Jumping in Headfirst

All-New X-Men Annual The candidates for the Sorcerer Supreme seem to get stranger and stranger.  Doom was the second guy to be offered the role, while Brother Voodoo was the third.   Now it's Tony Stark?!    I mean, I realize Stephen's basically a monster now, but can't we get someone who could conceivably be the Sorcerer Supreme for awhile? 

Batman Eternal I've always wondered--how did they get that dinosaur into the cave?  Does Batman have a working miniaturization ray?  Did he ask Superman or Wonder Woman to carry it in?   There's probably a comic where this happened, but I kind of like the idea that at some point a phone call went like this: "Yes, it's Bruce.  Clark, remember that time I made you an all-lead suit to deal with Metallo?  I need a favor..."

Welp, it's that time of the year again.  We're down to the last few days of the year, so before we start hearing all that "new year, new me" bullshit, everyone's got to talk about the Best and Worst moments of 2014.      It's kind of a slam dunk in terms of work because its pretty easy to generate content about what you liked and disliked about the year, but it generates easy hits and I'm pretty desperate for those, so let's have a look at the Most Disappointing Moments in 2014.

Amazing Spider-Man Annual Unintentionally or not, this issue showed me how people can dislike Peter Parker.  He's supposed to be in charge of his own company, with dozens of employees that depend on him, and he can't even read a report?  He spends the whole issue web-slinging about doing things that could've been done by the freaking police.   Look at that last panel!  He just looks like an impulsive man-child who can't sit still long enough to do his job.   Jeez.  Maybe Otto was superior.    

Angela - Asgard's Assassin Not even one issue in and I'm already exhausted with this "nothing for nothing" and "angels balance their debts" stuff they've tied Angela into.  Of course, it doesn't help that in this issue she murders a young king for no other reason than his attempt to make a criminal pay for their crimes.   That's the problem with a society of people who believe material goods can be traded for everything--they believe it works with lives as well.     At any rate, I'm sticking with this book because Kieron Gillen is one of my favorite new writers in comics right now, so let's hear it for blind stubbornness!

I comment on a ton of superhero books on Jumping in Headfirst because in all honesty, that's where my heart is.  I love the complexity of Marvel and DC's ever-growing, ever-evolving patchwork universes.   Some people describe them as a "pain" to keep up with, but not for me.   I grew up reading superhero comics, so as Bane once put it: "you merely adopted cape comics, I was born in them."

A flashback to my birthday.  Amazing X-Men A pitch perfect story starring the unlikeliest of duos--Northstar and Nightcrawler--working together to help one of the few enduring young mutant characters from the 2000s, Anole.  James Tynion manages to approach a sensitive topic with a ton of tact and class, somehow managing to include a Christian character in a story starring more gay than straight characters and not make that guy look like a complete imbecile.   I'm both appreciative and happy to see superheroes still capable of approaching subject matter that isn't "hit a bad guy in the head".    ...Even if one of the biggest moments in the book comes from hitting a bad guy in the head.

Amazing Spider-Man The guy who knows it all being killed before he can supply us with a healthy dose on exposition, cluing us all in on the rest of the plot.  I'm gonna miss that guy.

And we back, and we back....

As promised. Amazing Spider-Man Forget Spider-Gwen, Spider-Ham is probably my favorite character from this entire crossover so far.  He's got the humor, the 'tude, and frankly he's been more realistic and persevered through more than all the rest of them.  I love that Dan Slott hasn't tried to make him overly cartoonish or basically make him "too dumb to live".

Ugh.  Horribly late with this one, but last week's will be up a lot sooner. All-New X-Factor - In fairness, your book is being canceled Polaris, so "second string" might actually be shooting a bit high.

Know what I hate?  When people lament the state of a some form of media--be it comics, films, video games, whatever.   (I say this while quietly shifting all the blog entries where I've done that myself to "Draft".)   "Everything's ruined!", they scream, then go on lengthy diatribes about how and why whatever the fuck it is they love is terrible, now and presumably forever. And yeah, everything goes through a dark period.  Hip-hop suffered for like three or four years in the mid-2000s, until the new crop of guys popped up and put their stamp on the game.   But most of the time?  It's like the person who complains all day about how lonely they are while ignoring the best friend they've known forever who's freaking perfect for them.   What I'm saying is that usually when you're complaining about your hobby, there's probably some very noticeable things you're choosing to ignore.    2015 has a lot of potential to be a great year f

What, who said I could only do one of these a week?  This one's less geek-oriented though, so be warned.

