House to Astonish Episode 92
A couple of days late, but better late than never, we’ve got just over an hour and ten minutes of chat for you on Marvel’s latest wave of teasers, Mark Millar’s new role at Fox, the expanded line-up of the Avengers, IDW’s latest mega-crossover and David Lloyd’s Aces Weekly. We’ve also got reviews of Non-Humans, Uncanny X-Men and Detective Comics, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is the new Buzz Lightyear. All this plus the Avengers’ five-a-side football tournament, boob claws and the Secret Invasion point-and-click adventure.
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Adamantium? Avengers #66, actually.
We’re sad to say we already knew that, but sacrificed it for the sake of the gag.
It was one of Barry Smith’s early Marvel comics, when he was still drawing people’s heads as if their skulls were shaped like lightbulbs.
“Spider-Man as smug douche” is the concept behind the Spidey newspaper strip, at least according to The Comics Curmugeon.
IIRC (and I could have this wrong), Black Panther was at the first meeting of the Illuminati, said “This is a horrible idea that will go completely wrong” and walked out. And then spent World War Hulk saying “Told you so”. So I’ll be interested to see where that one goes.
Combat Colin! There’s something I miss about the Marvel UK days: comedy backup strips. Lew Stringer on “Colin” and “Blimey, It’s Slimer!” and Quinn and Howett on “Fantastic 400” and “Doctor Who?” (Actually, DWM still has once, currently called “Doctor Whoah!”, but it’s not the same.)
The first half of the Secret Invasion game is surely an observation game where you have to guess who’s secretly a Skrull, and the answer is “No-one interesting”.
As far as Penguin’s success as a mob boss goes, my understanding is that he’s been smart enough not to become the most powerful criminal in Gotham; there’s always someone else who should be Batman’s priority, so he can slip through the cracks.
Oh, and following on from the last podcast, if you were thinking “Okay, Dan Didio has done a Phantom Stranger origin story, which is dumb, but it’s done now. He can’t keep missing the point that spectacularly in an ongoing Phantom Stranger series, can he?” then I have some bad news for you, courtesy of this genuine quote:
“The most fun (and the most difficult) part is keeping the book focused on the character of the Phantom Stranger. In past series, the stories were mostly about other characters and how the Stranger affected their lives. With this series, every story affects the Phantom Stranger.”
Dan Didio: the man who does know how Phantom Stranger stories are supposed to work according to every other writer who has worked on the character, but thinks they’re wrong.
“Avengers’ five-a-side football tournament”
I thought this was a reference to the football game in Avengers Academy …
It’s interesting that, in the year when Marvel might expect new readers with a glancing familiarity to the Marvel Universe they put so much time and effort into a story where most of the X-Men that do anything try to destroy the world and the Avengers behave like dicks to provoke them in to doing so.
I mostly know Lew Stringer as one of the main writers on Sonic the Comic. I don’t know if I’ve ever read any of his other stuff.
He’s good on old British comics:
http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/
Hickman was on War Rocket Ajax this week, where he mentioned that the final tally of Avengers was over 30 (either 32 or 36, can’t remember offhand). And it’s double-shipping every month because he hates it when Marvel randomly double ships books.
This was my first ‘House to Astonish’ ep. – nice to hear some slightly more local accents chatting about comics!
I agree regarding reading comics on a tablet. I get comics from DriveThruComics, and a 10″ tablet is the perfect size.
Still seems Marvel didn’t make it clear enough that Cyke was ultimately AvX’s bad guy. What I’ve seen online is about 50/50, maybe slightly in his favour, about whether he was right or not. That it comes down to the extra K’un Lun training – that he couldn’t possibly have known about (and that nobody knew about at the start of the story) – being essential doesn’t help much.
While Phoenix has always been too vague, the simplified way they tried to do it here (‘like a comet headed to Earth – that’s all you need to know’) makes me think it should never have been chosen as the basis for an X-Men vs Avengers story at all.
I should point out that Layman is setting up the Penguin’s right hand man as someone important, which is probably why he’s the “star” of the back-up story. I think you guys noticed that the right-hand man in the first story – Ogilvy – was in the back-up story. I think one of you mentioned it – confound your confounded accents!!!
Fabok reminded me of Gary Frank, actually. I can see a bit of Erskine, though.
I quite liked that they stuck to Cyclops personality from before AvX and he didnt apologise for what he did. I will miss Gillen’s Uncanny title of all the X-Books ending, but at least there’s a couple more issues to wrap things up. It does make the whole relaunch of Uncanny last year a bit pointless now though, surely these 20 issues could have been part of volume 1.
I just realized, does this mean Bishop was right? He believed that Hope would cause some great disaster which would make mutants more hated and feared then ever. And now thanks to Hope, the Phoenix force came to earth, possessed various mutants and went on a rampage.
If Bishop succeeded the phoenix wouldn’t have come to earth and a bunch of planets wouldn’t have been destroyed because of it.
Forget the the Cyclops shirts, where’s my “Bishop was Right” shirt?
Mark Dodd: “This was my first ‘House to Astonish’ ep. – nice to hear some slightly more local accents chatting about comics!”
Ha! Mr. Dodd just proved all of you cynics wrong. See, there are new listeners out there.
@Lawrence
The best part about that idea is that it actually explains why Bishop wouldn’t just tell the X-Men what he was trying to prevent: He knew they’d do the same thing they did when Cap showed up for Hope. It almost makes you think they’d actually thought it out back during that plotline.
Almost.
That’s right about the Black Panther’s history with the Illuminati. I haven’t been reading any of the main Avengers plotline books since just before Secret Invasion. I think people sometimes take the argument about the use of the story title in story a bit too far, after all “World War 2” “9/11” and “the Arab Spring” are pretty much media-created “brands” used as shorthand for real-world events, I’m not sure that “the Secret Invasion” is actually any more arbitrary than “The Orange Revolution”.
I believe Bendis’s first Marvel work was a fill-in issue of Daredevil. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I want to say it was vol. 2 (Marvel Knights) #19 or thereabouts.