Worth Your Consideration 016 - A GF5 Linkdump

• I’ve had the first episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles sitting unplayed on my Apple TV since about a week after its premiere (it was a free download on iTunes way back when), but this Newsarama piece on the show’s second season has piqued my interest, and I may have to finally sit down and devote an hour to the show now.
• Earlier this year, when Marvel Comics retconned Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson’s marriage with their back-to-back “One More Day” and “Brand New Day” events, they introduced a new red-headed super-heroine by the name of Jackpot. She looks like Mary Jane, talks like Mary Jane, and has named herself after one of MJ’s most famous catchphrases, but her secret identity has yet to be revealed. Newsarama reports that the mystery will end in an upcoming Amazing Spider-Man annual, but me, I already know who it is: the resurrected Gwen Stacy. Yep, you heard it here first. And the masked villain Menace? That’s the long-dead Uncle Ben, come back to life. If the fanboys hated Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada before, I guarantee death threats this time around.
• Jason Kottke describes the anatomical drawings on this site as “part medical and part American Apparel advertisement” and he’s pretty much dead-on.
• And, lastly, Apple is giving me one more reason to enjoy trips up north to see my in-laws: an Apple Store in the Maine Mall. Stephanie may even be able to convince me to move up there now… Nah, probably not.

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“All over this like Go-Go boots on Gwen Stacy” - Spider-Man and X-Men Team Up

It may have something to do with the fact that one of the major ways in which I was introduced to the Marvel Comics pantheon was through Saturday morning cartoons where these guys seemed to team up a bunch, but I am super excited to read that Spider-Man and the X-Men are teaming up for a four-issue mini-series. Newsarama has the scoop, and according to the piece the series will “[take] place in a different era in Marvel history, [with] the final one occurring in the present day.”

The image I’ve embedded above is from the second issue and features both black-suit Spider-Man and the 1970s-era X-Men (Dazzler among them). This is just awesome, awesome, awesome in my opinion. I hope that they ratchet up the nostalgia factor to level ten and really do this team-up justice. There’s such a strong connection between the X-Men and Spidey in the Ultimate Marvel Universe, and I think it’s about time that we saw these guys teaming up more in the mainstream Earth 616 universe too (I’m sure Marvel’s sales guys agree with me, given the popularity of both franchises).

What say you, dear readers?

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Marvel Editor-in-Chief Answers Fan Questions at MySpace

Joe Quesada, the much-maligned editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics—he single-handedly destroyed Spider-Man, or so sayeth fandom—is returning to the realm of Internet Q&A after a prolonged absence. Comic Book Resources reports that Joe Q’s first “MyCup O’ Joe” column will appear on March 21 on MySpace. His previous columns had been hosted by Newsarama.com, but it appears as if the two sides have had a falling-out. The columnists at Newsarama were among the most vocal critics of Quesada’s plan to erase the marriage of Peter Parker (Spider-Man) and Mary Jane Watson. Quesada, who has long said that a married Spider-Man just isn’t as interesting as a single Spider-Man apparently knows how to hold a grudge. Because, seriously, he’s going to post a column on comics at MySpace? I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I only go to MySpace to communicate with close friends and to pimp my Website. When it comes to MySpace, I get in and I get out. It’s not a place that I think to go for news. It’s not a place that I want to hang around at.

I think Joe Quesada is one of the most talented artists working comics today (when he actually puts out work, that is), but I’m not a huge fan of some of the decisions he makes as a businessman. I won’t fault him for erasing the Spider-Marriage—traditional comic book characters are supposed to be forever frozen-in-time, after all—but I do take issue with boneheaded moves like this one. MySpace? Seriously, Joe, why? I’ll read your columns, because I have always loved them, and because I crave the latest Marvel scoop, but I can’t help but think that there are better options out there.

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The Amazingly Sh*tty Spider-Artist

I’d like to begin by giving my good pal Andy a shout-out for the shout-out he gave Geek Force Five on his site last week. And I’d like to follow-up that shout-out by thanking Andy for inadvertently reminding me that the comics coverage of this site has been woefully inadequate thus far. You see, in describing what I was covering over here, Andy specifically mentioned “comic book movies” instead of just plain comic books. That got me looking back into the archives to see what might have given him that impression. And, lo and behold, I discovered that the only comic book story I’ve done prior to this one was the one about the forthcoming Wolverine and Hulk movies. Add to that the fact that I used a movie-version of Spidey in the header image, and you can see why people might be confused.

So, without further ado, here is my attempt to get the comics coverage on this site back on track. Next week, I hope to get you an Explaining the Obsession entry similar to the one I did for Nine Inch Nails. Until then, here are my thoughts on this week’s issue of The Amazing Spider-Man:

The art sucks!

The gist of my feelings about the now thrice-monthly Spider-Man title is that Marvel is sacrificing quality for quantity. I was behind them 100% when they decided to cancel their excess Spidey titles and start publishing only one book that would have a more cohesive storyline. In the past, you had Spidey dealing with one crisis in Spectacular Spider-Man, one crisis in the adjectiveless Spider-Man, and another crisis in Amazing. And then, every once in a while, they’d do some sort of line-wide crossover and you’d have to buy all three when you hadn’t been buying all three before. It was confusing, even more confusing than this paragraph, if you can imagine that. The new strategy of publishing one title, Amazing Spider-Man, three times a month, was supposed to solve problems. And, for the first two months, it did.

But the problem now is that they’ve cycled through their top-tier artist and writer combos and we’re left with Bob Gale of Back to the Future fame doing the writing and this guy Phil Jimenez, who apparently couldn’t draw a realistic-looking foot to save his life. I mean, the art is just shoddy. Maybe this guy has done some quality work in the past, but what he’s doing now is just not doing it for me.

I started collecting comics in the 90s, when art was the major selling point. Now, I’m not saying that art should be the major selling point, and I’ll be the first to admit that the writing in the 90s left a lot to be desired, but I can’t stand books that try to win customers over with good writing alone. Comic books are about the marriage of art and words. You can’t skimp on one or the other, in my opinion. And that’s what I feel like Marvel is doing. They want to capitalize on Spidey’s popularity by having a new Spidey book out in stores three weeks out of every month, but they’re losing so much in the process.

Maybe next week will be better, but I’m not holding out much hope.

This Week’s Other Book(s)
This week’s Uncannny X-men (#496) was a surprise of the far nicer variety. Ed Brubaker’s spinning a couple of fun yarns here, one involving Wolverine, Colossus, and Nightcrawler bar-fighting in Russia near where Colossus comes from, and the other involving Cyclops and Emma Frost traveling to San Francisco to rescue some friends from a city that’s suddenly psychically under the impression that it’s the 1960s again. Fun, fun stuff. The mutants have been through some dark days in the past year or so, and this story arc seems to be all about balancing that.

I also managed to snag a copy of Secret Invasion Saga, a freebie book/marketing device designed to pull people in for Marvel’s big Secret Invasion event this summer. That was mildly entertaining, too. I loves me some skrulls, man. And I’m really excited to see what they do with this whole storyline. Basically, these shapeshifting aliens have infiltrated every facet of the Marvel Universe’s Earth. And everyone’s flipping out, because no one knows who’s who anymore.

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