Onslaught was terrible, but it made the Avengers and related characters into major Marvel Universe figures for the first time in years, spun off Thunderbolts, and the first year of the Busiek Avengers is full of references to the aftermath of the Onslaught and Heroes Reborn debacles. So I do feel a sense of nostalgia…

Well, this brings us back to the "is Superman boring or interesting?" question that is at the heart of so many superhero debates. (My answer: he is very interesting.) Besides, characters who always try to do the right thing can be flawed, complex and wracked with insecurities. It just means they always do the right…

Meh, superheroes are a dated, boring conceit too, and nobody's ever going to make us stop liking them. Most comics sort of acknowledge that the ideal is to have the good guys fighting the bad guys, they just go to insane extremes to twist and turn this around because you can't get a surprising plot out of it.

I think writers usually do their worst work on these events because they're subject to editorial pressure from every side in a way that they probably aren't when they do their own books. Plus they almost always start as a smaller pitch for their own books, and are taffy-pulled around into something else. Even though…

One of the Marvel editors said that they tried this in 2010 when instead of an event, they did the "Heroic Age" promotion. Their sales took a huge hit, and ever since then they've decided never to go too long without an event again.

Not with that awful Uppercase/Lowercase lettering it wasn't.

"Axis" isn't making much sense to me, like a lot of events don't - individual story elements make sense on their own, but all these things are so obviously slammed together out of different pitches that the end result is a mess.

Well, the first issue of Uncanny Avengers had the Scarlet Witch telling Rogue that the X-Men suck and don't understand Xavier's dream (which may be Remender trying to throw down the gauntlet and prove he can write Wanda even more out of character than Bendis did) and Rogue punching her in the face. I know he was…

Was it that part of the run that had the issue where Rick Jones bursts into Dr. Strange's pad and demands that he bring someone back to life, and when Strange says that's impossible, he points out that every single person in the room has died and come back at least once? That was great.

There's a lot of better-than-its-reputation stuff I found on re-reading like the Bomber Jacket Avengers of the early '90s (by Harras and Epting), the X-Files-ish Alpha Flight series… but maybe some of this is colored by belated nostalgia for the Marvel House Style of writing and art that got swept away when Quesada…

Marvel in the '90s has a lot of entertaining stuff as long as you avoid most of the X-Men and Spider-Man, i.e., the stuff the editors paid the most attention to.

It's not that weird. These are the books that are free from events and editorial tinkering. Plus a lot of writers just do their best mainstream work on small books with low expectations (eg Matt Fraction).

Also they have this great hook where characters find out dark secrets or have secrets from their past revealed, and hardly anything interesting came of it except the Daredevil tie-in story. This is where Marvel writers' fear of continuity - oh, no, we can't refer back to old stories because it's too geeky!- makes me…

I wish Ewing was writing the regular Avengers. "Mighty Avengers" feels the most like a "real" Avengers book of Marvel's current slate, and his "Avengers Assemble" fill-in issue with the Uncanny Avengers characters got them all better than they are in the regular book.

Also, Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck Omnibus is being re-released in October if you want to show him one of the big American influences on that meta style (though the '70s style of writing, with its narration and thought balloons everywhere, may not be to his taste).

I think it sometimes seems like a costume will get more praise the less sexy it is, though that doesn't really solve the problems comics have (readers' problem with the old Carol Danvers costume was much more the leering way many artists drew it than the costume itself). I do like the new Batgirl costume, though, as…

This may sound superficial - but it's superhero comics, where superficial things matter - but this is one of those books where I can't tell who's supposed to be pretty and who's supposed to be ugly.

This may be too familiar, but Ellis's "Nextwave" is available (only in a trade paperback though) and is great fun and a brilliant satire of the comics of the '00s, including Ellis's own. (Though I think someone still needs to come along and satirize him and other British writers for their refusal to use sound effects…

I like David but I haven't liked this as much as his two other runs on X-Factor - the government superhero team in the '90s or the private-detective team in the '00s. I think part of the problem may be just how cut off it feels from the rest of the X-universe. What made the two other runs funny and audacious was the…