I tried posting this on the Shrine, but apparently it doesn’t like me very much…

Gents, it’s a testament to the charm of your podcast that an all feedback show managed to be quite entertaining. I’m sure part of the attraction came from my own narcissistic desire to hear my comments addressed, but even so there was of interest in that show.

I’ve enjoyed the Power Records episodes, and I encourage Rob, if he has as much love for those recordings as he evinces, to return to them as often as he likes. I imagine most of us will quite happily keep listening. As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of audio drama, so these shows are right in my wheel-house. I have to say, though, after hearing several folks mention it, I’m dying to hear “Robin Meets Man-Bat.”

I THINK it was this show that saw a discussion about the need for the Big Two to get their books where people, especially kids, will actually see them, and I couldn’t agree more. If that wasn’t this show, then you are free to regard the rest of this paragraph as the ramblings of a madman, assuming you weren’t already so inclined. Anyway, I’ve been saying this for years. As long as Marvel and DC continue to pitch their product to an ever-dwindling market of aging fans, they’re inevitably doomed to a slow, strangling death. You can’t build a growing business on a shrinking pool of customers. The only way they can restore superhero comics to a viable business is to bring in new readers, and the only real way to do that is to hook kids. Yeah, it’s harder to do in the digital age, with the many and varied distractions and entertainments available to our youth, but in my experience there is little that appeals more to boys, and even girls of exceptionally good taste, than heroic, colorful characters engaged in daring do in fantastic settings. If they wrote books that kids could enjoy, but that weren’t so dumbed-down they’d be considered offensive to a severely impaired box turtle, they could have a chance of creating a NEW audience, one with ever-increasing numbers. Incidentally, such books would also appeal to those of us who have grown weary of the painfully shallow attempts at misnamed “mature” storytelling (Frank expressed the contempt I have for such misuses of the term rather well). And of course, to reach such an audience, the powers that be should put the books where they are. Toys ‘R Us, Walmart, Target, any and all of these places are perfectly suited to a spinner-rack model of distribution. I share Rob’s frustrated amazement at the lack of concerted effort on the part of the Big Two to reach that market.

Thank you Shag, for your complimentary description of my poor prose. I’m glad I’ve been able to add a bit to the conversation surrounding y’all’s work.

Ahh, now that you’ve answered my question about Firestorm and JLU, I seem to remember hearing something along those lines once upon a time. I agree, that’s a real shame. “The Greatest Story Never Told” is, without a doubt, one of the best JLU episodes. You can absolutely see how Firestorm would have fit in there, with Ronnie filing in easily for Booster Gold and Prof. Stein taking the same cerebral, cautionary role that Skeets fulfilled.

At the same time, that was such a great Booster Gold story that I’d hate to lose it either. I suppose that’s just one more reason that JLU should have gone on in perpetuity. Who knows what awesome tales would have been told! Firestorm vs. Killer Frost? Aquaman vs. Ocean Master? We’ll never know what might have been.

Well, I’m very glad you saw reason about the Firestorm/Flash exchange, Shag! Ha, though, you and Rob are absolutely right about the character being made into a mouthpiece for plot-induced drama. These old books engaged in that pretty often. Flash was actually a victim of it as often as not, though Aquaman also got his share. Either way, I certainly won’t hold a bad piece of character development against ‘ol Ronnie. If I were the type to do that, I’d have given up on the Sea King years ago!

Ha! Rob, by ‘barely concealed contempt’ I meant mostly that, in every show I have listened to (admittedly only a handful), you’ve always more or less just skipped over or skirted around the topic of Murk. I suppose ‘refusing to acknowledge his existence’ isn’t exactly the same as ‘barely concealed contempt.’ Either way I hope my theory proves correct and we see Aquaman school this second rate Namor like the chump he is.

My comic book “comfort food” begins with Marvel’s G.I. JOE from the ’80s and early ’90s. The first comics I ever read were from this series, and I love that IDW is re-collecting them in oversized hardcover format. The first 115 issues, almost all written by Larry Hama, are terrific, but issues #10 through #50 are my favorite run in comics and I can go back and read those anytime.

Other comforts that I always return to are Marvel’s WEREWOLF BY NIGHT, the FANTASTIC FOUR run written by Mark Waid, and Vertigo’s SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE.

I cannot understand why comic books aren’t available in Walmart. They used to be; that’s where I got some of my earliest comics when I was growing up. Walmart’s the biggest retail monster in the world. That Diamond wouldn’t ship to them seems asinine to me. I also don’t know why Marvel doesn’t ship comics directly to movie theaters every summer.

@Frank – I’m pretty sure it was “Face to Face” by Siouxie and the Banshees in BATMAN RETURNS. Also, Rick James’ “Super Freak” during the masquerade!

I do think you guys have great rapport and I am not surprised by the amount of feedback you get. Quality leads to quantity.

It is hard to think the Legion had it worse. There was one long continuity through the Baxter series. The 5yL series was the same continuity, just 5 years later. So it was only the Legion Lost and then the Waid ‘threeboot’ that were new. And then Levitz came back and reclaimed the old continuity. I can only imagine what the next re-imagination of Legion will be like. I am expecting to cringe.

10. For me, it’s going to be about who writes them more than the characters themselves. I’ve always been a “writer first” kind of reader, and it wouldn’t make sense for me to skip (and I haven’t checked who wrote what, this is just an example) a villains issue written by Jeff Lemire when I basically read everything he writes regardless of publisher.

16. In that sense I completely agree. There’s usually Legion to read if you don’t mind it being the version of the Legion you want to read about.

18. You have a point. I’d rather say all four 90s-ish Batman movies are dated-to-awful, no matter how much I liked the first one as a young man. It doesn’t help that I then saw the Burton Batman film again and again and again dressed in new costumes (The Shadow, the 90s Captain America movie, not to mention Burton’s aesthetic in just about everything he did). Familiarity breeds contempt and I am very contemptuous of those films.

21. True enough. We can call them Golden Age, Silver Age and Post-Crisis, though some as far as origins go, some credit should go to Donner and the Superman movies who eventually infected the comics with all that crystal Fortress nonsense.

24. Was I the only one who saw National Comics as cheap pilots for TV stories WB might like to see developed? They all had that dark supernatural tone TV likes so much these days, and would all have been pretty affordable as television shows.

32. Hey, How Did This Get Made is a really fun show!

Obviously, Canada is no more polite than all New Jersey citizens are hockey fans. I don’t watch hockey (or any sports) either, but I found it funny you would compare your state to Nova Scotia in terms of winter wonderlandedness. First, you guys have an NHL team, Nova Scotia doesn’t. And of all the places in Canada, you had to pick one of the warmest. Hardly any snowfall, in a temperate zone that allows them to grow grapes, some of the warmest beaches north of the Virginias, they’ve even been hit by hurricanes. It amuses me what people think Canada is like.

And in the same vein Shag, “eh” is for English Canadians, and I’m French Canadian, as well you know. And “zut alors” is so incredible French from France, there’s absolutely no way one of us would say it with a straight face. I could teach you some ribald French Canadian exclamations if you’d like!