The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 795: True North II, 1991

The first of the inevitable slew of comics I've picked up at the con this weekend. This issue features 53 different creators (so I will not be tagging them all) doing 2-4 page stories about censorship. It's perhaps a little-known fact that the Canadian border is (or was) quite restrictive on what kinds of comics could be shipped to comic stores in Canada. This comic comes about as a direct result of the Toronto police actually raiding stores in the city, and, I think, Aircel Publishing's warehouse, on charges of distributing pornography to minors and obscenity. Back when I had my comic store, Diamond Comics simply refused to ship anything even remotely "mature" across the border because there was no way they could guarantee that the comics would ever reach the stores they were meant for.

The editorial on the back page articulates the argument against this kind of censorship quite well. Derek McCulloch notes that "[m]any of the comic books I find myself...called upon to defend are ones I find personally repugnant...No matter what I may think of this title or that, though, there is presumably someone out there who...read them and enjoy [sic] them; it would be a gross kind of hubris for me to think my opinion of the material superseded anyone else's." This is absolutely the crux. While we have governments in place to maintain a particular level of civilized discourse and conduct, such strictures have a way of becoming restrictures, when one person, or a small group of people come to believe that the way they think of things is obviously the best way.

Oh. Right. We live in Trump's world now. You know these things already.

Some of the comics in today's selection were really cool, some not quite to my taste. But that's the point of art, right? We all have our own tastes, and we should all be able, as long as we're not hurting anyone, to indulge them.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 794: John F. Kennedy, August-October 1964

A great first day at the Calgary Expo - I haven't quite finished going through my finds for the day, and I'll be finding more tomorrow hopefully, so instead let's have a look a bit of an oddity - the John F. Kennedy biography comic from Dell.

What I'll say up front is that if this wasn't a biographical comic, it would make a pretty decent political piece of fiction. Kennedy appeared to live a pretty interesting life, and, though we're only getting a snapshot from a very particular point of view, he also seemed to be a pretty nice guy. Of course, of course, we have to note that biography really is fiction in a lot of ways, and this comic probably more so. It was published only a year after Kennedy's assassination, so there's certainly not going to be any damaging information. In fact, pop culture artifacts like this one are probably what helped contribute to JFK's reverential treatment that, in many ways, continues to the present day.

But as I say, this was actually a pretty excellent story. There's drama, action, success, and tragedy. I'm actually pretty impressed by Kennedy's World War II exploits, which really do stand in stark contrast to the current administrator of the U.S. JFK was also the first U.S. President to be born in the 20th century, which is really odd when you think about it. When reading that passage, I wondered how long it would be before we had a President born in the 21st century. Another 15-20 years, perhaps? Right now there's probably a 17-year old out there embarking on a path in politics that will eventually lead to the White House. Assuming, of course, that there's a country, or world, left to govern in 15 or 20 years.

Ah, enough pessimism. Still a bit bleary from pain and painkillers, so that's enough for today. Back to the Expo tomorrow - I'm giving a paper at 4PM, so if you're in the area, stop by and see what these ramblings sound like with sound.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 10: Doctor Who Weekly #1, October 1979

I just realized that I didn't do my magazine last Friday. Must be that memory thing that happens with age.

Today's magazine has got to be one of the oldest inhabitants of the collection. Not, necessarily, by it's actual age, but by the amount of time it's spent with me. The first issue of DWW I ever got was #19, but my Mum and Dad managed to track down a few back issues for me and have them sent to us in Canada in early 1980. I'm still trying to track down one or two to fill out my run of the weekly series - perhaps the Calgary Expo this weekend will bear some fruit.

Speaking of, I know I say it every year, but I'll try to do a full write-up of the con next week. I'm presenting a paper on Sunday afternoon, if you're about.

Today's inaugural issue features the first part of "The Iron Legion," one of my absolute favourite Doctor Who stories - imagine Rome never fell, and rampaged across the galaxy at the behest of demonic aliens for millennia. It's good and epic and everything that the television series was unable to be in those early days. It's amusing, and slightly unnerving, to me that one of the articles in this issue notes that the series began "16 years ago" and here we are in 2017 celebrating it's 50+ anniversary! There's something wondrous about the fact that this show has managed to stay around for over half a century, especially given the ridiculousness of its premise. But then, I'm a guy who love superheroes. Ridiculous premises are par for the course.

I read a few issues of this series a while back, but perhaps I'll put it on deck for my Friday magazines to come. Might be interesting to take a look back not just at old comics, but at comics that have been with me for a really, really long time.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 793: Failed Universe #1, December 1986

(Contingency comic today. I'm still feeling crappy.)

I've often said that I think I must be one of the few fans of Marvel's early attempt at a new narrative universe, creatively referred to as the New Universe. In my defense, I was only 12 when it came out, and it was completely different from the Avengers and X-Men comics I was mainlining at the time. Or it felt like it was, anyway.

Older eyes saw something, well, not quite as different, as this comic attests. As with most of the Blackthorne parody comics (most, but not all), it relies on the Mad Magazine-esque style of humour, lots of crass jokes, and a complete disparagement of the idea that there might have been something of merit behind the New Universe.

I guess, once I get to it in the project, we'll find out for ourselves.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 792: Gene Roddenberry's Lost Universe #1, April 1995

I think I'm going to wimp out on this one. I'm feeling horrible today. Can't breathe properly, can't sleep properly, and I have a paper that I'm presenting on Sunday that just doesn't seem like it'll ever be done.

Interesting premise, though not nearly enough story to really suck me in. This is one of those comics I feel would have benefited from a double-sized first issue, just to get us really mired in the setting and situation.

Sorry, that's all I've got in me today.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 44 - Salimba, 1989

As with today's comic, I'm just not feeling up to writing much today for this graphic novel. But it's an interesting piece, so I'll make a bit of effort.

Salimba is a pretty cool pulp-fiction jungle girl comic, made up of three different stories about the title character. Over the course of the book she moves from simply a jungle girl to being something far more eternal and mythic. Also, in the last story, there's these weird worm boys who look like giant uncircumcised penises with faces. Which, I think, is actually what they're meant to be.

There's some problematic essentializing going on in the story, it being set in an undisclosed jungle location where everyone is of African descent. This is always going to be difficult with jungle-based works though, at least up until a certain point where writers and artists became (or, more pessimistically, become) more sensitive to cultural stereotyping. But, as I note, Salimba moves out of stereotype and into myth, which is not a long journey in many ways, so there's definitely something there worth exploring. And the cleaving to the tenets of pulp-y writing is really handled quite nicely.

Okay. Sorry. That's all I've got.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 791: Command Review v.1, July 1986

A bit of a break from the second quarter of the collection, because I wanted to read this comic and after I had I realized it was really excellent and I wanted to say a few things about it.

First, I want to say the bad stuff, though. The comic is absolutely rife with spelling and grammatical errors, which is why it is so very important to have some independent editing, preferably by someone like myself whose spent a kind of insane amount of time dealing with language. The errors aren't huge, but I find that a spelling or grammar error in a piece of speculative fiction tends to pull me out of the setting, to hamper my suspension of disbelief. Now, this is certainly not to say that I'm not guilty of it myself on occasion, which is also why I recommend to my students that they have a couple of people read over a paper before handing it in. It's a small thing, but a fundamental one.

Okay, that said, this comic sets up a wonderful and thoroughly convincing hard sci-fi setting starring anthropomorphic animals, and is tackling politics and feminism while also giving us some pretty great military space action. It reminds me a great deal of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica from the early 2000s, in that it's willing to take a fairly ridiculous setting and wrap remarkably intelligent plots about it. Our lead character, Erma Felna is a woman in a man's military. From the little hints I've gleaned thus far, her animal society is very protective of women, but there's something almost Handmaid's Tale-esque about how it's handled. After seeing ground combat and showing herself to be quite capable, Erma's superiors ship her off to a backwater so that her heroic deeds, the subtext seems to be saying, can't disseminate too far into the rest of the population. Much as our focal character is heroic, it seems the organization she belongs to is less so.

