Longshot Saves the Marvel Universe.

Rabbit Rabbit. Lets get some luck for the beginning of February.

One of my favorite teams to use from my Heroclix figures is Longshot and Dazzler. Dazzler gives her and Longshot a bonus to attack values while they are adjacent while Longshot has the amazing power to always deal a critical hit. Added to that is perplex from Dazzler on her second click and Probability control on Longshot's first two clicks. Both are capable of running shot and Dazzler can even subvert the use of stealth so that Longshot can get some excellent damage in. So after using them in about 15 different games of Heroclix I decided to get more of an idea what the two characters were all about in the Marvel universe.

Well Lucky me there was a Longshot comic that came out right about the same time as the Heroclix set the pieces came out in. Boy did I have somethings to learn about Longshot. Dazzler I knew from X-Men so I didn't feel so lost there. First thing I had to learn though was that Longshot was not a mutant. So off the the learning factory I went with Longshot Saves the Marvel Universe.

And they are out of order with one missing. My photogenuis at work. 

Now I these comics didn't come with digital editions so please pardon the poor photography on my part.
This was an excellent read. I bought the first comic a few weeks before I bought the rest to see if I would like it. I loved it from just a few pages in. Lots of humor.

So the story starts off with Longshot getting a free haircut which serves as both a story element and an explanation for a change in character design. Excellent update if you ask me. Longshot explains his powers to us a bit, he explains that he is a genitally engineered  clone of his son and had a magic spell put on him giving him luck. If he pushes his luck to far things go wrong. Well after getting a free haircut he tries to do his eye glowing thingy that he does when he uses his luck power to get some free hot dogs. Well this blows a whole in a ladies apartment and basically destroys the universe from the resulting chaos.

Now Longshot is back to right after the haircut after meeting a god of luck after his head. So now he has to figure out what that fancy cube he was playing with was and how to make the universe right again. thankfully the resident magic expert steps in to help him out. With him he brings a lovely cast of characters to help out. Did I forget to mention that they are now on the Shield Hellicarrier? Well they are. And soon the Demon Lord of Balance catches them. Except it is just the order side. See when Longshot touched that powerful cube he done split it apart. So the demon of balance is now split into order and chaos. Now its up to Longshot and Deadpool and Dr. Strange to save the world. Oh wait, nope. They all work for the order guy now. Except Longshot. He is now hanging out with chaos as they crash the Hellicarrier.

That isn't even the good part yet. Now chaos, saddened that the Hellicarrier didn't kill anybody because

Longshot lucked his way out of that, summons a few threats from other dimensions and parts of time. This is just great. There is a lovely but powerful version of Magneto summoned to the plan and Carnage is possessing the Silver Surfer While Venom is on the Punisher. Vampire lord Wolverine also goes to fight alongside with Werewolf Captain America. Captain America from this timeline shows up out of nowhere to send his former Lycanthrope self back to the past fully aware that he was supposed to show up and do this. I liked this bit. It makes fun of how the Avengers don't even bat much of an eye at time travel anymore and eagerly await their chance to be a part of it.

In the end the two halves are put back together and the Balance Demon guy realizes that it wasn't Longshot he was after but the crazy cube that he split into two. I left out some bits on the story but that is for you to read yourself. Because I would rate this as a must read. The Trade Paper Back should be out some time this summer or something like that. Or pick it up from your local comic book store. There will be less glare on your copy. Go read it now. Or when you have the money. Or whatever. Or don't. I'm not your mom. But, if you do have a mom that forces you to read comic books. That is kind of cool. And if she is single you let me know. I'd make a great dad.

This ad though. It is a KOHL'S ad for some type of Spider-Man Jacket that they supposedly carry. Where is the gloves man? Do they not sell matching gloves? I'd buy those sooner than I would the whole jacket. And jeans? Are you trying to sell us your dorky jacket by proving that we would only look extra dorky in it? I bet they put a professional model in that damn jacket too. Some guy who got into the job on his looks. And they cover him up and some guy is sitting in the back of the office wondering why they couldn't have gotten anybody with two arms and both their hands to put on the outfit. Shit they were probably mostly wearing jeans that day to the office anyways. Well... I guess wearing jeans to the KOHL'S office probably doesn't happen that much. Why not put Spider-Man in khakis.

