|
Madkal posted:Looks like I was misremembering and yea I was thinking of Infanticide. I have a vague memory of a few Lobo one offs and mini series. There was (and I am a hundred percent certain of this now) even a Lobocop one off that I remember enjoying.
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2020 02:56
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:08 |
|
|
1972: Counter-Earth v1: High Evolutionary creates a duplicate "purer" Earth, this is the Adam Warlock Jesus one. Eventually it's stolen to be put in a Planet Museum in the 1980s by the Beyonders and then destroyed by Thanos in the 1990s, later reformed and used by The Goddess in Infinity Crusade as her "new planet". This was an Earth of 99.999% normal baseline humans, but the "Satan" of this Counter-Earth was Man-Beast, one of HE's old "New Men" animal-human hybrids. HE left them all back on Mount Wundagore when he went off to make a new Earth, but Man-Beast and some cronies followed him. 1995: Counter-Earth v2: The Earth that Franklin Richards creates where all of the Heroes Reborn comics happen. This planet persists after the Avengers/FF/etc. come back to 'our' Earth, featured in Thunderbolts and a number of one-shots/stories. 2007: Heroes Reborn Earth v2: Completely separate from the Heroes Reborn Earth that implanted/extracted all of the heroes killed by Onslaught, this is a duplicate of that Earth except with their own Hulk/Thor/Iron Man/Wolverine/etc. From the Loeb/Liefeld classic Onslaught Reborn. 2008: Nu-World, basically the exact same concept as Counter-Earth v1 (down to rotating around on the opposite side of the sun from Earth), created by scientists as an escape pod for when the Regular Earth is uninhabitable. It ends up getting populated by everyone who was living on a future Earth that was about to be destroyed by [something, I forget] and then later Galactus ate it. 2015: Heroes Reborn Earth v3: Or maybe a half-assed version of v2, they showedup as bad guys in James Robinson's Fantastic Four and were a mishmash of v1 and v2 and all mostly died. 2015: Counter-Earth v1.1: Another High Evolutionary creation, from Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers. This one was built from the ground up populated only by "New Men", but HE kept killing them all and resetting every time he didn't like something. The Avengers appeared to have driven him off of the planet but he's back in charge (v1.2?) in Al Ewing's Ultimates, and then tries to merge Counter-Earth with Regular Earth in the Avengers/Champions "Worlds Collide" crossover.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2020 01:01
|
|
|
It's right up there, the accretion of continuity on Mount Wundagore is pretty intense. 1. Morgan le Fay set up shop there and imprisoned Cthon inside the mountain. 2. Being a jail for an evil demon/Elder God made the clay around the mountain magical, which the Puppet Master discovered and used to be a supervillain. 3. Jack Russell's dad built a mansion on the mountain, which squint somehow turned his kid into a werewolf? 4. Dad Russell sold the mansion to Jessica Drew's dad and the High Evolutionary, which squint eventually gave her Spider-Woman powers? 5. High Evolutionary evolved a bunch of animals into New Men and populated the mountain with these half-human/half-animal mutates. 6. The ghost of Merlin convinced those New Men to model themselves after/be inhabited by the spirits of The Knights of the Round Table? 7. Magda wandered onto the mountain and gave birth to Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch and died and so they were raised by Bova The New Woman Cow? All of this poo poo (and subsequent stories involving all parties) got added in retroactively after the first appearance of Wundagore/New Men/High Evolutionary in Kirby/Lee Thor.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2020 22:10
|
|
|
I am probably repeating myself from earlier in this thread, but I think there have to be some distinctions made in terms of 'crossovers'. The vast majority of superhero comics before the Silver Age had a pretty loose sense of 'continuity', probably comparable to sitcoms from pre-2000 or whatever. There was continuity in the sense of "The Riddler! You're back! You escaped from jail?!?!" but not many multi-issue stories or meaningful status quo changes or etc. With the Silver Age both at DC and in early Marvel books, there was more of a soap opera-ish sense of continuity and the start of more *editor's notes where they'd explain that the Doctor Doom menacing Spider-Man is the same Doctor Doom that appeared a year earlier in Fantastic Four and is back from outer space or whatever, but in general there wasn't the idea that you had to read all of Fantastic Four to understand Amazing Spider-Man #5. The Avengers/Defenders War at Marvel was envisioned by Steve Englehart as a really ambitious thing where people would have to read both books to get a full story, which is different than the 'crossovers' that happened before. You could argue that if Iron Man walks into Avengers Mansion in Avengers #78 and he's wearing a different suit of armor that he was wearing in Avengers #77 and he goes "oh yeah, I built some new cool armor!* *see Iron Man #21" it's a 'crossover' but the Avengers/Defenders War was much more of a "at the end of Defenders #8 they're trapped in an alternate dimension, at the opening of Defenders #9 they're in the middle of a fight with Iron Man and Thor, want to know how it got here? Read Avengers #116!" and so on. A lot of people in the Marvel office didn't want Englehart to do this because they thought it would be confusing, but he did it and the world didn't end. It also didn't set the world on fire, so no one immediately decided that they needed to ape the crossover thing, but it was no longer seen as an enormous risk of losing readership. The other thing that I think is noteworthy about the Avengers/Defenders War to set it apart from future crossovers is that it was 100% Steve Englehart telling his story across multiple books, something happening less directly across all sorts of late 1960s/early 1970s Marvel books with a less direct throughline; Jim Starlin just sort of shoved Thanos mythos into whatever gig he got at first (from Iron Man to Marvel Feature to Captain Marvel) or I just saw a reference to "The Mister Kline War" which involved Gerry Conway using some pet villains in Iron Man, Daredevil, and Sub-Mariner. The modern era of "Crossover Events" definitely kicked off in the mid 1980s with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars (I and II) but even then, those were (largely) one tentpole book and "tie-in" issues that spun out of the tentpole books. They were blown-out versions of the just-before-this-era things like the aforementioned Casket of Ancient Winters 'crossover' where something happened and other books addressed it, with the key difference between that (or the Dire Wraiths War) being that Secret Wars and Crises were very explicit marketing pushes where the companies were giving you the impression that you HAD to read them all. And really, for several years afterwards, most "crossovers" were closer to that than anything else; the Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Acts of Vengeance, etc. were definitely stories where outside books were having an influence/getting referenced in other books, but if you wanted to know what was happening to the New Mutants in any of those you really just had to read New Mutants. The 1990s was when they really kicked Crossover Events into their probably best-known, least-liked form, with X-Men crossovers like X-Tinction Agenda and X-Cutioner's Song very explicitly taking over all of the books for months and not even pretending it's the book starring the title characters anymore. X-Cutioner's Song has a particularly infamous issue (X-Factor 85, part 6 of 12) where the main X-Factor team appears in less than half of the issue, with the main storyline being a three-way fight between Bishop, Cable, and Wolverine, none of whom are part of X-Factor. There's a one page interlude advancing X-Factor team member Madrox's storyline, two more interludes featuring Cyclops and Apocalypse (also not members of X-Factor), and the big group battle scene that takes up the other ten pages features the X-Factor team but they take a back seat in terms of action and dialogue to Gambit, Storm, Cannonball, Iceman, Rogue, Archangel, and various other people who are not part of X-Factor. It's basically what made Peter David quit working on the X-Books for a decade. So maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome or PTSD that makes me not really mind the 1980s style of "mention that a character had an origin story in a different book" 'crossing over', or even some of the more modern "you don't actually have to read the other books, but know that Norse villains are invading the Earth" Events. It beats what was going on in the 1990s.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2020 00:40
