Marvel Comics Presents #11 (Marvel – Various)
VANGUARD races to its conclusion: the mystery is solved, but who will survive to tell the tale? Meanwhile, Guardian confronts his tormentors in WEAPON OMEGA’s penultimate chapter; MACHINE MAN battles his past to save his sanity; and STINGRAY goes face-to-face with a horror from the deep!
I have been known to pick on independent anthology books, knowing the non-entertaining stories that may lie within and I feel bad about the time wasted reading them afterwards. Well, I tell you what, there are very few anthology books out there, independent or not, that have anything on Marvel Comics Presents as far as scoring on the “Eric’s wasted time”ometer.
Let’s see, where to begin. Well, how about the two stories I have followed for almost a year now. Marc Guggenheim’s Vanguard has actually been a decent storyline, It’s just reading eight pages at a time is getting old. This should have been it’s own series rather than a running lead-story in this book. The ending of this month’s Vanguard (spoiler: death of Blade?) is at the best part of the issue. Another arc that could been it’s own series is Rich Koslowski’s Weapon Omega story. This has been setting up a second coming (or is it fifth coming?) of Alpha Flight. Once again, decent story, but just dragging on and on. After these two, we really get to the ten minutes or more of my life I want back. This Machine Man storyline, where MM has created his own mechanized floating psychological breakdown (because he can’t actually have one being a robot). And I enjoy femme fatales as much as the next guy… but, Madame Menace’s return? really? Madame Menace, Wow! Boy, the only this that would be worse than that would be having a story headlining a D-list Avenger-wanna-be… oh wait, the fourth story this month stars Stingray. Yes, that’s right, Stingray. Stingray kills an ocean monster by having having it choke on his own body… I only wish I was making it up. At $3.99, Marvel Comics Presents might your worse bet this month.
Issue Grade: D
