House to Astonish Episode 126
It’s our last episode before our big live show (which, in case you’ve missed our many, many reminders about it, is on May 31 at the City Cafe in Edinburgh, with tickets on sale now – at this link – for £12 and granting you entry to the live podcast, a buffet and the House to Astonish Comics Quiz, where there are bags of prizes to be won). We’re talking about Superior Spider-Man issues 32 and 33, Steven T Seagle and Mark Dos Santos’s Imperial, the new movie Batman costume, the trailers for Constantine and The Flash and the general state of the comics TV union for 2014/2015. We’ve also got reviews of Original Sin, Justice League United and United States of Murder, Inc. and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has a brave new world to sell you. All this plus Josie and the Pussybats, a human turducken and Doris the tealady’s cybernetic leg.
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Re: the content in Constantine, it’s airing in the same timeslot as Hannibal. Considering what that show gets away with on a regular basis, there really shouldn’t be a problem with censors.
I kind of wish Matt Ryan was using his actual accent and giving us a Welch Constantine.
I really like US of Murder.
It really reminded me of [a recent Vertigo series] especially in the twist premise.
Al, I thought the current Deadpool book started out okay. The opening arc with the zombie presidents was an amusing idea stretched out about two months too long. However, after that the team got a better handle on the pacing and the book has become really good.
The recent arc The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was, hands down, one of the best Deadpool stories ever. I know your income is about to be much less disposable (I have two kids myself), but if you see the issues on sale, I highly recommend them.
” All this plus Josie and the Pussybats, a human turducken and Doris the tealady’s cybernetic leg.”
my favourite part of the fortnightly podcast is reading the intro. The actual podcast is all right too, i suppose.
We were going to do the doors in Star Sapphire, but it clashed with the Crimson Dynamo on the window frames…
I agree about Geoff Johns and the GL movie. When Spider-Man 2 recreated the exact shot of Peter walking away from a bin with his costume, it was kind of cool. When Superman Returns did the cover of Action Comics #1, it vaulted over a low bar to be the best part of the film.
When GL did Young Hal seeing his dad’s death from Green Lantern: Secret Origin it’s just “Does anyone apart from Johns actually care about this?”
On the disposable-income front, this is why I still swear by Marvel Comics Unlimited. I’ll wait the six months to save THAT much on being able to read everything, especially if I can bide my time reading practically every past Marvel comic when I need something to pass the time (i like reading/rereading entire runs and series on it, sometimes a hundred issues or more straight). I made back my annual cost, even assuming a reduced rate for digital back issues, some time back in February… 😉
Another sterling effort with this week’s pod.
Not trying to be an armchair expert or to over-sell it in anyway, but the monthly Walking Dead book (#127)did one of those jump-forward things when 2 years have come and gone since the last issue.
Apart from providing a jumping on point for new readers, the new status quo looks to be rather interesting.
And at least that War storyline is over.
I read the start of Duggan and Posehn’s DP run in HC and thought it was excellent. The Bronze Age flashback issue was especially fun and, although Tony Moore was good for zombies, the art takes a step up for the second half. Can’t wait for the second HC.
The Superior Spider-Man issues sound like the sort of story that SHOULD get the 19.1, 19.2 label.
…this week’s Amazing Spider-Man 1.1 is accurately numbered because it’s about 10% of a good comic…sorry.
Arrow is definitely better in season 2. Both seasons of the show fly in the face of ‘don’t take it too seriously’, but it works. I’d say it shows, along with the Bat-trilogy, that you absolutely CAN do capes without any attempt to lighten the mood for the general audience.
Yeah, I was highly skeptical of the whole Arrow thing after reading the tie-in comic, but it totally gets brilliant* at about episode 7. Like Shield, it just needed a bit of time to settle in, work out what it wanted to be.
I mean, on paper, it sounds like honk. Full of all the stuff that turns me right off American drama, such as lots of pretty rich people having #dynastyproblems. I mean, it pretty much uses sets from Smallville to do a Batman-meets-Lost show.
But it works!!!! On purpose!!
!!!!
He could do with his full name, mind. The most important part of names like Green Arrow and Green Lantern is the definite article “The.” It’s synecdoche, innit? THE Green Arrow, rather than Hoodie Bowman or whatever. Swashbuckley.
I liked the trailers, right enough. ConstantEYEne’s wandering accent – he’s supposed to sound like Eric Idle’s Nudge-Nudge, not Jimmy Corkhill – made me smile. Ryan’s slip into South Welsh worked for me…but then I always thought Ioan Gruffudd should’ve used his natural accent for Reed Richards. “Mae’n Clobberin ‘Amser!” and so forth. But I’m guessing we’re only going to see John in the UK for the odd Very Special Episode. The Nightwatchman – remember that? Remember when Maid Marian was a superhoodie ninjavenger? – nice to see her again.
