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Face Front, True Believers! A Marvel Comics Thread

Olli

(he/him)
Let me guess: because his human/vampire duality gives him the ability to comprehend the duality of two realities
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Let me guess: because his human/vampire duality gives him the ability to comprehend the duality of two realities
My guess is that he’s usually got a whole whack of supernatural bric-a-brac on his person and it weirded up whatever process affected the rest of the world
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Heroes Reborn #2 clears up the idea behind this crossover a lot more and BY GOD I think this is as close as we're ever going to get to Amalgam Comics returning; it isn't just that Marvels Evil version of the Justice League is the premier superhero team, but all the other characters are also DC stand-ins, Hulk is Bizarro, Ultron is Metallo, Galactus destroyed not-Krypton, there's a bottle city from the Negative Zone. It also seems that Blade isn't the only one to know the universe flipped a gear, but he is apparently the only one to have the ability to set it right. (y)

Heroes Reborn: Hyperion and the Imperial Guard is… kinda brilliant and justifies my burgeoning love of this crossover; much like how Superboy hecked off to the future to hang with the Legion of Superheroes, Marvels version of Superboy hecked off to space to hang with Marvels version of the LoSH. And it’s also supposed to be a 90s throwback (complete with fake letter page that references Wizard magazine) so it’s written like the Zero Hour era LoSH. (y)

Heroes Reborn Peter Parker: The Amazing Shutterbug looked like it was going to be a Jimmy Olsen riff, but it actually wound up being a The Boys instead! In this reality Aunt May is killed by Hyperion being a bit overly reckless dealing with a villain and then started photographing the Squadron Supreme looking for ways to get revenge on them, all while posing as Hyperions best friend. (y)

This is how you do a crossover story, Comic Book Industry; by chucking continuity out the window and just making up a whole new one-story-long universe! It worked for One Million, it worked for Secret Wars and BY GEORGE, it's working here!
 
It had been feeling like this for a while, but now it's confirmed:

Christian Holub @ Yahoo! Entertainment said:
Inferno will be Jonathan Hickman's last X-Men comic for now

...

"Oh, plans have changed entirely," Hickman says. "When I pitched the X-Men story I wanted to do, I pitched a very big, very broad, three-act, three-event narrative, the first of which was House of X. And while this loosely worked as a three-year plan, I told Marvel upfront that I honestly had no idea how long the first part would last because there were a lot of interesting ideas that I had seeded that other creators would want to play with, and so, we left this rather open-ended. I was also pretty clear with all the writers that came into the office what the initial, three-act plan was so no one would be surprised when it was time for the line to pivot."

Hickman continues, "However, I also knew that I was cooking with dynamite, and it was very possible that what I had written in House of X, and the ideas contained within, was not actually the first act of a three-act story, but something that resonated more deeply and worked more like Giant-Size X-Men, where it would represent a paradigm shift in the entire X-Men line for a prolonged period of time. So, during the pandemic, when the time came for me to start pointing things toward writing the second-act event, I asked everyone if they were ready for me to do that, and to a man, everyone wanted to stay in the first act. It was really interesting, because I appreciated that House of X resonated with them to the extent that they didn't want it to end, but the reality was that I knew I would be leaving the line early."

I guess I'm glad that the creative teams are apparently having fun and good for Marvel for sales working out well I assume, but I have to admit that personally I don't really care about either of those things and I'm just disappointed as a reader with where things have gone, a few titles aside. This is own fault for getting my expectations up and giving ongoing serialized comics being published in real time a shot again after swearing off them decades ago, really. I read HoXPoX based on word of mouth and enjoyed it so much that I let my guard down. Oh well.