|
|
|
DC published a bunch of Star Trek comics featuring the original crew in movie-era outfits in the 1980s. I haven't read any of them and none of the covers jump out as telling that sort of story but you can browse them all on comics.org The 1984-1989 run The 1989-1995 run Marvel did some Trek comics on either side of this, but I think they were all in the 1960s TV continuity and took their cues from more serious literature than Ridley Scott or Cronenberg 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 27, 2020 17:30
|
|
|
CzarChasm posted:Given the hair and the style of the outfit I'm pretty sure I was alive during the time when this came out, but I'm drawing a blank on "America's Hottest Singing Sensation" here. You don't remember the non-charting smash single #1 House Rule? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-hfE009MKM It's... not bad? Here's Elliot R. Brown talking about the project along with vintage photographs he took of NIGHTCAT on top of the Marvel offices. Here's the Marvel Age article/press release about the comic   The only official release of Jim Lee's character design appears to be this lovely Comic Images trading card 
Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Apr 30, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 16:49
|
|
|
Whoever was designing costumes for cosmic villains in the 1960s-early 1970s for Marvel (and maybe superheroes in general) loved a good set of thighs almost as much as Vince McMahon. Galactus, Darkseid, never forget early Pantless Thanos  Or manspreadin' Magus  Even Hawkeye got in on it 
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 01:41
|
|
|
I think the issue here is that there are a lot of different Punishers, so trying to line it up to what the character was "originally meant to be" is kind of a fool's errand. Gerry Conway has been pretty consistent in saying the inspiration was The Mack Bolan, Executioner series of novels. I'm not that familiar with them, but I don't think he's ever portrayed as a villain, secretly or otherwise. Death Wish (the novel) came out a couple of years before Death Wish (the movie), and the author of the novel hated the movie (he wrote the book to show someone's "descent into madness", not to lionize the protagonist) so much he wrote a "sequel" book where the lead character is turned (justifiably) into Public Enemy #1. The character might have been influenced in part on The Jackal (not the Spider-Man villain who Punisher is hired by, but the Jackal from The Day of the Jackal novel/movie), as a sort of amoral master assassin. The cover to ASM #129 looks a fair bit like one of the movie posters that would have been everywhere not long before Punisher debuted. He seems to have always been pegged for the "antagonist turned hero" role, and he's teaming up with Spider-Man, however reluctantly, within six issues of his first appearance. They flirted with him using "mercy bullets" (some sort of nebulous non-lethal rounds) for much of the 1970s so that he could he a proper Marvel antihero, though by the time they started really pushing the character they'd pretty much given that up. The character really has several distinct phases: 1974-1980: He's almost exclusively a supporting character in Amazing Spider-Man (appearing eight times in three years) * he also appears a couple of times in Marvel's B&W magazine line during this time, in the same magazines as adaptations of the Executioner books 1982: Frank Miller uses him in Daredevil, where he becomes a real cult character. In the first ten years of existing, Punisher only appears a couple of dozen times (including cameos) 1986: Punisher gets his first mini-series, which is a hit 1987: Punisher gets his first ongoing series, primarily written by Mike Baron, who is an oddball libertarian and this absolutely reflects his version of Punisher who veers between blowing up crack dealers and taking out corrupt government officials, white collar criminals, Jihadis, Klan members, Not-Exactly-Jim-Jones, Not-Exactly-Charles-Manson, kind of whatever Baron is mad at that month. It's barely recognizable as The Punisher in 2020, as he's constantly getting beat up and outgunned, making wisecracks, falling in love with a beautiful woman that he can't quite commit to because of the memory of his dead wife every three issues. It's weird to read now. 1989: Barely a year later Punisher gets a second (and soon a third) ongoing series, plus all sorts of one-shots, graphic novels, mini-series, etc. Chuck Dixon settles in along with various other journeymen as the go-to writers and pretty much all of the idiosyncrasies (for good or ill) are churned away and he become the iconic Angry Stonefaced Murder Machine 1990s Antihero. 1993: The wheels have started falling off of the popularity of the Punisher, so they start coming up with increasingly elaborate crossovers to "change the status quo forever" which mostly results in doing a hamfisted version of Reign of the Supermen except with four different people 'carrying on the legacy of the Punisher' before Frank comes back to show them how it's done. 1995: All of the Punisher books are canceled, and for the next five years they keep trying to revamp the character in various unsuccessful ways: maybe he's an mind controlled government agent! Maybe he's going deep undercover as a Mob Hitman! Maybe he'll fight Sentinels and anti-mutant terrorists! Maybe he retires and becomes a priest! 1998: After lying dormant for a couple of years, Punisher gets revamped into an Avenging Angel (literally, with ghost guns and wings and poo poo) as part of the initial run of Marvel Knights books. This is not well received. 2000: Picking up the pieces of the aborted Angel Punisher, Garth Ennis starts writing Punisher, going from Marvel Knights to MAX and for several years Punisher effectively only existed in the MAX Universe, not the Marvel Universe proper. This seemed like a pretty decent deal for all parties. 2006: Mark Millar pitches WHAT IF WE BRING THE PUNISHER BACK as part of Civil War, and while there have obviously been ups and downs it's been a real square peg/round hole series of revamps ever since. It's really hard to reconcile all of these versions of the Punisher, zero of them are "good guys" but the level of awfulness really waxes and wanes. I could never see the Ennis (or Baron, or Conway) version of Punisher going along with HYDRA in Secret Empire, but could 1000% see Chuck Dixon or Nathan Edmondson's version doing it. I'm grasping at straws to think of a significant storyline where the Punisher (not mind controlled) was a flatout villain though. Long story short, the Netflix Punisher wasn't as far afield from (some) of the comics as people who have mostly read modern Marvel might think, Secret Empire is still very bad, and writing Punisher as anything other than an utterly broken tragic antihero is bad on multiple levels, not the least of which that too many people have proven utterly incapable of reading him as such. And yes, Punisher's first appearance (where he's trying to kill Spider-Man) sets him up as a vigilante who signs on to work with the Jackal because the Daily Bugle accused Spider-Man of murdering Norman Osborn, and the Jackal sold it as "I'm next, please protect me and stop this bad guy" and Punisher realizes by the end of the issue that Jackal is bad and Spider-Man's not a murderer. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jun 6, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2020 01:41
