Episode 32: Whistle Pig

It is the middle of Labor Day weekend, which means that things are slow in the world of comics news, and fast in the world of drinking whiskey to forget you still have a job to go to on Tuesday.

So Amanda and I use this lull to idly speculate who might be a good casting choice for Doctor Strange in the upcoming Phase 3 Marvel movie. And not only that, but we got ourselves out to see the currently-in-theaters Sin City: A Dame To Kill For adaptation of Frank Miller’s hard boiled crime comics… and we had remarkably different reactions to the flick. Specifically regarding Eva Green’s casting as Ava Lord, Eva Green’s ability to portray Ava Lord, and Eva Green’s qualifications as an actress beyond the ability of some of her bodily appendages to defy constant gravitational forces. We also talk about the other parts of the movie.

We also discuss:

• All-Star Western #34, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, with art by Darwyn Cooke, and
• Silver Surfer #5, written by Dan Slott with pencils by Mike Allred!

And now the disclaimers:

• We record this show live to tape. While this might mean a somewhat looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means anything can happen. Like discussions about new supervillain Whistle Pig.
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings before spilling secrets, be on notice that spoilers can happen at any time.
• Amanda and I use explicit, adult language, and therefore this show is not safe for work. Before listening without headphones, please see the earlier note about the discussion vis a vis Eva Green’s bodily appendages. Get some headphones.

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Batman Beneath: Batwing #29 Review

So I haven’t written about Batwing for a while. Even though it has remained on my pull list, I had kinda tuned out of Batwing for a while. It survived my first cut of books from the initial New 52, unlike real stinkers like Hawk & Dove and The Savage Hawkman, and it never really got bad, but the whole former child soldier of African warlords angle never clicked all that well with me. Not because it was badly executed, but because it always reminded me of Joshua Dysart’s The Unknown Soldier, and that was a comparison that, when it comes to harrowing drama, a book about a guy in a Bat suit was going to lose.

Since writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti took the book over, those issues have vanished. We’ve got a different guy in the Batwing suit, a Batwing suit that is basically the Batman Beyond suit, and we’re back in Gotham City, giving us a little distance from the whole Batman Incorporated conceit that almost forced the international feel. And what we wind up with is a version of Batman Beyond, with a young, brash guy being mentored by Batman in the most dangerous city in the world. And that works for me; I don’t have an original Bruce Timm Batman Beyond sketch and the Batman Beyond Black And White statue on my mantle because I don’t like that kind of story.

And in Batwing #29, Gray and Palmiotti put together a mix of tones that is a little weird, but generally pretty fun. There is urban horror and real terrible stakes to what’s happening to Luke Fox and his family, horror befitting a modern Batman family comic. And yet it is tempered with big, silly comic book-y ideas, like an unknown underground city beneath Gotham, populated with homeless geeks in Egyptian costumes and giant monsters. It’s a weird mix, but it generally worked for me, and I found it really pretty entertaining.

Provided I turned some parts of my brain off.

Working With Vertigo: All-Star Western #26 Review

Editor’s Note: None a’ this is real. It is a twisted spoiler.

I have always had a soft spot for westerns, which is why I’ve always read Jimmy Palmiotti’s and Justin Gray’s Jonah Hex stories. Back in the pre New 52 days, Jonah Hex was a solid, straight-ahead western in the Sergio Leone vein, with real scumbag villains out on the frontier and plenty of gunfire to keep things interesting. There were no supervillains, monsters or alien invaders, and dammit, I liked it that way.

Because I always thought that the worst thing that ever happened to the character was when, back in the 80s, they took away Hex’s Colt, replaced it with a laser pistol, and had him fight space aliens or some Goddamned thing. As a guy who likes westerns, it was an abominable idea on its face, like dropping The Man With No Name onto the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It might sound like a good idea, but it’s all fun and games until poor Mr. Sulu is left confusedly looking back and forth from his fencing foil to the giant hole in his chest.

So I should be going apeshit nuts over the recent direction of All-Star Western, which has dropped Hex into the modern DC Universe. And I should be going particularly apeshit over All-Star Western #26, which gives us Jonah Hex, relentless bounty hunter and former Confederate soldier, interacting with Swamp Thing, alien plant life, The House of Mystery and a superhero just to round out the trifecta (Quadrifecta? I don’t know a lot about horse racing. I’m not allowed back at the racetrack since I asked the nice lady at the betting window for a quart of fresh glue).

I should be going apeshit. But Goddamn if this issue isn’t one hell of a lot of fun.

