A fine set of comics this week. Ah, it’s good to have Batman & Robin and Frankencastle Punisher around.
Batman and Robin #7
Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart
Captain America Reborn #6
Ed Brubaker and Bryan Hitch
Back for another week of panels that give you a vague essence of the comics we have read this week without any real context. Let the non-reviews begin!
Amazing Spider-Man #607
Joe Kelly, Mike McKone and Adriana Melo
The Boys: Herogasm #5
Garth Ennis, John McCrea and Keith Burns
I managed to pull myself away from Final Fantasy VII long enough on Saturday to record another Fourcast! with Esther. Of course, the looming specter of technical issues ended up eating about twenty minutes of what we recorded, if not more, but we pulled it out in the end. You can tell that there were issues because my headset suddenly changes sounds with five minutes to go. Whoo!
Here’s the breakdown:
-We open with a brief chat about the unnamed Secret Six, courtesy of Gail Simone and Nicola Scott, and beefcake. Did I call beefcake gross? No, but I did call Bane’s chest gross. Look at it.
Kapow! We’ll see you in… seven days?! What new development is this?!
(boilerplate stuff: subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed, or grab us on iTunes. feel free to drop a review on us!)
The next Comics from the 5th Dimention column should be up soon. The big drawback about writing for PopCultureShock rather than here is that you can’t have your stuff up instantly. Them’s the breaks.
I plan to one day write my own comic series. I’m currently trying to move my gears forward on that. That said, I still find myself thinking about what kind of DC or Marvel-owned series I would love to write if I had the chance. Stuff like an Eradicator on-going where he stations himself in Coast City as a way to make up for and investigate the human feeling of guilt he suffers from his failure to protect the city from Cyborg Superman and Mongul. Or a Juggernaut series where he’s on the run from SHIELD, all while showing the parallels of the Superhuman Registration Act and being the avatar slave of Cyttorak.
There’s one comic concept that came to me the other day. What If occasionally had sequels, most of them not very good. Having read so many issues and having some of them so nestled into my memory, the continuity nut in me always compares some issues to events that happened after the release date. Sometimes it’s just to laugh at the continuity screw-up, like how Alicia Masters in What If the X-Men Lost Inferno was really a Skrull and the writer didn’t know it yet. That revelation gums up her part in the story.
Sometimes I realize how much more interesting stories become when you toss in delayed retcons and new pieces of canon. For instance, there’s the issue What If the X-Men Had Died on Their First Mission, where the New X-Men team (Wolverine, Storm, etc.) go to Krakoa to save the original X-Men and they all die. Xavier beats himself up over it, Moira comforts him and eventually another X-Men team is created. It was a good story, but compare it to what we know now. Deadly Genesis showed the other X-Men team that died fighting Krakoa. When they failed, Moira was angry, so Xavier erased her memory of the events. Put the two stories together and it’s pretty fucked up. Xavier deserves to feel bad. His Krakoa mission would have cost him three X-Men teams, totaling at 17 mutants. Then you have Moira trying to keep him from being suicidal, not knowing what a bastard he really is because the son of a bitch removed it from her memory.
What would have happened when Vulcan came back to Earth, not only forgotten, but now without his brothers? Now that would be a sequel issue worth reading.
I think back to other What Ifs that lead to a new status quo and how vastly different things would have been if they continued the story and met up with the events that were destined to happen. I think a handful of them could make for a good limited series.
(Note: This was originally meant to be a few paragraphs, only it stretched into a full rant about a series of things. I’m not a Spider-Man expert and haven’t read every single thing he’s been in for the past few years. Forgive me if my information is off. But I feel that I know enough for my ire to be justified.)
Back when Marvel was in the latter days of the Spider-Man Clone Saga, the writers all got together to brainstorm a good way to end this massive story arc. They needed something big. A lot of the ideas weren’t so good, like revealing a big chunk of it to be a virtual reality program or have Peter Parker go public with being a clone or just kill off Ben during Onslaught. Some were a bit better, like revealing that Judas Traveler was Seward Trainer from the future and that Seward betrayed Peter into thinking he was a clone all this time. The most interesting and best way to keep both Peter and Ben fans happy turned out to be a time loop.
