Overstimulated, Exhausted Children: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review constitutes a confirmed extinction-level spoiler.

I don’t have kids myself, but many of my former drinking buddies do, which has in turn made me decide I can never have kids. Because I just can’t talk to them. You ever try talking to a little kid, particularly after they’ve had a shitload of candy? Candy you gave them in the hopes they would take it, go away and stop trying to talk to you?

You can’t make any sense of it; they spin wildly from point to point, with no real logical gristle connecting them, with weird exaggerations that beggar belief to hear (“Wait, wait, little Billy… you’re saying Deathstroke rode his pony… sorry, his My Little Pony… to Cybertron? To fight fucking Voldemort? Who plots your shit, Billy? Rob Liefeld?”). After a while, it starts to hurt the mind to keep track of what’s happening and why, because if you stop and think about it for even a minute, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

In that same vein, if I told you that the plot of a story was, “You know what would be cool? If the Avengers battled the X-Men and Phoenix – no, not some redhead in a green body stocking, but the actual giant flaming bird, like the one from Battle of The Planets – on – get this – the fucking moon,” you would think that you were overhearing a schoolyard monologue by some kid who was on the first step of a road that’s started with Ritalin and will eventually end with methamphetamine extract.

Welcome to Avengers Vs. X-Men #4: where every plot point was written with a prefix of, “And you know what else would be cool?” regardless as to whether it makes any Goddamned sense at all.

Finally Forward Thinking: Avengers Assemble #3 Review

Editor’s Note: There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could spoil the comics that we never could.

Put as mildly as a foul-mouthed, cynical, long-time drunken comic reader can put it, comic publishers almost never handle the release of a movie based on one of their properties well. Put less mildly and more baldly accurately, they generally seem to take the opportunity such a cross-media exposure provides for attracting new, enthusiastic readers to their comic books to grimly set their jaws, strap on their cleats, and stomp hard on their own dicks.

It happens over and over, so predictably that it might was well be a Cylon plot. The Dark Knight is poised to become the biggest movie of 2008, you say? What a perfect time for DC to kill Batman and put a new guy in the suit! Thor looking to open large? Awesome! Kill him! Iron Man breaking bigger than anyone thought in 2008? Sweet, let’s make him a government bureaucrat! It’s like the front offices of the Big Two, prior to the release of a comic book movie, go days without sleep, subsisting on amphetamines, trying to figure out how to convey to potential new readers, who wander into a comic store to learn more about the character they just fell in love with, that it would be in their best interests to fuck off and just keep right on walking.

So imagine my surprise when Marvel, not five days after the release of Avengers in American theaters, put out an issue of a comic book written and drawn by one of their A-list talent teams that looks like the movie, has the same characters as the movie, that is not only action-packed and imminently accessible to anyone who saw the movie, but also goes about answering one of the key unanswered questions from the movie that I have been asked repeatedly since last Friday: “So, that guy in the scene in the credits… who was that guy, exactly?”

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 9: Doublefisting Justice

I know what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “It has been a month since Amanda’s and your last podcast. What’s the occasion?” Which would be an excellent question had Avengers not opened in American theaters last Friday, so asking it makes you look foolish. So stop it. You’re better than that.

Here is the pure hell of being editors of a comics Web site: Amanda and I watched Avengers together Saturday afternoon, and rather than discuss it, we agreed to see it again on Sunday… and still not discuss it until we got home and did it into microphones. And discuss it we did; in this Avengers podcast, we discuss:

• The Avengers 3D vs. 2D Experience from the point of view of people getting old with slowly failing vision!
• The Hulk: Great Avenger or Greatest Avenger?
• The Hulk can lift tanks, so why can’t he carry his own movie?
• Our Friend, The Thrice-Nightly Screening, or: Why Can’t Johnny Edit?
• Black Widow as best developed Avenger (insert your own boob joke here)!
• Hawkeye: Redundant Avenger or Redundant Avenger?
• I Can Has Justis Leeg Moovee Nao?, and:
• AAAvengers: who do we want to bring up from the minors?

As always, if you intend to listen to this at work, we recommend you wear headphones unless you want your boss to hear phrases like, “Lokif***er,” “Mjolnir… is not the hammer,” or, “You just want a Dirty Ruffalo!” Besides, with headphones, if you listen really close, you can hear two grown comics geeks misidentifying S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sharon Carter as Ms. Marvel!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:44 — 56.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More

Enjoy the show, suckers!

(Avengers Booty Ass-emble via Kevin Bolk)

Assembly Required: Marvel’s The Avengers Movie Review

Update, 5/7/2012: Our spoiler-laden and much more in-depth Avengers podcast is now available.

Editor’s Note: This review contains no spoilers. As such, it feels very sketchy and incomplete. For more in-depth analysis of the movie and drunken incoherent ranting about specific things about the movie that were awesome, we will be producing a podcast in the coming days.

Marvel Studios’ The Avengers (Or as it’s known in England, Avengers Assemble, and as I presume it’s known in Pakistan, Imperialist Great Satans With Devil Powers) is finally in theaters in the United States. And you should go see it. Because it is good. Damn good. Seriously fucking good. Arguably the best superhero movie of all time (Granted, for me personally it is knocking M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable out of the peak spot, so take that into account as you read my opinion. Your mileage may vary, is all I’m saying).

