Podcast – The Classy Comics Podcast

The book featuring DC’s most awesome heroes (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) begins with three villains gathering and then our heroes having a pow wow to discuss continuity before getting to a real adventure. Affiluate link included Transcript below: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, DC’s longest enduring superheroes come together to talk. We’ll tell you all about it next as we take a look at Trinity Volume Two: Dead Space 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. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are the only three characters to have published continuously since World War II. Yes, there’s Captain America but he disappeared from publication for many years. Those three continued to be published even during that really dark spot between 1948 and 1956 when superhero comics really faded away. It was not actually thought to put all three of them together in their own book until 2003 when there was a three issue mini-series called Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman: Trinity and this was followed up in 2008 with a fifty-two week series of weekly comics called Trinity. With DC Rebirth a new Trinity series was relaunched. The first volume Trinity Volume One: Better Together focused on them getting used to the new status of a Superman we’ve talked about before being the post-crisis Superman, as opposed to The New 52 Superman. It wasn’t a great story but it was fairly good. Volume 2 of the series Dead Space collects issues Seven through Eleven of the series. [In Issue Seven] there’s neither Superman ,Batman or Wonder Woman but instead features there are three archenemies: Ra’s al Ghul, Luthor and Circe, and they’re being offered access to the Pandora Pit which will give them all sorts of evil power. Now there are a couple of problems with this. From what I gather this issue does pay off and become something several issues down the line. I have a problem with that when you’re dealing with a monthly comic book and you’re setting up events and saying ‘Don’t worry, this’ll make sense in another book’ if you’re reading from the trade or in four months if you’re reading from the actual comics. So, yeah, that’s a somewhat dubious practice. The other problem is Lex Luthor was a bit off in this story because Luthor actually – if you’ve been reading Action Comics – has been trying to be somewhat of a hero, and that sort of determination to be a better person is kind of…it gets a bit of a battering in the story. He doesn’t go completely evil; in fact, he’s the one who is hesitant about a lot of this, not just because it’s evil but because it deals with magic which is not something he’s particularly comfortable with. Still this is a very talky issue without our heroes in it directly and yeah, it’s was just not a great read. Issue Eight is The Truth About Superman which is another series or guest piece by the same writer, different artists and it’s essentially Superman relating a dream which we see drawn out and then them talking about it. And this is another really long talky issue with them just going back and forth about this thing that Superman barely understands himself. It’s not really necessary to be in Trinity because Superman has his own aftermath on this issue, and there’s just some stuff in there that’s lame, such as when Batman says in regards to the dream, “I’m not sure I love the idea of you having visions of me running around inside your brain”, and Wonder Woman says, “It’s not time for jokes”. Batman joking is not really a thing that happens too often, and you’d hope if he did tell a joke it would be better than that. Finally,

A look at a milestone issue jam-packed celeberation of Superman in Actions Comics #1000 with stories from some of the greatest creators in the comic book industry. Affiliate link included. It’s Action Comic’s 1000th Issue. We take a look at it 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. Welcome to a special episode of the Classy Comics Podcast. Usually I record these podcasts well in advance. You probably, this point, just heard Episode Thirty-Three. I just recorded Episode Fifty-Two today, so I stay well ahead. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly having to do with the number of books I read from the library and I want to record the episodes while they’re fresh in my mind. That said, I’m actually recording this fairly recently so I can talk to you about Action Comics Number 1000. Now here I’m kind of breaking my own rule in reviewing a standalone comic rather than a trade; however, Action Comics Number 1000 is a very big comic book, it’s practically trade-length itself. It has ten Superman stories written by some of the premiere writers in the comic book field, so I think that this is acceptable to go ahead and take a look at, and I want to do it while it is out fresh. I’ll try to avoid spoilers but there may be a few along the way. Alright, so let’s go ahead and we’ll start with the first story which is written by Dan Jurgens and it is called ‘From the City that has Everything’, and this is a play on the key story from Superman Annual Number Eleven ‘For the Man who has Everything’, but this one’s got an entirely different plot. ‘From the City that has Everything’ has Superman getting ready to observe a Superman Day Celebration; however, there’s an alien invasion and, truth be told, Superman would rather be dealing with the invasion. And as Clark Kent says, the Superman Day Celebration it’s not why he does it, it’s not what he’s all about. He doesn’t do it for parades and grand spectacles, and it’s an interesting story that does a good job showing the relationship between Superman and the city of Metropolis, and it’s just a really…has some really nice emotional moments. It’s written by Dan Jurgens, most recent author of Action Comics, but a pretty solid Superman scribe from the 1990s. Then we have ‘Never Ending Battle’ which is an interesting story in which we’re told of Superman battling Vandal Savage, and Savage tries to get him trapped in time, and he begins going through this loop where he’s experiencing different eras, and this leads to the art showing Superman as he’s been portrayed throughout the ages going back to the 1930s and then into the Silver Age, and more into some of the modern day stuff. The story is written by Patrick Tomasi and it’s a pretty…and it’s a lot of text with big full page spreads on nearly every page, and these are great pieces of art. Tomasi, good writer, and Gleason is just – his Superman is just a beauty to behold, and it just looks great from start to finish even if the stories just kind of maybe above average because the purpose of the story really is just to showcase the art and to celebrate Action Comics Number 1000 and the eightieth anniversary of Superman. Next stop is The Enemy Within which has the Metropolis P.D. dealing with a principal who is gone all over the deep end and is holding one of his students hostage while Superman’s out of town. And this is meant to be a salute to human beings, to average ordinary people who do extraordinary things. It’s written by Marv Wolfman; I don’t think it’s a bad story but it doesn’t really have enough space to develop. There are,

