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 2089: Tales to Astonish #84, October 1966

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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 2080: Conan the Barbarian #10, October 1971

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We enter the Bronze Age with a tale of the Iron Age, or one of them at least. My exposure/knowledge of Conan can be summed up in hazy memories of Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn in the roll. I've read a bit of Robert Howard's stuff, but mainly his Lovecraft-inspired mythos tales. The Conan stuff never really did it for me. I think I also must have read a few of his stories when I was first getting into Cerebus, if only for context. And today's comic offers that as well.

Barry Windsor-Smith is a fantastic artist. He stands out to me alongside someone like P. Craig Russell for having come out of the 70s with an art style unlike anyone else producing comics at the time. Marvel's Bronze Age, I think, is characterized by their house style with superheroes, but in the non-continuity, non-superhero titles, there was a little more wiggle room for differing aesthetic choices. Russell's Killraven and Windsor-Smith's Conan are wonderful examples of this.

Storywise, not bad. I think I enjoyed the Black Knight story that is sandwiched between barbarians in this comic, a reprint from a comic of the 50s. Sir Percy is an interesting character, effecting what really seems to me to be a medieval version of Clark Kent to keep suspicion away from his identity as the Black Knight. A fun little story, borrowing liberally from the Robin Hood tales.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2038: Amazing Spider-Man #415, October 1996

 

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I'm having a bit of a pain day today, so I'll talk a bit more about the "Onslaught" crossover tomorrow. Which might be more appropriate because, really, not much happens to further the plot in today's comic.

And there's two Peter Parkers? What's that all about?

(Yes, I know it's the infamous Clone Saga. I'm being facetious.)

 So, I like Mr. Bagley's art - he of Thunderbolts can do no wrong. And, as far as superheroes battling giant robots, it did the trick. But not much else.

 More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2037: Generation X #19, September 1996

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I find it appropriate that I return to blogging (after a fucking month!) with a series of which I'm quite overly fond. I loved The New Mutants, and Generation X was a fantastic follow-up to the tales of young mutants that I grew up with. While the whole mutant metaphor is very useful for telling stories about marginalized groups, the onset of mutation, in puberty, also makes it a perfect vehicle for telling stories about growing up.

 So, a month off, and my wrists and thumbs are slightly better, but not much. The job I'm doing now is not super great for my pain, but it's a worthwhile endeavour, and I've had so many people tell me how appreciative they are for my efforts. Who knew that delivering groceries would be so fulfilling?

 That said, we're well into the Onslaught crossover here. I don't have all of the parts, but I figured I had enough to finally sit down and read a good, multi-title event. I think I probably got most of the parts of this crossover from my initial purchase of a comic collection from Cover to Cover Books when I was in the process of opening up my comic store. I started getting back into comics around the time that this crossover was happening, but I was much more into DC at the time.

The crossover itself is pretty great, and though there were subsequent problems, the Image-led reboots of The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America were not terrible. Once Liefeld left, anyway. My Marvel re-introduction actually came from one of the series that spins out of this crossover, the amazing, fantastic Thunderbolts. I'll say a bit more about the actual Onslaught event tomorrow.

I love Generation X, particularly this initial Scott Lobdell/Chris Bachalo run. Mr. Bachalo's sense of panel layout and composition is just amazing. He and Mr. Lobdell seem unafraid to be very explicit about the materiality of their medium, breaking the fourth wall constantly and placing a sometimes Greek Chorus-level of exposition and commentary outside of the action of the comic. It's hard to describe, but today's comic is introduced by a talking toad whom we follow from event to event through the comic. Have I mentioned at all that this is actually a very strange comic, quite unlike the rest of the X-titles from the same era? Probably why I like it so much.

So, I'm back, hopefully. We'll see if I can keep it up.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

A few more pieces on Chris Bachalo.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1989: Spider-Man Interactive Comic Book, 1996

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I picked this comic up as part of an activity pack at a beach-side store while travelling down the Pacific Coast on vacation a few years ago. It's a reprint, as far as I can tell, of Spider-Man Adventures #7, based on the animated series from the 90s, and chronicles the first meeting of Spidey and Doc Ock. The "interactive" part of the comic is that some of the panels, or parts of panels, have been left uncoloured so that one might colour them. Now, I'm a fan of colouring. It's fun and relaxing, but I'm kind of waffling about this one. Colouring in a comic just seems....wrong.

