Funnybook Babylon

NOTICE: We had an export issue on our previous post of this podcast. If you have downloaded it, please listen to this one instead, the second half of the Achewood discussion on the previous one got garbled. I blame Apple, and their lack of support for Soundtrack Pro.

This Week: We review Chris Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight, discuss the All-Star Batman & Robin controversy, talk Final Crisis: Revelations and debut a new segment, “Yes, This is Being Published”.

YTiBP’s debut topic is Vertigo’s forthcoming Haunted Tank series. You can read a special preview of it on this toilet seat. No, really.

After cutting this podcast, I realized that yes, I am a Hater. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate! I got Silky Johnson and Buc Nasty on lock, I’m gonna be Hater of the Year!

We go into a lot of detail about the Great Outdoor Fight, so if you aren’t a regular Achewood reader and don’t want your experience “spoiled” you can read the whole story online before listening. Or don’t, just don’t come crying if we reveal the final fate of The Latino Health Crisis.

 

Funnybook Babylon - Episode 072 - [Expletive Deleted] [84:07m]

 

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All Star Superman #12 is finally here, and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s twelve-part epic (and it truly is an epic) has come to its long-awaited conclusion. For a while, Morrison was teasing that this conclusion would be the be-all end-all of all Superman stories, so I was somewhat surprised when I got the final page and wasn’t presented with any sort of twist or revelation but rather the final piece of a puzzle that, I think, we’re supposed to put together ourselves.

So with a great deal of thanks to Kal-L at the Comic Bloc and our own Gabe Mariani, I’m going to try to see if I can figure out what was really going on for these twelve issues. Spoilers, obviously, below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Final Crisis: Submit

So yeah, Final Crisis isn’t shipping on time. I’m sure someone, somewhere, is shocked, but I can’t fathom it - #3 was a week late, #4’s three weeks late, and we’ve got an extra skip month in December with a Secret Files. (On a side note, I’m incredibly curious to read that Secret Files, since it sounds like he’s getting Frank Quitely of all people to help him in his quixotic quest to reconcile this with Countdown.) However, despite the considerable delay on #4 and the total lack of a delay on subsequent issues, I’m forced to wonder if this quote from Morrison himself isn’t pretty telling:

Submit is designed as Beyond’s complete opposite number - a straight down the line, street level, Hollywood action book about a family in trouble and on the run in Darkseid’s Hell on Earth. It features Black Lightning, gives us a look at the world in the early stages of Darkseid’s takeover and loops straight back into the first scene on the opening pages of Final Crisis #4.

So wait, if Submit takes place before Final Crisis #4, why was it solicited to come out two weeks afterwards originally? And now, it’s delayed (according to the latest DC Direct Channel) until the 15th right alongside FC #4. People may be annoyed if they don’t put a notice in #4 to read Submit first, assuming this was the reason for the delays. This also leads to a single day with no less than five new Final Crisis books, which, I mean, is sort of a lot of a good thing at once: Final Crisis #4, Legion of Three Worlds #2, Submit, Rogues’ Revenge #3 and Rage of the Red Lanterns. Isn’t this sort of a deluge where major books (like Submit itself) might get lost in the shuffle? I never understood why Paul O’Brien complained about this kind of thing regarding the X-books until now.

So this poses the question: Are #4 and #5 actually coming out two weeks apart? It seems pretty unlikely, but if Submit was the cause for #4’s delay it’s not impossible. It seems odd that they took a month off, and production problems, not JG Jones, were blamed for #3’s lateness, and still couldn’t get the book out on time.

It’s just a theory, so if they announce #5’s being delayed until the end of November or whatever I still won’t be especially surprised.

All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder #10

It’s been an eventful week here on Team FBB as we (well, at least I) have been glued to the stats watching a bunch of cellphone shots of a funnybook using dirty words become, like, our most popular post ever. Back to that in a second.

In the meantime, I’ve been horribly delinquent in pimping my reviews over at the legitimate money-laundering front for FBB and 4thletter!, Popcultureshock. I’ve recently done reviews for X-Men: Manifest Destiny #1, X-Factor #34 and X-Factor: Layla Miller Special, Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #1 and Cable #6, so if you’re at all interested in my views on comics other than the Morrison-centric stuff I’ve been putting up here, check it out. More importantly, check out the rest of the site; 4l’s own Gavin Jasper and David Brothers are putting up great articles as well.

Meanwhile, I believe Pedro, Jamaal, Chris and Joe are soon congregating in New York for the podcast and Rock Band. Pray Jamaal isn’t handed the microphone in the latter activity, for the sake of public health.

Anyway, back to All-Star Batman. As for my personal views on the book’s artistic merit, our own Jon Bernhardt articulated his love for the book far more eloquently than I ever could, and having read the oh so naughty ASBAR #10 myself, it does nothing to change my high opinion of the book. People are complaining about the blatant immaturity of the use of language; I assure you, in context, that’s exactly how it’s portrayed as well. Of course, it’s always far sexier to get outraged over out-of-context panels than try to engage the material with an open mind. And, let’s be frank (no pun intended), these out-of-context panels are indeed practically media bait. Read the rest of this entry »

Jamaal is back and it’s time for him to pay the piper! What song must he sing? Stay tuned to the end, true believers!

In the spoken word portion of the podcast, we discuss the new Secret Six, Marvel Apes and Sub-Mariner: The Depths mini-series, and spin off into a larger discussion of Depths author Peter Milligan’s other recent series Infinity Inc. and The Programme. Milligan has built up a lot of goodwill with series like X-Statix, Human Target and Shade the Changing Man, but how do his newer books stack up? Listen and learn!

