Episode 94 - The Amalgam Age of Comics with Mitch Punpayuk (Part 2)
If there’s one thing that the “Big 2” have in common, it’s that they both believe that one popular event deserves another! Mitch is back to talk with us about the second round of Amalgam Comics! Do these surpass their predecessors or was the well running dry already? Tune in to find out!
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Meeting summary:
● The meeting focused on the in-depth discussion of various Amalgam Comics, highlighting key points such as the creativity and technical quality of each issue, notable characters and storylines, and the potential for future Amalgam possibilities. Participants also shared their top three Amalgam comics, wrapping up with contact information for participants and promoting related podcasts on the network.
Notes:
● 🎬 Amalgam Comics Discussion (00:00 - 13:08)
● Discussed the second run of Amalgam Comics
● Compared creativity and technical quality of first and second runs
● Noted more world-building and history in second run
● Mentioned Iron Lantern going backwards in time
● Discussed Generation Hex taking place during wild west
● 📚 JLX Unleashed (13:08 - 22:55)
● Discussed JLX Unleashed as a sequel to previous JLX book
● Noted inclusion of Iceman character
● Talked about Dark Firebird and Chaos characters
● Discussed the Judgment League name and its implications
● 🦇 Generation Hex and Bat Thing (22:55 - 33:43)
● Analyzed Generation Hex storyline and characters
● Discussed Bat Thing comic and its combination of Man-Bat, Man-Thing, and Swamp Thing
● Noted the detective story element in Bat Thing
● Mentioned Larry Hama as the writer for Bat Thing
● 🦸 Dark Claw Adventures (33:43 - 42:45)
● Discussed Dark Claw Adventures, influenced by animated series
● Talked about Ras al Ghul and Apocalypse merger
● Mentioned Lady Deathstrike and Talia al Ghul combination
● Noted the emotional arc and good storyline in the issue
● 🕷️ Spider-Boy Team Up (42:45 - 53:30)
● Analyzed Spider-Boy Team Up comic in detail
● Discussed Legion of Galactic Guardians and its iterations
● Mentioned the combination of Guardians of the Galaxy and Legion of Superheroes
● Noted the time travel elements in the story
● 🦆 Lobo the Duck (53:30 - 01:02:12)
● Discussed the combination of Howard the Duck and Lobo
● Talked about the satirical nature of both characters
● Mentioned the possible combination of Deadpool and Lobo in modern context
● Noted the misogynistic elements in the comic
● 🏆 Iron Lantern and Magnetic Men (01:02:12 - 01:12:24)
● Analyzed Iron Lantern comic and its combination of Iron Man and Green Lantern
● Discussed the Magnetic Men featuring Magneto comic
● Talked about the use of fictional metals in the storyline
● Noted the redesigns of Metal Men characters
● 🚀 Spider-Boy Team Up and Challengers of the Fantastic (01:12:24 - 01:21:54)
● Praised Spider-Boy Team Up and Challengers of the Fantastic as standout issues
● Discussed the combination of Fantastic Four and Challengers of the Unknown
● Mentioned the Galactiac character (Galactus + Brainiac)
● Noted the teaser ending with Doctor Doomsday
● ⚡ Thorion of the New Asgods (01:21:54 - 01:31:34)
● Discussed Thorion of the New Asgods comic
● Talked about John Romita Jr.'s art style
● Mentioned the combination of Thor and New Gods mythology
● Noted the lack of substantial story in the comic
● 🔄 Future Amalgam Possibilities (01:31:34 - 01:40:42)
● Discussed potential for future Amalgam comics
● Talked about combining modern characters like Miles Morales and Jon Kent
● Mentioned possibility of Krakoa era X-Men amalgams
● Discussed potential Batman and Iron Man combination
● 🏅 Top Three Amalgam Comics (01:40:42 - 01:48:19)
● Participants shared their top three Amalgam comics
● Spider-Boy and Spider-Boy Team Up were common favorites
● Dark Claw and Challengers of the Fantastic also mentioned
● Discussed reasons for preferences
● 🎙️ Wrap-up and Podcast Information (01:48:20 - 01:57:27)
● Shared contact information for participants
● Mentioned Men of Steel podcast and its social media handles
● Discussed United States of Women podcast on the network
● Provided information about Screen Snark podcast
Transcription
00:00
Case
He's a very classic type of supervillain. Like, scientist exposed a thing, turned into a monster. It's just like the lizard.
00:06
Mitch
Yeah. Which would have been the better amalgam.
00:10
Case
Maybe, but I actually ended up really liking this issue when I reread it. I did not really care for it back in the day because it's just a detective thing with a weird monster type floating around. But rereading it, I'm like, oh, yeah. This is actually kind of a cool story of a completely misunderstood intelligence that is no longer human in any way that we can conceive of, but, like, still understands things, and, like, that's some cool stuff going on there. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm case Aiken, and as always, I'm joined by my co host, J. Mike Folson.
01:06
Jmike
Welcome back, everybody. Glad to have you.
01:08
Case
Glad to have everyone back, because this is part two of our conversation of the amalgam comics line. And to continue that conversation, we're joined yet again by Mitch Pompeiic. Hi. Hey, Mitch. Welcome back.
01:21
Mitch
Thank you. I'm so glad to talk about the second part of the Amalgam comics, is I just honestly wanted to ask, do you like the second run more or the first run more?
01:33
Case
I was thinking about that when we realized that were doing this in two parts, and I think that I like the creativity of the first run more. Like, I was more hyped about it, but I think the second run is, generally speaking, more technically superior. Like, the actual writing is better. The references are a little bit more coherent.
01:55
Jmike
How dare you?
01:58
Case
But, you know. Cause. Cause, you know, it's the speed demon problem. Like, what I was saying last time, where speed demon on paper is the coolest fucking idea, and the image is goddamn awesome in this, like, nineties kind of way of just being like, fire running demon. Okay, cool. But I hated that issue. And, like, I. There's a lot of those, like, kind of misses, I think, in the. In the first wave, whereas in the second wave, there's a lot more deep cut lore. I feel like it's a lot more like Kurt busick and Mark Wade and just being like, we're just giant nerds for everything comics and really reveling in that as opposed to, look how gnarly this would be.
02:40
Case
And as a result, I think you end up with, like I said, slightly stronger finished products, but none of them are ones that I was quite as like, fuck, yeah. This is gonna be great. As a twelve year old.
02:53
Mitch
Yeah. I also enjoyed the fact, in the second one, I feel like there was more world building in the history of the amalgam comics. Kind of like, because, like, you have Iron Lantern, which definitely goes backwards in time. Right? As opposed to in the current timeline. Like, the lot of the stuff in the first one was. Am I thinking that wrong?
03:13
Case
How do you mean by that? Just an added.
03:14
Mitch
So, just, like, generation hex takes place during the wild west kind of thing, and iron Lantern seems more like the early 19th or 20th century.
03:26
Case
Iron Lantern feels that way, although they do allude to some of the changes in Uatu, the Guardian, and how he appeared in the. In the previous one when he showed up in. Was that in speed demon or was that Doctor Strange fate?
03:39
Jmike
The strange fate, was it?
03:41
Case
No, speed demon. He's the villain right at the start, and he murders a version of Hal Jordan. Yeah. Which anyone who's trying to think that there's, like, hard continuity and firm rules don't. You won't be able to look at these books.
03:58
Jmike
There are no rules. No, there are no, we make the rules here.
04:02
Case
But I will say that Iron Lantern definitely feels like classic sixties Iron man and classic sixties Green Lantern, regardless of everything. I mean, for one thing, Hal Jordan wasn't alive at this point in the regular comics. This was the Kyle Raynor era. And it's around the time, like, this is the thing were talking about. And I'd have to look at the exact years, how oftentimes this felt like the creative team's warming up for things. And I'm not sure if this is right before heroes return or if it was already underway at this point, because here is where we get Kurt Busiek working on Iron man, effectively like, Iron Lantern here.
04:37
Case
And then either at the same time or shortly thereafter, he did his run on Iron man at the same time that he was doing his run on Avengers, and at the same time, he was finishing up his run on Thunderbolts.
04:49
Mitch
Oh, okay. So seeing as how this is a year later, was it, like, the companies decided they just wanted to return to see these projects again? Or was there an actual, like, audience roar for them to go back to this world?
05:03
Case
I remember reading in wizard at the time that there were, there was a lot of, like, fans who reached out to say, like, hey, can you do this one next time? Iron Lantern is the big one for that, like a yemenite. A lot of fans were like, hey, this seems like a really obvious matchup. Could you guys do that next time you do amalgam? So I think there was good fan feedback and then also just, it sold well. A lot of people really liked it. It was a really in demand event because if you're a fan of Marvel or DC, you were like, yeah, I want to check this out.
05:31
Case
It's the same reason you do a crossover in the first place where it's like, yeah, if you're a fan of Batman or Superman, you'll buy world's finest because you want to see them together. And in this case, they're actually, it's all the same character. And there's that added mystery of how are they going to combine all these things. So everyone wanted to pick it up and just see. And the barrier to entry is relatively low because each one was just one issue to pick up. And it's totally standalone. So even if you didn't buy every single book because you weren't that hardcore of a nerd, you probably had at least a few that you're interested in.
06:02
Mitch
And do we know if they had already and planned to do something a year later or if it was just because the fans?
06:10
Case
I am not sure. I don't think there was immediately a decision like, oh, we're definitely going to do a second round. But I think they probably had ideas of if it's successful, we could do it because like I said, there was a lot of fan feedback to push ones along. Probably it didn't take very long. As soon as the initial numbers came in the first week of sales, they.
06:31
Mitch
Were like, oh, that did real good.
06:33
Case
Cause again, it's a fifth week event. So all that stuff dropped at the same time. So they would get the numbers pretty fast or in fact, they would get the solicitations even faster. Cause all the stores would have bought this up because this is the early era of like diamond totally taking over distribution.
06:50
Mitch
Yeah, I mean, obviously they brought back was it super soldier and Darkclaw for more adventures of those two characters, but then introduced things like bat thing and generation Hex.
07:00
Case
Yeah.
07:01
Mitch
So you got to wonder who came up with what idea or why they decided to create to cross over new characters. Are these the characters that you two would have wanted to see merged together?
07:12
Case
In a lot of cases? I mean, there are certainly characters that I've thought about that would be really cool amalgams outside of this. I always thought that Green Arrow and Iron man would be a really cool combination. Really? Yeah. Hear me out. The character is called trick shot. The whole deal is. So whatever the accident that strands Iron man has, the shrapnel strands him on an island where he has some access to his gear, and so he rigs the arc reactor or whatever type of magnet holding his heart together, but it's a power source that he can plug parts of weapons into to defend himself from whatever sort of, you know, if it's.
07:52
Case
If it's the Viet Cong, if it's the ten rings, whatever the hell you're going to go with in terms of the terrorist side of it, I think it all works together really well where he's on his own and he's just got just the thing powering his heart, but also it's his only self defense method. And then that makes him really good at adaptable, modular weaponry. And then he comes back and he's got the chestplate on, and he can then hook up different weapons to it.
08:14
Mitch
Wow.
08:15
Case
I like it. Oliver Queen and Tony Stark actually have similar kind of vibes. Being like, billionaires who learned their lesson by having, being cut off and forced to get their shit together on their own. I always thought that would be a really good combo, but Green Arrow is going to be combined with Hawkeye because, of course there are arrow people. I always thought also that Thor and Flash would be a really good combination.
08:42
Mitch
Because of the lightning calling. The lightning. Yeah.
08:44
Case
And especially a sentient kind of lightning type entity, like empowering a human avatar. So really more of like a thunderstrike and flash kind of combo.
08:53
Mitch
See, I always thought, like a Thor in the Green Lantern Corps kind of thing would be kind of interesting because there's so many, like, people that. That I guess go off of the power of Thor, like, with Beta Ray Bill and Thunder Strike and.
09:06
Case
Yeah, there was a Thor corps in the nineties.
09:08
Mitch
Was there?
09:09
Case
Which was. Yeah, it was Beta Ray Bill. Eric Masterson while he was Thor initially, and then later, I think they came together again when he was Thunder Strike and then Dargo Kator, the once in future Thor, from a future timeline where they needed to find Thor to save everything. And then, in fact, he turned out to be worthy to lift the hammer himself and he could save the world from, I think it was robots or alien future invasion of something.
09:34
Mitch
Alien robots. Got it.
09:36
Case
Yeah. So, yeah, Thorkor could work. Actually, what would be fun with Green Lantern would be the Captain Britain corps and then have them all be the Green Knights.
09:45
Mitch
Oh, there you go.
09:47
Case
And then you can get, like, arthurian legend stuff, like, right in there. I always thought that Captain America and Wonder Woman would be a better fit. Like, I get why Superman makes sense, but you could do, like, the Amazons sided with the Americans during World War Two, and they brought over the technology. And then, so then Steve Trevor gets exposed to blah, blah, blah. And the purple ray didn't purple ray, exactly. But then even Wonder Woman shield, which is a Hephaestus forged shield that happens to look very similar to the american iconography, could be like, oh, yeah, it's a shield forged from Hephaestus that you get to use to protect yourself, Steve Trevor. And then you could have an invisible motorcycle or something.
10:33
Mitch
I dig that. I dig that a lot.
10:36
Jmike
Invisible motorcycles.
10:38
Case
But again, looking at the nineties, you have to look at what books were being published at the time, and then what books do the writers actually want to talk about? Because, again, like, doom Patrol wasn't, like, the biggest run that had happened recently at this point, was the Grant Morrison run, which is real weird and real off the beaten path from the eccentric superheroes kind of side of things. I mean, it's that ramped up to eleven, you know, it doesn't quite feel like normal superheroes dealing with shit. It feels like, man, look how weird everything is and how far we can push the craziness for doom patrol.
11:12
Mitch
Yeah.
11:15
Case
So much so that, like, you know, that iteration of Doom patrol doesn't feel like what you would combine with, like, X Men. But clearly, like, they had, like, a lot of love for those old school doom patrol and for old school teen titan stuff and brought that stuff over. But at the same time, we get stuff, like, in this generation hex, where it's like, yeah, Generation X was a currently running book that people could at least allude to and whatnot. No one would do Jono Chamber as a character for an amalgam if it was just today being like, all right, well, what popular X Men characters are you going to combine? Most people, when you say chamber, they're like, who?
11:53
Mitch
Yeah, it's a good thing that the name just worked out that way.
