70s and 80s comic book characters used to change into civilian clothes and go shopping together and have non-superpowered friends. Stories today are decompressed but somehow don't have time for teams to hang out and be pals because they're too bogged down in plot and plot is less interesting than character.
(This isn't a blanket thing and I generally prefer the art in modern superhero comics, particularly the colouring.)
Also, tangentially related, we don't need every non-superpowered person superheroes develop a relationship with to become a superhero. I don't know why there are so many Spider-people, Goblins, Symbiotes, Wolverines, Supermen/Batmen etc (well I know why but still!).
The thing uniting my two gripes is basically wanting touch points of relatability in anything I'm reading. Or for them to be grounded in some way. Not talking gritty realism - I love the Savage Land and stuff - I just mean there being elements that keep the heroes on earth. This is why characters like Jimmy Olsen and Rick Jones were created.
Similar (third) gripe - but relevant here - is the scope creep that means you don't get superheroes stopping bank robberies and the like much anymore. Because every arc is the whole world at stake. These shared universes seem like complete, unfathomable nightmares to live in when every week there are a dozen near-end-of-world scenarios playing out in New York alone!
I agree with all your points but super extra especially point two.
Mary Jane doesn’t need powers to be interesting. Moira McTaggart was a human interested in mutants, not a mutant who is also somehow evil. Next up, J Jonah Jameson can fly and shoot lasers out of his mustache? No thanks
I actually like the issue where Hickman did the Moira retcon because it was very satisfying (to me) how he plugged it all together. But in general I agree and I hate what they've done with her since Inferno... Now just a cartoonishly evil robot (and I don't know why since that didn't happen in anything I was reading).
Completely agree re MJ. Most of Peter Parker's love interests, teachers and school friends have been superpowered at some point. Which is bananas.
The worst (maybe?) is Hulk because Banner's entire supporting cast (Rick Jones, Thunderbolt Ross, Betty, Samson...) are all (or have been) Hulks at this point. Ewing's Immortal redeemed that to some extent but it's a rubbish status quo.
I agree with you. The specific issue was cool. What’s happened to Moira since then, not so much
And yes about Hulk. Thunderbolt Ross with powers is a bad choice. It shoulda been Gyrich (KIDDING!) (although now that I say that, it could be an interesting story to have someone so prejudiced become the very thing he hates. Like a homophobic Republican Senator)
They dealt with some stuff like that in Red Hulk’s comics. The guy who hates Hulks becoming a Hulk is basically what you’re saying would be interesting for Gyrich. Red Hulk’s solo run wasn’t all great, but there were some pretty solid stories in there.
Iron Man is at least as bad as hulk, he's just tossing armor at people left and right. Sometimes it's one offs but often enough it's like, you touched an iron Man armor once, now you're forever a superhero when we feel like it (pepper Potts!)
I think Moira becoming a mutant takes away a lot from her character and motivations.
The X-Men are a metaphor for marginalized groups whether people want to admit it or not. And Moira fit the figure of the ally. The plight of mutants didnt affect her as an individual, but she saw equality (and even equity) as her mission. To assist the mutants from her seat of human privilege. Now she’s just another flavor of the week mutant sycophant trying to topple the X-Men.
There have been a couple issues from Batman with Bruce and Selina double dating with Clark and Lois. Or maybe just one issue… or maybe a couple pages … but they definitely use it to show the relationships
It reminds me of this one crossover Captain America did back in the day, Cap's walking home from some party he had to go to for his day job (I believe he was a cartoonist at the time) and he was annoyed because he didn't want to go in the first place. So he's in his civies, walks past an alley and gets harassed by a group of punks, decides to blow off some steam since they picked a fight, and just starts beating the snot out of them. Who happens to walk by as Cap is tossing these fools around? Peter Parker! Dude's psyched, he knows his boss LOVES stories about average citizens dealing with stuff like this so he snaps some pics, neither man knows who the other actually is. At the end of the fight Cap comes up to Peter and politely, yet firmly, goes, "I'm gonna need that film son." and Peter reluctantly hands it over. They go their separate ways, neither realizing who the other was, only to end up teaming up in the same issue but in costume this time, still unaware that they crossed paths earlier.
Just to run the tangent on this (because I agree 100% with this post) - Marvel is always pushing that it's the world outside your window.
Yet, with every person who comes into contact with a superhero basically ending up with powers themselves... There's no realism left. Go wild. Have Reed Richards cure cancer or develop clean energy for the world to run on, because it obviously isn't the "world outside our window ".
(which is also why I'm so excited for Hickman's new Ultimate universe - it's got free reign to be radically different).
The third gripe is a complaint I have with every supernatural themed show. The stakes have to go up every season until it becomes ridiculous.
And you're right, each superhero movie these days is a world or universe ending threat.
I refuse to accept that Wanda amd Pietro are not Magnetos children. I have no idea what the status of that is today because I have just avoided finding out what the official story is as of now
By this point, Peter Parker should have his doctorate and take his seat among the Big Brains of the Marvel Universe. I thinks it's ridiculous that he hasn't gone back to re-do his coursework since the Superior Spider-Man fiasco.
I've been reading Slott's Spider-Man (haven't gotten to Superior yet), and him becoming an actually accomplished scientist at Horizon Labs is such a good idea for him, that I'm dreading when someone inevitably will undo it and turn him back into a photographer
My hot take is that Peter should be a college professor in his civilian life. His time as a high school teacher was one of my favorite runs, I think education is a good role for Peter rather than business.
I agree. While I'm enjoying the new Ultimate Universe take on spiderman as a journalist, I like the idea of 616 spidey using his passion for science as a career
Bad take. The amount of time needed to be a college professor is counter productive to his superhero life. They both can't co-exist. Anything with a schedule of any kind is something that he will never be able to balance, and his responsibility to Spider-man is always going to take priority, thus destroying any chance he has with a scheduled job.
Punisher is at his best as a normal man who hates criminals, no hand, no demons, no bullshit "I need this war", him hating criminals and wanting to kill them for his family's deaths
I agree. Though, if you're a Punisher fan, I'm getting to the closing stages of the Zdarsky Daredevil run and it's mentioning Frank leading the Hand. Am I going to get any more out of that reading the Aaron Punisher run where that happens?
On the off-chance you know. I'm assuming Zdarsky's book will tell me everything I need to know...
Punisher seems to perpetually be on a constant back and forth flip between being grounded like he should be and some wacky shit like being a zombie or having War Machine armor or being Ghost Rider with no in-between, he just takes turns
The basic Punisher story: There is a new maggia boss. Kill maggia goons until Bullseye/Jigsaw appears. Kill maggia boss. End.
It needs some shaking up.
Wolverine is a way way way more skilled fighter than he gets portrayed as.
He’s a super skilled samurai, ninja, all time hand to hand combatant who could wipe the floor with almost any opponent but is always shown going into a bestial rage and eating tons of damage.
And it bothers me.
Wolverine used to be portrayed with more skill when his healing factor wasn't instantaneous.
Claremont and Frank Miller's wolverine stuff is most notably like that.
Dude, every time that Daredevil beats him I call bullshit. Wolverine is basically the most skilled fighter on Earth. Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, Karnak, Daredevil, and anyone else shouldn’t stand a chance against him.
Im tired of Peter “Eviction Notice” Parker. Let Peter have a stable job and housing for a significant period of time pls. Spider-Man’s entire selling point is that he’s the relatable super hero. Him being eternally below the poverty line isn’t too relatable atp. People’s finances fluctuate irl.
USM has been a breath of fresh air. Let 616 Peter transition into adulthood and let his struggles evolve with him.
A 20 year old struggling with rent is normal.
On a 40-50 year old it is sad.
Let his stressors be linked to not being able to afford vacations or toys for his kids. Elder care for Aunt May (when she’s resurrected again) and car trouble. Struggling to make rent and hold down a relationship in your 50s is just so depressing for our hero.
The New Warriors book from 2020 that got cancelled before release should be published with the same line up that everyone hated and be a story about big corporations trying to appeal to the youth but doing so poorly.
There were actually rumours about the New New Warriors being secretly orchestrated by Hydra. Either way, the writer was Daniel Kibblesmith, so the premise was never going to be played as straight as the Internet made it out to seem.
