Ilash

January 27, 2019 2:58 pm Yoiks that is annoying. Easy enough to fix, though. I just downloaded it and played it in Potplayer with the audio speakers set to "mono".

December 15, 2018 3:28 pm I liked this even more than you guys - Ryan aside, perhaps. Really interesting discussion but it made me realize just how few, if any, reservations I have about this film. I already thought 2018 was a top-notch year for superhero movies but I truly feel that this is probably the best of them. Yup, better even than Infinity War, which blew me away. I thought the pacing was pretty spot on - and I do think it did slow down just enough for those more emotional moments - and I don't think the extra Spider characters did anything to take away from Miles, who was always the centre of attention, but just solidified the overall theme that anyone (or, really, any outsider) could be Spider-man. Plus, they were funny as hell and, as someone who is a John Mulaney super-fan, I couldn't get enough of his Spider-ham. This is a pure 5-star film for me and one of my very favourite films of the year.

December 10, 2018 10:49 am Thanks for another year of awesome POTW shows guys. Great show as always. I have been loving Doomsday Clock, specifically because it's such a strange beast. I haven't read this issue yet but I'm sure I'll feel about it exactly the same as I have about the rest of it. First, I'm absolutely with you on the matter of this series clearly being Johns' vision for the future of the DCU that will probably be treated as an Elseworlds project because of the way the power structure at DC has shifted, As a piece of work, though, it's fascinating and incredibly compelling. Even when I haven't liked the stories he's told or his characterization (you know me and my feelings on Flash: Rebirth), I've always thought that Geoff Johns was one of the best craftsmen in the business. He has outdone himself here, though, working on levels that I never would have imagined he was capable of: taking on Watchmen and actually capturing at least some of Moore's peerless craft for his own story. I'm starting to think there's something to those nine-panel grids... What's interesting, though, is that even with the exceptional writing in terms of plotting, characterization and even dialogue (not something for which Johns is generally known) and non-more-incredible art, there's still a sort of shallowness to this story that means it doesn't quite reach the levels of Watchmen or King's Mister Miracle. This is true of Johns' work, in general, I think. He's the ultimate fanboy writer who generally has an impressive understanding of the DCU and its characters (Barry Allen aside) and armed with real writing chops, he can do this sort of fictional-universe-defining stuff better than almost anyone. What he doesn't do is put much of himself into his work; he has seldom done creator-owned comics and most of his superhero work doesn't feel like it has much to say about anything beyond the characters and stories themselves. He's the very opposite of someone like Tom King, basically. At least that's how I read it. Either way, it's ironic that Doomsday Clock so perfectly encapsulates Johns' strengths and weaknesses when, on the surface, it's such a departure for him! The reason I say this is interesting, incidentally, is because none of this changes how much I have been loving this series. I look forward to new issues of this about as much as I look(ed) forward to new issues of Mister Miracle and Lazarus. And it's really nice to say that about a Geoff Johns book again. As for your audience question, as someone who has been paid to write film reviews for the better part of a decade and who still feels like I've only just begun to learn the craft, my best advice pretty much mirror's yours: read a lot of comics; read a lot of reviews (of all sorts of media but especially comics, obviously) and, most importantly, just keep writing those reviews/long-form criticism. Like any form of writing, practice may not make "perfect" but it certainly does make "better". Learning about the craft of comics is essential but you can probably get that as much from reading different kinds of comics (I love superhero comics but don't limit yourselves to them) as from books specifically dedicated to dissecting the craft. Though, of course, that said, McCloud's Understanding Comics is a must-read - but then, it's a must-read for all comics fans. Thanks to Chadwpost, though, for that recommendation. Reading Comics sounds like a fascinating read.

November 25, 2018 9:22 pm I see... Cool, that's just what sprung immediately to mind while you guys were discussing it. Either way, though, it does like a promising series. I'll probably wait for the trade, though.

November 25, 2018 8:12 pm American Carnage, which I haven't read, sounds an awful lot like BlacKKlansman (I think that's how you spell it), which was based on an insane true story of a pair of cops, one black, one Jewish, who infiltrated the KKK. Have you guys seen it? It's fantastic.

November 18, 2018 4:47 pm Ah, OK, fair enough. I actually don't agree at all but I do see where you're coming from, at least.

November 18, 2018 4:13 pm Just that you were saying it was business as usual with WW comics when it clearly wasn't. Rucka's run was a semi-reboot and there were a number of prestige WW graphic novels at the same time. Not a big thing but I think you were slightly understating the push that DC was giving Wonder Woman in comics at the time the movie came out.

