The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1951 - 1956

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 My apologies. I'm feeling thoroughly burned out, so we're just going to have to have a catch-up post. Each of these comics was really excellent in it's own right, even the early days 90s X-Men annual. Both Omaha and Junkwaffel are worth tracking down, particularly Bode's comic. There really has been very little like him in comics, before or since, excepting, of course, his son. I'll endeavour to get back to posting more regularly. Habits are, sometimes, so easy to break out of.

Just as a reminder, these comics are rounding out my reading of works by queer creators and works by Black creators. And regardless of how I may feel about the particular story, or genre, or era, each of these works is expertly rendered and is a vital part of the larger conversation that is comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1939: Southern Knights #31, February 1989

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I have to admit, I always thought the Southern Knights series was an Australian production, but it turns out to be a superhero team from the southern United States. With the context of our contemporary problems, one might be able to see how that could go very wrong. But it doesn't. At least, not in those ways.

Our featured artist today is Joe Phillips, who cut his teeth on this series before moving over the Marvel and DC and gaining some mainstream success. But more importantly, to me at least, is that he also regularly contributes to queer comics publications, as Mr. Phillips himself is gay. *Gasp* A gay black man working in comics?!? But yes, it's true, and he's awesome. Today's issue is a very early example of his work, but if you have a look at his official site, linked there under his name, you'll see some more mature (in a couple of senses of the word) examples of his art, and it's beautiful. His "Pride" gallery is particularly lovely.

The stories in this issue bear a little individual consideration. The first, illustrated by Mr. Phillips is titled "Boys' Night Out." The two primary male-identifying members of the team are out on patrol and stop a woman from being assaulted. One thing I find very off-putting about some comics from the 70s and 80s is how cavalierly they used the threat of rape as a jumping off point for a story. It's not quite fridging, but it's definitely on the chilly side. And, literally, the woman is saved in the first two pages and disappears. But as the heroes depart, a Black man walking alone is attacked by a group of racists who almost beat him to death before Dragon and Electrode intervene. But then...in a twist that I think is wonderful and highly appropriate, the assaulted man asks that he be able to fight his attackers from a more even standpoint, and he ends up beating them down. As one of the racists tries to flee, claiming he doesn't want to fight, the heroes tell him he doesn't have the choice - much as our unnamed Black victim didn't have a choice. Dragon also threatens to eat the women who accompany the racists if they won't stop cheering their hateful companions. It's startling, the n-word being deployed liberally, but this 6-page story outlines so much of the toxic white masculinity that appears to run our society, and the way in which, I think, a superhero needs to respond to such things.

The second story, "Girls' Night Out," is a bit insulting. The boys combat sexual assault and bigotry. The girls go to a bar and learn how to flirt. *sigh*

The third story is about two assassins who are the only villains to elude the Southern Knights because they're so plain that no one ever notices them. Honestly, these are the characters I'm most invested in, and the reason I might track down more of the series.

Okay - it's June 17 today, and though I know the uprisings are still happening and still immanent, it's also Pride month and Mr. Phillips is the first queer artist I've highlighted this month. I think for the rest of the month, I'm going to spotlight more queer creators, and then I'll bounce back to Black creators for a while in July. I've also put together some cool reading lists of other POC creators, as well as a fair lot of comics by female-identifying creators. Much as I admire a lot of the white dudes who have produced amazing pieces of comics fiction, we've had our day, and it's time to make room for some of the other incredible stories that have been written, and are waiting to be written, by our visible, and not-so-visible, minority comrades.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I read one other piece by Mr. Phillips for the project which you can read about here.

And here's another comic from the same publisher, and interestingly I address in today's post one of the things I found concerning during the last. It's interesting how different posts in the project speak to each other.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1938: Sabre #3, December 1982

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 I've not read the seminal Sabre graphic novel, ostensibly the first such publication in the modern era, so I did a bit of background reading. It didn't help much, as I didn't want to spoil too much for myself, so I'm not exactly sure how Sabre and his pals have ended up in captivity by the totalitarian regime that has taken over the U.S.

Isn't it amazing how many pieces of fiction, from throughout the last hundred years or so, have warned of just this thing?

Today's featured creator, Billy Graham, has been dead longer than my kid has been alive. It's not a shocking thing, by any means, but it does give a nice sense, for me at least, of the historicity that is involved in considering the contributions of Black artists to the comics medium. As with many artists in the 70s, Mr. Graham cut his teeth on Warren's black and white magazines, illustrating a number of pieces in the original run of Vampirella. I've got a collection of the first 12 issues on my shelf, and I'll have to remember that Mr. Graham is in there when I get around to reading it. His work in this issue of Sabre is fucking brilliant. From a dream narrative to a government office to a dank dungeon, every page captures the atmosphere that one would expect to find in such a setting, and the characters react in very believable ways to their situations. I've a couple more issues of this series in the collection, and I really ought to get off my butt and get the rest of the series. It's really good.

