House To Astonish Episode 41
It’s podcast time again, and this time round we’re looking at DC and Marvel’s digital distribution war, Wonder Woman’s sartorial shenanigans, the closing down of Zuda, the Spider-Man casting and Jeph Loeb’s new position of power. We’re also reviewing Sea Bear and Grizzly Shark, Invincible Iron Man Annual and Wonder Woman, and taking revenge stories to new depths with the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. All this plus Ant & Dec’s new Saturday night concept, the Betamax of digital distribution and a very reasonable Vorlon.
The podcast is here – let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, by email or by carving them in the side of the oldest cliff face in the universe.
UPDATE: One of our listeners, Andy Costello of Comic Zone in Scottsdale, Arizona, has whipped up this bit of art to accompany our Official Handbook entry:
For future reference, we heartily endorse this sort of thing.
I really liked Red Riding; I’ve been meaning to rewatch it. Robert Sheehan, the main guy in Misfits, has a pretty big part in it too.
Heroes for Hire would be the best team to make a live action show.
Luke Cage
Iron Fist
Shang Chi
Silver Sable
Misty Knight
Colleen Wing
Moon Knight
not only are they all affordable and can be done on a TV budget (Iron Fist might have the most expensive power), that hits all the right diversity issues TV execs are so crazy for, and gives you three hot women to show off in skin tight suits.
Now if Arana ever gets to TV or the movies, that would be an injustice.
It probably bodes poorly for the Stracyzinski era that I was more interested in the Conner and Simone sections of the Wonder Woman book, and far more interested in seeing Cornell tour Lex Luthor through the DC Universe than seeing Superman tour across America.
Do you still stand by your argument that they were wasting him on Brave and the Bold, Al?
Well, this way he’ll at least sell more books for them. It’s not great for readers, but it’s a plus for DC, so it’s still the right call for them.
He’s going to ruin Superman.
All you need to do to write a good Superman story is just copy what Joe Kelly and Mark Schultz did back in the early 2k run of Superman. Even Jeph Loeb wrote some good Superman stories.
I get nervous with Superman more than WW because I really, really don’t want JMS turning Superman into some political story about illegal immigration or green jobs for the city of Denver or Detroit or wherever he’s going (he’s ignoring the South in his trip, he won’t even go to Kansas). I get a bad Green Lantern/Green Arrow vibe from the “Grounded” prologue.
I always figured X-Factor (Jamie and co.) would make a good Sci-Fi (well, Syfy now) original show. Relatively low-SFX characters, grounded enough in a familiar non-superhero genre to not scare away the audience.
Perhaps Marvel TV could do a show about Hercules having Legendary Journeys.
An X-Factor show would be cool, but probably a bit too similar to shows like Fringe and Eureka. They’d have to change the name too, of course.
I’d definitely watch a Guardians Of The Galaxy TV show. Maybe Starjammers would work too?
1991 pilot for a Power Pack TV show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OZz8RxQa10
I’d much prefer a Guardians TV show based on the DnA run/team. How they’d do Rocket Racoon and Groot on a TV budget I don’t know (apart from ‘not very well’, obviously), but it’d certainly be cool.
Hello sweetie.
That ‘Invincible Iron Man Annual’ was a real terrific read especially given Stark was absent. Hopefully it will be used to add gravitas to The Mandarin and elevate him to a general pedestal with the likes of Doctor Doom and the Red Skull and those sort of evil mavericks. Fraction has been doing such good work on that title. It’s probably been one of the most consistent books out there for a long time now.
Jeph Loeb, yeah okay he has experience in TV, but he was fired from ‘Heroes’. That show got terrible ridiculously quickly after the solid, if a tad overrated, first season. If even *they* saw that Jeph Loeb wasn’t worth keeping around, it kind of hangs overhead with dread regarding his new TV position.
In the eyes of Quesada et al, Loeb can do no wrong and his work still sells ludicrously well (well until you factor in he always gets big name A-List artists). Ah well, hopefully it reduces Loeb’s comics output.
I’d definitely be up for Ken B’s suggestion of ‘Heroes For Hire’. At the very least it would probably turn out to be something like the so-bad-it’s-quite-good ‘Mortal Kombat: Conquest’ that is shown on the Horror Channel way deep in the Sky listings on Ch319.
I’d suggest something like ‘Daredevil’ as it’s a familiar enough genre (you can never have too many legal shows, right?) and as ‘Law & Order’ is uprooting to Los Angeles (LOLA as it’s now referred to) there would be a bit of a gap in the market for New York. You’d have Matt & Foggy (comic relief?) for the courtroom stuff, maybe Dakota North for the PI/Detective duties and have Kingpin as a recurring baddie.
