With this weekend’s premiere of Marvel Studio’s The Avengers (and as part of our month long Standard Deviations series dedicated to the team), we’re taking a look at some past sets of variants shipped to coincide with the premieres of the solo movies featuring the Avengers’ “Big Three:” Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America. In this edition, we spotlight May 2011’s “Thor Goes Hollywood” variants that featured an excellent theme paying homage to some of American cinema’s most iconic films. Just about every image is immediately identifiable whether you’re a film buff or not.

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All week Marvel has been releasing teaser images focusing on the concept of fear that feature some of their flagship characters. No one seems to know what these are actually teasing, but it seems the publisher may be gearing up for another crossover event.

Earlier in the month, Marvel announced a list of creators that they’ve referred to as “The Architects” (see below). All of the names were listed with the titles they’re currently working on along with a “secret project.” We should be getting another teaser image tomorrow, maybe we’ll learn what they’re all about as well.

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Another batch of great images for Marvel’s 70th Anniversary variant covers have been released over the past few months and I thought it was worth posting an update.  While these covers are really cool, I’ve come to discover that they are incredibly difficult to find since my last post.  At least this seems to be true in Philadelphia as I’ve come across only one shop that regularly has them in stock, Brave New Worlds on 2nd Street.  This is by no means the fault of local shop owners, that blame falls to Marvel for using their ridiculous order minimum system to allocate these books.