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Milestone Book Club #39 - Icon #22-27 · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Marcus Anderson: Okay.
• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody! Welcome back to 22 Panels and the Milestone Book Club. I am fresh off a C2E2.
• 0:13
  Tad Eggleston: Where I got to talk to Dennis Cowan some. So…
• 0:16
  Ted: Yeah.
• 0:17
  Tad Eggleston: So I had, like, milestone on the brain.
• 0:19
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, I used the, bird sequence as part of my Cool People Talking About Comics slideshow.
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: from hardware number one. Oh, yeah.
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: Milestone connections.
• 0:35
  Ted: I wish I could have made it out there, but yeah, no, it's… it's… I'm… I'm here.
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: It was fun. I would have let you be a cool person.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: about comics with us.
• 0:43
  Ted: I mean, I would have tried, you know, no, I get it.
• 0:47
  Ted: But yeah, no, I'm, I'm raring to talk about this set of issues, because this was a really interesting one.
• 0:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this is a good set.
• 0:56
  Marcus Anderson: I have, yeah, just up top, I feel like,
• 0:59
  Marcus Anderson: One thing I love about this issue is that… well, this arc…
• 1:04
  Marcus Anderson: So, I mean, I don't know if you guys have heard this narrative or not, but definitely amongst, like, a lot of…
• 1:10
  Marcus Anderson: Black comic fans, when the talk of, like, what's your favorite, milestone book comes up, a lot of… people… people do like Icon, but Icon the character, a lot of times, gets some unnecessary… I feel unnecessary hate. Now, I definitely, obviously, don't agree with,
• 1:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he was a Reagan Republican.
• 1:31
  Marcus Anderson: Okay, but see, no, no, this is what… you're doing it too. You're doing it.
• 1:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I was messing with you.
• 1:35
  Marcus Anderson: No, no, no, this is what it is. But no, and that is the point that people get to, but I feel like this arc really gets into the complexity of Augustus. And yes, the period when he… but this is why Dwayne McDuffie is the GOAT, because, the…
• 1:50
  Marcus Anderson: So, the period in which Augustus… basically, Augustus was, like, all about the fight and the struggle.
• 1:57
  Marcus Anderson: for, you know, Black dignity, liberation, pretty much since he landed. You know, he… he lived… chose to and lived as a Black man, and then there… and we'll get into it in more detail, but I just love the fact that this… I feel like this arc really…
• 2:12
  Marcus Anderson: Disproves the simplicity of that narrative.
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: It does.
• 2:17
  Marcus Anderson: It is true that when you first meet Augustus, he's frustratingly conservative. That being said, it's not like it takes Raquel very long to…
• 2:26
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, because, I mean, what we learn in more detail in this arc, and had been hinted at before.
• 2:35
  Tad Eggleston: Is he kind of fell into conservatism after his… Right. Firebrand.
• 2:41
  Marcus Anderson: Well, I'll talk… I'll speak more to that, but that… that speaks to what was happening in the country, period. Like, you know what I mean? And it's… Yeah. It's… yeah, so, like, the… the 80s and 90s…
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but his… I guess his wife didn't… his wife died in 76? 77?
• 2:59
  Marcus Anderson: Sure. But think about this, I mean… Right, but like…
• 3:03
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
• 3:04
  Tad Eggleston: I was just trying to remember if she died earlier, and he helped… Usher in the era.
• 3:12
  Tad Eggleston: But no, she died later, so he…
• 3:14
  Ted: Yes.
• 3:15
  Tad Eggleston: He just kind of fell into it.
• 3:17
  Marcus Anderson: Right, but if you're talking about the late 70s, this is after, you know, so many of our leaders were murdered, you know what I mean? Like, systematically.
• 3:26
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I'm trying to agree with you, Marcus.
• 3:28
  Marcus Anderson: I'm not.
• 3:29
  Tad Eggleston: I was just doing math in my head. Because initially, I was remembering Harlem Renaissance, and for whatever reason, I thought she'd died young, and then I remembered, oh, no, no, she died in the 70s, that changes entirely. If he'd started to go conservative.
• 3:43
  Tad Eggleston: like, during the New Deal, it becomes a different ballgame than going conservative during the Reagan Revolution.
• 3:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 3:53
  Ted: It's…
• 3:54
  Tad Eggleston: Ideally, because he pulled back.
• 3:56
  Tad Eggleston: Only 10 years into it, rather than…
• 4:01
  Marcus Anderson: Right, but… yeah.
• 4:03
  Tad Eggleston: Trump years into it.
• 4:05
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, this is getting into a lot of ICON's backstory that we hadn't really gotten in a single setting before. And I mean, okay, so we kind of just leapt into it. We should probably give the listener some mild amount of context. So this is following up on the events of Mothership Connection.
• 4:20
  Ted: where Icon finally made contact with his people from his home planet, and has now left and given up the mantle of Icon to rejoin his people in the… what's the name of his, like, space…
• 4:31
  Marcus Anderson: Terminus.
• 4:32
  Ted: Yeah, I was trying to remember if there was, like, the name for the… or whatever.
• 4:37
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah, the people… well.
• 4:39
  Ted: Good, yeah.
• 4:40
  Marcus Anderson: Sorry, but, you know…
• 4:41
  Ted: Unity or something, like, it's, you know, there's a term for it, but I can't remember it. But, he's going back home, and, Raquel is left on Earth, and she is also pregnant, and thus giving up the mantle of Rocket, at least temporarily.
• 4:57
  Ted: But also, you know, having to realize that, like, now she's… she no longer has ICON around, she no longer has this friend that she's…
• 5:03
  Ted: You know, spent all this time with, and developed this relationship with, and developed this close bond with in a way that's, you know, very devastating for her.
• 5:12
  Ted: But at the same time, now we're getting into, okay, Icon has finally made it back to his people, and one of the very first things that happens, which I absolutely love, is that, like, he basically gets off the spaceship, and they're like, oh, and his people are like, oh yeah, it was this big deal, because, like, basically nobody ever dies in our civilization, so it was wild that you did.
• 5:27
  Ted: So, you know, we're gonna have this big party and everything, and it's like, oh yeah, and here's… meet the guy that we cloned who's your, like, backup replacement dude, because since death is unknown in our society, we just made a new version of you from your, like, brain recordings. And so, there's this intensely awkward thing of him being like, oh yeah, shit, there's a whole other me here.
• 5:49
  Ted: Which, first of all, that's a great science fiction conceit, that's fantastic, but then also, the basis for what happens in a lot of this arc, at least in space, is that Icon is basically being
• 6:02
  Ted: The advocate for…
• 6:04
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 6:05
  Ted: Earth in a really… like, this is…
• 6:08
  Marcus Anderson: It's also revealed that his being a lawyer, in some ways, kind of predates his time on Earth, too.
• 6:15
  Ted: Yes, because it's what he did when he was, you know, space harness, whatever. Space, you know, when he was in space, when he was a space guy. And he,
• 6:26
  Ted: he, is… so… so he, yeah, he gets the chance to essentially argue for whether or not Earth should be destroyed, because they've started developing stuff like Q-Juice, and, you know, they might get to interstellar travel in the next 900 years. So basically, hey, should we destroy these guys before they destroy us, or should we just let them be? And Icon…
• 6:45
  Ted: is chosen to represent Earth, and, like, this is… I was trying to think about this. This is, like, sort of the culmination of Icahn's narrative in a purely science-fictional context, and even, like, you know, with more than that, too. Like, he is…
• 7:01
  Ted: he… he's, you know, he's the man who fell to Earth, he lived here for 150 years, and now he's finally gotten back and has to basically make a report. And, like, this is sort of the…
• 7:12
  Ted: culmination of what would be his narrative if this was, like, a self-contained thing. It's him having to go back and be like, okay, here's what I learned while I was on Earth.
• 7:20
  Ted: And it's a… it's a huge moment, and a huge part of this narrative, and, you know, he gets to sit down and give not only his own history, but the history of Earth itself, which is…
• 7:29
  Ted: It's one of those great, you know, sci-fi bits where he's describing, like, well, yes, on this planet, they have this thing where, for some reason, they divide themselves into castes based upon the color of their skin, which is such a bizarre practice. You know, it's the outsider's view of Earth.
• 7:44
  Marcus Anderson: Actually, just real quick, I just want to point out that
• 7:47
  Marcus Anderson: While it's not something that necessarily…
• 7:50
  Marcus Anderson: Is, was, was 100%,
• 7:53
  Marcus Anderson: you know, coined, like, after the 2000s. Definitely, like, you know, Isabella Wilkerson wrote, her book on CAST. I think it was titled CAST, and it deals with the idea of,
• 8:06
  Marcus Anderson: you know, viewing race and racism and these constructs through the lens of… especially how it's… how it exists in the United States through the lens of caste.
• 8:15
  Ted: In that it is a caste system, even though we don't like to call it that or think of it as that.
• 8:19
  Marcus Anderson: Right, right.
• 8:20
  Ted: denial about it. No, you're right, I mean, yeah, no, thank you.
• 8:22
  Marcus Anderson: Hopefully, this is just another example of, you know, Milestone and Dwayne…
• 8:26
  Ted: Like, really just… That's curve.
• 8:28
  Marcus Anderson: of their time, yeah.
• 8:29
  Ted: Yeah, but yeah, so it's… as a culmination of Icon's whole narrative as the guy who fell to Earth and now has to defend it as, you know, the brother from another planet, like, he's now having to sort of present Earth in as… as…
• 8:43
  Ted: neutral… not neutral, but as accurate a light as possible so they can decide what they're gonna do with the planet. And it's…
• 8:51
  Ted: it's…
• 8:52
  Ted: For a superhero book, it's a weird move. For a milestone book, it makes perfect sense, and, like, I get what they're doing, and I like it, because it's such…
• 9:01
  Ted: I… it's…
• 9:03
  Ted: Okay, so it's not… it's not just Icon arguing on behalf of Earth, it's also then Darnice… er, Raquel sort of proving it at the same time, because she's finding a new icon, a new rocket, a new way to make everything work back on Earth, and it's… it's…
• 9:18
  Ted: When you were talking about McDuffie, like, having… not having to, but making Icon into a conservative, like, from a science fiction perspective, it makes absolutely perfect sense. A friend of mine told me that, like, yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. He's… he's a dude who came from the perfect space world, and now has to live on Earth, which is this backwater nothing place.
• 9:37
  Ted: And, like, why wouldn't he be as conservative as possible? He's gotta live here and just kind of make the best of it. He knows what paradise is, and this ain't it, so he's just, like, making the best of it while he has to before he can finally get back home.
• 9:51
  Marcus Anderson: Can I add one thing.
• 9:52
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, oh, please, I'm monopolizing.
• 9:54
  Marcus Anderson: I think the key… the key thing with that, and I mean, well…
• 9:58
  Marcus Anderson: I'll talk about more when you get to that point, but I think that if you think about the fact that Icon
• 10:03
  Marcus Anderson: This year, basically been here, like, 200 years. The…
• 10:08
  Marcus Anderson: His conservative phase is relatively short in comparison.
