The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2409: Fantastic Four #144, March 1974

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Publisher: Marvel Comics

Writer: Gerry Conway

Artists: Rich Buckler & Joe Sinnott

Man, year 7 of this project has been a real shit show. But, y'know, I try.

Before I get to today's comic, for the last little while I've been working through my Superman comics chronologically. My oldest is an issue of Lois Lane from the early 60s. Let me tell you, and I say this as a great fan and admirer of what Superman has become, some of this early stuff is just...bad. I mean, the art is great, and the dialogue and narrative flow are expert, but the subject matter of the stories is just subpar. I think about 90% of the stories across all titles that feature Lois are somehow about her needing to marry a good man. Superman uses his powers to play some pretty mean pranks on various friends, and Jimmy Olsen is the irresponsible "pal" Superman could possibly have. So let's just call it all apocryphal and move on, shall we?

I'm going to be spending a lot more time writing for work, so I'm hoping this will inspire me to get back to the project on a daily basis. Today's issue is a pretty rad 70s FF, with Medusa filling in for Sue, and Doctor Doom seemingly meeting his doom at the end of the comic. I will say this - Ben Grimm is a giant pain in the ass in this comic. I find the Thing's characterization to be off-putting sometimes. Given the things he's seen, I always expect Grimm to be a more even-tempered and open-minded creature. He is these days, but in his genesis he was written as a very pig-headed and resistant character. Thank goodness someone came along and gave him a bit of nuance eventually.

Not much more to say, except that this comic and I share a cover date.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2085: Captain America #149, May 1972

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 The question of consuming media that is older presents us with uncomfortable truths sometimes. And chief amongst those discomforts is depictions of different cultures or ethnicities, particularly in Western media. Both Sam Wilson's Harlem and Batroc "Ze Leap-air"'s horrendous French accent are reminders of times when stereotype was an accepted shorthand regardless of how insulting or misinformed that stereotype may have been. Really, as they do today, comics writers should trust that if a character is French, we can imagine them speaking with an accent, rather than having to Inspector Clouseau them for us. This is, of course, not to accuse any of the creators involved in such use of stereotype of any kind of bigotry - it's simply that that was the accepted, and available, language for such depictions at the time.

What this usually reminds me of is a conversation with a friend who pointed out that we, as kids in Western society, consumed a really startling amount of very racist content without even realizing it. I recently had a dig through a large collection of weekly British comics, The Beano and The Dandy and such, but literally every issue had some very problematic depiction of race, usually Native American people, and, honestly, Dennis the Menace and his constant bullying of his shy neighbour is some heavy-handed homophobia, really. Tough to get through, and hence back into storage for a while. I think that, for me, one of the processes of recognizing my privilege is this necessity of re-examining so much of the media of my formative years. So much programming took place at such a fundamental time. It's jarring to go back and recognize how fucked up everything really was (and still is, of course), and how I need to reshape the bits that were bent out of shape.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1927: Countdown Special: The Atom #1, February 2008

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I watched, for the first time, Batman v. Superman last night. The "Ultimate" edition.

Bear with me for a moment.

It was 3 hours long, which, even for me, is a long time to spend with superheroes. But I, to be totally honest, didn't mind it. While I was watching it, I was texting my kid, and I suggested to them that the thing about Zack Snyder films is that, to a certain extent, they just play like fan fiction. For superheroes, Mr. Snyder has a very clear vision of what he wants to see: a combination of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. But literally. Hence fan fiction. That said, and acknowledging that that's what was going on, it was a decent enough superhero movie with some good set pieces, and Ben Affleck is fucking amazing as old Batman. I would bring him back to that role in a heartbeat.

Near the end, however, I was chatting with my housemate about why it was so panned, and why, again by the end, I had just had enough. And she suggested that, quite rightly, people are just so fucking tired of seeing angsty white dudes on the screen, working out their issues in godlike exercises of power. There's a stab at diversity, in crowd casting for certain, and in the fact that we have an Israeli woman, a Japanese woman, and a Black man in supporting roles. But the three leads, the Bat, the Boyscout, and the Reporter, are white. And angsty. Today's comic reminded me of that.