The set that this was in came with some other stuff. There's a large poster of the web-slinger, with an uncoloured version of the picture on the back so that one can colour the poster as well. I've had some thoughts about making a super-psychedelic Spider-Man poster out of it. We'll see. There was also a strange little game, though, now that I'm thinking about it, I can't for the life of me remember where that stuff is. Probably amongst my superhero ephemera in storage in the basement.

The story itself was okay, as was the art. Definitely geared toward younger viewers and readers, but the think I find fascinating about it is the retelling of this first meeting. The two first come into conflict all the way back in Amazing Spider-Man #3 from July 1963, so there's a vast history to retell and revamp in this comic. I find that the animated versions of some superheroes are almost like compacted versions of their long histories. Both Felicia (Black Cat) Hardy and J. Jonah Jameson are involved in the adventure, bringing in characters who may not have been part of the original meeting, but who are vital to the Spider-Man mythos. I think there's something to be said about this compaction of myth - perhaps we see similar things in something like Disney's Hercules - in order to hit all of the salient marks in the mythology, we rearrange events and individuals into a more compact package. What I'd be very interested to know is what affect this has on those who might go ahead and read the originals (in the case of the comics, anyway) one day - will the compaction of the stories for younger audiences replace the original tales somehow? I think it happens with the MCU films now, so I could definitely see it happening with an entire generation of fans who grew up with the cartoon adaptations of so many Marvel characters in the 1990s.

That said, any exposure of superheroes (good exposure, that is) helps the hobby and the genre.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I did a week on children's comics a few years back, but failed to tag it all properly, apparently. Here's the first post of the week, on Mighty Mouse. There's some other cool issues if you're willing to click through.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1988: Marvel's Greatest Comics #57, July 1975

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I can't remember which book I read it in, though it might have been Ronin Ro's Tales to Astonish, in which was discussed the fact that in the mid-Seventies, after Jack Kirby had left the company, that Marvel reprinted a lot of his old work without giving him any remuneration. I think today's comic is one of these, as the series appears to reprint much of the original run of FF.

I've read a couple of things by scripted by Stan Lee over the last little while, and I think the thing that gets me about his writing is that he seems to lack faith in the abilities of both the artist and the reader. So much of his captioning is simply a character explaining what actions have just taken place, even though, through either visual clues or context, a reader really ought to have been able to figure it out themselves. "I've been thrown from the cavern" shouts a character, for example, even as in the previous panel we've seen them hurtling toward the cavern opening, and in the panel in which they're speaking, we seek them being thrown from the cavern. Any time that there's dialogue during action sequences, it's pretty much all description of what the artist has just shown us. And the artist is Jack-frickin'-Kirby, so we don't really need someone holding our hand through the action. Kirby is pretty good at communicating visually.

That said, the melodramatic dialogue outside of battle, the soliloquy-style thought bubbles, these are all excellent examples of where Lee is actually a pretty great writer. He elevates simple interactions to the level of icon, reminding us that the people we're reading about, despite Marvel's attempts to place their heroes on a much closer level than their Distinguished Competition, are in fact operating at iconic levels. These are gods in human guise who just don't realize that they're gods. I think Lee's scripting brilliance lies in that aspect. He knows that superheroes are role models, and that they operate in a much simpler reality than we do. So the hyperbolic language offers a similar tool as ancient Greek tragedies did, albeit in a much different format and millieu. I've spoken before about how when we read a Wolverine comic, the lesson is not that we should go and slice our enemies into little bits. It's that we should, and can, react to problems with the same resolve, sometimes the same savagery, but not with the same actions - at least in the case of the very violent actions we see in superhero comics. Instead, it's the passion, the placing of such importance on situations, that we should be taking away. If we apply ourselves to our own problems with the strength that Ben Grimm applies himself in this issue, we may find those problems, metaphorically, are flung away into the ocean, much like the Thing's enemies in this story.

I've avoided a lot of the early FF, mainly because I've always found Lee's writing off-putting. But I may give it another go from this perspective. Add to this iconic level of storytelling the fact that the four members of the team are elemental proxies, and all of a sudden the importance of these stories is amplified. We mock Lee's bombastic dialoguing, but what he's actually doing is channeling a different level of storytelling into a popular medium.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I had a lot of people ask me about Stan Lee when he died. Here's a post I wrote that says some things.

And, hilariously, here's a post from just over a year ago where I use almost the exact same opening line as I did in today's post. I need to be more original.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1975: The New Mutants #98, February 1991

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(A brief note: according to The Atlantic, the term "latinx" is not exactly a popular one. It is used primarily in academic circles, and since that's where I come from, I'm going to use it. I hope it doesn't offend anyone. I use it exactly to avoid such offense.)

