Marvel Two-in-One #71
This go around Thing partners up with his longtime teammate Mr. Fantastic to avert the “Holocaust on Hydro-Base!” What follows is a weird issue all around. A lot of stuff from this issue figures more importantly in later issues of various titles, including Stingray and Hydrobase in Avengers and the newly introduced Minions of Menace, expendable henchmen that could be replaced with clones whenever one of them dies. If that sounds like Mr. Sinister's gimmick, keep reading to find out who he was imitating.
This issue should have really starred Thing and the Inhumans or Thing and Stingray. a lot of the action centers around the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing and his freaky friends fending off attacks by a trio of new villains. Meanwhile, Reed Richards and the Inhumans' scientists attempt to return the people of Hydrobase back to a fully human form, and given his numerous failures to revert Thing to human form I'm not really sure why he thinks he can do the job. The Inhuman scientists probably do all the work. Reed doesn’t even participate in the issue’s final battle!
Wilson and Day do passably well on the art, but this is not the greatest thing Mr. Gruenwald ever wrote. I have to remind myself that he's playing the long game here. What makes this one worth it is the last page reveal of Maelstrom, one of my favorite underutilized villains. An Inhuman/Deviant hybrid, Maelstrom has a weird enough pedigree to work as a threat to any number of teams, the Fantastic Four, the Inhumans, the Eternals, and so on.
After a stint as an Avenger's foe, Maelstrom wound up being the big bad of the Quasar comics, also written by Gruenwald. The evil hybrid was also meant to be the mysterious benefactor who started Herbert Wyndham on the path to becoming the High Evolutionary (as seen in the Evolutionary War back up stories), though much later issues of X-Men made the heavily muffled Victorian figure to be Mr. Sinister in disguise instead.
Side Note: This issue also features the "traditional" yet never seen again Inhuman sport of “inertia ball”, but this is an otherwise unremarkable issue.
コメント