Glub Glub Glub

Marvel Adventures: Super Heroes #12

Captain America and Rick Jones are investigating Hydra and snooping around the Hydra homepage, which is full of happy families singing Hydra’s praises and an adorably mascot called Hydra Boy. Cap doesn’t really understand or trust this new-fangled “Internet” thingamabob — and with good reason, because Hydra is able to use webcams to recognize Cap and teleport him and Rick into the Internet itself! While Hydra Boy uses his abilities to alter the website’s environment to vex Cap, Rick sets out behind the scenes to phone for help and figure out how to alter the website himself. In the end, of course, Cap and Rick escape, riding a big search-engine locomotive.

There’s also a backup story, set stateside during WWII, in which Cap and Bucky fight this guy:

A prototype MODOK!

That’s really all I can say about it. Prototype MODOK! Whooo!

Verdict: Thumbs up. Hydra Boy was an amusingly nasty villain, and the story contained a wealth of great visual puns about the Internet. And again — Prototype MODOK!

Captain Britain and MI-13 Annual #1

One of the last issues of this comic we’ll see, as Marvel has already announced that they’ve cancelled it. Cancelling really outstanding comics seems to be the very favorite thing for comic publishers to do.

There are two stories here, the first focusing on Meggan, the mutant shapeshifter who used to be married to Captain Britain. Most of the story is a retrospective on her history, from her childhood, where she frequently got into trouble for accidentally using her shapeshifting powers to reflect back what people thought of her (at one point turning into a cartoonish stereotyped image of a Gypsy crone when someone accuses her family of being Roma) to her accidental imprisonment in Hell. However, she’s the only non-tormented soul in Hell, very optimistic and hopeful, which unnerves the rulers of Hell so much that they trick her into using her empathetic powers to let everyone in Hell shape her appearance. Once she’s been turned into a deformed monster, they exile her to a distant part of Hell, where she ends up leading a revolt, receives her first-ever superhero name, and meets up with Dr. Doom.

The second story puts the spotlight on Captain Britain as the rest of the MI-13 team spends an afternoon playing cricket. It’s a pretty amusing story — Blade can’t seem to pitch the ball correctly (Is “pitch” the right word? I know nothing about cricket.), Faiza Hussein is a cricket fanatic, and Spitfire uses very weird British slang.

Verdict: Thumbs up. More emphasis on Meggan than I would’ve expected, but it all seems to work out well. I really don’t understand anything about cricket, but I still thought the second story was funny. Sure, I didn’t understand very much of it because it was grounded so deeply in British culture, but I still enjoyed it.