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Underground > Comic Books >

The Marvel Universe

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Ronald Thomas Clontle

13:12 / 02.11.01

quote:Originally posted by moriarty:
For example, Grant Morrison never wrote a Vertigo Doom Patrol.

Doom Patrol switched over to 'mature readers' around issue 37 or so, and then became a Vertigo book somewhere in the 50's, nearing the end of Grant's run.

Deva: I think it is silly and foolish to place too many rules on what writers can be allowed to draw from in a giant sandbox of ideas...I think the emphasis should be placed more on sharing characters and ideas than in making sure that everyone does it in a way that makes absolute sense. It should be more about free creativity than about an anal retentive desire to have EVERYTHING make perfect sense.

Why does it have to make sense? Why can't it just be fun, or a good story?

[ 02-11-2001: Message edited by: Flux = Rad ]

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

19:12 / 02.11.01

i remember when cobra commander was all old and werking with the decepticons once, freaked me out cause if i recall he got turned into a snake in GI Joe the Movie which presumably was before he was old

20:58 / 02.11.01

erm... don't recall that particular fate of Cobra Comander... Besdies... Does "charactor continuity" even exist between Mediums???

Take the BATMAN movies for instance...

The Fantiastic Four also have a comic written about them published by Marvel Comics IN the Marvel universe... The John Byrn of That Universe was even abducted by The Watcher to witness an event of Cosmic Importance... sort of a People's court on a cosmic scale with Reed Richards, Galactus & the Shai'r's Lillendra...

The Damned Yankee

00:32 / 03.11.01

quote:Originally posted by PATricky:
erm... don't recall that particular fate of Cobra Comander...

UBERGEEKMODEGO!

That happened on a later episode of the Transformers, after the storyline had moved from the present to the near future. Cobra Commander was referred to as "Snake" and STILL wearing that funky, shiny faceplate after all these years. He was a go-between/arms dealer for a group of terrorists that wanted to take out the Autobots. The cool part for me came as "Snake" watches from a safe distance as the villains, their plans in ruins, are led away. "Snake" mutters to himself: "They just don't make terrorists like they used to." And, as he plods away into the sunset, he gives with the old battle cry: "COBRA-A-A-Ack! Cough! Cough! Hack!"

"Snake" ain't as young as he used to be.

UBERGEEKMODESTOP!

02:25 / 03.11.01

quote:Originally posted by Flux = Rad:

Doom Patrol switched over to 'mature readers' around issue 37 or so, and then became a Vertigo book somewhere in the 50's, nearing the end of Grant's run.

You might want to check again. Doom Patrol didn't become a true Vertigo title until the first issue of Rachel Pollack's run.

[ 03-11-2001: Message edited by: moriarty ]

A

02:36 / 03.11.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Penitents:
- There were, for example, two Supermen, one a reasonably tough cookie from the Justice Society of America and the other the ridiculously powerful superhero from the John Byrne reinvention - necessitating two different Earths to exist.

Actually, the John Byrne reinvention came AFTER the Crisis. What's more, his Superman really wasn't initially THAT ridiculously powerful, if memory serves. He certainly wasn't the planet-juggling type that the pre-Crisis Earth 1 Superman (fuck, writing those words makes me feel like a nerd) was. Of course, since Byrne's revamp, he or other writers have changed back pretty much everything he did differently, which is a shame. From all reports, Byrne is something of a jackass, but the Superman revamp was something the bastard did RIGHT, at least in my opinion.

Incidentally, Superman the Movie, where Byrne got a lot of his ideas, is on Australian TV tonight.

A

02:42 / 03.11.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Penitents:

Christ, Morrison really doesn't have an original thought in his head, does he?

I always thought that bit from the Invisibles was a "homage" to a bit in one of Whitley Streiber's books where a friend of Streiber's apparently saw a couple of disguised aliens walk into a bookstore and flick through Communion, saying things like "Ooh, he's got that part wrong" etc, but i could be wrong

07:45 / 03.11.01

quote:Originally posted by moriarty:

You might want to check again. Doom Patrol didn't become a true Vertigo title until the first issue of Rachel Pollack's run.