I also would like to just take a moment to mention Don McGregor. I've been intrigued by his comics for a while, and he's one of the names to come from 70s Marvel that, along with my fave Steve Gerber, is hailed as a deft and original comics writer. But Mr. McGregor, through his comics, is also demonstrating something that I think is really important, especially given the time in which a lot of his work was published: he's a good ally. Just in this series, we have a Black leading character, a homosexual couple, and, according to sources, the first gay kiss in mainstream comics. Beats out Apollo and the Midnighter by a few decades. This comic is dedicated to Mr. McGregor's son, with the epigraph reading, in part, "with the hope that the fight for dignity and honor will be easier in the future." Given the characters populating this series, the ideas of dignity and honour carry slightly more weight than they might in a comic featuring a team of monochromatic superheroes. Have a look at Mr. McGregor's output over the course of his career, and I think you'll see that this is someone who pushed for diversity and representation in his work right from the very beginning, and really we shold be considering him an important role model for the comics community.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I don't have any other Billy Graham-related articles on the blog, but here's a couple more about Don McGregor's work. His Killraven is totally worth checking out.

And having mentioned the gay couple in Sabre, I'll always take an opportunity to talk about queerness in comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1937: Papercutz Free Comic Book Day #11, 2017

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I'm not entirely certain how this comic found its way into my collection. Every now and again I find stacks of FCBD comics in our free lending libraries around Calgary. I usually take one or two, and I think that must be the origin of this piece.

Today's featured creator is cover and interior artist Alitha Martinez, one of the few Black women I could find represented in my collection. I read Jada Pinkett's Menace for my last look at Black creators, and I'm sure there must be more Black women in the industry, but the sad fact of the matter is that, as with most things in Western society, there is a systemic bias against POC, and Black women often feel the brunt of their dually-oppressed existence.

The Barbie stories in this comic are parts of larger graphic novels from Papercutz (who I just found out is an imprint of NBM, a really great publisher of European comics and of excellent erotica). What I do like about the comic is that it eschews the traditional Barbie look for something a little more relatable to the people who are going to be reading the comic. The first story, the one illustrated by Ms. Martinez, also features a prominent Black character as Barbie's more pragmatic foil. Of late, I wonder who it is that decides on the skin colours of characters in comics. I wondered about this a few days back with The Atom special, and the fact that literally every character, foreground, background, or otherwise, was white in a comic illustrated by a Black man. Is it the writer who decides? Or is the character description relatively vague and the artist decides? Or there's no guide, so the colorist decides? I have to believe that with newer comics like this Barbie one, there is a concerted effort to include diverse representation. The lack of it in older comics is simply a very blatant example of the racism that permeates not only comics, but culture.

Ms. Martinez's career in comics is relatively brief, compared with some of the other creators I've looked at, but she's made a mark in some really important comics, some of which I own and had no idea she was involved with. From art assists on the Christopher Priest-helmed Black Panther to work on the new(ish) line of Archie comics, she appears to be climbing through the ranks quite agilely, a feat we should be thoroughly impressed with given the oppressions with which she has likely had to deal. One of my favourite pieces of her work is this cover for Betty and Veronica #264. Just beautiful.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've only read one issue of the Priest Black Panther for the project, and here it is, with Ms. Martinez's art on the backgrounds.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1936: Midnite the Rebel Skunk, January 1987

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Milton Knight's work is just amazing. I love his revamp of early cartoon aesthetics, both the visual and social aspects. Midnite, our eponymous heroine, takes aim at her detractors and enemies, but also at the overtly racist tone of the cartoons that inspire her adventures.

Early Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons play fast and loose with physics, both of the world surrounding the characters and of the characters themselves. It's as if the characters and the environment are in a constant state of movement, which can be a difficult thing to portray in a static comic image, but Mr. Knight's art manages it wonderfully. Characters will expand with rage to fill a panel as they move through a world that seems to shift and change with each panel. But Mr. Knight's work also draws on the comic strips of the era as well, with small cartoon characters hanging about the edges of each panel offering commentary or little jokes.

A similar thing happens with the writing of H.P. Lovecraft - stick with me here. Lovecraft himself was an awfully racist human being, an aspect of his thought that, once realized, presents itself quite blatantly in his work. But contemporary writers have taken Lovecraft out of the works, as much as possible, and made his stories much more accessible. We can't ignore the fact that the early 20th century was an overtly and damagingly racist time, but what we can do is take the nostalgic lens through which we often view these older eras and smash it, making room for conversations about what it was really like, and for fantasies like Mr. Knight's that suggest what it might have been like had the era not been so steeped in racially-motivated oppression.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Blackthorne's output has turned out to be much more interesting than I thought it was.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1935: Marvel Two-In-One #71, January 1981

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Featured creator Ron Wilson has shown up numerous times in the project, though I don't know that I've ever spent that much time thinking about his art. Mr. Wilson illustrated the Masters of the Universe comic produced by Marvel's Star Comics, but is better known for his tenure with The Thing, stretching over today's series and Ben Grimm's solo series from the late 80s. I used to have a fair chunk of that series too, but it's disappeared from the collection over the years somehow.

Mr. Wilson's work definitely hearkens to the 70s Marvel style for me - there's a lot of Rich Buckler in there, I think, though I'm really only beginning to appreciate some of the nuance that the artists of that period (the Bronze Age, I suppose) bring to the characters. There's much more of a cleaving to a "house style" during this era, so one has to look very closely to note the differences individual artists put into these characters. For Mr. Wilson, I say there's a lot of Rich Buckler there, but beneath that there's a fair bit of Kirby as well, though perhaps that has more to do with the house style than it does Ron Wilson's particular personal style.

