Bunn got some slick stuff coming up in Uncanny X-MenAwesome Hulk gonna have to take on Fin Fang Foom
And whats good tho with the new Uncanny X-Men? Theyre like a new X-Force unit or something?
Thats fukked up how they got Archangel tho
Essential The Official Comic Book Discussion Thread [Support @Neuromancer’s book!]
- Thread starter MenacingMonk
- Start date
Nope, he's alive and well and the primary villain for Sunspot's Avengers team.
Dillah810
Flat Girther
Yeah it's weird that they got Uncanny X-Men acting more like X-Force. Extraordinary X-Men is more in the vein of Uncanny X-Men than the new Uncanny X-Men is.And whats good tho with the new Uncanny X-Men? Theyre like a new X-Force unit or something?
Thats fukked up how they got Archangel tho
It's like Ewing gets it but doesn't get it. He gets that having a big villain reveal is a great cliff hanger but he doesn't get that no one really gives a crap about Anti-Man like that, so it falls flat. He gets that Carol and Monica should be having girl talk but doesn't get that "it's complicated, ms gossip" immediately followed by more scientific power fluff talk doesn't cultivate any back story, juiciness or interest in either character, so that falls flat.
Right now these characters don't come across as very compatible with each other, and seem pretty 1 dimensional. If Anti-Man is the cause of the first major division between BM and the rest of the team, then we gotta see more emotional and charisma on page for #4, and less science talk
Right now these characters don't come across as very compatible with each other, and seem pretty 1 dimensional. If Anti-Man is the cause of the first major division between BM and the rest of the team, then we gotta see more emotional and charisma on page for #4, and less science talk
Jmare007
pico pal q lee
Finally read Secret Wars #9. shyt was 
after so many underwhelming endings I was satisfied with this big Marvel event, this actually felt like a real ending. Loved Hickman run's in charge of the Avengers/Marvel. It's still fukk Reed Richards though 
So uh, brehs...what are 2-3 books I should read to get a grasp of this "new" universe before I start reading The Ultimates?
after so many underwhelming endings I was satisfied with this big Marvel event, this actually felt like a real ending. Loved Hickman run's in charge of the Avengers/Marvel. It's still fukk Reed Richards though So uh, brehs...what are 2-3 books I should read to get a grasp of this "new" universe before I start reading The Ultimates?
Wargames
One Of The Last Real Ones To Do It
Quick question to anyone up and current on ANAD Marvel. I'm trying to catch up on ANAD marvel cause I decided to take a hiatus until SW #9 came out.
Right now beyond the ultimates, Vision, and Dr. Strange what books are worth picking up? With Hickman and Remender gone I don't even have fall back writers at Marvel. So I'm open to just about any book (even a Bendis book).
Right now beyond the ultimates, Vision, and Dr. Strange what books are worth picking up? With Hickman and Remender gone I don't even have fall back writers at Marvel. So I'm open to just about any book (even a Bendis book).
I'm enjoying Squadron Supreme, Illuminati(Though the art might be a turn off for some people), Totally Awesome Hulk.Quick question to anyone up and current on ANAD Marvel. I'm trying to catch up on ANAD marvel cause I decided to take a hiatus until SW #9 came out.
Right now beyond the ultimates, Vision, and Dr. Strange what books are worth picking up? With Hickman and Remender gone I don't even have fall back writers at Marvel. So I'm open to just about any book (even a Bendis book).
Check out Invincible Iron Man some people like it
TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
Yeah, I've been saying this. And the same goes for New Avengers, except it's less science talk and more interactions that fall flat. I think that although he understands how comics work, he simply doesn't have it.
I'm turnt on the SECRET WARS ending. I feel.like I should be more familiar with Hickman's whole New Avengers/Avengers run and I didn't feel that way for 1-8.
What should I check out, brehs?
What should I check out, brehs?
MenacingMonk
Tranquilo
Reading Space Punisher. Got damn this shyt is 
Best book Marvel is putting out right now is Vision.
