House To Astonish Episode 62
September is coming, and with it 52 new DC first issues. We’ve got a round-up of all 52, as well as a sprint through the rest of the solicitations, a look at Frank Miller’s Holy Terror, some chat on the opening of the Spider-Man musical and discussion of the impending X-Men relaunch. We’ve also got reviews of 15 Love, Graveyard of Empires and Kirby Genesis, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe makes a love connection. All this plus a selection of guest ales, Millie Collins’s nephew Millie Collins and the influence of Halley’s Comet on Marvel’s publishing schedules.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Wow. That Daredevil villain is exactly the kind of crazy nonsense I buy his Essentials for. (Even without getting into sheer lunacy like Mike Murdock, we did get the reveal that the Masked Marauder was *SPOILERS* Nelson & Murdock’s landlord !)
I can’t quite catch his name, though, and Google gives me nothing. In which issues does he appear ? I’m a bit backlogged on my Essentials – I haven’t reached the Black Widow issues yet – and I’d like to know whether I can look forward to him anytime soon.
Kline’s from Gerry Conway’s run — marvel.wikia.com says between issues 79 and 84. The Kline thing might be one of the odder things he came up with, but there’s a rather wobbly feel throughout his run about what sort of a superhero book Daredevil should be.
Even if it’s coming out when the DC Reboot is going on and after the death of Bin Laden, I think the release of HOLY TERROR in September is to time it with the 10th anniversary of 9-11. Thus, releasing it in a different, less-packed month wouldn’t really be feasible.
Tsk! I kept looking at 15 LOVE in Previews and thinking that there was something there that interested me, but repeatedly talked myself out of it because… well, tennis romance comic. And now you’re tellin’ me it’s actually good! Got to put in some back orders…
I’d love to see tennis Millie Collins show up with her Aunt if there’s any more Kathryn Immonen Patsy Walker comics.
I’d just be happy to see some more Kathryn Immonen Pasty Walker comics.
I believe that the current volume of amazing spider-man dates back to the 1994 Mackie/Byrne reboot, that would put it behind x-men legacy.
As far as reboots from Marvel for the last year or so:
Uncanny xmen
Wolverine
Daken
X23
FF
Daredevil
Punisher
Moon knight
Thor
Captain America
Avengers
New avengers
Iron man2.0/war machine.
This is just off the top of my head
That Mr Kilne stuff was some sort of plot running through Daredevil, Iron Man and Sub-Mariner – that basically wasn’t received very well by readers (according to the letters page in Iron Man #45)and I think Gerry Conway wrapped it up as fast as he could in Daredevil (but no one told Gary Friedrich who was writing Iron Man, so he featured the Kline sub-plot in the same month as the ‘conclusion’ in Daredevil). It was all very bizarre.
“I believe that the current volume of amazing spider-man dates back to the 1994 Mackie/Byrne reboot, that would put it behind x-men legacy.”
I think Al was only counting comics that have NEVER been rebooted. X-Men Legacy/X-Men/New X-Men has never gone back to #1; it’s been the same numbering since it started.
Paul: Yep, that was my rationale – XML has changed its name a few times, but it’s been running continuously since 1991, while Amazing Spider-Man was relaunched in 1999.
I’m still amused that, with the renumbering of UNCANNY X-MEN, the title with the longest run among the Big Two now becomes Vertigo’s HELLBLAZER, coming out continuously since 1988 (in September, when ACTION COMICS, DETECTIVE COMICS, BATMAN, and SUPERMAN all reset to #1, HELLBLAZER will be at #283!)
Might Wolverine and the X-Men not replace one of the umpteen Wolverine titles?
There’s also a John Carter movie coming out from Disney; they changed the title to John Carter of Mars.
There does seem a lot of backward movement in the DCU relaunch, which is odd given the emphasis on getting a new audience; on one hand they’re moving into digital, presumably to grab a new and hip audience, and on the other, they’re rolling everything back to how it was when the current crop of forty-year-old fans were kids.
I too really don’t see the point in bringing Apollo and Midnighter into the DCU.
In fairness, although the Grifter series echoes Rom, it also echoes the early days of the Wildstorm universe, in which they had the alien daemonites running around in human form, and Grifter and the WildC.A.T.s hunting them.
