The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 302: 1st Issue Special #1, April 1975

Oh, Jack Kirby. Will you ever be done mining the past for the future?

Say what you will about Kirby, he understands the superhero. His dialogue may be shaky. His plots might verge on the adolescent. Every now and again, he's kind of racist and sexist. (I'm really selling you on him, right?) But his artwork is always, always, gorgeous, and his conception of the superhero as god is sophisticated and beautiful, if occasionally naive.

After finishing this comic, I looked to see where the story continues, and it turns out that it doesn't. I had a quick look through the 1st Issue Special entries at the GCD, and from the looks of things not many of them got a second glance. I'm surprised that this Kirby creation didn't, but the mid-Seventies is moving into his more grounded Marvel work, so perhaps the gods were being put on hold in that decade. Considering that Howard the Duck makes his debut not to much later into the decade perhaps upholds this notion.

The other thing that may have kept the series from continuing is its "meh" factor. There's nothing new here, even for a comic that is drawing on mythology. We have a child, orphaned by evil raiders. We have a quest for vengeance, pursued by a heroic altruist. We have a lizard-like antagonist. Kirby seems to me to have been a champion of the Platonic notion of the outer appearance reflecting the inner nature of a person. His villains are always ugly and disgusting, his heroes always 50s movie star pretty. Frye notes that myth, in its underlying of literature, is akin to geometrical objects as underlying visual art - I think the problem with this story is that the underlying geometry is just too obvious, and the flourishes that one desires in these mythic variations are too thin to conceal the foundation upon which the story is built.

That does it for my recent dollar bin finds. Some Christmas stuff for the next few days. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 14: 1st Issue Special #8, November 1975

Something occurred today that I hadn't considered. It makes sense, honestly, looking at the breadth of the project, but I had some skewed notion about the portion of my collection that I call the "Storage Collection," that everything in there was somehow substandard, that if it wasn't in my active collection, then it couldn't possibly be good. Surely I would have read it by now if it were good? It's an odd point of view to take, and the more I consider it, the less sense it makes. So today, two full weeks into my project, I'm excited to have discovered a piece that I really, really, like: Mike Grell's "The Warlord."

I'll say, upfront, that I've never really been one for the Edgar Rice Burroughs-y pulp jungle adventure hero. And even with this issue, I was wary at the beginning. But there's something about this comic. Y'know what it is? Mike Grell. Each issue of 1st Issue Special features a text page explaining the sometimes esoteric origins of the characters they feature. This one is a brief bio of "writer, artist and letterer" Mike Grell. That's a remarkable amount of the page that Grell has full control over. And it's really noticeable. The pages flow together beautifully. As an artist who is also the letterer, Grell has designed each  panel to best accommodate the text. But in turn, the text boxes are beautifully designed, and add an interesting Saturday morning movie serial sort of vibe.

I kind of love this comic. Can you tell?

The dialogue suits the tenor of the story perfectly. Morgan, and his barbarian friend, whose name is Tara (which is my wife's name, so that's pretty awesome), occasionally verge on cliche, but it's the kind of melodrama that suits the tale. Well, so far, anyway. Having read only one issue, perhaps I can't yet say what suits the tale. Perhaps this dialogue, this tenor, suits the introduction to this tale. I look forward to seeing what it becomes.

Speaking of which, I see in my magical database that I actually have the next issue, that is, issue #1 of The Warlord series itself, which carries on from this one. Maybe I'll read that, and have another taste. Otherwise, with it starting with "w," I'll have forgotten reading this one by the time I get to that one. That's an odd thought.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 13: 1st Issue Special #7, October 1975

Today's 1st Issue Special is really pretty interesting. I'm not a huge fan of the character of The Creeper, though reading through the brief history of the character that's at the back of this comic, perhaps it's because there really hasn't been enough of him in the DCU to foster fandom. I know over the last 15 to 20 years he's played a large role in the occult side of things, but that's never the popular side of things, is it?

The Steve Ditko art is a treat, as always. Ditko is one of those artists with whom I have a long history. Way back when I was still living in the UK, and then in Vancouver, I would read the British Doctor Who magazine, and these publications reprinted Ditko's creepy little time travel and horror stories from 60s and 70s Marvel horror titles. And, in the interest of demonstrating the power the medium has always had on me, these stories scared the crap out of my little 6 or 7 year old self. The other ramification of this, though, is that I've known Ditko's art for basically my whole life. This is not to say that I'm always a fan. While sometimes his art really does capture the same dynamism, though in a wholly different aesthetic, as Jack Kirby, with whom he is most often compared for his early Marvel work, sometimes it just seems....I don't know. Not sloppy, but hurried somehow. Like his brain has already moved on to the next thing he needs to draw, and the thing he's working on just needs to be finished. I wonder if this is something similar to what happened when I first read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble? I found myself repeatedly thinking that many of the things she was saying were self-evident, that I'd heard them all before, until I realized that the reason I'd heard them all before is because she wrote this book and it became part of our scholarly zeitgeist. Ditko is the same, as is Kirby, as is Curt Swan, and a host of famous artists. We recognize, and sometimes are tired of, their art because it is so much a part of the zeitgeist of the medium, especially in the case of superhero comics. For this reason, regardless of whether or not I enjoy the particular artwork, I always respect and enjoy Ditko for what he has brought more widely to comics.

