Wait, What? Ep. 94: The Basement Japes

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Uploaded from the Photobucket iPhone App Above: The Farm Fusion Waffle, which is a liege waffle topped with mushroom, spinach, roasted pepper, tomato and marinated chevre, from the Waffle Window, Portland, OR.

Yes, that is one mighty tasty waffle, let me tell you -- although let me be honest, I do not tell you in episode 95, I merely mention it to you now. But!  Trust me, it's darn good.

As for what we do discuss in this episode, join me behind the jump for... show notes!

1:20-3:24: The Basement Japes: an introduction
3:24-13:21: The front page of Time.com and how to get there; Jeff makes Graeme break down the process behind his recent Dark Knight Rises
13:21-22:03: Graeme has recently seen Transformers: Dark of the Moon on Netflix Watch Instantly  and would like to talk about it and a certain amount of contemplation transpires about the quote-unquote charms of Michael Bay.
22:03-32:02: By very sad contrast, Jeff has something to say about Melissa & Joey, which he mistakenly calls "Melissa Loves Joey" THE ENTIRE TIME.  Is Jeff really so damn old he would get the title confused with Joanie Loves Chachi?  The answer, sadly, is yes.  Fortunately, Graeme steers Jeff toward Sex House, instead.  Although that seems like a weird lead-in to mentioning Jarett Kobek's new book, If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? (and yes, I also get that title wrong, too), it actually works quite well, honest.
32:02-32:22: This is the point where we acknowledge that we have not really talked about comics at all, yet.
32:22-34:18: So instead of talking about Transformer movies, we mention Transformers comics and GI Joe comics.  Woo!
34:18-40:51: Well, and so you can't really talk about GI Joe Comics without discussing Top Shelf's Double Barrel, can you? No, of course not.  Trust me when I say we speak glowingly of Double Barrel #2.
40:51-56:04: Jeff's other major comic read of the week was catching up on three weeks of Shonen Jump Alpha. Can Jeff handle jumping into Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal on its ninth chapter?  (Spoiler: no.) The pros and cons of reading a mass of serialized information all at a go also gets a bit of the ol' poke & prod.
55:04-1:00:24: This gets us talking about how jumping on points and story density can work both for and against a story's accessibility with mentions of Morrison's JLA in trade, Mark Waid's interview at the AV Club, and whether Marvel's recap pages work.
1:00:24-1:02:59: Kieron Gillen has his own podcast, DECOMPRESSED.  We haven't listened to it, but we are very excited about it!  Check it out here!
1:02:59-1:14:09: Graeme tallks about Dark Avengers #177 by Jeff Parker and Kev Walker, and Wild Children, the recent Image book by Ales Kot and Riley Rossmo
1:14:09-1:16:28: Graeme picked up the new Eddie Campbell graphic novel, The Lovely Horrible Stuff, digitally (for only five dollars, and you can too, here at the SavCrit Digital Store) and tells us about it.  It sounds quite good.  (I admit it, I've picked it up since and can sign off on Graeme's recommendation.  It really is quite good.)
1:16:28-1:29:00: Other books Graeme discusses:  Action Comics #11,which he likes more than Jeff did, Infernal Man-Thing; and Punk-Rock Jesus.
1:29:00-1:45:38: Were you still wondering why Graeme liked the first volume of the Greg Rucka Punisher trade even though he didn't like the individual issues he tried?  He tells us here, and we get in to a bit of a tussle over the nature of The Punisher, and the differences between Rucka's approach and Ennis's approach.
1:45:36-1:58:34: Does that mean we end up talking about Rucka's run on Elektra and his career at NuMarvel as well as his current webcomic, Lady Sabre?  Why yes, it does!
1:58:34-2:03:32: The end (of the episode) is nigh! Although promising earlier to spoil the hell out of Walking Dead #100, Jeff instead tells the comic book collection bet story from Bleeding Cool.
2:03:32-2:10:24: When we recorded this, Neil Gaiman doing Before Sandman was just a rumor.  Want to know what we thought of the announcement before it was announced?  We talk about it here!
...Oh, and also closing comments, which we are still not very good at doing.
If you've got iTunes, it may have already set the nose of your faithful RSS bloodhound stirring.  Alternately, you are welcome to have a listen to it here, and sniff at it dismissively at your leisure:
Oh, and a word to the wise, we aren't recording this week, which means we won't have an episode for you next week -- I've got a trip lined up for this week, and I realized it would actually benefit my life greatly if we baked this kind of thing into my schedule, so expect us to have one skip week a month from here on out.  (Think of it as an opportunity to catch up.)
As always, we thank you for listening and hope you enjoy!

