The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1924: Blue Beetle #1, June 1986

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.

 I think that this is one of Ted Kord's first appearances in the DCU post-Crisis, and post DC acquiring the rights to the Charlton heroes. It came out the same month as Watchmen #2, significant because the original premise of Watchmen utilized the old Charlton heroes, until the higher-ups at DC decided they could squeeze a bit more money out of them if they were a part of the regular DCU. Honestly, it's weird to think of a DCU that didn't feature the Beetle, or the Question, or Captain Atom. Would Watchmen have been as successful if it had seemed more like a Charlton heroes story than a standalone continuity? Probably not, but it would have been cool to see.

Today's featured artist is Paris Cullins. A quick check of the GCD yields numerous comics, and a check of my own database reveals a number of Mr. Cullins' works in the collection, notably an issue of Grant Morrison's Animal Man, one of the great superhero series of all time (IMHO, of course).

There's a dynamism to the art in this comic that really fits nicely with Blue Beetle, or the Ted Kord version of the character, at least. To me, before the Giffen/DeMatteis "Bwah-ha-ha" teaming of Beetle and Booster Gold, Blue Beetle had the potential to be a more Spider-Man-like hero. Unlike his predecessor and successor, Ted did not gain his identity from the mystical scarab that gave the other Blue Beetles superpowers. Instead, he based his identity off his old friend Dan Garrett, who was the original Blue Beetle. Ted is a scientific genius and adrenaline junkie, and Paris Cullins' art really captures that desire for action and excitement that Len Wein projects in the dialogue. There's even something of a manga look to some of the panels, where the characters are a little more-than-usually stylized, and their eyes are verging on dinner plate size. Whether this is actually anime influence or simply Cullins' style is neither here nor there - the art suits the energy of the story and the character very nicely.

While Blue Beetle has always been a less-serious character than some who inhabit the DCU, he sadly becomes something of a comedic relief character once 1987's Justice League is published, at least until he uncovers a giant conspiracy in the DCU and is shot dead by a supposed friend. But don't worry, I think he's back from the dead these days and hanging around with Jaime Reyes, the new Blue Beetle. I think. I don't keep up with DC much these days.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1598 - 1602: The Amazing Spider-Man #153 - #157, February - June, 1976

I was rearranging my Marvel collection yesterday, putting some things away, making space in the boxes, and I decided to just pull out random stuff and read it. I haven't done that with this project for a while. Up first is a run of five issues of Amazing Spider-Man from the 70s. I've under-represented the wall-crawler in the project, so it's time to remedy that. But I was away all weekend, so we're going to do them all together.

Let's do the art first, because it's handled by two of Marvel's famed old guard, Sal Buscema and Ross Andru. These are guys who defined the 70s house style for Marvel, a style that only significantly changes once the McFarlanes and Silvestris of the world joined the bullpen in the late 80s. Rather than the heavily-stylized depictions we start seeing in the lead-up to the great Image exodus, characters in this era of comics tend to move much more like actual human beings would in superheroic situations. There's a couple of ways to consider this. First, our heroes are human beings, so it makes sense that they would move like we do. Spider-Man may have the proportional strength, etc., etc., of a spider, but he utilizes these powers like a human would. Perhaps this helps us to place ourselves in his shoes when we see a pose that we, ourselves, could potentially strike had we the ability to stick to the side of a building or balance on a flag pole without fear of losing our balance. But I have to admit that it sometimes looks awkward, despite the talents of the artists involved. The other way to consider this is that Spider-Man, and other heroes, are enhanced, changed, or mutated human beings, so it stands to reason that their bodies wouldn't work the same way a base line human's does. Hence, when McFarlane comes along, Spider-Man's body starts acting more like a spider-inflected human, crouching a lot, flinging limbs about, and being a lot more crawly. That said, the over-stylization can be off-putting, especially for that identification we all love to have so much with our heroes.

I prefer, however, to think that what this is demonstrating, unwittingly, is Peter Parker becoming more comfortable with his powers and with the ways that those powers make his body want to move. Perhaps that's why he sometimes looks a bit stiff - he's fighting a more spider-like inclination that his body may be instinctually having. Once we get to the late 80s and 90s, we can pretend that he's had these powers for however long - ah, Marvel chronology - and has started listening to not only the obvious changes to his physiology (sticking to buildings, heightened strength, etc.) but also to the subtle changes that allow his body to use the powers to their fullest extent.

That aside, I enjoyed these comics. Writer Len Wein is really pretty great, and the stories are tightly-scripted and told, giving us all the requisite action and angst that one would expect from a 1970s Spider-Man comic.

"Mr. Osborn, I could kiss you."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1175: Action Comics #425, July 1973

I thought that, since I've been reading a bunch of Batman stuff lately, I should get into some Superman stuff too. And the nice thing about Action Comics, the old ones anyway, is that there's always 2 or 3 features, not just a Superman story. Today both the Atom and the Human Target share the book with the big, blue Boy Scout.

