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Old Comics Thread
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Adventure Comics #338
The Menace of the Sinister Super-Babies
By Jerry Siegel and John Forte
I’ve lost track of how many issues the Time Trapper sub-plot has been bubbling along for but it feels like years. As a shadowy figure who hid himself in the far future behind an ‘Iron Curtain of Time’ that defied even Superboy’s powers, the Trapper was fascinating and I was looking forward to the Legion finally confronting him.
Now it’s happened, and I am disappointed. Partly because the story premise is pretty silly—the Trapper turns the Legion into babies and has them commit crimes for him. But mainly because the Trapper himself is a huge let-down. For all his ‘master-criminal’ billing, his main goal seems to be looting banks and robbing trains, like any two-bit hood. I was hoping for a more grandiose ambition. And for the most fearsome evil scientist of all time, his abilities seem very limited. He’s got two gimmicks: a ring that creates force fields, and an hourglass that de-ages whoever touches it, inventions that Lex Luthor wouldn’t bother getting out of bed for.
His minion, Glorith of Baaldur, is actually more interesting.
She appears totally out-of-place among the Trapper’s other cringing, snivelling minions. While they are described as ‘slave-vassals’ and live in fear of their master’s laugh, she gets privileged treatment (like, more clothes—but not too many more), is trusted with the Trapper’s gadgets, and is sent off on her own on a mission to destroy the Legion. She is clearly a minion—she calls him ‘sire’—but a trusted one. It would be interesting to learn something of her background and learn how she came to serve the Trapper. Is she a native of this ravaged Earth millions of years in the future, and if so why is she so much more sophisticated than the other minions? Or did the Trapper pluck her from some other time period, perhaps even the Legion’s own time? Is her origin linked to the Trapper’s own (which we still don’t know)?
And there is one panel near the end of the story where you get a tantalising glimpse of more complexity to her character:
Not content with being a mere lieutenant, she’s thinking about enslaving her ‘sire’. Angling to become the power behind the throne? Or even more? We’ve seen that she’s completely ruthless, as well as intelligent, and it seems entirely likely that she’s playing a long game, and is ready to stab the Trapper in the back as soon as it’s prudent.
Sadly, the Trapper devolves her into a blob of slime in the very next panel, so we’ll probably never see her a gain. A wasted potential, I think.
As for the story itself, as I said, I’m disappointed. DC seem to have an obsession with ‘baby’ stories, and here they de-age the entire Legion to babies with ‘hilarious’ (not) results. It’s actually pretty cringe-worth, so I’m not going to give it any more thought and instead get on with writing some Glorith of Baaldur fan-fic …
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Reading no monthly comics at the moment, so I’m continuing to catch up on a sizeable backlog of collected editions.
Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus Volume 2
This period, 1966–68, was the beginning of my Spider-Man. This volume incudes the first Spider-Man stories I can remember reading (in black-and-white British reprints), and so they resonate with me more than those in the first volume.
The volume opens with issue 39, the first issue that John Romita pencilled after Steve Ditko left, and the book benefits greatly from the change. While I recognise Ditko’s legendary status, his art never really resonated with me, whereas Romita’s smooth, solid, muscular style will always be what I feel super-heroes should look like.
Story wise, these issues see the evolution of Peter Parker from nerdy outcast school kid to popular college student who can hang out with a cool circle of friends and get multiple girls vying for his attention. A massive debate raged in the letters pages (reprinted in this volume) over whether this was a good change or not, but for me the growth works. Peter is still likeable and relatable, and he’s still beset with the personal problems and constant bad luck that define the core of the character. At the same time, his supporting cast continues to expand and become characters you are interested in in their own right, and the plots and sub-plots get ever more deep and convoluted. Stan Lee was at the top of his game here.
The only real criticism I have of these issues is that Lee’s attempt at hip college slang and speech patterns is truly cringeworthy. As a successful businessman in his 40s, he clearly had no idea how ‘the kids’ really spoke.
Or maybe American college kids really did talk like that in the 60s, which is actually an even more disturbing thought!
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While I recognise Ditko’s legendary status, his art never really resonated with me, whereas Romita’s smooth, solid, muscular style will always be what I feel super-heroes should look like.
It’s kind of the eternal question for this era of Spidey isn’t it?
Personally I think both artists suit the kind of stories they are telling. Ditko’s awkwardness and weirdness works when Peter is an outcast and has social difficulties, and when Spidey is starting out as a misunderstood oddball.
Then Romita feels more fitting as Spidey gets to be a more established hero and Peter becomes more at ease in his own skin and popular (especially with women). I can’t imagine Gwen or MJ making such an impact if Ditko had drawn those stories.
I had the Artist Edition collecting loads of Romita pages from this era and it was stunning. Such a great classic superhero style.
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Ace Trucking Co. Volume One
The prolific team of John Wagner and Alan Grant sprang this off-beat comedy on the readers of 2000AD in 1981, and this collection includes roughly the first year’s worth of stories.
Ace Garp is the sole owner of the titular trucking company. As this is 2000AD, Ace is of course an alien and his truck, the Speedo Ghost, carries cargo from planet to planet. Ace is a wheeler-dealer, with a string of semi-legal plans to make money, and of course his plans consistently go catastrophically wrong to humorous effect. Ace is aided by his long-suffering crew, G-B-H the trouble-shooter and Feek the engineer, plus Ghost, the ship’s computer, who’s the only sane one of the bunch.
It’s a mix of high-energy action and high-silliness, and it’s a really enjoyable read. It worked in the weekly format while you waited to see how Ace would get out of the hole he’d dug for himself, and it works just as well as a collected read.
Art is by Massimo Belardinelli, a 2000AD favourite (well, he was my favourite), and drawing crazy aliens and technology fully plays to his strengths.
One of the highlights is the trucking slang that Grant & Wagner invented for the series, based partly on CB slang. A dictionary was provided in the comic (and reprinted in this volume), but it’s more fun to figure it out yourself as you go along. You don’t actually need to understand it, you just go with the flow.
I have fond memories of this strip from my teens, and I’m not disappointed reading it again now. As Ace would say, ‘Happy numbers tumble when the tumshy’s at its toughest!’
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In my older years looking back I have marvelled at how good a comics writer John Wagner is. Sometimes you revisit stuff for nostalgia and see a lot of faults but with his stuff I find the opposite. He never tries anything flashy but his pacing, dialogue, action scenes are all things you could pull out as an example of how to make comics well.
I got the Strontium Dog collections a couple of years back and the ‘Revenge’ story really stands up, if they ran it in 2000ad today it’d still be the best story in the prog as it was then.
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This period, 1966–68, was the beginning of my Spider-Man. This volume incudes the first Spider-Man stories I can remember reading (in black-and-white British reprints), and so they resonate with me more than those in the first volume.
I was a little disappointed with the “Romita run” when I read them a while ago. Firstly, his run is constantly interrupted by guest artists – at times it’s as much the John Buscema run as the Romita run – and while the art is great, it all felt a little shallow compared to the texture and richness of the Ditko era.