(digression: have been rewatching Heroes. Had actually forgotten the Oiyerlund bit. It can get so much worse than a dislocated dipthong. Sure an’his name was Bab O’Paulsson, bejaybers, etc.)
The Flash looked pretty good. The shoulder pads are a bit much, but in motion…yeah. The “tragic motivation” bit gave a little too much away, and I always confuse JD’s brother with that guy out of Numb3rs, so it’s only now that I realise that the guy out of Numb3rs isn’t in it.
I dunno. Arrow isn’t so very dark, The Flash won’t be so very light. Hopefully, they can both strike a mixture of tones.
Agent Carter! Taking bets on Tommy Lee turning up? How long are they going to spin out the Mystery Of Mister Carter, do you think? I like Hayley Atwell, so I’m looking forward to this. (and I’m eternally grateful that the division of IPs prevents this show from being stuffed full of every superhero’s rubbish ancestors.)
The new Batsuit continues the inculcation of the Jim Lee Aesthetic, probably. I don’t like the massive Batlogo, but I’m glad they’ve gone with something a little more theatrical. I’m betting we’ll see a beskirted Wonder Woman ere long.
//\Oo/\\
* – Roy Harper’s introduction will make you laugh *so hard*.
Might be a while since you’ve seen the Green Lantern trailer, but it played up the comedic aspects very heavily.
Regarding the Agents of SHIELD scheduling – I think Channel 4’s handling of it for the UK has been worse than the typical stop/start US broadcasts. We were getting it the same week up ’til Christmas, then it stopped. And didn’t start again for months, so that by the time Winter Soldier came and went we were weeks from AoS catching up. I understand C4 sitting on a few eps so they could go through to the end of season with no more breaks, but they could’ve done it so that we got the last couple back on same week airing.
AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. in particular had the problem where they knew going in that the third act of the season was going to be wholly overturned by CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, so they had to slowly set that up *without* actually mentioning particularly keywords that would potentially spoil surprises.
Besides that, both that and ARROW had the issue in their first seasons of introducing comic book shows that were expected to be seen by a larger audience than just comic book fans. As such, initial episodes needed to lay down rules that we as devotees of serial genre fiction are wholly accustomed to but is the needed bridge for, as I call them (in MAoS’s case) “the mom who saw THE AVENGERS and watches other ABC shows” and is going to want to learn about the characters in a different fashion than those of us used to learning-via-action (as is taught in serial comics, or even in the compressed two hours of an action comics movie).
By the second half of the first season of either show, the full audience was aboard and things picked up. However, had either gone for the full action-genre method from Day One, much of the *television* audience wouldn’t have watched and there wouldn’t have been enough of a carry-over *comics* audience to support the programs alone (the same as with the films adapted from comics, hence many of the changes that comics fans complain about that are made for other viewers’ sake). Look back in time and remember how much of a “CW show” that SMALLVILLE was in the beginning before you had Hawkman flying around and Kryptonians & alternate Earths everywhere…
Re: Deadpool, IMO the best of the current volume have been the flashback issues. Really quite funny, well-paced stand alone stories.
Original Sin will end with the heroes saying “we’ve defeated Orb, but we may never know who has Uatu’s other eye”. Then Nick Fury will turn to the viewer, lift his eyepatch, and wink.
“Tru Calling” was indeed a series staring Eliza Dushku (and a pre-fame Zach Galifianakis) as a morgue worker who would find herself reliving her day after a dead body asked for help, and she’d go looking for the person she knew was going to die and try to save them.
But when you were discussing “iZombie” I was reminded me “Pushing Daises” in which the hero piemaker could bring the dead back to life for a minute (a minute only or else someone else had to die) and was often visiting the morgue to use his gift to help his private detective friend solve the crime/mystery of the week.
Didn’t DC try and turn Kid Eternity into a ‘speaks to dead people detective’ with their National Comics one-shots a couple of years back?
Adam Dtrange = Dr. Strange + Adam Warlock?
I would be in the minority but I also thought about Neighbours when you mentioned Lucy Robinson
That’s nothing. The X-Men character Bishop has the rarely-used first name of Madge.
The Big 2 comic publishers seemed to have diverted all of their creativity to the number department. I’m psyched for Bendis’s Avenging X-Menforce number eleventy-threeve point AWESOME
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