11:57
Case
Yeah, that was kind of perfect. And, of course, one of the reasons you do the amalgam stuff from a publishing standpoint, aside from just it being popular, is you can pull audiences from the other fandom over this way. Like, you can introduce them to cool combinations here. Like, you know, I wasn't that familiar with Jonah Hex before this came out. Likewise, I wasn't super familiar with, like, man thing or like, I knew man bat, and I knew vaguely that Marvel had a version of Swamp thing, but, like, you know, what wasn't super obvious.
12:34
Mitch
Yeah, I would say that I wasn't familiar with Jonah Hex or Generation X at the time, I don't think a.
12:43
Jmike
Lot of people know about Jonah Hex. He's a very niche character.
12:48
Mitch
Very.
12:49
Case
Yeah, well, especially at this rate or at this point in the nineties, because I think he had a big run in the seventies and eighties when they started to relax the comics code. And you could have, like, a more violent kind of western character. And western books had, you know, risen and fallen and risen again. And I think they were on the downswing because westerns in general have been kind of on the downswing since like, the eighties. Every now and then you'll see like a small revival. But, like, it's just not this. It's not the fandom that it was in, like, the fifties and sixties where like, there were just like, studios were just cranking out westerns and everyone was, like, into it.
13:25
Mitch
Do you think we'll go to a complete side note? Do you think they'll ever try a Jonah Hex movie again?
13:31
Case
Another one at this point? No, probably not. They might try an HBO Max series. I could see them trying something like that doing Tombstone, but also DC.
13:42
Jmike
How did he beat me to that? I was going to say that.
13:45
Mitch
Do you think they use the same actor they used in Legends of Tomorrow for Jonah Hex? I'm going to say no.
13:51
Case
It depends on when they do it. They, I feel like they would have to get that shit together soon if they wanted to tie in actors like that. If. Because if we're talking like five years out or. Or something. I don't know if that would.
14:04
Mitch
Yeah, I just don't. I don't know if we're back to the whole wanting westerns again. Like, I think the last big western I saw was the remake of the magnificent seven.
14:13
Case
Yeah. And, like, I don't know how much those have really pushed the needle.
14:16
Mitch
Yeah.
14:17
Case
You know, like, westerns are, like, westerns are very complicated to talk about. If you are going to acknowledge the fact that, hey, it's a little fucked up to just paint people who are living in America first as the villains in so many stories, or you have to address the civil war or all of it's kind of fucked up propaganda. And as we get woke, it's difficult to look at and not be like, that's uncomfortable.
14:48
Mitch
All right, I'm done derailing everything.
14:52
Case
These are all fun books, and we'll have stuff to say about it. I guess we'll say more when we get back to it. But we've got bat thing up first on our list here. And like I was saying, when they first announced it, I was like, wait, it's man bat and whom. Like, what's going on here?
15:09
Mitch
Yeah, a book that focuses on man bat seems very odd. Like, I. I always see that as, like, a d list Batman, like, I guess, villain, quote unquote villain.
15:20
Case
Yeah. I mean, like, this is in the wake of, like, at this point, the nineties Batman animated series had come out, and on leather Wings is a great episode.
15:28
Mitch
It is. You're right.
15:30
Case
He's recognizable. He's very. He's a very classic type of, like, super. Super villain. Like, scientist exposed a thing, turned into a monster. It's just like the lizard.
15:38
Mitch
Yeah. Which would have been the better amalgam.
15:42
Case
Maybe, but I actually ended up really liking this issue when I reread it. I did not really care for it back in the day because it's just a detective thing with a weird monster type floating around. But rereading it, I'm like, oh, yeah. This is actually kind of a cool story of a completely misunderstood intelligence that is no longer human in any way that we can conceive of but still understands things, and that's some cool stuff going on there.
16:07
Mitch
So is this another one where they did three? Is it. Is it also swamp thing, man thing, and man bat?
16:13
Case
There may have been some elements, but, like, man thing and swamp thing are so similar that I don't know if I'd be able to identify very clearly all the spots unless we.
16:22
Mitch
Man thing has that. That, like, the. Like, whenever someone has an emotion, it. It. He attacks that or something like that, right?
16:31
Case
Yeah. Anything that fears the man thing burns at his touch.
16:34
Mitch
Okay. I mean, if you just make sure you don't fear it, you're okay.
16:39
Jmike
Everything that fears and burns because he.
16:41
Mitch
Touches seems like a catch.
16:42
Case
Yeah. And there's, like, some chemical reaction stuff going on there. It's, I'm, like, just scanning through to see if there's any, like, references to, like, Alec Holland. But, like, I mean, like, the. The character's Kirk. It's, like, clearly supposed to be man or man bat right there in a lot of ways. Just with, like, it is really mostly man bat with, like, just a little bit of the weirdness of man thing kind of, like, peppered in there, you know, the weird, like, swampy tendrils and vegetative life and all that. I mean, it's cool because, like, man thing has had comics over the years, and, like, usually they're horror books, which plays pretty well with. With all of this. And, like, he's usually a misunderstood monster who can't communicate, but has some semblance of intelligence, or at least purpose and drive.
17:25
Case
I think it, like I said, I ultimately really liked this issue. When I reread it, I was like, oh, yeah. I didn't give it a fair shake when I was a kid because it was a little too weird. I get that a lot of marvel, but the DC stuff I first got into was, like, superboy and impulse and stuff, you know, this is just very different from that sound.
17:45
Jmike
Like reverse Midas touch.
17:48
Case
Yeah, yeah. I just thought it was, like, kind of cool. There's a detective who's like, that fucking bat thing. Like, here's all the shit. And then it's actually like someone's trying to kill him and the bat thing's actually trying to save him. I don't know. Like I said, I ended up just rather liking it. I don't know if. Did you guys have any other thoughts about it?
18:07
Mitch
I mean, I do end up liking the ending, if I remember correctly, with the whole, like, the detective having to come to realization that he was going after the wrong person, like, for the wrong reason. And then this is written by Larry Hama, which is famously Gi Joe, right?
18:24
Case
Yeah, Hama. Like, has. I mean, he's been working in comics for years. Like, recently, he's been doing, like, Wolverine stuff, which I know he. I know he did a big run back in the day for Wolverine as well.
18:32
Mitch
Was he more of a. Yeah, so.
18:34
Case
He did a lot of GI Joe. You're right.
18:35
Mitch
Yeah.
18:37
Case
He also. I was about to say he also wrote bad thing. Oh, yeah, he wrote a bad thing. Of course. Just checking to see if he ever wrote man thing, which makes.
18:47
Mitch
Yeah, it makes me wonder if he was more of a Marvel person.
18:50
Case
Looks like it. Yeah. Yeah. I see some random Batman books in there, but not huge runs. So, yeah, I think he's more a.
19:00
Mitch
Marvel guy, but no man thing.
19:02
Case
No man thing.
19:03
Mitch
Once again, I really would just like to have talked to the editor at the time and be like, well, why Larry Hammer for bad thing? Did he have a take on this that you just had a story you wanted to sell, or was it more of like, hey, can you write a bat thing story?
19:18
Case
That's a good question. I mean, I know he does, like, when he does, like, wolverine stuff, like, he's a big fan of, like, patch and, like, Wolverine, like, running around Madripoor. So maybe, like, gritty detective Gnar kind of stories are just a vibe.
19:34
Mitch
And see, that reminds me of, like, GI Joe stuff like that. Like, Patch would be, like, a GI Joe character to me.
19:41
Case
Yeah, actually. Yeah, he would fit very well in the GI Joe world. Yeah, Wolverine would fit very well in GI Joe. Actually, now that I think about it.
19:48
Jmike
Wolverine.
19:51
Case
It'S our canadian division. God, that's what we're missing. Like, they always, like, link up GI Joe with transformers, but really, they should have linked up GI Joe with Alpha flight.
20:01
Mitch
There you go. That would have been an interesting one.
20:04
Case
But speaking of Wolverine, why don't we move on to the next book on this list, then, which is dark claw adventures.
20:09
Mitch
Now, this is heavily influenced by the animated series because it's drawn in that same style.
20:16
Case
Yeah. Which is a great idea when you think about it. I think at the time, characters having cartoon adaptations felt like table stakes to me, because this is the era where there was Spider man and X Men cartoons, but there was also ultra force, pardon me, and other attempts at capturing the lightning in the bottle. That was the Batman, the animated series kind of love. But looking back, I'm like, oh, yeah. Well, X Men is also a super definitive cartoon of the time. So it makes sense that in addition to doing Batman and Wolverine together, why not do a comic book spin off book in that style? And, like, Batman is the one that had the really distinct kind of art style to it, whereas X Men kind of didn't. It was decent quality, but I wouldn't say it was particularly stylized.
21:01
Case
It just kind of looked like it was trying to be a Jim Lee type look that could be reproduced en masse. And the comics that were the spin off had the same kind of, like, it just looked like another X Men book. So it makes sense that they would go with the diniverse style here, which looks great.
21:18
Mitch
Yeah. But I have to say is, like, I don't know if I agree with the Ras al Ghul apocalypse merging.
21:26
Case
I mean, from the standpoint of, like, their end goals, it makes perfect sense, because Ras al Ghul, especially in the show, they kept trying to emphasize that he wanted to do some kind of societal collapse that would kill off a large percentage and only the strong would survive, which is exactly apocalypse right there. Yeah, but it is very silly that when they show him in flashback, he's got the little r on his belt and stuff.
21:49
Mitch
I mean, I guess I couldn't really figure someone else that would be the more appropriate marvel, like, counterpoint, maybe Sebastian Shaw, maybe.
21:58
Case
And this is where we get, like, kind of colored by, like, how the characters have evolved over time.
22:02
Mitch
I guess that's true. It's not. That's not where they were at in the nineties.
22:05
Case
Right. Like, Apocalypse is fairly early at this point. This is right around the time that we got Age of Apocalypse. They had started to develop what his actual goals are, but he hadn't had any of his big almost succeeded arcs yet. The most famous thing he had was creating Archangel at this point, aside from Age of Apocalypse.
22:26
Mitch
Okay, you didn't run up against the wall in this one, right?
22:30
Case
Yeah. Especially because he's in flashback and then having Lady Deathstrike be matched up with Talia al Ghul I thought was like, all right, well, yeah, like, there's like some weird sexual chemistry stuff with Wolverine and deathstrike. That's cool. And then, you know, Talia, obviously, and this is well before we get, like, you know, Damien Wayne, right?
22:51
Mitch
Oh, yeah, right. Well, Talia wasn't a character that was created for the animated series, was she?
22:55
Case
No, no, she was part of the original, like, head of the demon story arcs.
22:59
Mitch
Okay.
22:59
Case
From the seventies.
23:00
Mitch
All right.
23:00
Jmike
It's way before my time. I wouldn't know.
23:07
Case
Yeah.
23:08
Mitch
I don't think I've ever read the original head of the demon story arcs.
23:11
Case
I did back in high school, and it's been a long time. It was one of the early Batman trades that they put out. So I was like, cool. Yeah.
23:18
Mitch
And do you know these writers that were on this one? Writers and artists? Ty Templeton and Rick Burchette? No, they didn't bring any bells for me either.
23:30
Case
Yeah, there's some good panels, like the two page spread of dark claw fighting through the danger room set up there. That's a great one and a much better two faced goblin. Omega beast, by the way, is a great one. Kgbeast combined with omega red.
23:48
Mitch
Yep.
23:49
Case
Yeah, this was a pretty good issue. I don't know. I don't have a ton to say. This is at least a nice standalone. Wolverine is, like, wounded. And there's a good joke at the end with Sparrow still tied up and Wolverine's heart healing right there and an actual story for Talia. At some point we're gonna have to talk about the Superman adventures book that they put out back in the nineties, the one that was actually written by Mark Millar. But it was all optimistic and hopeful.
24:14
Mitch
Was that a tie into the animated series?
24:17
Case
Yeah.
24:17
Mitch
Oh, okay.
24:18
Case
Yeah. And it's weird to think that these tie in books that they were putting out for the animated series were, like, really high, like, high caliber stuff and, like, this kind of continues that trend here, even though it's like it's part of the amalgam event and so forth. But it still feels like, oh, yeah. We actually cared about the books that were, like, very directly people coming from the show were going to pick up first to try to bring them into, like, being larger comic readers. They weren't wasting their time. I read some of the Superman adventures back in the day, but the one I really loved is before JLU came out, they had like a forget what it was called, but it was like DC adventures or something like that.
24:54
Case
And it would do different stories about all kinds of characters from across DC, but in the Bruce Timm style and just really fun introduction book for all the weird lore of DC. If you were a fan of the diniverse and being like, here's that style that you're used to. Let me explain ultra the multi alien to you. Anyway, so they fight. There's an emotional arc. It's a good issue. I think it's rather nice. It's not as nineties Edgelord as the first dark claw issue, and I think that's really good here.
25:28
Mitch
And this one ends with Lady Talia thinking she killed dark claw, or did she know that she doesn't actually kill him?
25:35
Jmike
Well, they're still talking at the end. So she stabbed him in the heart and he's like, oh, not dead yet. My healing factor makes it kind of taught to kill me. And she's like, my beloved.
25:46
Case
Yeah, she gives up. She, like, gets, like, she's. She's effectively won the fight because all she has to do is, like, finish him off, but she can't, and she, like, gives up.
25:55
Mitch
Okay.
25:56
Case
And Sparrow is tied up. Spoiler. Yeah, if Spoiler was around at this point, which I don't think she was yet, like that, you could have done some interesting combos there.
26:08
Mitch
Oh, wow. So when Tim Drake and Jubilee are interested in each other, spoiler isn't around yet.
26:14
Case
She might be in Tim's book, but she hadn't been Robin yet at that point.
26:19
Mitch
Okay.
26:19
Case
I don't know if she'd actually ever met Batman at that point or if she was just a strictly Robin sidekick. I don't know the exact timeline here, but she certainly didn't have the place of prominence that she would later. Anyway, moving on. Now we're actually going to talk about generation xdem.
26:37
Mitch
This was. I would. I always thought this was a strange book. And then rereading it, like, the whole plan that Jono has of, like, making everybody in the town look like mutants, like, I don't know, it just seemed very silly.
26:53
Case
It's. I mean, it's fucked up. Like, these aren't heroes.
26:58
Mitch
No, no. It's a weird book. But then again, Jonah Hex isn't really a hero.
27:04
Case
No, yeah, but I mean, like, convincing a town of bigots to, like, pretend to be mutants so that, like, clockwork sentinels or steampunk sentinels will murder them.
27:17
Mitch
And then he has to, he disguises himself to look like not a mutant.
27:22
Case
Yeah, yeah. Which all he does is he, like, pulls up his, like.
