Wow, There Are Zombies In This Story!: The Walking Dead #116 Review

I have not been particularly quiet about my opinion that The Walking Dead has been spinning its wheels for a while now – you get Negan making threats, Rick and company come up with some kind of plan to turn things around, Negan sees said plan coming and turns it around with effortless ease and an erudite and witty comeback such as, “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re fucking fucked, you stupid fucker,” – and yes, that was an actual quote from Negan from one of the last few issues – and you repeat and repeat and repeat until you start considering dropping the title and waiting for the trade for the first time since the seventh issue.

This seemingly endless cycle has been going on for at least 17 months, or since Negan killed Glenn… but with issue 116, we finally we have an issue of The Walking Dead where not only does something go wrong for that baseball bat-fellating son of a bitch, but where there’s an actual live zombie attack. It’s a Goddamned Christmas Miracle!

Well… Negan still says irritating cocky shit and gets a hostage out of the deal. So maybe it’s more of a Thanksgiving Miracle. You know, the kind where you still have to put up with drunken racist Uncle Pete, but you avoid jail time for choking him out because for once, you get to witness him slipping on some gravy and falls on his ass.

Walking Through Mud: The Walking Dead #115 Review

This review is going to be colored by the fact that I am sick to fucking death of Negan and am more than ready for The Walking Dead to move on to something new.

We have been dancing with this character for fifteen months and his crew of douchebags for even longer than that, and for the entire time it has felt like the guy has one note, and writer Robert Kirkman has been playing it over… and over… and over, in an unending loop that should offend the mind of any self-respecting software developer:

while (bool negan.getIsAlive())
{
    negan.sexualizeBaseballBat();
    negan.leaves().
    List ricksPlanToBeatNegan = new List ( { “Take The Fight to Negan!” } );

    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).execute();
    ricksPlanToBeatNegan.getIndex(n).setSuccess(false);
    negan.threatenMassViolence();
    n = n + 1;
}

See what months and months of reading about Negan has done to me? I develop software for my day job, and I just spent ten minutes trying to come up with a valid Java-ish method rather than contemplate 12 more issues with this fucking character.

But 12 issues should be the long and short of Negan, because The Walking Dead #115 signals the start of the major story arc All Out War, which should give us the final showdown between Rick’s and Negan’s people. And if the check that the title’s floating is any good at all, this showdown will be a straight-out fight, rather than these little insurrections and half-measures and bouts of oneupsmanship that have made reading The Walking Dead since July of (Jesus) 2012 feeling like walking through thick mud: you take forever and a ton of effort to take every step, and yet go nowhere fast.

So things should start speeding up… eventually. Because part one of All Out War is really more of the same.

New Sneak Peek Of AMC’s The Walking Dead

If you are as irritated as I am that Robert Kirkman’s comic book, The Walking Dead, has been moving at a snail’s pace over the Big Bad Negan arc and long for Rick to man up and finally put that fucker down and let the characters and the readers get on with their lives then, well, I can’t help you. However, you may rejoice in a couple of things:

1. In the last issue, Andrea stepped up and reminded readers why the version of her in the comic book is a far more superior, kick ass lady than viewers that have been only watching the TV show will ever know. I really wish this version is the one that folks watching the show could have gotten to know and I’m hoping she does something awful to Negan in the next issue or so.

2. In the TV version of The Walking Dead, Andrea died. So, we won’t have to put up with her mewling, weak ass, suck-up-to-anyone-who-looks-like-they-might-have-an-iota-of-power shit anymore.

3. The TV version did keep Michonne, introduced this past season, just as bad ass as she is in the comic book and she’s back next season. And next season starts soon. Very soon. Yay!

Check out a sneak peek of Michonne in action, after the jump.

Turbulence: SDCC 2013 Skybound Comics Panel

It is getting late in San Diego Comic-Con, and the true fatigue hysteria is beginning to set in. I personally have not slept longer than six hours in the past four nights, and considering my diet in that time has varied wildly from gourmet triple-creme brie to greasy patty melts to tater tots, washed down with everything from Starbucks iced coffee to Stone IPA to hotel room self-brewed coffee to Coors Light, I am beginning to break down physically. And considering I am writing this with only about two hours to spare before I have to haul my shattered carcass to the convention floor to attempt to obtain some Goddamned thing called a Plush Zerg for contributor Lance Manion (and knowing Lance, this “convention exclusive” can only be obtained in the third stall of the mezzanine men’s room), I am staring goggle-eyed at a notebook full of details from yesterday’s Skybound Comics panel.

Skybound is, if you are not familiar, the personal publishing imprint at Image Comics for creator of The Walking Dead Robert Kirkman. Meaning that, if you have picked up one of Kirkman’s comics – The Walking Dead, Invincible, or Super Dinosaur, off the top of my head – it was a Skybound book. But it is not a vanity imprint by any stretch of the imagination; Kirkman has been bringing other creators into the fold to release books, including the recent Thief of Thieves. And based on what we were told in the panel yesterday, there are a variety of other books on the way, covering genres from westerns to horror to 70s grindhoue-style revenge flicks, indicating that if we wait long enough, we will eventually see the Skybound bullet on a romance comics, if not some form of furry yiff-tacular.

Jesus, I’m tired.

Robert Kirkman Talks Rejected Walking Dead Merchandise On Conan

You ever finish an episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead and think “I wish I could smell like the zombie apocalypse?” Just me? Well, turns out that was very nearly a possibility. Robert Kirkman discusses The Walking Dead merchandising opportunities he’s passed on, including perfume and energy drinks, in this clip from Conan.

The Walking Dead can be seen Sundays at 9 PM Eastern time on AMC.

