Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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It would appear that today is Flying Ant Day.
I have seen no flying ants.
I can only assume they're absent from my life because Ant-Man has summoned them all for some deadly mission he's undertaking.
He has! He has summoned them for a deadly mission!
And that mission is escaping from a lift.
It's true. The world's mightiest super-team find themselves spending a chunk of this issue trying to get out of their own lift when it breaks down.
Now I'm starting to see how all those 2nd-string villains manage to give them such problems.
Meanwhile, giant robot Red Ronin's about to go on the rampage and Ms Marvel suddenly discovers she's pregnant!
What can it all be leading to?
What?
But, when he gets there, no sooner does he triumph than he discovers some of his allies may not be as reliable as he might have hoped...
Daredevil has to fight Doctor Octopus, for reasons I can't recall and, as you'd expect, it isn't easy, even though the deadly Doctor's currently missing an appendage...
Thinking about it, on their way there, they encounter that Canadian character from Alpha Flight, the one who can fly and has a maple leaf on his costume.
From this, I shall conclude it's the North Pole the FF are visiting.
Needless to say, it's not long before the Hulk's smashing the place to pieces and costing poor old Jack his life.
What a strangely sad tale.
Now I'm worried about what's become of Iron Man's other early foes, like Mister Doll, the Red Barbarian and the hypnotic robo-Neanderthal.
Peter Parker doesn't because, to my knowledge, he's never met him, even though that mad scientist was to blame for creating such menaces as Hammerhead, the Kangaroo and Will o' the Wisp.
Now he's back and using the magic ray he's invented to make everyone aggressive.
Can our hero get to the bottom of it in time?
And, if he does, can he put a stop to it?
And he's killing New York's crime bosses, in an attempt to take control of the New York Mob.
Who can this mystery villain be?
I can tell you.
It's the Vulture.
And it looks like he might succeed.
I've a feeling this may be the issue in which we first discover the Vulture's real name.
Now things get serious.
It's ancient times and, because a Valkyrie who seems to be the Defenders' Valkyrie has helped some bloke win a fight against some other bloke, Odin strips her of her Valkyrie powers, to teach her a lesson.
The bounder.
Now who can stop her?
The X-Men can.
And, if they can't, the Shi'ar, Kree and Skrull Empires will.
But then it all gets odd.
No sooner is his rampage thwarted than he explodes and it turns out he was just a robot lookalike and his captors had never noticed.
Iron Man finds himself up against the Endotherm whose power of freezing everything he encounters seems suspiciously like that of the aforementioned Jack Frost.
As far as I can recall, the Endotherm is an English security man, at one of Stark's factories, who decides to cause mayhem when he fears he's going to get the push for being no good at his job.
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20 comments:
An interesting batch of books this week. If memory serves me, Amazing Spider-Man wasn't all that memorable. The title really took a downturn until Roger Stern came along.
The Fantastic Four tale doesn't strike my memory either; but that cover is, well, fantastic. Love those monochrome covers.
X-men was terrific, Cap pretty good, so was Iron Man. And Spectacular Spiderman was pretty decent, seems Stern was doing that title at the time.
Alas, poor Carol Danvers. The future looked dark for her. And for the Avengers, whose book (like ASM) was heading for a slump.
As for flying ants- didn't encounter any back then, but did have a nasty episode with a wasp about that time. I was driving down the highway and a wasp flew in, getting stuck between my back and the seat. Started stinging me repeatedly; was finally able to pull off the highway and escape the unpleasantry.
FF #220 is as good as it looks from that cover Red - its the first by John Byrne as writer and artist. Which doesn't suggest things were going that well with the new team of Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz that debuted in the previous issue...
Anyhow, it shows that whatever you think of him, Byrne really understood the FF, which is more than you can say for most Marvel writers. Perhaps the best thing about the story is that in the second part - next issue - he had Sue save the day, which was a welcome development.
Unlike the Avengers take on superwomen and their career choices, with Ms Marvel lecturing Wanda about the importance of not having kids, only to discover she's three months pregnant herself.
And we haven't even got to how that happened yet.
-sean
PS X-Men #135 was the first time I can recall recognizing a deliberate cover homage. Not saying it hadn't been done before - pretty sure it must have been - but that was the first I picked up on.
Thats when you know you've been reading too many comics... (;
-sean
Red, as far as I can remember, I've been stung once by a wasp and once by a bee. I remember the bee hurting more than the wasp but, then, I was about four when the bee stung me and I was a grown man when the wasp did it. That might explain the difference. I've also been bitten twice by spiders. I would say that was more painful than the wasp sting.
