Podcast – The Classy Comics Podcast

The Flash deals with the Negative Speed Force and then has to solve a murder inside Iron Heights in Flash, Volume 6: Cold Day in Hell. A boy comes from Japan to Gotham looking for his parents in Batman and the Justice League, Volume 1. Wonder Woman and Batman get into a long fight on behalf of the Gentleman and then Poison Ivy takes over the entire world except for Batman and Catwoman in Batman, Volume 6: Bride or Burglar. Ms. Marvel goes full in for hero-on-hero fighting in Civil War: Ms. Marvel, Volume 2. Affiliate link included.  

It’s a team-up of classic comic strip characters in Kings Watch. Batgirl and the Birds of Prey have an all-female team to fight a deadly case of man-flu in Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, Volume 3: Full Circle. Finally, as the Captain Marvel movie approaches, we take a look at the star of Carol Danvers’ Miss Marvel series in Ms. Marvel, Volume 1: Best of the Best. Affiliate link included. Transcript below: King Features comic strip characters join forces to save the Earth, then we take a look at the last volume of Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, and the first volume of the May 2000’s Miss Marvel series with Carol Danvers, straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. Alright, well we lead off with a look at King’s Watch. Now King’s Watch came after Jeff Parker’s really good run on Flash Gordon. He did a good Flash Gordon solo series. I’d read it as it came out, it was just a lot of fun – really captured the fun and got me interested in Flash Gordon as a character, and this series really starts out as a bit of a reboot. The entire history and continuity these characters had from the Flash Gordon comics isn’t really in place here, so that they can start on building this extended King’s feature world. And so you have a group that includes Flash Gordon and Dale Arden as a science reporter, and Zorkov who was written as the drunk who’s somewhat functional. And then you have the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, and also Lothar. The plot is that Ming the Merciless is planning an invasion of Earth through another dimension, and he has this super villain – Cobra – acting as his lackey on Earth. I think the plot is really well done. It’s got a very good sense of the sort of invasion event comic, with enough peril as well as enough positive turns to really keep you interested and invested in the story. I think that there’s some good characterization but it can be a bit spotty. A lot of the characters are very one-dimensional – Zorkof and King Drunk, and the Phantom is not really well-defined in this one, though I think there is some reason for that. This series does have a resolution but it does set the stage for future Kings Feature series, and I think the hope of Dynamite in publishing this series was that you would read this event, and then you would go and pick up all of their mini-series for Flash Gordon and Mandrake and the Phantom. Now, I read their Flash Gordon one which was not written by Jeff Parker and it wasn’t bad, but I think I’ve read mixed reviews about the other series. This one though, I think, can be read on its own and be enjoyed for just being this great invasion story, and also if you’re a fan of the 1980s series Defenders of the Earth you get to see some familiar characters in that regards. So this is a really good event comic. The more you’re into these Kings Feature strips, the more you’re going to get out of it, but even not knowing much about them other than what I knew of Flash Gordon, I still found it an enjoyable read. I’ll give this one a rating of Somewhat Classy. Then we get to Batgirl and the Birds of Prey and Full Circle which is a nine-Issue collection because the series was brought to an end, and so you get a bit of an oversized book just to go ahead and fit all of the Issues into a single volume. The story opens with a one-Issue story, Gotham City Limits, and Barbara decides to hang out around Gotham while Helena AKA the Huntress takes her class as she’s become a school teacher along with Dinah Lance AKA Black Canary. Barbara hangs around Gotham and in the course of this she d...

We cover the second half of Martian Manhunter’s solo Silver Age Adventures in Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter, Volume 2. Superman goes back in time in a buddy team-up with Booster Gold in Superman, Action Comics, Volume 5: Booster Shot. And Thor and a group of lesser-known heroes team up with the fate of the Marvel Universe at stake in Avengers Infinity Classic Affiliates linkes included. Transcript: We take a look at the final series of Martian Manhunter stories from the Silver Age, the final installment of Dan Jurgens recent run on Action Comics, and then we conclude by taking a look at Avengers Infinity Classic, straight ahead. So, we’re going to start the show out by taking a look at Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter Volume Two. Now a lot of folks do not like Showcase Presents; in fact, if you take a look at either Showcase Presents or Marvel Essential, you’ll have someone complain that comics are all in black and white. And I guess because of those complaints both of those lines have been discontinued, but I personally enjoyed them and what I like is that they often covered characters or stories that did not have reprints elsewhere. One example of this, of course, they printed a whole book of Elongated Man stories, and they can do that because the production costs were less expensive, and it was less expensive for readers to be able to easily access these strips even if they were in black and white. And I actually really enjoyed the first volume of Martian Manhunters stories – Showcase Presents: Martian Manhunter, Volume One. And it actually is interesting because Martian Manhunter didn’t start out as a superhero. He was introduced prior to the start of the Silver Age of comics and essentially the character was an attempt to combine science fiction with detective stories, and so you had this Martian who comes to Earth through a machine and decides to fight crime, and go undercover as Detective John Jones. And I think you had a pretty good variety of stories focusing on those kind of sci-fi themes and also on the detective work. I think that this became less true as the story went on and Martian Manhunter joined the Justice League, and this led to public revelation of his identity. And this book starts off with that status quo, collecting first of all Detective Comics 305 to 326, and these are generally just pretty straightforward superhero-fighting-monster type stories with not a whole lot of style to them generally. The big thing that they did do in this book is introduce Zook. Zook is a strange-looking alien who is often described as Manhunter’s pet, though often functions as a sidekick. He has his own power set, including the ability to freeze people; and I don’t think he’s an annoying character but he doesn’t really solve whatever was wrong with the Martian Manhunter strips in Detective Comics, in that there was very little imagination or real strong stories coming out. They did try to give him his own super villain which is actually a Batman super villain named Professor Hugo, and you actually get a cameo by Batman in the first Professor Hugo story. Professor Hugo was just a big-headed mad scientist, and there are about three or four stories with Professor Hugo in the whole book. And he’s not a particularly memorable character nor did he have a really long history. He made his first appearance in 1962 in the Detective Comics run concluded in 1964. And the way that concluded is that John Jones appeared to die to the world although, of course, the Martian Manhunter lived on. Now the reason why he didn’t try to explain away the apparent death and keep John Jones alive, there don’t really make an attempt to that. I think that is just realized that this whole situation with him as a detective and he had ...