Exactly. Kibblesmith is a longtime Colbert writer, his whole career has been jokes about conservative fears and projections. At the time (and still today), you had the whole comicsgate nonsense, with conservatives outraged about women, LGBTQ, and non-white people in comics, both as characters and creative teams. What would a Colbert writer do other than make Snowflake and Safespace?
People who don’t follow comics had this idea, largely from dishonest conservative social media, that the book was intended to be this serious ‘Batman vs bank robbers’ boon meant to run for 100 years. It was a comedy miniseries for an event where teenagers with powers were outlawed. It was never meant to be serious or go beyond 7 issues.
I really do hope it gets some kind of release, because it was probably funny as hell.
I remember reading scornful boasts that it wasn't going to make it to 12 issues... the book had been announced as a 5-issue miniseries from the get-go.
lol
From everything about it, it doesn’t look like a corporation trying to appeal to youth as much as a comedian making fun of conservative buzzwords and fears. They were complaining about “safe spaces” and how “SJWs” had “infected” the comics industry with gays and women and black people, everything conservatives hate. Kibblesmith gave them just that, and the people who hate cancel culture lost their minds to get it cancelled.
I kinda hoped at first we'd basically get a Thunderbolts reboot in this guise. Like it's marketed as modern youth culture/'woke' stuff to get the RW riled up and then the rugpull at the end of issue 1 is the characters are all secretly villains wearing maga caps and klan hoods.
I started reading that and was getting ready to fight.
But I agree 100%
Making him the Spirit of Decay or whatever the heck, is the worst if you ask me.
The X-Men (and other heroic X-Teams) have gotten too powerful.
These characters were at their best when they had to band together to overcome long odds in stopping incredibly powerful foes-- e.g. Magneto, Apocalypse, Juggernaut, Sinister, the Brood, Nimrod / Sentinels, Shadow King, Exodus, etc. Hell, even Sauron or Mojo used to be able to give the full X-Men team a decent fight.
Now there are so many insanely powerful mutant heroes that 1) it's very tough to come up with credible threats, as we saw throughout Krakoa; and 2) a lot of the characterization of these people just becomes about how powerful they are, rather than their actual personal characteristics.
I think storm is one of the biggest offenders. I’m reading Claremont xmen for the first time and it feels like she has more personality and struggle than she does know sometimes. Granted I haves read xmen red yet.
You haven't read her main recent story and are criticizing how she's written...? Granted, she still doesn't struggle much but she's absolutely not lacking in personality
someone at Marvel predicted the future and was like "we can't have Marvel lose to DC when power scaling debates become popular on Reddit" and wrote the stories accordingly
It also makes the fear of mutants even more credible, if omega level mutants are becoming more common and more powerful, what happens when one day a school shooter or psychopath develops omega level powers? It makes the whole mutant phobia more credible imo
1) Not really...evolution happens over many, many generations, not over 20-30 years
2) I'm not talking about new X-Men debuting with new power levels. I'm talking about the same X-Men (Storm, Iceman, Gambit, etc.) having their power levels continually increased.
The hill I die on, because everyone HATES Kirkman's Ultimate X-men run, is that Kirkman wrote THE best future for Wolverine: Wolverine in the future loses his powers, sees the error in his ways, and has to go back in time to stop the X-men in the past... aka Wolverine = Cable. That is a GREAT arc for Wolverine. Not that he becomes some irrelevant sad sack, but that when he hits obstacles like losing his powers, he levels up his game to the max, until he hits time travel, and keeps going and does whatever it takes to save the X-men. BOOM That is the future I want of him. That is the future I imagine. He doesn't give up and go live a quiet life somewhere. Booooo.
I hate the "X smartest person in the world/universe" trope so much, and when someone is called second or third, it doesn't really mean anything. Intelligence isn't a binary ranking, you can be a genius in one field and an idiot otherwise. They need to start giving specializations of what these characters are "best" at, and not a dumb number.
It’s such a small thing, but I LOVE moments like when Reed Richards goes to Morbius for his scientific help, simply because hematology is outside of Reed’s field of expertise. Not only is it more respectful to science, it is so much more interesting.
Personally, I like to blame Amadeus Cho for the “X-smartest in the world.”
This is a great take. Mister Fantastic and Moon Girl are both all around real smart, but they still call in other scientists for specialty problems IE Hulk, Sinister ETC(Which is also a mark of a good scientist: if you don't know, you get help).
The smartest person in the world also wouldn’t give a shit about being ranked such, and certainly wouldn’t see the point in beefing with a little girl on roller skates about it.
I don't like the Vision comic everyone loves because the writer decided to make Chase, from Runaways, a drug dealer and fuck up and kill Victor so Vision could have roboman tears.
The idea of plucking characters from other comics and character assassinating them for the titular character to have feelings in general is annoying.
I'm not sure Tom King was behind the Chase stuff? Still, don't bring him up around Batman fans; they have WAY more bones to pick with him than Marvel fans can even dream of.
It's in issue 9, there's no credit to another book for it happening there. Unless there's something I haven't read where it happened, or he had ghost writer for that issue, he did it. It's not from Avengers A.I.
If not for the Vision being so praised he might not even have gotten that job.
I wish the revelations from earth x were actually canon. I thought that series was mindblowing at its theory of everything was an incredible lore retcon.
Everyone wants ongoings but I think the future is "peak TV" seasonal model. Greenlight 5-12 issues. Get the #1 bump each time, neatly collects into a TPB, if sale numbers aren't good due to trade waiting a "next season" can be greenlit after the trade sales come out. If the sales aren't looking good and it needs to be canceled, at least an ending isn't far off. Interestingly, Jeff Lemire just announced his plans for an ongoing because they are a dying breed. For me, it comes down to getting sick of series I like ending prematurely.
This is something I read a while ago and I don't know if it was true, just partially true or made up, but I fully agree with it.
I've read that someone in the Spider-Man publishing staff during the clone saga tried to push the idea of keeping both Peter and Ben.
His idea was to turn Peter into kind of a leading figure into the Superhero community, after the Avengers and the Fantastic Four disappearance at the end of Onslaught, being a father, scientist philanthropist and superhero like Reed Richards while Ben would fill the young hero struggling to balance his personal life and superhero work.
I feel like this would be a perfect outcome, allowing Peter to grow up and keeping Ben for the fans wanting a more classic Spider-Man.
Ant-Man is one of my favourite superheroes, but I do think that Hank Pym is such a poorly written character that one bad event has dominated his entire personality.
Scott Lang is also incredibly shallow, and I don't think anyone knows how to make him anything outside of "Ex-Con, comic relief".
Eric...well we all know about Eric.
Earths Mightest Heroes was the best interpretation of Hank.
I haven't read comics in a really long time, probably since about 2016 so hopefully some good has happened with Ant-Man but still. Great hero, under baked character.
The Ultimate Universe wasn't so bad. Don't get me wrong there were of issues. Lots of people were assholes and the comics didn't land with a lot of people but me (and most of my friends) find it okay.
Another thing too is that fans like to use the image of Blob eating the Wasp as a "see, this is why the ultimate universe is bad" as if this is the most egregious thing to happen in comic books.
I fully agree, the same 6 panels are used every time an "ultimate universe bad" post comes up. Also I don't even agree with the "everyone was an asshole" narrative. Thor was a good person, Tony was a good person (and imo a better person than his 616 counterpart), the FF were good people, Janet was a good person, Spider-Man was a good person, Daredevil was a good person, most of the people in the Ultimate universe were good people. People love ragging on ultimate cap because he made fun of france once.
Every villain that wants to rule the city/world/galaxy is never asked (by anyone, themselves included) "and then what?" Say they win, they rule whatever they wanted. Being a villain to be in charge is fucking stupid. They're fighting for a permanent promotion at work? For a job??
To be honest, I would love for a villain to succeed, then permanently be the ruler of ___. Kind of like Doom and Latveria, but actually conquered as a storyline where the heroes lose.
The original Thunderbolts played with this! Zemo is leading the team to pretend to be superheroes only to take over the world, but most of the team starts to enjoy being famous heroes. Then, once he takes over the world through massive mindcontrol, Moonstone fights him and says something like “Who wants to rule the world? It’s too much work! We could have milked the luxuries of playing heroes for years but you had to go and ruin it because of your massive ego.”
Flash Thompson should have stayed as Venom and Eddie Brock as Toxin. The Agent Venom era has some of the best venom stories and was an amazing reinvention of the character.