I enjoyed today's issue. It was a very silly story about a man who kills the last Moa in New Zealand, and ends up bringing its irradiated egg back to Metropolis. What's great is that the man, a hunter, kills the bird accidentally, and then spends the rest of the story guilt-ridden over his mistake. It's a nice contrast to the usual tales of big game hunters who more often than not end up as the villains of whatever story they're a part of. Don't get me wrong: I'm 100% against the kind of hunting that is depicted in this comic. It's the difference in characterization that I find refreshing.

There is one panel that is amazing - as the super-Moa is flying around Metropolis, Superman latches onto its legs, which immediately are shed and a new pair grows in their place. Superman is, quite distinctly in at least one panel, left holding what amount to a pair of human-sized chicken legs that disappear in the next panel! Where did they go? Did Superman just drop them? What the heck is whoever finds those legs going to think? I know that these kinds of details go unremarked upon in old stories like this, but I really want to know what happened to the legs.

More to come...

"A Monster In The Shadows": Gothic Themes in Superhero Comics of the Seventies

(This is the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2017 Calgary Fan Expo. We ran out of time on the panel, so I wanted to get a proper version of it out there.)

Though I have read a number of the classic texts that are included in the genre of “the Gothic,” it is not an era of writing, or a style of writing, that has had much influence on my thinking. Like most, I imagine, we see the Gothic as having spawned the Horror genre but then having been subsumed into that genre fully. Thus it is that in most of my thinking about H.P. Lovecraft, of which I do quite a bit these days, I see his work through the lens of Horror, rather than Gothic, fiction. This is an error I am in the midst of correcting.

The impetus for that correction came in the reading, in close succession, of two Superhero comics from the Seventies. The first, from 1971, is a Supergirl story in Adventure Comics, and the second a 1978 tale of the Hulk from his eponymous comic. The inclusion in both of these comics of elements I recognized from my prior exposure to the Gothic got me thinking about whether or not this genre, perhaps more properly now a sub-genre of Horror, continues its venerable lineage in a much more explicit way than we might have considered, and what role the Gothic in mass-marketed Superhero comics plays in the continuity of that lineage. Killeen Jarlath, whose work plays a large role in my preliminary investigation of this generic mash-up, calls the act of looking at a lineage of the Gothic, in the Nineteenth century specifically, following “the traces of a tradition” (3). This is precisely what I hope to do in this paper.

In thinking through a thesis for this talk, I’m reminded of one of the fundamental postmodern theoretical tenets, which is that we can’t understand a thing without understanding that which came before it and came after it. Meaning is not only determined by content, but by context. So for us to understand what’s happening in the comics I’m going to talk about, we have to understand what came before them. But this recognition of context isn’t simply a recognition of lineage, but also of effect. Jorge Luis Borges sums this up quite nicely in his short essay “Kafka and His Precursors,” in which he notes our ability to read writers who came before Kafka as presciently Kafkaesque, and that our understanding of them is fundamentally altered by our understanding of Kafka. Given all that, I’ll argue in this talk, then, that not only do the Gothic elements in these comics provide for us a through line from an art form popular in the 1800s to an art form of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, but also that our reading of the contemporary superhero Gothic offers us insight into the genre of the Gothic itself.

Before we get to the superheroic examples, though, it would probably be a good idea to establish two things. First, we’ll need a baseline from which to consider the Gothic. What are its characteristics, where does it come from, and, importantly, how do we distinguish it from its more popular cousin, the Horror story? And second, we’ll need an example of an almost purely Gothic comic book, free of the brightly-coloured trappings of the Superhero genre, in order to discern what exactly it is that the character of the superhero brings to the Gothic.

            In order to establish our baseline, we’re going to have a look at some scholarship written about the Gothic, and then we’ll have a brief look at the novel that is accepted as the one that starts the whole Gothic ball rolling way back at the end of the 18^th century, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

