Cbmason.ca – Page 2 – Gaming, movies, comics & other things I'm into.

Avengers Volume 2 Review

Posted March 4, 2019March 6, 2019 MaceLeave a commentPosted in Omnibus Reviews

Welcome to my review of the Avengers Omnibus Volume 2. This one covers issues #31-58 and the annuls #1 and 2 of the silver age stuff by Stan Lee. The team coming into this one is Captain America, Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Goliath (Ant-Man). Things start off with Goliath off in a far land trying to shrink down to normal size again, Black Widow becomes an Avenger, and the twins power diminishes so they returned to their home land.

Hercules, the God of Olympus gets banished and ends up living with the Avengers which is pretty wild, but I guess considering how Thor is part of Marvel its not too surprising to see other mythological characters show up. Around this time Black Widow also ends up being a double, double agent (triple agent?) working for Shield and the russians. Cap also decides to abruptly leave the team after several times feeling as if he is the only Avenger who doesn’t have a life outside the Avengers.

While Cap is away from the team he ends up finding out about the cosmic cube (first sign of an infinity stone in the marvel universe as far as I know). He warns the Avengers about it and they end up in a battle with Namor over it. It eventually falls through the earth and the Mole Man, one of the Fantastic Four villains stumbles across it, but thinks nothing of it.

Hank Pym, aka Goliath aka Ant-Man ends up obtaining the Dragon man that the fantastic four had previously fought. Diablo ends up bringing it back to life and captures Goliath and Wasp which was finally what convinced Hercules to join the Avengers. Diablo is able to hold the Avengers at bay until Captain America shows up and rejoins the team. After defeating Diablo the Avengers get a call asking them to help Black Widow as she is stuck behind the red curtain and working for S.H.I.E.L.D.

Hawkeye and Hercules are the first of the Avengers to go overseas and attempt to rescue Black Widow, we are then introduced to the Red Guardian who is basically Russia’s version of Captain America and also the Black Widows long estranged husband. Naturally, the Avengers win and save the day and destroy the Psychotron device which drives its occupants mad.

The first Avengers annual is in this omnibus and features most of the team reunite to take on the Mandarin and his gang of villains including the swordsman, the enchantress, power man, the executioner and the living laser. The Avengers split up to tackle the different foes and ultimately all meet up to take on the Mandarin in space, he uses a beam on them that makes them fight amongst themselves. Fortunately the Wasp fought with the Mandarin and ended up saving the day.

After that, Black Widow ends up retiring from Avenging, Goliath officially becomes the Ant-Man with a helmet that helps him command ants at his will. Pietro and Scarlet Witch end up getting recruited by Magneto to reform the Brotherhood of Evil mutants, they decline which leads to them being imprisoned by Magneto in the Black Knights castle. Magneto takes them to the UN to announce he wants to start a mutant country and stages Wanda being shot at in order to get Pietro on his side.

The Black Knight, who is actually the nephew of the original villain, ends up helping the Avengers/X-Men win the fight against Magneto. Meanwhile Hercules returns home to Olympus to find everyone is gone and that another God Typhon has banished everybody from Olympus. Hercules ends up defeating him, bringing the Gods back and leaving the Avengers to return home to Olympus.

Captain America ends up phoning to suggest the Black Panther be admitted as an Avenger. The Avengers happily take him on as per Cap’s recommendation. After the Grim reaper seemingly kills Ant-Man, Wasp and Hawkeye, its up to Black Panther to save the day and really make himself a concrete Avengers. Once Black Panther is on the team the big crossover between X-Men & Avengers takes place in X-Men #45 and Avengers #53. Angel reached out to the Avengers for help with Magneto and they staged a fight amongst the teams to trick Magneto and ultimately defeat him.

This omnibus also covers the first appearances of Ultron-5 an android who disguises himself as the Crimson Cowl and manipulates Jarvis, the Avengers butler into giving him security clearance to the Avengers Headquarters. He captured all the Avengers but was foiled by Jarvis escaping and getting help from the Black Knight who wants to redeem his uncles villainous ways.

