House to Astonish Episode 87
We did promise that we’d be back midweek, and we are (just). We’re talking – a lot – about Marvel NOW and Marvel’s publishing plans in general, Monkeybrain Comics, the Amazing Spider-Man opening day box office, Marvel’s future movie plans and the Harvey Award nominations. We’ve also got reviews of Infernal Man-Thing, Atomic Robo: Flying She-Devils of the Pacific and The Hypernaturals, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe can keep its hat on (except it can’t seem to keep its hat on). All this plus a taste-test of Hershey’s chocolate, pants with Spider-Man on them and the Legion of Super-Heroes with a moustache.
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I know I’m cynical about Marvel these days, but even so this NOW thing has a whiff of Heroes Reborn about it.
Is there an archive somewhere of the old Podomatic episodes? I’ve got some of them saved, but I’m missing a bunch.
She-Devils #1 is NOT the best introduction to Atomic Robo; I’d say that the volume 1 or volume 4 digital TPBs (both of which are pretty cheap) are much better simply by virtue of the fact that v1 establishes the ground rules for the universe and the character as well as telling a couple of stories from different points in Robo’s life as well as the overarching narrative of Helsingard, and v4 is four one-shots that not only provide different perspectives but are also funny as hell.
I think the best start for Atomic Robo is the Free Comic Day issue. Free, available on Comixology, done-in-one, and tells you everything you need to know about Robo.
Silver Age X-Men running around the modern day could be very funny. Like they face an international terrorist supervillain, and they deduce that his motive is that he wants to steal all the gold from Fort Knox so he can buy the Olympics. And Angel hires a secretary and assumes that she’s secretly pining for him.
Si: The problem with the FCBD issues is that by starting with a DR. DINOSAUR story, you’re setting the bar unreasonably high…
Are they from the 60s, or from 2002, cause if it’s the second that sounds pretty lame.
Congratulations, Paul!
“Are they from the 60s, or from 2002, cause if it’s the second that sounds pretty lame.”
That’s the problem isn’t it – if you say they’re from the sixties you pretty much break marvel continuity as it is, if you say they’re from the last ten-fifteen years (or whatever is the current rolling time-line dictates as “year zero”) you lose all the culture shock value: “I say Scott, internet connection is far quicker than in our time, also reality TV is far more prevalent in this dystopian futuristic nightmare”
Hah, great way to learn about Paul’s impending nuptials. “Oh, right, you’re getting married in three weeks, so I guess it’ll be awhile until the next episode, huh?”
Also – I’m starting a lobby to hear the missing “guess who” episode. The people must know!
Yeah, when you remove the 60s element from the silver age X-Men to fit the sliding time-scale, it’s not that much of a culture shock. If my 15 year old self met current me I’m sure he’d be a bit underwhelmed, but then I’m not sure I’d give much of a damn about his opinion and the X-Men would probably feel the same way.
Tho I could see Scott getting a bit depressed upon hearing about his torrid love life and two failed marriages.
Interestingly enough, the PRINT version of Infernal Man-Thing actually includes a reprint of the original 70s story – well, a reprint of a third of it, as it’s being serialized along with the main story. Which is, in a nutshell, monumentally fucking stupid, as it means a new reader won’t have context until the very end of the story when they should have it at the outset. Hard to recommend in serial form, this one, but a fantastic book in all other respects.
Silver Age Iceman meeting current Iceman certainly will illustrate how no one’s done anything with Iceman for, uh, a few decades.
random notes:
– I don’t think Tomb of Dracula was mentioned when discussing Marvel’s 70’s horror line. I think it is probably the best known and most revered title from the era.
– Also, from the early 70s, there was the whole Man-Thing vs Swamp Thing debate, with both generally believed to have been spawned from the “heap” story
– As timely a Gerber creators’ rights issue is now because of Watchmen and other issues, Gerber himself was certainly no stranger to the issue, regarding all the legal wranglings over Howard the Duck, both in the 70s proper and subsequent decades
– I always describe Atomic Robo as “Hellboy as a robot, but light hearted.” Not a slight, as I enjoy the book, but its formula seems extremely similar to what Mignola did. I also would recommend the FCBD book, which had such a great gag in it (the Dr Dinosaur story), I was telling people about for days.
