House to Astonish Episode 115
After last week’s debacle, we’re very pleased to be able to say that things seem to have worked out a good bit better this time round – we’ve got news about Stan Lee Media’s latest lawsuit, Fox’s Marvel movie universe, the X-Men movie after next, Warners’ casting of Wonder Woman (and yes, we know her name’s not Godot, that was just for a rubbish joke, we promise), Marvel’s digital trades giveaway and the new Wolverine & the X-Men and Magneto series. We’ve also got reviews of Inhumanity, Rover Red Charlie and Black Science, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is retro chic. On top of that, we’ve got interviews with Al Ewing, Kelly Sue DeConnick and Kieron Gillen which we recorded at Thought Bubble. All this plus Superman eating a puppy, scratch & sniff numbering, the sound of fighting geese and the true story of what killed all the Romans.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. Please do also leave iTunes reviews if that’s your thing, and remember that we have a range of very swish t-shirts and hoodies available via our Redbubble store.
“let us know what you think” … to be honest the cutaway interviews with creators are my least favorite part of the show when they appear
Any chance you’ll talk about Dark Cybertron when it’s done? You guys were what got me reading the Transformers comics and I’d be interested to hear someone outside the hardcore-fandom microbubble comment on it.
I got to the bit where Al describes Wonder Woman as Oor Strong Female Character and now I keep thinking of her sitting on an upturned bucket and trying to evade the attentions of PC Murdoch.
I’m with Ralf – not crazy about interviews, but I love the podcast generally.
Ralf/Jerry – fair enough! Sorry they don’t work for you. If it’s any consolation, we don’t do them very often. Also, if you listen via Mixcloud, the episodes are timestamped to help with skipping bits.
Stu – Would her movie open opposite Wee Eck’s-Men?
Zach – That’s not a bad idea. We’ll see what else is out when it wraps up, but it’s a definite possibility.
Happy holidays. Thanks for the show guys. My thoughts after listening:
As far as shared universe being the way comic movies are successful we’ve only seen it happen once and I’m putting the success on Whedon. I watch IM2 and remember how the shared universe thing drug that movie down for me. Marvel studios hire Whedon and he pulls it off. Now Fox and DC are trying to find that guy for them and I don’t think they have that with Goyer and this guy. (Didn’t Fox already hire Millar for this role?)
Al made the joke about Wonder Woman killing Max Lord but I think Max Lord will be the villain for the shared DC movies and Lex will be saved for a later Superman movie.
The new 52 Wonder Woman works for me on the fact they jettisoned the amazons history and just tied here into the Greek gods. The fans that are upset ghat this actress isn’t muscled enough I don’t recall many artists drawing her buff except Adam Hughes.
Inhumanity is a dud. I feel like Marvel know this and that’s why the ongoing Inhumans title is delayed until April because it needs reworking.
Yikes–Paul just doesn’t like Wonder Woman, huh? I guess I should have seen that coming.
I don’t think he’s wrong, that the only thing people know about her is that she’s the female Superman. I remember being in a college class full of Latin nerds and mentioning that WW is an Amazon, and everyone was totally surprised.
But come on–the only thing that matters is that she’s the Strong Female Character? You’re missing the bigger picture: Wonder Woman is a servant of (feminist) Love sent to our world to save us from (patriarchal) War. All the other major parts of her mythology flow directly from that. That’s why Ares is her Big Bad, that’s why her origin story (with Captain Trevor) has her falling in love, that’s why her home country is populated entirely by women, that’s why she tries to reform her villains, etc. It’s really that simple. It’s what marks her out as being totally different from even Superman, who has no grand ideological mission.
(And yes, I do think the Azzarello run is an abomination, so I know I’m not in touch with what makes her a mildly popular character nowadays, and therefore Warner Bros. should never listen to me.)
“Didn’t Fox already hire Millar for this role?”
Yeah, Millar mentioned on Twitter that he and Kinberg are working together on it. Apparently Kinberg’s been actually doing this for a while, the news is just that he re-upped his contract.
One other thing: the 1993 annuals. Wasn’t Genis-Vell introduced under the name Legacy in Silver Surfer during that event? He had a pretty good 12 years or so before Fabian offed him in Tbolts #100.
Yeah, the PAD Genis-Vell series is one of my favourite ever Marvel runs.
Genis was great but I did actually like his death and how it played into the themes of authorship Fabian was working with.
