I tried submitting a comment about DD 84 but I found myself blocked.

Apparently the way I have things set now a single link causes it to require my approval before publishing but I was alerted and I've published it. thanks.

As an Xmas greeting, here's some recommendations of non-Marvel continuity books you may like:

Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes V.2,3,4--This is the complete run of Jim Shooter's first comics series. Due to it being a Silver Age DC series, it does occasionally have some silly moments. However, this is the closest thing to a Marvel comic DC had back then and was responsible for Shooter being a fan favorite for quite a while.

Showcase Presents: Jonah Hex V.1--This is an extremely violent DC western and one of the best Western comics ever done. Despite it being a DC title, it is not silly at all(actually quite cynical and nihilistic) and Michael Fleisher's long run on the character is vastly superior to anything he did at Marvel.

Tarzan #15-#24(Marvel)by David Kraft, Bill Mantlo, John & Sal Buscema. True, the character's appearances in various media tend to be slow and boring, but not here. This Marvel-Tarzan is not a nice guy; he doesn't think twice about killing people in battle, for revenge, or even when he's just pissed off. This story is a sequel to "Tarzan at the Earth's Core" and features lots of monsters, a cool villain, and a large body count. Not collected, but back issues are very cheap.

Plop!--this title from DC has never been collected, but back issues are fairly cheap. This was the closest thing DC had to an underground horror comic in the 1970s and the stories are very nasty and cynical. DC actually put more than half the issues in a no-ads no-reprint format, meaning that they were all new story and art(including the inside covers) except for letters pages and one or two text pieces, something DC never did anywhere else back then. A big chunk of it is drawn by Sergio Aragones, and although that sounds cartoony, his art is very creepy here and features lots of eerie hidden details. This is also the only newsstand comic to show a pair of giant testicles on a cover.

Mark, hope you had a good Xmas. Thanks for the recommendations. I'll take a look at these as soon as i catch my project here up to 2011. ;-)

I don't know if it's a side effect of your efforts to upgrade the site but there's something strange going on with the character listings.The character search always works. But if you click on the character's name in an entry, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Thanks, Michael. It should be fixed now.

First off congratulations on the website. This is one of the best Comic book chronology sites I have come across on the web, and I'm in awe at the amount of work you must have put into it. I particularly appreciate the issue reviews, and the fleshing out of your reasons for placing stories where you do. One (very) minor criticism. I noticed that you have excluded comic books that you don't own/haven't read. I certainly understand your reasons for doing this as its clearly impossible to know how to slot in stories you are unfamiliar with. However it would be nice to be able to see at a glance what issues are missing from your collection in any given year. good luck with your chronology. I've recently been retreading the marvel universe from FF 1 and your chronology has proved invaluable. Great work!

Thanks, Asbestos Man. On the subject of comics i don't have, i should start by saying that not having the debut of your namesake is one of my deepest regrets, but it sadly hasn't been reprinted anywhere affordable (except Essentials... blech).

Listing everything i don't cover for a given year is an interesting idea, but it's potentially very time consuming and, as you noted, i've got my hands full already. Maybe it's something i could crowd-source; create a list for each year that readers could add to. Will consider it.

Thanks for the feedback!

A note on your back issue add: Marvel Spotlight #1 features the 19th century Red Wolf and the story has no bearing on any 20th century continuity.

Thanks Mark. One less comic to review!

Happy holidays.It's too bad you probably won't get to 1986 next year. I would have loved to see your reaction to Englehart's portrayal of Tigra in WCA- "why do I have to melt before anything in pants?" Now I'll just have to content myself with your reaction to Englehart having Clea sleep with Ben Franklin in Dr.Strange. It just won't be the same.

I posted a rebuttal to some comments on Avengers #157-159; I then saw a screen saying "pending review" or something. Is there a problem with it?

Comment has been rescued.

Sometimes comments get put into a Pending status; it's when a comment is longer than usual or maybe when you spend more time on a page (like, writing a long comment) than some hidden limit. There's no visible setting and so far i haven't been able to troubleshoot it.

It's not getting marked as Spam, it's just put in a Pending status waiting for review. But if you don't see me clear it in a reasonable amount of time it's good to post a comment here, as you did.

My comment for Daredevil #104 has been put into Pending.

Ok, since your Godzilla credentials are confirmed i've approved the comment.

Just wanted to say that this is a great site. I grew up with Marvel, following issues from about 1981-1988. The Jim Shooter years. John Byrne for Fantastic Four/Alpha Flight, Chris Claremont for X-Men/New Mutants, Roger Stern, John Romita and John Romita Jr for Amazing Spider-Man, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson (and Dennis O'Neill?) for Daredevil, Walt Simonson for Thor. The period from about 1980-1983 was a true high water mark.

Have been dimly aware of your site for a while, but only just focused on it fully today, and am in awe. I have been obsessively amassing notes on Marvel chronology for years, grappling with many of the same issues you obviously have, and cannot believe anybody has devoted so much time to it. But thank God you have, because this is the most incredible resource imaginable. My colleagues at Marvel University and I are going systematically through Marvel's output from FANTASTIC FOUR #1 to the end of the 1970s (when most of us feel the whole thing was starting to go to hell anyway), one month at a time. But, of course, we're going in publication order, which--as you know better than most--sometimes bears no relation to internal chronology. Our weekly posts are now up to January of 1971, while I myself am reading ahead as far as November (a key month). I'm sure that in the months ahead I will find many a fascinating tidbit here to enhance my enjoyment of the Bronze Age in all its myriad delights. Thank you for your herculean efforts on behalf of the Marvel Universe.

I need prices on many comic books, I have Spiderman # 1 and what I believe is Fantastic 4 # 1 and my uncle left me Flash 1 to a 100, lots of Action Comics, he was a true collector, what do I buy to record prices of these Masterpieces and to whom would I sell to?? He died awhile ago and I just opened boxes today; 26 boxes came out of his safe, boxes stacked in a securely locked closet and the secret room atop his garage with a huge amount of stacks and boxes,... Whew... David

http://www.mycomicshop.com/webuycomics

http://www.milehighcomics.com/buying/mv-a-buying.html

http://www.ebay.com/

I read a comic called Young Allies Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1. It's set in the year it came out (2009 or whatever year it gets pushed into thanks to the sliding timeline so you won't get to it in a while. I really enjoy this chronology. Your chronology is my favourite. The 2nd one being Marvel Database's Marvel Reading Order.

There seems to be a problem with Thor 259: the link you put up leads to Thor 258 and a quick search by switching the number leads to a dead page. Does this mean it's a two-part story you forgot to update the link for or did something happen?

Thanks, Ataru. I added #259 to the #258 entry but i forgot to update the title info. Fixed it.

It's normal for the URLs to not always match up exactly; i don't like to modify the URLs after i add/remove issues from an entry because it affects inbound links. But obviously it added to the confusion this time. Thanks for pointing it out.

There seems to be a problem with Fantastic Four #185-186 link. It takes you to the 1977 intro...Thanks

Thanks, Jay. Fixed it.

For some reason Marvel Two-In-One #76 is missing from 1981. It has the Thing team up with Iceman & Giant Man (formerly Black Goliath) to defeat the Circus of Crime. It also features the only other know appearance of Iceman's girlfriend Terri Sue Bottoms, last seen in Hulk Annual #7! The issue takes place sometime shortly before Iceman appears in Uncanny X-Men 145-147.

You'll see that issue listed on the Recent Updates page. It's "coming soon" as part of a big back-issue add i'm currently working on. When i'm done with that i'll be putting up a What's Missing page - even after the current effort there will still be issues that i don't own and so aren't covered in the project.

I will look forward to your missing list. Maybe i have some books i could donate to your Project.

Mark Drummond, are all these comments all at once about who has letters printed really necessary?

It's not a requirement to read them.

It is if I want to scroll down to comments that are actually interesting.

I was going to say that if anyone has the time, interest, and digital copies to create screenshots of all these letters, i would host them and link Mark's comments to them. If not, it's something i may do when my project is all caught up to the current year. ;-) So please tolerate Mark's comments for now even if you're not interested.

Well, i am actually interested in everything Mark may comment. Please continue.

This has a bunch of them:
http://cyberspacecomics.com/blog/category/famous-fanmail/

I love the first Ralph Macchio letter printed. It wasn't too long before there was a Spider Man/Frankenstein Monster issue of Marvel Team-Up.

I came across this site about a month ago, and am agog at the massive amount of work you must do. But it is worth it, the site is awesome!

You imply in one of your comments above that you'll catch up someday to the current year. But I'm wondering how long it takes you to add a year. I first became serious about collecting around 1986. I remember the Mutant Massacre making a big impression on me at 11-12 years old. And 1986 is only a year away from where you are. Are you actively moving forward in time, or you just working on Silver-Bronze age issues for now?

Thanks, Thelonius Nick!

Last fall i took a took a "break" from forward progress to focus on a massive back-issue add filling in gaps in my collection. I hope to finish that up this fall and start moving forward again. You can see my progress on the current Recent Updates page and it'll give you a sense of my velocity. The entire Great Back-issue Add is about 6 long boxes. So if i keep up this pace after the back-issue add, i expect to be able to add 2-3 new years every real life year at least until i hit the explosion in Marvel's output circa 1993.

So when i say "I'll do X after i catch up to the current year" it's kind of a joke - i'll catch up to 2013 by 2023 using the most optimistic measurement! But i'll keep plugging away.

Couple things I noticed in your listings:

1: You listed "Storm" twice in your "firsts" entry for Giant-Sized X-Men. I never knew there were two Storms...

2: Surprised She-Hulk is in neither your "new characters" or "important milestones" for 1980, but considering how big that year was for new characters she was probably an understandable oversite.

Thanks, Ataru. I've fixed both.

fnord, I apologize to you for coming across as rude. I want to state that this is a fantastic and noble endeavor. Aside from my comic collection, this is the single best comic related device/accessory I have ever come across. Again, thank you for your gift. Please understand that my distaste for a "quality grade" and my appreciation of the site both stem from a deep love for the comic book art form.

Thanks, Jack.

fnord, You're up to the year I consider the end of the classical era, 1985. For me the site is complete. I've noticed the absence of covers - would you consider including milestone covers?

I admit that once Shooter leaves in 1987 Marvel starts to feel less like Marvel to me as well... but there are highlights later on as well. Busiek and Perez's AVENGERS, for example.

Jay, Indeed - the two mentioned are truly Marvel. Another example, one which may not garner much support, is Steve Englehart's forgotten FF run, circa 1987.

I can't wait for you to put up 1986-1991! I loved the Louise Simonson run of X-Factor especially and thought there was some very interesting and creative work done in the rest of the Marvel Universe too during that time. It was my teenage years and I began truly collecting comics myself in 1986 rather than just reading friends' up to that point.

1986-1987 were very strong years as well.

Another high point for me after the classic Marvel period was Anne Nocenti on Daredevil. Considering you haven't been much of a fan of Nocenti's work up to this point, I'll be interested to see your view on that run. It's my all-time favourite work on DD.

Nocenti with JRjr was a nice run - definitely superior to Miller's hyped run.

Nocenti's DAREDEVIL run with Romita was very good, I agree. (I could have done without her apparent cameo appearance in the "Daredevil beaten nearly to death by C-list villains" issue, but that was a small lapse of taste in an otherwise strong story.)

I actually believe both of Miller's stints deserve their acclaim, but DAREDEVIL led a charmed life in the 1980s. Denny O'Neil's run, with the Japan trip, Bullseye, and the long Micah Synn/Kingpin arc, is also underrated, and has aged more gracefully than has some of his celebrated topical stuff.

Yep. There was a long stretch of really good work being done on Daredevil. He deserved it after the poor early start to the series.
You had Frank Miller, Denny O'Neil, and Anne Nocenti back-to-back.
Unfortunately, it was way downhill after that, as DD was left in the shadow of Miller for a very long time after that point, with every writer seeming to try to be just like Miller on the book.

I also think Miller's run deserves praise, but I will admit that I do find it a bit over-rated, just because of how popular it is, and so many fans seem to think that Miller is the "be all and end all" of DD stories.
I liked the Nocenti run far more. O'Neil's run stands pretty tall next to Miller as well, but gets none of the same praise.
Issue #192 (the issue after Miller's firt run on the book) is one of my favourite Marvel stories. It's a quiet story starring Ben Urich.

Truth to tell - I just can't stand Miller. But any way ...
DD had great runs before the 80s. The Steve Gerber/Gene Colan era doesn't get any love, but I absolutely love the San Francisco era with the Widow. Also, circa issues 40s through 60s were dynamite - they include Murdoack "death" and Karen Page finding out DD's secret identity. The notion that DD came to life in issue 158 is irksome.

And Gerry Conway was solid along with Gerber - Conway was the San Fransciso scribe.

One more thing - funny thing about Denny O'Neil - the dude rocked on everything he touched, but for some reason his mini run on Amazing Spider-Man was horrid. Thoughts on that?

I like the early Frank Miller. Up until about 1990, then his work got to be unreadable for me. He's not one of my favourite writers though.

Yeah, Conway was pretty good on Daredevil. Some of his stories bored me though, but other ones were really good. So, hit and miss, I guess.

Steve Gerber is one of my all-time favourite comic writers, ever. I can be biased towards him. His DD run wasn't his strongest work, by far, but there was also a lot to recommend it.
The origin of Moondragon issue was a classic, in my eyes, although some would argue that those sorts of stories didn't belong in Daredevil. Maybe so, but still a good story.
The Man Thing/Death Stalker story, Angar....yeah, some good stuff.

The Marv Wolfman run after Gerber was really strong too. I rank it highly for writers on DD, myself.

You know, I enjoyed O'Neil's run on Amazing Spider Man. I didn't realize I was in such a minority.
It was followed by everyone's favourite, the Roger Stern run. So, maybe some of that is down to O'Neil's run not being looking on fondly because it was so badly overshadowed?
Maybe people were expecting a lot more from O'Neil?
I'm not sure. I didn't find a problem with it. It wasn't his best work, but I found it at least average.

ChrisK - excellent assessment of pre-158 DD!

O'Neil is a great writer - I'm not a DC guy, but his Batman stories were top notch. One thing about O'neil's ASM run is that it was indeed sandwiched between a brief but exception Marv Wolfman run and a highly regarded Stern run. And, yes, perhaps much was expected of O'Neil. Still, I find his ASM run flat.

I'll admit - Miller resurrected DD, fine.

But Nocenti, Bendis, and (current) Waid plot and characterize Murdoack in ways that are truer to the art form. Granted, I may be harsh on Miller because I seriously dislike him.

Here's a great line by DD during the Nocenti run "Live in the inch. Forget the long mile." Now that is absolutely quintessential Nocenti!

sorry about the misspells above - rushed.

When I clicked on "Angel" (of the X-Men) to see his list of appearances, I noticed you had Human Torch #5A listed as his first appearance. I think you meant that to be the original, non-mutant WWII era hero Angel. You probably want to correct that.

There was so much title-hopping among the first-rate writers/artists of comics in those days (and maybe these days too, for all I know; I've been off the scene since the 1980s), and even the best seemed to have at least one series that was just a poor fit. Maybe Spider-Man was one of those for O'Neil. When I think of O'Neil, I think of The Question, Batman, Daredevil, Green Lantern/Green Arrow (dated now, but certainly a landmark in its day), the "de-powered" period of Wonder Woman (controversial, and he has said he would do it very differently now, but still a game-changer for that series)...these were all gritty, topical, downbeat, "serious." I do not know his Spider-Man run well, but maybe he had a hard time putting Spider-Man in the world he evoked best. There is a quirky humor about Spider-Man that is not really an O'Neil forte, as well. I'm just musing.

Conway got Spider-Man right ... he just did. Stern understood the character. And of course, Lee developed him. Romita created the image we know. Ditko gets way too much sympathy - he may not have gotten enough credit once upon a time, but he gets way too much now.

Maybe the humour was somewhat missing. Yet, O'Neil did seem to stay on the grounded characters at Marvel, which is somewhere Spider Man fits. O'Neil only wrote Amazing, DD, Iron Man, and Power Man & Iron Fist during his 1980s stint at Marvel. None of the characters who needed to have more cosmic or sci-fi stories. (ALthough I realize Iron Man can fit in with either type of plot.)

Oh, and speaking of O'Neil on Iron Man, that needs to be on the Denny O'Neil "best of" lists. I rank it right beside his work like The Question. My absolute favourite run on Iron Man, period.

One hundred percent agree on O'Neil's Iron Man run! Again, JRjr rears his head - the steady eddie!

I just wanted to call out that i've made a change requiring that people put in a Name and Email address. See the News section on the main page but i wanted to make sure people noticed it. The way it works is a little wonky so if you did forget to leave that info, hit the back button to not lose your comment.

@Jay Demetrick - fixed the Angel tag; thanks!

Gerry Conway: http://www.co2comics.com/blog/2013/07/09/gerry-conway-are-you-kidding-me/

fnord12,
As per your request I will cease and desist my contention with Jay. My concern was noted and disregarded, fine. I will point out one last time that the use of profanity (by Paul) should not be tolerated. It has not even been addressed. I do hope you do not ban me as a away of censoring legitimate concerns or as a way of appeasing a cyber bully such as Paul. I will abide by this townships codes to the best of my ability - however, I will point out indecency when I spot it.

And, then, of course - I can't help but wonder how many multiple names are in use by the same individual ... as creepy as it may seem - it is possible some individual is engaging in a two way, or three way conversation with himself (or herself).

With this comment i am ending the nonsense that started with Jack's comments on Friday, mostly here and here. And that after outbursts like this, where Jack absurdly claimed that this isn't even my website. Any more comments on this subject will be deleted and if it persists, those commenters will be banned. Jack has already been told that any more disruptive comments will get him banned and he's been adhering to that except where Paul came in afterwards and provoked him.

Paul, i do have the ability to ban people. I hope to never use it. It's somewhat ironic that the calls for banning are coming from you, since in the past you've picked fights with multiple people here, and i haven't banned you. I'm not equating you with Jack. But my point is that i hold perpetual hope that people coming here used to CBR message boards or whatever will adjust to the fact that this is a smaller site and we don't need to be hostile to each other.

Jack, this IS my site. I've opened my doors and allowed in guests, but that doesn't give you the right to be disruptive. If in the future you feel that another commenter is acting inappropriately, your first step should just be to wait and let me deal with it. You don't need to police my site. If i don't react, you should consider that what you think you're seeing isn't as obvious as you think it is, and you need to be a lot more civil about it and engage with people instead of blasting accusations. And if that isn't productive, and for some reason i'm still not stepping in, you can reach out to me privately (at the top of this page).

Additionally, i don't have a problem with commenters using "profanity" on this site. If that's a problem for you, then you need to find somewhere else to hang out. I do normally have a problem with commenters attacking other commenters, but in the cases in question it was understandable considering the disruptions your comments have caused.

Finally, no one is sock-puppeting here, or if they are they are in deep cover. All of the people that have responded to you have been contributing here before you came along.

Jay, i want to publicly apologize to you. I'm sorry that you came to my site and got called a racist for what i think is obvious to everyone was a benign and legitimate question, and one that didn't even bring up race. And Paul is right that my comment to you about feeding the troll right after warning Jack was a mixed message.

To everybody else, i apologize that we've had all of these disruptive comments. I'm also sorry if you think i'm being weak or overly tolerant or whatever for not just banning Jack outright. Jack has shown that he can comment without being disruptive, and i'm giving him a chance to do that. I also want to make it clear that Marvel comics will cover sensitive topics like race and sexual orientation and politics, and it's ok to comment about those things and you should be able to do so without fear of someone immediately jumping down your throat with accusations. Disagreements are fine, and i recognize that people will get angry and comments will get heated. So i try to have a high tolerance, but i will step in if i think things are getting out of hand. If you think i'm not doing what i should, please follow the steps i gave to Jack above. And that goes both ways. In this case, Jack has called someone a racist and i don't see any evidence of that and no one else on this site has said otherwise. In fact, most people are just assuming he's trolling. But i don't want anyone to think that i will tolerate racism or homophobia or anything else. Again, if you see something and think i'm not acting appropriately, reach out to me.