Skyhigh -- Hibbs on 6/6/12

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Hello from 30k feet!

Well, no, not exactly -- I'm writing this on a plane, coming back from Chicago, where I went to my cousin Ian's wedding (Ben was the ringbearer, and looked crazy awesome in a suit), but I won't post this until I hit the ground again. I only took a handful of comics with me, and only have something to say about maybe half of those, but I've been trying hard to have reviews every week, and I won't let something as small as "not being in town" stop me!

Nice town, Chicago -- last time I was here I was maybe 12 or so? Also for a wedding, for that matter, between my dad and stepmom, and I'd love to come back, so someone get married, and invite me! I had a chance to visit Chicago Comics, and see Eric Kirsammer and his kids, and that is a swell store, one of the better I've seen; and one I'd certainly shop at if I lived locally. I wanted to see several other stores (including Challengers, which I've heard nothing but swell things about), but, y'know, family obligations and all that.

Anyway, I don't want to write a travelogue, and I promised myself I'd tear through these books before I landed, so on with the show...!

ACTION COMICS #10: Wait... when is this taking place? It has to be just after the last storyline, I think, not in modern times, as the Justice League portion is a flashback. But why does he bounce back and forth between the t-shirts and armor, with no real mention of what's going on? I was a little excited, actually, about the notion of the death of Kent, and a new secret ID, because if anyone could actually make that happen (yeah, yeah, I'm a sucker), it would have to be Grant, but if this is still in flashback mode, obviously that's all garbage. Bah, for a time when I was less bitter and jaded, and when we'd just accept a premise straight-forwardly. I'm *liking* this, still, but I desperately want to be *loving* this, and 10 issues in and I'm not. 'sfine, but I want better than just GOOD, y'know?

AVENGERS VS X-MEN #5: that's a fun little plot twist, "the phoenix five" and all that, and while I'm totally willing to wait and see what they actually DO with it, it's hard to see in my head how characters used to/used by vast otherworldly power, like Peter and Illyana will work in this context. Or will they just ignore, wossname, cyttorak, is that the Juggernaut's mentoring power? I'm still deeply disliking the art, but the story is sorta kinda growing on me as act one closes. GOOD.

FUCK ALAN MOORE BEFORE WATCHMEN MINUTEMEN #1: As I said, I've not be in SF all week, so I haven't the foggiest notion as to how this is selling, but, after reading issue #1, if I was "just" a reader, I'd definitely not be coming back for issue #2. Not because it's badly crafted -- because it is very well-illustrated and written, indeed -- but because it didn't tell me anything I already didn't know, and, as a first issue, it was PAINFULLY "recappy". Absolutely nothing "happened", it just assembled everything we already knew from WATCHMEN into a chronological order. What the hell is the point of that? Darwyn Cooke was the one BW creator that I thought might actually make something I want to read (on this project, I mean), and was the one who, potentially, had the biggest canvas to play with, since the Minutemen characters aren't exactly character, but world-buildy background, but there's just nothing here at all. 17% of the page count gone, for shit-all purpose, foo. That's bad enough with "normal" comics, but on something as divisive as this? Ugh, no way. This was perfectly OK, but if you're going to take a big shit on Alan Moore, you've got to do a whole fucking better than this.

