Don’t Call It A Comeback Or A Reboot, Just A Cynical Marketing Move – Review Of Iron Man #1

A fabulously charming, billionaire, genius playboy walks into a bar with a hot air-headed blonde and a cold drink. The playboy says, “I have a lust for life that, when viewed from a distance is almost indistinguishable from a death wish.” The punchline? The cold drink is water because the playboy is an alcoholic, so he has to tolerate the blonde while sober. Also: the scene is drawn by Greg Land.

Iron Man #1 is written by Kieron Gillen. He is a man who knows his way around a solid, nuanced story, as anyone who has his recent work on Journey Into Mystery can attest. However, Iron Man #1 – titled “Demons And Genies”- appears to be, at the outset, more concerned with reestablishing plot points from earlier stories, such as “Demon In A Bottle” and “Extremis”, than breaking any new ground. So, yup – not a reboot. If anything, it’s taking Warren Ellis’s “Extremis” story and reminding the readers, “Hey, remember when storylines were fresh, new, and exciting? This isn’t one of those times. But don’t sweat it reader! We’ve got an app to fix that. Just view the selected panels through your smartphone using our Augmented Reality program and you’ll forget that what you’re reading breaks absolutely no ground at all!”

Probably not a good thing, right?

More blasts from the past, and spoilers, after the jump.

New Preview Of Greg Land’s Iron Man #1 Art Shows Same Old Lightboxing

We’re still under threat of Hurricane Sandy here at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office. However, I’d like to take this opportunity to pass along a new page of preview art by light box hack penciller Greg Land from Iron Man #1.

Where on earth could Greg Land have received such stellar inspiration? After the jump!

Has He Lost His Mind: Iron Man 3 Trailer Released

So I heard a weird and crazy rumor that that spastic behind the awesome 80s classic film script for Lethal Weapon, the underrated scripts to the 90s movies The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and the director behind the vastly underrated 2000s movie Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang was maybe gonna do a superhero movie. A rumor to which I put the normal weight one who has drunk a half-quart of whiskey would normally put.

And then I woke up with a crippling headache, and the following further evidence that one with a legally binding addiction should never comment on movie rumors:

Hard Reboot: Ultimate Comics Iron Man #1 Review

There are a variety of ways to read Ultimate Comics Iron Man #1, some of them cynical, others of them pleasant and forgiving.

The cynical side of me says that this comic book, in the most mercenary manner, throws aside a decade of continuity behind the Ultimate Universe Iron Man in favor of mimicking the depiction of Tony Stark by Robert Downey Jr. in the Marvel Studios movies, in effect putting itself aside in favor of a mass marketed version of the character designed to attract the maximum number of mouth-breathing summer entertainment seekers who don’t have air conditioning at home.
However, the hopeful and forgiving side of me says that the Ultimate Universe version of Tony Stark was originally depicted, in his first two miniseries written by Orson Scott Card, as a blue-skinned wuss who was mostly brain (literally; if I remember right, he sat on his cerebellum and pissed out of his medulla oblongata), with stupid organic armor and, if Card wrote what he knows, special magical underpants. In short, while it is weird to have positive feelings toward a comic book that so quickly and willingly throws away its own identity in favor of a popular movie depiction, the fact is that the old Ultimate Iron Man sucked hard, and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man was fucking awesome.

So what we got here is one damn strange book. One that feels like a cynical tack toward the widely popular while disgarding its own history… except its own history was mostly the sucky wankings of a controversial writer (not of comics) with some kind of spastic agenda who wrote the character as a snotty naked blue kid who sometimes liked to pretend he was a robot… which is arguably a bad story choice for a character written as having a brain situated in a way where getting a giant-robot-fetish-related atomic wedgie would give him a partial lobotomy.

All of which is a long way to go to describe what’s going on in a comic book stuck between a rock star and a polygamist’s place… but the overriding question is: despite what it is, is it any good?

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.”):

We Will Be: Gillen and Land Apparently Taking Over Invincible Iron Man

Marvel continues to hype their Marvel Now! initiative, where they’re planning to restart a bunch of their titles at issue #1 so that for a period of several months, every week when I go to my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me not to ask the paying customers if they “want to see my number one,” there will be a new Marvel first issue for me to pick up. Or, if is a first issue of something with Cable written by Jeph Loeb, for me to point at accusingly while loudly insinuating that it is practicing witchcraft.

Today’s announcement from Marvel? That writer Kieron Gillen and artist / pornography lightboxer Greg Land will be taking their work from Uncanny X-Men to a new comic book.