See, Ben would start remembering events that happened to Peter. Being buried alive by Kraven or fighting Venom. Then, during a big villain gathering climactic finale, Carnage would mortally wound the Judas Traveler and Scryer would reveal his true self. He is Mephisto, orchestrating this whole mess.
As part of this craziness, Peter is sent back in time five years with a distorted memory. Hence, neither is the clone. Peter Parker and Ben Reilly are both Spider-Man, just aged a bit differently. Not the best story ever, but it wasn’t too bad.
There were a handful of reasons why this idea was turned down. Ben should be more aged if this was true, but considering the healing part of his powers and the relatively less stressful life he’s had in those five years, I could buy that they’d still look the same. Then there are a couple continuity issues, like how Mephisto is supposed to be dead around that time. But the main reason why it was tossed out?
Mephisto doesn’t really belong in a Spider-Man story!
“I am not what I was before,” the silence says. “I am anger, I am madness, I am the spider. And God help you if you get in my way.”
No, really. This arc has been pretty bad, and the new issue? Terrible. Why?
Because we know how this ends. We’ve been here before.
Spider-Man: No Laughing Matters is a post I wrote last September about a pre-Clone Saga arc I liked a lot. In it, Spider-Man gets really angry, starts beating people up like crazy, and has an aunt on her death bed. Things between him and Mary Jane are really tense and he can’t quite manage to open up. It’s a story that has Spider-Man ready to kill… but he pulls back at the last second and remembers who he is.
Does any of this sound familiar? This arc was better 13 years ago, guys.
Images with sweet, sweet Bagley art from that story arc. The four pages of Peter reacting to Aunt May being hospitalized are better than anything Back in Black gave us.
And one of my favorite covers:
Back in Black is hollow.
Hal Jordan watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s his dream. That’s his nightmare.
Hey, now. Looks like it’s time for another installment of Ruining the Moment! Let’s roll.
Jesus, we’re actually at the top ten. And some of you haven’t even lost interest yet. I’m proud.
What If: Avengers Disassembled came out the other day. You might be wondering if I would have placed it on this list if it came out several months back. The answer is no. No, I can’t really get behind an issue that tries to retcon a major story into something that makes even less sense. Having written this paragraph, I realize the John Byrne jokes write themselves.
Before I start this, one more call for anyone interested in drawing fake covers for the countdown finale. Come on, you know you want to.
10) WHAT IF THE FANTASTIC FOUR’S SECOND CHILD HAD LIVED?
Issue: Volume 2, #30
Writer: Jim Valentino, Ron Marz
Artist: Dale Eaglesham, Rurik Tyler
Spider-Man death: No
Background: In-between having Franklin and Valeria, there was another time Sue was pregnant with Reed’s kid. Unfortunately, there were radiation-related complications due to the team’s recent venture into the Negative Zone. Reed went to Doctor Otto Octavius – supervillain Doc Ock and the biggest expert on radiation – for help. Ock went berserk for a bit and the two had it out on the rooftops of New York City. Reed calmed Ock down and he agreed to help out. Unfortunately, they were half an hour late. Sue had a miscarriage. So let’s say Ock didn’t freak out and made it just in time? We have two stories here on two different sides of the spectrum.
The first story is best described as a horror story. Franklin wakes up from a horrible vision of the future where his father is dead. His parents just think he had a simple nightmare and leave it at that, but Franklin already knows that there’s a monster living inside his mother. Over time, Sue’s pregnancy takes a horrible toll on her. She gets weaker by the day and almost skeletal, soon losing her invisibility powers. When she gives birth to her child, she dies in the process. Reed names the baby Sue in order to deal with the loss of his wife.
As experience has taught us throughout this countdown, this isn’t going to end well at all.
“I am not what I was before,” the silence says. “I am anger, I am madness, I am the spider. And God help you if you get in my way.”
This is gonna be a long one. Get a sandwich, come back, get reading.