The Zeitgeist is Real:   At least in comic books.   For roughly ten years or so Marvel and DC have had strange experiences where all their creations are mirror images of one another.   Civil War?   DC says, "What a coincidence, our heroes are fighting each other too ."   You're killing Batman ?   Wow, we just killed Captain America .   The Day Evil Won ?   Yeah, the bad guys somehow took over in our world too .    And so now we come upon " Convergence " and Marvel Secret Wars, the latest in a long line of "mirrored events".    I feel like I should criticize them for it, but the inner, multiverse-loving child in me can't stop squeeing long enough for me to collect my thoughts to do that.   I mean, DC One Million is in this!   So long as they don't pointlessly wipe them out, it's impossible for me to hate Convergence now--that's my ideal, ultimate future for the DC Universe. (Heroism Eternal.) Even in the case of Secret Wars--l

I'm more than a little late, considering this is going to be my shortest entry ever. I am thinking about doing something to make up for it, though.   Let's see.

Clips got one hell of a record against Dot Mob.

 Don't worry about what happened to five.  Just roll with it.

Amazing X-Men   People keep wondering how these heroes can still be going after decades of stories about them.  Here's a simple solution that isn't the "it's just comics" one: they aren't strictly "human" anymore.  Their physiologies are so frequently improved, altered, upgraded and/or fucked with, that there's no WAY they experience cellular degeneration the same way we do.    At some point you've bent the human form too far, and either you fall apart altogether (not happening here clearly) or you "fix" whatever it is that makes us age in the first place.

"That contract is set in stone, a beast come out--I'm a Gargoyle!"

"Look at me when I'm killing you!"

Avengers & X-Men: Axis  I'm gonna pop in here for a sec and poke holes in this: So, in Stark's dreams he imagined some giant, adamantium sentinels that would absorb heroes in case they went evil.  But for whatever reason they don't work on actual villains, and also magnetism works on them because apparently Polaris is not a super-hero.    Yeah, no wonder he kept this in his dreams.

Feels like it's been forever since I've done one of these.

Pop Rap Perfection:  Right now this might be my album of the year.  Rittz's Next to Nothing was great and I'm proud of what Lecrae did as a Christian rapper with Anomaly , but I don't think there's a more complete project than People Keep Talking.   Every song is playable, as Hoodie has an amazing talent of writing catchy hooks and using bass-heavy but catchy pop beats to effortlessly display what's actually one of the best flows I've ever heard.  Even the songs I didn't like (Act my Age felt like it belonged on a frat boy film's soundtrack when I first heard it) made sense within the context of the album.  I kept waiting for "that" one song that you hear and kinda want to skip, and found myself wondering when it would come until I realized I was done with the whole album. If I had one complaint it's that most of the songs' subject matter can kinda run together (you're probably not going to get through a song without mention o

The last grudge match in battle rap...or something. 

Avengers and X-Men: Axis I've never been a Rick Remender fan--his work just skews a little too dark to me for a superhero universe to me.  Avengers and X-Men: Axis does not do him any favors towards fixing that.  To begin with, the very idea of the Red Skull somehow having Professor X's brain is idiotic.   Brains don't work that way.   I'm sure they handwaved it somehow, but it sounds fucking stupid when I'm explaining it to people who don't read comics and I know superhero stuff can be better than this. But even without that, this whole thing is just a mess.  From the "AXISAXISAXISAXIS" lining the top and bottom of several pages, to the way this story just sort of haphazardly tosses everyone together and just expects something interesting to come from it all.   I keep up with 80% of the Marvel Universe and I was still lost at the plot points in this.  That shouldn't have happened.  I'm looking for issue 2 to be much, much bett

 Third week.  Let's see what sort of hijinx we can cover this time.

Shut up, this is exactly when I planned to have this done.

