f13.net

So Marvel redid all their books, but not so much a giant continuity reboot, just a lot of 'fresh takes' on characters where the creators are authorized to not pay so much attention to continuity. There are, as you might expect, some real turkeys in the bunch, but also some pretty interesting and enjoyable stuff.

My favorite so far is Jason Aaron's Thor, which is pretty fucking awesome. The initial arc tells a split story of Thor in three eras--as a god of the Vikings, joining in their plunder and raiding (and hoping that some gods of their victims will come down and brawl with him); Thor in the Marvel 'present', on an alien planet where they don't believe in their own gods; Thor in the Marvel future, the last of the Asgardian gods. In all three eras, he is stalked by a mysterious enemy called the God Butcher who does pretty much what his name suggests. Really recommend it.

The new Deadpool book is hilarious--the character is enlisted by SHIELD to fight an army of Undead American Presidents who were raised up by a sort of Tea Party sorcerer who immediately regretted doing it.

Captain America is a bit weird but I'll stick with it for a while--going for a sort of 1950s era "sci fi adventure" feeling to it. (Cap is thrust into a strange dimension.)

New Hulk book is good--very strongly derives from the Avengers movie in its feeling.

The rest is either eh or actively bad (the new X-Men book is terrible).

The new Deadpool is great, but I think Deadpool is probably the most fun of the Marvel IPs to write. Even during that terribad Fear Itself event, the Deadpool arc was the best thing about it.

The new Iron Man isn't bad, but not super-great yet either. We'll see where it goes.

ETA -- Ok, this new Avengers book could have legs.

Which X-Men book? From what I've read of Bendis' All New X-Men so far it's looking fantastic; the premise is so high concept I can't wait to see where Bendis is going with it. Immonen's art is also gorgeous, his take on Beast is one of the best yet.

What's the deal with buying these digitally? Is it all one-offs or can you sub? I know there is some sort of Marvel digital sub thing but it appears to be only for back issues?

I used to collect comics as a kid, the idea of collecting boxes of comics is really not appealing these days. The space to content ratio is just not there.

You can get them the day they come out via Marvel's app. The iPad app works quite well, you can do panel by panel reading, or the entire page, etc.

The cost for new comics seems to be full price, which is a bit lame. The real value seems to be access to old runs, etc. You can also buy trades, which seem to be a bit cheaper than purchasing them at a shop.

The digital sub is something totally different, I have no experience with it at all.

The "original X-Men come back to the present" book. Hated it.

Hickman's big-screen Avengers is more or less a continuation of his big-screen Fantastic Four.

(Really hate Fraction's new Fantastic Four books--I love Fraction's independent books but his Marvel work has been almost uniformly terrible.)

I'm surprised we'd have such opposite reactions to it; both my flatmate and I have really enjoyed the first 2 issues. In fact I don't want to read any more singles so I can pick up the TPB and enjoy it as a whole. That said, we live in the UK and I don't know how much further into the story you might be if you're in the US so perhaps it either jumps the shark or you're just not a fan of the entire idea. Or possibly not a fan of Bendis?

We are only up to issue #3 here in the states. Today might change that. Or not. Looks like a slow week for Marvel and DC (http://www.grahamcrackers.com/newcomics.htm), but with a load of indies of various worth.

My purchase list for the week looks like: Massive, Walking Dead, Supurbia (issue 2, we'll see how long it lasts for me), Batman, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and ASM. I have two back issues of Stumpville to track down and perhaps one of The Secret Service. I'm most excited about the Secret (Strange?) Talent of Luther Strode TPB that they got in for me.

I used to love Bendis, but yeah, I'm off him now. I just found that the X-Men book more than any other was bent by having to carry water for AvX, particularly its conclusion.

AvX was by far the worst event Marvel has done in a while. The stupid Divided We Fall thing in the Ultimate universe is better, and it is pretty awful on the whole.

Can you give me a spoilered rundown of AVX that made it so stupid? Not doubting it's stupidity. Bendis seems to revel in really stupid ideas that ignore everything a character has ever done in the past to make it fit his idea of a story.

Ok.

So, the Phoenix Force is spotted heading for Earth. It stops to fry some planets and shit along the way, but it's basically coming.

Cyclops, having recently gone more to the Magneto side of things (heading up a splinter faction of X-Men who were more and more unsubtly willing to hint that if humanity fucked with what was left of the mutants, the mutants would punch back), is convinced that the reason the Phoenix keeps coming back to Earth looking for powerful red-headed women mutants to possess is that it wants to help mutants out. He particularly thinks it is coming to work through Hope, who is yet another child of Jean Grey from some future or something like that. Captain America and the Avengers don't think so and want to take Hope off-planet until they can figure out how to beat or kill the Phoenix.

