shhhhhh secret wars is the big marvel summer event of 2015

Galactus has been written (at least over the last decade or so) as a cleansing force of nature or Death. I don't remember which book that said it, but I believe that the planets that can sustain him are naturally the same planets that are habitable for sentient life... he's culling the universe of excess population, and writers like to neutralize him for these big space invasion storylines like Annhilation

Have to pick up the Ultimate Galactus stuff, I was curious about that; I just blew through all of U. Fantastic Four (great), U.C.Ultimates (first half great), U. Doomsday (wasn't wild about it, but good payoff) - basically all the Ultimate Reed stuff to get what was going on with that guy, since I had no clue what his deal was from the Avengers lead-ins. I get the impression that the Reed throughline is really the big Ultimate arc, which makes sense if he's a big player in SW.

The ability of Marvel to lay out these massive plans and arcs and actually carry through with them, in the comics and in the movies, is amazing really, especially in contrast to DC completely thrashing in the water. Remember that 'map of the future' in Avengers from 2010? It doesn't cover what's going on now, but it did cover Age of Ultron which happened three years later.

just cracking #2 open. lol "doom messiah"

and yeah the millar ultimates is legit great. borrows a ton from millar authority but also batshit in its own unique way.

I guess Doom's spent his whole life looking for this kind of worldwide adoration and now he sure as hell has it!

Dunno if I'm the only one but man, I really dig the way Hickman uses blank pages, titles, that sort of thing to provide beats in the story. When I first saw it in New Avengers I was really impressed, but SW is the apex of that, with the page actually finishing a character's sentence ('Battleworld'). Maybe it reminds me of the endpapers of the individual issues of V for Vendetta, leading you in and out of the story and providing punctuation.

Will track down Millar Ultimates stuff as well.

he's had that distinctive style for a while that i don't have the visual vocabulary to really describe but is def recognizable as a type:

http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/insidepulse/uploads/2011/12/120511_2251_TPBReviewTh3.png

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/comicsalliance.com/files/2009/10/iron-man-covers-456.jpg

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NightlyNews3-197x300.jpg

sometimes i like it sometimes it seems a little shticky (nb not sure if this is a part of what you're referring to ^)

http://www.spandexless.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/4083915-17030124-thumbnail.jpg

based on this i hope he one day redoes the entire marvel encyclopedia

Yeah, I'm thinking of title pages coming after a couple pages of story introduction a la the SW title pages, more than covers or infographics, really. So a few pages of comic then wham *big title spread* then back to the story. (I would link to images but they're hard to GIS.) I think Morrison tried something similar a few times but restrained himself to doing titles as drawn comic pages, not blank pages of title interrupting the illustrations. When I saw this in New Avengers I initially thought it was incredibly pretentious but over time I grew to really love them since the story was so cosmic and epic it seemed to deserve them.

Thanks for reminding me about the Disassembled covers, I loved those when they came out.

yeah i found the art in nightly news way, way more interesting and compelling than the hacky sub-fight club story

i signed up for a free month's marvel unlimited in order to look at some of the background stuff, and i am .. confused by the interface. it seems like i have a navigation bar at the top and bottom its impossible to hide (and which .. barely works?) but which the resizing ignores so it's often cutting off the top and bottom five per cent of a panel, i.e., where .. most of the dialogue is

is it really this broken or am i being a noob

it's not the most intuitive thing, to be charitable. you have to click on the page itself or the black empty space on the sides to hide the interface buttons

some glitches will fix if you click the "smart panel <-> full page" button twice

love cap + devil dino in planet hulk

yeah dd is always welcome. hope he gets a vastly expanded role in the new mu. strong career move ditching moon-boy.

got confused for a moment and thought he was gertie's dino but no that was Old Lace - wonder where that dude is. nico is in A-Force. and i think SW is gonna have a new runaways series.

it's very weird to me that the runaways went from having a sorta ambushbugesque outskirts of the marvel u storyline to being embedded so completely in continuity

they did? when?

they're young avengers and shit now aren't they?

How often does that sort of thing really last, though? Howard the Duck is one of the few characters of that type who's managed to stay on the fringes for any real length of time, but even with him there seems to be a more continuity-centric push of late.

