RSS Feed
Jun 29

House to Astonish Episode 128

Posted on Sunday, June 29, 2014 by Al in Podcast

It’s our last episode before our hiatus, and we’re talking about Bob Kane’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, DC’s new creator royalties structure, Warren Simons’s promotion to Editor-in-Chief at Valiant, Elden Henson and Rosario Dawson joining the cast of Daredevil and the latest developments in the Kirby estate case. We’ve also got reviews of Outcast, Superman and New Avengers Annual, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has got 99 problems. All this plus sorcerous Storage Wars, Batman’s voicemail and the Golden Age Starscream.

The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that you can get our terrific tees at our Redbubble store, and help us raise money for Alzheimer Scotland at our Justgiving page.

Additional foley work on this episode courtesy of Mike Koenig, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Bring on the comments

  1. Cass says:

    The Bob Kane, crook, thing is something I’ve read and heard about many many times on the comics blogosphere. Not to say that any of it is wrong, but it does strike me as received wisdom at this point. Seldom are sources cited. As someone who knows nothing of the facts of the case, can you recommend a well-researched book or long-form article that deals with the origins of Batman in an essentially dispassionate way, i.e. focuses on facts and relevant creator interviews. A quick Amazon search for “Bob Kane” turns up Kane’s own book “Batman & Me,” as well as “Bill The Boy Wonder,” both of which appear to be wearing their bias on their covers.

    Sorry for the boring question, I just find the topic fascinating.

  2. quizlacey says:

    Most of what I know about the Bob Kane/Bill Finger situation comes from reading the excellent Gerard Jones (he of Green Lantern: Mosaic – and, indeed, most pre-Kyle 1990s GL books) book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book. It didn’t seem too intentionally biased when I read it, although Finger certainly doesn’t come out well.

  3. Al says:

    Chris Sims is, as with all things Bat-related, the person to ask on this one. This is a useful starting point: http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-164-bob-kane-is-just-the-worst/

  4. Stu West says:

    Yeah, the answer to the question of why Bob Kane got such a great deal on Batman is that he and his mother simply made his birth certificate disappear and claimed that he’d been a minor when he signed the original contract. By this time Batman was incredibly successful, so DC/National basically gave him a sweetheart deal rather than risk losing all rights to the character. Then when the contract came up for renewal it was around the time Batman was a TV phenomenon, so Kane was once again laughing all the way to the Leeds.

  5. Odessasteps says:

    Theres also the Bill Finger book that Ty Templeton drew.

  6. Cass says:

    @quizlacey: Thanks, I’ll check it out. Did you mean to say “KANE certainly doesn’t come out well”? I’ve never heard anything bad about Finger.

    @Al: That link leads to a rant against Kane. That kind of thing I’ve read before. It’s not what I’m looking for.

  7. Stu West says:

    @Cass – you might want to have a look at this recent blog post by Mark Evanier:

    http://www.newsfromme.com/2014/06/28/real-dynamic-duo-kane-finger/

    and its brief postscript:

    http://www.newsfromme.com/2014/06/28/p-s-30/

  8. Al says:

    Well, Sims certainly has an over-the-top rhetorical style, and he’s definitely very much against Kane, but he didn’t get there from nowhere (and he does provide a couple of good starting points). The letter from Kane to Batmania (here: http://twomorrows.com/comicbookartist/articles/03kane.html ) is a good example of Kane taking credit for literally everything, even things where nobody seriously casts doubt on Finger’s claim to them. The Men of Tomorrow book that was mentioned upthread has some thorough coverage of the Kane/Finger situation.

    The difficulty is that it’s hard to come by something that’s completely dispassionate about it, because articles or books that set out to cover the facts have to do so by swimming upstream against what is publicly posited by DC, i.e. that Kane was Batman’s sole creator. If that’s the starting point, then the article or book is presumably motivated, at least in part, by a desire to redress the balance, and it’s hard not to come across as being in Finger’s corner at that point. Men of Tomorrow is probably the closest I’ve seen to a “just the facts” version of events.

  9. Curtis says:

    Is there anywhere online where I can listen to the first 51 podcasts? (As a way to fill the void left by your absence) Libsyn only has 52-present.

  10. Al says:

    Not at the moment, Curtis (at least not to download – I think Mixcloud has about ten more), but I’m hoping to be able to start putting the older ones up as HtA Classic or something like that during the hiatus.