The X-Men and the Avengers fight (Wolverine siding with the Avengers). Then they fight some more and play "hide-and-seek Hope Summers" in between rounds. Then the Phoenix Force arrives and Iron Man does some supersciency thing and accidentally splits the Phoenix Force and it ends up divided between Cyclops, Colossus, Magik, Emma Frost and Namor.

The Phoenix Five make new costumes for themselves and proceed to make Earth a utopia. (Stop me if you've heard this one before.) Captain America thinks it's all a cheat and the Avengers and the X-Men fight some more. The Avengers kidnap Hope who is now on their side and it turns out that the Phoenix used to go to K'un L'un so Iron Fist has some magic anti-Phoenix techniques he can teach her or some bullshit like that.

The Phoenix Five turn on each other and become nastier. Cyclops absorbs all their powers and gets ready to destroy Earth. He kills Professor X out of irritation (stop me if you've heard this one before) and there's lots of Avengers and Phoenix Force fighting inbetween. Then Hope steps in and she and the Scarlet Witch work together and then fight and at the end the Scarlet Witch (formerly dead) reverses her House of M No More Mutants curse and there are lots of mutants again. Cyclops ends up in jail, having been proven kind of right actually that it would be good for mutants to have Phoenix back, and Captain America acts like a clueless dick towards the one superhero who actually is getting punished for being possessed by an evil superbeing ever in the history of comics.

The End.

Fuck me. I'm sorry I asked.  :uhrr:

It was basically Marvel does Dragon Ball Z, and no less stupid or enjoyable. I think Bendis just has fun with the event stuff, and it neatly bookmarks the period between AvX and House of M. Beyond that, one half of the event was essentially 'Who would win if X and X got in a fight' issues, which is as dumb as it sounds. I've had my expectations considerably lowered since Millar put the whole show on cruise control into the sun with Civil War so I just roll my eyes at the stupider stuff and wait to see where the event takes the rest of the universe afterwards. That said, I love Bendis' writing, especially his dialogue (no one else is in the same league) so I am willing to admit I let him off for some things I might not a writer I have less love for. Kirkman and K. Vaughan get a similar reprieve.

I like Bendis' dialogue when he's doing crime fiction/Daredevil street level heroes. His Avengers stuff? Absolutely and utterly wrong for that book. It was such a weird, ill-fitting tone and yet now it's stamped on just about everything Marvel does.

It's nice that Marvel is doing this reboot right now, because I just discovered how TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics from 1970-71 were. I plan to nerd out on Oliver Queen (while avoiding the Kevin Smith bits -- I fucking hated his Daredevil run) trades to placate my rage regarding a new Spider-Man book called Superior Spider-Man, which I cannot stop myself from buying.

Yes, that just conflated DC and Marvel comics, but dammit, I am just now discovering that DC doesn't suck. After digesting all of the classic Batman stuff (and even that DC reboot of Batman was cool -- the Court of Owls stuff was neat), I'm learning that DC has other worthwhile stuff.

Smith's run on Green Arrow is pretty decent, from what I remember. It gets overshadowed by the hate his writing got for more ...popular characters.

His Daredevil run was just so terribad.

Bendis, on the other hand, is awesome when he writes Daredevil. The End of Days limited run that's going on right now is kickass.

It's ok I think up until he does something really dark and nasty with Stanley and His Monster.

But it's coherent at least and has a fun nostalgic vibe. His later comics writing is basically a stoner giggling at himself in the corner, which is all Smith is good for these days. I don't use drugs but I don't have any particular beef about pot or other softer stuff--however, you could pretty much just show kids Smith from the beginning of his career to now and have that be 'don't be a pothead, QED'.

Denny O'Neill GA/GL was insanely important to the history of comics but I don't know that it's aged very well.

I'll just leave this here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmB_N3J-0Vk

The dated language is what makes it so awesome.

2 Things.

She's so goddamn hot.

And fuck me, Bendis is a retard.

Gotta do my bit to up her potential stalker quotient.

Ha, you've really got a crush on her now, don't you?  :drillf:

I actually read AvsX but I think I've blanked some of it out. Did we ever learn what Hope actually is? Clone of Jean Grey, daughter of Jean Grey, Jean Grey, creation of the Phoenix, creation of Scarlet Witch? Is it still a mystery?

Hope featured in a bunch of dumb X-Men crossover stuff before AvX. She started as a continuity mess and got even messier. Basically she's the first mutant born after the Scarlet Witch magicked mutants out of existence except for all the popular ones. Cable took her into the future and gave her the surname Summers, just so he'd have someone as stupidly complicated in backstory as he is. Then she came back to her time, the "present" of the Marvel Universe, and mutants started to be born again slowly and there was a bunch of stuff about the new characters she finds. And then AvX, more or less. The whole X-Men continuity is hopelessly borked in any event and she's a symptom of that.

