Marvel Universe

[jjreason]

Pisses me off though, because now I want one. Bad.

[anarky]

My daughter is sleeping with her stuffed Bone tonight.

Anyone who giggles at the potential double entendre is a prevert.

[jjreason]

Tell her to give it a hug for me, it's awesome.

[anarky]

So Wonder Man is a villain now? Huh?

[Rollo Tomassi]

Yeahhh...this is something Bendis just sorta made up. When the Avengers re-re-restarted (this is just after Siege and before Heroic Age) Simon shows up and is all "You fucking assholes! I hate you!" and the Avengers are like "LOLwhut?" and Simon is all "If you guys try to re-re-re-restart the Avengers bad juju is gonna happen and I will kill all of you if you start the Avengers" then he storms out in a huff. And the Avengers are all "WTF was THAT? Weirdo." Pretty much its just Marvel trying to create a little artificial drama by having one of the Avengers be a bad guy. But, honestly, its Wonder Man, so who gives a fuck.

[anarky]

On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, it's a former Avenger who had his own somewhat successful ongoing suddenly going bad for no reason.

And apparently putting together a team of former Avengers who want to kill the Avengers. This makes no sense.

[anarky]

Worth it?

I like Milligan. I like Allred. I like superhero parodies. But that's a hefty price tag for one of those massive books that are often physically tough to read. I only ask because it looks like all the trade paperbacks are OOP.

[vynsane]

it's a good read - i have basically everything therin in floppy form. if you have the dough, it might be worth it.

[anarky]

Almost immediately after posting that, I thought, "What happened to Marvel?" Meaning where are the wacky, more-or-less in-continuity books like X-Statix and Nextwave? Everything seems to be straight-up MU or straight up UU, with little wiggle room. I guess there's Deadpool, but that's not exactly critically acclaimed.

[jjreason]

The architects happened. It seems very much to me that Bendis seriously has turned into Reed Richards from his own Illuminati series. He has a cadre of about 4 really good young writers (and Matt Fraction ) at his beck & call to flesh out his version of the Marvel Universe. It's all going according to plan & there is very little room for wiggling, so far as I can tell. Rollo can likely offer more insight, as he reads just about everything produced by everyone, every week.

[jjreason]

Marvel will pretty soon have launched its own 52 new #1's, based on how this is going:

X-Men just released about issue 13 or 14
FF just released 6
DD 1
Cap 1
2 new x-books coming in the next few weeks
Punisher
Thor's up to #3

I know there's more as well - silly comic companies.

Just coming back to this as Incredible Hulk is going to get a #1 here this month. Of interest, in a few cases they are leaving an old volume running & creating a new #1 featuring the same hero to go along with it. This isn't likely news to you - I'm just trying to keep it straight in my head - but other Marvel heroes that have gone from one book to two include Iron Man, Thor (even though Journey doesn't really feature Thor, I'd still call it a second Thor book) and Cap (all of whom feature prominently in the Avengers movie, oddly enough). Of all of these, I'm buying the 2 Cap books and was considering trying to fill in the first few issues of New Thor based on the reviews. I have 1 & 3 only at this point, and haven't seen the other copies anywhere - it must be alright.

Interesting to me that they didn't continue on with the original Hulk numbering for the "non-new" book - they're sticking with the Red Hulk story instead of moving that over into the classic volume. A re-re-renumbering must surely be planned for the next sales lull. I will buy the first arc of the new book as a tester as I haven't been buying Hulk for ages and am feeling a bit guilty about the whole thing. ><

How long before DD shows back up into his own original series like the Hulk did after the Incredible Herc interlude, creating a 2nd DD book and relieving the Panther of his own series yet again? Less than a year I'd bet. At that point, will the Black Panther books be required to have a complete run? Oyes they will. If this happens I'll be more inclined to dump both books rather than buy both - I haven't read the new DD yet but I did try once and had a really tough time getting started. Not a good sign.

[jjreason]

I read a shit-ton of comics today. Question - when is it totally awesome to have both Thor & Captain America swearing? When you're writing Fear Itself and have no other way of showing they're both tired & frustrated, that's when. Because this is the biggest crisis either of them has ever faced.

[anarky]

I said before and say again: "Fear Itself," as teased, looked to be about the heroes really facing real-world problems, which could've been interesting. A bunch of Mjolnir-clone hammers does not a great crossover make, especially when there are so many crossovers they really have to get unique.

[jjreason]

The way I'm reading it isn't working properly. I read 1-3 of the series as it came out kind of on their own, months ago. The crossover books I kept leaving because I was so far behind on my reading (Uncanny, 3 Avengers titles) that I didn't think I'd understand where they were going anyhow. Yesterday I read all the issues of those books from the ".1" issue (where one existed, in only one case it didn't - New Avengers I think) up until the commencement of FI.

Then I read FI 4-6 (which I just got yesterday, thanks to the elsewhere-bitched-about shortcomings of my comic guy), and followed those up with the FI issues of Uncanny, Avengers and New Avengers. I still have the Secret Avengers and Black Panther crossover issues to go.

All of this will then all be capped off by FI 7 which comes out in about 2 weeks. It hasn't seemed very tight to me - a lot of rehashing mixed with a feeling that I've missed (or forgotten) certain events of the story.

I likely should have done a re-read on FI 1-3 before I started on the crossover issues, and I guess I could have shuffled the crossover issues to coincide with their specific FI issue (instead of reading the Uncannys all together, maybe I should have read an Uncanny then an Avengers followed by a New Avengers for example) but that's never been the way I've done it. Once the story is complete I'll go back and read a summary on a Wiki somewhere to see how much of the story I actually "got" from the books I bought & read.

[jjreason]

In trying to assess my collection of Brian Michael Bendis' take on the Marvel Universe, I realize I don't have the Siege mini. Doesn't look like the damage is too bad (at least on mycomicshop) but the thought of trying to piece together this event with the one-shots & everything else is making me feel a bit queezy. Hopefully I have the tie-in issues of the series I was getting at the time, haven't really checked through all of that yet ><


EDITED: And herein lies the rub. This should go in the mental health topic, but seriously - why is the focus of my comic collecting ALWAYS what I don't have and NEVER what I do have? How do you change this, or is it even possible to change???