Gotham City, 90210: Teen Titans #4 Review

We’ve had a lot of fun at Scott Lobdell’s expense here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives because, well, if you’re gonna relaunch a tentpole character of the DC Universe as an blank-slated set of jugs trolling for cock, you kinda deserve what happens to you. Just because Starfire happens to be Snooki-orange doesn’t mean you need to write her that way. We’re just sayin’.

Lobdell’s writing on Red Hood and The Outlaws was such a juvenile misfire we almost dropped his Teen Titans book because, well, if a man opens up with a blatant Southern Trespass, you don’t stick around to see what he has in mind after he gets comfortable fucking you and decides it’s safe to try the weird stuff. Frankly, we only held onto it because Amanda liked Brett Booth’s art, and while the story did seem like it was born from the pitch, “X-Men! Only in the DCnU!” it had enough potential to at least see where it was going.

Well, we’re four issues in now, and I have to give credit where it’s due: it’s been a while in coming, but I actually enjoyed this issue. Lobdell might be a juvenile writer, but on a book about juveniles, it’s finally working for me.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Or: Happy New Year, Watchmen Fans

UPDATE, 1/4/2011, 4:45 p.m.: Funny story: turns out that we’re not too small, and Fair Use is great… in theory. We’ve pulled the image at DC Comics’ request… as have pretty much all the sites linked below (except for comics-x-aminer, as of this writing). Hope you saw it while it was available!

UPDATE, 1/2/2012, 8:45 a.m.: Well, Rich Johnston got C&D’ed by DC Legal, which is a pretty solid indication that this image was legit. We’ve heard nothing yet ourselves, possibly either because we’re still too small to notice, or because the snippet of the full image we’ve posted falls under the tenets of Fair Use, so we’ll leave ours up for the time being. Regardless, as of this update, the full image can still be found at Comic Book Movie, io9, Scans Daily, and comics-x-aminer.

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So 2011 brought in a ton of rumors that DC Comics was quietly moving forward with a bunch of Watchmen prequels done by A-List talent (Provided you don’t keep Alan Moore on your personal A-List). Rumors like this have been a dime a dozen over the past few years… except this time, Bleeding Cool came up with speculative cover art for a Comedian series by J.G. Jones and a Nite Owl cover by Andy and Joe Kubert, and if they’re not real, the cease and desists that Time Warner sent Bleeding Cool sure were.

All that happened while the Crisis On Infinite Midlives home office stood unoccupied for the Christmas Holiday. But it’s New Year’s Day, and we are back, weighed down by swollen livers and crippling hangovers, with just enough energy to dial up the Internets… to find the alleged cover art to the Silk Spectre miniseries by Amanda Conner.

Come For The Hex; Stay For The Ghost – Review Of All Star Western #4

When Rob reviewed All Star Western #1 back in October, his summation that the book was neither “all star” nor “western”, beyond the fact that it includes the character of Jonah Hex, was pretty accurate, even despite the entire fifth of Jack Daniels I personally watched him put down his head shortly before he wrote that review. The man is a fucking machine, I tell you. However, what Rob may have overlooked is that All Star Western is not just about the saga of Jonah Hex as some kind of ass kicking fish out of water in an 1800’s Gotham City. The books also have been including an 8 page mini-story in each issue that fleshes out some of the other Western characters in the historical DCU. Issues #1-3 followed a neat little arc centering around El Diablo. Issue #4 begins the story of a newly created character called The Barbary Ghost. More on her later. Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti seem to be using these issues to tell not only Jonah Hex’s story, but to develop a detailed past history for the DCnU. Maybe All Star History Lesson was a less compelling title than All Star Western? Either way, in an interview with Newsarama, both Gray and Palmiotti express their desire to use All Star Western as a platform to explore the past and plant seeds that will have a bearing on DCU’s future – particularly in the Batman titles:

Jimmy Palmiotti: We are always researching and talking to the editors and other writers of the Batman books to see what’s going on and how we can interact and plant seeds in the past to make the whole picture make more sense. Currently, you’ll be seeing things in All-Star that have everything to do with what’s happening in the Batman titles right now.