            As I searched for a definition of the Gothic, one about which I might stage my arguments, I came across an introduction to a book called Gothic Literary Studies. This introduction was, very helpfully, entitled, “Declining Definition.” In it, Jarlath Kileen notes that the potential of the genre comes from the fact that “the Gothic is not an aesthetically or ideologically stable mode” (10). For example, were we to explore the idea of ancient and decadent lineages, family lines that have fallen into disrepute, one of the primary aspects of the Gothic, we might find one tale that uses this idea to critique conservative thinking as unlikely to advance the cause of reason or enlightenment, and another tale that might use this idea to critique the chaos that could result from unlimited liberalness. This, I’m sure, can be said of all generic fiction, superheroes being no exception, so rather than trying to define the genre, we should instead think about the aspects of a story that would place it into the realm of the Gothic. Genre is an inherently fluid construct, so something can be both, as we’ll see, Gothic and Superhero. In the Edinburgh Critical Guide to the genre, Andrew Smith offers that “[r]epresentations of ruins, castles, monasteries, and forms of monstrosity, and images of insanity, transgression, the supernatural, and excess, all typically characterise the form” (4). From this list it’s easy to see how the Horror genre grew from this older mode, as each of the aspect listed is most definitely visible in many Horror stories. Other definitions, or delineations, of the Gothic claim for it “an investment in history [as] fundamental” (Killeen 2), and that the form “‘invites readers’ fears and anxieties in highly stylised mystery-tales, using a limited set of plots, settings, and character-types’” (Robertson, qtd. in Killeen 1-2). This set of criteria will give us a good base from which to move forward, though there is one aspect that is central to the Gothic that we have not considered yet: the idea of the Sublime. Sublimity is characterised as an emotional state amongst “the most powerful that people are subject to” (Smith 2), and has been theorized as being connected to feelings from that of the beautiful to that of the terrifying. From a personal standpoint, my best understanding of the sublime has always come from looking up into the night sky when one is far from the lights of the city. There is a remarkably beauty to the stars, but also a deep terror, not necessarily of personal peril perhaps, but of the inability of the human mind to fully comprehend the infinite nature of the universe. This combination of breathtaking beauty and irrational incomprehension is, as far as I can tell, the feeling of the sublime. We can feel it while looking at the vastness of an ocean, or the scale of a mountain. Some might even argue that a deep and profound love can cause such a feeling. But let us be clear: the Gothic does not in and of itself produce such feelings. Instead it is attempting to depict the reaction of characters to such a feeling, often through the use of events and situations that are both physical and supernatural, and, from a particular point of view, are both beautiful and terrifying. Perhaps Horace Walpole can offer us an example or two.

            “[T]edious, artificial, and melodramatic” (Lovecraft 34) is how H.P. Lovecraft describes Walpole’s 1764 novel. Those familiar with Lovecraft’s own prose style will appreciate the irony. But the argument is made by scholars of the genre, and of the time period, that The Castle of Otranto, with its decrepit castle, its hidden ancestries, and its unexplainable supernatural phenomena, is the first Gothic novel proper, and one that “exert[ed] an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird” (33) and, by proxy, the horrific. The tale begins with usurper of the throne Manfred preparing to wed his only son to a young woman to solidify his hold on the throne. As the wedding is imminent, there is are shouts of confusion from the courtyard of the castle, and a servant who, when pressed, cries only “Oh, the helmet! the helmet!” (Walpole 74). Rushing out, Manfred sees “his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque made for human being” (74). 

This instance, literally two pages into the story, is only the first of many strange supernatural occurrences in the castle as Manfred attempts to marry his son’s fiancée, all leading to the revelation of an heir to the true lineage of the castle, and to the madness and repentance of Manfred. Walpole’s take on the sublime in his novel errs far more on the side of the terrifying than the beautiful, and this terror reaches the heights of sublimity as a result of the unexplained, and unexplainable, nature of the events that take place. As Lovecraft famously notes, “[t]he oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (Lovecraft 25). We might consider that what Lovecraft is actually talking about is the sublime, a concept which, both in its terrifying and its beautiful conceptions, can be applied to the central conceit of his own fictions, Cosmicism. What is important for us to take away from Walpole’s novel, in terms of how it might help us understand the Gothic comics, is the culture against which the novel appears to be speaking. Stemming, as it did, from “Enlightenment beliefs that extolled the virtues of rationality” (Smith 2), the Gothic novel in its inception “argue[s] that the complexity of human experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism” (2). Frederick Frank, editor of one of the latest reprints of the novel, says that “The Castle of Otranto…gratified timeless human need for inhuman and superhuman things, a need that had been ignored or supressed by the decorous standards of the Enlightenment” (Frank 11). It seems to me that his is all the link we need to establish the lineage from Walpole to superhero comics: a need for the superhuman, a need that flies in the face of the prevailing rationality of contemporary society.

In the introduction to a special issue of Gothic Studies focussing the “Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture, Catherine Spooner describes the genre as “always…[having] been associated with the popular,” which has made it “difficult to confine within narrow definitions of the ‘literary’” (1). As a result of this straddling of popular and literary, the genre has been dismissed “as, at best, a literary curiosity [and], at worst, popular trash,” a dismissal that “continues to shadow its academic reputation” (1). In combination, then, with the call to the irrational I spoke of, there is also a material, or textual, similarity between the Gothic and the Superhero comic. In much the same way that comic book fandom is often skewered in popular culture, perhaps the best example being Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, so too has the Gothic been a target of such satire, most notably in one of Jane Austen’s earliest novels Northanger Abbey. In Austen’s novel, heroine “Catherine Morland…sees the world through the prism of Gothic novels,” but comes to find that rather than the spectacle of the sublime in the Gothic, in real life “there are no abductions, no brushes with murder. The truth is subtle and all too human” (Baker n.p.). Both Gothics and comics have laboured under both this propensity for satirization and rejection from the literary or academic for a long time. But “good gothic storytelling, though sensational by its very nature, is not reducible to an immature taste for the sensational” (Pepetone 2), and neither are comics. Witness, for example, Swamp Thing.

