Marvel: Now What?! #1

It’s rare for me to buy a comic at regular price. But I did just that this weekend during the 2014 Free Comic Book Day event at Parts Unknown in Greensboro, NC. I love Marvel’s parodies. They do a fantastic job at poking fun at themselves. It’s one of the few things I think that they do better than DC. My love for Marvel parody began with the 90s series What the?!? That wasn’t the first humor/ parody comic (prior examples are Not Brand Echh and CRAZY!) done by the publisher, but it was the first one I was familiar with. Since then, Marvel has done some all-humor issues of What If… as well as more recently Fin Fang Four Return, Shame Itself, and Wha…HUH?

Now What?! mostly skewers the new Marvel NOW! reboot. The first part of this comic is a tutorial from the High Evolutionary on what changes occurred during the reboot and what’s in store for the Marvel Universe. As with most topical humor, there is an element of truth involved. Marvel did such a good job in the segment that I couldn’t tell what was true and what was fiction. Despite this, I thought a very good point was made; in the 90s just about every title was geared to the ever popular X-Men. Now that the Avengers movie has made the Avengers a hot commodity, the playing field has many characters becoming Avengers. Before long every title in the Marvel playbook is going to be either an X-title or an Avengers one.

After the Marvel NOW! tutorial, there were several short stories and one-page splashes that were lots of fun. The ladies of Marvel brunch was very funny and a biting satire at sexism in comics. There were several pages devoted to a Q&A panel called “WY-If” that asked some interesting questions about some of the lesser known characters of the Marvel Universe. But perhaps my favorite secondary feature was an intervention of earth’s Watcher by his fellow Watchers. It was extremely funny and featured some great art. Not everything was great. For example, the secret origin of Doctor Octopus was kinda lame and I didn’t get all of the inside jokes during the NOW! segment.

Overall, Marvel did another slam bang up job. I hope they’ll continue to produce more parody specials in the future. If they do, I’ll probably forgo my rule on only buying back issues. A book like this is worth the full cover price.

Worth Consuming.

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.