|
|
|
That was from (the first) time they had the government MK-Ultra him into being crazy. I can't remember if that was a retcon or not.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2020 03:27
|
|
|
bessantj posted:Ugh, sounds terrible. The "clone Gwen Stacy" was a woman named Joyce Delaney who via magic got her original memories and personality back. Then later during the Clone Saga they re-retconned it so the Jackal had faked his death and faked his notes admitting he couldn't clone poo poo to trick the High Evolutionary, and actually he can clone the hell out of whatever he wants! And he actually had like hundreds of clones of Gwen Stacy (and Peter Parker, obviously). He wanted to go find his best clone of Gwen (Joyce) and it turned out she was married to a clone of the Jackal and living a normal life, so Jackal got mad and killed all of his non-Joyce clones of Gwen (unless... some survived?) and I think killed the clone of himself who married Joyce/Gwen but then other stuff happened. And then in 2011 an even more eviller clone of Gwen murdered Joyce-Gwen for the Jackal, but then she died too. I think this was just a subplot to set up THE CLONE CONSPIRACY: DEAD NO MORE and clean up continuity so that Slott could introduce even more Gwen clones, who might have all died again, hard to say. There might be some of the original clones that were supposed to die but didn't (like Kaine but with Gwen Stacy) out there. The Deadpool #0 issue was basically a gag short where everyone who was dead came back from the dead as clones and it was mostly like loser villains Scourge killed because everyone else comes back from the dead on their own. The "money shot" Rhyno referenced is Deadpool walking in on Uncle Ben and Aunt May having sex, because Aunt May (or an actor hired by Norman Osborn to pretend to be Aunt May and die of cancer) was dead at the time too. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Jul 3, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2020 15:13
|
|
|
My mistake, the old people having sex as a joke for how gross it is for old married couples* to be sexually active was midway through, the french maid Gwens was in fact the final page.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2020 16:03
|
|
|
bessantj posted:Thanks for the explanation but loving hell, I'm not going to lie, I can see why manga is outselling superhero comics. It's like hearing about the plots of various Aaron Spelling soap operas and going "loving hell, no wonder reality shows are outdrawing scripted dramas." And yes, JMS wanted the two Grey Goblins(?) to be Peter Parker's kids, but editorial thought Spider-Man having adult children (even artificially aged adult children) would make him seem old. Which is valid, but is that really your first objection?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2020 16:51
|
|
|
Short version is that [either by accident or design] nothing makes particular linear sense in the lead-in to Dark Knights: Death Metal. The DC: Rebirth one-shot establishes that Doctor Manhattan is in the DC Universe and hints at retconning various parts of the New 52 DC soft-reboot as down to Doctor Manhattan doing weird cosmic stuff to the universe. This storyline is largely walled off to allow Geoff Johns to tell it... eventually. Dark Nights: Metal by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo establishes the concept of "The Dark Multiverse", where there are negatively numbered Earths that are the dark reflection of the "Good" Earths in the regular multiverse, which is a weird concept to begin with because a large number of "Good" Multiverse Earths are scenarios in which All of Humanity is Wiped Out or The Nazis Won or Vampires Have Taken Over the Planet or Darkseid Has Taken Over the Universe or etc. The common theme of all of the Dark Multiverses is that Batman has also become another character (Doomsday Batman, Flash Batman, Cyborg Batman, Wonder Woman Batman, Green Lantern Batman, Joker Batman) and all of these Batmans are evil and work for the evil Bat God Barbatos and also there are a lot of magic metals that make things more powerful or dark or good or evil. At the end of Dark Knights: Metal all of the good guys team up and use Metal and stuff to stop Barbatos the Bat God from making everything dark but it also blows up the Source Wall which is bad for universe reasons, or something. This leads into a mini-event called Justice League: No Justice where they have to fight other abstract concepts to fix the Source Wall. But they don't fix the Source Wall. This leads into Scott Snyder's Justice League run, which involves Lex Luthor finding out about Perpetua and secret evil version of cosmic powers (The Speed Force is counteracted by THE STILL FORCE, Green Lanterns are counter-acted by ULTRAVIOLET LANTERNS, etc.) This is basically the most direct lead-in to Dark Knights: Death Metal, but it ends with the good guys losing the Ultimate Battle Between Justice and Doom, and getting vanquished by Perpetua and her first lieutenant Apex Lex, The Lex Luthor That is Also Half Martian. The Justice League are beaten and exiled to the Moon, where they jump into a portal "to be continued in Death Metal". Except before that happens there's another mini-series (Hell Arisen) where Apex Lex gets into a fight with the Batman Who Laughs (who appeared in a number of storylines in the meantime that are only loosely connected to/recapitulate the arc he has in Hell Arisen) and basically Lex beats The Batman Who Laughs and takes him to Perpetua who goes "actually I want BWL as my servant, not you Lex BYE!" So that mini-series is why Batman Who Laughs and His Gang of Batmans is running things in Death Metal by Scott Snyder even though it was Lex in 50 issues of Justice League by Scott Snyder. All of the Doctor Manhattan Stuff came from Doomsday Clock, except not even really from Doomsday Clock. Instead there was a five issue mini-series called Flash Forward by Scott Lobdell that ends with Wally West sitting on Metron's Mobius Chair but that chair got Doctor Manhattan powers off-panel in a pre-Rebirth Geoff Johns comic, so now Wally has Doctor Manhattan powers but lost some of them off-panel. It's clear that a lot of stuff you're supposed to assume happened off panel, but also it's possible they're reference other comics that contradict the other ones they've already referenced. But none of that should matter, because there's like 5,000 different Batmans and one is a Car Batman and another one is a Dinosaur Batman and it's a shitload of Batman and Big Crazy Ideas just take my money already!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2020 04:14
|
|
|
I still kind of admire the audacity of it, I had a friend in college who during a protest just spraypainted his (uncommon) first name in giant block letters onto the wall of a campus building, and when people questioned the wisdom of it replied, "how stupid would I have to be to graffiti my own name so clearly? It's obvious that someone else would do it to frame me." The campus police reluctantly agreed with this sound logic. I like to imagine Tim Drake will use the same defense.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2020 21:46
|
|
|