The ever curious Captain America can’t help but feel as if his old partner Bucky Barnes is still alive, Hawkeye, Goliath, Black Panther and Cap go back in time through one of Dr. Dooms time machines that Reed Richards told Cap about. They witness the death of Bucky Barnes and return home to find the world is different than when they had left it.

This is where annual #2 begins and it seems the original Avengers team is all back at HQ when the time displaced team shows up. This reminded me a lot of the Civil War movie, where one group of the Avengers is fighting another group. On one side we had Cap, Hawkeye, Goliath, Wasp & Black Panther and on the other side we’ve got Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Goliath and Wasp. We end up finding out through a historical information machine that The Scarlet Centurion who is actually also Kang The Conquerer approached the Avengers of this timeline and made a deal with them to rid the world of famine, disease, poverty etc. In exchange for them taking out all the humans with abilities. The Avengers have to assemble the same time machine they used of Dr. Dooms in their original time line to get things back to normal, they end up tricking the Centurion and sending him into the future. At this point the Watcher showed up and explained to them the Centurion became Kang because of them sending him so far into the future. Following this there is only 2 issues remaining in the omnibus and they introduce us to one heck of an Avenger in Vision.

Vision shows up at the very beginning of issue #57 and is actually an android assassin sent by Ultron-5 to destroy the Avengers. He ends up shutting down when attacking the wasp and the Avengers gather to study him. Once they have all gathered he wakes up and ends up reasoning with the Avengers. He leads them to Ultrons lair where Vision was created and challenges Ultron 5 on behalf of the Avengers and wins. Vision becomes an official member of the team and the team goes to Goliaths lab for clues. They find that Vision has the memories and consciousness of Wonder Man placed into an android body. Oh and Black Widow also decided she is going to come out of retirement.

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

The Beginning

Posted February 10, 2019February 10, 2019 MaceLeave a commentPosted in Warcraft Memories

I can’t tell you how many times while playing world of warcraft that my friends and I will reminisce about things that happened several years ago in older expansions. I like to think I have the best memory of these times and events and can recall things others can’t. However not everybody was around for everything and as I’m getting older its becoming more difficult to remember everything, so throughout the course of this blog we may jump around from one time period to another but I do intend on keeping it as chronological as possible. In the first entry I talked about Warcraft and my knowledge of the games and universe before World of Warcraft. Today we’re going to jump right in.

I was unemployed at the time of launch and also did not have a credit card in order to get my subscription (I had just turned 16, give me a break). By the time I had saved up enough money to purchase it, knowing the first month was free. I couldn’t find it anywhere. In reality, the servers filled up so fast they actually stopped selling new copies of the game until the servers could handle more players. It wasn’t until February of 2005 that I got a text message from a friend saying they had just seen World of Warcraft in stock at the local Future Shop (RIP). It was snowing wildly but I was able to find a friend willing to drive me to the store, we spun out a few times in his moms mini-van but we got the game. After purchasing, installing and trying to play I was devastated to find out you could only redeem your free month after purchasing a minimum one month game time. I rounded up all the change I could find and caught the next bus back down Future Shop. I told some friends that I had finally got it and called it a night.

The following morning I had an email from a classmate advising most of my friends were playing Alliance on a realm called Deathwing and some names of people to whisper for a guild invite when I got on. The dwarves were the most appealing to me of the initial four alliance races and the fact they could be Paladins meant I could follow in the footsteps of everyone’s (or maybe just mine) favorite Paladin Arthas.

Just over 14 years later, I can still remember my first day of WoW quite well. It was a superbowl Sunday 2005, my dad had some friends over for the game so we had plenty of snack foods throughout the day, and me not being very interested in football took the opportunity to sink as many hours as I possibly could into my Day 1 WoW experience.

Right from the initial login and the narrator begins to describe the story behind your race was freaking epic! I spawned in Coldridge Valley facing some gnomes and dwarfs. There was an NPC mechanostrider and a guy with a quest to collect six rabbit pelts or something along those lines. I set out on my way to collect these pelts. I knew this would be the first of many quests my paladin would go on in the world of warcraft. After killing and observing the loot of six rabbits. I went back to find out I hadn’t actually looted anything, I had only been opening the window but not picking anything up. So I killed 6 more rabbits and learned how to properly loot things! Such noob mistakes looking back now but the learning experience is part of what made WoW as fun as it was.

