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Marvel Reviews

Marvel THEN! FF by Matt Fraction, Mike Allred, & Laura Allred!

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What Is The FF?

Ten years ago was a very different time in comics. The shock of The New 52 was just cooling, as comic fandom anxiously anticipated what at first appeared a similar turn of events in Marvel NOW!’s relaunch of the Marvel Universe. One of the more interesting reshuffles was with the Fantastic Four. One of Jonathan Hickman’s major changes to the franchise was giving the team a legacy, students in the Future Foundation (or FF). After Reed Richards observes that the world’s scientists and leaders were inadequate to the changing world, he began gathering children from all walks of life in order to form the FF, a think tank designed to solve problems. They end up becoming important in events like partially curing the Thing’s inability to return to human form, saving the world from other-universal Reeds and the Celestials, and end up becoming a core part of the family.

Matt Fraction’s relaunch of Fantastic Four with Mark Bagley and FF with Mike Allred and Laura Allred left this dynamic largely unchanged. The new premise of the books was the Fantastic Four with their children Franklin and Valeria departing the universe for a road trip that would last only four minutes in real time, though for those four minutes they each pick a member for a temporary Fantastic Four to guard the universe in case things go wrong. This of course being comics, things go wrong. But more importantly, it’s a story about rebuilding when you’ve lost everything and how lasting relationships can be forged even in tragedy. [Read more…] about Marvel THEN! FF by Matt Fraction, Mike Allred, & Laura Allred!

Omnibussin: Nick Fury, from World War II to S.H.I.E.L.D.

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Nick Fury must be a difficult character for Marvel to know what to do with. For the average Joe, Fury is the guy who founded the Avengers while looking a lot like Samuel L. Jackson. That’s not the Nicholas J. Fury you’ll encounter in most comics: Jackson’s depiction is based on a version of the character from the now-defunct “Ultimate Universe” line, an attempt to modernize Marvel for a new audience, free of decades of continuity. In fact, artist Bryan Hitch based the likeness of his Fury on Jackson long before he’d ever been cast for the Marvel Cinematic Universe!

In the main comics, meanwhile, the director of SHIELD is an old white World War II veteran who usually has little to do with the Avengers, let alone their creation. Nevertheless, the need for MCU synergy eventually reached Fury too, and the old man was retired from service while his hitherto unknown son, who looks a lot like a younger Jackson, took over as an agent of SHIELD. Before all that mess, however, “classic recipe” Fury had half a century of stories focused on him and in the SHIELD organization that he runs (if only sometimes!). There is a lot of classic material here, from the Silver Age to this past decade, most of which hasn’t yet been collected in omnibus format. So let’s change that, shall we? With the Secret Invasion Disney+ show starring Jackson’s Nick Fury coming soon, this may not just be an exercise in daydreaming. [Read more…] about Omnibussin: Nick Fury, from World War II to S.H.I.E.L.D.

“X Fated Warriors of the Sacred X” – Knights of X #1

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[Yanick Paquette and Alejandro Sánchez Rodríguez cover]

The tense, fiery opening pages of Knights of X #1 doesn’t just manage to immediately grab reader attention; as the heroes flee to the safety of a vast castle mantling an island in flight over a high-fantasy landscape, writer Tini Howard manages an admirably concise recap of the end of the last Excalibur series, which ended, unlike several other Krakoa titles, with nary a glimmer of hope: “The gate home has been destroyed.” And Merlyn, the creator of Otherworld long ago, has usurped Omniversal Majestrix Opal Luna Saturnyne and turned the Starlight Citadel into the grim Lunatic Citadel.

Masterful high-fantasy Excalibur colorist Erick Arciniega returns for Knights of X, and while Marcus To, who drew every single issue of Excalibur’s 26 issues, is off to Shang-Chi with Gene Luen yang, let’s hope that rising talent Bob Quinn (of Way of X) is here for an even longer run (although we should always be happy to see such hardworking artists catch a breather for a month here and there😊).

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“Hail Thanos”: Catching up with the Eternals Before Judgment Day

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[covers by Esad Ribic]

All Your Eternals Needs in One Title

For any Marvel heads, especially X-Men/Krakoa fans, who have felt some trepidation at diving into Eternals from legendary comics scribe Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + The Divine, Phonogram, Young Avengers, and many more, most currently Immortal X-Men) and largely drawn by the master of god epics, Esad Ribic (of Hickman’s Secret Wars and Jason Aaron’s Thor: God of Thunder)—just dive right in if you haven’t!

Especially do so alongside Free Comic Book Day, May 7—when Gillen’s A.X.E.: Judgment Day prelude drops, drawn by another extraordinary talent on such classics as Hickman’s S.H.I.E.L.D. and most recently Eternals: Thanos Rises, which we’ll look at below. The event’s acronym stands for Avengers, X-Men and the Eternals, and it’s these latter folks that most modern readers will likely be familiar with only from the recent blockbuster movie or maybe even as the strange, “high-concept” subject of what might be one of Jack Kirby’s duller projects, from 1976 (a rarity for King Kirby). Well, guess what? That’s perfectly fine!

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Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 2

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Our attempt to decide how Marvel should ideally collect all of Thor comics in omnibus format continues, with all the Silver Age and Bronze Age material already covered in the first part. Thankfully, things get much easier to work out from here: after Simonson, whose work on Thor received a dedicated omnibus back in 2011, writer Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Frenz collaborated on the title and a few spin-offs for nearly a decade, taking Thor well into the nineties. [Read more…] about Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 2