Sensory Overload

Okay, between Free Comic Book Day, Star Wars Day (May The Fourth Be With You! Get it? Is this thing on? Bueller?), the viewing of Iron Man 3, and the celebration of the birthday of one of our contributors (Happy Birthday, Trebuchet! Here’s to being one year closer to death!), we have been flat out all day and likely will be through the remainder of the evening. Thus, this is the end of today’s broadcast day… being as this is being written and published from a two-year-old cell phone.

However, we plan to see Iron Man 3 one more time tomorrow to better be able to review the film here, so watch for that in this space tomorrow. In the meantime, get yourself to a theater and check it out (one-line preliminary review: well worth seeing, but not nearly as exciting as last year’s The Avengers, and the whole thing kinda stinks of where they removed the Demon In A Bottle references that, by rights, should have been there. But a damn fun movie nonetheless), and we will regroup on the morrow.

But until then: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Crowdsourced Batman: The Movement #1 Review

Somewhere, the kids from Anonymous are shitting themselves with glee, because with The Movement, they’ve got their own comic book. And they’re superheroes and everything. Except they have custom facemasks instead of the omnipresent V For Vendetta masks, because not even those guys want to face the wrath of Alan Moore.

Okay, lemme take a step back. I was not a part of 2011’s Occupy movement, because I have one of those job things, but I walked past the Boston incarnation at Davis Square every day because they were between the job thing and one of those bar things. And while you can argue about that movement’s (Movement! Get it?) motivations, success or failure, it was pretty clear to a daily passer-by that, at face value, it was a group of people who were committed to battling corruption, policing themselves and providing their own version of social services. Also marijuana, but mostly those three things.

Write Gail Simone’s The Movement #1 takes those three concepts, throws in the social crowdsourced vigilante justice of Anonymous, mixes them up with a healthy dollop of superpowers, drops them into a DC Universe city so filthy and populated by killers, filth and dirty cops that it makes Gotham look like the city from Logan’s Run, and tries to show us what Occupy and Anonymous might look like in a place where something like that might not only be needed, but where no one can stop them.

Which is an interesting concept, but is it any good?

The Octopus Strikes Back: The Superior Spider-Man #9 Review

Editor’s Note: Sorry, but this has to be. The spoilers of an old life must make way for the new.

At the end of 2012, Spider-Man writer Dan Slott got a lot of attention boosting attention to his long run on The Amazing Spider-Man by, well, killing The Amazing Spider-Man.

The move caused an uproar amongst long-time Spider-Man fans, who acted like Slott stole Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey and then beat her with it about the nead and neck. It was interesting to watch: hundreds upon hundreds of long-time comic fans – fans who have seen almost every damn character of any prominence die and come back to life over the years – acting like they were incapable of understanding that Spider-Man’s death was obviously temporary. Of course Spider-Man’s gonna come back to life; Marvel would no more kill its flagship character than it would hand over the keys to the shop to slashfic writers for whom English is a second language.

However, the move got a lot of press and led to a lot of printings of The Amazing Spider-Man #700, so from a business standpoint, the move to kill Peter Parker was a success. So four months later, what does Dan Slott do for an encore?

Double Murder

I knew I knew you, I knew I knew you. But you ain’t you. You can’t be you… There ain’t no coming back. This is the really real world, there ain’t no coming back. We killed you dead, there ain’t no coming back! There ain’t no coming back! There ain’t no coming back!

– T-Bird, The Crow

Man, Dan Slott isn’t interested in making any friends these days.

Slott’s Twitter feed has been lighting up all day from people who are, shall we say, miffed at Slott over the events of The Superior Spider-Man #9. In the way that Simon Weisenthal was miffed at Josef Mengele. Or the way Alan Moore is miffed at Dan DiDio. Or Joe Quesada. Or Dave Gibbons. Or pretty much anybody.

So as soon as I got to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop making frivilous references to Mengele, the first thing I did was read The Superior Spider-Man #9. And while I don’t want to spoil anything (at least not until I review the issue), I can safely say that the reason so many people are affected is that, well, Slott’s done it again… which actually is a spoiler, but fuck it. If you actually figure it out, my defense will be that my brain has been taken over by an evil scientist: Dr. Jack Daniels.

