You Have Suffered An Emotional Shock: Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit #1 Review

I’m gonna start my review of Robocop: To Live And Die In Detroit by copping to the fact that I haven’t seen the rebooted Robocop movie that this comic book is based on. I probably will at some point, in the same way I saw the rebooted version of Total Recall: on cable while too shitfaced to operate my universal remote.

Look, I have established that I am a big fan of the original Robocop, and that I am not exactly thrilled to see a remake of that classic flick. With that said, I have heard a few decent reviews of the movie from sources I trust, so I don’t want to dismiss it completely out of hand, or allow my instinctive disdain for the idea of a new version of the Robocop character to overly color my opinion about this comic. Sure, the original Robocop was a genius mix of action, violence, satire and humor that I can’t imagine anyone improving on, but I imagine there were fans of Batman & Robin that hated the idea of the stylistic mindfucker who directed Memento sucking all the joy out of Batman. If you are one of those people, I hate you and everything you stand for and, oh yes, I will find you, but that’s not the point right now.

So I will try to approach this comic in the spirit that it really is about a character about which I know nothing. It’s certainly not my Robocop (and make no mistake, it really isn’t my Robocop), it’s just a character about a cyborg superhero working in a major American metropolis. So I tried to treat it like a completely new character, and judge it on those merits.

And on those merits? Yeah, it’s not all that great. Even considering it was impossible for me to really put aside the original Robocop.

They’ll Fix You. They Fix Everything: Robocop: Last Stand #1 Review

Robocop is awesome. Sure, there are a lot of questionable moments in the franchise, like parts of Robocop 2… and all of Robocop 3… plus the entirety of the Robocop animated series… not to mention every instant of the live-action Robocop TV series that was created to keep Orion Pictures from being sold for corporate parts in the mid 90s… but that original Paul Verhoeven flick? I can watch that all day.

Frank Miller, too, is awesome… or at least he was once. Sure, there have been a lot of questionable moments, like Holy Terror… and his film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit… and whenever he goes anywhere near a device that has an Ethernet port… but all those stories like The Dark Knight Returns, and Give Me Liberty, and Batman: Year One? Miller in the late 80s, early 90s, I can read all day.

Now, Miller famously wrote the original screenplays for Robocop 2 and Robocop 3 in the late 80s, before various studio executives and directors ripped the things apart to turn them into the respective okay and awful movies they became. And for a long time through the 90s, those screenplays were kind of legends in the comics world: Miller, working when he was at the top of his game, on a genre franchise that exploded into a classic right out of the gate.

Almost ten years ago, Avatar Press released an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 2 screenplay, with a comic script by Two Guns writer Steven Grant, that was pretty solid as I recall, and was a hell of a lot darker than the actual movie. But that still left Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay floating around out there. And in the meantime, Dynamite Comics got their hands on the Robocop license and put out some books that, frankly, made Robocop 2 look like Godfather 2.

However, the license has now moved to Boom Studios, who has put the band back together with Robocop: Last Stand, an adaptation of Miller’s Robocop 3 screenplay again adapted to comics by Steven Grant. So we’ve got an 80s Robocop story based on an 80s story by Frank Miller. On paper, it’s everything I ever wanted when I was 20 years old… but the question is: is it a classic like I always hoped? Or is it another wretchedly disappointing Robocop comic like every one I’ve read since we started this Web site?

The answer is… neither, really. But it is pretty damn good

…One For Each Of You: 2 Guns Red Band Trailer Released

Hey, didja know that 2 Guns, that movie you’ve seen advertised on TV with Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington where they obviously cough up the ending by showing Denzel saying “Make it rain,” and blowing up the car full of money, was based on a comic book? Yeah, neither did I until I came across the recently reprinted trade paperback of writer Steven Grant’s 2007 original at the Boom Studios booth at SDCC. And frankly, I didn’t even make the connection between the comic and the movie when I bought the book, because the title of the movie had never stuck to my brain, since 30 seconds of trailer was all it took for me to think, “Yeah, this is the movie that Denzel takes to pay the mortgage in between his semiannual Oscar bait flicks, and that Marky Mark takes when he’s, well, being Marky Mark. Pass.”