FBI Agent by Day, Commie-fighting cold war superhero by night. We look at Jim Drake, the Black Cobra who appeared in three issues of his own magazine in 1954-55. Read the Black Cobra from Ajax Comics for free at the Digital Comic Museum. Transcript below: Meet a Cold War man of mystery who was so mysterious even his writers weren’t clear if he had superpowers. We’ll tell you all about it as we look at The Black Cobra, 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. If we think of comics, particularly superhero comics during the Golden Age, we think of Marvel and we think of DC. While those two companies dominated, they were far from the only game in town. With the success of characters like Captain America, Captain Marvel and of course Superman, there was a plethora of companies that were offering their comics. And you can actually read many of them online for free, and I probably should have mentioned that when I did the program a few weeks back on how to read comics for free, but this is somewhat of a different category. The Digital Comic Museum, digitalcomicmuseum.org collects public domain comic books. Back during the Golden Age and even the early Silver Age of comics copyright only lasted twenty-eight years. You could renew it for an additional twenty-eight year term and that’s what’s happened to most of the really popular entertainment of that time, and then it’s been further extended by the Government. But if you didn’t get in that first twenty-eight year renewal prior to 1964 your work would fall into the public domain. Superhero comics boomed during World War II but then went bust after the war, and many companies went belly-up. Therefore, when it came time to renew the copyright on their comics and their characters there was no one to renew it. And Digital Comics Museum captures all these comics which you can read and download for free. Now if you would like to read them on their website you can do that pretty easily. If you would like to download them, most of their files are in what’s known as a CBR format which is a comic book archive, so you need a CBR Reader. For my Kindle I use ComiCat – it’s a very simple program, I just get the comics onto my Kindle and it will display them. Now Black Cobra which we’re going to talk about today is a somewhat obscure comic that you can find there. However, there are others that are a little bit better known that are also available there. DC has bought the rights to various characters but doesn’t own all of their past stories, among them, Captain Marvel and Plastic Man. They bought all of the comic characters from Fawcett and Quality Comics, but all of the stories from this era are actually free-for-all that you can go ahead and read, and some just really interesting titles. There’s so much there that I might want to get to one day. But we’re going to start with Black Cobra because he’s got a relatively short run, and also I’m working on a book where I use some public domain superheroes, so I’m kind of sharing some of my research on these characters with you. The one I’m talking about is actually the second character named Black Cobra. The mid-1950s saw a brief attempt to revive superheroes, and it only had been a few years after the Golden Age bust. And you can trace the root of it back to Atlas which was the precursor company for Marvel which revived the Submariner, Human Torch and Captain America, and particularly Captain America was focused on fighting communism. The others were there to a certain extent, and there were other characters during this brief period before the Silver Age properly began with the return of The Flash with Barry Alle...

Watch as we pull a podcast out of our hat—and look at some classic Rocky and Bullwinkle comics. Affiliate link included. Transcript below: Now it’s time for something really different. I’ll be taking a look at Rocky and Bullwinkle Classic Adventures from IDW 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. In the 1950s and ’60s, almost any media property could be a comic book, whether it’s Have Gun with Travels, Star Trek, I Spy, And today’s entry Rocky and Bullwinkle. Sometimes the transition to the comic book medium could be very rough. Oftentimes it didn’t feel like the original story – it was missing a certain something. I remember reading some gold key Looney Tunes comics several years back and they just didn’t feel all like Looney Tunes: they weren’t funny, they seemed to miss the whole point of Looney Tunes. If you read the early gold key Star Trek comics and even some of the later ones, it doesn’t feel at all like the show. They used words that don’t quite seem like Star Trek, and it feels like the people who wrote and drew it just kind of had seen some pictures and decided to make up a story. That, thankfully, is not the case with these classic Rocky and Bullwinkle comics that were reprinted by IDW. The book collects issues One through Twelve of the Gold Key Series of Rocky and Bullwinkle stories. They managed to capture the tone of the series perfectly. Each issue contained four stories, just kind of like the TV show often had for segments. Each has two Rocky and Bullwinkle segments, and in the middle you have Sherman and Peabody, and either Dudley Doright or Fractured Fairytales. The only thing really missing from the equation is the use of serialized stories on the TV show. You can’t really have that. These comics actually were published between 1962 and 1976, so you couldn’t really carry on a multi-part story. It does seem like a curious model by Gold Key, and they did a lot of big gaps on the books they sold; but I think they were less intended to be ongoing serial stories and things that you read every month. I suppose they were, I think more something that you had in stores that you could buy and give to fans of a series or which might catch the eye of a fan. As such, the closest we have to a long-form story is one where the first and second Rocky and Bullwinkle segments tied together in a story that ties into the Moon Man. To go over the plots of all these comics would seem to be kind of redundant. Rocky and Bullwinkle was never really about the plots, even when they were traveling along ways on an adventure they were just traveling so they could get from one gag to the next gag. What’s important is the tone and the humor and they do a great job capturing that, and there are some hilarious stories in there. My favorite is probably the one where Bullwinkle accidentally buys a laundromat and this ends up leading Boris into thinking that Bullwinkle is secretly a Pottsylvanian spy. Or the story where Snidely Whiplash is hypnotizing Dudley Do Right to do his bidding and commit robberies in his sleep, and Dudley is going around with a picture of the suspect drawing based on witness accounts and is showing it to people, saying, “If you see this man, report him” – no clue that it’s actually him. So these are the type of stories that they really would use on the TV show. The criticisms or, I guess, questions…one thing that came up when I was reading this is they had a couple of stories where they had Dudley dealing with modern things: he went on TV in one episode and another he went up in a modern aviation program, and it seems like maybe the writers forgot that Dudley Do Right was supposed to be a period piece set around th...

