Parents And Children: Justice League #25, Justice League of America #10 and Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #2 Quick Hit Reviews

Editor’s Note: It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Spoiled.

So between spending the week helping the new cat get used to a life where the searing agony of a shot to the nuts happens to stupid humans, and dealing with the first ice and snow falls of the winter (Three times in eight days! I love New England! And I am apparently alone in this affection, since clearly God has forsaken us!), so I am well behind in reading this week’s comics. You’d be surprised how hard it is to concentrate on a simple piece of graphic literature when the cat is yowling and my co-Editor Amanda is asking if I think it would help if she plunked his sack in a snowbank.

It’s hard being a parent, even to a lower beast who shits in a box, loves the taste of network cable, and thinks a laser pointer is the best thing ever despite not being a seven-year-old boy in 1977. So I found it interesting that the first three books I peeled off my stack this evening – Justice League #25, Justice League of America #10 and Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #2 – all were about, on some level, the relationships between heroes (or anti-heroes) and their parents.

And all three books range from pretty good to excellent, but while I would normally review each of them in depth, well, it is Monday, and to compose my usual type of review for each comic would take me three hours and about 1,200 words to review, meaning there is no way in hell I could get them done before the new comics drop on Wednesday. So for a change, I’ll just write a couple of paragraphs about each, in ascending order of my opinion of them.

Assuming, of course, that this cat doesn’t decide to use my leg to sharpen his claws to remind me that I should be spending my money on scratching posts rather than silly things like neutering. Or comic books.

International The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Trailer Has Some Previously Unseen Footage

Greetings from the snowbound headquarters of The Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office! While we spend the day digging out, please enjoy this new international trailer of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. There are some differences from the US version, notably Gwen almost outing Peter Parker’s identity at 1:44 and a good look at the Rhino’s armor at 0:54. Meanwhile, I’m going to try an convince Rob that you can’t clear snow from an icy sidewalk by pouring lighter fluid on snow to light it on fire. You need at least one beefy hobo for that lighter fluid, so that the flames can get some traction in a solid fat source to keep the fire burning longer and melt more snow over a larger surface area. I’m pretty sure that won’t violate the condo agreement, right?

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will open on May 2, 2014.

Behold The Superman: Remastered Miracleman #1 Art Released

The first issue of Marvel’s reprint of Miracleman, drawn by Garry Leach and written by someone Marvel is referring to as “The Original Writer” in order to avoid litigation, but who we will refer to as “The Cranky Old Bastard,” will be released on January 15th, 2014, which, purely by coincidence, will be the same day that my original Eclipse Comics copy of Miracleman #1 plummets to a value where it will be less expensive to use as attic insulation than fiberglass.

While I have been excited for these reprints, it has only been in that they are precursors for Neil Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s completion of their The Silver Age and The Dark Age stories that were scuttled in the 1990s when Eclipse went under. After all, I do own the complete original Eclipse run (including Miracleman: Apocrypha, Miracleman 3D and one or two of the trade paperback reprints of the original issues), so it’s not like I need the reprints for the story. And sure, Marvel has announced that they’re completely digitally remastering the artwork, but really: how much of a difference could that make?

A reasonable amount, it turns out. Marvel has released a few pages from that first issue to show off some of that remastered original Leach art… and it’s looking pretty good. And you can check them out after the jump.

Smoking: The Superior Spider-Man #22 (And As A Whole) Review

I haven’t written about The Superior Spider-Man in a while, even though I am still reading it and still generally enjoying it, because it is beginning to succumb to The Walking Dead disease.

Here’s what I mean: we all know full well how The Superior Spider-Man is going to end. No matter what writer Dan Slott says on Twitter and at conventions, we all know that Peter Parker will return as Spider-Man at some point before the Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie opens on May 2nd next year. And even if you choose to believe that Marvel’s overlords at Disney will be willing to allow that corporate synergy and mindshare (Christ, I feel dirty just typing that) to pass since the movie’s owned by Sony and Columbia, the signs are all here that Peter Parker will return and Otto Octavius will suffer a fall. Otto’s showing hubris, he’s arrogant, and his sense of superiority is rubbing damn near everyone the wrong way.