  11. Oh, no! The comics! Quick! Build a fireproof suit out of metallic holofoil!

    I will fight any man, woman or genderfluid cybertrothal over the awesomeosity of Jubilee’s classic dishwasher non-costume. Far more in the vein of Ace than Gambit, hein?

    Hoping that Dawson is somebody normal rather than just hoiking her into the expected action role. Oh, bejabers: WHAT IF SHE’S GLORIANNA O’BREEN, TO BE SURE (x2).

    Although, what, honestly, are the chances of keeping her out of a costume? Rosario Dawson in the Marvel Cinematic, Televisual, And Streaming Internet Universe? Could you imagine the creys if she can’t go toe-to-toe with Tripp and The Cavalry?! She’s never gonnae be Kiki McDuffie. Echo. All up and down the street.

    And can you imagine if JRjr had drawn Superman in the T-shirt and jeans costume? Pa-zow.

    Doc Strange is coming back? In a proper comic? A Doc Strange comic? (He’s “Dr.” because American surgeons don’t hew to the ancient vocational apprenticeship tradition that we do over here in Broken Biscuit) I wonder who’d be mad enough to take that job on?

    Marco Rudy’s artwork is maddening in a way that sort of defies sense. It’s just TOO gorgeous, TOO perfectly presented, TOO successfully experimental. You know how you might see a celebrity in real life and think to yourself, “Wow, they’re gorgeous. I’m gonna chance me arm,” and then you pass a reflective surface and realise that you’ve just bought thirty quid’s worth of Karl Kesel Superboy comics and look like the son Gloin doesn’t show pictures of to Elvish princes? Like that.

    Anyway, Rudy’s art is just so everything/everywhere that it might be a real nice fit for ongoing Strange. Lots of formal tricks required in both the art and the writing. None of your illegible captions instead of casting spells with dialogue and gestures.

    Anyway, have fun on hiatus. May the flames of Imp-Torch stay far from your polybags.

    //\Oo/\\
    http://twitpic.com/e779kz

  12. quizlacey says:

    Ahem. Yes. I absolutely meant Kane.

    Over there – shiny thing!

  13. Damien says:

    I’m sure I have read that the reason Bob Kane got such a good deal is a combination of his father being a lawyer and that he was a minor when he signed the first contract with National.

  14. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    As alluded to above, Kane got a good deal because he subsequently claimed he’d been a minor, but the dates apparently don’t bear this out. He was born in 1915, according to his gravestone, which would have made him 22 in 1937, which according to Wikipedia is when he started in the comics biz.

    Also according to Wikipedia, his dad was an engraver.

  15. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    It’s just occured to me you could make an analogy between Bob Kane and Terry Nation, the so-called creator of the Daleks.

    Nation’s contribution consisted of writing “robot villains with creatures inside them called Daleks”. All the exciting visual stuff was supplied by Raymond Cusick.

    The interesting bit was that apparently at the BBC being a freelancer did give you power, at least if you were Terry Nation and had a really good agent. Cusick was a BBC employee and was therefore just doing his job, so while Nation ended up actually owning the Daleks outright, he fought a long and hard battle to get rewarded with a hundred quid bonus and a Blue Peter badge. (I’m not even making that last bit up.)

  16. Joe S. Walker says:

    At the beginning of that Human Torch story, before the main action he puts out a burning building by absorbing the flames – i.e. there’s dramatic foreshadowing, a very rare thing in a Marvel story of that period.

  17. Gary says:

    Just a weird aside, but Chief Justice Clarence Thomas is a big fan of comics, especially Milestone Comics and, specifically, Dwayne McDuffie’s Icon. He’s even quoted Icon on occasion. It is covered here:

    http://dwaynemcduffie.com/opinions/archives/BTYB10.php

  18. Max says:

    Religious themes=d horror for the sake of itself does nothing for me. I’m not a believer, so there’s no anxiety there for material to exploit. It just bores me. Demonic possession can work as a metaphor. The Showtime series Penny Dreadful has done good work with the concept recently, I think. It will be interesting to see what HBO does with the rapture (another concept to many twits think is real) in The Leftovers.

    Zombie stories are another matter entirely. They’re pretty simple, really. They basically speak to the fear of society breaking down around you, and artists can craft whatever social or political message around that they want.