Justin Gray: The good thing about it is that we’re working with the idea that Gotham existed long before Batman and it has a rich history to be developed and explored. Like Jimmy said, we’ve been working with Mike Marts and Scott on making sure there are elements from the past that tie directly into Batman’s time.

So, now that we’re four issues in, has this direction positively or negatively affected their stories?

Answers, with spoilers, after the jump!

Quick Hits – Wolverine And The X-Men #3, Green Lantern Corps #4, And Ghost Rider #7

Call this post “The Good, The Bad, and WTF”. Here are some books we’ve talked about before. Let’s check in to see how they’re doing now.

The Good

Wolverine And The X-Men written by Jason Aaron with pencils by Chris Bachalo, Duncan Rouleau and Matteo Scalera wraps up the opening story arc of Wolverine’s first day trying to run a school for young mutants. I enjoyed the first issue. Aaron continues to bring humor to this tale, now up to issue #3. He pens an engaging story that reminds the reader that your typical teen can be an obnoxious handful who believes deeply that they are the hero of not only their own story but everyone else’s. Still, all the kids want to do is fit in somehow, in his or her own way.

More goodness, badness and wtf-ness after the jump…and spoilers.

This Is Not Gratutitous Self Boob Groping By Wonder Woman

Feels like I'm made of clay. Is it supposed to feel like that?

Xeni Jardin, of BoingBoing, recently wrote about an ad campaign in Mozambique that is a series of super heroines giving themselves breast exams to increase breast cancer awareness.

There is some controversy in the medical world about the value of breast self-exams. Even if it’s not the best way to detect cancer (mammography or thermography can “see” more than your hand, and many if not most lumps that can be felt are benign), I think more awareness and more data is generally a good thing. Even for superheroes.

As an aside, the ads are fun but I’m gonna guess that the creative team on this one was all-male…ever notice how public health ads about testicular cancer and prostate cancer don’t tend to feature fondle-y sexualized close-ups of those parts?

What? This isn’t “fondle-y” and sexualized?

Robin, quick! To the Bat Ball!

More breast aware superheroes after the jump.

Jesusfall, or: Apocalypse, or: LEONARD BERNSTEIN

The Aztec calendar says that the apocalypse happens next year, but the fact that yet another issue of Catwoman has found it’s way into another week’s new comics take…

…possibly means the premature 2011 end of the world. And if not, it totally means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you gotta go out, there are worse ways. After all, we’ve got the last issue of Butcher Baker Candlestickmaker from The Boys, Justice League #4, a new X-Factor, Ultimate Spider-Man #5, and a bunch of other cool stuff to bring us into the Christmas weekend!

And speaking of the Christmas weekend: both Amanda and I are traveling this week to spend time with either loved ones or people who will give us free shit without hissing, “What have you done with our family name?” Because of that, posting may become sporadic between now and the new year… and what we do post might be reviews of fifteen-year-old trade paperbacks we left in our folks’ houses around our college graduation (Hello, Death Of Superman reviews!).

But if we’re gonna get any reviews of this week’s book in, we need some times to read them. So in case shitty flights, rotten airport wi-fi and / or squinting parents muttering, “Why are you calling Spider-Man ‘Ultimate?’ And a ‘Fucking longwinded douchebag’?” slow our output…

Have a happy holiday, suckers!

You Sometimes Get A Second Chance: Batman & Robin #4 Review

Batman & Robin is a textbook case of the dangers inherent in telling a decompressed comics story. The first issue read to me as a wretched Goddamned mishmash of elements from Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and the old 60s TV show: big, silly action – including riding Batpoles, and not in that good superhero porno parody way – combined with the introduction of some darker elements, like a new villain who dissolves his enemies in acid. It was a frustrating experience in cognitive dissonance, like watching Cesar Romero tie Adam West to a giant roman candle and then chop Burt Ward’s foot off with a rusty machete.

The first issue was so dissatisfying that I was prepared to drop the book from my pulls, except I didn’t want to risk accidentally losing Scott Snyder’s Batman by accident. And I am glad that I didn’t, because the subsequent three issues, which tie up the opening story arc, have proven that Batman & Robin deserves to stand with Snyder’s Batman and Tony Daniel’s Detective Comics as some of the most rock-solid, entertaining Batman comics in years. Sometimes I’m glad to be wrong.

