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So last year over in the general discussion threads I had restarted an old project of mine where I'd read through the main 616 continuity starting from Fantastic Four #1(no set in stone end point but it's likely I'll stop sometime in the 90's) and share my thoughts on each issue, after a couple months I had to take a hiatus for various real life reasons, well last night I got back to it, just realized I should probably be crossposting it here as well, so here's my most recent post, it includes the rest of the posts I've made as well for the project, future posts I'll post in both threads at once
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Mar 5, 2022 04:05
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 08:04 |
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once again time for more Marvel with the next five issues; Fantastic Four #13: on the one hand the Red Ghost And His Indescribable Super-Apes is an incredibly goofy concept even by Silver Age standards, on the other the introductions of both the Blue Area of The Moon and of The Watcher are just absolutely well done, all in all a really fun issue Tales to Astonish #42: "Voice of Doom" is a really fun story for Ant Man dealing with a unique villain(yet another of those guys who appears once early on then doesn't appear again for a couple decades) and beating him in a clever manner, also a surprisingly funny gag about people getting hypnotized into eating dog food Tales of Suspense #40: in retrospect it's kind of funny how both Hulk and Iron Man were gray in their debut stories but switched to more vibrant colors for their second and onward stories, though Iron Man's golden version of his first costume is mostly forgotten these days outside of being the costume he wore in Avengers #1, overall much of the story is dedicated towards both explaining Tony Stark's situation in general(brilliant patriotic scientist, handsome millionaire playboy, and of course being Iron Man and needing an electric chest plate to keep his heart going) and setting up him deciding to change his costume's color(by having him realize that between it's large bulky appearance and gray coloration it makes him look a bit too much like a monster), which leaves the actual conflict of the story(random US town taken over by a super powered Neanderthal with mind control powers named Gargantus) a bit underdeveloped and ending a bit weirdly too(Gargantus turning out to be a robot built by aliens), overall though a reasonably entertaining story(much of said entertainment coming from how ridiculous all of Tony Stark's "transistor" based technology is) Journey Into Mystery #92: a fun little issue where Loki steals Thor's hammer and until he gets it back Thor just keeps making new hammers to solve his problems much to Loki's frustrations, a very Silver Age story in the best way Fantastic Four #14: another really good issue(aside from some old timey sexism here and there), with the return of the Puppet Master(who is still at this point the creepiest villain in Marvel and it's biggest rear end in a top hat too) and some really good fights between the Fantastic Four and Namor, Jack Kirby clearly had some fun with the various sea critters Namor made use of in this issue overall a very entertaining set of issues, and here's the covers;     
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Mar 6, 2022 03:45
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cant cook creole bream posted:Was Jessica a SHIELD agent at some point? I think there was a What If about that
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Mar 12, 2022 01:08
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What If can be fun but too many of them end up being depressing "everyone dies" situations to act as a smarmy "here's why things happened the way they did in canon cause the alternative would have been worse now shut up" Its one of those things that DC's Elseworlds comics were slightly better at avoiding
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Mar 13, 2022 22:35
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howe_sam posted:What else are you going to call a team with Galactus the Lifebringer on it? I'm still mad they undid that
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Mar 15, 2022 01:20
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Splint Chesthair posted:Budiansky also was the dude responsible for the stats on the back of G1 Transformers boxes, wasn’t he? He helped create a very large percentage of the G1 roster and wrote the comics for it's first couple years too, he's always been a little bemused at the ongoing popularity of Transformers and how it's fandom views him cause for him it was just a job
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Mar 21, 2022 23:05
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Dawgstar posted:I am vaguely irritated that Marvel Unlimited does not, in fact, have the Official Handbook or the '89 update. To be frank the fact that they don't have literally every comic they've ever published that wouldn't have rights issues up on there is an absolute joke considering the service has been around for about a decade now
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Mar 28, 2022 06:35
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glitchwraith posted:I've heard the digital versions on Unlimited usually get made when they are digitally recolored for new print collections. So if it's not on Unlimited, it's usually because they haven't collected them again yet. Which is dumb for multiple reasons, not least of which is that their recoloring efforts are almost always terrible compared to the original colors
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Mar 28, 2022 23:12
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Mameluke posted:can i get a "what if Glob Herman was the Joker" please From my recollection that's basically what the third Clayface was
