marvel comics – PopCult Reviews

Comic Book Review – Avengers Epic Collection: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes

Avengers Epic Collection: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (2014)
Reprints Avengers v1 #1-20
Written by Stan Lee
Art by Jack Kirby & Don Heck

When I was a kid with far more limited funds and had to pick a comic at the grocery store racks, I wanted the most bang for my buck. For me, that made team books far more appealing. You got a bunch of heroes and maybe more than one villain instead of a solo book. This made the Justice League, X-Men, Teen Titans, and Avengers more appealing. Yet, when I revisit some of these books, I find them lacking – especially Justice League and Avengers. Focusing on the latter, the Avengers is a comic that would have been the premiere book of the Marvel Age. Yet, it never overcame the appeal of Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, or even its individual members’ books.

Comic Book Review – Iron Man by Christopher Cantwell Part Two

Iron Man: Books of Korvac III – Cosmic Iron Man (2022)
Reprints Iron Man (2020) #12-19
Written by Christopher Cantwell
Art by Angel Unzueta, Cafu, Ibraim Roberson, Julius Ohta, and Lan Medina

Iron Man: Source Control (2022)
Reprints Iron Man (2020) #20-25
Written by Christopher Cantwell
Art by Angel Uzueta

There’s a new type of superhero story on the scene now. Well, it’s “new” because it’s only been prevalent for about a decade. I think it started with writers like Tom King, who, if you regularly follow this blog, you’ll know I’m not a fan of. His great concepts hook me, but the execution is woefully insufficient. These are stories where the writer seems to impose themselves onto the protagonist somehow, and I can honestly say most comic writers aren’t as interesting as people. Alan Moore or Grant Morrison can get away with it because they are incredible writers, so any self-referential nods are brief and don’t interrupt the greater narrative. Christopher Cantwell falls in the “not that interesting” camp as he turns Iron Man into such a story during this run.

Comic Book Review – Iron Man by Christopher Cantwell

Iron Man: Books of Korvac I – Big Iron (2021)
Reprints Iron Man (2020) #1-5
Written by Christopher Cantwell
Art by Cafu

Iron Man: Books of Korvac II – Overclock (2021)
Reprints Iron Man (2020) #6-11
Written by Christopher Cantwell
Art by Cafu and Angel Unzueta

So, I’ve never been an Iron Man fan. I read issues here and there, and there are plenty of comics in which Iron Man appears. I’ve seen all the Iron Man movies. I just feel very meh about the character. If you had to compare him to a DC analog, I would say Batman is the closest. They are both rich white dudes who use their wealth to fund their superhero exploits. Batman is more interesting to me because of the darker aspects, and I think his Rogues Gallery is far more interesting than anyone who has ever fought Iron Man.

31 Days of Character Creation #29 – Marvel Multiverse RPG

I don’t typically like most superhero ttrpgs because they focus more on the crunchy minutiae of powers and fail to provide anything regarding the sprawling soap operatic nature of the medium. I’m less interested in the power ratings of one character over another than I am the deep lore of the different people who’ve held the title Green Lantern, the zany Rogues Gallery of Shazam, or the legacies of the Justice Society. When the Marvel Multiverse RPG dropped I didn’t even pick it up and after looking it over yesterday for this character I probably wouldn’t play it unless someone else was running the game and knew it like the back of their hand.

Comic Book Review – Daredevil by Frank Miller Part One

Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume One (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #158-167
Written by Roger McKenzie with Frank Miller
Art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson

Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume Two (2021)
Reprints Daredevil #168-182
Written by Frank Miller
Art by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson

I knew at some point I would read this seminal run of Daredevil. As a kid, I first heard about it on the pages of Wizard Magazine, piecing together a rough version of it in my head. One of my favorite things about finally reading a book or comic or seeing a film I’ve heard about for decades is that the preconceived idea about the piece is destroyed and replaced with what it actually is. The result is that I now understand why the thing had such a profound influence on a noticeable portion of the culture. I felt the same when reading Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men or watching the films of Fellini. It’s the sense of “Now I get it,” which must release some dopamine or something because it feels pretty nice. Reading Miller’s Daredevil was one of those, where I could see how comics were being changed as I read through it.

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach

X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #21-24 and Giant-Size X-Men Forever
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett, Rodney Buchemi, Wil Quintana, and Mike Grell

Chris Claremont’s strange & fascinating experiment X-Men Forever comes to the end of its first of two acts. The story thus far has revealed that mutants die younger than humans due to the intensity of their powers burning up their bodies. Wolverine was killed by a strange copy of Storm while the real Storm was revealed to still be a little girl. Rogue seems to have permanently absorbed Nightcrawler’s powers and appearance. Nathan Summers is still in the present and living with his grandparents in Alaska. Kitty Pryde accidentally absorbed one of Wolverine’s claws and part of his personality while phasing through him just before his death. Sabretooth has joined the team, and Nick Fury has embedded SHIELD agents in the school. Jean Grey seems to have struck up a romance with Beast. All the while, the Consortium plots in the background how to take down the X-Men.