I’m going to focus mainly on the very first Swamp Thing story, a short from DC’s House of Mystery series, published in 1971, but there is one reaction to the regular series from a couple of years later that is worth noting. In May 1973, a letter was received to the DC offices from none other than Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer extraordinaire, and respected voice in the fan community. His praise is effusive:

No matter how good the best in any line of work are taken to be, once in a generation there arises a talent that goes far beyond the ordained limits. A Chaplin, a Van Gogh, a Twain, a Nureyev, a Namath. No matter what their chosen field, they rise above all others with a superiority that puts them in a class all their own.

Thank you for Swamp Thing. (Ellison n.p., emphasis in original)

High praise indeed. Ellison here places Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson in some stellar company, and skews heavily toward the idea of the comic as “literary curiosity,” rather than “popular trash.” What Swamp Thing does remarkably well, regardless of your opinion of the character or story themselves, is to present the Gothic rather perfectly in this 20^th century hybrid medium. The introduction to Smith’s Critical Guide lists a number of contemporary artistic modes within which he parses the contemporary Gothic, but comic books are notably absent from the list. What he does note though is that “[t]he Gothic…mutates across historical, national, and generic boundaries” (Smith 4), and it is in terms of mutation, appropriate for comic books, that we can parse the Gothic comic through Swamp Thing. The original tale, reworked a couple of years later into the more familiar version of the character, takes place in an isolated house in a barren landscape, at “[t]he edge of the swamp [where] the mist-wet old mansion rises like an aging apparition into a cold expanse of sky” (Wein, Swamp Thing 2). 

In the aftermath of her fiancé’s death, Linda Olsen marries his partner and friend Damian, and the two are discussing her memories of her former love even as a strange creature seemingly made of mud and plants watches through the window. As the tale unfolds, we find out that Damian, jealous of Alex and Linda, sabotages Alex’s lab, causing an explosion that critically injures the man. Damian dumps his body into the nearby swamp, at which time, for reasons unexplained, Olsen is reborn into his monstrous body. As Damian prepares to end Linda’s life, in case she discovers his secret, the Swamp Thing smashes through the window, saves his terrified ex-fiancée, and then lumbers back to the swamp. The parallels to Otranto are striking; the usurping antagonist, the forced marriage, even the almost, but only almost, supernatural circumstances surrounding Olsen’s transformation. In the Alex Holland version of the character, the transformation is more fully explained (and then again when Alan Moore takes over the character), but this first version falls into one of four delineations of the Gothic offered in the early Twentieth century by Montague Summers: the supernatural gothic, “in which the existence and cruel operation of unnatural forces are asserted graphically” (Carroll 4). The later Swamp Thing is more what Summers might term a “natural” gothic, which “introduces what appear to be supernatural phenomena only to explain them away” (4). Once again, when Moore takes over the character, this shifts back to the supernatural, though is also explained somehow. This, then, is one of the ways that the migration of the Gothic into comics offers a novel insight into the genre as a whole. What we see in the Gothic of the later Swamp Thing is a natural gothic, one that doesn’t explain away the supernatural, however, but instead offers a rational explanation of supernatural events. The question we are left with, then, is how supernatural these occurrences actually are, and what the boundaries of the natural might be. It is fairly obvious that Swamp Thing, at least in its earliest iterations, is drawing heavily on Gothic traditions, and were it not a part of the larger DC Universe, we might even be able to call it a “pure” Gothic tale, contradictory as that may be to what I said earlier. But it is a part of that superhero universe, so how does that affect the tenets of the Gothic, and vice versa?

Almost as if anticipating my own investigations, Killeen lets us know that in “[e]scaping from the tomb and the castle, the monastery and the mansion, the gothic arguably becomes more potentially terrifying because of its ability to manifest itself and variations of itself anywhere” (3). What we’re again seeing here is the ability of the genre to mutate dependant on the medium through which it proliferates. When we first encounter the house within which Mike Sekowsky’s Supergirl adventure “The Face at the Window” takes place, it bears a striking resemblance to the lonely house of the original Swamp Thing story. The old style of the house, and its dilapidated condition, demonstrates another aspect of the Gothic, namely the “concern with the historical past…[and] rhetorical and textual strategies to locate the past and represent its perceived iniquities, terrors, and survivals’” (Mighall, qtd. in Killeen 2). 

The medium of the comic book allows the storytellers to establish the age of the location without having to use verbal description. The shadows obscuring parts of the house, and the woods around the house, the dark, overcast of the sky, punctuated by a distant bit of blue, and the wildness of the surrounding property all work together to suggest the age of the place. Couple this with the à la mode fashions of the protagonists of the story, and we are given the visual indicators that this is a contemporary tale that is going to investigate the past. Once the expository text details a mysteriously dead couple and their uncle who now owns the house but hasn’t left it in 40 years, despite the bright red, blue, and yellow of the superheroic main character, the Gothic genre overwhelms this story. Sekowsky also supplies us with a ghostly little girl who leads Supergirl around the mansion and a terrifying old man, mad and guilty of a heinous crime which comes to light at the end of the tale. Notably, the supernatural element of the tale goes unexplained in the case of this story, perhaps suggesting that this example of the superheroic gothic fall into the category of “supernatural.” But as with the rewrite of the Swamp Thing tale, and given the superheroic setting of the story, the supernatural itself becomes more a part of the natural way of the universe. Supergirl demonstrates a number of abilities we might call supernatural (though she uses them very little in this story), but the fact of her origin shows these abilities to be natural, albeit from a nature very different from our own. It is in this way that much of the supernatural is described in superhero universes. Death is simply another dimension, to which and from which one might travel, and the manipulation of subtle forces, magic, while still called supernatural, is actually a natural part of the superheroic continuum. Thus does the superhero gothic manage to be both a natural and a supernatural Gothic, according to Summers’ formulation. It is a Gothic that involves supernatural forces which remain supernatural but are also natural at the same time. This said, there is an aspect of the Gothic missing from “The Face at the Window” that keeps the piece from being fully considered as an example of the genre: resistance.

