The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2087: Neil Gaiman's Wheel of Worlds #0, April 1995

 Just how much involvement Neil Gaiman had in this comic is hard to determine, really, though the concepts definitely scream Gaiman. Lady Justice was one of the first comics I picked up as I was getting slowly back into the hobby in the mid-90s. I was drawn by the Dan Brereton covers, and Gaiman's name, but they never really drew me in. Having revisited the world of the Wheel of Worlds recently, it's a little more intriguing, though doesn't seem as fresh as it might have 25 years ago. I may well try to track down the Teknophage series, as the character is like an evil, flesh-eating Morpheus, and I'd love to know how his story spins out.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1607 - 1608: Alice Cooper - The Last Temptation #2 - 3, August, December 1994

Our morality play ends as all morality plays do, with the protagonist having learned something that may not have made him happier, but that certainly made him wiser. The Showman is revealed to be a tempter, not necessarily The Devil, but a serpent, so make your own conclusions.

I am curious now about the Alice Cooper album that accompanied the series. I'll have to have a look next time I'm at the used CD place. Yep. I'm that kind of a dinosaur. I've liked, but not loved, Alice Cooper for a long while now. One of my treasured possessions is an original vinyl of his album From the Inside, on which each song is about an inmate in an asylum. The album features little cardboard doors to open behind which we have glimpses into the inmates' world. In retrospect, the album is definitely not doing any favours for the treatment or perception of people with mental health issues. It's more of a concept album version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (the book, not the film), but with much less depth. Which is not meant as a disparagement, merely an acknowledgement of Alice Cooper's place in the canon of popular culture. He's more entertainer than philosopher, I think.

The end of the story has piqued in me a curiosity. In proper horror-villain fashion, the Showman fades away into the mist in the last few panels, promising to return one day and claim our hero's soul. My curiosity is when did our villains start returning like this? Does it go as far back as our early myths? Does Loki slink away, promising to return in the original Norse epics? Or is this a more recent phenomena, spurred by the increasing paranoia of society, or, more likely, by a view of history that shows us that our problems always come back and rear their ugly heads. We must simply have the courage to not let our worse selves win.

That got deep. Neil Gaiman fans will like this comic. Alice Cooper fans will like this comic.

"Did I tell that you'll be going crazy tomorrow?"

Other things you might like reading:

More thoughts on music and comics: A Different Kind of Album

Another really obscure Neil Gaiman comic: The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 251: Elric #0 - One Life, 1996

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1606: Alice Cooper - The Last Temptation #1, May 1994

I posted this image to Instagram this morning with the caption "Remember that time that Neil Gaiman, Alice Cooper, and Michael Zulli teamed up and made a comic together?"

I love that this is a thing that exists. It's even got a Dave McKean cover!

What we've got here is actually a cool little artifact that's one of the interesting places that music and comics crossover. The Last Temptation is both the title of this comic and of the album by Alice Cooper that was released around the same time. Gaiman and Cooper had worked on the story together. I think perhaps this gives us a nice idea of just how big Neil Gaiman was in some circles with the enormous success of The Sandman. It also, in that case, gives us a good idea of how good, and how influential, The Sandman really was.

The story, thus far, seems to be a fairly straightforward morality play told through a creepy theatre revue. Cooper appears as the host, guiding a young man on a creepy and thoroughly transparent metaphorical journey through his future. I don't want to sound like I'm being harsh, but the story is not that complex. And stories like this one, which are some of the oldest stories that we have, don't have to be. A moral tale is there specifically to teach us how to be moral people. Such stories can't really be that dense, or no one would ever read them, nor ever learn. I often think that this is one of the things traditional academics miss about the pop culture they often dismiss. Or maybe they don't. I really have to stop caring about what traditional academics would think. Fuck 'em.

Zulli's art is just brilliant, of course, though one or two panels struck me as a bit stilted and out of place. I wonder if it's harder to compose something like this when you have to be aware that one of the characters who appears on just about every page of the book has to look like someone from real life. And the likeness to Cooper is pretty amazing. Unsurprising, really.