Dillah810
Flat Girther
Interesting article about Secret Wars being a metaphor for creative control/decisions of Marvel Comics
Here's the gist: Reed Richards and a small group of similarly gifted (and morally compromised) genius superheroes are trying to stop the collapse of the many universes of Marvel. They fail, destroying universes and alienating their superhero peers along the way. The only person able to figure out what is happening and how to stop it is the villain, Doctor Doom, who manages to combine the destroyed realities into a new, fragmented world where he sets himself up as the ultimate ruler, hero, and God figure. (For unexplained, probably psychological reasons, the only thing his power cannot repair is his own damaged face, which he continues to hide behind a mask.) Doom also replaces Reed as Susan's husband and Franklin and Valeria's father, remaking his arch enemy's family as his own. Meanwhile, Reed and a small group of other superheroes manage to survive the end of their universe to discover that Susan, the children, and the other superheroes weren't destroyed, but live on in a patchwork parody of their former lives.
If you think that sounds like a crazy blend of cosmology, metafictional self-commentary, and a complex, moving human drama, you're absolutely right. But it's not unique to Secret Wars — these are exactly the elements that the Fantastic Four brought to comics from the beginning, completely reshaping the pop culture that followed. DC's The Flash interjected fantastic science and kicked off the Silver Age, Spider-Man went deeper into everyman angst, and S.H.I.E.L.D. and Doctor Strange went into full psychedelia. But nothing pulled all these themes together like Fantastic Four.
As both a conclusion to the story and a commentary on the problems of managing a world of imaginary heroes, Hickman and Ribic's endgame is remarkably elegant. And it culminates in a fight between Reed and Doom — a physical and psychological battle where every line exchanged has double or triple meanings.
Doom wants Reed to appreciate all that he saved from total destruction. "Your entire life, you have been distracted with the modern concerns so precious to you and your kind... when all that matters is survival." "Nothing has ever been easy." Reed responds, "you know what's not easy? Having your life erased because someone wants to indulge themselves." It's an argument about the realities of business weighed against values and loyalty. But Doom wants to be loved, too. He wants Reed to admit that Reed has always thought himself better than Doom. Reed's response is perfect: "I've always believed that you could be better than what you are."
Doom's sin, which Reed identifies and Doom eventually confesses, is that he is "so afraid of losing the things you've saved that you hold them too tight." He may as well be talking to Marvel fans. Doom's imagination is too limited to be a leader: as Black Panther tells him earlier, "raising up a new [Marvel Universe] would require a vision you just don't possess." The metafictional message is obvious: a world needs to grow and evolve, not simply cycle through every conceivable permutation of conflict between existing properties, like a child bashing action figures together. Doom finally admits that with the same power, tempered by compassion and guided by imagination, Reed would have done a better job at saving everything. At this, the Molecule Man transfers his power from Doom to Reed, and everything changes.
With Molecule Man's power — which literally and metaphorically, is full creative control of the Marvel Universe — Reed, Susan, and their children work to restore reality. It's not aCrisis on Infinite Earths-style condensation into one timeline and continuity. The Marvel and Ultimate Universes are merged into a new Prime Universe, but the possibility of exploring other dimensions remains. And that's the cause to which the Richards family chooses to devote themselves.
When Franklin Richards asks his dad, "are we not superheroes anymore?" Reed responds, "it's doing good that counts, not necessarily how you do it... So, no... No more superheroes for a while, just science. And no more Mister Fantastic, just Dad." Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm have their own adventures to come, adding legitimacy to newly viable franchises. But Reed's family remains a family. These explorers have the opportunity, away from the prying eyes of movie studios and entertainment companies looking to exploit them, to continue greater explorations than anything imaginable in a comic booknot titled Fantastic Four.
"GREAT SOCIETIES ARE CRUMBLING AROUND US, AND THE OLD MEN WHO RUN THEM ARE OUT OF IDEAS."
The first character to return to the newly restored Prime Universe is T'Challa, the Black Panther. He returns to the moment just before the collapse began, in New AvengersVolume 3 Issue 1, a Hickman-written comic that was released more than three years ago. He briefly seems to remember what's happened, but resumes where he left off on this timeline, meeting with a group of teenage Wakandans to plan their exploration of a distant solar system and launch a new satellite. It's a passing of the torch. T'Challa takes Reed Richards' mantle as the preeminent scientist superhero who solves the problems no one else can. Meanwhile we see Peter Parker and Miles Morales, two generations of Spider-Man, begin to fight crime and meditate on power and responsibility. The fact that T'Challa and Morales are characters of color is not an accident. The old and new are joined and reconciled.
"Great societies are crumbling around us," says Black Panther, "and the old men who run them are out of ideas. So all eyes turn to you, our children — to build us something better."
