The Doomino Effect for the week of Jan 31
Another solid week in the world of 52. Other than Montoya not fighting a dragon, as the cover teases, the issue didn’t disappoint. And other than Lex Luthor getting his powers, as the cover gives away, the issue had some nice twists. It’s getting to the point where there are so few issues left that each one is probably going to be packed with good stuff.
Which leads me to Daredevil #93. It was this week’s Book of Doom, but I didn’t get my thoughts in on time to get included. So speaking of being packed with good stuff, this was almost too neat of a resolution to the past few years of Daredevil stories, both Bendis and Brubaker-spawned. The fact that everything wrapped up so nice and tidy only assures us that Matt Murdock’s world will continue to reach new levels of awfulness. That’s yet to come. This month, we just got a happy ending and a nice look back over some great stories.
Which leads me to The Vault of Michael Allred #4. I’m a big Allred fan, as I’ve written about before with this series, and so I love this fantastically self-celebratory series. It’s something I’d love to do if I were in Allred’s shoes. None of the later installments have had the drama of volume 1, which chronicled Allred and Madman’s ascent into the comics mainstream, but they still have their own character. This volume includes his work on X-Force / X-Statix and some sample storyboards for the non-existent Madman film, but overall, it’s just a lot of pinups and random things that probably just didn’t have a home in any of the previous volumes. The biggest excitement here was reading on the last page that there’s going to be an 852-page Madman Gargantua Hardcover coming out this week (Jean Claude, if you get a free promo copy, my birthday is in March…) and that Madman returns monthly in April. Again, not as poignant as earlier volumes, but a definite for Allred completists such as myself.
Which leads me to Ghost Rider #94. Originally cancelled at issue 93 back in the ’90s, this is the long-awaited, never published finale to volume three of Ghost Rider. Presumably due to the upcoming movie hype, the return of an ongoing series and the fact that Tom Breevort is now a Marvel bigwig, the inks and colors on the unfinished pages were completed and fans of the Dan Ketch era finally got their conclusion. As an added bonus, Marvel packs issue 93 into this bonus-sized book. I sometimes have trouble remembering what happened a month ago when I pick up a new comic; presumably it’s even harder when the last issue came out almost a decade ago.
Sadly, the story was written to extend well past issue 100, so the finale really only sets the stage for more, but it’s nice to see a cancellation get the closure it deserves. I stopped reading the book when I gave up on comics in the 90s, so I never really knew where the series went. There were too many complicating factors with all the Spirits of Vengeance and Midnight Sons and a purple-headed Ghost Rider with fangs, and I just lost interest.
But whether the writers and editors had a vision all along or Ivan Velez Jr just managed to make lemonade out of crap, I found myself really liking the direction the book took from this finale. The whole dark, vengeful anti-hero thing was so early-90s, so it was essential to give the characters more to work with, and Velez did that. I would have loved to have seen where he was planning on taking the story after issue 94. Maybe Marvel will put out #95 in 2015 or something.
I love that Marvel went old-school and used the cover box that they were using when that Ghost Rider issue would have originally hit shelves. Man, I miss that design. Now, instead of of a cool headshot or team roster, we get an advertisemnt for the latest over-hyped Marvel crossover. Because where else are you going to hear that Spider-Man is returning to the black costume or a Civil War is looming. Oh wait, that’s right: EVERYWHERE!
The headshots of the team members is my favorite upper-left design. Isn’t Uncanny X-Men using that?
Yeah, it is. At least, I’m 90 percent sure it is. I just put away my floppies from the past few months and don’t want to go digging through the long box.
I really hate those promos too. On the scale of wretched cover stuff, in which DC blowing every surprise on 52 covers is a 1 and anything done by Michael Turner is a 10, I would rate those promos as a solid 7.
[…] This process has been going on for years, of course. Why do you think we’ve seen the sudden release of the last Ghost Rider issue after a decade? Oh, yeah, a film is coming out. Every time a comic movie comes out, the comic book version of it is also released — from Superman Returns to X-Men. But that isn’t so much what bothers me. These comic adaptions have no relation to the ongoing series, just as the films have no relation to the ongoing series. What really pisses me off is when in-continuity editorial decisions are made for the express purpose of cross promotion. And that’s what we’re seeing with Spider-Man. […]