With the exception that there were no People of Colour in the comic. Okay, I lie. There's one panel, in the latter half of the comic, the part illustrated by my featured creator today, Arvell Jones. In one panel, a group shot of a bunch of telepaths' heads, there is front and center a Black man. I have to assume that Jones placed that there himself. The rest of the comic is, as Batman v. Superman is, a bunch of white dudes. And Supergirl.

Mr. Jones has had a few mentions in the blog, having illustrated a Doom Patrol story in Super-Team's predecessor publication, and having been featured in my first Black Lives Matter-related readings, with Super-Villain Team-Up, and one of the weirdest comics I've ever read.

So what to do with this comic. First things first, it's a late 2000s reprint of stories from the late 70s. I've noted a couple of times in the last few days how strange it must have been for Black artists of the Bronze age to illustrate stories in which they saw nothing of themselves. Do we have to look to the colour artists, perhaps, or whomever it was who created the colour guides for each page. Why are all the background characters white? In fact, by this point in DC continuity, there had been a Black Green Lantern for 6 years. Why not use John Stewart in the story, rather than Hal Jordan? I mean, the short answer is systemic racism. The people involved in these stories very likely aren't racists - they're people who have been brought up in a society that has racism woven into its fabric. There was a default society, and it was white, and that was simply how it was. As comrades to the Black Lives Matter movement, it's incumbent on us to recognize how that racism has manifested so that we can pull the threads, unravel the fabric, and make something new together.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

The Atom has shown up occasionally in my 40 Years project.

Slightly more so the Green Lantern.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1710: Kull, the Conqueror #5, November 1972

We move on from Jan Duursema to an artist who has been with Marvel almost since the beginning, Marie Severin. If you read comics in the 70s or 80s, especially Marvel comics, it's almost inconceivable that you wouldn't have seen some of Ms. Severin's work. Today's comic is a nice example of her 70s work, another R.E. Howard character snapped up and made visual by Marvel, something that resonates with the current Marvel U and the Savage Avengers.

Storywise, the comic is a bit of a miss. The tale is a good one, but it's not an original one: Kull is asked to help a neighbouring country, only to have them turn on him at the end. I worry sometimes that the proliferation of this kind of story is actually what makes us untrustworthy animals - we're so influenced by our fictions and stories (see: every organized religion ever) that we don't always tend to notice when that influence makes us worse. If we keep retelling a particular tale, like this one of betrayal, at some point we come to believe that it has truth to it, that we are an untrustworthy species. I wonder how long, and what kind of stories, it would take to convince us to actually trust each other?

"You will prove most useful, my curious savage."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1561: The Superman Family #193, Jan.-Feb.1979

Supergirl and the Doom Patrol finally meet! After the villains are defeated, and the chaos subsides. Supergirl says thanks, and lets them get back to their vacation. All in all, not the Patrol's finest hour.

A while back, I read the issue that follows this one, an issue that finishes up a number of the storylines I've read in the last few days. I'm going to have to read it again, I think, just to get a bit of closure. The Doom Patrol are absent from comics for a couple of years after this adventure, and it's a very different version that we'll see next. But that can wait til tomorrow.

If you're looking for a stereotypical DC comic of this era, Superman Family is pretty much it. It's kind of a last gasp of these versions of the characters, as the Crisis looms in the not too distant future. Superboy's Smallville backstory is never quite this naive ever again, nor Krypto's inner dialogue so wry. Lois loses a bit of her independence in losing her own feature. So, despite what I've called their unremarkability, their naivety is charming enough that I'd recommend giving them a go.

"I'd hoped my little absence wouldn't undermine our splendid relationship!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1560: The Superman Family #192, Nov.-Dec.1978

I think the thing about these stories is that they are, for the most part, unremarkable. It's not that they're not good stories - they're wonderful, silly, weird stories, just not remarkable ones. I get the sense that writers and artists were starting to really feel the stifling shadow of the Comics Code at this point, especially those creators who had come up through a more revolutionary culture than the generation before. You can see this in the pushing at the boundaries in some of the stories, most interestingly the Krypto feature. The Dog of Steel is involved in some inner city gang trouble, but it all turns out okay. Perhaps that's the problem - everything turns out okay in these stories. There never really seems to be too much on the line.

