Over at ComicsAlliance, I’ve got a lengthy review of Smallville: Absolute Justice (or SmAbJust, as Laura Hudson and I have taken to calling it), the two-hour Smallville movie where Clark Kent teams up with the heroes of the JSA.

As I make abundantly clear in the article, I’ve never seen a full episode of the show before last Friday, and while they certainly promoted the JSA appearance, I wasn’t too keen on jumping on now. So why the change of heart? An IM from Kevin Church on Thursday that just said “Let’s get drunk and liveblog Smallville tomorrow.”

Which is exactly what we did.

My weapon of choice was rum and coke; Kevin, being a Taxachusetts liberal, went with red wine, and the end result was the brief, bright Twitter hashtag #drunkville, which saw me twittering so often and so drunkenly that my account got locked down for the night with fifteen minutes left in the show. But it had its moments, and for those of you who missed it, here’s a few highlights:

theisb I like that there’s no attempt made to hide the fact that the Cosmic Rod totally just has a light bulb in it. #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin That’s one way to save on a special effects budget. Put your protagonist in a dumpster and have everything occur outside. #drunkville

theisb So wait. There’s a MARTIAN MANHUNTER on Smallville, but no Superman? #drunkville

theisb Bloodstained American Flag Fabric. Smallville, you are SUBTLE AS HELL. #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin Green Arrow’s pretty handsome. #drunkville

theisb “You don’t think Blondie’s our killer, do you?” “No. Debbie Harry’s still in Arkham.” #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin JSA stands for Just Superman Already. #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin I’m sipping my wine. @theisb is chugging liquor. ONE of us is going to make it to the end. #drunkville

theisb .@BeaucoupKevin It’s not #pleasantlybuzzedville, now IS it, Kevin? #drunkville

theisb I was sure–SURE–Clark was going to say: “They weren’t a team. They were a society. A JUSTICE SOCIETY.” #butiwaswrong #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin (I will say that my fondness for the Golden Age Flash uniform made me happy to see the hat. #drunkville)

BeaucoupKevin Meanwhile, at the Daily Planet where Clark Kent operates in his secret identity of Clark Kent… #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin “It’s been a long while since I made someone bleed.” I love hearing Superheroes talk like that. #drunkville

theisb “Okay we can’t have Superman in tights, the public’ll hate it.” “Right. But we can totally have Hawkman though.” “Oh of course” #drunkville

theisb Wait, they actually have SUPER-VILLAINS?! #drunkville

theisb Like, they for real have super-powered criminals, but NO SUPERMAN?! #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin I never thought I’d miss the fight scenes from MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS, but here we are. #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin daaahahahaha hawkman you guys hahahahahaha #drunkville

theisb oh my god martian manhunter is wearing his suspenders backwards to give him the red X on his chest oh my GOD #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin OH MY GOD QUOTING STAR TREK II FOR REAL. #drunkville

BeaucoupKevin oh my god they actually said “a silver age of heroism” #drunkville

theisb Dr. Fate is coming very close to just straight up cutting an Ultimate Warrior promo. #drunkville

There’s more, of course, but since I’m not sure how well even the best of ‘em hold up without the show (and the cocktails) to go along with them, I’ll leave it at that. The important part here is to remember one thing:

It is actually my job right now to get drunk and make fun of Smallville. And dudes… that is pretty awesome.

Today at ComicsAlliance, I’m reacting to Fox’s Human Target TV show, which took a comic with an extremely distinctive theme and boiled it down to something about as generic as it could possibly be.

To be fair to the show, the episodes I’ve caught have been pretty fun and enjoyably over the top (of the two episodes I’ve seen, one involved Christopher Chance jumping a motorcycle over armed guards as he escaped from the Russian embassy, then getting involved in a high-speed wreck with no ill effects whatsoever), but they’re also stripped of the smart, complex themes of losing one’s identity that made the Peter Milligan series one of my favorite comics ever. Fun as it is, it’s got nothing to do with the source material.

So to that end, I’m pitching other shows that take the “high” out of “high concept!” Where would Batman be without the vengeance? Where would Wolverine be if he was just pretty okay at what he did? Where would the Unknown Soldier be if everyone knew who he was?