It wasn’t long after that I was invited to my first guild <The Hombres> which was full of people from my school and some of their other gamer friends & family. Although most of my first day was spent alone on Coldridge Valley, I was on Ventrilo with my friend Ben who had initially created a Night Elf hunter named Klodie. Unlike me, who had spent most of the day trying to level up. His goal was to explore the world, and his first mission was to make it to me. If you never played back then you may not realize just how long of a journey it is to get from Teldrassil to Dun Morogh, especially as a level 1 getting experience strictly from discovering new parts of the map. Well it took him most of the day, and I got to listen as he was escorted by higher level players through certain zones, about his boat ride from the continent of Kalimdor over to Eastern Kingdoms (the boat may or may not have actually been implemented yet, I don’t recall 100%) and eventually he came strolling through the tunnel at the top of the hill leading out of Coldridge Valley. Much to my surprise, his Night elf was capable of randomly doing front flips whenever he jumped. For some reason this made me believe my dwarf could also do front flips if I were to jump a second time at the peak of my first jump. Unfortunately I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’ll cut this off here for now, thanks for reading! Until next time.

Fantastic Four Volume 2 Review

Posted January 14, 2019January 20, 2019 MaceLeave a commentPosted in Omnibus Reviews

Its that time again, back with another review! This time of the second Fantastic Four Omnibus and boy what a wild ride it was! I felt the stories in this one all tied together a little better and Lee and Kirby had really found their stride. I think I enjoyed this a lot more than volume 1! I’m also quite ashamed that my volume 1 review didn’t even mention the yancy street gang once! (Thing always bring them up, but I still have no idea who or what the yancy street gang really is!)

Anyways, lets get right to it. This omnibus opens with FF Annual #2 which gave us the origins of doctor doom, as well as a battle between him and the FF. Ultimately Reed hypnotized him and made him think he had won the battle and therefore would leave people alone … temporarily.

With that, there is no shortage of things to talk about but I’ll try to keep things relatively brief!

Mr. Storm, the father of Johnny and Sue was featured in the first few episodes and ended up dieing. We also got introduced to the Superskrull and a bunch of Villians came together to make the “Frightful four”. One of their members is Medusa, who ends up being part of the inhumans. People reading this in 2019 might know full well about the inhumans given their recent rise in popularity but I myself wasn’t too familiar. The inhumans come to take Medusa back to their land ‘The great refuge’ where they have been hiding and we also get introduced to the likes of Blackbolt, Maximus, Crystal, Triton and a handful of other inhumans.

Maximus ends up firing an ‘atmo-gun’ at earth which causes constant vibrations and ends up causing Galactus to become aware of the earth. Galactus is an ancient being who consumes planets for energy and he sends his Herald (also an epic first appearance) the Silver Surver to check things out. Maximus also ends up creating a negative zone around the great refuge which turns it into a completely solid dome which nobody can penetrate, trapping the inhumans inside, possibly forever….

The Silver Surfer ends up meeting Alicia, Things blind girlfriend. She opens his eyes (figuratively) to the fact that earth doesn’t need to be destroyed and that life on earth is valuable. He agrees and decides to fight Galactus off as earths defender. The watcher also assists in helping the FF and more specifically Johnny storm obtain a weapon to defeat Galactus. Johnny ends up trading it to Galactus in exchange for earths safety, and Silver Surfer is banished to earth.

The book continues to get even more wild from there, the Black Panther (also first appearance) invites the FF to Wakanda so he can hunt them. They ultimately end up becoming allies and that friendship pays off a ton in this book and I’m sure will continue to do so throughout years of Marvel comics. We also get the origin story of the Black Panther which isn’t exactly the same as it was in the MCU but still pretty close. Klaw kills the Black Panthers father Tchaka and the young Black Panther crushes Klaws hand. The FF return to their regular lives, Johnny attends school, Reed and Sue have a honeymoon (Oh yeah, I totally forgot to mention annual #3 where Sue and Reed got married and everyone showed up! Even spidey managed to snag a piece of cake from the window :P) and Thing goes to make up with Alicia after being upset he saw her with the Silver Surfer (come on thing, this guy is like a cosmic God, your girl ain’t got a shot with him!)