Let's start off my week of Latinx creators with a big one, and currently one of the most valuable comics in my collection. This issue, from featured creator Fabian Nicieza, is the first appearance of the inimitable Merc with a Mouth, Ryan Reynolds' alter ego, Deadpool. Though the credits list Nicieza as a "Scripter," and Rob Liefeld as the story writer, Deadpool's trademark, aside from his violent ways, is his unceasing patter while battling, eating, fucking, whatever. And that comes from a scripter, I would imagine. Rob Liefeld often talks about himself as Deadpool's creator, but comics are words and pictures.

Aside from this, we also have Domino's first appearance, a character played with utter perfection by Zazie Beetz. These introductions, of course, are groundwork for the end of The New Mutants with issue #100, and the beginning of the Liefeld/Nicieza title X-Force. With Liefeld's departure with the other image founders, Mr. Nicieza took over the creative direction of the series until the universe shattering events of The Age of Apocalypse. Mr. Nicieza was a foundational writer for the X-books throughout the 90s and early 2000s, and laid the groundwork for a lot of what has since become canonical in the Marvel Universe.

As with my look at Black creators, I'm interested to see what kind of Latinx representation there is in these comics that feature creators of that ethnic background. I didn't see too much representation in this issue, with the exception, perhaps, of Rictor, who leaves the team in this issue. I couldn't actually find too much info on Rictor's background, but it's telling that after Liefeld leaves the series, Mr. Nicieza returns Rictor to the X-Force fold.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1967 - 1974

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 Ugh. Doing my best to stay on top of my project, but apparently not the blogging. Here's what I've been reading for the last week or so.

 Back to blogging regularly with a week of Latinx creators. I'll try to keep up with it, promise.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1964: Suburban Jersey Ninja She-Devils, January 1991

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A bit of a break takes us into another of the very, very strange corners of the Marvel Universe that is inhabited by creations of Steve Gerber. I've had this comic on my radar for a while, but only procured it recently, and it was both everything I expected and nothing like what I expected. A tiny little child gets quite brutally killed in the first 2 pages, but everything is in Amanda Conner's inimitable cartoonish style, so it's like a cute brutal killing?

The story, and the villain, however, are pure Gerber. A giant-lipped immortal descended from an Aye-Aye wants to take over the world and eat it. A suburban housewife has been training three young married women as ninjas to take on this evil and save the world.

Yep.

The great part is that there are some hints that this is also taking place in the Marvel Universe proper, as Scarsdale is revealed to be a secondary Nexus of All Realities, subordinate to the primary one that Man-Thing guards in the Florida swamps. Which also means that there's a great chance that the She-Devils might show up again one day in the Marvel U. Or the MCU, perhaps? Wouldn't a premise like this make for a great MCU-set sitcom?

Worth a read if you're looking for something quite unlike just about anything else you've read from superhero comics - but that's kind of Steve Gerber in a nutshell

More to follow

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1947: Clive Barker's Hellraiser #9, 1991

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 As I sat to write today's post, I cast my mind back over the various Hellraiser films that I've seen, and I couldn't for the life of me think of any queer characters in any of them. Not that I've watched all of them (but they're on the list, I love the setting), but I'm pretty sure that the sex that is linked to pain in these films is all hetero. And given the links between the BDSM community that inspired the looks of the films and the queer community, you'd think it would be a no-brainer. Except, sadly, it would also likely alienate a large portion of the audience for these films.

Setting that depressing fact aside, today's featured creator is someone that I think will go down in history as one of the great queer creators of our time, Lana Wachowski. Honestly, The Matrix and Sense8 have to rank up there as some of the best pieces of media we've seen in the new millennium (I know The Matrix is 1999, but I think it presciently grabbed hold of our current zeitgeist). Sense8 is perhaps the best metaphorical articulation yet of how we ought to be reshaping our social systems, and The Matrix, no matter how many times I watch it, fills me with the fires of revolution. Ms. Wachowski got started, however, writing for the various Clive Barker properties that were under the aegis of Epic Comics in the early 90s. Indeed, it's somewhat fitting that the story that she writes here is called "Closets." The tale, of an abusive mother and her child, uses one form of violence to articulate an other - the damage done to the child in the story, his being locked in a closet, ends up corrupting him despite his escape from the Cenobites and Hell. Those of us who grew up in closets can perhaps see what the story is trying to say. In an interview with The Mary Sue, Lana's sister Lilly acknowledges that re-watching The Matrix from the point of view of the two creators' transness shows how the film is addressing that part of their lives, and of the lives of closeted queer people. I think in future we're going to have a lot of pieces of media that have to be read this way. Just as we might go back and read George Eliot from the perspective of a woman hiding in a man's world, we'll see stories told that must be considered from the point of view of the hidden queerness of the creators.