The comic itself is a pretty decent read – an undercover DEA agent and an undercover Naval Intelligence officer are manipulated into trying to sting each other into robbing a bank, before finding out that the bank belongs to someone who doesn’t rely on the FDIC to recover their losses, and that some other parties have plans for this off-the-books stolen money, requiring the two guys to go rogue – and was certainly entertaining enough to get me through an hour of the flight home last week. So the trade is certainly well worth picking up this Wednesday if you’re a light action crime comic fan (hard-boiled noir it ain’t, but it has a decent enough edge to keep you in suspense) and you have an extra 15 bucks to burn.

Grant apparently made a decent chunk of change for himself and Boom Studios for doing the flick, and Grant has not only been doing a series of columns for Comic Book Resources under the name Temporary Madness that could serve as a crash course for comic creators hoping to someday make that mad Robert Kirkman money off of their idea, but has announced that he’s working on sequel Three Guns (because Grant’s not a dope, fer Chrissake)… but none of that addresses whether the movie, which is being released in the United States this Friday, August 2nd, is to par with the comic, or worth what will cost you, after popcorn and a Coke at a 10:30 a.m. bargain matinee, more than the trade paperback.

Well, to help you make up your mind, a final red band trailer for the movie has been released, featuring more violence, profanity and nudity than we’ve seen to date. And while to me, even knowing that the film is based on the work of a comic writer I like, it still screams “Wait for cable!”, and I suspect the director might have spent a large percentage of the shoot saying, “Denzel, Mark: banter like dudes. You know, bros! Aaannnd, action!”, your mileage may vary. So check it out after the jump.

Brain Drain: Paul Jenkins Leaves DC, Writes Open Letter And Gives Interview Guaranteeing He Will Never Return

I’m about a week late to the party on this one, but the parade of talent walking away from DC Comics has added Paul Jenkins, who did the opening Deadman arc on DC Universe Presents, as well as a pretty decent fill-in on Stormwatch, and until recently was writing Batman: The Dark Knight.

Jenkins apparently has made the decision to walk away from both DC and Marvel to work exclusively for Boom Studios, currently writing Deathmatch for them. Which is fine; creators sometimes make the move to creator-owned comics from the Big Two – if I wrote comics, I’d be pounding on every indie publisher’s doors with creator owned ideas in the hopes of getting a TV contract and the keys to the Rich Guy’s Pissoir where Robert Kirkman currently pisses into Perrier.

Jenkins, however, rather than simply walking away to pursue his own projects, took a page from well-known people person Rob Liefeld and dynamited all his bridges by publishing an open letter regarding his reasons for leaving DC at Comic Book Resources:

I hope those reading this will agree the discussion will be worth their time. I feel that we are once again moving in the wrong direction, creatively. I’ve been down this road before, and it’s a road we can and should avoid. I don’t need to tell you what Greg Rucka and numerous other respected creators have already told you – that the Big Two have removed their focus away from the creators and towards the maintenance of the characters…

I know when it was a lot easier, and that was back in the days of Marvel Knights. In those times, Marvel had been in bankruptcy, and they had little choice but to allow the creators the freedom and trust that so many of us deserve… I look back on “Inhumans” and “Sentry,” on my Spidey runs with Bucky [Mark Buckingham] and Humberto [Ramos], and on various successes with “Wolverine: Origin” and others, and I know – because I was there – that they succeeded in large part because I was given freedom to create without being handicapped by editorial mandates. It just hasn’t been that way for a while. In recent years, I have watched, helpless, as editors made pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork that they had previously left alone. It bugs me that the creators were a primary focus when the mainstream publishers needed them, and now that the corporations are driving the boat, creative decisions are being made once again by shareholders.

Wow. Okay, there’s certainly an discussion to be had about the state of both Marvel and DC in the age of the blockbuster superhero movie, and after each publisher has either been bought up by a huge multinational corporation, or more closely folded into the huge multinational corporation who already owned them. God knows that, as a reader in the early 2000s, I felt like there was a sense of experimentation and a focus on new kinds of stories that I hadn’t felt from almost anyone outside of Vertigo Comics since the early 90s.

But I thought that DC’s New 52 was supposed to replicate that feeling by blowing continuity out of the water and starting over with A-List creators and allowing them to run wild with these long-running properties, right, Paul?

Right?

The Fantabulous Adventures Of A Couple Of Dandy Fops: Steed and Mrs. Peel #0 Review

For the second time in as many days, I am opening a comic book and diving into a mythology I know absolutely nothing about. I’ve never seen the British TV show The Avengers, I never saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery, and I never read the Grant Morrison Steed and Mrs. Peel miniseries from back in the 80s. All I know about the British Avengers is that it is about super spies in the 60s, and apparently Diana Rigg used to wear a leather catsuit that made men out of every straight male genre fan older than me who isn’t already dead. Which I can understand, but as a child of the 80s with access to Skinemax, I never felt the need hunt up reruns on PBS to dive in and see for myself.