Johnny, along with his new friend Wyatt end up going after the inhumans, Johnny believes he fell in love with Crystal and will stop at nothing to be with her again, amazingly despite them only briefly having met, the feeling is mutual. Klaw ends up coming to NYC to fight the FF with the power of sound but with the technology provided from the Black Panther (vibranium bracelets) they are able to defeat him! While this is happening the original human torch from like the 1940’s is resurrected and has a battle with Johnny. The Silver Surfer, having been banished to earth decides it is his duty to travel the planet and learn everything there is to know about earth and its residents. He ends up meeting Doctor Doom who has a device that is capable of swapping his powers with the Silver Surfers. Doom begins toying with everybody and the FF are even forced to retreat. Meanwhile, Black Bolt the true leader of the inhumans screams so loudly he is able to shatter the negative zone and set everybody free.

Reed, being the genius that he always proves to be. Realizes what is happening and tricks Doom into following a device into outer space, however because Galactus had banished the Silver Surfer to earth, Doom was unable to leave and their powers reverted back. The Silver Surfers board returned to the Surfer and Doom was nowhere to be found. Total cliffhanger. Avengers Volume 2 is next on the list but I’m super excited to get back to the FF.

Thanks for reading!

Doctor Strange Volume 1 Review

Posted December 16, 2018December 16, 2018 MaceLeave a commentPosted in Omnibus Reviews

“Where mankind is menaced by magic… there must Doctor Strange go to combat it!”

By the hoary hosts of hoggoth! Welcome to my review of the Doctor Strange Omnibus, Volume 1, which collects the B stories of Strange Tales #110-111, 114-146 and Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2. Right off the bat I was hesitant to even pick this one up. My exposure to Dr. Strange has been very limited. I’ve seen the 2016 movie as part of the marvel cinematic universe and read some of the infinity gauntlet tie in issues from the Sorcerer Supreme run. Lets just say before reading this omnibus I probably wouldn’t have even considered myself much of a fan of the Dr.

Written by Stan Lee and art by Steve Ditko I have to say this was definitely a nice surprise of entertaining story, beautiful art just an overall enjoyable read that I would recommend to anybody who enjoys Marvel comics. The issues are only 8-10 pages which is a little less then half the size of a standard size marvel comic, which makes each issue a very quick and fun read.

The book starts with the very first appearances of Dr. Strange which admittedly are some of the weaker issues. We’re introduced to some of Dr. Stranges more popular villians like Baron Mordo and Dormammu very early on, however there is a handful of people tampering with black magic who shouldn’t be that Dr. Strange has to deal with first. One thing that surprised me was the Ancient One being an old man, probably just because in the movies it was a woman, and given this stuff was written in the 60’s and womens place in society wasn’t viewed quite the way it is today its not overly surprising to see the character was originally written as a male.

For me, this book really found its stride around issue #130 (Not all previous issues of Strange Tales contained Doctor Strange, this is only about 20 or so issues into his run of B side stories) Coincidentally enough, Strange Tales #130 also features Human Torch and Thing from the Fantastic Four meeting the Beatles, which is a really cool shoutout of the time, unfortunately for me this omnibus only contains the B stories so I did not read the Beatles stuff. Anyways, this is also the issue the epic battle between Dr. Strange and Baron Mordo (with help from Dormammu) begins, and continues for 10-15 issues. What a wild ride. I love when comics end with a cliffhanger and the following issues picks up right where you left off. Especially when reading collected editions such as this one it really helps keep the book a page turner.

Another thing I noticed was that Wong, Doctor Stranges sidekick although present in some of the issues did not have much of an impact on the overall story. I would like to see Wong used more and play a bigger role like he does in the marvel cinematic universe. Either way that isn’t enough to take anything away from this book! If you’re into the 60s silver age content or a fan of Doctor Strange at all, I’d say this is a must read!

