House to Astonish Episode 102
Bags of stuff to talk about this time round, with chat about Marvel’s SXSW announcements (and the fallout from their 700 Firsts giveaway), Justice League of America‘s sales, the casting of Drax the Destroyer, the delay of the adjectiveless X-Men book, Afterlife with Archie, the closure of JManga and a quick trot through the June solicitiations. We’ve also got reviews of Lost Vegas, Aliens vs Parker and Age of Ultron, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is seeing other people’s lives flash before its eyes. All this plus War is Awesome, Captain America’s dramatic walk and the impracticalities of a Top Cat heist.
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On the Marvel/Comixology debacle, when I heard the first time of it (which actually was right before all crashed out), I thought not the big number of free #1s was going to be the problem, but mostly the very small timeframe the promotion was going to run.
Two days is way too short for such a huge volume of data and obviously in this little time everyone has to squeeze in all at once.
Big Dave should be ok as Drax, I’m hoping he somehow gets to reprise his “weapons are not only welcomed, they are allowed” line.
It’s certainly better than those Triple H as Thor rumours that were kicking around years ago.
Regarding that “Hulk: UK Vault” book you mentioned… this is actually a re-solicit from a year ago, but with less material than previously solicited. The price remains the same.
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Based on your review, “Age of Ultron” sound a lot like “Terminator” with super heroes. I was on the fence about getting it, but I think I’ll pass.
Bautista did very well in Man with the Iron Fists basically playing Drax so I think his casting was playing safe. I am much more excited about the casting of Pratt as Starlord.
I’m guessing the Phanton Zone trade is all about The Man of Steel movie but I’m preordering this trade in hopes they continue these collections of early 80s like the recent Nightwing collection of Action comics weekly.
I really feel like Age of Ultron has this we waited way too long to tell this story grime all over it. Teased for four years then dumped weekly and most tie ins done by outside creators. My bets are on a rehab of the nasty parts of Pym before Ant Man the movie.
Just for the record, John Kowalski made his appearance in the post-Steve Gerber Man-Thing series. I think it was Chris Claremont writing, or maybe Michael Fleischer.
I guess we will get to see Drax give someone a powerbomb. Also, Bautista showed some personality when he was a d-bag heel right before he left the WWE.
Is there any trope more played out in big 2 comics than the dystopian alternate future where some villain has conquered the world? And ultron 1 was a horrible version of it.
I think the comixology just showed how people will grab whatever free co ics they can. Look how people act at free comic book day or at a convention where freebies are given away.
As far as Age of Ultron goes, out of possible choices of dystopian stories going on at Marvel at the moment, Jeff Parker’s Dark Avengers is so, so much better.
America definitely does grant citizenship to anyone born in on American soil (I think one of the only exceptions is a diplomat’s kids). Even if they wanted to change it, they’d need to amend the Constitution, since it’s in one of the amendments abolishing slavery (the 14th or 15th, I think).
The Gerber/Colan PHANTOM ZONE is being reprinted because Zod&Co. are the villains in the movie. DC does that a lot, a Superman/Luthor book when SUPERMAN RETURNS came out, some villain themed books for the 1990s Batman movies. And it’s a really good story, probably the best of the (admittedly small number of) stories Gerber wrote in the DC Universe.
I suspect Age of Ultron’s pacing problems are as much Hitch as Bendis. Captain America Reborn was not by any means a good comic anyway, but its pacing was utterly destroyed by Hitch taking Brubaker’s 22 page scripts and padding them out by a full ten pages on top of that (they admitted this in interviews, but tried to sell it as “more for your money”) by taking half page sequences and stretching them out to a double page spread plus a page or two on top of that.
[Reminds me of the story Romita Sr mentioned about when he took over Daredevil, and after a few pages Stan Lee started getting Kirby to do layouts for him because he was spending too long on sequences like “Daredevil gets into costume” when Lee basically wanted a jump cut, only modern Marvel regard that sort of thing as A Plus. Hence the Twix page.]
PS: Paul’s distain on saying “hype thing” early on was hilarious!
That Absolute Luthor/Joker book is terrible value. $100 for about 250 pages of story. I liked Luthor (or Man of Steel, or whatever they’re calling it now), but it’s not worth that much.
