Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 10: The Fist of Rebirth

I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Jesus Christ, Rob! A podcast? How timely! Only almost exactly 23 months after your last podcast! You’re a Goddamned radio machine, you guys are!”

True, true… but we just came back from watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which we enjoyed the hell out of, and decided that rather than just sit in a bar and talk about it, we’d dust off the old microphones and mixer and do it for public consumption. Hell, we liked podcasting… but what we never liked was recording one, then listening to it and taking notes on what editing and post-production we wanted, then taking another two hours and actually, you know, doing those edits and post-production, before finally uploading the damned thing.

So we tried something a little different today: we just sat down, shot the s**t about the movie for about half an hour, slapped the intro and bed music onto it, and uploaded it. This is live to tape, boys and girls; as you hear it is how we said it, awkward pauses, “um”s, and everything. But since that “everything” also includes fisting jokes, we hope it evens out.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Captain America: The Winter Soldier in general
• Black Widow, and how this is the first time it feels like she’s a character who could carry her own movie
• Deviations between the movie and Ed Brubaker’s original comic
• What effect this might have on ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• The post-credits sequences
• How the lack of laughter over a tombstone makes me weep for the state of movie-goers in general

And a bunch of other stuff we can’t remember because yeah: live to tape.

Here’s the usual disclaimer: this podcast is not safe for work. Further, we spoil a bunch of stuff from the movie, so if you haven’t seen it and want to remain pristine, give this a pass for now… but feel free to come back after you’ve seen it!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:36 — 33.5MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

This Godzilla Is A Major Problem For Us; It Will Ruin Our Batch: Godzilla Extended Trailer Released

Dear God, I can’t believe how little I cared about the reboot of Godzilla when I first heard about it at last year’s SDCC. With what I’ve seen since then, I feel shame.

I think part of my initial lack of interest was based on the fact that I hadn’t heard at the time that Bryan Cranston was starring in the flick. Sure, the 90s Roland Emmerich Godzilla flick had Matthew Broderick in it, who I’ve liked since I was a kid, but I think nobody realized at the time that ol’ Matt used up all his “The World Is Coming To An End!” pathos sometime between the end of principal photography for WarGames and when John Hughes told him he’d be headlining a Chicago parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Cranston, however, never lost his ability to project desperate doom and gloom. He did it in every third episode of Breaking Bad for years, so I can buy it when he sells that a giant thunder lizard is coming to eat our iPads. But more interesting to me is the fact that, when Cranston wasn’t selling not-so-quiet desperation in that TV series, he was showing us a man who would poison a fucking child to get out of a jam. And that is the kind of guy I want to see spearheading the battle against the Gus Fring of giant monsters. Hell, five’ll get you ten that the last scene of the flick is Godzilla coming ashore, only to meet Matthew Broderick in a wheelchair, frantically dinging a hotel desk bell. And then Honolulu will explode.

Why am I ranting about this? Because Warner Bros. just released an extended trailer for Godzilla, with not only more scenes of Cranston acting angrily pathetic, but of the monster fucking up the U. S. Navy. And you can check it out after the jump.

Fighting Until The Big Sleep: SDCC 2104 Hotel Reservations This Tuesday

San Diego Comic-Con has a weird system of guaranteeing admittance, if you think about it.

First it puts you through up to two different nervewracking and emotionally draining online sales just to obtain passes to be able to walk in the door. If you get those passes, then you need to obtain yourself transportation from wherever you’re at to San Diego, which really requires you to strike as soon as you know you have said passes. For example, if you’re heading to San Diego from Boston as we are, you have the choice of pre-booking one of exactly two non-stop flights ASAP while they’re not sold out, or you can try your luck at, say, Travelocity, to battle with strangers for a cut-rate seat with layovers in three different cities, one of which will be Baltimore, where, if you leave the airport, you will be killed. Which you will be okay with, because once you see that “pan pizza” in the gate area, you would rather risk violent death than eat it.

None of this sounds weird at face value. The weird part, however, is that you need to spend all that time and money just to get to Comic-Con, all without a place to, you know, sleep. Because the last thing that SDCC provides is hotel room sales, meaning that you could dump literally $1,500 to attend Comic-Con, all to arrive in San Diego and spend your first hours battling the local homeless for one of the park benches outside the train station.

We won’t be fighting for pine slats close to the Amtrak ticket booth, because we booked an emergency backup room about 10 days after we arrived home from last year’s SDCC. But we will be fighting with the rest of you on Tuesday, because that’s when the convention puts its reduced rate hotel rooms on sale.