At least S.W.O.R.D. and Hellions are good.
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
It seemed like this was the case when they announced the Inferno miniseries. I'm disappointed he won't be writing the full story the way he intended it, but hopefully he can come back when it's time for the next phase.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Black Cat #6 Possibly one of the most fun books Marvel is publishing at the moment, Felicia has successfully stolen Manhattan, and gave it to a skeletor (wasn’t her idea) and now she wants to steal it back because Skeletors probably make bad mayors. I love this book. (y)

Guardians of the Galaxy #14 is possibly the Al Ewingest comic I have ever read; the guardians fight Doom and Ego (who has founded a cult) and Doom winds up joining the team after being mind-swapped into Rockets body. Everything about this is completely nanner, and we got Doom being insulted when it’s pointed out he got stretchy powers like a certain someone. (y)

Fantastic a four #32 Speaking of Doom, he’s getting married to Latverias fanatically devoted second in command, Victorious. And Lyra the Lazerfist decided to wreck Johnnys relationship with his alien bird-lady fiance who has to keep reminding everyone she doesn't know anything about outerspace. On page one, Johnny is told a prophecy that "He will make the wrong choice and ruin everything" which surely can't be a surprise to him at this point. (y)
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Curse of the Man Thing: X-Men Kind of a misleading name, since it's really just Magik who does all of the heavy lifting here, and only that courtesy of something I didn not know about Man-Things backstory (was he always connected to Belasco?). Anyway, it was a kind of disappointing ending to a mini I otherwise liked quite a bit. It alos featured the triumphant return of Shark Girl, which is excellent news, but she was redesigned to look more like SHe Hulk than Regular Hulk, and she revels in violence rather than being sheepish about the fact that she's a GIANT SHARK GIRL. Definitely a poor trade IMO. 👋

Fantastic Four: Life Story #1 My favorite book of the week; a retelling of the FFs origins intermingled with F'real historical things from the 1960s. Felt not dissimilar to DCs New Frontier from a while back. LBJ was much more concerned about how badly the Vietnam war was going for him than giant planet-eating aliens. Also; they finally gave a better explanation for that guy from This Man, This Monster. Loved it. :love:

Heroes Reborn #3: speaking of things inspired by the DCU... this issue focuses on Speed Demon, and makes the connections to the Flash even more obvious. But with the added element of him also being the HR Universes Dr. Strange. At one point he fights Ursa Major in the secret Russian invisible land of Grizzly CIty, which was everything I needed to know to love the book. Meanwhile, the real Avengers continue trying to reunite their team so they can figure out why Marvel suddenly became DC. (y)

Immortal Hulk: The Age of Monsters a tie-in that shows the life of the worlds First Hulk, ten thousand years ago. It's Immortal Hulk, so, naturally... it's got a pretty solid grip on the ol' body horror. Don't think it's really all that connected to the main Immortal Hulk story except in a prefunctory way, but it's a nice little EC-style horror comic.(y)
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Also, a big part of Life Story is about how Reed managed to get a glimpse of Galactus as they were combarded by cosmic rays, and it haunted him and affected his every decision thereafter.

Galactus himself varies between "Kinda Goofy" and "Genuinely Terrifying" through the book;

iGqq0ti.jpg


U0gYhVB.png
 
Curse of the Man Thing: X-Men Man-Things backstory (was he always connected to Belasco?).

I looked into this because I had the same question and did not remember Belasco in older versions of his origin story. The two characters aren't mentioned at all on each other's Marvel fandom wiki pages, so I could not find any information about when this happened. But because they're not intertwined at all on their fan wiki pages, my strong suspicion is that it's a retcon and either a very recent one or at least one that hasn't really stuck to the character as essential.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Man-Thing predates Belasco by over a decade in publication time, so whatever's happened since must've been a relatively recent development. It's kind of funny that someone's still trying to make Belasco happen.
 
In my experience, Belasco has worked in the one issue of X-Men where Illyana starts as a child and comes back as a teenager, and then in the Magik (Illyana and Storm) limited series that explains what happens in that issue, and that's pretty much it.
 
Apparently Mephisto is busy right now doing basically the same "it was all because of a deal with the devil" origin story retcon to the Green Goblin, for some reason.

