comicbooks

Um, did I miss something?  The promos for Mighty Avengers #20 promised two things: a Thor guest appearance and a surprise ending that no one would see coming.   Thor appeared, that’s true.  It was a good guest shot, too.  He showed up at The Wasp’s funeral and gave a nice eulogy of sorts.  Then he hauled Hank Pym off for a private time of mourning, away from the media circus that her funeral had become.

The surprise?  Honestly, I don’t know what it was.  This isn’t like the surprise at the end of Batman 680 which wasn’t very surprising, but at least I knew that revelation that Jezebel Jett was really the Black Glove was the surprise.  Here?  I honestly don’t know.  That Hank Pym was angry with Tony Stark?  That he chastised him at the funeral?  Hawkeye yelling at Norman Osborn?  Osborn smiling a little?  This has to be the biggest oversell I can ever remember in comics promotion.

Ranting aside, it wasn’t a bad issue.  Not at all.  But you can’t promise something that big and deliver absolutely nothing without disappointing some fans.  Fans with blogs; I’m just saying.

Final Crisis #5 was the least convoluted and confusing issue to date, which is a little bit like saying that Katrina was the least destructive category five hurricane to hit New Orleans a couple years back.

I’m still shelling out four bucks a pop for this mess, but I don’t know why.   Wonder Woman, the character featured on the cover, appears only briefly in the comic, and only in possessed by Darkseid, female fury form.  Superman was removed from the fray a couple of issues back and has yet to return.  Batman is nowhere to be seen.  But don’t worry, we’ve got… Frankenstein on our side?

Even with the big bad Darkseid enslaving half the planet, this just doesn’t feel Crisis-y enough.  One major reason is the aforementioned absence of Superman.

Two more issues.  I really hope something happens.  Something big.  Something that makes me say ‘wow’.  Something that would fit in oh, say, Secret Invasion.  At least Superman Beyond #2 comes out next month.  Although it has been so long since I read #1 that I forget what’s happening over there.

DC, oh DC.  How I miss the good old days.  The John Byrne era when Superman was the last son of Krypton.  The reinvention of the Dark Knight.  The magnificent seven Justice League.  Now all you seem to do is retread the silver age and indulge writers whose egos have outgrown their mass appeal.

Dare I hope that the ‘new’ Batman will take us into new territory?  Speaking of which, tomorrow we’ll dish about the simply awful new Batman: the Brave and the Bold animated series.

How good was Secret Invasion?  That whole mini-series rocked from start to finish.  After reading the last issue, I am left with a couple of unanswered questions, though.

Niggly question #1  - how did Hawkeye (the teenage chick, not the real one) go from almost dead to walking around and talking in, like, five minutes?

Niggly question #2 - Why did Nick Fury snub Dum Dum and the Contessa?  I admit that I don’t know much about these SHIELD characters, but I just didn’t get that at all.

Mockingbird is back!  Woo hoo!  (I know that’s not a question, but still - woo hoo!)

So the Secret Invasion mega-crossover is flowing directly into the Dark Reign meg-crossover?  I’d be annoyed about that, but SI was so good & Dark Reign looks so promising, I’m just psyched.

Is Emma Frost a bad guy now?  What about Namor?

I can’t wait to start Dark Reign.

Batman R.I.P.

Taken as a whole, Batman R.I.P. was an OK Batman story.  I haven’t been reading the Batman titles regularly, so I was lost on a lot of the historical references.  Apparently, somewhere in the past, Batman went into a cave (not the Batcave, but a regular cave) for awhile.  Apparently, somebody programmed him with a post-hypnotic suggestion so they could later erase his Batman persona.  Apparently, he planned ahead in case of such an emergency and created a backup personality, which just happens to be loopy as a fruitnut. 

In the end, Batman is still Batman.  He had it all figured out and was well in control of the situation, even when chained and buried alive.  DC isn’t even pretending that Bruce is dead, since the casebook was written by him.  He’ll be back.  The big mystery is: who will be the temporary Batman until Bruce returns?

Probably Nightwing.  And they’ll probably kill him off.  Word is that they wanted to off Dick Grayson during Final Crisis, but decided to do Superboy instead. 

Batman R.I.P. was a good-enough story, but failed to live up to the hype.  DC’s press material said that we wouldn’t believe the ending.  I’m not even sure what aspect they’re referring to.  There was nothing shocking or special at all.  There was a nice full-page panel of Nightwing holding the Batman cowl, though.  At least that’s something…

Quicksilver is a tool in any universe.  In the MMU, he was a bad guy, then a good guy, then bad, then good, then baddish, and now he’s just… out there.  He lost his speed powers and has the power to restart  the powers of de-powered mutants.

In the Ultimate Universe, he’s a teenager who was bad then good then kind of bad then dead.  As mentioned in Round 22, he and his sister have a relationship that is either creepy or just plain sick.  Not sure which it was, but now they’re both dead, at least for the moment.  I suspect they will both be back.