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Apr 2, 2022 03:11
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Could just have Ben be the one who settles down and has a family since Peter seems doomed to being an eternal bachelor in the main continuity
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Apr 3, 2022 08:02
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Gripweed posted:They should introduce a bunch of new unique Symbiotes and set up true symbiosis with Symbiotes as a potential future path for humanity to take alongside the Mutant takeover and the technological singularity paths shown in House of X That's basically what Venom: The End depicted, it's also basically the only good comic involving Symbiotes since the Agent Venom era ended(which in turn had been the first good thing done with them since some time back in the 90's)
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Apr 23, 2022 22:54
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Barry Convex posted:the run-up to, and beginning of, Secret Wars was very misleadingly, but seemingly deliberately, hyped (“the end of the Marvel Universe” and so forth)so as to imply that Marvel would be making drastic changes of some sort to its continuity, possibly even a total reboot. In reality, it changed basically nothing. To be frank at this point I would welcome a hard reboot
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Apr 24, 2022 21:41
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Codependent Poster posted:Rebooting the whole universe is dumb and gets you to where DC is where nobody knows what actually happened in continuity and what didn't so you have no idea what a character's actual history is. That's only because they did an incredibly half assed job of it and tried to retain parts of the previous continuity(mostly Batman and Green Lantern stuff) and then later tried to bring back more parts and that's why it's a complete mess
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Apr 25, 2022 00:32
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Gripweed posted:Comics have too much continuity, it scares off casual and new readers. So we’re starting fresh, clean slate, every new #1 is a perfect starting place for someone who has never read a comic. Like this one, starring the Red Hood! What’s the Red Hood’s deal? Well, That's actually another part of the problem, DC shouldn't have started off the line with 52 different books right out of the gate, should have been like 8 to 12 books max covering core heroes and concepts and only gradually introduce more books over time, same for this hypothetical Marvel Reboot
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Apr 25, 2022 01:13
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Karma Tornado posted:I was reading The Marvels the other night and it's nuts to me that they added an entire continuity insert war that was just Vietnam but with monsters and an Invaders villain so now when you read a comic where Ben Grimm mentions him and Reed fighting in the "big one" you know he actually means "working a CIA operation with Georges Batroc, MODOK, and for some reason Johnny Blaze's motorcycle sideshow father figure." but at least nobody seems too old, because they mention that this is all happening after Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean it's been a thing for a couple years now and it makes for a more time proof solution to the problem Vietnam's importance to early Marvel(or WWII for Reed and Ben) has than trying to port those parts forward to say Afghanistan or either Gulf War
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Apr 25, 2022 03:54
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Lobok posted:Man, it's disappointing that even with his own show on Disney+, Moon Knight's longest-running series is barely on Marvel Unlimited. Sixty or so issues in that series and MU has four. And three of those seem like they were uploaded only because they were part of Acts of Vengeance. Well at least there's always good old fashioned piracy to find the rest
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Apr 26, 2022 00:52
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ilikedirt posted:Is there even a good modern run of spiderman that most people agree is good? There's a reason I'm one of those people who prefer ignoring most things Marvel has done in the main 616 continuity since the early to mid 90's Gripweed posted:Instead of making every job a big status quo shakeup like, he's a CEO or a teacher or whatever, they should just make them a series of random entry level jobs or jobs he gets through connections that no one expects to last for very long. That would actually be relatable for young people. Peter Parker got a job driving a plow for the city. But then he got fired for not showing up to work, but a friend has launched a career as a country musician and Peter Parker is her manager! But her career took off and she got a professional manager, so Peter Parker is making some extra money as the Beer Baron. At this point just have him be a photographer again, it was his main civilian job for like 40 years, no reason he can't take it up again Skwirl posted:They changed their costumes a bunch even in the pre-Claremont era. Honestly that costume is fine except for the yellow shorts Skwirl posted:Scott, Logan and Jean just being a power throuple is easily my favorite thing about Krakoa. Agreed ilikedirt posted:Lol did angel just roll up on fools and shoot them with a revolver before professor x straightened him out or From my recollection it's a "gas gun" Skwirl posted:He has a loving bazooka on the cover of X-Men number 1. It's actually just supposed to be a metal pillar
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Apr 29, 2022 03:10
