Sunday, April 25, 2010

The Dissector #159.

DISCLAIMER (angry creators, please read)

[[WARNING! THIS COLUMN MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS!]]

"--The hell? (...) they're in prehistory (...) I hope no one steps on a butterfly and makes me have a mustache." Bob, Agent of Hydra... or A.I.M., Hulked-Out Heroes #1.

Sorry for the lateness, but here we are with the column for comics released on 04/14. Donald313 correctly noticed that Odin has two eyes in the retro-DT!, so that solves that. Now, the Dissector's Picks Of The Week are the following: Best Book Of The Week was Star Trek: Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor #1. John Byrne's artwork might be a tad outdated, but it's detailed and clean, perfect for a Star Trek book based on TOS, and it's clear he understands the setting and the characters. Worst Book Of The Week was Hulked-Out Heroes #1... pointless, I'm tired of Deadpool, at least the Sentry is lame but he's not the star of seven or ten books at the same time. It did have ONE quote that made me laugh, as you can see.

The Rundown: A-Team: War Stories: Face (French language mistake), Action Comics (Jay Garrick's emblem, Captain Atom's hair), Adventure Comics V1 (Matter-Eater Lad's gloves should be fingerless, and you can even see the aritst drew them that way, but the colorist just painted his fingers black), Batman (Riddler's hair is colored wrong), Booster Gold V2 (Rip Hunter's eyes and hair are wrong), Fall Out Toy Works (Tiffany's eyes are colored wrong on the cover), Green Arrow V4 (Atom's eyes are colored wrong, and Batman's chest emblem is completely wrong), Iron Man: Legacy ("paramiltaries"), Iron Man Noir (Pepper Potts' eyes should be green), Siege: Loki (numerous accented letters, also eye colors and designs), Siege: Young Avengers ("Broxtan", Oklahoma), Spider-Man: Grim Hunt: The Kraven Saga (Dear Handbook Guys: When putting an image in a profile, avoid having it obscure the text, particularly of non-context guessable information like the number of the issue of the character's first appearance), Ultimate Comics Enemy ("Latervia"), Web Of Spider-Man V2 (Marko's eyes are colored incorrectly again; at least the mobster is Don "Silvio" now), X-Factor Forever (Jean's eyes are wrong on the cover, and Trish Tilby's are wrong inside), Zorro Matanzas (Spanish language errors in spades... particularly "cajones" instead of "cojones").
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"JACKPOTALIZED."

TITLE: The Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Jackpot (Marvel).

ISSUE: 03 of 03.

CULPRIT: Marc Guggenheim (writer).

DISSECTION: "Pharmacalized"? Whu-what?

DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars. Making up random words, a no-no after the age of three.
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"DOCTOR?"

TITLE: Black Widow V4 (Marvel).

ISSUE: 01.

CULPRIT: Marjorie Liu (writer).

DISSECTION: The Black Widow gets trussed up like a Turkey in the street; so she gets taken to a hospital. While finishing up surgery on her, one of the doctors asks the other if "he checked if she has her liver, kidney, spleen..." (you know, what REAL doctors would call her internal organs), to which the other doctor answers, without much certainty, that he "saw them during the exam". That is the most unconvincing piece of medical dialogue I've seen in a long time.

DISSECT-O-METER: 6 Bazzars.
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"IN SOVIET RUSSIA, COMICS READ YOU!"

TITLE: Black Widow V4 (Marvel).

ISSUE: 01.

CULPRIT: John Rhett Thomas (writer, Black Widow Files).

DISSECTION: You know, all these "Saga" things Marvel puts together are very helpful for getting up to speed on characters, particularly when they're included in the first issue of a book, instead of being a separate one-shot (like the TWO Kraven family books Marvel put out on this same week). However, character histories need to be revised, particularly in Marvel's case, when continuity has never been rebooted in the main universe, only retconned here and there.

In this case, the problem is Soviets. Yes, the Black Widow has been injected with a serum that slows her aging, among other things, which allows her to retain much of the Cold War parts of her origins... but that's about it, her interactions, alongside other characters like Iron Man or the Avengers, with Soviet agents are no longer workable. The modern Marvel characters have been active for around 15 years in their sliding timescale, in fact, Tom Brevoort said the other day that Peter Parker is about 27 years old, which means he's been Spider-Man for only twelve years. (Me, I'd rather think he's more like 30, perhaps 32.)

There is only so much you can blame on rogue or splinter post-Iron Curtain fall Soviet whacko groups. That will work for characters who have only faint connections to the Cold War, for example, saying that the Crimson Dynamo that first attacked Iron Man was from one of those rogue Soviet groups... because even if Tony Stark has been active as Iron Man longer than Spider-Man (and I doubt it, or at least it can't be much longer), the USSR fell in 1991... that's almost twenty years ago, folks.

DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars.
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"BRIGHTEST DISSECTION!"

TITLE: Brightest Day (DC).

ISSUE: 00.

CULPRIT: Fernando Pasarin (penciller).

DISSECTION: So, Barry Allen visits Captain Boomerang in prison, but there's something wrong with this picture:


DISSECT-O-METER: 5 Bazzars. Also, Hal Jordan's emblem is wrong on both covers and inside the book, Barry's eyes are colored incorrectly, and Martian Manhunter's pants are missing on the variant cover.
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Thirty-nine dissections leave us with an average of 6.1 Bazzars; on the lower end of the usual range. Cover Of The Week is another Iron Man variant that has nothing to do with the book it's for:


This funky gladiator is by Gabriele Dell Otto; whose comic art is a bit unmoving, but he makes good covers. Moments Of The Week now, we start with some Quislet action!


The scene was longer, so I had to choose a part of it. Next, Flash meets the Legion!


... or not. Cool stuff, great start for the new Flash book. Then, a fun Winnie the Pooh parody:


Trap someone you want to get rid of inside the body of a stuffed animal in la-la-land? Genious. And last, Zorro... unsettles me:


Err... That's it for now, until next time, I'll be on the outlook for more dissections, because (almost) nothing escapes...

THE DISSECTOR!

6 comments:

JohnnyDoe said...

I'm gonna go with the proportions on this week's DT!
The first thing that struck me was the bed; WAY too big for a simple prison-cell, and the second was that the sink on the first picture also looks too big. Did Flash and Cap. Boomerang shrink or something? :-)

MaGnUs said...

It's indeed the cot... not only is it ginormous for a prison cell, but it's larger than in the first panel. The sink looks okay, though.

Ezequiel said...

It's obviously a TARDIS cell. It's bigger on the inside.
As for the sliding timescale. I think the cold war moves too. In a few years the cold war in the Marvel Universe will have happened around the mid nineties or so.

MaGnUs said...

No, it's not the cell, it's the bed. And no, the sliding timescale doesn't move real world events in Marvel.

Ezequiel said...

You're no fun anymore!

MaGnUs said...

Don't blink...