Damian Wayne, Jonathan Kent, and the Teen Titans faces Tim Drake from the future who wants to kill Jonathan in Super Sons of Tomorrow. A look at last of the Batman Silver Age newspaper strips from 1969-72 in Volume 3 of the Batman Newspaper Strips. Hal Jordan teams up with Superman and then the rest of the Green Lanterns in Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps Vol. 5: Twilight of the Guardians Transcript below: Tim Drake from the future returns to tamper with history. Join us as we take a look at Super Sons of Tomorrow Volume Three of the Batman newspaper strips collection, and then we take a look at Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corp Volume Five, straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. Alright, well, we’ll lead off this episode with Super Sons of Tomorrow, and this is a three-way crossover collecting Issues Eleven and Twelve of Super Sons, Superman Issues Thirty-Seven and Thirty-Eight, and Teen Titans Number Fifteen. And the basic plot is that Tim Drake from the future who we talked about a few weeks ago, appearing in Detective Comics, that he returns to once again try and save the future by murdering someone. In this case it’s murdering ten year old John Kent, aka Superboy, and he starts out by disabling both Batman and Superman because he is future Tim Drake aka Future Batman, and then goes after Superboy properly and the Teen Titans get in the way. Well what did I like about this storyline? Well, I think that like the storyline in Detective Comics, it did really do a good job highlighting the nature of a key relationship – in that case, that between Robin and Superboy, and the way that their partnership helps them and makes them better people. It also suggests that that partnership, that that friendship could cut against or change some of what has been shown as the DC Universe’s future, suggesting that these portrayals are only a possible future, they are a shadow of things that might be – not necessarily of what has to be because of the way they relate to each other. And I think that’s a really good idea. At the same time, if you were a fan of the Young Justice comic series from the 1990s you get a bit of a treat here as we see that Tim Drake is Batman in this timeline is being pursued and followed by the Flash, Wonder Woman and Superman who are Connor, Cassie and Bart from the Young Justice comic series in the 1990s. So that is nice. Where I think the story has problems is that, I think that the idea that you could bring Tim Drake back after the Detective Comics storyline where essentially he was doing the same thing, but with Batwoman, is really going to the well too often and way too soon after the last time. I also thought he was a little bit more annoying in this one. He doffs the Batman outfit early on in this story to take on the identity of Savior who is going to save the universe and everything from bad things happening by messing with the timeline and killing people. The Teen Titans are also a bit of a problem in this book. The Teen Titans actually end up dividing against one another on the entire question of cooperating with Savior after Superboy is essentially driven by Savior to a point of giving off this great solar explosion, which was the reason that he had this solar flare power which he couldn’t control and was eventually going to lead to killing millions of people. And Savior triggered this so that he destroyed the Teen Titans tower, and the Titans end up divided over whether to follow Tim Drake or not, with two going with Tim Drake and three not going with Tim Drake but trying to catch up to Robin and Superboy to give them time.