I would like to thank Marvel for not putting the AR symbol on the front of the comic. It had the same kind of ad that was in the Thunderbolts issues but didn't put AR on the front so that I would go searching every page looking for it.

Well that is all I have to say for Longshot. Check back later in the afternoon for a report on how/what I did at the Heroclix even.

300 points Modern Force construction. Playing for a Giant Man.

WXM 042 Fantomex MAX

Around the Time Wolverine and the X-men, or WXM came out for Heroclix is when I really started to pick up the game a lot. I had played in a few events and was really getting into it. So it doesn't surprised me that My first batch of favorite pieces are from there. Fantomex was one of those pieces that was pretty heavy on power. He can make an E.V.A. token that can go anywhere on the board. Most of the people I played with didn't really know much about Fantomex either it seemed. Then a short while later a mini series started under the MAX label. So I bought them.

First off, who is Fantomex? Fantomex doesn't know who he really is. He is an expert thief and a Frenchmen. Well he claims to be French but really the virtual world he was raised in is based in Britain. He is a super sentinel created by Weapon Plus. Shout out to Google plus. He was born like a person but is totally full of nano machines and does shit like turn his hand into an acetylene torch. The most uncanny ability of his is his external nervous system called E.V.A. Eva is another personality of his which is directly connected to him. She exists outside of his body while possessing machines and has and empathetic connection to him. When he feels pain she feels it too. Basically the rest of his powers consist of being an expert agent and thief.

So what did they do in Fantomex MAX? The story covered Fantomex following a government agent that he is in love with down to the bottom of the Mariana trench. Down there is a secret building of untold purpose. Whilst down there he finds out it was a set up for them to get the master thief to help them activate a machine that operates from down there. I'll tell you in a minute what that machine does. He gets the keys of course, EVA learns some more about herself and the world is saved. Yet again without the rest of the world really knowing it was in any kind of danger.

So was this book MAX? Well while Fantomex and his crew of characters definitely seem like they fit a MAX setting. MAX line of books are for adult and explicit content if you are unaware. Unfortunately they only seemed to use it for crude jokes and dropping F-Bombs. I feel the art was a bit off at times too. Being my first experience with Fantomex I wasn't sure what to expect. Andrew Hope and Shawn Crystal aren't exactly going on my list of artists to follow.

So here is my gripe. If you read avengers 24.now then you know what the premise was. Someone hurled a planet at our planet. In the Fantomex MAX series they hurl a planet at Earth. Really. It is completely unrelated in any way and will never be mentioned by the Avengers. They still haven't revealed who threw a planet at earth but after reading last weeks comics I'm getting a feeling it had something to do with Loki. However I think it would have been just fine for it to have been the planet in Fantomex. It is just weird and unfortunate that the stories would work out like that without them being tied together. I was going to make a comment about bringing Fantomex to more of the spotlight but apparently he was on X-Force for years and I didn't know it.

Another cool part for me happened in book three. There is a scene where the guy with the mind powers is inside Fantomex's super sentinel mind. He plays scenes from Fantomex's childhood in The World I guess. The lines were in untranslated French and German. The French I could mostly make out with only being wrong a little bit but the German I had no idea. Thankfully I am a child of technology and whipped out my phone so that I could use Google Goggles to read the text for me and translate it into English. This process worked out better than I even expected. I had used Goggles to look up Magic: The Gathering cards before but this was a whole new level of usefulness.

So yeah. I'm glad to know where Fantomex is coming from now when I play his piece. Thank you guys and girls for reading. I'm honored to share some time with your eyeballs. Remember, no paper cuts.

P.S. There was no Heroclix event this week. Hence no post about it. 

Battle Against the Serpent.

Perhaps I spread myself too thin thinking I would talk about comics three days a week. I will try to make a post about what I have done in Heroclix every Saturday, but I won't guarantee that I'll talk about a comic each time. Sorry to disappoint.

Today we fought the worthy.
All of them plus the serpent.

