Marvel Comics blabbery

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.

Ok, I will try again, again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCivz_0fJNQ

why were MTV's microphones so gigantic

You know, I still think of the 90s if I type "Peter David's X-Factor issues" but the run in the 2000s when he returned, which ran quite a few issues, is pretty great.

I'm with you on that. His second run on X-Factor lasted way longer but that initial run is the one that's stuck with me.

So many mullets in that video! I don't know how I never saw those clips before. That would've aired at a time when I was both incessantly glued to MTV and in the initial throes of my Marvel obsession.

You should read some of that not so recent but 2000s run! I feel like he really did ponder what the characters are up to

I have read both runs (and like 95% of everything X-related, more generally). The second run started very strong but got more than a little aimless as it went on. I've also started but haven't finished All-New X-Factor which doesn't really resemble either earlier run in any meaningful sense and which hasn't exactly bowled me over thus far.

The 00s run is the one that starts with Jamie Madrox absorbing a dying clone and featured little notes on his family in the 'previously' page?

his = PADs

Yeah, that's the one.

I enjoyed the Secret War series he did where he mashed together his future X-Factor characters with his future Hulk characters

so they launched an 'all-new hawkeye' comic that actually ... had the exact setup of the preceding hawkeye comic, then after number five they launched another all-new hawkeye #1 which continues directly from #5

for something that I can get hundreds of thousands of issues to read without getting out of bed, marvel comics sure are inconvenient

Starting in June, every new issue of a Marvel comic will be branded as #1 in perpetuity.

The least they could do is some kinda '90s Superman numbering shit to keep things straight. I'm way on top of this stuff and it's confusing even for me. I cannot even imagine how casual fans make heads or tails of anything (like trying to keep track of the three volumes of Captain Marvel that have been released in the last couple of years, featuring Carol Danvers, who was previously named Ms. Marvel but who is not the Ms. Marvel who has had two separate volumes of her own comic within the same span of time).

the sad thing is that i could easily keep all this shit straight in my head when i was 15, when i'd have to travel for a couple of hours in each direction to buy my comics. now that i'm 35 and have access to 50 years of marvel to read anytime and anywhere, most of the time it's too much effort to work out which captain america or whatever i should be reading next and i just end up doing something else instead.

Well, twenty years ago, Marvel would actually continue issuing a single volume of a title for decades at a time rather than rebooting every six months. It was a much more streamlined thing. And they also put out about a third or a quarter of today's volume of titles.

does continually bringing out new #1s really have a positive effect on sales? i'd have guessed diminishing returns would have set in long ago but they keep doing it!

it doesn't help that marvel unlimited will frequently throw an additional spanner in the works by filing All-New Forbush Man as under 'A' rather than with all the other Forbush Man comics under 'F'. it took me like a year to realise that the new squirrel girl series was on there because it wasn't where i expected it to be under 'S'.

I honestly can't keep track of the verbiage for the line-wide rebranding. I don't know what's Marvel Now! and what's All-New Marvel Now! and what's Even Newer Marvel Tomorrow! and Super-Seriously Way-New Marvel Future!

also this hawkeye comic sucks

the thought of an all-new hawkguy without fraction/aja is deeply unappealing tbh

I wouldn't say the new Hawkeye sucks but it's definitely not as good as the Fraction/Aja/Wu iteration

in the first five the present day bits just felt like the same thing done less well (why are kate and clint being idiots?) and the kid stuff was just ...

We (me and my friends in middle school/high school times) used to think it was awesome that Thor was on issue 348 and capt America on issue 275 etc etc. it made us want to read those series more. I mean new titles were exciting too but those triple digit issue numbers were IMPOSING like the way hulk lifting 50 tons was imposing.

Yeah, that's pretty OTM. But everything is Tweets and Vines now, who has time for long shit, man.

The first issue of Uncanny X-Men I picked up was #273. This was immediately on the heels of a crossover (X-Tinction Agenda, I believe), and all of the X-teams were hanging out at Xavier's. I had no idea who 90% of these people were, and there was a ton of them. Totally baffling, but also totally intriguing because I'd jumped into the middle of this story that had clearly been going on for a looooong time, and the fascination with digging into that backstory has kept me going for a couple of decades since in a way that I don't know I would've been as inclined to do had I first picked up, say Uncanny X-Men v.3 #4.

One of my first X-Men issues was during the X-Cutioner's Song crossover. I still don't understand what happened in that crossover.

there's just too much now. I would be more inclined to dip my toe in if series naming/numbering wasn't so bafflingly complicated.

One hopes that shit will settle down in the wake of Secret Wars but we shall see.

damn, and I thought I was kind of a latecomer to Uncanny X-Men at #210

I wasn't going any deeper into comics than G.I. Joe at that point.

huh, #272 was my first issue of uncanny!

Weird! And that was still most of a year away from Claremont leaving and all of the other big changes and new series, and a number of months before Infinity Gauntlet (the thing that cemented my own Zombification), so I don't even know what that's about. Synergy!

first one i remember was #176; i remember i thought it was wild that cyclops was destroying the name of the book

90% of my Marvel Universe collection at that point was culled from whatever random stuff I found in grab bags and on drugstore racks. Like one issue each of Alpha Flight, Micronauts: The New Voyages, New Warriors, etc.

Renumbering Ms Marvel - an actually popular IRL life comic book that sells to audiences beyond the usual nerds - is bananas. But renumbering other books, when a new creative team starts, doesn't strike me as an intrinsically terrible idea. Cutting off bullshit comics like Howard and Uncanny Avengers - I mean, those comics are bad anyway so it's hard to get worked up about.

The new Daredevil comic is also pretty awful compared to the last run, and it seems like they've continuity-fridged Waid's great female lawyer character (unless she's turned up now - I quit after the second issue.)

Also, I hate to mention Waid with DJP just five or six posts up, but the new Black Widow #1 was super fun, and read even better on the iPad guided view thingy.

I was just reading Waid's Fantastic Four. I gave up quicker than I was expecting to.

Seem to remember it peters out after the face scar story.

i gave up just after reed got it, you mean it was going to go downhill from there? terrifying

i remember reading a couple old issues -- human galactus, jack kirby god -- and quite liking them both. but the rest of the ideas seem less interesting and on a sentence by sentence level waid just can't write at all and they set up this whole 'they're explorers, adventurers!' thing in the first issue and then never do any exploring or adventuring and literally every single issue someone literally says 'we're not just a group of superheroes -- we're a family/'

oh, and mike wieringo's sue storm is just embarrassingly cheesecake all the time

For those keeping track of these things, a War of Kings/Rise & Fall of the Shi'ar Empire omnibus has just been solicited. So it looks like there will be omnibi of, well, at least most of the Abnett & Lanning cosmic saga.

i kind of appreciated the thread of the "time runs out" arc where sue storm was undercover with shield. in a different uniform and situation, i just kept thinking "damn, what a badass" which is, unfortunately, the opposite of what most FF writers do

yeah that was great

never really thought of it this way but if you think of Val's motivations being a result of her being Sue's daughter, not as some "dad vs. uncle doom / compromise" angle, she's an even stronger character