Take a look at the origins of Luke Cage in Luke Cage, Heroes for Hire Masterworks, Volume 1. Then Roger Stern reveals the true identity of the Hobgoblin in Hobgoblin Lives. Finally, see the origin of the Marvel Universe through the eye of a photographer in Marvels. Affiliate links included. Transcript below: We take a look at Luke Cage’s first appearance. Find out how the mystery of the Hobgoblin’s identity was solved in Hobgoblin Lives. Then we take a look at the beginning of the Marvel Universe from someone else’s eye as we take a look at Marvel’s on this all-Marvel edition, straight ahead. Well, we start out with Luke Cage, Hero for Hire Masterworks Volume One, and we get the first sixteen Issues of this series from 1972 and ’73. We get Luke Cage’s origin story in the first couple Issues which are written by Archie Goodwin, and you can definitely see from reading these how Marvel was trying to tap into the Blacksploitation films that were so popular at the time. Luke is a man who has been locked away for a crime he didn’t commit and he is hated by Rackham, a senior guard who has become Acting Warden while a new warden waits to arrive; and he’s continually being sent to solitary and such. Luke has protested his innocence and he really does carry a big chip on his shoulder, however, Dr. Noah first has come to the prison and he wants to do some experiments on Luke to test the liquid that will regenerate cells, and it involves immersing Lucas in that liquid. However, while the doctor goes away to adjust something Lucas begins to notice that this is very uncomfortable, and it turns out Rackham had followed the doctor down there and he was turning up the temperature to its maximum level. However, the effect of this is actually to give Lucas superpowers, most notably a skin that is resistant to bullets. Bullets will not kill him, they will hurt a little, but probably more like how paintballs would hurt the average person, if that. But, at any rate, Lucas breaks out of prison and is shot at and is assumed dead. However, he actually escaped and got some clothes and just stumbles into a robbery and foils it, and the grateful owner who he helped gives him some money which he uses to rent a motel room for month, pick up some business cards, as well as build his 1970sarific costume. And he sets out to establish himself as a hero for hire. In order to promote the Hero for Hire business Lucas takes on the organization of his old friend Jimmy Striker who has become a criminal and who Lucas believes killed the woman he loved, the crime for which Lucas was sent to prison. And he also adopts the name Luke Cage, combining his old first name with something he associated with prison. And the second issue, he has the confrontation with Jimmy Striker and Striker accidentally kills himself. At the same time, a complication comes into Luke’s life when Dr. Burstein moves into the city to start a clinic, kind of shaken up by what had happened while out at the prison, and of course he recognizes Luke Cage as Lucas, the criminal convict who had supposedly died, but in Issue Three decides to keep silent as long as Lucas stays on the up and up – although he doesn’t approve of the hero for hire status, and thinks he ought to give out his services for the good of all mankind. And Lucas is like, “I have to eat and get off my back!” And so from there you really see the story take on a different tone as Lucas goes and battles all comers, and in the rest of Goodwin’s Issues he…in Issue Three he takes on Gabriel Mace, a military officer who replaced his hand with a mace. And that does make for some awesome fight scenes. Issue Four is Phantom on Forty-Second Street which has him solving a...

Adam Graham pays tribute to the late, great Stan Lee (1922-2018) Transcript: On a special edition of the Classy Comics Podcast we pay tribute to comic book legend Stan Lee in The Mighty Marvel Manor, straight ahead… Well, it’s a different sort of episode of the Classy Comics Podcast as we pay tribute to Stan Lee who passed away at the age of ninety-five, and there’s so much that could be said about Stan Lee’s legacy. He forgot more about comics than most people knew, and I mean that quite literally. He actually wrote of Captain America being revived in the 1950s and forgot about that return when he wrote Cap’s Return in the 1960s, leaving that as an issue to be addressed by other comic writers. And I think there are a couple of areas to look at Stan Lee’s legacy. The first one as a writer, and Stan Lee’s writing credits go back to the Golden Age of comics. He wrote some very interesting characters – he wrote The Destroyer who is one of my all-time favorite Golden Age character, and probably the first one that Stan Lee created; and he wrote so many different comics over the years from the 1940s through the 70s and into the modern era. But really he’s best remembered for his work during the Silver Age, and I think that if you want to look at where Stan Lee’s greatest writing contributions you’re going to be looking at The Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. His work on Fantastic Four for…as writer for its first 117 Issues, and on The Amazing Spider-Man for almost…I think around 100 Issues. He let Roy Thomas take over for four Issues and then came back and he stayed on to about – I think Issue 113. So, he created so much mythology around those characters. So many things that happened have been retold dozens of times, and also he helped create so many of the great villains of the Marvel Universe – Magneto and Dr. Octopus and Dr. Doom; and not only did he script Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, he also worked on Daredevil where, I think, the Stan Lee run, writing Daredevil is way underrated. Iron Man, Thor, Agents of Shield, Ant Man, X-Men, The Avengers, Incredible Hulk, Dr. Strange, Captain America, and the Silver Surfer – and most of these he was writing continuously. He was writing so many of these titles and strips and stories every month. Now he co-created these characters with artists, particularly Steve Dicko and Jack Kirby, and they certainly deserve their share of credit. And they were definitely part of the creative process with them using the Marvel Method by which Stan Lee would essentially say, “OK, here is a general idea of how this story will go”, and then they will go ahead and they will draw the story that Stan Lee told, and they’ll often make a lot of their own changes, and then it will be up to…then it was up to Stan Lee to write all of the dialogue. And there had been some controversy about the degree to which Stan Lee was responsible for all of these stories, and clearly these other creative gentlemen played a role. In fact, Stan Lee acknowledged this. One of my favorite Stan Lee-related panels in comics is from Amazing Spider-Man Annual Number One, and it shows Stan Lee at a typewriter, like overwhelmed with all of these characters. He’s got Dr. Strange behind him and Captain America at his ear, and he’s got Incredible Hulk under him, and there’s the Fantastic Four and Iron Man’s on his hand. It just kind of showing all the things he was doing, but the accompanying story just…which Lee wrote, pokes fun at him, explains all the work – that he comes up with an idea in the middle of night, goes to Steve Dicko and tells his story, and then Steve Dicko has to draw and create this entire Spider-Man story under these really intense deadlines. And so he poked fun and acknowledged the contributions of these other creator...

