Sunday, September 15, 2024

Sunday Splash Page #340

 
"Phantom of the Forest," in Marvel Super-Heroes #2, by Steve Ditko (writer/penciler), Hollis Bright (writer), Mike DeCarlo (inker), Renee Witterstaetter (colorist), Diana Albers (letterer)

Many Months of Marvel is glad to get away from Doug Moench's lousy Star-Lord stories and back to Earth!

Marvel Super-Heroes was a quarterly, giant-sized collection of stories that ran for a few years in the early '90s. It's probably best known as where Squirrel Girl made her first appearance. Failing that, it's where Marvel published what would have been the last two issues of Carol Danvers' first ongoing. I assume drawn years after the scripts were originally written, because the art is a stark departure from the previous issues.

I don't own the Squirrel Girl issue - it's pricey - and the reprints of the two Ms. Marvel stories I own in the Essential Ms. Marvel collection are in black-and-white. If the Wasp story Amanda Conner drew in the third issue had a splash page, I'd have gone with that, but instead I picked one of the Speedball yarns Ditko did, though those stories a slog to get through. Robbie Baldwin's the most bland character (and I use that word grudgingly) possible, and the villains wouldn't be worth Scooby-Doo's time.

Occasionally there's a story that takes up most of an issue - Christopher Priest gets 50+ pages for a story about Justin Hammer making Stark's life miserable - and there's a Roy and Dann Thomas X-Men story that stretches across three issues. But most comprise a handful of short one-off stories, focused on one character handling some relatively small or personal problem.

The second features Iron Man (dealing with sabotage of an experimental engine by a government agent gone round the bend), Rogue (falling for a robot Mystique commissioned from Machinesmith to lure her daughter home), Speedball (two adults fighting over a toy gun from their childhood), Tigra (seeking an antidote for a disease a crippled rich asshole infected her father with), Red Wolf (stopping some guys threatening to cause a nuclear disaster), Daredevil (a kid mistakes his mother's insulin for, gasp!, drugs) and the Falcon (tries to protect a briefcase nuke, but an innocent bystander dies in the process.) Most of the stories are 8 pages, and a lot of them seem to end on silent panels, usually of a character standing with their head bowed. Maybe that's just this issue, though.

Like a lot of stuff we've looked at lately, it's a mixed bag, but you see some names in the credits who go on to much bigger stuff later. I mentioned Amanda Conner, and Greg Capullo draws a story about a Project PEGASUS-created hero called Blue Shield in the same issue. Kurt Busiek writes a couple of Iron Man stories, including one about a guy who learns the hard way he's not cut out for the job of Tony Stark's bodyguard.

No comments: