Wednesday, March 18, 2009

In Which We Over-Discuss Fill-In's Wednesday!

For those of you who don't read comics yet read my blog, there is something that happens sometimes called a "fill-in." Basically, these are back-ups the publishers have of comics that are ready to go whenever they are falling behind and can't get a title out by deadline. These issues are usually written and drawn by people who don't do the normal comic, so it's painfully obvious when this happens. Picture watching your favorite television show one week and finding all different actors playing the characters, and you'll get the idea.

Well, this happened in the Avengers at a terrible time. The team had been zapped away to an alternate world where they were going to confront the Squadron Sinister Supreme, and for the following two issues they were having an unrelated flash-back where they were fighting a throwaway nemesis called the Assassin. Considering that this interrupted a thinly-veiled fanboy dream of the Avengers vs. DC's Justice League, this could not have happened at a worse time.

So, by Avengers #147, they resumed the storyline that began in #144 and it was implied that we were to forget #145 and #146 ever happened. As Marvel rightly assumed, we were children. And since we were reading comic books, it's not like we had other things in our lives to turn to and everything was forgiven.

So, while Avengers #147-149 were awesome, they didn't have a lot of moments to make fun of. But, because I'm Adam, I noticed a few things that you may have missed:


I, like many fanboys, assumed that the idea of the "living costume" came from Spider-Man's foe, Venom, but it appears that the Hellcat had an outfit with a mind of its own back in the 1970's. For some reason, I had totally forgotten this and I think everyone else did as well. It was an idea whose time had not yet come.
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If this was how they got rid of contestants on American Idol, I might actually watch it.
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Hey, kids! It's time for Fun with Out of Context Dialogue!(tm!):


That's why I usually have to pay her extra.

Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all week!
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Marvel Comics: Teaching boys how to have healthy relationships with women since 1939.

See you tomorrow!

5 comments:

Sea-of-Green said...

Ah, Hellcat, Hellcat ... I liked her very much, but mostly in her early days, when she was just known as the Cat.

I had NO IDEA her costume was self-directing, though. Yowza.

-- Sea

The one letter wonder said...

Between Hellcat's living costume and the out context panel of the day. My wednesday is not looking as bad anymore.

Aaron Carine said...

Hellcat didn't start out as the Cat. The Cat was Greer Nelson,who became
Tigra.

D.B. Echo said...

I remember one Sunday when I eagerly picked up the latest issue of Star Wars comics - I think it was the last one before they started on the serialization of The Empire Strikes Back - and rather than the story promised the previous month, there was some strange stand-alone story with extremely weird art. I guess it was a "back-up" story. Turns out "Riders in the Void" was probably the most striking, original, and memorable issue of the entire run!

Sea-of-Green said...

Oh, yeah, yer right, Aaron. Forgot about that.