Another dip at the Marvel Well

Sometimes it is heard for us here in the States to remember that Marvel is a multinational corporation, that is ti say, that it publishes comics all over the world. Well, sometimes, even those of us who know that are often surprised by the appearance of non-US-based stories. Well, that is precisely what happened when I discovered Marvel Europe last month.

The comic contains three previously-unpublished stories staring Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain America, Daredevil and Captain Britain. The Wolverine story has our clawed mutant running around in Brazil fighting a new mutant presence, Cap and DD team up in NYC to fight Mr. Fear on behalf of S.H.I.E.L.D. While Spider-Man and Captain Britain team up to fight the Red Skull that came out of the pages of Marvel's British offices.

All three stories were very interesting, and I hope that the sales of the comic do well enough for it to precipitate the publications of other non-US stories. I think it is only fair, all of our comics get reprinted overseas (eventually), so having some of their comics reprinted over here just seems to make sense to me.

Another Marvel comic I want to talk about here is the newly-released Marvel Assistant-Sized Spectacular. This anthology comic purports to be helmed by the assistant editors who finally get the chance to strut their stuff. there is a second volume of this series that is due out later this month. I really liked it quite a bit (unfortunately, at first I thought that it was being done in the spirit of the previous outing in this venue, in that 12 years ago the assistant editors all published a one-off comic in the regular lines of their respective titles, that were supposed to be goofy.

These stories weren’t (to be sure the one silly story was Chris Giarrusso’s Mini Marvels). Given that I personally can’t get enough of Chris’s work, I would have loved it if the whole book was his work. Still the other two stories (staring D-Man and American Eagle) were also quite good. Truth to tell, I’m not a big fan of D-Man, but this story was a good read (even if I found the art to be sub-par). On the other hand both the story and the art on the American Eagle story were quite excellent. While Chris’s story was up to his usual most-excellent standards

Again, I’m not only looking forward to the second installment of this two-shot, but I hope that they issue another version of it again next year.