Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 13: The Fist Of Rhino

Yes, we know, it’s been a couple of weeks since our last podcast, but we have a good excuse: we were drunk we were busy catching up on the latest in pop culture and comics after a weekend pretending we were still young reintroducing ourselves to classic video games!

So we are tan, rested and ready to talk about the biggest comics and geek events of the past week! Including:

• A discussion of a weekend spent playing video games at the American Classic Arcade Museum at the Funspot Arcade in Laconia, NH
• A talk about the highs (Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man) and lows (Jamie Foxx as Electro) of The Amazing Spider-Man 2
• A dissection of the upcoming death of Wolverine, why it feels empty and corporate, why most recent comic book death stories feel the same, and a few comic book death stories that break that mold (and why)
• A review of Jason Aaron’s and Jason Latour’s Southern Bastards, how it feels like a modern High Noon, and how it plays into (and stymies) views of the South from a couple of inveterate yankees
• Quick discussion of DC’s Futures End Free Comic Book Day release, and Batman: Eternal #4

And, as usual, here are the disclaimers:

• This episode was recorded live to tape, which means that there may be more dead air, ill-advised language, and “ummmms” than you are used to in your standard comics / pop culture podcast
• This show uses explicit and profane language, and is not safe for work. If you have the choice between listening to this show on speakers and being reprimanded for faking a disability for wearing an earplug to listen to this show? Take the write-up. Sure, your hearing-impaired co-workers will give you the stinkeye tomorrow, but at least you’ll still be employed to see it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:48 — 66.7MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

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!

Hey, Kids! Comics! Witnessing Free Comic Book Day

Despite being inveterate comic books geeks here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, I don’t think we’ve ever actually gone to a comic book store on Free Comic Book Day. We missed the first one, on May 4, 2002, because we had spent the night before driving around Boston looking for a theater that was showing Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie that wasn’t sold out before finally catching a late show in Cambridge and then closing out our local bar, drinking and babbling excitedly at how Raimi really captured the visual style of the character. The only way were were gonna make it to a comic store the day after that would be if they were also selling the chick drinks I would have needed to stop the screeching pain in my head without making me throw up.

Besides, there wasn’t a hell of a lot on that first Free Comic Book Day to bring me into the store. There was a reprint of Ultimate Spider-Man #1, a reprint of an issue of Greg Rucka’s Queen And Country, a copy of Justice League Adventures and a couple of other books… but I already had most of those comics. Let’s face reality: Free Comic Book Day hasn’t, historically, been an event for people like me. The point of the event has always been to use the publicity surrounding the release of whatever superhero flick that, by 2002, was inevitably gonna come out in May, to draw new readers into the art form that inspired those movies. And that art form had made me its bitch 27 years before some poor Hollywood costumer had to puzzle out how to hide Tobey Maguire’s junk in those spandex pants.

Further, and this is not meant as a slam, but my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to remember that attempts to leave the store with freebies will be followed with pepper spray, is not known for holding any kind of event. I love the place, which has a huge selection of new books and back issues as well as a ton of pop culture paraphernalia, but in the 13 years I have been a regular customer there, there has never been a creator signing. Or a reading. Or a panel discussion. Or a gaming night. There was one sale, once, but that was when a lost lease led to a move down the block, and the owner didn’t feel like hauling all his shit to the new address. And even though I remind him that that sale led to my finally buying the entire original First Comics run of American Flagg! and my Glenn Fabry-inspired John Constantine statue, I doubt there will be a recurrence any time soon.

So I’ve never seen much point in heading to the comic store on Free Comic Book Day, since it happens on a Saturday (and I’d always had that week’s new comics on Wednesday) and I didn’t anticipate much of anything going on there. But today, Amanda and I were out for lunch at a new restaurant down the street from the comic store, so we decided to swing in to see what was happening and maybe grab one of two of the free books, and…

Holy shit.

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.

You Will Believe A Man Can Crawl – Spider-Man Fan Parkour Video

How does Spider-Man get around when he runs out of his precious bodily web fluid? Why, parkour of course!

