Episode 1515 Talkback - Comic Talk
Adam_Murdough
Posts: 506
Peter Rios is on the line for this episode, in which we express our initial enthusiasm for the Big Two's recently announced mega-events of Spring 2015: DC's multiverse-manifesting 'Convergence', and Marvel's new spin on 'Secret Wars'! Also, a brief rave from Pants about the current volume of 'Elektra'; famous quotations from Howard Chaykin; and other bits'n'bobs. (1:11:51)
Listen here.
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Comments
Regarding the upcoming Convergence event, I have to admit I'm quite looking forward to it. I'm certainly intimidated by the potential number of books that are going to be available, but like you guys I'm hoping DCBS has us covered. I've stated before that I gave the Nu52 a try with WORLDS' FINEST and EARTH 2, but they ultimately didn't hold me. I just missed "my" DCU too much. And the idea of revisiting what is ostensibly the pre-Nu52 DCU virtually right where we left off is certainly appealing.
And regarding the "bonus" content on the app... Thanks, @Shane. That Gremlins theme song is going to be stuck in my head all day now. :D
As for Marvel, my gut tells me they're heading in a "soft reboot" direction. They've been laying the groundwork for a long time for one I think, what with all the discussions across multiple books about all the damage that's been done to the fabric of time/reality/etc due to all of the time travel (the "incursions" arc in New Avengers, the recent Kang-centric storyline in Uncanny Avengers, the Cancerverse story in GotG, etc, etc).
I'm with @ShaneKelly on all of it though ... as long as it's done well, I'm in.
As for Spiderverse, I'm only following it on the periphery as I read Amazing Spider-Man. It just blew up in issue #9 and, even though I had no idea who most of the Spider-Men were, I still thought it was a great read and am looking forward to next issue. To Murd's point, not that I was going to read every issue, but I too can't figure out if there's a reading order for it or not. At the end of Amazing Spider-Man #9 they said you don't have to read the associated books to keep up with the Spiderverse story in their book, so I'm going to take them at their word on that.
I can't believe you all are getting roped into this. 3 life long DC fans who have been disappointed for so many years now, and just the tease of the old sweet stuff has Pants breaking his no DC edict and Murd looking for a bundle to by all the titles. This is a band aid. It keeps them publishing and making money while they move. It's the old Spidey story in Stan's desk drawer he pulls out when Jazzy John Romita is under the weather. Why should we think it's any different that the 0 issue month or the 3d cover month, or the *dry heave* selfie cover event. New talent? Perhaps. But read the fine print:
"(Dan Jurgens of Futures End is co-writing the zero issue with him, while former Superman scribe Scott Lobdell is helping to lay out the overall outline of the story.)"
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
@Pants - Way to go with the healthy changes to your life, that's some truly awesome progress. Keep at it.
I agree with @Peter that Secret Wars was probably just the next chapter in Hickman's Avengers story but Marvel decided to make it more. I think the same thing happened with Infinity as well. I'm still excited for it.."in Hickman I trust."
Howard Chaykin and Big Hero Six:
There is a scene in the movie where a character is holding an issue of Marvel Premiere #32(Monark Starstalker!) which was written and drawn by Chaykin. I couldn't believe it..why that comic of all the ones to chose from? Starstalker happens to be one of my favorite "obscure" characters so I like to think someone working on the film likes him a lot too.
A) I like the idea of the multiverse - X happened on Earth 1 and y happened on Earth S and so on. For me, Hypertime was a weak way of leaving everything in play without providing any of the structure of whe(re)/(en) it occured.
B) I bought The Kingdom in back issue form years later and with such a strong positive feeling toward Kingdom Come. When I got to the end of it I felt like the only point to the book was to present the Hypertime concept. I was left incredibly underwhelmed.
Loved @Peter's Chaykin discussion. I had no idea that was Howard's attitude and I find it disappointing, but what an eye-opener. And I agree with him, his Star Wars material is some of his weakest work. I can imagine that if he weren't sold on the idea in the beginning, he probably just "phoned it in" before the deadlines. Marvel / Disney have a chance to rectify that in January when the Star Wars ongoing series begins at Marvel anew. As far as Chaykin's feelings about all Spider-Man iterations after Ditko's... I see his point, but he's full of it.
As for the Marvel event, I think they are going to really shake things up with this event. So many big rumors flying around regarding their properties and them trying to more cloely resemble the cinematic universe. I wouldn't be surprised if this is very close to a soft reboot, if not at the very least killing off a few more legacy characters. It won't stop with Wolverine.
