It's Al and Paul's podcast birthday! Or it was yesterday when they recorded this, anyway! Join them for House to Astonish's 18th anniversary, as we run through the comics landscapes of 1993 and 1998 (the years when we turned 18, do you see, it's thematic) and talk about all sorts of things that happened in those years, from Marvel Knights to Vertigo, DC One Million to Slingers, via a man made of air, the gentle hillock of Marvel UK, a fruity tench, St Trinians vs Umbrella Academy and the Punisher War Zone of Barbies.

Al and Paul are covering off the back half of the first New Thunderbolts arc this time round, covering issues 4-6. Come with them as they join our heroes in dealing with a nuclear bomb, a huge sea monster and strip club etiquette as the team finally comes together against Baron Strucker. All this plus a man covered in cheese, 10% of a leg, the finest superhero cinema of 2005 and the unforgivable laziness of the Fantastic Four.

A tidy little hour of comicsy nattering for you this time, as Al and Paul discuss Marvel/Star Wars: Hope Assembles, Fugitive X-Force, Origin III, The Snail and the extensions of Fury of Firestorm and Deadman, and review Fixation and The Forever Home. I say I say I say, my Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has no nose. How does it smell? It does not, it is a conceptual feature of this podcast.