shhhhhh secret wars is the big marvel summer event of 2015

yeah thanks chuck!

Just finished the FF "Forever" storyline and it's really wonderful especially #604

so i've been catching up w/ stuff i missed and i'm reading some of the ultimate material atm (mostly the stuff that involves ultimate reed). before now the only ultimate comics i had read were the first few volumes of spider-man, which i thought was pretty okay. all the rest of this material tho... is the idea behind the ultimate universe that it's all the same characters but now 80% more jerky?

It wasn't supposed to be that way, but they let Jeph Loeb and Mark Millar write too many things so it became that way

mostly agree with that, though Millar had some good series here and there
Loeb's work with Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum was just awful, not even entertaining awful like Red Hulk

There were some interesting things done with Ultimate X-Men after that, but Ultimatum was basically the end of that comics line being a sleeker, more cinematic version of the Marvel Universe. The first Avengers movie pulled heavily from the Ultimates, but can you imagine them using any of the later Ultimate stuff for movie material?

As far as I've gotten into it (still inching toward Ultimatum), most of the Ultimate stuff is pretty perfunctory. Bendis has done well with Spider-Man in terms of personalizing the characters and raising the stakes, and Ultimates was good in terms of bringing the wide-screen cinematic bombast, but very little of the rest of it has much reason for existing. Far too often, the Ultimate stories I've read have hinged on familiarity with their 616 analogues and the reader's ability to spot the differences between the two. Too much fan service and not enough effort to make the stories stand on their own.

post-Ultimatum there's some major status quo changes and stories that got away from this with some interesting results. the end of the Ult. Peter Parker run, the second generation of Ultimate X-Men, and the Ultimate Comics: Doomsday miniseries of series. (I'm kind of ignoring the wacky New Ultimates/Ultimate Avengers and Captain America stuff, though I guess I give 'em some points for that weird Red Skull/Captain America II hybrid story)

ultimate comics X was interesting to me, between the concentration camp stuff and the SEAR govt, felt like this was territory that was hinted at but shunted off to "alternate future" storylines in 616 and pursued further. some good stuff here

Ultimate Doomsday was boss, hard to explain why without spoilers though. let's just say it picks up on a bunch of pre-Ultimatum threads and does well

Yeah, it's definitely starting to feel like the Ultimate universe was in need of an enema around the time Ultimatum was released. Loeb is like a creative Galactus, so he was kind of a perversely perfect choice.

who is loeb's herald i wonder

speaking of Galactus, I like the Ultimate Galactus trilogy.

the gah lak tus swarm? i think i prefer regular universe sentient chill-bro galactus

yeah, galactus as a guy in a purple tabard and impractical helmet with the space-munchies or gtfo afaik

as far as i'm koncerned

what are the best galactus stories? obv the original ff one is great, and i really dug his whole in the original secret wars. oh! he had a great appearance very recently in unbeatable squirrel girl.

john byrne's trial of galactus story was pretty great iirc

(in fantastic four back in the 80s)

Recently, old Thor vs Galactus in Jason Aaron's book was fun.

I've never really understood Marvel's big space God characters (e.g. Thanos, Celestials etc). It's like they're omnipotent, but completely useless at doing anything with it. Darkseid is the same as Thanos, right? But at least Darkseid has his own planet to attend to, which explains why he's not busy destroying the world all the time.

Anyway I guess this is a conundrum Hickman's Secret Wars is trying to wrestle with: What if a world-killing God was actually good at their job?

(I should probably get around to reading the 70s Starlin stuff I guess.)

It was interesting to realize, reading the '60s Marvel stuff, that Galactus was presented pretty much from the start as a non-evil (and even cosmically necessary) presence. He's just a hungry dude, and if the lifeforms inhabiting his potential meals protest loudly enough, he's generally okay with moving on to another entree.

The Hickman FF bits that involve Galactus, and more importantly his relationship with the Franklin Richards who drops in from the future, show a more personal side.

It's a throwaway in that there's one panel and later one quote about it, but apparently Reed tried to see if Franklin could stop the incursions and Franklin feels bad that he couldn't.

Did Hickman ever explain how future Franklin exists (or indeed anyone) if everything is Secret Wars now? I know there was a lot of "Well, we're not worried about the incursions because our future selves are alive" - but I'm not sure if that got resolved (or, I suppose, if it's worth caring about).

I think that was one of the nice parts of Hickman's run, the idea that the multiverse is in flux and things will fall apart, sometimes at a galactic or multiversal scale, but there are some things in the future that are still going to happen. No matter how much things get fucked up now, Franklin is still going to be there in the far-flung future.

I mean, the counterargument is that all time travelers came from futures that no longer exist.

i assume franklin will have something to do w/ the general secret wars arc. hickman obv likes him, he's the most [potentially?] powerful mutant in history, etc.

