Rebellion Bias: Spurlock’s Comic-Con Documentary Trailer

Morgan Spurlock is one of those documentary directors that, like Michael Moore, makes my dad act like the sharp edge of his jock just poked through his jockeys and mutter about “liberal bias,” and “stilted opinions,” and “I like supersized fries, Goddammit.” My dad prefers the editorial vision of, say, a Sean Hannity… the difference between Spurlock and Hannity being that if Hannity showed up at SDCC he’d be roofied for spite, with videos of a line of furries angrily yiffing his leg soon to follow on YouTube. When Spurlock goes, he gets a documentary about it.

The flick is called Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, and it follows a few attendees around the con (if memory serves, based on the Alien facehugger freebie masks that people are waving around, it looks like at least some of it was filmed at the 2010 convention), and provides a general sense of what it’s like to be there… minus the terminal exhaustion, unexplained physical breakdowns, and unless the film costs $1,500 to attend with another $1,200 for snacks, the cost.

Regardless, you can get a taste by checking out the movie’s trailer after the jump.

Never Judge A Book: Ultimate Spider-Man #7 Review

We’re now seven issues into Brian Michael Bendis’s new Ultimate Spider-Man, and Miles Morales is in his costume, Peter Parker is in his heaven, and there is finally superhero action in this superhero action comic book. Man, I’m liking this book a lot more now that something’s actually happening in it. Who woulda thunk it?

However, the book gets a rough start thanks to Kaare Andrews cover. Sure, it’s beautifully rendered with pseudo 3D / photorealistic backgrounds, and unlike the cover in the last issue we reviewed here, it doesn’t look like Spider-Man’s so excited to have superpowers that he’s double-ejaculating like some kind of pornographic Chow Yun Fat while busily sucking his own dick. No, in this cover, Spider-Man is overlooking the city, demurely and quietly squatting… and apparently crapping a giant golden dook. Right on top of the American flag. Look, I really like Kaare Andrews work – his stuff on Spider-Man: Reign was excellent – but the man draws these Ultimate Spider-Man covers like he’s trying to see what weird shit he can sneak into them. I’m guessing that either we’re two issues away from a cover where Spider-Man sprays webs onto Black Cat’s upper lip, or that I just have a filthy, dirty (sanchez) mind and should stop reading perversion into these covers.

Things, however, are a little more plain vanilla between the covers (Ha! Get it?).

An Epic Tale of Blood and Drool – Review Of BattlePug

Riddle me this Batman…

What do you get when you combine Conan the Barbarian, giant baby harp seals, a massive, drooling pug, Santa Claus, a thousand angry gophers, and a tattooed naked woman lying in bed relating the whole story to her two talking dogs? A giant bucket-full of awesome, that’s what!

If Robert E. Howard and Boris Vallejo had a love-child, and it wrote a boy-meets-dog/revenge story while tripping on mushrooms, BattlePug might be the result.

Don’t Be Shy; I’m A Doctor

It has been a strange and full day, culminating in a spirited argument between me, Amanda and conributor Lance Manion as to the proper order of a Dr. Who-themed Fuck, Marry, Kill game populated by Amy Pond, Rose Tyler and Jon Pertwee (Editor’s Note: I have chosen… poorly). So combining that and hard liquor means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But if you have to find yourself in a position where you’re denying that Tom Baker’s scarf might be hiding tits and an Adam’s Apple, there are worse takes with which to distract yourself. We’ve got new Ultimate Spider-Man, Secret Avengers, Avengers Academy, All-Star Western, and a bunch of other cool-looking books to distract you from what happened at the glory hole in the side of the TARDIS!

But before we can review them, we need to read them! Also to gargle, but mostly to read them. So until then: see you tomorrow, suckers!

The State Of The Superheroine Addressed

Yesterday on Comic Book Resources, Robot 6 announced that Wonder Women! The Untold Story Of American Superheroines would receive its world premiere in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest Film Festival on March 10, 2012 at 7pm. According to its official Web site this is a Kickstarter funded documentary, which:
 

…traces the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, WONDER WOMEN! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.

WONDER WOMEN! goes behind the scenes with Lynda Carter, Lindsay Wagner, comic writers and artists, and real life superheroines such as Gloria Steinem, Shelby Knox and others who offer an enlightening and entertaining counterpoint to the male dominated superhero genre.

Check out the official trailer after the jump and read on for some separate, but related material, also posted to Comic Book Resources, by Kelly Thompson that questions just how equally men and women are portrayed in the comic book medium.

Blue Velvet: Blue Beetle #6 Review

Blue Beetle #6 is a weird book. Good, but weird.

First off, I still maintain that, of all DC’s first round of New 52 books, Blue Beetle is one of the best at accomplishing its supposed mandate: making the hero generally relatable and understandable to not just new readers to the title, but to new comics readers in general. This is a series in general where you don’t need to know almost anything about the DC Universe at all to enjoy it. And this particular issue, while still part of the overall origin arc, functions as a pretty decent one-and-done that tells you everything you need to know to enjoy just this issue if you want a place to jump on.

