Over the coming year, I’m sure we will see a variety of good and bad changes as a consequence.
"Four billion dollars... Muwhahaha Muwhahaha!"
Posts Tagged ‘Marvel
Marvel turns 70 today.
Happy Birthday!
It’s back!
The classic 2D fighter has come back into the mainstream via Xbox 360 (and PS3 on August 13) download.
If you want some background on the game, you can checkout my initial post:
Marvel vs. Capcom 2!!! (What can I say? I was excited).
Review
The Good
It’s Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The game is basically a direct port of the classic Dreamcast version, with slicker graphics. If you liked the original version, you will like this one.
The Meh
While online play works well, actually getting into a match is kind of difficult. Most of my attempts to join a game result in a failure to join message… But once your in it’s great.
The Not-So Good
The Xbox version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 allowed you to assign dedicated “high/low punch” and “high/low kick” buttons. While some purists probably frown upon this button configuration, I was quite fond of it. I can’t remember if this was an option on Dreamcast (I don’t think it was), but I miss being able to create those buttons. They were especially good for chaining into hypercombos.
The final boss, Abyss. He still sucks.
The Bottom-line
If you are a fan of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, buy it. If you aren’t a fan, and are looking for the slickness of modern fighters, this one isn’t for you.
All-in-all, it’s a good game with the potential for endless variation.
I stumbled upon the New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller list and was really puzzled. Two of the books are reader-unfriendly piles of garbage that sold well due to marketing.
I never paid much attention to the Best Seller list in the past, but I always assumed that the books had to be somewhat decent, and not just sell well.
I guess I was wrong. The two books in question are impossible to appreciate without a deep knowledge of the Marvel & DC Universes, and you had to read a number of other books for context on the main story.
3 FINAL CRISIS, by Grant Morrison, J. G. Jones, Carlos Pacheco and Doug Mahnke (DC Comics, $29.99) – The heroes of the DC Universe have their backs against the wall in this event storyline which features a much-publicized “death” and a surprising rebirth.
10 CIVIL WAR, by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven (Marvel Entertainment, $39.99) – A government registration act pits the heroes of the Marvel heroes against each other.
Both of these books are written in the standard event comic tone:
Comics don’t need to make sense if they are bombastic, and a lot of important characters die, or are resurrected.
Final Crisis in particular made no sense, and the lasting impact of the book is barely felt except for the fact that they killed off Batman, and brought back Barry Allen, the Flash. Oops, guess that was a spoiler. That’s really all you need to know from this terrible story.
Civil War wasn’t as big a mess as Final Crisis, but it wasn’t really a standalone story, or a good representation of the power of the comic medium.
The rest of the list is much better. However, the presence of these two is strange, especially since I am presuming that if one is selecting their comic via the New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller list, they probably don’t have enough context to appreciate either of these stories.
The soft cover list included the horrid All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder among the mix of great and terrible books.
Don't read this book. I wish I hadn't.
3 ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee (DC Comics, $19.99) – Two comic book industry legends set their sights on re-examining the Batman and Robin team with over-the-top violence and characterization. Is it intentional parody or bad comics? The debate rages on.
Let me answer that question they pose. It sucks. It might intentionally be bad, but that doesn’t make it enjoyable.
Standards people! Standards.
29
Jun
09
Storm Wastes Her Talents
Let’s geek out a bit.
Something about the X-Man, Storm always bothered me. I couldn’t put my finger on it until my drive up to Buffalo.
As I drove through Upstate New York I noticed how full all of the rivers, lakes, streams, and reservoirs were; New York has had in unseasonable volume of rain this month. I realized that we certainly won’t have drought conditions this summer, or next for that matter. At the same time, much of the rest of the US is in desperate need of rain.
That’s when it hit me.
What is Storm doing using her power to control the weather fighting villains? She could be saving far more lives by helping regions in need with their climate issues. I know she isn’t with the X-Men anymore, but she should be traveling the world solving serious problems that even the most strong-willed people have no control over.
That right there could be an interesting new take on a relatively old character. It would make a lot more sense.
Last month, Marvel killed off Ultimate Peter Parker/ Spider-Man (There are multiple Peter Parkers/ Spider-Men in a number of different continuities. This is not the real Peter Parker/ Spider-Man, however it is the one I have found most interesting over the past decade).
I just got around to writing about it because I had been behind on my comics. School, the thesis, graduating, vacation, this blog and finding a job got in the way of reading my comics.
A few months ago I wrote about Marvel’s Ultimate Universe and it’s impending reboot -
http://geekwhisperin.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/%E2%80%9Cultimate%E2%80%9D-reboot/
The reboot is happening by way of an event story called Ultimatum. In no small terms, Ultimatum sucks. It has no redeeming qualities and I am only reading it because I have read every single Ultimate story that has come before it. I am disappointed in writer Jeph Loeb and Marvel for pushing this steaming pile of poo on the general public at $4.00 an issue.
