Earth's Mightiest Blog

Brother Voodoo is the new Sorcerer Supreme and I guess you get your graduate degree with that because now he’s “Doctor” Voodoo.  His “Wong” is Daniel, the ghost of his dead brother, who has been his companion for many years now.  Doctor Strange appears early in a kind of “Ancient One” role, but he quickly turns over the keys to Earth to Voodoo.

The first thing he does is put a new protection spell around Earth and threaten Dormammu to stay away.  But then he faces a threat from Doctor Doom, who wants to steal the Eye of Agamotto.  Voodoo manages to find him off, but in the process Doom gets a vision from the Eye—and Voodoo doesn’t get to see it.

Issues 2 and 3 focus on a team-up with Son of Satan, where they fight Nightmare.  The dream demon is trying (another) incursion into Earth, and because Doctor Voodoo isn’t really a “Doctor,” he’s struggling to fend it off.  But Doctor Doom (actual doctor!) is shown having little trouble protecting his home town of Latveria.

Nightmare has managed to take control of Danny Ketch and Johnny Blaze. And not just them. Nightmare takes control of many other magic-based heroes as well, like Doctor Druid and Black Knight, and storms Latveria.

Voodoo and Doom are forced to team up and defeat Nightmare’s army of Man-Thing, Magik, Iron Fist, Dracula, and many others–before taking Nightmare down.

I note that this should have been fun but it felt pro-forma. Maybe it was rushed. I’m really not sure why it didn’t work well. It had a very good creative team and a ton of cameos and some cool ideas but for some reason it never seemed to fully realize its potential.

Plus, we never find out what the vision was (that Doom was given by the Eye of Agamatto) and the ending promises a new threat.

Picking up from his pirate adventure, this arc starts with Deapool aboard his new ship.  And by ship, I do mean an ocean vessel.  Not a spaceship, or anything cool like that.

But don’t worry, he’s not there long.  Thanos and Death appear (in Pool-O-Vision only), Deapool gets thrown into the ocean, kills a shark, and then washes up on the shores of San Francisco, where he tries to join the X-Men.

Of course Cyclops doesn’t want Wade on the team, but he does manipulate the mercenary into helping with an X-mission.  What’s the mission?  Truly, it doesn’t matter.  Like all the issues in Daniel Way’s run, the plot is just a loose idea to platform a series of comedic sketches and general zany mayhem.  It’s not all bad, it’s just frivolous and forgettable.

There’s a nice reference to the Clash song, “Know Your Rights,” for example. You can tell from the panel below that the jokes are more straightforward, less creative.

Again, not horrible comics, but not great.

It ends with Cyclops putting Wade on a bus to New York, and we’re promised a Spider-Man team-up in the next story.

That dude on the cover is Raptor. Raptor is a new villain.  But he’s very familiar, as will become clear.  He also dies in this arc.  He’s completely expendable.  

“Dr. Ryder” (Raptor’s human form) shows up at Peter Parker’s work site thinking that Peter is Ben.  The clone confusion continues as Dr. Ryder/Raptor hunts Peter throughout the story.

Flashbacks reveal why Raptor is mad at Ben.  It seems that Reilly tried be Dr. Ryder’s lab assistant, and it didn’t work out.  It seems Ben had reservations about Dr. Ryder experimenting on himself (which led to his becoming Raptor).  Yes, their relationship is a close parallel to Peter Parker’s relationship with Dr. Curtis “Lizard” Connors.

Meanwhile, Peter also hunts Reilly and finds Kaine. 

Oh God.  It’s another clone saga.

It seems that while Raptor is hunting Ben and Peter is also hunting Ben, Kaine is hunting Raptor because he believes the formula that turned him into a dinosaur can help him with his cellular degeneration (which hasn’t killed him since the 1990s so, really, how pressing is it?).

When Raptor and Spider-Man finally meet, Screwball arrives and gets in the way.  But truly that is unimportant.  Pretty much everything about Screwball is unimportant.

Anyway, during the big final fight, Kaine tells Raptor that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.  How does he know this?  How did Mephisto’s spell not work on him?  I don’t know.

The cops come to interrupt the final fight.  Peter gets away and so does Kaine–but he takes the web-bound Raptor with him, and kills him.

Told you he’d be dead by the end of this story arc.

I mean, nobody is sad about the death of this vaguely defined villain who appears to be part-Stegron and part-Lizard.  Plus, the clone characters that return here feel inconsistent with the original clone saga.  While it’s not necessarily a bad thing to diverge from a widely reviled storyline, it does beg the question: Why bring them back to begin with?  It’s certainly not a service to fans.  

I also feel like I should understand why Kaine remembers Peter Parker’s identity as Spider-Man.  Did I miss anything obvious here?

All these “The List” one-shots advance a storyline in some way. Here, Bruce Banner and Hulk’s son, Skaar, rescue Kate Waynesboro from a HAMMER facility and, in the process, Banner is exposed to gamma radiation. By implication, his “cure” from being Hulk would seem to be coming to an end.

I love Cerebus. I know a lot of people think Dave Sim should be cancelled, but I’ll say it again: I loved Cerebus.

Dave was born on May 17. Happy birthday!

This tale is drawn by Ed McGuinness as a wonderful, loving tribute to the classic Jim Steranko Nick Fury comics.  The best Nick Fury comics, frankly.  

It’s mostly wordless, and features Fury breaking into the Osborn-occupied Avengers Tower to wake Norman up in his bed so that Nick can hand Norman his own list.  