27:25
Jmike
Yeah.
27:25
Case
Puts a banana bandana over his face. He does the 2020 disguise yourself.
27:32
Mitch
Yeah, yeah.
27:33
Case
I mean, it was fun. Like, having a trask and, like, setting up, like, the, like these proto sentinel characters I thought was cool. I mean, I think most of the reason they made this book was just because it was a funny crossover of names. Like, yeah, like, generation X was a book. What if we combine it with Jonah Hex? That'd be so weird. Right? I like that the skin character. Skin hunter, like, with his, like, weird stomach, like, congealed basically his poop and then fired it off his bullets.
28:03
Mitch
So was that skin and scalp hunter who was the DC version? I guess.
28:09
Case
I'm not sure. Like, I don't know the DC western characters that well.
28:14
Mitch
Yeah, that was another, that was another thing that was not hard. But it was just like, I don't know who these other, the other counterparts are that are in this. I almost feel like, I know that the amalgam comics was trying to put you in the illusion that this is an actual ongoing book and stuff like that. But I feel like there should have been just the page of being like, okay, these are the characters that you should know that are being merged together at the beginning.
28:38
Case
Yeah, sort of. But then the other side of it is the fun of being like, oh, I'm the guy who knows, like, fair kind of approach that, like, that. The type of nerd that I am and that many people are, you know, are the, like, when a layperson or a person who only knows one side it's like, well, wait, I know all these X Men characters who are, they merged with and it's like, and, you know, someone pushes up their glasses and goes like, well, let me tell you, there is a certain kind of fun to that.
29:03
Mitch
You're absolutely right. There is a fun to that.
29:06
Case
But I'm sure there were, like, either wizard articles or some kind of supplement. There's got to be something where they're like, oh, yeah, it was, these were.
29:12
Mitch
The crossovers, Generation X, they weren't villains. Right. They're an offshoot of the X Men. They're just like, the. Like, how were they an offshoot of the X?
29:21
Case
Mendez? Okay, so Generation X was a spin off book that was like the teen team that came out in the nineties for the X Men specifically. There's a couple things going on. So, one, when the image split occurred and Jim Lee went off and founded Wildstorm Studios, he was starting to put together a team book that was going to be the second big book that they would do after Wildcats and Stormwatch being the frontline books of that line, and that was going to be called Gen X. And Marvel was like, fuck no. The most famous X Men artist at the time is not going to go off and make his own book called something X. So they rushed into production this whole thing called Generation X, and that forced Gen X to become Gen 13.
30:08
Case
Generation X was, they did this event called the Phalanx saga, where they brought back this techno organic thing that they had set up in new mutants and some other spots there. There was Cameron Hodge, who was an X Factor villain back when X Factor was the founding five. And Archangel had a best friend who convinced the team to go off and pretend that they were hunting down and murdering mutants, but actually they were protecting them, which was a terrible idea. And then when Louise Simonson came on, the book was like, this is a terrible idea. We can't do this. Anyway, this event happened where it's like, the, this, like, techno organic Borg type thing is assimilating mutants and, like, trying to hunt them down.
30:51
Case
And so Banshee, Emma Frost, and Sabretooth at the time, although he doesn't stay on for the actual book, like, finds all these young mutants that Cerebro had identified and, like, bring them in. And then once the event is over and blink is introduced there, but she dies, saving everyone at the end of the event, and Sabretooth is put in, like, X Men jail or whatever that's going on at the time. When the event is over, they decide to set up a second Xavier school at what used to be Emma's Massachusetts Hellions Academy. So this is where she goes from being a villain to being path of, being a hero, because she was always more of an educator first.
31:28
Case
And so they set up there, and it's white queen and Banshee teaching this new generation of X Men, which included Jubilee as sort of like, the, like, oh, yeah, no, see, it's still, like, still all tied in with the old X Men. But that's where we got chamber. That's where we got Cinque, who is now currently on the X Men and is fucking rad. He has the rainbow aura that can match up to anyone else's powers.
31:54
Mitch
Nice.
31:55
Case
So he can like, yeah, he can copy anyone's powers as long as they're kind of in proximity to him. And then you get M, who became a huge character. You get Mondo, who is a hard character to describe because he's mostly just like a laid back, I don't want to fucking do anything because my power is like, fuse to Earth. And his entire character description is just like, nah, he goes with the flow and he doesn't really want to participate. And then you get Husk, who rips off. She's a guthrie. So she's the younger sister of Cannonball, who was on the new Mutant X Force, which is the previous teen team of X Men. So it was just, here's the nineties teen X Men group.
32:34
Mitch
So the eighties was new mutants. Nineties is generation X.
32:36
Jmike
Generation X. Yeah. Didn't they get like a cartoon spin off of that?
32:40
Case
They had a tv movie that came.
32:42
Mitch
Out, which we watched for journey to mystery. That movie is bad.
32:48
Case
It's weird. Yeah. And it's got some original characters that I'm always curious, like, are they ever going to bring buff back?
32:52
Mitch
Yeah, they were obviously, like, tv alterations of the version of the characters that are in the book. Like, it's like, why not just stick with the characters that were in the book? Why make them different?
33:04
Case
I don't know. I have a headcanon on buff because there was a character also called Buff who was also blonde and had the same basic powers that showed up in Wonder man at the time. And that, like, I'm like, oh, I wonder if that's intentional. And it almost definitely is not. And I forget what the laser eye guy was, but that was just more like, well, we can't do chamber. What if we do a low rent cyclops? And maybe that was just to be like, more like what people recognize with X Men stuff. True. Maybe. I don't know.
33:32
Mitch
And the thing with chamber is like that the fire that's coming off his face is just psychic fire. Right. It's not actual burning fire.
33:43
Case
Right.
33:43
Mitch
Okay.
33:44
Case
And it's because he's really bad at his powers that it's exploding out that way. Because in Age of Apocalypse, the version that was better, because all the age of apocalypse characters are better at using their powers because it's the future trunks situation. It's a shitty timeline, so they've all been forced to adapt and get good at stuff. His is actually a condensed little furnace burning out of his chest. And it looks like there's some sort of cybernetic enhancement, but he has his face.
34:11
Mitch
Got it.
34:12
Case
But it's just exploding out from him. And because he's more of a psychic energy being, he doesn't really need to do anything to keep them together. But then when the no more mutants thing happened with Scarlet witch, he was left with no power and a giant hole in his body.
34:28
Mitch
Oh, jeez.
34:30
Case
And so, like, the immediate issue after is him being rushed to the emergency room with the lower part of his mouth gone and most of his neck and chest cavity exposed. And they're like, how the fuck are we going to keep him alive? We don't know. And they kept him alive by turning him into a miniature version of apocalypse. And then everyone decided, I don't like this idea, and just moved on.
34:53
Mitch
And then the other side is Jonah Hex, which we all kind of said we don't really know much about the character.
34:59
Case
Yeah, I've got the big showcase book for him, and I read it and it's like, yeah, these are just western stories. And it's never been my genre. And it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, I don't know, lore. I've read them, and I just never processed it.
35:17
Mitch
And what about Peter Milligan and Adam Polina?
35:20
Case
Milligan is a name I recognize, but I could not tell you off the top of my head. What? Yeah, so that makes. Oh, he's okay. Yeah, he does the X Force series that became ecstatics with. With Mike Allred.
35:30
Mitch
Why does that name sound familiar?
35:31
Case
Mike Allred. He created Madman.
35:33
Mitch
Oh, okay. Yes.
35:34
Jmike
Oh, he did?
35:35
Case
Yeah.
35:36
Mitch
Cool.
35:36
Case
Oh, he created Asriel.
35:38
Jmike
He did.
35:39
Mitch
Wait, which Asriel, like the.
35:42
Jmike
The original.
35:43
Case
The replacement Batman. Azrael? Like, no, that was in the Wikipedia article. During an editorial meeting, Milligan presented the idea that led to the creation of Asriel, who became the Batman during the nightfall crossover.
35:55
Mitch
Oh, then, wow. Because it's usually credited to Denny O'Neill and Joe Cassada. They were the ones who worked on it, probably.
36:03
Case
You know, it's one of those, like, he. He's getting a credit for, like, having the initial idea that then got developed into more.
36:10
Mitch
Okay, that's interesting. Hey, it's more I know about the character I love. So. Yeah.
36:15
Case
So that's all I can really say for him. I clearly don't know that, like, he. Yeah, he's been working like, any. And, like, X statics has come back.
36:24
Mitch
So, like, there's still.
36:25
Case
That stuff is still coming.
36:27
Mitch
And they're the ones that travel the multiverse, right? Am I thinking.
36:32
Case
No, you're thinking exiles.
36:34
Mitch
Exiles. Okay.
36:34
Case
Yes. Yeah. No. What was X Force and then became X Statix is more like a celebrity kind of driven superhero concept. Like, that's the one where, like, princess die is, like, kind of sort of tied up in it all.
36:50
Jmike
Explain it.
36:52
Case
I can't. I'm sorry. I can't yet. I got the omnibus. I actually didn't read it when it came out. I know there was a character that was supposed to be like, princess die, like, resurrected, and then like, editorial. We're like, we can't actually do that. And so in there, that's probably a.
37:07
Mitch
Good thing that Torio stepped in and be like, yeah, might want to walk this one back, guys.
37:11
Case
People might not be cool with that.
37:13
Mitch
That's like those conspiracy theories of people like, oh, Bruce Lee did. I fixed his death, and he's like, you know, a undercover CIA agent going around stopping things is like, you want one of the biggest stars of the seventies to be an undercover agent? How does that work? Like, kind of thing?
37:30
Case
Yeah, it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't have. I don't know. I mean, that's the kind of rumor that starts with Elvis when he demanded to see President Nixon so that they could do something about the hippie problem.
37:43
Mitch
Yeah.
37:44
Case
Anyway, moving on. Next up is a book that at least makes a bit more sense for why it would happen, which is one of the few actual sequels in this whole run, which is JLX unleashed, which is picking up with the X Men characters from before. And were talking last time about, is there an ice character or an Iceman character? And, yeah, it happens here. I don't know why I just didn't think about it, even though I had read it right before we got into this all, I was like, oh, it's weird that they don't have Iceman. I'm like, oh, yeah. Cause they fucking do.
38:12
Mitch
Also, this is the, like, second or third time they go to the feng fang foom like character in these amalgam books, isn't it? Because they do Fingfeng flame here, but I could have sworn that they have another version of Fing fang Foom earlier.
38:27
Case
Are you thinking of King Lizard? Maybe, which was King Shark in Spider Boy. It was King Shark and the lizard, maybe, and had been exposed to Pym particles, so it was growing rapidly.
38:38
Mitch
Maybe that's what it was. I could see that.
38:41
Case
So this is a fun opportunity, at least, to see a lot of marvel character references. We get Dark Firebird, so we get the dark Phoenix version of Fire Mistress Maxima. So we get nods there. This is all the hellfire characters, kind of, sort of. We get chaos, like, their take on havoc.
39:00
Mitch
And the book from the last time was just called JLX. Right?
39:04
Case
Yeah.
39:04
Mitch
And Christopher Priest goes on to do a lot of X Men stuff, right?
39:09
Case
Priest has done a lot of stuff. Just in general.
39:11
Mitch
In general.
39:11
Case
So, yeah. Like, he's super famous for his run in the late nineties, early two thousands on Black Panthere. He's worked on just tons of books.
39:20
Mitch
What do you think of the Judgment League adventures to making the JLA work for both? Like, combining the two as a nickname?
39:28
Case
I never got the judgment part.
39:29
Mitch
Like, yeah, I think that's the part that. That throws me too.
39:33
Case
It feels too much like we're fucking cops.
39:39
Mitch
True. Very true.
39:41
Case
And I never got why you'd have to make that change, because, like, the Avengers part, it's like, yeah, we're like, Avengers has, like, this weird element of, like, we're out for vengeance. Like, it's reciprocity for, like, misdeeds, which is, like, a little bit. Like, no one would actually take this. Like, if you just called yourselves the Avengers. Like, no one would actually think, like, oh, well, you're clearly, like, driven by rage, but, like, there is that element of how the language works.
40:05
Mitch
Yeah, it's an odd one. Do you remember, it's either late nineties, early two thousands, when the Justice League had forgotten that they had formed the Justice League, and they all formed their own versions of the Justice League. It was like, Justice League Atlantis, Justice League Angels, Justice League Aliens.
40:23
Case
I kind of remember that event, but I do not remember any of the specifics.
40:27
Mitch
I don't remember what that event was called, but, yeah.
40:29
Jmike
Wait, say that one more time.
40:32
Mitch
It was an event where, like, all the Justice League members had forgotten that the Justice League had already been formed, but each one of them went and formed their own version. So, like, Batman came up with the Justice League, Arkham, which was, like, him just taking a whole bunch of his villains out of Arkham and making them work for him. And Justice League alien was Superman, coming up with a bunch of other aliens that wanted to protect Earth. So it was like, him. I want to say power girl and Starfire and someone else, but Martian Manhunter.
41:05
Case
Like, a heavy hitter team.
41:07
Mitch
Yeah, it was a very heavy hitter team. And then eventually, like, I think eventually they were just like, someone comes up with, like, well, when we just call ourselves just League of America and like, Aquaman steps up first, is like, wait, why is it just America? And I think Batman's like, no, no, that makes sense. I just don't remember the name of that event was called.
41:26
Case
Yeah, I vaguely recall this, but I just can't even picture it at the moment. But getting back to JLX, so we pick up now, it's been a year. Mr. X. Jean Jones is now crippled so that he's more accurately a professor Xavier parallel right there. Amazon shows up because most of them have been imprisoned. And to deal with fin feng flame, she frees them all to go be like, look, there's a giant dragon that's on fire attacking everything right now. We. We kind of have to, like, deal with this. So, like, this, finally, we bring Amazon into a book because she's not getting her own one this time.
42:03
Mitch
And the whole idea was like, she's like, I have to reconcile with the fact that I'm also a mutant or something like that.
42:08
Case
Yeah, because.
42:09
Mitch
Yeah, on the. On the regular JLA judgment league Avengers team, they have a few mutants on the team, but these guys, the Jlx, are supposed to be like, no, we're. We're the mutants or something like that. Like, we're fighting for mutants, right?
42:22
Case
It's like, God, it's like the ones on the team, on the JLA still are, like the Uncle Toms. Like, they can pass, so they're going to be okay. And this is my problem. Always, when we try to use mutants as, like, the metaphor for the mutant metaphor when you have lots of superpowered beings, gets a little, like, muddy. Like, it makes sense to a certain degree. And I've heard people make really compelling points being like, oh, no. The fact that we can accept the Fantastic Four means that it's all good in comparison with, like, where we set up. It's like, no. That. That actually is why it's bigotry, as opposed to just being legitimate fear of people with superpowers.