Spidey was definitely in need of a shakeup, though, and it’s a relief to see Pete finally come into his own rather than forever being the outside, but Romita’s romance comic roots are definitely telling – by the time he’s “going steady” with Gwen, barely an issue goes by without him upsetting her thanks to his superhero commitments, causing her to shed a single tear and sob “Oh Petey!” It all gets a bit much.
By the time you get past #100 it’s a relief to finally say goodbye to Lee and Romita, and welcome Gerry Conway and Ross Andru.
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Just read Daredevil #133, which guest stars… Uri Geller!
This was in 1976 when Geller was the darling of the talk show circuit, and apparently Marv Wolfman met him and was clearly taken in by his con. So much so that the comic features Uri’s “origin” story that he used to tell (he claims he saw a light in the sky that was so dazzling he passed out and when he came to he felt different and had gained extraordinary powers!)
It’s a hilariously awful bronze-age story, featuring a terrible supervillain called Mind-Wave who Uri ends up defeating by mentally bending some metal bars around him.
The best bit comes a few issues later, with the letters page about this issue, featuring such luminaries as the late, great James Randi.
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I just googled Russell Targ for fun, and the research he was doing at Stanford – and later for the US military – was in remote viewing. Christ, what a time. Remote viewing, stargates, randomly pumping people full of LSD… and all fully government-mandated. Those were the days.
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Adventure Comics #339
The Menace of Beast Boy
By Edmond Hamilton and John Forte
Before I get into reviewing this issue, I want to talk about A Conquest of Two Worlds, a short story by Edmond Hamilton published in Gernsbeck’s Wonder Stories in 1932 (reprinted many times, I have it in The Best of Edmond Hamilton from 1977). It’s an absolute classic of the genre and one of Hamilton’s best stories. Every serious SF fan should read it.
In the story, Earth is expanding into the solar system and ‘colonising’ Mars and Jupiter. Colonising has always been a euphemism for ‘driving the native people from their land, stealing their resources, and slaughtering them if they object,’ of course. And so we see that happening to the primitive Martians and Jovians. Only one Earth man thinks that this is wrong, comes to sympathise with the aliens, and helps them fight back against his own people. It’s a very dark story, that doesn’t end well.
Which brings me to The Menace of Beast Boy. The details are different, but the idea is exactly the same. On the planet Vorn, primitive creatures that the humans have previously hunted with impunity are suddenly fighting back. We’re obviously meant to side with the poor humans against the threat of the monstrous beasts, but right from the start we maybe see the clues that maybe the humans aren’t the good guys here.
Because, you know, maybe trapping dumb animals for sport isn’t a nice thing to do, and maybe it’s entirely understandable that the animals want to free their friends?
There’s a nice call back to the Heroes of Lallor, a group of the Legion’s allies who we saw many months ago, as it turns out that one of their number, Beast Boy, is using his powers to organise Vorn’s creatures against the humans.
Here’s where the comic deviates from the earlier story. We learn that Beast Boy’s actions are because he’s been treated shabbily by the people of Lallor and has decided he now hates all humans. It’s a very cut-and-dried motivation that will be familiar to young comic readers and doesn’t raise any uncomfortable questions. In A Conquest of Two Worlds, the hero doesn’t hate humans he just thinks they’re wrong, and finds himself reluctantly fighting against his own friends because he believes it’s the morally right thing to do. It’s a more morally complicated story, and it’s quite clearly making parallels with similar situations in Earth’s history (as all the best science fiction does).
After several twists, the comic story ends with Beast Boy regaining his faith in humanity when a little girl is kind to him, and then sacrificing his life to save that girl from a monster he had ironically unleashed himself. It’s a good ending for a comic story, turning it into a story of redemption and self-sacrifice, but I wish Hamilton had been more bold and presented the same moral conflict that his earlier story tackled.
But despite that missed opportunity, this story still ranks as one of Hamilton’s best Legion stories, and one of my favourite comics. -
I hadn’t really been reading comics for a while, and randomly decided to return to the pile of floppies that’s sat next to the bed for literally years, which included the full 9 issues of Dark Knight III: The Master Race. I’d read the first three issues as they came out, and then accumulated the rest without reading them.
After the divisive DK2, All Star Batman, and Holy Terror, a lot of people had lost faith in Frank Miller, but I recall there being a fair bit of hype around this book initially, until delays set in (9 issues published between 2015 and 2017). While Miller and Azzarello are listed as co-writers I think it’s widely agreed that Miller didn’t have all that much do with the details, and might have just contributed some loose ideas and his name on the cover. The dialogue certainly reads like an Azzarello book.
Storywise it’s another broader DC Universe tale like DK2 instead of a Batman tale like DK1, set some years after DK2 – the media talking heads still play a part throughout, with likenesses of real life personalities used (a Jon Stewart type, a Bill O’Reilly type, a Hillary Clinton type, a Donald Trump type (pre-election)) like David Letterman and Dr Ruth in the first series, and the baddies are a Kryptonian cult.
The art is really good, with Andy Kubert and Klaus Janson combining to often mimic a Miller style, though Kubert’s faces are still a real drawback (I’ve always hated the way he draws everyone with the same face, and an unpleasant one at that). It’s definitely a more organic style, a world away from Kubert’s earlier Slvestri/Lee/Williams look. Each issue has a mini-comic stapled into the middle, and the chronology is a bit weird – not sure if they’re meant to be read at that point in the issue, saved to the end or a mix – I would usually read them as I got to them. The first is penciled by Miller and it’s… rough. It appears to have been rushed as he does return to pencil some of the later ones and they’re much, much better. Other mini comics are penciled by Eduardo Risso, and JRjr.
All in all it’s a solid book with some cool little action setpieces, some great character moments, and some interesting treatments for characters like Wonder Woman, GL, and the Atom.
I’m not usually a cover guy, but this series featured some of the best cover images I’d seen in years.
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While Miller and Azzarello are listed as co-writers I think it’s widely agreed that Miller didn’t have all that much do with the details
It’s a weird situation really.
Not to avoid the elephant in the room, Miller had some pretty heavy addiction problems going in, photos of him looking 20 years past his age, a guy who lived near him in a liquor store saying he was serving him 2 bottles of spirits a day.
Then he got better, roughly halfway through this project, his initial interviews saying he just went with the BA scripts and was rather distant to the project and hadn’t read the script he suddenly started adding more and more of his own content in the backup material, written and drawn.
Initially I think it was just DC renting his name, I think that changed but to what extent we’ll probably find out in a ‘tell all’ book written 20 years later.
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Yeah, he appeared pretty rough for a while there, but from what I’ve seen via his Instagram posts he’s looking well and his art (just pin-ups) is looking solid again.
He even got “woke”, auctioning a new Martha Washington illustration to raise cash for the NAACP (with a BLM hashtag!).
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Superman Year One was a bit of an oddity but I’d rather have something weird and interesting than dull and bland. Romita Jr’s art was great too.