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just realized I haven't done anything for my Chronological Marvel Reading Project in a while, so I'm back with the next five issues(see my post history for previous entries); Tales to Astonish #43: this was a fun little issue, again less so for Ant-Man himself(though there's a neat bit early in the issue where he gets all shy when a crowd notices him and wants to get autographs and interviews from him) and more for it's "villain" the Time Master whose sympathetic story has a surprisingly happy ending for an early Marvel villain Tales of Suspense #41: in this story we see the first character to use the name Doctor Strange, this one being a mad scientist wanting world domination, probably the most interesting things about this issue are 1) we get a "superhero gets hypnotized into helping the villain" plot where everyone immediately realizes Iron Man has been put into a trance and thus not directly at blame(rather than thinking he's turned to evil or something), and 2) the story makes a big fuss about Doctor Strange being this huge world ending threat and then he just completely disappears until they brought him back for The Marvels last year(though I haven't read that series yet so I don't know the context of his appearance there) Journey Into Mystery #93: man this was a silly issue, though unlike a lot of the Communist threats in Early Marvel, the Radio-Active Man was at least somewhat interesting as a concept(if incredibly goofy and probably mildly racist), also Thor basically nuked China at the end of this story The Amazing Spider-Man #3: the debut of Doctor Octopus is a pretty strong one overall, including some great art by Ditko in making Doc Ock look rather creepy and menacing in a lot of panels, also yet another legendary typo in this issue when Otto calls Spider-Man Super-Man in one panel Strange Tales #109: another solo Human Torch story that's mostly carried by it's villain, this time The Sorcerer a mystically inclined kook who commits crimes using the Evils stored inside Pandora's Box, all drawn wonderfully by Jack Kirby overall an entertaining batch of issues and once again the covers for these issues;     
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Apr 30, 2022 23:18
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OnimaruXLR posted:I just realized it's a bit weird how Scott and Jean basically picked up where they left off before his affair with Emma, considering that Jean was dead for ~15ish years in realtime, during which Scott got radicalized and then died I imagine her being able to read minds plus having experienced some of that period retroactively through her teen self being around for a while probably sped up the whole catching up thing, not to mention that due to the sliding timeline it had probably only been about 3 to 5 years at the most between Magneto killing her and her getting brought back in universe
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May 1, 2022 12:07
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Dawgstar posted:This satisfies me enough on why the 'if Peter's so smart why isn't he rich front.' I'm in this picture and I don't like it
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May 2, 2022 21:43
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cant cook creole bream posted:You'd call yourself a genius? More the bad with money part
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May 3, 2022 01:49
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Wanderer posted:While we're in Dan Slott chat, has anyone else seen the preview for next week's issue of FF? Got a link?
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May 14, 2022 20:34
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Yeah man gently caress Dan Slott, such a talentless rear end in a top hat
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May 15, 2022 03:37
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Yvonmukluk posted:I think it's also kind of hilarious that when Spider-Verse came out people produced that panel with Squirrel Girl talking about comics being places to escape to, not from. By one Dan Slott, IIRC. Its one of the only good things he's ever done so it makes sense people would post it BrianWilly posted:At the risk of...I dunno, defending a notoriously mediocre writer or whatever, I feel like we're maaaybe sorta perhaps starting to project some notions onto Slott that we reeeaally can't be sure of Nah gently caress him Potsticker posted:The problem then is that Squirrel Girl's whole thing was showing up and somehow beating the toughest badguys because she has "lame" powers, but attempting to worf her like that is really just well now either the writer no longer getting the joke or they're being pissy that she's popular. It doesn't make the tough villains somehow look impressive and you'd think someone who was a long time writer would understand that. Of course part of the joke is that Squirrel Girl's powers aren't even particularly lame, sure the whole "talks to squirrels" thing is the sort of Silver Age type power that mostly doesn't show up anymore except to make fun of but it's still a pretty useful power, and the rest of her power set is basically a blend of Spider-Man's and Wolverine's, people just tend to forget that because she's usually a nonviolent hero and usually manages to resolve issues without beating people up Blockhouse posted:I don't deny that it's a sloppy attempt at playing up a villain and it doesn't work but I think the level of maliciousness people are getting out of it comes off as this thread's weird obsession with projecting every lovely thing they can think of onto Dan Slott Again gently caress him and anything he does
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May 15, 2022 20:05
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Like, there are some vague-rear end impressions here being taken as ironclad.
