This week Marvel released Avengers Annual #1 by Brian Michael Bendis and Gabriele Dell’otto. It’s the long-awaited follow-up to New Avengers Annual #1 from several months ago, which featured Wonder Man’s Revengers beating the stuffing out of the New Avengers and trashing the mansion. The new issue reads almost like a Garth Ennis anti-superhero story where he somehow reins in the sodomy and bad language. Despite his extreme actions, there’s little reason not to root for Wonder Man. He brings up good points about why the Avengers may not be worth having around and their rebuttal is never anything more than, “My God, Simon’s gone insane!” or “Are you being mind-controlled?” or “Please, Simon! You need help! Would punching you in the face help? I’m going to punch you in the face. It might help.”

The Avengers naturally win and the final scene shows that Wonder Man’s reasoning for wanting the Avengers disbanded goes deeper than originally thought. Before that, after the other Revengers are taken down, one of the Avengers wonders aloud why they did this. Bendis had his own spin on it, having them express feelings of revenge, atonement, insanity and — in Anti-Venom’s case — full agreement in Wonder Man’s mantra. Me? I think Bendis was as off the mark as he is whenever he writes any scene with Marvel Boy in it.

Okay, that might have been a little harsh. It’s not that bad. Still, I think I can shed some better light.

Read the rest of this entry �

Last Wednesday brought us the end of Avengers Prime by Brian Michael Bendis and Alan Davis, which really should have been called Avengers: Ah, I Can’t Stay Mad at You. Steve Rogers, Iron Man and Thor accidentally get sucked into one of Thor’s locales. There, they all have their separate moments of being badass, deal with Enchantress and Hela and a subplot involves Rogers hooking up with a blue elf lady. That might be a little scummy, since that means he’s cheating on Sharon, but I’m pretty sure the “what happens in Vegas” rule applies to most of the nine realms. The point of the miniseries is to put the three guys in a situation that reminds them that they’re buddies and thick as thieves.

But still, the ending rang pretty familiar to me…

Odin’s will be done.

Welcome back to another week of New Ultimate Edit, based on Ultimate New Ultimates featuring that All-American American Ultimate Captain America.

Thor is dead and has decided to fix that by making a baby with Hela. Loki and Enchantress take advantage of his absence by attacking New York City, taking over the minds of the female team members and showing Valkyrie how Thor has been unfaithful to her. Personally, if someone literally traded places with me in the afterlife out of love and selflessness, I think I’d be giving them a ton of leeway in how they spend their tortured eternity. Loki and his turncoat army have succeeded in defeating the Ultimates, outside of those guys who nobody cares about to the point that Enchantress didn’t even bother messing with Shanna.

If you need a more detailed refresher, check out the previous two weeks.

And… go.

Thanks to the ever-classy ManiacClown for his assistance. Tomorrow will feature more flashbacking, followed by bedlam in the present.

Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

These days, Superman is strolling through the country, acting like a smarmy douche to most people he comes across. I think it has something to do with how people slip in the shower and Superman’s not there to help them because he’s too busy making sure monsters from the planet Apokalips aren’t enslaving all existence. You know, minor, self-serving stuff like that. So when a random citizen asks him about why he’s essentially focusing on saving people from slipping in the shower and letting the cosmic threats go unchecked, he quotes Henry David Thoreau for the sake of saying, “Because I’m Superman. You go deal with Doomsday, Poindexter.”

Not good enough, I say.

“What’s that mean? Hey! I asked you a question! What does that mean?”

That guy’s lucky, though. Imagine if he tried the same badgering on the Plutonian.

Yikes.

I wrote up this short piece on how JT Krul and Geraldo Borges’s Rise of Arsenal got the way heroin works wrong. While proofing before posting, I realized that I didn’t care enough to post it. Rise of Arsenal got everything you can get about heroin wrong, including how to freebase and the effects of the drug. It’s lazy and stupid and pointless. My post was going to be called “Rise of Arsenal: Wynken, Blynken, and On the Nod” which is some kind of perfect storm of stupid and amazing, but no–not worth it. Rise of Arsenal is lazy and stupid and doesn’t even have a villain. There’s no conflict beyond “Will Roy Harper shoot up?” I can’t even get mad about it.

Instead, here’s something I posted three years ago. I think it still applies.

Read good comics instead of getting mad about bad ones.

Art by Jim Calafiore, and I think that this is a fair assessment of the issue and what happened in it. Here is an alternate take on the issue.

4thletter! Fading comic books like bleach since 1983.

Thor is always saying shit out of line. Like when he accused Iron Man of not caring about black people other than Rhodey as he hammered him into the distance. I bet he likes having Namor’s fish stick in his mouth.

Man, it’s been like three years since I last posted this, and the old image links are broken. However… here is the photoshop I’m still the most proud of.

Follow-up #1
Follow-up #2
Follow-up #3
Follow-up #4
Follow-up #5

(Don’t read #4 if you intend on seeing that Orphan movie any time soon)

Click the image to see.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m not doing an article about Captain America today. Uh huh! Eat it! And eat a delicious, grilled hotdog. And maybe a burger. With a cold one. And fireworks.

Happy 4th from the guys (and girl) at 4th.