Finally, our resident canary in the mineshaft Chris has decided to join the MARCH ON ULTIMATUM, and gives a recap of Aron Coliete’s initial Ultimate X-Men arc. In this metaphor, the canary has died and had its corpse repeatedly defiled.

 

Funnybook Babylon - Episode 071 - Back to School with a Song [97:33m]

 

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We interupt our regularly scheduled nitpicking about proper grammar and usage to bring you this breaking story:

The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars didn’t print properly a whole bunch of times! Cusswords are visible! Look out! Don’t click through if you don’t want to see Batgirl being super-sassy:

Read the rest of this entry »

For the second week running, we’re missing Jamaal. We miss Jamaal so much that we want to remind everyone that we’re still taking suggestions for what we should make him sing on next week’s podcast. A BET IS A BET!

Two books of the week this time out: one for its importance, and another for its je ne sais quoi:
Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #1 by Grant Morrison & Doug Mahnke (annotated here!)
DC Universe: Last Will & Testament by Brad Meltzer & Adam Kubert

Speaking of Last Wills, Virgin Comics has joined the dustbin of comics history alongside CrossGen, Tekno Comix and countless others. What lessons can be learned? What went wrong? Just how many different things has Richard Branson slapped “Virgin” on?

We also begin our discussion on Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Most of the discussion is Joe introducing the Nausicaa and its creator Hayao Miyazaki, so anyone wanting to catch up still has time. We’ll be doing the second (and final) Nausicaa book club discussion in a couple weeks.

The whole series is translated in seven volumes (Volumes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and you can buy them through Amazon for $10, supporting the site at the same time.

 

Funnybook Babylon - Episode 070 - The Last Will and Testament of the Third Dimension

 

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Jon, Pedro, Chris, and Joe got together on Wednesday to discuss the current status of Marvel’s (not-so) Secret Invasion.

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend!

 

Funnybook Babylon - Episode 069 - Explicit Invasion [39:36m]

 

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Computer Lettering is Destroying Proper Usage As We Know It

We live in a fast-paced modern world, full of whirring machines that make everything faster and easier than it was in the old days. In the Old Days, all the lettering in comics had to be hand-written, using complicated pens and plastic strips and you had to be careful about using “FLICKER” or “CLINT” lest the cheap four color printing presses bleed the second and third letters together.

Today, we have COMPUTERS! You can FLICK that guy CLINT all you want, and use crazy Photoshop effects and letter a comic in mere minutes! But the personal touch is lost, which means there are a lot of typos. Typing is faster than hand-lettering, but more physically disconnected — you never hear about write-oes, do you? — but that should leave more time for copyediting, right?

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The fine people of Timothy McSweeney’s Purchasing Harangue are putting all their available literary quarterlies on sale for the ridiculously low price of $5.00 a pop through Friday. For all you funnybook fans, this means you can get Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern issue thirteen, guest-edited by Chris Ware, for less than the cost of two Secret Invasion tie-ins!
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Hh. Spoilers within. This is actually the first thirty pages of a sixty-page script; I imagine Morrison still did a bit of work to modify it, though, since it ends on a pretty satisfying cliffhanger (if that makes any sense). I assume the second issue won’t hit until at least December, either along with or in place of Final Crisis #7.

The 3-D “gimmick” isn’t really used for any particular narrative purpose just yet, it just looks cool (or distracting/annoying, depending on your outlook). Still, it does distinguish the extradimensional elements from the mundane ones.

After these annotations, I’ll include a few observations regarding FC: Rogues’ Revenge #2. In the absence of Granddaddy Wolk I don’t know if anyone will be covering this issue, but I really haven’t read Johns’s Flash run recently enough to do a full annotation. Last Will and Testament is out too, but it pretty much totally fails to match up in any way with Final Crisis and is really just a vehicle for Brad Meltzer to do his Meltzer Thing. Something else regarding that might be in the works, though…

Anyway.
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With Pedro and Jamaal doing adult things, we brought in a ringer. Jon Bernhardt came up from Baltimore to chat about the first issue of Air, G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Perker’s new Vertigo ongoing.

Then, a surprise visitor arrived just in time for our discussion of Captain America #41 by Ed Brubaker & Steve Epting. I bet if you whisper “Captain America” three times in your bathroom mirror, Pedro will show up at your house too, looking for beer.
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Funnybook Babylon - Episode 068 - Out of Nowhere... [62:10m]

 

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Everybody makes mistakes; sometimes they’re really important mistakes, like electing the wrong president. More often, especially on the Internet, they’re petty mistakes. I flew off the handle and interpreted some Batman solicitations incorrectly last week. I was wrong. Rich Lovatt seemed to have missed a plot point in Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s Fantastic Four, and went back and re-read the books. Afterwards, he admitted he may have rushed to judgment.

These things happen, and they’re no big deal. We’re a bunch of people who like comics, and for whatever reason have decided to discuss them in a public forum. There will be disagreements. There will be mistakes. These things happen. It’s a dialogue.

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I think I speak for everyone on the site when I say this: historically, corporate comic book characters who aren’t straight white American males have gotten a pretty bum rap. I think things are improving, and there are reasons to be hopeful. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t call out dubious material when they see it; but manufacturing outrage does nothing to further anyone’s cause. I know that seems like a vague boilerplate, but I wanted to get it out of the way lest anyone think I am condemning the sentiment put forth by Perry Moore in his recent Newsarama interviews. I completely agree with his sentiments, my issue is the way he chooses to further his argument.

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