Writer/Artist Steve Galllacci handles the balances I've noted in this comic with great ease. The four reprinted stories from Albedo Anthropomorphics in this issue were originally published between September 1984 and August 1985, and Mr. Gallacci's art improves a great deal even over such a short time. There's a huge amount of Erma Felna material still out there waiting for me, the Albedo series having gone through a few publishers before going on indefinite hiatus in 2005. Good thing the comic con is coming up this weekend!

One last thing about this comic - it's probably the one with the earliest reading time of any in the project so far. After my surgery yesterday, I couldn't sleep. My nose was packed with about a foot an a half of gauze, so I had to breathe through my mouth. Anyone's whose had a cold will understand the difficulty. So my lovely wife, in solidarity, and myself got up around 3 AM, and I read Command Review. I've read that this was actually a regular practice in some Victorian homes, to get up, have a cup of tea, read, and then head back to bed. I can see why. It was really rather pleasant.

Though I'd rather have been sleeping.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 790: Metallix Free Comic Book Day #1, April 2003

A blast from Free Comic Book Days past today. Metallix is an interesting premise, in that it's a superhero team book but the superpowers are shared amongst the four members of the team. What I mean is that only one character at a time can wear the supersuit, and each brings their own unique abilities to the enhancements granted by "Metal X." It's actually pretty cool, and I really want to track down the rest of the series to see how it all plays out. The team is set up as an industrial troubleshooting team, and in this issue we see them taking down saboteurs in a Central American country. This is a little troubling, as there's a good chance that the saboteurs are actually people from the country fighting to keep industry from destroying the environment, but there's no hint of motive behind the saboteurs, just explosions and gunfire. It's a bit of a gap in the storytelling, really. Even the most mundane of crooks always seems to have a reason, and it's only the truly terrifying, and rare, villains that do things with no reason whatsoever.

That aside, the comic reads quite nicely, and that's because it's produced by a group of veteran creators, all old school (well, 70s and 80s) Marvel guys. And the comic bears this out. The art style really looks like it could have come out of Marvel in the mid-Eighties, which is perhaps another reason I enjoyed it so much. It's got that old Avengers/New Mutants look going for it. There are three other preview features in the comic, none as long as the Metallix story, and I'm curious as to whether or not these comics were an interlinked universe, or if each existed in their own continuum. There's no hint either way in this comic, but I get the feeling, especially based on the credentials of the creators, that what we're looking at is a shared universe. I will, again, have to track things down a bit to figure that out.

Well, I'm off for a septoplasty operation today. I've never had a general anesthetic, so I'm a little bit freaked out. But I'll see you back here tomorrow, probably in a bit of pain, but ready for more weird comics from the second quarter of the collection. To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 789: Killer Instinct Nintendo Power Exclusive #1, 1996

I'm always a bit thrilled when I find a comic that's not listed in the GCD. I feel like it's a special little part of the comics world that only I have access to.

It's just a pity when it turns out to not be actually the greatest part.

I don't know the Killer Instinct game franchise at all. I've never been a fan of fighting games. This one looks pretty typical. What I've often wondered about such franchises, though, is why introduce any kind of story element to the series. It's literally two sprites punching the crap out of one another - why muddle things with story. It's a bit like when a terrible porn film attempts to insert narrative. You just sit there wondering why that's something that needed to happen. But here's the thing: I tell my students that we narrativize everything - our lives, from the moment we get up to the moment we fall asleep, are narrativized. We can't help but tell stories, even if it's only to ourselves. So perhaps it's natural to put narrative into something that doesn't seem to benefit from narrative. In the case of Killer Instinct, the narrative provides reason and impetus for the fighting game - it's not just two sprites punching each other, it's a hero moving through a journey, even if that journey is basically virtual boxing with shiny sticks.

And it's becoming clear that I don't like fighting games, right?

Paul Gulacy's name is familiar to me, and a quick look through my database reveals a few other comics featuring his art. I found his work in today's comic okay, but occasionally a bit difficult to follow. What you need to know is that the whole comic is basically a fight between B. Orchid and Jago, the two "heroic" characters from the franchise. Choreographing a fight sequence in comics must be very difficult. You have to capture the speed and movement of a very rapid sequence of events in static images. To do this for an entire comic must be exhausting. There are some moments in today's comic where I'm not entirely certain what's just happened, but one character looks like they've moved, and one looks like they're falling over. And there's a fine line to be straddled in such depictions, in that you occasionally want this confusion to be there - fights can happen so quickly that it's sometimes difficult to figure out what just happened. But you don't want this too much, especially in a medium that relies on its visuals to tell a story, rather than just depict one.

More tomorrow. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 788: I Dream of Jeannie Wishbook, 2001

Two weeks ago, I sorted out a stack of comics that were pertinent to the reading of comics by African-American creators. Getting into my collection is occasionally quite difficult. I have drawer boxes for much of the latter half of the alphabet, but not the former, so anything from about G to O was concealed beneath sometimes three other comic boxes. So while I had a stack of comics to select from for the last few weeks, I decided it was time to re-organize my storage, and to file almost 2 full boxes worth of comics into the collection. What I ended up doing was reversing the stacking of some of the boxes, so that I have access to the other letters of the alphabet. The next week will feature odd bits and pieces from all of those letters that have, thus far, been somewhat neglected in the collection.

There's a couple of interesting things about this comic. First, the cover. Let me be very up front about the fact that Barbara Eden was one of my earliest crushes, coming in second only to the bewitching Elizabeth Montgomery. I used to watch Jeannie when I would come home from school, along with Gilligan's Island, and I fell head over 10 year old heels in love with her. Secondly, however, the comic was published with both a photo cover and an art cover, and got me thinking about something about this project that I hadn't considered. The predilection for multiple covers has always escaped me, but when I had my store I used to bring in multiple covers for the same comic so that my clients (what clients?) had a choice. Now that they're in the collection, I wonder if I should be reading each one, or reading one and then marking all of the differently covered comics as read? I'm thinking of the latter, mainly because with the scope of the project, there may well be multiple times I'll want to read the first issue of Glory by Alan Moore (perhaps the comic I own the most variant covers of).

Today's comic was really a very good adaptation of the television series, capturing the flavour of the series while expanding the possibilities of the premise thanks to the comics medium. I see, according to the GCD, that Airwave only produced a few issues of the comic, which is a pity, as Eden's Jeannie character deserves a long and healthy presence in pop culture. Though, it has been a while since I've seen an episode, and I wonder how much my theoretically-inflected conscience would shudder at the attitudes of the 1960s.

More weirdness tomorrow. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 787: Black Panther #1, November 1998

I'll fully admit that leaving Black Panther to be the last comic I read in my couple of weeks highlighting Black creators is purely a case of leaving the best, in my opinion, for last. I love this run of comics, even though I don't actually have them all. When Marvel Knights premiered in the late 90s, I'd already been reading Quantum and Woody for a bit, so Christopher Priest's use of his ridiculously (but in a good way) post-modern storytelling style wasn't a shock, but I certainly wasn't sure how it was going to translate to mainstream superhero comics. I was pleasantly surprised, as I think many were. If you haven't guessed already, Mr. Priest is my featured creator today. And, as I've noted before, I think that his run on Black Panther is one of the most under-rated superhero comics of all time. It's funny, it's remarkably smart, it's beautiful to look at, and it tells a story in a way that, barring Q&W, I'd never seen before in comics.

