Okay, little blue man - Hulk smash! Then Hulk go look for Easter eggs.
We here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives hope that you are having a happy, healthy holiday weekend and are thoroughly enjoying yourself, in the midst of whatever sort of celebration yours entails. Ours involves copious amounts of beer. Don’t look so fucking shocked.
Meanwhile, please enjoy this latest incarnation of Avengers movie trailers. We certainly are – and the beer has nothing to do with it.
You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!
I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.
Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.
Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Children of The Pixel. Feared and hated by those they have sworn to protect. These are the strangest spoilers of all!
Cyclops is a fucking dick.
– Crisis On Infinite Midlives Editor Amanda, every New Comics Wednesday since I’ve known her
So Cyclops, like Han, shot first. Except, unlike Cyclops, people actually like Han. But we’ll get to that in a minute.
Avengers Vs. X-Men, Marvel’s tentpole summer crossover event, is finally here, and now that it is, it’s hard for me to really know what to think of it. It has a lot of action, although almost none of it is the aforementioned Avengers Vs. X-Men action (Note to self: remember the “Vs.” “Avengers on X-Men” action is an entirely different animal), and loaded with character moments, which is important in the opening chapter of a story that requires one character to act like he’s simultaneously on the upswing of a bipolar cycle and the downswing of a complete psychotic breakdown to make his behavior believable in the slightest.
If you’d told me even five years ago that I would enjoy a Daredevil comic wherein Daredevil battles a giant underground Sarlacc monster and gets into an acrobatic battle with the Mole Man – of all people – I would call you either a deluded scumbag, a shameless huckster or D. G. Chichester… all of which amount to almost the same thing, but I don’t want to digress this early.
My point is that, despite the innate ridiculousness, for an old comic reader raised on Miller, Nocenti and Bendis, of the plot of a Daredevil story like this one, it is in reality a spectacular comic book with great action, stellar art and actual humanity behind both the hero and the villain. This issue is akin to Hamlet’s soliloquy to Yorick’s skull on the nature of death and mourning, only with groin kicking… which actually might get me out to watch some Shakespere. Simply put: this comic is the good shit.
I’m gonna start with a sad, yet probably obvious revelation: I have no idea what is going on in The Twelve. I bought the first eight issues in 2007 and 2008 before it went on hiatus so that writer J. Michael Straczynski could take up writing duties on Superman and Wonder Woman and also not finish. And while I remembered enjoying it, it never clicked enough with me to add to my pull list at my local comics store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop telling the paying customers, “You looking for The Twelve? Well, you came to the right guy!”
So I missed issues 9 and 10 when they dropped last month because, well, this is an in-demand book, and it was sold out when I got to the store each week; frankly, the copy I have in my lap was the last copy of #11 in stock yesterday. And since I’m two issues behind, and haven’t bothered to re-read the first eight issues, I’m kind of in the dark here, so I’m reviewing this based solely on the merits of this individual comic book. And it is a very good comic book… which shouldn’t be surprising. Because Straczynski is an excellent writer… and because it includes riffs that I’ve seen in at least three other classic comic books.
When The Avengers opens in the United States, as well as most other countries, the movie’s main end credit song will be Live To Rise by Soundgarden who reunited for the first time in fifteen years in collaboration for this song. Soundgarden also has plans to release an album, their first in almost twenty years, later this year. See, comics fans? The 90s is back and as inescapable as Rob Liefeld’s short long term plans for Deathstroke.
However, if you happen to be in Mumbai on April 26, you can attend an early screening of The Avengers, complete with a live performance of the song that will play over the Indian movie version’s credits, Hello Andheron (Hello Darkness), performed by the band Agnee.
Wonder what The Avengers would be like through the lens of a Hindi music video? Check out Agnee and Hello Andheron, after the jump!
A. J. Mester has tweeted this image of a theoretical poster from the next installment in the Wolverine franchise of X-Movies. According to Screen Rant, who write,
The Wolverine has had a bit of a bumpy development road with some slight delays due to the weather situation in Japan, compounded by director Darren Aronofsky dropping out of the project for personal reasons.
With James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) now set to helm the feature based on Christopher McQuarrie and Mark Bomback’s adaptation of the classic Chris Claremont and Frank Miller’s 1982 story arc in the Wolverine comics, production is on the right track with a solid release date locked down for next summer.
It is from Mangold’s offices where our first look at The Wolverine may have leaked through an Instagram photo which we’ve straightened out for a clearer image. Check out what may be the first teaser poster for The Wolverine, featuring the Japan flag in the background being sliced by Wolverine’s claws.
Is it for real? Who knows. Does it get you excited for the next movie? Maybe. If you’re me, you really like the Claremont/Miller trade and hate the way they fucked up Deadpool in the last movie, so, you’re proceeding with caution.
And, if you’re me, you’re hung over and have to go to that filthy day job that pays the bills. So, that’s enough of that.
The Wolverine drops in US theaters on July 26, 2013.
