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DC’s Young Animal “Gatherum”, Episode One

Before we start, I just want to address yesterday’s episode of Morituri Mondays (#20).  While listening back to edit, I… I dunno, I feel like I might’ve sounded a bit “off”.  If that was indeed the case, and it isn’t just me looking for odd pauses and gaffs, I apologize.  For all I know, that’s how I always sound regardless of the situation.


I’m working hard at getting back “into form”, assuming of course there is a “form” I used to have.  Also assuming anybody noticed or cared in the first place…


Anyhoo, onto an almost embarrassingly “stream of consciousness” discussion about how Reggie and I became de facto Young Animal experts… mostly by process of elimination.





“Once in Every Lifetime…”



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As I’ve mentioned over the past couple of days, I have begun the project of gathering all of the Chris and Reggie Channel audio… which, I’m sure I’m making a more complicated process than it really ought to be.  If there’s anything you might know about me, having read near a half-decade of my daily ramblings, it’s that I am pretty anal about how I deliver content.  I’ve been unflinchingly rigid in my presentation… even down to the way I use tags and labels.  Anytime I’ve tried to invoke a bit of change, it’s resulted in a boatload of stress… and this change, my friends, is no different.


In order to actually write a bit about each episode I share here… which, I’m hoping will eventually come to include every episode from the Archives (as well as new shows as they come out), I realized I was going to have to actually listen to some of this audio.  It’s been a rather emotional process… I wasn’t sure I was quite “ready” to listen to our work again.


Here’s the thing though… where would I even start?  As of this writing, there are over 300 episodes on the Channel.  Do I just start at the beginning and work down?  Do I skip around?  I mean, I’m putting far more thought and worry into this than I probably ought to.  Blame it on having a bit too much time right now, I guess.


After revisiting the first handful of episodes of Comix Tawk (the first of which I shared this past Sunday), I found I was starting to get my “legs” under me.  It didn’t hurt near as much as I feared it would… though, there were certainly moments that got me.


Anyhoo, during one of those Comix Tawk episodes… which will hit the main feed over the next couple of weeks… we started complaining about the shipping delays on the Gerard Way run of Doom Patrol (volume 6).  It was one of those discussions where we allowed ourselves to become quite heated… and even became a bit looser with our language.


That reminded me… that we have an entire (thirty-hour) “Gatherum” of episodes in the archives where we looked at every-single-DC’s Young Animal-offering (for the first two “seasons”)… and, I suddenly had a real hankering to revisit those.


As luck would have it, Young Animal probably would have been the next “chapter” in the Reggie and Me series here at the blog… as the Young Animal Segment would be our next Weird Science DC Comics Podcast bit once the Cosmic Treadmill grew into it’s own stand-alone program.


So, how did it come to be?  Well… DC announced Young Animal, which would be flooded with “weird” books.  This was right up our alley, and it just sort of happened that we wound up covering all four of the titles.  Reggie was very excited to finally be getting a new volume of Doom Patrol… as there hadn’t been one since the sadly truncated pre-Flashpoint (Keith Giffen/Matthew Clark) series.  I was a bit fan of the Milligan/Bachalo Shade the Changing Man series (I maintain that Chris Bachalo is probably a Top-Three artist in comics)… which made Shade the Changing Girl a natural fit for me.


Since we were doing those two already, it wouldn’t take much prodding for us to take the other two… Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye and (a book featuring an all-new character!) Mother Panic.


It’s funny, as soon as plans started coming together for this little project, the first thing that came to my mind was: the theme song for the segment.  Reggie and I were both very big fans of The Young Ones.




This was a program that came up in our non-comic conversations pretty often.  In fact, I was able to turn him on to another Rik Mayall/Ade Edmondson program, Bottom.  Listeners to the Chris is on Infinite Earths program might not even realize that I use both the opening and closing theme from Bottom for my show.




