House to Astonish – Live!
It’s been a long time coming, but here it is – House to Astonish Live, recorded yesterday at the City Cafe, Edinburgh before a live audience. Paul and I are discussing the departures at Marvel Studios, the fallout from the Graphic.ly closure, the cancellation of Iron Patriot and the upcoming Avengers event. We’ve also got an interview with a comics legend, a live reenactment of scenes from a truly terrible recent comic and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook is coming soon. All this plus an incident with jam, the Windows 7 approach to continuity patches, an octopus with spears for arms and a small pea.
Between ticket sales and direct donations, we’ve now raised just over £700 for Alzheimer Scotland. Thanks so much to everyone who came along – if you’d like to help us push that even higher, please do consider donating at our donation page.
In the meantime, the podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available through the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, via email, on Twitter or at our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that you can get our fab and funky shirts at our Redbubble store.
The fire alarm was a nice touch yesterday, for all us sirens on the podcast fans.
Enjoyable show.
I hope you post the pub quiz questions at some point.
Did the recent Marvel edict towards the censoring Fantastic Four content prevent Post from being resurrected as a herald of Galactus?
I like Ant-Man! I want an Ant-Man film, Wright or not. This situation isn’t ideal for a character that seems to have had an uphill battle for credibility from the off. I wonder if Wright hadn’t spent the past 8 years not quite making an Ant-Man solo movie would Whedon/Feige put him straight into the Avengers films instead. It would perhaps have been the less risky way to use the character.
Frost on the Wings of a Dead Angel is so the name of my new darkwave band.
Is this the first mention we’ve had of Baby O’Brien’s name?
Is there any chance we could see a video of this episode? It would be nice for those of us who live in other countries.
I remember the last video podcast you did, it was real fun and odd seeing you looking completelly different than what we expected
I am going to miss Al and a friend while the show is on hiatus.
Nice meeting you yesterday. 🙂 [Sorry I had to skip out on the quiz – I got a message that meant I needed to get an earlier bus.]
> The fire alarm was a nice touch yesterday, for all us sirens on the podcast fans.
If the sirens were THAT loud in real life, no wonder Al moved!
There’s an old Neal Adams cover with Batman stripped to the waist and keeping his cowl on for hand to hand combat. And losing: DC heroes suffered a lot on covers in those days.
Also, has there never been a team/organisation called the Echelon? You’d have thought some villains would style themselves the Black Echelon or the Nova Echelon or something.
For more “comics for young kids,” the best one around is Owly. http://www.andyrunton.com/owly/
And there’s always the classic Disney ducks
Post couldn’t possibly work for Will.I.Am. Post No Bills.
…
…
Bill. William.
…
Well I’ll be off then.
Show was a lot of fun. For some reason, even though they have LITERALLY nothing in common aside from being mutants with shitty names, I always mix up Post and Tower (early pre-Horsemen henchman of Apocalypse). So the discussion of how he originated during Onslaught confused me until I looked it up.
Count me in with the Ant-Fans, though I think the things that make me love Hank Pym as a character are the things that make him a terrible candidate for a movie. I think he’d work much better as second-male-lead in a TV show, but the cost of the effects would be seriously prohibitive.
Iron Patriot really picked up in the second issue, as the themes start to become apparent. And the art was very interesting. I wish they’d given it more of a chance. A politically minded book starring an African-American cast in New Orleans? Marvel really should have trusted Kot and given the book more of a push.
Might want to look at this if you haven’t already – the original version of Nightwing #30, before it became “Batman and Nightwing beat the hell out of each other, with racist Japanese characture guest-star!”
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/06/02/the-entire-art-from-nightwing-20-by-before-it-was-binned/
I think Post should be the herald who shows up to signify that you’re in a plotline that’s being made up on the fly that’s just going to be retconned later anyway. Kind of like the opposite of the Watcher (RIP) – when Post shows up, you know an event really doesn’t matter.
His motto could be “Just ignore it, we’ll fix it… (unnecessarily cocking his floating guns) …in Post.”
I loved being at the live show, I hope we get one every year. Great work, chaps and chapesses.
If you guys did a live reading of crappy comics every episode, I would not complain.
I thought Post was killed by Pyro during the Brotherhood’s attempt to kill Senator Kelly in “Dream’s End,” in Cable #87. Pyro subsequently died of the Legacy Virus.
This may be a silly question, but is this only the second appearance of ‘House to Astonish Theatre’?
Because the only other time I remember it being employed before was in HtA Episode 90, with Phantom Stranger #0. (Which was, incidentally, *fantastic*. I actually kept that on my iPhone for a while, and relistened to it a few times when I needed a laugh.)
A great episode and I wish I’d been there.
Every now and then something comes up in the discussion that reminds me that I’ve been reading comics 15-20 years longer than you guys have. This time it was the discussion of the over-dialogue late Claremont X-Men. I grew up reading the *early* Claremont X-Men, which was wordy but not crowding-out-the-art overloaded. His logorrhea really started when he was shoved into Siberia and reduced to the level of script monkey over Jim Lee & Whilce Portacio’s plots. Dialog became his only artistic input to the books that he had taken from reprints to the tentpole of Marvel’s sales, and he slobbered down absolute OCEANS of it.
Other short notes:
I still feel that Morning Glories delivers enough plot and satisfaction issue-by-issue that I’m happy to keep buying it until it reaches its end, at which point I will re-read it with pleasure. But I can understand why other people wouldn’t reach the same decision.
I have to admire your restraint in not making “dumb as a post” jokes or referring to any of the several newspapers called Post-Herald.
I said on Twitter today that if I were forced to make an Ant-Man movie, I’d probably launch off the short Mike Freidrich run in Marvel Feature in the early 1970s, where he’s stuck at ant-size. They weren’t brilliant–hell, I last read them when they were still relatively new, they might be objectively crap–but they had a real sense of menace to them. Alternately, Robert Kirkman’s “Ant-Man the Super Sleeze” would be a good basis for a not-Wrightian comedy.
@Leo We didn’t video it, I’m afraid – audio only!
@Loren I think it’s the third or fourth time. We’ve certainly done it before the Phantom Stranger episode (though that was a memorable one right enough)
@Kevin I wonder if Wright’s version featured O’Grady-style tendencies, hence Marvel’s rumoured desire to concentrate on the “moral centre”.
I think they did one for Jupiter’s Legacy #1, best underlining the unique blend of abrasiveness and tell-don’t-show exposition that is Mark Millar’s dialogue.
Spectacular factors altogether, you merely got a brand new visitor. Just what can you recommend regarding your distribute you produced some days prior to now? Virtually any specified?