#March2014

Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (3.26.14) – Beyoncè and other Heralds of Galactus

Serfbort

Welcome once again to BTFC, the one place you need to check before hitting the LCS, Comixology app, torrent site, or the great comic book black markets that reside in the backrooms of White Castles all across the continent.  The rules here are simple:  I’ll run down the list of what I’m grabbing, on the condition that you tell me what you’re picking up in the comments below.  This week brings an absolute shotgun blast of talent to the stands – from relative newcomers like Ales Kot and Simon Roy, to industry titans like Neil Gaiman, Mike Allred, and Paul Pope.  So fill the tub up halfway, hit the jump, and let’s get started, shall we?

A full list of this week’s titles can be found HERE.

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Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (3.19.14) – Spring Break Fo’evah

Spring Break!

Yo kids, it’s that time of the year.  The land thaws, the days get longer, and the great migratory pattern of the teeming, oversexed youth of the nation marches southward.  It’s also time to break out those wallets, and ramp our nation’s commerce back up.  For those not into buying nunchakus and shorts in every color, we got Ghost Rider rockin a hemi on hell-wheels, Daredevil changes locales, more John Prophet, more Kamala Khan, and Superman off da’ chain all comin at us today!  I got comic books in my blood, ya’ll, and I hope you do, too.  This is the American Dream.  It’s Spring Break, ninjas!  So put on your dark tannin’ oil, spritz on two kinds of Calvin Klein, and hit up the LCS for this week’s dopest selections.

Hit us up in the comments below to celebrate the accumulation of material goods with us, particularly of the four-color variety.

A full list of comic releases can be found HERE.

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Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (2.25.2014) – Wakey, Wakey! The Wake Returns…

The Wake.

BOOM!  Hotsauce here.  Another Wednesday, another slapdash post by yours truly giving you the 411 on today’s best funnybooks.  This week brings a whole slew of shiz to my pull-list, and I hope your comic bounty is as fruitful as mine so we can reconnoiter in the comment section and share the love.

A full list of the comics released this week can be found HERE.

So hit the jump and let’s talk about sea monsters, fantastic fourways, space cowboys, and the brotherhood of avenging archers!

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Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (2.19.14) – Guardians of the Galaxy Shameless Clickbait!

hey there

Sexy, glistening space abs sell.  It’s science.  Marvel would do well to put Chris Pratt’s prison-hosedown scene on the cover of every comic from here to August 1st.  We here at Omega-Level are no dummies, and plan on flooding the page with all the Star-Lord gut muscle you can handle, and probably a few more than that.  To that end we’ll also provide some Guardians of the Galaxy related content, as this week in BTFC I’ll be showing you some comics to go check out now that you’ve been thoroughly wow-ed by the movie trailer.  Even though the GoG are generally considered comic-book third-stringers, come August they’ll be as big (or bigger) than the Avengers, and it’s our duty to provide you the research material to impress your friends and neighbors with GoG factoids.  So hit the jump and learn about some books that will get you on your way to being that Guardians fan you always claimed to be.

A full list of this week’s releases can be found HERE.

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Buy These Flippin’ Comics!!! (2.12.2014) – Trade Ya!

Dumpuary

It’s Dumpuary for the movies – ya kids know what that is?  Films that otherswise would not be successful get dumped into this month for release in order to ensure some sort of profit.  So, though there can be diamonds found in the rough, most flicks coming out are pure gaaaarbage.  And while I don’t consider this week’s comic book releases to be completely void of merit, some weeks are better than others, ya feel me?  Call it a Weakday, maybe?   So I’m going to do my best to plug some of the more entertaining releases, plus shine a light on some of the cooler trade paperbacks dropping this week.  Hit the jump for all the patronizing pseudo-intellectualism you’ve come to expect from me, plus comics!

A full list of this weeks’s releases can be found HERE but I’m serious this week is pretty stale.

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Variant Covers: Sex, Drugs, and Mystical Hammers.

I got myself a stack of the fat ass funny books. ‘Stead of reading them, I have to blather to you interbeings about the shit that is dropping in the world of comics tomorrow, and I’ll be goddamned if that ain’t proof Leibniz didn’t know shit. Most perfect of all worlds? My fucking ass! Pizza gets you fat and your fucking colon kills you.

Bullshit.

This is the world of Variant Covers, a preview of the comic books coming out this week. Hit me with your pull-list.

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Variant Covers: Choking You Fanboys Out With Grayson’s Cape

Templesmith Is A Stud

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.

ZOUNDS!, the Grand Resurrection

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.

Das Monkey of Doom!

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!