Infinity Gauntlet #5
raven isn’t having any of thanos’s shit
Yeah, an O’Malley variant cover. You heard.
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Cross-posted to 80-Page Giant…
In 1956, Atlas Comics (precursor to Marvel) began publishing Dan DeCarlo’s short-lived humor series Sherry the Showgirl. In 1964, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko introduced the villainous Kraven the Hunter in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man. In a storyline beginning in 2012, Stan Lee, his brother Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk paired the two up in the Spider-Man newspaper strip.
Stan Lee has the weirdest ships you guys seriously
(Cover scans courtesy of comics.org, newspaper strip courtesy Comics Curmudgeon.)
So here’s a snapshot of an unusual and short-lived trend in animated adaptions. You had these villainous characters across three franchises who were inspired by the original “insidious Oriental,” pulp villain Dr. Fu Manchu: Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, Dr. Julius No in James Bond, and the Mandarin in Marvel Comics’ Iron Man. All were fairly major antagonists - two were essentially the heroes’ arch-villains. You couldn’t leave them out of an animated adaption, but their original portrayals were maybe not so audience-friendly in more enlightened times. What do you do?
Apparently, you make them green.
Of the three cases before us, Ming’s hue-shifting in 1986’s Defenders of the Earth makes the most internal sense; he was an alien emperor from Mongo, after all, so there’s no reason his pigmentation had to be like those of us puny earth-men. However, it would seem the Hearst Corporation didn’t feel like this alteration was enough to move Ming away from his roots - the 1996 Flash Gordon cartoon would take the idea one step further and make him into a straight-up lizardman.
The Mandarin, meanwhile, was given an in-story explanation for his greenness in 1994’s Iron Man cartoon: the alien gems that gave him power changed his skin color, turned his ears pointy, and buffed up his physique. The logic behind this explanation is given a strange twist, though, by other information in the very episode that depicts it… everything in “The Origin of the Mandarin” points to the Mandarin not being of Asian descent before his transformation. He was archaeologist Arnold Brock, whose character design and portrayal compared to his companion Yinsen implicitly point to him being a white American before going green. It results in his ensuing choice of supervillain name being at best an extension of his stated desire in the episode “to find his destiny” in central Asia, and at worst utter nonsense. “Yes! With this green skin, my elf ears, and the gems I stole from a spaceship belonging to an alien dragon, the world shall fear me as… a bureaucrat of Imperial China!”
Dr. No, though… I have no idea what 1991’s James Bond Jr. was thinking. Compared to the Nehru jacket and clean-shaven look he sported in the film, his animation model actually ramps up the stereotypical elements, which is not helped by his newfound tendency to employ ninjas. Because… half-Chinese/half-Germans hire ninjas all the time? There was no explanation as to why Dr. No became green, but considering he was supposed to have died in his eponymous film, maybe he was actually undead…
Were these character alterations related? Defenders of the Earth and Iron Man were both by Marvel Productions, but produced almost ten years apart - and James Bond Jr. was by a different studio entirely, Murakami-Wolf-Swenson. No, at best, it seems to have been a very strange series of coincidences: to avoid propagating Yellow Peril stereotypes, these three villains instead became part of the Mean Green Machine.
Which is probably still better than being on the Green Team, all things considered.
400th post!
Two years ago, former Marvel Comics bullpen member Steve Bunche posted a comics try-out page submitted to Marvel in the 1990s by an unknown hopeful. The page, while lacking in polish and technique, nevertheless had very clear storytelling, and, as Bunche notes in his blog post: “While this guy would never have gotten work in a professional comic as a penciller, I have to admire his talent for creating an instant classic of a non sequitor:”
artist unknown
You are not imagining this. Wolverine stalks through the wilderness, searching for we know not what, and finds the late Freddie Mercury, frontman of the band Queen.
The page has since been rattling around on the Internet, occasionally reposted and retweeted, chuckled over and admired by people like my studiomate Jeff Parker, which is how I originally became aware of it. And it just kind of got stuck in my head. For TWO YEARS.
The story as presented raises a number of questions. What is Wolverine looking for? Agents of AIM? Peace and solitude? Or, as my other studiomate Memorial artist Rich Ellis suggested: is he looking to find Somebody To Love?
And how and why does Freddie Mercury appear at the end of his search? Was his tragically fatal illness miraculously cured, perhaps by an alien symbiote? Has he just returned from sailing the Seven Seas of Rhye? Or more simply and perhaps most logically, has Logan found himself in the presence of the wordly manifestation of a literal God of Rock?
And so, I have decided to explore these mysteries by recreating the original story, correcting some of the technical blunders on the way. I invite other artists to do the same, by which exercise we may one day come close to the fictional Truth of the matter.
I am reblogging both to further signal boost this brilliant piece by my studiomate, Colleen Coover, and also make sure you don’t miss that final line at the end of her commentary:
I invite other artists to do the same, by which exercise we may one day come close to the fictional Truth of the matter.
You guys, Colleen fricking Coover is inviting you all to re-draw that original page of Wolverine discovering Freddie Mercury by an unknown artist.
She is starting a movement.
Will you answer her call?
thefunkmob asked:
So I wanted to get into transformers comics. Can you recommend a good place to start? Ive already started reading the classic Marvel comics, and they have been fantastic. Basically I am asking which newer comics I should start with that you think are good.
The current ongoing comic book series by IDW are both good, Robots in Disguise and More Than Meets The Eye. It might be best to read Last Stand of the Wreckers before them, and then the “The Death of Optimus Prime” one-shot that kicks off both of them.
And then there was that time I stayed at a hotel and discovered a freebie Avengers promotional comic that was all about Tony Stark shilling the Wyndham Rewards club. (Oddly enough, I was not actually staying at a Wyndham.)
Stark really does not strike me as a Continental Breakfast kind of guy - or a breakfast before noon guy, really, and you know you can never find anything at hotel breakfast bars after like 10am. On the other hand, that penultimate panel of the assembled Avengers being incredulous is amazing.
Story by Fred van Lente, art by Brad Walker. Part 2 of 2.
And then there was that time I stayed at a hotel and discovered a freebie Avengers promotional comic that was all about Tony Stark shilling the Wyndham Rewards club. (Oddly enough, I was not actually staying at a Wyndham.) Love that panel at the end.
Story by Fred van Lente, art by Brad Walker. Part 1 of 2.
boatsalad asked:
got any 80's marvel comics Ratchet? (if not I could provide)
picturesofratchet answered:
I would have to buy those comics, which means I would have to wait for my next paycheck or a commission- but once I got the extra cash that and the cybertron games are top on my list
edit- that being said, feel free to submit pictures! I love submissions :)
i don’t see a submit button, so should i just like reblog this sixty billion times with different pictures of marvel ratchet that i have
So I was reading through the collected IDW “Classics” reprints of the original Marvel comics, got to Wheeljack here, and was like waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaitaminute….
*shakes fist* You cartooned him up! You monsters!
I mean, like, there are legitimate coloring errors that these reprints completely ignore, but, sure, hey, have Wheeljack edited into his cartoon colors.
A frightening peek into my understanding of world history as of the Nineties.
Like with Marvel Comics readers, Creationists also believe in a sliding time scale. You know, to make the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations fit. Between 2000 and 1500 BC, there was a rise and fall of every prehistoric and early civilization, a score of Egyptian dynasties occurred at a rapid-fire pace of about maybe two years each, to fit them all in, and Peter Parker went through like 30 girlfriends and six Presidents while remaining 25 years old.
rosalarian