Marvel Comics blabbery

You do need to read three years' worth of two Avengers titles, but they *are* really good comics, so it's worth it, even if it takes a while. It's easily the best crossover I've read since Invasion!, way way back, which is what got me into superhero comics in the first place.

The only disappointing loose end [spoiler] was the central Cap vs. Iron Man conflict being resolved so weakly at the end of the Avengers run. And Infinity was a bunch of wank, really.

I'm glad Marvel have stood their ground against the fanboy moaners and kept the same artist in spite of the delays. It *has* dissipated the momentum, but you know, who gives tbh.

Out of the new titles, Iron Man, Totally Awesome Hulk and Captain America are surprising highlights; Thor continues to be great; Ms Marvel continues to run out of steam; Dr Strange and Waid's Avengers started weak but have promise; everything by Soule and Lemire is dull as shit.

Granted, I'm still about a year's worth of material away from Secret Invasion, but it seems pretty clear that Hickman's Avengers titles were intended from the start as a preamble for something much much bigger. So I guess it's worth thinking of his Avengers run less as a perfunctory chore in the lead-up to Secret Wars than the opening chapters of a long story which ends with Secret Wars.

The new Devil Dinosaur series is pretty good and I like Weirdworld a lot.

Right now, my favorite Marvel book is Doctor Strange

of course it is

only spoiler for today I will share is that the multiverse is still a thing ;)

have to say I share Tuomas's distaste for these UNIVERSE_SHATTERING-CONTINUITY-RESETTING-EVENTS but it seems like it's the only thing Marvel and DC can think of to do at this point, constant crises = sales + branding consistency, but it makes for shitty comics imo

the thing is that they generally maintain for a decade or so in-between. short of starting over and heightening the stakes, after ten years of in-depth life with one character who can shoot lasers out of their eyes, what else do you do?

create new characters

easy peasy

they've tried that too...
http://www.multiversitycomics.com/columns/return-of-the-return-of-the-1993-marvel-annuals/
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/3/36267/729107-25143_20060601140205_large.jpg

I mean Alan Moore's got a lot of crazy opinions but he is absolutely correct about the Big Two's creatively bankrupt/entirely financially motivated interest in just exploiting their existing properties rather than encouraging the development of new ones. Kirby didn't draw Fantastic Four for 50 years, he moved on and made up new shit, as was pretty much the case with every comics creator for decades. But now we just get reiterations and recreations of the same old shit, just shuffled around and reconstituted in the most confusing money-grubbing manner possible.

cool

the alternative is that you get a good writer/artist team and pay them well and let them have creative control of their book and then build numbers so you have a legit following, a'la hawkeye, captain marvel, squirrel girl but that's not a long term solution and not good for the company. what team in their right mind would stay on a single book for a decade at the height of their creative peak when they don't own the characters? the few that are capable eventually become industries unto themselves and merge, borg-like with the company (bendis, byrne)

essentially, i think it's intractable and that the superhero universes will need to go through these weird entropic cycles for the rest of our lives.

short of starting over and heightening the stakes

tbh I preferred the direction DC were moving towards in the 80s with a kind of legacy/passing of the torch thing for major characters - the mantle of Flash being passed from Barry Allen to Wally West etc. You could still have the same basic premise and characteristics, but things could change or shift over time. But they long ago abandoned that tack, it's kinda too late to go back to something like that.

xp

the only universal alternative these days appears to be emulation of the post grim'n'gritty Miller years... the 'more things in heaven and earth' philosophy founded by moore and filed to a razor by morrison wherein we never really understood these myths in a meaningful way to begin with, I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND

perhaps not so strangely, my fave hero books are regressing back to sheldon meyer principles of slapstick, encyclopedia brown mysteries and character development. a "comics ARE for kids" comeback is one I'd welcome.

your suggestion of "torch passing" is being emulated in the xmen movie franchise and will likely make a serious comeback when the current avengers roster outdates their characters in 2022 or sooner. RDJ is in amazing shape for a fifty year old, but they're not gonna have a sixty year old iron man.

haha yeah that's true about the films, I wonder if that's gonna turn into a tale-wagging-the-dog kinda situation where the necessities of filmmaking impact the comics.

my fave hero books are regressing back to sheldon meyer principles of slapstick, encyclopedia brown mysteries and character development. a "comics ARE for kids" comeback is one I'd welcome

I'm totally in favor of this

Shakes, a lot of your complaints seem to suggest that you haven't actually read any Marvel comics in a while. There is, for example, a whole lot of torch-passing going on of late.

young avengers and whatnot

xpostSheldon Mayer, not Meyer

I definitely recall Alan Moore saying, in the late 1980s, how he wished superhero writers wld look to C.C. Beck's Captain Marvel for inspiration, rather than Watchmen or Dark Knight

that is true I gave up quite awhile ago. I flip through things on the shelf sometimes but the only floppies I buy are for my daughter (who mostly prefers DC's kids' comics as far as superheroes go) and um GI Joe vs. Transformers, which is incredible.

xp

marvels' and dc's explicit attempt at bolstering a female readership is one of the more interesting currently running inside stories imo

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a Marvel comic tbh, it's been decades

no wait I liked GMoz's X-Men run

there are several good marvel books being put out right now! not that i'm buying floppies ever again for the foreseeable future but you should get Marvel Unlimited (connectivity issues aside) and set aside an hour and you will be amazed!

