…Nobody knows it better than me…
……Because I will end up reading all of it……
…because i’m a shill…
Welcome all once again to —
Hey! Looks like it’s time again for a new subject header… the 198 has come and gone so next week join me for my fun in revolving photoshop graphics!
For now though, let’s get straight to the news.
LET’S MOVE BEYOND!
(Mercifully extracted from Newsarama)
Okay, so did you enjoy New Warriors? I did. I thought it was neat. Not fantastic… not even Uncanny…. just neat. Did you enjoy seeing all of these old characters uniting under a new mantle? Well BEYOND! wants to do the same thing, but Dwayne MacDuffie is going to sit at the helm:
“They’re kidnapped to another world by a being of unimaginable power, a world so dangerous that they’ll have to learn to cooperate if they’re to have any chance of survival,” McDuffie explained
So what we are looking at is Lost – Marvel style with Spidey at the head of it all. So what does this mean for the world? God only knows, but it does sound like it’s going to be a fun little group of characters that might actually see some sales. In all actuality, this sounds like it is going to be kind of a fun book with a couple Spidey villains, and some push to the forgotten few… and Gravity who appears in the image on the left… the poor guy.
THIS WEEK’S REPRINTS…
(Reprinted from Newsarama)
As it’s been the way of things lately, when a book reprints, Marvel goes and reprints it with a new flashy cover. It’s a way to keep a book sales going, and keep the speculators happy. It’s actually a pretty nice way to do things, so that you aren’t sitting there and concentrating on the SPESHUL UBER MEGA COVER that came out, and instead, if you got the book… you got it. If you didn’t get the book… it will probably get a resolicit.
This week’s selections for new covers:
MARVEL ZOMBIES #1 – In it’s 4th printing – Hulk gets Zombified!
FANTASTIC FOUR #526 – A Brian Hitch variant.. pretty.
…and another gift for yall…
FANTASTIC FOUR #527 – Sporting a Hammer wielding Doom… not bad.
REMEMBER PANINI? YOU WILL….
When I was a little kid, I had these sticker books. They were wide albums where the story would be told in pictures. The pictures you bought from blister packs of stickers and then put into the books. Sometimes you would find foil variants and things that would make it all look that much more prismatic, much like most of the 80s. I had a Voltron book, and my older sister had a Care Bears one, and I remember that it was the greatest treat in the world to open up new packages of stickers, and after a few months be miserable because blisters seemed to only hold the same six cards that you already had, except for one foil that you now had to painstakingly put exactly over the original. DAMN IT THE FRUSTRATION RETURNS!
The company that made those books: Panini
Now Panini, who apparently are a European book publisher, have made a deal with Marvel to do some great books for the ‘M’ with International appeal. I’m a fan of more comics equalling more people reading comics. (I mean seriously, The Death of Superman comes with most homes these days) – Let’s see what they’ll be bringing to the table:
An X-Men mini-series and a Young Dr Strange mini-series produced by Red Whale, artists of the top selling Disney W.I.T.C.H. title and acclaimed creators of the Monster Allergy comics.
This sounds fun! WITCH is actually kind of a fun cartoon, in a pool of mediocrity of kids cartoon, so a fun little Doc Strange book should be right up his alley.
A Women of The X-Men graphic novel written by X-Men icon Chris Claremont and illustrated by top-selling European artist Milo Manara
Given my current love of Claremont and his wily ways, I think this will be perfect for an audience across the world.. especially if they send it to lands where people don’t know how to read english and they don’t bother translating it. Then I’m sure it will make more sense than when I try and read it.
Also, given Claremont’s penchant for bondagey themed women, expect this book to sell out in Amsterdam three times over.
A Wolverine graphic novel written by Jean-David Morvan with art by Philippe Buchet, two of the main stars of the French comic book industry and authors of the best selling series Sillage.
What to expect in this:
Wolverine goes against a legion of French ninjas.
The ninjas to surrender.
French jokes are too easy.
A Daredevil/Captain America graphic novel written by Tito Faraci and drawn by Claudio Villa, top artist of Italy’s iconic and top-selling comic book title – Tex.
I think out of all of the projects, this is the one that makes me wonder the most – as I find other countries taking on the writing of Captain America to be a fantastic concept. I would like to believe that most of them just have him as this picturesque vision of 1950’s nuclear family. Randomly drinking milk and eating red meat while selling war bonds.. you know, EXACTLY how he was in the 1950s – just now hating the Middle East.
A complete collection of Stan Lee and John Romita’s Spider-Man daily strips and Sunday pages, originally published in 1977-1980 and never before re-printed in their totality in book format.
Expect this to be huge. No. No joke. Huge.
ONSLAUGHT – YES! LIEFELD……. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(Sobbingly retrieved from Newsarama)
I remember the mid 90s like they were only ten years ago…. that time when all of the superheroes and mutants joined together to face the conglomorated monster of Magneto and Xavier and lead to a world unlike any world we had seen before – where every superhero kind of hung out inside of Franklin Richards… a world called Heroes Reborn.
Man, that was a piece of crap ploy of marketing to restart numbers twice.
