Marvel Comics blabbery

and I'm saying forget it happened, just read good spider-man issues

xpost
Those Colan issues of Doctor Strange were the first time that Tom Palmer had inked Colan's pencils - Palmer was only about eighteen years old at the time, but could already claim to be Colan's best inker with George Klein his only real rival. Just beautiful stuff, and Roy the Boy back before he was a Republican, writing some great naively psychedelic opportunistic hipster stuff, w/ decent plotting and invention.

Tom Wolfe made a follow-up appearance - in the white suit - in a Thomas scripted issue of the Hulk pleasingly called "They Shoot Hulks Don't They"

https://i2.wp.com/i41.photobucket.com/albums/e256/caker23/more%20pix/Hulk142Wolfe.jpg

this anecdote:
Englehart and Brunner created another multi-issue storyline featuring sorcerer Sise-Neg ("Genesis" spelled backward) going back through history, collecting all magical energies, until he reaches the beginning of the universe, becomes all-powerful and creates it anew, leaving Strange to wonder whether this was, paradoxically, the original creation. Stan Lee, seeing the issue after publication, ordered Englehart and Brunner to print a retraction saying this was not God but a god, to avoid offending religious readers. The writer and artist concocted a fake letter from a fictitious minister praising the story, and mailed it to Marvel from Texas. Marvel unwittingly printed the letter and dropped the retraction

Not sure if Gary Glitter and milk bottle man are still in continuity

https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/1105907.jpg

lester bangs was in amazing spider-man iirc

waaaaht how come I can't find an img of this

That xpost plot synopsis is everything I love best about marvel

how come I can't find an img of this

Incredible how this has been suppressed.

it's almost like it never happened

My son got a "blind box" with a "Captain America: Civil War"–themed bobblehead; I couldn't identify the character upon opening it (a blonde woman wielding sticks), so I checked the Web and figured out it's the SHIELD agent who was portrayed in the movie by the Emily Thorne actress from "Revenge." (I watched half the movie on TV recently, but it left almost no impression.)

Then I checked further, and learned that this particular character (Sharon Carter) has been around since 1966(!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Carter

That's the kicker with Marvel; you can scratch the surface and find there's tons of history on a character you've never even heard of. (I rarely encountered SHIELD when I was a reader in the '80s and early '90s, so didn't know most of the backstory.)

status quo for most of the last decade or two is that she's captain america's girlfriend in the comics

at least when he's not being killed or stuck in time or actually the red skull, and she's not being brainwashed

Also worth noting that Captain America's girlfriend is the niece of Captain America's dead ex-girlfriend. Which, y'know, a little weird.

Oh, is her aunt that "Agent Carter of SHIELD" from the TV show set in the 1940s?

yeah, she was in the first Captain America film

Great-aunt, I think.

Actually, Peggy is quite a bit more than incidental -- she's in The First Avenger as a possible romantic foil for Captain America but he "dies," she reappears in the Winter Soldier basically on her deathbed and in flashback to the origins of SHIELD (they made the tv miniseries take place in that time), and then in Civil War there's a scene with her funeral.

Yeah, she's been retconned to be age appropriate for whenever Captain America thaws out. The women stay the same age, but WW2 just gets further in the past every year.

war never changes iirc

https://media.giphy.com/media/OWrtdm1irskAE/giphy.gif

That's what I love about Carter girls, man. They get older, and I stay the same age and start dating their nieces at some point.

defrosted and confused

I think Sharon was Peggys sister to begin with, and it wasn't until Brubaker that she was changed to her niece. And it was pretty controversial at the time.

Yeah, she's been retconned to be age appropriate for whenever Captain America thaws out. The women stay the same age, but WW2 just gets further in the past every year.

This actually a part of larger problem that comes with the sliding timeline: Marvel may retcon the origins of some heroes that relate to real-world events (Ben and Reed aren't WWII veterans anymore, the origins of Iron Man and Punisher aren't tied to the Vietnam War any longer), but Cap, Peggy Carter Red Skull, Namor, the original Human Torch, etc, are so intricately tied to 2nd World War that it's very hard to retcon that, and they have never tried. But this raises the question, why haven't there been any superheroes in the gap between the 1940s and whenever the origin of the FF takes place in the ever-adjusting timeline? At the moment that gap must be something like 60 years, and it keeps getting bigger.

In the 1960s, the gap was less than two decades, and the recent emergence of mutants was explained by atomic testing that began in the 1940s, so the children of the atomic era were only then coming of age. But now we know mutants have been around for centuries, so where were they before the 00s, or whenever the X-Men started according to the current timeline? Why didn't the costumed heroes of the 1940s inspire a new generation of heroes until 60 years later, but after that new heroes start to pop up constantly?

baby boomers too self-absorbed to fight crime iirc

I sorta felt like Jonathan Hickman was going to try and explain this in S.H.I.E.L.D., but then he never finished it.

