"The Craptacular B-Sides" was a three issue miniseries published by Marvel Comics in 2002, detailing the lives of a teen superhero team in a fictional New Jersey suburb. The series was written by Brian-David Marshall and illustrated by Brett Weldele, with the characters designed by famed underground comics creator Evan Dorkin. The three characters are F8ball, who uses a magic 8 ball to tell the future, Mise, who causes things to breakdown, and Jughandle, who can travel through loops in spacetime. The characters have a general "goth" or "alternative" appearance, and the art is cartoonish, moving away from standard "realistic" super hero art in favor of distorted and humorous caricatures.
As for the story, there isn't a lot to it, perhaps because it only lasted three issues. The three teenage superheroes are recruited by a local conman and wheeler-dealer to be a crime-fighting team. Their uniforms were designed for a bowling team. They scuffle against a local "super villain" and then get involved in a gang war between local street toughs that turn out to be Kree and Skrull. The Fantastic Four show up for a cameo. The series ends with a note to write in if you want to see more. As far as I know, the characters and setting were never used again, but who knows what might have been mentioned in Marvel's sprawling continuity.
The main thing I noticed was the good and bad parts of Marvel's transformation around the year 2000 and 2001. The launch of the X-Men movie and the abandonment of the Comics Code gave Marvel a great deal of stylistic choices, and some of the concepts in the Craptacular B-Sides had already been explored in X-Statix. I certainly appreciate some humor in my comics, and the story was cute and engaging, but some of the "post-modernistic" winking at the camera about the silliness of the genre now seems very dated. In addition, the story is a bit muddier than it was previously--- "show not tell" is good advice, except for in superhero comics where, as corny as it is, sometimes a thought balloon interior monologue can really help a reader know what is going on.
And for me, the most outstanding point is just how much mainstream comics changed between 1998 or 1999 and 2001 or 2002--- comparable to how much music changed between 1962 and 1966. A few years before, Marvel was basically making the same superhero comics they made in the 1980s---and then in a very short period, the boundaries of what was happening in mainstream comics changed, which was a bold move, even if it didn't always work perfectly.
Side Quest 2024