It's a three-part story, so I'll fill you in on how things go tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1537: Vertigo Preview #1, 1992

I went right back to the very beginning and read the first Vertigo comic. It's mostly made up of bits and pieces of other series, but there's also a Sandman story in there that's original. Though I usually refrain from including these sort of preview comics in the project, this one is pretty historically significant. Vertigo literally changed the way things were done in comics. It's interesting that this was happening at around the same time that the Image revolution was going on - two such different aesthetic movements within an ostensibly superheroic genre really does say something about the multiplicity of fans in the comics community. Honestly, anyone who says diversity is killing comics really has never been paying attention to them, have they?

"I'm scared I'm going to do something stupid."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1362: The Sandman (1974), September 1975

Reading this comic makes me want to go back and read the entirety of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, especially since these characters show up in the series, and their appearance there makes much more sense now that I've read an issue of their series. Of course, in true proto-Vertigo, 1980s fashion, the characters are changed and twisted into something much more monstrous and depressing than what we see in this whimsical Kirby silliness, but that's actually a pretty nice way of thinking through the ways that comics have matured. This story reads very much like the fantasy of a child, one of escape and heroism, one that is very much in line with the tenor of comics at the time. But Mr. Gaiman's take on the story asks the question of what it is exactly that young Jed is trying to escape in these Nemo-esque adventures? The answer is awful. I mean, really well-written and conceived, but awful nonetheless.

What we get here in a nice bit of inflectionary reading. Mr. Gaiman's series was much more popular than Mr. Kirby's, and continues to hold a good deal of influence over comics. So we can read this as innocent adventure comic from the Sixties, or we can read it as representation of the fantasy that Jed has to tell himself in order to avoid the abusive situation in which he finds himself. Both are valid readings, and there's good arguments for each. Which might sound nebulous and smacks of fence-sitting, but really that's what good writing does: it invites and support multiple readings. When we add in the fact of vast temporal distance and completely different creative teams, then the unintentional aspect of inflection makes itself apparent. Kirby could not have known of Gaiman's eventual rethinking of his story. Whether or not Gaiman's inflection of terror into these whimsical stories was intentional or not is much harder to say, but it happens nonetheless. Well, if you choose to read that way, I suppose.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 251: Elric #0 - One Life, 1996

There was a time, shortly after I discovered The Sandman, that I would voraciously track down all the Neil Gaiman writings I possibly could. There's a remarkable amount of stuff out there, comics and otherwise, with his name attached to it, not all of it good. The whole "Wheel of Worlds" thing from Tekno Comics is really pretty mediocre, and they really push Gaiman's name on it, even though he basically just gave them the idea and let other writers tell the stories. But I'm betting that having his name on those comics really helped sell them.

The case is probably the same with today's selection. One Life is based on a story that Gaiman wrote as a prose piece, and is adapted for comics by P. Craig Russell. This is much like the majority of Alan Moore's output for Avatar Press, in that Moore wrote the original stories, but someone else adapts them for comics. It's sort of a weird subset of the industry, but one that occasionally produces real gems. One Life is close, but mostly because of the stunning beauty of Russell's art. As far as Gaiman stories go, it's not his greatest. It treads on literary/biographical grounds that I'm not sure Gaiman is particularly adept at, though it does provide a nice picture of a young boy becoming a teenager and parsing his experience through the works of Michael Moorcock - something that, perhaps, a number of the British comics writers of Gaiman's generation can relate to.

But Russell's art, as usual, is amazing. I can't even tell you what the first P. Craig Russell comic I read was. It might well have been The Sandman #50, a gorgeous story about mythic Baghdad, but it might just as well have been something else. His is one of the most distinctive styles in comics, and is unique in that he doesn't appear to have acolytes whose style mimics his. I can look at particular artists and think "Oh, he draws like Mike Mignola" or "She draws like Rick Burchett," but I've never looked at a comic and thought, "Hey, that looks like P. Craig Russell," unless it was, of course, P. Craig Russell. I'm not sure why this is, unless it's because his work is so intricate, so precise, that to copy him one would have to duplicate him, rather than simply be inspired by him. Perhaps it's time I kept a lookout for those who have been inspired by Russell, though that would necessitate my reading contemporary comics, for which I'm losing my enthusiasm.

