[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

Bruce Wayne has been dead for about a year now. During this time, Grant Morrison has unfurled one of the most interesting imaginings of the Batman mythology in years, letting Dick Grayson rock the cowl and having Damian fulfill role of Robin. It’s been refreshing to see typically static characters further developed, pushed into areas that drives some fanboys into genuine nerd rage. Yeah, it’s been great to see fans breaking down, screaming, “But…but, Bruce is Batman, not Richard…Because…that’s how it’s been…and…well, see…you CAN’T CHANGE THE STORY! BECAUSE I’VE NEVER SQUEEZED A TITTY! AND A RESPECT FOR SIXTY YEARS OF CONTINUITY IS THE ONLY THING KEEPING A BULLET FROM MY BRAIN!!!”

One might be inclined think that a comic whose cover advertises “The Return of Bruce Wayne Begins Here!” would really cheese me off. But Batman and Robin #10, the comic touting just that, is actually quite enjoyable. The book is a well put together balancing act, laying an early foundation for the return of the original Caped Crusader while still playing with the currently assembled cast. Since superheroes never manage to stay dead for long, the best one can hope for is a reanimation that still progresses the mythos.

With Batman and Robin #10, Morrison runs the characters through the unavoidable emotional gamut that comes with bringing loved ones back from the dead. On one hand, Dick is eager to snatch Bruce Wayne out of the abyss, snacking on every morsel of a lead he finds in his investigations. After all, Wayne is the guy that saved his life, offering him a home and a purpose after his parents got capped.

On the other hand, Damian is a bit more hesitant to welcome his father back to the land of the living. But when you look at it from his perspective, the reservations make sense. First of all, Damian never really had a great relationship with his father. Moreover, if Bruce Wayne were to reassume the Batman responsibilities, Damian would be SOL; Dick Grayson can go back to being Nightwing, but the younger Wayne has nothing to fall back on. He can’t go even go back to his crimelord mama, as he had to defy her to even keep his job as Robin.

When it’s not ruminating about feelings, Batman and Robin #10 has got some sick, kooky-ass comic book shit to keep you flipping pages. There are newly discovered secret passages in Wayne Manor. There are goofy bad guys, showing up just a second too late to get Batman’s mysterious ally. Oh, there are some strong hints (I smell red herring) that aforementioned ally is actually the already-returned Bruce Wayne. Also, time travel is involved in one way or another. I think.

The issue is peniclled by Andy Clarke and inked by Scott Hanna, whose combined efforts come across as an imitation of Frank Quitely. Which is fine, really, since Quitely started this series and is one of my favorite current artists. Clarke and Hanna are pretty much par for the Batman and Robin course, never particularly wowing me but certainly not disappointing me either. Again, I’d love to see Frank Quitely do every issue of the series, but I prefer this pair to former pencillers like Philip Tan and Cameron Stewart.

With its vibrant colors and bubbly approach to a morbid topic, Batman and Robin #10 is damn fun. Yes, I used the three-letter word that is to be avoided at all costs, but that’s what pops up when I think of this comic book. Grant Morrison is proving, once again, that comic books don’t have to be gritty, macabre spectacles in order to be entertaining.

Sometimes the light hearted approach is best.

You have to give it up to Square Enix. They don’t even try to be subtle in their hyper-sexualizing of teenagers in Final Fantasy XIII. Sometimes FFXIII feels like a copy of Barely Legal for overweight and underweight nerds.

At first I thought I was just a big pervert when I began playing Final Fantasy XIII. I mean, once Vanille was on screen, my parts engorged and I was like, why am I so attracted to this polygonal teenager? I thought to myself that it’s probably because I’m a fat nerdboy who also suffers from a laundry list of mental impairments. She was there on screen, all being cute, but scantily clad with skin everywhere. God dammit!, I thought to myself. This is how it starts.

But then I was saved! You see, Final Fantasy XIII wants to me to get a hard-on for the near jailbait! I realized it pretty early into the game. When the gang of douchebags get branded for their Focus or whatever, and they’re turned into L’Cie, there’s this moment where they’re all showing where they’ve been branded. I’m sort of half-paying attention as they show their brands, and then Vanille shows hers. It’s all the way up her thigh, right next to her ass. Which she reveals by pulling up her skirt, revealing pure, milky goodness. Jesus Christ I thought, this is exactly what they want! I was relieved, and continued playing, not bothering to put my pants back on.

