Make Mine Manga!

The Masters of Evil may take center stage on this week’s discussion of Avengers: Under Siege and Thunderbolts, but you won’t believe how much Burn Notice we can manage to talk about at the same time.

The real world has been a beast lately, so the boys are taking a week off from the grind of… reading… comics. To help pass the time, though, Stephen is here with three recommendations for favorite comics books. That’s “books about comics,” not “comic books.” Here’s a good opportunity to practice those language comprehension skills that may have been left fallow for a while!

Personal drama is getting in the way of getting an episode out on time, but hopefully a surprise drop helps your hump day along! We’re continuing our read through two fantastic Dan Slott runs: Silver Surfer and Superior Spider-Man. Grab your trades and follow along!

Episode is a bit late this week, but we think it’ll be worth the wait. The boys take a look at the career of the late, great John Romita Sr. through some of the amazing comics he left behind. We always love the chance to flex our art critic muscles, and we enjoyed seeing the way JRSR influenced the industry. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

The High Evolutionary - star of the big screen and of this week’s episode, where the boys take a look at 1989’s Evolutionary War saga. The landscape of Marvel events looks dramatically different now from 25-ish years ago. How well does this event hold up?

New babies mean the boys are taking a break this week, but that didn’t stop Aldo from doing a deep dive into the career of one of our favorite art teams: the incomparable Gurihiru!

The comics Star Wars universe keeps getting bigger, and we continue to poke around out there with another installment of the Doctor Aphra series! Plus, the tendrils of Marvel/Disney have been grabbing different properties for years. We take a look at a more obscure offering in Mystic, an old Crossgen property with a fresh coat of paint.

IT’s JEFF!!! …no, seriously. It’s just Jeff. We did a whole episode about Jeff the land shark and the Infinity Comic dedicated to his adorable antics. If we had the chance, we’d do it again.  

This week, we tackle a pair of character-defining stories (or at least character-illuminating): Daredevil’s “The Devil in Cell Block D” and Captain Marvel’s “Enemy Within.” Read along and enjoy the show!

The Marvel era of Star Wars is a curious one, that brings opportunities to explore the cast of the original trilogy in a way that’s never been done before*.  This week, the boys dip into a few issues of the Age of the Rebellion event to see what more can be done with Luke, Han, Leia, and Vader. *E.U.? What’s that?

Our two stories this week take us to the edge of the universe… and beyond! A review of 2012’s X-treme X-Men prompts a discussion of what makes a good alternate universe story, while the landmark 2006 event Annihilation has us questioning how the Guardians of the Galaxy even came to exist.

Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Does whatever a spider can! …which, this week, includes DIE. It’s the Death of [Ultimate] Spider-man, this week on the Superhuman Registration Podcast. WITH some bonus Miles Morales.

This week, we take a look into the deep back catalog for some stories that completely passed us by.  Is the 2004 Starjammer’s series secretly one of the best stories ever written?  What about 2017’s Nick Fury miniseries?  We gambled - did we strike gold?

It’s time for the sequel nobody asked for except for some branding genius at Disney: Civil War II!  In reviewing the first Civil War event, the boys decided that the best stuff in this massive crossover occurred in the tie-in issues.  Will the same hold true here?  Is Civil War II: Kingpin somehow better than the main event?  And is the main event itself any good?  Let’s find out together!

Lots of folks are curious about Black Knight after his appearance in the MCU (spoilers: Stephen hasn’t seen it yet), so the boys at the podcast decided to visit the character’s very early origins.  We also dip our toes back into the waters of early 2000s Fantastic Four comics and the work of creative wizard Grant Morrison. Is 1 2 3 4 as rough a read as we’ve heard?

Out there, there are infinite universes, and yet in all of them, Tony Stark is a jerk. We head back to the Ultimates universe for a second stint with that world’s premier superhero team. It’s Ultimates 2! The first one!

The podcast’s trend to track down stories about under-the-radar characters continues this week with a double feature, starring the most obscure X-Man, Wolverine! [checks notes] The boys read the Gambit team-up sorry, Victims, and follow that up with a Jason Aaron-penned team up with that other most underrated character, Spider-Man! [checks notes again] Yeah, I’ve never heard of any of these folks.

We’re getting a real two-for-one this week, as the boys read Aero, an adaptation of a Chinese manhua which introduces Stephen to his favorite Marvel Snap card. As a treat, this series also has a backup featuring Wave, a Marvel Snap character Stephen has yet to unlock. A single twelve-issue series that gives us BOTH our stories to rank? What a bargain!

The folks at the Superhuman Registration Podcast appear to be mining Marvel Snap for their story ideas, as they are reading primarily stories focused on their favorite cards from the game. In this week’s installment, they tackle a Blade-centric story in 2004’s Tomb of Dracula. After that, it’s a return to Ironheart when the character gets her own ongoing series in 2019. How does the character’s so...

We kick off the new year by visiting the Star Wars side of Marvel with a couple of weirdly Empire-specific tie-ins. First, we look at the alternate-timeline series Star Wars Infinities, where the story of the original Empire Strikes Back plays out after Luke escapes the wampa on Hoth and… dies. Huh. The second story is a modern take on some of the events bridging Empire and Return of the Jedi, whe...

We’re back from sick leave with our technically holiday episode! There’s not much to celebrate when the King in Black comes around, except for maybe we like Venom now? Also, we visited the world of Marvel’s Champions, because what says Christmas more than teen heroes?

Well, the plague has come to the Superhuman Registration Podcast, and none are spared. So we’re skipping our usual episode format this week, and instead Stephen is taking a closer look at the career of letterer extraordinaire Chris Eliopoulos!

We take a break from the tights and flights this week to discuss some classic literature. We look first at the Marvel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (no zombies - October was last month), and then we review The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (no music - comics are a visual medium).

We took a break from playing Marvel Snap to try something a little different. We still read a bunch of comics (in this case, Giant Size Dracula #2, The New Mutants Special Edition #1, and The Chris Claremont Anniversary Special), but this time we chose to focus on the career of one individual. There’s a clue to who the topic of our exploration this week was in one of the issue titles. Can you figu...

The spookiest season of ‘22 concludes with the traditional observation of All Hallow’s Eve: trick or treating, singing the Monster Mash around a trash fire… and, of course, the annual reading of Marvel Zombies. This year, we tackle Marvel Zombies Return, and we follow that up with a little Halloween cheesecake in the form of 2001’s Bloodstone.