I figured the LEGO movie was going to be Warner Brothers’ token effort at putting Wonder Woman on the big screen. I don’t particularly care either way for WW, but her appearing in a Zach Snyder film is in no way encouraging. I find it mind-boggling that DC sat on a Whedon WW film project for so long and now have thrown her to Snyder to deal with.
Julia – thanks for your thoughts! I think that what I was failing to get across in my unfocused rambling is that there is a core to the character that lasts through the various iterations that DC have come up with, and that DC have managed to contrive to hide that by rebooting and rebooting the focus of the character so many times over the years.
Zach – I can’t believe I forgot Genis-Vell, given that he’s one of my all-time favourite characters.
Agree with Ralf about the interviews. I always skip them. Not crazy about guests either.
I listen to the interviews later but not when i listen to the pod when it comes out.
Wonder Woman breaking necks will fit in well with the zod-neck-breaking zach snyder superman.
Also, if Diana is magic and made from clay brpught to life, does she need to look like Chynna?
Personally, i would like to see a WW that plays up the greek mythology stuff. Just dont make Paradise Island another planet like they did with Asgard.
The Annex stuff made him sound like he was a human 3D printer.
Al: I think you’re totally right about DC’s misuse of the property! I used to say, the moment you put an sword in Wonder Woman’s hand, you’ve missed the point of the character. She wields a lasso, a restraint, not a weapon; she deflects bullets instead of shooting them. Any weapon of war in WW’s hand should feel as wrong as a gun in Batman’s.
Now you can’t find a cover or statue or action figure without her being armed with a stabby something.
Haven’t heard the podde yet, but I like the interviews. They’re a nice bonus. The only problem I’ve had is the ambient noise – which is hard to get around in the middle of a show.
Julia: *salute*
//\Oo/\\
So I really do agree with what Julia says is the fundamentals of Wonder Woman but my question is this when was the last time she was portrayed as that? I honestly can’t remember and I’ve been reading comics since the 80’s. Was it the start of Perez? I seem to remember her being a warrior type since at least the early 90’s.
I like the interviews
Tdubs: I think you’ve hit on the real problem of the character: she has this pro-love ideological core, but most of the time she’s expected to act like a normal superhero, which requires her to be pretty violent. The best compromise many writers (most recently, Gail Simone) have come up with is to play her as the Noble Warrior.
I think Phil Jimenez–whose run is basically an extended George Perez tribute–was the last writer to make that core the very center of his or her run. After him, Rucka did a very good job at playing her as a progressive ideologue and a diplomat, until the whole Max Lord storyline was forced on him. (His Wonder Woman OGN, “The Hiketeia,” published before his work on the ongoing, is perhaps a purer example of his take on the character, and it’s much more traditional.)
But there’s no doubt that it’s a hard task to pull off, writing a character who saves us from War by fighting bad guys. That’s really why you have to stress her focus on rehabilitation. Never forget: Wonder Woman was the first super-hero to have an extended storyline in which one of her super-villains reformed under her influence and became a hero herself (Baroness Von Gunther in the Golden Age comics).
P.S. Sholly Fisch wrote an issue of The All New Batman: The Brave and the Bold a couple years ago, #4, that tackled this problem directly and IMO is probably the best Wonder Woman story in a decade.
Sorry for going on a bit about WW, folks! 🙂
I tend to like the interviews (or not, sometimes) on an individual basis. I thought the DeConnick interview, for example, was interesting, and it was nice to hear a personal account of how Pretty Deadly came into being.
I like the interviews, though maybe they can be edited for length, and the more noisy ones are hard to listen to.
But hey, if no creators can make it to the Christmas show, I want characters from the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook there. Definitely Doctor Strange (the not Stephen one), and that dude who was building the stairway to another planet or whatever it was he was doing.
That said, I can listen to Kelly Sue DeConnick talk all day, she’s got a gift for that public speaking thing. Though I’m not a big fan of her writing strangely enough.
Hey guys. Just got a sneak peak at Marvel’s May solicitations. Some real exciting stuff in the pipeline: Wolverine.now, Spiderman.dll, XtremeXmen.exe. It looks like they’re even relaunching Alpha Flight, kicking it off with an all-new one-shot Alpha Flight: Alpha.α, in which Alpha Flight faces their greatest challenge yet, Dan Slott’s Alpha! The solicit reads, “Now that Thanos has empowered Alpha with the terrigen mists, will the all-new Alpha Flight team of Wolverine, Winter Soldier, and the Superior Spider-Man stand a chance? The worlds of Infinity and Inhumanity may never be the same again!”
