Marvel Comics blabbery

The prices for the Abnett/Lanning Nova TPBs have also become ridiculous now, because they were never reprinted, unlike the GotG ones and the Annihilations. I was missing the last few issues of their Nova run, and I had to order them from the US as floppies, because the TPB containing them had gone up to 50 euros or something.

xpost That's too bad. Just picked up a big, cheap lot of Marvel Comics Presents with McGregor's complete 25 part 'Panther's Quest'. Hopefully that'll balance the scales.

I've never read a good comic by Dan Abnett. Do they exist?

I saw this in part because Death's Head II was one of the things that put the boot in me reading comics for several years.

xps always hoping i'll find a reasonable price on those early Fourth World omnibuses, especially vol. 2 which is way worse than the rest for some reason

I've never read a good comic by Dan Abnett. Do they exist?

I haven't read much of his early 90s Marvel UK comics, only the Knights of Pendragon, but the '00s comics he cowrote with Andy Lanning are way better than those. Their Guardians of the Galaxy and Nova run, which begins in Annihilation Conquest, continues in the CotG and Nova ongoing titles, and culminates in The Thanos Imperative, is my favourite long-form Marvel story of this millennium. There's so much sense of wonder and Silver/Bronze Age inspired thrills in those comics, especially considering that at the same time most of the Marvel universe was stuck in Bendisian "hard boiled"/"gritty" bullshit and increasingly pointless mega-crossovers. (Since CotG and Nova weren't set on Earth, they managed to avoid those crossovers; they had a few of their own, but those were small-scale and mostly plotted by Abnett/Lanning, so much better than Bendis and Millar ones.)

I don't think it's a coincidence that Guardians of Galaxy movie was mostly based on the Abnett/Lanning run (and the groundwork laid for it by Keith Giffen in Annihilation and Annihilation Conquest), not the original version of the team (which had an almost completely different cast of characters). Those were some quality comics, and the movie-makers must've recognized that too.

Otm. Some of the best fun comics I've ever read.

Had no idea about slabbing or what it was

My FFs are p banged up i doubt they rate as Fine (probably VG at best). But i dont wanna sell them anyway

Guys, the variant cover theme for September's books is, um, Prostate Awareness Month.

I await the final covers with bated breath.

they know their audience

'bated breath.

Any thoughts on RiRi Williams beyond "which black name generator did Bendis go to in order to make that name"?

ouch, lol

I keep imagining him watching tennis highlights with "Work" playing in the background while he was working up the backstory

I was thinking more "standing at the grocery store, reading names off the magazines at the check-out aisle"

lol that's probably more accurate

i have zero issues with marvel's desire to broaden the racial/ethnic/gender base of its headliners but boy do moves like "RiRi Williams" feel patronizing.
also, i had never seen this origin story panel before
http://wetalkpodcasts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Power-Man-V1-17-Page-19.jpg

aaaahhhhhhhh

I'm sorry, that is the best "coming up with my superhero name" panel ever

Is that mcgregor Gerber englehart or thomas

Len Wein

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/scans/PM17_AceOfSpades.JPG

It gets even better than that, right before coming up with Power Man he was considering "The Ace of Spades", but thought it was "too ethnic"!

:-o

This one breaks it down into storyline sections, I think, but seems to be missing some parts (no 52 issues).

https://kat.cr/complete-grant-morrison-batman-comic-run-pre-new-52-t7100920.html

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 9:35 AM (1 month ago)

Not only is it missing parts of Morrison, it appears to have more non-Morrison bullshit than Morrison, and not put all the Morrison in the right order

― glandular lansbury (sic), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 11:35 AM (1 month ago)

otm

As soon as I saw the word "Hush" I was thinking, wtf is this shit

― μpright mammal (mh), Wednesday, June 8, 2016 11:39 AM (1 month ago)

just looked at this on a computer for the first time, so I could actually count: out of the first 90 comics in this "complete Morrison Batman" torrent, FIFTY-THREE are by other people

the 11 reprints from 1951-64 are at least more relevant to his run than all the contemporaneous stuff. (and the last 42 issues are uninterrupted Morrison.)

