I get back to talking about Clue and how I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and then open a pair of 1980s Marvel events that many fans might label as guilty pleasures. Not me. I unabashedly love these all-annuals crossovers.
Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.
Episode 76 features Evolutionary War Omnibus and Atlantis Omnibus, both of which are covered in my Guide to Marvel Universe Events.
You will never convince me that Atlantis Attacks is a good story. But after watching the video and going back over my copy, it was not as bad as I remember.
You made the point that the writers of the regular titles wrote the annuals. It had been my impression that this was not the case for AA, but looking back over it, it was much closer than I remembered. But there are 2 big exceptions for this. X-Men and Avengers were guest written by Michael Higgins instead of Chris Claremont or John Byrne. I think the story suffered some because of this.
I also did not like the scatter shot approach to how the story unfolded. This approach worked for the Evolutionary War crossover, since the in story explanation was that the High Evolutionary had many side projects running at the same time before he launched his final plan. I never got the same impression from AA.
My biggest gripe is how Namor was used for this. He was “killed off” in the first annual in a way that everyone knew was fake. Then a mysterious armored figure shows up to lend a helping had here and there. Then in the last annual, he revealed himself. Namor should have been front and center through the entire storyline. An explanation for why he pretended to be dead, even from his friends, was never provided. I suppose if the mystery had been built up better, than it wouldn’t be such a weakness. But it doesn’t help when the New Mutant issues leading up to the annual HAVE NAMOR UNDISGUISED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY. I’m guessing a memo was missed, but this is a bad plot hole.
On a side note, I am glad that they got Roy Thomas to write the last two annuals. He wrote Thor instead of Tom Defalco, but I think the writing level is pretty even there. And he wrote Fantastic Four instead of Steve Englehart. Englehart had his FF run rewritten or spiked. He was almost out the door from Marvel because of this. So it’s probably for the best that Roy guest wrote this instead.
Ah ben zut Au fur et à mesure que je postait des images de cette série sur faceook, je me disais quil fallait que je la teste, et que le charme naïf des dessins finirait bien par agir sur moi. Voilà que ton article me ramène à mon manque denthousiasme initial. José Villarrubia est un excellent metteur en couleur avec une vraie approche artistique, et il écrit parfois de très bonnes introductions, comme pour le recueil dhistoires adaptées dHP Lovecraft, en BD par Esteban Maroto. Mais comme toi, je ne peux plus prendre au sérieux ce genre de comparaison annonçant le nouveau Empire contre-attaque, ou le plus classique nouveau Watchmen pour les comics. Le dessin a une apparence damateur en surface, mais dun autre côté la narration visuelle de Lemire est efficace et opérationnelle. Allez, je laisse Sweet Tooth de côté, et je vais tenter dautres de ses œuvres, plus courtes, pour voir.