Guilty.  I've actually refrained from watching all of her shows to keep it from getting worse.  :oops:

She looks like she could ba a little bi-curious to me....

Curious? Hell, she looks like she could teach Lant a thing or two to me.

The Generation Hope book was kinda decent. I'm a bit pissed that it abruptly ended when AvX began. CBG19 seems to love the Wolverine and the Xmen series, but I dumped it during AvX. My local shop has a "give us a pull list and get 10% off" deal. It has been like two years since I got back into comics and I'm still slacking on that.

I need to focus the list.

In other news, I scored Deadpool #3 and #4 today.

Deadpool is staying great. But of course he's already in another book where the take on him is completely different and mostly serious.

These are early 90s issues of Deadpool. "In honor of Hillary, call me Dead Rodham Pool!"

A lot of the Marvel NOW! books are really quite good. The distinction between how Marvel's handling the ongoing publishing of comics and DC is really striking. The word coming out of DC is that there is massive editorial interference, some of it directly by Jim Lee and Geoff Johns, or by Didio. They've rehired virtually every 90s Marvel editor with a bad reputation and revived some of the worst storytelling emphases of the 90s. They're emphasizing plot over characterization and situation, and trying to make everything even MORE continuity-dependent. The requirement to have 52 titles is causing them to cycle through tons of low-selling, terrible books (I think maybe they're about to give up on the 52 concept though with the latest wave of cancellations).

Marvel is letting its writers do what they want, they're not terribly worried about continuity, they're emphasizing a big diversity of art styles and aesthetics. Fraction's Hawkeye couldn't more unlike Hickman's Avengers, but nobody cares. Lots of the NOW! books you could walk in and start fresh without having read a boatload of earlier things but they haven't formally 'restarted the continuity' or anything of that kind.

Just read through the first 9 issues of Fraction's Hawkeye books the other day and they're really damn good. Has a very deliberate "indie book" sort of feel to the point where it barely feels like a superhero book (and really it's not) let alone a superhero book that's recognizably Marvel.

Just wanted to quote that as thanks to the Marvel free #1 promotion, I got a chance to read some of the first issues of the AVX stuff for free.

Had I paid for this, I'd have wanted my money back as well as the opportunity to cockpunch Bendis. It is so UTTERLY IDIOTIC on its face. Cyclops starts the book as the biggest raging dickhead I've ever seen and if I've missed some continuity that explains why he has suddenly turned into Magneto's douchier son, it still could not explain why the fuck he would choose to protect the Phoenix Force against the Avengers. FFS, the goddamn Phoenix Force tricked him into thinking he was banging his girlfriend, then killed her in front of his fucking eyes. There's no goddamn way he'd think "Oh great, we can use this uncontrollable cosmic force to make more mutants that everyone hates because that won't start a war with humanity or nothing."

SO... MUCH... STUPID.

The vs. books which were essentially Marvel Team-Up/Two-in-One only devoid of any plot were even more fucking retarded. Magneto vs. Iron Man and Tony Stark suddenly channels the goddamn magnetic field of JUPITER from Earth via satellite. I'm sorry... LOLWUT? That's not even comic book LOLWUT that's just bad bad bad handwaving sciency-wiencey shit. I don't think I can blame Bendis for that, but I can blame an editorial staff who didn't dickstab the writer when that script was brought to them.

Look, comics have often been over the top and a lot ridiculous. But... just no. NO.

NO.

I'm still liking the NOW! books but I think they need to keep their eye on Hickman, much as I like his writing. Everything is getting so amped up in power and scope that he's more or less ruling out ever telling stories again where the Avengers punch the fuck out of Count Nefaria. He's got Tony Stark building a Dyson Sphere on the other side of the sun, for example, with Shi'ar contractors doing the construction. Like, what? Why does Earth still look more or less like our own planet when there's a smart guy who has the resources to build a Dyson Sphere in our solar system?

Haven't read much lately myself. I only checked out Hawkeye because I was constantly reading great things about it. Green Lantern is the only mainstream superhero book I'm following, and that will stop next month when Geoff John's run comes to an end. I did check out the first few issues of Age of Ultron and was pleased to find out it was only mildly stupid and boring rather than offensively fecal.

It isn't terrible. But it's a well Marvel has gone to maybe once too often--time-travel, alternate dimension stuff is pretty much "it was only a dream", or the Marvel equivalent of Silver Age Superman Imaginary Stories. As long as they're gonna do it, I'd like to see some stuff that is wackier or less expected than "Ultron kills everyone".

