Celebrate Turkey Day with the Vertiguys by chowing down on the first grim tale from Lucifer’s ongoing series, as the Devil-in-retirement seeks advice, takes in a show, and is generally kind of a prick.
Show Notes
2:09 – The actual line is “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” and it’s from Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2. It’s part of Horatio’s goodbye to a dying Hamlet.
3:10 – We were reminded of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series where each half-episode had its own title. To boot, these titles often didn’t match the titles we’d been given in the next-episode bumper.
3:17 – I didn’t have the summary of X-Men (vol. 2) #51 quite right. The person spying on Bishop works for Dark Beast, not Sinister, and doesn’t appear in this issue (that actually happened in issue #49). Sinister is in this issue, though, and was responsible for mutating all the passengers on the train into monsters. Unbeknownst to the X-Men, Dark Beast is in this issue as well – that’s him on the cover posing as Beast. This cover is by Jeff Matsuda and Dan Panosian, also the issue’s interior artists.
4:25 – When we say, “writing for the trade,” we mean practices that de-emphasize the importance of making individual issues readable and rely on readers to read the whole story arc at once (probably in trade paperback form).
5:15 – Loki’s fuckery toward Susano-O took place in Season of Mists.
6:00 – Our discussion here reminded Sean of this Penny Arcade strip.
6:04 – The wheel of pain is shown to play a formative role in the life of Conan the Barbarian in the 1982 film. It is also, to my horror, a key craftable object in 2018’s Conan Exiles.
8:50 – Pastourma is a form of cured meat that is repeatedly pressed and air dried. Pastrami may be a relative of this. As we suggested, its use here seems to be to show that Lucifer has cultured tastes.
32:52 – I think we’ve made this reference before, but that’s a reference to this Mitchell and Webb sketch.
38:47 – Cardcaptor Sakura is a manga and anime by Clamp which was seen in the late 90s. The plot is quite similar to what we see here – a magical girl has to track down and reimprison a bunch of magical creatures that escaped from a magical deck of cards..
39:20 – See also the Key to Hell in Season of Mists, which caused so much trouble for Morpheus and Remiel. By the way, although Lucifer says angels don’t breed here, we’ve seen evidence that they can – over in Hellblazer, Ellie the succubus had a baby with an angel once. By claiming that he doesn’t breed, Lucifer also distinguishes himself from Paradise Lost’s Satan, who has a daughter, Sin – albeit by the Zeusian method of conjuring her from his brain.
40:35 – Mike Hammer is a fictional private eye who first appeared in a series of novels by former comic book writer Mickey Spillane, starting with 1947’s I, the Jury. The novels were told in the first person and were known for their purple prose reflecting the main character’s deep cynicism.
43:17 – I realized that maybe not everybody is old enough to be familiar with the theme song to the TV show Cheers, which we referenced here.
43:35 – Editors were discussed in Transmetropolitan #1 and our episode here.
44:44 – In 1973’s Live and Let Die, 007 seduces the tarot-reading psychic Solitaire (Jane Seymour!) by stacking a deck, filling it entirely with Lovers cards.
51:41 – A Trip to the Moon was an early science fiction film created by the French auteur Georges Méliès. The rocket’s collision with the moon is portrayed thusly:
1:17:12 – The device Sean incorrectly described here was actually used in issues prior to the death of Superman in Superman (vol. 2) #75. Successive issues leading up to the epic battle between Superman and Doomsday featured dwindling numbers of panels per page, with #75 consisting entirely of full-page panels.
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