Podcast - Episode 36: Civil War Mania

What a week, guys. What. A. Week.

There was so much Civil War/Winter Soldier/Sebastian Stan coverage in the media this week I couldn't even read all of it.

So this episode is a jumbled mess of trying to piece together our thoughts on everything. Plus, Dave is suffering from a cold. Nothing that a solid hour of listening to be ramble on about Winter Soldier can't fix!

First, let me introduce you to our special guest co-host:

Not a bad looking figure, right?

Here is the travesty that they are calling a Winter Soldier toy that I saw at Toys R Us:

Nope.

I did not enter the contest to win a helicopter ride with Henry Cavill, but I do get hilarious emails about it:

J.Bone did indeed do a really great drawing that imagines Spider-Man being Bucky's annoying friend:

I'm sure in another world they would be best of friends #wintersoldier #spiderman #spidey #marvel #captainamericacivilwar #drawing #jbone

A photo posted by J.Bone (@originaljbone) on Mar 12, 2016 at 10:53am PST

So, so great. Knocking it out of the park as usual, J!

Here are some links to the many interviews and such that I mention this week:

Jeremy Renner being a douche with poor Elizabeth Olsen

Sebastian Stan doing a weird and adorable and sexy video Q&A for Moviepilot

Sebastian Stan on ET

Chris Evans and RDJ on ET

Markus & McFeely on why Bucky is a messed up sad sack

Buzzfeed Q&A with Evans, Stan, Downey, Boseman and the Russos

It's worth scrolling though the Buzzfeed posts because you get to see things like a portrait of Winter Soldier, quickly drawn by Sebastian Stan, as well as a screengrab of his Winter Soldier Spotify playlist. Plus, images like this one:

Boys. Come on. Cut it out.

There's also this really great little video of Sebastian Stan talking about seeing Civil War for the first time. I forgot to talk about it this week, but I will definitely talk about it next week:

Short version: it made him stress eat a whole thing of candy

Here is the new Civil War trailer, by the way:

And here's what you've all been waiting for: the Winter Soldier vs Black Panther Pop Secret packaging!!!

Butter only makes the Winter Soldier more powerful!

Ok, let's wrap this up, with, oh, I don't know...this picture from Friday of Chris Evans wearing the shirt that Sebastian Stan was wearing the DAY BEFORE?!

I mean. Come on. Also: god damn, Chris. Looking good. Trying to keep my eyes above the waist here.

I'm actually going to end this with this screengrab of Sebastian Stan's insane Winter Soldier body:

He's gonna get his shirt off in this movie, right? RIGHT?!

Podcast - Episode 12: Costumes with Special Guest J.Bone!

Happy Wednesday! New comics are out today and we are here to talk about...last week's comics? Yup, that's what this podcast is. A thrilling glimpse into a few days ago.

Hey, this week we have a guest! A really GREAT guest! J.Bone joined us all the way from Toronto! It sounds like he's joining us from space! It's via Skype and it sounds like it's via Skype, but still completely awesome. We apologize for the sound quality. We had some technical difficulties and eventually just had to go with the best sound we could get. I think it gets better as the episode goes on? We'll work on it for future episodes.

J talks about being nervous meeting famous people. I know the feeling! I was nervous talking to J.Bone!!! He's my favourite! Remember when he drew that sexy Peter Parker in response to that super sexist Mary Jane statue?! He made me a crochet Batman once! It's the first thing you see when you walk into my house! He's the best! And he's on our show this week!!!

The theme this week is superhero costumes. J happens to be VERY good at re-imagining superhero costumes. Check out this Wonder Woman fashion plate!

Awesome, right? Ok, here's the episode:

Right off the bat I want to say that Dave and I FUCKED UP because we forgot to mention The Rocketeer when we were talking about awesome costumes.  Not only is it the best costume, J.BONE DREW ROCKETEER COMICS! I mean...yeah, we failed.

Ok, we'll get back to superhero costumes and our shortcomings as hosts in a second.

