Episode 123: Binders Full of Metahumans

DC Films’s Suicide Squad opened this week, to impressive box office numbers, if not so impressive reviews. But here at Crisis On Infinite Midlives, Rob in particular is a fan of John Ostrander’s and Kim Yale’s 1980s original DC comic, so we went out of our way to see the flick, excited to spend Sunday preparing to talk about it, in depth, during this week’s show.

Then Rob’s day job called him on on Saturday night and worked him like a dog until 5:45 a.m. Sunday morning.

But we refused to let that stop us! So we spent our few waking hours today rereading dozens of issues of Ostrander’s Suicide Squad (and a few more modern issues, and even a few issues of Michael Fiffe’s Copra for some flavor), hashing out problems with the movie, discussing the differences between Ostrander’s nihilist Deadshot versus Will Smith’s devoted dad, arguing about whether the movie’s Harley Quinn was insanely devoted to Joker or ready to accept herself as a massively anti-social person, speculating about whether the rumored studio edits and deleted scenes would have made a better or worse flick, and bickering over whether three naps in a single 14 hour span is healthy.

So you’re in for a unique show: we taped this late, didn’t have time to really edit it at all, and recorded it in a state of profound fatigue hysteria. And we still somehow found the wherewithal to discuss DC Rebirth Suicide Squad #1, written by Rob Williams with art by Phillip Tan!

And, as always, some disclaimers:

• This show contains spoilers. If you haven’t seen Suicide Squad, and want to avoid being told whether or not Captain Boomerang consummates his forbidden love with a fluffy pink unicorn, you are hereby forewarned. (NOTE: This is not a sleep deprived hallucination. It is an actual and valid question introduced in this multi-million dollar studio-backed major motion picture).
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. Hello!? Aussie Unicorn Rogering! Get some headphones.
• We repeatedly misidentify this episode as number 113 during the show. We are very ,very tired.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:57:29 — 117.2MB)

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Thanks for listening, suckers!

Flipping The Bird: The Savage Hawkman #1 Review

Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. But what do you care? It’s not like you were gonna read Hawkman anyway.

And, as usual, one last Wednesday morning review before the comic stores open…

For good or ill, we’ll end our coverage of DC’s New 52, which officially ends today with a new batch of #2 issues, with The Savage Hawkman #1. The Savage Hawkman is the story of Carter Hall, who has a harness made of Nth metal that allows him to… um… fly and stuff… and he… has… yeah, sorry. The problem is I don’t care about Hawkman. The problem is that nobody cares about Hawkman. The only person who cared about Hawkman was Hawkgirl, and nobody gave enough of a fuck about Hawkgirl to leave her alive.

The upside of that general apathy is that it allows writer Tony Daniel to try almost anything he wants to make Hawkman interesting for a new generation. The downside is that what he tries feels like throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Almost literally.

Daniel opens this new chapter in Hawkman’s rebooted life by showing how exciting it is to be Hawkman… by having him be a depressed alcoholic who hates being Hawkman so much he tries to kill his costume with a flare gun.

Let’s take a moment and examine that, shall we? As a New 52 book, this is meant to make new readers excited about characters they aren’t familiar with. And Daniel has decided to introduce us to this new Hawkman by telling us that:

1. Even Hawkman thinks that being Hawkman sucks, and:
2. Hawkman’s power set is so weak that even Hawkman himself thinks he can be defeated by a roman candle.