Zatara comes back into Bruce’s life while the cult that birthed Azrael has an idea for sentient religious robots. What could go wrong? Affiliate link included. Transcript below: Batman has a magical meeting with an old flame and he and his team have to face off against a fanatical robot and Spoiler tries to save the city from vigilante superheroes by being a vigilante superhero. We’ll talk about it all in a review of Batman: Detective Comics: Deus Ex Machina, 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 fourth volume of the Detective Comics series in D.C. Rebirth and it collects issues 957 to 962. While Tom King’s Batman has been solely a Batman-focused book, Detective Comics has tried to be a team book. Batman forms a team because he senses something really dangerous is coming to Gotham City and he needs to be ready. And he chooses for his team a variety of characters and most of these had either had their own series or been quite popular with fans. The original team was Batwoman, Red Robin, Tim Drake, Spoiler, Stephanie Brown, the heroine Orphan Cassandra Cain, and the oddest choice for the team, the super villain Clayface who’s reformed now. In the first volume it looked like Tim Drake was killed, but it was revealed at the end of the issue that he’s actually being held somewhere, and then in the second volume Spoiler departed. In the third volume both of them were replaced on the team by Azrael and Batwing. Batwing is Lucas Fox, the son of Lucius Fox, a long-time employee of Bruce Wayne. He’s a wealthy inventor and scientist in his own right with his own company and a kind of Tony Stark-esk ego, but not necessarily the charm. Azrael is Jean Paul Valley and that character has a very interesting backstory. He was introduced in the 1990’s; he was a college student unaware that he was the latest in a line of assassin enforcers for the cult The Order of St. Dumas. However, he runs into Batman and he ends up giving up the path of the assassin and becoming a protege of Batman – which became important during the Nightfall event where Batman’s back was broken by Bain. And it was stated in the comics that Bruce would never walk again, and Jean Paul Valley actually took over as Batman. However, he became increasingly unstable and out of control, to the point that Valley and Bruce have to fight, with Bruce ultimately finding a way to triumph. After Bruce Wayne took over as Batman, he would kind of kick around and appear here and there through the D.C. Universe, seeming to die in the late 1990s story ‘No Man’s Land’, but it all becomes kind of unclear. The D.C. Universe rebooted with the New Fifty-Two and he made an appearance in Batman and Robin Eternal, and then was introduced into Detective Comics. In this current timeline he’s alive and he’s been freed from the order St. Dumas, and prior to joining up with the Bat Team he was out helping up people in a shelter. And I liked in the last volume, it revealed even though he’s left this cult he still holds on to faith – which I think is kind of cool because a lot of comics would be tempted to turn him into an atheist or make some kind of straw man argument. And they didn’t go there – I give James Tynion credit for that. Deus Ex Machina in its A-plot is really an Azrael story. The Order of St. Dumas is trying to reassert itself over his armor and take control of his armor and him, and at the same time they’re also sending in robot versions of Azrael, trying to replace him with a robot who – unlike a human – will not be programmed to doubt and to alter or back away from the mission. This story was kind of hard to get into. I don’t think the order of a St.

