Ultimate Fantastic Four #21
I've always been told you can't judge a book by its cover. I never particularly understood why you would even try to, but I've
definitely learned you can't do it. I've only been reading comics for a few years which is why four of the five books I'm about to show you
were published this decade, but I can assure you this is not a new phenomenon.
While misleading, this was actually an excellent book. Since the ultimate universe was created in 2000, people had been wondering when they would do a crossover between the ultimate universe and the regular Marvel universe. Here we see the ultimate Reed Richards, the younger version in glasses, coming face to face with his older counterpart who appears to be the Reed Richards from the regular Marvel universe. Over on the right you can even see that the name of this story arc is "Crossover". People could only draw one logical conclusion from this, and that was that the ultimate and regular universes were finally going to meet. As it turns out, they were wrong. Very wrong. This issue was actually the introduction of the Marvel Zombies, and the crossover was between the ultimate universe and the zombie universe. That guy on the right is zombie Reed Richards, and he'd like to eat your brains please. If you're going to be misled by a cover, the result should be this awesome, but unfortunately, that's not always the case.
With the zombie universe being created in Ultimate FF 21, Marvel was now ready to release their five part miniseries Marvel Zombies. The book was excellent, and it was actually the first comic I ever bought from the store. It was so good that each issue went to about five printings. In fact, it was too good. Other books started having zombie tie-ins, which were also written very well. Then Marvel Zombies 2 came out. With the second miniseries came a wave of zombie variant covers. Zombie variant covers on books such as the issues of Black Panther featuring the Marvel zombies are fine, but Ms. Marvel #20 has nothing to do with zombies. At all. She is not a zombie. She does not fight zombies. There aren't little zombies hidden on each page like the lawn gnomes in Home Movies. Luckily, this was not the regular cover for the book, but there's really no need for it to even exist.
Here's a vintage one out there for those of you who can't stand anything made after 1970. I haven't read this book, but I can tell you
with 100% certainty that Superman does not tell Jimmy Olsen his secret identity. I know this for 3 reasons:
1. Superman did not have the power to kiss people and make them forget stuff except in the bullshit movie that came many years after this was printed,
2. Even if Superman did have that power, DC Comics would never have printed that in 1969.
3. Most compellingly, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #17 has the same dialogue practically verbatim on the cover.
Issue #536 of the Fantastic Four depicted Thor's hammer with Dr. Doom's hand around it. That never happened in the book. Here we see
Doom holding the hammer above his head. Needless to say that doesn't happen either. That doesn't mean he didn't try, however. Thor's hammer
had crashed into Earth after somehow helping Dr. Doom escape from Hell. Or something like that. A huge line of people try to lift the hammer, and
none of them succeed. Having escaped from Hell, Doom decides to cut the entire line and try to pick the hammer up himself. He gives it one little
tug, fails to lift it, and walks away. That's pretty much it. He doesn't even see the Fantastic Four in the issue, let alone kill them
with the hammer, as the cover would have you believe.
My bosses ordered this book based pretty much solely on the covers. There really isn't much for pirate comics these days, so the idea of a pirate comic with such realistic artwork seemed at least mildly appealing. The books came in, and my boss showed it to me. After seeing the quality of the cover art, I was shocked to see the quality of the interior art:
Needless to say we don't order that book anymore.
Dr. Jeebus may or may not look exactly like Dr. Vink
© 2008 by Dr. Jeebus