Marvel Comics

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So it's not taking place in the Franklinverse? lol

That world got pulled into the the 1616 universe by Doom, and became the new Counter Earth (after the original was taken by some group called The Beyonders as a sample of "local talent"). The Thunderbolts went there iirc, and Moonstone took her counterparts stone to add to hers (as he was a psycho)
 
And then they kicked Liefeld off of his rebooted Captain America and he went off and did a reboot of that Kirby Cap clone, Fighting Eagle? or something. Crazy times

Fighting American. He made him more like Cap, as the original didn't carry a shield. Titan Comics licensed the character, and did two mini-series, as well as reprinting the original stories. I haven't read them yet, but i got them on sale via Comixology. Wouldn't mind seeing a team up between him and their original character Blazing Glory
 
Fighting American. He made him more like Cap, as the original didn't carry a shield. Titan Comics licensed the character, and did two mini-series, as well as reprinting the original stories. I haven't read them yet, but i got them on sale via Comixology. Wouldn't mind seeing a team up between him and their original character Blazing Glory


Yeah, I recall part of the lawsuit's resolution was that Liefeld couldn't depict him throwing his shield, lol.

A character born from bitterness over Captain America twice over again.
 
Why the hell are there Beyonders (emphasis on the S)? Did Marvel screw that up too?
 
Yeah, basically a Q continuum type thing. They've done at least two retcons of what the Beyonder was that I'm aware of, once dialing him down to the level of Eternity and making him a her and then the thing where there are beyonders that exist beyond reality from whence he came. It's like a scab they can't stop picking at.
 
I will say that one thing I don't miss from older comics is that weird thing where they see the need to cover every single page with a million word boxes describing exactly what you can already see happening in the images.

Rereading all the core X-Men series again from the beginning and if I see one more box that just describes that colossus is super strong/tough...
 
I will say that one thing I don't miss from older comics is that weird thing where they see the need to cover every single page with a million word boxes describing exactly what you can already see happening in the images.

Rereading all the core X-Men series again from the beginning and if I see one more box that just describes that colossus is super strong/tough...

Yeah it is a slog to read the issues where the reiterate what happened in the last issue too. Makes sense of course because of how they were published then but tiresome now, I usually skip it but worry that I may be missing something important inadvertently.
 
Because hope springs eternal, I'm going to be getting the forthcoming Heroes Reborn mini, which covers a Marvel earth where the Avengers were never formed, and some of the spinoff minis that will be tied into it. I'm a bit of a sucker for superhero alternate reality stories, as well as the classic Squadron Supreme setup, and this looks to play into both of those elements, as the main hero group is the Squadron Supreme of America.

You sold me at Squadron Supreme. I'm still waiting for Marvel to make a movie around them, just to show DC how to do Justice League right :tongue:
 
Yeah, I recall part of the lawsuit's resolution was that Liefeld couldn't depict him throwing his shield, lol.

A character born from bitterness over Captain America twice over again.

His partner was kind of cool though, being a female robot. When Alan Moore took over writing the characters, Fighting American wasn't as bad as Liefeld made him. But yeah, giving him a shield was such an FU to Marvel, he shouldn't have been surprised he got sued
 
The Marvel Wiki breaks it all down for you. Since I had stopped reading Marvel long before this happened (other than Counter Earth being stolen), I don't know much about all this
I read a friend's copy of the story where the Beyonder is reborn as a woman and shown how amoebas are above cosmic concept entities because it's a mystical loop thingie. And I read some of the scans daily pages from Hickman's run on Avengers but not enough to know more than these beyonder guys were behind the universes being merged/destroyed and that people don't send Thor to negociate if they're acting in good faith.
 
Basically, the first retcon was done by Englehart--he was trying to link the Beyonders (which were mysterious beings mentioned in old comics) to the Beyonder, and was given a mandate to "end the character" (they did not want the Beyonder to come back after that). This was done on his run on Fantastic Four, and they established the following.

  • Beyonders created the cosmic cubes. Cubes eventually hatch into beings like The Shaper of Worlds and Kubik
  • The Accident that created the Molecule Man actually was part of a cosmic cube's power.
  • The other energy became the Beyonder himself.
  • At the end of the issue, Beyonder and Molecule Man merge and become a cube, which hatches to become cosmos.
  • When it hatches to become Kosmos, they release Owen Reese and he comes back to earth.