"I would have thought Heartless, would have made you care who you bet your life against." That line Lux spit was one of the few that went over my head when I first watched the Lux vs. Calicoe battle that brought me into battle rap, and it took awhile before I learned what he meant in this.  Calicoe was one of the first battlers in the new era to ever get that "undefeated" tag that pretty much gets passed around like a hot potato now.  You win a few battles, doesn't matter if your opponent sucked or had a wack night, and suddenly you're "unstoppable".   Cal was the first guy to get that...but if you dig a little closer, every undefeated guy has a battle which is "debatable" but edges closer towards an L for them.    This is Calicoe's--a battle in which he let a GT rapper in a bright pink hat from the SONS crew 2-1 him.   It's life; it happens.  He survived this, and he survived the battle with Lux and went on to 3-0 Tsu Surf

  I know, I'm surprised to be back for a second week too.

Batman Eternal The Bat-Family reunited.

A hometown battle.

Hello there, and welcome to a new column on JiH.   I'm hoping I can make it as regular as Bottom of the Pile or Battle Rap Wednesdays--which is to say, about as close to weekly as I can reasonably get it.   Basically, the column will be devoted to my thoughts on comics, video games, anime, toku, and really whatever else comes to mind--up to and including my own life, depending on how I feel.    Cool?  Let's get started, then.

This battle has a couple problems.

Last week's comics, because somehow being in school has made me more timely. All-New X-Factor Okay, I can buy magnetism.  I can buy a woman with control over probability.  I'll even buy a hyper-intelligent AI that wants to experience sex for the first time--though you're pushing it.   But what I can't buy is this: no one has ever had this reaction to beer their first time drinking it.

"I'm steps outside your house...that's a porch!"

In time for this week's stuff.  I may try to make this a regular thing. All-New Ultimates Break-ups like this always bug me. These characters haven't exactly been together that long in the first place.  There's no story based reason this is happening--the author seems to have decided that they should, and so he introduces an argument, builds tension, and forces the two to split up all in a single issue.   Even in the days of compressed comics it usually took longer than this for a superhero relationship to end--you needed the proper development to make the audience feel something.  Here...they haven't even been together that long.   It's weird.

"His name is gonna be "Oops why did I take this battle" afterwards."

To answer my question, "Can I catch up?"  It appears the answer is "...Kinda?" All-New X-Factor Danger's grown tired of all the kissing in the X-books and has decided to take things to the next level.  Methinks Warlock would've rather just stuck with the kissing, at least for another issue or two.  (Also, I'm going to throw something if at any point two robots for some reason end up having human intercourse.)

A day late.  Can I finally catch up this weekend?  We'll see. All-New X-Men Can I just say that I love whichever Cuckoo this is?   Because I do know who Nate Grey is, and that reference is hilarious.   It's also simultaneously sad and funny that as one of the Cuckoos, she's been around long enough to reference mutants nobody else has ever heard of.   Sad because she's not that much older than these "new mutants", and hilarious because I guess that's what happens if you stick around too long --you become the mutant equivalent of a comic book geek. 

B Magic?  You're a magic eight-ball 'cause you give answers when you get shook. Even though Danny Myers didn't battle: Yikes at that line.  Best battle at the UDubb Annihilation event, hands down.  Charron gets joked a lot but he's low key one of the best battlers on the scene right now, hence him confidently 3-0'ing B 'muhfucking' Magic here. The next guy who battles him is definitely going to need to step their freestyle/rebuttal game way up.

Let's see if I can actually get this week's up by Friday.  All-New X-Factor Because romance is everywhere in the X-Universe and kissing is contagious, it's caught on with the A.I.s, too.

All-New X-Men "I don't have to be a telepath" is probably the most common lie told by telepaths ever.  Also: Oooooooh.     Emma should call Iceman, 'cause that was a sick burn.

It's a little late to call them "first" impressions, since we're actually about halfway through the season.  I've actually got a good measure of these series for once, so let's talk about them.

I keep waiting for JC to do great on the big stage...

You hate to see a favorite lose. But, it's gotta happen eventually--see Lux vs. Mook.  This is a great battle, but Bigg K took it solid with a strong first and third.  Danny started off decent in the first, had a crazy second, then a third that had a great angle without enough bars to support it.  Either way, this is one of several great battles from BOLA 5--it's great to see at least one league killing it with consistently good to amazing events.  Bigg K's been on a streak of good battles recently, and he's got B Magic in October, while my dude Danny Myers has JC next month at Go-Rilla Warfare's "Blueprint" event.  JC's been on a mediocre/losing streak, so with my luck this will be the battle that he destroys his opponent, because I haven't been right about shit the last few months battle wise.   I'm still going to say Myers 3-0, though--against JC and AyeVerb.  (I'm positive I'll be wrong about at least one of these.)