The Catalyst Prime Universe begins with an amnesiac astronaut flying about the desert while his wife sets out to beat down anyone who stands between her and her husband. Affiliate link included. Read Catalyst Prime: The Event for free. Transcript : Find out about Noble. Is he a noble success, a noble fire or not noble and all. Find out as we take a look at Noble: Volume One: God Shots, 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. While we talk a lot about Marvel and D.C. but there are other superhero universes out there and one just got started last year. It’s the Catalyst Prime Universe from Lion Forge Comics. I’m going to take a look at the first book they released as a trade paperback. Now I did find an interview that they did just before the launch of cattle last primes first leadoff book, The Event, and there were some.. actually kind of interesting statements from Joseph Illidge who is the co-writer of the first story in the Catalyst Prime Universe and also is the founder of the company. He says, “Catalyst Prime is a superhero universe but it’s pretty rooted in science”. Well, the essential way that people get their powers in the Catalyst Prime Universe involves an event where several astronauts go off to stop a collision with the earth that would be an extinction level event, and they come back with superpowers and there are superpowers as a result of the fallout because apparently that’s how science works. I guess if there’s anything that’s more scientific about this universe having it come from a single event, it’s that it’s probably slightly more likely that an event happens that causes strange changes in a multitude of people rather than separate events occurring where, for example, in the Marvel Universe you have the Fantastic Four getting transformed into superheroes by getting exposed to cosmic rays right before Peter Parker’s bitten by a radioactive spider and Bruce Banner exposes himself to gamma rays creating The Hulk and Hank Pym discovers the ability to shrink himself down. It’s slightly more plausible, I think, claiming the authority of science might be a bit much. Elad says, “A second thing, quite frankly, is that Catalyst Prime is new. I think that we’re singing in attrition of the capacity of fans tolerance for change. I think they’re exhausted. I think they’re tired of the reboots of Superman. They’re tired of the rebirths of the Marvel Universe. It’s exhausting and it’s confusing. The idea that people can come into the Catalyst Prime line of books and start now, get it in on the ground floor of it, I think that’s exciting for people”. I think that…there’s some things that’s problematic about that. For one, it’s kind of like he’s dishing on those other companies. It’s like a negative attack ad from a political campaign, but also assumes that by not being Marvel and D.C. and not having this massive continuity that that’s going to draw fans, when the fact is that there have been several companies to come before that have tried this. He was part of One Milestone, there’s also been Dynamite, Dark Horse, Image and so many others. Certainly there’s a point where people get tired of being over-continuitied and retcons with characters they like, but you also if you’re going to take advantage of that you need to provide them other characters they’re going to like. So, does the first Catalyst Prime book ‘Noble’ do that? So,

Adam Graham discusses how to Amazon Pre-order, Comixology sales, eBay, and more to get the best possible deals on your comic book purchases. Transcript Follows: Find out how to get the best price on your comic book purchases, 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. Back in Episode Nineteen we discussed ways where you could read comic books for free, but for many people they want to own them, they want to actually buy and own their comics, and so we’re going to talk about how to get bargains on comic books and on trades. We’ll start with the obvious in regards to newer trades or trades that are coming out, is to pre-order the books on Amazon if you know for example that you’re going to want to read a book that comes out at the end of the year. Pre-order it now. You won’t get charged by Amazon until it’s time for it actually to be purchased. But Amazon’s got a pre-order guarantee which means that if the price goes down between now and when you actually have the book shipped out to you, you will get charged the lowest price and that can be a really nice benefit. I ordered Volume Five of the Silver Surfer – it was, I think, more than a year before publication and the publication date got changed and they added two more Issues to wrap it up, so I put in my request on a six-Issue trade, it became an eight-Issue trade, but before it became an eight-Issue trade the price dropped from nineteen dollars to ten dollars so I only ended up paying ten dollars for a brand new trade. And I had similar experiences ordering some of the Titan Doctor Who comics where I got significant savings by pre-ordering the new trade in advance. Now that’s for just getting a new trade. What about other physical comics and trades, order trades? I will go ahead and talk about them both from physical perspectives as well as the digital version. Now, as I’ve stated in a previous podcast I really prefer trades for reading comics, but occasionally I get individual Issues. And there are reasons why I will get the individual Issues, uncollected stories is one reason. Sometimes they’re not collected just because the series wasn’t viewed as popular enough, or just the company made a decision. I have, for example, Issues 72 to 100 of Spider Girl because they stopped doing trades for her comics with Issue Seventy-Two and I wanted to read the whole series. So, I have all Twenty-Eight of those physical Issues. Sometimes a company’s license has expired – you’ll see this particularly with a lot of the old Marvel trades where you’ll see, for example, that they skip where they’re collecting all the Issues of Marvel Team Up or Marvel Two and One, the team up books with Spider Man and The Thing, respectively. You’ll see some Issue numbers not included, and the reason is Marvel often teamed its license properties with its in-house superheroes in order to boost sales for both. But when a license expires they can’t reprint the book, so thus there was an Issue of Marvel Two and One which featured The Thing teaming up with Doc Savage, as well as the Spider Man comic featuring the same. And those books were not collected; however, you can still buy used copies of the Issues offline. Another example are Pinky and Brain comics or the comic series for the movie Condorman. These were all obscure things I could not get in a trade and so I went hunting for the actual paper existing comics. I will say on uncollected stories, it’s probably a good idea to be 100% sure that they’re not – or as sure as you can be – that they are not going to be issued as a trade. There have been some cases where I have been like, I’m getting these because I want to read them and they came out as a trade anyway....