The Lizard is actually a terrible example for the "superheroes don't care about rehabilitation they only want to hurt and punish the underclass" hot take or whatever, because Curt Connors has been given many many second chances and they all go bad, sometimes not through his own actions, because of comic books. In his very first appearance where he accidentally turns himself into the Lizard, Spider-Man puts together a cure, reverts Connors to human form, and decides not to tell any authorities that Connors was the lizard monster they were looking for because he didn't have any control over the transformation. Connors became a recurring character in the Lee/Ditko/Romita Spider-Man books as an ally, but when he reverts back to the Lizard Spider-Man again whips up a cure and doesn't send him to the cops or anything. The third time he becomes the Lizard he's blackmailed into doing it by the mob and Spider-Man once again gives him the cure and doesn't send him to jail. This continues for years, as best as I can tell the first time Curt Connors/The Lizard ever faces any jail time is in the 1990s, when Todd McFarlane's big debut writing gig "Torment" has the Lizard mind controlled by Calypso into killing and eating people and in the aftermath his dual identity is exposed. Peter Parker appears as a witness for the defense, but Connors decides to plead guilty drop any defense motions because if he can't control the Lizard he is a public threat. At some point in the late 1990s/2000s he got slotted into the "well look who is part of this bank robbing/world beating team of villains someone has cobbled together" rotation and also he just ate people as a matter of course. He probably got sent to jail on/off panel a lot in that stretch. Millar used him in this capacity at least twice, once in MK Spider-Man and once in Civil War. More recently they keep veering back and forth on him, he's mindswapped between Lizard-but-human-brain, human-but-lizard-brain, worked for the Avengers, eaten his own son, gotten an inhibitor chip, helped someone else grow legs, turned the unstable clones of his dead family into living half lizard clones, and last I checked is back to teaching grad school and being one of Peter Parker's professors. The metal arm thing is absolutely like a "no, I want to succeed on my own terms" thing if you can ascribe motive to a character who's banged around across so many writers for so long.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2020 16:09
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:While mostly true, I do think at one point Curt turned himself in and was sent to... let's say the Vault because Project Pegasus feels too early and the Raft too late.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2020 21:21
|
|
|
The Red Skull and his body: 1. The original Red Skull (Johann Shmidt) was thought to have been killed in a bunker at the end of World War II when a grenade exploded in his hand and then his bunker got bombed and collapsed, but he was wearing armor! And the bunker released a gas to put him into suspended animation and heal him of his wounds! (this was a retcon to explain why he was around after Cap got unfrozen) 2. There was a Communist Red Skull in the 1950s comics that got retconned to be a different guy, Albert Malik, who fought Spider-Man's parents when they were secret agents. Eventually he got tracked down and killed by Scourge acting on the orders of the original Red Skull. 3. The Red Skull got revived by THEM (who were later retconned to be a front for HYDRA) and this revived Skull hadn't aged and was strong and youthful as he did all of the poo poo in Marvel Comics from 1965 to 1984. But then at the tail end of JM DeMatteis's run on Captain America, the chemicals that did kept him young and strong broke down and he was rapidly aging and going to die. He tried to kill Captain America one last time but died. 4. But Arnim Zola made a copy of his brain and put it in a clone of Steve Rogers, allowing the no-longer-Skully Red Skull to work behind the scenes on the Commission of Superhuman Activities as John Smith, where it turns out he was the force behind like all of the bad guy groups in Gruenwald's run, from Scourge to the Watchdogs to Ultimatum to pulling the strings to replace Steve Rogers with John Walker. Eventually his face got turned into a skull again and Magneto dropped him in that pit so he was back to being a kind of skinny frail guy with a skull face. 6. In Mark Waid's first Captain America run, Red Skull got a Cosmic Cube again and tried to take over the world, but Captain America sliced his arm off with his shield, severing Skull's connection to the Cosmic Cube and then the Cosmic Cube exploded and killed Red Skull! 7. But of course his mind survived in the Cosmic Cube and he eventually broke free with the help of Kang and internalized the Cosmic Cube power. Red Skull uses the Cube power to take over near-future America before Captain America finally resolves to kill the Red Skull with his energy shield that can turn into an energy sword and when he kills Red Skull all of the power of the Cube flows into Uatu... who is really Kang... who is really Korvac! Captain America follows Korvac into the future and then comes back and it's a little earlier than when he left so he doesn't kill the Red Skull after all, but then he kills him again by tricking him into jumping into Galactus's antimatter warp drive or something, which disintegrates him and pops out a nice clean Cosmic Cube. 8. The Red Skull appears again a couple years later, with a cursory explanation given that he survived getting disintegrated because he still was kind of connected to the Cosmic Cube, which brought him back as a normal human but the Red Skull's connection let him turn the Cosmic Cube into a new Hate-Monger. But people Care Bear Stared Tolerance and Diversity back at the Cosmic Hate Monger and he disintegrates, leaving a normal human Red Skull to get punched in the face and arrested. 9. Then the Red Skull got a normal human mask and bribed/murdered his way into being appointed the Secretary of Defense, Dell Rusk. He killed a bunch of people with a secret death gas made in a lab under Mount Rushmore as a prelude to I guess take over the world, but Black Panther literally punched his skull jaw off before he could do it. 10. His jaw gets better, but at the outset of Brubaker's Cap run the Red Skull gets assassinated by the Winter Soldier. Aleksander Lukin is the guy who orders the hit, because he wants the Cosmic Cube Skull has again. But Skull uses the Cube to transfer his brain into Lukin, and they're both inside the same body fighting for control. Then Skull (in Lukin's body) arranges to assassinate Steve Rogers (right after Civil War) and fake Lukin's death so he can run things behind the scenes and eventually use the Cube to stick his brain into Sharon Carter and Steve Rogers's baby's body. But Sharon Carter shoots and kills Skull (in Lukin's body) before he gets to do any of this. 11. But Arnim Zola fuckin' backed him up again, and put him in that giant robot! And also Red Skull didn't actually kill Steve, he just made him unstuck in time with the back-up plan to stick his brain in Steve Rogers instead of Steve's baby, which was miscarried anyway. But then Skull's brain gets stuck in the robot body and the Avengers blow it up, killing the Red Skull again. 12. Then one of his "back up clones" awakens after the 'real' Red Skull dies, and this is the one who smooshes Xavier's brain onto his to become a super powerful telepath. This Red Skull is the one in AXIS and all of Nick Spencer's Captain America/Secret Empire run. At the same time, the Avengers (in Uncanny Avengers) track him down and surgically remove Xavier's brain from him, then Nazsteve murders him right before Secret Empire proper starts. [I'm not really clear why they made such a point that this WASN'T the real Red Skull, it was a backup clone, but they did, repeatedly. Spencer even did a dumb thing in Standoff/the early parts of his Captain America run to have Red Skull remind everyone he was just a clone of Red Skull with Xavier's brain -- but he wasn't going to use Xavier's powers to make everyone into a Nazi, because that would be too easy. He just uses another Cosmic Cube to turn Steve Rogers into a Nazi, because I guess that's more on-brand? But he wants to brainwash the rest of America into fascism the old fashioned way.] 13. In the current TNC Cap run, Selene resurrects Lukin, and when she does the Red Skull is somehow still back inside him. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Sep 8, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2020 06:54