The Young Ones and Bottom were both set to be topics of conversation for a Patreon-exclusive program we never got around to fully fleshing out.  It was going to be called NOTCMX… which, would just be us talking about things that, ya know, weren’t comics.  Only one episode of that show was ever made… and it was a solo-effort from me looking at an episode of Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator.  Maybe that’ll make it’s way to the main feed sometime down the line… who knows?


Anyhoo, since this pop-up imprint was called Young Animal… I figured it would be a no-brainer to use the Young Ones theme as our intro.  It didn’t take much convincing… Reggie loved the idea.


DC dribbled out Young Animal books sporadically throughout the Fall of 2016… a very staggered launch, which, in hindsight I really appreciate.  It didn’t feel like a rush-job, and it wasn’t immediately overwhelming like many launches seem to be.  So, every week that there was a Young Animal book… we discussed that Young Animal book.  Easy-peasy.


Fast-forward about a year and half later, we were in the middle of our six-part Age of Apocalypse coverage (which coincided with our one-hundredth episode), and Reggie found himself without internet for the latter half of the week.  We scrambled a bit… tried finding other ways to record, including a really sorry attempt over our cell phones.


It became clear after a bit that… there was no way around it, we were going to miss a week of the Cosmic Treadmill.  But… we didn’t wanna miss a week altogether.  And so, we brainstormed… dipped into the Archives, and decided to begin compiling our Young Animal Segments.  We figured it’d be the first time a lot of the folks actually got to listen to them… and, it seemed like making the best of a bad situation of missing a week of “all-new” content.


Problem was… we didn’t keep the raw audio for the Young Animal segments.  And so, I had to download many episodes (and many, many hours) of the Weird Science DC Comics Podcast (which was weighing in at between 10-14 hours an episode… and not always time-stamped) and forensically “snip” our segments out.


For this first “Gatherum”, we wanted to include at least one segment for each of the books in the line.  As mentioned, DC “staggered” this launch… and so, in order to get all four books, we were going to get multiple segments for the earliest books, ya know?


So, there would be six segments/seven books total for this first episode… all stitched together, with an all-new introduction by me.  This “gimme” episode actually turned out to be one of the more labor-intensive pod-projects that I’d ever engaged in!  No joke, this episode took the better part of two days to put together.


This episode features the following books:

  • Doom Patrol (v.6) #1 (orig. aired September 18, 2016)
  • Shade the Changing Girl #1 (orig. aired October 9, 2016)
  • Doom Patrol (v.6) #2 (orig. aired October 16, 2016)
  • Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #1 (orig. aired October 23, 2016)
  • Shade the Changing Girl #2 (orig. aired November 6, 2016)
  • Doom Patrol (v.6) #3 (orig. aired November 13, 2016)
  • Mother Panic #1 (orig. aired November 13, 2016)
An interesting thing about our Young Animal coverage is… how our opinions changed throughout the run.  Without spoiling anything, there were books that we started out very high on… which, at the end of the project, we couldn’t stand anymore, and one book which we outright hated at jump street, that we absolutely adored as we were flipping the lights off.

I realize thirty-hours is a huge ask… and, I understand that there’s probably nobody out there who will actually listen through this playlist… but, I’m happy to be presenting it nonetheless as it was a very fun part of my partnership and friendship with Reggie.

Anyone out there remember these books?  Anybody have any thoughts about ’em?  Lemme know!

One thought on “DC’s Young Animal “Gatherum”, Episode One

  • Cave Carson was the book I bought and read. I also bought Doom Patrol but have not got around to reading it. I did like Cave Carson and bought the second series (have not read it though). I liked the weird art and that Wild dog was in it.

    I listened to these segments and got a lot out of them, mainly for the books I had not read. These are probably some of the only modern books that you discussed that I have not sought out in some fashion after listening to the podcast. I can't really explain why, it certainly was not due to the praise or lack of for the different stories.

    One thing I did appreciate is your discussion of how the release schedule and lateness of the books impacted your enjoyment of them. I was nice to get the "editorial" included in the discussion of all the books.

    Reply

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