The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1891: Awesome Preview, 1998

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This'll be one of three times that I'll be reading the story "Glory and the Gate of Tears," reprinted one more time from Awesome and then once from Avatar (plus a preview of it from Avatar). As I've noted in my posts on the various covers that this incarnation of Glory commands, it's a bittersweet tale to read because it's got so much promise. I know that much of that promise is fulfilled in Promethea, so that's nice, but I feel that Glory would have brought a very different aesthetic to the exploration of the World Tree and the Sephiroth. Where Promethea exists in a superheroic world, I'm not sure I'd class her as a superhero. But Glory definitely is - she's got the comics to prove it.

I'll talk more about this story tomorrow.

The Fighting American preview is quite cool - it's just Stephen Platt's pencils and I love seeing stuff like this. His work is super-detailed. I can't imagine being the inker for this work. That said, the Dogs of War mini was my least favourite of the Awesome Fighting American stuff. But his pencils are gorgeous.

The Re-Gex preview is Beowulf's story, but without dialogue. I think this story is reprinted in an issue of The Coven, in the Re-Gex zero issue, and potentially in one of the Re:Gex preview issues that I do not have. Maybe this one is reprinted almost as much as the Glory story. As I've said over the last couple of days, Re:Gex is interesting, but ultimately goes nowhere.

First day on a new job today.

More to follow.

And here's the flip cover:

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1873: Fighting American:Dogs of War #3, May 1999

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A few final thoughts as I wrap up this particular version of Captain Am....I mean, Fighting American.

First, no one told me this wasn't a complete story, dammit. This issue ends on a cliffhanger, with the promise of another part to the story that simply never appears. And the 5 month time between last issue and this one probably means that another of Liefeld's financial relationships was falling apart.

Second, No Name's racism, especially given the nature of the weapon they're trying to stop, is just horrendous. The team are trying to stop the sale of a weapon that targets people with higher melanin content in their skin, so it's basically a white supremacy weapon. At the end of today's issue, it's in the process of being sold to a Texan who wants his state to be, and I quote, "All white." Where's Beto when you need him? So to have a racist character on the side of the angels (so to speak) is quite off-putting. Not that racism ever isn't.

That's all I've got for this one. The previous two series were okay, but not great, but this one was just rampantly mediocre. It's a pity, because both Starlin and Platt are very good at what they do. I just don't think this series is what they should have been doing.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1872: Fighting American:Dogs of War #2, December 1998

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I wasn't 100% wrong - the series is pretty much devolving into an excuse for random violent sequences against faceless bad guys. That said, Fighting American still wrestles with the idea of killing. No so his sidekick for this series, No Name, who we're supposed, and who FA supposes, to think is actually the lost Speedboy, somehow back from the dead. And No Name likes killing. And using racist language to talk about someone from China. Actually, he uses racist epithets that are more properly (?) applied to Japanese people, so I'm not sure if this shows a gap in writer Jim Starlin's knowledge (which I doubt), or our No Name is just supposed to be a stupid enough racist that he doesn't differentiate between people from different parts of East Asia. I'm going with the second idea, as it adds a bit of nuance to a relatively nuance-less story.

Honestly, this series really seems like it's trying to reboot the whole of Fighting American in the Awesome Universe - there's no mention of previous adventures, no mention of other characters. Fighting American, it appeared, was being set up to take a starring role in The Allies (which never appears), and was perhaps going to bring a military, but sympathetic, viewpoint to the Awesome Universe. But now, and I think I may have said it yesterday, it's like they handed him to Frank Miller and told him to forget the rest of the shared narrative space the character inhabits.

Awesome Comics folds about a year and a half from this comic's publication. As Alan Moore's revision wave at the beginning of this awesome experiment suggests, sometimes a universe will start trying as many different possibilities as it can in order to find something that will stick. I get the feeling that this Fighting American series was just such a try. As we'll see with tomorrow's issue, it just didn't work.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1871: Fighting American:Dogs of War #1, September 1998

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Fighting American's final Awesome outing is a very different creature from the previous few stories. As far as I can tell there was supposed to be a Loeb/Liefeld series bridging Rules of the Game and Dogs of War called Cold War, but it never materialized. I wonder if it would have gone some of the distance toward explaining the changes. I think the aborted Allies series was probably supposed to have come out around this time as well.

