Oct 17
House To Astonish Episode 70
Posted on Monday, October 17, 2011 by Al in Podcast
We’re back, and better late than never, as we’ve got a round-up of absolutely tons of news out of NYCC for your delectation and delight. We’ve also got reviews of The Shade, The Strange Talent of Luther Strode and Power Play, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook is pretty hellish. All this plus masterless samurai, demonic Elvis impersonators and the harbinger of deathless inertia.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or accessible via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
I have no real source to quote for this but I believe the new Deathstroke costume is based on a Hamner design. Cully Hamner strikes me like Bachelo does as an artist whose designs are never done justice by others.
Shade is a comic that like Batwoman ruins the new continuity for me since it is shoehorned into it after being scheduled well before. I heard a rumor that some of the new books will take place on different Earths so I’d be happy for Shade to be on Earth-2
Also Action Comics starts a Steel back up with issue three or four.
Oh, lovely. As if we needed another reason to hate Jeph Loeb, his very presence is causing Paul – who survived Mutant X, Chuck Austen and the bloody Neo – to contemplate dropping the X-books. 🙂
No mention of Christos Gage taking over X-Men Legacy? That was the one piece of Marvel news that had me genuinely excited, as Avengers Academy is my very favorite Marvel book right now.
Funny to hear the guys complain about a Marvel ennui, as I think there are a number of good books right now and the last thing I’d want to see is a DC style reheat to ruin Avengers Academy or Thunderbolts or the Cap books.
Isn’t it pronounced Lie-feld, with a long “i”?
I heard a rumor that some of the new books will take place on different Earths
Isn’t part of the point of the New 52 to do away with all the alternate timelines and have everything happen in one setting? I don’t really follow DC but I’m sure I picked that up from somewhere.
It merges WildStorm with the DCU, but it’s also booted the JSA back to Earth 2 (so as not to contradict the idea that superheroes only emerged a few years ago).
I’m not honestly sure how Liefeld pronounces his name but I’m guessing it’s German, in which case ie would normally be an E sound. I think.
“Isn’t it pronounced Lie-feld, with a long ‘i’?”
It is – at least that’s how he pronounces it.
Re Angel-Punisher: this is the worst Golden and his pal Sniegoski have ever written.
And in two pages with just voice over captions Garth Ennis put this nonsense right.
Dracula as a pyramid scheme is a hilarious idea 🙂
The Shade maxiseries was definitely planned for the old DCU, Robinson announced it in the afterword for the final Starman omnibus back in January.
Hey guys, thanks for the best comics-podcast out there!
Shade will be 3 times 3 issues by Hamner, Javier Pulido and Frazer Irving respectively, with ‘Times Past’ inbetweeners (issues 4, 8 & 12) by Darwin Cooke, Jill Thompson and Gene Ha (who has a history with Shade history).
From the horse’s mouth on an iFanboy Don’t Miss podcast.
Keep up the wonderful work & I do hope Paul enjoys the Starman Omnibi.
L&P
–nout
Oh and completely unrelated & maybe only because I refuse to ever update my iTunes again: since you’ve changed the RSS (or whatever it was that thankfully made downloading the podcast a LOT faster), the little drawing of the House doesn’t show up in iTunes anymore. Hardly essential, but I liked having it there.
Maybe the new Scarlet Spider is Earth-616’s Miles Morales!
Re Earth-2: Anyone else noticed the new Huntress mini calls her “Helena”, but doesn’t mention her surname?
On the other hand, I’m not clear[1] that Mikaal and Congorilla were never in the Justice League. (And the mere mention of the League means it probably wouldn’t fit into Earth-2 either.) Batman Inc. still happened. War of the Lanterns still happened. Who’s to say Robinson’s JLA run (which went to the trouble of breaking the team up just before Flashpoint) never happened? Not the Justice League book, which has taken the curious step of setting the core of the shared universe five years before everything else.
[1]A phrase with which I open almost every discussion of how the New 52 actually works….
William von Hammer appeared in one panel of Robinson’s Superman, incidentally.
Olivier being worried about overcrowding reminded me of one of the middle series of Old Harry’s Game, where he enters the world of men to try and make us behave better, so we don’t end up being his problem.
“If you’re an environmental campaigner and the environmental disaster that will destroy the world has already happened, what do you do?”
Say “I told you so,” probably.
The Ringer wasn’t ACTUALLY killed by Scourge! He reappeared as a cyborg for a while to stop his wife from going on a rampage over his death, until he finally died in a Thunderbolts flashback (when she was in that book. Before being squished by Graviton).
> Who’s to say Robinson’s JLA run (which went to the trouble of breaking the team up just before Flashpoint) never happened?
Well, with that version of Supergirl being deleted, the status of Jade being very unclear with Alan Scott being shoved off the main Earth, and Jesse Quick also being in doubt for much the same reason…
You joke about Death Death, but Marvel UK did put out the Death’s Head spinoff Death³.
You must do an entire podcast as Frank Cho and Dracula.
