Previously on Baxter Building: We’ve pretty much worked our way through the truly classic Jack Kirby/Stan Lee run, with Inhumans, Black Panther, Galactus and the Silver Surfer and even Him all making their debuts. Sadly, that means that we’re now onto the slow decline of the title, which is going to last… for awhile. But don’t worry; it’ll all look better in comparison to what we’re starting off this episode discussing…!

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0:00:00-0:56:33: Our attempt at a cold open doesn’t really work, because Jeff had just returned from seeing the Fantastic Four movie, and so we end up talking about it pretty immediately. (We’re also talking about Fantastic Four #68-73 and Annual #5, but that doesn’t start until the 56:34 mark. For those who’re concerned about spoilers for the movie, jump to that point!) “Although I was pretty aware that this wasn’t a good movie, I found it a really, deeply interesting, oh, I could see how this maybe could’ve worked, oh, here are two or three things that are really interesting but are so far from the spirit of at least the later Fantastic Four comics [movie],” Jeff says at one point and, really, that’s pretty much the way we both felt about it. It’s not good, but it’s certainly not dull. Plenty of things under discussion in this chunk, including the ways in which the movie isn’t true to its characters or even itself, with scenes that would be obviously missing even if we hadn’t seen a bunch of them in the trailers for the movie. Also: Jeff comes up with the ways in which the movie might have worked had director Josh Trank been left to do his stuff (I reference this Hollywood Reporter story a bunch, in relation to the Trank/Fox tussles), the miscasting of Miles Teller, the waste of Michael B. Jordan, and why two random kids and Jeff’s wife Edi would make better movie reviewers than the two of us. I apologize for nothing when it comes to “Victor Von Boom,” however.

Look at all these scenes that aren’t in the finished movie!

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0:56:34-1:20:49: We start on the comic books with Fantastic Four Annual #5, which is certainly the best of the bunch this time around, in no small reason because of the debut of Psycho-Man — arguably the last great character creation from the Lee/Kirby run, and certainly one of Kirby’s best designs from the entire run — as well as three of the greatest minions you’ll see. Do we focus on them, though? Nowhere near enough, because we’re more concerned with Sue Richards’ pregnancy and the ways in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are moving out of creative synch again. Also: how bad is Stan Lee’s memory that he can’t remember the name of his own Macguffin across seven pages, quite how do Psycho-Man’s powers work, and just how coincidental can a plot be before we call shenanigans? (Spoilers: Apparently very, very coincidental.)

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1:20:50-1:28:27: Annual #5 doesn’t just have the Psycho-Man story; there are also two back-up stories, including “This Is A Plot?” which gives an inside look at the Lee/Kirby relationship, as seen by Kirby. (Also, me utterly misremembering the story of it despite having only read it days earlier — always a sign of a memorable story; thankfully, Jeff’s on it.) Also, if you’ve been wondering when Roy Thomas would make his first appearance in Kirby’s work, you might be nearly as excited as Jeff here. There’s also a Silver Surfer short that we don’t spend a lot of time on, for obvious reasons.

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1:28:28-1:41:45: Holy deja vu, Whatnauts: Fantastic Four #68 starts a serious lull of the series, and it does so by… surreally rehashing a storyline that happened less than two years earlier (We talk about the fact that you couldn’t really do that kind of thing these days). On the plus side, we get a great (and, sadly, temporary) new look for the Invisible Girl and one of the greatest pages in comics history ever:

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I promise, it’s all downhill from here on. No, really. Even the existence of a scene which proves that Stan Lee should have never written teen dialogue doesn’t match up to that wonderfulness, even though it appears to magically predict Grease.
1:41:46-1:49:09: “By Ben Betrayed!” is the title of #69, and maybe it’s an allusion to the fact that it’s the readers who are getting betrayed by this impressively throwaway issue. How throwaway is it? Jeff and I find more to talk about in alternative careers for the Mad Thinker than we do with what’s actually in the issue. There is a random King Kong reference to lighten the readers’ load, however, and Jeff reveals who Reed Richards’ true love is.