Kinda. In the sense that you (and we) can battle for a certain spot on the waiting list for rooms to be sold once the sorting algorithm decides if you can have one or not.

Requiem: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #200 Review

I really enjoy the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, but I am always gonna have a soft spot for Peter Parker. Which, for a superhero comic fan, is about as controversial a statement as decrying Nazis, or perhaps coming down on the negative side of human trafficking, but it doesn’t make it any less true. Not only was the Ultimate version of Peter a pretty solid modernization of the character, while still keeping his core values and characterization, but it allowed we readers to see something we don’t normally get to see: the actual conclusion of the character’s story.

Sure, we get nods toward final stories with Marvel’s The End periodic series of books (and some of those are damn good) and in a few DC Elseworlds stories, but they’re never really final in a satisfying way. Because yeah, they’re endings, but then they, you know, end. And part of why any comics fan loves these stories is that they are ongoing. So while we sometimes see a beloved character go down, we don’t see the aftermath in a serious, ongoing way. But we got that with the death of Peter Parker in Ultimate Spider-Man almost three years ago, with the Death of Peter Parker, which was a really spectacular story. I recently reread the issue with Peter’s public memorial, and when the little girl asked Aunt May if she was Spider-Man’s mommy, and if she needed a hug? Jesus, if I could get my hands on whatever motherfucker was cutting onions in a room that dusty…

But that story concluded, and we moved on to Miles Morales, as comics do… but in real life, when someone gets killed, people don’t just yank up stakes and start paying attention to a new person, unless your name is Michael Peterson and you don’t mind explaining your weird behavior to members of the law enforcement community. In real life, those losses stick around for a while… and that brings us to Ultimate Spider-Man #200, which is a long reminiscence of Peter’s life, and shows how some of the regulars from the original series are doing. And while there isn’t any action and no current storylines are really affected, it’s damn nice to check in with Aunt May, Gwen Stacy, Mary Jane and some of the other former regulars on this title.

Unless you hate Brian Michael Bendis’s “guys sitting around a table talking” issues. Because then you’ll hate this.

The Best Laid Plans

Famous last words:

But before we can talk about any of them (and with God as my witness, we will try to talk about some of them), we need time to read them…

Yeah, that didn’t work, Make no mistake, there were some damn good comic books in the take last week – seeing the apparent return of Peter Parker in The Superior Spider-Man #30 was one of the more thrilling moments I’ve seen in a comic recently, so a high-five to writers Dan Slott and Christos Gage, and to Guiiseppe Camuncoli for that closing splash page – but good planning thwarted by an unexpected extended stay in a hospital emergency room put the skids on our ability to review any comics for the umpteenth week in a row.

Which is not a thing that we are proud of, and yet this week may not be any better. We already have scheduled a check-in visit with the person we spent last Saturday waiting on in the ER, and there’s the small matter of finding time to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier sometime before the weekend concludes. Plus, we’re still working on the capital improvements to the Home Office we recently mentioned that have been delayed by watching the incontinent gobble Jell-O, and as we speak our mascot, Parker The Kitten, is distracting my co-Editor Amanda by demanding she allow him to chase around a toy mouse on a wire, under the implied threat that otherwise he’ll chew all our electrical wires, leading to the discovery of a dead cat in a burning house.

But still, we promise to try. Because it is Wednesday, which means a clean slate. Unfortunately, it also means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

And even though it is a somewhat light take this week, there are some winners in there. There’s the 200th overall issue of Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Brian Michael Bendis with at least some art by Mark Bagley just like in the old days, a new issue of Action Comics (which has become actually really good since Greg Pak took over writing duties, the first issues of Inhuman and Aquaman And The Others (for some reason), and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff.

But before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need to calm this Goddamned cat down and eventually read them. So while we try to accomplish that…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Cyborgs And Mutants: Terminator Reboot, X-Men: Days of Future Past Videos Released

Let’s be real here: it is April 1st. And that means that you can’t trust a Goddamned thing that you read on this, or any other, Internet.

Just today I have seen stories that Reddit can hijack your webcam and allow you to scroll around by making hipster head nods. I have seen Google claim that you could take pictures of anything from a new kitten to a homegrown snuff film and have Pokemon appear in the photo. And in the comics realm, I have seen Brian Michael Bendis claim that Marvel and DC had buried their more than decade long agreement to disagree on crossover comics to bring back the much remembered and less-much loved Amalgam line of comics.

