House to Astonish Episode 89
It’s been a really, really long time since our last episode, but we’re back, with an incredibly echoey, extra-long and tasty episode. We’re talking about the sad deaths of Joe Kubert and Sergio Toppi, the cancellation of the Dandy, Defenders and Avengers Academy, the changes to Marvel titles like Journey Into Mystery and Red She-Hulk in the wake of Marvel NOW!, Superman and Wonder Woman’s hookup, the cancellation of the Premiere Classic line, the newly-named Marvel movie sequels, Ed Brubaker leaving Winter Soldier and a blast through the November solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of Hawkeye, Archer & Armstrong and Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe walks with a zombie. All this plus Dennis the Menace’s amazing modern hat, an anthropomorphic Scottish indie band, the Crossover Bell, driving an issue of Grifter into a wall, the octopus that makes Marvel’s editorial decisions, countercultural cows on mopeds, John Merrick as Iron Man and Swastikabucks.
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Sad month.
We lose Joe Kubert- a tremendous talent and a very classy gentleman (I had the honor of meeting him some years ago) who gave so much back to the industry.
Then there’s Rob Liefeld, who may as well be the Bizarro version of Joe Kubert on a prima donna rage tweeting things like “Someone told me that loser fat ass Brevoort was talking trash about me today. I dropped him awhile back.”
Frankly, I don’t care how valid Liefeld’s criticisms of DC might be. Whatever results in him getting less work makes the comics world a better place as far as I’m concerned.
I’d say that there’s one big Captain America story where you can confidently say that if he hadn’t been there, everything would have turned out basically the same way: “World War II”.
Another cancellation that you didn’t get to mentioning was the Thanos mini that was announced in the last solicitations; cancelled two weeks after it was announced.
Instead, Keatinge and Elson are doing a Morbius ongoing, which at least is unexpected, but is probably going to be the first Marvel NOW! book to be cancelled.
Mark Bagley – Thunderbolts, no?
Argh! Of course. Bums.
Uncanny Avengers as a genuine new #1? Or are you regarding at as just the latest extra Avengers title, with added X-Men?
I’m taking ‘All-New’ as being just the Uncanny replacement. Which means for the first time in nearly 20 years I won’t be getting the ‘flagship’ X-title. What I’ve read of Bendis’ Avengers has seen to that (plus, the concept has no appeal for me).
Didn’t Lobdell do something similar with Alpha Flight? Bringing the originals into the present or something like that.
Bagley has been doing Avengers Assemble too.
Ballsing hell.
Goodness me, doesn’t this thing HAVE editors? I bet Steve Wacker is to blame. Somehow.
I’m pretty sure the Spider-Man book that Kurt Busiek anti-recommends is the X-Factor crossover SHADOWGAMES. Checking quickly, MUTANT AGENDA was Steve Grant.
And just so people know, there’s not a huge amount of Kubert art in that upcoming WEIRD WAR TALES collection. Kubert only edited the first seven issues, and for those he mostly just did the cover and a framing sequence. Maybe 30 pages of Kubert art total, a few more if they include the older reprints. Nice stuff, and a lot of other great artists in there (when Joe Orlando takes on the editing there’s a lot of early work by the Filipino artists DC started hiring at the time (Alcala, DeZuniga, Nino), and that stuff always looks better in black and white), but for a big chunk of b&w Kubert check out the SGT. ROCK, ENEMY ACE or HAWKMAN Showcase books.
such a shame you guys recorded before the Rob Liefeld vs the World Twitter shitstorm.
I can’t read Marvel NOW! without remembering Paul and Al screaming Marvel NOW!
I scream it in my head when I read it.
Marvel NOW!
Oh the Dandy, cursed with one of the least funny headline strips ever. Seriously, has here even been a Desperate Dan strip that ever entertained anyone at any age?
I think, as was mentioned in the podcast, the best thing to do with the properties would be to use them in some sort of kids based flash-game site ( that bored adults could also kill hours on, like Kongregate).