I don’t know about you guys, but color me super stoked (dot now).
Wonder Woman is IMO just too problematic as a character, although I do admit that this is less noticeable these days when everything is written as loosely connected mini-series.
Specifically for movies, it is all but impossible to make her work in live action. She ends up looking like a not particularly inspired cosplay effort.
However, ideologically DC is stuck with attempting to promote her no matter how unpromising that may turn out to be. I see this as yet another disadvantage of her, actually. She is stuck with a single message and it is a contradictory one at that, while Superman is a very flexible (if often mishandled) character, with far more in the way of narrative and dramatic possibilities.
From a strictly artistic perspective, DC should probably choose some other head female character. Out of the top of my head, Batwoman and Barda are the obvious choices. Power Girl might work at some point in time, but not right now when Superman is playing second banana to Batman in the movies.
The comparison between WW and Thor is interesting – what would we have said were the core aspects of Thor they had to put in a movie, compared to what they chose to go with? They kept the exile and Jane Foster yet dropped Don Blake completely, and made him more of an alien than a god.
Fantastic Four suffer more than most, maybe all, of Marvel’s ‘main’ characters from being kept to the status quo (or being pushed back to it very often). They should have a big shake-up like having them leave Earth for a good number of years, without being able to come back in emergencies, encountering new villains (and allies). When they do eventually come back, let Franklin have aged a bit, and let that carry on. Keep them out of New York for good – they can live on a space station. Give them a new ‘world’ to explore instead of going back to the negative zone or microverse over and over again.
With the wider issue of recurring villains, they’re only stuck with this as much as most of Marvel – FF has over-used Doom (and Galactus, and others) lately, X-Men has over-used Apocalypse (and related bad-guys), and even when Morrison was introducing Cassandra Nova and Sublime a huge part of his major plot was that it was Magneto all along. Fraction’s Iron Man had to culminate in a Mandarin death story, cosmic Marvel after using Annihilus and the Phalanx in fresher ways has gone back to Thanos…maybe Ultimate Reed will be a ‘new’ villain for 616.
But is there a core to Wonder Woman worth keeping? Like everyone above has mentioned, if you play up the fact that she’s one of the most skilled and powerful warriors in the DCU, you lose sight of the fact that she was sent to teach Man’s World about love. The problem then is that if you go that route you have to stress her otherness, specifically her status as an Amazon and as long as Steve Trevor is in the picture, that just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t make sense that a character, born and raised in a society that has no men and is proud of it, would fall for the first man she meets and have that define her life from there on out.
On top of that, it sounds like a lot of the appeal of the classic Wonder Woman is that she will always find a way to stop villains without killing them. My question is how that makes her any different from Superman, Batman, or most of the other big name DC characters.
“she was sent to teach Man’s World about love”
Equally important, I think: she was sent to Man’s World to learn what it will take to get the isolated-to-the-point-of-stagnation* Amazons ready to rejoin the rest of the human race. Because that’s the subtext of that story, I think.
*(I mean, they probably have a thriving, if somewhat dark and surreal, drag king kabuki on Themiscyra. But once everybody’s had a turn playing He Who Doesn’t Shave, it probably gets old)
All that stuff about Superman’s purpose in Man Of Steel? Really Wonder Woman’s, when you think about it. Diana is the last hope of salvation for Paradise Island, as well as “Man’s” World (and that’ll be the first thing that she’ll learn, won’t it? That “Man’s World” is a massive misnomer. Except when it isn’t. But even then).
Far from being generic and iconic-by-way-of-amber, Wonder Woman is about some very specific and complicated things which have come a long way since Moulton Marston & Peter, i.e.: Men and Women, both individually and in the context of each other. All the minotaur-blapping is just the fun MacGuffin that gets us on the way to the truth.
Because the real key to Wonder Woman’s story lies in the heart of Colonel Steven Felicity Trevor.
//\Oo/\\
PS: loved that Kelly Sue interview. Consumed by jealous rage by the Al Ewing one.
Good podcast. I like most interviews.
Wonder Woman is problematic. When I’ve enjoyed books where she features, she has been cast in the role of a warrior.
