Marvel Universe

[Diabolical]

http://badassdigest.com/2012/10/02/amaz ... antasy-15/

Last issue of ASM to feature unused Ditko AF#15 cover.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Yet another reason to detest Rick Remender. I read the Secret Avengers issues my friend sent me. It's 21-30 and 32 which is the bulk of Remender's run. Still need to hunt down the final half dozen books as his run ends with issue 37 which comes out this month I think.

Anyway, apart from the usual mischaracterizations of just about every single person in the book, the first thing he does is kill off Eric O'Grady! The Irredeemable Ant-Man is probably one of the funnest and funniest characters Marvel has created in the last decade. And Rick kills him off in his second issue. Then replaces him with an evil LMD traitor mole version.
Next up, after getting sidetracked with some AvX crossover nonsense, in his second arc he kills off John Steele.
What the fuck. If you're gonna constantly be killing Marvel characters, why don't you whip up some third-rate two dimensional pieces of shit fodder instead of taking other writers' unique fun character and wasting them in your shitty ill conceived murder pron fantasies? You clown dick.

The sooner Tom Brevoort's obsession with the taste of Remender's jizz is over, the better.

[jjreason]

Read Hickman Avengers 1&2, and it seems to be a retelling of Ulimates, which was a retelling of the Authority, volume 1, 1-4. Except on Mars. It's good though.

How is Bendis XMen up to 6 already? Is it bi-weekly?

[Tom Foolery]

Yes it is. And he'll be writing Uncanny as well, so it'll be 3 X-Books every month from Bendis. I dunno, is Uncanny bi-weekly also? He might be doing a weekly X-Men. Plus, he's doing Guardians of the Galaxy.

Hickman's Avengers is alright, but his New Avengers is better. So far. As we all know from Hickman's Secret Warriors and FF runs, he takes a while to put the pieces in place, but it pays off big later on.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

I had to take another break from Kavanagh's X-Man series. It's just a boring ass series. I did finish Kavanagh's run and still have Warren Ellis' final 12 issues to go, but it's still a drain to read and I've been plugging along on it for too long. I'll talk about it elsewhere when I finish.

But in the meantime, I delved into a different box today. And today it was "P,Q,R,S" box.

First up were the final two issues of The Prowler miniseries from 1994. Its by Carl Potts and Bill Reinhold who has a vaguely Sal Buscema style in this book. I love taking an 18 year break between the beginning and end of a story. Actually I have no clue what happened in the first two issues, but I caught up. The new younger Vulture has taken over the factory where Hobie Brown works and is using his pneumatic tech to make a better Vulture costume. There's also a new vigilante called the Nightcreeper who is essentially a darker, grittier Prowler who kills! Hobie eventually beats up Nightcreeper and Vulture, but his wife leaves him for a job in California because he won't stop being the Prowler.
I've always liked The Prowler. He's a vastly underrated character with a lot of potential. He gets used much less than he deserves. I keep reading Slott wants to use him, but can't figure out how to make it work.

Next was Prime/Captain America 1996 oneshot by Len Strazewski and Gerard Jones and of course art by Norm Breyfogle! Cap shows up in the Ultraverse and fights Prime in the White House in front of President Clinton. But it turns out there's another Prime from a third universe who's evil and the Bill Clinton from that universe is a skeevy snake oil type who has replaced the REAL Clinton(well, the real Ultraverse version anyway) and Cap and Prime have to save him. A fun oneshot with awesome Norm art. Captain America looks awesome when Breyfogle draws him. It's sad the Ultraverse characters all got effed because of the Marvel buyout of Malibu.

Then we have Pryde and Wisdom. A 3 issue mini from 1996 by Warren Ellis and early work by the Dodsons. Kitty Pryde and Pete Wisdom are tracking a mutant serial killer in London who is turning victims to stone. It turns out to be Cain, the original. Son of Adam. Grandson of God as it were. Along the way we get to meet Wisdom's dad and his sister Romany who would later show up in issues of Excalibur and X-Force. The usual cheeky dialogue and weirdness from Warren Ellis. Warren also had done the unthinkable and made Marvel characters age slightly so Kitty was 20 or so in this book. However, when Claremont came back he decided Kitty was still 16ish which retroactively made Pete Wisdom a pedo in this book and in Excalibur.

