Episode 37: 50 Shades of Lobo

Hi, my name is Lobo! I enjoy vegan cuisine, fitness, and long walks on the beach. I’m looking for someone who shares my affinity for sword collecting and leather clubs. Could you be my special someone?

With the cancellation of Vortexx on the CW network, this is the first weekend that has had no Saturday morning cartoons on a major television network. And given that seeing superheroes on TV was a large part of what got Amanda and I into comics in the 1970s, we spend some time reminiscing about our favorite cartoons (as well as live action superheroics like The Adventures of Superman and Shazam!), and digging into how modern kids might find comic books. You know, other than billion-dollar Marvel Studios movies.

It is also a week where several comic characters have new faces behind classic costumes. So we talk about them all:

• Lobo #1, written by Cullen Bunn with pencils by Reilly Brown,
• Captain America #25, written by Rick Remender with art by Carlos Pacheco and Stuart Immonen, and
• Thor #1, written by Jason Aaron with art by Russell Dautermann!

And now the legalese:

• We record this episode live to tape. While this might mean a looser show than other comics podcasts, it also means that anything can happen. Like learning about a child named Vlad who apparently lives under the bed.
• We spoil a lot of stuff on this show. While we try to shout out warnings ahead of time, consider yourself warned.
• We use adult, profane language, and therefore this show is not safe for work. If you don’t have any headphones, ask Lobo. Based on what happened to him in this week’s issue, he’s not using them.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:25:47 — 67.3MB)

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Enjoy the show, suckers!

The Other Guy: Justice League / Lobo #23.2 Review

Editor’s Note: Mess with th’ Main Man any you buy yourself oceans of spoilers!

Well, that wasn’t as bad as the leaked design art made it look. Then again, it couldn’t possibly have been.

There was a lot of Internet nerd rage over Kenneth Rocafort’s new design of Lobo, and a lot of that rage included the terms, “Twilight,” “metrosexual,” and “Bieber only more effeminate and probably white due to liberal application of semen.” And I’m guessing that that was based on the fact that the dude is named “Lobo.” The world is full of wuss-looking swordsmen who fluidly chop apart all comers before moving on to woo the maidens fair. After all, Orlando Bloom doesn’t get more ‘tang than an astronaut because he is a credible-looking medieval warrior. If it takes you more than five seconds to realize that Genghis Khan could kill Orlando Bloom just by thinking about it really hard (if Khan wasn’t busy thinking about whether to make Bloom his woman), then you don’t need fantasy literature because you clearly are living in one.

The problem has been that name. If you’re gonna call that mincing pretty boy Lobo, you’re gonna piss off anyone who is a fan of The Main Man, even though writer Marguerite Bennett has tried to make it clear that this character is a completely different guy than the Lobo that we all know and love, and that that design was not a redesign of the traditional Lobo. But that is an easy thing to forget or to put aside when all you have is a drawing, labelled “Lobo”, of a dude who looks like he’s a sword away from being a regular at Tower of Power night at the Manhole Club.

Well, the story is now here, in Justice League #23.2, and having the whole package in front of you makes it clear that this dude is not Lobo. He’s got the same name, and he is gunning for Lobo, but it’s a different guy. And that went a long way toward taking some of the sting out of my initial reaction to that concept art.

What took a lot of the rest of that reaction out was the fact that Rocafort didn’t draw this issue. Which means that the “new” Lobo looks a lot less like a clown and leather fetishist’s fantasy about who’s on the other side of the glory hole.

And all things being equal, it’s actually not all that bad.

Brain Bleach: Kenneth Rocafort Ruins Lobo

Take a good long look at the picture of the Main Man, Lobo, over there to the left. Drink it in, because the artist who teamed up with Scott Lobdell to help ruin the launch of Red Hood And The Outlaws in DC’s new 52 is at it again. Cheesecake master extraordinaire Kenneth Rocafort has redesigned indestructible space antihero Lobo for Marguerite Bennett’s take on the character in upcoming Justice League #23.2: Lobo. Gone will be the over muscled, heavy metal biker look that has been the character’s hallmark for decades. Instead, Rocafort will be giving us an athletic-looking, sanitized Lobo with the vapid features of a plastic surgery victim. Indeed, Lobo seems to be getting the full PG-13 makeover, as was similarly inflicted on John Constantine with the demise of Hellblazer. Huzzah for mediocrity! Check it out, after the jump.