Spoilers below the cut.

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I like a lot of crappy characters. It comes with the territory, I think. Everybody has those weird little crap characters they like. More specifically, though, I’ve got a perverse fascination with crappy black characters, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has read more than ten words of this site before. I mean, I’m just saying that I [slang term], [rap reference], [animated gif of someone shaking their head], y’know?

But there’s something I love about all these characters that were just dashed off back in the day. Moses Magnum has the greatest name in comics, the kind of name you just steal outright if you ever get a chance. Hypno-Hustler has a great name and backup singers. Shades & Comanche are the down-on-their-luck scrubs that litter every story about the hood. I don’t even have to defend my love of these characters, either. There are people out there who want to read about people whose only power is “I shrink.”

One crappy black character I never liked, though, was Triathlon. Delroy Garrett was introduced in Kurt Busiek and George Perez’s Avengers, in a story with Moses Magnum no less, but I never took to him. He was boring. He had some weird Fake Scientologist entanglement, his costume was ehhh, and his powers were lame. Oh, you are as strong as three guys? Congrats, I’m happy for you. Learn to shoot lasers or use a sword.

Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman, though. Those guys looked to be featuring Delroy Garrett in his new role as the 3-D Man in Atlas. I couldn’t even really say that I was skeptical. I think I knew he was going to be in the book going in, but Parker has rarely done me wrong. I liked his Agents of Atlas work both times around. They were pretty clever and deftly written little books, weaving into and out of Marvel history without feeling like a Crisis or a history lesson.

This week’s Atlas #1 is the grand return of the Agents of Atlas. The first series (which had fantastic covers) was an introduction and establishment of a status quo for the Agents. The second series placed them squarely within Marvel’s Dark Reign status quo, kind of like how the second Runaways series tied in a little closer to the greater Marvel Universe.

This third one, though, feels like something different. It also stars Delroy Garrett as a has-been hero. He made some hard decisions during the Skrull invasion, and the aftermath of those decisions is that he has been completely ostracized by his peers. He’s looking around for a new career in Los Angeles with his actress girlfriend when he runs into trouble. Garrett ends up being accused of murdering one of his mentors, on the run from the police, hunted by some mysterious entity, and suffering from vivid nightmares. The nightmares point directly toward Atlas.

The tone of Atlas is something like ’50s paranoia, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There’s a creeping feeling of mystery and danger that runs through the issue. Everything Delroy trusts is either wrong or broken, and his one lifeline is a comatose old man. He’s one man against the world, with no friends and no allies to speak of.

As befitting the tone of the book, the agents haunt Delroy. They appear in nightmares, news reports, and as silent characters up until the end of the first story. They infest his dreams and while they don’t come across as villains, exactly, it is clear that Atlas isn’t your same old super-team.

This book was excellent. Hardman and Elizabeth Breitweiser’s art was appropriately moody and subdued, Parker’s dialogue and pacing were on point, and (pregnant pause) it made me a fan of the 3-D Man. His new status quo works for me in a way that Triathlon never did. I never thought that would happen, but what can you do? I picked up the first issue on a whim, rather than waiting for the trade like I usually do, and it paid off huge. Huge enough that I’m buying it monthly from here on out. Check out the preview at CBR and go pick it up.

Looks like next week is going to feature another Jeff Parker bullet to the dome, too. Good show.

There’s little more disappointing in comic books than a bad ending. A story that’s bad from start to finish? It happens all the time. A story or series with a rough beginning? As long as they can get past it and get their footing, it gets a pass. A rough ending, on the other hand, easily poisons your final thoughts on a product. For instance, let’s say Return of the Jedi ended with a scene of Luke saving the galaxy by viciously murdering Darth Vader and the Emperor. Not only would that have sucked, but Return of the Jedi would have sucked and the Empire Strikes Back would have sucked in retrospect.

That’s how I feel about Siege, the miniseries by Brian Michael Bendis and Oliver Coipel. The miniseries ended about a week ago and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it initially. Why did the ending bug me so much?

First, let’s look at the miniseries itself and how it ranks as an event. At only four issues (regardless of the unfortunate delay), it’s really refreshing. With Secret Invasion and Blackest Night, I’ve become completely sick of overly long event comics. This goes doubly for the two examples, as it means every single comic tie-in is going to be the same basic story told over again. Siege is quick and to the point. The issues are action packed and move the story forward at breakneck speed. The tie-ins are quite good for the most part, with the worst being at least inoffensive. It’s the first event where the Ben Urich tie-in mini is actually pretty good.

The art’s rather nice too.