Xerxes was a decent enough sequel to 300 – and it was great to get full interiors from him again after many years – but it didn’t quite hang together like 300 did as it didn’t have the same strong focal point, it was more of a sprawling history. It had its moments though.
I think his best recent project might have been the Dark Knight: Last Crusade book he did (again with Romita Jr on art) – it felt far more like a full Miller script than DK3 and Romita’s art rarely looked better.
The most recent Dark Knight book he wrote, Golden Child, with Grampa on art, has some interesting ideas but isn’t a classic. Still worth a look though.
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I guess that’s fair. I have Holy Terror, but haven’t reread it since first buying it – I recall enjoying the artwork, while acknowledging the problematic script and themes.
(I can’t recall specifics but I thought he had sheepishly addressed his state of mind during that period, and probably sees it as something embarrassing he’d rather forget.)
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(I can’t recall specifics but I thought he had sheepishly addressed his state of mind during that period, and probably sees it as something embarrassing he’d rather forget.)
Yeah and I think that’s where Will is coming from, he said he had moved on in his views, distancing himself a little rather than disavow the project.
I didn’t buy it or read it, when someone, even if they are a great creator, says they are releasing anti-muslim propaganda it’s not getting my business.
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when someone, even if they are a great creator, says they are releasing anti-muslim propaganda it’s not getting my business
That was part of Miller’s typically hyperbolic style hyping the book up ahead of release and comparing it to the old wartime propaganda comics.
I’m always one to let a book speak for itself, and Miller is a favourite creator so I was always going to check it out.
I’m glad I read it as there is some good stuff in there from a storytelling point of view. Unfortunately it serves a fairly crass story based on the broadest stereotypes you can imagine and I’m not surprised it was so poorly received.
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Just finished reading Machine Man #1 to 19, one of Kirby’s last creations for Marvel. Kirby did an adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then, bizarrely, an ongoing 2001 monthly comic, which showed the monolith appearing to various characters throughout history. In #8 of that series, he featured a story where the army was trying to create a race of intelligent robots, the first 50 of which were failures, but then X-51 had an encounter with the monolith and achieved sentience, and became… Mister Machine! The 2001 book was cancelled a couple of issues later but the by-then-renamed Machine Man spun off into his own series.
And the Kirby stuff (#1 to 9) is great – a lot of fun, sharp dialogue, the stories are coherent (not something that can be said for all of Kirby’s later work) and the series has a very definite direction. I was particularly pleased to discover that Machine Man’s somewhat sarcastic humour was a Kirby invention, and not something that Warren Ellis shoehorned in later in Nextwave.
Also, it seems Kirby was working out some of his frustrations in the comic – there’s a criminal organisation called “The Corporation” whose aim is to steal Machine Man’s design – his intellectual property – and profit from something they didn’t create. It’s not hard to draw the parallels to Kirby’s fight with Marvel.
After #9, Kirby left Marvel Comics for good, and went to work for DePatie Freleng animation, and Machine Man went on hiatus for 9 months. Meanwhile, he appeared in 4 issues of the Hulk (#234 to 237) before returning to his own book, now by Marv Wolfman and Steve Ditko. Those Hulk issues are kind of important because MM gets beaten pretty badly by the Hulk, and MM #10 starts with him being rebuilt.And the first thing Wolfman and Ditko do is to reduce his powers – the one thing that made him stand out, i.e. all his crazy gimmicks – and they even make a point of giving him smaller eyes, thus making his design less distinctive as well.I can sympathise a little — there was a feeling at Marvel at the time (1979) that Kirby’s Silver Age craziness was old hat, that his style was out of step with the times. And it does seem a little anachronistic, particularly with the likes of Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men advertised in the same pages.
But if their intention was to make the book seem more contemporary, then Wolfman and Ditko was a poor choice of creative team. Reading the remaining issues, I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of care shown for the character. It seemed as though Marv Wolfman hadn’t even bothered to read the Kirby issues. He writes MM as someone completely devoid of personality – like a cold, unfeeling robot. And he barely uses any of MM’s powers. Most of the time he comes off just like an anonymous purple guy with super-strength.And Ditko’s art is just hard to look at during this latter part of his career. There’s almost no detail, his people look freakishly mannequin-like, and he seems positively contemptible towards his audience and his employer. Here’s his interpretation of Alpha Flight, who show up in #18 for instance. And this is a splash-page! He literally had to draw one panel, and it looks like garbage.
Also, I don’t know how much input Ditko had on the plotting, but whoever’s responsible should be ashamed. There’s an issue featuring a lame villain called the Binary Bug, who flies around via a bulky backpack thing, and the issue just ends with him accidentally flying into some overhead power lines!Things take a slight upturn when Wolfman is replaced by Tom DeFalco in #15, but a few issues later, the book is cancelled. DeFalco revived him a few years later (or at least an alternative, “futuristic” version of him, set in the distant future of 2020!) in a 4-issue mini-series, but otherwise he was pretty much forgotten, apart from the odd guest-appearance. Until, that is, he appeared in Nextwave. So that’s what I’ll be reading next…EDIT: With apologies for the formatting. Don’t blame me, the board doesn’t seem to be recognising paragraphs. I’d be really grateful if a mod could sort it out for me.-
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That is poor. I remember reading a few of Ditko’s Rom comics for Marvel, the last thing he did for them I think on any regular basis, and that was a lot better than this Machine Man stuff.
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The Machine Man mini by DeFalco & Barry Windsor-Smith has, unsurprisingly, some really great art. I don’t remember the story too well, though.
I was a little disappointed with it. BWS only does inks over layouts by Herb Trimpe for the first 3 issues. No idea why – it’s not as though he needed a helping hand. Story-wise, it’s also a bit of a disappointment – because it’s set in the future, DeFalco has all these street-thugs using supposedly futuristic jargon every other word, and it’s all a bit cringe-inducing.
I love the covers though:
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Yeah, inking varies a lot. There are some inkers who make the artwork look very much their own work – and I would include Sinnott in that category because he famously “softened” a lot of Kirby’s excesses, including redrawing faces sometimes – but others like Mike Royer, who inked a lot of Kirby’s later work, including most of his New Gods stuff as well as Machine Man, made a point of being extremely faithful to the pencil art. Which is fine if they’re full pencils, but otherwise you end up with the Ditko situation.
Here’s John Byrne over Ditko, which is like 80% Byrne’s work, and P. Craig Russell, who probably came up with the more elegant solution, keeping Ditko’s simplicity, but prettying it up.
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The Machine Man mini by DeFalco & Barry Windsor-Smith has, unsurprisingly, some really great art. I don’t remember the story too well, though.
It ran as a backup strip in the UK Transformers comic in 85-86. They ran a lot of the Wolfman/Defalco/Ditko/etc run before that, but I have very distinct memories of the cyberpunk one and not the earlier stuff, which shows what kind of impression both series made on 8 year old me.
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The Machine Man mini by DeFalco & Barry Windsor-Smith has, unsurprisingly, some really great art. I don’t remember the story too well, though.
