So, What comics did you buy this week?

[Tom Foolery]

Guardians of the Galaxy! Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw on art started a new GotG ongoing after the events of Infinity Wars. Drax is dead, Gamora is hunted by everyone after chopping off Thanos’ head and becoming the suoervillain Requiem, and Rocket has fucked off without telling anyone good bye, so everyone is pissed at him. So it’s just a mopey Quill, and Groot(who can speak full sentences now, I guess the ‘I am Groot’ thing got stale for writers) as the two remaining members.

1-6 Meanwhile, the rest of the Cosmic heroes, movers and shakers gather for a reading of Thanos’ will by Starfox. Literally everyone from the Imperial Guard to the Starjammers is there. Silver Surfer, Nova, Darkhawk, you get the picture… But it’s not a will, Thanos’ final message is telling everyone he uploaded his consciousness into one of them and he’ll return. Everyone gets suspicious of each other, but mostly Gamora is the main suspect. Just then, the Black Order, working for Hela, rip open a black hole, killing everyone there, in order to steal Thanos’ decapitated corpse. A select few heroes manage to pull themselves out of the black hole just as Quill and Groot arrive late to the shindig. The Nova Corps tries to detain the survivors for questioning, but a loophole in galactic law excuses members of Quill’s immediate crew from being arrested, so Cosmic Ghost Rider, Beta Ray Bill, Phyla-Vell, and Moondragon become the new Guardians of the Galaxy…and that’s just the first issue! Donny Cates swings for the fence with everything he writes!
So, others survived the Black Hole, and Starfox puts together a team of Dark Guardians including Gladiator, Nebula, and Wraith, to hunt down Gamora, because they’re sure she’s the new Thanos. Hela and the Black Order find Thanos’ head to restore his body, and the regular Guardians also look for Gamora to protect her. In the end it turns out Starfox was the incubator for the new Thanos and they stop the transference after a giant three way dust up, but Starfox dies and the ‘resurrected’ Thanos is obliterated.
7-12. A giant Universal Church of Truth worldship arrives from the future and starts brainwashing cosmic heroes and using them for fuel. Oh, and (almost)the entire Nova Corps is destroyed trying to stop them. Their leader turns out to be Quill’s father J’son who is also possessed. The Guardians get captured and only Moondragon and Groot escape. Out of options, they go recruit a dying Rocket for one last adventure to save the Galaxy. Rocket in turn, recruits the adolescent Magus last seen with Gamora in Infinity Wars. Meanwhile the Church is gestating several hundred cocoons we are led to believe are new Warlock/Magus, but they are filled with clones of Drax, but like old school Drax with the purple cape, not the new tatted version from the last decade or so. In the end they stop the Church, save all the posssesed heroes, send the ship back to the future and Drax is alive again and Rocket gets medical attention so he’s not dying. ‘Twas only a 12 issue ongoing, amd got rebooted again a couple months later(I’m reading that series next.)

Annual 1. They explain how most of the other heroes survived the Black Hole in the first issue. And that explanation was…read Silver Surver:Black because that’s where it happened. Lol. Three short stories focusing on Nova and Quasar, Adam Warlock, and Darkhawk that I’m assuming were setting up future stories elsewhere.

Guardians of the Galaxy; Prodigal Son oneshot. Continuing from the FF and Silver Surfer oneshots. Prah’d’Gal returns to his home planet where his father the King has died and his brother Luuk is now in charge. Luuk is friends with Peter Quill, so the Guardians interfere with the potential fratricide, but then plot twist, the son killed the dad because the father wanted to reinstitute the world conquering Empire of centuries past. Then another plot twist, the citizens were cool with the patricide because they also did not want to resume being world conquering asshats. So the Prah’d’gal guy is like cool, you people can have Luuk as your leader and I’m not gonna kill him, but this is my planet, so everybody get the fuck off. So he forces a mass evacuation of the planet and then he blows it up. The Guardians are like, should we get involved in this and Quill’s like ‘Nah.’ and they just leave and that’s how this story ends. This guy just obliterates his own planet to be spiteful. Fucking stupid story from Peter David.

Up next, the other Guardians ongoing from Al Ewing.