– Bandette is wonderfully charming already, with barely a set up so far.
– Congrats Paul. I hope we don’t get a pod hiatus equal to the one when Al went on his honeymoon.
That Americop series sounds fantastic, I would totally buy that.
He was a vigilante bronco buck,
With a throwing hat and a pickup truck,
And criminals were out of luck,
The day that they all died.
They were singin’,
Bye bye, Mister Americop Pie…
Yeah, okay, I’ll stop.
Congratulations, Paul!
I suppose the trick with the Silver Age X-Men is to gloss over when exactly they’re from in real world terms, and just focus on them being from a time when Cyke believed in Professor X’s dream, Hank didn’t hate him, Jean was alive, and Magneto was an undeniable bad guy running a group called “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”.
(Oh, and look – It’s Batman with a false moustache! As you have spoken, so has it become!)
Congratulations, Paul!
The timeline issue in Silver Age X-Men is of course difficult. In the last 15 years even the Marvel U hasn´t moved that much to qualify as a dystopia. And even if you do this straight, do we really want to read about all the nonsense time – and many fans – so conveniently forgot? “Well, dear Jean, Cyclops married your clone and dumped her and the baby in a minute when you were resurrected. All your relatives got killed because of what you are and you got killed again. Prof Xavier really did you a favour when he made you a pupil.”
– Every single member of the original X-Men has had a villianous counterpart in the current 616 universe (Phoenix/Goblin Queen, Dark Beast, AoA Iceman, Archangel and well… current Cyclops)
– There will soon be three different versions of Hank McCoy running around all of whom look radically different and with very different life experiences/beliefs. Come to think of it, they’re also all different ages by about a decade each. I feel like this is a brand of comic book weirdness I haven’t quite seen before.
I would buy Moustachioed Avengers, but not if Bendis was writing it.
Congratulations Paul!
congratulations, paul!
All the best for the wedding, Paul.
You weren’t kidding about the Infernal Man-Thing, it’s terrific. So did you lads get a week-early digital release or something?
Hey guys, don’t Judge Hershey’s…
(crickets)
Seriously, though, Hershey’s makes some decent stuff – the kisses with almonds in them are pretty good – but if you just get a plain Hershey’s bar or plain Kisses, yeah, that’s pretty much the plain McDonald’s hamburger of candy. (I’m told that American candy in general is much less sweet than British candy, but I’ve never had the latter so I can’t vouch for that)
@Marilyn Merlot – Silver Age Iceman coated himself in snow and modern Iceman actually turns his flesh into ice and can survive being shattered, generate multiple bodies, and grow to giant size. He’s arguably the Silver Age X-Man whose powers have changed the most (albeit mostly through writers and artists who didn’t know how his powers were supposed to work writing or drawing him the way they thought his powers worked so often that it became canon) even if he hasn’t had as many major plotlines.
The more I think about it, the more the concept seems like it would make a good one-shot or mini-series. Each of the Silver Age X-Men has changed drastically but in different ways:
Iceman is vastly more powerful but still the joker no one takes seriously. He’s currently working for two people who haven’t been X-Men as long as he has (one of whom is younger than he is).
Jean is dead, and everyone speaks about her with hushed reverence or thiny-veiled resentment. And there’s a school named after her run by some crazy old stalker perv (which is undoubtedly how modern-day Wolverine would seem to a teenage Jean).
Beast has become one of the most respected scientific minds in the world. And in the process he’s lost most of his friends and the ability to pass for human. And teenage Hank is smart enough to know that modern day Hank’s assurances that he doesn’t mind looking like a blue cat could well just be what he needs to tell himself to get through the day (even if we know it’s true).
