Ryan Christopher (00:09):
I’ve got to change that. It’s trippier when you’re backstage waiting. If you’re watching the show, it’s Monday night, which means

Shannon Browning (00:21):
An earworm or anything that gets stuck in your head. The more you hear it

Ryan Christopher (00:26):
Be dreaming of it tonight, it’s Monday night. That means it’s time for another episode of Recent Reads, the comic show where we talk about books that we’ve read. So we’ve got a good panel tonight. So joining me as always is sis, we’ve got Kyla Ralph over in the top corner.

Kylie Ralph (00:47):
Hello.

Ryan Christopher (00:48):
Got the one and only Shannon Brownie and Nathan. John,

Nathan Judd (00:54):
I don’t get anything. I don’t get anything. Special One and only haven’t thought of one yet, right? Thought of one. That’s

Ryan Christopher (01:00):
Appropriate.

Nathan Judd (01:01):
Yeah. Okay, we’ll keep thinking on that. Yeah, take time.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:04):
Yeah, we’ll get there. I had one, but it’s a PG show, so

Nathan Judd (01:09):
Yeah, I think I’ve heard that one before.

Shannon Browning (01:12):
Thanks.

Nathan Judd (01:13):
We’re

Shannon Browning (01:13):
Still, you are the one presenting us with all these restrictions. I got hours of material I just can’t use on any of these shows. Don’t worry. We’ll get the after dark shows. Going after

Ryan Christopher (01:26):
Is Common is still not settled, but

Shannon Browning (01:29):
Been in greetings today. By the way,

Ryan Christopher (01:34):
This past week we came to the end of spooky season, so I’ve been watching a lot of spooky movies. So I kind of want to know, did you guys do anything for Halloween? Did you watch all those spooky movies over the spooky movie period? How did you guys celebrate the month of October?

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:56):
I’ll go first. I think I was working, to be honest, I think I worked all day and into the night. I think I even did an all nighter.

Ryan Christopher (02:05):
Oh wow. Did you at least have your own side stash of candy to get you through?

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (02:11):
I wish. I wish. I think I had a V and lots of coffee. That was about it.

Ryan Christopher (02:18):
That’s adult candy, I guess.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (02:20):
Adult Candy. Yes, it’s true. Coffee is adult band. Anybody else?

Kylie Ralph (02:28):
I worked and took some sweets and brownies and stuff into work for everyone. Candles, play the Dead. That’s pretty much my Halloween play. The Dead thing.

Ryan Christopher (02:42):
Wonderful.

Shannon Browning (02:46):
Why we,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (02:48):
Yeah,

Shannon Browning (02:53):
I am 50 years old. I had never been trick or treating and I’ve lived in this house in this neighbourhood for a couple of years now and some of my neighbours have met me. So I got costumed up and because I thought, alright, no one’s probably going to have any chocolates and I don’t really eat chocolate anyway, I bought a bucket full of chocolate and I actually gave it away to the people who opened their door for me, of which there were minutes. So yeah, I did that and I cannot put into words how stupidly excited I was to be doing that After about the seventh or eighth, there’s someone home, but they’re not answering the door. It kind of killed the enthusiasm a little bit, but I was still happy I did it. And then my girlfriend and I watched her favourite Halloween movie, which ironically is Halloween, three season of the Witch. Oh

Ryan Christopher (03:47):
Wow. The one that’s like standalone that’s disconnected from the franchise. That’s

Shannon Browning (03:52):
The one, yeah, that’s her favourite. I even went and bought a new Blu-ray copy of it with a bunch of special features, especially for Halloween.

Ryan Christopher (04:00):
That’s really cool.

Shannon Browning (04:01):
Yeah, that’s her favourite. That’s one of my favourites as well. But it’s a really good film. They just got slagged off because it was called Halloween three.

Ryan Christopher (04:09):
When I hear it’s instead of renowned for its soundtrack as well. There’s a lot of people who say that the Halloween three score and soundtrack and stuff like that is phenomenal.

Shannon Browning (04:20):
Score is great. Yeah, it’s still got that creepy sort of vibe that John Carpenter early eighties synthesiser sort of sound to it. The one thing that would people off put people off is the commercial theme that’s played through all throughout the movie. That’s done to the theme of London Bridge has fallen down where it’s just constantly, there’s six more days to Halloween. Halloween, Halloween, six more days to Halloween, silver, Shannon Rock, and they play that. Again, that’s choice. So much fun to get to sleep later on and just hearing

Ryan Christopher (05:03):
Nightmare experience.

Shannon Browning (05:08):
Yeah,

Ryan Christopher (05:08):
I had fun. Nathan, did you get up too much?

Nathan Judd (05:13):
I was kind of Kylie. I was working and then I just came home and I’ve just been drawing, drawing, drawing, so I’m glad to not be drawing right now.

Ryan Christopher (05:24):
Well, you’re super deep into volume too right now, is that correct? The pencils are done

Nathan Judd (05:29):
Super deep. Well, yes, 17th pages of inks at the moment, so I’m super deep. That’s a nice way of putting it.

Shannon Browning (05:38):
Is that what you’ve done or is that what you’ve got left?

Nathan Judd (05:41):
No, that’s all done. So yeah, the hard part’s done how, but then I’ve got two covers to ink as well, so if I count that then I’ve still got more, but yeah,

Ryan Christopher (05:52):
But you’re kind of on the home stretch in the way that you’ve done a bulk of the second lot of heavy lifting,

Nathan Judd (06:00):
So all the major work’s done. Yeah, so it’s actually, I’m pretty happy with the progress I have made, but yeah, I’ll be happy at that once I’m only got the covers lift, then I’ll be like, okay, I’m just going to enjoy these. Trying to worry about the speed element.

Ryan Christopher (06:17):
Nice.

Nathan Judd (06:18):
Yeah, it’s good.

Ryan Christopher (06:19):
That’s a pretty chill way to bring about the spooky season, the end of the spooky season. I actually watched a movie that I’d been meaning to watch for a long time. I missed it when it was in the theatres, but I really enjoyed it Late night with the devil

(06:39)
Starring David. It was really good. Lo-fi sort of mostly single location, a phenomenal cast, interesting premise into David s Mehin here gets to do a lot more. So we mostly know him as the weird guy, right? He’s played psychopath weirdos and prisoners and he was in the dark night, et cetera. He was a omet man. He was polka.man as well. Yeah, that’s right. But he gets so much more to work with that’s not just working within the exterior. He sort of plays people who are on the outer fringe or the really traumatised individuals. I mean the character he plays in this kind of is. But at the same time he’s got a career on television. He’s got his own late night show. He is sort of in the era of Johnny Carson, so the peak of late night television and he has a mentalist come on, a sceptic come on, and then a woman with a young girl who claims to be possessed by quite a malicious demon.

(07:58)
And it sort of, as the show goes on, it all sort of unfolds from there. But it was really well crafted. I’m not entirely convinced that I like the ending. It’s fine. It doesn’t spoil the movie. It’s that kind of lo-fi, a little bit Art house, but not quite low budget horror movie. But because they’ve gone single location, they’ve been able to make it look really nice. So it’s really well styled because that’s a really good, the colour grading on the film’s excellent. But yeah, I recommend checking that out if anyone’s interested. I think it is on Netflix. Netflix or binge Netflix. Yeah, Netflix.

Nathan Judd (08:43):
I’ll check it.

Ryan Christopher (08:44):
Yeah, it’s only about 90 minutes or so too, so it fits in your, oh, I’ve got time to watch a quick movie sort of. It’s not an all-nighter.

Nathan Judd (08:57):
Nice, nice. Awesome. I thought I was going to meet Joe Black. I was like, oh no, that’s totally different.

Shannon Browning (09:08):
And Dave Di is giving us a little bit of trivia. Hey

Nathan Judd (09:11):
Dave,

Shannon Browning (09:12):
Alleg 31st of October is the anniversary of the charge of the Australian Light Horse Brigade at Bathsheba in 1917. That’s all that date means to me. Well, it’s nice hearing all these stories of when you’re a teenager, Dave, but we were talking about that

Nathan Judd (09:28):
Sheba, it’s

Shannon Browning (09:28):
Not on the show. He can’t give me shit back.

Nathan Judd (09:31):
It sounds like a place that doesn’t even exist anymore. I don’t even know where it is, but

Ryan Christopher (09:42):
Everyone make sure you check out Tuesday night’s episode of Chinwag.

Nathan Judd (09:47):
It’s going to be so good.

