Maximum Carnage, and on top of it all? The book’s been canceled. So there should be nothing in Daken: Dark Wolverine to look forward to… Which is a shame, because it is a pretty damn solid comic book. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting, and that’s enough.

Interruptus: Powers #8 Review

I like Brian Michael Bendis’s Powers a lot. It has been on my pull list at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop acting out the term “pull list” in front of the paying customers, for more than ten years. I have all the individual issues that follow the first “Who Killed Retro Girl?” arc back when the book was published by Image Comics. And I even like this individual issue of Powers. But I’m not going to recommend that you buy it.

It is, in fact, all but pointless to buy this book, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or not, or if you like it or not. Falling in love with an individual issue of Powers is more pointless than falling in love at summer camp. It’s more pointless than falling in love with a hooker. It’s roughly akin to falling in love with a hooker in a city that isnt your own, that you might come back to in a few years, and as you’re zipping your pants you realize that all you remember is that her name is P-something.

Because this comic book simply. Does not. Come out. Ever.