Finally, the Psylocke miniseries from 2010 by Yost and Harvey Tolibao. Follows up some story from the main X-books where Kwannon came back and got rekilled again. So Betsy is returning her body to Japan when Hand ninjas show up and immolate the body. Since its technically Betsy's body from before the switch, she gets pissed and vows to kill M'atsuo(he sent his own guys dressed as Hand to burn the body). Along the way she meets Yukio who's acting as M'atsuo's bodyguard, acting on behalf of Logan.
Because if you'll remember, M'atsuo killed Mariko with poison and Logan has vowed to take a piece of M'atsuo every year on the anniversary of Mariko's death ever since. And M'atsuo is now pretty fucked up, missing parts of his face and various limbs and shit. He just wants to die and get it over with and wants Betsy to be the one. And Logan wants to stop her because M'atsuo hasn't suffered nearly long enough by Logan's measure.
Anyway, Logan and Psylocke fight and eventually Logan says fuck it, kill the bastard and Psylocke puts M'atsuo Tsurayaba out of his misery. Quite a good miniseries if you find the TPB for cheap, I'd say get it.

Since this is the 'P' box I think I'll dig out a bunch of Punisher related books and read those next.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Here's M'atsuo after years of getting worked over by Wolverine.
Don't EVER kill Wolverine's girlfriend, people! He will FUCK you up.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Assorted 'Q' and 'R' books. I'm just putting 'em all in here.

Quicksilver. He had a short lived 1998 ongoing that only lasted 13 issues and a Half of an Annual(half because it shared it with Heroes for Hire). The High Evolutionary put Pietro in charge of his Wundagore Mountain evolved animal Knights. I had already read the first half of the series, and just finished the last five or so. I was pleasantly surprised how well this book intertwined with Heroes for Hire and KaZar book that came out at the same time. I guess editors still communicated back then. The only problem I had was the final issue where a mysterious hooded figure is harassing Pietro and getting him to evaluate his past mistakes. At the end, the mystery man turns out to be Magneto. As if Quicksilver wouldn't instantly recognize his own father.

Relative Heroes. A six issue miniseries from DC. Released in 2000. A bunch of superpowered kids' parents die in a car crash and they jump in the family Winebago to drive across country to Metropolis to find Superman. Not bad. Not great. Reminded me of Runaways, although this came first.

Robin. A few oneshots, one with Argent, one with Impulse, and an 80 Page Giant with Wildcat, Black Canary and Spoiler. Nothing noteworthy. Except Tim's dad got remarried.

Rogue. A 2001 miniseries set immediately after Rogue first came to Xavier's as a reformed villain. Xavier tries to help her with her powers. Pretty good.

Rogues oneshot. A DC oneshot from 1998 starring Flash's villains. Some crap about Neron and some mystical religion guy fighting over their souls. Ugh.

ROM Spaceknight. The first issue. Damn, it's hard to believe this series is almost 35 years old! Good GREAT series start by Mantlo and Sal Buscema. Marvel should buy the ROM rights back from Hasbro. It's not like Hasbro or Parker Brothers did shit with it in the last three decades.

Next up, some old Sabretooth books.

[anarky]

I wonder if ROM will go into the public domain.

I'm not even kidding, sadly enough.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Not until we are all in our 80s (and JJL is in his 40s).


I started in on my various Sabretooth books, and was going to wait until I'd finished all of them, but I started with a 1994 series called Sabretooth Classic and decided to comment on that series separately. The Classic series was a 15 issue series that reprinted Sabretooth's earliest comic appearances. What I found fascinating was that I had almost every appearance of Sabretooth from the beginning and never realized it. He only had a small handful of appearances before he showed up in the Mutant Massacre, which is where I first read about him. And the Wolverine connection didn't start until then and didn't get fleshed out until later in Wolverine's solo book and later X-Men issues. It's also interesting to see his mythology expand as his appearances progress. Nowadays, we take the idea that Sabe and Logan's histories are intertwined for granted. But he didn't start out that way.

The series didn't reprint his 1st appearance in Iron Fist 14 (probably because it had gotten a Marvel Milestone issue the year before)

1-3 reprinted Power Man/Iron Fist issues where Sabretooth was teamed up with Constrictor as muscle for some forgotten crime lord from PM/IF. In the third issue Sabretooth attacks Cage's supermodel girlfriend Harmony thinking it was Misty Knight(who had defeated him earlier). He claws up her face. Luke Cage tracks him down and beats the shit out of him, putting him in the hospital. Evidently, Sabretooth did NOT have a healing factor.

4-5 reprint two issues of Spectacular Spider-Man. Sabretooth breaks out of prison and finds The Foreigner(remember him?!) asking for a job. He refers to Foreigner as "mentor" implying he'd gotten training from the assassin. Foreigner sends him after Black Cat, and Spidey intervenes. He defeats Sabretooth by webbing his face. When Sabes rips the webbing off, he pulls his skin off with it, sending him back to the hospital. Three issues later Sabretooth breaks out of the hospital intent on gettin even with Spidey, and gets his ass handed him by a powered down Black Cat(in a horrendous 80s costume. Rhinestone shoulder pads on a leather jacket over a unitard. Euuchh). She claws the fuck out of his face. Which doesn't heal.

