Big Box o’ Physical Comics
Sep. 28th, 2023 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroWhen we went up to Uticon in 2022, Xannoside was cleaning out his comic collection and gave us three big boxes of trades to sell. We sold two of them, but I sorted out a full box’s worth of comics I wanted to read and possibly keep. I read a pile of them in fall of 2022 (along with a miniseries I picked up at Uticon) but never actually wrote out the reviews because I got distracted to reading other things.
Books read in 2022:
Slapstick (Issues #1-6) – I thought I was buying a full set of the original mini, but this was actually a reboot / sequel to the original miniseries that changed around a few of the rules of Slapstick’s cartoony powers but remained entertaining in a strict niche sort of way.
The Sentry – One of Marvel’s many overpowered Superman take-offs, this one is insane and hallucinates his evil archnemesis who may or may not be his split personality.
Dynamo 5 (volumes 1-2) – The five illegitimate children of a Superman-type each have inherited one major power and the Lois Lane character becomes their handler as a super-team against various threats. Cute idea, middling execution, fun read.
Supreme Power (volumes 1-3) I actually already own in hardcover and was just re-reading, though they lead into Supreme Power: Hyperion and Squadron Supreme (volume 1) which are interesting but honestly kind of water down the world-shaking setup of the first few volumes.
Ms. Marvel (volumes 1-3) – The Carol Danvers edition of “Ms. Marvel”, and they clearly didn't really know what to do with her.
There was a random volume of Gen-13 that seemed really familiar, to the point I’m 90% certain I have a copy in the stacks somewhere. It was four unconnected stories.
Alias (volumes 1-4) – The original set of stories of Jessica Jones that was built into the Netflix series. It’s very different from the TV show, stronger in some ways but weaker in others, and still very good. This was one of the few things from the box I decided to keep for my collection after reading.
Then, we have the stack I’ve read more recently:
Runaways: Dead End Kids - "Joss Whedon" appears in giant letters on the cover, which should give you an idea of when this was published. It's from the middle of the series, after a couple of the original kids were killed and replaced, and has some good old time travel nonsense going on. The treatment of the gender fluid shape-shifting character was... fair for the time and mainstream comics. (Runaways was always a series that I wish they had put a strict limit on. Like, it was a great concept, I loved the start, and I think with a 24-issue planned run it could have been spectacular. But they spooled it out into a long-running ongoing with a series of different writers, which both hobbled character development and lost the original threads. Also Gert was my favorite and they killed her very early on.)
Deadpool (volumes 2-3) - Honestly, I think Deadpool is too wacky when he's the solo main character. He really needs a serious counterpart, which is why Cable & Deadpool works and this was only meh.
Excalibur (volume 1) - Xavier and Magento in a destroyed Genosha when there are suddenly more mutants.
New Excalibur (volume 1) - Dazzler, Nightcrawler, and a host of British characters when there are suddenly fewer mutants. (I did like the evil X-Men they got to fight, though.)
Thunderbolts (volumes 1-3) - Picking up the book right around the time of Civil War, and Norman Osborn is running the Thunderbolts, whose gimmick has always been a team of villains pretending to be heroes. And boy oh boy, does this make it political—Osborn is playing the US government like a fiddle and just barely keeping his team of psychopaths on a leash. The cameo from Doc Samson and his redemption of Penance/Speedball is probably the best thing in three volumes, because I’m just too damn sensitive about how realistic “villains with good PR running the government by manipulating racists” is these days.
Ultimate Fantastic Four (volumes 1-3) – The origin story, which presents the Four as teenagers, with Reed and Sue specifically gathered as part of a government program for genius children, until an accident with an interdimensional teleporter (tampered with by Doom) turns them into super-powered freaks. This makes an effort to sci-fi the Four up to modern standards (answering things like “what happened to Reed’s organs?” and “why doesn’t Johnny burn himself?”) and lets them make dumb choices because they’re teenagers. I’m sure this series declined as it went on, but these first few volumes were a lot of fun. This is the only Ultimate material I’m keeping.
The Ultimates (volumes 1-2) – Opening with a “getting the band together” that the Marvel movies cribbed from wholeheartedly, and then veering into “I’m the goddamn Batman” territory, trying so hard to be edgy that it just comes out cheesy. The Avengers don’t need to be dark and gritty, really. And this feels like a bunch of Millar’s other work: Interesting ideas, too much grittiness, uneven characterization and an overall middling execution.