Smith notes that some of the great writers of the Romantic era used the stock characters and locations of the Gothic to critique “quasi-rationalistic accounts of experience” (2). As mentioned earlier, the genre comes into focus during a time when Enlightenment science was arguing for an objective reality, one that could be quantified fully by the observations of reason. We still exist in such a time, really, though now resistance to notions of the rational are decried as the ramblings of the lunatic fringe, rather than the musings of the intelligentsia. If, as the old academic saying goes, all writing is political, then this is certainly an aspect of gothic, and superheroic gothic, that we must consider. Where Sekowsky’s Supergirl tale was not an overtly resistant piece of writing, the Len Wein/Jim Starlin tale “Feeding Billy” from The Incredible Hulk #222 is. After a disastrous run-in with the military, the Hulk is gassed and falls unconscious mid-leap as he tries to escape his pursuers. 

He is discovered, incongruously, by two small children, not unironically called Donny and Marie, who drag his much lighter Bruce Banner self into an isolated cavern so that he can be a playmate of their monstrously deformed brother, Billy. The Gothic theme of “tainted blood” (Pepetone 7) is explored fully here as we are made aware of the unfortunate circumstances of Billy’s monstrosity, in which a small baby wanders across a leaking container of radioactive material and is somehow transformed into a hideous beast. Written in the late Seventies, this tale is obviously taking its cue from the resistance to nuclear power and its waste materials that was a part of the peace movement from the Sixties all the way into the early Nineties. But where any radiation-related mutations caused in lived experience end generally as cancer, in the superheroic gothic this waste product of rationality creates monsters, a corruption that infects not only those touched by the chemicals but also those around them. This origin of Billy is another instance of the superheroic gothic being both natural and supernatural, in that we have a “natural” explanation for Billy’s mutation, but that explanation is outside the realm of our own lived nature. Coupled with the isolated location and the meditation on the past, though the recent past, this natural/supernatural conflation and the resistant tone of the story give us a remarkable example of contemporary Gothicism in a decidedly popular medium.

If the case is indeed that the Gothic is supremely malleable, then the chances of nailing down a precise exemplar of the genre in comics is impossible. Recalling that the genre appears in the wake of the ultra-rational Enlightenment, it makes sense that the genre itself can only be defined irrationally. Or rather, its definition is based as much on enumeration of characteristics as it is on how a story makes one feel. There is an affective dimension to the Gothic, and given that the Hulk is a creature of affect, it’s unsurprising that his is the story that perhaps can be held as an exemplar of the superheroic gothic. The caveat that must be added here is that before such a claim can be made of “Feeding Billy,” more examples have to be uncovered and analyzed. If Walpole and the Romantics used the Gothic to protest a strain of thinking that they saw as damaging, or at least close-minded, then was there a similar protest occurring in superhero comics in the Seventies? And, looking ahead from that decade, what prompts the revolution of Gothic superheroes represented by the early titles published under the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics? Further questions we might ask could focus around Len Wein, writer of two of the three comics under consideration, and the source of his gothic imagination, or around the idea that “[t]he Gothic is…a form which is generated in different…national and social contexts” (Smith 3), and if so, how is the superheroic Gothic intrinsically American? One conclusion that the present paper suggests is that the superheroic Gothic conflates two of Montague Summers’ four formulations of the Gothic, namely “the natural or explained gothic” and “the supernatural gothic” (Carroll 4). Ironically, Summers put forth this formulation in The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, published in 1938, the same year that Siegel and Shuster published Superman’s first tale in Action Comics, inaugurating the genre of the superhero. And as we’ve seen, just over 30 years later, the comics medium demonstrates its ability to engage with far older literary traditions, not only in upholding their tenets and respecting their origins, but also in updating these venerable lineages, the 350-year old Gothic genre specifically, and offering perspectives on these traditions we might only glean from the considered study of comics.

 

Works Cited

Baker, Jo. “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Val McDermid’s ‘Northanger Abbey’.” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/books/review/val-mcdermids-northanger-abbey.html?_r=0. Accessed 24 Apr. 2017

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.

Ellison, Harlan. “May, 1973.” DC Special Series, vol. 1, no. 2, 1977, frontmatter.

