House to Astonish Episode 206
Merry Chri… er… Happy New Y… um… Happy February? Welcome to the joint 15th anniversary and end of year wrap-up episode of House to Astonish, as Paul and I chat through the news of the past few weeks, including Blood Hunt‘s polybagged “Red Band” editions, Jason Aaron taking on the relaunched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the 40th anniversary of Usagi Yojimbo and Criminal coming to Amazon Prime. On top of that, we have the 2023 Homies awards, where we (and you) give our picks of the best things we read last year, and the complete audio of the SILENCE! To Astonish panel from November 2023’s Thought Bubble festival. All this plus Alan Sugar action figures, being turned evil by a bop on the head with a bowling ball, and every comic character who is legally not Captain Marvel. There’s almost too much here! Don’t eat it all at once!
The episode is available here, or through the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Bluesky or (I guess) Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page. And look, if you don’t already know how good you would look in a House to Astonish t-shirt, I don’t know how much more I can emphasise that fact.
They were planting seeds for a vampire event a few years ago, when Blade joined the Avengers and Dracula was stealing Wolverine’s blood and whatnot. Then it went quiet all of a sudden, probably because Marvel had placed the Vampire Nation in Ukraine and it got retconned by reality.
Marvel vampires are still in Chornobyl, aren’t they? They didn’t change that, they just… stopped bringing it up too often. Leah William’s X-Terminators still mentioned that. I think.
Ah, I didn’t realise you’d reformulated the Homies. I must admit, I’d not looked at it because I’ve been out of reading monthly or even particularly new comics for a few years now and so haven’t been able to contribute meaningfully to the original Homies format for a while. So just “the best thing you read last year” is definitely a take closer to my reading habits.
Belatedly then, my choice is early Silver Age Kid Colt: Outlaw. My only experience with classic Marvel westerns previously was the first Masterwork of Rawhide Kid, which isn’t great. But last year I read all of Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid and Two Gun Kid from about ’60 through to ’65 or so. Not only is Rawhide Kid better than that Masterwork volume suggested (those are Kirby’s issues and he’s really not very well suited to Westerns and it tries to lean into other genres, such as with the Living Totem issue, which wants to be an Atlas monster book) but Kid Colt was a very pleasant surprise, along with its regular artist Jack Keller. I’d literally never heard of him, but he was at Atlas/Marvel for over a decade, working almost exclusively on Kid Colt. He’s got a really clean style which always clearly tells the story. Those Westerns frequently recycle plots (moreso even than you can spot Lee’s repeated tropes in his Silver Age superhero comics), often within a month or two of each other but it’s usually the Kid Colt version that turns out the best.
I was a bit underwhelmed by Avengers: War Across Time. Davis’ work suffered from not being inked by Mark Farmer and the story didn’t really do much in the end. I was expecting something closer to Avengers Forever, but it’s much more restrained and the time bending stuff suggested by the covers is incidental. I did like that it’s explicitly set in the original period of publication of the Avengers issues it’s set between, rather than the sliding timescale though.
Oh and Paul, as Al says, Ninja Turtles are still very much an ongoing concern. My 6 y/o nephew is mad for them (especially the recent movie), while his dad is really enjoying the IDW series. I think it helped that when the first cartoon was happening, the original comic series (which grew out of being a Daredevil parody pretty quickly) carried on doing its own thing regardless, meaning the entire enterprise wasn’t entirely dependant on the cartoon and toy sales. Nickelodeon buying the entire property ten years ago or so probably helped too, as it means they’ve an invested interest in continually making new versions of it.
In some other timeline, it was Adolescent Radioactive Black-Belt Hamsters that became the gigantic hit amongst all those books that came out in the mid 80s black and white glut.
There was a Blade: Vampire Nation one-shot, written by Mark Russell, published in November or December 2022. It was a quality comic. The setting was still Chernobyl. I think that may have been the last time that Marvel really touched on the Vampire Nation.
Al, I feel the same way as you about the Tom King books I’ve tried in the past, but I did pick up Love Everlasting (because Elsa Charretier) and so far I’ve really liked it.
I too didn’t notice the Homies reformatting because I’m so behind on everything, but the best thing I did actually get to last year was Kate Beaton’s Ducks. Emily Carroll’s A Guest In The House was pretty great too.
Boy, it must be a good FF book if Paul likes it.
Like Al says, Avengers Inc sounds like a corporate superteam. In fact Avengers Inc by Al Ewing specifically makes me think of Sunfire’s Avengers Idea Mechanics.
Worth noting re: Avengers as a multi-title thing that there was also Avengers Academy, The Initiative (“Avengers: The Initiative), Avengers AI, Avengers Assemble, Young Avengers, Uncanny Avengers and Avengers World. And Arena, which…had the word Avengers slapped on it.
Just want to say a big thanks for the podcasts and keeping the quality so incredibly high after all these years (along with the rest of the blog postings). Always a good day when I see a new episode appear.
Sadly like others my comics reading is pretty much non-existent due to life and the as you mentioned the absurd costs of single issues.
In terms of physical comics, years ago the Panini UK Marvel Collectors’ Editions were really good value (if you didn’t mind being a bit behind the US schedule) and a good gateway into Marvel way before the MCU was a thing, but shop closures during peak covid and their constant relaunches with new formats/price points seems to have more or less killed them off unfortunately.
Like you said unless you are dead set on a graphic novel, Marvel Unlimited is really the only place to go these days.
Great news about Criminal, that was an excellent series. The anthology style of it may suit the TV show well as it would allow them to focus on a different section of that world every handful of episodes. I do share the scepticism about four show-runners though, hopefully not a case of too many cooks.
Yes, the Panini collected editions were very good. I only stopped buying them semi-regularly when they started turning double page spreads into crammed single pages. But with the post-covid relaunch the price DOUBLED (or not far off). They doomed it to failure.
Interesting as well that the DC equivalents, through Titan, had multiple titles that nearly all disappeared before covid, IIRC.
There’s clearly a market for these, so I don’t really understand how they collapsed in such a big way. Is it only Spider-Man (Men) and the Wolverine/Deadpool one running now?
I believe so yes normal Spider-Man, a Miles version, and Wolverine/Deadpool. At their peak I think it was something like seven Marvel titles with the Spider-Man one fortnightly plus a Batman book that were about £2.50 for three full stories that had zero adverts.
I kept hearing that as “the official drink of Eastbourne.”
Excellent show and listener chat here. I’ve enjoyed every issue of Avengers Inc but the one thing I’ve really, really disliked is the colour scheme. Alex Sinclair is a world-class colourist but the super-drab palette – which may not have been his decision – sucked a lot of energy out of the art.
Amazing covers!
First and biggest, thank you so much for this amazing 2+ hour episode. It made the miles absolutely fly by as I drove down to be with my family during a crisis.
Minor clarification: The central characters in DANGER STREET aren’t random z-listers; they are all from the mid-1970s series, 1st ISSUE SPECIAL, which has a fascinatingly weird backstory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Issue_Special