House to Astonish Episode 81
We’re back, with more comics chat goodness – this time round, we’re talking about the new Scott Pilgrim colour editions, the shake-ups on Avenging Spider-Man, 2000AD‘s digital expansion, the Mars Attacks! musical and Katsuhiro Otomo’s new series and taking a quick look at the new solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of B.P.R.D. Hell On Earth: The Pickens County Horror, Astonishing X-Men and New Deadwardians, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is free to be you and me. All this plus PunisherMAX as a Country & Western ballad, an international firm of surveyors and the Gothiest of all child detectives.
EDIT: And yes, I did say we were looking at news out of Wondercon, when actually I meant ECCC. I would like to enter a plea of It Was Early And I Was Sleepy.
The episode is here, or on Mixcloud here, on iTunes or available via the embedded player below. Why not check out the show that comicsbulletin.com described as “the best comic book podcast out there“? Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or at our Facebook fan page.
I’m pleased to see 2000AD supporting .cbr/.cbz; it’s a good, simple format that I’ve always preferred to the bloated and complicated formats the big publishers have used thus far.
There’s an editing glitch in the podcast by the way, around the point you’re talking about the post-apocalyptic environmentalist comic; there’s an orphaned bit of conversation about Kingdom Come.
Oh! I can talk about Dark Horse’s attempt for a super hero line! I bought every one of them when it launched in 1993 (I didn’t have kids then.) There was a new character introduced every week for 16 weeks in a series called “Comic’s Greatest World”. Yes, that was the name of the line. No, they probably didn’t find anything better.
The most popular concepts were Ghost, X and Barb Wire. But you had also stuff like Pit Bulls, Monster, Rebel, Mecha, Titan, Catalyst, Machine, Wolf Gang, Motorhead, Hero Zero, King Tiger, Division 13 and the Vortex. Again, not the best names. Not all of them got their own series at the end of the launch, but some did get a limited run like Catalyst: Agents of Change, Division 13, Out of the Vortex and Agents of Law. It didn’t last more than a year if I remember correctly.
And as for Lady Justice, she was a Neil Gaiman concept (probably written on a napkin) for Tekno Comics (1995) with Mr. Hero, The Teknophage and Wheel of Worlds. Yeah, I got those too. Did I say no kids then?
Finally, I have a question to the House to Astonish community. What is your opinion on Greg Rucka’s Punisher run? I’m a big fan of Queen & Country, Stumptown, Gotham Central, Batwoman, etc. However I thought that his Wolverine run was pretty weak. So should I order the Punisher TPB?
Thanks for the reviews. I was on the fence about Deadwardians but it sounds like something I’d enjoy so I’ll be grabbing that.
I got the impression that Astonishing was to be a straight up Manhattan super team. I believe the Reyes and Gambit relationship was dropped early in x-23.
If I were to attempt to get into bellboy and BPRD where would I start and how hard will it be to catch up? I have the very early trades.
@Pascal
I’m still enduring Rucka’s Punisher and it’s average. IMO it is muddling through the plot with stock characters. Marvel have a habit now of selling the premiere HC to retailers at half off after the trade ships so I’d wait for that.
Kelvin: Cheers – I’m uploading a replacement version with that particular hiccup excised right now.
Pascal: I only read the first issue, and thought it was okay but wasn’t blown away by it.
Tdubs: Hellboy and BPRD have been largely telling different stories; you can read one or the other but each volume of Hellboy is mainly a self-contained thing with some ties to its arc plot (which is wrapped up in v12); BPRD has mainly been dealing with the frog war for a few years but Dark Horse have been doing some chunky omnibuses of that storyline recently.
I’m with Al on the shelf OCD thing. I got the Quasar Classic trade the other week and was quite vexed to find it had a new spine design somewhere between a Marvel Masterwork tpb and a Premier Classic HC that looks odd (and dull) compared with every other paperback Marvel puts out.
@pascal
I don’t think I gave you a good enough answer. I’m a big Rucka fan and find this average and I’m getting it monthly in hopes it improves. If you buy the first volume I don’t think you will get a satisfying complete story, I’m not sure we have that now at issue 9.
I was really looking forward to Astonishing X-Men, based on the characters, and my burgeoning love of Marjorie Liu’s writing, but the idea of domestiX-Men (sorry) seems to be exactly my sort of thing. In fact, if you wanted to market an x-book to me, this would be the ideal thing. Shame I’m only a market of one.
My local newsagent had the full line of Tekno comics for some reason, I always found it rather odd since they rarely had US Marvel stuff.
Everyman is a JM DeMatteis/Sal Buscema creation, from Marvel Team-Up. And yes, the Zeitgeist thing is kind of inexplicable – Gruenwald’s last few years on Cap were terribly strange.
So, given IDW’s habit of putting every alternate cover in the digital version of things, does this mean the digital Mars Attacks will have the story start on page 58?
Since al mentioned tbat neither he nor paul ordered it, any thoughts on smoke and mirrors? Thought it was interesting idea, but on the fenve about reading further issues.
The “going back in time and suing the people who had the idea first” was an idea i first heard, i think, in hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.
Very glad to hear 2000 ADs initiative. I’ve tried comixology and the DC app on android and both are very poor (limited settings and it just keeps crashing).Already uninstalled it after a week. Guided viewing is fun, an actual working app, like droid comic viewer, is so much better.
I thought it was interesting to hear the unedited bit left in, kind of a Jean-Luc Godard effect.