No one knows what Angel’s current status quo is. They can’t even be sure he has continuity of consciousness with his old self. He went evil twice, died a monster, and either came back as or was replaced by a delusional amnesiac.
And Scott’s barely changed at all … except for the fact that he’s basically accomplished all his goals while betraying all his principles in the process.
Iceman actually is interesting to study. He’s the classic example of a character never having much substance. When he was originally written, nobody but the stars had much characterisation of course. Beast had his intelligence, which was developed strongly later on. And Jean Grey was saved by the whole Phoenix thing, but is still pretty empty without it. Angel has suffered pretty much the same fate as Iceman, though his being the trailblazer for late 80s BadAss helped him along. But poor old Iceman has nothing going for him. Some writers make a stab at making him the kid and the joker, but it rings hollow because he’s tied firmly to the origin on the team itself, and must surely have grown out of that immature phase by now if he’s the least bit heroic.
So writers compensate for his lack of interesting character traits by messing with his powers and trying to make them interesting. Unfortunately he’s now at the point where he’s so ridiculously powerful that realistically he could end any fight in seconds. Then the writers have to get around that, and have him zooming around on slippery dips and stuff.
At the same time of course, he’s a character who is Important, as one of the founding X-Men and everything, so he keeps being used. And everything that is done to him just tangles the knot tighter. Maybe some visionary will come along some day and cut through the knot with a single page of dialogue that reveals the essence of an Iceman who is both original and true to what we have seen before. I have no idea how they’d accomplish it though.
I’m not sure why there’s hate/disdain for resurrecting Jean. She’s called Phoenix. If ever a character was justified to keep dying and returning… um, this would be it. That’s sort of what a Phoenix does, y’know? Isn’t it inevitable for Jean to return at some point?
She’s only actually died twice and been reborn once*, and the second death was a homage to the first. As superheroes go, that’s downright restrained.
I’m old enough to remember the original Phoenix, who was actually Baron Zemo, the son.
I think that issue of Cap was one of those 70s Marvel books that came out with a record.
@Rhett: There was an issue of Peter David’s Captain Marvel Run that had Marv bring two of his past selves from different times to the present to convince the heroic one to kill the loser one so that the (then-current) mad one will never come to pass. That issue also gave us three Rick Jones (Beatnik, Bucky and then-current singer/songwriter versions). Mental in a great way.
You can buy Hershey’s chocolate from Amazon UK. More than one reviewer there has said that it tastes of vomit.
You COULD do something interesting with a character meeting their past selves (though, again, it something that could sustain a mini or a one-shot, not a running series). The thing is I don’t trust Bandis to do it: even assuming it doesn’t become the confused mass of one-thing-after-another-without-any-thread-to-it of his Avengers run (to be fair – I only read the first couple of arcs, but I’ll take Al and Paul (and almost every other reviewer out there) that he did not improve) I can’t see him make any point other than the done-it-before “gee whiz, thing are sure dark and oppressive today as opposed to how fun and colorful it was when we were younger” that is the automated response of any comic writer doing past-vs.-present (see also – The Sentry, Kingdom Com, Morrison’s Animal Man etc..).
Congrats on the impending nuptials!
I’m surprised Paul didn’t make more of an issue of this being such a step backwards creatively for Marvel. So their goal for the Avengers is to add some X-Men to the mix and their goal for the X-Men is to introduce versions of the characters that already exist? Maybe it makes sense from a business stand point, but then please, tell them to stop calling themselves the house of ideas.
More to the point, the whole Schism storyline that the X-Men have been engulfed in for the past year has been completely torpedoed by all of this, which just serves to illustrate that all of this has been developed as a concept in the last six months, which makes their claims of AvX being “the culmination of years of stories” insulting.
I really don’t like being the cynical sort, but when Marvel comes out and says their big idea going forward is to mesh their biggest properties and reintroduce earlier versions of established characters, I can’t help but feel depressed. As Paul said in one of his reviews, this is the sort of idea Bill Jemas would have shot out of a canon. And I don’t mean to imply that Jemas had that much more insight or vision than the next guy, but he was about creating and establishing something new and different, and more and I more appreciate that way of thinking in a world where we have to deal with the Uncanny Avengers and a remake of a SpiderMan movie that we saw just ten years ago.