[Tom Foolery]

Guardians of the Galaxy. The most recent ongoing by Al Ewing ran 18 issues and ended last year. Here are the first twelve issues.

1-2. Nova needs to recruit a team to stop the recently resurrected Olympian Gods who are now quite mad(crazy mad, not angry mad. But also angry. Wrathful even…) but the Guardians have been through a lot and are recuperating on Halfworld. Quill tells Gamora they can’t be Guardians all the time. But then he and Rocket decide to and help Nova anyway, along with Moondragon and Phyla-Vell, and new recruit Noh-Varr aka Marvel Boy. They find Hercules chained up on the Olympian vessel and rescue him and then Quill sacrifices himself by detonating a black hole bomb on the Olympians ship. Very sad.
3. The team deals with Quill’s death. Gamora blames Rocket and Nova. She starts her own Guardians team with Blackjack O’hare, the 616 Moondragon, Groot, Drax, and others, while Rocket, Nova, Herc, Noh-Varr, Phyla-Vell and the other Moondragon keep doing their thing.

4-5. The two teams come into conflict with each other when a anthropormorphic beaver CEO of a mega corp hires Blackjack to kill Rocket, and Rocket’s team are trying to dismantle an energy station using Galactus’ tech. The two Moondragons have a psychic battle and merge befoe the two teams mend fences and defeat the evil beaver.

6. Nova is seeing a therapist because the Nova Corps is dead, he died again during Annihilation:Scourge, and his best friend died, and his ex-gf is mad at him for it. Richard Rider has had a rough life.

7-8. In the wake of Empyre, a new galactic council is formed, and one of the delegates is immediately murdered, and Marvel Boy is blamed for it. Detective Rocket comes in to solve the murder, and word comes in from across the galaxy of entire worlds being decimated; Knull is awake and headed to Earth.

9. Peter Quill is alive in another dimension. He lives there for over a century and develops a bunch of new powers, but the Olympians show up again and he has to return to our universe just in time for….

10. King in Black tie-in. Knull’s symbiote dragons are attacking Spartax and killing billions. Star-Lord returns as the Guardians are trying to save the planet and uses his new powers to defeat the invasion. Happy reunion for everyone.

11-12. It’s a rematch with the mad Olympians, who are defeated by the new bigger badder Guardians team. And at the end, the new Galactic Council makes the Guardians the official super-team of the Galaxy. Which is what the final six issues are about I’m presuming.

Next up, the final stragglers in this box. The box ends with the Hulk run I already read earlier this year. So it’s a half dozen short runs or oneshots, then it’s on to the next box.

[Tom Foolery]

Gunhawks oneshot. Marvel did a bunch of oneshots celebrating it’s 80th Anniversary. This one was a celebration of all the Western books Marvel had done thru the decades. It’s a story of a sheriff with a questionable past in an Arizona town defending it against female Mexican bandits with a vendetta against him. It was okay.

Gwenpool Strikes Back 1-5. Gwen is fending off cancellation and thus being retconned out of existence. She has Deadpool guest star and also attempts a battle royale with a bunch of heroes to secure her place in continuity. The Gwenpool books take breaking the fourth wall to hilarious extremes. Like having the writer of the original Gwenpool book come back to write a single page of the new series, or pulling various Gwens from the pages of her previous guest roles in books like Champions, Rocket & Groot, etc to team up and fight the Hulk, but each one drawn in the style from that book. It’s such a fun meta idea. Good stuff.

Gwen Stacy 1-2. A mini series set just before her debut in ASM 31. Gwen is running for class president and also trying to prove her dad’s innocence after a perp shooting. The book got cancelled during the pandemic after two issues. But they are re-releasing the entire 5 issue mini as a Giant Sized Gwen Stacy oneshot this August. Nice timing!

Next up, a Harley/Ivy miniseries. And maybe a Harley oneshot or two. The Hellions ongoing is in there, but I’ll wait to read it with the rest of the Hickman X-stuff.

