Wasp

In a sentence, Ultimatum is the superhero comic that will make you hate superhero comics and will have you reading nothing but Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, and Daniel Clowes for the rest of your comics reading career. (My apologies to Fantagraphics.) Jeph Loeb really should have apologized to Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis for destroying their carefully crafted, simultaneously optimistic and nihilistic universe with all the skill of a child knocking over sand castles and then pulling its pants down to take a piss on the wretched ruins.

With four great stories and one mediocre one, Secret Wars Secret Love #1 is definitely worth picking up as it looks into a variety of relationships from platonic to struggling marriages and even ones that will make long time Marvel fans smile. This is a comic that will bring all generations of Marvel fans together and is filled with humor, heart, and a nice variety of art styles. (Gurihuru’s Danny Rand/Misty Knight is the cherry on top though.)

Avengers #55 marks the first real appearance of Avengers arch-villain, but the Avengers lineup he faces is quite odd. It’s a truly kooky quartet of the recently introduced Black Panther, Hawkeye, Wasp, and Goliath, which is one of Hank Pym’s dozen or so codenames. They open the issue as prisoners of a new, mostly filled with second stringers Masters of Evil, including “sultan of sound” Klaw, Radioactive Man, Whirlwind, and the “mysterious” Melter. Their strings are being pulled by the Crimson Cowl, a truly mysterious figure, who was revealed to be the Avengers’ butler Edwin Jarvis. However, writer Roy Thomas subverts the overused “the butler did it” cliche and throws in an even crazier plot twist that the robot Ultron-5 is behind the Avengers’ capture and infiltration of their HQ.

Yesterday, Marvel released yet another of their mysterious “All New Marvel NOW” teasers with the words “Ms.” in green on a black background with no creative team listed. Some have theorized that this means the return of 2010’s “Girl Comics” anthology, but I think that it means that Ms. Marvel will return and get her …