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The Full Kyrun

The Full Kyrun

THE STROMAN ARGUMENT: Kyrun Silva of Taurus Comics and the 4 Tales Podcast joins D. Bethel for this week’s show and they talk a bit about some recent guests Kyrun has had on his podcast.

WEEK IN GEEK: This week, Kyrun dives into Alan Moore’s celebrated run on DC Comics’ Swamp Thing while D. Bethel is awestruck by Godzilla Minus One (though, technically, he watched Godzilla Minus One Minus Color).

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(00:00) Intro – Welcome, Kyrun Silva!
(11:20) Kyrun’s Week in Geek: Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing
(21:10) D. Bethel’s Week in Geek: Godzilla Minus One Minus Color
(42:46) Outro – A Mini Con Artists
(46:25) Outtakes

RELEVANT LINKS:

  • Godzilla Fhtagn“: an essay about the 2014 American production, Godzilla, and its Lovecraftian overtones by D. Bethel.

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Memory of a Landline

Memory of a Landline

WEEK IN GEEK: It’s a week of superhero adaptations with Andrew watching the recent slate of DC/CW tv shows and D. Bethel playing the opening hours of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy by Eidos-Montréal.

RELEVANT EPISODES:

  • Business Exempt” (19 Oct. 2018): Where our hosts last discussed TellTale Games…when they laid off a bunch of employees.
  • #SaveGrifter” (14 Feb. 2020): Where our hosts plus the DC-on-the-ground reporter, Taylor, talk about the last big DC/CW crossover event, “Crisis on Infinite Earths.”
  • All Those Words” (19 March 2021): Where Andrew talked about the most recent addition to the DC/CW catalogue, Superman & Lois.

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Meat Pops

Meat Pops

NEWS CRUISE: Andrew and D. Bethel cover a lot of different news stories this week, including the acceptance of NFTs in video games by Steam and the Epic Games Store; the workers of tabletop game developer, Paizo, form a union; developers who worked on Metroid Dread not seeing their names in the credits; Ruby Rose speaking up about their treatment on the set of Batwoman‘s first season; and some announcements made by DC during the DC Fandome event.

UPDATE: Venerated Metroid fansite, Shinesparkers, reached out to Metroid Dread developers, MercurySteam, for clarification on what qualified for crediting in the game, specifically with regard to what constitutes the “25% game dev time” and “significant creative contributions,” stating:

“A significant contribution might mean A LOT of things: from designing a playable character, writing dialogues, lore.. anything substantially important to the game. On the 25% this is something based on our experience. Of course it can be seen differently elsewhere.”

FURTHER UPDATE: Union issues with Paizo and its workers came to an agreement on Thursday, October 21, with Paizo officially recognizing the workers’ union.

RELEVANT LINKS:

RELEVANT EPISODES:

  • Business Exempt” (19 October 2018): Where D. Bethel and Andrew talk about the first major attempt to unionize video game workers.
  • A Casualty of the Rhyme” (22 May 2020): Where our hosts, along with Taylor, talk about Ruby Rose’s sudden departure from Batwoman.
  • Milkbloods” (09 April 2021): When Andrew and D. Bethel first discussed the strange culture of NFTs.

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Books For Days

Books For Days

CAP PUNCHED FIRST: Another day, another attack on fictional characters as a cable news segment pilloried Marvel Comics for making Captain America “woke” in a recent issue, seemingly forgetting that Cap has been punching literal Nazis in his comics since his first issue. Andrew and D. Bethel explore this while also examining the variety of ways texts (movies, comics, books, music, tv shows, etc.) can be read.

PRINT ON DEMAND: After buying some RPG books through DriveThruRPG, Andrew becomes fascinated by the idea––and future applicability––of print on demand services, where a book isn’t printed until a customer orders it. D. Bethel brings his creator experience with POD services to the conversation as well.

RELEVANT EPISODES:

  • Slapcast” (02 July 2021): Where Andrew gave us the run down of the strange TSR Twitter fight.

