Wednesday Night Fights

EDITOR’S NOTE, 1/12.2012, 10:20 p.m.: Three new Avengers Vs. X-Men fight promos have been added to the media gallery below!

It has been a busy and interesting week, including the release of a bunch of Avengers Vs. X-Men promo posters, which we’re just too shitfaced to post for you.

Don’t look at us like that.

Okay, since you’re so nice, and not calling us racist, sexist pigs (Don’t ask. Please).

Now that we have the business out of the way, it is, in fact, Wednesday night, which means this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But it’s a decent-looking take (Then again, so was last week’s and other than Fatale? Guh.): New Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. with O.M.A.C. guesting (More Goddamned periods to type? Seriously?), Bendis’s and Bagley’s Brilliant, Batman & Robin, and Crisis on Infinite Midlives’ favorite: The Strange Talent of Luther Strode!

Plus we’ve got new Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Batwoman, Batgirl, and many other female-friendly comics! That we read and enjoy (I told you, don’t ask)!

But to review them, we gotta read them. Which means: see you tomorrow, suckers!

Back In Thine Saddle: Simonson Returns to Marvel for Avengers

There was big news yesterday afternon from Marvel via their Next Big Thing liveblog with Brian Michael Bendis: starting with issue 25, the main Avengers title is gonna tie into the Avengers Vs. X-Men event for six issues! Wait, that’s not news… after Fear Itself and Avengers: X-Sanction so far, a Marvel event tie-in unfortunately sounds less like news than it does a diagnosis.

Then again, maybe not. Because Walt Simonson is returning to Marvel for the first time in around a decade to draw it. Not that image above; that’s a sketch for the Hero Initiative from a couple years ago, but I figured it’d be a nice taste of what we’re in for.

Cable’s Out: Avengers: X-Sanction #2 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Also rage, but mostly spoilers. Look at it this way: it’ll save you four bucks.

God damn you for making me do this, Jeph Loeb. I defended you after Heroes hit the skids. I didn’t scream at you for Ultimates volume three. you brought Jason Todd back from the dead and I didn’t insist you take his place (Yeah, I know it was actually Clayface impersonating Jason in Hush, but you planted the filthy idea in Judd Winick’s head). I tried, man.

But Avengers: X-Sanction is so wretchedly and abysmally bad it boggles my mind. For a time travel story it is heartbreakingly tiny in scope. The storytelling is flawed and full of holes, and required every character involved to act like a complete fucking idiot. As an event, it makes me miss Fear Itself, which is like being nostalgic for a canker sore.

Extra Pulp: Black Panther #527 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And once again, one last review of last week’s books before the comic stores open… and somehow once again, it’s about Black Panther. Although it might seem like it, Black Panther is not the last book I read every month. It’s just that since it comes out a week before Hawk & Dove, I need it to steel myself for the inevitable.

Black Panther has been canceled; the last issue of David Liss’s run is in two months, closing out the currently running Kingpin of Wakanda storyline. Which is a Goddamned shame on a couple of fronts, the first being that Liss has put together a great run of comics. The second being that, after all this time – I got an inkling of it back when I reviewed issue #524 a couple months back, but I didn’t totally get it – I’ve finally figured this book out. It’s old-school pulp, pure and simple.

A rich guy with a background in adventuring in the jungle, genetic superiority to normal men, who’s battling to defeat colonial encroachment? That’s Doc Savage when it isn’t Tarzan or Alan Quartermain. A rich guy who puts together a team of specialists to battle corruption in an urban jungle? That’s The Shadow –  yeah, okay; it’s also Batman, but if you look back at Detective Comics #27, Batman was also The fucking Shadow. Not to be confused with fucking The Shadow; that was Margo Lane. Or maybe Alec Baldwin. But I digress.

Brain Bleach: Marvel Legal Department Edition

Look out! Next he'll be after your wimmenz!

Sherry Singer and Indie Sing were the two international trade lawyers working for Marvel Comics in the ’90s (and they were ladies, we feel obligated to mention by the mandate of the site), who took a look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a book full of customs regulations, and realized that “dolls” were taxed 12% on import, while “toys” were taxed only 6.8%. The difference between the two was that a doll “represented only a human being,” while “toys” were ”monsters, robots, angels, basically anything that isn’t “only representing a human.” Probably, at some point in the past, some American doll manufacturer had felt threatened by overseas competition, and had lobbied the government to put a tax on imported dolls.

There’s also a link at The Mary Sue to a podcast that explains how the case turned out, so click on over there to find out the resolution.

Ones And / Or Zeroes: Nook Comics, Part 2

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 2 of our review of buying and reading comics on the Nook Color in its new version 1.4.1 software release. You can find part one here. You can find an anxious walrus reporting crimes here.

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Look: one thing you’re never gonna get past reading a comic on the Nook is the size of the screen. At about seven inches of widescreen diagonal, it’s 2/3, maybe 3/4 the size of a standard printed comics page. That’s not the fault of the Nook platform; it is what the thing is. But given that limitation, the images are clear – either they’ve pulled in digital originals or they made a damn good scan. When held in the vertical position, you get a complete single page that’s imminently readable unless you’re farsighted or worried about being seen occasionally squinting like a furious masturbator on the city bus.

