Flash Must Zoom: Extended Flash Trailer Teases 80’s Character Elements. Maybe.

So last night, during the Arrow season finale, they showed the first teaser trailer for The Flash, which will be starring this season’s Arrow guest star Grant Gustin reprising his role as Barry Allen, only with a much larger paycheck and a spiffy new red body condom.

What’s that? You were busy watching the Boston Bruins get knocked out of the NHL playoff last night, and therefore you were too busy crying to catch the Arrow finale? Well, here you go.

Not a bad job, as teasers go: it focuses on the character whose show you’re currently watching, it ties the two characters together into a shared universe, and it gives Flash a sense of fun that was missing from the pulpy, hard-boiled first season of Arrow.

But still, it doesn’t exactly do much besides show off the costume and give an idea of what Flash’s power effects might look like in action. It certainly doesn’t tell you anything about the show itself, beyond the fact that the lead guy seems to be having a blast with his superpowers. And that he has a taste in red leather that would make him very, very popular in certain niche adult Web communities.

Well, the good news is that The CW has released an extended trailer for the show… and there is a lot to be excited about. Particularly if you are a fan of old school, just post-Crisis, Mike Baron Flash.

Diversionary Tactics

It is a strange night here in Boston. For the sports geeks, there is the Boston Bruins battling against the Montreal Canadiens in game seven of a playoff series to see who goes on to play for the Stanley Cup. This is a series that has captured the imaginations of many Bostonians, whether they care about hockey or not… but I am not one of them. I have lived here long enough to understand the long-time rivalry, but my geography will not make me pretend to be a hockey fan. Unlike the Indian kid at the Dunkin’ Donuts I stopped at on the way home from the comic store, who responded to my report that “The Habs are up by one,” with rolled eyes and an exasperated, “I asked about the Bruins / Canadiens game!”

And for the standard geeks, there is the warm glow we are still operating under having seen Agent Coulson use that shoulder cannon to actually wipe out a bad guy in last night’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., mixed with the new glow of the season finale of Arrow, which will include the first trailer for the fall debut of The Flash, which we determined during last week’s podcast would be the most likely comic TV show to fail (The 1990 Flash show failed with no genre competition while the comic version was fresh off Mike Baron’s groundbreaking run that made The Flash compelling for the first time in my life, so I can’t imagine a superpowered version of CSI is gonna do much better).

The bottom line is that there is a lot of distracting shit going on this evening. But this is why we went to our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop demanding that all sports be played by athletes with access to the Super Soldier Serum (and with katanas), early. Which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

Still, there are some solid books in there. We’ve got the second issue of DC’s Future’s End, the first issue of Justice League United, the first issue of Powers: Bureau creative team of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s and artist Michael Avon Oeming’s The United States of Murder, Inc., a new issue of Robert Kirkman’s and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can address any of them, we need to pretend to know what icing is, that we have hope for The Flash, and still take time to read the books. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

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.

Once A Smoker: NBC’s Constantine Trailer Released

We talked a bunch about the upcoming Constantine TV show during this week’s podcast, but at the time we didn’t have a lot of information about the show, like what day it would be on and when it might debut.

Well, since we taped the show, site contributor Trebuchet brought to our attention that NBC has released a trailer for the show that answers a couple of questions about the show. Such as the fact that it looks like it will be debuting in the fall, and it will be airing on Fridays with Grimm (probably taking the place of Dracula).

Further, it seems that John’s first botched misadventure in Newcastle where he damned Astra’s soul to hell and got himself committed to Ravenscar will be part of continuity. However, it also seems that a big chunk of the show will be spent dealing with Americans, which were always the weakest issues of the comic book.

I have one or two other observations, but I’ll reserve them until you watch the trailer, which you can find right after the jump.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 14: Scooby Gang From Ikea

My God, it’s a miracle: we’re actually releasing a new podcast on our regularly-scheduled Sunday! Sure, we had to tape it on Saturday to get it done, and during a time when we were forced by circumstance to remain sober while we did it, but what the hell; it’s a small price to pay for being able to rant about comics and pop culture on a predictable schedule.

In this week’s episode, we discuss:

• Television! Particularly, the announcements this week that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was renewed (and whether or not that is a good thing), and the announcements that various networks have picked up season orders of Agent Carter, Gotham, iZombie, Constantine, and Flash, and which shows we think might be good or horrible, depending on their direction
• Moon Knight #3, written by Warren Ellis with art by Declan Shalvey
• Miles Morales, The Ultimate Spider-Man #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by David Marquez, and
• Why you should never allow a kitten into a recording studio when you are, you know, recording.

And, a few notes (and please let us know in the comments if we mentioned something obscure and forgot to include it here):

• The “Maurissa” whose name we were trying to remember was Maurissa Tancharoen, one of the showrunners for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• When we talk about Beacon Hill and Dorchester, you might not know that Beacon Hill is a Boston neighborhood populated almost exclusively by people who use the word “summer” as a verb, and Dorchester is a place where you go to witness or participate in a knife fight (it is the home neighborhood of Mark Wahlberg, so you know almost nothing good has come from there)

Finally, the nitty gritty pseudo-legalese:

• This show may contains spoilers, and it may spoil something with no warning whatsoever (although we make an effort to chuck a “spoiler alert!” in now and again)
• This show was recorded live to tape and is unedited, so there may be more “ums”, pregnant pauses, and vile, ill-advised humor than you are used to from your everyday comics / pop culture podcast
• This show includes the use of explicit and profane language, and is most decidedly not safe for work. Unless you have the kind of job that requires you to know what a “Tunguska Reacharound” is, in which case, listen away and feel free to tell your pimp that we think you deserve a larger cut of the take.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08:18 — 62.6MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

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.

