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!

Man Down: Graphic.ly Closes Online Comic Store

Crisis On Infinite Midlives hasn’t been around all that long in the greater scheme of things, but almost since our first day, we’ve been skeptical about digital comics, at least in the formats and forms of distribution in which they currently exist. Custom apps requiring mothership server authentication when you want to read your comics and with limited download and archiving options seemed less like buying comics than it did paying someone for the right to read their comics. This is very much unlike the experience of buying actual physical books from my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop offering ten bucks for half an hour alone with the Omaha: The Cat Dancer books.

Until now, these concerns have been a moot point. After all, digital comics is still a young field, and no matter which platform you chose to buy your digital comics, they would still be around for a while, allowing you to build your collection while the hardware with which to read that collection get better, faster, and more easily able to maintain your books locally. Right? Sure.

Wait, what?

Tour of Duty: Disney Announces Captain America Sequel

Obviously sensing a groundswell of excitement behind the approaching Joss Whedon Avengers flick, Disney has apparently decided to strike while the iron is hot – or at least strike before someone at Ain’t It Cool News can file an advance Avengers review from a projectionists’ screening saying, “Hi, Harry – R3ct@l Pr0l@p53 here, reporting that Chris Evans suxxors ballz!” – and has announced that the sequel to the Captain America movie will hit theaters on April 4, 2014.

One-Eyed Wonder Worm: Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!

Cyclops is a fucking dick.

– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her

So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.

Black Widow Chair Dance: Avengers Movie Clip

I know that we said that we would see you tomorrow (suckers), and that it was the end of our broadcast day, but this is simply too new and too good to ignore.

Yes, we are still reading this week’s new comics and drinking beer. However,  in the meantime, please enjoy the first full, non-trailer clip of Avengers, starring Black Widow doing an awesome chair act, after the jump.

Hadouken!

It is arrived. It is in you now. Marvel, for once thinking ahead about an upcoming movie about one of their properties, has conspired and planned and looked ahead enough to make sure that once the Avengers movie drops in a month, non-comic reading moviegoers who wander into a comic shop will see a book with the name of the movie on it and hopefully think, “Hey! That’s the movie I done just seen! Who’re they fightin’? Hey, I lurve me some Hugh Jackman! Lemme buy this funnybook!”

Which is great for the rubes and potentially good for comics in general, but for those of us in the trenches buying comics every Wednesday, it means that Marvel’s big summer event, Avengers Vs. X-Men is finally here, which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But is is a nice looking week, ain’t it? We’ve got Avengers Vs. X-Men, Ed Brubaker’s Fatale, Ultimate Spider-Man, a new The Boys, Ann Nocenti’s second issue of Green Arrow, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But before we can review it, we gotta read it. So, as often happens on Wednesday nights: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Look! Up In The Sky! Run For Your Life!: Superman #7 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It is new comics day, which means that – wait! Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! I normally get this excited, scream and bother passers-by when I see a bird! Oh, no; it’s one last comic review before the comic stores open, forget it.

Superman #7 is the first issue with the new creative team of co-writers Keith Giffen and Dan Jurgens and art by Jesus Merino and, well, Dan Jurgens. These are a couple of old-school comics writers working on a brand new Superman, which arguably is what this book has been needing, and the classic flavor they bring to certain sequences of this book makes it somewhat endearing, but I’m guessing how you feel about it will likely depend on how much you’re digging  the new, cocky, armored Superman, and how you feel about a villain with a classic feel… that feel being that of a Republic Serial villain chewing scenery like Robin Williams teething in the midst of a heroic Ritalin bender.

This book starts off with an definitive statement of “Bang!” by the new team, dropping us in the middle of a battle between Superman and some robot right on the streets of Metropolis. It’s an action-packed sequence with a visually satisfying amount of collateral property damage, while Superman internally soliloquizes about how the battle seems like merely an attempt to call him out… which would be an interesting plot point if this weren’t Superman, who, thanks to super hearing, can be called out by whispering, “Hey Superman! I’m on the corner of Weisinger and Swan, on my way to fuck yer moms!”

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!

Scrounging For Mangers: San Diego Comic-Con Hotel Booking Aftermath

The mad dash for discounted downtown hotel rooms for the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con is all over, bar the cancellations. Registration opened – and closed – last Thursday, and yesterday – April Fools’ Day, purely by coincidence – confirmation emails went to people lucky enough to snag them, leaving many disappointed. Not us, however… at least not completely.

Let’s start with the positives about the experience; unlike other years, the Web server for submitting reservations appeared to be more robust than a Vic-20. Thursday at the stroke of noon eastern time, I was able to get the Web page with the Magic Green Button to bring me to the registration page to load almost immediately, with only a couple of presses of the F5 (or: “Goddammit!”) key.

The registration form page opened immediately, and I was able to get my form submitted in its entirety by about 12:03. It was painless, at least compared to the last time I tried to obtain a room through the convention (2008), when it took me about two hours to get the page to load and by the time it did, the Hyatt, Sheraton and Hilton – Holy Grails of many convention goers – were a distant memory, like the dodo bird, or times when it was easy and hassle-free to attend SDCC.

I Hate It When This Happens To Me, Too

It’s Sunday. The question that is burning in the minds of ardent Game Of Thrones fans everywhere: will I make it until 9pm, so that I can watch tonight’s premiere? Because Winter may be coming, but my hangover is already here and I need to go back to bed. What? Just me? Ok. Meanwhile, here’s a little clip from Funny Or Die to help keep us going for the next four and half hours. Enjoy!