It ran as a backup strip in the UK Transformers comic in 85-86. They ran a lot of the Wolfman/Defalco/Ditko/etc run before that, but I have very distinct memories of the cyberpunk one and not the earlier stuff, which shows what kind of impression both series made on 8 year old me.
I would grab back issues of the UK Transformers comic from second hand bookshops here, several years after their release, and early in my comic buying – those backups must be my first exposure to BWS art. I have since bought a trade of Iron Man 2020 but never read it.
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There are some inkers who make the artwork look very much their own work
Before Mike Royer was brought in to ink Kirby’s pencils on the Fourth World titles at DC, he was initially paired with Vince Colletta who had worked with Kirby at Marvel. Unfortunately (according to rumor) Colletta had a habit of erasing backgrounds that Kirby had drawn, and simplified crowded panels presumably to make his job easier. Eventually Mark Evanier convinced Jack, who never liked to complain even though he was unhappy with Colletta’s tampering, to ask DC to remove Vince and retain Mike Royer to ink his pencils more faithfully. There is a noticable improvement in the art from that point forward.
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I reread Nextwave. It was fine – entertaining for the most part, but I was never a huge Warren Ellis fan, even before the recent allegations came out. He’s neither as clever nor as funny as he thinks he is – the humour in Nextwave is particularly hit and miss, with some stuff landing…
… and other stuff being just plain ewww:
Also, we get it, Warren, you have a type.
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I remember Nextwave reading quite well at the time, as it came when Marvel was just kicking up a gear in terms of big successes like the Ultimate universe and the New Avengers – it was nice to see a book that took itself and the Marvel universe less seriously and generally took the piss out of that big bombastic superhero thing.
The Nextwave style of glib self-mocking humour became more popular in the years since, so it maybe doesn’t feel as distinctive today as it did then.
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He’s neither as clever nor as funny as he thinks he is – the humour in Nextwave is particularly hit and miss, with some stuff landing…
Yeah, some of Nextwave is really quite funny, but other bits, not so much. The Dirk Anger suicidal stuff is naff and there’s a strong current of what I always think of as Chris Sims’s Ultimate Super-Blog shallowness; stuff that’s just been thrown together from an almost a madlib of tropes and is funny only on a very thin surface level of absurdity. It’s the kind of thing Brian Azzarello skewered quite nicely in his Dr 13 series from around the same time.
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I agree generally that Ditko’s 80s work was taking the piss largely. Squirrel Girl’s debut story is by Ditko and I remember it looking awful. I recently read some early Avengers West Coast, for which Ditko did pencils on the first annual (or the east coast annual it crossed over with, I forget which). Utterly dire stuff. Without his name on it, it’d wouldn’t have been published.
I remember reading — I think it was that big Ditko retrospective Fantagraphics put out a while back — that by that period in Ditko’s career, he was only really interested in doing those Ayn Rand “Chick Tract” books he self-published like Mr. A and Avenging World. He had burned a lot of bridges in the industry and was basically being thrown pity work by editors (stuff like Transformers coloring books) that he half-assed his way through. Turn in some loose pencils, and leave the inker to do all of the heavy lifting. Which seems really un-Objectivist; I mean when Hugh Akston was flipping burgers in Atlas Shrugged, they were best goddamned hamburgers ever crafted by man.
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So a chat the other day raised that Jupiter’s Legacy reminded them of The ClanDestine, Alan Davis’ Marvel book from the mid 90s. I fancied going back to check it, I read some if not all of the original series when it came out but had forgotten most about it if I’m honest.
I went back and read what there is (8 issues of the first series, a 2 part X-Men crossover mini and a late 2000s follow up 5 part mini-series).
First off – I really enjoyed it. The setup is a family based in rural England, their absent father was blessed with immortality and it tells mainly of his kids, a set of siblings aged from around 800 years old to 12 year old twins, all with super powers.
I believe it’s the only thing Davis created from scratch as a writer/artist and in that quirk of early 90s contracts that has Liefeld earning royalties for Deadpool has some creative control over. Quirky also suits the material, it’s told in very straightforward style as most Davis material is but there are weird elements around the whole family dynamic. The characters really grow on you, the artwork is probably Davis at his peak, it’s very detailed and also such clear storytelling.
My main complaint is there isn’t enough of it, for whatever reason Davis left the first series at issue 8. It went on for 4 more written by Glen Dakin but those are not offered on Marvel Unlimited and Davis retcons everything in it anyway as a dream (the same as he did in Excalibur). Most of the mysteries he sets out for the family are answered but in maybe a slightly rushed way in the second mini, like Marvel only gave him 5 issues when he’d have wanted more. He seems pretty semi retired nowadays (which is fair he’s of retirement age) so I doubt we’ll see more but I had a lot of fun with what we had.
Talking about obscure Marvel properties that would do well in a movie or TV series I think this would do very well, it has the character work and humour that suits the MCU, but is probably too obscure to be noticed or Davis’ equity in the project not to Disney’s taste in sharing anything.
Edit: Oh and aside for the family dynamic it doesn’t share a whole load with Jupiter’s Legacy but I kind of get where the thought came in, one of the siblings being a party girl and getting smashed is reminiscent of the Chloe story but only vaguely.
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Talking about obscure Marvel properties that would do well in a movie or TV series I think this would do very well, it has the character work and humour that suits the MCU, but is probably too obscure to be noticed or Davis’ equity in the project not to Disney’s taste in sharing anything.
Guardians of the Galaxy was fairly obscure, too, and look at it’s success.
ClanDestine would be a fun way to introduce UK and other global superheroes. It would also off a different sensibility to the MCU.
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ClanDestine would be a fun way to introduce UK and other global superheroes. It would also off a different sensibility to the MCU.
It might also be a good way to introduce Cap Britain and MI-13 as they might be investing the strange occurrences that involve the family.
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I was browsing Marvel Unlimited and they have a rather useful ‘events’ section, where they give you the reading order for any crossovers.
I’m looking at Inferno, at the time I only read the Uncanny X-Men issues.
It’s interesting because I think this is the first ever proper crossover event, with multiple titles telling the same story.
Secret Wars and Crisis had a central mini series with sub-plots running into other series. Mutant Massacre had a central theme of the attack on the Morlocks but famously none of the characters in the books meet, Fall of the Mutants was more of a marketing exercise, the stories don’t really overlap at all.
It’s pretty cohesive though because nearly all of it is written by Claremont and Louise Simonson. A pair very used to working together as she was his editor for several years.
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Picked up these backissues from 2008 for a Hellblazer two-parter by Jason Aaron and Sean Murphy.
It’s a decent enough tale about Constantine’s past coming back to haunt him (again!), and it gives Murphy a chance to draw quite a lot of scenes of punk bands and a bit of nasty demon stuff, but as a story it’s actually fairly thin and nothingy – not much really happens.
Still worth a look for the art though.
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That was Brian Azzarello, Christian 🙂
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Shit, yeah, brainfart! Thanks!
