Episode 14 - I CAN SEE YOU!
April 27th, 2008 Stin 
Episode 14 - Animal Man, Captain Marvel # 5, Flash #239, Justice League Of America #20, and X-men: Divided We Stand #1.
Hi. It’s Stin.
In this episode of Graphic Detail we cover Animal Man, Grant Morrison’s ground breaking, fourth wall smashing series about one Buddy Baker.
We felt it only appropriate to break our own fourth wall this episode, so expect a lot more chatter in our intros and outros.
We talk about Buddy’s character, his journey as a fictional character and everything about the series that makes it so great. We also analyze the difference between the Big Two and the stories they tell, the common themes in Morrison’s work, why we like heroes who are people first, and what it means to meet your maker.
For weeklies we talked:
Captain Mar-Vel #5: and the dubious nature of knock off Nega Bands as well as if any of us are going to be reading Secret Invasion.
Flash #239 and Justice League #20: One of these books features a well developed Wally West who doesn’t use his kids as a crutch and interacts with other heroes in a realistic way. And one of them has Jay Garrick punching Wally in the face. Guess which is which.
X-Men Divided We Stand: Our group pick, we all have different favorite stories and artists in this collection of one shots featuring the cast off x-students after Cyclops booted them all out of the mansion.
Twitter and Comic Creators
April 15th, 2008 StinThe New York Comicon is upon us.
From all over the country people will be flocking into the city that never sleeps for the convention, several of the forum members who are New York based are going to be there; Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman (who somehow hasn’t attained living legend status yet) and a huge assortment of other creators.
But I won’t be.
Part of it is scheduling, part of it is a lack of any kind of budget because I buy way too much pop culture related crap.
Most of it is an irrational fear of New York and the assorted…smells…it manages to constantly generate. My germphobia won’t allow it.
The nice thing is that I don’t even really have to go. Most of the creators I’m really interested in meeting or listening to either have blogs or twitter accounts.
For the uninitiated, twitter is a strange little social networking service that allows you to post up to 140 characters worth of information as a message (that they call tweets. Har har har), that then gets sent to the internet and displayed on your twitter page. You can also link your phone to it and start sending messages on the go from whatever mobile device you’re a slave to. It’s sort of like text messaging no one in particular and letting anyone who wants to read it.
I got into this because Warren Ellis has one. Because Ellis is an internet jesus and he always clues those of us in the know in on cool shit.
Then a REALLY cool thing started happening and other comic book creators started using twitter. Then more of them joined in.
And then they started talking to each other. And this is when it became really cool, because they’d talk about projects, break each other’s balls, announce when and what they were working on, all sorts of crap that a comic junkie would love to hear about.
And it occurred to me that this was the first time this sort of information was even available to the comic reading public, unless you had your favorite creators emailing you everyday with random thoughts, but even then you wouldn’t have the interactions between creators that you get with twitter. It gives them the opportunity to be in touch with their audience as well, and the brevity and relative one way street of twitter keeps the bullshit of message boards out of the conversation.
What I really want to see is the indie community embrace this more, it would turn a wide assortment of people onto crap that we’d otherwise never hear about. Which is kinda the mission statement of our podcast in the first place.
Here are the creator twitters that I follow:
http://twitter.com/BrianReed
http://twitter.com/brianbendis
http://twitter.com/Remender
http://twitter.com/mattfraction
http://twitter.com/warrenellis
http://twitter.com/bremxjones (This is actually Kieron Gillen)
http://twitter.com/ivanbrandon
http://twitter.com/mckelvie
http://twitter.com/tonymoore
http://twitter.com/roblevin
http://twitter.com/templesmith
http://twitter.com/brianwood
http://twitter.com/bclaymoore
And this is just a small smattering, people. They’re all over the damn place.
Check it out because it’s free, and funny, and usually cool.