I don't own any digital device I would want to read comics on tbh

I will check out Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel though, thx to this thread (I thumbed through Hawkeye but was kinda eh about it)

The fifteen years since Morrison's New X-Men have featured some of the best-written comics in Marvel's history. Arguably, and admittedly not across the board, but still.

i would also recommend howard the duck, mark waid's run on daredevil, basically all of the new star wars books, Nick Spencer's Ant Man, Groot, Dan Slott and Michael Allred's Silver Surfer, Warren Ellis' run on Moon Knight, phil noto's Black widow...

But, also, a lot of the comics they're putting out now don't resemble the stuff they were doing even 5-10 years ago. They're clearly trying to evolve.

If Morrisonesque superhero comics appeal to you, you could do a lot worse than Hickman's Marvel work.

Al Ewing's Mighty Avengers run has turned into the new The Ultimates, which seems pretty good so far. The core of the team includes the Blue Marvel, which had a kind of so-so "let's retcon a black superhero into the Marvel universe" origin but has really come into his own.

I think Marvel has mostly moved past the phase of comics where underserved characters are written with that as their main characteristic, which has been a problem.

I'm not enjoying The Ultimates as much as I enjoyed Mighty Avengers but I think that's partially because the team synergy with Hulkling, Wiccan and Squirrel Girl in the mix feels off

it's leaving plenty of room to grow, imo

I forgot to mention Al's New Avengers, it's excellent. The Ultimates, I haven't gotten into yet. On the whole I wish they'd kept Mighty Avengers happening. That was a great book.

MH, can you do one of your awesome summaries and explain me what happened in the last half of Secret Wars 9?

Sure!

Doom thinks he's smart enough to spot a distraction, but apparently not, as Reed and the Maker aka Ultimate Reed make their way to Molecule Man's White Room (not to be confused with the set of THX-1138, the phoenix entity's white room, or a room with black curtains). Owen's still hungry, as no one remembers to feed the poor bastard. Doom realizes he's being played, and fights both Reeds until he makes the crucial mistake of being badgered into admitting that Richards would have been able to imagine a better world. MM snaps to attention and hands the reins to his power over, which obliterates Battleworld, to be remade in Richards' image. There's a neat splash page with Reed/Victor talking, which goes back to all their past interactions. Reed is a nurturer, Victor's a protector.

Outside the room, as the world ends, Black Panther sees the light in his non-gauntlet-clad hand light up, indicating a world-destroying event is imminent. He seems to embrace it. After the flash of light, he finds himself in Wakanda, which apparently has a space program. He calls to the students studying nearby, calling them Makers, which is apparently the buzzword of the day.

Flash forward to eight months later (jeez these people love time lapses and countdowns) to Peter Parker and Miles Morales swinging around town. Miles's dead mom is back due to the universe smashing, possibly just a wink to him being the only one who packs a lunch.

The main aftereffect of the whole shebang is back on the moon, where Franklin is using his powers of imagination to dream up whole universes. There was a neat bit in the Hickman FF issues where the future Franklin coached his younger self into adventures every night where he'd explore worlds he'd conjure up, so he's in practice. Hopefully he's better at imagining Marvel universes than that time he created that Heroes Reborn clusterfuck, but who knows, Liefeld-verse might be out there. Reed still has the power Molecule Man has given him, and he's launching these fully formed universes into the void between multiverses and embedding a MM in each, who hopefully aren't bombs anymore. His power should diminish with each launch since he's giving up MM copies?

Sue is not the copy from Battleworld, but the original 616 version recreated so she assumes Reed saved her when the raft broke up. It's up in the air how many people remember Battleworld, but it's probably just those who were on the life rafts that didn't die. Reed's more optimistic than he's been in a long time, and likens his outlook to a belief in life and expansion instead of death and entropy, summing up the diseased universe breaking and collapsing and only being held together by Victor as opposed to his new role as cosmic creator.

Dr. Doom gazes across his balcony in Latveria, pulls off his mask to reveal an unscarred face (he was still hideously disfigured in Battleworld, unable to imagine a world where life and creation could blossom) and laughs.

At first I thought the gem that the Black Panther used as everything was winking out was yellow, the Time Gem, and he used it to go back to pre-Battleworld existence. But maybe it was orange, the Reality Gem, and he used it to reconstitute 616. From the coloring it's not entirely clear which gem it was.

It's possible that the Doom piece of Battleworld is the center of the new 616 (or whatever) but as noted earlier in the series, the infinity gems only work in the universe of their origin, to the extent that Strange made sure Doom's castle was constructed on a world fragment where the gauntlet existed. So its power was limited in the scope of fixing things.

something poetic about a white-hooded man being confronted by a black panther with his fist in the air

Thanks MH!

It is depressing/existentially weird to think that almost everyone did, in fact, die, and that from now on all the versions of your Marvel favourites are just Reed and Franklin's recreations.

I've been haunted since I was a child by the idea that you "die" every night when you got to sleep - or, at least, that day's version of you dies, because you think and feel differently in the morning.

So - creepy. But I guess more satisfying/interesting than Superboy punching everyone different.

Spider-Woman is the funnest thing going on currently.

Funnier than Squirrel Girl?

Haven't read SG. I'll give it a shot. Also, funnest not funniest.

Oh sorry, I misread that.

enh 'fun' applies to squirrel girl too. that galactus issue! so enjoyable.

I don't like Squirrel Girl and I feel bad about it. (I think it just topped Tom's poll.) Sort of feels "amusing" but not actually "funny". Sorry, grouch.

I was blase on issue #1 (the first issue #1) of Squirrel Girl until I noticed the running captions at the bottom of every page; that really made the book for me.