Marvel Comics blabbery

Ugh, wish I had it in front of me to confirm but I thought the implication was that Fury used something like an Asgardian cheat code to render Thor unworthy.

Still enjoying the Aaron Thor issues. I like the really transparent ploy at the end of the current issue. Thor and Jane Foster are both present?!? I thought Thor was Jane! What kind of trickery is... wait... oh yeah

Yeah it's gotten better the past couple issues after a boring patch

This is persnickety but, while I dig the artist, I find his panel shapes really annoying

i guess no one else has talked about how much fun Squirrel Girl is? It's fun.

I think we have somewhere, maybe on another thread. The issue with Galactus is one of my favourite issues of anything ever.

omg the last issue of vision is SO SAD

can't remember having that "count the days until the next issue" feeling for a while

Original Sin payoff is definitely a long game, since we still don't know what made Thor drop the hammer!

i guess no one else has talked about how much fun Squirrel Girl is? It's fun.

in my head its the only marvel comic discussed on this board bar hickman's universe-ending thing i've just totally blanked on the name of. this is obv inaccurate. anyway squirrel girl yeah it's great

i think it's good in a way that 'fun' is unnecessarily diminutive of actually

but that's my weird predilection for narrative art that exists by virtue of the preposition 'hey, most narrative art of this genre is dumb'

Genndy Tartakovsky is doing a Luke Cage book and it looks like this:

https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2016/07/11/who-is-marvels-blaxploitation-luke-cage-comic-even-for-exactly/

Jesus Christ.

that looks... suspect, but i'll warily give Genndy the benefit of the doubt until the book comes out because Samurai Jack was so good

also wow this was actually announced nine years ago??

That's a nicely written piece though, by comics bloggin standards

see, to me that cage sample reflects less tartakovsky and much more destefano: the rubbery limbs, contorted faces, bigfoot-style cartooning all 'round
i love destefano's work in general but Marvel putting him on something as culturally loaded as a blaxploitation take of power man running concurrent with the netflix relaunch of Cage as "unapologetically black" is tone deaf to the point of ugliness.
i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bigfoot Luke Cage story, but why not give it to Milton Knight or (DeStefano's Instant Piano cohort) Kyle Baker? Shit, I would buy those books in a heartbeat! Even Sanford Greene's work would be more appropriate and i don't even dig that guy's style.
anyway pulliam-moore otm

I'll personally wait on dropping the otm-bombs until we have more than one dialogue- and context-free page of art upon which to judge.

(sitting stunned by how much I would love a Kyle Baker Luke Cage)

The elephant in the room here is surely that the reason he's a big deal these days is almost entirely due to a white guy.

no offense OL but unless the placement of that page of art is "thing that luke cage reads in a grocery store tabloid and then shakes his head walking away" there is no particular context in which it's gonna play well.

the reason he's a big deal these days is almost entirely due to a white guy.

Yeah, I thought he was a big deal because he released some acclaimed graphic novels in the '90s, I have no idea who this "white guy" is?

I assume that he's saying Luke Cage is a big deal because of a white guy (or, really, a long succession of white guys) but I'm not sure why that's an elephant.

TBF, I'd predict that Luke Cage is on track to become a bigger deal than ever almost entirely due to the performance of a black guy.

the white guy Andrew Farrell is referring to is Bendis, right?

That's who I thought he meant.

I thought he was talking about Iron Fist.

xxp I'm willing to hear a counterfactual, but as far as I know Luke Cage's profile has received an enormous boost over the last decade because Brian Michael Bendis featured him as a prominent character in a lot of his Marvel work - supporting character and love interest in Alias & The Pulse, and himself and Jessica Jones have been in various Bendis-written Avengers books since - they provide the "new family - how can we have children in a world/life like this?" role to varying degrees of eye-rolling depending on who's writing them.

I could certainly have been clearer that I meant Cage and not Kyle Baker, true.

I too would love a Kyle Baker Luke Cage

If this is your kind of thing, the collected Steranko SHIELD is on sale for £3 on the Marvel app. It's about 500 pages.

I've been reading late '00s Spider-Man, likely because I have a deep-seated self-loathing I'm trying to work through and reading questionable comics is how it's playing out.

I started out right before "One More Day." It's really as bad as everyone said it was! The partial retcon definitely helped, although it's still very clumsy in execution. It divided the two events that the plot encapsulated into more-digestible bits, at least.

The multiple issues per month deal was sloppy in that it kept the number of plots and variability of quality that you'd get across multiple Spider-Man series, but all under the banner of Amazing Spider-Man. You still end up feeling like there's a main title and some interesting side stories, but they end up being neatly divided between "written by Dan Slott" and "some other stuff."