The only other thing I'd like to say about this comic is that it's also part of an odd little genre that tells stories about the British school system, which, if I've learned anything from comics, is completely different from the North American system, and is populated by sadists and child molesters. Or perhaps that's just the British system from Gaiman's point of view, because off the top of my head the only other story I can think of in this vein right now is the one that introduces the Dead Boy Detectives in the pages of The Sandman. Perhaps Gaiman just did not enjoy school.

I may, tomorrow, just do what I did today: simply open up one of the miscellaneous sections of my storage collection and pull out a random comic. It's been ages since I read One Life, so that was kind of nice. I wonder what I'll find tomorrow. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 54: 1602 #8, June 2004

And so we come to the conclusion of Gaiman's early modern superhero epic. I think I have to say that it was a little underwhelming. The best bits involved Reed Richards, and those only took place in the last two issues. In this issue, Richards outlines a taxonomy of the sciences based around the metaphor the the Knights of the Round Table, each equal and each a part of a whole. A cool (actually, very cool) metaphor, and one that scholars and academics could benefit from, I think.

The climax of this tale is a letdown, frankly. There's so much that could have been done with an early modern approach to the superhero, and Gaiman teases out some of the implications with the Inquisition, with Clea's return to her realm, with Doom as a power in Europe. But the ending comes down to a fairly standard superhero trope: heroes and villains join forces to fix a problem with the spacetime continuum. How many times have we seen this? On the one hand, I suppose, that's the whole point, that we have seen these things before, and that they are all a part of the fundamental stories that Richards muses upon in the previous issue. And, in many ways, this is how we can forgive 1602 it's flaws, by considering that it is simply a superhero story (are they ever simple?) wrapped in an early modern setting. I think that the problem with this explanation is that the world Gaiman and Kubert create is so intriguing that to wrap it up in a superhero story seems somehow to quash its potential as a vehicle for stories. I've not read any of the subsequent series that spun out of 1602, but the fact that there is no ongoing series based on these concepts currently extant means that the potential of the setting was not realized.

Writers and artists cannot, of course, always be historians and scholars. But had Gaiman sat down with such people, co-wrote with them even, then this could have been an amazing alternate history piece coupled with the myths of the Marvel superheroes. We would also have needed an ongoing, or at least longer than 8 issue, run on the title. What's happening on the African continent of this reality? And South America? The title is problematically Eurocentric, even as the contemporary comics are problematically North America-centric.

Ah well. A pleasant, if flawed, deviation from the usual superhero fare, an experiment with, I would argue, inconclusive results. The characters are going to show up in "Secret Wars," so perhaps we'll see something spin out of that eventually.

The promised song will have a link here some time today, but probably not until later this evening. Recording a song is a lengthy process.

I'm not sure what to move on to tomorrow. I actually have a cool idea, but I'm also getting my exam questions this week, so my cool idea may have to wait until I have sufficient time to devote to it. Either way, see you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 53: 1602 #7, April 2004

There's an interesting moment in this series when the newly rescued Reed Richards is conjecturing about the nature of the universe within which he and his comrades exist. He posits that the fundamental principles of his universe are stories, that they exist in "a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can only be continuances." There's a couple of ways we can read this. First, it could be a purely metatextual moment, in which we, as readers, have the ironic stance of understanding that Richards is absolutely right, that their fictional milieu is a universe that deals in continuances. If that's the case, though, it flies in the face of what Gaiman has previously stated about the nature of stores, that they have beginnings, middles, and ends. Perhaps, in Richards' case, and coming as no surprise from me, it's not stories that his universe favours, it's myths.
The second way we can read this moment is of a character realizing the nature of his universe. It's slightly different from the metatextual moment, because rather than us having a realization about his reality, he himself is having a realization about his own reality, a realization that is separate from our understanding of reality as readers. When the Human Torch says "Ah yes...atomies and suchlike" in response to Reed's wonderings about fundamental principles, he is reflecting our understanding of our reality. We understand that it rests upon the fluctuations of the quantum foam. So Reed is realizing that his reality does not rest on that sub-atomic level of reality, but on the level of stories.
The third way of interpreting this is the most interesting, however. Perhaps here Reed is not making a claim about his own reality, nor is the comic pointing out a metatextual moment for us, but perhaps it is suggesting that our reality, the one in which we read the comic, is actually based on stories. I know, for the rationalists amongst us, it makes no sense. But if you consider that we place ourselves in narratives all the time, and that these narratives have a far more fundamental impact on our lived experience than the "atomies and suchlike," then we really could say that the fundamental principles of our existence, and thus our universe, is stories.