Even moreso than the X-Men and Fantastic Four, Spidey is Marvel’s flagship character. He’s their everyman. Reed Richards is a super genius who has enough game to woo Susan Storm and convince her, her brother, and Ben Grimm that stealing a spaceship to go into outer space is a good idea. The X-Men are a bunch of freaks and outcasts with perfect bodies, and nobody likes the Avengers.
Don’t even get me started on those freaking Avengers, all right?
Spidey is the guy that every relates to and loves. He’s probably the most human out of Marvel’s big characters. He’s had girl trouble, family drama, tragedy, and upswings. He’s led a real life and ended up marrying a wonderful girl. He’s easy to relate to. He’s the guy that we’re supposed to identify with when tough choices come up. His role in Civil War, at least outside of the main (crappy) miniseries, shows this. He is us. His set of experiences are pretty much universal, except for that whole crime-fighting thing. Let’s look at that. The crime-fighting, I mean.
Spidey is a jokester. He’s constantly cracking wise. It’s been pretty well-established that jokes are his way of both coping with the incredible danger he finds himself in every day and throwing villains off balance. I mean, seriously, I can barely stay calm when some jerk is telling me unfunny jokes, imagine if some guy were telling jokes and punching you. Disorienting for sure. The joking is coping because it allows him to maintain control of a sick situation. It takes his mind off the fact that Carnage is about to murder a schoolbus full of children. It lets him focus.
Spidey also believes in the innate goodness of man. I’m reminded of the scene in “Return of the Green Goblin” where he sits down and just has a heart-to-heart with Norman Osborn about his life, their relationship, and Gwen Stacy. He remarks that Norman can never win because Gwen will always be greater than he is. Her smile and her spirit will always overpower Norman’s hate and crazy. Norman killed her, but her memory defeats him. In his heart, Peter believes that almost everyone can be rehabilitated. Evil exists, but it has nothing at all on good. Good will win out in the end, because that is the way it is. That is the way it has to be. Right?
What happens, though, when you push him to the edge? Not in a battle, I mean. When battles get serious, Peter gets desperate. What happens when you make Peter Parker genuinely angry? What happens when he gets close to that breaking point, or possibly just past it?
What happens when the jokes stop?
Read the rest of this entry �
What if I just got straight to the article itself for once?
70) WHAT IF DEATH’S HEAD I HAD LIVED?
Issue: Volume 2, #54
Writer: Simon Furman
Artist: Geoff Senior
Spider-Man death: No
Background: Oh, boy. Where to begin?
There’s a good chance you’re scratching your head, wondering who the hell Death’s Head I is and why he would deserve his own What If issue. First off, stop scratching your head. It’s a disgusting habit. Death’s Head I was a character from the 80’s created by Simon Furman and integrated into the Marvel UK Transformer comics. Death’s Head I was a charismatic and likeable bounty hunter, striking some of the same chords that Deadpool would years later. A robot from the future, Death’s Head I spoke through a voice box on his face, usually turning his statements into questions, like a French guy trying to speak English. Like for instance, he’d likely tell you, “Refer to me a freelance peacekeeping agent, yes?” He was weird like that. It was neat.
Death’s Head I mainly hung out in the year 2020, but had a tendency to time travel, usually leading to crossovers with guys like the Fantastic Four and She-Hulk. During the 90’s, Marvel decided to reboot his image. AIM had created Minion, a powerful robot with the ability to absorb the instincts, skills and knowledge of whoever he destroyed. He’s like an evil Megaman, except he looks like a blatant Predator rip-off. Minion was mainly created to destroy a mysterious threat named Charnal. I’m not savvy on the details here, but Minion ended up going up against Death’s Head I and Mr. Fantastic in our present. He killed Death’s Head I and absorbed his mental workings. It was too much for Minion to handle and parts of Death’s Head I’s personality caused Minion to override into something new. Now calling himself Death’s Head II, he and Marvel’s heroes fought the merging of villain Baron Strucker’s soul and the remains of Death’s Head I’s body. In other words, Charnal. Death’s Head II was victorious and went on to have some extreme 90’s adventures. Yay?