Their PR for Age of Ultron is their typical level of terrible though. "Hey, you guys know that event we aren't even halfway through with yet?  Well in the last issue, Angela shows up! You guys remember Angela right? She's that character that hasn't been around in 15 or so years from Spawn, which hasn't been relevant for around the same length of time.  After that, she's popping up in an issue of Guardians of the Galaxy.  That's the book that was so good that we're using the IP as the next new Marvel movie franchise, while also relaunching the comic with Bendis writing rather than the talented writers who made these low-tier characters worth reading in the first place."

Well that shows me how long it's been since I read anything Spawn-related.  Angela was all the rage at the time. 

I never understood why Angela was some amazing thing to pay attention to in the first place. But then I thought Spawn was mostly shit anyway.

As for Marvel, I'm going through a few of these free #1's and I'm noticing that they all read the same. Nothing much of anything happens in these first issues... like AT ALL. What fight scenes they have are usually C-grade villains getting dispatched in two GIANT panels while the rest of the book is talkie talkie about the new status quo for the book. The new Hickman Avengers book was essentially some weirder than Grant Morrison set of villains that lure the Avengers to a lush green Mars before beating them senseless and sending a battered Capt. America back to earth to assemble a new team of people I've never seen. The Bendis stuff is just fucking awful. He has literally become a caricature of his own work. First gen IMAGE comics written by Liefeld had more first issue plot development.

It really, really was.

I only knew who Angela was because the issue she appeared was written by Gaiman or something.

That's how she's ending up in Marvel comics now. There was a long legal battle over who owned the character and I think there was some out of court settlement which also involved some Marvelman/Miracleman stuff as well. I'm not really sure how much of a character Angela is when you likely have to strip everything Spawn related out.

At the time everyone was raving about it's brilliance so much that I was afraid to even voice my opinion of it in my own home. (That it was over-hyped shit.) I actually had to sit through the movie as well. Now THAT was the definition of drekk.

It did lead to a brief surge of similarly crappy demonic heroes that were even worse and were promptly forgotten.

I think I've read maybe one issue of Spawn. That was pretty much a shit time for comics in general.

On Angela

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=44385


Yes, I'm sure an angelic demon hunter in a bikini brings out a lot in the creative community.

I think that line might have been referring to Marvelman.

The whole fight over Angela was immensely dumb - the character idea is so generic and silly that the hard-fought battle over her seems like a bad joke. And now she's in Marvel - who cares? Seriously, who is supposed to care about this?

And yeah, that period of comics was the worst, to the point where it seems to have permanently killed comics as a viable mass-market product. So many awful trends dovetailing at once to create a historic clusterfuck. That period is when I stopped regularly buying comic books - huge price increases, artists with no writing ability being elevated to star status and writing their own books, books constantly missing deadlines, a million X-Men ripoffs, forced scarcity and speculation, major new title launches that were completely unsustainable, a million and one gimmicks like alternate and glow-in-the-dark covers.

Sure glad Marvel learned from those days and restricted Uncanny Avengers to only having 20 variant covers.

I think that line might have been referring to Marvelman.
[/quote]

Eh, you're probably right. I need sleep

Is that some sort of record? Gen 13 had 13 IIRC.

Gen13 #13 that came in 13 separate issues that you had to read them all if you wanted to be able to follow the story was the end of me following that particular series.

However, the 90s was when comics really went mainstream and darker, plus comic creators started to work towards owning their creations. Image attracts a lot of flak, but without that break DC and Marvel would have been content to deliver the same junk and we probably wouldn't have the same kind of pop culture releases of superhero properties today.

You can't give Image credit for the super hero movie releases since they only ever got one movie released and it was dogshit. You can thank Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi for the movie releases because if X-Men and Spider-Man hadn't been handled so competently by those two, we'd still be getting movies like Daredevil (theatrical release) and Ghost Rider.

I meant it more that creators breaking from Marvel and DC meant that suddenly a lot more people were interested in creating comics, which in turn reinvigorated the medium. Suddenly writers and artists started to think that they perhaps could make some money on owning their own creations rather than constantly creating according to DC's / Marvel's tune.

Plus we're here 20 years on and those people who read comics years ago because everyone was doing it feel comfortable going to see a film based on those characters.

Yes, "Spawn" was ordinary, but so were the bulk of Marvel's film releases up to that point too. "Punisher" with Dolph Lungren? "Captain America" with Reb Brown? That an independent comics publisher made enough of a splash to even get a film developed was a big deal.

And "Blade" is the superhero movie to look to for the start of the modern superhero film push - it sold very well on DVD, which helped give Sony the confidence to push ahead with "Spider-Man".

Justice League of America #1 which came out in Feb had 52 variant covers which essentially were the same image, but each variant had a different state flag (plus D.C. And Puerto Rico).

