Find The Nerve Is Not As Pleasant As It Sounds: New The Dark Knight Returns: Part 2 Teaser Video

Over the New Year’s holiday, we here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office spent an entire day drinking whiskey and watching DC animated movies on streaming Netflix. We went through Justice League: Doom, Batman: Under The Red Hood, Superman Vs. The Elite, and All-Star Superman, all in one big throwdown. Because you can say what you want about Warner Bros. and DC and their inability so far to make a decent major motion picture that doesn’t star Batman, but they are light years ahead of anything that Marvel’s been doing in the animation space, and they have been for years. They just make good animated series and direct-to-video features, so clear and fun you can follow them despite, by the time All-Star Superman started bubbling down the magical pornography wire into the XBox, being so drunk we couldn’t make our desires known to an establishment that only sells pizza.

But the one film we didn’t stream was The Dark Knight Returns: Part 1, despite being excited by the teaser trailers that were released for that release back in July and August, because we are huge fans of Frank Miller’s original comic series, and if we’re going to watch it, we want it all in one whack.

And soon, our wait will be over; The Dark Knight Returns: Part 2 is scheduled to be released on DVD, Blu-Ray and video on demand on January 29th… and Warner Bros. has released another teaser trailer for the second part. This particular clip presents Batman stomping the living shit out of a heavily-armed SWAT team. Hang on while I get my Jack Daniel’s, and let’s meet up after the jump.

In A World…: New Avengers #1 Review

Christ, he thinks he’s making movies. That’s why I wasn’t completely satisfied by Avengers #1, and was actually kinda pissed off by New Avengers #1: they’re not really stories. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.

So let me start with a personal note to Jonathan Hickman: Hi, Jon? There is a difference between an action movie and a comic book. An action flick costs ten bucks and usually lasts between 100 and 140 minutes. A comic book costs just about half as much as a movie, but is 20 to 24 pages, and lasts about 15 minutes, or maybe 20 if you’ve eaten a lot of cheese and let yourself become dehydrated.

A full-screen title card in a movie usually takes maybe 10 seconds, or fifteen if the director is a bombastic prick – about 0.002 percent of a movie, or about 2 cents worth of screen time in a best-case scenario. In a comic? it’s two pages out of 22 – about nine percent of a comic, or about 36 cents worth of the book. And yes: I sat down with a calculator and did the math.

My point is: the big, movie-style title cards you insist on chucking into the first issue of each Avengers book you’ve taken over? Save that shit for the movies. Reading comics is more expensive than going the movies. If you want to write a movie? Call Avi Arad. If you’re writing comics? We’re paying by the page, champ. Don’t waste those pages on your James Cameron fantasies.

Okay, now that my pet peeve is out of the way, we can talk about New Avengers #1.

Peanuts From The Comment Gallery

First of all: we are aware that there are problems with submitting comments. We upgraded the Web site last week, doing so for the first time without announcing that we were making changes, and sure enough: things went tits up without our regulars there to test for free while we busily made whiskey safe for children by turning it into pee. We are working on the problem, and hope to have it resolved shortly. For the time being: please try pressing the refresh button next to the CAPTCHA and using the new code just before posting; we’ve had some luck with that here.

But further work will need to wait until the morning. Because it is Wednesday – the first Wednesday after a long holiday vacations – and that means that we have spent the evening at the bar, counting the days until our time off for San Diego Comic-Con (202 days, by the way).

But is also means new comics – the first substantial take in two weeks – and that means that this…

…is the end of our broadcast day.

Kind of a strange take this week. We have a huge pile of DC issue #15s (including Firestorm, the first issue of which we’ve checked out since the seriously disappointing first one), but there’s also the sixth issue of Batman Incorporated (which, as a series, has been hit or miss… but the last issue made my top ten of 2012), along with Hellboy In Hell #2, the latest Marvel Now entries of New Avengers and Morbius: The Living Vampire (plus the lastest Brian Michael Bendis All-New X-Men #5, and Scott Snyder’s last pre-hiatus issue of American Vampire, and a bunch of other cool-looking stuff!

