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Murd's Time Bubble Talkback: The Eighteenth Time
Pants
Posts: 567
The Time Bubble goes into full reverse, as Murd spends an entire show reviewing comics from well before 2000! The challenge of the Man-Bat! The befurring of the Beast! And the million-dollar debut of... Squirrel Girl??? Plus a double-fistful of classic Silver Age reprints, and even a few Quick Pops for good measure. (1:51:48)
Listen here.
Listen here.
Comments
Personally I love the format at the moment. I think you should continue to talk about whatever you've read since the last episode, irrespective of when it's published. I love that each episode could be about literally anything.
Keep up the good work!
I second the emotion above: You should talk about whatever you've read lately that strikes your fancy.
That said, I personally do have an interest in comics published between 2000 and 2006 or so, since those were the years when I wasn't reading (comics). So it's always a treat when I learn something about that era based on what you've just read.
But I'm sure I'll continue to enjoy the Time Bubble no matter what.
Also props for throwing "sesquipedalia" in there, the source of one of my favorite throwaway Phineas & Ferb gags. =D>
I actually really like Frank Robbins, but I thought a lot of his Batman stuff looked extra rushed. All of his stuff looked rushed, actually, because of his style. I wonder if it was the way Batman was colored then; the blues of his cape and cowl may have been too bright. If he'd been colored more in the vein of much of the 90's and today it may have worked better. I really liked his Shadow and Invaders stuff, although they're very different. I had to laugh when you said "I wanna say he drew some issues of 'The Invaders,'" because I think of him as the Invaders artist. Pretty sure he drew most of them, and I thought they were great. But he didn't ink himself, I don't think, so they're much different from his DC stuff he pencilled and inked.
Keep on keepin' on!
Thank you,
chris
I'm actually surprised that Tom Strong doesn't pop up on more "greatest comics ever" lists. The individual stories hold up well as simple entertainment, but when you look at the way the series sums up the entire history of comic books, it's a staggering achievement.
1. The 80-Page Giants did not start under that title; they started as Annuals--Superman Annual #1, for example, was the first DC giant of the Silver Age. But a funny thing happened; people wanted to subscribe to the Giants and horror of horrors, the Post Office required a separate license (and more important, an annual license fee) for each magazine title published. So DC got the bright idea of naming the annual line "80-Page Giant" to get around paying an additional fee every time they came out with a new annual. Eventually, they got the even brighter idea of just incorporating the annuals into the regular numbering of the individual series with which it was associated, so they could drop the annual license fee for the "80-Page Giant" series.
2. Superman #227 was not an 80-Page Giant. Unfortunately it came out during the inflation of the late 1960s-early 1970s and so DC had trimmed the page count slightly, but ominously to 68 pages. Worse, they included advertising pages in the count; the original 80-pagers had no ads except for a few house ads.
3. Great point about Weisinger's desire to de-power Superman; he admitted that one of the problems with Supes was that he was so strong that it was hard to maintain drama, because we all knew that he was invulnerable and hence could not die no matter how dire the situation he found himself in. Cool to hear about the Weisinger Easter Egg; those are particularly rare in the Silver Age.
4. The Gold K story from Superman #157 is technically not the first appearance of Gold K. In an imaginary story from Adventure #299, Gold K popped up, and Weisinger alerted us in a closing panel that although the rest of the story was non-canonical, the new variation of Kryptonite was real.
5. What I love about the Superman ant story is that while it reveals the popular obsession with the horrors of nuclear war so common in the 1960s, the ants' motivation to spread the news makes no sense. Wouldn't the ants be thrilled that their species arose to the top of the food chain because of nuclear war?
I love CGS podcasts, and I am particularly fond of Murd's Time Bubble (and all things Murd, really) but I am only up to The Twelfth Time. Alas - all of you are from my far flung future!
How is life when you are?
Is Ben Affleck the president yet?
Do we ever get an Avengers movie?
As it will take me quite a long time to catch up to you in listening - and who knows, I may be too old and feeble to register my input by then - I couldn't wait to send my words of praise and thanks to Murd. I love comics both old and new, and I love the Time Bubble.
Very truly yours,
BionicDave