Or am I being too cynical here?
I honestly thought Paul was already married…congratulations!
Atomic Robo is, unfortunately, one of those cases where I should’ve just bought the comic and never visited the creator’s blog. Clevinger’s non-stop “build up my own work by tearing down others” shtick guaranteed I’ll never read anything he does.
It’s ironic that the new series has the name ALL-NEW X-MEN, when it by very definition is NOT all-new in any way. Reading an interview with Quesada (CBR?), I was struck that the internal nickname for the concept “Days of Future Now” actually works both as a niftier name AND one that synergizes well with the whole Marvel NOW idea.
And yes to Americop — a thousand times yes!
Granted that having an actual 60s team bust forward to now would be alot funnier, but even with downplaying the actual years and just doing a generic “15 year old novice heroes meet their 30 year old counterparts and realise shit went horribly wrong” works incredibly well as a concept.
While it’s tempting to throw in all the culture shock gags, by not doing so allows the characters to see where they went wrong and have another crack at it. If they go back in time, they could create a divergent timestream where things play out differently. It’s a very nice creative way to have the next incarnation of the ultimate line or a similar to the new 52 reboot without actually just flicking the reset switch. I’m genuinely curious to see where this goes.
Big congrats to Paul.
“It’s ironic that the new series has the name ALL-NEW X-MEN, when it by very definition is NOT all-new in any way”
Yes, it is. I mean, it literally is. That there are ironies inside the name is at least part of the point.
Congrats Paul.
On new properties vs recycling, is anyone else checking out Scarlet Spider?
I know Kaine is Kaine in name only compared to his 90s self but it’s a great read compared to the grinding ‘Nobody Dies!!!!’ character Spider-man has become (I hope Slott is just taking Peter through a phase and he’ll start getting less angsty along the way).
Instead of the Avengers getting X-Men to join, wouldn’t it be better for mutant relations if the X-Men had more non-mutant members? (Yes I know recently we’ve had the X-Club and Danger)…always struck me as weird that ‘Xaviers Dream’ never really moved beyond a mutant only paramilitary school camp; what a great way to promote inter-species peace :-p
Silver Age X-Men has a similar premise to New Mutants: Truth of Death mini from the 90’s.
Jokes aside, the book sounds fun actually. I’ll probably read it.
When you were talking about the Gerber 70’s Man-Thing, I started to remember a book and record combo I had as a kid. It had Man-Thing and a clown who commits suicide, and the ghost comes back and performs to torment people.
I remember it vividly, it confused me so I read it over and over. However, I was starting to doubt myself. Surely no kid’s book would feature a suicidal clown. But the internet tells me it was real and based on Man-Thing #5 by Gerber. Here’s the whole thing to give you nightmares: http://powerrecord.blogspot.com/2007/11/man-thing-night-of-laughing-dead.html
Congratulations, Paul! And Kieron, Al, Paul, someone pitch Americop to Marvel.
Hi guys, I’m a mad Atomic Robo fanboy who followed Clevinger’s link here, and now you have a new listener. I’m sorry to hear you ‘only’ vaguely enjoyed it and didn’t like it respectively, but your equitable, encyclopaedic, strenuously precise criticism is the reason I went on to grab other episodes. To the extent that it’s a logical statement, ‘I don’t like pulp and therefore didn’t enjoy some of the pulpiest pulp on the planet’ is about as reasonable as a person can be. For what it’s worth, for better and worse the oblique characterisation you discussed most has been a deliberate policy from the start in Clevinger’s quest for accessibility above all: http://www.atomic-robo.com/2008/04/03/the-dragnet-theory-of-writing/
Hi there! I’m at work surfing around your blog from my new iphone 4! Just wanted to say I love reading your blog and look forward to all your posts! Keep up the fantastic work!|