Episode 42: Rear Admiral Cyberman

This week we added and installed a ton of new studio equipment for the show… and then used it to spend a few minutes laying in movie sound clips like middle-market Morning Zoo jocks.

Once we got that out of our system (and it is out of our system, we swear), we spent some time discussing the Doctor Who season finale, Death in Heaven. We talk about how the finale resembled a big comic book crossover event, whether the season theme of The Doctor-as-aristocrat really held water, the missed opportunity of Clara insisting that she was The Doctor, and why the English put so much stock in Christmas specials.

This week also brought us the solicitations for the first week of DC’s Convergence event on April 8th, so we go through each of the books and talk about what looks good, what looks great, and what it would take for us to even remotely care about some of the returning pre-New 52 characters (hi, Damian Wayne!).

On the comics front, we discuss:

• Captain America and The Mighty Avengers, written by Al Ewing with art by Luke Ross,
• Captain America #1, written by Rick Remender with pencils y Stuart Immonen, and
• Superior Iron Man #1, written by Tom Taylor with art by Yildiray Cinar!

And now the warnings:

• This show is recorded live to tape. While that might mean that this is a looser comics podcast than you are normally accustomed to, it also means that anything can happen.
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, just assume that the spoilers you fear most will be uttered as the punchline to a dirty joke.
• Speaking of dirty jokes, this show contains adult, profane language, and is not safe for work. Having just bought a crate of recording studio gear, I can state with some authority that headphones are cheap. Get some.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:53 — 78.2MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Episode 37: 50 Shades of Lobo

Hi, my name is Lobo! I enjoy vegan cuisine, fitness, and long walks on the beach. I’m looking for someone who shares my affinity for sword collecting and leather clubs. Could you be my special someone?

With the cancellation of Vortexx on the CW network, this is the first weekend that has had no Saturday morning cartoons on a major television network. And given that seeing superheroes on TV was a large part of what got Amanda and I into comics in the 1970s, we spend some time reminiscing about our favorite cartoons (as well as live action superheroics like The Adventures of Superman and Shazam!), and digging into how modern kids might find comic books. You know, other than billion-dollar Marvel Studios movies.

It is also a week where several comic characters have new faces behind classic costumes. So we talk about them all:

• Lobo #1, written by Cullen Bunn with pencils by Reilly Brown,
• Captain America #25, written by Rick Remender with art by Carlos Pacheco and Stuart Immonen, and
• Thor #1, written by Jason Aaron with art by Russell Dautermann!

And now the legalese:

• We record this episode live to tape. While this might mean a looser show than other comics podcasts, it also means that anything can happen. Like learning about a child named Vlad who apparently lives under the bed.
• We spoil a lot of stuff on this show. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, consider yourself warned.
• We use adult, profane language, and therefore this show is not safe for work. If you don’t have any headphones, ask Lobo. Based on what happened to him in this week’s issue, he’s not using them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:25:47 — 67.3MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

That’s The Power of Love: All-New X-Men #1 Review

As I have stated repeatedly throughout this history of this Web site, I am not the world’s biggest X-Men fan, despite my long time reading comic books. I’m not sure why they never hooked me in, but my guess is that it’s because those titles were the poster child for extensive, convoluted continuity that thrills longtime readers but is simply impenetrable to new ones.

Go ahead and pick a random issue of any X-Men title from, say, the late 1990s. You’ll see Wolverine; okay, everyone knows Wolverine. Then there will also be some dude from the future with a bionic arm, a gun as big as a Buick Skylark, and no feet – he’s the elderly son of one of the other 20-something X-Men. From the future. Yeah.

And then there will be seven guys you’ve never seen in any other Marvel comic, with names that sound like discarded names from failed 80s Sunset Strip hair metal bands (Shatterstar? Tracy X? Fucking X-Treme?). There might also be an alien, and a couple of coin tosses will tell you if Professor X can walk, or if Magento is a bad guy. And each one of them is fucking, once fucked, or is trying to fuck, each of the others. It’s an inscrutable mess that makes General Hospital look like Dick and Jane.

Besides: through it all, Cyclops was a real dick.

But thanks to Avengers Vs. X-Men, even people who aggressively don’t follow the X-Men have been exposed to the characters, and there is no doubt that that event has seriously mucked around with the mutant status quo. So when you combine that with the fact that Brian Michael Bendis has left the Avengers books he did such a good job rebooting and renovating over the past several years by shaking up the status quo and introducing new characters, and started a new book, All-New X-Men, it would seem that this would be a perfect time to jump into the mutants’ story without being bogged down in years of history and relationships. Right?

