It’s the Free Comic Book Day edition of ThWiP! Which is good, since I didn’t really get too many books on Wednesday and need some padding. I did end up picking up Journey Into Mystery, which I’m enjoying the hell out of. The adventures of a now-young Loki will always trump the adventures of a now-young Tony Stark. Goddamn 90’s comics.

I’m joined by my usual folks, David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa. As mentioned, last week’s FCBD stuff is being used here. At least, the stuff I got around to reading through. The Inspector Gadget one didn’t do much to wow (wowsers?) me and it suffers from one hell of a editing mistake on the second page. In a big two-page spread, what should be the dialogue between Gadget and Penny in the middle of the spread is instead being said by a stack of luggage on the far right of the image. How did nobody prevent this?

New Avengers is the first panel in a while that I’ve posted where it’s more about, “Look how bad this is.” The modern plot is interesting enough for the five pages we get an issue, but the Chaykin-drawn “Bendis decides to make his own Agents of Atlas lineup” segments are the worst. I’d drop this book if I thought this was going to be a new status quo for the series.

Atomic Robo FCBD
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener and others

Batgirl #21
Bryan Q. Miller and Dustin Nguyen

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I had seen the movie Thor recently and I enjoyed the hell out of it (Iron Man > Thor > Incredible Hulk > Iron Man 2). For longtime readers of this site, you usually know what that leads to. Ever since Spider-Man 3, I’ve had a tendency to pick up the novelizations of Marvel movie properties before the movies come out. When I see the movie, I then go home and write up all the stuff that was in the book, yet never made the on-screen transition. These always lead to interesting differences between early versions of the draft and later ones. Like how Iron Man 2 was going to be a total piece of shit rather than just being simply the lowest rung of the Avengers Saga movies.

Here’s the problem, though. The Thor and Captain America movies don’t have novelizations and won’t be getting any. Oh, sure, there’s the junior novel, but those things are always too cleaned up and they overly abridge chunks of the story. I guess I’ll just have to kiss my bread and butter goodbye.

But then, I figured, what’s stopping me? Sure, I haven’t read the original script for Thor. Sure, I don’t know how earlier drafts of the story went. But YOU don’t know that!

…shit, wait. You do. Pretend those above three paragraphs never happened. I want to tell you about all the scenes from Thor that never came to be. The ones that were left on the cutting room floor, for better or for worse. Let’s go.

– In the opening scene, when Jane and friends are driving through the desert, they briefly spurn a hitchhiker and drive past him. Bruce Banner puts his hands back into his pockets and continues down the road, accompanied by sad piano music.

– The real reason those frost giants snuck into Asgard isn’t because of any magic or trickery, but because Heimdall was too distracted from doing that thing where you point your index fingers at each other and cross your eyes and see a little floating hotdog finger in-between.

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Hey there, folks. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained the concept of this weekly series, here’s the gist for new people: Every week, me, some readers and occasionally Mr. David Brothers put together a collection of panels from each comic that we’ve read collectively. The idea is to sum up the comic in one panel. If you were trying to sell someone on the issue while giving them an idea of what the comic is about without overly spoiling them, what would that panel be?

I have stuff from David, Was Taters and Space Jawa. Jawa also sent me an image from Free Comic Book Day, but I’m going to save all of those for next week.

Also, apologies for the lack of content from me in the past couple weeks. Been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat while catching up on the rest of season one of the Avengers cartoon off YouTube. There are like seven episodes aired in Australia that they held off on in America because there’s a lot of Asgard stuff going on and they wanted to save it for after the Thor movie was released.

You know what’s kind of fucked about that cartoon? Chemistro got to make his animated debut before Luke Cage and Iron Fist.

Annihilators #3
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Tan Eng Huat

Annihilators #3 (backup)
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Timothy Green II

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I’ll try to keep it short here. Long, long day for me and I’m pretty damn tired. Though I did catch the big WWE Extreme Rules PPV. After the show, newly-crowned champion John Cena addressed the crowd to tell them the news that Osama Bin Laden’s officially dead. All I can think of when seeing the footage is that scene from the Simpsons where it’s the last day of school and the kids are running out the building, celebrating summer. Then a teacher runs out with an open book in hand.

“Wait a minute! You didn’t learn how World War II ended!”

“………”

“WE WON!”

“YAAAAY! USA! USA! USA!”

I’m helped out this time around by Was Taters and Space Jawa. Enjoy the naked Spider-Woman.

