It finally happened. The Walking Dead Season 10 episode 16 finally aired!! We finally have the finale of the season so now we can talk about it! There was plenty going on in that final hour. We had…
MAGGIE and MASKED MEN and SOLDIERS! OH MY!
Not only did we have all these 3 revelations but we also had the conclusion to the Whisperer War. We will definitely not be seeing the Whisperers in future seasons.
The excellent Art Adam covers to the Whisperer War story arc
Jon and I talk about the finale episode and go into details about how it played out and what this might mean for Season 11. We then conclude the podcast with a recap of the “Spoil The Season” where I compare the spoilers I gave at the start of the Mid-Season Premier based on the comic compares to the end of the actual season.
This week we have a slight variation in our comic review. This is a new comic but it a comic that is adapted from a well know American novel. Jon and I are reviewing Ryan North and Albert Monteys‘ comic adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The adaptation is published by BOOM! Studios and is available now.
From left to right: Cover to the novel, cover to the comic and cover to the Blu-ray movie that also came out in 2020.
You may be familiar with writer, Ryan North. He worked as the writer on the awesome and very funny Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel comics. What I discovered about Mr. North in doing some research is that he also created the Dinosaur Comic that is still running today at his own website, qwantz.com
It is one of the earliest internet memes that I remember. Here is the 1st comic that started it all…
The dino comic uses the same art format for each additional comic, only the script changes.
The Artist, Albert Monteys is a Spanish artist that works on the satirical weekly comic magazine, El Jueves. He has also created his own web comic called Universe! which has been collected and published.
And finally, Kurt Vonnegut who was an American author who had a 50 career and has published many fantastic novels such as The Sirens of Titan (I misremembered this as the Game Player of Titan which is a Philip K Dick book), Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five.
We went over an hour on this one but we kept it under 2 hours so not to split up the podcast. Jon and I both love the original book and we think the adaption is brilliant. We talk about the story and how well the comic stayed true to the source material. In the podcast, we make recommendations on movies based on Vonnegut’s novels and I must mispronounce Paul Lazzaro‘s name about 15 times. I don’t know if I ever got it right.
Last week, we reviewed the Warner Bros. Animated movie Superman: The Man of Tomorrow. Months ago, when the title of the movie was announced and there wasn’t any information about the movie, I thought they may be adapting the venerated Superman story: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. To my dismay, they did not adapt it and we were given a generic origin story for Superman.
Fast foward to a week later, I decided that we will be doing a retro review for Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow. This story was originally told as a 2 part tale in Superman # 423 (Part 1) and Action Comics #583 back in 1986. It was written by Alan Moore (with help by editor Julius Schwartz). The art was done by long time Silver Age artist, Curt Swan with inks done by George Perez (Superman #423) and long time Silver Age inker, Kurt Schaffenberger (Action Comics #583). The story is regarded as the “Last Superman Story” which is somewhat true. It was the last Silver Age story before DC would reboot and modernize Superman with the release of Man of Steel miniseries.
Left to right: Original cover to Superman #423, Original Cover to Action Comics #583, Brian Bolland’s homage to Action Comics #583 for the Trade Collection.
If you have never read this story, we highly recommend you buy the Collected Edition (Retails for $14.99 but you can find it for less online) and then listen to the podcast. This story has some surprises in the 2nd half and we spoil all of them in the podcast.
If you don’t mind spoilers, then check out the podcast. We go over a brief history on how Alan Moore was selected for this story and why it is considered one of the best Superman stories as well as best told comic book stories.
A few months ago while searching for the release date of Superman: Red Son (a comic and animated movie that are both quite good), I came across an image for another upcoming Superman animated film called Superman: Man of Tomorrow.
There was no description of this movie but I was excited that WB Animation will be releasing another Superman film in 2020.
Fast forward to September 2020 and the release of Superman: Man of Tomorrow written by Tim Sheridan (co-writer of Reign of Superman Movie and other DC Animated series).
Jon and I have watched this movie and we felt it was…adequate. This movie is not based on any existing storyline in the Superman comics as far as I can discern. It has elements of the New 52 iteration of the Superman comics (Modern interpretation of Superman, Clark Kent is an internet at the Daily Planet, Superman has only just been spotted in a modern setting) but it does not specifically reference any direct comic storyline. Here is a clip of the movie for context:
Listen to the podcast and I will explain why this movie has the worst version of Lex Luthor since Superman Returns. This is a boilerplate Superman story whose only purpose is to establish Superman’s story in the modern age. There is nothing special about this movie and it will soon be forgotten in the coming months.