Atomic Robo fights his archnemesis in The Savage Sword of Doctor Dinosaur and then travels back to the Old West in the Knights of the Golden Circle.  Superman takes patriotic family vacation in Superman Vol. 5: Hopes and Fears Affiliate link included. Transcripts Below: Atomic Robo battles Dr. Dinosaur and then goes back to the Old West in two different Atomic Robo collections, and then we’ll take a look at Superman: Hopes and Fears, straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast, where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. I’d received the Atomic Robo Omnibus Collections, the Hell and Lightning Collection, which contained three different Atomic Robo stories; and so we did the first one in the last podcast and we’ll do the last two in this one. So, we’ll be discussing Volume Eight and Volume Nine of Atomic Robo. Volume Eight is The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, and the plot is that Robo and a team of scientists from Tesladyne are heading out to investigate a series of sightings of a mysterious cryptid in Venezuela as Robo has been dealing with some negative publicity, as well as just attacks from the military and the press as a result of an in-universe event known as Eight-Eleven – not really explained but clearly it is a bother. They end up stumbling into an underground city full of stone men under the command of Dr. Dinosaur, who is this insane, mad scientist dinosaur – and he has concocted a plot to fire a time bomb which includes several atom bombs that will wipe out history and return the earth to being ruled by dinosaurs. At the same time there is an invasion of Tesladyne which is Atomic Robo’s company, top secret Government organization. Dr. Dinosaur is a great character – he’s over the top, he is insane and really entertaining in comic book form. One big challenge with the character that I think is a concern when I read about it, is giving him a five-Issue arc all to himself could be too much of a good thing. But here the invasion of Tesladyne plot really does balance out what’s going on with Dr. Dinosaur so he doesn’t get too much time, but just enough to really make this book work. He’s great; the interplay with Robo is fantastic. There’s some fantastic humour as well as just a lot of great action and adventure as Robo tries to stop him from destroying the earth, though Robo’s less sure that Dr. Dinosaur can do that. More like Dr. Dinosaur could cause just a major catastrophe. And the story we get just has a lot of great action, some good humor, some really genuinely funny lines. Dr. Dinosaur has the most obviously funny lines. A lot of the people with Robo are also really funny as well; and so it’s just this great, over the top adventure, and I’ll give Sword of Dr. Dinosaur a rating of Classy. Next up we have The Knights of the Golden Circle, and this one actually does follow right after the plot of the previous book which…and I’ll give a little spoiler for the end of The Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, is that after fighting him over this time travel device, Robo finds himself in a desert where there are historic Native Americans on horses. And we learn in Volume Nine, The Knights of the Golden Circle, that Robo has actually been sent back in time, and he finds himself in the Old West and he’s just trying to stay out of the way and avoid interfering with history and messing up the timeline. However, Robo rescues a wounded man from the gang of Butcher Caldwell, and he goes to a saloon in order to get treatment, and in that saloon you have Doc Holliday who is in the process of being captured and arrested by Marshal Bass Reeves, Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves.

We go to the Golden Age for a look at that other DC Super-team in the Seven Soldiers of Victory Archives, Volume 2. We look at the earliest adventures of Superman as a boy in the Adventures of Superboy. Finally, Atomic Robo meets up with a gang of outlaw lady pirates and takes on a rogue Japanese terrorist in Atomic Robo and the Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. Affiliate links included. Transcript: The Seven Soldiers of Victory go on epic adventures, and we take a look at some early adventures of Superboy, and we wrap it up with a little bit of Atomic Robo. Join us straight ahead. Welcome. Well we’re going to start out, we have a couple different Golden Age comics from the 1940s and we start out with the book, The Seven Soldiers of Victory, Archives Volume Two. Now this is not to be confused with Grant Morrison’s later series, The Seven Soldiers of Victory. This one is the original; they starred in leading comics in the 1940s and this book was really just their big team up book. And Volume Two of the Seven Soldiers of Victory Archives collects Issues Five through Eight. Now the Seven Soldiers of Victory were Shining Knight, Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy, Vigilante, Green Arrow and Speedy, and Crimson Avenger and Wing. Now none of these characters had super powers except for Shining Knight who had some magical powers, mainly his flying horse which was really cool. One thing I don’t like about this is how they do the Seven Soldiers of Victory and how they count it, because if you listen there were actually eight names. And there are three sidekicks who regularly appear; thus, there’s really only five features per book. The one sidekick that is usually not counted as a soldier is Wing. Wing is the Chinese sidekick to the Crimson Avenger and he’s got his own costume and is pretty competent in battle. However, the way his dialogue is written is kind of in this broken English as well as Wing’s general design is really stereotypical. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the writer realized that the Chinese were actually our allies at this point – though Wing would have better portrayals and better stories and actually be the keystone to the big story in Justice League of America Number 100. In many ways, the Crimson Avenger was a rip-off of the Green Hornet from the radio show in the same way the Blue Beetle was. And so Wing came along as the sort of valet character who was also the sidekick, though I think Cato from the Green Hornet was a stronger character. The Crimson Avenger was actually DCs first masked hero, beating Batman to the punch by several months. The Vigilante was a Western-themed character. He was related to a Native American fighter and the son of a sheriff in Wyoming; and he went on to stardom as a singing radio cowboy, but comes back to avenge the death of his father and begins the first of many adventures fighting evil in the pages of Action Comics. Green Arrow and Speedy are probably the most familiar to modern-day readers, and of course were known for their archery related skills and powers. And the team wraps up with the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy which is kind of an interesting reversal. Star Spangled Kid is actually the hero and is a kid, and Stripesy is an adult, Star Spangled Kid’s chauffeur in his real life. So, this is the case of an adult sidekick for a kid which didn’t really happen a lot, even today. They are really known for having a series of maneuvers and they’ll call out the maneuver, like a football play, and they will use that to fight and to overcome their enemies. So that is the team, so let’s take a look at their adventures. The first one in here in Issue Five is The Skull, and the plot of this is pretty simple.

