The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1359: Shazam! #6, October 1973

First time I've read some proper, old-school Captain Marvel. It was very weird.

And my copy has no cover, so I've never seen that creepy AF cover up there.

I've never really understood the draw of Captain Marvel. To me, he's always been a less-interesting Superman. But today's comic is just really weird. I've been thinking a lot lately about the stories that writers were able to tell under the restrictions of the Comics Code. Some of the work we get is good, but definitely pretty standard. Would it be too strong to say that the Comics Code inspired a few decades of mediocrity being the standard. And only when you had a particularly imaginative writer or artist would we get what might be seen as a comic that pushes the genre forward.

Captain Marvel's adventures are definitely very different from those that I've seen in other superhero comics, especially of this era. There's actually something of an Archie feel to this comic for me. The situations are every bit as weird as the ones that the Riverdale gang get themselves into in the 60s and 70s, but instead of American teenagers, it's a guy in a bright red costume. I wonder if I could transpose the Riverdale characters into stories of the Marvel Family?

I don't think I actually have more than 10 comics in the collection that feature Captain Marvel, and that's a liberal estimate. I may have to track down a bit more of the C.C. Beck stuff, though, as his art style is just so lovely.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1182: Action Comics #562, December 1984

Okay, this one was just okay. The villains weren't particularly interesting, and their schemes really didn't seem like they'd be that big of a challenge to Superman. I sometimes wonder if we should be reading these comics with the subtext that Superman is actually letting all of these things happen to him, just to either a) see how much he can take, or b) build up the villains so their defeats are more demoralizing. Which doesn't say a lot for the Man of Steel, either way.

What I do like is having a bit of background on Queen Bee, who shows up in Morrison's JLA as part of an anti-JLA team of villains. One that's much more threatening than the team in today's comic.

But they can't all be winners, and even if the story was a bit of a letdown, the art was, as usual, beautiful. The early 80s Superman artists were really on the ball.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1181: Action Comics #561, November 1984

Let's add this one to probably one of the most misleading covers we've seen thus far. Nothing even remotely like this scene happens in the issue. In fact, Toyman appears to have actually gone straight (a contentious phrase in our gender-nonconforming era), though he does use his newfound wealth for his own selfish purposes. However, as a collector, I totally understand his desire to track down the first toy he ever made. That's important.

Superman's role in this story is really that of observer, which is a nice way of parsing stories about an alien trying to fit in on Earth. But he also play peacemaker between Toyman and his nemesis, evincing a bit of the Christ metaphor that people seem so quick to lay over top of Superman. I'm more of the opinion that we have a Moses metaphor going on, but that's just me.

The second story is a nice example of the wackiness that Superman often encounters, especially in terms of his exposures to Red Kryptonite. This time, it splits the Man of Steel into his much younger counterpart (on the cusp of revealing himself as Superboy), and into a future version of himself that has a ridiculous array of powers, including splitting his secret identity off from the body so that both can function at once, or turning himself into an actual man of steel. The story is silly and entertaining, which is not a bad thing for a holiday Monday morning read.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1179: Action Comics #559, September 1984

We're starting off a short run of consecutive issues today, though strangely they don't all appear to have been written by the same person. Though my reading of Action has bounced about a lot, I've yet to see a regular creative team. I mentioned to some friends that my recent readings seem to suggest that at this point in time, DC was just throwing things at Superman and seeing what stuck, so perhaps that philosophy also applied to creative teams.

Today is a throwback to a Superboy story, in that a villain from Clark's youth returns. She's not actually so bad, but her husband, it turns out, is a bit of a con man, and tries to use her powers to milk money from pollution-choked towns.

I've noticed a very strong environmental aspect to many of the stories I've looked at over the last week or so. It seems to have been prevalent in the minds of the writers on Superman through the late 70s and early 80s. Not surprising, really, as this was when the environmental movement really got going. But it is a bit surprising to see the attitude evinced by numerous different writers.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 831: Wonder Woman #218, June-July 1975

I was about to get all angry about these trials that Wonder Woman is undergoing, but I thought before I flew off the handle, I should do a bit more research. It turns out Wonder Woman requests this surveillance and testing herself, after regaining her powers and finding out that her mother has erased some of her memories, the tale of which is told (or perhaps re-told) in Wonder Woman #270. So it's not the men being unfair to her, but her testing herself which, really, is more in line with her character now that I think about it.

That said, the missions have a very odd aesthetic for superhero comics published in the 70s. DC was becoming a far more integrated universe at this point, but the adventures Wonder Woman has in these last couple of comics smack more of the standalone stories of the early 60s. I could see the old Doom Patrol having to fight a Statue of Liberty that comes to life, or the original Teen Titans facing off against a strange alien robot that lands in the middle of the desert. Undoubtedly these were the kinds of adventures Wonder Woman had a decade or so before this comic was published, but they seem a bit out of place in the last days of the Silver Age, and before her retconned history following the Crisis.

One of the complaints that often dogs Wonder Woman's comics is that writers don't seem to know what to do with her. I get the suspicion that it's because the writers are, by and large, men who don't actually know what to do with a strong female lead. That might seem unfair, and I don't mean to level it as a criticism of the people involved in the creation of the stories, but rather at the society that has socialized them into not knowing what to do with a strong female character. I think, really, we're only just, in the last 10-15 years, seeing a generation of male writers who are coming to understand how to handle female protagonists. But in the Sixties and Seventies, though there are definite gestures toward treating female characters equitably, the larger education of mid-Twentieth century society produces a difficulty in creators trying to wrap their heads around a woman who doesn't need a man around. There were so few models to draw upon.

I don't want that to sound disparaging of a group of writers whose work I actually hold in high esteem. But one is always limited by the society within which one develops, so as much as one might want to push at the boundaries of that society, it can be hard without the proper tools.

To be continued.