You’re The Guy Who Does His Job. I Must Be The Other Guy

We originally intended to have our final Boston Comic Con roundup episode, including audio from the Spider-Verse, Marvel Universe, IDW Comics and DC Comics panels, produced and online by today. It was an ambitious goal, except for the fact that it required us to edit four hours of audio in, after sleep, day jobs and bathroom time required to prevent slow death by blood poisoning, about the six remaining hours.

Bottom line is that we are sill busily cutting cool panel clips from the convention, and therefore are not ready to put up a new show tonight, So our regular Sunday night show will be our big Boston Comic Con roundup, including panel audio from Southern Bastards and Spider-Gwen‘s Jason Latour, Batman‘s Scott Snyder, Dark Knight 3‘s Brian Azzarello, Locke And Key‘s Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the upcoming Black Knight‘s Frank Tieri, and a bunch of other awesome creators!

So thanks for your patience, and tune in Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. EST for our big Boston Comic Con show! And while we’re sorry we’re late, look at it this way: it means we can’t do a show about the new (awful) Fantastic Four movie!

Bad Technician

As we announced on the show for the last couple of weeks, there won’t be a new podcast today. We’ve spent almost the entire weekend upgrading not only the engine that drives our Web site, but that handles creating the feeds for the podcast itself. Should this task have taken nearly 48 hours? Probably not. But the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Director of Information Technology is a known drunkard who spends most of his (increasingly rare) sober time reading comic books.

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming next Sunday at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, but there are one or two technical changes here I wanted to let you know about.

The biggest change is that of our podcast feed. In short, it has moved. We have taken as much care as possible to make and test the necessary modifications and redirections under the hood to prevent this change from affecting anyone, but if you have an issue finding new shows, you can subscribe directly to our new feed here. If you do run into trouble, please use our contact form to let us know and we’ll try to figure it out.

Second, we’ve added one or two new ways to subscribe to the show. You might notice a new More Subscribe Options link under the audio player for each show. You can use that to find the latest and greatest ways to make sure you get the show as quickly and reliably as humanly possible.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to close the damn HTTP editor, open ten beers, and see if Secret Wars #3 is just as much of a bummer as the first two.

Recap In Our Ass

Well, we had good intentions.

Yesterday, I was able to pull good audio clips from two of the three panels we taped at C2E2, with the plan being that I would get up bright and early today to edit down audio from the Batman panel so Amanda and I could get home from our day jobs at a reasonable time and tape our final recap episode about the convention.

And I did get up bright and early. Only to notice that, thanks to contractors ripping out drywall in our garage to begin repairing the damage from the Hoth-ish winter here in Boston, our garage door opener was hanging perilously from tiny framing screws completely unfit for mounting a garage door opener. You know, hanging over my convertible. Which I was suddenly afraid to remove from the garage. Since that would require using the garage door opener. Hey, previous owners of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office: if you are mounting a heavy piece of equipment to a ceiling, and find that you don’t have the right screws? Go out and buy some fucking screws. And what kind of an asshole puts most of the load-bearing responsibility for a 40-pound motor on drywall? Someone who never went to college, that’s who. Otherwise, they’d know that drywall disintegrates when gently butted by a ten-pound drunken head.

But I digress.

The point is that events have conspired to make it impossible to tape our recap show tonight. But fear not: Out current plan is to release two recap shows:

• A show running down the New DC Universe and Secret Wars: Last Days panels will be available tomorrow night, and
• A recap of the Caped Crusaders, Dynamic Duos and Darkest Knights panel (otherwise known at the Batman panel) should be available Thursday.

Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the delay. Now: anyone know how much Elmer’s Glue it takes to remount a garage door opener?

Comedy Of Errors – You May Ask Yourself: Where Is That GD Podcast?

Of all the weeks to be running into issues every time Rob and I want to sit down and try to bang out the damn podcast.

So, you may have noticed for the last couple nights we’ve thrown up a quick site business to explain the delay of our typical Sunday night podcast, which tens of you have come to know and rely on. If it wasn’t full on internet drought in the wilds of northern New England (and, frankly, how dare the White Mountains have no fucking Wi-Fi, amiright?), it was traffic and travel related. Tonight? Skynet. No, but seriously, Rob has run into an issue at his job he needs to stay ridiculously late for. I’d do the podcast myself, but I think we all know that while I’m good at saying really awful things at inopportune times, the show really needs Rob’s dick jokes to bring the whole thing into full focus. They say write about what you know and I am, well, dickless. It’s true. I checked.

