Jason Aaron – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com The best place on earth for nerds. Tue, 13 Nov 2018 13:18:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/cropped-nerds_head_thumb2-100x100.png Jason Aaron – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com 32 32 All the podcasts from NerdsonEarth.com, under one umbrella. We create short run podcasts for nerds, covering D&D, Marvel, Starfinder, and more! You vote for your favorite shows and they just might get a second season. Jason Aaron – Nerds on Earth false episodic Jason Aaron – Nerds on Earth jason.sansbury@nerdsonearth.com podcast All the podcasts from NerdsonEarth.com, the best place on Earth for nerds. Jason Aaron – Nerds on Earth https://nerdsonearth.com/wp-content/uploads/powerpress/noe-podcast-logo.png https://nerdsonearth.com/blog/ The Delightfully Bonkers Doop Issue of Wolverine and the X-Men https://nerdsonearth.com/2018/08/doop/ Thu, 30 Aug 2018 12:00:09 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=19599

Wolverine and the X-Men #17 might be the funniest Marvel Comic to date as it explores what Doop does at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning.

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I’ve been asking around a lot lately for reading recommendations inside the Marvel Unlimited app.  I’ve taken some great suggestions from many of the other Earth Nerds in our Slack channels, as well as a few from the growing community of our comics-focused Nerds on Earth-616 Facebook Group.

The binging has taken me through Whedon and Cassaday’s Astonishing X-Men run and populated my Library with more Star Wars titles than you can shake a kyber crystal at.

I also stumbled across the Battle of the Atom podcast which performs two services for me simultaneously:

  1. Recommends the best X-Men series, arc, and issues to look out for.
  2. Cautions me to avoid the worst of the same subset of Marvel Comics.

And in the very first episode, I was surprised not only to hear the name of a very oddball and relatively obscure Marvel comics character, but also to hear hosts Zachary Jenkins and Adam Reck highly recommend I read a single issue in which he stars:  Wolverine and the X-Men #17: Wolverine’s Secret Weapon starring Doop.

So I pulled up Wolverine and the X-Men and got to reading…and it earns its every accolade.

What Does Doop DO, Exactly?!

The comic opens up with a bit of a progress report form Deathlok on the current staff of the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning.  Overall, the staff seems to be doing a great job, but there is one member of the faculty that has no title or responsibilities that Deathlok can determine:  Doop.

Wolverine assures him and the rest of the staff that Doop is there at his request and that he performs a “vitally important function” at the school.

The pages then transition to a flashback of Wolverine convincing Doop to come onboard, and progresses through a series of increasingly more demanding and hilarious tasks Doop requires of Wolverine before he’ll even consider taking on the job.  And I won’t spoil it here, but the last one is downright LOL-inducing!

Click to embiggen.

After accepting the gig, the rest of the comic is a series of vignettes revealing just what that “vitally important function” is:  Doop is to identify and eliminate threats to the school before they get to the school’s doorstep.  This has him tackling problems ranging from the League of Nazi Bowlers to the Westchester County School Board to Robo-barbarians from another dimension (featuring a cameo by none other than Howard the Duck!), and even a nun who appeared to be writing a bad review of the school on Yelp (my personal favorite).

He even travels back in time at one point to save the progenitor of the entire Xavier family line from Wendigos in 1652.

All of which explains why the poor floating green half-man always appears to be sleeping on job:  He’s exhausted, not lazy.

Pure Fun

Writer Jason Aaron seems to have been given free license to just have fun with an issue when it came to Wolverine and the X-Men #17.  The issue is bonkers from beginning to end with lots of laughs via absurdity.  And Doop co-creator Mike Allred along with his wife, Laura, are brought in for this issue to bring the silliness to life on art and colors respectively.  They keep the visuals very cartoony and bright, which serves the tone very well.

Out of curiosity, I also looked up a Doop translator for the issue to make sense of his speech balloons (he speaks an alien language that goes untranslated in the comics, but has an official translation key).  While not necessary for enjoyment, I did find that his lines were just as comedically engineered as everything else in the issue, so its well worth reading along with this page-by-page translation.

You don’t have to read any issues preceding #17 in this run or be familiar with Doop at all to get a kick out of it.  This might well be the funniest Marvel Comic I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend checking it out, for sure!