|
|
|
I feel like this post could be made at any point between like 1990 and present, but if you're basing it on October 2020: Spider-Man Family Amazing Spider-Man (ships twice a month) Amazing Spider-Man Last Rites (tie-in comics for a Spider-Man-centric event that ships on the off-week of ASM) Spider-Man Noir mini-series Miles Morales: Spider-Man Champions (a team book ft. Miles Morales) Spider-Woman Marvels Snapshot: Spider-Man one-shot Spider-Man (the JJ Abrams and his kid mini-series) Venom Web of Venom one-shot So like twelve books (five-ish ongoings and some minis/tie-ins) featuring characters in the Spider-Man family, 14 if you want to count doubleshipping books twice. Batman Family Batman (ships twice a month) Detective Comics (ships twice a month) Batgirl Nightwing Catwoman Batman: White Knight Presents: Harley Quinn Batman: Three Jokers Dark Knights: Death Metal Dark Knights: Death Metal: Rise of the New God Dark Knights: Death Metal: The Robin King Justice League (Doom Metal, ships twice a month) Arkhamaniacs Batman Beyond Batman's Grave Batman/Superman Batman and the Outsiders Batman: The Adventure Continues Red Hood: Outlaw So ten ongoings, three mini-series, a couple team books with Batman in them, and some event one-shots. So 19 or 21 depending on how you want to count it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2020 16:16
|
|
|
Purple Man's Threat Level from Daredevil to Emperor doom to Alias and beyond is a pretty good example. It's usually a relatively forgettable character being brought out of obscurity and revamped, you could make a similar argument for Mister Freeze, Deadshot, really about half of the main characters from Suicide and/or Thunderbolts.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2020 22:18
|
|
|
muscles like this! posted:So I read the 80s Vigilante series and one thing it is notable for is the introduction to the DC universe of Peacemaker, who becomes a minor character for a chunk of the comic. However, Peacemaker in the comic was portrayed as completely bonkers with the idea that the souls of those he killed would become trapped in his helmet. Later appearances of Peacemaker that I've seen over the years don't mention this at all so how long did that character quirk last?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2020 04:12
|
|
|
They really bounced around with a) what Captain America's shield is made out of and b) how it got made. Cap's shield got destroyed repeatedly in the Golden Age and early Avengers comics, and was never treated as "indestructible". This was retconned later by saying that Iron Man was doing experiments on the shield and the ones that got messed up were loaners he gave Cap. Pretty quickly they went ahead and made it "indestructible". Roy Thomas introduced Adamantium in the Avengers where it was a "new metal" that SHIELD scientist Myron MacLain was developing. There wasn't any explanation as to how they developed it, and it was a plot device for Ultron wanting to build his body out of it. Captain America didn't appear in these stories and his shield didn't play a role in anything, though the Black Panther made a cameo giving Thor some vibranium, which I guess helped destroy the Adamantium shell of Ultron? Adamantium got used a couple other times (usually as something someone would build a trap for the Hulk out of or something) before making its more famous appearance as The Stuff Wolverine's Claws (and eventually bones) are covered in. By the time of Cap's 40th Anniversary (when Roger Stern and John Byrne did a modern retelling of his origin) Captain America met with FDR and was given "a shield with incredible properties... if only the metalurgical accident which produced it could be replicated..." but it doesn't mention anything specific, and can't find any explicit reference to it being made out of vibranium, adamantium, or anything else prior to 1983, when The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe connected the dots that Myron McClain was a metallurgist in World War II who accidentally made Vibranium/Adamantium alloy and forged it into a shield for Captain America. I couldn't find any reference to this prior to the OHOTMU entry, and this Brian Cronin piece I found after doing 90% of the same legwork concurs that this was made up for OHOTMU. But just a couple of years later Mike Carlin and Mark Gruenwald (editors of OHOTMU) did a two-part Captain America story where MacLain was kidnapped by Stane International and held at gunpoint to make them an Adamantium Iron Monger suit, where MacLain reiterated the story in flashback: he was given a sample of something "he thinks" was Vibranium and fell asleep while melting it, and when he woke up he had Adamantium. So that was eventually made in-comic canon. Except Vibranium isn't exclusive to Wakanda, and in fact the first appearance of it was when people discovered it in the Savage Land in an early Daredevil/Ka-Zar team-up (this itself is a retcon, as it was a similar magic metal called "antimetal" in those stories, but in the 1980s they established it as a secondary Vibranium lode.) None of these 1980s stories about Cap's partially-vibranium shields mention Wakanda. Though to throw a further spanner in the works, Reggie Hudlin and Denys Cowan did a mini-series about ten years ago (Flags of Our Fathers) where Captain America follows some Nazis (who have heard rumors about Vibranium and want it for their V2 rockets) into Wakanda, where he discovers that they're super advanced and helps them fight the Nazis. T'Challa's grand-dad won't enter into the war but he offers Captain America a vibranium shield, and the Howling Commandos and Captain America agree to keep Wakanda's technology secret. So I guess this means that maybe the United States had no idea about Wakanda when they were working on Project: Rebirth, but they might have known about it when they made Captain America's shield, or maybe just found some vibranium, or maybe Wakanda made the shield for Cap? This all gets weirder as the sliding timeline slide, because Adamantium has to predate the Avengers forming (and certainly like... the Vision being a member of the Avengers and etc.) for Wolverine to have had it bonded to his bones in the 1970s, and it seems weird that Myron MacClain both was a top army scientist in the early 1940s and also around in the past 8-10 years to interact with Ultron, working-cartoonist-era Captain America, etc. Plus the world's knowledge of Wakanda (and vibranium, and the existence of Vibranium lodes outside of Wakanda) all seem to sort of jump back and forth depending on what a story dictates. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Nov 27, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2020 07:18
|
|
|