Greatest Muddle the Murd Edition yet!! With those kinds of prizes, I bet @Adam_Murdough gets a bunch of challenges this month. Looking forward to your Previews episode soon. I just finished my DCBS order and tend to tighten it up after listening to your podcast every month... not sure if that's a good thing. This month's deadline for orders at DCBS is Nov 26.
Simply a top shelf episode guys ~ thanks!
Favorite two quotes this episode:
"Can I 'Hump the Murd'?" Peter Rios
"I do nothing if not beat dead horses around here!" Brian "Pants" Christman
About Convergence and Secret Wars... Basically, at this point all I have to reiterate is:
I'm so f*cking burnt out on alternate universe stuff. I'm just beyond tired of it. Both Big Two companies have done this stuff so many times in the last 2-3 years especially that I'm in disbelief that anyone could get all that excited about it anymore. It's like "Hey look, another random configuration of a preexisting character."
DC: The whole New 52 relaunch was basically a line-wide attempt at "Let's explore a new version of the DCU". Piling a new Earth 2 on top of that... then piling Futures End and Multiversity on top of that... It was just too much for me to care. We've barely gotten to know the New 52 history and continuity. So since the new "normal" has barely been established, alternate takes seem less special. To me, multiverse stuff means more and matters more when it plays off of a stable foundation, and the New 52 wasn't stable enough for me to care about its possible future or alternate versions. (That, and I'm like six years overdue for Grant Morrison to finally be done with DC superheroes already. He's possibly my favorite writer. I wish he'd apply his talents elsewhere more often, but that's just me.) I was a Marvel kid growing up anyway, so if others who grew up more with DC are excited for Convergence... hey, I can't fault you.
Marvel: We had the alternate reality of Age of Ultron. We had the original X-Men jumping into the 616 timeline. We had all of the reality/time-jumping of Uncanny Avengers. We had Battle of the Atom, in which future X-Men came to the present. We had Captain America going to a different dimension. We had three different Thors, from three different places in time, all sharing the spotlight in the same book. We had multiple earths colliding in New Avengers. We had the regular Avengers traveling to the future. Now we have every Spider-Man ever meeting each other, and we have both Hickman Avengers titles jumping forward in time for no real reason other than "We need another new 'time'/'reality' gimmick for the next six months, to fill time before Secret Wars".
It's all just so jarring. Defamiliarization makes for interesting fiction, but when EVERYTHING is defamiliarized, it becomes much less interesting. I just don't have enough of a sense of what the normal cohesive universe is anymore. It doesn't help that the big events of certain series (particularly Age of Ultron and Uncanny Avengers) were barely ever mentioned in other titles. The New Avengers have been dealing with the colliding earths for damn near two years now, but only in the last month have I noticed references to this in other titles. It all seems so big and convoluted. With Uncanny Avengers in particular I feel that a really great storyline was basically squandered in terms of what it could have meant to the publishing line, simply because it wasn't given a chance to breathe. The earth and everyone on it died, and it didn't matter. Characters died, and it didn't matter because literally they only referred to Rogue's temporary death like once, in an oblique way in an X-title, before she was back. And even with a subpar event like Age of Ultron: Okay, it would have felt LESS subpar and would have at least meant something to the publishing line if the events of it were at least referenced in other titles more. But no, instead those other titles were all doing their own huge reality-twisting storylines simultaneously and without regard for a shared universe. These series can be read on their own terms, but in terms of being a Marvel fan and reading Marvel's publishing line... the whole thing has just felt like a convoluted mess at times. If the volume is always turned up to 11 (i.e., if reality-changing events are ALWAYS happening), then it starts to feel less exciting than it SHOULD feel.
When reality is always being twisted, it starts to feel like there IS no shared reality here, or that continuity doesn't matter. And to try and redeem that mess by turning it into the point of an event ("Time is breaking!") seems dubious at best. You can tell me all you want that "Realities are ending!", but unless there's a good STORY to go along with it, then it's far less exciting than it should be. Give me a comic like Daredevil #191, or Uncanny X-Men #268, or Hawkeye #11, over ALL of these shrill hyperbolic attempts to scream at me and tell me to be excited because you can't stop regurgitating your universe and have no new ideas.
This isn't a "cannibalization myth"; this is regurgitation. Marvel is puking up food from 1984 (and 1992, and 2009, ...) and presenting it as a new meal for us to eat. And the scariest thing is that at this point it doesn't seem like Marvel can do anything else. Besides a handful of titles (Ms. Marvel, Inhuman), it seems like ALL MARVEL DOES NOW is represent alternate takes on its characters.