It’s absolutely the worst time to find life hamstringing us like this; there are a lot of really interesting stories that have come out of New York Comic Con. For example, the attendance numbers at NYCC reportedly exceeded those of the San Diego Comic-Con. This year, 151,000 separate attendees all washed up on the doorstep of the Javitz Center. That is 21,000 more than San Diego. Given the crush of humanity that is the SDCC experience, I can only imagine what it must have been like to try to move around in that. It’s a mixed blessing. As more and more folks come out to see what all the geek fuss is about, the harder it is to actually get around to see all the panels, pros, vendors, and general weirdness that we’re all coming out to celebrate. NYCC has already set a date next year for October 8-11, 2015. The good news for folks who are specifically out to celebrate comics culture though is that there will be a special comics oriented edition in June on the 13th and 14th. This is actually a trend I’d like to see continue for some of the bigger cons. I hope it is a sign of more mindfully planned, better targeted convention experiences for fans going forward.

And then there is some of the news coming out of comics entertainment press in the past couple days.

The Driving Dead

Another funny story: in New England, there is a type of person called a “leaf peeper.” These are people who, based on a love of nature’s glory, travel to northern New England in the autumn to look at the colorful changing foliage.

Turns out they like to do this on long weekends like this one. Also turns out they like to return south to their homes today. Also turns out these useless treehugging motherfuckers can’t find the wherewithal to drive a straight line on New Hampshire’s Route 93 at a speed exceeding 15 miles per hour.

Because of this, Episode 38 will be posted tomorrow evening. We apologize for the continued delay.

Where Is My Internets?

So, funny story: we are in New Hampshire, at an unfamiliar hotel we booked last minute for the long Columbus Day weekend. We booked the hotel because their Web site swore that they had Wi-Fi available.

Turns out that that Wi-Fi is available only in the hotel lobby. Which is across the street. And which closes at 6 p.m. on Sundays after Labor Day.

Which means that we have a satchel full of recording equipment, opinions about some news items from New York Comic Con and Scott Snyder’s comics this week… and only 2G cell phone Internet. Which ain’t exactly enough to publish a big MP3 podcast file. Or a small one. Or anything more complicated than an apology.

We will be back in the Civilized World tomorrow afternoon, and will have a new episode on the wire soon after that.

I’m On An Internet, Whoa-Oh, Radio

Q: Hey, I haven’t been by the site for a while. I come back, and… what the fuck is this? What the hell happened? Did you quit?

A: Hell, no! We’ve just switched away from posting written content every day. Have you ever tried to write every damn day? It’s hard! It leads to questionable judgment! What do you think happened to Chuck Austen?

Q: So what, in fact, are you doing?

A: We’ve changed our focus to our weekly podcast, The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Show. Every Sunday, Amanda and I (and the occasional guests) talk about a couple of recent comic / genre / geek related topics, and review a few of the week’s comic books we really liked (or desperately hated)! Plus, we tell as many filthy jokes along the way as the law will allow!

Q: That sounds pertinent to my interests, as I have a long commute / strenuous workout / extended stretch in solitary confinement I need to kill! How can I obtain this show?

A: How can’t you get it? Let’s count the ways! You can:

Mutations, or: Turn And Face The Strange

When Amanda and I got back from San Diego Comic-Con in July, 2011, we were both kinda at loose ends. Amanda had just been turned down for a promotion for the second time, and I was in a new day job that I hated so much that, when a minor earthquake hit Boston just a month later, I fled the building as soon as I felt the floor shake without telling anyone, secretly hoping that an aftershock would knock the building to the ground, killing all my co-workers and forcing me to find some, any, better gig.

It was in the days after we got home from SDCC that Amanda suggested that maybe we could start a comics podcast, leveraging our knowledge in our favorite hobby, so at least we felt we were doing something that wasn’t a terrible day job. The idea was awesome at its face – I had worked in radio in the past, and Amanda and I had both worked as stand-up comedians, so talking into a mike to entertain strangers wasn’t a foreign or scary idea – but we had no equipment to record a podcast, nor a place on the Internet to host one.

After about a month and a half, Amanda convinced me to stake out some Internet real estate to host the show, and Crisis On Infinite Midlives was born. When we launched, we still didn’t have podcasting equipment, so we decided to start out as a regular comics Web site.