Episode 13 - Beetlemania
April 14th, 2008 Stin |
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Episode 13, Blue Beetle, Young Avengers Presents #3, Green Lantern Corps #23, Action Comics #863, and Nova #12
Lucky Episode 13 brings us one of the best things to come out of the whole Infinite Crisis/One Year Later event, The Blue Beetle (volume 6 or 7 depending on who you believe, thanks alot wikipedia), written by Keith Giffen and John Rogers with art from Cully Hammer and Rafael Albuququerque.
The third character to take over the mantle of the Blue Beetle and the associated Scarab shenanigans, we go in depth talking about Jaime Reyes and the first 25 issues of the comic.
Randal and Charles both love the series, while Stin isn’t crazy about it. All three however, are huge fans of the last story arc and agree that the main character is one of the best new creations out of DC.
We go on to talk about the various moments throughout the series that we enjoyed, how funny we found the comic (especially Peacemaker), and Charles and Randal go on to explain what they liked about the series, countering the things Stin did not.
It all ends in a ridiculous argument that Charles wins regarding the magical nature of the scarab.
Let’s leave it at that.
(grumble).
Then it’s Biweeklies:
YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #3: This time out it’s Wiccan and Speed taking the spotlight in this series of one shot. While not nearly as bad as the last issue, is this one good enough to justify the series? Also, Randal and Charles discuss what they were hoping the series would be, and what they’d like to see in the future.
ACTION COMICS #863: The Legion arc wraps up and we spend some time discussing our favorite things about Superman, wonder what the hell happened to the Richard Donner/Johns book, and nearly make Stin catatonic with rage at the mention of the Spiderman movies.
GREEN LANTERN CORPS #23: Green Lantern finally gets back to good stories about Lanterns we care about. The dickhead Oans get told to shut their blue pie holes by one Kyle Rayner, and Guy Gardner sleeps through being tossed into a wall. Because he’s a badass.
And our group pick,
NOVA #12: In which all of the resignation and depression of the last issue as Richie came to grips with losing his last hope of being saved gets tossed out the fucking window through a series of events that are unbelievably well written. No one Dies! Everyone Lives! The Human Rocket is Back! We also spend some time predicting where the series may be headed.
The links below will send you to the internet territory of the folks that made our main topic book this time out, give them a shot.
John Rogers Blog: http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/
Rafael Albuququerque Blog: http://www.rafaelalbuquerque.com/blog/
Cully Hammer’s Art Studio: http://www.gaijinstudios.com
Opening provided by: http://www.botar.us/bluebeetle.html
And when you’re done with that head on over to www.teslacorps.com and www.antifanboypodcast.com/forum
Episode 13 - Beetlemania
April 12th, 2008 admin Episode 13, Blue Beetle, Young Avengers Presents #3, Green Lantern Corps #23, Action Comics #863, and Nova #12Randal Reviews: Titans #1
April 10th, 2008 RandalWelcome, to what may or may not be the first of many solo reviews done by me, Randal. You should probably expect a LOT of sarcasm or just ridiculous love of thinsg that make no sense. But mostly, sarcasm.
To start things off, we’re taking a look at Judd Winnick’s Titans #1 with art by Ian Churchill.
I’ve made it clear in the past in reviews and podcasts long since gone by that I don’t really have any love for Judd Winnick. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Exiles and the first 10 or so issues of his Green Lantern run, but that was how many years ago? And I haven’t liked a thing since. He kind of has this tendency to constantly need to throw something big and flashy and shocking and controversial into every story on every book. Homosexual characters that are clearly just forced there for the same of it and fail to add to the story, rape victims, aids, drug abuse, child slavery, I mean this is the guy who had a special gust appearance from John Walsh in his title. But this is about the Titans, a group of established heroes with very defined characteristics quarks and history’s, can’t make any of them gay out of the blue, or give them aids as most of them are parts of important properties, what could possibly go wrong?
Siegel, Superman, and Chaos Magic.
April 7th, 2008 StinThat a judge was even interested enough to give serious thought to the whole superboy issue a little while ago (which, regrettably, may have had something to do with the death of Conner Kent) was cool enough.
But this?
