Happy Wednesday to all the Verbal Brew-aholics! Its episode # 6. This week we got a special primer for the Watchmen movie coming up this weekend. And we got new spiffy intro music thanks to Kev!

This week its:

• The Watchmen – a look at the comic
• Out of the Bin – The Darkness

Special Note: We mention in the show that if you want to avoid spoilers, to skip ahead 10-15 minutes. We lied. We got a little chatty so you really want to skip ahead 42 (?!) minutes. But really, its 20 years old and if you haven’t read it, go get it now. You won’t be disappointed.

As always, leave feedback in the comments section.

Download Episode 6 – Captain Obvious

The New Avengers #50: Dark Reign

Published by Marvel

Written by: Brian Bendis

Art: Billy Tan, Matt Banning and Justin Ponsor with a shit load of guest artists.

I was meaning to do this review I little while ago, but I’ve been busy and didn’t have the time to really sit down and give this the read it needed. But as it is, I’m done with it and this is what I thought.

Like I had stated before, the whole Dark Avengers thing was a bit confusing to me since I hadn’t had the chance to read #1 of that title. Well, this issue of the New Avengers guest stars the Dark Avengers and there was  a lot of  explaining concerning the things I didn’t get earlier. For that reason alone I enjoyed reading this comic.

Things I know now; Tony Stark took the blame for the skrull invasion (why I don’t know yet), the Venom of the Dark Avengers is actually Scorpion with the venom symbiote (which I knew he had before but I thought didn’t anymore, it’s still a dumb idea that Venom/ Scorpion wants to eat people), Spider-Woman has ginormous breasts and is very self conscious about how her team views her (rightfully so. Apparently during the Skrull invasion one of the main antagonists was a Skrull done up to look like her), and Hawkeye, for whatever reason, dress’ in Black and yellow with a full mask and goes by the name Ronin. Don’t ask me why.

What I do know is that this was an enjoyable read. It’s a thick book with a special sneak peek into a Fantastic Four story at the end of it (I could have done with out this because personally I think the fantastic four are as exciting as watching the shopping channel).

Right off the bat there is a lot of humor involved as the New Avengers watch a video of the Dark Avengers and try to make heads or tails of whats going on. Bendis is a really good writer who for the most part keeps me entertained while reading his books. The banter between the characters, especially in the first half of the book was very enjoyable.

Things did slow down for me around the middle of the book though. The story changed a bit and it didn’t work for me. It’s here where for eight pages we are treated to single shots of different members of the New Avengers as they have a little bit of alone time with their inner thoughts… while beating the crap out of the bad guys. For each of the eight pages one is dedicated to a certain character such as Captain America or Spider-Woman, and there is a different artist for each of the eight pages.  Art really is a personal thing, so you may like one of the pages more so then the other, and they are all very distinct styles within the eight pages.

So, with a few exceptions, the art is pretty solid  through out the entire book, but its really Bendis’ writing style that makes this book fun.

So if you remember from the last show, we were looking at Dead Rising on the 360. And since I had only gotten a chance to check out the demo instead of the full game, the boys had convinced me that my money would be well spent grabbing myself a copy. So much to my surprise, the Wii port ended up coming out this same week so I thought I’d give it whirl to see how it compared to the 360 version. Soooooooooo??????

(more…)