I own this dumb shit already. It’s called my Wii. It sits unused gathering dust while I use two systems that aren’t predicated on gimmicky motion control bullshit. The only time I want to be furiously working my wrists is when I’m pleasuring myself or a partner. I’m going to probably end up buying this anyways. Oh well.

[Search Engine Terms come from an app in the Word Press dashboard. It tells you the terms that people are using in google to lead to your site. Most of ours are ultra depraved and horrible. And amusing to sick people like me.]

Dude, are you kidding me? The aisles are running full with the fluids spilled by fanboys and fangirls over Bayonetta.

I saw Tron when I was a little kid. And knowing how neurotic I was, it probably gave me nightmares. After I saw the second Terminator movie, I was convinced that every other child I interacted with was secretly a robot plotting my death. I’m not kidding.

Since it’s been so long, I really have no idea what the movie was about. That isn’t stopping me from being really stoked about the sequel. It’s got all the ingredients to make me excited for a movie. It’s got Hot Chicks In Latex. It’s got futuristic, maybe even retro-futuristic visuals. And it’s got The Dude. It’s a perfect storm. Watching the trailer is like snorting a line of Nerdboner Viagra. Check out the trailer below.

EL LINUS struck this week, giving us an hour of the weasel and his nasal voice. I’ve always found Ben to be a tremendous douchebag, and I mean that in a loving way. There has never been anything he wasn’t willing to do in the name of himself, and you have to appreciate that in a guy. Be it letting his daughter get shot, or owning Locke in a seedy hotel room, the dude plays for keeps. He’s a a shitbag you respect because of how far he will go to maintain his tenuous grip on power.

The interesting wrinkle that this week’s episode addressed is what happens to Benjamin Linus when he realizes that he’s been duped, ain’t had no power, and has been a rube for the past twenty or so years? The immediate answer is simple: he stabbed the shit out of Jacob, before his dumb ass was rolled into a fire. But I suppose I’m talking more about the emotional effects.

On the Island, Ben is totally busted as the dude who jabbed Jacob in the belly-guts with a knife. Miles rats him out after doing the creepy twitching thing with Jacob’s ashes and this severely pisses off Ilana. And not in the good way, because I know you’re thinking it may be enjoyable to get spanked by such an authoritative and sultry woman. No sir, she has a gun. So then she’s like, hey, Linus, dig your own grave while we go and eat mangoes and shit. TTYL, d00d.

What a busch league move by Ilana. Hasn’t she been watching this show at all? You leave Ben Linus alone for anything more than nine seconds and he’s going to get out of the situation somehow. He has a remarkable ability to escape certain doom. So while she’s letting him dig his own grave, y himself, with some bamboo shoot or something, good ole Smokey rolls up and chats up Linus.

The biggest revelation this week on LOST was something that no one seems to want to talk about. Smokey is a fucking Jedi! Did you see that shit? He unshackled Benjamin with nothing more than a cute little wink and a hand gesture. Isn’t anyone else amazed by this? I am. I mean, I knew LOST was awesome, but I had no idea that we were dealing with wielders of The Force! Good god damn.

So Smokey and Ben have a heart to heart. It’s all very touching but all I could think about is how Ilana, while she was eating her mango, had no idea that Smokey had approached. I mean, for the past six seasons, every time he went anywhere, Smokey roared and you could hear him from three miles away. Well, if she’s dumb enough to let him be, she may be deaf enough to not hear a rampaging pillar of black smoke. Smokey frees Ben’s ass and once again Ben flees and Ilana is like, “Oh fuck, maybe I should be watching the sociopath and not eating a mango” and chases after him.

The two of them talk, and they get into one of the overriding themes of the show, which is a person’s sense of purpose. Ben has been feeling legitimately ass-crushed since he thought that Jacob had been playing him for a fool. And when he found out he had been betrayed and his entire sense of duty was but a charade, he freaked the fuck out. All of the power he assumed he had, all of his existence was tied up in what he thought was his position as the leader of the Others. When this was dismissed, he wile’d out. Like, woah.