[Tom Foolery]

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy 1-6. After the events of Heroes in Crisis, Harley is taking care of the recently revived Ivy, but she seems incomplete. Harley gives her a ‘fertilizer’ concoction given to her by Lex Luthor and it seems to help. Then the Floronic Man shows up and they’re forced to go on the run. After briefly getting sidetracked by Jervis Tetch and then some weird d-list villain at a Dinosaur Theme Park, they head to NYC where the Floronic Man has overrun the city with plants. But surprise plot twist, the “villain” is the Real Ivy, and the one Harley has been on the run with was a cutting of the main version. The cutting helps Harley escape and then returns to try to make the original version ‘whole’ so she’ll remember her and Harley’s relationship. This is probably the first time I bought multiple covers of every issue of a series. Each variant cover featured Harley on one cover and Ivy on the other. Artgerm, Warren Louw, David Finch, Amanda Connor, Josh Middleton and Mark Brooks did the art for each set of variants.

Harley’s Villain of the Year oneshot. The villains all show up at an awards show at the Hall of Doom to accept awards like best comeback, most obsessed, etc as voted on by the readers. It was supposed to be a humorous book, I think.

Harley Quinn 1. First issue of her new ongoing where she’s trying to be a hero in Gotham working with Batman and the rest of the Bat-family. Much like the entirety of her previous series, I’m getting the book for the variant covers and not because I particularly enjoy the character.

Only five(ish) boxes left to go thru. The next box is ‘I’ thru ‘M’. Iron Fist, Iron Man, Joker, a long run of Justice League and a bunch of the Marvel Action stuff from IDW, plus whatever rinky dink stuff in between.

[Tom Foolery]

Iceman 1-5. The first ongoing Iceman series got cancelled after 11 issues. But apparently it did well enough digitally and in Trade sales, they gave Sina Grace another five issues. It was pretty blah. Again.

Infinite Frontier 0. In the aftermath Dark Knights:Death Metal, this oneshot had brief stories teasing upcoming story arcs in the main DC books, like Joker attacking Arkham Asylum, and Barry passing the baton back to Wally, etc. It probably would’ve been cool if you were following all the DC books and read it the week it came out. But I read it 18 months too late, and I only marginally follow DC these days so….

Iron Fist:Heart of the Dragon 1-3. The first half of a six issue mini. Someone is killing the dragons of the seven mystical cities and Danny and the surviving Immortal Weapons have to figure out who’s trying to release the evil from the Eighth city. Larry Hama is crafting an interesting story, but sometimes his dialogue and execution of said story get a little clunky. The final three issues are in the newer boxes.

Iron Man 1-7. After Dan Slott’s run fizzled with Iron Man 2020, Chris Cantwell took over the new series. I enjoyed Cantwell’s Dr Doom series, so I was excited to read this. Hot damn! Korvac is back and a low tech Tony is trying to stop him from regaining his omnipotence with the help of his new girlfriend Patsy Walker, and some other d-list heroes like Frog-Man. The first seven issues rocked. The book is on issue 20 i believe.

Jessica Jones:Blind Spot 1-6. Kelly Thompson was handpicked by Bendis to continue writing Jessica’s story. The first five issues are a murder mystery when a former client shows up dead in Jessica’s office and she’s the prime suspect. The sixth issue ended on a cliffhanger with Jess and Luke’s daughter turning Purple. I thought I was missing issues. But the book was covid cancelled and rest of the series released digitally and eventually the second arc got a TPB release.

Jinny Hex Special oneshot. The great great great granddaughter of Jonah Hex has been hanging out with the Young Justice kids. Or Teen Titans. One of those groups. Anyway, a guy claiming to be her long lost dad shows up but he’s really just an immortal nemesis of Jonah’s looking for some doodad that Jinny inherited and he uses it to become a supervillain and she has to stop him. It was meh.

Next up, Joker! I think.

[Tom Foolery]

Joker 80th Anniversary one shot. Several writers and artists collaborating on Joker stories. Also, a selection of his most famous cover appearances and pin-ups from other artists. As always, some stories were better than others. I got the 70s Jim Lee cover.

Joker 1. First issue of the ongoing Joker series. In the aftermath of the Attack on Arkham Asylum, known as A-Day, and the Joker War that ravaged Gotham, Joker resurfaces in Guatemala. A mysterious woman representing a mysterious consortium of billionaires tries to recruit a retired Jim Gordon to track down and kill the Joker. The rest of the series is in the new boxes.