RELEVANT LINKS:

  • The video Dan referred to with Stan Lee talking about the creation of the X-Men, though it’s one of many similar and slightly different creation stories he has told over the years:

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The Nature of the Gutter

The Nature of the Gutter

TAYLORVISION: [SPOILER WARNING] With the divisive (but generally well-received) season of the Disney+ original, WandaVision, all wrapped up, D. Bethel brings friend-of-the-show and on-the-ground DC correspondent, Taylor Katcher, on to talk with Andrew about the twists and turns of this wonderfully unique entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spoilers about WandaVision are talked about consistently and thoroughly throughout the episode. You have been warned.

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It Has Full Body

It Has Full Body

WEEK IN GEEK: As is often the case with our hosts: everything old is new again. Andrew plans to take on the psychological strangeness of Atlus’ Catherine in the recently released “definitive” version of the 2011 game called Catherine: Full Body. D. Bethel actually steps outside the realm of Xavier’s School for the Gifted to try out a different Marvel hero, The Silver Surfer, in the 2019 limited series, Silver Surfer: Black, by Donny Cates, Tradd Moore, and Dave Stewart.

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2019: Blue Dick, Blue Team, and Blue, Navy

2019: Blue Dick, Blue Team, and Blue, Navy

This year we are hosting a variety of looks back at 2019 as hosts and friends-of-the-show offer up the things that defined the year for them. Today we have fellow nerd lawyer and tabletop RPG writer, André La Roche, share the things that stood out to him this year. NOTE: This contains spoilers for the season finale of HBO’s Watchmen and DC Comics’ Doomsday Clock.


Wow. Wow, wow, wow. 2019 was a banner year for geekery. When D. Bethel asked me to contribute this year-end review, I had many options to choose from in my corner of geekery. In particular, I had to resist talking about the following honorable mentions: the release of Avengers: Endgame, the controversial ending of HBO’s Game of Thrones, the drama regarding Sony reclaiming the rights to Spider-Man from Marvel, before ultimately agreeing to share custody (Sony gets weekends and holidays), and the sky-is-falling hubbub around the release of Joker. (To be fair, I already wrote about that one here).

While I’m sure these events and many others will also be a part of others’ 2019 year-end discussions, the next three represent the highlights of my own particular year in geek.

Both HBO’s Watchmen series and DC’s sequel, Doomsday Clock, radically confront the original Watchmen‘s themes in their own ways. Source: (L-R) HBO, DC Comics.

Fixing Boomer Comics: Or, the Story of How Doctor Manhattan’s Heart Grew Three Sizes that Day

Earlier this year, an amusing story emerged regarding the hashtag “#fixingboomercomics.” In it, several artists identified problematic comic strips written and illustrated by Baby Boomer creators. These comics often depicted straight white middle class men puzzling and chortling over issues faced by their wives and children. Independent creators “fixed” these comics by adding a panel depicting the Boomer male protagonist, instead of making fun of others, engaging in the issues that interested them with good-natured curiosity. However, I don’t think the artists behind this movement predicted the highest profile incidence of this: not one, but two “fixes” of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.

December 2019 showed the conclusion of not one, but two sequels to Watchmen. The first being the similarly-titled HBO television series, and the second being the comic book Doomsday Clock published by DC Comics. A proper analysis of each of these works independently, or even comparatively, would take more room than I have here. However, for our purposes the following suffices: both works end with a complete and tidying ordering of the moral universe which includes Adrian Veidt (aka Ozymandias) being apprehended for his act of terrorism in the original graphic novel, and the stoically amoral Doctor Manhattan dying after being overcome with feelings of love and hope (respective to the show and novel).

via GIPHY

This is one of the few instances where I side with Alan Moore’s notorious hostility towards adaptations of his works. Watchmen, by design, was supposed to be a rejection of the white hats vs. black hats style of comic books. The bad guy killed millions, and got away, and the heroes turned a blind eye for the greater good. Both sequels saw fit to “fix” this carefully considered ending. To my great disappointment. The willingness to defy conventional superheroic storytelling was a large part of why this work stood out, and influenced a generation of comics to come after it. Though I enjoy hopeful and optimistic stories, I also at times enjoy those that end on darker notes. After all, I live in a world where Augusto Pinochet died peacefully in bed in his 90s after killing or disappearing thousands of political dissidents. This is the same world where members of the Bush administration are not presently in jail for waging a preventative war in Iraq, nor likely ever will be. It’s a world where children are being separated from their parents, held in cages along the U.S.-Mexican border, and in some cases reportedly experiencing sexual assault.