Our narrator is Everett K. Ross, described in the editorial at the back as "king of all white-boys." He's a government agent assigned to liase with T'Challa while he's in the United States investigating the death of a child in connection with a charitable foundation he set up. The first issue is a cacophony of images and little sketches that Ross is telling his boss/girlfriend about losing his pants, hunting a rat with a handgun, and a visit to the Panther's rooms (in a poor neighbourhood in NY - T'Challa refuses to stay somewhere swanky while investigating the death of a poor Black child) by the Devil. Literally.

What one ought to draw from that brief and under-stated description of the first issue is that Mr. Priest is not interested in any kind of white-washing, be it with characters or situations. It's also, or it was in my experience, one of the first comics to actually treat the Panther as a king of a foreign country, and specifically as a king of an African country.

I'm sitting here trying to think of things to say about this comic. Here's the thing: just go and read it. I know there was a remarkable amount of noise over Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze taking the reins of the Panther, but Priest was there with an Black-centric version of the character years and year earlier. In an interview with the New York Daily News, Priest says of his focal character "I realized I could use Ross to bridge the gap between the African culture that the Black Panther mythos is steeped in and the predominantly white readership that Marvel sells to,"and the comic does an amazing and wonderful job of taking that African culture, and the Black culture that the comic comes to be steeped in, and showing the "predominantly white readership" how foolish and biased their views of those cultures are. It's an important comic, in my opinion, and, thankfully, also a really, really good one.

Last thoughts: I've, as is always the case with a themed reading, read some really good comics and some really bad ones over the last couple of weeks. What this little sub-project has definitely done for me is helped me to recognize a small portion of the diversity that has always been a part of the comics, even if it hasn't always been a visible part of the comics. Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons I did this.

Onward.

(I should also add that the cover date of this comic is the same as the date my son was born, which makes the comic very special to me.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 786: Body Doubles #1, February 1998

What I was not expecting when I did a bit of background reading on featured creator Joe Phillips today was to find that he's not only known for his comic book work, but also for producing animated gay porn. And successful animated gay porn, if the awards its won are any indication. It's one of the great gifts this project has given me is a much wider understanding of the ranges and talents represented by the comics community.

Though, given the main characters of this comic, I have to say the whole gay man thing was a bit of a shock. That said, another of Mr. Phillips' ventures was into fashion design, and Bonny and Carmen, the Body Doubles, are nothing if not fashionable.

I liked the New Year's Evil event, which I think I may have mentioned before in the blog, and DC's fifth week events in general. I thought they provided nice "event" style runs of books without being completely overburdening to the wider continuity. James Robinson's Justice Society event was really great, as was Mark Waid's Silver Age, and The Kingdom. Though there's not quite as much continuity in the New Year's Evil Books, short story style glimpses into the worlds of some of the DC super villains is always a treat.

These things aside, I was a bit lost in today's comic. I like the Resurrection Man series from which these characters hail, but I've never had the opportunity to actually read the whole thing. The ladies on the cover up there are hired assassins, and I'm going to assume that they've interacted with Mitch Shelley somehow, though there's no mention of him in the comic. The art was lovely, a bit goofy at times and a wonderfully kinetic. The writing was very good, as one expects from the team of Abnett and Lanning. I think I'd be in a better shape to comment on the story of the comic if I knew how this story fit into the larger one.

The real takeaway is that there's some really well-rendered erotic comics out there by Mr. Phillips that I think I'm going to have to track down.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 785: Super-Villain Team-Up #17, June 1980

I was looking at Arvell Jones' Wikipedia page, to see what kinds of extended runs he has done, that I might know him from. I found out that he drew a Supergirl/Doom Patrol team-up story one of the numerous Super-anthologies of the Seventies. He only has two pages of credits as a penciller at the GCD, the most sustained being a run on All-Star Squadron in the mid-Eighties. Not a series I have any real familiarity with. I can't for the life of me, figure out why his name rings out so prevalently in my head. Ah well. It does, and perhaps that's enough.

Today's comic was very, very fucking weird. What we're seeing is the final chapter of a 3-part story in which The Red Skull, The Hate Monger, and Arnim Zola are trying to create a new Cosmic Cube (basically the Tesseract from the movies, for you non-comics Marvel fans). So we all know that Skull and Zola are nazis, right? Their basic back stories are that they're nazi mad scientists. But what I didn't realize is that the Hate Monger, under that hood, is actually a clone of Adolf Hitler. No fucking joke. So we've got these three full-on nazis trying to become gods. Hate Monger's actual identity is no secret to anyone, and is referred to slyly until his reveal partway through. But there's one moment where the Cube is nearly ready and Monger and Skull look at each other and realize that they're actually going to end up betraying one another, and then the Red Skull has this soliloquy-style lament, alone in his darkened chamber, sitting at his desk, over how all he ever wanted was for he and Hitler to be able to work together, to achieve their goals together. It's very. Fucking. Strange.

Of course, the Skull ends up betraying Hitler, and seals his soul inside the Cube, which is not in fact a Cosmic Cube but actually a prison for Hitler's psyche. Because reasons.

Now, the aforementioned Mr. Jones guides us through this very odd comic with aplomb. I imagine that when an artist gets a script, there's only a few reactions one can have. I think mine, upon reading this, would be "What the hell?" But I suppose the practice of art requires one, and teaches one, to stretch the creative muscles into things we may not have expected. I can't imagine this story was expected. Mr. Jones' work has to a bit of the Kirby, I think. But it's Kirby in a more organic style that's reminiscent of the big names of the era: Brunner, Buckler, Mayerik. But in the facial expressions I sometimes think I see a bit of the undergrounds, a bit of that dark cartooniness. I'll have to keep an eye out as I read more of his work.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 43 - Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, 2005

Before I talk about the graphic novel this week, I need to show you something. Today's featured creator is Inker Dexter Vines. What I want to show you, for those who might not understand what an inker does, is an example:

What we see here are Ed McGuinness's pencils on the left, and an inked version of the page by a Deviant Art member named "dubbery" on the right. What an inker does on a comic, essentially, is controls light and darkness. The common misconception is that an inker simply traces over a penciller's work, and while there is that aspect to it, a delineation process, the control over light and shadow, over how prominent or not a particular piece of the art will be, these are important considerations in storytelling. And this is what Dexter Vines does to great effect in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies.

I'll be honest: I love this book so much. McGuiness and Vines' Superman is easily one of my favourite interpretations of the character, and the Batman-Superman interaction in this comic is handled with such love and grace by writer Jeph Loeb. Though the look of the book can be considered a bit cartoon-y, in that McGuiness errs on the side of the stylized, rather than the realistic, the dialogue by and between the two main heroes is measured and thoughtful. We may be looking at a stylized version artistically, but a realistic one verbally. Or something. I just think it captures, from both a verbal and visual perspective, something really fundamental about these characters, and about their relationship with one another. And to capture the nuance of a relationship is a special feat.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 784: The American Special #1, 1990

Nothing like coming in literally at the end of a story to promote confusion and discomfort in the morning.

That said, I'm intrigued by The American, a story of a government-produced line of superheroes-as-propaganda that ends in tragedy. This issue follows the tale of the last American and the journalist who exposed the program, one that cost most of the individuals wearing The American costume their lives. The comic, and the series, come at around the same time as the realistic superhero stories of the 80s were having their most profound effect, and deals with many of the same issues: how does a world like our own, one that is twisted and difficult to navigate, suffer the existence of the far simpler ideal of the superhero. Not well, by the looks of things.

