The Pull List: 28 November 2012

Okay, come on Marvel. This is taking the piss. You are fooling nobody. It was only last week that I was complaining about having to buy Iron Man twice in one month due to double-shipping. Now I find myself at the comic shop buying second issues of Thor: God of Thunder, All-New X-Men and X-Men Legacy only two weeks after buying the first. You might have got me to keep trying Uncanny Avengers past the first issue - I was on the fence after issue #1 - but there are only so many comics I am prepared to purchase in a single week. If I wasn't reviewing them for this blog, I'd probably be buying even less.

There is one reason for Marvel to double-ship all these relaunches in a single month, and that's market share. They want to be able to claim their sales dominated the market, and smashed those of their "Distinguished Competition" (am I the only one who used to love the way they used to write that in the letters columns?). Except they won't have, not really, and I think in the long term it'll do them damage. You only have to look at The Amazing Spider-Man, whose sales declined further and further once they started publishing it three times a month.

I had no problem sticking with quite a lot of fairly average DC New 52 titles because they were only costing me $2.99 a month. A lot of Marvel's comics cost $3.99, and if they double ship them I'm paying $7.99 a month for the privilege of their company. That suddenly makes a lot of the mid-list a much less attractive proposition, and if you take a close look at the sales figures you'll see a hell of a lot of Marvel's range is mid-list. The slack I gave DC from last September is simply not an amount of slack I'm going to be willing to extend to Marvel. Iron Man's gone - after the first two issues I've decided to drop it. I'm going to take a pass on Uncanny Avengers as well. Indestructible Hulk and X-Men Legacy are currently on the fence - they could go either way. If I'm asked to buy either title within the next two weeks, they're toast.

Under the cut: reviews of (deep breath): All-New X-Men, All-Star Western, Aquaman, Batman Incorporated, Bedlam, FF, The Flash, Journey Into Mystery, Multiple Warheads, Nowhere Men, Planetoid, Revival, Thor: God of Thunder and X-Men Legacy.

Ads from Comics: Lego (1982)

From the back cover of ROM: Spaceknight #36. Cue a generation of adults diving into nostalgia over how Lego used to be.

Ads from Comics: Dungeons & Dragons (1982)

One of the reasons I adore reading old comic books in their original "floppy" form is the advertisements. If you buy the trade paperback you miss all of these hilarious or fascinating ads they used to publish. The older the comic, the better. Read a comic book today and the ads are all for deodorant sprays, cars and TV shows. Read a comic for 1982, and you get ads like this: selling Dungeons & Dragons to the kids of America. This one's from the back cover of Marvel's ROM: Spaceknight #28, dated March 1982.

Free Enterprise #20: "Detained"

Archer and Mayweather wake up in a Tandaran internment camp after encroaching on military space. At first it seems as if their stay will be short - three days in prison, a meeting with a magistrate, then freedom - but when Archer discovers that the camp's Suliban population are being held without cause or charge, and when the overseer Colonel Grat learns of Archer's previous contact with the Suliban Cabal, Archer and Mayweather's stay may just be a little longer.

In the role of Colonel Grat is Dean Stockwell, a veteran actor of American film and television. Contemporary audiences still probably remember him best for his five season run on the science fiction drama Quantum Leap, which starred Scott Bakula (Captain Archer). This is then the episode of Enterprise that I think every science fiction fan knew was coming: an unofficial Quantum Leap reunion inside the Star Trek universe.

Babble On #30: "The Long Dark"

An early Earth spacecraft drifts into the station's vicinity, carrying within it a cryogenically frozen explorer who's been on ice for a century. If a homeless veteran in the bowels of the station is to be believed, it has also carried an invisible, demonic entity to the station - an entity that murdered his entire team during the Earth-Minbari War. While Garibaldi investigates, Dr Franklin cares for the revived century-old explorer.

Is it just me, or is Dr Franklin a hysterically bad doctor? He comes dangerously close to taking advantage of his patient. It isn't as if she makes the first move - he's fawning over her and stroking her hair as soon as she's awake. Never mind she's 125 years old or more, her husband is long dead and he hasn't actually told her either of those facts yet - our hair-strokey doctor is deeply inappropriate at best. No wonder she abandons him at the end of the episode to return to Earth. If it was me I'd have been running for the hills from the fifteen-minute mark. Thankfully I wasn't the only one to notice Dr Franklin's malpractice: Garibaldi calls him out on it, and Sheridan gets pretty short with him as well.

Who50: The TV Movie

Who50 counts down to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who by reviewing my favourite episodes and serials over the history of the programme, counting down from #50 to #1. Today, #49: Doctor Who, a 1996 made-for-television film written by Matthew Jacobs and directed by Geoffrey Sax.

The TV Movie is possibly a contentious pick for one of Doctor Who's fifty best stories. It's been a controversial episode in the series' history pretty much from when the idea of an American co-production was first mooted in the early 1990s. Lots of fans seem to actively hate it. I've even seen some, albeit a thankful minority, attempt to claim that the TV movie "doesn't count" and that Paul McGann is not a "real Doctor".

This is insanity: Paul McGann is an outstanding Doctor. He slips into the role with such apparent ease. I remember when Peter Davison debuted as the Doctor. It took me a full four episodes to accept him in the role. Colin Baker took me half a season. Sylvester McCoy took me a couple of weeks. Paul McGann took about six minutes. There's something about his gushing enthusiasm and intensity, oblivious to how silly he may look or sound, that simply convinces. He's that perfectly-formed English eccentric that American audiences would have gone crazy for, had the TV movie not been broadcast against one of the highest-rated episodes of Roseanne ever.

Free Enterprise #19: "Oasis"

Following a lead from a rogue trader, the Enterprise investigates a crashed spacecraft. It seems to be long-abandoned, and the crew take a shuttle down to take a closer look. There they discover that despite negative scans the wreck's crew are alive and well. Or are they?

There's a strange sense of deja vu about "Oasis", until the penny drops and you remember that you've actually seen this episode before. It's Deep Space Nine's "Shadowplay", in which a sad old man has resurrected his friends and family as unwitting holograms. That version was written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe; this version is by Stephen Beck, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. If was was Wolfe, I'd be asking for some royalties.

Odds'n'Sods

A few interesting web links for your weekend:

• It's the 49th anniversary of Doctor Who, and the BBC's celebrated by giving him a new Director General. (link)
• Speaking of Doctor Who, Tansy Rayner Roberts is counting down to the 50th anniversary with a series of great posts like this one: (link)
• Deadline have a short interview with Bill Murray about playing F.D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on the Hudson, and not winning Oscars. (link)
• Patton Oswalt talks through his film performances - this one is a must-read for his section on Blade III, which is almost on a par with Richard E. Grant's memoirs on making Hudson Hawk. (link)
• Kyrax2, the famous Batgirl of Comicon, writes about Stephanie Brown and DC Comics - it's weird how the only people I see criticising this for being a silly, frivolous issue are men. (link)