Marville / YMMV - TV Tropes

Bizarro Episode:
- Oddly enough, Issue 3 is considered one to the rest of the series. This is because in that issue, the text is printed right on top of the artwork, which ends up covering up quite a bit of it. The only boxes or bubbles are panel descriptions and two thought bubbles, both of which come from a fish.
- Issue 6 is a recap of the series. Normally, it wouldn't be an example of this trope, except it also happens to be the last issue that's actually about Marville.
- The actual final issue, Issue 7, is a submissions guideline for Marvel's Epic Comics imprint. None of the cast show up in it at all.
Bile Fascination: The biggest reason that one would want to read this series is to see if it's really as bizarre and stupid as reviewers have claimed.
Broken Aesop: As much as the comic skewers left-wing viewpoints, Al's story is clumsily rooted in socialism, if not communism. He arrives in the past with no money, no skills, and no personal identification, gets by at first due to the charity and help of others who take pity on him, and becomes rich through what is basically government handouts for doing nothing. Additionally, he claims that in the future society of 5002 everything on Earth is owned and run by AOL and no one has any personal possessions, yet the future is shown to be a rather idyllic advanced utopia (and Al claims that crime has been eradicated if only because no one has any personal possessions to steal anymore).
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The Take Thats directed at Peter David, since Marville was part of a contest/competition between Jemas and David as David began writing for a relaunched Captain Marvel title. Not only did Captain Marvel outsell Marville handily, but some 20 years later, Peter David still works for Marvel and enjoys a good reputation both for his comics and his novels, while Bill Jemas left Marvel a couple years later and hasn't done anything high-profile since, meaning that Marville is what he's most remembered for (that and controversial comments about the readership masturbating to Elektra.)
- America Online taking over the world might have seemed like a possibility in the early 2000s, but just a few years later it lost most of its money when broadband internet came along and stomped dial-up (AOL and Time Warner split in 2009). Likewise, Ted Turner was completely marginalized at the post-merger AOL Time Warner, resulting in his business career effectively ending.
- Issues 4 and 5 state that Wolverine was the first human. It would later be revealed in Wolverine: Origin that, while he had lived for centuries, Logan was definitely not that old. For bonus irony points, Bill Jemas co-wrote Origin.
Narm: There are a lot of lines in the comic that are supposed to be meaningful or insightful, but just come off as awkward or stupid. For example:
Kal: So Jurassic Park wasn't just a movie, it was a tribute!
Mickey: Tarzan isn't a fantasy, it's a memory!
Protection from Editors: Bill Jemas had this despite having no experience in writing. Nathan Rabin's assessment spent a lot of words to note how the low quality is directly related ("He’s the boss, so he’s in a position to do whatever the fuck he wants, like publish an insanely self-indulgent, obnoxious comic book in violent defiance of logic and basic decency").
Shallow Parody: The story became infamous for this aspect; the jokes are not particularly well-researched, usually generalizing the subject of humor, and sometimes not even bearing resemblance to said subject. The series drops the "parody" aspect going into Issue #3 for a truly bizarre tract on evolution, morality, and human existence.
So Bad, It's Good: Weirdly, the comic can be seen to start getting funny when it stops trying to be an intentional comedy and goes into hilariously ill-researched tangents on various subjects like religion, science and philosophy that are supposed to be taken seriously. Special mentions go to the talking Jewish dinosaurs and tragically murdered carbon dioxide molecules.
Strangled by the Red String: The opening recaps try to imply Mickey and Al are in love, but it never shows up in the actual comic. In fact, the prologue to #2 says they're in love, but that was never shown. Meanwhile, in #3, the prologue says they were never in love.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Issue #7 uses the Marville name, but aside from that it is just an instruction guide on submitting to the Epic Comics imprint. Even Linkara commented they could have at least had the cast of Marville being the ones to give out the information.
  - Similarly, Al is established to be very rich in-universe. The in-universe explanation could have been that Al was launching his own comics company since the editor in the sixth issue refused to publish his story, and Marville was the very comic to come out of that.
- The first issue implies Ted Turner owns/runs "Dad's Comic Company" back in the year 2002. The series ends with Al pitching his story to a comic editor to try and have it turned into a comic. We never see the editor, when it could have been the past version of Ted Turner. And given that Ted in 5002 claims his comic company sucked and didn't publish anything good, his 2002 self agreeing or refusing to publish "Marville" could have been a humorous bit of Self-Deprecation either way.
- While the first two issues weren't hilarious, if Jemas had stuck with their initial premise and kept doing superhero and political satire instead of turning the comic into an Author Tract and his characters into mouthpieces for his odd ideas on intelligent design and philosophy, the comic might have had the potential to improve, or at least land a couple half-decent jokes.
  - For that matter, if Jemas had ignored Al and had Ted Turner going back in time, we could have had a comic series about a seemingly immortal media mogul (or at least his identical descendent from 3000 years in the future) trying to become a superhero, which would have served the parody and satire elements far better. And given that Ted karate-chopped a meteor in half, he actually does seem to have superpowers somehow.
Unintentional Period Piece: To say that this comic hasn't aged well is an understatement. For example, there are numerous references to AOL Time-Warner, portraying it as a powerful MegaCorp that rules the world in 5002 (relatively plausible in 2002, downright laughable now). There are also "jokes" about the industry in general — and Marvel's staff and comics in particular — in the early 2000s. One example is showing Peter David, who was making a bet with Bill Jemas to see who could sell more comics, as a poor man (David won the bet). And the title and the cover of issue #1 reference Smallville, which had come out the year before. Still, Jemas somehow manages to screw up at depicting how things were in the early 2000s; for instance, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda were divorced at the time of publication.

YMMV / Marville

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