Today's featured creator is Doug Braithwaite. I know his name, and I've got some of his stuff in the collection, but I can't for the life of me recall any of it off the top of my head. I do know he pencilled issue #25 of Morrison's Doom Patrol, a story starring Josh Clay and Dorothy Spinner, but today's comic is my first considered experience of his work. It's very superhero. And that's a good thing in terms of the comic we're looking at. The set up of The American is that a flashy superhero is created by the American military as a propaganda tool, though those who wear the costume are also trained soldiers, so The American participates in numerous battles in hotspots around the world. As such, the character, and his world, should look like a superhero comic, but shouldn't necessarily read like a superhero comic - which is exactly what Verheiden, Braithwaite, and company do. The characters look one way and behave another. It raises the interesting notion of a superheroic aesthetic that somehow transmits that notion of a simpler world visually, though the characters might be acting and interacting in much more complex ways. This again puts me in mind of something like Watchmen, which is unsurprising. The juxtaposition has also made me want to read the rest of the series (8 issues prior, 4 following), just to see exactly how it's all pulled off. Calgary Fan Expo is coming up. I'll have to keep my eyes open.

To be continued.

(I forgot to add that this comic does something awesome that I love - at the end of the issue, we get a few pages of what the comics that would have been published in-continuity would look like featuring different versions of the The American throughout history. Alan Moore's Supreme pulls this off to perfection, and I always enjoy seeing these kinds of takes on characters that are also a part of the fiction.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 783: WildC.A.T.S. Annual #1, February 1998

Upon beginning to read this comic, I was very confused, and figured that I'd missed a previous issue or something. Not so. It's one of those times that James Robinson reminds us that he's actually a pretty good writer, Captain America v.2 notwithstanding, and that we've been dumped unceremoniously in media res into this little tale of mad aliens. And not the aliens you'd think. A virus is infecting all of the Kherubim and Kherubim hybrids on Earth, and right now Mr. Majestic (basically the Wildstorm Superman) is headed toward Earth, ostensibly to destroy it. Stormwatch holds him off on the Moon while the rest of the WildC.A.T.S. team searched for a cure. Oh, and various members start to lose it during the mission. Though it's maybe a bit of an old set-up, the way in which the story is pulled off lends it a sense of urgency that's fun to read.

Today's featured creator is Larry Stroman, penciller of today's comic. I will tell you the thing that leapt out at me immediately about Mr. Stroman's work: the women in the comic have...wait for it....*gasp*....varying body sizes! Rather than a Wildstorm Universe populated by supermodels, we actually have characters who look like they might need to wear size 8, or even 10, jeans. What gets me about this realization is how strange it looks, how much it actually stands out, when one is reading a superhero comic. We become, as readers, so trained as to what to expect from our comics that when we see something even slightly different, it's quite a marked difference. And for it to be something like this lets one recognize the "normalization" process that's been working on readers for decades within the hobby.

That aside, Mr. Stroman has a strange idea of what Voodoo's hair does. But, as his style is very stylized, one can look past such things as unrealistic depictions of hair.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 782: Masters of the Universe #1, May 1986

I've waxed lyrical about the end of this series already, a fantastic story pencilled by today's featured creator, Ron Wilson, so I thought we'd look at the beginning of the series as well. Unfortunately, it pales in comparison quite a bit. I mentioned in my previous posts on this series that it's only when a toy-based comic gets to a point where the toys upon which it was based are no longer popular that the characters and story can actually come out from beneath the marketing and flourish. At the time of this first comic's appearance, He-Man and his compatriots were still popular enough to have a television series and a still-lucrative toy line. Though the series is only 13 issues long, it was published bi-monthly, so we're seeing 2 years worth of comics. And 2 years can be a long time in the life of a children's toy. By the time 1988 rolls around, and "Lifetime" is presented in the final issues of the series, the toy line was winding down. Hence the good story.

This is, of course, not to say that today's story was necessarily bad, only that it was definitely skewed toward showing the toys to kids, rather than telling them a story. We get two views of castles in this issue, one of Greyskull and one of Skeletor's lair, Snake Mountain. And they are, quite literally, views of what the toy versions of those locations would look like if placed on a rocky, barren landscape. I know this not only because I've seen the toys, but because I had them way back when. Even at the issue's end, when He-Man is trapped in Hordak's "Fright Zone," the creature that attacks him looks literally like the hand puppet that comes with that set. While this might be good for advertising, some creative license needs to be taken in depicting toys as dynamic objects within a narrative.

Mr. Wilson's depictions of these toys, however, are very accurate, and given the ridiculousness of the characters he's been given to draw, he does a decent job of trying to twist someone like Leech, a character who drains life energy through suction cups on his hands, though the toy version simply has large flat suction cups for hands - how exactly does he do anything else? He looks like the toy in the comic, but really looks like he wouldn't survive long trying to do anything other than stick to a window. This said, it's also the first issue of the series. I imagine that rather than doing character design work, Mr. Wilson was simply given reference pictures of the toys and told to go to.

Masters of the Universe continues to be a popular franchise, though mostly with those who enjoyed the toys as kids, and in the later series of the story it gets a bit of a grit-washing in order to appeal to those grown fans. But the Wilson/Carlin iteration of the series was the longest-running comic during the first run of both toy and cartoon, and therefore holds an important place in the history of the franchise.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 781: Midnite #1, November 1986

Today's comic comes from a publisher that I had at one point written off as simply another of the independents that sprung up in the early 80s and produced pretty bad comics. There were a lot of them. But as I read more of Blackthorne's output from this era, I'm beginning to see that they occupied a pretty important place in the comics culture of the time, and produced some really excellent comics.

Today's piece is by Milton Knight, who was, I had no idea, also involved in my favourite run of Mighty Mouse, the Marvel series of the 90s, doing some of their covers and "Bat-bat" back-up features. Today's comic is really great. A comic from an indie publisher of the 80s that hearkens back to the Golden Age of Betty Boop and the Fleischer Superman. What's great though is the fact that Knight, as a Black creator, is taking this traditionally quite racist era and redefining it. There's definitely an element of Black culture coming through this comic, one that feels like it's taking place some time during the Harlem Renaissance. This could be because I've just finished reading Zora Neale Hurston's Spunk, and the same kind of slang Hurston deploys in her writing is spouting from the mouths of many of these cartoon characters in Knight's comic. Not only is it funny, but it's sending a very clear message that the Golden Age aesthetic is being cleaned up and made welcoming to all, rather than to the casual racism of the Barks duck comics, or the very early superhero pieces.

As I say, Blackthorne is starting to really stand out to me, as are many of the indie publishers of the era, mostly thanks to the dollar bin boxes I've picked up in the last little while. But Midnite is definitely a title I'm going to track down more of, as well as more if Mr. Knight's work. It's quirky and cute, but has an edge you wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 780: Green Lantern #59, February 1995

Alright. I know I said I'd blog this today, but it's really a kind of mediocre comic, and that's coming from someone who just loves the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern. Or rather, I love him in the JLA comics, but his solo adventures....meh. So I'm going to blow through this one today. I hope you don't mind too much.

Today's featured creator is Darryl Banks. With regard to his Green Lantern work, Mr. Banks is responsible for co-creating Kyle Rayner, and also with much of the design work of the various famed events that come out of the era (Parallax and all that). The comic is well rendered, and honestly the story is kind of a nice little Christmas tale of a lonely Green Lantern on monitor duty for the Titans. He ends up facing a newly-clad Dr. Polaris, bonds (?) with his teammates, and ends up fulfilling every fanboy's early dreams and kisses Donna Troy. All rendered with great facility and flow by Mr. Banks. If we consider the ramifications of the Parallax storyline (if it still has ramifications in the "Rebirth" era), then his contribution is crystal clear. This Green Lantern story, the fall of Hal Jordan, defined the character for most of the 90s, and well into the new millennium, and had lasting and important ramifications throughout the DCU titles. Hall Jordan's turning to evil forced a mistrust and fear into the mainstream superhero community (and their writers) that hadn't really been seen since the early days of the Dark Age with Watchmen and Dark Knight. But this new dark age was inflected by the optimism that such titles as Waid's Flash and Morrison's JLA infused in the time.

