Fantastic Voyage: Fantastic Four #606 Review

Editor’s Note: Come along and ride on a Fantastic Spoilage! 

First off, let’s stipulate that Fantastic Four editor Tom Brevoort was having a bad day when he recommended that an issue about alternate Nazi versions of the Fantastic Four be labeled as a Point One entry issue, rather than this simple, classic-feeling one-and-done about the core team performing the type of weird, over the top science adventure that is the team’s stock in trade. Yes, a bad day, and not simply colossally poor judgment, or perhaps rampant alcohol abuse. But more likely an off day. Sure.

Let us also stipulate that, while this is an entertaining and charming issue that services all four core characters extremely well and captures the feeling of a classic FF adventure, part of the reason it feels classic is because the plot has been done before. And done, and done, and done, both in movies and in other comics. The thing works, but it works because it’s hung on a proven framework… the same way The Magnificent Seven is cool, but mostly because it’s taken straight across from The Seven Samurai.

In Case You’ve Been Under A Rock On The Internet Today – Marvel’s Northstar And Boyfriend To Wed

As Rob teased yesterday, the hot topic for both Marvel and DC recently has been upping the profile of its gay characters, either by increasing their numbers or the prominence of their story lines. Today on The View, it was formally announced that in Astonishing X-Men #50, Northstar and his boyfriend Kyle will indeed wed. Here’s your invitation to the joyous event:

After the jump, check out the announcement of the impending nuptials by Whoopi Goldberg on The View. Please pardon the unfortunate “Now Batman and Robin can come out of the closet” comment by Joy Behar. She apparently is unaware that Robin is Damien, Batman’s son. Also, she’s not funny.

Astonishing View of Gay Marriage: X-Men Announcement on Tomorrow’s The View

According to Amanda, the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Social Media Director and Marketing Guru, it is safe to say that if you are a devotee and regular reader of this Web site, the research numbers indicate that you are a comics enthusiast, a geek culture devotee, and an unemployed degenerate alcoholic.

And demographic point number three indicates that you will be home tomorrow, watching daytime television and sobbing into your Mad Dog 20-20 Red Banana Flavored Semi-Gelatinous Bevaraje (because calling it “Beverage” would imply that it was legally intended for human consumption). Which means I am the bearer of good news! You’ll be around to see Barbara Walters and the other horrible, horrible harridans of ABC’s The View announce some of the details surrounding this week’s Astonishing X-Men #50!

Ich Bin Ein Douchebags: Fantastic Four #605.1 Review

Editor’s Note: It was the world’s strangest accident. While testing a new Web site, our heroes were bombarded by mysterious spoilers from outer space!

In a complete and total vacuum, Fantastic Four #605.1 is an interesting little one-and-done Elseworlds-style alternate history of the Fantastic Four, hypothesizing what the team would be like if they’ve been born and raised in Nazi Germany. Which, again, taken on its own is a kind of cool concept (although “Nazi Thing” sounds suspiciously like a fetish German Scheisse porno), but in the real world, it only shows that writer Jonathan Hickman has read Mark Millar’s Red Son and Warren Ellis’s Planetary, and that he also thinks that the character of Reed Richards is a real, real douchebag.

Overstimulated, Exhausted Children: Avengers Vs. X-Men #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review constitutes a confirmed extinction-level spoiler.

I don’t have kids myself, but many of my former drinking buddies do, which has in turn made me decide I can never have kids. Because I just can’t talk to them. You ever try talking to a little kid, particularly after they’ve had a shitload of candy? Candy you gave them in the hopes they would take it, go away and stop trying to talk to you?

You can’t make any sense of it; they spin wildly from point to point, with no real logical gristle connecting them, with weird exaggerations that beggar belief to hear (“Wait, wait, little Billy… you’re saying Deathstroke rode his pony… sorry, his My Little Pony… to Cybertron? To fight fucking Voldemort? Who plots your shit, Billy? Rob Liefeld?”). After a while, it starts to hurt the mind to keep track of what’s happening and why, because if you stop and think about it for even a minute, it doesn’t make any sense at all.