So there’s that big Octopus-scented shot coming across the bow this New Comics Day, but that’s certainly not it for new comics. There’s plenty of other books just out, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

There’s some good stuff in there, huh? There’s the new book by J. Michael Straczynski and Ben Templesmith, Ten Grand, the new Gail Simone book The Movement, Brian Buccellato’s new pulp superhero book The Black Bat, a new Hawkeye and Age of Ultron, plus a bunch of other cool-looking stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can review any of them, we need time to read them. So until we can get that done…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Release Your Anger, And Mix Your Metaphors: Wil Wheaton Tells Infant Why Geekdom Is Awesome

Unless you are a geek of a certain age, say about 35 and older, it is hard to understand the hatred that fandom had, during Star Trek: The Next Generation’s original run, for Ensign Wesley Crusher.

If you were of an age to grow up on original Star Trek reruns, with the Vulcan Nerve Pinch and “Dammit Jim!” and green alien chicks getting the Captain Kirk Slam (definition: railing someone to the rhythm of that “dun dun DUN! DUN! DUN! DUN! DUN! dun dun dun!” song from when Kirk fought Spock in the ring during Amok Time), the debut of The Next Generation, with its calm and measured captain and its Klingon on the bridge and its actual adherence to the Prime Directive, was hard to get used to on its face… without having a precocious teenager on the bridge doing particle physics and rewiring the warp core and generally acting like, well, anyone else on the bridge except with (presumably) wispier pubes.

Fandom’s hatred of that character was palpable, most obviously and continually evidenced by the late 90s Usenet discussion group. At the time, it seemed that nothing could redeem the character, or Wil Wheaton, the actor who portrayed him.

That, of course, was then. Now, in 2013, Wheaton is a widely-respected geek genre actor, writer and icon, and the reaction many people had to Wesley Crusher seems as silly as it should, considering he was a character in a franchise that also gave us Tribbles and “Double dumb ass on you!”

But nevertheless: that negative passion was there in the 80s… but Wheaton doesn’t dwell on that, even though he’d pretty much have every right. And here’s the proof: at this weekend’s Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo, a fan asked Wheaton to record a message to her infant daughter explaining why being a nerd is a good thing. And Wheaton, who took such a beating from fandom once upon a time that even Jake Lloyd sometimes pities him, recorded a four-minute message to this child emphasizes everything good and cool and awesome about being a geek of any stripe. And you can check that out after the jump.

High Ideas: Batman Incorporated #10 Review

Editor’s Note: Criminals are a cowardly, spoilered lot…

On my initial readthrough of Batman Incorporated #10, I was fully prepared to lower the boom on writer Grant Morrison. Here’s why.

Did you ever get really drunk or high and have an epiphany? One of those moments where, seriously under the influence of something, you realize something that is so seemingly obvious that you can’t believe nobody else ever came up with the idea, yet so seemingly transcendant and perfect that you firmly and totally believe, in your stupor, that your idea will change things deep down at their core? So you stumble around and you find a piece of paper and a pen and you write it down… and then you wake up in the morning, praying for relief and wondering if you should consider shaving your tongue, and you find the piece of paper… and it says something like “pizza beer.” Or maybe “Dorito-flavored rolling papers.” And you look at that piece of paper, and you think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty obvious idea… but it’s also really kind of obviously stupid,” and you chuck the piece of paper and you lurch into the sunlight, looking for greasy food.

In a bunch of ways, Batman Incorporated #10 lives and dies by that kind of late-night, shitfaced, obvious idea that never survives the harsh light of day… except Morrison missed that part where you sober up and realize that the whole concept is a little on-the-nose and kinda dumb.

Yeah, I was ready to do that. And on a lot of levels, I still am: the final reveal on the last page (not like it’s much of a reveal, given the book’s WTF gatefold cover that gives up the ghost before page one) simply stinks of a guy ripped to the tits on absinthe and psilocybin screeching, “Wait a second, wait a second and hear me out… what if Batman… actually was a bat? Stop laughing and gimme that one-hitter…” But with that said, there’s some decent imagery here, a tease that some characters we saw months ago might come back into play in an unexpected way, and a tease that Talia might be facing some trouble on all fronts.

But that ending really should’ve been held until someone sobered up, man.

Healing Factor: Boston Comic Con Rescheduled For August 3 and 4

The Boston Comic Con was originally scheduled to take place last weekend at the Hynes Convention Center on Boyston Street in Boston. Unfortunately, the event was abruptly postponed last Friday, due to the usual mundane and obvious reasons a convention gets put off: some douchenozzle blew up the street upon which the venue was scheduled, and then spent Friday, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, trying to make a dazzling escape from law enforcement on a landlocked boat.

