House to Astonish Episode 134
Paul and I are back after a slightly unusually long break, with a massive run-through of the All-New All-Different Marvel books, the announcements out of Image Expo, DC’s Convergence tie-in launches, Vertigo’s new slate, IDW’s surprising licensed launches and the return of Tokypop. We’ve also got reviews of Archie, The Spire and Dungeon Fun, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is lovely jubbly. All this plus Little Nico in Slumberland, Belfast’s most bangin’ DJ and the gentle caress of a brick to the face.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget that you can also deck yourself out in one of our natty t-shirts by visiting our Redbubble store and, like, buying one. They’re all the rage in Paris, I expect.
My thought on the Miles vs. Peter matter in ANAD is that Miles’s role the “primary” Spider-man is on account of his being the one doing the standard Spider-man things. He’ll be in NYC fighting street crime, (as well as being a high-school hero in the time frame while we’re being reintroduced to that as the set status quo of Spider-man as a concept through all the other media). Meanwhile, Peter Parker will be doing more globe-trotting as he’s moving about on his business work and science stuff – there’s some reference to his taking up some of the Tony Stark place in the universe in term of snarky business/science hero who can move around the the place (since Stark himself seems, from indications, to be at a low ebb in his finances).
Honestly, it seems that Marvel’s giving all three characters new challenges to play with (for all the complaints about Parker being successful, having him negotiate the big leagues is a natural place for him to both doubt himself and test power & responsibility), and moving Peter around like that gives Miles to play with within the Spider-man space without getting rid of Peter – I’m reminded similarly of Steve/Bucky and Steve/Sam in certain ways, but this is probably even better, because it’s moving Peter around naturally.
(BTW, someone with an axe for hands needs a separate axe more than anyone. After all – axes can usually be thrown…UNLESS they’re attached to someone’s arm!)
Like so many of the OHOTOHOTMU characters, Damon Dran (the Industructible Man) would be a great addition to Unlimited Class Wrestling. He feels no pain? The new Undertaker.
The new John Cena…
The idea of a ROM collection is intriguing. It’s going to have to be some kind of shared publication right? I’ve been trying to put a collection together from $1 bind and there is a huge reliance on Marvel characters. There are guest stars on a very regular basis.
So from the looks of the announcements so far I see very little continuation on plots from Bendis on X-Men. I’m very curious about what we are going to see in #600. Also from the outside looking in it appears that Bendis wasn’t much of a team player with Secret War. Ultimate End makes no sense plus they keep saying they intended to tell a story about the X-Men and Cyclops with the Phoenix stuff but it never was told.
IDW and Marvel have a good working relationship, so I can see ROM reprints going ahead with no problems. That said, beyond Chris Ryall being a massive ROM fan, I can’t quite see the appeal for IDW. Literally everything to do with ROM beyond his name and appearance is owned by Marvel, so there’s little to make a new series out of. I’m surprised Hasbro even care to keep him, as they’ve made precisely one figure of him in the last 30 years (a Mighty Mugg). They’d surely be better off selling the property outright to Marvel (and then doing a Marvel Legends figure of him, natch).
I was reading a PAD hulk trade (right before the Pantheon started) the other day and there’s a ROM cameo in the story where Rick is captured by Skrulls.
I think Alias #7 (? the one with bits of Rick Jones’s autobiography) is the last time we got any kind of reference to ROM in a recognizable form. After that he appeared in flashback as “Artour” in Spaceknights, but only in a stained-glass representation that was unrecognizable enough to prevent legal issues.
The contrast of ROM and Micronauts is interesting, because both are properties that were WAY more successful as comics than as toylines, but Micronauts has a core concept and a few characters that are “portable” enough to potentially work (though it’s a longshot) outside the MU, whereas ROM is literally just a name and a character design. There is *nothing* about him that people remember that Marvel didn’t create.
