Marvel Boy: The Uranian #1-3Issue(s): Marvel Boy: The Uranian #1, Marvel Boy: The Uranian #2, Marvel Boy: The Uranian #3 Review/plot: Bob Grayson arrives on Earth while the Navy is dealing with an attack from a man named Maxwell Deacon (his only appearance). Deacon is a former employer for "Stark Aircraft", and he's attacking because the military turned down his defense system, which is basically a prototype Helicarrier. This is something i hate about continuity inserts. The debut of the Helicarrier, some 10 years later, was a big deal. It was a huge technological achievement. The idea that the thing was originally designed by a disgruntled employee of Tony Stark's father, and that he actually had a working version of it, makes that a lot less special. The Navy is unable to deal with his lightning generators, but Grayson is able to penetrate the flying fortress' defenses with his rocket and stop Deacon with his "hard light". Despite his help, Grayson is imprisoned by the military and questioned about his possible ties to the Soviet Union. Monitoring this from afar are the Uranians. We learn a few things. The headband that Grayson wears has an "inhibitor". They feel like his costume is already out of date. And the Uranians were exiled from Earth but are hoping to be "invited" back, if the "Aboriginoids" will allow it, assuming they still exist. It had been established in an Untold Tales of the Marvel Universe back-up story in What If #23 that the Uranians were an offshoot of the Eternals that got banished after a conflict between Uranos and Chronos. In that same story, Uranos later "cast off the ways of war forever". I assume that Parker is referencing that general story, assuming the "Aboriginoids" refer to the Earth Eternals. Grayson escapes from his cell and heads "to the other side of the United States" to try to re-establish himself. He parks his rocket at a science expo in Central Park. His first action is to save some workers that are falling from some scaffolding. He introduces himself to the crowd as The Uranian ("I am not from Russia"). But the Daily Bugle calls him the Venusian in an article buried in the next day's paper. While he's being disappointed by that, Grayson is approached by a comic book artist named Dean, who wants to promote Grayson as a new "Marvel Boy". Grayson recounts his origin to Dean, and it's mostly along the lines of what we know from Marvel Boy #1, with some changes. Instead of Grayson's mother and sister being killed by accident by Nazis, the mother (no sister) was killed for being Jewish. Grayson's father was forced by the Nazis to design rockets, but he instead used his knowledge to flee the planet. In the original story it was said that Matthew Grayson was aiming for the moon but once they were in space they were brought to Uranus. It's said in this story that Matthew was sending out signals into space and he was contacted by the Uranians, who helped him build his rocket. Once they were on Uranus, Bob was raised as a Uranian and trained in mental abilities. Dean tells Bob that he's going to have to change some details in the comic book version, to address things that readers won't "buy". One thing that the comic book explanation helps with is the fact that in Marvel Boy's original series, his wrist bands were effectively not much more than glorified flashlights, when in fact they are the bands that Quasar uses (or duplicates of them). In Fantastic Four #165 (when that story was meant to be the return of this Marvel Boy) it's said that Marvel Boy originally used a weaker version of the bands, but by the time of the FF story he had more powerful ones, which are what Quasar inherits. The implication here is that Marvel Boy had the more powerful bands all along, but the comics de-powered them. Marvel Boy starts getting into the super-hero life. We definitely see more use of telepathy than we did in the original series. The Uranians want Marvel Boy to do more high profile events, which creates a conflict since Marvel Boy finds himself assimilating into the United States and Earth culture, and he likes doing things that actually help the country or the world, regardless of whether he receives acclaim for them. To get him back under control, they kill his father and tell him that he's sick and needs to come back to Uranus. They try to get him to stay on Uranus for a period of one year, the traditional amount of time of mourning on the planet. But that would be 84 Earth years, and they eventually get him to commit to stay for a single Earth year. While he's on Uranus, he's given a belt and bands that will allow him to fly. This allows him to be even more of a super-hero when he returns to Earth, which is all according to the Uranians' scheme. What's interesting is that, according to the original stories i have seen, including ones reprinted as part of this series, Marvel Boy was actually going in the opposite direction, rarely even appearing in costume. It was noted when Dean first met Marvel Boy that we were in a period where super-heroes weren't all that popular. What's also a little weird is that while the in-universe comic book explanation seems to be designed to eliminate the more outlandish parts of Marvel Boy's early adventures (e.g. Marvel Boy sees the cover of Astonishing #4 and laughs about how he's fighting skeletons), one of his "actual" adventures in issue #3 of this series has something as wildly Silver Age as you can get, a scientist with a don't-call-it-a-devolving ray. Marvel Boy later fights what feels like a Monster Age era creature... ...but it turns out to just be a mecha unit. Soon after that, Marvel Boy is arrested by the government again, but it turns out that the arresting officer is acting on his own agenda, and Marvel Boy is rescued by Jimmy Woo. This is how Marvel Boy becomes a member of the Agents of Atlas, although their low profile again puts him in conflict with the Uranians. The Uranians' plan is to replace Marvel Boy the next time he comes back to Uranus. And that's basically it. There's a little bit about Bob developing a romance with a college student named Violet, and in the end we see Bob go back to Germany where his mother died. But taken on its own it's a hodgepodge of events rather than a story, and as a comprehensive origin it feels incomplete in and of itself and, as noted above, it fails to address the inconsistencies between