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1:49:10-1:55:47: “We’re speeding through these, because I swear to God, they’re not worth paying attention to,” I say, as we spin into Fantastic Four #70. I’m not joking, apparently, because I really do speed through the plot of this issue, at least until we hit the point of true Kirby logic: no matter how much thinking you can do, a good punch is always better. Meanwhile, Jeff ponders the way in which the series starts to fulfill Stan Lee’s ideal (which is to say, Reed Richards Spotlight Monthly.) and the surprising lack of design when it comes to the Mad Thinker’s androids. There’s also this memorable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons Kirby splash page (We can all agree he’s checked out at this point, right?):

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We also talk about the other sign that Kirby isn’t paying as much attention: The lack of subplots in these issues.
1:55:48-2:01:11: Fantastic Four #71 brings a slightly revived Kirby (art wise, at least) and a Lee that’s perfectly prepared to sell Sue down the river if it makes Reed look good. It also brings the first appearance of a future FF trope, which is bad news for the Negative Zone, but that’s really about all you can say about it.

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2:01:12-2:10:13: Even though I finally ‘fess up and say that I don’t like the Silver Surfer (Sorry, everyone), there are things I find fascinating about #72 — not least of which is the fact that the Silver Surfer is very explicitly depowered, which will never be mentioned again. Oh, and the Watcher reveals that he’s all about Jesus:

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Meanwhile, Jeff blows my mind with a theory that Superman and Silver Surfer are pretty much the same character with just one important difference (I’m unconvinced, but it’s something that never would have occurred to me). Also, is this the era where Stan Lee goes from wanting his characters to evolve to wanting it just to look like things are evolving? Jeff has another theory that suggests that’s just where we are. And if you’ve never considered the possibility of the Watcher as a boy scout, prepare your mind.

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2:10:14-2:19:27: Oddly enough, Fantastic Four #73 is the third part of a storyline that began in Daredevil #37, and so I fill Jeff in on what he missed — I highly recommend everyone who has Marvel Unlimited checks it out, because it’s wonderfully fun, if utterly ridiculous (The panels above come from Daredevil #38, AKA “Superior Spider-Man, but 50 years earlier”) — before we tackle the fall-out, in which Stan doesn’t really realize whether or not the FF think the Spider-Man and Thor they’re fighting are the real thing or not. I’m not a fan of this issue, which feels like filler for me, but trust Jeff to find a subtext that makes it more interesting, speaking to Kirby’s dissatisfaction with his place at Marvel at the time. There’s a textual reason to enjoy it, too: more proof that Sue is by far the most important member of the team when it comes to ensuring that they don’t do something dumb to destroy themselves. Where would the team be without Sue? We’ll find that out next episode.

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2:19:28-end: In which we look back on the issues we… enjoyed? Kind of? and look forward to what’s to come in the next episode — #74-81 — promising that, honestly, it’ll be a better batch of things than what we had this time. Really. As ever, you can find us on Tumblr, Twitter and Patreon, as well as on this very site, where we’ll have no less than three written posts this week before returning next week for a regular Wait, What?. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick — or, for that matter, having to sit through that Fantastic Four movie again. Thanks for listening (and reading these notes), as always.

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From the Department of Grr:  So last week Viz had a digital sale or two.  To be more precise, they had two sales at Comixology, one for Shojo Beat titles (which is, more or less, their girly romance books) and one for Viz Signature (which is, more or less, their mature reader titles).  And they also had a sale at their own digital storefront for their Shojo Beat and Viz Signature titles that ran the same time.

Now, Viz’s iPad app is, technically speaking, pretty darn nice.  Of course, it’s naturally set to read from right to left, it seamlessly handles moving between single page layouts in portrait mode and double page layouts in landscape mode, and it has a bookmarking function that I wish every app had (both Sequential and 2000 AD’s old app have one as well). I prefer it quite a bit to the Kindle app, which in my experience had problems with extra-wide gutters on double-page spreads, no pinch to expand function, etc., etc.

But there’s one thing their iPad app doesn’t have which I think is kind of a big deal:  consistency.  You can buy just about every manga Viz has in print via their digital website….but that doesn’t mean you can read it.  Years ago—maybe in year one or two of my Shonen Jump subscription—I threw down some cash on a few books…only to discover after the fact the books I’d bought (the first two volumes of Dorohedoro) I couldn’t read on the app because of their mature content.

I’d bought books I could only read online in a web browser.

To quote the cool kids of yesteryear: TEH SUCK.

So yeah.  I was a little bummed I missed the sales on Comixology (which inconveniently listed neither start nor end dates) because I knew I could actually read the books I bought on my tablet of choice where and when I wanted.  Also not so great,  some series at Viz (like Detroit Metal City) started on sale at Volume 1, whereas on Comixology, the earliest volume on sale was Volume 6 or 8 or something.