We recommend to watch this movie only if it becomes available on HBOMax and don’t pay any thing extra for it. If you are curious about the plot (or lack thereof), then you want to listen to the podcast.
Last year, we were give The Boys, an Amazon Prime adaptation of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson‘s comic series, and it was great.
We waited and about a year later, we are given the second season of The Boys!
Amazon Prime is doing something different with the release of Season 2. Instead of getting all the episodes at once (a la Netflix), they released the first 3 episodes and 4 though 8 will be released weekly. I like this schedule. It gets the ball rolling and gives us something to talk about in this podcast and then we can do a wrap up podcast after episode 8.
***OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING***
There is a lot to talk about in just 4 episodes. We mostly talk about the revelations that happened in Episode 4 and compare them against the comic book storyline. I don’t want to say too much here but we talk about Homelander and Stormfront’s tenuous relationship on The Seven. How Butcher is dealing with the revelations at the end of Season 1. What The Deep is up too and much more.
We could have talked for 2 hours on just these 4 episodes but we stuck to just 1 hour. We are looking forward to the end of the season and doing the wrap up podcast.
This week we are talking about an original graphic novel that came out about a month ago that is part western and part crime drama. It is called Pulp.
This fantastic story was written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips and coloring by Jacob Phillips. It was published by Image comics.
Here is the description from the Image website:
Max Winters, a pulp writer in 1930s New York, finds himself drawn into a story not unlike the tales he churns out at five cents a word—tales of a Wild West outlaw dispensing justice with a six-gun. But will Max be able to do the same when pursued by bank robbers, Nazi spies, and enemies from his past?One part thriller, one part meditation on a life of violence, PULP is unlike anything award-winning BRUBAKER & PHILLIPS have ever done before.
cover of Pulp
Jon and I really liked this story and we talk about it and other themes like: living through the Turn-Of-The-Century – witness the world change from riding on horses to riding in cars. Comic creators and their rights on the characters that they create – we go over some real comic history, and finally the rise of fascism in America – in the 1930s, some Americans thought Hitler was a great leader. How could so many people be so wrong?
Some spoilers in the podcast but we recommend you go buy the comic and come back to listen to the podcast.
DC Animation recently released a new movie called Deathstroke: Knights & Dragons. It features DC’s anti-hero Deathstroke and the movie was written by long time comic scribe, J.M. DeMatteis.
Here is a description about the movie:
Ten years ago, Slade Wilson-aka the super-assassin called Deathstroke-made a tragic mistake and his wife and son paid a terrible price. Now, a decade later, Wilson’s family is threatened once again by the murderous Jackal and the terrorists of H.IV.E. Can Deathstroke atone for the sins of the past-or will his family pay the ultimate price?
As I understand it, the movie originally debuted on CW Seed (free streaming service for CW) as a multipart web series and then it was collected and released as a Blu-Ray movie. I bought the movie but did not know about the streaming part.
If you would like to watch the first 30 minutes free, here is the CW Seed link:
Jon and I watched the movie and it is a retelling of the origin of Deathstoke but modernized and all references to the Teen Titans have been removed. I think the WB Animated Universe is trying to make Deathstroke into a viable IP as an anti-hero with this movie. Maybe this will lead to more Deathstroke miniseries and movies.
The first half of the podcast we go over the movie and plot points and the second half of the podcast, we discuss how often do comic companies retell and modernize the origin of their characters. How often is too often? Is it better to replace heroes with newer, younger versions then to retell the origin? What if you vary too many elements of the origin story that an older fan can no longer recognize a character?
A few weeks ago we did a podcast for the Netflix movie, The Old Guard. In that podcast, I mentioned that the comic and movie The Old Guard were both written by Greg Rucka. We went over some history of Greg Rucka’s past comic work and brought up that he did a Gotham Police comic with Ed Brubaker in 2003 called Gotham Central.
Fast forward to today. I was able to pick up the first book in the Gotham Central series so Jon and I read the first 2 story arcs: In the Line and Motive. We will talk about the comic and why you should be adding this to your “must read” list.