Another contribution, though more notorious, is that Mr. Banks was the penciller on Green Lantern for the story that gives us the "Women in Refrigerators" trope. That's a longer conversation, though.

One last thing before moving on: according to Wikipedia, Mr. Banks was responsible for one of the first painted comics, Cyberpunk, published by Innovation comics in the late 80s, and which I reviewed last September. Though I can't actually remember what I said about it. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 779: Master of Kung Fu #36, January 1976

Much as I enjoy the character of Shang-Chi in his Avengers appearances under Jonathan Hickman, it's hard to read his earlier comics without cringing a little (or a lot) at the Orientalism on display. Mainstream comics in the Seventies took a turn into strange territory by pushing Said's fomulation of Orientalism into the Far East and inundating the shelves with martial arts comics. We've seen the fruits of this in Netflix's latest Marvel series, the much-maligned Iron Fist (which I haven't watched yet), a series that has crumbled under accusations of white-washing and just not being very good. I'll get back to you on that when I've seen it. But, to be fair, Iron Fist was always white-washed. And it's in this respect that Master of Kung Fu is at least a slightly more positive depiction. Shang-Chi is a non-caricatured Chinese man, a revelation in and of itself given comics' propensity for caricaturizing citizens of the Far East. The odd bronze colour they give his skin is questionable, but at least it's an attempt at a skin tone, rather than simply slapping yellow on anyone of East Asian descent. If you want to see this at some of its worst, have a look at "The Japoteurs," one of the old Fleischer Superman cartoons.

Okay, moving on. Keith Pollard is today's featured creator. He's best known for an extended run on Thor, on Iron Man, and on Fantastic Four, all in the late 70s and early 80s, which means this is one of his early works. His Wikipedia page notes that he's from Detroit, and I've noticed over the last couple of days a number of artists from this era who all came out of Detroit, shepherded by Rich Buckler. I'm not sure if anyone's ever written on this phenomenon, but perhaps there's something to be said on the Seventies Detroit artists. But what to say of his art? It's good. There's occasional places where the panel layout is a bit confusing, but when we get to the end of the comic and Shang-Chi is unveiling the strange creatures of the circus he's been asked to protect, we get some very odd and cool creatures, called the "mysteries," and Mr. Pollard very nicely refrains from giving us a full-on view of any of them, thus maintaining some of their mysteriousness. Add to this that earlier in the comic, as Shang-Chi battles a group of ninjas (as one does), the depictions of the speed with which a martial arts fight takes place are really nicely handled. At some point I'll have a look at some of his later work, and see how things have progressed, but from this comic it is easy to see why Marvel would have taken a chance on him.

Before I finish, I have to note that I didn't find the comic in general that great, mainly because it's narrated in the first person by Shang-Chi, and Doug Moench's dialogue here is not great.

More tomorrow. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 9: Crazy Magazine #12, August 1975

So, embarrassingly, I was unable to find a magazine in my collection that features any African-American creators. This is not to say that they're not there, only that the magazine portion of my collection is at this point catalogued only by title and number. Contents are on the way. So, instead, we'll have a quick look at Marvel's attempt at a humour magazine from the 1970s.

I have Crazy on my list of things to get because the inimitable Steve Gerber is the editor, and a contributor, to the features. But these kinds of magazines, Crazy, Mad, Cracked, aren't really my thing. The art within is excellent, no doubt. There's a real skill to good parody. And much of the writing is hilarious and subversive. But, as with many things, I find that by the time I reach the end of a magazine like this, it's all been a bit much. I like my snark and silliness, but perhaps in smaller doses.

Two features do stand out to me, however. First is Will Eisner's astrological comic strip and its send up of the Mafia characters that had catapulted to popularity thanks to The Godfather having been released a few years earlier. I'm occasionally uncomfortable with Eisner's work, as I think he treads a fine line between stylized representations of characters and outright racist depictions. The feature here does this, though its presence in a humour magazine skews it more toward caricature than cruelty.

The second feature is called "Gentle on my Mind," written by (and starring) Marv Wolfman, with photos by Michele Wolfman. I'm going to sca nit and post it here. It's two pages of humour comics that encapsulate with frightening accuracy the workings of a brain beset by anxiety and paranoia. In the mid-Seventies that's likely not what it was aiming for, but it's certainly what it achieved. What is interesting is that this was intended as a funny little strip about a brain that seems to hate its host, but in reading it from a contemporary point of view, it's a harsh and truthful reminder of what it's like to live with mental illness. Watch for it to go up here on the site in the next little while.

That's it for this week's magazine. I'm going to do my best to find one for next Friday that features and African-American creator. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 42 - The Boondocks: Because I Know You Don't Read the Newspaper, 2000

I can't for the life of me remember how I came across The Boondocks. I think I may have seen an ad or two for the cartoon, and then stumbled across a collection at a thrift shop one day. I'm so glad I did. In the introduction, Aaron McGruder thanks Berke Breathed, creator of Bloom County, and The Boondocks is in many ways both the spiritual successor to that strip and the logical extension of Breathed's style of political consciousness into the Black point of view. Mr. McGruder is angry, just as Mr. Breathed is, but where Bloom County's anger is often directed at politicians and their numerous gaffs, The Boondocks straight up takes aim at not just the politicians but also the society that suffers them. Huey Freeman, proxy for Mr. McGruder, is a voice we should be listening to. And while the cartoon has had a bit more popularity than the comic (I actually just watched it for the first time last night), it doesn't quite achieve the levels of political discourse that the comic does. Huey's occasional rant or book chapter is often played for laughs, but they're laughs beneath which burns a harsh truth: to be Black in America is to be ignored and marginalized, regardless of where you live and who you are.

This first collected volume of the series introduces us to the major and minor characters. Huey is our focal point, but his brother Riley is as important to the story. Riley, in grade 3 or 4, is a full-on wannabe gangsta who has no time for his brother's high-minded politics. For Riley, success in life is about "platinum jewelery with ICE!!" McGruder navigates an interesting dichotomy with Riley, at once acknowledging the importance of Hip Hop culture to the experience of many Black youth, but also noting the damage that its inflection by Capitalist discourse can cause. Mixed in with these two young men are Jazmine, a mixed-race little girl who refuses to be Black or White, her father Thomas and her mother Sarah, who are suburban and liberal, but not liberal enough for Huey, and, of course, Robert Freeman, grandfather and caretaker of Huey and Riley.

Let me be very clear: I love The Boondocks. The comic, that is. I'm still undecided about the cartoon. I've loved Bloom County since I got my first collected edition for my 16th birthday, and to see that level of social critique leveled at the treatment of Black people, in a newspaper strip, is inspiring to say the least. The only downside is that there's so little of it for me to read.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 778: Hardware #1, April 1993

 






















(Link, because my Web Fu is bad: https://www.comics.org/issue/871010/)

We've got two cover images today, one for the actual cover, and one for the polybag within which the comic is shipped. What this tells us is that Hardware was produced in that time of comics that was all about collectibility, rather than readability. Fortunately, in this case, the comic is more readable than it was collectible. At least, it is now.

First, let's briefly talk about Milestone Comics. Far from being a thing of the past (almost 25 years past), Milestone, as a home for creators of colour, is alive and well, as the above link attests. As the editorial in the middle of the comic, written, I'm assuming, by EIC Dwayne McDuffie, notes, "Diversity's our story, and we're sticking with it. The variety of cultures Out There make for better comics In Here." I don't think I could say it better. This is especially important to note given the recent comments from Marvel on potential reasons for a market slump (and, as I noted when that article blew up the Internet for a bit, there's no mention of the rising price of comics [the reason I've stopped buying so many], or the drop in the U.S. economy). One of the few comics I still regularly read is The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, a thoroughly positive and diverse bit of comics if I've ever seen one.

