Catching up on Comics

On April 10th of this year, I moved out of the United States.

I left behind my friends, my family, and, most importantly, my comic books. Living in a new country on the opposite side of the planet from what I’m used to is very strange in many ways, but the one thing I’ve had a particularly hard time adjusting to is not having a comic shop nearby, where I can spend more money than I should every Wednesday afternoon.

Luckily, as Dr. Ian Malcolm so eloquently put it in the first Jurassic Park movie, “Life… finds a way.”

So now, nearly three months since I left America, and over five months since I stopped reading comics (I had to prepare myself), I’ve finally found a way to get caught up, and it is amazing. It hasn’t been that long, in the scheme of things, but I feel I’ve missed out on so much. (more…)

I hate spoilers.

They’ve gotten progressively worse over the years, as people try harder and harder to be the first to get the scoops on all the latest movies, comics, TV shows, whatever, and I just don’t get the appeal.

It’s gotten so bad that discussions of spoilers of major plot points now come up months before the thing that’s being spoiled is even ready for mass consumption.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to some friends online about a recent blockbuster movie, and one of them mentioned a MAJOR plot detail, one that only appears after the credits roll, only to follow it with a non-ironic spoiler alert for what she wanted to talk about next. She’d grown so numb to spoilers that she didn’t even realize she WAS spoiling something for those of us who hadn’t seen it yet, as that post-credit detail was leaked online about six months ago.

To be fair, we’ve been guilty of spoilers here on Doomkopf from time to time, but we’re not alone. And the spoilers aren’t debuting on our blog, by any means, but I still find their presence here annoying. (more…)

Last summer, The Amazing Spider-Man, directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, was released by Sony Pictures, and, if I’m not mistaken, it wasn’t exactly considered the best comic book movie of all time.

Matter of fact, I seem to recall it getting completely lost in the shuffle between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. And now, a year later, I don’t think I could tell you a single major thing that happened in it. I just remember disliking it a great deal and hoping to never have to watch it again.

A quick browse through our archives shows that, indeed, I hated it, though Jim Doom thought it was pretty great.

Let’s look at some facts first, before I get to my point.

Hit the jump, and let’s get down to business. (more…)

Yesterday, I had some fairly negative things to say about the prospects of an upcoming Justice League movie, because of how different it’s going to be from Marvel’s The Avengers, which was a huge success last summer.

But all that negativity got me to thinking. Maybe DC/WB shouldn’t try to copy the formula that made The Avengers so successful. One doesn’t have to look hard to find a formula that might work much more to their advantage: The formula Marvel is currently working on in regards to next summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

The Guardians are a pretty well-known team to comic book fans, but the general movie-going public has no clue what they’re all about, a fact that I don’t think is inevitably going to matter all that much. Whereas the Avengers took the long approach to developing each individual of their team in their own standalone movies before adding all the parts together for the team-up, Guardians is instead just throwing as much talent as they can possibly muster into a gigantic cast for a movie that will eventually, presumably, somehow tie into everything else in the Marvel Universe.

It’s a huge gamble. But I think it’s going to work. Let me explain why. (more…)

Now that Man of Steel has broken the record for largest opening weekend for a motion picture in the month of June, the talk of the town has turned to building toward the Justice League movie, as WB has said they want that property in theaters by the summer of 2015. Now, if you haven’t seen Man of Steel yet, don’t worry about me offering up any spoilers here, because I haven’t seen it yet either. But I CAN offer up spoilers for the Justice League movie, as you can probably guess from the title up above:

It’s not going to be very good.

How do I know this, you might be wondering? Simply put, it’s going to be compared to The Avengers constantly, and, as I keep saying, it won’t be good.

Comparisons between the two properties are inevitable and perfectly fair. As soon as Iron Man was released back in 2008, people started buzzing about the inevitable Avengers team-up, and some of us knew that could only mean an equally inevitable Justice League team-up.

Whereas it seemed that Marvel Studios had a master plan for how to make their movie happen, DC/WB released The Dark Knight a couple months later, a movie so grounded in its own realism that the notion of a team-up with Green Lantern or Hawkman seemed absolutely ridiculous to even think about. Indeed, DC/WB showed with that movie that they had absolutely no plans for anything even resembling the Justice League. Marvel not only fired the first shot, so to speak, but they did so at a time when the other side didn’t even know they had a gun. (more…)

[SFX: Intro music]

DOOM DELUISE: Hello and welcome to the latest Podcast of Doom. I’m your host, Doom Deluise, and with me is – –

JIM DOOM: Hey, I’m supposed to be the host. What are you doing? Hello, folks, I’m your host, Jim Doom and – –

DOOM DELUISE: I forgot to ask you, but why did you quit reading Green Lantern?

[SFX: Intro music fade out]

JIM DOOM: I just haven’t enjoyed it at all.

I am glad that DC is doing something to make their roster less of a white-boys club, but the attempt to normalize those of middle-eastern descent by having him be a falsely-accused terrorist just felt really heavy handed and I can’t get into this Third Guardian War at all. And I’m spending too much on comics, so that finally got the axe.

Green Lantern was one of the longest-running comics I’d been buying.

I think I’ve been reading that since I first made the effort to read more DC books around the time that the Countdown to Infinite Crisis began. (more…)

Captain America sucks.

It’s true. He’s a boring character from a bygone era. If he were in the DC Universe, he’d be a member of the Justice Society, pushed to the fringe where he belongs, a reminder of where superheroes came from but not much good for anything else. He punched Hitler on the jaw once, and not much has happened with him ever since.

At least, that’s what I’d be saying if it weren’t for Ed Brubaker and the past eight years of stellar Captain America storytelling. Not only did he take a tired character, dust him off, and make him a vital, central member of today’s Marvel Universe, but he also brought back Bucky, the plucky boy sidekick of Captain America from the 1940s and 50s.

And he made him awesome! (more…)