Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 14: Scooby Gang From Ikea

My God, it’s a miracle: we’re actually releasing a new podcast on our regularly-scheduled Sunday! Sure, we had to tape it on Saturday to get it done, and during a time when we were forced by circumstance to remain sober while we did it, but what the hell; it’s a small price to pay for being able to rant about comics and pop culture on a predictable schedule.

In this week’s episode, we discuss:

• Television! Particularly, the announcements this week that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was renewed (and whether or not that is a good thing), and the announcements that various networks have picked up season orders of Agent Carter, Gotham, iZombie, Constantine, and Flash, and which shows we think might be good or horrible, depending on their direction
• Moon Knight #3, written by Warren Ellis with art by Declan Shalvey
• Miles Morales, The Ultimate Spider-Man #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by David Marquez, and
• Why you should never allow a kitten into a recording studio when you are, you know, recording.

And, a few notes (and please let us know in the comments if we mentioned something obscure and forgot to include it here):

• The “Maurissa” whose name we were trying to remember was Maurissa Tancharoen, one of the showrunners for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• When we talk about Beacon Hill and Dorchester, you might not know that Beacon Hill is a Boston neighborhood populated almost exclusively by people who use the word “summer” as a verb, and Dorchester is a place where you go to witness or participate in a knife fight (it is the home neighborhood of Mark Wahlberg, so you know almost nothing good has come from there)

Finally, the nitty gritty pseudo-legalese:

• This show may contains spoilers, and it may spoil something with no warning whatsoever (although we make an effort to chuck a “spoiler alert!” in now and again)
• This show was recorded live to tape and is unedited, so there may be more “ums”, pregnant pauses, and vile, ill-advised humor than you are used to from your everyday comics / pop culture podcast
• This show includes the use of explicit and profane language, and is most decidedly not safe for work. Unless you have the kind of job that requires you to know what a “Tunguska Reacharound” is, in which case, listen away and feel free to tell your pimp that we think you deserve a larger cut of the take.

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Where’s Waldo: Wally West Returns In Flash Annual #3

I have been to two San Diego Comic-Cons and one Boston Comic Con since DC kicked off their New 52 reboot (and one just before, when most of DC’s plans for the characters after the reboot had become public), and there has been one question asked almost more than any other: “Excuse me, sir? You, the middle aged guy with the ponytail? Where the hell are your pants?”

But that is not the most asked question. It is vastly surpassed by, “If you see a woman in a Batgirl costume, can you give me a quick heads-up? And also pretend to be me, Dan DiDio?”

But even more asked than those everyday questions is: “What happened to Wally West, and are when we going to see him again?” It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat at SDCC without hitting a pissed-off Wally West fan, or being screamed at by outraged furries.

And the answer has always been something along the lines of, “Barry Allen is The Flash now, and that’s that.”  Despite the fact that Wally West was The Flash for just about as long as Barry Allen ever was, and that there were two generations of comic book fans who only knew Barry as Flash if they’d read Crisis On Infinite Earths, it has seemed for about two and a half years that Wally West had been consigned to the quarter bin of history.

Except, yeah: apparently he’s coming back in The Flash Annual #3.

This Is It, The Apocalypse: Johns Leaving Aquaman, Manapul and Buccellato Leaving Flash

It has not been a good week for DC Comics, publicity wise. In the last week, the creators of Batwoman announced that they were leaving the title early, mostly due to editorial interference on a bunch of story points, including forbidding the planned plotline of Batwoman getting married to another woman. And while that particular story point was not, by the accounts of both the creators and DC Editorial, the primary cause for the split, but it’s what fired the imagination of half of the comics Internet (if by “imagination,” you mean “screeching hate frenzy”)… particularly once Dan DiDio, at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic Con, defended that particular decision by announcing that no DC superheroes are married. Even though a bunch of them, you know, are.

But Baltimore is over now, and the initial hubbub is starting to die down, so DC can get back to focusing on the comics, particularly the few that are left from the New 52 relaunch that still have consistent and successful creative teams. Like Geoff Johns on Aquaman. Right?

Historical Anomalies: Batman Zero Year Crossovers

DC Comics just wrapped up an event called the DC Retailer Roadshow in New York, which is not an event to which I was invited, due to the fact that I am not a comics retailer, and thanks to ugly rumors spread by the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop including the word “taser” in sentences that also include the phrase, “If I ever get face-to-face with Dan DiDio.”

A gentleman named Roderick Ruth, however, was there, and filed a report on the proceedings. Which included the normal stuff you would expect from a meeting with retailers – hype about the upcoming Trinity War event, addressing concerns that DC isn’t giving retailers enough information to appropriately order high-demand books like the one where Robin died, what have you – but it also included an interesting tidbit about Scott Snyder’s Batman origin story Zero Year, which just started last week.