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A friend of mine dropped by on the weekend and gave me a big bag of old comics that have been sitting in his garage for about five years unread. There’s a handful of comics he bought on a rare trip to a comic shop whenever Civil War II was happening, a couple of trades I’ve given him as presents over the years (hello Last Stand of the Wreckers trade that can go on eBay) but most a load of comics from someone his mum used to work with.
I was quite happy to take them off his hands and both go through them and read them. It’s a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t ordinarily go for but am interested in, mainly through UK reprints. So I thought I might post about the interesting bits. Starting with:
The Flash #1 (Titan) dated Jun/Jul ‘15.
I haven’t paid attend to the UK newsagent reprint market in donkeys years but this might be when Titan got the DC rights off Panini. Or did that go the other way? Or it might just be they did it to tie into the success of the Arrowverse show on Sky. Either way, this is super-confusing to read.
It opens with some mediocre bit of fluff from Secret Files showing a pretty rubbish retelling of his origin. Then there’s Flash Annual 2 followed by Flash #1 and #2. These are from the New 52 relaunch, so they’re already a good few years old by this point, but fair enough. Perfectly decent pair of issues and I’m interested to read the rest of the arc. Two issues though.
First is that the annual is from two years after the normal issues (which isn’t made clear) and so working out the continuity of them is a mess. Barry is living with someone called Patti who knows he’s the Flash in the annual, but in the issues, she’s his co-worker and he’s maybe got a thing with Iris? A really poor choice of ordering from Titan there.
Second problem is the rest of this story isn’t in the next issue (which is in the big batch of comics)! It says it’ll be concluded in Justice League Trinity #9, so I’m sod out of luck there. But what a bizarre choice to make with the first issue of a new series. Well, I think it was a series. That second issue is dated December 2015 and contains #8 and #9 (and an issue of Harley Quinn). I cannot see the logic in that at all.
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Essential X-Men 141 dated November 2005.
This has the third to sixth parts of God Loves, Man Kills II, which was part of X-Treme X-Men. Now, admittedly, I’ve not read the first half of this story, but wow, it really is near impenetrable nonsense. Lots of Bible quotes, mainly. The strangest thing about this is that they gave over this entire issue (and seemingly the previous one) to X-Treme X-Men instead of running it alongside New and/or Uncanny of the time. (Well, actually, Uncanny was Chuck Austen’s run so I can skipping that.) When you’ve got a monthly series reprinting three US issue per issue, I don’t know why you wouldn’t keep multiple titles running concurrently instead of bouncing around.
Another slightly surprising thing is all the people on the letters page asking for their email address to be printed so other readers can email them. I get why people did that in ye olden days, when it was hard to connect to people, but this was 2005! There were forums! Did anyone need total strangers emailing them to talk about comics then?
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Wolverine Unleashed #45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, Essential X-Men #66 cover dates March – November 2000.
Even allowing for the fact I’ve got a couple of issues missing there, this is an odd, confusing read. The Wolverine series is mostly two “new” issues and then some old filler – there’s a Wolverine and Punisher mini-series from 93, an oversized one-shot about Wolverine in Rio from around the same time as the current stories, then a batch of issues from the Goodwin/Byrne run on the main Wolverine solo title. It really jumps around all over the place and I can see why they decided to turn the title into Wolverine and Gambit with 55. Thing is, the main content isn’t that consistent either. It goes #92-96, then 105-113, with the X-Men issue (which came out the same month as the last Wolverine Unleashed one) containing 117 and 118. There’s a bit chunk of issues seemingly just skipped over there and, as far as I can tell, they include pretty important parts of the ongoing story about Wolverine devolving into a more feral state after his adamantium was removed. I think maybe there’s some reference to some of that stuff already having been in Essential X-Men, but it’s really not a good way to read these stories.
They’re written by Larry Hama too, which means that most issues tend to feel rather disconnected from the previous, even if explicitly carrying on a storyline. Hama famously/notoriously doesn’t really plot in advance, he does it as he goes, which can make for disorientating reads in collections because each issue is almost completely its own thing.
Mind you, they’re actually pretty good. I’ve never really bothered with much Wolverine solo stuff – the Millar Enemy of the State Run and the original Claremont/Miller mini-series is about it – and he’s not a character I give that much of damn about in teams, thanks to decades of over-exposure. But these work. The character’s a good fit for Hama’s pet tropes and niches, some of which did start to drag GI Joe down a bit as it wore on in the 90s. I think this is actually the first non-Joe Hama stuff I’ve read, surprisingly, and I’m a little surprised by how keen I am to pick up some of the Wolverine epic collections. (the Goodwin/Byrne issues are fun too).
Also of note is that these are from around when the first X-Men movie came out. Wolverine Unleashed #50 had a Hugh Jackman photo cover. Essential X-Men 66 has a special three page letter column for movie reactions (I wonder if they cut story pages to fit that?). Some highlights include:
Oh my God. Picture the scene. Friday 18th August, 21:00 hrs. Myself and some friends arrive at the UCI. 96 minutes later I leave the cinemas after seeing what was, without a doubt, THE GREATEST FILM I HAVE EVER HAD THE PLEASURE TO BEAR WITNESS TO!!!!
I hear that X-Men will be made into a movie franchise, like James Bond. It’s obvious that we’ll be seeing Bobby Drake again.
Just thought I’d write to say I’m glad someone else has teh same feeling about Hugh Jackman as myself (Mutant Mail 64). I find myself attracted to him in an animalistic kind of way.
I have to admit I stepped into the cinema last Friday feeling both excited and anxious. I hoped (like all fans) that the combination of top director Bryan Singer and our bunch of merry mutants would produce quality, but I was painfully aware of the internet rumour mill which had already labelled the film a turkey. The strange thing was that the criticism was completely contradictory; some claiming the film was not faithful enough to the comics, while others railed against it as being incomprehensible to the non-fan.
PS Famke Janssen was hot!
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I read Hama’s Wolverine run in those cheap black and white Essential collections. Claremont, Goodwin and David all do relatively short runs on the solo book after it launched and then Hama does something like 90 issues of it.
That format was right for me, in truth none of it is essential but it is good solid fun comics and kept me entertained on a long business trip I was on.
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Superman Legends #2, 5-10, 14, 15, 17-21 cover dated 2007-2008.
I haven’t actually read a huge amount of Superman comics – mainly just All-Star Superman, the start of Busiek’s post 52 run, that Azzarello and Lee run, a little Golden Age stuff – so when I saw this huge stack of Superman comics, I was pretty keen to give them a go. Broaden my horizons.
First issue: Azzarello and Lee; All-Star Superman; Jeph Loeb’s Batman/Superman.
So yeah, turns out a decent chunk of this is stuff I’ve already read, the odds of which is… pretty slim. But there is enough I haven’t for it to have been interesting. I mean, I didn’t read the Jeph Loeb stuff, obvs. But it does collect (some of?) the rest of Busiek’s run, Camelot Falls, which is handy. It turns out I didn’t really miss out on anything amazing there, but it’s decent enough.
