Marvel Comics Presents ran for 175 issues from 1988 until 1995. Each issue included four eight-page stories with typically two or three on-going features (and no ads). It spotlighted some of the leading creators of mainstream comics over a period of precipitous economic growth and even more rapid decline. Reading through it is an opportunity to revisit any number of weird aspects of 90s superhero comics. This blog is a primitive, oddly regimented, manifestly scattershot crawl through an often disappointing but occasionally splendid comic. All image copyrights are Marvel's. Issue credits linked below. Updated on Wednesdays. Marvel Comics Presents #33: Early December 1989(5.06.20) Credits: grandcomicsdatabase Captain Britain squares off against two previous iterations of Captain Britain in a serviceable Paul Ryan cover with Bob McLeod inks. While it's a low energy offering--despite some peculiar Speedball bubbles percolating around the Captains--the cumulative wraparound is a modest success. Sadly, the logo and design remain an abject disaster with four different fonts in the header. Yeesh. A. Excalibur, "Having a Wild Weekend" [3/8] A dust-up/dream sequence outing that doesn't do much to advance the somewhat inscrutable martial Looney Tunes story. But the dynamic and energy here are hard to resist. Larsen opens with a tight splash of only Captain Britain's face gasping out of the water and then marches him through a dream-like, channel-flipping parade of sitcom characters. The visual highlight, through, is a vertical column flight trajectory immediately followed by a horizontal tier that spreads the eye immediately across fold and over the entire visual space. The highpoint of this layout experiment so far. B. Black Panther, "Panther's Quest" [21/25] McGregor owns up to some plotting chicanery here by simply having Gore and some mercenaries stumble upon T'Challa's glider and set in motion what's long seemed inevitable: that Zanti would be shot while aiding T'Challa. The final panel has Zanti taking three bullets to uncertain effect, but the narrative misstep here is that he's largely played for laughs in this installment, bumbling through a thicket of trees. And, rather clearly, Colan is far more comfortable drawing urban rather than natural settings, given the odd, hunky branches. C. Coldblood, "Rise and Shine" [8/10] Gulacy's weakest outing in this feature with some dashed off interiors and figures that stick out on account of the scrupulous attention to detail elsewhere. Some of the extraneous narrative is, at least, sloughed off here with Coldblood on a collision course with Mako through a maze of hallucinated robot attackers. The apex here, which likely indicates the tone that ought to have been pursued throughout and aligns with other highlights in the series, is a gruesome vision of vultures eating through Gina's junk food-filled ribcage. It's a haunting image and a reminder that setting Coldblood into a darker Robocop-esque narrative world rather than Logan's Run constitutes a clear misstep. D. Namor, "Dying in Paradise" Now this is an oddity. McGregor writes a "silent" piece told entirely in pantomime. With Namor discovering a massive oil spill and, while attempting to save a baby bird, discovers a vast flock of trapped and dying flamingos. It's a potent enough piece, but, somewhat remarkably, drawn by Jim Lee. While Lee's landscape is solid and there's a great physicality to his Namor, the final inset panels with his awed, grim face don't *quite* hit. By MCP standards, this is a lovely, mournful, change of pace, but, given its personnel, it's mostly an interesting, somewhat off-kilter artifact of collaboration. Power Ranking: Namor (A-), Excalibur (B+), Black Panther (B), Coldblood (B-)