Let’s get some of the prejudicial facts out of the way up front: I have never particularly liked Damian Wayne. Since his introduction he has often been written as a bitchy little brat, to the point where Amanda has sometimes gotten the both of us laughing by reading Damian’s dialogue in the voice of Stewie from Family Guy. Try it yourself, it’s fun: “Now look here, Pennyworth…”

The Dark Knight Rises Trailer Finally Out

Well, it’s finally out and far more viewable than the blurry cell phone footage that made its way to The Gothamist four days ago. I give to you, for your viewing pleasure, The Dark Knight Rises official movie trailer:

Just in the nick of time, now that the other, also blurry, cell phone footage of the 8 minutes of DKR prologue got yanked from the Internet by Warner Bros. I will say the brief snippets of Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle are definitely getting me more interested in her/the movie’s take on the character. Oh, and it’s nice to finally be able to understand what Bane is saying without needing a script to follow – although the dialogue in that script refers to the DKR prologue, not that Bane was particularly intelligible in the trailer leaked on Dec. 15, either.

Forced Spectrum: The Ray #1 Review

Let’s get the good part of the review out of the way up front: Jimmy Palmiotti’s, Justin Gray’s and Jamal Igle’s The Ray is a fun comic that I intend to keep buying, at least for the time being. It has a likable protagonist, a stack of interesting supporting characters, and an old-school, “Wrong place, wrong time, boom! Dude gets superpowers” attitude toward it’s origin story that reminds me of comics like Nova and Firestorm when I was a kid back in the 70s.

The bad part of the review is that The Ray feels like the obligatory “black best friend” that DC Comics will trot out at SDCC 2012 to prove to extremists in Batgirl costumes that they’re not racists. But we’ll come back to that.

Our hero is Lucien, a lifeguard in San Diego who gets blasted by something called the Sun Gun – probably because if it was the actual Large Hadron Collider that it’s clearly meant to be aping it would imply that he got his powers from something called a God Particle, which would draw out a whole different kind of extremist to SDCC – and gets the power to control light. All of this happens in three pages, and one of them is the opening splash page. Compare that to, say Ultimate Spider-Man, where we’ve gone four issues without even putting Miles Morales in his own costume, and you can tell we’re looking at a fast-paced origin book like, say, the original Spider-Man.

Of course, it takes a little longer than for Lucien to get his costume on because gaining the control of light apparently means losing the ability to wear pants. Everything he touches burns, which means that The Ray will be the first superhero to die of a backup of semen to the brain stem. In fact, a large part of this issue revolves around Lucien’s pants problem, meaning that we spend a lot of time in the company of a naked young man, and that there is a particular demographic who can use the book to make sure they are in no danger of death by semen accumulation.

Not Getting Older, Just Getting Better…Right? – Review Of Deathstroke #4

Ed. Note – This review is in no way influenced by the fact that I’m turning 40 tomorrow. Condolences, whiskey and Lipitor can be sent to the usual place.

Being Slade Wilson has never been easy. Given super strength, agility and healing factors through military experiments, you’d think Wilson would’ve had a bright future ahead of him as a metahuman super soldier. But, as so often happens, government bestowed super powers only come with more headaches than they’re worth. Am I right, Captain Atom? That guy knows what I’m talking about. In Slade’s case he ended up going mercenary to protect a friend, getting one of his sons kidnapped and grievously injured, getting shot at and partially blinded by his wife, and going on to become the punching bag for a group of teen superheroes, the Teen Titans. Oh, and engage in what can best be described as an “inappropriate” relationship with a 15 year old girl in the process. Slade Wilson – making the good choices! Serious, it’s all in The New Teen Titans: The Judas Contract. Go on. Read it and come back. I’ll wait.

Ok, so, now that the DC Universe has been rebooted, where does Slade Wilson find himself? Still a sad adversary to meta-powered children or did The Powers That Be give him a shot at a better life this time around?

Spoilery goodness and knife play after the jump!