House to Astonish Episode 210
Another episode, another convention to bring you all the news from! This time round, Paul and I are talking about the return of Vertigo (with a detour into the state of Marvel’s Red Band), the launch of the Marvel Premiere Collection, Hush 2, Absolute Flash, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern, Rise of Emperor Doom, IDW’s new logo and IDW Dark line, Andy Khouri becoming TMNT editor, and a multitude of Godzilla series. We’ve also got reviews of Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu and Batman & Robin Year One, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe introduces The Picture of Dorian Hay. All this plus the continuity links between Pride and Prejudice and Pilgrim’s Progress, Jack Kirby as a hologram AI NFT, and Adventures Of Weird You Know That Sort Of Thing.
The episode is here, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Bluesky, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And T-shirts? Do we have T-shirts for you! Sorry, I mean, do we have T-shirts for you? I think yes, we do.
Just to clarify, the DC trades Al was referring to are the DC Compact Comics. DC Finest is their upcoming equivalent to Marvel’s Epic Collections (which look good, but I don’t trust DC to not screw it up and/or abandon it. The relatively last minute change to the contents of the first Batman one doesn’t evince confidence in their mapping).
For the Scarecrow, I’d also make him able to appear from every copy of the painting but put it on RedBubble, so he can manifest from t-shirts and phone cases and even the odd bathmat.
(Another stream-of-conciousness, typed-while-listening mega-comment, sorry.)
I can’t help wondering if part of the thinking behind relaunching Vertigo right now is “Let’s back out of the whole Sandman Universe thing as quietly as possible.” I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the Vertigo logo makes an appearance on the final issue of Dead in America.
Speaking of, the idea of Hickman “streamlining” his own work makes me think he’ll cut out all the boring talking and fighting bits, and just include the important stuff that tells the story – the charts. (I don’t actually remember if FF was that chart-heavy, but still.)
Honestly, I think this might be the first time DC have used a big crossover thing to launch a secondary continuity, rather than rewrite their main one — they didn’t do it for Earth One, for instance. It actually reminds me more of the All-New Ultimate Universe being created by the Maker after he escaped from the 616.
Regarding crossover bloat, this probably says more about my own attention span and lack of organisation, but this month’s comics arrived last week, and it was only after searching vainly for the conclusion to Absolute Power that I realised I’d somehow only ordered #1 of the core mini. Two months of so much Absolute Power I didn’t even miss it!
I can see the W in the new IDW logo as a W, but ony by seeing the top of the D as an N. Trying to see the D and the W is like trying to see the duck and the bunny at the same time.
“I think it’s in continuity but I’m not 100% certain” is basically the official slogan of DC books set in a character’s backstory these days. Action Comics recently did a story that was set early in current-continuity(?) Superman’s career and also in the seventies, complete with Clark being a TV reporter for GBS. As were Lois and Jimmy, which wasn’t even the case in the stories it was homaging.
That said, while I somehow missed that this book even exists (see above re: organisation and attention span when ordering comics), I’d be amazed if it wasn’t at least in continuity with Waids’ World’s Finest … whatever that means.
Those ECW things are just weird. They’re also pushing DC’s 13+ rating, because there was one in Action for some female wrestler whose name I’ve forgotten already which used a phrase I never expected to see in a Superman book.
…And that’s the downside (okay, one of the downsides) of the stream-of-conciousness approach — I went back and added the FF comment when I thought of it, but somehow missed that it came before the Hickman reference I’d already made, hence the “Speaking of…”
As an Oregonian, who lives in the Portland area, I’m interested in seeing how they handle Godzilla attacking my home state.
As far as no Red Band on Unlimited, I know there have been issues with some of the manga apps, like the Shonen Jump app, where due to platform holder content restrictions, certain titles or issues are limited to the web version of the site (for example, chapter 58 of Chainsaw Man is web only because of a sex scene). In particular, they also don’t link to the relevant chapter (or series) on the site either – you have to go to a browser on your phone/tablet and plug in the URL, sign on to Viz’s web portal, and search for the relevant book. (I assume this is a requirement of the platform holder).
Other apps have tried to compensate by doing semi-censored versions of the manga chapters, with various forms of success (or failure). It’s possible that, for Marvel Unlimited, whoever is handling curation basically went “F- it” and rather than having the app version point people to their browsers, they just chose not to put those works up at all.
While I mostly agree with you that superheroes are not Jeff Lemire’s strong suit, I wanted to mention that people speak highly of the Lemire-written BLACK HAMMER and its spinoff titles. I haven’t read them myself.
(I did like his first foray into superheroes, the unjustly overlooked FRANKENSTEIN, AGENT OF S.H.A.D.E. that spun out of FLASHPOINT.)