A brief word on the scripter (though more likely the dialoguer) of this issue, Michael Fleisher. I'm not that familiar with his comics work, at least his actual comic book work, but I do rely pretty heavily on an interesting project he worked on probably around the same time he was writing this issue. Fleisher was behind three volumes of The Encyclopedia of Comic Books Heroes, one each on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. They are well-researched and give a nice overview of the first 40 or so years of each characters' history. While not the kind of scholarly publications I'm more often encouraged to cleave unto, to ignore the wealth of information within them would make me a negligent comics academic.

The story itself is a standard "villain escapes from prison, hero goes after him, is mistaken for a bad guy (the Spider-Man trope), but good guy does his duty regardless." One thing that does separate this tale from many others is the seeming death of the Firefly at the end of the story. Firefly falls afoul of his own technology in the end, causing him to plummet to his death. The Creeper, ostensibly a superhero, does nothing to attempt to save the hapless villain, and in fact ends the comic laughing manically over the ledge that the villain fell from. And perhaps here we have an indicator of why the Creeper lacked, or lacks, the popularity that he may or may not deserve. This is, really, the sort of character that would have worked far better as an early Vertigo comic, when the imprint was mining the DCU for dark characters with which to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre. Trying to slot him into the mid-seventies DCU seems, well, a terrible idea, actually. Perhaps I'll have to have a look at the late 90s series the character received. I've read the DC One Million crossover from that series, and it was dark and weird, and along with Chronos, Chase, and a number of others, represented a mid-point between DCU and VU (Vertigo Universe, that is) superheroes, a tradition we see continued in the "dark" side of the New 52 titles.

More 1st Issue Special tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 12: 1st Issue Special #3, June 1975

You know those moments when you read a comic that is utterly and completely dated? Or watch a movie or TV show that is the same? Some older superhero comics maintain a timeless quality, regardless of the fact that the plot would be solved with a simple cell phone call nowadays. Others....

This issue of 1st Issue Special is one that has not aged well. The tryout book features a new character every month, ostensibly to see whether or not there is call for an ongoing series of said character. This particular issue, however, falls prey to that malaise that dogs much of Jack Kirby's late 60s, early 70s work: the obviously older writer trying to capture the zeitgeist of the youth to whom he thinks the comics are appealing. Whenever I read a story with Metamorpho, I do my best to like him. He comes from the tradition of the kooky groovy superheroes of the early 60s that gave us my beloved Doom Patrol, The Metal Men, all of these B-list heroes whose adventures are....well, weird.
But I can just never get into him. The only time I've ever appreciated the character was when he pulls what we'll anachronistically call "a Groot" at the very beginning of Grant Morrison's JLA. There he evinces a quality of heroism that I'd call superheroic. But I've never been much impressed with any of the other stuff I've read. Even the Allred/Gaiman story from Wednesday Comics, which, considering its creatorly pedigree, should have been really great did very little for me.
I suppose the problem is that, in contrast to other completely bodily altered heroes like Cliff Steele, Rex Mason doesn't seem to deal with the notion that he's no longer a human. Or, at least, his writers don't, and I think that for characters like this, that's an important, even intrinsic, part of the narrative. I recently found a really old review I did of Doom Patrol for a website back in the early 2000s, and I call Morrison's run on the title one of the most human stories told with superheroes. What does that mean? It means that he takes some of the most outrageously strange heroes in the DCU and tells us a story that is, at its very core, about how we are human, about the choices we make and the challenges we face. For me, Metamorpho has this amazing potential, but is rarely deployed in the same way. I'm not saying that his adventures have to be deep and soul-searching metaphors of the human condition, but some consideration of what he is would add a bit of humanity to "the fabulous freak."

Okay, enough bashing. I feel like all I've been doing with these comics is complaining. So here's a really cool fact: this issue was illustrated by Ramona Fradon. Ms. Fradon was one of those rare creatures in mid-twentieth century comics culture, a woman. (I shouldn't say was. She's still alive). Not only this, but she co-created both Metamorpho and Aqualad, forever, I think, securing her a place in superheroic history. I find this aspect of this project fascinating. Eventually I'll get to Marvel's Girl Comics series, which has brief articles on the important women of twentieth century comics, and Ms. Fradon must surely be one. So, even if I don't particularly enjoy the story (and Sapphire Stagg, Metamorpho's lady-friend is surely one of the most annoying supporting characters in this history of comics), something great that's coming out of this project so far is discovering creative teams and historical facts of which I was unaware, whether it's a discovery like Ms. Fradon or witnessing an early Moore or Gaiman story as they are cutting their teeth on the medium they end up mastering.

More 1st Issue Special tomorrow. The Creeper, I think.