After defeating the arch-villain Lady Shiva, Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) faces her biggest challenge-actually having her own adventures in the midst of numerous crossovers. Affiliate link included. Transcript below: Batgirl takes an Issue off to recover from death, then she gets involved in a lot of crossover events, and finally she gets to battle Batgirl? We’ll talk all about it as we review Batgirl Volume Three: Point Blank, 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. OK, probably the first thing I should make clear is we’re not actually talking about the Barbara Gordon Batgirl in today’s program…talking about the Cassandra Cain Batgirl who was active from 2000 – 2006 and then again in 2008 for a mini series, but she was actually the first Batgirl to have her own title. Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl previously only had strips in other magazines such as Detective Comics or Batman Family. Cassandra Cain was the daughter of David Cain as well as anti-heroine Lady Shiva. She was raised to be a killing machine by her father, and is traumatized by the memory of the one man she remembers killing when she was eight years old. The way he taught her and raised her was that she did not actually learn any language – she learned to read body movements which made her very effective as a fighter. However, she did learn to talk in the early Issues of Batgirl which caused her fighting skills to falter. She then made a deal with her mother, Lady Shiva; Lady Shiva promising to restore her powers and abilities as a super martial artist in exchange for fighting her a year later in a fight to the death. And Cassandra agreed to this, and in the battle to the death with Lady Shiva, Lady Shiva killed her but then brought her back to life and then Cassandra ends up defeating her. And I guess you would have to call that a draw overall, and that’s where Point Blank comes in. It collects Issues Twenty-Six through Thirty-Seven, and follows immediately on the end of her battle with her mother. Issue Twenty-Six actually finds her out of action because she is recovering from being temporarily dead and is out like a light, but Barbara Gordon who is Oracle at this point sends Stephanie Brown who is known as Spoiler out to investigate a bit of an aftermath of that fight. And Stephanie goes out and does the investigation shadowed by her imagination’s take on Batgirl. So, Batgirl is in this as a phantasm of Stephanie’s imagination. This Issue is a bit weird, it’s OK, it’s really weird you have a Batgirl-like episode where she appears just like that as well as for a couple brief moments as she is recovering. After that we get into in Issue Twenty-Seven, the book does something and this is probably one of the chief challenges with this book, is that in the Batman Family books there was an event going on – actually a couple of events that came right one after another. One is collected in Bruce Wayne: Murderer? and then also Bruce Wayne:Fugitive, about Bruce Wayne being framed for murder and the Bat Family trying to work this out. And there are three Issues of Batgirl in this book that actually tie into those two events. I personally am not a big fan of including event-tying comics in the book because they tend to take you out of the story and out of the character’s world, and I would just rather you’ve put those in the Events Book. But they didn’t in this case and it turned out not to be so bad, they are at least mixed. Issue Twenty-Seven ties in and it has her, when learning about Bruce Wayne being suspected of murder, she does something nobody else does and digs up the body of the victim and makes a discovery when she examines the corpse. And it shows her kind of unique take as well as some of her g...

The Eleventh Doctor, Alice, and the Sapling go on three random adventures. Affiliate link included. Transcript below: More adventures with the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling in Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor: A Sapling Roots straight ahead. Well it’s time to review another Doctor Who book, and I promise we’re not going to make the next two episodes Doctor Who reviews as well. I didn’t realize I’d recorded three straight reviews until I was thinking about it more carefully. This book collects Issues Three point Five to Three point Eight, or the Eleventh Doctor comic series. Issue Five is ‘Time of the Ood and it involves the Ood from the TV Series. The story on this, and this is somewhat important – probably more important than it should be, is that the Tenth Doctor met the Ood onboard a platform that was possibly in a blackhole. Ood were a servile race though they didn’t do anything to free them because he was dealing with a demonic bane who was taking them over. However, the Doctor did help free the Ood in Planet of the Ood in Season Four, and the Ood Song was released throughout the solar system calling for the Ood to return home. However, in Time of the Ood they find seventeen Ood enslaved at a place called The Devil’s Eye which is a resort and because of its unique position these Ood cannot hear the Ood Song calling them home. A villain of the piece is Jonni Halliburton, formerly a member of the Friend of the Ood who were seeking to free the Ood. However, she took the view that the Oods who were on the planet who were being docile…seemingly happy slaves were making a mockery of everything she and her fellow activists had stood for. It’s an interesting idea that someone can be an activist and can actually become more concerned with their cause and the people they say they’re trying to help. But even with that interesting idea this story has way too much continuity in it, which is unusual for the Eleventh Doctor series. And it’s not particularly quite a bit of continuity for just a one-Issue story. The next story is ‘The Memory Feast’ and it finds the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling landing on a mysterious ship that is known as a Memory Ark, and they stumble through odd landscapes, many of which are drawn from the Doctor’s or Alice’s memories. This story I found to be just a little bit confusing and busy. The art was pretty good but it was really hard to follow what’s going on. It was a one and a half Issue story and it feels like it wasn’t long enough to explain all the concepts. It’s not bad but like I said, a bit busy. The final story is ‘Fooled’ which has the Doctor, Alice and the Sapling heading to a fair – looks a bit like a renaissance fair was what we called it in the States – and the three of them are having a good time just on holiday. However, people around them start losing memories of key events, and the Sapling starts gaining them. What’s going on and why is the Sapling leeching these memories? This is probably the best story in the book. It’s a single-Issue tale but it has its…a good concept, it’s heart, and also has a character moment for the Sapling. ‘Something Borrowed’ is a short that was printed along with The Memory Feast. It has the Doctor going on a spaceship to get something that he had loaned to Drax – a character that he’s only ever met in his Fourth incarnation. So, this is something that he’s been wanting returned for seven lifetimes, which turns out to be somewhat anticlimactic and silly, but not silly enough to really actually be funny. Overall I was somewhat underwhelmed by this. This is not by any means a horrible book. There are some good moments and some good art, but more than anything else it felt like this book was kind of marking time ...