Sean, I'm struggling to remember any Avengers stories after the Ms Marvel pregnancy one. It'll be interesting to see how many of their issues jog my memory when I get to them.
When I was in the army, in Germany, I got drunk in Nuremburg, and wound up getting into an argument with some other G.I.s over a taxi, and they proceeded to kick my ass.
Maybe I had it coming. The end result was my face was a mess. I barely made it back to base. I hadda walk around for a week looking like John Merrick.
A couple weeks later, I'm walking to my barracks from the PX, fully healed up, perfectly innocent and bothering nobody, and I see a large black dot spiraling towards my face at s high rate of speed.
I was transfixed. Almost hypnotized. It was a bee (a German bee, no less, which might be meaner than other bees) and it stung me right above my right eye. By the time I got back to my company half my face was puffed up and my right eye swollen and closed.
Everybody assumed I got beaten up again, and nobody bought the bee story, even though it was God's honest truth.
"Either learn how to fight or keep your mouth shut!" one guy said to me.
Another time, many years later here in South Dakota, a bee stung me on the finger and it swoll up like a sausage.
It was painful as hell, but at least it wasn't humiliating.
Yeah, they hurt allright.
M.P.
Sean- thanks for the refresher course on that FF issue! I'd forgotten Byrne wrote that. I dearly loved his lengthier run on the book starting in issue 232 (?). If I see a copy, consider it bought. Oh, and yes, Byrne's approach to Susan on the title was refreshing. He really brought her to the forefront.
M.P.- man, you had some tough facial luck. Culminating with an encounter with a particularly antisocial bee. Ouch...
Steve- can't remember if bee stings are more painful; I just seem to run afoul of wasps. Usually when I'm helpless. Another one flew in my bedroom window one night while I was asleep and got caught up in my sheets. The little beggar stung me three times before I could wake enough to jump out of bed...
I must say, the Endotherm in the Iron Man comic has excellent posture!
I must say that Byrne's run on FF was a delight to read. IIRC it was Redartz himself who turned me on to it! (Thanks Red.)
I must say, MP I think you have a bee allergy.
I must say though that most people call yellow jackets bees, and they are not; they are yellow jackets and an exterminator is allowed to exterminate them at will, and not allowed to exterminate bees.
I didn't know the difference until two years ago I was weeding out my butterfly / hummingbird garden and looked up to see I was quite literally in the middle of dozens and dozens and dozens of bees just doing their thing with the flowers. Not a one bothered me, though I thought I was a goner. Turns out bees are actually very docile unless you threaten the hive. Yellow jackets, on the other hand (and wasps) are just a bunch of mean bastards that are aggressive and attack for any reason.
Red, I've never been stung by a wasp but to hear my Ma tell it, it ain't no kinda fun. She told me it's excruciating. On another note, I knew a guy one time who said he saw a guy on a beach after he got stung by a jellyfish. He said the guy was screaming when they put him in the ambulance. Yikes.
Something nasty bit me on the back of my upper thigh a couple weeks back, and that swelled up pretty good. My brother claims to have seen a large spider running across the floor when he was at my place.
Honestly, I don't wanna picture that. I'm scared of spiders.
I would think spider bites are pretty rare this far north, they don't get very big and for the most part their fangs aren't long enough to penetrate human skin.
I didn't even get any super powers outta the deal, just an itchy leg.
M.P.
I thought the X-Men cover was stunning but it wasn't till many years later that I discovered it was a homage to a previous X-Men cover.
Steve, I'm fascinated you've been bitten twice by spiders. Whenever my father saw a spider in our house he'd cup it in his hands and release it outside. I asked him if he'd ever been bitten by a spider (thinking of Peter Parker) but he said he never had.
Colin, British spiders are generally not aggressive but there are some that, if you take them by surprise, will respond by biting you. The first time, I was bitten by a spider that was lurking in some curtains when I was taking them down. The second time, I was bitten by one that was lurking in a duster when I picked it up.
I've been stung by hornets and yellow jackets.
I've been bitten by spiders and horse flies.
I've even had poison ivy all over (all over) my body as a kid.
But the worst was the man-o-war that stung me in Miami around 1996. I was wondering if I was going to die. It was tiny, too, like a plum... dangling between my toes. I thought I had stepped on glass and then immediately felt the pain. Ohhhhh... the pain. Marching up my leg like Patton through France in Operation Cobra or the Destruction of Germany's Army Group Center in the summer of 44 by the Reds.
Speaking of Reds... you chaps realize that exactly 76 years ago was the Battle of Prokhorovka? The real "mother" of all tank battles. 800 tanks doing battle in an area as big as a handful of soccer fields. Lordy...
