Podcast - Episode 73: The Image Revolution

Dave and I have decided to not do a Best of 2016 episode this year because those things are BORING.

Instead, we have taken a trip back to a simpler time by watching the 2014 documentary, THE IMAGE REVOLUTION, about the creation of Image Comics in the 1990s.

The documentary features clips from the 1991 series, The Comic Book Greats, which was hosted by Stan Lee. You can see full episodes of Stan the Man talking to "greats" like Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld on YouTube:

I didn't really read superhero comics that much in the 90s because they were so ugly and confusing and just didn't appeal to me at all. Besides the occasional Jim Lee X-Man comic, I mostly ignored them. Most of my 90s superhero intake was in animated form.

As a result, comic books in the 90s have always just baffled me. It's a bizarre island where no attention was paid to storytelling or art or character development. And yet it was the most successful the comic book industry has ever been.

But, like all things that are all flash and no substance, the bottom fell out hard. Fortunately, Image was able to continue on, and even flourish, and today is a place where some of the top talent in the industry have the ability to tell their stories the way they want to tell them. As much as we roll our eyes at the comics Image was putting out in the 90s, the idea of Image as a publishing house for creator-owned properties was important and is responsible for some of the best comics on the stands today.

Enjoy! We'll be back next week to talk about Rogue One!

Podcast - Episode 40: Captain America II: Death Too Soon

We just couldn't put it off any longer, guys. We bit the bullet and watched the second (and thankfully final) 1979 Captain America television movie, Death Too Soon. It's...not good.

I'm not gonna lie. I am pretty distracted writing this post because I am waiting for the live stream of the Civil War red carpet premier to start. Also, there are like one gajillion amazing images, interviews, videos, and gifs hitting the internet this week of all my favourite men. Like this one:

HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ANYTHING DONE?!!

Look, I'm probably gonna get in trouble with big popcorn here, but here are the links to the Pop Secret promotional Marvel comics by Peter David and Marc Laming:

Hawkeye vs Black Widow
War Machine vs Falcon
Iron Man vs Captain America
Black Panther vs Winter Soldier

My apologies if any of those links go dead. You don't wanna mess with the Pop Secret thugs.

Maybe you didn't believe us when we said there is a lengthy scene in Captain America: Death Too Soon where Steve Rogers paints a portrait of a cat. Well, joke's on you, dummies!

Yeah. It happened. And then some local thugs intimidated him by PAINTING GLASSES ON THE CAT!

There is NOTHING funnier than that!

So, it's a really good movie. If you don't believe me, here is a good clip that shows you Captain America drive his motorcycle into a prison, drive around inside for awhile, and then fight three dogs for way too long:

Ok, not much more to report this week. Thanks for listening. Next week...maybe an awesome surprise guest! Stay tuned!

Podcast - Episode 24: Best of 2015

I thought before Dave goes into full Star Wars shutdown mode, it would be good to compile and present our Best of 2015 lists. So here they are!

I was going to write them out here, but nah. You gotta listen to the episode. Maybe I'll post them next week.

What I WILL post is my prediction for the Guardians of the Galaxy 2 soundtrack line-up. We'll see when the movie comes out how many I got right. I correctly predicted that Hank Henshaw was Martian Manhunter on Supergirl, so I am on FIRE here!

Rachelle's Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Soundtrack Predictions:

1. Shake Your Groove Thing - Peaches & Herb
2. We Are Family - Sister Sledge
3. Jungle Boogie - Kool & the Gang
4. I Think I Love You - The Partridge Family
5. Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations
6. Sister Christian - Night Ranger
7. Starman - David Bowie
8. School's Out - Alice Cooper
9. Low Rider - War
10. Free Ride - Edgar Winter Group
11. Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees
12. Tide is High - Blondie
13. Tempted - Squeeze

Bonus tracks suggested by Dave:

1. Jim Dandy - Black Oak Arkansas
2. Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder
3. Rapper's Delight - Sugarhill Gang

I think we'll have at least a 60% success rate with this list.

I mentioned some very exciting interviews on the subject of one Steve Rogers and one James Buchanan Barnes in Entertainment Weekly. You can find the full line-up of articles here.

If you want a taste of what that Charlie Brown Christmas concert was like that I went to, you can see some videos of Jerry Granelli performing the songs with the trio he put together on the CBC website here. It's pretty spectacular. I would especially recommend 'Skating.'

Owen Craig was kind enough to invite me back onto his comic book podcast, Panel Culture, this past week. So if you can't get enough of my sultry voice you can check that episode out here.

Podcast - Episode 3: Our Favourite and Least Favourite DC Characters

There were a few little technical problems with our podcast this week so there are a couple of awkward edits. It also runs a little long, but that's only because it's so jam packed with sparkling wit and brilliant insight. We promise not to make a habit of 90 minute episodes.

Too much Marvel talk lately has prompted us to talk about our favourite DC characters. Dave and I each roll out our lists of our top ten favourite DC characters, and our five least favourite. My list is not super surprising, but Dave's is straight bonkers (my opinion). You'll notice something weird happening before we talk about Blue Beetle. Dave had to re-record the intro to it and we lost a bit of the talk. Just know that I love Ted Kord.

We talk about the upcoming Image titles announced at Image Expo. You can check out the full list with descriptions on the Image site here: July 2015 Image Expo Announcements

You can see the Entertainment Weekly Batman vs Superman cover and images here: Exclusive Batman vs Superman Photos

We finally début The Renner Report this week (with a stinger that makes me laugh out loud). You can read the super insane Jeremy Renner Playboy interview here: if you want to read about him "kindly choking" people out. Please read it. Please.

When we were talking about our favourite DC characters we mentioned Halloween 2007 when I dressed as Barda and Dave dressed as Orion. I promised I'd post pictures, so here are some:

Serving Kirby face.

