Episode 20: Ally McBealing Around The City

In this week’s episode, Amanda and I discuss:

• DC Entertainment’s / Warner Bros.’s rumored slate of movie released, from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 to a rumored new Batman movie in 2019, whether DC is overextending, which ones we’re most looking forward to, how Sandman could work as a movie, and who should play Shazam,
• The recently announced Quentin Tarantino / Matt Wagner crossover of Django Unchained and Zorro, why we’re not as excited as we might have been 15 years ago, and what Django crossovers we’d rather see,
• Sex Criminals #6, written by Matt Fraction with art by Chip Zdarsky,
• Thunderbolts #27, written by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker, with art by Carlo Barberi, and:
• How World Cup soccer is enough to put an American – even a baseball-loving American – right to sleep.

But some disclaimers:

• This show is recorded live to tape, like a live radio show. While this might mean some dead air and dead ends, it also means that anything can happen.
• This show contains spoilers. We try to drop a warning ahead of time, but tread lightly.
• This show contains profanity and adult language, and is not safe for work. If it was translated into sign language, it would be only a middle finger. Wear headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:26:33 — 79.3MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Django Adapted: Django Unchained #1 Review

When DC Comics announced at San Diego Comic-Con that they were planning to release a comics adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained, which is out in theaters today, I was not particularly enthusiastic, even though I am a Tarantino fan from years back.

Why? Well, picture the first fifteen minutes of Pulp Fiction. Now try to picture that quarter hour as a comic book. Hell, imagine it as a major event comic with A-list talent; let’s say they got Frank Miller to do the art, because after all, the man knows how to draw people in black and white suits. What do you think that comic book would look like? That’s right: it would be 75 pages long with half of those pages being word balloons. And the visuals would be of three different angles of two guys sitting quietly in a car, giving Miller all kinds of unexpected free time to shriek at hippies to get off his lawn. And we know that those would be some killer word balloons, but as a comic book? Not the most exciting-sounding four-color experience. Frankly, if you pitched a comic issue about two guys in a car talking about cheeseburgers and the metric system without using the name “Tarantino,” even Brian Michael Bendis would say, “Meh; sounds kinda… talky“.

So at first glance, a Tarantino comic sounds like a rough idea on its face. However, Django Unchained is a western, which at least implies a certain amount of action and visual dynamism… but to play Devil’s Advocate, Pulp Fiction was a crime movie, which would also imply some adrenaline pounding, but which really only would provided it during the, well, adrenaline pounding. So how does this comic play? An ultra-literate Jonah Hex shoot ’em up? Or, to paraphrase Eric Cartman: a couple of gay cowboys talking about pudding?