Works like the original Watchmen offer the following consolation: “Yes, the world can be a terrible place where justice is fleeting. You’re not alone in recognizing this, and yet, you can still carry on with grace and dignity.”

In the original Watchmen, the Boomer got it right.

This promo image for HoX and PoTen begs as many questions as the entirety of the event itself. Art by Mark Brooks. Source: Marvel

HoX and PoTen

The X-Men franchise was my first true obsessive-compulsive venture into geekery as a child. Sure, I loved Transformers, Thundercats, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but when it came to X-Men, I became an encyclopedia of useless knowledge—down to the characters’ heights and weights gleaned from their 1993 Skybox trading cards. After the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the X-Men assumed a less-prominent role in Marvel Comics—that is, until Marvel regained the movie rights to the property.
This year, Marvel published an ambitious relaunch of the X-franchise with the intertwined miniseries House of X (“X” as in the letter) and Powers of X (“X” as in the Roman numeral for “ten”). Or, as I like to call them, “HoX and PoTen.” D. Bethel has already discussed what HoX/PoX meant for him, but hey—when you have two X-fans contributing to a website, you’re bound to get some redundancy when X-Issues pop up.

This relaunch completely overhauled the high concept of the X-Franchise—all of mutant kind, including villains, find themselves united and creating their own island nation of Krakoa (the villain from the very first reboot of the franchise in 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men #1), and their own unique culture which includes their own language. On top of this, mutants no longer need fear death, due to the implementation of so-called “resurrection protocols.” Whether Krakoa’s inhabitants are truly able to cheat death isn’t something I’m convinced of.

In HoX and PoTen, Charles Xavier found a way for mutants to avoid––or at the very least, invalidate––the threat of death. From House of X #5, by Jonathan Hickman (words), Pepe Larraz (lines), and Marte Gracia (colors). Source: Marvel

HoX and PoTen and the “Dawn of X” phase that followed them, have all been imperfect. Despite this, though, the ambition behind this wide-ranging relaunch is undeniable. And in the hands of skilled storytellers, those gaps in the premise will no doubt meet with eventual patching. Overall, it’s good to see Marvel’s Merry Mutants receiving some tender love and care.

Patent drawings of the (L-R) “Craft Using an Intertial Mass Reduction Device” and the “High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Generator.” Source: TheDrive.com/USPTO.GOV

Technology is More Advanced Than You Know

“Technology is more advanced than you know.” This enigmatic statement, devoid of any other context, was uttered to me many years ago by a contact in the defense sector. At the time, I found this statement incredibly curious. After all, I consider myself reasonably well-informed. I get my news from a variety of sources with a variety of political and world views. I have friends who are researchers in many fields or employees at leading tech companies and ask them about the work that seems interesting and daring. I always had a rough sense of what was coming down the pike. Or so I thought.

2019 was the year where reports of credible UFO sightings made the news. The most noteworthy of which was the U.S. Navy confirmation of video from 2004 depicting a UFO—now rebranded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) that reportedly broke the known laws of physics: hovering in mid-air, and accelerating from a dead stop to a speed of approximately 2,400 miles per hour.

Now, as much as I wish this were evidence of extraterrestrial life, I can’t claim that it is. What it is evidence of, is a technology so radically advanced that it defies conventional wisdom of the known laws of physics and their mechanical applications, and represents a quantum leap (not the Bakula kind) between current understandings of what is scientifically possible, and what science can actually achieve.

After the story of the 2004 video broke, my curiosity was piqued and I continued to do research into the subject of UAPs. What I found was equally as shocking as the Navy-corroborated video.

Earlier this year, the Navy filed a series of patents that, if accurate, could mean that we are on the precipice of attaining Star Trek-like levels of technological development.

These patents were developed by a Naval scientist, researcher, and aerospace engineer named Salvatore Cezar Pais located at the United States Navy’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River. Dr. Pais’s patent applications are for the following devices: an “electromagnetic field generator and method to generate an electromagnetic field” with the principal stated application of deflecting asteroids that may hit Earth; a “craft using an inertial mass reduction device” that could be a high speed “hybrid aerospace/undersea craft” that could “engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level”; a “room temperature semiconductor” that would enable “the transmission of electrical power with no losses”; a “high frequency gravitational wave generator” used for the purposes of “advanced propulsion, asteroid disruption and/or deflection, and communications through solid objects”; and a “plasma compression fusion device” that would effectively represent the holy grail of energy sciences—nuclear fusion.