I don’t really think that warrior role works well with the whole hippy love schick.
Matthew: That second aspect to her mission–she’s not only here to show us a better way, but to show the Amazons how to open up to the world–is a HUGE part of the Post-Crisis Perez version of the character. It’s not my favorite part of the mythology–I prefer the idea that Paradise Island is a utopia, full stop: they don’t need us, but they love us so that’s why they get involved. But in the right hands, that could be a useful entry point for a writer.
I think you’re 100% right about the importance of Steve Trevor! Taibak wrote above that stressing her Amazon origins lessens his importance, but it’s exactly the opposite. The Amazons are the human ideal, which means they are driven by Love. It always made sense to me that Wonder Woman first comes to Man’s World at least in part because of her love for Steve. Her love for him is the microcosm of her love for everyone. And besides, that would give a movie the emotional weight, making that connection between WW’s public mission and her private desires.
I dunno, I quite like the version where Steve’s married to Etta, and he and Diana are just really good friends. The Love that she’s here to teach us about isn’t romantic love, it’s – if you’ll excuse the masculine phrase – brotherly love, and conflating the two doesn’t work for me.
Also, “character from Female Utopia sees a man for the first time and instantly falls in love with him” kind of gives me the crawlies. (Although not as much as Superman’s Girlfriend, Wonder Woman.)
Sorry, I just can’t take Wonder Woman seriously and I never could. If I were attempting to spread a message of “Love, not war.” across the world, I certainly wouldn’t wrap a portion of the American flag around my ass and expect anyone (apart from Americans) to take me seriously. She may as well have a picture of an oil drill in place of the eagle or “w” or whatever it is she wears across her chest these days.
Mohandas Gandhi stood for peace and he did it his way and it worked. Wonder Woman punches people. Granted, that’s a requirement of the genre she happens to be in, but it’s precisely why the character doesn’t work for me. Her stated mission, what she represents is completely at odds with what she actually does and how she dressed. DC has retooled her numerous times but they’re clearly reluctant to change her too drastically which is a pity because a drastic overhaul (dropping the American symbolism, ditching the ambassador for peace shtick) is precisely what she needs, IMO.
Here’s how I’d reinvent her: No Paradise Island. No amazons. Diana would be the biological daughter of Ares, Greek god of war and a mortal pacifist woman. Raised by her mother, Diana could be recast as a symbol of the great nature vs nurture debate. You know, a theme people actually have an interest in and can relate to. Just like Spider-Man’s power and responsibility shtick. Have her struggle to maintain a balance between the values taught to her mother and her the tendencies she inherited from her father.
Trouble is, can that be made to work in a market that has steeply moved away from that perception for the last few decades?
Heck, they are using freaking USAgent as the moral center of the Thunderbolts these days. And that is not even a comedy book.
Wonder Woman is no more problematic a character than Superman or Batman. They’ve all got baggage from multiple decades’ worth of different stories, writers, versions. Grant Morrison’s recent run of Batman comics, for example, was largely about reconciling different versions of the character from over the years.
The “problem” with Wonder Woman is that readers (and DC, most of the time) are uncomfortable with the feminine aspects of the character. The message of peace and love, the reliance on defense instead of offence, the willingness to find points of commonality with her foes. Those parts of her character provide real points of tension for the character, especially when she’s thrown into the violent world of superheroes and supervillains. How does she stick to her principles in “Man’s World” when so many people (men and women) are dedicated to perpetuating conflict?
In short, I think it’s time to stop blaming the character for the problems that readers, writers, and publishers have understanding what makes the character interesting.
Sorry, but DeConnick *really* has to learn to not refer to all Americans as “we” — I for one, like many, always vastly preferred Frank Burns to that asshole Hawkeye Pierce…
I spent the bulk* of that interview tempted to just fast forward through it to the next review. I really should have.
(*it was worth it only for the Gerard Way joke)
I’ve noticed that interviews are becoming more and more a piece of the podcast of late. Is this a deliberate change or just due to the places where Al might interview folks all being right after one another? Personally, I know that I prefer the show WITHOUT them, since it means more of the Paul/Al discourse. There are plenty of shows with the interchangeable “writer” (or writer-wannabe) archetype discussing things. The strength of this show has always been that its two lawyers talking comics & comics entertainment from a very analytical point of view not found in other artsy or fanboy podcasts (including those with writers & artists)…
Sorry for the negativity, but the holidays does that to me.
halapeno: Your idea is interesting–it’s actually not too far away from Brian Azzarello’s current scheme: he’s set up Ares as father figure to Diana since she was a girl–but I think it sounds like a different character. Not a bad character idea, just not Wonder Woman, you know? WW is not really a pacifist. She’s about the power of love to overcome patriarchy, not about pacifism vs. militarism per se (the latter is more Hawk and Dove’s territory).
