Best Of

Fun episode! I would HIGHLY recommend listening to the directors commentary on this one. One of the BEST on any movie.

It always felt to me that The Sphinx was intended as The Flaming Carrot originally, rather than Captain Amazing. The oblique philosophy and outsider nature feels more like Carrot than anything Captain Amazing does.

Agree that the backyard recruitment scene is the closest it gets to the feel of the comics, though Macy, Azari and Garafalo kind of nail it in their performances all the way through.

For me the very 90s superhero look of the movie is ultimately is its undoing. It should've looked more like Clerks than Batman & Robin.

(and they should have done the Nazi Boots story from Flaming Carrot Comics).

Haven’t fixed the episode yet, but two things so far:

1) @i_am_scifi : Please, don’t let @wildpigcomics go first when you both try to speak at the same time. His complete inability to say the name of the book you’re talking about means that you should always go first.

2) Re: Crowded. The trade in this month’s previews is the final arc, but I didn’t get the impression that you were aware that it’s also new. They went straight to trade with the final arc; It was never released in singles. If you want to read the final arc this is the only way to do it. Probably you were aware of that, but I didn’t hear you explicitly say it, so I wanted to point it out.

If you're talking about letters of the alphabet, something like a slash or any kind of accent is called a diacritic. Numbers can't have diacritics though. According to the wikipedia article "Slashed Zero", the slash that sometimes appears in a zero is called... a slash.

Re: the inking of Ditko’s later work, I've seen some of Ditko’s late ’70s/’80s pencils, and he wasn’t usually spotting the blacks. His pencils were fairly tight, but still more like breakdowns than full pencils in many cases. That left the inkers having to interpret Ditko’s intentions, and that “oversimplification” Paul speaks of is inkers being too faithful to what Ditko put down on the page. But asking an inker to try to replicate Ditko’s inking style from years (or decades) earlier is, in my opinion, a big ask, especially if they weren’t being paid a “finisher” rate, instead of a basic inker rate. It’s a lot of extra work, both mentally and physically, and time, which they may not have had.

I also think in some cases — and I know for a fact of at least one case — editorial may have wanted a more modern look, so they intentionally called in someone to ink, wanting/directing them to overpower Ditko’s pencils. And that’s a fairly common thing that happened with a lot of older artists late in their careers, not just Ditko.

Great episode. Have not seen Shang Chi yet, but loved the coverage of Buckaroo Banzai (a favorite of mine).

This is a movie that I end up quoting frequently. Favorites include:

"No, no, no, don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."

"Laugh while you can, monkeyboy".

"Home... home is where you wear your hat... I feel so breakup, I wanna go home."

A few fun cameos that you didn't mention were Billy Vera (of "At This Moment" Billy Vera and the Beaters) as Blue Blazers Regular Pinky Caruthers and Yacov Smirnoff as the National Security Advisor (especially funny to me given the still in the cold war setting that they would cast a Russian in this role).

I actually asked a Stump the Rios that included the Buckaroo Banza comic adaptation years ago. My recollection was that there was stumpage and a little on air complaint that adaptations didn't count.

The best use of Nick Fury Jr is the Nick Fury series from James Robinson and ACO. ACO elevates the story with Steranko-inspired art. If you have Marvel Unlimited do give a shot.

The character was heavily featured in the recent Taskmaster mini-series which is a lot of fun, and is the star of the Infinite Fury story currently running in the Marvel annuals.