This Week on Marvel Unlimited: Most of the Summer
Holy crap!!! Marvel dropped much of their summer content this week; everything they released from April to August, along with some stuff from September. We get some X-Men, Empyre, and books of variant covers. This is a full week.
****Please note that the italicized and starred titles below were removed after the list was made. I don’t know when these title will show up. There were some really good titles pulled.****
New This Week
Amazing Spider-Man #43
Amazing Spider-Man & Mary Jane: The Variant Covers #1
Ant-Man #4
Avengers #33
Avengers of the Wasteland #4
Avengers of the Wasteland #5
Black Cat #11*
Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda #8*
Black Widow #1*
Bring on the Bad Guys: The Variant Covers #1
Carnage-ized Variants #1
Daredevil #20*
Deadpool #5*
Deadpool: The Variant Covers #1
Doctor Doom #7*
Dr. Strange #5*
Empyre: Avengers*
Empyre: Fantastic Four*
Excalibur #10*
Ghost-Spider #9
Hawkeye: Freefall #5
Magnificent Ms. Marvel #14*
Marauders #10
Marvel: The Action Figure Variant Covers #1
Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Black Cat Strikes #4
Miles Morales: Spider-Man #17*
Ravencroft #4
Revenge of the Cosmic Ghost Rider #5
Scream: Curse of Carnage #6
Spider-Man Noir #2*
Star #4
Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #1
Strange Academy #2*
Strikeforce #8*
Sword Master #10*
Taskmaster #1*
Uncanny X-Men: The Variant Covers #1
Venom #25
Venomized: The Variant Covers #1
X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills Extended Edition #1*
Notes: Revenge of the Cosmic Ghost Rider is the limited series finale…Marvel’s Spider-Man: The Black Cat Strikes is part of the Gamerverse…Avengers starts the Age of Khonshu, which features Moon Knight taking on the Avengers…Doctor Aphra is a continuation of the last series, moving to right after the Empire Strikes Back…
Best of Last Week
Falcon & Winter Soldier #2 – The title characters take on a train full of Hydra agents to try to learn who Baron Zemo’s protege is. Instead they find Zemo on the train. They are forced into a partnership to take down the Protege. Solid issue, if not predictable. There is really good dialogue, which saves the recycled story type.
Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler #1 – Nightcrawler leads a mission to find out why the house of Xavier at Greymalkin Lane isn’t responding to Krakoa. It’s an OK issue. I enjoyed reading it, but it really wasn’t that memorable and doesn’t add much (as of right now) to the overall Krakoan story.
Hellions #1 – What happens when you take all mutants and put them together? You get some conflicts. How do you handle those responsible for the conflicts? Send them to Sinister. If you are wondering why Havok is on the cover, it’s because he loses control and almost kills some humans. This was a good set up issue and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Road to Empyre: The Kree/Skrull War #1 – This set up follows a Skrull sleeper family living on Earth preparing for war. It gives a little insight into the Skrull thinking, but really didn’t have much value. I’m waiting to see if this family has some kind of impact on the bigger story; if so, this issue has a little more to it than I initially thought.
Star #3 – Star recounts why she hates Captain Marvel, and it really didn’t hit for me. The main character really doesn’t have much going on to drive this story; the bad guys wanting to hunt her for the reality stone really isn’t the main story, and I feel that it could carry the book more than her discovering her identity. It might work for others that know her full story.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunters #2 – I generally like Star Wars books, specifically when Boba Fett and other bounty hunters are involved. This story really isn’t doing it for me. It’s slow and not really moving the overall story. I really feel like the story from 1 and 2 could have been combined.
Wolverine #2 – Wolverine has killed his team and doesn’t remember or know why. He’s working with a CIA agent to investigate the Flower Cartel, who’s using Krakoan flowers to make a new designer drug. It’s an interesting story, but very slow. I’m going to stick with this one though.
X-Men #9 – The Summers Brothers get the Brood Kings Egg into space with a hoard of Brood following. We learn that the King Egg is the highest in the Brood heirarchy and that the Queens want it destroyed to keep their place in the Brood. Broo ends up consuming the egg, which makes him the ruler of the Brood. It’s interesting that the X-Men keep expanding outside of Krakoa (Jamie Braddock rules Otherworld with Betsy as Captain Britain), Masque has a retirement community in Arizona, Cannonball is with the Shi’ar). The best thing about this book is many of the arcs are only a couple of issues, rather than the standard 6 issues we see in most series.
X-Men/Fantastic Four #3 – The X-Men and Fantastic Four get to Latveria Island to discover Doom is going to fix Franklin and Excalibur has agreed to it. Magneto is upset that the Red Queen has agreed for Krakoa without the Quiet Council’s consent (although Xavier is good with it). We also get a group of X-Men with Sue trying to free some mutants that are “captive” after they agreed to stay on the beach of the island.
Retro Review: Wolverine: Origin 1-3
As I’ve consolidated my floppy collection, I noticed I didn’t have a full run of Origin II; I picked up the missing issue and decided to give both parts a read. I was able to get Origin 1-3 in last week.
One of the best parts of this series is using Rose as the focal point and seeing the events through her point of view. I remember how much the story was a “shocker” at the time because they set it up for the reader to believe Dog was Wolverine. Making James our hero was a nice twist; making Logan his father was even more so.
The story was very well written and gave Wolverine a lot of depth. Paul Jenkins left a lot of questions after each issue and answered them with the next. This was one of the books that really got me into a deep dive of his work (on top of the fact he’s a great guy in person). The art is very stunning. The color really captures the story, avoiding bright colors.
I remember loving this series when it came out, and it has held up so far.