Frank, Frederick. “Introduction.” The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, by Horace   Walpole, Broadview, 2003, pp.11-34.

Killeen, Jarlath. Gothic Literary Studies: History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914.      ProQuest ebrary, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary/detail.action?docID=10817766. Accessed 3 Feb. 2017

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S.T.      Joshi, Hippocampus Press, 2012.

Pepetone, Gregory. Hogwarts and All: Gothic Perspectives on Children’s Literature. 2012.          ProQuest ebrary, http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary/detail.                 action?docID=10551965. Accessed 13 Jan. 2017.

“Reading the Collections, Week 3: The Castle of Otranto.” Echoes From The Vault,             standrewsrarebooks.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/reading-the-collections-week-3-                            the-castle-of-otranto/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2017.

Sekowsky, Mike. “The Face at the Window.” Adventure Comics no. 408, July 1971. pp. 1-14.

Smith, Andrew. Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature: Gothic Literature. ProQuest ebrary,             http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary/detail.action?docID=                             10695133. Accessed 13 Jan. 2017

Spooner, Catherine. “Introduction: Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture.” Gothic Studies,      vol. 9, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1-4. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca                       /ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=ucalgary&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA392479748&sid                  =summon&asid=4bc53ff8cb55d2c6ca2827b5df147689. Accessed 13 Jan. 2017.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother. Edited by Frederick S.        Frank, Broadview, 2003.

Wein, Len. “Feeding Billy.” The Incredible Hulk, vol. 1, no. 222, Apr. 1978, pp. 1 – 31.

---. “The Saga of the Swamp Thing!” Illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. DC Special Series, vol. 1, no. 2, 1977, pp. 1-24.

---. “Swamp Thing.” Illustrated by Bernie Wrightson. DC Silver Age Classics House of Secrets    92, 2001, pp. 2-9.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 824: Incredible Hulk #183, January 1975

My oldest actual Hulk comic gets us properly rolling through the week. I say "actual" because there's a wonderful subset of Marvel... titles (e.g. Marvel Spectacular) that reprint older comics. I have them arranged and catalogued within the particular titles that they reprint, but some slip through the cracks and I'm pretty sure the Hulk reprint ones have thus far. So we'll start in 1975.

It's a pretty good place to start, really. Len Wein is a fantastic writer. I recently gave a paper (and I'm hoping to post the paper at Sequart) talking about one of his Hulk comics as a way of thinking through the genre of the Gothic, a popular type of fiction that was big from about the end of the 17th century to the end of the 19th. It gets subsumed into Horror in the 20th century, but my reading of a Hulk comic and a Supergirl comic from the 70s seems to show that the Gothic is alive and well, and distinct from the Horror genre, at least in superhero comics. I'm going to look into it a bit more. The long and short of the Hulk section is that Wein is fantastically well-known for co-creating Swamp Thing, one of the most Gothic characters to emerge from comics, so it's interesting to see the same kind of treatment being laid on a character that is as outcast as Swampie, but is still a huge part of the mainstream Marvel U.

Today's story sees the return of ZZZAX, a living electronic creature that absorbs humans for sustenance. Weird and ridiculous, but once the creature actually kills someone in this issue, the ridiculous fades into the background, and we begin to have some understanding about the importance of having a creature like the Hulk about to deal with these things from beyond. There's something of the Cosmicism of Lovecraft in such an idea. ZZZAX doesn't care much about humans aside from them being food, and Hulk just wants to be away from them. It's only the minute traces of Banner within him that prompt his rescuing of a couple of scientists from the energy creature. I've argued elsewhere that one of the contemporary responses to Lovecraft's cosmicism is creating meaning through emotional relationships, and this comic articulates this very well. The uncaring universe, as represented by ZZZAX, is defeated by human beings and a creature that embodies emotion. The uncaring cosmos is literally defeated by the embodiment of our emotions. Further, Hulk chooses to help the scientists because one of them helped him - rather than rage motivating the Hulk, it's affection, or the rage born of an affection scorned.

I honest did not think I was going to enjoy these Hulk comics as much as I am.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 650: Wonder Woman #3, April 1987

So, um, this comic was amazing.

First, the Perez/Wein team is something I can't believe I've never read til now. Perez has always, always, meant superheroes to me. My first foray into the DCU was Crisis, pencilled by Perez in all 12 issues (I think). For me, Perez's style (or Phil Jiminez, or Darick Robertson) perfectly balances the realistic and the superhuman. They're not afraid to make these characters larger than life - they simply don't place them outside of Life.

But that's not the only thing. I know this is issue 3, and I don't know what the previous ones have been like, but the 4 of the 5 most interesting characters in this issue are women. And not just tiny spandex-wearing women (though WW wears it well!), but a university professor, her insecure daughter, and a brilliant reimagining of the Golden Age Wonder Woman's pal Etta Candy, now a military member (I have no idea how to talk about ranks and denominations in the military. It's a failing). Only Steve Trevor represents the male of the species, Considering that this comic is almost 30 years old, and was published by a major comics/entertainment corporation, that's pretty remarkable. Four fully-developed characters who are women in a superhero comic from the 1980s. I'm surprised.

