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.

Spoon! The Tick and Invincible

It’s March solicitation time, and all the big publishers have hyped their stuff for the new year, but there’s one solicitation from a little local press called New England Comics that is filled. With. Win.

THE TICK #100

THE TICK MEETS INVINCIBLE!

We celebrate the 100th issue of The Tick with a 48-page full-color blockbuster co-starring Robert Kirkman’s INVINCIBLE! In a full-length 24-page epic, Invincible is transported to The Tick’s Universe where the two mighty heroes confront the combined threat of the master criminal Chairface Chippendale and a mysterious and menacing new villain who makes even Chairface look like an ordinary umbrella stand! A story so awesome that it requires two planets (and at least one moon!) to contain it! Added bonus: THE SAGA OF THE TICK, a 20-page full-color history of The Tick’s illustrious career, heavily illustrated with covers and selected artwork from all 99 previous issues of THE TICK!

Writer: Benito Cereno Artist: Les McClaine

Cover price $6.99

Saddlestitch, 48 pages Color text, color covers

Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar And Sometimes The Scarlet Witch, Well, You Decide.

Bleeding Cool wants to know: Did Frank Cho realize when he drew the Avengers vs. X-Men 0 cover that Hope Summers appears to be, well, flying out of the Scarlet Witch’s special lady place…or at least a cape, gently waving in the breeze of the Phoenix Force or something, that’s shaped like a vagina?

Yes. These are the questions that need to be answered.

Here’s Frank Cho’s response:

“It never occurred to me that I was drawing a giant vagina when I drew this cover. I could kind of see it now in its final colored form. It’s funny how people project their fears, concerns and fantasies into other people’s art.

“Okay. Rebuttal.

“Like Georgia O’Keefe, I love vaginas. What’s wrong with vaginas? ;-)”

You decide, after the jump.

The Dark Whowhatnow Prologue?

It’s 10 p.m. on Thursday, and you should hurry up and look… because it won’t be here by 11.

Shaolin Ninja: Geof Darrow’s Wolverine #300 Cover

If you’re not an old school comics fan going back to the 80’s or into more indie stuff, you might not know who Geof Darrow is, since he’s done most of his work for the movies and TV. He started out in animation doing character designs for the Pac-Man Saturday morning cartoon, so you know he must smoke pot. Then he did the concept art for Neo’s biopod in The Matrix, so you know he must smoke laced pot.

Comics-wise, he wrote and drew Shaolin Cowboy, which has been out of print for years.  He drew The Big Guy and Rusty The Robot and Hard Boiled, both written by Frank Miller. And at the 2009 Boston ComicCon, he grabbed my 1990 first print copy of Hard Boiled #2 and used it to give some kid who he was talking to when I shuffled up an impromptu art lesson without my having to ask or buy something or shoot his loved ones in the face.

Five Guys On One: Marvel Announces Avengers Vs. X-Men

Yesterday Marvel announced that their big crossover event for 2012 will be: Civil War! Wait – I mean: Avengers Vs. X-Men!

In a streaming press conference with Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso, SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, Senior Editor Nick Lowe, and Marvel’s Architect writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, they gave the gist of what we’re in store for: about 300 clams to read the whole story! Wait, that’s not right…

…the seeds for this story have been growing for a while. When [the 2007 X-Men event] “Messiah CompleX” introduced the so-called “Mutant Messiah,” a little girl with green eyes and red hair named Hope, it raised the obvious question, “Who is she?” and, of course, the specter of the Phoenix.

So if I had to hazard a guess, the Phoenix Force is returning to Earth, probably to infect the little girl who looks just like Jean Grey, if Jean Grey were redrawn by commission for loathsome perverts. The X-Men will want to protect their messiah, The Avengers will want to stop a potential extinction-level threat to Earth, stuff will explode, and dudes will get kicked.

Stalking Horse: Dark Horse’s Digital Pricing Controversy

It is the twenty-first century, and it has been a week, so that must mean that someone tried to do something tricky about digital comics that pissed almost everybody off.

Earlier this week, Dark Horse Comics announced that, like DC and Marvel’s Ultimate line, they were going to make their books available digitally on the same day as the print copies. The problem is that they didn’t specify any details about their pricing model, which, for older books that they’ve made available digitally to date, is generally a buck ninety-nine, compared to the normally $2.99 print editions.

And then the comics Internet shit its tubes.

Brian Michael Bendis To Leave The Avengers – If A Head Explodes On The Internet, Can Anybody Hear It?

A couple hours ago, Comic Book Resources ran an interview with Brian Michael Bendis in which he announced he will be ending his run on The Avengers in 2012. Seemingly instantaneously, message boards, Facebook accounts, and Twitter all exploded with chatter. In the interview, Bendis discusses where his Avengers arc is going, the addition of Storm to the team, and how a newly revitalized Norman Osborn is going to flare up and plague The Avengers like herpes on prom night. And he compared his run on The Avengers to Breaking Bad.

“I’m going to wrap up ‘Avengers’ and ‘New Avengers.’ At the same time the first storyline of ‘Avengers Assemble’ will be done,” Bendis told CBR. “It’s a good time to move on to other things. Before I go, though, I’m ending things big. I’m in countdown mode. You know when you’re watching a show like ‘Breaking Bad,’ and every episode feels like the second to last episode? That’s where I’m at. I’ve been on the Avengers longer than anybody in the history of the book. When you take everything into account, I’ve written over 200 issues. I’m very, very proud of that, and what we have coming up this summer gives me the opportunity to go out on a high note. I know enough about showbiz to know that’s a great time to go.”

So, You Want To Work Out Like Batman…

Sam DeHority recently published an interview on Men’s Fitness with John Romaniello, NSCA-CPT to examine whether the training regimen published in Matthew Manning’s The Batman Files is something an actual human being could do. The short answer? No.

What are the odds that someone could get through a regimen like this cleanly?
Zero percent. It’s too many elite levels of skill. For the highest one percent of one percent of the population, you can be good at just about everything and great at a few things. Let’s take someone who’s both big and strong, and has good endurance—someone from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby squad. I don’t think they could sprint 20 miles. A 4:50 mile is damn near a sprint, and those guys don’t have to deal with broken bones from fighting bad guys.

But…I’m no quitter! How bad could it really be? This, coming from a girl who can’t actually manage to stick to a simple plan of going for a walk three times week. Mostly because I’m hungover a lot and sunlight brings pain.

Workout plan and feelings of inadequacy after the jump

The Long Con

Anyone who’s ever been to a major convention – and as veterans of six San Diego Comic-Cons, we at Crisis on Infinite Midlives certainly qualify – knows that they can be a trying experience. Between crowds, cosplayers, BO, frustrated creators who feel waylaid by rude fans, fans who feel slighted by cosplaying creators with BO, and Dirk Benedict, tempers can get a little frayed. It can be hard for anyone to know how they’re supposed to act.

Thankfully, fan favorite comic writer Peter David has written The Fan / Pro Bill Of Rights, which lays out some honestly excellent and well-thought guidelines as to how to act at a convention for the uninitiated. Which we will, in turn, experience with a sense of humor, which is how we experience conventions so we don’t wind up chucking a flying elbow smash into every Type II diabetic oozing over of every surface of a Little Rascal except for the tires, which are oozing over my feet.

Kick us off, Peter!