House To Astonish Episode 68
We’ve managed to bring an episode in at under an hour for the first time in a while, with discussion of the good and bad press DC have received over the New 52, John Rozum leaving Static Shock, the Amanda Waller controversy, the announcement of Avengers: X-Sanction, the Spectre TV show and the opening of Little Island Comics. We’ve got reviews of Pigs, Ultimate Comics Spider-Man and Demon Knights, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is running a two-for-one deal. All this plus kiddy-on people, the most mysterious brand of apple and the link between Green Lantern and Michele Bachmann.
The podcast is here, or here at Mixcloud, on iTunes or accessible via the player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or at our Facebook fan page.
While we’re here, here’s another quick plug for my guest appearance on Scotland’s most petty and foul-mouthed SF podcast, The Thumbcast, where Iain Hepburn, Craig McGill and I talk a lot of daft nonsense about Apollo 18, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Fright Night, Star Wars on Blu-ray, Doctor Who, the New 52, SeaQuest DSV and a whole bunch of other stuff. Enjoy!
Loved the Thumbcast discussion on those damned “Star Wars” re-re-re-releases – I’m assuming that was Al doing the fake promo for the Biggest DVD Box Set You’ve Ever Seen? 🙂
You write this like people were complainend your podcast was too long – this surely can’t be true? I’m convinced most listeners don’t mind you talking a little bit longer about stuff since you’re usually not wasting time with useless filler to pad the length. Personally I’m indifferent to the handbook, but since that’s at the end, I won’t complain.
I admittedly have yet to listen to the episode, but just from reading the list of content in the description makes me feel like there’s potentially so much in there I probably wouldn’t mind a few minutes more.
Diana: Cheers 🙂 Yep, that’s me doing my best impression of Professor Brian Cox (for those who don’t know him, he’s this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8E_3ku17H4)
Weblaus: People have complained that the episodes are too long since our very first (which is one of our shortest episodes)! We’re aware that there are a lot of comics podcasts out there that are two or three hours, and that people don’t always have that amount of time to spend listening to a couple of guys nattering about comics, so we like to try to keep it to an hour if we can.
House to Astonish is not one one of the shortest comics-related podcasts I’ve heard, it is also about the best prepared and edited.
Some of the others are 2-3 hours that could be cut an hour with better editing. Sound levels can be out of balance, particularly if they are communicating by computer or whatnot (instead of all being in the same room). Tons of “uhms” and “ahs” when people are speaking. Dead space and a general overly chaotic nature. And seemingly bad planning where they have topics that only part of the review cast have experience with, but everyone chimes in their own opinions anyway. Proper editing appears to be too much work, but they don’t even seem to do any planning at all? (This isn’t just comics related podcasts, either.)
Too long? This is a joke, right? Compared to other Podcasts which seems to go on forever you guys have a great timing. And mostly something interesting to say 🙂
Of course you are right, with 52 “new” books there will be some missteps. But somehow the Waller transformation is really distasteful. She was one of the few “normal” characters that were memorable. One woman who was older and not a supermodel.
So of course they had to change it. The DCnU, no marriages, no old or fat woman in positions of power. The writer´s explanation is of course BS. Was there ever a superhero-comic where people changed over a period of time? And I don´t mean transforming into zombies, cyborgs or superheroes.
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It looks to me like DC’s quality books are the ones that were already in production (swamp thing, animal man ,batwoman) and just folded into the relaunch.
I’d like to chime in that the time length was fine the way it was. But I’ll also admit that this one didn’t feel short-changed in any way. I will note that the longer length is usually just enough to for me to finish an 11 k jog, whereas this one left me scrolling despondently through Long Blonde songs on my iPod with 2 or 3k to go. So if you’d keep in another 15 minutes or so for my personal benefit, I’d appreciate it.
Re: Demon Knights. I have to say, I was surprised by this, in a good way. After recent team launching books, it felt almost audacious (again, in a good way) to be introduced to cast member after cast member. It made the issue feel like it was moving really quickly, even if it did delegate the big action sequences to next issue.