"Cooperative Scenario vs The Worthy
Format: 500 Silver Age, No Feats, Battlefield Conditions, Relics, or Resources.
Prizes: IIM102 Bethany Cabe - 1 awarded to most damage to The Worthy and 1 awarded to most damage to The Serpent. Participation prizes will be given out as well. To be eligible for one of the Bethany Cabe, your team must be Marvel only and accompanied by a good explanation of why those characters are together fighting The Worthy."

My team was a mighty theme team from the fear itself pieces.

Wolverine
Spider-man
Iron Man
Red She-Hulk
Doctor Strange

The fight started off right away in a showdown with my team and Mokk. He charged in and made it so that my team couldn't take an action on their second turns. Thankfully his devastating attack on Iron Man was completely reduced by Doctor Strange's magic staff and Iron Man's uru metal armor. Mokk then took out a few clicks of damage on some figs but Spider-Man was hearing none of it. He ran in and finished the fight Superior Spider-Man style.

Player across from me made quick work of the remaining two Worthy on our side of the maps. I would like to take a second to point out that I was the only one to run a Mighty team btw. Also Spider-Man broke off of his base so he was taped down for this match. Then we chased down the rest of the mighty and cornered the Serpent (human form) on a ledge while we attacked from the branches of Yggdrasil, The World Tree.

A few more turns in and the Serpent had been fully summoned. The ground is torn asunder into hindering terrain. He strikes with a great force, and Wolverine deals penetrating poison to him every turn while my team Alpha Strikes him. I would like to take credit for being the only guy melee attacking the serpent. Well me and one other guy. Thanos really did all the massive damage to the Serpent after some other game effects.

I didn't win anything but we did defeat the dragon. Fear did not win today. Spider-Man did end up going to his revert form but didn't get around to dying so that was nice.

You can't really tell it but all of my team is standing behind the Serpent. You can actually see Iron man above his left wing. Spider-Man and Wolverine are quite hidden behind him though. Red She-Hulk is completely hidden. That sentinel would have trouble hiding anywhere and Thanos was already picked up before I took the shot. Some of them offered to set back up but I wanted a picture of the shot while it was in action. Or as it was at least. Something like that.

I was a little sad that we didn't sit down at the beginning and explain why our teams were here to fight the serpent. I was half ready to explain it all myself based on my team actually being there. My Tony Stark went to a different universe, because him and Reed Richards just do that a lot, and picked up a few other Iron men and a different Kurth. Then he went and reprogrammed a horde of Sentinels to target the worthy instead of mutants. After that he called up Thanos and told him that some Asgardian gods were getting out of line and it would probs be totes fun to come beat them up. Then Red She-Hulk asked the other Red Hulk, likely with secret red hulk only telepathy, to send over some thunderbolts and so SwampMan-Thing showed up with some friends after a short walk in the nexus. Well Kurth came with them. Something like that.

Well thank you guys for reading. Check back in with me on Tuesday where things will be as Scheduled. Sorry this post wasn't up to the low par that I have set. I need to find a way to take better pictures for Heroclix night. Also for comics that I bought that weren't digital. I did get a Man-Thing and Howard The Duck off of a guy there along with an Ancient One. So that was cool. You guys have a great weekend.

Thunderbolts, Digital Comcis, Heroclix.

In Heroclix figures have keywords. Sometimes if the guys on your team share a keyword fun things can happen. Some times you get a bonus to rolling for first or even the whole team getting extra uses of an ability. Sometimes you get a team ability that you can assign to people with certain keywords. One that I like to use is the thunderbolts keyword. As per the usual I have no idea who the Thunderbolts were. I knew that Red Hulk had something to do with it and figured he might have something to do with the team name. Aside from that I had no idea what was going on here as far as who the Thunderbolts were and what they stood for.

In an attempt to learn this I picked up Thunderbolts Annual #1. I figured it would be a nice starting point. I heard something about Ghost Rider joining the team soon with the start of Marvel Now or whatever is going on this year. So I picked it up from my local comic shop and managed to read it within 24 hours of purchasing it. For some reason I never am in the mood to buy comics and read comics in the same day.

I found a panel in this issue that I believe sets the tone of who the Thunderbolts were from what I read.

