Last week's Mighty Thor saw a meeting of superpowers.

[thanekos]

They weren't all superpowered.

They were all financial superpowers, fingers on one of the hands turning the world.

They weren't a cooperative, but a courtesy; they were meeting to address one of them being discourteous.





(Tiny guy's not a failure of proportion; he's Darren Cross, whom you might've seen recently in Ant-Man.

Grid-shirt in the back's the Mister Stone- he's representing Alchemax at the table.)

Pressed to share, he didn't: " The other realms..

" .. THEY'RE MINE! "

His super-strong table pounding didn't ruffle them.



(The lady with the hair's from the Shi'ar, because of course aliens have a vested interest in Earth finance.

Mister Agger's eyes and bulging vein are because of his minotaur powers.)



(That's the best the second Silver Samurai's looked yet.

Pagecount's ~2 of 20.)

Comments

[nyadnar17]

Usually super rich, blah blah blah, true rulers of the world, infinite money bullshit is boring and inane as hell to me. But this? This is interesting and great. First time ever for me in comics. Bravo Aaron. Bravo.

[arthur_wynne]

What makes this different, in your opinion? Because to me it just reads as more of the same.

Not trying to be contrary, just curious. I don't follow the book.

[long_silence]

The only one who I don't think belongs there is the little girl from Aaron's kid Hellfire Club. She was never a funny or clever character concept, they were all always just obnoxious.

Also I can't imagine Stanephones being more popular than Starkphones.

[erikred]

Think Zune 2. Of course they're awful and don't deliver, but that's the point of Stane, innit?

[rzerox21xx]

not to mentioned all she is is a walking animal cruelty joke, I hate as a cat lover and seeing her stroke a dead cat doesn't do me any favors.

[mrstatham]

I like it when a pet villain acts like the bigshot in the room among villains who are much, much better than them. Tell me why Wilson Fisk wouldn't just mash this guy's skull into the table a la the 'enthusiasms' speech from The Untouchables?

[lonewolf23k]

Because Agger, in his Minotaur form, has traded blows with Thor, who's way above Fisk's strength class?

[wizardru]

Because in the first part, he doesn't even see this guy as a significant threat. Look at his face there, it says 'I would kill you, but you don't warrant that much effort'. He's suffered fools, even super-powered fools, plenty of times before. He's a patient, methodical man. Second, the Kingpin generally doesn't resort to physical violence unless provoked and certainly not in a setting like this. No, the Kingpin has you shot as you're entering your limo, visiting your mom, exiting church. The Kingpin finds your family, hurts THEM and makes sure you know who did it and why.

[silicondream]

I was wondering the opposite: in a room of power players whose spheres of influence extend across multiple dimensions and galaxies, isn't Wilson Fisk a little out of his depth? I mean, there's "I can have you shot in your sleep" and then there's "I can drop an asteroid on your home country."

[locuatico]

I assume it's more that he has the criminal monopoly on New York, which is filled with superheroes, and has plenty of super-powered contacts. You need help doing business under tony stark's radar? You call fisk.

[gnarll]

I kind of agree. Fisk comes across as badass, because he is written that way in stories with Daredevil and the Punisher. And he is in charge in New Yorks underworld.

But he is a one-city guy in a room with people who are trading in worlds and realms. He seems to be outmatched by degrees of magnitude. And not just because people like Shaw or Agger is vastly more powerful.

Why does the King of New York matter more than the king of Manilla, Singapore or St. Petersburgh?

[jlbarnett]

well, he's crossed swords with the Red Skull who has been a big time player and lived to tell the tale. So he's on supervillains levels but he's a bit more sane than most of them who care about money and that sort of thing

[icon_uk]

Well, the one city IS New York, which seems to have more superheroes than the rest of the world put together, and he's still in business as a businessman AND a crime lord. Yes he's been taken down a few times, but he has ALWAYS recovered and remains rational and logical.

I'd say he'd earned a place at the table, and these power brokers would be fools to no include him.

[starwolf_oakley]

Wilson Fisk probably respects these people too much to do that. Killing an underling for a perceived slight is one thing. That was a "once per DAREDEVIL issue" thing with him for a while, Fisk has to do business with this group.

[malitia]

The villains are interesting. But this was one of the problems with this book for me for a very long time... I mean the villains (and jekasses with mysterious agenda, hi, Loki) stealing the plot while Jane waves the hammer ineffectually in their general direction.

I so hope this arc will be different. :/

[richardak]

I know I've said it before, but if comic writers are going to write about business, it would really help if they developed a passing understanding of how business works. Why do writers think that it's a serious threat to make "your stock price make[] like a Golden Gate jumper"? Let's assume that he could actually do it, and let us also leave aside that stock manipulations of that sort are generally against the law. We can just assume that these people are career criminals and do not fear prosecution for stock manipulation. Why is that a threat to Agger? Does he actually own a lot of Roxxon stock himself? Because if he doesn't, it's not going to hurt him at all. Whether he does or not, he will know, for a certainty, that the stock drop does not reflect Roxxon's actual value. He can just turn around and buy up the stock, maybe taking the company private, and exploit the difference between the company's real value and its market cap following the drop.

Then there is this issue of his deal with Malekith. Presumably, they are upset because this is an exclusive contract, and he has shut them out. If it is not an exclusive contract, why are they upset? Why not just cut their own deals with Malekith? If they are exclusive contracts, is Malekith the only one with access to the "realms of Norse legend"? Couldn't they just cut deals with Odin or whomever? But let's assume that the deal is exclusive and that Malekith is the only game in town, because then at least this story makes some sense. Now, Malekith is a king, so I assume that the only courts that could enforce any contract with Malekith would be Malekith's own courts. So if Malekith decided, for whatever reason, that he only wants to do business with Roxxon, presumably because he thought that that benefited him in some way, he's not going to start doing business with these other people just because they murdered the CEO of Roxxon. If he is willing to do business with these others, Roxxon would not be able to enforce whatever exclusivity provision it had in its contract anyway, because Malekith himself is the very one they would have to go to for enforcement. So for them to threaten Agger over this is pointless and stupid: either Malekith only wants to do business with Roxxon, in which case threatening Agger is pointless, or Malekith is willing to do business with them, in which case threatening Agger is superfluous.

But the biggest problem of all is this: if Roxxon's stockholders, and the market at large, do not yet know about deal with Malekith, then that means that the value of that deal is not yet reflected in the price of Roxxon's stock. So if these people all want a piece of Roxxon's action with Malekith, all they have to do is buy Roxxon's stock on the open market. When Roxxon's profits increase due to the Malekith deal, the stock price will rise to reflect the value of the deal, and they will have their piece of the action. Granted, yes, that might very well be insider trading, depending on how they found out about the deal, but we've already established that they do not fear prosecution. And again, depending on how they found out about the deal, it might not be insider trading. Note: I am not your lawyer, and I am not giving anyone a legal opinion or legal advice on insider trading or any other subject.

[zylly]

I just realized... is this the first we've seen of Shaw since A vs. X? I remember him breaking out of the Avengers Academy holding pen, but he was still amnesiac and good then.

Dammit, I liked good guy amnesiac Shaw.