I couldn't find any good information but I kind of hope that the Man-Thing retcon is a few years old by now and I just never heard about it because no one writes social media clickbait stories about Man-Thing, or else it's very silly that both of these are happening at once.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Beta Ray Bill #3 continues to be my other secret favorite Marvel spinoff, alongside Black Cat. A sudden infusion of Asgardian Magic caused Bills ship Skuttlebutt to turn into a robot-lady who clearly cares for him deeply and wants to help him with his whole "I don't want to be a horseman all the time" thing and Bill don't care because he's looking for a magic sword, dangit. Meanwhile, Scurge has an inexhaustible supply of guns and also fire demons so he's just living his best life. I love Scurge; he's a man of simple tastes. (y)


New Mutants #18 I *finally* figured out what is going on in this comic! Pretty proud of myself for that! Dani needs to kill X'ian in the Crucible because X'ian is possessed by her dead brothers ghost and the only cure for ghosts is being killed (this is a Hickman-adjacent book, so there's a bunch of handy infographics explaining this), and meanwhile, Laura Kinneys sister is trying to deal with the Shadow King being The Shadow King; still have no idea why he's allowed to live on Krakoa. He's neither a mutant nor redeemable in any capacity. Cosmare continues to be one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire X-line 👋


Heroes Reborn Magneto and the Mutant Force: Probably the most overtly "No, this timeline is BAD, actually" book in the Heroes Reborn crossover; mashing together a few of the more unfortunate X-Men crossovers into the same story; Magneto becomes leader of the X-Men, and did such a bad job that now Mutants are even worse off than they are in the 616. Mags tries to get a bunch of psychics together to try to resurrect Chuck and it goes real bad. I don't know if this book is getting a second issue (all the HR spinoffs are presented as if this continuity has always been in existence, so the "To Be Continued" could be a misdirect) but I hope so because the swerve at the end got its hooks into me. (y)
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Too much to fully recap, but Heroes Reborn remains one of my absolute favourite crossover stories in recent years and in my top 3 overall.

Otherwise;
Immortal Hulk #47 was largely a retread of a MUCH earlier issue in the run with the Avengers being brought in to stop Hulk. Key difference is that this time they’re fully aware that they don’t need to hold back (Hulks had some… bad PR lately) and also they’re in the middle of Manhattan instead of the middle of nowhere. Issue ends with a logistically implausible make out that I’m sure nobody was completely happy with. Blade assumes Hulks a vampire because he sees all his problems as vampires.

Black Cat #7 concludes a story set up two relaunches ago, with Felicia having to steal all of Manhattan a second time, this time from a Skeletor. Also she’s bi now; good for her. This is absolutely my favourite Marvel book that nobody is talking about.

Hellions #12 continues the series proud tradition of taking the piss out of everything going on in the main X-Men books; to wit the Hellions crash the Hellfire Gala, get drunk and all make asses of themselves. It’s debated how ethical it is to get Orphan Maker drunk, and a compromise is made. Sinister decides to slum it by talking to Kings and Gods.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Not loving the update to Marvel Unlimited. Not hating it, but not loving it. Real one-step-forward, two-steps-back, also a step to the side and some jumping jacks.

Cant search for individual issues anymore
Search brings up entire series instead of specific ones
Erased my entire library of things I’d either bookmarked to read in the future or was in the middle of reading
Doesn’t stop loading a comic in the middle of reading it until I close and relaunch the app anymore
Scrolling from panel to panel is erratic, and kind of distracting when it’s going to a new page
It’s Jeff is present
 
Not loving the update to Marvel Unlimited. Not hating it, but not loving it. Real one-step-forward, two-steps-back, also a step to the side and some jumping jacks.

Cant search for individual issues anymore
Search brings up entire series instead of specific ones

I felt neutral to positive about it at first, but what has happened to me is that those two things I think have basically ended my attempt to use Marvel Unlimited to read new releases at all.