42:59
Case
But, like, I think there are also limits to that one where it's like, well, what is the fucking difference between your friend who just randomly developed superpowers because, like, something, versus, like, another person who developed superpowers because they got bitten.
43:11
Jmike
By a spider, right, or hit by cosmic rays.
43:14
Mitch
It's all mutated genese.
43:16
Case
Yeah. Like, I get more being afraid of aliens in that scenario where it's like, yeah, they might look like a human, but they're, like, legitimately not from this planet. Like, I get being really freaked out by that part, but, like, who cares if it's that? Literally, the greek God of thunder gave you power versus you happen to have the mutant power to control storms. Which one of those is scarier? I'm not actually sure, but yeah. So we basically get a chance to shake up the roster. So we get iceberg. So again, we just fucking forgot. Like, we all read this before the last time we recorded it, and we're like, oh, is it like, it's weird that they don't have ice maiden ice here? Oh, they do. Right here. Right here, we get chaos, which is havoc.
43:59
Case
And I think a different version of Rey. Or maybe I'm mistaken. Cause, like, it's. This is the nineties ray is combined with cyclops for Apollo, and I think it's like the golden age Rayde for his quote unquote brother.
44:09
Mitch
Oh, okay.
44:10
Case
I think I could easily be wrong about that one. I am not sure. Cause it's very clearly havoc, but. And he's called chaos. I'm not positive on the rest. And then we get returning night creeper and runaway for a rogue gypsy.
44:25
Mitch
Gypsy rogue, yeah.
44:27
Case
And we get some cool shots with nightcreeper teleporting around, putting on his costume to go into the fight. We get ice powers fighting with a fire dragon, which is great. And ultimately, we end up with them blowing up this monster and. Or at least from the insides. And then Apollo, who had been catatonic for most of the issue, being supercharged by this mystic fire and being this weird, glowing omega type mutant that we get at the end. I don't know how else to describe it. It's just he's full on energy being at this point.
45:01
Mitch
Right?
45:01
Case
Yeah. So a fairly straightforward, like, X Men style story, ultimately. Like, I think the jail part is really just like, oh, yeah, we're gonna take some DC stuff to combine with it all. But, like, I don't know, it. It feels like an X Men book here.
45:13
Mitch
Very much so, yeah. Do you think that the X Men and the Justice League would, like, would ever be able to, like, work together? Like, does the justice. Do you. Do you feel like the X Men and the Avengers work together?
45:24
Case
Well, I think sometimes they do. Like, when you emphasize the academic or the sort of separatist nature. Like that. Like, I've made a note, bones, that I'm a big fan of the current Krakoa stuff in X Men books, and I think that is a good position. Like, here's how different the two are right there. And I've seen eras where it makes a lot of sense, where it's like, oh, no. This is a school of young people learning how to use their superpowers. And they go on missions, but they're not professional superheroes. The claremont run of the late seventies, early eighties, most of the X Men there are 18 to 24. So it has a different feel than. Yeah, no, we're professional heroes. Like, beast graduated from the X Men and now he's an Avenger.
46:11
Case
Now, those type eras, I think, work really well, and eras where there's a lot of weird shit happening with mutants because mutants got really popular, and so writers started doing a lot of stuff with them while simultaneously avengers were trying to hold down the fort. Just in general I'm thinking of. I can picture the COVID It's Wolverine, Captain America, and Black Widow on it. And it was like one of the big arcs that led to the end of Avengers west coast blanking on it at the moment.
46:37
Mitch
Yeah, it's not sounding familiar to me.
46:38
Case
But I think they can work. But when the X Men become more generic superheroes, it starts to feel less like, well, what is the difference here?
46:45
Mitch
Yeah, because I guess it's one thing I always feel like Marvel does well is the mixing and matching. See, X Men becoming part of the Avengers, whereas I couldn't imagine a doom patrol character becoming a Justice League teammate.
47:00
Case
I mean, you get a little bit of that with, like, beast Boy starts as a doom patrol member who moves on to teen titans. And, like, there have been timelines where Beast Boy becomes a member of the Justice League, I guess.
47:12
Mitch
Yeah.
47:13
Case
Or some equivalent, like the Titans tomorrow story I'm thinking of.
47:15
Mitch
Right. Yeah, I can. Yeah, you're right. That makes sense.
47:19
Case
But certainly other ones. Do you really imagine the negative man becoming a jail heir? Probably not.
47:28
Mitch
Probably not going to see robot man on titans.
47:31
Case
Right. So it's the question of, well, what are the X Men more like? If it's. They get paired up with the Teen Titans a lot because eighties X Men and eighties Teen Titans were the two most popular books at the respective lines. So, like, there is some strong comparisons right there. And so many of the X Men are, like, young heroes for the most part. It kind of makes sense. And then, like, yeah, Wolverine eventually makes it on. Beast had a stint. You know, a lot of X Men have had, like, periods on the Avengers. Teen Titans depends on the JLA. Like, the Avengers, while they have their, like, founders. Like, I don't think have ever had, like, quite as, like, here's our. Our founding seven type, like, big Pantheon, because, like, who really cares about giant Mandev?
48:12
Case
Like, love most of those versions to death, but the Avengers roster usually has a few more b and c listers on it than what people want for the justice league. And whenever Justice League has been like that, usually that's when the book is not doing as well.
48:26
Mitch
Yeah, your Justice League Detroit doesn't usually do as well as the big seven.
48:31
Jmike
Justice League Detroit.
48:34
Mitch
So do you want to move on to lope with the duck?
48:36
Case
Yeah, let's move on to loba the duck, because I don't. Again, JLX is an X Men book.
48:41
Mitch
Yeah, it really is. It's just an. I mean, not just an X Men book, but it is. It feels the most like an X Men book now.
48:47
Case
Love of the duck. So I didn't know shit about howard the duck when this first came out back in the day, but if you read anything about Howard the duck, it makes so much fucking sense that this is the crossover right here. But it feels so weird if you don't know anything about it.
49:02
Mitch
I mean, I think at this point, all I had was the Howard the duck the movie. I didn't. I didn't even know that Howard the duck when that movie came out. That that was a Marvel thing.
49:11
Case
Yeah.
49:12
Jmike
I don't think I've ever seen that movie before. I don't think I've actually sat down and watched that before.
49:18
Mitch
Not even part of it.
49:19
Jmike
No. I've seen, like, clips here and there, all stuff on YouTube, and I'm like, it looks weird. So I'm like, you know what? I'm okay. I think I'm good. But she said I'm not missing much, so now I'm not worried.
49:33
Case
Yeah. No one really sees the movie Howard the duck as the definitive take on the character.
49:40
Mitch
No.
49:41
Case
No. So here's why it actually makes a lot of sense. So Howard the duck, for one thing, was ferociously popular in the eighties. He actually had his own newspaper strip, which I did not know about until I was watching a history of the character.
49:54
Mitch
Oh, wow. I didn't know that either.
49:55
Case
The books were just, generally speaking, pretty popular in that it was kind of like, here's this crass parody of Disney stuff, which is funny now that you think about Marvel being owned by Disney, because it's all the duck stuff. It feels very Donald duck, but kind of fucked up, and he hits on women and so forth. It's the satirical nature of the character living in this weird ass world of Marvel superheroes and shit, because he deals with multiverse stuff, because he hung around the nexus of realities, and that's how he ends up in our reality, even though he's from a world where they're all ducks.
50:28
Case
Lobo is also a big satire of big, popular comic trends, and in this case, it's more like the grim, dark, late eighties, early nineties stuff taken to this extreme of violence and vice, and both of them are giant womanizers. And so to take the weird shit from both, which are just pushed to extremes that normal comics can't do, and to combine it all here actually makes a lot of sense.
50:52
Mitch
Yeah. No, I mean, as you put it, that does make the most sense. To put the two it comes, it makes for a very strange look, like the duck with one giant arm, one.
51:06
Case
Not so big, right, but wrapped up in chains.
51:11
Mitch
But the storylines do make for a good amalgam.
51:17
Case
Yeah, I mean, Howard the duck, I mean, we've seen him, obviously, in MCU stuff, but it's more as, like, an Easter egg type character. It doesn't as easily scale back to a non satirical kind of approach. Like Lobo, you can put in a non goofy kind of book, and either you can make him actually scary or you can make him kind of a funny character in the background, but not necessarily breaking the reality of things versus versions, where he's been so annoying when he's died, that hell had to kick him out because they're like, we can't fucking deal with this guy. Which is why he's super immortal. Not just immortal.
51:49
Jmike
They just don't want him back anymore.
51:51
Case
Right. Like, he's worked with Santa Claus in the DC Universe.
51:55
Mitch
Yeah, that's true.
51:57
Case
But you can reign him back, and then he fits in the young justice cartoon or the Superman animated series, or, like, you know, like, you can have him be drawn by Jerry Ordway, and it doesn't look that incongruous to what Lobo's supposed to look like. There are better takes that more cross the line. But when we get into the Keith Giffen books, where, again, Lobo's back is back, and we're showing off just how satirical and weird we can take Lobo, it's just very different from those two animals right there, but it works more as one character, whereas, again, Howard the duck just feels so different from everything else Marvel does.
52:40
Mitch
So saying that Howard the duck, being popular in the eighties and nineties, do you think if they were to have done this now would have been Lobo and Deadpool?
52:48
Case
Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
52:49
Mitch
Okay.
52:50
Case
Really? This is before Deadpool had that reputation, right?
52:54
Mitch
Yeah. So it feels like this is, you know, it's the breaking the fourth wall commentary on comic books kind of feel that would be going on here.
53:03
Case
Yeah, this is like circa the, like, Fabian Niciesa, like Deadpool miniseries maybe where like, he's a merc with a mouth, but he's Spider man, but a murderer as opposed to, like, see outside the fourth wall. You could maybe also see like, maybe she Hulk, right? Yeah, but I think the particulars of, like, I think she Hulk would work better with, like, ambush bug. Like, Lobo would be an interesting combat with, like, Deadpool because they're both mercenaries also. And like, you can make that all kind of fit.
53:30
Mitch
Right, right.
53:31
Case
But I don't mind it here. I think the book is fun. It's a lot of, like, sight gags and weird shit going on here. Combining Lobo's dog with the impossible man. I think it's a great choice just to have, like, weird shit happen all the time. And it's like, well, when were we going to use the impossible man in this? We got to use the impossible man, right? What if he's a dog? Fuck it. Doctor Bongface, it's just a weird, silly book that is like super misogynistic, but like, you know, it's there. Also, fun side note, the Gamora show or shows up at one point in this one.
54:01
Mitch
Oh, yeah, that's right.
54:03
Case
Definitely a character who is way more popular now than she was then. And so she could be this like, random character who one page into her appearances has her top off and Lobo is like just like cuddling with her.
54:14
Mitch
Yeah, yeah. She's very much a side, almost background character in this book. As to now, she would, yeah, definitely.
54:23
Case
Be a forefront, but I mean, this is a goofy kind of wacky book. And to like, I don't think anything covers that more than at one point when Lobo has to figure out some information, he threatens his own reflection and his reflection gives in and gives up information.
54:38
Mitch
Sounds about right.
54:39
Case
Yeah. So it's like, definitely, if you're looking for like, it's fucking itchy and scratchy. Yeah, it's taking like Ren and Stimpy, or rather Tom and Jerry kind of like stuff or Looney tunes or whatever kind of cartoon violence and taking it up to eleven, having all the blood and gore and having like, all the things that you would censor for kids actually put in there for adults. So, like, if you're really into, and that's another thing that we haven't really talked about, which is that like, they're trying to appeal to comic fans in general and, like, allude to stuff and, like, funny animal. Funny animal comics used to be a huge thing. So this is a chance to do that in the amalgam line, the same way that Howard was taking on stuff from the fifties.
55:23
Case
Hoppy, the Marvel Bunny, was a very successful character even after Shazam folded. And the Ducktale, all the Disney Duck books, that's where most of the DuckTales lore came from. The building out Huey, Dew, and Louie building out all the characters that we would see in later the larger Duck universe especially, that was going on in the nineties. To keep on talking about this era. A lot of those originated in the comics, so it certainly makes sense to try to do a funny duck book, but it's funny that Marvel's parody of Disney would eventually become the owners. But why don't we move on to the actual book that we sort of wanted to talk about for this all, which is super soldier man o war.
56:09
Jmike
A quick side note about the Lobo thing. I read that in completely the Donald.
56:13
Case
Duck voice, and that works. Or you could read it in Brad Garrett's voice. All of those work for this character.
56:21
Mitch
Brad Garrett was the voice of Lobo in the animated series, wasn't he?
56:24
Jmike
Yeah, yeah.
56:25
Mitch
Wow.
56:26
Case
Like, any sort of very cartoonish voice could work for it. You could also do, like, a Robert Paulson or something.
56:31
Jmike
True.
56:32
Case
Yeah. Or now I'm thinking, like, well, like, David Tennant took over as, like, Uncle Scrooge. Like, maybe he could.
56:38
Mitch
Oh, yeah, that's right.
56:39
Case
I. Or, like, a darkwing duck type. Any kind of, like, funny voice actor you could see, like, do that part and do that part really good justice because it's just violent. Donald Duck. Donald Duck, instead of threatening all the time, actually murders. Moving on. So super soldier man of war. So this is an actual world War two story for the character along the style of, like, all star squadron or the invaders, like, doing the, like, the retro stories for the characters, but being written and drawn by modern teams. So we get to see a young version of the Mariner. We get to see, we get to see our wizard flash hybrid right there, American Bell, which is a Liberty Bell Miss America hybrid. And then what is this? Batman Barnes.
57:27
Mitch
Oh, is this supposed to be like.
57:28
Case
It'S Bucky Barnes and the cop from all the Superman stuff that works with Maggie Sawyer. Why am I blanket Turpin. Dan Turpin.
57:34
Mitch
Turpin.
57:36
Case
Presenting him as, like, having been, like, a young sidekick to super soldier back in the day. We get the green flame so we can sort of set up the crossover with Iron Lantern.
57:45
Mitch
Right, so that's Alan Scott.
57:47
Case
Yeah, it's supposed to be.
57:48
Mitch
Yeah. Okay.
57:49
Case
Combined with, like, the Jim Hammond Human Torch.
57:51
Mitch
That's right. Yeah.
