House to Astonish Episode 180
We’re back (back! Back!) with a new episode, where we remember Tom Spurgeon, Howard Cruse and Tom Lyle, talk about delays at Marvel, the announcements of Hellions and Strange Academy, Chris Samnee’s Fire Power and Vault Comics’ Myriad line. We’ve also got reviews of Annihilation: Scourge – Silver Surfer and Dying Is Easy, and the audio from the SILENCE! To Astonish panel live at Thought Bubble 2019, with Gerry Duggan, Ram V, John Allison and Emma Vieceli. All this plus Shane McGowan’s very special set of skills, the Sliding Doors of dentistry and the ghost of Norris McWhirter.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
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And if you’re in the market for another podcast with me in it, please do come over to check out Desert Island Discworld, where every episode I talk to a guest about their life and work, and the Terry Pratchett novel they’d take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
“Dan Abnett was one of the architects of the cosmic line.”
The Line Cosmic, surely?
Put me in for The Bromeliad.
Ashley Barton is Peter Parker’s Granddaughter in the world of Old Man Hulk, also known as “Spider-Bitch,” because her Dad is Dirty Old Man Hawkeye and her mother is Unspecified Parker Daughter (and therefore about forty years younger than Hawkeye).
Greg Parker is a guy who only ever sticks to the story.
Great tributes in this episode. I’ll miss Tom Spurgeon. Honestly, I think he’s the only person in Comics I ever wanted to think I was cool.
(I’m not, and I’m sure he didn’t. Still.)
Merry Christmas, all. Click my name for…a link.
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Addemdumb: “Tonya Parker?”
Oh, like “Tony.” Clever.
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Sorry for the late response, but I only just got around to reading Dying Is Easy #1. I think it’s pretty clear from the context that we’re not supposed to think Shit-Lick’s monologue is particularly funny–he’s playing in a bottom-end club with a bunch of other wasters. Like a lot of barely funny comedians, he understands how a joke is structured but he doesn’t really understand what will make other people laugh.
The scene mostly serves to give us insight into his very cranky mind–this is the type of guy who thinks *this* is *funny*.
Your discussion of it did remind me (favorably) of Thomas Disch’s observation that you could never write a novel about a great poet, because you would *have* to include some of the poetry and by definition almost no one is a Truly Great poet.
(Disch later realized that you could get around this by making the novel about a great poet *in another language*, so you could present “translations” of the poems that only had to hint at the greatness of the original. This was the inspiration for John Crowley’s very good novel The Translator.)
Martin Scorsese took on a different form of this challenge in “Life Lessons”, his segment of the anthology film New York Stories, where Nick Nolte’s character is a Great Painter; much of the film actually shows him making a Great Painting and he somehow manages to pull it off.