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.
With Namor's movie rights tangled up somewhere else there's probably not much impetus to do a lot with him. The Invaders series by Zdarsky is good from what I read. It kinda borrowed from the Ocean Master Aquaman comics that largely informed the movie.
ReplyDeleteMovie rights have nothing to do with the comics. Even when Blade was the only thing Marvel movies had going for them, he was still stuck in the same interminable comics limbo.
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