SSDDR: New Avengers #19 Review

I had a moment reading The New Avengers #19 where I just about completely and totally checked out. I just suddenly had had enough of Norman Osborn and the Dark Avengers and different made up villains in Avengers costumes and doing the mental clean and jerk required to buy into a story where a man who is known to have killed a woman in cold blood in broad daylight follows a master plan of winning over public opinion to prove he leadership material when in reality we demonize leaders for taking pictures of their junk.

That moment was at the end of the book, when Norman and his Dark Avengers are standing in front of a crowd and announcing that they were here to make the world a better place, and I realized it was the same Goddamned moment as when he introduced the Dark Avengers back in Dark Reign. And my enthusiasm for this story, as precarious as it was to begin with, just vanished.

Seriously, I know what I said last month, but I don’t think I have it in me to climb back on board the Norman Osborn PR gladhanding and the Dick Avengers train again. I stuck with it for what felt like forever in Dark Reign and I just don’t care anymore. This doesn’t feel like anything interesting or new or that I didn’t read a dozen times over in the earlier story, which I didn’t like the first time around. The whole thing was like watching your uncle use his AA chip to crack open a Bud before Thanksgiving dinner: you know what’s coming, you’ve seen it before, and you know it’s not gonna be fun.

Assuming you don’t have an innate and visceral weariness and mistrust of Dark Reign and it’s ilk, on an individual issue level, there’s nothing wrong with this comic book. Bendis continues to write excellent dialogue and character moments. Seeing Daredevil wandering by Avengers Mansion and being hit on by Squirrel Girl – while being overwhelmed by the stench of baby shit and squirrel funk – is a nice little moment showing that sometimes superpowers aren’t all they’re all cracked up to be… while knowing all the while that yeah: he’s gonna hit that. Daredevil’s already fucked every woman that’s walked, moved or crawled; why wouldn’t he add “skittered up a tree?”

Five Guys On One: Marvel Announces Avengers Vs. X-Men

Yesterday Marvel announced that their big crossover event for 2012 will be: Civil War! Wait – I mean: Avengers Vs. X-Men!

In a streaming press conference with Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso, SVP of Publishing Tom Brevoort, Senior Editor Nick Lowe, and Marvel’s Architect writers Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, Ed Brubaker and Jonathan Hickman, they gave the gist of what we’re in store for: about 300 clams to read the whole story! Wait, that’s not right…

…the seeds for this story have been growing for a while. When [the 2007 X-Men event] “Messiah CompleX” introduced the so-called “Mutant Messiah,” a little girl with green eyes and red hair named Hope, it raised the obvious question, “Who is she?” and, of course, the specter of the Phoenix.

So if I had to hazard a guess, the Phoenix Force is returning to Earth, probably to infect the little girl who looks just like Jean Grey, if Jean Grey were redrawn by commission for loathsome perverts. The X-Men will want to protect their messiah, The Avengers will want to stop a potential extinction-level threat to Earth, stuff will explode, and dudes will get kicked.

Brian Michael Bendis To Leave The Avengers – If A Head Explodes On The Internet, Can Anybody Hear It?

A couple hours ago, Comic Book Resources ran an interview with Brian Michael Bendis in which he announced he will be ending his run on The Avengers in 2012. Seemingly instantaneously, message boards, Facebook accounts, and Twitter all exploded with chatter. In the interview, Bendis discusses where his Avengers arc is going, the addition of Storm to the team, and how a newly revitalized Norman Osborn is going to flare up and plague The Avengers like herpes on prom night. And he compared his run on The Avengers to Breaking Bad.

“I’m going to wrap up ‘Avengers’ and ‘New Avengers.’ At the same time the first storyline of ‘Avengers Assemble’ will be done,” Bendis told CBR. “It’s a good time to move on to other things. Before I go, though, I’m ending things big. I’m in countdown mode. You know when you’re watching a show like ‘Breaking Bad,’ and every episode feels like the second to last episode? That’s where I’m at. I’ve been on the Avengers longer than anybody in the history of the book. When you take everything into account, I’ve written over 200 issues. I’m very, very proud of that, and what we have coming up this summer gives me the opportunity to go out on a high note. I know enough about showbiz to know that’s a great time to go.”

