The Classy Comics Podcast

Can the Twelfth Doctor and a punk rocker from the 40th Century stop a seaweed monster on the loose in a 1970's English village?
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Transcript:
GrahamCan a Punk Rocker save a 1970s English town from destruction? Find out as we take a look at Doctor Who – The Twelfth Doctor: Time Trials Vol. 1: The Terror Beneath.

[Intro Music]
Announcer:Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham.
Host:Welcome back. As I mentioned in my previous Twelfth Doctor review, after Clara Oswald left, the Twelfth Doctor had two adventures with Hattie Monroe, a 40th century punk rocker who the Doctor met on the Twist, a figure eight shaped world ship. The book opens with the Doctor finishing a pretty cool mission, from what it looks like, involving the return of the Quarks to an undersea location before leaving to check on Hattie at the Twist. When he first met Hattie, she was an aspiring punk rock star. Now she's made it big and is getting a little bit tired of all the attention. So, when the doctor shows up, she just wants to get away and so they do to Seaton Bay in 1979. As Hattie points out it is cold and grey there but as the Doctor points out they have great chips which is apparently worth travelling about 2000 years back in time for. However, as any Doctor Who fan will tell you the Doctor and companion or friend can't just go on a simple vacation because there's always a monster about and in this case it's a seaweed monster that is terrorizing the town.
Overall, this is a good story with some suspenseful moments but I think what really does make this work is the art. The art is by Art by Mariano Laclaustra and colors by Carlos Cabrera and they do a fantastic job. It is so vibrant and beautiful to read. It has some not undersea scenes that particularly pop out. They are just so beautifully done. Now I know a lot of Doctor Who fans were not a big fan of the Twelfth Doctor playing the electric guitar and I think it works well particularly in the comics because the Doctor not only plays the guitar but he jams with Hattie, who he knows is going to be a great legend in the 40th century world of punk rock and where I think the art comes in so well is you can really see the way it is drawn that these are two people who are having a good time being around each other and doing something they love together. You don't have to like punk rock and you certainly don't have to think that it is plausible that there would be punk rock in the 40th century. It's not one of those evergreen genres of music. Pardon the pun with the seaweed in here. It's just a really fun, pleasant read. If I had any complaints, it was the tongues out bit of the punk. That part, if there were punk in the future, I think we could leave behind in this decade but that's just me. I liked it and I thought it was a solid start.
The second story in the book. The first takes up three issues. We have a one issue story, The Boy with the Displaced Smile, which finds the Doctor in the small town of Sweet Haven in the mid-20th century. So sometime, probably 1950s or 60s, where there are strange goings on with a monster involved and there's a boy who's lonely and a waitress who’s trying to be a friend to him. This one is by a guest writer, James Peaty and the art is by Warren Pleece. The story's not bad but it's clear to me that Peaty wanted more than a one issue story and he tries to jam a lot in here. Some of it slightly political though, to be honest, he doesn't really have much time to try and say anything within these few pages. It's a challenge to try and tell a Doctor Who story in the space of a single comic though it has been managed in even less space than a full sized American comic in Doctor Who Magazine.

Can the Twelfth Doctor and a punk rocker from the 40th Century stop a seaweed monster on the loose in a 1970’s English village?

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The Eleventh Doctor and Alice have a baby…tree (I am not Groot.) while trying to thwart a member of the Silence who refuses to shut up.
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Transcript:
Graham:The Eleventh Doctor and Alice and a baby tree makes three find out what it's all about as we take a look at Doctor Who – The Eleventh Doctor: The Sapling Volume 1: Growth in today's episode of the Classy Comics podcast.