57:52
Case
Or human lantern.
57:53
Mitch
Pardon me, human lantern. Yeah.
57:55
Case
Again, one of those ones where, like, the conventions are just like. Obviously you would call them, like, the green. Like, green flame or something like you, where they're like. We have to combine these names, but they're not. The combined name is not what anyone would ever actually call themselves. He's a man. He's on fire.
58:09
Mitch
Right.
58:10
Case
Like a lantern.
58:14
Mitch
So.
58:15
Case
So Clark Kent, again, who is super soldier, heads off to go deal with nazis on a mission, and he goes off with Jimmy Olsen, gets into some fights. We get Sergeant rock showing up, which is always fun.
58:30
Jmike
The howling commander.
58:32
Case
Yeah.
58:32
Mitch
Because in the amalgam universe, we have. We have both Sergeant Rock and Nick Fury. Right. Yeah, because they show them agent of Bat or Bruce Wayne. Agent of S h I e l d. Yeah.
58:42
Case
They're both still. Still lingering around at that point because.
58:45
Mitch
It seems like that would be the obvious two to merge together would be rock and fury.
58:50
Case
Yeah. Well, and they. I mean, they do from a role standpoint, it's just they establish them as separate.
58:54
Mitch
Two separate characters.
58:55
Case
Yeah, yeah. But they. Instead of easy company, it becomes the howling commandos, because that's a cooler name. So that's one where it's interesting to see characters slotted into roles without necessarily fusing the characters, necessarily. But. So super soldier's on this mission. He stops some torpedoes from attacking people. He's doing his job. And we get Baron Zemo trying to steal the kryptonite, and we get the war wheel. We get a version of Peggy Carter. But it's a. Before Peggy Carter was a character people cared about.
59:29
Mitch
How far back was she introduced? Is she there in the original Captain America books?
59:33
Case
I don't think she was in the original cap books, but she definitely was in the Avengers, the invaders stuff. Because they were setting up her connection with Sharon Carter.
59:40
Mitch
Okay. Yeah, I was gonna say I didn't think she was in the original Captain America stuff.
59:43
Case
Yeah, but love interest in the time of World War Two, who needs it? It's only in retrospect where we start applying that stuff. So she's french and she's a redhead?
59:52
Jmike
Yeah, I was gonna say she's french here.
59:53
Mitch
That's right. That's right.
59:55
Case
Which I'm guessing is an allusion. I don't know. I'm wondering if the redhead is either a. Like, I'm wondering if that's supposed to be a lana lang thing. It's gotta be, but I am not sure. And I'm not sure about the fact that she's french. I'm guessing there's something from one of their books, but I don't know which. Unless it's like a really weird, like, anti french, like, Lori Limerick type thing, right? Where it's like, oh, well, she's a. Instead of being a mermaid, she's a frog. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But we get a war wheel, which is always fun to see these giant, dumb nazi death trap machines that they would use back in the day in comics.
01:00:37
Case
And we get a setup for how Luthor gets ahold of the kryptonite to use in the story arc that we see. What makes him the green skull. So it works as a prequel to the first issue of Super Soldier that we got. The last panel is him holding the plans for ultra Metallo, and he's got the original rocket. It's cool.
01:00:58
Mitch
Now, it says on this one that we got Dave Gibbons doing double duty on this writing anart. But then he also has Mark Wade and Jimmy Palmiotti coming in.
01:01:08
Case
Yeah. So this is probably Gibbons having more control. And then Mark Wade kind of coming in and, like, so Palmiotti is inks. Mark Wade is co plot. And then, so Gibbons actually co plotted and scripted it and then the pencils.
01:01:22
Mitch
Okay.
01:01:23
Case
Which is cool. I mean, I like Dave Gibbons as an artist a lot. I think that there are certain books where he's really good for it, and I think it's better here than on the first issue. Like, his style, I think, works really well for, like, we're gonna tell an old World War two type story versus, like, here's an action packed modern comic.
01:01:42
Mitch
Does he, does he often go and do writing and co plotting or.
01:01:47
Case
Well, he's credited as a co plotter for the original Watchmen stuff. I mean, obviously, it's, like, the litigation and all, but he's, like, Moore is very open about crediting him for lots of the innovations of the book and so forth.
01:02:01
Mitch
Okay.
01:02:02
Case
And he's just, like, comics royalty. Like, again, co creator of Watchmen.
01:02:05
Mitch
Yeah, exactly. No, you're absolutely right.
01:02:07
Case
Oh, you want to do a thing? Sure, go do it. But it's a perfectly fine book. Like, it's, you know, it's. It's good. Like, it. This one's more of the Captain America type story. Like, the second, like, the first issue was more of a Superman type book in terms of, like, oh, yeah. Like, he's gonna go fight a robot against Lex Luthor. This one is like, oh, yeah. Well, yeah, he's, it's back in World War two, and he's dealing with nazis.
01:02:29
Mitch
I was once again, sorry, going on a sidetrack, but I was having a conversation with Chris Franey, who I used to do the Imagine if podcast with. And I'll ask you this question. Is there ever a Clark Kent book where you didn't focus on the Superman heroics that he did, but more of his journalism, I'm not sure of a.
01:02:50
Case
Book off the top of my head. Recently, we looked at the Superman radio show, where it is a lot more Clark Kent focused, where Superman usually shows up as a MacGuffin to sort of correct the thing, but it's usually Clark Kent investigating and doing all the stuff.
01:03:04
Jmike
Getting Lois out of trouble.
01:03:07
Case
It's like Clark Kent goes, talks to the police, goes and tries to find a person. He'll, he'll go investigate a criminal and then, like, get kidnapped, and then he'll break free as Superman. Superman was like I said, just like a deus ex machina to sort of, like, right the wrongs of a situation. Clark Kent was generally doing the investigation.
01:03:24
Mitch
Yeah, like, because, and I know it's probably, it's, they're making comic books because they want to make something exciting. And it's probably not the most exciting to not see Superman do the Superman stuff. But, like, I almost feel like there needs to be that story out there where Clark Ken is just as pivotal to putting away the bad guys as Superman is. Does that sound interesting at all?
01:03:46
Case
I love the idea. There was a meme going around the weekend that we're recording it of, like, wouldn't it be funny to do a movie about, like, the CIA trying to assassinate Clark Kent because he's a good reporter and not being able to figure out why they can't.
01:03:59
Mitch
That's hilarious.
01:04:02
Case
And I thought, like, that's a great idea. I would love to see that. I'm always here for Clark Kent as a great journalist. I love, like, a dapper man about town Clark Kent, who's, like, actually really successful as a journalist. So I'm here for it. And, like, I think any extended Superman run, like, an art, like, the writer will at some point do, like, a more Clark Kent kind of focused story at some point. But obviously, once you get into, like, oh, he's fighting a big space monster, you end up kind of focusing on the superman side of things.
01:04:27
Mitch
Right? Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, why wouldn't you focus on the Superman side of it? He's Superman. I just always thought that would then always. I recently thought that was interesting. It's funny that. That meme had been coming around, too.
01:04:40
Case
Yeah. But like I said, always here for it. This one ends up feeling more like a Captain America book in a way that the first one, like I said, feels more like a Superman book. But it's nice that we get that kind of contrast, because I do think they. While I might think that Wonder Woman makes more sense to combine with Captain America, I think that they do still make a lot of sense as, like, very similar archetypal characters. And in this case, it's just we've got Captain America, and he's not just peak human. He is literally a superman. All the shit he can do as a result. And that's cool.
01:05:10
Jmike
Like, blow up icebergs.
01:05:12
Mitch
Yeah, well.
01:05:15
Case
And deal with, like, the secret identity stuff that never made sense for Steve Rogers, Captain America, but does make sense here for Clark Kent, super soldier, you know, like, or at least more so. We've got a character who is, like, our national secret and so forth, like, versus, like, just a really awesome soldier who can, like, really solve shit. Like, it didn't make sense for Steve Rogers to have a secret identity back in the day, but here it's like, yeah, no, it makes sense because, like, we don't want everyone to know, like, what's going on with, like, our ace in the hole. So moving on, I'm gonna be honest. Next up is one of my two favorites of this whole run, which is challengers of the fantastic.
01:05:54
Mitch
And you know what? Reading this book back in the day always made me want to read more. Challengers of the unknown. I always wanted challenges, the unknown to be a bigger thing, but every time they've restarted the book, I've gotten it, and then I'm like, this isn't interesting. Like, there's too much backlour that I don't know.
01:06:13
Case
You know what it is? It's that easy to understand family dynamic that we get from the Fantastic Four side here that I think just makes it, like, work so much better.
01:06:22
Mitch
I think you're absolutely right.
01:06:23
Case
Right back in. Back when he was working on the Fantastic Four, John Byrne had a what if issue where they didn't get their powers. Like, the cosmic ray shielding worked, and so they didn't get powers, and they had a successful flight, and then they just started doing adventures because mole man still shows up, and it was fucking awesome because you're like, I'm here for all of this. This is really cool. And Carl Kiesel and Tom Grummet, after this, do section zero, which is a love letter to, like, fantastic four type stuff. I think that the fantastic. I mean, Fantastic Four is great. I hate that no one cares about it anymore as a franchise. I think it's one of the best comics that ever came out. I have the entire.
01:07:05
Case
In the black and white reprints, but, like, I have the entire Lee and Kirby run. I think it's so fucking cool. I think the basic idea of, like, oh, yeah, weird shit happened to us. We have superpowers. Let's go exploring. Is such an easy to understand motive for characters that I think that trying to limit them to just being superheroes instead of science heroes is counterproductive. I think it's so cool. And I think combining the proto Fantastic Four with the Fantastic Four, and we already knew we got that in Spider Boy, but having them go on an adventure here is fucking dope. I think combining all the weird shit that they want to do here, there's all this Kirby stuff going on. That's great. They've got the forearmed monster from.
01:07:48
Case
From, like, Kirby's run on Superman here to combine with the thing, which I, you know, is a fun use here, and combining it with the punisher from the original Galactus arc is great. Having, like, reed use the, like, the Doctor octopus harness to, like, emulate. Having, like, stretching abilities is awesome. It's just good. Like, it's so fucking fun.
01:08:11
Jmike
Let me really hear. I don't know if you remember this case, but I think the first time I ever asked you about the challenges of the unknown was after I saw Teen Titans go to the movies. And I was like, who the heck are these guys? I've never heard them before. And you're like, oh, man.
01:08:29
Case
Yeah. I mean, like, again, like, I. This. This was my intro to, like, really kind of understanding who the challengers of the unknown were in the way that the amalgam books are supposed to be. Like, they're supposed to introduce you to stuff you aren't familiar by getting you into the stuff you like. And I was all about learning more about these weird kind of characters, and, like, they're fun. They show up right after this. Kiesel and Gromit come back to Superboy at this point, and they have a whole arc where the challengers of the unknown deal with Superboy as they deal with a multiversal adult version of Superboy Black Zero. So it's fun seeing that kind of shit. I don't fully know. I'm not super familiar with everyone that's ever come out. It's usually not been quite as exciting.
01:09:11
Case
It again, it's just missing that family dynamic. Like, I think that's the. That's the hook that, like, makes it, like, really compelling, and it makes the secret sauce work.
01:09:18
Mitch
The version of the challenge was the known that came out right after. Was it dark metal or whatever?
01:09:27
Case
Death metal.
01:09:28
Mitch
I don't think it was death metal yet. Whichever the first one was.
01:09:32
Case
Yeah, whatever the first one was. Dark Knights metal.
01:09:35
Mitch
There you go. Yeah, that. I enjoyed it, but it was doing. I think it was doing way too much. Instead of, like, trying to just simplify it, they decided to try and combine all the different versions of the challengers of the unknown up to that point into one. I was just like, I'm overwhelmed.
01:09:52
Case
Yeah. There is a fine line between let's explore how weird everything is and, like, let's just be weird for the sake of being weird and, like, have too much stuff going on. It's hard to balance.
01:10:01
Mitch
I also thought that. So after Aqua, James Wan's Aquaman did really well. Like, they. He was gonna. He announced that he was gonna do a trench movie. Like a movie that was based on just the trench creatures from the Aquaman movie.
01:10:16
Case
Oh, yeah, I heard about that.
01:10:17
Mitch
And then they've recently said they weren't gonna do it anymore, but I was like, okay, if you're gonna do a movie that's just on the trench, this could be the perfect backdoor entry for challenges of the unknown. You just have this team that goes and studies these trench monsters. Because what else is that movie going to be about?
01:10:37
Case
Well, you could also bring in the Sea Devils.
01:10:40
Mitch
You could bring in the Sea Devils. You could bring in.
01:10:41
Case
That's another thing that we actually haven't mentioned, which is that DC used to have just all these teams of humans that now you're like, well, why? There's so many superheroes, but like, the Blackhawks, the Sea Devils, and the challengers of the unknown, it's sort of like land, sea, and air. Sort of.
01:10:59
Mitch
I always thought that would have been a great idea, but there's no trench movie coming anymore.
01:11:02
Case
I mean, it was a weird call.
01:11:04
Mitch
It was. It's very weird. That's why I was like, this is challengers of the unknown. Just bring this in. Now.
01:11:09
Jmike
It might not be a movie, but it could be a mini series. You never know.
01:11:13
Mitch
It's true. Everything goes to HBO, Max. It's fine.
01:11:18
Case
So we get galactiac, which is a hybrid of galactus and brainiac, which, as an idea, I really like. I think the design's too much galactus for me. I wish it was a little bit more brainiac in design, but, you know, they've got some parts there. Like, he's got this sort of, like, wire bulb kind of effect that's sort of like the classic brainiac going on up there. And obviously, we got the skull face, but I could have used just, like, a little bit more, like, weird robot kind of stuff. Like, I like brainiac a lot. I think he's an underrated villain.
01:11:51
Case
And the idea of combining him with Galactus, where they're both like, this, like, omnipotent alien power who is going to come and do the thing they want to do to earth, and we really don't have a choice but to let them do it. But these people, they challenge it. I think that's a really good vibe, and I think it's a cool idea that works. You know, I think it works well enough here. Like, it's still. I mean, this is, like, this isn't a. The amalgam version of the Galactus saga, or however, if you want to call it that, like the. The original story of all that. So it.
01:12:25
Case
You know, it's very much following the tropes that we're all very familiar with, because that story has been replicated in every adaptation of the Fantastic Four ever, not counting fan forstic, because that died on the vine.
01:12:39
Mitch
Oof.
