Blind Ambition: Daredevil #4 Review

I like to make the occasional joke about Frank Miller, as I am known to do about anyone who seems to be taking seriously their own bullshit, but the fact of the matter is that the man is one the most lauded comic creators of the 1980s for a reason. Just look at the resume: The Dark Knight Returns. Batman: Year One. Ronin. the Wolverine miniseries with Chris Claremont.

And then there’s Daredevil. Say what you want about Miller’s 21st century penchant for drawing two detailed red dirigibles crashing into each other and then sketching a woman’s nose and eyes above them, but Frank Miller changed the face of Daredevil from a second-tier Spider-Man knockoff into a classic of noir storytelling, which cast a long shadow over the way the character was written and drawn for 25 years.

So when I heard that Mark Waid was going to take over the character with a renumbered #1 issue (But Marvel doesn’t do reboots! Also, their poop smells like ROSES!) and make the character lighter and less tortured, I considered dropping my subscription… but considering I was already considering dropping the book thanks to the disappointing Shadowland event (Daredevil’s a ninja! A possessed ninja! Who raises the dead! Hey, where you going?), I decided to give it a day in court (Lawyer pun not intended).

And I’m glad I did, because it turns out that Waid’s Daredevil is one hell of a book. And issue #4 is the best one yet.

Four Inches of Plot: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to introduce our newest contributor, Lance Manion! Lance was trained as a writer, by… ninjas or something… and will be contributing comic and movie reviews, comments on geek culture, and possibly herpes! You can learn more about Lance when we get around to publishing an About Us page! Welcome, Lance!

Alan Moore has lost it.  Yeah, I’m going there.  With publication of LXG 1969, I’ve accepted that the mind that created Watchmen, re-envisioned Swamp Thing, and invented The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has finally jumped the shark.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  More accurately, he roofied the shark, transported it to some sort of realm of the imagination, had sex with it in every possible configuration, some requiring non-Euclidian geometry, dropped it back off in the ocean, and then slapped it in the face.

Just Punching The Clock: Green Lantern #1 Review

And now for one last pre-comic store opening review of last Wednesday’s books…

For most of Green Lantern’s history, the character had a weakness against the color yellow. That, however, was before the DC New 52 reboot. Now it is a whole new world, and Green Lantern apparently has only one weakness: the fucking inker.

Doug Mahnke has been drawing Green Lantern in the main book since 2009; his art is proven on Green Lantern, and was a welcome point of continuity between the pre and post New 52 universes. But then they hired inker Christian Alamy, who is a perfectly competent inker provided you want each panel of the book to look like Steve Dillon was given a case of Jameson to draw green rings on the hands of every character in an old issue of Preacher.

I’m serious – just take a look at this:

Oh, My God! They Killed Mitch! You Bastards: Review Of Resurrection Man #1

Mitch Shelley is a man with a problem. He can’t die. And when he does die, he comes back to life with some sort of freaky power that is related to the way that he died. Now, you might be asking yourself, “Self? How is that a problem? I’m all about things that don’t suck. Freaky powers and immortality don’t suck!” And you might be right, unless you’re Mitch Shelley.

Don’t You Forget About Me: New Avengers #16 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. How many spoilers? Well, I’m going to include a scan of 9/10th of the last page of the fucking story. The only way to more effectively ruin a climax involves a Donkey Punch. You are warned.

I would like to start by saying, clearly and unambiguously, that I liked New Avengers #16. The story is excellent, the art is spectacular, and the action is almost unrelenting. This is a good comic book. Are we clear?

Good.

Because now I am going to rank it out for a little while.

“Misters Glass, Dallocchio, Getty, and Hanna – Tear Down This Wall”: Suicide Squad #1 Review

Ding Dong - Candygram!

Wow! Check out Harley Quinn on the cover of “Suicide Squad” #1! That’s quite a makeover you’ve undergone there, ma’am. Trying something different to regain the Joker’s interest after his disappearance in Detective Comics #1, huh? It’s a good look – and I don’t just mean the multi-tonal hair and the push up, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bustier (and, just between us girls – how do you keep that on when swinging that sledgehammer? I have a running theory that involves dress tape and transdermal snap implants – am I close?). No, I mean that extra sprinkling of crazy. It looks good on you, and I’m not just saying that because you’re holding a knife. Really.

Better Late Than Never: Witch Doctor #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It turns out that this “new release” is actually a second printing of a book that was initially released in July. Normally I would put the review aside and start on something more recent, but it’s almost beer o’clock. So fuck it.

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Witch Doctor is what House M.D. would be if the diagnoses were supernatural and House were allowed to skip the medical pretense and just physically abuse his patients. If that makes Witch Doctor sound to you like a derivative knockoff with an originality problem, that’s because it is and it does.