Daibhid: I get what you’re saying, but I think when Steve *isn’t* WW’s love interest, he loses his place in her stories. (Etta too: being Steve’s love interest took her away from her traditional role as WW’s first apostle.) I think the Steve and Diana relationship dynamic is so cool, that it really does deserve to be a central part of the story. But it can be done badly, no doubt.
Thom: Love everything you said.
I’d wager there’s zero chance of the “love” part of Wonder Woman’s backstory making it on screen. I certainly don’t want them to even try, since Zach Snyder would eff it up horribly.
The way to make a “strong”, generally-liked heroine today is to make them badass and act like a man, and I’ll bet that’s the Wonder Woman we get.
“The “problem” with Wonder Woman is that readers (and DC, most of the time) are uncomfortable with the feminine aspects of the character”.
I’m not sure if I agree or not but what evidence would you point to that supports this argument?
And even then, assuming that peace, love, and defense are feminine traits is in and of itself dangerous. Gender stereotypes aside, in the hands of a sloppy writer, those could very easily get warped into passive and submissive. It can work – and there’s nothing wrong with Wonder Woman becoming a superhero version of Vash the Stampede or Himura Kenshin – but it’s a far cry from what we have now.
And I just can’t reconcile Wonder Woman’s mission being to teach the world about love with the idea of Paradise Island as a utopia. If it’s an ideal society, then it’s a society that’s reached perfection without heterosexual romantic love. On the other hand, if she’s trying to open up the Amazons to Man’s World, in part by introducing romantic love, then it can’t be a utopia since it’s missing a very important aspect of human behavior. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground there.
As for Steve Trevor. A platonic relationship where he and Wonder Woman are equals would seem to be the ideal, but can writers (and fans, for that matter), resist the temptation to pair them off? And it still doesn’t change the fact that, as Daibhid and I said, Captain Trevor is literally the first man Diana had ever met. For them to automatically pair off is more than a little sketchy.
And, yes, I agree that the Superman/Wonder Woman pairing is lazy and more than a little creepy.
Taibak: I think the whole idea of Wonder Woman is to construct love as an active, dominating force; That’s not even the subtext of the Golden/Silver Age mythologies: it’s directly in the text that women ruled by love are to dominate men and women, and Wonder Woman is the “love leader” in par excellance. WW should be (and has been for much of her career!) active, passionate, fierce, and strong–but all for the cause of love. There’s no question of her being passive at all.
As for Paradise Island as a utopia without romantic love–well, consider for a second the Golden Age, where the chief patron goddess is Aphrodite (and she continues to be one of the patron gods in all the other incarnations). It’s symbolic/mythic, but the idea is clearly that the Amazons submit themselves to Love and that’s what makes them Love’s ambassadors in Man’s World (ruled by Mars). In Wonder Woman, I don’t think Love is split into types like “romantic love” or “sisterly love.” It is simply Love itself, sublime and worshiped, then humanly experienced in the love of the mother-daughter relationship of Hippoylte and Diana, the sisterly relationships of the Amazons, the sisterly relationships of Diana and her many Man’s World friends (Etta, Julia and Vanessa Kapatelis, Cassie, etc.) and the romantic relationship of Steve and Diana.
I’m not saying it makes perfect sense (it is, ultimately, based on Marston’s neo-Fruedian psychological theories, which haven’t stood the test of time), but it gives you a perfect place to start for a fantasy epic adventure. Sooooo many Disney movies have at their center the redemptive power of love (whether the love of Price Charming awakening Snow White from the sleep of death, or the love of two sisters saving the kingdom from endless winter in the recent movie Frozen). Wonder Woman is custom-built for that kind of story.
Dave: Fantastic Four as the old TV show Lost in Space is a great idea. You’d have to be careful it doesn’t get compared to Planet Hulk, but if every month they’re meeting weird silver-age kooky alien things and discovering bizarre pop art concepts, it would be very entertaining.
