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!

Bros Before… Ah, Nevermind: Batman And Red Hood #20 Review

Batman And Red Hood (previously named Batman & Robin but recently renamed due to Robin being occupied by a previous engagement with a dirtnap) #20 is finally proof – to me, at least – that when Grant Morrison killed Robin in Batman Incorporated, he really didn’t tell anyone what he was planning to do ahead of time. Because the only possible explanation I can think of for a comic like Batman And Red Hood #20 to exist is that the creative team had to come up something – any damn thing – to fill the pages that was at least somewhat on point with this dead kid they suddenly found themselves saddled with.

Seriously: sudden, blinding panic is the only explanation for some of the things we’re seeing in this issue. Trying to introduce some version of Carrie Kelley that we’ve never seen before is a bad enough flailing grasp from a creative team realizing that they’re buying groceries with the money made from a book with the name “Robin” in the title. But it also is the only explanation for, hell, almost the remainder of the book. There are so many problems with this issue, from off character moments to weird methods of attack that make no sense to a couple of legitimate “what the fuck?” panels that I have to believe the issue was whipped together at the last minute in a pants-shitting panic.

Because otherwise, I need to believe that a writer of a Batman comic book would think that Batman would engage in a drive-by shooting in the interest of resurrecting the dead.

Yeah, you heard me.

Silent Lucidity: Batman & Robin #18 Review

When DC leaked the news last month that Grant Morrison would be killing Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated #8, the company claimed that the character’s death would resonate across the main Batman Family titles, despite Batman Incorporated existing, since the New 52 reboot, in some strange continuity bubble that seems to lie outside of the New 52, and based on some weird editorial philosophy where all major decisions are tagged with the phrase, “…but keep Grant Morrison happy.” In that spirit, one would think that, compared to the maintenance of continuity spreadsheets, last-minute story changes and line editorial late nights and headaches, it would be cheaper and simpler to just dump a truckload of peyote on Morrison’s driveway, but whatever.

My big question at the time of the reveal was: how exactly were the other Batman Family creators going to handle this event? After all, Batman and Robin’s battle against Leviathan from Batman Incorporated wasn’t exactly something that had been addressed in the other books, and it seemed like those other writers already had plans for upcoming story lines. Hell, before Robin’s death, Scott Snyder had announced he was embarking on a Riddler story in Batman before more recently announcing that instead he was gonna do a long-form Batman: Zero Year story focusing on Batman’s early years, and while Riddler might be a part of it, it at least seems like a change of plans.

But my biggest question, that I couldn’t address at the time without riddling the story with spoilers, was how this would affect Peter Tomasi’s Batman & Robin, what with the tiny detail that Robin’s name appears in the fucking title. And while other Batman Family titles have clearly just shoehorned Robin’s death into previously-planned storylines as an afterthought (last week’s Detective Comics simply mentioned it in a panel or two while Batman then went on his merry way attacking Penguin and Emperor Penguin as previously planned, and in this week’s Batgirl the death gets a page and a half before going back to Barbara’s fight with James Gordon, Jr), it’s gotta be hard to move forward with any previously-existing plans when one of the title characters is taking a dirtnap. You know, until someone kicks his carcass into a Lazarus Pit (and you know this will happen).

So given the early efforts of the Batman Family titles to apparently simply slot the fact that Robin is dead into existing story plans (Please note that I don’t know that this is the case. For all I know, Grant Morrison called a staff meeting with the Batman editors and creators a year ago and announced his plans over absinthe and some form of ritually sacrificed beast of burden, and it’s just the half-assed executions that make it look shoehorned in), I was half-expecting for Batman & Robin #18 to be a standard Batman story with maybe some weird-looking camouflage art to cover where Robin was supposed to be, and a headset quickly pencilled onto Batman’s head so it wouldn’t look like he was talking to himself like an insane person.

I was wrong about that. Instead, Batman & Robin #18 takes Damian’s death head-on, with the focus solely on Batman and how he is handling the event (short answer: badly), and makes use of a bold storytelling choice to make the reader empathize with Batman by almost forcing us to try to think about what we’re seeing in his reactions. Suffice it to say that, if Robin’s death in Morrison’s playground was a forced afterthought in some of Batman’s titles, it most definitely was not here.