This is bloody huge: http://uncivilsociety.org/2008/03/the-siegel-superman-decision.html
“After seventy years, Jerome Siegel’s heirs regain what he granted so long ago – the copyright in the Superman material that was published in Action Comics Vol. 1. What remains is an apportionment of profits, guided in some measure by the rulings contained in this Order, and a trial on whether to include the profits generated by DC Comics’ corporate sibling’s exploitation of the Superman copyright.”
This could easily set the tone for future lawsuits, especially if the trial goes well and they end up granting Siegel’s heirs any portion of the money DC has been making off the superman franchise. How DC will (or could) react to this is even more frightnening. Will they get rid of Superman? Call him something else? Completely replace him?
How far would they go to save some cash? What would this mean for other original creations. Holy shit, Len Wien might finally see some of that sweet Wolverine money…
But it gets even stranger, because this happened the same exact day that Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman came out, in which Supes makes a pocket universe where he never existed just to see if a world without a Superman could exist. The result we see in the final panel is the creation of a Superman comic in the old school Siegel design.
….Don’t you see? Grant Morrison MADE THAT SHIT HAPPEN!
He’s done it people, he’s cracked the wall between reality and comics. And thankfully he did it in one of the best comics being published right now (I shudder to think what would have happened if this took place in that other all star book. Sorry Bill Finger, you’ll just have to wait).
But really, the coincidence is enough to even warm the cold rational heart of this old skeptic.
I’m glad to see the old folks finally getting their due, here’s hoping it doesn’t spiral out of control and destroy comics completely.
I’m just still amazed that the comics world has gotten to this point at all.
70 years is a long time.
Randal: Old folks finally getting their due? Are you serious? This isn’t old folks getting their due or young folks reaping their commeupance or anything like that.
This is some sort of wonderful real life illustration of a fucked up legal system. What you have here is a case of 2 separate entities, neither of which ACTUALLY created the product in question fighting over who owns in. In one case you have people who won a genetic grabbag so they feel they get to claim inheritance rights. In the other instance a giant faceless corporation who makes most of their bank off of S-man hats at six flags and has done almost as much hard to the character and the brand over the years as they have good.
Ah, but for me you see, there-in lies the difference. The S-kids want not only money but full creative control rights. But they want it the easy way. They want cushy perpetual office jobs where they thumbs up and thumbs down superman decisions and get kickbacks well into eternity which they then can pass onto their kids well into eternity without having spent the last however many years working and building up the Sman machine to the point it is today. If they want to see a dime of the money, give them full creative control. And I mean FULL creative control. That’s right Warner Bros, let that shit go. Pull every superman t-shirt, hat, comic, movie, tv show, guest spot out of the fucking either. Create a Sman void. Then let these kids who just want “what their grand/father worked so hard to create” try to manage a machine like that. They’d be crushed. Destroyed. There would be no more Superman. If you want to claim rights, claim responsibility.
And that’s why I actually side with the faceless corporation. Because throughout the years, they’ve done the work. They built the machine, they put it into place, they maintain it. It’s akin to a child being orphaned at the age of 8, being raised by another family and growing into a billionaire, and then his brothers and sisters who never had shit to do with him before wanting a piece of the pie.
They may not have created him, they may not have even taught him how to walk or ride a bike. But they were there for his driver’s license, to bail him out of jail that one time he fucked up major, they were there with the college fund and to give him that first car as a graduation present. The faceless corp did their job. And while it probably wasn’t the stuffy old man in the ivory tower who did it, it was still the people who made up the company.
The real solution: Give the money to Geoff Johns. Or Kurt Busiek, or Grant Morrison. Hell, even Bryan Singer. Being part of the Superman mythos is a big, important and full of pressure deal. Give a kick back to who ever is actually telling the stories at the time. Make it even more rewarding to be part of the machine for a change. They’re the people who keep it alive, and also the people who kill it from time to time (Thanks whatever Chuck Austen’s pseudonym was!). But they’re the people who deserve it.
They’ll never see it, obviously, but in my book the company getting money is a little bit better than some lucky sperm.
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