Weirdly the Tekno Comix stuff was really widely available in newsagents at a time when all the other US imports were dying out on newsstands. I was well into it for a while, but haven’t heard anyone mention them in years.
@ Tdubs
BPRD has become a tightly serialized story over the last years, so they are a bit hard to get into. DH has collected the trades of the Frog War in hardcovers – 3 in 1 – so maybe you check those.
Hellboy and BRPD are the last monthlies I buy except Hellblazer, and after all these years it begins to crumble. The writing still is very good, but some of the new artists especially for the minis are very disappointing. The min-series drawn by Karl Moline “The Dead Remebered” for instance was just bad, his style is unsuited for the franchise.
On the whole though the Hellboy books have a consistency in quality both Marvel and DC have long lost.
Regarding novels that suddenly divert into tangentially-related short stories involving characters other than the mains:
Donald “Richard Stark” Westlake’s “The Outfit” (third book in the Parker series, and the second one adapted by Darwyn Cooke) does a few of these in which teams of thieves pull a variety of heists that are each self-contained stories only loosely tied together by Parker having encouraged them all to do the hit on an Outfit joint that they’ve always dreamed of. They’re all great vignettes in a great book, and Cooke’s art style shifts in his adaptation are amazing.
Yeah, Ultimate Power made sense because Supreme Power was already an Ultimatisation of the Squadron Supreme who interacted with the Avengers. But then that Squadron Supreme showed up as well. (I can’t recall any coherent explanation for that, it was probably a Jeph Loeb bit.)
Comparing BPRD to a Star Trek episodes where it’s just redshirts we’ve never seen before is, I think, the cue for this Doctor Who geek to mention the episode “Mission to the Unknown”, in which the only recognisable characters are the Daleks.
The word “zombie” probably shouldn’t be used in the Edwardian era, although “vampire” certainly can. And I thought the standard orthography for exclamations by Edwardian maids was “Gawd”?
It might be counterintuitive, but I think launching a small tight comics line in today’s market might work. In a world where X-Men and Avengers are putting out eight titles a month, it’s sort of refreshing to have an entire universe contained to four titles.
@Delpire:
Which version of Android do you have? Comixology’s pretty stable on mine except for a minor glitch with the zooming from full page. I’d definitely like to see an upgrade, but it’s become how I read 99% of my comics (and all of Atomic Robo).
Please make “Flashback, the Campfire Comic Cowboy” a recurring character for future pods.
Vertigo Brown! That totally seems like a late ’90s Sandman spin off miniseries.
Anyway, I have lots of random notes.
I believe another major problem with the Chase collection is that it didn’t actually collect all the stories. Apparently it left out one or two short Secret Files comics that would have added less than 20 pages to the collection.
Who’s in charge of their collected editions now that Bob Harris is EiC?
The Image 10th Anniversary hardcover came out (though years late), I think you meant Image United, which hasn’t shipped an issue in serveral years.
However, Spawn has actually been pretty good at shipping on time for the last couple of years. Spawn #217 shipped in March, and #218 is listed as shipping this wednesday, so #220 should be out in June.
Some old serialized ficiton definitely had those stories about characters you never see before or after, I remember some in Dostoevskii’s work.
Samurai Pizza Cats is another show where the English translation was made up with just the visuals and no knowledge of the original dialogue.
@TDUBS BPRD can be said to start after Hellboy volume 5. Darkhorse is currently collecting BPRD into a nice series of hardcovers that feature 3 tpbs in each. Those are they way I’d check out the series, as the first two paperback volumes have some dodgy stories not written by Mignola and the series doen’t get really good until volume three.
I still remember the whole thing with spawn where they skipped ahead on numbers and went back later to publish the missing issues.
@ Yom Clarke
Android version 2.3.5
I’ve been told version 3 is meant for tablets. Maybe version 4 will help (still not made available).
In the meantime I’m happy using torrents and ACV as viewer (lots of features in the settings menu). Reading Puisher Max andFabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
RE: Avenging Spider-Man – could it be that sales aren’t what Marvel would expect for a Joe Mad comic (probably because it *isn’t* a Joe Mad comic any more)? They’re fairly ruthless about pulling expensive talent off lower selling books.
In terms of 2000AD’s DRM-free digital files, arguably the comic’s main problem is that the readership is fairly static with limited opportunities for outreach, and that the comic needs new eyes on it – even if those eyes aren’t initially paying – more than it needs to be zealously guarded against pirates.
Music from iTunes is DRM-free and has been for a while. Market pressure seems to have been a significant reason for the change. DRM provides absolutely no benefit to the consumer, and so consumer choice seems to tend towards DRM-free digital content when it is available.
If one takes that view that what one gets for one’s money is a license to particular content, then DRM-free services offer more appealing licensing terms. The license is good for the lifetime of the format, rather than the lifetime of the content provider (cf. the demise of the Wal-Mart music service), and the license is not limited in terms of how, when and where the content can be consumed by the licensee.
There is an argument that going DRM-free is actually a way to reduce piracy. Filesharers are, in a sense, competition who offer better licensing terms and a better price, but illegitimately. Legitimate content providers can’t hope to compete on price, but they can attempt to compete by offering comparable licensing terms (i.e. DRM-free content) with higher legitimacy (i.e. freedom from the specter of law suits, which can balance out higher pricing).
I’m a bit late to the party, but I hope you guys have learned by now that the Mars Attacks musical story was an April Fool’s joke. Layman told me he was a bit puzzled why Topps would put the news out several days BEFORE 1 April, but they did. You guys actually made it sound plausible, but it ain’t happening.