This is pretty much what we have to look forward to during this summer’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Galactus is a giant cloud. Great.

I can verify this. We got the novelization of the movie at work the other day and I skimmed the latter half of the book. This, plus the goofy final battle, are enough to keep me out of the theater for the time being.

I like that Spider-Man 3 and F4:RotSS come out during the same summer. They’re as different as night and day. The F4 movies take some of Marvel’s most beloved villains and bastardize them to the point that it’s painful to even talk about them. Spider-Man 3, based on the novelization, does a great job taking a villain most comic fans hate (Venom) and a classic villain who never really did all that much (Sandman) and making them interesting and exciting. I’m expecting Sandman to make a major comeback based on the movie’s portrayal.

How the hell are they going to make merchandise for a giant cloud, anyway? You can’t give gas kung-fu grip.

We’re finishing off the trilogy of World Championship Wrestling articles here at 4th Letter, but first I want to talk about blame.

Ever since the moment I picked a couple of these issues up at New York Comic Con, my fellow 4L guys and my comic-reading friends all asked me the same question: why? Why would I do this to myself? Why am I always the guy on this site willingly reading comics I know are going to be lousy? The truth is, it’s all hermanos’ fault.

He and I are similar in terms of comic-reading background. He and I read stuff in the 90’s, only to break away from comics due to the Marvel Cloneslaught disaster. He got back in the game before I did and had more reading experience. He would be the one who would suggest comics that I would eventually follow obsessively. He suggested I read that Deadpool issue where he Shoryukens Kitty Pryde. He told me to read Kingdom Come. He told me that the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League is good stuff. And I won’t even tell you how many times I had to hear him push Flex Mentallo in my direction before I submitted.

A problem arises from that. It gets annoying discussing things when he’s read pretty much everything I’ve read and more. Where’s my upper hand?

So I had to dig deep in the opposite direction. Has hermanos read the comic where Venom fights Carnage inside the internet? What about the one where Skeletor controls Superman’s mind and makes him beat up He-Man? Did he read Super-Villain Team… wait, hold on. Super-Villain Team-Up turned out to be pretty great. But he didn’t read the Tekken comic, did he?! And he’s a better person for it because that thing is a stinking turd on the level of the Doom comic.

But the Tekken comic review will be for another day.

I think I’m just stalling because the cover of issue #9 features the Steiner Brothers with the blurb, “The Steiner Brothers are cruisin’ for a bruisin’! Part 2 of 4!” At least Jesse Ventura is in the upper-corner logo. That’s as good a reason as any to keep moving forward.

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The new solicitations for July are out and Marvel looks to have quite the month. Annihilation 2 begins, Iron Fist takes part in Mortal Kombat for some reason, we get the conclusion to Ash Williams vs. Zombie Sentry, Deadpool and the Great Lakes gang get their own special, Eddie Brock gets his own story arc, Captain America makes friends with Optimus Prime, Namor does his thing and Thor makes his mighty return.

What really gets me excited is this blurb:

GIANT-SIZE MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #1
Written by Jeff Parker
Pencils and Cover by Leonard Kirk
Remember your history-The Avengers didn’t thaw out Captain America, and Kang the Conqueror became Master of the World throughout all time. To make a brighter future, our heroes have to go to the 1950’s and enlist the help of The Agents of ATLAS! Plus extras!

Now that is a comic worth looking at. I’ve already discussed Agents of Atlas here and there. It’s a great miniseries and it’s nice that Marvel looks to be trying to sprinkle their appearances through their various books. Gorilla Man is set to show up in X-Men: First Class, Namora is going to be a player in World War Hulk and now this.

I love how the cover is actually an update of the What If issue that created this “Avengers-before-the-Avengers” concept. Of course, back then, 3-D Man was a member of the team.

If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel Adventures: Avengers, you might be wondering why Storm is there in Thor’s place. Marvel Adventures is like the all-ages version of Ultimates. Instead of grim and gritty, we get a new continuity that has a friendlier, Saturday morning cartoon feel. As kiddy as it sounds, it’s actually pretty high-quality.

The roster is Captain America, Iron Man, Storm, Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine and Giant-Girl (Janet Van Dyne with a more useful gimmick). Yes, each issue is self-contained, but they cluster together to create story arcs. The first issue has them fight Ultron. The second issue has them fight the Leader. The third has them fight Baron Zemo. This all ties together into the fourth issue, where those three villains start up the Masters of Evil.

The second arc focuses on Loki. Somehow they’ve brought Loki in as a major Avenger villain without a single mention of Thor. Even more impressive is that they introduced Juggernaut as a villain without a single connection to Xavier or the X-Men. His new origin is actually really good and they tossed in the option of redemption if they ever want to make him like he is now.

Not to mention that there’s an issue where the team gets transformed into a bunch of MODOCs (C is for Conquest here. That’s good enough for me). Seeing them drive the Leader to tears by making fun of his inferior, “tiny” head is priceless.

I’m a couple issues behind, but damn if this series didn’t surprise me with its fun factor. I haven’t been this pleasantly surprised with a comic since Marvel Megamorphs.

No. Really. Megamorphs was good. I’m serious.

If you’ve spent more than two minutes at this site, you may have noticed that it absolutely blows to navigate through. You want to look for that time I ranted about Wolverine? Check Google, because chasing through the archives will probably take you two hours.

That’s at an end… hopefully. I finally put in a Table of Contents page. You can see it under “Pages” on the right side of the screen. Here we have a majority of the 4L articles, split up into little groups. And a big group for David’s articles, the show-off. Plus you can actually get a little blurb about what the article in question is about.

Give it a test drive and tell me if you come across any mistakes.