One of the best battles to come out of Battle of LA 5, I'm glad this was the second one chosen to get put up.  (For obvious reasons, it couldn't be the first.)

Batman Eternal How'd this go at the writer's table?   "Wait?  Harper's not in this issue?  Crap!  Who can we unnecessarily elevate into a Mary Sue?!" Babs doesn't need to be involved in the giant prick-waving contest that is being a sidekick to Batman--what makes her cool is that she's driven by duty, not a need for vengeance like the rest, and that she's a fucking genius.  But for the record: Nothing Babs' does makes her "better" than any Robin except maybe the guy giving this narration.  Dick was a natural acrobat from birth and has the benefit of being with Bruce almost from the beginning, so his experience is second literally only to Bruce.   Tim isn't as smart as Babs but he's a better detective and probably received the most intense training of any of the Robins, being the one who got trained to take over the title after Bruce had only just lost Jason.  Speaking of, Jason's probably the only person this

Avengers World The biggest worry I have about "Time Runs Out" is that it somehow makes what Maria Hill's doing to the Avengers trivial.   She's literally got them under mind-control and this story is very much not okay.   Plus...I mean.  It's Maria Hill.  She's incompetent in Marvel proper--how's this NOT screw everyone over at the end of it all?

What's the definition of a body?  Allow me to show you...

All-New Ultimates Y'know, at the "ripe old age" of...16 or 17, you shouldn't be having back problems yet.  I can't imagine what life's going to be like in your 30's.

I honestly didn't know how much I wanted this. Seriously, I had the biggest, goofiest kid grin on my face the whole time the trailer played.

Couple days late. My apologies. All-New X-Factor The end of this arc brings a Bruce Wayne-level catastrophe to this kid, and the X-Factor isn't even apart of the X-Men proper.  Told her to escape while she could.

This is the dollar menu ballad, so throw your ones up in the air They going right back in our pocket though, so we don't even care For all my niggas out there struggling, I gotta let you know Being broke, ain't a joke, but you gotta keep the hope  In complete, utter contrast to yesterday's Shuffle entry--the most down-to-Earth video I've ever watched.  No balling, no happy-ass dance routines out of nowhere, just pure truth and dope rhymes about the struggle. 

I'm not a huge BoA fan by any means, so thank Fairy Tail for exposing me to this bass-heavy earworm of a song.   That's not to say she's not talented--BoA's some kind of impossible J-Pop/K-Pop super-legend.   She was one of the first people I picked up after Do As Infinity and Masami Okui, which is literally over ten years ago at this point and actually mind-boggling to think about.  In a world where pop music in any country pretty much chews you up and spits you out most of the time, she was making music at the turn of the millenium and here she is well over a decade later still making incredibly catchy tunes even to pop-neutral guys like me.   That's just impressive.

Almost caught up.   All-New X-Men The X-Men's entire storyline lately has been a master course in "Why superheroes fucking hate time travel".

The best battle of 2014, and UW/UDubb is finally able to release the shit to the "YouTube peasants" instead of hiding it behind a paywall.    Y'know, nevermind that it's been on YT as a shitty bootleg for the past five months.

This is everywhere by now, and since I know everyone who sees this and knows me is going to ask me what I think, this is going to be my response: Her costume looks neat.  That is all. Okay, not really.  But what do you want from me?  I don't know anything about her character yet.  She could be all angry and abrasive and work my last nerve.  She could be heroic, powerful, and courageous and I'll fall in love.  She could be a Mary Sue and I might very well shoot myself in the head.   I don't know yet. What I will say is this: There are some people who are going to be upset.  Not ALL of them are sexist.  The ones who are will make themselves plain, really really fast.   But there are other factors being ignored at the moment.   But first, let's get into Jason Aaron's actual story decision. This is all conjecture based on what I've read, but: It seems like, that as a result of Thor's own actions in either God of Thunder or Avengers, he fucks himsel

Let's see if I can get on schedule this week.  >_< All-New X-Factor The longer you've been in life-threatening situations, the more you begin to think it's appropriate to have conversations about how good the original Star Trek film was during them.

