Amused in Review

had a hankering to work on a Marvel or DC comic? Well, now you can scratch your itch to create comics by committee by participating in Infinity on 30 Credits a Day, David Morgan-Mar's new project. You sign up on the website, indicating which tasks you're willing to lend a hand with (plot, dialog, art, website coding, etc) and then as they come up DMM picks a handful of people (starting with ones who haven't contributed yet) from the list for that type of task and they all make their short contribution (e.g. 200 words to describe a scene, or a character design) and the participants in the project vote for their favorite in order of preference. The winning entry becomes official.

So far, the decisions have been made on:
Genre: SF
Title: Infinity on 30 Credits a Day
Logo: (see the site)
Collective Name for the Participants: The Infinite Monkeys
Core Cast: Daisy Hoshino, Jimmers, and Jake Starr (see the site for descriptions)

and voting is currently under weigh for the character references sketches for the core cast, favorites icon, and prose description of the opening scene.

Essential Defenders, Vol. 1 (Marvel Essentials)

by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Len Wein, Gene Colan, Ross Andru, Sal Buscema, Jack Abel, Marie Severin, Bob Brown, Herb Trimpe

A birthday present from Jeff, this volume features the founding of the 70's Marvel super-team: the Defenders, originally an "un-team" consisting of Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, The Hulk, and The Sub-Mariner, who would briefly band together to fight some world-threatening menace before once again going their lonely separate ways. The first stories are scattered among the various titles the heroes appeared in, plus Marvel Feature, before they were actually given a book of their own.

What's truly remarkable about this is just what a god-awful writer Roy Thomas was. My rose-colored nostalgia glasses don't kick in until well into the series, so it was something of a shock to me to find it nearly unreadable--a wince-inducing mix of bombastic dialog, narration that seems to assume that the art will be indecipherable, and stunningly incoherent plot. The plotting nadir, though, was was probably reached in Marvel Feature Presents: The Defenders #1 (the sixth tale in the book), which really does make me wonder whether Thomas was drunk or stoned when he penned it. Let me try to convey the truly mind-boggling stupidity of this tale...