More Batman and the Brave and the Bold team-ups as Batman teams up with the Joker, and later joins forces with the Metal Men to stop radical Native Americans from taking the Constitution and Declaration of Independence hostage. Affiliate link included. Transcript below: Get ready for the ultimate Batman team up. It’s Batman and the Joker! We’ll tell you all about it next as we conclude our look at Legends of the Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Volume One straight ahead. Welcome the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham. In the previous episode, we took a look at those Jim Aparo stories that appeared in Issues Ninety-Eight, 100 to 102, and 104 to 108. Now we turn to those that were between 109 and 122, and again I’m only focusing on those that I think are interesting. ‘Death has the Last Laugh’ is probably one of the more intriguing titles. The front cover advertises it as the strangest team up in history, Batman and the Joker with Batman protecting the Joker from the police. That doesn’t actually happen in the story, but it draws you in. Actually, when the story opens Batman is at the scene of what appears to be the Joker’s latest crime, killing an entire family and leaving each one holding a Joker Card. And this leads to Batman proclaiming, “By God, Joker, you’ve done your last criminal act! I swear, this time, to hunt you down and destroy you like the mad dog you are!” I love how Aparo sets that apart – the frame is separate from the opening spread, and it has Batman on a red background which reinforces the anger. Now when he is leaving the crime scene Gordon reminds Batman that he can’t actually kill the Joker legally. Batman says, “I’m making no promises. You’d better catch the Joker before I do – if you want him alive.” That’ not something we’re used to Batman saying but Batman is truly ticked off and he doesn’t actually end up killing the Joker in the comic. It’s a human moment and it works. However, evidence begins to emerge that maybe the Joker didn’t commit the crime, and it appears that someone else has framed the Joker, and the Joker doesn’t like it one bit and we get the setup for a team up between Batman and the Joker. I won’t say how it plays out but it is a brilliant story with some great twist and it also highlights the importance of Batman’s relationship with Commissioner Gordon. Issue 112 is ‘The Impossible Escape’ and it features Mr. Miracle, and Batman in a case that requires going into an old Egyptian temple. There are some good twists and what’s really interesting about it is they’re pretty much apart and interacting until the final few pages. Issue 113 is ‘The Fifty Story Killer’ where a new regime comes into City Hall and Gordon is forced to retire and Batman is sympathetic as you would always expect Batman to be. But his thought bubbles shows his thoughts, “Poor Gordon is getting too old. They did him a favor retiring him before he becomes decrepit. Hope someone does that for me when my time comes.” And immediately he’s informed that he is being retired as the city’s defender and being replaced by the Metal Men. Batman continues to fight but is given a cease and desist order. I guess that’s a downside of the whole Deputized Agent of the Law thing that Batman had going on in the 1970s. So, Batman is forced into retirement until the Metal Men run into something they can’t handle, which not surprisingly doesn’t take long. I’m not a huge fan of the Metal Men, and this story doesn’t really do enough to justify some of its silly terms. ‘The Last Jet to Gotham’ is a fascinating story because a jet carrying a key wit...

Batman has a terrifying team up with the Phantom Strangler, is paralyzed and has to rely on his team and dumb luck, and then has to team up with Sgt. Rock to battle Satan-or is it Hitler or both? Affiliate link added. Transcript below: Batman teams up with Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Metamorpho, and of course his old buddy, Sergeant Rock. We’ll talk about it as we examine ‘Legends of the Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Volume One’, straight ahead. Recently, DC has released a lot of books that have reprinted Batman comics from the 1970s and early 80s when a lot of them had been reprinted. Certainly, when I really got into reading through the trades they weren’t around a whole lot. One series of ‘Legend of the Dark Knight’ books focused on Jim Aparo, who a lot of people tend to overlook but was actually very influential on artists that followed. And I noticed that my library through Hoopla had access to that book, and that had a lot of the same titles as in the Showcase Presents Brave and the Bold, and even more. Though we’ll talk Mr. Aparo’s work and in today’s episode we’ll talk about all of the comics that were both in Showcase Presents Brave and the Bold Volume Two, and Legends of the Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Volume One, and we’ll finish the rest of the comics in that volume in our next episode. Aparo really began his work on Brave and the Bold as just a guest artist. He drew the Phantom Stranger character, so it was decided that he would draw Brave and the Bold Number Ninety-Eight which featured a guest appearance by the Phantom Stranger. And then in Issue 100 he took over the book for the most part all the way until Issue 196. And Brave and the Bold ran until Issue 200, so throughout the rest of the ’70s into the ’80s he would be the predominant artist on that title. He’s got a great style and it is just a beautiful way to draw Batman as well as the related characters. And he’s definitely at the peak of his ability here; in later years he got kind of burdened by just all of the books he was being asked to draw on, but here are some great examples of his work. Issue Ninety-Eight, ‘Mansion of the Misbegotten’ is probably the scariest story in the book. In this story Batman goes to visit his old friend Roger Birnham Now Roger Birnham hadn’t been in the comics before, and he promises to watch out for Roger’s wife and young son. When Batman finds a funeral guest dead of a ritual murder he goes in to investigate and finds himself caught up in cult ritual. It’s a really chilling little story – pretty intense for the time, it’s not black R-Rated or anything but it’s definitely very creepy and haunting. And it shows the strength of Batman’s character that Batman’s able to do those sort of stories. He’s able to be in pretty much anything, whether it’s something that’s a bit on the supernatural side or if it’s aliens or if it’s something a little bit offbeat, or if it’s just a plain old crime story. Batman is pretty much able to carry any story you’d like to put him in, which is one of the strengths of the character. Now I will say that as usual I’m not going to comment on those stories that don’t really stand out to me, but a lot of these do stand out and are pretty interesting. The next appearance, Issue 100 is called ‘Warrior in a Wheelchair’. In this story Batman is shot and put temporarily in a wheelchair until a surgeon can fly in from out of town, but he has got to stop the narcotics trade which he was trying to do when he got shot, and so he needs some help from his friends. And so he calls in four heroes to help him: Green Arrow and Green Lantern who are kind of a team at this point, along with Black Canary and Robin. Now in many ways I think the idea to put Batma...