That aside, the Doom Patrol feature in this issue, and last, is odd. It's touted as a team-up with Supergirl, but the two haven't even come close to meeting. And the Doom Patrol's part of the story seems fairly straightforward, and really could have featured any superteam. I think that if you're going to have a guest star, you have to respect the version of the genre that star comes from. I'm prepping a post that is the first article I ever had published, and it thinks about how we can reconcile a satiric or parodic comic like Doom Patrol, Ambush Bug, or Hitman, with the more serious fare of the Batman books, for example. I explain it through inflection theory, which very quickly would mean that if the Patrol are guesting in Supergirl's feature, there should be some specific reason it's the Patrol. Just as if she were guesting in their book, there would have to be some reason it was her.

I'll try to get the article up soonish.

"Gosh, Supergirl---you're even better than the Bionic Woman!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1559: The Superman Family #191, Sept.-Oct. 1978

A little less than a year later, the Patrol return to assist Supergirl in her series in the anthology title The Superman Family. Although the stories are, for the most part, the generally pretty undramatic fare of comics in the throes of the Code, I have a soft spot for these kinds of series. These, to me, are comics aimed squarely at kids, and at giving them a fair bit for their hard-earned money. Some of the stories are standalones and some are parts of series. They're all well-rendered, much in the vein of the era, like their stories. One thing I will say for this era of DC is that despite having some lackluster stories, their artists were still top of the line.

The Patrol stumbles into trouble today while on holiday in England. I suppose that's as good a place as any to find them, and let's assume that some strange case took them to the United Kingdom. They don't actually meet up with Supergirl in this issue, though both she and the Patrol face menaces that are affecting local gravity with some pretty catastrophic consequences. I'll likely get sick of writing it, but they act very much like superheroes here, saving people and trying to stop the menace, and there's nothing wrong with that, but usually it's more of a struggle for the Doom Patrol to act like superheroes. More often than not the situations within which they find themselves remind our heroes of just how fragile they really are, which in turn prompts them to adopt more unorthodox thinking. Not so with the New Doom Patrol. They wade in, hands blazing, and blow things up.

(Oh, the Lois Lane story today has the intrepid reporter tracking down a baby trafficking ring and just about beating the leader of it to death. Literally. She has to be pulled off at the last moment. It was pretty intense, and not at all what I was expecting from this series.)

"For all our insecurities, it seems we have some use in this world, after all!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1178: Action Comics #523, September 1981

A very silly story about an alien that convinces Steve Lombard that they're brothers in order to steal Steve's athletic prowess.

I'm not even kidding a little.

As I noted a couple of days ago, Superman faces some very, very strange menaces. I think it's because most writers recognize that if they used the kinds of challenges that are usual for other superheroes, Superman would fix the problem immediately. But when you go to the stranger side of things, antagonists can have very weird and specific powers that baffle, but never quite defeat, the Man of Steel.

More Action to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1176: Action Comics #479, January 1978

I've never actually seen the cover of this comic. I have in my collection a fair number of coverless comics that have found their way into the boxes over the years. I'm not picky about this sort of thing. Though the covers are wonderful works in and of themselves, I'm more particular about the story being complete, rather than the comic itself. I'm more inclined to not include a comic in my collection if the center pages have come loose, and there is thus story missing. This is the case with many of my Archie comics, and, sadly, one of my old Animal Man Strange Adventures issues.

But today's story is intact, if coverless. Superman faces a foe that only he can see, which makes for some kind of hilarious panels of the big guy doing what looks like those instructional dance photographs that you might find in an old disco album.

(Tell me there's someone out there who gets that comparison...)

It's a competent story, and indicative of the Superman stories we see in this era, pre-Crisis, pre-gritwash. Writers appeared to just throw the most outlandishly powerful and weird villains at Superman to see what he would do. The random bad guys he faces in the 70s remind me of the weirdos the Doom Patrol fought a decade earlier. That's a strange lineage to trace, but I think that Superman is often far more weird that we give him credit for. Consider the wackiness of the 50s and 60s, much like that of Batman - I think in a lot of ways that surreality has never really left the Man of Steel. It's not just that he's equipped to deal with villains that are strong, but also those that are strange. The super human is not only physically superior, mentally superior, but also conceptually superior, able to intuit about alienness. Which Superman does very, very well.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1001: The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #4, 1988

And back to the Evolutionary War.