Also, DC charging $4.99 for the first issue of Superman Unchained has put me off that book. Annoying precedent too.
No mention of the monstrous Wolverine omnibus that’s upcoming?
Re the X-Files, I thought it perked up a bit when they replaced Mulder and Scully, mainly because Robert Patrick’s a really good actor.
When X-Files ended, wasn’t there still an impending 2012 alien invasion coming? I remember hoping there’d be a movie to show it.
I’ll be getting the Hama Wolverine collection. I started buying monthly comics regularly towards the end of his run (with Kubert) and these issues have never been collected. I’d been getting Wolverine classic, but it stopped. This is rebranding it, I guess (picks up from Classic without missing an issue).
As I recall, The X-Files ended on a rather apocalyptic note, with aliens coming to ravage the Earth, but then the second film chucked that all aside in favour of Billy Connolly as a kiddie fiddler and a happy tropical island ending. So who knows?
I remember the Topps X-Files comics being not bad, certainly better than their hercules/xena comics.
I think you guys may be overthinking the “alternate universe” thing. They’re just saying this is supposed to be the main Marvel U timeline that’s been screwed up somehow by Ultron. Same as the original Age of Apocalypse, before they retconned it into an alternate universe so they could revisit it.
Also how widely did Peter re-reveal himself post-Brand New Day? I remember him unmasking to the FF and the New Avengers, but I just read it as him saying that because She-Hulk and Beast and others were standing there too.
Oh and based on the costume it’s Peter not Superior.
That said it is a terrible book, kind of caught me off guard after I’ve been enjoying his X-books.
When the second X-Files movie came out, Carter basically said that if it made enough money he’d be able to make a big budget invasion movie to wrap up all the conspiracy blah. But then no one went to see it.
Also, cheers for the heads up on those Kieth and Breathed artbooks. That’s going to be a pricey Wednesday for me.
The original Petrucha/Adlard run on The X-Files is one of my favourite X-Files stories in any medium, and well worth getting. Might buy it in IDW trade, as I had it in lovely over-sized UK reprints but seem to have lost half the issues at some point.
I do hope this is a hit so they’ll do the Doggett/Reyes spin-off, but sadly the first arc on this new comic is ‘people close to the X-Files are getting bumped out’ so I’ve got a horrible feeling my beloved X-Files B-team are about to get chucked under the bus.
Bumped *off*, not out.
I’ve watched about two seasons of X-Files on Netflix. Mostly it’s all been standalone episodes.
Speaking of companies making their own DoS, SPX registration today was also unable to handle its traffic.
Joe Q’s top secret ending to Age of Ultron is new-history Peter Parker mentioning that he once lived near a woman who had a neice called Mary something, who he spoke to, like, twice.
Thanks to you BobH, I will order the PHANTOM ZONE tbp. If I’m not mistaking, Phantom Zone is the very first official mini-series published by the big 2.
Re: JManga vs Comixology vs Marvel Unlimited:
JManga was fucked from day one. When they launched, they had hundreds of titles listed which were never made available for sale (some had pointers to Dark Horse or Viz’s website to buy them in print), their prices were initially $10 for a 200 page tankoubon (it took them about two months to realize that dog wouldn’t hunt) AND you’ve got the absurd payment structure. You had to get a monthly recurring subscription ($10 a month) to get points to spend on books, which were almost guaranteed to be enough points to buy one book with money left over, but not enough to buy two books. You couldn’t buy points without an active subscription until like a year in, but if you had a sub you could buy MORE points in addition to what you get with your sub. AND it was web only (they finally delivered an Android reader in, like, November but the iOS one never did materialize). The whole thing was a fucking disaster from start to finish, and it really isn’t comparable to Marvel Unlimited. MU is the ‘library card’ service you describe (and while I dropped it years ago, I’ve come back since the app launched…and hell, the app lets you temporarily download a few books at a time for offline reading to save data plan space) but JManga was, literally, the worst of all worlds.
Yeah, the Phantom Zone mini is a superb read, get it if you’ve not read it and want a decidedly different pre-Crisis Superman Family story.
@Pascal The first limited series was World of Krypton.
