New Article up!

I know, I know, I'm well behind on the comics. There's only so much one can say about these Jughead stories I've been reading.

But I suppose I should actually say it...

Anyway, I've recently started writing for Comic Book Resources, and my first article is up. I'm still learning the style a bit, so this is with generous help from the editors at CBR.

https://www.cbr.com/our-encounter-with-evil-mignola-johnson-cadwell/

Neato!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 772: Alpha Flight v.1 #30, January 1986

One of the things I'm finding interesting about the last couple of issues is that it's early work by Mike Mignola, predating Hellboy, I think. You can see the stark difference between Mignola's personal style and his inked style here as the cover seems to be his own work, whereas he's inked in the interior pages. And, if I'm to be very honest, it just doesn't look like his work inside. It looks kind of...you know, usual. Which, of course, an artist starting out at Marvel would want to be. Gotta make sure you can cop to the house style. I'm supremely grateful, though, that he decided to pursue his own style and stories, and that we have the brilliance that is Hellboy as a result.

Scramble, the Mixed Up Man, is a villain of Lovecraftian proportions, bringing a heaping dose of body horror to the Great White North. The creatures we see within remind me of the Famileech from the New Universe titles, and you can see in their depiction on the cover there Mignola's interest in things Lovecraftian, an interest that gets taken up in much of his later work. For a great example, see the wonderful The Doom That Came To Gotham Elseworlds series. So good.

One more Alpha Flight tomorrow, then on to something a bit different. To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 771: Alpha Flight v.1 #29, December 1985

We're going to spend a couple of days with Bill Mantlo's Alpha Flight, and then, on Sunday, I'll be starting a project within the Project that I hope is interesting and thought-provoking. But until then, let's see what the Alphans are up to under new management.

As with most passings of the reins between creative teams, there's a fair bit of tidying to be done from the previous team's tales. Today is one such bit of tidying, as the team faces off against the Hulk in the streets of downtown Vancouver. To put this slightly more into context, the creative team that has taken over the book was actually previously working on the Hulk's book - the back matter of the previous issue notes that the two books, The Incredible Hulk and Alpha Flight, literally switched creative teams. Completely. Even the editors switched roles. So it's no surprise that, as Mantlo and company take over the Canadians, they do so with a little epilogue to their work with the Hulk. By issue's end, he's back across the American border, and the Flight decides not to pursue him. They may technically have won the battle, and ousted the Hulk from the city, but at the cost of being quite badly wounded.

What the battle accomplishes for the team, though, is to solidify it as a team. One of the running themes, especially since Guardian's death, has been the coherency of the team. I mentioned earlier in my look at Alpha Flight that I kind of liked the way that the team wasn't really a team, a "non-team" almost in the mold of the old Defenders title from the 70s. Much of Marvel America is centralized around New York, though we see more and more teams being located in various cities around the country. But the dearth of heroes in the Great White North means that the team has to traverse vast distances to assemble. I liked that about them. Canada is fricking huge. For those who've never been here, we are the second-largest country in the world. And lots of it is pretty empty. The closest major city to Calgary, where I'm currently residing, is Edmonton, a 3-hour drive away. And that's actually pretty close.

I know that the team is likely to relocate to the old Langkowski manor that was the site of Gilded Lily's plans earlier this week, but I don't know when. And what does that mean for Northstar, who obviously has a life in Quebec, literally on the other side of the country? We may find out in the next couple of days, but perhaps not. Something to look forward to when we get back to the Flight, I guess. Oh, and I was mistaken when I said that I didn't have a coherent run after Byrne's departure. It actually looks like I have much of Mantlo's run as well. Groovy.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 615: Cosmic Odyssey #4, 1989

I'll admit, right off the bat, that by this point in reading this series, I'd started to lose interest. I really think it does come down to the promise of the covers versus the actual story within. We now have Dr. Fate brought into the mix, so there is some attempt, with both him and the Demon, to bridge the cosmic and the magical sides of the DCU, but I feel like it's too little too late. While magic, both fictionally and when treated in lived experience, does often function as a deus ex machina, it's a little too convenient here. Had there been some indication earlier in the series that there was something mystical about the Anti-Life entity, that would have been great. But there wasn't.

There's an interesting attitude on display here that stems from Arthur Clarke's assertion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Unfortunately, the way this assertion is most often interpreted is that all things that appear magical are simply technologies that we cannot understand. That's not what the assertion says, though. It says that these technologies are indistinguishable from magic, not that magic is an indistinguished technology, so to speak. But that's how the assertion is playing out in Cosmic Odyssey, that the magical and the technological are simply different aspects of one another, and the science fictional power of Darkseid is somehow pretty much the same thing as the magical power of Etrigan and Fate.

In the end, however, the major problem with this series is that it purports to be much larger than it is. I teach my students to pay attention to titles, and the title Cosmic Odyssey certainly promises some mythological-level adventure going on - I did not get this feeling from the comic itself. It was pretty much a run-of-the-mill superhero story. But, damn, does it have some beautiful covers!

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 614: Cosmic Odyssey #3, 1989

Darkseid connects himself to the newly reunited Jason Blood/Etrigan, and journeys to the realm of the Anti-Life equation. It does smack of Kirby when you describe it in these little soundbites, though sadly it doesn't translate to the comic. Again, I'm not sure Starlin's brand of cosmic quite fits Kirby's. Kirby's Darkseid is basically a cosmic Lex Luthor, which works in the strange and simple world of the New Gods. They're new gods, right? So they embody, through particular traits that we layer over them ourselves, aspects of how we perceive the universe. In keeping with this, later depictions cast Darkseid as a cosmic force, something we can see the effects of, but can't necessarily understand or communicate with.

Unfortunately, Starlin has him, and Highfather, to be fair, cast as rulers of science fiction empires, without any of the characterization of either Kirby silliness or cosmic otherness. I think that the New Gods work best when they're written almost as superheroic versions of Lovecraft's Old Ones. They function on a level far above that of the mortal mind.

I'm also not 100% certain why Etrigan is even here. I mean, they explain it in the book, but I'm not sure why the character ends up being needed. Surely there are New Gods who could have supplied the same power as the Demon. What it seems to serve is bringing another Kirby character back into the spotlight, or just having a mini-series about Kirby creations. I don't think he was necessary, but, then again, look at that beautiful cover up there. Maybe that's reason enough.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 613: Cosmic Odyssey #2, 1988

No, that wasn't a hoax or a dream. The Anti-Life Equation is a sentient anti-matter creature.

So, anyway, its plan is to destroy a bunch of star systems in order that a gateway between its dimension and our own is formed, thus allowing it to take control of everything in the universe. The superheroes pair up and head off to stop the destruction of these planets.

What we have in this issue is a John Stewart Green Lantern that I don't think I've ever encountered, really. I don't remember him being quite this arrogant in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and he's certainly not this way in more recent fare. But here, he thinks he's such hot shit that he'll leave J'onn J'onzz behind and try to defuse an extra-dimensional super-god-bomb by himself. I don't imagine it's any surprise that he fails.

Well, actually, it kind of is. Superheroes don't fail in these kinds of situations. The planet full of innocent beings never blows up, especially not because the hero was too proud. You might think I'm being facetious here, but I'm not. It's a rare occurrence that results in the destruction of an entire civilization due to a superhero's negligence. That's what happens here.

The really infuriating part of this is that I was recently reading something featuring John Stewart, something outside of the Project, and they reference his failure at Xanshi. And the older, wiser John Stewart carries that burden, and it's what makes him the hero that he is currently (or, rather, last time I read/watched him).

So some bits are retconned, and some are not. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 608: Cosmic Odyssey #1, 1988

I am in no way amongst a minority of people who, upon seeing Mike Mignola's name attached to a project, are immediately interested, no matter the subject matter.

Did I say that right?

I love Mike Mignola's art, is what I'm trying to say. I don't know where I found these comics, but I know they've been a part of the collection for some time now. I've started reading this particular issue a few times, but I've never finished it until now. There's a couple of reasons for this.

You'd think that if anyone could come to Jack Kirby's New Gods and make them incredibly cosmic and strange, it would be Jim Starlin. But I think Starlin's particular corner of the cosmic is inflected more by old school science fiction serials (think of Warlock, or Dreadstar) than is quite appropriate to the superhero genre. Superheroes need to stay just as firmly in the fantastic and the mundane as they do in the science fictional, but this series removes the superheroes from that milieu. When held up against the New Gods and all of the beings that inhabit the cosmos, Earth's superheroes just don't seem that special. And it's their specialness that we crave.

So that's one reason. The other is that I didn't really like the inking in the book. I know that Walt Simonson is attached to the New Gods, but I don't know if this is before or after his run with them - that said, the art looks very Simonson-y to me. Which is not a bad thing. Simonson's one of the originals of superhero art. But I was expecting Mike Mignola art, like that which we see on the cover. Such is not the case. Which is an interesting thing for me, because I'm not really very good at recognizing the amount of the look of a comic that inkers and colourists bring to a comic. Here, however, I have an excellent example.

Anyway, the last reason that I don't like this comic is that the Anti-Life Equation is revealed to be an extra-dimensional life form from the anti-matter universe that is trying to take over ours through the equation.

Um.

Yes, of course it was retconned. But some things in the series weren't, and we'll talk about that next time. Onward!