Journey into Mystery:Birth of Krakoa oneshot. Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos crash their transport plane after they get caught in the shockwave of an atomic detonation on a isolated Pacific island. The island starts turning the Commandos into plant people until Fury talks the island out if it in exchange for making the military think their atomic test failed. Meh.

Juggernaut 1-5. Fabian Nicieza and Ron Garney making Cain Marko a good guy again this week. After losing the Gem of Cytorrak and getting banished to Limbo in an arc in Uncanny X-Men, Cain makes his way back to the real world and travels to Tibet to secure a new Juggy armor made from Cytorrak Bands. Then he retrieves the smashed Gem to regain his power, but this time he is not beholden to Cytorrak himself. Forging his own destiny, he takes a job with Damage Control, helping demolish condemned buildings. He takes on a wayward mutant youtuber, who starts livestreaming Juggy’s efforts to be a hero starting with fighting the Hulk. Then he gets sued for the fight he had with Spider-Man way back in ASM[whichever issues], but Quicksand interrupts the trial and Cain saves everyone. This leads to a fight with Arnim Zola and eventually to a floating supervillain prison on a retired helicarrier. Cain gets Xavier to allow his new friend to come to Krakoa, then he tentatively starts a new super team with Quicksand and Primus to help villains who want to reform break their cycles of supervillainry. My only real beef with the story was Cain being casually decent to Black Tom on Krakoa. Apparently everyone in the editorial dept forgot about Sammy.

Next up, a sizable run of Justice League.

[jjreason]

Saga 59 e-copy. That must be the end of the first 6 issue arc, at least it read like it was. Hopefully they'll hold the schedule.

I think I need to head to a LCS on Wednesday for the grand finale of BatCat.... and it's starting to sound once again like they might have Neil Gaiman ready to finish his Miracleman stuff. I fell for this once before, but I think I'm ready to do a re-read & fall for it again.

[Tom Foolery]

After Rebirth, there were two Justice League books. Then a mini event called No Justice happened and there were three relaunched JL books, Dark, Odyssey, and the main title written by Scott Snyder. I didn’t start getting it until issue 25.

Justice League 10. I got this one because it had the cool foil cover. It was part of a crossover between JL and Aquaman called “Drowned Earth”.

24-25 was the end of a arc called “Sixth Dimension” where some far future Justice League have turned into tyrants and the current League is trying to stop them. Batman is working with the bad guys, but subconciously he assists Superman escaping a trap dimension and showing up and saving everyone. It was very confusing. The end dovetails into the FCBD issue from that year, which set off the “Year of the Villain” mega event that threaded thru all the DC books for several months. Lex Luthor sent a worldwide message out and then blew himself up on live TV. Which is why I started buying the Variant covers going forward.

26-28. J’onn J’onzz and Hawkgirl brought back their hypothetical son, Shayne, from the sixth dimension with them. There’s a remnant of Starro living in a jar in the Hall of Justice that Batman has adopted. His name is Jarro. And there’s a new major baddie called Perpetua, who is the original creator of the multiverse, and she’s the one who gave Lex his power upgrade. Her children are the Monitor and Anti-Monitor, from the original Crisis, and a new guy called the Forger who was the bad guy in the previous arc, but the League convinced him to join them instead. Anyway, Lex lures J’onn in and absorbs him so he can use his powers for the next major arc.

29-39. Justice/Doom War. So Perpetua and her new henchman, Apex Lex are combining these seven elements so they can become all powerful and destroy the multiverse and remake it or whatever. The three Monitor bros, along with Starman Will Payton are set up to stop their mother, but they need some mcgoobers from the past and the future to make it work. Flash and John Stewart head back to 1941 and team up with the Justice Society(that noone has ever heard of because DC wrecked their own continuity) and the Trinity heads into the future to team up with Kamandi to fight Brainiac One Million, but both teams get their butts kicked, so Aquaman(who everyone thought was dead) shows up in the past, and he gets Vandal Savage’s help to get the past mcgoober back to the present, and Kamandi goes and recruits future JL teams like Kingdom Gone, and the JL Beyond era to reinforce the future team, and they get the future mcgoober. But they’re too late! And there’s a big showdown back on Earth in the present, and Shayne gets in Lex’s head and switches places with his dad so Martian Manhunter can use his mental powers to convince everyone on earth to think good thoughts and turn the battle around. But that also fails! And Snyder's last issue has a depowered JL stuck on the moon somewhere and the Quintessence(Spectre, Phantom Stranger, Shazam, Hera, Ganthet, Highfather) show up and say there’s one more chance to fix this and it’s a huge cliffhanger and the next issue(40)Venditti took over like none of this happened, so I’m assuming there was some mini series that concluded this bullshit. But like seriously, every book I read from DC, like Doomsday Clock or Convergence, or Infinite Frontier, seems to be them trying to fix all their multiverse fuckups and make sense of the diarrhea that is their continuity. Their solution to unringing the bell is to KEEP HITTING THE FUCKING BELL.