There’s also most of a story by Darwyn Cooke and Tim sale, which is utterly forgettable in story terms – a piece set in early continuity about Superman’s first encounter with Kryptonite – but it at least looks nice. There’s a decent story by DnA about Superman’s first encounter with the New Gods too, which I liked well enough.
Geoff Johns’ run on Superman takes the main spotlight after ASS, Azzarello/Lee and Busiek though and that’s… not particularly good. The arc where Lois and Clark adopt Zod’s son is really dumb. The following one, about the Legion of Super-Heroes has some interesting concepts (a reject Legionnaire convinces everyone on Earth that Superman wasn’t Kryptonian, but actually human and that the alien Legionnaires lied about it for their own ends) but I didn’t entirely work for me. Part of that is the awful captions on introducing the Legionnaires and explaining their powers, which are surprisingly hard to read, but also don’t really pick up the slack of the story, which assumes some familiarity with them. The other problem is that the art is by Gary Frank. To be clear, I do like Gary Frank’s work, on the right book, like Supreme Power. But it feels really out of place on an actual Superman title, especially drawing the Legion. Frank is seemingly unable to draw any woman to look under 50 and/or healthy, so the Legionnaires really don’t come out of this well, especially in the flashbacks to them being teenagers.
The other thing of note is that, like the Panini collector’s editions, this Titan series might be good value, in doing three American issues (and only house ads) for only £2.60, but it’s not the best way to read any of this stuff, let alone “collect”. Everything feels very jumbled and hectic. It starts printing Alex Ross’ Justice at one point, but seemingly not from the beginning. Part 11 shows up in #14. I’ve got the three issues before that missing, but I can’t see all 10 previous parts of Justice being in them, somehow.
I do like that they managed to find a different headshot of Superman for the corner box almost every issue though.
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Justice Inc. (1989) #1 by Andrew Helfer and Kyle Baker.
Possibly one of the most obtuse comics I’ve ever read. Poorly explained characters and premise, not helped by Baker’s ill-defined painted artwork. A chameleonic man whose face can be reshaped to resemble anyone is a concept that only works when the characters can actually be distinguished easily in the first place, which they can’t. They’re all just a black outline and then some hazy painted blur of a face. The plot seems to assume a pre-existing familiarity with the characters – most of whom it doesn’t name – which is a bit much for what, the internet tells me, is a second string pulp novel hero. Then it just leaps about across a decade or more, occasionally but not always bothering to make that clear. An utter mess.
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Right, finally got through the rest of this horde (I saw finally, because it’s taking up a lot of room and I want to get on with my stack of unread books).
Astonishing Spider-Man circa 2000.
Weird seeing casting rumours for the first Raimi Spider-Man in the letters page. Nicholas Brendon and Alyson Hannigan were key picks.
Anyway, this is mostly the post-Ben Reilly run, where Peter’s got his powers back, is happily married to MJ and living with her Aunt. It’s… fine. Howard Mackie writing one or other of the main series and his issues are pretty brainless. Tom DeFalco is writing the other and his are ok but seem to just be doing a rehash of the Gang War story he did an decade earlier. The most interesting bits are a few issues of Sensational Spider-Man by Todd Dezago and Mike Weiringo. That got collected recently, so I’m definitely going to pick that up.
I have to say, although having both Pete and MJ go back to ESU feels a little reductive, the status quo generally isn’t too bad. I don’t get why some writers were so consistently trying to get rid of MJ. The teasing sub-plot about their baby having been kidnapped (rather than being stillborn) is unpleasant though. It gets swerved on, with the woman who supposed took her instead having Aunt May, but one scene here fairly clearly has her talking to a cot. Hard to backpedal that.
Ultimate X-Men – like almost all of it.
I only really flipped through this looking at the ads. I’ve read everything up to halfway into Kirkman’s run before and beyond BKV’s run (which I have in OHC), I don’t intend to revisit it.
So speaking of ads, how bad are American anti-drug ads? They’re all so painfully lame I feel more inclined to do drugs from having seen them. Even the ads promoting milk are cooller.
I dropped Ult. X-Men back in thr day in Kirkman’s run, which I thought was crap. I did skim read the back end of that and it was a little better than the previous chunk. Compared to what follows it though, it’s a masterpiece. With Ultimatum on the way, the book’s given to some guy who Heroes who just shits on it. Half-arsed Ultimate Alpha Flight turn up! They’re all on drugs! Colossus has been addicted to the same power enhancing drug this whole time! He gets half the other X-Men addicted! It turns out it’s made from Wolverine! And invented by Professor X! And now manufactured and sold Moira!
The sheen is really off the Ultimate U by this point and it’s just flailing around for kind of relevance or worth. It’s just a bit sad really.
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I only really flipped through this looking at the ads.
You immoral monster, how dare you?
They’re all so painfully lame I feel more inclined to do drugs from having seen them.
This is what happens when you look at ads. Your brain melts.
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Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of how cool I am doing drugs right now.
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This is Martin’s brain on ads:
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This is Martin’s brain on ads:
Now I’m hungry…
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If I don’t try them, how will I know how delicious they really are?!
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Rereading Sandman. Nothing particularly insightful to say about it other than it gets better every time I read it. I don’t think it’s anything to me being better read than I was when I read it first time around. I think it’s more to do with the fact that I’m just older and I’m more attuned to the themes within.
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Hmmm…
Looking at this article on the gamesradar site:
Would have at the very least piqued everyone’s interest and might have led to more swaps.
Makes me wonder what Marvel would have done with MM in the Marvel universe and DC with She Hulk.
But it was too complicated working out the legalities.
Who would you swap, even for a temporary 1 year stint?
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Now Batman reportedly will be gone from Gotham for a little while in the title…
Say…
Have a story where the main 7 of the JLA get stuck in another dimension and have either their sidekicks (Robin or Nightwing, the junior Wonder Woman, Superman’s son, the Flash understudy, etc.) fill in across all the DC titles as stand ins until the JLA get back. And have the JLA title pick up on the 7 in the dimension they are stuck in.
Been done before but not that wide.
Anyway…
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Who would you swap, even for a temporary 1 year stint?
Ragman and Namor.
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Hawkeye for Green Arrow. Just to see if anyone notices.
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The characters swapped should be characters who have potential but the owners have never been able to do something interesting with them.
So I would give Ghost Rider to DC. It is a great design, and DC has a better track record with magical horror type comics. Perhaps they can make him work.
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I could see the Owl as a Batman villain, partially because owls are natural predators of bats.
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as far as swaps go, I think it should always be like for like. if you are swapping MM, i would go with Vision. a good swap might be Deathstroke for Deadpool. Slade for Wade.
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Captain Marvel for Captain Marvel.
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That pic of Owlman got my head spinning a little.
You could have a 2-year plan where all the money is shared between the companies, culminates in a big company crossover series in summer of 2024 (against the real foes in all of this) and fully bring in each universe, even multiverse.
TP and HC kept in print guarantee, people return to own universe at end.
Super LCS friendly event, even giving more profit margins to stores.A big swap of 8 from each side, heroes and villains. They don’t know how they got there, but they can’t get home.