• 10:13
  Ted: Yeah.
• 10:13
  Marcus Anderson: Like, he's basically been about to struggle for the majority of the time, and, like, that… he was dealing with not only grief, he was… he was dealing with grief and frustration, and he also…
• 10:26
  Marcus Anderson: did, you know, in a lot of ways, give up and give in to a popular narrative that really took place when you're following, like, the Civil Rights Movement, following the Black Power Movement. There's that moment.
• 10:38
  Ted: I don't know, I mean, you, you… because, yeah, there's that moment where he's like.
• 10:41
  Ted: you know, reflecting on it, he's, like, standing behind Martin Luther King, at the… at the I Have a Dream speech or something, it's… it's some moment like that. And he's like, yeah, finally, we won, we did it, you know, we succeeded at achieving equality.
• 10:56
  Ted: like, the battle was finished, which is very much what the narrative of, you know, the arc of history has finally bent towards justice. America's great now, everything's fine. Like, that was the narrative of.
• 11:08
  Marcus Anderson: Which he stopped… he stopped listening, because even Dr. King…
• 11:12
  Ted: Yes.
• 11:12
  Marcus Anderson: Absolutely, you know, would be the first one to tell you that those achievements, in 64… in 65 weren't the culmination.
• 11:22
  Ted: yeah, they were the start, but, like, but yeah, I mean, it's… it's crucial that, like you said, I mean, he's… it's probably that he's dealing with grief, but it's also partly that he thinks that the battle is over, which, again, like, that's the narrative that, like, I got in school growing up, is like, yep, racism's done because we had civil rights leaders, and…
• 11:38
  Ted: everything's.
• 11:39
  Marcus Anderson: And who pushed that narrative?
• 11:41
  Ted: Yeah, well, yes, yeah.
• 11:43
  Marcus Anderson: landed on us.
• 11:44
  Ted: Yeah, so it's…
• 11:45
  Tad Eggleston: white folk.
• 11:48
  Ted: Yeah. No, I mean, it's… it makes sense for Icon as a character that he… this is where he stopped at the time, and also now he…
• 11:57
  Tad Eggleston: So, I…
• 11:58
  Ted: reawoken to stuff through… through Rocket is…
• 12:00
  Tad Eggleston: I also like that he acknowledged that he forgot that their lifespans were shorter.
• 12:06
  Ted: Yes. Yeah.
• 12:07
  Tad Eggleston: He had gotten where he got, and he was fed up with people making excuses because he'd managed to forget that, yeah, he got where he got, but he essentially did… took 3 lifetimes to get there. Yeah.
• 12:20
  Marcus Anderson: Lord knows I've argued with people who… who have voiced the same things that… that he was voicing, you know? Oh, yeah!
• 12:27
  Ted: I, I, I…
• 12:28
  Marcus Anderson: During this time period, yeah.
• 12:29
  Ted: Yeah.
• 12:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 12:31
  Marcus Anderson: How many black people, yeah.
• 12:32
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, no, I… it's… it's… this is a really powerful issue, and, like, I mean, as part of the arc, too, it's like, it's not just this one issue, obviously, but, like, this arc of… this specific issue of Icon having to argue and be like, yeah, okay, here's where I was, here's how my eyes got reopened to…
• 12:50
  Ted: what's actually going on in the world, here's, you know, when the scale fell from my eyes again. Like, you know, acknowledging the huge impact that Raquel has had on him, which of course is fantastic, because I like that she's been the driver of so much in this.
• 13:04
  Ted: And, like, then having to acknowledge, yeah, okay, my, you know, the work isn't done, and maybe I'm not done either.
• 13:10
  Ted: Which is why I'm a little disappointed at how the actual sort of conflict plays out, but I mean, that's the bigger… because that's the bigger thing for me, is like… so we have, simultaneous with all this, you know, him in space, having the space lawyer battle over whether or not Earth deserves Earth to be saved, we get the other half, which I really like on the whole.
• 13:29
  Ted: Where it's Raquel training Darnice, and trying to find a replacement for Icon, to take his place while he's, you know, gone, which she… I… I don't know if it's sort of…
• 13:40
  Ted: if it's indicated that she is sort of deluding herself into thinking it's temporary when it's played as if it's gonna be forever, but… yeah, she's thinking, like, oh, I need to have… we need to have a new icon. We need to have a new guy who can… who can be him, and there's a great little montage of her asking every other hero.
• 13:55
  Marcus Anderson: And for what it's worth, for what it's worth, she's, like, she's still 15, and… Yeah. You know, she's always been somebody who's taken on a lot, has kind of, like, natural…
• 14:06
  Marcus Anderson: leadership and organizational, like, skills, you know what I mean? But she's still a kid, so what you said makes.
• 14:11
  Ted: Yeah.
• 14:12
  Marcus Anderson: that she's…
• 14:14
  Marcus Anderson: you know, possibly, like, you know, deluding herself, and maybe even in over her head, because it's kind of like, you know, she also, before she… oh, you didn't get to a book yet, but, anyway…
• 14:23
  Ted: popular.
• 14:24
  Ted: No, no, no, I mean, I'm also just kind of doing this as a recap, but it's… Yeah, yeah. But it's… it's… you know, there's that great little… there's that great little montage of her, like, talking about static and hardware and everybody else, trying to get them to stand in for him. And finally, of course, to get back to Buck Wow and Mercenary Man, why I've seen an icon number 13,
• 14:40
  Ted: And the whole thing with Buck, I… I don't feel qualified to comment on, apart from I think it's absolutely phenomenal, and it's such a crucial part of this book, yeah!
• 14:50
  Tad Eggleston: She sends them to the library, and he comes out Thor.
• 14:53
  Ted: Yeah, and he comes out, like, a revolutionary, and it's… it's… it's funny in a way that, like.
• 15:00
  Ted: God, this is Dwayne McDuffie to the core, because, yeah.
• 15:03
  Marcus Anderson: He's never…
• 15:03
  Ted: to act like Icon, which means also talking with, like, you know, proper diction, and sounding like a real educated guy, which means that he's also sounding like Thor, and like…
• 15:14
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 15:14
  Ted: It gets… God, it gets so good, because…
• 15:18
  Marcus Anderson: No worries.
• 15:18
  Tad Eggleston: They even did the lettering once, in a way that made it feel very much like he was introducing himself as Thor when he introduced himself as Icon.
• 15:29
  Ted: Yeah, and it's… and…
• 15:31
  Marcus Anderson: I should just… I should just point out, just for context, because it's been a while since we spoke about Buck Wilde, but, like, he, very much was… you know, Dwayne McDuffie was on the record about how he was frustrated by Luke Cage, especially… and obviously, like, people have…
• 15:46
  Marcus Anderson: have, added complexity and, humanized Luke Cage in a lot of ways over the years, including David Walker, but, like.
• 15:55
  Marcus Anderson: In his original iteration.
• 15:58
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it's kind of rough, and I could speak for myself.
• 16:02
  Marcus Anderson: And definitely, I spoke to many, Black comic creators and comic readers, where it was, like, it…
• 16:09
  Marcus Anderson: Luke Cage was… original Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, was complex in the sense that, we…
• 16:17
  Marcus Anderson: like, we read him, and we rocked with him because it was what we had, you know what I mean? But we were also very well aware. And, like, for me personally, I think I've talked about this on the podcast. Obviously, I was a big Marvel kid.
• 16:30
  Marcus Anderson: But, there was such frustrating stuff when, not just Luke Cage, but when, you know, a lot of, like, even your favorite Marvel writers had to write dialogue for Black characters, you know what I mean? And, like, there was, like, a default…
• 16:45
  Marcus Anderson: Addiction and everything that kind of, like, everybody had regardless, you know, of…
• 16:51
  Marcus Anderson: of who they were, you know? And so…
• 16:54
  Marcus Anderson: Luke Cage, though, it was dialed to 10, and it was so apparent to all of us that this was a white person writing what they thought that a streetwise Black person would sound like, you know? So.
• 17:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he was definitely, definitely created by three very…
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: Archie Goodwin, George Tuska, and Roy Thomas.
• 17:15
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:15
  Ted: I was also trying to look up… I forgot to actually get the specifics, but I was wondering what was… what they were doing with Luke Cage at the time, because I'd be curious to know, like.
• 17:24
  Marcus Anderson: So, there was a 90s series…
• 17:27
  Marcus Anderson: Yes. It was okay. It was, like, better, but it was, like, you know…
• 17:32
  Marcus Anderson: Actually, wait, I'm forgetting who worked on it. I did read it at the time.
• 17:36
  Ted: Yeah, I remember there was, like, something in the 90s, I don't remember who did it, and then there was the, the Max book in the 2000s by… was that Brubaker?
• 17:46
  Ted: I want to say it was Brubaker. But yeah, like, I don't think they were doing anything huge with him at the time.
• 17:53
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, but that's the thing, is… oh, go ahead, yeah.
• 17:56
  Ted: No, no, I'm just saying, like, you're right, I mean, he is.
• 17:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so, so here, here,
• 18:03
  Tad Eggleston: The series had no dedicated creators or storylines until Christopher Priest became the writer with issue 111, until the issue was canceled with 125, breaking alongside MD Bright. Priest, who is…
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: was criticized within Marvel for reducing Cage's use of stereotypical black Dialogue. This is a Wikipedia.
• 18:28
  Marcus Anderson: Yikes.
• 18:28
  Tad Eggleston: But, but…
• 18:29
  Marcus Anderson: Excited.
• 18:31
  Tad Eggleston: Power Man and Iron Fist and back issue number 45 from tomorrow's Publishing. They generally are pretty well sourced, so… That's perfect.
• 18:42
  Marcus Anderson: example, right? Even Christopher Priest, like, you know, is frustrated, not even, but, like, you know, like, the writers themselves, who, yeah, grew up with Luke Cage, but also were like, we could do better.
• 18:54
  Tad Eggleston: There was a new series called Cage in 92 that removed most of the blaxploitation elements of the character.
• 19:06
  Ted: Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, so… so this is sort of the… the… Buckwild…
• 19:12
  Ted: redemption… I don't even want to say redemption art, because he was already kind of an interestingly nuanced character.
• 19:19
  Ted: But…
• 19:20
  Marcus Anderson: Well, yeah, and I would say, just real quick, like, I think this is the…
• 19:24
  Marcus Anderson: were even more nuanced. I think McDuffie, before What Happens, which I know you'll get to, McDuffie was… was giving him an opportunity. And I think we kind of went on a tangent, but all I wanted to say briefly about what we were talking about with the dialogue, is it's just… it's just vintage McDuffie, like.
• 19:42
  Ted: Yeah.