Next, Justice League continues. I have 40 thru 59 left in this box. It looks like 59 was Bendis’ first issue on the book, but I don’t think he was on it for very long.

[Tom Foolery]

Justice League 40-43. Robert Venditti took over writing for a couple story arcs. The first one had The Eradicator return with an army of clones he’d created from Daxamite DNA to take over Earth and make it a new Krypton. Batman recruits Madam Xanadu because Kryptonians/Daxamites are weak against magic. John Stewart and the League trick the army into going thru a portal to a world with no yellow sun, and proceed to kick ass. Superman volunteers to give Eradicator his DNA in exchange for leaving Earth alone permanently.

44-47. Jim Corrigan finds a loophole and separates himself from The Spectre and retreats into Tarturus, the greek underworld. Without human influence the Spectre begins bleeding into everyone’s subconcious causing the JL to fight each other, and then eventually a legion of Amazonians when they go to find Corrigan. Corrigan eventually re-bonds with the Spectre when he sees the problems it causes. He just needed a break.

48-50. Si Spurrier stepped in for an issue where the JL stops an evil alien queen oppressing her subjects, but are ill suited to governing in her place when the subjects put them in charge. Only Wonder Woman thinks its a bad idea and is proven right over and over as the two factions of aliens refuse to compromise. The whole thing was a metaphor for intolerance or some shit. It was a weak-ass, clumsy story arc.

51-52. Jeff Loveness came in for a fantastic two parter where the JL comes across an entire planet enthralled by a giant Black Mercy plant. It gets ahold of the League, but the story is Bruce trying to break free of the illusion in the form of his mother wishing for him a life beyond being Batman. Good stuff.

Williamson had a short run on the series, then Lanning came in for a mini-event called Endless Winter that crossed over with some other books. Then Bendis took over. Those are up next.

[Tom Foolery]

Justice League 53-57. Williamson wrote a five issue tie-in arc for Death Metal where Nightwing, Detective Chimp and Hawkgirl have to recruit Lex Luthor to go rescue the rest of the Legion of Doom from the Doom Throne that Perpetua put them in. Cyborg and Starfire show up to help, they fight an army of Starros before they free Sinestro, Grodd, and Cheerah then everybody has to work together to defeat the Darkest Knight, which is like a giant Jaeger-esque robot dude protecting the throne. I was sooooo comfused, because this was basically picking up where Snyder left off in issue 39. So I looked it up, JL went bi-weekly after that, and issues 40 thru 52 came out in six months while Death Metal was running. But it’s pretty much like a solid year of the equivalent of inventory stories or some shit. Fuckin’ DC man.

Justice League:Endless Winter. Andy Lanning and Ron Marz co-wrote a story arc that had two bookend issues, then ran thru an issue of JL, Aquaman, Flash, JL Dark, as well as special oneshots for Superman, Teen Titans, and Black Adam. Stagg Industries is illegally mining at the former location of the Fortress of Solitude in the arctic circle and they unleash a supervillain that Black Adam, Hypolyta, Swamp Thing, and the Viking Prince defeated back in the 10th century. The Frost King unleashes endless winter on the Earth while he’s looking for his family, and the story weaves thru all the heroes’ books until the JL manage to subdue him in the finale. The reading order was annoying, but the story was okay.