You’re Trapped In Here With Me: All-Star Western #22 Review

When I reviewed the first issue of All-Star Western almost two years ago now, I was semi-enthusiastic, but bemoaned the fact that the creative team of writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, and artist Moritat, had taken Jonah Hex off of the western frontier and dumped him into Gotham City. As I recall, I referred to the book as “Crocodile Dundee with dead hookers,” because dropping Hex into an urban setting, even in the late 1800s, felt like a well-trod fish-out-of-water story.

So you would think that All-Star Western #22, which features Hex being stuck in modern, 21st century Gotham City, would drive me absolutely fucking apeshit. Because on paper, if All-Star Western #1 was Crocodile Dundee, All-Star Western #22 should be Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Seriously, this book has all the elements that should drive me up the Goddamned wall: Hex baffled by a radio? Yup! Hex shocked and offended by the forward nature of modern conversation? Uh-huh! Hex amazed by an automobile? Hell, yes! If you go down the list of the classic fish-out-of-water stories, the only thing that’s missing is Hex trying to take a shit in a phone booth!

So case closed, right? I wasn’t thrilled with Hex in old Gotham, so I must hate Hex in modern Gotham, correct? Well, you’d think so… but it’s really the opposite. I enjoyed the hell out of this issue, not in spite of the fact that it was a fish-out-of-water story, but because of it. Because All-Star Western #22 isn’t a fish-out-of-water comedy; after all, Jonah Hex isn’t funny. He is a very dangerous man… and other than Batman and one or two other guys and girls, there are very few truly dangerous people in Gotham City.

You know… other than Jonah Hex.

Mad In Gotham – Review Of All-Star Western #21

Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have put Jonah Hex through a lot in All-Star Western in the last 20 issues. He’s dealt with everything from early Crime Bible disciples to Vandal Savage to Mr. Hyde (yes, as in “Dr. Jekyll and…”. Really.). At the same time, Gray and Palmiotti have created an intricate backdrop that has unfolded from an early Gotham City and spiraled out across post-Civil War America. They’ve populated it with a menagerie of colorful characters, ranging from the familiar, like Amadeus Arkham, to new ones, like The Barbary Ghost. However, starting with issue #19, the writing team has begun to focus on a character with definite ties to the DCnU present, if not the future, time traveling hero: Booster Gold. Does this signal an end to Gray and Palmiotti’s exploration of historical Gotham and its characters?

A closer look at the events of All-Star Western #21, rife with spoilers, after the jump.

The Colour Our Of Space, Which We Then Shoot: The Deep Sea One-Shot Review

If you are a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, The Deep Sea one-shot, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Tony Akins, will utterly fucking infuriate you. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

If you are, in fact, a fan of Lovecraft, you know the general basic tropes of the classics: a group of explorers go someplace unseen by human eyes. They find a weird city. They do something that awakens a slumbering elder god of some kind – Cthuhlu is always a favorite – whose visage and presence in the world is so utterly alien and wrong that it drives men mad to simply witness it. And then there is the implication that this awakening means the probable end of the human race. If you take that general summary and chuck in the odd racist comment, and you might as well be living in H. P. Lovecraft’s Medulla Oblongata.

Well, The Deep Sea hits all of those elements, save one. And it is the one that is the most common of those elements, and the one that makes the concluding implication of humanity’s doom a satisfying ending. And weirdly, it is the elimination of that element that makes The Deep Sea fresh and interesting despite following almost all the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction, and which will make the end of this comic book irritating to you.

Because you’re gonna want more.

Casualties of Reboot: DC Cancels More Books, Shifts More Creative Teams

It has been 17 months since DC blew up their entire line of comics, shuffled all their creators around to different books, and blew up their entire history of continuity. You know, for everyone except Grant Morrison, who has been allowed to continue his Batman saga that started several years ago in Batman Incorporated like it’s still 2009… or sometimes, considering all the Silver Age characters Morrison’s shoveled into that storyline, like it’s still 1959.

And the New 52 reboot was an unqualified success. It put DC over Marvel, in both sales numbers and dollar earnings, for the first time. It refreshed the classic characters of the DC Universe for a new generation. Truly, those 52 books signalled the start of a thousand-year uncontested reign. Nothing could stop them. They would march to victory on a road of bones. They would drive their enemies before them, see them broken, and hear the lamentations of…

What’s that? DC’s cancelling six more books?

Whoops.

You Don’t Understand! They’re Already Here!: Human Bomb #1 Review

DC’s Human Bomb miniseries, written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray with art by Jerry Ordway, is one of those books that just sort of showed up at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop asking the paying customers if they want to see – or smell – why they call me The Human Bomb, without a lot of fanfare. Kinda like Phantom Lady and Doll Man by the same writing team a few months ago, and their pre-New 52 Freedom Fighters before it, Human Bomb seemed like another low-publicity, low-stakes attempt on the part of Palmiotti and Gray to make someone , somewhere, give a damn about the Freedom Fighters.

