Pick of the Week Podcast
Show Notes
Books! Dissent in the ranks! Disagreement at the highest fundamental levels! However, coupled with a mutual respect for divergent views, the show soldiers on, unsullied. While it’s a big milestone for the big comic this week, we’ve still got a job to do, and that job is comics. Are you supposed to put a comma in 1000 if it’s on a comic cover? Did the CCA handle these things?
Running Time: 01:17:53
Pick of the Week:
00:01:27 – Detective #1000
Comics:
00:18:29 – Heroes In Crisis #7
00:23:45 – Invaders #3
00:29:11 – Daredevil #3
00:28:41 – Fantastic Four #8
00:39:40 – Dial H for Hero #1
00:42:13 – Shazam! #4
00:46:03 – The Flash #67
00:45:23 – Bad Luck Chuck #1
00:48:29 – Black Science #39
Patron Pick:
00:50:40 – Batman Beyond #30
Patron Thanks:
00:58:04 – Michael Hemsley
00:59:43 – Doug
01:01:20 – Donald Dohm
01:03:01 – VerumLibertas
Audience Questions:
01:03:35 – Mike B. wants to know about Garth Ennis’ The Demon series.
01:05:31 – Andrew F. wants more comics like the current Shazam! series, and Aquaman.
01:09:51 – Andrew M. is curious if Jonathan Hickman can return the X-Men to glory.
Brought To You By:
• iFanboy Patrons – Become one today for as little as $3/month! Or make a one time donation of any amount!
• iFanboy T-Shirts and Merch – Show your iFanboy pride with a t-shirt or other great merchandise on Threadless! We’ve got seven designs!
Music:
“1000 More Fools”
Bad Religion
Subscribe
Get Involved
Doing the podcast is fun and all, but let's be honest, listening to the 2 of us talk to each other can get repetitive, so we look to you, the iFanboy listeners to participate in the podcast! "How can I get in on the fun?" you may ask yourself, well here's how:
- E-Mail us at contact@ifanboy.com with any questions, comments or anything that may be on your mind.
Please don't forget to leave your name and where you're writing from and each week, we'll pick the best e-mails to include on the podcast!
Find us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Some rights reserved.
Josh, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed? 😉
Here’s my ranking of the 11 Detective Comics #1000 stories. Starting with my least favorite to the best!
#11. “Return to Crime Alley” – I felt super bad for Batman in this Denny O’Neil story. Perhaps Leslie Thompkins was a little too harsh on Bruce. O’Neil was good back in the day but his glory days are over.
#10. “Heretic” – Christopher Priest and Neil Adams deliver the issues most forgettable story. Not a fan of Adams art.
#9. “Medieval” – Tomasi and Mahnke set up the next story arc of Detective here. I know we are suppose to be excited but was left feeling a bit underwhelmed by it.
#8. “The Last Crime in Gotham” – Geoff Johns and Kelly Jones answer the question “what does Batman do when he’s succeeded in his quest to rid Gotham of crime?” The answer is eat some birthday cake. Subpar story and art.
#7. “I Know” – interesting story by Bendis and Maleev but kinda falls flat in the end. But stellar art by Maleev.
#6. “Batman’s Design” – No surprise twists in this straight up Warren Ellis story. Becky Cloonan does a nice job in translating the grim and grittiness.
#5. “Longest Case” – Snyder and Capullo. Nuff said.
#4. “The Precedent” – Nice flashback tale about the problem of taking in orphans and training them to be crime fighters by Tynion and Martinez-Bueno.
#3. “Legend of Knute Brody” – Paul Dini pins a fun little tale with BTAS style art by Dustin Nguyen. Nice one.
#2. “Batman’s Greatest Case” – Tom King shows is his lighter side in this heartwarming story, wonderfully drawn by Daniel and Jones.
#1. “Manufacture for Use” – this night the best thing Kevin Smith’s done since Clerks! Loved this one. Smith played to Jim Lee’s strength which is drawing pin-ups of Batman and his rogues gallery.
I agreed with Josh on Detective Comics 1000. It coul’ve been something different like I already knew what I was getting when I bought the comic. How could it be different? I don’t know but let’s take a look at how DC approached both Superman and Batman’s 75th Anniversary Shorts. They’re entirely different but they’re both great for what they are.
Those are great shorts, but that was a completely different medium where it would be difficult to pull that off in a comic especially with the music changes in the Superman one.
