Welcome to a special mid-week edition of the Friday Brew Review! As a high school teacher, my life seems to include a number of regularly-scheduled compromises — meager wages, hours spent on projects for students who couldn’t care less, the frustration of not being allowed to swear for eight hours a day, etc. But every now and then, an occupational perk seems to hop out of the shadows and give me a hug.

Today’s embrace comes in the form of a snow day.

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[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]

I love comics — honestly and earnestly, at that. As such, I definitely spend more money on Wednesdays than I should. Not only do I pick up  titles that will be remembered for years to come, but some of their more timid brethren as well.

It is with this preface that I present OL’s comic of the week: Ultimate Armor Wars #4

As the final issue of a limited series taking place within the Ultimate universe, this book is hardly “mandatory reading.” In fact, I can’t even remember whether or not I’ve read all three of the preceding issues. Fortunately, this isn’t really of consequence and the comic could work fine as a one-shot about Tony Stark.

How can this be? Three word answer — Warren fucking Ellis.

While I’m sure that the story would’ve made more sense if I had carefully followed the entire Ultimate Armor Wars series, Ellis demonstrates his complete mastery of paneled images in a mere twenty-two pages. Unlike most comic book writers, Ellis can create works of legitimate merit (such as Doktor Sleepless and Transmetropolitan) and still triumphantly return to the world of capes and superpowers. So even though I can imagine Warren Ellis banging out the script for Ultimate Armor Wars in a thirty minute haze of Red Bull-induced freneticism, it’s still stronger than most of the garbage released on hump-day.

So, what’s the plot? Again, I’m not even completely sure. I know that it involves Tony Stark fighting people who wear knock-off Iron Man suits, having sex with a babe who double-crosses him and realizing that his grandfather is a cyborg. And not just any cyborg, but one that threatens his life in the hopes of learning the secret of some technological wonder. It’s chaotic, kooky and all over the place, but somehow it works.

Again, what makes the book work is the writer’s grasp of the Tony Stark character. While it seems easy for  creators to make  Stark either too much of a hero or too much of an arrogant playboy, Ellis has stumbled upon the perfect balance. Take note of the following bits of dialogue, muttered by Iron Man in the midst of battle;

“I quite literally cannot afford for you all to get killed. I’m not as rich as I used to be.”

“Dammit — everywhere I go, people in metal suits trying to turn me into dog food–”

Hell, Ellis even gives Stark a great line to describe his grandfather;

“Like Ernest Borgnine in an ill-advised love triangle with farming machinery and the wreckage of a Lincoln Continental.”

If you’re weary of spoilers and think you might  buy this book, stop reading right now. But Ultimate Armor Wars #4 gets the feature in Images & Words because it ends with one of the best monologues I’ve seen attributed to Tony Stark in awhile. Having saved the day, the billionaire-genius heads to a bar to toss back a few shots and shed a tear.  Below are the words of a man who realizes that his capacity for good is only rivaled  by his capacity for evil.

Here’s to killing things.

Here’s to stamping out evil. Heh.

Here’s to liars and cheats and what they deserve.

Here’s to the life of a bachelor and an orphan.

Here’s to saving the world.

From me.

Oh, God.

Ellis knows just which question to ask – Is Tony Stark a sad superhero or an inspiring drunk?

Fortunately (for the readers), he seems to be both.

• The 24 Movie is Real?
  Here’s hoping Billy Ray is better than the glue-huffing monsters writing this season.
• Final Fantasy XIII Is Receiving Xbox 360 Bundle in North America
  Jesus Christ, it’s hot. Not as sleek as the PS3 bundle, but it still gets the parts engorged.
• Haters Gon’ Hate: My Top 10 Nicolas Cage Movies
  My friend Patrick Cooper discusses the utter genius that is Nicholas Cage. Dude gave me Adaptation, Raising Arizona, and The Rock. He can churn out all the Ghost Riders he wants after that.
• Bioshock 2 Came Out Today
  I won’t be able to play it for roughly a zillion years, but I can’t help wanting to see how they pull off the sequel to a rather tightly-bound story, needing nothing added to it. Other than a more satisfying ending to the original. Oh, I said it!
• Bruce Wayne Looks Really Dumb As A Pirate and Cowboy
  Yo, listen. Between LOST and Captain America: Reborn, I’m officially fatigued with time-warping, trans-dimensional takes on my favorite characters.
• Now Us Men Can Count Our Own Sperm!
  Welcome to the future, may you be fertile!

