Comics Alliance has a great post up discussing “the Core Marvel Universe.” What do I mean? It all stems from the new Rick Remender/Tony Moore arc for the Punisher called FrankenCastle. I’ve already written my thoughts of it over at Best Shots, but needless to say, there are some fans who don’t feel it fits with “the Core Marvel Universe.” To which the Invincible Super-Blogger known as Chris Sims decided to lay down the law on to what that actually meant, such as this apt description of Wolverine:
In the Core Marvel Universe, the most popular person is a 120 year-old Canadian berserker samurai who has who has been to the moon and was in love with a psychic who destroyed an alien planet and came back from the dead, married to both Japanese royalty and a green-haired terrorist, and had a child with a woman from a hidden region of Antarctica where dinosaurs and cavemen live. When he is not fighting his enemies — most of whom are versions of himself, some of whom have claws made of lasers — he reaffirms his status as as tough-as-nails loner as a member of at least three superhero teams.
Or perhaps you’d like to hear this one, about the God of Thunder, Thor:
In the Marvel Universe, Thor — the literal Norse god of Thunder — was turned into a frog for three issues, including one where his magic hammer turned him into a 6′6″ frog-man (er, frog-god), which had the side effect of chipping his hammer so that another frog (who had once been a man before he was cursed by a fortune-teller) could turn into a normal-sized frog-god, which came in handy when he had to team up with a teleporting dog and a sabretooth tiger to get magic gems back from an alien from Jupiter’s moon who was in love with the living embodiment of Death.
Needless to say, over the past week Sims has made #coremarveluniverse a Twitter phenomenon, with some other great examples of Marvel zigging where they usually zag:
jjason1749: In the Core Marvel Universe, your Dad didn’t die when you were a kid. He’s a space-pirate with a hot, furry girlfriend. #coremarveluniverse
kennykeil: A robot creates an android who marries a reality altering mutant witch and gets shot at by cows. #coremarveluniverse
ciscocosta: #coremarveluniverse The King of Atlantis became CEO of a major corporation after repeatedly trying to destroy the surface world.
keithpille: In the #CoreMarvelUniverse, you can be the world’s best assassin by putting people into a giant pinball machine and not killing them.
In other words, yes, occasionally comics do jump the shark on occasion — see X-Men, the Shiar, Mojoworld, inferno, Operation Galactic Storm, Secret Wars, and so many more. Sometimes, like the Angelic Punisher, it can hurt the series — but if creators keep the characterization in check, it can be (just like many of the Claremont references I just made) be some of the best comics of your lifetime. Comics can be one crazy medium, and it’s stuff like FrankenCastle and Frog Thor that help keep it so refreshing. What say you, Rama readers?
November 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Why the hate for Frog Thor? How is that any weirder than 6-armed Spider-man?
November 24th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Change is usually for the best.
It just doesn’t always need to be so radical.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
@Mechagamera: No, I love Frog Thor! I was just listing some of the more radical storylines. Good catch on Spidey.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Aside from that one reader who argued Sims, who is it exactly that is FOR repetition and tedium in superhero comics published by Marvel? I’d like to say that, yes, random weirdness is what makes superhero comics what they are and if you’re not on board, go read something else… it’s almost inherent to the form and anyone who digs the radical strangeness that was introduced in 1979 but can’t handle the radical strangenes introduced today is missing the point.
I’d like to say those things but it seems most people are in agreement. It was cool reading this list - Marvel has done some gloriously screwed-up stuff over the years and when it’s bad, at least it’s funny.
November 25th, 2009 at 9:31 am
While the phrase “core Marvel Universe” is unfortunate, I think the objections are valid. Marvel has always billed itself as the more realistic super-hero universe, where events are just on the other side of “that could really happen.”
And, his dealings with the Russian aside, The Punisher is usually one of the most realistic characters at Marvel. He has no super powers or high tech gadgets; he’s just an obsessed man with a gun.
I haven’t read Punisher in a couple of years, but it seems to me that, with this Franken-Castle storyline, they’re breaking The Punisher’s story engine. You wouldn’t see Frank in Guardians of the Galaxy, because that would be stupid. When Frank became a guardian angel or whatever he was, people stopped reading because it was stupid.
Sure, this Franken-Castle storyline could well work, and super-hero fans are notoriously fickle about this sort of thing, but this sort of thing seems to remove something that makes Frank the Punisher.
November 25th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Frankencastle is a godawful storyline reserved for an end of year annual/Halloween type story. I think Marvel has been taking the term “funny books” a little too literally as of late.
But there is also comedic value putting all the fictional comic book events together and trying to write in real world terms. You wouldn’t believe half the things that would happen to these people. Marvel has some seriously screwed up continuity. I’m sure new readers if they read these brief descriptions would be frightened away if not for the marketing machine behind this company.
November 25th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Please, The Punisher is certainly not 1one of the most realistic characters at Marvel’; BECAUSE he has no super powers or high tech gadgets; he’s just an obsessed man with a gun. Realistically an obsessed man with a gun fighting the mob would be dead a million times over by now. Its only because the Marvel Universe is so wacky that the character is at all possible. Becomeing a frankenstein style monster is no less beleivable than the character being not dead for so long, but both become `believable’ because of the itnernal workings of the core marvel universe where crazy stuff can and does happen.
Hooray for Nabokovian theory!
November 26th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I think usually the problem comes from as with those examples above, the core of the character was still there while they were having some weird adventures. With also coming up did they have to change the character just to have that adventure when say another character could have come in that would have fit it better?
For example Wolverine description above, did he change or did everything around him change for the weird adventure?