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 777: Dark Nemesis #1, February 1998

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.