All the signs point to Otto falling from grace and Peter returning, and the problem is that every reader knows this. Because we read comic books, and we know full well that dead only means dead in comics if the dead guy is Uncle Ben, Thomas Wayne or Martha Wayne. So we all know that the broad-stroke ending of Otto falls / Peter returns is coming (the same way we’ve known that Negan falls / Rick triumphs is the likely ending of the Walking Dead arc that’s been going on since 2012)… but it seems it has been going on forever.

And the events of The Superior Spider-Man #22 continues with the long, slow arc of Otto blindly heading toward a bad end, with yet another instance of Otto interacting badly with someone who would expect Peter to know and be friendly with him. And it’s certainly enjoyable enough, particularly in seeing J. Jonah Jameson’s reaction to some of the events of the issue… but it is also still more of the same interminable setup for a story for which I’m becoming damned impatient to see the punchline.

Happy Anniversary: Nova #100 Review

There are bigger and more ostensibly important comic books that have been released this week, but none of them had quite as much resonance with me when I saw the cover as Nova #100. Not because Nova is the biggest book in the world, but because it sure as hell isn’t the biggest book in the world.

My dad bought me Nova #12 when I was about five years old, mostly because Spider-Man was on the cover. And I really fell for the character, as I did DC’s Firestorm who debuted at about the same time, because even at five years old, I kind of understood that there were so many Spider-Man and Batman and Superman stories that I would never be able to never be able to read them all. But when you find a new hero that I found on the 11th issue? Well, that was someone who could belong to me.

However, I soon learned that the world of comics publishing didn’t revolve around the excitement of five and six year olds with 50-cent per week allowances willing to contribute a big $4.15 to the annual bottom line for a single comic book, because it was cancelled in 1978. And then it was cancelled again in 1995 after Eric Larsen brought it back, and again in 1999, and again in 2010 before returning in its current incarnation with a different dude under the helmet.

So it’s kinda cool that after 37 years, Nova has finally hit the hundred issue mark, showing simultaneously that sometimes the things you love when you’re five stick with you forever, and that the tastes of five year olds should never be used as a publishing strategy unless you want to wind up owned by a toy company, or worse, Disney.

But I’m not writing about Nova #100 just because of nostalgia, even though that is the reason it made its way to the top of my stack. It’s because in recent months, this book has become a fun and solid read, getting the mix of millennial spirit and fun, goofy dialogue that the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon on Disney XD often whiffs in trying so hard to deliver. And this issue is no exception, with a couple of cool stories about a kid trying to figure out how to be a hero when he’s got classes in the morning and his family has money trouble out the yang. And it’s a lot of fun.

A Long Way From The Silver Age: New Miracleman Stories in 2016

One of the hard parts about getting older is that you start to understand that there’s a chance you won’t live long enough to see all the cool shit you assumed you would when you were a kid. When I was a kid in the 70s, I assumed that someday I would live on the moon, while now I understand that the best I will ever be able to do is a few minutes in low Earth orbit, strapped into a chair and watching only my vomit float in zero gravity, and even that assumes that I have six figures to give Richard Branson in exchange for a 45 minute “vacation” in space. Hell, when Warren Zevon was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he famously said that he hoped he hung on long enough to see the next James Bond flick, and the poor prick never knew that if he’d survived for two James Bond flicks, he might actually witness a good one.

Yes, this is a morbid and depressing way to start a post about comic books, but it feels appropriate, because I am a Miracleman fan. And as a Miracleman fan, I was thrilled by the recent news that, after 20-plus years of waiting, Marvel was not only gonna reprint the original series written by Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but that they intended to publish the as-yet-unseen conclusion of Gaiman’s and Mark Buckingham’s The Silver Age and The Dark Age stories that were aborted when Eclipse Comics went under and suddenly nobody – and everybody – owned the rights to the character.

However, in comics as in life, there is no good news without bad news. The good news is that Marvel will start reprinting the original out-of-print stories soon, but I don’t care about that since I already own the entire original Eclipse Comics run (including Miracleman 3D and Miracleman Apocrypha). But the bad news in this story is that Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, thinks that we will see new Gaiman / Buckingham Miracleman stories, well, a little less soon.

Like, in two or three years soon. When I will be 45 years old, and actuarially closer to dead than alive even if I didn’t have 35 pack years of cigarettes and about 5,000,000 case years of whiskey under my belt. Or sometimes overflowing my belt.