The Tick is mighty! So mighty that he got me to break my rule of only reviewing trades as we look at New England Comics latest Tick comics including Issues 1-4 of the new series and the Free Comic Book Day issue. Transcript: The Tick is Mighty. Join us as we take a look at the latest comic book adventures of The Tick. The Tick is a much-beloved character, probably best remembered for his 1990s Fox animated TV series; and there’d been two subsequent live-action series, one of which will have new episodes. I believe in February 2019 we’ll get Season Two of the Tick for Amazon Prime. Now most people know that the Tick began as a comic book but the Tick’s relationship to a regular publishing schedule is a bit strange. The first issue of the Tick appeared thirty years ago, and in those thirty years there have been 100-odd issues of the Tick. Some of those actually were very odd but, be that as it may, that averages out to just about three to four comics per year. There have been quite a few ongoing Tick series as well as years where there haven’t been any Tick comics published at all. During the last five years all we’d gotten were free comic day books. The Tick is not owned by Marvel or DC, nor is it published by a comic book company that publishes multiple titles like Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW or Boom. Rather, the Tick continues to be published by New England Comics, a chain of comic book shops in New England, thus the name. I’ve actually read either in trade paperback or in some other form every previous Tick Issue, so I was excited that we were finally going to get some new Tick comics with a new series starting in late 2017 and written by Cullen Bunn who has written a lot of work for Marvel Comics. We’ll be discussing Issues One through Four of this Tick series that were published in 2017 and 2018, as well as the 2008 Tick free Comic Book Day comic. Well first, on to the ongoing series and we’ll talk about these four Issues and we’ll talk about the ongoing main story written by Cullen Bunn with art by JimmyZ, and then there are backup stories in each comic and we’ll talk about them as well. The story opens with the Tick and Arthur riding on a bus to Canada and the Tick recalling how they got there, which was the Tick was trying to stop a robbery by some ninjas and finds out that it’s all a trap – that the ninjas and their arch-nemesis, the Murder Clowns, have teamed up to battle against the Tick. And what happens in the course of the battle is that a crate falls on the Tick’s head. Now that would kill you or me, but being this is the Tick and he’s nigh invulnerable, when the crate lands on his head he starts speaking French, and then really goes after both Murder Clown and ninja alike with a vengeance, easily winning the battle. It’s important to note that in this book Cullen Bunn is doing some callbacks to Ben Edlunds first work on the Tick. Edlund drew the Tick comic as a bit of a joke, kind of playing around with superheroes and got published in the New England Comics newsletter, and the idea was so popular that they decided that there needed to be a Tick comic book. As part of the newsletter Edlund drew up a list of facts about the Tick, describing his background, his weight, etc. and just really was just being absolutely silly and almost nonsensical about it. And the folks who wrote the newsletter didn’t bother to proofread it, thus having some very odd misspellings passed on for posterity whenever the piece is reprinted. Among the Tick’s abilities Edlund listed: can floss all his teeth, speaks fluent French, concert pianist, knows all the Presidents in order. And so the idea of the Tick starting to speak French by Bunn is a callback to Edlund’s original work. After Tick thrashes both Murder Clown and ninja alike, he begins to wander and dream about his origin.

The Silver Surfer faces his last days in Silver Surfer: Requiem. Jack-jack has a disease and it’s giving others Superpowers in Incredibles: City of the Incredibles. And the Marvel Universe is rebooted…sorta in the 2015 Secret Wars. Transcript below: We take a look at Silver Surfer: Requiem, The Incredibles: City of the Incredibles, and 2015s Secret Wars, straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. Alright, well we’re going to start our review looking at Silver Surfer: Requiem, a mini series written by JMS, the creator of Babylon Five and a writer on a wide variety of comic books series both for DC and Marvel as well as Indie Work. This is a kind of What If… story dealing with the potential death of the Silver Surfer that was released back in 2007. For context, it’s important to remember that Grant Morrison had launched his series, All-Star Superman, back in 2005 which focused on Superman trying to make sure that his loved ones and his adopted planet were safe once he was gone. So you can see how this story may have come about. It’s also worth noting that from here Marvel did do several books featuring the last stories of popular characters, usually titled something like The Ant. But just like in Silver Surfer, it was essentially a What If story rather than a situation where they were actually killing off the character. So, again, this one is a What If story. I’ll comment first of all on the art. It’s by Esad Ribic and it is amazing. Just absolutely beautiful, gorgeous painted artwork that’s stunning, and it really gives emotional weight and power to really every scene in this book. And so, the art is just incredible throughout, and it drives home the power of the story by JMS. Issue One features the Surfer going to the Baxter Building. He clearly senses that things are not right and he wants Reed Richards to examine him. And so Reid examines him and what he finds is that slowly but surely the protective layer that allows him to go through space as the Silver Surfer is beginning to fail, and because it’s tied into his nervous system his body is going to fail and he’s going to die in three weeks to a month. And we also get flashbacks into the Surfer’s past and how as Norrin Radd he had agreed to be Galactus’ herald in order to save his own planet, and he’d hoped to lead Galactus to planets without life on them, but the infusion of the Power Cosmic overwrote a lot of his personality until he came to Earth and the Fantastic Four with the help of Alisha, Ben Grimm’s girlfriend, were able to jar that back into being, and he stood and fought Galactus and saved the world at great personal cost. And so it was appropriate that he went back there; and he’s facing death and it really does capture all the emotion of that as he’s coming to terms with that, and also putting it into perspective. At one point he says, “The Monarch butterfly has a lifespan of two weeks, and that’s a generation to the Monarch butterfly so I’ve got two generations left. In Issue Two the Surfer runs into Spider-Man. He assists Spider-Man because he sees some innocent people are in danger and he’s just passing by; but Spidey notices something is wrong and follows him and gets him to tell him what’s going on. In many ways this story works a lot better than you would think it was because Spidey is not really a typical major part of the Surfer’s life or vice versa. JMS at the time had been working on The Amazing Spider-Man. But in many ways Spider-Man represents a sort of average Joe, average person’s perspective on Earth; and before...