• 19:43
  Marcus Anderson: Brillius, because he could have just kind of made him, like…
• 19:47
  Marcus Anderson: talk just like Icon and mess up, but it was very much…
• 19:51
  Marcus Anderson: a dude who just, like, crammed a bunch of, like, reading and knowledge, and, was encouraged to take all that knowledge and put it towards sounding like Augustus Freeman. Like, you know what I mean? And it's…
• 20:08
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, like, it's just, it's just so well written. It's so… it's well written in character as him trying to be in character. Also, yeah, just having digested a bunch of books, but maybe not had time to fully digest them yet.
• 20:23
  Ted: Yeah, because he starts off and he's literally doing Thor dialogue. Fear not, Fermeida, as long as I do not bet, the forces of good shall never have a champion, so swears Icon. But then, in 25, once we do the… there's, like, a 6-month time skip, after the… er… is that where the baby is? Yeah, after the baby.
• 20:39
  Marcus Anderson: Hornets.
• 20:40
  Ted: the previous issue. Then we see him, or… actually, no, back in 24, even, he's doing that. He's delivering dialogue in a way that is, like.
• 20:50
  Ted: revolutionary, it's, yeah, you know, the, you know, Dardisa.
• 20:54
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, so they went to a Blackpool store with,
• 20:57
  Ted: Yeah, third world books, yeah. Many thanks, my dubian sister. This is just another example of how cooperation between black men and women will lift our race to parity with the oppressors, and it's… it's…
• 21:07
  Ted: again, like, I feel weird commenting on it at all, but, like, it's so good, and it's so…
• 21:14
  Ted: it's… I really love seeing what they do with Buck Wilde, and making him not…
• 21:21
  Ted: Yeah, I don't even… I don't even know how to comment on it. I like it. Like, I clearly.
• 21:25
  Marcus Anderson: No, I think that…
• 21:25
  Ted: What do you do with him?
• 21:26
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. Yeah, well, that's the thing, I mean, I think he began… he… not think, I mean, when Adoppy did say, like, he began as…
• 21:34
  Marcus Anderson: his critique and satire, and I think Blamen Duffy was pretty ruthless, you know, previously in it. Not that I hate it, I enjoyed it, you know, and I knew what he was doing instantly when I read it, but, yeah, I would say, like.
• 21:50
  Marcus Anderson: he definitely…
• 21:52
  Marcus Anderson: like, I would say, like, showed compassion and allowed him some level of growth and nuance in this art.
• 21:59
  Ted: Yeah, and there's even… I mean, we won't get to it for a while, but there's… there's further opportunities in the book for him to…
• 22:07
  Ted: show… There's further opportunities where he gets to show off what he…
• 22:12
  Ted: what he became, and what character he was, and what he was doing as a character. That's a very vague way to put it, but I don't want to spoil anything. But, like, yeah, so Buckwild and Dardice have taken over as Icon and Rocket, while,
• 22:27
  Ted: Raquel has given birth to Amistad, her son. She has a lovely little recounting of, like, where his name comes from.
• 22:34
  Ted: And there's a… they do the time skip, I mentioned the time skip, which, on the one hand, I was a little bit iffy about. I'm like, I hate them when they kind of just do a random time skip, but it makes a lot of sense in here, where we don't really want to have to follow…
• 22:45
  Ted: like, the whole, you know, the whole birth process and everything for… for Raquel, so it's… I kind of… I end up liking a lot that they just sort of jumped ahead and were like, yeah, it's, you know, 6 months later, let's get to it.
• 22:56
  Ted: I also… sorry, I forgot to also mention, like, the great bits of… of Raquel training Darnice. There's some great, fun banter between the two of them, as Darnice is learning how to use the belts, and Raquel gets to show off her skills, not just, like, as a person who uses the belt, but also, like, a teacher, and, like, there's a… there's a… there's a real…
• 23:15
  Ted: I don't know, I liked their… I liked their back and forth a lot. It felt very naturalistic, and I liked how they got to interact with each other as…
• 23:24
  Ted: Friends, but also their.
• 23:25
  Marcus Anderson: There's a…
• 23:26
  Ted: little bit of tension, and they're sort of not competing over a role, but it's a role that one's handing after the other. It's a… it's a neat dynamic that I'm trying to… I don't really have a lot of other… I can't think of a lot of other places where I've seen that specific
• 23:39
  Ted: dynamic, so… Yeah.
• 23:41
  Marcus Anderson: Pretty… it's pretty unique.
• 23:42
  Ted: It's great, I like that, I like that bit a lot. But yeah, we move on to Icon and Rocket, the new Icon and Rocket, and, you know, they're… they're stopping criminals, they even have a two-page
• 23:56
  Ted: two-bit supervillain, named Trapshot, who gets completely demolished in… yeah, it's like, because it's completely important. And then we get into… I was telling this out of order, I guess, but then we get into the…
• 24:07
  Ted: the… here's the history of Icon. And here's the part where I think that… here's… here's the thing that I think lets the story down a little bit, which is the stuff with, like, Icon's big, horrible nemesis, Oblivion.
• 24:20
  Ted: Who shows up on Earth and starts just randomly massacring people, because that's Oblivion's whole deal. He loves killing, he's obsessed with killing and death and murder, and like, he's also from Icon's world, like, the whole…
• 24:32
  Ted: trans-species collective, or whatever. So he… where death isn't a reality, so he is obsessed with actually making death happen, and now that he's on Earth, he can do that.
• 24:42
  Ted: And… he's…
• 24:46
  Ted: like, as a character, I get the purpose of oblivion, because you gotta have some kind of villain that sums up things for Icon.
• 24:55
  Ted: and especially in this arc, sort of represents the world that Icon left behind, and what he had to give up, and so forth, but it's also…
• 25:05
  Ted: he's… he's just kind of not a very satisfying villain to me, like, I don't… he's very…
• 25:13
  Ted: I don't know, I mean, I'm curious how you guys feel too, because I just found that to be sort of the weakest part of this whole sequence, is the stuff with Oblivion, and I'm curious if I'm alone on that, or what.
• 25:24
  Marcus Anderson: No, I… I, I mean, I think it worked for me, because, I mean, so my experience of this arc is…
• 25:30
  Marcus Anderson: There's so much, like, you know, rich stuff going on.
• 25:34
  Marcus Anderson: with,
• 25:36
  Marcus Anderson: what was going on with Raquel and New Rocket, you know, and then Buck, and then, so, to me, I think that, Oblivion did what he had to in the sense of an antagonist, because it… this…
• 25:54
  Marcus Anderson: when I'm just looking at the entirety of this arc, this arc, to me, isn't about the big battle. It's like the big battle is… is a culmination, and if anything, the big battle, in Oblivion's, murder spree is, story-wise, is the vehicle to create a need for,
• 26:12
  Marcus Anderson: icon to come back to Earth, you know what I mean? Right. Like, so…
• 26:17
  Marcus Anderson: I think in that sense, you know, I think he… I don't think he was, like, yeah, he definitely wasn't a top-tier villain for me, but he also wasn't, like, oh, like.
• 26:27
  Marcus Anderson: Like, he's dead. Like, I think he was appropriately,
• 26:33
  Marcus Anderson: you know, imposing, and just a pure pain in the ass, and challenge.
• 26:41
  Marcus Anderson: an antagonist, but… but yeah, yeah. He definitely wasn't, like, a top-tier villain, but I think in the… in the arc of the story, to me, this was way more…
• 26:50
  Marcus Anderson: About all the cool character stuff that they were doing.
• 26:52
  Ted: Yeah, that's… I mean, because that is the thing of, like, all the… all the best stuff is… I mean, everything but Oblivion is the best stuff. This is… this is kind of the… the culmination of all of Icon, and I don't remember how many issues are past this. I think there's actually a significant number past this. I think it goes up to, like, what, 40 or something?
• 27:10
  Marcus Anderson: So, yeah.
• 27:11
  Ted: Yeah, but it does feel like this is the, like, the thrust of Icon. You know, the whole idea that the person being put on trial over Earth is this… is, you know, the brother from another planet who gets dropped in and lived as a black man in the South and had the worst possible
• 27:27
  Ted: you know, exposure to the worst possible parts of humanity, and he's the one who's sort of arguing for our inherent right to exist, and whether or not we should continue, and so forth. Like, that's…
• 27:38
  Ted: that's the ending of Icon in sort of a conventional way, not in the sense that, like, I think the book should stop, but it's also, like, it just…
• 27:47
  Ted: That's…
• 27:48
  Ted: That's sort of the thesis statement of that part of the book, of the sci-fi… the big sci-fi ideas part of the book.
• 27:55
  Ted: Which is not entirely what Icon is about, because Icon is also about race, and about history, and about, you know, heroes, and identity, and memory, and everything else, but, like, Icon himself…
• 28:09
  Ted: his story as a character is, yeah, I want to get back to my home planet, I've had enough of this place.
• 28:15
  Ted: To some degree, and I…
• 28:18
  Ted: I don't know, I don't even know where I'm going with this. I… it's a big… it's a big, messy section of the book, and I do like it. I think that there's…
• 28:26
  Ted: Yeah, again, like, Oblivion, you're right. I mean, Oblivion does what he needs to do. Oblivion is the big cackling villain who literally, like, I do also love the revelation that, like, oh yeah, he doesn't really have any powers, he's just using the equivalent of, like, stage magician technology to kill everybody and, like, morph into a T-1000 puddle and stuff. Like, that's…
• 28:43
  Ted: That's, you know, that's parlor tricks, quite literally, on Icon's world. Yeah, he's like, yeah, no, this is nothing, guys.
• 28:48
  Marcus Anderson: I think they do establish, like, the motivations, too, like, and I'm not saying it's, like, the richest motivations of all time, but it's like…
• 28:57
  Marcus Anderson: you know, he does have his obsession with death and oblivion, and I mean, when you really think about, like, the classic comic book villains.
• 29:04
  Marcus Anderson: there's not much more there with a lot of them than… than… you know what I mean?
• 29:08
  Ted: Fair, yeah.
• 29:10
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, like, I feel like there's a lot of very celebrated villains that are kind of…
• 29:14
  Ted: Kinda don't have anything.
• 29:15
  Marcus Anderson: I mean, Thanos wanted to date the living and… wanted to impress his would-be girlfriend that he was trying to court, who was dead. Like, you know what I'm saying?
• 29:24
  Ted: Everybody loves the rich motivations of Doomsday, the guy who just shows up to punch… Exactly!
• 29:29
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:30
  Ted: Yeah, no, I… I mean, you're right, you're right. Like, he doesn't need to have a lot, but I don't know, I can't help thinking that there's a better… not better, I can't… yeah, look at me, I'm rewriting Dwayne McDuffy over here.
• 29:43
  Marcus Anderson: Remember, he was the one that, like.
• 29:45
  Marcus Anderson: sent Icon to Earth in the first place. So they're, you know, they're connected in that sense.
• 29:50
  Ted: Here's the thematic reference, yeah.