I talked quite a bit about Planet Hulk, which wrapped up with issue #5 this week. As I mentioned many, many times on the podcast, I LOVED this crazy thing. But I also mention that it seemed like there was some backpedaling in this final issue as far as the whole Steve-and-Bucky-are-totally-completely-crazy-in-love-in-a-romantic-way thing goes. There was one panel in particular that seemed to be a lot less cute in the final book. Here's the side by side of Mark Laming's original, which he posted on Twitter some time ago, and the final panel:

Not cute, Marvel. Not cute. Extra weird because holding hands at the end of a gladiator battle victory isn't really explicit. But the way they were holding hands is so adorable I want to die!

To be honest, the issue/series was still pretty romantic. And awesome. I bought a beautiful Planet Hulk print from Marc Laming. Check it out! I believe he'll be selling them at New York Comic Con. You should get one!

Also in the 'what we're reading' segment, J recommends Head Lopper by Andrew MacLean, I recommend Virgil by Steve Orlando and JD Faith, and Dave recommends Nailbiter by Joshua Williamson and Mike Henderson. So we give Image Comics a lot of love this week.

Because you have to see this thing, here's that Jeremy Renner tweet we were talking about:

Ugh, let's wash that taste out of our mouths with some pictures of Sebastian Stan at TIFF:

Yes. Yessssss. Those pants are way too tight.

Like, come on. Just stop. It's rude to look like that if everyone can't have some. It's like eating a bag of candy in front of me. Does he have a hair elastic on his wrist? Oh my God...

And that was just his afternoon attire! He got all GQ for the actual red carpet premier that night, looking all young European royalty. Here's a gif of him smiling while meeting fans, looking not at all terrible:

Sigh.

J did an AMAZING Winter Soldier sketch cover commission that he posted in a few places. It's so good. Here it is:

So nice. I think I've looked at this on my phone like fifty times over the past week. I want him to draw a Winter Soldier series! Come on, Marvel!!!!

Dave politely suggests that we wrap up the Winter Soldier segment, AND THEN we get into the actual topic, which is costumes. I feel like I need to post a lot of images here. It's a very visual topic for an audio podcast. I am not going to post an image of every costume we talk about, but here are some highlights.

J names the Cheeks Galloway Spider-Man design from the Spectacular Spider-Man animated series as his favourite Spidey costume. Interesting and cool choice!

J also had Flash Thompson's Venom costume on his list of favourites, which I wholeheartedly agree with! Sexy Venom is not something I ever thought would exist, but here we are.

Also getting love from all three of us, Taskmaster! And after the podcast, J brought this Cheeks Galloway rendition of the character to our attention! Rad!

Dave surprises no one by naming the classic 1970s Wonder Man off-the-rack affair as his favourite. Dave should be this for Halloween.

He also mentions Doctor Mid-Nite, who is indeed awesome. Moon-shaped buttons? Forget about it!

I give props to Ted Kord's Blue Beetle costume, which might be my very favourite?

Also, Daredevil. I guess I just really like tone-on-tone colour schemes.

Magnus Robot Fighter is obviously wearing a perfect costume for fighting robots:

So much upskirt. "It's head" is right!

I also love Iron Fist's H&M-looking costume:

Cloak has the most comfortable super hero costume, Dagger has the least comfortable super hero costume:

I said that Tim Drake ditched the yellow on his Robin costume as a tribute to the recently deceased Superboy, but really it was the green he did away with. He still kept a bit of yellow. Oops. Just pretend I'm saying 'green' every time I say 'yellow.' It's a lot of times.

Getting into some of the more ridiculous costumes, here's that badass Bon Jovi looking Nomad and Baby Bucky:

What on Earth is going on there? I think I have a new contender for 'thing I show my kids if they ask me what the 90's were like.'

Of course we love the Steve Epting Winter Solider character design, but are not so crazy about the Alex Ross Bucky-as-Captain America design:

Man I fell hard for that imaginary man in 2005. Well done, Mr. Epting. You ruined my life.

Now I've lost my train of thought.