And at the start, it was awesome. We both had the benefit of working jobs we didn’t care about, so we could write two or three articles a day. And while eventually we did get some gear to record podcasts, it turned out that the process we’d chosen to be more than onerous: we’d record the thing while half-drunk, then immediately listen to it while totally drunk to see if it was any good, and then anally edit out every pause and cough before releasing it. It meant that every one hour show required me to listen to the horrifying sound of my own voice for another three or four hours, which, if you’ve never tried it, is simply awful. It was nothing like radio, when I’d crack the mike, open my mouth, and then close the mike with a shrug and a, “Well, that happened. What’s next?”

So we kinda let the podcast fade, but Amanda and I made the commitment to post at least one thing to the site every day. But here’s the problem with that kind of commitment: when you eventually get a new and better job, and your partner finally gets that promotion, and eventually a little kitten requiring care and play moves into your house, well, that once-a-day commitment becomes damn hard.

And if you are one of the few readers who has become a regular, you’ve see how that extra difficulty has affected the site. It’s been quite a while since we posted more than one article in a day, and it’s been damn near two months since we’ve posted a comic book review. And that’s because there’s just no time anymore; Amanda works late more often that not, and I have to take care of our mascot Parker The Kitten, and when it’s all said and done well… let’s just say that comic book reviews generally take me two to three hours to write. And those are hours I just don’t have anymore.

But in the meantime, what we have learned is that we don’t need to record podcasts the way we did at the start. Not only could we record them live to tape (the way we have since we reintroduced the podcast a couple of months ago), thus simulating live radio and comedy and eliminating the wretched need to keep listening to the show until we’re convinced it sucks, but we learned that we can do other nifty stuff that we’ll be setting up and unveiling in the coming months.

And more importantly: we now have a lot of fun doing the podcast, whereas we currently need to struggle for one of us to free up an hour here or an hour there to try and write something every day. Which has led is to a decision…

…Crisis On Infinite Midlives can no longer guarantee to post written content every day. We will be, effective immediately, focusing on producing and improving our podcast.

We are not giving up on written content; after all, SDCC 2014 is coming, and we will likely post some write-ups and post some photos… but we will also be producing and posting short podcasts from the field, hopefully with some cool audio and special guests to make listening worth your while.

To those readers who’ve been with us for the past few years: thank you. And we hope you’ll check in now and again to see new written content, while still giving our podcast a chance.

You can directly subscribe to our show here, or subscribe to it via iTunes here. As we set up other ways to find the show, we’ll let you know here.

Thanks again for sticking with us for the past few years, and we hope you’ll give our Internet radio show a chance; we post a new episode every Sunday.

And now, for tradition’s sake (and not for the last time…)

…see you later, suckers!

On The Road Again

We are traveling today for the purposes of recording a new episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast, so we will be dark most of the day.

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

What You Want…Might Be At The Bar – AKA Broadcast Day

Hi folks,

So, funny story, we went to our local comic book store, as we do every Wednesday. The extremely helpful staff, who know us by name and ask us not to frighten the “norms” that have popped in with increased regularity since Winter Soldier became more than a euphemism for a frigid play date, gave us our books and sent us on our merry way. We stopped into the bar…and that’s where I consumed a bottle of something red and, upon emerging into Twilight (the transitive daylight state, not the shitty movie), forgot half our take on a hanger under said bar. My take involved something involving Batgirl 30 and Superman/Wonder Woman…some number. They both have the cool retro covers that DC wants to make a thing for publicity. I also got the new issue of Deadpool, which involves the “Original Sin” storyline and has Dazzler on the cover. I have no idea what its about but, 8 out of 10 – cover has Dazzler, will reach for again Marvel.

Rob has been dispatched to the bar to rectify my inebriated wrongs.

However, Rob, being more accustomed to remembering what to keep track of in the bar – seriously, I usually just look out for me and roofies – brought his stash safely home. So, even if he is not successful on my behalf, that means that we have things to read this week. Behold:

Like tears…in…rain…

Campers, you know this means the end of of our broadcast day.

And, what made it home? Kieron Gillen’s Uber #14. The Amazing Spider-Man “Learning To Crawl” #1.2 by Dan Slott. Dead Letters by Christopher Sebela. Are you reading Dead Letters? You should totally be reading Dead Letters. Anyway, those books and more as you can see from my blurry cell phone photo, which totally had nothing to do with my hands shaking or anything.

You all know the drill: before we can talk about them, we have to read them. Which means that this is the end of our broadcast day.

Tune in later this week for our thoughts.

They may even be coherent.