The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 54: 1602 #8, June 2004

And so we come to the conclusion of Gaiman's early modern superhero epic. I think I have to say that it was a little underwhelming. The best bits involved Reed Richards, and those only took place in the last two issues. In this issue, Richards outlines a taxonomy of the sciences based around the metaphor the the Knights of the Round Table, each equal and each a part of a whole. A cool (actually, very cool) metaphor, and one that scholars and academics could benefit from, I think.

The climax of this tale is a letdown, frankly. There's so much that could have been done with an early modern approach to the superhero, and Gaiman teases out some of the implications with the Inquisition, with Clea's return to her realm, with Doom as a power in Europe. But the ending comes down to a fairly standard superhero trope: heroes and villains join forces to fix a problem with the spacetime continuum. How many times have we seen this? On the one hand, I suppose, that's the whole point, that we have seen these things before, and that they are all a part of the fundamental stories that Richards muses upon in the previous issue. And, in many ways, this is how we can forgive 1602 it's flaws, by considering that it is simply a superhero story (are they ever simple?) wrapped in an early modern setting. I think that the problem with this explanation is that the world Gaiman and Kubert create is so intriguing that to wrap it up in a superhero story seems somehow to quash its potential as a vehicle for stories. I've not read any of the subsequent series that spun out of 1602, but the fact that there is no ongoing series based on these concepts currently extant means that the potential of the setting was not realized.

Writers and artists cannot, of course, always be historians and scholars. But had Gaiman sat down with such people, co-wrote with them even, then this could have been an amazing alternate history piece coupled with the myths of the Marvel superheroes. We would also have needed an ongoing, or at least longer than 8 issue, run on the title. What's happening on the African continent of this reality? And South America? The title is problematically Eurocentric, even as the contemporary comics are problematically North America-centric.

Ah well. A pleasant, if flawed, deviation from the usual superhero fare, an experiment with, I would argue, inconclusive results. The characters are going to show up in "Secret Wars," so perhaps we'll see something spin out of that eventually.

The promised song will have a link here some time today, but probably not until later this evening. Recording a song is a lengthy process.

I'm not sure what to move on to tomorrow. I actually have a cool idea, but I'm also getting my exam questions this week, so my cool idea may have to wait until I have sufficient time to devote to it. Either way, see you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 53: 1602 #7, April 2004

There's an interesting moment in this series when the newly rescued Reed Richards is conjecturing about the nature of the universe within which he and his comrades exist. He posits that the fundamental principles of his universe are stories, that they exist in "a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can only be continuances." There's a couple of ways we can read this. First, it could be a purely metatextual moment, in which we, as readers, have the ironic stance of understanding that Richards is absolutely right, that their fictional milieu is a universe that deals in continuances. If that's the case, though, it flies in the face of what Gaiman has previously stated about the nature of stores, that they have beginnings, middles, and ends. Perhaps, in Richards' case, and coming as no surprise from me, it's not stories that his universe favours, it's myths.
The second way we can read this moment is of a character realizing the nature of his universe. It's slightly different from the metatextual moment, because rather than us having a realization about his reality, he himself is having a realization about his own reality, a realization that is separate from our understanding of reality as readers. When the Human Torch says "Ah yes...atomies and suchlike" in response to Reed's wonderings about fundamental principles, he is reflecting our understanding of our reality. We understand that it rests upon the fluctuations of the quantum foam. So Reed is realizing that his reality does not rest on that sub-atomic level of reality, but on the level of stories.
The third way of interpreting this is the most interesting, however. Perhaps here Reed is not making a claim about his own reality, nor is the comic pointing out a metatextual moment for us, but perhaps it is suggesting that our reality, the one in which we read the comic, is actually based on stories. I know, for the rationalists amongst us, it makes no sense. But if you consider that we place ourselves in narratives all the time, and that these narratives have a far more fundamental impact on our lived experience than the "atomies and suchlike," then we really could say that the fundamental principles of our existence, and thus our universe, is stories.

That's all I've got for today. Conclusion of 1602 tomorrow, and some music.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 52: 1602 #6, March 2004

This issue opens with a conversation on the Moon between Doctor Strange and The Watcher. In which all the things that the Gaiman avatar in the previous issue's opening tells us are, in a far more organic way, revealed. I am still mystified as to the need for that opening in yesterday's issue. Ah well, I'll let it go, I suppose.
I need to also add a caveat to my promise to have music to link to on Sunday. Only 4 verses of the Ballad of the Fantastick have been released so far in the series, so it might be a very short bit of music. I'd considered trying to write a couple more verses myself, but, to be honest, I'm writing and studying an awful lot these days, so adding more to my plate seems like a great way to have a nervous breakdown. (Which might make for some interesting posts, but at what cost...AT WHAT COST!!???)

Anyway, on to today's comic.