We weren’t deliberately trying to keep the length down; this is just the length that it naturally ran to.
I think Batgirl will remain a popular book after the controversy blows over and people just decide they would rather thow their hands up and go along with a remit they may not like than miss out on a book with a reliable creator.
As an atheist, the Spectre is a concept that has always bored me. Characters like Mephisto are from alternate demonic dimensions, which means they are basically characters from places where science just acts differently. I can go along with that. Spectre is god’s wrath… I can’t get thrilled up about it.
It depends on the story. Plenty of religious concepts work perfectly well on a metaphorical level whether or not you believe in them literally. Of course, it’s also possible to write the Spectre in a way that really is only of interest to believers, but I don’t think it’s inherent in the concept. It’s not as if Thor is read exclusively by latter day Vikings.
In the Marvel U, Asgardians are basically just aliens. It also helps that nobody in the real world still worships them. Or maybe I just get tired of hearing about god’s wrath from all the Pat Robertsons of the world, so when the Spectre shows up I just want him to piss off. I’m sure the armchair psychologists here could probably have a great time with me on the matter.
Scott McDaniel is apparently one of the nicer guys in the industry, so hopefully it was just an odd way of phrasing the departure from Rozum.
Great Podcast as always!
But fans of the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES will need smelling salts when they reach the point where Mordru is referred to as a “longtime JSA villain”. The evil sorcerer was a big-bad Legion villain decades before Geoff Johns decided to use him in JSA.
@Andy D
At least its not as bad as Harley Quinn in that book, talk about making a character that was a bit ok going towards lets say a character males like the look of to an all out protitute like garment. It definitely distracted me a lot, and not in a good way!
When it comes to the Spectre, it’d be tremendously easy to jettison the “Wrath of God” angle entirely, and present him as the ghostly alter-ego of a cop who dies and comes back in the pilot, avenging the crimes that he investigates in his day job which the law fails to solve.
I think “Sinestro is our protagonist” is enough to justify fascism references all on its own, no?
I never notice it in print, because it’s spelt differently, but every time I hear Bob Harras’s name, I have to remind myself that he’s not “Whispering” Bob Harris.
Agree about Amanda Waller. If “it doesn’t matter what she looks like”, why make a concious decision to change what she looks like? Then again, I took one look at the cover of Suicide Squad and decided no, I wasn’t going to be seen reading that on the bus.
Madame Xanadu is actually Nimue, who in this version is the younger sister of Morgana and the Lady of the Lake, so yes she’s an Avalonian Elder Race and she’s a witch who was Merlin’s lover.
In Seven Soldiers, incidentally, we’re told that the story of King Arthur repeats: Ystin came from an antideluvian Celtic Camelot, letting the original Sir Justin’s role with the French Romance knights-in-shining-armour-stand. I don’t know if Cornell is keeping this rather complicated idea, but it might explain why Ystin didn’t see Xanadu or Jason at the Fall of Camelot; it was a different Fall of Camelot.
Maybe taking over a murdered man’s life was the one thing Zaxton wouldn’t be prepared to do, and therefore was the one evil act Good!Zaxton was totally okay with.
The longer the pod, the better, esp since its bi weekly.
I do wish we could get reviews of “off week” books. I know i had tweeted with al about casanova #1 being on the pod, but it didnt make it.
@Daibhid I read Merlin’s ramblings (“All is lost. As always. But I keep trying”) and the fact that Ystin claims to have been at the fall of Camelot both pointing to the cyclical nature of new Camelots rising and being signs of goodness and virtue in the world, only to fall once forces of evil rise. The ebb and flow over time of darkness and light taking their turns of being in control. Thus Ystin is speaking of the fall of her proto-historical Camelot, a different event than the one presented in this book’s prologue. I suspect the whole Sheeda aspect has been jettisoned away however, and what Ystin is doing in a tavern in the Dark Ages is anyone’s guess.