New Gods gotta eat!

If you are interested in reading the list of my top 10 favourite DC characters that I wrote for Mondo Magazine in 2007, you can check it out here. It's pretty close to this list I made for this podcast. My thoughts are much more coherent when written down.

I've thought about it since the last episode and I have decided that Guy Gardner should be played by Jamie Bamber in the upcoming Green Lantern(s?) movie. Let's re-brand Guy as a very hot ginger!

I mean, right?

Ain't That A Kick In The Skull?: A Special Early Skullkickers Review

 Skullkickers is the latest Image series to garner crazy accolades and fevered speculation before the first issue has even hit comic shops, alongside recent hits like Chew and Morning Glories. Fueled by positive early reviews, the first issue of Skullkickers has sold out at the distributor level before it’s even shipped (a second printing has already been announced). There’s always an element of hysteria surrounding this kind of pre-release excitement, and I find that, as both a reader and a retailer, I’m usually a bit suspicious that somehow, somewhere, somebody has manipulated the internet and/or media to give the book an added promotional push. I’m happy to say, though, that like Chew and Morning Glories, Skullkickers is a fun book with broad appeal that, unlike most of the offerings from the Big Two these days, makes a point to reach out to potential new readers with an accessible concept rather than trying to squeeze even more money out of an existing, ever-shrinking readership. The breezy script and slick artwork don’t hurt, either.

 Written by Jim Zubkavich and drawn by the art team of Edwin Huang, Chris Stevens, and Misty Coats, Skullkickers stars a couple of hard-drinking, two-fisted, medieval badasses who make a living tracking down and destroying supernatural menaces for money. The story opens with the duo busting up a werewolf cult, but they’re screwed out of getting paid by the local constabulary. Broke, the heroes—one a bald giant, the other a feisty Scottish dwarf—witness a political assassination and find themselves caught up in some kind of paranormal body-snatching conspiracy.

 The tone of Skullkickers falls somewhere in between Joe Madureira’s Battle Chasers and Todd DeZago & Mike Weiringo’s Tellos. The art by Huang, Stevens, and Coats has the exaggerated proportions and fast-paced action of the former, with the light touch and clean lines of the latter. Despite some gruesome subject matter, Zubkavich’s script maintains a fun tone—the back-and-forth between the leads, not to mention the barking city official who attempts to stymie them at every turn, brings to mind a buddy cop comedy transplanted to a fantasy setting.

 Skullkickers isn’t perfect—so far as I can tell, the two protagonists aren't given names in the first issue, and I’m still not entirely sure what’s going down on that last page—but, it is only the first issue, and the positives outweigh the negatives to be sure. What’s more important, though, is that Skullkickers is a comic that anyone can pick up and read without any prior knowledge of characters or continuity as a requirement. It’s also not trying to jump on the bandwagon of some existing concept that happens to be hot stuff right now (the supernatural angle means that either zombies or vampires could conceivably pop up at some point, but there aren’t any in the first issue at least), but is instead carving out its own place in a popular but under-represented genre. That kind of willingness to break away from the pack is always worthy of praise, advance or otherwise. 

Downe By Law

 Some days, I want to read a comic book that makes me consider new ideas, or one that stretches the boundaries of the medium’s possibilities. Other days, I just want to read a comic where a guy punches another guy’s head off, and said displaced cranium is stuck on the first guy’s fist for the duration of the comic. Image’s new one-shot Officer Downe was made for just those kinds of days.

 Aimed squarely at fans of hyper-violent comics in the vein of Miller and Darrow’s Hard Boiled, Joe Casey and Chris Burnham’s Officer Downe has a pretty simple concept. In a cartoony-futuristic Los Angeles ruled by animal-headed gangsters and depraved evil geniuses, Officer Terrence Downe is the last line of defense for ordinary citizens. A nigh-indestructible supercop of Hulk-like proportions, Downe uses a combination of foolishly huge guns and freakishly large fists to mow down armies of jumpsuited ninjas and rampaging convicts. When Downe inevitably suffers enough catastrophic damage to his frame that he finally drops dead in a bloody, dismembered heap, his fellow officers recover his remains and the combined psychic might of 100 telekinetic sensitives is used to resurrect him so he can do it all over again. For about 48 of the most violent pages I’ve ever seen, that’s pretty much it. Definitely not for the faint of heart, to put it mildly.

 I keep giving scripter Joe Casey a shot with his various projects over the years, and I keep just not quite clicking with his work (I thought if anything the guy wrote did it for me, his ‘70s Kirby riff Godland would be the book, but strangely I couldn’t get into it). However, the straight-ahead high concept approach of Officer Downe did the trick this time. Chris Burnham’s unbelievably gory artwork helps a lot—clearly, this guy has been studying the combination of operatically-choregraphed mayhem, microscopic attention to detail, and over-the-top ultraviolence that has made Geof Darrow and Frank Quitely superstars. Marc Letzmann’s lively colour palette tops the whole package off nicely. Once again, though, and I can’t stress this enough—this book is not for the squeamish. It contains enough decapitiations, defenestrations, and peeled-off faces to make RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven turn away in disgust.

 A word on the format as well—I really appreciated that Officer Downe was a comic book, a double-sized, glossy-papered, done-in-one affair that isn’t squarebound, or part of a series, or likely to make its way into another collection of some sort (trade-waiting will avail you naught here). For five bucks, you get a substantial, self-contained read with a couple of extras thrown in for good measure (an interview with Casey, and a look at some of Burnham’s concept art). If you’ve ever enjoyed the irresponsible antics of proto-fascist comic book thugs like Judge Dredd or Marshal Law, you’ll be happy that Officer Downe is out there.