That's all I've got for today. Conclusion of 1602 tomorrow, and some music.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 52: 1602 #6, March 2004

This issue opens with a conversation on the Moon between Doctor Strange and The Watcher. In which all the things that the Gaiman avatar in the previous issue's opening tells us are, in a far more organic way, revealed. I am still mystified as to the need for that opening in yesterday's issue. Ah well, I'll let it go, I suppose.
I need to also add a caveat to my promise to have music to link to on Sunday. Only 4 verses of the Ballad of the Fantastick have been released so far in the series, so it might be a very short bit of music. I'd considered trying to write a couple more verses myself, but, to be honest, I'm writing and studying an awful lot these days, so adding more to my plate seems like a great way to have a nervous breakdown. (Which might make for some interesting posts, but at what cost...AT WHAT COST!!???)

Anyway, on to today's comic.

I'm noticing a trend of sorts when I'm writing about runs or series of comics in this project. By about this point in a run, I'm running out of things to say. I mean, 1602 is still really good, but I think I've addressed the problems I have with it, and pointed to the things about it that I like, yet, including today's issue, I've got 3 more days of trying to find something to say about it. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to address whether or not this series was really the big deal it was made out to be at the time. A quick look at the GCD shows that this was Gaiman's first major comics work, really, since the end of The Sandman. I remember when it was solicited and then released that it marked Gaiman's "triumphant" return to the medium, but I wonder if the story was overshadowed by the man at this point. Not that I'm saying that it's a bad story. It's actually very good, and a very creative way of using these characters, aside from the heavy-handed exposition I've already complained about. But is it of Sandman calibre? No. It really isn't. I think I actually prefer Gaiman's next Marvel project, The Eternals, to this one, but again I wonder if it's because there was so much hype around this series and I'm not entirely sure it lived up to it.

Ah, is this another trend? The further I get into a series, the more critical I get? I shudder to think what's going to happen when I hit up Milligan's Shade. By the time I hit issue 70, I'll just hate it through and through. (That will never happen with Shade, by the way.)

Okay, that's enough of that. Tomorrow and Sunday we continue on with the rise of the Marvels in the seventeenth century. What I'm starting to think on is whether or not this series, aside from the sequels it spawned, has any real ramifications for the Marvel Universe, or, if not, whether or not it could have. See you tomorrow.

(Oh, actually, can I mention one other thing? I'm sooooo glad that there is no frickin' Wolverine in this series. Finally a Marvel comic that doesn't feel the need to use the most over-used [next to Batman] character in superhero stories to bump up its sales. Okay, rant over.)

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 51: 1602 #5, February 2004

I broke one of my most sacred rules with regards to comics yesterday. I looked at the solicitation and preview information for "Secret Wars." I only mention this because it's in some ways pertinent to something I want to address from today's comic.

But before we get to that, I'll say that the story is really gripping me now. I finished reading this issue today and was unhappy that I'd have to wait until tomorrow to read the next one. (I know, I don't have to, but this is that discipline thing I mentioned a few weeks back, right?) 1602, perhaps a bit surprisingly, is actually a Nick Fury story. I hadn't really put that one together on previous readings of the series, but he's the fulcrum about which the whole story is turning. Not to say that he's necessarily the most important person to the events that are taking place in early modern London, but he's the focal character through which we're witnessing the unfurling of events. I've never been a huge fan of Fury, though in many respects I think that's because I've read only a  few comics that really did a good job with him. Most of the time, for me at least, he's been a background player in a world filled with far more colourful costumes. Which is, of course, exactly how Fury would like it. But then you read something like this, or more ideally, the Secret Warriors series, which demonstrates just how well Fury actually fits into this world. (And, as an aside, I'm pretty sure that the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. television series is gearing up to adapt Secret Warriors, and if they do, it'll be amazing.)

