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 #47: April 1990(8.12.20) Credits: grandcomicsdatabase John Byrne pulls together one of the stronger wrap-around covers with a classic Wolverine design hack: three claws carving out space for three additional characters. It's hampered a bit by the flat purple backing, but Byrne nicely inks his own lines here and splashes some genuine textures and heavier shadows on to Wolverine. His Devil Slayer and Arabian Knight are largely afterthoughts, but there's a pronounced aesthetic difference between his Captain America and Wolverine. Like most artists, Byrne tackles the former with a distracting commitment to legibility: all of the costume needs to be fully rendered as if to imply that derogating any part of it would betray just how silly the costume is. A. Wolverine, "Black Shadow, White Shadow" [10/10] Wolfman opens this concluding installment with Black Shadow's host throwing himself into Wolverine's claws in an impressively gnarly suicide. What follows is mostly a perfunctory wrap-up with Logan and Mai debriefing in a simultaneously under- and over-written scene and Logan removing some kids to Hong Kong in what seems like the most idle plot wheel. It's natural to compare this feature to the Claremont/Buscema feature from the start of MCP and, with respect to plot, it's perhaps a modest improvement. It's clear, however, that Buscema and Janson's moody Madripoor setting surpasses the serviceable artwork here. B. Devil Slayer, "Lost Souls" [2/4] So why did the envisioned gritty realism of this feature immediately devolve into bland, Hot Shots farce? Ramos' gummy pencils are, of course, a terrible fit, but Zimmerman's script is marked by an unfounded faith in the familiarity and interest of the Devil Slayer backstory and the belief that merely aggregating 90s action cliches yields a coherent arc. The awfulness of this feature--well, this installment at least--seems to foreshadow the depths of "mature reader" anti-hero vacuity of the coming years. A tiny bright spot: Wilcox goes old school four-color feel for this hacky graveyard scene and it actually works if you squint. C. Captain America, "Old Glories" We're a year after Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" and this feature is a thinly plotted nod in that direction. When a Carlos the Jackal-type storms a Veterans' Hopsital, which also bizarrely stores weapons-grade plutonium, there's a stilted intervention by disabled veterans to assist Captain America in stopping the terrorist plot. The creative team behind this business is an interesting mix: Len Wein gets a script credit along with Deni Loubert, who's credited as "co-plotter," and Steve Bucellato does some early penciling work. There's a fair amount of energy here and Bucellato's design sensibilities come through in spite of some chunked, flat linework. At the same time, it's hard not to speculate and bemoan the fact that Latin American characters are portrayed as shadowy, untrustworthy abstractions in two of the features in this issue. D. Arabian Knight, "A Father's Love" Don Perlin, Todd Klein, and Paty Cockrum pull out all the stops, papering over a slipshod script from Lobdell. Perlin infuses almost everything with screentoned textures and Simsonian angularity, complemented with wide, flat panels that lend a kind of decorative feel to the proceedings. Klein juggles Arabian Knight's back and forth with some desert monsters as well as the jarring, unexplained narrative voice sprinkled throughout. Cockrum throws weird splashes of green and purple across the monsters and demons that race past. It's a wild affair that peaks with the "so bad it's good" demon baby conceit which is resolved with some Lobdellian schmaltz. A tremendously strange feature where the talent more or less works around Lobdell to carve out the closest thing to a Vault of Horror/Middle Eastern Conan mash-up we've seen. Power Ranking: Arabian Knight (A), Wolverine (B), Captain America (C), Devil Slayer (D)