Ryan Christopher (09:49):
One of my favourite Aussie creator’s, Paul Bedford is going to be the guest on the show best known for his alternative graphic novel list. So check it out. He’s done an episode of Chin Rate before and it was absolutely phenomenal. You don’t want to, before we get started, we’d really appreciate it if you like, share and subscribe because it helps us grow the channel and we’ve gone to FOCs, we’ve gone to a different streaming platform, a little bit nicer, a little few more features then we had over at Streamy Yard. So your support allows us to do some interesting things and branch out some interesting ways, so we really appreciate it. So I’m doing the plug for this.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (10:40):
Oh, thank you buddy. What I’m going to do as well is I’m going to press that studio button. Don’t freak out. I think only person who can see this is Ryan. So yeah,

Ryan Christopher (10:52):
It’s my screen into two screens that are mirrored to each other. So if you’re not prepared for it, it’s like you’re having a stroke.

Kylie Ralph (11:00):
Fun.

Ryan Christopher (11:03):
How about we crack into tonight’s reads? Is there anybody who wants to go first? What have you read this week?

Nathan Judd (11:15):
I will perhaps I’ll go first. What did you read please? I can’t wait. I want to

Ryan Christopher (11:21):
See.

Nathan Judd (11:22):
Did you

Ryan Christopher (11:22):
Read whilst

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (11:24):
Give up?

Ryan Christopher (11:25):
Whilst is busy. I’m happy to go, I guess.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (11:28):
Yeah,

Ryan Christopher (11:29):
I’ll start off this

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (11:30):
One.

Ryan Christopher (11:32):
So this week I read one of my modern favourites, which is Tom Taylor’s Batman, the Detective. So it’s a six issue series that Tom Taylor did with Andy Qubit, Sandra Hope, and Brad Anderson and Colours, and it’s a standalone Batman story, not quite elsewhere.

Nathan Judd (12:02):
It’s not in his run. This isn’t in his standard run that he did. Just a

Ryan Christopher (12:06):
Previous, sorry, this is separate. So sort of Batman is middle aged, so we’re not talking like Dark Knight returns, but he’s sort of significantly older than he’s portrayed in most Batman comics, I guess. So maybe instead of being a guy in his mid thirties, he’s a guy in his mid to late forties in this one, and he’s sort of beaten down because he’s come to that sort of realisation with a lot of reflection that I’ve been protecting the city a long time. I’ve saved a lot of people, but there’s still people dying every day. Have I really made a difference? Because all that seems to have happened is everyone that I have ever loved or cared about has died. So that’s sort of his realisation of maybe where Batman is to him right now. Alfred has passed away. He’s living in Wayne Manor all by himself and sort of a terrorist attack takes place. This organisation called Equilibrium, who dress in sort of all white Batman costumes, destroy a passenger plane killing everybody on board and they leave a note for Batman, and it’s one of the coolest premises, I think for motivation. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal a little bit because it changes as the story goes on, but Equilibrium sort of a terrorist organisation has popped up and they’re only killing people that have been previously saved by Batman.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (13:58):
That’s right.

Ryan Christopher (13:59):
So every killer has a personal connection and it ends up leading him to London. So he says goodbye to Gotham and he goes to London and he teams up again with Knight and Squire, and they end up leading him to Paris where he once again seeks a bit of help from Henry Dard. So Henry Dard is the master man Hunter who basically taught Bruce Wayne in the comics how to be a detective, how to hunt and find people that don’t want to be found. So know

Nathan Judd (14:41):
This is

Ryan Christopher (14:43):
In the white. What’s that?

Nathan Judd (14:47):
He’s in the white suit? Yeah, he’s

Ryan Christopher (14:50):
The

Nathan Judd (14:50):
Guy. No,

Ryan Christopher (14:51):
No. This is just a guy that he sticks out for help, but he’s from back in Batman canon. And Liam Lin’s version of Al Goul is kind of based on him a little bit as well, but Henry Dekar used all the skills that he had to sort of become a little bit of a criminal hunting down and killing people for money as opposed to Batman who used the skills to save people. But as it goes through, you learn more about why Equilibrium was doing this and then the race to stop them from doing something cataclysmic, but I really recommend it. Andy Kubert is such a legendary creator and he’s still doing outstanding interior work, so it’s kind of a joy to see him get a full six issue solid run on Batman to really make a mark. And there’s so much qubit in it. The designs of the characters are all something where you can tell just by looking at them, that anti qubit has had a huge buy in to how everything specifically looks. And if you grew up reading all those nineties comics like Sylvester and Jim Lee and Marvel Potassium, so the image guys,

(16:17)
But before Image when they were at Marvel and DC and having their epic runs and characters that whatnot, it kind of takes you back to that. I think Andy’s always had a little bit more of some monish elements, so I don’t think his stylization has necessarily dated as much as some of the other creators. So it still looks super crisp trying to find a good page.

Shannon Browning (16:58):
Andy is responsible for the first few storylines in Ultimate X-Men back in way back in the day.

Ryan Christopher (17:05):
Oh wow. The artwork in it was still top shows.

(17:15)
And then Sandra Hope is one of the best comic because going around, so you have a Tom Taylor who I think around this time Tom was really starting to hit his strides creatively with the big two. So things that came out around this era was his constant team heaven and hell, he had finished doing deceased, he did well, we all know Tom’s done a bunch of stuff and he’s been getting better and better and better. So you’ve sort of got a Tom Taylor who’s starting to really get into the groove with the big two. Andy Qubit doing still career best work, Sandra Hope, one of the finest Iners going around, and Brad Anderson’s colours like Brad Anderson had come off doing things like the Watchman Doomsday Clock series. So yeah, sort of a powerhouse creative team and it comes in a nice hardcover as well. So the book looks really nice, feels like it’s a bit of care has gone into actually putting it together. So I highly recommend it, especially because you don’t have to have read anything before or after. It’s a one shot Batman story in one hardcover. You can read it in one good sitting. Yeah. Must have four Batman things.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (18:50):
Nice. I like,

Shannon Browning (18:52):
It’s a great, if I remember rightly, there’s a great little moment in it where Bruce has, it’s basically a mobile bat cave. It’s a semitrailer or something like that that’s been turned, the interior has been turned into a ve,

Ryan Christopher (19:09):
It almost looks like a train carriage. So think

Shannon Browning (19:11):
That’s the one. Yeah. But he had it shipped over, he hadn’t really used it before. He developed it years ago, and as he’s going through, he finds a note from Alfred that says something along the lines of, I wanted to make it feel more like home and next to it was a toy dinosaur and an oversized plastic penny. Nice.

Ryan Christopher (19:34):
Yeah, that was, the comic had been ramping up emotionally from the beginning. And then you get to that point

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (19:43):
And

Ryan Christopher (19:43):
It’s sort of like it opens the world up to you again. You go, man, these characters are so great. Even when they’re only appearing in a note form, when it feels true to the character, it’s like, oh yes,

Shannon Browning (19:55):
They

Ryan Christopher (19:56):
Did it. Even Night Wing gets a one panel cameo near the very tail end of the story, but he looks older, he’s aged up the same amount that Bruce has aged up from the regular canon. But it is just nice to be like, oh yeah, this world is, it’s whole. It’s got the characters that you want, even if they’re not pleasant, very, very much. So it was a really good job. Yeah. Recommended hit up your local comic book store.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (20:32):
Nice.

Ryan Christopher (20:33):
Cool.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (20:34):
I’ll go next. Yeah, you go screen. I’ll just press this button.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (20:40):
Magic.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (20:42):
Okay. I did something totally out of character, took a day off. I usually hate digital comics. I missed that.

Shannon Browning (20:53):
I said took a day off.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (20:55):
Oh no, I haven’t done that. I took a few hours off to read this actually, and I just stumbled across this when I got my, what do you call it? Trial period of DC Universe I think it’s called. So I dunno if that’s going to show up on the screen or not.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (21:16):
Oh, absolutely.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (21:19):
Absolute power. Is anyone else doing that, by the way? No, no.

Shannon Browning (21:23):
I did that when the first issue came out, but now the whole story is completed, so you’ve probably got a different take on it.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (21:32):
Yeah, well it’s the whole story. Yeah. I read all four issues and just this won’t be as good as Shannon’s.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (21:43):
Yes,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (21:44):
It’s awesome. Basically Amanda organises for, is it six or five? I forget now how many there were, but Amazon robots, am I getting the name right?

