ComicMix Radio: Whatever Happened to The Defuser?
It’s been over a year since we last saw The Defuser win all the chips on Stan Lee’s Who Wants To Be A Super Hero. So is he still flying high? He swings in to share the holiday with us, plus:
- Wizard kicks off The Best of 2008
- Dynamite fills in the Battlestar gaps
- Topps gambles on a new CCG
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Transcript
Broadcast 292 ComicMix.com Whatever happened to the defuser? ComicMix.io Hi, it's Mike Raub, and you know sometimes you watch a reality show and then a year or so later you'll wonder what happened to those people.
Well, we're gonna find out what happened to the one wearing the cape in Stan Lee's Who Wants to Be a Superhero. You might be kind of surprised to find out what he's up to now. It's all coming up on November 27th. 2008 ComicMix News Interesting feature of note in the new issue of Wizard hitting comic stores over the next few days. It is the best of 2008. Yeah, time for those lists to start popping up here and there.
According to Wizard, here are the people they think did the best work in comics this year. It includes Best Writer for Jason Aaron, who did Skelpt, Ghost Writer, and some issues of Wolverine as well. Couple of other interesting choices. Best Book of the Year was Action Comics, Best Event was Secret Invasion, Best Villain was Norman Osborn for Marvel Comics, and the Best Revamp, The Incredible Hulk also for Marvel as well. Lots of other choices, including a real interesting one for the Best Artist of the Year.
Find out in the gold issue of Wizard, Best of 2008, which again will be in comic book stores over the next couple of days. Couple of TV notes. Ashton Kutcher's production company has two new projects in development on the way to the CW. One's called The Beautiful Life. It's a reality show about male and female models living together in New York City. And the other is Chloe Gamble. It's an original series based on the upcoming book, The One, about a young beauty queen from Texas who moves to Hollywood with her family looking for fame and fortune. Meanwhile, over on CBS, they figure the best is always better if there's two. They're developing a spin-off of their highly successful NCIS series.
They'll be introducing new characters in the regular show over the next few weeks. Those will be spun off into a new show, hopefully by fall of 2009. One of the sadder parts of the upcoming New Year will be the end of Battlestar Galactica. You know about that, and we'll probably talk a lot more as we get closer to it. New episodes, the final run, begin around the 16th of January. But Dynamite Entertainment is still going to continue to fill in the gaps with the various comic series, including Battlestar Galactica The Silon War. It starts in January. It's a four-issue run from Dynamite Entertainment. Gail Ann Hurd has closed a deal for the film rights to produce the graphic novel Gearhead.
Hurd, as you know, has been involved in a number of different features based on comic properties over the past few years. That includes the Terminator, Aliens, Ian Flux, The Punisher more recently, and last summer's Incredible Home. TOPS is producing a new card game despite the fact that a lot of people say that CCGs are almost dead. It's going to be based on Free Realms, an upcoming online game from Sony Online Entertainment. The game will interact with physical trading cards, complementing the digital game in the online world.
There'll be two parts to the release, beginning with Passport to Free Realms, the starter pack, and then a Passport to Free Realms booster pack collection. Those will have 11 cards in them, and they'll retail for just about $3.99. Hi, I'm Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and you're listening to ComicMix. ComicMix Radio! A little over a year ago, we were all enthralled in the second season of Stan Lee's Who Wants to Be a Superhero.
But like I said, a year has passed, and what happened to the winner? Well, he was called the defuser. He was a Midwestern police officer in real life, and he's still pretty much doing that, except now he's got a costume. Pretty much what I've been doing locally with the police department is, with the police chief's approval, I've been doing a lot of elementary school appearances. Doing the same type of spill and presentation I do as a police officer, 911, stranger danger, stay in school, stay away from drugs. But I now get to do it as a superhero, and that's a lot of fun, but it takes up an awful lot of time.