Yeah, not so much. However, that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Everything Old: All-New X-Men #1 Preview Art By Stuart Immonen

We haven’t devoted a whole hell of a lot of pixels to the Marvel Now! initiative of re-imaging and recasting some books, and restarting others, all with newly mixed up creative teams, partially because thanks to the sheer volume of teaser posters and creative team teases Marvel’s been putting out about the changes since SDCC, and partially because it all seems kinda familiar (but Marvel doesn’t reboot! And Spider-Man has always been an unmarried highly-paid research scientist! And we have always been at war with Eastasia!).

That said, a couple of the books that have been announced are exciting me more than others, and one of them is All-New X-Men, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Stuart Immonen. The concept is pretty interesting and somewhat novel: the original X-Men as created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby – Iceman, Cyclops, Angel, Beast and Jean Grey as teenaged school children – travel forward in time and space (and hopefully Bendis remembers the “space” part, otherwise the X-Men will wake up gasping with their blood boiling somewhere off the shoulder of Orion) to the current Marvel Universe and meet their modern counterparts. Meaning that these five idealistic teenagers who firmly believe they are on the side of the angels in trying to save the world will have to come to terms with the fact that they grow up to be the semi-psychotic angst-ridden spastics who started Avengers Vs. X-Men.

Part of my excitement for this title, despite not being the X-Men fan on the staff, is the sheer number of cool, obvious storytelling opportunities this crossover will provide. I’m no comic writer, but I’m guessing we’re going to be seeing:

Big Dumb Fun. With Pussies: Avenging Spider-Man #7 Review

In a spring season loaded with Batman battling to save Gotham from the Court of Owls, and The Avengers trading punches with the X-Men with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, sometimes Event Fatigue sets in. And sometimes you want a change of pace from the ongoing Superhero Apocalypse, and as you look at your normal alternatives – the Zombie Apocalypse in The Walking Dead or the Zombie Apocalypse in Crossed: Badlands are normally pretty much it – you maybe start wishing for a nice, fun, and maybe a little goofy one-and-done to cleanse the palate as a change of pace.

Or maybe you just have a thing for cats. Maybe your house smells like cat litter and ammoniac urine, the Internet doesn’t give you enough other cats to fill in the gap, and where the rubber hits the road, you’re despondent that you just can’t hug all the cats, despite oodles of free time with which you can pursue this goal thanks to the aforementioned ammoniac smell. Either way, Avenging Spider-Man #7 is the book you’ve been looking for, and between it and Versus, it is living proof that, from the standpoint of just plain fun comics, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want, ever.

This Is About Fights: Versus #1 Review

Versus #1 takes the Avengers Vs. X-Men event, strips out the backstory, the plot contrivances and the other useless crap that is being pounded into this event to make it hang together as a story, and it leaves us with the core idea which is all that almost anyone gives a tin shit about in this event: superheroes kicking the shit out of each other.

Let me offer an analogy: let’s say that Avengers Vs. X-Men is a Grateful Dead show. If that’s the case, then Versus is the smelly guy in the parking lot selling hits of acid for five bucks a whack: in other words, it’s far more entertaining, and if you’re honest with yourself, it’s the real reason you decided to attend the main event in the first place.

This book is fucking fun. It is meant to be fun, and it knows that it’s fun; any comic that opens on its recap page (and interesting choice for a first issue) with…

This book is about AWESOME BRAWLING! You want PLOT? LOOK ELSEWHERE, CHUM. You want a KNOCK-DOWN, DRAG-OUT WHUPPIN’? WE GOT YOU COVERED.

…is a book whose only ambitions vis a vis obtaining an Eisner Award to to snatch one out of Joe Sacco’s hands and use it to beat Grant Morrisson about the head, neck and face.

Adventures In Digital Comics – Review Of Comixology App, Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1, And Marvel Infinite Comics

You may remember that I was very excited to review Fanboys Vs. Zombies #1 the other day. Unfortunately, my Local Comic Book Store, where the owner knows us by name and asks Rob wear his Gleek Underoos under his pants, did not have the book in stock. What to do? Take this as an opportunity to investigate the growing medium (sort of) of digital comics!

I downloaded Comixology onto my phone and an Asus Transformer Eee pad. From there, I was able to download a couple of books relatively easily to the app to read. I say “relatively” because, while the functionality is an easy “touch-the-button” user interface, it is a few long minutes before each book will appear on the device. So, there’s some wait time until gratification. And, while you can read any book you’ve purchased on any device on which you’ve installed Comixology, it appears you need to download books locally to the new devices. One digital comic book takes up 74 MB of space on the Eee pad.

Of course, once you have the books, how is the app overall for reading the books? That is the most important question after all.

Check out my video review of Comixology and the books I used it to purchase after the jump!