Morning Ramble 352: Four in Hollywood and me on Venus

Fantastic Four #9

The Fantastic Four are broke. Yup, Reed made some dicey gambles on the stock market and lost all their money; they’re gonna have to sell the Baxter Building, the Pogo Plane, and all the neat gizmos Reed built for them. But all is not lost as they get a letter from a Hollywood studio to make movies. Arriving in California, the team learns the studio is owned by Sub-Mariner and he’s got plans for a great superhero movie, so they sign on for a million dollars. But once filming starts, we learn that Namor has plans to destroy each of the team one-by-one. He sends Mr. Fantastic to an island to face the Cyclops, Johnny is dropped off on an island where the local tribe has a fire immunity potion, Namor decides to fight Thing in hand-to-hand combat for supremacy, and I think the worst is the sleazy way he gropes Sue as she tries to evade him. Each of our heroes overcomes their obstacles with their superpowers and regroup to face Sub-Mariner who in the end is saved by Sue’s sense of decency and the fact they need his money.

As the last issue of 1962 for the Fantastic Four, I think it’s one of the better ones so far, so I made a few notes:

• The artwork is pretty cool, particularly some of the Hollywood scenes with the different actors of the time hanging about, and I think Kirby has settled on how he wants to depict both Thing and Human Torch after 9 issues.
• Namor/Sub-Mariner seems to be the big bad of the first year of the Fantastic Four since he shows up as the villain 3 times (4,6,9) while Dr. Doom only has 2 guest appearances (5,6).
• Regardless of how gropey Namor gets, Sue still defends him – she sure seems to like the bad boy.
• Alicia seems destined to stick around as Ben Grimm/Thing’s friend – at least she was only an accessory to crime, not the actual criminal.

In my view this was a pretty decent issue and I rate it a B+. I hope this signals a trend in Marvel heading into 1963.

Made it to Venus in Destiny

While I’m not technically considering this part of my steps through Destiny, I do feel like I made an accomplishment that I had to commemorate with a screenshot. I finally made it to Venus and am starting on the quests there. Actually, I had to reinstall Secret World the other day so I took some time away from my computer and jumped on my PS4. From my experience, Destiny is a game I can easily shift back into whenever the feeling strikes – the controls are pretty straight forward and there are not to many complications other than point and shoot. Sure, you have to avoid too much damage and it helps to know who has a shield or who can teleport, but the game is forgiving enough that you can figure these things out as you go…at least that’s how it seems at my low teens level. It’s also nice that I don’t have to struggle to find a build guide to try to min/max my character so far. Sure, I enjoy having a guardian that can easily take things down, but I don’t feel that I have to follow what others have done in order to enjoy the game. In any case, I think I’m about half way through the basic game and then I’ve got a bunch of expansions to get through before the next version comes out. I’m looking forward to getting through this story to see where it leads.