On the weekends, I'm trying to hit as many of the comic book conventions as I can to get the defuser name out there, meet a lot of fans, raise a lot of money for my charity, which is Scare for a Cure. It's a charity haunted house, which I raise money for breast cancer and related cancers every year. Our pal the defuser, who really doesn't want to reveal his secret identity, still says he's a comic fan. I've been a comic geek my entire life. I've got about 11 or 12 thousand comics in my garage. God love my wife for putting up with the storage space.
She actually created me a comic book bathroom, which she took some of my favorite issues, such as my Hulk 181, my X-Men number 2, those types of things, and framed them all professionally and lined the walls of the bathroom with them. So it looks in pain of the bathroom Hulk green, and it's just awesome. So yeah, I'm a comic geek. And when you get a minute, drop an email to Dark Horse, tell them we're still waiting for that defuser one-shot comic book. I'd really like to see it. November 27th, 1966. Just in time to settle back on Turkey Day, we ran down to the drugstore to get a couple of comics and you know what those would be at the end of the month. We dug through the go-go checks to get Action Comics number 345 from DC, Adventure number 352 as well. More Jim Schu,
A Legion of Superhero stories there. Detective Comics number 359 gave us the debut of Batgirl, fresh from the TV series. There was Adventures of Jerry Lewis number 98. We got that one for our little brother. There was Plastic Man number 2, Sea Devils 33 over in Showcase. But what a beast had his first and sadly only appearance in Showcase number 66. And there was a 25-cent Superman giant, another 80-page goodie that featured things like the death of Superman, Superman's lost parents, and the first Superman of Krypton. From Marvel we got Thor number 136, Strange Tales 153, which had another S.H.I.E.L.D. story in it. This time written by Roy Thomas. Heiress Tales of Suspense number 86 with Captain America and Iron Man of course. Tales to Astana's 88, which had Submariner in the Hulk.
Sergeant Fury number 38, Rohide Kid 56, and a bunch of good old stuff for our quarter in Marvel Collector's items classics number 7. Dell gave us Dracula number 3 this week and from Gold Key we got the first issue of the Green Horn. In the news the Viet-Con broadcast orders for their troops to observe a two-day Christmas truce as well as a two-day New Year's truce. A U.S. airport transport plane crashed and exploded after taking off in Saigon killing 27 American soldiers. And while his mother was posing for photographers at a zoo, the 6-year-old son of actress Jane Mansfield was bitten by a lion. In the movies just in time to go out after you stuffed yourself there was the fortune cookie with water math out, the greatest story ever told.
A rat pack was in a movie called Texas Across the River. While the cool kids spent the weekend away from school going to see something called Out of Sight. The plot, and I use that term loosely, had a super spy who was driven mad by rock and roll and of course there was a soundtrack. It included stuff by Freddie the Dreamer's, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and a theme from Toby Gray. Yeah, yeah, yeah, baby it's out of sight. TV Tonight Walt Disney was still serializing the Moonspinners with Haley Mills, and Sullivan had Glenn Yarborough and the Muppets on stage and Andy Williams, and Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks and the 3,000 year old man.
On the radio one of the foundation bands from Motown that a song that I feel is one of their more underrated hits. It may not have been as rhythmic as some other Motown hits, but come on. A lot of people have their all time top 20 and I do too. That's temptations. And I know I'm losing you. You know the song is a classic? Well, it hit the charts again less than three years later with a band called Rare Earth. Your love is fading. I feel it fading. Your love is fading. I feel it fading. Hello and Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Peter Rivera of Rare Earth, hoping you have a great turkey day wherever on this earth you may be.
Back on the weekend, still enjoying the holiday with a lot of time to share with your family, friends and hopefully with us. Make a couple of clicks and subscribe to us on iTunes so you don't have to miss anything. Plenty of time for you to read some free comics too and ComicMix as well. Great stuff there, including the Pilgrim and Mark Ryan and Mike Grell. Of course, there's the original Johnson and lots of free things in the archives and lots of news and information coming fast and furious. You don't have to miss that either. We'll give you a little electronic nudge whenever you want it via Twitter, MySpace or Facebook. Talk to you in a couple of days. Bye.