Let's end this here. I have a stack of comics i want to review today, and i'm sure you'd all rather talk about comics than any of this crap.

I'm good. I will adhere to your rules. It is YOUR site. I prefer to discuss the one thing we all agree on, the one thing why we come here - comic books, Marvel Comics.

It would be great if we all could actually get together, in person, face to face. Imagine - at a nice beach house on the coast of Maine - we'd all gather over wine, cheese, various hors d'oeuvres, etc. Of course, there'd be lamb shank, roast beef, turkey as well as vegetarian dishes. The beach house would have a wrap around porch - it would be during the month of August. We'd chat about comic books, Marvel, and Stan Lee would drop in. I know this may not seem plausible - but, if we all chip in - we can rent a place for a week. As far as Stan goes, well, perhaps an invite? Any thoughts?

Read above!

Hey Jack, i think everyone can see it without any additional pointers. Speaking for myself, it's not something i'd really be interested in. I'm a socially awkward comic book nerd; last thing i need is to go out and meet new people. ;-)

I'll call Stan Lee!
"Is that wine and cheese, True Believer? 'Nuff Said!"

Yeah. I'm afraid I'm really a cat. A cat who can type and read comic books. Hence, you can see why I would not want to out myself in public, as the scientific establishment would never allow me to live in freedom after discovering I am, indeed, a cat who can type and read comic books.

Chris - this does not surprise me! At all!

fnord12 - what's your real name?

Jack, i want the off topic and vaguely stalker-ish comments to stop. For now, you can continue to comment on comics if you like, but only if you keep your comments about the comics themselves. But you've already had multiple outbursts since you've first arrived here and now the switch to being overly familiar isn't appreciated. Any off topic comments and i'm banning you. Maybe a year from now if things go well, we get more buddy buddy. In the meantime, it's not worth my effort to keep addressing this stuff.

Don't even reply to this comment.

Update: He's been banned. No need to say "I told you so." Sorry to everyone else for the disruptions.

I have just noticed that Peter Parker #3's and #46's entries are duplicates of each other (so in effect #3 is missing).

I think the URLs may be throwing you. Issue #3 can be found in the 1976 category and here's the link. The link for issue #46 has _3 in it, which is probably what's causing the confusion.

I knew this would be a problem for me eventually. The issue is that "Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man" is an especially long title, so when my system generates the URL, it truncates it. And that causes every issue to have a duplicate title, so it adds a numeric suffix. But the suffix has nothing to do with the issue number; it's just sequentially generated. And since i didn't add my Peter Parkers to this project in order, the numbers in the URLs are essentially random. So just ignore them and use the Search or the year categories to find the issue.

Even more generally, the URLs can be unreliable. See the Q&A for more.

Please let me know if you still see a problem after this convoluted explanation.

Congrats on finishing the big add. Though I don't know why you want to get to the 90s...are you that excited to get to the era of way more comics and Rob Liefeld? (well OK, it will be fun finally seeing Deadpool in the Characters Appearing section, but still...)

Thanks! Not quite there yet; still a few continuity inserts to get through. But close!

I want to read Quasar, and Peter David's Hulk, and Walt Simonson Fantastic Four, and Infinity Gauntlet, and..., and..., etc. Still plenty of good stuff to get to! And it'll cut down on all the off topic posting. ;-)

(Ataru is reacting to the News post on the main index page, in case others missed it.)

Yeah, the Peter David Hulk is definitely a reason to move forwards...but with all the X-talk as of late, I sort of fear what's going to happen when you get to their big messes. (and when they start getting out of control with their franchises)

There's plenty of good work ahead, but things start to get really bad in the early-90s with some of the books too.
You're going to have such a headache when you get to the Bill Jemas era.

There a lot of good stuff coming up before 1990: Gru's Cap, PAD Spidey as well as Hulk, the second Michelinie/Layton run on Iron Man. Even DeFalco's Thor is pretty good, and Gerry Conway's late '80s run on Spectacular and Web deserves a closer look. Unfortunately we'll also get Engelhardt going off the rails in AWC and FF, and some of the worst Avengers stories ever told follow the conclusion of Stern's run, which is still a ways off for this project.

Quasar is definitely worth looking forward to as get toward the '90s, too.

I was thinking about HEROES REBORN (because I hate myself) and I found myself wondering how fnord planned on tagging the the characters appearing in those books. ONSLAUGHT makes it pretty clear which mainstream Marvel characters actually went into the HEROES REBORN universe. My suggestion would be to only tag the characters explicitly seen "crossing over" at the end of ONSLAUGHT, but not the alternate universe versions of other characters that they encountered there. In other words, the Human Torch, the Invisible Woman, the Thing, and Mister Fantastic actually appear in HEROES REBORN, but the Silver Surfer, Wyatt Wingfoot, and the Super-Skrull do not. At least not the same Wyatt, Surfer, and Skrull that you've been tagging thus far. If by the time you get there you choose to use the "616 and other fun numbers" designations then I would keep in mind that most of the characters appearing in HR are the original "616" versions, but many are not.
The tricky one is the Hulk, of course, since he's seen splitting into two separate characters at the end of ONSLAUGHT, one of which (The "savage" Hulk) stayed behind on 616 and one of which (Bruce Banner) crossed over to the HR universe, where he experienced a new origin and turned into the Hulk all over again. I'm not sure how you're going to handle that but I assume you'll just employ whatever solution you'll be forced to use when you get to the John Byrne issues of Hulk that split up the Hulk and banner the first time.
Good luck with all of that, you insane genius.

There's also the Liefeld Bucky, Rikki Barnes, that comes back into the main Marvel Universe (i think? looking at Wikipedia it's more confusing than i remember). But yeah, i'll likely only be tagging characters that appear outside of the Franklinverse.

Could you please explain what the J:______ or Q:________ means on the notes for some of the comics. I didn't see any mention of this in the Q&A or The Rules.

That is old pricebook notation for Joins or Quits. I'm not as consistent about noting that as i'd like to be (sometimes i just miss it, and sometimes a character just kind of wonders off or starts hanging around and it's not clear until a few issues later that they've actually joined/quit).

I'll add something to the Q&A. Thanks!

A small correction to your 1974 page: it was Gerber, rather than Englehart, who was writing DAREDEVIL that year.

Thanks, Matthew. I often mix up the Steves. I've fixed it.

Hah! Funny you should say that. I'm now into 1973 in our chronological review for Marvel University, and I've taken to calling what may be my two favorite Bronze-Age writers "The Two Steves," just as I sometimes refer to my two favorite Marvel writer-artists (Steranko and Starlin) as "The Two Jims."

Fnord12 have you ever considered doing this for DC comics it would be pretty cool despite all their reboots

Ha ha, thanks for the interest, doomsday, but no, i'm not the guy for that. First, this Marvel timeline is probably a lifetime project for me. But i've also never gotten into DC for a variety of reasons. I've been a Marvel zuvembie from the start.

DC is also extremely problematic for a project like this, going all the way back to the fifties and the fact that there is no clean break between the Golden Age and the Silver Age. You can't accurately pinpoint where the stories about "Earth-2" Superman and Batman end and ""Earth-1" stories begin.
And yes, the endless reboots make it impossible as well. They never really wipe the slate clean with those things; they invalidate some stories, uphold some, erase some, replace some, and lightly tweak some. It's a mess trying to keep track of what "counts". DC has published some great stuff over the years but they've never been a cohesive "universe". It's just not the way they're built.

Good points.

When I read comics, my loyalties to characters were about evenly split. There were periods when one company was producing more good work than the other. DC was moribund for the first half of the 1980s (Wolfman/Perez's TITANS and Alan Moore's SWAMP THING being two bright spots), but came back strong after CRISIS, and I have very fond memories of the Byrne SUPERMAN, Perez WONDER WOMAN, Mike Baron FLASH (even though he's since admitted that he was coked out of his mind when writing it, and you could kind of tell), Giffen et al. JUSTICE LEAGUE. Titles that for years had been hacked out by revolving-door teams of journeymen suddenly had very individual points of view and creative visions. It was a glorious resurrection. And of course, in that same period we had WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT.

As much fun as it would be to read fnord's take on something intercompany such as the TITANS/X-MEN crossover special, I know that some things fall outside of the scope.

While on the subject of DC: I also recommend Showcase Presents:The Spectre. This reprints all the Silver/Bronze Age appearances of the character in one volume. I list this here because the Spectre was the first bronze age superhero(of a sort) who regularly killed his villains. Of course, this was what the Spectre did in the Golden Age, but none of those stories got reprinted in the 1960s. When readers of the Silver Age Spectre book saw the 1974 series, fandom as a whole was horrified and threw tantrums claiming writer Michael Fleisher was ruining comics in general and DC in particular. All this was before Wolverine even existed, mind you...

What about comics one-shot for Chronology - captain america operation zero point?

Thanks, Owl. I've added this to the What's Missing page.

Fnord12 do know of current dc timeline website to check out

Fnord12 any dc timeline website worth checking out

With DC I'm sure you could work out a recommended reading order, but coherent timeline is impossible. And you definitely can't drop continuity implants into the order decades before their publication date and have them fit. DC is constantly saying "Well, this is the way it is NOW." There is no timeline, only a series of retcons. Again, you can construct a reading order, but it would mean arranging everything pretty much according to publication date.

And just to answer Doomsday directly, i don't know of any sites that have made the attempt, and i wouldn't be a good judge of whether or not they were any good.

Even if you tried to do a DC chronology that stopped short of the first ever reboot; there's another reason why you should skip it:most of it would be pointless. For nearly all of the Silver Age and for big whopping chunks of the 1970s, most DC characters just didn't intersect in any way with each other. There were some exception titles like the Justice League of America and the Teen Titans, but for the most part you would have really long stretches where any given Superman issue would not reference Batman, any given Batman issue would not reference Wonder Woman, any given Wonder Woman issue would not reference the Flash, any given Flash issue would not reference Green Lantern, etc. You could probably order issues by strict publication date without checking the contents, and most of the time there'd be no chronology errors because the books didn't have much of a chronology to begin with. Of course, doing it like that would be rather simple, but it would get boring and unchallenging REALLY fast...

Ha... I'd like to add more to what you said, Mark, but I want to be respectful to our host and not hijack his site with all these DC cooties. All in all, though, you're right.

Hey, I found one! (Sorry, fnord)
http://www.dcindexes.com/features/chronology.php?skip=300&earth=Earth-2&order=pub&startyear=&storychar=7&nav=MORE

I'm really looking forward to you tackling 1985-1986, especially the era around the Mutant Massacre and how it relates to the West Coast Avengers/Avengers Annuals story, Thor, and Iron Man and the rest of the Marvel Universe in general. There's a Gordian Knot of continuity around there.

Yeah, the Mutant Massacre and WCA-Avengers Annuals crossover are especially tricky in terms of continuity, especially since one has to also consider the Power Pack issues from 22 to 28 and the Mansion Siege. Several major stories running at the same time create a huge mess that will drive fnord crazy, I mean, a wonderful puzzle for fnord to solve.

An additional, self-inflicted, complication is that i have the X-issues plus Power Pack #27 and Thor #373-374 in trade format. I've always thought that would work ok (with the necessary Avengers, FF, and Power Pack issues surrounding it) but if anyone knows differently let me know and i'll scramble to pick up the individual issues.

I used to actually have all the original issues, but when min and i moved in together, we consolidated our comic collections and i gave away my originals since i didn't care what they were "worth" and the trade was already in chronological order. I've since learned that trades always mess things up so it was probably a bad idea.

I am looking forward to this period though, continuity Knots or Knot. Almost there...!

It's complicated- the MCP decided to stick Avengers Annual 15 and West Coast Avengers Annual 1 in the middle of the Massacre but there was considerable debate over it. In any case, Uncanny X-Men Annual 10 is placed by the MCP in between Uncanny X-Men 210 and 211.So yeah, those issues are so complicated that you might want to leave the option of placing stories during the Massacre open.

The biggest conflict is between Thor, Spider-Woman & Beast's appearances in the Avengers Annuals story and the Mutant Massacre. Sticking Beast's appearance there during the Mutant Massacre is ridiculous. He is shown just stepping out of the shower to answer Wasp's phone call and he tells her that he'd help them out if they wanted. Beast is never shown returning to the X-Factor building during the Massacre, and considering Rusty had a severe concussion and Artie was missing somewhere in the Morlock Tunnels, along with the rest of the team in danger of being killed, it makes no sense to have his appearance during the Avengers Annuals story take place during the Massacre. There are possible other options for Thor and Spider-Woman's appearances I'll suggest when you eventually get to those issues which could place the Avengers story either a bit before the Mutant Massacre or just after it depending on their appearances in the pages of Iron Man (which I don't own).

I accidentally put a comment for Secret Wars II #3 with the new Cap entry; can you please delete or move it?

Roger Stern on Avengers, Chris Claremont on X-Men & New Mutants, John Bryne on Fantastic Four, Walter Simonson on Thor, Danny O'Neal on Iron Man, Mark Gruwald on Captain America, Bill Mantlo on Hulk, Tom Defalco on Amazing Spider-Man, and Frank Miller on Daredevil. Anything else that was great during the 80's

@Jay D. - patience, man. We'll get there soon. ;-)

@Ataru - done.

@doomsday - i highly recommend Peter Gillis' Defenders and Bruce Jones' Ka-Zar.

Thanks Fnord12

Namor is my favorite superhero what is your guys favorite superhero.

Hey doomsday, i try to keep this General Comments section devoted to observations about the site ("I hate your grading system", "There's a mistake on your 1974 category page", or "The search is broken".). It's not really designed for topics of conversation about the comics content. I unfortunately don't even support nested comments right now. So this page will get really unwieldy really fast if we start having those kinds of conversations here. I really ought to replace this page with a message board, but that will require effort i'd rather devote to reviews right now.

To be clear, you didn't do anything wrong, and obviously conversations above have already devolved into this type of thing. So no big deal and i appreciate your interest and involvement here. Best thing to do in the future is to pick an entry that is as closely related as possible and post there instead.

Thanks!

I personally can't wait until you review the issue Jubilee 1st appeared in, she's so cute.

Fnord12, I have a question about your future review of Amazing Spider-Man Annual 21. Because of the "One More Day" storyline the marriage of Spider-Man and May Jane waa retconned. So will you be reviewing that issue or not?

Yeah, i'll still cover it and all the subsequent issues and just note the retcon. My understanding is it all kinda happened just not exactly the same way. I've read One More Day but I haven't been following the Dan Slott stuff in realtime, and i know that some effort was made to make things make more sense, so people can pitch in and let me know of any specific clarifications that he's covered, or i'll update entries when i get to the Brand New Day stuff.

Thanks

You'll have to mention that Harry Osborn did not die in Spectacular Spider-Man 200. I don't any of the details beyond that but I'm sure someone in the comments will fill this in. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In Harry's case, it was a typical Mysterio-faked-Harry's-death retcon, so Spectacular 200 is still in ocntinuity.

Thanks Michael

You sometimes mention Adam West, particularly with the implication that the silly giant props and traps started with that show. However, they actually came from the past decades of comic books.

The giant deathtraps and props seen on the show can be traced back to comics as well, because they were a frequent part of Batman stories in Golden Age and Silver Age comics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130811094050/http://www.arkhamverse.com/news/2013/08/the-legacy-of-the-batman-part-3-comic-book-references-in-the-tv-series/

Comment on several your entries which mention Adam West: you seem to indicate that the giant props and traps came from that show, when they had appeared in the comic books for decades prior.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130811094050/http://www.arkhamverse.com/news/2013/08/the-legacy-of-the-batman-part-3-comic-book-references-in-the-tv-series/

The giant deathtraps and props seen on the show can be traced back to comics as well, because they were a frequent part of Batman stories in Golden Age and Silver Age comics.

Thanks for the background, PB. It's just shorthand. If anything, the implication isn't that the giant props and traps came from that show but that they were already being lampooned on that show circa 1966 and yet were still being used in the comics earnestly. But mainly it's just a way to say "giant preposterous death-traps" that people will quickly understand.

I noticed that you still have Fantastic 4 44-47 in 1965; but have next in continuity as the Galactus arc, which is in 1966. (so does this mean you finally found out that missing piece of 48 linking the two arcs?)

I'm still stuck with the truncated trade for #48-50. But i did place it that way knowing that the stories are linked.

I notice you didn't review Devil Dinosaur. Considering that he and Moon Boy will be a big part of the Fallen Angels limited series in 1987, which I assume you will cover, do you plan on going back and touching on the Kirby series later?

Robert, my starting point is Marvel Comics #1 and the Devil Dinosaur series takes place before that. I've added it to the Out of Scope list.

Happy holidays. Next year, you'll be getting into 1987-1989 and I'm looking forward to seeing your reaction to how some of the women are treated in that period- Cly Erwin, Sharon Ventura, Mockingbird, Madelyne Pryor, the Scarlet Witch.

Some Xmas recommendations:

1)Any Marvel Essentials you may have been thinking about, because it looks like Marvel is now terminating that line so prices on those will inevitably go up.

2)Showcase Presents: the Spectre from DC. These contain all the infamous Spectre stories from the 1970s where he would execute the villains(this was before Wolverine), causing comic fandom to yell en masse "YAAAHH!! STOP THIS BEFORE THE INDUSTRY GETS CENSORED AGAIN!!""

3)Superman #400 from 1986. This is one of the best Superman issues and compares favorably with anything Marvel was putting out then. There are extremely cool pinups by Simonson, Kirby, Ditko, Bolland, Wrightson; and stories from Marshall Rogers, Wendy Pini, Frank Miller, and even Steranko.

Dear Mark, where have you heard Marvel is terminating the essentials? (Fjord, sorry for useing your site as a message board but I hadn;t heard of this.)
happy X-mas!
Kveto (from Cuba on holiday)

Thanks Michael, Mark, and Kveto and happy holidays to everyone that reads and comments here. I'm on staycation for the next week or so and that means new entries will be sporadic - some days of heavy postings and some with none at all. Which i guess really isn't too different than it's been lately.

I did manage to scoop up some Essentials, mostly focused on missing Marvel horror comics (you can see the increased orange fonts on the What's Missing page), but as promised i'm going to keep pushing to finish the 80s next year and that's already pretty ambitious so i most likely won't be adding new entries for those.

No more Essentials!? NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Oh man I love those things! Tell me it's a lie!

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Mutant Massacre reviews from this site. I'm guessing the chronology will be complicated.

Marvel hasn't solicited any upcoming Essentials, and Amazon doesn't list any after the December Hulk Essential(and Amazon always lists things months in advance; look at their DC Showcase Presents listings by comparison)

They are starting to run out of material to collect, I think.
Once you get to the '80s on their biggest titles, they've already collected the defining runs on those books in other format, and probably don't want to take away from potentially more profitable sales.
Most of their other books have received the Essential treatment by now.

The line was a great thing! I would never have been able to read as many of the Marvel series I have without lots of Essentials.
They could always come back to the line at some point too. DC's Showcase line was cut way back recently, and DC has a lot more potential books they could release than Marvel at this point.

Hmmm, wonder if the new Marvel "Epic Collection" series (some are listed on Amazon) has something to do with the phasing out of the Essentials.

I got to wonder Fnord, and you may have been asked this hundreds of times already, any opinion upon the Marvel movie productions? More specifically I mean the Marvel Studios ones, Iron Man, Thor, Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Avengers? I personally love them, re-watching Avengers right now, not perfect but I got to see them as Marvels. Minus Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 but still even those worse ones are good films. I eagerly look forward to Captain America 2 in a few months.

