Episode 135: I Like To Light Things On Fire

After a year of superheroes beating on each other in comic books and in not one, but two different cinematic universes, sometimes you just need a good, old-fashioned superhero team-up. You know, where the good guys fight each other at first because of a misunderstanding or mind control or something, then they come together to fight seemingly insurmountable odds, and finally defeat the bad guys.

Some comic publishers seem light on their ability to publish such stories recently (hi, Marvel!), but thankfully, the people in charge of the DC Arrowverse shows on The CW network have us covered. The Invasion! crossover between Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow took place this week, and gave us heroes from four shows and two Earths coming together to battle aliens, the government, and the after effects of time travel. Not to be confused with the after effects of physical travel; you might suffer Montezuma’s Revenge as a result of either, but only one involves a stone axe and your face.

So we discuss the crossover: what worked and what didn’t, what plot points were genius and which were purely for storytelling expediency, which characters and actors shared excellent chemistry, and who should be given more to do considering he once played Superman, for God’s sake.

We also discuss:

• The Totally Awesome Hulk #12, written by Greg Pak with art by Mahmud Asrar, and:
• Inhumans Vs. X-Men #0, written by Charles Soule with art by Kenneth Rocafort!

Alas, the disclaimers:

• This show contains spoilers. If you don’t want to learn why the greatest weapon against an alien invasion might be just one damn pocket? Watch Invasion! before listening and consider yourself duly warned.
• We use adult, profane language, so therefore this show is not safe for work. You want your mom to hear us talk about the emotional resonance behind an X-Man trying to get themselves hard as fast as they can? Then get some headphones.

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Thanks for listening, suckers!

It’s Not Even Past: Every Comics Reference In X-Men: Days of Future Past

There’s an Internet service provider truck out in front of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, which means we have at least intermittent Internet service this morning. Serves us right for setting up shop in a neighborhood where local entrepreneurs advertise their wares by chucking Air Jordans at the utility lines.

So with potentially limited time available on the wire today, we wanted to at least share this: there’s a dude who watched X-Men: Days of Future Past and took note and found video for almost all of the Easter Eggs and references to the original comics in the flick. He caught a couple that even Amanda and I missed (Hell, I forgot Spike even existed, and I loved Peter Milligan’s and Mike Allred’s X-Statix back in the day), and it’s a reasonably entertaining way to kill six minutes of a Friday while you wait for Beer O’Clock and / or for your Internet service to become reliable.

I’ve dropped the video after the jump. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll see what new wares my enterprising neighbors might have for the weekend.

Crisis On Infinite Midlives Podcast Episode 16: Crystal Blue Mess

It’s Sunday, and even though it’s the long Memorial Day weekend here in the States, it’s still time for another episode of the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Show!

In this week’s episode we talk about:

• X-Men: Days of Future Past! We discuss how much we enjoyed the movie, some of the cooler moments in the flick, but most importantly: we try and take apart where the film fits into the X-Men movie franchise continuity, and whether or not any of the other movies can even exist with this one stuck at the end!
• The recently announced title Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice! We talk about why the title makes sense, how a desire to make The Dark Knight Returns might have led to decisions director Zack Snyder made in Man of Steel, and how this title could have come directly from the name of one of our earlier podcasts!
• Forever Evil #7, by Geoff Johns and David Finch
• MPH #1, by Mark Millar and Duncan Fegredo
• Original Sin #2, by Jason Aaron and Mike Deodato, and:
• Why if 3D movies are bad, falling asleep during an IMAX 3D showing of Godzilla is worse (spoiler alert: it involves waking up to Godzilla shrieking at you through 100 subwoofers.

And now the legalese:

• This podcast uses adult, vulgar language, and is not safe for work. This week’s hook joke is about penis tinting, and things really go downhill from there. Wear headphones. You are warned.
• This show was recorded live to tape, and may contain awkward pauses, the use of the word “f**k” as a comma, and truly vile humor that any reasonable show would edit out.
• This show is chock-full of spoilers. We try to warn you ahead of time, but there’s no getting around it: we are ruiners.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:02 — 63.2MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Bryan Singer Explains Why Everybody Loves X-Men

Fox has released into the wild this featurette to promote X-Men: Days Of Future Past with new footage and an interview with Bryan Singer, who explains why he wanted to come back. Click the tag for a hint!

