Episode 102: In Blackest G’nort

It’s been a couple of weeks since DC Comics Co-Publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee tweeted their first teasers toward something called “Rebirth,” and  since then, there has been, well, absolutely no concrete hard news whatsoever.

But what there are are rumors. Many, many rumors. From where did the rumors originate? Who knows? But rumors there be, about book cancellations, creative team changes, new books, new first issues, and partial to total reboots. So we talk about them, kick around which sound like good ideas, which seem like terrible mistakes, and wind up in a short-term, love-hate bromance with Dan DiDIo.

We also discuss:

• Batman: Europa #4, written by Matteo Casali and Brian Azzarello, with art by Gerald Parel, and:
• Spider-Man #1, written by Brian Michael Bendis, with art by Sara Pichelli!

And, the usual disclaimers:

• We record this show live to tape, with minimal editing. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like finding a very valid, but… shall we say, alternative, use for your comics.
• This show contains spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, be aware that you might find out that Batman talks like Phillip Marlowe, and why that’s maybe not a great idea.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your boss to find out what “Gank the wingman” means? Then get some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:48 — 77.1MB)

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Thanks for listening, suckers!

Episode 76: The Hiro Nakamura Experience

We’re a couple of weeks out of San Diego Comic-Con, and, even though we can hardly believe it, it turns out that one of the panels we’ll be missing the most? The Heroes Reborn panel on Sunday in Hall H.

I think we can all agree that Heroes kinda went sideways in its later seasons, but we’ve always had a soft spot for the show, ever since seeing the pilot at our very first San Diego Comic-Con. And all these years later, it’s easy to forget just how exciting the show was in its first season. So we discuss what was so exciting about the show in its first season, what went wrong as time went on, what we know about Heroes Reborn, and what we want to see from this miniseries.

We also discuss the Miles Morales-starring Spider-Man book announced by Marvel last week, including what this might mean for Peter Parker, why it was a foregone conclusion that Miles would not only get his own post-Secret Wars book, but keep the name Spider-Man, and what the timing of this announcement might have to do with recent Marvel Studios activity.

We also discuss:

• We Are Robin #1, written by Lee Bermejo with art by Jorge Corona, and:
• Gotham by Midnight #6, written by Ray Fawkes with art by Juan Ferreyra!

And, the usual legalese:

• We record this show live to tape, with minimal editing. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like learning why D-Man is to beautiful and ephemeral a character to ever be put on film.
• This show has a lot of spoilers. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, if you want to find out for yourself if they ever Saved The Cheerleader? Be forewarned.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your employer to learn the finer points of performing a Spider-Mohinder? Get yourself some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:23 — 93.4MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Hunting Angels In The Gutters: Guardians of The Galaxy #7 Review

Since Guardians of The Galaxy #7 has the names Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli on the cover, I will start by saying yes, there are at least three double-paged layouts in this book where you need to stop what you’re doing (which will be enjoying the actual story) to decode whether you need to read page one and then page two, or across the spine from the top. The bad news is that this is still a storytelling technique that drives me bugfuck nuts.

The good news is that I have long since learned, when I see the names “Bendis” and “Pichelli” on the cover, to stop with every page turn and decode how to read the pages before continuing my story enjoyment. But still, even though I have learned to look for the layout doesn’t mean I like it. It’s like an SAT word problem, or a solid donkey punch: you don’t start loving it just because you know it’s coming.

Jesus, I have been writing comic reviews for more then two years, and I have never started one by poking at a technical element of the visual storytelling before. Which should go to show just how crazy the whole cross-spine layout makes me… but which also might make make it seem like all I have to say about it are technical nitpicks and “get off my lawn!” screeching about more modern storytelling techniques. But that’s really not the case.

Instead, Guardians of The Galaxy #7 is a comic book that will play for any Browncoat. It’s one of Bendis’s “let’s alll sit around a table talking” issues that let’s the reader spend some quality time with a tight crew of a small starship, cracking wise in the face of danger while simultaneously trying to negotiate with and size up a potential enemy. And with its cocky and wisecracking captain, warrior woman second in command, and gunslinging goon backing them up, it’s a stupid hat and a misguided hero’s ballad away from being an episode of Firefly.

And I like Firefly. So I had a lot of fun with this book.

The Uncle Ben Incident: Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #22 Review

Editor’s Note: Bitten by a stolen, genetically-altered spoiler that have him incredible, arachnid-like powers… to irritate people.

Finally, we’re getting somewhere.

Between the slow and decompressed start of Ultimate Comics Spider-Man back in late 2011 and the leisurely dealing with Miles’s uncle the douchebag cat burglar and the unfortunate and misguided intervention of the whole United We Stand crossover across the entire Ultimate Comics line, it has felt like there has been something missing from Miles’s story. That thing being a real and clear motivation for his being Spider-Man.

Sure, we got the ephemeral sense that Miles understands that his power arose from his uncle’s bad acts, and that he feels a responsibility and sense of awe toward the legacy and reputation of Peter Parker… plus that, you know, he gets a kick out of being Spider-Man. But there has never been a simple, bright-line-in-the-sand motivation for him to actually be Spider-Man in the way that other superheroes have. You know, Parents Killed In Front Of Him, or On A Mission Of Peace From Themyscira. Or, you know, Let The Man Who Killed His Uncle Go Free.

