Everything But The Fall: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Posters Released

2014 is less than a month old, and yet we are less than 90 days away from the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and that feels weird.

It feels weird because it is most definitely a summer movie, and yet it is opening in the spring, while it has “Winter” in the title, and we are talking about it from the planet Hoth. Which is a fucked-up metaphor if ever there was one, but it is cold and I am tired and I grew up in a time when summer movies opened up on Memorial Day weekend, which at this point in the year feels far enough away that it will correspond to the release of Google Wetware.

Why yes, I have been drinking. What’s your point?

Anyway, with the release date coming up fast, the marketing blitz is moving into high gear. Not only will a trailer for the movie air during the Super Bowl this Sunday, but Marvel Studios has released new character-based posters for the movie. And I will stream those posters to your Google Wetware if you’ll provide your IP address and check the box saying you take full responsibility for any and all brain aneurisms arising from the transfer.

Wow; I think I put a little too much Irish in this Irish Coffee. What I meant was, you can check the posters out after the jump.

Summer Weather, Winter Soldier: New Captain America: The Winter Solder Set Pictures

We were without power here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office for the past several hours up until about fifteen minutes ago thanks to some truly impressive thunderstorms, and there is more thunder rumbling on the horizon. So for good or ill, my review / observations of Man of Steel will need to wait a while longer (although for a sneak peek, Google “Miracleman #15”) while I frantically try to get a post up before we’re reduced to drinking warm beer in the dark and watching Amanda’s four-year-old bootleg copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on her five-year-old Zune.

So in that spirit of quick, yet entertaining and informative: The Cleveland Plains Dealer has been doing a daily liveblog of the filming of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and recently released some more pictures of that movie’s principal photography. And several days ago they broke (and we rebroke) some of the earliest pictures of Bucky as The Winter Soldier… and now they have released some of the earliest pictures of Cap. And Cap’s new costume.

And you can check those out after the jump.

Leather Pants In Cleveland No Longer Exclusively A Sign Of Terrible Desperation: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Location Photos

The original plan for today’s post was to comment on DC Comics’s upcoming Villains Month, and how it is not only a lead-in to DC’s first great crossover event since the New 52 reboot, but to implicit bankruptcy – seriously, DC is shipping 16 different Batman Family titles in September, and multiple shipping almost every other title, meaning that I will be surviving on bricks of ramen noodles in September, while the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me if I have their money – not some of their money; all their motherfucking money – makes the down payment on the new 911 Targa.

However, as sometimes happens, circumstances got in the way… those circumstances being fatigue hysteria. So an in-depth analysis over the troubling recent tendency of comics publishers to ship multiple copies of their books in a single month, and therefore effectively getting eight clams out of every reader every month while pretending that they haven’t increased their cover price, will have to wait for a day or two.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything cool going on in the world of comics and superheroes. For example, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is currently shooting in Ohio. And while it is a superhero movie, from a visual standpoint, it is a movie about a guy in a spandex suit with a painted hubcap fighting a guy in a leather suit with a machine gun. Which, fortunately, means that directors Anthony and Joe Russo can actually shoot some of it in the real world… and they have. Which means that Cleveland.com has some location photos of a gunfight scene, that includes some of the first photos of The Winter Soldier, so we can see if they’re keeping the same look from Ed Brubaker’s comics.

And you can check some of those pictures out after the jump.

Mistaken Identity: Robert Redford “Confirms” Role In Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the sequel to 2011’s Captain America (duh; what did you think it was the sequel to? Ice Castles? Use your head) is in production now, which means that casing rumors and news are coming out on a semi-regular basis. The latest news, from about a week ago, was that Robert Redford was being cast to play… something. But exactly who was anyone’s guess. Was it one of Captain America’s old, pre-freezing, World War II buddies? Agent Coulson’s angry and vengeful father? Batroc The Leaper? Leatherface (Yeah, I know, but the man’s spent a lot of time in the sun, is all)?

Nope. Redford did a press conference to support The Company You Keep, the upcoming political thriller flick he directed, and he point blank told reporters the role he’s playing… and it turns out that, yeah, we still don’t know what role he’s playing in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Because I don’t think Redford knows what the fuck he’s gonna be doing in the movie.

Why do I say that? Well, Redford told reporters he was playing:

Well, the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. The head of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Oh, okay. The head of S.H.I.E.L.D. Got it. Thanks, Bob.

Wait, what?