JL 59. Bendis took over and added Black Adam and Naomi to the roster. The rest of his run is in the new boxes, and I’m pretty sure my run starts jumping around. His run went to issue 74, and the final issue 75 was written by Williamson where the League “dies” setting up Dark Crisis which just started.

Next up, part of a Killmonger mini, then I skip over the entire King in Black saga in this box because I read it while I was reading Venom, and jump into the Ls and Ms. it’s a relatively small pile before I get to Marauders, which is also getting postponed until i work back around to all the X-books. After that it’s a variety of IDW’s Marvel Action imprint and that is the last of this box.

[Tom Foolery]

Killmonger 3-5. Missing the first two issues. Flashback Miniseries filling in the early part of Killmonger’s career using the MCU version as a sort of template, but being respectful of the actual 616 character. Not a retcon perse. Killmonger falls in with a team of assassins working for Kingpin. Fisk double crosses them and sends Bullseye to kill them, but they mostly escape. Then one of the assassins who Killmonger is infatuated with gets flipped by SHIELD to turn in their boss. The boss assassin and his wife get killed and Killmonger gets doublecrossed by his new gf. He eventually tracks her down and doublecrosses her to SHIELD before he heads to Wakanda where his story “begins” catching up to his first appearance back in the 70s. Stylish crime noir vibe to the story. Didn’t hate it.

Legion of Super Heroes:Millennium 1-2. Two part series re-introducing the LoSH with Bendis writing. Rose(as in Rose and Thorn) is somehow immortal now and the story follows her from the present thru all the ‘future’ DC timelines, like Batman Beyond, Kamandi, Booster Gold, OMAC as she’s living and surviving into the 31st Century where she meets the newly formed LoSH. Leads into…

Legion of Super Heroes 1, 9, 12. Bendis wrote a new LOSH ongoing that only lasted 12 issues and I only bought 3 of.

Lockjaw 1,2. First two issues of a 4 issue mini from 2018. Lockjaw and his tag-along buddy Dennis “D-Man” Dunphy popping around the world with guest-stars like Ka-Zar and Spider-Ham showing up. That Kibblesmith guy wrote it. He wrote something else I enjoyed, but I don’t remember what. A Deadpool mini maybe?

Lois Lane 1-3. Greg Rucka and Mike Perkins doing a firecracker mystery story that I only bought the first three issues of, but now I want to read the rest of this 12 issue maxi. I think it was because I got the variant cover of the first two issues and then my guy stopped ordering them and I didn’t want the regular covers. Definitely gonna track them down at some point.

[Tom Foolery]

Loki 1-5. Oh wow, I was just talking about Daniel Kibblesmith, and here he is again. After WotR, Loki is the new King of Jotunheim. And he’s bored. So he goes to his brother and asks if he can be an Avenger. Thor laughs uncontrollably and tells him to go ask Tony Stark. He ends up going to the House of Ideas, where Eternity’s two children, Now and Then, turn Loki into a proper hero, with certain caveats. Loki also gets on Nightmare’s wrong side and he has to deal with the fear lord. Kibblesmith was setting up an interesting series, but low sales canceled it before it could get going. Basically, Loki was in charge of his own continuity, so if he remembered, say, teaming up with Wolverine in the Wild West, then the ‘flashback’ became retconned and actually happened.

Luna Snow oneshot. The K-Pop star, who was introduced in the Marvel Fighting App Game, gets an origin issue. She’s part of the new Agents of Atlas team.

Major X 1-6, 0. Marvel had Rob Liefeld come back and create a new character for them. He’s the time-traveling son of Cable and Storm from the future, trying to protect his offshoot mutant paradise future called the X-istence from being destroyed by some D-list villains Liefeld made up back when he was writing Wolverine back in the late 90s. Pretty much bleh thru and thru. The 0 issue was a reprint of the only two issues of Wolverine I’m missing (154 and 155) with some new material framing it and tying it into the new series. So I got to read those issues without paying $50 or whatever. Which is nice.

Man-Bat 1. First issue of a mini or ongoing, not sure which. Kirk Langstrom is a junkie for his bat serum. Francine leaves him because he won’t leave it alone. He turns into Man-Bat to go be a hero/vigilante and causes a bunch of property damage and injuries trying to stop a robbery. Batman intervenes and gives him a lecture before remanding him to the GCPD. He escapes and Amanda Waller’s Suicide Squad gets tasked to bring him in. I got the variant cover of issue 1 and didn’t bother keeping up with the rest of it.