Avengers #12.1
Brian Michael Bendis and Bryan Hitch

Batman Incorporated #5
Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette

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As a kid, I never read much of the choose-your-own-adventures books. I did read an old Superman one once, which was really good and in retrospect is intriguing for including so many ways that Superman can get taken out in one book. It’s just that those books tended to be just a little too depressing. You don’t just receive bad luck in a lot of those books… you enact nightmare material that I was too young to endure. Where I currently work, I had flipped through several of them and even now I find the stuff questionable. I saw one book where a decision led to the main character getting hit with a car so hard that they needed to check the dental records to see who he was. Jesus…

Then I saw this book: Race to the Rumble: Pick Your Path #1 by Tracey West. It’s a WWE choose-your-own-adventure book and it’s Royal Rumble-based. I kind of had to pick it up and read through it out of principle.

Rey Mysterio actually has very little to do with this book. Same with Edge who appears on the back cover.

The book is nearly 100 pages and exists as being both fun and lacking. Lacking in the sense that there’s no real path divergence in the stories. Instead of branching off into different scenarios, we’re only given two storylines. Each decision, with one exception, gives you one choice that will continue the story or end it in one page. That’ll at least make this write-up easier on me. What is there is at least good stuff. West has a decent grasp on the WWE and really does come up with some good booking ideas for a gimmicky book like this. There are times when I’ve read what’s happened and thought, “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

So let’s get into the story. It all begins with you, a nameless and indistinct indy wrestler winning a match against Blockhead in a high school gym. A talent scout from the WWE comes to you and offers you a tryout. You remember news that WWE’s announced a tournament of sorts that’s allowing newly-recruited guys to earn a spot in the Royal Rumble. This sounds awesome and gives you the drive needed to beat another nameless hopeful in your tryout match in front of Vince McMahon himself. Vince thinks your ringwork is impressive, but wants to hear you cut a promo on the spot.

This is where we get our first choice. You can either play a good guy or bad guy. For now, let’s go face and cover the rest later. You give a generic, “What this means to me,” speech and Vince kind of shrugs at it. You’re a good athlete, but you have a month to prove yourself and grow a personality. Off you go to your first match where you’re opening a show against Drew McIntyre. Backstage, Drew takes offense to the idea that you were signed by Vince himself, since he’s Vince’s Chosen One. You get absolutely destroyed in your debut match and the fans call you a loser.

Here’s where we get the one and only side-plot of the choose-your-own story. Chris Jericho meets you backstage and comes up with a gimmick idea that comes off as lame, but he’s a veteran, so maybe you should listen to him. The gimmick is Kid Caveman, where you’d wear a loincloth and carry a big dinosaur bone as a club. Should you listen to his advice? Let’s see what happens with that…

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Hey, I’m back from Vegas! Had a fantastic time and made about $400 during the trip. Also got to check out some good Lewis Black stand-up. Now I’m back, enjoying the fruits of Mortal Kombat and my Chikara King of Trios DVDs. I’ve watched the first night of King of Trios which features Team Minnesota in the main event, made up of Arik Cannon, Darrin Corbin and the 1-2-3 Kid. Yes, you read that correctly. Not Syxx. Not X-Pac. The 1-2-3 Kid. Although he shaved for the show, he apologized to the crowd because there was no way he was going to bring back the mullet.

Said match involved them facing a team which had Jinsei Shinzaki (otherwise known as Hakushi in the mid-90’s WWF), leading to a big “1995!” chant from the crowd. God, I love Chikara.

On topic, great comic week. All my non-Venom favorites showed up. Avengers Academy, Darkwing Duck, Thunderbolts and Uncanny X-Force. Lot of stuff this time around, as I’m assisted by David Brothers, Was Taters and Space Jawa. Let’s get cracking.

Avengers Academy #12
Christos Gage and Tom Raney

Avengers #12
Brian Michael Bendis and John Romita Jr.

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Some of you longtime readers might remember that a couple years ago, me and some guys experimented with iRiffs, a part of the Rifftrax site where any idiot with time and a microphone can record his own Mystery Science Theater 3000 garbage and put it online. Our first couple attempts were plagued with sound issues, mostly on my part, but we moved onto a project I practically begged the others for: Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins. Journey Begins was an animated movie released to hype up the theatrical release of Mortal Kombat. Anyone who has ever seen it can tell you that it’s ripe with ridiculousness and begs to be made fun of. So we did just that.