It seems like DC films are trying to catch up way too fast and with going to the same writer for the same stuff, while trying to make everything dark and just...too dumb. I mean I love the Dark Knight saga but they tried to do the same thing to poor Superman and Man of Steel fell flat with me.

And to think I once thought superhero films couldn't get funner or better than Spider-Man 2 or X-Men 2.

Sure. I threw up a quick post on the main blog just in case anyone else wanted to weigh in:

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/2014/02/marvel_studio_movies.shtml

Whoops. Second time I missed something today. Yeah, Malekith isn't much like his comic book version, much as I've learned the last few weeks. I've learned I do better watching the movies first then reading the storylines based on. A Casket of Ancient Winters saga film would be awesome.

Captain America might be my favorite film Avenger, which is a total 180 with how I felt going in back in 2011, seeing it just for the Red Skull.

Yeah, if you do another back issue thing, I got an idea of which comics should be in the Golden Age. The Saga of the Human Torch and The Saga of the Sub-Mariner. Both covers the time of these heroes from the Golden Age from the beginning of the Golden Age to the end of Atlas Comics' attemted
super-hero revival.

I've never read the Saga of the Human Torch but Saga of the Sub-Mariner is basically Namor looking back on his life after Marrina's death. Fnord goes by the present-day sequence, so that would be placed in 1988.

If I remember correctly, the Saga of the Original Human Torch was just a flashback book, but the final issue took place in the then-present day.
I enjoyed the series. It did a good job covering the history.

Are you going to add a section for 1987 pushback? You said you already have a couple of issues that you're putting in 1986.

Yes, of course. I'll do that when i get to my first pushback comic in 1987. Still have to wrap up 1986 first...

Hulk Annual 15 and the Daredevil:Love and War Graphic Novel aren't included in 1986. I take it you decided to place them in 1987?

The Hulk annual is just a miss. I'll look at that before i start 1987. But yeah, i saw that the MCP has the DD graphic novel between DD #241-242.

Well then, congratulations on finishing 1986. 1987 doesn't have any big mess like the Mutant Massacre-Avengers Annuals collision but it will be interesting to see how you handle the mess created by the Mephisto Vs. limited series, which is a continuity headache that makes the X-Men Vs. Avengers limited series impossible to place, and try to figure out where FF Vs. X-Men fits in the FF's chronology.

Fnord, are you going to follow the Marvel Wikia and place the Hulk annual after Hulk #324?

That looks like where it goes, Clyde. It's where the MCP has it too and a quick skim supports that. I'll want to read it before i confirm. Had it filed in the wrong box.

Oh cool 86 is done and the page has an info box now and pictures.

1987: year I was born, maybe some troubling things popping up in Marvel but the 90s are still a ways away or I could be wrong.

It seems like Marvel's quality dropped starting in 1988. There's still plenty of good in '87. The true horrors of the early-'90s are still to come. Some of Marvel's books were hit worse, while other titles were still very strong.
I always found it funny that DC was breaking creative heights in 1988, while at the same time, Marvel started to really lose ground. For the first time since Marvel Comics started, really, they were no longer the trend-setter of the Big Two.

Random question but is there a specific criteria you use when determining what covers to use for each year? Do you try to pick stuff that's representative of the year? From what I see you seem to pick one representative cover (Secret Wars, 25th Anniversary cover, etc.) and then the other two seem random. This isn't a complaint. They're just covers and if they are randomly picked, that's cool. I was just curious if there was something about that Thing issue I was missing (LOL).

It's mostly about giving a sense for the style/trade dress of the covers of the period. I try to avoid the more well known covers and i try to avoid repeating books from nearby years. And if there's a special event for that year i might give it some extra consideration. But i'm only picking 3 covers out of many for the year, so it's never going to be truly representative and it's going to feel essentially random. And of course the Grand Comics Database has every cover available so covers don't need to be a major part of my project.

The Thing/Devil Dinosaur/Moon"boy" cover is of course awesome. ;-)

There's a lot of good stuff in 1988: "Armor Wars" in Iron Man, Peter David takes the Hulk to Las Vegas, Steve Rogers becomes Cap again and the Red Skull returns, and, yeah, even Inferno is better than a lot of people remember. Venom seemed pretty darn exciting in Spider-Man at the time, too, even if in retrospect Micheleinie's Amazing is nowhere near as good as the Stern or even DeFalco runs. It's true that Avengers and Fantastic Four are terrible, alas.

But Walter, two examples you cite- Inferno and Armor Wars- are basically "the hero (Scott and Tony) doesn't have to pay for being a douche".

I would have to disagree with you about Inferno. Scott didn't knowingly cause Madelyne to turn into the Goblin Queen. Plus, Inferno also involved Illyana. Tony started the Armor Wars to get back his armor. Without his crusade, none of the events following that would have happedned. Especially the incident at the Vault.

A funny thing to me about Armor Wars, much as I love it, is how everyone goes 'Iron Man you're fighting super villains...WHAT THE HELL!?' Which is something they've all been doing for decades.

I think the distinction is that Tony went looking for trouble, as opposed to the trouble coming to him.

Let me just say I am someone who loves Inferno. I thought it was Marvel's best cross-over, and one of the top three greatest cross-overs ever, I think I'd say. I'm not a great fan of cross-overs though, per se.

Iron Man also went too far in Armour Wars too. That was part of it. He crippled one villain, and he went after law-abiding types like Stingray also.

Clyde- what I meant was the writers turned Maddie into the Goblin Queen so that Scott wouldn't have to pay for waiting months to report his wife and child missing. (Claremont has confirmed this.) More on this when fnord actually gets to 1988.

Erm... Scott didn't actually know Maddie was missing and simply thought she refused to answer his calls and then assumed she left him like she threatened to in X-Factor #1 when he discovers their number is disconnected. We'll see in X-Factor 13-15, when he does return home to Alaska, that their house is empty of all their belongings, is up for sale and all records of her existence and his son's are gone. We learn later, during Inferno, that this was done by Mr. Sinister.

So... not sure what you (and Claremont) mean by that. During X-Factor 1-12, he thought she was refusing to return his calls and then disconnected their number. When he discovered she was missing during X-Factor 13-15, all record of her, and their son's existence had been wiped clean. How could he report someone missing who had no record of existing?

I think that is simply Claremont grousing that bringing back Jean disrupted his plans for Scott & Maddie's happily-ever-after and he decided that if he couldn't write Scott the way he wanted to, he'd throw his toys out of the pram and make Maddie evil so Scott (and Jim Shooter/Mike Carlin/Bob Layton/Louise Simonson... whoever he blamed for changing things) had to "pay" for it.

You guys are gonna run out of things to talk about for when i actually get to these issues... ;-)

Jay, I'll save this for later like fnord requested but just two points: (1) Claremont didn't want to turn Maddie evil- that was Harras's idea and (2) what Claremont was complaining about was that Scott ASSUMED Maddie left him and waited so long to check that if something bad HAD happened to her, she and the baby would likely be dead.

Re: The new Watcher banner on the main page - LOL!!!!!

Looking forward to your review of ASM#289 and the whole Ned Leeds Hobgoblin reveal.

It's too bad you didn't do Hulk 334 today- that would have been the perfect issue for daylight savings time. Plenty of us forgot to change the clocks but at least we never got our wife almost killed.

I would have gotten to it today but i lost an hour. (Not really.)

Just wanted to say how much I enjoyed what you've done so far aswell as what you are continuing to do. It's revitalized me to get back into reading my comics again. Hopefully in the fullness of time I'll be able to contribute something.

Les

I don't really want to start jumping through every issue of Captain America I haven't seen yet but there's an issue I want to know about.

Years ago I had a single Captain America comic, it had Cap's shield stolen and the paint removed. He was able to track it down to a hide out where they were trying to duplicate it I think. The bad guy was making his own suit of armor, he snuck on a gauntlet of his armor and tried to hit Cap from behind but he dodged it. Cap tries to find his shield while bad guy, silver haired flat top guy, puts on the rest of his armor. Cap tries to fight him and does as well as he can since baddie is unpracticed with the suit, Steve grabs a shield or two but they are not his since they break.

I think there was a scientist who was forced to work for Flattop and he gives Steve a shield and is pretty sure it is. Steve knows it is, winds up, throws it and slices through the armor while knocking out Flattop with one hit.

I'm pretty sure it was from the 80s...maybe Sal Buscema on art? Ring any bells for anyone?

I believe what you're looking for is Captain America 302-304.

If that is it, here's a link to the description on this site:
http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/captain_america_302-303.shtml

I found it after Clyde's comments, thanks none the less. One less childhood mystery to wonder about. I was very wrong about the artist.

The site's hosting service had a hardware problem today. Everything seems to be good now. A few comments that were left during the period while the site was being restored got lost, including my original comment notifying everyone there was a problem. I restored Vincent's comment (thanks and welcome) and tried to reproduce Mark's. If anyone else tried to leave any comments, they may have been lost to the void.

We should be up and running again now.

Alright! Off to Captain America 2. My day off is devoted to this and homework,.

That was an awesome movie, you folks disliked the pulpy tone of the First Avenger I think this is worth a shot.

Does 1987 get classified as one solid year, or does it get split into Shooter-EIC and DeFalco-EIC periods?

I don't split up the years, so since 1987 is mostly Shooter, it'll all go there. The years are just broad stokes.

This is in the Q&A! ;-)

FNORD, are you going to be covering Web Of Spider-Man Annual #3 in 1987?

No. I listed it on the Out of Scope page earlier today. It's just a collection of pin-ups and stuff.

Just a quick one. I don't remember reading it in your FAQ but why are your scans out of sync to the actual comic?

Can you explain what you mean by out of sync?

Some of the issues you've scanned I have and the way you've scanned them they're not in the right reading order. For instance you might show panel 3&4 after panel 5&6 appears.
I'm sure the last panel in DareDevil 247 isn't the last panel in the comic book.

It doesn't affect what you're doing it's just if someone doesn't have the issue it might look as if the panels are in the order you've scanned them in.

Ah, i see.

The entries are meant to be summaries and reviews, not necessarily a sequential retelling of the comics. For summary purposes, if we've got a separate subplot that runs over the course of three issues (or even three separate occurrences in one issue), it often makes sense for brevity to cover that subplot all at once, until/unless it intersects with the main story. And for review purposes, if i'm highlighting a particular theme or concern, like say references to Cyclops' bout with madness in X-Factor, i'll want to pull all of those scenes together to make the point. So due to those factors, scans don't necessarily fall in the order they appear in the books. If i did that, the reviews would be much longer and more mechanical, and i wouldn't be able to highlight the various themes/ideas/problems as well.

Good question. I'll add it to the Q&A.

Oh, I understand. That makes sense. I thought there was a reason for it. I just didn't understand what it was.

Please tell me your review of 87 isn't coming to an end. I can't bear to read about comics from 88 onwards. I think the only event I enjoyed back then was New Mutant's Inferno storyline. We're heading into a decline in the quality of stories under De Falco and by 1990 I was gone from comics. I tried to get back into them but the Clone Saga and Maximum Carnage story lines killed it for me. I know this is a bit long but it's a desperate plea in order for you to keep 87 going for as long as possible. Ha ha.

I was wondering what's your "problem" with Bill Mantlo's writing? You seem to not enjoy it. I don't think it's any worse than other writers during his time there.

Congrats on finishing 87. You did it pretty quickly. I'm guessing 88 and especially 89 will take a little longer with Marvel adding more titles, some of them multiple-story books like Solo Avengers and Marvel Comics Presents. Not to mention when a lot of the titles go biweekly that will increase the volume of books you have to sift through. I'll stop now in case I'm depressing you.

Getting into the post-Shooter era you start to see a different Marvel. I'll save any rants about quality drops for later when you cover those individual titles but a change is definitely coming. There's still a lot of good books and stories on the way though and, in my opinion, Marvel doesn't totally jump the shark until the mid-90s.

Wait 87 is already over? Geez I swear you just started it a month ago while 86 was going on for my last two terms.

Well I hear Marvel had a decline in quality but I still really enjoyed Spider-Man until the 90s. Besides you get to read about TEH BESTT CHACATER EVAR! VENOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! I want all comics to have VENOM AND WOLVERINE IN THEM! Then Wolverine and Venom team up to fight bad guys!

The future's going to be great! Just wait until Rob Liefeld shows up: Rob Liefeld and muscularity goes together perfectly just like...well...GIL KANE AND NOSES!

There's still some good stuff to come but, with the possible exception of Peter David's Hulk, it's going to be a long time before Marvel has another "classic" run. Some would argue there wouldn't be anymore but I won't open that can of worms here.

Well, i'm holding onto a few 1987 comics thinking they might fit better in 1988 (see the news blurb on the index page if you haven't yet) but yeah, 1987 was a fairly light year and it's wrapped up. My goal is to finish up the 80s which, if i push myself, might happen by the end of the year, and then i'll look backwards again and address the orange colored entries on the What's Missing page before jumping into the 90s.

I don't want to say i have a problem with Bill Mantlo, but i'll let my reviews stand for themselves. He's obviously very important to Marvel and left us a lot of great characters, but his plotting to me is uneven - he's got some great stories like the Hulk/Nightmare saga and the middle period of ROM, but lots of stinkers, too, like the decline we saw in Alpha Flight. And even when his plotting is good i find his scripting overly verbose and very, very melodramatic. But i'm still glad for his contributions; one of the biggest strengths of the Marvel universe is that even when individual stories don't come off so well they leave a legacy that can be built upon, and Mantlo did a lot of foundational stuff.

Not only is there PAD's Hulk, which by itself would justify continuing, but Gru's Quasar is the kind of book this project was made for. It's a continuity lover's dream. Gru's Cap hasn't reached its peak yet, either, and eve the people who like Claremont's final years on X-Men less than I do can find plenty that's interesting about them. I've never read Byrne's She-Hulk, but it has a decent reputation. Byrne's West Coast Avengers is an important, intermittently entertaining train wreck. Some people like Simonson's FF, and there's still some prime Michelinie/Layton Iron Man for a year or two. Engelhart's final year on Silver Surfer is arguably the best work he's done for Marvel. I'm sure there are other decent runs I'm overlooking.

Hey, what about Mr.Jip? Shouldn't he be listed under new characters in 1987.

Oh fine if i must, since i already had Birdbrain and Goblyn. I've added Manikin too.

FNORD, are you planning to summarize all the annuals that make up the "Evolutionary War" as one big entry, or are you planning to break them up into individual entries?

Wait and see? ;-)

The Annuals have to be broken into individual entries, since issues of the titles are clearly intended to take place in between them. For example, part 1, the X-Factor Annual, takes place before X-Factor 30 (and before X-Factor 32, which takes place before Avengers 295), while part 11, the Avengers Annual, takes place after X-Factor 33 and Avengers 298.

I made a back-end change as part of an ongoing anti-spam campaign. If you try to submit a comment and get an error message, you might need to clear your cache. Hitting Control-F5 or your OS's equivalent should do it.

Well since Marvel did some Godzilla comics I think it wouldn't hurt to vouch for the new Godzilla movie. Much better than the last American Godzilla, been a fan since I was four years old. Sadly no Avengers of Fantastic Four fighting this one.

I believe you haven't answered this in your FAQ (I could be wrong) but how do you decide on which comics to review? I guess you don't have every issue of say Thor from 1977-whatever but you don't just review the classics. So I was just wondering are you picking out every comic from your comic book long box for a particular year? What's the process?

I've actually been meaning to add something about this to the Q&A, but for now the short(er) answer:

This site is a review of my personal comics collection. So any comics i'm reviewing are comics i own (could be a reprint, which i note in the entries). And i've always kept my comics in chronological order, so when i'm ready to work on a new year i just go through all the comics in the box or boxes for that year. My order was always rougher before i started this project, which is why when i'm working on a year i'm still working out the fine tuning. And on top of that, lately when i start a new year i do a little shopping first to fill in any holes since comics from the 80s and beyond are pretty cheap nowadays. So i'm working those comics into my collection for the first time. But the short answer is i'm just working through my collection in order and doing the reviews. Then i fine tune the placement and adjust the comics in the boxes accordingly.

In terms of process, i have my books in my original, rough, order, and then when i start a new year i look at the Marvel Chronology Project for some key characters and try to get things more in sync. Then i read the issues and make notes (lots of post-its), and i also continue to look at the MCP (their search feature is invaluable to me). What i review on any given day isn't necessarily intended to be the final order. I try to do them in what i think will be the final order, but if i know i only have a little time i may pick something smaller, or if i'm waiting to see how something plays out i may hold off on reviewing something. Or other times i'll review key issues as markers and try to fit in stuff around them. And inevitably once i'm done i'll still have to make adjustments when other things become apparent as my reading continues. And of course people leave comments and point out mistakes.

I'll save any more details for when i write the full Q&A entry. Hope that makes sense so far!

Thank you for your response. Yep, makes perfect sense. This site is brilliant as it as bought back so much fond memories of reading comics during my childhood.

I was wondering if you're going to be covering the three series of Damage Control. I know it's not until 1989. I didn't know if it was relevant enough to be included in the summaries.
P.S. if it is, does that mean the preview in Marvel Age will be covered as well?

I'll be covering the Damage Controls series and i think the first one will be part of 1988. I don't have the Marvel Age stuff, though.

Does anyone know why in-story, none of the X-Men ever tried to contact Prof. X?

I meant during the time Prof. X was off earth.

The problem was that Xavier was constantly fleeing from Deathbird- he was never in the same spot for too long. And space is BIG.

Hi, I have a question: Why did you name this site Super Mega Monkey?

Sure. It's not at all related to comics. The main blog started long before the comic project. Min and i wanted to move away from Friendster (!) and basically just have a place to post the links that we used to always email each other and i wanted a place to hang the files from my music projects, so we started up our own site.

The name is a play on the variations of Street Fighter games like Turbo Hyper Fighting Tiger Edition. And so the full name of the blog is Super Mega Monkey Ultra Extreme III Alright!!!! But of course that's a little unwieldy...

When i decided to create this project for my comics to replace and expand on the Word document i had been using (which was just a list of titles and issue numbers), i just gave it the generic name Marvel Comics Chronology with the main goal of not calling it the Marvel Chronology Project since that was already taken.

Brilliant. I like the name, it sort of rolls off the tongue. :)

FNORD - Other than the issue of Marvel Comics Presents that you covered for Damage Control, do you intend to cover any other issues of this series?

Clyde, yes, i intend to cover the entire series. I just gave a priority to that story since i've got Damage Control #1 coming up and i knew that was a prelude. FYI the Weapon X issues are also already included.

And in distressing news Frank Miller is interested in writing Captain America. Noooo! Don't let him do it Marvel!

I figure writing Holy Terror would have gotten it out of his system but I guess not.

Ugh the image of big footed Captain America with an army of whores makes me nauseous.

I have a bad feeling we're nearing the end of '88. Please tell me I'm wrong. :S

Less than halfway done, actually. I'm approximately at the May-Jun cover dates right now, and we also have a few special events like Nick Fury vs. SHIELD and Evolutionary War.

But we can't hold it off forever, JSFan. Eventually we have to get to 1989 and then... the 90s!

(Actually we can hold off the 90s a little bit longer since i'll be doing a back issue add after 1989. But it's still only delaying the inevitable.)

Phew! I was getting worried. I must admit from around 85 to 87 (to me) Marvel was at its peak. The stories start to get a little dull (again, to me) around the time Tom DeFalco takes over the reigns.

On another note, I hope I don't come across as a bit of a Partisan but I hope this site will eventually be archived. I think it's a very important site regarding the history of Marvel comics.

JSfan, this site turns up on the wayback machine (at archive.org). I have no idea if they've archived every page, or the graphics, but they've certainly got some of it saved for posterity.