Skipping Marauders, so just a bunch of Marvel Action left in the box.

[Tom Foolery]

In 2018, Marvel farmed out it’s ‘All Ages/Middle School Readers’ line of comics to IDW. Previous incarnations had been under Marvel Age or Marvel Adventures. This imprint was called Marvel Action. I’m not writing ‘Marvel Action’ for every series…

MA Classics Ant-Man oneshot. Reprint of two earlier Marvel Adventures issues.

MA Avengers 1-12. Simplified MCU-esque version of the team, but fighting some classic 616 adversaries, like the U-Foes, Count Nefaria, Madame Masque, and Fin Fang Foom etc. solid series.

MA Avengers 1-3. The shortened second volume had the Avengers taking an HR mandated day off, and each issue had two different Avengers ‘team up’ on their day off. Thor and Ant-Man, Cap and Squirrel-Girl, Dr Strange and Capt Marvel.

MA Black Panther 1-4. T’Challa and Shuri teaming up on adventures. It was a six issue run. I’m missing issues 5 and 6 for some reason.

MA Classics Captain America. Oneshot reprinting two earlier Adventures issues.

MA Captain Marvel 1-6. Carol teams with BFF Spider-Woman and the Guardians to stop a Kree orchestrated Flerken invasion. In the second arc, she teams up with Nadia Pym, the new Wasp.

MA Captain Marvel 1. The second series had her teaming up with Spider-Gwen. The rest of the issues are in the new boxes to be read later.

MA Chillers 1-4. Horror tinged mini. Shuma-Gorath unleashes the Darkhold, and Dr Strange, Ironheart, Elsa Bloodstone, Spidey, Cap, and Iron Man sort of team up to ultimately fight Dracula in a stolen Iron Man armor, Iron Dracula. Pretty good series.

MA Classics Avengers starring Dr Strange oneshot. Two more reprinted Adventures.

MA Classics Avengers starring Iron Man oneshot. Two more reprinted Adventures issues.

MA Classics Hulk oneshot. Two more reprints. Ironically, one of the stories in this was the same as from the Iron Man issue, because it had IM, Hulk, and Spidey in the same story.

MA Origins 1. Two origin stories per issue. This one had Spidey and Thanos. The other issues are in the new boxes.

MA Spider-Man 1-12. In this version, Peter, Miles, and Gwen are still in high school, and all have their Spider powers. They eventually discover each other’s secret identities and fight crime as a Spider-Trio going against the Lizard, Kraven and his family, Black Cat, and Venom. It was an interesting re-interpretation. I liked the dynamic.

MA 2, 3. The story continued in a second volume. I’m missing the first issue. And the rest of the series is probably in the new boxes.

MA Classics Spider-Man Two-In-One 1-2. Two reprint issues featuring four Adventures issues.

Some of the series were pretty good, others were so-so. I think Marvel eventually yanked the license(along with the Star Wars Adventures series) in late 2021 or early this year.

So that’s it for that long box(minus the series I skipped). Only four more to plow thru. However, I found a short box from during the move, that had an assortment of issues from series I had already read, but subsequent issues had come out and I was planning on ‘keeping current’ with those series, but then I moved and stuff got put in different short boxes and yadda yadda…anyway. I may read those issues, so I can reunite them in their proper boxes and get rid of that extra short box. Or not.
I was also flirting with the idea of bingeing the entire run of Boys now that I found the final issue I was missing, so that I can watch the series after I read the comics. But I feel like that’s a distraction from my goal of getting these boxes read, so I can sort, log, and put them on my cbrealm list.
Perhaps I will compromise and read an arc of Boys at a time, interspersed with the other reading.

[anarky]

I'll never figure out why Marvel licensed their kids' titles to another company, but I guess the bean counters saw some advantage to it. I never read any of the MU titles, but the SW were a mix of absolutely amazing and completely disposable.

Is Dark Horse or someone else getting the Marvel YA license now? Or I guess the real question is what the hell happened at IDW to make them crash and burn so hard, so fast, and are they essentially dead now that they've lost most of their licenses? (I'm guessing their total inability to release books on time, or even just a month late.)

