Rules of the Marvel Universe
For as long as I've been reading Marvel Comics there's been some story and illustration rules that made Marvel stories feel Marvely. Some of these rules have remained constant and others have been tossed aside for the sake of a good story. "Bucky Stays Dead". Did anybody ever really believe that the several Buckybots and clones sent by the Red Skull to torment Cap were going turn out to be Bucky miraculously back from the dead? No. He was blown up. Nobody walks away from that, right? A good example is Tales of Suspense 88, where a Bucky is seen on a monitor saying to Cap, "Cap! Cap! It's me Bucky! I'm Alive! I've been held prisoner all these years!" When I first heard that somebody, I didn't yet know who Ed Brubaker was, had the gall to resurrect a character traditionally seen in WWII flashbacks and retro-continuity stories like The Invaders I thought it was going to bomb. It sounded like yet another "event" from the House of Old Ideas. Against the odds Brubaker has seamlessly reintroduced Bucky, aka The Winter Soldier, as a vital and interesting character. It helps that he hasn't been over used. Outside of Captain America he's appeared in The Winter Soldier one-shot during Civil War and an obligatory appearance in Wolverine Origins, where it turns out he killed Wolverine's wife or girlfriend- it seemed a little much that in his previously unknown past he knew both Black Widow and Wolverine. Did everybody know Wolverine in the past?
There are far more people on the Marvel Earth than in reality. This becomes clear by several points: For every supervillain there's at least a few henchmen. Some street level guys may rarely have henchmen but they all seem to know where they can find highly trained ex-military personnel to make up their private entourage. More financed megalomaniacs like the Red Skull have employed thousands of dedicated and uniformly costumed soldiers ready to ineptly carry out their employers wishes. Then there's HYDRA and AIM and SHIELD, all of which employ apparently tens of thousands of military, science, and intelligence personnel. These groups need factories of people to produce their respective matching attire, exotic weaponry, and more people to service their housing and food needs. More people are needed to build their secret lairs and complicated underground fortresses and doomsdays devices, etc. There is not this many readied, available and easily expendable ex-military personnel in all of the real world.
Secondly, there must be more people in the Marvel Universe to compensate for all those who die at the hands of supervillain plots, urban monster disasters, cosmic accidents that rent the fabric of space and time (if these affect the X-men, for instance then Joe and Jane Schmoe must also occasionally lose their memories or vanish from existence,) and keep society from falling apart, rebuild communities (Damage Control). There are dozens of more countries and civilizations, Latveria and Atlantis for example, and resources remain apparently stable despite the hundreds of millions more people needed to populate these regions (which might also mean the Marvel Earth is physically bigger.)
Time progresses in a fictional way in the Marvel Universe.
The good folk at the Marvel Chronology Project- www.chronologyproject.com
have been attempting to put into chronological order all of the appearances of each and every Marvel character. This is brilliant in the way that TV show and comic blogs, like mine, are not. It is a useful tool for a story world that is nearly fifty years old and unwieldy. Another project is an attempt to calendar the events in the comics into conventional times, utilizing portrayals of day and night, the moon, holidays, etc. I think this is cool but flawed. The Marvel Universe is a fictional world where chronology is possible although imperfect but relating that to 365 day years is counter intuitive. Here's a different approach to reconciling topical mentions of real years (like if a character in an old comic says something like "1976 is going to be the best year ever" but its clear that he's been written to age only a few years since then) with obvious time lag- time moves fictionally, it's just a comic book. Characters like Cap kept in suspended animation, or time traveled like Cable or Bishop, may actually be aging, even progressing through time differently than the average person. So many stories have involved the radical altering of space and time that its perfectly understandable that characters who lived in the early seventies would still look little unaged, they age normally while time moves fictionally around them. Another option is for writers and artists to stop making and using precise dates. "Several years ago..." could mean five years or fifteen years back.
I applaud the Marvel Calendar idea but I think its too rooted in reality for a comic book clock.

