The Nerdpocalypse: San Diego Comic-Con 2012’s Saturday Programming Schedule

Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con. The Nerdpocalypse. The day when the convention stacks up their A-List programming. ,Meaning that you will be around more lines than Tony Montana, and if the humidity rises above 40 percent, by noon you will smell like a foot.

It’s the day we Nerd Prom-goers wait for for about 364 days a year, and yesterday SDCC posted the entire preliminary programming guide for Saturday, July 14th. So let’s take a look at the panels that looked most interesting to us here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, and the ones most likely for us to attend, cover, and really foot the place up.

Twi-Nite: Nite Owl #1 Review

The problem we’ve run into a few times in the Before Watchmen books, and which I think we’re destined to keep running into and being annoyed by, are changes in character and established plot from the original Watchmen story. It’s been popping up since the first issue of Darwyn Cooke’s Minutemen, where we saw professional wrestler and noose enthusiast Hooded Justice suddenly able to disappear into shadows like the ghost of Bruce Lee. The worst offender (so far) has been Brian Azzarello’s Comedian, where Azzarello apparently decided that when Alan Moore wrote that Eddie Blake was working with Nixon in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination, what he really meant was that Blake was off somewhere fighting Moloch and whimpering over the shooting like a woman or some common hippie.

J. Michael Straczynski’s Nite Owl isn’t the worst offender in this vein – frankly, it would probably take seeing Rorschach gathering intel to take down Big Figure by going undercover at a glory hole outside a Chippendale’s to beat seeing The Comedian get all weepy over a millionaire Boston liberal – but JMS makes a fundamental mistake in Rorschach’s characterization that conflicted completely with Moore’s original work, and which popped me right out of the story. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Because despite that fundamental flaw that will be glaring to any hardcore fan of Moore’s original, there’s actually a lot to like about this comic book.

San Diego Comic-Con – Friday, July 13th: The Schedule

Ok, so, as we started yesterday, here’s a preview of some of the programming that will be brought to you on Friday of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Friday looks like a weird day that will be mostly appealing to those who are interested in television programming, The New 52 (can we still really call it “new” at this point?), and the Whedonverse. Here are some highlights from the official site:

Fan Film Friday: “Deadpool: A Typical Tuesday”

If you, like me, are counting the scant days until the opening of The Amazing Spider-Man and can barely contain yourself, here’s a little something to hold you over until July 3. Allow me introduce you to Deadpool: A Typical Tuesday and its Facebook page.

Put together by BeanDIProductions, this movie has the humor that those of us following Daniel Way’s current run will appreciate and, some audio issues aside, a lot of heart. Oh – and, in keeping with Marvel fashion, fan film or otherwise, stick around for a bonus scene after the credits!

Twilight : Comics :: Herpes : Picasso: San Diego Comic-Con 2012 Wednesday and Thursday Programming Schedule Release

We are a mere two weeks away from the official opening day for the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con (with the unofficial start occurring at the Nicky Rotten’s bar next to the Arrogant Bastard Ale tap about two hours before Preview Night opens on Wednesday night), and that means that the Comic-Con programming schedule is starting to drop, with Wednesday’s and Thursday’s schedule revealed today.

Now, be aware that this schedule is not official and utterly finalized, since it doesn’t include the annual “Rob yorks raw whiskey and bile into the toilet near the gaming room and screeches ‘Bring me the head of Roberto Liefeldo!'” panel. If by “panel,” you mean “trauma center event.”

Anyhoo, here’s what we have in store (and some of which we will be reporting on in damn near real time) for Wednesday’s Preview Night, and Thursday, July 11!

Strange Days

This is a strange looking week for new comics. We’ve got a Watchmen book that wasn’t written by Alan Moore going toe-to-toe with a book about Mina Parker that wasn’t written by Bram Stoker but that was written by Alan Moore, both competing for space with a graphic novel by a cooking writer. Throw that in with a comic about two Spider-Men and one about Robin if he was a homicidal 12-year-old girl, and we have one of the more surreal New Comics Days in recent memory.

