The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1711: Strange Tales #155, April 1967

A blast from the past, from a Marvel Universe only 6 years old. The lead Nick Fury story is from the classic Jim Steranko era, and it's pretty awesome. I kind of want to read more of this earlier version of Fury, more James Bond than super-spy. He's a lot less jaded than writers treat him now.

But Ms. Severin's contribution to this issue is a Doctor Strange tale, and it's pretty great. The story is a concluding episode to a longer tale, and the Stan Lee script is, as usual with him, a bit stilted. There's just too damned much exposition. But the art has a wonderful Golden Age feel to it. As I read more pre-1955 comics, I'm gaining a much greater appreciation for the style of that era, and also for the influence it casts over comics. While the EC horror comics influence is fairly obvious, sometimes we fail to look for, or perhaps include, influence from the early superhero tales. They were simple and often very quickly produced, but the stylization that seems a staple of the era manages to convey fantastical situations with very little detail. Contemporary comics, to a large extent, are about spectacle, sometimes to the detriment of story. Comics from the 30s and 40s aren't, as the production standards were so much lower. Or rather, the production technology was so much less-sophisticated. This Doctor Strange story is beautiful to look at. I kind of wish the overly-verbose Stan Lee speech bubbles weren't there.

(For example:)

"For, only I possess the knowledge--only I possess the power--only I possess the consummate skill--to withstand so deadly a blow--and summarily repel it!"

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 1667: Marvel Super Special #20, 1981 (Movie Adaptation Week)

I'm reasonably sure I've seen this film, though there really is a good chance that I haven't. I have vague impressions of it, though I would only have been 7 when it came out.

Maybe I haven't seen this film.

I'd really like to, though, because this was a pretty great story. While I'm concerned that the special effects may not have aged particularly well, the tale that's told is pretty solid. There's lots of cool twists, some very mythic stuff going on, especially the bits that touch on Christianity. It's a story that really feels like it could have happened in our world. Though I can't really say why without spoiling one of the coolest parts, IMHO, of the story.

Apprentice wizard Galen has to face off against the last dragon. That's all I'll say. It sounds like a pretty standard fantasy story, but, as I mentioned, there's neat twists that definitely set it apart from the usual bunch. Though I grew up on a pretty steady diet of Dragonlance in my early teens, I've never really been a huge fan of the genre. Given my penchant for Dungeons & Dragons, that's a bit odd, but I think I've always taken from superheroes the same sort of escapism that fantasy brings. We geeks, we sometimes focus on one genre to the virtual exclusion of all others. So it's worth noting, for me at least, when a fantasy story does resonate. This one did.

Denny O'Neil adapts the screenplay, and Marie Severin and John Tartaglione handle the art. One of my planned theme weeks will feature Ms. Severin and a couple of other female artists from the early days of Marvel. The likenesses to the cast of the film are well done. I can't imagine having to draw a story in which you had an actual real-life original that could be compared to your work on pretty much every page.

The back half of the magazine is given over to "making of" features. There is, of course, one that focusses on the creation of Vermithrax Perjorative ("The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse") - the titular dragon. One particular part of that article jumped out at me in the first description in the article: "...it is the last of the great dragons, a four-hundred year old androgyne, a fire-breathing monstrosity" (emphasis mine). There's no other mention of this in the entire magazine, but I find the idea that the dragon is non-binary very interesting. On the one hand, the creature is squarely conceived as an evil force outside of nature, contrary to humanity and it's perceived binary of male/female. From this perspective, the dragon represents something contrary to Christian binary worldview. On the other hand, Christianity is not well-presented in this story, particularly, and even the ending hints at a hidden way of perceiving magic within the Christian framework that comes to dominate the world. But the dragon is still (SPOILER in case you missed the title of the comic!) slain, and the magic, and androgyny, they represented is hidden. I'm perhaps making too much of this, but I'm fascinated by the appearance of gender identities that are becoming more widely recognized in older works of literature.It tells us a lot about cultural attitudes toward such things through history.

(Of course I've just realized that the main female lead in the story begins in drag, so as to avoid the lottery of maidens sacrificed to the dragon, but "comes out" partway through the story. Maybe I need to think more about this one.)

"You can't stop me. After all, I've been a man longer than you have."