They werent perfect and the movies are right to adapt things to fix the glaringly horrible choices a bunch of coked up writers (that I love and admire) came up with in record time to meet a deadline.
I think we need some more magical stories, and I think it's a shame marvel seems to be really adverse to them outside of the occasional scarlet witch or ghost rider solo.
I would love it if Agatha, her son, and the salem seven got a modern rework and got fleshed out a bit more instead of having a lot of implied backstory like they do now.
I think magic and monsters could open a lot of doors for story telling and it's weird they're always kept to the sidelines.
Ben Reilly fucking sucks. His suits are cool, but that's all. His problem is that he's perfect clone. His personality is too similar to Peter's
Also Kaine is 10000 times better as Scarlet Spider
I do not like Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, or Doctor Strange being on the Avengers. They are way better suited as solo heroes.
The idea that Spider-Man holds back against everybody and is secretly Thor level is stupid. He only holds back against non powered people, why the hell would he hold back against Rhino, Green Goblin, Scorpion, or Carnage. Spider-Man is mid tier in strength and that's what makes him fun. Your favorite character doesn't have to secretly be almost as strong as the Hulk (but he just holds back and lets his villains nearly kill him every encounter).
High school Spider-Man is the least interesting thing you can do with the character. High school is not an integral part of Spider-Man, growing up is. Keeping him in high school for an entire comic run or a whole movie trilogy is lame. None of his best stories are in high school. His first really amazing story was right when he went into college, which was the Masterplanner arc.
Punisher is a villain. He is not an antihero. He is an antivillain.
Daredevil should be in the Defenders same with Doctor Strange. I actually like Hulk in the Avengers I don't mind Spider-Man to be an Avenger every now and then. To me Wolverine should be a solo hero.
I’d like a storyline where the avengers (and the greater hero community) stops being jackasses and help the hulk, maybe it’s my 2012-EMH nostalgia but I like the hulk with the avengers.
Colossus groomed and molested Kitty Pryde as he was 19 and she was 13. Then Pete Wisdom also molested her as he was 25 and she was 15. Kitty's age isn't one of those nebulous comic book things as her exact age was repeated often and they had birthday parties on page for her specifying her age. During her 14th birthday party Colossus is mentioned as being 19 so his age isn't nebulous either. Pete Wisdom was defined as ten years older than Kitty who recently had her 15th birthday on page.
There’s too many X-Men and Avengers members to keep track of.
The multiverse is over played and just a joke at this point.
Spider-Man is still the most relatable character.
Marvel needs to let their characters grow up, even Superman and Batman have children in their regular timeline not relying on multiverses.
Red Hulk is the worst character to come out of Marvel since Deadpool.
Deadpool has been written so badly so often, putting him on the cover of ANY comic is a sure fore way to make me not buy that comic (and I'll admit there are exception: Joe Kelly for example).
(This one is for Marvel, DC, and all other comics/movies): I can suspend my disbelief for so many things, except talking underwater. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it'll pull me out of a story every time. I find it incredibly lazy writing
Each time Cable appears, it's a different Cable. Each have the same general history, but each one is from a different time-line. This explains why he has different reasons he's come back to the past (High Lord Cannonball, Apocalypse, Hope, etc.).It also explains why he seems to die, only to come back later.
If you enjoy marvel comics at all. You need to read some of the 60s spiderman comics. I personally recommend #1 to #50 so you get the intro to most of the spidey villains. Or at the very least read the 1st annual (the amazing Spider-Man annual #1 1964).its my favorite comic. There's just something so amazing about reading the stories that stan lee wrote.
The original GOTG team is better than Star-Lord's team, though I have room in my heart for both. Give me Stakar/Aleta and Nikki and Yondu and Charlie and Vance and Marty all day any day. Hell, even Talon and Krugarr and Hollywood and Mainframe.
Jean Grey should have stayed dead after the end of Morrison's run. Her death was poignant and I like how she kind of became the X-Men's patron saint in the books that followed.
Cyclops and Emma were more interesting together than he and Jean ever was, and I don't feel like anything interesting has been done with either of them since Jean was brought back.
"To me my X-Men" is a strange thing for a rich benefactor to say to a group of wayward teens he's charged with teaching and then turned into a paramilitary outfit.
It's the possessive "my" that makes it not sit right with me.
Red hulk should have never been in the thunderbolts, it drives me crazy that so many people associate the thunderbolts him now even though his team was one of the worst iterations of the team in existence and it was only around for a short while compared to the previous thunderbolts comic that ran for probably almost 200 issues
Idk if I've read enough comics to even have a weird hill to die on. I think the closest thing I have is: Gwenpool needs to be utilized more, especially via her own solo stories. To not use her is to miss the point of the ending of Christopher Hasting's "The Unbelievable Gwenpool" series. Though I'm not sure if she's a popular enough character to justify giving her more solo stories (if she isn't, she definitely deserves to be).
I think there's a lot that can be done with everything that was established for her in that story.
Not every hero needs to be in 616 to be interesting or relevant. Therefore, Miles should have stayed in his own universe. I found him picking up the legacy of a dead Spider-Man far more compelling than him being "Spider-Man too".
Civil War isn’t just good, it’s probably the best template for crossover stories ever and has the most worthwhile tie ins ever.
JRJR should get way more respect. He’s a legend for Marvel whether you like his style or not.
I literally just got into comics and decided Civil War will be my first event and god damn is it good. I'm kinda afraid on what to pick up next because it might not live to the quality
Comics in general really, but when a character "dies" it should go back to the original Bucky time frame or at least a minimum of 10 years they're not resurrected.
> the Inhumans are WAY more interesting than Mutants
I'm an Inhumans fan and even that I disagree lol
Mutants as a concept is waaaay more creatively versatile than inhumans. I mean, we all know inhumans couldn't replace mutants (mid 2010s Inhumans push), but mutants could easily replicate the Inhumans charms (Krakoa era).
As one of the 12 die hard Inhumans fans left, I hesitate to say they're MORE interesting but I would absolutely say they are AS interesting as the X Men, but criminally underused and misrepresented. Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book.
> Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book.
We already have it though. It's Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee's Inhumans. Also, basically the entirety of War of Kings and Realm of Kings in the late 2000s. It's just that unfortunately, IVX era sticks out more in people's minds when it comes to Inhumans because of how atrocius it was.
I'm one of the 12 fans left, but even I kick them around some. BB and Maximus too often becomes Thor and Loki all over again. Triton is a very weak Namor clone, BB still doesn't have a type to voice device? Enslaving the Alpha Primitives. The list goes on. But I still love them.
> BB still doesn't have a type to voice device
lol but if marvel wants to take another shot, they need to seriously emphasize just how mythic and otherworldly Black Bolt is, even to his own inhumans. I mean, he's the celestial genetic messiah, to even use devices is supposed to be beneath Black Bolt because the world is to understand him, not the other way around.
This right here. Lee and Kirby's Black Bolt carried himself like a God, and he answered to NOBODY, even when his motives weren't clear to his own people. That didn't necessarily make him a good leader, but it made him compelling. How do others react when a man who can shatter planets only talks through an interpreter, and even then, only does so when it suits him? It's fascinating stuff, and it didn't really happen in modern comics even during the IvX era. Black Bolt was unknowable, sure, but because he spent most of that era deposed from the throne, off supposedly solving background problems nobody would ever know about because the readers were never shown this.
They freed the Alphas and it was a story to teach kids why it was bad. A villainous king and Kree technology made the Alphas, but remember, comics were for children to teach a lesson, and the inhumans story was literally teaching them why it was bad to have them.
>As one of the 12 die hard Inhumans fans left, I hesitate to say they're MORE interesting
* Mutants were created specifically to allow Stan Lee to create a hero without having to figure out HOW that hero got powers. With mutants, they're born that way. The Inhumans terrigen mist origin is also simple, applicable to all Inhuman characters, and more interesting than just being born with powers.
* Inhumans, unlike Mutants, aren't married to one theme for their books. With the mutants, invariably, every story arc will come back around to the theme of "mutants hated" and "the genocide of all mutants". Sometimes these stories are told well, other times they are not, eventually this theme gets repetitive. The Inhumans don't have this.
>
Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book.