The Ultimates 2 (volumes 1-2) – I’m not entirely clear why this wasn’t just “volumes 3 and 4”, because it’s just following the same story. Most of the characters are terrible people (and most of the women are slutty idiots), Thor might be insane, Loki leads everyone around by the nose, lots of people die, but the billionaire is an actual super-genius. Again, characterization takes a back seat to the shock panels and the overall arc, and by the end I kinda hated all of them.
Ultimate Power – The collection of a miniseries in which Ultimate Reed Richards does something stupid and drags the Ultimates and the X-Men into a cross-dimensional fight against the Squadron Supreme. (This is another case where the fact that Reed is a teenager makes his dumb choices make much more sense.) This is not a particularly good story; really it’s a dumb excuse to have lots of these characters meet and fight and it’s probably 40% splash panels by volume. I can appreciate it on that basis, though!
Ultimate Galactus (volumes 1-2) – The first two parts of the “Ultimate Galactus” trilogy, where the various ultimate Universe characters find Vision in Russia and then catch Captain Mahr Vel of the Kree infiltrating their space program, all because Gah Lak Tus is coming to destroy Earth. Unfortunately, this collection didn’t have the volume where he actually shows up and they fight him, so it’s all just stretched-out foreshadowing.
Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra and Ultimate Elektra: Devil’s Due – A pair of miniseries that give us the origin of Elektra as a college student, her romance with Matt Murdock, and various gray-heroic situations she gets into. I think what irks me about this is that Elektra is the title character and the focus of the story, but so much of both plots hinge of her ignoring Murdock but him being ultimately in the right. (And honestly, I can’t help but think that if she’d just stabbed the guy in the first story the world would have indeed been a better place.)
Ultimate X-Men (volumes 1-7, 18) - I appreciate that this was a reboot of the X-Men without decades of continuity dragging it down. That said, the need to be "dark and gritty" suffuses it, as does the constant need for characters to quit or change sides at the drop of a hat. The X-Men are a soap opera (and always were intended as such) but that also means their internal drama gets repetitive and tiring. And in the meantime, this goes through all the hits: They fight sentinels and Magneto and the government hates them and Beast turns blue and Wolverine has it out with Weapon X and Jean gets the Phoenix Force. That last volume features Apocalypse!
I think the other thing that annoys me about the X-Men, though they’re hardly the only offenders, is that they’re subject to wildly fluctuating power levels, and the psychic characters are the worst about it. How much Jean can do with her telepathy or telekinesis varies with literally every use. Xavier demonstrates telekinesis randomly in one scene and then never again. Magneto’s entire schtick is magnetism, but he regularly creates forcefields to protect against things magnetism shouldn’t have any effect on. (Can he deflect lightning? Sure! But bricks and punches? Seriously?) The characters get their powers from a special gene, but Betsy Braddock switches bodies and somehow maintains her powers. Don’t get me wrong, the Flash is often guilty of this sort of thing also, and comic writers have no understanding of the relative weight differences between a person and a train, but it’s so very noticeable even within the same story arcs here.
Ultimate Annuals – A collection of the annuals for each of the Ultimate books, which are an extremely mixed bag. Peter Parker and Kitty Pryde starting their relationship is the best thing in here; everything else is kind of forgettable.
Marvel Knights Spider-Man (volumes 1-3) – A 12-issue story that attempts to re-frame Norman Osborn’s relationship with Peter and the greater scope of super-villains in the world, which I’m sure was thoroughly ignored by everyone subsequently. It pulled in too many threads and tried to change too much of the lore (JJJ gets convinced his son is Spider-Man and vows to only be positive about him in the future; Eddie Brock dies and the Venom symbiote gets passed on; a whole bunch of classic villains get re-vamped; etc etc) and was honestly overstuffed. I see that Millar was trying to write an “iconic” Spider-Man story; I don’t think he succeeded. I think the thing that irritated me most, though, was that in the big fight against the Sinister Twelve when Peter thinks he’s going to die...he survives because MJ calls the Avengers out of the blue. That’s a direct violation of the rule that the hero needs to save the day, and especially since they don’t even show the villains fighting the Avengers, it makes the buildup to the Sinister Twelve pointless.
