0:01-32:14: Greetings from Graeme “Gradiated Purple” McMillan and Jeff “Privacy Tab” Lester, with an opening about the joys of Skype updates. Also discussed: Superbowl Sunday, watching commercials as their own thing compared to watching movie trailers as their own thing; the Hobbs & Shaw trailer; the Harley Quinn teaser; James Gunn rumors; and more.
32:14-1:07:51: Remember all that great stuff Jeff was saying about Vinland Saga? Well, Graeme has read the first volume and has his own take. So we talk about that first volume and what we liked (and didn’t!) and why we are on different pages about Vinland Saga’s different pages. Also discussed: contemporary colloquial historical language; Jackie Chan’s Police Story; the conclusion of the first arc of Action Comics and Young Justice #1; teasing our next podcast; reader buy-in; and more.
1:07:51-1:31:21: Jeff thinks he can tie in our talk about genre and medium conventions and audience buy-in by talking about the first two seasons of Netflix’s The Punisher. Let’s…see how that goes for him? Discussed: The Punisher on TV vs. The Punisher in the Marvel Universe vs. The Punisher Vs. The Marvel Universe vs. The Punisher Max universe; and more.
1:31:21-2:17:26: As he’s discussed here recently, Graeme has been doing a pretty hefty read of the post-Kirby New Gods, and it’s only getting bigger and bigger as he goes on. Join us for an update on his readthrough experience. Discussed: the different takes on the mythology when written by Mark Evanier, Tom Peyer, and Jim Starlin; the upcoming Female Furies miniseries by Cecil Castellucci and Adriana Melo; what part of the New Gods mythos works best today; the very recent Justice League Annual #1 by Scott Snyder, James T Tynion IV, Juan Albarran, Daniel Sampere; and more.
2:17:26-2:30:31: And finally, we’re pleased to officially announce our next readthrough podcast now that Baxter Building, our Fantastic Four readthrough, is done. Next week will be the first episode of Drokk!, our readthrough of the Judge Dredd Casefiles. Here we talk about our decision to do this readthrough, what scares us and excites us about this new podcast, the monthly giveaways we hope we’ll be able to institute, and more.
2:30:31-end: Closing comments! Look for us on Stitcher! Itunes! Instagram! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Matt! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including the kind crew at American Ninth Art Studios and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for their continuing support of this podcast. And then we’re out!
NEXT WEEK: Drokk!
And for the cutting and the pasting, there’s:
http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts3/WaitWhat264.mp3
Very excited about Drokk! Can’t wait until you guys get into the post-America Dredd stories, which aren’t talked about as much as they should be…
Hi guys, super excited for DROKK!, because the world desperately needs more Dredd. Is it just the Dredd casefiles, or will you detour into the spin off titles like Anderson and Lawless?
A few things on Vinland Saga. I enjoyed the first part of vol 1 (I’ve read all of the English releases to date) for the procedural elements of the caper. I spent the first half most engaged with the verisimilitude of how the the Viking raid and looting process was depicted, but then I also enjoy manga’s habit of turning into history lessons at random. That said, I wouldn’t have kept going with the series if not for the flashback sequence. Without giving too much away on future volumes, the dad from the flashback will hang over the rest of the series as a plot point and as a thematic counterpoint to the other Vikings.
Vinland Saga eventually becomes a meditation on cycles of violence, though that takes a while to move out of the background, since this is a manga series, and is content to thoroughly explore a status quo before moving on. Not sure if that is enough for Graeme to keep him going, but Thorfinn does move beyond his blank “I will kill you” starting place, and Jeff is very on point with his “Put a kids’ manga character into an adult manga story” outlook, to the point where, I believe, in a later volume’s notes section the creator says that was a goal for him in the series.
Having just re-read the first volume of the Casefiles, I’m curious to find out how you’re going to do Drokk!? Either you’ve set an arbitrary limit (since there’s no ‘volume 1’ here), you’ve developed some podcasting equivalent of the speed-force, or this is it, the patreon backed portion of your podcast which, at the very least, will see me out. Not a complaint, just interested to hear your thoughts on beginning what looks to me to be a substantially longer read-through.
Also looking forward to Drokk! But I hope the pace isn’t too fast, because that’s a *lot* of Case Files to buy to keep up with it.
I will be severely disappointed if our hosts don’t give the line “Keep your hands off the cool judge threads!” the level of exhaustive discussion that it deserves.
And having gotten to that point, I find that the line is “Keep your mouldy mitts off the good judge-gear!” Evil memory!
Although it speaks to something that I’m noticing. I remember reading the Troggies story in which this appears not when it came out (I was very young), but about 10 or so years later (probably in some sort of reprint).
And I remember it feeling incredibly dated compared to the Judge Dredd stories that I was reading at that point in the late ‘80s. That’s presumably why my memory rewrote the line to seem ridiculous and out-of-date.
Reading these now, though, after decades, they seem very much the same sort of thing as “my” Judge Dredd period, and not any more dated than that.* There are obviously differences (I’m looking out for when things start to be named after minor contemporary celebrities), but the similarities seem stronger — this is recognizably “my” Mega-City One, or at least it’s getting there at a rapid pace.
(And overall, I’m struck by how much less dated early Judge Dredd seems than a typical American superhero comic from the same period.)
Jeff, this is how my dad the aerospace engineer used to explain stuff about different bit sizes. You can think about computers as building stuff out of bricks, each of which is yea long and this wide and that high. Right now, macOS’s own bricks are all one particular size, the 64-bit size, and so all the tools that handle them can be made to grip, move, and otherwise mess with stuff of that size. But in the past, Apple and everyone else has worked with bricks of several different sizes, and so a lot of the system’s tools have to be prepared to also deal with bricks that might be the usual size but half as tall, or two-thirds the width, or otherwise not the current usual thing.
