Issue(s): Marvel Fanfare #25
Cover Date: Mar 86
Title: "School's out!"
Credits:
Bill Mantlo - Writer
June Brigman - Penciler
Terry Austin - Inker
Rosemary McCormick-Lowy - Assistant Editor
Al Milgrom - Editor

Review/plot:
The main story in Marvel Fanfare #24-26 are from Doug Moench's Weirdworld fantasy storyline, but they all have back-ups that take place in the Marvel Universe.

This one features Delayne Masters, a good student in a school overrun by gangs.

He receives the Uni-Power and becomes Captain Universe and starts fighting back against the thugs.

Even after the Uni-Power is gone, he leads an uprising of the other good students against the gang kids.

It's a slight story that feels like filler. It's not Brigman's best work, either. But it does show the potential of the Captain Universe concept as a 100 Bullets style, someone has a problem and briefly gets the power to solve it, type of series. Someone would just need to develop the stories a little more; the problem here is it takes a potentially serious problem and trivializes it with the pure wish-fulfillment storyline and doesn't even really give us that nice feeling from Delayne's perspective of triumphing over his adversaries. I mean it's just a ten page back-up story; i don't fault Mantlo too much for that in this case. Just saying that more could be done with the concept.

In addition to this and the Weirdworld story, this issue also has pin-ups from David Sim. Definitely a rarity to have Sim on Marvel stuff.

Quality Rating: C+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: No reason not to place this at publication date.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Dave Sim's Cyclops looks like Don Simpson drew it.

The Iron Man Dave Sim drawing's pretty nice. I reread Cerebus recently, and I was struck by something I hadn't really noticed reading the issues one by one: Dave writes about alcohol a LOT.