Who else was in this issue, though? The Hellraiser books are anthologies, brimming with talent, really. Two of my featured creators from the recent past, Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie grace these pages, and Miran Kim, who illustrates Ms. Wachowski's story, is of Korean descent. Add to this some bloody (literally) brilliant painted artwork, and one can see how this series lasted as long as it did. If you're a fan of the franchise, this is one of the few times that I've seen an adaptation be almost as effective as the source material.

One last note, as I'm celebrating queer creators right now, is that Clive Barker is also queer, having come out in the mid-90s. I remember the furor over it, but I wish I could remember how I, personally, felt about it.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a bit more from Epic Comics for the project, including the very queer-sounding Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool.

And since Ms. Wachowski and her sister are, primarily, filmmakers, here's some thoughts I've had on movies.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1946: Captain America #7, May 1997

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Another shout-out today to Joe Phillips - if you didn't have a look at his website when I spoke about him last week, you really ought to. Just frickin' glorious art, and so fabulously gay!

I am dying to see a gay Captain America. Can you imagine the ruckus from the fanboys? There's an interesting moment in this comic, one that has played out in numerous Captain America stories from the past, in which Cap questions whether his allegiance is to a government or to a country. I wonder if the choice has to be muddied a bit with a third option: an ideal. It has always seemed to me that Captain America stands for the ideal of America, not the brutal, racist state that currently exists. But once we go back and interrogate the Founding Fathers and their notions a bit, can we even begin to talk about an "ideal" America? If disparity and inequality are baked in at the most fundamental, original levels, how does one go about dismantling that system? More likely, and more what we're seeing now, is the tearing the system down as unrecoverable, and starting again.

I am dying to see what happens, even more so than I am for a gay Captain America. But that's the thing, right? If Cap is to stand for the ideal of America, then he ought to be queer. And of mixed descent. Child of immigrants. The blond haired, blue eyed ubermensch is a bit Nazi ideal, really. In fact, were I to have my way, I think I'd rewrite Captain America as a team of individuals, or have it as an identity that floats from person to person, always where it is needed to right one of the injustices that have become the fabric of daily American life.

But seriously, go have a look at Mr. Phillips' work. It's so great.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

Here's a few more things that I've written about Captain America.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1944: Amazing Adventures #31, July 1975

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I feel like if you're a comics fan and you don't know the art of P. Craig Russell, then you need to do yourself a favour and educate yourself. Today's featured creator is one of the most dynamic and innovative comics artists out there. No one lays out a page like Mr. Russell, and no one tells a story in the way he can. And, according to his wiki entry, he was the first comics creator to openly come out as gay. I can't access the article in which this is stated, but I'll give the wiki the benefit of the doubt.

I'll say this: even if you didn't know he was gay, you'd have an inkling after reading this comic. There's so much more attention lavished on the male bodies than on the female ones here. That's not to say that the women aren't present in the story, just that the men are prominent in the story. This is an early series for Mr. Russell, and as he moves through the 80s and 90s I find his work becomes slightly more stylized, but also more confident. His adaptation of Wagner's entire Ring cycle is a beauty to behold, though it's sometimes a bit of a slog. Maybe I'm just not an opera fan.

While there isn't any explicit homosexuality in this comic, given it's a mainstream comic from teh mid-70s, there is a remarkable amount of homosociality. Mr. Russell's art illustrates the story and words of Don McGregor, whose work I've spoken highly of in the past. Mr. McGregor, to me, demonstrates an interesting precursor to ally-ship in a very specific forum. His comics celebrate diversity in ways that I don't think any other comics were at the time. Both of these creators really bear some attention, more than they have been given, I think.

One other thing came of my reading this comic - I think I'm going to have to track down all the issues. I've only ever read the entirety of the Killraven saga in the Marvel Essential series, which reprints in black and white. While you still get the story, it's hard to really appreciate the beauty of the setting and the characters without some colour. That's my feeling, anyway. So Amazing Adventures joins the original run of Man-Thing on my list of old comics that I just need to get.

More to follow.

 Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a few other bits of Mr. Russell's work in the project. He always brings a remarkable beauty to whatever publication he's involved in. 