The biggest change is that S.P.I.C.E. is not only absent from the comic, but isn't mentioned even once in this first third of the story. In fact, things have taken a turn for the darker, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find this comic amongst early Image titles by the same people. Stephen Platt's artwork is insane. His sense of the scale of masculine bodies is not something I understand, though there is something vaguely homoerotic about the consistent hyper-masculinity across his works. FA, and all of the male characters in this comic, are buff beyond buff. Like, to the point that I don't think a human body could actually sustain the amount of muscle that appears to be packed onto these bodies. Jim Starlin's words are, as would be expected, at a level above the usual hyper-violent Image-esque work, though he seems to be channeling Frank Miller a lot of the time here. Starlin also illustrates an issue of Supreme: The Return for Awesome, so perhaps he was one of the big-name talents Liefeld was courting before financial disaster struck.

While Platt's art is good, and I generally enjoy his work for what it is, this series, thus far, isn't nearly as good as the previous two. I think Loeb had a nice handle on how FA would react to his new circumstances, and much as I disliked her, S.P.I.C.E. brought some much-needed levity to the books. Without her, Fighting American has the potential, as I think we'll see in the next couple of issues, to basically become an early-Supreme styled Captain America, simply violent for violence's sake.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

 

I've totally run out of related things to this series. If you want to read some more interesting stuff, how about my various thoughts on the Dollar Bin, one of my favourite parts of comic collecting.

Or how about a few posts on a very weird, very violent Canadian science fiction comic called Futility.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1870: Awesome Holiday Special, December 1997

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In much the same way I wrote a series on the minor works of Steve Gerber, I think it would be worthwhile to do the same for Alan Moore. He's had so many series that just never went anywhere, and for the most part they were going to be amazing. There was a recent interview with Leah Moore in which she described her father's deep love for superheroes and the damage that was done to this love by his time in the comics industry. It's actually quite sad that someone who so obviously loves superheroes so much got treated the way he did by virtually every major superhero publisher in North America. No wonder he's so bitter.

The reason I bring this up is that there's a Youngblood story in today's issue that is the prelude to the 2.5 issues we end up getting of his reboot of the team. As I was reading the story, told in the voice of team leader Jeff Terrel, Shaft, I was amazed at how Moore's voice in the story was so different from his voice in any of his other stories. I know this seems like an obvious thing to point out, but a lot of writers have one voice when they write - their own - and they simply layer it over whatever character they're writing. But one of Moore's great gifts is to give each character their own distinctive voice, to the extent that I'd be hard-pressed to point to a comic that is actually written in Moore's own voice. Like Foucault said, the author isn't a person, it's a function, and at the best of times that function includes an erasure, or subsumption, of the author's own voice.

But there's more than just Moore in this issue. I have to say, at the end of the comic, I was left smiling and feeling pretty good, which is exactly what one wants from a holiday comic. I'm actually surprised that I haven't read this one already, but I'm glad that I was able to leave it until I was reading Fighting American. The FA story in this issue is about S.P.I.C.E., written and drawn (almost exclusively in full page panels) by Mr. Liefeld. It's not bad, but not great, but also takes place after the Rules of the Game series I just finished, as FA is in the process of putting the Allies back together.

What else? Both the Coven and Kaboom stories were good enough to make me want to track down their respective series. Honestly, I'm not that far off from having everything that Awesome produced, and, as I've said before, I just love the hell out of this universe. Back to FA's final Awesome outing tomorrow. Then maybe Youngblood?

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Though I missed it this year, I'm usually pretty good about reading holiday-themed comics (though apparently I have two different tags for them?)

And if I'm going to dive into Youngblood, you can find what I've previously said about them here and here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1869: Fighting American:Rules of the Game #3, March 1998

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The series ends with an appearance by another couple of old FA villains, Double Header and the Buzz Bomber, as Flagg and S.P.I.C.E. (whose name I'm getting sick of typing) make their way to the mastermind behind the bounty on FA's head, Round Robin. The final fight is a bit anticlimactic, but it serves the purpose of convincing John Flagg that Fighting American is needed back in the world.