What can I say about the comic otherwise? I really like the Marvel Two-In-One run from this era, especially when Tom DeFalco takes over. I've never really been a big fan of The Thing, but these team-up comics place him in interesting situations and remove him, for the most part, from the larger team dynamic within which he is usually presented. I think it allows us to see Ben Grimm for who he actually is, rather than as back-up for his more dynamic team mates. And it doesn't always work out well, as Grimm's derogatory attitudes toward Native Americans in the Marvel Two-In-One annual I reviewed here, attests. Ben gets better as the years roll on, as, one hopes, does the society that has produced his stories. I find that he's one of the Marvel heroes whose character development is most striking over the course of his existence. While some characters have remained pretty much how they were first portrayed (I'm thinking about Quicksilver, who shows up in this comic), the Thing undergoes quite radical shifts of his perspective. Can we make some preliminary suggestions over the relative traditional monstrousness of a character and their ability to grow and change? Is someone like Ben Grimm, as a result of his appearance, forced to shift and change his personality more than someone who looks stereotypically "normal?"

And just so we're clear here, Grimm then becomes a rather adroit metaphor for the very people whose uprisings I'm here supporting. And that's where our problems begin.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

If you're interested in Marvel's young readers output in the 80s, have a look at the Star Comics stuff I've reviewed.

And for some of the Thing's team-based adventures, here's the reviews of the Fantastic Four that I've posted.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1934: Lady Death II #4, June 1995

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Back to a little bad girl action from the early 90s. I read another issue of Lady Death the last time I did a series highlighting Black creators, also illustrated by today's featured artist Steven Hughes. That wiki article is quite sparse, but here's a really lovely obituary that lays out Mr. Hughes' importance to comics in the early 90s, and highlights his position as founder of Chaos! Comics and as one of the most successful Black comics creators around. They're not really my thing, though the last time I did have some stuff to say about the page layouts (still amazing - Mr. Hughes' panel borders verge on the invisible) and the myth-building that was going on. A couple of issues later, and I'm not really sure what's happened, but this one is pretty much a 20ish page battle between first Lady Demon (Death) and Purgatori, and then Lady Death and Satan. Not really much of the myth-building, though I guess the ending, with LD taking over Hell, is pretty mythic. I will admit to a morbid curiosity as to how her story eventually plays out.

But on the other hand, though Mr. Hughes' command of it is expert, the big boobs skinny waists bad girl look is just far too distracting. I always come back to Kill la Kill, one of my favourite animes when I'm considering the overabundance of exposed female flesh in a comic. In the anime, the characters dress in costumes every bit as revealing as Lady Death's. But at some point in the series we realize that we've stopped paying attention to the sexualized bodies because the story is so engrossing. At least, that has been the experience of myself and others I know. I think the trouble is that this doesn't happen in most of the Chaos! comics I've read. The physicality of the character is just so..there that it's never not impacting the story. And I won't bother with the why question. We all know why the characters are presented that way.

But the thing is that, as I mentioned last time, there's something intriguing about the story of Lady Death. She's a badass female character, takes no shit from Satan himself, and seems to actually have a well-wrought backstory. And Mr. Hughes' art is just wonderful. His characters all look different physically (with the exception of every lead female character), they all move through their environments in different ways (I noticed in this issue the different way Satan moves through the battle as compared to Lady Death - each character has their own way of expressing physicality), and his layouts are interesting without sacrificing logic.

So I remain torn about the series itself, though it appears to have all the ingredients for something quite cool. It's just difficult to see past the boobs.

More to follow.

 Further Reading and Related Posts

There's a bit more on Chaos! Comics on the blog, including a section in my ongoing thoughts on the intersections between music and comics. 

Note: While I am focussing very heavily on only one creator, generally, in these posts, I never want to lose sight of the fact that comics are a collaborative medium. While the Black creators are taking necessary precedence right now, you'll always be able to find any other primary creators' names in the tags. In fact, in a lot of ways it's this spirit of collaboration that we ought to be taking away from comics at the moment and figuring out how we can apply it to our broken society.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1933: Green Lantern #57, December 1994

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I think I've said before how much I love the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern. He just always seemed a much nicer, more relatable character than Hal Jordan. In a recent review of Green Lantern: Rebirth, I suggested that Hal would have been one of the kids that picked on me in high school, whereas Kyle is more likely to be one of the ones who was indifferent at worst, and friendly at best. I loved him in Morrison's JLA, and he's pretty great in the few issues of his solo title that I've read.

Today's featured creator, Darryl Banks, did most of the art chores for Kyle's run on this title. I like his work - it's very mid-90s DC, which is a great art style, emblematized by work like Howard Porter's previously mentioned JLA run, or by the various artists who supported Mark Waid's Flash. It's not quite the grim 'n' gritty that was overwhelming Marvel in the wake of the Image exodus, though it does retain bits of that, but it's also more stylized and more, well, DC. Perhaps it's the colour palette, actually. DC comics just seem to be a little brighter than their competitors. In fact, when I come across a DC title that is dark or resembles more Youngblood than Young Heroes in Love, I find it slightly off-putting.

