The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 590: Marvel Spotlight #5, March 1980

I find it amusing that this comic came out just around the same time as Edward Said's Orientalism. I think he'd find this comic troubling.

But I don't really feel like going into that today. This comic was kind of bad. I mean, yes, Marv Wolfman wrote it seemingly mere moments before he and George Perez became the darlings of the industry with New Teen Titans, and Steve Ditko illustrated it, though it seems to lack the manic energy of Shade, the Changing Man, which is coeval with this comic.

There's even a glaring editorial error that makes the whole comic make no sense. The whole set-up hinges on an ancestor of the contemporary Tako Shamara having died trying to defeat a Gozilla stand-in (no joke - apparently the rights lapsed the year before, so the monster just sort of looks like Godzilla) - but in the very panel in which the monster is defeated, we have a caption box reading "He roars, flails, he sees the insect [Taka Shamara] ride off whooping in victory..." The next we hear, apparently Tako has fallen trying to defeat the dragon. It makes no sense whatsoever, and really is a remarkable error, given that it undermines the entire story that takes place, and, narratively, the 500-year long oath sworn by the sons and ancestors (because of course it's the sons, right?) of Shamara.

And then, in the current storyline, the 70s Tako Shamara actually summons the dragon from a remote mountain wilderness into his suburban neighbourhood in order to battle it.

Just a bad story all around, really. Ah well. They can't all be winners.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 69 - Marvel Spotlight #29, June 1976

It's interesting to see the cover of this issue in colour, since the version of it I'm reading is black and white. With a character like Moon Knight, whose various costumes are black and white, the lack of colour doesn't really make much difference. But I never would have pegged his antagonist, the hyperbolically-named "Conquer-Lord," as a blue and orange kind of bad guy. Oh, the seventies.

So, it's a nice-looking Jack Kirby cover. Honestly, if you need someone to draw super-people battling on a giant, flame-spouting chess board, there's few artists more suited to such a task than Kirby.

The story inside is fairly standard seventies superhero stuff, with a couple of slight, yet important and interesting, variations. First, we have in this issue the first reference to Marc Spector's affliction with/act of multiple personalities, as he notes accessing different personalities for different skills they possess. Though he refers to is as schizophrenia, and the existence of MPD is still one of those highly-debated points in studies of the human mind, he comes across here as almost a prototype of Crazy Jane of the late eighties Doom Patrol. It's interesting to see precursors to an idea that Morrison deploys with such grace. Not that it's not deployed gracefully here, but it's an instance of the trope that I've not seen before.

The reading of these comics in the Essential editions has two ramifications for me: First, I'm struck with a desire to know these writers a little better. I'm familiar with Steve Gerber, who rose to prominence in this era, but Doug Moench, Bill Mantlo, Steve Engelhart, these are names that I see occasionally in the credits of older comics I read, but I can't put my finger on them the same way I can Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. I'm curious to see if these writers have distinct styles like their 80s counterparts, and whether I can get to the point of recognizing their distinctive qualities. We'll see.

The other thing that occurs is a solution to a problem I was wrestling with as to how to both read and keep track of issues collected in trades for this project. I think that, at least of collections of individual issues, I'm going to enter them into my database but make sure they're explicitly marked as being collected in a particular edition of a particular trade paperback. The only difficulty is going to arise when reprints, like this Essentials edition, only reprint partial issues that include the character in question. This Essential edition collects short stories from Hulk Magazine, but I can't include those issues in the database if I haven't got the whole thing. Perhaps I'll have to figure out a way of noting that it's a partial issue in the database.

Anyway, back to The Score tomorrow, and then a bit more Moon Knight. I have to say I'm enjoying Moon Knight more than The Score at this point, but I get the suspicion that The Score is really more of a "read in one sitting" sort of story, rather than a sequential one, and perhaps that's why it's suffering in my eyes. See you tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 65 - Marvel Spotlight #28, June 1976

I have an admission to make: that colourful cover up above, that's not the comic I read. This is:

I really like the Marvel and DC black and white reprint series, which makes their cancellation recently both a boon and a curse for me. A curse because, inevitably, the colour reprints that will follow will be either exorbitantly expensive or solely digital, neither of which really fits with my reading habits. The boon part is that these older books are getting sold off cheap, and I've managed to get some good deals on them.

Anyway, in order that I don't succumb to having nothing to say about The Score once I reach it's last issues, I've decided to alternate with chapters from this collected edition of Moon Knight stories. I've recently rediscovered the character through the new series, one that was launched by the awesome team of Warren Ellis and DeClan Shalvey. Though I was going to drop the series once the superstars were gone, it's actually continued to be really excellent. I wonder what will happen to it next month when Secret Wars drops, but hopefully it'll be cool still.

One last caveat. I only read very quickly the first two stories in this collection. Moon Knight makes his initial appearance in the pages of Werewolf by Night, a collection of which I read only a couple of months ago. Thus, I'm starting with MK's first solo appearance in Marvel Spotlight. I have to say, especially in light of the concerns I will shortly speak about with the Shadow Line Saga from Epic, that this issue manages to fairly seamlessly combine a decent adventure story with some subtle exposition, all wrapped around a few mysteries (who is Moon Knight, really?, and who's after the mayor?), all within a 20 or so page story. The art is competent, the writing is very 70s, but that's okay too. Moon Knight is often relegated to the same place that Daredevil or Green Arrow are, in that they're simply ways to cash in on the Batman archetype. I would never say that this is completely untrue, but I think Moon Knight (and the others to a certain extent) have enough originality to perhaps be descendants of the same myth that Batman is. What that myth is is a topic for a dissertation. Stay tuned.

Over the last few years I've started reading the old Marvel horror titles in these reprint volumes, and so have been exposed to some writers whose work I was previously unfamiliar with. Doug Moench is one of them, and I've really been enjoying his stuff. I think I was also swayed to respect him when he sheepishly admitted to having poorly finished Steve Gerber's Omega the Unknown story in the pages of The Defenders after Gerber left Marvel with the conclusion of the story.

(And, with Gerber's death a few years back, that story is likely never to see print. Just imagine....)

So that's that for today. Back to The Score tomorrow, and then some more Moon Knight on Saturday. See you tomorrow.