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever Volumes Three and Four

X-Men Forever: Come to Mother…Russia! (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #11-15
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett

X-Men Forever: Devil in a White Dress (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #16-20 & X-Men Forever Annual #1
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Graham Nolan and Tom Grummett

Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever continues its fascinatingly weird alternate take on the 1990s X-Men. As discussed in the first review, Claremont was given this out-of-canon book to continue his X-Men run and started by shrinking the team to a smaller, more easily handled number. He instituted several other big changes – killing off Wolverine, revealing Storm is still a child, and showing that the adult Storm is some kind of imposter. Nathan Christopher Summers was never sent to the future and more. He’s not done and in Come to Mother…Russia, Claremont keeps providing new takes on familiar faces. One of these is a character who retired in Uncanny X-Men and even walked away from the book when Bob Harras pressured him to bring back Colossus.

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever Volumes One and Two

X-Men Forever: Picking Up Where We Left Off (2012)
Reprints X-Men Forever #1-5
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett

X-Men Forever: The Secret History of the Sentinels (2012)
Reprints X-Men Forever #6-10
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Paul Smith and Steve Scott

This year, 2024, I read through the entirety of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men run. It’s one of the all-time great comic book runs with highs and lows, but always something new and interesting. It came from when comic book characters were not IPs making billions of dollars in box office revenue. With less scrutiny came more creativity & risk. But, by 1991, Marvel Comics wanted an X-Men comic that wasn’t so weird and had traditional team dynamics with missions against the villains of the month. Claremont stepped away. But he wouldn’t burn his bridges; Claremont understood the spotlight shifted to the hot young artists like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld in the early 1990s. He kept plugging away with little projects here and there, even writing for DC Comics. Eventually, he started writing new stories for Marvel about many of the characters he helped to create. The idea was to have Claremont write an out-of-continuity series that continued his X-Men as if there had never been an interruption. Sounds great, right? It’s one of the most insane X-Men things I’ve read in a long time.

Comic Book Review – Squadron Supreme

Squadron Supreme (2021)
Reprints Squadron Supreme #1-12 and Captain America #314
Written by Mark Gruenwald
Art by Bob Hall, Paul Ryan, John Buscema, and Paul Neary

In 1969, writer Roy Thomas and artist Sal Buscema pitted the Avengers against the Squadron Sinister, a team of slightly familiar villains created by the bigger baddie Grandmaster. The creators intended it to be a DC Comics’s Justice League pastiche. The characters and their counterparts were as follows: Hyperion/Superman, Nighthawk/Batman, Doctor Spectrum/Green Lantern, and The Whizzer/The Flash. The idea would stick around and be reworked by Mark Gruenwald with a retconned explanation that these villains were based on the Squadron Supreme, the premier hero team of another Earth in Marvel’s Multiverse. Nighthawk would eventually cross over to the main Marvel Earth and join the Defenders for a short time. In 1985, Gruenwald took the idea further and devoted a year-long mini-series to this team. It’s a story noted as a possible inspiration for Mark Waid & Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come.

Comic Book Review – X-Men by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee Omnibus Volume Two

X-Men by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee Omnibus Volume Two (2022)
Reprints X-Factor #63-70, Uncanny X-Men #273-280, X-Men #1-11, and Ghost Rider #26-27
Written by Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson, Whilce Portacio, Jim Lee, Fabian Nicieza, Peter David, John Byrne, Scott Lobdell, and Howard Mackie
Art by Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri, Rick Leonardi, Michael Golden, Larry Stroman, Paul Smith, Andy Kubert, Steven Butler, Kirk Jarvinen, Ron Wagner, Art Thibert, Scott Williams, Hilary Barta, Josef Rubenstein, Michael Bair, Mike Witherby, Karl Alstaetter, and Dan Panosian

The first X-Men comic I ever read in full was Chris Claremont’s final issue. I didn’t know it at the time. It was Christmas 1991. For the last couple of years, I had desperately wanted one of 22 issue comic book grab bags sold in the Sears Wishbook. Having grown up watching Challenge of the Superfriends, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and other animated series, my interest had been piqued. Occasionally, I’d convince my mother to buy me a comic book at the grocery store, or I’d spend some birthday money to pick up a couple. That same year, I purchased some Superman books and a Wolverine comic. But this Christmas gift was the one that changed everything. This was the year I became a comic book collector, not for money, but because I was enamored with these complex worlds and their colorful characters.