The drawbacks would be that he might be too big a character especially if they wanted to re-boot the film franchise, and it may be difficult for the lead actor to play a blind guy all the time (you’d need a real specialist actor unless they re-jig his origin, although it would immediately make for a sympathetic lead character that the audience could get behind).
I just wanted to say thanks for throwing my silly image of this week’s OHOTOHOTMU entry on the main page for the world to see! I had a really good laugh at your update for ol’ Bill, and I couldn’t help but throw the mental image down on paper…Except I didn’t have any paper nearby, so I doodled him in Photoshop, instead.
Keep Jeph Loeb away from any show with “heroes” in the title.
don’t forget, Loeb also worked on the worst season of LOST (s2).
In fairness to the digital front: the Comixology app does carry Marvel and DC material. While DC does have their own iPad app, everything there is also available in the Comixology app at the same time, and DC material bought in one app can be downloaded to the other.
It doesn’t seem to work that way in the Marvel app, and Comixology seems to get things after the Marvel app.
Oh! And Blade was a pretty good TV show, I thought… You should be able to get the DVDs from somewhere.
Alias (± bumfun)
Slingers
Urich (Joey Pants would do that in a heartbeat)
Mannikin (my old Epic pitch would have had this as “Scrubs meets Multiplicity, only good;” I would still write that comic in a heartbeat)
Puck
The Bubblegum Life of Jubilation Lee
DareDevil
Ghost Rider
Darkhawk (c.f. Blue Beetle)
Nova (c.f. Green Lantern)
Howard, The Duck [sic]
Pointless Trivia: I’m playing this game while listening to the podcast:
http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/powerpool-2/Powerpool2.swf
And the musical bed goes so well with the sound of the podcast, I can’t believe it.
On Garfield: he’s older than Tobey Maguire was when he made Spider-Man (and Spider-Man 2). Should be good, though.
On Wonder Woman: the new costume is ordinary, and the belt comes together into a tramp-stamp at the back. My feeling is that problem isn’t with the costume, or the character, particularly, but the projected feelings of the observer. Heisenberg Was Right!
On Straczynski: there’s a reason he gets on so well with Neil Gaiman, I think. It’s not that he’s obsessed with ankling the feet of clay – that’s the symptom, not the disease (which isn’t the insult it probably appears to be) – but rather that he’s obsessed with the myth over the story.
More Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman’s backstory is fine, more or less. The character setup in the story and what the character is in the real world are slightly different things. She’s the archetypal female superhero for reasons of uniqueness and longevity (name another superheroine that isn’t a distaff spin-off or inheritor. Storm? Jubilee? Fire? Ice? Red Tornado? Anima?) But what she really is, is an (explicitly male, but embraced, co-opted and reframed by women) fantasy of the ultimate American female. Beauty beyond belief, compassion beyond limits, strength and wisdom beyond measure. And there is a rich seam there, in those three words, to mine for actual, character-driven stories. Gender issues, political issues, cultural issue, personal issues – rich, rich soil. And there are more bizarre, impractical outfits in pop music, and more leg on show at Wimbledon.
The myth of Wonder Woman – island princess rescues American pilot, returns him to Man’s World and falls in love with it, swearing to bring Amazon peace and strength to all – is golden. It draws on Old World mythology, just like so much else (including and especially Superman), but is (is therefore) wholly and unequivocally American.
It is, perhaps, ironic, that in trying to recentre the mythical roots of the character, they’ve had to dress her in such ordinary…she looks like La Roux! La Roux on Smallville!
Aanyway: seen this interview?
http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=26965
UT-O.
Sure there was more. If I think of it…
//\Oo/\\
Re: Martin S Smith (post 9)
You give the Jim Henson Creature Shop a call, obviously…
“don’t forget, Loeb also worked on the worst season of LOST (s2).”
It’s season 3 that is universally regarded as the worst.
I would buy every issue and the hardcover of Punisher Bill.
I’m not wild about Straczynski’s Wonder Woman run so far, but I appreciate what he’s trying to do with the character. For years Wonder Woman hasn’t really been about anything – in fact, the last time I can remember reading a Wonder Woman run with a really distinctive feel that gave me a solid idea of what the character was about, it was when George Perez was on the book. You can throw around “iconic” this and “archetypal female superhero” that but that sounds like a nice way of saying that Wonder Woman’s really just generic. Batman’s iconic, but I know what to expect when I pick up a Batman story, because I know the core themes of that character and what he’s supposed to be about. Wonder Woman has always seemed more like a collection of accouterments than an actual person – a lasso that goes here, a tiara that goes there – and if Straczynski manages to bolt an actual personality or a coherent set of themes onto that for the first time in decades, more power to him.