That's from my direct reading. The FF story that puts a coda on Secret Wars 2 (called Secret Wars 3) was included in the Secret Wars II omnibus. That doesn't include the quick stories (backups in FF annuals) that make up

They haven't done anything with the Beyonder character at all, or the maker. At one point (see the second wiki), they were going to try to establish the Beyonder went back in time to Thanos' early years that would have had an impact on his personality, but was dropped after his short lived solo series was cancelled. (This was a Keith Giffen idea, Starlin had left).

One retcon that was blurry was Bendis (who is the guy who writes stories that ignore past continuity, and leaves it to other people to fix the contradictions), tried to establish the Beyonder as an Inhuman Mutant, but that doesn't make sense.

And the Beyonders finally invaded wanting to reset the multiverse...which is the story of Secret Wars (2015).

This article actually does a better job of explaining things, since it has some page snapshots.

 
Or Carol Danvers and how she was used by Immortus (and the Avengers let it happen)

I'm not saying that wasn't messed up, but thing that get's me about Patsy is that her origiins are in 1940s romance comics. She transition into Marvel 616, first as cameos, then as a support character, legittimate superheroine, demon and finally appearing as major character in Netflix's Jessica Jones... that just boggles my mind.
 
I'd love (and this goes for any comic publisher with a shared universe) to see a publisher have a finite timeline. Say 5 years. At the end of that 5 years, all storylines are concluded and they start the next five years rebooting/reimagining their characters.
So Spiderman might be a wisecracking teen for 5 years, a horribly mutated hybrid the next, A non-powered vigilante after that. Keep the names. keep certain themes, but be a bit more adventurous in the depiction.
 
The Beyonder was fine when Shooter handled him.

The Marvel guys had some aggravation with Shooter because as soon as he was gone they pretty much shat on all his stuff. I think Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage might have been the last thing he was responsible for and that lasted 20 years.
 
I'd love (and this goes for any comic publisher with a shared universe) to see a publisher have a finite timeline. Say 5 years. At the end of that 5 years, all storylines are concluded and they start the next five years rebooting/reimagining their characters.
So Spiderman might be a wisecracking teen for 5 years, a horribly mutated hybrid the next, A non-powered vigilante after that. Keep the names. keep certain themes, but be a bit more adventurous in the depiction.

I think a lot of the issues with modern superhero comics is just trying to keep the IP (the very term tells you the problem imo) going for so long under so many writers and artists.
 
The Beyonder was fine when Shooter handled him.

The Marvel guys had some aggravation with Shooter because as soon as he was gone they pretty much shat on all his stuff. I think Peter and Mary Jane’s marriage might have been the last thing he was responsible for and that lasted 20 years.

See, I always found the Beyonder uninteresting. Especially because they basically ran Secret Wars and Secret Wars II so close together (there was literally something like 2 months between the end of one and the beginning of the other). It was like the herald of things to come with giant constant crossovers that ruined the ability of individual books holding their own storylines that aren't constantly interrupted.
 
See, I always found the Beyonder uninteresting. Especially because they basically ran Secret Wars and Secret Wars II so close together (there was literally something like 2 months between the end of one and the beginning of the other). It was like the herald of things to come with giant constant crossovers that ruined the ability of individual books holding their own storylines that aren't constantly interrupted.

Oh yeah, Secret Wars was created to do cross-merchandising with Mattel. That it turned out to be a half-decent story is testament to Shooter/Zeck.
 
See, I always found the Beyonder uninteresting. Especially because they basically ran Secret Wars and Secret Wars II so close together (there was literally something like 2 months between the end of one and the beginning of the other). It was like the herald of things to come with giant constant crossovers that ruined the ability of individual books holding their own storylines that aren't constantly interrupted.

Yeah the crossover events were never my thing even as a kid even though I really got into comics around the Mutant Massacre which must have been one of the first big ones, even if it was relatively grounded compared to what came after.
 
Yeah the crossover events were never my thing even as a kid even though I really got into comics around the Mutant Massacre which must have been one of the first big ones, even if it was relatively grounded compared to what came after.

See I don't mind the X-Title crossovers, because they are thematically tied and a lot of the characters have strong established histories with each other from being on the same teams in previous iterations and such, so it's good to see them back together. Especially when they are like Mutant Massacre and are smaller scale stuff. (Though like I said, I love Age of Apocalypse and that was a huge world shattering style one, though that was a contained alt reality thing that once it was over everything went back to normal like nothing happened (with a few changes, like Sugar Man and Dark Beast and Nate Grey and such escaping).
 
