House To Astonish Episode 42
It’s Saturday afternoon, and it’s been a fortnight since the last one, so it’s time for another episode of House to Astonish, where we’re looking at Kickstart Comics, Vertigo Resurrected, Kirby: Genesis, the cancellation of Atlas and the launch of Spider-Girl and remembering Harvey Pekar. We’re also reviewing Scarlet, Doctor Solar: Man Of The Atom and Royal Historian of Oz and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe goes all Saturday morning cartoons on us. All this plus actress Holly Hunter, an action figure of Apocalypse’s leg and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
The episode is here – let us know what you think, either by commenting below, on Twitter, via email or or by writing us secret messages in lemon juice.
I just have to ask: Is either one of you a Xbox 360 gamer? Because the weekly Q&A show on there does the same thing with their “let us know what you think” bit.
(Note: I’m not from the UK, so I might not recognized this routine as a reference to something well-known there).
Bizarrely, Weblaus brings something up I was waiting to ask this week: can anyone recommend any good UK podcasts (be they about games, movies, comics, etc.) to a non-UK person? Listening to Paul and Al, uh, fortnightly has developed within me a hankering I didn’t know existed.
I actually read all of the Baum books and a good chunk of Thompson’s stuff ages ago. I remember enough to remember the Cowardly Lion’s buddy the Hungry Tiger. I don’t think Oz is public domain, but official books haven’t been published for years.
Weblaus: I’ve got a 360 but I haven’t heard of the “Let us know what you think” think from their perspective – do they do that for a podcast or suchlike? I just post along those lines because I want people to let us know what they think – any similarity to any other podcasts, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Al, when you mentioned Woodgod as a Kirby character, it sounded wrong to me. I thought he was a Mantlo creation, and indeed Wikipedia indicates that he’s a Mantlo/Giffen creation, albeit around the period of time when Kirby was back at Marvel, so Kirby did the cover of his first appearance.
I’m really not sad to see Atlas gone. I never read the initial series, but I think I’ve probably read everything else they’ve appeared in (both because people said the original series was so good, and because Marvel and Parker seemed determined to shoehorn Atlas into EVERYTHING). I’ve never much enjoyed it, honestly, so giving them a rest and flogging something else doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me.
Sorry for the multi-comments – I’m listening to the podcast and commenting as I go.
The Death of Dracula thing probably got a bit lost in the shuffle. In retrospect, it was a tie-in with the new X-Men book, and the house ads list it as a Heroic Age tie-in IIRC. But it was also “yet another vampire thing” – Marvel are republishing the Thomas/Giordano Dracula adaptation, and I want to say there was some other Dracula stuff recently as well.
That said, it’s been impossible to get a copy of the thing here in Atlanta. Oxford sold out of it (during a week when I was out of town on vacation) and couldn’t get any more copies back in (second printing coming in August, they say), and multiple Titan stores got screwed by Diamond shorting them, and could only scrounge up enough copies among the three stores to satisfy their pull lists as I understand it. I ended up having to order the thing online.
Marvel’s official standpoint on Woodgod (and God help me, they do have one, because of this litigation) is that he’s a Kirby creation because Kirby designed him and the story was written around the design later.
I remember he was included in that faintly ridiculous roster of Kirby characters that ran in the border around the Bullpen page the month after Kirby died. Not the most auspicious of obituaries.
Has the living totem ever met toomazooma, the totem pole guy from fantastic four?
Al: The UK Xbox Live guys do a Q&A show called SentUAMessage every Saturday that can be accessed in the “Inside Xbox” tab. And they close it out just like you do for a while now with “Tell us what you think/Send us a question” followed by various options like Twitter, Facebook, email and at the end a usually very convoluted and bizarre alterantive that’s both unreal and funny – i.e. just like yours.
Valiant never owned Solar, Turok and Magnus; they only licensed them, just as Dark Horse has. I was pretty disappointed in Solar after Shooter’s shockingly good LSH return a couple years back; I hope that Magnus is better, since he’s by far the most interesting of the Gold Key trio.