It’s a shame that there aren’t more sport comics outside Japan, as I think it is a bit of an under served — sorry — genre.
Millie is in continuity; she’s got connections to Mary Jane Watson through their modelling careers, and has also appeared alongside the Sentry, which is probably her low point. Millie has another niece, Misty, who had her own series in 1985. Jemas first announced 15 Love — and a film, which was optimistic — in 2003, by the way.
French-Belgian comics have made a foray into the sports genre : most of them are short-lived comedy series (chiefly about football), but there’s also the very long-running Michel Vaillant (mostly about Formula One, but nearly all other motor sports have been featured at one point or another in the 70-and-counting albums).
Football stories were also a mainstay of British comics back in the day.
“I too really don’t see the point in bringing Apollo and Midnighter into the DCU.”
The only interesting thing would be to do a book – ot miniseries – pairing Superman and Batman with those two. A team-up. If Ennis would write it it could be a great joke. Other than this it sounds just odd.
For those keeping track at home on the DC relaunch:
PAUL & AL BOTH BUYING: Justice League, Wonder Woman, Fury of Firestorm, Action Comics, Batman, Batwoman, Justice League Dark, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE, Stormwatch, Grifter, Static Shock, Blue Beetle, Legion Lost (13 titles)
PAUL BUT NOT AL: Aquaman, Flash, Superman, Batwing, Batgirl, Red Lanterns, Demon Knights (7 titles)
AL BUT NOT PAUL: Justice League International, Nightwing, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Resurrection Man, Sgt. Rock (6 titles)
NEITHER: Captain Atom, Green Arrow, Savage Hawkman, Mr Terrific, DCU Presents, Superboy, Supergirl, Detective Comics, Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman & Robin, Catwoman, Birds of Prey, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lanterns: New Guardians, I Vampire, Voodoo, Deathstroke, Suicide Squad, OMAC, Blackhawks, All-Star Western, Teen Titans, Hawk & Dove, Legion of Superheroes (26 titles)
Football stories were also a mainstay of British comics back in the day.
This I am aware of, but aside from strips in a couple of tabloids and maybe Roy of the Rovers — is that still going? — it’s not really a going concern nowadays, whereas the Japanese — and the French and Belgians, apparently — still put out sport comics.
This was one of the surprising things about the Blood Bowl comic Boom! put out a couple of years ago. Here was an actual sport comic — albeit not an actual sport — but there was no attempt to portray it as such.
Oops. Sorry about the broken italics there.
Near Death sounds like My Name Is Earl with a killer instead of a jerk.
Did the word “and” not occur to anyone involved in John Carter: Princess of Mars?
I’m getting Batgirl for the same reasons as Paul, and also because I suspect that if Gail’s BOP plotthreads are going to be resolved anywhere, this’ll be the place.
Agree about Kirby’s lack of interest in continuing with characters rather than telling a story and moving on. The Big Two never got that either. That’s why Marvel missed the point by putting the Eternals in the Marvel Universe, and DC, vaguely aware Kirby had an ending in mind for the New Gods, but not knowing what it was, basically left them in a holding pattern for decades.
@kelvingreen: Roy of the Rovers got cancelled in the 1990s, I think. One thing that disappointed me about Knight & Squire was that Cornell failed to establish that Beryl was a Melchester fan.
(Cyril? He watches the rugger, donchaknow.)
Hmm, Thunderbolts has about 160 issues of continuous publication, or does the wrestling period give it some demerits?
Thunderbolts did get a relaunch/renumbering combo (remember New Thunderbolts ?).
@JD: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/mrkline.htm
Apollo and Midnighter are a bit brutal to pass off as mainstream heroes in a universe with the Justice League in it. If the new Stormwatch series embraces that disconnect by having them bluder about the DCU as if they were still in the Authority in 1999, there might be some good material to mined from it.
Apollo and Midnighter in the DCU just makes me think that there are too many characters in the DCU. Place seems awfully crowded.
@Daibhid I think Beryl is more of a Fulchester Rovers girl. I think Cornell did check some Viz references in to Knght and Squire, vague memory of someone very ‘Barry the Cat’esque dying in the Joker’s spree.