What a travesty for Kick Ass Torrents!

ha ha

I was thinking more for milo trying to read the whole thing

After putting it off for years I finally did finish reading the Morrison run. well almost - the weird thing is towards the end, after New 52 started the Batman universe is really weird being half-rebooted and half-not, but the Morrison run does slightly intersect with the other Bat-titles (Synder Batman/Detective Comics/Batman & Robin/Nightwing etc.) so while I've read Batman Inc - Leviathan I still have to read Death of the Family...

I've read the 13 issues that came after Leviathan and I have no idea what Death Of The Family is

It's a Snyder thing, you wouldn't understand.

To steer this back towards the topic at hand, I've been catching up on the secondary and tertiary All-New X-titles, and I've been pleasantly surprised to see the extent to which Morrison's New X-Men run has been referenced in recent years, especially after the embarrassed, 'shove it under the rug and forget it' treatment it received for so long. I guess we just had to wait for a new, Morrison-inspired generation of writers to come 'round.

Spurrier's X-Men Legacy (not exactly the book I was referencing but clearly a beneficiary of that legacy) is good stuff, btw.

as much as I hated their "resurrect Grant Morrison's toys he created then killed" approach, I guess I'll let them have Xorn now

Good grief Civil War II must be one of the most relentlessly un-fun comics I've read since Countdown or Identity Crisis.

wtf is going on re: Civil War II

I kinda dig it for reflecting the zeitgeist but Chuck is OTM, it ain't fun.

i know basically nothing about CWII, what's the deal?

minority report divided by world war hulk with bendis dialogue

guy sees future
people ask if it's a series of self-fulfilling prophecies
hawkeye kills banner because ?!?

Welp, there's that spoiler I'd been assiduously avoiding.

Apparently the deal is "Bendis murders old characters to make space for new ones"

it hardly feels like a major plot beat, more "then this thing happened"

ah, it'll retrofit in a year anyway
killing major characters is as serious and stable as a jenga set

Seriously. To the extent that I kinda wish they'd just stop doing it for like a decade or so.

lol as if Banner is really gonna give anyone a way to kill Hulk

It's like a bigger ontological problem at this point. Why does death even mean anything to characters in the Marvel U? Why is that a universe where death would've ever even been considered more than a minor annoyance in the first place? Because all of the people who've died seventeen times on average look at Uncle Ben's as-yet-undisturbed grave and say, that could be us?

I will lol if they murdered Banner in order to prevent Hulk from killing all the heroes and Amadeus Cho freaks out and kills everyone in order to keep himself sage

even if death isn't permanent i'm sure dying is still uncomfortable (especially dying violently), and being out of the scene for anywhere from 6 months to years is also a sad thing. maybe not any more sad than someone going on a long vacation but still. and the chance that you don't ever get resurrected makes it a bit russian roulettish. maybe knowing death is rarely permanent might make you more willing to take risky heroic chances that put yr life into jeopardy but they are already doing that on a regular basis so either it's bc they know and so that kind of heroism is a logical result of knowing you can't die permanently or bc they're just big heroes and thank god there's a safety net to catch them if they ever fall off the tightrope of the living.

(waves at friend's mangled corpse) Have a nice trip!

One of the best recent-ish stories I've read along these lines revolved around Siryn refusing to grieve Banshee's death because he was an X-Man and therefore due to be resurrected any day now.

I was thinking of that exact story, too. This big secret re: death is being referenced in-universe more and more frequently.

pretty sure he came back during the x-force thing where the dead remained half-dead, but allied with selene xp

tbf the reaction from almost every character running into a "reanimated" character in that plot was "aw, hell no"

xpost Yeah, he did. Don't recall what ultimately became of those resurrected Horsemen.

I wish it were at least treated in some manner similar to Buffy's death and resurrection. Like, there are at least consequences or things lost from being brought back from the dead.

I guess they kinda went there with Nightcrawler's resurrection, but it doesn't really have as much gravity as a one-off thing.