But wait, there’s more!
Event stories are never self-contained. They spill-over into the regular monthly titles, and usually bring them down in the process.
As a result of Ultimatum, Brian Michael Bendis has killed off Ultimate Spider-Man. After nearly a decade of consistently good and interesting super hero stories (a feat in and of itself) Ultimate Spidey bit the big on in an issue devoid of dialog.
If you are unfamiliar with the title, it was famous for its dialog; it was the bet part.
To artist Stuart Immonen’s credit, the story is very easy to follow visually.
However, looking at the pages I am fairly certain that there is no dialog because putting words in the characters’ mouths would underscore how stupid this turn of events was. I can’t see how Bendis could have made the dialog anything but trite.
The Ultimate line was created so that Marvel could do things with the character that they couldn’t get away with using the “real”/ original versions. With that in mind, I will give them a little bit of wiggle room and hope that the reboot breathes new life into the Ultimate line.
That being said, the only Ultimate title that didn’t need improvement was Spider-Man.
I hope the folks at Marvel know what they are doing. If they screw this up, they will lose my readership on the entire line of comics… a reboot is a good place for new readers to jump on, but it is also a great spot for old ones to hop off.
“‘Nuff Said”
05
May
09
Eminem and the Punisher Team-Up
Hey Marvel, April Fools Day was last month!
…Wait… you mean this isn’t a joke?
Cause if it’s a joke, it’s really funny.
… OK then… you are serious… and now I am sad.
Marvel Comics is presents EMINEM & The Punisher, available now. Or you can read it here. I refuse to read it, but someone might want to.
“‘When we learned that Eminem is a fan and collector of Marvel comics, we could only imagine what would happen if The Punisher and Slim Shady met up in the Marvel Universe,’ said Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. ‘This was a unique partnership and the team had a blast working with Eminem and incorporating the rapper into the Marvel fold’” (CBR).
Really Joe, he’s a fan? That’s what it takes to play a staring role in a miniseries with a well-established character.
The fact that this comic exists really drives me nuts. I hope Marvel received a fat check from Mr. Shady’s record label. If they did this without extra monetary gain I will be thoroughly disappointed.
04
May
09
Wolverine is Weak
I decided to take a break from school work this evening to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine and all I got was this blog post.
It wasn’t very good and I am going to tell you why without spoiling the film too much (My last point has a very cryptic spoiler… and I don’t mean to brag, but I think my last point is better than the actual reveal in the movie).
Three claws down
Wolverine who?
I’m not sure who the main character is, but I am pretty sure it’s not Wolverine.
Way too many characters
It was a “who’s who” of Marvel characters who like to kill people. Half of them should have been edited out to make room for some proper character development.
Identity crisis
This movie didn’t know what it wanted to be. Sometimes it reached for sentimentality and character development, then it would snap back to a shallow action movie. Either would have been fine, but both made the movie feel schizophrenic.
PG-13
Let’s paint a picture… You have two main characters. They both have claws, and they both can regenerate from nearly any wound. These two clawed and immortal characters hate each other (for reasons that were not laid out very clearly). Why the hell aren’t the fights brutal? All they do is dig there claws into the other’s chest – what a cop out.
Did Wolverine even stab anyone? All he did was destroy property and make his claws spark (which doesn’t even make sense in a world where people can shoot lasers from their eyes).
Wolverine and Sabretooth do two things – they heal, and they slash. How can you make a fight sequence with these guys interesting without the slashing?
And another thing, Sabretooth’s dog running charge attack. Why did we have to see him do that so many times?
The “I’m the best at what I do” stuff doesn’t fly when you don’t kill people.
The endings
All of the endings sucked – All three of them. How do you tell a story with three different endings and not have a decent one in the bunch?
Don’t bother staying through the credits for the remaining two endings. They aren’t worth your time.
Deadpool (Slightly spoilerific)
Deadpool is also known as the “Merc (mercenary) with a Mouth” which horribly ironic.
28
Apr
09
Marvel vs. Capcom 2!!!
My all-time favorite fighting game is the classic 2D fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
The game pits characters from Marvel Comics and Capcom’s video games against each other in crazy three-on-three battles. Some of the characters are popular favorites, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Dr. Doom, the Hulk, and Wolverine among other X-Men come to mind from the Marvel side. Mega Man, Ryu, Ken, Akuma, and a ton of Street Fighter characters are all part of the Capcom character gallery.
The game isn’t particularly balanced, some characters are dreadful, and some are way overpowered, but there are so many characters, and even more combination of characters that the game is endless fun (Over 10 years later, and I do play it on a fairly regular basis).
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is officially coming to XBox Live and the PlayStation Network. You will be able to download it for $15.00 sometime in the near future.
