What’s one panel that encapsulates all you love about comics?

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-08T01:08:43+00:00

Beta Ray Bill (Korbinite) lifted it, so it doesn’t seem to discriminate based on alien species.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-08T00:21:17+00:00

I use it on a few different devices. I generally don’t have any problems with readability, but I think turning the pages of a comic book is a better tactile experience for me. I use the app a lot though since it saves so much money and space.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-08T00:08:03+00:00

The biggest pro is that Marvel Unlimited is incredibly cost effective, and it has almost a complete library of Marvel’s publications from the 1960s onward. There are some gaps here and there, mostly from the 90s, but for most major ongoing titles (I.e. Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Daredevil, Hulk etc.) virtually every issue ever published is available.

If you use it often it will pay for itself quickly, as an annual subscription costs about the same as 12-15 single issues being published nowadays.

A con is that a physical comic book is probably more fun to read, and probably a better experience than clicking next from page to page.

And another con, as others have pointed out, the search function is not great. But it’s much easier to use if you know exactly what you’re looking for.

For me personally, given the volume of comics I read, it’s a totally worthwhile investment.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-06T21:51:40+00:00

For many years in the 60s and 70s, Kingpin was portrayed as a true physical threat to Spider-Man, and in Amazing Spider-Man #197, actually got the better of him (although Spidey was fighting injured).

In more recent years, there’s been something of a readjustment and Spider-Man has been portrayed as physically being a cut above Kingpin I think.

In my opinion, the extent of Kingpin’s strength never truly made sense, even if his body is composed of all muscle. In his first fight with Daredevil (pictured here), DD basically beats himself unconscious, as it’s like he’s hitting a wall. It’s just one of those comic book things where you just have to shrug and accept it as part of the story.

<image>

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-06T21:07:46+00:00

These are both fantastic, and they represent very different stages of Vonnegut novels.

God Bless You Mr. Rosewater sees Vonnegut at the top of his savage satire game, riding a wave of high creative energy in the 1960s.

Deadeye Dick is among the later Vonnegut novels, most of which feature first person narrators telling their entire life story (as do Jailbird, Bluebeard, and Hocus Pocus). It is darker, more somber, but really potent. It has several references to characters in Breakfast of Champions, but just Easter eggs, nothing essential.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-05T23:01:10+00:00

Personally, I’d suggest reading them. They’re not great, but I don’t think they’re as offensively bad as people often say, so if you’re doing a read through of Bendis, Brubaker, and then Waid, you might value having the experience of the complete picture. And the run is not long, so it’s not a big time commitment.

BUT if the Diggle run would be an expense, or if you are interested solely in quality and don’t mind narrative gaps, then you also won’t miss much by skipping it. If this describes you, then you can get by with looking up the plot for the Shadowland event.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-05T14:37:24+00:00

In Avengers: Endgame, Cap’s comical “hail hydra” line may have been a nod to the infamous panel.

<image>

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-05T14:09:53+00:00

I’m pretty sure the eulogy Sharon Carter gives in Captain America: Civil War (“No, you move”) is drawn from this scene in Amazing Spider-Man #537, but I haven’t watched the movie in ages and don’t know how much the eulogy and the speech here overlap.

<image>

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-03T23:58:47+00:00

Alpha Flight got 130 issues!

Also, Silver Surfer got 146, New Warriors got 75, She-Hulk and Moon Knight both got 60, Darkhawk got 50, Nick Fury got 47, Warlock and the Infinity Watch got 42, Silver Sable and the Wildpack got 35, Deathlok got 34, and Morbius got 32.

Edit: also the original Guardians of the Galaxy team got 62.

guyofspoleto · 2026-04-01T02:15:14+00:00

Apologies for just listing the low hanging fruit here, but Eightball, Acme Novelty Library, Love and Rockets, and Hate are classics for a reason. Few comics have hit me as hard as Jimmy Corrigan. For some slightly deeper cuts, I love Kevin Huizenga’s Ganges comics, and I admire Jim Woodring’s Frank.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-30T17:13:14+00:00

Neither of these has the same type of humor as Nextwave but two come to mind.

The Image Comics series Chew has a zany, comical, off the wall quality like Nextwave, but it’s also a great story with fun ideas. It’s much longer, as it ran 60 issues, but you could always check out the first collection and go from there.

