When There Is No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Wait In Line For Marvel’s One Men’s Room: New Marvel Teaser Poster Released

It’s been a little while since Marvel dumped out one of their recently ubiquitous, one-word teaser posters to hype an upcoming new title, but a new one entered the wild yesterday, following a tease at a retailer’s breakfast yesterday… and as an aside: why does Marvel seem to have so many breakfasts for retailers? It was a retailer’s breakfast at New York Comic Con where Marvel teased The Superior Spider-Man, and it just seems… weird. I know that the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to consider making their establishment the first stop on my comic store / local bar routine, would much prefer a retailer’s cocktail hour. Or at least I presume that he would, considering that every time I leave his store, I hear him mutter, “Christ, I need a drink.” But I’m getting a little off point here.

The point is that there is another intriguing teaser poster for some new Marvel book coming this fall. And the bad news is that, like all the other teasers preceding it, it gives almost no information on the actual book – including no creator names.

But the good news is that Marvel apparently got Ike Perlmutter to sign off on the budget for a couple of additional words for the teaser! Which you can check out after the jump.

Winter Is Coming Back – New Trailer For Game Of Thrones Season 3

“Death is coming for everyone and everything”, says Catelyn Stark in this new trailer for season 3 of Game Of Thrones and I say: it can’t get here fast enough.

Game Of Thrones returns to HBO on March 31 at 9pm.

And, a little treat for everyone who loves to hate Bitch King Joffrey, after the jump.

Pulling The Pin: Justice League of America #1 Review

Editor’s Note: Gathered together from the cosmic reaches of the universe – here in this great Hall of Justice – are the most powerful forces of spoilers ever assembled.

This isn’t like The Suicide Squad.

– Steve Trevor

Actually, Justice League of America #1, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by David Finch, is a lot like Suicide Squad, in that it’s got Amanda Waller making unique and intriguing personal offers to fringe people with super powers to join a team controlled by the government to perform missions for the government’s purposes. It’s also a lot like Keith Giffen’s and J. M. DeMatteis’s early issues of their late 80’s Justice League, in that it is attempting to lay the groundwork for and justify a Justice League packed with second-stringers and also-rans. It’s also a lot like Brad Meltzer’s post-Identity Crisis run on Justice League of America, in that it’s got as many sequences of people looking at pictures of, and talking about, superheroes as it does sequences of people actually, you know, doing stuff.

Two of these similarities are good things.

Look, as an opening issue of a book trying to justify the creation of a second Justice League when there’s a perfectly good one that’s only a year and a half old, this is a perfectly acceptable story that delivers the necessary exposition required to justify the concept and to introduce characters who are either relatively new since the New 52 reboot, or who have been around in their own titles, albeit with sales numbers low enough to warrant a whole new introduction (I’m looking at you, Hawkman). And it does it with enough mysterious teases and interesting secrets to justify their willingness to join this team to keep things intriguing… with one exception. In one case, using a single word balloon, Johns shows himself to be playing with some serious fire. Fire that, if he handles it well, will thrill anyone who read comics through the 1990… and that conversely, if he screws it up, will make a fairly significant niche fanbase turn on him like he insulted their mothers, and make the attempted rehabilitation of Vibe seem like a low-risk venture.

Elegy For A Bastard – Review Of Hellblazer #300

Yesterday, I bemoaned the fate of Hellblazer and the title’s termination at issue 300 before going on to say mostly nice things about a character that had been generally known as a cliche, prior to being brought back from the dead. Today, I will talk to you about a character who has also turned into a cliche prior to becoming dead: John Constantine.

I think my “wailing and gnashing of teeth” yesterday was primarily mourning for a character who has really been dying and on his way to dead from about issue 251 on. I’m sure Peter Milligan meant well, but this series – which managed to survive the literal dicking Brian Azzarello gave it back in the year 2000 – has been dead man walking for some time. Sure, there’s been some glimmers of good story, but this is not the John Constantine we all signed up for. This is a sad shell of a John Constantine, a Constantine that, had he been anticipated as a likelihood by former writers like Garth Ennis, would have eaten a bullet sometime back around 1994. Issue 300 does not serve so much as closure for John Constantine as make you wonder about the Constantine that might have been in other hands.