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Why We Need More Long Runs in Comics https://nerdsonearth.com/2018/04/why-we-need-more-long-runs-in-comics/ Tue, 10 Apr 2018 12:00:57 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=17052

A brief survey of 3 fantastic long runs in comics leaves us wishing they happened more often.

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Recently, we have seen three rather remarkable series come to an end, and each different in their own way. Robert Kirkman’s Invincible came to an end with its 144th issue. Jason Aaron is coming to a close on his run on the various Thor comics, coming in at 88 issues and Dan Slott is ending his epic run on Spider-Man and each of them can teach us something as an audience and, hopefully, give publishers pause on how they handle books moving forward.

Robert Kirkman is most famous for his comic The Walking Dead and the massive hit television show that spawned out of it along with a spinoff series (You bet I still got shade for Fear the Walking Dead). But around the same time that Kirkman began creating The Walking Dead, he began to tell the story of Mark Grayson, a high schooler who discovers that he has superpowers.

But over the course of the next 144 issues, we see the character grow up, change and experience cosmic adventures. It is a remarkable run for a creator and certainly something that we will rarely see anymore. Because the character of Invincible is creator owned, Kirkman was able to do some remarkable things; the character experienced real growth and change, without ever having to experience a massive reboot that has become so common when writing characters for the major 2 publishers of DC and Marvel. But that isn’t to say that substantial, important runs aren’t possible at those publishers. Jason Aaron on the Thor books and Dan Slott on the Spider-Man books are two recent runs that are ending that demonstrate that it is still possible to do epic, long form stories.

Jason Aaron was a strange choice when announced to be taking on the Thor comic in 2012. He didn’t seem to fit the genre-specific Thor at the time but he quickly proved everyone wrong as he used the Thor series, as well as the Original Sin crossover, to help reshape and give the character Thor a new vision.

WIthout a doubt, Aaron’s largest contribution was having Thor lose the ability to pick up his hammer and having a woman (eventually revealed to be Jane Foster) pick up the hammer and mantle of Thor. Here at Nerds, we have written about various parts and aspects of Aaron’s run but it is fairly amazing that he was given such a clean slate to tell a long running story in a major superhero comic, even as the Thor movies were coming out and growing in popularity. (Thanks to this site for an excellent reading order of all the Jason Aaron Thor comics.) Sadly, it does feel a bit like Aaron’s run on Thor ends with him having to put all the pieces back to where they were before, but it is a testament to how a good writer of comics can do an excellent run, praised by both fans and critics, when largely left alone to their own devices. It should be a lesson that Marvel and DC learn especially because it is ending as the same time as Dan Slott’s Spider-Man run.

When Dan Slott picked up the mantle to write Spider-Man, it could not have come at a worse time in some ways. Slott was a part of the team of writers taking on Spider-Man after the infamous One More Day story, where Peter Parker and Mary Jane Parker make a deal with Mephisto to save Aunt May’s life by essentially resetting theirs, including making it so their marriage never happened and lots more. To say that that story isn’t well regarded by the comic public is an understatement.

But Slott began writing Spider-Man then and continued as other creators dropped off until he was the sole writer of the Spider-Man comics for Marvel in November of 2010. Publishing twice a month, Slott managed to guide Peter Parker and crew on some epic stories, including the body swapping Superior Spider-Man story among others. Where as Slott inherited a challenging start, he took it and ran with it, taking risks and telling some remarkable stories. His run will end soon and it has been announced that he will shift over to the Iron Man comics.

All of these runs should teach us something about great comic book runs.

First, creators are largely left alone to tell their stories. Because of Kirkman’s ownership of Invincible it isn’t such a big deal but with Slott’s Spider-Man and Aaron’s Thor runs, they are successful in part because they let one creator focus on those characters without the distractions that can overwhelm modern comic creators. The major crossovers still happened at Marvel but Slott and Aaron were largely allowed to stand to the side of them or, in the case of Aaron’s Original Sin series, use them as a major focal point of his story. Too often we see great creators struggle with the notion of telling a great, epic long form story because they have to pause so Marvel can reveal how it has figured the most recent way for heroes to punch other heroes. Instead, they should trust characters and creators to breath.