• 29:53
  Tad Eggleston: Ted asked a question earlier, and you know that I had to fall down a rabbit hole. He asked… he wondered what Luke Cage was doing in the Marvel Universe, and I discovered that Cage had ended, but, like, Luke Cage's last appearances
• 30:09
  Tad Eggleston: in the Marvel Universe, before this episode seems to have… or this…
• 30:15
  Tad Eggleston: certainly around the time this issue would have been written, because it was in October and November of 1994, and this came out
• 30:27
  Tad Eggleston: Er, the, the… the… you got December through…
• 30:35
  Tad Eggleston: May of 95, or December 94 through May of 95 is what we read.
• 30:41
  Tad Eggleston: Read this, this month.
• 30:44
  Tad Eggleston: Cage had appeared in a book called Thunderstrike. I don't know if any of you remember when…
• 30:52
  Tad Eggleston: Eric Masterson.
• 30:54
  Ted: Yeah.
• 30:54
  Tad Eggleston: Thor hammer?
• 30:56
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:58
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, I remember that, I just remember the cover of that, which was so, like, oh boy, that was 90s edgy try-hard superhero, oh, that was oof.
• 31:08
  Ted: They say that they're.
• 31:10
  Ted: Yeah.
• 31:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that appears to be his…
• 31:13
  Ted: God.
• 31:13
  Tad Eggleston: his.
• 31:15
  Ted: His most recent appearance at the time.
• 31:17
  Tad Eggleston: His most recent appearance at the time.
• 31:20
  Ted: Yeah, okay. That's… I mean, it's interesting. I was mostly just curious, because I… I… I…
• 31:25
  Ted: I couldn't see him being… I think at the time, he… it seems like he would have been one of the characters that Marvel was embarrassed to have lying around, you know? Like, I can imagine them being like, can we use Luke Cage yet?
• 31:40
  Marcus Anderson: I don't know that they know to be embarrassed. I mean, per, like, the previous… no, I'm for real!
• 31:45
  Ted: Yo!
• 31:46
  Marcus Anderson: Sometimes, I'd be willing.
• 31:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, his previous writer had been black, but it's a guy that I don't recognize. Do you guys know Mark McLaurin?
• 31:55
  Marcus Anderson: No, I don't recognize the name.
• 31:57
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 31:58
  Tad Eggleston: He did the entire Cage series, the 20 issues.
• 32:03
  Tad Eggleston: Of his series before this.
• 32:07
  Tad Eggleston: But then it looks like… Looks like his next, like, appearance, appearance…
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: after… I mean, I guess he was in Marvels.
• 32:19
  Tad Eggleston: But that's kind of a different thing.
• 32:21
  Tad Eggleston: We're talking the actual MCU, his next appearance…
• 32:26
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 32:26
  Tad Eggleston: After that is in, like, Sensational Spider-Man in 96.
• 32:33
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. I would say Luke Cage has been rehabilitated, but Dwayne McDuffie was very much satirizing him as he had been through his childhood, especially at a time when there was a dearth of… and it's not like there's an abundance of…
• 32:47
  Marcus Anderson: Marvel and DC, Black Heroes, but there was, you know, there was very much a dirt at that time, so that was, like, what you got.
• 32:55
  Marcus Anderson: You know, like, yeah.
• 32:58
  Ted: Yeah, it's… it was this, or… Black Panther would have been around, but probably not.
• 33:03
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, Black… yeah, Black… so Black… no, I very vividly remember in my childhood, like, you would occasionally get… you would occasionally get… Black Panther was, like, 60s, but, like.
• 33:12
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I feel like.
• 33:13
  Marcus Anderson: get, no, no.
• 33:15
  Marcus Anderson: And ironically.
• 33:17
  Marcus Anderson: he debuted in 66, like, literally within a month of, possibly the same month that,
• 33:28
  Marcus Anderson: Huey Newton and Bobby Seal were forming the Black Panthers as college students.
• 33:33
  Ted: That's… it's one of those wild historical coincidences that never fails to get me. But, yeah, but I was just trying to think, because at the time, was… the priest run would have already been going on, right? Or…
• 33:43
  Marcus Anderson: No, no, no, not during this. So, Priest was, like, at 2000, I believe. Or Black Panther.
• 33:48
  Ted: Who, walked… no. Who was…
• 33:51
  Marcus Anderson: So, there was, there was… so you would periodically get a run, like, for instance, around this time, maybe a little bit later, maybe a little earlier, Dennis Cowan.
• 34:00
  Marcus Anderson: Had done a run, colin?
• 34:05
  Marcus Anderson: illustrated it, and I forget who wrote that one. I love that one, though, it's like a four-issue miniseries, but that's how it was when I was a kid, like, you would get, like, an occasional four-issue Black Panther thing. There was Panther's Prey, which was written by… he was a white dude who had written a long run.
• 34:22
  Marcus Anderson: Huh? McGregor? McGregor. McGregor, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I liked Panther's Pray, like, that was, yeah, that was cool.
• 34:27
  Ted: Yeah, that's fantastic.
• 34:28
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, but that was… and then I would just… I would jump all over it when there was, like, a Battle Black Panther miniseries.
• 34:35
  Tad Eggleston: McGregor had the first really great run on Black Panther, period. Oh, yes, he did.
• 34:42
  Marcus Anderson: Because there was…
• 34:43
  Tad Eggleston: lost.
• 34:43
  Marcus Anderson: There's some whips before that as well.
• 34:45
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 34:46
  Marcus Anderson: Well, no, I'm just saying there was some whiffs before that. Oh, there were definitely some whiffs before that.
• 34:52
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, like, I will say one of the greatest crimes Marvel has ever
• 34:57
  Tad Eggleston: committed, and one of the greatest crimes Kirby committed, was, you know, they were doing a, you know, McGregor and actually some black artists.
• 35:05
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 35:07
  Tad Eggleston: the wrist were doing their great run when came back.
• 35:10
  Marcus Anderson: Tomorrow.
• 35:11
  Tad Eggleston: and rebooted… Black Panther with the stupid, like, frog.
• 35:16
  Ted: Hey, King Solomon's Frogs, man, King Solomon's.
• 35:19
  Tad Eggleston: That's right.
• 35:20
  Ted: I'm not gonna defend Gink Solomon's for that.
• 35:21
  Marcus Anderson: You just saw… you just summed up… you just summed up my experience as a Black comedy fan reading Marvel, because, like, Kirby is… I have so much respect
• 35:30
  Marcus Anderson: artistic respect for Kirby. But that was some real Grade A white man colonizer shit right there. Yeah. Like, for real, for real. It's kind of like, I started this first, like, you know, I'm gonna… I'm gonna show you how to really do it, we're gonna…
• 35:45
  Ted: Yeah.
• 35:46
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, like, the original Black Panther comics… Yeah, and when he popped up in Fantastic Four, this was a sin that it definitely took Marvel a while to correct, where they would just color…
• 35:58
  Marcus Anderson: the Wakandans and just Black people in general are great, and…
• 36:02
  Ted: Oh, God.
• 36:02
  Marcus Anderson: And it's like, you guys are coloring brown, like, tree trunks and other things brown. Like, you can handle, like, making a brown color, you know?
• 36:12
  Marcus Anderson: Even with Doc Martens, guys.
• 36:14
  Marcus Anderson: So, I digress, you know, I could… I could speak one day about this.
• 36:18
  Ted: Nothing but digressions on this show, no, we're here.
• 36:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that is one of our things, so, like…
• 36:23
  Ted: You know, that's true.
• 36:24
  Marcus Anderson: I know. I'm trying to keep the train on the rails, though.
• 36:26
  Ted: No, you're right, though. Yeah, no, I mean…
• 36:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just trying to find, like, the mid-'90s Black Panther stuff.
• 36:32
  Ted: Yeah, I was trying to…
• 36:33
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm, I'm interested right now.
• 36:35
  Ted: I was the person writing it. But yeah, I mean…
• 36:37
  Marcus Anderson: pray was early 90s, but yeah, go ahead, go ahead, Ted.
• 36:39
  Ted: Yeah. No, no, no, I just, I mean, this.
• 36:41
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in my rabbit hole, so you guys get to talk, and I get to keep… I get to keep finding stuff.
• 36:47
  Marcus Anderson: Okay, we got it.
• 36:48
  Tad Eggleston: It is, Panthers Prey was 91.
• 36:50
  Ted: Oh, that way. Okay, for some reason, I thought that was earlier, I don't know. I thought it was, like, right after Panther's Quest.
• 36:55
  Marcus Anderson: early 90s.
• 36:57
  Tad Eggleston: Life of Captain Marvel and Knights of Pendragon.
• 37:01
  Ted: Huh, okay, huh?
• 37:02
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I was just saying, Infinity Gauntlet.
• 37:07
  Ted: Yeah. Yeah, so this is, I mean, this is the cultural stew that we're in right now. This is… this is the state of comics, and particularly race in comics, at the time that is…
• 37:20
  Ted: this…
• 37:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and this is a good time for me to bring up one of the things that Joe Illage highlighted when he was on.
• 37:28
  Ted: Yes.
• 37:28
  Tad Eggleston: That's right. Last week, and that's DCSoWhite.com, and we're currently up to 1,140 days since DC Comics published an ongoing comic book character… comic book for a black character in their mainline continuity.
• 37:46
  Ted: Oh, my goodness.
• 37:47
  Tad Eggleston: I Am Batman number 18 was published on February 14th, 2023.
• 37:53
  Ted: Oh, God.
• 37:54
  Marcus Anderson: And that's with an asterisk, because I do contend
• 37:59
  Marcus Anderson: It's the laziest possible thing you can do.
• 38:01
  Marcus Anderson: to… and I'm not even coming from… it feels weird to sound like the racists who are always like, why do you gotta turn Spider-Man black? But I will say, it is a shortcut
• 38:13
  Marcus Anderson: as opposed to, like, allowing, like, Black creators room and space without the stress of getting a certain sales number to create a new…
• 38:24
  Marcus Anderson: Black character that they perfectly retain ownership to. You know what I mean? But either way, or at least, or at least have some type of, good deal. But, you know what I'm saying? Like, so I'm saying I Am Batman is still…
• 38:36
  Marcus Anderson: got an asterisk, because it's still Batman-oriented.
• 38:39
  Ted: Yeah, it's a… it's a character… part of the Batman family, who is not really… He, he…
• 38:47
  Marcus Anderson: I mean, it counts, but…
• 38:48
  Ted: It counts, but he's part of a… he's part of an existing sort of chain of characters.
• 38:52
  Marcus Anderson: I'm just saying this props up the narrative of the idea of DC so white, is all I'm saying.
• 38:58
  Ted: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:59
  Marcus Anderson: Because this is the furthest they'll step out. There's nothing… there's nothing wrong with it. I don't have beef with I Am Batman existing, but it's just like…
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: He's a show.
• 39:08
  Marcus Anderson: Was there caution?
• 39:09
  Tad Eggleston: You know, this is actually… it's…
• 39:11
  Tad Eggleston: to look at. They also point out that, yes, there's an absolute Green Lantern, but… but they… they can… they can say that… that, like, it requires the absolute title to be successful.