Recidivism: New Avengers #18 Review

Albert Einstein supposedly said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Norman Osborn is insane. Brian Michael Bendis might be too.

Let’s start with the most important thing to keep in mind when reading this review: I didn’t particularly like Marvel’s 2008 – 2009 Dark Reign crossover event all that much. The foundation behind it – that Norman Osborn was made head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Renamed H.A.M.M.E.R. to sound all badassed during the event) – meant that reading a Marvel comic during that time required a suspension of disbelief that would make Hercules say, “Ah, fuck it.”

Yes, I know Osborn killed that invading Skrull Queen in Secret Invasion. He also killed Gwen Stacy. In cold blood. In the middle of New York City. On camera. Making Osborn the Top Cop was roughly akin to setting Bernie Madoff up as Secretary of the Treasury, or hiring Ted Bundy as the Headmaster of The Finishing School for Aspiring Victoria’s Secret Models.

The biggest thing Osborn did during Dark Reign was create his own “official” version of The Avengers, packed with supervillains dressed as their superhero counterparts. With Daken as Wolverine, Venom as Spider-Man, Bullseye as Hawkeye, et cetera, et cetera. Which is a brilliant and interesting concept… for say, a two or three issue story arc. As a fiendish plot by some master criminal to fool street cops. “I know… while we are robbing the New York Bank of New York, we will dress in the costumes of our enemies! That will make the police mistrust and harass The Avengers, and we will have our revenge! Mwu-hah-hah-ha!”

Instead, the Dark Avengers went on for almost a year and a half, all based on a concept that also only worked if you never stopped and thought about it for even a second: “Hi, Mr. President? Meet Bullseye. Hired assassin. Done years and years in prison. Once had a brain tumor back that made him hallucinate and kill strangers. Also killed Karen Page in cold blood. In a church. And there’s garage surveillance footage of him stabbing Elektra to death floating around on the Internet. Can we get this man a badge and a security clearance? And while you’re working on that, I’d like you to meet Venom…”

Every Generation’s Got Its Own Disease: Phoenix Returns

About a week and a half ago, we reported on a postcard that Marvel sent to comic book retailers like my local comic store owner, who knows me by name and asks me not to unbuckle my belt and tell him to “check out my back issue”, that simply read: “It’s Coming.” Following the right URL to Marvel’s Website brought you to a page containing a placeholder for their liveblog of Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada’s Cup ‘O Joe panel at the New York Comic Con.

Well, that panel took place yesterday. Tell us what’s coming, Marvel blogger UltimateKidNova!

The teaser “It’s Coming” was shown once more before being morphed into what seems to hint heavily at the return of a certain character named for a mythical flaming bird.

“Flaming bird,” huh? Can you be a little more specific? RuPaul? Devine? Beiber?

Yeah, even I’m not that hung over. Marvel’s bringing back Phoenix. Eventually. Marvel’s promo art they showed at the panel is after the jump.

Every Picture Tells A Story (Badly): Ultimate Spider-Man #3 Review

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with Ultimate Spider-Man #3: the Kaare Andrews cover.

This cover looks like Spider-Man is trying, more successfully than most 13-year-old boys, to suck his own dick. While shooting streams of sticky goop from his general crotchal area. With his apparently gapingly spread ass shown more prominently and unobscured than his fucking head.

There are action covers, and then there are action covers, Kaare… I think Marvel picked the wrong issue of this book to hide in a polybag. Actually, I might have preferred receiving it in a lead-lined sack.

Let’s move on to the second most obvious problem with this book: More Goddamned useless widescreen visual storytelling. I’ve talked about this before, and go figure, it’s another issue of Bendis-written Ultimate Spider-Man that makes me bring it up again.

