Posts Tagged ‘ variants ’

The recent announcement of the return of DV8 got me all nostalgic about the original series which, unfortunately, is on the other side of the Atlantic from me right now.

So instead I decided to run all the covers from the original DV8 #1 (plus I had nothing else lined up as a post).

There were, unsurprisingly, 8 variants – one for each of the seven deadly sins and the group shot by interior artist Humberto Ramos…

GROUP SHOT – Humberto Ramos. Very ’90s – the team coming out of the steam, the team’s handlers (Ivana Baiul and Sideshow Bob) lording it over them – but effective.

ENVY – Michael Lopez. Sublime was the team’s resident powerhouse – and she happened to be rich and privileged too (not to mention Deathblow’s daughter). So you should, you know, envy her.

LUST – Kevin Nowlan. Okay, this is just creepy. Threshold, son of Team 7′s Stephen Callahan, was basically controlled by Ivana using sex and drugs. Also, he had a thing for his sister. Ew.

SLOTH – Jim Lee. Frostbite, team leader, was a bit of a bum. So I suppose it fits.

GLUTTONY – Glenn Fabry. Powerhaus used the emotions of people around him to bulk up and gain superstrength. He didn’t eat to do it, but whatever. Like most Fabry covers, I appreciate the art but I find it vaguely creepy.

GREED - J Scott Campbell. Bliss (Threshold’s sister) could use her powers to make people feel extremes of pleasure or pain, and usually did both in her one night stands – with fatal results. One can only imagine that she could make a lot of money with this…

WRATH – Liberatore. Evo was ‘the monstrous one’ of the team, but he was also the most immature. The whole ‘wolfing out’ thing started happening later in the series, I think – I seem to remember him being pretty mild mannered at the start.

PRIDE – Adam Hughes. Copycat was the team’s resident telepath with the ability to take over others. Copycat also had multiple personalities and was batshit crazy. So kind of like Legion, only prettier. Which is something to be proud of, I guess.

Weirdly, kind-of-probability manipulator Freestyle didn’t get a cover. You’d have thought that they would have put her on the Greed cover and lumped Bliss and Threshold together doing all kind of very wrong Lust type things.

But they didn’t.

You know, I really want to go and reread the series now – the early Warren Ellis stuff was especially good, but it was enjoyable pretty much all the way through.

Posted via web from Comic By Comic’s Wonderous Posterous!

Newsarama has a look at some of Marvel’s 70th Anniversary frame variants – most of which (previews, not variants) are below…

(That Runaways one is adorable and may be worth picking up even though I don’t get the book).

I wish they weren’t variants (unless they’re 50/50) – as they remind me, intentionally no doubt, of 1986′s 25th Anniversary frame covers…

…although that math clearly doesn’t work.

God, the fact that I was buying those off the shelf 23 years ago terrifies me!

Posted via web from Comic By Comic’s Wonderous Posterous!

I shit you not.

Via Rob Liefeld’s Twitter.

Presumed inspiration:

Dear Marvel,

I see that you will be celebrating 70 years of Marvel in 2009, complete with variant covers and little ’70 Years’ corner boxes.

Maybe I’m not quite as good at maths as I thought I was because when I started picking up US Marvel comics in 1986, I was fairly certain that all the corner boxes then trumpeted that that was Marvel’s 25th Anniversary.

In fact, I’m relatively sure that all your November 1986 issues carried special anniversary covers too. Of those books, only eleven are still around in some form or other (I’m counting X-Factor and New Mutants to be generous), but only three are still on the same numbering run – and of those, only Uncanny X-Men has been numbered straight through.

Sadly, Ewoks, Care Bears and Heathcliff are no longer published by you, and you’ve lost both the Transformers and GI Joe licenses since then.

But I digress.