3 comics a month for 24 months on each side, one is a 24 issue monthly, 2nd spot for mini-series (3 x 8 issues or 4 x 6 issues), and 3rd title an anthology mix of the all on their respective sides (but leans to the villains).Supergirl (top notch talent for 24 issues)
Martian Manhunter
Shazam family member (or Black Adam)
Firestorm (or Firehawk)
Lobo
Deadshot
Talia al Ghul
OwlmanShe-Hulk (top notch talent for 24 issues
Spider-Woman
Luke Cage
Quentin Quire
Black Cat
Bullseye
Norman Osborn
Kingpin
(Hmmm, maybe those last two couldn’t be parted with for that long, unsure of Marvel comparables)Would need a major guiding hand, and be properly thought out and mapped out.
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@sean_robinson… That is a cool idea.
I remember in that Ultimates/new Squadron Supreme crossover story, Nick Fury got stuck in their universe for a year.
Then Wildstorm’s Mr. Majestic was stuck in the main DC universe for a while…As for DC and Marvel, the characters that get stuck shouldn’t have any real ties and won’t be missed much. Kingpin has strong ties where he is, and I don’t know if he would work in DC given their crime underworld setting. I mentioned Bullseye as a Batman villain immediately. Haven’t given that much thought about the rest.
If the 2 did trade MM and She Hulk back then, we most likely would have had more swaps by now.
What might have been…
YES! We are off topic… It’s own thread is a great idea!
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Rereading Hitman. Continues to he magnificent. I love that it’s giving us multiple Garth Ennises. The war stories one, the gross out humour one, the heartbreakingly sad one, the “stuff about Ireland” one.
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I fear some times I’m a masochist.
I’ve been rereading the DnA (and Giffen) era of cosmic Marvel comics recently. Annihilation, War of Kings etc. And this time I’m going on from them to the more recent GotG runs, to see which are worth time. I am, of course, skipping over the five years or whatever the book was given to Brian Bendis, because, come on, it’s a Bendis team book.
But I have made an exception for the Original Sin tie-in he did, where – after literally years of ignoring it – he explained how Thanos, Star Lord and Nova got out of the cancerverse they were trapped in at the end of the Thanos of Imperative, and also how Drax came back to life. Because I curious, you know.
I really shouldn’t have bothered. It’s dreadful, not least because Bendis clearly hasn’t read or understood the Thanos Imperative – you know, the story he’s writing an immediate follow up to. For instance, Drax shows up, in his old beefy, non-tattooed Destroyer design he shouldn’t have (to be fair, that’s an error in Thanos Imperative too, so fair enough) and the others are all surprised to see him because a) he was killed by Thanos (again, fair enough) but also b) that he’s in the cancerverse. Star Lord and Nova decide that Thanos must have not actually killed Drax but mistakenly transported him into the cancerverse. HE WAS IN THE CANCERVERSE WHEN THANOS KILLED HIM, BENDIS, YOU MORON. It’s literally the reason why he had to! The cancerverse’s whole deal is that it’s a reality where the concept of Death was obliterated and so as an avatar of Life, Drax was driven sort of crazy and Thanos had to kill him – being the only person who could kill in that reality given his whole avatar of Death thing. Yet Bendis clearly doesn’t understand this, and has Thanos spout stuff like ” It would be foolish to think that cosmic concepts of our universe would apply across all universes… we are not made of the cancer materials of this universe”.
The other thing is, someone presumably told him there was a cosmic cube involved in Thanos Imperative, but not that it was broken and dead, because here it’s just a normal, fully powered Cosmic Cube waiting to be an obvious deus ex machina.
Oh and this is all being relayed from Star Lord to Gamora (who has tied him up to get answers – you think some of this would have come up at some point when he got out and reformed the team, given they all thought he was dead), who acts incredulous about lots of the details – including the entire concept of the Cthulhu-esque Avengers of the Cancerverse – despite the fact SHE WAS THERE. SHE SAW THEM FIRST HAND.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, Brian, it was like six issues. You could have read them in an afternoon! Literally the bare minimum required of you.
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I mean, for fuck’s sake, Brian
I feel like this could be the tagline for most Bendis books post-2005.
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People keep telling me I should read more of Brian Bendis’s work because he’s normally much better than the dire examples I have been unlucky enough to read so far.
I still think those people are trying to con me.
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I think Bendis’ very first run of Powers (at Image) was his best work. After Powers moved to Marvel/Icon, it was plagued by so many delays and due to his Marvel workload, you could tell he did not have the same focus as the writing and stories felt rote and uninspired.
Alias and Daredevil were also very good.
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He keeps trying it but Bendis is just awful at big bombastic complex superhero books. Guardians and Legion are the last books he should be on really. He seemingly plots ‘on the go’ rather than with some masterplan hence a few examples of stuff that makes no sense. The iFanboy podcast guys teased him for ages for an Avengers plot where something was hidden in a closet he never returned to.
I have enjoyed a lot of his work though, Daredevil, early Powers, Ultimate Spider-Man and some of his last Marvel work with Ironheart and Doctor Doom. A lot of the rest has a tendency to start promisingly (his X-Men and Superman runs) but go off the rails because he doesn’t know where the story is really going.
So basically anything he does well is a solo book with a tight focus and down to earth setting. Again, the opposite of Guardians and Legion. He seems to have moved over to creator owned work primarily now, it may actually be better for him to emulate Millar a bit and work more shortform.
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Alias and Daredevil were also very good.
Alias, Daredevil and Ultimate Spider-Man are his three great runs, for me. And I have to give him credit for creating Miles Morales.
But after New Avengers it all went downhill, with only occasional flashes of greatness in books like Scarlet since.
After his DC move flopped it feels like he’s a bit past-it at this point.
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I finished my big Cosmic Marvel read-through today. I wasn’t sure where best to talk about it, but given even the newest of them is a couple of years old now, it might as well go here. As I’ve mentioned before ( somewhere) I expanded out from just the Giffen-DnA cycle. I read the early Star Lord comics (which are, at best, sort of ok), the Thanos series just before Annihilation (half of which is by Starlin and feels from a different era, half of which is by Giffen and really should have been in Annihilation book one), more of the X-Men stuff that built into War of Kings than I have before (most of which isn’t amazing) and then some modern Guardians runs, which is what I want to talk about really.
Guardians 3000
This is by Abnett alone and is with the original Guardians, from the future. It largely feels like a rehash of the stuff he and Lanning did with them in 2008 though, just with much worse art. There are interesting differences – the character Geena Drake mainly – but unfortunately it all gets waylaid by Secret Wars and amounts to nothing.