See I don't mind the X-Title crossovers, because they are thematically tied and a lot of the characters have strong established histories with each other from being on the same teams in previous iterations and such, so it's good to see them back together. Especially when they are like Mutant Massacre and are smaller scale stuff. (Though like I said, I love Age of Apocalypse and that was a huge world shattering style one, though that was a contained alt reality thing that once it was over everything went back to normal like nothing happened (with a few changes, like Sugar Man and Dark Beast and Nate Grey and such escaping).

The Mutant Massacre did loop in non-X-Men types but they were all NYC based like Daredevil, etc. and just for one or two issues. The idea seemed then to just get you to notice their non-X-Men titles and it worked on me as I discovered Simonson's Thor and Power Pack through their guest appearances in X-Factor, The New Mutants, etc.
 
Crossovers used to be cooler back in the day, like the annual JLA/JSA or Avengers/Defenders team ups. Not a lot of titles involved, and short, tight storylines. Crisis on Infinite Earths changed all that. I've liked some, but after awhile, I got turned off to them. That's one of the three main reasons (along with not having the money to keep up, or the space to store them) that I stopped reading comics for a long time. Comixology got me back into comics in a big way. Of course, I read more small press titles than I do the big two, but I do enjoy getting older stuff or checking out select titles from Marvel/DC.

Awhile back, pretty much everything Black Panther related was free on both Amazon Kindle and Comixology (not long after Chadwick passed). I grabbed everything I could, and will likely have a hard time getting to read it all. That was a classy move by Marvel, as it probably cost them a bit. But it did make me want to buy more older stuff, so I grab what I can when I can afford it.
 
Oh yeah, Secret Wars was created to do cross-merchandising with Mattel. That it turned out to be a half-decent story is testament to Shooter/Zeck.

Yeah...the first Secret Wars was good because it was a very simple premise, and the Beyonder was more of a plot device than anything else.

Secret Wars 2 though was absolute garbage. And it was everywhere. That was the first company wide crossover that Marvel really did.

Shooter was notoriously difficult to work with. There are all kinds of horror stories about him from that era.

But the Beyonders in the Avengers/New Avengers run by Hickman, leading up to Secret Wars (2015) are much more like the original, and they’re connected to him. He’s commented on as being an immature member of their race who did things he wasn’t supposed to.

That story is worth checking out.
 
I do like Secret Wars (2015) more than 2 by far. It's why I find it weird that people would think the changes to the Beyonder to the Beyonders is "ruining" it. Secret Wars 2 already "ruined" the beyonder to me and that was in his first two years as a character. 2015 Secret Wars made the Beyonders more interesting, not less.

Also I liked the evolution it gave to Doom after the story line.
 
Secret Wars II had Spider-Man teaching the Beyonder how to poop...

Speaking generally, not about any specific storyline, my take on comic book continuity is that, as long as the story I'm currently reading is a good story and internally consistent, I really don't care if it contradicts some other story from decades prior.
 
Secret Wars II had Spider-Man teaching the Beyonder how to poop...

Speaking generally, not about any specific storyline, my take on comic book continuity is that, as long as the story I'm currently reading is a good story and internally consistent, I really don't care if it contradicts some other story from decades prior.

I’ve found that if you don’t adopt this kind of outlook when it comes to the big two, you’ll simply go insane.

Plus, I’ve come to realize that a shitty story shouldn’t necessarily “matter” just because it was written first. I’ce become more than comfortable with the way they simply skip over certain shit without ever mentioning it again.

What? Frank Castle committed suicide and then became some kind of undead avenging angel with magic guns? No. No he didn’t.

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The Lee/Kirby stuff reminds me so much of Gygax/Arneson stuff. In that we'll never know the full story.

Just kind of sucks that things turn out like that.
 
I spent an hour trying to explain X-Men to my two sons and man trying to get into any conversation without going into some kind of bizarre tangent about some whacky shit is impossible.

It actually started as a discussion of how one of the artists for New Mutants insisted on giving Cannonball a forehead that was 8 stories tall.

Edit: My god why:

RCO019_1469097472.jpg
 
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I spent an hour trying to explain X-Men to my two sons and man trying to get into any conversation without going into some kind of bizarre tangent about some whacky shit is impossible.

It actually started as a discussion of how one of the artists for New Mutants insisted on giving Cannonball a forehead that was 8 stories tall.

Edit: My god why:

View attachment 27177

Sienkiewicz was extremely stylized, but his run on New Mutants was easily one of the best visual stretches of the title.
 
As a kid, I read New Mutants in spite of Sienkiewicz's art. As an adult, I re-read it largely because of Sienkiewicz's art. It really contributed to the tone of the book.
 
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