Marvel Comics

Master of Kung Fu gets collected (or: After 100 years, Fu Manchu is still a villain)

September 25, 2015 by krisis

This was the news last night from the Diamond Retailer Summit via Heidi MacDonald, EIC of Comics Beat:

Holy shirt!!!!! MASTER of Kung Fu omnibus!!!!!! Huzzah!!!! #diamondsummit pic.twitter.com/TtEj382Giz

— Heidi MacDonald (@Comixace) September 24, 2015

Photo of Marvel’s slide from the summit by Heidi MacDonald of ComicsBeat.

This is a series you’ve probably never heard of, yet it’s both historically significant and solidly entrenched in the top 10 most-wished-for Omnibus editions from Marvel’s online collector community.

What’s the story behind the excitement and why does this seemingly obscure series merit four massive volumes? To figure out the answer, we need to travel back in time over 40 years to 1974.

Similar to Marvel 70s horror titles Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night that emerged in 1972, Master of Kung Fu both featured a major non-Marvel character and was built to serve a public craze.

In this case, the craze was the titular Kung Fu. It was blowing up in the summer of 1973 thanks to a culmination of factors including the television show Kung Fu, a number of successful movies imported from China’s booming cinema, and one man: Bruce Lee. To read more background, I suggest starting with a marvelous pair of blog posts from “A Shroud of Thoughts” – parts 1 and 2.

Marvel wanted to license the popular Kung Fu to take advantage of the nationwide interest in martial arts (which also yielded Iron Fist), but they failed to obtain the rights. Instead, they turned to another pre-existing mythology: the story behind villain Fu Manchu, a fictional criminal mastermind who coined the mustache of the same name. He was created by author Sax Rohmer in 1912 in a serialized novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Fu Manchu was popular enough to merit an initial trilogy of serialized books in the 1910s and even more starting in the 1930s, plus a number of film adaptions ranging from 1929 to 1980. The character can be a controversial one – even in the 1930s he was seen as a racist caricature representing the “Yellow Peril” of an East-Asian threat to the wider, whiter world.

Enter Marvel Comics. [Read more…] about Master of Kung Fu gets collected (or: After 100 years, Fu Manchu is still a villain)

All-New, All-Different Marvel – a book-by-book break-down

September 24, 2015 by krisis

ANAD-Marvel-Comics-2 It’s upon us! Even though Marvel’s mega-event Secret Wars won’t quite be over until December, they’re pressing ahead with a line-wide All New, All Different Marvel relaunch starting in October with over sixty new books debuting into the spring, and more announced each week. That’s a lot of comics, many of them with completely fresh directions and creative teams – how can you wade through to find the most-interesting titles?

As always, I took care of the sifting for you! Here’s a list of every book Marvel has announced to date, the amount of hype I’m feeling on it, a one-sentence summary of the concept and creative team, and the elevator pitch on why you should care.

Ready? Here we go! Updated November 2!

A-Force
Hype Factor:
What is it? An all-female team of Marvel heroes
Who’s creating it? Written by G. Willow Wilson (Ms Marvel) with art by Jorge Molina, one of Marvel’s most consistent artists

Why read it? Even for someone like me who lives for the women of Marvel, this assemblage of female heroes seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. At least Marvel Now’s Fearless Defenders had a cleverer central trope, but, it began with a pair of B-list players. Here, Marvel is pulling out all of the stops short of Storm and it’s probably going to pay off. Plus, Wilson was ace on her brief run on X-Men Vol. 4 – she clearly did the homework on the character’s rich histories, and they never sounded so good.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Hype Factor:
What is it? Marvel’s comic version of the TV team
Who’s creating it? Original Green Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim

Why read it? It’s Agent Colson and friends mashing up with/against Hydra, which should be very palatable to Marvel’s TV fans. However, it’s going to take a lot for this to top both the prior Coulson-starring books, Ales Kot’s Secret Avengers and Mark Waid’s Agents of SHIELD. Plus, Guggenheim was weak on his X-Men arc in Marvel Now – the history was there, but the voices were off. Is that because a TV writer writes for actors and not pictures on a page? Either way, I’ll believe it when I read it.

All-New, All-Different Avengers
Hype Factor:
What is it? A team of second-generation heroes takes the Avengers mantle (but not the budget)
Who’s creating it? Writer Mark Waid with artists Adam Kubert and Mahmud Asrar

Why read it? Take four of Marvel’s hottest properties of the past few years – Falcon as Captain America, the black and hispanic teen Spider-Man, a female Thor, and the new Afgani-American teen Ms. Marvel. Add a pubescent Nova and cinematic smashes Iron Man and Vision. Oh, and Waid will write it hot off of one of the best (and most playful) Daredevil runs of all time. Yeah: everybody’s going to buy this comic book. I’m slightly less excited by the artists – Kubert is wildly uneven and Marvel has yet to find the right colorist for Asrar. Still, this book will be a smash.

my first custom-bound comics project

September 20, 2015 by krisis

Top to bottom: Marvel’s B&W Essential She-Hulk Collection, my bind of the same issues, my Sub-Mariner bind, a color Spider-Man Epic collection of about the same length as my bind, and a color Marvel Masterworks collection of about half the length without its dust jacket.