FNORD, this may have been asked already, but what criteria do you use to determine if a comic series or book from Marvel actually takes place in the "616" universe?

I pretty much follow the MCP. Here is their list of non-canon books. I do link to that page on my Out of Scope page.

I may occasionally make an exception, like i did with the Man Without Fear mini and like i may do with First Class, if the non-canon books are referenced or have impact in canon books (i'll just note the problems). Nextwave is another maybe, when i get to that. That's all subject to my personal whims. ;-) But for the most part i follow the MCP's list.

Does anyone know why the Avenger's butler Jarvis was drawn differently in his later appearances?
He used to look like this: http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/iron_man_17-19.shtml - see the 9th scan.
Then he changed looks in the late 80's - http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/avengers_280.shtml

I don't know why, but Roger Stern has the Wasp comment on Jarvis' weight loss in Avengers #267.

Coming into comics in 1987/88, I had always just assumed that the weight loss had come as a result of his time spent in recovery from his injuries from the Mansion Siege, but I can see now that he had lost he weight well before that.

It wasn't just the weight loss. He literally looked like a different person. It was almost as bad as what happened to the Thing over the years. At least he got an in-story explanation in Marvel-Two-In-One 50.

Hi, fnord12, I've been thinking about your rating system (not to much) and I was wondering if you'd ever consider changing them? Personally, I believe the majority of viewers to this site are Marvel fans and I think reviewing comics for their story rather than whether a non-comic fan would enjoy the story would make more sense. What about rating the stories as thus: A= great story, scripting, plotting,art etc; B= Very good story, C= Average story and D= bad story not much to enjoy.

I know you explain your reasons but sometimes I still can't help think your ratings can come across quite harsh.

Of course, I'm merely making a suggestion.

JSFan, thanks for your feedback and i understand where you're coming from. But i chose this criteria for specific reasons (explained elsewhere) and i don't intend to change it now.

For one thing, going back and re-grading all these issues based on different criteria (or even just removing the grades, which i don't want to do) would be very time consuming at this point and would take away from forward progress.

But more importantly, one of my goals is to track how and to what degree the comics industry evolves and matures over time. Stan Lee made a conscious decision to target older readers, and i like to evaluate how successful he was at that, considering other market factors like the fact that the primary audience was still kids. Then we have the shift to the direct market, the advent of deconstruction, and we'll soon be getting to the Vertigo period. So i like to try to rate the comics the same way i would a novel and see how close they get to Stan Lee's vision. And Marvel's current position is that the continuity gets in the way of good storytelling, so i want to see if that proves out and/or do i and others prefer a story with cornier dialogue but better continuity and consistent characterization vs. a modern story with realistic dialogue but not necessarily those other qualities. So that's a big part of the project for me and i'm not going to change that because sometimes people come here and get mad because they see the low grades.

Even with my criteria my grades are of course subjective, but it should be clear this is just my personal website. I'm not Wikipedia or Marvel.com or God and my grades aren't telling anyone that their personal enjoyment of the comic is wrong or invalid (and of course, based on my criteria, a low grade doesn't mean that i didn't enjoy it either). People need to be able to handle encountering opinions on the internet that they don't agree with, frankly. I do find the occasional angry complaints from people that haven't read the sidebar stuff to be a little tiresome, but i'm willing to accept that for the purposes of what i'm doing. So we soldier on, and i hope that makes sense.

Hello, again, Fnord12. Thanks for the reply. To be fair, I understand your grading much better now you've explained it in such depth. It makes a lot more sense now rather than I thought initially --though I'm going to have to try and get it out of my head that you're NOT grading them as if they were novels. Cheers!

FNORD, you said you dislike split-books like Solo Avengers. What do you think about Marvel Comics Presents? That has multiple stories combined with a split-book format.

Clyde, i'll save it for when i start reviewing those issues, but short answer is in general i don't like that series for the same reasons i've stated about Solo Avengers.

On the movie front got some nice news, seems Pacific Rim 2 has been green lit along with an animated series.

What does this have to do with Marvel? Uh, I think I've called Crimson Dynamo Crimson Typhoon a few times here.

So you're halfway through 2014, fnord? Now all you have to do is finish up the second half of 1988 and 1989 by the end of the year. Without being bored to death by Panther's Quest, of course.

Sure, that's *all*. ;-)

I am actually looking forward to reading Panther's Quest in one sitting.

Just curious how you're going to deal with the conclusion of Inferno if you'll pull those issues that have a 1989 publishing date into 1988 or...? Also the Annuals for this year begin to have 2 or more stories in them, some of which take place earlier or later than the other stories. Will you have separate entries for them?

The Year categories are just broad markers and in the past i've pulled stuff forward in publication time, pushed it back, or just let it roll across the two years (e.g. Secret Wars II) depending on the nature of the story and how it affects the surrounding books. Right now i'm leaning towards pulling the 1988 cover date Infernos back into 1987 but i'll wait until i get closer and note all the dependencies before making a final decision (i don't want to wind up pulling half of 1989 into 1988).

For Evolutionary War, i will split up the stories if necessary. If you're asking about the historical back-ups on the High Evolutionary, i'm going to do something special with them and cover those either in a single entry in the Hero Gap or as a post on the main blog.

Noticed you've covered X-Factor up to issue 33... are you going to cover the Marvel Age Annual #4 story (where they appear as well as Wolverine, New Mutants, Excalibur, etc. in the teaser to Wolverine's solo series)? It has to take place between X-Factor 29 & 30 (along with the Strange Tales/Cloak & Dagger story & X-Factor Annual #3) too.

I never bought any Marvel Age issues so i won't be covering them at least at the moment. I thought they were all just previews. I'm not even sure if i should list it on the What's Missing page. Is there any actual story in the issue? Is this the same issue of Marvel Age that Clyde asked about above (May 20th)?

FNORD - It is the same issue.

Here's a link to the entry on the marvel wikia: http://marvel.wikia.com/Marvel_Age_Annual_Vol_1_4

It's an actual 5 page comic by Chris Claremont, writer; John Buscema, breakdowns; Klaus Janson, finished art; Tom Orzechowski, letterer; Gregory Wright, colorist; Jim Salicrup, editor; Tom DeFalco, editor in chief; simply titled "Wolverine".

He sneaks around Madripoor in his black ninja outfit with the fishnet eye mask and sees Ship & X-Factor pass overhead (and somehow smells their scents including Jean's). He changes into his "Patch" outfit sees Jessica Drew & Lindsay McCabe at a cafe and says they've recently arrived from San Francisco. Nguyen Ngcoc Coy turns up and Wolverine claws his car. The New Mutants teleport in with Magic freaking out about Destiny's prediction of Inferno. Shadowcat runs over to talk to them but they've already teleported away. Nightcrawler, Captain Britain and Rachael are there with her. Wolverine goes into the Princess Bar where the X-Men are waiting for him and they teleport away.

MCP places this for:
Wolverine between: Wolverine: Doombringer & Uncanny X-Men #232
X-Factor (Beast, Cyclops, Iceman, Marvel Girl, Ship) between: X-Factor Annual #4 & X-Factor #30
Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman): Wolverine #3 & #4
Lindsay McCabe: Wolverine #3 & #4
Ngyuen Ngcoc Coy: New Mutants #31 & Wolverine #4
New Mutants: Uncanny X-Men #231 & New Mutants Annual #4 (2nd Story)
Excalibur: Excalibur Special Edition #1 & Excalibur #1
X-Men: Strangely, their appearance is not listed but probably between Alpha Flight #61 & Uncanny X-Men #232 like Wolverine has it. I'll have to mention it on the MCP Forum.

There is also a 5 page Speedball comic, a 5 page Damage Control (with Mr. Fixit!) comic and a 5 page A Shadowline Saga comic too. Worth picking up.

Thanks, guys. I've listed it on the What's Missing page and will see about picking it up at some point.

The Damage Control story is definitely canon- it's referenced in Damage Control 3.
The X-Men story is posted in its entirety here:
http://marvel1980s.blogspot.com/2013/10/1988-marvel-age-annual-8-wolverinex.html
I always had problems with it being canon. Aside from the fact that Logan and Kitty both learn about Destiny's Inferno prophecy and don't do anything , there's also the problem that Logan knows that Coy is in Madripoor and plans on taking over the Madripoor underworld. Only problem is, in Wolverine 4, Logan asks Karma who Coy is and what he's doing in Madripoor. The problem with this is that Wolverine 4-9 is a continuing story and the Hulk appears in issues 8-9 after Avengers Annual 17, in which Beast appears furry. Of course, Beast is human in the Marvel Age Annual. I suppose it's possible that what Wolverine meant when he asked Karma was "How is Coy connected to you and do you know his specific plans?"

A cute sounding story to quickly highlight the entire X-line, but when you consider it an official part of cannon, it just seems RIDICULOUS. All the mutant teams just happen to pass through Madripoor (of all places) at nearly the same moment?

Just a note since i know people don't always see the "News" section on the index page. I'm going to be away from the site for about a week, and the entries i finished today are the last until i get back. So tomorrow i'll just be around to respond to comments if applicable, and then no new entries or anything from me until late next week at the earliest.

Just didn't want anyone coming here looking for new entries every day and wondering what's going on.

Another for the What's Missing list: In late 1987 Marvel put out a hardcover called the Marvel Holiday Book, which was apparently only sold through catalogs like Sears and JCPenneys. It was mostly reprints, but did have a new Wolverine story by Claremont/Marshall Rogers/Randy Emberlin. It's probably been reprinted, but I have no idea where.

Mark I believe that book was called The Best of Marvel Comics. The story was called "The Hunter."

"The Hunter" was reprinted in the book "Marvel Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics" which, in addition to a history of Marvel up until 1989, beginning with Martin Goodman's pulp fiction magazines, reprints four stories. The other three being "Vengeance" from Sub-Mariner #35 (in August 1954), "Duel to the death with the Vulture" from Amazing Spider-Man #2, and "This man, this monster" from Fantastic Four #51.

I have no idea if the Wolverine story was ever included in an actual comic.

What Flashback -1 issues from 1997 are covered on this site? I saw Cable -1. Any others?

Thanks to everyone who left me a correction (typos, missed character appearing, placement) while i was away. I think i've addressed them all; i just didn't want to leave a string of "Thanks, fixed it." comments on the site. That Best of Marvel Comics issue is already listed on the What's Missing page.

Clyde, you can find the Flashback/-1 issues i've covered so far either by searching for the "Flashback" crossover issues on the Advanced search, or just by searching for the string #-1 with the "Search issues only" box checked. The rest i'll cover when i get to 1997; some of them i think have framing sequences that will require them to be placed in that year, and i don't want to look through them yet to see which are which (or if that's even true).

Thanks FNORD, good to have you back. :)

FNORD - your NEWS comment is dated 1 year in the future.

Thanks Clyde. My sneaky attempt at taking a year off has failed.

Any chance there's a navigational tool implemented where you can browse from, let's say, Captain America 45 to 46, or, whatever closer next number is databased. Sometimes you want to browse a particular title, and, as of now, you can't.

Thanks in advance.

Nothing sophisticated, but there is a clunky way of basically doing what you want to do (which you may have already thought of). You can search for a string like Captain America # and check the Search issues only box, and you'll get a list of all the Captain America issues. You can then right click on each link and open it in a new tab or browser. And you can even use the checkboxes in the search results list to keep track of where you are.

As i said, clunky, but it'll work!

I'd love to implement something more sophisticated but there's no easy way with the platform i'm using.

I only know of the classic Guardians of the Galaxy and even then just Korvac Saga and a Thor annual. Still I very much enjoyed the movie about the newer version and it is super fun.

Hi fnord12, Have you ever thought about adding a forum to this website so users can discuss comics in general?

A bit of a weird thing is happening to me as I read your reviews from '88 -- I'm beginning to miss the stories from the early 80s. I'd say from 83-86 was a great period in terms of quality stories.
The stories from '88 seem a little bit lackluster, in my humble opinion. Funny enough, it was around that time that I became less interested in comics.

JSfan, regarding the message board, this page really needs to be replaced with something like that, but i haven't wanted to spend the time to investigate and install something.

David Barnes, i recommend checking out the Annihilation event and the Abnett/Lanning GotG series that followed, if you get the opportunity. I haven't seen the movie yet.

fnord12, are you going to review the Marvel UK's title such as Death's Head or Dragon's Claw (these two started in 1988)?
And what about Wolfpack, both the graphic novel and the 12-issues serie? I think it's stated somewhere that are Marvel Universe titles...

The Wolfpack graphic novel was listed on the What's Missing page and i've now added the regular series. My understanding is that its only connection point with the rest of the Marvel universe is that alternate versions of them appeared in House of M, so it's not a priority for me to cover it. Some of the Wolfpack characters appear in Marvel Comics Presents, and when i get there it may inspire me to hunt down the other stuff, or alternatively i may skip those stories in MCP.

The original Death's Head takes place entirely in alternate futures, i believe, so i won't include that. I may be able to cheat and cover it anyway because my copies are from the Incomplete Death's Head series that has framing sequences with Death's Head II, but in that case i'll cover it in 1993. Dragon's Claw i believe also takes place entirely in an alternate future, but i've never read it. I've added both to the Out of Scope page.

Some issues of Death's Head take place in the present day. At the end of #8, the Doctor (from Doctor Who) drops Death's Head off at Four Freedoms Plaza, and #9 sees him fighting the Fantastic Four in 1989, culminating with him taking off via Doom's time machine, after which he ends up in 2020.

And the FF meeting will be referenced in FF 338, which is part of a storyline picking up where Simonson left off on the Avengers.

I'm sorry to write this here but I was wondering if anyone can answer me this: was the comics in the 70s tight in continuity or were they just all over the place? I may have answered my own question but I guess it wasn't until the 80s when continuity became important.

I would say the difference with the 70s was that there were fewer crossovers and therefore less mistakes. The continuity wasn't a mess or all over the place. When there were crossovers (in a non-Event sense), they were actually very tight. Cap's appearance as Nomad in the Avengers issue was very specifically delineated in both books, the various aspects of the Thanos war ran together with no problems, etc.. And when i was doing the placement for those years, there were considerations to make but it was possible to put the books in a good order more easily than it is in the 80s. When i got to the 80s there was a lot more interaction between titles, which i like, but that also led to more difficulties, and often outright impossibilities (without a liberal use of No Prize rules).

And i'd say continuity in the sense of characters' past histories was respected pretty much equally in both the 70s and 80s, and the idea of stringing together various stories to clean things up or create connections - you can find a direct lineage from Thomas to Englehart to Gruenwald for that.

This is probably worth a bigger essay with supporting points! But that's my quick take.

I think you make a pretty clear summation. I guess with all the titles and crossovers, things get a little bit complicated in the 80s. I actually thought that continuity wasn't important in the 70s and it was more-or-less about getting the books out no matter what state they were in. Anyway, much obliged.

Fnord, there's a problem with including Atlantis Attacks but not Acts of Vengeance in 1989- there's too much overlap. For starters, New Mutants Annual 5- an Atlantis Attacks Annual- seemingly takes place after New Mutants 86-an Acts of Vengeance issue. There's a great controversy at the MCP over how to handle it. Meanwhile, Wolverine 19-20 are the Acts of Vengeance issues- but they take place before X-Men 249. So you'd have to move X-Men 249-255 into 1989.

Re: Wolfpack. Several years back, I did a re-read of all my comics. I have most of Wolfpack (probably due to cheap back issue bins), and it was a slog. Not a great story, and no visible connection to the Marvel universe. I did more research after my last post on this subject, and the House of M Wolfpack seems unrelated, just more recognizable characters using that name for their team.

(I think I somehow confused Wolfpack with Shadowmasters back in the day)

But Namorita mentions Wolfpack in New Warriors 1.

If other books are referencing Wolfpack that'll make me more likely to cover it sooner rather than later, but Erik's review doesn't get me too excited about it. ;-)

Regarding 1989, i intend to include Act of Vengeance issues in that year if that's what makes sense. I just don't want to start reviewing AoV and then stop for six months or whatever while i work on the back issue add. So i was thinking i'd hold off on the AoV issues and then insert them when i get back to it. But if the stories are too tightly intertwined i'll just have to find a different breaking point when i get there.

You know, I'm actually looking forward to your reviews for comics produced during the early 90s; if only just to measure how the art and stories compare to the 80s. I'm also looking forward to your reviews of the disatrous Clone Saga and Maximum Carnage stories...;)

Wolfpack is just mentioned in passing as a superhero team in New Warriors 1.
Shouldn't Kevin Masterson (who eventually becomes the second Thunderstrike) be listed under new characters in 1988?
So you can finally start 1989. Now you get to review 2 mothers of small children turning into crazy women lusting after their brothers-in-law in one year. Lucky you.
It will also be fun to see your reaction to Atlantis Attacks- the crossover so badly edited that they had to admit Tigra wasn't really there, so badly edited that they created an unsolvable conundrum with the New Mutants Annual as to whether it takes place before or after Acts of Vengeance, so badly edited that they destroyed Atlantis TWICE, so badly edited that the couldn't even remember the number of the DD Annual.

I didn't list Kevin, or Cassie Lang on the 1979 page, because i like to use the main category pages as overviews of what happened that year, and the significance of those characters doesn't come up until way later.

As an aside, i like to look at the lists of new characters and compare against the criticism that you sometimes hear that no worthwhile characters were introduced after 1975 (or 1963, or whatever). And 1988 actually has some characters with longevity: Venom, Speedball, Tombstone, Typhoid Mary. None are exactly Spider-Man, ofc, but still.

FNORD - this may have been asked before, are you going to be covering the Guardians Of The Galaxy series from 1990? I know that it takes place partially in the "current" Marvel Universe during the Infinity War in 1992.

Clyde, i only have a few scattered issues of the 90s GotG and i don't have any of the Infinity War tie-ins. Normally i wouldn't include GotG since it's an alternate future title, but if there are specific crossovers with current day books i would like to include them. I have a Doom 2099/Daredevil crossover in mind where i intend to include the Doom issue(s), for example (i'll have to re-read them again to see exactly what i'll include). If you think the GotG issues are relevant and there's a set of issues that you recommend include, i may pick them up before i get to 1992. Or i'll at least list them on the What's Missing page.

FNORD - GOTG 27-34 takes place on "our" earth.
#34 is where the new Yellowjacket - Rita Demara joins the Guardians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket_(Rita_DeMara)#Guardians_of_the_Galaxy

Plus 32-33 features Captain Universe.

Hi FNORD, have you ever looked at phpBB free forum hosting website? I've created a stand-alone website using their software and it's very easy to use. However, I'm completely useless at creating banners and making it look fancy but it might be something you'd be interested in if you do finally decide to pursue that area.

I actually got as far as downloading phpBB one time but then put it aside and never went back to it. I will do it one day but it's not a priority for now.

Fair enough. I guess there's no real urgency.

This is just a general question - What significance does the Silver Surfer: Judgment Day graphic novel have in regards to the continuity of the Silver Surfer?

Clyde, not sure exactly what you're asking but see the entry and Michael's comment for Silver Surfer #16. It's referenced in that issue and the experience in the GN is said to help the Surfer fight back against the Soul gem, but as Michael says it seems to reflect a different status quo for Nova. Beyond that i don't know if it has any real impact on the main Surfer book; it's really about giving Stan Lee and John Buscema an opportunity to work with the Surfer again. I'll be covering it "soon".

FNORD - Will you be putting a comment next to one of the "X" issues as the "start of Inferno" on the main page of 1989?

I did that for X-Terminators #1 in 1988. It can't start twice. ;-)

Fnord, there's a revelation about Dum Dum Dugan in today's Original Sins 5. Your site doesn't have spoilers, so I'll link to Scans Daily:
ORIGINAL SINS 5 Spoilers at the below link:
http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/4806665.html#cutid1
I'm curious frord, are you going to change Dum Dum's entries immediately or wait to see if this is retconned?