[Intro Music]
Announcer:Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham
Graham:As a reference before, Titan comics when they got the Doctor Who license launched series for the previous two doctors David Tennant's 10th Doctor and Matt Smith 11th doctor and gave each of them new set of companions, kind of to create a new era for them outside of the show and its continuity and what was going on there and indeed with the way the Eleventh Doctor was written popping in to see his first companion, Amy Pond, just every now and again, it was possible to fit in any number of companions. I think Titan created a really good companion with Alice Obiefune and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing the last name. It's African in origin it's O-B-I-E-F-U-N-E. For simplicity, I'll just refer to her as Alice from the now on.
Alice's mother had just recently died when she was first introduced to the Eleven Doctor and that sense of loss was something the Doctor comforted her over and then they ended up traveling together and having two years of great adventures. The second year was a very plot heavy arc involving the time war and some mystery about the activities of the War Doctor. The third year launched a new arc, the Sapling and the book we're going to take a look at is Volume One of the Sapling which collects the first four issues of that story.
The book begins with the doctor running as part of a quest set about by their friend Jones, a musician who was Alice's mom's favorite singer and who they met during their first year. Jones would send them on a little bits of a scavenger hunts for rare memorabilia and just little bits of things is a kind of a game between the Doctor and Jones. I love the first issue has some great stuff in it. My favorite part of it is Bessie 2. If you're a long-time fan of Doctor Who you'll know that the third doctor had an old car that he souped up that was known as Bessie. What Bessie 2 is a monster truck which the Eleventh Doctor drives into the Tardis. It's just a fun visual. It's reminiscent of Clara Oswald’s entrance to the Tardis on a motorcycle, only saying let's go ahead and raise that up to the totally crazy level. It serves establish Alice and the Doctor’s relationship and also that Alice is a bit comfortable with this whole time and space travelling thing she's been doing it for a few years and she's also a pretty stable adult as an exile librarian, just a pretty responsible person.
However, their next search for Jones leads to Jones's funeral and another clue leads them to a planet where they run into a member of the Silence, an alien creature who’s part of a religious order opposed to the Doctor. The Silence power is that if you see them and then you turn away, you absolutely will forget having seen them previously unless you do some jiggery pokery. This Silence is so good that even fellow Silence forget him and this is really bugged him and he wants to be remembered and he wants to be known. His name is the Scream and he's even got the letters on its head, the Scream, and his plan is to steal the Doctor and Alice's memory and to transfer his own being into the Sapling, a creature who is part of a race of plants that see themselves on a planet and then shook out all existing plant life.

The Eleventh Doctor and Alice have a baby…tree (I am not Groot.) while trying to thwart a member of the Silence who refuses to shut up.

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A look at the Seventh Doctor's earliest comic strips in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine as he battles the Ice Warriors, and lends a hand to a microscopic species.
Transcript below:
It's time to set your TARDIS time coordinates for 1987, then we're going to take a look at the start of the Seventh Doctor's comic run in Doctor Who Classics: Volume Seven just ahead.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
As I mentioned in a previous podcast, going back to the late 1970s' Doctor Who Magazine was the home of Doctor Who comic strips, and this continued into the Seventh Doctor era. The Seventh Doctor was portrayed by Sylvester McCoy who took over at a very difficult time. Colin Baker had been fired as the Doctor at the request of the BBC – quite unfairly in my opinion – and hadn't actually appeared in a regeneration story with McCoy donning Baker's costume and a blond wig. Definitely a bumpy way to begin an on-television run. Are the comics that bumpy? Well, we'll take a look here. We're going to be reviewing Doctor Who Classics: Volume Seven from IDW.
Back in the earlier part of the Twenty-First Century IDW landed the Doctor Who license for comics and they not only printed new comics with the Tenth and the Eleventh Doctor, as well as a Fiftieth Anniversary Special series, they also did Doctor Who Classics which reprinted stories from the Doctor Who Magazine. Doctor Who Classics: Volume is not the only way to read these stories. You can actually buy Panini's Collection which is now the one who will print all of the previous classic Doctor Who comic collections. A big difference with the Panini Collection is that the books are in their original magazine size and they're also in black and white. I like the Doctor Who Classics presentation because they're more typical American comic size which I'm used to, plus they're also colorized. The colors are done by Charlie Kirchoff who just does a fantastic job on here. They feel very true to the type of color choices that the artist would have made had they had the option of doing color comics back in the 1980s. The only downside to reading this in the Doctor Who Classics version is you don't get the commentary at the back, which the Panini version is kind of nice but we can forego that. The book is about 120 pages long. The comics and Doctor Who magazine at this point were eight pages in length, so you have fifteen strips collected in here and a total of eight Doctor Who stories.
The first story is A Cold day in Hell which finds The Doctor travelling to a planet that is supposed to be a tropical pleasure planet along with Frobisher who was best known as a Sixth Doctor companion. He is a shape-shifting, hard-boiled private investigator who, through most of his Doctor Who comic run, took on the shape of an anthropomorphic, talking penguin. Give the comics credit for introducing a companion they couldn't have done on TV. As the title implies the Doctor and Frobisher find that the planet is now in the midst of an Ice Age and the Ice Warriors are present on the planet.
This is a fairly decent, if not spectacular, Ice Warrior story. It hits most of the highlights though the Ice Warriors lacks some of the complexity and nuance that can make them interesting in the TV series. The one big problem with this is I'm not entirely sure this was originally written with the Seventh Doctor in mind. The story serves as a goodbye point for Frobisher but is somewhat confused as to chronology, partially because Peri traveled with the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher, and so this is assuming that this is right after they dropped off or said goodbye to Peri, when in fact the Sixth Doctor had a fair amount of living left to do before he regenerated.