I would think Marvel’s “official standpoint” on Woodgod and any other character whose creation credit hasn’t been settled by litigation (Captain America, Howard the Duck, not sure who else) is that Marvel created him. Woodgod wouldn’t be subject to the current litigation in any case, that’s way outside of the window of time the Kirby Estate can currently claim copyright reversion on.
In any case, most of Kirby’s 1970s covers for books he didn’t draw were based on layouts provided by Marvel (mostly Marie Severin), unlike back in the 1960s when he was contributing new characters and story ideas on the covers. Not sure if I’ve seen the layout for that one, but I’d be surprised if Kirby designed the character. If the only evidence is a list on a Bullpen Bulletins page, I wouldn’t take that as official, that’s the kind of thing they probably got an intern to cobble together just before the deadline.
Weblaus: How weird, that’s pure coincidence. Interesting, though – I’ll have to check them out now!
Bobh: Sorry, to clarify – Marvel’s position is that it’s all owned by Marvel, but when it comes to who came up with the ideas for the characters, Woodgod’s a Kirby thing.
Jerry Ray: Yeah, they’re republishing the first part of the 1970s Vampire Tales Morbius stuff. I imagine it’s all been prompted by this X-Men story, but the various different flavours of vampire story are all blending into one.
The Busiek/Ross/Kirby news makes me sad.
Grim Hunt was a bit of an anticlimax after all that build-up. Tell me, did you see the last page? No, not that one: the actual last page of the comic, coming after the Kaine back-up and the chipper Lee/Martin double-pager, was a twist ending of the worst kind. Not least because, for the love of Pete, Spiders don’t have twelve blimmin’ eyes.
I mean, I didn’t hate Grim Hunt, but there were bits that just screamed of top-down programming. Araña’s adoption of the terrible Arachne suit and “Spider-Girl” name just make me sad.
And what the hell does she look like in that J. Scott Campbell piece? Marg Helgenberger? Seriously, she looks like Marg Helgenberger (and I pray to Christ that this the only time I see that as a negative). And look at the way Spider-Man is letching at her trouserhams. Wrong and three-quarters.
Trying to set Spider-Man up as the heart of some kind of Spider “family” is just so…bloody DC Comics. Dressing it up as characters passing on some kind of ersatz legacy (really? That superpower is communicable?) doesn’t disguise blatant protection of trademarks, and when it interferes with, or dictates the direction of a good story, it lets everybody down.
(Oh, and hello, unfortunate moment of levity by a man about to recieve some terrible news that might cause him to drop down dead. (I did rather like the Bad News bit, oddly, Electro aside. The faces suddenly go all Gaydos for a second, and the dignity is quaieet supairb).)
All that pish about destiny and prophesy and totemic magic just gets in the way of people actually proving their quality every day of their lives. And what’s more Spider-Man than that?
And here’s a scientific fact from a genuine Master of Science: when a 6’4 man gets his hair cut, he rarely loses six inches off his legs as well. Barbers don’t do that anymore.
The art was good, though. Lark and Gaudiano are the business. But what, really, was the point of Grim Hunt? To undo a great story, and pointlessly tie up a rubbish one, only to immediately undo that, as well? To reshuffle trademarks, freeing up some names and duplicating others?
(And whither Jessica Drew with her sexualised power-set, in amongst all this totemic jazz? Why Julia, and not her? Easy target? And whither Black Tarantula?)
(Anya “Corazón”…Carlos “LaMuerto”…oh, Marvel)
The Kravens collapsed as a threat far too soon. The, aheh, threading together of these particular characters seems forced, and honestly? There’s something about Anya’s line re: her old costume that I find oddly, if obviously unintentionally, insulting.
(the vision of the Bad Tomorrow, however, with Spidey in the awful ’80’s jacket that JMS and JRjr gave him, was hilarious)
Nah. Grim Hunt was an interesting, if flawed – if not compromised – end to a long arc whose main purpose has clearly been to refocus and repurpose Spider-Man’s villains. Which, they’ve done with some aplomb.