It  pokes fun at the whole concept of “The List,” which is that Osborn is making a list of people he wants to hurt.

The two men then go to an interogation room where a tortured spy warns of a new threat called Leviathan. The man is former SHIELD agent Seth Waters, who was a double-agent for Hydra back in the Steranko days. Fury has Waters killed by a sniper and then escapes the tower.

Great spy stuff, followed by a bunch of data files about Leviathan.  You have to be an ubernerd to enjoy them.  That’s followed by an old Stan Lee/Steranko story.

I don’t think I’ve ever posted a sketch of this character before.

This event is a sequel to “War of Kings,” which I personally found kinda underwhelming.  This one introduces a brand new universe, The Cancerverse, and is … also underwhelming.

It’s thirty issues in total, with a one-shot, four minis, and tie-ins to the Nova and Guardians of Galaxy series.  These are the issues it covers:

• Realm of Kings (one shot)
• Realm of Kings: Imperial Guard #1-5
• Realm of Kings: Inhumans #1-5
• Guardians of the Galaxy (vol. 2) #20-24
• Nova (vol. 4) #31-35
• Realm of Kings: Son of Hulk #1-4

I’m going to do an overview here because, honestly, I don’t have the patience to read these issues closely.  Again, it’s not that their bad it’s more that I just don’t care that much about most of the characters involved.

At the end of War of Kings, Black Bolt set of a bomb of Terrigen Mists, seemingly killing both himself and Vulcan in the process.  The bomb creates a rift across reality, called The Fault, which begins expanding and threatening all of existence.  Looking for a way to stop it, Quasar goes inside the Fault and finds The Cancerverse—an alternate reality full of villainous versions of Marvel heroes who want to break across The Fault and invade the 616verse.  Like Lord Mar-Vell, a giant monster Hulk, evil X-Men, and the Pentagram Avengers (called The Revengers). 

The Guardians continue to fight Magus, who they thought they’d killed in their prior story arc.

Much of the event is the various cosmic heroes fighting off these incursions—but the best parts deal with the aftermath of War of Kings.  Gladiator taking over for the (believed) dead Empress Lilandra.  Medusa struggling to lead the Kree Empire, and then Crystal leading the Inhumans in her absence. 

She also seems to be having some kind of romance thing with Ronan the Accuser.

They’re a cute couple.

They’re also married. I’d forgotten about that at first. It was an arranged political marriage, but seems to be working out.

In the Son of Hulk miniseries, Hiro-Kala (the son of Hulk who isn’t Skaar) goes to the Microverse and Jarella’s world, and meets the Micronauts. That’s always fun.

The event also marks the end of the Guardians of the Galaxy series. In the final panels, Rocket and Quill get drunk together…

Nova’s series has a big fight against Sphinx, but there will be one more issue–a formal bridge to Thanos Imperative, which will deal with the fallout of this even.

These issues take place while Skaar is having his fairly disappointing “Planet/World War Skaar” adventure on Earth. Skaar isn’t actually the title character anymore–the book is now just called “Son of Hulk”–and the series is now about Hiro-Kala, Hulk’s OTHER son. The less interesting one.

While Skaar was gone, Galactus ate planet Sakaar and Hiro swore he’d get revenge as he led his people off the planet.

Galactus had been attracted to “The Old Power,” and while he did consume some of it, Hiro-Kala manages to find a new planet for his people that has a big “Old Power” battery.

Hiro-Kala accesses it, becomes a God, poisons the Old Power on the new planet, and then tricks Galactus into eating it.

Galactus doesn’t die, though, he just runs away. The series ends with Hiro-Kala preparing to go look for Skaar.

Rick Remender does a one-off between Andy Diggle’s run and the upcoming Jeff Parker run. The cover says that “Power Man and Iron Fist join the Thunderbolts.” But that’s not what happens.

Iron Fist is being held prisoner by Norman Osborn, who is trying to torture/brainwash him into becoming a Thunderbolt. He projects images of Fist fighting his New Avengers teammates directly into Danny’s mind.

It works, and Danny then helps Osborn capture Luke Cage and brainwash him, too.

But of course Danny’s not really betraying Luke. His “Chi,” which he uses to summon the iron fist power, cleansed his mind.

The two escape and that’s it for that fill-in issue.

Along the way various members are still engaging in various degrees of betrayal of Osborn and each other.

This is an early comic by Mahmud Asrar and, thankfully, his art gets better in the future.

These “The List” one-shots are basically just “here’s what the title character did to piss off Norman Osborn.”  They’re fun, but the whole Dark Reign era is ending soon so it’s hard to get too invested.

This issue explores “The World,” which is the hidden facility that once housed The Weapon Plus Program.  Osborn wants to take it and sees Logan is a potential barrier.  Noh Varr is sent to stop Wolverine, but instead Logan tricks him into going to the World and facing all kinds of challenges there.  Including Fantomex.

This is really more of a Noh Varr comic, and a nice way to reintroduce readers to The World. It’s fun enough.

Marjorie Liu begins a run on Daken (and then she’ll become one of the best-ever writers of X-23), but unfortunately it’s still part of the Daniel Way run—with him as a cowriter.

Norman Osborn sets a bunch of D-list villains free just so that he can send Daken after them and publicly slay the killers, just to rehabilitate his image.  It doesn’t go as planned.  Like most of Way’s work, the plot is thin and pretty dumb.