Re- Football comics in general. I suppose there’s only so much you go do with them. Roy lost his magic left foot in a helicopter crash and went into coaching, his son didn’t have the same natural talent….memories.
I guess Roy of the Rovers could consider a reboot (chortle) but he’s sort of a very Barry Allen figure in comparison to todays footballers, especially since the last bastion of decency in British football, Ryan Giggs, has been torn down.
Let us also not forget the Sun had an abysmal daily football strip in some sort of computer generated graphic nonsense.
I would love to read a sports comic about a substitute goalkeeper. Forever warming the bench, the comic can follow his descent into madness as he drifts further into a paranoid Camus/Kafkaesque nightmare. In the final issue he finally gets a game in the 3rd round of the FA cup, he spends the whole game trying to tell fantasy from reality, before dropping a clanger in injury time and getting demoted to the reserves.
David Icke was a goalkeeper once.
I meant Fulchester United FC….not Rovers :-p
Ah, JD, thanks, I’d completely forgotten about that 18-month blip!
“The Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has come to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and is all out of ass.”
Ha, ha, brilliant! (Is that to honour hell freezing over with Duke Nukem Forever finally being released?)
Anyway, for all DC’s faults, they have to get some praise for having the common sense to launch all their titles at $2.99, and not trying to shaft readers. Hopefully it’ll be worth a few extra buys to them.
So Marvel’s next event is the return of the Dark Avengers? And they expect people to be be excited enough to throw money at it??? *head bangs off table*
@Paul C: The Dark Avengers have a pretty good buzz to them amongst most fans, even now. But I think it’s more due to the concept itself rather than the execution.
What most people seem to be completely oblivious to is the fact that most of their tenure the Dark Avengers primarily served in the role of jobbing to the headlining heroes in other titles and did next to nothing memorable in their own book.
I think there needs to be a series about a legion of robots from the future who travel back in time to arrange relationships between superheroes (and villains too) based on cryptic instructions from a computer that they THINK is telling them how to prevent the destruction of humanity but is actually just displaying an old superhero fanfic archive that calls up a random story whenever you hit Enter.
“Well, we got Hawkeye to sleep with Spider-Woman, as the computer decreed, and the future is still a disaster. Let’s see what its next instructions … Nightcrawler and Wolverine? This is gonna be a rough one.”
Call the series “Time-Shippers.”
@Michael R: Have those fans not heard/read of the original Thunderbolts, as the premise of Dark Avengers – villains posing as heroes – was pretty much that.
Looking at that roster now makes for grim reading:
Osborn – well he’s still around
Venom – isn’t actually Venom now
Daken – trying to be as far removed from Wolverine as possible
Moonstone – rehabilitating pretty decently in Thunderbolts
Victoria Hand – a goodie now with Avengers
Marvel Boy – haven’t a clue where he went, probably in a cupboard until Bendis needs him again only to do nothing with him
Bullseye – dead
Ares – dead (I think, Chaos War did nothing for me)
The Sentry – dead
So either Marvel are going to have to sort out/undo a hell of a lot, or they’ll be use different folks to make up the team. And in the latter there is always the very real possibility that they will just come across as second-string losers.
I just can’t shake that the idea is lazy writing for Bendis going back to the well once too often, usually with diminishing returns (The Hood would be another example).
Don’t know if you are open to suggestions for the OHTTOHTTMU… I would guess not, but you may find this amusing anyway.
Just two things:
Trull
http://www.comicvine.com/trull-the-unhuman/29-63809
Bagger 288:
http://www.rathergood.com/bagger288
Actually this may be less a OHTTOHTTMU idea and more of a pitch for a new Ghost Rider comic… Hmmm…
@Jacob: Barry the Cat was, like so much of Viz, a rip off of a DC Thomson character (Billy the Cat from The Beano), so Cornell could just as easily have been riffing on the original.
Enjoyed the podcast. The review of Graveyard of Empires (“zombies in afghanistan”) reminded me of something. Let’s see:
Article on Zombie fandom and “Zombie Hunter” patches spreading among NATO troops in Afghanistan…
http://www.stripes.com/news/downrange-with-the-living-dead-1.123731