Some of My Friends Read Comics

This Jimmy Olsen story has too many characters we've never heard of, but now that we've read the back half of Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber's 12-issue Eisner winning maxiseries, we kind of love them all. We also continued reading through The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck with Chapter 4! Next Time: We return to Alan Moore's Swamp Thing (first time since Episode 45 back in January 2017) with Saga...

Jimmy Olsen?!??! It's easy to forget that Superman's Pal used to have his own long-running series filled with adventures, but now he's back and winning Eisner Awards thanks to Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber! We read the first half of the 2019 maxi-series which is all about the murder of Jimmy Olsen's fake body double. Then we continued The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck with Chapter 3! Next Time...

Shang-Chi! CM Punk! It's a double-topical episode! Shang-Chi is finally getting a movie and we admittedly knew absolutely nothing about him, so we went back to his beginnings in Special Marvel Edition #15 & #16 which was then renamed to Master of Kung Fu and the story continued with #17-19. But we didn't stop there! We also read Master of Kung Fu #126 written by the Best in the World himself, CM P...

Some of my friends... WATCH WRESTLING?!?!? We delved into the squared circle with this episode by reading a biography of the biggest man in the industry, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend by Brian Box Brown. Chris and Kia did their best to teach Vince all about this weird world but really we all learned how big of an asshole Andre was. Then we moved onto our next long read: The Life and Times of Sc...

Agents of Atlas is a superhero team with a monkey AND a robot. Wow, it really doesn't get any better than this folks. We've been talking about Jimmy Woo and his weirdly thrown together team for ages and now it's finally time for us to see what it's all about. We read their first appearance as a team back in What If #9 when they saved President Eisenhower, and then we read their first substantial m...

With everybody talking about the lore of Metroid these days, and the release of Metroid: Dread on the horizon, we took a look back at some Super Metroid comics from Nintendo Power 57-61 so that we could learn about Samus Aran and her weird bird blood. And we did it with a guest! Mike from the podcast "Games My Mom Found" joins us and he even read Amazing Spider-Man #11 with us too. What a swell gu...

Just like in the movies, Black Widow spent most of her time in the comics as a side character until she finally got to stand in the spotlight on her own. We took a look at a couple of these stories from the 80's in a collection called Black Widow: Web of Intrigue, both written by Ralph Macchio. First up is a George Perez story from Marvel Fanfare #10-13 and then a black & white one-shot in Bizarre...

It's a busy episode! We're reading Volume 2 of Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier run on Captain America where we see those dastardly Russians fill Bucky's brain with lies! There's also a House of M tie-in issue in the middle which we went ahead and red as well. Then we end things with the debut of Electro in Amazing Spider-Man #9. Thankfully, J. Jonah Jameson also returns to the series after taking a m...

Loki is everybody's favorite trickster god and in 2004 he finally got his own 4 issue mini-series by Robert Rodi with painted art by Esad Ribic. It starts with a victorious Loki, which means he doesn't have to use any of his fun trademark trickery throughout the book. Hooray! After reading that, we move onto Amazing Spider-Man #8 in which we see the least likable version of Peter Parker there has...

Created by Dwayne McDuffie & John Paul Leon in 1993, Static Shock went from being a small project on DC's Milestone imprint to getting his own cartoon and becoming part of the DC Universe proper. We read the 2000 miniseries Rebirth of the Cool in which we got our first glimpse at the Milestone Universe and then moved onto Amazing Spider-Man #7 with our first return villain: The Vulture! Next Time:...

M.O.D.O.K. is easily one of the most bizarre Marvel creations of all time. A big head with tiny baby limbs who flies around in a little machine. Beautiful. To celebrate his new series, we took a look at his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #94 (the Captain America half of the issue). Then we read Super-Villain Team-Up: Modok's 11 because we thought we would get lots of Modok (we didn't). Then...

It's time to revisit our favorite super fascists in Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe, a one-shot from the Marvel Graphic Novel line that came out 5 years after the original series. Turns out this takes place A WEEK after the original series. We'll see the team realize the error of their ways and... fight a giant hand from outer space?  Then we moved onto Amazing Spider-Man #5 where Doctor Doo...

Before Big Hero 6 was a movie, it was a Marvel superhero team based out of Japan that got two largely forgotten miniseries. We're reading their 5-issue mini from 2008 written by classic X-Men scribe Chris Claremont and drawn by David Nakayama. Unfortunately these issues may have been better off remaining forgotten, because Big Hero 6 might be the Balan Wonderworld of comics. We try to figure out j...