November 18, 2018 3:49 pm I haven't gotten my hands on Mister Miracle yet but I've heard a lot of negative things about it - but these negative comments seem mostly to be that this very non-traditional superhero comic didn't have a conventional superhero ending. I was still really excited to read it as I've adored the rest of the series but your discussion has me more excited than ever. I'm almost tempted to download it before going to the comics shop and getting my hands on the physical copy. If this final issue was even half as good as the rest of the series, though, I couldn't agree more about this being an Important superhero comic - the sort of medium-redefining, standalone stories that DC have proven themselves to be particularly great at (though thanks to the creators they hire and the relative freedom they give them, of course). Which is why, incidentally, I'm still surprised that it hasn't been folded into their Black Label imprint, which seems to be all about those kinds of comics. As for Wonder Woman, I have to correct you guys. Again, I haven't read this title as of yet but I think you may be misremembering how things were when the film was released. Around the time the movie came out, we had Grant Morrison's Wonder Woman: Earth One; Jill Thompson's The True Amazon and Greg Rucka's Year One. I have lost complete track of time so I'm not sure if it was Rucka on the main book at the time but either way, you had those three WW origin stories plus recent collections of George Perez' and Rucka's original runs as well. Maybe not at the exact same time as the movie but all within a few months of it, I think I'm right in saying. And, needless to say, that was a really great, balanced (but rightly unreserved) tribute to Stan Lee.

November 11, 2018 6:09 pm As for the DC Crises, I have a somewhat different view on them so I'll throw my 2c in for Andrew's question. First, shockingly, I still haven't gotten round to Crisis on Infinite Earths despite having been reading comics for 25 years, regularly. I will say this, though, along with being like 500 pages long, Crisis is probably like most '80s mainstream superhero comics in that it is extremely verbose and the dialogue pretty stiff so, while I do agree that it is the most logical place to start, it's a huge investment time-wise. Zero Hour is the next Crisis - and it is a far closer follow up to CoIE than some of the other comics with Crisis in the title. I loved the hell out of it when I was a kid but I haven't gone back since. There's a very strong chance that the story has not aged well at all but a) the art was undoubtedly pretty great being peak Jurgens and b) the Zero Hour tie-in comics (including both #0 issues and those with Zero Hour somewhere on the cover) were often exceptionally good. They seem to have started collecting those #0 issues in affordable trades so they might be worth picking up. Skip a bunch of years to Identity Crisis. This series stands almost entirely alone and I would recommend it as the perfect place to start if it wasn't so, ya know, terrible. Great Rags Morales art and some decent craft in the writing don't change the fact that it's one of the most cynical, ugly and wrong-headed DC comics ever. It ushered in a new age of "grim and gritty" DC comics that proved to be more resilient than the one in the early '90s and quite a bit more mean-spirited too. Plus, it has nothing to do with any of the other Crises so, meh, avoid it like the plague. Infinite Crisis has some nice art but is mostly largely disposable as it did play a bit too heavily on the "continuity porn" that Geoff Johns was criticized so often for at the time. It also (re)introduced the fairly unbearable Superboy Prime and pretty much screwed up the Flash for the last decade-plus. It did have its moments, though, and there were so good tie-ins, especially those by Rucka and Simone. Also, it led into 52, which was pretty great. Final Crisis. It largely ignored all the build-up to it (Death of the New Gods anyone?) but it's probably the most impenetrable Crisis, just because of how Morrison wrote it - though it's much easier to come to grips with ever since it was collected (in a surprisingly cheap trade paperback edition) and all the issues and tie-ins were put in the correct reading order. It does suffer from inconsistent art, though, as JG Jones was unable to keep up with its schedule and the fill-ins by largely really good artists were often rushed. This was apparently also at least partially fixed in the trade, with some pages redrawn and recoloured. I say all this because it is, for my money, by far the best Crisis comic that I have read, with Morrison's high-imagination, experimentation with format and on-point characterization (not to mention further embellishments on the themes that he has been exploring in superhero comics since Animal Man) elevating Final Crisis beyond most Big 2 events, which, even at their best, tend to largely be an excuse for fan-service above all else. Reading some other Morrison first is probably the way to go, though.

November 11, 2018 4:42 pm Interesting to hear Conor talking about Nightwing because that's exactly how us Wally West fans feel about our favourite character. And, to be clear, I don't think he will be dead by the end of HiC - but I do think it's a strong chance that he will be a villain.Wally is probably the one character that Didio hates more than Dick Grayson.