The Beano always had better strips anyway…although I think the Dandy did have the ‘Jocks and the Geordies’ for a time.
They should reveal that guy from the handbook is the ruler of the Marvel Zombies planet.
“I can’t read Marvel NOW! without remembering Paul and Al screaming Marvel NOW!
I scream it in my head when I read it.
Marvel NOW!”
You too, huh?
They should let Morrison write the last Dandy and call it Final Pie-sis. (groan)
It would be a deconstruction of Desperate Dan where he’s trying to find one last cowpie to eat. At the end Morison himself appears and reveals that all the cowpies he’s been eating over the years have actually been the other characters who’ve disappeared from the book.
Doesn’t Jamie Smart do a lot of stuff for The Dandy? I’ve never read any of his kids comics, but I like his adult work so much I’d probably be picking it up if I lived in the UK.
I’m sure I’ve seen the Ben Grimm Hardsuit before. Wasn’t Grimm using it himself at some point in the 80’s or 90’s?
Seriously, has here even been a Desperate Dan strip that ever entertained anyone at any age?
Jamie Smart’s Dan stories are brilliant.
They should let Morrison write the last Dandy and call it Final Pie-sis.
Morrison’s versions of the Dandy characters appeared in Zenith in 2000AD. As I recall Dan was a Cossack.
I would read a comic about Urusei Yatsura (the band).
I remember being introduced to the concept of the superhero crossover by an old Dandy Comic Library issue where Bananaman met Desperate Dan, who was a superhero called ‘Bananadan’. This comic was a firm favourite of my youth.
I am so old.
I’m American but I’ve lived over here for a long time. I think the middle class in the states would lovingly take Waitrose into its embrace as they do here.
(I guess some things are universal…)
I can’t remember the last time Uncanny X-Men was actually consistently good or worthy of being the flagship title. I mean before LAND we had aborted attempts by Fraction, Brubaker never quite clicking, a TERRIBLE Claremont lineup snore fest, Austen, average Joe Casey, editorial mess, THE FUCKING NEO, Davis, Seagle’s editorially meddled with stuff then it’s 1998 and Scott Lobdell.
“average Joe Casey”
Funny, my memory of it at the time was “crap Joe Casey.” I guess Austen’s run was so bad that Joe’s work got promoted to “average.”
The Casey run isn’t very good, but for the most part it’s uninspired rather than terrible. There are exceptions – the silent issue is awful, for example.
I’ve enjoyed the current Uncanny run. Unit and Sinister have been entertaining. Tabula Rasa was an interesting diversion. All round, I approve.
“I can’t remember the last time Uncanny X-Men was actually consistently good or worthy of being the flagship title.”
I feel like Uncanny hasn’t been the ‘real’ flagship since the launch of X-Men vol. 2. That goes up through Morrison’s New X-Men and Whedon’s Astonishing. I guess you could consider it the flagship since Fraction and then Gillen took over, but it seems like most people are leaning towards Wolverine & the X-Men taking that slot. Those titles have vastly outshone Uncanny ever since Claremont left.
In terms of being a “flagship” title that sets the tone and direction of the X-books, I would argue that Uncanny X-Men hasn’t really played that role since the Mutant Massacre. After that, the X-Men head to Australia, and X-Factor and the New Mutants sort of start directing things, with Apocalypse, Inferno, and Cable. Then X-Men vol. 2 comes along, which as Jeff says arguably becomes the flagship.
Here’s how the Lord of Death would come really handy:
In a very near future, AMC will again slash dramatically the budget of The Walking Dead TV series while ordering more episodes at the same time. After much numbercrunching, the producers would have no choice but to close the expensive make-up and extras departments and hire Lord of Death to create zombies at a fraction of the price.
The thing suit has been worn by a bunch of people, including Ben and Sharon Ventura aka the other ms marvel. Thats who i thought it was before learning about it being a paris hilton analogue.
