DESTROYER!

I don’t know if you’re like me, but I love me some stories by Robert Kirkman.  His creativity and general love for comics shows in just about everything that he writes, and his style of story-telling fits perfectly for guys like me in their 20’s who’ve been reading comic books since they were children, but don’t want to read a children’s comic.  He manages to blend character cliché’s from over 50 years of Marvel and DC comics and turns them on their heads, giving them interestingly realistic opinions and motivations that seem like they were obviously simple to the characters but never explored.  Add in buckets of blood and guts, and brutal fights where as the reader I even feel bad for the villains, and what you get is comic book greatness.

I just got done reading Robert’s Marvel Max series Destroyer, a five part miniseries produced in 2010.  If you’re unfamiliar with Marvel Max, its Marvel’s adult line of comics where literally anything goes.  Often times, the Max series exists within the Marvel Universe with already established characters as their protagonists, but Destroyer is set in a world all by itself using a character that has been in comics sparingly since the early days.  The character the Destroyer was a character who appeared in Marvel comics in the 1940’s as a much younger super hero.  Robert Kirkman took that character and wrote a story as if he’s been aging since the 40’s.  Here’s the pitch: Marlow is an old man with a bad ticker, and his number is up any day now.  Despite the doctor’s warnings, this old war horse has decided that he needs to tie up some loose ends before he dies.  After a lifetime of trying to never kill the villains in his rouge gallery, he’s decided at the end of his life that he must put an end to these psychos once and for all, because leaving them to wreck havoc on the world after he’s gone would be simply irresponsible.  As he swabs a bloody path through his enemies, his old rivals start to reappear to attack his family before he can execute them.  Will Marlow survive long enough to save his wife and daughter?

The story is drawn by Robert’s original Invincible artist Cory Walker, who does the best work I’ve ever seen come from him in Destroyer. Honestly, I thought his early work on Invincible was just so-so, but with Destroyer he’s become one of my favorite artists out there.  The comic is colored by the extremely talented Val Staples, and lettered by VC’s Rus Wooton.

Destroyer is a story that short and sweet and covered in blood.  The character designs are really well done, from the giant monsters to the everyday thug-for-hire.  As it is with Invincible they seem to poke fun at already established Marvel and DC icons, while remaining serious enough to carry an engaging story.  I could read another three volumes of Destroyer, but unfortunately it was kept to a small story focused on the retirement of an old hero, and maybe its better that way.  If you’re interested in reading this graphic novel, you can find it at Amazon here for 11 bucks: http://www.amazon.com/Destroyer-Robert-Kirkman/dp/B005M4JAAK/ref=sr_1_15?ie=UTF8&qid=1344283444&sr=8-15&keywords=destroyer+marvel.

Ten Sexy Marvel Comics

Here’s a shot of nostalgia to your brain. I’m sitting bored at the computer, waiting for my flight deck missions to finish on Avengers Alliance, and I’ve decided to compose a list of ten of my favorite all-time Marvel single issues. When I say favorite, I mean I liked them all so much that I had to own a few issues of each, because I destroyed them from reading over and over again. Hopefully this can be an interactive discussion, and I urge you to throw in some of your favorite comics as well, so I can go find them and read them too.  This is a list of single issues, not graphic novels, or long-winded story lines, though they can be your favorite single issue out of an arch.  So, them’s the rules.  Here’s my list, in no particular order of which one I like the most, because they’re all pretty damned good.

Spider-Man Unlimited #2

Ya'll know why this little diddy is up here.  Carnage.  Venom.  Finale.  This comic blew my mind when I was a kid, because after years of the kid-gloves, the writers for Spider-Man finally grew some balls and gave us Carnage.  When Carnage first came around, it meant that a lot of people were going to die by the bucket-loads, and unlike Venom, Cassidey was a complete psychopath with a symbiotic suit that would morph and move like water.  I swear to you, there were characters that would show up, and in the first panel they appeared in, they would die with a red tendril to their head.  Carnage was like T-1000 mixed with Venom, suffering from at least 10 major mental illnesses and smoking PCP.  Now-a-days Carnage is basically the poor man's Venom, and there hasn't been a story, or an issue where Carnage has been nearly as cool since.

X-Men #2

Okay, I know that by today's standards, these super-hero brawls have become a redundant and lazy story-telling tool but, when this first came out I couldn't get enough.  Here was Jim Lee drawing the Blue team versus the Gold team, and they all actually wanted to hurt each other.  This was back when X-Men comics were really good, and this comic had it all: The awkward Gambit sexual advances toward Rogue, Wolverine poping his claws and saying something creepy and egocentric, Archangel, Invisible Planes, mind control, Magneto being a bad-ass, beast being a big nerd, and swim suit/giant boob scenes. The dialogue was especially cheesy and the drawings were super detailed. Ever notice that during these days the X-Men always    seemed to hang out by the pool?