Peter Parker relives how he fell in love with Gwen Stacy in Spider-man: Blue. Find out what Adam Graham thinks of Watchmen and Pirate comics. The Doctor and Clara meet up with some World War II pilots carrying an Atom Bomb in Doctor Who: Skyjacks Donatello accidentally opens an inter-dimensional gateway allowing Bane to come through to their New York which means time for another Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Team-up in Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II. Also we take a look at Graphic Audio and present another Hero of the Public Domain as we look at Blue Lady who appeared in Amazing Man Comics #24-26 Transcript below: Today Spider-Man’s feeling a little blue, Batman meets up with the Ninja Turtles once again, and we talk about a little comic book called Watchmen, straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. Today we have four different graphic novels to discuss, and then we have a couple of what I call ‘department segments’ we’ll get through which are not our typical reviews but I think you’ll find interesting. Alright, well we’ll go ahead and we will get started with Spider-Man Blue, written by Jeph Loeb and art by Tim Sale. It’s a 2002-2003 miniseries in which Peter Parker is making a recording to Gwen Stacy, and recalling that time in his life when he met Mary Jane Watson but also started to fall for Gwen Stacy. Essentially the book retells mini incidents that occurred in the early part of Stan Lee and John Romita’s partnership on The Amazing Spider-Man. Now the art on this book is just great. Tim Sale always does a fantastic job whenever he’s assigned to a project, particularly with Loeb, and in this case it’s no exception, and what he does here is he really captures the feel of the John Romita era and makes that whole John Romita senior feel be really apparent in the way that he draws the book. So it was very authentic and well done. The plots are good because they’re essentially the same plots that Stan Lee used. However, the story by Loeb it fills in some plot holes from the time, for example, well one thing that happened in this early period with Amazing Spider-Man is Peter goes out and buys a motor scooter which is really odd because the comics portray Peter as always being in a constant battle with poverty. So, where’d he get the money for that? And this book answers that sort of question, so it takes away some of the silly stuff, and it gives some reflection and depth to Peter’s emotional state because this is Peter Parker who has grown up, he’s gotten married and he’s gone through all those things that Spider-Man has gone through through 2003. So he’s more in touch with his feelings and better able to express a lot of things that were going on in his head and going on in his life at the time. So it’s got the gift of hindsight and a little bit of additional reflection. Now one criticism I’ve seen out here for this book which I don’t think is particularly fair is that the book doesn’t really give a whole lot of depth to Gwen Stacy. Well that is really not Loeb’s fault because he’s going based on what Stan Lee had, and there really wasn’t a lot of depth to Gwen Stacy as written by Stan Lee. In addition, as the story is about him recalling his thoughts on falling in ...

It’s a brand new format as discuss four different comics: * Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows Vol. 3: Eight Years Later * Shadow/Batman * Patsy Walker: Hellcat * Nightwing, Vol. 5: Raptor’s Revenge Affiliate links included. Transcript: Brace for a brand new format as we discuss not one but four different trade paperbacks: Spider-Man, Batman, the Shadow, Patsy Walker and Nightwing. We’ll talk about them all straight ahead. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. This is the start of a brand new format. We begin the series with doing two episodes a week, generally covering one book per episode – though there were a couple episodes where we did go ahead and extend it out, and do multiple episodes for a single book. So now we’re going to go through generally three to four different graphic novels/trade collections, and probably not go into detail as much so that we cover more books, and hopefully in a little bit less time. And we’ll only be doing one episode a week. So we’ll start out with Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, Volume Three eight year later. The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows mini-series was a tie-in to the Secret Wars event and then it led to a series that was initially written by Spider-Man legend Jerry Conway, and with art by Ryan Stegman who took over the writing duties after Conway left. With Issue Thirteen Jody Houser took over the writing duties and it was decided to take the story of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Parker, and their daughter Annie eight years ahead. And I think there a lot of good reasons to move this story to when she’s a teenager, just because there’s so much more you can write about with a teenager in a series as they’re facing so many choices about what direction they’re going to take in life. So, I think this definitely had potential. There are two stories in this volume which collect Issues Thirteen through Eighteen of the series. First three Issue arc eight years later finds the family going for a day off at Coney Island when the Lizard attacks and they all change into their costumes. While Spidey and Mary Jane have the same costumes they did previously, Annie AKA Spiderling has got a new costume and it looks nice. It plays on the classic Spider-Man design but with a greater emphasis on the blue, with just a few red accents like the webbing across her chest is blue. So, I think it’s a good design. At any rate it turns out that the Lizard does have a reason for attacking, and that there are a bunch of people who are deformed or who would be identified as freaks who are imprisoned in the sewer, and so they have to fight to save them. It’s not a bad story but it’s also nothing special. There is one point in the story where Peter gives her a lecture about what it means to be a hero, and the type of decisions that heroes make and need to make, and the risk that they have to decide to take. That wouldn’t be out of place if she was just starting off, but she’s been doing this thing for eight years. So it doesn’t feel like a particularly believable interaction. The second story is, ‘Fast Times at Midtown High’. Peter gets a job teaching at Annie’s high school – which is the same high school that Peter went to when he was a kid. Annie finds a couple of kids who have developed superpowers and lies to her dad about it, and decides that instead she’s going to train with them and train them to be superheroes. However, things get out of hand and she ends up needing some help from her parents. I like this story.