As part of our ongoing quest to return to some of the series we've previously covered, we're revisiting Locke & Key with Volume 2: Head Games which has everybody opening up their dang heads. Gnarly stuff. Then, we move on to Amazing Spider-Man #3, our first full-length Spidey story! Peter Parker is still kind of lame and he gives up almost immediately after meeting Doc Ock. What a nerd. Next Time:...

When you think about it, Batman and the Ninja Turtles have a lot in common. They're orphans, they're well-trained in martial arts, they thrive in darkness. I think they're all aliens too but I could be wrong about that.   We read their DC/IDW co-published 6-issue crossover from 2016.   Then, Peter Parker starts making that money in Amazing Spider-Man #2   Next Time: Locke & Key, Vol. 2 - Head Game...

We're starting a couple of classics today from very different eras! First up it's Ed Brubaker's Winter Soldier run on Captain America, which provided the inspiration for the second Captain America film. We're planning to read the whole thing eventually, but for today we're just doing the first volume. Then we're starting our long-read of the first year of Amazing Spider-Man. That's right, all the...

How many of the Captain Marvels have we talked about? We've talked about Mar-Vell and Carol Danvers, but Monica Rambeau hasn't really come up that often, at least not as Captain Marvel. With her being featured recently in WandaVision, we thought we'd take a look at her first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16 and then the Captain Marvel one-shot from 1989. And then it's finally time for S...

Wedding bells are in the air! We're going back to the mid-90's when Lois and Clark got married in the comics as well as on TV! We read Superman: The Wedding Album, a one-shot from 1996 which tells the whole story in a pretty self-contained issue. We also get to some more questionable moral choices in Squadron Supreme #11 as we get really close to the end! Next Time: Monica Rambeau's origins in Ama...

Babyhands. This dude has babies for hands. I know this was supposed to be about Wanda and Vision and their weird magic babies or whatever, but as soon as this guy came on the scene he stole the whole damn show like he stole those babies. BABYHANDS.  This was from West Coast Avengers 50-52 and 56-57, which was a strange selection of issues. Over in Squadron Supreme #10, we get some spies on the tea...

Somehow, we'd never read The Death of Gwen Stacy for the show, so we rectified that by reading Amazing Spider-Man #121 & 122. We also read "What If Spider-Man Had Rescued Gwen Stacy?" from What If #24. Special thanks to Uatu who hooked us up with this story, it's good to know that Peter Parker makes dumb decisions no matter what happens. We also continued with Squadron Supreme #9 in which a member...

It's still December, we've been told, which means we're legally obligated to continue covering Christmas comics. But we broke the rules and did a cartoon too! Take that! We went with Paul Dini's "Slayride" in Detective Comics #826 as well as the "Christmas with the Joker" episode of Batman: The Animated Series.  And then we continued Squadron Supreme with issue #8, in which we get an actual honest...

Anytime the holidays roll around, you know we're gonna get Santa plastered all over a ton of comics. DC's Christmas With the Superheroes 1988 collects 6 different stories from throughout the years and we tried to guess how many would contain the real Santa. Or as real as a comic book Santa can get.   And then we got another shocking twist in Squadron Supreme #7.   Next Time: A double-dose of Paul...

We forgive you if you haven't heard of Dog Man, he's not exactly a super hero. He's half cop / half dog, stitched together after a terrible accident, but not in like a gross way. It's cute, we promise. It's a spinoff of that kids book, Captain Underpants and it's published by Scholastic. We jumped right into Dog Man Volume 3: A Tale of Two Kitties and then went on to Squadron Supreme #6, where we...

Spooky month continues with a highly praised modern horror comic called Harrow County. It's a witch book by Cullen Bunn with watercolor finished art by Tyler Crook, so we just had to try it! The first volume, Countless Haints, was only 4 issues and the haints were honestly pretty countable. Then we moved on to Squadron Supreme #5 where the entire team gets mind controlled AGAIN. Next Time: Dog Man...

We wanted to read some classic horror to celebrate the spookyseason so we dug up some of the original Tales From The Crypt comics from 1950. Actually, we read the first issues (#17-19) called Crypt Of Terror before they changed the name. It was some weird crime stuff before that, I know it's confusing, just listen to the episode and everything will be okay. Until we continue our read of Squadron S...