If it also makes Witch Doctor sound to your like it’s fucking full of awesome with a dark, cynical and filthy sense of humor? That’s because it is, and it does, AND you are a dirty, dirty misanthrope. Which only means you are in the right place, both with your choice in comics Web sites, and in choosing to read Witch Doctor.

Witch Doctor is the story of Dr. Vincent Morrow, an M.D. whos been chucked out of the medical community and who now treats supernatural infections, and before you pick up the phone, your herpes doesn’t count. Just because you don’t remember banging that skank doesn’t mean you got it by magic.

Ring Of Fire: Red Lanterns #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains immediate, thoughtless, prejudicial spoilers. It is even possible that the story has already been ruined for you. So you might as well keep reading.

If you’ve been a comic book fon for the past couple of years, particularly if you’ve been one who followed Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern saga from the Sinestro Corps War through the Blackest Night event of 2010, you are going to cream your pants over the first seven pages of Red Lanterns #1. Peter Milligan NAILS everything fun and cool about the Red Lantern Corps, so much so that at one point I stopped what I was doing and I told Amanda, “You know what? Red Lanterns has the opening I’ve liked best of any of DC’s New 52 so far.”

“That’s great, Rob,” she said, “But I’d appreciate it if you’d put the comic book away until after we’re done having sex.”

But I digress… actually, I don’t, because that seven page opener is as much a non-sequiter as the above joke was. It has next to nothing to do with the remainder of the story that follows, and frankly? If you’re one of those ephemeral “new readers” that the New 52 is supposed to be reaching, I’m guessing you’ll quit somewhere during those seven pages and never read the book again.

Because if you don’t already know the characters, their backgrounds and motivations, what you’re seeing as an introduction to the Red Lantern Corps is an angry kitty in a red jumpsuit who bites some space dicks (The aliens in question being dicks, not ACTUAL, dangling space wangs. And the aliens themselves aren’t actually penises, they’re DICKS. Oh, forget it.), and his owner, who appears to be Mike Tyson if he ate too many carrots and tore his own lips off to give his teeth room to reproduce in his own mouth. And you’ll close the book, say something like, “Huh. those comics people DO eat mushrooms,” and go back and read Harry Potter again.

Buffy Summers: Party Slayer: Review Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 #1

Fun Fact Of The Day: today, I discovered that my taste in classical music runs toward pieces that involve string instruments, restrained use of the woodwind family, and, are actually Led Zeppelin. Mostly the latter, actually. I determined this during a brief, but abortive attempt at cultivating a taste for classical music while trapped in traffic gridlock on the I-95 corridor. This may not have been the best time to make the attempt, but it’s not like I had anything better to do. I was trapped in a sedan sandwich between what appeared to be a head made mostly of cell phone in front of me and a morbidly obese individual in a Toyota Yaris who seemed to have dozed off in back of me. He would appear to wake every now and again to shovel a fistful of Funyuns down his head and then drop right back to sleep. It was fascinating except for that part where I worried he’d lose control over the brake pedal and smash me into Funyun dusted road pizza. I needed something to distract me.

There are seven television seasons that one could point to in the Buffy-verse as being “Classic Buffy”, as opposed to the comic book Season 8, which I consider to be “New Coke Buffy”. I wanted to like it, but even Whedon has said in interviews that by the end of Season 8 things needed to be reined back in and brought back to basics. But hey, sometimes, you just have to try. For every instance of “No, I think I need something that rocks a little harder than Mr. Vivaldi here”, there is also an “anything goes” reverting back to “basics/world with no magic”. Sometimes the classic is better.

Batman, Robin and Curly Joe: Batman & Robin #1 Review

We’re only halfway into the four-week reveal of DC’s New 52, so it might be a little early to say this about any particular book, but I’ll say it anyway: I firmly believe that Batman & Robin was only released because “New 52” sounds catchier than “New 51”.

This book tries to be all things to everyone who ever read a Batman comic book. And while that might be a noble goal for some marketing drone slavering over the idea of thousands of non-comic geeks stumbling into comic stores to “check out that new blasphemous, hipster douchebag Superman I keep hearing about,” for an actual comic reader, it leads to an uneven, schizophrenic read that can’t seem to decide what it wants to be.

After an introductary action sequence where a new villain, Nobody… no, HE’S Nobody… the name of the bad guy is Nobody… um, third base? Anyway, there’s a new bad guy. Nobody. He’s invisible. Spoilers. Yeah.

The book proper opens with a reproduction of the parlor from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One where Bruce Wayne told his father’s memory that he would become a bat. Which for a rebooted Batman story isn’t a bad place to start, and God knows that last week’s Detective Comics #1 did itself a solid referencing Miller’s classic look…

And two pages later? Batpoles.