Interesting. I'll hold off for now. It won't be that hard to make a change if i decide to do so (i'd rename the current tag and then create a new one for the early appearances), but we'll see if it sticks.

Divan is what????? That's messed up!

Dugan*

Solar Man. DO you plan on reviewing that character?

Ignore that last comment. I think It only ran for 2 issues.

FNORD - you have the second story about Yellowjacket in Solo Avengers 12 as a pushback in the 1989 section. However, you actually have it placed at the beginning of 1989 in that year's section.

Thanks Clyde. I tagged it with the wrong year category, so it showed up in 1989. Fixed now.

Hi fnord12, may I ask who you're favourite comic book writers, artists and story arcs are?
Thanks in advance.

JSfan, to respond to your question, i've started a website where i'll review all my comics in chronological order. I've made it partially into 1989 so far, and i'll just keep going until i get all the way through, and then you'll have your answer. ;-)

Fair enough. I have an idea on which writer you're not a fan of. :)

Can't wait till you get to ATLANTIS ATTACKS. On the one hand, it's a fun, breezy story, perfect for a rainy Saturday afternoon. One of ny favorite crossovers. On the other, some of the in-story continuity is awful (they can't keep the genocide of Atlantis straight).

I was wondering what your plans are (If you already have any) for certain crossover with alternate universes. Like when the Juggernaut and a couple of nobodies ended up in the Malibu Ultraverse, or 616-Galactus's recent sojourn into the Ultimate Universe.

And what about the Age of Apocalypse? Will you ignore it as an alternate universe, or not? And what about the specials that feature the history of the Age of Apocalypse universe?

And, dare I ask, what about Avengers vs. JLA?

I'll definitely cover Age of Apocalypse. That's really just like the Kulan Gath saga in Uncanny X-Men #190-191 but on a larger scale, and it has real impact on the Marvel universe (e.g. Sugar-Man and Dark Beast). I will probably be brief in those reviews since it won't be important to cover all the ins and outs of the individual plots, but i'll definitely include them.

I won't be including cross-company crossovers. Malibu's potentially a special case because Marvel owned them for a while, but i think legally they can't do anything with those concepts and there was never any impact on the main Marvel universe (e.g. the "Ego Gem" has pretty much been ignored). In any event i don't own those books and i most likely wouldn't make it a priority to include them even if someone convinced me that it was canon.

As for the crossovers between Marvel's publishing lines where the intention was originally that they were entirely unrelated, my plan is to just cover where they overlap. So i'll of course cover the Starblast event but i haven't covered any the New Universe books. And i'll almost definitely cover Spider-Men (which has impact on Mysterio) and probably Hunger, but nothing else from the Ultimate line. And even stuff like Death's Head coming to the Marvel universe from Transformers, i'll probably just cover his actual MU appearances. This is different than, say, Squadron Supreme, which was introduced in Marvel universe books and frequently intersects.

My goal is really to get as much of the proper Marvel universe documented as possible, and then i can go back and look for edge cases if i want.

Don't do Death's Head like that! I hope you at least do issues 8-9-10 of his series (the Doctor leaves DH on top of Four Freedoms Plaza / he fights the FF for the first time / battles Arno Stark).

If I understand correctly, Death's Head's recent appearances (in SWORD and Iron Man, at least) take place earlier in his own personal timeline than the DH series does. They may even take place before he interacts with the Transformers.

I was going to do this in Captain America 351's entry, but I think that's getting clogged with too much about current comic events so I'll just say it here:

I think the most pathetic thing about this thinking over the ridiculous events of modern comics like "Original Sin" is that this is just an attempt to address realism and yet it doesn't address the sliding timescale at all. You can try to eliminate the original Nick Fury and Dum Dum Dugan just because of their ties to WWII (and because everyone wants Samuel Jackson Nick Fury like the Ultimate universe or the MCU), and yet other characters who fought in WWII or who have associations with specific events (the Punisher and Vietnam) can continue to slide along with new origins devised every few years or so (like, you know, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm). Likewise if a minor character is important enough, they can slide too while those who aren't can age normally (thinking of how Dorrie Evans can have children and be middle aged while Johnny Storm can keep reverting back in time). Honestly, you can't have it both ways, trying to address things that require specific moments of impact while letting anyone without said moments of impact keep going along with the sliding timescale. I get Marvel is a business and one where characters have to keep remaining relevant for them to make money, but to throw some characters aside and not others does feel more or less like it cheats us out from ideas that one person may like a character but they don't get to live or matter or be relevant because another writer wants to do something shocking to "change the status quo".

It just shows how hard it is to associate with comics if there is a massive back history and a consistancy to be relevant to a modern reader. You can have it both ways but it cheats when they pull stuff like this.

Ataru320 - the only other option is to do what DC did - restart their universe from scratch.

Clyde: Ultimately its no-win though: you want characters to remain relevant but rebooting universes takes away what made some of them so important or relevant in the first place; let alone places the emphasis on the factors of writers, the company, the fans, etc and who knows who will remain standing aside from those so strong in people's minds that they just will never go away. Having a shared universe is fine and it works in some respects but not others, thus leading to stuff like this.

Cullen, any MU appearance of Death's Head that shows him at Transformer size takes place before his interactions with the Transformers - he was shrunk down to human size immediately after his final encounter with them. Any appearance that shows him at human size takes place afterwards.

Yes, fnord should cover Death's Head #8 & 9 (easiest way to get hold of them is probably volume 2 of the Death's Head graphic novel). But #10 takes place in an alternative future (the Machine Man / Iron Man 2020 one), so is clearly out of scope by this site's rules.

Dorrie looking middle-aged was weird- she last saw Johnny 8 years ago real time and she was 20 at the most then. So she still have looked like a young woman, unless she didn't take good care of herself.

I've been wanting to read up on cosmic Marvel or really Captain Marvel and Thanos since it seems like Starlin was able to weave something of a completed story through out the late 60s and 70s. Then of course Thanos came back and we got the The Infinity Gauntlet from 1991.

Still I worry if I read a story before the movies I'll be watching the movies and complaining the whole time while going the other way around works out better.

Anyway, any book recomendations?

David, seems like The Life & Death of Captain Marvel* TPB and (per a recent recommendation by Instantiation) Warlock by Jim Starlin: The Complete Collection would be exactly what you're looking for. I think the stories will be so different from how it plays out in the movies that it won't spoil anything but still give you some extra background.

*It may be cheaper to get the older "Life of Captain Marvel". The "Death" story takes place much later and just taking a quick look on Amazon it looks like it might be cheaper to buy the "Life" and "Death" books separately.

On this site, those stories are mostly covered here, here, and here.

Sounds good to me. Maybe I'll get Captain Marvel Essentials too just for fun. Seems like those are the big three 'chapters' concerning Thanos.

Maybe I should read some Quasar since I keep getting him mixed up with Adam Warlock/Him.

FNORD - Are you planning on covering Havok & Wolverine-- Meltdown?

Yep, it'll be part of 1989.

FNORD - also I know someone suggested this above me, but what about Death's Head 8 - 10?

I mention somewhere above on this page that i only own the reprints in Incomplete Death's Head. The good news about that is it means that i'll be able to cover all the alternate future stuff because of the framing sequence. The bad news is i won't be getting to it until 1993.

Alright looks like I'm getting Avengers vs. Thanos, Death of Captain Marvel, Starlin Adam Warlock, Infinity Gauntlet, Essential Captain Marvel 1 and...the last three O'Neil Question books.

Maybe I'll snag Essential Adam Warlock just to be safe.

There isn't anything else I should read before Infinity Gauntlet is there?

Thanos Quest is a direct prelude to Infinity Gauntlet.

Oops, I thought that was a sequel.

Oh! I gotta get the issue with the Thanos-copter! I hope that's in one of the trades.

If you're getting the Infinity Gauntlet Omnibus it looks like it's included in there. Otherwise i see there's a Silver Surfer: Rebirth of Thanos trade that includes it along with, well, the rebirth of Thanos.

You're definitely getting some overlap with all these trades but i guess you're accepting that as inevitable.

The Thanos-copter is from the non-canon Spidey Super Stories, sadly. ;-)

Hoo boy over 1,000 pages. I think I'd rather get a bunch of smaller trades, it's hard holding a 1,000 page book that isn't paperback size. Don't see a trade for Rebith of Thanos just the Silver Surfer one, overlap isn't a big deal.

Sorry to clutter the comments but I want to do this homework before class starts again.

No problem on clutter. This is the Surfer trade i was talking about that includes Thanos Quest.

That's what I saw too, alright adding to the list.

FNORD - just curious, how do you determine what issues are fill-ins versus a one issue storyline?

Clyde, i guess it's subjective but there are usually clues or sometimes they outright tell us. For example, for the recent Avengers issues i covered, it's announced in the lettercol for issue #300 that Walt Simonson was leaving (and we know it was abruptly) and that John Byrne will be replacing him. Gruenwald then says that Ralph Macchio is "pitching in script-wise for the next three issues". The fourth, by Danny Fingeroth, isn't even mentioned, which could indicate that it took an extra issue for Byrne to come on board. In general, in the eras i've covered so far at least, writers having multiple issue runs on the title are the norm. Some counter-examples involve star creators, like Daredevil #219 (although that was actually a fill-in too) or Avengers #88.

Does anyone know if there's a web site that shows scans of all the house ads that Marvel ran over the years for the various storylines and other important events that they had?

FNORD - I noticed you have Hulk Annual #13 in your What's Missing Section. You indicate you have it but haven't added it to the project. MYCOMICSHOP has it taking place between #301 & #302 - https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?SeriesID=5621 Are you planning to cover it at some point?

My plan is to do a back issue add after i finish 1989 (or mostly finish 1989; i'll be stopping somewhere before Acts of Vengeance starts). With the back issue add i'll be covering all the issues in orange on the What's Missing page.

Hey man,
I've taken it upon myself to read every issue of Avengers from start to finish, since I really never read any of those in my youth (I was all about Spidey) and I always felt like they were at the center of the Marvel U. It's the mid-80s now, and I'm on a detour into Secret Wars 2 and all it's crossovers (another Marvel thing I never got exposed to other than Spidey's golden notebook).

Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line to tell you that your recaps and continuity explanations have been not only informative and helpful, but often (especially lately) more entertaining than the comics themselves. Thanks for your awesome work.

I quite agree. My interest in comics left the Marvel Universe a long time ago, but fnord's interest and passion for the Marvel Universe makes the site worth checking regularly. I've enjoyed looking up books I barely cared about as a kid, and I've gone through numerous mental hoops to argue about comics I didn't care about when I was older and defended comics I still love to this day.

When I want to waste time, this is my favorite site to visit, just to re-read an account of a Spidey story (or whatever) that I didn't really care about in the first place. Major kudos, and I'm sorry that I'll be leaving the site (except when I want some nostalgia) once you reach the '90s. But can you blame me? EWWWWWWWW!!!

I'm actually now looking forward to the 90s even though I've noticed that the quality of the stories have been declining (I've only enjoyed Captain American & Iron Man). I'm very interested to read Fnord's review on the works of Liefeld and McFarlane -- especially when McFarlane has his own Spider-Man book. To be fair, I might drop out around the late 90s as I don't think there's anything there to remotely interest me but I can't wait to read his take on The Clone Saga and Maximum Carnage.

Andrew, thank you! To the rest of you: pthhhhllllltt!! Nice to know you're going to abandon me to face the 90s alone! ;-)

Don't worry, I can't wait for the 90s. I love when you rip the weird and bizarre concepts or ideas(Silver Age insanity, things that just made no sense or were just dumb, and of course those two words: Mike Murdoch) so seeing your take on Liefeld, the Clone Saga and all the never-ending mish-mash that happens from here on out is just going to make this page way more entertaining.

I, too am looking forward to the 90s, because I largely peaced-out on comics from '93-'97 and when I returned it was almost exclusively DC and Vertigo. So I want to see the recaps of what I missed, not to mention the few gems and early appearances of characters and creators who later gained prominence.

I'm very much looking forward to the 90's. That was the time I regularly started buying comics. Oh, the hours I spend hunting down every single issue of the Clone Saga or the Age of Apocalypse. Fun times, fun times...

Actually makes me realize I'll only be around for another couple of years, till 93 or so when I noticed comics really started to suck (and I discovered girls:-)

I stuck with Marvel through most of the 90s til the combined tragedies of Clone Saga and Heroes Reborn finally chased me away. I'm looking forward to revisiting these comics (most of which are awful in retrospect) and getting fnord's take on them. Should be more fun coming up than it was going down ;)

Is Spider-Man: Chapter One considered in continuity?

Something like the Spider-Clone Saga I'd be willing to read out of sheer curiosity - same reason I enjoy reading "The Life of Reilly," if anyone's familiar with that - but after McFarlane/Liefeld/Lee and Peter David leave their respective titles, there's only Alan Davis' return to "Excalibur" to look forward to (for me, don't think I'm denying anyone else the right to comics they love, or hate, or love to hate.) I read the first collection of "Thunderbolts," one or two Busiek/Perez "Avengers" collections, and some of PAD's 21st Century return to "X-Factor." I'm aware that "Damage Control" had a third miniseries which I never got around to reading. There are no other Marvel storylines I have more than vague familiarity with. "Age of Apocalypse," "One More Day," these might be interesting the way a car wreck is interesting, but that's about it.

What else do I have to look forward to? "Marvels"? It's already on this site. "Illuminati" #2? Already on this site. "1602"? Not on this site (I don't think, checks, nope) and it's already chronologically happened. Claremont's return to Marvel and the X-titles? Maybe, possibly, in that 'car wreck' sense. "JLA/Avengers"? Probably not going to be on this site.

Robert, Chapter One is not considered canon, at least by the MCP, which i'll happily follow.

Mentioning Heroes Reborn brings up a question, fnord, and maybe you've addressed it already - will you actually be covering the Heroes Reborn stories, since they take place in a pocket universe? I know you answered a similar question about Age of Apocalypse, but they're not *quite* the same...

Fnord, what are your thoughts on the company crossovers? They did fit into Marvel continuity - especially "JLA/Avengers" and "X-Men/Teen Titans" - and I'll completely understand if you have a reason for not including them, but if you don't, good luck on withstanding the holy water and crucifixes. ;)

Ok, scanning this page, I see you specifically state you won't be covering the crossovers. That's cool. So is silver. And garlic. And the mid-morning sun. But I respect your decision.

Quasar's "Cosmos in Collision" storyline is something to look for ward to, and a couple of '90s crossovers like Galactic Storm and Age of Apocalypse are fun on their own terms. PAD's Hulk is good for a few years, and DeFalco's Thor ( and even Thunderstrike) ain't bad. In fact, Len Kaminski's run on Iron Man and Harras's Avengers are better than most people think; IM, especially, has had worse runs. I have a soft spot for Chichester's Daredevil, too, though bringing back Elektra certainly sucks. Larry Hama's Wolverine has its moments.

I will be doing Heroes Reborn, although not the 13th issues. Because skipping company crossovers doesn't make you a vampire.

I am so mad at your antipathy towards intercompany crossovers!!

Chichester's sequel to "Born Again" was very good, I forgot about that one. I'm only mildly curious about the rest of his run, but the four issues leading up to DD #300 made a very good story.

"Because skipping company crossovers doesn't make you a vampire."

It does so!!! Now that I have fit the Universal Thing-a-majig into the Cosmic Doo-dad, anyone caught skipping company crossovers will become a vampire, just so long as some guy in tights and a cape doesn't try to stop me. Especially once we reach the "Dr. Strange" storyline. This I Command!!!

ChrisW, in what way does the X-Men/Teen Titans story impact 616 continuity? I know it had relevance to DC (first appearance of the Source Wall), but I've never heard about its significance for Marvel. (Not challenging you, just interested).
It can't actually happen on 616, obv, since theres no interuniversal travel, and Marvel doesn't have Hypertime.

(Hopefully by the time fnord gets to Avengers/JLA, he will have seen the light ;))

I don't think "X-men/Teen Titans" impacts Marvel continuity, and it's been awhile since I've read it, but it was definitely of a specific X-Men era. Storm had long hair, Kitty was still a newbie, flirting with Peter and nothing more, Scott was still around. I have no idea when it would have happened - fortunately I'm not insane enough to put Marvel comics into chronological order; pity those poor suckers - but at the time, Claremont was very good about knowing when a given event happened to his characters relative to every other event. I don't care when it fits into continuity, but I think it really does fit into continuity, and I'll leave it up to those poor suckers to figure out when, how and why.

I've finally gotten around to installing a message board forum to phase out this page. I'm going to leave this page active for now, but if the forum works out i will probably close comments here.

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/phpBB3/

Yay. Finally I can ask general questions about comics unrelated to the comics you're reviewing.

Eh, I'm going to miss talking about the comics themselves on the pages.

Didn't know there was a general comments section!

This is a great site!

Keep up the good work.

Make mine marvel.

Thanks, A.Lloyd. Appreciate all your comments.

I have only recently found this site while researching Howard the Duck. I am interested in identifying any references to Howard in issues of FOOM. I have copies of #15, 17, 18 & 19. I notice that Mark Drummond has made mention of issues 10 & 21. Can Mark or anybody else help out?

It's been a while since I looked at my FOOMs, but the vast majority of Howard mentions are strictly upcoming issues in the news section. The big Howard issue is the one with the wraparound Election cover.

Mark, you mentioned that Bev was originally going to be called Mercedes Bent from a preview in FOOM #10. I'd be very interested to see a scan of that preview if it was at all possible. I checked eBay and that issue is ridiculously expensive. I think because of Wolverine.

Welp Marvel has announced the lineup for Phase 3...Lots of 'yes' to be heard!

FNORD - is "X-Men Archives featuring Captain Britain #1" the 7 set limited series published in 1995?
I saw it in your back issue add section and am interested in purchasing it.

Correct. Note that most of the series - beginning halfway into issue #2 - is also reprinted in the Alan Moore Captain Britain trade.

Many, many thanks for the work you've put in here.

I found this site today when looking for a list of the order of Marvel releases in the sixties. I've now spent hours poking about and reading. The sheer scale of the work you've put in is staggering and much appreciated. It's now bookmarked and going to be a much-used go-to resource.

Really great stuff!

Thanks and welcome, lividhedgehog!

I'm about to start doing some background updates to the site software. This should be completely seamless to end users*, but there's always a chance something might go wrong. If so, i'll be aware of it and will frantically be trying to fix it, so no need to try to alert me.

I'll update this comment when i think i'm done.

*Actually the forum will go down for a little while.

OK, the updates are done now. If you find you're having trouble with anything, please let me know (a comment on this page, the forum, or the email link at the top of this page).

One thing to always try is doing a cache refresh. Control-F5 or your OS & browser equivalent. But i know of no reason why that should be necessary this time.

So I got some comics called Avengers Origins. All they do is re-tell the origins of Luke Cage and some other heroes. The only retcon I can find is in Avengers Origin: Ant-Man and the Wasp where it's revealed that Janet Van Dyne knew Hank Pym long before he was introduced. They now met right before he shrank himself for the first time. And also Avengers Origins Thor where we see that Odin manipulated Donald Blake to find the hammer. Then there's the Season One series that have lots of retcons for heroes origins.

Hi, fnord. I was just wondering what Sturky tab means?

A while back during a dispute between commenters here someone complained that i was too hard on one guy, threatening to ban him, but just gently told the other guy to go have some chamomile tea. The person who complained completely misinterpreted the entire exchange. But i thought it was funny and added a Chamomile Tea button, with the idea that when you were feeling like you might submit an angry flame comment, you could click the Chamomile Tea button instead to calm down. Then later i decided that the button should be more theme-appropriate, so i changed it to Sturky, the monster used to calm down Betty Ross when she was having a histrionic fit in Hulk #271.

