Marvel Comics blabbery

Only (barely) related – I dug this costume redesign, but think it only lasted for a minute(?):

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marveldatabase/images/6/63/X-Factor_Vol_1_26.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/329?cb=20180228041215

(Hmm... the one time I don't test my shit out in the "html test" thread...)

Why come this never happened: 

Hello. We're X-Factor, here to capture the dangerous mutant you've identified in the area.
"Huh... you're a red-headed lady and a guy wearing AmberVision glasses, with a big 'X' on your jumpsuits. You look a lot like, y'know, that famous mutant team that's always in the news..."
Yes, it's a coincidence. What are the odds. Anyway, sometimes the lady covers her hair with a hat. Lead us to the mutant threat, please.

Oh, and the blond gentleman just has a really thick back. Those aren't folded wings. Why would you think that.

hello yes this is marvel girl she’s back. the fact my wife is identical to her is weird and awkward. hope we resolve this in the next few dozen issues

Out of nowhere (at least to me), Hickman and Hitch are writing a new Ultimate mini-series this week, which is apparently going to Kick Off Big Things.

The issue itself follows directly on from Secret Wars and nothing much happens, but it's quite good (won't spoil).

I wonder -- is this Hickman's thing, now? Instead of writing yearslong epics, he starts a story with a bang, pisses off, and gives it to someone less interesting to finish.

I am a completist by nature and this is a very bad quality to have with comics. I read ALL the Swamp Things and there is not a lot to recommend after Moore.

I'm currently trapped in She-Hulk. I got through Savage She-Hulk which was fine for being a dopey old comic. The Byrne stuff was good sometimes but the breaking the 4th wall eventually got tiring. I realized after reading the Byrne omnibus that there was an entire chunk missing when he left for a while. I'm reading those now and it's a slog. A good bit is written by Steve (Howard Duck) Gerber and it tries way too hard to be clever. The stuff in between Gerber and Byrne's return is dreck. Soon I'll get into more modern stuff and I'm hoping that will pick up a little.

I am a completist by nature and this is a very bad quality to have with comics.

Oh man, feeling u...

I read ALL the Swamp Things and there is not a lot to recommend after Moore.

No longer feeling u! Veitch 4 life (although I realize I'm in a serious minority for believing it to be one of the greatest comics runs of all time).

Veitch wasn’t great, but he was waaaay better than what came afterwards. The idea of Nancy Collins ST sounds good, but nope. The idea of teenage ST daughter sounds good, but nooooope.

Yes, both of those runs were terrible. Not-so-secretly love the Wheeler run, though.

Veitch run is great, Millar run frequently approaches competency.

about the Hickman bit?

he did the x-men thing for a couple years. exiting seemed planned, he was just setting up a much different status quo

the ultimate thingy seems less like a secret wars continuation than a backdoor way to return to his ultimate universe master plan imo


in other Marvel news, is that spider-man plot cycle they’re going through right now as bad as it seems? barely checked it out but it seems like “well, we have to explain the crazy shit that started the flash-forward in time status quo and just made up something”

the internet theory is that they intended to kill off MJ and chickened out at the last minute leading to some weird, but pro-corporate synergy choices.

The Spencer run had some similar meddling, seemed like they were finally about to undo the One More Day thing and then... nothing, run ended. Also had a crazy super retcon finale arc that was very strange. Followed by an odd stop-gap year with Ben Reilly returning temporarily ("Beyond")

I'm ride or die for the Millar Swamp Thing, which is not challenging Moore for the best Swamp Thing, but is definitely the best Millar.

Yeah the last Spider-Man run is not good. It’s like Spider-Man is Marvel’s Superman, they’re always breaking the status quo for no particular reason, perpetually whiffing it

I still haven’t read Moore’s run. I really should…

Oh man, it's the best.

I was not very pleased w/the last Spider-Woman series (though I bought all the trades), but I am pleased to see a new one (with different creative team) is coming: https://www.fandompost.com/2023/08/08/marvel-comics-sets-new-spider-woman-solo-series/

Jess is my favorite character, fwiw

Can anyone recommend a good 1980s Spider-Man run for a boring January evening? I know (and enjoy) the early 90s DeMatteis run — is there anything else like that?

I’m mildly intrigued by this

https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/4373093/avengers-twilight-1

But is the Dream?

Chip-written alternate reality? I'll give it a shot at some point

Disappointed at the lack of shiny vampires.

Zdarsky's career is so weirdly split between fun stuff and glum journeyman product. I like his Batman run right now, it's very silly but very readable. The first issue of Twilight was fine, but everyone's read a billion of these things by now and this one isn't anything special.

(FWIW the Cliff Chiang Catwoman miniseries from last year was a actually pretty fun, original take on "what if superheroes but dystopia and they're old so their back hurts")

since I enjoy reading random stuff on Marvel Unlimited, I started reading through the original Alpha Flight series from 1983. John Byrne might be a notorious shithead, but he could at least do a little X-Men style Canadian spinoff that had some interesting, if very dated by 2024 standards, moments

I guess it was subtle for the time since people weren’t looking for obvious tells, but any summary (see Wikipedia) that tries to say it took a while for the series to hint about Northstar’s sexuality is… wrong

I’ve been cracking up because every time he shows up there’s some obvious “hey did you know this guy is gay? he’s gay!” setup

I've always found Byrne to be vastly overrated. Most of his art is just so static, and there is a bland sameness that he brings to everything. I consider him the anti-Kirby.