Yeah, that was a bit ridiculous. My local comic shop was pissed because now they're stuck with loads of issues.

Marvel's current books are being written heavily under the sign of decompression, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Everybody who likes decompressed story-telling likes to go back and point to the insane wordiness of Chris Claremont's work, but I was just re-reading Alan Moore's older stuff in Swamp Thing and it's just as wordy--but the words are great whereas Claremont's mostly aren't. So in Moore stories not only does a lot happen in a short time, a lot of interesting stuff gets said about what happened. In decompressed stories, sometimes you get great cinematic storytelling that works beautifully in a trade paperback, and sometimes you get empty shit with mediocre art that is just dawdling along in order to stall until somebody thinks of something to do with the character or the storyline.

I'm not liking Bendis' Guardians of the Galaxy much, maybe because I really loved Abnett and Lanning's work with those characters so much. Now there were some stories where shit happened--and they took Marvel's cosmic-scale characters and blended them in with grunt-level people like Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon so well. I think this is what is putting me off about Hickman--the grunt-level stuff is disappearing in a cloud of cosmic one-upmanship that follows Morrison's meta-fictional take on comic heroes without the fun fetishistic attention to the classic tropes of superhero comics.

Aaron's Thor is fucking knocking it out of the park, though.

I actually am sort of liking Uncanny Avengers, which is almost a sequel to Remender's X-Force work in mood and even characters. I was really, really put off by all the stupid fan criticism of Havok's speech in issue #5.  I also am sort of liking Bendis on Uncanny X-Men (the 'militant' X-Men) partly because it doesn't have the gimmick of the original five time-displaced X-Men, which really bugs me. (It's a classic case of being unable to let the characters really evolve and change--pressing a half-assed reset button just in case they get too scared of the current status quo.)

Indestructible Hulk has been good.

The arc in Journey Into Mystery with Sif was fantastic.

Young Avengers is fun.

I think this is the big thing--the range of mood and style across Marvel's books is now as good as it's been in my memory. Whereas DC is doing this curdled, unpleasant retread of the worst aspects of the 90s, and has chased away almost everyone who was trying to do their own thing--it's become the Didio, Johns and Lee Show and isn't even showing off the best side of Johns and Lee, really.

I'm amused by the notion that comics haven't always been shit, regardless of the title. These aren't the next great bit of literature.. or pamphlet. 

But then I've never been a "comic guy." I know the characters, some of the plots, etc and I'll pick one up from time to time to read but that's it.  Most of what I know has always been because I had "that friend" who *was* a comic guy.  That's how I read the Spawn stuff, guy in college who was a huge McFarlane freak.  Had all the Amazing Spiderman covers and started in on Spawn our Freshman year.  The idea was at least more interesting to me than most superhero back stories.  /shrug.

The 90s was the golden comic bubble.  All the bullshit around them came to a head and burst.. and you still have guys at all the publishers trying to recreate 'the golden days' of their young careers, not understanding it was just another investment bubble.  When I read things like "rebooting everything again!" and "52 comic covers." that's all it says to me.  "We still think we matter and aren't selling to a fraction of our previous base!"

You aren't making a very compelling argument that all comics are shit when you back it up by saying you haven't really read many comics but this one time in college you read Spawn because a friend of yours was into it.

I was "that guy" at one point. I have almost every McFarlane issue of Amazing Spider Man and Spider Man. However even I, being a total McFarlane mark, began to realize that McFarlane sucked when he started writing Spider-Man, and then began to realize that the McFarlane era of Amazing was also fairly sucky for a variety of reasons. By the time Spawn came around I was totally off the bandwagon.

It's fair to say that most comics are bad, but there are plenty of good ones, even among mainstream titles. I don't think comics are literature but then again literary fiction is the worst genre so I don't know that I care either.

Just the comparison to literature is kind of pointless. Comics are written as scripts like movies or TV, they aren't written as prose, so to say that these aren't great works of literature is kind of a "yeah, no shit" point to make. That doesn't mean they can't be great stories, although you largely have to look outside the superhero genre for stuff that would really qualify as great.

Cue McCloud's "sequential art" concept. Which I think is pretty on the money, though he's pushed it too far.

The early Marvel comics were written with the art first! Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would discuss the overall plot, Kirby would draw the comic, then Lee would add text later.

This was done for a variety of reasons some of which were purely pragmatic but it's a pretty brilliant strategy if you really want the art to convey the story rather than just serve as illustrations.

i'm sure I've mentioned it here before, and I've long forgot where I initially heard it from, but to me one the important aspects in good comic book art is whether or not you can generally understand the plot without reading any of the text. A good artist can do great two page spreads, but a good comic artist can effectively tell a story through sequential art.