Mighty Mouse flies out of the television and into real life…literally. Affiliate link included. Transcript: Here he comes! It’s time for Mighty Mouse: Saving the Day, Volume One. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. Dynamite Comics is a company I tend to associate with kind of hard-edged, noirish comics; stuff that tends to go pretty dark. I was surprised that they were trying to get into all ages comics and kind of surprised by one of the volumes that they did, and it really caught my eye. It’s Mighty Mouse, Volume One: Saving the Day. It’s a five-Issue mini-series written and with art by Sholly Fisch. The book focuses on Mighty Mouse from the classic cartoon era. Mighty Mouse began as Super Mouse, a parody of Superman, and then became kind of his own character with this yellow costume and the name of Mighty Mouse, and singing as he went into action. When I was a kid Mighty Mouse was one of those characters that was kind of OK, but for the lead character in this book Mighty Mouse is much more than that. Joey gets picked on at school and the story shows that he goes through a lot of bullying. And he also comes home to an empty house as his mom has to go off to work, and so he sits at home watching Mighty Mouse cartoons and is daydreaming. He’s enthralled and he’s wishing that Mighty Mouse were here to deal with the villains, the bullies in his life. And so he draws a picture about Mighty Mouse being there, and so Mighty Mouse flies out of the TV screen. And eventually after some introductions Mighty Mouse flies out into town and they run across a mugger, and he’s about to punch him with the super strength, and Joey stops him and says that if Mighty Mouse hits this mugger it will kill him, he will die. And Mighty Mouse is really taken aback by that because he comes from a cartoon world, and things happen in a cartoon way. And so he says, “Well, what if people fall off a cliff?” And Joey says, “They die! Get blown up? They die! Get run over by a steamroller? They die?” And Mighty Mouse delivers the best line in the comic; he says, “Your world is really terminal!” But Mighty Mouse’s heroics are detected so they have to get off the street, and not only that but the cartoon is going on without Mighty Mouse, and without Mighty Mouse in his world the villains are taking over, and Mighty Mouse needs to go back and save the day. But before that can happen Joey needs to get sleep and then get off to school, and the police actually show up because they are curious about this whole Mighty Mouse thing, and Joey had been seen at the scene. But they’re able to bluff their way through it with a Mighty Mouse doll in the backpack along with Mighty Mouse. However, when the bully start pushing around Joey at school, Mighty Mouse comes out and saves the day, and he actually hits the bully and his neck does this really weird spiral thingy. And it’s determined that cartoon physics do work in the real world, but only for Mighty Mouse. When they get home from school they get back on to the whole getting Mighty Mouse home thing, and they get into a very long convoluted attempt to explain how Mighty Mouse got here; and they get into things like the fact that Mighty Mouse needs to save the day and Joey needed Mighty Mouse, but now Mighty Mouse needs to get back to his own world. And so Joey comes up with the solution to draw a portal that goes between the worlds. Unfortunately that allows the villains who happened to be invading Space Cats to come into our world and to unleash havoc on the city. And so the cats from outer space are opposed by Mighty Mouse but there are a lot of them that only wanted Mighty Mouse, and he gets close to being overwhelmed when Joey has the idea that since his drawing ...