For your enjoyment — Devin Townsend Project performing By Your Command

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Devin Townsend in concert. To put it mildly, it was one of the most inspiring performances I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks to YouTube user superskum, you can sample the wonder that is the Great Canadian Metal/Nerd Hero.

While most of HevyDevy’s catalogue is worthwhile, Ziltoid the Omniscient is one of my all-time favorite records. At times, I think it may have been written just to suit my tastes –  a concept album about alien invasions, black coffee, metaphysics and puppets? What’s not to love?

Even without the skullet, Devin Townsend is a goddamn hero.

Choker #1

The first issue of Choker is coming out this week, and I’m jazzed because I’m a huge glutton for Ben Templesmith’s work. You may know him as the artist and co-creator of 30 Days of Night, or the co-creator of the barely-ever-released but no less awesome Fell. There’s something about his artwork that I can really get into, and so when I heard that he was putting this out with writer Ben McCool I was stoked. And if that wasn’t enough, McCool’s explanation of what the title was about sounded as though it came from the rotting canals of my own brain:

I guess I’d better lay down the disclaimers, then: language used is dastardly goings-on are repellent, and the characters are so lewd you’ll feel like only an industrial-strength jet wash will be able to rinse your tarnished conscience clean. Put simply, we’re hoping to give Bill O’Reilly a Rush Limbaugh-resembling hernia.

It’s a rotting, filthy noir fable. How the fuck can you not get amped for that? Wait, you mean you’re not a glutton for perversity and depravity? I can’t relate to that.

Batman and Robin #8

It really saddens me that Batman and Robin, a title that was created for Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne couldn’t twelve or so issues before delving back into the monotonous resurrection of Bruce Wayne. And if that isn’t enough, consider the fact that we know the actual return is coming in a stand alone title, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne. So what the fuck is going on in the pages of Batman and Robin? Why, they’re trying to bring Bruce back to life! It all just screams of redundancy and lack of progress.

Who the fuck knows, I could be wrong.

It is upsetting to me that an interesting storyline involving Grayson trying to wear the cloak and embrace the burden of filling his pseudo-father’s shoes has been canned so quickly into its run. Whether or not the timeline was intentional or not, I am the unhappy because everything is switching so quickly back to the Bruce Wayne type thang. There’s some speculation that Bruce could return and not be Batman, or even that the dude’s displaced spirit is going to be caged in the body of Damian and, and, and…I don’t fucking know, I don’t care.

So this week we find the emaciated, laser-blasted corpse of Bruce rising from the Lazarus Pit. I don’t need ingenuity or textual analysis to figure out that it isn’t going to work, I only need to look at the list of DC events this year to figure out that this attempt is going to be a steaming failure pile.

That’s the bad. The good? Well, the storyline is being written by Morrison, who has been Batman’s curator for the past few years, and as usual, I dig it. If you want to look aside all the annoying seemingly financial aspects of the storyline, Morrison continues to drill into Grayson’s psyche for interesting examination. While reading this newest arc where Grayson so badly wants to succeed in bringing Bruce back, there comes a debate. Is Grayson really bringing back Bruce out of a promise to be there and protect him always, or is it a selfish motivation, because he can’t handle manning the wheel of the Batmobile himself?

Grayson’s motivations have been interesting throughout. The dude had to don the Cape almost out of necessity, to prevent a pack of assholes from Damian to Jason Todd inheriting it. And since wearing it, he has been fumbling through the motions, trying to distance the symbol of the Cape from the symbol of the Man who previously wore it.

Hit-Monkey #1

Listen, it’s a fucking Monkey Assassin. You’re not sold? You’re saying it isn’t worth your three-dollars? C’mon now! I don’t know anything about Hit-Monkey, other than the cover features a monkey dual-wielding pistols in some dramatic pose. Apparently he’s from one of the seventy-three Deadpool titles that I don’t read. I’m so out of touch. I’m like the Awkward Uncle of comic book readers, I think I’m still hip but I’m sitting here in an Age of Apocalypse t-shirt covered in chunky peanut butter and wearing no pants.

That said, I bet it’s somewhere between “entertaining” and “not worth my money”. I’ll give it a whirl, since I’m comics-curious. And when I say I’ll give it a shot, I mean I’ll buy it and it’ll sit in the rest of my backlog, gathering dust and grimy fingerprints.