Batman team-ups from the 1970s including Batman tries to exorcize himself of the ghost of a Portuguese sailor, trying to foster mutual understanding between adults and some well-intentioned teenagers who are holding Gotham City hostage with a nuclear bomb!And will the Metal Men refuse to help Batman because of robot lib? Affiliate link added. Transcript below: Batman joins forces with the fastest man alive! Killers[?] from another dimension and three random British people. We’ll tell you all about it as we look at Showcase Presents Brave and the Bold: Batman Team Ups Volume Two. Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here’s your host, Adam Graham. I love a good team up book and DC was kind of the leader in getting those started. They had the original monthly team up between Batman and Superman in World’s Finest. In the Silver Age they took Brave and the Bold, what had been a series with a colored past and various formats – more recently a tryout book like Showcase Presents, and the featured team ups between various superheroes. Batman team ups begin to dominate, and then with Issue Seventy-Four it became an exclusive Batman team up book. I am reviewing this using Showcase Presents the Brave and the Bold: Batman Team Ups Volume Two, but there have been some more modern collections from DC called Brave and the Bold: The Bronze Age Omnibus and then just plain Brave and the Bold. Bronze Age, the one that’s the Omnibus takes Issue Seventy-Four and goes all the way up to Issue 121, while the Brave and the Bold goes from Seventy-Four to Ninety-One. Now while these stories are set in where many define the Bronze Age to be – they were written in the 1970s and the art reflects a lot of that ’70s artistic style, particularly in this collection. You have art by Ross Andru and then Nick Cardy, they fully invested into the 1970s style. However, a lot of the stories have a Silver Age feel to them. At this point the comics were changing – there was more of a focus on being a little more grown up, not talking down to kids; and Marvel had captured the imagination of a lot of older kids by – while still being fairly family friendly by modern standards – also being a bit more grown up. DC is trying to do this, and there’s a sense of trying to be a bit more mature, but there’s still this underlying layer of goofiness that comes off so often. And it’s not like the intentional goofiness of the ’60s stories, so there can be some of these that are just a bit awkward. That said, we’re going to take a look at the first few issues. I won’t cover every single team up. Someone not particularly impressive either as good or bad. Most of these – with one exception…all of these actually are written by Bob Haney – the art is by various people: Nick Cardy is on most of the ones that we cover here. Issue Eighty-Eight was a notable, ‘Count Ten and Die’ because it had Wildcat, i.e. Ted Grant, a former boxer meeting up with Batman, and Batman bringing him out of retirement both as a boxer/boxing coach and eventually as Wildcat. And it’s a fun adventure that involves Batman and Wildcat having to contend with the Soviet propaganda machine. I enjoyed that one pretty well. I Issue Ninety is another one of those stories which really is not so much a Bronze Age story as it is a Silver Age story with a bronze coat of paint. Adam Strange is the guest character and I love Adam Strange. He is this character who was on earth and hit by a Zeta beam that took him across the galaxy, and he goes to this planet Rann where he is a hero who manages to save the day. And he’s continually being shot back and forth between Rann and Earth by the Zeta beam. Anyway,

