User blog:Nausiated/Horrors, Surfers, and Spider-Women

I've been a busy guy the last little while, I'm sure some have noticed that my updates have been a little sparse of late. Well, what may come as a surprise is that this fellow writer has been having an active social calendar as late. Winter is over, spring is in the air, and there is much beer to drink and women to romance... Or at least hang-overs to be dolled out the next day. So I've been a little preoccupied. Not surprisingly though, on the other hand, I've kind of detoured off my original game plan of coming updates. During the last couple of weeks I had the chance to get through the third volume of Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups, Hawkman Vol 1, AND Marvel Horror Vol 2. Not to mention going back and doing the 7th volume of Fantastic Four. But we're back on track, I just finished doing the 2nd volume of Silver Surfer, and starting this week sometime I'll be doing Spider-Woman. Some general comments about the Marvel Horror stuff now... Where do I start? This second volume of Marvel Horror was certainly better than the first one. With the first volume you got a collection of the early Son of Satan and Satanna books, while this second volume had more variety. It had the Living Mummy, Brother Voodoo, Golem, Gabriel the Devil Hunter, the Scarecrow, and Mordred the Mystic. What's interesting about these characters was how interesting concepts just didn't pan out (This was also evident with the Satanna stories) Brother Voodoo appeared in the pages of Strange Tales, before being tossed into Tales of the Zombie monster mag, before it was canned, The Golem seemed to suffer the same fate, having his story quickly wrapped up in Marvel Two-in-One, and the poor Scarecrow certainly didn't have a fair chance to start, being bumped from book to book to book before having his story wrapped up in Marvel Team-Up as well. Mordred also had the same problem.. Poor Thing, always being treated like a monster, AND is the dumping ground for loose plot threads. Anyway... One thing I wish Marvel would do more of is print more of their non-super hero books in Essential format. DC Comics at least has some variety with what they print in their Showcase Presents books. Granted, they also mostly cater to the long-underwear crowd, but they've also made strides to reprint some of their non-superhero books as well (Challengers of the Unknown, Jonah Hex, Red Baron, Sgt. Rock etc.) Marvel hasn't done so much, their Essential Marvel Horror books and Essential Tomb of Dracula being the closest, and even then you're not entirely safe from capes. I'm hoping they keep on printing the Essential Horror stuff.. There are still some great Marvel horror stories which have yet to be reprinted and the Essential books is the best place to go about it: There's the Man-Wolf and Morbius solo stories, the Lilith (The vampire, not the Ghost Rider villain), and not to mention Bloodstone. Why haven't they reprinted THAT yet? Well suffice to say, we'll just have to wait and see. Until then, I'll be plugging away at some Spider-Woman for a while. Which is kind of a funny series, if you ever read it... Plot holes the size of VW mini-busses, not to mention it looks like they never really knew what to do with her in the beginning and did all SORTS of wacky things.