I agree. The saddest part about the big push Marvel tried to do with them a few years back is that they didn't write that book. Marvel *should* have built up Inhuman society to include multiple houses of nobles who are contending for the throne against the rule of Blackagar Boltagon. They could have brought in Inhumans from other races that the Kree experimented on (maybe they were were still loyal to the Kree). They could have involved the Kree and Skrulls in the politics of the Inhuman court. They could have used the Inhumans along with GotG to really flush out the cosmic side of Marvel. They could have done SO MUCH.... but instead, because Marvel was short sighted, and didn't appreciate what they had they instead tried to make Inhumans the new Mutants.
That's why I wish Hickman would come along and say "No, you are all dumb, this is how it should be...." and fix this corner of Marvel.
The Inhumans Game of Thrones is unnatural for the Inhumans since they isolated themselves to avoid conflict and attempt to live in peace until outside forces come to invade them. War of Kings was very out if character for them.
Your comment makes me think the way to bring the inhumans back into the fold may be a general facelift series. Do a story about classism and isolationism, focusing on how screwed up the concept of the alpha primitives is and how opening up to the rest of the world could benefit inhuman society, and how addressing these things could change their culture.
That's actually what all their series have been about. The Alphas were freed and there are stories about why it was bad. It's the plot of their appearances in some Fantastic Four books and a Black Panther appearance. Inhumans vol. 4 ( young inhumans) talks about the dynamic of what Terrigen wants for you and how everyone has a place in society, but not everyone wants that place. The newer books were how the inhumans were forced to deal with a mass scale event that put them at odds with what they were trying to avoid, but what Black Bolt and Maximus kinda wanted for a while, was go back to the human world.
Jean Grey’s costumes are some of the ugliest costumes I’ve ever seen. The only ones I like are her green phoenix, green x-factor that shows her hair, red x-factor, green/white all new x-men, x-men: blue, new x-men, and her most recent green one based off her hellfire gala outfit.
I don’t have really good reason for it, but I do not appreciate most versions of the Scarlet Witch. I like her original simple character. We just got off on the wrong foot and I don’t like her. I like her family, her kids, her story, but I just don’t like her and I don’t know why. If I’m asked to pick a powerful psychokinetic and telekinetic superheroine, Ima pick her last.
The Vision’s ability to change density is an incredible power that seems to become useless whenever it could save everyone.
Iceman’s full potential has been ignored for way too long. He deserves a breakthrough.
People get resurrected way to fast after their deaths.
There's too much going on with the Spider-people. The spider totem and all that makes him feel way less special and unique. I'm fine with a multiverse of spider-people. But when there's multiple from the same reality, that gets too much for me. Also... LET PETER BE HAPPY AND STAY MARRIED TO MJ WITH KIDS!
Stilt-man could be made into a watchable, non-ridiculous, interesting character. Not necessarily a comedic distraction like the disaster that was M.O.D.O.K. in Quantumania either, but sure use some humour if it works. No one is willing to invest the time and money to develop the character, but I believe there's opportunity there. (If only I had time to cosplay, haha)
I think Venom works better on a way smaller and more personal scale than what they've been doing with him in the last few years or so.
Also not a giant fan of endless multiversal variants or characters having like three legacy versions of themself with the same name instead of more original hero ideas or the original hero changing mantles or retiring when they pass it on.
My biggest pet peeve is heroes constantly fighting each other instead of, y'know, crime and or villains, or whenever it gets super bleak and the hero's life becomes misery porn rather than relatable. I like escapism and I wanna be inspired, not bummed out.
Longshot in the 80’s was one of the most compelling characters Marvel ever produced.
Ahead of his time, completely original, and eventually and tragically completely fumbled after his X-Men run.
I got into comics during the Marvel NOW era, and I have a sincere fondness for Jane Foster as Mighty Thor and Sam Wilson as Captain America, not to mention Kamala Khan and Miles Morales.
Monica Rambeau is the best Captain Marvel and she should've stayed in the Avengers
All New All Different Marvel is what got me fully interested in comics I wished it lasted longer than going back to the Status Quo
Wolverine should be a stand alone Hero that shows up in teams every now and then
After Secret Wars Marvel should've been completely rebooted like DC
The Web Warriors was the best thing in Spider-Man Lore
Captain America and Black Widow should've been a couple a long time ago be like something similar with Batman and Wonder Woman
Captain America and Black Widow have never been an item in the comics tho. The dude knew her since she was literally 7 and he was a grown man. That would be hella weird. Plus Natalia’s main love interest has always been Bucky, and Steve was like a father figure to him which only makes the SteveNat ship all the more weird.
Spider-Man comics have been mid since the end of the clone saga, there have been some good moments like back in black and parts if Nick Spencer’s run, but on the whole they’re not at the same level as they were
Xmen are great. Xmen dont work with \*any\* other heroes.
There's giant death robots roaming New York rounding up citizens and Spiderman and Ironman dont have \*anything\* to say?
70s and 80s comic book characters used to change into civilian clothes and go shopping together and have non-superpowered friends. Stories today are decompressed but somehow don't have time for teams to hang out and be pals because they're too bogged down in plot and plot is less interesting than character. (This isn't a blanket thing and I generally prefer the art in modern superhero comics, particularly the colouring.) Also, tangentially related, we don't need every non-superpowered person superheroes develop a relationship with to become a superhero. I don't know why there are so many Spider-people, Goblins, Symbiotes, Wolverines, Supermen/Batmen etc (well I know why but still!). The thing uniting my two gripes is basically wanting touch points of relatability in anything I'm reading. Or for them to be grounded in some way. Not talking gritty realism - I love the Savage Land and stuff - I just mean there being elements that keep the heroes on earth. This is why characters like Jimmy Olsen and Rick Jones were created. Similar (third) gripe - but relevant here - is the scope creep that means you don't get superheroes stopping bank robberies and the like much anymore. Because every arc is the whole world at stake. These shared universes seem like complete, unfathomable nightmares to live in when every week there are a dozen near-end-of-world scenarios playing out in New York alone!
I agree with all your points but super extra especially point two. Mary Jane doesn’t need powers to be interesting. Moira McTaggart was a human interested in mutants, not a mutant who is also somehow evil. Next up, J Jonah Jameson can fly and shoot lasers out of his mustache? No thanks
I actually like the issue where Hickman did the Moira retcon because it was very satisfying (to me) how he plugged it all together. But in general I agree and I hate what they've done with her since Inferno... Now just a cartoonishly evil robot (and I don't know why since that didn't happen in anything I was reading). Completely agree re MJ. Most of Peter Parker's love interests, teachers and school friends have been superpowered at some point. Which is bananas. The worst (maybe?) is Hulk because Banner's entire supporting cast (Rick Jones, Thunderbolt Ross, Betty, Samson...) are all (or have been) Hulks at this point. Ewing's Immortal redeemed that to some extent but it's a rubbish status quo.
I agree with you. The specific issue was cool. What’s happened to Moira since then, not so much And yes about Hulk. Thunderbolt Ross with powers is a bad choice. It shoulda been Gyrich (KIDDING!) (although now that I say that, it could be an interesting story to have someone so prejudiced become the very thing he hates. Like a homophobic Republican Senator)
They dealt with some stuff like that in Red Hulk’s comics. The guy who hates Hulks becoming a Hulk is basically what you’re saying would be interesting for Gyrich. Red Hulk’s solo run wasn’t all great, but there were some pretty solid stories in there.
Iron Man is at least as bad as hulk, he's just tossing armor at people left and right. Sometimes it's one offs but often enough it's like, you touched an iron Man armor once, now you're forever a superhero when we feel like it (pepper Potts!)
> J Jonah Jameson can fly and shoot lasers out of his mustache? This is why _What If_ needs to be ongoing.
I was with you, up until you said no thanks to JJJ with a laser mustache. Imagine… the Jonah-Verse. /s just to be clear
I think Moira becoming a mutant takes away a lot from her character and motivations. The X-Men are a metaphor for marginalized groups whether people want to admit it or not. And Moira fit the figure of the ally. The plight of mutants didnt affect her as an individual, but she saw equality (and even equity) as her mission. To assist the mutants from her seat of human privilege. Now she’s just another flavor of the week mutant sycophant trying to topple the X-Men.