various depictions of Uranus from the What If back-ups, Quasar, and the Fantastic Four story. There just isn't a lot here. I like Jeff Parker as a writer quite a bit and i'm a fan of the Agents of Atlas, but this is a weaker effort even ignoring the continuity problems. I also think Felix Ruiz's scratchy ugly art is all wrong for this kind of a story. I suppose the thinking was that instead of having bright clean art that would have fit the 1950s era, we'd get gritty realistic art to draw a contrast between what was real and what was in the in-universe comics. But that kind of reasoning falls apart when we're introduced to mad scientists riding woolly mammoths and giant Oorla robots, let alone the basic stuff like Uranians and super-heroes. Even as "realistic" art it really just looks unfinished and everyone looks sickly. Quality Rating: C- Chronological Placement Considerations: This spans a period of time beginning with Marvel Boy's first appearance on Earth to after the Agents of Atlas are formed. I'm placing all three issues based on where the final issue ends, which means that this needs to take place after all the other Agents of Atlas have debuted and with enough time for them to have acted as a group for a while. References: N/A Crossover: N/A Continuity Insert? Y My Reprint: N/A
CommentsConsidering that they actually bothered to retcon the FF story, it feels like they went to a lot of effort to ignore what had actually been established about the characters they appropriated in order to tell the story they wanted to tell about them, when I'm not sure how necessary it was. Obviously it probably would have been difficult to track down every post-FF #1 appearance of every character to figure out what can be retconned easily and what can't (at least if you're not Kurt Busiek and you're living in an age before obsessive fans have catalogued it all, which may have been the case for the original series although I bet the MCP already existed), but I'm not sure why you even bother knowingly introducing contradictions with the original comics, and I certainly don't know why you bother introducing more retcons that muddle things up even more after you already know about some of the contradictions, and do so in 2010, when there are a lot more resources and obsessive fans that'll tell you exactly what you need to smooth over. I'd be sorely tempted to declare the entire Agents of Atlas corpus an alternate universe depending on the depths of its ties to the present-day comics. Posted by: Morgan Wick | May 24, 2016 4:37 PM Hey, some child's sketches in his school notebook accidentally got published as "art" here. How did that happen? Posted by: kveto | May 24, 2016 6:42 PM The "Aboriginoids" are a race of amorphous amoeboids who are native to Uranus. Jeff Parker created them so that he could later "reveal" that The Uranian (Bob Grayson) had become a human/Uranian hybrid. Not one of his better ideas, especially since it involved retconning the humanoid Uranians from peaceful scientists into malevolent convicts who had been imprisoned on Uranus. Parker's idea was that the humanoids had made a pact with the natives whereby they would be allowed to live on Uranus as long as they didn't try to leave. The humanoids hoped to circumvent the pact by using Marvel Boy to get the people of Earth to invite them to come to Earth, figuring that that wouldn't count as a violation of the pact. However, they were wrong and when the natives learned of their activities they killed the entire colony. I assume that part of the reason why Parker transformed the Uranian humanoids into manipulative and ruthless would-be conquerors was to make their murder by the native Uranians seem somehow more justified? Personally, I think that Parker's retcon trashes a fairly good backstory in order to replace it with an inferior one. I remember reading somewhere that Parker has since regretted his idea about transforming Bob Grayson as he did but I don't recall where I read that. Posted by: Don Campbell | May 17, 2018 1:55 PM This series interests me, and I'm OK with a certain amount of under-the-table retconning, but using the old "THOSE stories were just comic books!" explanation is disappointing -and really, unnecessary. The Golden Age Marvel Boy stories really didn't need to be erased like this. Posted by: JP! | May 17, 2018 7:50 PM The other issue is that Parker never really did adequately explain why Deathurge and Eon lied to Quasar about the Uranians. Posted by: Michael | May 18, 2018 12:00 AM It was the Eternal Uranians that sought death, not the Native Uranians (the ones already living on the planet; the membrane aliens) - apparently all the Native Uranians' died as well but we're never quite told why, we just see like the planet on fire and stuff, but I think it could even be the result of Deathurge too. Some of them survived as mental alien blobs in a union with the real Grayson. It's still a mess, but there's enough there to not have to say Deathurge or Eon were lying. Parker still screwed too much, the distinction between the two types of Uranians was barely made clear - with most of them looking just like Eternals - so you have to catch the occasional use of the word "native Uranians"... and it seemed he never really read the the Uranian back story or any of the Quasar stories about them or "Crusader/Blue Marvel". On top of the discrepancies between Parker's Uranus and Marvel Universe's Uranus, I think saying Bob Grayson never actually worn the real Quantum Bands and only replicas is a massive mistake that diminishes the guy's relevance in lore. Posted by: AF | May 18, 2018 7:22 AM I just looked through Quasar #2 and only Deathurge says anything about the Uranian Eternals (and how he killed them). Eon never even mentions them, only stating that the quantum-bands had fallen into "the wrong hands" and that "Marvel Boy" was not worthy of them. So, technically, Eon didn't lie about any of the Uranians, either the native blobs or the humanoids. Also, I don't know of any story in which it was stated that the native Uranians had died. In fact, the flashback in Agents of Atlas #3 makes it look as if it was the natives who were responsible for the "radiation from the core" that killed the humanoid Uranians. Posted by: Don Campbell | May 19, 2018 3:25 AM Comments are now closed. |
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