Madkal posted:This might be a bit subjective and the answer is probably "it depends" or "both" but was Jim Shooter a bad EiC at Marvel? I am currently reading Stan Lee's biography and it is pretty much a history of Marvel (whether it was when Lee was there or not) and I just got to the Shooter years. By the sounds of it Marvel had a hard time keeping a EiC for longer than a year or two and it seemed like a freeform unweilding mess trying to keep books right and out on time and whatever else. It also seemed to be Marvel at it's most creative. Then Shooter comes, gives more power to the editors and tries to run a tight ship from the sounds of it. It also seems like a lot of the talent hated him (never really mentions if it is because of the tight ship thing or personality wise). I am trying to remember the stuff I read in the Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and it seems like it is saying the same thing. So was he a bad EiC, a bad person on a personal level, or eventually correct in the way he ran things? The revolving door of EiCs in the 1970s was due in part to the second wave of Marvel Era people coming in and all fully buying into the Merry Marvel Marching Society ol' Bullpen Gang and all of them on one level or another wanted to be One of the Boys being creative in opposition to the stuffed shirt suits. This created many good comics and also a lot of bad comics and was a bit of a business disasters because being One of the Boys meant not being a jerk about deadlines or things not being coherent or etc. etc. Jim Shooter (though he was younger than I think anyone else who took over the slot besides maybe Conway?) was less concerned about being One of the Boys and more concerned about running Marvel successfully. He stopped letting deadlines/shipping dates slide, stopped letting editors assign books to themselves to write, and laid down a bunch of creative/editorial rules that people bristled over, though at the same time it's not like a bunch of groundbreaking/popular comics weren't launched during his tenure. And while he definitely was valuing "commerce" more than anyone in the era between him and Stan Lee, I always got the impression he also values the art side of the equation. When he got replaced by Tom DeFalco, who was more amenable to all of the variant covers, gimmick #1s, crossovers, etc. that marketing/executives were clamoring for, a lot of creators/editors were excited, because DeFalco was One of the Boys. But he was also One of the Boys who was willing to go along with pretty much anything pushed down from the top. When DeFalco was eventually replaced by Bob Harras, Harras was less interested in sugar coating the corporate mandates with "One of the Boys" camraderie, and was content to just play boss. One thing people frequently point out as "Jim Shooter is bad" is a wildly homophobic Rampaging Hulk magazine story he wrote, which is unquestionably gross; he did some decidedly mixed/mostly bad LGBTQ representation in early Valiant, as well. While not defending either of those in the slightest, it is also a signpost of how much (most of) society has evolved in the past 30-45 years, and despite what any older Jim Shooter Hatin' creator may say, that doesn't seem to have been any sort of source of anger/outrage from them contemporaneously. It's not like Shooter was making jolly "f-word slur" jokes in fanzines of the era -- that would be John Byrne, one of his biggest critics. It's also worth noting that two people from that era of Marvel who have almost exclusively positive takeaways from working with Shooter are Larry Hama and Jim Owsley, basically the only two not-white dudes in the offices for much of Shooter's tenure. There's also the whole Jack Kirby issue, where Shooter absolutely was the public face of some creator rights issues where Marvel came off horribly in the 1980s. He always insists that he fought back against these corporate edicts, and there's circumstantial evidence he did, but this is another thing that some old heads will always hate him for, and that's also understandable. This was not short at all. Jim Shooter is a land of contrasts, graded on a curve of Marvel EiCs I think he did a good job for his era from a creative/business perspective, but was definitely not the most personable/'cool' person to hold the position.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2020 19:09
|
|
|
Arguably the entire Charlton (Blue Beetle, Question, Captain Atom, etc.) line. Arguably the entire Gold Key/Valiant (Magnus Robot Fighter, Solar: Man of the Atom, Turok) line Lots of the exact same character being a middling/one-off character before getting revamped (Squirrel Girl, Two-Face, Mister Freeze, Deadshot, Purple Man) decades later There are a lot of cases of character names being recycled from the Golden Age and applied to much more enduring characters too: Daredevil, The Vision, Angel, Miracleman, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2020 20:28
|
|
|
Look, let's not exaggerate. From everything I hear about the creative summits, several years ago Jason Aaron was talking about how he had big plans for whenever he took over Avengers to have Hulk and Thor date. Brian Michael Bendis decided as a giant gently caress you to the fans that he would kill off Bruce Banner in Civil War II just to gently caress with Jason Aaron's future comic Jason Aaron flipped over a table but paused before pulling out his switchblade, and told Bendis to shove it up his rear end, he could just have Jennifer Walters and Jane Foster date as Thor and Hulk in his future book. Bendis put She-Hulk into a coma in retaliation and declared that he was going to make his self-insert Mary Sue Kong into the new Hulk and this self-insert would sleep with literally every member of the Avengers, past present and future. Yes, including Triathlon and Rick Jones. Nick Spencer killed Rick Jones in Secret Empire to protect his personal OTP and the entire Secret Empire event was built to try to trick Bendis into writing his self-insert having sex with a Nazi. Bendis I am told straight up sent a nailbomb to Nick Spencer's house and while there were no fatalities I'm told that is why Bendis was "in the hospital with a life threatening illness" (you can't spell Nick Spencer is Pissed without "ricin") and to make up for Nick Spencer losing most of his right hand they're 'letting' him write Spider-Man, as a giant gently caress you to Dan Slott. Though it's not as if Nick Spencer is actually writing it. Slott meanwhile pitched his FF to be about how Hulk is ultrapermadead and never coming back, he never even existed, not unlike Franklin being a mutant or James Rhodes ever being Iron Man. Al Ewing legitimately and very literally ripped both of Nick Lowe's arms off at the conference to give Dan Slott *four* middle fingers Goro style, then slapped Slott unconscious with the dismembered arms in what was called a stirring tribute to Geoff Johns, who was previously banned from working at Marvel because he literally just shitted all over anyone's scripts before reading them then making one of his proteges wipe the poo poo off and tell him what plot points he should contradict. Hearing that Slott was going to permanently retcon Hulk out of existence and was working his connections to Isaac Perlmutter to make even mentioning Hulk (or retroactively, having written a Hulk comic) a federal crime punishable by getting disappeared, Al Ewing (not a US citizen) cracked his knuckles and swore to bedevil the inhuman scoundrel war criminal Dan Slott's entire loving family for a thousand generations. Not only would he bring Hulk back, but he would write the shittiest, grossest, least popular Hulk comic of all time, something that would enrage Dan Slott for merely existing, and also serve as a giant gently caress You to Jason Aaron, making the Hulk so toxic and awful Jason Aaron would never want to include a character more loathed than Scrappy Doo and Forerunner combined in his Avengers run. And you know these clowns in Congress, he couldn't even do THAT right. Every month is agony as Al Ewing is forced to write more Hulk, and the crisis actor they hired to portray Jason Aaron after he got murdered laughs and laughs. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Dec 19, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2020 00:11
|
|
|
Cubone posted:yeah nobody wanted to touch that character before YJ The period between "Byrne creates a new Wonder Girl" and "Wonder Girl joins Young Justice" wasn't a big period for teen books at DC: Superboy, Robin, and Impulse (the original core of YJ) all had mid-selling solo books, but the "New Titans" book finally got canceled with #130 in December 1995, and DC didn't seem to be in a rush to fill that slot in their publishing schedule. I guess you could squint and say Superboy & the Ravers (launched in July 1996, lasted 19 issues) was a replacement, and they did an explicit Teen Titans relaunch (August 1996, the all-new team by Dan Jurgens, ran 24 issues) but neither of these feel like a great fit for Wonder Girl. I have not read any of these books since near the time they came out and even then I'm pretty sure I skipped the majority of them, so was there ever a great explanation as to why Wonder Girl evolved from this    to this   In the span of probably a little under a year in-universe time? I guess the dark hair was a wig?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2020 18:05
