Episode 116: They Lebowskied Superman

It’s the first full week of DC Comics: Rebirth, and not a single Watchmen character appears in those issues, so we decided it would be a good opportunity to complain again about Watchmen characters appearing in the DC Universe.

Specifically, it was revealed this week that DC Comics didn’t contact Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons to ask him his opinion about adding Watchmen characters to Dc Universe: Rebirth. So we talk about whether that was a bush league move (protip: yeah), some of the history around DC leaving Watchmen alone, and whether DC Editorial really had any choice in asking for Gibbons or writer Alan Moore for even a half-hearted blessing in using their characters in Rebirth.

Then, since we were on a Rebirth roll, we discussed all this week’s titles from that event:

• Superman: Rebirth #1, written by Peter Tomasi with art by Doug Mahnke,
• Green Arrow: Rebirth #1, written by Benjamin Percy with art by Otto Schmidt,
• Green Lanterns: Rebirth #1, written by Geoff Johns and Sam Humphries with art by Ethan Van Sciver and Ed Benes, and:
• Batman: Rebirth #1, written by Scott Snyder and Tom King with art by Miken Janin.

And, just so Marvel doesn’t feel neglected, we close the show by talking about:

• Civil War II #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by David Marquez!

And, as always, the disclaimers:

• This show contains spoilers. If you want to avoid knowing how the DC: Rebirth books end (spoiler alert: no matter what happens, it probably won’t matter next month), then consider yourself warned.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your mom to know what “giddy bottom” means? Get some ear buds.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:08 — 92.2MB)

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Thanks for listening, suckers!

Episode 80: Lee Van Cleef In A Gimp Suit

We’re joined this week by Eisner Award nominated writer Christopher Sebela, who was gracious enough to spend well over an hour talking to us about his upcoming Boom! Studios comic We(l)come Back (with art by Jonathan Brandon Sawyer), as well as his work on High Crimes, Dead Letters, and Escape From New York.

Christopher talked with us about not only about the books themselves, but about some of the personal experiences he brought to the characters in them, some of the storytelling methods he favors in some books (and why he doesn’t use them in others), and how he feels lucky to have worked with the artists he has. He also explained to us why it’s so expensive to get vomiting drunk in Chicago, why we were suckers to get vomiting drunk in Chicago, and why he favors writing about damaged people like the kind who like to get vomiting drunk in Chicago. It was an interesting and wide-ranging conversation, and we’re pleased to bring it to you.

(And by the way: the first issue of We(l)come Back is excellent, and you should really add it to your pulls. Trust us on this. The Diamond order code is JUN151070).

Amanda and Rob also discuss:

• Star Lord And Kitty Pryde #1 by written by Sam Humphries with art by and Alti Firmansyah, and:
• The Punisher #20, written by Nathan Edmondson with art by Mitch Gerads!

And, the usual disclaimers:

• We record this show live to tape, with minimal editing (Although in this case, we recorded and edited the interview before the rest of the show). While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like a discussion of the phrase “sentient fedora.”
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out a warning ahead of time, be aware that a book titled The Punisher: Final Punishment might feature the Punisher’s final punishment.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. If you’ve read Christopher Sebela’s work, you know that he knows some swear words. If you’ve listened to our show, you know that we arguably know a few more. Get some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:53:22 — 102.3MB)

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Thanks for listening, suckers!

Episode 72: He’s Calling From Inside The Pouch!

Last week, we talked about how the future of the DC television shows, particularly the upcoming Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl, and how they might fit into the continuity created in Arrow and The Flash on The CW. And we mentioned over and over again that it’s hard to figure out the direction of the upcoming shows based only on trailers and not even a complete episode.

Well, clearly someone trusted with access to intellectual property at CBS or Berlanti Productions was listening, because the complete, hi-def pilot to Supergirl leaked to the Internet on Friday afternoon. And while normally one needs a little technical knowledge to find pirated videos online, this one leaked in a way where anyone with a mind to can watch it (although I’d use that link quickly, as CBS’s lawyers will be back from the Memorial Day holiday weekend bright and early Tuesday morning).

So we talk about the pilot, including how it uses the Superman mythos as shorthand to build Supergirl’s back story quickly (in ways both good and bad), how it’s potentially laying the groundwork for some continuity from the comics, possibly introducing an entirely new version of Lex Luthor, and creating questionable relationships between Superman and the government. We also talk about how the pilot wears its “girl power” themes on its sleeve, and whether that’s something that’s desirable or sustainable in the long run.