[Show][Hide]
Young Meat.

I know I feel better for having shared that with you.

Wow. James McAvoy “finally feels like he’s in a real X-Men movie”? Damn. Harsh diss on X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn, although I suspect he’s too busy directing the movie version of Mark Millar’s The Secret Service or dealing with the pre-production mishegas of the The Fantastic Four reboot to really give a shit. I wouldn’t.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past opens Stateside on May 23, 2014.
Via Bleeding Cool.

Danzig-Free: New X-Men: Days of Future Past Trailer Released

Ever since 2000, when the first X-Men movie was released in theaters, April has been an exciting time to be a comic book geek. Because it seems like every year since then, there has been at least one summer comic book movie to get psyched up about. Sure, in that summer there was just the one flick, but by 2002 we had Blade II and Spider-Man, by 2003 we had Daredevil, X2: X-Men United, Hulk and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and just this summer, we have Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Guardians of The Galaxy, and yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for some reason.

And we also have X-Men: Days of Future Past, directed by X-Men and X-2: X-Men United director Bryan Singer, who is, if any one person can be credited as responsible for the superhero movie explosion, that one person. Let us remember that, back in 1998 and 1999, there was widespread speculation that Wolverine would be played by Glenn Danzig. Who I’m sure would be a delight for any kind of fan to meet at a convention, but who I frankly prefer working in small suburban rock clubs, shrieking “MOTHER!” at increasingly aging punk chicks who know that Glenn is checking out their tits when he appears to be ogling their knees.

But the depressing circumstances of being Glenn Danzig are neither here nor there. The important thing is that X-Men: Days of Future Past is opening in American theaters on May 21st, which means that it’s time for a new trailer to come out to whet our appetites. And that is a thing that happened today, along with the release of the latest one-sheet poster for the flick, which you can check out at the top left of this piece.

The trailer? Well, you can check that out after the jump. Spoiler alert: it does not feature Glenn Danzig. To see Glenn, you’ll need to follow him on Twitter to see either where he’s playing, or where he’s jingling a Dunkin Donuts cup for spare change, and will likely call Wolverine a homo for you in exchange for a Marlboro Light.

Days of Future Aging: X-Men: Days of Future Past Trailer Released

A lot of the geek excitement for movies in the next year is focused on Marvel Studios, what with Thor: The Dark World opening next weekend, Captain America: The Winter Soldier dropping in April, 2014, and Guardians of The Galaxy (and if you’re not excited for that one, go see director James Gunn’s earlier flicks Slither and Super and tell me how you feel then) coming out next summer.

And once upon a time, that slate in and of itself would be enough to blow the heart of any self-respecting comics fan right out the back of his or her underpants. But we live in a charmed time, where we have even more comic flicks on the way, like The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and X-Men: Days of Future Past, which features the return of Bryan Singer, the director of X-Men and X-Men: United, the two films that started the whole superhero movie renaissance.

Twentieth Century Fox brough some footage from the film to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, but none of it has made it to the general public… until today, when the first official trailer from the movie was released. And you can check it out right after the jump.

SDCC 2013 Odds And Sods, Part 2: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary Panel

And finally, here is the last of it. The last panel we attended at San Diego Comic-Con on Sunday, July 21st, before the convention-closing screening of Buffy The Vampire Slayer‘s musical episode, Once More With Feeling: The Avengers, X-Men, Dr. Strange and Sgt. Fury 50th Anniversary panel, featuring classic Marvel writer Roy Thomas, current writer Brian Michael Bendis, and artist John Romita, Jr.

