Credits: Steve Englehart (writer), Kyle Hotz (penciler), Jimmy Palmiotti (inker), Vickie Williams (letters), Micky Rose & Malibu (colors)
Summary: Night Man finds himself transported to an amusement park in the Marvel Universe. He escapes from overzealous guards through a maintenance hatch, and soon discovers Wolverine. Wolverine believes that Night Man is another simulation created by Arcade, but he eventually realizes the truth. Teaming up, the heroes are able to outsmart Arcade and escape Murderworld.
Continuity Notes: Night Man is a hero from Malibu’s Ultraverse line. This story takes place after the Godwheel miniseries, which I assume was one of the early attempts at integrating the Malibu characters with Marvel after Malibu was bought out.
Commercial Break: Did Malibu Comics have some community service it needed to work off or something? Almost every ad in this book are from charities or advocacy groups.
Review: I remember seeing ads for the various Malibu/X-Universe team-up comics and thinking, even in the depths of X-completism, that I would never read the things. Every comics fan who’s been around for more than a year knows the inter-company crossovers don’t “count,” and since I never followed the Malibu line, I couldn’t pretend that seeing Sludge hanging out with Rogue for the first time was particularly exciting. Steve Englehart does have a higher reputation than the typical no-name who was stuck writing these things, so there’s at least the potential this could be entertaining, but it’s clear from the opening page that this is a continuation of the ongoing Night Man series and has nothing to do with Wolverine. Englehart writes the generic tough guy interpretation of Wolverine; the kind you would’ve seen in Marvel Team-Up in the late ‘70s before Claremont got around to fleshing out his character. If this is supposed to be a showcase for Night Man, all we learn about him is that his father apparently owns an amusement park, and he sure is confused by this Marvel Universe. Occasionally the story reaches such levels of absurdity you wonder if Englehart is just going for pure camp. I certainly hope this scene was intentionally hilarious:
3 comments:
I think this was one of those issues you'd have to send away for by mail, and probably had a portion of the proceeds going to charity. That would explain the ads.
I always wanted to get Exiles. Never saw it in the shops though.
I picked up all of these Ultraverse/X-Men comics within the last year. I mean, they're just pointless. As a total completist, it was pretty satisfying to add them to my collection, but for no reason inherent to the books themselves at all.
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