We also discuss:

• Planet Hulk #1, written by Sam Humphries and Greg Pak, with art by Marc Laming and Takeshi Miyazawa,
• Ultimate End #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Mark Bagley, and:
• Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars #1, written by Cullen Bunn with art by Matteo Lolli and Jacopo Camagni!

And now the disclaimers:

• We record this show live to tape with minimal editing. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like learning the origin story of Trucker Klingon, a.k.a. Steroid Loki.
• This show contains spoilers. Like, we spoil the entire pilot of Supergirl. Consider yourself warned.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your boss to learn the filthy double meaning behind Deadpool’s 80s-style costume logo? Of course not; nobody needs a visit to human resources on a short holiday week. Get yourself some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:03:48 — 110.9MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Contested Election: The Ultimates #15 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I pledge allegiance to the spoilers of the Ultimate Comics of Marvel…

If it was really that easy, Bart Simpson would have been the President of The United States since 1992.

I have previously mentioned that the Ultimate Comics Divided We Fall storyline feels, to me, a lot like Wildstorm’s World’s End arc from a few years back: a major publisher making their sub-universe story playground look more relevant by turning it into an arbitrarily violent cesspool to drive large-scale storylines that the characters themselves weren’t weighty enough to introduce with any believability. Stories like this are the zombie apocalypse of comics: create some form of MacGuffin that sends society into turmoil, like a Kherubim attack or the rise of The Children of Tomorrow or a probe from Venus, and let the circumstances allow characters to do shit that you would never accept in a remotely realistic world.

The problems with stories like that is that you need to buy into the circumstances that have broken society. That’s easy with something like Night of The Living Dead – if you can buy the concept of space bacteria making the dead walk, the overrun of society by the zombies is an easy next step. But if you want to buy into the chaos at the heart of The Ultimates #15, even if you decide to ignore the Sentinels going apeshit in Arizona and that most of the northern eastern seaboard is under National Guard control (despite barely seeing any signs of even traffic snarls in Ultimate Spider-Man), you need to believe that the entire West Coast has united under the rule of pastiches of what appears to be Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Now, my day job is in a software company, and I can tell you with some authority that there isn’t a serious techie in the world who would cross the street to piss down either of those guys’ throats if their hearts were on fire. If this happened in the real world, California’s computer systems would die like pigs in a chute as all the real programmers emigrated to Arizona, because I guarantee you that the Sentinels run on Linux. But I’m getting off on a tangent here.

October Surprise: Marvel Leaks Spoilers For The Ultimates #15

Back at the San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Editor In Chief Axel Alonso and The Ultimates writer Sam Humphries teased a huge event occurring in The Ultimates #15. “This will be one of the biggest comics of the year… siesmic,” Marvel’s Director of Communication Artie Singh said at the time, showing off upcoming covers to The Ultimates while withholding the cover to #15 and further teasing that the covers for #14 and #16 they were showing weren’t the final versions.

Which, at the time, felt like just some nifty hype; the entire panel in which this information was teased was far more hype and far less actual hard information. And I don’t think I can remember an SDCC where someone from one of the Big Two publishers didn’t say something like that, and usually the big reveal winds up being something stupid and ultimately inconsequential, like Wonder Woman buying a pair of pants, or Thor installing a pair of Truk-Nutz on Mjolnir.

Well, The Ultimates #15 will be out in comic stores tomorrow, and Marvel has leaked the big development to The Washington Post. Which means that, as a classic inverted pyramid lead, this article totally sucks, but I needed enough words (assuming “Truk-Nutz” counts as a word) to build in a cushion for the jump, to protect your tender little eyes from the big spoiler…

Wanted Killers: More Marvel Now One-Word Teasers

Fine Marvel Comics, you’ve done it: you finally fucking stumped me. I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Are you happy now, you sons of bitches?

Marvel has released a couple of new one-word teaser posters for their winter Marvel Now releases. Earlier this week they released ones reading “Lightning,” which was pretty clearly a teaser for a Thunderbolts relaunch by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon… and then there was “Survive,” something by Dennis Hopeless and Kev Walker, which seemed to me to be a possible Marvel Zombies title… maybe. That one’s kind of hard to tell – the word “survive” covered in blood might be a Marvel Zombies book, or it might be a book with Morbius The Living Vampire, or it might be about an accidental bathroom encounter with Ike Perlmutter.