Shannon Browning (21:59):
Mazo? Yes.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:00):
Yeah, Mazo. Yep. And they pretty much steal rather than duplicating the powers of heroes, they steal them it. So the opening scene, which is my favourite. Oh, it’s going,

Nathan Judd (22:14):
Do

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:14):
You mean like

Nathan Judd (22:15):
D Powers

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:15):
Or D power panel? I can’t show you the

Nathan Judd (22:18):
Hero.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:20):
Sorry.

Nathan Judd (22:21):
You mean steal by they physically de power the hero they stole it

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:24):
From? Yeah, de power the heroes. Yeah.

Nathan Judd (22:26):
Okay.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (22:27):
So the very first scene is Superman, and there’s this weird effect on him that you see and you don’t realise what that is at the time until you see them steal powers off other people. But what that is is one of them stealing Superman’s powers and he’s shot at just before that moment and the bullets go straight through him and then he falls because he can’t fly anymore. Oh God. And you’re like, what the hell is going on? You don’t know that his powers have just been stolen. All is he’s suddenly bullets can hurt him and he’s falling. Yeah. So it starts with that and it goes into then I don’t remember the order, but you end up finding out that Amanda Waller, Waller, how do you pronounce her name, is pretty much organised, this massive undertaking to get rid of all meta humans pretty much, or superheroes I should say. She doesn’t seem to have a problem with the criminals, it’s just all the superheroes she’s trying to take down. And I don’t know how to describe this. I had it all in my head before, but now that I’m on the screen here, I’m forgetting everything.

(23:44)
So basically Soman and the remaining heroes who aren’t captured all retreat to soup man’s soli, what’s it called?

Shannon Browning (23:54):
Fortress of Solitude.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (23:56):
Fortress of Solitude. Thank you. See, I’m forgetting words now. They retreat to there, but they think they’re safe there and they’re not. The brainiac queen gets in there, one of the masos who can go stealth mode now thanks to stealing marshal man, hunter’s powers get in there, start stealing powers. So they end up needing to, I dunno if I should say what they end up doing because that sort of spoils, I think the second or third book because I read them all in consecutively. I’ve forgotten which should I say what happened?

Nathan Judd (24:38):
I know, I don’t know how many

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (24:39):
Stuff it, I’ll say it, I’ll say it. They end up having to blow up his solitude fortress thing to get away to escape, and they escaped to the schema, schema, whatever. And even then there they’re found again, and this time they’re found by Superman’s son who has been corrupted by the brainiac queen. That happens right at the beginning of issue two. Pretty much just all this shit keeps happening until finally they get their wits about ’em and make their way back. I won’t go into how it ends, that was sort of ruin the story. But I will say one thing, I only read the four miniseries, the 1, 2, 3, 4 miniseries. The problem with that was it ties into all these, it’s a big crossover. So there was parts of the story they’re talking about stuff and I’m like, what are they talking about? So that was the only unfortunate part of just reading those four.

(25:47)
There were things where I didn’t, I just sort of went with it, read comics for a long time and there’s a lot of just going with the flow and finding out what the story’s all about to it that I just sort of ignored it and left it. Maybe I missed something earlier. Maybe I didn’t read it close enough, but now I realise it’s because all the tie-ins and the crossover and we call ’em the little miniseries that went off it as well, that explains all those little details that I missed. But even though that happened, the four issues were still brilliant on their own. It was easy to ignore those little things. They were just little things. They weren’t major. You don’t see how Superboy, for example, is corrupted. You just see that he is, and apparently that’s covered in one of the other issues, which I didn’t read stuff like that. But the story’s still really good. I really liked it. I was never a DC guy big time, but reading that, I was just like, holy crap. And just not reading anything from mainstream, actually for that matter to come back to that was a really blew me away. And then everyone told me that, yeah, it hasn’t been so good until then.

(27:09)
So I was like, oh, okay. So I just fluked on the time when they did a really good crossover. Okay, cool. Miniseries, whatever you want to call it.

Ryan Christopher (27:17):
My opinion, there is one series that DC is doing right now that’s being pretty exceptional all the way through. I can’t remember what issue they’re up to, but I think they’re into potentially the thirties now. And that’s Mark Wade’s World’s finest.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (27:34):
So

Ryan Christopher (27:34):
That’s the Batman Superman book that’s kind of got a little bit of a golden agey sort of flavour to it at times. The characters are presented very traditionally, so it’s really good. And Dan Mora has done most of the artwork for it and that’s been super good too. So I recommend that one sis, if you enjoyed.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:00):
Yeah, Mark Wade,

Ryan Christopher (28:02):
That’s who wrote this.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:04):
So

Ryan Christopher (28:04):
Same writer

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:05):
And Dan

Ryan Christopher (28:06):
Mora. I think

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:07):
Mora is the artist.

Ryan Christopher (28:09):
Oh, so same writer and artist on World’s Finest as was on absolute power. So if you like that combo, hopefully you’ll like Reds fast.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:19):
Actually I remember finding that out, but I forgot it too.

Nathan Judd (28:25):
I think more is one of the big kind of it guys at the moment for comics. He runs so good.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:32):
It’s really nice art, I must admit. I really like the way that the Brainiac queen, I think it is Queen is drawn. He does that really well considering it’s such a weird thing and I’ve never heard of that other dude. Oh god, I can’t remember names. I’m so bad at this. I should take notes. The Batman creature, whatever he’s called.

Shannon Browning (28:58):
Oh, fail Safe.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (28:59):
Fail Safe. That’s it. I’d never heard of him before. So this was a new interesting character for me. Amazing

Shannon Browning (29:08):
Old story that they did in the Batman, in the Batman books.

Nathan Judd (29:15):
I thought it was like a robot.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (29:16):
He is, yeah. He likes controls all the amass in some sort of weird way because he reboots them when they start growing I emotion. What was the conscience?

(29:33)
He reboots them to get rid of it. I don’t know if that’s explored more because it’s very quick in the story. Maybe it’s explored more in the other books. But yeah, just Amanda saying is a conscious superpower now or no moral something is a superpower now, is it? But yeah, great. Four books get it if you can read on digital if you have to, but yeah, I wish I had this in physical. I’ll probably be looking for the entire series so I can read all the rest in omnibus because I’ll become a bit obsessed with Omni.

Ryan Christopher (30:09):
I was going to say, it probably won’t be too long before they put it out in a omnibus or at least a deluxe hardcover sort of thing.

Shannon Browning (30:17):
They only just finished that storyline recently, so I don’t know if it’s even out in a collected edition yet. So yeah, there was the main absolute power story. There was one exploring Amanda Waller’s quote unquote origin, and then there was a series of one-offs about the different a Mazo robots all based based on Justice League members. And that’s where it went more into them. They didn’t just absorb their powers, they absorbed a little bit of their personality as well, which is why they started developing a conscience. Sorry, the little jimy crickets

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (30:59):
Talking like me. Stop it.

Shannon Browning (31:02):
That’s all. I don’t even know where that came from, sorry. But yeah, I enjoyed that crossover as well. And like you said, Dan Mora is a phenomenal artist. He draws one of the best supermen I have seen in a very long time and Mark Wade has just been one of my favourite writers since he was writing the Flash back in the nineties for crying out loud. So really good storyline.

Ryan Christopher (31:34):
Yeah, I think Dan Mora is going to be one of those guys that has a long-term visual impact. I can see in five years time there’ll be a dozen more artists that draw basically like Dan Mora popping up.

Nathan Judd (31:49):
I feel like there almost already is. I think he’s pretty influential.

Ryan Christopher (31:54):
Yeah, he’s already had a bit of an enviable career in quite a short period of time, but he’s that damn talented that he deserves it.

Shannon Browning (32:04):
Yeah, exactly. I dunno if they still do them, but remember the comical companies always used to do comic adaptions of movies when they came out. If they were going to do one of James Gunn’s Superman, I think Dan Mora would be the perfect artist to really capture that sort of silver age hopeful, bright and colourful sort of look that they seem to be going with that film.

Ryan Christopher (32:31):
Yeah, definitely.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (32:35):
Cool. And just quickly collect a code on Instagram and yep, Wils Finest is amazing and tomorrow is doing Justice League Unlimited next. There you go.

Ryan Christopher (32:47):
Oh wow. Nice.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (32:49):
Nice. And I guess we’re up to the next person. Is that right host?

Ryan Christopher (32:56):
That is right. We are up to the next person, but Andrew’s done a bit of research for us. Oh nice. So absolute power one to four trade paperback due out February 25th.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (33:05):
There we go. Okay, do some more research Andrew and find out when the Omnibus is out. Just saying

Shannon Browning (33:12):
Probably

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (33:14):
Get to it Kylie, I’ll let you go next so that you’re not following someone else who does as badly as me. No one’s going to be as badly as me.