Duggan
I was pleased with Duggan’s run initially (when I read most of it a couple of years back) because, after years of Guardians being Bendis’ Space Avengers, it re-engaged with the cosmic stuff DnA had left hanging. But upon re-reading it in context now, it was kind of disappointing, because it doesn’t really get most of it right. Robbie Rider, for instance, (Nova’s kid brother) is picked up as being stranded in space, where he’s brainwashed by the Fraternity of Raptors. But Thanos Imperative shows Robbie, and all the other Nova recruits, back on Earth. Similarly, Duggan picks up with the Raptors, but turns them into an army of cosplayers, a far cry from the interesting ideas DnA had of a relatively covert group manipulating events from the sidelines. The reintroduction of the Nova corp – which I assume happened earlier elsewhere, otherwise it’s pretty abrupt here – is similarly disappointing, as it just becomes a fairly drab, Earth-centric police force thing. Not that I’m saying the Nova corp was ever particularly interesting, but yeah, it wasn’t that good here. And the joke of Duggan’s (actually, I think his initial Deadpool co-writer Brian Posehn’s) mate Scott Adsit being an agent of SHIELD, now a Nova Corp commander, has worn a bit thin.
All this goes into an event. Initially Infinity Countdown, which has some interesting ideas, but also suffers from the worst tropes of Marvel events. There’s a recurring opening to issues of it where an Asgardian dwarf is forced to make some armour for someone, like it’s a big deal. I guess it’s vibing off the Infinity Gauntlet and the bit in Infinity War (the movie) where Thor gets Stormbreaker. But it doesn’t actually go anywhere. I think it’s just Gamora getting her disguise as Requiem made, which is disposed of in the first issue of Infinity Wars.
Similarly, there’s an entire Darkhawk Infinity Countdown mini. I’m not entirely sure why, because it doesn’t play into Infinity Wars at all, apart from tie up the Raptor stuff. Written by Chris Sims – it’s a character with 90s nostalgia, of course it’s by Chris Sims – it does actually tidy up the Raptor stuff, by having some of the actual Raptors come back. But it also turns Robbie into “Dark Starhawk” or some nonsense and it re-redefines Darkhawk’s powers/status quo and it just feels utterly inconsequential. Props to Sims for using Death’s Head, I guess, shame the artist didn’t draw him right.
Infinity Wars itself is also disappointing. There are some interesting ideas, like the Infinity Gems being a network (needing strength of mind to use the Power gem etc) but it doesn’t come to a good story. Loki is dicking about, gets an obtuse answer to an obtuse question and I don’t know why any of it matters. Everyone spends ages telling Gamora that she can’t possibly go into the Soul stone and get the missing piece of her soul back, but again, not entirely sure why. Yeah, there’s a big creature or what, but
Oh and Hank Pym gets offed in passing. We also see Gamora and Star-Lord get pushed together as a couple (or at least being in love with each other) which is a stretch for the characters (as I know them at least) and feels like movie synergy.And really, that element persists here greatly. So much of it feels like a watered down elements from the MCU and I don’t really need that – I could just watch the MCU for it. I want the comics universe to be true to its own self rather than emulate its own adaptations.
Cates
Cates’ Guardians run at least has some fan-wank going for it, in that it remembered that Wraith exists. I always loved that character (or his design anyway). Speaking of good designs, Infinity Wars did bring in an alt-universe Moondragon and Phyla-Vell, the latter of which has a tremendous design, so it’s nice to see them stick around here.
But ultimately, it’s not a particularly good comic, because it just regurgitates elements from previous ones. The first half of the run is about Thanos having set his own resurrection in action. I am so sick of reading about Thanos, and I didn’t even bother with all the other stuff from this period, like that Infinity series and whatnot. The second half does the Universal Church of Truth again, along with the Magus again, while killing off the Nova Corp again. While I can totally get behind making Rich the only Nova again, it just feels so utterly derivative, with no real new ideas. Rocket’s dying! Except, no, he can just get new implants no problem at the end, seemingly from the same place he was hiding out anyway.
Also, everyone sounds wrong. Groot talks like pretty much anyone else (and is different even from his “reset” in Duggan’s run, which gave him back full speech), Gamora has lost any distinctive speech pattern. Cosmic Ghost Rider is in there (part of Cates’ habit of having plugs to his other work – a long-standing Marvel tradition admittedly) and he’s apparently Frank Castle, but doesn’t sound anything like him in speech. It all just feels lazy, like he can’t differentiate the voices of his characters.
Annihilation Scourge
This is by Mathew Rosenberg and is, well, a micro-event, I’d call it, running about five issues. There are some good moments in it – Nova meets Annihilus, who doesn’t recognise him as the guy who killed him in Annihilation – but again, it’s just derivative for the most part. Oh, let’s do the Cancerverse again, but with the Sentry! Honestly, it’s like no-one at Marvel read Thanos Imperative nor has access to a copy. It feels trite and its cop-out ending (Nova dies! But gets better!) just makes it all worse in retrospect. There’s a bit in the final issue that should be cool – when Nova gathers a load of heroes together – but the art is so bad, they’re largely unrecognisable, completely undermining the entire moment.
Ewing
Finally, a good new Guardians run! This is the best the title/characters have been since DnA’s era. And it’s not that it matches or emulates it – Ewing is more emotionally minded and dabbles in some astrological stuff (an original and quickly abandoned part of Star Lord’s character) that isn’t entirely my cup of tea – but it has the same sense of integrity. That is Ewing has his own ideas, ones that use existing characters and concepts – the Gods of Olympus for example – but tells new stories with them, ones that speak to the characters.
And the characters are good here. I like that he delves into Nova’s survivor’s guilt, chronic pessimism and general mental health issues. Rocket gets to be cool again. Hercules shows up and is completely devoid of the kind of toxic masculinity that can so easily define the character. Ewing also seems to want to fix and build up, the same way DnA did. He makes the random new Quasar that was created for Standoff (of all things) feel legitimate. He takes Groot back to his classic “I am Groot” self, which instead of being reductive, comes across as a healing exercise after the embarrassing “punk Groot” concept of Cates’ run. Turning the team into a proper pan-galactic response team instead of a plucky group of vigilantes is also a really interesting take, expanding its roster out to cover most of that swathe of cosmic characters that have no reason not to be on the team save the demands of movie synergy.
There’s also some great art, with some utterly trippy and inventive panel layouts.
Admittedly, it ties into other series more than I had expected and hoped – it really would have helped to read Empyre between volumes 1 and 2, and various other titles, including X-Men, in volume 3. But that same criticism is true of DnA’s run, so it would be hypocritical to complain and it’s only my general detachment from current Marvel that makes it an issue. But this is a properly good run of comics. So it’s disappointing to find it ends after 18 issues. I thought there was at least something called The Last Annihilation after it, but that turns out to just be a repackaging of the last few issues with the things that tie into it.
Thing is, however good Ewing’s run ended up, it was always going to be a bit of a folly for me reading these later GotG runs. Nothing was ever going to hit the same way as that original cycle did. Reconnecting with the characters is a bit like meeting up with an old Uni friend after years and finding out they’ve become vegan and gone into investment banking. And the MU has changed so much in the past 8 years (maybe 10) since I stopped caring much about it, that I just feel like a stranger in it, that even if they had been the same, like Quasar largely is, tbf, the context around them would have been starkly different anyway.
Basically, you can never go home again and Marvel were idiots for ending the late 00s runs of Nova and GotG in the first place.
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