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

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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 253: Young Justice #1000000, November 1998

To celebrate my son's 17th birthday, I'm reading a comic today cover dated for the month of his birth.

I'd decided a few months ago to read through the DC One Million crossover, a huge cross-company story that DC did in the waning years of the 20th century. I think it is perhaps the best superhero crossover story I've read. It's got gravitas, it's got humour, it's got amazing superheroics, and scads of cool new characters who are both familiar and unfamiliar. Today I was up to Young Justice, the issue that rounds off the first week of the month-long series.

I haven't read a lot of Peter David's stuff, though I have substantial runs on Incredible Hulk and Aquaman that he wrote as a result of having owned my store. He's also done acclaimed runs on Supergirl and Young Justice, but for some reason his titles have never been ones that I've collided with. I'll have the opportunity, eventually, and this issue of YJ was a nice portent of things to come.

The three members of Young Justice Legion S, pictured above, tell legendary stories of their 20th century predecessors, muddling crisis with crisis, Zero Hour with Millenium Giants. I've been teaching a course on the ways that myths travel down the ages to us, so this was an amusing reminder that even the stories that I revere now, and that I think will last...thousands of years from now, they'll be mixed up tales of flying people and monumental, but silly-sounding, events. It makes me wonder, as I often do, what the stories that we tell from thousands of years ago actually started out like.

The comic is also cool because each of the flashback sequences is drawn by a different artist, so we even have art styles that hearken back, to a certain extent, to the crossovers the characters are butchering. All in all, a pretty satisfying comic.

I remember the day my son was born, I went over to a convenience store and bought a couple of comics to read while he and my wife were asleep at the birthing center. I can't remember what comics they were. At the time I was getting my comics at a small store in a  town called Listowel, about 45 minutes from where we lived, and the owner was kind enough to put one of each copy of the One Million crossover aside for me. It took me about 3 months to buy them all. Whenever I read it, I'm reminded of that time in my life, and of the remarkable change my wife and I underwent. I must have read these comics as he dozed, small and fragile, on my shoulder. A great story to be exposed to at such an early age.

Something else random tomorrow. I'm enjoying the things I've been pulling out. I will get back to my weekly posts on the Con, and The Flash soon. Work's been a bit killer lately. See you tomorrow.