The entire week in Marvel seems dedicated to variant covers featuring Deadpool, and I’m on a nostalgic trip. I remember the good ole days when everything had a variant cover. If it wasn’t a tin-foil, ultra-rare, holographic, four-dimensional cover featuring Savage Dragon, I didn’t want anything to do with that shit! And it seems the good days have returned! Yes! This week you can get Deadpool variant covers of shit like Amazing Spider-Man, Invincible Iron Man, Wolverine Savage, X-Men Forever, and yes, more.

This will cure the ailments of the comic book industry! Variant covers! It’s all so simple, why didn’t they try this like fifteen years ago. Oh, they did. Collect them all to be a true asshole!

I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret. I text, eat, write, and occasionally fantasize while driving. So when I read this news while driving and eating a crumb cake, I almost veered off the road more than usual. Every nerd with half a hard-on for comic book movies worships at the altar of Christopher Nolan.   He gave us Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and kicks unfathomable amounts of ass. This news has me running around in a frothy geek insanity:

Via Deadline Hollywood:

Warner Bros is trying to ready  its DC Comics stalwart Superman to soar again on the Big Screen, and the studio has turned to Chris Nolan to mentor development of the movie. Our insiders say that the  brains behind rebooted Batman has been asked to play a “godfather” role and ensure The Man Of Steel gets off the ground after a 3 1/2-year hiatus.

…

Let us emphasize that Superman 3.0 is in the early stages of development. And we doubt Nolan would direct.  This wouldn’t be a sequel to Superman Returns but a completely fresh franchise.

It doesn’t even matter to me that he probably won’t direct it. If you were like me and hated the last Superman movie, Superlifter: Guy Who Lifts Shit While Kevin Spacey Acts Like An Asshole, you know how much I dreaded seeing Bryan Singer take another crack at the franchise. Just the name alone inspires faith and revelry in me, and it has to be better than a movie where Superman is an emo absentee Dad who gets shanked by Lester Burnham.

Do you know what I did on Friday evening? I spent seven hours reading Millenium Hall. What, you say that you don’t have a thing for eighteenth-century British women’s literature? I say to you, neither do I! Jesus Christ with a Guitar, get me the fuck out of here. Getting into my graduate program late, I didn’t have the luxury of picking classes. Rather, it was “Here is what’s available to you, and they’re still open for good reason – you’re going to want to kill yourself.” As someone who spent his entire undergraduate career focusing on ethnic, African-American, and philosophical readings, this shit is from outerspace for me.

When I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2 and consuming too much caffeine.

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.

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Twenty-seven hours into Mass Effect 2, and I’ll write something up when I’m finished. For now, this dialogue choice encapsulates my experience of the game.

Nothing really important to impart, just bored on a Saturday. I swung by Barnes and Noble today because I had to pick up some ass-chapping Penguin’s Guide to Literary terms. While I was there, I tried to find the book Infoquake because it had been recommended to me. Not finding it, I seethed and went to buy my shit. I find B&N generally exasperating, because of the complete lack of want when it comes to shitty, soccer mom drivel, but the inability to find anything random or esoteric.

But as I got to the counter, I noticed they had the paperback edition of Oscar Wao up to be peddled, and I had to smile a little bit. I don’t understand how something as dense and esoteric as Oscar Wao has garnered so much mainstream attention, but it makes me grin. It’s equal-parts fictional nerd biography, centering on references to the Danger Room and Watchmen, and a historical account of the last century or so of the Dominican Republic. When I saw a girl reading Wao on the train, I was all, oh shit!

As a nerd, who relates to Oscar Wao’s tale more than should be healthy – obesity, being a virgin until 25, self-deprecation and suicide attempts, it makes me glow inside to see it up there. If you haven’t checked out Oscar Wao, and you’re a fan of nerdculture, historical fiction, or more important, really fucking gorgeous prose, check it out.

It was a fine afternoon in the autumn of 1946. The war was over and if you were a sailor you were guaranteed a piece of ass. Every night. These weren’t the worst of times, they were the goddamn best of `em. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anyways, it was in a Brooklyn coffee shop that Socrates and Plato had their now infamous conversation about brewing beer. No, I won’t deny the fact that Aristotle was there too. But it’s important to remember that he was just tagging along. Had he not been Plato’s boyfriend, he would’ve never slimed his way into annals of the Drunken Kingdom. But the dude could smooch with the best of them, so he was there too.

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