Then you have to look at what it’s all about. Usually with these event comics, they do so well because they’re really dynamic story ideas. You can rant about how people only buy them because they’re important to continuity, but I mostly disagree on the basis of having described these stories to non-comic readers and seeing their reactions. If you tell someone about what World War Hulk or Civil War or Blackest Night is about, a lot of the times they’ll come across as interested.

How do you describe Siege to somebody? “There’s this crazy jerk who is one of the country’s bigwigs and he conspires with a trickster god to attack a floating city of gods in Oklahoma just because they’re there. The crazy jerk has a uber-powerful ace in the hole and a bunch of superheroes interject themselves into the battle.” It doesn’t have any real kick to it.

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Click ’em if you got ’em.

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Fellow fourth letterers, I have been . . .

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In Red Robin #12, Tim is a nice guy, surrounded by friends, who makes logical decisions, and narrates his actions using personal pronouns.  He’s considerate, grateful, and relaxed about relying on others.

The difference between this and the Tim we saw a year ago is so staggering that is almost produces vertigo.  What it does produce is an actual desire to read the book.  Hey look!  A hero who is dedicated, sincere and considers others!  And also flies around having adventures and fighting villains.  It is what I want to read in a comic book.  Who’da thunk?

I do wonder what it is that happened that makes everyone suddenly want to get into Tim Drake’s pants.  Did he have a birthday sometime during the run, because having a teaser for a storyline entirely devoted to getting the hero to impregnate Ras Al Ghul’s daughter doesn’t seem like something DC would do pre-eighteen.

I have to admit, I hope that they follow that storyline up, though.  And I hope they play it for laughs.

Oh, Ras, and you thought Bruce Wayne was a – well, yes, a tough nut to crack.  Just wait until you try enticing Tim Drake.  This is a guy whose last voluntary kiss was in a dank cave, surrounded by the corpses of clones of his murdered best friend.  You will have an easier time getting pandas to mate.

(Anyone know why Ras has given up on having a son himself?  He’s a good-looking, no-shirt-wearing millionaire.  It can’t be hard for him to find a woman.  And he has a lot of time.  If he spent as much time on dating sites as he did on trying to get Bruce to have sex with his daughter, he’d have an army of sons by now.)

Hey, remember when I said this was going to be a 5-parter? Make that 6. I should really learn to count better.

In the first installment, we took a look at Marvel’s A-Team from the mid-80’s. The show faded away, but Mr. T remained Mr. T. While he did have some projects here and there, such as the ever-memorable Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool, Mr. T didn’t really enter the 90’s with any steady piece of media. If he was going to appear in a comic book, he wasn’t going to be B.A. Baracus or any fictional character. T would have to be T.

In the mid-90’s, the company NOW Comics was filled with a myriad of interesting choices for licensed comics. Green Hornet and Terminator? Not bad. Speed Racer and Ghostbusters? Unorthodox, but still fully acceptable. Three Ninjas and Married… with Children? Then you have to vocally wonder what the Christ. Not only that, but the Married… with Children comics included a miniseries where the Bundy family gets powers from cosmic radiation and become the Quantum Quartet. I get the douche chills just thinking about it.

Mr. T would also get some play from NOW with Mr. T and the T-Force. The series lasts a whopping ten issues, longer than any other Mr. T series to date. Well, ten issues that I know of. Wikipedia suggests that there were eleven issues and there were certainly more announced within the comics, but I haven’t seen any evidence of issue #11. Though there also appears to be an annual that came out during the series’ existence. I’ve found absolutely nothing on it online outside of a Scans_Daily post showing Mr. T fighting a dude who looks like a cross between Spoiler and Phantasm.

The series ultimately works like Marvel’s Nextwave in that each arc is done in two issues. Unlike Nextwave, each arc is done by a different creative team. That means there really isn’t any true arc to the comic. Just a series of subplots and callbacks to supporting characters.

The main problem with the series is how Mr. T himself just doesn’t seem to have anything going on. While he’s shown to be a landlord, he has no actual personal life. He just goes around stumbling across people who need his help. B.A. Baracus helped people all the time too, but he still had his own personal problems to deal with. The army was after him, he had to deal with Murdock’s nonsense and his fear of flying. In Mr. T and the T-Force, Mr. T’s life seems just a little too perfect to the point that they rarely even show him in any real peril. So much that whenever anyone pulls a gun on him, he disarms them at the snap of a finger every time. I’m going to keep a tally on that.

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In less than two months, the new A-Team movie will be released in theaters. Even though I have a feeling the movie will be less than great, I’m still excited about it and have been ever since I heard about the casting. As far as I’m concerned, they were four-for-four with their choices and that gave the project a big head start. I suppose as long as it isn’t amazingly terrible, it’s good to see the movie exist because I’m just happy to see more A-Team.

