Strange Tales II #3

By: Nick Bertozzi, Chris Sinderson, Terry Moore, James Stokoe, Benjamin Marra, Tim Hamilton, Kate Beaton, Bill Crabtree, Dean Haspiel, Toby Cypress, Michael Deforge, Alex Robinson, Eduardo Medeiros, Harvey Pekar, Ty Templeton, KT Smith AND Jody LeHeup (editor)

The Story: An anthology of short stories about Marvel characters told by indy creators.

What’s Good: Are you curious to see a young Thor who keeps losing Mjolnir because it doesn’t have a strap on it yet? Would you like to see the kinda girls Reed Richards dated in college? Any interest in watching the Silver Surfer play cards with a bunch of Skrulls as his master devours their planet? How does Rogue get out of trouble if she breaks one of Professor X’s favorite vases?

If the answer to any of those was “yes” you should make a point to check out Strange Tales 2. This is the last issue of an anthology series in which Marvel brings in indy creators and let’s them write/draw short stories about Marvel characters. “Indy” is a confusing word in comic circles and I think a lot of people use that to mean “not Marvel or DC”. The majority of these creators are doing things like writing comics under their own imprint, doing webcomics, etc. In my mind, this is what “indy” means.

As with any anthology, some stories are better than others. It really doesn’t get any better than the three stories to start this issue. First we get a story by Terry Moore that shows a young, recently exiled Thor who is having some trouble with Mjolnir. This story is just hysterical. That is followed by a James Stokoe riff on Silver Surfer playing cards with Skrulls (who look a lot like his Orc Stain orcs) as Galactus ruins their world. Might as well get in a last game of cards, huh? Then we get an awesome Benjamin Marra story featuring U.S. Agent at his boastful, womanizing best as he takes down a terrorist “who’s been genetically spliced with the DNA of a velociraptor!! And if that weren’t enough, he has a nuclear warhead strapped to his back!! We call him Terror-Saur!!” Of course, he lives in Terror-stan and is threatening the American way of life.

If tongue-in-cheek isn’t your thing, there are also somewhat touching stories about Reed Richards, Michael Morbius, The Thing and a few others.

Mostly though, this issue succeeds because it has a few memorable stories in it where you just say, “That was awesome!”. And hopefully it inspires to check out a few of these really talented people’s other works.

Special kudos to editor Jody LeHeup. The editor probably has to hustle a lot just to get any anthology issue to come out on time and that task is probably magnified when you are dealing with folks who aren’t already in the Marvel system. Also, wouldn’t you love to get a look at the story ideas that had to be shot down for decency concerns? “No! Absolutely NOT! You cannot have Thor doing ______ with a pig!”

What’s Not So Good: Nothing. I guess there are people out there who don’t like to read any stories that “don’t matter” or see anything other than standard super-hero art. If you’re stuck in that rut, I’d encourage you to give things like this a try because it’s a lot of fun.

I also strongly doubt that everyone will like every story in this issue. It is kinda like a box of chocolates. You don’t know what you’ll get when you start reading. Some of them are yummy and you wish you could find another in the box. Some are not to your personal liking and you try to remember what that one looked like so you don’t eat another by mistake.

Conclusion: Awesome end to an anthology series at Marvel. If you haven’t been following this, buy the trade when it comes out so Marvel continues to be interested in doing projects like this. Marvel takes a lot of deserved crap for grunting out too many Deadpool, Wolverine, X-Men and Avengers titles, but you have to hand it to them when they do something really cool stuff like this.

Grade: B+ (because some stories were the awesome sauce and some were “meh”)

-Dean Stell