What comic book? Beats the shit out of me. See if you can figure it out:

Unchained Doggerel: Marvel’s Avengers Vs. X-Men Panel and Quentin Tarantino’s SDCC 2012 Announcement

We’ve seen a lot of cool things at San Diego Comic-Con over the past couple of days, but the Marvel Comic Avengers Vs. X-Men panel held this afternoon wasn’t one of them. Iron Man’s new armor from the upcoming Iron Man 3 movie was, so here it is. Get a good look? Good. Now let’s get back to the bad news.

Avengers Vs. X-Men is Marvel’s marquee summer event for 2012, and we are at about the midpoint of the story, and shit is heating up. We’ve got five X-Men possessed by the Phoenix Force, Hope is being trained by Iron Fist’s sensei to learn to repel the Phoenix, Tony Stark is working with Black Panther to find a way to defeat the Phoenix Force with a combination of science and magic, and Spider-Man is getting at least one of the best moments in a comic set in the 616 universe he’s had in years. So while the event isn’t perfect, there’s a lot of fan excitement around the event and what it has in store for us for the rest of the summer.

So it was with a palpable sense of excitement that we filled the third-biggest room at the San Diego Convention Center at 2:45 this afternoon to discover some tidbits about what the Marvel House of Ideas might have coming up for the fans.

Turns out? It’s hats.

Marvelous Hype: Friday Marvel SDCC 2012 News

One thing I’ve learned over several years of attending the San Diego Comic-Con is that DC Comics panels are more entertaining than Marvel panels. That’s a harsh reality but for me, a true one.

Panels from each company are jam-loaded with hype, and each does its damndest to try and whip the crowd into a screeching nerd frenzy, which is fine; Comic-Con panels aren’t press conferences, they’re public relations exercises that happen to include some pieces of legitimate comics news. And often that news is exciting – Neil Gaiman back on Sandman, anyone? – so I don’t blame either editorial staff for trying to whip the crowd into a slavering geek frenzy. But for me, the difference is that Marvel is just so self-congratulatory about things.

Here’s an example: last year, DC Comics blew up their entire universe and ran a real risk of alienating a huge chunk of their core audience. Instead, the move allowed DC to overtake Marvel in sales for he first time in recent memory, and their sales have reportedly stayed damn solid since then. We have attended no less than five DC panels so far at SDCC, and the biggest pat on the back DC gave themselves was when Bob Wayne opened the New 52 panel yesterday by asking the crowd how many people spent SDCC last year thinking that DC was insane for making the move… and followed up by asking why more people didn’t think that at the time.

Compare that to Marvel, who last year introduced a black / Hispanic Spider-Man. In the Ultimate Universe, which thanks to the recent 616 universe crossover in Spider-Men, is the equivalent of DC’s Earth 2 – a sandbox where Marvel can mess around with characters without it affecting the valuable core titles from which they make movies. Was is a bold move? Sure it was… but compared to blowing up your entire continuity, it’s about the same as comparing dropping a washer slug into a Coke machine to sticking up the Federal Reserve with a dynamite belt: one’s a little easier to walk back if the plan goes sideways.

However, if you listened to the panelists at yesterday’s Marvel Ultimate Universe panel, you’d think they cured the common cold. “This was a big risk,” said Marvel Editor in Chief Axel Alonso, “It was harder for us to kill [Peter Parker] than it was for you guys.” Alonso also said that the new Ultimate Spider-Man was the best work of Brian Michael Bendis’s career, and make no mistake: it’s a pretty good story, albeit utterly decompressed. But the hype was, personally, a little hard to take. My notes from the panel read, “Lot of ‘We’re so awesome and brave’ shit on the panel for killing Peter and having an Afr.-Am. kid as SM. There’s no news here, just fucking hype.”

And then Alonso announced that Ultimate Spider-Man artist David Marquez just signed an exclusive deal with Marvel. And my notes read, “There’s your news, writer prick.”

Hard As Iron: First Photos of Iron Patriot In Iron Man 3

While we comic fans are still swooning over The Avengers movie, let us not forget that Marvel Studios is not resting on the hundreds of millions of dollars that that movie has brought in the way your or I would if presented with hundreds of millions of dollars… actually, given a second thought, I would not be resting on it. I would be furiously masturbating on it. But already, I digress.

No, Marvel Studios already has Iron Man 3, directed by Lethal Weapon writer and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang director Shane Black, in the throes of principal photography. That means they’re shooting it now, in laymans’ terms, and when a geek movie is being shot? That means spy pictures are being leaked to the Internet. Such as the ones after the jump.

(And by the way – “spy pictures” is not industry jargon for “upskirt shots.” Don’t make that mistake and learn about it the hard way, like I did.)

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)