In that same vein, if I told you that the plot of a story was, “You know what would be cool? If the Avengers battled the X-Men and Phoenix – no, not some redhead in a green body stocking, but the actual giant flaming bird, like the one from Battle of The Planets – on – get this – the fucking moon,” you would think that you were overhearing a schoolyard monologue by some kid who was on the first step of a road that’s started with Ritalin and will eventually end with methamphetamine extract.

Welcome to Avengers Vs. X-Men #4: where every plot point was written with a prefix of, “And you know what else would be cool?” regardless as to whether it makes any Goddamned sense at all.

Big Dumb Fun. With Pussies: Avenging Spider-Man #7 Review

In a spring season loaded with Batman battling to save Gotham from the Court of Owls, and The Avengers trading punches with the X-Men with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, sometimes Event Fatigue sets in. And sometimes you want a change of pace from the ongoing Superhero Apocalypse, and as you look at your normal alternatives – the Zombie Apocalypse in The Walking Dead or the Zombie Apocalypse in Crossed: Badlands are normally pretty much it – you maybe start wishing for a nice, fun, and maybe a little goofy one-and-done to cleanse the palate as a change of pace.

Or maybe you just have a thing for cats. Maybe your house smells like cat litter and ammoniac urine, the Internet doesn’t give you enough other cats to fill in the gap, and where the rubber hits the road, you’re despondent that you just can’t hug all the cats, despite oodles of free time with which you can pursue this goal thanks to the aforementioned ammoniac smell. Either way, Avenging Spider-Man #7 is the book you’ve been looking for, and between it and Versus, it is living proof that, from the standpoint of just plain fun comics, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want, ever.

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”:

Finally Forward Thinking: Avengers Assemble #3 Review

Editor’s Note: There was an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, so when we needed them, they could spoil the comics that we never could.

Put as mildly as a foul-mouthed, cynical, long-time drunken comic reader can put it, comic publishers almost never handle the release of a movie based on one of their properties well. Put less mildly and more baldly accurately, they generally seem to take the opportunity such a cross-media exposure provides for attracting new, enthusiastic readers to their comic books to grimly set their jaws, strap on their cleats, and stomp hard on their own dicks.

It happens over and over, so predictably that it might was well be a Cylon plot. The Dark Knight is poised to become the biggest movie of 2008, you say? What a perfect time for DC to kill Batman and put a new guy in the suit! Thor looking to open large? Awesome! Kill him! Iron Man breaking bigger than anyone thought in 2008? Sweet, let’s make him a government bureaucrat! It’s like the front offices of the Big Two, prior to the release of a comic book movie, go days without sleep, subsisting on amphetamines, trying to figure out how to convey to potential new readers, who wander into a comic store to learn more about the character they just fell in love with, that it would be in their best interests to fuck off and just keep right on walking.

So imagine my surprise when Marvel, not five days after the release of Avengers in American theaters, put out an issue of a comic book written and drawn by one of their A-list talent teams that looks like the movie, has the same characters as the movie, that is not only action-packed and imminently accessible to anyone who saw the movie, but also goes about answering one of the key unanswered questions from the movie that I have been asked repeatedly since last Friday: “So, that guy in the scene in the credits… who was that guy, exactly?”

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)

Assembly Required: Marvel’s The Avengers Movie Review

Update, 5/7/2012: Our spoiler-laden and much more in-depth Avengers podcast is now available.

Editor’s Note: This review contains no spoilers. As such, it feels very sketchy and incomplete. For more in-depth analysis of the movie and drunken incoherent ranting about specific things about the movie that were awesome, we will be producing a podcast in the coming days.

Marvel Studios’ The Avengers (Or as it’s known in England, Avengers Assemble, and as I presume it’s known in Pakistan, Imperialist Great Satans With Devil Powers) is finally in theaters in the United States. And you should go see it. Because it is good. Damn good. Seriously fucking good. Arguably the best superhero movie of all time (Granted, for me personally it is knocking M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable out of the peak spot, so take that into account as you read my opinion. Your mileage may vary, is all I’m saying).