War Rocket Ajax

HickMania continues on this week's show as we read issues 1-5 of Hickman's run on FF! We talk about Spider-Man replacing Johnny on the team, Doom coming on board, and some very bad Reeds. Plus, artist changes already!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're rating more swords on this week's show, including two different things that can be described as a "chainsword"! Plus: a Sailor Moon sword, a version of Excalibur, and a sword that requires a truck.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's time to rank comics once again! And this time, we're reaching back into the Silver Age for a whole bunch of stories!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're taking your listener questions on this week's show on topics including Mario princesses, Muppets, gritty reboots, burgers, and a whole lot more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Matt and Chris are catching up on what just might be the most late-Bronze-Age Batman comic there is, where Bruce is just so, so sleepy!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

That's right, we're rating swords once again on this week's show, and one of them is made of lightning! We also rate a very cool D&D sword, a video game sword we love, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's HickMania time once again, and one member of the Fantastic Four is doomed to die! We talk about how well Hickman and artist Steve Epting did at putting all four members in credible danger, and how well the death was ultimately handled!Covering Fantastic Four #583-588.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Time to rank more stories? You know it! And we even get one this time that cracks the top 100!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's time for more sword ratings on this week's show, including some from more anime we're not sure we should watch, X-Men comics, D&D, and real life itself.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Dan Schkade returns to the show this week to talk about the Flash Gordon newspaper strip, the new Lavender Jack collection, Berserk, the downsides of talkin' trash, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Longtime friend of the show, member of the crew even, J. Gonzo, joins us for the show once again this week to get really serious about what it means to be an artist in 2026! We get into feeling out of place among professionals, wanting to avoid being perceived as greedy, the speculator market, and a whole lot more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

This month, we're looking back to the 1968 magazine where Norman Osborn returned as the Green Goblin! He and Peter do drugs, and it's all lovingly rendered by John Romita Sr.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're taking your listener questions on this week's show, including queries about character classes for our pets, superhero media music, the franchise with the best swords, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're rating swords once again on this episode! At least one of them could be your friend, and they're all pretty toyetic. Well, with one key exception made by Hattori Hanzo.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're back and we're rankin' on this extra-sized special, including several stories from The Gauntlet!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're very happy to welcome Geoffrey Golden of The Devastator back to the show this week to talk about his new game ALL-CARDS, which uses...every trading card! We actually play a bit of the game to get a flavor for it, while also talking about gum, making fake trading cards, Tarot using Tarot, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Alex Ross' 2022 prestige Abrams Arts tribute to Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four is what we're catching up on this month. It's good, but is it great to the point we'd recommend it to others? Listen and find out!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Time for more Hickmania on this week's show as we read through Fantastic Four #579-582! Reed is sick of his Science Club, so he starts a new one! Also, his dad shows up from the future in the past.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Longtime friend of the show Kel McDonald is back this week to discuss their new Cities Between collection, Shards of Reflection, which is funding now on Kickstarter! Before we get to that, though, we talk a lot about what we're watching, good questions to ask that aren't "How are you?" and New England's love of Dunkin'. Plus a whole lot more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Benito joins Matt as guest host this week to talk to longtime friend of the show Jeremy Whitley! Jeremy's got a Zoop crowdfunding campaign for not one, but two new comics, Slay! and The Girlfriend Survives! We talk with him about what makes the two books similar, trying to break away from being typecast as a writer, creating a big mean bear monster, the Berserk influence, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're rating our first batch of swords for 2026 this episode, while also going back to one we tabled last year! And there's one submission we really have to work to decide if it's a sword or not.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's legitimately the 15th annual Gordie awards! You submitted the categories, we choose the winners! A bevy of big stars are in the audience at the Flash Gordon Memorial Auditorium for this super-sized look back at 2025!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We honestly have no idea how we missed this one by Jason Aaron and Doug Mahnke. Batman goes to space to learn how to punch better, and in the process befriends a dog. It's basically made for us. So where does it rank?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Merry Ranksmas! We're ranking some holiday-themed stories to close out the year on this ESE special...when we're not talking about Margaritaville.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's our annual Christmas special, but there's one problem. A moose/snowmobile crash has led Matt and Chris to forget what Christmas even is! It's up to an unusually game Matt Fraction to help them remember -- but at what cost?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's time to rate more swords this week, and we got some weird ones this time. Plus: Stay tuned for one of the wildest arguments in Ajax history.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's Christmas time, so we're going back to 1994 to read the Christmas special from Rob Liefeld's Image imprint! Troll has got to find the 12 gifts from "The 12 Days of Christmas" -- that sounds fun, right?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're taking your listener questions on this week's show! We figure out just when Nygma Time is, decide what to get Stone Cold HCC for Christmas, and discuss Thanksgiving parade balloons, among other things!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

