Intro
Another week, another letter. Is this routine now? Habit? Who knows. All I know it I've spent most of the week trying to dial in the colours on the new TV and it still isn't quite right just yet.
I want his book so bad
So me and the boys (and Ryan and Meat) went to see the new MCU film, Ant Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. Do you really need a review of it? I feel like its a bit of a fools errand at this stage, at this point you either know if you're in or you're out. I'm still in, nothing yet has knocked me off the hype train just yet. I still love that a film with this much money being spent on it looks as great as this does. There's been a lot of talk about how this is a Star Wars film in a lot of the look and they're not wrong. It has that lived in feel, maybe not as well realised as Andor did it but you can't argue with all the daft alien designs. A guy with a laser jar for a head? Squishy dudes? Vegetables? I'm here for.
So rather than a review, lets do some recommended comics suggestions, with some spoilers so tread carefully if you've not yet seen the film:
A large part of this new Ant Man, and Phase 4 of the MCU, is to do with variants from other realities. Kang in the comics is full of this, because he's a time traveller, and this series goes through a lot of that. Its also wrapped up in beautiful artwork from Carlos Pacheco, like really top draw art. Lot of fond memories of this one as this was one of the first trades I bought when I was getting back into comics in the late 90s (according to Amazon I bought it in April 2001 which is actually I don't want to think about low long ago that was) and is still highly recommended
The writer of Avengers Forever, Kurt Busiek, was also writing the main Avengers comic at the same time. This was after the Heroes Reborn era, so his run was a big return to a classic style of Marvel Avengers comics; lots of soap opera and big adventures, really fun stuff. And this was the finale to his run, a big 16 part epic with Kang coming to Earth to, well, conqueror. This was a great last hurrah for that era of Avengers, as it wasn't that long until Brian Michael Bendis rebuilt the book from the ground up with Avengers Disassembled and his work that followed. Well worth your time, remembering that the next Avengers film is called Avengers: The Kang Dynasty
Secret Wars
Speaking of upcoming Avengers films, lets talk about Secret Wars. Before we get going this is about the modern Secret Wars, not the original Secret Wars from the mid 80s that properly kicked off the era of event comics, and not Secret War which was another story from the 2000s. Nope, we're talking this modern one because the word 'incursion' has cropped up a couple of times now in the MCU, which is something that forms a large part of the comic. To get the full jist I'd recommend the entire Jonathan Hickman run on The Avengers, but the short jist is that multiverses are collapsing into each other, destroying each other, which is what an incursion is. As the final few smash together fragments are brought together into a mish mash world built up of different realities. Now, Kang doesn't form a large part of the modern Secret Wars as Doctor Doom is the focus of that series, and only shows up as peripheral character in the 80s Secret Wars but again it'll be worth your time given that the other next Avengers film is called Avengers: Secret Wars.
Outro
Thats pretty much it actually; got a podcast to edit, and another video to work on at some point as well so going to crack on with that. Maybe. It was the second of a two part Death in Paradise this week so need to watch that first.
Bye!