However, this is where DC were at this point in the 80s. That decade gets short shrift because of some questionable fashion and political choices (Flock of Seagulls hair? Ronald Reagan?), but in comics you were getting things like Byrne's revamp of Superman, which, though I'm not a fan of Byrne, is really pretty fantastic. Frank Miller had change Batman forever, and Alan Moore had proven that superhero comics could tell stories on par with the literary. Over at Marvel, Roger Stern was telling incredible stories with the Avengers, and Mark Gruenwald was showing us a world where the Justice Leag...errr, sorry, the Squadron Supreme became a frighteningly convincing dictatorship. I think the only reason Perez's Wonder Woman doesn't get the same treatment as some of these other works is that the main character is a woman. Though the comic demonstrates a surprising equity in its characters, the culture that surrounded it did not.

I think I'm going to have to see about finding Perez's run on this title. It looks to be something special.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 470: Final Crisis: Secret Files, February 2009

There are two covers to most of the comics in the "Final Crisis" crossover. I really love the trade dress on these covers, the red bars slowly dissolving into black. But, having seen some of the other covers, which, like the cover of the Revelations hardcover, share the vertical titling but not the bars, I kind of wish I had those. Primarily, in the case of this cover, because the alternate would be a gorgeous portrait of FC villain Libra, rather than this godawful Jim Lee Wonder Woman. I don't actually remember where I read it, though it was likely Morrison somewhere, but a suggestion was made that Wonder Woman's costume doesn't really work when you strap it around a large bosom. The original H.G. Peter design was instead placed on a body that was slight up front, but featured the broad shoulders of someone who had spent her life in athletic training. A swimmer or weight lifter's body, rather than a supermodel's. Regardless, even if we account for the aesthetic shift of Western culture to privilege tiny waists and ample bosoms, there's no need for a picture of the greatest female superhero of all time to focus, literally front and center on both the cover and the picture, on her breasts. I would have bought the comic anyway.

(As an aside, Wonder Woman features in exactly none of this comic.)

Now, that said, it's not really a great comic. The lead feature is by Len Wein, whose name will forever be revered for his contribution to comics of the Swamp Thing. His story offers an origin for the mysterious Libra, one that, really, we probably could have done without. Mother dies, Father starts drinking, beats child, child grows up to become supervillain. Yawn. I think I'd have preferred not to know. Throughout this origin story, he seems somehow pathetic, rather than intimidating, as he is when we first meet him at the beginning of Final Crisis. And for all of his talk of balance, I don't see it played out through the story. I was close to only reading the Morrison and Rucka-penned sections of this issue, but then I remember that the larger project is reading comics, not just Grant Morrison comics.

Greg Rucka contributes a page from the Crime Bible to this issue, though I won't say much about it, as it's reprinted at the very beginning of today's graphic novel. Morrison gives us a short piece on the nature and history of the Anti-Life Equation, which is good, as over the course of its history, it's been a bit nebulous. Which, I suppose, is fitting for a god-weapon. We also get a sketch-book section from Morrison and J.G. Jones which doubles as a metatext of Nix Uotan's sketches, which we get a glimpse of in the early issues of the series when we follow the fallen Monitor into the real world(ish). Notable here, and actually in the Superman Beyond series, is that we get a glimpse of Doc Fate, mystic champion of Earth-20, and focal character in Morrison's later DCU epic Multiversity. I love seeing these things playing out over the course of decades. It speaks to the kind of creative vision that DC has been sorely lacking in the last few years. If you're going to set things up, you have to have some idea how you're going to knock them down before they simply crumble by themselves.

Tomorrow we'll move back into the story proper, and get a ground-level view of the end of the world.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 362: The Incredible Hulk v.1 #222, April 1978

I've never really got the Hulk. Or, at least, I've never really got the version of the Hulk that is predominant in the comics he inhabits. The premise is fine, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that there's a really interesting re-telling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein going on in this comic. What I don't get is how this character has managed to be one of the most recognizable, iconic characters that Marvel has ever produced. I just wouldn't have thought that there were that many stories you could tell about this creature.

That, of course, is a supremely arrogant stance to take. A character is a character - it's all up to the writer(s) who handle such a creation what kind of stories can be told. That's why I added the caveat up there about the predominant mode of the Hulk. The mindless, raging beast is just not interesting to me. But then you have someone like Bruce Jones and John Romita Jr come along in the early 2000s, and give us a story about Bruce Banner, instead. And the heroic thing he does is to keep the Hulk in check until the last possible moment, until there are no other solutions that present themselves. In Cold War-speak, Hulk is the nuclear solution that should only be deployed in the direst of circumstances. He's a character who is best utilized, I think, when he's mostly absent from the stories about him.