Benjamin isn’t the only one being a self-pitying asshole ever since they learned they weren’t a Unique Snowflake. My boyfriend, the inestimably gorgeous and immortal Richard Alpert, is afflicted with the same sense of Emotitis.

Emotitis is a disease that is fatal to one’s dignity and leaves them without any sense of pride. Where your self-respect once was, you find a puddle of wallowing and lack of self-worth. Many of those suffering from this disease also still use MySpace-esque pictures in their Facebook profile, post status updates that read things like “Gee whiz I can’t ever catch a break :-/” or “UGH today is the WORST”, and they use self-hate as a way to attract members of the sex they wish to copulate with.

So yeah, Dicky Alps is seriously suffering from that.

Ricardo dupes Hurley and Jack the Sexpot to follow him to the Blackrock, where we’re given confirmation of what we already knew: the dude can’t die. Everyone who Jacob touches receives a “Gift”, which explains Dick’s predicament, but is vague enough to create another thousand questions. Like, is everyone immortal? Or what are their gifts? Can Jack shoot lasers out of his asshole? And since he can’t die, he wants Jack to light the fuse of the dynamite he wishes to go kabloom with. What a shitty way to die, right? I mean, couldn’t Richard have found like, a bottle of pills somewhere and had Jack dump them down his throat? Jesus, explosion?

Richard is seeking obliteration because he as well as Ben feels betrayed by Jacob. Much like Linus claims, Dicky was told by Jacob that he was part of some enormous plan, and now that Deity-Dude-Guy has been stabbed and rendered ashes, he assumes that it was all a lie.

What a fool! How can you possible begin to conceive of God’s…I mean Jacob’s plan! You self-absorbed fuck!

Jack’s drinking the Destiny Kool Aid though, and he agrees to light the stick of dynamite. After staring out at the ocean and humming that Kings of Leon song from the Grey’s Anatomy commercials, he’s come to accept his totally-specialness in the grand schemes of everything. It’s just like in the Matrix when Cipher is like IF HE IS SPECIAL CAN HE TOTALLY DIE TRINITY?!, Jack knows he’s all Neo shit and the fuse won’t go off. And look at that, he’s fucking right.

Jack’s got some grand role to play in everything, and it seems by displaying that, he cures Dicky of his Fall Out Boy-Blues, though I assume Alpert will continue to wear eyeliner. Can’t win all the battles.

And here’s the thing. While Richard may have directly communicated with Jacob, we know for a fact that Benjamin never did. So why is the guy so butthurt? For all his intimations that Jacob lied to him, and he was betrayed by Jacob, the dude is full of shit. Benjamin was never appointed leader of the Others, he was never addressed by Jacob, he stole that shit. Just like I thought he was going to in LA X this week.

In case you’re a mouth breather and missed it, the school in LA X is a metaphor for the Island. Did I just blow your mind? Jesus fucking Christ, I hope not. And through LA X this week, we watch as Benjamin Linus once again begins his manipulation of situations to claim a post that wasn’t awarded to him. Yes, you see, in case you missed it the principal is an analog for Charles Widmore. The plot in the alternate dimension this week takes us through the alterna-Linus as he begins to weasel and scheme and manipulate his way to the top.

I really didn’t know where they were going to go with Linus in LA X, but I was betting on the side of him continuing to be a villain. It seemed fitting that they would have him continuing to sacrifice his daughter in the name of power. I mean, I’m not a cynic, but for the past three-plus seasons I’ve seen Benjamin Linus throw away every chance at redemption. I was genuinely surprised when he decided that he would rather have Alex receive a sterling recommendation as opposed to have him sitting on yet another throne that didn’t belong to him.

I’m a sentimentalist, so it felt good.

You see, in the main reality, Linus never belonged as the leader of the Others. He was never chosen by Jacob. Just because he supplanted Widmore through treachery and deceit didn’t mean that the position was for him. Sure, you can politically backstab your way to running a high school, but I don’t think you can supplant someone through bullshit, when that person has been handpicked by a Deity.* So for all the QQing he did about his betrayal at the hands of Jacob, that’s what you get for taking the cookie that wasn’t yours! Fucker!

