Never Ending Story – Review Of The Fearless #9

Like some kind of demonic Energizer Bunny, Fear Itself continues to chug along, now in the guise of The Fearless. Sure, The Serpent is gone, Thor is dead and Odin has fucked off for points elsewhere, but Sin, the daughter of the Red Skull, still has daddy issues and she wants them addressed right friggin’ NOW! Damn it, people! Some jerk took her special magically evil hammer that daddy surrogate, The Serpent, gave her and she wants it back. That is her toy and she sure as hell isn’t going to let Valkyrie or anybody else play with it. Nope, not when she can throw a tantrum and have a bevvy of bad guys go do her bidding to go get the hammer back for her.

Hair pulling, slap fights and spoilers, after the jump.

Stealing My Dreams: Winter Soldier #2 Review

Okay: we’re two issues into Winter Soldier now, and I’m getting a better sense of what Ed Brubaker’s going for here: some old-school, Steranko-style, 60s-S.H.I.E.L.D. sci-fi super spy stuff that doesn’t necessarily need to make any logical, real-world sense beyond a James Bond film with a 200 million dollar budget. All of which takes some of the edge off the fact that what initially appeared to be a modern, Marvel-based espianoge story suddenly spun, by the end of the first issue, into a scene of a screaming gorilla with a machine gun…

…and none of which makes it any easier to see that same gorilla with a jetpack at the beginning of this issue. That Goddamned gorilla is living every dream I’ve had since I was nine years old. By the third issue he’s gonna be throwing the meat to Heather Thomas, and by the fifth that fucker’ll be chucking feces at The New Kids On The Block.

Sloppy Seconds: Red Hood And The Outlaws #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-SPOIL-ROBIN! If you don’t want to see Jason Todd spoiled, dial 1-900-FUCK-OFF-DUDE-ROBIN-SUCKS-WHERE’S-MY-TWO-DOLLARS-DIDIO! Either way: I’m a-spoiling this book!

I am sick. Deathly sick. Like, “Wow! I think I must have obtained spider powers somehow because every 30 to 45 seconds, I appear to be horking up webbing!” sick. And I can confirm that Peter Parker was wrong; with great power seems to come great chills, fever and runny stool.

As such, I have very little energy to do anything, and am desperate for a solution that will make me feel better. So I decided to read Red Hood The The Outlaws #6. Which, based on Amanda’s experience reading the first issue, might mean that I’m am not just sick, but also very, very stupid.

I purchased the issue before I became quite as ill as I am now, so I can’t even blame antihistamines or brain fluke or whatever. No, I bought it because the cover proclaims that this issue contains the first meeting between Red Hood and Starfire, meaning that despite skipping issues 2 through 5 (Yes, I bought one in between, but didn’t have the heart to put myself through reading it), maybe I could get an explanation about Starfire’s post New 52… priorities.

So let’s get it out of the way: is this issue any good? Well honestly, it is better than the first issue. That doesn’t mean it’s good, per se; I recently put out something better than Red Hood And The Outlaws #1, albeit being somewhat runny.

Ghost Riders In Artists’ Alley

We haven’t written almost anything about the Gary Friedrich / Marvel lawsuit because we are not lawyers, other comics news outlets have covered it better than we could have, and frankly, a major comic publisher winning a lawsuit against a destitute former creator isn’t, unfortunately, what you’d call isolated, groundbreaking news,

In a nutshell: the first guy who wrote the Ghost Rider character for Marvel sued Marvel claiming that they hadn’t properly registered a copyright to the character and that therefore ownership of the character had returned to him. It’s a lawsuit that’s been going on for some time, and about a week ago a judge issued a document saying that both parties agreed that Marvel owned the character, and that Friedrich actually owed Marvel $17,000 for selling Ghost Rider stuff at conventions. Which to the non-legally trained mind – like, for example, ours – seemed like getting hit in a crosswalk by a Ferarri and having a judge tell you to pay the rich guy for damage to his headlight.