01:12:41
Case
Yeah. I love the designs that we have going on here. I love, again, the thing formed monster. I don't remember if it ever actually got a name or if it's just, like, some sort. I know that Superman's allergic to him, literally has an allergy to him, but I don't know if it ever actually got a name.
01:12:57
Mitch
No, I don't think so.
01:12:58
Case
Yeah, cool. We got the. Like I said, we got the mister fantastic with the auto, like, the doc ock harness, which is great. I still don't actually know anything about that clone. Like, the tiny clone of Johnny Storm.
01:13:13
Mitch
They needed to sacrifice somebody in the clone.
01:13:16
Case
I mean, that makes sense here. I still just don't get it. I'm sure it's a challenge of the unknown thing that I just don't know shit about. It's just like, oh, yeah. Also, he has a tiny clone, not like a mini me, but like, an action figure sized clone. And it goes on missions, and then we get the teaser at the end, which is the doctor doomsday having taken the power of the death Racer.
01:13:40
Mitch
Yeah. Yeah, that one was weird.
01:13:43
Case
I mean, again, classic imagery right there because it's Doctor doom stealing the silver surfer's powers but because it's skis, it's just so much goofier because.
01:13:53
Mitch
Yeah, because the surfboards. Not goofy.
01:13:57
Case
You know the word. I mean, frankly, the surfboard is less goofy than ski. Especially because, like, some versions make it look more like it's just like some sort of cylinder that the surfer kind of is bonded to. Right. Like the. The ultimates version. It was almost like a meteor and then a man, like, emerged out of it. I don't know. But not the point. The point is that someone with the brain of Doctor doom and the physical body of doomsday is wielding the power of a combined version of literal death and the power cosmic.
01:14:29
Mitch
It's a lot of power.
01:14:30
Case
Yeah. It's a really interesting cliffhanger for this issue to end on and, you know, like, look, Tom Grumman is an amazing artist. I love his look for everything here. And Carl Keys is a really solid writer. Like, I think it's. There's no surprise that this is a book that really appealed to me because, like, they're just a great creative team.
01:14:48
Mitch
Do they often work together?
01:14:50
Case
Yeah. So they worked before this. They were working on the adventures of Superman book up into and through, like the death and return of Superman. And then they were doing Superboy, like, his solo series in the nineties. They left. They did section Zero, which I mentioned is already like a tribute to the fantastic four because it's like, it's about a bunch of scientists at area 51 who have like an alien and a bunch of other, you know, it's a lot like BPRd, like the Hellboy stuff.
01:15:16
Mitch
Right.
01:15:17
Case
Which is also like Hellboy secret sauce for everyone out there is horror version of Fantastic Four. Like, hellboy is their version of the thing. And, like, originally Mike Mignola was gonna have it be about a team and then was like, I really just like the fucking demon guy. But that's why he's got the weird hand because it was a tribute to the thing's hand.
01:15:37
Mitch
Oh, wow. Did not know that.
01:15:38
Case
Yeah, I mean, again, like, it became, it evolved and changed, but it started off being like, it's gonna be a team book and this is gonna be my thing equivalent and we're gonna have all these little things. And then became focused on that and then it didn't. And then it became actually about the team again eventually and had all kinds of its own weird creative weirdness instead of super science magic.
01:15:58
Mitch
I mean, is there much difference between the two?
01:16:01
Case
Depends. Depends on the writer. Because some writers just treat science as a form of magic and others actually really want to get into the physics and shit and different strokes for different folks.
01:16:10
Mitch
Right.
01:16:11
Case
But yeah, just a really fun issue. I really like this issue in general, doing Galactus, but it's doing it in a way that's really fun and, like, alluding to a lot of, like, weird DC stuff.
01:16:20
Mitch
Yep.
01:16:21
Case
Next up we have the exciting expatrol. So I've mentioned this before. Brian Hitch is an artist who really benefits from, like, good colorists, like, colors who know how to work with him. Like, I. Nothing Brian Hitch worked on prior to working at Wildstorm on Stormwatch ever looked good to me. And then as soon as he got, like, the team that was working with him for first the authority, and then when he went over and did Marvel for ultimates, like looks amazing is the artist that defined the MCU. But for whatever reason, anything that came before that stuff, like he did X Men prime, he was popping up in all these other books, never looks good to me. I don't know why. I just can't stand his art with a slightly older style of coloring.
01:17:04
Case
And that's my first part about this because it's a Brian hitch art book with Barbara Kiesel as the writer on this one. And this is a tribute to the Baron Blood Teen Titans arc. Again, X Patrol, despite being like a portmanteau of X Men and Doom patrol, has a lot of teen titans elements going in it. It has a fun, punny name of Baron Blood combined with the brood.
01:17:31
Mitch
Now, this one does a lot in the way of doing the whole cable summers. Different family lines and different timeline stuff, right?
01:17:42
Case
Yeah. So they have a character who they don't identify at first. They just call him Jericho. Again, teen Titans kind of book. And Jericho, of course, has tied him with a lot of brother blood stories. It's revealed to be a different time version of Nathan Calder or, no, Niles cable. Pardon me?
01:17:59
Mitch
Niles cable.
01:17:59
Case
Yeah, which actually makes it more like the modern stories that have had young cable as opposed to, like, X Man, but he's very clearly supposed to be Nate Gray X Men character who was around at this point. Clearly, if we're talking about him, this means that this book dropped a little bit after age of apocalypse since that's where he was introduced. And. Yeah, I don't know. It's fine. It's less weird somehow than trying to explain Nate Gray.
01:18:31
Mitch
I mean, it just makes me think that they were like, we gotta poke fun at that kind of thing because that's what was going on.
01:18:37
Case
It is interesting that they decide to have his disguise be just the thing.
01:18:42
Mitch
But gray, I thought that was interesting. Yeah, that was weird.
01:18:46
Case
And I don't know why I get the Jericho side of it. It's just the thing.
01:18:55
Mitch
Which makes me think of what's the character? That's the young mutant now, Santos, that kind of looks like a gray version of the thing.
01:19:03
Case
Yeah, it's rock slide.
01:19:04
Mitch
Rock slide.
01:19:05
Case
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we get some fun allusions to stuff. Oh, also we have got Terra X, which is a fun hybrid of terra and Terax the Destroyer, one of Galactus heralds. Yeah. And his powers are also earth control because all Galactus heralds are based on a grecian element because silver surfer, despite being silver, is a surfer and thus a water elemental. There's Fire lord, there's Gabriel the air Walker, and then Terex. And then all the ones after that are kind of in that theme. But those first four are very hardcore. That theme to go along with the.
01:19:35
Mitch
Fantastic four being elementals themselves.
01:19:38
Case
Yeah, yeah. We get a couple more allusions to random characters that they never were going to find a space for by way of Dial H for Husk being able to transform into stuff. So she becomes an artemis character who is black, which is like, good call. It's artemisty knight.
01:19:55
Mitch
Artemisty knight. That's right.
01:19:57
Case
Which is just like, yeah, dial H for Husk is probably the best thing in this whole franchise in general, because you can just, like, throw out as many, like, weird amalgams as you want.
01:20:06
Mitch
Who didn't we use yet? Throw it in there. We got it. Yeah, we got a space for her.
01:20:10
Case
But that's about it for what I have to say about this book. Like, it's another one where this one's actually more like teen titans of a book. Like some X Men trappings.
01:20:18
Mitch
Yeah. All right, Iron Lantern.
01:20:21
Jmike
Yeah, we're not going to talk about pharaoh man here. Nice call back.
01:20:28
Case
Well, do you have anything to say about Feral?
01:20:30
Mitch
Lady said last time?
01:20:32
Jmike
Yeah, it's just a fun call back to Feralad.
01:20:34
Case
Yeah, I do love Feralad. And again, I didn't know who Feralad was when I first read these books with his character because he was only around this time being reintroduced in the final nights arc or, like, miniseries in DC.
01:20:48
Jmike
He did get the best send off in the tv show.
01:20:51
Case
Yeah, well, and he got the best send off when he first appeared. But again, like, it was the weird element of this character died in, like, the seventies, and, like, we're not allowed to, like, bring him back because, like, his death is the thing that's important. And so it was only when they did a reboot that they were allowed to bring him back, really, because, like, he was the legionnaire who gave his life for everyone, which also Colossus.
01:21:11
Mitch
Right. With the.
01:21:12
Case
Yeah, yeah. Not yet, though, because it was the end of Claremont's, like, second run on X Men, which was around 2000, when Colossus dies.
01:21:21
Mitch
Really?
01:21:22
Case
To cure everyone of the legacy virus.
01:21:23
Mitch
Oh, okay. That's interesting.
01:21:25
Case
Yeah. Because it was. Because it was distinctly like, Claremont came back. The sales weren't that good. Grant Morrison came back. 911 happened right when the genosha, like, giant catastrophe occurs, and it's like, oh, yeah. If that issue had been pushed back a month, it wouldn't have come back.
01:21:40
Mitch
Wow. Okay.
01:21:42
Case
Weird areas where, like, time, like, how do you remember time? I don't know. What are the big events?
01:21:47
Mitch
Big events? Yeah.
01:21:48
Case
How do you remember directions? I don't know. Where's the wendy's? Anyway, so. Iron Lantern. Yeah. So Hal Jordan's never been my favorite Green Lantern. Who is your Green Lantern? So I got into Green Lantern with Kyle Raynor, but I honestly like, Alan Scott's probably my go to Green Lantern.
01:22:06
Mitch
Okay. Kyle's mine.
01:22:08
Case
Yeah. It's between those two. Like, you know, I mean, you already.
01:22:11
Jmike
Know who mine is. My man Jon Stewart here.
01:22:16
Mitch
Yeah.
01:22:16
Case
And he's great. And became way more of a green lantern of choice for me once he was on Justice League.
01:22:23
Mitch
Yeah.
01:22:24
Jmike
I mean, he had to deal with what's your face, Vixen and Hawkgirl at the same time.
01:22:29
Case
Yeah. But, you know, this era, he was mostly known for accidentally wiping out a planet because he was overconfident and for a brief period, being a guardian.
01:22:40
Mitch
Wow.
01:22:41
Case
Green Lantern Mosaic was an interesting book.
01:22:44
Mitch
What was that other team that he was a part of that.
01:22:48
Case
The dark stars.
01:22:49
Mitch
Dark stars, that's right.
01:22:50
Case
Yeah. Which was the controller's equivalent to the Green Lantern Corps.
01:22:53
Mitch
Okay. And then I like how they, in this iron Lantern book, how they kind of incorporate everybody that is a Green Lantern. Like, we know to be a Green Lantern. Like, at some point in time, they wore the Iron Lantern armor or something like that, right?
01:23:08
Case
Yeah, yeah. They've got a lot of, like, vibes going on there. I didn't like how they didn't like my man. My man, Kyle Rayner.
01:23:17
Mitch
Make him a good guy in this. Yeah, but they tie it back to human Lantern again with Alan Scott.
01:23:24
Case
We get pepper Potts being combined with Carol Ferris and Madam mask being combined with star sapphire. I think that works.
01:23:30
Mitch
Yeah, that makes sense.
01:23:31
Case
Yeah. Like I said, this is actually a remarkably coherent combination of Silver Age Iron man and Silver Age Green Lantern. Like, if you only knew Green Lantern from, like, the Ryan Reynolds movie, you're like, oh, yeah, I see how this all works. And if you only knew Green Lantern from, like, a couple random comics from the sixties, you're like, I see how this all works. If you only knew Iron man from the nineties cartoon, from the, like, the. The old, like, seventies or eighties cartoons that had come out. If you only knew him from reading a couple random issues back in the day. And then, like, soma, avengers, all this, like, fits. It's all very classic set tropes.
01:24:03
Case
Only confusion I have here is there appears to be a killer croc or not killer crochet, King shark showing up a second time, and this time combined with, is it ultima? I'm blanking on the giant robot Iron man foe. It's about to say ultron. It's not ultimo.
01:24:21
Mitch
Maybe ultimo.
01:24:23
Case
Yeah, it's something like that. It's very similar. And you're like, why have all the robots have, like, the Ul prefixed and really cool use of the green Lantern ring to make yourself giant by having this layered armor on top of light, construct armor on top of light. Construct armor to make yourself be able to participate in a kaiju fight in space.
01:24:47
Mitch
Changing the color scheme of Iron man armor to green and yellow as opposed to red and yellow. I kind of dig it.
01:24:54
Case
Looks pretty good. You can easily picture an updated version of that. It works really well in general. Yeah, we get Mandarin Esto, who mostly is. It's interesting for all the Mandarin ring or all the Green Lantern rings, which at this point, we've had the howl goes evil and steals all the rings from people cover. That happened right before he became parallax. So there is that kind of vibe. But I'm also curious. Like, that's interesting. A lot of Green Lantern rings there. I'm not sure if they add to power that way or if it's just like, here's all the Green Lanterns I've killed.
01:25:27
Mitch
I wonder if you were to redo this now. If you could do armor war and War of light combined storyline.
01:25:35
Case
Yeah, the different cores, certainly with the mandarin side of it. If he had one of each ring, would be really cool.
01:25:42
Mitch
That would be cool.
01:25:43
Case
Yeah. Because a lot of adaptations of the Mandarin have moved away from him, each ring having its own unique, distinct power. And I think that's so cool. This ring specifically is ice beams. This ring specifically is fire. And I always like that. I like when you have just enough of a niche that it forces creativity. It's like my right hand is trapped, but my left hand is free, and I can only have these five ranks or something to that effect. But, yeah, like I said, it's a really solid silver age throwback. Then we get the magnetic men featuring magneto.
01:26:21
Mitch
So, once again, the idea to continue this particular storyline from the first one, I don't remember the magneto and his magnetic men book being all that great. The fact that they want to continue with the magnetic men featuring magneto, I.
01:26:38
Case
Have a theory for why you would do it, which is that the robots that they fight are all such wonderful niche comic book references that I feel like you'd almost just do it for that.
01:26:50
Mitch
Okay.
01:26:50
Case
Because each one of them is so in the arc. The magnetic men are rebuilt after some damage. Being like, you're all sentient, and I can't risk you getting hurt. So here's counter lives and lots of deep cut lore. But then they all get ambushed by all these other robots, which are all based on, in addition to being based on characters, each one of them is built off of, like, a specific fake metal from one of the companies. And I think that part is really fun, because then you've got, like, your claw one being built out of vibranium, and you've got your, like, vance cosmic being built out of Innerton, which is, like a legion of superhero metal. And, like, your vulture slash Hawkman one is built off of 9th metal or nth metal. That's all cool. That's all the same shit.
01:27:37
Case
That is the dark. The dark knights metal stuff.