Kylie Ralph (33:24):
You’re fine.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (33:26):
No, I wasn’t.

Kylie Ralph (33:27):
See if I can remember myself as well. Now I’ve kind of become a little bit obsessed with Reinhard Kle after the last graphic novel that I read. So I have read Stoneman from

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (33:44):
Oh, very nice

Kylie Ralph (33:46):
As well. So he’s done two. David Bowie graphic novelist is the first one of the two and I love it so much. It’s so good. He’s really interesting in this one with Mostly On Me, which was the Nick Cake one that I read previously. It was kind of all very moody, very black and white heavy ink, that kind of thing. This one, he’s got a whole range of different techniques that he uses, which is really I find really interesting and it pretty much starts from Bowie, little Bowie listening to the radio and that sort of thing. And we are sort of starting in black and white with just a tiny little bit of colour in there as he’s starting to get his ideas and that sort of thing. And then there’s all of these from the rest of the book, he doesn’t use black and white again as he’s starting to express themselves and that sort of thing all of the day-to-Day mundane sort of things are done in different colour watches.

(35:00)
So you’ve got, some of them are sort of brown. You’ve got some really beautiful sort heavy blues and that sort of thing, which is really nice. And then you’ve got, where are we? Sorry I’ve got a million tabs, but this one here feels just space auditing. Oh cool. I know it’s just beautiful. It’s sort of understated but still quite, how can I put it? I know you can sort of tell exactly that song that the part of the song that’s represented in those panels. He’s also used, which I discovered a thing today a lot things. I’m very excited this technique, which is founded a lot in really old school comics with your old paper and newspaper print and that kind of thing.

(36:00)
Then Dave Box, really exciting. I like this. It was a way it was developed apparently the 1870s as a way of shading and adding colour without using a tonne. So I find it really interesting that that technique is still being used now for so long through, so that’s kind of like his intermediate going from colour washing and then we’ve got the bandaid dots starting to fill the colour in more and then he is just pure of colour saturation by the as you get further and further through. But it pretty much starts, you’ve got him starting up with the spiders of Mars and then Diggy star Aladdin saying you’ve got bits of this sort of touches on his work with Iggy Pot when they were doing raw power. So Idy is in there as well. Sorry, I’m having issues trying to find my camera a little bit of meeting Mark Bolen and Rex and Andy Ol is sort of mentioned in here as well. And then just the fashions, everything is represented just beautifully.

(37:21)
I love it. Absolutely love it. And it’s sort of touches a lot on his relationship with his brother and the influence musically that his brother had on him to explore things that were outside the normal and be kind of wanting to be more than just himself, I guess. Trying to find a greater part of him that he can share. So he’s gone through all alien sort of stages and that sort of thing and then you kind of end up near the end he’s kind of destroying Ziggy and Aladdin sane sort of characters and starting out his thin white Duke era and that sort of kicks off the next book. I kind of got to the end, it was like, oh this is great. Oh great. Now I have to get the next one to find out what happened. Welcome. So there’s another one coming, I’ll have to get it at some point, but it’s just got some beautiful artwork in it. The last few pages are kind of a gallery of different times in his creative career I suppose. So you’ve got these really beautiful pictures. And then the last picture is just ing, I absolutely love it. That’s the last one as

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (38:52):
Very

Kylie Ralph (38:52):
Space quality but almost kind of a nod to Black star and his future stuff. So I’m really looking forward to getting the next one. I polish it off really, really quickly. So yeah, I love his work. It’s so good. It’s really interesting. And Reino seems to do something different with each of his artists. I don’t know, he always a very colourful personality, so I think if he had him just done it in black and white, it did Nick Cave or I think the Johnny Cash ones in black and white as well. It wouldn’t have shown the essence of him fully.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (39:38):
That makes sense.

Kylie Ralph (39:40):
Yeah, Paul Harley really recommends 11 out of 10, it’s great.

Ryan Christopher (39:46):
Who publishes it?

Kylie Ralph (39:49):
Oh, why not publish this himself? Self-made hero. I’ve got this copy from, oh, I can’t remember the name, I forgot. There’s a massive Japanese bookshop in the galleries in Sydney in the town hall station.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (40:06):
Oh exactly.

Kylie Ralph (40:07):
Huge. That’s it. Huge section of mango and graphic novels and that sort of thing. And they’ve got a tonne of his stuff in there. Absolute tonne of it.

Ryan Christopher (40:17):
Awesome.

Kylie Ralph (40:17):
But I think you can order direct Offline Heart’s website as well.

Ryan Christopher (40:22):
Oh cool. That’s really cool. So visually interesting. I love it when colouring is less naturalistic and more emotional based. So things are, they’re trying to get you to feel what they want you to feel in the story using colour theory rather than just being like, oh these people are standing in the street. Someone going to colour everything. Exactly. It would be if you were standing in the street.

Kylie Ralph (40:48):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And then the progression from the, this is him going out day to day talking to record execs and all the rest of it. And then it’s like now he’s on stage or he’s performing in front of people. It’s just like colour, colour, colour. I like it. I like the contrast between it as well.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (41:08):
Cool. That’s really

Kylie Ralph (41:13):
Coolman. Go get it. Anyone who likes music stuff go get it.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (41:17):
Definitely. Well thanks Kylie. Unless someone else you got questions?

Shannon Browning (41:28):
I just think the only unfortunate one about this one is that there’s no panels of Kylie ow getting hit in the head with a rock. Right, absolutely.

Ryan Christopher (41:39):
Maybe the next one, who knows, maybe the next one,

Shannon Browning (41:42):
Something to look forward to.

Ryan Christopher (41:45):
Is it presented actually in any particular way or is it just presented as a straight up sort of biography style book?

Kylie Ralph (41:55):
It’s a little bit more biographical than it’s all unauthorised I should say that. But mostly on Me book is very much fiction and fantasy song lyrics and a bit of biography sort of all mixed into one and it becomes a little bit intertwined and I think a lot of that Nick tended to get very intertwined with his characters and that sort of thing. So I think that’s why he did it with that one. This one is a little bit more, this is Child his progression through where he is getting his musical influences and that sort of thing, meaning Angie and sort of carrying on that way. So yeah, there’s not as much Kylie

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (42:46):
Breeze.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (42:46):
There she is. I wasn’t sure if it was me or you, Kylie.

Ryan Christopher (42:53):
I think we’re still a little bit frozen.

Shannon Browning (43:02):
Someone’s trying to steal her wifi. Sorry.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:10):
Oh yeah, signal really weird.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:16):
It seems like a great book. Yeah, I lost

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:25):
See Collie a million times Better than Me.

Kylie Ralph (43:29):
You say that.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:31):
No, it’s true. Me’s true. I didn’t even remember half the name of my characters. Did you remember Super, super who? Super, super doggy, super male. What From Man

Shannon Browning (43:48):
We got guys power and abilities of a mid-size car.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:54):
We’ve got two reviews to go. Who wants to go next? Pick on the guy who picked on me.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (43:59):
Ah, narrow

Nathan Judd (44:01):
Down me pick on. I was like that

Shannon Browning (44:07):
Could have gone either way. It really could have.

Nathan Judd (44:09):
It really could have. I feel like there’s been too much one-sided DC propaganda tonight. So I went with Moon Knight fucking, so this run is Warren s and then an artist called Declan Shelby. So I read this quite a few years ago before the show came out. I was the early adopter of Moon Knight. I like to think. I was like, yeah, moon Knight was cool. Nobody knew him. I was on the ground level still 20 years after he was made, but won’t talk about that. But I was like, no one knows who he is. He was cool. Now everyone knows who he is, but I still like to be like I was there when no one knew who he was. But this interesting book, I remember when Connor show’s progression of me because I read it at the time and I was like, this is cool.

(45:06)
The story, I remember being good but I didn’t like the artist. And now Future Me is I read this specifically because I really like this artist now. And I was like, this is the best book, what the hell? And it is interesting to just reflect on that bit of a journey where you look at things a little bit different as you kind of go on. But this book, it’s six issues and I reread it today. I was like, what am I going to read? You need something different. And I was like, I’ll just read one and I finished the first one, I’ll just read another and it was that good. I just read them all in a run. Something was so entertaining. Mood Night is, I feel like most people know he is, but I think it as an inverted Batman where he’s obviously white in his suit because he wants the bad guys to see him come in. He’s just kind of antagonistic and there’s no hold barred so he can happily kill people if he wants to. So he doesn’t fit in with the Avengers or anything like that. He really doesn’t fit in with the show. I think they took the superficial kind of elements of him, wasn’t a big fan of the show. A lot of other people were so give than that, but I just think he’s kind of a little bit too crazy to fully adapt it unless it’s a really kind of brutal show that’s like

Ryan Christopher (46:34):
Razor are this particular trade, it covers the Mr Night character, isn’t it?

