Dark Rift Epoch Mega 1
Vanina Mazzillo
He felt that this is one of his best art jobs, since he had no emotional investment whatsoever in the characters, so for him it was all about stretching his artistic muscles....I must say that this is probably his best use of Duo-Shade ever.
Marvel Comics Presents #77-79 (Dracula/Nick Fury)This is one of the stories that I remember well from MCP. This is what the various stories should have been; crazy team-ups and fun concepts rather than solo character filler material.
Marvel Comics Presents #77-79 (Dracula/Nick Fury)This story is completely inconsistent with both real world history and Marvel continuity.
Let's start with Marvel continuity. Pam Hawley supposedly lived until 1943, according to Doctor Strange 50-51, and the Howlers didn't meet Koenig until after Pam was dead. So this can't take place in July 1942.
Next, let's go to real history. Transylvania's Jews and Gypsies were not sent to German concentration camps near Transylvania in 1942. Many of them were deported to Romanian controlled areas of Transnistria. (In 1944, the Jews and Gypsies in Hungarian-controlled regions of Transylvania were sent to Auschwitz, which is in Poland, nowhere near Transylvania.)
Meanwhile the other Avengers travel back to the Kree homeworld of Hala, where we see the Kree, as primitive barbarians (there's a mistake in the panel below, as acknowledged in the lettercol for issue #139.
Captain Marvel #37-39I remember reading from somewhere that the Year Zero Kree being pink was indeed a colouring mistake. Maybe it was even corrected in the Celestial Madonna TPB? I don't have my copy at hand right now, so I can't check whether the Kree are still pink in that.
Marvel Comics Presents #42 (Union Jack & DotD)"Poof" is one of those cases where it just gets a 'pass' from North American audiences. I've noticed it get used a few times in BUFFY and the spin-off ANGEL (usually by Spike), both in the live-action tv and the current comic book continuation of the series.
Marvel Comics Presents #42 (Union Jack & DotD)The art is Ye Olde English Caricature-y, but Nicieza's script, while not good, isn't as outmoded, and a rough "working class hero" like Chapman might well have called a posh hero like Captain Britain a "political poof," in the way, say, Captain Teamster in the U.S. circa 1990 would probably have some politically incorrect language in his repertoire. It's not hard to imagine USAgent (in his Superpatriot days, at least) calling someone, say, a "liberal pansy,"
Captain Marvel #37-39I've always thought it was odd that Steve Englehart was telling this story with its subplot concerning the remaining few "full-blooded blue Kree" at the exact same time he was revealing the origins of the Kree Empire in Avengers #133-134, simply because in those Avengers issues, all of the Kree we see inhabiting the Kree Year Zero onward are colored exactly the same as Mar-Vell, i.e. white or pink. I don't think there's a single blue-skinned Kree on display in those Avengers issues. Yet here we're being told that all the Kree were blue-skinned way back when. I wonder if Englehart forgot to mention all of this to the colorist on Avengers.
Fantastic Four #233This is one of the stories that confirms there is capital punishment in the usa of the MU. I was always a bit unsure because some villains should have been up for it at some point (I can think of plenty of villains who would be eligible, even in the early 80s).
The only other story of the era that deals with capital punishment is when Marc Gruenwald very foolishly thinks Germany has a death penalty. Basic research, Mark. No EU country has capital punishment.
Fantastic Four #39-40The green suit with eyepieces that Johnny wears looks a lot like the ones used by the Human Torch's opponents in Marvel Mystery Comics #4. In the Golden Age story, the flame was also green, but I still think this might be an intentional homage.
As for these issues, there are some bits I like, but the conceit that leads to them is just so dumb. The FF are desperately trying to train and mechanically approximate their lost powers to give themselves a chance at survival if an enemy attacks... when they could have just used the stimulator and bam, powers restored.
It's not even some old piece of equipment that could reasonably have been forgotten, they used it to get their powers back just two issues prior. Instead they dick around with all this other equipment, nearly get killed, then suddenly remember in #40, "oh yeah, we have a raygun that does that."
Spider-Man #18-23Especially after reading everyone else's comments, I see this story as a harbinger of the kinds of things Geoff Johns does at DC and some Marvel writers do today: taking Silver Age concepts and "updating" them by retaining the colorful and goofy aspects, as well as "good vs. evil" monochrome morality, but adding ultraviolence to the mix.