It might sound like a small thing to reschedule a relatively small city comic convention – Boston’s a big town, and the Boston Comic Con has become quite a little convention, but it’s still only about four years along from being an old school, buy-your-back-issues-and-get-out convention as advertised on late night UHF channels) – but you’d be surprised. In talking with the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop referring to myself as “The Comic Con,” I was told that the biggest problem with rescheduling was finding a venue. Apparently the Hynes Center is fully booked pretty much a year ahead of time, and there simply aren’t all that many venues in town of the right size to book a thing like this. In a lot of ways, you either have a hotel’s function room (which holds about 90 people), the TD Banknorth Garden (which holds about 15,000 people), or you just wait for the Hynes to have an open spot on the calendar.

So while I held onto my advance tickets (which the convention assured us would be accepted for any alternate dates) to show the people so desperately trying to give this town a decent convention that some of us were pulling for them, I was fully expecting to eventually hear that the convention was being cancelled until next April.

Yeah, I was wrong.

NEW DATE: August 3-4! NEW VENUE: Seaport World Trade Ctr! Details on the website! Tell your friends! bostoncomiccon.com #comicmarket

— Boston Comic Con (@BostonComicCon) April 27, 2013

Okay, so they’re having a convention. But that doesn’t mean that any of the originally-scheduled special guests or artists are gonna show up, right?

Oh, you’d be surprised.

This Is A Triumph – GLaDOS Deals You In With Telltale’s Poker Night 2

Have you ever wanted to throw down in a game of chance against your favorite fictional characters from the world of television and video games? If so, Telltale Games, maker of The Walking Dead video game, has the gaming opportunity for you. Poker Night At The Inventory featured such characters as Tycho, Max, the Heavy, and Strong Bad. Poker Night 2 gives the spotlight to Ash, Brock Sampson, Sam, and Claptrap, with the added bonus of cheerfully murderous AI, GLaDOS, as your dealer. Check it out:

Poker Night 2 is available to buy through X-Box Live Arcade or to download for PC and Mac computers.

Via The mary Sue

Cowboy Up: Dark Horse Releasing New Chapter of Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy

Artist Geoff Darrow is a personal favorite here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. We’ve got a first print copy of Hard Boiled with a sketch by Darrow in it from the Boston Comic Con a couple of years ago – I walked up and waited while he was talking to somebody else, and he grabbed the issue out of my hands and started sketching in the front cover to illustrate a point to the guy, without even having to be asked – and we also have a big inked sketch of Nixon from Hard Boiled, the Big Guy from Big Guy And Rusty The Boy Robot, and Shaolin Cowboy.

Sadly, Shaolin Cowboy was the big gap in my actual reading of Darrow’s books. We missed it when it was initially released by Burlyman Comics back in 2005 (only one store in the area carried that imprint in any numbers, and it wasn’t our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop begging the paying clientele to show me their Burlyman), and it has been pretty out of print for a while since.

However, that is now a thing of the past. Dark Horse Comics announced this week that they’ll be releasing a new installment of the story this coming October.

There aren’t a lot of details available at this point beyond that, but Dark Horse has release the first two variant covers to the series, which you can check out after the jump.

The Uncle Ben Incident: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #22 Review

Editor’s Note: Bitten by a stolen, genetically-altered spoiler that have him incredible, arachnid-like powers… to irritate people.

Finally, we’re getting somewhere.

Between the slow and decompressed start of Ultimate Comics Spider-Man back in late 2011 and the leisurely dealing with Miles’s uncle the douchebag cat burglar and the unfortunate and misguided intervention of the whole United We Stand crossover across the entire Ultimate Comics line, it has felt like there has been something missing from Miles’s story. That thing being a real and clear motivation for his being Spider-Man.

Sure, we got the ephemeral sense that Miles understands that his power arose from his uncle’s bad acts, and that he feels a responsibility and sense of awe toward the legacy and reputation of Peter Parker… plus that, you know, he gets a kick out of being Spider-Man. But there has never been a simple, bright-line-in-the-sand motivation for him to actually be Spider-Man in the way that other superheroes have. You know, Parents Killed In Front Of Him, or On A Mission Of Peace From Themyscira. Or, you know, Let The Man Who Killed His Uncle Go Free.

Well, 19 months in, we finally have a moment that fits the bill. Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #22 closes out with a gutpunch of a moment that meets all the emotional criteria for someone to, beyond all reason, pull on a pair of spandex pants and not only go out in public wearing them, but wear them battling criminals and monsters. It is emotional, it is effective… and it is a credit to writer Brian Michael Bendis that the moment is not a simple, “Now I shall become a $ANIMAL!” point of departure for a standard, if well belated, origin story.