Out Of The Basement Podcast

It’s Monday yet again, so welcome back to another This Week in Marvel Unlimited post! In the “new” column, it’s a fairly big week for the War of the Reams crossover, with the main book hitting #4 and three crossover books joining the service. Of those, the one I find most interesting is Giant-Man #1, The premise intrigues me: The All-Mother, Freyja, needs a team to infiltrate New Jotunheim. How do you do that? Get four characters who can grow to giant size: Tom Foster, the current Goliath, Erik Josten, the former Thunderbolt called Atlas, Scott Lang, the current Ant-Man and Lang’s friend Raz Malhotra, the current Giant-Man.

Elsewhere Spider-Man: Life Story #3 becomes available, Uncanny X-Men and Age of X-Man continue their parallel tracks, and MU readers get a chance to check out The Immortal Hulk #17. There are a few others, of course, but those are the ones that caught my eye.

As often happens, the most interesting part of the week for me is the back catalogue. This week we get fifteen issues of Classic X-Men… kinda.

So, the year is 1986. The X-Men are the cast of the most popular comic-book in North America. Chris Claremont has been writing the book for 11 years. Back issues are hard to come by, and expensive when you do. So Marvel sees an opportunity: a reprint series that will allow current fans to read the older material at a reasonable price.

The thing is, Marvel’s comic books had changed during the eleven years that had gone by since Claremont began his run. Specifically, the page count was now higher than it was in 1975. So, in order to pad out the books, (and to entice readers who may have already bought or at least read the originals to buy the reprints) Marvel included new X-Men stories written by Claremont. Each story was set around the same time of the reprinted issue, filling out details or showing things from a perspective not seen in the original book.

Now the thing is, all of those originals are available already in Marvel Unlimited. So the Classic X-Men books now available (and those issues on the service before this week) only have the new stories. They don’t have the reprints. There are holes in the collection of Classic X-Men, but a lot of those holes are because not every issue of the reprint series had new stories in the back.

It makes for an odd read. I’m one of those people who eagerly picked up Classic X-Men. I only really got into comics in 1983, so being able to read all these older stories that were referenced in the X-Men was great! The back-ups often dovetailed nicely into the main story. One particular favourite was Classic X-Men #26, reprinting the first appearance of Alpha Flight. In the original issue (Uncanny X-Men v1 #120) Wolverine is wandering in Calgary. As was normal for comics of the time, we got to “hear” his thoughts courtesy of thought balloons. At one point, he wonders if “Cracklin’ Rosa” is still running her “social club”. That was published in 1979.

The backup in Classic X-Men #26, published nine years later, took that inconsequential line and from it spun a fairly amusing tale of how Banshee’s work for Interpol resulted in Wolverine getting into a memorable brawl at “Cracklin’ Rosa’s.” The story is almost evenly split between a night out at Harry’s HIdeaway, where the tale is being told,  and flashbacks to the events at Rosa’s.

Now, the reason I’m going into so much detail is this: With the backup happening just a page or two after the reprint of Wolverine’s musings, it was easy to connect the two. Without the original story, reading the backup loses something, in my opinion. Still, it’s great to be able to read that stuff without digging into my longboxes (I still have my run of Classic X-Men.)

I don’t know how much more material there is to reprint from Classic X-Men; Marvel eventually stopped adding new material when the length of the originals reached “modern” page counts.

See you here next week!

Well, Monday has come around again. This time it’s Remembrance Day here in Canada, and Veterans Day in the United States. If anyone who’s served is reading this, thank you.

For those of you playing “cross-over scorecard” at home, this week in “new” additions (week of May 8th, 2019) we have one Age of X-Man book (Apocalypse & the X-Tracts #3) and three War of the Realms ones. Of the War of the Realms books, the most interesting to me is Agents of Atlas #1, featuring Greg Pak’s reimagination of the concept to an all-Asian team of heroes fighting the War on the Pacific Rim. At least Jimmy Woo (Khan of the Atlas Foundation) is involved. I really like Pak’s writing though, so I’m looking forward to this.

In the nostalgia market, Marvel Feature #1 gets a Facsimile Edition. This one features the first appearance and origin of the Defenders, Marvel’s first “non-team” superhero team.  Also serving the nostalgia market is a reprint of Marvels #3, the excellent Kurt Busiek/Alex Ross series. I’m doing it a disservice though. This is much more than a reprint… this is a 25th anniversary annotated re-release. If you’re like me and love both Marvels and an insider look at everything that goes into making a fantastic comic book, this re-release is a gold mine.

There are actually five Spider-Man books out this week, and three of them caught my attention. The first is the May 4th Free Comic Book Day book (yes, Free Comic Book Day 2019 was also Star Wars Day.) Also catching my eye was Symbiote Spider-Man #2 and Spider-Man/Deadpool #50. My reaction to the Spider-Man/Deadpool book is “wow, that book lasted fifty issues?” (#50 was indeed the final issue and features a cover appearance of the Grim Reaper. Not the Marvel villain one either. 😀 )

Symbiote Spider-Man is a series set during the time after Spider-Man got his living costume, but before he found out the truth about it and got rid of it (creating Venom.) I’m interested here because the writer is Peter David. I’m a big fan of David’s Marvel work (you may recall my mentioning his X-Factor run in my last column.)

That’s it from the “new” side this week (I’m trying to avoid just listing everything that comes out.) On to the back catalogue! This week illustrates why I love Marvel Unlimited so much. This week we get issues #91-#107 of Power Man and Iron Fist.

Now, Power Man and Iron Fist was a book I was aware of when I started seriouslyreading comics back in the early 80s, but it wasn’t a book I actually read. I was aware of it because of Marvel’s house ads. The sales on PM/IF weren’t the greatest (although they would blow away most of today’s books) and so Marvel supported the book by running house ads in their other titles. The ads were striking because there were two main ones, both full-page spreads. One featured Luke Cage, the other Danny Rand… and they were both breaking the fourth wall, talking directly to the reader. Luke threatens the reader. Danny talks about Luke getting mad (and violent) when he finds out people aren’t reading their magazine. They were great ads. I didn’t have the budget to get more comics (I consider myself lucky my parents subscribed me to the handful I did) but those ads have stayed with me for well over thirty years now.  Check them out here!

Power Man and Iron Fist is a great example of Marvel just not saying die. It all started with Luke Cage, Hero For Hire #1 in 1972. That lasted sixteen issues, and then re-branded itself as Luke Cage, Power Man with #17. In the meantime, Iron Fist got his own title in 1975 (after appearing in Marvel Premiere for several issues). Neither title was doing that great. Iron Fist’s book was actually cancelled, and Chris Claremont wrapped up some storylines in Marvel Team-Up. Then, Claremont introduced Luke & Danny in Power Man #48. Two issues later, Luke Cage, Power Man became Power Man and Iron Fist.

Power Man and Iron Fist lasted from issue #50 to issue #150, and featured some really fun stuff. With this newest batch of books, Marvel Unlimited now has everything Power Man and Iron Fist right from the beginning through to #107, and then it jumps to #121 (which is a Secret Wars II cross-over issue.) There is onemissing issue between #50 and #107… #73. You’ll have to forgive Marvel for that one though. It featured Rom, Spaceknight, and Marvel doesn’t have the rights to reprint anything with Rom in it.

I’m really hoping Marvel will eventually reprint #108 through to #150. This is a series that I’d love to binge-read. The reason we have as much as we do is obvious: Luke & Danny’s profiles got a major boost thanks to the Marvel/Netflix collaboration that brought them both to millions of subscribers. Here’s hoping that we get the rest of it.

See you in this space next week!