Well, 19 months in, we finally have a moment that fits the bill. Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #22 closes out with a gutpunch of a moment that meets all the emotional criteria for someone to, beyond all reason, pull on a pair of spandex pants and not only go out in public wearing them, but wear them battling criminals and monsters. It is emotional, it is effective… and it is a credit to writer Brian Michael Bendis that the moment is not a simple, “Now I shall become a $ANIMAL!” point of departure for a standard, if well belated, origin story.

Casual Encounters: Spider-Men #4 Review

Editor’s Note: Seeing double? I got two spoilers, one for each of you.

You ever run into an old high school or college girlfriend that you broke up with? I have, and man, it sucks. There’s that whole moment of cognitive dissonance where your brain tries to match the person you knew years before with the older face and new haircut you’re seeing right now, and then you plaster on the fake smile and exchange overly loud and jocular greetings and exclamations of surprise at how long it’s been, and then you exchange stories of who you are now and the things you’re doing, and you promise to keep in touch while maybe exchanging email addresses that you know full well will never be typed into any browser, all the while dealing with the guilty knowledge that the reason it’s been so long is because you told her that you needed space… space to try to chuck the meat to that skank from UMass with the big knockers and the full liquor cabinet in her dorm room. And then you wander away feeling like you’ve had low-voltage elecro-convulsive therapy, and you spend the next day or so kinda moody and fucked-up, trying to get yourself back to normal equilibrium where you don’t feel like a long-term asshole. It’s a terrible experience; it’s one of the primary reasons you will catch me dead before you catch me on Facebook.

I know what you’re thinking: “Rob,” you’re thinking, “What in the ripe fuck does any of this have to do with comic books?” Well, all this emotion I’m describing comes from seeing someone you merely hurt by breaking up with them. Peter Parker, however, in The Amazing Spider-Man # 121, at best failed to rescue Gwen Stacy, if he didn’t accidentally kill her himself in a botched rescue attempt. So when Peter meets and interacts with the still-living Ultimate Universe version of Gwen in Spider-Men #4? I simply didn’t buy it. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

One And A Half Spider-Men: Spider-Men #1 Review

Back in July 2005, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Joe Quesada said that, if the classic Marvel Universe ever crossed over with the Ultimate Marvel Universe, it would mean that Marvel was “officially out of ideas.” It is now June 2012, and by Joey Q’s own metrics, Marvel is officially out of ideas. Say hello to Spider-Men #1.

This is the first time that the 616 has mixed with the Ultimate Universe (Think a Resse’s, your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter deal except ram-fed full of anticipated marketing dollars), but it’s not the first time that the Ultimate Universe has crossed over, even at the hands of Spider-Men writer Brian Michael Bendis. Bendis was one of the writers of Ultimate Power, which crossed the Ultimate world with Marvel’s other alternate world of Squadron Supreme, back in late 2006, or about four months after Quesada announced that such a crossover would equal an utter dearth of ideas. That crossover event led to Nick Fury leading Squadron Supreme, that book eventually quietly disappearing, the Ultimate Universe being almost destroyed by Magneto, the reboot of the Ultimate Universe (But, but Marvel doesn’t reboot! And their crossovers are always well-conceived and executed!), and, ultimately (get it?), the death of the original Ultimate Spider-Man.

My point is, when it comes to Ultimate universe crossovers, Spider-Men is facing a bar that is comfortably low. So the big question is: does Spider-Men make it over that bar? Well, considering this is the first issue of a Bendis miniseries, the answer must be: how the fuck should I know? Almost nothing happens in this comic. This issue is all set-up.

Every Picture Tells A Story (Badly): Ultimate Spider-Man #3 Review

Let’s start with the most obvious problem with Ultimate Spider-Man #3: the Kaare Andrews cover.

This cover looks like Spider-Man is trying, more successfully than most 13-year-old boys, to suck his own dick. While shooting streams of sticky goop from his general crotchal area. With his apparently gapingly spread ass shown more prominently and unobscured than his fucking head.

There are action covers, and then there are action covers, Kaare… I think Marvel picked the wrong issue of this book to hide in a polybag. Actually, I might have preferred receiving it in a lead-lined sack.

Let’s move on to the second most obvious problem with this book: More Goddamned useless widescreen visual storytelling. I’ve talked about this before, and go figure, it’s another issue of Bendis-written Ultimate Spider-Man that makes me bring it up again.

Pages two and three are delivered in a standard, read-page-one then read-page-two format. Pages three and four, however, are amongst the most egregious examples of fucking with format for no return at all I can scarely describe it.

Here: I will ruin the spine of this book on my scanner to show you what I mean:

I Can See For – Ah, Screw It: Ultimate Spider-Man #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. For example, Miles Morales is apparently Spider-Man now. And by the way, the spoilers start IMMEDIATELY.

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If you’re anything like me, the first thing you did after seeing the last page of Ultimate Spider-Man #1 is hit Google and see if spiders can, in fact, camoflage into their backgrounds. I did this even though I am petrified of spiders. Petrified to the point that season three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer is my favorite; not because of the plot, characters or theme, but because it was the first season without that everfucking scuttling tarantula in the opening credits.

Turns out, as I suspected, that any Web site touting the camoflagability of spiders will, by nature, include large, full-color close-up photographs of spiders in order to prove that some spiders can, in fact, blend into their surroundings. Which proves two things:

1. Brian Michael Bendis has done his spider research for this new iteration of Spider-Man, and:
2. If you are an arachnophobe, Brian Michael Bendis is a Goddamned douchebag.