6 thru 11 were all Mutant Massacre tie ins.
6. X-Factor 10. The Marauders are killing Morlocks by the dozens. Sabes is just one of several Marauders getting page time. This issue ends with Angel getting pinned to the wall by Scalphunter. We all know how that turned out.
7. Thor 374. Sabretooth is hardly in this issue. Other than giving Blockbuster grief for not standing toe to toe with Thor, he's not in the book for more than a page.
8. Power Pack 27. The Power Pack kids defeat Sabretooth by dropping a tunnel wall on him. Let's recap, shall we? At this point in his career, Sabretooth has been beaten up by Misty Knight, Luke Cage, Spidey's webs and his own stupidity, Black Cat, and now Power Pack. What a loser. Amiright?
9-10. Reprints Uncanny X-Men 211 and 212. Sabretooth's first throwdowns with Wolverine. In the first part, there's one throwaway line of dialogue that suggests Logan and Sabretooth know each other. In the second part, while Psylocke is rooting in his head looking for the mastermind behind the Massacre she sees an enigmatic image of Wolverine laying in the snow after fighting with Sabretooth a long time ago.
11. Daredevil 238. Sabretooth fights Daredevil in the Morlock tunnels. DD uses psychology on Sabretooth to end the fight.
12. Missing this issue.
13-15 were Uncanny X-Men 219, 221, and 222 which had some of Silvestri's earliest work. Again, Sabretooth is just one of the Marauders with not more than a line or two as Sinister sends them to kill Maddie Pryor. His short scuffle with Logan in 222 again suggests they have "history" but it's very vague and amounts to little more than tough guy spouting.

And those were Sabretooth's first 16 appearances. The name Victor Creed was many years off, as was all the "Team X" stuff and just how deep his relationship with Logan went. Since I started reading during the Mutant Massacre, and everything after, I always assumed that relationship between them had already been established. It was interesting to learn it was not, and that his "healing factor" and other powers were added later.

Oh, and Power Pack and Black Cat beat him up. Douche.

Next up are some of his miniseries and oneshots. Not his first one, but a Sabretooth/Mystique series from '97 and another one from 2003. Also a oneshot from 98.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Sabretooth/Mystique. A 1997 series by Jorge Gonzales and Ariel Olivetti(before he started doing painted artwork). Set during the time Victor and Mystique were roped into working on the X-Factor team. First, they fake their deaths. Then they break onto the SHIELD Helicarrier ahead of some AIM scientists to steal a macguffin of the corpse of a dead Hydra guy. The macguffin belong to a Hydra guy who tortured Sabretooth, Mystique, and Destiny during the cold war. AIM wants the macguffin because it can break into NORAD and launch a bunch of rockets at Russia. Victor and Raven save the world and kill all the badguys.

Sabretooth: Back to Nature. Also set during his X-Factor tenure. A couple former Soviet assassins are serial killing on the west coast of Canada and kill a old friend of WildChild. He enlists Sabretooth to help him track down the killers and bring them in. But Victor wants to hunt them down and kill them. This version of WildChild is completely ignored by Daniel Way and Jeph Loeb when they wrote that insidiously stupid Romulus bullshit later on. Way and Loeb are complete douchepuddles.

Sabretooth:Mary Shelley Overdrive. A 2003 mini from Dan Jolley and Greg Scott. Victor saves a girl from Russian Spetsnaz killers. They turn out to be Cold War Soviet scientists who are putting their own brains into the fit bodies of dead soldiers Frankenstein style which makes them difficult to kill. And they were targeting the girl because she was inadvertently infected with a super virus that will kill everyone in just a few hours if she isn't killed/given the antidote.
Victor kills everybody but the antidote gets destroyed so he's forced to kill the young girl he swore to protect. Pretty badass story. Recommended.

I'm gonna skip about 40 or so Secret Files & Origins oneshots that DC put out in the late 90s/early 00s and read some assorted other 'S' books next.

[Diabolical]

I recently found the 4 issue mini he had in the early to mid 90s with Graydon Creed, Mystique and Birdie.
I've been meaning to read it again. It wasn't bad from what I remember and had badass art from Texeira.
And I liked the Birdie character. She was kinda like Sabretooth's Harley Quinn.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

Didn't Birdie try to kill him almost the minute after she was introduced?