Getting the Carol Corps on board for anyone but DeConnick is going to be a hard sell. I think Agent Carter showruners are a good an attempt as any. The show’s been really well received in the same sort of circles, though I don’t know if Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas’ names have been much associated with that success. From what I’ve seen of fan discussion, the big sticking point for the fans–in sort of a lesser parallel to what you were discussing about Ms Marvel–they really didn’t want the title give to a dude.
When it comes to Jubilee’s kid nerfing her potential as a character, I’d say that to be fair, the depowering and vamping did that a while ago.
Bless Al for his “Archie-type” pun.
@Martin: Marvel and IDW work well together, but that doesn’t extend to using Marvel-Owned characters in reprints. The reprints they do of the Marvel Transformers series are missing #3 (Spider-Man appearance) and at least one more issue containing a very obscure character, so obscure I can’t recall which one it is…
Circuit Breaker?
It amuses me that CM Punk will be writing Batista.
So, if Marvel are jumping forward eight months after Secret Wars, shouldn’t Jane Foster be dead? She certainly seemed close to it when we last saw her.
@quizlacey you are thinking of Circuit Breaker, which is a really weird case because some of her later appearances were republished by IDW but her first appearance wasn’t. She’s also a character who, like Death’s Head, was created for a TF story and then poached to appear somewhere else first (Secret Wars II) so that Marvel would retain rights. Much like comparing ROM to the Micronauts, she has a lot less upside than DH, yes?
@Paul F – does the time that Jane have left “count” while she’s transformed? Effectively, it’s the old Thor/Donald Blake question again in terms of whether the two are the same person or two entities that share memories, coupled with a phenomenon like Ben Grimm’s (who who shown during the Hickman run to live for thousands of years in the future, since he only actually physically ages during the brief time that he’s human each year).
Since a small number of mortals are Worthy and a smaller number are transformed INTO Thor when gripping Mjolnir, it says something about magic’s gaming the system to choose her now to give her extra time to do good before dying, Since The Death of Captain Marvel showed that the Marvel Universe can’t cure advanced cancer (and The Thanos Imperative showed the cosmic rationale why), it makes a sort of sense for the Blake-style transformation to “game the system” on her behalf like this — and creates story tension on how much humanity she’s willing to sacrifice to survive.
I’ve felt for the past decade or so that it might be best to let Peter Parker go off and do Avengers/global stuff and leave the classic Spidey formula to the Ultimate version.
Spidey’s not like Batman, where you can have a justice league version living on the moon and a street version fighting the Joker at the same time. You can’t put Peter back in the box without a reboot of some kind. The Ultimate version actually wants to do that young Everyman thing anyway. It looks like with ANAD Marvel, they’re kind of going in that direction. It won’t please everyone, but it might be the best we’re going to get.
Also, Paul Misspoke. It was John Francis Moore who did the road trip era of X-Force (which is not bad…. but soooooooo 90s)
I had a feeling that wasn’t the name. What ever happened to Moore? Judging from his Wikipedia entry, it’s been over a decade since he wrote anything.
@quizlacey You’re a few years behind the times. IDW have (re-)reprinted all of Transformers US, including the issues with Spider-Man and Circuit Breaker and are (slowly) going through all the UK material, including the issues with Death’s Head. Hell, they also reprint actual Marvel comics for their Artist’s Edition series. So yeah, I can see Marvel letting them reprinted the original ROM, as is.
@Brian: Going by the end of the last issue, the time she spends as Thor is actually making her cancer progress faster.
@Martin When the IDW Transformers Humble Bundle was up, the collections covering the 50-or-so Marvel US issues were included… minus with Spidey and Circuit Breaker issues. The Artists Editions are a very specific type of reprint, non-competitively priced when placed against the same material in ‘standard’ reprint format.
To my knowledge, Archie doesn’t carry much nostalgia here in the U.S., either. I don’t know anyone under 60 who has ever purchased an Archie comic.
@jpw I’m a Millennial, and Archie was a minor but memorable part of my childhood. I bought Betty & Veronica digests at the supermarket every now and then, and I subscribed buying the Sabrina the Teenage Witch comic after the sitcom started. They smartly put Melissa Joan Hart on the cover of each issue, so it felt like an extension of the show, even though I now realize the continuity was completely different.
