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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 1h

If I'm remembering the story inside this book correctly, it's extra-bonkers, even by the koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs standards of late Silver/early Bronze Age Superboy

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 3h

I hope Wilson has the time and opportunity to keep writing Black Cat

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 4h

My question would be, is writing a paragraph of back cover fluff so hard that humans can't do it?

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 5h

I love when Gerber took over this series, but these earliest appearances of the Non-Team have their own charm.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 5h

Yes, I haven't read all of the FF's history, but, to me, North's run has supplanted Byrne's as the best run the title has ever seen after the Big Bang of Stan and Jack. When his oddball sci-fi premises connect, they really connect.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 5h

It's so good, and, wow, Carlos Gomez killed it on the handful of issues he drew. I wish he'd stuck around longer on this book.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 5h

… and I love how North's run always foregrounds Alicia as an equal member of the team. She has no superpower, yet she has a greater power than Reed, Sue, Johnny, or Ben, namely the power of empathy, cheesy at that may be to say.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 5h

My #TopShelfFriday is a story I just read in trade, Fantastic Four #19 by Ryan North and Carlos Gomez, featuring Alicia Masters, Private Eye. Hands down the best What If? or Elseworlds story I've ever read, but North puts a bow on it by cleverly tying this genre exercise into the FF's larger story …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 9h

Chopping out bits of the story to make a work fit into this digest format is a bad idea, I agree.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 12h

AI music won't be much worse than the Pro-Tooled, Auto-Tuned pop that has dominated the past 20 or 30 years. It might be more honest, insofar as it will dispense with the pretense that humans play any part in it.

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Reposted by John Hunter

Jeff Allard @jallard.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

And, as with the other Midnight books, I love that this feels like such a hardcore departure. The main failing of the recent Ultimate line, for me, was that it played it too safe in its reimaginings. That's not the case here. This is a FF that feels closer to E.C. Comics than to Marvel Comics.

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Reposted by John Hunter

RJ White, Alas!, Was a butterless man! @rjwhite.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

"In the spring of 1989, an R.E.M. concert led to Philadelphia’s first reported (measles) cases, involving concertgoers at the Spectrum. The city health department interviewed teenagers exposed at the show, ramped up vaccinations, and braced for the worst."

share.inquirer.com

Pa. measles outbreak is nation’s worst, echoing deadly 1991 Philadelphia epidemic

Three decades later, physicians who treated children in 1991 can hardly believe that Pennsylvania is again contending with the nation’s worst measles outbreak.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

… stories I'm more interested in, although my Silver and Bronze age tastes are probably not what young readers today care about the most. And there are already imprints like the Penguin Classics Marvel trade paperbacks catering to my ossified preferences.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I can think of 5 or 6 other Daredevil stories I'd have picked first to keep in print forever. But, to look at the bright side, at least Marvel has acknowledged that letting key books fall out of print has been a problem, and this is a first step to fix it. Maybe future volumes will collect …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I actively dislike the Punisher in any incarnation, so apologies in advance if Suicide Run is truly a modern classic.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Call me crazy, but one might expect the “Renown”/evergreen line to kick off with something that deserves to stay in print forever, like, oh, I don’t know, the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange, Steranko’s Nick Fury, or Miller’s Daredevil, instead of preserving some random Punisher storyline.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

For all its problems, Marvel still has some strong creators and some strong books, but it does strike me that Wacker has some awareness of what problems Marvel needs to fix to make its line stronger from top to bottom. Starting with fewer gimmicks and more good writing and art.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

DC has brought back its Vertigo line to feature books outside of the superhero genre. Marvel’s Midnight flirts with horror. I’m not well-versed in anime and manga, although I know those genres are popular. I like the superhero books; I’d just like to see Marvel put out better ones across its line …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I believe he is saying he is going to favor quality over quantity, which would represent an about-face for Marvel.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

If I had to bet, I'd bet that she and Ben get together, or are already together.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

One gets the sense that here they're not going to fall in love right away, if ever.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