Nathan Judd (46:43):
Yeah, it is focused on him. There’s a couple of times where they kind of view the suits as his egos. He’s Mr. Knight the whole time. But yeah, he changes in the different issues. He does change a little bit between the suits for the specialisations, but mainly it’s focused on Mr. Knight. So this is where I think, I’m not sure if he was the first one to come up with the Mr. Knight suit or how much that existed beforehand. I knew him. God, trying to get a good,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (47:14):
There you go,

Nathan Judd (47:15):
There we go. Because when I first saw him it was like the David Finch, the super crazy looking suit. I don’t think it’s probably not a good example here for a while because I didn’t plan it out, but it does focus on him. So I like the suit and they specifically did it in this book with it is kind of like he read Soya where the only red that’s on the page will be Red Soya is here, he’s white, he’s the only white thing on the page. So his whole suit is white and they don’t put any grey tones, any shading or anything on it. He’s literally stark white on a fully coloured page on everything. So I thought that was kind of an interesting take on it.

(48:01)
The sit off is pretty much not really, it has a little bit of a disclaimer on his background. He’s ksu, he’s the disciple of a God, so he is imbued with these powers, but he’s also kind of crazy. He has split personalities, so that’s what makes him unique and you never really know what is real with him. And I think that’s interesting aspect. Personally I don’t care because it’s the best storytelling format. You don’t have to worry about reality. And then I haven’t read tonnes of Warren Ellis, but this guy from what I have read is super crazy and knows way too much stuff about stuff that is just crazy and then puts it into his writing. And if you read it mushrooms, how psychedelics and stuff would affect you. And I reckon he reads it and goes putting that into the story and then boom. And he was up in Moonlight and I thought it was going to be most comments. Now I expect it to be an ongoing, there’d be a five connected, a big long story. No, this is pretty much individual stories, but number one and number six connects. But in between them it’s pretty much a unique story.

(49:17)
You can’t say too much without, they’re very short but very effective. You kind of don’t want it to be over. But this one, it’s kind of funny, there’s ghosts in New York City attacking people and he is like, oh, I’ve got to go protect him. And he tries to punch out the ghost and it just goes straight through the ghost and he goes all home defeated and he’s talking to himself, his three collective consciousnesses. And then he’s like, how do I beat a ghost? How do I beat something I can’t even fight? And then KSU is like, well you’ve collected different pieces of armour. How do you beat something that’s dead with something that’s dead? So he ghost rummaging into his little storage and he pulls out all these kind of bone armour pieces and then goes back and then because comics, he can smash out the ghost. I was like,

Shannon Browning (50:09):
That

Nathan Judd (50:10):
Was pretty cool. It’s kind of interesting stories like that. We was like, okay, I knew we saw that coming, but it was pretty funny. And then you read the next issue and there’ll be someone sitting on the train with a newspaper and it will have the headline like Ghost to New York City attacking people. So there’s little references in there. It is very brutal in what he does to people. So it’s a little bit gory. He actually kills people and he has no qualms about it. So it’s not like Batman, he’s like, I’m going to punch you, but you’re still technically going to be alive. You might be in hospital for the rest of your life, but you’re still alive. So there’s no issues like that. If he thinks someone has to die to make a little better place to be safer, they’re dead, I’m sure can change on who the writer is. But the way that or Alice Wrighton, these people aren’t coming back.

(51:09)
I do like the humour as well. The final issue, there’s a girl that’s been kidnapped and it’s in a big story building and the way it’s done, there’s basically no story. It’s like girls kidnapped, she’s in the top story of the building. He interrogates the guy and he is like, how many guys is there? 20? And he is like, okay, logically I should go in from the roof and I can save the go easiest that way. And instantly next panel, he’s sitting down on the ground floor looking up at all the things and he’s like holding two bats and he’s like, all right, let’s go. And it is pretty much like the daredevil one shot fight scenes where it’s like the hallway fight scene and he just goes up level by level just trashing these dudes in whatever way he can. There’s a guy running down the stairs.

(51:56)
The funny stuff is how he actually defeats them. There’s a guy running down the stairs and he’s got his little moon batter rings and he just chucks it out of his foot and it goes and it locks in his foot and he just falls down and just wrecks himself from the stairs. He’s like, yeah, sorry. So it’s really interesting how the artist on this thinks about the art. He really fully leans into the comic. How can I show this on a page in an interesting way? There’s a part where he climbs down sewers and he shows three different layers as if the camera’s looking at him and you kind of see three different layers, what should be an impossible shot, but he’s just climbing down and it’s kind of like an isometric kind of view, but it’s all on one page. It’s just interesting way to show it that it wouldn’t be realistic at all. But it encapsulates art and simplifies storytelling on a page. He doesn’t try to do anything too fancy. He’s focused on the narrative, but how to make it interesting as a comic. So I don’t know if I can give it 11 out of 10. I think that’s pretty high. I would give it an eight. Eight’s really high. Eight.

Kylie Ralph (53:12):
Just solid.

Nathan Judd (53:15):
Yeah, the artwork’s really, really good. I like how it’s rendered because I’ve lt so much into more dirtier, grittier, sort of stylized art. That’s what I find interesting list right now. That’s what I think is interesting about the artwork. It’s not super clean. Probably Bert or Dan Moura or that stuff where it’s really well done. Lines perfect faces and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s definitely more, he’s putting everything on the page. It is a bit gritty. There’s a bit of ink slash everywhere, but what I find is a kind of analogy to get immersed in it a little bit more because you don’t have that uncanny value sort of thing going on. It’s like, oh, that’s realistic. And no, I don’t care. That person just got lobbed their face lo. That’s all right. That’s funny. So yeah, I loved it. I dunno if Alice, I don’t know how long he stays on the run. If he does the other issues, I might continue reading it. I’ve got a couple different moon nights here, but that’s my favourite. The other ones I have read are pretty crazy as well for different artists. I like these guys as a combo together. But I do like Moon Knight as a whole.

Ryan Christopher (54:35):
You’re right about Warren Ellis being crazy. Warren Ellis did a series called Trans Metropolitan with Derek Robertson. Yeah,

Nathan Judd (54:46):
I haven’t read it

Ryan Christopher (54:46):
Yet. It looks crazy. Wild interior artwork

Nathan Judd (54:51):
You

Ryan Christopher (54:52):
Will overcome.

Nathan Judd (54:54):
Who’s the artist on it?

Ryan Christopher (54:56):
Derek Robertson.

Nathan Judd (54:58):
Okay, right.

Shannon Browning (55:00):
That’s a phenomenal

Nathan Judd (55:00):
Story. I’ve seen the covers and I’m like, oh, I don’t know. I think it’s just too much for me, but I can’t say that until I read it.

Shannon Browning (55:08):
Oh, it’s just concept after concept after concept thrown at you. But it’s amazing. It’s written really, really well done.

Ryan Christopher (55:14):
Some of the best comic book world building that’s ever been done in the students. There’s not a single detail that either Warren or Derek haven’t thought about and then put into the world. So similar.

Nathan Judd (55:26):
Yeah, I definitely think he is crazy. I read a bit, he’s got another comic called something Gods and that comics is next civil crazy with what he does in it. So I think he’s one of those things. He just shoots for the moon with a story and he is like, the artist must be sitting there going, oh man, how am I going to draw this? There’s literal towering mushrooms in this. I reckon if someone broke down on a page for me going into crazy Mushroom Dream Psychadelic fan, I’ll be like, no building. No, I can’t. Mushrooms the size of buildings like nightmare.

Ryan Christopher (56:04):
But that

Nathan Judd (56:05):
Does.

Ryan Christopher (56:05):
That’s why Declan Shelby’s so good.