I did enjoy the Doomsday +1 book he did for Charlton very early in his career.

yeah, I wouldn't say he's good per se compared to my favorites, but I think he's generally cohesive/consistent

with the whole Marvel Unlimited deal I've tackled a pretty broad swath of comics and tapped out more than a few times. so, I'm putting that caveat on my comments

When I was a kid in the 80s, I found Marvel Comics annoying because they had too many captions compared to DC.

That is probably... not true, but it's how it seemed at the time.

Anyway - I was reminded as I'm rereading Byrne's Superman run, for the first time since the UK reprints came out in the early 90s. They seem way more zippy and readable than his Marvel comics (although possibly more hacky - and his Superman is a real prude!)

I think the Marvel Method often leads to overwriting - scripters trying to fill every available space on the finished artwork. Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two. Once Byrne wrote full scripts for himself, he could let more of the artwork do the talking.

I do think it's a shame that the thought balloon has pretty much vanished from modern comics storytelling, tho - it's one of comics most distinctive literary devices!

Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two.

Orzechowski's lettering is so nice, it's probably hard to resist...

Claremont having a little catchphrase to describe the powers of each individual character, and the fact it was deployed about once per issue, makes you start to go a little insane after a while. I guess that in theory this would make it easier to start reading a comic at any point during the run, but it also makes a certain portion of each issue this background framework

Steve Gerber could go on at length like nobody's business.

I mean, all these Marvel writers are taking their cues from Stan the Man, who overwrote like crazy as a way of asserting himself on the product (and lol at the 'story' credit on this one):

https://www.comicsbookcase.com/features-archive/daredevil-comic-1966

https://i.imgur.com/LOYDFzn.jpg

How will you know that some real shit is going down if Betsy isn’t talking about the focused totality of her psychic powers?

LOL at Foggy already scheming about Karen.

xp lmao

Stan did have a flair for titles.

I may be alone in this but I think Claremont and Ann Nocenti are two of the better over-writers in comics. They can be purple and weird but they're very readable. Gerber, on the other hand...

Meanwhile I'm also rereading Milligan's Shade and some of those Vertigo titles are just as bad as Marvel.

... how would you be alone in liking Claremont in Nocenti, they're fairly beloved

I mean, it's a cliche that they're both a bit prolix. But I don't really see that - I think they're some of comics better sentence writers, i.e. wordy but easy to read. So often, reading comics feels like wading through sludge, and I don't get that with them.

I think it's relative. Compared to Alan Moore or some later writers, maybe they read as corny. But compared to the writing in most of the mainstream comics at the time they were on another level. Definitely soapy and wordy, but they helped bring more nuanced emotions into superhero books.

Well Nocenti is really a post-Claremont writer - she’s at the very tail end of the ‘overwriting’ era, a Shooter writer (whereas Claremont is very much a Roy Thomas writer).

Steve Gerber a million times better than either of them, of course.

I've ragged on Shooter for 45+ years for sanding down all the rough edges that made Marvel comics interesting in the 70s

― WmC, Tuesday, July 1, 2025 3:09 AM (sixteen hours ago)

Can you elaborate on this in the Comics board?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, July 1, 2025 1:24 PM (twenty-two minutes ago)

Sure, got some stuff to do but later. The short version is this:

Dreaded Deadline Doom notwithstanding, I loved the auteur years between Stan and Shooter as E-I-C. Shooter's ascension = the day the music died.
― Malibu Stasi (WilliamC), Saturday, September 6, 2014 6:18 PM (ten years ago)

A lot of stuff in that Sean Howe book about the weirdness of the 70's, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber and so on.

Agreed, Howe's book is great.

I must have read all the worst Marvel Comics of the 70s because I'm frequently perplexed by the acclaim for that era.

I guess all I can do is mention my favorites and hope you haven't read them yet.
Everything Steve Englehart wrote from 1972-1976
Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck, Man-Thing and Defenders
Don McGregor & Billy Graham's Black Panther run in Jungle Action
McGregor/Craig Russell on Killraven in Amazing Adventures
Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock runs
Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy on Master of Kung Fu
to a lesser degree, Rich Buckler's Deathlok series, which had some strong visuals though it was a storytelling mess
The b&w non-code horror and kung-fu magazines

Would add:
Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan (and Tom Palmer)
Conan by Thomas and Smith
Kirby's return, especially 2001, Captain America, Eternals

But over and above all the 'good' comics, 70s Marvels as a whole just have a fantastic VIBE, which you probably had to experience at the time to fully appreciate. Also, whether by accident or design, Roy Thomas and subsequent editors-in-chief assembled a fantastic group of creators who all offered something different - Gerber was a very different writer from Englehart, who was different to McGregor, who was different to Moench etc. And you had that moment when 'veteran' artists like Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney found themselves working on more stimulating scripts from younger writers and really raised their game, which was quite inspiring to see (if Vince Colletta didn't ruin their pencils).

I would say that by the time of Shooter's elevation to EIC, that 70s vibe and cohort had pretty much gone from the comics anyway, and people like Roy Thomas had got rather too comfortable as a Writer-Editor with nobody to really push them creatively. And again, whether by accident or design, there were still good Marvel Comics under Shooter's watch - Miller's Daredevil, Simonson's Thor, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men - that still had a personality and a style.

I've read a little bit of some of them. I have all that Gene Colan in black and white Essentials but couldn't stick with the story. I'm a big fan of the cosmic side of Marvel (at least from a visual standpoint) and a lot of that was happening in the 70s.

Once again: there are stacks of Marvel stuff I would buy just for the artwork if they would do good scans and were affordable. The Taschen collections look wonderful but they are super expensive and released at a snails pace.
https://www.taschen.com/en/collection/marvel-comics-library/

Is there any links to scans of Marvel Comics Presents 175? It goes for stupid money now, I probably could have had it for buttons when I was a teenager.