And in a piece of typical Parker-aping Craigy luck, my copies of Grim Hunt and Shed (sort of good ending, but does The Power Of Being Really Flipping Needy work any better than The Power of Love?) have just fallen down the back of the chair and got bashed up. Boo! Even the giant spiders currently running around my kitchen are annoyed.
In other news, good to hear Larry Young’s name again. Here’s some text copied from Jason Netter’s IMDB entry:
In Development:
1. Robotech (details only on IMDbPro)
2. The Red Star (details only on IMDbPro)
3. Crossed (details only on IMDbPro)
4. Hench (details only on IMDbPro)
5. The Boys (details only on IMDbPro)
6. Preacher (details only on IMDbPro)
7. Couriers (details only on IMDbPro)
Producer:
1. Battle Chasers (2012) (in production)
2. Wanted 2 (2011) (in production)
3. Major Bummer (2010) (in production)
—-
Crikey! Major Bummer! Looking forward to that reaching UK shores…
I haven’t read Scarlet – and I wasn’t going to, but if it had been in the comic shop today, I would have bought it (I think my store was shorted some books this week, such as WoWaHulks: Spidey/Thor and Manara’s X-Men).
It sounds a bit Warren Ellisy, to my mind – hell, Angel Stomp Future, Transmetropolitan and Quit City all featured characters talking directly to the reader, literally and stylistically – and the whole setup sounds a bit fetishistic (the outfit, the hot girl with brain damage and a grudge). I mean, I think it sounds shit, and the conversation gimmick sounds like flimsy justification for Bendis’ loghorrea. But…Powers, you know? I don’t know if I want to wait for the trade to be proved wrong about it.
On the subject of Vertigo: Resurrected, I would love to see more of Jim Lee’s Flinch-era work. Imagine if that aesthetic had taken off!
Speaking of which: the Casanova colours proved to be loverly. I should have held fast, and not bought it (again), but I don’t feel too bad about it.
And I’m stopping there.
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When you guys first started talking about Royal Historian of Oz, I was momentarily confused and thought you were talking about the ultra-violent HBO television series Oz, set in a prison.
I like how the Build-A-Figure concept totally confounds Paul.
They really did have to start scraping the bottom of the barrel after they did Galactus, the Sentinel and Giant-man. It didn’t help when they put out Apocalypse bits in two different colour variants. Actually, mine’s unfinished. I reached the point where I was so fed up with how Toybiz would do a variant on every figure and still couldn’t paint stuff with a white paint that didn’t bizarrely have blue streaks in it that I never bothered to pick up Sasquatch, who had the other arm.
And it was a bit weird that Onslaught was so ridiculously small. About the same size as the Mojo one.
Giant-Man was actually one of the last Toy Biz Build-A-Figures, Martin.
The only Build-A-Figure I’ve ever been able to complete from any toyline is the Sentinel. Closest I’ve come after that is my DCUC Solomon Grundy, which I’m only missing an arm for.
To elaborate on what Zach Adams said, Doctor Solar, Magnus and Turok were all originally published by Gold Key (a comic subsidiary of Western Publishing) back in the 60s. While Gold Key folded back in the 80s, Western Publishing was still around in the early 90s, when Jim Shooter was trying to move Valiant Comics beyond gaming and wrestling licenses and revive characters from some defunct publisher. After considering Harvey and Archie superheroes (along other things), he decided to approach Western Publishing and licensed the characters from them and revived them. Dr. Solar got a pretty drastic revamp while Magnus and Turok started out pretty much the same (though they wound up diverging from their original incarnations later on).
Once Valiant went out of the business, the rights to the characters reverted back to Western Publishing. Or, rather, they reverted back to Random House, which acquired Western Publishing by that point. And now, from what I understand, Random House licensed the characters to Dark Horse thought it’s Classic Media subsidiary.
Isn’t corporate history fun?
