My wife has been just exceedingly supportive of my allowing this toy comic hobby to consume my spare time, to the point of finding and buying interesting little accessories for me to include. She bought me the little toy dog that became Tanngrisnir, and the second I opened the box that the toy was housed…
One of the tossed-off lines in the MCU that’s always going to stick with me is when, in the first Avengers movie, Tony Stark remarks that he’s, “kind of the only name in clean energy right now.” The MCU never really returned to that idea, at all, and I really wish it had. I get…
I remember when Fat Thor made his first appearance in Endgame, and for just a moment, I felt more seen by the MCU than ever before. I am certainly not the star of an action movie franchise, but I am a cisgendered, straight white guy, so I’ve never really hurt for representation in media. I’m…
So, given how emphatically certain Avengers make their case for their politics and worldview, it’s probably no surprise that I, personally (mostly) share that worldview. However, the infighting and interpersonal drama that so define the Avengers doesn’t work if only one side gets to consistently make their argument, and that’s kind of where this strip…
As much theory and philosophy as I can pack into the making of these comics, and the building out of the Phil Wrede Marvel Action Figure Comic Universe, this is fundamentally, still, playing with toys, which means I can pair up versions of characters who won’t have a chance of meeting on the big screen….
One of my favorite parts of a good, classic comic story is when we temporarily switch our perspective from the heroes to the villains, and start to get a more clear picture of the stakes of the approaching conflict. Oftentimes, telling this part of the story demands a delicate balancing act from the creators. The…
Like most everybody else who played a lot of video games in the 2000’s, I have a real soft spot for the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, particularly the team-up special moves that allowed your two favorite heroes (or the two heroes nearest one another, anyway) to combine their powers and absolutely wreck nearby bad guys….
I have tremendous love for Andy Serkis’ performance as Ulysses Klaw. If* the MCU is a long line of great actors having their characters killed off after too few appearances, I think Klaw is near, or at the top of the list of villains I wish could come back twenty more times. Killmonger, too. The…
I feel like Shuri and Thor would have so many incredible stories to swap about their relationships with their brothers, and over those shared stories, they would develop an incredible bond. I should have done more with this gem of an idea, I think, and I’d like to do better…
It’s difficult to make a quiet, human-style moment land in a toy comic. Since characters’ expressions can’t usually change (unless they came with multiple heads, with different expressions, or something), “cinematic” elements like angles, colors, and shadows have to do even more of the heavy lifting than usual. I feel tremendously lucky to have found…