The members of Agents of Atlas are mostly from the '50s. Plus they've retconned plenty of characters into that era ('50s Avengers, Byrne's Lost Generation).

imo it's easier to gloss over the difficulties in how your near-ageless characters relate to humans when they're also the gorilla man

Isn't it, Captain America is perpetually World War II guy, and that's fine, you just update his defrost date, then at some point Sharon will have to be Peggy's grandchild or whatnot.

only one solution: freeze Sharon

seriously though, Agents of Atlas did some smart moves on the ageless character front. a robot, a guy from uranus, a goddess, gorilla dude, all of them are divorced enough from humanity it all just works

I'm sorry, a guy from where

oh, you know

fwiw he was Marvel's original "Marvel Boy" and he now goes by... The Uranian

http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Robert_Grayson_(Earth-616)

Uranian? Hallelujah.

Was not aware of this fellow, but sounds like a respectful "R.I.P." is in order: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/james-galton-dead-marvel-president-ceo-was-92-1012944

Nah, corporate hack who appears to have had little or no creative/aesthetic vision, did zilch for creator's rights during his time at Marvel and presided over the artistic decline of the Shooter era.

the direct market was an idea that worked really well for a while, until it completely wrecked so many things

as far as release day comics go...

I have the feeling that Jason Aaron is having a lot of fun with this Star Wars book

I didn't know Aaron was doing Star Wars.... he's so great with Thor. I've never read an SW comic, even tho I enjoy the motion picture property (like the rest of Gen-X humanity).

Star Wars is quite good - Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader is excellent though.

I think out of the half dozen or so series maybe only one has been mediocre. I have Charles Soule some flack before but combined with the right artist (Alex Maleev) on Lando he's ok!

Really I think the really middling to bad art on the Dark Horse stuff is what kept me away from Star Wars comics in the past

I'm told that none of that old stuff is SW "canon" any longer, anyway... (for what that's worth, probably not much).

quite a bit, actually! they're doing really well with keeping things in line with all the nu-canon, and while some of the material released (looking at a certain book series here) feels a little like it's connecting dots between dictated points, there are references between the books, comics, television and movies that make sense

I think a couple of the main departures have been Luke seeking out Jedi ephemera in the space between the original films, and the post-original trilogy lack of Jedi that leads in well to the new films

all stuff for the Star Wars threads, though. just pick up that Vader book and watch him taking down entire groups of rebels

The photo-referencing on Larocca's art is getting out of hand. Every panel looks like a bad papaerback. it's like he's a whole new, much worse artist since Dath Vader ended.

Also for some reason the redhead baddie has exactly the same facial features as an ex and it's freaking me out.

it's because salvador is "referencing" your ex if you get my drift ;)

kudos to Jason Aaron on taking Thor back up another notch

Thanks for the cue. Best issue in a long while. Feel like it's been a bit snoozy since Secret Wars.

I've never had this with an artist before - I love Dauterman's art, and he's a good storyteller, but his panel layouts are fucking annoying.

I'm not a fan of the "bokeh" effect employed sometimes in the "Thor" artwork -- but I assume that is more likely the work of the "color artist," Matthew Wilson (rather than Dauterman).

i wondered if that had a term for it. thought of it as cheesy motion blur

Guess that is how it manifests on the most recent cover (blur of hammer in downward motion). Thought I noticed it before more as a "depth of field" / camera-out-of-focus effect. Either way, it looks fake and, indeed, cheesy.

This was a very good issue, btw (#20). The parallels being drawn with the war in Syria were clear, but effective (and affecting) -- not always the case with such "torn from the headlines" maneuvers.

One other note -- I actually agree with sentiments of the final letter in the letterpage (from "Kevin in Columbus, OH"): as great as this series has been, Thor/Foster is not as richly developed a character as the hero of a series usually is. (Think I said something similar above.) The assoc. editor sort of brushes it off, saying "Jane's cancer has been a theme since issue #1"... I assume she's not suggesting that giving a character cancer is a substitute for depth/complexity(!), but is rather saying that Jane's struggle against her disease should be providing what Kevin is asking for (character development via "overcoming an adversary"). Regardless, I just wish Jane's personality came through more strongly. Especially in a book with so many strong (Asgardian) personalities, Thor tends to fade into the background of her own book.

Yep agree. Aaron doesn't write Jane as well as he writes regular Thor, or even Roz.