Nathan Judd (56:08):
Yeah, no, he is great. And like I said, it’s funny that when I originally read it, I didn’t like it as much. I thought, this guy’s a bit simple. And now I’m like, nah, this guy’s crazy. He’s simplifying it because it’s the best way to show it for him. But it is interesting because it’s like I ended up fighting myself in the past. Well, I thought it was like this. It’s like, no, you’re just an idiot. Like, okay,

Shannon Browning (56:33):
Cool. Warren Ellis had a newsletter, he had a website, I think it was back in the nineties, I think we’re going back that far, where you signed up at his website and he just would send you his newsletter. And the newsletter was basically having a drunk uncle who just would email you his latest rant about stuff, not reading it. It just like, Warren, do we need to call someone? Are you okay with you? Okay, off on a tangent or have a rant or just talk about some of this random shit. But then you get one newsletter and it’s like seven pages long and you’re trying to read it all and it just goes deep into all this esoteric nonsense. And then you’d get another newsletter. There’s two sentences saying that he had a sandwich and it made him stick. So he doesn’t really feel like, but yeah, it was kind of Warren Ellis, that’s a guy you’d love to read his books. I don’t think you’d ever want to sit in a pub and have a beer with Guy.

Nathan Judd (57:37):
No, I don’t even want to meet him.

Shannon Browning (57:39):
I think he’d

Nathan Judd (57:39):
Wind up. I’m happy only knowing the manufactured story version of it. Not where he actually got the idea from because that would be far too scary. But yeah, no,

Ryan Christopher (57:55):
You, you’d end up finding out that you were now, you’d leave the meeting and then you’d get a letter saying that you were now financially responsible for a rundown houseboat or something, and you won’t understand how or why that’s happened

Nathan Judd (58:08):
Or where the houseboat is.

Ryan Christopher (58:12):
It’s in your name. You must have something.

Nathan Judd (58:15):
I own it now. Don’t look under the floorboards. That’s the only note he puts there as well. Thanks. But no, I loved it. I didn’t expect to. I was like, yeah, it’s one of those things on my own. I need something different. I only read it because I’m going through Declan stuff at the moment and I was like, dude, it’s better than I thought it would be. So you don’t get that feeling a lot either. So

Ryan Christopher (58:38):
That’s always a good surprise too.

Nathan Judd (58:40):
Yeah, for sure. You get more and more Jade as you get. What is this? What is this? It

Shannon Browning (58:47):
Kind of says a lot when you are actively expecting everything to be crap. So you’re just No, because

Nathan Judd (58:56):
No, I’m at that stage where I reread stuff that I thought was awesome and I’m like, oh, this is not awesome. I dunno what you were thinking previous Nathan, but yeah, it’s one of those things, your taste change. I always feel it a journey. And I try to be less dismissible of stuff because I know I’ll come back in five years and be like, Ugh, yeah, I should have read this a while ago. Nice.

Ryan Christopher (59:21):
You got around to it. That’s what this show’s all about. This show’s about whittling away that to read by.

Nathan Judd (59:28):
Yeah.

Ryan Christopher (59:30):
And if you like most of us here, it doesn’t happen.

Nathan Judd (59:33):
Oh, hey Mark, when are you saying? Well Chancellor it up. Thanks guys. Everyone loves moon night. See, it’s the best deep dive on moon night. Alright, it’s going to happen.

Ryan Christopher (59:44):
I think I’ve read some St. Cabbage Moon night and I’ve read some,

Nathan Judd (59:49):
Well, I’ve got to read that

Ryan Christopher (59:50):
Moon Night.

Nathan Judd (59:51):
Yeah,

Ryan Christopher (59:52):
Ference haven’t read a full run of anything.

Nathan Judd (59:54):
Don’t read the Steven Platt run. Don’t just look at it. You probably don’t even know Steven Platt is looks, no, it doesn’t even ignore everything I just said now. And I’m sorry about Steven Platt. Don’t come after me. He’s good. I like him. Okay, next review before I talk myself into the hole.

Ryan Christopher (01:00:14):
Okay. Thanks for sharing with us, Shannon.

Shannon Browning (01:00:19):
It’s you.

Ryan Christopher (01:00:20):
What’s been in front of your eyeballs this week?

Shannon Browning (01:00:22):
Well, first of all, I just want to reiterate the fact that I really have no desire to see Kylie Minogue hit in the head with a rock. I actually quite like Kylie Minogue. That’s kind of my all pass sort of thing. She comes along, Ashley’s out the door, but not just sitting around in my room, just polishing my acts and waiting for Kylie Mog.

Ryan Christopher (01:00:53):
If anything happens right now, if any news comes out, we’d just like to know that Shannon is here with us alive. There you

Shannon Browning (01:01:01):
Go. Yeah. The chances that I will ever get in a situation close enough to Kylie au to do anything to her is like, no, I have a better chance of flying to the moon by lighting apart. So we won’t actually do too deep dive of that. I think it’s kind of ironic that Nathan was complaining about all the DC stuff that we had because ha ha, screw you, Nathan. More dc.

Nathan Judd (01:01:28):
Screw you. I love Green arrows. So actually what

Shannon Browning (01:01:32):
Green

Nathan Judd (01:01:33):
Arrow is it, by the

Shannon Browning (01:01:33):
Way? Yeah, very specific Green Arrow story. This is Quiver, which was written by Kevin Smith, and it’s the one that’s actually resurrected Oliver Queen after being dead or the majority of the nineties. Now I have a little bit of a complicated relationship with Kevin Smith. I think anybody who’s around the same age as me, I hope your back’s not hurting, but

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:02:08):
Who

Shannon Browning (01:02:10):
I was a year younger than the characters in his clerk’s film. I saw clerk, somebody had handed me a VHS copy of that when I was 23 or 22 or something like that. And I watched it and pretty much instantly became a Kevin Smith fan. And of course, during the nineties, maybe a little bit in the two thousands, but definitely during the nineties, Kevin Smith was sort of the ideals. The guys like me held up. He was a filmmaker. He made these independent films about guys talking about movies and Star Wars and that sort of thing. He put all these comic book references into his films. Elms, he was a fan as well. So you would hear him talking about it in his, what do they call it? He did his live speeches to people in live DVDs and that sort of thing. And whenever he was talking in interviews and stuff like that, this was a fan that got through the Glassdoor and he got into the industry and it was all by his own force of Will as well.

(01:03:24)
So as a kid, as a 20 something year old guy who loved comics and loved movies and wanted to be a filmmaker and wanted to draw comics and that sort of thing, Kevin Smith was the guy that you sort of held up pretty much in a pedestal these days. I won’t go in it too much, but I feel like Kevin Smith is a man who is, both his talent and his laziness are in extreme and very equal parts, but his laziness has been far outreaching his talent recently, and I get into arguments people, it’s just like, oh, he can make whatever he wants. He’s like an adult. He like me lives his life his way, the way he wants. Yeah, sure, absolutely. But what I always go back to when I’m talking about the kind of thing that he used to be able to produce, I go to Quiver because this was a fantastic 12 issue run that, as I said, it brought back Oliver Queen, Oliver Queen was killed in a plane or a plane explosion or something like that, if I remember rightly. And then for the nineties, his illegitimate son, Conor Hawke had become Green Arrow for the longest time. So I think this came out early, two thousands, give or take.

(01:04:57)
But the story he chose to tell, it wasn’t just like, oh, we’re going to just pull him out of time, or we’re just going to do some magic Constantine bubble thing. And oh look, here’s Green Arrow. He’s exactly the way he was before on with everything, and we’ll pretend that nothing really ever happened. He was just here the whole time. Not at all. The way they bring him back was it was doing during the Darkest Night crossover where Hal Jordan was still parallax and a bad guy, and he was sacrificing, he had all this power and he was sacrificing himself to save the world. But before he did, Superman still had a little bit of Oliver’s DNA on one of his suits that Parallax sort of found and lifted and used that as a catalyst through time and through his energy to recreate Oliver Queen.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:06:00):
Oh wow.

Shannon Browning (01:06:01):
But he couldn’t get Oliver’s soul. So first of all, so this version of Oliver Queen was a much earlier version of Oliver Queen. I think there was a famous storyline where Oliver killed someone for the first time. I think it was him and Black Canary, I’ve got it somewhere. I can’t remember what the name of the story was, but they got a version of Green Arrow, sorry, of Oliver Queen before he killed someone. So before he was tainted by his past, I, sorry, I was distracted by one of the comments. Andrew Law is just asking if it was a Monica Lewinsky situation with the DNA. No.