(*Assuming Widmore was. Big assumption, I know.)

Linus rejoins the Justice League Oceanic when Ilana is all “I will have you”, and two of my friends who watched the episode with me rolled their eyes so hard they almost tore their optical nerves out. Meanwhile, because I was on my period, I was teary eyed and yelling at the screen “Oh Benjamin! I will have you too! Sweet prince of darkness!” And if LA X is reflection of consequences, perhaps it is this moment where he finally decides that hanging out with the Island’s equivalent of Darkseid isn’t the best idea that seals a decent fate for him in the other world.

The episode ends with my boy Widmore rolling back up onto shore in a fucking submarine. It’s only taken him like twenty years to find the Island again, but he looks pretty pissed about everything. His arrival saved the last moments of the episode, because I was going to lose my mind if they ended the episode with one of this horrible, dreary, melodramatic moments that feature teary music and slow motion shots of pensive character members. Naw son! We got fucking UV goggle vision and submarines!

Shit. Is. Going. Down!

I almost hope they were aware of how lame ass the slow-motion+sappy-music endings were from the first couple of seasons, and this was them spoofing on it. Widemore is fucking back! He’s pissed off and English as fuck! He’s English, right? The dude had the Island taken from him, and now clearly he’s there to do battle with Smokey with his submarine that transforms into a mech. Obviously. It’s on!

My friend Buddy and I have been friends for ten years, and the two of us are legitimate Final Fantasy fanboys. In fact, we met on a Final Fantasy message board. We’ve been texting back and forth as we play, and this a good indication of some of my initial feelings. I’m in green, Buddy is in gray. I also spell fal’Cie wrong, because it isn’t a word constructed by humans, but rather by grammatical devils.

[Variant Covers is a column every Tuesday that breaks down the various titles coming out that week in the world where Jean Grey dies over and over again, only to return as a hot-ass redhead. Again.]

Cable #24

I think tomorrow may be the day when I hope aboard the X-Train again. I haven’t been following those kooky batch of freaks for a while now. The X-Verse has become so convoluted and expensive to follow that instead of trying to keep up with it, I just imagine days when Wolverine used to drink beer in Australia and get crucified, and everyone was hopping through the Siege Perilous. The good ole days!

Cable this week is the beginning of the X-Event that hath been dubbed Second Coming, and if I had to say of what, I’d guess: Jean Grey. It’s not the most complicated guess, given that Cable has been escorting around a super-special mutant with red hair and green eyes for the past couple of years. Also, last year at New York Comic-Con, when Matt Fraction was asked who Hope was, he was like “Uh, she’s got red hair and green eyes” and then he laughed.

Seriously.

So shit be poppin’ off with Jean Grey and Cable, having finally returned from the timestream, or an alternate reality, or wherever the fuck they were. And so I figure it’s worth checking out. The whole Hope and Cable storyline is an example of why comic books are both absurd, and great. Let’s deconstruct what’s going on here.

Cable is protecting Hope. Who is Cable? Cable is the son of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone, Madelyne Pryor. Alright it’s pretty fantastical. So then, Cable is shot into the future and shit because of some techno-0rganic virus that couldn’t be treated in the present day. This was just an excuse to make him look XTREME back in the 1990’s, but whatever. Then Cable comes back from the future, and is older than his Dad.

Sweet.

Then there’s Hope. This chick was the only baby mutant born after the Scarlet Witch went all bonkers and willed the mutants out of existence. And oh, she happens to have red hair and green eyes. Then she jumps into the future with Cable. Dude cannot, simply, will not get enough of the future. He fucking loves it. As an aside, when is the “future” for Cable? If he grew up fifty-zillion years in the future, is present day the past? Whatever.

So there’s Cable, Cyclops’ son. And he’s protecting the reincarnated manifestation of the chick his Mom was cloned from. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, and this is the sort of shit that could only happen in comic books. As I mentioned, the X-Books and myself have not been BFFs for a long time, but the whole culmination of Jean Grey returning has got my attention.

