Weekly Comic Book Discussion 5/03/2006

Cafe Society
81

Unsurprisingly, Fenris and Mississippienne got the broad strokes. I’ll round out the top three summaries.

From wikipedia:

"Bendis and Maleev’s final story arc, “The Murdock Papers”, depicted the Kingpin manipulating the FBI, Daredevil, the Black Widow, and Elektra over nonexistent documents proving the Murdock/Daredevil relationship. Despite help and entreaties by Luke Cage and Iron Fist, an unmasked Daredevil surrendered himself to the FBI. The arc ends with Murdock and Fisk in jail, and the FBI hoping the two will kill each other.

Brubaker and Lark
Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark became the new creative team with #82 (Feb. 2006), the first not under the Marvel Knights imprint. Brubaker and Lark worked together on DC’s Detective Comics and co-created Gotham Central with fellow Batman scribe Greg Rucka. Their first arc, “The Devil in Cell-Block D”, finds Murdock in prison alongside some of his most heinous enemies, including the Kingpin, Hammerhead, and the Owl. The first issue ended with Foggy Nelson’s [apparent] murder in the prison. Meanwhile, another Daredevil has been sighted in Hell’s Kitchen."

#83 has Matt Murdock disguising his face and leaving his cell at will to exact revenge for Foggy’s death, as he puts the beat down on Hammerhead and the Owl to find out who arranged for the hit on Foggy Nelson. Meanwhile, outside prison, The Punisher reads about the beatings in prison while eating in a diner, walks outside and kills a pimp and immediately surrenders to a newbie cop in order to join the festivities in jail.

Brubaker’s arc rocks so far.

82

Okey Dokey. Dr. Strange, Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Namor got sick of Hulk getting pissed off and smashing shit every five minutes, mainly because if you think about it the Hulk has smashed just about every town in the United States twice and the construction crews were getting tired of having to rebuilld them.

They concoct this plan to ship Banner out into space to take out some bizarre gamma powered satellite (Think Brother Eye from infinite crisis meets Ultron) that Reed may or may not have had something to do with. They tell him that after he beats the satellite they’re going to bring him back to Earth, but they don’t. Instead they give his escape pod a course for an Eden devoid of intelligent life. Somehow they don’t think anything can go wrong. :confused:

Guess what? Something went wrong. For some reason, the Hulk gets slightly annoyed when he finds out that he’s getting shot into some distant galaxy and he decides to punch his way out of the ship. This sends the ship careening through a hole of some sort. He lands in a big ass bug hive and begins stomping the crud out of them. Then he get’s drugged by some red dudes and winds up fighting gladiator style in an arena. Now he’s basically getting stronger every day and trying to fight his way to ultimate vengeance against the emperor who controls him.

Throw in some references to Hulk smashing and puny humans and you’ve got just about everything.