I’ve discussed comics based on video games before. Many of them aren’t very good. There are exceptions to the rule out there, like the UDON Street Fighter series. That is, if you can get past the horrid delays and the lack of anything of importance happening in most issues. The Darkstalkers comic wouldn’t have been all that bad had it lasted more than six issues and actually went somewhere.

The subject today is Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects, based on the similarly named videogame Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. This review is going to be a little different, as I’m going to try and lead you through the process of me reading this series. The experience of reading these issues when they came out is worlds different than if I were to be reading them for the first time now.

The news first hit that Electronic Arts would be releasing a Marvel fighting game. The place-holder of a name “Marvel vs. EA” was the popular term for this new project and immediately, we were lambasted with awful joke after awful joke. As a comedic writer, something that annoys me is when somebody makes an obvious joke that half of the hemisphere had already made and acts like they’re a comedic genius. The kind of people who make jokes about Mr. Fantastic stretching his wang. Anyway, for months on end, everybody chimed in with the same played out “Spider-Man vs. Madden” or “Wolverine vs. Gandalf” punchline. It was really sad.

Over time, details about the game, such as the actual title, were announced. The first footage of the game featured Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Thing and two EA-created characters Johnny Ohm and Brigade. Artist Jae Lee had a major role in the art direction of the game and made the character select images. He would also draw the cover art for the comic miniseries. Mark Millar was brought in for character designs and backstories. The creative team for the six-issue miniseries would be writer Greg Pak and artist Renato Arlem. I was unfamiliar with Pak at the time, so I had no idea that this was a really good thing. Renato’s art style shares similarities with Jae Lee’s style, so that’s also a big plus.

The cover features a foreground shot of the story’s villain, Niles Van Roekel. Behind him are Spider-Man, Wolverine, Elektra and Thing, all infected with some kind of green goop nastiness. Thing is what it looks like when you chew Fruity Pebbles and then open your mouth and stick out your tongue.

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The Contest of Champions paved the way for the event miniseries that Marvel and DC have become dependant on. The star-studded scavenger hunt wasn’t the greatest story in the world, but it was still memorable and classic for being the first step. Naturally, there would one day be a sequel.

If you can call it that.

When I think of Contest of Champions II, I think of the Infinity Gauntlet. Bear with me on this. Infinity Gauntlet was a popular Marvel miniseries starring a bunch of heroes that was eventually used as the basis for Marvel Superheroes, a very good arcade fighting game. While the game did include characters like Psylocke, Magneto, Juggernaut, Blackheart and Shuma Gorath (that still boggles my mind), the gist of the story was that it was supposed to be a retelling of Infinity Gauntlet, only the heroes aren’t useless.

What does this have to do with Contest of Champions II? Marvel Superheroes was a fighting game based on a Marvel miniseries. Contest of Champions II is the opposite. It’s a Marvel miniseries based on fighting games.

Funny thing about fighting games is that there aren’t many variations of the story out there. For the most part, every fighting game’s story is based on one of two concepts. Sometimes it’s just about a quest where different characters run around with a goal, meet each other and fight. Marvel Superheroes was basically this. The other, more popular one, is the tournament. It’s the easiest reason to have different warriors from different walks of life battle each other, especially when there’s no animosity between some.

The tournament stories are occasionally straight-laced and legit. That’s boring. Many others would have the tournament just be a front. In actuality, the host of the tournament is trying to use this as a way to kill off all threats to his or her plans for world domination. Maybe the host plans on using the beaten warriors as zombie cyborg soldiers. A lot of the time, all the fighting is just a way to unleash some long-imprisoned monster god thing to wreak terror on the lands.

This is pretty much what Contest of Champions II is.

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So, guess who just got back from a special sneak preview of the Iron Man game coming from SEGA :quagmire:

It was a short preview, and not hands-on, but it looks pretty dope. We saw the 360 rev, which looked really good to be so early. We saw a Siberian stage, with IM versus Russian mercs… Russian mercs run by AIM. Rhodey and Jarvis assist him over a radio.

We saw a couple good scenes. Iron Man can catch missiles and redirect them, turning the enemy against itself. It was an unfinished build, but there was a pretty good sense of speed, and the stage was huge. It’s structured so that you can complete objectives in a mission in the order that feels most comfortable to you, which is kind of cool. Infantry and that kind of thing are really no threat, but heavy armor? Yes, that will rock you but good.

One last thing before I dip– I asked the dev specifically about armors. He said that they’re going to rep the movie first and foremost, but that they’re going to pull on 40 years of Marvel continuity and give us some hot unlockables. War Machine armor is a no-brainer. It’d be kinda cool to see some Hulkbuster armor (renamed, of course) or something from Adam Warren’s Hypervelocity.

One more one last thing– I know one of the dev guys, and he’s local to SF :whatup:

This is probably #348 on the “They made a comic based on this?” list. Somewhere between Pirates of Dark Water and Married with Children. Not saying it’s an undeserved concept. A Vigilante 8 comic sounds pretty good on paper. The reality of Chaos Comics’ output, unfortunately, leaves a lot to be desired.

For those of you who have no idea what Vigilante 8 is, it’s a two-game series from the late-90’s, as part of the all-too-skinny car combat videogame subgenre. You choose one of several cars and drive around different locales, with the mission of not finishing a race, but instead, blowing up every opposing car with rockets, mines and the like. While it never quite received the popularity of Twisted Metal, I personally have always enjoyed the Vigilante 8 series.