Overall, it’ll help speed and reliability when all programs are on the same page about the size of the chunks they work with. In the meantime, though, the reminders are oddly lumpy themselves – it seems like I get flurries of them, and then nothing for a while.
Thank you for this, Bruce! This was very helpful (and I thought I’d already said as much but apparently not…)
RE: the little blips of action and a logo that run before the full trailer on YouTube. I can explain why.
When you are an advertiser on YouTube, your ad also exists as a regular YouTube video. Since that video is used as a pre-roll ad in front of other YouTube videos, you have to optimize for the YouTube ad format. The most common YouTube pre-roll ad format is skippable after six second. So the ad runs for six seconds and then the skip button comes up. If you just ran the normal trailer, people who click skip would just see your production logo and maybe hear “In a world….”. But if you stick the big action beat or joke or whatever and the movie logo, the people who click skip at least got some sense of what the movie is about and what it’s called.
For YouTube optimization reasons, you want your ad (in this case the trailer) to get native non-paid views, too. So you generally don’t want a separate trailer for the paid advertising views and one for the organic views.
Really enjoyed the thoughtful discussion of Starlin as he relates to Ditko and Kirby. I think it’s notable that Warlock is both Starlin’s most personal book, and the one that feels the most like Ditko.
I just put in an Interlibrary Loan Order for the first Dredd case files book. I’ll be a little behind Jeff and Graeme, but I’m excited to read Dredd (for the first time ever) along with the podcast.
Agreed a lot about the New Gods discussion. Caught me completely off-guard! I was expecting “and here’s how this sucks, and here’s how this sucks”, and just look, now I’ve got a larger reading list. Thanks, Graeme. :)
Graeme, are you planning on picking up Dematteis’ Forever People miniseries from the ‘80s, too, that’s somehow a weird Crisis on Infinite Earths tie-in?
Really pleased Jeff circled around to “my anal desire”. Pretty much lost it when Graeme dropped that out-of-context gem the first time.
I’m trying to No-Prize why Simonson’s Orion wasn’t mentioned here but otherwise excellent 4th World musings.
The concept of DVD extras being repurposed as “trailers” seems like a level-up for movie studios. If DC can’t get an MCU stood up, a lean and mean 2nd fiddle has worked for DC in the past?
I’m excited for Drokk! since this podcast is pretty much the only way I know anything about Judge Dredd. I’m also disappointed that you’re also not doing Battlin’ about Bendis because I have soooo many thoughts about Bendis’s Daredevil.
When I used to watch a lot of shitty action movies in the 90s the show-each-stunt-from-several-angles (bonus points if it was also in slow motion) thing was really common. I always took it as way for the film maker to stretch their limited budgets, not as some service to the viewer.
Looking forward to Drokk, I’ve mostly read Dredd in Swedish translations in the 80s and 90s, and those magazines are long dead now. Before the rise of digital it was quite a hassle to read anything beyond what your local publishers deigned to put out, you kids today has it so easy!
i became a 2000AD / Megazine subscriber because of this podcast and this will be my sixth consecutive year of having an active subscription. 2000AD used to run really regular sales so I was able to fill in large gaps of my knowledge, so I’ve got something like the first 20 case files that I snagged at half off through the years which I’ve been working my way through. I was so naive that I had no Idea that TB Grover was a pseudonym. I kept thinking to myself :”this guy is great, why don’t we ever hear about them?!” I’m very eager for Drokk!!.
Also I really liked Simonson’s Orion run when I read it in omnibus form (thanks to the library) aside from the wild final two issues which seem like a poorly thought out “well now what?” after the conclusion of the story that Simonson wanted to tell
Listening to your Jim Starlin discussion I came to the startling realisation that Tom King is the new Jim Starlin, but utilising the narrative tricks of post millennial comics as opposed to post ’60’s.
Genuinely looking forward to “Drokk!” although parts of me wishes hit were called “Grudd on a Greenie” instead. That said, it’s going to be fascinating listening to the first couple of Casebooks because it’s arguable that it was only during the Lunar stories that the strip decided upon an identity for itself.
And will Judge Dredd: The Last Meal be included in the read through?
https://i1.wp.com/downthetubes.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cursed-Earth-Supplement.jpg
OK, so in preparation for the podcast I was looking at the beginnings of Dredd afresh after not having read these early stories in quite a while.
One thing that really strikes me this time is how, although all the elements of Ezquerra’s character design are there from the start, McMahon and Ezquerra make Dredd’s overall look into something quite radically different from how he is going to look.
Obviously, the helmet originally looked much more like a motorcycle helmet. But I think the real thing is how well, understated elements like the boots are in comparison to what they will become, and, as a result, how terribly elegant Dredd seems. Part of this is how slim he is in the early stories, and the black of the suit really brings that slimness out. Combine that with the tremendous degree of emphasis that the art and dialogue place on Dredd’s unflappable cool, and well, I can’t help but think there’s something Zeitgeisty about this…
…I think this Dredd might be a Mod. And then it occurs to me to look it up, and I discover that the Jam recorded In the City in the same month that Dredd first appeared. So, yes, I’m calling it — Judge Dredd starts as a late ‘70s Mod revival icon.
Popping in to say that I would read the crap out of a Mark Russell miniseries featuring Desaad. I’m seeing it as Dessad being a bit of a misunderstood sad sack, who really really wants to do evil things, but either they just don’t get off the ground or they backfire and end up being really nice things for his intended targets. So the general population thinks of Desaad as kind of a local Santa Claus and it drives him nuts.
As for the art, who? Maybe someone kind of grounded but with a light touch. Amanda Conner? Kevin Maguire?