Gotham Central was written by Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker with Michael Lark doing the art. It was published by DC in 2003. It ran for about 40 issues and was cancelled in 2006. It was nominated for Eisners for writing and art in 2003 and won an Eisner for Best Serialized Story in 2004.
So why did a well written police procedural comic with fantastic artwork have such a limited run? The answer is: no promotion. The comic started with hot but lost steam over the years. DC did not seem interested in keeping this comic going so rarely saw any ads for it and there were no crossovers in its 3 year run.
We recommend picking this book up and giving it a read. It starts with Detective Marcus Driver and Detective Charlie Fields following a lead for a missing persons case and then having the worst day ever…
Detective Driver survives his encounter with Mr. Freeze but his partner did not. The reader follows Detective Driver as he works with the Gotham Central to track Freeze down before he hurts someone else. Driver wants justice for his partner so he wants to find Freeze before the Batman does.
Jon and I really enjoyed this book and characters and we highly recommend that you pick it up. I am not a fan of police procedural books but this one held my interest. There is a buzz that this may get turned into a TV series and I hope it does. This book really deserves a chance at a bigger audience.
Last week, we covered the 2020 Eisner Award Nominees and Winners. In the category of Best Limited Series, Writer Bobby Curnow and Artist Simon Gane were nominated for Ghost Tree. I recently purchased the trade for Ghost Tree so I thought it would be a great time to cover it.
The podcast for this week will be Ghost Tree by Bobby Curnow and Simon Gane with colors by Ian Herring. The comic was published by IDW Publishing. It originally came out in 2019.
I was not familiar with Bobby Curnow’s writing before Ghost Tree. I found out that he has worked on other IDW books like My Little Pony and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is my first time reading his work and I hope he puts out many more books like this.
I was already familiar with Simon Gane’s work. I was reading a comic called They’re Not Like Us from Image that he was working on. That was a great book and the art really sold it for me. I was looking forward to see what he was going to do with Ghost Tree.
Ghost Tree on the surface is a tale about ghosts and the 2 men that have the ability to communicate with them. Below the surface, you get a story about relationships and what you have to do to make them work. Jon and I really like this miniseries and we highly recommend that you pick it up.
***Minor Spoiler Alert*** – we talk about some plot points but we did not give away the major revelations in the comics so it is fairly spoiler free.
The 32nd Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards were presented at a virtual ceremony on Friday evening, July 24.
Normally, these awards are held at the San Diego Comic Con (AKA The International Comic Con) but due to COVID-19, the Comics Con was cancelled. Luckily, the ceremonies were held virtually which you can watch here.
I believe this is our 6th Eisner Award review we have done on the Comics Misremembered Podcast. We like to cover the awards like Best New Series, Best Continuing Series, Best Writer, Best Artist but we don’t cover all the awards. If you want to see the list of categories and winners then go to the Eisner Awards website here.
Jon and I talk about the series and creators that we have read and which series that we are most interested in checking out.
We have been watching the CW show: Star Girl – which is set on Earth-2 and references the heroes and villains of the Golden Age of DC. The show does a good job of using the Golden Age villains and heroes without being too hokey or corny.
While watching the show, I was reminded on how I got to know the Golden Age characters as a comic reader. It was back in the early 90s, DC has a JSA comic series and I was enjoying it. Getting to become familiar with the Golden Age version of Green Lantern and Flash while learning about new characters like Hour Man, Wild Cat, Starman and others. Remember, we had no internet back then so I only had back issue and new comics to give me backstory.
In 1993, a relatively unknown writer, James Robinson pitched an Elseworlds story (The What If? equivalent for DC) about most of the JSA heroes called The Golden Age. It would feature art by the awesome Paul Smith and had colors by Richard Ory. DC would publish it as a 4 part prestige series between 1993 – 1994.
clockwise from upper left: Issue #2 of The Golden Age original series, Issue #3, a cover to first collection of The Golden Age series and a more recent collection of the trade (it has a Watchman vibe to the cover).
The Golden Age is an awesome mystery story that helped me learn a lot about the Golden Age Heroes. Did you know there was a Robot Man before Cliff Steele? Did you know there were multiple speedsters in the Golden Age like Jay Garrick, Johnny Chambers and Libby Lawrence? Did you know the Golden Age Atom was called that because he was small not because he became small? All this and more will be revealed to you.
