Diversionary Tactics

It is a strange night here in Boston. For the sports geeks, there is the Boston Bruins battling against the Montreal Canadiens in game seven of a playoff series to see who goes on to play for the Stanley Cup. This is a series that has captured the imaginations of many Bostonians, whether they care about hockey or not… but I am not one of them. I have lived here long enough to understand the long-time rivalry, but my geography will not make me pretend to be a hockey fan. Unlike the Indian kid at the Dunkin’ Donuts I stopped at on the way home from the comic store, who responded to my report that “The Habs are up by one,” with rolled eyes and an exasperated, “I asked about the Bruins / Canadiens game!”

And for the standard geeks, there is the warm glow we are still operating under having seen Agent Coulson use that shoulder cannon to actually wipe out a bad guy in last night’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., mixed with the new glow of the season finale of Arrow, which will include the first trailer for the fall debut of The Flash, which we determined during last week’s podcast would be the most likely comic TV show to fail (The 1990 Flash show failed with no genre competition while the comic version was fresh off Mike Baron’s groundbreaking run that made The Flash compelling for the first time in my life, so I can’t imagine a superpowered version of CSI is gonna do much better).

The bottom line is that there is a lot of distracting shit going on this evening. But this is why we went to our local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop demanding that all sports be played by athletes with access to the Super Soldier Serum (and with katanas), early. Which means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

Still, there are some solid books in there. We’ve got the second issue of DC’s Future’s End, the first issue of Justice League United, the first issue of Powers: Bureau creative team of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s and artist Michael Avon Oeming’s The United States of Murder, Inc., a new issue of Robert Kirkman’s and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead, and a bunch of other cool stuff!

But you know how it is: before we can address any of them, we need to pretend to know what icing is, that we have hope for The Flash, and still take time to read the books. So while that happens…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!