The problem here is the splash pages. When the Nook is held vertically, you get, like I said, one comic page, which means you only get half the splash. If you rotate the Nook, the page reloads into a two-page view that shows you everything, but is imminently unreadable. You can zoom in using the standard poke-your-fingers-and-spread-them as you know from the iPad and dating virgins in high school, all the way to full original page resolution. And you can drag the page around with one finger, as in other table apps or dating slutty skanks in college.

Ones And / Or Zeroes: Nook Comics, Part 1

EDITOR’S NOTE: The first draft of this was written on Christmas Day while my parents were at church. They came back before I could finish, so I put it aside hastily, because I would rather have them believing that I was viewing pornography than running a comics Web site. So please forgive the dated references.

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Merry Christmas from deepest, darkest Florida! Being the holiday season, familial obligations have forced us to leave the Crisis In Infinite Midlives Home Office, with it’s convenient bars, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, bars, movie theaters, bars, comic store and bars. I am writing this from an area of Florida that, if you’re familiar with the adventures of Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, well… they’re familiar with those adventures here too, because they also watched them on TV when they were younger and had less ear hair.

This is what they call a “snowbird community,” because to call it a “retirement community” brings uncomfortable connotations of Blade Runner, which their Generation X children forced them to watch repeatedly on grainy VHS tapes. Or at least my parents were forced, so we’ll stick with the snowbird thing. It’s a nice little town where you can get anything you need, provided it helps in maintaining regular bowel movements.

But one thing they don’t have is a comic store. If you ask a local where you can get a comic book, they think you’re asking for something by Andy Rooney, and then they remember that he’s dead, then they get quiet, and then they call you an ungrateful hippie.

So it seemed that my visit here would remain comicless, since I certainly didn’t pack any comics for my trip down here. Packing anything more subversive than an iPhone with a fart generator app is a non-starter when facing an interaction with a TSA “agent”, since the last comics-related story they’ve probably heard was that Superman renounced his American citizenship, and if they see a picture of Batman boning Catwoman, you will become intimately familiar with the second knuckle of the middle finger of a strange man making minimum wage. It’s a Christmas Miracle OH GOD WHY I’LL ADMIT ANYTHING YOU WANT I’M SORRY BATMAN IS A BIGGER PIMP THAN YOU YES THOSE ARE MAGNIFICENT DREADLOCKS FOR A FEDERAL AGENT NO NOT THE THIRD KNUCKLE

But I digress. I thought I was going to be comicless, but a couple of weeks ago, Barnes & Noble released an operating system update for their Nook Color e-reader that prominently touted the availability of digital comics, particularly Marvel Comics. So I thought I would give the new functionality a shot.

The Final Countdown: Secret Avengers #20 Review

Unlike every other comics Web site in the world, we here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives are not putting together any lists of the best and worst comics of 2011. This is partially because we only came into existence in September, partially because when we review books we try to tell you what we think in a little more depth than a star rating or an idiotic list of weekly winners and losers, and partially because before we started this site we read many, if not all, of our comics on Wednesday nights while shitfaced at the bar next to our local comic store.

But if I were compiling a list of my favorite comics of 2011, Warren Ellis’s Secret Avengers would have a rock solid place on it. It has been a series of big idea, one-and-done issues with rotating, top-shelf artists, and an overriding concept – missions to stop extinction-level events that no one can ever know about – that cheerfully lends itself to big stories that can flip the bird to ongoing continuity. And this week’s #20 continues the solid run… although I readily admit that more than once, the stories have felt a little, shall we say, recycled.

A couple months ago when I reviewed Secret Avengers #18, I reveled in the fact that Ellis acknowledged that the problem with time travel is that if you just move through time, the planet would have moved, and you would pop out of your time tunnel or your hot tub or your DeLorean in the empty vacuum of space to die with blood boiling in your brain and leaving Elizabeth Shue available for Karate Kid II after all.

Quick Hits – Wolverine And The X-Men #3, Green Lantern Corps #4, And Ghost Rider #7

Call this post “The Good, The Bad, and WTF”. Here are some books we’ve talked about before. Let’s check in to see how they’re doing now.

The Good

Wolverine And The X-Men written by Jason Aaron with pencils by Chris Bachalo, Duncan Rouleau and Matteo Scalera wraps up the opening story arc of Wolverine’s first day trying to run a school for young mutants. I enjoyed the first issue. Aaron continues to bring humor to this tale, now up to issue #3. He pens an engaging story that reminds the reader that your typical teen can be an obnoxious handful who believes deeply that they are the hero of not only their own story but everyone else’s. Still, all the kids want to do is fit in somehow, in his or her own way.

More goodness, badness and wtf-ness after the jump…and spoilers.

This Is Not Gratutitous Self Boob Groping By Wonder Woman

Feels like I'm made of clay. Is it supposed to feel like that?

Xeni Jardin, of BoingBoing, recently wrote about an ad campaign in Mozambique that is a series of super heroines giving themselves breast exams to increase breast cancer awareness.

There is some controversy in the medical world about the value of breast self-exams. Even if it’s not the best way to detect cancer (mammography or thermography can “see” more than your hand, and many if not most lumps that can be felt are benign), I think more awareness and more data is generally a good thing. Even for superheroes.

As an aside, the ads are fun but I’m gonna guess that the creative team on this one was all-male…ever notice how public health ads about testicular cancer and prostate cancer don’t tend to feature fondle-y sexualized close-ups of those parts?

What? This isn’t “fondle-y” and sexualized?

Robin, quick! To the Bat Ball!

More breast aware superheroes after the jump.