• 39:23
  Tad Eggleston: Even when it comes to miniseries, like, the number of miniseries they've done since 2000 fit nicely
• 39:32
  Tad Eggleston: on a screen.
• 39:34
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 39:37
  Marcus Anderson: Well, mini…
• 39:38
  Tad Eggleston: They're…
• 39:38
  Marcus Anderson: That's what I'm talking about, like, I'm not ongoing, right?
• 39:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right, but even… I mean, even the miniseries, it's a relatively short list.
• 39:49
  Tad Eggleston: And there's just not enough, transparency in sales numbers.
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: To have any idea whether or not they truly don't sell, particularly given their lack of promotion.
• 40:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, DC's so white, dot com.
• 40:13
  Ted: Yep. I didn't even realize that was a resource, but I'm not surprised at it.
• 40:16
  Tad Eggleston: It is, it is.
• 40:18
  Tad Eggleston: by the time this is out, it'll be too late, but Joe's also pushing hard on the,
• 40:26
  Tad Eggleston: The final order cutoff for the…
• 40:29
  Tad Eggleston: the second printing of the new history, the UC… or DCU Dakota incident.
• 40:36
  Ted: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:37
  Marcus Anderson: Either way, whenever you hear this, just make sure you get it if you have it.
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: Get it. Help it sell out and go to a third printing.
• 40:44
  Ted: Show people there's a demand.
• 40:47
  Ted: But yeah, I mean, this is… this is a… a… not… not a finale… not a finale for Icon, but it definitely feels, in a way, like it's the culmination of this specific…
• 40:58
  Ted: part of his character, being the… the person who's having to advocate on behalf of Earth, and it's… I…
• 41:06
  Marcus Anderson: Happy the end of Act 3, but it's definitely decisively the end of an act, you know.
• 41:10
  Ted: Yes, yeah, and I…
• 41:11
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's the beginning of year 3, so it makes sense…
• 41:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's in issue 25, this stuff that we're talking about.
• 41:19
  Ted: Yeah, which I…
• 41:19
  Tad Eggleston: It also has…
• 41:20
  Ted: ugly bits of, like… it's sort of like prose-written stuff, where there's these
• 41:23
  Ted: about his life, which I think is really well done. And also, I can't remember what parts have and haven't been revealed at this point, but it nicely sums up what we do and don't know about him. It gives us.
• 41:33
  Marcus Anderson: Mmm.
• 41:33
  Ted: You know, full history of, like, oh yeah, then in this.
• 41:35
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it really fleshes out his… history.
• 41:37
  Tad Eggleston: Something that we haven't done in a while that I'm in the mood to do, just because it…
• 41:43
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because we're on the topic of there just not being… enough representation, etc.
• 41:53
  Tad Eggleston: But, I want to look at what else came out March 21st, 1995. The,
• 42:01
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, we've got Aliens and Berserker.
• 42:06
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember that at all, do either of you?
• 42:09
  Ted: Predator.
• 42:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, it just says Aliens Berserker.
• 42:14
  Ted: I don't know if you don't.
• 42:14
  Tad Eggleston: Was it even written or drawn by anybody cool? This is a Dark Horse.
• 42:19
  Ted: Oh, okay.
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: John Wagner. I'll give it John Wagner.
• 42:26
  Tad Eggleston: Amazing X-Men 3…
• 42:30
  Ted: Amazing X. Is that… wait, was this… Age of Apocalypse?
• 42:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so Age of a poverty going on.
• 42:37
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:38
  Tad Eggleston: Asriel number 4…
• 42:47
  Tad Eggleston: Shadow of the Bat had the Joker, so, I mean, that was kind of cool.
• 42:51
  Tad Eggleston: Beavis and Butthead, number 15.
• 42:56
  Marcus Anderson: Ayy.
• 42:57
  Marcus Anderson: Do you remember?
• 42:58
  Tad Eggleston: He had Black Lightning number 4 going.
• 43:01
  Ted: Okay, so wait, so there wasn't… there was an ongoing for Black Lightning at the time. Okay, that's not…
• 43:06
  Ted: That's not nothing. I'd be curious to know more about that.
• 43:09
  Tad Eggleston: by Jenny Blake Isabella and Eddie Newell.
• 43:12
  Ted: Okay, okay, huh? I don't know.
• 43:15
  Ted: Yeah, I… it's the… it's… I didn't…
• 43:18
  Ted: I'm not up enough on what and when DC has ever done with Black.
• 43:23
  Tad Eggleston: There was a Conan, there was a demon… I'm just… what I'm really looking for is, was there anything, like, good-good?
• 43:31
  Tad Eggleston: I, I guess…
• 43:34
  Tad Eggleston: One of the writers that will not be named was making his name on Doom 2099 that month.
• 43:42
  Ted: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 43:45
  Ted: Ich.
• 43:47
  Tad Eggleston: Hellblazer was around.
• 43:50
  Ted: Hell yeah.
• 43:52
  Tad Eggleston: Who was on Incredible Hulk at the time? Was it a good run?
• 43:59
  Ted: Was that still Peter David?
• 44:00
  Marcus Anderson: There's so much people…
• 44:00
  Tad Eggleston: David, okay, with Liam Sharp penciling, so, I mean…
• 44:05
  Tad Eggleston: That was probably a decent comic.
• 44:08
  Tad Eggleston: kabuki was underway at Caliber, but probably in even less shops than Milestone.
• 44:18
  Tad Eggleston: Moonshadow number 9.
• 44:25
  Ted: Okay. It's an interesting blend of big stuff at the time, big stuff kind of…
• 44:31
  Ted: warming up. Like, it's… the Age of Apocalypse thing was the huge thing that Marvel was doing.
• 44:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Sandman was underway, it was number 68, even.
• 44:40
  Ted: Oh, wow!
• 44:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: This was… this was Mark Millar's run on Swamp Thing.
• 44:47
  Ted: Okay, yeah, so we got some controversy going. What was.
• 44:50
  Tad Eggleston: Rel and Shaman's Tears.
• 44:53
  Ted: They weren't yet doing.
• 44:54
  Tad Eggleston: Starman number 7.
• 44:56
  Ted: You mentioned Shadow of the Bat, but they weren't yet doing, like, Nightfall or any of that stuff, were they? That would have been…
• 45:02
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think Nightfall was going on right now. The death of Clark Kent in Superman number 100.
• 45:08
  Ted: Yeah, he's always doing that.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: But… but my… oh, Zombie number 12. So my real point is, like, with Icon and Zombie coming out this week, they were…
• 45:19
  Tad Eggleston: definitely to… I mean, no matter… almost no matter how… how you roll in terms of what you like, if… if they weren't… if Mar… I think it's really hard to argue that Milestone didn't have
• 45:35
  Tad Eggleston: 20% of the top 10 comics that came out this week.
• 45:40
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of quality.
• 45:41
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 45:42
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of sales, who knows? Because… they don't get…
• 45:48
  Ted: It's all… Right.
• 45:50
  Marcus Anderson: Sales is not a barometer of our quality.
• 45:53
  Tad Eggleston: But in terms of quality, you know, if we… and, like, I…
• 45:59
  Tad Eggleston: I certainly don't want to go through all of the books that came out this week, because some of them look horrible, but, like, if we… I'm all but certain that if we take any week during Milestone's run.
• 46:10
  Tad Eggleston: and picked out… The 10 comics that we thought were likely to be best.
• 46:16
  Tad Eggleston: we would absolutely feel like Milestone not only belonged with them, but… but probably near…
• 46:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, more top 5-ish than top 10.
• 46:29
  Tad Eggleston: You know what I mean? This is just something that, every time I revisit it, it just really annoys me, that…
• 46:36
  Ted: Especially because this is also, I think… I don't know the numbers on it, but I would be…
• 46:42
  Ted: I would… I would hazard a guess that this is when the money is starting to not make as much sense for Milestone, and they're having to think about shuttering, because… Right. Like, I know that the long, hot summer storyline, which is the very… what happens at the very tail end of this sequence, is…
• 46:58
  Ted: kind of the milestone's… I don't… not swan song.
• 47:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, technically we have two compendiums left, but I think.
• 47:06
  Ted: a second.
• 47:06
  Tad Eggleston: Compendium has a lot of the stuff.
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: Where they…
• 47:09
  Ted: Yeah. And it is… I think… I would… I would guess, I… obviously, I don't know anything, but I would guess that at this point, the writing was perhaps on the wall, that they knew that they weren't gonna get much more if they had any more at all. Again, even though Icon technically goes to issue 40, like, I don't…
• 47:29
  Ted: I don't know how much of that, like… I mean, Shadow Cabot is almost like…
• 47:34
  Tad Eggleston: just from a pure reader standpoint, and a pure, like, I'm involved in a comic shop that sells stuff standpoint, I mean, I'm still frustrated now, because these compendiums are awesome, but I don't get somebody into the milestone universe with these compendiums.
• 47:48
  Ted: Yeah, these are… these are…
• 47:50
  Tad Eggleston: I need smaller trade paperbacks.
• 47:54
  Ted: Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's the problem with the.
• 47:56
  Marcus Anderson: the 15th.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: or $20 bite.
• 48:01
  Marcus Anderson: You're… you're stepping into my shoes. This is… this is what it is. This is what it is to…
• 48:07
  Marcus Anderson: you know, love this medium, I love some stuff from the big two, but it's like, you know… and that, which is…
• 48:13
  Marcus Anderson: where… Well, that's a larger discussion. Sure, but… but it's… yeah, the…
• 48:20
  Marcus Anderson: I am so dissatisfied with what they are doing, and…
• 48:24
  Marcus Anderson: I, you know, we waited so long for a milestone, Relaunch.
• 48:29
  Marcus Anderson: And… it's the way they've done it. The lack of commitment.
• 48:35
  Marcus Anderson: on DC's part has been different.
• 48:37
  Marcus Anderson: That's awesome.
• 48:38
  Tad Eggleston: Fair.
• 48:38
  Ted: Yeah, especially because, I mean, steering us back a little bit more towards the actual pages, like, this is… this is a really… like, as much as I was complaining about Oblivion not being that interesting a villain, which, I mean, you're absolutely right, it doesn't really matter, we've had some plenty weak villains lying around in comics for.
• 48:54
  Tad Eggleston: But, I mean…
• 48:55
  Ted: Yeah.
• 48:55
  Tad Eggleston: I also thought that he was a good riff on Venom from the time.
• 48:59
  Ted: That's, you know…
• 49:00
  Marcus Anderson: more dangerous, because, cause he's.
• 49:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, way more dangerous!
• 49:03
  Marcus Anderson: They didn't make spikes and stuff.
• 49:05
  Ted: Yeah, I didn't actually think… I didn't realize the Venom connection, but my god, you're absolutely right, that's, like, that's what he is. He's a Venom, or also, like, a Carnage guy, like, it's.
• 49:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's something that we haven't talked about a ton. I think Milestone, like, kind of brilliantly lampoons a lot of…
• 49:28
  Ted: for, like, trends.
