Marvel Comics blabbery

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.

Ahh, didn't know there was a BP movie in the works. I was looking at an Ant Man Epic Collection just the other day - on the one hand, it reprints some very rare and expensive early Marvel comics at a reasonable-ish price - on the other hand, most of the stories are utter rubbish.

Maybe it’s regional, but most Epics I’ve seen sell for $25.00 (i.e. $10 more than Essentials) and I’ve never seen them sold for cover price.

Nonetheless, they should’ve kept Essentials!

I like both Masterworks (paperback) and Essentials. They really need to rethink Omnibuses. They are way too expensive and impossible to read (for their price you’d expect a textbook binding).

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

!!! This is very good news, just recently discovered my old floppies.

And the second volume is due in December or something, so it looks like chances are good that they'll plow through to the end.

I was looking at an Ant Man Epic Collection just the other day - on the one hand, it reprints some very rare and expensive early Marvel comics at a reasonable-ish price - on the other hand, most of the stories are utter rubbish.

Yeah, those early Ant-Man stories are really awful. Pretty much the low point of the Silver Age, from what I've read. That collection is a little silly, since the material they're reprinting was already issued in an Essentials trade and, to the extent that the movie was an impetus for its publication, it would have made much more sense to put out a collection of the as-yet-unreprinted Scott Lang stuff from the '70s. Deep sighs, Marvel.

Tell me about the recoloring on the epic collections. I am defaulting to the assumption that it is hideous and detrimental but would love to hear to the contrary

It probably depends on what era is being reprinted, yeah? The coloring in those Spidey alien costume trades looks appropriately '80s-ish and understated, IIRC. I don't think I've ever seen recoloring as awful and garish as what Dark Horse, et al did to the reprints of the '70s R.E. Howard stuff, so I rarely have complaints in that regard.

I take it you haven't seen the Nick Fury paperback reprint of SHIELD stuff

This is true. I will, however, probably buy the new, complete Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD omnibus sight unseen despite what I've heard about the earlier trade.

Jon, I wouldn't say that the (re)colouring on the epic collections is 'hideous' - I'm guessing that it's matched to the original comic printing in most cases, and as Old Lunch says, on the whole it's understated - they haven't added flashy computer colouring effects to old Kirby/Ditko pages. In comparison to the early hardcover Masterworks - truly some of the nastiest recolouring I've ever seen - they're a model of taste and restraint. But it is still obviously colour produced on a computer, so 'feels' wrong, and I would be more interested in Marvel reprints shot directly from the comics themselves. Of Of course,Marvel kept very very poor copies - if at all - of their early superhero titles, so that almost from the start, reprints of the Silver Age material have involved greater or lesser amounts of 'correction', redrawing etc, that often significantly departs from the original artwork and its first printing.

hmmmmm
http://nypost.com/2015/07/14/did-stan-lee-steal-spider-man-from-a-brooklyn-costume-shop/

The costumes looks nothing alike, beyond what you'd get if you got two guys to design different spider-man costumes. I am curious how common the <something>-Man name would have been back then, though.

I think there was a Superguy or something back then