We talked about Gambit and 90's Cyclops, but you guys know what they look like, right? (I will always kind of love 90's Cyclops). We also mention some of Nightwing's less good costumes. I'm getting so tired of looking up images, guys. But I think it's important that I include this one of Thunderbird:

And maybe this image so you know which Scarlet Witch costume J is talking about:

That looks very hard to put on. You can read the story of the crazy messed up John Byrne thing between Scarlet Witch and Wonder Man in West Coast Avengers here.

Let's wrap this up with a picture of Clock King and his insane homemade costume:

You can read more of my thoughts on Clock King here.

Costumes are fun. They were always an important component of my Rating the Super Hunks series.

Thanks again to J for being on the show and generally being a very nice guy, and being very patient with our technical difficulties. You can check out his blog or his hotter blog to see his older artwork. And you really, really should. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter too to see new stuff!

If you want to hear a really good conversation with J.Bone that actually includes questions about his work and other things that would be smart to ask about, you should check out episode 15 of the Weekend at Burgie's podcast with SJ the Wordburglar. It's really fun.

My son Mitchell makes his debut on the podcast this week in a little segment we like to call 'Hey, Guess What?' with Mitchell. Here is a picture of him dressed as Speedy for Free Comic Book Day this year (I can't sew):

Yeah! I'm one of those parents now! My kid is so interesting!!!

Seriously, he told me he yesterday that he wants to be Starfire for Halloween. #blessed

Alright I'm done! Thanks for listening/reading! Rate us on iTunes!

One more picture of Sebastian Stan at TIFF.

Friendly, Neighbourhood...Thing

I know ads for totally absurd merchandise are common place in any Marvel comic, but seriously:

 

What is this?

No, really? What is it?

These are my best guesses.

Salad Tongs.

Melon baller.

Ultra safe scissors?

Or some sort of medical tool? Foresceps? Or...uh...a speculum?

Ugh, chilling stuff.

 

Please help me out. The more I think about it, the creepier the possibilities.

It's Like A Comic, But In A Book!

 One of the best things about working in a comic store is having a look at what turns up in collections that people sell to us. More often than not, it's a pile of W.I.L.D.Cats or Youngblood that are headed right for the discount bin, but occasionally some cool old-timey treasures turn up. My favourite of these are the now-obsolete repackagings of vintage material that are fairly hard to come by, from the days when publishers were still experimenting with people's ideas of what constituted a comics-delivery system, so to speak. I'm talking about the old over-sized treasury editions (my favourite of these is the Kirby 2001: A Space Odyssey adaptation, but I'm still keeping an eye out for the original Superman Vs. Spider-Man), or the novel-sized digest reprints where you would only usually get about two panels per page. However, this little gem appeared in a collection a few weeks back:

Published by Simon & Schuster, this collection features a pretty random collection of pretty awesome Spidey classics. There's some early John Romita-drawn issues (yes, despite what the cover would have you believe, somebody other than Stan Lee was involved) featuring old favourites like Electro and the Rhino, and the notoriously non-Code approved three-issue arc by Lee and Gil Kane where Harry gets hooked on drugs, triggering his old man to become the Green Goblin again. This arc is also notable for having appeared at a time when Stan Lee decided to stop using so many exclamation points all the time, resulting in weirdly deadpan delivery from everyone. Check it out: 

The issue after this one is the one where they basically just erased any punctuation that wasn't a necessary exclamation point or question mark, which reads as though everyone is talking in a weird monotone voice (there's a great article about this short-lived phenomenon over at Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed). That drug dealer guy is awesome, by the way. Only a career criminal could get away with that look. Speaking of fashion, though, let's take a better look at Peter and Harry's wardrobe at this point...

Whoa, what the hell is going on? Harry at least has the excuse of a raging drug habit to explain away his orange suit and yellow turtleneck combo, but Peter's outfit has entirely too many tassels. He looks like Beyonce!

I sort of got off track here. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, old Spider-Man comics are the best. Especially when you can get 'em in a now-defunct format.