• 49:29
  Tad Eggleston: A lot of mainstream stuff going on at the time, but in a way that's, like…
• 49:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's both lampooning and… And doing it so much better.
• 49:45
  Marcus Anderson: Well, and the Venom parallel is definitely there, because it's like, one of the things I don't know that we've touched on is that Oblivion, you know, gives himself the cape, and not the exact carbon copy of Icon's costume, but enough that people are like, oh no, Icon's tearing up the city.
• 50:02
  Marcus Anderson: Similar to Spider-Man. Yeah.
• 50:04
  Ted: I kind of assumed, I don't know if this was ever sort of stated in the text, but I kind of assumed it was a thing where there was some sort of, like.
• 50:09
  Ted: psychic field or something that made him look exactly like Icon to people in the comic. Because, like, Raquel and Darnice are looking at this dude who's, like, when we say that he's black, we don't mean that he's African American, we mean he's literally, like, solid, like, full-color black.
• 50:25
  Marcus Anderson: Right, I think from…
• 50:27
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, he's got the tape? Yeah, I don't know if they… I read it as they thought it was, like, just a costume or…
• 50:34
  Ted: I just… I assumed it was a thing where it's, like, for some reason, they literally can't tell the difference even at close range, so I thought it was, like, he had some sort of…
• 50:41
  Tad Eggleston: Or, you know, they've been reading the Secret Wars, and they know about the black costume.
• 50:46
  Ted: You know? That's a pretty good explanation, too. I'll accept that, it's a headcanon, yeah. But yeah, I mean, Oblivion shows up, starts tearing up the place, they don't… they think it's either Icon, or then… well, then they think it's Buck Wilde who has, for some reason, gone…
• 51:01
  Ted: buck wild, and decided to blow the place up, and so they go to stop him. Of course, it's not,
• 51:07
  Ted: And then this is where we get the…
• 51:10
  Ted: Buckwild, you know, literally having his final battle, and he sat.
• 51:13
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, he goes out like a hero.
• 51:15
  Ted: He goes out like a hero, and like, that's… when I was saying… I said earlier that I don't think it's right to call this a redemption arc for Buck Wild, because I don't think he…
• 51:22
  Ted: really needed redemption, exactly. He's not… it's not that he's that kind of character, but like…
• 51:27
  Marcus Anderson: You can use that term, I think it's fair.
• 51:29
  Ted: Yeah.
• 51:29
  Marcus Anderson: Redemption arc exclusively means you.
• 51:31
  Tad Eggleston: I think of it more as a self-actualization arc.
• 51:35
  Ted: Yeah, self-actualization arc, I love that, yes, because that's… because this is him, you know, proving, like, yeah, he's not just the mercenary man, he's not just here to get paid, he is here to live up to the ideals that he's been taught and realized, and, like, to finally be, like, icon, and…
• 51:50
  Ted: he doesn't make it, but he, you know, stops the guy for as long as he can, and, like, I wish they'd gone even further, like, you know, have him save a bus full of kids or something.
• 51:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I mean, I should also toss in, I've always thought it was, like, somewhat fair for heroes to at least kind of want to get paid sometimes, kind of like comic book writers and artists. They, too, have to eat and have a place to live and that sort of thing, and like… Yep.
• 52:16
  Marcus Anderson: Whoa.
• 52:16
  Tad Eggleston: How often does Peter Parker run into trouble trying to keep jobs because he's going off being Spider-Man?
• 52:23
  Ted: Yeah… Sure.
• 52:25
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, but if you read a lot of, like, you know… I mean, the X-Men…
• 52:31
  Marcus Anderson: Well, depending on the area you're talking about, but, like.
• 52:34
  Marcus Anderson: Charles… Charles had just, inexhaustible wealth, you know, so that was… that was… that was furnishing their lifestyle.
• 52:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's how they kinda hand-wave it with the Avengers, is, oh, Tony pays them all.
• 52:48
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, and they're also, like, they work for the feds most of the time, too.
• 52:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 52:54
  Marcus Anderson: So, yeah. But, you know, alright, so this is the thing, because, I mean, everybody's probably seen on social media or something the… the, where's my money, honey, where, you know.
• 53:04
  Ted: Yes.
• 53:04
  Marcus Anderson: chase down Dr. Dune for $5. But, and look, I get being serious about your money, especially when, you know, you're not accustomed to having an abundance of it.
• 53:16
  Marcus Anderson: But, I mean, to that point, though, one of the last things I think that Buck says in that final battle is, you know, he used to, like, fight exclusively for money, or something to that nature, and that now… he basically, like, spoke to the fact that he, I think, sees a purpose in fighting the good fight, even if it's not…
• 53:36
  Ted: I was out saying something like, I'm giving you this one for free, or whatever. It's like…
• 53:39
  Tad Eggleston: I think we need more sliding rate or pay-as-you-can superheroes.
• 53:46
  Tad Eggleston: You just saved your life. Can you afford to contribute towards my rent? Okay, that's fine.
• 53:52
  Ted: Venmo.
• 53:53
  Tad Eggleston: life.
• 53:53
  Ted: he's got the Venmo, like, symbol on… Right. He's got, like, his Venmo QR code on his chest, or whatever. The… yeah, no, I like that Budweis…
• 54:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not saying this the way it should have been, Marcus. No, no, no. Or Ted. I'm just…
• 54:07
  Marcus Anderson: We're talking about this arc.
• 54:08
  Ted: Yeah, like…
• 54:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'm talking about the realities of 2026, if you're a superhero.
• 54:15
  Ted: Ugh, yeah.
• 54:15
  Tad Eggleston: Or if you…
• 54:16
  Ted: right now.
• 54:17
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, Mike.
• 54:18
  Tad Eggleston: need it.
• 54:18
  Marcus Anderson: You want a little bit of escapism, too, though, right? I don't need my super hills to be exactly like what we're going through. Yeah.
• 54:25
  Ted: That'd be a.
• 54:26
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair, that's fair too.
• 54:28
  Ted: But yeah.
• 54:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, but should they be, like, friends, where you're like, how do you afford that apartment as a barista?
• 54:36
  Marcus Anderson: I'm sorry, are you saying you should be… What level is inferior…
• 54:42
  Tad Eggleston: do we want?
• 54:42
  Marcus Anderson: Where you're a duplicate of Living Single?
• 54:45
  Ted: Yo!
• 54:45
  Tad Eggleston: Nice, I like it.
• 54:49
  Ted: I watch a Chunk of Living Single, it's good. Like, it holds up. Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 54:53
  Marcus Anderson: No, it's, it's… yeah.
• 54:55
  Ted: Anyway, but yeah, this is… this is Buckwild sort of getting to make a last stand, and… and, you know, prove he's a hero to the end, and it's surprisingly, like, not even surprisingly, but it's very…
• 55:07
  Ted: it's… it's hard, it's hard to watch, it's touching, it's depressing, it's like, God, this guy, you know, he gets stabbed through the chest a bunch, he's got blood running everywhere, it's… it's harsh. Like, it's… it's really well done in a way that's, like.
• 55:20
  Ted: It's… yeah, it's a… it's an unexp… I don't think even unexpectedly, but it's a really impressive send-off for this character in a way that.
• 55:27
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 55:28
  Ted: It's… it's cool to… it's cool to read, and it's… it's…
• 55:32
  Ted: it hammers home the stakes, and it keeps everything… it makes it clear what exactly we're facing, and what Icon is facing, and what he's fighting for. And it's…
• 55:42
  Ted: it, of course, leads to Icon flying, you know, teleporting back home. He makes some reference to, like, yeah, I had to spend all my savings, which, like, he lives in future space utopia, and they still have money, like, I don't… anyway.
• 55:54
  Ted: But he teleports back and has to defeat Oblivion, which he does quickly, because he has the power to shut off his nanotechnology. And it… it…
• 56:06
  Ted: it wraps up quicker than I would have liked, and frankly, this is the part where I feel as though…
• 56:13
  Ted: Again, I'm… I would… I have no actual insider knowledge, and I'm just…
• 56:19
  Ted: I'm just spitballing, but I feel like this is them thinking, like, oh, we gotta… we gotta swivel hard to the Utopia Park Long Hot Summer storyline. Because literally, like, as he's, you know, putting away…
• 56:32
  Ted: oblivion in, like, a magnetic bubble thingy, the mayor drives up and is like, hey, Icon, I've got a whole new storyline for you to jump into. And, you know, and it becomes the thing about, like, Utopia Park, which is this…
• 56:46
  Ted: Utopia Park showed up in…
• 56:49
  Ted: Cobalts? It's been mentioned in some of the other comics we've read, I'm trying to remember.
• 56:53
  Marcus Anderson: Right, yeah.
• 56:54
  Marcus Anderson: exactly which one to…
• 56:56
  Ted: Yeah, but it's like, it's a… it's not quite an amusement park, it's like a big, complex,
• 57:03
  Ted: Not, like, development, but it's something where it's like, hey, there's gonna be a whole bunch of new apartments and also, like, cool attractions and stuff, and It's… a whole lot of people have clearly invested a lot of money into it, it's very important to a whole lot of very powerful people.
• 57:17
  Ted: The mayor has gotten a call about it from the governor, who's like, hey, we gotta make sure this thing goes through. And so, the governor… the mayor, who, again, this is the mayor who had, like, the relationship with ICON until he revealed he was Icon, and then also, like.
• 57:32
  Ted: you know, point… expose her crimes about being involved with the Big Bang. She just sort of screeches up in her limo and is like, hey, we got a whole new storyline to happen over here, come on in. And that's kind of where it pivots, at sort of the last minutes.
• 57:48
  Ted: And I don't… I mean… I think I may be reading too much into it, but it does feel…
• 57:55
  Ted: not rushed, but forced, I guess? And I…
• 57:59
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I mean…
• 57:59
  Ted: want to know.
• 58:00
  Marcus Anderson: I think what you're speaking to is the nature of events, too.
• 58:04
  Ted: Yeah, well, that, yeah, I've already…
• 58:06
  Marcus Anderson: We just kind of, like…
• 58:08
  Ted: pop up.
• 58:08
  Marcus Anderson: They're like, yeah, yeah, I know you like what's been going on, but we're about to do an event, baby.
• 58:12
  Ted: Yeah, hold on, we got a crossover icon, you know, button your vest, we gotta go. It is, and I've sort of… when we were talking about Worlds Collide, I mentioned that, like, I always find events very jarring in the way they happen, and this is…
• 58:23
  Marcus Anderson: Me too. Some of them have happened… I remember when I was a kid, there were some arcs I was just loving, you know, and then… and then the event dropped, and sometimes they really didn't pick up the threads afterwards that you were, like, really looking forward to.
• 58:40
  Ted: Yeah, so this is… this is the, sort of, official start of this event, and unfortunately, that also means that the whole, like, trial aspect gets…
• 58:49
  Ted: kind of quickly wrapped up where original… or no, clone Arnis, which is Icon's replacement, etc, which is, again, like, what a great sci-fi high concept. You could do a whole book off of that.
