2.365 (730) New Mutants vol 1 Special Edition 1 ... #Mutants ...

[This is posted on 27th Nov 2017]

There was a time, in the 80s, when Marvel managed to churn out a few mutant issues out of sequence but because it was such a delightful read, all of us loved it and bought, bought, bought them all. There is an Alpha Flight/ X-Men series where the X-teams encountered Loki and got away with it. So as expected, Loki would plan revenge and revenge starts with the end of issue 34 when Amahl Farouk aka Shadow King was defeated and Shan aka Karma was rescued

So instead of going home to USA, Storm who was on a sabbatical away from the X-Men, offered to take them on a break to some romantic idyll of an island holidays and that's how this issue opens. Naturally before the team can have a few good days, in comes Asgardian warriors and one by one everyone is defeated with ease

When they recovered their senses, the Mutants and Storm found themselves in the clutches of Amora aka the Enchantress who has done this on behalf of Loki as apparently all Loki need to do to get around his promise to higher powers is assign his revenge through an agent like Amora (say whaaaaat) ...

The good thing is Illyana tried to teleport everyone away and sent them to different parts of Asgard and different times SPOILER ALERT and this is what happens to each with some truly having long lasting changes that has yet to be retcon ...

Miraga aka Dani fell in with a bunch of Valkyries and crazily enough was accepted by them thus coming across her flying horse, Brightwind

Fat Karma landed in the middle of some dessert encountering a kid and while she hates what she has become, she could not give up her live and thus strive across miles and days to take care of her and ... loses all the bloat becoming a hottie ...

As for Sunspot, he found the Warriors Three ... which suited his ego just fine while Sam fell in with the Dwarves who can make weapons including Thor's hammer ...

As to be expected after their individual journeys, they managed to reunite for the final all out battle against Amora ... but the story doesn't end here as it continues into the X-Men annual ... but the battle did end here so there is an ending

What is truly Amazing is the work by artist Art Adams from cover to interior. Every single panel was simply amazing

Ratings: 10/10

729. Avengers vol 1 #254 ... #Vision ... #Starfox ... #Isaac ...

[This is posted on 7th Dec 2017]

This is how they used to rock the world when Avengers and storytelling were tight with no decompression style unlike today. Imagine the huge battle in Asgard with Thor and his fellow Asgardians that took months of build-up ultimately spilling over in Avengers 249 and then for 250 it is yet another menace called Maelstrom

While all these was happening, we see what initially happened in the 230s of a Vision hurt and recovering ultimately developing into something darker ... with the Vision thinking that the only way to really protect the world and make it a better place is if he indirectly assumes control of everything via machines. That's why he was busy coordinating with ISAAC Titan's ultimate AI computer that runs that world

In this issue, the Avengers finally pieced everything together and rush back to the mansion to confront the Vision who then projects himself as different forms to combat each of the Avengers' teams to better suit them. For example: Warrior Mode to fight people like Hercules and a more humane feature for his wife, the Scarlet Witch

However, in the end, as is expected, they managed to convince him of the error of his ways and he reloaded his true self back into his true body. Nevertheless the governments of selected countries were aware that something had invaded their systems. And so while the primary thrust of the story is over, its repercussions will definitely be felt in the days/ issues to come

Ratings: 6/10

728. X-Force vol 1 #38 ... #X-Force ... #Phalanx ... #Cable ...

[This is reviewed on 8th Dec 2017]

There was a time when crossovers are contained within specific corners of the Marvel U with a bit of spillovers here and there. This issue took place during that era and it is chapter 2 of the Phalanx Covenant. Basically the Phalanx is a collective intelligence of techno-organic being that is spreading and infecting everything it touches, converting them into beings like itself and then absorbing their consciousness within so that they all become one big happy family

And this virus like effect is because of the Magus and Warlock, alien beings wherein the former is the dad and the latter is the son. And their rite of passage to adulthood is that dads must kill offsprings and offsprings must defend or kill dad for their right to live. Waaaaaay back at the start of these aliens, we see the Magus able to rip apart stars (WTF) ... and he even tracked the Mutants through time (double WTF) ...