Unfortunately, some people are going to have trouble enjoying this issue because, frankly, it includes some action that’s likely to disturb and upset some readers, no matter how good and self contained the issue is in general. This book includes scenes of the hero smacking around a teenaged girl and threatening a mother and her child at gunpoint. Now, if your reaction to that description is immediate and context-free outrage, just hold on and I’ll get to that. If your reaction is to mutter “Awesome!” or to find a discreet place to masturbate, fuck off and find a different comics site, okay? Or better yet: find a different hobby; no superhero’s power is a donkey punch, you spastic.

Raider of The Last Arc: Grifter #1-6 Review

Finally, a reboot you can sink your teeth into.  As I stated in an earlier review, I’ve been trying to get back into the game and the New 52 has been somewhat of a disappointment.  I say disappointment because no title I’ve read so far has been a true “reboot”. Everything so far has relied on at least some previous knowledge of character and/or story to truly get the most out of it.  Then a Grifter came to town.

Shortly after my Voodoo review , I noticed a Daemonite on the cover of a Grifter book, so I cracked the cover. Lo and behold, we have a parallel to Voodoo’s alien invasion arc!  So once more I find myself with a character I’ve never heard of, which is great, because with so many established “mainstream” characters, I love to experience the joy of discovering something new, even if it is only new to me.

Cole Cash (They do love their alliteration, don’t they?) is a former Special Forces Operator, an expert in infiltration and combat. For reasons yet to be explored, he’s deserted the military and become a small time con man, moving from mark to mark with his girlfriend Gretchen.  He’s about to see behind a curtain that he didn’t know existed… and he’s going to have a very bad day.

Pretty Vacant: The Dark Tower: The Way Station #3 Review

Like most guys who came of age during the 1980s, I grew up as a Stephen King freak. And like many of those guys, I was a Dark Tower fanatic, initially because you just couldn’t get the Goddamned thing. The first Dark Tower book was listed in King’s C.V. starting with Pet Sematary, but until 1988 it was only available in a long sold out limited edition that, provided you could even find a copy, would requiring beating off other like-minded fanboys to get it. Possibly literally.

But once it, and its sequels, started reaching the mass market, it hit the sweet spot for comic book fans. It was a fantasy, but not one about some other wimpy pretty boy with a magic sword. No, Roland was a bad motherfucker who was well-trained with a gun – medieval Batman with a sandalwood-handled .45. And as the series went on, it tied into King’s other stories. And his other stories tied into the Dark Tower (which is one of the only redeeming reasons to read King’s Insomnia). He built an entire, cohesive universe tied to the actions of Roland and his hunt for the Tower, turning his entire body of work into a continuity-laden universe. This shit was crack for a comics fan.

The Dark Tower series officially ended in 2004 (although King’s dropping another book of short stories set in the Dark Tower world called The Wind Through The Keyhole later this year), but King kept feeding the fans’ back monkeys by authorizing Marvel to produce Dark Tower comic books, which they’ve been doing since 2007. The initial pitch to stir up the rubes – including me – was that the comics miniseries would fill in gaps in the stories from the novels. And some of them, like The Fall of Gilead and Battle of Jericho Hill, have done just that. Unfortunately, others have just retreaded parts of the original novel in comic form as straight adaptations.

The current mini, The Way Station, is a straight adaptation. It’s an adaptation of a part of the first Dark Tower book that takes place in and around one building, where a lot of the dialog is internal in nature. This isn’t probably the best thing to try to make into a comic book.

We’re All Going To Die, Die Standing Up! Peter Panzerfaust #1 Review

And then he appeared from nowhere. Like he had been there all along, just… my eyes had failed to see him. He loved a grand entrance. That was Peter’s way.

Peter Panzerfaust is billed as “Red Dawn” meets “Peter Pan”… how can you not be interested in reading that?

The setting is the port city of Calais France, May 1940. The Nazi blitzkrieg is sweeping though France, Calais is falling and a quarter of a million allied soldiers are about to evacuate France at the port of Dunkirk. It is one of the darkest times of the Second World War.

The Punishment For Graffiti: New Clip of The Amazing Spider Man Released

The first complete, non-trailer scene clip of The Amazing Spider-Man flick has been released to the Internet on a viral site called Mark of The Spider-Man, a site which shows pictures of a bunch of people doing Spider-Man graffiti in cities around America, and then shows a disclaimer saying that each tagging was done with permission and that they don’t “condone or support the propagation of unauthorized graffiti.” In really small letters. Way at the bottom of the page. All the while, I’m sure, praying fervently that teenaged punks actually do start throwing Spider-Man symbols on brick walls around America. Which they will never do. Because all evidence to the contrary, teenagers are not morons. If Columbia Pictures really wants to reach the young, dumb and full of come “XXX-treme” demographic, they should put the Spider-Man symbol on bags of meth. Perhaps with a disclaimer stating that Columbia Pictures doesn’t condone or support the use of methamphetamines. And yes, I am currently whacked on a double dose of Sudafed; what’s your point?

Anyhoo, if the marketing swine at Columbia are hoping that releasing a clip of Spider-Man will lead to some kind of viral campaign of petty vandalism, they might be right… if perhaps they had released a clip including, you know, Spider-Man. Or The Lizard. Or any action whatsoever. However, they did not, so stow your spray cans, settle in, and enjoy approximately 45 seconds of the epic battle of: Peter Parker vs. The Dick Doorman!