I really should replace that Green Arrow image with a headshot of Ruin from Superman, but I can’t find a decent enough image of him. Damn me for coming across that arc towards the end.

We continue our look at the adventures of our Friendly Neighborhood Steve Borden. First, another wrestling history lesson.

This Ghoul storyline looks like it’s really meant to be a mix between two “mystery man” storylines WCW had done a year or so before the comic came out. The first was the infamous Black Scorpion storyline. WCW had done Sting vs. Ric Flair to death. They needed to give Sting a new rival. They came up with the Black Scorpion, a masked man with a distorted voice that would appear in taped segments, taunting Sting. He would bring up their past and how intimately they know each other. Then he’d do magic tricks because, you know, he’s mysterious and stuff.

WCW didn’t actually have any good ideas of who the Black Scorpion would turn out to be, so in the end, they just made him Ric Flair, thereby totally defeating the purpose of this storyline.

The other “mystery man” storyline involved a wrestler called the Halloween Phantom, who defeated the Z-Man at the pay-per-view event Halloween Havoc before unmasking. The following issues are more in tune to this one.

As any wrestling fan can tell you, most of these stories turn out to be convoluted messes by the time they’re done. Kind of like the Clone Saga, now that I think about it.

The next issue (we’re on #4, if you’ve lost track) begins with the new tag team of the Diamond Studd and Stunning Steve going up against the fictional cannon fodder Jersey Jerry and Mangy Matt. First a little something on Stunning Steve.

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Norman Osborn would be the worst celebrity partner for $10,000 Pyramid ever.

Contestant: Okay, okay. Animals. Cages.

Osborn: Spider-Man?

Contestant: No, no. Peanuts. Signs that tell you not to feed the animals.

Osborn: Ah. Spider-Man.

Contestant: Pass. Er, hm. Bread. Biscuits.

Osborn: Spider-Man.

Contestant: No! Cookies. Um… cupcakes!

Osborn: Things that sound like Spider-Man!

Contestant: NOT SPIDER-MAN!

Osborn: Spider-Man?! Where?!

Contestant: Stop that! Jeez… Cakes! Pies! Brownies! Freaking bread!

Osborn: Things that you bake…

Contestant: YES!

Osborn: …for Spider-Man!

Contestant: NO! Pass. He’s a superhero. Wears red and blue, but now wears black. Shoots webs. Has a movie coming out. Made you kill yourself.

Osborn: Miss Stacy!

I should be finishing up my next installment of the WCW debacle, but it’s taking longer than I thought. Admittedly, it’s the least exciting of the three articles and it covers the most issues. Expect it up within the next few days. Honest.

In the meantime, how’s about we pass the time with more of these? For instance, in Annihilation, it was pretty badass when the Silver Surfer returned to Galactus’ thrall as herald. But I know the real reason Galactus was smiling.

Cassandra Cain Batgirl has been out of it for the past few months, acting like a villain and murdering people. I think I have an explanation.

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Chances are, you already know what World Championship Wrestling was. If not, you at least remember the days when World Wrestling Entertainment was referred to as the World Wrestling Federation. WCW was the WWF’s competition and for quite a long while, relegated itself to being a distant second.

Though the company leaked money for many years, it stayed afloat because it was billionaire Ted Turner’s pet project. He kept the fed around because it amused him. Sure, it had its talented wrestlers and a couple personalities like Big Van Vader and Cactus Jack that I admired, but I could never really get into it at that age. I was strictly WWF. Maybe it was just a sense of being loyal. Maybe it was the feeling of blandness that clouded a show that didn’t have the Undertaker and Ted Dibiase. Maybe I was turned off by the rules that dropped the entertainment potential like a rock (like being disqualified for throwing someone over the top rope, being on the top rope or even backdropping your opponent).

That’s in the past. The product would finally get the shot in the arm it needed in the mid-to-late-90’s and would, for a while, dominate the WWF. This lasted for only a few years before the WWF got its act together and fought back, using wrestlers that WCW discarded. Two of which appear heavily in this series I’m about to review. WCW lost its momentum thanks to a lot of amusingly bad decisions, many of which came from hiring the wrestling equivalent of Chuck Austen to write the shows. It eventually drowned on its own suck and was bought by Vince McMahon, who incorporated WCW and fellow beaten wrestling fed ECW into his own company, like some kind of Crisis in Infinite Arenas.

I’m getting ahead of myself. This 12-issue comic, released by Marvel, took place during 1992-93, years before the New World Order would turn the tide. At the time, WCW had its share of problems. Their golden boy Ric Flair was off in the WWF. Another mainstay, Sid Vicious, was also playing for the winners. WCW had talent, but it didn’t have much in terms of big names.

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Sometimes I can’t keep myself from reading spoilers. A week or so before Revenge of the Sith came out, I read the comic based on it. I like Runaways member Chase so much that at one point I had to check Wikipedia to make sure he wasn’t the one who died in Runaways #18. I read spoilers for Supernova’s secret identity the day before that issue of 52 came out.

This is no different. The other day I got my hands on the novelization of Spider-Man 3, as written by Peter David. I was a bit wary, as the last time Peter David wrote Venom, this happened:

I’m going to try and stay away from major spoilers, but I may slip here or there. For instance, there’s an excellent scene where Aunt May defeats the Grizzly in a game of beer pong. What I won’t spoil is that she did it blindfolded.

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I feel kind of silly making this article since it was supposed to be done months ago. There are several things that kept me from finishing it, but I’m going to take the easy way out. All the time I usually use to write these What If articles was really used to pretend I was writing for Lost. I love writing Sam the Butcher’s dialogue the most.

Starting it off, here’s a series of sig images I made for the Batman’s Shameful Secret sub-forum at Something Awful. I guess they worked.

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