It’s Always Darkest: Batman Vs. Superman Gets Proper Title, Which Could Be Worse

We’re a little late to the party with this one, what with our day jobs and commitments and congenital drinking problems, but Batman Vs. Superman has an official title and promo image. The promo image is at the top left. The title is Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.

And then the Internet blew up.

Seriously: people I have known for years and respect have taken to Twitter to complain about almost every aspect of the title. One guy complained that Superman didn’t have top billing. Another guy bitched that they were using a “v” instead of a “vs.” or a full-on “versus.” I’ve seen gags revolving around “Tony Orlando of Justice.” Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show @Midnight started a hashtag, #BetterBatmanSuperman, implying that Joe Blow from Falmouth could come up with a better title.

And maybe they could. Because honestly, it’s not that great a title. But it’s not the worst title in the world, either.

Nothing Wrong I Can’t Fix With My Hands: Kevin Smith On Zack Snyder’s Batman Suit

So recently, Batman Vs. Superman director Zack Snyder tweeted a photo of Ben Affleck in the Batman suit for the upcoming movie. And while some of us who are actual comics fans might have seen some similarities in the suit to some other earlier comics works, there were just as many people who said, “Meh; it’s just another one-color Batman suit, just like in the Christopher Nolan flicks. And the Tim Burton movies. And the ones by what’s-his-face, that nipple-obsessed pederast.”

And certainly, that single photo that most of us have seen points toward that kind of design… but most of us have only seen the one photo posted to the public Internets by Snyder, who is known to like fucking around with visuals, whether or not it’s actually a good idea.

But there is one man not involved with the actual production who has seen a photo of the costume: Kevin Smith, the director of Clerks, host of podcast Fatman on Batman, and the guy who cast Affleck in Chasing Amy, which led Hollywood producers to see him as something other than his character in Dazed And Confused, i.e.: a paddle-obsessed pederast (I’m detecting a common theme here).

Smith has been saying for months that he’s seen the Batman suit, and based on his descriptions, we weren’t expecting another one-color Batman costume. Well, Smith has made a few more comments about the costume he saw on his Hollywood Babble-On podcast (transcribed by ComicBook.com), and in doing so, confirmed some things that many long-time comic fans already suspected from the first black and white photo.

The New Guardians Of The Galaxy Trailer Because, What The Hell? You Haven’t Got That Long A Life Span Anyway

As we mentioned the other day when the teasers rained down upon us from Marvel Marketing, today is the day that a brand new full length Guardians Of The Galaxy trailer would drop. And they are true to their word.

However, as cool as the new trailer is, I can’t help but wonder how much more impact it would have had if the teasers hadn’t been released. Although, they did keep some choice bits for the trailer proper, that screen shot to the left up there being one of them. Bradley Cooper’s animated raccoon is going to fight Chris Pratt for every laugh in this movie. I say, bring it on.

Teaser, Trailer, Promo, Hype – Marvel Releases Teasers To Promote GOTG Trailer

On Monday, Marvel Studios will release a new trailer for The Guardians Of The Galaxy. In order to get you excited about that, they have released not on but two (!) teasers to get you ready for it.

So, are you ready for it?

Here’s one:

And we have the other, after the jump.

I Shall Become A Wicked Pisser Bat: First Photo of Affleck as Batman in Batman Vs. Superman

So we’ve been hearing about Zack Snyder’s upcoming Batman Vs. Superman since last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, where director Zack Snyder announced the flick by having an actor read Batman’s internal dialogue from when he defeated Superman in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. And since then, we have been excited by reports that Snyder has met with Miller to discuss the movie, and, depending on your point of view, have been dismayed or excited about Ben Affleck being cast as Batman.

And other than some other casting news, there hasn’t been a ton of news about the movie (other than the fact that we’re apparently gonna see Wonder Woman and Cyborg at least in this flick). And that drought continued today, when Zack Snyder pissed away his bully pulpit on Twitter to talk about his new fucking digital camera.

Huh. Okay.

I Am Akira: Akira Project Releases Live Action Trailer

I went to my first comic book convention in 1990, when I was 19 years old. It in no way resembled the comic book conventions I currently attend; it was in a small function room on the second floor of a hotel in Boston’s Chinatown, and was packed with nothing but dealers from local comic stores, with big plywood backboards of rare and old comics that my college student ass wouldn’t be able to afford until he hit 40 years old (and by then, inflation would mean that I still wouldn’t be able to afford them).

There was one exception: there was, as there is at every comic convention in the free world, a table covered in bootleg videos. At the time they were all on hand-Sharpied VHS cassettes, but they had some cool shit. Like Die Hard 2, a couple of days before the movie even opened in theaters (the purchase of which got me so much high school girl tail that summer)…

And Akira, which at the time, I’d never heard of. It wasn’t released in my southeastern Massachusetts town, and it wasn’t really available on commercial video cassette at the time. The dude running the bootleg table was showing the movie on a TV in the background, and I’d never seen animation like that before.