[…] a podcast weekend, so don’t forget to check a couple of posts below for this week’s episode. As well as rounding up the news, Al and I are talking about the […]
Well, I came across the Giant-Man series before I ever saw the Onslaught, Mojo and MODOK waves, but my point was that after the obvious three options of Giant-Man, Galactus and a Sentinel, they had to stretch to think of characters worth doing as a BAF. Hasbro did as well, as evidenced by Ares being one.
Oh and ToyBiz really took the michael with the Giant-Man one. To get the complete figure you had to buy two versions of AOA Wolverine, the only difference between them being that one had a ‘burnt face’.
The bit about Jeff Parker having to write books around an already-produced cover reminds me of how Larry Hama had to write some of the issues of G.I.Joe.
Hasbro and Marvel were doing animated television commercials for the comics, and those commercials always ended with the animation turning into a cover for the comic. And because the animation, understandably, took much longer to produce than the comic, those particular covers (around three or four in a year) were drawn before the stories were actually written.
This meant that Hama either had to hammer that cover image into something that fit into his ongoing storylines (and the covers were usually generic enough so that didn’t take THAT much effort), or take a break from the ongoing storyline and do a stand-alone single-issue story.
Some of those stand-alone issues were my favorite of the series, though.
Isn’t Ross quite involved in Astro City? A fair number of the characters seem to be co-developed with Busiek and Brent Anderson.
Something very bad happened to Alex Ross’s art around the time he was painting the 12-issue DC series Justice. He started to add all these reds and yellows as light sources, rather than, you know, white and shadows. Considering how colorful the characters are to begin with, it just makes things harder to see and distinguish. I don’t know what he’s thinking.
Build-a-Figure is a scheme that has been used in many toy lines. Of the top of my head, I recall a Megaman toy series that had a build-a-figure figure as well as a Dragonball Z set that let you build the dragon. (The DBZ one was rather funny as the completed dragon figure was probably the size of the other figures.)
Build-a-figure as a concept shouldn’t be surprising, as it was an attempt to sell entire sets of figures to people who otherwise might only buy the two or three specific figures that they wanted. And of course if the figure you really wanted was the split figure…
As for Royal Historian of Oz, Oz is the perfect choice because of the series history. There were other people who continued to write Oz stories after Baum, and there is even an organization that tries to claim specific books as canonical.
I remember Baum’s later Oz books. When I was a kid Puffin Books re-released them all with photo covers from Return To Oz.
Baines: There really is an organisation that chooses “official” Historians of Oz? I wonder what they make of the comic’s “bunch of old gay guys with dogs called Toto”?
Regarding the “Comment by” thing – it’s always reminded me of the bit on the Ansible masthead, which tells you Ansible is “Available for SAE or [weird skiffy thing]”.
I lived in Minnesota for three years, and while I’m aware this might not be indicative of the nation as a whole, I was surprised at how many comics I saw in places other than comic shops. Book shops like Barnes & Noble had loads of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, but they also cropped up a lot in supermarkets, and places like Wal-mart. Target (a sort of upmarket Woolworths, or less shady Wal-mart) not only had comics, but they seemed to have special editions of Marvel titles which I never saw anywhere else these would be short collections of the Marvel Adventures titles, two or three individual issues per book.
It’s also perhaps worth noting that, the bookshops aside, the vast majority of the comics on sale were Marvel.
It is a shame about Atlas, but you’re right about Parker’s profile. He’s a good writer, and he was producing the best Avengers comic for a while. I hope he moves on to one of the big titles soon.
Apparently there are at least three other Living Totems, so you could very well have a team book.
Shaman out of Alpha Flight came back from his powerless sabbatical with a three-faced totem familiar, didn’t he? I remember the eagle bit used to come to life and maul people.
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Daibhid Ceanaideach: From how I understand it, the real group didn’t pick Historians in advance, but rather looked at existing stories and decided what would be “official”.
Can I make a review suggestion – Judge Dredd Megazine Issue 300 is released this week and it’d be pretty cool to see Paul and Al review another British comic.