The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 984: Avengers v.1 #290, April 1988

Just awful.

That's really the only way I can describe this follow-up story to Roger Stern's masterful handling of the team.

This was like reading a children's board book - that's what the dialogue reminded me of. Seriously some of the worst written superhero stuff I've ever read.

The thing is, it could really have been a very good story - especially with the inclusion of Machine Man as a double agent.

One of the ways that we distinguish a work that is deemed "important" is to measure it by how much people write about it. If you compare the amount I wrote on a per post basis about Stern's run with how much I wrote on Macchio's run, you get a good idea of how that works.

Okay, Walt Simonson, the bar has been lowered. Let's see what you can do about raising it.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 983: Avengers v.1 #289, March 1988

Just. Terrible. I'm amazed at how rapidly the quality of this comic has dropped. The art is still excellent, but the writing is just terrible. Almost every speech bubble, every thought bubble, is laden with exposition, even in moments where it's just not needed. Par example:

Well, thanks, Namor. I might not have known otherwise.

When will this end?

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 982: Avengers v.1 #288, February 1988

I think my biggest question about this story is why it is that Machine Man is hanging out with the Adaptoid (and not the Fixer, apparently). Though Kirby's mechanical creation has always had a contentious relationship with humanity, he's always been relatively benign, so allying himself with a group of very destructive and villainous machines seems a bit off-brand. Hopefully he's playing it cool until he figures out what the Adaptoid's up to.

Once again, there are some very bizarre narrative and dialogic choices made in this comic. The editorial text box at the end of the issue gives us what I can only assume is a sanitized run-down of Stern's departure from the title, ostensibly due to his being unable to cleave to editorial decisions without doing some injustice to the characters in his care. And, honestly, I think I'm beginning to see that. The treatment of Captain Marvel in particular is pretty awful. By the end of Stern's run, she's an obvious choice for leader of the Avengers. She's intelligent, committed, extremely powerful, and maintains a humility that some of the members (Namor, I'm looking at you) could learn from. But from the get-go of Macchio's run, she's been painted as somehow inept, her every decision questioned by Doctor Druid who, even with Namor and Hercules having been recent team members, gets my vote as most obnoxious member of the team in recent memory.

I was talking with one of my classes recently about the way that characters pass from hand to hand in superhero comics. It's inevitable, given the longevity of characters and teams. When handled well, the transition can either be smooth or catastrophic. In this, I mean that there's the chance that the new creative team will so smoothly continue the title that you hardly notice the change, or they will completely shift paradigms and establish a new status quo. This one does both, and it doesn't work out. The Buscema/Palmer/Scheele art team continues to turn out lovely pages. The sense of motion in each panel is really quite spectacular, and is very much in keeping with the previous run. But Macchio's handling of the personalities of the team is totally different from Sterns, making it seem as if the characters have all undergone radical personality shifts between issues 285 and 286. It's just too jarring and, as Stern suggests, is doing grave injustice to a few of these characters. She-Hulk's only role seems to be to drool over Namor and punch things, completely forgetting that she's an intelligent woman with a law degree, and a former member of the most scientific of teams, the Fantastic Four.

Walt Simonson takes over writing in three issues. I think in my head canon I'm going to consider this as a story that takes place on an alternate Earth where the personalities of the Avengers are very, very different. I mean, this is comics - that kind of thing happens all the time!

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 981: Avengers v.1 #287, January 1988

I generally don't like coming down on comics creators unless it's a particularly egregious case, but these Avengers comics are so far below the bar that Stern and Buscema set that it's hard to get through them. While I'll admit to being somewhat curious as to what's going on with the Fixer, the level of dialogue really sometimes reads like it was written by a small child. I read something recently (it might have been one of the "Mark's Remarks" in the back of a previous issue) noting that if you were to read aloud the dialogue of a superhero comic, it would sound ridiculous, because nobody speaks that way. While this may be generally true of the genre, I think Mr. Stern's dialogue approached a fairly realistic tenor, demonstrating for us the way in which a person might actually react in the fantastic situations the Avengers find themselves in. Mr. Macchio's dialogue is, to put it bluntly, erring on the side of the ridiculous.

Now, I have to admit, I don't know the circumstances of his having taken over the book - this issue is still ostensibly plotted by Stern, so it may have been a very sudden departure, and these issues may have been somewhat rushed. But in a lot of ways it seems like the new scripter never even read any of Stern's work, and makes no attempt to continue the aesthetic, character-wise, that makes the Stern run so very good.

I guess we'll see over the next few issues, as it solely becomes Macchio's story, whether things improve. But I can certainly see why my 14-year old self might have stopped reading Avengers at this point. It's a bit of a let down.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 980: Avengers v.1 #286, December 1987

From a plot by Roger Stern.
But that's about all.

Black Knight laments that he never "scored" with the Wasp.

She-Hulk basically drools her way through the book staring at Namor.

And Captain Marvel becomes highly incompetent as team leader.

*sigh*

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 740: Marvel Fanfare #10, September 1983

Marvel Fanfare was, when I was first collecting comics, that book that sat off to the side from others, different because of its production quality and its purporting to tell stories a little more mature than the standard Marvel comics. I never really paid it much attention until a couple of issues made their way into the collection years back and I finally had a chance to read it.

At which point I realized it's pretty much a standard Marvel comic from the early 80s.

That said, the back-up in this issue is P. Craig Russell illustrating a story from The Jungle Book, and though Kipling's a bit dodgy sometimes, Russell's work is always worth seeing. The lead story, "Widow," however, is a kind of boring origin story for the Black Widow that appears to serve as set-up for the story in the next issue. Which I don't have. What I did like about the story is that this is the Widow in my favourite of her outfits. I wasn't a fan of the short-haired look that dominated the later part of the decade and much of the 90s. And this is definitely the version of the character that inspires the Scarlett Johansson version of the character. That could be her up on the cover there, really.

