The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2355: Doctor Tomorrow #2, October 1997

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Publisher: Acclaim Comics

Writer: Bob Layton

Penciller: Dean Zachary

Cover Artist: Unknown, though suggested to be Butch Guice

I made a bit of a blunder this Remembrance Day and posted something on Facebook that hurt the feelings of a good friend of mine who serves in the military. Still trying to figure out how to apologize. But today's comic actually brings me back to something I raised in that post, and that's the rhetoric used to describe historical wars. Or, rather, recent historical wars, rather than all historical wars. The three-issue opening arc on Dr. Tomorrow is titled "The Glory War," and chronicle's the character's origins in the opening days of the Second World War. It's this notion of glory that set my blood boiling a bit this November. All we seem to hear about Remembrance Day is about the glory, about the honour, about the sacrifice, about how heroic it was that these brave young men and women gave their lives in defense of their country. And not just in the sense that some did not return from the battlefields - some did and still gave their lives. My Grandad was such a person, battered and scarred, from all that I can tell, from his experiences in WW2. Yet still, despite the cost in lives and lifetimes, we still revere these young people, we still only remember the glory, the honour, and not the fact that they were sent to die often for reasons that had nothing to do with what they were told. I'll stop there. That's not the point of this post. But that rhetoric of reverence for people who were sent, in some cases unwillingly, to war just rubs me the wrong way.

The character of Dr. Tomorrow appears first in the Acclaim Universe in 1941-42, as far as I can tell. Only a few years after Action Comics #1 goes on sale and kicks off the Golden Age of Superheroes. It's not a new device for installing a history into a newly-created shared narrative, but it's a good one. As we recognize various ages of comics, we also recognize how those ages work together to create the foundations of a shared narrative universe. When writing a story of the Golden Age of a setting, there are certain signs and signals that let us know what kind of a history is being installed. It's a superheroic history, of course, but that isn't just communicated by the captions and artwork - it's communicated in the way that the comic is in dialogue with the actual, "real world" history of the superhero genre. Like giving your hero an origin point near to the first big three DC heroes. In Gerard Way's take on Doom Patrol, he hints at a figure called the God of Superheroes, the Platonic form of all of the superheroes that have come since. By stationing Dr. Tomorrow so close to the early originals, the comic signals that he is to become a template figure for the shared universe moving forward, similarly to how Captain America has been positioned in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadly, I'm not sure Acclaim's version of the Valiant Universe lasted long enough for any of this admitted speculation to come to fruition.

But we got a pretty cool comic series out of it. Oh, and today's issue is a tribute to Will Eisner and his early Spirit adventures.

"I made it a rule to never look into the future more than a year at a time."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2354: Doctor Tomorrow #1, September 1997

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(Yeah, yeah, 2 in a row. Contain yer excitement 😏 Going to try a bit of a format change for a while, see how it feels.)

Publisher: Acclaim Comics

Writer: Bob Layton

Penciller: Don Perlin

Cover Artist: Mike Mignola

I've had this one kicking about the collection for about 20 years now. I started finding Acclaim comics in the comic bin at a used bookstore in Kitchener, ON, that I'm sure has gone the way of most used bookstores nowadays. It's where I first found Quantum & Woody, and where I started poking my nose into the Valiant/Acclaim universe. I've always found the idea of a historically presented superhero universe, like Astro City, for example, and this series is a cool way for the Acclaim superhero universe, relatively new, to establish a history for itself.

I don't really know much about the series, having only read this issue, but I'm intrigued by the premise, though I have inklings already, of an ontological paradoxical nature, about what's going to happen.

Or, perhaps I think I do, except that I don't. Bear with me. The series is the brainchild of writer/inker Bob Layton. Each issue has a different art team, and is presented in tribute to a particular luminary of Comics' history. Today's is a paean to Jack Kirby. I'm missing a couple of the later issues, which I may try to track down in the next few days, but I noticed at some point that Mr. Layton's name does not appear on the final issue. And, being, as far as I can tell, a fairly open company about the ways things work behind the scenes, there's an explanation in the back matter of the final issue. According to this, Layton asked to have his name removed from the issue because he had differences with the editorial department over how the series should end. The editorial side had plans for a character from later in the series that must have somehow conflicted with Mr. Layton's, as the writer, original ending.