  19. BobH says:

    My initial reading is that DC’s new “participation” plan is that it’ll probably mean lower payments (often nothing but the original page rate) to people on lower selling books, maybe higher payments for better selling books.

    As I understand the old system, a periodical direct-only comic pays royalties if it sells over 40k, while the collected reprint of that and the digital edition pay first copy royalties. So if your book sells 30k monthly in print, 3k digitally, and the collection sells 2k, you’d eventually get royalties for 5k digital and collection sales.

    In the new scheme, the print and digital periodical sales go into the same basket, and if they come up short of the “sales threshold which triggers participation payments”, you get nothing. They say they’ve changed the applicable thresholds, but given “the new thresholds and percentages are designed to generously reward high sales performance” I’m guessing that won’t mean higher payments for low selling books.

    For the collection sales, they say they’ve added a threshold for that, so it’s no longer first copy royalties. We don’t know at what level they kick in, but we do know a lot of periodicals fall short of the 40k threshold, so I think it’s safe to assume some collections they publish will fall short of this new threshold.

    For digital-first releases, their old scheme was that those got no additional payments, and now they will, but I’m not really sure any of them except maybe INJUSTICE was selling well enough to meet their thresholds anyway.

    While US supreme court justices have the option of serving for life, most in modern times choose to retire before that point, whether to have a like-minded president choose their replacement or just to have a retirement. Only one has died in office in the last sixty years.

  20. BobH says:

    Oh, wait, I see ICV2 has the new thresholds
    http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/28940.html
    “The new thresholds, which are higher than the old but incorporate digital copies as well as print, are 60,000 for comics, 15,000 for original graphic novels, and 3000 copies for book collections of previously published content.”

    So if you previously were on a book which sold 55k in print, 5k digitally, and 3k in the collection, you’d get royalties on 23k of that. Now you’d get nothing but your page rate.

  21. Niall says:

    I really couldn’t get into NA – even though I rather like Doc Strange.

    The pace felt all wrong.

  22. I don’t agree with Paul on the Exorcist. I don’t think the moviemakers are believing that demonic possessions is for real. They just set a mundane and realistic setting before going into the supernatural stuff.

    I think the Exorcist is a great metaphor for puberty. The young girl goes through physical and mental changes, always stays in her room, acts horribly while her mother is afraid, not recognizing her child anymore. Then the mom gets help from catholic priests who, of the whole wide world, are the most afraid of human sexuality and independent thought this side of Talibans.

    On this joyous note, I like to express my sincere good wishes to the Kennedy family. My only advice: when the baby sleeps, always take a nap.

  23. Nate says:

    I love you guys

  24. Alex H says:

    I find it interesting you brought up Doctor Who while talking about Strange – I’ve thought for a while that you could easily use the Who format for Strange, combined with the whole enough time/resources aspect. The whole concept explained to a layman is kind of “What if House became the Doctor but with magic”.

  25. Fynn says:

    Does anyone know where I would of read that Human Torch story in the 70’s or 80’s? I read it as a kid in black and white in the back of something else but for the life of me I can’t remember what. It may have involved The Micronauts……maybe.

    Should say this was in the UK.

  26. Oli says:

    Hey,
    I think you mentionned John Romita Jr’s X-Men run as being his first significant work for Marvel, while he was actually coming off a quite long and quite solid run on Amazing Spider-man (from 208 to 250 I think). I’m mentionning this because I do think it has genuine artistic value and is worth checking out if you haven’t read it (for the first issues, his art was way too inspired by his dad’s, but then he finds his own voice -his first, very realistic own voice, the one you have on his first X-men run, not his more cartoony current voice) and it is really good. Although his Peter Parker kind of looks like a bodybuilder who is about twice the weight of the Peter Parker he’s going to go back to in his later returns to the book.

  27. Oli says:

    About the exorcist thing, Kirkman’s edito as you read it really pissed me off, but I realize and I can’t fairly explain why without flooding the comment section with way too much text, so I won’t. But the anger is still here and I probably won’t be able to get rid of it until I’ve written it all down. I’ll post a link if someone’s interested.

  28. Will says:

    Really enjoyed the final episode of House to astonish. It did veer off into courtroom drama for a bit and the rumoured death of a major character didn’t occur. It did however tie up all the loose ends in a satisfying manner. Themes like how much astonishment one person could handle and general musings on suspension of disbelief felt right for the characters.

    Congratulations to both of ye on the beginnings of family life!

Leave a Reply