House To Astonish Episode 31
This time round, Paul and I are looking at the iPad, and wondering whether anyone actually knows what effect it’s going to have on comics. We’ve also got our regular round-up of the solicitations, a bit of chat on Diamond’s revised minimum order policy, and a few words on DC’s new Flash Ring promotion, Angoulême and The Beat leaving Publisher’s Weekly. We’ve also got reviews of Starman, New Avengers and Joe the Barbarian and we go back to the surprisingly deep well of awfulness that is the Ant-Man rogues’ gallery in the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. All this plus the opposite of Occam’s Razor, the first cuckoo of spring and the possibility of an Alabama accent.
The podcast is here – let us know what you think, either by commenting below, by email, on Twitter or by writing it on your eyelids and blinking slowly at us.
The New Address for the Beat is …
http://www.comicsbeat.com
not
http://www.comicbeat.com
as Paul said in the podcast.
I’m fine with DC giving away plastic tat assuming they eventually do a Legion flight ring. I’ll get indignant about it after I’ve safely acquired one of those.
It does make you wonder where it’ll all go next. Batarangs? Wonder Woman bracelets? HERO dials?
If they give away a plastic HERO dial I’ll forgive pretty much anything else they do.
Didn’t the blowing-up happen in the New Avengers Annual? Maybe the problem is that whatever intern wrote the recap page DID read NAv #60… but not the Annual.
(And shouldn’t the plural of “Captain America” be “Captains America”?)
They still make Quote… Unquote but the radio 4 website says it’s between series at the moment.
I’d buy any comic DC sold with a Batarang. Heck, I’d have to resist the urge to buy thousands and star throwing them at thugs.
Or T-Spheres, T-Spheres would be awesome.
You didn’t mention that the Flash relaunches were made even more preposterous by the fact they were rapidly backtracking through the Flashes:
Flash: The Fastest Man Alive: Bart Allen is now the Flash!
Flash: Oh, no-one liked that idea. Wally West is now the Flash! Er, again!
Flash: Rebirth: Still nothing? What if we brought back Barry? I know we said we’d never do that, but the hell with it.
Based on this trend, I predict the new Flash title will be about Jay Garrick.
Robinson’s Superman work has been pretty good, excluding this week’s issue.
And JLA #41 is actually pretty good, as it’s a recruitment issue, and Bagley drawing Batman & Robin is always a treat.
But everything else Robinson has done has been very very bad.
When you said “Immoneny”, I thought you said “I’m a ninny”.
Also, “Her-Oes” doesn’t work in any accent… unless you’re saying “These aren’t my O’s, they must be her O’s.”
I think, somewhere in a box, I have a Legion flight ring when they made them, what, maybe 10 years ago? and not Plastic Tat back then.
BTW, as a hardcore Starman nerd, Jack hasn’t been in Opal City since the end of the original book. He took his kid and rode off into the sunset to San Francisco (I guess sort of Robinson did the same thing). Off the top of my head, I don’t know if he’s appeared since then.
If Dazzler really does die in “Second Coming,” I’m abandoning the X-books wholesale, and blaming you guys. Be aware.
They should kill Collosus at the end of 2nd coming, and let his death bring some finality to a pointless going nowhere plotline. oh wait…
> BTW, as a hardcore Starman nerd, Jack hasn’t been in Opal City since the end of the original book. He took his kid and rode off into the sunset to San Francisco (I guess sort of Robinson did the same thing). Off the top of my head, I don’t know if he’s appeared since then.
I believe he’s had a couple of cameos in wedding/funeral-type crowd scenes, but nothing more. Like Gaiman with the Endless, Robinson has some sort of partial veto over his use.
Y’know, to stop someone randomly pulling him in as cannon-fodder.
I got a free plastic Wonder Woman tiara with light up star at a con last year. Pretty rad. It was released to coincide with the animated movie on dvd.
The Marvel recap pages are awful; I recall one for Mighty Avengers a few months ago where they consistently misnamed the team, which one would think would be a pretty basic thing to get right.
The last time I read an issue of New Avengers, which was at least a year or so ago, The Hood’s minions had a big fight with the New Avengers. And that was about a year after the previous issue I’d read, in which The Hood’s minions had a big fight with the New Avengers. Has anything else happened in that book in the past few years?
Re the Time Master, the police do make a point of telling Ant-Man that “His note didn’t read like the typical crank letter! It was well-written — and carefully thought out!”
Re: Superia
Superia never made good on her threat to turn Cap & Paladin into women; for all we know, she was nothing but talk. Now she’s dead, so I guess our gender-bender questions will go unanswered? Maybe Time Master should team up with Miss Sinister instead?
“Man and Wolf” actually came after “Superia Strategem.”
Considering that Nightshade figured in both of those Cap stories, she could serve as Time Master’s ally, turning people into werewolves in order to teach them valuable lessons about animal rights.
One of the reasons I dropped New Avengers was that I realised that there really is no connection between the end of one issue and the beginning of the next, if it’s not part of the same arc. Or, a lot of the time, even if it is.
If ever there was a time when it was fine, surely, to use the title “Marvel Girls…”
I can see the reactions to the McCarthy book now…*sad panda*
And DEATH TO WOLD NEWTON FANFIC.
//\Oo/\\
Also, I believe the googling I quickly did on the Time Master said he was in TTA 43, which was one before the first appearance of the Wasp. So, Jan couldn’t have helped Hank beat him.
There’s also a story in which Giant-Man and the Wasp have a fan club who dress up in costume as their old villains. No Time Master, though!
Regarding New Avengers 61 being a Siege tie-in – I assumed the relevance was when Spider-Man and Woman were watching Avengers Tower and saying that something was going on, presumably Osborn’s forces shipping out to Asgard. Very tenuous, but we already know that Steve Rogers finds out about the invasion while watching Fox News back at the safe house.
I still don’t understand how ‘death of a beloved character’ is a selling point. Marvel Comics: now with progressively less of the things you enjoy reading about! Now, ‘death of a middling, overexposed character’, that would shift some comics, I think.
Anyway, I think Dazzler’s safe, since Nightcrawler’s in all the 2nd coming promo art, despite not having a storyline in the past two years…
DC was the original publisher of “Stuck Rubber Baby” (under their Paradox Press imprint), so it kind of makes sense for them to publish a new edition.
A batarang shipped with the deluxe edition of Batman Arkham Asylum. Never mind how I know.
Not to sound like the World’s Greatest Detective, I assume you know because you saw it in the shop. Or bought it.
I had a friend who bought it and lent it to me to go with my Batman costume for my 30th birthday. I felt authentic.