Considering Spider-Man has faced the High Evolutionary's forces three times now, this crossover is starting to feel like a Spider-Man story, rather than one that spans the Marvel Universe. But the stories are still only very loosely connected. Spidey himself admits he really has no idea what's going on. I think this is really what sets the crossover apart from others, and it's something I mentioned right at the very beginning of this story - unlike most crossovers, the heroes really have no idea what's going on. No one's discovered a secret cache of plans, no enemies have defected to the good guys' side because they disagree with the High Evolutionary's plan. From this point of view, the crossover is not playing into many of the tropes that we see in contemporary crossovers. Indeed, given the utter lack of awareness and information that the heroes have, I can't see how they'll end up stopping the Evolutionary's manipulations.

I guess we'll find out in tomorrow's Avengers annual, which will lead us nicely back into the last few issues of Walt Simonson's run. I should note that I didn't manage to find one part of this crossover, the West Coast Avengers annual, but I'll keep an eye out for it and fill in the gap when I can.

Today's issue had a couple of interesting points. First, Gwen Stacy is back. When will poor Peter be free of this burden? Well, as it turns out, at the end of this issue. The "clone" turns out to not be a clone, but rather a genetically altered woman, and that alteration is undone and she goes back to whatever life she has out there. Second, we have the Young Gods. This is a super team created way back in 1972 - ostensibly they're people chosen by various gods of Earth to become the next generation of deities. There are, however, some problems. First, though hailing from numerous different nations around the world, most of the characters are coloured Caucasian. A young Polynesian girl and an Indian man are probably the most egregious examples of this whitewashing, and I can only hope that it's a colouring problem from a technical standpoint, rather than a deliberate act. Another problem leapt out at me because I've been teaching Indigenous Literature and culture this week. One of the characters is a young white woman from 19th century Ottawa (misspelled in the comic) who is chosen by a member of the Algonquin pantheon to be a deity. This seems problematic to me, though we might be able to side-step the problem by claiming that the woman was simply the best choice for deification. However, given the horrendous under-representation of Indigenous Peoples in comics, having a settle chosen by an Indigenous god is just not okay.

But enough for now. We'll finish the war tomorrow.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 837: Wonder Woman #268, June 1980

Our last little look at Wonder Woman's adventures for now wraps up a long-standing storyline about The Cartel, a mysterious organization working to....do something. I've never really been quite sure about their motivations. Something vaguely sinister and world-dominating, I would imagine.

Diana and Buddy follow a lead to the south of France. The first page of the issue has Buddy rubbing tanning oil onto Diana's shoulders (who, being invulnerable, shouldn't really have to worry about a sunburn). I shudder to think what poor Ellen would think.

The story wraps pretty quickly, actually, which makes me think that this was writer Gerry Conway finishing off a story so that he could move the comic in a different direction. The finale of the story seems to sever Diana's contacts with the U.N. and the teaser on the letters page for the next issue notes that there will soon be a "major transition in the Amazon's life." Just what it is is a mystery for the ages.

We're going to follow Mr. Buddy Baker for a little while, starting tomorrow. I'll see how much of his early stuff I haven't already read, and then maybe we'll get into the Morrison run. But this week has definitely been awesome. I'm glad that I enjoyed the Wonder Woman movie, because it prompted me to read some of her comics, and keep my eyes open for more.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 836: Wonder Woman #267, May 1980

So I have a confession to make.

Much as I laud the Man of Steel, much as I find inspiration in his stories, he's not my favourite superhero.

Animal Man is.

I've written a few times about Animal Man. He's a character that is near and dear to my heart. He's the first superhero I ever read by Grant Morrison, whose work is also so dear to my heart.

(The first Morrison I ever read was The Doctor.)

Even in the strange, lost years in which I was not an obsessive comics fan, I recalled Animal Man's adventures fondly. And when I regained my senses and got into comics again, his were some of the earliest comics I started tracking down.

