Marvel Comics General

The funniest thing to me about that cover is remembering that the Hulk crossover was with . . . Batman. Hulk and Batman. The DC villain for that one was Joker, and the Marvel villain was the Shaper of Worlds. DC brought a detective and a murderous clown, Marvel brought an unstoppable rage monster and a god.

It was a fun story and everything. Just hilarious to think about.

TIL of Spellbound, which followed the adventures of Erica Fortune, who discovered she was an extremely powerful telekinetic who could even reshape matter but the power was fated to drive her and anyone that wielded it insane. After defeating the evil Zxaxz and the even more powerful being called the Other, a follow-up series in Marvel Comics Presents had Erica succumb to her power's effects and become a tyrant, ending in her being imprisoned in a crystal while her brother Roy took over the mantle of Spellbinder Supreme presumably without issue (neither of them have been seen since). :(

Edited by lalalei2001 on Apr 25th 2024 at 12:14:59 PM

Is a Spellbinder different from a sorcerer?

It seems to be the same but more high-fantasy, like Amethyst Princess of Gemworld. The Spellbinder can harness the power of order and chaos to reshape reality using conversion rings (one destroys and one creates), and there can be more than one Spellbinder in existence at a time.

Zxaxz and co. were otherdimensional beings so they didn't interact much with the main Marvel Universe anyway, but they did encounter the New Mutants and Lila Cheney. Spider-Man was mentioned too.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Apr 25th 2024 at 11:00:22 AM

So... I've got a question that's been staring at me for a few years now... something I figure would make sense to ask, given this nation's particular portrayal in comic properties like X-Men.

Does anyone know what exactly Marvel Comics has against Canada? Why is Marvel so... begrudging about letting some of its biggest icons (like Wolverine and Deadpool) sport that Canadian heritage with pride? What did Canada exactly do to Marvel Comics, to have an unflattering portrayal sometimes, like say Mutant experimentation facilities rivaling that of World War II-era Germany?

It's just the consequence of Wolverine being made Canadian and then given a backstory suitable to his angstiness and the vibe of the X-Men in general. Once Alpha Flight was created and tied to his backstory, anything that would give Wolverine a fittingly harsh backstory was attributed to the Canadian government by proximity.

There's definitely also an element of "we can make the country next to the US have more over-the-top evil things without our readers thinking as hard about it or arguing about it as much."

So I just chalk it up to narrative convenience that makes for a very funny meme about the Canadian government being the most monstrous organization in the world.

OG Genosha was probably worse. Everything Canada did in secret, Genosha did openly and worse.

Yeah, but there are a lot more Canadian Marvel readers than Genoshan, for some reason.

Canada has Alpha Flight.

They're not as big as Deadpool or Wolverine, but they exist.

Genosha used to be a huge foreign market for Marvel. I wonder why readership dropped so much

Surely they simply just all jumped over to DC Comics instead.

Wait... an otherdimensional being with a nigh-unpronounceable name... Are you sure this was a Marvel series? Because these sound like some of DC's 5th-dimensional imps.

On that note, is it true that some writer wanted the Impossible Man to be a form Mr. Mxyzptlk took to visit the Marvel Universe? Or am I misremembering my behind-the-scenes Marvel trivia?

That was a gag John Byrne did in an issue of Superman. It wasn't supposed to be taken as Marvel canon any more than the dozen of Clark Kent cameos.

"TIL of Spellbound" I had an issue of that when I was a kid. And I have since read the full thing, definitely through completely legal means. It's a weird one. It wasn't particularly good, but the issue I had as a kid meant the characters weirdly stuck with me.

And now I've unlocked a memory, from back when I was active on the CBR forums. There was an Avengers Dream Team thread that I occasionally posted in, and I once came up with a set of teams, with one including Erica as Spellbinder. I think my idea was for a team dealing with more mystic threats, and Erica was a mole for Dormammu. (I think the team also included Alejandra as Ghost Rider, along with . . . Squirrel Girl. This was before the North/Henderson run. I actually kinda miss coming up with weird team line-ups.)