Ah, I see. Brilliant!

Hey fnord, there's a continuity fill-in mini-series called Fantastic Four First Family. It takes place right after they got their powers for the first two issues and then it takes place after Fantastic Four #1 for the rest of the mini-series.

Thanks, pst1993. If that's the 2006 Joe Casey/Joe Weston series, it's already listed on the What's Missing page.

When I saw all they did in the mini-series The Marvels Project, I knew it was coming. In the Young Allies 70th Anniversary Special one-shot celebrating 70 years of Marvel, it was revealed that a lot of the Golden Age Timely Comics were wartime propaganda to boost morale. These stories didn't happen the way they did. They just got the basics right. Due to this, they did other series of the 2010s like Captain America Patriot (chronicles The Patriot's time as Captain America), the 70th anniversary one-shot specials of Marvel Mystery Comics, Miss America Comics, USA Comics and All-Winners.

Well, quite enjoyed the first two episodes of Netflix Daredevil, I think it's worth keeping watch.

When you do your next big back issue thing, I have some suggestions for comics to get and review. I would suggest a lot of continuity inserts. Captain America Patriot is a good start as it cronicles the Patriot's time as Captain America. The 70th anniversary one-shot specials of Marvel Mystery Comics, Miss America Comics, USA Comics and All-Winners would be good as I found them enjoyable. There is also Marvel Boy The Uranian. Then there's Avengers 1959 (they actually retconned in an Avengers Team for the year 1959). The Hero's Gap now has more inserts. First X-Men, Before The Fantastic Four and Angel Revelations.

Yeah, my next backissue add will either have an MM&M theme (Moon Knight, Micronauts, and Master of Kung Fu) or it will focus on continuity inserts. Or maybe both. But it won't be for a while. I intend to work my way through the 90s for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for the recommendations! You might want to check the What's Missing page. A lot of the stuff you've listed is already there, and you may find other inserts that you're interested in.

noticed from a search that one of your '89 covers was from '88 (the Spider-man one); sort of like the idea of at least one representative of McFarlane but nothing from '89 stood out?

Whoops. Thanks, Ataru. Yeah, i wanted a Ron Frenz retro cover contrasted with a McFarlane cover but i went back too far on McFarlane. MJ's big hair on the cover i originally picked was too much of a beacon, i guess. But i've changed it.

Hopefully big hair Mary Jane will appear in a later year...then again it isn't the same if it isn't Big haired Mary Jane by McFarlane. (though seeing Larsen's isn't bad either for context)

Well, greatly enjoyed Age of Ultron.

No spoilers about Age of Ultron please! We're not seeing it until next week. :-) Of course, i did create the Forum just for stuff like this, so if anyone wants to talk about it there, that's fine (just mark that there are spoilers).

Love the headshots on the character pages! Been AWOL so maybe they've been there for a while, but I just noticed them--great addition.

Thanks Shar. It's still an incomplete and slow-going work in progress.

Hi, fnord. Regarding your 1976 page, for what it's worth, the announcement regarding the "big news next ish about Gerry Conway and Marv Wolfman" came from Stan's Soapbox in the August, not the July, issue. Keep up the great work! Just started re-reading THE ETERNALS and liked your review very much.

Thanks, Matthew. Fixed it.

I've made a code change that will hopefully prevent, or at least reduce, accidental double comment submissions.

If you submit a comment and find that it's going into moderation or you're getting some other error, please trying doing a Control-F5 or Apple/Command-R. The way i've applied the update you shouldn't have to do that, but if that does happen give that a try. And if you're still having a problem please let me know in the forum.

fnord, a couple of possible duplicate character tags:

You have Bertrand Crawley and Betrand Crawley tagged as two separate characters. You have the same for Chad Mountebak and Chad Mountebank.

Thanks, Thanos.

Another possible duplicate: Nezarr and Nezzarr.

And on the character search page you have Justice Peace misspelled as "Justic Peace." (Sorry for all the nitpicking)

Thanks, Thanos. No problem on being nitpicky. In case you don't know, there's a thread on the forum to point out stuff like this, but if you don't want to register for the forum or whatever i'd rather hear about it in the comments than not at all. I do appreciate you pointing these things out.

Ah, my apologies. If it's more convenient for you to have these kind of things in the forum, I'll do them there from now on.

Absolutely love this site. It's a great way for adult me to revisit the comics of my youth, without traveling halfway across the country to fetch them from my parents' attic.

And really appreciate the love you give to Gillis' Defenders run. I always wondered if I was the only one who loved it.

Thanks Bob!

You're definitely not the only one who loved New Defenders, Bob - it was smart stuff.

The inkers credits for Hulk #292 and 293 were switched. Big Joe Sinnott inked #292, and Genial Gerry Talaoc inked #293 onto #313.

I'd like to petition Marvel to do Carol Danvers justice and make a true, complete Ms. Marvel #25. This, I believe, is part of what necessitated Avengers Annual #10, as well as the treatment afforded Carol in Avengers #200.

Even Omega The Unknown got a better sendoff.

Fixed the Hulk credits. Thanks Vin.

Okay - this is where Contact takes me, so General Comments it is. I went up to the personal blog level to confirm that my required info was up, even on a day I hadn't rechecked the Remember box again, before I came here to point out that it'd been working there since I first commented on something, and so wasn't my settings at my end.

Oddly enough, there's my info already up for the first time on the cronocomics project level. And I love the larger comment box. :b:

...So I go check a comic write-up page as soon as I posted the previous - and small box, Remember unchecked, no required info up for my commenting convenience. Sorry to be a bother...

Hmmm...I've had the same issue for quite some time, but considering the work Fnord puts into updating the site, it's a small thing to re-add info before posting.

Lo and behold, I didn't have to do it this time!

In my system there are "pages" and there are "entries". This page and the What's Missing and Out of Scope pages are "pages", and all the comic reviews are on "entries". It sounds like you guys are not having a problem on "pages" but you are on "entries". And it also sounds like BU is not having the problem on the "entries" on the main blog.

Not sure exactly what it means but it gives me something to look into. BU, i think you said you were using IE. Vin, are you on IE as well?

Safari and Dolphin, as well as IE.

To clarify, I believe you are correct in regards to "entries" versus "pages". The checkbox works here and on the main blog page, just not on the entries. As I stated earlier, it doesn't prevent me from contributing.

I have no problems getting it to remember my info when I'm using IE on my laptop, even if I haven't been on in a week (provided I haven't cleared cookies since). Safari however is a different story and I don't see a way fnord can help that.

IE 11 - the menu bar was refusing to come up that night, or I'd have given version then.

Vin, same here - just, I perceive a wish for comments on the part of our gracious host (who always receives "you missed a spot"s in the spirit of helpfulness intended) so, less barriers, more comments. Just seems like a helpful "missed a spot" to me, certainly no criticism intended.

Do you plan on reviewing Elektra Lives Again? It came out in or around 1990? I'm not sure its considered canon. It's a good read but I never hear many people discuss it like they do Frank Miller's other Daredevil work. Either readers don't agree with me that its good or its just flown under the radar all these years for some reason. Chronologically it is placed somewhere after DD-190. Thanks

It's not canon (i don't think it was ever intended to be) so i won't be reviewing it.

I agree that it's good, at least artwise. A nice collaboration by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley.

There were some comments in Amazing Heroes(one from Miller) in late 1990 stating that the GN was supposed to be in continuity.

I always assumed it was in continuity as well but since it was not covered on this site I then became less certain. Just out of curiousity, what about it would take it out of continuity?

I believe the issue is around the use of Bullseye. I believe that Miller had Bullseye "reserved" so that other writers couldn't use him, but Miller took a long time to get Elektra Lives Again completed, and in the meantime Mark Gruenwald decided to stop waiting and use Bullseye in Captain America's Streets of Poison. ELA has Bullseye still in prison after his last appearance in DD #200, but Streets of Poison shows him getting out of prison (Bullseye is also killed and resurrected in ELA, but i don't know if that mattered for continuity purposes).

So i thought that Marvel declared as the book was being released that it wasn't canon, but per Mark's comment i may be wrong and i can't really cite a source for any of this. And it's been a while since i read ELA.

I do know that the MCP lists the book as non-canon.

Thanks for clearing that up. That is disappointing to read though. I was looking forward to seeing your review of this graphic novel, as well as seeing some of artwork from the book posted on here as well. I guess there is no chance you will change your mind about reviewing it is there? Regardless, I appreciate you taking your time to answer these questions for me.

The reason why it's not canon is because ELA takes place before Born Again and at the end of ELA Bullseye is "permanently" killed. (Incidentally, so is Elektra.) So there's no way ELA can be in continuity.

I hate to Be That Guy, fnord, but I come in and catch up here via Recent Comments each morning - and suddenly, I think it was Tuesday, Recent Comments is fixed width so bumping up the display to 125% for ease of reading is no longer practical, because side-scrolling...

BU, i wasn't aware of it but i see that it was happening in IE. It's because of a comment someone left with a long hyperlink. Other browsers seem to know how to break a long URL like that but IE handles it poorly. I will see if i can find some way to help IE help itself. In the meantime, i guess i'll also ask others to help out in the sense that if you know you're going to be pasting a long URL use a service like TinyURL to shorten it.

I've done that for the URL in question and it seems to have addressed the issue.

Fnord, thanks for fixing that. I'm afraid that it seems to be a comment I posted regarding Hulk #374-375 which caused the problem. If it was, please accept my apologies. I'm sorry for the inconvience that it caused BU or anyone else reading through the comments and for the inconvience I put you through trying to troubleshoot and eventually fix the problem.

I have been used to posting on message boards that automatically reformatted long url links, but I should have asked you how to reformat the link once I saw how lengthy it was, after my comment was posted.

I will be careful not to repeat that error again.

I feel very foolish, though. Right now, I think I need to Sturky myself.

It's no problem at all, Aaron. No need to apologize. Just a limit of my system and/or IE.

Just as an FYI for everyone, it's also possible to embed a url using straight HTML. Here's an example:

<a href="http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic">this will be a link</a>

If you do it that way, a long URL won't be a problem.

Fnord, thanks!

You appear to be focusing on books from 1990 now. Just curious: Will you be covering the graphic novel "Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph & Torment" by Roger Stern, Mike Mignola, and Mark Badger from 1989? That's another old favorite of mine.

Thanks.

It will be relatively soon but still a little longer. It has to take place after Dr. Doom is restored to Latveria, and the MCP have it a little later than that, after Infinity Gauntlet. I'll be covering it in 1991.

Cool. Glad you'll be adding it. (After IG, though ... wouldn't have guessed that but haven't tried to think the continuity issues through.)

Triumph & Torment has to take place after Avengers 333 since Doom is still trying to save his mom in that issue. And of course, the continuity by that point gets complicated due to IG.

No Marvel Spotlight 5 in your mini-add, frond? Coming from a Godzilla fan like yourself, I'm shocked.
Considering the sheer number of books Marvel put out in 1991, finishing 1991 by the end of the year sounds VERY aspirational.

I am interested in that Dragon-Lord story. But i can save Marvel Spotlight #5 for my M themed back-issue add that i'll do at some point (filling in my Micronauts, Moon Knight, Master of Kung Fu runs).

Besides, Marvel's Godzilla is an abomination.

As a Godzilla fan from 4 years of age I guess I sorta kinda liked Marvel's Godzilla. I mean I've just accepted it typically won't be as good as the real deal. At least with exception to the new American movie and the cartoon featuring Toonzilla. I mean at least we have Jonah shouting at Godzilla and I believe Thor flipping Godzilla over.

Congrats on surviving 1990 and all that it encompassed. 1991 is going to be a nightmare with the flooding of the marketplace and all the zillions of new books and the height of the "Pre-Image Image" madness. But hey, at least we have the Infinity Gauntlet, merged Hulk and Fin Fang Foom build-up in Iron Man...and Deadpool but sadly with Liefeld still there he may take a while to develop into his classic form.

Thanks Ataru! Yep, still interesting things to come.

In hindsight I don't feel like Marvel lost it until 1993. That's around the time I thought the art started to suck. Everything was crazy anatomy in crazy poses, chain spit flying from contorted faces, and speed lines instead of backgrounds.

Not to mention the period from 1993-1996 alone brought us such classics as the Clone Saga, the Crossing, and Onslaught. If we could go back in time and do away with the speculator bubble I'm genuinely curious how many regular readers would have been lost during that period.

The New Characters Appearing in 1990 could maybe use a few additions- Silhouette, most of Code Blue, Blackout.

Thanks Michael. I agree. I added Code: Blue under Notable Events, and the other two as new characters.

I understand the reasoning, but it's a shame you wont be reviewing Guardians of the Galaxy, which I thought was easily the best of the new series launched by Marvel in 1990. The first year of that book, before it became infected with the dreaded 90s Ghost Rider/Punisher Syndrome, was stellar.

For what it's worth, i will be covering the first two annuals, which are both written by Jim Valentino (and the first is also drawn by him), because they cross over with other Marvel annuals. And i'll also be covering issues #27-34 or so because they also take place in the present day.

Fnord, in the Golden Age section, shouldn't Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #12 come after Marvel Universe #1-3?

Yes, thanks Aaron. Looks like i missed that when i did some shifting while adding Sgt. Fury #29 recently.

http://integr8dfix.blogspot.com/2015/11/1983-marvel-comics-group-last-of-best.html Just this and my tanks. Cecil

Hey all, at the risk of sounding anal, just a request regarding comments:

The posts on this site are not time dependent, so while some people read them as i post them, people may also be reading them 6 months from now or more. That's why i prefer to keep some types of comments off the individual entries. Please keep questions about my progress or what i'm going to cover on this page or other places like What's Missing or in the forum.

And with regard to typos and scan problems and the like, at this point, there are some readers who are willing to use the forum to let me know about them (and i appreciate that very much!). So if you see a typo or similar problem on a recent entry, most likely someone will let me know about it in the forum, and may have already done so (between the two places, i have been getting duplicate alerts lately).

In addition to the fact that people coming by 6 months from now don't want to read through typo alerts, there are good conversations in the comments, and i don't want to see them cluttered up. And some people are subscribed to the comments RSS feed and probably don't want to get typo alerts that way.

So while in the past i've said that i prefer typo alerts in the forum but will take them in the comments if you don't want to use the forum, i'm now asking that you let it be handled in the forum. If people disregard this request, i may not respond with a "thank you". I'll just quietly fix the error, and i might delete the notifying comment.

One grey area is character appearances and creator credits, so i understand if mistakes in those areas continue to get pointed out in the entries.

And let me just say that i appreciate the great comments that everyone leaves, and i appreciate it when people point out my mistakes (wherever they do it). This is just one guy's random website, and it's great to get feedback and thoughts and help from so many other people.

I would just like to thank you! This is an amazing site. It's thoughtful, well researched and well written. But most importantly it's fun! I seem to have discovered the Marvel Universe around the same time as you and similarly found the connectivity to be fascinating. Anyway, thanks again. Absolutely astonishing work!!!!

Thanks and welcome, Yogi!

Are you ever going to write a book? I'd buy it.

I am definitely not going to write a book! But thanks. :-)

If you go by word count, I think you've written tomes....

I'm a big Howard the Duck fan. I was intrigued to hear that FOOM #10 refers to Beverly Switler as Mercedes Bent. I'd love to see a copy of the article. Any chance Mark Drummond?

It's actually not an article; it's just a short news item.

Hello. I am preparing to embark on the adventure of your website, and have begun with "the rules". I like to know as best I can if I have found what I'm hoping to find (as yet, still not defined). Just felt compelled to say I'm looking forward to dipping my toe, and appreciate the sidebar reminders. I hope I don't forget them and take for granted I will be served by a staff of presumption. I might, and apologize in advance. If I do (assume), I hope it's considered a compliment--- I might be under the fun illusion of channeling. Best, emily

Emily, thanks for giving the Rules a read before diving in. Welcome, and i hope you do find what you're looking for.

Fnord, is there any way you can add the "year" dimension to the advanced search. Now that you are hitting the dark times of Marvel, I'd love to query specific issues as per your perspective.

Sorry in advance if this has been posted before

Tabe8

Seems the ratio on the comments of new vs old entries is changing as the timeline moves into the dark ages.
I'd forgotten just how quickly Marvel fell apart from 1990 into 1991, as Byrne, Simonson and Claremont bolted and Gruenwald jumped the shark.

Tabe8, unfortunately the info that i put under "Published Date" is not stored in a way that is search enabled.

I did spend some time today trying to make the categories (like the years, or EiC: Jim Shooter) as search criteria, but it doesn't seem to play well with the rest of the advanced search. And in any event, the search results already come back sorted chronologically (based on my placement, not the publication dates), so limiting by the year category wouldn't be all that helpful (i.e. it would just help filter things a little). I can see being able to search on the Published Date could be useful, but unfortunately i can't enable that.

Just to make sure i'm clear on what you're trying to do, can you give me an example? I interpreted what you said to mean like "Show me all comics drawn by John Byrne in 1984", and while that's not strictly possible, you can find all comics drawn by John Byrne, and then kind of eyeball where in the results list the 1984 comics are, with the caveat that continuity inserts or other considerations might put things out of order. But if you're trying to do something else entirely, let me know and maybe i can figure out a way to make it happen.

So my university has this awesome art gallery for EC comics until July 10th. Been there several times. They go into detail and have some originals on EC's horror, sci-fi, shock and Old Trend. Outside the building is this picture...https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/769957.jpg That's art by Johnny Craig. Never heard of him but I got excited and thought it was Jack Kirby's art work. Doesn't that man with the yellow hat look very Kirbyesque? Heck the Old Witch reminds me of Karnilla's witch. Craig Crackles sounds almost as catchy as Kirby Krackles.

@davidbanes: The exhibit sounds fascinating! btw Johnny Craig did that (in)famous cover depicting a severed head that Bill Gaines deemed to be in good taste "for the cover of a horror comic" during the 1950s Kefauver hearings. Later on in the 1960s Craig did some work for Marvel/Stan Lee, mostly on Iron Man. fnord has reviews of those issues. http://www.supermegamonkey.net/cgi-bin/mt512/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=3&Template=chronocomic&search=johnny%20craig

When I was researching some more info about comics I was reading (the only way I enjoy reading anything is 2 hours of research to 1 hour of reading), I stumbled on this set of books, which is - similarly to your website - apparently describing almost every Marvel comics of 60s, 70s and 80s

http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=777
http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=979
http://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1179

(random pages can be seen on Google Books).

Apparently, it's a paper version of website called "The Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index" (SAMCCI), that was taken down for some reason somewhere between 2000 and 2010, and it is still cached on web.archive.org.

What do you think about it? (I am asking both fnord12 and people here in general.)

I admire what they were doing and that they published it as a book, but actually.... as I was reading through the pages, I don't like it that much. It's just retelling of the stories - in much more boring way than this website - and worse searchability.

From a quick skim, actually looks pretty good to me. From what you said, i was expecting that it would be just dry descriptions like the Marvel Indexes, but there is commentary and behind the scenes stuff. And it's nicely put together. It does make more sense for something like this to be on the web though. As you say, for searchability, and also because it makes updates possible. I wonder why they took their site down.

I have a longstanding question about Captain America's wartime partner, Bucky:

When--in real time--was Bucky's birth name revealed to be James Buchanan Barnes?

I assumed I'd find the full name in my Kirby-Simon reprint volumes of the first 10 issues of the 1940s Cap book; but he's only referred to as Bucky Barnes at that time. The same is true of the 1960s revival stories in the Cap Omnibus Volume 1--which reprints the Kirby-Lee and Steranko periods.