This month, we get another story into the top 100 and rank some first appearances of Batman villains, along with much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're rating even more swords on this week's show, including one that slayed a Gorgon, one that's all too real, one that we don't even have a picture of, and a couple that come in pieces.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Yes, we finally did it. We read all six issues of the 1995/1996 Dawn miniseries. It's somehow both surprisingly impressive and just as bad as we expected.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Our GarFriend Daniel Kibblesmith returns to the show this week to talk about his new book So You've Been Bitten By a Radioactive Spider: How to Survive the Marvel Universe! We discuss having to decide what to feature in the book (and what to leave out), starting points for comics readers, Disney character sizes, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

If only we had known this story arc would be taking place in multiple cities, we'd have figured out a way to make this HickMania 2. But it's our third installment, and Hickman is taking the Fantastic Four to cities that are underground, underwater, on the moon, and in the Negative Zone!Covering Fantastic Four #575-578.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Our friend 'till the end Erica Henderson joins us on the show this week to talk about Harley and Ivy: Life and Crimes, including how she now gets to determine what's canon for The Joker! Plus, some haunted doll talk (of course) and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Time for more rankings, and it's specifically time for Every Spooky Ever! Listen as we rank some monstrous comic stories, some moreso than others!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Benito and Matt finally got Chris to watch a movie they recommended, Deadstream. So they're offering up some more spooky-not-scary ideas for stuff for him to watch, while visiting the old abandoned War Rocket Ajax-themed amusement park our grandfathers opened. Happy Halloween!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

The creative team behind the new biographical graphic novel Fela: Music is the Weapon is joining us on the show this week to talk to us about making biographical comics that do what only comics can, showing different states of being through color, drumming, and a whole lot more!(Note: The Fela graphic novel is not authorized by the Fela Kuti family.)We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's undoubtedly a visual marvel, but how well does the story of James Stokoe's 5-issue 50-year Godzilla epic from 2012 hold up?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Sword rating time once again, and we're taking some that glow, some that break, and some from, yes, fine art.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Yes, we finally find out what Joseph Michael Linsner's Dawn is about in this episode. And we also take some of your listener questions!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

It's time to rank more comic book stories, including a truly bananas backup about Lil' Silver Sable.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We rated some more swords on this week's episode! One we weren't familiar with from the source material, but the vibes were immaculate. The rest? Well, good and bad.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

You demanded it, we read it! The 12-issue Charles Soule/Javier Pulido run on She-Hulk from 2014 tries to come at the character from a law focus. How well does it pull that off?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We get going on the Jonathan Hickman Fantastic Four run proper in this episode, and while there are clearly some seeds being planted for big future stories...it also really reads like a comic from 2009. It even seems to follow on the previous run more than we expected.Covering Fantastic Four #570 - 574.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're taking your listener questions on this week's episode, including Qs about candy, what swords we would be, how much Spider-Man can eat, bad Riddler designs, and more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're rating more swords on this week's show, and this time they include: something that's not a sword, a sword that's way too big, a sword that is also a hammer, and lots more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Time to rank stories once again, with stories from Matt Wagner and several creators who disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

HickMania begins this week with what very much feels like a prologue to not just Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run, but maybe...his whole Marvel saga? And yet it still feels like it's a little too long.We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

We're reading the 2023 update to Matt Wagner's first comic work from 1983. How does it hold up?We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!

Our good pal Kyle Starks is back on the show this week to talk about his Kickstarter for the latest volume of Where Monsters Lie! Plus we discuss how humor comics are viewed in the industry, genre shifts, basketball, and much more!We make our show on Zencastr, and you can too! Follow this link to sign up now!Join the WRA Patreon to help us keep doing the show and get rewards!