We've already thought a bit about penciller Denys Cowan in Iron Man from a few days ago. Today's comic comes about 4 years later, and one can see that there's more passion behind this project than the mainstream Marvel fare. It's not surprising, really, that a creator would put more passion into a project that hits a little closer to home. In my own work I'm far more passionate about teaching comics (or occasionally Lego) than I am many other things. And Mr. Cowan's (and writer Dwayne McDuffie's) passion seeps through these pages, creating a story that engages the reader as much as it probably engaged the writers. So let's talk a bit about writer Dwayne McDuffie, a powerhouse creator in the comics world who sadly passed away in 2011. As with Mr. Cowan, Mr. McDuffie's passion for this project is palpable. Hardware, a.k.a. Curtis Metcalf, is a very, very angry character. As the tag on the cover proclaims, "A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears," though it would be more apt to say that the gears are blown up and sprinkled as dust across Dakota City. It's appropriate to bring up Iron Man in the context of this comic, as Metcalf is a scientific genius who is exploited by a tech magnate very much like Tony Stark. (What a great story that would be to see Stark accused by one of his employees of institutionalizing racism in Stark Industries.) We have, of course, seen stories of the downtrodden corporate employee retaliating against their bosses, but very often the character is Caucasian, and in the end becomes a villain. And while Hardware kills a fair few people in this issue, it's hard to call him a villain. In fact, I could see the series moving into the territory currently being explored on Arrow vis a vis heroes who kill. Though given the time period within which the comic is written, perhaps the hero who kills is not that big a moral problem.

Mr. McDuffie's writing bears some resemblance here to the style of the early Image titles, which is unsurprising given their popularity at the time. But Curtis Metcalf's angry inner dialogue rings much more true than the over-muscled badasses of Youngblood or Deathblow. (As I write this, my English class are writing their final exam, and one of the terms we've covered is "verisimilitude." This is the insertion of detail into a fiction that allows the fiction to more closely resemble reality. Hardware's grievances with society are far more verisimilitudinous than any member of Youngblood.) What this accomplishes for a reader like myself is to see that the kind of dialogue that I despise in some comics actually works and is far more appropriately deployed and executed in a comic and setting where it actually makes sense. Dwayne McDuffie will undoubtedly come up again in this project. He left an indelible mark on comics, working not only in the print media aspect, but also the business and animation sides of the industry. But Milestone might be his most significant contribution, and one that will hopefully live a long and prosperous existence.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 777: Dark Nemesis #1, February 1998

I don't really have a lot to say about today's comic. It's a pretty standard DC super-book from the late 90s, which means it's going to be generally pretty good (DC were having one of their upswings at the time, well before Geoff Johns got his hands on the DCU). But having read no other issues of the Teen Titans from this era, I'll admit I was totally lost on this one. The Atom is a member of the Titans? I seem to recall something about that, vaguely, but very little else about this era of the venerable super team.

It's kind of amusing that a team consisting of young people can also be venerable.

Anyway, today's featured creator is penciller Chriscross, or Chris Williams. Williams got his professional start in a pretty big way as one of the primary artists for the Milestone Comics project. Much of his work since has been with DC, though he's done some fairly substantial runs at Marvel as well. His Wikipedia entry notes that he's currently creating some graphic novels for Humanoids in Europe, and also pencilling The Midnighter. I'm on the fence about his art, I'll admit. It's very much typical of the post-Image boom DC style, in which they were getting away from the hyper-kinetic style of McFarlane or Lee and moving more to a synthesis of that style with the 80s pseudo-realistic style that I talked about with Iron Man a couple of days ago. One thing I do appreciate about Chriscross' art, specifically in this issue, is that he doesn't draw his women as if they're going to snap in half. There's an excellent shot of Scorcher and Axis (the two ladies up there on the cover by Jason Pearson) getting ready to bust the rest of their team out of The Slab, and they look like they could kick the hell out of just about anyone. It's nice to see an artist who recognizes that female bodies can be every bit as kickass as the male ones in superhero comics.

Looking through Williams' GCD listings, I'm pretty sure I have a fair bit of his work. The late 90s was one of my favourite eras of DC Comics. But I'll admit that with the amount of amazing artists that I'm seeing involved with Milestone in the early 90s, I'm getting pretty excited about reading some of those comics. I think the first issue of Hardware is somewhere in the stack I put aside for these next couple of weeks.

Looks like I did have a bit to say about the comic.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 776: Lady Death II: Between Heaven and Hell #1, March 1995

I have, at last count, 22 Lady Death comics in my collection, but aside from the lingerie special I wrote about a few weeks back, I've never read any of them. Most of what I do have comes straight from the shelves of my now defunct comic shop, and, I'll admit, I've based my assessment of them purely on the covers. Big breasts, quasi-bondage costumes, lots of scowls. Today, however, marks the first time I've actually read one.

I'm quite glad I did. I was worried that I made a claim in the opening of my look at Black creators that these were great and important comics, but the first couple I read weren't actually that great and important. This isn't a huge problem. Comics, and especially mainstream comics, are a medium founded on mediocrity - to appeal to the widest range of people, you need the widest common denominators. That's why the more literary comics only appeal to a certain subset of readers. And, given my thoughts on Chaos! Comics in general, I was not holding out hope (which is a pun Lady Death readers will get!).

Today's featured creator is Steven Hughes, who passed away after succumbing to cancer in 2000. Aside from a handful of other appearances, Hughes' career has been tightly bound to Chaos! Comics. He created the looks of many of the company's signature characters, and shepherded them through their various adventures. Hughes' style is fairly standard, building off superhero art of the decades prior, but his page layout is really interesting. There are occasional moments where the panels are a bit out of sequence, or it's hard to tell which one to read next, but these are only occasional. For the most part, his page layouts are fantastic. We get a peek into Lady Death's past, both real and illusory, in this issue, and the flashback panels are drawn as curling scrolls sitting over top of the contemporary action. This mixture of temporality and dimensionality is really quite lovely, and leaves the reader in no way confused as to the time periods (and there are 3) being explored throughout the tale. Page construction is not an easy thing to master, so to see it coming so wonderfully from an artist working at the height of the car crash that was early Image Comics is great.

So let me briefly meditate on that last point. I think the reason I avoided Chaos! was that they are contemporaneous with early Image, so I just assumed they were pretty much more of that mess. But the story within these buxom covers is actually quite intriguing, and there's an element of myth here that I hadn't expected. In fact, the appearances of the characters vanish into the story in this comic, so rather than being the softcore porn that much early Image seems to have embraced, the scantily-clad ladies are actual characters that just happen to be mostly unclothed. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm well aware that this is objectification of a particular variety of the female form in order to sell comics. But that we actually have a decent story within that doesn't revolve around showcasing those forms is both surprising and gratifying. I'm actually looking forward to reading more from Chaos!, and from Hughes, as the project goes on.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 775: Iron Man v.1 #241, April 1989

The late 80s at Marvel were a strange time. Or, my understanding is that they were. I'd stopped collecting comics at this point, so I missed much of the hullaballoo that led to the forming of Image Comics. It seems to me, though, that the stories were very much retreading waters that had only recently been trod (?). Today's comic is a good example.

I was recently talking with a friend about Blues music. My contention had been that, much like Shakespeare, it wasn't necessarily the originality of a Blues song that was paramount, but the way in which an artist took the form and made something novel out of it. Comics, I think, are very similar. Especially superhero comics. There's really only so many stories you can tell, and so many things you can do with a character, so it's not always the originality of plot we readers want to see, but originality of execution.