We take a look at Gambit’s first appearance and his first mini-series preceded by a completely pointless comic with a flying alien. Affiliate link included. Transcript follows: Find out about Gambit’s first comic book appearances as we take a look at Gambit Classic: Volume One straight ahead. Gambit Classic: Volume One was the book that I’d hoped to get for my inter-library loan request last year, and I talked about the book I got instead on our second and third episodes. This book collects Gambit’s earliest appearance on Uncanny X-Men, and then his first mini-series. He appeared in Issue 266 of The Uncanny X-Men. So, of course this book collects Issues 265 to 267. Issue 265 is one I really could have done without reading. After the initial appearances in 266 and 267, Marvel put a page of exposition to explain his entire tenure with the X-Men over two year prior to the mini-series. It seems like the relevant parts of Issue 265 could have just as easily been summarized. The relevant part is that at this time Storm has amnesia and is regressed to a child physically, and so doesn’t know how to use her mutant powers. She’s operating as a thief, stealing from other thieves and returning the items to their rightful owners for rewards, I guess. But beyond that there is so much more going on in the book. The book opens with four pages in space with alien space warriors, and there are no alien space warriors in Issues 266 or 267, so that’s kind of weird thread anyway. This really should have started with 266, but that said, once it gets started it’s pretty good. Storm has stumbled into the Shadow King and his minions, and she tries to get away and ends up being rescued by Gambit who had his heart set on stealing some art but instead decided to save Storm instead. Saying, “paintings will keep, us thieves we have to stick together”. And they have to escape the Shadow King together, and the minions who are under his control. There is some pretty good action and they end up becoming sort of a Robin Hood pair. They steal but only from those who have stolen in the first place, and it’s shown through an entire comic strip montage. However, their good times together are spoiled when the Orphan Maker, who I guess from reading this had something to do with Storm losing her memory. About the story in these two issues, Gambit is a really fun character. He is a roguish character but who follows a code of honor and genuinely cares about other people, particularly Storm – this girl who he doesn’t know what her powers is but he takes on the role of her friend and protector. And he is very clear that it will be no more than that because you do have this picture of Gambit as this sort of ‘gentleman thief’. There are lots of pieces of art that show his coolness, his skill, the strength of his powers as well as his great coordination. 266 and 267 are a fun introduction to Gambit. The Gambit mini-series really brings him back to New Orleans and to his roots where his wife, or is it ex-wife or is it comatose wife, is dying and can’t be waked, and at the same time the Tithes Collector is at work. Remy’s Guild, Remy LeBeau which is his true identity, is part of the Thieves Guild in New Orleans and they are opposed by the Assassins Guild who are picking off members of his Guild and of his family. And so Remy and Rogue they go down to New Orleans. It’s a pretty well-packed four issue mini-series. Most mini-series today are six issues but they tend to meander on a bit. This one is four issues and it is full of conflict and intrigue, great character relationships and interactions. It gives you a good insight into who he is as well as into the culture of this whole Guild, and he has to deal with things. One thing that does occur to me as I read it is this entire Guild system is incred...

Find out who breaks up the Green Lantern Corps/Sinestro Corps alliance as we look at Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps, Volume 4: Fractures Affiliate link included. Transcript below: Breaking up isn’t hard to do, not when you’re two enemy factions trying to forge a fragile peace, and Kyle Rayner ticks off the one person who can send it all into a tailspin. We’ll tell you all about it next as we look at Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps, Volume Four: Fractures. 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. ‘Fractures’ is the fourth volume of the Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps trade for the current series. It collects issues Twenty-Two through Twenty-Nine, and contains two separate four-part stories. First up is ‘Fractures’, and to explain this story a little bit of continuity in the series. The Green Lantern Corps was thought to have disappeared from the galaxy, and Sinestro, a longtime enemy of the Corps stepped up to fill the gap with his Sinestro Corps. Unlike the Green Lanterns, the Sinestro Corps are Yellow Lanterns, harnessing fear in order to obtain their power. Joining Sinestro was his daughter Soranik, former Green Lantern. However, when Hal Jordan exposed that her father was really behind the disappearance of the Lanterns, and that he was masterminding yet another really evil plan in his long history of really evil plans, Soranik, shocked that her father would have a really evil plan turned on him and joined forces with Hal in order to thwart Sinestro. Many members of the Sinestro Corps survived and she proposed banding them into a force for good and joining forces with the Green Lanterns. The Lanterns, while not eliminated from the galaxy, had their numbers dwindle and so, John Stewart the leader of the Lanterns was open to this alliance and it appears to be making some progress. As in the last volume the two toughest, meanest members of each Corps – Guy Gardener of the Green Lanterns and Arkillo of the Sinestro Corps forged a friendship and partnership, and many were starting to work together. That leads to Sarko coming to try and break up the harmony of the two Corps. Sarko was killed at the end of Volume Three and shortly after that Kyle Rayner discovered that Sarko was his son with Soranik who he’s had a romantic interest in. And that is our story upon until Volume Four, even though that this was probably going to happen with a division between the two Corps. After all, the Yellow Lanterns kept the name Sinestro Corps. It would be like a branch of the Hitler Youth wanting to join with an international youth club after World War II and saying, “We realized Hitler was totally wrong but we want to join with you and keep together as a group”. Well, OK, you can do that, great. “Everyone remained being called the Hitler Youth.” Wait, what? If you’re really making a break with the past and you don’t agree with the ways of Sinestro, why the heck would you still continue to call yourself the Sinestro Corps? But I digress… Strains on the alliance come in two ways: first, both corps joined forces to stop the robbery of a great intergalactic bank. It’s an epic battle and it gives us a chance to see them really work together as a team before the fracture. However, the leader of the raiders reveals that a member of the Green Lantern Corps committed murder, and he is going to reveal it unless John Stewart lets the raider and his crew go. The murder itself turns out to be of little consequence, and is more a pretext for the fracture rather than the reason for it. The person who the Green Lantern murdered was a Sinestro Corps member who refused to join with the new alliance, and he was also a murderer of children from that Green Lanterns’ home world,

A look at Jan Van Meter’s 21st Century updated take on Black Lightning’s origin story. Affiliate link included.