So I can’t address whether or not Boom Studio’s Steed and Mrs. Peel, by writer Mark Waid and drawn by Steve Bryant, is true to the original TV series or the movie or some purely theoretical Stud and Mrs. Kneel porn parody or anything else. I can say that, having seen similar shows like The Prisoner and Department S (of all things), Waid and Bryant capture the general feel of British television shows from the 60s and 70s, including wildly optimistic visions of the future, cheapjack-looking “special effects”, and about 50 percent more Nehru jackets than a 21st century man should have to contemplate.

So it feels authentic enough… but is it any good? Well, that all depends on if you actually like that sort of thing.

Roger Langridge Gonzo From Marvel, DC

If you’re a casual comic book reader, you probably have no idea who Roger Langridge is. Here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, however, we are big fans, mostly due to his work on Boom Studios’ The Muppet Show comic back around 2009, when a Muppets movie revival was only the bulge in Jason Segal’s BVDs, and when reading a comic based on a childhood favorite TV show was a pleasant diversion from our constant morning joint pain.

(Digression before the meat of the story: if you are a Muppet Show fan, you owe it to yourself to find those issues. I don’t know how Langridge did it, but he distilled a visual show with a heavy musical element into a standard comic book, and he captured the tone flawlessly. Disney buying Marvel, meaning Disney suddenly had their own comic publisher for the Muppets and therefore could pull the license from Boom, has been, to us, the biggest tragedy of that merger to date).

Since that book folded, Langridge has been doing some work for Marvel on their John Carter books (See? Goddamned Disney merger fucks up all kinds of shit…), but no more. Following in the footsteps of Chris Roberson and announced, via the Internet, that he will no longer be working for either Marvel or DC due to “individual conscience”:

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!

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!

Should You Have A Burning Need – Valen The Outcast #1 Review

I know we’re heading into December and that, as the season gets colder, we all try to find ways to keep warm. Me? I go to my day job and get money to pay for utilities, like gas and electricity to run my heat. Maybe I throw on an extra pair of socks and pop open a bottle of Bowmore. Scratch that. I definitely open the bottle of Bowmore. Michael Alan Nelson, on the other hand, burns books, specifically, his own. Why?

Even though I’ve been writing comics for seven years and have written over 120 single issues for dozens of series, most comics readers have never heard of me. Now, that’s not a woe-is-me-nobody-reads-me-wah-feel-sorry-for-me statement. Not at all. Let’s be honest. If you’re a customer and can only afford one comic, are you going with the book about a character you’ve been reading since childhood or a book by some guy who includes his middle name in his credit like some self-important twit? The math is simple. Childhood Hero > Self-Important Twit.

That said, I’ve been fortunate enough to have people take a chance on me and many of them can now be called my fans, for which I am incredibly grateful. I believe, as does BOOM!, that if you read one of my books, chances are you’re going to enjoy it and want to read more. The problem is getting enough people to pick up that first issue.

Um, ok. Seeming self esteem issues aside, this lead you to burn your own books in what appears to be some kind of publicity stunt? Really?

Yes, really. Check it out after the jump…oh, and some spoilers on the book in question.

My Inner Child Takes A Break – Review Of Peanuts #0

Ok, full disclosure – I once played Snoopy in a school production of “You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown” when I was 8. I was confronted with this fact in full 8mm glory recently. So, I was fully prepared to dislike Peanuts #0 and complain that it shit on my childhood. But, honestly, inasmuch as we tend to focus on the more adult oriented comics on this site, particularly in the wake of “T” and “T+” DC titles that may as well stand for “Tits” (or “Tits Plus!”) instead of “Teen/Teen +”” (Red Hood And The Oulaws, Catwoman, etc.), there are actually a lot of great books out right now that will bring enjoyment to readers of all ages. For example, Boom! Studios has started a kid friendly imprint called Kaboom! Studios. The titles range from licensed properties, such as Darkwing Duck and Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers, to original books such as Snarked! by Harvey Award winner Roger Langridge – who also did The Muppet Show comic book for Boom!. I loved The Muppet Show adaptation, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that I also loved the relaunch of Peanuts released this past week.