Episode 59: The Adventures of Midget Gordon

DC’s Convergence event is almost upon us, so news about the soft reboot is coming fast and furious. And this week, that news included pictures of new costumes destined to be worn by Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman. And there’s just something about a costume redesign that drives comics fans into screeching frenzies of either hate or excitement, isn’t there?

So we discuss not only the new costumes (and speculate on the circumstances that make them necessary), but superhero costume changes in general, including when they have and haven’t worked, and which ones have spun us up the most in our 40 years of reading comics (hi, Fall From Grace armored Daredevil!)

We also discuss:

• Howard The Duck #1, written by Chip Zdarsky with art by Joe Quinones, and:
• Southern Cross #1, written by Becky Cloonan and drawn by Andy Belanger!

And now the disclaimers:

• We record this show live to tape. While this might mean a looser comics podcast than you are used to, it also means that anything can happen. Like learning the definition of “Batman’s Old Fashioned Texas Love Tubes.”
• This show has a lot of spoilers. While we make an effort to shout out warnings ahead of time, be aware that we could ruin certain plot points. Like whether or not Howard is, in fact, a duck.
• This show contains adult, profane language, and is therefore not safe for work. You want your employer to hear speculation about where Wi-Fi Barbie keeps her antenna? of course not. Get some headphones.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46:58 — 97.0MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

Under New Management: New Avengers #34 Review

Editor’s Note: Those spoilers are some bad mother – shut your mouth! I’m just talking about spoilers…

Well, that’s it. With New Avengers #34, Brian Michael Bendis is (for now) finished with the Avengers books. And, as he did in the core Avengers book, he uses this issue as an opportunity to repair all the toys he played with and damaged during his time on the floor, and clears the decks for Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting to give New Avengers its third first issue in less than ten years, making New Avengers only one comeback short of Lindsey Lohan in that same time period.

With multiple comic series, crossover events, and an Avengers movie under our belts since Bendis started on Avengers, it’s easy to forget that this all really started about a decade ago, when I walked into my local comic store where they know me by name and ask me to stop yanking at my belt and screeching, “Avengers Disassemble!”, and saw a book named Alias that I bought for Amanda, thinking it was a comic adaptation of the new Jennifer Garner ABC TV series. It most certainly was not. It was a crime story taking places on the dirty fringes of the Marvel Universe, involving B-Lister Scott Lang and the first real rehabilitation of Luke Cage since his introduction (we’re gonna claim convenient amnesia about Brian Azzarello’s attempt to turn Cage into a mix of 50 Cent and Leone’s Man With No Name).

Bendis brought Jessica Jones and Luke Cage with him into The New Avengers, and it is somewhat fitting that he closes out his run with them here… with a pretty exciting and well-drawn mystical battle thrown in to boot.

The Lamentations Of Their Artist

The first big announcement from the New York Comic Con came from Dark Horse Comics yesterday, when they announced the new creative team for the upcoming Conan The Barbarian: Queen Of The Black Coast miniseries: Stan Lee’s lawyers!

Just kidding! It’s actually gonna be Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, the creative team behind the Generation X-focused emo superhero book Demo!

Just kidding! It’s actually going to be – oh wait, that one was real?