Jul 23
House to Astonish Presents: The Lightning Round Episode 21
Posted on Tuesday, July 23, 2024 by Al in Podcast
Who is Humus Sapien? If you don’t know, we can help you with that! We’re covering issues 53-55 of Thunderbolts vol. 1, as Charcoal’s dad makes his dazzling debut and we meet the winner of the 1973 F.O.O.M. Magazine Create A Marvel Character contest! There’s people dying of asterisks and a krill-filled moustache! Comics!
The episode is here, or available via the player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And you can get a very handsome House to Astonish t-shirt over here, in this other bit of the internet.
“One of those will be quite short”
I suspect that you explaining the entire ‘Nuff Said concept will actually fill some serious podtime.
Another explanation for SHIELD is that it’s designed to distract all of the terrorists and get them to use their resources to infiltrate it while some very boring office building somewhere gets on with doing the real espionage work.
The second Arabian Knight was quite cool, from what I remember of that one Union Jack mini he appeared in. The OPEC one… well, hardly the only character Reggie Hudlin screwed up in his Black Panther run, where clearly no-one at editorial wanted to make him aware of things like continuity. He had the Black Knight as a villain in that series, I think, which Paul Cornell had to clean up in Captain Britain and MI13.
I’d love to see Marvel reprint FOOM and DC reprint The Amazing World of DC Comics. I finally got a complete set of the latter off eBay after decades of never even seeing some of the issues.
I was tempted to write a song about Charlie Cole to the tune of the Charlie Chalk theme, but you’ll be pleased to know I resisted the urge.
Didn’t Jonathan Hickman reveal that the whole of SHIELD, as an organisation, was a triple agent? Like, Secret Warriors was based around the idea HYDRA had subverted the whole thing from the start, and then at the end Nick said that that was just what HYDRA were supposed to think. I remember this, because I thought “Wait, so when Victoria Hand was complaining that SHIELD was just playing some weird game with HYDRA that got people killed but had no real impact, she was 100% correct.”
Do we know the real-world reason why Humus Sapiens never joined the X-Men? If it was “Because the lawyers said it’d be a nightmare” Brevoort probably should have looked into that a bit further…
The other danger of asterisks is that if you’re wearing a Roman helmet, he’ll punch you with super-strength.
There was an Arabian Knight in one scene of All The National Heroes in Jason Aaron’s Avengers, but I’m not sure which one.
Looking at images of Humus Sapien, I think I’m with Paul, it mostly looks as though the Earth is meant to be either a chest logo that isn’t affected by perspective or “within” him somehow. Like, the action figure would be made out of translucent plastic and the Earth would be inside the torso. (Except it wouldn’t, because that sounds expensive to do.)
@Martin Smith: A fanatical Catholic villain who claimed descent from Lancelot, no less.
Did anyone ever manage to explain why the Rhino spent that book thinking he was American?
That SHIELD/Paranoia mashup is a great idea.