Hello again, everyone! We are all back at school now, so now it is time for a new ALT Report. Please enjoy as I talk about something I like very much.
Probably you have seen some of the Marvel superhero movies. Many people in Japan love the exciting stories and cool characters in these movies. But did you know about the original Marvel comic books?
Marvel Comics is a part of Disney now. But before Disney and the movies, Marvel only made comic books. The first Marvel comic book is very old. It was published in 1939!
American comic books are not like Japanese manga. There are many reasons. First, you read American comics left to right. Manga is right to left. Second, American comics are usually in color. Manga is usually black and white. And last, manga series usually have the same writer and artist. American comics have many different writers and many different artists. The Amazing Spider-Man comic book has had 29 different writers!
Because American comics have many different artists, you can see different people’s ideas about the characters. I think this is interesting. Like artist John Romita Sr. draws Spider-Man like this:
And artist Todd McFarlane draws Spider-Man like this:
Another difference between American comics and manga is crossover events. Sometimes in manga, characters from one series will be in another. Osamu Tezuka did this often. But American comic book crossovers are different. I will explain.
In Japan, manga chapters are usually published in magazines that have many manga series in them, like Weekly Jump or Champion. For American comics, one chapter is sold as a single issue. But with crossover events, it’s not so simple. Look at this picture:
The War of the Realms was a Marvel crossover event with Thor, the Avengers and other characters. To read the full War of the Realms story, you would read the issues like in this list. That’s a lot of comic books! But the crossover stories are very interesting. Many of the stories in the movies were crossover stories in the comics. Like the Captain America: Civil War movie was a comic book crossover story:
And so was the Thanos story from Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame:
American comic books are exciting because you can read many stories with your favorite heroes. My favorite Marvel comics story is World War Hulk. It is a crossover story. The Avengers sent Hulk into space, and this made him very angry. When he comes back to Earth, he fights all the Marvel superheroes. This is one story you cannot see in the movies, so if you like Marvel superheroes you should try to read the comic books, too.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this ALT Report. Stay safe and healthy, everyone.
-Devon (Kasachu ALT)