And Don McGregor is really a great writer. I think he's worth checking out.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1942: The Age of the Sentry #3, January 2009

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Today's featured creator, Colleen Coover, won my heart with her amazing, amazing girlie porno series Small Favors. As I was looking for comics to read to celebrate my LGBTQ+ family, I was delighted to come upon her name and this excellent faux-history romp with the Sentry.

For a moment when I was reading the second story, illustrated by Ms. Coover and written by her partner Paul Tobin, I was a little mystified as to why the story was so, so straight. On the one hand, it's definitely because it's a mainstream superhero comic from about 10 years ago, when they weren't quite ready to have so much queerness on display. But then I also thought about the fact that Ms. Coover, according to her wiki, identifies as Bisexual. We're a mysterious breed, we bis, sometimes accused of greed, sometimes of not existing at all. But we exist, and persist, and as a bisexual creator, Ms. Coover is going to create some art that, sometimes, doesn't look very queer at all. I think in these cases, we have to read a little more deeply into both art and words, to see if there is a different inflection to the heterosexual stories that are told by bisexual creators. How do we identify them as bisexual stories?

And, really, do we need to?

More to follow. 

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've got a couple of other posts about Ms. Coover's work here.

And there's some other stuff about The Sentry here.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1940: The Abominations #1, December 1996

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 I'm going to use yesterday's post about Joe Phillips to springboard into a couple of weeks of queer creators in comics, just so I feel like I've done my bit for Pride, as we definitely won't be having our parade and celebration, not in the same way, this September. I've spent the last couple of weeks pouring through the collection, so once I'm done this little hiatus into the gay world, I've decided to get back to featuring POC creators in comics from as broad a spectrum as I can. We're at a turning point, I think, if we can just be brave enough to actually make the turn. My job, as I see it, is to show other people why that turn is worth making.

Today's featured creator is Ivan Velez, Jr., a gay Latinx man who has spent a large amount of his time in comics pushing for diversity. According to his wiki entry, his first comics were about queer kids in the Bronx, back in the 80s, and his devotion to demonstrating both gendered and heritage-based diversity in comics hasn't disappeared. I wondered, as I opened this comic that I have absolutely no context for, aside from Mr. Velez's identification, whether there would be coded queer language, and how that would present itself. I needn't have worried. The language isn't coded - it's clear. Not even 10 pages in, Sleek, one of the main characters, is in conversation with Po, about how cool Po (who is male-identified) can be under pressure, to which Sleek (also a male-identifying character) adds, through thought bubble, "That's why I love you so much." As I say, I have no in-universe context for this comic or the characters, so this might simply be a familial or brotherly bond, but given the context of Mr. Velez, I'm going straight (see what I did there?) to the gay.

I really enjoy talking about queerness in mainstream comics. It's something that I am pretty sure went right over my head as a kid, but there really is a lot of representation, and a lot of subversive representation, in the mainstream. I like to think it's because the heterosexual censors at the top simply had no idea of the kind of language that queer people used to communicate with one another, a lesson that the original Danny the Street from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol makes plain. Coded language has always been used by oppressed minorities. I probably shouldn't, but I find such joy in noticing it, and then noticing that it must have flown right past the hawkish, straight eyes of the Comics Code.

That is all to say that the queer characters in this comic are not hidden. At least, not from us. They may be hiding things from themselves, but that's a fundamental part of the queer story. Mr. Velez Jr. will definitely be showing up again in coming days. I'll have to keep an eye out for rainbows in his work.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I just linked to this the other day, but here's my writing on queerness in comics. It's probably a part of the blog, and project, of which I'm most proud.

And since The Abominations hails from stories of the Hulk, here's the Hulk stuff I've written on the blog.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1935: Marvel Two-In-One #71, January 1981

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Featured creator Ron Wilson has shown up numerous times in the project, though I don't know that I've ever spent that much time thinking about his art. Mr. Wilson illustrated the Masters of the Universe comic produced by Marvel's Star Comics, but is better known for his tenure with The Thing, stretching over today's series and Ben Grimm's solo series from the late 80s. I used to have a fair chunk of that series too, but it's disappeared from the collection over the years somehow.

Mr. Wilson's work definitely hearkens to the 70s Marvel style for me - there's a lot of Rich Buckler in there, I think, though I'm really only beginning to appreciate some of the nuance that the artists of that period (the Bronze Age, I suppose) bring to the characters. There's much more of a cleaving to a "house style" during this era, so one has to look very closely to note the differences individual artists put into these characters. For Mr. Wilson, I say there's a lot of Rich Buckler there, but beneath that there's a fair bit of Kirby as well, though perhaps that has more to do with the house style than it does Ron Wilson's particular personal style.