DC is certainly better about it i guess. haven't heard from this guy lately
http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20071010010819/marvel_dc/images/a/a6/

er:
http://blogintomystery.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/mazing5.jpg

though didn't it turn out that denton killed ralph dibney's wife?

i'm afraid to know of what you speak
i'm several years behind on YA but i thought the Runaways had pretty much disappeared from continuity, glad to find out they're still around

I need to reread the Avengers/New Avengers leadups to this. I read a bunch of yesterday's releases and still have some wtf?!?! questions.

Nico and Chase were involved in Avengers Arena/Avengers Undercover

DJP is our Area/Underground expert. I read the former once, but have forgotten most :/

"comic characters who live on the fringe of continuity" would be a good thread.
Ambush Bug (kinda pissed that no one ever points out that deadpool is basically Ambush Bug + Lobo)
Mazing Man
Conan the Barbarian
who else?

darth vader

Dracula

Arena was so, so, SO much better than it should have been

was that the one w/ arcade? if so, i liked it a lot too

and Undercover was so, so, SO much worse than it should have been

heh true, but by that point residual Arena affection made me forgive a lot of nonsense

Oh my fuck I just read the first issue of Ultimates 3 and it is sooooo much worse than the image I have in my head when I talk shit about Loeb's writing. I really think I might have to skip ahead. Especially if I'm going to get caught up with Secret Wars in anything resembling real time.

who is still alive, from the runaways? i think all the ones that i liked, died

it turned out that my problems with the marvel comics were problems with looking at it in chrome, on this computer. i am now using lol internet explorer to read the avengers. it's pretty impressively 'cosmic' and 'high stakes', though i think knowing that three years later they actually followed through on the implicit threat helps underwrite that. i would be interested in rereading morrison's jla after this, with its somewhat morbidity-free escalation of scale; i wonder who the comparison would favour

resurrected evil alex, karolina, molly, victor, chase, old lace (maybe not?), nico all alive i think

oh, alex is back, good

i finished the pre-infinity stuff last night and this morning i looked at the infinity reading list and ... oh hell no

If you're cowed by the Infinity reading list, you'll be heartened to learn that they'll be cranking out that much Secret Wars material every month. After looking through the solicitations for August, I think we're be nearing 150 issues. And this runs through..October, I think?

That's the thing--the SW enthusiasm had me going to the Hickman set-up reading list to see if I could get into it, but gaaaaah. Having said that, if you HAVE read all that, I can see why the payoff would be a hell of a lot of fun.

mmm but infinity is a crossover in the sense of 'go read this and then this and then this thing with a plot point you need to know about drawn haphazardly from a terrible script,' right? whereas the fun of the secret wars setup seems to be that the main series is its own thing but the miniseries are basically more ridiculous what if? stories that people felt like telling

There's nothing in Infinity you need to read except for Avengers, New Avengers, and Infinity (and Mighty Avengers, not because it's important to the story, but 'cause it's great).

I do feel bad for Jason Aaron, whose (good!) bestselling Thor book is being interrupted for several months by a (probably also good, but fanwanky) miniseries. Rebooting makes sense when a writer leaves, or if the sales are slipping, but rebooting in the middle of a successful run that seems to be pulling in a lot of new readers? Seems daft.

ok I feel like I have license to skip vast swathes of infinity now, ty

Secret Invasion was one of the only big Marvel crossovers I've read where the ancillary issues were fairly crucial to one's comprehension and enjoyment. Maybe Civil War, too. But, yeah, they're generally easily dispensible.

yes definitely - so just after the big Thor reveal, with that series going really well (art is consistently fantastic), he has to force back in tons of decades old boring MAN THOR continuity for 7 or 8 months

Infinity has a little diagram of the issues in the back of each chapter and afaik it only include New Avengers, Avengers, and Infinity

I think all you need to understand the swathes of titles out there for Battleworld is, at most, the Secret Wars title, if even that. Each issue seems to have the backstory of its "world" as a short feature at the end of the #1.

Captain America/Devil Dinosaur is a great team, why would he even want Bucky back?

to feed to DD

thanks to Marvel Puzzle Quest, my default paring for Devil Dinosaur is now Nick Fury

btw it's worth noting that with the multiverse collapsed, all the Runaways/Young Avengers/etc are fair game in Battleworld titles since they're not limited to the 616 :)

man i read the 'core' infinity story this evening and it was kinda frustrating -- like, oh, there's some guardians of the galaxy for a panel, or, something happened at the jean grey school but, who knows

it also felt weirdly low stakes, considering