Transformers: Matrix Quest - The middle of a run of the Marvel Transformers comics published in the UK in which everyone is searching for the Creation Matrix that was lost with Optimus' original body when he died. It starts on the second half of a two-parter but at least most of the stories stand alone?
Ultra: Seven Days - A soap opera superhero piece by the Luna Brothers, centering around a Latina superwoman and her two best friends, surrounded by standard superhero characters with their serial numbers filed off. On one hand, I can see they were going for a “the media circus hurts young women who are just trying to be normal and do their best” vibe, but their knowledge of how women interact with each other clearly comes from media tropes and not actual women.
Judgement Day - A storyline that was clearly the End of an Era for the Youngblood, written by Alan Moore (and centering around the sort of meta comics fiction he loves) and mostly drawn by Rob Liefeld (and boy, does that show. There's no mistaking Liefeld's mockery of the human form). The last issue is a tribute to Gil Kane.
WildC.A.T.S. A Gathering of Eagles - A jam-packed mess of fight scenes that barely makes sense knowing all the characters already. Oh Chris Claremont, you really know how to write a "standalone" story that can't be followed without years of unrelated backstory material.
WildC.A.T.S./Cyberforce: Killer Instinct - Yeah, between the stupid fold-out pages and the 90s inhuman anatomy, and the fact I don't particularly care about either team, I'm just giving up on this.
The New York Five – I’m 90% sure I’ve read this before (it’s a Vertigo comic), but I had no memory of it or the first volume, The New York Four. And honestly, it’s too short and too piecemeal to really work as a story. It’s a collection of emotional moments for four (plus one) college girls, but it doesn’t actually give them enough time to earn the impact any of them would have. Maybe it works better if you read the first volume?
Pride of Baghdad – The story of four lions in a zoo in Baghdad, on the day when the sky falls and the keepers scatter. It’s not a happy story, but it’s a clever one (apparently based on a real headline).
I think that's pretty much all from the box I'm really still interested in. There's a bunch of New X-Men, Avengers: The Initiative, and some Civil War and World War Hulk stuff, but I think I've had my fill. (There's also about half of The Boys collected, but my dad has the full run so I'll just read his copies and review them later.)
Overall: It’s nice to actually read an era of Marvel books I hadn’t before and re-read a bunch of bits and pieces of other 90s material, but I can see why Xannoside was ready to let the collection go.
Books read in 2022:
Slapstick (Issues #1-6) – I thought I was buying a full set of the original mini, but this was actually a reboot / sequel to the original miniseries that changed around a few of the rules of Slapstick’s cartoony powers but remained entertaining in a strict niche sort of way.
The Sentry – One of Marvel’s many overpowered Superman take-offs, this one is insane and hallucinates his evil archnemesis who may or may not be his split personality.
Dynamo 5 (volumes 1-2) – The five illegitimate children of a Superman-type each have inherited one major power and the Lois Lane character becomes their handler as a super-team against various threats. Cute idea, middling execution, fun read.
Supreme Power (volumes 1-3) I actually already own in hardcover and was just re-reading, though they lead into Supreme Power: Hyperion and Squadron Supreme (volume 1) which are interesting but honestly kind of water down the world-shaking setup of the first few volumes.
Ms. Marvel (volumes 1-3) – The Carol Danvers edition of “Ms. Marvel”, and they clearly didn't really know what to do with her.
There was a random volume of Gen-13 that seemed really familiar, to the point I’m 90% certain I have a copy in the stacks somewhere. It was four unconnected stories.
Alias (volumes 1-4) – The original set of stories of Jessica Jones that was built into the Netflix series. It’s very different from the TV show, stronger in some ways but weaker in others, and still very good. This was one of the few things from the box I decided to keep for my collection after reading.
Then, we have the stack I’ve read more recently:
Runaways: Dead End Kids - "Joss Whedon" appears in giant letters on the cover, which should give you an idea of when this was published. It's from the middle of the series, after a couple of the original kids were killed and replaced, and has some good old time travel nonsense going on. The treatment of the gender fluid shape-shifting character was... fair for the time and mainstream comics. (Runaways was always a series that I wish they had put a strict limit on. Like, it was a great concept, I loved the start, and I think with a 24-issue planned run it could have been spectacular. But they spooled it out into a long-running ongoing with a series of different writers, which both hobbled character development and lost the original threads. Also Gert was my favorite and they killed her very early on.)