We learn from T'Challa that in light of the rest of the world abandoning exploration, "Wakanda now possesses the preeminent space program on the planet." Hickman's played with this theme before: in Fantastic Four 579, Reed Richards shocks attendees of a TED-like event called the Singularity Conference for their narrow vision and warnings of global calamity. "The future of man is not one billion of us fighting over limited resources on a soon-to-be-dead planet, but one trillion human beings spanning an entire galaxy," he says. "The future of man is not here. It is out there. Because it's our new horizon. Because it's what's next." Mister Fantastic and the Fantastic Four can't exist in a world resigned to its own destruction, content with merely holding onto whatever's left.
Fantastic Four was first published in 1961. It was a time of both apprehension and optimism, particularly for science, and for which space exploration was the ultimate symbol of progress. The four characters get their powers in a space flight accident. They become heroes; they become monsters. They remain scientists and explorers, above all of the farthest reaches of outer space. The Kree, the Skrulls, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Thanos, even later the Inhumans, and the entire cosmic backdrop of Guardians of the Galaxy all appear in Marvel Comics because of the space exploration of the Fantastic Four (and sometimes the Avengers. The fundamental assumption of Fantastic Four is that human space exploration would continue, that it would be led by heroes, and the places, creatures, and objects they encounter would enrich all of our lives.
This assumption is no longer viable, both in real life and in fiction. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet to depict the human exploration of space that characterized so much of the early franchises. (Guardians of the Galaxy's Peter Quill is a half-human, half-alien, and he was kidnapped by aliens rather than electing to become an intergalactic traveler.) Outer space, and encounters with aliens, are threatening enough to give Tony Stark symptoms of PTSD, and prompts his and Bruce Banner's creation of Ultron as a first line of defense. [Spoiler: that doesn't work out.] Outside the Marvel Universe, movies like Interstellar, Gravity, and The Martian all emphasize the dangers and inhumanity of space, almost certainly more accurately than the classic Fantastic Four, but with a corresponding imaginative cost. Even Star Wars, a direct descendant of Jack Kirby's work on Fantastic Fourfor Marvel and New Gods for DC, is necessarily set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Our human heroes are now rarely explorers in a conventional sense, and technology and inequality have largely replaced science and the unknown as the fundamental problem explored in superhero stories. Our heroes are soldiers like Captain America, inventors like Iron Man, or gifted-but-ordinary people solving problems at a smaller scale, like Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones. The Marvel Universe is more earthbound than it's ever been, and that's why the Fantastic Four can no longer interact with the universe they founded and shaped — it's no longer big enough to contain their ambitions.
In Breevort's eyes, this is just a part of an ongoing cycle. "At different points in time, different characters and concepts have struck sparks in the public consciousness, when at other times they haven't been so successful." But, he points out, the MCU is slowly becoming less bound by realism, with Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and the Black Panther and Inhumans movies around the corner. Science, mysticism, alternate dimensions, secret cities, outer space: the Marvel Universe is getting bigger, weirder, and more fantastic in a hurry. "We live in a world in which Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy are blockbuster movies," says Breevort. "So I think it's only a matter of time until we see [the Fantastic Four] again."
"NOSTALGIA BY ITSELF ISN'T ENOUGH."
But if the Fantastic Four are to return, they have to returned transformed. As Breevort says, "nostalgia by itself isn't enough." The very real threat of nuclear apocalypse might have pointed an earlier generation's imagination to the stars, but our apocalypse is here, in the form of climate change. The futurists Reed chastises for focusing on the world's immediate economic needs are not entirely wrong. Even Doctor Doom is not entirely wrong. Reed and his family had to be erased from existence for him, and for the readers, to recognize that.
"I've learned that the difference between living and dying is managing fear," Reed Richards tells his wife Susan, shortly before they are ushered off stage, possibly forever. "Not being so afraid of losing the things you love that you hold them too tight." The final act of the Fantastic Four is both an indictment of our failure of imagination, and a testament to its power. "I'm letting go," Reed says. "Because now I believe in expansion. I believe we endure."
