SILENCE! #183
April 12th, 2016
JANE SUCK DIED IN ’77, I THINK ABOUT HER ALL THE TIME
I don’t know about you but I’ve had enough of it. Enough I tell you. I won’t stand for it a second more. NOT ONE SECOND. It’s an outrage. AN OUTRAGE. The imposition…the nerve of it. It’s too much. Far too much. Too far. A BRIDGE too far. It’s beyond the pail. I’m disgusted to have even been asked that. DISGUSTED!
What was it we were talking about again? Oh that’s right…SILENCE!
<ITEM> A brand new podcast slips into the world mewling and in need of the nourishment of your ears. The Beast Must Die & Gary Lactus are joined by Bobsy to both raise and lower the tone
<ITEM> Tales of Karaoke, Sponsorship, a moment of Cerebus, and the usual high quality time-wasting? All here.
<ITEM> The Reviewniverse beckons gentle stranger leading you on a merry tango into it’s sequential kaleidoscope… the boys discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther, The Black Panthers, Providence, Prophet: Earth War, Black Widow, Fraction & Aja’s Hawkeye and Mark Millar’s new elevator pitch Empress.
<ITEM> So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
click to download SILENCE!#183
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This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
April 13th, 2016 at 5:17 pm
Love when you guys discuss race and gender after a long weekend of drinking and karaoke! Last time I found myself trapped in a karaoke song of the wrong register it was Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” Such a great song, such a pitiful performance.
I have read very few comics of late, though I did come across a cheap copy of the Aliens: Labyrinth trade, written by the great Jim Woodringwith really lively art by a Kilian Plunkett, who apparently has been doing Star Wars stuff, some of which I probably read as a young pup, ever since. Truly horrible story (in the Beast Must Die sense) from Woodring. I wish he’d do more scripts….
I also picked up Grendel: Devil’s Legacy. I’ve never understood the appeal of the Pander bros, but I am enjoying their weird perspectives, odd framing, and alien heads here, I think because I dig Wagner’s flat and bright colouring. Fun stuff. Bit dense, but compellingly voiced script.
April 13th, 2016 at 7:05 pm
The art in Wonder Woman: Earth One was pure dead annoying (much like myself). Paquette is a great artist, but a bad fit for this, I reckon. Yeah he’s good at pinup cheesecake stuff, but it’s such a boring, predictable visual take on the material. Needed someone a bit more idiosyncratic, I reckon.
(types then deletes too many paragraphs about my problems with the comic. Then typed the following, which is a concise version, honest).
Wish Morrison’d engaged with the feminist themes a bit more. For example, the embarrasing Beth Ditto Photo Reference coming along and saying “Hey, I wear makeup and I’m empowered, so it’s no big deal” is all well and good, but, well, it’s very easy for a male writer to write that without any unpacking. Plus, all the Amazons are drawn as if they are wearing makeup, anyway.
A DECENT COMIC, THOUGH. Fun. Some nice architecture. Liked the Gorgon. Comic was overpriced.
PROVIDENCE: love it as a monthly comic, it’s a satisfying chunk of reading. Also love Bobsy’s enthusiasm for it, it makes me want to reread it! I do enjoy the comic, I just definitely don’t get as much out of it as some folk.
Loved the bit where Robert Black’s worried about the prophecy, and Carver’s all “nah, don’t worry, even it were true, there’d have to be a meeting with some ‘Messenger’, and the likelihood of those two meeting is very unlikely”. Then, a few pages later, the handshake between Robert and Lovecraft.
It was funny but also chilling. Such a good atmosphere of foreboding and inescapable horror.
COMICS
April 13th, 2016 at 8:56 pm
The Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966. The cover date for Black Panther’s first appearance is July 1966, which means the comic was actually being drawn in February 1966. Originally, Kirby drew a different looking character, with yellow stripes on his suit and an exposed face, whom he wanted to call the Coal Tiger. It was Stan’s idea to have the all black full face mask, and he even instructed Joe Sinnott to ink over Kirby’s drawings of T’Challa’s exposed face. The source where I read this (Brian Cronin’s blog at comicbookresources) states that Stan wanted to introduce a Black superhero, but was too afraid of backlash to make the character African-American.
Given all of the above, I would put the chances of Stan intentionally referencing the eponymous Black radical group at approximately zero.
April 14th, 2016 at 5:50 pm
I’m gonna wait for the paperback version of Wonder Woman Earth 1, when I looked at it in my LCS it looked a tad too thin to justify the £16 they were asking for it. Comixology has the page count at 130 but no idea how much of that is actual story. No problem with the large size low page count European Album been hard covers because the art at that size can be so absorbing but there’s something about low page counts in books that are American Comic Book dimensions getting the hard cover treatment that just seems ostentatiously bad value for money AFAIC.
The Coates/Stelfreeze Black Panther was entertaining, although it was only actually 22 pages of story for £3.I think he mentions he’s got a 12 issue arc planned in the back matter. Hope he doesn’t get suckered into any events guff. There was a good Black Panthers Storyville documentary on the iPlayer earlier in the year, if it gets repeated well worth a look at (at least from my white middle class English perspective).
Nice to see Bobsy was well behaved this time.
April 14th, 2016 at 9:09 pm
Yeah, it does not justify the price in the way a beeeeauuuutiful peak-of-their-craft eurocomic might.
April 15th, 2016 at 11:02 am
I didn’t really give a huge amount of thought to Fraction and Aja’s Hawkeye being a potential ‘all-ages’ comic, but I think I agree with Bobsy. If only more Marvel titles were like this (maybe more are now, I’m not reading a lot of new stuff at the moment). As a former hardcore Marvel zombie, I used to rage about comics that broke continuity. I mean, how can Electro appear in New Warriors, when he is still in jail in the Spider-Man titles? Now of course, I realise a good story can just be… a good story. I enjoyed Hawkeye, and when my niece reaches an age where she might give a shit, I will be reading it with her.
Used to love those Stelfreeze covers on the Bat titles a few years back, didn’t see an awful lot of his sequential stuff, will check out his Black Panther.
LATERZ
April 15th, 2016 at 7:17 pm
Good listening. Rarely is it so much fun listening to people talk about comics I don’t read than during SILNCE!
A black panther was used as a symbol for Black Power issues in general before 1966 (comes from a voting icon among a predominately illiterate group if I recall rightly – something to do with Stockily Carmichael?) and Huey Newton picked up on that…
I’d not be surprised if Stan had heard the name without having any insight into what the party was about and just thought it sounded cool – the way scriptures used to refer to their barbarian heroes as ‘the penultimate swordsman’.
Made me think of a reverse situation about a decade back when OAPs started logging on to the internet in numbers and got labeled ‘Silver Surfers’. The idea of an old codger trapped in a flat he never made, pining for his lost love and using the Power Cosmic/Google to protect humanity/complain to the council would make a good strip…
April 16th, 2016 at 10:57 am
I think the Black Panther is one of the best characters marvel created. I remember reading a reprint of his first appearance, in the the fantastic four, as a kid and just thinking he was a really cool character for being able to defeat the FF despite his lack of superpowers. Since the new comic sounds a bit dull, perhaps I’ll just dig those out for a reread instead…
It’s a great costume and, importantly when you’re at that age, he was the easiest superhero to draw. For me the key to the character wasn’t so much his skin colour as the fact he was African. Obviously from 2016 there’s something a bit awkward about a character representing an entire continent but T’Challa is such a noble and smart character that I reckon he’s one of the few successful depictions of ethnicity in a medium that has a mostly appalling track record in such matters.