I wound up buying the flick purely based on what I saw on that 19-inch TV screen, and fell in love with the movie. I am not what you’d call a big anime fan, but I have the original DVD special edition of Akira that came out in the early 2000s, in the aluminum clamshell case. I have the MacFarlane Toys Kaneda action figure and his motorcycle displayed on my living room book shelf. I have all six volumes of the Dark Horse Comics English reprint of the original manga (and a bunch of issues of the Epic Comics color reprint of the same series from the late 80s). And I have a print of the original movie poster framed and hanging in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Studio.

These are all reasons why I, like many people, have been ambivalent at best and angry at worst about the repeating reports that studios are working on a live action adaptation of Akira. Particularly when those rumors included the casting of Keanu Reeves. Why? I will allow you to insert your own “Tetsu – whoa!” joke here, because I am a classy man.

When that version of the movie went down, no tears were shed here, and we hoped that no one would take on the task of a live action Akira movie again. However, while the studio project has been in turnaround, some people running something called The Akira Project raised some crowdfunding cash to put together a live action Akira trailer. Which they have completed. And for which I had no hope.

Until I saw it. And. Holy. Shit.

Nothing From Nothing Means…: Star Wars Day Video From J. J. Abrams And Lawence Kasdan, And Star Wars: Rebels Trailers

So it is Star Wars Day because of a vagary of pronunciation (if Ben Kenobi had talked about the august of heaven, we’d be doing parking lot lightsaber duels in much more humid temperatures), which is something that would generally mean less than nothing beyond an excuse to fire up the Blu-Rays of the original trilogy while drinking White Russians with blue food coloring dripped into them.

But this is the first Star Wars Day in a decade where there’s a Star Wars movie actually in production, which means that today of all days, there is an expectation that we will hear something from the people producing that movie about the movie in question. And, true to expectations, a video was posted to YouTube by Star Wars: Episode VII director J. J. Abrams and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. And thanks to that video, we have learned something important!

That thing being that Abrams and Kasdan are aware of Star Wars Day, and that they understand that they should acknowledge it to the fans, left they face shock and damage!

X-Men: Days Of Future Past – The Final Promo Push

Hi, all. The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office took itself out to see The Amazing Spider-Man 2 last night. We will discuss it on an upcoming podcast soon but, the quick review? Pretty good…if you ignore a whole bunch of stuff.

Meantime, the next Marvel character based movie to hit the big screen, X-Men: Days Of Future Hype Past, has dropped three character-centric promos in advance of its debut in theaters on May 23. We’ll put the first one up front and center because it features Peter “The Dink” Dinklage, continuing to find himself in a situation where he needs the protection of a sell sword. Hopefully, Sentinels will have to do.

Check out the other two, and a bonus credit footage clip from last night’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, after the jump.

Family Reunion: Cast of Star Wars: Episode VII Announced

Yeah, I know we were gonna release a podcast today, but a couple of unexpected things got in the way. The first being that Amanda, my co-host and co-editor, is still trapped at her day job. The second being that the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Mascot, Parker The Kitten, is inconsolable because Amanda is not here, and is displaying his displeasure in his normal reasonable way: by attempting to destroy everything we love.

So right now we intend to record and release a late episode of the podcast tomorrow (we won’t be talking about any particular comics since we won’t have had a chance to read the new books, but we’ll address a couple on the planned, regularly-scheduled weekend episode.

And we will be addressing this little news item in a little more detail on the next episode as well: the main cast of Star Wars: Episode VII was announced today.

Big News, Bigger Monsters: Godzilla Featurette Released

While we were busy at the American Classic Arcade Museum, pretending that the end of the world would come from the bottom of a vector graphics tube, or perhaps in the form of an orderly stack of marching aliens that mutter, “Dun DUN Dun DUN” while firing missiles so powerful that even gravity doesn’t change their velocity (because Force equals Mass times Fuck You Gravity I’ll Get There When I’m Ready), there was a of comics news that came out of Chicago’s C2E2 convention.

There was the announcement from Marvel that we’re about to learn about a second person who was bitten by the spider that gave Peter Parker his powers, and the other announcement that Wolverine is about to die (and unlike every other comic book character who isn’t Uncle Ben, Logan is really and truly gonna stay dead you gais!!!1!), and then there was the news that Zack Snyder has already been signed to direct Justice League immediately after he’s done with Batman Vs. Superman. And these are all things that we want to talk about… and we will, when we record our podcast tomorrow. Yes, I know we are already a day late on releasing it, but we are still half dead from playing stand-up arcade games for eight hours at a time, and the Home Office Mascot, Parker the Kitten, is still exacting vengeance for our 72 hour absence by demanding constant and exhausting play.

So while we gather our thoughts on these weighty matters for honest discussion (and dick jokes – a J’onn J’onzz vs. J’onn T’omazz gag is never far from my lips) tomorrow, we will instead move to simpler matters of giant monsters and mass destruction with no possibility of superhuman intervention: Godzilla, to be precise. The movie opens on May 16th in the United States (and on May 14th or May 15th across most of the rest of the civilized world), which means that Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures are putting the publicity machine into overdrive.

The most recent release is a short featurette on the flick, which features some quotes from Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Olsen… which means that you can forget what I said about superhuman intervention a paragraph ago. Godzilla is doing battle with Walter White and The Scarlet Witch, yo. With that kind of opposition, Godzilla won’t have the time to throw a tidal wave in a bathtub.

Either way, you can check out the video after the jump.