And therein has always lain the problem with these books for me: I don’t really care about The Freedom Fighters. Even as a 37-plus year reader of comic books, The Freedom Fighters have always, to me, been that group that got their asses quickly kicked in Crisis On Infinite Earths, and whose members have had a couple of distinguished appearances in James Robinson’s The Golden Age and Starman. Otherwise, The Freedom Fighters was nothing more than the team with Uncle Sam, the girl with the boob shirt who isn’t Power Girl, Other Hawkman, and the dude in the stupid radiation suit.

Well, the dude in the stupid radiation suit was The Human Bomb. And that is really about all I know about The Human Bomb – I didn’t even know the guy’s secret identity until I read The Human Bomb #2 (and, having read the character’s Wikipedia page for background this review, even his identity is something new for the Post New 52 era). And I therefore have no idea if the new origin being presented in this miniseries is historically consistent with the original tale or not. But what I can tell you is that what is here is a pretty interesting, Cold War style story of sci-fi paranoia, fit into the modern New 52 world, with some detailed, damn fine art straight from the guy who inked the character in Crisis On Infinite Earths. It’s Invasion of The Body Snatchers if Dr. Bennell could blow shit up by touching it (and if you could trust the government to pay attention when you started shrieking about Pod People), and it’s actually pretty entertaining.

Smash Cut: The Ray #3 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a comics Website, at a time when spoiler-free reviews roamed the Earth. One review changed all that. It hit with the force of 10,000 spoilers. It has happened before. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when. Which would be now.

So apparently Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray believe that Michael Bay is the greatest threat that has ever roamed the face of the Earth. Having seen two Transformers movies and Pearl Harbor, I’m inclined to agree, although I’d think these guys would put in a bigger vote for the guy who fucked up the Jonah Hex movie.

This issue of The Ray has more of an action-oriented edge than the first issue, which makes sense; in an origin story you need to spend a certain amount of page real estate setting up the characters and the rules of the powers. But after a certain point, you need to get the heroes and the villains into the trenches to beat on each other. And that certainly happens here, but Palmiotti and Gray take things in a slightly different direction than you’d expect. by which I mean The Ray tries very hard to not beat on people in the trenches.

There’s a key scene in this book where The Ray stops the action and tries to talk the villain down. We’ve got more than two full pages of The Ray trying to calm the villain down, along with a few other scenes of the hero aquiescing to demands from authority as diverse as cops to paramedics to pissed-off parents. The Ray is polite, Goddammit, and it not only all makes sense on a character basis – the kid is the adopted child of two stereotypical pot-smoking California liberals as we saw in the first issue – but it’s interesting. After all, if you stop and think about it, having superpowers and using them to beat on someone would probably only be fun if the guy you’re fighting doesn’t have superpowers. If the other guy has them, then it’s just a plain-old fight, and that’s no fun. Having superpowers is probably a lot like having a gun: everyone has someone that they wouldn’t mind shooting, but nobody wants to be in a gunfight.

Come For The Hex; Stay For The Ghost – Review Of All Star Western #4

When Rob reviewed All Star Western #1 back in October, his summation that the book was neither “all star” nor “western”, beyond the fact that it includes the character of Jonah Hex, was pretty accurate, even despite the entire fifth of Jack Daniels I personally watched him put down his head shortly before he wrote that review. The man is a fucking machine, I tell you. However, what Rob may have overlooked is that All Star Western is not just about the saga of Jonah Hex as some kind of ass kicking fish out of water in an 1800’s Gotham City. The books also have been including an 8 page mini-story in each issue that fleshes out some of the other Western characters in the historical DCU. Issues #1-3 followed a neat little arc centering around El Diablo. Issue #4 begins the story of a newly created character called The Barbary Ghost. More on her later. Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti seem to be using these issues to tell not only Jonah Hex’s story, but to develop a detailed past history for the DCnU. Maybe All Star History Lesson was a less compelling title than All Star Western? Either way, in an interview with Newsarama, both Gray and Palmiotti express their desire to use All Star Western as a platform to explore the past and plant seeds that will have a bearing on DCU’s future – particularly in the Batman titles:

Jimmy Palmiotti: We are always researching and talking to the editors and other writers of the Batman books to see what’s going on and how we can interact and plant seeds in the past to make the whole picture make more sense. Currently, you’ll be seeing things in All-Star that have everything to do with what’s happening in the Batman titles right now.

Justin Gray: The good thing about it is that we’re working with the idea that Gotham existed long before Batman and it has a rich history to be developed and explored. Like Jimmy said, we’ve been working with Mike Marts and Scott on making sure there are elements from the past that tie directly into Batman’s time.

So, now that we’re four issues in, has this direction positively or negatively affected their stories?

Answers, with spoilers, after the jump!