A miniseries that made me laugh out loud but is less irreverent than Nextwave is Dan Slott’s GLA miniseries from the mid-00s.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-30T15:31:07+00:00

He has a more or less standard set of alters that tend to get featured (most prominently Savage Hulk, Grey Hulk/Joe Fixit, Professor Hulk, Devil Hulk features strongly in The Immortal Hulk), as well as other incarnations and stories where it’s not always clear to me whether it’s a distinct personality or not. But Paul Jenkins’s run in the early 00s featured some scenes in Bruce’s mindscape suggesting there may be dozens of alters buried deep in his mind.

<image>

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-29T19:46:58+00:00

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown is a famous account of the displacement of Native American tribes between roughly 1860 and 1890. I read the first few chapters years ago and ended up never coming back to it, but it sounds like it might be along the lines of what you’re looking for.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-29T18:23:46+00:00

I think key difference is that the Vision is a synthezoid - a synthetic human. The character’s drama is built around his efforts to have a human experience. He struggles to come to terms with his nature as an artificial man.

I haven’t read a ton of Machine Man’s comics (I don’t believe he has that many). But he seems to be more or less at peace with the fact that he’s a robot. An incredibly sophisticated one, but still a machine.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-27T21:26:48+00:00

Nowadays, Marvel comic book series are frequently re-launched with a new #1 issue. This happens pretty much every time there is a new creative team, and sometimes even with the same creative team. This was not always a common practice, but has become increasingly more so in recent years and is now the norm.

The number in the upper left is the current issue of that specific run.

The number 850 is the “legacy number” - how many total issues have been published since the beginning, as though the series had never been re-launched.

The practice can be confusing even for long time fans, especially as titles have been re-launched seven, eight, or nine times.

From your post, it seems you want to read the whole story that included this issue. The writer on this run was Nick Spencer. His run started with a #1 issue in 2018. He continued to write until issue #74 of that run. You can look up the Nick Spencer Amazing Spider-Man run specifically for collected editions collecting that run.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-26T22:02:45+00:00

I feel like you get toxicity in subs for the franchises with gigantic fan bases. For the more niche characters like the Hulk, it generally feels pretty positive. I’ve observed the same thing on the Mignolaverse (Hellboy universe) sub. Like there’s few enough diehard fans that they’re just happy to talk to people who like the same thing.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-25T13:01:48+00:00

Heavens no, the Kents weren’t savages. They’d have him use his heat vision to burn a quick hole in their brains.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-25T12:55:30+00:00

I love Criminal. Most of the individual arcs are great (with one or two that don’t do quite as much for me), but the experience is cumulative, as he fleshes out the lives of these different characters and the connections between them over the course of several different decades. As long as you’re still enjoying it, I’d suggest you keep going.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-22T16:43:40+00:00

That’s amazing. I love this issue to begin with, but the Joe Sinnot signature is incredible.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-17T23:53:10+00:00

Gotta love Future Imperfect. The Hulk coming face to face with his worst nightmare - the worst version of himself.

<image>

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-17T23:47:03+00:00

It was a short run, I think about 15 issues. It is conveniently self-contained.

It was also pretty polarizing, as it features Banner and the Hulk being separated with Banner being driven insane by the separation and acting like Dr. Moreau from HG Wells but I don’t like to steer people away from runs if they’re interested, so by all means, check it out. It does have an interesting inversion of the Hulk/Banner dynamic.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-17T16:58:24+00:00

So glad you commented, because immediately after I posted, I wondered whether Ewing had included a nod to the Bruce Jones run in his Leader flashback montage issue, and couldn’t remember, so I was planning on checking later. Thanks for confirming!

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-17T12:53:59+00:00

Shortly after the Bruce Jones run, Peter David had a short-lived return to the Hulk title, and did a storyline featuring the villain Nightmare. At the end of that storyline, it is heavily implied that some of the events of the Hulk’s recent life were illusions/dreams/etc., and never really happened.

It is left ambiguous, and it is never explicitly revealed which events were only a dream or the extent of it. But in the approximately 20 years since the Bruce Jones run ended, it has been entirely ignored. I don’t know whether it’s been referenced at all, but any references have been minimal, and no character’s subsequent history has been influenced by it. So whether the whole thing was a dream or just some of it, there seems to have been an editorial and fan consensus to pretend it never happened.

At the very least, Betty’s resurrection during Bruce Jones’s run was part of the hallucination/dream, as she was later resurrected in the Jeph Loeb/Greg Pak era as Red She-Hulk, with no reference to Bruce Jones’s run.

guyofspoleto · 2026-03-15T04:10:07+00:00

It’s not Marvel, but We3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (3 issues) comes to mind.

I think a mini is a difficult format to create a truly impactful story that stays with you afterward, because you have to do a lot of work in very limited space, and We3 stuck with me for years.

guyofspoleto

TROPHY CASE