Interesting to hear the comparative figures for The Beano and The Dandy. The Dandy has been in a continual flux of reinvention for a while now; the most recent copy I saw was obsessed with strips about celebs, and before that there was Dandy EXTREME, which I uncerstand the recent coffee table book on the comic’s history passes over as quickly and tactfully as possible.
Meanwhile he closest thing to a revamp The Beano has had in the past ten years seems to be going back and forth on how similar Dennis is to the Dennis & Gnasher cartoon series. I believe “The Bash Street Kids” has had the same artist for fifty years.
And yet everything I’ve read about Dandy‘s cancellation says something like “In spite of a revamp to appeal to modern kids”, when the evidence strongly suggests it should be “Despite a revamp to appeal to a vague idea of what cynical adults believe modern kids want; i.e. strips about X-Factor judges”.
Er, “Despite” should read “Due to”, what with “despite” and “in spite of” meaning exactly the same thing. In my defence, I spent last night on a train, so I’m not fully awake.
I am happy to report that the Dandy is a yearish past its Look In-lite phase. The Harry Hill strip is gone, and with it the majority of slebscum references.
There are a number of superhero gag strips, responding to the summer tradition of superhero movies, none of which are as funny as Bananaman.
Revamps of Beryl The Peril (brilliant) and Bully Beef and Chips (less so, but nice art) sit alongside new strips in the modern style, such as barreling thugathon Nuke Noodle and more classically-modelled fare, such as The Banana Bunch, Dreadlock Holmes and Blinky.
If anything, The Dandy is less cynical than when it regenerated in 2010. It’s certainly a much daffier, funnier book, even if some of the gags might be a little gentle for our Malcolm Tucker tastes. And I would have maybe not given away copies of the MTV Spider-Man show where he spends the night with a girl he doesn’t care about then chucks her off a roof. But that’s just me.
I bought a copy of The Beano the other day – the Jess Ennis one, where the caricature we all saw on the news was printed on the cover and Ctrl-V’d into a strip in which she played no other part. They still do the questionnaire thing, though. The Beano’s a more traditional comic, sure, which makes the loss of the Dandy all the more sad, and which makes me loathe the newsberks who passively-aggressively-ly slate the Save The Dandy campaign for being overly nostalgic with the strength of a thousand slippers, but it’s still pretty funny. The production is all to cock, however, with overdesigned borders and blurred drop shadows behind all the speech balloons. Dennis The Menace’s Mum and Dad appear to have been recast, as well. Or maybe just made over – there’s a whole Gok Wan thing going on.
The tragedy of The Dandy leaving newsstands is nothing to do with yesterday (and hey, bet your arse Batman will die someday, too) so much as it is tomorrow. There’s nack all for kids on the stands now – certainly nothing for girls beyond preparing them to be young shopaholics – which means losing another generation of potential readers. Worse, there are cartoonists who are going to lose a valuable revenue stream, and it’s not like everybody can jump ship and write Radio Times spoofs and deconstructionist TV review shows. Although it would probably raise their chances of being picked up for Clint (currently racked behind Bizarre, GT and Attitude, because where else, huh?).
The Dandy changing, ending, transscending the eschaton, whatever, makes the British comics landscape a little smaller, less diverse and a lot sadder.
As to kids finding comics online, I think I’ll have to ask some of my yummy mummy chummys, but I’m pretty sure they’re just as keen on the American imports as we all are, even if all they do is watch Ultimate Spider-Man. I don’t know if any of their weans are webcomics readers, but I doubt it.
I have to ask – does “cow pie” not mean “cow dung” in the United Kingdom, or is that part of the joke?
@ Eric – Good to hear; I’ll have another look.
@ Dave – The usual UK term is “cowpat”. It’s certainly possible the gag is intentional, although in 1937, the writer would have had to have been *very* confident that the dour Dundonians running DC Thomson wouldn’t spot the joke. They wouldn’t have approved.