Obsessively putting our comics in chronological order since 1985.
| 1990-02-01 03:03:13 |
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Marvel Comics Presents #80 (DotD)
Issue(s): Marvel Comics Presents #80 (Daughters of the Dragon story only)
Cover Date: 1991
Title: "Child's play"
Credits:
Mary Jo Duffy - Writer
Chris Tsuda - Penciler
Joe Rosas - Inker
Kelly Corvese - Assistant Editor
Terry Kavanagh - Editor
Review/plot:
This is the second Daughters of the Dragon story to be written for Marvel Comics Presents by Mary Jo Duffy. Duffy wrote Power Man & Iron Fist, so it's nice to see her return to some of the supporting characters from that book, and it's nice to see Misty Knight and Colleen Wing playing a non-supporting role.
Since the Daughters run a detective agency (Nightwing Restorations) it's easy to give them a simple one-off story for this book. In this one, they are working on a kidnapping, and getting help from a girl that knows the layout of the building that the kidnapping victim is being held in. The twist is that the girl turns out to be the kidnapping victim, who managed to escape but is treating the whole thing like a game.
Misty and Colleen weren't aware of the girl's nickname due to an incompetent secretary named Penny (who i don't think we ever see again).
Chronological Placement Considerations: This should take place before Misty and Colleen start appearing in Namor.
References: N/A
Crossover: N/A
Continuity Insert? N
My Reprint: N/A
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Comments
The secretary isn't the only incompetent one- why didn't Colleen and Misty ask for a photo of the victim?
If you have an anthology comic like MCP, there's only a few things you can do with it.
1) Use it as means to develop new talent. New writers and artists who haven't proven their worth can be given some pages to see how they tell a story using characters they can't damage.
2) Use it as a means to allow "important" talent to tell stories that otherwise couldn't be publish because of format issues. It's a good way to reward them.
3) Use it to develop and showcase lesser characters with important stories as a tryout for a limited or ongoing series of their own.
Some amount of inventory story dumping is inevitable, but it can be done in a tolerable way if there are good quality stories.
However, at this point Marvel seems uninterested in any kind of editorial excellence. I would like to say that this would never happen under Jim Shooter, but he allowed Marvel Fanfare to be overpriced crap. It's just an even worse version of Solo Avengers.
MCP really seems to be a way to provide an income to various hangers on at Marvel at this point - whether old classics like Ditko, loyal Bullpen members like Duffy, writers and artists who don't have consistent series, or old cronies. There is nothing that indicates the editors were doing any real work developing talent or use the opportunity to tell interesting stories.
At least this story can conceivably be classified as #3. It returns an old writer to her old characters. This probably did not make anyone want a Daughters of the Dragon story, but neither is it awful.
It doesn't seem that hard to do it right. Find a popular character that doesn't have his own title, perhaps an old Avenger or X-Man not currently on the published team. That is your headliner. Let your creative team know they are supposed to develop him like he had his own title - just with lower page count.
Find an older creative team and let them do something non-commercial, but in high quality like when they brought back Moench on Shang Chi. Let them do extended arcs and that if they do well, they can continue with the character.
Find some new talent that needs developing and give them steady work until you raise them where they can take over an actual title.
If you need to dump inventory stories, keep it to a minimum every issue.
MCP seemed like this is how it started (except that Wolverine already had a solo series), but it quickly declined into garbage.
I'm pretty sure Wolverine's ongoing (not mini) came after MCP - wasn't MCP where the Madripoor setting was established?
The format really restricts what you can do with MCP - it's close to impossible to really do inventory stories in the format unless you just happen to have an eight-page backup sitting around, so everything has to be specifically built for the format. Once it started moving away from classic creators working on non-commercial concepts, there wasn't really anywhere for it to go but "Wolverine and a bunch of filler", especially since, once it started getting really backlogged, the ongoing stories that used to be its bread and butter were easier and more commercial to convert into one-shots than these filler single stories, and those are the ones that don't suck.
According to dcindexes, Marvel Comics Presents 1 came out on 5/3/88 and Wolverine 1 came out on 7/12/88.