Now, from what I can tell, over time Viz has widened the range of what they’ll allow on their app.  You can read the two volumes of Cat Eyed Boy by Kazuo Umezu on the app, but you can’t read Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom.  You can read the Viz Signature titles Solanin and What A Wonderful World by Inio Asano on the app, but you can’t read any volumes of the Shojo Beat classic Nana by Ai Yazawa.  All those volumes of Detroit Metal City you could buy on sale on Viz’s digital storefront?  You can’t read them in the iPad app.  As far as I know, you can’t read them on any tablet Viz has an app for.

According to this article, the difference appears to be that that books that are actually rated ‘M’  for Mature can’t be allowed on the app or Viz loses its 12+ rating, and books like Solanin  and Cat Eyed Boy are rated T+ for Teens.  So why doesn’t Viz create a mature readers version of the app, either with or without the storefront?  I dunno.  Maybe I’m missing something but doesn’t it seem like most of the hard work has been done in creating an app that syncs with your account and all that?

Between that, the weird disparity in volumes offered for sale across platforms, and what previously had been a pretty low-key warning that mature titles were only available in a flash browser (it’s gotten better since), I feel Viz is being disingenuous with their approach to digital manga.

Even though my checkbook is happy I missed out on the Comixology sale, the part of me that digs manga on my iPad is sad.  Because as much as I love Viz’s titles, I don’t really feel like buying any of them for their app if I can’t read all of them.

There.  Now that the griping is out of the way, feel free to join me behind the jump for brief reviews of Assassination Classroom, Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto, and a very late Fuuka update. Continue reading

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Housekeeping! First, make sure you don’t miss new posts from Jeff (on Red Sonja) and Graeme (on autobio comix) below. Second, also don’t miss Graeme’s similarly-themed (but much better-written!) post over at Wired; he and I only overlap on one run, so you shouldn’t be TOO bored. Now fire up the existentialators and let’s gooooooooooooooo!

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So the Fantastic Four cratered at the box office again, a flame-out so spectacular that it makes their widely-mocked last outing (“a juvenile, simplistic picture”) look like The Dark Knight by comparison. This has led to a whole bunch of thinkpiecing and podcast chatter wondering what this means for superhero movies in general and what it says about the Fantastic Four specifically.

Should the movies have followed the comics more closely? Less closely? Is a body horror take appropriate for the property? Maybe it should be all high-gloss pop? But wasn’t that what the last ones were? Maybe it’s impossible to make a good Fantastic Four movie AT ALL! And so on.

Full disclosure: I haven’t actually seen the current movie. But I have found myself compulsively reading (and listening to) these dissections of the aftermath, and — in true internet pundit fashion — have decided that I totally have the answers despite only having a third-hand approximation of the problem. And my basic answer is this: they started off with the wrong comics.

For all that this isn’t adapted from any particular set of Fantastic Four comics, it seems pretty clear that they’re using the Ultimate Fantastic Four as their starting point: younger lead characters; childhood friendship between Reed and Ben; working together at an institute; Doom being their peer; the Storm’s father being involved; etc. And those comics, for all the palpable talent lined up behind them (Bendis! Millar! Ellis! One of those Kubert people!), were not particularly memorable. It was the first major-character misfire (i.e., not that stupid Ron Zimmerman book) in the Ultimate line, and no amount of flailing ever seemed to cause it to make a dent in the gestalt psyche of comic fandom.

Which makes it a questionable foundation on which to build the edifice of a movie that had plenty of other potential problems as well. You understand the impulse — who wants to watch OLD PEOPLE in a superhero movie, amirite?!? and superhero teams with silly names????!? — but it’s the same impulse that missed the mark in the Ultimate comics.

But Fantastic Four is a comic that’s been published for something like 54 mostly-uninterrupted years. Surely somewhere in that vast catalog of lunacy there are some ideas that might better inform a film? (Or a Netflix series? Or whatever Oculus Rift thing we’re doing by the time someone feels brave enough to try again with these characters?)

Yes. Yes, there are. Since binging on the movie’s autopsy reports, I’ve spent some time thinking about my favorite Fantastic Four stories, and trying to figure out what elements made them work for me — I’m an intermittent reader of the book — and how they might translate to the screen. So here, in the spirit of this poor, beleaguered piece of comic book IP and fine internet listicles everywhere, a countdown of four fantastic comic book Fantastic Four eras that might have something to offer the big-screen FF.