Thanks to the hectic nature of a weekend that’s contained St. Patrick’s Day, a visit with my tax guy where I learned my coming federal refund, and a trip to my local electronics retailer to piss that refund away on a jacked-up tablet PC to help faciliate more effective reporting at SDCC this July (At least that’s the excuse I’m using to justify dropping the coin), it has been difficult to keep up with the goings-on at this weekend’s Wondercon in Anaheim, CA. Frankly, by about our second bar yesterday afternoon, it was difficult to keep up with the going-on in my my own pants (“I’m actually peeing in the bathroom, and not dreaming I’m peeing in the bathroom while I’m busily pissing myself on the couch, right? Right? …who am I talking to?”).
But when I finally managed to find the time to filter through the Wondercon announcements after a busy morning whimpering and cleaning the couch, one particular item jumped out at me: Marvel’s announced the return of The Lizard starting in Spider-Man issue #679. Which, on one hand, is in no way surprising; the issue’s due out about a week before the Amazing Spider-Man movie’s scheduled to be released in theaters, and if there’s one thing comics do well in the face of movie publicity, it’s try to match the books with the flick… and fuck it up. After all, this is the industry that killed Batman just before The Dark Knight make a bazillion dollars. So I’m less surprised over Marvel’s bringing back The Lizard than I am that they’re not bringing back Gwen Stacy (“Oh, Peter! I was absorbed by the Phoenix Force! No? Howzabout I’m a clone? Um… Ultrons? Just shut up and give me your comics money.”).
So the concept of writer Dan Slott and artist Giuseppe Camuncoli bringing The Lizard back wasn’t exactly exciting. The art that debuted at Wondercon, however…
This is in no way at all inspired by Rosie The Riveter...or Frank Quitely.
Yesterday at Wondercon in Anaheim, California, Marvel announced that starting this July, the character currently known as Carol Danvers, aka Ms. Marvel, will move into the role of Captain Marvel – complete with a haircut and costume change. Character concept designs were developed by Jamie McKelvie. Cover art will be handled by Ed McGuinness on issues 1 and 2, with Dexter Soy on interior art. Writing the new series will be Kelly Sue DeConnick (Osborn: Evil Incarcerated, Castle: Deadly Storm w/ Brian Michael Bendis). Says DeConnick:
My pitch was called ‘Pilot’ and the take can pretty much be summed up with ‘Carol Danvers as Chuck Yeager,’” says DeConnick. “Carol’s the virtual definition of a Type A personality. She’s a competitor and a control freak. At the start of our series, we see Carol pre-Captain Marvel, pre-NASA even, back when she was a fiercely competitive pilot. We’ll see her meeting one of her aviation heroes and we’ll see her youthful bravado, her swagger. Then over the course of the first arc we’re going to watch her find her way back to that hungry place. She’ll have to figure out how to be both Captain Marvel and Chuck Yeager—to marry the responsibility of that legacy with the sheer joy being nearly invulnerable and flying really [expletive] fast.
Huh. Chuck Yeager? That sounds a bit similar to the pitch her husband, Matt Fraction, gave when he announced his plans for Invincible Iron Man back in February 2008:
Tony Stark is equal parts James Bond and Chuck Yeager–a pioneer, a test pilot, an engineer, an adrenaline junkie visionary.
Well, Chuck Yeager is pretty cool. I suppose it’s entirely possibly that DeConnick just picked up a Chuck Yeager comparison through some kind of idea osmosis from being in such close proximity to Fraction for so long. Heck, now that Rob lives with me he can tell you exactly how and why you need to temper eggs before adding them to a custard. And he’ll only whimper a little bit when you ask him. I don’t see why he gets upset. Those brain cells were just going to be killed by whiskey anyway.
But is there anything else going on with this relaunch that calls to mind similarities with other creative properties?
EDITOR’S NOTE: And there came a day, a day unlike any other, when Crisis On Infinite Midlives douchiest editors found themselves united against a common threat. Spoilers Assemble!
I am perhaps not the best person to review Avengers #24 objectively, since I have gone on record as not being the biggest proponent of the whole Dark Reign 2 / Return of Norman Osborn / Dark Avengers Redux storyline. Based on particular individual issues in this crossover, I had somewhat softened my original opinion about the story arc, but considering my original prejudices, I perhaps cannot be trusted to be impartial in my opinions about this semi-ending to the story.
However, considering that you have made it this far after being spoiler and prejudice-warned on a Web site where the tagline on every page proclaims me to be a grumpy drunkard, I now feel safe in telling you that the ending of this story is so Goddamned wretchedly and horrifyingly bad it cheapens the entire arc, which I didn’t hold in particularly high value in the first place. In terms of excitement, this ending ranks with “And then I woke up.” In terms of a climax, this is on par with “I’m sorry; this has never happened to me before.” And in terms of pacing, it can only feel like writer Brian Michael Bendis said, “Avengers Vs. X-Men starts when? Oh shit.”
In addition, this story, as did the first Dark Reign storyline a couple years back, violates what should be an obvious and cardinal rule of resolving a Norman Osborn Ascendant story that should be Goddamned obvious on its face… but I’ll get to that in a minute.
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