• 59:03
  Marcus Anderson: They also peacefully coexist, that's… I just wanted to point that out.
• 59:07
  Ted: Yeah, that's… I mean, that's, again, that's what makes that a really interesting dynamic for me, is like, oh, we kind of have to just sort of both be here, we can't… like, we're not gonna fight about it, we just gotta kinda deal with the fact that there's sort of two of me.
• 59:20
  Marcus Anderson: What would you guys do if you went away, and you came back, and your clone was…
• 59:24
  Marcus Anderson: Your clone was living in your place.
• 59:26
  Ted: I don't know, man, depends on how well we hand.
• 59:28
  Tad Eggleston: Go back to Earth?
• 59:29
  Ted: Yeah.
• 59:31
  Ted: Are the bills paid? Like, is he… is he fed the dog? Like… No, I… it's… but that's the thing, like, I think there's a compelling story, like, just in there. Like, I think that's… that's a whole… that's a whole separate problem.
• 59:43
  Tad Eggleston: I would… I would kind of like to have seen more of the trial. I think that you're right, it is a separate comic to do that other story, and it would have been cool if the universe was robust enough and had kept going enough that we'd gotten, like, that five-issue miniseries of… of Arno going, oh, wait…
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: Now I'm Armo 2, because Arno Prime is back! How does.
• 1:00:09
  Ted: And he used.
• 1:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm actually way more interested in how the clone handles.
• 1:00:14
  Ted: Yeah!
• 1:00:15
  Tad Eggleston: Because how's that supposed to work? Am I gonna get just incinerated now, because…
• 1:00:19
  Ted: I'm not…
• 1:00:19
  Tad Eggleston: guy's back, I mean, how does…
• 1:00:22
  Marcus Anderson: To that point, my… I mean, I can… I can…
• 1:00:25
  Marcus Anderson: I just guessed, when I read it, my read was that with whatever their kind of elevated, thinking and, you know, coexistence that they have on their world, that it's not a problem, you know what I mean? Like, but it also has never…
• 1:00:44
  Tad Eggleston: happened.
• 1:00:46
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, true, true, true.
• 1:00:47
  Ted: for anybody to die. I mean…
• 1:00:48
  Tad Eggleston: Like, no matter how elevated they are, you know, they seem to, like, understand humans because of their own history.
• 1:01:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, based on how terribly we handle things that have never happened and are weird.
• 1:01:09
  Tad Eggleston: I don't… I don't wanna care… guarantee that they're gonna be… as… as.
• 1:01:18
  Ted: Forgive?
• 1:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, as enlightened in the situation as we might hope they'd be, just because, again, they're having to,
• 1:01:30
  Tad Eggleston: But where I was really going is in terms of the… them just, like…
• 1:01:34
  Tad Eggleston: showing up and them handing off Oblivion, I kinda like that ending.
• 1:01:38
  Ted: Oh, so the whole thing of him handing it off to DMZ is people who turn out to be, like, Green Lantern, apparently. Like, Green Lantern.
• 1:01:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:01:46
  Marcus Anderson: Yes, which I think we had learned that…
• 1:01:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but rather than, like, totally dragging out this… so-so…
• 1:01:57
  Tad Eggleston: villain. You know, I mean, we already
• 1:01:59
  Tad Eggleston: commented on the fact that Oblivion is… is… he's… he's a gag in a lot of ways.
• 1:02:05
  Ted: Albanian.
• 1:02:06
  Marcus Anderson: Yes.
• 1:02:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right, he is, you're right, I mean, that's the thing.
• 1:02:08
  Ted: He's not the point of this story, and I guess I'm kind of…
• 1:02:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:02:12
  Ted: Losing the forest for the trees.
• 1:02:13
  Tad Eggleston: And you're… but, like, one of the reasons that you're sitting there going, I'm surprised, you know, feels abrupt, is, like, Marvel or DC would have made it a whole 5 issues to deal with all that stuff, and…
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: You wouldn't have noticed until years later that we never re-read that part.
• 1:02:29
  Ted: Yeah. You know, fair point. Totally fair point.
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:02:34
  Ted: But yeah, like, it… so the storyline wraps up, essentially, with Arnis2 contacting Icon through space telepathy and saying, hey, just so you know, like, we're gonna just leave the situation for right now, we're gonna watch what you do in Utopia Park, and off of that, make our decision of whether or not to blow you guys up.
• 1:02:52
  Ted: So, just so you know, peace out. Like, it's… it sort of kicks the can down the road, sort of,
• 1:03:01
  Ted: And… and makes it clear that this upcoming storyline is gonna be, in its way, just as consequential, ideally.
• 1:03:09
  Ted: But yeah, that's… that is sort of the ending of this storyline. Like, we've got… oh, and then… and then the… the final note is that, on top of all this, of course, now Raquel and her mom and the whole family are being evicted as part of the stuff for Utopia Park. So, it's setting up Utopia Park as the…
• 1:03:27
  Ted: not villain, but as the… as the big, conflict that everyone's gonna be dealing with for the next…
• 1:03:33
  Marcus Anderson: Icon, I mean, you briefly mentioned it, but when the mayor
• 1:03:37
  Marcus Anderson: came to him, and she basically had been… the governor was pressuring her to… Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  Marcus Anderson: And in this domain, the people, you know, who lived in the project, for a better, cleaner project, which we all know how that's worked out in the past,
• 1:03:52
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:03:52
  Marcus Anderson: But, you know, so… so she, like.
• 1:03:57
  Marcus Anderson: She's pretty stressed about it, but she gives it, she relents, and she goes back to her ex-boo icon and asks him, you know, for his assistance in this, and he… he doesn't take her up on it. So, I mean, I do think this is setting up, obviously, his…
• 1:04:14
  Marcus Anderson: between that and, you know, Rocket and her family being evicted, that's definitely setting up his, I'm sure, opposition.
• 1:04:23
  Ted: Yeah, it's… and he even tries to pass it off at first, where he says, like, oh, my business… I no longer live on this, I mean, in this city, which is a nice little kind of slip-up, but eventually he kind of caves, and it's like, okay, I guess this is sort of the next…
• 1:04:39
  Ted: major storyline for Icon and Rocket is gonna be the Utopia Park stuff, which…
• 1:04:44
  Ted: Sure, yeah, I… this is… like, Utopia Park is a perfectly… like, that's… the whole idea of, like, yeah, minority families getting pushed out, and, like, development, and sort of gentrification, slash also some superhero nonsense, that's… that's a perfectly fine storyline, I'm looking forward to getting into it, but it is also… it just feels a little bit…
• 1:05:03
  Ted: I feel like there should have been a more conclusion… conclusive ending to the trial stuff, but I get…
• 1:05:09
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I think where they left it is that… because remember, the whole purpose of the trial is that Earth is…
• 1:05:15
  Marcus Anderson: It is an unruly adolescent planet, and… and basically, the people of Terminus were like, look.
• 1:05:24
  Marcus Anderson: It'd be one thing if they wanted to, you know, mess up their planet on their own, but they are within a thousand… less than a thousand years of being able to do interstellar space travel.
• 1:05:36
  Marcus Anderson: At which point, they'd become everybody's problem. And so, they're basically, like, Earth is on trial. I can't remember if we really got into that, but, like, Earth is on trial.
• 1:05:46
  Ted: We're fine.
• 1:05:47
  Marcus Anderson: So, and at the end of this, the… the,
• 1:05:53
  Marcus Anderson: prosecution, I guess I should say. They're basically like, alright, we're gonna put it on hold, we wanna… they're basically like, we're gonna keep our eyes on things, but the trial…
• 1:06:03
  Marcus Anderson: is not… so it's almost like the trial's on hold while they observe what's going on. And even Icon is like, I don't think this whole Utopia thing is gonna be a good demonstration of…
• 1:06:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right. What does it say about… the culture of Earth.
• 1:06:21
  Tad Eggleston: that.
• 1:06:22
  Tad Eggleston: like… the first… fiction that I can think of that involved, like, big interstellar alliances and whatnot, Star Trek.
• 1:06:33
  Tad Eggleston: We led it, and we were a big part of it, blah blah blah. And everyone since…
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: that I can think of, and I'm not deep, deep into sci-fi.
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: But it feels like everyone since, like, as soon as the outside
• 1:06:52
  Tad Eggleston: intergalactic civilizations discover us, they're like, no, no, no.
• 1:07:00
  Tad Eggleston: Tuesday!
• 1:07:01
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, well, there's that, and then there's the other thing of limited human imagination, going back to… I mean, look, War of the World is great, but, like, you know, it, although…
• 1:07:15
  Marcus Anderson: If she wills, has some problems. But, but the,
• 1:07:20
  Marcus Anderson: You know, it's just funny, you definitely… we've had the trope so many times that, obviously, if aliens came here, they'd want to conquer us and colonize us.
• 1:07:28
  Marcus Anderson: you know, like, which… because for… well, especially European, descendants, like, that's, like, kind of how you do things, you know? So, it's like, those fears are enacted throughout the fiction. But you're right, I like… did you see,
• 1:07:44
  Marcus Anderson: Not the Charlie Sheen one, but Arrival.
• 1:07:48
  Ted: Oh, yeah!
• 1:07:49
  Marcus Anderson: The rival dealt with that well, you know. And it's like, yeah, human beings, again, propensity for militaristic reactions almost messed things up. But the aliens were like, hey man, we're…
• 1:08:02
  Marcus Anderson: Well, about to spoil it for… I won't spoil It wasn't seen the field.
• 1:08:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:08:06
  Ted: My personal favorite about one of those, by the way, is Contact, which I read.
• 1:08:10
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah.
• 1:08:11
  Ted: And the movie is… the movie's pretty good. It's not… it's not nearly as good as the book, but the movie is, like, pretty good at having that whole element in there of, like, yeah, how do we understand this message, and can we take it on faith that this is from a benevolent civilization, or are they just secretly tricking us into blowing ourselves up? So, anyway, but yeah.
• 1:08:30
  Marcus Anderson: So I want to say real quick, wait, don't lose your thought. I want to say, anybody who's listening who's taking these as, sci-fi recommendations, make sure you watch Arrival. The Arrival is a hilariously goofy, kind of bad Charlie Sheen sci-fi movie.
• 1:08:47
  Marcus Anderson: Never even heard of it. Well, I mean, it's worth a watch if you want to watch something funny in bed.
• 1:08:51
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:08:53
  Ted: Sure, no, I have to check that out, I have no idea what that is.
• 1:08:58
  Ted: Yeah, anyway, so this, I mean, this storyline, and one of the parts… okay, so this essentially puts things back to not quite status quo, but Icon's back, Raquel's back, Buck is dead, and Darnice has sort of given up the… has she officially said she's not gonna continue it, or…
• 1:09:16
  Ted: I think…
• 1:09:17
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, well, you know what? I guess we have to see.
• 1:09:20
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if Raquel's gonna give her an option.