I’m excited!
10
Feb
09
“Ultimate” Reboot
Today we are going to talk about Marvel’s “Ultimate Universe” and it’s impending reboot.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with superhero comics, there is a fairly complicated series of “universes” that these stories take place in. I will probably write some posts in the future about the structure of these universes, but it will take a lot of time to write it and get everything correct (my memory of this stuff isn’t exactly encyclopedic).
To give you a quick point of reference, most of the classic Marvel stories, the ones that are subtly or overtly referenced in the movies come from the original Marvel Universe or the Earth-616. Over the course of the last five decades, the Earth-616 Universe became pretty unwieldy and bogged down in continuity (which it still is and probably always will be).
In response, Marvel created the Ultimate Universe in 2000 with Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men. In 2001, they launched Ultimates (the Ultimate version of the Avengers).
They started with issue one. No history.
While the ultimate characters frequently overlapped with the classic characters we all know and love, they didn’t have upwards of forty years of history, so the writers were free to do things differently and take the characters to new, uncharted territory. The goal was to make these characters accessible and modern, and grounded in realism (as much realism as you could have with superpowers).
Ultimate Spider-Man took a conventional yet fresh approach to Spidey. It was clearly Peter Parker, but the world around him was different. The art was vibrant and action packed. The writing was thoughtful and witty. The storytelling was superb and has pretty much remained so for the last nine years there were a few weak story arcs, but it was a consistently strong read. Bendis and co rarely ever missed a deadline, so the regular publishing schedule helped to make this an enthralling read.
Ultimate X-Men took a more cynical approach to the characters and the world around them. Mark Millar delved deeply into issues of racism and prejudice. His characters had a distinctly dark but still fun feel to them. Unlike Spidey, the X-Men had a number of writers, and the stories became progressively more inane and out there. This completely defied the “grounded” and “realistic” feel of the Ultimate Universe.
Ultimates was a completely different beast. The Ultimates (Avengers) were so ridiculously badass. They were deeply flawed individuals fighting for mostly selfish reasons. The stories were cleaver, violent, political, and very funny in a dark and twisted kind of way. The only real flaw with this book was that it was eternally off schedule. I’m not talking a month here, a month there. I started and completed college with a double major and a minor in less time that it took Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch to write 26 issues of this comic. I usually forgot what had happened between the issues because it took so damn long for them to go to print.
Ultimate Nick Fury looks Samuel L. Jackson because who else is the biggest badass in the universe going to look like?
Other Ultimate titles came and went. They had Ultiamte Daredevil, Elektra, Iron-Man, a number of random mini-series, and the eternally delayed Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk.
Damon Lindelof, co-creator of the hit TV show Lost wrote the first issue of Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk back in 2005. After the first two issues of six, the book went on hiatus. There hasn’t been a single issue printed since. Allegedly the final four are written and going to press over the coming months. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Reboot
After nearly a decade, the Ultimate Universe has become somewhat unwieldy and with the exception of Ultimate Spider-Man, the quality has completely eroded from accessible, grounded, and intelligent storytelling to bad Saturday morning cartoon caliber.
It’s a pretty sad state of affairs for the Universe that got me into comics in the first place.
The line is being rebranded as “Ultimate Comics” and everything is starting sometime in the future with issue one.
Spidey will still be penned Bendis, Avengers will be written by Mark Millar, and Jeph Loeb will be the scribe behind Ultimates (I’m kind of worried about this one. His past Ultimate endeavors have been atrocious). There will be one more Ultimate Comic title, but it has not been revealed yet.
I hope that the reboot brings thoughtful and cleaver storytelling with it.
Everyone remembers 6th grade math right? Truth Tables? Where P equals Q if all things stay constant and all that malarkey? Well, here’s my reference point:
I’m writing on this site. Therefore I must be a geek. If i wasn’t a geek, I couldn’t write on this site. And so on and so forth. But I must be honest, there are levels of geekdom that I will just never achieve. I’m way too lazy for it. It requires too much effort and follow through. I mean, as you read this post you’ll realize you’re hardly even getting a review…
So while David posts about Robert Kirkman, his manifesto and the implied future of comics, all I can add is “His zombie comics are effing sweet!”
And they are. Marvel Zombies is just superb. Here are two of my favorite things (raindrops and puppies not withstanding), COMBINED INTO AWESOMENESS! The story, spanning the ultimate universe includes arcs from the Fantastic Four to the Black Panther, all culminating into graphic novels that exceeds expectations in vulgar, graphic and scintillating ways. The redone covers (every issue of Marvel Zombies has a cover that zombifys a classic Marvel Comics cover), and the art in general, are also superb. (Yay Sean Phillips and Arthur Suydam!)
