Thursday, September 22, 2016

Look, you can sort these into order later. Yourself.


The current plan is to slowly, eventually, blog all of Marvel's 1989 annuals, the Atlantis Attacks crossover. So far, in no particular order, we've covered four (and an issue of Quasar that tied into the What If? for this event) but now we hit a chapter I hadn't read: New Mutants Annual #5, "Here Be Monsters" Written by Louise Simonson, pencils by Rob Liefeld, inks by Tim Dzon.

So, I didn't read this one back in the day, because I've never been a fan of the New Mutants: the phrase "ah'm near invulnerable when ah'm blastin'" just makes my jaw clench up, for one thing. (I know I had Cable's first appearance, though; and New Mutants #100...) But this issue also ties into New Mutants #76, which I also hadn't read, guest-starring the Sub-Mariner in a fight for the Horn of Doom. You know, the one Subby blows to summon big, cool monsters, like that one that looks like Moby Dick with feet. (Giganto.) This time around, Ghaur and Llyra send some Deviants to steal the Horn, with they do from Namorita. Because the Deviants resemble some of the New Mutants, and Namorita knows about their recent encounter with Namor, she goes after them, accompanied by super-powered Atlanteans Sharkskin, Eel, and Undertow. Their group name was Surf, which doesn't really make sense: they were underwater all the time, they might see currents, but would they see surf? If they were a DC team, they'd probably get killed in a crossover, but Marvel's allowed Surf to sink into obscurity.

While the required Marvel-misunderstanding brawl rages, Ghaur blows the Horn, drawing a giant, poisonous, squid-monster to destroy Atlantis. Ghaur's sub does take a hit, and the Horn is lost, but he still declares this a pretty good sacrifice to Set. The combined heroes manage to stop the monster by burying it in an undersea trench, but while most of the Atlanteans are saved, the city is (once again) destroyed. This was chapter nine of fourteen, and we've looked at five now...I doubt we'll do this faster than we did with DC's Ghosts annuals, but you never know.

4 comments:

SallyP said...

Gah! Liefeld!

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

So you have the whole set?

googum said...

I've read the whole set, but now wonder how many I still have. The Iron Man Annual in particular, since I don't recall it being great; but it's probably easy to dig up, too. The Punisher one with Moon Knight I shoulda blogged years ago, it's great!

And I have more tolerance for Liefeld than I do the New Mutants. I just don't like them...!

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

Yeah the King of Thessaly(fellow friend and blogger) blogged about that Punisher/Moon Knight team up, but I'm curious to see how you'd present it.
I can stand Liefield in small doses myself, and I'm meh about the New Mutants myself, except for#81 with Hercules, that was touching, or the Marvel Team-Up issue with Spider-Man that also featured Cloak and Dagger