The key to humanising Wonder Woman lies in three little words:
Steve Goddamn Trevor.
Lois, Alfred, Aunt May? Only two of them can cook, and only two of them can kick your ass.
Steve Goddamn Trevor can do all of the above.
//\Oo/\\
As a continuity nerd, I can’t help wondering: if Wonder Woman’s history has been “rebooted”, what happened to her place in the DCU? It’s not *that* long since they proclaimed with much fanfare that they’d put her back where she belonged as a founding Leaguer.
Heck, if Wonder Woman never existed, who killed Max Lord? A book that’s *already* about everyone except the main characters getting amnesia probably can’t survive the same events being rewritten so even Booster et al don’t remember them.
Having never read any ’70s monster comics, I had no idea there was any actual point to Sea Bear. It really didn’t seem to get its own joke, or revel in the pure absurdity of the title. (Kirkman’s intro also seemed to miss the joke of just saying “they got mixed up” by going on and on about it.) I agree that Grizzly Shark was a blast, all the more so by placing after such crap.
“It’s season 3 that is universally regarded as the worst.”
Are you saying odessa steps isn’t part of the universe? 😉
I don’t seem to ‘get’ JMS’ attitude to any of the comics he writes.
How do you read about super-powered beings and wonder how they can fight in their costumes?
Why would you put Thor in small towm America, and make Spidey mystical?
* scratches head *
As much as people seem to be saying that it’s a shame that Gail Simone is leaving Wonder Woman, I actually am happy she’s off the book, it just wasn’t working. In the end all we got were a string of entirely forgettable stories and a lot of missed potential, though I’m sure the baggage of the horrid relaunch and Amazon’s Attack was partly responsible for some of it.
The only story that really shined through the mountain of meh was the really funny two issue team up with Black Canary that mostly depended on Gail writing Dinah again and Wonder Woman spending most of the story being entirely out of her element and trying to not be too stoically serious when her disguise for their undercover mission turned out to be a small mask covering half of her face and an outfit that heavily emphasized her cleavage.
I don’t know if you guys are aware of it, but the Mandarin/Kim Il Jong comparison is very apt: in 1978 Kim kidnapped a famous Korean filmmaker and forced him to make movies glorifying North Korea and it’s Glorious Leader forhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2003/apr/04/artsfeatures1 nearly a decade.
I suppose it’s also worth noting that Stracynski, when he was the major producer of Murder, She Wrote, also made Jessica Fletcher move to NYC to get in touch with the ordinary people. History repeats, perhaps too much.
Was Jessica Fletcher ever not in touch with the ordinary people. I mean admittedly she spent most of her time hanging around with people that turned out to be murderers, but it’s not like they were all living in ivory towers with butlers and maids to do their dirty work for them.
‘I say, Chapman, be an awfully good fellow and run down to the local motel, lure my ex-fiance there and stab her to death would you? Oh and pick up some fois gras from the patisserie on Lexington on your way back.’
I guess it was the idea that living ensconced in her cape town, she was completely cut off from Stracynski’s idea of the “real people of America.” I guess the working class and all that? Admittedly, she was sometimes rather snooty in those first few seasons. Perhaps the salient point is that Stracynski has gotten a lot of credit for that change, and perhaps it is this initial praise for the concept that got to his head.
Not for nothing, but there’s an advance review of Superman #701 out. I hope it’s some kind of hoax, because Superman buying a Philly cheese steak and not knowing what it is must really mean that Clark Kent has been sleepwalking through life. That or Stracynski’s pulling a Wonder Woman-type reset of Superman continuity that’s adding insult to injury.
I correct myself: according to the article, it’s not that Superman doesn’t know what a Philly cheese steak sandwich is. It’s that he’s not carrying money on his person. Which seems like one of those commonsense things that Ma and Pa Kent would have taught him. Ho hum.
Regarding digital comics, I too see these proprietary formats fading away in favour of a generic one, if for no other reason than that’s the way almost every other electronic entertainment medium has gone.
But then the whole thing seems to be misguided, with these bloated programs attempting to justify their own existence with all sorts of bells and whistles, when a simple .cbr file does the job just fine.
Hang on, wasn’t Marvel’s first live action show, er, the Hulk programme you mentioned earlier in the podcast? Or are Marvel using some arcane definition of “first”?
Daredevil is perfect for TV, and I’m astounded that it hasn’t been done.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/jul/16/doctor-who-villains-list
I hope this is used in a special alternative to the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.