|
|
|
Terry Long was black and had electrical powers too, coincidence?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2021 04:43
|
|
|
I think the limited information thus far doesn't 100% rule out that there may be two Vulcans, but after X-Men #10 (the first issue of the Empyre tie-in) it seems like there's a more likely explanation: X-Men #1: Vulcan is back and with a better attitude. X-Men #8: A [Shi'ar] data page talks about how Vulcan was presumed dead after the War of Kings finale. Specifically "VULCAN was also believed to have perished in the fault." Then a page (that mirrors Black Bolt's page from Hickman's FF) showing Vulcan floating in the fault and being told to wake up. Then an updated copy of the same page ends the issue saying "VULCAN never died." This was where everyone got the idea that maybe Krakoa resurrected a happier less broken Vulcan and the original crazy Vulcan was still floating in the Fault, unless I'm missing something else. X-Men #10: The same Floating in the Void page but this time the dream/flashback continues to show Vulcan retrieved by an unknown/unnamed group who do alien/magic surgery on him, describing him as broken but with a sliver of good in him. "So we've separated the two. Inside -- hidden under a thin layer of good -- is the beautiful broken creature you are. We're going to release you back into your universe. They will see you as changed -- reborn, healthy and whole but that is just a shell. Underneath it -- buried alive in a shallow grave -- is the REAL you." I don't think they've ever specifically mentioned Vulcan getting resurrected, so it's reasonable to assume the one from the Fault, plucked out of the Fault by these mysterious beings, and then "released back into the universe" is currently the one and only Vulcan.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 16:53
|
|
|
Spider-Woman/Arachne was supposed to be one of the New Men (animal-human hybrids created by the High Evolutionary on Mount Wundagore) from her first appearance. After one issue of Marvel Spotlight and a handful of Marvel Two-in-One appearances, she got her own series which revealed she wasn't a New Man (i.e. a spider evolved into a bipedal humanoid) but the daughter of one of H-E's collaborators given spider powers on Mount Wundagore. So that's always basically been her origin, but they've kept tweaking it over the years. I know there are weird things that I only partially remember about whether or not she was actually born in like 1940 and spent [sliding time scale] years in suspended animation, whether she was raised to be a Hydra agent or if they brainwashed her/implanted false memories, etc. But she's always been the daughter of Jonathan Drew, one of the High Evolutionary's assistants, at least since her second or third appearance when they named her parents.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2021 19:02
|
|
|
AceRimmer posted:Looking for a gift idea for someone that will be studying late 80s to 90s comics, any good at least somewhat academic books that cover this era?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2021 20:00
|
|
|
Random Stranger posted:There's also Comic Wars which is about the financial stupidity that lead to Marvel's bankruptcy. I haven't read that one, though. It gets a lot of basic timelines and facts wrong too, the one that always springs to mind being how Ron Perelman saw the big sales gimmick covers like [1991's] Silver Surfer foil cover and Ghost Rider glow in the dark cover, and that convinced him to buy Marvel in 1989. AceRimmer posted:Iirc they're going to be looking at the post-Watchmen transition into the Dark Age for their PhD but something touching on any of the other topics would be great too. I think they're also interested in the indie scene of the time and the 90s crash as well. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Feb 25, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2021 21:36
|
|
|
I emailed them, and got this responsequote:We're working on it! Should be up in a few weeks.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2021 00:08
|
|
|
In addition to the New Warriors series, there's a lot of stuff Marvel announced/solicited that has been held off since the Covid gap: A bunch of Empyre tie-in mini-series The Marvels by Kurt Busiek & Yildiray Cinar How to Read Comics the Marvel Way by Christopher Hastings & Scott Koblish A Darkhold series of one-shots A mini-event "Infinite Destinies" across some annuals that never came out Amazing Mary Jane #7-12 Morbius #6-8 Valkyrie: Jane Foster #11-12 Scream: Curse of Carnage #7-8 Ghost Rider #8-9 Doctor Strange: Surgeon Supreme #7 A lot of things that disappear either got resolicited or reworked. Children of the Atom by Vita Ayala & Bernard Chang was supposed to come out at the same time as X-Factor #1, but is instead coming out next week. Joe Kelly and Chris Bachalo's Non-Stop Spider-Man got moved from June 2020 to next week too. At least one Empyre mini-series (The Union) got reworked into a King in Black tie-in mini-series. There are other books like Runaways, Black Panther, and the Marvel Snapshots series that are just now coming out after being pushed off of the schedule back in March/April of last year. But yeah, New Warriors is probably dead.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2021 14:29
|
|
|
The fourth issue of Dr. Strange: Surgeon Supreme came out in March 2020. They solicited issues 5-7 for April through June, respectively. Then they paused distribution and everything picked back up in July. Issue 5 slipped from April to July, issue 6 ended up being the final one, printed in August. Issue 7 was announced but never came out. That gap gave them time to add that goodbye page to the sixth and final issue in August, but pre-COVID it looks like the plan was for it to continue.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2021 14:57
|
|
|
My point is more that issues were literally announced and solicited and covers and synopses were written up for these books, these solicitations were published, no comics were published in April-June, and these books were canceled. I have no idea how much (if any) of these comics were completed, and if anything was completed, if there are any plans to do anything with that material. Most of them will probably never see the light of day and are just canceled, I agree. But other ones have popped back up after everyone assumed they were canceled (the continuation of Runaways, Children of the Atom), and others have been reworked (the Union mini-series shifting from Empyre to King in Black, a Ghost Rider annual getting reworked as a "Return of Vengeance" one-shot) so I was listing all of those. At the point that a book gets solicited, it's pretty rare for it to get canceled after solicitation. It obviously happens, but it is rare. There are like a dozen books that got canceled post-solicit due to the Covid gap, so I think it's fair to say Covid impacted these cancelations?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2021 15:57
|
|
|
B-1.1.7 Bomber posted:Hi everyone. I hope this is the right thread to ask a lame "What comic was this?" DC didn't publish a *ton* of team books in that period, and the Justice League of that period generally had most/all of the A-List Super Friends on it, but maybe check out the Legion of Superheroes books? Or this short-lived All-Star Squadron revival whose cover kind of seems similar to what you described?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2021 20:21
|
|
|
B-1.1.7 Bomber posted:Thank you for this! Regardless of whether or not I find my Questing Beast, I'll enjoy hunting for it. This is a great resource. Cheers!