The Midnight Suns game had alternate costumes for Hulk that gives him Grey Maestro and Red Maestro.

I kinda want those as What Ifs. Although Joe Fixit Maestro probably wouldn't be that much different.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13390809420A05589200&page=2622#comment-65547

…That was beautiful.

And yeah, I came for USM, but it's wild how Nu-Ultimate in general is grabbing my attention in a way OG Ultimate never did. Maybe because Nu-Ultimate has a blueprint to work with when OG Ultimate didn't? Or I wasn't the target audience for OG Ultimate?

×2

Well, Fixit's Dystopia would probably look more like Las Vegas.

Same. Nu-Ultimate is really hitting a lot of buttons for me in a way that the original didn't. Maybe it's just because I love Hickman's brand of high concept Science Fantasy and Nu-Ultimate is basically an entire Marvel setting with the same vibe and feel of Hickman's X-Men and better Marvel in general work.

On the subject of Maestro, I think there's an interesting idea in depicting variants of him as Bruce's various personalities taken to their worst extreme. OG Maestro from Future Imperfect was pretty much Professor Hulk with all his flaws magnified to hell; the snark, the intellect, the drive to "improve" things, and such but all warped into a narcissistic person who treated everyone around him like playthings and claimed he was trying to fix things but really wasn't. And that makes sense given Professor was the one running things at the time, so he faced a Professor Maestro. So you could extrapolate from there what other Maestro's might be like.

A Joe Fixit without his Hidden Heart of Gold, just a gangster with no morals or honor whatsoever. A Savage who destroys and kills and torments for fun rather than not knowing any better. A Devil who's genuinely the evil destroyer that Bruce viewed him as before accepting him. A Green Scar who takes his "avenger" personality so far that he becomes a full-blown terrorist with none of his prior restraint and causes mass death and destruction in the name of "justice".

Reposting from thr DC thread

Now a cover from Lee for thr Amalgam omnibus

It's so weird seeing Darkseid with a cape.

So I've finally gotten a chance to read Moonstone's epic speech and beatdown of Baron Zemo.

Knowing more about Moonstone than I did before....is she as right as she thinks?

Could they have really kept it going forever? On the one hand, with the others actually starting to like being heroes, they might have eventually been able to turn it into Method Acting like they already were.

On the other hand, someone might have started wondering where these Thunderbolts came from, and there were already a few cracks in the plan (like the Mad Thinker noticing that they were too good for a rookie team) and lets not forget that the Avengers and Fantastic Four ended up coming back, and they might have eventually sussed out the truth.

So is Moonstone right, or is she full of shit?

I don't think Moonstone intended to keep it going forever; just as long as they possibly could. The speech there is basically highlighting the big mistake Zemo made with the Thunderbolts plan and the mistake he always makes with the Masters of Evil; he presumes that all the supervillains he gathers up share his goal of taking over the world to save it from itself. But most of them don't and are, in fact, mostly just career criminals with no real aspirations beyond making money and doing whatever they feel like, and that's not even going into people like Songbird and Mach who were barely even villains to begin with and just begging for a Heel–Face Turn.

Yeah, she acknowledges that eventually the act would have gotten old, but they could have done a lot before it got to that point.

I think Moonstone is less right than she thinks she is (the walls were closing in on the Thunderbolts, Zemo's actions just accelerated them), but she's not wrong, either. Her idea is sound, she just probably has an inflated idea of how long the con could work, which ties into her pending character arc where her ruthless, pragmatic solutions only work in the short term.

Yeah. That's what I was thinking.

Hell, it's entirely possible that Zemo did plan on keeping it up for long, but her manipulations, combined with the return of the Avengers and Fantastic Four, forced him to up the timetable (and also use it as a way to solidify his control over the rest of the team).

Hell, he had the Avengers and FF under his control. And if he'd kept it up, they wouldn't have needed to be career criminals any more. There would have been no fear of ever being caught.

But she helped destroy that. So who's really the dumb one.

They both suck, but in different ways than either thinks.