Just a quick one today to share a project I completed earlier this year.

Even with my primary focus being on graphic novel collections of individual comic books, I have a ton of single “floppy” comics boxed up in my house. Some of them are from my original 1990s collection, which I’ve bought others to fill gaps between official collected editions. The rub is I am completely disinterested in reading single comic book. So much picking up and putting down, plus those annoying bags and boards to keep them safe. I love a book I can bring with me to bed or on my commute.

As a result, I took a spare low-grade run of The Savage She-Hulk plus some cheap Saga of The Sub-Mariner recap comics and sent them off to be custom bound per my exact specifications. Some people carefully clip out unnecessary pages and back covers, but I wanted to begin by just getting some whole comics bound.

Here are the results – the only difference between the two books is that the She-Hulk bind is oversewn (stitches pass through all pages a short distance in from the spine) and Sub-Mariner is sewn through the fold (each comic is effectively one signature of the book, with stitches through the fold of the book).

What I loved about learning about book-binding was that it wasn’t just about comic books. I didn’t get to work on anything with a hardcover in my years of print production, and this really opened my eyes to the types of binding methods used in the books we encounter every day.

Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked

September 17, 2015 by krisis

After Avengers vs. X-Men at the end of 2012, Marvel reloaded their entire line save for a handful of just-launched books and dubbed the era of titles “Marvel Now.” There have been a few incremental waves of additional launches since then, but the main spine of Marvel has been telling consistent stories since then – the Avengers and X-Men flagships, their big three Avengers heroes, and Spider-Man.

The stories haven’t only been consistent – they’ve been really good. Unlike the 2011 DC New 52 launch, Now hit the stands with nothing bad in the bunch. Even as some books declined as the period wore on, we got other amazing winners in the intermediate waves.

Now that we’re only weeks away from the next major period of Marvel where every book will be refreshed, I thought it was the right time to look back about what was so awesome about Marvel Now by ranking every book we got along the way – over 70 ongoing titles!

As with my Writer-Rankings last week, being low on the list doesn’t mean a book was bad – just that it’s not my top pick for you to spend your hard-earned dollars on.

The criteria: I’m a trade-waiter, so books had to release at least one trade by this week. Books from before Now only count if they made it through 2014. No series that were explicitly disclaimed as limited (short series that got cut off by Secret Wars do count). Two volumes of a book by the same author or with continuous story count as one entry – like Daredevil Volume 3 and Volume 4, both by Waid, or Iron Man and Superior Iron Man.

The final trades for these series were too late-breaking for me to evaluate them fairly: All-New Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 3, Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, Deathlok, Savage Hulk, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2, Wolverines.

Let’s get to it! [Read more…] about Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked

Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Writer, Ranked

September 10, 2015 by krisis

ANMN-promo Next month, Marvel launches an all-new era of series and storytelling (with the same history and continuity) called “All New, All Different Marvel!”

What does that really mean? Think of it this way – Marvel treats every few years of their comics as like a TV Season or one of their Cinematic Phases. Every comic released from October 2012 to right now was part of “Marvel Now.” As of the end of this month, every one of those comics will end, and we’ll start a new season or phrase, called All-New, All-Different Marvel.

That means we just had three whole years of brilliant, interconnected storytelling in the largest and most long-running shared universe in the world – and I read every comic along the way.

As a look back at what was awesome about Marvel Now, I’m ranking every writer in the bullpen. What’s great about this list even the writers at the bottom of the rank turned in some five-star issues for me, but the ones at the top are the unquestionable best-of-the-best of Marvel Now – they write the books I immediately snag from the box and read in the middle of the floor like an eager little kid.

The criteria: Writers had to be the sole pen behind more than six issues or more than a single arc in the main Marvel Universe during Marvel Now, beginning with Uncanny Avengers in October, 2012 and extending through titles currently in their Last Days arcs during Secret Wars like Magneto, Ms. Marvel, Loki, Black Widow, and Punisher.

Honorable Mention: Warren Ellis – If we let Ellis loose on this list he may very well be its ruler every time, so let’s call him “Warren Ellis the King Emeritus of Marvel”. His 2014 run on Moon Knight (go to the guide!) was a jagged reboot of eminent readibility and his Avengers Assemble (go to the guide!) team-up with Kelly Sue DeConnick was a delight. That’s what Ellis does for Marvel: parachutes in once a year to leave things nice and messy for the next writer up at bat. We love him for it.

In ANAD: Writing Karnak, the Inhuman. This should be pretty interesting since Karnak was dead last time I checked. He’s also one of the most interesting Inhumans, so getting him back under Ellis’s pen is an awesome development.

Now, on to the list! Do you have some different opinions? Sound off in the comments! [Read more…] about Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Writer, Ranked