Nineties Week: My computer was rollin' like it was 1995

Man, I had a rough time posting this. My computer was not working in every way possible, which seemed timely for nineties week. But aren't we supposed to be past that now? Shouldn't my computer be psychically linked to me? Shouldn't it just know what I want it to do?

Anyway, I didn't read every title in my stack of nineties comics as my fellow blogger, Dave, so bravely did. I mean, there were three X titles in there, and I'm not going to read that in a regular week. But here's a sampling.

The Spectacular Spider-man #180

I was expecting a fun Spider-man story, but instead it was an issue where Harry Osborne has an internal psychological fist fight with his Dad and with Peter. I guess it was a metephor and Harry was really fighting himself, Batman Ego-style? Poor Harry. He was really losing it and I was concerned that he may harm himself.

That was kinda messed up, but it seemed like Owly after the terrible shit I witnessed on the first page.

UM, WHUT? That is nine kinds of fucked up.

X Factor # 70

This issue is an epilogue, so not much happens. Professor X is in a coma or something, and everyone's upset. But he wakes up in the end and everyone's okay. Wolverine extinguishes and cigarette by swallowing it. The X-Men's costumes are super fugly.

This issue did highlight that strange nineties trend where the sexiest part of a woman was considered to be the upper leg/side area revealed by a costume where the leg holes is cut almost to the lady's bust line. The leg/side/hip. Was that called something, like the muffin top? The pear-neck?

Avengers #338

The story was called "Infections Compulsions," 'cause the nineties were gross, and I have no idea what happened. In fact, I had to wiki almost every member of the Avengers team. Who were these people? And what were they doing? They were in space...or something? And fighting? I felt like I was deciphering an ancient text that may hold all the clues to what will happen in the next Marvel cross-over.

But this issue did have an editorial page that feature this:

THE COOLOMETER!!!!

I don't even know where to start! Sushi and Twin Peaks are not particularly cool? Don't rollerblades and ponytails on men normally go together? Infinity Gauntlet is clearly forever cool. And I like that Quasar is cool. Quasar totally strolls into the malt shop with sunglasses and a leather jacket on and is all, "S'up ladies?"

Justice League Quarterly #4

This was fun! This was the much-talked-about silly era of the JLA, right? The first story follows the Injustice League in a wacky caper to make some money. In the second story Guy Gardiner and some other JLA member that can only be described as relics, cruise around a psychic fair scaring the fake-weirdos by showing them some authentic powers, and then dying laughing. Nice!

Strangely, a whopping ten pages of this issue is devoted to "CaTales," following the hilarious adventures of the JLA cat. And he's no Streaky—he's just a smelly old cat that gets into trouble. I love a cat comic, so I'm not complaining but it wasn't the action-packed JLA that I'm used to.

In the story this panel is from, the Elongated Man had to give him a bath! Haha!

Outlaws  # 1

Hey, remember Outlaws? No? Anyone? Dave? This was apparently a six-part mini-series about a Robin Hood-style hero and his gang of outlaws who had all been horribly abused by the king of wherever it was set. Anyway, it was a fun read, in an unchallenging sort of way.The art was bad though, and it reminded me of every comic brought into Strange Adventures by a totally crazy person who thinks they've invented a franchise-worthy character with "Superior Man."

The best/worst/best again thing that came from my 1991 comics time capsule was a flyer for a con that took place in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

The schedule featured a midnight filking session. FILKING. Look it up and cower at the nerdliness.

Anyway, the conclusion I've come to is that the nineties weren't all that bad. Or more accurately, that lots of comics in the two thousands blow too. We still see brutal fashion, terrible butt-flossy costumes on ladies, confusing plots and money-grabbing crossovers.

But at least in the two thousands, I'm old enough to buy beer. And that makes reading crappy comics way more fun.

Last Week's Haul!

Well screw it. If Johnathan is going to post reviews this late then so am I. Memorial Day in the States screwed up our comic buying schedule, and I didn't end up picking up my comics until Saturday either. And for the past couple of days I have been doing a whole "should I...shouldn't I..." inner struggle about whether or not there is any point in posting reviews this late. But Johnathan did it, so I will too. Because I actually have a lot to say about last week's comics.