That got me thinking about The Eternals. Not the movie, but the mid-80s maxi-series from Marvel that dropped around the same time as Squadron Supreme. The last four issues of that series, originally helmed by Peter B. Gillis, were written by Walt Simonson. It's been a while since I've looked, but I imagine the excuse given for Gillis' departure is similar to that given for Layton's. I wondered, briefly, why this might be the case until I realized that by the end of the series, there would have been significant sales figures for previous issues, indicating whether or not it was worthwhile to continue the character/series somehow. And that continuity, the imposition of the shared narrative universe, on what looks to be a story with a definite end, has to cause some ruptures. Perhaps I'll look into it a bit more over the next few days as I continue Dr. Tomorrow's cool-ass history.

"Who is this mysterious man from the future who has joined forces with the allied march into Europe?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2353: Valiant FCBD 2016 - 4001 A.D. Prologue

 For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on the importance of being vaccinated, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

 

I honestly hadn't intended for there to be months between posts anymore, but, y'know, holy shit life gets in the way sometimes. I've been channeling a lot of my creative energies into music over the last few months, managing to compile three full albums of music that I hope to somehow release to the world once I figure out a good way to do so. And comics have fallen by the wayside.

Sort of.

I've kept up with the reading, and since we last met I've made my way through most of the Harris Comics content in the collection. I've come to appreciate Vampirella a bit more now - I made the classic mistake of seeing what she looked like and assuming that was the be-all and end-all of the character. It's shocking to realize, only every now and again thankfully, how much that kind of thinking, especially with regard to women, has been intrinsically programmed into my psyche. I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways that I have to deprogram myself from the toxically masculine behaviours that were performed as the norm for me when I was still learning how to human. Going back to school helped in a big way, but moments like this remind me that I have to remain vigilant.

So, yeah, Vampirella's a kick-ass lady who uses her scantily-clad appearance to stop enemies in their tracks, giving her the opening to kill the hell out of them. And she's battling in an America that's been, in some ways, taken over by all the creatures of the night that we fear. And her boyfriend's a creature-hunting congressman. It's all pretty great and ridiculous, and just good comics.

After that, I decided to dive into the Valiant/Acclaim publishing universe. There's a couple of longer runs in there that I skipped over, and will perhaps start on tomorrow, but I'm glad I did my overview first, as the Valiant/Acclaim universe is one with which I'm only tangentially familiar. I was a fan of the Acclaim Comics iteration in the early Naughts, but only, sadly, as that line was imploding. Quantum & Woody still ranks as one of the best superhero stories I've read, and I only wish Mr. Priest and Mr. Bright had been able to finish telling their story. I'll talk more about that soon, I hope. All that said, I'm going to be a little more on the lookout for Valiant/Acclaim stuff when I'm doing my dollar bin or TPB buying. I've managed to read bits and pieces across about 4 different iterations of this universe, as far as I can tell, and each of them have been really quite good. I think I used to link Valiant to Image too much, as the most prominent Valiant exposure I've had was their crossover with early Image in Deathmate. But where Image was over the top and grandiose, Valiant took a different route. I wonder if anyone's ever compared them with DC and Marvel at the beginning of the Marvel Era? Valiant takes the Marvel route of grounding its heroes in the "real" world, and it works almost too well. There's a series called Armorines, about, you guessed it, an armoured Marine squad. The characters are really well done, and there's some excellent commentary on U.S.-Cuban relations, from a diasporic point of view even (!), but it's still very pro-military in a way that just doesn't sit right with me. I've noticed this in only a few comics as I've been going through the collection, but there's definitely ones written so much farther right on the political spectrum of where I sit that it becomes noticeable. The key, I suppose, is to appreciate that the belief in that particular ideological perspective has created what amounts to a wonderful popular work of art. The artists behind the work all obviously feel strongly about the material they're presenting, and that's fabulous. Indeed, I get that feeling from all of the Valiant/Acclaim books - but again, they promote a "Bullpen" atmosphere in their back matter, so perhaps I'm simply buying into the rhetoric that Stan Lee perfected back in the 60s.

Ah, voluminous. I really ought to try to get back to daily writing.

More to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tomorrow. To be continued.