If I may agree with Thom H for the most part while using Marvel as a contrast to DC (not for vs., just for contrast), I’d say DC wants their characters to be perfect, iconic, so they tell and retell origins and strip them of their underwears and storypoints and such in search of some perfect iteration. Marvel says “yep our characters are flawed. Yep they make mistakes. Yep 60 year old characters have done almost everything it is possible for a superhuman to conceivably or inconceivably do, so whatever.”
So relating that back to WW, she and many DC heroes are a bit of a mess and I am very excited to see Grant Morrison muck it up in WW Earth One because he is always brilliant and/or interesting.
“The “problem” with Wonder Woman is that readers (and DC, most of the time) are uncomfortable with the feminine aspects of the character”.
Feminine? No. Feminist? Yep. A utopian society comprised exclusively of women. Because only women could successfully create a utopian society. *rolls eyes*
“…but I think it sounds like a different character. Not a bad character idea, just not Wonder Woman, you know?”
I know. That was the point.
Lost In Space would be an awesome set-up for the Fantastic Four.
I might even buy FF if it happened.
I saw the TV pilot a couple of years ago and thought Adrianne Palicki wasn’t bad for the part, but the programme makers didn’t realise that Wonder Woman isn’t supposed to be a sadistic bully. I doubt Zack Snyder will grasp that any better.
Niall: “I’m not sure if I agree or not but what evidence would you point to that supports this argument?”
Honestly, your previous comment about “hippy love schick” started me on the road of that particular argument. It seemed dismissive of some of the emotional core of the character in a way that I’ve heard before.
And then I thought of the current Wonder Woman series, which is one of the most successful of the New 52 titles while stripping the character of a lot of her softer qualities.
Taibak: “And even then, assuming that peace, love, and defense are feminine traits is in and of itself dangerous.”
That’s always a problem of this kind of conversation. We can call it something else besides “feminine,” like “yin” (as in “yin” and “yang”) or “soft” or whatever. They’re just on the other side of the spectrum from “warrior” behaviors.
I don’t mean to say that those traits are feminine in the sense that women have them and men don’t. Some of WW’s best “feminine” qualities (like always finding a way to stop a villain without killing them) can be shared by male heroes as well (like Superman).
“Honestly, your previous comment about “hippy love schick” started me on the road of that particular argument. It seemed dismissive of some of the emotional core of the character in a way that I’ve heard before.”
The emotional core of the character isn’t clear. That’s why this discussion even happens.
The hippy love schtick I’m refer to was what came to mind when Julia wrote:
“Wonder Woman is a servant of (feminist) Love sent to our world to save us from (patriarchal) War”.
I find that idea just a little bit twee. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of descriptions about the magic of Superman/Captain America/The Beatles/The Clash, that I find equally unpalatable, but I still enjoy All Star Superman or whatever.
Anyway, a quote from me or some other chap you met down the pub, isn’t really a good basis on which to decide that readers are comfortable with feminine characters. The Buffy series of comics has been amazingly successful. Y The Last Man was a massive commercial and critical success. I’ve bought many series with a female lead, but I’ve never been interested in buying a Wonder Woman book regularly.
“Anyway, a quote from me or some other chap you met down the pub, isn’t really a good basis on which to decide that readers are comfortable with feminine characters.”
Fair enough — it’s not like a did poll or anything. I have a hunch it’s true, but no real proof.
“The Buffy series of comics has been amazingly successful. Y The Last Man was a massive commercial and critical success.”
Again, I didn’t mean to conflate “feminine” with “female.” Just because a book stars a female character(s) doesn’t mean it’s feminine at its core.
“I’ve bought many series with a female lead, but I’ve never been interested in buying a Wonder Woman book regularly.”
Hey now — if I can’t use one guy’s opinion to back up my argument, then neither can you. 🙂
I was late listening to episode #114, but on Austen’s X-Men run being dictated by editorial, Austen wasn’t defending his entire run.
Austen was referring to events right after Morrison’s run ended. I know that he said that he was told to bring (non-Magneto) Xorn into the book, and I want to recall he mentioned some other things.
It’s kind of like JMS talking about Quesada forcing certain story elements in his Spider-Man run. No, readers might still hate the run even if editorial influence hadn’t been heavy, but it probably does feel bad to be blamed for writing things that were not your idea.