Seems that Marvel Comics has captured my attention again.
For the longest time I collected comics, mostly all throughout High School.
However, Marvel started to piss me off with their multi-title mini-series that had really terrible endings and did nothing but attempt to drive up sales.
Now, I know that comics is a business, and if you want to drive up sales, then interesting things like mini-series are a good thing. And I have no problem with that, just as long as there was a good story behind it.
But they failed at that part, and they ticked me off just once too much. So I stopped.
Mind you, at that time I started getting heavily into Anime and Manga pretty much for the fact that they were doing the things that Marvel wasn’t. They were short(ish) stories that weren’t soap operas that would span for years/decades and I didn’t need to be aware of 30 years or history to follow. I liked that. I still like that.
That went on for years.

Then I started to pop into the local comic shop and generally just look for the same old same old. Then the torrents hit. I was able to download a boatload of comics and read at my leisure and well, for free.
That’s when I discovered one of the smartest things that Marvel did.
It’s the Ultimate line. Sure, it sounds kinda dumb, but what it is, is brilliant.
Here’s the rundown(in general).
OK, so Spider-man, X-Men, Avengers and the Fantastic Four have been around for 40+ years. With one long, flowing story line, much like a soap opera.
So, if anything new happened, it would have to match up with historic events, some of which were kinda dumb.
For instance; Venom is cool, the fact that it came from an alternate dimension full of Venom suits that was brought into our world during the Second Secret War from the Beyonder, is kinda dumb.
So what they did is say, screw history, let’s start new and fresh. Hence, Ultimate Spider-Man.
The same goes for Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four and the Ultimates(Avengers).
It allows for a fresh new look at the same old characters. It allows for new story lines that don’t worry about re-writing history.
In a nutshell, it’s cool.

The next cool thing that Marvel did was kill all the mutants.
Let me explain.
For the last 20 years, the easiest way for a new super hero to come about was to become a mutant. Because of this, there are probably more mutants than regular folk in the US. Or at least that’s the way it was feeling.
So they just wrote this great, multi-series series that dealt with an alternate present/past, which was just like a really big What If series.
That lasted a little while(pre-arranged short series) and then, BOOM!
All but 198 mutants remained. And for people that weren’t part of the alternate present(it’s a long story that I’m not about to talk about here, but trust me, it makes sense) all see the mutant powers just suddenly disappear. It’s rather cool, and again, refreshing.
Even some of the old characters didn’t make the cut and lost their powers. This includes Ice Man I think. For those keeping score, Ice Man has been around since day one.

Anyway, because of all this, I’m starting to get more and more into the Marvel X-Men comics. Not something I should really have done, but I’m knee deep in it now, and I don’t see me running away anytime soon.
Good thing I’m buying a house so that I can have some place to put my comics.

Gah…

Quick Edit about Comics:
http://www.marvel.com/catalog/listing.htm?category=Ultimates
http://www.marvel.com/publishing/stories/showstory.htm?id=22
http://www.marvel.com/publishing/stories/showstory.htm?id=52

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Filed under: Blog - @ January 12, 2006 2:32 pm