Jun 9
House to Astonish Episode 213
Posted on Monday, June 9, 2025 by Al in Podcast
Two weeks in between episodes? What is this, 2014? Whatever it is, it’s me and Paul talking about Peter David, Marvel and DC’s upcoming Deadpool and Batman crossovers, David Marquez’s The UnChosen, Superman: The Kryptonite Spectrum and Punisher: Red Band. We’ve also got reviews of Imperial and Be Not Afraid, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook hunts alone (in a group of five). All this plus Skrull bin collections, Bruce Banner’s canonically accurate coat and the Space RNLI.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think in the comments, on Bluesky, or via email, and don’t forget to treat yourself to one of our frankly lush t-shirts, right now, while you remember.
Marvel do seem to be getting the better deal in the team up, Batman is a much higher level then Deadpool, You would expect Spiderman or Wolverine for brand parity both of which are a better fit. Though you can do a batman hunts and assassin maybe wade gets recruited by ra’s.
You could argue that DP is currently MArvel’s biggest media character at the moment.
Plus, if Morrison is writing one of them, and based on what he said on our pod a couple weeks ago, we will likely be seeing the return of The Writer (GM from animal man 26), its going to be a weird meta book. So, Deadpool as a fourth wall breaking character makes sense.
Grant Morrison writing Deadpool, especially Grant Morrison writing this book after not working at DC since 2021, is most likely going to be the strangest comic news of 2025.
Well, looks like I am going to have to buy a Deadpool comic book again. I don’t think I’ve paid for a comic starring Deadpool since Remender’s Uncanny X-Force.
@Mark Coale- Deadpool’s success at the movies, though, doesn’t translate to success at the comics. Ziglar’s run has already been cancelled. And Wade’s presence in Deadpool/ Wolverine and Weapon X-Men was a drag on those books’ sales.
At the beginning, Deadpool was a basic by-the-numbers agent for the real bad guy. It was another Liefeld character who had a lot of the traits that would make Deadpool famous – Wildside. That’s the character that was just constantly goofing off, and saying dumb things, to the annoyance of his more serious team mates. I assume most of that behaviour came from Liefeld’s plots rather than Nicieza’s scripts.
It’s funny, Liefeld is remembered for making these iconic characters (and fair enough), but his early stuff is really like one of those evolution sims. Get 10 characters with some variation of white skin, circles around the eyes, swords, robot arms, manic grins, and gigantic triangle hair. Then mix all those bits up in different forms until you get maybe five really well-adapted characters and 50 iterations of basically the same thing that nobody remembers.
I’m not badmouthing Liefeld by the way, I’ve long held that what a lot of people call flaws in his work are actually the very features that made him successful. He’s not my favourite artist, but boy he made New Mutants fun to read.
The way I hear it, Liefield wanted to draw Deathstroke the Terminator, but he was working for the wrong company. So, he made a Deathstroke pastiche. It’s why Fabian Nicieza named Deadpool “Wade Wilson”, while Deathstroke’s real name is Slade Wilson, it was that obvious. Then, Liefield had Deadpool stab himself with his own sword and the rest was history (or maybe I’m thinking of Shatterstar).
It was Joe Kelly who fleshed out the character and the reason Deadpool isn’t another Stryfe, MLF, Gideon, or Shatterstar today. Kelly was doing some heavy lifting also, as he somehow made Deadpool tolerable. I’ve never understood the love for the character.
@Chris V- It was Shatterstar who stabbed himself with tihis own sword.
It was Nicieza’s scripting that made Deadpool more popular than most Liefeld characters. And it was Nicieza who helped flesh out the character in the Deadpool: Circle Chase mini, which established that Wade was a merc dying of cancer who went to the Weapon X project for a cure and wound up getting healing factor that disfigured him. That miniseries also established Deadpool as a conflicted antihero while not letting the reader forget what a horrible person Wade is.
Yet, Nicieza was scripting all the other Liefield characters I mentioned who are barely remembered. Sure, Nicieza wrote a mini starring Deadpool (and Mark Waid wrote a sequel), and yes, that laid groundwork so that Deadpool wasn’t just a cipher like Shatterstar or a nobody like Gideon, but as I said I couldn’t stand Deadpool. I believe it’s Kelly’s interpretation that has made the character so beloved to this day, even if Nicieza paved the backstory for Kelly to build. I think all the readers who kept pushing for Deadpool to be an A-list Marvel character (for some godawful reason) kept hoping for the Joe Kelly series again. If Kelly hadn’t written the ongoing Deadpool series in the late-‘90s, I don’t believe any fans would have been clamouring to continue seeing the character based off the Nicieza mini.
Regarding Shatterstar, I think he could have become a relatively popular character if it wasn’t for Jeph Loeb. I can see why Loeb might want to make Shatterstar gay. What I can’t understand is why Loeb decided to come up with the convoluted “Benjamin Russell” retcon.According to Scott Lobdell, the last issue of Loeb’s run was rewritten and nobody has ever explained why. But Loeb’s issues were contradictory- one issue Beast says Shatterstar has identical DNA to Longshot, a few issues later the Gamesmaster claims that Shattterstar has no tie to the Mojoverse and was merely brainwashed by the Gamesmaster. It took DECADES for Shatterstar to recover from that mess- arguably he never fully did.
I was surprised to hear that the Wolfpack were late 80s. They sound more like one of those forgettable edgy mid 90s groups. Maybe some kind of precursor.
I’m no slave to continuity. But the differences between the Hulk’s character from writer to writer is jarring.
