“Fear of the Jedi” was the Marvel comic running alongside the final few bits of Phase 3, but sadly due to this it didn’t really get to do… anything. The main action on Eriadu was seen in the Adventures comics and the Trials of the Jedi book finale, leaving this to be some space dogfighting and, um, that’s about it. Still, always nice to see Keeve and Sskeer I guess?!
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Our look at the comic origins of Marvel characters actually comes to a close with Iron Man, leaving only the Avengers origin left on my list before we start heading into actual story arcs. Iron Man was a character who didn’t really click with a lot of people until Mr. Downey Jr. came along, I enjoyed the early 90s cartoon and I liked playing as him in the CAPCOM vs. fighting games, but even I didn’t really find him all that interesting for a lot of his early stories. Does this revisit to his very early days change that? Erm, well… sort of! It’s a mix of dull and often racist stories and fun and hilariously weird ones.. Let’s take a look!
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The High Republic comics return in the shape of two connected story arcs: “Children of the Storm” and “The Hunted”. Weirdly the story then takes a break for a full cast audio drama before continuing next year, which is fine for me (a quick look on this blog will show I’m not averse to an audio drama!) but might be slightly alienating to a lot of the audience… Ah well, either way, let’s take a look at the first chunk of Phase III comics, shall we?
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Our next foray into Marvel comic origin issues is the X-Men, appearing here in their first ten issues. It’s funny given how big they became but the X-Men weren’t actually super popular in these early issues, it wasn’t really until the reboot in the mid-70s that it started picking up steam (stay tuned for that one later!) and then skyrocketed in the 80s. So is there any point to revisiting the less popular years? Let’s find out!
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The High Republic Phase III continues on, though admittedly much slower than the previous two phases (the wait for the next main book has felt like forever!) and with that comes “Shadows of Starlight”, a four issue comic series that basically fills in the gaps between the end of Phase I and “The Eye of Darkness”, the first book of Phase III (for those not in the know Phase II took place in the past…) It does manage this in a mostly satisfying way, even if reading it after reading the book meant a lot of the gaps had already been filled in by my mind’s eye anyway… Let’s take a look!
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For the longest time Thor was one of my least favourite Marvel characters as my only real exposure to him was when he was a simple hero type who speaks Shakespearian English, it took a while for the comics to find a way to make him “cool”, so to speak, or to add any real interesting layers to the character… or any kind of layers at all, really. For that reason I wasn’t really looking forward to these first fifteen or so Thor issues but brought and read the collection however many years ago for complitionist’s sake, and now I’m looking at them again for review’s sake! So let’s take a look and see if early Thor really is a drag or not…
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Our next look at Marvel comics is, really, the big one as Spider-Man is undoubtably Marvel’s most popular hero. That being said his original run of comics, the first 10 of which are collected in a trade paperback I have (along with his debut issue in “Amazing Fantasy”) are all full of 60s charm and villain backstories we’ve seen 100 times since, often with these villains themselves in adaptations. Hell, Spider-Man’s debut story has been adapted so many times now that it’s going to feel redundant talking about it! Still, this is a look at major Marvel comic stories and I can’t miss out Spider-Man’s debut, so let’s start with that issue…
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Resuming our look at the Marvel comic universe from start to present (with many, many stories and issues missed for the sake of my sanity) it’s time to look at the debut of the Incredible Hulk, all… six issues of it. Yeah, Hulk didn’t really take off to start with and was cancelled, being moved into “Tales to Astonish” until eventually gaining popularity later. So it’s an odd thing to look at retrospectively, but to be fair to fans at the time, there isn’t much going on here… Let’s take a look!
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Our next look at big Marvel comic releases in rough order is the chunk of comics that most point to as the start of the Marvel comic universe as we know it, with “Marvel’s first family” the Fantastic Four due to it coming out first (not including the 40s Captain America stuff I looked at last time, which wasn’t released by Marvel just absorbed by them later) What are they like? Well, they’re full of 60s comic cheese and lots of inner-monologuing, as you tend to get with, well, 60s comics. Is it still fun to read though, or is it just worth it for the historical significance?
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It’s time to finally put a cap on Phase II of the High Republic by looking at the comic run that unlike Phase I didn’t really have a clear breaking point (even though the trade paperback people tried, as you can see by the title!) Over 10 issues we see a mostly new group of Jedi on the planet Jedha, dealing with several issues to do with the many different Force-based groups before seeing the Battle of Jedha through their eyes. It’s a very fun story actually, not that I should really be surprised at this point… Let’s take a look!
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Hogan Reviews 