Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Marvel NOW! Point One #1!
Once upon a time, Marvel saw the success of the New 52 overhaul from DC Comics in 2011 and thought “ME TOO!” So they did their own version starting at the tail-end of 2012. #MeToo
As for me, I’ve been bouncing around Marvel with much less focus compared to DC, and now I’ll put in a little more focus by digging into the Marvel NOW! shit and see where it takes me. I’ll keep bouncing around, plugging along with Ultimate Spider-Man and Astonishing X-Men and others, certainly, as the sands of time slip away. But Marvel NOW! looks like it has a lot of fun stuff, so I can no longer resist its alluring aura. Plus, unlike DC’s New 52, which mostly has 52 shitty series with an average of about 52 shitty issues each, Marvel NOW! has about 700 shitty series with an average of about 15 shitty issues each! You can’t beat that! Series get done quicker. I can bounce around a little faster. Plus, there appears to be much less unnecessary crossover weaving.
The whole Marvel NOW! relaunch kicked off with a one-shot to get the ball rolling, and that’s what I’m covering today. Looks to be six short stories spread across about 60 pages. SO LET’S GET TO IT! Enough blabbin’.
Marvel NOW! Point One #1 [December, 2012]
“NYSE”
Written by: Nick Spencer
This story seems quite wordy and I’m already bored! Fuck Marvel NOW!
All right, we see Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which is a complete bitch to type out, by the way) getting reassigned. Fury seems FURIOUS! Just kidding, he seems accommodating and patient, but also lacks a lot of info about what’s going on, so some attractive S.H.I.E.L.D. lady briefs him as she leads him into a basement of sorts. “You’re here to make a new friend.” she tells him, snarkily I’m sure.
She says she’s leading him to a man who was discovered at 9am on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange putting in tickets for over a dozen hedge funds. Every single ticket is making bank quickly. By 11am, everyone had noticed. Apparently, this man was suddenly in control of the economy of the entire goddamned world, moving billions in only three hours. S.H.I.E.L.D. ain’t havin’ that! So, time to get Nick Fury on his ass. Nick Furious!
Cork it, Special Agent No-One-Fucking-Cares.
Fury’s not Furious yet, damnit. He’s not Fast either. He asks how the hell this could happen in the first place, and Agent Maria SomethingOrOther informs him that the man is from the future! 100 years in the future! 2112, by my watch. Rush made a whole album about that year, but failed to mention this part of it. Nick Fury doesn’t believe this shit, though. People from the future? That has never happened in the history of comic books!
Fury still doesn’t understand why he’s on this assignment. S.H.I.E.L.D. wants information from Future-Man, but Fury’s skills don’t involve interrogation. Basket-weaving, maybe. But, look sir, normally they’d agree with your hesitation, but… “He asked for you. That’s why. You. No one else.” It’s like, look Nick Fury, you’re pretty far down on our list of people we actually, uh, wanted, you know, working on literally anything. But here we are. Everyone’s sorry, trust me.
So they shove Nick Fury, who is wearing a stupid uniform by the way, into the interrogation room where Mr. 2112 is waiting. He’s happy to see him! “Nick Fury! In the flesh. Amazing.”
Fury asks for his name, but the man ignores him. He’s not too happy that the snarky Agent Coulson is there with Fury, but Coulson ain’t going anywhere, so onward they continue. “I want to tell you things that are important. I want to tell you what’s coming. But you — you won’t listen.” the guy says, smug and in a relaxed hands-behind-his-head position. He insists that there are real dangers that Fury and his kind aren’t even noticing, let alone addressing. Fury calmly tells him to spill.
The guy tells him that America will be seventh down the list of leading nations by the time he’s born. Yawn. We’re already lower than that in 2022. Next!
He’s not here to threaten, of course. He’s here to warn. “See, that’s what’s so special about this moment in time. You’ve still got the arrogance. You’re angry, but you don’t know why.” he keeps lording his I’m-from-the-future position all over these sad motherfuckers.
“You don’t know what’s waiting for you up in the stars.”
The End! Interest piqued? Mine neither! But that’s ok, this particular story is woven in between the others. Let’s move on for now, shall we?
“Guardians of the Galaxy”
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Wisconsin, 20 years ago.” Yeah yeah yeah, I saw this fucking movie in the theater with Chris Pratt Schwarzenegger Magoo and Vin Diesel was a tree. Very amusing.