The point I would like to make is that if you’ve got a big year planned, maybe I can give you some pointers on ways to make it a good year…

1) No deals with the Devil (or demons, imps, devil substitutes or hedge fund managers). It may actually result in a substantial uptick in quality of the title, but it’s not worth the year of pissing and moaning from people who somehow believe that this will cause mythical young readers to fall into satanism (or become accountants).

2) Stop with the status quo-shaking crossovers. Look, if you change the status quo every twelve to eighteen months or so, the new status quo doesn’t have time to become status quo, okay? I understand that BOLD NEW DIRECTIONS! result in temporary sales boosts, but eventually you’re going to lose readers because of them. I know you’ve got War of Kings and probably some mutant-superhuman war thing lined up, but try to keep line-wide ramifications to a minimum, eh?

3) If you must have a status quo-shaking crossover, try to limit the number of new titles that spring out of it. For every Avengers: The Initiative that actually succeeds, you get a The Order which will fail and a New Warriors that will flounder, or an Omega Flight which will just plain tank. Just concentrate on putting out fewer new books and making sure that they’re good ones. Like Guardians of the Galaxy, which is awesome.

4) Stop launching new titles with old title names that bear little relation to those old titles unless you actually have a plan to tie it to the team’s legacy in some way. A good way of doing this is as Abnett and Lanning have done in Guardians of the Galaxy, which is awesome. A bad way is shoehorning Rage and Justice into the New Warriors book, which only reminds us how much better the original book was.

5) I get that #1′s sell, but if you want to relaunch a character who already has a book, just do it in that book. Otherwise the existing title suddenly becomes secondary and it’s blindingly obvious that it’s being phased out. It just pisses readers of that book off. And yes, I know that Invincible Iron Man is pretty good, that’s not the point. The point is that for the past six months, Director of SHIELD has been the red-headed step child.

6) Reinventing characters is great. I for one would love a new spin on, say, Nomad. Or Rocket Racer. But leave alone existing marquee characters unless they actually need a revamp. For example, if you have a character that has had more development in the past year than in the past ten years put together, don’t revert to the most annoying take on that character and introduce a big mean new-colored version of him who, although he may make a good visual, kind of stinks up the place. Am I being too vague, or would you like to look at the cover above?

7) Quit with the Zombie and Ape variants. I know I don’t have to buy them, and I don’t. But they annoy the crap out of me*. We get it! You’re marketing geniuses! You can change any cover into a variant by changing a little bit…it’s irritating in the extreme. Next things you’ll be sticking Skrull chins onto…oh.

There are some great underused characters out there who could do with a limited series or ongoing to spotlight them. The upcoming Cloak and Dagger is a good start, but how about the main MU Power Pack? Alpha Flight? Werewolf by Night? The Shroud? And, of course, Dazzler? I realize that you must get burned on these things but honestly, don’t they sound better to you than Hellcat or The Last Defenders?

9) Not just Wolverine needs inventory stories when he’s running late. Would it kill you to line up some Fantastic Four one-shots so that by the end of 2009, when we still haven’t finished Millar and Hitch’s run, we at least have a couple of issues starring the team out there? Yes, I’m being facetious and delays have lessened over the past couple of years, but I wouldn’t say no to the odd one-shot starring Marvel’s First Family.

10) You’ve got some great books out there at the moment. Captain America, Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, Incredible Hercules, Captain Britain and MI:13 are all solid gold and I continue to hear very good things about Immortal Iron Fist. Don’t screw ‘em up, ‘kay?

A white-haired King Kong-ified Captain Britain carrying a Fay Wray’d Meggan up Big Ben?

Just plain awesome.

That is all.

Via

Things don’t look too good for the Buffster in the variant to Buffy #19.

Yes, I said the Buffster…

Marvel have just premiered the Secret Invasion double cover variants for Ms Marvel #25 and Captain Marvel #4 by Terry Dodson and damned if they don’t look good.