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Karma Tornado posted:given that this whole thing reads like he's had it in the can since like 2006 there's a nonzero chance Slott actually started the Squirrel Girl is unbeatable running gag in the first place entirely to have it pay off with an otherwise nondescript space villain beating her and then saying like "and here I'd heard this INSIGNIFICANT EARTH WHELP had actually DEFEATED the MAD TITAN" with an editor's note that said "it's true, the Watcher said so!!" If anything that makes it worse
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May 15, 2022 21:55
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Cartridgeblowers posted:This is weird. This is really weird. I just really dislike the man both as a writer and as a human being, he has an undeserved level of success in this industry and in a more just world he'd no longer be employed in it(though I could say this about a LOT of people at both Marvel and DC)
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May 16, 2022 08:49
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BrianWilly posted:Literally one post ago... I stand by what I say, I don't want him to be financially ruined or maimed by a bunch of escaped zoo animals or anything I just want him to no longer be employed by Marvel, he can go write mediocre indie comics all he wants I just want him away from characters I care about that he clearly lacks the talent to write for
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May 16, 2022 21:14
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Mind you the trademarks for Conan won't be expiring which is a whole other kettle of fish
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May 21, 2022 00:44
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Gripweed posted:Iron Man is more like Marvel's The Atom. They're both billionaires with Iron Man suits. But The Atom's Iron Man suit can shrink so it doesn't have to do all the extra stuff Iron Man's Iron Man suit can do Atom is only an Iron Man knockoff in the CW universe, in the comics he's just a size changer like Ant-Man, though Ant-Man came second
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May 26, 2022 04:41
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Party Boat posted:Related to the Hulk discussion a few pages back, I've been using Unlimited to dip back into various bits of Hulk history and I think I'm a Hulk guy now. That highlights one of the reasons even though it's such an enormous task I like the whole "read Marvel from the beginning" project I've been doing off and on, since I'm jumping between multiple series in each lump of issues I do it means I don't have to deal with any flaws a given series has in too large of a dosage at once, like if I had had to read the original 6 issue Hulk run(which as my reviews point out is mostly pretty bad after the first issue) in one sitting like if I had done a "Hulk only" thing I probably would have given up then and there
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May 27, 2022 01:18
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Skwirl posted:I once thought to read all Fantastic Four from the beginning but noped out pretty hard like 5 issues after Kirby left. It wasn't even that the art changed much JRSR is a great artist, but it became very clear very quickly how much writing Kirby was doing on the book also. Another example where jumping around books will be helpful Rick posted:I love this version of leader. Lot of nostalgia for that version since its what the 90's cartoon used from my recollection
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May 27, 2022 03:27
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Gripweed posted:I read Phoenix: Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey. I know that there was a stretch of time where the teen versions of the X-men were brought forward to the present by Beast to prove some kind of point. So at first I was like "Cyclops is acting a little out of character here" but then I realized that oh yeah that's not the real Cyclops. I also new that Jubilee had been a vampire for a little while, so when poo poo bit a guy that made sense. So all that was fine. But also the real Cyclops was dead, apparently? And Wolverine was old, Sabertooth was part of the X-men, and Emma Frost was a bad guy again. Wolverine was old because the real Wolverine was dead at the time and that one was from another reality(the Old Man Logan comic that the Logan movie was partially based on), Sabertooth had been "Inverted" from a recent event that had switched the alignments for a bunch of characters(most had returned to normal by the end of that event but he and a couple others stayed that way for a while afterwards), as for Emma and Scott I don't quite recall the specifics but I believe it had something to do with that poorly thought out period where Marvel was trying to push the Inhumans over Mutants due to Perlmutter being a whiny baby about Fox having the X-Men movie rights
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Jun 5, 2022 03:49
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Gripweed posted:Wait, there's a part in the comic where Teen Cyclops says he's going to go talk to Jean, and Wolverine stops him and says "this isn't your Jean. You never knew her, you never loved her" But she wasn't his Jean either? What the gently caress? She was significantly less old Wolverine's Jean than she was teen Cyclop's Jean! When I thought it was an old version of the real Wolverine I was like, I don't like this because the Wolverine/Jean pairing has always been bad to me, but at least he had a point that he had known Jean a lot longer than teen Cyclops. But he never even knew that Jean, and teen Cyclops did Normally I'd agree but the whole Scott/Jean/Logan throuple thing they've been doing since Krakoa started has been great, not to mention puts an interesting retrospective lens on when it was a love triangle