Today's comic is one of the few pre-Morrison Animal Man adventures that exist. Between his origin and Morrison's comic, there's probably less than 15 appearances. It's nice to see A-Man show up and hold his own against the Amazon Princess, especially given the limits of his powers at this point. Rather than his connection to a morphogenetic field in the later run, Buddy could only access the powers of animals he could see. Good thing for all those coincidentally useful creatures passing by.

There's one line in this issue that I think sums up Animal Man quite well. It's quite wise, which isn't surprising given its source. Wonder Woman, considering her new ally, thinks "A strange man. At first, he seems almost like a clown...but underneath that humorous exterior, I sense a driving purpose..." I noted in my very early entry on Animal Man #5 that the art on that run is very cartoon-y, but is meshed with a proto-Vertigo sensibility. Which is kind of what Wonder Woman says right there. Neat.

One last little bit of the Amazon tomorrow, and then I think we're going to follow Animal Man on his adventures after this little encounter.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 753: Justice League of America #200

A lazy Sunday morning in bed reading an oversized Justice League comic and having a bowl of cereal. While outside, it looks like it might actually be Spring (I fool myself, but sometimes we have to).

Today's comic follows in that long tradition of comics about superheroes fighting superheroes. I'm not sure where this particular subgenre comes from. Sometimes I think that it has a lot to do with why diverse religions have battled one another over the course of human history. We place our faith in something and can't possibly understand how someone else could place something so important and vital in something different. Everyone has a favourite superhero, one that we place our faith in, so it's natural (?) to want to know who'd come out on top. My god is stronger than your god, I suppose.

On the other hand, it might just come from the idea that we want to see the cool characters duking it out with one another. Yeah, when they fight a villain, it's cool. But villains, by their nature in these kinds of comics, will always lose. If it's heroes fighting one another, who's the villain? Who's going to lose? Such contests offer a bit more suspense.

That aside, this was a fairly standard early 80s DC comic. The artists jam on the issue was pretty sweet, bringing together some of the truly great DC artists of the last few decades. It was also a nice hearkening back to the original JLA case from The Brave and the Bold, though how it would fit in with Mark Waid's retcon in JLA:Year One, I'm not sure. Though I'm fairly certain that's not canon anymore anyway. Well, given DC's propensity for multiverses, it's canon somewhere, I'm sure.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 289: Wonder Woman v.1 #270, August 1980

Occasionally I will hear stories from friends about inheriting a cool collection of old comics from a relative, or (and this is true) just finding a box of comics chucked in a dumpster. More often than not these troves contain treasures, though slightly tarnished, that I would dearly love to add to my collection. Alas, it's never happened to me. However...

While tidying my basement the other day, I came across a stack of old comics and I have no recollection of where they came from. I think it might have been a 50-cent bin at a local comic store, but none of them have been entered in my database, so I've no record of where, or when, they found their way into my lair. Today's comic is one of them.

Wonder Woman is so often over-looked that even to say that has become a cliche. Part of me wonders (pun intended) if it's because she's undergone so many metamorphoses over the course of her existence (which sort of links her back to her Greek roots, I guess), many of which have been quite short-lived, that no one's really got a good sense of her. For myself, I think the original version, and some of the original comics, are probably the best version of her. But this issue, by Gerry Conway and Jose Delbo, seems to be yet another reboot, a few years after the de-powering feminist issues, and a few years before the George Perez Crisis-inspired reboot. And while such repetition can be troubling in a periodically published story, I wonder if these retellings of her origins don't actually bring her closer to her mythological roots.

I've recently finished teaching an introductory literature course, and the linking facet of the texts was their hearkening back (and forward) to myths of the past. One of the things I told the class very early one was that myths become myths because we keep telling and retelling the stories in different forms for different times. Is this why we see so many retellings of Wonder Woman's origins, why there's so many different versions of her? Perhaps. Maybe there's something fundamental going on in this tale of the girl made of clay who becomes a paragon of peace. Okay, not maybe. There definitely is. So, I suppose the question becomes, when will we actually see a version of this story burst into the popular culture and be regarded as every bit as good and important as the other members of the DCU trinity?

Hopefully soon, but, much as I like to remain optimistic, I'm not holding my breath.