I Want To Have Mike Allred's Children - But I Haven't Got A Womb.

Ah the simple pleasures in life like ice-cream, fellatio and a Marvel reboot! And who doesn't like those things?

This Marvel Now! thing is looking pretty darn sweet - and not *cough* in any way designed to *cough cough* claw back some readers who went off to the shiny land that is the new DC 52... AT ALL.

Still there's some sick looking stuff on the horizon for next month including more Avengers titles (to go with the seventy three other Avengers titles we've seen over the last few years) and a brand new, awesome Thunderbolts line-up that made me do a little love wee.

Observe:

Holy shit look at the colour co-ordination there! Red Hulk, Electra, Deadpool, Punisher and a sweet looking Venom all in black and red. Good fucking times.

But what I'm happiest about is Marvel rediscovering Mike Allred - creator of some of the weirdest and most wonderful comics I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Titles like Madman, The Atomics and Marvels own X-Statix to name but a few. Oh how I love Mike Allred - let me count the ways...

1. The art is so clean and bright and fun it makes me think of a simpler time when I wasn't even born! 2. His writing is funny and has the oddest mix of innocence and out and out weirdness I've ever read before. With dialogue coming straight out of the 60's but never with that cloying faux hipness that Stan Lee used to write into Spider-Man back in the day. 3. OK, so I only have 2 ways but those are 2 pretty good ways.

So they let Mike Allred do an issue of Daredevil recently (issue 17 true believer) which boasted a truly beautiful cover. Have a butchers at this:

And there's more to come as he's also doing not one but a series of covers for FF. Covers like this one:

I don't care that this reboot seems on the whole to be a colossal waste of time - it's got Mike fucking Allred doing covers so until the Mad Thinker... erm... stops having mad thoughts, make mine Marvel (Now).

Comic Book Origins More Tragic Than Batman's - My Response

I was just shown a site called Dorkly.com that had an article entitled '8 Comic Book Origins More Tragic Than Batman's' - And it wasn't a bad list.

However, I think there's more tragic origins out there. And I'm going to prove it right now because proving stuff like this is obviously cool and almost guaranteed to get me laid lots, right? Well, probably not but I'm going to prove it anyway.

Matt Murdock/Daredevil.

Matt Murdock had a pretty shit time of it. He was raised by his father, a washed-up boxer, for the early part of his life. Then an industrial accident caused him to go blind. Not easy for a kid to cope with at the best of times but, as Murdock was soon to find out, this was nothing like the best of times.

His father, 'Battlin'' Jack Murdock, was murdered by some hoods at the request of their boss 'The Fixer' for refusing to throw a fight leaving young Matt blind, alone and pissed off.

What's more, nobody told him that his first costume (the black and yellow one) sucked.


Daredevil started life as a hero after bereavement and a disability. That's pretty tragic, no?

Jonothon Starsmore/Chamber

Jono's origin was pretty grisly to say the least. Hanging out at a nightclub with his girlfriend when his mutant gene decided to kick in the resulting explosion of psionic energy (no, me neither) crippled his missus and ripped a hole in him from his naval to his jaw. He doesn't have the sort of power you can really hide from people as he's missing half his face and it's no wonder it made him depressed. He can't even have a snog, poor sod.


Arseface.

The cult comic series Preacher was chock-full of tragic characters, perhaps none more so than Arseface. Son of the local sheriff and a big Nirvana fan in a redneck town, he was horrifically bullied along with his best friend Pube.

After hearing about the suicide of his hero, Kurt Cobain, the pair decide to follow suit and shoot themselves in the head to end their miserable existences. Whilst Pube is successful and kills himself as intended, Arseface is not and leaves himself horribly disfigured for the rest of his life. And yes, his face looks like a rectum - and that's never easy.


Wade Wilson/Deadpool.

The Merc with a mouth is renowned for being one of comics funniest characters but his back story is not so full of laughs. After losing his mother to cancer and getting the snot beaten out of him by his abusive father, Wade Wilson turned to the slightly unusual career of being a mercenary. Then he contracted cancer himself and became part of Department K - an off-shoot of Weapon X.

Deadpool is a scarred, mostly insane character that has had far more than his fair share of tragedy... 2 lots of cancer and an abusive parent has surely got to qualify as a bleaker start than Batman's.



There's a start anyway. I'll think of more later.