COMICS: Wha... Huh?

Yesterday at the comic shop, I picked up a copy of Wha... Huh?, the new humor comic from Marvel. When Dorian saw it, he stopped dead, and then rolled his eyes so dramatically you could actually hear it. "What? What's wrong with that?" I said. "What is it?" Mike asked. Dorian showed him the comic. And then Mike rolled his eyes. When I'm someday on trial for their murders, you'll know why I did it.

As for the comic itself... uh... it wasn't that bad. I mean, it was overpriced (almost four bucks). Way, way too much of it was real inside baseball stuff, more about the people writing the comic than about the characters being written. And Jim Mahfood... man, a little of his art goes a long way. But it did have at least a couple stories that were pretty funny: the Identity Crisis bit made me laugh, and the "What if Black Panther was white?" piece was fairly clever, turning into a look at token minority hiring by the Avengers. There's a blatant alteration to the artwork in that piece, though (much like there was in Defenders #2), that set my teeth on edge. In the story, Iron Man gets drunk. But the bottle he's drinking from has been deleted. In two separate panels, Iron Man's hand is poised above his mouth, with his head tilted back, clearly indicating that he is chugging from a bottle. But in each panel, the bottle has been erased, leaving Iron Man in an inexplicably bizarre pose, his hand curled around nothing, hanging about six inches from his mouth. Seriously, what is wrong with Marvel?? In this issue, Galactus can be shown with his pants around his ankles taking a crap, but Iron Man can't be shown holding a bottle of booze?