There’s nothing really else I’m checking out in the Marvel Universe this week, though there’s the usual Spider-Men and Deadpools afoot. Does anyone check out any of the fourteen Deadpool titles? I’m intrigued, and I figure there has to be one worth reading.

Weekly World News #3

One of the stalwarts of grocery shopping when I was a kid was the deli counter guy always giving me a piece of cheese. In retrospect, the pervert in me wonders if he was just trying to tap my Mom’s ass. Oh, how cute, he gave my son some food and look at him with glee. And look how he handles the meat! Fuck, I need my meds.

The other staple of grocery shopping with Mom was the inevitable begging for a copy of the Weekly World News. I’ve always been a sucker for ridiculous stories about aliens and freaks, and Bat Boys. Which seems pretty obvious, given the fact that I write a weekly comic book column. This was far before the internet, so I didn’t have dope columns on conspiracies and shit to read every week. I had to get my fill from the ole Weekly World News.

I haven’t read any of the comic iterations of WWN, but I’m glad that this comic is out there. Clearly having read this as a child has warped my mind in unforeseen ways, and it gives me comfort that it shall be doing the same to other little children. Or maybe just fat fanboys like myself who can’t let go of childhood nostalgia.

Superman: Last Stand of New Krypton #1

Superman has spent the last god knows how many months embroiled in some legitimate bullshit on New Krypton. What’s New Krypton? Oh, just some fancy new planet for the Kryptonians to live on that is opposite the Earth in orbit around the sun.

Yeah, fuck that. Even if you hate on Superman, you understand something simple. Superman is dope because he’s the lone survivor of a demolished planet, trying to make sense of his place in the universe. As I’ve always said, and I love because of this, he is the emo existential crisis personified. And I’m emo, and constantly in some sort of existential crisis. When you bring a zillion million Supermen into the fold, all of a sudden they’re not as cool.

Just like Jedi, or those douchebags from the Matrix sequels.

So finally, Superman is throwing down with General Zod – yes he’s back – and all sorts of other Super-dbags in this one-shot, that is setting up the War of the Supermen storyline this Spring. Sweet. If you’re in charge of the next Superman movie and you have the misfortune of reading this column, pay attention. This is exactly what Superman needs to be doing. Fighting shit. Ignore Bryan Singer’s movie where he was Superlifter and cried a lot and sired a bastard child. Superman needs people to punch. I don’t care if they’re robots, or other straggler Kryptonians.

And judging by the cover to Last Stand of New Krypton, he’s going to be fighting both. Perfect.

I picked up Final Fantasy XIII last night at midnight, and I figure I’d fire off my initial impressions. There’s a lot to get into, but the most resounding thing so far is that the story is retarded. Now, I’m only in the first chapter, and I’d like to emphasize it could and probably will get better.

But so far, I don’t think I’ve ever been this apathetic towards the characters in the beginning of a Final Fantasy before.

Everything is overwrought and ridiculous. Everyone is crying and making epic proclamations and acting like emo kids. The problem is that I’m not invested in these characters yet, and so when they cry and the dramatic music swells, I just roll my eyes. I’m all for in medias res, but so far the narrative is fractured between three different strands, and all of them are vague and insubstantial. Terms are getting thrown around, everyone is chasing down a loved one, and I’m standing in the middle of the room yelling WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.

I expect the storyline to get better, but I think I would be caring more if they didn’t throw me into some overblown confrontation while never bothering to get me invested in the characters, or the complicated mechanics of the game’s world. If I don’t know the characters, and I have to dive into a glossary every four seconds just to decipher the ridiculous names for everything, I’m going to be more confused than empathetic.

[pic : source]

It’s fucking weird out today. Something’s up. Massachusetts feels like it exists on an inhabitable planet. Which is really odd, since the shit and the snow and the sleet and the muck had convinced me we were on some awful amalgam of Hoth and Dagobah. I’ll take it though. The skies are blue, the air doesn’t stink of frost and snow, and the wind only makes my nipples slightly hard. Knowing New England we’ll be struck by an unforgiving blizzard next week, but who the fuck cares. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

Watching / Freaks and Geeks

I just started watching Freaks and Geeks, and no, I cannot provide you with the answer you’re looking for.