I’m an atheist myself, but I like religion in comics under certain circumstances. For example, I like the Nightcrawler’s portrayal as a devout Catholic, and it always annoyed me when certain writers tried to ignore/remove this aspect of the character. I like a faithful Nightcrawler because I like the idea that a guy who, if you didn’t know him, you’d think he was a demon straight from hell, when in reality, he’s this really nice, God-loving man. Doesn’t matter that I don’t believe in God myself. I just like characters like this. Characters who are the opposite of what you’d expect if you were going strictly by appearance. I like the Beast for similar reasons (looks like a ferocious monster, but he’s a funny guy and a brilliant scientist).
I like Nightcrawler too. I’m not saying I only want to read atheist characters. That would be dull. It’s just that DC clearly has one god above all, and characters like the Spectre and Zaurial work for him. I don’t see the world that way, so for me stories that center around these characters tend to be rather boring to me. Marvel leaves me an out, since all the mystical characters come from other dimensions and tend the act on behalf of themselves.
“I’m not saying I only want to read atheist characters.”
I didn’t think that, Max. Sorry to make you feel as though you needed to defend your remarks, but I wasn’t really responding to your post directly. Nightcrawler just suddenly sprang to mind, and I felt compelled to jot down my own atheist viewpoint on that character and his portrayal.
Brian, no problem. I didn’t take it that way.
@Max- Oh, I will say though that where you and I differ is on this point:
“…DC clearly has one god above all… I don’t see the world that way, so for me stories that center around these characters tend to be rather boring to me.”
For me, it doesn’t matter that I don’t see the world that way. Since, in my mind, God is just as real to me as Odin, I can therefore enjoy stories about God and the Spectre in the same way that I can enjoy stories about Odin and Thor. It’s all the same to me. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Askani, Cylon, Jediism. If the stories involving any of these concepts are good, heck, throw them my way.
I’m an atheist, but I’m not, y’know, religious about it. Which is to say, I don’t mind reading fiction in which a god or gods appear, any more than I mind reading fiction in which beefy humanoid aliens fly through the air in their underwear. Max, are you unsettled whenever you watch My Neighbor Totoro, since the title character’s status as a forest god is an implicit endorsement of Shintoism?
I’ve never heard of it, sorry. I never said I get unsettled. I said I get bored.
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@Chris
That’s largely how they did the Spectre for his DC Showcase animated short (though I think as Corrigan he was a private investigator after ‘dying’). It worked well. Having Gary Cole voice him helped.
Madame Xanadu was one of my favourite series for the last few years, so I was pleased to see her turn up in Demon Knights.
Curiously, it seems she’ll be appearing in at least three DCnU books (this, JL Dark, and Resurrection Man), which seems odd.
“Maybe taking over a murdered man’s life was the one thing Zaxton wouldn’t be prepared to do, and therefore was the one evil act Good!Zaxton was totally okay with.”
You’ve just spent more time thinking about the deeper meaning of that story than the people who produced it ever did.
Al and Paul didn’t mention its penultimate panel. There’s a caption saying “After Thor disposes of the dead man…” Er, how does he do that precisely? Anyway, Thor bursts through the wall of a cellar to free a bound Jane, and tells her that Dr Zaxton’s sorry now – which is kind of an inadequate apology. Maybe he just dropped the dead Zaxton outside a hospital en route to getting there.
Thanks to Al for joining us on the show – always a pleasure having him on, and looking forward to Paul joining us in the near future too.
Count me in the crowd that doesn’t mind longer podcasts (not that this one seemed too short or anything). I have an hour+ commute, so anything long enough to fill that time is very much welcome.
There were actually TWO anti-Mjolnirs created (two Anti-Thors, both of which fade out when Thor hits them very hard).
And because it was early enough that the details hadn’t been worked out, the Anti-Thors would heft but not use the superpowers of the anti-Mjolnirs since they Weren’t Worthy.