A Green Lantern artist has to be dynamic, and Mr. Banks' art is certainly that. There's lots of flight, lots of things moving around thanks to the ring's power, and lots of bodies in action, as one might expect from a superhero comic. All of these fluid moments are very nicely-rendered. It's a vital part of comics that the static images you see on the page actually look like they're moments of movement - this makes it easier for us to take the disparate images and stitch them together into what our brains perceive as actual movement. One of the greatest tricks of comics is to make you forget that you're looking at a bunch of static images. Well, one of the greatest tricks of well-made comics. Which this one is.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

I've got a couple of other pieces by Darryl Banks in the project, and it turns out of them was one of his very first works.

There's a bunch of Green Lantern stuff on the blog. Have a look.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1932: Ghost Manor #45, September 1979

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There's something so very intriguing about the Charlton Comics horror output from the 70s. While researching today's featured creator, the late Wayne Howard, I found an excellent articulation of this intriguing feeling from blogger Mark Andrew at Comics Should Be Good: "...since Charlton didn't want to do anything that'd offend your average 9-year-old, you can feel this book fighting against the uber-restrictive comics code." This is the sense that I get every time I read a Charlton horror title. The writers and artists want to be telling us much more interesting stories.

The other really interesting thing I came across, thanks to Mr. Howard's Wikipedia page, is that he was the first comics creator to receive the "Created by" credit in a comic for his work on Midnight Tales for Charlton. Such credits become common over the course of the 80s and 90s, but Mr. Howard was there first.

Much is made in a lot of the things I read about Mr. Howard's art style, some calling him the best of the Wally Wood school of artists, some calling him a really good imitator of Wood. I think they're really saying the same thing, but the language they're using really shifts meaning. I don't think there's anything wrong with coming from an artistic school - we see so many creators who are Kirby-inspired - where do we draw the line between practitioner of particular artistic techniques and wholesale copier? For the record, I think Howard's art is fantastic - it is dynamic while hanging onto a sense of menace that, as Mr. Andrew above notes, fights against the restrictive reigns of the Comics Code. The comic is really quite well done, for the genre of non-scary scary comic (?), and were I still an academic, I'd probably have something to say about the depictions of the Devil in this book and some of the similarities I see to the depiction of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. But I'm not still an academic, so never mind.

One last interesting thing to note is that Mr. Howard apparently did not want to talk about his work for Charlton, turning down an interview in 2001 with Comic Book Artist. I'm curious as to why this was the case, but that may simply be one of the great unsolved questions of comics.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1931: G.I. Joe #8, 2002

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 I've gone on record (well, I've said it a couple of times) that the old Marvel G.I. Joe series is really, really good. Larry Hama brings just enough authenticity and grittiness to a war comic based on science fiction toys - not unlike what happens with Marvel's Transformers, or even their Star Comics Masters of the Universe series. I think with a toy-related comic, you have to be very careful to balance good stories with advertisement, otherwise the comics can become quite tedious. When I originally collected Transformers, this was the impetus to stop for me - it just seemed like ever month became an ad for the latest toy, which didn't really reel me in. Today's issue, though still attached to a toy line, is far enough removed from the franchise's heyday to allow for some interesting storytelling.

I have some other, and IMHO better, examples of the work of today's featured creator, Jamal Igle, in the absolutely stellar Ahoy Comics series The Wrong Earth. I was going to read an issue of that for today's comic, but I think with a series that well-wrought, I want to do the whole thing as a series over the course of a couple of weeks. So instead, we'll have a look at a much earlier piece by Mr. Igle. He shares art chores on this issue, and while his and Mr. Kurth's art meshes well, it's easy to tell the two apart. One of the things I really appreciate about Mr. Igle's work is that he lavishes as much attention, as far as I can tell, on facial expression as he does on body language. We communicate as human beings in so many ways, and often it's a little off-putting in a comic when we see body language, verbal (print) language, and facial expression not quite meshing. But looking through the Igle-pencilled sections of this comic, the characters all evince different faces and expressions, and through that personality. This comic is dripping with a kind of personality in each character that, despite it's awesomeness, the original series doesn't quite attain.

To that point, I'm quite excited that I have the first 10 issues of the series, though I think this is the only issue that Mr. Igle helps out on. It'll be interesting to see if the things I'm picking up on today continue throughout the series without his artistic talents.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Larry Hama is a pretty fascinating guy, and I'll definitely feature a bit more of his work when I get to my series on creators of East Asian descent. But here's a couple of places he's already shown up in the project.

The only other G.I. Joe piece in the collection is a neat promo piece that I reviewed here. Get your ABBA ready!

 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1930: Detective Comics #761, October 2001

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 Shawn Martinbrough, today's featured creator, is not a familiar name for me, though he's got a few mentions in my collection, mostly for this particular run of Detective Comics scripted by Greg Rucka. He also did the art for Creeper #1000000, part of one of my favourite DCU crossovers, DC One Million.

If I might digress for just a moment, writer Mr. Rucka is a great proponent of diversity in comics. Two characters who show up in this issue, Crispus Allen and Renee Montoya, are two of the best POC characters I've read, with Ms. Montoya also getting a shout out for her queerness.

