Hurm.

Rorschach’s Journal, June 6, 2012: Classic comic carcass on top of pull pile this evening. This industry is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. George Washington’s face. The comic stores are extended quarter bins and the quarter bins are filled with 80s nostalgia and when the bins finally go five for a buck all the indie books will drown. The accumulated greed for another classic comic will foam up inside their pants and all the DiDios and Lees will look up and shout, “This is a tribute to Moore!” And I’ll look down and whisper, “What’s his cut?”

All of which is a long way to go to say that this week’s new comics brings us Minutemen by Darwyn Cooke, the first issue of DC’s long-gestating Before Watchmen, and further that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it’s not all Before Watchmen today, kids. We’ve also got a new Avengers Vs. X-Men,a Garth Ennis The Boys, a Red Lantern crossover in Stormwatch, a Jamie Delano Crossed: Badlands, and a bunch of other…

Yeah; Minutemen is kinda the money shot this week. Be it in the good sense, or the bukkake sense.

But until we can tell you, first we need time to read them. So until then: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Jim Lee – Stepping Down From Justice League Already?

It’s not even a year yet, but Bleeding Cool is running an article that reports DC is “making a number of approaches to what could only be described as the A-List of modern comics to sign up for a twelve issue run on Justice League, to replace Jim Lee.” While Geoff Johns will remain on the book as the writer, apparently DC is looking to lock down art talent for the next few years – including as yet unnamed individuals who are currently working for Marvel. Oooo! The plot thickens!

Just who could or would step into Jim Lee’s shoes? Could it be frequent Johns’s collaborator, Ivan Reis? Would DC steal Marc Silvestri back from whatever projects he’s engaged in, assuming he’s done icing his shoulder after penciling those couple Incredible Hulk books last fall and that variant cover of The Walking Dead #100 for Robert Kirkman over at Image? Would DC lure Greg Land away from Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men to turn his pornbox light on for Wonder Woman?

New Dark Knight Rises Promo Unveiled During MTV Movie Awards

Something wonderful happened at the MTV Movie Awards last night – and it wasn’t just that Jennifer Anniston was named “Best Dirtbag“, an honor that’s been overdue to her for years now. No, no. A new promo trailer for The Dark Knight Rises aired. This time with some new footage of Christian Bale in a humorous exchange with Morgan Freeman, more Selina Kyle/Catwoman, and Bane vs. Batman throwdown goodness. Check out the awesomeness!

The Dark Knight Rises hits US theaters on July 20th, 2012.

Body Dysmorphia: The Incredible Hulk #8 Review

In most of the ways that matter, The Incredible Hulk #8 is not a bad comic book at all. It’s a decent opening to a story told from Hulk’s point of view, where Banner makes moves neither Hulk nor we are privy to, with a reasonably effective guest spot by The Punisher, an interesting, if short-lived new villain, and fun violence inflicted in new and exciting ways. There’s a lot here that works.

However, the stuff that does work is somewhat hamstrung by a couple of significant weaknesses, including a general plot that is taken from the annals of Breaking Bad, if Giancarlo Esposito’s mother was actually an Alsatian Wolf Hound, and, well, the artist. In short: Steve Dillon is an excellent artist. An excellent artist who should be tazed in the groin before he even thinks of drawing The Hulk ever again.

All New, All Incomprehensible: The Ravagers #1 Review

Last September, DC Comics rebooted their entire universe, with the stated purpose of making each and every one of their books accessible to readers who had never read any of their books before. It is now June, and DC Comics has released The Ravagers #1, and apparently their commitment to making books accessible to readers unfamiliar with existing continuity lasted almost exactly ten months.

The Ravagers is a superteam introduced in the latest few issues of Teen Titans, which I haven’t been following as closely as I perhaps should be because it started as a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men and became, well, a decompressed and slow paced riff on The X-Men. Well, apparently somewhere around Teen Titans ninth issue, they introduced The Ravagers, victims of the fiendish plot of shadow organization N.O.W.H.E.R.E. to activate the metagenes of unsuspecting teenagers and to force innocent comics writers to type longassed acronyms.

Putting The Band Back Together: Powers #10 Review

Brian Michael Bendis’s and Michael Avon Oeming’s Powers has been a dicey read for me for a long time now. A comic that started as a unique take on the superhero book, where some regular cops worked regular cases that just happened to involve superhumans and included some of the coolest dialogue you could find in a comic book, it eventually… evolved. Or devolved. Into a book where the regular cops got powers and secret identities, and the compelling partners at the core of the book split up, all while Bendis and Oeming started putting out, say, an issue a year, whether we needed one or not.

If the original Powers arc, Who Killed Retro Girl?, was the comics equivalent of Twin Peaks season one, the more recent arcs have been more like Laverne & Shirley after they went to Hollywood… assuming Garry Marshal had had the brainwave to replace Shirley with The Great Gazoo. Which is somewhat of an unkind comparison, because I always kept Powers on my pull list, because even while the characters shuffled and I lost track of the plot between issues, it still offered some of the best dialogue in comics, and there was always something interesting going on, even if some issues felt less like seeing Muhammed Ali in his prime in 1979 than it did watching Muhammed Ali trying to eat prime rib in 2009.