01:27:39
Mitch
True.
01:27:40
Case
It's like, so, like, that's all, like, good ideas. I hate the redesigns of all the metal men here. They all look so much worse than the first issue, specifically, like, nickel. But, yeah, I mean, it's mostly just like, here's the fun of that. And then we got chemo and Arnim Zola. Yeah. Showing up here combined with Quasimodo and computo. Yeah. Anyway, it's like. It's like, kind of whatever. At the very end, all the robots team up with them, but that's the only reason I can think of it, where it's just like, oh, yeah. Wouldn't it have been more fun if instead of just, like, racking your brain to come up with more than the three actually existing magnet metals, which is a fun idea from the starting point, but there's only three actual metals that are magnetic.
01:28:25
Case
Wouldn't it be fun to, like, use all these fake metals from throughout continuity and tell a non story?
01:28:34
Mitch
Yeah, because it's very much a non story.
01:28:36
Case
Yeah. And, like, Tom Pyre, we, like, we talked about him a bit when we talked about the Superman 2000 pitch because he was the fourth person on that group, along with Morrison, Millar, and Wade. And, like, he does good stories, but this issue just isn't much of something. But I don't know. I mean, I guess the other part is, like, this is the era of, like, magneto. You know, they did Age of Apocalypse where Magneto was a hero. Joseph was a character right then. So, like, maybe they wanted to, like, do more magneto stuff because Magneto was popular and, like, becoming a hero in the books. I mean, like, the combos are cool.
01:29:10
Mitch
Yeah. And I think you're right. It was. It was an easiest way to get more out there using these characters. You had such a wide array of characters to use.
01:29:20
Case
Yeah.
01:29:21
Mitch
I just didn't think the first book was all that interesting. Maybe that's just me.
01:29:27
Jmike
Yeah, it looks cool.
01:29:30
Mitch
True.
01:29:31
Jmike
It's cool concept.
01:29:34
Mitch
I think the idea of splitting the two, like, the will Magnus and the Magneto character. Eric Magnus, I guess. Yeah. Was a cool idea.
01:29:44
Case
Yeah, that was a really cool background idea that they never, you know, will Magnus being the villain in the first JLX book was interesting, and at the same time, were getting it there and we talked about how there's, like, some weirdness with the writer for the original. So, you know, maybe they just wanted, like, some redemption on that arc and move on with their lives. But, yeah, it's just. It's just not a particularly exciting one. And, like, while the first issue had, like, very nineties art, it was, like, nineties art that was at least, like, cartoonishly appealing. And this one, like, is kind of, like, less interesting to me.
01:30:17
Mitch
Yeah.
01:30:19
Case
Moving on. Spider Boy team up. This is my other one that I really love.
01:30:23
Mitch
Oh, this is a great book.
01:30:25
Case
Yeah, this is super fucking cool. So for starters, I love, you know, like, the first one had Mike Waringo as the artist on this one, and this one has RK Sterncell, who has a very different style. But I love this, like, weird, kind of kirby esque, kind of anime look that he does. It's so fucking cool. I love Sky Vulture, which is the scavenger and vulture I bring in here. Fucking fun stuff. I love, I mean, legion of superheroes guys. This is the legion of superheroes book, finally, that they're doing. And like, goddamn, finally. I mean, where did, where to even start?
01:30:59
Mitch
I mean, I do love that superboy, spider boy, like, is takes off with takes more of the Peter Parker being smart, like, focus, I guess I don't. Wait. Characteristics. That's what I was looking for.
01:31:13
Case
Yeah. I mean, yeah, like, they play that up more, which is good. And they play that up more. I wonder. So behind the scenes when they did the first one, like Spider Boy is Ben Reilly and Connell, but they have elements of, like, the Clark Kent, Superboy and, like, classic Spider Man, Peter Parker stuff. But by this point, like, Peter Parker was back to being Spider man. So I wonder if there was, like, a little bit of an attempt to, like, more, make him a little bit more Peter Parker ish and like, emphasize kind of the science side, I would.
01:31:41
Mitch
Assume it have to be.
01:31:42
Case
And Legion of superhero stuff oftentimes. Superboy, you know, Superboy had a lot of super science. He had, you know, super robots and super other things, like Super Lab. I like that there is a tie in to the challengers of the fantastic bit here with the death Racer showing up, or silver Racer. Pardon me. And we get, like, all these iterations of the Legion of Galactic Guardians, which for people who are not familiar, prior to the two thousands, the Guardians of the Galaxy was a future super team. Like, they were superheroes in the far future, in the 30th century. And in their case, Earth had been taken over by the bedoon, which was like a lizard race of alien space conquerors.
01:32:19
Case
And they were like freedom fighters in this era, including Vance Astro, who was an astronaut frozen in time or in cryogenic suspense on his way to Alpha Centauri. And when he arrives there, we'd already figured out faster than light space travel. So he was like, oh, shit. My entire life was a waste. But he gets the shield of Captain America and becomes the leader of this whole team. Each of them from different colony worlds of humans that had been genetically modified to survive on their worlds. So Pluto was designed with people who could control their temperature really well because it's so cold. But they needed to be able to both adapt for cold, but also generate heat for things. The Charlie 27 is from Jupiter and is designed for super high gravity.
01:33:05
Case
So that was guardians of the galaxy and legion of superheroes we spent, like, two months talking about on this show.
01:33:11
Mitch
So was guardians of the galaxy then just like, a more direct answer for Marvel. Two legions of superlin.
01:33:18
Case
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, again, the structure is a little different because it's freedom fighters in a. The world has been taken over, although eventually they do win, and they're the super team of that era. Versus the Legion is more of a utopian type future. But they're both like, here's the future team. And they would both come back in time and deal with stuff. And in Guardians of the Galaxy, there's all this captain America lore because the shield is a thing that survives into the future and whatnot. And Vance Astro, who is the leader of the team when they come back in time, meets his younger self, who hadn't gone off to be an astronaut yet. And that character finds, realizes that he would eventually develop mutant powers and becomes a superhero instead of an astronaut.
01:33:59
Case
And that becomes the character known as first as Marvel Boy and then justice.
01:34:02
Mitch
Justice, yeah. I always knew him as justice, and.
01:34:05
Case
He'S a founder of the new warriors. So there is actually, like, even a superboy kind of element going on there, but it's, like, very weird and indirect. Anyway, so we got our first roll calls in this. Yeah, yeah. And there's so many fun ones here. I love living lightning lad. Yeah, yeah. Just like a bunch of great ones. Timberwolf by night.
01:34:28
Mitch
Paste eater Pete instead of paste pot Pete.
01:34:32
Case
Yeah, yeah.
01:34:35
Mitch
What's the character that Michael Rosenbaum does in the Guardians of Galaxy volume two? Or. Yeah, part two. That. It's the crystal guy.
01:34:43
Case
Oh, yeah, he. That's Martinex.
01:34:45
Mitch
Martinex.
01:34:45
Case
So in this, it's combined with brainiac five to be Martinex five.
01:34:49
Mitch
Martin X five. Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's it.
01:34:51
Case
I mean, there's so many fucking cool ones, we don't have time to go through every single one because, again, there's three roll calls. But so Spider boy is almost killed in by the scavulture. Like, he gets shot at and time freezes, and he's brought into the future so that he can, like, explain a thing to these people in the future before time breaks down and so he can be sent back to die. So this whole issue, he's just wait. Like, every time he comes back to his time, like, he's, you know, literally a second away from die and shit goes wrong because they fuck up. Like, their version of the fatal five show up, screws up everything, and he can't be out of time for too long, or he breaks reality. And so he does.
01:35:26
Case
And at first, it looks like he's going to split into Spider man and Superboy.
01:35:31
Mitch
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
01:35:32
Case
And then he gets pulled through five years later. So we get the five year gap legion stuff, which I don't know if you guys noticed this one. Like, once he goes into that time, they're doing the nine panel grid, which is an illusion. Like the giffen, infamously, in the. When he did the five year gap legion, like, really did, the Watchmen style nine panel grid was, like, slavishly. So we get that illusion there. It's this grim, dark future. You know, five year gap is like Earth is shit. Everyone's in these, like, you know, grungy, late eighties, like, outfits. Everything's terrible. And then it gets sent through time again, but now he's in the reboot era, and he's like, oh, no, I know how this goes. Except, like, everything's different.
01:36:12
Mitch
And then we get the tie in with Spider Man 2099.
01:36:16
Case
Yeah. Yeah.
01:36:17
Mitch
So making him Mon El and Miguel. I thought that was great.
01:36:23
Case
Yeah. Miguel O'Hara. That's a fun combo right there. The legion shows up in the past, and it's all fun. I like the legion ring, the anti gravity ring. So guardians of the galaxy, I believe, had anti gravity belts they could use. And the design with this sort of american kind of icon to it, to the star is a reference to the guardians of the galaxy stuff that they had. So it's really well integrated iconography for everything. So I just like, the art is super detailed here. It's way too in excess of what you would expect. Every circuit is illustrated. Everything is drawn way out. And I fucking said the wrong name before because I was looking at the credits. It's Ladron is the penciler. RK Stearnsl is the writer on it.
01:37:07
Mitch
Well, it's the amalgam of Roger Stern and Carl Kessler.
01:37:10
Case
Yeah, I think so. But either way, I said the wrong thing before holding. I just love this issue. It's so much fun. It's so much fun. Everything about is great.
01:37:20
Mitch
I have to assume it's more of a legion story than it is. So a superboy legion story than it is Spider man story, but with the whole Mon El going trapped in the Phantom zone till he gets cured of his lead poisoning by brainiac five. Right?
01:37:37
Case
Yeah, it definitely feels like at this time, this is more legion of superheroes, although now with more spider verse, stuff like Spider man has started to come. Feel more like this in some ways.
01:37:47
Mitch
Yeah. Yeah.
01:37:48
Case
I don't know. The pin up at the end is fucking gorgeous.
01:37:51
Mitch
It is.
01:37:51
Case
By the way of him sitting on a neon sign and you can see all the tubes for the. For the neonat. Yeah. But it's definitely, like, more superboy in the legion of superheroes throughout this whole thing. And I'm fine with that. I love it all.
01:38:04
Mitch
You mean part of the creator for Men of Steel is fine with the superboy legion of superhero card, right?
01:38:11
Case
Like, I love Spider man stuff, but, like, man, like this. Like, and I love Spider Man. 2099 is the other thing. So, like, I'm happy to do, like, allusions to all that. So great. It's great. I'm happy with it all. Like I said, you can tell, like, the two that are my favorite. I have, like, a lot to say. And then last up, we've got thryan of the new asgards.
01:38:31
Mitch
So I know, I don't know how you two feel about it, but I never been a fan of John Romita Junior art. So, like, this book has always been like, I don't want to read it, okay? So I don't even remember what happens.
01:38:47
Case
In this book, you know, not a lot, frankly. Like, it's a love letter to, like, kirby stuff, but it's mostly like, oh, loke de Saad is going to unleash terribleness and Thorion goes to face it and turns into a celestial at the end. Okay, this is the one which really clicked the whole. This is test runs for teams working on other books. Because like I said, Howard Porter on JLX would then go on to do JLA. But this is the one where it was the next year they announced the new Thor book, following heroes reborn or the heroes return, because they came back. And like I said, there was a, they had the Kurt Busaik, George Perez Avengers run. They had all these relaunches. Wade and Gurney picked up the Captain America book and whatnot. But Thor didn't come back at first.
01:39:31
Case
And it was another year before the Dan Juergens John Romita junior Thor run. So I feel like that's being like, hey, can you draw Thor? Shit, was the question. And it was like, yeah, I can do that. And most of the book is just an excuse to draw a lot of Jack Kirby stuff, but in John Romita style. I think this is the type of book Romita should be working on, though, because I like Romita the most when he's doing big barbarian type characters, like, when he's doing Thor. I don't really like Romita on Spider man.
01:40:00
Mitch
Yeah, I never liked him, which sounds.
01:40:01
Case
Like blasphemy, but it's because his dad was a famous Spider man artist.
01:40:04
Mitch
But they obviously have two different styles of art.
01:40:08
Case
Yeah, way different. Compare the Romitas to the Kuberts, like, Joe Kubert versus Andy and Adam andy Kubert. Like, their styles look way more consistent with each other and especially between Adam andy. But, like, the Romitas look so different. I don't know. Like, Romita. Like I said, like, I want him to have, like, big, dumb space shit. To draw big, dumb space shit with axes. Like, is perfect. Like, him working, like, when, like, Hercules and Thor and the destroyer are fighting the dark gods. Looks fucking dope.
01:40:39
Mitch
I do have to say his. His Hercules. I do. I do enjoy the. I do like the way his Hercules looks.
01:40:44
Case
And so it looks fine here for the most part. Like, I think the design for Thorion looks good enough, but it's kind of weird to take Jack Kirby's weird pseudo Sci-Fi take on gods and combine it with Jack Kirby's pseudo Sci-Fi take on actual gods or actual mythology, and then try to combine it into a way. Because the new gods were already based on actual mythology, but just, like, on more of a metaphoric level versus, like. Or an abstracted degree of it all versus Thor stuff was like, all right, we're gonna take gods, but we're gonna, like, strip the wagnerian and the ritual and so forth. And we're just gonna make them ancient aliens. And how those all weirdly mesh together here, where then we're combining that. It makes sense, but only so much. I don't know if that makes sense.
01:41:30
Case
I feel like the new gods and the eternals would have been a better fit for what they were trying to do. Because all we're doing here is we're taking norse mythology and making it slightly weird.
01:41:39
Mitch
Right.
01:41:41
Case
But that's about all. Yeah, not a lot happens. It's at the very end, it's like, oh, yeah. He faced off against the, like, this terrible force and prevented these Prometheans from being freed and became a guardian of the source.
01:41:55
Mitch
Yeah, we see the source wall in this. Right. Like, kind of thing.
01:41:59
Jmike
Yeah, that kind of. I mean, he's just standing there with his little axe in hand.
01:42:07
Case
It's a lot of cool visuals. It's just there's not a lot of story in this one.
01:42:10
Mitch
So then, do we. Do you think that this second run of the amalgam just didn't do well enough that they didn't come back for a third run?
01:42:17
Case
Yeah, it's weird that they did do another Axis mini series. Like, so there's axis, and then there's.
01:42:23
Mitch
All access and then Axis Unlimited.
01:42:25
Case
Yeah. Or was it all access then access?
01:42:28
Mitch
It's one of the two, because they.
