the vynsane asylum

So is it like all 7 Avengers teams vs all 7 X-Men teams, or just one particular branch of each team?


And will Wolverine fight himself?

The teaser art they showed had Wolvie fighting Cap in one picture, but in the bigger group shot, he's clearly attacking Emma Frost.

Wouldn't it be awesome if he ends up getting ostracized by both sides?

That could be the best thing to happen to Wolvie. It would mean taking him off both teams, so I doubt they'll do that.

Especially since they just launched the Wolverine and the X-Men comic.

Pffft. They aren't the Real X-Men. That's like Wolverine's Cover Band.

Wolverine and the X-Men = "The Spaghetti Incident?"

Which means that now the X-Men will break up and Wolverine will keep the rights to the name and start a team of rotating hired guns. Wait, hasn't that already happened?

I saw an offhand reference to Tony Stark's armor being a part of him. The Wikipedia articles were way the fuck too long, so I skimmed. But Tony is a true cyborg now, and his armor stores itself in his bones when not in use? When did this happen?

I think it was Warren Ellis that created the concept of the suit absorbing into Tony, but I'm not sure. Cue Rollo in 5,4,3,2............

Hmmm. Don't want to hate on Ellis, but Tony making that leap from "guy in armor" to "transforming cyborg" seems to be quite the fundamental change to the character.

Yeah, JJ is correct. It's called the "Extremis" Armor. Its a sorta bio-nano-wetware "infection" Tony gave himself. Warren's thinking was that the 'guy in armor' was technologically advanced in the 60s, but today it's fairly mundane and even retro to have Tony carrying his armor around in a briefcase. So he wanted Stark to be 'bleeding edge' techno advanced.

Spidey Group Editor Steve Wacker responded to my glib comment on the new Scarlet Spider ongoing.

So I'm slowly working through my 12 long boxes of unread comics. Today I picked out a Warlock miniseries from 1999. In it, somebody is killing people on different planets with large spears that have Drax the Destroyer heads on them. Like life size heads. I don't know of they're paper mâché or rubber or what. But the hilarious part is that Warlock, Gamora, and Pip the troll automatically assume Drax is the killer and go and confront him. Because if you're gonna kill people, naturally you'd do it with spears adorned with a copy of your head. Even better, when Drax is all "WTF? you're an idiot..." Warlock becomes enraged because his proof makes it Obvious Drax is lying. gawd, the 90s were shitty.

Dipped into my back issues again. This time I'm reading the Timestorm 2009/2099 Miniseries from a couple years back. In the X-Men oneshot tie-in, future Wolverine tells present Wolverine about a Gamma Bomb dropped on Washington DC "a few hundred years back".
Sooo...a Gamma Bomb from 1799?? That goddamn Ben Franklin.

Reading some old Venom books. One of the minis was Carnage Unleashed by Hama and Wildman. It had a bit of a Meta slant to it because it was released in the mid 90s and it was about the Maximum Carnage video game and Cletus signing his rights to the IP away. Not Wildman's best work though.
Also read the first three issues of the Venom ongoing from 2002. Daniel Way pretty much ripped off the movie The Thing verbatim. Isolated arctic station, jumpy sled dogs, mysterious disappearances, except the creature is the Venom Symbiote. I mean seriously, if you read it, you'd wonder how Marvel didn't get sued. And on top of that, the art was by Francisco Herrera. Who is to Humberto Ramos what Ramos is to Jim Lee. The most exaggerated cartoony art imaginable. Which gels with a "horror" plot about as well as a pork shrimp cheeseburger does at Passover dinner. So Way continues to reside fairly high on my shitty writers list. Not as high as Remender and Loeb and Millar. But up there.

The Torch 8 issue mini series from 2009. The Mad Thinker brings the original Han Torch back to life as a WMD. He gets better, then he and the recently brought back to life Toro fight secret Nazis living under the mountains in Bolivia in a "New Berlin" where everybody thinks they won WWII. All told, it was a pretty good read. It was "by" Alex Ross, so it's one of those Dynamite partner books like Invaders Now! and Avengers/Invaders.