Marvel Comics blabbery

re: Hawkeye's deafness, didn't Tony give him some supertech cochlear implants or something similar?

probably

I was thinking he got his hearing back after Wanda brought him back, but no... after the bad comics post-Onslaught, he was recreated with his hearing.

I think I just realized a stupid way they could resolve Secret Empire, urgh

that is, the problem with Steve Rogers having "always been HYDRA" or whatever

nothing's going to resolve the poorly-conceived story telling

and then The Clown deafened him again during Fraction's run

completely forgot or didn't read that

http://www.avclub.com/article/hawkeye-19-uses-deafness-help-broken-clint-barton--207612

IMO this issue rivaled the Pizza Dog issue

The pizza dog issue was great, but then they kinda weakened it by going over the same events "for real this time" (i.e., from the human characters' p.o.v.) later.

<i>the Spider-Verse is still a thing: Spider-Woman, Spider-Gwen, and Silk had a three book crossover that is old enough it just wrapped up on Marvel Unlimited. involved people infiltrating from Spider-Gwen's world to 616 to steal tech, and had a male Jessica (Jesse) Drew</i>

That crossover started with Spider-Woman and Silk literally popping over to Spider-Gwen's universe for lunch (and then getting "stuck there") -- that's how easily permeated the line is in the Marvel multiverse these days, it's pretty funny.

Reading a great collection of Dr. Strange stuff from '68-'74 or so. Gardner Fox, Englehart, tons of robert e. howard/lovecraft stuff, v fun. Opens w a couple issues of Gene Colan art that are fantastic.

Sounds great -- Amazon link(?)

Thought the first issue of Secret Empire was better than expected. Might have been okay as a standalone summer crossover instead of a 3-year-long epic. But at least it'll be over soon.

In other news, I read Revolutionary War, which was Marvel UK's equivalent of the Sleeper/Bluetones reunion tour - I think it came out in 2014? Anyway, it's dumb fun and is a definable story with a beginning and end (remember those?). If it's the sort of thing you like, you'll like it. God knows why but I still have a v. sentimental attachment to Death's Head. (The first one, not Death's Head II, you monsters.)

Marvel's generally not giving a fuck about long-term continuity and the consistency of its parallel universes is, I think, one of its strengths.

it's this one: https://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Strange-Epic-Collection-Separate/dp/0785194444/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494004246&sr=1-5&keywords=Dr.+Strange

xp

the tangle that is contemporary spider man continuity is really amazing; only matched by superman in its spectacularly unnecessarily convoluted imperviousness to logic

― Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out. (ulysses), Friday, May 5, 2017 9:40 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's actually shockingly straightforward*! Spider-Verse was astoundingly coherent, given the millions of balls it was juggling.

*If, at least, you consider the period since Mephisto reset Spidey's reality as its own discrete thing separate from what came before.

first issue in the collection is here

including hilariously gratuitous Tom Wolfe cameo:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-C4z0Cn4w8Go/Tv-2DQhepoI/AAAAAAAAbAU/pRzpr7FCnGU/s1600/DrStrange-18010.jpg

Haha, wtf (and where's the famous white suit, at the cleaners?)

Circling back to Spidey -- while the fact that they "undid" Peter & MJ's marriage, via the Mephisto thing, is a nonstarter to me; I'm also not interested in reading "Renew Your Vows" (which you'd think would be giving me exactly "what I want"). So I guess there's no degree of "fan service" that will suffice in this case (at least for this "fan") -- and maybe that's unfair. (But in my defense, I read the first ish of the Secret Wars "RYV" and it was really bad.)

hee hee 'millions of balls'

yeah, marvel did a thing that month across some of their books where journalists had little cameos - hunter s thompson showed up in avengers, woodward and bernstein were in fantastic four and lester bangs was in amazing spider-man iirc

It's actually shockingly straightforward*! Spider-Verse was astoundingly coherent, given the millions of balls it was juggling.

*If, at least, you consider the period since Mephisto reset Spidey's reality as its own discrete thing separate from what came before.

Any residual patience I have with Bendis these days comes from my appreciation with him being the last person to do spidey right (in ultimate)
Slott is horrible imo

Heck even miles has been okay this far until the recent poorly considered Claremontesque soap opera direction

it's not that hard -- again, you can grasp all the basics about Spider-Man and pick up on the few minor changes like his job, current girlfriend, etc and just read an issue where he's stopping a villain and it's fine. it's the issues that are based completely on some aspect of past events, not just using them as a framing mechanism for the story being told, that are completely broken for new readers

To be clearer, I guess I am not saying it's "difficult to follow" so much as I am saying "it is dumb and bad"

and I'm saying forget it happened, just read good spider-man issues

xpost
Those Colan issues of Doctor Strange were the first time that Tom Palmer had inked Colan's pencils - Palmer was only about eighteen years old at the time, but could already claim to be Colan's best inker with George Klein his only real rival. Just beautiful stuff, and Roy the Boy back before he was a Republican, writing some great naively psychedelic opportunistic hipster stuff, w/ decent plotting and invention.