When this book opens, we see an angry and doubting Cannonball demanding explanation and proof from Douglock (ex mutant who died and returned to life and basically is a merger of Warlock and Cypher) ... as Doug had whisked them away against their wishes to a hill overlooking a picturesque town where Doug's senses hinted that this could be Phalanx HQ

As they descended, nothing seems to be out of order and all that did was serve to fuel Sam's anger

Meanwhile, the rest of the X-team have gone to ground and marshalling their forces. When Prof X joins or rather mindlinks with Forge and Sam's team and only then did they see the truth of the town for what it is and discover the birthing point for new Phalanx

Can you guess what happens next? Yes it is obvious. All hell broke loose and a fight ensues and as this is the ending days of overly-posturing and mouth-snarling artwork, sad to say, some of the scenes depicted are just plain odd (nicest word we can think of to use). Example when the ladies were gathered for a pow wow, just check out how all of them were standing around thrusting their boobs out as much as humanly or even inhumanly possible! Hahahahaha! And how Sam is always snarling with every word that comes out of his mouth! Heh!

Anyway as this is part of a longer arc, naturally it doesn't end here. So it entices you to move on to Excalibur for the next chapter

Ratings: 5/10

727. Moon Knight 1980 #1 ... #Marvel ...

[This is reviewed on 19th Dec 2017]

Moon Knight has many similarities with the Batman. He is wealthy and smart and has businesses. But there are obvious differences as well although he dresses in a cape and works at night, he is completely covered in white. The reason is that he wants the villains to see him coming and to strike fear as he approaches

And over the course of the past three to four decades, while he has had many incarnations and some slight tweaks to his origins, the fundamentals are that he is a mercenary. After a disagreement, he was left for dead. He was saved because he was a tough nut and could last out the punishment or the fact that an Egyptian God of Vengeance named Khon-su resurrected him. But whichever version we are led to believe, he then operates as three different people with the primary being the rich dude Marc Spector. Others include taxi driver and what-not and somewhere along the line, his personality split and he has a psychosis problem

Unfortunately with every relaunch of his title, the authors keep fixated on the split personality psycho dude issue. If the relaunch is say once every 20 years to a new generation of readers, it may have been fine. But when it is less than say 5 years, then it feels like a re-telling only. Perhaps that's why while entertaining, his series as of late, never lasted long before cancellation

Anyhow, in terms of supporting cast, he has an on-again girlfriend named Marlene and a French bloke who flies his copter ... who started the tale as straight and subsequently thanks to more "diversification" became gay ...

In this tale, rather in this series, is the proper longest ongoing for Moon Knight and this book, the first issue covers a lot of ground which is more or less everything we stated above. So after he was resurrected, Marc quickly tracked down the man who would in every subsequent relaunch be his nemesis, Bushman - basically a tanned gentleman with weird face mask or tattoo and one of his co-merc. They had a good fisticuff action before he defeated the chap and left him for the authorities and so it ends this opening issue

In today's times? It probably is not enough to warrant coming back for second issue but back then, when there were less titles on the shelf and less new number 1, this would probably have killed it and yes, it serves its purpose because entire origin told in one issue. Artwork sad to say is average although later on with Bill S it will improve tremendously

Ratings: 5/10

726. Punisher 2009 #16 ... #punisher

[This is reviewed on 19th Dec 2017]

With the Punisher finally finding success on the small screen with his current miniseries already supposedly a cult fave, we are going back to the year 2010 to review this issue and especially this run of the Punisher

Firstly we were never fans of the Punisher even though we love violence of this sort. Reason is because we are never fans of most of the artists except Dillon who had a great run and some of the others but for the bulk of it, the series was kinda bleurgh and there were so many versions and reboot and limited series that at the end of the day, it is the Punisher. You do not need to follow it and can pick it up at any time if you want

Why? Because he is ex-Army or some such whose family was killed by bad guys and he survived. Hence he decided to take it out on all bad guys like drug dealers and what-not and that's the crux of all his series wherever he may go. Same, same; different days only