My access to the 1970s-era Cap is spotty; but the earliest mention of the name "James Buchanan Barnes" I've been able to find comes in 1980's Cap #252, in the back-up feature "The Life and Times of Capt. America." Authors Roger Stern and John Byrne repeat the name late in their great origin issue, #255. Both are inveterate explainers of heretofore "missing" super-hero lore, and I can imagine they coined the name in their masterful Cap run (which I consider definitive of the character).

But I can also imagine Roy Thomas filling in that gap in his "Invaders" run, which was the only place Bucky appeared with any regularity in the 1970s. The real James Buchanan was the 15th U.S. President, immediate precursor to Lincoln, and widely considered the worst president for setting the stage for the Civil War. Perhaps it amused Roy to redeem this discredited name through Bucky, the way Steve Rogers' 4F status was redeemed through his transformation into Capt. America? However, if Roy did coin it, it wasn't in the first 21 issues of "Invaders," which I have in reprint.

FYI, the recent "Captain America: White" by Loeb and Sale has Steve Rogers refer to his sidekick as James, but that's an anachronism going by the publication chronology.

I know there were other Golden Age books featuring Bucky, and roughly a decade of Cap stories in the 1970s where Bucky's full name may have appeared. Maybe I've overlooked something else. But I wonder whether readers of this site have any thoughts on the full name of comicdom's most famous fallen soldier?

(NB: I posted the comment above in May, in honor of Memorial Day, on the page devoted to Captain America #251-252. I thought I might re-post it here in General Comments; I’m still interested in hearing from anyone who has an answer. This really is an enjoyable site, with commenters equal to the content.)

Just to close the loop, i've posted a response to Chris on the Cap entry. Chris, sorry i didn't respond earlier; i didn't know the answer so i left it to see if anyone else did.

Thank you, Fnord. I likewise left a note at the Cap 251-252 entry.

Okay, so I've had some extra time at work lately, and I was wondering about some things I couldn't get your advanced search page to perform, so I did a little statistical analysis. Yes, I'm aware that might be a sign of mental illness.

Anyway, since the above post didn't come out all nicely formatted like I hoped, basically what I did is come up with the average ratings you've assigned to comics for several years: 1961/62, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, and 1991.

What I really wanted to see was how different eras compared to each other. For instance, I've always had the opinion that the Jim Shooter years were Marvel's best, and this indeed bore that out. Your ratings for 1986 average out between a B and a B-, and for 1981 a little higher than a C+. The lowest rating was for the 1961/62, which earned just below a C-, and 1971, at just above a C-. This seems about right.

Some other things I noticed--the total ratings you have for 1971 drop compared to 1966. You don't have any Thor entries for 1971 which would up the total a little. I wonder too if much of 1971's Marvel output was outside of your project's scope--Conan and the various horror anthologies, mainly.

Generally, your grades follow a nice curve as well, with C being the most-awarded grade (386 times in the years I looked at). There are a couple exceptions. A lot of Ds pile up, suggesting you may need a D- to separate the terrible from the truly execrable (although I suppose once you're that low, maybe it doesn't matter.

You also have a pile-up at the B+ level, suggesting you may be hesitating to assign some things as an A- that really deserve it.

Overall, having gone through all these, I have to say I agree with the grades you've given, with the big exception of the 1966 Fantastic Fours, which I feel you criminally underrate (a C for Fantastic Four 51!).

Final attempt to make the table formatting work. (fnord, could you delete my earlier attempts if this one works--sorry for the extra work I'm causing!)

Ratings_1961/62_1966_1971_1976_1981_1986_1991_Total
A+__11______0_____0____0____0____5____11___0_____16
A___10______0_____0____0____0____21___14___6_____41
A-__9_______0_____0____0____0____1____11___11____23
B+__8_______0_____0____0____0____16___82___69____167
B___7_______0_____5____0____24___33___37___56____155
B-__6_______1_____12___1____19___23___47___30____133
C+__5_______4_____14___14___91___63___52___92____330
C___4_______3_____45___34___98___69___32___105___386
C-__3_______10____47___40___103__58___13___96____367
D+__2_______2_____3____11___9____8____12___54____99
D___1_______7_____5____19___34___2____5_____71___143
Total_______27____131__119__379__299__316___590
Average_____2.92__3.88_3.13_3.94_5.19_6.37__4.45

Still not perfect, but that last one is at least readable. So, I have the years across the top (I did 1961/61, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, and 1991).
The first column is the grade, the second column a numerical translation of that grade.
The next columns are the years, with the total number of grades awarded for each year.
The total grades given is the last column.
And on the bottom two rows, we have total issues graded, and the average grade for each year.

This is exactly why i said on the advanced search page that i wasn't sure if i should have made the grades searchable! ;-)

But thanks for the analysis, and good to see i'm largely following a bell curve. Yes, i don't give Fs and to get in the A range i feel like it needs to be truly special, so the clustering you see at the edges makes sense.

Let me request that if there's going to be any further discussion about my grades, let it happen on the forum (which also has editing options so Nick if you wanted to try again with the table, that may be the place).

So just a thought fnord, and not sure where else to comment it but here... when you get to 2000 you have to push ALL the X-related titles after a certain point back after all the rest of the year's Marvel titles to just before Maximum Security, because those books have a "six-month gap" (I never trust specific numbered gaps when dealing with comic book time but there IS a gap. Once you hit Maximum Security the X-books are synched back up with the rest of the Marvel U again because the X-Men participate in that crossover.

Thanks Jeff. A while before i get there, ofc!

Here's something to ponder over about the lack of visible aging in the Marvel Universe: http://www.writeups.org/aging-in-the-marvel-universe/

Someone posted a link here to a site with pirated digital comics. Probably the person who posted it didn't realize the implications, but linking to sites like that from mine could probably get me a DMCA notice or worse, so i took the comment down. I'll add an addition to The Rules when i have more time but wanted to explain why i was taking the comment down.

I notice you're no longer introducing this project as "humble." Good for you, dude.

Of course, since you're deep in the nineties, maybe it should be "Welcome to the excruciating mid-point of my soul -crushing project."

It was "humble beginnings" and yeah, i figured i'm closer to the middle, so i changed it. To be fair, it's the mid-point, not the project, that's soul-crushing. Hopefully. ;-)

You are a stronger man than I. I quit collecting as the 90's began, came back around late '92, and couldn't even make it a year. It was all so depressing. Do things get better in the late 90's, I hope?...

@Matt the later '90s get a lot better with Busiek on Avengers, Jurgens on Cap and Thor (and later Waid on Cap) and Alan Davis on the two X-Men books -- my opinion. Spider-Man doesn't get better until Straczynski in the 00s.

Hmm. IMHO, the next Marvel comic worth reading from this point forward will be the Waid/Garney "Operation Rebirth" storyline, starting in Captain America 444, which is October 1995. So, that's not too far off. But that's pretty much it until the "Heroes Return" in early 1998, as Jeff said (other than some diamond-in-the-rough writing from Warren Ellis).

From what I've heard, I'd would say the period prior to Heroes Return with Thunderbolts and early Deadpool would be worthwhile too.

Incredible Hulk is worth reading up until issue #425, and Silver Surfer is worth reading up until issue #109. Then there is Thunderbolts in 1997.

Fnord, since Vision is green in Spider-Man Unlimited 2 and Fantastic Four 377-378, you have to move those issues past Avengers 366. That means you also have to move all of Maximum Carnage, FF 376 and FF Annual 26. Don't you just love Gruenwald- DeFalco continuity?:)
And we're not even up to the big Blood and Thunder-Siege of Darkness- Starblast mess yet.

Also, if War Machine is a West Coast Avenger in Wonder Man 22-24 and USAgent 1-4, then those issues, plus Wonder Man Annual 2 and Wonder Man 25, all have to be moved after Avengers West Coast 93-95.

Thanks Michael. After my reshuffling yesterday, i had a suspicion that i'd have to put everything back, so i made sure i kept track of where everything was, and based on what you point out i have reverted that shuffle. I wanted to make a good faith effort to honor the passage of time (or lack thereof) that Nicieza intended in X-Force, but each one of the additional stories you mention would add more complications, and it just doesn't seem worth it. So i'll assume a gap in time between X-Force issues.

I do want to say that for stuff like this i don't blame the Gruenwald-DeFalco era per se. I think the big problem is writers who make every issue continue directly from the previous one while referencing ongoing changes in other books (the very temporary period where James Rhodes was in charge of Stark Enterprises being the most problematic in this case). Of course as a writer Tom DeFalco is very guilty of this himself on his FF run, but i don't necessarily blame this on editorial oversight, except maybe in a broad sense of not suggesting that the characters need to take a break from running from one thing to the next all the way from X-Cutioner's Song to Fatal Attractions. The implications of having War Machine appear in X-Force and how that affects whether Darkhawk can fly or Henry Pym is Giant-Man or what 'costume' the Vision is wearing seems way too subtle and complex for editors to have worked it out in advance in realtime, and it's not something most readers would notice.

I also want to say that even though it causes hair pulling, i don't mind when these types of problems come up. Because it means that there are a lot of interactions between characters and books, and that's exactly what i like about the Marvel universe.

fnord, just wanted to let you know that I find this to be a really interesting and informative website. Keep up the great work.

I love you, fnord!!

Wow. This site is amazing. I recently re-read the entirety of Chris Claremont's X-Men run, including his work on New Mutants, Excalibur, Wolverine, significant portions of Louise Simonson's X-Factor and New Mutants,various minis, events and relevant crossovers, and developed a chronology that I was pretty proud of, but this puts what I did to shame.

Of course, placing everything into an exact continuity is problematic at best as it isn't an exact science.

That said, I hope you'll indulge a theory of mine that would argue that your placement of New Mutants 21, Annual 1 and 22 comes too early in the timeline.

In my view, you place too much time in between New Mutants 21, where Warlock smashes into Asteroid M, and his rescue by Lee Forester in Uncanny X-Men 188, while the X-Men are in Dallas. I question that Magneto just bobbed in the ocean for days during the time before Storm lost her powers and the point that the X-Men arrived to fight the Wraiths(UXM 185-188 by your placement).

I feel the events of New Mutants 21 and Uncanny X-Men 188 need to be a little more concurrent. So, I postulate that the events UXM 186 (Lifedeath)and NM 21 (Slumber Party) take place largely concurrently.

This explains why there were no X-Men on campus when an alien crash-landed in their yard. They were on their way to Eagle Plaza to retrieve Storm. The snow started falling soon after the last page of NM 21, and Illyana's appearance in UXM 188 came soon after.

Thoughts? All in fun, of course.

@turtletrekker

Hi! I'm not fnord, but while your timeline makes sense if only reading X-comics, it bumps into problems if you factor in other things. The main culptit is Marvel Team Up annual 7, in which Warlock is already on Earth. It takes place in a long run of Spider-man stories which take place in a short span of time soon after the return from Secret Wars and there are a bundle of Spider-man appearances which happen between there and the snow starting to fall. If not for that I'd place it where you said in my own chronology. As it is, I look on Magneto's rescue from the sea as a 'whatever happened to...?' style flashback rather than in real time. something has to give somewhere.

that should be 'culprit'. I have no idea what a culptit is.

Thanks, turtletrekker!

As Benway says, the problem is that Marvel Team-Up annual #7 has to take place after New Mutants #21 but before the start of the Casket of Ancient Winters storyline, while Magneto resurfaces in an arc where Casket of Ancient Winters is beginning. It might be possible to compress things a little, but there are a number of dependencies. Once i've settled on placement for a year i don't move things around unless it's proven that it can't work (don't want to disturb the house of cards). In this case i don't think Magneto floating on some wreckage for a couple of days is too terrible (as you say, there are always things that are a little problematical). And the good news is that Lee Forester finds him in the Bermuda Triangle, so if we really wanted to we could make up a little Untold Tale where he spent some time in Skull the Slayer's pocket dimension. ;-)

I definitely appreciate the thoughts and hope it doesn't sound like i'm blowing you off.

Fnord, we'll miss you, but enjoy some time off. And when you come back, don't be afraid to give some of these nineties stories the short, dismissive reviews they deserve...

Thanks Andrew and those in the Infinity Crusade #6 comments, and everyone, really. I'll still be around for a bit (although no new posts until mid-Jan) but i hope everyone has a happy holiday season.

Welcome back fnord.

Hi everyone,just joined into this site solely about comics and I find it very much interesting so many thanks for letting me join the team!
There are a few things in my years of comics I would like to bring forward and this place seems the rightful spot. Nuff said!

Man, I don't know what Starblast, Blood and Thunder, and Siege of Darkness are, but they better be the Gravity's Rainbow of comics, that's all I'm saying...

What they are is a big mess of continuity issues all mixed together. They're fun stories individually, but a headache when put in chronological order.

Starblast - a Quasar crossover which crosses over with Fantastic Four, Sub-Mariner and Secret Defenders and has it's own series. Tie-ins are irrelevant filler and the art is generally atrocious. Also features loads of characters in small roles, including Doctor Strange and Warlock and the Infinity Watch.
Blood and Thunder - A Thor storyline crossing over into Infinity Watch/Silver Surfer/Warlock Chronicles. Also features Doctor Strange. Some more atrocious art and a overpadded weak storyline that's been playing out for a year already.
Siege of Darkness - A Midnight Sons crossover which also features Doctor Strange.

There are references back and forth between them with Warlock mentioning Blood and Thunder in Starblast and vice versa and so on. Same with Doctor Strange.

I was just wondering, there doesn't seem to be a Historical Significance filter on this site. I'm not sure if it'd really be needed but I may be interested in seeing all comics in a scale from regular stories to important stuff, or possibly categories for each HS level. Any plans to implement that? If not, why? Maybe wait until your project is finished? I'm not trying to give you more work, I'm just curious about this.

Historical Significance is one of the criteria on the Advanced Search page. It can be used by itself or in conjunction with some other criteria (e.g. all issues of Avengers with a HSR of 5, or run it with the Character Filter to find all Spider-Man appearances with a certain HSR).

I can definitely see other ways that people might want to use the field. One thing i'd like to do is add a greater than/less than option to the search. I've also had one other person ask for a way to filter the year pages by HSR, and i can see that being useful. But even though i try to do a lot of different stuff on this site, the main purpose is the chronology, so that's how everything is organized. At this time i don't plan to do any coding for a while; i'm focused on cranking out reviews.

Also, as i note on the search page, i kind of hesitated to make the Quality and HSR values searchable at all. The values are just my personal judgements, and i don't want to get into endless fights with people about how i've rated things. I can definitely see the value in wanting to filter down the huge list of entries to just the things that are important, but you may find that my definition of what's important isn't helpful to you. ;-)

Just wanted to add a clarification regarding my policy for mistakes. My request has been to point out typos and other obvious mistakes in the Thread of Shame. And that's been mostly happening.

One grey area is with regard to character tags. The "obvious mistakes" phrase comes into play here. If i've just neglected to tag Spider-Man in a Spider-Man comic, or if i've selected the wrong character tag (Daredevil Gladiator instead of Shi'ar Gladiator), then please identify that mistake in the forum. If pointing out a missing/incorrect tag also adds valuable information to the entry - the character in question is really a shape-shifter impersonating them, or a minor unnamed character that i missed will become important later - then go ahead and call it out in a comment on the entry if you prefer. Similar situation if the character appearance is questionable ("isn't that Shamrock's ear in the corner of that massive group shot?"). Anything that might merit debate or adds value should go in the comments, otherwise please put it in the forum.

A basic rule of thumb is when you come to this site to read an entry and the comments, do you want to have to scroll past a bunch of comments pointing out dumb mistakes and me acknowledging that i've fixed them?

As noted in several places (Q&A, The Rules, the forum), i may quietly delete comments that break this policy.

OK, that makes sense.

Okay, turns out the HSR filter pretty much fits what I was looking for. I should have got a good look at the advanced search page earlier. You're definitely right about the Quality filter though, this is just asking for trouble ;) (well I don't care much about that but I know many people do) Anyway, keep up the great work!

Congrats on finishing '93. The good news: the crash has arrived so way less books. The bad news: you're almost at the Clone Saga. May we all have mercy.

Looking forward to the Bob Harras era...Not!

Keep up the good work, mate! Enjoy your vacation.

Well, I am! They might not be the greatest comics, but they are what I started with, so it will be a huge nostalgia fest for me! Especially the Clone Saga! That had just wrapped up when I got into comics, so the discount bins were full of issues dealing with it. So it was easy for me to collect what felt like an epic story, without it dragging on for years and years. So I might be the only person in the world, but I have many fond memories of the Clone Saga and am really looking forward to it being covered!

Enjoy your "vacation" Fnord! You've earned it!

Great work, fnord! This site is both a wonderful source of information and highly entertaining. Enjoy your vacation.

Thanks everybody!

September!? Aaargh!!

Have a nice vacation, fnord.

One thing younger readers might not realize from fnord's 1993 page was that it wasn't just Marvel that was going crazy in 1993. In the summer of 1993, Superman returned from the dead, Azrael replaced Bruce Wayne as Batman. The summer of 1993 was in many ways the climax of 1990s craziness. And then the industry collapsed and everyone started getting desperate.

The long break will be frustrating, but enjoy the vacation!

Gutted you won't be back until September but, boy, you deserve the break!

I love this site. Enjoy your break!

Take it easy, fnord!

... and there's already spambotting. That didn't take long.

Have a nice break fnord!

I want to suggest something: A counter for the numbers of entries in each year.

Perhaps you've already thought of this and have a good explanation for not having it.

I think it would be a good feature to see the expansion/contraction of the industry (or at least Marvel's)

Regards and see you in September!

Enjoy the break! Maybe by September I'll be closer to the 90s myself in my X-book reading project. I'm stalled in 1987 Uncanny X-Men right now. That was a weird year.

Enjoy the break, although I'll miss the distraction of new posts on my lunch break. If you want to come back early, say, July.... :)

If only you had planned a Death of Fnord12 set of entries in anticipation of your September return, right? Enjoy your break with non-reality and have some fun!

If a good break ensures your ability to persist with this wonderful project over the long haul, I can only encourage you. But as someone who has so freely given so much to the online comics community, you shouldn't be begrudged whatever time you need for other things. Even reviewing some of the best material has to be quite an effort and I'm amazed you haven't burned out while going through less enjoyable stuff. Yours is an admirable and impressive labor of love and I salute you.

Just thought I'd post what other people have thought of a couple comic book storylines that have proven to be controversial:

The Crossing: http://www.delusionalhonesty.com/2011/04/crossing-not-avengers-abbey-road-1.html

The Second Clone Saga: http://www.benreillytribute.x10host.com/LifeofReilly1.html

I would imagine fnord will quote liberally from Life of Reilly in his Clone Saga reviews considering the wealth of quotes from people involved it presents.

The only reason I'm looking forward to the "Clone Saga" reviews is because "Life of Reilly" was such a fascinating read that I am genuinely curious about the actual comics.

After months of reading stuff and then reading fnord's reviews about that stuff chronology became a natural thing for me. I'm already trying to find a reading order for Civil War II and its various tie-ins and generally everything post-Secret Wars. If fnord really doesn't make a separate chronology for everything after 2015 (and it'd be perfectly fine, given how much work he'd already doing) and if someone else doesn't do it I might very well do it myself after fnord is done with this project. But let's wait and see :)

Hey guys, this is a totally unrelated question but I feel you are the best people to ask.

I'm going to las Vegas in a couple of weeks and I'm wondering if you could tell me whats the best place to find x-men back issues of the early 2000s.

Thank you!

Committed a minor infraction in my first-ever comment, sorry about that. I tend to be the guy that reads the directions last!

Well I guess this wasn't the proper place for my question.

Thanks anyway

I think the all new all different avengers free comic book day issue was published before the 2015 secret wars. I might be wrong but I just wanted to check. If I am right I was wondering wether you are going to add it when you get to 2015.

