Den of the Cyphered Wolf

Saturday, October 7, 2017

If I Were A Rich Man: The Library: Comics: Marvel



Alright, they're making a Runaways show. This is gonna be good.  Time to break out my list of  Marvel comics I want to read. Let me reiterate these aren't comics I've read but comics I want to read, moreover this is not a complete list, not by a long shot.

By the way, anybody who knows anything about the comic knows the big hook the trailer is trying to avoid giving away. So saying ANYTHING about it even the basic premise is kind of hard.

Patsy Walker: Hell Cat
Okay, I don't want this list to be too obvious, so I'm not recommending Alias though it's on my list. If you want to read where Jessica Jones originated it's not hard to find. Anything that already had a more or less a straight Hollywood adaptation doesn't need any advertising from me, sorry Brubaker run of Captain America. Anyway, Marvel adaptations always have to simplify and compress comic book continuity that developed over decades without much of a plan. As such the characters from the MCU are often very different from their comic-book counterparts. For instance movie, Patsy is a mash-up of both herself and Captain Marvel.

In the comics, the minor character Trish Walker is a superhero in her own right and I can't help but think reading that would be kind of fun. Especially out of the context of Jessica Jones and more along the lines of Mary Tyler Moore with a cape which is the vibe I'm getting.

Spiderman 2099
So. I like to revisit old cartoons from my childhood... and a lot of them never got a chance. I love Batman Beyond. I will die crying the accolades of the Timmverse, but damn it people should have given Spider-man Unlimited a chance.  It's hard to track exactly when I became a fan of cyberpunk but Spiderman Unlimited is one of the earliest things with the aesthetic I can remember liking and nobody remembers it.

Next, to Spectacular Spider-Man it's probably my favorite Spider-Man cartoon. The Marvel cartoons of the day had this problem with being too faithful to the source material. Unless you were steeped in that stuff from the beginning you wouldn't know what the hell was going on and this show mostly avoids that problem. Still knowing who/what Man-Wolf is explains a lot.

Anyway, It's not an adaptation of Spider-Man 2099 but it did start out that way and well Spiderman 2099 sounds kind of bad ass. Basically what if a guy was running around in a dark cyberpunk future taking up the mantle of Spider-Man.

... And he shows up in Spider-verse.

X-Men: The Mutant Massacre
Look I love the X-men and all but the civil rights allegory always felt weak when most of the X-men could pass as normal humans if they wanted to. Mystique is the saving grace of the movies in that regard, lamp-shading and angrily pointing out that they shouldn't have to hide.

Regardless it's hard to think of the rich kids with superpowers living in an upstate New York mansion as the disenfranchised. I'm sorry.

...

The Morlocks are badass.  May I have some more, please. The movies screwed them over royally. I WANT MORE MORLOCKS!

The Mutant Massacre is their story. I want more Morlocks.

Nyx
Like I said I go back to cartoons I loved as a kid and it bums me out how many decent ones get kind of lost.

I honestly think that in a lot of ways X-men Evolution is the best X-men cartoon. It's not perfect but Marvel doesn't have as great a track record in that regard as DC. There is no really great X-men cartoon, in the same way, there are a lot of great Superman cartoons. Marvel cartoons made in the 90's are dense with continuity and that problem extends to X-men TAS. It opens with a Sentinel attack. A lot of it is spent going "whaaaaaaaaaaa?" and Wolverine and the X-Men while being better animated takes itself entirely too seriously to be fun.

X-men Evolution, on the other hand, was as well as engrossing. It did a great job at explaining who everybody was, in terms of powerset, backstory, and personality even if it was kind of annoying that all the X-men were in high school. Considering their origin that should not have bugged people as much as it did.


... It also introduced X-23 who has kind of become a big deal all of a sudden.

It's always interesting to me when characters and ideas migrate from a single adaptation to a larger mythos (writing a retrospective about "The Saracen" is on my bucket list).  While Nyx isn't just about here it does serve as her introduction to the larger Marvel universe.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Ah, joke characters, putting the comic in comic books. She beats mega-event level super-villains with squirrels. I can't help but smile every time I say that sentence.  And I can say it all day. Marvel has a character that beats mega-event level super-villains with squirrels. God bless Squirrel Girl.

Annihilation
Okay, I'm cheating, but the interesting thing about the Guardians of the Galaxy is that they were really obscure before their big-budget Hollywood extravaganza. Hell, even Hawkey, Falcon and Vision got a cartoon before making it to the big screen. The Guardians pre-movie were so obscure that Marvel has not so subtly retrofitted their comics counterparts into basically being their movie versions.  And I'm cool with that though I would still like to read a story or two made before the MCU. Word on the street is that Annihilation is one of the best cosmic Marvel stories ever written.

Howard The Duck
Moviebob made him sound like my kind of talking animal. Look. I have a soft spot for fast-talking glib wise-asses (let's just say I'm nowhere near as nice in my head as I am externally) and Howard the Duck is that.

Trapped in a world I never made gone mad I need some common sense now.

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