I miss text captions. I really really miss them. Yes, some writers went WAY overboard (looking at you Bill Mantlo, RIP) but they really did help set the medium apart, added to the story told by the art and gave a comic some weight so that you weren't tearing through them in 5 minutes.

I've been meaning to get back into comics since I can steal a lot of ideas for painting minis.  Turns out it's pretty damned hard to actually find any. No place in this city sells comics.

Re: McFarlane. I like how he shook up the art scene and pushed the genre forward. I also like how his spider man runs financed my move to California (with a full set of AD&D 1st ed books thrown in because they were all NM and I wanted them).

I understand that folks just have them shipped to their houses or buy them digitally these days.

Well I figured on that but I need to scope out the landscape first. Looks like I head a couple cities over and see if there's still a comics shop.

Ok, everybody needs to be reading Jason Aaron's current run on Thor. I now rank it as equal to Walt Simonson's early issues and yet it's totally different. This is a lusty, violent, funny and moving Thor and beautifully disinterested in "continuity" per se. In fact, a lot of the current Marvel books are using time-travel and alternate universes and so on to free themselves in interesting ways from the "normal" 616 continuity. But this is one of the best.

I hope to get out to the comics shop (if it's still there) in the next couple days (rain!). What's a quick run down of current marvel awesomeness, with a focus on art rather than story. I like good stories, but mostly need good inspiration for painting. Both is a bonus!

Captain Marvel has a very interesting, exaggerated art style that has been very polarizing--you love it or hate it, no in-between.

Mike Allredd on FF is doing some great stuff with his style if you like his work.

Jerome Opena on the first three issues of the current main Avengers title was very good, I thought. I think he's done most of the issues since as well.

Lotta people like David Aja on Hawkeye, I think it's a bit following on Mazzucchelli circa Batman: Year One, but that's a good thing.

I thought Stuart Immonen's arc on Journey into Mystery (featuring Sif) was so fantastic--and the story was great fun too. Might want to wait for the trade.

Young Avengers is a fun book artistically and characterization-wise.

In non-Marvel books, Fiona Staples work on Saga is really really great.

Darwyn Cooke's Parker book last year was amazing.

Lots of people like Manapul on Flash but I just can't deal with DC books any more. Amanda Conner was doing something for DC too and I would otherwise probably have read that as I love her art.

Of course I completely forgot to jot that list down. Just looking over what was on the new books stand, I nabbed:

Fearless Defenders 1, 3 (Valkyrie, lots of nmm)
Guardians of the Galaxy
Savage Wolverine 2, 3 (they didn't have 1) - About to paint a Shanna and she's guesting in it
Iron Man 8, 9 (more nmm -non-metallic metal)
Thanos Rising 2
Avengers 1, 3 (didn't have 2 and I didn't want to buy their 1-6 bundle for the first 3)

No real art fans at the comic shop (eh what?) but they did point me to Witchblade 147-9 and they didn't have a full run of Alex Ross Marvels, so I'm nabbing that (and probably an art book of his) off Amazon. Then nostalgia took hold; when I was telling them my favorite comic from when I was collecting I mentioned Walt Simonson's Havok & Wolverine series and they had all 4...had to grab them. I was trying to find the Sif stuff, they didn't have it.

Still not sure what I'd sub to. Marvel looks schizophrenic with stories all over the place, multiple books per team, artists switching in and out every couple issues. What the hell? When I was younger, I had subs to FF, X-Men, Alpha Flight, Avengers and Defenders. Now who the heck knows.

And they ain't cheap no more!

They're silly expensive. It's why a lot of people are switching to trades.

I like Fearless Defenders.

Guardians of the Galaxy really frosts my tits because Bendis is just ignoring all the fantastic work that Abnett and Lanning did with the characters in order to get the title into compliance with the movie treatment.

Iron Man I should take a look at because Greg Land isn't doing the art any more. I cannot stand that guy (he traces almost all of his stuff from porn actors and actresses)

Thanos Rising has been better than I expected.

I want to like Fearless Defenders, but there's just so many blatant little annoying things that I have trouble looking past them.

So pretty much everything he's written since Daredevil then?

Done. Just ordered a few trades and pre-ordered a couple others. Nabbed Alex Ross Marvels and another of his art collections.

Mostly hard bound, lower price and prime shipping? Okeedoke.

Sorry to raise this again after so long but I`ve just been rereading some of these books and I'm sure I must have missed something. Why did a new mutant get born after the Scarlet Witch stopped new mutants being born? How come her powers handily involved creating more mutants? How come she looked like a young Jean Grey? Did the Phoenix force magic her up maybe?

Perhaps the answer is just that it doesn't actually make sense. But I'm still wondering if it's me being dumb.

I think it's because everything involving that storyline was idiotic.