I’m not talking about ‘Savage’ Hulk or ‘Joe Fixit’ Hulk alters. But this constant reset to a ‘Gravage’ Hulk baseline when the writer wants to avoid Banner’s DID.
@Brendan- A lot of characters felt off. Rich seemed to have given up on super-heroing at the start of the issue when he was just going on adventures with Rocket a couple of months ago in Phoenix. (And isn’t Rich the one who always reacts badly when he loses his powers because being a hero is one of the most important things in his life?)Ronan’s return from the dead was inexplicable. And the Super-Skrull was described as a separatist when he was loyal to Hulkling the last time we saw him.
I didn’t like Imperial at all. The whole “political” setup just felt like people were being stupid rather than the antagonist(s) being clever. Also if She-Hulk is going to be a space barbarian instead of in a rom-com where she belongs for any length of time, that would be a travesty.
I haven’t read any comics with space Wakanda so I don’t know if this is something Hickman made up or inherited. But their setup being isolationists with Vibranium monopoly, just like Earth Wakanda, is hilariously lazy.
Finally a love triangle is where three people have overlapping relationships that they don’t want. It’s defined by the conflict. If three people are in a mutual relationship it’s called a throuple, triad, or polycule.
The Space Wakandans come from further into the Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run then I’ve read, so I don’t know anything about them other than that’s where they originated.
In the same vein, is the New Sakarr ruled by Hiro-Kala something that was set up anywhere before this? His entry on wikipedia doesn’t mention it.
I like certain aspects of Hickman’s writing. Imperial #1 had little of them and plenty that rub me the wrong way. Still, much like with HOXPOX and his X-Men ongoing (and his New Mutants ongoing, now that was a misfire) – he’s got his hands on characters I like, so I’ll see what he does with them. Maybe I’ll like it.
The odds for that aren’t very high.
There’s a 50s DC science-fiction story in which the main character is a space pilot named Slag Sorrel. At one point he gets a telegram from his girlfriend saying “GOODBYE SLAG, I’M MARRYING ANOTHER MAN TODAY.” I don’t know if it’s been reprinted any time in the last few decades.
The whiplash going from the last issue of Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk (the Banner and active Hulk personas on good terms and buoyant spirits) to the first of Donny Cates’ “Starship Hulk” (Banner hates, fears and mentally tortures a savage Hulk) was particularly intense. As our good hosts put it, there is a vast range of what Hulk stories can be, but you gotta put some time or connective tissue between particularly disparate ones.
The biggest tell that Wolfpack are extremely 80s is their “super racially and culturally diverse street gang” motif.
I don’t think it came up that Wolfpack was a Larry Hama creation? It kinda sorta is of a piece with all the ninja clan legacy feuds in his GI Joe. And Wikipedia tells me there was an attempt to revamp the concept for a modern audience during House of M.
I read Coates’ Black Panther run; the short answer is that the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda is a time loop thing where modern Wakanda starts a space program, the astronauts get hurled back in time and space, and start building a new home since they can’t get back to their old one. Centuries later, their already advanced Wakandan tech (and sometimes dodgy Wakandan morals) results in a space opera empire that only remembers Earth Wakanda as garbled myths.
I preferred Nicieza’s Deadpool, especially in Cable/Deadpool to Joe Kelly, but Kelly’s writing rarely does anything for me.
As for Batman & Deadpool (or Batman vs. Deadpool), beyond a character that breaks the 4th wall being written by Morrison, Deadpool would actually fit fairly well as a Batman antagonist. A lot of Batman’s foes are people with mental illness, who Batman believes can receive treatment and eventually re-enter society no longer a threat to themselves of others. Some of them even manage it for various periods of time, though there’s typical a backslide.
Deadpool has some sort of mental illness, though it varies in type and is a very comic book depiction regardless. He’s done awful things, but he’s also done good things, helped people, saved the world, without ever getting any real treatment.
Depending on the day (or writer) Batman would either be disgusted by what he saw Deadpool do, or convinced the guy could be something great if he got some help.
Was Nova in that alt reality with Star Lord in Ewing’s GotG? I thought it was just Star Lord in a throuple with two people native to that place, while Rich had a mini-breakdown while Pete was away.
The ebb and flow of Deadpool has always fascinated me, having started reading comics as he debuted and became a big deal.
People forget that, despite having a solo series, by the end of the 90s and early 2000s, Deadpool wasn’t exactly a book that had much of a following or was selling all that well.
I’m thinking particularly of when Jimmy Palmiotti and Buddy Scalera were working on it, and even Frank Tieri’s brief run which tied in with his Wolverine/Weapon X saga.
Even Gail Simone’s fantastic run was far more a critical success than a commercial one – Recall it was one of the books (along with Cable and X-Force) that were relaunched in mid-2000, with Deadpool becoming Agent X.
You’re right, I’ve completely misremembered that. They definitely did have a very close relationship in that series though, which led to a lot of online chatter and speculation about whether they were more than friends (and it definitely reads that way to me). Certainly a very different relationship to what they have in Imperial.
I have the Wolfpack Complete Collection. The trade dress really plays up the 80s of it. I think they were trying to cash in on Stranger Things 80s nostalgia.
Larry Hama bails after issue 3 or 4. I don’t know why. I like that it was an honest attempt to bring some diversity to the MU even if it does feel a little like they were box checking little too hard.
The horror themed cover to the sixth issue is pretty great.
It’s interesting enough curiosity if you ever find it in a discount bin.
oh yeah and Wheels Wolinski does return in Occupy Avengers. He gets to drive a robot transformer truck thing or something.