But you know the drill (even if it’s difficult currently to comment on it): before we can review them, we need time to read them. So until we can do that…

See you tomorrow, suckers!

Dead Inside: New Teaser Trailer For The Walking Dead

So New Year’s Day has come and gone, the roads are covered in watery slush where they aren’t rendered into luge tracks by black ice, and the holidays are ended, with each and every one of us having, at best, exactly 0.0403226 vacation days accrued for the year to date. So God, am I ready for society to fall.

Thankfully, the people at AMC know this, so they have released a teaser for the upcoming second half of the third season of The Walking Dead, which returns in early February. And you can check that video out after the jump.

We Are The Walking Dead: Crossed: Badlands #20 Review

Editor’s Note: And one last review of the (few) comics of 12/26/2012 before the comic store opens with this week’s new books…

In the annals of zombie fiction, each imprint or subgenre meets a particular literary need. The Walking Dead allows Robert Kirkman to address the long-term effects of constant stress with no civilization on individuals of different types. George Romero uses his Night of The Living Dead stories to satire human pack behavior, such as mass consumerism, blind obedience to the military / industrial complex, and the compulsion to record life rather than living it.

And Avatar Comics’s Crossed: Badlands is generally here so comic creators can write and draw the most depraved and twisted shit they can possibly imagine.

I’m not kidding. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows created, in their initial run of Crossed, a world where the “zombies” want to eat you, sure… but only after they fuck your holes, stab a few new holes and then fuck them, and then do the same to your friends, family, vague acquaintances and household pets, all in front of you if possible. And subsequent creators playing in the Crossed world have generally embraced this concept with both hands; David Lapham’s last two arcs in Crossed: Badlands revolved around a cowardly teenager who only finds his courage after mistakenly blowing away a teenaged girl he believed to be a zombie (and then fucking her), and then a literary salon that models itself on the old Hellfire Club… until they meet the Crossed, who show them what sexual adventurism really means, by way of the Zombie Cleveland Steamer (where you lie under a glass coffee table while a Crossed rips out your colon, takes it to Cleveland and then dorks it).

Crossed: Badlands is historically the place to go to produce the kind of stories that would get you a no-questions-asked Thorazine prescription if you told it to a psychiatric professional: fun if you like that sort of thing (and I usually do), but not where you look for social commentary or characterization beyond, “people sure do suck, don’t they?” So imagine my surprise when writer Si Spurrier and artist Raulo Caceres turned in a two-part arc about two damaged people, together for the wrong reasons and separated by the Crossed outbreak and their own selfishness, doomed to repeat their destructive cycle. This is a good one. Gross and intense, but good.

How Low Can You Go? – Amanda’s Picks For The Comic Book Low Points Of 2012

2012 is firmly at our backs. Congratulations, everyone. We made it.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we had some real time encounters with abject, stinking failure in 2012 that make me all the more grateful to move on and away from it. From the weird decision to fire and then almost immediately rehire Gail Simone, to the baffling continued employment of Greg Land, to the need for some high profile comics creators to make odd and unnecessary comments about Batman’s sexuality because they can’t seem to stop giving Playboy interviews while in the thrall of a mescaline bender, there was plenty to color the comics enjoyment experience last year. And, after all the dust settled from the complaints of former employees about creator rights and other assorted Twitter bitching, sometimes, just sometimes, there were the comics themselves that were the problem.

Here are my picks for the top five comic book disappointments of 2012, after the jump.

Hangover: Rob’s Biggest Comic Disappointments of 2012

It is New Year’s Day, and thanks to about fifteen glasses alternating between Milwaukee’s and Lynchburg, Tennessee’s finest products last night, it feels like my brain has been taken over and occupied by Doctor Octopus. Or at least part of Doctor Octopus. Part of Doctor Octopus after a meal of bad sushi and piss-warm Chango. And to add insult to injury, I flipped on the TV this morning to be subjected to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which, as comic book movies go, certainly is one (man, Stringer Bell and Sailor Ripley sure have let themselves go).

