The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 879: The Defenders #77, November 1979

This is the way the world ends...in the story, with a bang. But for Omega the Unknown, it's more a whimper, I'm afraid.

Now, don't get me wrong. The way that Steven Grant finishes off this tale is a wonderfully epic superhero tale. It's just that, in a lot of ways, Omega wasn't a superhero story. When I went to pick this up at Purple Gorilla Comics, Michael, the proprietor and THE guy to go to to find the comics you're looking for, told me it wasn't the ending I was hoping for. We chatted about the weird vibe of the Gerber series, and I fell back on my oft-repeated thought that Gerber would have fit late-80s DC so very, very well. He was simply writing 15 years ahead of his time.

SPOILERS AHEAD

While we'll never really know what Mr. Gerber, Ms. Skrenes, and Mr. Mooney had up their sleeves, the revelation that this entire time Omega and James-Michael have been the danger was actually a very cool way to finish up their tale. Thinking about it a bit, it's really the sort of thing that one could have wrapped a pretty epic Summer event around - run the Omega series for a bit, build things up, and then have the finale be a Summer event revealing that James-Michael has the power to destroy the world. Imagine the epic moral struggles of people like Captain America and Mr. Fantastic. Maybe I'll pitch it to Marvel.

So the Grant/Trimpe ending was a pretty great superhero story, with a nice twist, and some interesting moments. What's really great about these issues is that the Defenders are all women. Moondragon, Hellcat, Valkyrie, and guest-Avenger The Wasp. It was cool to see this configuration of the team, and gets me thinking about the Fearless Defenders series, which I really want to track down.

I know I've missed a couple of magazines and graphic novels, but I'm trying to catch up. Eventually I'll read the rebooted Omega by Farel Dalrymple and Jonathan Lethem, and have another think about the enigmatic man in blue.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 878: The Defenders #76, October 1979

Grabbed the two issues of Defenders that finish Omega, so I'm gonna get into them.

But got a horrendous sunburn today, so I think I'll talk about them both tomorrow. It'll work better as an ending of the Omega series that way anyway.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project Friday Magazine 11: The Rampaging Hulk #8, April 1978

The Friday Magazine finally returns! My apologies for the weeks of absence. My recovery from surgery and work and all that stuff has just been mad, and the magazine was one of the things I felt could be set aside momentarily. But I'm hopefully back on track. We'll see next week I guess.

I'm glad that I had a magazine that fits with my theme week this week. The ever-awesome Steve Gerber pens a tale of Ulysses Bloodstone in this issue, hence its presence in my collection. But what I find most fascinating about this magazine is really the very fact of its existence. I've wrestled over the course of the week with why the Hulk is such a popular character. I simply don't understand the draw of this character. But in the 70s he had not just a monthly comic book, but a monthly magazine and a television series. The X-Men, whose popularity hit undreamt of peaks in the 80s and 90s, never had a dedicated magazine or television show. Yes, they had a gazillion different titles chronicling their adventures, but the magazine and the television show of the Hulk shows that the character was appealing to a much wider array of consumers than just the comic book fan.

In Thursday's review, I mused on the idea that the character's popularity comes from the idea that he represents a safe space in which to vent our most negative emotions without fear of damaging others, hence the lack of casualties whenever the Hulk rampages through a population center. If this is indeed the case, I could certainly it as an explanation for the more diverse media representation. The safe release of negative emotion is something that most, if not all, people can understand. In contrast, the exclusion and prejudice evinced toward the X-Men, though widespread, is not universal by any stretch of the imagination. So is this it, then? Does the Hulk articulate something universal about our emotions and how we handle them, or wish we could handle them? And given that it's savagely negative emotion that he embodies, what does this say of us? It seems that the wish fulfillment that the Hulk represents articulates some of the worst of our impulses.

Onward.