THAT SAID: I'm still enjoying a lot of what Marvel's been doing! I'll still buy many of their comics during Summer 2015, and I fully expect a lot of them to be the standard 3-star or 3.5-star outings that I've gotten from Marvel on a regular basis for a few years now (not a bad average at all). Will I buy Secret Wars? Of course. Would I be up for one-shots called "Old Man Logan" and "Civil War" or whatever? Absolutely. I'm sure they'll be okay/good.
But the thing is that I just want things to calm down so I can enjoy them more. I'm not saying "Marvel isn't putting out good comics"; they are; but they're putting out too many decent comics all of the same hyperbolic type, and it's making each title seem like less than it could be. As great as a lot of Uncanny Avengers was, it absolutely lost something because Age of Ultron was going on at the same time, and Cap was in Dimension Z at the same time (publishing-wise), and Hickman is creating and destroying worlds at the same time. When everything is big and convoluted AND conflicting, AND when there is basically zero attempt at referencing big events of certain titles in other titles across the line, then something is lost. Nothing is big if everything is supposedly big.
The elephant in the room here is STORY. For a lot of these series, I'm not really seeing much in the way of story. Over and over again I'm mostly just seeing "mash-up". I'm seeing "Let's throw these different versions of characters together and see what crazy stuff happens." And that's a fun concept, but I've seen it like 27,000 times just in the last three years alone. When Hickman's New Avengers battled a "Justice League"-like team from another earth, it should have felt more exciting to me than it did. Because as it was, it was yet another thing like that, spread out across 5-6 $4 issues, all to fill time so Hickman's Incursions storyline can last even longer.
It's just...
I dunno.
I'm sure a lot of the stuff next year will be fun and exciting. I just hope there's more of a STORY to it. I find myself craving STORY, but instead the Big Two seems to be leaning even harder than ever on repackaging nostalgia and name-recognition of past storylines. Yes they've always done this, but more and more they just seem to want to replay stories of the past like pushing buttons on a keyboard: instantly the past storyline is conjured up readymade in the reader's mind, no further work necessary.
Besides, I've already seen this sort of Marvel mash-up stuff before...
Even this idea of mashing all their alt-universes together is itself a regurgitated idea!
Silver Surfer #7
Did Norrin Radd ever even do any bronze-age Hostess ads?
As for the New 52, I've been drawn back in at least a little lately, and things do seem to be improving. I've gone back to discover Manapul's Flash and Lemire's Green Arrow, and those are both fun. Johns and Romita's Superman has been pretty good, too, though I wish they'd change that dopey costume already. And then you have the new takes on the Batman periphery like Grayson (which I don't like as much you guys seem to, but it's fun), Batgirl, and Gotham Academy. It still doesn't feel as familiar and, well, as good as DC used to, but then again, the last few years of the "old" universe didn't either. At least there seems to be a little room for something other than grim 'n gritty doom 'n gloom again.
What I would like to happen with Convergence is for it at least to cause a couple spin-off titles that tell stories in the old universes, similar to what they are doing for the event itself. I think those types of titles would go over really well. I know I would love them. I am someone who loved the old DCU, but still loving and enjoying the current stuff. I really feel that the new DCU is finding its footing more and more as the years have gone by. I love the chances they are taking with some stuff and the stories overall have been really good in the titles I am reading (and I am still reading about 20-25 titles). I am all in for this event (hoping DCBS will have a great a good discount bundle for it).
With Secret Wars, I am very intrigued by the alternate worlds battling it out. It's like the original Secret Wars meets Crisis on Infinite Earths. I am a HUGE fan for alternate realities, so I am glad to see a lot of these alternate worlds coming back (at least we assume they are coming back for this event). I really would like for the same thing to come out of this that I would like for Convergence, which is a couple titles that tell stories that take place in those alternate realities. Something like that could be a lot of fun to read.
I am really enjoying Spider-Verse, and anxious to see what finally comes out of that.
I am behind on both Marvel and DC titles, but much like those on this episode and others, I am working towards being completely caught up by the time the events get here.
Convergence: I'm into in. I doubt that I will order everything, but I'm curious to see what they will do.
Secret Wars? Again? I have to admit that it sounds interesting.
Spider-verse: I'm only reading Amazing Spider-man, but I'm enjoying the Spider-verse back-ups.
Wow....that was some Muddle-the-Murd! Nice job, Jason. Nice job, MURD!