Well yesterday, Marvel released two more one-worders. What do they have on the plate for us?

Fucked if I know, but you can check them out after the jump.

Marvelous Hype: Friday Marvel SDCC 2012 News

One thing I’ve learned over several years of attending the San Diego Comic-Con is that DC Comics panels are more entertaining than Marvel panels. That’s a harsh reality but for me, a true one.

Panels from each company are jam-loaded with hype, and each does its damndest to try and whip the crowd into a screeching nerd frenzy, which is fine; Comic-Con panels aren’t press conferences, they’re public relations exercises that happen to include some pieces of legitimate comics news. And often that news is exciting – Neil Gaiman back on Sandman, anyone? – so I don’t blame either editorial staff for trying to whip the crowd into a slavering geek frenzy. But for me, the difference is that Marvel is just so self-congratulatory about things.

Here’s an example: last year, DC Comics blew up their entire universe and ran a real risk of alienating a huge chunk of their core audience. Instead, the move allowed DC to overtake Marvel in sales for he first time in recent memory, and their sales have reportedly stayed damn solid since then. We have attended no less than five DC panels so far at SDCC, and the biggest pat on the back DC gave themselves was when Bob Wayne opened the New 52 panel yesterday by asking the crowd how many people spent SDCC last year thinking that DC was insane for making the move… and followed up by asking why more people didn’t think that at the time.

Compare that to Marvel, who last year introduced a black / Hispanic Spider-Man. In the Ultimate Universe, which thanks to the recent 616 universe crossover in Spider-Men, is the equivalent of DC’s Earth 2 – a sandbox where Marvel can mess around with characters without it affecting the valuable core titles from which they make movies. Was is a bold move? Sure it was… but compared to blowing up your entire continuity, it’s about the same as comparing dropping a washer slug into a Coke machine to sticking up the Federal Reserve with a dynamite belt: one’s a little easier to walk back if the plan goes sideways.

However, if you listened to the panelists at yesterday’s Marvel Ultimate Universe panel, you’d think they cured the common cold. “This was a big risk,” said Marvel Editor in Chief Axel Alonso, “It was harder for us to kill [Peter Parker] than it was for you guys.” Alonso also said that the new Ultimate Spider-Man was the best work of Brian Michael Bendis’s career, and make no mistake: it’s a pretty good story, albeit utterly decompressed. But the hype was, personally, a little hard to take. My notes from the panel read, “Lot of ‘We’re so awesome and brave’ shit on the panel for killing Peter and having an Afr.-Am. kid as SM. There’s no news here, just fucking hype.”

And then Alonso announced that Ultimate Spider-Man artist David Marquez just signed an exclusive deal with Marvel. And my notes read, “There’s your news, writer prick.”

Adventures In Digital Comics – Review Of Comixology App, Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1, And Marvel Infinite Comics

You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!

I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.

Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.

Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!

Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 – Oh, It’s On Now!

Ok, so, you’ve got your Comic-Con pass. You’ve survived the ordeal of finding a hotel in San Diego that will take your money and probably not make you room with a meth dealer. Sure, July is still about 4 months away, but you’re already getting pretty excited about Nerd Prom, right.

Of course you are. You know what would make Comic-Con even better?

Zombies.

Behold, released from Boom Studios at the crack of tomorrow:

One is a decrepit mob of gurgling, ravenous fiends…and the other is a zombie outbreak. When there is no more room in Hell, the undead shall take over Comic-Con! A crew of feuding best friends find themselves trapped inside America’s largest comic convention transformed into a seething cauldron of zombies. Is a horde of starving brain-eaters any match against reflexes battle-hardened by video games, nerves tested by horror flicks, and courage crystallized by comic books? Find out as an unlikely band of nerds use their genre savvy to survive in Fanboys vs. Zombies!

Seriously! How cool is that going to be? Just take a look at this preview art by Jerry Gaylord, who will be drawing the book:

Best. Masquerade night. Ever.

Fanboys Vs. Zombies will be written by Sam Humphries (Our Love Is Real). If you, like me, are too excited to wait for the full issue experience tomorrow, check out this preview over at Comics Alliance.

Fanboys vs. Zombies – it’s on motherfuckers!