But New Comics Day it is, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it is one hell of a week for new comics. We’ve got this week’s Before Watchmen book, Nite Owl written by JMS, the latest installment of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, the second issue of Brian Michael Bendis’s and Sara Pichelli’s Spider-Men, and new Brubaker / Phillips Fatale, a ton of DC titles, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But by this point, you know the drill: before we can review them, we need time to read them. So until that time: see you tomorrow, suckers!

…And The Omega: Spider-Man Gets A Sidekick

When Brian Michael Bendis had Spider-Man join The New Avengers a few years ago, I remember hearing grumblings amongst the regulars at my local comic store, where the know me by name and ask to remember that “that’s not a web shooter, and please don’t wave it at the paying customers while shouting ‘thwip!'” that having Spider-Man join a team would take away the whole outcast loner vibe that was part of what made the character unique.

That was 2005. It is now 2012, and after having had Spider-Man join not only The New Avengers, but also the Avengers proper and The Fantastic Four, Marvel has made it clear that they haven’t forgotten Spidey’s long and storied history as a loner, and that they intend to celebrate that history by giving him a teenaged sidekick!

Wait, what?

Killing In The Name: Avengers Academy #32 Review

Editor’s Note: This Sentinel’s Prime Directive: Ruin or spoil all stories about mutants.

Being a cynical and ironic child of the late 1980s / early 90s, there isn’t a reason on Earth why I should like Avengers Academy #32. It is naked and blatant in its attempts to manipulate the reader’s emotions by placing children and their pets in mortal danger from a cold and callous external threat. It blatantly pulls the old E.T. trick of making kids the emotionally satisfying voice of emotional trueness in the face of cold and calculating adult logic and compromise, and it even alludes to the old Old Yeller tearjerker moment when it isn’t obviously humping the corpse of Short Circuit. Truly, a book like this should have me sneering disdainfully while listening to Nirvana on my way to a Richard Linkater film and slacking. Or something like that.

With all that said, it’s now 2012, and the other day I almost got weepy when the Boston Red Sox traded Kevin Youkilis. So I don’t know if I’m losing my edge or what, but rather than being turned off by the obvious emotional manipulation going on in this comic book, I found it to be one of the best of the week. So either writer Christos Gage is damn good at what he’s doing, or I am turning into a colossal pussy. Regardless: I liked this book.

Iron Fisting: The New Avengers #27 Review

Editor’s Note: With great spoilers, comes great douchebaggery. I learned that lesson from my Uncle James. Yup. Good old Uncle James Beam. Died sticking up some old fart at gunpoint.

The final four pages of New Avengers #27 are amongst the most affecting and most emotional of the entirety of the Avengers Vs. X-Men event to date. It humanizes Hope in a way that has been missing in the event in favor of showing her alternate between a willful little whining brat and a cocky willful little whining brat, and it gives Spider-Man not only a logical and effective (if small) role in a cosmic apocalypse that should be completely out of his league, but it distills, in just a few short panels, the essence of the character and what he’s about better than six hours of Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies did. And it is Goddamned gorgeous to look at, besides.

Unfortunately, this is a 20-page story. Which further unfortunately means that what we got here is sixteen pages of decompressed life support for those spectacular closing four pages, that spins out a story conceit based purely on what was probably a simple lack of costume and coloring design communication between John Byrne and Gil Kane back in the mid-70s. On the fortunate end of the equation, those are sixteen pages of decompressed life support written by Brian Michael Bendis, meaning that they are filled with entertaining dialogue and some decent character beats… even while the best part of the book could have been presented as an interlude in the main event’s title.

Brain Bleach: Doctor Who + My Little Pony = Doctor Whooves

Well, this happened, and I can not unsee what I have seen. Yes, as reported by The Mary Sue back in April, YouTube user Ocarinaplaya has created a Brony Doctor Who…thing.

And now there’s a follow up episode:

I’ll be over here, with some Tito’s Handmade Vodka that Trebuchet and Pixiestyx left behind after their visit this weekend, contemplating the kind of world where this kind of thing can exist.