Darkness And / Or Light: Drew Goddard Reportedly Writing Daredevil TV Show

There’s been a lot of news out of Marvel Studios this past week or so, which would be exciting if it weren’t for the fact that every time Marvel Studios does anything it makes me want to excitedly haul out my wallet and throw more money around. The only reason we haven’t seen Thor: The Dark World yet is because it is the first Marvel movie since Iron Man to not play at our local theater, and because we were busy battling our own Godforsaken evil in the form of an angry hot water heater.

Last week, Marvel Studios announced that they were teaming with Netflix to put out four direct-to-streaming television series, based on Daredevil, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones (or Brian Michael Bendis’s Alias if you’re nasty). They’re planning on doing a 13-episode series a piece, and apparently things are already approaching the pre-production stage, because there are reports that Marvel Studios is in talks with World War Z and former Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer Drew Goddard to write Daredevil.

Beautiful Disaster: Cataclysm: The Ultimates Last Stand #1 Review

Yesterday I complained that DC’s Forever Evil crossover wasn’t working for me because we’ve spent a whole bunch of weeks watching familiar villains in a new version of the universe run around unopposed, doing blatently evil shit for unclear reasons. And while it’s been all Earth-threateney and what-not, it hasn’t been all that compelling, because we all know that once the heroes reappear, there’s gonna be hell to pay. And to get that vaguely dissatisfied feeling has only taken a few months.

Enter Marvel’s Cataclysm, where a villain appears in a new universe and starts doing truly horrific things that endanger the planet without saying a word as to his motives. It’s Galactus, and unlike his prior appearances (and very much unlike Forever Evil), there is no herald and there are no grandiose declarations of superiority or inevitability. There is just hunger and mass destruction… and in one issue, it’s already ten times more compelling and tense than Forever Evil has been so far.

Marvel’s Mighty Avengers Mystery Spoiled By Spoiling Jerks At Marvel: Identity of Spider Hero Revealed

Editor’s Note: This story contains spoilers for upcoming issues of Mighty Avengers. So if you’re digging the mysteries that were presented in the first issue last month, please feel free to pretend that we are still upgrading our Web server, and that I am still shrieking impotently at our Web caching software, which apparently only accepts upgrading when it is convinced that you are who you say you are, and that game four of the World Series is safely past the third inning.

We really enjoyed the first issue of Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Greg Land. It was, unlike many recent Avengers titles, a more human, character-based story, with an interesting mystery at the code: who is the “muscular” and “intense” dude who has a history with Monica Rambeau and wears, at least for now, a rotten “Spider Hero” costume into battle?

There was a lot of speculation that it might turn out to be Miles Morales behind that mask, giving that character a place to go if the upcoming Ultimate Universe Cataclysm event does, as it appears it will, fuck all that Universe’s holes and leave it for dead. But regardless, it was meant to be a fun little guessing game for a few months before Ewing pulled back the curtain sometime in the next few issues.

Yeah, I said that it was “meant to” be a mystery. Past tense. Because Marvel went and gave the whole thing away.

Another Editor’s Note: Spoilers will follow after the jump. Last chance to bail, turn on the TV and watch the Red Sox show St. Louis how we do things in Boston…

Old Man And The Shield – Trailer For Captain America: The Winter Soldier

While the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office was celebrating the Red Sox and their 8-1 trouncing of the St. Louis Cardinals last night with whiskey, bottle rockets, and eventual blackouts, Marvel released the new extended trailer for Captain America: Winter Soldier into the slipstream of the internet. Prepare yourself for Nick Fury, cybernetic arms, and being uncomfortably close to other men on elevators. Also, thrill to the reveal of the rumored Robert Redford appearance as Alexander Pierce, S.H.I.E.L.D. covert über spy.

Cool to see how they’re handling Falcon, and if you didn’t get more than a little excited at the glimpse of Bucky’s cybernetic arm, well, then I question your Captain America fanhood.

Not seen in this trailer? Batroc the Leaper. Yep. He is supposed to be in the film.

Guess there’s just some things we’ll need to wait for the movie to experience.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier drops in US theaters on April 4, 2014.