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Jun 5, 2022 04:08
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Skwirl posted:I'm pretty sure Scott and Jean are supposed to be mid 20s by Giant Size X-Men #1. That's why most of the OG team quits, they're all full rear end grown adults who've been doing this since they were teenagers. And then Beast, Angel, and Ice Man go on to have interesting careers between leaving the X-Men and forming X-Factor
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Jun 6, 2022 02:33
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Skwirl posted:First few years of Marvel comics basically happen in real time, Peter graduates high school in less than thirty issues because that's 2 and a half years we've been reading about this character. It wasn't until Stan and Jack and Ditko weren't writing everything that there was a concept of a "status quo" that poo poo needed to return to. And Betty Brandt was clearly supposed to be a teenager when Peter was dating her, older, but like 19 at most. Yeah the standard model "Floating Time Scale" Marvel uses can definitely complicate things though obviously keeping things anchored in real time wasn't feasible for more than a couple years anyways(Astro City is pretty much the only Superhero comic to pull that off long term), though I still really like the concept of what one could call a "Reverse Floating Time Scale" originated by the Original Marvel Universe blog where instead of the current method where Fantastic Four #1 is always being pulled forward in a nebulous "about 20 years before the present", instead Fantastic Four #1 is always anchored to Late 1961 and later comics get dragged back towards that more and more depending on how far afterwards they were published and as the timeline gets more compressed(so for example X-Men #1 and Avengers #1 from 1963 only get pulled back about a year to 1962, while stories published in the early 90's get dragged all the way back to around 1976*), though admittedly this does have some kinks when applied to existing comics rather than some new universe *admittedly this particular degree of compression works for OMU because they cutoff after the early 90's what they consider canon for OMU(so only compressing about 30 years of real world publications down to about 15 years of in-universe events), if one were to do a similar formula for a timeline encompassing all the way to 2022 you would probably need a different ratio since you'd be working with about 60 years of publications and would probably want to fit that into an approximately 20 to 25 year stretch of in-universe time(which would put comics published in 2022 all the way back to approximately 1986 in-universe)
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Jun 6, 2022 22:09
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We Got Us A Bread posted:And there was that one scene in...I think it was HoX/PoX that kind of implied that the Scott/Jean/Logan relationship very much included Scott and Logan as a thing, too. Which is what makes it work, especially with how it puts a new lens on pretty much every Scott and Logan interaction since basically the beginning
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Jun 7, 2022 00:30
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Yeah if Miles is going to truly move forward as Spider-Man in 616 and not end up event fodder or get rebranded or something within the next decade or so(a lot of fans are surprisingly keen on the idea of him taking over the Prowler identity) then he needs to become the primary Spider-Man and Peter needs to be allowed to settle down as a family man and semi-retire as Spider-Man
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Jun 18, 2022 21:14
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Gripweed posted:I got to the issue of Hulk where he fights Juggernaut. I was aware of Juggernaut, I'd seen him in the cartoons and stuff, and I knew he was Professor X's brother, so I'd always assumed he was a mutant. He had like, momentum powers or something. I think the movies have been the only time Juggernaut has ever been a Mutant Also this led to me rewatching "The Juggernaut, Bitch!" for the first time in years and yeah it's still pretty funny
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Jun 26, 2022 20:15
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Angry Salami posted:I think he was also a mutant in the Ultimate Universe and the X-Men Evolution cartoon. And there's a bunch of stories where he's treated as if he's a mutant because, let's face it, assuming that "Professor X's brother who also has powers" would also be a mutant should be a pretty safe assumption to make. Worth bringing up that Xavier and Juggernaut are only step-brothers
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Jun 27, 2022 18:59
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Dawgstar posted:How many series have we had now of 'Jen puts her life back together?' It feels like a lot, even if probably isn't. It is a bit weird, especially when she works better as being one of those rare heroes who actually mostly has their poo poo together to contrast how messy her cousin's life is
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Jul 6, 2022 01:13
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