I really liked Gerry Conway's run on Batman.

And what I have read of his Justice League and Spider-Man have been great too.

I can't speak for badwolf, but here's an article about Gwen's clones and their many retcons. I suspect it's the Evolutionary War chapter that is referred to.

Good lord, talk about a string of bad ideas!!!

Oh, for goodness’ sake! Tell me that didn’t happen. Lie to me if you have to!

That cover art is awful. No wonder I steered clear of Marvel* in the '90s.

Cei-U!
I summon the Pepto!

* with a handful of exceptions like the Busiek/Perez Avengers and anything drawn by Steve Rude

I re-read the Marvel adaptation of Raiders of the Lost Ark over the weekend, as part of my planned re-read of the full Further Adventures of Indiana Jones series...




It's a fairly solid re-telling of the film and was actually slightly better than I remembered it being. Walt Simonson handles the writing, no doubt working from the film's shooting script and a bundle of promo photographs (which is how Marvel's Star Wars film adaptations were all done). As such, it's the little differences that are really fascinating.

So, for example, in the comic, the sinister bespectacled Gestapo agent Toht dies when his car plunges off of a cliff, during the sequence where Indy chases the Nazi truck with the Ark on board across the desert, whereas in the film he survives to have his face melted when the Ark is finally opened. Then there's the scene where Jones threatens to destroy the Ark with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which takes place at the ceremony site itself in the comic, not slightly earlier as it does in the film. Also, the memorable scene in which Indy hilariously shoots a scimitar-wielding Arab in Cairo is completely absent here, lending credence to the rumour that the scene was improvised on-set.

Another rather shocking difference to the film is that it's revealed that Marion Ravenwood worked as a prostitute for a time after her farther died! Again, I'm assuming this is something that was in the shooting script, but was sensibly dropped during filming.

In addition to these differences, a number of the film's most spectacular set pieces are rather under-played in the comic. For instance, the extended punch-up between the bald, shirtless Nazi thug and Indiana Jones near the Nazi flying wing aircraft is really truncated, with none of the "propeller death" gore of the film. Also, Indy's daring and action-packed pursuit of the truck carrying the Ark ignores many of that sequence's most spectacular stunts, such as when Jones goes under the truck and climbs back over the top. Knowing how these things worked between Marvel and Lucasfilm with the Star Wars movie adaptations, I would think it likely that Lucasfilm insisted on Marvel omitting most of these sequences so as to not spoil them for cinema audiences.

On the plus side, we get a lot more information about the map at the beginning and Indiana's links to his guide Satipo (played in the film by Alfred Molina) in the opening sequence at the the lost temple of the Chachapoyans. We also learn a bit more about Dr. Abner Ravenwood's obsessive quest for the Ark, and we finally see how Indy reached the remote island while on top of the Nazi submarine: turns out he lashed himself to the periscope with his bullwhip and took a nap! Luckily for him the submarine never descended any deeper than that.

The artwork is serviceable, with John Buscema doing pencil breakdowns and Klaus Janson finishing off the art. I'm not, in all honesty, the biggest fan of Janson's heavily inked artwork, but he does a decent job of telling the story. Unfortunately, the scene where the Ark is finally opened and Belloq and the Nazi's receive God's punishment is, perhaps predictably, nowhere near as memorable or as horrific on the comics page as it is in the film. All in all though, this is a pretty decent adaptation of the film, without ever being anything amazing.