Probably sitting on a sweet 10PM time slot. Enjoy!

Face front, True Believers:

Lee, of course, is the guy who co-created Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, the Avengers, and pretty much comic books as we know them today, and while he did all that with the help of extremely talented collaborators, he was the one shrewd enough to have his name attached to the whole shebang. As such, he’s been the public face of Marvel Comics for almost fifty years, and among a certain demographic, that buys you a pretty long line of credit. Credit that, over the past few years, Lee has spent on bringing truly, hilariously terrible projects to life.

Such is Lightspeed, which is not just a one-star movie, but a one-star Sci Fi Channel Original, which means that it didn’t even meet the standards set by Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

One thing I mention in the article is that the movie is essentially Stan Lee ripping off his own work, but you might be wondering just how far that goes. As an answer, I offer the press’s reaction to Lightspeed:

The Worst of Netflix: ‘Nuff Said.

–The Complete Peanuts, 1969-1970

–Batman and the Outsiders #1, 1983

Each week, the ISB endeavors to enlighten our readers by offering the unedited words of the Warrior Scholars of the squared circle, for who among us cannot benefit from the wisdom of Macho Madness, Hulkamania, or the American Dream? The instruction we offer should be considered carefully, meditated on, and applied to one’s own life for the enrichment of the self and others.

What I’m trying to say here is that it was a pretty good week.

How good? Well, that’s what you’ll find out tonight on the Internet’s Most Ultimate Comics Reviews! Here’s what I picked up this week…

…and here’s what I thought about ‘em!

Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #3: Before we get too far into tonight’s reviews, I wanted to mention this one. I don’t usually review comics I don’t actually buy and Blackest Night: Wonder Woman was one of the books that didn’t make the cut when I trimmed down my sub to reflect my new employment status. Still, I did get a chance to leaf through it today at the shop (yes, I know, this ain’t a library and I’m killing comics) and given the amount of venom I spat at the last issue, I thought it might be worth mentioning.

I’ve got to say, I liked this issue a lot more than the previous one. It might just be that my initial anger that the whole concept has had time to cool down, but just the fact that Wonder Woman didn’t spend the whole issue going “please… no…” was a pretty major improvement. I think the key was to get her back to actually fighting villains, and the fact that Rucka was able to work in a literal response to the eternal bondage jokes without having it seem forced into the dialogue was not only a nice touch, but it actually made me think about that stuff in a way that I hadn’t before. And Nicola Scott’s art, of course, was just beautiful. Even the ridiculous Star Sapphire costumes look better in this one than they normally do.

Which isn’t to say that they’re not spinning gold out of complete and utter nonsense. Everything I said last month still applies; loving everything in the world is still the definition of compassion, Wonder Woman shouldn’t be relying on something outside of herself, and seriously, I never need to see another person who is not Green Lantern talk about how super-awesome it is to have a power ring. Also, I have no idea where Rucka was going with the scene where Wonder Woman talks about how Mera’s rage is at herself. Just going from the panels, it seemed like it was a parallel with Wonder Woman never telling Batman she was totally in love with him, but given that Mera was actually married to Aquaman, I can’t see how. But that might be on me, as the things I know about Mera are limited to: a) She was Aquaman’s wife, and b) there is a tiny plastic gamepiece of her vomiting an insane amount of blood coming out soon. You know, for the kids.

(SIDENOTE: If Wonder Woman wanted to express her love for Batman, she probably should’ve just started a comics blog. It’s what I did.)

But like I said: When it’s actually about Wonder Woman fighting bad guys, it’s great. It’s when it has to deal with everything else that the character’s wrapped up in with the rest of Blackest Night that’s the trouble.

Nova #34: Okay so look: Everybody already knows that Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning can write really fun outer-space super-heroics. In fact, everyone who was paying attention already knew that like ten years ago when they were writing Legion of Super-Heroes. It’s old news! So how about we just talk about Man-Wolf for a minute.

I’m totally serious here, guys: How friggin’ awesome is Man-Wolf? First of all, his dad is the third-best Marvel character ever, but that barely even comes into consideration in how great he is, because he’s also an astronaut werewolf barbarian king from another dimension. Anywhere else, just one of those things would be enough to define a character, but in the Core Marvel Universe, it takes all four and he’s not even one of the top tier guys. And in this issue, he fights a time traveling mermaid princess. In space.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but guys, I totally love comic books.