Tom Wolfe made a follow-up appearance - in the white suit - in a Thomas scripted issue of the Hulk pleasingly called "They Shoot Hulks Don't They"

https://i2.wp.com/i41.photobucket.com/albums/e256/caker23/more%20pix/Hulk142Wolfe.jpg

this anecdote:
Englehart and Brunner created another multi-issue storyline featuring sorcerer Sise-Neg ("Genesis" spelled backward) going back through history, collecting all magical energies, until he reaches the beginning of the universe, becomes all-powerful and creates it anew, leaving Strange to wonder whether this was, paradoxically, the original creation. Stan Lee, seeing the issue after publication, ordered Englehart and Brunner to print a retraction saying this was not God but a god, to avoid offending religious readers. The writer and artist concocted a fake letter from a fictitious minister praising the story, and mailed it to Marvel from Texas. Marvel unwittingly printed the letter and dropped the retraction

Not sure if Gary Glitter and milk bottle man are still in continuity

https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/1105907.jpg

lester bangs was in amazing spider-man iirc

waaaaht how come I can't find an img of this

That xpost plot synopsis is everything I love best about marvel

how come I can't find an img of this

Incredible how this has been suppressed.

it's almost like it never happened

My son got a "blind box" with a "Captain America: Civil War"–themed bobblehead; I couldn't identify the character upon opening it (a blonde woman wielding sticks), so I checked the Web and figured out it's the SHIELD agent who was portrayed in the movie by the Emily Thorne actress from "Revenge." (I watched half the movie on TV recently, but it left almost no impression.)

Then I checked further, and learned that this particular character (Sharon Carter) has been around since 1966(!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_Carter

That's the kicker with Marvel; you can scratch the surface and find there's tons of history on a character you've never even heard of. (I rarely encountered SHIELD when I was a reader in the '80s and early '90s, so didn't know most of the backstory.)

status quo for most of the last decade or two is that she's captain america's girlfriend in the comics

at least when he's not being killed or stuck in time or actually the red skull, and she's not being brainwashed

Also worth noting that Captain America's girlfriend is the niece of Captain America's dead ex-girlfriend. Which, y'know, a little weird.

Oh, is her aunt that "Agent Carter of SHIELD" from the TV show set in the 1940s?

yeah, she was in the first Captain America film

Great-aunt, I think.

Actually, Peggy is quite a bit more than incidental -- she's in The First Avenger as a possible romantic foil for Captain America but he "dies," she reappears in the Winter Soldier basically on her deathbed and in flashback to the origins of SHIELD (they made the tv miniseries take place in that time), and then in Civil War there's a scene with her funeral.

Yeah, she's been retconned to be age appropriate for whenever Captain America thaws out. The women stay the same age, but WW2 just gets further in the past every year.

war never changes iirc

https://media.giphy.com/media/OWrtdm1irskAE/giphy.gif

That's what I love about Carter girls, man. They get older, and I stay the same age and start dating their nieces at some point.

defrosted and confused

I think Sharon was Peggys sister to begin with, and it wasn't until Brubaker that she was changed to her niece. And it was pretty controversial at the time.

Yeah, she's been retconned to be age appropriate for whenever Captain America thaws out. The women stay the same age, but WW2 just gets further in the past every year.

This actually a part of larger problem that comes with the sliding timeline: Marvel may retcon the origins of some heroes that relate to real-world events (Ben and Reed aren't WWII veterans anymore, the origins of Iron Man and Punisher aren't tied to the Vietnam War any longer), but Cap, Peggy Carter Red Skull, Namor, the original Human Torch, etc, are so intricately tied to 2nd World War that it's very hard to retcon that, and they have never tried. But this raises the question, why haven't there been any superheroes in the gap between the 1940s and whenever the origin of the FF takes place in the ever-adjusting timeline? At the moment that gap must be something like 60 years, and it keeps getting bigger.

In the 1960s, the gap was less than two decades, and the recent emergence of mutants was explained by atomic testing that began in the 1940s, so the children of the atomic era were only then coming of age. But now we know mutants have been around for centuries, so where were they before the 00s, or whenever the X-Men started according to the current timeline? Why didn't the costumed heroes of the 1940s inspire a new generation of heroes until 60 years later, but after that new heroes start to pop up constantly?

baby boomers too self-absorbed to fight crime iirc

I sorta felt like Jonathan Hickman was going to try and explain this in S.H.I.E.L.D., but then he never finished it.

The members of Agents of Atlas are mostly from the '50s. Plus they've retconned plenty of characters into that era ('50s Avengers, Byrne's Lost Generation).

imo it's easier to gloss over the difficulties in how your near-ageless characters relate to humans when they're also the gorilla man

Isn't it, Captain America is perpetually World War II guy, and that's fine, you just update his defrost date, then at some point Sharon will have to be Peggy's grandchild or whatnot.