Of interesting note, was that the Navy’s patent application for the craft using an inertial mass reduction device was originally rejected by the patent examiner at the United States Patent and Trademark Office as being scientifically impossible. It was then that the Navy appealed the patent officer’s determination with the Chief Technical Officer Dr. James Sheehy testifying that not only was the patent application operable or near operable (the requirements for a patent being granted), but that the Chinese Government was close to perfecting such technology. Similar appeals were filed by the Navy in response to other patent rejections.

Many commentators were unconvinced that the Navy was actually close to implementing the described technologies. Some believed that this was actually an elaborate disinformation campaign, designed to trick rival governments into wasting resources pursuing impossible technologies. That may very well be the case. But I also wonder how many of these commentators were being held back by their own possibly imperfect perceptions of what is scientifically possible—the nay-saying old guard to Dr. Pais’s modern-day Galileo. The technologies described in Dr. Pais’s patents are definitely the stuff of Star Trek—but so too were cloning, gene editing, hand-held mobile communications devices, tablet computing, augmented reality gaming, and real-time high definition video-conferencing. All of those technologies have since come to fruition.

If you’re interested in reading about Dr. Pais and the Navy’s patents in greater detail, www.TheDrive.com has been dogged in publishing a fantastic series of articles with each new development over the past year. Each of these patents and the stories and commentary around them far exceed the scope of this year-end review’s ability to do them justice, and are worth spending a lazy Saturday afternoon reading. Who knows—alongside the credible reports of UAPs, they may convince you, as they did me, that there’s hope that technology is more advanced than you know.

In Conclusion

For me, 2019 had two great highlights—a return to prominence of my first geeky love, and a renewed hope for realizing technological marvels that I once thought were limited to the world of fiction. It also brought with it some disappointment, as the custodians of the one of the most influential graphic novels repudiated the moral ambivalence that was its most important artistic legacy. On the whole though, these developments of 2019 have left me more than eager to see what 2020 will bring us beyond perfect hindsight.

Tummy Drums

Tummy Drums

NOT FAR FROM HOME: It was announced that Sony and Disney/Marvel had once again struck a deal that will keep Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, much to the joy of fans and to the benefit of both companies’ bank accounts. Having discussed the initial breakup back when it happened in August, Andrew and D. Bethel have a surprisingly heated discussion of this generally happy news.

THE STRANGEST HANDSHAKE: British tabletop company, Games Workshop, announced that it will be licensing one of its beloved properties––Warhammer 40,000––to American comic book giant, Marvel Comics, to make a line of comic books. This is interesting because both of Games Workshop’s original Warhammer line and especially its Warhammer 40,000 line have deep lore and continuities that has our hosts wondering how well it will translate to a comic book series.

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RELEVANT EPISODES:

  • Ghost Highway (23 August 2019): Where Andrew and D. Bethel talk about the great Sony-Marvel contract dissolution of 2019.
  • New Dangers (20 September 2019): Where, briefly, D. Bethel and Andrew display their light wrestling knowledge in the light of AEW’s strange storyline built around a jock heel wrestler insults his opponent for liking Dungeons & Dragons.

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Roman Math

Roman Math

WEEK IN GEEK: This week, Andrew continues his trend of trying things out years after their initial release by sitting down with 2014’s Sims 4 while D. Bethel tries to wrap his head around the opaque––but good?––X-franchise reboot in House of X #1 and Powers of X #1, both written by Jonathan Hickman. SPOILERS for these two titles; you’ve been warned.

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Start With Doom

Start With Doom

CAN YOU SDCC ME NOW?: Though San Diego Comic Con is ostensibly about comic books, the biggest announcements that seem to come out of the show revolve around cinematic and televised properties. Andrew and D. Bethel focus on the announcements that not only ignited their excitement but also triggered their critical processes, from the Cats trailer to the next big DC/CW “Arrowverse” crossover event to the new Star Trek show to Marvel’s Phase 4 lineup.

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Image Credit: Pocket Books/Marvel/CBS

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