That isn’t to say that long runs are perfect. It is a bit of twinge in my comic loving heart when I think about how inevitably someone is going to be asked to resurrect Jane Foster and, in a way, undo some of the greatest of Aaron’s Thor run. Sadly, I am sure Kirkman may have to revisit Invincible when they inevitably work to bring it to television or movies. Slott’s run wasn’t perfect and there are aspects especially later that made me feel like I didn’t understand his take on Peter Parker. And in two sentences I have managed to show you the modern comics debate: tell me new stories but don’t change them too much. But, that said, I sure do wish Marvel and DC would learn a little bit from the lessons these runs can teach us.

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The Hillbilly Redneck Sagas that are Dominating Comic Books https://nerdsonearth.com/2016/11/hillbilly-redneck-sagas-dominating-comic-books/ Sat, 12 Nov 2016 13:33:02 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=10371

If you’ve ever seen the Goonies or Stand By Me, you have a glimpse of what it was like for me and my cousins as we prowled around the hollows of West Virginia. But, please, no Deliverance jokes, as I’ve heard them all before. Late one morning our gang of little rascals were out exploring […]

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If you’ve ever seen the Goonies or Stand By Me, you have a glimpse of what it was like for me and my cousins as we prowled around the hollows of West Virginia. But, please, no Deliverance jokes, as I’ve heard them all before.

Late one morning our gang of little rascals were out exploring and came upon a slate dump (West Virginians will know this term). Just over the edge was a mason jar filled with a clear liquid that had a slight shimmer to it. The nerd I am, I imagined it was a D&D potion.

We scrambled down, grabbed the mason jar, then huddled around as one of my older cousins wrenched the lid off. The strength of the smell nearly blasted us off our feet, which would have sent us rolling down the slate dump.

We had found a jar of moonshine, that mythical elixir famous for being over 100 proof alcohol. Call it hooch, white lightning, mountain dew, or homebrew (for those of us with D&D inclinations) but it scared us kids to death. We took off screaming and hollering through the hollers.

My point is that the Appalachian mountains have always had a culture all their own, and it’s a culture that is wild and mysterious for many. This wild and mysterious culture is turning out to be a source of inspiration for comic book writers.

The Hillbilly Redneck Sagas that are Dominating Comic Books

Southern BastardsThe talented Jason Aaron is perhaps the best known comic book writer to tap into the small town rural vibe through his Southern Bastards comic. Southern Bastards is a story about Earl Tubb, a man who returns home to Craw County, Ala., only to find that it is ruthlessly run by Euless Boss, the local high school football coach.

That might not sound dramatic enough for you, but Southern Bastards has a psychotic-redneck tone that makes for an incredible read. I recommend it highly and you can get it here for the great Image Comics first trade price.

Stories can be cyclical in how they follow trends. Undoubtedly, other creators and publishers took notice of the popularity and success of Southern Bastards and decided there was more coal to mine out of the hillbilly redneck genre. I’ve picked up four brand new #1 issues lately and I’ll share some brief thoughts with you, in hopes I can convince a few of you into dipping into the genre.

 

Warlords of Appalachia

Warlords of Appalachia is a new comic by Boom! Studios. The 4 issue series is built on the premise that after a second Civil War (not of the Marvel variety), only Kentucky holds out in a last stand of the New Confederacy, refusing to recognize United States sovereignty. The reluctant folks hero Kade Mercer becomes a feudal warlord.

Boom! describes it as Southern Bastards meets Dune, and they aren’t wrong. Warlords of Appalachia features future hillbilly military tech and some great worldbuilding. It has great graphic design and nice art as well, so I’m looking forward to more.

You can find issue #1 here.

 

1Moonshine is a prohibition story. Its setting is prohibition era, deep in the hollows. A city-slicker from New York City is sent to negotiate a deal with Hiram Holt, the best moonshiner in West Virginia. The city-slicker tries to get the hooch, but he ends up discovering some supernatural secrets.

Since my no-good grandfather ran a little ‘shine in his days, I’m interested to discover more about the hillbillies that are set up so well by Brian Azzarello, who is best known for 100 Bullets and tons of DC titles, like Batman.

Moonshine features G-Men who are way out of their element. It’s gangsters with a little horror slipped in. I’m really looking forward to more.

You can find the first trade of Moonshine here.

 

cannibal_02-1Cannibal is set in Florida, which doesn’t really capture the southern culture, unless you are talking about the panhandle. But Cannibal places such a nice spin on the zombie apocalypse, that I thought it was worthy of inclusion.

