Episodes

Marvel Studios’s Avengers: Infinity War opened last week and scored the biggest box office opening weekend of all time. It pulled in about $640 million in four days, meaning that, at around $15 per ticket, it was seen by roughly 43 million people.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag this week, as we discuss, first of all, that we’re not dead (but thanks for asking!). We then talk about the ongoing process of getting ready to attend San Diego Comic-Con, which, once upon a time,

Season two of Marvel Studios’s / Netflix’s Jessica Jones dropped late last week, and as with most of Marvel’s / Netflix’s shows, we burned through it in a single weekend binge. And this binge was more enjoyable than the last couple,

With all the excitement and hype surrounding last week’s release of Marvel Studios’s Black Panther, it’s easy to forget that, when the movie was announced as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Three three and a half years ago,

We are smack in the middle of awards season, when networks cynically fill their airtime with slapped-together ceremonies celebrating old crap you already know about, all in the hopes that someone will get drunk and start making a damn fool of themselves, all on a short budget. Or, in other words: welcome to the 2017 Crises Awards! Last year was one where there were some truly spectacular accomplishments in comics, genre television and movies. And there were also several comics crossover events...

It’s been an speedy week, from the threat of yet another government shutdown, to calling other nations ugly names, to a 30-something minute span where it seemed like a large chunk of the population of Hawaii might be on deck to have a chance at their o...

After a couple of weeks off due to holidays, family travel, blizzards, arctic vortices, and professional obligations, and we’ve moved past holiday genre movies and into the pre-convention season lull. Meaning that until Marvel Studios’ Black Panther drops in about six weeks, there’s nothing to talk but comics. And frankly, we’re kinda glad about that. Because as much as we like the comics-related visual entertainment, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned comic book to make you feel like a...

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the inarguably most anticipated genre film of 2017 (at least the most anticipated by everyone except Rob) was released last Friday, and based on the box office returns approaching half a billion dollars in four days, it was beloved by nearly everyone on the planet, yes? Yeah, apparently not. It seems that a movie that takes many of the beats that you’d expect from a Star Wars movie and deliberately tries to do something different with them isn’t for everybody. It’s an ...

Crisis on Earth X, the annual crossover between DCW (Rob swears he will make DCW a thing) shows Supergirl, Arrow, The Flash and DC’s Agents of Tomorrow aired a couple of weeks ago, and while we’re a little late to the conversation, we wanted to discuss it, because it wound up being one of the finest pure comic book superhero stories we’ve ever seen put to screen. From its oddly unique willingness to embrace depicting legitimate Nazis as pure and legitimate villains (as opposed to Marvel’s recen...

Marvel Studios’s latest Netflix series, The Punisher, dropped all at once a couple of weeks ago, and it was, in a lot of ways, very different than the series that have been delivered up until now. Sure, the other series dealt with adult themes – Jessic...

Justice League was released to theaters in the United States last weekend, and, to put it mildly, it underperformed. In the same way that the Atlanta Falcons underperformed in last year’s Super Bowl. Sure, there was a lot of weird buzz about reshoots and rewrites and new directors surrounding the movie, but none of that […]

There’s a new Thor movie out. If history were a guide, this would excite us not at all. While we have been, and still generally are, fully in the tank for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we have not seen any of the Thor movies in an actual movie theater...

We are now fully into Marvel's Legacy initiative to step back from years of event overload and senseless character deaths, and to reintroduce simpler, more classic versions of the character back into the monthly issues. And as we glory in the reintroduction of series' original numbering, and the inclusion of classic Stan Lee / Funky Flashman-esque Mighty Marvel Marching Society hype into each issue, we also wonder: where the hell are the simpler, classic versions of the characters? In that vein...

DC has been teasing the inclusion of elements of Watchmen into DC Rebirth for nearly a year and a half now, which has made us, Rob especially, very nervous. That inclusion has been kept down to a dull roar until this past weekend, when DC released an ashcan of the first six pages of Doomsday Clock, the 12-issue mini-series that will make good on their threat - I mean, their promise. So we read those pages, and, to be honest, we read them cold, without noticing that the date in the first panel w...

With everything that’s been going on at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office (goodbye flood, hello nine-foot curtain hanging!), we’ve been a little late to the party on Marvel’s latest Netflix series, The Defenders. Again,

It was yet another berserk week at the Crisis On Infinite Midlives Home Office, with more workmen in the house, the building of massive shelving that, Tardis-like, is somehow bigger on the inside, and family members evacuating South Florida to escape H...

We are back, after a lengthier-than-expected parental visit, an unexpected recording studio flood, extended remediation of water damage, and a certain amount of recording equipment replacement and testing. So please: be gentle.

We are back and recovered from San Diego Comic Con 2017. SDCC is a show we've attended more than almost any other, and yet this year it seemed, I don't know... bigger. More oppressive. More willing to empty your wallet and leave you for dead, while showing you genre spectacle you couldn't get with an all access pass to Industrial Light and Magic. So after recovering (and even the recovery from Con Crud seemed more difficult than past years), we were joined by longtime SDCC attendee, Los Angeles...

The first official day of San Diego Comic-Con 2017 was yesterday, and we are doing shows live (to tape) from the belly of the beast. Being our first day back to SDCC in three years, we discuss what's changed in the intervening time, including a brand new requirement to bend the knee and pledge fealty to Rick Grimes. We also discuss some of our strategies for working the floor, some interesting observations about the state of the convention, and some protips on how to ask a question at a panel (...

We're a little late to the party when it comes to Spider-Man: Homecoming, which opened a week and a half ago to the tune of 200 million dollars and 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. But late or no, there's a lot to unpack in the movie, given that it's the third reboot of the cinematic Spider-Man, which is a lot for a franchise that's barely as old as its fifteen-year-old protagonist. So we invited special guests - comedians Ross Garmil and Benari Poulten - to talk with us about it. And we dig into how To...

We are mere days away from San Diego Comic-Con 2017, which will be the first we've attended and covered in the past three years. To say we're excited would be a massive understatement, and we're putting together our plans to cover the show and record and release short episodes directly from the con. But figuring out what to cover means knowing what's there. The convention released the complete programming schedule last week, and we spent some time poring over it, finding not only the panels we'...

At face value, there is nothing impressive or exciting about crossovers between DC Comics and Looney Tunes or Hanna Barbara. We didn't pay a ton of attention to these books when they started dropping last year, until we finally picked a couple of them up out of a combination of seeking relief from the impending invasion of Watchmen characters into the DC Universe, and the kind of base rubbernecking instinct that makes people slow down to look at car wrecks, or non-Mission Impossible Tom Cruise s...

Some weeks, you don't record a podcast when you're ready. You record when you're awake. Rob had a long weekend of late nights being on call for his day gig, leading to a slim, two-hour window where he'd had enough coffee to be able to say something longer than his own name, yet not enough liquor to actively slur those things. And this strange state put him in a mood to rant. About the golden days of Marvel after the bankruptcy and before Civil War, when they were willing to take chances. About ...

We are in a genre entertainment lull. A week after Wonder Woman debuted in theaters, three weeks before Spider-Man: Homecoming opens, and with all the geek TV shows on summer hiatus, there's not a lot to talk about except the comic books. So we stick with comics this week, and we are thankful that we don't have to deal with a week of DC Comics trying to shoehorn classic comics from the 80s into modern continuity. Instead, we weep that we have to deal with DC Comics trying to shoehorn classic co...