[ 03-11-2001: Message edited by: moriarty ]

actually you are both right-- pre vertigo titles did get 'mature readers' labels on the covers and in solicitation notes way before the existence of vertigo. Basically
There was tacit acknowledgement that the 'Berger books' as they were known (cos most of them were being edited in some way by karen berger) we 'a bit different' to the rest of DC's output interms of content theme politicsetc...

07:58 / 03.11.01

and for those of you shocked by angel's sudden depth of knowledge of DC comics output o the late 80s the unfortunate truth is i just poeted as her.

Sorry

13:05 / 03.11.01

I agree. They were, unofficially, "Proto-Vertigo" books at the end of Morrison's run. The letter columns were always being used to solicit Shade, Animal Man, etc. I just remember going to pick up the latest Doom Patrol by the replacement writer and wondering what had happened to the cover design.

But for all intents and purposes the mature audiences books hadn't been in the DC universe for quite a long time.

Thanks, Angel.

17:01 / 06.11.01

quote:Originally posted by moriarty:
Keep in mind that Animal Man, The Doom Patrol, Constantine, etc. made the majority of their regular DC Universe appearances before there was a Vertigo proper. Then they were only Mature Audiences. For example, Grant Morrison never wrote a Vertigo Doom Patrol.

The JLA appeared in Sandman before it was a Vertigo title. After it was a Vertigo title, a character (I think it was Wanda) was obsessed with Bizarro Superman, only it wasn't -- it was "Weirdzo Ultraman" or something similar. So either there are other superhero comics in a universe with the superheroes we read about walking around in it, or else there's some sort of infinite iteration thing going on.
I lean towards that explanation. Like a crystal, fracturing under pressure - all these heroes looking in on themselves in different revisions. I think life is like that, too.

Oh, and (old style geek) Man-Thing was Marvel, and exists in the same universe as the Micronauts. In fact, they exist within an atom inside Man-Thing's body. There was one issue where they get enlarged and fight Man-Thing's enemies.

17:35 / 06.11.01

quote:Originally posted by The Haus of Penitents:

Indeed. The inter-company crossover is interesting, as it often involves groups who are the heavy-hitters of their respective universes, interacting in the same one, often with no explanation given whatsoever why, if they are interacting in the same universe, they have a) never mentioned each other, b) never encountered each other and c) never encountered any og the other universe's superheroes.

This was what made "Kingdom Come" so satisfying in the really geeky way - finally, Captain Marvel and Superman go at it, mano a mano, no-holds-barred.
And Batman knows who Billy Batson is.

Alan Moore refers to the loophole that seems to allow "localized continuity" to exist in DC, when he has Green Arrow give that impassioned speech about "Who's looking out for Houma, Louisiana??" in Swamp Thing. There's the idea that each hero has local turf and doesn't much care about what's going on outside it. (And when the hero isn't paying attention, the reality-distorting demons emerge....)

In some way, I suppose each hero could be read as a totem or spirit protector for each city. Green Lantern is/was Seattle, right?
What's interesting is that there are (at least) two New Yorks: Metropolis and Gotham City. One is intensely localized, dark, claustrophobic, and the other is localized loosely, has global connections, but at the end is still pretty much divorced from whatever's going on outside its borders.
Which probably says a lot about the isolationist American psyche - possibly mistaking the Home Town for the Whole Wide World.

12:04 / 29.09.04

what about when Face sees a cyclon in the credits to the A-Team and looks like he recognises him... ?

I used to love that sh*t man...

14:33 / 29.09.04

There's the idea that each hero has local turf and doesn't much care about what's going on outside it.

I guess that's what the Justice League is for; they kinda police everything else together.

The alternative is Marvel Comics, where every superhero lives in New York, which is why it's fortunate every single supervillain lives there as well. If I were, like, Electro, I'd move to Atlanta and there would be nobody to stop me.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

14:58 / 29.09.04

There have been stories about villains going elsewhere to do stuff in the Marvel Universe, but they all seem to be "one off" tales.

The MU started in New York because that's where all the writers and artists lived when it started, and now it seems to me that it's just sheer laziness.

07:32 / 30.09.04

how about 2000AD continuity

as far as i remember

harlem heroes - harlem hellcats - giants son becomes rookie judge giant and works with dredd, somewhere inbetween a big war starts and makes the cursed earth

ABC warriors robot war / clean up mars, meet deadlock - hammerstein joins robuster - deadlock appears in nemesis as do some ABCs if i remember rightly which then must follow on from from the time of robusters

sorry, just had to get that off my chest

14:32 / 30.09.04

and Jonny Alpha meeting up with Judge Dredd in Necropolis.... had it already been established that their earths are the same or was it a dimension hopping thing... or shall I just shut up...