I'm noticing a trend of sorts when I'm writing about runs or series of comics in this project. By about this point in a run, I'm running out of things to say. I mean, 1602 is still really good, but I think I've addressed the problems I have with it, and pointed to the things about it that I like, yet, including today's issue, I've got 3 more days of trying to find something to say about it. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to address whether or not this series was really the big deal it was made out to be at the time. A quick look at the GCD shows that this was Gaiman's first major comics work, really, since the end of The Sandman. I remember when it was solicited and then released that it marked Gaiman's "triumphant" return to the medium, but I wonder if the story was overshadowed by the man at this point. Not that I'm saying that it's a bad story. It's actually very good, and a very creative way of using these characters, aside from the heavy-handed exposition I've already complained about. But is it of Sandman calibre? No. It really isn't. I think I actually prefer Gaiman's next Marvel project, The Eternals, to this one, but again I wonder if it's because there was so much hype around this series and I'm not entirely sure it lived up to it.

Ah, is this another trend? The further I get into a series, the more critical I get? I shudder to think what's going to happen when I hit up Milligan's Shade. By the time I hit issue 70, I'll just hate it through and through. (That will never happen with Shade, by the way.)

Okay, that's enough of that. Tomorrow and Sunday we continue on with the rise of the Marvels in the seventeenth century. What I'm starting to think on is whether or not this series, aside from the sequels it spawned, has any real ramifications for the Marvel Universe, or, if not, whether or not it could have. See you tomorrow.

(Oh, actually, can I mention one other thing? I'm sooooo glad that there is no frickin' Wolverine in this series. Finally a Marvel comic that doesn't feel the need to use the most over-used [next to Batman] character in superhero stories to bump up its sales. Okay, rant over.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 51: 1602 #5, February 2004

I broke one of my most sacred rules with regards to comics yesterday. I looked at the solicitation and preview information for "Secret Wars." I only mention this because it's in some ways pertinent to something I want to address from today's comic.

But before we get to that, I'll say that the story is really gripping me now. I finished reading this issue today and was unhappy that I'd have to wait until tomorrow to read the next one. (I know, I don't have to, but this is that discipline thing I mentioned a few weeks back, right?) 1602, perhaps a bit surprisingly, is actually a Nick Fury story. I hadn't really put that one together on previous readings of the series, but he's the fulcrum about which the whole story is turning. Not to say that he's necessarily the most important person to the events that are taking place in early modern London, but he's the focal character through which we're witnessing the unfurling of events. I've never been a huge fan of Fury, though in many respects I think that's because I've read only a  few comics that really did a good job with him. Most of the time, for me at least, he's been a background player in a world filled with far more colourful costumes. Which is, of course, exactly how Fury would like it. But then you read something like this, or more ideally, the Secret Warriors series, which demonstrates just how well Fury actually fits into this world. (And, as an aside, I'm pretty sure that the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series is gearing up to adapt Secret Warriors, and if they do, it'll be amazing.)

I mentioned something I wanted to address about this comic. It's the first page. As a reader of superhero comics, one has to become inured to the recaps that are a fundamental part of superhero storytelling. So to find one done in the creative way that the one in this issue is done is kind of cool:

It doesn't take up story space within the story, it just lays out the characters and situations about which we need to be aware. I can't remember off the top of my head whether or not this was done because the issues were shipping late. The publication dates in the indicia don't indicate that, but that doesn't mean that the series wasn't late in a few places.
I think, however, that this page was added for a different reason. The first sentence from Gaiman's mouth (so to speak) is "We are in the Marvel Universe." He continues with "It's 400 yeas ago. For reasons we do not yet understand, people and events are coming into existence at the wrong time." Further down, Kubert's avatar asks "Hey, Neil, if this is the Marvel Universe, what are all the tiny dinosaurs doing?" My concern with the story, then, is that up to this point there's no indication that the tale is meant to be set in the regular continuity of the Marvel U. It reads far more like one of DC's "Elseworlds" stories, or an extended "What If" tale. Placing it in the main Marvel U makes the story far more interesting, of course, but surely there must have been some way for a writer with as much facility as Gaiman to tell us this without having to step in and basically blurt it out. In fact, had we been able to understand this from the get go, the four issues that precede this one would have had an added depth. The problem is that, as I've noted in the last four posts, there are historical events, aside from the appearance of the Marvel characters, that simply do not jibe with the events of "actual" history, and this pulls us from the notion that all this is happening in the main Marvel U.

So why is this page here, then?

Part of me wonders if maybe there was an editorial intervention that asked Gaiman to place his story in the mainstream continuity in order that Marvel could wring a bit more prestige out of having him write for them. Rather than a one-off "What If" tale, all of a sudden superstar writer Neil Gaiman is telling a cataclysmic story of the main Marvel Universe. I like to think this is not the case, that it was Gaiman's intent all along, but knowing what I do about the way that the editorial oversight of the comics industry functions, I would not be surprised if this was exactly that kind of intervention.