We recorded our lines and everything, but things fell to the wayside and a lot of it was forgotten about. Considering Nick Zachariasen, also known as ManiacClown, had little to do after Ultimate Edit finished up and the new Mortal Kombat game was on the horizon, it made sense to get back to work on it. He worked his ass off on it and here it is. It’s me, Nick and James Howard, who rules the roost with his delivery. My quality has gone from outright terrible to plain crappy, so that’s a slight step up.

Rather than show you a preview and ask you to purchase it, I thought it would be better to just give you the whole shebang, synced up and ready to go. So here you go. The entire iRiff of Journey Begins for free. Enjoy.

There is an iRiff page for the mp3 file, so if you feel the need to pay a dollar for it, I won’t hold it against you.

(The last couple seconds repeat a few times. No idea what that’s about)

(Special thanks to Fletcher “Syrg” Arnett for his assistance)

With the new Mortal Kombat game coming out tomorrow, it feels right to cover another comic based on a game that tried to ape the series’ success with lesser results. Already, I’ve covered Killer Instinct and Primal Rage. Now it’s time for Eternal Champions, a short-lived backup featured in the UK publication Sonic the Comic. Sonic the Comic was a bi-weekly anthology featuring stories about Sega’s rodent mascot with the occasional backups of other Sega properties. It’s mostly remembered in the comic world for a series of Streets of Rage stories written by one Mark Millar. Eternal Champions got two story arcs and a special one-shot issue out of the deal.

So what is Eternal Champions? The game was released on the Genesis in the early 90’s, followed soon after by an updated version with an expanded roster on the Sega CD. The game had a really cool and inventive storyline… until it remembers the part that it’s a fighting game and it falls apart. The idea is that there’s this being called the Eternal Champion and he’s a big force for good. In the distant future, he comes to realize that the balance between good and evil is way out of whack. Evil’s held its grip over history a bit too much and this will cause a major cataclysm. He notices a handful of beings who were killed before their prime from different time periods. People who would have made the world a better place had their lives not been cut so short.

The Eternal Champion decides to use his powers to bring in these nine souls (more in the Sega CD game) in an attempt to help set things right. It’s like Exiles with time travel. Despite having the power to pull them all from the time stream, he only has the strength to send one of these guys back a moment before their scheduled death. That’s a weird drawback, but okay. I was thinking you could blame the butterfly effect on that, but even if the caveman changes history for the better, the Sega CD endings feel the need to remind you that EVERYONE ELSE IS DESTINED TO DIE HORRIBLY via early-90’s CGI animation.

So how does the Eternal Champion decide who will get his or her second chance? FIGHTING TOURNAMENT, THAT’S HOW! Man, it’s a good thing all of these potential heroes are physically fit martial artists. So not only do they have to murder the fuck out of each other (and honestly, the “Overkills” are more violent than most Mortal Kombat Fatalities), despite the fact that they’re all pretty good people, they have to fight the super-cheap Eternal Champion to prove themselves. Why? Like, if he kicks your ass – and believe me, he probably will – he cancels the entire project and decides to allow reality to crumble to evil. All because you can’t defeat a nearly omnipotent deity with your knowledge of karate. What a dickhole!

Luckily, even the comic is aware that the Eternal Champion is full of snot. Let’s look at our nine time travelers:

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Hello, everybody. This week I’m helped out by David Brothers, Space Jawa and Luis.

In a couple days, I’m taking off to Las Vegas for a bit, but that won’t put a damper on the quantity of posts. In a few hours, I’ll have a big review article going up. Tomorrow I’ll have something really cool to share with you all and while I’m gone, a couple Mortal Marathon guest articles should be popping up. Plus that one guy and that one girl will probably still be posting stuff as usual.

Anyhow, panels.

Batgirl #20
Bryan Q. Miller and Ramon Bachs

Batman and Robin #22
Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason

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Before I get to the panels, I’d like to point out that Rand Hall, a reader inspired by my old Top 100 What If Countdown list to read every single What If issue has finished his own list of his 25 favorite issues of the series. A great choice for #1, which would definitely make my top 10 when I redo my list. Maybe even top 5. If anything, I consider it my all-time favorite Dr. Doom story.

I’m only joined by Space Jawa this week. He only covered one comic, but also included the backup and it starts with A, so he pretty much conquers the above-the-cut part of the article. Well played.

Annihilators #2
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Tan Eng Huat

Annihilatiors #2 (backup)
Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Timothy Green II

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