Given how much enjoyment comics companies have given their readers, and all the creative people busting their butts to put the issues on the racks that you and I devour, it's never pleasant to point out a character or concept that perhaps never should have seen the light of day. It's probably a topic ripe for discussion in one of Doug and Karen's reader forums--but I can easily get the ball rolling with a character spawned by the otherwise talented mind of Marv Wolfman, who one day went right off the deep end and gave us:
Wait for it...
Wolfman would probably tell us that we really need to lay the blame for this monstrosity at the door of Hydra--the international terrorist organization that, like A.I.M., often tinkered in their labs to come up with something horrible, just to see how bad bad could get. In this case, they've produced a serum from an analysis of the chemical structure which created Spider-Woman--and, as payback for the Thing destroying one of their bases, they've decided to test it on Alicia Masters. Worked pretty well, didn't it?
Naturally, once Alicia was transformed, they turned her loose on Ben, who has his own idea of payback in mind at the moment:
Ben and Spider-Woman do their best to halt Alicia's rampage, made worse when the Thing rips away Hydra's control device--leaving Alicia insane and striking out literally blindly. Ben doesn't want to have to resort to belting his girlfriend, so he places a quick call to Sue Richards--who stops Alicia by suffocating her, which is much more gentle.
From there, it's just a matter of finding a doctor to zap Alicia back to normal:
No, I don't know what this guy is doing with Deathlok, either. Let's hope the crazy old fool doesn't go for broke and transfer Alicia's essence to him. Who's going to want to read about a cyborg sculptor?
2 comments:
Well, Ben's having girlfriend troubles here.
Actually, the writing on this title was pretty hit-and-miss, but I always enjoyed Ron Wilson's pencils. They were solid, not too flashy, but he really drew the Thing well. I always wondered if his knack for capturing Ben Grimm's many emotions made him the go-to guy for this mag. It takes an artist to wring a lot of feeling out of that face!
Other artists like Sal Buscema and John Byrne did great work here, but Ron Wilson kinda defined this title for me.
Wilson does otherwise fine work, but I think he has a tendency to bulk up his characters a little too much, even for a comic book. Often he seems so preoccupied with giving them an imposing presence that his action sequences come off somewhat stiffly.
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