To be honest I haven’t bought a lot of comics in the past year.  I buy Flash more out of habit than anything at this point and the other few titles I’ve bought haven’t been from the big two.  I do like to keep up on what is going on in books though.  It’s because of this I was quick to read an announcement that Beta Ray Bill was going to be making an appearance in the new Nova comic.  I’m a huge Beta Ray Bill fan so I was excited to see what was going on.  The cover for the book he’ll be showing up in is posted below. 

The first thing you notice is that Beta Ray Bill is a bad ass.  This is normal and it’s how he should be portrayed.  The second thing you probably notice is the giant number one in the right hand corner.  The funny thing about the number one is that this is issue number 13.  You can actually see the 013. printed much smaller down on the bottom right hand corner.  Now it is entirely possible that this is only a promotional image and the real comic will not have a giant number one on the cover.  But if the comic does ship that way it is pretty interesting.

There will always be debate in comics if restarting numbering is more important than having huge issue numbers.  New number ones seem like a fresh start, but you can’t have a 100^th issue if you renumber every year.  Is Marvel going to start numbering their story arcs?  Would you jump into a comic you’ve never read before if they were on the third story in an arc of a book that’s on issue 20?  Again I’m speculating a lot over an image that might not even hit the comic stands that way.  It was something I noticed yesterday and haven’t been able to stop thinking about. 

With Thor making 65 million over the weekend I’m guessing some of you went and saw it. I just saw it Monday night; I’m pretty allergic to opening weekend crowds so we waited a bit. I really enjoyed the movie. I’m a sucker for cosmic Vikings smashing things though, so your mileage may vary. Most of the comic book references were pretty nicely handled; the bits about Donald Blake had me literally laughing out loud. The after the credits scene is such obscure nerddom that it was almost funny to watch the audience’s confusion.


I’m not bringing Thor up to do a review though. I’m bringing it up because I’m excited. If the god of thunder keeps bringing in money the Marvel machine will have to do a sequel. If they do another one, they’ll have to introduce Beta Ray Bill won’t they? Iron Man 2 brought in War Machine, so it only makes sense. I hope so, because I have a confession. I like Marvel’s version of Thor; but I freaking love Beta Ray Bill.


A little history for those not versed in Thor comics; Beta Ray Bill showed up in 1983. The horse-faced alien didn’t start that way. He was part of an alien race called the Korbinites, who go on searching for a new home when their galaxy explodes. To become their champion Bill undergoes a series of experiments to make his super strong and tough. The rest of his race look human, he bame that thing to protect his people. Thor encounters his space ship and in true comic book fashion the to fight it out before realzing they are both good guys.


All this talk of Beta Ray Bill may make me play Marvel Ultimate Alliance again. My team of War Machine, Scarlet Spider, US Agent, and Beta Ray Bill was epic.