So, does your theory about Marvel’s demons mean that the real Marvel Satan died on his hellish toilet with an infernal cheeseburger stuffed in his gob?
I remeber some speculation at one point that Huntress and maybe Birds of Prey were on a different earth.
I think the way things are headed we are going to see some kind of sorting out events mini within a year or so. Didio says if it isn’t in a comic then don’t believe it then he goes and tweets no crisis events ever happened and sits on a panel where Bobbie Chase confirms that there were no Teen Titan before this #1. I just can’t see a “have your cake and eat it” reboot working in the long run and Didio’s flippant attitude to it doesn’t help.
start over or just leave it alone.
I too have wondered if the Scarlet Spider will be Miles Morales, but I’m not sure what the point of that would be. I don’t care about Kaine or Eddie Brock. Boring characters.
DCnU’s approach to continuity and history appears to pretty much be “Hypertime”, except that DC is afraid to outright call it that.
Something to consider about Shonen Jump going digital and its library model:
Shonen Jump is fighting online scanslations. Popular manga is available online within days of release in Japan, though the quality isn’t great for fast releases. If Shonen Jump catches up, then people might be willing to pay to read a more professional translation.
There are also weird manga situations like J-Comi. Created by manga creator Ken Akamatsu, J-Comi offered legal free previously-commercial manga to Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Comi
I think there was some other kind of library-style service in Japan, but I cannot remember, and may be mistaken.
@Paul
In answer to your question: “Does Marvel have anything?” It sure looks like they’re trying to build up to something big with these…
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/marvel-its-coming-phoenix-teaser-111017.html
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/nycc-2011-marvel-its-coming-111005.html
“And in two pages with just voice over captions Garth Ennis put this nonsense right.”
Yeah, and then Ennis went on to write “Born” where he established that Castle made a deal with either the Devil or perhaps Death itself that ultimately cost him his family. And that Castle’s subsequent actions would be keeping him (the malevolent entity) “busy.”
Heh, how good that I never read “Born” *g
@Reboot: “Well, with that version of Supergirl being deleted, the status of Jade being very unclear with Alan Scott being shoved off the main Earth, and Jesse Quick also being in doubt for much the same reason…”
Yeah, good point. On the other hand, Brightest Day appears to have happened (since Swamp Thing is where that left him), despite the fact that version of Firestorm never existed either…
Dan DiDio just doesn’t seem to get that knowing what’s happened and what hasn’t isn’t just a nerdy thing continuity geeks worry about, it actually helps to convey where the books are now.
Nothing happened before the new 52. It’s like those old Crosby-Hope “Road” movies. The movies would usually begin with the characters roughly where the previous movie left them, but they’re essentially playing different characters, so nothing in the previous films really happened.
It’s much easier to read the new DC as if these characters didn’t exist until now, than to always be stressing over what happened and what didn’t happen. Everything you think you know is now backstory that will be explained in-story as needed. So, for instance, Starman and Congorilla are friends. It doesn’t matter how they became friends. They could have been in the JLA together. They could have met some other, completely different way.
@Robert Fuller
I would like to just pretend history is there waiting to be told but a little under a quarter of the line is just picking up like nothing changed (Green Lantern titles etc). Meanwhile we are having books start clean with characters that affect the existing titles.
There are books that I want to read but I can’t get past this and will probably give up soon.
One of the best examples of a book where guided view works is Atomic Robo, but only with the animations *off*.
When I read #1, there’s a great scene where one panel has a dark tunnel and the next is the exact same image with Robo’s eyes staring out. Unfortunately with the animations on, it flows from one panel to the next.
With them off, it just looks like his eyes blink on…
The upside to this Loeb nonsense about bringing Sabretooth back is that the board would be reset back to zero and that horrific story arc can be swept under the same well ignored rug as the Draco storyline.
Tdubs: Yes, but you can still read them as if they’re the beginning of the story. Sure, the first issues of Green Lantern and Batwoman and Legion of Super-Heroes read a bit awkwardly that way, but once you get past that, it’s not difficult.
I love these stories which on some level are always left with as little reference as possible – The Crossing, The Draco, The Loeb Wolverine story, The Clone Saga etc.
@Brian: I didn’t read the “deal with the devil” in Born as anything other than metaphorical. It’s pretty clear that it’s a traumatized man talking to himself, trying to rationalize the fact that he’s gotten through a hellish corner of the war by killing many, many people.
I suppose the larger issue is that Ennis, and now Jason Aaron, have altered the character slightly; he’s still motivated by the death of his family, but that didn’t make him a killer, because the war had already done that. I feel like this is a notable change in the character, but a good one.
@sam: I actually had been reading it as Castle talking to himself all the way through the series, up until the page in the final issue where the voice tells him “You remember I mentioned there’d be a price?” as he’s looking upon his family. If he’s talking to himself, then he’s correctly guessed that his family will be taken from him in the near future, which is rather amazing.
“You joke about Death Death, but Marvel UK did put out the Death’s Head spinoff Death³.”
I always wondered how that was supposed to be pronounced. And how to you catalogue that alphabetically, anyway?