Sounds like the spiders might have been waiting for you Steve. Maybe you should keep an eye out for them...
Funnily enough, I don't recall much about the Avengers after #200 either. I remember getting it around the same time as X-Men #137, which sort of marked an end of my Marvel years.
I still kept up with stuff like Miller's Daredevil, Byrne's FF and Simonson's Thor - which made me wonder why Marvel didn't get rid of all their writers and just let the artists get on with it! - but around this point I stopped reading comics just because it was the Avengers or whatever.
M.P., if you're scared of spiders (eh?) don't ever go to Australia.
(Steve, you should probably avoid the place too)
-sean
Charlie, Prokhorovka was just part of the battle of Kursk, when the Soviets took the Don valley (not the one in South Yorkshire - that was already a peoples republic).
-sean
Wildly varying quality in this months titles. Gold standard issues would be Byrne X-men and Miller Daredevil... As good as it gets! Cap was entering a golden era which Jim Shooter brought to an end with some daft policy of no continuing stories! Stan did the same thing 10 years earlier and similarly caused a slump in sales which was entirely self inflicted! Thor was unreadable with Roy Thomas' adaption of the 'Ring' cycle(sounds like a washing machine) though Ironman stories were quite entertaining but big hitters were floundering. FF had Moench and Sienkiewicz woefully mangling it's legacy and would continue to do so for another year until Byrne showed up. Those 2 issues were actually a commercial tie-in which suggests a dreaded deadline problem. Amazing Spider-man would also slump until Stern arrived and regenerated the title. Hulk would basically become aimless and story and art remained bland until Byrne turned up.... sensing a pattern here! However loved Ditko art on that issue. Conan had long since become formulaic and I lost interest in it after 116.The real sad story this month was Avengers, arguably Marvels most consistent title, falling into a 5 year hole, only reimerging when Stern and Buscema(or should I say Palmer with Buscema breakdowns) returned it to former glories. Very much a mixed bag but remember, I bought each and every issue and loved them all at the time! Great post, keep up the good work.
Hi Sean - I would like Prokhorovka to Kursk like 9/15/40 to Battle of Britain perhaps.
On July 13, 1943, the German generals knew the war with the USSR was lost.
And on 9/15/40 the Germans knew they would not invade the UK and hence we get "Battle of Britain" day!
Hey! SDC should do a special 80-year anniversary of Battle of Britain day with some lovely covers from all sorts of UK comics to include Victor, Valiant, Hotspur, etc.
Also today, July 13th, is the 35th anniversary of U2 playing at Live Aid....and the same day the Queen bestowed Bono with the title of "King of the Mullets!"
C'mon dudes! Let's hear it for the mullets!
Please don't bring up mullets.
My adolescence was rather awkward...
Sean, I saw this thing on Youtube, in Australia, somebody filmed a huntsman spider (those things are huge down there, they have an enormous leg span) and it was dragging a dead mouse up the side of a refrigerator. It was a lot bigger that the mouse.
If I were the owner of that house, I would have seriously considered burning it down to the ground after seeing that. Turn it into ash.
Nope, I'm staying in the north where spiders are smaller than a dinner plate.
M.P.
I knew that this summer was the 80th anniversary of the Battle Of Britain but I didn't know September 15th was Battle Of Britain Day.
Charlie, lots of acts played at Live Aid, such as Madonna - she sang "Into The Groove" which went to No.1 in the UK a few weeks later (her first British #1 hit). As far as us Brits were concerned it was Madonna's performance at Live Aid which turned her into a megastar.
I too have heard horrendous accounts of Australia's spiders - apparently there's a spider that jumps at you.
I totally disagree with Fantastic Four Follower that Thor was unreadable during the adaptation of the Ring cycle - I absolutely loved those "Wagnerian" issues!
re;Colin,Obviously everyone has their favourites and please remember I bought every issue and loved them at the time but...those Thor issues were heavy going with so many threads that Roy(I say Roy,never actually met him, as if we were close personal friends!)was trying to link together.Fair play for his attempt but it just seemed to go on forever.My opinions come from 40 years later not the person I was then.Rightly or wrongly I tend to view titles and issues from the perspective of will I read them again..in this case probably not.Though I did like Keith Pollard as an artist and If I remember correctly he was drawing Amazing Spiderman and Fantastic Four at around the same time!Those are pretty big titles and if I am right he drew the anniversary issues,Thor #300, ASM #200 and FF #200 but I might be wrong!Has the entire story ever been reprinted Colin?Best wishes Jim.
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