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2021 03:26
|
|
|
Really brief Valiant Comics timeline: 1988-9: Jim Shooter and some other comics people tried to buy Marvel Comics when it was up for sale (and eventually purchased by Ron Perelman). The big investor backing the move was Steven Massarsky, who was an entertainment lawyer/manager. 1989: Unable to buy Marvel, Shooter/Massarsky launched Voyager/Valiant Comics, initially just publishing licensed Marvel and WWF comics (two of Massarsky's clients) before getting the rights to the Gold Key characters and launching a superhero line that was a mix of Gold Key characters (Magnus, Solar, Turok) and new characters (X-O Manowar, Harbinger, Shadowman, etc. 1992: Valiant Comics were a hit for various reasons, Shooter/et al wanted to do a slow sustainable build of the line, Massarsky wanted more chromium covers, crossovers, and celebrity appearances like Shadowman fighting his clients Aerosmith. Massarsky won and Shooter was fired. 1993: Jim Shooter (and various creators who left with him) launched Defiant Comics, whose flagship title was going to be PLASM. This was launched with a trading card line, as was the custom of the time. Before any comics were published, Marvel sued them because they'd announced (and filed for a trademark in the UK prior to Defiant doing so) a Marvel UK mini-series with the titular character being PLASMER. This was a frivolous lawsuit that Marvel lost, but it still kneecapped Defiant. 1994: Massarsky sells Valiant to Acclaim so that they can make X-0 Manowar and Turok video games. Defiant Comics folds. 1995: Valiant shakes things up and hires 'big names' (Dan Jurgens! Ron Marz!) to spearhead a BIRTHQUAKE rebranding. They also spend a lot of money to get the rights to publish licensed comics based on Magic the Gathering, Baywatch, Killer Instinct, and Sliders. Jim Shooter launches Broadway Comics which doesn't even last as long as Defiant before funding gets pulled. 1996: The entire Valiant line folds, leaving Valiant with a couple of creator-owned books and the aforementioned licensed books. October 1996: Valiant v2.0 launches, run by Fabian Nicieza. It is mostly (only?) remembered for introducing Quantum & Woody, and folds in mid-1998, though a few books trickle out for the next couple of years, mostly a failed relaunch of Q&W and some video game tie-in books for Shadowman and Turok. 1999: Acclaim hires Jim Shooter and Jim Starlin to do UNITY 2000, a return to the original Valiant universe with an eye to relaunching the whole line. Unity 2000 gets three of its six announced issues out over the course of nine months. 2004: Acclaim files for bankruptcy. Gold Key characters revert to their original owners, who eventually get purchased by Dreamworks. I feel like they've licensed these out in an attempt to relaunch them at least four times in the past 15 years. 2005: Another group (led by the aforementioned Dinesh Shamdasani) buy out the rights to all of the Valiant stuff (minus the Gold Key characters), and launch the current Valiant Comics. 2018: DMG Entertainment buys out Valiant and Dinesh leaves. I'm hazier on the details of the current version of Valiant, but the new owners were the ones who justified their purchased in the context of "we're going to be the next Marvel Cinematic Universe", and really put all of their chips on that. So it really is history repeating itself in a way, as Shooter/Dinesh both wanted to build a sustainable model where they were happy to be a solid 3rd/4th company and an alternative to Marvel/DC, and the money people went NO WE WANT TO BE MARVEL. Dinesh's new company is Bad Idea, which was supposed to launch last spring and then launched last month. Part of the gimmick/the 'bad idea' is that they're selling their comics directly to retailers and not through distributors, they're not doing same-day digital comics, they're not doing variant covers, etc. This may be why people are not talking about them much, and doing this in the midst of a pandemic where people probably are not getting hand-sold nearly as many comics as in 2019 was a particularly bad idea. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Apr 21, 2021 |
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2021 17:06
|
|
|
The original "Crisis" at DC was a follow up to "Flash of Two Worlds", the book that established the Earth-One/Earth-Two multiverse. 1963 saw "Crisis of Two Worlds", then pretty much annually DC did "Crisis on Earth-Three", "Crisis on Earth-A", "Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two", "The Super-Crisis of Earth-Two", "The Negative-Crisis of Earths-One and Two", etc. At some point they stopped using "Crisis" in the actual issue titles but the annual multiverse issues were colloquially referred to (and eventually collected in trades by DC) as "Crisis on Multiple Earths". "Crisis on Infinite Earths" was similarly named as an homage to those stories, as it was meant to close off the DC Multiverse. Since then they've done Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, and Heroes in Crisis as events, only some of which were multiverse-style Crises, but all were 'branding' themselves to the "Crisis" name. It is probably the winner for "most recycled name", though also the majority of the stories from 1963-present with "Crisis" in the title at least imply some sort of multiversal/universe-altering hijinks, which gives more of a continuous thread between the stories than the various recycled "Secret War" or "Heroes Reborn" stories. The closest parallel I can think of is Marvel going back to the Age Of well (Age of Apocalypse, Age of X, Age of X-Man) repeatedly to indicate an alternate timeline in a mutant story. There's also been Days of Future Past, Days of Future Present, Days of Future Yet to Come, Days of Future Tense, and probably some other ones I'm blanking on, but those are all like short story arcs, not 'events'.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2021 13:50
|
|
|
Pastry of the Year posted:Do the missing chunks of Marvel Unlimited have anything to do with Rom and the Dire Wraith invasion of Earth? Those events touched way more books than I would have originally imagined. As for ROM himself, he only appeared in a handful of non-ROM books, which are largely not on Unlimited, but the list is literally: Contest of Champions #1 Incredible Hulk #296, #319 (cameo) Marvel Two-In-One #99 Power Man and Iron Fist #73 Secret Wars II #4 Uncanny X-Men #187 (cameo) Web of Spider-Man #7 (cameo) What If? #36 So if any of those books are missing, it's probably ROM. Anything else, who knows?
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2021 15:29
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 20:08 |
|
|
bessantj posted:I recently read Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #100 the story of which continued into Web of Spider-Man #1 and I was wondering when was the first time a story continued in different solo titles for the same character? So for example Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #100 to Web of Spider-Man #1 rather than an issue of Captain America to an issue of Avengers or an issue of Batman then an issue of Justice League. Random Stranger posted:But Spider-Man was the first time there was continuity between two solo books for the same character. Superman and Batman had multiple simultaneous series, but even the Sand Superman story which was the first proper long-form story for one of them was only in one book. Skwirl posted:There's an early Spider-Man story where it's snowing for two panels and he says "oh, that was weird" and an editor's not saying to "check out Tales to Astonish" because Thor was dealing with some sort of cask of the eternal winter shenanigans. And I think whichever issue of Fantastic Four Hulk first showed up in was meant to be a continuation of the story happening in the then canceled Hulk book.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 3, 2021 16:02
|
|