So, I would say, you’re right that it doesn’t carry much nostalgia, but more non-comics-reading kids have been exposed to Archie comics than any other. And there is a generation that fondly remembers Sabrina in particular. (But as a TV character.)
I thought the road trip era of X-Force betrayed the goshdamn concept of a paramilitary slightly more violent version of the X-Men…. although the arc made sense for the characters, especially given that they were once New Mutants or X-Terminators.
Still, being in love with the Cable/Cannonball/Warpath/Boom-Boom/Shatterstar/Feral version…. I missed the violence and the guns the side of mailboxes
Seriously! Does Bendis even read Marvel comics he doesn’t write anymore? Does he even have an editor?
It’s clear that Hickman is a little ticked off about this. And he should be. I know I am. It would be one thing if Bendis had actually had a story to tell in Uncanny but he spent so much time on fairly pointless filler that you can’t defend him for failing to have one page where Cyclops acquires a Phoenix egg.
As for Ultimate End, it is sad but it somewhat appropriate for the end of the Ultimate line to be a book where Bendis ignores everything else that is happening given that this is exactly what he did when writing Ultimate Spiderman etc. since he stopped writing Ultimate X-Men.
Paul:
Per his entry in the Comic Book Database, the last John Francis Moore work was in
2004, a Vertigo Now! miniseries entitled Touch:
http://comicbookdb.com/creator_chron.php?ID=2003
The final issue was called “Elvis Has Left the Building”.
Also, the Greg Pak game tie-in book was Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects, a
2005 miniseries. That wasn’t his first Marvel work–he had previously written
X-Men: Phoenix Endsong and, before that, the odd Southeast Asian version of
Warlock with art by Charlie Adlard.
Axes for hands? Death’s Head, yes?
If they’re going to have a teenage Spider-Man doing the teenage stuff and a grown-up Spider-Man doing grown-up stuff, maybe they can reverse the stupid Satanic Divorce and let the grown-up be married again, because wasn’t that the excuse they gave at the time? Being married was too far from the young-person-with-many-romantic-entanglements root of the character, apparently.
@Niall
I must have missed an interview or tweet, but how is it obvious Hickman is “pissed” at Bendis? Hickman already set-up the Phoenix egg plot in his Avengers run which takes place months after Bendis’ run on X-men.
@Lawrence – Hickman punched Bendis in the nads at Comic-Con and insinuated that he performed certain acts with his mother.
Pissed may be strong. He’s basically said that everyone was told where they needed to their characters to end up for Secret Wars and there were supposed to be stories explaining about Nation X and the Phoenix Egg but they ended up “not happening”.
It seems everybody played ball except Brian Bendis.
When asked about Ultimate End and how it doesn’t seem to make sense within the context of Secret Wars, he said that Bendis would say wait until the end for a full explanation. Which doesn’t really fill one with confidence. You’d imagine that if he was confident, he’d just say wait until the end for a full explanation.
@quizlacey I don’t know what to tell you other than that those issues are right there in the print editions and the Kindle editions. And you’re splitting hairs about the Artist’s Editions: they’re Marvel products being used by IDW to make a profit. Whether they’re competitively priced against a similar Marvel product or not is irrelevant, but even if it wasn’t Marvel hasn’t got the option to reprint ROM, so a bit of negotiation (and money) to grease the wheels and I can’t see ROM Classic trades not happening (in print at least).
Why didn’t Marvel just get someone to write the Cyclops SW set-up in any of the other X-books? Cyke was in an arc of WatXM while Bendis was on Uncanny, so it’s not that Bendis was the only one allowed to write him or anything.
Re Touch, that was actually part of DC Focus, a line of ongoing titles which might politely be called “ill-fated”.
@Dave
My guess would be that when asked, Bendis would say that he’d do it. And so Marvel itself would say “Look, Bendis is doing it.”
