Captain America didn’t see *this* coming.
Hotsy-Totsy have a history of producing eccentric geek-centric burlesque tributes, most recently creating a Game of Thrones and Mad Men show, as well as an upcoming Doctor Who Parody…To further stake their clam in the land of nerd, overheard backstage were some of the burlesque dancers discussing the merits of seaQuest DSV versus seaQuest 2032.
Check out a trailer for the show, after the jump.
(Ed. Note – This review will be spoily woily, which is like timey wimey or explodey wodey or whatever, but with more spoilers. Starting pretty much immediately. You’ve been warned.)
Last night was the premiere of Doctor Who season 7. Last night was also the night I discovered that Layer Cake Wines makes an excellent, if powerful, Grenache that will knock you on your ass and make it very difficult to post a review in real time, let alone live tweet it. This is probably just as well, given the number of folks I saw in my Twitter stream threatening to do awful things to those who might post any hint of spoilers that might ruin their own personal viewing experience when they get around to finally watching it themselves, in their own good time. For example:
.
@davemaulding@sizzlerkistler Yeah, I haven’t watched it yet. I’ll be blocking and cursing anyone who spoils it for me.— Janna O’Shea (@dreamyeyed) September 2, 2012
But, it’s a whole new day and I’m sober. Therefore, I feel I should dispense with the niceties and warn everyone up front that last night we learned that The Doctor regenerates and comes back as Raptor Jesus. Also, the Ponds discover they can assemble themselves into Voltron. Oh, and The Doctor’s new companion is a Dalek.
One of these things may or may not be true.
Read the rest of my actual review, after the jump!
I’m gonna have to start out this review by admitting that I haven never read Joe Hill’s and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke & Key series, which is a point of shame for a serious comics fan… particularly one who’s read and enjoyed Hill’s novels Horns and Heart Shaped Box… and before you start: yes, I can read books without pictures, smartass. I simply generally choose not to, which means that Hill’s novels must be pretty fucking good for me to break that habit. Either that, or I didn’t feel comfortable waiting for job interviews with a big Howard Chaykin trade paperback. But I’m getting off point here.
The point is that I knew nothing about Locke & Key other than its good reputation when I picked up the Locke & Key: Grindhouse one shot. I imagined that there were probably locks and keys involved, but whether they were of the door or the canal transit and-Florida-homosexual-mecca varieties, I had no fucking idea. And for all I know, the original story arcs are about either, both or all of those things. But this story is a period piece about criminals on the lam with nothing to lose, which is an effective and engaging throwback to EC Comics horror and crime stories from the 50s. And it’s really pretty damn cool.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This review is based on a review copy of Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood Part 2 provided free of charge to Crisis On Infinite Midlives by pubisher Slave Labor Graphics and writer Van Jensen.
Pinocchio is a bad motherfucker.
Pinocchio: Of Wood and Blood is the concluding chapter of Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, which Amanda and I came across completely by accident at San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 at the Slave Labor Graphics booth. We picked it up based purely on the title – how can you not give a book named Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer a try? If we’d seen a book titled Cinderella: Street Vigilante we’d have bought that too – and were delighted to find an action-packed, funny story about Pinocchio and his puppet crew hunting down vampires by telling lies (think along the lines of, “I will take no joy in staking your dead ass and dragging it screaming into the daylight”), which grows his nose and gives him a handy, on-demand wooden stake for bringing the stabby.
The US premiere of Doctor Who Season 7 is tonight at 9pm EDT. We’ve all heard that the Ponds will be exiting the series this season, potentially with one of them being killed. However, the wording of Matt Smith, the actor currently in the role of The Doctor, in this interview with The Mary Sue is positively cryptic:
…what’s really interesting about these next five episodes, which is the first season, if we tag that as the first season, it deals with the fall of the Ponds and the demise of those two great companions (emphasis added) that the Doctor is hugely, hugely attached to and had such a significant impact on him as a character and for me as an actor. So that’s bound to be an event that flips his universe massively.
Wait, what? Words like fall and demise are pretty freaking dire there, Matt. Are you being dramatic about the exit of The Doctor’s companions or are they taking their leave in a somewhat more permanent and final manner?
Well, all we know for sure, based on this Doctor Who Insider clip and the events of the Season 7 Web series prequel, Pond Life, is that whatever’s coming down the pike, it’s going to be pretty emotional. Check it out:
And, catch the entirety of Pond Life after the jump!
EDITOR’S NOTE: One spoiler! One spoiler!