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Why not the cover to the actual volume, Jeff? Why?

Hey, sorry for the delay.  Here’s my late post!  Please don’t let it make you miss Graeme’s awesomeness below, yeah?

I have to say:  I’m very happy with the corner I’m painting myself into these days.

While I don’t feel especially burdened by the need in these posts to have “hot takes,” or review “current books,” or even pretend to know “what year it is,”  there are times I’m aware giving you reviews of screamingly old comics, more or less chosen and read on a whim, and that may not be the best way to keep or attract a regular readership.

But you know what?  I’m really happy doing this.  Technically, I’m pretty sure last week’s capsule reviews were unbalanced—I’m not sure if I spent too much space on Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen, not quite enough space to really cover the charms and pitfalls of that book, or too little space on everything else—but boy did I enjoy reading them.

And so it is with this week’s read, even though it’s only one book and not a bunch.  Join me after the jump, won’t you?

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I have accidentally fallen into an autobio comics hole; over the last week or so, I went from Dustin Harbin’s Diary Comics to John Porcellino’s The Hospital Suite before landing back in the middle of a longterm favorite, Eddie Campbell’s Alec, all without really realizing what was going on. Okay, that’s not entirely true; I went back to Alec in large part because the combination of the first two left me more conscious of what does, and doesn’t work for me in terms of people telling their life stories in comics. I ended up returning to the best, in my opinion, to recharge and restore my faith in my taste, as ridiculous as that sounds. Continue reading

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Howdy, chums!  We’ve got a two and a half hour podcast for you today—we hope that’s okay?

A certain member of the team—I won’t name names but let’s just say it was neither Graeme nor Matt—overcommitted to a certain amount of family activity this weekend, so join us behind the jump for some thorough but speedy show notes, won’t you?

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Had to search on "monkey driving a car," instead.

Had to search on “monkey driving a car,” instead.

Hey, everyone! Jeff here, with a bit of an apology.

Normally, this is where my Sunday post would go, but I got so squeezed for time today, I ended up having to push that aside to make sure I got the podcast ready for Monday delivery, instead.  (It ended up being an old school 2.5 hour episode.)

So….look for my post later on in the week!  I’m hoping if everything comes together properly, I’ll post it on Wednesday, thus falling neatly between Graeme’s Tuesday post and Matt’s Thursday post.  I hope, but man this is going to be one of those crazily busy weeks so…we’ll see.

My apologies, and thank you for your patience.  Make sure you look for Wait, What? Episode 182, out tomorrow!

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Housekeeping note: please be sure to scroll down to see posts from Graeme, Jeff, and me again. Truly, this is the age of proliferating production of pontificating and philosophizing in the wacky Wait, What way.

I took my kids to see Bugs Bunny cartoons on the big screen this weekend, because, frankly, I wanted to see Bugs Bunny cartoons on the big screen. Oh, sure, I couched it as an excursion with kids and banked some dadpoints, but let’s be real: this was something that I would’ve done even if they hadn’t been around.

Like all right-thinking human beings, I love Bugs Bunny — arguably one of the most consistent and pure pop culture loves of my life. They are funny in almost exactly the same way now as they were when I was a kid — I haven’t had to adjust my expectations of Bugs, haven’t had to think about what it would mean for Bugs Bunny to be in the real world, haven’t read people’s grim and gritty tellings of his eventual end. He’s a funny trickster rabbit, and even if I focus on different specific gags, the basic charm remains exactly the same.

So does the perfectionism. These are cartoons created by people at the top of their game, from the writers to the animators to the directors to the musicians to the inimitable voice talents of Mel Blanc. It’s good stuff, and it holds up remarkably well on the big screen.

In fact, if anything, it’s better. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Looney Tunes in the theater before — it was always a TV show for me, or a compilation movie  on VHS or DVD — and it thrives from being back in its original venue. Some of that is just the basic nature of comedy — it’s easier to respond to things as part of a group than as one dude slumped alone on the couch.

But some of it was pretty specific to these cartoons, which were originally developed as theatrical pre-feature shorts. Take this gag, where an “audience member” stands up to get out of his row, only to be shooed back by Yosemite Sam.

Yosermite Sam audience

I’ve seen that gag, or variations thereof, probably dozens of times. And it’s fine, it gets a chuckle, but it’s largely unremarkable. In the theater, the perspective totally works. There’s an initial, irrational moment of anger where you think someone has legitimately stood up and blocked the projector. And Sam’s reaction plays much funnier as a result.