The integration between Spider-Man and the two (!) teams he's on is decent, but still a little sloppy. You no longer end up asking "if the Sinister Six (or however many villains there are this week) are so powerful and they're in New York, then how come the Avengers don't help out?". It also gives Slott the chance to do a couple FF stories during Hickman's run, and you end up with some fun stories that are less about the plots-within-plots and more about Spidey playing off of the Richards family.

I really liked Superior Spider-Man! I'm sure the new status quo is starting to show some wear, but having Doc Ock take over was the world's longest shortcut to pushing Peter into being a more developed human being. Him being a scientist only because he had to sell out to Tony Stark via the Civil War shenanigans just never felt right, and now he has an actual job instead of decades of bouncing between photography and teaching gigs. He's turned into a little too much of an Iron Man-lite version now, though.

I remember some decent Waid/Marcos Martn stories in that period.

Feel like he's much more interesting as a photographer than a scientist.

agreed, those were some of the better stories!

imo having him do science stuff is good, him being really successful is probably bad

there's also the weird anachronism of him showing up to the office with the classic "check out these pictures!" and "can we make the evening edition" style banter that continues on way too far into this century when absolutely no news room operates like that and I have no idea why he isn't uploading his pictures and while editions are important, newspapers upload shit all the time

Slott himself seems only half-sold on the Parker Industries thing at first. there's at least one "spider-mobile!" joke per issue for six months

I've recently started catching up slowly on some of the Marvel books from the last few years. Are they publishing anything else these days as focused and idiosyncratic as Tom King's Vision?

Karnak had a shot, but artist issues and disastrously blown deadlines kind of derailed that.

Karnak is nearly far enough behind that Marvel Unlimited will have all the released issues by the time the next is out

it's only up to issue three right? first two were real good.

I think I'm cautiously optimistic about Mariko Tamaki's take on Jennifer Walters; I don't know how well Tamaki's strengths will carry over to superhero comics, or how much of a free hand editorial will give her, but she's always been deft at character studies.

Karnak's up to #4 (came out in mid-May). Theoretically #5 is out this week.

Mariko Tamaki's doing She-Hulk?! This is excellent news!

I'll rep for the current Moon Knight series. Half a dozen issues in and I genuinely don't know whether the lead character has just had a breakdown and is imagining it all.

Got to say that Luke Cage trailer looks cool on Netflix.

Re: my previous post about Genddy Tartakofsky's Cage!...

I'll personally wait on dropping the otm-bombs until we have more than one dialogue- and context-free page of art upon which to judge.

After reading the first issue, I'm comfortable proclaiming that this is an indefensible piece of shit on pretty much every level. Even more racist than the previous dialogue- and context-free page of art would suggest, a pathetic 'story' that barely hangs together, shitty dialogue, no characterization. I thought at least the art/design would offset any other subpar elements but even that's no great shakes. I'm surprised Marvel actually put this out, and especially surprised that they timed its release so poorly as to coincide with a much better show that'll probably send people to the comic shop in search of further Cage material. Avoid!

Also, it's completely incidental that this is a Luke Cage book or that it's set in the Marvel U at all. This could've been any random-ass character.

it's shitty, yes.

And there's ample evidence on this board to suggest that I'm as big a Marvel apologist as it gets. Like, I can't think of anything Marvel that I've read from the past, I dunno, 5-10 years that I personally would call outright shitty. But this was outright shitty.

I mean, I do understand "don't judge a book by its cover" but we were actually given some severely offensive contents to peruse, I don't know how much benefit of the doubt was actually necessary here.

Agreed. If I was a fan of the show and saw this, it might put me off comics entirely.

I hadn't heard about the writer of Mockingbird being chased off of Twitter because of an MRA-baiting feminist joke on the cover of the series finale but this just more intensely fuels my belief that every Marvel comic should be an overt celebration of everything scared little man-babies wet their regressive widdle drawers over. The Scarlet Witch proclaimed 'no more hetero white dudes' and, lo, many neckbeards were drenched with tears on that day.

otm

I enjoyed the Mockingbird run quite a bit and read a few articles about the writer, with whom I wasn't familiar, before all this harassment bullshit. I might check it out now, so... hey

Vision was the best series since Superior Foes of Spider-Man. Almost makes up for how much utter crap they've been publishing since Secret War.

Ack! I know. I'm putting off the last issue as I don't want it to be over.

i'm starting to wonder what it might say about me that comic books and videogames, two of my favourite things, attract fans who are regularly so fucking vile

brb gonna get into classic literature, crochet and gardening