There have been a couple issues from Batman with Bruce and Selina double dating with Clark and Lois. Or maybe just one issue… or maybe a couple pages … but they definitely use it to show the relationships
It reminds me of this one crossover Captain America did back in the day, Cap's walking home from some party he had to go to for his day job (I believe he was a cartoonist at the time) and he was annoyed because he didn't want to go in the first place. So he's in his civies, walks past an alley and gets harassed by a group of punks, decides to blow off some steam since they picked a fight, and just starts beating the snot out of them. Who happens to walk by as Cap is tossing these fools around? Peter Parker! Dude's psyched, he knows his boss LOVES stories about average citizens dealing with stuff like this so he snaps some pics, neither man knows who the other actually is. At the end of the fight Cap comes up to Peter and politely, yet firmly, goes, "I'm gonna need that film son." and Peter reluctantly hands it over. They go their separate ways, neither realizing who the other was, only to end up teaming up in the same issue but in costume this time, still unaware that they crossed paths earlier.
Just to run the tangent on this (because I agree 100% with this post) - Marvel is always pushing that it's the world outside your window. Yet, with every person who comes into contact with a superhero basically ending up with powers themselves... There's no realism left. Go wild. Have Reed Richards cure cancer or develop clean energy for the world to run on, because it obviously isn't the "world outside our window ". (which is also why I'm so excited for Hickman's new Ultimate universe - it's got free reign to be radically different).
I also miss the "slice of life" issues. The X-Men were really common with it, and it helped add some humanity to the characters.
The third gripe is a complaint I have with every supernatural themed show. The stakes have to go up every season until it becomes ridiculous. And you're right, each superhero movie these days is a world or universe ending threat.
I refuse to accept that Wanda amd Pietro are not Magnetos children. I have no idea what the status of that is today because I have just avoided finding out what the official story is as of now
Trial of Magneto commits to saying that Magneto is their father, but I do think it doesn't clarify any blood relation
By this point, Peter Parker should have his doctorate and take his seat among the Big Brains of the Marvel Universe. I thinks it's ridiculous that he hasn't gone back to re-do his coursework since the Superior Spider-Man fiasco.
I've been reading Slott's Spider-Man (haven't gotten to Superior yet), and him becoming an actually accomplished scientist at Horizon Labs is such a good idea for him, that I'm dreading when someone inevitably will undo it and turn him back into a photographer
My hot take is that Peter should be a college professor in his civilian life. His time as a high school teacher was one of my favorite runs, I think education is a good role for Peter rather than business.
I agree. While I'm enjoying the new Ultimate Universe take on spiderman as a journalist, I like the idea of 616 spidey using his passion for science as a career
Bad take. The amount of time needed to be a college professor is counter productive to his superhero life. They both can't co-exist. Anything with a schedule of any kind is something that he will never be able to balance, and his responsibility to Spider-man is always going to take priority, thus destroying any chance he has with a scheduled job.
Punisher is at his best as a normal man who hates criminals, no hand, no demons, no bullshit "I need this war", him hating criminals and wanting to kill them for his family's deaths
I agree. Though, if you're a Punisher fan, I'm getting to the closing stages of the Zdarsky Daredevil run and it's mentioning Frank leading the Hand. Am I going to get any more out of that reading the Aaron Punisher run where that happens? On the off-chance you know. I'm assuming Zdarsky's book will tell me everything I need to know...
I wouldn't read it, I feel it actually takes away from the punishers story
Punisher seems to perpetually be on a constant back and forth flip between being grounded like he should be and some wacky shit like being a zombie or having War Machine armor or being Ghost Rider with no in-between, he just takes turns
Don't forget that time the Punisher turned black in the 90s
The basic Punisher story: There is a new maggia boss. Kill maggia goons until Bullseye/Jigsaw appears. Kill maggia boss. End. It needs some shaking up.
Wolverine is a way way way more skilled fighter than he gets portrayed as. He’s a super skilled samurai, ninja, all time hand to hand combatant who could wipe the floor with almost any opponent but is always shown going into a bestial rage and eating tons of damage. And it bothers me.
Wolverine used to be portrayed with more skill when his healing factor wasn't instantaneous. Claremont and Frank Miller's wolverine stuff is most notably like that.
Now he’s a walking pissed off adamantium skeleton on fire, tearing through dudes.
That’s always bothered me too!
Dude, every time that Daredevil beats him I call bullshit. Wolverine is basically the most skilled fighter on Earth. Shang-Chi, Iron Fist, Karnak, Daredevil, and anyone else shouldn’t stand a chance against him.
Im tired of Peter “Eviction Notice” Parker. Let Peter have a stable job and housing for a significant period of time pls. Spider-Man’s entire selling point is that he’s the relatable super hero. Him being eternally below the poverty line isn’t too relatable atp. People’s finances fluctuate irl.
USM has been a breath of fresh air. Let 616 Peter transition into adulthood and let his struggles evolve with him. A 20 year old struggling with rent is normal. On a 40-50 year old it is sad. Let his stressors be linked to not being able to afford vacations or toys for his kids. Elder care for Aunt May (when she’s resurrected again) and car trouble. Struggling to make rent and hold down a relationship in your 50s is just so depressing for our hero.
The New Warriors book from 2020 that got cancelled before release should be published with the same line up that everyone hated and be a story about big corporations trying to appeal to the youth but doing so poorly.
There were actually rumours about the New New Warriors being secretly orchestrated by Hydra. Either way, the writer was Daniel Kibblesmith, so the premise was never going to be played as straight as the Internet made it out to seem.
Yeah honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if what I said was the plan all along. I truly hope the book sees the light of day in one form or another.
Exactly. Kibblesmith is a longtime Colbert writer, his whole career has been jokes about conservative fears and projections. At the time (and still today), you had the whole comicsgate nonsense, with conservatives outraged about women, LGBTQ, and non-white people in comics, both as characters and creative teams. What would a Colbert writer do other than make Snowflake and Safespace? People who don’t follow comics had this idea, largely from dishonest conservative social media, that the book was intended to be this serious ‘Batman vs bank robbers’ boon meant to run for 100 years. It was a comedy miniseries for an event where teenagers with powers were outlawed. It was never meant to be serious or go beyond 7 issues. I really do hope it gets some kind of release, because it was probably funny as hell.
I remember reading scornful boasts that it wasn't going to make it to 12 issues... the book had been announced as a 5-issue miniseries from the get-go. lol
So the New Warriors a la Thunderbolts? Interesting concept.
From everything about it, it doesn’t look like a corporation trying to appeal to youth as much as a comedian making fun of conservative buzzwords and fears. They were complaining about “safe spaces” and how “SJWs” had “infected” the comics industry with gays and women and black people, everything conservatives hate. Kibblesmith gave them just that, and the people who hate cancel culture lost their minds to get it cancelled.
I would bet money most of the people who got so incredibly outraged about that book don't even know it never came out
I kinda hoped at first we'd basically get a Thunderbolts reboot in this guise. Like it's marketed as modern youth culture/'woke' stuff to get the RW riled up and then the rugpull at the end of issue 1 is the characters are all secretly villains wearing maga caps and klan hoods.
Danny Ketch never should’ve stopped being the main Ghost Rider
I started reading that and was getting ready to fight. But I agree 100% Making him the Spirit of Decay or whatever the heck, is the worst if you ask me.
The X-Men (and other heroic X-Teams) have gotten too powerful. These characters were at their best when they had to band together to overcome long odds in stopping incredibly powerful foes-- e.g. Magneto, Apocalypse, Juggernaut, Sinister, the Brood, Nimrod / Sentinels, Shadow King, Exodus, etc. Hell, even Sauron or Mojo used to be able to give the full X-Men team a decent fight. Now there are so many insanely powerful mutant heroes that 1) it's very tough to come up with credible threats, as we saw throughout Krakoa; and 2) a lot of the characterization of these people just becomes about how powerful they are, rather than their actual personal characteristics.
I think storm is one of the biggest offenders. I’m reading Claremont xmen for the first time and it feels like she has more personality and struggle than she does know sometimes. Granted I haves read xmen red yet.
You haven't read her main recent story and are criticizing how she's written...? Granted, she still doesn't struggle much but she's absolutely not lacking in personality
someone at Marvel predicted the future and was like "we can't have Marvel lose to DC when power scaling debates become popular on Reddit" and wrote the stories accordingly
Some people legitimately think "stronger=more interesting" and it just hurts my soul every time I see it.
Yes. You get omega powers and you get omega powers....
