The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1831: Amazing Spider-Man #218, July 1981

Been a while since I read some Spider-Man. I'm currently revamping my storage system now that we're in a new house, and it's involving some necessary shrinking of the amount of space my collection takes up. I'm making my way through my Marvel Comics collection right now, and I realized I actually have a pretty significant Spider-Man collection. I'm not 100% sure where these comics came from. The collection feeds from a couple of large collections that I bought when I had my store, as well as my own significant collection that dates back to the Doctor Who Weekly's I brought with me from England when we came to Canada. Had I had the foresight, I'd have traced the provenance of each part of the collection. That would be interesting information to have.

Anyway, this was a pretty disturbing comic, in retrospect. First, Peter is really rude about a lady's looks in this issue. He tries to smooth it over by saying she's not very nice, but Mr. Parker is definitely displaying a propensity for socially-constructed notions of beauty. Second, villains The Sandman and Hydroman get dumped in the river together and come out as a single gestalt creature, eventually dubbed "Mud-Thing." It shows rudimentary signs of consciousness, but is generally unmoving and unthinking. It's this unthinking that has me disturbed. Both Sandman and Hydroman possess complete control over the cells of their mutated bodies. But in order to turn completely into sand or water, they'd need to have a different way to store their software (personality, emotions, memories), as we've seen numerous times that their entire bodies can disintegrate into their constituent respective elements. Where is the soul in a pile of sand? I would imagine that the easiest solution would be that each grain, each drop, was encoded with the fundamental information of the whole - each atom contains the entirety of Sandman or Hydroman's personalities. So what happens when those atoms are, through the admixture of water, made into something else? What if the personalities are also mixed into a psychic mud? To me, Mud-Thing stands still because there are two psyches mashed into one, unable to move or think or do much of anything. And given the destruction by drying this creature suffers at the end of the comic, I'm curious how Sandy, at least, managed to come back to become Silver Sable's back-up.

I might read a bit more Spider-Man over the next few days. I'm intrigued.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1577: Uncanny X-Men #210, October 1986

Aside from reading the "Age of Apocalypse" back in the first year of the project, they've been mostly absent from my writing. I started out liking the team, but they just became too mired down in continuity, and too mired down in their own metaphorical nature. I picked this issue up and was struck by the fact that Marvel basically tries to commit genocide against a group of people every few years with the X-Men. What if we instead tried showing a world that doesn't hate and fear them, but accepts them? Perhaps then life might imitate art for a bit.

Despite that, I loved, and still love, this crossover. I think it was one of Marvel's first bit crossovers, and the GCD lists it as the first X-Men crossover issue. That's a dubious honour, considering some of the crossovers that followed. This one, though, unlike many of those that follow, seems very personal. There's something intimate about the way the Marauders cut a swath through the Morlocks. It's got a claustrophobic setting that bleeds out into everything about the comic. This is my era of X-Men, when I discovered the mutant corner of the Marvel U and found a metaphor blunt enough to speak to my 12-year old brain.

Enjoyable as it is, I will say that Chris Claremont's style in this series has not aged well. Colossus has waaaaay too many internal soliloquies, as do, honestly, all of the other characters in the book. There's so much exposition that, really, doesn't need to be there. Contemporary comics allow that the reader has some experience of the world, and some intelligence, and don't spell everything out for you. I wonder what it would be like to remaster some of these old stories into contemporary aesthetics.

More massacred mutants tomorrow.

"What I wish, comrade Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin -- what I really want -- is a super hot fudge quad-scoop sundae bananarama split with all the trimmings."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 817: Iron Man #117, December 1978

Writing this post is actually the first time I've see this cover. The copy of this comic that I have is missing the cover, so my first experience of it is seeing Tony Stark, mustachio'd and smoking jacketed (it's the 70s) getting his brain splattered all over a curtain.

Don't worry. It's an LMD. Which kind of makes Aida's behaviour in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. seem a bit more justified.

Not a bad comic today, though, with a very brief flashback exception, this comic, like yesterday's, features Stark encased in the Iron Man armour constantly. I'm feeling a little adrift due to my severe lack of exposure to Iron Man comics, and whether or not this was a regular thing with the title through the 70s. In the Avengers titles I've read with Iron Man in them, he doesn't spend quite an equal amount of time as Stark, but there's definitely moments where it's important for him to be out of his armour. You have to have this for superhero comics - the secret identity doesn't just work to protect the fictional loved ones, but also to link the superhuman to the human. Stark needs to step out of the armour occasionally, or we just begin to see him as a robot, not a person.

There's going to be quite a leap in time for tomorrow's issue, and I think it may actually skip right over the famous "Demon in a Bottle" storyline. I noticed in today's issue, Tony has a couple of drinks, so this is definitely pre-alcoholism. The next issue is from 1984, probably post. But I'll be interested to see if the influence of a story that so very fundamentally revolves around the man, rather than the iron man, has placed the man a little more in the spotlight of the title.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 363: Cable - Blood and Metal #1, October 1992

There was a gap in my comics collecting. I can pinpoint it pretty accurately by my Animal Man collection. I know that the last issue of it I bought was around #14, in 1989. I picked up the hobby again around 1995, when I was living in London, Ontario. So I missed the Image explosion, and I definitely missed the X-titles that followed in its wake, when Marvel Comics was trying desperately to mimic the success of it's former employees.

Thank goodness.

There's a reason why comics from the early 90s are so mercilessly lampooned. They're really bad. And I'm saying this about a comic written by Fabian Nicieza, the man behind some of my favourite Thunderbolts stories, and by John Romita Jr., perhaps one of the most lauded of the Bronze Age/Modern Age comics artists. But, y'know, Cable. He was created, pretty much, by Rob Liefeld, and at this point in his history, he hasn't shed that image, so to speak. He still has giant puffy shoulders, and seems to spend his entire life grimacing over something painful, speaking in Frank Miller-esque bursts of exposition, and basically killing as many people and trying to sound like as much of a badass as possible.

It's hard for me to determine if this comic was good or bad, though. It's obviously picking up from New Mutants/X-Force storylines about which I have no knowledge. So in context, it might actually be a decent piece of superhero storytelling. Out of context, though, it suffers from the cliche of most X-books that one tries to read in a vacuum - it's so bogged down with continuity that the story just doesn't make sense. There's flashbacks, and references to apparently important characters. I half expected a Deadpool appearance, but maybe that's just a result of having spent time on the Internet in the last 2 months or so.

Bottom line, this is a Marvel X-comic from the early 90s. If you read them at the time, you have a nostalgic affection for them, but can't really convince me that they're any good. And if you didn't read them at the time, you probably avoid them like the plague. Like I would, though I don't have that option.

Okay, in an effort to end on a less negative note, Romita's art is always lovely to look at, even when I don't really know what's going on.

There. More tomorrow.