What the end of the Fantastic Four means for Marvel
Here's the gist: Reed Richards and a small group of similarly gifted (and morally compromised) genius superheroes are trying to stop the collapse of the many universes of Marvel. They fail, destroying universes and alienating their superhero peers along the way. The only person able to figure out what is happening and how to stop it is the villain, Doctor Doom, who manages to combine the destroyed realities into a new, fragmented world where he sets himself up as the ultimate ruler, hero, and God figure. (For unexplained, probably psychological reasons, the only thing his power cannot repair is his own damaged face, which he continues to hide behind a mask.) Doom also replaces Reed as Susan's husband and Franklin and Valeria's father, remaking his arch enemy's family as his own. Meanwhile, Reed and a small group of other superheroes manage to survive the end of their universe to discover that Susan, the children, and the other superheroes weren't destroyed, but live on in a patchwork parody of their former lives.
If you think that sounds like a crazy blend of cosmology, metafictional self-commentary, and a complex, moving human drama, you're absolutely right. But it's not unique to Secret Wars — these are exactly the elements that the Fantastic Four brought to comics from the beginning, completely reshaping the pop culture that followed. DC's The Flash interjected fantastic science and kicked off the Silver Age, Spider-Man went deeper into everyman angst, and S.H.I.E.L.D. and Doctor Strange went into full psychedelia. But nothing pulled all these themes together like Fantastic Four.
As both a conclusion to the story and a commentary on the problems of managing a world of imaginary heroes, Hickman and Ribic's endgame is remarkably elegant. And it culminates in a fight between Reed and Doom — a physical and psychological battle where every line exchanged has double or triple meanings.
Doom wants Reed to appreciate all that he saved from total destruction. "Your entire life, you have been distracted with the modern concerns so precious to you and your kind... when all that matters is survival." "Nothing has ever been easy." Reed responds, "you know what's not easy? Having your life erased because someone wants to indulge themselves." It's an argument about the realities of business weighed against values and loyalty. But Doom wants to be loved, too. He wants Reed to admit that Reed has always thought himself better than Doom. Reed's response is perfect: "I've always believed that you could be better than what you are."
Doom's sin, which Reed identifies and Doom eventually confesses, is that he is "so afraid of losing the things you've saved that you hold them too tight." He may as well be talking to Marvel fans. Doom's imagination is too limited to be a leader: as Black Panther tells him earlier, "raising up a new [Marvel Universe] would require a vision you just don't possess." The metafictional message is obvious: a world needs to grow and evolve, not simply cycle through every conceivable permutation of conflict between existing properties, like a child bashing action figures together. Doom finally admits that with the same power, tempered by compassion and guided by imagination, Reed would have done a better job at saving everything. At this, the Molecule Man transfers his power from Doom to Reed, and everything changes.
With Molecule Man's power — which literally and metaphorically, is full creative control of the Marvel Universe — Reed, Susan, and their children work to restore reality. It's not aCrisis on Infinite Earths-style condensation into one timeline and continuity. The Marvel and Ultimate Universes are merged into a new Prime Universe, but the possibility of exploring other dimensions remains. And that's the cause to which the Richards family chooses to devote themselves.
When Franklin Richards asks his dad, "are we not superheroes anymore?" Reed responds, "it's doing good that counts, not necessarily how you do it... So, no... No more superheroes for a while, just science. And no more Mister Fantastic, just Dad." Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm have their own adventures to come, adding legitimacy to newly viable franchises. But Reed's family remains a family. These explorers have the opportunity, away from the prying eyes of movie studios and entertainment companies looking to exploit them, to continue greater explorations than anything imaginable in a comic booknot titled Fantastic Four.
"GREAT SOCIETIES ARE CRUMBLING AROUND US, AND THE OLD MEN WHO RUN THEM ARE OUT OF IDEAS."
The first character to return to the newly restored Prime Universe is T'Challa, the Black Panther. He returns to the moment just before the collapse began, in New AvengersVolume 3 Issue 1, a Hickman-written comic that was released more than three years ago. He briefly seems to remember what's happened, but resumes where he left off on this timeline, meeting with a group of teenage Wakandans to plan their exploration of a distant solar system and launch a new satellite. It's a passing of the torch. T'Challa takes Reed Richards' mantle as the preeminent scientist superhero who solves the problems no one else can. Meanwhile we see Peter Parker and Miles Morales, two generations of Spider-Man, begin to fight crime and meditate on power and responsibility. The fact that T'Challa and Morales are characters of color is not an accident. The old and new are joined and reconciled.
"Great societies are crumbling around us," says Black Panther, "and the old men who run them are out of ideas. So all eyes turn to you, our children — to build us something better."