And, I think I’ve figured out why.

Join me as I spoil my way through problem solving, after the jump.

…Move Zig

9:30 a.m., February 20th, 2013:

“…Okay, I’m heading to the day job, Amanda. We’ll head to the comic store when I get home, okay?”

“Cool! I’m bummed that Hellblazer‘s closing out, but at least Geoff Johns has a couple of books coming out today!”

“Um… he has one new book. Justice League of America. Which looks pretty interesting, except for… Vibe.”

“Actually, Johns also has the first issue of Vibe’s solo comic coming – ”

“NO! There is no Vibe solo book!”

“But Rob,” Amanda said, “Geoff Johns is a pro at rebooting characters that people have forgotten. And – ”

“I have never forgotten Vibe,” I hissed, “I bought issues of Justice League Detroit when I was 15 years old. And I don’t need Geoff Johns to reboot Vibe, because Vibe already made me reboot. In the sense that once I read those issues, I booted. And when I reread them, I rebooted.”

“Rob,” she said, “It’s been 28 years. Don’t you think it’s time you gave the character, and more importantly, Geoff Johns, a chance?”

“Never!” I cried. “With God as my witness, Vibe will not be a part of my weekly take tonight!”

——–

…and I was right. In the sense that, since Amanda, having a day off her day gig when I didn’t, went to my local comic store, where they know me by name, and ask me to stop telling the female paying clientele that their vibrators cause cancer because they are “part Vibe,” picked up the issue on her own and wrote it a damn fine review. But I am as good as my word, which means that I have obtained this week’s take – sans Vibe – and which further means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But even putting Vibe aside, this is a pretty solid-looking take, no? We’ve got Johns’s Justice League of America, the final issue of Vertigo’s Hellblazer (which I think Amanda and I will both have comments about in the near future), a new issue of Dan Slott’s The Superior Spider-Man, Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key: Omega, a new Saga, Matt Wagner’s The Shadow: Year One, and a bunch of other good stuff! Good stuff that’s (mostly) Vibe-free!

But in order to discuss any of them, we need time to read them (and to sober up after our drunken, Vibe-related argument). So until those things happen…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

For Great Justice – Review Of Vibe #1

Vibe #1 drops into stores today and, if you’re like many of my LCS’s core demographic, you responded with a polite, “That’s nice”, blinked nonchalantly, and then went looking for Hellblazer #300 because you are a SERIOUS PERSON, GODDAMMIT and that the LAST REAL JOHN CONSTANTINE ISSUE before DC further neuters him and…went on to some post traumatic whimpering before finally pulling yourself together to look through the spoils of this week’s stack. Turns out, once you put your wailing and gnashing of teeth over the the Constantine thing aside and read Geoff Johns and Andrew Kreisburg’s Vibe, it’s actually pretty good.

If you are like many casual, or perhaps not even so casual, comics readers, unless you were a fan of Justice League Detroit in the 80s your only real brush with Vibe was in cameos on the television show Justice League Unlimited and on Cartoon Network’s DC Nation shorts. Behold:

Yeah, you’d take that character seriously too. And, you wouldn’t be alone in your opinion. The original Vibe was killed off by J. M. DeMatteis to try and cap the end of the JLD era and George Pérez disliked Vibe so much that he refused to draw anything more than Vibe’s legs falling off a panel in the mega crossover JLA/Avengers – and Pérez knows a thing or two about teen superheroes.

So, why does this new iteration of Vibe work?

Warning – Ahead there be spoilers!

And You Sir, Are No… Comedian #5 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the comics of 2/13/2013 before the comic stores open with the new books…

I had sworn to myself that I was gonna stop reviewing Comedian by writer Brian Azzarello and artist J. G. Jones, because after just two issues I knew it wasn’t working for me, and even that damnation with faint disappointment was only possible when the book wasn’t actively pissing me off.