The story goes that in 1994 a hurricane swept through Florida. While many focused on the property damage, the real damage was that the hurricane uncovered ancient mosquitoes that had been hibernating just below ground. The mosquitoes infected humans with a 100-year-old strain of Yellow Fever. A medicine was rushed to combat the disease. The symptoms were treated, but a terrible side effect was unleashed: recipients began to crave human flesh.

The tiny little town in Florida hasn’t seen a cannibal…yet.

I’ve written about cannibalism in pop culture before and it continues to gross me out. But the comic has that small town vibe that tethers it to the other Appalachian stories and I’m interested in more.

Find it here.

 

d-hillbilly-04-cov-0f9ddFinally, there is the perfectly named Hillbilly. Hillbilly is the story of Rondel, a man born with no eyes, yet cursed with terrible vision, and is out to rid the world of foul demons and witches.

Self published under the Albatross Funnybooks imprint, Hillbilly is by Eric Powell, who is best known for The Goon. Powell draws from Appalachian folklore, but spins it into a wholly new Appalachian mythos. But Appalachia is part of the Bible belt, so Satan and witches make obvious bad guys.

The book has a talking bear, a big ‘ole cleaver, and a few opportunities for a legitimate Deliverance joke.

You can find it here.


And there are several great comics if you are interested in the trend of hillbilly redneck sagas that is gaining so much popularity in the hobby. Do check them out.

And there may be more that I’m not aware of. Please join us on Facebook and share a title I may have missed!

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What Could be the Next Walking Dead: An Introduction to Scalped https://nerdsonearth.com/2014/11/comic-series-scalped-made-for-tv-walking-dead-jason-aaron/ https://nerdsonearth.com/2014/11/comic-series-scalped-made-for-tv-walking-dead-jason-aaron/#comments Sat, 15 Nov 2014 19:07:38 +0000 https://nerdsonearth.com/?p=792

The Walking Dead is a television sensation. The comic series Scalped has the potential to follow that lead.

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In this series of posts, we have been looking at what could be the next Walking Dead, by which we mean what intellectual property in the comic book and graphic novel world could be mined to become another hit television show.

So far, we have looked at the saga of Manhattan in the second American Civil War, that is DMZ.  We looked at the “all men are dead but one” adventure of Y the Last Man. We theorized about the supernatural and spiritual story of a demon possessed Preacher.  All worthy candidates potentially.

When you think of what can make a great television series, you need to look at a variety of factors.  Is the story complete?  Would it be reasonable to film cost-wise?  Does the story build a big enough world that you can tell other stories successfully other than just the main one?

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Which comic series could be the next Walking Dead?

One terrific candidate would be Jason Aaron’s Vertigo imprint book Scalped.  The comic series Scalped tells the story of Dashiell Bad Horse, a Native American who returns to the corrupt Indian reservation as an undercover FBI agent.  Adventures ensue and in order to avoid spoilers, not much more can be said.

But this book is excellent.

When a comic book is good, my approach is to plow through it as fast as possible.  When a comic is excellent, I slow down and savor it.  After having heard this book get praised for many years, my local book swap place had the whole run on trades one day and I had enough credits to snatch it up.  And after a fast start, I have been slowly reading my way through it.

 

Would would Scalped be great for TV?

Here is why it could be a great series on television:

  • scalpedOne, it merges and mines certain dramas.  It is a mix of an undercover agent story but also a story of a man wrestling with his history.  Bad Horse is a fantastic main character and casting the right person would be key to the series working.  But it would be great.
  • Two, the world of the Rez opens up to so many stories, flashbacks, and spin-off stories that it would be compelling to watch.
  • Three, Scalped has a beginning, a middle and an end.  While there are some parts of it that could expand or contract, there is a lot of potential in bringing this one to a close.
  • Four, Scalped has really interesting, compelling side characters.  As a reader, there are rarely moments where I can’t or don’t on some level empathize with the characters.  That is compelling television in a way that a lot of television isn’t.  (I’m looking at you Scandal, a series where everyone is just worthy of spite and hate. You deserve zero ratings and you are taking up a slot on my television that should be occupied by a great comic book property.)

Read Part 1: DMZ, Part 2: Y the Last Man, Part 3: Preacher. Then tell us in the comments what comics you think would make excellent television shows!

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