Morning Ramble 346: Cupid, Tales, and Strange

SMITE: Searching for American Gods

With American Gods on the air and a game focused on playing gods, I figured it’d be pretty cool if I could play some of the gods from the TV show. So I set out to find Czernobog…and couldn’t find him. Hmm, I suppose SMITE doesn’t have all deities or even all mythologies in the game yet, but it’d be cool if they could bring some of the people from the show into the game. It’d be cool to see Czernobog wielding his hammer and causing havoc ingame, but I did see that they have Odin who calls himself Mr. Wednesday in the show. Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to play as Odin today but I did try out Cupid.

Cupid works as a hunter and seems to have a pretty decent kit. The game I played, we won, but I was still just getting used to his abilities. He’s got a decent heal, some mobility, and a delayed AOE similar to what Zilean from League of Legends has (though he can only throw out one at a time). I need to get better at helping my teammates with my heal since I kept forgetting to fire it off in the heat of battle, but the rest of his skills are pretty straight forward.

Perhaps in my next game session, I’ll be able to throw down a game or 2 as Odin, but I’ll keep an eye out for other American Gods characters in the game.

Marvel Complete Reading Order

I’ve come to the realization that if I keep reading one or 2 comics in the Complete Marvel Reading Order every week or every month, it’ll take forever to even get into the 1970s comics so I’m gonna just read and when I feel like it, post some thoughts on what I’ve read. With that in mind, I read through Tales to Astonish #37 and Strange Tales #103.

Tales to Astonish #37: Trapped by the Protector
This is an Ant-Man story that reads like an episode of Scooby-Doo. The Protector is extorting jewelers in the city threatening to turn their wares into dust if they don’t comply. After a few of the merchants complain, Ant-Man uses his patented catapult to fly to the scene of a crime and tracks the Protector. He then sets himself up as a fake jeweler to entrap the villain. But little does Ant-Man realize, the Protector brought a vacuum with him and he instead captures Ant-Man. All is not lost though as Ant-Man’s strength allows him to break free and have his ant buddies send a message to the police. With the Protector captured, they pull off his helmet and it turns out the villain is the jeweler from the earlier crime. Not a very good issue and the ending really made it weak. I rate this a C-.

Strange Tales#103: Prisoner of the 5th Dimension!
This issue features the Human Torch on loan again from the Fantastic Four. Actually, Reed shows up in this one briefly but only on some kind of video phone. The story starts with a series of homes sinking into a swamp that supposedly is solid enough to support the buildings. Seeking answers, Johnny digs under the homes and sees that the ground is hard enough to support them…it must be something else. Hiding overnight, he sees an Old Man, who was warning about Swamp Demons, show up with 2 buddies and zap the ground making it soft enough to swallow the houses. But before the Torch can do anything about it, they capture him and walk him into the 5th Dimension. Zemu, the leader of this other world, traps Johnny in a liquid with a breathing mask so he’s prevented from turning on his flame, but won’t die. Fortunately, not everyone likes this tyrant and Valeria and her father free Johnny so he can start a revolution. The dictator is captured and Johnny heads back to his home where the houses are no longer sinking in to the swamp.

The story is much better than the Ant-Man story, and it’s a bit further reaching…all the way into the 5th dimension. If the story ended with the old ‘swamp demon’ man doing things on his own, I would have really been pissed, but the fact the folks from the 5th dimension were helping him out made this worthwhile. The art is good and some of the concepts seemed original, though magnets were still pretty important to the story…again. On the whole, I rate this a C+.

These stories are part of the growth process of early Marvel, I know but sometimes I feel like this is a grind.