But back to Mr. Martinbrough. I got most of this run of Detective while I was running my comic store, and I've actually not read much of it. Batman, for me, is one of those really overdone characters, much like Wolverine was at Marvel in the late 80s and all of the 90s, so I don't tend to read Batman stories unless it's a favourite writer or a key story from the DCU. This, I'm finding, is a mistake, as we have wonderful runs on the character throughout his history that ought to be considered on their own merits, rather than on blanket thinking about the character. So when I opened up today's comic, it didn't quite look like I expected it to. The art reminded me very much of Michael Avon Oeming's work, and numerous outlets describe Mr. Martinbrough's work as "film-noir" influenced, which I can definitely see. But there's also the stylization, into a Darwyn Cooke-kind of place, that still gives the comic, despite its darkness, the feel of a superhero comic. I think sometimes writers and artists forget that Batman, though unpowered, is still one of the greatest superheroes to have come out of American culture. And even when he's on his darkest cases, we shouldn't forget that. Martinbrough's art manages to bridge these two worlds nicely, and has honestly pushed me over the edge into tracking down a bit more of this run. Rucka is always a draw, but when he's paired with artwork this good, how can I say no?

Though I've not read it in a while, I can also see how Mr. Martinbrough's art would work wonders on the Creeper installment of DC One Million, and it also appears he did the art for the short-lived series as well. There's a few short-lived series from DC at that point that I've made an effort to track down (Chase, Chronos, Vext) - they seemed to be willing to experiment a bit with their shared universe, and I think they produced some really spectacular comics that just didn't resonate with the wider readership. Creeper has definitely just made that list.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a fair bit of Mr. Rucka's work for the project, if you're interested in some of my other thoughts on his work.

And, despite my previous statements, I've read a ton of Batman stuff for the project. Peter Milligan's Detective run is really quite excellent.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1929: The Demon #26, August 1992

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I think I'll have to find #s 28 and 29 of this series, because the idea of Etrigan running for POTUS, backed by a group of conservatives who want "to put a real conservative in the White House" (this being published during the first Bush's administration), and to "restore America to greatness" is just too good, and too real, to not read.

 

I just want to point out that this comic, scripted by today's featured creator Dwayne McDuffie, is 28 years old this year, and still, with the possible exception of everyone being on cell phones, reads like it could have been written today. I suppose this offers a nice illustration of just how long people have not only been dealing with but also commenting upon the systemic inequalities of Western culture. That the Republicans have been such an easy target for such a long time really only underscores the necessity of the uprisings happening throughout the United States at the moment. And Etrigan really is the Orange Man, literally. All that the current President is missing is wings and scales, but we have to assume he's got good make-up people. The Demon's plans of course include taking all the power for himself and using his position to invade Hell, and with the possible exception of the destination of Hell (we can hope), this sounds like most of the dodgy politicians that we've had to put up with the world over for, well, longer than I can imagine.

 

The aforementioned Mr. McDuffie, who passed away in 2011, is a luminary in comics, and has done work for just about every major publisher in the industry. His first major comics work was the first Damage Control series, which I remember buying when it came out, though it's since disappeared from the collection. Mr. McDuffie is also one of the founders of Milestone Media, a publishing concern that focuses on diversity:

 

"If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren't just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can't be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn't all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn't do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that's wider than the world we've seen before."

 

After his death in 2011, the Long Beach Comic Con established, with McDuffie's widow Charlotte, the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, and McDuffie was also included for posterity in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I honestly don't know how much Milestone work I have in the collection, but I have read at least one comic for the project.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1928: Curse of the Spawn #3, November 1996

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I hadn't realized when I sat down to read this comic that not only is Dwayne Turner, artist of the issue, a Black man, but so is Alan McElroy, the writer.

 

And this comic is very, very angry. Mr. McElroy's style of writing is very descriptive, perhaps something that comes from his other writing work in film. It reminds me a great deal of Don McGregor's work for Marvel in the late 70s, almost a poetic accompaniment to the apocalyptic landscape through which our numerous characters journey. Dwayne Turner evokes the landscape viscerally. This is Hell come to Earth, and humanity really has no chance of surviving. The question of the comic is whether or not the new Hellspawn will accept this and play his part, or if he'll rebel, like many do.

 

But angry. There is a scene in which the Spawn character, Daniel Llanso, is fighting some human soldiers, and the prose that accompanies it is worth considering, especially given current circumstances: "He's been spit on his entire life by cops, soldiers, men in various uniforms. Now he has the power to make them pay for the pain, the misery, the humiliation. It all comes down to this." I often wonder, when taking in any work of fiction, at what points are we actually seeing a glimpse into the author's self, whatever that might be. A good writer will always bring something of themselves to a work, but a great writer knows when to hide and when to be heard. I wonder how close that particular passage is.

So yes, an angry comic, but one also that drips with passion. The subject matter is the end of the world, and the setting is rendered in detailed, organic art, accompanied, as I say, by this poetic exposition. There is a palpable feeling of building to something, to a meeting of all of these players at a conflict that likely will decide the fate of the planet and its peoples. And I'm pretty sure I have the next part, but it'll have to wait for a bit. I'm not optimistic for humanity's chances.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

I read the first issue of Curse of the Spawn from a very different perspective.

Here's a piece I wrote about Spawn for CBR. The Al Simmons version of the character is one of the most prominent Black superheroes around.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1927: Countdown Special: The Atom #1, February 2008

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I watched, for the first time, Batman v. Superman last night. The "Ultimate" edition.

Bear with me for a moment.