A look at the Seventh Doctor’s earliest comic strips in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine as he battles the Ice Warriors, and lends a hand to a microscopic species.

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In preparation for the Black Panther movie, we take a look at the beginning of Christopher Priest's 1998 influential run on Black Panther, Issues 1-17.
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Transcript follows:
T'Challa fights evil in Wakanda, in the air and in Hell's Kitchen, while his State Department liaison tries to avoid getting hit by Bill Clinton with a hockey stick. I'll tell youall about it as we take a look at the beginning of Christopher Priest's run on Black Panther ahead in the Classy Comics Podcast.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
T'Challa, the Black Panther, was the first black superhero. He was introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four by Stanley and Jack Kirby back in 1966. He begins by kidnapping the Fantastic Four. Good heroic opening if I've ever heard of it, but it's only to test them to see if they would be able to help him with the problems he's going through in his nation of Wakanda. He later makes a big appearance with Captain America, which leads to him joining the Avengers and becoming a long-term character later as he would appear repeatedly as a member of the team and as a guest star in other books.
His own series would be a bit more challenging, that would definitely have some highlights. His first solo series wasn't in his own book but in the series Jungle Action, and with the story Panthers Quest by Jack McGregor. The series saw him trying to stay alive against Erik Killmonger, a Wakandan expatriate who returned hoping to claim the throne and the power of Wakanda for his own. The story had striking art. It also had some very dark moments as well as a certain reflectiveness. Many consider it Marvel's first graphic novel, this multiple part story told over two years.
After the cancellation of Jungle Action, Black Panther got his own series written by Jack Kirby who also did the art. This was a lot more adventure/fun/Sci-Fi than the Jungle Action, and it also get a mini-series as well as a few more scripts by McGregor who would create some sequels to his original story in the '70s.
He continued to be a pretty low profile character until the 1990s, and perhaps the best thing to happen to Black Panther was Marvel going bankrupt. This led to Marvel Knights where Marvel outsourced comics for characters who were kind of low profile including Daredevil, Punisher, The Inhumans. Yes, pushing the Inhumans has been going on that long, and Black Panther was among them.
African-American humor writer Christopher Priest was brought on to write the series. His status as a comedy writer shows throughout – he made many changes and expansions to T'Challa's world and also redefined the character. Everett Ross, played by Martin Freeman in the upcoming movie was created by Priest.
So, we'll take a look at the series; we'll start by looking at his take on the characters before we get into the plots. Everett Ross is Priest's big innovation. It was his idea that the comic book readership which was predominantly white Americans needed a character who could be a bridge to T'Challa who's, of course, an African. For that reason he creates Everett Ross, and Ross is hilarious. He can also be frustrating.
Ross is the primary storyteller in the book and he is a bit scatterbrained to put it mildly. He tells the stories in whatever order occurs to him. It's kind of a thought for thought storytelling process. I have to admit that it probably was a bit maddening if you were getting this book one Issue at a time.
The book opens with Ross making a grand entrance into the Black Panther series sitting in the bathroom with a gun, but without pants, hiding from a rat. We have to take several issues to find out why he ended up ...

