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 #49: April 1990(8.27.20)
Credits: grandcomicsdatabase
An urgent empirical question about nineties comics: when did Wolverine ascend to peak popularity? My hunch is that we're still a couple of years away, but, given Miller's success, we've surely entered the phase wherein all pencilers are hunting for novel takes on his costume that might break some kind of visual ground. This effort succeeds but only insofar as we treated to a cautionary lesson about how not to carve out his cowl. This Larsen outing is plainly mistaken in its read on the visual appeal of Wolverine. As best I can recall, this was a singular bit of folly, but it's also striking that this departure from the standard sharpness is so very off-putting.
A. Wolverine, "Fist Fight" [2/3]
Larsen continues tooling around with two of the most fun action figures in the Marvel sandbox. There's arguably even less of a story to track here, but some villains pop up and there's a bit of slashing and bouncing around along with an obese mutant *apparently* from Spiderman's high school.
There's some awkward layouts here, but Larsen's keenly aware of the joy of the Kirby-esque indifference to anatomy and the vibrancy that comes with throwing bizarre shapes and volumes over varying depths.
B. Devil Slayer, "Lost Souls" [4/4]
The Defenders-era Devil Slayer enjoyed an appreciable albeit highly limited kind of Black Knight meets Doctor Strange appeal. The exceptionally disjointed flavor of this feature suggested a half-assed romp through the character's backstory, but, remarkably, this four-part story has proven to be an absolutely unsuccessful retcon rather than a brief detour from his recognizable costume. Equipped with Starman pointy thing, long hair, muscle shirt, and stubble, Devil Slayer departs this morass of shrieking foolishness as an incredibly accurate depiction of all that will emerge as typical and cliched through the nineties.
C. Daredevil, "White Messiah"
John Figeroa of Wolfpack "fame" returns with an oddly titled piece. There's a black villain here who, after an exceptionally brief fight with Daredevil, says "You, the Punisher, all of you white messiahs can think about something the harder you push, the harder the streets push back. The image of the future is a child of the streets, rising and spitting in your masked face." I suppose this intended as commentary of some sort, but there's no characterization of Scope that would render this at all substantive.
The dashed off feel to the story squares with Ron Wilson's spartan backgrounds, but, perhaps accidentally, there's a pleasant open, Gulacy feel. The foundations are solid to spotty here; it's hard to imagine that this isn't a deadline scramble yielding slapped-together, paper-thin storytelling.
D. Gladiator, "The Unbeatable Foe"
A spiritual sibling of the Triton one-off in MCP#28, Gladiator soars around the cosmos with little apparent cause and, after a few exploratory pages of light action, stumbles into an immediately resolved fight with a underwritten threat. There's a Tales of the Green Lantern Corp feel to the storytelling, given the limited depth Gladiator's been afforded elsewhere and the setting--a backwater "sector" left more or less ignored. It's entirely possible that this is a delicately revised Quasar or Starfox piece, but it's charming enough and useful to see the wrongly derided Don Heck immediately muster depth and texture to make the contrived fight attention worthy.
Power Ranking: Gladiator (B), Daredevil (B-), Wolverine (C+), Devil Slayer (D)