Young Peter is walking home all slumpily in the windy, shitty Wisconsin weather. His mother is waiting on the porch. He tells her that someone was picking on a girl, no one was helping, and he’s not hurt. She tells him to go inside before it rains. She spots three bright lights in the woods across the lawn. “What the hell? Oh my God…is it you?” she asks the three bright lights. The three bright lights turn out to be three robot gun dudes! “THIS IS THE ONE CALLED MEREDITH QUILL. THE SPARTOI BLOODLINE WILL NOT CONTINUE.”
Whoops, that’s gonna leave a freckle.
Then they blast her with lasers. Into the back, exit wound through the titty.
Little Peter Quill Pratt Parker Schwarzengger Whatever is cleaning up in the bathroom for dinner. Unbeknownst to him, his mother is FUCKING DEAD NOW or something. The robots enter the house looking for the kid, and he comes running out like a little nimrod. Didn’t you hear the lasers? Come on, loser, you’re dead meat now.
So they’re shooting at him, and this kid has no idea what’s going on! He’s just about pissing his overlong bangs about it. These robots, they’re crashin’ and smashin’. Little Peter Quillface runs to a closet, finds a shotgun, and blows these fuckers dead with one shot. That’s some quick thinking, son.
As he’s trying to process that his mother had a shotgun in the closet in the first place, he’s mesmerized by the sun symbol on the robots’ laser guns.
But then he hightails it out of there when, heh heh, uh, a big goddamned spaceship blows up his house. That’s gotta hurt! Heh!
“Diamondhead”
Written by: Jeph Loeb
Some little punk in a black and yellow suit is zipping across the country like a comet. A big, blue, streaking comet. He’s not even flying, it’s like he was launched or something. From NYC to St. Louis to Kansas to Utah, all while talking to himself about how he can’t believe Thor let him be an Avenger!
Oh boy, the hyperactive blue streak will be an indispensable asset to real QUICK-THINKERS like Captain America and the Falcon.
This kid’s just a nobody from nowhere! Wow! What an opportunity!
Some diamond-looking guy with a diamond on his belt and a diamond-looking head, I’m gonna call him Diamondhead, stops this twerp in his tracks while over Utah. He asks the kid who he is with an uppercut to the jaw! Bam!
“Who am I? Who the heck are you?!” he squeals.
“Name’s Diamondhead. You should know that!” Diamondhead responds. Even I knew that, it’s the title of the story! Duh!
“And…what’s your problem other than you’re ugly?” the kid whines.
“They said you were all dead!” claims Diamondhead. “Rich Rider. The Nova Corps. All dead.”
The kid, whose name I still don’t know, tells him that he’s sort of right. Before he tells Diamondhead his name, Diamondhead flies him straight into the side of a big Utah butte! Kaboom and shit.
Diamondhead tells the kid that he’s been tracking him since New York. Nova sucks! They’re jerks! Buncha punks! He wants his revenge. The kid tells him that he has nothing to do with THAT Nova, so step off old man!
But Diamondhead is performing a little preemptive strike here. Fool me twice, shame on me. That kind of thing! Nova tries to fight back, but the half-pint shouldn’t really even try. This guy’s made of diamonds! Don’t you know how hard diamonds are? Rock hard, kiddo. Rock hard all day. Diamondhead tells him that he’s gonna kill him and keep his cute little Nova helmet as a trophy. And the Nova kid is like “fat chance, pops” and hits him with a burst of extremely intense, blinding blue light.
Don’t worry, I absolutely promise that I didn’t just dissolve your rods and cones into piles of sticky goo.
Diamondhead is blind now, so he’s sad and whimpering. After assuring Diamondhead that the blindness might be temporary, possibly, maybe, he warns him not to fuck with him anymore. “You’ll have a lot more than just me to worry about. I’m bringin’ in the Avengers. Cap. Thor. Iron Man. That chick with the thing on her thing. All of them.” And Diamondhead gets the picture. Loud and clear. Aye aye.
Diamondhead asks if the little Nova kid can at least fly him to the next town, but Nova leaves that blind bastard high and dry!
We cut to Future-Man speaking with Nick Fury back in NYC, tying in the Nova story as a metaphor for America. “You flew so bright and so fast for such a short while. That alone makes it worth the visit, if you ask me.”
Future-Man is all high and mighty about how primitive America was in the present day. Agent Maria is getting impatient now, struggling to find how this is worth anyone’s time, and asks for files on any known time-travelers or time-traveling-related cases. Ahh, and Future-Man considers them all lucky, getting to know how the next few generations will play out in real time. He mentions something called “The Ascendant”, and then starts waxing nostalgic about the adorable youngins who want to make names for themselves…
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