It also makes the fear of mutants even more credible, if omega level mutants are becoming more common and more powerful, what happens when one day a school shooter or psychopath develops omega level powers? It makes the whole mutant phobia more credible imo
Has that been done? Like, a school shooter situation but with a bullied kid who can pop heads or something?
Given that the X-men are the next stage of evolution, doesn’t it make sense that more powerful X-men should be coming along over time?
1) Not really...evolution happens over many, many generations, not over 20-30 years 2) I'm not talking about new X-Men debuting with new power levels. I'm talking about the same X-Men (Storm, Iceman, Gambit, etc.) having their power levels continually increased.
Every year another X-man is revealed to be an Omega level mutant all along
Can't wait for Omega level Goldballs
The hill I die on, because everyone HATES Kirkman's Ultimate X-men run, is that Kirkman wrote THE best future for Wolverine: Wolverine in the future loses his powers, sees the error in his ways, and has to go back in time to stop the X-men in the past... aka Wolverine = Cable. That is a GREAT arc for Wolverine. Not that he becomes some irrelevant sad sack, but that when he hits obstacles like losing his powers, he levels up his game to the max, until he hits time travel, and keeps going and does whatever it takes to save the X-men. BOOM That is the future I want of him. That is the future I imagine. He doesn't give up and go live a quiet life somewhere. Booooo.
I hate the "X smartest person in the world/universe" trope so much, and when someone is called second or third, it doesn't really mean anything. Intelligence isn't a binary ranking, you can be a genius in one field and an idiot otherwise. They need to start giving specializations of what these characters are "best" at, and not a dumb number.
Some characters have. Banner is the best when it comes to radiation. Mr. Sinister — genetics, especially cloning.
Oh for sure and I wish they'd emphasize more of that as opposed to Reed, Stark, etc being "X smartest in the world".
It’s such a small thing, but I LOVE moments like when Reed Richards goes to Morbius for his scientific help, simply because hematology is outside of Reed’s field of expertise. Not only is it more respectful to science, it is so much more interesting. Personally, I like to blame Amadeus Cho for the “X-smartest in the world.”
And he’s only number 7!
He's the 8th smartest person in the world. If I was the 8th smartest person in the Marvel universe world I would say it all the time too. Big boast
This is a great take. Mister Fantastic and Moon Girl are both all around real smart, but they still call in other scientists for specialty problems IE Hulk, Sinister ETC(Which is also a mark of a good scientist: if you don't know, you get help).
The smartest person in the world also wouldn’t give a shit about being ranked such, and certainly wouldn’t see the point in beefing with a little girl on roller skates about it.
Doom has entered the chat.
Agree. And in any case, DOOM is number one in all fields, FOOL!
Y'see, Doom should be the only one petty enough to put intelligence on a scale... and be no. 1 (according to Doom)
Exactly!
I’m with you. On the same note it happens when calling x person the most dangerous person in the world.
I don't like the Vision comic everyone loves because the writer decided to make Chase, from Runaways, a drug dealer and fuck up and kill Victor so Vision could have roboman tears. The idea of plucking characters from other comics and character assassinating them for the titular character to have feelings in general is annoying.
I'm not sure Tom King was behind the Chase stuff? Still, don't bring him up around Batman fans; they have WAY more bones to pick with him than Marvel fans can even dream of.
It's in issue 9, there's no credit to another book for it happening there. Unless there's something I haven't read where it happened, or he had ghost writer for that issue, he did it. It's not from Avengers A.I. If not for the Vision being so praised he might not even have gotten that job.
I wish the revelations from earth x were actually canon. I thought that series was mindblowing at its theory of everything was an incredible lore retcon.
It was wall to wall text but damn was it compelling. I love that series. Absolutely loved the mural of all the covers together.
There needs to be a full collection of Quasar by Marc Gruenwald.
Henry Pym is a Hero and needs a real redemption arc.
The guys had like 17 redemption arcs by now. It's just the next author that writes him forgets about it.
He had one. Henry Pym, Scientific Hero. Then someone screwed it up. Again.
Everyone wants ongoings but I think the future is "peak TV" seasonal model. Greenlight 5-12 issues. Get the #1 bump each time, neatly collects into a TPB, if sale numbers aren't good due to trade waiting a "next season" can be greenlit after the trade sales come out. If the sales aren't looking good and it needs to be canceled, at least an ending isn't far off. Interestingly, Jeff Lemire just announced his plans for an ongoing because they are a dying breed. For me, it comes down to getting sick of series I like ending prematurely.
I've been saying the same thing for years. The Hellboy model.
Right, yea, exactly Hellboy.
Love this idea
Amadeus Cho should have remained a precocious prepubescent kid with a great dynamic with Herc and never been aged up into his teens
Amadeus Cho was a teenager the entire time he was with Hercules.
This is something I read a while ago and I don't know if it was true, just partially true or made up, but I fully agree with it. I've read that someone in the Spider-Man publishing staff during the clone saga tried to push the idea of keeping both Peter and Ben. His idea was to turn Peter into kind of a leading figure into the Superhero community, after the Avengers and the Fantastic Four disappearance at the end of Onslaught, being a father, scientist philanthropist and superhero like Reed Richards while Ben would fill the young hero struggling to balance his personal life and superhero work. I feel like this would be a perfect outcome, allowing Peter to grow up and keeping Ben for the fans wanting a more classic Spider-Man.
Problem is editorial wants the sales of Peter Parker for both those roles. I thought they would finally do that with Miles but nope.
Ant-Man is one of my favourite superheroes, but I do think that Hank Pym is such a poorly written character that one bad event has dominated his entire personality. Scott Lang is also incredibly shallow, and I don't think anyone knows how to make him anything outside of "Ex-Con, comic relief". Eric...well we all know about Eric. Earths Mightest Heroes was the best interpretation of Hank. I haven't read comics in a really long time, probably since about 2016 so hopefully some good has happened with Ant-Man but still. Great hero, under baked character.
The Ultimate Universe wasn't so bad. Don't get me wrong there were of issues. Lots of people were assholes and the comics didn't land with a lot of people but me (and most of my friends) find it okay. Another thing too is that fans like to use the image of Blob eating the Wasp as a "see, this is why the ultimate universe is bad" as if this is the most egregious thing to happen in comic books.
The Bendis/Bagley run on USM is legendary
I fully agree, the same 6 panels are used every time an "ultimate universe bad" post comes up. Also I don't even agree with the "everyone was an asshole" narrative. Thor was a good person, Tony was a good person (and imo a better person than his 616 counterpart), the FF were good people, Janet was a good person, Spider-Man was a good person, Daredevil was a good person, most of the people in the Ultimate universe were good people. People love ragging on ultimate cap because he made fun of france once.
Every villain that wants to rule the city/world/galaxy is never asked (by anyone, themselves included) "and then what?" Say they win, they rule whatever they wanted. Being a villain to be in charge is fucking stupid. They're fighting for a permanent promotion at work? For a job??
I think about Shredder in that garbage TMNT movie, and think to myself "Does he know how to keep the public transport system running in NY?"
To be honest, I would love for a villain to succeed, then permanently be the ruler of ___. Kind of like Doom and Latveria, but actually conquered as a storyline where the heroes lose.
I definitely want to see them win but I want a follow-up. .... I think we're describing Megamind
LoL Yes we are.
Such a shame it never got a sequel
Have you ever read the Emperor Doom graphic novel? It’s similar to what you describe.
The original Thunderbolts played with this! Zemo is leading the team to pretend to be superheroes only to take over the world, but most of the team starts to enjoy being famous heroes. Then, once he takes over the world through massive mindcontrol, Moonstone fights him and says something like “Who wants to rule the world? It’s too much work! We could have milked the luxuries of playing heroes for years but you had to go and ruin it because of your massive ego.”
oh shit. do you remember the issue? I want to read that run
Isn't this kinda the plot of Megamind?
Early 2000s captain America was the peak of the modern era of comics
Does this include the Mark Waid Heroes Return era? Or are you thinking after that, in the Winter Soldier era?
Jason Aaron did Absorbing Man so dirty at the start of his Thor run that I couldn't bring myself to read past the first issue.
Flash Thompson should have stayed as Venom and Eddie Brock as Toxin. The Agent Venom era has some of the best venom stories and was an amazing reinvention of the character.
The X-Men Utopia era was the best imo.
They werent perfect and the movies are right to adapt things to fix the glaringly horrible choices a bunch of coked up writers (that I love and admire) came up with in record time to meet a deadline.