You get all that? Good. Now forget it all. Because Powers #10 is flat-out the best issue of Powers since the early, early Image Comics days. It has it all: the crackling dialogue, Walker and Pilgrim back together doing interrogations in the box, and real, human stakes behind the superpowers. It is awesome, and one of the best single issues of not just Powers, but of any comic book I’ve read in weeks.

Hard As Iron: First Photos of Iron Patriot In Iron Man 3

While we comic fans are still swooning over The Avengers movie, let us not forget that Marvel Studios is not resting on the hundreds of millions of dollars that that movie has brought in the way your or I would if presented with hundreds of millions of dollars… actually, given a second thought, I would not be resting on it. I would be furiously masturbating on it. But already, I digress.

No, Marvel Studios already has Iron Man 3, directed by Lethal Weapon writer and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang director Shane Black, in the throes of principal photography. That means they’re shooting it now, in laymans’ terms, and when a geek movie is being shot? That means spy pictures are being leaked to the Internet. Such as the ones after the jump.

(And by the way – “spy pictures” is not industry jargon for “upskirt shots.” Don’t make that mistake and learn about it the hard way, like I did.)

All Filler, All Killer

It’s the New Comics Day of Memorial Day week here in the United States, and in my experience, that leads to a truly shitty week of new comics. It means a short, truncated take after a bunch of regular books punt off by a week so that comic creators can relax and attend what I call the Lynchburg, Tennessee Comic Convention, while we normal comics fan are stuck with a small pile of what appears to be mostly annuals by second-string creative teams.

And on paper, this week’s take appears to be no different that prior years, what with at least two different DC annuals, along with one by Marvel. And to add (potentially) insult to injury, the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me not to show the paying customers my definition of a “small pile,” threw in a complimentary promo poster of J.G. Jones’s Before Watchmen drawing of The Comedian in a gimp mask to make my take look less anemic.

So on paper, things sound dire for this week’s take, but for good or ill, this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But you know something? For a week that is normally a time-waster, I can only say that, of the three books I read at the bar, not one of them wasn’t one of the best books I’ve read in months. From a new The Walking Dead, to the new Bendis / Oeming Powers (which is the best issue of that book in literally years), to the Scott Snyder written Batman annual, which gives us the traditional origin of Mister Freeze, only with a truly interesting and satisfying twist, there are some damn good books here. Chuck in an Animal Man annual,  a new Angel & Faith and personal favorite Rocketeer Adventures, and we have a damn good, if smaller than usual, take of comics this week.

But before we can review them, we need time to read them (and also to dry out). So until then: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Brain Bleach: Chef Chris Cosentino To Write Digital Wolverine One Shot.

Somehow I missed it back in April when it was announced at WonderCon that Incanto chef Chris Cosentino had been asked by Marvel to write an issue of Wolverine. Cosentino says that Marvel Senior VP Of Creator And Content Development, C.B. Cebulski, and he tweet a lot and that while Cebulski was a guest at Incanto he asked Cosentino if he’s be interested in writing a comic book. Cosentino says that his comic will be set in San Francisco, be food-centric, and have lots of giant robots. The book will officially be titled Wolverine: The Fifth Quarter (“the fifth quarter” being a nod to the food most commonly associated with Cosentino, offal) and the art will be done by Tim Seely (Hack/Slash).

With Anthony Bourdain set to release Get Jiro! in July, one does have to ask if this is going to turn into a growing trend. Can we expect one shot publicity stunts from other celebrity chefs? Would Emeril write Gambit? Gordon Ramsay pen The Hulk? Should we look forward to a Flash tale from Rachel “30 Minute Meals” Ray? I’m sure the answer is most likely “no”. At least I hope so. Maybe Bourdain and Cosentino will prove me wrong, but I’ve got a fifth of Old Crow that says we’re going to see exposition heavy text and a story that leans heavily on the art. Hell. I’m willing to drink Crow.

So, why is this back in the news today? Well, over on The Daily Meal, Cosentino has a video interview in which he promotes his new cookbook, Beginnings: My Way To Start a Meal, and also talks about his comic book at around 1:35 or so.

Wolverine: The Fifth Quarter is set for this June as a digital release.

…You Rent Them: The Tale of The ComiXology Backup Script

Earlier this week, some dude posted to the Reddit Comic Book board that he had written a short Bash script (for the technologically challenged, think an old Windows batch file with ambition) that would allow you to download any digital comics you purchased from ComiXology, strip the DRM (again, for the uninitiated, DRM stands for digital rights management, which is nothing but copy protection with an official-sounding acronym to make it sound intimidating, like “FBI,” “CIA” or “DIAF”), and convert them to a format you can store locally and read on anything. Clearly this is a young man with plenty of free time to spend frittering on coding and hanging around in courtrooms.

The script author even posted a copy of the script with detailed instructions on how you could use it to download copies of the books you bought from ComiXology. Isn’t that nice? Oh, don’t go searching for it – ComiXology caught wind of it and asked the kid to delete the script.