House To Astonish Episode 65
Episode 65 of House to Astonish (65! How time flies.) is now live, with plenty of chat about Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga, the new Fables series, Roman Dirge’s putative Lenore movie, The Sixth Gun moving to SyFy, a big round-up of Marvel-related announcements and the summary judgements in the Kirby estate lawsuit. We’ve got reviews of Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil and Our Love Is Real and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe speaks with forked tongue. All this plus the writing skills of a hole in the ground, supervillainous Edinburgh Fringe shows and what happens when you play a comic backwards.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud. Let us know what you think, either in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Excellent podcast; I totally agree on your reviews of ASM and Daredevil. FYI, I think the main reason that Herc is tying into Spider-Island is because Steve Wacker edits both that title and ASM.
Paul, when did Fraction’s Iron Man series turn you off? I’m with you on much of his recent output, but that title still seems to be moving along quite nicely. I thought the Detroit Steel story was a bit anticlimactic, but #500 did a great job of tying together a number of elements from previous issues and making it clear that there’s an overarching plan in place, and I quite liked the Doc Ock story, which basically painted Ock as the anti-Tony Stark.
Al, did you rant about whatever it was from earlier in the week you said you didn’t want to tweet about and would save it for the podcast? Was it the DC female creator quotes from SD?
I dunno about there being nothing wrong with Twilight for the audience it’s aimed at. As I understand it, it contains such teenage-girl-friendly messages as “If a guy breaks into your house in the middle of the night to watch you sleep, that’s True Love, rather than a matter for the police”.
Incredible Herc Spider-Island tie-in: Herc looks across the Brooklyn Bridge and says “There’s something weird going on over there.”
I suspect the real rift in the Venomm/Python relationship would be that she got to join the Serpent Society and he didn’t.
Alex: It was the DC New 52 omnibus, so I got my rant in on that one!
Daibhid: I think Twilight is bad, and fairly anti-women, but my point was more that if someone wants to read that kind of thing, then that’s their choice.
@ Ben Johnston
Obviously I can not speak for Paul but I stuck with Iron Man from the first issue up until #500. For me the arcs were just far too drawn out and there was not a lot to keep my attention. At $2.99 I felt the book was overpriced and as soon as it went to $3.99 that was reason enough for me to drop it. Honestly, the only issue that I remember quite enjoying was the Spider-Man guest appearance (#7 maybe?). After that it was one over-extended and boring arc after another.
Fraction also drove me off of Thor with his first arc and I was happy to see him leave Uncanny X-Men. There’s a fair bit of hype surrounding him but for the most part I find his books to be very underwhelming.
The comments about editors and writers knowing the story too well reminded me of something from Jim Shooter’s blog (which you should be reading if you aren’t) where he said that when Frank Miller was first learning to draw and write comics his ‘moment of revelation’ in understanding Shooter’s notes was when Miller said something like “I get it now. WE know the story and the audience doesn’t, and we have to tell it to them!”
At first I thought you must be joking about the New 52 omnibus.
I hadn’t particularly thought before about the practical reason to avoid the constant renumberings. Found it annoying anyway, but just because it’s stupid rather than thinking of people looking to read the older stuff. Captain America’s getting really bad for this (three #1’s since Heroes Reborn, or is it more?).
I was surprised how much Clone Saga influence there was in ASM. Pleasantly surprised, though. Still like the Clone Saga.
Picking up on the discussion of comic book endings:
-I’m right with Paul on the ending of the Jack of Fables series. Part of the reason it fell a little flat for me was that it was built up so long, then concluded in a manner that really didn’t feel like it had any affection for the characters involved, and given that the series’ roots was essentially “loveable rogue,” if you take that affection away, there’s not a lot left. In the coda, Willingham writes that they were proud to do an ending that no one had ever done before, and my immediate response was, “yes, and that’s WHY no one’s done it before.”
-I have some affection for the Ex Machina ending, but I feel like a large part of that’s because of my affection for the Y the last Man ending. The difference between the two, in my mind, was that the Y ending felt like a natural extension of what we knew going in, whereas the Ex Machina felt a little more like Vaughn waving his hands and saying “trust me, this follows, okay?”
-Speaking of the Y the last man ending, it is hands down my favorite ending to a series ever. My opinion in this matter should be taken with a grain of salt, because my second favorite is probably the Captain Marvel Peter David finale, where someone actually tells the protagonist that the reason people have stopped noticing him isn’t because they fear he’s insane, but because, on the whole, they find him kind of boring.
I rather liked how Preacher ended, but then Preacher was brilliant.
“An ending that no one had ever done before”? I think the Norse called it “Ragnarok.” That book did start losing me after a few months of Jack Frost as the lead, but I don’t see what burning everything down accomplished for the readers.
I do still enjoy the main Fables book, though, enough to be intrigued by Fairest. Unlike Paul, I actually like Cinderella in the Bond role, but I’m still wondering if the twist in the penultimate issue of the second Roberson mini was a deliberate homage to Willingham pulling the same twist with Morningstar and Shapeshifter a quarter century earlier…or just some kind of trope.
Willingham writes that they were proud to do an ending that no one had ever done before, and my immediate response was, “yes, and that’s WHY no one’s done it before.”