[Diabolical]

Something like that, but she also used used her psychic powers to help him...somehow.
Its been awhile since I've read it, but it seems like it may have implied she was a indentured servant or slave of Sabretooth. I forget. Definitely going to have to reread it now.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

An assortment of books from the 'S' box.

Sentinel Squad O*N*E. A five issue mini released after House of M/Decimation. The Committee of Superhuman Affairs starts up the Office of National Emergency (The ONE in the title) which builds giant Sentinels piloted by people(instead of being giant evil robots) and trained by Jim Rhodes. After M-Day all the remaining mutants were rounded up and placed at the Concentration Camp Xavier's School to be Guarded protected by these giant SS Jackboots robots.

The Age of Sentry. A six issue mini from 2009 that "reprints" old non-existent Silver Age Sentry comics. Very tongue in cheek spoof of the 60s Marvel comics. Pretty fun if you see the TPB cheap.

Sgt Fury & His Howling Commandos. A 2009 oneshot. I'll let Sgt Fury sum up the issue from the last page; "We destroyed a nuclear factory, a German airfield, and a Warbot. Prevented the Russians from getting their hands on the plans for an atomic bomb, and brought you a Japanese submarine full of gold." Yes, crammed packed issue with art by John Paul Leon. Great stuff.

Shadowland: Daughters of Shadow. 3 issue mini. Daredevil recruits Colleen Wing to lead his new all girl assassin squad because their mothers were all Hand ninjas.

Shadowmasters. 4 issue Prestige series from the late 80s. Spans 40 years from WWII to the "present". A Japanese ninja and an American Soldier and their children are trained to become ninjas and fight a secret Japanese society bent on ruling Japan. Pretty epic. These characters would go on to be Punisher supporting players, albeit briefly.

Shang Chi: Master of Kung Fu. A six issue MAX title that brought Shang out of retirement. Some guy is using Shang's fathers old troops and hideouts to build a doomsday device to blow up London. Suprise! It's really his Dad! Because it's ALWAYS his dad. Oye. Get a new shtick. Other than a few 'F' bombs there was no reason for this Moench/Gulacy series to be in the MAX imprint.

Shang Chi Black and White Super Special. One of several B/W oneshots released in 2009, and none of them have disappointed. The highlight of this issue was a Hickman story featuring Shang and Deadpool in a desert death rally race thru Mexico and the Southwest, but they eventually become besties and bond over hotdogs made from humans. Sublimely absurd humor from Jonathan Hickman.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

More 'S'. Mostly various She-Hulk issues.

Savage She Hulk. Issues 16 and 17 from her original series all the way back from 1981. She fights the Man-Elephant!! A guy dressed in armor that looks like an elephant. So D-List bad, these issues were hilariously campy.

She Hulk: Ceremony. A two issue Prestige series from 1988 by Dwayne McDuffie. Shulk and Wyatt Wingfoot fight an evil Shaman/Corporate CEO who's trying to destroy Wyatt's Reservation and consume all the souls on Earth. Resolved the romantic relationship between Jen and Wyatt from the FF book. They parted as platonic friends. I miss Dwayne.

Sensational She Hulk 45. From John Byrne's run. This issue was hilarious. Byrne is padding his story with unnecessary pinups and splash pages to the point where Editor Renee Witterstaeter starts calling him out on it(in dueling captions between her and Byrne). He was clearly spoofing/critiquing the art styles of the Image guys to hilarious effect. This makes me want to track down this entire series now.

She Hulk: Cosmic Collision. A oneshot from 2009 by Peter David. Shulk and a bunch of other female heroes get whisked to a battle world by The Collector to fight a powerful alien warrior powered by Emnity.

Nick Fury vs SHIELD 2. I only have issue 2 of this six issue Prestige series by Bob Harras and Paul Neary. The other five issues are in the basement and haven't been read since the series came out in 1988, but from what I remember and reading this issue I was missing, it was an epic storyline.

The Shield. A 10 issue "ongoing" series from 2010 when DC re-reaquired the Archie/Red Circle heroes again(the first time was !mpact). I had previously read 1 thru 7, but didn't remember anything. Finished up issues 8-10. Nothing sucky, but nothing spectacular either.

I tried rereading Hickman's recent SHIELD series but couldn't get into it again, so I put it back in the box. I also skipped some DC Showcase issues from '95 and '96 and also a DC "Event" or series of oneshots called 'The Silver Age' from 2000. (I've just been not into DC for the last couple weeks. I think it was those back to back marathons of Flash and Green Lantern runs.)
Oh well, next up is Silver Sable and a bunch of random Silver Surfer books.