The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1359: Shazam! #6, October 1973

First time I've read some proper, old-school Captain Marvel. It was very weird.

And my copy has no cover, so I've never seen that creepy AF cover up there.

I've never really understood the draw of Captain Marvel. To me, he's always been a less-interesting Superman. But today's comic is just really weird. I've been thinking a lot lately about the stories that writers were able to tell under the restrictions of the Comics Code. Some of the work we get is good, but definitely pretty standard. Would it be too strong to say that the Comics Code inspired a few decades of mediocrity being the standard. And only when you had a particularly imaginative writer or artist would we get what might be seen as a comic that pushes the genre forward.

Captain Marvel's adventures are definitely very different from those that I've seen in other superhero comics, especially of this era. There's actually something of an Archie feel to this comic for me. The situations are every bit as weird as the ones that the Riverdale gang get themselves into in the 60s and 70s, but instead of American teenagers, it's a guy in a bright red costume. I wonder if I could transpose the Riverdale characters into stories of the Marvel Family?

I don't think I actually have more than 10 comics in the collection that feature Captain Marvel, and that's a liberal estimate. I may have to track down a bit more of the C.C. Beck stuff, though, as his art style is just so lovely.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 822: Iron Man #203, February 1986

Our last issue of Iron Man for now sees Stark trying to regain control of his life after the suicide of Obadiah Stane. Stane is so evil, he's actually set up a system whereby if he doesn't enter a particular code every so often, Tony's fortune will be electronically erased. So, like any good former multi-millionaire industrialist superhero, Stark shrinks himself to minute size, flies into the computer, and stops the erasure of his fortune.

These things just happen. It's one of the parts of the MCU that irks me a good deal. Something crazy will happen in one of the television shows, and everyone acts like it's the weirdest thing they've ever seen. When aliens have actually invaded New York through a hole in the sky, and an entire city started floating off into the air, you'd think that no one would be particularly surprised by the other strangeness.

I have to say that this last week of Iron Man has not made me any more of a fan of the character. Granted, I didn't get into much, but, as I noted in an earlier post, I enjoy him much more as part of a team than as a solo hero.

And, I think, that's all I have to say about him. For now, anyway. I'll of course get back into the vast amount of Iron Man comics in the collection eventually. I think that I must have bought a collection when I had my store from someone who actually was a fan. I can't think of any other reason I'd have so many of them. Tomorrow we're going to start a week of another character I've never really taken to: The Incredible Hulk.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 820: Iron Man #200, November 1985

Skipping ahead a little further, and we hit a milestone comic. The 200th issue of any series is really something to celebrate, especially in our current climate where, while a series or character might reach this milestone, they've likely undergone numerous numbering changes and reboots by that time, so keeping track of when the 200th arrives is problematic at best. Such was not the case in the earlier years of the medium.

From what I can tell from the previous issues, Tony gives up the Iron Man armour because he's worried that getting back into the suit will drive him back to drink. But he realizes, in today's issue, that abdicating the armour doesn't mean abdicating the people who hold grudges against him and the armour, nor does it mean that the people he is close to aren't still in danger. A death close to him drives this point home, and in response, we see the new Iron Man rise from the West Coast Avengers compound.

What's actually quite cool about this comic is that much of the final battle between Tony and the Iron Monger serves as the basis for the plot of the first Iron Man film. Obadiah Stane is a much more long-haul villain in the comics, taking away Tony's company and his designs, and seeing himself much more explicitly as a Lex Luthor-type villain, with pretensions to world domination, than the Jeff Bridges version of the character who seems to just want the company. That said, had the Iron Monger escaped at the end of the first movie, we might actually have see this villainous evolution. It's one of the definite advantages the comic book versions of the stories have over the films: space to grow, not just for the heroes but for the villains as well. We get continuity of character through the MCU output, but really only with the main heroes. Take, for example, Zemo, the villain of Civil War. In the comics, he's a legacy villain, his father having fought Captain America in the Second World War, and he's perhaps one of the most fully realized villains the Marvel Universe has produced. Check out Roger Stern's Avengers: Under Siege collection, or Zemo's leading role in Thunderbolts. He's fascinating and compelling, though thoroughly fascistic and evil. In the film, he's a Sokovian soldier who wants revenge, and there's a good chance we'll never see him again. Though I'm a fan of the televisual Marvel U, I think that this is one way in which we can talk about the transition to film being unsuccessful. Comics, and superhero comics particularly, work really well because the antagonists of the stories are, in the best cases, just as well-realized as the protagonists. We understand the nuance of personality in the villains, rather than simply their stereotyped motivations.