And here finally as far as we know Remender, author brought huge changes by letting Frank Castle finally be killed during a long fighting running saga while Norman Osborn was in-charge. However, Frank dropped into the kingdom of Marvel's olden day monsters and was fixed up into something resembling Frankenstein and what good timing as well because there is a man whose family was killed by monsters and in turn, has assembled his own task force that goes all out to kill monsters regardless of their mental strength ie even intelligent beings who resembled monsters are hunted and killed

This is the end of that storyline as we see Frank beaten badly but not defeated while the villain has found the Bloodstone - a stone gem supposedly able to return him to a semblance of what he had lost. However, this is the Punisher we are talking about and at the last moment, he managed to drag our villain down into the monstrous pit of limbo with him and with the aid of the Monster from the Lagoon (whose family was killed a few issues ago by this self same villain), they finally as a team of monstrosities defeated the villain leaving him to rot in limbo while they returned to our world

And ... the end ... naturally Frank is still Franken castle and naturally we will all still come back next issue. While the art isn't our taste, it resembles a little too much of a throwback to an earlier era's style, we must admit it is adequate for this series especially the way artist Moore draws cannon fodders if you know what we meant. Hahaha!

Ratings: 8/10

725. Thanos Imperative #1 ... #Thanos ... #Infinity

[This is reviewed on 20th Dec 2017]

Well well well with the forthcoming inifinity avengers movie in 2018, we decided it would be good to take a look at some of the more recent adventures involving our friend, the purple man, Mr Thanos

Unfortunately if you are new to the series or comics or even out of the loop for a while this book is going to be a very difficult read. Firstly series writers Dan and Andy have been doing Marvel's cosmic series for a bit of a while and thus they kept on building from that point which is great for readers who have been following but for the rest of us? Not so good. Next is that artist Miguel did a bang up job and we meant it and so did Jay on colours but for some reason everything looks kinda dark, murky and full of unnecessary darkness/ shadows/ lines so we are not too sure who is responsible for what ...

Anyway, the story opens up in a quieter moment of the cosmic wars where the cosmic heroes, Nova and Peter Quill (of GOTG) are taking a breather after the big bad war with the Annihilation Wave. But this is not a vacation but a one page breather because they are sucked into the next mess which is when they received emergency confirmation from other now space-faring races that there is breach in the universe and that something else from another universe is coming through

Okay brace yourselves ... because that something else is actually some sort of life form that has infected all life in their universe and grown so much and so big that they needed to find a new universe to expand as theirs is full ... so if a universe is theoretically infinite how is that possible? Suspend your disbelief because ... hey this is comics

The next question then is how the heck did it happen?

The answer is that in the other universe, death has been conquered and no one is to die. However, as everyone is infected, even though they have their own individual personalities, they ultimately share the same vision as their body invasion bacteria or whatever

So the rest of the issue we see our space heroes fighting to save the initial fleet that was attacked before being joined by some of the cosmic entities like Galactus and Celestials with war being fought on both physical and other fronts and all the while we know that the invaders are searching and kidnapping entities they believed are anomalies but trying to find the right anomaly

And how does Thanos figure in all this?

As the person who worships death and intends to contribute to death's kingdom's expansion, he is perceived as the biggest threat to their universe's expansion plans but in this tale, our Thanos starts off with having less of his normal mental prowess and abilities though as the tale progresses he is recovering fast even as he joins the GOTG to invade the other universe called the cancerverse

After all that, you know inspite of the mess and headache you will be back for issue 2 right?

Ratings: 6/10

724. Iron Man vol 1 # 99 ... #IronMan ...

[This is reviewed on 21st Dec 2017]

How much action and plot can you squeezed into about 20 pages of comics? Let's count shall we?

1. Sunfire has come to attack Iron Man and Tony Stark out of his usual hotheadedness and misunderstanding and during the first fight (last issue), he encountered a Tony Stark-Guardsman and a Michael-Iron Man. He zapped the latter off to Mandarin

2. In this issue, Iron Man-Tony Stark finally confronts and whups Sunfire's ass

3. Rushing to find out what the F is going on, he discovers the return of the Mandarin

4. Mandarin didn't know the Iron Man he has is not Stark and his men easily defeated the imposter and strapped him to a missile

5. Realizing what is going on, Stark delegates his corporate duties to two people inc Sitwell while rushing to Avengers Mansion to borrow a quinjet

6. Stark made it in time to China to rescue the imposter and sent him back to USA while he himself then heads back to confront a revitalized Mandarin wondering how the Mandarin came back to life

See? So much goodness going on there and we cannot wait to read 100 the culmination of all these plots and more ... yes more ....

