You Have Suffered An Emotional Shock: Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit #1 Review

I’m gonna start my review of Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit by copping to the fact that I haven’t seen the rebooted Robocop movie that this comic book is based on. I probably will at some point, in the same way I saw the rebooted version of Total Recall: on cable while too shitfaced to operate my universal remote.

Look, I have established that I am a big fan of the original Robocop, and that I am not exactly thrilled to see a remake of that classic flick. With that said, I have heard a few decent reviews of the movie from sources I trust, so I don’t want to dismiss it completely out of hand, or allow my instinctive disdain for the idea of a new version of the Robocop character to overly color my opinion about this comic. Sure, the original Robocop was a genius mix of action, violence, satire and humor that I can’t imagine anyone improving on, but I imagine there were fans of Batman & Robin that hated the idea of the stylistic mindfucker who directed Memento sucking all the joy out of Batman. If you are one of those people, I hate you and everything you stand for and, oh yes, I will find you, but that’s not the point right now.

So I will try to approach this comic in the spirit that it really is about a character about which I know nothing. It’s certainly not my Robocop (and make no mistake, it really isn’t my Robocop), it’s just a character about a cyborg superhero working in a major American metropolis. So I tried to treat it like a completely new character, and judge it on those merits.

And on those merits? Yeah, it’s not all that great. Even considering it was impossible for me to really put aside the original Robocop.

“Fear Is the Mind Killer” And Other Truths

Rob swears he will put up that Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit review soon. I know he’s read it because it’s in the bathroom, although that might also be where he figures its contents belong. All I know is Parker The Kitten tried to carve his name into our leather couch last night, possibly in reaction to yesterday’s Wolverine Cat post. So, Rob is going to be preoccupied for much of this day using various leather products to buff that masterwork out. Therefore, I’m going to step in for the moment to share this video, via Topless Robot:

How’s your geek cred holding up? Were you able to identify where each of those very self-evident geek truths came from? Check your answers, after the jump.

Weapon X: Meet Wolverine Cat

So here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office in Boston, we are dealing with our third snowstorm in the past seven days. This means that we are trapped in here with nothing but a case of beer, a variety of processed food products, and our Walking Dead Blu-Rays to bone back up for the continuing back half of the fourth season.

Oh yeah: we also have a cat. Parker the Kitten has no idea that the reason we are home with him all the time is that we are also trapped like animals and starved for human contact. All he knows is that he has a prey drive that makes him want to kill, and we are the ones who drive the stuffed mouse that allows him to satisfy that drive enough to sit with us on the couch without trying to remove our eyes.

Which means two things: we are busy being run ragged by this little guy to the point it is hard to write and publish anything substantial (although after all my disparaging remarks about the new version of Robocop the other day, I promise to put up my review of Boom Studios Robocop: To Live and Die In Detroit tomorrow)… and this cat video really cut close to home.

It is the origin of “Wolverine Cat.” And it hits close to home because, since Parker has been all wound up, he has gone on a rampage that will require me place an order for a new Transformer tablet to replace the one (and the completely separate keyboard dock) that Parker has utterly destroyed in the past 24 hours.

(via Bleeding Cool)

Dry Wit: Jodorowsky’s Dune Trailer Released

These days, my primary love is comic books – well, it always has been, but in the life of an adult, one chooses one or two passions and then lets others slide to make sure there’s enough time to go to the day job to pay for those passions, and then sleep and maybe refine the revenge list.

But when I was younger, I was a rabid reader of science fiction. And not the normal young adult pabulum that passes for the science fiction kids read these days – I didn’t read Ender’s Game until I was 34, and when I was finished, I put it on the shelf and said, “Yeah, I saw it when it was called The Last Starfighter,” – but the big stuff. I was a huge Issac Asimov fan, snapped up William Gibson and John Steakley, and read Frank Herbert’s The White Plague back when Y: The Last Man was just a twinkle in Brian K. Vaughan’s eye.

But I found Herbert the way everyone else did: through Dune. Dune was one of my first science fiction obsessions, to the point where I am the proud owner of a first edition copy of The Dune Encyclopedia. Not because of years of hunting down a copy, but because I saved my allowance and bought a copy off the shelf when I was 14 years old. About a decade ago, I took part in a Boston geek-themed comedy show called The Grand High Council of All Things True, and one of the concluding questions was, “Who controls the spice?” I am told on went on a long a detailed rant about Paul Atreides, sandworms, the Kwisatz Haderach and the effect of water on the Little Makers that ended with me shrieking, “Eat shit and die!” at an audience of about 100 people. I say, “I am told this,” because I remember nothing about the evening, as I was ripped to the tits on melange. Or perhaps Sam Adams. There’s very little difference between the two in Boston. But I digress.