Bottom line: any words written on any Website between now and midnight tonight should be disregarded as bullshit. So in the interest of proving that we do not have mischief or shenanigans as a motive, we’re just gonna dispense with the words and go straight to whatever genre video we can present without looking like hamfisted amateur comedians.

So in that interest, here is the latest teaser for the upcoming Terminator reboot. It’s just a quick minute or so, and there’s a possibility that it’s just fan service (although the opening credits indicate it’s probably legit), but either way: you can check it out after the jump.

Hugh Jackman Sings!…About Wolverine

I’d like to make a couple things clear before I go any further in this post:

• Hugh Jackman was invited on BBC 1 Radio’s Matt Edmondson Show to plug X-Men: Days Of Future Past.
• Hugh Jackman was handed a set of lyrics to a parody of Les Miserables power ballad “Who Am I?”, which Jackman sang when he took a turn as Jean Valjean in the movie version, scripted as though sung by Wolverine.
• Hugh Jackman gets through the experience nicely and is a very good sport about the whole thing.

Watch.

That being said, Parker The Kitten, Official Office Mascot for Crisis On Infinite Midlives, reacted poorly to this video. Like, nosed my laptop closed, climbed on top of it (on my lap), and then scratched at the cover like he was trying to cover his own deuce in the cat box. To be fair, he also has that reaction to videos of howling puppies, Animal Planet footage of hyenas in the wild, and Bruce Springsteen. I don’t pretend to understand it, but, he’s got enough other adorable things going on that I’m willing to let it slide. Rob hid upstairs the entire time I screened Les Miz here at the home office, shrieking “Who am I? I not fucking drunk enough for this; that’s who I am! Why is Wolverine yelling at me? Where are my pants? Hey, do you smelling burning toast?” But, that’s just Monday around here. Your mileage may vary.

Via ComicBookMovie.com.

Happy Birthday, Batman, or: I Wish My Parents Were Still Alive

We need to keep things short again today – we spent a large chunk of yesterday at the hospital waiting for news about and the discharge of a member of one of our extended families who happened to fall ill while we were the only ones around. So after a Saturday evening spent in the emergency room of a major metropolitan hospital’s emergency room (which is where you meet not only the finest, but the cleanest and sanest, people) and a Sunday morning and afternoon spent watching said family member to make sure that the crisis had, in fact, passed, we are fucking fried.

But we are not too fried to acknowledge that today is a huge day in comic book history. Because it is today, March 30th, in 1939, that one of the most important comic books in history was first released for sale. That comic? Detective Comics #27.

The first appearance of Batman, yo.

Plans Are What Happens…

Due to an unforseen emergency, we are currently at a hospital, awaiting a family member’s discharge. So no new content today, unfortunately.

We should return to our regular broadcast schedule tomorrow.

Flickum Bicus: Dresden Files War Cry Announced

It might be hard to believe, given that we are big enough comic book fans here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives that we started a Website that is dedicated to comics, but we are, in fact, capable of reading books. You know, actual books. Ones with no pictures in them. And sometimes even ones that don’t feature superheroes. Although not often. Unless they’re written by Neal Stephenson. Which do feature a character named Hiro Protagonist. But that’s not the point right now.

The point is that we do read books… albeit usually genre books. And those genre books include Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. We became fans of the character, as many did, via the Sci-Fi Channel (you remember, back when “SyFy” actually showed, you know… sci-fi?) series starring Paul Blackthorne from Arrow. We became fans of the book, as many did, when I was at Logan Airport waiting for our flight to San Diego Comic-Con, realizing that I’d forgotten to pack a book to distract me from five hours of crippling nicotine fits, and finding Storm Front at the Hudson News near the gate.

So we have enjoyed the series of books (to the point where we own the Dresden Files roleplaying game, and will even play it when we have a spare hour here or there), and have enjoyed the Dynamite Comics adaptations of some of those books, except for the most part, the comics have been just that: adaptations. Meaning that we already know how those stories go and how they end, which mitigates some of the wonder of reading those comics.

But there’s a lot of time and activity that happens in between those novels that isn’t accounted for, and one would think that those periods would be a fertile groundwork for stories. And apparently, Butcher and Dynamite agreed, because at the currently-occurring Emerald City Comic Con, Dynamite has announced The Dresden Files: War Cry, which is an actual untold story of The Dresden Files… and which puts it high on our pull list.