Via Bleeding Cool

Brand New Day: Invincible #100 Review

Editor’s Note: We can’t afford to be innocent. Stand up and face the spoilers.

Over ten years, Invincible has evolved from a book about a teenaged hero learning both his powers and how to balance being a superhero and a high school student, into an experiment in comic superhero universe building. Seriously: this book has gone from a relatively small-scale story about a dude whose dad was basically Superman, fighting small-scale villains like mad bombers blowing up high school kids, to a seriously ambitious epic about interstellar travel, interplanetary war, politics and intrigues across multiple race, numerous superteams, and a pinkish, one-eyed powerhouse named Allen. Okay, some parts were more ambitious than others, but that’s not the point.

The point is that Invincible, over the years, became something that in almost no way resembled what it started out as: a simple superhero book that was pretty reminiscent of early Spider-Man. And as with The Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible has built up a huge amount of continuity that could make the book inscrutable to new readers. Which means that, as with The Amazing Spider-Man, it seems that writer Robert Kirkman has decided that, with Invincible #100, it’s time for a good, old-fashioned reboot.

Hangover: Rob’s Biggest Comic Disappointments of 2012

It is New Year’s Day, and thanks to about fifteen glasses alternating between Milwaukee’s and Lynchburg, Tennessee’s finest products last night, it feels like my brain has been taken over and occupied by Doctor Octopus. Or at least part of Doctor Octopus. Part of Doctor Octopus after a meal of bad sushi and piss-warm Chango. And to add insult to injury, I flipped on the TV this morning to be subjected to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which, as comic book movies go, certainly is one (man, Stringer Bell and Sailor Ripley sure have let themselves go).

Chuck on top of that steaming mess that there are no new comics until tomorrow, and nothing whatsoever apparently going on in the world of comics, and what we have is a new year that, so far, is… disappointing. And with that feeling in mind, and 2012 at our backs, it seems like as good an opportunity as any to revisit the biggest disappointments in comics and geek culture that occurred in 2012.

And given that the memory is so fresh, we might as well start with (although this list is in no particular order):

Meandering: The Walking Dead #105 Review

We’re a bunch of issues into the Negan Is A Douchebag arc in The Walking Dead, and I still don’t have that douchebag figured out yet.

I know a few people with some experience dealing with people on the autism spectrum (I know, I know: “Gee Rob, doesn’t everyone who knows you have experience dealing with at least one guy on the autism spectrum?” Yer a real fucking comedian, you are), and I’ve heard enough descriptions of missed social cues and inappropriate responses to interpersonal stimuli and the need for rigid routine to think that maybe writer Robert Kirkman intends for Negan to be rocking that kind of diagnosis… although everything I know about autism comes from secondhand anecdotes, Rainman and when people question my motivations.

But at the same time, I know a rotten, cowardly fucking bully when I see one, an I certainly see one in Negan. A big kid in arrested development who realized somewhere along the way that, since there’s no one to put the arm on him for telling racist jokes and flushing drunks heads down the toilet, why the hell not escalate to baseball bats and hot irons?  Maybe Negan’s just the kid who wedgied you in junior high who’s stuck in a state of arrested development, taking advantage of the fact that he maybe pinkbellied his first couple of “followers” into line, and the rest followed the pack.

Or maybe Kirkman has some combination of the two in mind; a character who never had the capacity to understand that just because a littler kid didn’t hit you back didn’t mean he was your friend, who thrives in a black-and-white set of simple rules that he suddenly found himself in a position to create on his own (no matter how much sense those rules might make), and whose pre-apocalypse personal obsession was zombie movies which made him better prepared to handle the rise of the walkers while we other social outcasts who were obsessed with, say, comic books, contributed to the rise of the new world order by becoming lunch.

Or maybe I’m completely full of shit, utterly off base, and have no idea what I’m talking about. And even if I am, who gives a damn? I don’t need the DSM-5 to know batshit crazy when I see it, and Negan is crazy. Regardless of his motivations (although clearly, this is the kind of thing that’s on my mind these days), this issue serves to show that, back at the ranch, Negan is at least as dangerous as the Governor, if not more so due to his obvious lack of real care for his people. He needs to die, already… and he has Carl.

This will not end well… and frankly, after six or seven months with this prick, I’m not sure it will end at all.

He’s Dead Tired: The Walking Dead #103 Review

I am not going to recommend that you read The Walking Dead #103 as an individual issue for two reasons. The first being that this issue is all setup for seeing the gang’s nemesis, Negan, eventually take his rotten barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, Lucille, somewhere south of Tainthattan (and that is, by the way, my official prediction as to what happens to the greasy bastard).

The second reason is that, since this is all setup for that inevitable, yet eventual, beatdown, it is an issue designed to make us hate Negan even more than we already did for killing Glenn. Which means that we spend 22 pages here watching Negan be a colossal asshole and get away with it. Which will make Negan’s inevitable defeat all the sweeter, but seen on its own, as an individual issue?

God damn, what a bummer.

Final Rest: Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore Settle Walking Dead Lawsuit

There is nothing more heartwarming in this world than seeing a childhood friendship grow into adulthood, turn into a productive working relationship, lead to an amicable parting of the ways as one friend pursues his dreams of producing professional comics work for page rates while the other turns their mutual prior work into a license to print money, then meet again in a Federal courtroom with mutual exclamations of affection like “[You are] a proud liar and fraudster,” and “[Your] lawsuit is ridiculous,” all before concluding in that most beautiful of Hollywood of endings: with one friend writing a check so the other can feel free to fuck off and die.

Or, in other words: Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore have settled their lawsuit over profits from and ownership over The Walking Dead.