Wolverine: Weapon X #10: As far as writing awesome comics goes, it’s been a pretty good week for Jason Aaron. Heck, let’s be honest here: In that regard, it’s been a pretty good two years for Jason Aaron, and this issue’s a great example of why.

It’s not just that he gets the characters that he writes, although he definitely does, and that’s certainly a big part of it. He’s a guy that understands that Ghost Rider is a guy who rides a motorcycle with his head on fire, and so he needs to fight giant demonic backhoes. And he gets that the Punisher needs to have truly horrible people to shoot in the face. And he gets Wolverine.

You’d think that’d be pretty simple–guy has claws, guy stabs things, guy is best there is etc.–but as a direct function of his thirty odd years of incredible popularity, Wolverine’s become a deceptively complex character with a lot of facets that are often directly opposed to each other. It’s something that Aaron’s tackled in a couple of stories, and he tackles it here again in a way that manages to make everything work. What really sells it, though, is that Aaron doesn’t shy away from the ridiculous bits of that history. He’s not afraid to make Wolverine funny, or to use him as the straight man who gets the punchline (or as seen above, the facekick), and it brings a tone to the stories that you don’t often see.

Also, he writes about guys with chainsaws for hands, and, well, you know.

Crogan’s March: This week saw the release of Chris Schweizer’s second installment of the Crogan adventures, and I loved it just as much as the first.

For those of you who missed my unabashed excitement the first time around, the deal here is that each book tells the story of a different member of a family whose history includes pirates, escape artists, minutemen, gunslingers, ninjas and–in this volume–a member of the French Foreign Legion, with each story told as a life lesson passed down to the family’s youngest member. If it sounds a little strange, that’s because it is, mostly because of the ambition that’s led Schweizer to plot out a series of sixteen graphic novels based around a family tree, but it’s largely because of that ambition that I’ve been in love with the concept since I first heard about it.

And the best part is that it lives up to it. The stories are rich and detailed, and while the idea of object lessons from a family history sounds like it could be the most boring thing since The Uncanny Paint-Dryers, they’re genuinely thrilling. The characters are done well enough that he rarely spends time on explaining relationships, instead letting things just play out organically, and the framing sequences that I thought were surprisingly entertaining the first time around (surprising because I had no idea they were giong to be in there) held up very, very well. It’s the art, though, that makes the book: Deceptively clean, cartoony linework that gives way to crowded battle scenes and detail down to the filigree on the barrels of muskets. I’m sure the comparison to Jeff Smith has been made more than enough by now, but with the clean, effective storytelling, it’s easy to see why.

If you haven’t read it, the first volume, Crogan’s Vengeance is still available, and the new one is out this week and worth every penny.

Iron Man and the Armor Wars: I mentioned Joe Caramagna and Craig Rousseau’s all-ages Iron Man story when it was coming out in single issues, but now that it’s out in trade, it’s worth mentioning again: I loved this comic.

I’ll admit that it was a little weird for me going in; the original Armor Wars is probably my favorite Iron Man story, and I was leery of a book that was going to be a direct re-telling along the lines of the failed “Marvel Age” books from before they did the “Adventures” line. Instead, what I got was a fantastic all-ages story that took that title and did it in a completely different way, setting up a story where Tony Stark has to fight super-villains that have stolen all of his old suits of armor, starting with his original and working their way up.

Just the idea of Iron Man fighting a bunch of different versions of himself is one of those hooks that I could read all day long, and the fact that Caramagna throws in stuff like Dr. Doom loaning Stark a spare suit of Doom armor so that you can get a fight scene where Dr. Doom’s the good guy and Iron Man’s the bad guy? That stuff pushes my fan buttons just right, and it ended up being one of my favorite stories of last year.

I will say, though, that there is an oddity in the paperback. In addition to the four-part story, it also has the first part of the original Armor Wars from 1987’s Iron Man #225. It’s weird, because it’s just the first part of a story, but even weirder because it’s immediately followed by an ad that advises you to check out the Armor Wars trade, and while you see that sort of thing in MMPB novels all the time, I think this is the first time I’ve seen it in comics. Also, as Caramagna and Rousseau’s version is directed more towards kids, it seems like telling them to go read Iron Man: Armor Wars after they just read Iron Man and the Armor Wars (which annoyingly leaves “and the” off the cover) would be confusing as heck.