… in this world, or whether theirs remains a marriage of convenience, as we see it established in the first issue.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

member of the team, although she was always the most interesting, but I like how in the first issue of this she is established as a badass from the start, and perhaps as a bad person as well, although I'm not so interested in her being bad. Curious to see if she and Reed fall in love …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yes, I've seen some reaction that this is developing too slowly, but I saw enough that intrigued me that I'm willing to wait for them to blast off in the rocket & for whatever else is to come. Over the long journey of the original series, Sue has gone from doormat to the most powerful & interesting

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The art style's not my usual thing, and I don't know enough about manga to know the degree to which Scie Tronc is paying homage to that genre, although I gather that he is, but I do like his art overall, even if some of the gory bits are a bit much.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

the horror/monster aspects of this are not what interest me about it: what interests me the most about it is the rethinking of Sue, somewhat along the lines of what Byrne tried to do by turning into her Malice, but already more thoughtfully executed.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Ben/The Thing has always been the original body horror character, and that theme of "Is being this monster worth the power that comes with it?" has been pretty well trodden in his case, so I don't need if I need to see the other three members go through their own monstrous transformations, but …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Yes, I do think Midnight FF is by far the best of the three, although that's at least partly down to me loving the FF more than I love the other two series. But I like how Reed is more Reed than ever, while at the same time Sue takes over the Reed role of the bossy boss. From This Man, This Monster

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

But I grew up on all of that '70s soft rock stuff like Moonlight Feels Right, Chevy Van, Brandy, I'd Really Love To See You Tonight, Wildfire, etc. and have always loved all of it.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Magnet & Steel was and is one of my favorite songs of that time

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

To Gil, this might as well have been another issue of the Atom

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So this line of omnibuses (omnibi?) is the one to get to read the Krakoa story across all of the different X-books of the period in chronological/reading order?

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

So, as I understand it, this omnibus that came out last year follows the same mapping: it collects the first bits of all of the disparate titles that immediately followed House of X / Powers of X, in reading order? I am interested in this, but see it's already out of print, maybe?

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

They seem to have a new series of Krakoa omnibuses that collect the different titles in the same omnibus in a coherent order. But, as always, if you're interested in that, you'd better act quick before it goes out of print.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Judging the right number of copies to print to avoid a warehouse of unsold books can be a tough needle to thread, but I agree that Marvel could do a better job of keeping certain evergreen titles always in print.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

with the main story on any level. But Kirby was so overflowing with ideas (and, at the time, Marvel was still constrained from launching any new titles), so the Inhumans story got shoehorned into the greatest FF/Doom/Surfer story.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Issues #57-60 of the FF are where Kirby most successfully tied together all the threads of his creation, I'd say, by integrating the two separate Dr. Doom and Galactus/Silver Surfer plots, even as he casually tossed off a entire third quasi-Shakespearean story about the Inhumans that doesn't connect

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

against all outside advice and common sense.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

… but the book's most interesting remake is Sue, who in the earliest issues of the original series, was routinely portrayed as a shrinking violet / damsel-in-distress who probably didn't even belong, but here takes on the "Reed" role of the cocky scientist who pushes for the ill-fated rocket launch

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I agree that Midnight FF best pulls off the "different, but the same" hook of DC's Absolute line. As I saw someone else point out today, this take on Reed, with his absent-mindedness racheted up to eleven, is more interesting than the Evil Reed / Maker alternate take on him we've seen elsewhere …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

… didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I feel like Ewing has done a good job with the obtuse mysticism of his take on the Lanterns, their respective color spectrums, Oa, and Qward - if a lot of that has been impenetrable, it has been so in an interesting way. But flashing back to WWII for a bonus issue of Ezra Cain & the Brutal Dark …

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The Adultress and Bad Boys Get Spanked flirt with self-parody, but of course Talk of the Town is unimpeachable. Tough but vulnerable is a lot more appealing than cartoon tough.

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I really like this series, but this is first issue where I felt a twinge of WTF is going on here, and not in a good way

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is certainly going to work in getting me to pick up the X-Men and Superior Spider-Man books

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Whatever it costs, I'm guessing it will be cheaper that what the out-of-print omnibus is going for on the secondary market

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John Hunter @johnhunter38655.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Maybe they're copying DC, but I will straight-up buy that X-Men compendium that looks to cover the whole? Cockrum/Byrne era.

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