Welcome to Make Ours Marvel, the weekly show where Michael Kaiser and Jon M. Wilson read chronologically through Marvel Comics’ spandex adventures and discuss their thoughts with little to no authority.
In this episode…
- Strange Tales #151
- The Avengers #34
- Thor #135
- Sgt. Fury #37
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Strange Tales #151: Fury vs HYDRA and the not-singing Caballero. Like you guys, I didn’t like them changing from Don’s fancy-shmancy party to abandoned ruins. The story was going fine, there was no need to switch to Indiana Jones setting just to have statue robots.
And signal one of my pet peeves: the overly complicated villain plot that relies on the heroes doing extremely specific things every step on the way, because the villain is SO SMART he could predict all of those things in advance! If you’re the Mad Thinker, I allow it because that’s his deal. But most times, I roll my eyes so loudly you probably can hear them thru this email.
Umar the Um-mentionable. If I hadn’t been reading Doctor Strange, this catchup would have been cool, albeit longer than it needed to be. Reading along with your show, sigh…
“‘Money’? Don’t waste my time with ‘money’! Here’s moneys!” Very disappointing. I was really interested where that subplot would go, and I guess the answer is, “it’s gone.” Double-sigh…
The Avengers #34: “Living Lazer”? More like “Living Loser”, amirite?!
Is it me, or is this take on LL more appropriate by today’s standards? They establish he’s a “bad guy” and he’s going to do bad things. But his attitude towards Jan comes across more “evil” today than it might in the 60s. So something thrown in back then to give him motivation to attack the Avengers, now is even more evidence of how awful a person he is. Even titling this episode “Incel” shows the differences in attitudes over 60 years, since there’s now a term that succinctly and immediately tells us what we need to know about LL.
Thor #135: High Evolutionary. Knights of Wundagore. Super-Beast. These all sound like cool high concepts. Eventually H-E becomes more interesting to me, and his look is pretty iconic. But in this issue, they don’t quite hit the mark. It’s a weird mix of too much stuff and too little space. Super-Beast appears, and he’s one million years advanced man and wolf, and he has this power and this power because reasons, and whoops he’s gone it’s over.
Such a good episode, guys! Until next time, or until Living Laser becomes a Scooby-Doo villain by disguising himself as a ghost*, make mine Make Ours Marvel!
* – Iron Man #258-260, where he holograms himself as the Titanium Man.