I'm feeling a bit aimless in the project again. Perhaps it's time to go back to alphabetical reading, though I'm just not feeling the Alpha Flight right now. Guess I've got a day to figure it out!

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 365: The Transformers #1, September 1984

Okay, before I get into today's comic, can we just bask in that cover a bit? This, coupled with Sienkiewicz's Starriors covers from the same year, grace what could have simply been a silly toy comic with a real elegance.

Welcome to the completion of my first year of The 40 Years of Comics Project! Before beginning this project, I was notoriously bad at maintaining my various blogs, but having set myself the manageable goal of a single comic a day, I've felt re-invigorated toward my public writing. Thanks to anyone who's read even only one or two posts. I am humbled by any attention my writing might command. To celebrate the first year, I'm going to post a bit of a retrospective, musing on the good and the bad, but to cap the completion of Year One, I'm going to talk a bit about a comic that has been in my collection almost longer than any other.

If we're to stick to the notion that a comic is released three months before the date on the cover, this particular issue came out in June or July of 1984. I was ten years old. This jibes with my memories of buying the comic, as it would have been while living in Mississauga, and was probably amongst my first solo forays to the variety store (a Hasty Market, I think) about half a kilometer from our house. This store became my first source of comics, only supplanted when my Mum recognized my love for the medium, and started taking me to specialty stores. What this all boils down to is that this comic has been a part of my collection for over 30 years, never having been sold, traded, lost, or replaced. This is the same comic that, in many ways, kick-started my passion for the medium.

Of course, when I bought it, it was because it was based on an awesome series of toys, most of which were far too expensive for my meager allowance. But if I could experience the adventures of these titanic robots, even without playing with them myself, that was fine. In all, I collected The Transformers for about 5 years, only ceasing in the late 80s when I discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and left comics behind for a little while.

Nostalgia and memory aside, however, is it a good comic? Yes and no. One of the things that pushed me away from this series was the trend it stumbled into, fairly early in the run, of introducing new characters almost every issue, in order to keep up with the toy line. This first issue does have moments that read much like advertisements. There are two particular spreads in which both the Decepticons and the Autobots perform a roll call of sorts. Ostensibly, within the story, this is to make sure that all members of each team have survived the crash of the Ark, but really the dialogue and captions read like they've come straight from the backs of the toy boxes, outlining personalities and weapons in a decidedly awkward manner. Much like the G.I. Joe series that preceded it, the impetus to sell toys is not far from the surface of the series. That said, we're still reading a comic by three relatively experienced and expert creators, and though one of the uses of the series was to sell toys, another was to tell an interesting, and engaging, story. Which this comic does. The history of the Cybertronian war is excellent, and reading it now, I would be far more interested in a series depicting that conflict than the one on Earth. The notion of "naturally occurring gears, levers and pulleys" is also pretty fantastic, and speaks to the idea of infinite variation in an infinite cosmos. There is an entire culture built on Cybertron in the first few issues that teases a myriad of fascinating stories.

We don't, however, get much of that. The real delight of this first issue is the Autobots' assumption that mechanical devices are the dominant life form on the planet, and their subsequent discovery otherwise. As Prowl notes on the second last page of the issue, what they "are seeing is non-machine life, as hard as that may be to accept." That caveat to the statement, the difficulty of accepting life that is so unlike their own conception of it, provides a profound depth to the characterization of what are ostensibly representations of plastic toys. This isn't just a comic used as advertisement, but a tale of first contact between life forms that are in some ways completely foreign to one another, and in others remarkably similar. The surface action story aside, this subtext is really rather remarkably hopeful.

Sadly, as I note above, this subtext is lost in the rush to advertise. Only later in the series, when the toy line was waning, and writer Simon Furman takes over, do the characters once again attain, on a regular basis rather than only occasionally, the depth that is teased in this first issue. I'll get there eventually.

I can't promise I'll read the next issue tomorrow. I might have to find something equally as important in my collection to kick of Year Two. Tune in, and find out. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 168: Tales of the Age of Apocalypse, December 1996

Another piece of the history of the AoA, courtesy of Scott Lobdell, Ralph Macchio, and Joe Bennett. This special was published well after the crossover itself had finished, and it smacks, as does tomorrow's comic, of B-list stories that were deemed not necessary for the crossover proper. That, by no means, means that it's a bad story, just that it was one that was not intrinsic to the fabric of the AoA adventure. Again, though, approaching it from the historical perspective that I've endeavoured to use for the last few comics, it is quite good. This one deals with what becomes of The Inhumans in the AoA, with Maximus standing in, albeit temporarily, as Death, the fourth horseman, though his plans to overthrow Apocalypse are stymied by the X-Men and Cyclops.

(On a reading order note, this comic appears to take place before yesterday's X-Men Chronicles #2, as Gambit is still a part of the team. I'll reshuffle it to take that into account for the next read through!)

The relationships between Sabretooth and Blink, Sabretooth and Morph, and Morph and Blink are explored in some depth in this comic, making it a nice look at some relationships that are simply not present in the regular continuity. Sabretooth's character in particular is given some much-needed fleshing out throughout this crossover, though I'll be interested to see what becomes of him when things return to "normal." That we're not seeing him as a regular protagonist in any current X-titles is a sign of how things go for him, I suppose.

Historical novelty aside, however, not much happens in this story that can possibly impact the main storyline. This is of course because the story is over, so what else can happen. The only really interesting inflection this story adds to the AoA crossover is the uncertainty of Prelate Summers about his role in Apocalypse's empire. Having read this comic first, I'll be looking at Factor X in a different light, I think. More history tomorrow! See you then.