But if there's one thing I've learned from my seemingly-interminable years at school, it's that we can't think in essentials. Today's comic is a perfect example. The creative team is one of the finest pairings of the 1970s, with Len Wein scripting and Jim Starlin plotting and penciling. It doesn't get a whole lot better for teams from this era. Starlin's pencils and layouts are, unsurprisingly, amazing. Not to take anything away from Ernie Chan's excellent cover, but look at this first shot of the Hulk from page 1:

There's a reason Starlin is lauded for his work. I'm trying to imagine this page without all of the caption boxes and indicia, as simply a portrait of slavering human rage, framed by blue sky and desert. But the beautiful pencils are not all. As I noted in an earlier post on a Superman comic from this era, there' some oddly gothic storytelling going on in superhero comics at the time. Wein has a pedigree for this kind of storytelling, of course, with his earlier Swamp Thing tales, but even here, in a different fictional universe, and 5 years later, he's telling tales of cannibalism, degenerate lineages, and the confusion of the protagonists who find themselves pulled into these bizarre family dramas. Much as Lovecraft uses these ideas to present his cosmic notions, Wein and Starlin here show us that, even in a universe with unstable molecule costumes and purple pants that never split at the crotch, there are strange, tragic, disturbing stories that can only be glimpsed in the half-light of a dank cave, human bones littering the floor, two adorable children innocently accepting the macabre scene. Why does the gothic lend itself to the superheroic...or more properly, to this era of the superheroic? Is the Silver Age of comics a degenerate ancestor of the Golden Age? Probably a question for another time.

A high rating for this one. As I say, I'm not a huge fan of the Hulk, but Wein and Starlin tell an interesting and thought-provoking tale here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 293: Adventure Comics #420, June 1972

What was that I was saying the other day about Supergirl being lured to alien worlds to fight battles for their inhabitants? This one's even stranger as we never actually learn why there's a war being fought, or between whom. Instead, we're told the story of a group of wizards who join their minds together to protect themselves and their people, and who manipulate Supergirl into attacking their enemies. Who those enemies are, we're never told - the story is more about the collateral damage of war. Togran, son of one of the wizards, tries to stop Supergirl from falling for the plot, only to be killed by his own father. Sometimes I think it would be best if Supergirl just stayed on Earth.

The Animal Man story in this issue is one of his earliest costumed appearances. It's not the greatest story, but what it does highlight is the difficulties associated with becoming a superhero. Animal Man (or "A-Man" as he's called in the story) pursues the same gang of crooks repeatedly in this story, always failing to capture them until the very end. Though he's enthusiastic, his experience with his powers is slight, and it's kind of fascinating seeing how he gets around the limitation of having to be around animals to absorb their powers. I'm glad that that aspect of his power set gets retired eventually, though having such limitations does force some creative thinking, both on the part of the hero and on the part of his creative team. Regardless, it was nice to see the old orange and blue again.

The other stories are typical 60s and 70s fare. The "Star-Men" story read like an old EC sci-fi story, and, according to the GCD, the second Supergirl story is actually a reprinted Superman story that's had his name replaced with hers to make her seem like the star. And, though it hardly bears repeating, Supergirl sports very different costumes in both stories. I wonder if anyone's ever collected the various fashions she's sported over the years into one place. It would be interesting to see where she's been.

Perhaps more Supergirl tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 291: Adventure Comics #414, January 1972

I don't want to make it sound like I've not been enjoying the comics I've been reading for almost the last 300 days, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed every story in this comic a great deal. Bob Oksner is now my absolute favourite Supergirl artist. And not just because of the hotpants! It's also cool to see some Len Wein stuff from around the same time that Swamp Thing is taking off - he writes a pretty decent superhero story as well as his more famous horror stuff.

Unlike yesterday's Adventure Comics, this issue takes up the anthology nature of the title that I think continues until the series ends. We've got a couple of gorgeous Supergirl stories, a Zatanna story by Gray Morrow and Wein, and the second Animal Man story with art by Gil Kane (and written by Dave Wood, about whom I can find almost no information except that he co-created Animal Man - I probably should have heard of him sooner). And all of them were excellent. There's definitely a EC Horror comics vibe to a couple of the Len Wein-scribed stories, which makes a pretty cool combination with the superheroes (SG and Zatanna) that he's playing with. The stories are also less-bombastic than what one might expect from 70s DC, and you can see the transition from goofy 60s television Batman-inspired shenanigans to writers who are thinking through the ramifications and ways of telling superhero stories. I'm definitely going to have to see if some of this old stuff has been collected so I can get a better idea.

Strangely, this comic was in my Supergirl section in the collection, even though it prominently features an Animal Man story. It's going to go back into the AM collection now. Animal Man's earliest adventures originally appeared in Strange Adventures, and were reprinted years later as back-ups to Supergirl's Adventure Comics run. They're not easy to come by, but as of this writing I'm only missing one of Animal Man's earliest adventures. What's interesting is the recolouring job that some of the stories undergo in the 6 or so years between publication. Such decisions, though, are best left to the mysteries of the universe.

A bit more Adventure tomorrow, I think. I'm enjoying the crap out of the Supergirl stuff, and it's great to revisit the early Animal Man adventures. See you then.