But it doesn’t end there. The Walking Dead (one of Kirkman’s creator owned series) from Image is probably one of my favorite story arcs still being published right now. You would think reading about the post-apocalyptic zombie revolution would get old, but it’s the relationships between the survivors that really keeps me coming back for more. Plus it’s gory. Everyone wins.
In the end, that’s why I’m fascinated with zombie literature. In horror situations, people all of sudden don’t become humane. They stay evil and wretched, or they maintain their compassion. Some change out of necessity, but in the end, there are no more distractions besides the living dead to deter people from actually interacting with each other. (I know this to be true. Once, when the power went out in college, my roommates went to bed rather than hangout without the constant dim of the light emanating from their Myspace pages).
“In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living” – Quoted on the back of every Walking Dead graphic novel, and oh-so-true.
03
Jan
09
Don’t Give These to Your Kids!
Holy misperception Batman!
The comic industry has one of the worst image problems I have ever seen. It has been my observation that most people view comics as something “for kids.”
In no uncertain terms, they aren’t. The overwhelming number of comics published since the 1980 are for people in their late teens at the earliest. The plots and themes are mature in nature. They aren’t designed for a kid to read and then simulate with an action figure.
I didn’t start reading comics until I was in college. I thought they were dumb kiddie books. Then my college roommate read them compulsively and kept telling me, “You should read these, they are really well-written and the art is great!” I begrudgingly read an issue because I had concluded that I couldn’t think something was stupid until I gave it a try. My roommate was right. Next thing I knew I was reading four different titles, then eight, and then 12.
Here’s the problem. People who read comics know that they aren’t for kids… but no one else does. When you work in a comic shop you see all sorts of different people come in and out of the store, male, female, young, old, wackos, and professionals in suits and ties. The age range is what is so interesting. There are so many lifelong readers. Yet there are so few new, young readers.
Wonder Woman painted by comic writer/artist Alex Ross.
In spite of the massive Hollywood success that comic-based movies have seen, the comics that these movies are based off of haven’t seen the gigantic influx of new readers that one would expect (This observation comes from things I’ve read and comic shop owners I have spoken with).
So, what’s the disconnect? The Dark Knight was a great movie, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to Batman at his best in the comics. The Spider-Man movies suck compared to some of the classic stories. V for Vendetta was a great movie, but it wasn’t even in the same league as the book. Sin City was basically a page-by-page remake of the comic. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a steaming pile of poo, but the original series was exceptional.
Here’s the problem. Comics have become completely inaccessible for new readers for two reasons:
1. Stigma – “Comics are for kids!” Adults who enjoy the movies and feel an attachment to the characters are deterred from reading comics because they are actually embarrassed to do so. It’s sad but true.
I know a lot of comic readers who walk into their local comic shop looking over their shoulder and don’t tell their friends where they are going like there are about to meet with a prostitute or buy drugs (now that I think about it, I think that the potheads I know are more open about their drug habit than most of the comic readers I know are regarding their penchant for superheroes).
Let me be clear. These books are good. They are intelligently written, and the characters are relatable.
Reading comics has helped me gain perspective, and improve my life, and I am not ashamed to say so. A few years ago, I had a really rough stretch and I couldn’t find happiness in my life until I read a conversation between Peter Parker and Aunt May (I’m not even a fan of Spider-man… I read that book because a friend insisted that I do so). That dialog literally helped me find my way back to happiness.
2. The stories are inaccessible for new readers – Most of the major titles from Marvel and DC have been woven into this very complex tapestry. The stories are all interrelated, and cross paths with each other. Not only that, but they have extensive histories to boot.
So let’s say you want to read Batman. If you picked up last weeks issue on a whim without knowing anything else about the current Batman series or the greater DC Comics Universe, you would be completely lost. The story that is about to wrap-up has been brewing for a couple of years! On top of that, it ties into the current overarching story (or event) for the DC Universe known as Final Crisis.
Final Crisis is an extremely extensive story that spans over countless titles, and it is the result of years and years of buildup from other event stories.
Basically, it’s become hard to just pickup a comic and read. That being said, if you are willing to go back and read this stuff from the beginning, it will be very rewarding. Give it a shot, read the graphic novel Identity Crisis (in my opinion, that book gave birth to the modern DC Universe). It is an extremely compelling crime drama.
Anyway, a comic creator named Robert Kirkman sparked debate about the future of the comic industry with his Kirkman Manifesto video.
He raises a lot of points, some I agree with, some I disagree with. If you want some counterpoint check out the debate between him and comic creator Brian Bendis.
What matters here is the point that most current comics aren’t for kids, and that the industry is supported by an aging readership. A way to start reading is to pickup some creator owned work. Over the coming weeks I am going to begin writing about some of the titles you could pick up if you want to give comics a shot, but don’t want to jump into a robust universe that will require homework and study to fully appreciate.
