Let’s Put These Jokers Through Some Changes

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, because I am neck-deep in Batman: Arkham City, I have beer that I need to render safe for children by using my superpower of turning beer into pee, and I wish to combine these two activities, culminating in an uberactivity of wandering the house, “controller” in hand, screaming, “Who wants to give Batman a handjob?”

That said, I feel compelled to at least comment on a rumor that’s been going around the comics world for the past couple of days. I can’t confirm or deny it because, well, I’m just a drunken comic fan who doesn’t know anyone in the industry to ask if it’s true and then stab if they tell me it is.

I’ll just start with asking you to remember the source. Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool traffics in comics gossip. Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not… but the last time this rumor came up, Alan Moore himself said there was some truth to it.

Two days ago, Bleeding Cool mentioned that Watchmen prequels at DC were back on the agenda, after the success of the New 52. That meetings were happening this week. That it had the code name “Panic Room”. That names mentioned included Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, Darwyn Cooke, JMS, JG Jones, Andy Kubert and more.

Indeed I am now told that there will be four Watchmen miniseries, all prequels. Working off an over-arching uber-plot by Darwyn, who will be writing and drawing on aa [sic] book or two.

I believe the phrase I’m looking for is “this shit just got real”.

My first reaction to this news was the same as it was when I first heard it two years ago:

No no no no no no no no

Cognitive Dissonance: An Open Letter to Alan Moore

Alan Moore is doing a reading of one of his non-comic things on Saturday, so he did an interview with a UK… tabloid? I think it’s a tabloid. Then again, I thought English tabloids were supposed to have titty shots, which I couldn’t find. But it’s not like I looked hard; after all, all I had access to was their Web site, and I’m not gonna spend time figuring out where “Page 3” is when I can smack my head against the keyboard, press the Enter key and get thousands of pages of hardcore pornography. But I digress.

The point is that Alan Moore did a short interview with this thing, and used the opportunity to talk about how awesome Alan Moore is:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Oh, Alan… let’s start with the obvious stuff.

Four Inches of Plot: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Crisis On Infinite Midlives is proud to introduce our newest contributor, Lance Manion! Lance was trained as a writer, by… ninjas or something… and will be contributing comic and movie reviews, comments on geek culture, and possibly herpes! You can learn more about Lance when we get around to publishing an About Us page! Welcome, Lance!

Alan Moore has lost it.  Yeah, I’m going there.  With publication of LXG 1969, I’ve accepted that the mind that created Watchmen, re-envisioned Swamp Thing, and invented The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has finally jumped the shark.  Actually, that’s not entirely true.  More accurately, he roofied the shark, transported it to some sort of realm of the imagination, had sex with it in every possible configuration, some requiring non-Euclidian geometry, dropped it back off in the ocean, and then slapped it in the face.