Because it used to be possible to search for individual issues and sort by time (or even just see every individual issue released in a certain year), you could essentially simulate the feeling of walking into a comic store and picking up individual issues that interested you in a given week. I enjoyed this a lot. With this gone and also even "New This Month" eliminated and replaced with only New this Week, I found that being a few weeks behind in the current system makes it a hassle to figure out what I missed. (I know the information is out there... But why not just have this continue to be easy to do within the app?)

I get that the idea is probably to funnel people into reading runs or the very newest additions, which honestly is the best approach for most people and want most users want. But as someone in the probably tiny minority of readers who was using MU to create a time delayed experience of walking into a comic shop to get "new" releases whenever I got around to it, it's introduced enough friction into the a previously effortless experience that I've just given up.
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
It also doesn’t seem to keep track of what you’ve most recently read or are about to read as that’s no longer saved on the main page. Or maybe it is!

Or sometimes it’s something you read one page of a week ago but it’s still there.

Never know what you’re going to get!
 
I think their idea was that they automatically shuffle anything they think you "finished" off of the recently read area, presumably with the idea of decluttering your recent list. So, the thing you read one page of a week ago is still there because you're "still reading" that issue. Something you read or maybe even mostly read but didn't necessarily actually finish might be gone the next time you open the app. (Presumably there's some page, typically but not always the last page, that marks a book as "read" when you get to it, and then there's some sort of a timer that vanishes "read" books after a certain time...) I don't think it's an improvement over the old list that just showed you the last dozen-ish issues you read and pushed the oldest one off automatically. It's trying a bit too hard to curate something that worked fine before.

And even this wouldn't be that much of an issue at all for reading new releases, except that they also got rid of the ability to just show all issues by release date...
 
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Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Luckily if I have a series saved, and I go into my Saved list, it WILL pick up where I actually left off; like a much clumsier version of how it used to work.
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
I think their idea was that they automatically shuffle anything they think you "finished" off of the recently read area, presumably with the idea of decluttering your recent list. So, the thing you read one page of a week ago is still there because you're "still reading" that issue. Something you read or maybe even mostly read but didn't necessarily actually finish might be gone the next time you open the app. (Presumably there's some page, typically but not always the last page, that marks a book as "read" when you get to it, and then there's some sort of a timer that vanishes "read" books after a certain time...) I don't think it's an improvement over the old list that just showed you the last dozen-ish issues you read and pushed the oldest one off automatically. It's trying a bit too hard to curate something that worked fine before.

And even this wouldn't be that much of an issue at all for reading new releases, except that they also got rid of the ability to just show all issues by release date...
Really sounds like they're overthinking this...
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
It’s a real one step forward, two steps back situation.

Except you trip on one of the steps back and land flat on your ass
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
So the whole of Hickmans Avengers run was kicked off by some golden naked antler guy turning Mars into a jungle. And the mid-point of his X-Men run involves the X-Men turning Mars into a second, better Earth.

Are there two completely different verdant forests on Mars now, or did the Antler Guys garden disappear with Secret Wars or what?

Will Hickmans next comic after X-Men also be about making Mars livable?
 

Positronic Brain

Out Of Warranty
(He/him)
Are there two completely different verdant forests on Mars now, or did the Antler Guys garden disappear with Secret Wars or what?

Will Hickmans next comic after X-Men also be about making Mars livable?
Did you finish the Avengers run? They all bite the dust facing the Beyonders
 

Positronic Brain

Out Of Warranty
(He/him)
The naked golden people did, yeah, but was the jungle of Mars destroyed too? I don’t recall
I though it did at the end of the first arc - and even then I assume that with no gareners, the garden died.

That said, the good thing about Secret Wars is that if you find a contnuity hole, you can just say that it's Molecule Man's fault when rebooting the multiverse. It works for DC and The Flash!
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
There’s lots of things to like about Secret Wars, but an easy out for minor plot holes is among the better ones
 
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