In this video, Ronnie Shalvis, who you may remember from the Assassin’s Creed themed parkour training videos, suits up in an actual, official, Sony Studios Spidey costume and demonstrates for the world what might have happened if Peter Parker got his nose out of his books, blew off the Oscorp field trip, and went outside and got some fresh air…but was still obsessed with dressing up in red and blue jammies.

Check out the “Making Of” video, after the jump.

Your Circuit’s Dead, There’s Something Wrong

Yeah, so, long story short: there’s no podcast tonight. Life got in the way again, and we have learned that we simply need to record this thing on Sundays… and to plan our Sundays to make sure we can record them. Because terrible distractions happen on weekdays. Distractions like day jobs. And the cat. And the day job of the cat. Which is also a night job. And an afternoon job. Parker The Kitten is a cruel and unforgiving taskmaster, is what I’m saying.

So throw today’s travails on top of the fact that we will be unable to tape tomorrow because we will not only be attending an advance screening of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but we will be attending it with the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to remember that not everything that shoots sticky goo is a “web shooter”, and it looks like there won’t be a new show until this weekend.

So we feel shame that, not only are we a week behind in our podcast, but we are so under the gun that we don’t have time for a new comic day review. But there are new comics today, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there are some long awaited comics in that pile, man. We’ve got the first Peter Parker-headed comic book since 2012 in The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (not the particular comic book with that number I’ve wanted since I was five years old, but still very, very decent), the official return of Wally West to the DC Universe in The Flash Annual #3, a new issue of Dream Police by J. Michael Straczynski, which is the sequel to a 2005 one-shot drawn by Mike Deodato that was powerful enough that I literally got chills when I saw this new issue almost nine years later, a new issue of Kieron Gillen’s Uber (which, after the last issue, I could not wait to see), and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know the drill: before we can talk about them (and we will talk about them in a podcast this weekend, along with the Star Wars casting and possibly the new Spider-Man movie), we need time t read them. So for now…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

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.

Rise From Your Grave: Another Visit To The American Classic Arcade Museum

So have you heard the urban legend about when Atari buried about a million copies of the E. T.: The Extra Terrestrial in a hole in the desert? The rumor is that Atari whipped out the E. T. video game in about six weeks to make the almighty Christmas dollar, and when the game turned out to be a giant, buggy, stinking pile of shit (that part’s not a rumor; I borrowed the game from a buddy back in sixth grade for a weekend, and have never been so happy that I didn’t spend my own allowance on something) that no one wanted to buy, Atari’s management sent truckloads of of the game to the middle of the desert, under cover of darkness, to drop in a dark hole to take as some kind of filthy tax write-off.

It’s an event that, while a lot of people thought it was apocryphal, is widely considered to be the beginning of the end of the original era of classic video games. Within a couple of years, the Atari 2600 and 5200 had gone down (along with ColecoVision, which was the biggest and most advanced competitor for the home video game throne until people just stopped giving a shit) and video arcades began a long, slow decline to take a place in Americana with the drive-in movie theater: an institution that once was everywhere, but that now you need to really hunt for.

And it all started with an alleged hole in the desert, dug by a company that did something that the full weight and power of the United States Government was unable to do: kill E. T.

Or at least it was an alleged hole. This weekend, a group of documentary filmmakers successfully found that hole in an Alamogordo, NM landfill and unearthed a bunch of copies of the E. T. cartridge, thereby bringing to light the end of the first golden age of video games.

And it is purely by coincidence that the bulk of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives staff made our semi-annual visit to the American Classic Arcade Museum at the Funspot Arcade in Laconia, NH, to get back a taste of the meaty days of that first golden age.

Down In An Internet Hole

Most of the staff of Crisis On Infinite Midlives is traveling today, and disturbed to find ourselves in a place with a drought of Internets.

I am posting this from my phone, in the very, very sketchy 1G sticks of northern New England wireless connectivity. If you can call it that.

We will be back in service tomorrow with photographs of our adventure, and will then resume our regularly scheduled programming.