Considering that one exploding star is enough to wipe out the solar system, does it really matter what number they put before it? I like how we've gone from "more powerful than a locomotive" to this level now.





They should have given him a cellophane Sentry symbol on his costume that he could throw at people. Well, hopefully he stays dead for a good long while, and never shows up in any movies.





How much was the DVD? I ask because...




I believe the Marvel app works on I-pod touches and I-phones as well. It's a remarkably good comic reader on the I-pad screen, very quick and responsive, and the Marvel store has a new assortment of free issues every week or so. When the I-pad launched, it was consistently on the "must get" lists of apps...

Which is why I'm really disappointed that Marvel seems unwilling to commit to it. It's obviously a toe in the water at best, because the comics that you can get for it are all old ones... recent enough that they would already have digital files for them all, but usually at least a few years old. It's like one random back-issue bin, only they charge $1.99 per issue, which is *way* too much. There are no deals, no collected versions... They'll put out the six issues of a storyline, and you have to buy them individually for $2 each. The price might work if I could buy a specific storyline I want, but the comics available seem to measure around maybe a hundred total. So there are something like 14 Avengers issues (a Geoff Johns story arc and the opening "New Avengers" story arc) for instance. As a result, I haven't bought a single comic.

It's extraordinarily stupid, because every now and again I'll hear about a comic and go look for it in their store, and of course it's not there. You can't read any current comics, and you can't get hooked on a title because they add them randomly... so after you finish one story arc, lord knows if they'll ever get around to offering the next story arc in line for sale there. And $2 for a digital copy only is *way* too high a price. There is zero collectors value and zero printing costs (while programming and conversion costs are probably much lower).

I have to assume the reason they didn't go with a more reasonable $1 per issue is that then it would be a much better value for people who just want to read the story to buy the app copy rather than a published graphic novel of it, and they don't want to undercut that side of the business. I have trouble understanding why they aren't offering new comics at all on the thing... hell, even comics a month or two behind the newstands, but added as ongoing series so that people could get hooked and keep buying. It's such a blown opportunity to expand the audience for comics. I hate that there's a beautiful app which most everyone with an I-pad downloaded, and now they won't offer me anything for it that I would want to buy.





I very much agree with Ian's point that Bendis writes crime stories well, but those have very different needs and story beats than the more grand heroic fiction. As such, IMO he's very good a creating horrible situations, and very bad at giving the heroes a triumph in the end.





I would have preferred that myself. Now I wonder, had they done that, would we be getting a "Marvel Knights" movie in a few years instead?





I thought the new Ant-Man was a criminal who used his powers to watch Ms. Marvel shower or something?








Speaking of characters introduced to drive a single plot point...

I never really hated Simon as much as some posters, although he's really the definition of that plot-point example, two times over in fact. He was a throw-away character his first appearance (given the Wonder Man name to annoy D.C.), and then brought back to screw with the Vision's sense of identity. And then he just... hung around... and while some writers made him fun, nobody knew what to do with this extra, generic hero, and things got messy.

I like the idea of the hero-as-a-would-be-star that they tried, but the thing is the character was too defined as other things before they got to that point. He's really the ideal kind of character to do as an "Ultimate" version, because he has so many false starts that could be pruned away until you had a character with a clear point and purpose... but then, that's not what the Ultimate Universe ever did well anyway.

Mostly, these days it's just sad to see that the Vision has been so totally wiped out of the Marvel Universe, and Wonder Man's mostly a reminder of this for me. All of the Vision's relationships have been stripped away and hung on other characters. (The entirety of the conflict with Ultron has been shifted to Pym, despite Ultron's origin being mostly a subplot in the introduction of the Vision. Not surprisingly, once Simon came back, the Grim Reaper's focus shifted to him. They moved Wanda's relationship with Vizh into more of a Wonder-man subplot, and they made his twin boys entirely Wanda's kids, with him never being mentioned any longer when discussing them.)

But then I remind myself that I pretty much have to go back to the 70's to when the Vision that I liked was in comics. Kudos to Bob Harris for beginning to bring him back in the 90's, but then Heroes Reborn happened and that was the complete end of him. Considering the amount of time that has passed, I think the wounds have scabbed over.