Which is what his military bosses had hoped would happen when they hired Robin in the first place.

I think that if the Awesome Universe had continued, I'd have loved to see some interactions between FA and Supreme, or Doctor Night. This universe had so, so much potential, which is, I think, why I'm so obsessed with getting all of their titles, even the ones that are kind of sub-par. Which is not really a fair thing to say, because the really good titles are really, really good, so even the sub-par ones are pretty fantastic comics.

Fighting American, in this incarnation, is a very interesting character, and I think having used the retirement story line for Captain America could have been cool. We see it to a certain extent in the MCU - after Civil War, Steve Rogers really isn't Captain America again, aside from being in the costume at the end of Endgame. I'm sure there's other moments, but even if he's in the costume, he's not really Cap again. Really, he ceases to be Captain America when America ceases to support him. It's the old argument about the character, really. Does he represent the U.S. as it is now, as a patriotic hero that embodies what the country is at the moment, or does he represent what the U.S. could have been if it hadn't been bogged down by corruption, white nationalism (accidentally typed "shite" there!), and capitalism? For me, Cap, at his best (see Gruenwald's work in the 80s), is the dream of America, rather than its reality, and those are always the best stories to tell with him, the ones that question where things went wrong, and whether or not that spirit of freedom and innovation can survive in the urban sink that America has become.

I wonder if perhaps a book on Captain America is about due, given the awful, awful turn the country has taken in the last few years.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

For more on the writer of this series, have a look at the other Jeph Loeb comics I've read.

I wrote a piece for Sequart on Steve Gerber's Captain America that I'm pretty proud of too.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1868: Fighting American:Rules of the Game #2, January 1998

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I'm not sure exactly who a battle between a septuagenarian and an adolescent girl is appealing to, but it ain't this guy. I'm not exactly a fan of superhero vs. superhero battles at the best of times (the Civil War series being an obvious exception, though not the mediocre film of the same name) - it's trite and cliched and moves the story along in ways that could have easily been accomplished without resorting to violence. So at the end of yesterday's comic, when S.P.I.C.E. turns on Fighting American, I rolled my eyes and got ready for an annoying read today.

It was still kind of an annoying read, thanks to S.P.I.C.E.'s hackneyed dialogue (what 90s teen calls someone "Pops"?), but was mitigated somewhat with the reveal that she had been taken over by another of FA's old foes, Invisible Irving. I still don't like her character, but at least she wasn't taking on Fighting American out of some misplaced need to boost her superheroic ego.

This issue manages to make Fighting American distinct from his patriotic forebear in one very important way: he is totally fine with killing his opponents. Hotsky Trotsky gets a shield-spike through the chest, and Irving is fried by a joint attack by FA and S.P.I.C.E. It's probably for the best, as they were Russian stereotypes perhaps most wisely left in the 50s with the original run.

There was a flip comic in today's issue, a 5-page preview for a series called SWAT!. From what I can tell, it's two normal teens with lots of hardware store equipment who are hoping to take on supervillains in their town. Or something. And it seems to have never materialized as a series, if the GCD is to be believed. Again, it's probably for the best, as the lead male character, Lee, espouses some attitudes toward women that would be more at home with FA's enemies in the 50s than they would be in the more progressive (somewhat) 90s.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Rob Liefeld's business practices have made his movement through publishing companies something of an industry joke. He starts out with Extreme Studios, as part of Image Comics.

After this, he founds Maximum Press, the direct precursor to Awesome Entertainment.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1867: Fighting American:Rules of the Game #1, November 1997

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

As FA only lasted 8 issues with Awesome, I figured I'd just read them all. The great thing about today's comic is it's one of the earliest collaborations between Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuiness, who go on after Awesome folds to write a really, really good run on Superman in the early 2000s. McGuiness' art has a kinetic feel to it that works very nicely with the acrobatic maneuvers of both FA and S.P.I.C.E.

Who is a character I dislike immensely. She's meant to be a snarky 16-year old, or is programmed to be, anyway, and she definitely acts like it. The problem is that unless they're quite mature, a 16-year old girl isn't really the best choice for a superhero. And that word there, choice, is the key. Who in their right mind would create an android that is a, and I quote, "weapon of mass destruction that is built like a sixteen year old girl"? Is there some thinly-veiled teen angst rearing its head here? And even if one built such a device to look like a girl, why oh why give it the personality of one. I know that it's an attempt to link a character who is from a different time with the time within which the stories are set, but there must be better ways.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I haven't read a lot of Captain America for the blog, but I have had a few thoughts.