It was 3 hours long, which, even for me, is a long time to spend with superheroes. But I, to be totally honest, didn't mind it. While I was watching it, I was texting my kid, and I suggested to them that the thing about Zack Snyder films is that, to a certain extent, they just play like fan fiction. For superheroes, Mr. Snyder has a very clear vision of what he wants to see: a combination of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. But literally. Hence fan fiction. That said, and acknowledging that that's what was going on, it was a decent enough superhero movie with some good set pieces, and Ben Affleck is fucking amazing as old Batman. I would bring him back to that role in a heartbeat.

Near the end, however, I was chatting with my housemate about why it was so panned, and why, again by the end, I had just had enough. And she suggested that, quite rightly, people are just so fucking tired of seeing angsty white dudes on the screen, working out their issues in godlike exercises of power. There's a stab at diversity, in crowd casting for certain, and in the fact that we have an Israeli woman, a Japanese woman, and a Black man in supporting roles. But the three leads, the Bat, the Boyscout, and the Reporter, are white. And angsty. Today's comic reminded me of that.

With the exception that there were no People of Colour in the comic. Okay, I lie. There's one panel, in the latter half of the comic, the part illustrated by my featured creator today, Arvell Jones. In one panel, a group shot of a bunch of telepaths' heads, there is front and center a Black man. I have to assume that Jones placed that there himself. The rest of the comic is, as Batman v. Superman is, a bunch of white dudes. And Supergirl.

Mr. Jones has had a few mentions in the blog, having illustrated a Doom Patrol story in Super-Team's predecessor publication, and having been featured in my first Black Lives Matter-related readings, with Super-Villain Team-Up, and one of the weirdest comics I've ever read.

So what to do with this comic. First things first, it's a late 2000s reprint of stories from the late 70s. I've noted a couple of times in the last few days how strange it must have been for Black artists of the Bronze age to illustrate stories in which they saw nothing of themselves. Do we have to look to the colour artists, perhaps, or whomever it was who created the colour guides for each page. Why are all the background characters white? In fact, by this point in DC continuity, there had been a Black Green Lantern for 6 years. Why not use John Stewart in the story, rather than Hal Jordan? I mean, the short answer is systemic racism. The people involved in these stories very likely aren't racists - they're people who have been brought up in a society that has racism woven into its fabric. There was a default society, and it was white, and that was simply how it was. As comrades to the Black Lives Matter movement, it's incumbent on us to recognize how that racism has manifested so that we can pull the threads, unravel the fabric, and make something new together.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

The Atom has shown up occasionally in my 40 Years project.

Slightly more so the Green Lantern.

A note with regard to Black representation on the blog

I was speaking the other day with someone whose opinion about such things I hold in almost higher regard than anyone else, about the term "African-American." I know that throughout the blog I have used this term as a catch-all for Black people in the United States, but it was pointed out to me that there are a few concerns with that term, and that usage. First, not all Black people in the U.S. are of African descent. The term thus erases the experiences of POC from numerous Caribbean, Central American, South American nations. Secondly, it has some difficult resonances to slavery, a problem that should certainly be addressed, but not necessarily linguistically attached to an entire cultural group.

A short delineation of the conversation, but enough, I think. I'm going to spend the next little while seeing if I can comb through the blog and change "African-American" for "Black." I feel like it's better to revise the posts and avoid potentially insulting someone than to leave it as a historical artifact of language.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1926: The Crusaders #5, 1975

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Today's featured artist is Fred Carter, who, according to the few bits of writing about him I can find was an illustrator for Chick Publications in from the 70s until at least 2001. The article above that talks about a new series of Chick Tracts redone with all black characters refers to Carter as a "black pastor" and "one of the world's best illustrators," and I have to agree that Mr. Carter is a really gifted artist, and brings that gift to his visions of suffering and redemption.

I have to say, up front, as I did in my last review of a Crusaders issue, that I find the overall message of this comic, and of Chick in general, to be absolutely disgusting. It's the worst kind of Christianity, and flies in the face, as I understand it, of what being a Christian person means.

That said, this comic offers a really lovely way of articulating how we can appreciate a piece of art while wholly disagreeing with the overall intention (stated, in this case) of the work and artist themselves.

First, it's surprisingly racially sensitive. One of the core teachings stated in the comic is that of racial equality. Of the two main characters in The Crusaders, one is a black man. However, the story does hinge on the guys helping to convert a Jewish man in Israel to Christianity. And the Holy Land is supposed to get invaded by an army of evil Asian people. So let's perhaps take that racial equality with a grain of salt. It's racial equality if all races decide to follow Christianity.

Second, Carter uses some amazing visuals to represent Heaven, even using contemporaneous deep space nebula pictures to offer a way of visualizing the Gates of Heaven. I've talked a little about this before when I wrote a piece for Sequart that explores the relationship between Christianity and comic books. In that piece, I talked about how Mike and Laura Allred's adaptation of The Book of Mormon adds visual metaphor to written text, offering another layer of teaching and interpretation. Carter's use here of an interstellar photograph to illustrate the Gates of Heaven is a clever updating of a difficult idea.