The story takes place in the 70’s, during a major oil crisis. The multi-national corporation OMAR (Oil Monopoly Alliance Regime) is out to take out an oil monopoly on the entire world, but the US government won’t back down. As a way to take it to the stubborn Americans, OMAR hires terrorist and explosives expert Sid Burn to blow up several US oil refineries. With his gang, the Coyotes, Burn has an easy enough time beating the law. That’s when the trucker Convoy – who is basically Sam Elliot – starts a group of citizens bent on striking back, calling themselves the Vigilantes. Also, thanks to the discovery of a crashed alien spacecraft, the government has been able to construct some rather advanced weaponry. During a raid by the Coyotes, said weaponry landed in the hands of both the Vigilantes and the Coyotes, increasing the explosive level of their battles.

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We’re almost done with the Malibu MK series. When we last left our heroes, Sonya was kidnapped by Kintaro, who claimed Shao Kahn had plans for her. Liu Kang and his new friend Bo defended against ninjas that repeatedly came out of the fucking blue. Johnny Cage and Jax were challenged by Smoke and Jade on an airplane. And Bullwinkle signed a contract to be a lounge singer, not realizing that his agent is really the nefarious Boris Badenoff!

Oh yeah. That too.

Smoke and Jade try to attack Jax and Johnny with their own strategies. Smoke uses the strategy of turning into pure smoke while Jade uses the strategy of having her tights hiked way up her buttcrack. The heroes counter this by making a couple Gone with the Wind references before knocking them through a hole in the plane. That… might make more sense if you read the comic.

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Next up on the Mortal Kombat tour is the 3-issue series Rayden and Kano. Definitely an interesting pairing. In fact, it almost seemed like a poor man’s Cable and Deadpool, with the over-powered hero god and his odd relationship with a less-powerful, vile criminal smartass. On one hand, I did like the story of this arc. On the other hand, two of the three issues were done by one Kiki Santamone. Fuck.

So Kano gets broken out of prison and is punished by the Black Dragon. He escapes his death sentence, but blacks out. Raiden has him taken to his pad, where Kano awakens to meet Raiden’s servants, two Asian ladies named Wynd and Rayne. I’d give props to Raiden for that, but at no point do we get to see art that makes them look like more than ugly, lumpy freaks.

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We’re seven issues into the MK series, meaning it’s time to talk about Goro: Prince of Pain. Yes, indeed. Here comes the pain. As you might remember from the last article, Goro was last seen beating up other MK characters until vanishing with no explanation. From there, the story split into Blood and Thunder #4-6 and Goro: Prince of Pain #1-3.

Prince of Pain starts off with Goro wandering around a major US city at night. He comes across a couple cops, who are too stupid to shoot him. Suddenly, a talking crow named Rook appears out of nowhere and vaporizes the cops with green laser vision.

We’re only just getting started. Rook lures Goro to the being that summoned him. He is Zaggot, a green-bearded wizard with a love for all things chaotic. He is completely insane and screams pop-culture nonsense that Goro isn’t meant to understand. Somehow, he’s still not awesome by any stretch of the imagination. I can’t understand it either.

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In the last article, I covered Malibu’s horrific attempt to do a comic based on the hit fighting game Street Fighter 2. As some of you might know, that wasn’t Malibu’s only attempt at a fighting game comic. Along with their forgotten attempt to make Virtua Fighter’s story look appealing (cancelled after the first issue), Malibu tried some of their magic on the Mortal Kombat series. As a series of mini-series and one-shots, the Malibu Mortal Kombat run went on for 26 issues in total. All-in-all, that’s nothing to laugh at.

But there is stuff to laugh about. Oh, believe me. There is plenty of stuff to laugh about.

This series isn’t to be confused with Midway’s promotional one-shots that came out as prologues for their respective games. Series co-creator John Tobias wrote and did the art for comics based on the events prior to Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat 2 and Mortal Kombat 4. You might remember seeing advertisements for these during the demo mode on old MK and MK2 arcade machines (ah, nostalgia), while the harder-to-find MK4 comic came with a pre-ordered copy of the PC version of MK4. These three comics were all decent enough and succeeded in what they were trying to do.

The MK2 one also had a fantastic depiction of the second Sub-Zero, who was shown as being less of a mysterious assassin and more of a tech-savvy businessman with a heart of gold.

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(Note: I originally posted this article about a year ago, but it fell off the site when hermanos redesigned it. Since we have Mortal Kombat Armageddon coming out in a week and a half, I thought now would be the best time to repost the Malibu comics articles. Expect to see the Mortal Kombat articles back over the next few days)

Street Fighter 2 is probably the most defining videogame in my life. When it came out, I was downright obsessed with it. I’d still be obsessed with it if Capcom would get around to making a new installment. Instead, they give us crap like Capcom Fighting Evolution, which defines itself for the wrong reasons. It actually is Capcom fighting the very concept of evolution.

Back in the 90’s, there was a lot of silly Street Fighter crap that came from the United States. Who can forget the live action Street Fighter movie starring Van Damme and Raul Julia? Or the awful American cartoon? Or the GI Joe action figures? Even worse was the 3D rollercoaster ride where Ryu and Ken blast M. Bison in the balls with a double hadoken.

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Ha Ha I Am Blogging About Bad Comic Books

Let’s talk for a moment, you and me, about things I hate.

I hate Venom, for example. I’ve never been able to stand that schmuck, ever since the Spider-Man books turned into the Venom Show back in the ’90s. I hate Howard Mackie for being the embryonic stage of Chuck Austen… and I hate Chuck Austen, because all right-thinking people do. I hate Scott Lobdell, Frank Quitely’s pudgy Play-Doh people, and any book that Ashley Wood drew…

…but most of all, I hate licensed comics that’re written by somebody who hasn’t even touched the source material. I really hate it when I’m familiar–or in this case, scarily familiar–with that source material.

That means I hate the Resident Evil comic books.

Call the neighbors and lock up the kids, folks. It’s time for a bunch of pointless fanboy bitching.

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