RSS Feed
Apr 11

House to Astonish Episode 131

Posted on Saturday, April 11, 2015 by Al in Podcast

We’re back (on what seems to be a three-weekly schedule, though don’t go setting any recipe timers by it) with discussion of the Daredevil Netflix show – not spoilery in terms of plot details, though we do discuss tone and so on – as well as the Agents of Shield and Arrow/Flash spin-off shows, the Luke Cage showrunner, Valiant’s next crossover, James Stokoe’s return to Godzilla and Marvel’s latest Secret Wars tie-ins. We also review Convergence: The Question and Kaijumax, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is pressing the flesh. All this plus Godzilla’s stockings, the accidental word of the week and the Radox Bandit.

The show is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. We also have a Redbubble store where you can outfit yourself in our most chic duds.

Bring on the comments

  1. JRC says:

    YAY!

  2. odessasteps says:

    I think Miller is the author of that Gotham/Metropolis quote.

  3. Martin Smith says:

    I wasn’t expecting a huge amount from Daredevil, but I’m 9 episodes in and adoring it. Great stuff and I’m even excited for AKA Jessica Jones and the rest now (despite not liking Alias).

    I actually preferred Arrow’s first season to certainly the second. The third is an improvement, but it’s a very different show now. Not necessarily better or worse, but… different.
    The Flash is a lot better than I thought it’d be – I don’t give a damn about the character in the comics beyond being a guy in the Justice League, but the show has me hooked.
    The pair are essentially DC’s TV equivalents of Batman and Superman now. Be interesting to see where the Arrow goes when it runs out of Nolan Batman films to lift season story arcs from though.

  4. Sol says:

    Isn’t it fairly well-established that the Days of Future Past universe was NOT fixed by the time travel, because they (Kate and/or Rachel) didn’t manage to travel back to the past of their own universe? (After a quick Google search..) Right, it’s explicitly Earth-811.

    Now, I think maybe an Excalibur story I didn’t read “saved” Earth-811 from the Sentinels…

  5. Zach Adams says:

    The agency responsible for Blackjack (or whatever they were called) was GRAMPA, clearly named as a parody of UNCLE.

  6. odessasteps says:

    Zander did a TED talk recently, which just got posted to youtube.

    http://youtu.be/t4tNALubJTA

    My favorite stuff of his is the still-unfinished Replacement God series from 15 ish years ago from SLG/Image.

  7. Paul says:

    @Sol: The 1980s Official Handbook claims that you can’t alter history in the way that Kitty attempts in Days of Futures Past, but that’s simply the Handbook authors trying to impose their view that the time travel rules of the MU were laid down for all time in one issue of Fantastic Four. It’s pretty clear that Claremont was thinking no such thing – his idea seems to have been that even though Kelly’s death had been altered, history remained stubbornly on track for the same general end. Another of Claremont’s stories explicitly ends with a self-cancelling alteration of history – the Kulan Gath/Nimrod arc – and the Handbook similarly refuses to acknowledge that that happened as depicted.

  8. max says:

    I prefer the Star Trek rules of time travel: time travel works however the plot requires it to work at any given time.

  9. Rob says:

    Why do people think Gambit’s so closely associated with smoking? I’m pretty sure he explicitly gave up cigarettes in the 90s long before Quesada was EIC. There’s an issue in the 30’s of adjectiveless X-Men where Gambit has to smoke outside the mansion because of Beast’s new non-smoking rule that he enforced when he was temporarily leader. And he tried to quit completely in the Gambit/Wolverine miniseries from 1995. Pretty sure he wasn’t ever depicted smoking after that.

    For my money, if I had to bet on which X-Man smelled worst, I’d say Wolverine by a country mile. I can’t imagine he ever uses deodorant.

  10. Si says:

    Sad Daredevil is pretty damn wrenching for the cinematic universe. Especially considering they could have made him their ersatz Spider-Man. I watched the first episode but it really isn’t a show I could get into. I love his balaclava though.

    By the way, Smith the quiet guy with lots of layers of clothes? Is his first name Kevin? Or maybe Silent Bob?

  11. max says:

    One thing I’ve learned from Arrow, Agents of SHIELD and Constantine is not to give up on a show too quickly. All three needed time to make course corrections and find their footing and now all three are among my favorite shows.

  12. Paul C says:

    I’ve only seen the first episodes of Daredevil so far, but absolutely loved it. The dark and grim tone makes a nice change from the rest of the MCU. Plus the casting has been excellent. I did appreciate how as mentioned they didn’t do a big origin info dump and how they didn’t overplay the heightened ability with his other senses.

    Agents of SHIELD has definitely gotten better, but it is still not all that great. Decent enough to pass a bit of time, but nowhere near the top tier of shows on TV. Part of the problem is that they are leaning so heavily on the Inhumans arc, but the actress playing Skye is not very good at all. I’m surprised there are talks about it getting a spin-off as I don’t think the ratings are all that great, and there’s not a great bunch of critical buzz or clamouring for more.

    I’m still crossing my fingers for a second season of Agent Carter (even if it’s only another 8 episodes) as that turned out to be wonderful fun.

  13. After Top 10/Smax, Zander Cannon teamed up with Kevin Cannon (No relation!
    Seriously!) to do several true-science books–T-Minus: The Race to the Moon
    (2009, written by Jim Ottovani), The Stuff of Life (2009, written by Mark
    Cadillacs and Dinosaurs” Schultz), and Evolution (2011, written by
    Jay “Clan Apis” Hoesler). They’re both terrific. Zander also did some writing
    for IDW–a Star Trek: TNG mini and the Transformers: Bumblebee mini.
    So he’s kept busy, even if not full-time.

    Paul, since you watched the first episode of Agents of SHIELD and thus know
    the character setups, you could skip forward to “T.R.A.C.K.S” (the first really good
    episode) or “The End of the Beginning”, which begins the Hydra storyline and where
    the quality just shoots straight up. By the middle of the second season, it’s enormously enjoyable–“Face the Enemy” was a standout, a terrifically fun Steranko homage.

  14. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    Quick nitpick on Cpnvergence: I don’t think any of the cities are from universes which we’ve exactly seen in Multiversity. The closest I can think of are Angor (the Marvel parody world) and Earth-C (Captain Carrot), and in both cases we’re getting the “classic” version, while the Morrison take is very different.

    And I think that’s the point; these cities all come from universes that don’t exist in the current multiverse, and Brainiac rescued them before their universe stopped existing. Which is how we can have pre-Flashpoint Earth-0 and Flashpoint Earth-0 and their continued existence doesn’t effect the existence of the current Earth-0.

  15. Zach Adams says:

    Well, there was also the 7-8 worlds that were explicitly left “hidden” in the Multiversity guidebook, which I assumed was leaving those slots open For “classic” world’s that may need to come back here or elsewhere.

  16. bad wolf says:

    As Daibhid pointed out, we somehow have a list of 45 DC universes published one month ago and 42 universes published two weeks ago. That’s … weird.

    I’m going to have to count but there’s definitely a lot of overlap with the Elseworlds universes; Tangent, Just Imagine, Gotham by Gaslight, Red Son, …

Leave a Reply