But again, they are different stories, and I’m living proof that it’s possible to love both of ‘em, and while that struck me as a truly bizarre marketing decision, the real draw here is the story itself. And brother, there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

And that’s the week! If you’ve got any (FINAL?!) questions about something I read this week, or if you just want to talk some more about Jason Aaron and how he knows how to end a Ghost Rider run, then feel free to leave a comment below.

I mentioned it before here at the ISB (and on this week’s Ajax, and on Twitter), but this is my last week working full-time at a comic book store, which I’ve been doing for holy crap six years. What I haven’t mentioned is why I quit, but in case anyone was worried, it’s good news:

I’m quitting to become a full-time writer.

The bulk of it, which I’m sure will come as no surprise, is going to be a full-time freelance job with ComicsAlliance as their Senior Writer, but there are a couple of other things that hopefully I’ll be able to mention soon.

So what’s this mean for you, the cretinous loyal reader? At this point, not much. From a content standpoint, I’ll actually be writing more than I do now and doing a bigger variety of things. I’m certainly not abandoning the ISB–believe me, try as I might to sell it, nobody wants to pay me to read Anita Blake or slap together a Wrestler Wisdom Friday–so there’ll always be stuff here, although the links to external content are going to be a more permanent fixture.

The biggest change for the ISB itself is probably going to be regarding The Week In Ink. It’s probably the longest-running feature I’ve got, but in both depth and frequency, it’s largely a product of me being at the store all the time. With the new schedule, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get my comics by Thursday night, let alone read ‘em all and write Uranus jokes reviews. But I’ll see how it goes on that front. It might be just as simple as moving ‘em to a different day.

I’ve got to say, I’m pretty excited about this. Even if it’s not going to make me rich, being able to make a living writing is something I’ve wanted since I was twelve years old. So please, join me in celebrating Quitsgiving this Saturday, and be on the lookout for more changes (good ones, I think) coming to the site soon.

Today on ComicsAlliance, I use the upcoming Archie #608 to launch into a brief discussion of the history of interracial dating and non-white characters in Archie Comics.

It’s entirely possible that this is only of interest to me (and that I am, in fact, the only one who thinks about Archie this much), but there’s one thing that ended up being left out of the finished article, and that’s the double standard between boys and girls when it comes to interracial dating. Though there’ll never be a story where Archie marries anyone but Betty or Veronica, which I think has less to do with the fact that they’re white than with their status as the Classic Love Interests, he’s always seen hitting on other girls. He certainly had an interest in Kimiko, his new Japanese-American classmate, after all.

The boys, however–and as I said in the article, this plays into the classic racist fears of miscegenation leading to the dilution of racial purity–tend to “stick with their own kind,” as the old saying goes. I’m sure there are probably a few exceptions, but in the majority of the stories, it’s like an unspoken agreement at Riverdale High that Chuck needs to be with Nancy, Frankie Valdez needs to be paired with Maria, and… Well, other than Raj Patel, that’s pretty much all the male minority population, and he hasn’t had time to garner a love interest yet.

It’s a clear double-standard that sets up women as objects that need to be protected and men as conquerors, but the minute I start writing that, it becomes a Whole Big Thing, and Laura told me I’d already hit my mandatory Treatment of Women in Comics quota for this month. So please, enjoy the article, and I’ll keep obsessing over the comics that they keep next to Nutter Butters at Bi-Lo.

This time around, it’s the newly released X-Men: Misfits, starring Kitty Pryde as the only girl at the otherwise alarmingly handsome Xavier academy. I thought it was highly enjoyable, but as most ISB readers will no doubt recall, I am a total sucker for entertainment explicitly designed for teenage girls.

Still, most of my enjoyment came from the sheer over-the-top extremity of the the shojo-inspired sensibilities, which is why I’ve thrown the spotlight onto the Seven Most Hilariously Sparkly Moments in the book.

Seriously: You will not believe the Hellfire Club.