It was a really good show and it hits me of why. The thing was like a Justice League made up of four characteristics that dudes find empowering: suave, slick, crazy and tough. Each guy fully encapsulated these ideals and nobody came off as the weak link. All four had something to offer. That said, the additional members pretty much sucked. By that I mean the two female reporters and that Santana guy they tossed in during the last season. I appreciate the attempt to keep the show fresh in the face of declining viewership, but I can’t remember a thing that guy had to offer. When the show lasted, you had a great foursome of heroes enduring explosions, rampant gunfire that almost never hit a single human being, episode after episode of making fools out of the government and bad guys who could be taken care of in less than an hour thanks to Hannibal being on the jazz. It was manly as hell.

Of course, the man we remember the show for most of all is Mr. T, who played the role of Bosco “B.A.” Baracus. With momentum from his role as the antagonist of Rocky III, Mr. T not only became a highly-paid star during the A-Team’s five seasons, but it practically defined his career. While George Peppard, Dick Benedict and Dwight Schultz each played characters, Mr. T was – and still is – a character in himself. Baracus was nothing more than an extension of his real life persona to the point that it’s hard to tell where Mr. T ends and B.A. begins. Even to this day, he stars in Snickers commercials where he gets so outraged at a man’s cowardice that he fires Snickers bars at him from a helicopter and warns him not to make him do this again because he hates flying.

And God bless him. I think the world of Mr. T and it’s hard to say exactly why. I guess he’s just a larger-than-life personality that accumulates nostalgia, super-strength, unique style, badass disposition, camp and a genuine heart of gold. Not only that, but he embraces what he is. Not as endearing as him kicking cancer’s ass (T-cell lymphoma, ironically), but endearing enough.

I thought I’d celebrate the lead-up to the A-Team movie by taking a look at Mr. T’s many comic book appearances from over 25 years. That’s right, over 25. Eat that, Norris!

What better way to start it off than Marvel’s A-Team miniseries? It lasted three issues, with the first one written by Jim Salicrup and drawn by Marie Severin. If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you probably already know what the A-Team is about. A handful of soldiers are wanted for a crime they didn’t commit and now go from city to city, righting wrongs as soldiers of fortune. There’s the brilliant, cigar-chomping tactician Hannibal, the quick-witted ladies man Face, the insane and childlike “Howling Mad” Murdock and of course, B.A. Baracus. Oh, and there’s reporter Amy Allen, but she never did anything of importance.

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Sorry for the long break there. For the past few months I was more busy writing about Eddie Guerrero and Brock Lesnar than Eddie Brock, so I had to let the whole We Care a Lot thing fall to the waysides. Now, then. Where were we? Ah, yes. I was talking about alternate reality versions of Venom for the sake of completion. Now it’s time to look into the future.

I was originally going to call this installment “Brock to the Future”, but I noticed that no matter what alternate future you look at, Eddie’s days are almost always numbered. Even in the futures where he could still be theoretically alive, he’s not only dead, but they don’t feel the need to explain how he bit the dust. Same goes for Mac Gargan, except for when he appears as Scorpion in Spider-Man: Reign.

I’ll go farther out into the future and inch my way back towards the present. That means starting with All-New Savage She-Hulk, a miniseries by rocking writer Fred Van Lente. The new She-Hulk is Lyra, who has come to Earth from an alternate future, hundreds or thousands of years from now. Her mother is Thundra, a warrior leader in the never-ending war between barbarian men and amazon women. Thundra went back to the present, scraped some DNA off the Hulk’s face during a fight, went back to her time and created Lyra. Lyra is the bane of her people for having a father, despite her great strength. That strength, by the way, comes from a zen mentality. If she gets angry, she becomes increasingly weaker.

So what does she have to do with Venom? In her time, the men are mostly split into tribes that worship the long-dead superheroes. Since her reality seems to be based on Osborn never being dethroned, the tribes are mostly copycats of different Dark Avengers. They have the clawed Howlers, the Goblinkin, the Men of Gold, the War Gods and, of course, the Crawlers.

Not only that, but the Venom symbiote still exists in her time. Man, what kind of life expectancy do these creatures have, anyway? The women warriors have their home protected by a moat with the creature now known as “The Black Bloom” residing. The women are treated with a pheromone that renders them invisible to the symbiote, meaning that when the tribes of Crawlers, Goblinkin and so on chase Lyra, they end up getting devoured by the hungry pool of black.

Later on the story, when Lyra is in the present, she fights the Dark Avengers. She’s amused that Venom wears the Black Bloom and easily disposes of him. After all, her pheromones make her into Venom’s kryptonite.

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Spoilers, of course.

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