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I think a lot of stuff today in comics and elsewhere suffers from what might be called “deformed premise syndrome”, in which the authors have striven so hard to put a twist on their material that that becomes the main point of it.
“I think a lot of stuff today in comics and elsewhere suffers from what might be called “deformed premise syndrome”, in which the authors have striven so hard to put a twist on their material that that becomes the main point of it.”
You just described Mark Millar’s career.
I have an idea that the 52 Omnibus is designed partly for the collector market but mainly with the US library market in mind. As an idea I have no problems with it, as it’s clearly designed to be around on the shelves for far longer than the individual comics it contains, and from what I understand the Library market in the US is a surprisingly fertile one, and may encourage the reader to seek out the continuation of some of the stories he may like. Of course, this heavily depends on whether the book actually explains where the stories continue in, of course.
Personally I agree that they are unwieldy, and have little wish to buy one myself, but to criticise the collection for its size and number of pages strikes me as very disingenuous. Surely every omnibus released over the past few years should be discounted because of their physical unwieldiness in that case, from reprints of Ditko’s Spiderman and Kirby’s Fantastic Four (1088 and 848 pages each) to Bendis’ Daredevil Omnibus and Simonson’s Thor Omnibus (another 848 pages and 1192 pages respectively)?
They’ll make for mighty fine doorstops, though. Or something rather handy to assault any unexpected intruder if kept next to the front door.
I didn’t like Roberson’s Cinderella stuff either. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t feel any desire to buy the second series.
I thought the first few issues of The Order were great, but I think it fell apart towards the end. Shame, it had a lot of potential. Has anything been done with those characters since?
On ASM 666: Either Jackal’s math is off or Slott and Wacker’s is. If there’s a .001% chance of getting the Spidey virus, that’s one in 100,000 which means only 16 people in Manhattan (which has 1.63 million residents) got it. And honestly, I don’t think that’s ENOUGH people to tell the story they want to tell…there ought to be at least a couple hundred running around.
I agree with Carey, while the New 52 Omnibus seems like a ridiculous thing to sell to your average consumer, it’s quite a good thing to get into libraries. I borrowed Marvel’s 70th Anniversary sampler from my local library not long ago and it gave nice samples of titles/runs I’d never had hands on experience with before (Golden Age Sub-Mariner and PAD’s Hulk especially).
I think Paul Cornell killed off Princess Python in Dark Reign: Young Avengers. Well, not Paul Cornell personally in the comic. Her son, the new Executioner, did it.
And I thought the Order went downhill massively after the first few issues. I read it in trade and while the first was good, the second was bloody awful and, reading it after Fraction started on Iron Man and X-Men, just felt like him staking out ideas for those titles.
Appropriate that you should rave about the old MCP Daredevil/Black Widow story just after talking about Amazing Spider-Man as it was one of Dan Slott’s earliest stories.
[…] you haven’t listened to this week’s podcast yet, then it’s just one post down. Reviews include Daredevil #1, Amazing Spider-Man #666 (the first part of Spider-Island) and […]
@Dave
By my counting there have been five Captain America #1s since 1996.
The Heroes Reborn #1 from Liefeld
The Heroes Return #1 from Waid/Garney
The Marvel Knights #1 with John Cassidy
The Brubaker/Epting #1 off the back of Avengers Disassembled
And the Brubaker/McNiven #1 from earlier this month.
Don’t forget Cap and Falcon #1 by Priest and Sears.
Don’t forget Cap and Falcon #1 by Priest and Sears.
Can we, please?
A friend once encapsulated the concept of Daredevil nicely: he’s a blind superhero whos super power is that he can see.
Daredevil’s hiatus was about as long as cm punk’s.
Do you know what you can buy at the Misney Smore? Books by schmeff schmoeb. (Callback~!)
Didn’t HITMAN end kind of like Jack of Fables too? I have the feeling Garth Ennis tends towards stories where, you know, everyone ends, so to speak 🙂
Finally giving a listen to the podcast…
Mark me as another who was underwhelmed by the Cinderella Fables stories. As said, it just seems a poor mix of two genres, something that was better in concept than execution.
Snakes on a Plane was doomed when the studio saw the internet response and tried to openly court it. It went from being a guilty pleasure to being a poorly conceived attempt to court a niche audience. And the publicity campaign was just a waste of money. Either you believe the Internet is a large audience, in which case word of mouth will sell the movie for you, or you believe the Internet is a niche audience in which case you shouldn’t be using them as a judge for the overall saleability of your movie.
On Matt Fraction, he’s overrated at best. At worst, he’s honestly kind of bad. He should not be allowed near a team book. Putting him on Uncanny was a really bad choice, made worse when Fraction promptly swelled the book to a cast of thousands while simultaneously showing that he couldn’t handle more than three characters at a time.
The 52 Omnibus would be a neat thing to win in a raffle, but I wouldn’t pay for it.
Oh man, I have to reread Hitman soon.
I’ve ordered the 52Omnibus in work. I’ll get it at a 45% discount, and I LIKE the giant hardcover format. I read comics in bed. When I do get it, I’ll send pictures compared to my other stuff. I got the Walt Simonsen Omnibus for my birthday but haven’t read it yet
“You snake hussy!” had me LOLing. You guys are awesome. I love “The Parent Trap” snake-coupling idea.