For myself, I choose to ignore this page. I don't need this story to be set in the main Marvel U for it to be a good story. In fact, separating it from that continuity makes it a story. By this, I mean that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that kind of containment of narrative is something that Gaiman himself once argued for in ending The Sandman. I've also noted Frye's complaint about comic strip characters, that they live on in a deathless state, another way of saying that the process of narrative must have that kind of containment. That said, the ones that don't, which really are only serialized superhero comics and religious narratives, move off into the direction of typological reading. But that's a topic for a dissertation (and will be soon.)

The last question I'll pose, and perhaps those who read this blog might know, is to ask whether or not this page shows up in the collected edition of the series? It would serve no purpose other than to shift the setting in a collection, which would be extremely jarring. I'll have to flip through a copy next time I'm at the comic store.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 50: 1602 #4, January 2004

Do you ever think about Doom?

I sometimes think that Doctor Doom is easily the most versatile and well-realized character in the Marvel Universe. Yes, he's a totalitarian dictator who believes only he is fit to rule, well, the universe. But that's not all he is, and it seems to me that the various investigations of his personality have fleshed out a character with far more depth than most of the heroes who oppose him. I'm thinking here of his turn at the end of the original Secret Wars series, his inclusion in the Future Foundation in Hickman's F.F., and now here, in 1602. Yes, he's a totalitarian dictator, but he, honestly, seems to wrestle with his hubris often enough to demonstrate that he's considered all the options and still come out with himself as the best one. I've not read any of the series that have focussed on the man himself, but as a major supporting cast member for so much of the MU, he's fascinating.

The intrigues continue in this issue, and we finally are given some clue as to the fate of the four from the Fantastick. This issue also really begins to highlight the differences between the world of 1602 and our own, aside, of course, from the existence of metahumans. North America is said to be home to some particularly large "leather wings," pterodactyls that seem to have escaped from the Savage Land. And there's a strange panel at the bottom of the fourth page depicting a torch-bearing mob (because there's always a torch-bearing mob) that is being scrutinized by a black cat with extremely large fangs. Gaiman and Kubert do a rather remarkable job of making this realization of difference a very subtle process. There's little to no metahuman activity in the first issue, and even when it does happen, it's fairly mundane because we're expecting it, so the trick is to make the world strange in other ways. The surrounding fauna and weather is a nice way of doing it, as well as the subtle historical changes (i.e., the survival of the Roanoake colony, Elizabeth's death a year early, Raleigh's death long before the actual date of his death).

There is a brief telling of the origin of Virginia Dare in this issue, involving (spoiler) her touching what looks like a floating infinity symbol that sparks her powers. Two things spring to mind: first, the Infinity Gauntlet and gems, and I can't for the life of me remember if that has anything to do with this story. Second, the repetition of the infinity symbol in The Multiversity: Pax Americana, which I was discussing with a friend yesterday, and which has absolutely no bearing on 1602 whatsoever.

Okay, we're past the halfway point, and things are getting exciting. More tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 49: 1602 #3, December 2003

There's a couple of parts of this comic in which we get an inkling that the 1602 world isn't just an experiment in displacing the characters of the Marvel Universe, but actually a part of that very same universe. "...I merely watch," the text of the final caption box on the first page, is the blatant clue as to the narrator's voice, and the back of his head shows up in a later panel. That Uatu makes his presence known makes 1602, at the very least, a possible What If world, which, by this point, have been acknowledged as part of the Marvel multiverse.

These questions of multiversality (or, to quote Morrison, multiversity) offer some interesting ways of coming at superhero comics. Leaving aside for a moment that a newly-published theory is actually positing interaction between parallel universes, in many ways, especially for the last decade or so, we've seen rampant tacit interaction between parallel comics universes. There is a long history of multiverses and alternate realities in superhero comics, stemming from the "imaginary stories" of the fifties and sixties all the way to Morrison's current meditation on the concept in Multiversity. Interesting shorthands have been created that allow writers to deal with multiverses, the notion of "the Bleed" being perhaps the most useful, and most used. These veins of the multiverse not only separate the various dimensions, but also parse the universe in terms of the biological, a metaphor with which we are fundamentally in tune. And while this notion, and its genesis in the differing vibrational rates of alternate Earths (see Flash v.1 #123) primarily finds its origins in DC Comics and their eventual offshoot Wildstorm, Marvel writers, Jonathan Hickman notable amongst them, have taken up the concept in the Marvel Universe(s). The Bleed, or the veins of the multiverse, become a concept in numerous multiverses from different publishers, and thus become a metaphoric link between economically disparate fictions. Thus we see a version of the Sentry show up in Final Crisis, gathered together with other versions of Superman (along with a version of Supreme), or we see the Avengers take on a barely concealed version of the Justice League in a recent issue of that series. These veins allow us to think superhero comics not as disparate fictions attempting to grapple with the mythic resonances of these kinds of characters, but as parts of an organic whole, combinations and permutations moving toward some kind of solution. Whether or not the solution even exists is beside the point. It is the movement that matters.