There wasn’t anything revealed that you could particularly call “news” at this panel. Hell, there wasn’t even a hell of a lot of information about the creations of The Avengers, The X-Men, or any of the rest (although we did learn that Thomas made The Vision an android because hey! Stan Lee says stuff sometimes!). But what we did get were some cool and inspirational stories of what it was like to be at Marvel right around the time when Fantastic Four was breaking, what it was like to grow up around one of the premier Spider-Man artists of the late 60s, early 70s, and what it was like to grow up in Brian Michael Bendis’s broken home! Well, I guess some stories are inspirational only in their aftermath.

But even if the panel didn’t have anything new to say about the modern world of comics, I can think of worse ways to close out the convention than to hear about what the world of comics was like when legends were being created every month, when characters who would literally change some of our lives were being spitballed to meet a deadline on a Sunday afternoon, and when a man could get a gig writing some of the most legendary books in Marvel history by filling out a workbook on his lunch break.

And even if you weren’t there, you can check some of it out right here. We have a few videos of some of the cooler stories – not the best videos we’ve ever shot, but you can see who’s talking and get the whole stories – right here after the jump.

Sexy Beast. Or Maybe Blue Balls: Bryan Singer Reveals Beast’s Look in Days of Future Past

While we have been talking about the rapidly ramping up hype around this summer’s geek and genre movies, the cool thing about living in this part of the 21st Century is that no one is waiting to see how the comic book flicks do this year before they make more: we’ve already got at least four of them in the pipe for next year.

As we speak, Marvel Studios has Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Thor: The Dark World and Guardians of The Galaxy being whipped together, but let’s not forget the Grand Old Man of modern superhero movies: the new X-Men, Days of Future Past, directed by Bryan Singer, the dude who put together the first two X-Men flicks (and I guarantee you that he thanks God for that fact every day, since there ain’t no one wandering around referring to Singer’s accolades as the director of Superman Returns, or Valkyrie).

And even though Singer is relatively early into production on Days of Future Past, he’s done a good job using Twitter to keep the rabid fans on the edges of their seats. Not too long ago, he Tweeted pictures of a bunch of the actors attached to the movie, but now he’s moved to showing off some early makeup effects. Specifically that of Nicholas Hoult in his Beast makeup. Which you can check out after the jump.

Tweet Impairment: Bryan Singer Posts Photo of X-Men: Days of Future Past With New Cast Members

You ever wake up on a Saturday morning, crippled from drink with the sense memories of about seven too many Jack Daniels-based drinks lingering in the back of your throat (along with a flavor that you can’t identify, but strongly suspect is gonorrhea)? And then your phone rings, and it’s a friend of yours saying, “Um, buddy? What exactly is this thing you went me a cell phone picture of? It’s a little blurry, but I figure it’s either a couple of sand dunes in the Saraha Desert, or else you’d better start rehearsing the speech you’re gonna give to your neighbors when the judge orders you to… inform them.”

Of course you have; if you were an upstanding citizen, you’d be getting your comics information from a more reputable source (read: almost anywhere else). And that means you understand the innate and insidious nature of Twitter. Just four years ago, the worst thing you could do with your cell phone camera was baffle a single person. Now, you can baffle the whole world at once!

Which is a long way to go to say that X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer has been Tweeting again.

XX-Men: Marvel Gives Details on Wood’s and Coipel’s All-Female Book

Y’know, for a guy that had his DC exclusive contract politely allowed to expire about a month before the New 52 relaunch (and after DC announced, and then unannounced, that he would be the writer on the Supergirl relaunch in September, 2011), Brian Wood has had one hell of a busy – and big – year. Between the launches of Mara for Image, Conan and The Massive for Dark Horse – not to mention the big success of Star Wars for that publisher just last week –  the guy has a lot going on… including that new book for Marvel that they teased last week with a one-word poster reading only “XX”.

These’s been a lot of speculation about what “XX” means, from the idea Amanda floated to me that it was an X-Treme X-Men relaunch, to the one I insisted upon to my bartender that it was about Dos Equis. Actually, I was just ordering a Dos Equis, but that’s not important right now.

What is important is that Marvel has revealed what it’s all about. It’s an X-Men book. Titled X-Men. With no, you know, men in it.