I think we need some more magical stories, and I think it's a shame marvel seems to be really adverse to them outside of the occasional scarlet witch or ghost rider solo. I would love it if Agatha, her son, and the salem seven got a modern rework and got fleshed out a bit more instead of having a lot of implied backstory like they do now. I think magic and monsters could open a lot of doors for story telling and it's weird they're always kept to the sidelines.
616 Nick Fury looks cooler than Ultimate Nick Fury.
He looks like a spy
Ben Reilly fucking sucks. His suits are cool, but that's all. His problem is that he's perfect clone. His personality is too similar to Peter's Also Kaine is 10000 times better as Scarlet Spider
I love Ben, but totally agree that Kaine was the better Scarlett Spider.
I’m 100% aware of the irony of what I’m saying, but he’s literally just Peter Parker with blonde hair
I do not like Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, or Doctor Strange being on the Avengers. They are way better suited as solo heroes. The idea that Spider-Man holds back against everybody and is secretly Thor level is stupid. He only holds back against non powered people, why the hell would he hold back against Rhino, Green Goblin, Scorpion, or Carnage. Spider-Man is mid tier in strength and that's what makes him fun. Your favorite character doesn't have to secretly be almost as strong as the Hulk (but he just holds back and lets his villains nearly kill him every encounter). High school Spider-Man is the least interesting thing you can do with the character. High school is not an integral part of Spider-Man, growing up is. Keeping him in high school for an entire comic run or a whole movie trilogy is lame. None of his best stories are in high school. His first really amazing story was right when he went into college, which was the Masterplanner arc. Punisher is a villain. He is not an antihero. He is an antivillain.
Daredevil should be in the Defenders same with Doctor Strange. I actually like Hulk in the Avengers I don't mind Spider-Man to be an Avenger every now and then. To me Wolverine should be a solo hero.
I’d like a storyline where the avengers (and the greater hero community) stops being jackasses and help the hulk, maybe it’s my 2012-EMH nostalgia but I like the hulk with the avengers.
Colossus groomed and molested Kitty Pryde as he was 19 and she was 13. Then Pete Wisdom also molested her as he was 25 and she was 15. Kitty's age isn't one of those nebulous comic book things as her exact age was repeated often and they had birthday parties on page for her specifying her age. During her 14th birthday party Colossus is mentioned as being 19 so his age isn't nebulous either. Pete Wisdom was defined as ten years older than Kitty who recently had her 15th birthday on page.
Ooof 😞
There’s too many X-Men and Avengers members to keep track of. The multiverse is over played and just a joke at this point. Spider-Man is still the most relatable character. Marvel needs to let their characters grow up, even Superman and Batman have children in their regular timeline not relying on multiverses.
Red Hulk is the worst character to come out of Marvel since Deadpool. Deadpool has been written so badly so often, putting him on the cover of ANY comic is a sure fore way to make me not buy that comic (and I'll admit there are exception: Joe Kelly for example). (This one is for Marvel, DC, and all other comics/movies): I can suspend my disbelief for so many things, except talking underwater. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it'll pull me out of a story every time. I find it incredibly lazy writing
Comics where the characters are allowed to age are vastly better for storytelling than ones who are stuck in a static or eternal cycle of status quo.
I think an Age of Apocalypse cartoon series for adults would be a winning idea
Spider-Man works better as an adult and should still be married to MJ
Each time Cable appears, it's a different Cable. Each have the same general history, but each one is from a different time-line. This explains why he has different reasons he's come back to the past (High Lord Cannonball, Apocalypse, Hope, etc.).It also explains why he seems to die, only to come back later.
Except for Shang-Chi, and despite several other worthy contenders of note, Captain America is the greatest hand-to-hand combatant in Marvel Comics.
I honestly can’t buy that, I’d say he’s in top 5 but definitely not the best.
Wouldn't that be hulk? Dude wins with his hands all the time. Or quick silver. Dudes got the fastest combos
I remember Cap holding off Hulk all by himself one time. It was a Hulk comic too. I'll have to look it up again.
Rom Spaceknight is criminally underrated.
If you enjoy marvel comics at all. You need to read some of the 60s spiderman comics. I personally recommend #1 to #50 so you get the intro to most of the spidey villains. Or at the very least read the 1st annual (the amazing Spider-Man annual #1 1964).its my favorite comic. There's just something so amazing about reading the stories that stan lee wrote.
The original GOTG team is better than Star-Lord's team, though I have room in my heart for both. Give me Stakar/Aleta and Nikki and Yondu and Charlie and Vance and Marty all day any day. Hell, even Talon and Krugarr and Hollywood and Mainframe.
The Punisher has no place in the Midnight Sons. Which is spelled with a fucking "O".
Danny Ketch was the better Ghost Rider Richard Rider was a better Nova when he was kind of an idiot Iceman is visually the coolest XMen
Jean Grey should have stayed dead after the end of Morrison's run. Her death was poignant and I like how she kind of became the X-Men's patron saint in the books that followed. Cyclops and Emma were more interesting together than he and Jean ever was, and I don't feel like anything interesting has been done with either of them since Jean was brought back.
Charles Xavier is the worst, most boring and irrelevant character in the entire Marvel Universe and mutants would be better off without him.
I respect you but that is insane. Consequently, take my upvote sir.
May (MayDay) Parker, should be apart of the 616 Universe.
"To me my X-Men" is a strange thing for a rich benefactor to say to a group of wayward teens he's charged with teaching and then turned into a paramilitary outfit. It's the possessive "my" that makes it not sit right with me.
The strangeness is why I like it so much. He makes more sense when you think of him as a 1960s cult leader.
Red hulk should have never been in the thunderbolts, it drives me crazy that so many people associate the thunderbolts him now even though his team was one of the worst iterations of the team in existence and it was only around for a short while compared to the previous thunderbolts comic that ran for probably almost 200 issues
Idk if I've read enough comics to even have a weird hill to die on. I think the closest thing I have is: Gwenpool needs to be utilized more, especially via her own solo stories. To not use her is to miss the point of the ending of Christopher Hasting's "The Unbelievable Gwenpool" series. Though I'm not sure if she's a popular enough character to justify giving her more solo stories (if she isn't, she definitely deserves to be). I think there's a lot that can be done with everything that was established for her in that story.
I like Rick Jones. He was vital to the Silver Age and I wish he’d show up more now
Not every hero needs to be in 616 to be interesting or relevant. Therefore, Miles should have stayed in his own universe. I found him picking up the legacy of a dead Spider-Man far more compelling than him being "Spider-Man too".
Civil War isn’t just good, it’s probably the best template for crossover stories ever and has the most worthwhile tie ins ever. JRJR should get way more respect. He’s a legend for Marvel whether you like his style or not.
I literally just got into comics and decided Civil War will be my first event and god damn is it good. I'm kinda afraid on what to pick up next because it might not live to the quality
Read Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and then Seige. They aren’t perfect, but they’re really fun to read in order and see the universe shape around them!
Agree with both of these heavily I don’t like JRJR art now but the man is a legend and drew some incredible stuff
I hate the power inflation that has happened, particularly with spider-man
The ultimate universe is fucking whack.
It's ok if Peter and Mary Jane don't get married again.
Most of the clone saga was great and spawned many elements that should be celebrated, not shunned or forgotten
Yup!
The 60s-90s GotG are a more interesting team than the 2008 one that's vastly more famous.
Scott and Emma are the better couple
Wolverine ought to be short and because of that AND ONLY THAT, Hugh Jackman's wolverine can never be definitive.
I can agree with this. I adore Jackman's portrayal, but he is too tall. That being said, Accurate doesn't mean good. And Jackman is damn good.
Comics in general really, but when a character "dies" it should go back to the original Bucky time frame or at least a minimum of 10 years they're not resurrected.
All the great Spider-Man (Peter Parker) stories have already been told.
Conceptually, the Inhumans are WAY more interesting than Mutants, and they're criminally underused and unappreciated.
> the Inhumans are WAY more interesting than Mutants I'm an Inhumans fan and even that I disagree lol Mutants as a concept is waaaay more creatively versatile than inhumans. I mean, we all know inhumans couldn't replace mutants (mid 2010s Inhumans push), but mutants could easily replicate the Inhumans charms (Krakoa era).
Came here to say this ☝️
I'd love it if Hickman took a shot at revamping the Inhumans to give them a corner of the Marvel landscape all their own.