I’ve got mixed feelings about Justice League International Annual #1 which is the final chapter of the book and which depicts the dissolution of the team. It has a lot going for it, including the return of writer Geoff Johns to the character of Booster Gold for the first time since 2008, and Dan DiDio’s return to writing O.M.A.C., which was one of the most underrated and unfairly cancelled books of the New 52 relaunch. It ends the story of the team decisively and fairly satisfyingly, if suddenly, and spins Booster, Blue Beetle and O.M.A.C. into new directions that could prove interestingly in the future… or in the case of Booster, in his past.
The problem is, the issue does it, in several cases, by introducing sudden and drastic changes in a couple of characters’ motivations and personalities, at least in relation to how they were depicted in recent issues of Justice League International. Which makes a certain amount of sense – you switch writers, you get new interpretations… or in the case of Booster, old interpretations. There is a sense in this issue of Johns and DiDio sweeping in to conclude the book and reclaim their characters, all while muttering, “No, no, no… Goddammit Dan Jurgens, you’re doing it wrong!”
EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve had the blues, the reds and the pinks; one thing’s for sure: love spoils.
Well, that’s the end of the first year of the first post-reboot Justice League since Crisis On Infinite Earths back in 1986. That Justice League, at the end of its first year, had established itself as a solid action book with an interesting character-based humor element… and was already on its way to becoming far more focused on the comedy than it was on the action. It short, its best days were already gone by that first anniversary, having given or on its way to giving Guy Gardner a 70s sitcom level personality change, The Martian Manhunter an Oreo fetish, and Booster and Beetle a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme of the month.
So how does Justice League #12 compete? Well, by going in the opposite direction, coming out of an only okay character-based story while promising, in a Geoff Johns patented epilogue, action-packed tales including an attack by Atlantis, battles between Superman and Batman and Shazam, and a possible conflict between The Justice League and the recently-announced Johns and David Finch produced Justice League of America.
Oh, and it seems that we will spend some time witnessing Superman boning Wonder Woman. But you already knew that, and we’ll get back to that in a minute.
I fully intended to put up a full review of Justice League #12 this evening to address the hookup between Superman and Wonder Woman, but I was unable to complete it in time because after reading it, I found myself unable to stop masturbating. Hell, as we speak I’m typing this with one hand, and you know what that means:
It means that this…
…means the end of our broadcast day.
However, being the approximate one year anniversary of DC’s New 52 launch, it means we have a bunch of cool shit to go over this week. We have annual issues for Flash, Detective Comics, and the final issue of Justice League International, along with a new issue of The Goon, the final issue of Brian Azzarello’s Spaceman, and a pile of other cool stuff!
But before we can review them, I need to finish looking at Wonder Woman and Superman and cranking myself chafed. Oh, and we need time to read them. So until the ointment arrives…
See you tomorrow, suckers!
With all the recent excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, it’s easy to forget that DC / Warner Bros. is busy putting the finishing touches on the TDKR movie that anyone who was reading comics in the late 1980s really cares about: the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.
As someone who owns the first print issues of The Dark Knight Returns, plus the first print of the trade paperback, and the Longmeadow Press leather-bound Complete Frank Miller Batman from 1989 (including both The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, and no, it is not for sale), I am damned excited for this flick… and yet disappointed that we are getting it as an animated feature. Because any comic fan around 40 years old had dozens of conversations between 1986 and say, 1996, about who to cast in a live-action version of Dark Knight. My 1988 money was on Lee Marvin as Batman, Anthony Perkins as The Joker, and Christopher Reeve back as Superman… and given all their current availability, I guess I’ll stick with the animated version.
Anyway, DC and Warner Bros. have released the first complete clip from the first part of the movie (It’ll be two DVDs or Blu-Rays), and despite being only a minute or so long, I think you’ll see at least one familiar image… from both The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Rises.
Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Well, it wasn’t so bad in relation to the July shootings that led to Batman Incorporated #3 being delayed for a month. From a storytelling standpoint, it’s another matter, but I’ll get back to that.
Batman Incorporated #3 has a lot going for it, and that is a surprising thing for a guy who hasn’t been digging Grant Morrison’s Batman stories to say. Morrison delivers us a 70s style detective story, with Batman spending a large part of the issue undercover – Batman doesn’t appear in full costume in a single panel of this issue – trying to root out Leviathan and Talia Al Ghul. It’s not a perfect issue, but it’s generally a refreshing throwback to Neal Adams / Dennis O’Neil stories from the 70s, with the weirdness for the sake of weirdness that Morrison can’t seem to help himself from chucking into his Batman stories dialed back to a dull roar. Not no roar, but it’s subdued enough for me to alternate between hoping Morrison might be mellowing, and suspecting that his mescaline dealer coughed up a weak batch.
With that said, this issue suffers from a few storytelling problems, and requires a few voluntary leaps in logic if you want to truly enjoy it… which means that the “weak batch” theory is getting more of a foothold with me.
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