And here's some stuff about comics from the era in which Fighting American was first published.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1866: Fighting American #2, October 1997

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

As a follow-up to some of the things I said yesterday:

First, I fucking love the Awesome Universe. Once Alan Moore revamped it, it became a place where we could both question and celebrate some of the greatest superheroic characters ever created. I've no doubt that, had Rob Liefeld managed the company a bit better, it could have grown into one of the greats. Having Moore and Jeph Loeb as two of your primary writers, how can you go wrong?

Second, it turns out that Marvel, in the 90s and during "Heroes Reborn," started failing as a company, and asked Liefeld to take a lower pay rate for his work on Captain America. Liefeld refused and left, taking his stories with him, one of which turned into this series. Perhaps that's my big problem with Liefeld. It's the same problem I have with John Byrne. They think so much of themselves, rather than recognizing that they are people doing a job in an industry with thousands of others. Just because you're lauded for a little while doesn't mean you have carte blanche for the rest of your career.

Today's issue attempts to mimic Alan Moore's model of Supreme, giving us a flashback sequence mid-comic. It doesn't quite work as well, as the flashback is drawn by Stephen Platt, in his own inimitable style, rather than in the style of the era within which the flashback was set. The same thing happens with Moore's Glory from Avatar. In order for these flashbacks to work in the way that the writers want them to, they need to be era-appropriate. That's how Awesome was building its universe and its history at the time. Platt's art, which I actually love, screams 90s, so it's hard to imagine that the story he illustrates is taking place in the 50s.

That said, I'm sure lots of people had no problem with it whatsoever. Taste is a very personal thing.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Fighting American was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and was, uncommonly for the time, creator-owned. I've had a fair bit to say about Jack Kirby. 

And here's a post on Youngblood that I think goes some distance to explaining my fascination with the Extreme/Maximum/Awesome characters.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1865: Fighting American #1, August 1997

For information on stopping the spread of COVID-19, and on what to do if you are quarantined, have a look at the World Health Organization site.

The editorial at the back of this comic is a full page of Rob Liefeld whining about how Marvel Comics wouldn't allow him to publish this comic. Every time I try to give Liefeld the benefit of the doubt, I run across something where he's just the worst.

Let's be very clear: the Awesome Entertainment stable of characters, with possibly one or two exceptions, are thinly-veiled knock-offs of DC and Marvel characters. This is especially the case in the post-Judgment Day universe within which this character makes his appearances. Supreme is Superman. Glory is Wonder Woman. Fighting American is Captain America. It's not hard to see this. Now, don't get me wrong. Marvel should not have shut this comic down the way that they did. No one is going to mistake this mediocre comic for the Waid/Garney Cap stories that were being published around this time. Liefeld seems to be angry about the "Heroes Reborn" initiative being shut down by Marvel, but here's the thing - they were really pretty crappy stories. Even after Liefeld left Captain America, the James Robinson stuff afterward is just awful.

Having said that about the Awesome characters, I honestly don't see anything wrong with it. These are simply paeans to some of the greatest mythic characters that North America has managed to produce from its hodge-podge culture. The problem comes once again to the idea of corporate copyright, or perpetual copyright. A company like Marvel truly believes that Captain America belongs to them, which shows a complete disregard for the way that stories work in our culture. Once it's out in the world, no one "owns" it anymore. It's simply a story that we transmit, and in that transmission we sometimes adapt the story in order that it suit our particular needs. Which, to me, is what Liefeld and company were doing here. If he couldn't tell the stories he wanted to with Captain America, why not simply tell them with a version of the character?

I have feelings about corporate ownership of stories. It just feels wrong.

More to follow.

Related Posts and Further Reading

Have a look here for some more of my thoughts on the Awesome Universe, the good and the bad.

And if you'd like to read more of my thoughts on Rob Liefeld, or at least stuff that mentions him, be warned: I am just not kind to him.