Anyway. Today's featured creator is breakdown artist Denys Cowan. Cowan's work is very much in the 80s Marvel style, similar to the John Buscema Avengers that was my bread and butter a little earlier in the decade. Marvel's art had moved from the more stylized look of Kirby and Ditko into a parodic style through the 70s (see Howard the Duck), and then into a more realistic style in the 80s. I can only assume this is a response to Dave Gibbons' work on Watchmen. There's not a lot to distinguish Cowan's art from most of his contemporaries at this time, but that's entirely the point. A "house style" develops at a publisher in order that readers might have some idea of a baseline level of quality they'll be receiving in buying a comic from that publisher. And while there's definitely something to be said for novelty, sometimes one simply wants a good, old-fashioned superhero comic. Whatever that may be.

From the looks of his Wikipedia bibliography, Mr. Cowan has mostly moved on from comics, though he's fundamental in the formation of Milestone Comics at DC later into the 90s, and which we'll be having a look at some time in the next couple of weeks. Milestone was an imprint designed to highlight Persons of Colour in comics, and was, for a little while, mildly successful. In today's issue, as I've intimated, his art is very much in keeping with the look of Marvel in the 80s. I don't want this to seem like I'm down-playing his art. The creation of a brand, of a standard of production, is very important in a publishing endeavour, so that an artist can cop to this house style, even though his own personal style might be quite different (I'm thinking of Cowan's very different art on The Question), speaks well of that artist. Of course, it's likely that inker Bob Layton had a lot to do with this as well.

More tomorrow. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 774: Menace #1, November 1998

I wish, given that this is the kick off comic to my fortnight celebrating Black creators in comics, that I could say that this is an amazing piece of work, life-changing, paradigm-shifting.

I really, really wish I could.

But it's not. This comic is just bad.

As you see up above, the comic's written by Jada Pinkett Smith - I figured a bit of celebrity power might start things off auspiciously. What we basically get, though, is a retread of The Crow, with the main character a street thug who is gunned down and then given a chance to repent her wicked ways as Menace, the Dark Angel. Fraga's art is pretty run of the mill Awesome/Extreme/Maximum stuff, and though Smith's script has potential, it was edited by Rob Liefeld, whose sense of storytelling leaves something to be desired. Alas, this one issue represents Menace's sole appearance, and the only comic Smith has written to date.

What does make this comic stand out, though, is that it's one of very, very few I've been able to find in my collection written by a Woman of Colour. This is not to say it's the only one. There are numerous comics written by women in the collection, and I'm not privy to the appearances of most. Comics are a bit like 1970s rock music - no one knows what the creators of it look like. But for the next two weeks, Ms. Smith is the only female representation.

Hopefully tomorrow's comic will be a bit better. To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Black Lives Matter

A few months ago, I watched this video. If you haven't watched it already, please do.

https://www.facebook.com/eatthecakenyc/videos/1069821676406053/

I have been wracking my brain over whether or not this is the right thing to do. There are so many tweets and Facebook posts and Tumblr posts going around the Internet the last while on how to show solidarity with #blacklivesmatter, how to be an ally or a comrade, how to speak and support and to fight back against the horror that faces people of colour on a daily basis. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a middle-aged white man. Aside from being called gay in high school (and what those assholes would have done to me had they realized how close they came to the truth, I don't know), I've never been the target of prejudice. So I can't even remotely wrap my head around what it is to be a person judged on the basis of skin colour. Nor can I, thankfully, wrap my head around judging someone on that basis.

How often have we seen young black people gunned down over the last month, year, decade, century....on and on. We can blame the political system, built and protected by old white men, or the media that depicts young black men, more often than not, as gang-banging thugs. We can blame the systematic ghettoization of major North American cities throughout the history of the settler culture on the continent, but, ultimately, the blame falls on all of us who have seen this happening, and not only in the last year or so, but for as long as we can remember, and who have done nothing. I have for a long time tried desperately to cleave to the idea of being the change I wanted to see in the world, but in the wake of the last 6 months, in the wake of 2016, a number that sounds like the future, like the utopian dream of science fiction, it just doesn't feel like enough anymore.

So I'm hijacking the 40 Years of Comics Project for a little while. And I'm going to try my best to be a comrade in a way that I know how: I'm going to talk about comics.

Each and every person who has been gunned down, be it by racially-biased police officers, by gun-toting homophobic terrorists, by soldiers in wars they have no right to be fighting, every single one of those people has had the potential to contribute wonderfully and significantly to our culture. Many may not have. Many may simply have lived long, happy lives, enriching the lives of those around them, and leaving behind happy memories. But some might have placed something into the cultural repository that reflects who we are as a species, or more properly, who we have the potential to be. Neither contribution is more important than the other - it's simply that one is more visible.

So, in solidarity with the young black men and women, people like Christoph Carr in the above video who explains to us, eloquently, the fear of living in a world in which his life is in constant peril, I wish to present, for a little while, comics produced either wholly or partially by Black creators. Huge names in the industry, wonderful, important comics. In the flagrantly racist society in which they created, any one of these people could have suffered the fate of Alton Sterling, of Philando Castile, of any of the more than 100 unarmed Black people killed by police in 2015, and the thousands and millions who have come before them, put to death by imperial and colonial powers that chose not to recognize them for who they are: human beings.

I don't know what else to do, or how else to help.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 773: Rion 2990 #1, Summer 1986

(Sorry. I know I said Alpha Flight, but my wife's been watching the Harry Potter films, and I got sucked in, so I'm going with a contingency comic instead!)

It's not often that one sees an unabashed protest comic, but this one wears its intentions on its sleeve, so to speak, as it features a photograph of one of the atomic bomb explosions in Japan at the end of the Second World War. Throughout the comic the alien race that is travelling to Earth is highly concerned with the destructive capability the planet possesses. One member of the alien council wants to take over the planet before the violence spreads to the stars, another wishes to educate the people of Earth and ease them out of their destructive ways.

Of course, the optimist wins, travels to Earth, and is subsequently shot down by the US Air Force. He leaves behind an Astro Boy-looking progeny who, I'm assuming, is destined to save the planet. That's just how these things work.

I remember being uncontrollably freaked out by the idea of nuclear war for most of my childhood. I think by 1990, things had quieted down a bit. The wall in Berlin was down, the Soviet Union seemed to be done, and Capitalism had won. If only we'd known where it was all going to lead.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 8: Heavy Metal v.3 #2, June 1979

Taking my first tentative steps into my Heavy Metal collection. I've a good friend back in Ontario, and Heavy Metal were the comics he grew up reading. It explains a good deal about him, I have to say. I'm just sometimes amazed that I managed to get as far into the hobby as I have without having a bit more exposure to this magazine.

The story that stood out in this week's magazine was the full-length story that's featured, "Captain Future," the tale of an ordinary person who is thrust into a role of greatness. The nice little switch on the theme in this story is that his coming is foretold by a strange probe returning from the future, so everyone around him assumes he's the person foretold, and therefore creates him. It's one of those ontological paradoxes which drive many people nuts, but which I think are one of the more realistic aspects of what time travel would be like. Of course stuff like this would happen.

The rest of the issue was okay, I guess. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the aesthetic and the demographic are that the magazine aims for. One thing is for sure, though: this is very, very different from the mostly North American comics output that I've been reading for the majority of the Project. This might seem an obvious thing to point out, but in reading comics from other cultures, especially when those comics are in translation, it's important to remember that they developed very differently from the comics that I've grown up reading. And I have other thoughts about the fact that a comic written in another language has the words translated into English, but the pictorial form isn't translated into "North American" graphic language. Is this a problem, or does it give us a more "authentic" experience of the comic's original publication?