Not that this says anything about the comic in question, really. This issue, at least, combats the problem I was thinking about yesterday, that of the novelty of revelation carrying the story more than the narrative itself. Things happen in this issue. Major events propel the plot forward and characters are developed in such a way that they are made distinct from the archetypes from which they are drawn. Not too distinct, mind you, but enough that we can see the way in which the different time period manages to change the surfaces of the characters at the very least. But I still can't get away from the idea that this story would not be nearly as well-regarded if it didn't feature the Marvel superheroes. Only three issues in and I'm already getting ready to set it aside and read something else before finishing the series. But I did say there'd be music by next weekend, which means the series needs to be finished, in which case, I'll see you again tomorrow, direct from the 17th century.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 48: 1602 #2, November 2003

I realized today that I haven't talked much about covers yet. I love this one. I think it's one of the nicest covers I've seen. (That's why it's a little bigger today.) It, and all of the covers for 1602, were created by Stratford, Ontario artist Scott McKowen. The ostensible use of a cover on a comic, and on anything, really, is to draw the eye to that object over all the other objects that might be vying for your attention.

Look at that cover. Even surrounded by hundreds of other comic, that's going to draw your eye.

I don't know how others look at it, but I begin to look for esoteric symbols in the hedge designs. That's only one of the ways that this cover also achieves the feat of really expertly symbolizing the atmosphere and action of the story beneath it. Did you ever see a cover of a comic and get really excited by it and then find that, really, nothing even remotely like what's happening on the cover happens inside? This cover, without explicitly citing some of the interior artwork, tells you precisely what's going to happen in the story within, but spoils nothing. The figures on the cover are doing precisely what they do in the comic, but in a highly symbolic environment. Some move toward the center, some are left at the periphery, some look ahead and some look back.

And that's what happens in this issue. I feel like this one's going to be a bit weird to talk about, because it really is a matter of each chapter basically breaking down to intrigue upon intrigue. Plans were made, predictions divined, powers revealed. In a lot of ways, this book is really a love-letter to the Marvel characters, proof from a gifted pen that they really could exist in any milieu, that there really is something timeless about them. The trouble with this is whether or not the story is really that good. Let me explain: I'm trying to ascertain how much of the appeal of the story is the revelation of the characters in a new setting, the novelty of seeing Daredevil as a blind Irish minstrel, or Peter Parker...ahem....Parquaugh as Nicholas Fury's assistant, and how much is the actual story. Or would this story, one of the end of the world and a lost Templar treasure still be as good if it were not the Marvel characters filling the leading roles. Does the story depend too much on the affection we have for the characters prior to their appearance here? And what does that say about the way comics work, let alone why these characters have succeeded where others have dwindled away into history? We no longer read Timely's original Vision, but his contemporary Captain America is still about. Many superheroes simply disappear, so what makes these ones so loved, and so adaptable?

These are the kinds of questions that drive me in my research. I think they're important ones to ask.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 47: 1602 #1, November 2003

Each issue of Gaiman and Kubert's 1602 contains a verse from "The Ballad of the Fantastick," a seventeenth-century adaptation of the origin of the Fantastic Four. My project this week is to read all eight issues by next Sunday, and arrange and record a version of "The Ballad of the Fantastick," which I'll post on YouTube at the end of the week.

Can I admit something to you about Neil Gaiman? And this is after having met him last year when he was U of C's distinguished writer, and him really seeming to be a genuinely nice guy. I feel like he betrayed us.

Us who? you might ask.

Comics people. The splash Gaiman made in our little pond in the late 80s was revolutionary in the most fundamental meaning of the word. He changed, forever, the way things play in comics. He gave us one of our first English-language long-form literary works in the medium, and then basically fucked off and became a novelist.
I honestly felt like he made his mark with The Sandman, and then moved on to "proper writing."

That's not fair, I acknowledge that, but when 1602 first came out, that's how I was thinking about Gaiman, so I didn't enjoy it very much. I read it, because it's Gaiman, but I felt like it was too little, too late. And, to be honest, I thought the story was kind of second rate.

Going back to it now, I'm appreciating the level of historical detail he is trying to go for, and I think he largely succeeds in transplanting major MCU characters to the early seventeenth century. I'm going to hold off on any real opinions until tomorrow. As I mentioned yesterday, we had a whiskey party last night, and I'm tired and want to go to bed.