The new ("Legacy") Marvel revamps are abroad. Get 'em, get dem "lenticular" covers while you can. Move the comic back and forth in your hands and squint hard. Ain't it clever. Ain't it a modern day miracle. You'll think a man can fly. Two images, neither of which is particularly clear.
The Chip Zdarsky "how to draw" variants are pretty funny though. Which variant will be worth more in twenty years? Grown men are speculating in comics shops about this very controversy. Who can tell. Will there be a planet Earth in twenty years?
("Will there be a planet Earth in twenty days?")
I bought a heap of these things and very few seem to move me except towards that veteran feeling called "regret". Also I got a migraine.
I bought the Punisher one, gamely. The Punisher has been going over very old tired ground for a long time now. The mainstream (formerly "616") universe Punisher was always at his most enjoyable when he was going after costumed criminals. Now they are borrowing from the "Max" universe and having him pursue hordes of generic Eastern Europeans and African-American thugs and Middle Eastern terrorists. As "John" Rotten ("Johnny Lydon") would say, "Ooh yes they really turn me on." The crucial error is that these sort of dull "black-op wetworks" could only be done successfully by Garth Ennis by that mystical magical way that he has.
The apogee of the 616– iteration of Punisher was Remender's "Frankencastle" story. Also some of the Eighties issues by Mike Baron, Chuck Dixon, even Abnett and Lanning if you're interested. If you're still reading. See: the "Eurohit" storyline, drawn by the excellent Dougie Braithwaite, back in 1992. Believe the reprint TPB is out in December just in time for my Christmas present.
Not much more to say about this dull stuff in front of me –– Punisher #218 by the new old numbering –– except for two points:
1. The "new" Nick Fury is a patent disaster on the scale of one J.J. Binks. Who gets all excited when this guy makes an appearance? Answer: a negative number of human beings. That's right –– we have to raid the Negative Zone just to get people perverse enough that they want to read about this dull man. Trying to inveigle the Ultimates–Universe/Samuel L. Jackson version into the 616 universe by the clumsy means they used –– didn't they end it by putting his eye out purely for cosmetic reasons? –– was patently fudging the story for commercial reasons.
Oh I see.
Marvel is a company that tries to make money.
Marvel is not a radical arts commune forfeiting wealth, giving away art works for free.
Oh okay I got it now.
2. Made–up countries have got to go. This issue is full of them. I don't care a groat, a farthing or a goat's fart for all Marvel's imaginary states. "If all Marvel's made-up countries had but one neck." DC is the same. They had a hard-on for stories set in mythical Middle Eastern countries and that was invariably when my eyeballs rolled completely up, flipped over and rolled down my throat in sheer boredom. I required surgery.
There really (really) ought to be only one country in super hero comic books, and it should cover the entire planet and that country would be called America –– if it wasn't actually in fact called "New York City." Okay not that because I like the West Coast Avengers too.
But exclude Brooklyn please. Brooklyn in comics, and conversations about the best egg drop soup in Brooklyn, must go. Also comics set in the British Isles or France. Did you ever read those "Civil War" issues of Fantastic Four where the Thing protested the Registration Act by moving to France? It made you nostalgic for that bad awful thing, an issue of Justice League Europe. The words "nadir of my entire life on this planet Earth" drift to the forefront of my consciousness as I think of it.
I like the made-up countries in G.I. Joe okay as long as Larry Hama is writing it. I don't mind Latveria, I don't detest Genosha (if it still exists), and I don't object to Wakanda or the Savage Land although it is well known that nothing interesting has happened in either imaginary country –– only 100% pure boring stories happen in Wakanda and the Savage Land.
Except for Kirby's stint on Black Panther.
To sum up today's tirade: No more imaginary countries.
Marvel ought to bring back the original Nick Fury, notwithstanding he is supposedly currently doing the tedious work of Uatu the Watcher on the Moon (or has Marvel sheepishly elected to forget that farcical "mega-event"and white-out it out of continuity?).