In preparation for the Black Panther movie, we take a look at the beginning of Christopher Priest’s 1998 influential run on Black Panther, Issues 1-17.

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Wrapping up our look at Peter Park's spectacular 1980s adventures in the pages of Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3.
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Transcript:
If you want to view paradise, go to the suburbs? We'll talk about that and more as we continue our look at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Volume Three.

Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.
Welcome back to our look at Essential Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Volume Three. There were not a ton of major villains who appeared in the book. I think more of the really heavy hitters tended to show up in Amazing Spider-Man; nevertheless you did have a few. Kraven and Electro were two major villains from Spiderman ‘s Silver Age; certainly Electro was not looked on as quite the big deal he had been back in the 1960s, although Kraven would have one of the best known Spider-Man story lines in just a few years. In The Spectacular Spider-Man appearance he's notable for appearing besides Calypso, a voodoo priestess who tried to help Kraven do away with Spider-Man, but Kraven viewed her methods as dishonourable and I think in that way showed a greater sense of honor than he had in a lot of his appearances in the Silver Age.
Towards the end of the book we also get to see Doc Ock appear; however, his escape from prison is teased in Issue Seventy-Two but we don't actually see him until Issue Seventy-Three. They do instead an Issue Seventy-Two, I think is pretty clever. They tease the release but instead we made a kid who is part of a group of kids who run around dressing up as super villains for fun, and he's come up with the best Doc Ock costume ever complete with mechanical arms, and so he goes around town in it. Doc Ock is wanted – this leads to some confusion and introduction of a character who would be back about a dozen times or so.
Issue Seventy-Three and Seventy-Four feature The Owl and Darkhawk, as well as Kingpin. I like the inclusion of The Owl since he was always more of a daredevil villain than a Spider-Man villain, and they make some slight reinvention of the character after he had been in a very critically-wounded conditions in his last appearance in Daredevil. There's some great action scenes as well as a battle over McGuffin with a very surprising resolution at the end of Issue Seventy-Four which closes out the book, which I won't spoil for you even though it was published thirty-five years ago. You also have a lot of minor lesser-known villains show up. There's The Smuggler who, in the book, makes a point of…used to be known as Power Man until Luke Cage cleaned his clock and won the right to use that title. Of course, now everybody knows Luke Cage is Luke Cage. Still he was never really a villain who was worthy of that name.
There was Nitro who could blow himself up; there was Jack O'Lantern who had a Jack O'Lantern on his head, but in other ways ripped off the Green Goblin design. To me, the character doesn't look scary or intimidating – just looks kind of silly. There's The Ringer, there's The Beetle who I think they wanted to have as a major villain at one point, like back in the '60s but never quite made it; and he also appeared in the series with The Gibbon – a guy who was a bit of a Spider-Man fan but ended up disillusioned, running around in a Gibbon costume. There's The Ringer, Moonstone, Gold Bug, and probably one of the more interesting ones was Boomerang.
Boomerang was a former Major League pitcher who threw boomerangs as part of his attempts at being an assassin, and he decided he wanted to be the Kingpin's point man to replace Bullseye. And so he decided to kill a witness who is rumored to be giving testimony tha...

Wrapping up our look at Peter Park’s spectacular 1980s adventures in the pages of Essential Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-man, Volume 3.

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