(01:07:06)
So yeah, so Green Arrow not only is he doesn’t know where the world is up to, he’s reacting to that sort of thing, but as it turns out, because he is what is known as a husk or a soulless body, there’s all these entities and demons and stuff like that who are trying to get their hands on him so they can have a physical body on the earthly plane and go do all their mischief and stuff, that sort of thing. Yeah, there were cameos. There’s cameos from Batman. There’s cameos from Hal Jordan. Hal Jordan was the Spectre at the time as well. Cameo from Superman. And it leads to finally, I think this version of Oliver somehow communes with his own soul, which is in the afterlife, and convinces the soul to reenter the body and they become Oliver Queen again. It is a complicated story, but it all works and it works really, really well. I know we’re trying to be positive on the show, but this is why I get so angry with some of Kevin Smith’s work nowadays because he phones it in so badly. He just, he’s so afraid of doing the wrong thing or being criticised or something like that that he doesn’t really try. But even when he’s not trying, he does some incredible stuff. It’s in a minute in between all the dick and fart jokes, but it’s there. I think it’s depends

Ryan Christopher (01:08:50):
On the character with Kevin Smith because I agree that he did a great job with Green Arrow, but then personally I wasn’t a fan of either the Wide Nick guy or Caco, his two Batman books. I thought they were quite poor.

Shannon Browning (01:09:08):
I 100% agree with that. He did those three Batman books and they’re some of the worst Batman stories you’ll ever read. They’re horrible sort of thing, and that was more in his, I’ve given up trying sort of thing. Now I’m a stoner and I’m just doing what’s funny and that sort of thing. He did Green Arrow at the same time as he did that Daredevil run for Marvel, which was the one where Mysterio killed himself. Mysterio was the villain or the behind the scenes villain of that storyline. And once again, that storyline, these are two characters that up to that point I’d never given a shit about. I never really cared about Green Arrow, sorry Nathan and I’d never really cared about Daredevil up to that point as well.

Nathan Judd (01:09:54):
Daredevil, hater. Hater. Any boots on the ground character that you do like?

Shannon Browning (01:10:01):
No Boots on the ground character.

Ryan Christopher (01:10:04):
Maybe that’s because they were the underdog characters is why Kevin Smith was able to write them the way that he did, I suppose to the big tent pole characters.

Shannon Browning (01:10:15):
Yeah, I’m sure there are, mate. I couldn’t list them at the time. Fan as well.

Nathan Judd (01:10:22):
I think like characters that can fly. I think it’s you.

Shannon Browning (01:10:27):
I like that man. I like Plastic man. He can fly.

Nathan Judd (01:10:29):
He flies

Shannon Browning (01:10:31):
Like I like going Boost the flies.

Nathan Judd (01:10:37):
I’ll wait. I’m going to wait. Keep going, please.

Shannon Browning (01:10:43):
Superman. You know what you like, what I like. You know what? I think Moon night sucks. I’m kidding. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I don’t care about Moon night at all. That’s okay.

Ryan Christopher (01:10:59):
You care so little. You don’t even have an opinion.

Shannon Browning (01:11:03):
I think the costume and the TV show was great, but yeah, but back to what I was talking about. Yeah, this is just a sign of what Kevin Smith can do when he puts his heart and his soul into stuff when he takes a chance and takes a risk and uses that incredible talent of his and he does have an incredible talent for characters and for dialogue and for distilling emotion down into phrases and conversations and stuff like that, into descriptions that are so relatable, but it’s so easy to understand. So yeah, green Arrow really, really quiver. Was it specifically quiver? It’s a really good story. It’s an older story, but it’s a really good story. It’s really well written. Never read Kevin Smith’s Batman stories because they’re terrible and this is fine. Check out Moon night because apparently it’s pretty good.

Nathan Judd (01:12:09):
You can’t save yourself now. No.

Ryan Christopher (01:12:13):
Let’s be fair though. There’s been, over the 85 years there’s been some legendary creators that have had some quite terrible runs on Batman over the journey as well. So these things happen.

Shannon Browning (01:12:29):
Everybody can have an off day, everybody can have an off story. Sometimes there are creators that just do not mesh with particular characters. Sometimes there creators that have a vision for a character that just doesn’t find its audience or anything like that. As I said, I have a complicated relationship with Kevin Smith now, and this is one of those things that I hold up when I’m speaking about his work now versus his work earlier. I am totally agreeable to the fact that I can be 100% wrong to other people. Ask Nathan,

Nathan Judd (01:13:15):
This is more of a review on Kevin Smith than the book. Like I said, what writing are we going to get? Smith this.

Shannon Browning (01:13:25):
It’s a good book. I really do like this storyline. That’s why I bought the graphic novel back in the day when it first came out. But did you like the show? My lead into this story is Kevin Smith was the creator on it and yeah, I was having a big discussion with a friend of mine who in the same boat with Kevin Smith and we were talking about quote three just recently sort of thing. So that’s kind what had it in my mind.

Ryan Christopher (01:13:54):
I realised that I either missed it or I forgot to ask who was the artist? Probably

Shannon Browning (01:13:59):
The artist was Phil Hester and I think Andy Parks

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:14:04):
Who

Shannon Browning (01:14:05):
Had this fantastic style to their, Andy was the inker. Phil Hester was the penciller. I’m just trying to find, there we go. So there’s a double page spread the way they used to draw with their blacks and their sharp angles and stuff like that. I really loved their artwork, especially when they were combined with each other. I thought it was fantastic. Very cool. Yeah, Phil Hester worked on a few books around that period of time. He was getting quite a bit of work. I unfortunately cannot bring another one to mind. I do remember him working on other projects though. I dunno if Andy Parks was his Inca for all of that.

(01:15:00)
I get the feeling Phil Hester was one of those people that because of his art style, you needed a very specific Inca to work with him and if you had an inker that didn’t really understand his style or didn’t get it, then all of a sudden his artwork looked terrible, which is unfair. Oh yeah. All the covers were painted by Matt Wagner who created, if I remember rightly May I think, which was a retelling of King Arthur in Modern Times. That was another book from the nineties that was kind of huge at the time. I don’t really hear a lot about anymore.

Ryan Christopher (01:15:42):
He also did Grendel, which was huge.

Shannon Browning (01:15:46):
Was Matt Wagner. Did Grendel? Is that what I’m thinking about? I apologise.

Ryan Christopher (01:15:50):
I think it’s Grendel, but he was renowned for,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:15:58):
Let me just see if I can get you both on the same screen. You can fight it out.

Shannon Browning (01:16:07):
Talk about Comex the fight’s after the show.

Ryan Christopher (01:16:16):
Yeah, Grendel Publishing doing it in 1982.

Shannon Browning (01:16:24):
I apologise, who didn’t age that? I’m going to have to look that up. Yeah, Grendel,

Ryan Christopher (01:16:30):
Maybe he did Maj as well. I mean he’s been around for ever.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:16:37):
Oh, there you go. He did both. Thank you Andrew. Thank you.

Nathan Judd (01:16:43):
Andrew,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:16:44):
You going off tonight? Andrew?

Nathan Judd (01:16:47):
Andrew, turn the AI off, mate.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:16:51):
There we go. Now’s all of us Dream team.

Ryan Christopher (01:16:59):
I feel like that was a good lot of books tonight. There’s something, there was something to connect with a pretty wide amount of people I think whether they’re fans of a specific era of comics, whether they’re fans of stuff that’s maybe less traditional such as the Starman book, one Shots, crossovers events. So a little bit of everything tonight by,

(01:17:28)
I remember when I first got back into reading comics on a monthly basis and I’d sort of been disconnected by so many of the concepts that had become popular in comics like events and whatnot. And the first big crossover event that I encountered was fear itself with Marvel where more weapons of the Titans land on earth. So some of these super villains become essentially equals to Thor and Odin than the other Norse Gods like Juggernaut becomes a Titan. So that goes really crazy. I mean nowadays it’s not looked back as being a great event. A lot of people think it was pretty terrible. I liked it at the time. I haven’t read it since, but events were the coolest thing I could have possibly imagined when I first got back into reading comics. Now they do 15 events a year, so it can get really tiresome, but encountering it for the first time, it was like, what do you mean this story goes across all these books? That was the coolest thing I’d ever heard

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:18:46):
Until you looked in your wallet afterwards until

Ryan Christopher (01:18:50):
I realised all of a sudden I was buying actual. Yeah,

Shannon Browning (01:18:55):
I remember when DC did the zero Hour, which is another one of their crisis on Infinite Earthing. I still have every single zero issue of every book they did. It’s a good thing I was still living at home at that point. The only way I could have afforded it, but they’re still all packed away somewhere

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:19:14):
Nice.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:19:16):
I had all the one millions, I sold them story to them. What events all collected? Oh sorry, the one Millions. Do you remember those?