And by the time it sank in to enough people that Bendis wasn’t going to do it, it was too late.
Bendis is Marvel’s current vastly overrated writer of the decade. Marvel’s not going to turn on him yet, not without something massive going wrong.
Kelvingreen basically nails it. The problem with Spider-Man of the last few decades was never the marriage, per se. One More Day missed the point. The problem was that he had aged past the point where the character is truly in his element…. high school.
But times change. If Marvel is more or less officially passing the teen Spidey torch to Miles, why not have a married Spider-Man again somewhere down the road??
It’s an interesting argument that Spiderman’s natural element is high school. But he graduated high school in issue 28 in 1965. I have read and seen plenty of versions where he is in high school, but in the main comics Peter has not been a high school student in my lifetime – and since that’s 50 years I’m guessing not in the lifetime of almost all current readers. Given that, we’d have to believe the Spider-Man comics have been out of whack for all but a few years of the character’s existence.
Had Stan Lee had known Marvel would still be publishing Spider-Man for decades to come, he probably would not have been in a rush to have him grow up so fast.
They’re not likely to marry Peter off again. And certainly not before they have a good sense of how the new Peter/Miles status quo is going to work out in the long term.
Besides which, the readers who grew up on married-Peter will dissipate over time just as my generation who grew up with a single Peter did.
I can’t see Marvel reestablishing the Spider-marriage. If anything, they would re-introduce it as a new event rather than a continuation of the old. I, for one, do prefer Peter not married to Mary Jane.
Bendis is this generation’s Liefield.
While it’s true that comic book Peter Parker has been out of high school for a long time–and the movies tend to move him out of that range pretty quickly–the two most recent cartoons, which might have higher circulation/viewing numbers, do feature a teenage Peter Parker, so that version is certainly out there in the public consciousness.
And apparently Ultimate Spider-Man, the current ongoing cartoon, is the longest yet at 104 episodes, which annoys me a little because I can’t stand his fourth-wall breaking schtick–but then, I’m not really the audience.
“The problem was that [Spider-Man] had aged past the point where the character is truly in his element…. high school”
I have trouble with that argument, in part because of what was stated above about his graduation (which to me feels like complaining that Batman’s been wrong since Alfred showed up), but also looking at sales of Amazing over the years:
http://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights/amazingspiderman.html
(Unfortunately, pre-1966 data wasn’t included, but Stan Lee has said that sales went up during Romita’s tenure. For what it’s worth, anyway, given his oft-stated poor memory.)
IMO, what made Spider-Man work as a character was his gradual but continuous evolution over the first 30 years or so. Some years sold better than others and creative success is in the eye of the beholder, but it doesn’t look like anything that happened with the character drove fans away until Marvel started trying to “fix” him, starting with “Peter’s the clone” and moving onward. (Not that the 90s comic implosion helped.)
“Had Stan Lee had known Marvel would still be publishing Spider-Man for decades to come, he probably would not have been in a rush to have him grow up so fast.”
Maybe not, but that raises the question of how much Marvel’s willingness to mess around with stuff played into its early success. If they’d gone a more traditional route (which was basically “establish the basic elements and formula and stick to it”), would those characters have sold well enough for Marvel to “still be publishing [them] for decades to come”? Who can say?
(errr… sorry, max. I’m really not making it my life’s mission to disagree with you…)
Just another counter argument here: what if Spider-Man actually doesn’t work best as a high schooler? One of the main themes of the character is that his responsibilities to his family, friends, and career are often compromised by his being a superhero. Wouldn’t that tension be better illustrated if he were a college student or someone working his first job after graduating?
Spider-marriage supporters love to cite “naturally developing Peter” as a case to reinstate the marriage.
Personally, I find it hypocritical. If you’re truly in favor of that, then you should be perfectly okay with Mid-Life Crisis Peter driving around in a Spider-Mobile that his teenaged kids refuse to get into for fear of being seen by their friends. Becuase that’s what comes next. At some point.