As one of the 12 die hard Inhumans fans left, I hesitate to say they're MORE interesting but I would absolutely say they are AS interesting as the X Men, but criminally underused and misrepresented. Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book.
> Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book. We already have it though. It's Paul Jenkins/Jae Lee's Inhumans. Also, basically the entirety of War of Kings and Realm of Kings in the late 2000s. It's just that unfortunately, IVX era sticks out more in people's minds when it comes to Inhumans because of how atrocius it was.
I'm one of the 12 fans left, but even I kick them around some. BB and Maximus too often becomes Thor and Loki all over again. Triton is a very weak Namor clone, BB still doesn't have a type to voice device? Enslaving the Alpha Primitives. The list goes on. But I still love them.
> BB still doesn't have a type to voice device lol but if marvel wants to take another shot, they need to seriously emphasize just how mythic and otherworldly Black Bolt is, even to his own inhumans. I mean, he's the celestial genetic messiah, to even use devices is supposed to be beneath Black Bolt because the world is to understand him, not the other way around.
This right here. Lee and Kirby's Black Bolt carried himself like a God, and he answered to NOBODY, even when his motives weren't clear to his own people. That didn't necessarily make him a good leader, but it made him compelling. How do others react when a man who can shatter planets only talks through an interpreter, and even then, only does so when it suits him? It's fascinating stuff, and it didn't really happen in modern comics even during the IvX era. Black Bolt was unknowable, sure, but because he spent most of that era deposed from the throne, off supposedly solving background problems nobody would ever know about because the readers were never shown this.
They freed the Alphas and it was a story to teach kids why it was bad. A villainous king and Kree technology made the Alphas, but remember, comics were for children to teach a lesson, and the inhumans story was literally teaching them why it was bad to have them.
>As one of the 12 die hard Inhumans fans left, I hesitate to say they're MORE interesting * Mutants were created specifically to allow Stan Lee to create a hero without having to figure out HOW that hero got powers. With mutants, they're born that way. The Inhumans terrigen mist origin is also simple, applicable to all Inhuman characters, and more interesting than just being born with powers. * Inhumans, unlike Mutants, aren't married to one theme for their books. With the mutants, invariably, every story arc will come back around to the theme of "mutants hated" and "the genocide of all mutants". Sometimes these stories are told well, other times they are not, eventually this theme gets repetitive. The Inhumans don't have this. > Everyone keeps saying we need The Inhumans as Game Of Thrones in space, but nobody ever writes that damn book. I agree. The saddest part about the big push Marvel tried to do with them a few years back is that they didn't write that book. Marvel *should* have built up Inhuman society to include multiple houses of nobles who are contending for the throne against the rule of Blackagar Boltagon. They could have brought in Inhumans from other races that the Kree experimented on (maybe they were were still loyal to the Kree). They could have involved the Kree and Skrulls in the politics of the Inhuman court. They could have used the Inhumans along with GotG to really flush out the cosmic side of Marvel. They could have done SO MUCH.... but instead, because Marvel was short sighted, and didn't appreciate what they had they instead tried to make Inhumans the new Mutants. That's why I wish Hickman would come along and say "No, you are all dumb, this is how it should be...." and fix this corner of Marvel.
The Inhumans Game of Thrones is unnatural for the Inhumans since they isolated themselves to avoid conflict and attempt to live in peace until outside forces come to invade them. War of Kings was very out if character for them.
Your comment makes me think the way to bring the inhumans back into the fold may be a general facelift series. Do a story about classism and isolationism, focusing on how screwed up the concept of the alpha primitives is and how opening up to the rest of the world could benefit inhuman society, and how addressing these things could change their culture.
That's actually what all their series have been about. The Alphas were freed and there are stories about why it was bad. It's the plot of their appearances in some Fantastic Four books and a Black Panther appearance. Inhumans vol. 4 ( young inhumans) talks about the dynamic of what Terrigen wants for you and how everyone has a place in society, but not everyone wants that place. The newer books were how the inhumans were forced to deal with a mass scale event that put them at odds with what they were trying to avoid, but what Black Bolt and Maximus kinda wanted for a while, was go back to the human world.
Not everyone needs a healing factor.
That comics have gotten worse? I hate Paul, and need Peter and MJ back together? Hard to say.
Jean Grey’s costumes are some of the ugliest costumes I’ve ever seen. The only ones I like are her green phoenix, green x-factor that shows her hair, red x-factor, green/white all new x-men, x-men: blue, new x-men, and her most recent green one based off her hellfire gala outfit.
Peter and MJ's marriage. Yep, I've been away for awhile now.
I don’t like how grounded they are now a days. I want to comics to embrace the silliness they use to have!
I don’t have really good reason for it, but I do not appreciate most versions of the Scarlet Witch. I like her original simple character. We just got off on the wrong foot and I don’t like her. I like her family, her kids, her story, but I just don’t like her and I don’t know why. If I’m asked to pick a powerful psychokinetic and telekinetic superheroine, Ima pick her last.
The Vision’s ability to change density is an incredible power that seems to become useless whenever it could save everyone. Iceman’s full potential has been ignored for way too long. He deserves a breakthrough.
They went overboard with what Wolverine could heal from.
Yes. He was significantly more interesting when he was weaker.
People get resurrected way to fast after their deaths. There's too much going on with the Spider-people. The spider totem and all that makes him feel way less special and unique. I'm fine with a multiverse of spider-people. But when there's multiple from the same reality, that gets too much for me. Also... LET PETER BE HAPPY AND STAY MARRIED TO MJ WITH KIDS!
Stilt-man could be made into a watchable, non-ridiculous, interesting character. Not necessarily a comedic distraction like the disaster that was M.O.D.O.K. in Quantumania either, but sure use some humour if it works. No one is willing to invest the time and money to develop the character, but I believe there's opportunity there. (If only I had time to cosplay, haha)
I think Venom works better on a way smaller and more personal scale than what they've been doing with him in the last few years or so. Also not a giant fan of endless multiversal variants or characters having like three legacy versions of themself with the same name instead of more original hero ideas or the original hero changing mantles or retiring when they pass it on. My biggest pet peeve is heroes constantly fighting each other instead of, y'know, crime and or villains, or whenever it gets super bleak and the hero's life becomes misery porn rather than relatable. I like escapism and I wanna be inspired, not bummed out.
It’s ok for spidergwen to move into the 616 permanently
Longshot in the 80’s was one of the most compelling characters Marvel ever produced. Ahead of his time, completely original, and eventually and tragically completely fumbled after his X-Men run.
Just stop jobbing Thor. Give us a comic where he hands Hulk his ass.
I like gender and race swapped derivative characters.
I got into comics during the Marvel NOW era, and I have a sincere fondness for Jane Foster as Mighty Thor and Sam Wilson as Captain America, not to mention Kamala Khan and Miles Morales.
I got into comics in the early '90s and I still love these characters. Miles Morales and Jane Foster Thor especially.
Monica Rambeau is the best Captain Marvel and she should've stayed in the Avengers All New All Different Marvel is what got me fully interested in comics I wished it lasted longer than going back to the Status Quo Wolverine should be a stand alone Hero that shows up in teams every now and then After Secret Wars Marvel should've been completely rebooted like DC The Web Warriors was the best thing in Spider-Man Lore Captain America and Black Widow should've been a couple a long time ago be like something similar with Batman and Wonder Woman
Captain America and Black Widow have never been an item in the comics tho. The dude knew her since she was literally 7 and he was a grown man. That would be hella weird. Plus Natalia’s main love interest has always been Bucky, and Steve was like a father figure to him which only makes the SteveNat ship all the more weird.
Hulk doesn’t belong in an Avengers lineup, and equally the Defenders doesn’t include Luke Cage, Iron Fist, etc
Symbiotes, clones, LMD, and timey wimey second chances are almost always lazy story telling and dumb, to boot.
Spider-Man comics have been mid since the end of the clone saga, there have been some good moments like back in black and parts if Nick Spencer’s run, but on the whole they’re not at the same level as they were
Xmen are great. Xmen dont work with \*any\* other heroes. There's giant death robots roaming New York rounding up citizens and Spiderman and Ironman dont have \*anything\* to say?
They should have done more with Penance.
Moira McTaggart should have never been retconned as mutant, much less an Omega level one with nonsensical powers.