Third, and I noted this last time, Carter draws one fine-looking male physique. Both Tim and James are, to be blunt, hot. Perhaps working this devoutly for God confers special attractiveness powers? I am, of course, always wary of comics that are explicitly, as this one is, homophobic, yet contain some extraordinarily homoerotic illustrations. That said, Mr. Carter lavishes this kind of detail on all of his characters - but Tim and James get some special treatment.

So, a few things to pull out and consider. I think the addition of metaphoric pictorial representation is the most important thing comics can bring to spiritual texts - we are overwhelmingly visual creatures, so using pictures to elucidate some of our oldest metaphysical mysteries just seems smart.

But just to be clear, this comic was put together, and believed in, by some very wrong-headed individuals.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

Despite being firmly agnostic about just about every spiritual tradition, I tend to think a lot about religion because it impacts every facet of life in the world, despite our protestations of the separation of Church and State, and not always in such great ways. Here's some thoughts I've had.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1925: Captain Marvel #0, November 1999

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There was a time, before the widespread use of the Internet, when one would have to actually pick up print magazines to find out all the upcoming news and gossip from the world of comic books. Some magazines were very good, offering interesting critical engagements with interesting works coming out of the medium. And some were Wizard.

I'm not going to lie - I read Wizard on a regular basis for a while. It wasn't great reporting, but it did a decent job of keeping a comics junkie up to speed on new titles, new creators, and just neat things. And the magazine never purported to be any more than that. But, to be fair, one of my favourite parts of the publication was the exclusive comics that would fairly frequently be packaged with it, of which today's issue is an example.

Featuring pencils by Chriscross, this comic started off the Captain Marvel series featuring Genis-Vell, son of the original Captain Mar-Vell. And, honestly, that's about all I know about it. In the late 90s I was much more a DC fan than a Marvel fan, so this character kind of passed me by. I'm not even sure if he's a part of the Marvel U anymore, though, given superhero comics, I'm sure he could be once again.

Today's art is, and I do not mean this disparagingly, very 90s. There was a particular aesthetic to superhero comics at the time, perhaps spurred by the huge success of Howard Porter on JLA, and Chriscross' work is a wonderful example of that aesthetic. I think the true mark of a good artist in such circumstances is when they can keep to this general aesthetic but at the same time inject interesting variations that personalize the piece. There are some cool panel constructions in this comic, and some neat visual effects that add a sense of motion to all of the characters. There's also a really hot picture of Genis about halfway through, still super-muscly, but in kind of a good way?

I should mention that the series is scribed by veteran writer Peter David, of Incredible Hulk fame, and it is yet another example of his facility with dialogue and action, and with the superhero in general. We'll see more of these creators as the project progresses.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've only read one other Chriscross comic for the project, and I really didn't have much context for it.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1924: Blue Beetle #1, June 1986

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 I think that this is one of Ted Kord's first appearances in the DCU post-Crisis, and post DC acquiring the rights to the Charlton heroes. It came out the same month as Watchmen #2, significant because the original premise of Watchmen utilized the old Charlton heroes, until the higher-ups at DC decided they could squeeze a bit more money out of them if they were a part of the regular DCU. Honestly, it's weird to think of a DCU that didn't feature the Beetle, or the Question, or Captain Atom. Would Watchmen have been as successful if it had seemed more like a Charlton heroes story than a standalone continuity? Probably not, but it would have been cool to see.

Today's featured artist is Paris Cullins. A quick check of the GCD yields numerous comics, and a check of my own database reveals a number of Mr. Cullins' works in the collection, notably an issue of Grant Morrison's Animal Man, one of the great superhero series of all time (IMHO, of course).

There's a dynamism to the art in this comic that really fits nicely with Blue Beetle, or the Ted Kord version of the character, at least. To me, before the Giffen/DeMatteis "Bwah-ha-ha" teaming of Beetle and Booster Gold, Blue Beetle had the potential to be a more Spider-Man-like hero. Unlike his predecessor and successor, Ted did not gain his identity from the mystical scarab that gave the other Blue Beetles superpowers. Instead, he based his identity off his old friend Dan Garrett, who was the original Blue Beetle. Ted is a scientific genius and adrenaline junkie, and Paris Cullins' art really captures that desire for action and excitement that Len Wein projects in the dialogue. There's even something of a manga look to some of the panels, where the characters are a little more-than-usually stylized, and their eyes are verging on dinner plate size. Whether this is actually anime influence or simply Cullins' style is neither here nor there - the art suits the energy of the story and the character very nicely.

While Blue Beetle has always been a less-serious character than some who inhabit the DCU, he sadly becomes something of a comedic relief character once 1987's Justice League is published, at least until he uncovers a giant conspiracy in the DCU and is shot dead by a supposed friend. But don't worry, I think he's back from the dead these days and hanging around with Jaime Reyes, the new Blue Beetle. I think. I don't keep up with DC much these days.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1923: Batman #403, January 1987

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 We'll jump back a few decades now. I think it's really important that we recognize that the contribution of POC to our culture isn't a new thing. It's not just since we've entered ostensibly more "politically-correct" times that people other than white people have had a hand in our entertainment media. If one considers that to be the case, one misses out on some truly excellent pieces of art.