Winner - MMU Quicksilver, but it’s nothing to be proud of.  Both versions of Quicksilver suck.  MMU Quicksilver just sucks slightly less.

Tomorrow - We take a break to review Batman R.I.P.

Both versions of the Scarlet Witch share the same basic origin and powers.  She is the daughter of Magneto, with the power to alter reality.  She started out bad and turned good.

In the Main Marvel Universe, she turned bad again.   Driven mostly insane when she was reminded that she once had children (sort of), she went on a behind-the-scenes reality-altering rampage that destroyed the Avengers.  Really, that’s what happened.  When the gig was up, she warped reality farther, creating the whole House of M mess.  Then, she got mad and undid it all.  Now, she is living a quiet life in Europe with seemingly no memory of her past life.  When Hawkeye went to seek her out, the two of them did the nasty but resolved nothing.

Ultimate Scarlet Witch is an insanely-hot, teenaged version of the character.  Unfortunately, the creepy, possibly incestuous relationship she has with her brother negates most of her coolness.  Plus, she’s currently dead. 

Winner – MMU Scarlet Witch

Tomorrow - Quicksilver

MMU Bishop: Born in a dystopian future where Mutants have been hunted near extinction, he traveled back through time to stop the one incident that lead to his predicament – the death of the X-Men.  He completed his mission when he prevented Onslaught from killing his companions.  Then he became a cop for a while.  Now he’s turned into something of a bad guy, intent on killing a little baby because he thinks SHE is the cause of his bleak future.  Maybe he didn’t read the Onslaught story line. 

Ultimate Bishop is an older version of a character currently incarcerated in the Ultimate Universe.   While he gets points for eventually marrying Ultimate Psyloche, he is little more than a tool for Ultimate Cable and he quickly got himself killed.

Winner – MMU Bishop

Tomorrow – The Scarlett Witch!

Charles Francis Xavier – the most powerful telepath on the planet, except that there are now a ton of other telepaths that seem just as if not more powerful – is the founder and sometimes leader of the X-Men.  He was once close friends with Magneto, but their fundamental disagreement lead to Xavier being confined to a wheelchair.  In the MMU, his creepy, inappropriate feelings for a teenaged Jean Grey caused him to turn into Onslaught and led to the temporary ‘deaths’ of many of the world’s superheroes.  In the Ultimate universe, his creepy, inappropriate feelings for a teenaged Jean Grey just led to Scott Summers getting a little mad.

MMU Professor X’s legs got better, then he suffered another accident that put him back in a wheelchair.  Then he regained the use of his legs but lost his telepathy, but then he got his telepathy back.   

Ultimate Xavier was first shown to be more devious than his MMU counterpart, but with all the retcons of MMU Professor X over the years, that doesn’t really hold up anymore.  Both are pretty willing to use their powers to mess with other people’s minds.  Ultimate Prof X just doesn’t protest otherwise as much as the MMU version.

Winner – Ultimate Professor X

Tomorrow – Bishop!

Magneto is an extremely powerful mutant bad guy.  He and Charles Xavier were once friends, but their ideals took them down different roads.  I guess you could say the friendship was officially over the day that Mags severed Chuck’s spine.

The MMU Magneto has been dead (but it didn’t take), reformed (likewise, didn’t take), de-aged (but not really, that was another guy), dead again (another guy again, but a different other guy), and de-powered (in M-Day - guaranteed not to last very long).

The Ultimate Magneto may be even more powerful than his MMU Counterpart ever was.  As of this writing, he has recently slapped Thor silly & stolen his hammer, and is now on a quest to wipe out most of Earth’s population.  From the looks of Ultimatum #1, he’s got the power to back that plan up.  He’s mad as heck that his kids got offed and he’s not gonna take it anymore.  Oh, yeah, and his wife was TOTALLY smoking hot.

Winner - Ultimate Magneto.

Tomorrow - Gambit

This is a tough one for me.   Both versions started out with essentially the same origin.  The Beast initially looked basically human, with some brutish characteristics.  Then he was forcibly mutated further into the classic fuzzy blue version.  Then he was de-mutated back to the brutish look.  The Ultimate Beast is holding at that point now.  The MMU Beast was un-de-mutated back to the fuzzy blue look, then secondarily re-un-de-muated to a cat-like “Beauty and the Beast” version of the character.

The Beast was among the most enjoyable characters in the Marvel Universe.  Then Grant Morrison got a hold of him and turned him into the dour grumpy cat dude he is today.

The Ultimate Beast was dead for a good while.  His resurrection story (he almost died, but didn’t, Professor X & Nick Fury conspired to keep him hidden so he could work on a cure for the legacy virus) kind of sucked.   As of this writing, he may or may not be dead again thanks to Ultimatum.

Winner – Classic MMU Beast.  Way better than the current MMU Beast of the maybe-maybe-not dead Ultimate version

Tomorrow – Magneto!