Is it just me or is Ms Marvel’s 70s costume so much better than her current one? Now if her book was better…

EBay has returned to blight me after a good solid six months without purchases (some of which I haven’t even read yet) – I picked up The All-New Atom #1-11 for a song recently and loved every issue. I don’t know why I skipped this first time round – possibly because the captions in the Brave New World story annoyed the crap out of me.

Other recent purchases include the OYL issues of Firestorm – a book I supported since #1 that I felt lost a little steam. When I saw the last issues on Ebay I couldn’t resist – and I suspect the same thing will happen shortly with Green Arrow and Hawkgirl; I just can’t resist completing runs.

I also picked up Ion #1-12 but haven’t had a chance to read it yet – I’ve always preferred Kyle to Hal (I’ve said before that Kyle really got me back into DC just prior to Zero Hour) so this was a no-brainer.

Showcase ’93 – ’96 was another pick up – basically all of 1994-1996 and a few 1993′s. I love anthologies, especially those that highlight characters that don’t get used too often. I’ve also been picking up the Thunderbolts variants of eBay, much as I did the New Avengers ones.

There’s been one other purchase – a dirty secret, really – and that’s Secret Defenders #1-25. It’s not as though I’ve forgotten how creatively bankrupt a lot of the 1990s were, or that I’d forgotten how bad the one issue I picked up at the time was – it was just that it seemed like a good idea.

Good grief. I know this was knocked out at a point where quantity ruled over quality but it is awful. And the really bad thing is that I’m kind of enjoying it….

There’s a few more things that I’m always looking out for – Action Comics Weekly, a complete low-cost run of Sub-Mariner #1-72 (which only exists in my head), and a whole host of recent DC minis – Tales of the Unexpected, Mystery in Space, Omega Men - and regular titles such as Checkmate.

So is there anything you’ve picked up lately?

Note to self: If you’re not looking to make Hulk angry, aiming rockets at his crotch is probably not the best idea…

other Slayers. Bad enough we were subjected to the faux-cockney slayer in the last season (the writers clearly hadn’t spent much time in London), but now we have an apparently German slayer, a possibly Scottish one and maybe an Irish one – and the old practice of writing like you think it sounds here feels, well, amateurish and kind of stupid. And I don’t think Joss Whedon is either of those things.

It’s like Whedon just read some early Gambit appearances and learned how to write from them.

Yeesh.

Finally, there’s Buffy herself. Apparently she’s fighting with Dawn again (nothing new there, but they had reconciled somewhat at the end of the show), but she’s also doing that moping thing she does so well which turned her into a weak link on her own TV show in Season 6 and the latter half of Season 7, which is slightly disappointing.

Oh, and she misses sex. A lot. Although I’m not too surprised at that as if I recall, she and Spike didn’t sleep together in Season 7. Well they slept together, but they didn’t sleep together.

What we’re not too clear on is whether she’s aware that Spike is alive – presumably as Andrew is in Italy at the moment, he knows – or what she really thinks about Angel running an eeeevil law firm. That may be deliberate as Dark Horse don’t have the rights to the Angel characters – although presumably characters that originated in Buffy, like Angel and Spike themselves, are fair game.

Misgivings aside this is a pretty decent comic – just not one that lives up to its own hype yet. I have hopes that it will do in time but right now it’s a work in progress.

And yes, I bought both covers.

I’m a weak, weak man. After managing – successfully – to wean myself off variants to Red Sonja, I caved last week during my weekly trip to Midtown and picked up the two variants for Amazing Spider-Girl #1.

I’ve always liked Spider-Girl, and picked up the first 7 or 8 issues when they came out (along with the same number for A-Next and J2) because I liked the idea of MC2. I fell away for reasons I don’t remember but lately thanks to the great digest format that Marvel’s been putting out, I’ve fallen back into Spider-Girl. I’m not sure that I’ll continue to pick up Amazing on a regular basis purely because it’s about 60 issues ahead of where I’m reading in the digests.

Still the covers are pretty…