I mentioned something I wanted to address about this comic. It's the first page. As a reader of superhero comics, one has to become inured to the recaps that are a fundamental part of superhero storytelling. So to find one done in the creative way that the one in this issue is done is kind of cool:

It doesn't take up story space within the story, it just lays out the characters and situations about which we need to be aware. I can't remember off the top of my head whether or not this was done because the issues were shipping late. The publication dates in the indicia don't indicate that, but that doesn't mean that the series wasn't late in a few places.
I think, however, that this page was added for a different reason. The first sentence from Gaiman's mouth (so to speak) is "We are in the Marvel Universe." He continues with "It's 400 yeas ago. For reasons we do not yet understand, people and events are coming into existence at the wrong time." Further down, Kubert's avatar asks "Hey, Neil, if this is the Marvel Universe, what are all the tiny dinosaurs doing?" My concern with the story, then, is that up to this point there's no indication that the tale is meant to be set in the regular continuity of the Marvel U. It reads far more like one of DC's "Elseworlds" stories, or an extended "What If" tale. Placing it in the main Marvel U makes the story far more interesting, of course, but surely there must have been some way for a writer with as much facility as Gaiman to tell us this without having to step in and basically blurt it out. In fact, had we been able to understand this from the get go, the four issues that precede this one would have had an added depth. The problem is that, as I've noted in the last four posts, there are historical events, aside from the appearance of the Marvel characters, that simply do not jibe with the events of "actual" history, and this pulls us from the notion that all this is happening in the main Marvel U.

So why is this page here, then?

Part of me wonders if maybe there was an editorial intervention that asked Gaiman to place his story in the mainstream continuity in order that Marvel could wring a bit more prestige out of having him write for them. Rather than a one-off "What If" tale, all of a sudden superstar writer Neil Gaiman is telling a cataclysmic story of the main Marvel Universe. I like to think this is not the case, that it was Gaiman's intent all along, but knowing what I do about the way that the editorial oversight of the comics industry functions, I would not be surprised if this was exactly that kind of intervention.

For myself, I choose to ignore this page. I don't need this story to be set in the main Marvel U for it to be a good story. In fact, separating it from that continuity makes it a story. By this, I mean that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that kind of containment of narrative is something that Gaiman himself once argued for in ending The Sandman. I've also noted Frye's complaint about comic strip characters, that they live on in a deathless state, another way of saying that the process of narrative must have that kind of containment. That said, the ones that don't, which really are only serialized superhero comics and religious narratives, move off into the direction of typological reading. But that's a topic for a dissertation (and will be soon.)

The last question I'll pose, and perhaps those who read this blog might know, is to ask whether or not this page shows up in the collected edition of the series? It would serve no purpose other than to shift the setting in a collection, which would be extremely jarring. I'll have to flip through a copy next time I'm at the comic store.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 50: 1602 #4, January 2004

Do you ever think about Doom?

I sometimes think that Doctor Doom is easily the most versatile and well-realized character in the Marvel Universe. Yes, he's a totalitarian dictator who believes only he is fit to rule, well, the universe. But that's not all he is, and it seems to me that the various investigations of his personality have fleshed out a character with far more depth than most of the heroes who oppose him. I'm thinking here of his turn at the end of the original Secret Wars series, his inclusion in the Future Foundation in Hickman's F.F., and now here, in 1602. Yes, he's a totalitarian dictator, but he, honestly, seems to wrestle with his hubris often enough to demonstrate that he's considered all the options and still come out with himself as the best one. I've not read any of the series that have focussed on the man himself, but as a major supporting cast member for so much of the MU, he's fascinating.

The intrigues continue in this issue, and we finally are given some clue as to the fate of the four from the Fantastick. This issue also really begins to highlight the differences between the world of 1602 and our own, aside, of course, from the existence of metahumans. North America is said to be home to some particularly large "leather wings," pterodactyls that seem to have escaped from the Savage Land. And there's a strange panel at the bottom of the fourth page depicting a torch-bearing mob (because there's always a torch-bearing mob) that is being scrutinized by a black cat with extremely large fangs. Gaiman and Kubert do a rather remarkable job of making this realization of difference a very subtle process. There's little to no metahuman activity in the first issue, and even when it does happen, it's fairly mundane because we're expecting it, so the trick is to make the world strange in other ways. The surrounding fauna and weather is a nice way of doing it, as well as the subtle historical changes (i.e., the survival of the Roanoake colony, Elizabeth's death a year early, Raleigh's death long before the actual date of his death).