No, he won't cover it, because - regardless of when it was published - it's set AFTER Secret Wars 2015. Same goes for a lot of other comics they released before Secret Wars 2015 actually wrapped up.

Hm. A question.

Now that Ultimate Universe got folded into 616, are Ultimate books considered "canon"? :)

(meaning, will they be covered in this project)

No, they weren't "folded" into the main universe, the universe was destroyed and a few characters made the jump over. Like how Nate Grey and Dark Beast did from Age of Apocalypse or the Squadron Supreme did.

And, even if that was the case, they wouldn't have been folded in to the main universe until AFTER fnord's stopping point.

@Fnord Is there a reason for Ghost Rider #10 (original Johnny Blaze series) to be missing? I've scanned the site and haven't seen it. From what I recall, it was a team-up with Son of Satan, had Frank Robbins art, and seemed to immediately precede the "Salvation Run" story in issue #11. If I've missed something, please feel free to correct me. Thanks, and have a good Memorial Day.

@Brian Coffey: Ghost Rider #10 was a victim of the Dreaded Deadline Doom and contained a reprint of Marvel Spotlight #5.

@BenHerman Thanks for that. I tried to remember that issue by memory, that was a comic long since discarded, and my collection definitely needs to be reorganized. I wondered if perhaps that might be the case and I got the numbering wrong. Thanks again.

Just thought I'd like to let you know you've been directly mentioned twice and indirectly mentioned once on TVTropes as seen in the links below:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/CharacterizationMarchesOn
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/SeriesContinuityError
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheCelestialMadonnaSaga

TVTropes actually is how I discovered this site in the first place. Someone linked to the Odin vs Infinity fight review in the forums. Btw, always nice to see another troper here!

And your review of Avengers 200 is referenced in Carolyn Cocca's Superwomen: Gender, Power and Representation.

In the movie Wonder Woman's defense: a whole lot of the rendering of mythology involves Christianizing it. Therefore the frequent rapist and animal lover Zeus=God. Not so bad Hades=evil fiery devil. And Hera goes from being really petty, though you could understand her disliking Zeus, to just being good wife to good ruler. I think the movie was merely obeying the roots.

Regarding the "Amazons are souls of abused women" thing- that's a relatively recent retcon- 1987. Not something that's been part of the mythos from an early stage.
And I can't believe fnord forgot Visionaries- they had a Star comic.

Welcome back Fnord!

Welcome back! 😀 I do realize that I basically just said the same thing as Nate but I wanted to welcome you anyways.😉

I want to do a bunch whole bunch of happy face emojis to give you a proper welcome fnord but it would probably annoy you if I do to many so I'll settle for 5. 😃😃😃😃😃

P.S It still says that the comments are disabled.

I'm sorry if I should have put that in the forum. I am fine with you deleting my comment if you want to! (As you can see I read the rules. Do I get extra credit?😀

I wish you could edit comments because I just realized I forgot to put this symbol ) at the end!

Sorry for posting so many comments at the same time I was just exited to finally have you back!

Oh, thank God you're back. The site feels dead without you...

Howdy, Fnord! Glad that you've returned. Arguing with Trump zombies in the YouTube comments sections has become a stone drag! Also, thanks as always for the answers to my inquiries before your sabbatical from comments, they were more than fair. I look forward to quality back-and-forth with you and my fellow visitors, as well as seeing your new reviews and additions.

Thanks all. Just to set expectations, i'm only "back" in the sense that i'm around to moderate comments. I won't be starting reviews again for a few weeks.

Hey fnord12, if it helps with your project, Marvel has been recently publishing the Clone Saga as two sets of trade paperbacks: Spider-Man: The Complete Clone Saga Epic (Books 1-5) and Spider-Man: The Complete Ben Reilly Epic (Books 1-6). Also, there was a 1997 trade paperback called Spider-Man: Revelations that had 14 bonus pages added onto the Spider-Man #75 entry. It's no longer in print but I wanted to inform you of it in case you're interested.

See here, specifically the comment at the bottom. fnord is easing up on looking for things he doesn't have physical copies of in part because he's running out of room to store them. Getting trades would help a teeny-tiny bit, but not nearly enough to be worth it.

Those 14 extra pages in Revelations are also in the Ben Reilly Epic Vol. 6 too.

Today, I opened comicbookresources and I got very, very sad.

What happened to that website? "Comics Should Be Good" is still there, hidden on http://www.cbr.com/tag/csbg/ , but the whole website is... sad.

Actually, I think the rebranding and redesign broke some links now and then in the comments. Basically all those "comics legends" links no longer work and redirect to the main website.

(But the fact that I noticed all that only now is probably telling. :( )

I mean, broke some links in the comments on SMM, and probably in the articles themselves.

For example I just saw this link - http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2015/06/05/comic-book-legends-revealed-526/2/ - on here http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/contest_of_champions_1-3.shtml -

The link goes to the terrible CBR frontpage ; correct link is http://www.cbr.com/comic-book-legends-revealed-526/

I don't think you should correct that, link rot is unevitable unfortunately these days

Before the awful CBR redesign, Comics Should Be Good also included a terrific, lively comments section. That's now gone, as well (there is a nominal comments section on the new site, but it doesn't seem to be used much).

Let's hope Super Mega Monkey is not bought by clickbait farm! :)

Fnord was made aware of the CBR redesign fairly close to when it happened.

I've added this to the comments policy section in The Rules:

Please also respect the character limit. I can understand occasionally needing to go a little long and following up with a second comment. But if you find yourself posting multiple full-length comments in a row in order to deliver your thesis, please do it on your own blog and provide a link for anyone that is interested.

All, just a reminder that you don't have to tell me what i "forgot" or "missed" or that you're "surprised" that i didn't mention something in a review. If i made a mistake, let me know, preferably in the thread of shame. Otherwise just feel free to expand on my review with your comment. Depending on my level of interest with a comic, there are bound to be things i gloss over, but if they are important to you, just mention them and they'll be there on the page. The comments are an invaluable part of the site, and this will help me crank out my reviews at the pace that i do without feeling obligated to cover every detail in every story. Thanks!

Any chance we could get either A) a way to search by grades, or B) a list of all the comics you give A/A+ too? I'd love to see what your top ones are, but don't know any way to find them all besides brute force. Thanks!

Wait, never mind, I found it. Sorry.

Re: "X-Men" 104-5: Part of the problem is just the nature of a comments section. They tend to wander around. It's fnord's house so he can decide what goes on whatever basis he chooses. A forum is a different animal than a comments section, and this is the internet. If we can't indulge ourselves immediately, anything else is second-rate. For good or bad.

The complexity of the Marvel Universe doesn't help. Issues and storylines segue into each other, characters can appear in any title and discussing the creators is a very valid option. We're not comparing "300" and "Sin City: The Big Fat Kill" to the Death of Elektra (except maybe for a toss-off reference or a joke.) We're not comparing "Secret Wars II" to whatever Paul Levitz did with Jim Shooter's Legion of Superhero characters. If we were talking about Neil Gaiman's "Sandman," it would be fair to address other issues of the series, other Gaiman books and spin-offs, etc.

Fnord has bandwidth to consider and moderating the comments section, so it's not like he doesn't have other concerns. I'm not saying he's wrong, but I don't think there's a way to handle it that makes everyone happy. "Take it to the forum" will almost always lose when you can write a comment and push 'post' on the spot, and Claremont's X-Titles are practically designed for people to be interested in other aspects of an issue or series or character above and beyond these particular issues.

Jeeze, Chris - you expose me for a moron --- here, and not there, of course.

Just deleted too much ruminations on my own moderating philosophy and asking myself whether any particular thing going that I don't much care for is actually a problem, because I've presumed enough on Our Gracious Host, and you're right that he has to juggle a lot of eggs on this site. -In the end, though, it's all about what makes the maximum number of people maximally happy, and a manger should, by rights, factor some of that in for himself, too...

Well I also think that anybody who finds a website with a specific page about "X-Men" #104-5 that they enjoy and start reading the comments isn't going to be too put off by the discussion we were having. We were polite and respectful of disagreeing viewpoints. Frankly, I'd give greater credence to the people who are just plain sick of yet another discussion of Claremont's X-Titles. I think that's a more valid complaint than fnord [PBUH] telling us to stay on-topic or take it to the forums. But it is what it is.

Noting that I've no intention to keep patting this ball into the air ad nauseum - That's a really good point well-put; I daresay you and I have each enjoyed the other being wrong and attempting to set him straight. I would hope it shows, and I'd venture that the comment thread in question is the kind of internet thing where people learn ALL SORTS of things for the first time, browsing. And a good time had by all -albeit, a little bothersome to a nerdish sense of order, yes- is a very good thing. We'll always have Paris.

The Legion of Super-Heroes had already been in existence since 1958 before Jim Shooter started writing for DC in 1966 at the age of 14. He created 3 legionnaires (at a time when there had already been about 21 or more), namely Karate Kid, Princess Projectra, and Ferro Lad, who was one of the first legionnaires to be killed for dramatic purposes. Shooter also created the Fatal Five (Tharok, Emerald Empress, Persuader, Mano, and Validus). Wikipedia also gives him credit for creating the Sun-Eater, but I question that; I think the Sun-Eater had been used before, but I no longer have my LSH collection to verify that. Finally, I've long believed that the Emerald Empress and Persuader were inspired by Marvel's Enchantress and Executioner, who predated them by 2 years. But they were all pretty cool IMO, except for Karate Kid, who pre-dated the movie series of the same name by about 20 years.

Great, now I have to rewrite what I was planning to say about that time the Sun-Eater fought a female redhead named Jean. Or was it the Sin-Eater? Damn you, Jim Shooter!

I think the(a?)Sun-Eater previously appeared in a panel in an Edmond Hamilton-written issue.

The Sun-Eater had never been used before; it was introduced as the plot device for bringing together the Fatal Five. Strange as it might seem in retrospect, Shooter created a very big chunk of Legion continuity and the great majority of their classic antagonists, to the point that a substantial portion of the 1970s Legion stories was basically writers expanding on the hints and characters he'd tossed off along the way. It's worth recalling that the Legion was, for a long time, just some colorful stuff that showed up in Superboy stories, and consistency was limited mostly to the Legion auditioning ad occasionally accepting new members.

Of the big-name Legion foes, it's really just the Time Trapper, Glorith, and the "adult" Legion of Super-Villains -- most prominently Lightning Lord -- that predate Shooter. He co-created not only Karate Kid, Projectra, and Ferro Lad, but also Shadow Lass. He also co-created the Fatal Five, Universo, Mordru,the Dark Circle, the Dominators, the Miracle Machine, the Controllers, the Sun-Eater, Doctor Regulus, Nemesis Kid, Grimbor the Chainsman, and Black Mace.

Appropriately enough given the purposes of this site, the Legion was one of the more continuity-heavy books at DC. Again, this was largely Shooter's work, as he was trying deliberately to imitate the Marvel model. It was one of the only Silver Age series period where heroic characters could die, and a DC series where the heroes developed distinct personalities.

Edmond Hamilton wrote a novel called The Sun-Smasher in 1959, expanded from a short story of 1954. In it,t he title object was a weapon used by an evil king, and was actually called "the Hammer of the Valkar." However, it focuses more on a character learning he has a secret heritage on an alien world, and that his human identity is a fake one he's been brainwashed into. The superweapon is more a McGuffin than anything.

I don't think Hamilton ever wrote for Marvel. However, the idea of a character who's brainwashed into thinking he's someone else is rather like the idea Grant Morrison pitched to Marvel for Nick Fury -- that Fury was actually just a fake persona imprinted on various people over the years. When it was rejected, Morrison used it as the basis for The Filth instead. And it also bears some similarities to the "Nancy Rushman" plot in the Claremont-era Marvel Team-Up.

There was another Sun-Eater who appeared in Adventure Comics #305 (1963) in a story written by Jerry Siegel (Superman's co-creator) which pre-dated Shooter's run. He was defeated by Legionnaire Lemon, who only appeared for one issue because he was secretly Mon-El (note that Lemon is an anagram of Mon-El, which was a clue for the readers).

I still have a vague memory of another earlier story which featured the Sun-Eater in a panel or two, likely written by Edmond Hamilton as Mark suggested, but without my old collection at hand I'm unable to verify this. Hamilton introduced a lot of monsters and concepts in his stories which were later reused by other writers.

"Shooter created a very big chunk of Legion continuity and the great majority of their classic antagonists, to the point that a substantial portion of the 1970s Legion stories was basically writers expanding on the hints and characters he'd tossed off along the way."

Something similar could be said for both Siegel and Hamilton. Paul Levitz probably wrote more Legion stories than any other writer, but he spent most of his pages reworking old concepts, which he did well-- and I don't mean this disrespectfully-- insofar as the vast majority of Marvel's later writers also spend more pages revisiting old characters and revising old stories than they spend creating new material and concepts.

I'd forgotten that odd two pages of Siegel's story, which as a green, fiery monster called a "Sun-Eater" who is driven off by Mon-El's heat-vision, which is apparently hotter than the sun?

Shooter's "terrifying space cloud" version reminds me of the way Galactus was portrayed in Fox's first Fantastic Four movie.

I suppose analogies are in order:

Shooter : LSH :: Roy Thomas : Avengers :: Claremont : X-Men
Levitz : LSH :: Shooter : Avengers :: Gerber : Defenders

But we're getting well into "visit the forums" territory here.

I know ha I guess a guy who can fly into the sun must have some badass heat vision. Found some relevant panels from Adventure #305 here: http://legionofsuperbloggers.blogspot.com/2017/01/whos-who-sun-eater.html

It's the "terrifying space cloud" version however that I'm unable to locate. *sigh* I was hoping I might find it in Hamilton's Legion of Super-monsters story, but instead I only noticed the similarity between Jungle King (1963) and Kraven the Hunter (1965). Both of course should probably be considered derivative of Tarzan rather than either one of the other.

I'm curious as to how much the "visit the forums" policy might extend to the "General Comments" section. Perhaps Aron the Rogue Watcher would be so kind as to comment on whether or not he finds these General Comments equally annoying. They don't disrupt any specific comic book entries but might still be considered too disruptive of the "Recent Comments" sidebar and "All Comments" section.

My general sense from The Rules is that this is for comments that are about the site's updating or overall site-related questions and comments. Basically, stuff about the site that isn't entry-specific, about what's Out of Scope, or best fit for the Thread of Shame.

When we're discussing a DC comics series that's way Out of Scope, it's hard to see where it belongs other than the forums.

Well I'm just asking. I personally don't mind posting in the forum and don't wish to annoy anybody, but a lot of those whom I consider to be good commentators seem very reluctant to post there for whatever reasons. I don't think they're trying to be annoying either. Originally I too was reluctant to register at the forum so I can understand why others might be equally or even more reluctant. Posts in the forum don't seem to draw the same attention as comments do in the comments sections, and this might be part of the reason why people don't want to post there. So please accept this comment as an "overall site-related" question. Maybe a separate section for "General Discussion" or "Digressions" or some such title might be considered as a reasonable compromise? Maybe there's a way to keep such comments from showing up in the "Recent comments" sidebar? And maybe not-- I sure don't know-- but these are just suggestions to be considered only when time allows. I don't wish to second guess fnord12's intentions or try to upstage his moderation of the site when he's absent. Thanks. I enjoy this site immensely and am altogether grateful for it.

One could also make the case that discussing Jim Shooter's pre-Marvel writing contributions is not too far off-topic, and might be of general interest to many Marvel readers everywhere. And yet it too can lead into further digressions, in this case, about other LSH writers. I'm not trying to start a debate about that, either, but it just seems like it's in the nature of the discussions here that they are bound to occasionally get hijacked onto related topics which might or might not be of interest to other visitors on the site. Thanks again; I'll shut up now and leave it to others to reply or not as they see fit.

Omar has it right; this page is for one-off questions or comments about the overall site (a lot of the comments on this page pre-date the forum). The "separate section for 'General Discussion' or 'Digressions'" that doesn't show up on the Recent Comments page literally is the forum.

The purpose of this site is for me to put my comics in order and discuss the individual issues, and to hear thoughts from others on the same. The forum exists for people who want to hang out and discuss other topics. The comments sections on the entries are not designed for multi-paragraph, twenty back-and-forth posts between two or three people. But the forum is good for that. If the forum is where discussions go to die, that may be an indication of how many people who come here are really interested in off topic conversations. There are a lot of other sites on the internet for talking about comics generally. If they don't get captured on my site, it's no loss to my project.

Sorry if that sound callous, but i feel like everything i'm saying is self-evident, and the vast majority of people that post here seem to understand it intrinsically and/or have picked up on it after reading my Rules page and seeing me step in a few times. With this latest episode, there were three or four people that politely indicated that the back and forth was off topic. And then when two people finally left irritated comments (understandably, in my opinion) and i stepped in, i got "Ok fnord it's your house" and then another half-dozen comments complaining about my policy. Stuff like this takes all the joy out of my project.

I was hoping to just let people vent and move on, but then i woke up to the Invasion of the Legion of Super-Heroes! ;-)

Sorry if this is genuinely confusing to people. I love the people who comment here and i don't want people to be afraid to post. The problem isn't the occasional off topic comment, it's when the back and forth discussion of something off topic dominates the entry. If you find yourself tempted to respond to something that's off topic, that's when you should consider creating a forum topic, and if your dislike of the forum is greater than your need to respond, let it drop. Thanks!

(Also, there's no need to respond to this post. If you feel the need to rebut, clarify, etc., please take it to - you guessed it! - the forum.)

Yeah, sorry. I had the strength of character not to take the Legion bait -and I'm LLL all the way back to the early 70s- but since it happened anyway, I don't have the maturity to not mention before I bugger off again that I looked at the forum yesterday, and didn't see a recent X-Men thread. -So still definitely no sale.

I have to admit I was a bit confused about the policy and also that it's been awhile since I read the rules. Thanks very much for replying and clarifying.

Thumbs-up, Andrew, re: your last comment in the Daredevil thread, and I'll drop that line of talk now. "Take it to the forum" still ruins fun side-tracks for me, but I cannot resent it nearly so much if somebody actually tries to take it to the forum - I saw your X-Men thread, too. Good man.

-fnord - I supposes a few user buttons to auto-insert HTML tags automatically -and keep me from failing to close some italics- isn't feasible?

-Oh, and I'd further suggest that Andrew has established an excellent custom that other forum members ought to follow when they deem a comment thread is going off-topic and into a "take it to the forum" situation - start the thread and link it. I'm confident that fnord is glad when the community here develops that sort of smoothly self-regulating habit. Innerwebs communities work better when that sort of thing crops up, reducing the workload for the managers.

I opened a thread. Click on my name to get there if your interested.

I've tested the forum in multiple browsers & devices and everything seems fine. No changes were made recently and no one's been banned. If anyone is still having trouble, please let me know what's happening (exact error message if one is given) and your OS & browser versions.

It's working okay for me using Linux and Firefox but my way-out-of-date Mac OSX 10.5.8 and Firefox 10.2 can no longer access the forum although I was always able to access it previously. The browser error message is "The connection was reset. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

I changed the URL from

https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/phpBB3/

to

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/phpBB3/

and it now works okay, so it probably has something to do with the browser's HTTP Secure authentication which is affecting some (out-of-date?) browsers but not others.

Had an emergency appendectomy last night. Fnord, your site has made the time go by well in lieu of a proper stack of marvels, ecs, and mad magazines.

fnord12 may want to cut the project off in 2011, not 2015, as Marvel apparently put out a TPB of nothing but Impossible Man stories that year. Clearly this marks the true death of the Marvel Universe.

What's next, an all-Zodiac collection of Avengers issues? Spider-Man Visionaries: Terry Kavanagh? The Brotherhood by X Omnibus?