House To Astonish Episode 21
The tale of our recording of this episode is one of woe, including telephone calls and visitors and near-battery-failures, all in the middle of recording, but somehow we managed to pull it together. In this week’s show, we’re talking about the news from Chicago comicon, the Frank Darabont Walking Dead deal, and the Spider-Man musical. We’re reviewing Doom Patrol, Lenore and Ultimate Comics Avengers, and talking about retconned patriotic hipsters in the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. We also discuss Dan DiDio’s amazing comic-producing machine, have a good old rant about Ultimatum and discuss why ‘machinations’ is a great word.
The episode is here – go check it out, and let us know what you think here, at the podcast page, on housetoastonish@googlemail.com, by hiring a skywriter, throwing a message in a bottle into the sea or by any other appropriate method.
How can you say you like the cat-Beast design. There IS NO cat-Beast design.
EVERY. SINGLE. ARTIST. who draws him does so completely different, in a way that goes beyond “artist style”. They base him on different types of cats – different types of ANIMALS in some cases, if you’ll remember the bear-Beast from Civil War: X-Men – when they bother to reference any sort of actual animal to start with.
The basic idea of “a design” is some sort of consistency. And the only consistency in the design is on the part of the colourists, not the pencillers or inkers.
I love the way that “@comicsinnotime” is clearly dubbed in after the fact.
Mam: The cat design is a design in as much as Perez’s fuzzy ape beast looked like Jim Lee’s fuzzy ape beast and Roger Cruz’s fuzzy ape beast and Joe Mad’s fuzzy ape beast. There’s a lot of artistic interpretation but they’re clearly all going for ‘he looks like a cat’. If we’re going to be traditionalists we should be calling for the return of the Kirby design, but given that he’s looked feline for eight years I think it’s sufficiently established as the status quo rather than a transitory phase between returns to the fuzzy ape beast.
Tom: Shhh. 😉 I got it wrong the first time. It is @comicsinnotime, though, and it is funny.
Did you have a fan or A/C on during some of the recording? I kept hearing a faint hum. Refrigerator? Window open?
I understand there were liberal edits by Al in order to make this podcast more coherent and less rambling. If I were to guess, was there a contentious tangent that took place between “At least Sleepwalker’s got a cool character design.” and “But yes…”? It certainly allowed you to get in the last word on that particular debate.
Also, despite your claims that there are no remnants of the Morrison Doom Patrol in the current Giffen book, I’m pretty sure that the reason that Negative Man has tattoos on his bandages is because Rebus had inscribed himself with weird, transformative iconography.
Tom DeFalco once famously said Sleepwalker was “Sandman done right.”
Parker has said ATLAS will be back as a monthly after the x-men mini and the back-up strips.
As I tweeted earlier in the week, I hope youdiscuss Marvels Project at some point, maybe after issue 2.
Either that, or he keeps waking up in the middle of the night to scribble down ideas for his next comic, only to find that he’s run out of paper…
//\Oo/\\
Ken: we had to plug in the laptop halfway through as the battery suddenly decided it was about to die, so the hum that kicks in was the Macbook’s fan coming on.
Ben: The edits weren’t so much to make it more coherent and less rambling as much as it was to make it listenable at all – the recording was interrupted on close to half a dozen occasions. There is an edit after the start of the Sleepwalker discussion but only because that bit of chat went nowhere and ended with me telling an incredibly rubbish joke – there was no contention, just some pointless wittering about legwarmers. If Paul and I disagree about stuff, I tend to keep those bits in as much as possible because debates make for interesting listening.
Al: ALL look feline? This one’s (by Yanick Paquette) shows a farking BEAR: http://tinyurl.com/qms9ex
Granted, that’s something of an outlier, even given the general wild variation, but there’s no resemblance between Quitely’s Beast & Jiminez’s, nor Cassasday’s, nor pretty much any artist you care to name who’s drawn it (even compared to each other rather than Quitely.) I don’t even want the “classic” Beast back, I just want some frelling CONSISTENCY between artists – and I dare you to find ANY costume or character concept less consistently rendered than cat-Beast.
[And on your point about Pérez & Jim Lee – there was an actual redesign between the two. The design after he reverted to blue in X-Factor wasn’t the pre-X-Factor design.]
A correction for you about the Doom Patrol… Yes, Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol (as well as all previous versions) were retconned away by John Byrne’s 18 issue run, but then during “Infinite Crisis” they were all retconned back into DC continuity. From Wikipedia:
“While assisting the Teen Titans in battling Superboy-Prime, members of the Doom Patrol had flashbacks to their original history. Robotman and Niles Caulder regained memories of the previous Doom Patrol teams with which they had worked. This battle apparently undid some of Superboy-Prime’s timeline changes, and resulted in a timeline incorporating all previous incarnations of the Doom Patrol, but with Rita Farr and Larry Trainor still alive.”
In all fairness, looking through Paquette’s other work on that page, I think it’s fair to say that he just draws a piss poor Beast. On this page he looks more like a blue Joe Camel than anything.
http://tinyurl.com/pegtwf
M.V.: You’re comparing cat Beast’s features to a costume, but… y’know… it isn’t one. It’s makes more sense to compare his features to other characters’ features, and artists don’t tend to draw characters consistently in facial structure/musculature/height/etc. Just look at Kitty’s face in that weird Paquette link – she’s only recognizable because of her costume, ponytail and Lockheed. Beast’s costume (what there is of it) looks accurate. He doesn’t look like a cat, but that seems like a pretty extreme example you’ve dug up – all other cat-Beasts I’ve seen do, regardless of artist. Wolfsbane has seemed more inconsistent to me over the years.