Thor survived the boring bland plainness that was Eric Masterson, so in comparison to that, there's really nowhere to go but up given the whole "other wielders of Mjolnir" thing.

I didn't love Superior Spider-Man the way a lot of people did, but I thought it was solid and a good addition to a run I was already enjoying, and as much as I wish Brubaker ran with Steve longer, it's hard to deny the quality of the Bucky Cap stories. Marvel's pretty much been shooting a good field goal percentage for me lately (and even more than usual recently), so I can't really see myself not at the very least enjoying this.

Admittedly, if DC pulled the same thing, I'd probably be rolling my eyes, but you know, that's what a track record gets you. Allowances if you're doing well, more eye rolling if you're not.

So Joe Q publicly announced something on TV that was accidentally spoiled a month ago. Any one who actually cared already knew.

You're assuming all comic readers frequent comic news and gossip sites, and that's not really true. I'd bet that even among our members here, a significant majority don't check those sites, and didn't even when our community was at CBR. Some (gasp) wait and see what comes out and is on the shelf when they walk into a shop or only see things when they are picked up by national media or major shows (like Quesada on Colbert or Jimmy Fallon last time, or the View announcement, etc. or Entertainment Weekly doing articles on Avengers Now etc. 

Again just anecdotal here, but I'd say about half the pull customers at our shop never go to comics newssites and the only time they know new series are coming are when we promote them in shop based on pages from Previews we use, when they get the freebie postcards or see the promo posters we get from Diamond, or when they get house ads/write up in the actual comics themselves. For a lot of our customers, comics are something they enjoy, but don't go out of their way to inform themselves about upcoming events/series/etc. I wish they did, and that they then told us what they wanted to buy in advance, it would make doing the orders so much easier, but most don't have a clue about new stuff until after we have had to place the order for it with Diamond. 

-M

Quesada gave Colbert Cap's shield the last time he was on.

I'm seeing The Falcon's promotion being played up as the "first black Captain America", but there was another one in 2003, Isaiah Bradley from the miniseries Truth: Red, White & Blue, which mashed up the super-soldier serum with Tuskegee.

Also, Storm was briefly Thor during the Asgardian Wars.


Maybe you should do like my LCS and slip a copy of COMIC SHOP NEWS in with each purchase.  I like that I can read the Spidey daily strip in there too.

Hmmm...perhaps. But I still maintain that one instinctively knows a "cheap" stunt when one sees/hears about one.




Oh lordy! If you really believe that, then we obviously have such opposing views on what makes Spider-Man -- and, dare I say it, superhero comics in general -- work that it's probably best for everyone if we don't engage on the subject of the web-slinger.




That's sort of how I felt. I found the idea of Doc Ock replacing Peter Parker an interesting one and, at times, it made for some really entertaining comics. Having said that, I was definitely ready for it to end and Peter to come back after a year's worth of Superior Spider-Man. To be honest, six months would've been ample time to have told all the stories that Slott wanted to tell and to shake up things enough that it refreshed the title. Hell, in the Bronze Age they'd've told that story in 6 issues!




(emphasis mine)

Well, that explains a lot! I think that any fan -- and especially any comic book professional -- who says that they don't care about character history or continuity, is really missing a trick. With a comic being published every month, 12 months of every year, for years on end sometimes, an incredibly rich and convoluted backstory is one of the things that is pretty much unique to comics as a story-telling medium. The only other medium that can come close is weekly radio serials/soap operas.

TV programs, films or books, by dint of their season breaks or the years that may elapse between published installments of a given franchise, can't give us that kind of regular, 'every month come rain or shine' continuity that comic books can. The incredibly rich history that comic book characters amass over a period of years or even decades is, in my view, one of the key strengths of the medium. Creators should seize that and run with it, not disregard it and treat it as some kind of story-telling hindrance. A good writer/artist can make that continuity work wonders for a character.

Sorry, getting off topic a bit here. But I just had to address this.

I get the impetus behind "it's a stunt," but all good stories, all pitches are stunts. You pitch a story because it sounds exciting, that's the only reason to pitch or tell a story, really. It's intriguing. It's exciting. That's it.

Well, Val. And, Jane Foster in What if Jane Foster Etc with the cover sketch that made Kirby and Cockrum fight.

But, it depends on what we mean by "female Thor."

We haven't seen an actual female named Thor who's a god of lightning and hammer-fighting starring in a comic before, no. There've been comics with female mythological leads. I think that was actually half of Virgin's output.

He's been a frog, before, and replaced by both a drunk, a kind of dope, and a guy with a skinned horse head for a - um - head. And, that's just at Marvel.

My Marvel is FF #1 to Shooter getting fired. Simple as that. Once stories get stretched out beyond 25 years (!) you're wayyyyyyy into Days of Our Lives territory.

Boo to Joe Quesada.