Thoughts:
1) Page counts are doomed on digital media. They’re rubbish anyway. I mean twenty pages could be made up largely of double page spreads (of rubble) or it could have scores of little David Aja boxes. Likewise the pages could be filled with throwaway scenes (of rubble), or they could have dense storytelling. I imagine the easiest way to evaluate a comic would be the number of frames, though that’s far from ideal.
2) I quite like Danger Days (the album), and I think it could do very well as a comic. You see, it’s not really a concept album, the songs are mostly about rooting and dancing and the regular pop-rock stuff. But there is a running theme in the album of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with defined characters and motivations. It would be easy to flesh it all out into a full fictional world.
I chuckled when I read that ‘Big’ Dave Batista have been cast in a Marvel movie. He’ll certainly look the part, and probably be fine enough. Hopefully they’ll throw in a token clothesline or something similar. He isn’t the thing I’m worried about though, I’m a bit unconvinced about them taking the franchise into space.
I thumbed through the first issue of Age Of Ultron and honestly it looked like it could have been done in 6 pages maximum. But this is Bendis, and I guess Hitch’s cinematic double-page spreads, so of course decompression is the order of the day here.
It’s an ‘event’ comic, people should know by now what you are going to get: an overly hyped story told in many more parts than it needed to be, an unnecessary character death, and an ending that is not really an ending but more of a prologue for future stories.
I did enjoy how you said “rubble” so many times that the word lost all meaning and sound.
You raise the issue of which Spider-Man it is and I’ve been wondering the same thing with Hickman’s Avengers series. Is it Peter or Doc Ock in that book?
@Paul C, I think it was Peter who joined in flashback, but itwas clearly Otto who stole Sam’s lunch and then bitched about being mistreated by “infants” in issue 6 or 7. Or else Hickman has no idea how Pete talks.
It’s an ‘event’ comic, people should know by now what you are going to get: an overly hyped story told in many more parts than it needed to be, an unnecessary character death, and an ending that is not really an ending but more of a prologue for future stories.
I would put money on it.
“It’s an ‘event’ comic, people should know by now what you are going to get: an overly hyped story told in many more parts than it needed to be, an unnecessary character death, and an ending that is not really an ending but more of a prologue for future stories.”
Sounds like every Geoff Johns story for the past 5 years.
I thought most of the Avengers didn’t know Spidey’s identity. Wasn’t there a gag where the Avengers were all getting paychecks, only Spider-man couldn’t get one because he’d have to sign it as a real person?
“I thought most of the Avengers didn’t know Spidey’s identity. Wasn’t there a gag where the Avengers were all getting paychecks, only Spider-man couldn’t get one because he’d have to sign it as a real person?”
I believe that was in the last volume of New Avengers. The Avengers all knew Spidey’s identity, but he wouldn’t reveal it to the Avenger’s liason Victoria Hand, because she used to work for Norman Osborn.
@Zach Adams: Thanks, that makes sense.
Camelot 3000 is all Bolland art (which is probably why it took so long to come out) and is worth a look for that alone, but Barr’s story is pretty good, too. It was remarkably controversial for the early 1980s, too, even though it seems tame today.
Thank you lads for reminding me why I never buy ANYTHING with Brian Michael Bendis’ name on the cover (Daredevil End of Days being an exception I am regretting minus the Sienkiewicz art).
It sounds like Age of Ultron has more Rubble Rubble than Grimace. I haven’t laughed this hard listening to HTA in a while.
And now Neil Gaiman’s Spawn character Angela is going to make an appearance in it. I can’t wait.
“Also how widely did Peter re-reveal himself post-Brand New Day? I remember him unmasking to the FF and the New Avengers, but I just read it as him saying that because She-Hulk and Beast and others were standing there too.” >> That’s how I read it as well.
“Oh and based on the costume it’s Peter not Superior.” >> It’s definitely Peter.
I would regard AGE OF ULTRON similar to YOUNG AVENGERS: CHILDRENS CRUSADE… it fits within the MU tapestry if you squint a bit…. but if you try and align everything that is happening in all the books with all the characters packed in there… it’s not quite going to work.
But looking back, does anyone truly remember that Steve wasn’t Captain America when YA:CC started? Does anyone care that much about lining up all the continuity ducks?