Deadpool (volumes 2-3) - Honestly, I think Deadpool is too wacky when he's the solo main character. He really needs a serious counterpart, which is why Cable & Deadpool works and this was only meh.
Excalibur (volume 1) - Xavier and Magento in a destroyed Genosha when there are suddenly more mutants.
New Excalibur (volume 1) - Dazzler, Nightcrawler, and a host of British characters when there are suddenly fewer mutants. (I did like the evil X-Men they got to fight, though.)
Thunderbolts (volumes 1-3) - Picking up the book right around the time of Civil War, and Norman Osborn is running the Thunderbolts, whose gimmick has always been a team of villains pretending to be heroes. And boy oh boy, does this make it political—Osborn is playing the US government like a fiddle and just barely keeping his team of psychopaths on a leash. The cameo from Doc Samson and his redemption of Penance/Speedball is probably the best thing in three volumes, because I’m just too damn sensitive about how realistic “villains with good PR running the government by manipulating racists” is these days.
Ultimate Fantastic Four (volumes 1-3) – The origin story, which presents the Four as teenagers, with Reed and Sue specifically gathered as part of a government program for genius children, until an accident with an interdimensional teleporter (tampered with by Doom) turns them into super-powered freaks. This makes an effort to sci-fi the Four up to modern standards (answering things like “what happened to Reed’s organs?” and “why doesn’t Johnny burn himself?”) and lets them make dumb choices because they’re teenagers. I’m sure this series declined as it went on, but these first few volumes were a lot of fun. This is the only Ultimate material I’m keeping.
The Ultimates (volumes 1-2) – Opening with a “getting the band together” that the Marvel movies cribbed from wholeheartedly, and then veering into “I’m the goddamn Batman” territory, trying so hard to be edgy that it just comes out cheesy. The Avengers don’t need to be dark and gritty, really. And this feels like a bunch of Millar’s other work: Interesting ideas, too much grittiness, uneven characterization and an overall middling execution.
The Ultimates 2 (volumes 1-2) – I’m not entirely clear why this wasn’t just “volumes 3 and 4”, because it’s just following the same story. Most of the characters are terrible people (and most of the women are slutty idiots), Thor might be insane, Loki leads everyone around by the nose, lots of people die, but the billionaire is an actual super-genius. Again, characterization takes a back seat to the shock panels and the overall arc, and by the end I kinda hated all of them.
Ultimate Power – The collection of a miniseries in which Ultimate Reed Richards does something stupid and drags the Ultimates and the X-Men into a cross-dimensional fight against the Squadron Supreme. (This is another case where the fact that Reed is a teenager makes his dumb choices make much more sense.) This is not a particularly good story; really it’s a dumb excuse to have lots of these characters meet and fight and it’s probably 40% splash panels by volume. I can appreciate it on that basis, though!
Ultimate Galactus (volumes 1-2) – The first two parts of the “Ultimate Galactus” trilogy, where the various ultimate Universe characters find Vision in Russia and then catch Captain Mahr Vel of the Kree infiltrating their space program, all because Gah Lak Tus is coming to destroy Earth. Unfortunately, this collection didn’t have the volume where he actually shows up and they fight him, so it’s all just stretched-out foreshadowing.
Ultimate Daredevil and Elektra and Ultimate Elektra: Devil’s Due – A pair of miniseries that give us the origin of Elektra as a college student, her romance with Matt Murdock, and various gray-heroic situations she gets into. I think what irks me about this is that Elektra is the title character and the focus of the story, but so much of both plots hinge of her ignoring Murdock but him being ultimately in the right. (And honestly, I can’t help but think that if she’d just stabbed the guy in the first story the world would have indeed been a better place.)
Ultimate X-Men (volumes 1-7, 18) - I appreciate that this was a reboot of the X-Men without decades of continuity dragging it down. That said, the need to be "dark and gritty" suffuses it, as does the constant need for characters to quit or change sides at the drop of a hat. The X-Men are a soap opera (and always were intended as such) but that also means their internal drama gets repetitive and tiring. And in the meantime, this goes through all the hits: They fight sentinels and Magneto and the government hates them and Beast turns blue and Wolverine has it out with Weapon X and Jean gets the Phoenix Force. That last volume features Apocalypse!