What can I say about the comic otherwise? I really like the Marvel Two-In-One run from this era, especially when Tom DeFalco takes over. I've never really been a big fan of The Thing, but these team-up comics place him in interesting situations and remove him, for the most part, from the larger team dynamic within which he is usually presented. I think it allows us to see Ben Grimm for who he actually is, rather than as back-up for his more dynamic team mates. And it doesn't always work out well, as Grimm's derogatory attitudes toward Native Americans in the Marvel Two-In-One annual I reviewed here, attests. Ben gets better as the years roll on, as, one hopes, does the society that has produced his stories. I find that he's one of the Marvel heroes whose character development is most striking over the course of his existence. While some characters have remained pretty much how they were first portrayed (I'm thinking about Quicksilver, who shows up in this comic), the Thing undergoes quite radical shifts of his perspective. Can we make some preliminary suggestions over the relative traditional monstrousness of a character and their ability to grow and change? Is someone like Ben Grimm, as a result of his appearance, forced to shift and change his personality more than someone who looks stereotypically "normal?"

And just so we're clear here, Grimm then becomes a rather adroit metaphor for the very people whose uprisings I'm here supporting. And that's where our problems begin.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

If you're interested in Marvel's young readers output in the 80s, have a look at the Star Comics stuff I've reviewed.

And for some of the Thing's team-based adventures, here's the reviews of the Fantastic Four that I've posted.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1925: Captain Marvel #0, November 1999

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.

There was a time, before the widespread use of the Internet, when one would have to actually pick up print magazines to find out all the upcoming news and gossip from the world of comic books. Some magazines were very good, offering interesting critical engagements with interesting works coming out of the medium. And some were Wizard.

I'm not going to lie - I read Wizard on a regular basis for a while. It wasn't great reporting, but it did a decent job of keeping a comics junkie up to speed on new titles, new creators, and just neat things. And the magazine never purported to be any more than that. But, to be fair, one of my favourite parts of the publication was the exclusive comics that would fairly frequently be packaged with it, of which today's issue is an example.

Featuring pencils by Chriscross, this comic started off the Captain Marvel series featuring Genis-Vell, son of the original Captain Mar-Vell. And, honestly, that's about all I know about it. In the late 90s I was much more a DC fan than a Marvel fan, so this character kind of passed me by. I'm not even sure if he's a part of the Marvel U anymore, though, given superhero comics, I'm sure he could be once again.

Today's art is, and I do not mean this disparagingly, very 90s. There was a particular aesthetic to superhero comics at the time, perhaps spurred by the huge success of Howard Porter on JLA, and Chriscross' work is a wonderful example of that aesthetic. I think the true mark of a good artist in such circumstances is when they can keep to this general aesthetic but at the same time inject interesting variations that personalize the piece. There are some cool panel constructions in this comic, and some neat visual effects that add a sense of motion to all of the characters. There's also a really hot picture of Genis about halfway through, still super-muscly, but in kind of a good way?

I should mention that the series is scribed by veteran writer Peter David, of Incredible Hulk fame, and it is yet another example of his facility with dialogue and action, and with the superhero in general. We'll see more of these creators as the project progresses.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've only read one other Chriscross comic for the project, and I really didn't have much context for it.

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 1718: Thundercats #1, December 1985

I have some nice nostalgic feelings about Thundercats. I remember watching the series as a kid, being annoyed by Snarf, but generally enjoying the story.

This comic didn't quite have the same effect, though whether that's quality of narrative or distance of nostalgia, I'm not sure. There's a flimsy set-up (planet destroyed, this group is the only one that survives the escape), and then some action, and then some more action on "Third Earth." (I'm actually fascinated with where humans must fit in this world - if it's Third Earth, does that mean humans colonized it? And where did Mum-Ra come from?)

I was curious in the first couple of pages as to whether or not the characters were, for the most part, naked. They seem to be, as Tygra, at least, is walking around in bear (or tiger) feet. Chetara has boots, as does Panthro, but it doesn't look like they're wearing clothes. Which makes sense. If you look at a cat, they're not wearing clothes, though one could make the case that that's what fur would look like on an anthropomorphic creature.

I think about these things too much.

"H-how am I supposed to use the sword, Jaga? I-I can't even lift it!"