Chuck on top of that steaming mess that there are no new comics until tomorrow, and nothing whatsoever apparently going on in the world of comics, and what we have is a new year that, so far, is… disappointing. And with that feeling in mind, and 2012 at our backs, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to revisit the biggest disappointments in comics and geek culture that occurred in 2012.

And given that the memory is so fresh, we might as well start with (although this list is in no particular order):

Because This Champagne Won’t Open Itself: Amanda’s Top Comic Book Picks For 2012

Happy New Year! Well, almost.

This year in comics has been pretty uneven for the Big Two. Marvel finally dragged its ass across the finish line to end the pain and suffering that was Avengers Vs. X-Men, leading to a reboot relaunch of most of its major titles under the imprint of something called Marvel Now! Whatever its actual intentions (sales!), Marvel Now!’s primary functions have to have an excuse to bring Jean Grey back as a teenager (hot!) and kill off Peter Parker (cold!). The jury is out with me on the whole concept right now. Meanwhile, DC has killed off many of its New 52 titles before they even made it to middle school (oh, O.M.A.C., we barely knew ye!). On the other hand, Scott Snyder has emerged as an architect of some vision with his “Death Of The Family” concept, which is currently impacting the Bat Family of books. I’m digging this story almost enough to forgive him for taking a break from Vertigo’s American Vampire…and Vertigo’s got enough problems right now.

So, where were the bright spots? Check out my picks, after the jump.

Dropping Balls: Rob’s Top 10 Comics of 2012

It is New Year’s Eve of the first complete year of the existence of Crisis On Infinite Midlives. We have all the comics we’re going to get in 2012, so it is time to publish my list of the best comics of the year… mostly because with no new comics, there isn’t much to review, and the biggest comics news we’re likely to get between now and Wednesday is likely to be “Frank Miller Publicly Intoxicated, Yells At ‘Hippies.’ Must Be Tuesday.”

So here’s my list; Amanda’s will appear later today. It is in no particular order, it encompasses everything from single issues to multi-issue story arcs to series that started in 2011 and ended this year. And I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “Why don’t you organize things a little more? And use some consistent criteria for your list?” Well, because fuck you, that’s why. Look: it’s New Year’s Eve, and I intend to be recklessly intoxicated within about 90 minutes from the time I press the “publish” button.

So without further (or any) ado: here’s my list!

X-Factor Writer Peter David Suffers Stroke

Update, 12/31/2012, 2:40 p.m. Peter David’s wife Kathleen has posted additional information on David’s condition on her Web site:

We have a diagnosis, which is a small stroke in the Pons section of his brain. Now we have to figure out where we go from here and how we get Peter back to what he was before the stroke. We know that a total recovery is slim because damage to the brain doesn’t go away but the brain can be trained to work around the damage and give Peter back what he has lost…

As he stated, he has lost most of the use of his right arm, his right leg is incredibly weak, the vision in his right eye is blurry, and the right side of his face is drooping slightly. But the brain is there with all its quips and quick retorts. He has had the nurses laughing a lot.

Again, we wish David a full and quick recovery.

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Peter David, writer of a long and awesome arc of The Incredible Hulk in the tale 80s and early 90s, the early 2000s run of Captain Marvel that made Bill Jemas’s Marville look like the pile of shit that it truly was, and the current writer of X-Factor, has suffered a non-fatal stroke while vacationing in Florida.

David reported the incident on his Web site earlier today:

We were on vacation in Florida when I lost control of the right side of my body. I cannot see properly and I cannot move my right arm or leg. We are currently getting the extent of the damage sorted out and will report as further details become clarified.

And that’s the extent of what we currently know, other than the fact that this totally sucks. David has long been considered one of the more consistently good Marvel Comics writers here at the Home Office, and on a personal level, has made X-Factor a must-read, even though I generally don’t read too many X-Titles. We hope he has a full and speedy recovery.

(via Peter David dot net)