Outside of Bottom of the Pile (which is two weeks late, shut up I know ), I don't really talk about comic books very much.   That's because the industry, unfortunately, rarely says or does anything that catches my attention.   Still, sometimes you get a feeling that you can't shake.   Like lately, DC has been making a ton of new announcements that make me think a lot of the mentality that lead to the words "New 52" becoming cringe-worthy is slowly fading away. Grayson Writer: Tim Seeley (Hack-Slash), Tom King Artist: Mikel Janin (Justice League Dark)   Relevant Interviews: Newsarama , Comic Book Resources   Begins: Issue 1 is on stands now.   It started with Grayson.  While Forever Evil seemed to drag on...well, forever , and was preceded by one of the most depressing theme months I've ever read in my life considering DC's supposed to publish superhero comics, the actual idea behind turning Dick Grayson from Nightwing into a secret agent...

Amazing Spider-Man Careful Parker.  You keep this up and you'll have a class action suit from your employees: they'll all be suffering from a mean case of mood whiplash.

Avengers .....Ultron.  Really.  Let me, go back a bit, just to get this straight.   The guy you idiots went back into the past to completely erase from the timestream , actually shattering time altogether in the process--the full repercussions of you still aren't even sure of yet ....somehow still exists, and took over Earth 500 years into the future anyway.  Y'know what?  Quit.  This is clearly not a winnable battle.  Either that, or Marvel could...oh, I don't know... stop spamming the same fucking villains so they don't seem like implacable singularity points who will exist regardless of what the heroes do to get rid of them. 

Feels like it took forever for this battle to actually happen, but SMACK finally made it happen.

This is the part where I do four of these in roughly a week's time.  >_< All-New Ultimates It's literally rule one Bombshell/Lana: Don't get high off your own supply.  You've got a lot to learn if you're going to be a drug dealer.  Or, apparently, a superhero who specializes in stopping drug dealers.

Two weeks out from E3 and I'm finally overcoming the disgusting amount of inertia it took to actually write this piece.    I've got a lot of content due out for this place, so let's just jump right into it. - It's 2014, and publishers are finally taking advantage of the internet.   "And it's available...right NOW!" became a catch phrase for the pre-show conferences, as publishers offered everything from betas to full games.   This is really something that should've happened with the PS3 and 360, but they were too busy figuring out the "season pass" concept, I guess. - Nintendo won E3.   Y'know, a couple days after E3 I had this big report on each company's press conference that was three or four pages long in MS Word, and then I realized it all broke down to this: Nintendo kicked ass.   Microsoft did good, Sony did okay, Ubisoft was Ubisoft, and EA was garbage, but Nintendo came in and blew the fucking doors off.  I know from

I know, I know.   Weeks two and three of June are coming up shortly. All-New X-Factor Come now, Gambit.  You had to see this coming.  Also, you kinda deserved it for defining your superpower being irresistible to women. 

One thing you can say about me, I'm habitual in my lateness .   E3 is upon us once again, only this time I've been talking about it for months because quite frankly...this year has been pretty shite for announcements, with everyone using the excuse that we should "wait for E3".   At one point I literally watched some people try to count down from 100 days.   These gaming fans out here are thirsting, son. I've heard conflicting rumors from everyone's new favorite source for gaming information (Twitter)--some say this E3 will be crazy , others claim you should only get excited for games you already know about.  Now to me, that makes E3 pointless since E3 should be about the new .  But hell, they've revealed so many games prior to the show that I honestly wonder if anything will be left to reveal at all.   Still, let's go down the list of hopes/predictions. Prediction: More Information on the mysterious "X" I've been excited for th

All-New Invaders Wait wait wait.  Captain America is immune to radiation ?!   So, the guy who should've pulled Rick James away from the gamma testing site should've been Steve.  Could've saved us billions in property damage.

When I first heard they were trying to turn MJ into the next Tupac with all this posthumous album nonsense, I was pretty firmly against it.  But I can't lie...XSCAPE has some jams, like this throwback joint JT and Timbaland brought to life, the lead single of the album "Love Never Felt So Good".

So....this one was a little racist. 

All-New X-Factor Danger's right!  Don't do it, little black girl!  You'll have some life-ending injury happen to you within a year!  Run!  RUN!!!!!!!