Sunday Marvel Sunday - Postponed

Obviously I'm posting this on a Monday, which for a feature titled "Sunday Marvel Sunday" already means something has gone horribly wrong.  Which is called COVID-19.  Which has now robbed millions of the unlikelihood of reading "Sunday Marvel Sunday."  For the time-being.  See you later!

Sunday Marvel Sunday "Marvel Super Hero Adventures #1"

Marvel Super Hero Adventures #1

I think we can agree that there are areas where Marvel definitely outperforms DC.  Being the most consistently most popular superhero comics publisher.  Being the most consistently most popular superhero movie studio (at least in the past decade).  But DC wins some, too.  It does animation better, on TV and video releases.  Um, that's probably it.  Because Marvel has never come even close to that.  The only Marvel cartoons I've ever been interested in were Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and X-Men, and they were decades ago, and...that's pretty much true of everyone.

So in order to do a comic like this, Marvel has to...Anyway, it may work for young readers, but not for older ones.  There is one thing from the comic I really enjoyed, and that was Ty Templeton's Daily Bugle Funnies, parodies of actual comic strips with Marvel characters: the Spider-Man Peanuts, the Thor Hagar the Horrible, the Peter Parker Dilbert, the Ant-Man Little Orphan Annie (which was the oddest creative choice, not because of Ant-Man but because of...Little Orphan Annie???).  Templeton has done these before, and will in all likelihood do them again, and the irony of it is that I know him from...comics versions of DC animation. 

Anyway, this example isn't from this comic, but here it is anyway:


(reproduced "large," which will hopefully satisfy Bill Watterson)

Sunday Marvel Sunday "Marvel Comics Presents #1 (2019)"

 

Marvel Comics Presents #1

Hurm.  Blogger's not letting me customize image placement like normal.  And Google was no help in finding the blue-border variant cover I had.  Well.

I think I bought my first copy of this at a mall about a year ago.  I got this one in one of the Walmart three-packs, of course.  I didn't necessarily mind buying, or reading, it again, as it contains a nifty Namor story.

This is significant in that Marvel, inexplicably, hardly ever actually does Namor stories.  It's bizarre, since Namor is a great character, and he's also one of Marvel's oldest.  As a DC guy, this is one of the most obvious differences between the companies.  Even if DC used Namor like the Justice Society or the Spectre or Phantom Stranger, he'd still, at this point, have a far bigger and greater legacy behind him.  And yet, at Marvel, he receives minimal attention, year after year, decade after decade.

Marvel will probably tell you that it's because, from its perspective, he's kind of...a villain.  He's kind of Marvel's Black Adam.  But he doesn't even, or was never given, a heroic counterpart.  This is equally ridiculous.  But even without one, he could very easily have been drafted into, I don't know, X-Men comics.  Which of course never happened.  At DC, meanwhile, of course there's Aquaman, and you'd maybe think that over the years someone at Marvel might glance over and see what a huge legacy even the guy routinely lampooned for "talking to fish" has, and say, "Maybe we can do something?"

But.  No.

Even when there's great examples, like this (in this instance, contributed by Greg Pak, who was also the guy to finally break Hulk free from a storied but useless legacy, by the way), in which Namor is confronted by WWII, and the US government's big secret, the atomic bomb.  Pak has Namor turning his back on the surface world because of it.  It's a pitch-perfect story, and even makes Namor's traditional outlook perfectly rational. 

And yet...Look, this is one of those things I'd do my damnest to correct, given half a chance.  I just don't understand wasting such potential.

Sunday Marvel Sunday "Infinity Wars: Iron Hammer #1"

Infinity Wars: Iron Hammer #1

Marvel didn't completely ignore the MCU (besides the many Guardians of the Galaxy comics that conspicuously populated after the movie's smash success).  There was also Infinity Wars.

Technically, revisiting the Infinity Gauntlet saga has been continuing for years, thanks in large part to Jim Starlin, although just as technically, fans have never been all that interested in Starlin's follow-ups.  Infinity Wars, which happened to coincide with the MCU finally, finally getting back to Thanos, collecting all those Infinity Stones, is exactly what you might expect: another story about the Infinity Stones, who has them, what they're doing with them.

Turns out, turning Marvel into its own Amalgam Comics.  Amalgam was the result of the landmark DC Versus Marvel (or, Marvel Versus DC) that happened in the '90s, in which, temporarily, in a series of one-shots (and then a second series of one-shots), DC and Marvel superheroes were mashed together.  I guess it's not surprising that the whole thing came and went and has left no real impact (aside from quibbles about who should've fought who, and who should've won, which I will not get into here), since it would require both companies to continue to agree on republishing the results, and that's not likely to happen.  Marvel, in collected edition, lives in a virtually perpetual present while DC loves revisiting its past.  (Of course, half of what made Marvel such a fan favorite phenomenon was that reboots never happened.  Then of course they started happening.  All.  The.  Time.  So that, even if technically everything still happened, it really no longer matters.  The only property with a semblance of real continuity at this point is the X-Men.)

Anyway, so as you might guess, this "Infinity Warp" mashes Iron Man with Thor.

The results are decent.  The writer is Al Ewing, who is definitely one of Marvel's best assets at the moment, so that certainly helps.  And it helps that he doesn't go too on-the-nose, which is what Thor comics tend to do, leaning far too heavily on the archaic language Thor tends to use for...reasons, and not having any real clue what to do with the mythology (but then, even Neil Gaiman didn't know what to do with Norse mythology when he literally wrote Norse Mythology, a striking contrast to how he used it in The Sandman).