This installment of Standard Deviations takes us back to the Spring of 2009 as Marvel Comics produced a set of “Art Appreciation” variants as part of their celebration of Wolverine’s 35th anniversary. The books also coincided with the release of Fox’s Wolverine: Origins in theaters around the world on May 1st of that year. With another movie featuring Marvel characters debuting next week, the publisher has opted to do a follow up set of Avengers Art Appreciation variants throughout April of this year. This post is part of a Standard Deviations double feature today as we look at both entries in Art Appreciation collection.

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Even though I dislike all the renumbering Marvel does, I’m a sucker for their manufactured milestone issues. While I’m not a huge fan of the title character, last Wednesday’s Wolverine #300 was another fun read from another aggregated landmark. Jason Aaron and a team of artists bring a big story that includes the return of a major Wolverine villain, a new path for another, and a new Silver Samurai along with most of Logan’s Japan-based supporting cast. Aaron has said this will be his last arc on Wolverine (though he’ll still write the character in the pages of Wolverine and the X-Men) and he’s clearly planning to go big before going home.

Spoilers for Wolverine #300 will follow.

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While I’ll admit to a certain amount of fondness for the Hulk, Captain America and Iron Fist, for the most part I’ve never really been a fan of the Marvel Universe in general. So you can imagine my surprise at the number of Marvel toys I purchased over the last week at Walmart. This story actually starts a few weeks ago when I stumbled upon a display of balls. The display promised that each ball opened like one of those plastic eggs you see around Easter time and that within them would be a tiny Marvel figure. The line is called Marvel Heroics and among the photographs on the display were Captain America and Hulk. The balls were priced at just $.97 so I figured I’d buy one. At that price, why not!?

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There was a lot for this X-Men fan to be thankful for this week as all four major X-titles shipped on Wednesday. While in many ways this is great, I can’t help but recognize how much the publishing scheme for these books has changed after they had been coming out weekly for almost all of 2010. With this in mind, I thought it might be a good time revisit the state of the books post-Second Coming.

This will probably contain what some would consider spoilers, so keep that in mind if there are things you’d rather not know about these books.

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I overlooked this in all my excitement over the Age of X, but Marvel recently unveiled another ultra-wide Marko Djurdjevic poster image, this time featuring the history of Wolverine. This image will be available as an oversized poster and as a set of interlocking variant covers to a group of Wolverine titles scheduled for December and January (Uncanny X-Force #3, Wolverine: The Best There Is #1, Wolverine #4, Daken: Dark Wolverine #4, X-23 #4, Wolverine: The Best There Is #2).

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