Why, dear God, have you not watched this show yet?

I don’t know, okay? I’ve had much venerated friends recommend the show to me. I’ve read all about the geeky references to nerd staples like Rush and Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been amazed at the cast that was assembled, given their current day success. And yet? I hadn’t watched this shit until the last couple of weeks.

I may never have seen it, given the way I was going, if it weren’t for a direct interjection by Pepsibones’ better half. I returned to the Man Cave one day, and the DVD boxset was sitting on my computer desk. “For Ian”, it read. I had mentioned in passing to The Girl Zany Enough to Take On Pepsibones As A Boyfriend how much I wanted to check out the show, and then I simply forgot all about it. And one day? One day it was here!

I dig it. I dig it a lot, and so does Mrs. Caffeine Powered. I bet when she reads that I referred to her as my bride, she will throw up a little bit in her mouth. I love you, honey! We stayed up late watching it on Friday night, and the next thing we knew it was like 1 in the morning.

I really dig on how miserable everyone in the show is; at first it was weird, because I was like, man, everyone seems so unhappy and confused. That’s when the Mrs was like, no shit, it’s fucking high school. Oh  yeah. There’s no neat denouement at the end of every episode, and that’s refreshing.

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I’m pretty stoked for Spring Break to be coming out. If I had to describe my first semester thus far in graduate school, I’d respond with an “Eh”. I enjoy one of my classes, and I dread the other. The reading is the definition of voluminous, and the payoff in class for spending countless hours by myself reading most of the time isn’t worth it. I’ve always been confused by a pedagogy that makes the student consume far more material than can be discusses. It’s always made more sense that the students should consume less, and concentrate more on that material.

I felt that way as an undergrad in survey courses, and I believe it even more now. I mean, back in the day, we’d cram Hamlet into a class. And it was like, really? These days I’m digesting five-hundred pages from various sources, only to have a fraction of those sources discussed.

In a jaded way, it’s like, why am I even busting my ass to read that scholarly article way down the reading list? There’s no tests on it, we’re not going to discuss it, and if I choose to do my final project on something else entirely, it won’t impact my academic life at all.

So I can use a break from sitting on this computer chair for five hours at a time and reading something from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

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Playing / Fallout 3

Have I mentioned that Final Fantasy XIII is coming out tomorrow? Have I? I have? Okay, good.

I picked up Fallout 3 again last week, and god damn, do I love it. I had a brief lull in my gaming life, where I didn’t have the time to finish off one of the countless games in my backlog, but I needed a break from Mass Effect. My entire gaming life since January had been Mass Effect-centric, between capping my characters in the original, and playing through the sequel twice. I needed a break, so I bit a one-tear goodbye to my Mrs. Thrace Shepard, and put the disc away for a bit.

Fallout 3 is the (atomic) bomb. Haha, puns! Somehow I had managed to miss thirty-percent of the quests in the game, which is ideally a testament to the enormity of the title. And less a commentary on how much of an asshole I am when I bomb through games and don’t take time to appreciate them.

It’s probably the latter. Fiddlesticks.

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I think I may have been one of six people in the world to write about Pepsi Max Cease Fire, since a good amount of our hits are coming from people searching for it on Google.

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Reading / Ultimate Avengers, Mark Millar and Carlos Pacheco

Pepsibones wrote about this shit last week, but it’s worth echoing. Forget Kick-Ass, I think Ultimate Avengers is the best thing Mark Millar is churning out currently. Maybe that’ll change when Nemesis comes out, who knows. The entire thing is just patently insane. The Red Skull is Captain America’s kid, and he killed JFK. Repeat that sentence in your mind two or three times, and once it registers and you say “What the fuck?!” come back to me.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s insane, it’s hyper-violent, it’s the Avengers movie that’ll never be, because it couldn’t be pulled off on film. It’s bizarre, it’s irreverent, it’s the Marvel universe through the eyes of a madman who has obviously been granted the keys to the kingdom. This title alone is a justification for the Ultimate universe.

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What are you, those unlucky enough to read my slop, up to?