Pick of the Week Podcast

Pick of the Week #531 – Star Wars Special: C-3PO #1

Show Notes

Let’s just start with an apology. This week we had a rough time with the recording and the audio quality in general is not up to our standards. Ron Richards is on hotel wi-fi in Orlando, Josh Flanagan had intermittent connectivity issues at his home base and we might be listening to Conor Kilpatrick slowly dying before our very ears. So we’re sorry about the audio quality. As for the content of the show itself, we cannot apologize. After 11 years, it is what it is. Enjoy!

Running Time: 00:51:00

Pick of the Week/Star Wars Corner:
00:01:38 – Star Wars Special: C-3PO #1
00:13:38 – Star Wars: Darth Vader #19

Star Wars Special C-3PO_1Comics:
00:15:06 – Black Road #1
00:18:07 – Moon Knight #1
00:21:24 – Batman / Superman #31
00:25:02 – Guardians of the Galaxy #7
00:27:53 – Citizen Jack #5
00:29:45 – Heart Throb #1
00:32:15 – All-New X-Men #8
00:33:58 – Jupiter’s Circle, Vol. 2 #5

Audience Questions:
00:36:12 – Luke wants to know what happened in X-Men comics before Chris Claremont but he doesn’t want to read the issues to find out.
00:40:45 – Brian from Long Island, NY doesn’t like the way that modern comics are written and doesn’t feel like he can give them to his daughters.

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Music:
“Workin’ Man Blues”
Merle Haggard

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Comments

  1. Don’t sweat it, iF crew. It’s all good.

  2. Thanks so much for doing this show, I hope health is better and races were run.

    You were spot on, Ron, that X-Men was drawn by Werner Roth, Jay Gavin was a pseudonym, apparently made up of his son’s forenames. It was one of those Gene Colan/Adam Austin deals whereby an artist drawing for DC doesn’t want them to know he’s also working for Marvel.

    I feel for Brian, but yes indeed, comic characters have to sound like themselves. If Soule were writing Obi Wan Kenobi, I’m sure the voice would be more ‘proper’. (Well, not super-sure, I’m not too up on Star Wars, but heck, he was played by Sir Alec Guinness and I remember him being a bit theatrical. So long as Sttar Wars and My Little Pony comics aren’t all the young girls are reading, that they’re part of a varied diet including decent books, what’s the problem?

    (And if Hasbro today are anything like they were when I was editing UK MLP comics in the Nineties, and writing the odd script, the editors will be so fraught getting the scripts passed that they may well miss the odd semi-colon…)

  3. Luke who had the first audience question this week should check out Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men Podcast.

    They cover the particular era of X-Men in question as well as a wide range of other X-Men arcs and various spin-off books in semi-chronological order. In addition to the comics they often discuss the various cartoon and film incarnations as well. The hosts are a married couple that were geek high school sweethearts so they have excellent chemistry and it makes for a fun listen.

    http://www.xplainthexmen.com/

  4. Another great show gentlemen. I can’t believe Conner didn’t care about Threepio’s red arm. He must be dead inside. Hahahaha I’m joking of course, but damn I felt bad for him. He sounded bad and he needs to take better care of himself. Ron and Josh could do a twosome if needed 🙂 Hell, I remember when Josh was by himself one time, and I loved it (mainly because he had an oh shit quality to his voice 🙂 ) Keep up the great work ya’ll, looking forward to the next one.

  5. I really admire your dedication.

  6. I’m 100% in agreement with Josh about GotG. I loved the Annihilation stuff and the books that spawned off of that event. When Bendis relaunched GotG I was hyped. I read the first 10 or so issues and it just was not for me. It didn’t feel connected to the depiction of the team I loved previously. The same with the new Nova book. They are fine, but they are very different from what I had come to expect from these cosmic characters.

    What’s interesting is somehow the GotG movie did feel connected to the depiction of those characters and I loved it. Then the book shifted to mimic the movie and it still didn’t work for me. I think I’m just not connecting with Bendis’ voice for the book I think. The shoe horning of characters into the book and the over reliance on the Spartax/J’Son story (which I really could care less about) were probably two other big sore spots for me.

  7. I’v been thinking about emailing you guys for literally months. Have you seen the “What Do Artiss Do All Day?” episode featuring Frank Quitely? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy6lSE0bTeA

  8. I’ve got bad news for Brian from Long Island: not only aren’t comics now as dumb as he thinks, but the comics from his childhood weren’t as smart as he remembers.

    I read my kids (ages 8 and 5) a seventies issue of Marvel Team-Up every night as a bedtime story. I picked the series thinking, “They love Spider-Man team-ups, but nothing published now is appropriate for their age group, so I’ll read the ones from when I was little. They used to write so eloquently, yet managed to be friendly for all ages!”

    Well, that turned out to be wrong while also being entirely, completely wrong. The last couple of nights, Chris Claremont has given us Red Sonja, Satana, and a Black Widow with amnesia who faints into Spider-Man’s arms every time there’s action, so I’ve set my kids’ gender education back 40 years while also introducing them to the concept of demonic possession right before bed. More relevantly, though, the books are RIDDLED with errors both grammatical and punctuational. (“Punctuational” would not be out of place in one of these comics.) They let writers edit their own books at Marvel in the seventies. They only seemed smarter to us at the time because we didn’t know the words when we were eight. I know them now. They’re not always usin’ ‘em right. You can’t go home again, Brian from Long Island!

  9. Completely agree on the Moon Knight commentary. Why is Marvel so bent on pushing this character? I feel like he was just some d-list character for years. Is there a movie in the works I’m not aware of??

  10. I have a soft spot for Moon Knight since the Moench-Sienkiewicz days, when it was ground-breaking. It’s true there have been a lot of bad runs since, until the Ellis-Declan Shalvey run, which was a critical and commercial success. After they left from selling over 50,000 each month the sales petered out as sales tend to do in comics. I’m puzzled by the “why are they trying to make moon knight work?” view because this is a pattern for almost all the titles. Why are they trying to make anything work? This Lemire-Smallwood issue is the best since that run, it shows the borderline insanity of the character and you never really know if he’s completely delusional. I like this, so I don’t really understand Josh’s comments about not wanting to read delusions in comics, which ought to be the home of delusions IMHO.

    • I understand what you mean, and I agree with some of the things you said. Yes, absolutely creators and companies want their characters to work. Create something people enjoy, make some money, everyone is happy. To me it just feels like Moon Knigt is a character that had been dormant for so long, and there is obviously a reason for it. While I’m not saying every character created needs to reach the level of Spider-Man to be considered relevant, I’d say it’s pretty clear Moon Knight just didn’t connect with enough readers. If so, we would have consistently seen more of him.

      So, again, why now? I’d say this is a blip on the Marvel radar for a fleeting bit…Moon Knight will then fade off into obscurity, only to perhaps be dusted off again many years down the road. And I won’t understand that try either.

    • @Snts6678 with Ellis and Shalvey it was selling as well as the likes of Thor, Iron Man and the X-Men. Of course its a C-list character, but Marvel’s current strategy is to flood the market with lots of titles in order to make a little money of each of them to make the whole business model work. MK has its cult following and the casual readers will look when there are good creators, and we are talking about what everyone including on the podcast says is a really good comic! I’m not sure what the problem is.

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