14:58 / 30.09.04

alpha comes from like 150 years in dredd's future nno? the idea i guess is that at some point brit-cit and its judges devolve back to new britain or something time and the kreelers take over. pollution of the normo genebase is probably the kicker there.

other weird continuity paradoxes can only be solved by dipping into the real world, such as the Man-thing/swamp-thing Coincidence??? hullabaloo. in like 1973 steve gerber and len wein were flat mates. one imagines they were smoking a fair amount of weed, knocking ideas back and forth, and came up with a considerably cheesy idea that they knew they could simultaneously sell to two different comic publishers. good on em i reckon. don't know where 'the heap' fits in there though.

15:59 / 30.09.04

There was a Stronts/Dredd crossover before Judgement Day (not Necropolis - that was the Dark Judges epic), too.

17:11 / 30.09.04

Is thread about the Marvel Universe or just a comics free-for-fall?

Either way is cool, just wondering...

09:59 / 01.10.04

01:54 / 02.10.04

ohh-kaay, so Face from "The A-Team" and a Cylon walks past him....were you trying to communicate something via this animation graphic?

01:55 / 02.10.04

Forget it, I just wised up and read the above post asking about this scene. Very cool that you dug it up! I loved The A-Team.

02:20 / 02.10.04

ooh i love continuity theory. thanks for bringing this to the top again.

I read somewhere on the huge junkpile of the internet that ALL 1960s and 1970s TV shows could be collapsed into the dream that one kid had at the end of a particular Hospital soap opera. By virtue of things like the Gary Coleman guest-star in Knight Rider, Diff'rent Strokes was said to be in the same universe as KR and so on...

Also, while we're on the comics-within-the-comic-universe dealie, there's Elliot S! Maggin's guest appearance in a JLA comic he was writing at the time, and even funner - the Captain Carrot Zoo Crew thingy where Captain Carrot's secret identity was a comic writer who wrote a funny animal version of the JLA, and then they teamed up with each other in one issue.

love that continuity.

m.

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

08:04 / 02.10.04

www.poobala.com/crossoverlist.html

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

15:58 / 02.10.04

Gambit...there have always been swamp mosters in comics for some reason. There was "The Heap" in the Golden Age, and in the horror books of the 50's everyone did one or two "swamp monster" stories, even EC. The first Swamp Tuing story was a short horror story set in the early 1800's, and when it sold, DC did a modern version of it where Wein and Wrightson cycled through all of the classic horror mosters. At Marvel, they started up Man-Thing in one of the horror books as a continuing feature.

Gerber says that he and Wein didn't know what the other was doing, but when they worked on the series, they both tried VERY hard to make them as different as they could, and to my mind, they succeeded.

But then, in the 70's Marvel and DC were in very heated competition, unlike today where they just seem to co-exist. They were fighting over the rights to old pulp characters, tried to flood the market to knock the other off the newsstands. I still think that Marvel was trying to blunt Kirby going to DC by introducing a bunch of series reprinting 60's Kirby work in the months before The New Gods came out.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:33 / 02.10.04

The vegetative monster is often traced to the Theodore Sturgeon short story, "It", which I think came out in 1940 or so. The Heap was one such in the Golden Age, as was Solomon Grundy, I guess. You could possibly look at them as some form of Golem thing, but I could just be influenced by havng recently read Kavalier and Clay...

21:28 / 02.10.04

Jonny Alpha time jumped a lot - there was the story where he brought in Hitler for example - I think that it was established that it was a dimension jumping thing, though. As for tele continuity, Arnold also became president of the world in Buck Rogers, and Mr T featured in an episode of differen' strokes, so they probably were all linked - but then Automan and Manimal came along, and shattered everything, like Crisis or something...

Um, just so I'm not completely off thread, whatever happened to the Molacule man (excuse spelling, I'm tired and can't remember it at present!).

17:31 / 04.10.04

Maybe the title of this thread should be changed to "Comic Book Universes" since it seems to be more about the intermingling and handling of various comic universes than the Marvel U. .....

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