I've always had a bone to pick with the concept of Planet-Eatin' Galactus, the big gaping story hole (imo) in his existence. Unless there's been some backstory that explains why he has to eat planets that have flora and (sentient) fauna, I don't see why he can't just eat life-free gas giants, and even stars that don't have habitable planets. It seems like bullshit to me that sentient life is less than an ant colony to him – if he has any kind of moral grounding at all, he would avoid ant colonies. If he doesn't have enough morality in him not to torture and kill bugs, I think he would have been taken out eons ago by a Kree/Skrull/Shi'ar/whatever gangpile. This paragraph may be gibberish; I blame poor sleep.

funny bc i just read this issue last night:

http://i59.tinypic.com/qn3azq.png

(Silver Surfer v.1 #01, 1968)

my understanding is that galactus feeds off life force in the cosmic sense so a dead planet won't work... best case scenario is that he gets there before the dominant species has evolved to the point of sentience. or, you know, that the planet can fight back.
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/uploads/WilliamRoberge/2012-12-21_093441_T161_EgoVsGalactus2.jpg

An element of Galactus that's fluctuated over the years is his scale with relation to lowly, mortal, planet-dwelling creatures. He's just kind of a big dude in his initial appearances, having conversations with the FF, but he's slowly become a more gargantuan presence who doesn't even seem to register the presence of the buzzing gnats inhabiting his meals of choice.

(And there's the whole complicated notion that his appearance varies wildly depending on who's actually beholding him at the moment.)

Galactus has been written (at least over the last decade or so) as a cleansing force of nature or Death. I don't remember which book that said it, but I believe that the planets that can sustain him are naturally the same planets that are habitable for sentient life... he's culling the universe of excess population, and writers like to neutralize him for these big space invasion storylines like Annhilation

Have to pick up the Ultimate Galactus stuff, I was curious about that; I just blew through all of U. Fantastic Four (great), U.C.Ultimates (first half great), U. Doomsday (wasn't wild about it, but good payoff) - basically all the Ultimate Reed stuff to get what was going on with that guy, since I had no clue what his deal was from the Avengers lead-ins. I get the impression that the Reed throughline is really the big Ultimate arc, which makes sense if he's a big player in SW.

The ability of Marvel to lay out these massive plans and arcs and actually carry through with them, in the comics and in the movies, is amazing really, especially in contrast to DC completely thrashing in the water. Remember that 'map of the future' in Avengers from 2010? It doesn't cover what's going on now, but it did cover Age of Ultron which happened three years later.

just cracking #2 open. lol "doom messiah"

and yeah the millar ultimates is legit great. borrows a ton from millar authority but also batshit in its own unique way.

I guess Doom's spent his whole life looking for this kind of worldwide adoration and now he sure as hell has it!

Dunno if I'm the only one but man, I really dig the way Hickman uses blank pages, titles, that sort of thing to provide beats in the story. When I first saw it in New Avengers I was really impressed, but SW is the apex of that, with the page actually finishing a character's sentence ('Battleworld'). Maybe it reminds me of the endpapers of the individual issues of V for Vendetta, leading you in and out of the story and providing punctuation.

Will track down Millar Ultimates stuff as well.

he's had that distinctive style for a while that i don't have the visual vocabulary to really describe but is def recognizable as a type:

http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/insidepulse/uploads/2011/12/120511_2251_TPBReviewTh3.png

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/files/2009/10/iron-man-covers-456.jpg

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NightlyNews3-197x300.jpg

sometimes i like it sometimes it seems a little shticky (nb not sure if this is a part of what you're referring to ^)

http://www.spandexless.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4083915-17030124-thumbnail.jpg

based on this i hope he one day redoes the entire marvel encyclopedia

Yeah, I'm thinking of title pages coming after a couple pages of story introduction a la the SW title pages, more than covers or infographics, really. So a few pages of comic then wham *big title spread* then back to the story. (I would link to images but they're hard to GIS.) I think Morrison tried something similar a few times but restrained himself to doing titles as drawn comic pages, not blank pages of title interrupting the illustrations. When I saw this in New Avengers I initially thought it was incredibly pretentious but over time I grew to really love them since the story was so cosmic and epic it seemed to deserve them.

Thanks for reminding me about the Disassembled covers, I loved those when they came out.

yeah i found the art in nightly news way, way more interesting and compelling than the hacky sub-fight club story

i signed up for a free month's marvel unlimited in order to look at some of the background stuff, and i am .. confused by the interface. it seems like i have a navigation bar at the top and bottom its impossible to hide (and which .. barely works?) but which the resizing ignores so it's often cutting off the top and bottom five per cent of a panel, i.e., where .. most of the dialogue is

is it really this broken or am i being a noob

it's not the most intuitive thing, to be charitable. you have to click on the page itself or the black empty space on the sides to hide the interface buttons

some glitches will fix if you click the "smart panel <-> full page" button twice

love cap + devil dino in planet hulk

yeah dd is always welcome. hope he gets a vastly expanded role in the new mu. strong career move ditching moon-boy.

got confused for a moment and thought he was gertie's dino but no that was Old Lace - wonder where that dude is. nico is in A-Force. and i think SW is gonna have a new runaways series.

it's very weird to me that the runaways went from having a sorta ambushbugesque outskirts of the marvel u storyline to being embedded so completely in continuity

they did? when?

they're young avengers and shit now aren't they?

How often does that sort of thing really last, though? Howard the Duck is one of the few characters of that type who's managed to stay on the fringes for any real length of time, but even with him there seems to be a more continuity-centric push of late.

DC is certainly better about it i guess. haven't heard from this guy lately
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071010010819/marvel_dc/images/a/a6/

er:
http://blogintomystery.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mazing5.jpg

though didn't it turn out that denton killed ralph dibney's wife?