01:42:30
Case
Did to the Axis miniseries the following year. And I was like, oh, cool, we'll get more amalgam stuff. And, you know, they had some cool ideas in the actual comic, but they didn't do actual amalgam books.
01:42:39
Mitch
Right.
01:42:39
Case
Which is interesting. It's also interesting that they didn't just, like, throw up their hands and say, like, let's just do all new shit. And I'm glad that they didn't. From the standpoint of Spider Boy team up and challengers of the fantastic, I think those are great books that built off of what was done the first time. Dark Claw Adventures, I think, is a great idea. Building off the. Off the first time. Fuck it. Sure. Super soldier. Sure. More of that. That's fine. But it is weird that they didn't stop to be like, oh, what else could we do that's new and different from the previous stuff.
01:43:05
Mitch
Right.
01:43:06
Case
And it would. And the next wave, it would have been. I would have been fine with, like, all new amalgam stuff. Like, do. Do Captain Mar. Captain America Junior.
01:43:14
Mitch
Yeah, do that.
01:43:16
Case
Do that Iceman Green Lantern hybrid.
01:43:18
Mitch
There's a. I mean, would you, would the two of you like to see something like this again? Because I know that you're both active on Twitter and you've probably seen that. Was it Cal Hussette who's been champion more?
01:43:30
Case
Yeah, I've been. Yeah, I've been seeing, like, I'm Algaemon. I think it's such a fun idea that people just gravitate towards because it's so easy to explain where it's like, it's your. It's these two characters mashed together.
01:43:41
Mitch
Right, right. And who doesn't like to just do that?
01:43:44
Case
Obviously, I'm all for more of this. I would love it. I would love a 2023 amalgamous event. Like, if DC and Marvel could get.
01:43:52
Jmike
Their shit together, that would be so much fun.
01:43:54
Mitch
Don't think it will ever happen again.
01:43:56
Case
Yeah, that's the problem.
01:43:58
Jmike
Well, I mean, never say never, but probably never.
01:44:04
Case
Because you could even imagine doing it where they really dwelled on the weird multiversal nods and really built off of that. Maybe an assemblers squadron supreme team up that leads into an event that has amalgams.
01:44:18
Mitch
Could be fun because didn't they, I know they didn't directly show it, but, like, they allude to it in doomsday clock. Like, when they, at the end of it, when they talked about the metaverse and all that stuff, like, wasn't there an amalgam character kind of in the background or in shadow or something like that?
01:44:35
Case
I wouldn't be surprised.
01:44:36
Mitch
Yeah. I mean, it's still on everybody's mind, I think. I think you're right. It's just because everybody loves to shove two characters together.
01:44:43
Jmike
Yeah, of course.
01:44:46
Case
Yeah.
01:44:47
Jmike
Like how we got dark.
01:44:48
Case
Of course I want more of this. It's so fucking fun. As long as it's not the norm. Yeah. And it's been, like, 25 years. It's time for another one.
01:45:01
Mitch
No, exactly. I mean, why wouldn't you. Why wouldn't they try and work something out for their 25th anniversary or I guess now 30th anniversary?
01:45:09
Case
Yeah, that'd be really cool. But don't know if it would ever happen, but I would, obviously, I'd be happy for it. The books have gone in such weird directions over time. Avengers matter in a way that they didn't hear were talking last time. It's like Captain Marvel. Carol Danvers is a totally different character than whatever was going on at the time. Binary was a character that no one talked about unless you were really deep into X Men and specifically space X Man lore. There's so many things you could do now, and you could make allusions. Can you imagine a parody of the Snyder cut combined with endgame?
01:45:43
Mitch
Oh, wow.
01:45:45
Jmike
Wow, that would be awesome.
01:45:49
Case
Yeah. Especially, like, multimedia, like. Cause it would be really cool and everyone would pay to see it, but then they'd have to decide who gets the money.
01:45:55
Mitch
Yep.
01:45:56
Jmike
That would be the worst.
01:45:57
Case
Yeah, yeah. And you could imagine, like, a Miles Morales John Kent amalgam right there.
01:46:02
Mitch
Yeah, yep.
01:46:03
Case
Yeah. Lots of fun stuff you could do with it, but probably won't. But, yeah.
01:46:08
Jmike
Be here for just a dash of on the rocks.
01:46:12
Case
Yeah. And, like, I'm trying to think, like, okay, so with, like, krakoa era X Men, what would you do with that? With DC and, like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Now I'm like, That is actually, like, kind of rough. Unless you did it, like, you kept it with, like, doom patrol, but it was now more like a leper colony. Yeah, it'd be fun to build on. I would love to see all that. And I'm like, artists and writers could come up with really creative stuff, and sometimes that would be from the restrictions of, like, okay, this character's already called, but we have these other characters and see what people could come up with would all be a lot of fun. And like we said, ambush bug could be used, Deadpool could be used. You could get some real meta stuff going on there.
01:46:51
Case
You could have a lot of fun with that at all.
01:46:53
Mitch
Yeah. I wonder if you would go back to the. I mean, obviously the iconic, as you said in the last recording we did, dark claw being a very noticeable one or one that people remember iconic. But wouldn't you? I feel like it'd be Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark merging together the same, you know, Iron Man, Batman. Just because of the popularity of those characters.
01:47:15
Case
Yeah, probably. Or. Or do, like, Steve Rogers with Batman this time to kind of play it up in a weird way.
01:47:21
Mitch
That'd be cool.
01:47:22
Case
Or you can find the Bruce's, like, you have, like, a raging Bat monster kind of thing.
01:47:28
Mitch
Well, yeah. Thank you for having me come on to talk about this again.
01:47:32
Case
Thanks for coming back. It was a lot of fun to revisit these books again. It's been 25 years to read these books for me.
01:47:38
Jmike
You know, I was. I don't remember how old I was, but I was young when these came out.
01:47:44
Case
Yeah. J Mike, of these top three books, what, for the whole amalgam run. Like, we're not. Not just wave two.
01:47:51
Jmike
I really like Spider Boy because that was actually a lot of fun, both. Both iterations. Dark claw, just because. And which one had the Doctor strange fate?
01:48:03
Case
Doctor strange fate.
01:48:04
Mitch
Yeah, yeah.
01:48:05
Jmike
Which one was that one? I don't remember which one.
01:48:06
Case
It was just Doctor Strange fate.
01:48:08
Jmike
Well, there you go. I love Doctor fate. And I was like, holy crap. He amalgam with, like, Doctor Strange and Charles Xavier. This is too powerful.
01:48:20
Mitch
It's too much, man.
01:48:21
Case
You took too much. Oh, that's how you do it. You do magic instead of mutants because they have, like, homo magi in, like, DC in DC stuff where, like, humans who are innately magical.
01:48:32
Mitch
Okay.
01:48:33
Case
And then you make all the X Men stuff, like, magic. And then it could be Avalon, which is already X Men stuff anyway, so it combines really well there.
01:48:38
Mitch
Yep.
01:48:39
Case
Oh, shit. Okay, Mitch, what top three?
01:48:43
Mitch
I think, again, you're gonna go with super soldier. Definitely Spider Boy. And I think I really. I had a lot of fun with that iron Lantern book. I think that was a. It was a fun book.
01:48:52
Case
So for a top three, this is gonna be, like, kind of lame because it's gonna be for me. Spider Boy. Spider Boy team up in challengers of the fantastic, which. And then the close runner up is Dark Claw Adventures, which is different than where it was when I was younger because I liked it fine, but I was more there for the edgy look of the first issue of Dark Claw. But rereading it, I'm like, oh, no, this is a great issue. But the Spider Boy books, those two are just easily the standouts for me. I fucking love them. I think they're fucking great. Challenges of the Fantastic Ross is just a lot of fun.
01:49:33
Mitch
I mean, I definitely have to say that the design of Dark Claw is so great. Like, just the look of the character. I think when rereading that Legends of the Dark claw book, I didn't get the whole. I didn't get as much from it as I thought I did the first time around, or maybe I just did the first time around, and this time, it didn't hit me as much. But the adventures of Dark Claw book was much better.
01:49:57
Case
Well, and it's a full story, right? Instead of, like, a fake, like, cliffhanger at the end. Yeah. Like, dark cloud ventures and Lobo the duck are also, like, close up there for me. And honestly, that puts four of them higher up on the list than anything else besides Spider Boy from the original run. And I like that original run. It's just none. Like, more of those are, like, the idea is cool, and the art's cool, and a lot of them have, like, fake cliffhangers that, like, kind of mean that the story doesn't have a resolution. So it's like, here's a fun premise, and. And that's about it. But, yeah, I'm just so lame because the Spider boy is so good. Like, the Spider Boy costume's so good. The art in both books are great. Like, the story in general is fucking awesome.
01:50:34
Case
I just goddamn love it. And, like I said, challenge the fantastic. So good. Even if it's just doing the beats of the Galactus saga, it's like, the Galactus story is a really good one. Yeah, that's. That's where I'm at. I wish, looking back, that I had more to say about super soldier because it's a good idea, but neither issue has a lot going on in it. It's unfortunately the problem of Superman comes and saves the day type situation.
01:51:01
Mitch
It's the thing you're battling against with your podcast here.
01:51:04
Case
Yeah. Which is rough. And you would think it wouldn't be as much. And they have good reasons for him to have threats. The first super soldier feels like the robot fight Max Fleischer cartoon, but, you know, like, he's getting weak and he's fighting, and it's a struggle, but it's just. It doesn't feel like there's as much going on as some of these other books. Like that first Spider Boy book has so much shit in it, and then the legion of superhero tie in is so much shit. And there's so much stuff for you to look at and to take in and to, like, appreciate and, like. And he's getting married to Mary Jane. But I stand by my take that I think that technically speaking, the second round is better. The first round has more energy, and that's sort of like the.
01:51:49
Case
So I don't begrudge anyone preferring the first round. And the second round doesn't have quite the same vigor because it just happened. It's round two, but it has, like I said, I think better across the board writing and actual appreciation of the larger lore and more deep cut references.
01:52:05
Mitch
Okay.
01:52:05
Case
Fun to revisit, definitely. If you can track these down, track them down. They're a lot of fun, especially the spider Boy books, in my opinion. But all of these are really strong contenders. And, you know, even the worst of them are at least, like, interesting to look at. Like I said, like, speed demon is my least favorite of this whole group. And the COVID is amazing.
01:52:23
Mitch
Yeah.
01:52:26
Case
Like, check that shit out.
01:52:32
Mitch
I love that.
01:52:33
Case
Like, they're all fun. Like, Doctor Doom is combined with doomsday. That can't go wrong. But, yeah, so that was a lot of fun. I really appreciate looking back at this. And Mitch, thank you for coming back on.
01:52:44
Mitch
Thank you. Thank you both for having me. Great time.
01:52:47
Case
People want to find you. Where can they find you? Follow you.
01:52:49
Mitch
You can definitely find me on Twitter. I spend a lot of time there trying to interject my opinions at themichopedia.
01:52:57
Case
J Mike, where can they find you?
01:52:59
Jmike
Find me on Twitter 101.
01:53:01
Case
As for me, you can find me at case Aiken. You can find the podcast in the pod. It turns out there's now a new min of Steel 14. I saw when I, because I still have some links up that have our old Twitter handle, but whatever. We're men of Steel pod now, guys. You can find it on Twitter steelpod. You can find more episodes of this show and tons of other great shows@certainpov.com. Where you can find a link to our discord server. We have so much stuff going on the Discord server. Sneak peeks at stuff, great conversations. There's a lot of nerds there. So if you are a nerd for anything, there is going to be someone there who shares your nerddom. So check it out.
01:53:40
Case
I feel like nerds of a feather should flock together and this is a great place to take flight, keeping that metaphor going. But then you should also be checking out tons of great shows. I'm going to throw out one that is a perfect tie in for who our guest is. We have recently relaunched United States of women on the network, so check that out. It used to be part of geek elite media, but the show is living on. Jessica and Elizabeth are doing a great job chronicling important women state by state as they join the union. And it's really cool. The first two seasons are out as of us recording it right now. The second two will probably be out by the time this actually hits the air, so check that out.
01:54:23
Case
And new episodes are starting in May, so very likely we're going to be at that point by the time this episode drops. But it's a great show with lots of historic information that's awesome to check out. And it's a great framing device of looking state by state in terms of order. I think that makes it really easy to go on what can be a very daunting task, which is like, how do you respect the underappreciated people in history? And it's like, well, what's the framing device for that? And the show's great for that. And Mitch, you're the editor for that.
01:54:51
Mitch
Yeah, you know what? There's lots of things that I've learned just from having or just from listening and editing the podcast, so it's great.
01:54:59
Case
Yeah. So great show. Check that out. It's at certainpov.com. And until next time, stay super man.
01:55:09
Jmike
Mend of steel is a certain POV production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is edited by Matt Storm. Our logo is by Chris Bautista. Episode art is by case Aiken, and our theme is by Jeff Moon.
01:55:27
Mitch
We just finished brunch with our parents, but we had it here, so I didn't have to go anywhere nice.
01:55:34
Case
Yeah. Originally it was supposed to be a trip because, like, my parents have a beach house in Delaware, and they were like, we'll all go out to the beach for Easter. I'm like, I can't take off a week because, like, the Wi Fi is terrible there, so I can't actually do any work if I'm out there. And it's a two and a half hour drive. So it's like, it's just long enough that it's not like I can just, like, pop over there for the evening and then, like, come back, like, in the afternoon the following day. Like, it. Like, it feels like too much of a trip.
01:56:01
Mitch
Yeah.
01:56:01
Case
Yeah. But, yeah. Hope you enjoyed it. My parents are like, have we failed you as a Christian right now? Hey there, screen beans. Have you heard about screen snark? Rachel, this is an ad break. They aren't screen beans until they listen to the show. Fine. Potential screen beans. You like movies and tv shows, right? I mean, who doesn't? Screensnark is a casual conversation about the movies and television shows that are shaping us as we live our everyday lives. That's right, Matt. We have a chat with at least one incredible guest every episode, hailing from all we've interviewed chefs, writers, costumers, musicians, yoga teachers, comedians, burlesque dancers, folks in the film and tv industry, and more. We'd be delighted for you to join us every other Monday on the certain POV podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts, fresh and tasty off the presses.
01:56:58
Mitch
What?
01:56:59
Case
That's. No, that's not. Can I call them screen beans now?
01:57:03
Mitch
Fine.
01:57:05
Case
Screensh. So tune in and we'll see you at the movies or on a couch somewhere. Cause you're a whole screen beans, man.
01:57:18
Mitch
You will be mine.
01:57:23
Case
CPOV certain pov.com.