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 772: Alpha Flight v.1 #30, January 1986

One of the things I'm finding interesting about the last couple of issues is that it's early work by Mike Mignola, predating Hellboy, I think. You can see the stark difference between Mignola's personal style and his inked style here as the cover seems to be his own work, whereas he's inked in the interior pages. And, if I'm to be very honest, it just doesn't look like his work inside. It looks kind of...you know, usual. Which, of course, an artist starting out at Marvel would want to be. Gotta make sure you can cop to the house style. I'm supremely grateful, though, that he decided to pursue his own style and stories, and that we have the brilliance that is Hellboy as a result.

Scramble, the Mixed Up Man, is a villain of Lovecraftian proportions, bringing a heaping dose of body horror to the Great White North. The creatures we see within remind me of the Famileech from the New Universe titles, and you can see in their depiction on the cover there Mignola's interest in things Lovecraftian, an interest that gets taken up in much of his later work. For a great example, see the wonderful The Doom That Came To Gotham Elseworlds series. So good.

One more Alpha Flight tomorrow, then on to something a bit different. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 771: Alpha Flight v.1 #29, December 1985

We're going to spend a couple of days with Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight, and then, on Sunday, I'll be starting a project within the Project that I hope is interesting and thought-provoking. But until then, let's see what the Alphans are up to under new management.

As with most passings of the reins between creative teams, there's a fair bit of tidying to be done from the previous team's tales. Today is one such bit of tidying, as the team faces off against the Hulk in the streets of downtown Vancouver. To put this slightly more into context, the creative team that has taken over the book was actually previously working on the Hulk's book - the back matter of the previous issue notes that the two books, The Incredible Hulk and Alpha Flight, literally switched creative teams. Completely. Even the editors switched roles. So it's no surprise that, as Mantlo and company take over the Canadians, they do so with a little epilogue to their work with the Hulk. By issue's end, he's back across the American border, and the Flight decides not to pursue him. They may technically have won the battle, and ousted the Hulk from the city, but at the cost of being quite badly wounded.

What the battle accomplishes for the team, though, is to solidify it as a team. One of the running themes, especially since Guardian's death, has been the coherency of the team. I mentioned earlier in my look at Alpha Flight that I kind of liked the way that the team wasn't really a team, a "non-team" almost in the mold of the old Defenders title from the 70s. Much of Marvel America is centralized around New York, though we see more and more teams being located in various cities around the country. But the dearth of heroes in the Great White North means that the team has to traverse vast distances to assemble. I liked that about them. Canada is fricking huge. For those who've never been here, we are the second-largest country in the world. And lots of it is pretty empty. The closest major city to Calgary, where I'm currently residing, is Edmonton, a 3-hour drive away. And that's actually pretty close.

I know that the team is likely to relocate to the old Langkowski manor that was the site of Gilded Lily's plans earlier this week, but I don't know when. And what does that mean for Northstar, who obviously has a life in Quebec, literally on the other side of the country? We may find out in the next couple of days, but perhaps not. Something to look forward to when we get back to the Flight, I guess. Oh, and I was mistaken when I said that I didn't have a coherent run after Byrne's departure. It actually looks like I have much of Mantlo's run as well. Groovy.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - The Weekly Graphic Novel: Week 41 - Girl, 1999

Another book from the naughty list today.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 770: Alpha Flight v.1 #27, October 1985

Wait! What?! Guardian was an imposter? It's actually the robot Delphine Courtney? And Omega Flight have taken out most of Alpha? I guess you can miss a lot in those 20-odd pages from last month. Well, except that, as I predicted, the Marvel summary machine works very well, so I don't feel lost at all!

We get to see, today, the inside of Shaman's medicine pouch, which looks very much like Byrne doing his best Steve Ditko Dr. Strange impression. Byrne, in a lot of ways, combines features of the two major Marvel originary artists, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, so it's appropriate to see something of an homage to him in this issue. I'd have liked to see more, but the needs of the story, apparently, override my desire for psychedelia! Who knew?

Sorry, I'm in quite a bit of pain today, and I can't really think of much more to say. We'll keep on with the Alphans for the time being, and we'll make some headway into Doug Moench's run on the series, though not in quite so coherent a fashion as Byrne's.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 769: Alpha Flight v.1 #25, August 1985

But who is it? Whose silhouette (negative silhouette?) is that on the cover? Can you guess? As I have a look at my database, I see that we're coming up to the last few issues of John Byrne's run on Alpha Flight, so the stops are being pulled out, and the horrible events of a year previous seem to have been reversed. Seem to have been, that is. It's Guardian, for those who aren't in the Alpha Flight loop. He famously returns from the dead in this issue with a strange story of having been thrust into the past and to the moon Ganymede, there to befriend some strange creatures who help him get back to his own time and place. It's moments like this that I kind of wish I had the rest of the story. I'm missing the next issue, and then number 28, which may is Byrne's final issue and a Secret Wars II tie-in, which means it's already on the list. Now that I think on it, that means I'm only missing 4 issues of Byrne's run on the title. Incoming writer Bill Mantlo is credited in this issue with "Creative Kibitzing," which I think may be the first time I've seen acknowledgment of the an incoming writer laying groundwork for their run on the series. I imagine it must happen a fair bit (I seem to recall something about Grant Morrison and his desire to kill off most of Paul Kupperberg's Doom Patrol), but it doesn't get credited that often. Nice to see.

What else? The team starts to get into Northstar's potentially terrorist past, though that's interrupted by their departed leader's return. Talisman manages to take out a supervillain all by herself, proving that she really is as powerful as everyone seems to think.

So, next issue is apparently a rematch with Omega Flight. Let's hope that the 80s Marvel tradition of having at least two pages of recap per issue is being upheld, so that I can read #27 without too much trouble.

To be continued!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 768: Alpha Flight v.1 #24, July 1985

The end of the second year of the title closes out the "Great Beasts" storyline as the Alphans travel to another dimension to rescue the soul of Walter Langkowski, and battle the last of the beasts. Snowbird fulfills her purpose on Earth (we should all be so lucky), and the team seems to have cohered in a way unlike their previous gatherings throughout the series. Though there is still much of the American superhero comic to Alpha Flight, there's also much of that is different. I made the comparison to Doom Patrol yesterday, and I think that a lot of that similarity is tied to the fact that we're seeing characters that no only are super-powered and thus more than human, but are also deeply flawed, and deeply disturbed by their experiences, which makes them very human. I was chatting with a friend about this very thing, the Marvel aesthetic of being unable to decide if their characters are gods or humans, and the fine line they tread in treating them as both. It makes me think back to the levels of story that Frye discusses in Anatomy of Criticism. Superman, ur-hero, is obviously the mythic hero, superior in kind to his fellows and to his environment. He chooses not to be, on occasion, but he still always is, Kent or no. The Marvel characters are created to straddle the line much more actually, in that they don't just show the qualities of both god and human, but embody them in a way that the DC characters often don't. Which is fine, of course. These difference of mythic aesthetic is what makes the characters and stories great.

We'll see, though, if the team is not a little more US-styled in its composition, whether or not the comic itself manages to maintain that quality that is setting it apart from other Marvel team titles of this era. I'm thinking, of course, of the X-Men and Avengers titles that are concurrent with this one. Avengers, of course, is large-scale superheroics, as they always have been, whereas the X-titles at this time are more allegorical. Alpha Flight, I think, if it bears resemblance to anything in the Marvel U at this point, it's to Goodwin's original Squadron Supreme, in that it deals much more explicitly with the consequences not just for the world, but for the weilders, of superpowers.

To be continued.