Comic Culture May 1st, 2019

Every week Comic Culture hosts Chris Owen and Walter Durajlija talk the comic book talk.

So kick back, relax and enjoy this week’s Comic Culture.

Oh, and please make sure you go out and support your local comic book shop.

Comic Culture is written by Walter Durajlija and engineered by Chris Owen.

Enjoy Comic Culture’s May 1, 2019 Edition:

Walter Durajlija
Walter Durajlija

Walter Durajlija is an Overstreet Advisor and Shuster Award winner. He owns Big B Comics in Hamilton Ontario.

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Chris Meli
4 years ago

As comics tended to lead their cover dates, in October 1959 Strange Tales #72 arrived on the newsstands, with the cover story “I Fought The Colossus!” The extraordinary Saxophone Colossus had arrived on the scene in 1956, and a challenge from a totally new direction was in order. In this battle there would be no defeat, with both combatants triumphing and through their battle enriching the world.

Thanks for the recognition.

(Also: CGC 7.5. Really undervalued given general scarcity and particular scarcity in high grade, as well as fantastic Kirby cover.)

Chris’s strength with respect to spoilers much appreciated, although the reveal of no Jell-O vat battle was a definite downer. In the course of the past of hour of listening to the end of the show and starting to write this I overheard one plan to see Endgame, was asked by my kids about what our plans were, and was approach by a coworker aficionado who said “Endgame!” So I think it definitely has legs for the near-term, as there are a lot of us out there who want to see it but haven’t. That I have been able to avoid spoilers to this point has renewed my faith in humanity. Similar to the airport security trick, given the length of the movie I will bring a compressed empty plastic bottle for later filling.

Chris’s quote was “comic book people are generally pretty nice.” This is why I listen to the show, frequent this site, go to cons (albeit rarely given my schedule), go to the shop once a week, etc. While the spoiler guy at the movie got beat up, I suspect that it was not by true fans. Comics are filled with violence and yet my experience with the fans is of some of the most pleasant and accepting people on earth. The true fans would probably have said something like, “not cool, man.”

Great show.

Charlie
Charlie
4 years ago

I feel like I’m the only person who didn’t enjoy Endgame. It was overly self aware… and instead of progressing the story, it was 3 hours of nods and winks. I’m not trying to dissuade anyone from seeing it… In fact, I’m seeing it again tomorrow. There are great moments and many other reasons to watch the movie… but as a whole, once everyone is off their sugar high, I predict that time will consider this to be cinematic equivalent of the final episode of Seinfeld.

Chris Meli
4 years ago

After seeing Endgame this past Friday I can say that Charlie might be right as I enjoyed it. I think you are on the wrong track with Seinfeld – if anything this is Back to the Future II & III, with this linkage and further Spielberg homage explicit. The key difference is that Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and the final episode was about a show about nothing – hence about something. The MCU movies have definitely not been about nothing, so I think all the winking and nodding was great fun. My only disappointment was Disney’s playing it extremely close to the vest with Easter eggs, but from a corporate perspective this is probably the right choice – we are still waiting for the end credits from Guardians II to bear fruit two years later, so getting people excited about too many different possibilities could engender too much resentment.

I don’t know why Charlie saw it again if he didn’t like it, but on my side, different daughters had different priorities, so the least geeky demurred as long as I agreed to take her later. I tried to get tickets for Sunday afternoon/evening at two different theater complexes and nada, zip. This thing is a cultural FOMO phenomenon. My oldest daughter got extremely agitated by a mixup in which I thought I wasn’t taking her Friday. I told her that while it was frustrating to have to go through a fifteen minute rapid-fire txt message group discussion to resolve this, if you had told me when I was ten years old that my family would be going at each other over getting to see The Avengers, which would turn out to be the biggest movie ever, I would have been ecstatic. If I can find some Pym particles I might attempt this.