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Avengers By Jonathan Hickman: The Complete Collection Vol. 4 Review!

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There’s still time.

Things are still falling apart in the Marvel universe, but the Avengers have had a victory, after fighting back the Builders and Thanos in Avengers by Jonathan Hickman Vol. 3. For the Illuminati, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. The death of everything is still coming. And now, the chaos that comes with that begins to seep into everything else. Things are unraveling, and the heroes begin to realize why.

If Infinity was an epic story, touched with character moments, then Avengers Vol. 4 by Jonathan Hickman and a host of artists, is focused on the characters, using the epic moments to bring us closer to them. And the question these characters are forced to ask themselves is – what have they become?

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How to (Re)Read the Hickman Era of X-Men: Powers of X #3 Pt. 2; and the Conundrums of Moira

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A group of people in clothing Description automatically generated with medium confidence

I. POX3, pages 11-25: “This Is What You Do”

A. Black Hole Sun

At first, it looks like the four diversionary X-Men attacking the Church of Ascendancy are winning. But they’re really just pressing their advantage of surprise while they can, knowing this is a last desperate act. Even Cardinal—“pushed to the brink”—knows this, having eaten “a terminal apocalypse seed” in order to fight till the end.

Related:

Hickman X-Men Reading Order

Krakin’ Krakoa!

More in this series!

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Introducing Michael Morbius in the Morbius Omnibus

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Amazing Spider-Man #101, written by Roy Thomas, art by Gil Kane, lettering by Artie Simek

With the Morbius film due to make its debut in early 2022, one assumes that more people than ever are looking back to the early days of our dear Michael M. to see what makes him tick. Though Morbius would later go on to have a more complex arc that would bring many nuances to his strange morality, his early days portrayed him as bloodthirsty and ravenous, destroyed by the experiments that were meant to save his life but instead saw him cursed to be—you guessed it—a LIVING VAMPIRE!

Following his premiere in Amazing Spider-Man #101, Morbius quickly grew in popularity via the pages of Marvel’s various horror titles, enjoying brief stints in anthology titles like Fear and Vampire Tales. For fans of the bizarre horror/sci-fi/superhero stories coming out from both Marvel and DC during the early 1970s, Morbius’s early appearances will scratch a very specific itch, while newer fans might find enjoyment in the camp factor of juxtaposing superhero hijinks with the tortured self-loathing of vampires. [Read more…] about Introducing Michael Morbius in the Morbius Omnibus

X-Men Inferno Omnibus Review!

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Oh Inferno, you big beast of a crossover. 

Inferno is the culmination of a plethora of story seeds in the X-Men line of comics over the course of just…so many issues. The event runs through New Mutants, X-Terminators, Uncanny X-Men, and X-Factor. Not to mention, titles like Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Cloak and Dagger, and various Spider-Manses all get in on the tie-in game! And this Omnibus collects it all. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming, or at least it was for me when I first approached reading it in my 80s X-Read through sometime last year. However returning for this coverage, it’s much more simple to parse when you realize there are really two stories under one event. The first story is about Illyana Rasputin being tricked into opening the gate to limbo and reckoning with her role as the Darkchilde, and the second is the tragedy of Madelyne Pryor and her turn as the Goblin Queen. 

This is a big event for two big stories. It can’t be overstated just how many things were leading directly towards this event and how many elements can be tied right back to it.  But honestly, enough prologue. Like I said there’s a lot here.

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DC’s Earth One: You Can’t Go Home Again

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Earth One Box Set

Superman: Earth One v1

Michael Straczynsk • Shane Davis • Ardian Syaf

Batman: Earth One v1

Geoff Johns • Gary Frank

Wonder Woman: Earth One v1

Grant Morrison • Yanick Paquette • Nathan Fairbairn • Todd Klein

Earth One: Genesis

By 2010, Marvel was deep into its Ultimates Universe, their alternate universe for experimenting with modernizing their heroes and taking big swings. By the same token, DC was mostly past the failure of its All-Star line, which attempted the same approach and met some success, but ultimately never coalesced into a cohesive vision the way Ultimates had.

Earth One is an attempt at replicating the first and fixing the second. Like Ultimates, the line focuses on retelling the origins of popular superheroes now recast in the 21st century. And like All-Star, it tries to do that by giving DC’s top talent a ton of freedom.

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