Marvel Comics blabbery

Someone on the John Buscema Facebook page shared this great anecdote about Buscema's art tuition class:

So there we were, in Buscema's Workshop for Comic Book Art, at the Commodore Hotel - one day close to Christmas. Big John decided to hand out pages of original art as a gift to each of us. As he reached my seat, he was surprised to find this splash page in the stack! "I could get $50. for this one!" he exclaimed as he tried to shuffle it back to the bottom of the stack and hand me the next page down - but the next one had been heavily corrected & pieced together... Buscema paused for a moment, looked at this longingly, then shoved it at me... "What the Hell! Merry Christmas, kid!"

And this is the page:

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/t31.0-8/s960x960/11406607_10207496983886091_7641302544163860037_o.jpg

wow. hell of a piece of art too!

I never had much of an appreciation for Buscema (John, anyway...I was wild about Sal back in the day) until I started reading some of his old Conan stuff and wondering how the hell I'd overlooked him before.

FYI, still doing the pre-Secret Wars catch-up and started reading Remender's Captain America more out of a sense of completionism than real interest, but it's actually really good! The first arc, anyway, which is some Planet Hulk-level Big Action gamechangery.

i caught up on remender's cap recently too and really enjoyed it. cap's relationship with ian was surprisingly touching!

Yeah, he really pulled off the hat trick that's eluded Marvel so much of late in creating a big and bombastic action story that also has legitimate emotional beats and characters the reader cares about and is invested in.

Steve Rogers as a dad is really something that makes a lot of sense.

It's good! I think the run kind of falls apart after that story, sadly, although the big blowout finish is worth slogging through to get to. But then the Falcon stuff back to being super generic.

Just noticed that Jeff Lemire is the X-men writer, which is a hot snooze.

Stoked for:
Captain Marvel
Daredeveil
Dr. Strange
Iron Man
Thor
Sam Wilson, Capt. America
Vision
Spider-Man (Miles Morales)

Will give a chance for a few issues:
A-Force
All New All Different Avengers
Ant-Man
Hawkeye
New Avengers
Scarlet Witch
Squadron Supreme
Ultimates
Old Man Logan
Spider-Woman
Karnak
Uncanny Inhumans
Illuminati

Little or no interest:
Agents of SHIELD
Angela
Nova
Hulk
Uncanny Avengers
Wolverine
All New X-Men
Deadpool
Extraordinary X-Men
Uncanny X-Men
Amazing Spider-Man
Carnage
Silk
Spider-Gwen
Spider-Man 2099
Venom: Spaceknight
Web Warriors
Ms. Marvel
Guardians of the Galaxy (might check it for 1 or 2 issues)
Drax
Star-Lord
Gamora
Contest of Champions
Howard the Duck
Howling Commandos of SHIELD

They're on issue three (I think) of Lemire's All-New Hawkeye and it's pretty good, Hawkeye #22 hasn't come out and they're already announcing a #1 for a new Hawkeye series. Yeeesh.

a new hawkeye *other* than all-new hawkeye??

All-New-Hawkeyeeye

Nothing by Hickman or Gillen, and Daredevil and Loki are finishing, so this is a net loss for me - especially Daredevil, which should've just carried on permanently like a Dick Tracy strip or something.

But still, some interesting-looking stuff. Al E has three titles, which is super, including a Mighty Avengers reboot. Jason Aaron on Doc Strange seems like a good match. Thor will probably carry on being great.

Still curious why Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire getting so much work, both kinda unexceptional.

What are the other two Al E titles?

Ulitmates (!) and New Avengers (!!)

Actually I guess Ultimates is kind of the reboot (as it has Monica Rambeau and Blue Marvel, along with Black Panther, America Chavez, Captain Marvel and, er, Galactus). Contest of Champions, a video game adaptation, is his third.

Gillen has been coy and non-bridge-burning about it, but since The Wicked & the Divine has blown up, he's been describing his Battleworld work as his farewell (for now, depending on circumstances, etc) to Marvel - of course he's still writing Darth Vader.

I personally prefer his hackwork to his indie work, but really hard to begrudge that decision. Kind of hated his work until I finally read Journey into Mystery; he's really grown on me since.

Still haven't quite synced up with Gillen. On the other hand, I wasn't that into Jason Aaron based on what I'd read of his in the past but having just read his first year on Thor I may be changing my tune. Really good stuff, and I'm glad to see he's sticking with it.

a new hawkeye *other* than all-new hawkeye??

Cool to see Greg Pak back on the Hulk, as well.

I think Aaron's first year-and-a-half on Thor was my favourite trad superhero thing since, I dunno, Seven Soldiers. It's levelled out a bit since then, but it's still very good.

Finally a release date for Hawkeye #22 -- July 15th.

What happened to Surfer?

That's a very vague question.

lately he's been traveling around space w/ his human love interest

Finally a release date for Hawkeye #22 -- July 15th.