I ganked this picture from here

CREATOR OWNED HEROES #1: Really? Man, so first, that's a fucking AWFUL title for a comic, as it says just nothing about content. (Seriously, find me 50 people in the entire nation who inherently cares about the ownership of a work, rather than "is it any good?" I'll wait -- I had a "self published" section in the store until I got sick of answering people what that MEANT, so trust me, I KNOW) And second, the content is more padded than a twelve year old's bra. If what you want to do is "A magazine nowhere near as good or relevant as fucking HERO ILLUSTRATED, with a bunch of mediocre comics", that's cool, but shit, you could have told us that's what you were delivering. I Just don't give a damn about your convention snapshots (that's what Facebook is for, not something you're charging me $4 for!!), or features on cos-players, or, and this is the one that really got me, creator interviews that aren't ABOUT creator-owned work! I mean, the VERY FIRST LINE of the Gaiman piece is "I love his work on SANDMAN", which, y'know, is a notoriously creator-owned comic book, right? What a mis-thought project from ship to stern. AWFUL.

DARK AVENGERS #175: I'm mostly writing this bit for anyone writing up sales chart analyses: Marvel kept the NUMBERING of THUNDERBOLTS here, but did a really really weird thing after that -- it had Diamond assign the book a new SERIES code. A series code is an invisible-to-consumers code that allows retailers to sign up customers, well, to a series. Like (say) 123456 is the code for CAPTAIN FANCYPANTS, and it allows the computer to know that CAPTAIN FANCYPANTS #1 and CP #2 are *the same thing*. It also allows me to, say, take the various BPRD series, and assign it to a custom series code (like CUST123), so that every BPRD series gets pulled (even though Dark Horse treats them as *entirely separate* things, go figure)  In the past, when Marvel changed, say, INCREDIBLE HULK to INCREDIBLE HERCULES they kept the series code the SAME, which meant that all of the preorders AUTOMATICALLY transferred, here they consciously did NOT do that, in other words: eliminating 98% of the marketing-driven reason to carry over the numbering. What's even weirder, is that it really IS TBOLTS #175, and it's a bit hard to follow if you haven't read those previous issues (well, or the last year or so at least), while at the same time kicking off all of the people  who WERE buying it. I don't get it. The comic itself was perfectly OK.

EARTH 2 #2: Normally I despair against "decompressed" comics, but I have to say that I find the very slow world-building on display here to be very fine. I'll probably want it to move a whole lot faster once all of the players are on stage, but for now? I'm loving the hell out of this. VERY GOOD, and easily the best comic I read this week.

Right, almost time to turn off electronics, so ending it there. What did YOU think?

-B

Wait, What? Ep. 52.2: Jerks, Fighters, and Jus' Folks

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Photobucket I admit it. I love "Our Valued Customers" even though it caters to the worst stereotypes about comic store customers. (Although I had my share of crazy people stories when I worked the counter at CE, none of them ever seemed quite as bad as what apparently walks into Mr. Tim's store on a weekly basis -- and honestly, most of the crazy people we had were "it's San Francisco and there are mentally ill people on the streets" crazy as opposed to "I must talk to you about Spider-Man so hard spittle is always flying off my lips" crazy.)

In any event, none of this is especially relevant to the conclusion to Episode 52 of our podcast, although it might be pretty easy for you to imagine Graeme or I coming off like this guy as we discuss Marvel and what might happen to the direct market in 2012;   Chris Roberson's Superman, recommendations for crazy silver-age DC stories, NuMarvel, comic book movies, Bendis and Ultimate Fallout, New Dark Avengers, Frank Darabont and Walking Dead, and much, much more, thanks to our listeners, colleagues, and fine friends who follow us on Twitter.  Itunes should have the episode all queued up for you, or alternately, you can listen to us gab about all of the above here:

Wait, What? Ep. 52.2: Jerks, Fighters and Jus\' Folks

We hope you enjoy and as always, thanks for listening!