Onslaught though, was COOL! I will state that I liked Onslaught. I liked the concept. I liked how it tied into a year’s worth of stories. How it was built slowly. It was all fantastic! I don’t care if you don’t agree with me – it was my heyday of loving the X-Men.
Now they are bringing it back for a short miniseries, which I can’t WAIT to read, except I probably won’t. I probably won’t come near it with a ten foot pole. I probably will try and avoid eye-contact with it when I see it in my local comic book store. Why? WHY!?
LOOK AT CAPTAIN AMERICA’S FRIGGING BOOTS! THEY FLARE BIGGER THAN HIS MONSTEROUS THIGHS!
In another attempt to hush Rob Liefeld from discussing all of the dirty secrets he knows – they’ve let him draw something else. Again though, they are keeping him locked in a mini-series, guaranteeing they only have to give him one paycheck.
Onslaught, I’ll miss you.
DAN SLOTT WANTS YOU TO TOUCH HIM.. err.. something..
(Pulled from Newsarama)
The Thing isn’t doing so well. Not to say that Ben Grimm is having problems, far from it. He’s just not pulling in the numbers on his own Dan Slott created mini-series, and Slott doesn’t want that. Slott wants everyone to read that book, but the fact that Slott is writing it should be enough to pull in bigger numbers.
In this interview with him he candidly explains that he understands that he is a secondly rated character wedged in the middle of a crossover explosion. Book sales are slumped and the chances for him to get his own Thing title are dying by the issue.
So go check out the interview, even if you aren’t a fan of The Thing – Dan Slott is a fantastic read.
Now all the information about Civil War you didn’t give a care to know. First off, they have now released a full checklist of titles that Civil War will be touching upon. Here’s the master list:
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #529 – 531
CIVIL WAR: OPENING SHOT SKETCHBOOK
FANTASTIC FOUR #536 – 537
CIVIL WAR #1 – 7
CIVIL WAR: FRONT LINE #1 – 10
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #532 – 537
BLACK PANTHER #18
CABLE/DEADPOOL #30 – 32
CAPTAIN AMERICA #22 – #24
CIVIL WAR: YOUNG AVENGERS & RUNAWAYS #1 – 4
CIVIL WAR: X-MEN #1 – 4
DAILY BUGLE: CIVIL WAR EDITION
FANTASTIC FOUR #538 – 543
HEROES FOR HIRE #1 – 3
IRON MAN #13 – 14
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT: MILLAR/MCNIVEN
MS. MARVEL #6 – 8
NEW AVENGERS: #21 – 25
PUNISHER: WAR JOURNAL #1 – 3
SHE HULK #8
THUNDERBOLTS #103 – 105
WOLVERINE #42 – 47
X-FACTOR #8 – 9
Okay, did you get all that? That’s roughly 74 books in Civil War alone. Yeah, just a small list of books. What does this mean? It means by mid-July you are going to be sick of it. It means that by September, you are going to be praying it’s over. It means by January… we’ll be buying the trades like a bunch of ravenous jackals. It means by 2008 we’ll be trying to remember why it was important.
Now let me address in a bit of a Hatton editorial, the issue of Professor Xavier. Now this is more of a mention of him specifically because of his recent announcement in X-Men Deadly Genesis, but is easily going to have an affect on Civil War due to his — ok — after this stop reading if you don’t want to be spoilered.
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Ok – five more dots then I talk
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– due to Xavier’s lack of power. Let’s now talk as a group shall we? Professor Xavier is the former baddest ass mindbender in all the world. He has now been given the power to walk again, but his powers have been removed. What does this in fact mean?
It means I think he’s lying.
Over the last year or two, they’ve been building Xavier (with the help of his Ultimate counterpart) to be not just the fond father figure of the X-Men, but also someone who can, at times, be just as broken as his magnetic nemesis. Sometimes, the ends will justify the means it seems, and in killing an entire team of mutants in Deadly Genesis as well as keeping it a secret for years, mindblowing Cyclops so he doesn’t remember his kid brother, keeping himself disappeared after being powerless, as well as being a member of a secret society of the Illuminati without ever addressing it to anyone.
So where does this leave us?
It leaves us with a man who is now behind the scenes, able to adjust whatever he wants, and do it without any kind of suspect or suspicion. He can remain behind the walls of Xavier with his children – or outside without any outside suspicion of the Sentinal Squad.
Jamie, won’t the sentinels pick up on the fact that he’s a mutant?
No. He’s Xavier. The people reading the readouts don’t need to ‘see’ that information.
So welcome to the new Xavier era. One where the father figure of mutanity is maybe not the corrupt politician that so many others are, but he is no longer the family friendly, loving, caring, die for the dream Xavier we knew. Remember, when we last saw him in the Marvel-verse he was trying to figure out if he even believed in his own dream. I think maybe now he might believe in it a little too much.
THE END….
Let me first apologize for not having a column last week. It wasn’t because I forgot, or was stranded in the middle of Iowa with nothing to conect to. It was because there was no news last week. None. It would have been a column about a Spidey variant cover – and that’s it.
So there, sometimes there just isn’t that much news to view. I would like to believe I made up for it this week though… what do you all think? Let me know.
Til next week, ciao.