― dart scar rashes (WilliamC), Sunday, July 5, 2015 2:24 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd completely forgotten this was coming lol

It remains to be seen if my theory pays off once I get caught up to Secret Wars, but I'm about a year into a bunch of the Marvel Now! reboot titles and it seems like almost all of them have contained a plot/subplot involving potentially-inadvisable time/space fuckery. I'm assuming at the moment that this is all part of the years-long planning that went into SW, so it'll be interesting to see how many of these plot strands get callbacks.

I was reading somewhere a review basically making the point that Silver Surfer is currently Doctor Who with the serial numbers filed off

ha, that's right! but allred, so great!

I assumed all the time-wimey stuff was just writers being told to go for broke with the status quo, safe in the knowledge that everything would reset after Secret Wars.

Daredevil seems to be (spoiler alert) going for a proper reboot, with MM back in New York, no one knowing his secret ID, and (presumably) none of Waid's supporting cast. Which is disappointing but I guess ultimately who cares. Is there a word for fridging via continuity reboot?

Judging from his Facebook page, Dan Slott, who is writing SS at the moment, is a massive Who fan

http://www.david-tennant-news.com/blog/pix-wizard-world-philly-celebrity-photo-highlights-includes-david-tennant-and-billie-piper/

I was reading somewhere a review basically making the point that Silver Surfer is currently Doctor Who with the serial numbers filed off

*adds Silver Surfer to pull list*

too late, it's all over, man

*hops into time machine*

If I had one request for Marvel at the moment, it would be that they let their post-Secret Wars titles just, y'know, keep running. Stop all the rebooting. We're about to get the third Uncanny X-Men #1 in less than five years. At the very very least, I would ask that they figure out a way for the collections to make sense of the reboot confusion (e.g. the multiple different Captain Marvel trades I saw in the bookstore labeled as Volume 1). I'm able to keep track only because I'm a super Marvel nerd, but the casual fan isn't going to give enough of a shit to try to figure out Marvel's lack of rationale wrt this stuff.

I've been reading random Marvel collections that are on scribd -- switched to it over Marvel Unlimited for a while since it also has IDW/Valiant stuff. Their organization is really bad, especially from the iPad app. Sometimes you can pick a collection and it'll know what sequence the following collections are in, but browsing is bad.

The lesson it has taught me is that randomly consuming storylines in nonsequential order isn't all that bad, but it's kind of irritating.

I should start a thread about the new Valiant universe if we don't have one. There's some good stuff in there.

I wondered how long it was going to take for the wheels to start coming off of Marvel's Epic Collections plan (for those unfamiliar, they're unofficially replacing the Essentials but are being ambitiously released out of order with volume numbers assigned, e.g. Avengers v.17: Judgement Day) and the answer is 'a little over a year'. I bought the two books collecting the Spider-Man alien costume stuff, which are nicely comprehensive and cover all of the involved titles from that period...and which heavily overlap with a separate Spider-Man Epic Collection that was released last summer. And these books are super not cheap. So, y'know, yet another round of congratulations to the Marvel reprint department.

That's a very vague question.

LOL. Why wasn’t it picked up? It isn’t in the new Marvel Previews. It’s my favorite Marvel title. :(

Every Marvel title is ending. Many of them are being rebooted (most with new creative teams) after Secret Wars is over.

I wondered how long it was going to take for the wheels to start coming off of Marvel's Epic Collections plan (for those unfamiliar, they're unofficially replacing the Essentials but are being ambitiously released out of order with volume numbers assigned, e.g. Avengers v.17: Judgement Day) and the answer is 'a little over a year'. I bought the two books collecting the Spider-Man alien costume stuff, which are nicely comprehensive and cover all of the involved titles from that period...and which heavily overlap with a separate Spider-Man Epic Collection that was released last summer. And these books are super not cheap. So, y'know, yet another round of congratulations to the Marvel reprint department.

I like them. They released an Iron Fist volume this week which is nice since Iron Fist never got a Masterworks paperback.

I like them in theory except that a) they're effing expensive and b) they're replacing an abandoned reprint series that was much more affordable. Like that Iron Fist Epic Collection is basically just a color version of Essential Iron Fist at double the price.

The expense might be worth it to people who prefer color reprints but I think it's a shame that the Essentials had to be sacrificed in the process.

Yeah, I miss the Essential, too. The repro on the Epic Collections looks OK on the whole, but a lot of them have new colouring, not always to good effect.

Thankfully, I'm currently only about 10-12 books away from owning all of the Essentials, so I don't have too much work to do before they're all totally out of print and fetching exorbitant prices. Such is my sickness.

I held off buying the Black Panther Essentials because I had all the Kirby material in it, and now that's one of the ones going for stupid prices. And the Marvel Masterworks reprinting the McGregor stuff is also out of print. I guess there'll be an Epic Collection at some point, but can't see it being a big priority.

It could be, with the impending movie. The MCU seems to be driving a lot of the reprints these days.

I mean, they're finally starting proper reprints of Priest's run starting this month or next. So keep your eyes peeled.