The point is that I love Dune but I hate the Dune movie. Why? Well, I’d start with the phrase “nipple plugs,” but no one needs me to go off on another rant.

The reality is that, back in 1974, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the guy who directed fucked-up midnight movie western El Topo, signed on to do an adaptation of Dune. These were the days of Logan’s Run and Silent Running, which means that the state of the art of special effects at the time could be surpassed by a child with a Google Chromebook and a Go Pro camera today.

The thing is, nobody told Jodorowsky that. The guy hired H. R. Giger to consult on designs (this was well before Alien came around to make Giger a geek design icon), he made a deal with Salvadore Dali to play the Emperor (provided Dali could show the Emperor taking a dump on camera), and basically designed a movie that was so huge in scope it probably couldn’t be filmed even today, since even the highest-end Makerbot can’t 3D-print mescaline.

It would have been a glorious thing to see, if he had somehow managed to put the thing together, even though it would have borne as much of a resemblance to Herbert’s original novel as the Denver Broncos bear to an actual football team. Alas, not a single frame was ever filmed, I’m guessing because investors weren’t convinced about the merchandise rights to make toys of Salvador Dali dropping a drug-fueled deuce into a toilet that looked like a dolphin.

However, all is not lost of the film. Director Frank Pavich has produced a documentary about the aborted flick (That might be a pun, as it’s entirely possible that Jodorowsky planned an abortion in the middle of the movie. If you’re gonna commission a golden dolphin toilet, you’re not gonna just use it in one scene, am I right?). Jodorowsky’s Dune is getting a theatrical release on March 21st, and the first trailer has been released. And if you’re a Dune fan, or just someone curious about how a science fiction film featuring “whore-ships driven By the sperm of passionate ejaculations In an engine of flesh,” might look, you can check it out after the jump.

Police Sketch: Francesco Francavilla’s True Detective Fan Art

Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, we have the full-boat cable TV package of all channels. This is because we are members of Generation X, which is the final generation to remember watching three channels of broadcast television as we waited for some cable TV provider to string coaxial to our doors. And even after the cable made it our door, many of us had the basic package while our peers saw tits and ass via Porky’s on HBO, because our parents were too cheap to subscribe to the good stuff. So now that we are adults, we not only get all the channels, but we tell our parents that we do and how much it costs. And we tell them that we’re finding the extra money in our “Mom and Dad Nursing Home” fund, so they know that when they’re slapped into a cut-rate home, they know it could have been avoided with a simple Skinemax subscription in 1983.

Not only do we have all the cable channels, but we have a top-of-the-line TiVo – not the cheapjack cable company no-name DVR like my parents use to try to save a few bucks to stave off the inevitable transfer into a place where medication is used so that state investigators don’t find restraint bruises on their wrists, but the real deal – with three terabytes of recording space, and enough tuners to record six programs at once.

All of which is a long way to go to say that we record a lot of television, not all of which we can watch in a timely manner. And one of the programs that we have been recording is True Detective, the Woody Harrelson / Matthew McConaughey show on HBO where they play two cops with dark sides investigating a possible serial murder. We watched the first episode and enjoyed it, but have allowed the following three episodes to stack up, thinking we’ll get to it eventually.

Well, “eventually” might have to come sooner rather than later. Because Francesco Francavilla, one of my favorite artists, has started releasing some fan art posters for the show on his Tumblr. Now, not only do we love Francavilla’s art (he’s gonna be a guest at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, and if he’s got a presence on the floor, that’s where my art budget’s going this year), but the guy has impeccable taste in television. And when he really likes a show, he does fan posters. He did them for Breaking Bad, so the fact that he’s doing the for True Detective is high praise indeed.

What? You want to see these posters without having to look for them? Some detective you are. You can check ’em out after the jump.

There Will Be Trouble

There is a problem with the Robocop remake, beyond the fact that there is a Robocop remake. I will explain.

I love Robocop. Specifically, the original Robocop. The original Robocop came out when I was 16 years old, and was a revelation of fun science fiction combined with smart satire and wicked dark humor. And I know that Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 get a bad rap for paleing in comparison to the original, but keep this in mind: those maligned sequels are movies written by Frank Miller. And not the 21st Century, “I fear turbans and get off my lawn” Frank Miller, but the “I just wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One and helped redefine comics for two generations” Frank Miller. So for a couple of movies to be written by that guy, at that time, to be considered abysmal failures? It just means that the original is that fucking good.

