Fantastic artwork. Story was a little weak. A different time and audience. ( )

I am not a fan of most comics from before 1995. I read this to get the back history on marvel's secret invasion and just to know about it. It was ok I guess, but again, not a big fan of the old styles. ( )

Lo leí hace unos años y no tenía unos recuerdos muy positivos. Ahora lo he vuelto a revisar por ser de las historias más conocidas. Tampoco me ha gustado. El personaje de Rick Jones nunca me ha parecido interesante y muchos de los vengadores simplemente se se pasean por la historia. ( )

What’s great about this is that there’s a clear opening up of scale of the series. The volume in this series collecting the first Ultron tale had a bad theatrical feel to it; wherever they went and whatever happened you never believed the scenery. It all looked like New York, wherever they went. That changes with Neal Adams and the Buscema brothers on art duty here – Adams in particular lends a sense of cosmic scale to events that Thomas’s ambitious intergalactic epic would fall completely flat without; the inside of the Vision, the Negative Zone and the planet of the Skrulls each have a sense of place and the universe a sense of scale.

Thomas and Adams hurl mad ideas about like confetti on a particularly windy day; rather wonderfully this essentially starts with Skrulls disguised as cows and spirals around to take in the Inhumans, devolving rays, the SuperSkrull, coups on both Kree and Skrull planets, human paranoia and Annihilus. It’s a rich broth that, for all its reputation, doesn’t quite cohere into a satisfying storyline (but then, as Alan Moore’s pointed out, trying to shoehorn ongoing series which were written with no thought of being collected is unlikely to produce a conventionally satisfying reading experience – these are essentially four colour soap operas so the appeal is in ongoing serial adventures, not in collections of issues). In particular the wave of anti-alien and superhero paranoia suffers from an easy resolution from being threaded into the overall story – it’s a little dispiriting to realise how relevant it still is today with Donald Trump’s electoral shenanigans. A 45 year old comic retaining contemporary resonance whilst remaining hugely entertaining and energetic is no mean feat; one of the delights of these reprints is a new appreciation for the work Thomas and Adams did all those years ago. It doesn’t quite scale the heights it wants to but the ambition remains impressive and you can see the genre evolving. ( )

I almost quit comics yesterday. Three hours (because I don't get in to read them much) catching up on my stories in Yellowjacket Comics & Games, surrounded by Magic players and their particular funk, and I swear a full 50 per cent of the recent Marvels I flipped through were all about Marvel Zombies. There's even a pointless Marvel Zombies/Army of Darkness crossover.

And it's just pornography. At first maybe there's a "Ha ha, Spider-Man ate Aunt May," kind of skewering-of-sacred-cows action, and the whole thing is good enough for a scary dead-world "What If?" or a crossdimensional horrorshow for the Ultimate FF, but it just keeps going and going. The pretense is that it's a legitimate world, and so they make Captain America president or whatever, but there are no other differences. It's all just an excuse to see everyone die. It's profaning the sacred so long and perversely that by the end the sacredness is long gone and you're just profaning the profane, spreading shit on shit. And guys like the Magic kids who can't get a girl to touch them and get slowly twisted on Consumptionjunction or its modern equivalent, guys like Adam for whom no asshole is gaping enough, eat it up. Guess it should be no wonder: first heroism became a subculture; then, and separately, sex became a subculture; now the thing is to keep going lower and lower, to find something that will deliver some response, some brute shock, through the layers of "seen worse." Faugh. Faugh.

Thus my review of Marvel Zombies (ha!). Anyway, I was about to walk out when I came across this little number in the bargain bin - so classic silver-age pop-art awesome, with characters that, like, change over time and still are fresh and brave. Because, like, look at them now. They've fought evil every day for almost fifty years. EVERYONE around them has died and come back. It's completely meaningless, and you know that the writers are pulling their strings and that under the compulsions of the authorial pen they're all in constant bone pain and irrevocably insane. Because nobody can go through constant horror and they don't even have private lives anymore.

I take it back. This story was lovely, but I think I'm done with new Marvel. I'll still pick up a "New Mutants" or a "Beta Ray Bill" or maybe even a "New Warriors," but nothing new because the seams are bare and it's all for kids who can't tell that nobody ever really dies.

As far as I'm concerned the only job left is figuring out where, in fact, each individual character's story really ended, where it stopped being symbolic and cogent and got gratuitous. Like, for Daredevil it was as late as the end of the Bendis run (and then he gets out in 20 and has some kids with a nice Irish girl. What a powerful story, superhero lawyer in jail for life). For Spider-Man it was a long time ago, like when he married MJ and got a teaching job. Hell, for Rick Jones it was probably at the end of the Kree-Skrull War. This book was really fun and good and made me feel good about loving these old clapped-out bastards, like "Fairytale of New York" or a picture of your incontinent old dog when it was a pup. ( )