This is why the confrontation with Obadiah Stane in today's comic is so dramatic (or would be, I suppose, for those who followed the series) - even simply according to the notes, the Stane storyline goes back 40 issues, which is almost 4 years of story. That's a lot of time and space to flesh out a villain, and make his defeat in this issue affecting.

Can such a thing happen with the MCU? Absolutely. The recent re-introduction of Grant Ward in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. speaks to this. The character was built up and fleshed out over the course of a few seasons, so to see him return, and to fulfill many of the hopes viewers might have had for the character initially, creates a wonderful sense of drama and involvement. What the films lack, unfortunately, is their seriality, an intrinsic factor in superhero narratives.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 819: Iron Man #188, November 1984

One of the really cool things about reading stories from this particular era of Iron Man is getting to see Jim Rhodes learning the ins and outs of being a super-powered adventurer. At one point in the comic, Stark notes that Rhodey might have the potential to be a better Iron Man than he ever was, as Rhodey has piloting skills that make him more at home in the air than Tony might once have been. Rhodey might be technically better, but the story being told is demonstrating how much of being a superhero is a very specific skill set that allows one to deal with the unforseeable without having it throw you for a loop.

Rhodey's not great at this. Yet.

I think the part of the comic I found most interesting was the letter column. Comics fans don't change much, it seems - they just get more venues in which to give their opinions. At least here there is editorial oversight that keeps the vitriol to a minimum. Fans are fairly united in their desire to see Stark back in the armour. Comics fans have this need, sometimes, for something original, in that there's a belief that the first version of something, particularly a superhero, is somehow intrinsically the best version. I think this betrays an odd propensity for superheroes to take on a reality that's more significant than most fictional characters. But this undercuts the ability of the creative team to propel a character to greatness. A number of the letters claim that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but I think this betrays a misrecognition about where the vitality of a character comes from. It would be more suitable to credit a creative team with being Iron Man, as they are the ones who take the iconic assemblage that is a superhero and turn it into stories that we enjoy and cleave to.

History has shown that Rhodey is every bit as good in the armour as Stark. This is a result not of anything intrinsic to the character, but to the characterization he is given by the people writing the comic. As long as the story is well-told, the inhabitant of the armour doesn't matter that much.

Not to me, anyway.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 818: Iron Man #187, October 1984

So we jump 70 issues, in to the 80s, and all of a sudden James Rhodes is Iron Man. This is the Iron Man I was originally introduced to. The first West Coast Avengers series was one of the first series I ever collected, and Rhodey had just become Iron Man at that point. As I noted yesterday, the reason for this is that Tony Stark has accepted, and started dealing with, his drinking problem. There's a nice two or three panel sequence in this issue of Stark musing on "being thirsty," and then walking away from a bar that he's strolling past. It's a small moment, but one that speaks to the daily struggle that is very often the life of an addict.

Story-wise, this is a relatively straight forward tale - villain escapes from prison and threatens a small town if Iron Man doesn't present himself for vengeance. Of course, IM and his team figure out the source of the villain's powers and defeat him. It's the last part of the story about Vibro (an unfortunate villain name if ever there was one, and probably a future Scourge victim), and it has about it the feel of an epilogue. The art by Luke McDonnell is...well, it's a bit awkward, actually. There's one or two shots of Iron Man flying away and he really seems like he doesn't know what to do with his body. This could be a narrative choice, I suppose, but Rhodey simply doesn't seem like the kind of character that would hold himself awkwardly, whether flying through the air or standing on the ground, so these moments where the red and gold body looks somewhat askew are quite off-putting.

I'll keep on trucking through Iron Man this week. I've got a short run of the Michelinie-penned stuff coming up, so perhaps I'll draw our look at the golden Avenger out a little longer than a week. But I'm kind of hoping to spend at least a week over the next little while on iconic characters. The Hulk, John Constantine, some others that have become more available to me since my rearrangement of the collection.

To be continued.