So I was already thinking about how Bugs Bunny plays in various forms of media when Looney Tunes #226 showed up from DC Comics.

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Housekeeping: If you haven’t already, scroll down for reviews from Matt and Jeff!

As part of a massive, at-times-overwhelming re-read of material for my guest-stint on X-Plain the X-Men — it’s me and Elle Collins talking about the Amazing Adventures run featuring the Beast, available this Sunday, Whatnauts! Be there or be somewhere else entirely! — I found myself re-reading the final issues of the original X-Men run one more time, and thinking about the ways in which nostalgia and common wisdom conspire to make us all that little bit dumber. Continue reading

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Hey, this post is late because I am bad at adulting. As a result, it pushed down some terrific reviews from Jeff that are actually thoughtful and smart and stuff. You should be sure to read those also, probably before you get to these.Annual tag

I’ve always been prone to shameless, embarrassing nostalgia. If a song reminds me of someplace specific, or of a particular group of friends, I will like that song more. Period. It’s not something I’m proud of — it feels like an incredibly basic bit of reacting, devoid from any real introspection or thought — but it’s also kind of pointless to ignore.

And, let’s be real, most readers of superhero comics in my age cohort are probably keeping their hobby gassed up with 93 octane nostalgia, so it’s not like I’m alone. But reading review copies of the DC books triggers all-new, all-different nostalgia than “regular” comic reading. It’s taken me some time to work out why that is, but I think it finally crystallized as I read the five annuals that DC sent around this week, and ironically it kinda hearkens back to my first post here on Wait, What?.

That was a nostalgic ramble (cf. me as a basic nostalgia beast, above) on the first comic that got me reading DC books regularly, and an attempt to dissect what made it so sticky for me. What I mentioned in passing but maybe should’ve focused on was that I read it because I was at summer camp and didn’t have anything else.

Which brings me to annuals. I’m going to write the following without doing even the most cursory internet research, because this is one of those times where I think my perception of truth is more relevant than whatever the actual truth is, so here are some things that I remember to be true about the superhero (mainly Marvel) comic book annuals of my youth:

  • They came out in the summer
  • They contained one thick, generally self-contained story
  • The tone of that story was often wildly different from the regular tone of the book
  • They were rarely by a book’s entire regular creative team, but were instead often by the regular writer with an unusual artist (and, much different from today, that artist was often a BIGGER name than the regular book’s — an Art Adams or an Alan Davis, say, who maybe couldn’t keep up a monthly schedule but who was perfect for this sort of one-off)
  • As a result of the last three items, you could read the annual of a book even if you had never read the series before

Again, the summer thing is key. Annuals weren’t something that really fit into my allowance-based comic-buying budget. But on summer vacations out to the delightfully trashy Maryland shore, my parents would be more willing to buy things like extra comics, and I’d be more willing to choose whatever the hell was on the spinner racks at the weirdly understocked beach-town bookstores, and anyway an annual was perfect for being on vacation because you could read it without needing to pre-read a bunch of earlier issues, and if you accidentally left it in the rental beachhouse, well, it didn’t REALLY leave a hole in your collection.

(It’s probably not coincidental that my interest in annuals totally fell off when Marvel started using them for TERRIBLE line-wide crossovers, thus eliminating the “free-standing slab of comics” element that made them so perfect in my eyes. As usual, The Evolutionary War ruined everything.)

Thinking about the annuals that stick in my memory — New Mutants annual #3! X-Men annual #10! The crossovers betweeen Avengers and West Coast Avengers! — the other thing that keeps coming to mind is the taste of donuts. Not just any donuts, but fresh-baked, custom-dipped donuts from the Fractured Prune, then (years before an ill-fated attempt to franchise) unique to Ocean City, Maryland, and the kind of splurge junk food my family only ever ate on vacation. That association probably just means that I sat around reading comics during breakfast, but it also kinda feels like a decent food metaphor for how I think of annuals in general.

ANYWAY, this is all a lengthy preamblish way of saying that I’m predisposed to love annuals but I also never, ever seem to buy them, because doing so would intrisically undermine what I remember loving about them. Nostalgia is a complicated, stupid thing, and gravity always wins.

Soooooooooooooooooo how would I feel if a bunch of annuals just randomly showed up in mid-summer, mainly for books I don’t follow faithfully? Let’s see!

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