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:19:29):
Oh yeah.

Shannon Browning (01:19:29):
Million.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:19:30):
Yeah,

Shannon Browning (01:19:31):
I’ve got them as well, but I sold them away as well, so I really should start selling my stuff. Maybe I’d have more money.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:19:44):
Had lots of money. You went manic and spend it on stupid things,

Shannon Browning (01:19:47):
But that was back in the day where you get two comics and a can of drink for five bucks. That’s true. It was easier to go, yeah, I’m going to buy all 40 something issues that you publish in this one month.

Ryan Christopher (01:20:03):
Even now though, people shouldn’t underestimate even just picking up one or two books or when you want to buy a trade or something like that. If you’ve got a local poker book store walking in there and picking it off the shelf, it really does go a long way to supporting Australian businesses and we are such a hard market when it comes to having vibrant, active, engaged, long running comic book stores and there seems to be less and less of them every year now. So we’re very much in favour of go in, say hello, introduce yourself, join the community, buy your books local if you can. If you can. Yeah. So that sort of brings us to the end of the reviews. So I guess we’ll go around now and we’ll just quickly, if someone’s got something that they want to plug, they want to talk about briefly or maybe they’re working on a comic, they’ve got something in the pipeline, this is your chance to go around and let the people know. Sis, do you have anything for us know?

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:21:11):
Probably the main thing is tomorrow night we have good draw. Tomorrow night we’ve got Chinwag Tuesday Chinwag with Lee. Talker is back. He is talking or chatting or chin wagging, whatever you want to say with Paul Bradford. God, I have a bad memory.

Ryan Christopher (01:21:27):
Paul Bradford

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:21:29):
Bedford doing that. Sorry dude, sorry Paul. And yeah, so that would be a very interesting chat. A very long one I’m guessing as well. And that’s the last for of the year. So it’s your last TWA for the year. So

Ryan Christopher (01:21:46):
Out the bank this year.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:21:47):
Yeah,

Kylie Ralph (01:21:49):
I think

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:21:51):
That’s the main thing and drink and draw this week is droids Star Wars droids. Oh wow. Any source book, comic movie, movie. That is a very, very cool topic. The things they called movies, whatever.

Ryan Christopher (01:22:11):
It’s already given me an idea and I’m just going to,

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:22:14):
Awesome, awesome.

Ryan Christopher (01:22:16):
Kylie, do you have anything that you want to talk about tonight?

Kylie Ralph (01:22:20):
No, not really. Not really. Watch this space essentially. Watch this space plans in the works. But yeah, it’ll be a little bit before it’s quite,

Ryan Christopher (01:22:31):
That’s okay. These things got to simmer. We’re going to take as long as they take. Shannon, you got anything for us today?

Shannon Browning (01:22:40):
Oh no, not a goddamn thing, unfortunately.

Ryan Christopher (01:22:42):
No, that’s okay. You’re too Tuck it out from the kitties.

Shannon Browning (01:22:49):
I painted one of the walls in my house over the last couple of days, which was exhausting, but it looks fantastic. A few little glitches that I didn’t realise what problems you would have from painting a wall that I did, but it’s now got what my girlfriend calls personality and I refer to as mistakes. I did that and I’m working on a third draught of my Chicken Man screenplay at the moment. I’m trying to cut 25 pages out of it so I can enter it into festivals. Very cool. That’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Ryan Christopher (01:23:27):
You’ll have to keep us updated anyway as

Shannon Browning (01:23:30):
I’ll. I’ll, yeah, I’m still very proud of that screenplay. It took me, excuse me. Yeah, it took me like 23 years to write, so I was thrilled I got to the end of it and I’ve sent it out to a bunch of people to read and got a lot of very positive feedback, which is great. But yeah, now I kind of want to get it out into industry people and see what they think. But yeah, I’ve got to write a much tighter version of it and I dunno how to do that just yet, but we’ll see how we go.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:24:00):
You

Ryan Christopher (01:24:01):
Excellent. Nathan, we know you’ve been busy, you’ve been sort of deep in the issue. Two trenches deep in the issue

Nathan Judd (01:24:08):
Two.

(01:24:10)
Yeah, so doing the last of the inks on issue two, three Hollow on a lot of the guys here have probably read it already. It just hit over 6,000 views last week or so. So it was a pretty cool milestone just to that people have taken interest and read it. Yeah, the issue too, we’re probably going to be doing a Kickstarter for want to sort finalise. We’re getting a lot more details out, but I’m pretty stoked at how it’s looking and where the story has actually gone with it. So I think a lot of people are going to be surprised. It’s a very grounded story. It’s definitely character focused and the issue two is going to explore those characters a lot more than the first one. So I’m keen for you guys to look at and read it, but I’ll post the link for issue one. You guys can check it out.

Ryan Christopher (01:25:04):
Do you have approximate date in mind when you’re hoping to get it all wrapped up?

Nathan Judd (01:25:13):
I dunno, I have to talk to Sue. I don’t want to say anything and promise it. I don’t know what the backend stuff’s going to look like, so I don’t want to say anything yet.

Ryan Christopher (01:25:22):
Everyone’ll just have to watch the space.

Nathan Judd (01:25:24):
I know when I’m going to have it done, but I don’t know when everything else is going to go through, if that makes sense.

Ryan Christopher (01:25:30):
Yeah, well if people follow the Comex socials, they’ll be able to keep up to date with everything that’s going on. If you look at Nathan’s screen name there, it’s at Nadia, that is his Instagram handle as well. So you can jump on there and follow the progress. Does it feel good? Does it feel exciting to be getting issue two down?

Nathan Judd (01:25:59):
Yeah, it feels good. I’m more excited about the story than anything else. I’m excited what I’ve done with the characters and how different it’s going to be from issue one and yeah, I can see the progress in it and how it’s looking. So yeah, I’m excited. Yeah, I think more so once it’s, I’ve got the covers and stuff, once I can see that I’ll be stoked. But yeah, it’s definitely coming together and I’m on that home stretch, so that feels good because it’s just a lot of work to even get to this point. So you feel like, yeah, that’s good.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:26:34):
And I watching the Stream the other night and I can assure everyone there’s still abs, there’s still

Nathan Judd (01:26:41):
Tops Men, there’s still some naked Dirts. One naked dude, at least one naked dude. I’ll promise every issue Naked Guy.

Shannon Browning (01:26:53):
But it’s done in a weird Wally kind of style. So you have to actually look around and see if you can find the Naked guy. No man, take up the whole page, right? You’re going to be right, your

Ryan Christopher (01:27:04):
Full frontal through page, the final issue.

Nathan Judd (01:27:08):
It’s like it’s Game of Thrones season one. We’re just going, just going to all win everything

Shannon Browning (01:27:13):
Just as long as you don’t decide to make it a popup book. We’re good.

Nathan Judd (01:27:19):
That could be the Kickstarter reward.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:27:21):
No, it’s just give me ideas.

Nathan Judd (01:27:24):
That’s nice. That’s a good one. Holographic where it’s like,

Ryan Christopher (01:27:31):
I suppose I’m going to just talk a little bit about something that’s happening this week in Brisbane, which is Supernova Expo for those watching who may or may not know. So Supernova is happening in Brisbane again, I believe it’s Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for show number 100 in their calendar of shows is, so if you’re a comics fan, Roy Thomas is going to be there. A whole range of Australian creators are going to be there as well from your indie through to your professional. And for the first time in Brisbane as well. If you’re a comics collector, you’ll be able to submit your books to CGC onsite through Grail Hunters Australia. So for the first time we’re offering, well, grail Hunters is offering CGC signature series books at an Australian show. So head to Grail Hunters, ask Neville all the questions about what you need to do and they will be happy to look after you. But it’s pretty cool, it’s sort of bringing us in line with some of the other major cons that happen overseas now where they’ve got the representation of those sort of companies. The first one that they did was Sydney this year with Art Germ and it was hugely successful. So I imagine with Roy Thomas and his incredible library of work that Brisbane is going to be even bigger again. So head along and enjoy the weekend.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:29:16):
Sounds great. Well good.

Ryan Christopher (01:29:19):
And always share, subscribe, help us grow the channel, but most importantly, we appreciate you watching, so we hope that you’ll join us again next week.

Shane ‘Sizzle’ Syddall (01:29:30):
Thanks guys. And it’s the part where we awkwardly wave for ages because we dunno when it’s going to actually cut out. So let’s give it a go. Goodnight everyone.