Your Mother

Our content management system is advising us that we are well behind on regular site maintenance, and it is doing it at a hell of a time: Mothers’ Day is this Sunday, which, despite the number of people who call us “motherless pig dogs,” still requires us to pay tribute to the women who, had they the ability to see 43 years into their future in 1971, probably still wouldn’t have aborted us. Probably.

This means that, if we are going to record a new podcast episode tomorrow, we need to perform these maintenance actions and upgrades tonight and tomorrow morning, so we have time and a stable platform upon which to record, and to give us time to stuff our mothers full of enough steak to forget that they wanted to talk about our siblings and their wills.

So please bear with us while we perform regular maintenance. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Love’s Labour Lost: No Badge Resale For San Diego Comic-Con 2014

We’ve written more than once about the Herculean, if not Sisyphean, effort it takes to attend San Diego Comic-Con these days. The Hercules metaphor is probably more accurate, since between pre-registration, registration, hotel registration and assorted travel and vacation time booking, the steps you need to complete to make it to the show approach Twelve Labours. However, for many people the Sisyphus analogy is more apropos, because when it comes to Comic-Con, if you make a single misstep, the rock will roll right back down over you.

With that said, there has always been one final chance for all comers to attend Comic-Con: the final badge resale. For the past few years, what has happened is that, once the first cancellation deadline for hotel rooms passed (which happened on April 30th this year) and the convention badge refund date has gone by, the nice folks who run the convention sell the returned badges to desperate people who haven’t been able to navigate the process fully successfully.

So that’s nice, isn’t it? No matter what happens leading up to the final date, everyone gets one last bite at the apple to attend the biggest pop culture convention of the year. So that final badge resale should be happening any day now, right?

Yeah, not this year.

Wounded In Action

I fully intended to review the first issue of Original Sin by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato today – a story about one of the most cosmic of Marvel’s characters being killed by being shot in the face like a common corner dope dealer, drawn by an artist known for going almost photorealistic, is too absurd to not be at least kinda fun – but once again, it was one of those days.

The day started before six a.m., when I was gently roused from sleep by Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office Mascot Parker The Kitten (see above left), who said, “good morning!’ by slapping me awake with paws that really need to have their claws trimmed.

From there, I embarked on a frantic early morning cleanup to clear the decks for the house cleaning service – it sounds counter-intuitive, but if you don’t pick up, the maids will clean around the empty beer bottles, which would mean that we would have paid a hundred clams for a stranger to scrub a single square inch near the coffee table.

Then there was a good hour trying to distract the cat from the maids’ vacuum cleaner by gently massaging the tips of his claws with my hands, wrists and face. Then off to the day job, where I tried to convince a SQL database that I was its master by attacking it with my hands, wrist and face. Then, since my co-Editor Amanda is working late again, it was home to amuse the cat in a surprisingly familiar fashion (I’m in constant, terrible pain!) and by that time, well, things had gone sideways on me.

But there was a brief window in there where there was a trip to the local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop accosting the paying clientele with woeful tales of pussies and gashes, And that means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And this was one of those weeks at the comic store where it looks like it’s gonna be a light week when you look at your pulls, but once you do a lap of the shelves, you discover you’ve grabbed about five pounds of comics. We’ve got Original Sin #1, Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man #1 (marking the fourth reboot of that title since 2000, and the second since this Web site started in 2011), a new issue of Miracleman (now polybagged due to adult content, marking a depressing step backwards since the book was originally published by Eclipse in the 80s), a new Moon Knight written by Warren Ellis, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can talk about any of them, we need time to disinfect these damn wounds, and then we need time to read them. So until that time…

…see you tomorr-OW! Dammit, Parker!

Ill Communication: DC Comics Looking For Readers To Take Survey

So didja ever wish you could make your opinions about what’s happening at a major comic book publisher known without having to go to the onerous lengths of writing a strongly worded letter, tazing Dan DiDio at a comic convention, or starting and maintaining a comics Web site for nearly three years?

Well, here’s your chance. DC Comics is asking readers to complete a survey (the first one we’ve heard about since just after the New 52 reboot in 2011) addressing, among other things, whether they like to read stories about smart heroes versus superpowered heroes, well-known characters versus more obscure characters, and who your favorite superhero is.

Of course, they will also ask you whether you like to buy reproductions of superhero costumes, and if you like buying ancillary merchandise related to particular superheroes. So clearly the comics aren’t the only research priority for this survey.

But with that said, I am going to recommend that you complete it anyway. Because if you do, you will be eligible for some freebies and discounts, including a free comics digital download, a digital skin for the Infinite Crisis video game, or most enticing (if you are the type to be interested in the superhero merchandise questions of the survey): a 10% off coupon code for purchases at the DC Entertainment shopping site that’s good until the end of the year.

Further, if we do this survey right, we will soon be able to buy an official Wild Dog replica jock strap. Which will mean that I will have won an under bet that I placed in my high school lunch room in 1988.

So help DC, help comics, help yourself… and help me make Paul from Drama Club have to wear a dress at Boston’s First Night New Year’s Eve festival while shouting, “I am the night! I am upside down! I am suppurating with herpes! I am… Bat Wang!”

Take the survey. Make your – and Paul’s – voice heard.