Fantastic Four Volume 1 Review

Posted December 7, 2018December 14, 2018 MaceLeave a commentPosted in Omnibus Reviews

“If you weren’t a female, I’d demolish ya!! But the only thing I can do to a nut like you is give ya the spankin of your life!!”

Ugh, I’m so bad at writing these reviews. I finished the book a while back but have just been too busy to write up a review. I’ve been keeping up on reading though and am nearly done Doctor Strange Volume 1 so hopefully I’ll be posting a review for it sooner rather than later!

I’d also like to take a minute to say Rest in Peace Stan. He passed away recently and if you don’t know he was basically the father of Marvel comics as we know it. He will truly be missed.

Well here we go. I feel like a lot of my writing starts with that. So I’ll work on a different opener, but for now you’re stuck with it. The Fantastic Four! This is one of the Marvel teams and characters I know the least about, or knew the least about going into this first omnibus. If there was ever a cartoon (I believe there was but too lazy to look it up at this second) I never watched it! I’ve seen bits and pieces of the two movies but never sat down and watched them start to finish but if they end up in the MCU you can bet I’ll watch those movies.

This Omnibus collects Fantastic Four #1-30 and Annual #1. If you don’t already know, the fantastic four consists of Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), Johnny Storm (The Human Torch), Sue Storm (The Invisible Girl) and Ben Grimm (Thing). The four of them went into space in an effort to win the space race and ended up getting blasted with some cosmic rays that granted them their abilities.

The book itself was a bit slow and probably the toughest omnibus I’ve read so far but still highly enjoyable and glad I was able to read it!

I think the biggest reason I slowly got through this book and took me longer than others is the lack of ongoing story lines. Most issues are completely standalone stories that have no cliffhanger or something that makes you crave that next issue. Marvel was still figuring out their formula at this point so its to be expected. I’ve also heard others say the silver age stuff can be a bit wordy which can make issues take longer to read. The issues as individuals are quite good though, don’t get me wrong. But for me personally I’m looking to invest in some long term story lines. Which is why I decided to pick up a lot of these characters from their origin stories and not just jump onto the most popular arcs that become movies etc.

This omnibus introduces us to some of the fantastic four’s greatest foes like the Mole Man, Namor the Sub Mariner, the Puppet Master and of course Dr Doom. I personally always thought Namor was more of a good guy but the amount of issues he shows up as the antagonist in this book would leave me to believe otherwise. However I’m still behind about 50 years on Marvel lore so anything can happen!

Namor is constantly trying to win over the love of Sue Storm and surprisingly enough to me anyways she seems torn between Namor and Reed Richards. Throughout the omnibus she witness’ enough from both of them that her love for Reed is quite clear by the end however it was an interesting dynamic I had never known about before reading these books.

I almost completely forgot to mention the other couple present in the fantastic four. Thing and Alicia, the blind daughter of the puppet master. They have a funny dynamic of constantly not feeling good enough for the one another. Thing with his grotesque rock man like features and Alicia with her blindness. SPOILER WARNING but I think in the current FF run these two actually just got married. So its cool to see how it all began almost 60 years ago!

This book also had some great guest appearances from some marvel favorites such as Spider-Man, The Avengers, The X-Men, and some epic showdowns between the Hulk and Thing.

This panel, where Thing tells Jean Grey of the X-Men that he is going to give her the spankin’ of her life absolutely astonished me in 2018. It is truly a sign of a how much the times have changed since the 60’s. I don’t think anything that they let kids read would have anything close to an adult male spanking an adult female. It just wouldn’t be accepted in todays society.

One other character that shows up in this omnibus that I wanted to talk about is the Watcher. When the Fantastic Four go to explore the moon and end up on a collision course with a Russian scientist, they end up having an encounter with the Watcher. The Watcher is a cosmic entity who is never allowed to interfere with the dealings of the creatures of the universe but will observe. He ends up breaking that rule though and helping the Fantastic Four by taking Molecule Man with him to an alternate dimension so earth can be safe.

All in all its an exciting series of stories that is only beginning to scratch the surface on what will become the Marvel Universe and I couldn’t be more excited to read through them!

Thanks for reading my review! Nuff said 😉