Big sale on cheap comics yields big finds
Sean Welch, Dean of Acquisitions



My classes have ended for the semester and my summer has begun! Capital City Comics has been putting out a great selection of crappy condition old comics in their 3 for a dollar box for the last couple months. As the acquisitions officer for the Repository I've been vigilant in monitoring their offerings and I came up with a few gems this week, including Brave and the Bold 50 and 56, both in only fair condition, a fine copy of Gold Key's Dark Shadows 28, Detective Comics 347, Superboy 141, and Lois Lane 112. If you're wondering if I'm a DC fan all of a sudden the answer is no, but the Repository Board, myself included have decided that at $.33 an issue we can afford it.
I'm proud to announce the MCBR has acquired our fourth autographed Marvel Treasury Edition, a copy of #15, a Conan issue autographed by Roy "the Boy" Thomas (seen above).
One of the faculty's favorite new titles is The Twelve from Marvel by Stracznski and Weston. The story is reminiscent of Captain America, twelve Golden Age characters who most of us have never heard of before are frozen back at the end of WWII, discovered and revived in 2008. The comic has a Watchmen feel about it because the heroes are coping with a world that has changed so much from their glory days. If you want info better than I can give check out: http://www.newsarama.com/Comic-Con_07/Marvel/TheTwelve.html
I don't want to spoil anything about the story but it's very well done- great characterizations and beautiful illustrations. The latest cover features The Witness!
Next Time: Some rules of Marvel Universe!

MCBR gains new shelf space and acquires valuable autographs
Sean Welch, Dean of Acquisitions
The MCBR is proud to announce the acquisition of some new shelves. Saint Vinnie's on Williamson St. was selling some of their old display furniture and my wife Beth bought a tall metal bookcase for our living room, like you might find at a library; and a two-tier magazine rack for the Vault Office. It's a very addition to the room and the MCBR now has a display area. Beth has more than earned her tenure here at the Rep'. We are planning another round of preservation work as we continue to bag and back the one-third of the collection either unbacked or in need of a new bag. The damage done by not having backers is evident in comics from the mid-nineties that had been moved around a lot. Some spine rolling or slouching, but still most issues are flat. When we get all the comics backed and sorted we will begin our first comprehensive inventory since 1994. Stay tuned.
I've been downloading scanned comics for Reference . I am not further sharing the downloads because they are for educational purposes only. The MCBR has in the digital collection almost every Spider-Man comic from Amazing Fantasy#15 through the issues of about Dec. 2006. That includes Amazing, Spectacular (The Rep' already owns the original magazine size issues), Marvel Team-Up, Web of, the Todd Mc Farland Spider-Man, and even the Spidey Super Stories. We have the commercial release cd-rom of the Avengers. We have the complete runs of Defenders, ROM, Tales to Astonish, Strange Tales, Tomb of Dracula, Marvel Comics Presents, and Secret Wars.
Since Christmas the MCBR has acquired almost 100 old comics, most pre-1985. Ebay provided our most exciting find. Three Marvel Treasury Editions, Doctor Strange, Howard the Duck, and Thor were purchased from a book seller of rare volumes and first editions. Comics books were not their business. Except for a tear to the Doctor Strange issue in shipping, these huge comic books look great. In the Strange issue we found a John Brunner autographed poster for his Seven Samuroid graphic novel (http://www.majorspoilers.com/archives/3898.htm/). A freebie! I decided to look for other autographs and on the splash page of Thor we discovered JACK KIRBY's autograph! The faculty were wowed. Then we found that the Brunner stories in the other two comics were also autographed by Mr. Brunner. These comics cost only $7 in total. The four autographs were unknown to the sellers. The Brunner poster was framed by Beth and hangs in the Vault Office.
The MCBR received two Captain America action figures and one Bucky from the most recent Marvel Legends series. This series has received some potent criticism from collectors on both low pose ability and a lack of the great mold detail compared to the previous offerings, my brother Rory Welch reports. I concur but still think they are worth having. The best Captain America from Marvel Legends is still Series One.