So most of the comics Internet blew up, partially because of the 17 grand, but also because at face value, it looked like Marvel was going after creators for selling unlicensed materials at conventions. Which, frankly, would be bad; my walls are personally loaded with unlicensed drawings and paintings purchased at various conventions, and half of why I go to conventions is the opportunity to shake a creator’s hand and come home with an awesome convention souvenir… or at least a better convention souvenir than Yiff Herpes.

…A Fight For Love And Glory: Batman #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s Wednesday, and once again, the local bar is closed for reasons that border on the frivolous: there are very few hookers in this town to start with, and she might have stabbed herself seven times in the men’s crapper, and either way: I never saw her before. So I might as well take the opportunity to lie low and do another short comic review.

If you’re Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, the problem with producing one of the more triumphant single comic book issues in recent memory – particularly when that triumph is based on what amounts to an engaging storytelling gimmick you can only use once that wraps a story that’s been told a million times: Batman gets driven nuts – is that you need to come out with another issue just four short weeks later. Well, it’s four weeks later, and Batman #6 is merely pretty damn good. It misses the level of great by hitting a story beat we’ve seen before, but it’s still very, very decent.

They’re All Agin Me: Alan Moore on Before Watchmen, Darwyn Cooke Minutemen Art

In a truly weird article reeking of cognitive dissonance, Fast Company’s Co.Create, which is a Web site that is not about comics, debuted exclusive new Darwyn Cooke art from the upcoming Before Watchmen book The Minutemen, while simultaneously debuting new comments from Alan Moore complaining that the Before Watchmen project should die on the vine, or in a chute, or really anywhere, preferably with Moore pulling the trigger.

“It seems a bit desperate to go after a book famous for its artistic integrity. It’s a finite series,” says Moore. “Watchmen was said to actually provide an alternative to the superhero story as an endless soap opera. To turn that into just another superhero comic that goes on forever demonstrates exactly why I feel the way I do about the comics industry. It’s mostly about franchises. Comic shops these days barely sell comics. It’s mostly spin-offs and toys.

Hmm… that’s not what I witness every Wednesday at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to quit asking if they carry inflatable Power Girl dolls. What I do witness are a bunch of middle-aged guys with lucrative day jobs who can afford to buy a stack of three and four dollar comics, but that’s a different issue for the industry. Everyone knows that a product that targets only old white guys is destined to rocket to the top of any sales chart… provided your product is named Cialis. But I digress.

Decompression Sickness: Batman & Robin #6 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vowing upon their parents’ death to rid Gotham City of the forewarning element, Crisis On Infinite Midlives has, over the years, fought spoilers in their many macabre forms. This time they lost. You are warned.

As I said in my review of Batman & Robin #4, I am enjoying this book one hell of a lot more than I thought I was going to when I finished the first issue. A book that started out looking like the worst of the Batman TV show was starting to look more like the Christopher Nolan movies. And #6 continues that trend, but there’s a funny thing about movies: I’ve always said (Because I lifted it from Stephen King in Danse Macabre) that I can tell if a movie’s any good, or if it’s too long, if I start wishing for a cigarette in the middle of it. At six issues into this battle against new villain Nobody? Yeah, I could use a smoke.

It’s not that this is a bad story by any stretch of the imagination. This issue gives us Robin under the clandestine tutelage of Nobody, who is actually Morgan Ducard, son of Henri Ducard, who trained Bruce Wayne before he put on the Batman suit. You remember, Liam Neeson from Batman Begins? You know, that Batman movie just before The Dark Knight? The one with the chick who’s banging Tom Cruise? Just go to any Best Buy dollar DVD bin and you’ll find it. But I digress.