The Infinity Gauntlet #4

I actually didn't like the Infinity Gauntlet series as much as everyone else seemed too.  I thought there were some really cool ideas, but the execution of it wasn't exciting enough for me at the time (not like it is today, either).  This issue however, was awesome.  The cover basically says it all: Thanos versus everybody.  Inside was the most savage, blood-spilling battle I've ever read in a Marvel comic, and literally every single hero either dies or fails completely trying to take the cosmic tyrant Thanos down.

 New Avengers: Civil War tie in Issue
This was a stand alone comic where Brian Bendis's writing for Marvel is at it's best.  Unlike most of Brain's other Marvel comics, there were no interviews or monolog-ing to showcase the characters, however the story was great and it showed a side of Tony Stark's character in a brighter light than I'd ever seen it previously.  The story is: One of Tony's friends and former employees, a man who helped him design the Iron Man suit, has decided that he disagrees with Stark's decisions during the Registration act, and that he must do whatever he can to stop Tony from using his creation to hunt heroes.  So, whats he do? He storms Stark tower and tries to assassinate his old friend.  What ends up happening, I won't tell, but it's good.  Trust me.

The Punisher: The End
You get what you ask for when buying a Punisher comic: Death, Violence, and an un-comprimising mission to extinguish the morally corrupted.  If you like watching a driven psychopath shoot his way through a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, and at the end of his life trying to find and punish those responsible for the world's end, then you're going to love this comic as much as I did. Oh yeah, and there's the classic "Punisher/ prison break" scene to start the whole thing off too. Never have I seen the Punisher written better than right here.  Frank's dedication to punishing the wicked is put to the ultimate test, and what he does sure as shit surprised me, and it just might do the same to you too.

Wolverine #32
Here's another stand-alone, with a black-and-white variant edition (which is what I have) where the artwork itself could sell the comic.  Written by my favorite writer, Mark Millar, this comic did something that no Wolverine comic ever did before: Logan didn't say a damn word throughout the whole thing.  No obscene amount of boasting, no hard-ass sarcasm, not even any stubborn bickering. Nothing. Not a single word.  Instead you get the rantings and ravings of a German concentration camp Warden slowly losing his mind as he swears to God that he keeps killing a man (Logan) who just won't die.  Like a ghost hell-bent on driving him mad, Wolverine continues to show up for breakfast in the morning no matter how many times this Nazi-bastard shoots, stabs, poisons, burns, or strangles him.  It's a great story, and a good telling of a Wolverine memory set in during World War 2, and it's one of the few times you'll ever find a truly inspired Marvel one-shot comic.

Captain America Universe X Special
One of the coolest renditions of Captain America was during the whole "Earth X" storyline, where it's a futuristic time during which all the main Marvel heroes are at the ends of their lives trying to decide how and what kind of legacy they will leave behind.  Alex Ross does a great job designing an elder Steve Rodgers, and after two graphic novel-length story lines, this issue is where Cap finally kicks the bucket.  He goes out in a very epic way, and I was so engrossed in the storyline that I re-read it a dozen times just to re-live the emotion I got when I first read it.  Very seldom do I get moved when reading comics, but this is one of the the ones that did it.

X-Force #116
This is when Mike Allred, a genius among indie comics, was finally given the go-ahead to work with Milligan on a superhero team where they could do whatever the hell they wanted to do.  For a little bit of time X-Force was completely awesome, and the team of mutants you see on the cover were some of the most interesting and emotionally deep characters that you'll ever read about.  I'm kidding.  If you have read this comic, then you'll get that joke. The story is good, and the characters are very interesting, but they ain't the ones you see on the cover. Here's a mutant team breed for the spotlight as a reality TV superhero squad, equipped with greedy, sleezy producers and strange alien camera men.  I won't go on too long about this because I really don't feel like I need to sell it.  It's really good, and the art is great.

Onslaught
If you're a Marvel comics fan, then you already read this, and all the talking I'm doing is for absolutely nothing.  If you haven't read it, then it's too late for you, and you should just give up already.  I'll put it like this: when I was growing up, it was all about the X-Men, and this is their pen-ultimate story.  This last issue was so damn epic, with one of the best Hulk fights, that you'll end up wanting to get the whole thing.  Onslaught was one of the most dangerous villains ever created, but after this story he was simply redundant because he would never again be able to do the kind of damage that he does here ever again.







 X-Men #25
When I read this one, I was all like "Whaaaaaat?!" And, it came with a cool Magneto hologram on it.