The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1949: Vertigo Visions: The Geek - Corruption of the Innocent, 1993

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I've written of today's featured creator, the fantastic Ms. Rachel Pollack. I've always said her run on Doom Patrol is severely underrated, and the fact of her being a major creator during the early Vertigo years and also being a trans woman working in comics at that time is one of the more significant moments, to me, in the history of our beloved medium.

That said, and as I noted when I read Ms. Pollack's other entry into the Vertigo Visions series, I wasn't a huge fan of this story. Actually, that's not entirely accurate. I enjoyed the story - it's a hallucinatory and twisting tale of Brother Power and his corruption by ever more brutal media, and is perhaps slightly dated in that it was written before the explosion of new media in our culture. Though in some ways that also serves the story of Brother Power, who was created as a weird hippy superhero in 1968, and who was virtually absent from the DCU in the intervening 30ish years. What I think is the problem is that it's a difficult story, as is Tomahawk, and difficult stories need to be re-read. Mike Allred is a master of metaphorical storytelling, as evidenced in his adaptation of The Golden Plates, and Ms. Pollack's deep understanding of Tarot and the way images can shape our futures combines with her expression of transness in her work to produce something remarkable. But definitely not something easy.

Vertigo, more and more, is proving itself an imprint to which one needs to come back, over and over. There was really some very sophisticated storytelling going on, especially in the somewhat heady early days. These are very weird comics, and very important.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Links

Vertigo Comics were one of the reason I got back into comics. I think their early period is really some of the absolute best comics gets.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 33: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #8, August-September 1978

All things must end, I guess. At least, in a lot of ways, we have a decent closure here, which I was not expecting. Shade is tasked with another mission, and is still considered a traitor, but he has allies, and a deal to clear his name after another trip into the Zero Zone on the way to Earth to stop Dr. Z.Z. These are adventures that, sadly, we won't get to see, but this trip into the zone does manage to segue very nicely into Peter Milligan's run.

This issue, as the last one, is in large part exposition, this time filling in some of Shade's back story, specifically the story of how he gained the M-Vest. There's also quite a lot of cutting across the Zero Zone from Meta to Earth to witness the various scenes taking place in either zone. One of the lovely things about this issue is the transition panels that Ditko inserts where we have a snippet of dialogue from whichever zone we have just read and a snippet from the zone that the action is moving into, and in between there are bizarre illustrations of the inhabitants of the Zero Zone. Creepy and weird, a little trite, but nicely executed.

There's also a long-awaited reunion, which I won't spoil, since the series, if you can find a copy of it, is well worth a read. I'm glad I decided to take this detour into Ditko-Land. It was wild and wonderful, and I'm now looking forward to discovering some more of his work deeper in the collection (there's definitely some of his Charlton work kicking around in there) and to re-reading Peter Milligan's wonderful Vertigo take on Shade.

Shade shows up a few more times in the DCU and Vertigo Universes. For the ten year anniversary of Vertigo, Milligan and Mike Allred did a short Shade story based on the Vertigo version of the character. As I've mentioned before, the Ditko-Shade shows up in Suicide Squad in the 1980s, and then an interesting amalgam of the two makes an appearance in the Flashpoint crossover, and is catapulted into the New 52 DCU in the Milligan-penned Justice League Dark. None of these later appearances measure up to his original and re-visioned Vertigo iterations.

This Ditko run of Shade suffered, I think, in its resemblance to a superhero comic, which it most certainly isn't. There's no evidence that it takes place in the mainstream DCU, and had DC thought ahead here and changed the branding on the comic in order to show that it wasn't a superhero comic, it might have helped draw in readers. That said, the series still might not have survived the "DC Implosion," so perhaps branding is a moot point.

I wasn't sure what to read tomorrow. I don't think I'll move on to the Vertigo Shade yet. It's a 70-issue series, so I'd be reading it for few months. I'm not sure I'm up to it quite yet. In my database, Paul Pope's 100% is next in the reading order, but I'm not sure I'm ready right now to jump into so dense a work.

Here's a thought, though I'm not promising anything. If you're reading this, and I have irrefutable statistical proof that people are at the very least looking at the page, if not reading it, anyway, if you're reading this, and you have a suggestion of a series or character, or publisher, or decade, or genre, let me know, and I'll do my best to fulfill the suggestion from my collection. Again, I won't promise I'll do it every time, but once it a while it might be fun to get some public input.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 12: 1st Issue Special #3, June 1975

You know those moments when you read a comic that is utterly and completely dated? Or watch a movie or TV show that is the same? Some older superhero comics maintain a timeless quality, regardless of the fact that the plot would be solved with a simple cell phone call nowadays. Others....

This issue of 1st Issue Special is one that has not aged well. The tryout book features a new character every month, ostensibly to see whether or not there is call for an ongoing series of said character. This particular issue, however, falls prey to that malaise that dogs much of Jack Kirby's late 60s, early 70s work: the obviously older writer trying to capture the zeitgeist of the youth to whom he thinks the comics are appealing. Whenever I read a story with Metamorpho, I do my best to like him. He comes from the tradition of the kooky groovy superheroes of the early 60s that gave us my beloved Doom Patrol, The Metal Men, all of these B-list heroes whose adventures are....well, weird.
But I can just never get into him. The only time I've ever appreciated the character was when he pulls what we'll anachronistically call "a Groot" at the very beginning of Grant Morrison's JLA. There he evinces a quality of heroism that I'd call superheroic. But I've never been much impressed with any of the other stuff I've read. Even the Allred/Gaiman story from Wednesday Comics, which, considering its creatorly pedigree, should have been really great did very little for me.
I suppose the problem is that, in contrast to other completely bodily altered heroes like Cliff Steele, Rex Mason doesn't seem to deal with the notion that he's no longer a human. Or, at least, his writers don't, and I think that for characters like this, that's an important, even intrinsic, part of the narrative. I recently found a really old review I did of Doom Patrol for a website back in the early 2000s, and I call Morrison's run on the title one of the most human stories told with superheroes. What does that mean? It means that he takes some of the most outrageously strange heroes in the DCU and tells us a story that is, at its very core, about how we are human, about the choices we make and the challenges we face. For me, Metamorpho has this amazing potential, but is rarely deployed in the same way. I'm not saying that his adventures have to be deep and soul-searching metaphors of the human condition, but some consideration of what he is would add a bit of humanity to "the fabulous freak."

Okay, enough bashing. I feel like all I've been doing with these comics is complaining. So here's a really cool fact: this issue was illustrated by Ramona Fradon. Ms. Fradon was one of those rare creatures in mid-twentieth century comics culture, a woman. (I shouldn't say was. She's still alive). Not only this, but she co-created both Metamorpho and Aqualad, forever, I think, securing her a place in superheroic history. I find this aspect of this project fascinating. Eventually I'll get to Marvel's Girl Comics series, which has brief articles on the important women of twentieth century comics, and Ms. Fradon must surely be one. So, even if I don't particularly enjoy the story (and Sapphire Stagg, Metamorpho's lady-friend is surely one of the most annoying supporting characters in this history of comics), something great that's coming out of this project so far is discovering creative teams and historical facts of which I was unaware, whether it's a discovery like Ms. Fradon or witnessing an early Moore or Gaiman story as they are cutting their teeth on the medium they end up mastering.

More 1st Issue Special tomorrow. The Creeper, I think.

"Let Them Serve As Signs": Graphic Adaptations of Christian Texts

An article I wrote for Sequart.org about adaptations of Christian holy works.


Let Them Serve As Signs: Graphic Adaptations of Christian Texts