I think the other thing that annoys me about the X-Men, though they’re hardly the only offenders, is that they’re subject to wildly fluctuating power levels, and the psychic characters are the worst about it. How much Jean can do with her telepathy or telekinesis varies with literally every use. Xavier demonstrates telekinesis randomly in one scene and then never again. Magneto’s entire schtick is magnetism, but he regularly creates forcefields to protect against things magnetism shouldn’t have any effect on. (Can he deflect lightning? Sure! But bricks and punches? Seriously?) The characters get their powers from a special gene, but Betsy Braddock switches bodies and somehow maintains her powers. Don’t get me wrong, the Flash is often guilty of this sort of thing also, and comic writers have no understanding of the relative weight differences between a person and a train, but it’s so very noticeable even within the same story arcs here.
Ultimate Annuals – A collection of the annuals for each of the Ultimate books, which are an extremely mixed bag. Peter Parker and Kitty Pryde starting their relationship is the best thing in here; everything else is kind of forgettable.
Marvel Knights Spider-Man (volumes 1-3) – A 12-issue story that attempts to re-frame Norman Osborn’s relationship with Peter and the greater scope of super-villains in the world, which I’m sure was thoroughly ignored by everyone subsequently. It pulled in too many threads and tried to change too much of the lore (JJJ gets convinced his son is Spider-Man and vows to only be positive about him in the future; Eddie Brock dies and the Venom symbiote gets passed on; a whole bunch of classic villains get re-vamped; etc etc) and was honestly overstuffed. I see that Millar was trying to write an “iconic” Spider-Man story; I don’t think he succeeded. I think the thing that irritated me most, though, was that in the big fight against the Sinister Twelve when Peter thinks he’s going to die...he survives because MJ calls the Avengers out of the blue. That’s a direct violation of the rule that the hero needs to save the day, and especially since they don’t even show the villains fighting the Avengers, it makes the buildup to the Sinister Twelve pointless.
Transformers: Matrix Quest - The middle of a run of the Marvel Transformers comics published in the UK in which everyone is searching for the Creation Matrix that was lost with Optimus' original body when he died. It starts on the second half of a two-parter but at least most of the stories stand alone?
Ultra: Seven Days - A soap opera superhero piece by the Luna Brothers, centering around a Latina superwoman and her two best friends, surrounded by standard superhero characters with their serial numbers filed off. On one hand, I can see they were going for a “the media circus hurts young women who are just trying to be normal and do their best” vibe, but their knowledge of how women interact with each other clearly comes from media tropes and not actual women.
Judgement Day - A storyline that was clearly the End of an Era for the Youngblood, written by Alan Moore (and centering around the sort of meta comics fiction he loves) and mostly drawn by Rob Liefeld (and boy, does that show. There's no mistaking Liefeld's mockery of the human form). The last issue is a tribute to Gil Kane.
WildC.A.T.S. A Gathering of Eagles - A jam-packed mess of fight scenes that barely makes sense knowing all the characters already. Oh Chris Claremont, you really know how to write a "standalone" story that can't be followed without years of unrelated backstory material.
WildC.A.T.S./Cyberforce: Killer Instinct - Yeah, between the stupid fold-out pages and the 90s inhuman anatomy, and the fact I don't particularly care about either team, I'm just giving up on this.
The New York Five – I’m 90% sure I’ve read this before (it’s a Vertigo comic), but I had no memory of it or the first volume, The New York Four. And honestly, it’s too short and too piecemeal to really work as a story. It’s a collection of emotional moments for four (plus one) college girls, but it doesn’t actually give them enough time to earn the impact any of them would have. Maybe it works better if you read the first volume?
Pride of Baghdad – The story of four lions in a zoo in Baghdad, on the day when the sky falls and the keepers scatter. It’s not a happy story, but it’s a clever one (apparently based on a real headline).
I think that's pretty much all from the box I'm really still interested in. There's a bunch of New X-Men, Avengers: The Initiative, and some Civil War and World War Hulk stuff, but I think I've had my fill. (There's also about half of The Boys collected, but my dad has the full run so I'll just read his copies and review them later.)
Overall: It’s nice to actually read an era of Marvel books I hadn’t before and re-read a bunch of bits and pieces of other 90s material, but I can see why Xannoside was ready to let the collection go.