[Tom Foolery]

‘Marvel’ is a pretty big catch-all section of the ‘M’ box. Because their are plenty of series that are Marvel-this and Marvel-that. I read a big chunk of them a few years ago when I started playing catch up in these unread boxes, but here’s what didn’t get read the first time.

Marvel Voices:Indigenous Voices oneshot. The Voices books are anthology oneshots about minority characters written and drawn by minority creators of the same persuasion. It spun out of a podcast or something a couple years ago, and the first oneshot had like 20 stories crammed into it. Afterwards, they did books focused on Asians, Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ, etc. This one focused on Native Americans. Three different stories starring Echo, Danielle Moonstar, and Silver Fox.

Marvel Voices:Legacy 1. Stories featuring RiRi, Shuri, and Kamala having a slumber party, a short story about Miles, Monica Rambeau grocery shopping with her mother and the Avengers, an alt-universe Venom, Blade killing vampires in a bodega, and Domino in a high stakes poker game.

Marvels Epilogue. As part of Marvel’s 80th anniversary, Busiek and Alex Ross came back for the 25th anniversary of Marvels and did an extra 16 page story, then padded the rest of the issue with interviews and art breakdowns and stuff. But this also kicked off a Marvels renaissance of sorts. They did an annotated reprint of the original series, but also…

Marvel 1-6. An anthology series, framed each issue by a Busiek/Ross story featuring Nightmare and Dr Strange. Each issue had two or three stories that just let the creators do interesting stories with random characters that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else. Some of them were surprisingly good. I’m missing issue 2 for some reason. Overall, it was a satisfying read.

Marvels X 1, 2, and 6. Alex Ross and Jim Krueger came back and did a prequel to their Earth X trilogy. The mutant virus gave everyone powers and society collapsed. A young boy from Toledo is orphaned by the events, and makes his way to New York City because he idolizes super heroes and that’s where they all hang out. In the end he dies, but plot twist he’s the immortal Daredevil from the original series. I got bored after two issues, but somehow also bought the final issue probably because of the buy 3 get the 4th free deal at my comic shop. It wasn’t bad. I’ll probably try to fill the missing three issues in at some point, but not a priority.

Marvels Snapshots: Sub-Mariner oneshot. The Snapshots idea spun out of the original idea for Marvels, which was the Marvel Universe thru the eyes of a normal person, ie the photographer Phil Sheldon. So each of these oneshots is a story told from ‘bystanders’ eyes. The Namor issue was about his Golden Age girlfriend, Betty Dean dealing with Namor’s and her brothers’ PTSD after the war.

Fantastic Four. A newsteam is doing interviews in the small town of Glenview for Johnny Storm’s 10-year high school reunion return as a super celebrity.

Captain America. Set after the Mad Bomb storyline, a young man’s world is upended and sets him on a path to joining AIM after the perceived indifference of Cap and other heroes. Really well done story about collateral damage from super hero battles.

X-Men. Uhmmm…the ‘bystander’ in this issue is Scott Summers living in the orphanage before he was recruited by Professor X. Didn’t really thematically follow the ‘rules’ but it was an okay story.

Avengers. A police officer and an off duty EMT help civilians into a bomb shelter during an Avengers battle with what looks like the giant Red Ronin robot, and then tell stories with the people about encounters they’ve had with various heroes while waiting for the battle to end. Then they exchange phone numbers.

Spider-Man. Howard Chaykin’s upchuck graced the pages, so I couldn’t get past the first panel. Ugh.

Civil War. A low level SHIELD Agent in the Toledo office is having second thought about which side he’s on when two young kids with powers are treated as criminals simply for being powered.

Captain Marvel. A 14 year old girl with a history of getting in trouble for activism, meets two of her heroes, Carol Danvers and Ms Marvel.

Marvel Tales:Ravencroft. A $7.99 reprint of the Marvel version of Arkham’s early appearances. I’m pretty sure I got this in a $1 bin. Also, I have the original issues it reprinted.

Next up, more ‘M’ stuff. Mary Jane, Moon Knight, Ms Marvel, etc.