From the beginning, Azzarello has made Comedian a story where Watchmen continuity is optional on a good day, where consistency of character with any prior depiction of Edward Blake was problematic, and where Azzarello seemed less interested in telling a story about The Comedian than he did in telling a story about shit that happened in the 1960s where The Comedian happened to be. Sure, The Comedian was an active part of the story, but it wasn’t so much about him; imagine Mad Men if Don Draper was selling anti-Kennedy ads to Donald Segretti, or if he was running a pro-segregation focus group with James Earl Ray as a member: all of Mad Men‘s elements are there, but it ain’t really a story about a conflicted advertising executive anymore, is it?

That tendency continues in Comedian #5, which, as per this book’s norm, is less a story about The Comedian than it is a story about Vietnam and My Lai, where The Comedian just happens to be. Which, again, I’ve learned to expect from this comic book, and which is something that I didn’t think needed further reviewing. However, Azzarello added one thing to this books that boiled my blood. It’s not much – just two words – but to my mind, it put a stamp on the book stating Azzarello’s intentions toward the book, and it’s a check that the series just doesn’t cash. And while there’s a possibility that I’m wrong, and that those two words might just be a simple Easter Egg to observant readers or maybe a nod to placing Comedian into a Wold Newton-style shared universe, it blew me out of the book as effectively as would have seeing Blake throwing the meat to Trudy Campbell. Or even Pete Campbell.

One-Two Punch: SDCC Hotels On Sale 2/26

Now that was fast: just a few days after selling out passes to San Diego Comic-Con 2013, the convention has announced that hotels in the downtown area will be going on sale Tuesday, February 26th at noon Eastern Time. This is fully a month earlier on the calendar than last year, when there was almost a month in between when passes went on sale and the opening of hotel reservations. So I don’t know if the people at SDCC are hoping that forcing people to fork out for passes and a couple of days worth of hotels all at once will help deter the bubblegummers who aren’t really serious about attending Comic-Con… or if they’re treating the preliminaries like a Band-Aid: just rip the damn thing off all at once and just get the pain over with.

Well, whatever the reason, here’s the deal. At some point in the 72 hours before Magic Hour, SDCC will be sending an email with a link to the sales site to badge holders. The site won’t go live until noon Eastern Time on the dot, and when it does, once you get in, you will need to pick six hotels from the list: no more and no less. This is different from previous years, when you could pick one hotel or all of them. And it is certainly different from, say, 2006, when I read the list, thought it over, went to lunch, came back, thought it over some more, and then booked a room with no trouble at about 4 p.m.

Stan Lee Explains How Popular Movies Should Have Ended, Avoids Telling Kids To Get Off His Lawn

Good news, everyone! Stan Lee is feeling better – so much so that he’s teamed up with the crew at How It Should Have Ended to let us all know how some of the most popular movies should have actually ended. Check out his take on Inception, Batman Begins, Star Wars, and its prequels, explained to us as only Stan can. Welcome back, man!

Via The Mary Sue

First Step Into Scatterlands: Warren Ellis Debuts Daily Webcomic

A few weeks ago, Warren Ellis teased some kind of a new comics project, named Scatterlands, with Super Dinosaur artist Jason Howard… and he did it without mentioning any further detail about what it was. Oh sure, he had previously Tweeted that he missed doing a free Web-based project like FreakAngels, but as a teaser, that really didn’t mean anything. After all, the man has also Tweeted about the gastronomic delights of the common infant, occasionally combined with the pastime refreshment value of Col. Werner Von Braun’s Old No. Nein! Stuttgart Slurpin’ Partially Gelatinous Booster Fuel. So it’s best to take Ellis’s 140-character pronouncements with a grain of salt. At least, I sincerely hope it is.

However, in this case, those announcements were at least semi-accurate, because Ellis has announced the nature of the Scatterlands project: it will be a Web-based, daily, single-panel comic strip, with new panels every weekday.

And by “it will be,” I mean that “it is.” The first panel debuted today on Ellis’s Web site.

So whaddya got in store for us, Warren?