Batman in Barcelona (one-shot)

These days I tend to pick up any Batman comic that is independent of the Battle for the Cowl. Or basically any Batman comic that has Batman in it doing Batman stuff. This comic was basically created for the Barcelona comic convention which ran over the past weekend. It was pretty flat, I gotta say. It will probably be fun for the comic fans in Barcelona, but it sort of had that Spider-Man goes to CANADA! feel, y'know? Not that I don't collect and love any piece of American pop culture that I can get my hands on that involves a trip to Canada. So what I am saying is that although I have already forgotten what this comic was about, I am sure that the fans in Barcelona are at least a little thrilled to see Bruce Wayne partaking in Festival of St George celebrations (or, at least, acknowledging them).

Superman #688

Oh, Mon-El. So tragic. In this issue Mon-El finds out why his powers have been unreliable of late, and the news ain't good. He's dying. His stupid body is killing itself. But for now at least he is attractive and talking with a vague accent that passes for British. He also kinda wants to live, especially after a fairly (and maybe I read this wrong?) romantic encounter with a young man who runs an Italian restaurant downstairs from Mon's apartment. The man gives Mon a panini and encourages him to check out some café in Paris (which is undoubtedly writer James Robinson's favourite Paris café). It definitely felt like he was hitting on Mon, and that Mon was into it. Maybe it was the beautiful Renato Guedes art that was making everything seem so romantic. Anyway, after going to the café and drinking some espresso, Mon decides that not dying would be nice. To be continued!

Wonder Woman #32

Wonder Woman says enough is enough and beats the holy hell out of Genocide for this entire issue. It's awesome. She also admits that she never loved Tom, she just wanted to attractive children with him (children who would have been at least a little douchey, if you ask me). It's a tough day for Tom. There's only one issue left of this awesome storyline!

The Last Days of Animal Man #1

This six-issue series is set maybe ten years into the future, where an aging Buddy Baker is dealing with the fact that his powers are fading. Gerry Conway is writing it, and he knows a thing or two about writing comics. I really enjoyed this. Fans like me have been whining for years about DC and Vertigo having some sorta problem that didn't allow Vertigo heroes to return to the DCU. Over the past couple of years we have seen Animal Man slowly work his way back into the main DC line-up, and while I doubt we'll see him in the JLA anytime soon, he works really well in off-beat stories like this one. I think this series will be pretty fun.

Spider-Man: The Short Halloween (one-shot)

An oddly-timed but charming little Spider-Man comic written by SNL's Seth Myers and Bill Hader, and drawn by Kevin Maguire! It's a wacky story of mistaken identity when the real Spider-Man gets confused for a drunk dude in a Spider-Man halloween costume. Hilarity ensues. The comic does have pretty sharp comedy writing, and Maguire, the master of physical comedy in comic books, makes it funnier with his art. Plus it's a great stand-alone Spider-Man comic for those fools who aren't reading Amazing Spider-Man.

Ghost Rider #35

Whoever had the idea of making Tony Moore the artist on this book deserves a massive high five. What a great pairing! Like all Jason Aaron issues of Ghost Rider, this issue was gross, awesome and awesome.

Green Lantern #41

Looks like Hal Jordan's Guitar Hero playing days are over!

Bayou vol 1

The first book to be released under DC's Zuda label, Bayou vol 1 collects the acclaimed and beautiful webcomic. For those of you who weren't paying attention to Zuda, it's something DC set up a couple of years ago where creators could post the first few pages of a webcomic for people to read and rate. It has an American Idol-style competition element where the winner of each competition will become an ongoing webcomic on the Zuda site (complete with a contract). Unlike Idol, however, Zuda has actually brought recognition to people who deserve it. Bayou, by Jeremy Love, is the first of the winners to be collected into an actual physical book.

It's a very touching story about racism set in Depression-era Mississippi. The fantasy and folklore elements, and young girl protagonist, make it appropriate for young readers as well. I was hoping the paper quality of the book would be higher, but that's my only complaint. It's a lovely book.