The weird thing about this one, given that Denys Cowan is one of the most renowned Black creators working in comics, is that there isn't a single person of colour in the whole story. This is something that needs to be thought about when we're on the subject of creators who are POC. Representation is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but as I begin to see more bisexual characters introduced into media, I come to have a much better understanding of why it's important. For Denys Cowan to work on this comic that doesn't feature a single representative character that resembles him, at least physically, is pretty messed up. This is not to say that the motivation for this was a racial one - at least, not an overtly racial one. It's simply another symptom of the systemic racism that permeates our culture. White = default, and it has for so many years. I suppose the question I'm left with is whether or not this absence was noted by Mr. Cowan at the time. What I think is of great concern is when these situations do not raise red flags because all of us, POC or not, have internalized the idea that white = default. And that's a dangerous place to be.


Storywise, I quite enjoyed this one. A crazed cop takes on Batman's identity and starts killing people, and Batman, in the end, defeats him and tries to get him help. There's some interesting stuff going on in the comic with regard to whether or not Batman actually helps those he apprehends, and, honestly, if the comic was going to hit on some of the more salient cultural problems surrounding its publication, making the incarcerated cop Black could have opened up some even more uncomfortable conversations for the Bat.


Hope that makes sense.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Here's a few other mentions of Denys Cowan in the project - he's instrumental in establishing Milestone Comics, and is an intensely important creator in comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1922: Ant v.2 #7, June 2006

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

So you'd have to be blind, willfully or otherwise, to not see or know what is going on in the United States at the moment. Sorry, not at the moment - basically since its inception. In the years since the ascendancy of the Trump presidency, the precarious position of People of Colour in the U.S. has never been more on display to the world, and to the citizens whom it affects.

A lot of the rhetoric I'm seeing from white people about the rioting and unrest in the U.S. is either whining about how bad things are, or asking POC "what can I do, I don't understand." And the most common response is that we educate ourselves and stop leaning on the very people this cultural disparity is impacting to either help us understand or assuage our "white guilt." The former is vital, the latter a deep insult. As allies, or comrades as I prefer, we need to understand that our place in this struggle is to stand behind those on the front lines and say "I've got your back, I am 100% in support of you, but I will not supplant you." One of the best ways I've read of to do that is to make sure that the cultural contributions, the importance of POC in the Western world, is plain and clear for all to see.

A few years back I had a similar notion, in the wake of yet another racially-motivated killing, and I made the effort to post about comics with Black creators. I'm going to do this again. Yes, it's repeating myself, but it's also one of the few ways that I know I'm qualified to help, as much as this might help, in combating the horrendous waves of racially-motivated violence that seem to be sweeping across the planet. I'm going to start with Black creators for a while, but then I'm going to move on to creators from other visible, and sometimes not, minority groups. It's important that we recognize that though it often looks like it, the Western world was not constructed by white people alone, nor should it be a haven solely for them.

So let's get started, shall we?

The first thing I ought to say is that just because I'm highlighting these comics in support of what is perhaps one of the greatest and most necessary cultural revolutions to be waaaayyy overdue, it doesn't mean that I'm going to simply offer glowing reviews. Some of these comics, I'm sure, will not be my cup of tea, and I feel that I have to be objective about that, despite my previously-stated goal of celebrating the contributions of Black creators. Not all comics are good ones, regardless of who creates them. (Oh, and I'm doing them alphabetically, so that no creator seems to be prioritized.)

I'm torn about Mario Gully's Ant. I read a bit of the back story, and it actually seems to be a neat consideration of escaping into fantasy, and perhaps also of mental illness, using the superhero as a way out of a difficult situation. What I glean is that Ant herself is a fantasy concocted by a young African American girl whose living conditions are, as they are for many young POC, deplorable.

There's some problems with the book, as(s) you can probably tell from that cover. It's very "fan-servicey," though only having one issue of the series, I don't know if that's something that is ever addressed. But there's one really important thing about this series that I really think Mr. Gully himself should let you know. From Newsarama:

 “I was convicted of robbery and sentenced to one year and probation. The event was a turning point in my life. I used to draw portraits and hot chicks on envelopes for commissary. One day around day #6 of 358, I was depressed about where my choices in life put me. I was looking out the barred window and a single ant crawled in from the outside of my window seal. I said to myself ‘Man, I wish I were an ant! Then I could crawl right out of this place and start my life all over!’ Well, I couldn't pull that one off, so I decided to make a homemade comic book about it. It got around and I had a little audience with my cellmates. Really built up my confidence about drawing. That's when I realized that one day I could be a comic book artist. I sent out my first submission from the county jail. I hope one day my story can be an inspiration to anybody out there who has a dream. You can do it if you want it bad enough. I was determined to do something positive with my life after that.”

It is a well-documented fact that young Black males make up a ridiculous percentage of the people incarcerated in the United States. But even here, under the unyielding thumb of systemic racism, we see creativity, talent, and a desire to contribute something positive. Ant has also got to be one of the few superhero comics that features an Black woman as lead character. It was really difficult to find, in my own collection, Black female creators (though I did find a few), so it's great to at least see a lead character representing that important demographic.

Okay, enough for today. The posts over the next little while might be a bit longer than usual, but that's because this is a long-overdue, or perhaps a long-running, conversation. And I think it's important for us, as comics fans, to consider where our hobby and our passion fits into this important moment of social change in the world.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

If you need to get up to speed on what's going on in the U.S. right now, here's a CBC article. I know it might be Canadian bias, but I always feel like the CBC does a good job reporting on stuff like this.