No one knows what the hell Hope was suppose to be. Is she scott summers surrogate daughter? Jean Grey 2.0? Whats her powers again? Meh lets just write angsty teenager, creepy Scott Summers, and general wankery and see how far it gets us. At some point this was actually wondered, "Well she is the only legit mutant after the scarlet witch fiasco, maybe we should run a train on her so she can have all our mutant babies and jump start the mutant race. I mean she is like only 14 right?"

Here, knock yourself out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Summers_%28comics%29

After you have passed your san roll and unscrambeled your brains after trying to make that crap make sense you can tell us.

My enjoyment of comics is enhanced by my ability to just ignore most of that kind of nonsense.

Same here usually. In this case they actually built up a really nice long running mystery which looked like it was going to lead up to a conclusion but maybe not  :headscratch:

I haven't been a big comic book reader but have decided to give Marvel Unlimited a go for bit and give them a try.  Any recommendations for some good stand alone stuff?

I started Joss Whedon's X-men stuff but it was clearly written with the assumption you had read earlier stuff.  I had to stop reading when the danger room became sentient though  :uhrr:

I then went right back to the Stan Lee X-men start but couldn't stand traveling to the 60's.

I don't think I can handle too much of the superhero silliness.  I think I will The Punisher a try next.  What I am really hoping for though are some good stand-alone stuff.

Not sure what's available. My favorite Marvel stuff off the top of my head: Simonson's Havok and Wolverine (4-part series) and more recently (for me) Alex Ross's Marvels (tpb).

Thanks Sky, the Havok and Wolverine series was really good.  The art style was really cool too.

There are two panels that are my iconic wolverine.

(http://mctmd.com/storage/Havok__Wolverine_-_Meltdown_Wolverine_x2.jpg)

And the other is when he's in a bar fight, but I can't find it quickly online.

Can't say enough about that set of books, it's by far my favorite and I've always had a copy around (and just bought another set because it was reasonably priced and in good condition).

Figured I'd update this thread with my latest Marvel reading since it's all about Marvel Now.

I reached the point of having to stop with the Avengers/X-Men titles because the ongoing stories weren't fully available on Unlimited yet, so I went back and caught up with Daredevil. I liked Brubaker's run though holy shit was it incredibly depressing. And then came Shadowland.

What... the... fucking... fuck?

I was ok with Matt deciding to take leadership of the Hand in order to prevent The Kingpin from getting it. I was even ok with Daredevil killing Bullseye because I could stretch it that far. But then it got stupid. Daredevil is possessed by the Beast of the Hand demon thing and goes full metal villain. The Shadowland: Moon Knight series was fucking awful. And finally we have Daredevil being killed and of course Elektra bringing him back to life. He leaves town and is wanted by the law and the series ends.

Then it starts again and quite literally handwaves away almost everything that happened to make Matt Murdock's return to New York impossible.

If it weren't being written by a writer with the chops that Mark Waid has, it would be fucking awful.

Thankfully, Mark Waid is writing it now and it is FANTASTIC. Better than all the Brubaker and Bendis stuff combined. I liked the Bendis/Brubaker gritty street crime drama stuff - but after awhile, it got oppressively dark and depressing. Waid has taken a much more super-hero-ey 4-color approach and it is just spectacular. The editors have also chosen artists who totally fit that tone, with very clean lines and an art palette that is full of bright primary colors and it all just fits so cohesively. I recommend every issue of the new series - it's the tits.

I've also started reading the Guardians of the Galaxy series by Abnett and Lanning and I can't wait for the movie now. Just the right mix of humor and action and cosmic shit. Groot is just fucking awesome. I shudder to imagine how Bendis will fuck this up in the new series.

Shadowland was seriously bad. I gave up right away.

And then Waid pretty much said, "Hey, forget about that, let's make the character fun again while still making him a bit broody and complex." It's been a great, great run, one of my favorite superhero books in the last decade. Fun, interesting, thoughtful--and true to the medium and its history.

So they finally updated Marvel Unlimited with the Infinity series and crossovers, and I just finished it yesteday.

 :facepalm:

What should have been a lot of really cool moments (Cannoball dating Smasher, lots of galactic fight scenes, Hulk and Thor vs. Thanos) gets lost in a fucking mess of a storyline. Sometimes, a story is just... TOO... BIG. It's immense. Hickman can't seem to decide who he wants the big bad to be and he just keeps escalating the amount of actual GODS involved in the story. The Builders start assaulting every race in the universe (all the big players - Shi'ar, Kree, Brood, Skrull, Spartax) all because they are driving through the universe in a straight line to destroy Earth. And killing entire worlds along the way... because. So most of the Avengers leave Earth to go fight a galactic war and as a result, we get very llittle characterization, or really a good minute-to-minute viewpoint of what's actually happening. We don't get long battle scenes, we don't get long character scenes, it's just rush rush rush from one scene to the next. And because fighting a galactic war against the race that supposedly created fucking life in this universe anyway wasn't big enough, Thanos packs up his five most powerful generals and attacks Earth because the Avengers are away and... he wants to kill his last remaining son (apparently, the guy in love with death is a complete pussy hound and a deadbeat dad - I'm not making that up). The son has been hidden by the Inhuman king Black Bolt in an Inhuman enclave that is separated from Attilan. Oh and he and his mad brother Maximus the Mad want to set off a Terrigen bomb (the Terrigen Mists give Inhumans their powers) because that creates more Inhumans all over Earth among regular looking humans who happen to have some Inhuman DNA. Which will kick off the next big event... INHUMANITY!!!! And Thanos discovers that the New Avengers/Illuminati have anti-matter bombs.

Oh and just for good measure, the New Avengers/Illuminati who have been almost murdering entire parallel earths to keep their own earth from being destroyed also have to deal with that - and according to the Black Swan, the Builders (world killers and life creators of the universe remember) aren't the real threat behind the Incursions and there's all this other stuff coming to kill Earth through the Incursions and they are so much worse, mmmmhhmmmm you better beware because you can't stop them.

It's too much. At some point, you can't make the villains THIS UNSTOPPABLE. Hickman's shit in Fantastic Four was already bad enough with the Mad Celestials and now we're upping the ante on that? What the fuck ever happened to stopping Doctor Doom from taking over the world? Why wasn't that an interesting enough story? No, we have to have the Marvel Universe fighting ACTUAL FUCKING DEITIES and I don't mean goddamn Norse Mythology, I mean some kind of scienc-fiction-y conceptual being that can destroy planets by fucking blinking but somehow the goddamn BLACK PANTHER is going to stop him with the Panther Spirit and an anti-matter bomb.

For something so smart, comics have gotten REALLY GODDAMN DUMB.

yeah. Can't say I like Hickman.

Now see if you can read Avengers World and not laugh at the big bad in that.  :why_so_serious:

Having said that, I like Avengers World more than I like Hickman anywhere else (I've only read his recent stuff).

Once again I feel like I'm too dumb to follow the plot, which I'm sure shouldn't be an issue with superhero comics.

Why did the Builders want to destroy or conquer all life anyway? What was their relationship with Thanos, or was it just a coincidence that both things happened at once? How come they were unstoppable for so long but then suddenly collapsed? Ok, I get that the answer to the final question is partly because Thor killed one, giving their opponents a big morale boost, but it still seemed strange.

But I did enjoy the series overall, and certainly enjoyed the early issues. They set up the big epic space war well and it had a sense of immense scale with so many of the Marvel Universe alien races getting involved.

Thanos found out the Avengers had left Earth to fight the Builders, so he chose to attack Earth when it was vulnerable. Yeah, it's not a very good justifcation, considering there were only 18 Avengers off-world.  But THANOS IS MAD!!!!!!! The Mad Titan... or some shit. Also... reasons.

That was the problem. Thanos alone is a big enough threat to make a decent story. The Builders thing didn't have to be scrunched in there. It was two invasions stories for the price of 1 and both suffered for it. The Builders shit could have been left off completely (including the whole Ex Nihilo/Abyss characters - totally fucking geek smart stupid they were) and the Thanos invasion would have been more than enough for a big summer crossover event. Plus, those were better story beats anyway despite the silliness of "I just want to kill my last remaining son but I'm going to leave my daughter, Gamora, alive."


Because... reasons. It was a cool scene watching Thor toss his hammer around the fucking sun and through one of those squidgy fuckers but the rest didn't make sense. "We killed all their world killing ships, surely they don't have or can't make more." Really?

I wonder how pissed Starlin was to learn Thanos had children.  :why_so_serious:

He essentially retconned that away in Infinity Guantlet: Nebula claimed to be his (grand)daughter, and Thanos said something like "As if I'd have progeny."

Hickman just misses the point of Kirby/Lee cosmic, that it only works if the amazing big crazy shit is at one scale and Our Heroes, even Reed Richards or Thor, are at the other. Jason Aaron's Thor recently gets this: his Thor deals with stuff like "all the gods in the universe are being murdered" but in the midst of that is brawling, drinking, putting the moves on a sexy SHIELD agent, and so on. Hickman loses that scale of things altogether, so all of his characters are almost the same--modular chess pieces being moved around on a story that is really just about the idea that everything is so BIG AND COSMIC but that there is even MORE BIGGERER AND COSMICER stuff right around the corner.

Jason Aaron is a really good writer. He's made a concept I thought would be utterly terrible (Wolverine running the X-Men school) and made it one of the better books in the Marvel stable right now.