We take a look at the first stories featuring the man who would become the Hobgoblin. Affiliate link included. Transcript: Are you ready to find out about the origin of the Hobgoblin? Join us as we take a look at Spider-Man: Origin of the Hobgoblin, straight ahead. So I didn’t talk about the Hobgoblin stuff when I was doing my review of Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume Eleven so that we could get in some issues that were not covered in that but rather covered in the trade Spider-Man: Origin of the Hobgoblin. The first Issues are not actually The Origin of the Hobgoblin, but they do tell us about Roderick Kingsley who would eventually reveal to be the Hobgoblin. And essentially the thrust of three Issues from 1980 was of Spider-Man battling Belladonna. Belladonna had a really strong sort of film noire look to her. Roger Stern was the creator of the Hobgoblin and he also wrote these issues. And it’s a simple crime story really. It begins with some of Belladonna’s goons robbing Peter’s lab at Empire State University. He pursues as soon as he can and gets led to the studio of Roderick Kingsley, but Kingsley couldn’t be one of the goons who robbed him. Spidey says of him,”He’s too short, too skinny…and they used to call me Puny Parker!” But at any rate, Belladonna tries to rob Kingsley, but Spidey comes in and saves Kingsley from Belladonna, fighting her and her men, while she does manage to get away. Kingsley calls Spidey a ‘ruffington’ and says he made everything worse, that they would have just stolen some designs and he would have been able to trace those, and Spidey responds to this argument – particularly when the Daily Bugle was mentioned – by webbing Kingsley up and leaving him there to stew for an hour or two while waiting for the webbing to dissolve. Belladonna then sabotages the fashion show of Kingsley and Spidey once again rescues Kingsley, but Belladonna gets away by messing with Spidey’s vision when she hits him with some of her poison, which isn’t lethal but it makes it so he’s blinded just long enough for her to get away. Issue Forty-Seven opens with a crime that the police attempted to blame on Spidey; however, Peter deduces that they’re not going to be very open to Spider-Man coming to look around the crime scene, but he decides to come in as Peter Parker, photographer – and he’s able to stay. And he points out some things such as the hand marks on the side of the wall, which indicates that somebody was out there, not Spidey and that he gets the police to see somebody was trying to impersonate Spidey and frame him. And Spidey immediately suspects the Prowler because the types of marks that were made were the type of things that the Prowler used to do. But Spidey finds that Hobie Brown who was the Prowler has actually retired, and he stored his equipment upstairs on the roof in a storage area in his apartment complex, but discovers that they’re gone. And it turns out that the Prowler’s tools have been taken by another Spider-Man villain, the Cat Burglar, who is really not all that effective against Spider-Man. He was from way back during the Lee-Ditko era, and he just gets totally overpowered but he does manage to lead Spidey into a room that locks and reveals reinforced walls from which he can’t escape, and that there is a death trap set by Belladonna because she doesn’t like Spidey and thinks he’s strange and that he’s gotten in the way of her plans. And so you get a great cliff-hanger at the end of Issue Forty-Seven with Spidey trapped and seemingly doomed. However, while Spidey can’t get through the steel, he is able to break through the window. And he gets out to find that Belladonna, while it look like she was standing behind the glass…really was not…it was just a TV screen.

Tim Drake is released with Mister Oz along with the crazy Batman from the future whose determined to kill one of his teammates who happens to be him. Affiliate link included Transcript: The hopeful plucky Tim Drake returns along with a dangerous menace, the evil cynical Tim Drake from the future. Find out all about it as we take a look at Batman Detective Comics, Volume Five: A Lonely Place of Living, straight ahead. This book collects issues 963 to 968 of Detective Comics, and it has two stories in it. First up is the titular story arc, ‘A Lonely Place of Living’, and what happens is Tim Drake in the first volume of James Tynion’s ran on Detective Comics was taken and imprisoned by Mr Oz. If you’ll recall from our previous podcast on The Oz Effect, Mr. Oz was taken out of the picture by the events of that arc, and so they had to go ahead and let Tim Drake, i.e. Red Robin go free. But being Mr. Oz he had wanted to be sure and teach Tim Drake a lesson, so he also released another prisoner and that was the Batman from the future. And this Batman packs heat and Tim quickly finds out that this Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne, it’s actually Tim Drake who is here to tell his younger self that everything he’s doing and believes in is wrong, and that the future is going to be destroyed and terrible, and the only way to stop it is to kill Batwoman. And so that’s what he sets out to do. So Tim has to team up with the rest of Batman’s squad of knights to thwart evil future Tim’s plans.In many ways this is a plot we have seen before. One of the big plots in The New 52 Flash was when the Flash had to battle the Future Flash, and it was much the same story line. What does make this work and why I overall like it, though not too much because it’s not all that original, is just the strength of the Tim Drake character and how that comes out in the story, and affirming those sort of virtues that are just at the heart of who he is as a character. So, I really…I did enjoy this one. The second arc is one where it’s a bit confusing. It’s the two-part story ‘Utopia and Dystopia’ with the ‘A’ being the symbol for Anarchy because it deals with Anarky spelled with a ‘K’ – An anarchist who appeared at the end of the previous volume of Detective Comics to work with Stephanie in her quest to be different from Batman. Stephanie Brown, i.e. Spoiler, and in the pre-New 52 world was also a Batgirl. She is not too happy, and she has a great realization when she’s talking to Anarky. She says, “How come every time I try to do this better than Batman, I just end up doing exactly what Batman would do?” And this really is a nice payoff because in the previous story where she was out on her own, thinking she was doing all this stuff in a way that Batman wouldn’t do, she was doing exactly what Batman would do. And I’m glad she had that realization, it makes her a little less dense and easier to relate to. But Anarky assures her that they are planning something different, and he makes a philosophical argument as they discuss the nature of anarchy and anarchists, and all of this is leading up to the conclusion of the first issue in the arc where he reveals to her that there’s actually an entire underground city that they’ve set up called Utopia, with everybody equal and taking terms leading, and it’s this supposed to be an ideal society for the poor and downtrodden and outcast. And it’s built in this section of Gotham City known as Monster Town, so they’re not going to be disturbed too much. And Stephanie’s overwhelmed by this when Batman comes out of the shadows, because that’s the sort of thing Batman does, and gives Anarky a chance to tell her the truth or he’s going to make him.