They were both tributes shown in different ways. The Superman one was all his greatest hits, like an anthology comic while Batman’s was one focused story. Both milestone tributes, both great and differently told.
It needed more homage. Give me some little one page interviews of creators in Batman’s history (Dennis O’Neil, Adams, Dixon, ect). Give me some photos of Kane and Finger, Sprang, Breyfogle, Aparo. How about some pinups of how the characters have changed over time with a thank you to its readership for the support? (How is there no ‘thank you’ They’ve always done a thank you. Why was it all about Batman? Should have included some of the Detective comics support characters.
Josh, you are spot-on. This was good. Fun stories. Great creators. BUT it could have been so much more and its gonna be another 20 years (100 year) before they have a chance to do something this cool again.
I will add context to the current Batman Beyond series. This is not the same series that Conor read in the past. That was Batman Beyond 2.0 and actually set in the animated universe. That was a great series until the reveal of Bruce impregnating Barbara happened which goes back to them dating as mentioned in the Batman Beyond TV show. They were also dating during The Mystery of the Batwoman movie. The current series wasn’t set in the animated universe and was another future in the DC Universe where Jason Todd was killed by the Joker. This was the first issue that Doc Shaner drew and he was not a regular on the series and I read it because he was doing the art. Doc Shaner should be a far bigger name at this point and doing a random issue of Batman Beyond was very strange to me since he never drew the comic before.
Related to the discussion of what could have been with Detective Comics 1000, someone from outside the industry should have added a long form story. Stephen King? Jordan Peele? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (after comic fans went nuts over her Rorschach reference she seems like a get). Maybe DC reached out to folks like this but I’m guessing they did not.
I always hold these anniversary issues up to Superman 400 (http://theages.superman.nu/400/) and Batman 400 (https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman_Vol_1_400). These were so different from the ongoing books at the time from the covers to the contributing artists to the loosely connected but widely varied stories. Without the cover dressing, does DC1000 stand out from the other covers on the shelf? Nope. Take away the cover dress for Supes and Bats 400 and they pop!
Thanks for another great show.
That run of Anniversary issues DC had in the Eighties is the type of thing I’d hoped for here – big stories, perhaps creators jams, linked to a single narrative idea eg Legion #300 or Flash #300.,, this was indeed better than the normal anthology but overall just another Batman giant. Remember Sam Hamm and Denys Cowan’s Blind Justice from Detective #598-#600? That sort of thing would have been great.
Still, most of the stuff here was enjoyable. The Batman’s Longest Case was poor in the idea that X years into his career Batman still had to prove himself to the likes of Slam Bradley and Whoever Hawkman Is This Week?
The Tom King story suffered from the production issue of having so many unseen characters chatting in narrative boxes of the same colour, even those little corner symbols would have helped.
The Power of Shazam series that followed the OGN was terrific. I like the new book for what it is ie not a Shazam book, but again with Black Adam? Can’t Geoff Johns just marry him and be done with it?
As a lapsed X-Men reader I agree with Conor. I think AvX was the nail in the coffin for me. I’m not sure any creative team could convince me to read X-Men religiously again if they keep with the status quo. I find I’m bored with it. There have been some bright spots, but mostly nothing manages to rekindle that flame. Morrisson might have been the last one. Like Conor, I feel they just keep telling the same stories and also they tend to be overburdened by the weight of their continuity. Picking up an X-Book now after being lapsed is like tuning into a random episode of a long running soap opera. When they try and turn up the melodrama dial, and it’s not connecting, it feels super awkward to me.
The movies to me feel like they are in the same place. I totally am not looking forward to another poor adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga. I hope they surprise me, but I’m going in with super low expectations. What’s interesting to me is I’m excited to see what Marvel does with FF now, but I don’t know how to feel about X-Men coming into the MCU continuity potentially in the future. It’s nice now that they get a whole archives of mythology to explore that was previously locked to them (thus giving the MCU a potential new lease on life when their older properties age out), but while it’s new to the MCU the X-Men mythology is not a new thing to movie going audiences. They’d need to find some way to come at it from a very different angle compared to the Fox approach to make it feel fresh. Are audiences really gonna want to sit through Charles and Erik crying each other’s names for the entire movie again?. As great as their relationship was in First Class and X2 it seems almost comical now going into the seventh iteration. Very similar experience to the comics for me.