• 1:09:22
  Marcus Anderson: Well, yeah, that's interesting, because…
• 1:09:25
  Marcus Anderson: with the, like, Raquel very much took the belt and jumped in in the heat of a very, very dire situation, and Darnice was having panic attacks. Like, she, you know, as much as good as she had been feeling about being in the role of Rocket.
• 1:09:41
  Marcus Anderson: I think the enormity of what she was facing, she was really freaked out, and Raquel was like, I got this. And so, yeah, I think it's kind of up in the air as to… I'm sure that we're going to see some type of discussion between the two of them.
• 1:09:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, had Raquel said that she was planning on giving it up permanently, I thought she was just…
• 1:10:02
  Marcus Anderson: Giving it up while she was pregnant.
• 1:10:04
  Tad Eggleston: contents.
• 1:10:04
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I think…
• 1:10:05
  Ted: I got really excited about, like, the costume that Icon gave her before he left, and stuff like that.
• 1:10:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:10:10
  Ted: And that's… I mean, we kind of… I kind of glossed over it just because I was trying to get through the full summary, but, like, the Raquel Darni stuff is really good, like, as.
• 1:10:18
  Marcus Anderson: Why didn't we talk about, like, the…
• 1:10:19
  Ted: Yeah, the icon Earth on Trial stuff, like, the Raquel and Darnice stuff is really interesting, because it's Darnice is coming into the role of a superhero, doesn't really know what she's doing, and is really scared to do stuff at first, but then gets to the point where she's really eager to do it, and almost too eager, and, like, accident… almost accidentally killing people, and, like, she eventually gets her footing, but it's still very much like she's… she's a different rocket from Raquel, which I really like.
• 1:10:44
  Ted: And their relationship, and sort of Raquel having to teach her the ropes, but also, like, accept that she's gonna do things differently, that's… that's really solid stuff. I like that… those interactions a lot. And they maintain friendships, and they're not, like, you know, at each other's throats through it. It…
• 1:10:59
  Ted: Yeah, like, I… I thought that was a really… as much as we talked about the sci-fi stuff, I think that's a really solid part of this arc, too, is the two events.
• 1:11:08
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 1:11:09
  Ted: friends, and…
• 1:11:10
  Marcus Anderson: And you know what I think is interesting, and it kind of… I don't know…
• 1:11:15
  Marcus Anderson: avoids the temptation of previous comic book trope. There's a lot of times… obviously, we've had 1 million and one bad family members over the years. I've read 1,001 people having their trial by fire, and it always feels like they're almost instantly
• 1:11:32
  Marcus Anderson: doing Batman stuff without… Yes. Like, Bruce Wayne used his immense wealth to travel the world, learn from the best of the best, and I think, presumably, he was doing it for years, you know, so that explains why he can do all this crazy bad stuff. But then there's a lot of times where other
• 1:11:51
  Marcus Anderson: Bat family members, they gotta trial by fire, and they're just doing all the bad stuff.
• 1:11:55
  Ted: Yeah, he just takes in a teenager for, like, a week, and they're…
• 1:11:58
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:59
  Ted: It's a long weekend, even, you know, you give them, like, two sparring lessons, and, like, here's the bat rope, figure it out, you know.
• 1:12:06
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, so it's interesting to see somebody jump into a role, but, like, it's pretty complex. And then, to your point, I think you mentioned it.
• 1:12:15
  Marcus Anderson: you know, Darnice is having a bumpy ride, but Rocket, after, I think, I think after the time jump, or maybe before, Rocket's like, you know, she's doing her thing, Darnice, and she's even, like, figured out how to do some stuff with the belt that I haven't done.
• 1:12:30
  Ted: How to fly with it? Yeah.
• 1:12:31
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, but that… but it's interesting, it's like, that alone doesn't specifically make you, like, a hero, like, you know, or not that Darnice isn't a hero, but that alone…
• 1:12:42
  Marcus Anderson: isn't the whole picture, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's… there's still more to it, so… the way that… I think Raquel saying, I got this, just please take care of my baby, like, was a symbol of the fact that, like, yeah, maybe she hadn't figured out all the things Darnese had, but, like, she had…
• 1:13:00
  Marcus Anderson: at her heart, like, you know what I mean? Like, what it is to be Rocket.
• 1:13:04
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:13:05
  Ted: But yeah, this is… I mean, this is sort of back to status quo-ish, and looking ahead to a new era, and moving on to the Utopia Park stuff, and like, it's… it's…
• 1:13:16
  Ted: it's interesting, exciting, but we've got the Utopia Park stuff coming up, it's,
• 1:13:22
  Ted: Sorry, I don't know where I was going with any of this, but yeah, like, we understand that there's… we get more of the icon backstory, and the idea of exactly how much he's lost, and…
• 1:13:34
  Ted: Yeah, I, I…
• 1:13:36
  Ted: I genuinely don't know where I was going with this, I was just maybe summing it up, I guess, but, like, I liked how much they had put all this together, and also, you know, Raquel's had her baby, so now that storyline is not wrapped up at all, but, like, in a new phase.
• 1:13:49
  Ted: Yeah, it's… this ongoing… the ongoing icon narrative, as with all the Milestone books, like, their ability to balance all this stuff is so…
• 1:13:58
  Ted: So…
• 1:13:59
  Tad Eggleston: I do have one quick question.
• 1:14:01
  Tad Eggleston: And… and I… I… I want to preface this with, I love Amassad as a name, so, like, I'm not bashing the name.
• 1:14:11
  Tad Eggleston: But, she says she doesn't want to saddle the kid with a name like Augustus?
• 1:14:18
  Tad Eggleston: and then calls him Amistad?
• 1:14:21
  Marcus Anderson: Right, but I think she's thinking, like, like, and there, that, that's almost like an in-community joke about, like, there, there, there's some, like, old names that people have, like, and, like, Augustus is… and so I think she's saying more about, like, old names, but…
• 1:14:36
  Tad Eggleston: I think I'm still pretty bad. But still, it felt weird to me.
• 1:14:41
  Ted: It is, like, I do… again, like, Rocket… I know we keep saying it, like, Rocket is the… the… not the main character of this book, but she's such.
• 1:14:50
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, she is. No, but she's the… she's the heart of it. She's the driving force.
• 1:14:54
  Ted: Yeah, the heart there, yeah. That's… and her getting to have…
• 1:14:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the first issue that we read here, where it said rocket, where it had the rocket spray-painted over the icon, is the first properly titled.
• 1:15:07
  Tad Eggleston: issue we've had so far, as far as I'm concerned.
• 1:15:10
  Ted: Yeah, and even though it's Darnice and not Raquel, it still continues that spirit of her being a very different type of superhero than a lot of the female superheroes, a lot of the black superheroes, a lot of any kind of superheroes that we've had up until now, so…
• 1:15:25
  Marcus Anderson: So if you think about it, like, just through her journaling, like, pound for pound, you really get… her voice actually drives the story way more, like, throughout the run, like, way more than likely.
• 1:15:38
  Ted: Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that, but you're absolutely right. Like, it's… her… her narration… it's… a lot of these… yeah.
• 1:15:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this has been Rocket all the way, as far as.
• 1:15:48
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: concerned.
• 1:15:49
  Ted: No, you're right, I didn't even think about that, but yeah. But yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward.
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: Chauvinist… Chauvinist… Salesman.
• 1:15:59
  Marcus Anderson: Well, sadly, they corrected it with the modern run, but they just didn't bother to give us another arc of it.
• 1:16:07
  Marcus Anderson: You know? Because it is currently…
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully we can say yet eventually, but it's not feeling good.
• 1:16:14
  Ted: It, you know.
• 1:16:16
  Ted: Man, it's been.
• 1:16:17
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:16:18
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, we'll see, we'll see. I'd love to be proved wrong.
• 1:16:22
  Tad Eggleston: I would too.
• 1:16:22
  Ted: Me too, me too. I realize I'm looking at the clock, and I know you guys.
• 1:16:25
  Marcus Anderson: We are, are we over?
• 1:16:26
  Ted: podcast recording.
• 1:16:27
  Tad Eggleston: No, I've got an hour, but…
• 1:16:29
  Marcus Anderson: Okay.
• 1:16:30
  Ted: Oh, okay. Well, I got…
• 1:16:31
  Tad Eggleston: 8.30. 8.30 is when the other one starts.
• 1:16:35
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I'm looking at my 830, okay.
• 1:16:37
  Tad Eggleston: I thought.
• 1:16:38
  Ted: It was Marcus's 8th, whatever, it's…
• 1:16:40
  Tad Eggleston: It's my 8.30. Which, I mean, I think… I think we're getting a little into our, this is cool, Chris Farley phase, so… and or the DC So White, which we already covered, so…
• 1:16:58
  Ted: Yeah, I'm…
• 1:16:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not saying that it might not be time to wrap it up, but it's not because I'm in a hurry.
• 1:17:03
  Ted: Yeah, I am… I am starving, though. I gotta get dinner on the stuff.
• 1:17:07
  Tad Eggleston: That is a good reason.
• 1:17:09
  Marcus Anderson: Yes, it's good to go.
• 1:17:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, for, for, for the brothers Anderson, no related? No relation?
• 1:17:17
  Ted: What's the next… what's the next chunk we're reading?
• 1:17:20
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah.
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that, that is a good question.
• 1:17:23
  Tad Eggleston: So, we have two choices. We could take a static shock brake.
• 1:17:30
  Tad Eggleston: I bought myself the first season.
• 1:17:33
  Ted: Right.
• 1:17:34
  Tad Eggleston: Or, I have Volume 4 for both of you that I need to get in the mail.
• 1:17:40
  Ted: Or, we could get our hands on the Milestone Generations, documentary, if we wanted to watch that at some point.
• 1:17:45
  Marcus Anderson: Okay, do y'all know where to…
• 1:17:48
  Marcus Anderson: get it, though? I just… I just don't know where to…
• 1:17:50
  Ted: It can be forgotten.
• 1:17:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, oh, gotcha, gotcha.
• 1:17:54
  Tad Eggleston: on this.
• 1:17:54
  Ted: And we have…
• 1:17:55
  Marcus Anderson: We have total… But it means of… yes, we'll get it, legitimately.
• 1:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:17:59
  Ted: Any FBI agents listening in, don't worry about it, but yeah, it… yeah.
• 1:18:05
  Ted: But yeah, that's… I mean, we have some options ahead of us. We'll be talking those over in email, I'm sure, but .
• 1:18:10
  Marcus Anderson: Okay, yeah.
• 1:18:11
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:18:11
  Ted: That's what we'll be doing next time.
• 1:18:12
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so yeah. We'll figure it out before next month.
• 1:18:17
  Tad Eggleston: We'll be starting Volume 4.
• 1:18:19
  Tad Eggleston: Probably no later than 2 months from now, but we might do an interlude. We've done an interlude between all of the other ones, it seems like we should do another interlude.
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: So, for the Brothers Anderson No Relation, this has been the Milestone Book Club on 22 panels, and we will see you after the next page.