Yes. That is Dr. Strange saying, "come at me, bros". The book tries to be corny. Deadpool is in it. I don't know what else I could have expected. I'm not sure how I felt about it. Maybe if it was a bit funnier I would have liked it more. Otherwise this book didn't really interest me much. The story was kind of interesting but I'm not sure how long a, lul wat, kind of story telling can hold my attention. I think Silliness is kind of one of the goals in this comic. Or maybe it was just the annual that I read.

On top of this this was the first digital comic that I have claimed on the website. I like the way they did it. Nice and simple. The best part was getting a free comic to go along with it. They have these things called infinite comics. They are web optimized comics that you buy. I guess. It gave me a free one of  Wolverine in Japan. I liked it. Want to read the rest. Probably going to have to buy them. Thanks for making me want to read a Wolverine book again Marvel. Besides the fact that I just picked up the Deadpool cover for Origins 2 when it came out.

Time to get ramble-y. I have decided to have a new thing called Heroclix Saturday where I talk about either Heroclix directly or comics that I am reading because of Heroclix. So There shall be that. Likely I shall talk about both. Like how I am now going to talk about (or edit in later if you are reading early) what happened at this weekends Heroclix event.

Saturday 3-1-14: 350 point modern. You get to choose a figure from your opponents force to remove from their force before the game. Relics are allowed but no resources.

My team:

AVX013e Magik 75
WXM047a Jubilee 56
WXM009 Longshot 75
IIM002 Rescue 65
IH035 Wolverine
The Bat Signal (not pictured)

First Opponent: Daniel

Big Barda
The Question
Dark Phoenix

I removed Big Barda afraid I wouldn't have time to go through Barda's Dial with the strikers I had. What happened in the end though was I didn't read that the question made my use of perplex a power action. One by one he disassembled my team and I hardly got any damage done.

Daniel Removed Magik from my team and the victory was his with no losses on his side of the field.

Second Opponent: Jordan

ASM Frank Drake
FI Monkey King
ASM Spider-Girl
WXM Longshot
FI Sin
Tigra

I removed Longshot from his team knowing what Longshot is capable of with his hits always being crits. He also removed Magik from my force. Much more of a game was afoot in this match. My Longshot worked his way to the middle of the field first turn as Frank Drake stepped into the shadows of Jordan's heavy object using Stealth to keep me from hitting him. Rescue however was having none of it and threw the dumpster aside so Longshot could get some quick near death damage in. Things went down hill from there for Longshot as he was ganged up on by the rest of Jordan's force and put to pasture. Rescue was pulled away from the tragic scene by Jubilee using the bat signal. Jordan slowly followed me into the large room that my team had retreated to. He made good use of his two stealth characters and made it so Wolverine and Jubilee didn't have much of a chance to be near each other for their bonuses. Rescue had to resort to throwing the Bat Signal at a pursuing Tigra. The result literally snapped her in half at the waist causing her to also lose an arm. Hopefully he won't have much trouble repairing his fig. Not sure what happened but I didn't actually throw the Bat Signal at it.

The match drew near and end. Wolverine was down. Rescue was trying to figure out what to do with herself having run out of objects to use telekinesis on and time in the round coming soon. Jubilee was left with no targets as Spider-Girl pushed herself into her KO click and Sin hid in the shadows with stealth.\

After only two round we only had one person that was undefeated and decided to call the competition there since there was a small turn out on this somewhat cold day. The winning team played 4 Molemen, 3 Vampires, and Jubilee Prime at 33 points of vampire-y goodness. Lots of mind control was had. Absorbing man LE was the prize for this event. I got the Batcowl and the Handcuffs as consolations prizes and still went home with a map. I had fun at the event. It was great to spend the week building a team. Started off trying to use pieces that I had about to make a team with 3 Monkey Kings and some Thunderbolts. I see where I could make some improvements with my team idea. Mostly I loved that it was a learning experience. Got some more input on Telekinesis as I tried to throw the Bat Signal and wasn't sure if I was in my own way to throw it. I wasn't. All in all fun day. Still want a chance to really get to use my Phoenix Force. Maybe I can get some casual games in for the week.

Thank you for reading guys. Especially if you came back for the update as I took a while getting home to update the post after the auto post. Have a great weekend.
!Victor!