This series does a great job at making these Golden Age characters feel believable while introducing them the the problem and politics of the real world in 1940 – 1955. It takes on issues like World War II, Communism and McCarthyism (Not McCartneyism – that has to do with Rock n Roll and screaming teenage girls).
***Spoilers Ahead***
Jon and I talk about the history on how this book was made and then go over plot points and characters. We don’t spoil the final act of the book but we do go over most of the story.
We highly recommend reading this story. It has some ties to the Star Girl series and will bring you up to speed on most of the Golden Age heroes.
We are covering a comic related item this week – the recently released Netflix movie called The Old Guard.
This is based on a comic series written by Greg Rucka and art by Leandro Fernandez. It is published by Image comics. In fact, Greg Rucka wrote the script for the movie.
We normally like to read the comic that the movie is based on and then do a comparison of the movie to the comic to see if it is true to the source material or does it stray… *cough*Last Days of American Crime*cough*.
Unfortunately, we could not get a copy of the 1st trade paperback – it was sold out everywhere I looked. We will still try to pick it up and do a review of it later. For this review, we focus on the movie.
Jon and I did not read the original comic so all our knowledge about Old Guard comes from the movie. We talk about the story and the world building it does to explain how The Old Guard comes into existence and operates in the world. We both give our final opinion at the end of the podcast. The movie has been getting good to excellent reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Do we feel the same way? Listen to find out.
As always – SPOILERS are in the podcast so watch the movie and come back to dissect it with us.
I know it was hard to wait a week for our review but thanks for coming back! We continue with our examination of the Wolverine miniseries written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Frank Miller. It was published by Marvel in 1982. We also compare the miniseries to the 2013 The Wolverine movie and show you how much they used from the miniseries in the movie.
Some things you can expect to hear in this podcast:
We continue to spoil a comic that came out almost 40 years ago and has been recapped in issues of Uncanny X-Men, X-Men and The Wolverine regular series so it’s not much of a spoiler.
I call Yukio the wrong name for half the podcast and Jon does not pick up on it until I correct myself.
We know our 80s American Asian cinema – we go off on a 10 minute tangent to talk about how Asian culture influenced media during the 1980s.
Jon and I try to piece together why Storm has her “punk rocker” look on the final 2 pages of issue #173 of Uncanny X-Men.
All this and more hilarity with this podcast. Thanks for listening.
A new week and a new comic. This week we are talking about Chris Claremont and Frank Miller‘s collaboration on the 1983 Marvel miniseries Wolvervine.
We recently read the trade paperback of the 4 issue miniseries and took some time out to watch the 2013 The Wolverine movie. There are many moments the movie uses which is directly taken from the miniseries.
At the start of the podcast, we go over a interview that Chris Claremont told Sean Howe about how he trapped Frank Miller and forced him to work on the miniseries with him.
This chance encounter lead to an epic miniseries that all the fans demanded. 1982 was when the Uncanny X-Men were at the height of their popularity. The character that everyone wanted more of was Wolverine. He was the mysterious, animal bad boy with the shadowy past. The miniseries was a way to add more dimensions to him. Everyone expected a hack and slash tale (and they got that) but they also got to know the sensitive side of Logan.
***SPOILER ALERT***
We are talking about the entire Wolverine miniseries and the movie so we will be spoiling all of the plot points. The miniseries is almost 40 years old so some of the original story has been retold in other comics so if you are long time follower of Wolvie, then you know most of this story.
This is it – the final installment of our Dystopia Futures run on comics. This does not mean that we won’t talk about Dystopian Futures in… the future, but it mean next week will not be a Dystopian Future theme.
We are continuing were we left off last week – we are concluding our discussion of Frank Miller’s Ronin six issue prestige format miniseries that was published by DC from 1983 – 1984.
This is the cover of the trade we read.
*** MAJOR SPOILERS THIS WEEK***
Ronin is set in the near future and has a massive twist at the end of the comic that you don’t see coming (we debate it’s validity) but we want to warn everyone up front – if you do not want the comic’s ending spoiled, stop listening when we tell you in the podcast. You can listen to everything else but stop listening and go read the comic.
Reflecting back on Ronin, Frank Miller was in an experimental mood when creating this comic. He tires several different art styles (cross-hatching, negative space) and we also pushes the limits of dialogue and censorship with the way some of the characters speak. It was ground breaking, especially for a DC comic, at the time and still holds up today.