Southern Trespass: Captain America #4 Review

The unique thing about comic books, at least comic books from the Big Two that are owned by the publisher and have been around for a while (of course, whether those kind of comic books are the best thing for the industry or for readers is a whole different argument) is that writers and artists come and go, while the character remains. This dichotomy brings comic fans one of their favorite things – a continuity across years that can give some characters and titles an epic, historic feeling that supercedes the often simple adventure stories at their core – and one of their least favorite things – a continuity across years that the new douchebag creative team on a book are clearly fucking with with no regard for the character’s epic history and they’ve ruined the character and now I will Tweet a death threat and hello, Officer, no handcuffs are necessary, if you’d just read this issue, you’d see that I was right to threaten to set fire to the writer’s cat, and is that a Taser, and…

…well, you get the point.

The point being that creative teams change, and each new set of people has their own stamp that they want to put on these long-running books. And a lot of times these creators want to pay homage to a particular era from the character, which can be pretty damned varied; keep in mind that, at various times, Spider-Man has been a high school student battling street-level crime, a college student fighting more mid-level threats, an Avenger, a widely-reviled public menace, a member of the Fantastic Four, and a fucking clone… and now he’s Doctor Octopus. So if a writer wants to revisit any particular era, the story could be almost any kind, and if they want to do something new with the character, they’d need to make him a gay cowboy eating pudding or something (and I’m pretty sure if I dug far enough into the Marvel Team-Up back catalogue, I might even find that’s already been done).

All of which brings up to Rick Remender, and his reboot of Captain America following Ed Brubaker’s long run on the title. Brubaker’s reign on the title was categorized by S.H.I.E.L.D.-based espionage stories, and while God knows that he took his share of chances on the title – he killed Cap and brought Bucky back to life, for Christ’s sake – they were generally grounded, somewhat realistic stories with a classic Steranko-era feel. However, that’s not the only kind of Captain America story there is; Cap has a legacy of science fiction-style stories in his history, written and drawn by no less than Jack Kirby and Gene Colan – let’s remember that before MODOK became a comic reader’s punchline, he was created to fuck around with Cap.

Remender has clearly chosen to focus on the science fiction history of Captain America in his initial reboot story, which continues through this weeks issue #4. This is a full-blast sci-fi story, including alternate universes, alien races, spaceships, and one of the classic Captain America sci-fi villains: the Kirby-created Armin Zola. The question is: how does all this weirdness – weirdness supported by various eras in Captain America’s history, mind you – go down immediately following years and years of cold war-style spy stories?

Honestly? It’s going down hard.

Contested Election: The Ultimates #15 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I pledge allegiance to the spoilers of the Ultimate Comics of Marvel…

If it was really that easy, Bart Simpson would have been the President of The United States since 1992.

I have previously mentioned that the Ultimate Comics Divided We Fall storyline feels, to me, a lot like Wildstorm’s World’s End arc from a few years back: a major publisher making their sub-universe story playground look more relevant by turning it into an arbitrarily violent cesspool to drive large-scale storylines that the characters themselves weren’t weighty enough to introduce with any believability. Stories like this are the zombie apocalypse of comics: create some form of MacGuffin that sends society into turmoil, like a Kherubim attack or the rise of The Children of Tomorrow or a probe from Venus, and let the circumstances allow characters to do shit that you would never accept in a remotely realistic world.

The problems with stories like that is that you need to buy into the circumstances that have broken society. That’s easy with something like Night of The Living Dead – if you can buy the concept of space bacteria making the dead walk, the overrun of society by the zombies is an easy next step. But if you want to buy into the chaos at the heart of The Ultimates #15, even if you decide to ignore the Sentinels going apeshit in Arizona and that most of the northern eastern seaboard is under National Guard control (despite barely seeing any signs of even traffic snarls in Ultimate Spider-Man), you need to believe that the entire West Coast has united under the rule of pastiches of what appears to be Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Now, my day job is in a software company, and I can tell you with some authority that there isn’t a serious techie in the world who would cross the street to piss down either of those guys’ throats if their hearts were on fire. If this happened in the real world, California’s computer systems would die like pigs in a chute as all the real programmers emigrated to Arizona, because I guarantee you that the Sentinels run on Linux. But I’m getting off on a tangent here.

October Surprise: Marvel Leaks Spoilers For The Ultimates #15

Back at the San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel Editor In Chief Axel Alonso and The Ultimates writer Sam Humphries teased a huge event occurring in The Ultimates #15. “This will be one of the biggest comics of the year… siesmic,” Marvel’s Director of Communication Artie Singh said at the time, showing off upcoming covers to The Ultimates while withholding the cover to #15 and further teasing that the covers for #14 and #16 they were showing weren’t the final versions.