I usually read such remarks for what I believe they are: “I grew up on a married Spider-Man therefore I want MY status quo restored. What? Kids? Wrinkles? A receding hairline? No no no. He should only develop to a point. The point being the point in which I latched onto the character. THAT point.”
“(errr… sorry, max. I’m really not making it my life’s mission to disagree with you…)”
I’ll see you in Hell, Dave!!!! No, it’s cool.
In fact, I might have got the discussion off track when I claimed Spidey’s element is high school. That was a mistake because I mistakenly gave people the impression I was drawing a line at Amazing #28.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a sense of “youth” is what makes the character tick best.
“He should only develop to a point. The point being the point in which I latched onto the character. THAT point.”
That viewpoint is hardly unique to marriage supporters. Plenty of single Spider-Man fans who don’t agree he needed to stay in High School.
“Graduating from High School was okay, but it should have stopped there.”
“It’s okay that he’s less of a social misfit that he was in the beginning, but he should still be a high school kid.”
“As soon as he got a girlfriend, it all went wrong.”
Whatever you like.
If you want to be kinder, it’s simply that if you were introduced to the character at a certain stage of his life and became a fan, how do you argue that the version of the character is “wrong?” It didn’t drive you away, after all.
And if you really want to play the middle aged card, going with the pace they were taking up to, say #400, we’re looking at an average 5 years to 1 ratio. Continuing with that, Peter would be hitting middle age around… 2118. Maybe by then the world would have been ready for such a thing? 🙂
“Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a sense of “youth” is what makes the character tick best.”
To me, Spider-Man was the epitome of the concept of the “realistic super-hero.” He had to study to get good grades, he had to work to pay the rent, he had a number of relationships, he made mistakes and mostly learned from them, he had weak moments, there were good days and bad days, he wasn’t magically able to be in two places at the same time so he actually had to choose between saving the city and making it home in time for dinner, etc.
Along those lines, it wasn’t so much “youth” that made him tick for me, it was the sense of “growing up,” which, if you do it right, is a process that continues right up until you croak. There’s never a point where you truly have all the answers. There’s always more to learn, more to experience, etc.
Taking that potential away in favor of tying him to a specific version of “young” really ruined the character for me. But I have about 30 years or so of “my” Spider-Man to work with (with occasional glimpses for some years after that). Hopefully fans of today are enjoying theirs.
“If you want to be kinder, it’s simply that if you were introduced to the character at a certain stage of his life and became a fan, how do you argue that the version of the character is “wrong?” It didn’t drive you away, after all.”
Some of today’s readers came in during the Clone Saga. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t shit.
The marriage roped off more story avenues than it opened up. And since he doesn’t NEED to be married then it’d be stupid to reinstate that status quo. Like I said before, the pro-marriage lobbyists will dwindle over time. Already have. They’re being gradually replaced by new readers coming in after OMD/BND.
I used to read Spiderman – UK reprints in the early 80s and then the pretty much classic late 80s comics – stories like the Sin Eater. I stopped not long after the wedding, mainly because I’m an X-Men obsessive and the line started to expand around that time (as a 13-year-old in 1988, I didn’t have that much money). The money worried, freelance photographer Spider Man was the most accessible, more, for me, than the earlier high school stories. I wasn’t interested in superheroes who were like me, but the great thing about Marvel was how it made the fantastic relatable.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that most of the SpiderMan stories regarded as “classic” took place in college, not high school
I reckon of all the Spidey I’ve read, married/unmarried is around 50/50, so I’ve no great preference, and I never got the impression the marriage was limiting things.Let’s look at ‘Superior’ as an example – if Ock had taken over with Peter married to MJ, he could’ve just chosen to drive her away to make things easier for himself, and that’d be the only real difference it’d make to the story. Would Spider Island suffer for having Pete with MJ instead of Carlie Cooper?I’ve yet to hear anyone make a good argument for why the marriage was bad for the character, while there’s the obvious counter-argument that OMD was terribly stupid.