Larsen was of course doing this well before Johns ever wrote a comic, and there are hints of it int he early issues of Mackie's Ghost Rider, as fnord notes in those reviews. But it's really with Johns that it becomes a widespread technique.
Thor #312-314Yeah, like Chris said, this is just a complete misuse of the Tyr character. Not only was his personality the exact opposite of what's shown in this arc, but his power level in relation to Thor is completely off. I guess Moench was just looking for a "name" character to use and decided Tyr was enough of a blank slate that he could give him this "obsessed with Sif" motivation and not overwrite anything established in Marvel continuity... even if it flew in the face of everything that Norse mythology had to say. I really think it would have been much better if Tyr were somehow under a spell of Loki's, even if that would have invalidated the "carrying a torch for Sif" aspect. Tyr should have come out of this storyline as a strong ally of Thor, not the weasel he's depicted as here.
I also need to re-acquaint myself with Marvel's "Nine Worlds" cosmology and how it differs from the actual canon (though it isn't fully clear there, either). At the end of their confrontation, Odin tells Hela to return to "Niffleheim." Spelling aside, Niflheim and Hel (where Hela rules) should be completely separate places. I assume he meant "Nilfhel," which is the lowest level of Hel.
Spider-Man #18-23Re: the Sinister Six and capital punishment- Larsen was careful to put the lab they destroyed in Manhattan. New York doesn't have the death penalty. Since the lab was government owned, they could have tried for a federal death penalty but at the time this story was written the federal government hadn't executed anyone in 29 years.
Alpha Flight #93-94John Byrne answered tgat question wonderfully in his second issue as writer on Fantastic Four. He does stuff like fly up and punch them by selectively extinguishing his fists, create a cage of fire to hold them while he calls the police, and so forth.
Amazing Spider-Man #344Cardiac's powers are very similar to a much earlier David Michelinie character created at DC called Pulsar. Like Cardiac, he was a cyborg empowered by an artificial heart and used a staff to shoot energy blasts. He was also African-American, for what it's worth. Here is his second and final appearance.
No one one remembers him because he appeared in the utterly terrible Karate Kid series, a spinoff of the Legion of Super-Heroes that was one of DC's very, very clumsy answers to the Bruce Lee fad (and presumably Marvel books like Iron Fist and Master of Kung-Fu.)
Contemporary Nazi stories bored me at this point. I liked the Red Skull, but honestly how many thawed Nazis do you need in the modern day? Still, I thought it was entertaining, and I liked the idea of an Invaders reunion even though the team has no reason to exist nowadays.
Given how many powerful Nazis seemingly escaped justice in comic-book universes, up to and including Hitler himself (via cloning and so forth), you have to wonder how much of a victory it really felt like. And then there's the sheer number of comic-book Neo-Nazi groups, all of them absurdly well-funded and well-connected.
But then, as Tom Lehrer pointed out brilliantly, the very existence of World War II nostalgia is a rather odd thing in some respects. "Hey, remember that time there were a bunch of dictatorships and invasions and genocides and then a lot of people had to die to stop most of them? Good times!"
Spider-Man #18-23I am a HUGE fan of Erik Larsen... but I am not really a fan of this particular story. For me, "Revenge of the Sinister Six" is the perfect example of why Larsen's sensibilities and ideas work so much better on his creator-owned series Savage Dragon than on a book like Spider-Man, which is set firmly in the Marvel universe.
The fact that the Sinister Six commit mass murder in this story really should have earned all of them the death penalty. But these are all classic Spider-Man foes dating back to the early 1960s, so of course we aren't going to see any of them get the electric chair.
Larsen would later do similar stories in Savage Dragon, with massive superhero battles causing widespread death & destruction, but since he owns all the characters he was able to show lasting, long-term consequences in them.
Likewise the scene at the end where crystalized Sandman shreds Doctor Octopus into a bloody mess, nearly killing him. As I recall Larsen later said he did that as a challenge to the next writer to figure out how to bring back Doc Ock. Instead, the next time we see the character is in an issue of Incredible Hulk where, aside from a few band aids on his face, Octopus is completely back to normal. Oh, yeah, and he's also back to being an incompetent loser who gets defeated by the Hulk in one page, because Peter David totally disagreed with the Hulk getting such a beating in this story.
On the other hand, in Savage Dragon, Larsen could totally upend the status quo for any of his characters, leave them maimed or dead or whatever, and then would not have to worry about all of that being completely ignored two months later in the pages of Spawn or Youngblood.
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