Thor And X-Men

It's a Marvel double feature! No no, I don't mean this; I mean the movie kind of double feature! The situation was this: so compelled was I to write about my experiences with the delightful summer blockbusters Thor and X-Men First Class that I spilled forth well over 2500 words on their trashy glory. BUT, not wanting to sully this site's hermetically sealed status as an arty comics blog about comics-as-art and the art thereof, the only recourse was to outsource. Good thing, then, that I was able to bully a far better writer than me into posting my review on a far better site than my own. If you want to read those thousands of words head over here to Tucker Stone's fine blog The Factual Opinion, where they have been comfortably ensconced for all eternity. Yep. If you insist on a little taste before diving in, here's how it starts:

Marvel Movies -- is there any more recognizable commodity at today’s box office? In comics the time when “universe building” was an achievable task seems to have well and truly left us, with every company that’s placed an emphasis on constructing a shared story space for their properties to interact in either decayed into something else or gone belly-up entirely. There are worse testaments to just how much the average comics reader isn’t-a-child-anymore than that: it was easy to accept that Sal Buscema’s Avengers and Herb Trimpe’s Hulk and Gene Colan’s Dr. Strange all hung out, easy even to keep on accepting it as time went on because hey, you were twelve when you first read that stuff. And you were only five when Kirby first imagined it that way. But these new attempts, the ones undertaken when you were already a grown-up, they were just insults to your intelligence. Tell me why the WildC.A.T.S. and Spawn were allowed to bump up against eachother without explanation. Or why the stars of both Sojourn and Scion both had glowing ying- yangs tattooed on them. But we’re talking about movies here, people. Ahem. All I’m saying is, the fact that Marvel Films has managed to build a coherent, believable shared universe for their characters the same way the comics built one half a century ago is nothing short of a conceptual/marketing miracle. Read more