Fair And Balanced, Or: Wolverine Vs. Everybody: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

The biggest problem with the first two issues of Avengers Vs. X-Men was, to me, that in order for it to make any sense, the writers needed to make Cyclops into a monomaniacal zealot, vis a vis Hope-as-mutant-savior, so focused, rigid and intractable that he made Timothy McVeigh look like Winston Churchill with a quualude habit.

It is now the third issue, and it appears that the Marvel Architects in charge of this story have found a way to temper our perceptions of Cyclops’s fanatical tendencies: by making Captain America a focused, rigid and intractable monomaniacal zealot.

In short, Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 displays the first real and disappointing cracks in what has been a tight, if sometimes logic-stretching little tale (if you can call an event comic destined to cover all Marvel titles for the next four months “little”): and that is that it attempts to mask Cyclops’s believability-stretching reactionary behavior with similar, yet opposite,  behavior by Cap. And instead of balancing the scales, it shows the Man Behind The Curtain by making two characters do stupid and unbelievable things in the interest of advancing the plot.

With that plot apparently being to make it so Wolverine can fight anybody. Because that shit sells some comics, yo. But we’ll get there in a minute,

An Asskicking By Any Other Name: Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 Review

Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 is a big old action movie of a comic book, where the first punch gets thrown by the second page and the hits keep on coming until we’re reminded by the last page that all this hot, sweet superhero-on-superhero action (wait, I think that came out wrong) is in service of a plot related to the Phoenix Force coming to destroy the world before the Avengers movie even has a chance to come out.

This book is filled with satisfying, balls-to-the-wall action… but it is also filled with overblown, florid and somewhat pretentious captions that read like a sixteen-year-old either trying to use his comics addiction for an easy C in Intro to Poetry, or to charm the Drama Club skank into turning a backrub into a front rub. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

If you’re looking for any kind of story advancement in this issue, you’re not gonna find much. The issue opens with the X-Men and The Avengers beating the unholy shit out of each other, and pretty much ends the same, with only the minor plot points of, “Yup, Phoenix Force… still coming,” and “Yeah, Hope… still getting jacked up on the Phoenix Force,” being advanced. If this was a modern Grandmasters’ chess game, this issue would be the equivalent of Bobby Fischer darkly muttering about Jews while some scabrous geek flips on the opposing IBM supercomputer.

Graffiti Artists, Assemble! – Live Stream Of Graffiti Event To Promote Avengers Movie

There’s a live art event to promote the Avengers movie going on in London right now. From the event’s Web site:

Don’t miss your chance to decide how graffiti artists create never-before-seen Avengers Assemble art in this exclusive global event. Vote via Twitter to determine which character assembles next – while graffiti superstar Alex Young from Addict brings the Avengers to life, live from London’s Old Street. Two characters will come to life every day from Wednesday April 18 – 21, streamed live from this channel.

CURRENT STATE OF PLAY
Already assembled: LOKI, THOR, IRON MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA
In progress: THE HULK
Current leaderboard: #VOTEBLACKWIDOW – 73% | #VOTENICKFURY – 27%

HOW TO VOTE
To vote, simply tweet #ASSEMBLELIVE plus your favourite character #VOTEBLACKWIDOW, #VOTECAPTAINAMERICA, #VOTENICKFURY or #VOTETHEHULK. Follow on Twitter @assemblelive.

Check out the piece in progress, via livestream.com in real time, below:

Geek Penthouse: Joss Whedon on Buffy Vs. Black Widow

If you’re anything like I am, you watched that teaser clip, from Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers flick, of Black Widow tied to a chair and still kicking the shit out of three or four guys and you wondered: “Why can’t I control when I get an erection? I’m a fucking 40-year-old man!”

However, if you’re anything like Amanda, you wondered who would win in a fight: the Widow, or Whedon’s most famous creation, Buffy The Vampire Slayer? I know she wondered this because she asked me while I was drafting the above-linked article; I sat quietly for a moment after her question, and after some intense consideration, I could only reply: “…I gotta go put on clean pants. New rule: don’t ask me about purely theoretical superhero girl fights. No, this does not supercede the existing rule to not ask me to solve complicated mathematical word problems in front of you and your friends.”

Thankfully, Whedon has responded directly to the question to USA Today, saving those of us wallowing in the realm of superhero geekdom the heartbreak of hours of heated bar debates, ill-advised and extended podcasts, and shameful and furtive midnight laundry sessions.

To wit:

And Then, On The Second Day – Hulk Smash! More Avengers Trailer Goodness For You!

Okay, little blue man - Hulk smash! Then Hulk go look for Easter eggs.

We here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives hope that you are having a happy, healthy holiday weekend and are thoroughly enjoying yourself, in the midst of whatever sort of celebration yours entails. Ours involves copious amounts of beer. Don’t look so fucking shocked.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this latest incarnation of Avengers movie trailers. We certainly are – and the beer has nothing to do with it.

One-Eyed Wonder Worm: Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!

Cyclops is a fucking dick.

– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her

So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.