Pages two and three are delivered in a standard, read-page-one then read-page-two format. Pages three and four, however, are amongst the most egregious examples of fucking with format for no return at all I can scarely describe it.

Here: I will ruin the spine of this book on my scanner to show you what I mean:

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 4: The Justice of F***ing

We here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives finally kicked the cold and got healthy! And then we celebrated with cheap liquor and got sick a different way, so once again, here we are, a day late and a dollar… where’s our f***ing dollar!?

In this week’s episode, we drool over the new trailer for the Avengers movie, we thank DC Comics for announcing that they’ll be selling comics on the Amazon Kindle Fire (When we bought a f***ing Barnes & Noble Nook Color six months ago) by speculating which New 52 book will be canceled first (and which should be canceled first), and talk about our sleeper books of the week!

In addition:

• Amanda would like to announce that she was incorrect when she said that Alex Maleev was the creator of Echo! She meant to say it was Jesus!
• Here’s Rob’s review of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode!
• While tomorrow we will be posting a full-on video of the Avengers trailer in family-friendly and buggy Flash video, here’s the Quicktime edition so that Steve Jobs can cockblock you with upgrade warnings from the grave!
• And simply look up and to the left to see happens when you Google “Captain America Liefeld Boobs”! (via Grotesque Anatomy)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:57 — 42.1MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers! And if you don’t, we’ll show you what happens when you Google “Liefeld Mantits No Seriously Just Liefeld’s Mantits”!

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 3: The Fistula Of Justice

The Sudafed finally mixed with the Jack Daniels and made a mellow, Earth-friendly body-meth, which gave us enough energy to complete Episode 3 of the Crisis on Infinite Midlive’s Podcast: The Fistula of Justice!

Thrill to two drunk sick people as they talk about the impact of the New 52, DC Comics’ new Neilsen Survey (Which sadly didn’t include the obvious question: Orange nip slip: horrifying moment or the most horrifying moment?), the overriding post-Catwoman question: are superhero comics sexist (“What’s wrong with being sexist?” “Not sexy, sex… Jesus, you really are a monster, aren’t you?”), and our sleeper favorite books of the week!

And to answer some questions from the show that are enigmas, wrapped in riddles, covered in mucous:

• The Crow said Don’t Look (Seriously: don’t look at this. It’s not safe for work. Or your appetite)!
• Turns out 53 is a prime number!
• Tell DC what you really think without having to spoon Dan DiDio (EDITOR’S NOTE: Rob just tried to take the survey and was told he wasn’t qualified. Probably because of his area code. Or because he said his penis had an area code of its own)!
• Newsarama asks if comic fans want to Smell The Glove!
• Hot, sweet, [male] child on [male] child roundeye action!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:37 — 34.4MB)

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Enjoy the show, sucker! And if you don’t, just hit that “Don’t Look” link up there!

Castles Over Kings

So now the both of us have caught this wretched head ebola, which means that posting may slow while we lie around looking for mindless entertainment to feed our middle brains while we slowly undergo the process of turning cold medicine into snot… but don’t worry about us, we have a tool for dealing with this. It’s called a screwdriver.

And a likely candidate for tonight’s distraction from our various aches, pains and uncomfortable viscous bubblings is Castle, starring Nathan Fillion, on ABC at 10 p.m. eastern time. It’s not a regular view for us, but ABC is owned by Disney, as is Marvel, and since, purely by coincidence, Marvel’s releasing a Castle graphic novel Wednesday, it seems that tonight’s episode has a distinctly Marvel Comics feel to it, which you can see in the preview after the jump:

Don’t You Forget About Me: New Avengers #16 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. How many spoilers? Well, I’m going to include a scan of 9/10th of the last page of the fucking story. The only way to more effectively ruin a climax involves a Donkey Punch. You are warned.

I would like to start by saying, clearly and unambiguously, that I liked New Avengers #16. The story is excellent, the art is spectacular, and the action is almost unrelenting. This is a good comic book. Are we clear?

Good.

Because now I am going to rank it out for a little while.