We learn from T'Challa that in light of the rest of the world abandoning exploration, "Wakanda now possesses the preeminent space program on the planet." Hickman's played with this theme before: in Fantastic Four 579, Reed Richards shocks attendees of a TED-like event called the Singularity Conference for their narrow vision and warnings of global calamity. "The future of man is not one billion of us fighting over limited resources on a soon-to-be-dead planet, but one trillion human beings spanning an entire galaxy," he says. "The future of man is not here. It is out there. Because it's our new horizon. Because it's what's next." Mister Fantastic and the Fantastic Four can't exist in a world resigned to its own destruction, content with merely holding onto whatever's left.
Fantastic Four was first published in 1961. It was a time of both apprehension and optimism, particularly for science, and for which space exploration was the ultimate symbol of progress. The four characters get their powers in a space flight accident. They become heroes; they become monsters. They remain scientists and explorers, above all of the farthest reaches of outer space. The Kree, the Skrulls, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, Thanos, even later the Inhumans, and the entire cosmic backdrop of Guardians of the Galaxy all appear in Marvel Comics because of the space exploration of the Fantastic Four (and sometimes the Avengers. The fundamental assumption of Fantastic Four is that human space exploration would continue, that it would be led by heroes, and the places, creatures, and objects they encounter would enrich all of our lives.
This assumption is no longer viable, both in real life and in fiction. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet to depict the human exploration of space that characterized so much of the early franchises. (Guardians of the Galaxy's Peter Quill is a half-human, half-alien, and he was kidnapped by aliens rather than electing to become an intergalactic traveler.) Outer space, and encounters with aliens, are threatening enough to give Tony Stark symptoms of PTSD, and prompts his and Bruce Banner's creation of Ultron as a first line of defense. [Spoiler: that doesn't work out.] Outside the Marvel Universe, movies like Interstellar, Gravity, and The Martian all emphasize the dangers and inhumanity of space, almost certainly more accurately than the classic Fantastic Four, but with a corresponding imaginative cost. Even Star Wars, a direct descendant of Jack Kirby's work on Fantastic Fourfor Marvel and New Gods for DC, is necessarily set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
Our human heroes are now rarely explorers in a conventional sense, and technology and inequality have largely replaced science and the unknown as the fundamental problem explored in superhero stories. Our heroes are soldiers like Captain America, inventors like Iron Man, or gifted-but-ordinary people solving problems at a smaller scale, like Spider-Man, Ant-Man, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones. The Marvel Universe is more earthbound than it's ever been, and that's why the Fantastic Four can no longer interact with the universe they founded and shaped — it's no longer big enough to contain their ambitions.
In Breevort's eyes, this is just a part of an ongoing cycle. "At different points in time, different characters and concepts have struck sparks in the public consciousness, when at other times they haven't been so successful." But, he points out, the MCU is slowly becoming less bound by realism, with Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel, and the Black Panther and Inhumans movies around the corner. Science, mysticism, alternate dimensions, secret cities, outer space: the Marvel Universe is getting bigger, weirder, and more fantastic in a hurry. "We live in a world in which Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy are blockbuster movies," says Breevort. "So I think it's only a matter of time until we see [the Fantastic Four] again."
"NOSTALGIA BY ITSELF ISN'T ENOUGH."
But if the Fantastic Four are to return, they have to returned transformed. As Breevort says, "nostalgia by itself isn't enough." The very real threat of nuclear apocalypse might have pointed an earlier generation's imagination to the stars, but our apocalypse is here, in the form of climate change. The futurists Reed chastises for focusing on the world's immediate economic needs are not entirely wrong. Even Doctor Doom is not entirely wrong. Reed and his family had to be erased from existence for him, and for the readers, to recognize that.
"I've learned that the difference between living and dying is managing fear," Reed Richards tells his wife Susan, shortly before they are ushered off stage, possibly forever. "Not being so afraid of losing the things you love that you hold them too tight." The final act of the Fantastic Four is both an indictment of our failure of imagination, and a testament to its power. "I'm letting go," Reed says. "Because now I believe in expansion. I believe we endure."
What the end of the Fantastic Four means for Marvel
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TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
I wasn't a big fan of it, precisely because it was just decent. It read like every quirky wannabe hip book that Marvel hopes will catch on, but that's not the way to go if they actually want to push her as the major female superhero they want her to be so bad.