Which, at the time, felt like just some nifty hype; the entire panel in which this information was teased was far more hype and far less actual hard information. And I don’t think I can remember an SDCC where someone from one of the Big Two publishers didn’t say something like that, and usually the big reveal winds up being something stupid and ultimately inconsequential, like Wonder Woman buying a pair of pants, or Thor installing a pair of Truk-Nutz on Mjolnir.

Well, The Ultimates #15 will be out in comic stores tomorrow, and Marvel has leaked the big development to The Washington Post. Which means that, as a classic inverted pyramid lead, this article totally sucks, but I needed enough words (assuming “Truk-Nutz” counts as a word) to build in a cushion for the jump, to protect your tender little eyes from the big spoiler…

Who Wants To Be An Avenger? Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers Lineup Revealed

We’ve known for quite some time that Brian Michael Bendis’s run on the various Avengers titles was coming to an end, and it was recently announced that current Fantastic Four writer Jonathan Hickman was going to be taking over the two main titles, Avengers and The New Avengers. But one of the burning questions leading into the transfer of power has been: after the Avengers Vs. X-Men event shakes out and Hickman takes over, who’s gonna be on which team?

Well, some of those questions have been answered, as Marvel has released the first three covers to Avengers, written by Hickman with art by Jerome Opena, picturing a pretty big gathering of superheroes (and, as did Pinocchio, I question the correct term for a gathering of multiple superheroes. For today, I will eschew “gaggle” and “pride,” and will go with “wad.”):

Early Retirement: Ed Brubaker Leaving Marvel Comics

It’s been an eventful week at the big two this week when it comes to high profile creators stepping away. Earlier this week, Rob Liefeld left DC in what could be called “colorful circumstances”… but which most people would call a petulant display of “Fuck you, Mom! You’re not the boss of me!” via Twitter. And while an argument could be made, given similar (albeit lower-keyed) sentiments about post-New 52 practices by DC Editorial have been voiced by creators like John Rozum and Gail Simone, that maybe there is a logic behind a public airing of grievances, all I can say is, that as a guy who recently changed jobs, I find the airing of dirty laundry in public, and the burning of bridges, to be incomprehensible to me. Don’t get me wrong, I did it – once – and it basically guaranteed that I could never work in that particular industry again. But then again, I was never a particular name in that industry, so there was no reason for anyone to try to keep me, despite the fact that, drunken snit or no, at least I never drew tits on Captain America. But I digress.

Turns out Liefeld isn’t the only high profile creator walking away from a high-profile assignment: yesterday, also via Twitter, Winter Soldier and Captain America writer, and Marvel Architect Ed Brubaker, announced that his current tenure at Marvel is drawing to a close:

To end all speculation: Cap 19 and Winter Soldier 14 are my last Marvel books for now. But I may return, because Marvel has been my home.

— brubaker (@brubaker) August 24, 2012

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 9: Doublefisting Justice

I know what you’re saying: “Rob,” you’re saying, “It has been a month since Amanda’s and your last podcast. What’s the occasion?” Which would be an excellent question had Avengers not opened in American theaters last Friday, so asking it makes you look foolish. So stop it. You’re better than that.

Here is the pure hell of being editors of a comics Web site: Amanda and I watched Avengers together Saturday afternoon, and rather than discuss it, we agreed to see it again on Sunday… and still not discuss it until we got home and did it into microphones. And discuss it we did; in this Avengers podcast, we discuss:

• The Avengers 3D vs. 2D Experience from the point of view of people getting old with slowly failing vision!
• The Hulk: Great Avenger or Greatest Avenger?
• The Hulk can lift tanks, so why can’t he carry his own movie?
• Our Friend, The Thrice-Nightly Screening, or: Why Can’t Johnny Edit?
• Black Widow as best developed Avenger (insert your own boob joke here)!
• Hawkeye: Redundant Avenger or Redundant Avenger?
• I Can Has Justis Leeg Moovee Nao?, and:
• AAAvengers: who do we want to bring up from the minors?

As always, if you intend to listen to this at work, we recommend you wear headphones unless you want your boss to hear phrases like, “Lokif***er,” “Mjolnir… is not the hammer,” or, “You just want a Dirty Ruffalo!” Besides, with headphones, if you listen really close, you can hear two grown comics geeks misidentifying S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Sharon Carter as Ms. Marvel!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:44 — 56.5MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

(Avengers Booty Ass-emble via Kevin Bolk)