There is a brief telling of the origin of Virginia Dare in this issue, involving (spoiler) her touching what looks like a floating infinity symbol that sparks her powers. Two things spring to mind: first, the Infinity Gauntlet and gems, and I can't for the life of me remember if that has anything to do with this story. Second, the repetition of the infinity symbol in The Multiversity: Pax Americana, which I was discussing with a friend yesterday, and which has absolutely no bearing on 1602 whatsoever.

Okay, we're past the halfway point, and things are getting exciting. More tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 49: 1602 #3, December 2003

There's a couple of parts of this comic in which we get an inkling that the 1602 world isn't just an experiment in displacing the characters of the Marvel Universe, but actually a part of that very same universe. "...I merely watch," the text of the final caption box on the first page, is the blatant clue as to the narrator's voice, and the back of his head shows up in a later panel. That Uatu makes his presence known makes 1602, at the very least, a possible What If world, which, by this point, have been acknowledged as part of the Marvel multiverse.

These questions of multiversality (or, to quote Morrison, multiversity) offer some interesting ways of coming at superhero comics. Leaving aside for a moment that a newly-published theory is actually positing interaction between parallel universes, in many ways, especially for the last decade or so, we've seen rampant tacit interaction between parallel comics universes. There is a long history of multiverses and alternate realities in superhero comics, stemming from the "imaginary stories" of the fifties and sixties all the way to Morrison's current meditation on the concept in Multiversity. Interesting shorthands have been created that allow writers to deal with multiverses, the notion of "the Bleed" being perhaps the most useful, and most used. These veins of the multiverse not only separate the various dimensions, but also parse the universe in terms of the biological, a metaphor with which we are fundamentally in tune. And while this notion, and its genesis in the differing vibrational rates of alternate Earths (see Flash v.1 #123) primarily finds its origins in DC Comics and their eventual offshoot Wildstorm, Marvel writers, Jonathan Hickman notable amongst them, have taken up the concept in the Marvel Universe(s). The Bleed, or the veins of the multiverse, become a concept in numerous multiverses from different publishers, and thus become a metaphoric link between economically disparate fictions. Thus we see a version of the Sentry show up in Final Crisis, gathered together with other versions of Superman (along with a version of Supreme), or we see the Avengers take on a barely concealed version of the Justice League in a recent issue of that series. These veins allow us to think superhero comics not as disparate fictions attempting to grapple with the mythic resonances of these kinds of characters, but as parts of an organic whole, combinations and permutations moving toward some kind of solution. Whether or not the solution even exists is beside the point. It is the movement that matters.

Not that this says anything about the comic in question, really. This issue, at least, combats the problem I was thinking about yesterday, that of the novelty of revelation carrying the story more than the narrative itself. Things happen in this issue. Major events propel the plot forward and characters are developed in such a way that they are made distinct from the archetypes from which they are drawn. Not too distinct, mind you, but enough that we can see the way in which the different time period manages to change the surfaces of the characters at the very least. But I still can't get away from the idea that this story would not be nearly as well-regarded if it didn't feature the Marvel superheroes. Only three issues in and I'm already getting ready to set it aside and read something else before finishing the series. But I did say there'd be music by next weekend, which means the series needs to be finished, in which case, I'll see you again tomorrow, direct from the 17th century.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 48: 1602 #2, November 2003

I realized today that I haven't talked much about covers yet. I love this one. I think it's one of the nicest covers I've seen. (That's why it's a little bigger today.) It, and all of the covers for 1602, were created by Stratford, Ontario artist Scott McKowen. The ostensible use of a cover on a comic, and on anything, really, is to draw the eye to that object over all the other objects that might be vying for your attention.

Look at that cover. Even surrounded by hundreds of other comic, that's going to draw your eye.

I don't know how others look at it, but I begin to look for esoteric symbols in the hedge designs. That's only one of the ways that this cover also achieves the feat of really expertly symbolizing the atmosphere and action of the story beneath it. Did you ever see a cover of a comic and get really excited by it and then find that, really, nothing even remotely like what's happening on the cover happens inside? This cover, without explicitly citing some of the interior artwork, tells you precisely what's going to happen in the story within, but spoils nothing. The figures on the cover are doing precisely what they do in the comic, but in a highly symbolic environment. Some move toward the center, some are left at the periphery, some look ahead and some look back.