It’s good enough that I’ve had Robocop on my pull list for years, even through some really bad Robocop comics. And I want to keep Robocop on my pull list, as I’m enjoying the Steven Grant adaptation of Miller’s original draft of the Robocop 3 script, Robocop: Last Stand. But there is a remake of Robocop. And that means that Boom Studios has the license to print comics about a new blockbuster movie about some dude who isn’t also Buckaroo Banzai, but who also calls himself “Robocop.”

I’m not sure I want comics about the new Robocop. And yet, I don’t know how I can communicate that fine line of difference to the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop bitching about Robocop unless I want to repeat my tales of woe to Localcop.

But maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe there’s some merit to this new version of Robocop, which will make me want to read Boom’s new Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit. Or maybe not. But either way, it is a new comic, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But whether Robocop is any good or not, there are a lot of good-looking books in this pile. There’s a new issue of Batman, a new Fatale, something called The Royals: Masters of War written by Rob Williams (who I think is a good comic writer, despite being a crappy Robocop writer), a new The Walking Dead, and a bunch of other cool looking stuff!

But you know how these things are: before we can even think about talking about any of them, we need time to read them. So until then…

…I’d buy that for a dollar!

Er, I mean: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Trudeau Puts Doonesbury On Hiatus, Except For Sundays. Thanks For Nothing, Alpha House!

Well, the good news is that Gary Trudeau has a home run in Alpha House, the Washington Beltway comedy series he created for Amazon for on-line distribution. The bad news is, because of Alpha House‘s success, he will be putting his long running comic strip, Doonesbury, on a long term, open-ended hiatus in order to focus on his new politically satiric property, according to The Washington Post.

Say it ain’t so, Gary!

“I’ve done the strip for 43 years — 45 if you include the college edition [at Yale] — and I’m ready for an extended break,” Trudeau, 65, tells Comic Riffs.

In making the move, the New York-based cartoonist takes nothing for granted: “A hiatus comes with uncertainty, of course: I can’t assume I’ll be welcomed back a year or two from now.”

Yes, It’s True; This Man Has No Dick: The Adventures of Apocalypse Al #1 Review

Hey, didja know that one of J. Michael Straczynski’s first professional writing gigs was on the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters? Sure, it might seem odd that the guy who came up with Babylon 5, Crusade and the first draft of the World War Z movie cut his teeth on irony-based horror comedy, but it’s true: one of JMS’s earliest gigs was putting words in the mouth of Peter Venkman. That puts him in the rarefied company of Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, and every slashfic author who ever wanted to see Bill Murray take a PKE Meter in the Ghost Trap from Patrick Swayze, if you get my drift.

Without that knowledge, it would seem really counterintuitive for the guy who wrote Changeling to write a horror comedy with an oracle who can foretell the futures price of cucumbers, a lawyer with a sense for the dramatic who happens to represent the Prince of Darkness, and a private detective protagonist who specializes in stopping the end of the world despite her crippling fear of sensible shoes. It might sound silly for the guy who wrote The Shadow War to write a book where someone warns the hero that the end of the world is preferable to undercooked bacon, but again: Straczynski made his bones writing for the animated avatar of Bill Fucking Murray.

Which means that Straczynski is actually a pretty damn good person to write a book like this. Which is why it’s actually a lot of fun.

You Too Will Believe That A Man Can Fly…Because You Are 16 Months Old…

Just caught this on comic book writer Mark Millar’s Twitter feed:

I’m not really a kid person, but that was just fucking adorable. The unadulterated glee on the toddler’s face was priceless. Now, how do I get myself back to that level of unabashed, pants-shitting wonderment? Will a crate of whiskey be enough?

Conan’s “The Walking Dead” Cold Open Parody

I missed this last Thursday, but the Conan show parodied The Walking Dead in a cold open to honor the cast of the show. They were guests for the night. There’s a lot to like about the clip. Conan’s zombie make-up is solid. Andy Richter is remarkably well put together, considering, well, zombie apocalypse. And, the Basic Cable Band seems particularly enthusiastic covering the theme to The Walking Dead. After all those year’s of playing Basic Cable Name That Tune, it must have been very exciting for them to play a song that had a licensed copyright. All in all, well done, Conan.

Now, I’m going to have to see if I have this recorded somewhere on the Tivo.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC tonight, February 9, 2014 at 9pm.

Via Kotaku.