That tidbit being that there will be crossover stories with Zero Year appearing not only in some of the Bat titles, but also in Action Comics, Flash, Green Arrow and Green Lantern Corps.

Wait, what?

Stone Cold Killer – Review Of The Flash #6

The Flash is another one of those books that finds its way into the house that I rarely get around to reading. It’s really Rob‘s thing, more than my own. Not that I particularly dislike the character; hell, I got a kick out of watching him run around the globe in order to pick just the right amount of steam to punch Lex Luthor in the face in Justice League Unlimited. However, my DC superhero tastes tend to run to characters with the word “bat” somewhere in their names and there is no “Batflash”…and if there was it sounds more like a euphemism for an evening of rooftop sex between Bruce and Selina that ends in disappointment.

With Flash issue 6, “Best Served Cold”, I find myself again picking up a book that is smack in the middle of a story arc. And, I do mean “smack” and “in the middle” – as the book opens, The Flash is engaged in an all out brawl with Captain Cold on a frozen lake (? – I always assumed Central City was somewhere out in fly over country), with a boat themed restaurant teetering from a giant stalagmite made from ice that is protruding from the lake’s surface. Will The Flash save the trapped restaurant patrons in time? And why does Captain Cold’s beef with The Flash seem so much more personal this time?

Ahead, prepare yourself for the cold fist of spoilers. Or don’t. Whatever.

It Means To Expose Everything: The Flash #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: Struck by a belt of whiskey and doused in bourbon, Crisis On Infinite Midlives editor Rob was transformed into The Spoilingest Man Alive. Tapping into the Internet device called the keyboard, he applies a tenacious sense of… ah, to hell with it. This review contains spoilers. But on the plus side, it also explains the ending of this book. You’ve been warned.

The Flash is really beginning to frustrate me. I want to like this book. The Flash is one of my favorite characters. The art by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato is some of the best currently appearing in monthly comics, which is no small praise when you’ve also got Jim Lee doing Justice League and J. H. Williams on Batwoman. Manapul and Buccellato are trying like hell to bring new concepts to the book. The problem is, what they need to be bringing to the book are writers.

The book opens with a spectacular title page that should make whatever Marvel intern who writes those dry, empty recap pages chop their typing fingers off in abject shame. It also contains The Flash complaining that he hates coffee, which, as a lifestyle argument, is a complete and total non-starter here in the Home Office. Sure, he says it’s because caffeine plays hell with his speed powers, but it cuts right to the core of everything I believe. Next he’ll be complaining that he can’t believe anybody likes porn because of how it leaves him chafed, bleeding and screaming. But I digress.

…Dressed Up With A Lot of Flash and Thunder: The Flash #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review may contain spoilers. Or it may just contain my suspicion that “The Speed Force” comes in powdered form. You are warned.

Here’s the first problem I have with Francis Manapul’s and Brian Buccellato’s New 52 reboot of The Flash: it’s not Mike Baron’s and Jackson Guice’s 1987 post-Crisis reboot of The Flash. To me, that book is the definitive reboot.

It put a new guy in the costume. It completely rethought how the powerset worked – to my knowledge, Mike Baron was the first person to make the mental leap that moving at that speed would require a lot of food and sleep to maintain… something he probably extrapolated from his prodigious use of cocaine. In short: it changed everything, and in doing so, it made it fascinating.

So when I read Manapul’s and Buccellato’s Flash, I kept wishing that I was actually reading Baron’s for the first time… and not just because it would mean that I was 17 years old and 175 pounds again. But also because this book, while beautiful, is completely uneven.

Plotpoint

The DC Source blog released some promotional hype for the New 52 Flash reboot that’s coming in on September 28 with art by Francis Manapul and co-written by Manapul and Brian Buccellato. Here’s a taste; you can see the whole nut here.

Flash’s editor, Brian Cunningham, chimed in on the new series:

But it also has something else. It’s something we let slip at Comic Con, but many of you might not have heard it, so brace yourself for this SPOILER WARNING:

The Flash is a single man. He’s a bachelor who has never been married.

I’ll give you all a few seconds to take that in and digest it.

Yes, folks — in the post-FLASHPOINT world, Barry Allen has not only never dated Iris West, but he’s dating someone else entirely in issue #1! And that someone is…his longtime coworker Patty Spivot!

If that upsets you, sorry about that. But I make no apologies for opening up a traditional storytelling avenue with our hero’s romantic life, something that’s been shut closed for a very long time now.

Look: I love The Flash. Mike Baron’s stuff right after the first Crisis reboot is amongst my favorite 12 issues of comics. William Messner-Loeb’s run on the book was fun back when I was in college (I even have a soft spot in my heart for Chunk, fer Chrissake), and what Mark Waid and Geoff Johns did with the character was damn entertaining.

That said…