And that's what happens in this issue. I feel like this one's going to be a bit weird to talk about, because it really is a matter of each chapter basically breaking down to intrigue upon intrigue. Plans were made, predictions divined, powers revealed. In a lot of ways, this book is really a love-letter to the Marvel characters, proof from a gifted pen that they really could exist in any milieu, that there really is something timeless about them. The trouble with this is whether or not the story is really that good. Let me explain: I'm trying to ascertain how much of the appeal of the story is the revelation of the characters in a new setting, the novelty of seeing Daredevil as a blind Irish minstrel, or Peter Parker...ahem....Parquaugh as Nicholas Fury's assistant, and how much is the actual story. Or would this story, one of the end of the world and a lost Templar treasure still be as good if it were not the Marvel characters filling the leading roles. Does the story depend too much on the affection we have for the characters prior to their appearance here? And what does that say about the way comics work, let alone why these characters have succeeded where others have dwindled away into history? We no longer read Timely's original Vision, but his contemporary Captain America is still about. Many superheroes simply disappear, so what makes these ones so loved, and so adaptable?

These are the kinds of questions that drive me in my research. I think they're important ones to ask.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 47: 1602 #1, November 2003

Each issue of Gaiman and Kubert's 1602 contains a verse from "The Ballad of the Fantastick," a seventeenth-century adaptation of the origin of the Fantastic Four. My project this week is to read all eight issues by next Sunday, and arrange and record a version of "The Ballad of the Fantastick," which I'll post on YouTube at the end of the week.

Can I admit something to you about Neil Gaiman? And this is after having met him last year when he was U of C's distinguished writer, and him really seeming to be a genuinely nice guy. I feel like he betrayed us.

Us who? you might ask.

Comics people. The splash Gaiman made in our little pond in the late 80s was revolutionary in the most fundamental meaning of the word. He changed, forever, the way things play in comics. He gave us one of our first English-language long-form literary works in the medium, and then basically fucked off and became a novelist.
I honestly felt like he made his mark with The Sandman, and then moved on to "proper writing."

That's not fair, I acknowledge that, but when 1602 first came out, that's how I was thinking about Gaiman, so I didn't enjoy it very much. I read it, because it's Gaiman, but I felt like it was too little, too late. And, to be honest, I thought the story was kind of second rate.

Going back to it now, I'm appreciating the level of historical detail he is trying to go for, and I think he largely succeeds in transplanting major MCU characters to the early seventeenth century. I'm going to hold off on any real opinions until tomorrow. As I mentioned yesterday, we had a whiskey party last night, and I'm tired and want to go to bed.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 46: The Clockmaker #4, May 2003

Okay, I get it now. The Clockmaker is a play. The series, or at least these four issues, make much more sense in that context. In a play we don't necessarily have room or time for exposition, nor for movement to too many different locations. Act One introduces the main characters, gives us enough of their personalities to make sense of decisions and conversations, and provides a place in which these things can occur. And then ends on a crux point that changes the direction and scope of the action.

I think I'm gonna have to track down act two.

My understanding is that the art of the next act is not reproduced 1:1, which is a shame as I really did enjoy the size of the artwork here. It reminds you that comics started out in that tabloid size and that the art was far more spectacular (in that it was a spectacle) than it is in current comics. I think we see artists like Jack Kirby and Bryan Hitch using the smaller contemporary venue to its fullest, but not too many other artists do. Or they use it in a way that appears to be self-limiting. Having the 1:1 reproduction size in The Clockmaker, coupled with the notion of the series as a play rather than a serialized story (or as well as) really creates a singular comics experience. I wonder if it's been reprinted, and if so, in what format?

Okay, moving on from The Clockmaker tomorrow. Moving through the collection, Neil Gaiman's 1602 is next up, but I'm not sure I feel like reading that. I've also dug out the four issues of The Score from Piranha Press, so maybe that. But, fair warning, we're having a "Death by Whiskey" party this evening, so tomorrow might be a fill-in post.

Unless I can find a comic about either whiskey or hangovers.....

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.