7. An industrial spy has infiltrated and is stealing documents and other what-not from Stark's company only to be confronted by a mystery lady whose identity will be revealed in future issues

8. And there are some politicians involved in a hearing that is going to have a huge impact on Stark

Again ... see? So much goodness and Tuska's art rises to the challenge as well giving everything a very serious, realistic slant

Ratings: 7/10

723. Fantastic Four vol 1 #11 ... #FF

[This is reviewed on 21st Dec 2017]

What is wonderful about this issue is that while it has 2 tales in one comicbook, none of it feels like a throwaway and both stand equally strong. In fact, on the inside, it opens up not with Mr Impossible but with the quieter tale of a day in the lives of the Four

We see them during downtime as they go about the city encountering other people including children who are at the early stages of hero-worshipping the Four and actually being friendly but then comes the best part of the entire comicbook ... fan mail ... with the thing feeling down and opening a box hoping it contains something lovely only for it to turn out to be a joke mail with a punch! Literally!

And then came the shocker as a depressed Sue feels that she is not contributing enough to the team and their adventures and that it would be better for her to leave them be. It is certainly heartwarming to see everyone coming together to rally her moods and tell her not to read too much into all the fan missives. This is actually a good thing even in today's internet technology where everyone is forwarding stuff without thought of what harm it can be especially if it is malicious and not based on real hard facts

We also saw that at this juncture Reed was developing serums to test on Ben that gave him the ability to turn back to Ben Grimm human not the rocky Thing albeit the formula works for very short span of time ...

And then on the flipside we learnt of the origins of the Impossible Man, why he came to Earth and how the Four tried to stop his menace only to learn that it is ... well, impossible as he can transform into anything. However, the key to his defeat is to ... ignore him and whatever shenanigans he gets up to and once he is bored, he will move on! Hah! What a concept! Of course this is during the era of less grim n gritty heroes and villains. If told today or even mid 90s, you will see Impy threatening death and destruction all around just to get the heroes to "play" with him ...

Ratings: 7/10

722. Avengers vol 1 Annual 15 ... #Avengers

[This is reviewed on 22nd Dec 2017]

There was a time when there were 2 distinctive teams of Avengers. The regular or original and the West Coast Avengers. And once a year, they would meet to play baseball and this is the start of that tradition way back when comics were a simple joy to read without all that over-the-top cosmic threatening scenarios

And as the game progresses suddenly there is a flash and the Freedom Force (ex Brotherhood of Evil Mutants members who temporarily was pardoned by the government to serve them) appeared. They are authorized to serve the Avengers' written summons and to bring them in to custody

Naturally to ensure we have enough to fill our plates, there are some who agreed and some who do not so a battle ensues and we get to see the team fighting and actually realizing that FF is not such a pushover after all. But as expected, after a few pages, everyone sort of calms down and went along to face the hearing only to find out that there will be serious charges brought against them which is actually quite obvious because the Avengers have been operating as they please, jetting here and there and deciding on their own who should be captured and who shouldn't

Nowhere is this more apparent than when the Vision tried to take over the world when he was recuperating from a total systems shutdown but the Avengers after convincing him otherwise, did not even report him for an independent party's review

But more important than even this is that there is a betrayal or three in the book. First is someone, perhaps an Avenger ex or reserve has betrayed the team and revealed intimate details about their past cases and their bad decision making to the authorities. And secondly is Spider Woman who at this time is a member of FF but could not bear the thought of capturing the Avengers. So once the night sets, she came to sabotage the guards and free the Avengers even though they do not know who was responsible as they ran helter skelter into the night to set up post for fighting back

It was also a time before Spider Woman would realize that the Avengers cut her no slack especially Wonder Man when later during Civil War he would help Osborn and Ms Marvel take down Spider. Sigh! Bastards!

The story doesn't end there though as it continues into the WCA Annual #1

Ratings: 7/10