Pick of the Week #987 – DC Vs. Vampires: World War V #11

July 27, 2025·1 hr 29 min·5 clips

Damien stabs Barbara Gordon in the back, enraging the vampires and forcing Alfred to make a heartbreaking decision.

987 starts mid-scramble. The cold open burns through sponsor copy before Conor Kilpatrick and Josh Flanagan joke about a rough performance and an entrance that comes in too loud. Then the comic talk takes over. It has that old comic shop rhythm: a plot question bumps into a continuity problem, then somebody notices a page design choice and everything pauses for a second. DC history keeps making trouble. They work through how these characters can already have so much story behind them while the book is still sitting near 1986 in real world time. Nobody tries to make it airtight. The fun is in watching the book wrestle with it, especially when the art gets to draw weird, playful, history soaked images. Batman and Robin get the cleanest pop. A page with their heads looming behind the villains turns into the kind of small visual move that makes both hosts stop and appreciate the page itself. They read it as cool and a little Golden Age flavored, not as some grand statement about the issue. That is the episode's lane. Plot recap keeps brushing up against craft talk, then swerves into jokes about quizzes, exams, and whether Josh knows enough DC history. The ad breaks chop up the flow. After one return, they move right into Big Bad World number three. The show stays loose all the way out, with housekeeping about the video version, Patreon after show, Jeff Reed's comic book deep dives, and the old video archive from 2007 to 2012. The archive bit carries a little nostalgia. They cast themselves as early video people before YouTube culture had caught up. The goodbye is easy: Conor signs off, Josh answers, and the last beat is a plain promise to return in two weeks.

As heard by us

A scrappy weekly comics chat that treats continuity as a game worth playing.

Pickle League episode 987 settles into the familiar iFanboy groove: a little grumpy, a little loose, and more interested in how a book holds together than in handing out a neat verdict.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a comic chat that argues, corrects itself, and keeps the jokes moving.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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