Nobody is slowly massaging Robin into becoming a killer, starting to ease Robin toward a willingness to kill by doing the old “give him an empty gun and tell him to shoot a guy to get him used to pulling the trigger” trick, followed a couple of pages later with the subtle mindfuckery of the “Now dump the guy into a vat of acid while he’s awake and screaming like a pig in a chute” ruse. In the meantime, we flash back to Bruce’s first mission with Nobody’s father, where he tried a similar method of attenuating Bruce toward lethal means with the time-tested classic, “Shoot a dude in the face in front of the guy who has repeatedly stated that he will never kill, then say, ‘U mad bro?'” The two stories are interesting and effective in drawing parallels between Batman’s early training and Robin’s current work, but the abrupt nature of each Ducard suddenly chucking in lethal force is jarring, and forced me to say, “Oh well; he only had about about 20 pages to get it done,” and just like when you realize you’ve started looking for the wires in a space opera movie, boom! Just like that, you’re out of the story and wishing for a cigarette.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Trebuchet here with some Avengers movie speculation.

There hasn’t been this much buzz over something so small and pink since the Clinton Administration. I speak of course of what appears to be a Skrull board game piece that MTV (they’re still around?), discovered at a toy fair.

The board game in question is The Avengers: Mighty Battle and it’s hard to argue that the piece in questions isn’t a Skrull.  This could mean that Joss Whedon’s adamant proclamation that there aren’t any Skrulls in the upcoming Avengers movie is just a diversion… but…

Apparently, Fox may own the rights to “Skrulls” through its Fantastic Four License. So what gives? The way I see it, one of two things is happening.  Either Joss managed to get the rights to the name from his dear, dear friends at Fox, or more likely, they aren’t Skrulls.  We’re probably looking at “Chitauri”, which are basically Skrulls of another flavor.  It’s kinda like saying, that’s not a “Grizzly” bear, it’s a “Kodiak”!  The Chitauri showed up as the big bad in the 2006 animated movie Ultimate Avengers: The Movie, so they have that going for them. Either way, I can’t wait until May!

The Avengers drops into theatres on May 4^th.

(via MTV Geek)

Vindication, or: Freezing Out Jar Jar

Back in 1999, a high school buddy of mine and I caught that case of Skywalking Pneumonia that seemed to be going around that May, and we went to see Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace for an opening matinee. A couple of hours later, we walked out and said, “Um… it had lightsabers. Lightsabers are cool. Right? I mean, I thought they were… cool… and there were – Exactly what the fuck just happened to us? Why do we suddenly miss Ewoks? And if I hear the word ‘Meesa,’ I swear before God I will plow this car into a fucking abutment!”

Since then, there’s been a lot of hyperbolic talk about George Lucas raping childhoods, while Lucas defended himself by saying The Phantom Menace was meant to be a kids’ movie, but the bottom line is that a lot of people see the movie as a filthy aberration. And I am one of them… to the point that I never paid to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again (I was, um, provided a copy of the 2002 leak of Attack of The Clones, and I saw Revenge of the Sith at a free advance screening sponsored by the radio station I worked for).

Well, it is now thirteen years later. And despite Lucas’s tone-deaf verbal defenses of the movie in the face of fan revolt, there is finally, all in one day, two pieces of concrete evidence that we fans were right.

Undeserved Fate: Journey Into Mystery #634 Review

I can’t imagine that Kieron Gillen was super excited to be assigned writing duties on Journey Into Mystery. A comic that’s nothing but Thor retitled following Thor’s “death” in Fear Itself, at face value this is a book designed to do nothing but park the title until they’re ready to bring Thor back properly. This is a book that is designed to have no future, and getting the assignment had to feel like getting a gig at a VHS tape factory. Or at a newspaper. Or on a non creator owned J. Michael Straczynski ongoing title.

So it would have been easy for Gillen to treat the book as what it is, write himself a good old middle of the road Thor-ish story and bide his time for a more lucrative assignment, like Scarlet Spider’s Pal: Jimmy Douchebag, or perhaps Ultimate Boom-Boom. Instead, he’s cutting loose with some of the zaniest, most fun comic writing you can currently buy. When it comes to pure fun, you’re not gonna find anything better than Journey Into Mystery #634 on the shelves this week.