The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 910: Avengers v.1 #241, March 1984

I'll say this for Marvel Comics - when it comes to magic, they're totally willing to be completely psychedelic about it.

Well. Most of the time.

Magic's an interesting thing in the Marvel U. Some of the aspects of it that we might traditionally consider magical, mythical creatures and figures for example, are explained by way of a mixture of the multidimensional and the multiversal. Different dimensions are actually different viable ecosystems hosting various kinds of life. And we can all jump from world to world, dimension to dimension. So some of the things that we might consider magic - Thor's Mjolnir - are actually just different expressions of science from worlds with different laws of physics.

The other expression of magic is that it fucks things up.

This is the one of which I'm a fan. The makers of the Dr. Strange movie came pretty close to visualizing it, I think, in the Dark Dimension sequences. But they still didn't quite get the effect it had on our dimension right. Magic just messes up reality. It makes things squirm that shoudn't squirm, makes things speak that oughtn't. Though infernally-focussed, I think that the "Inferno" event that ran through the X-titles in the 80s did a really great job. Shit just got weird. There was a real body-horror-meets-superhero feel to it. Magic in this way makes us recoil slightly, to recognize something of the utterly, utterly, illogically alien to what is happening.

Morgan Le Fay inhabiting a giant stone body in this issue, for example. Or the strange spiked tentacles that attack Captain Marvel and the Scarlet Witch as they watch over Jessica Drew. Magical dimensions are weirdly-lit. They don't make any sense geographically, structurally. Maybe the best example of a magical landscape from recent memory are the two Weridworld series that spun out of "Secret Wars." Ever-shifting and nonsensical, and very, very dangerous.

The reactions that even 7-foot tall green superheroines have to the idea of magic also tells us how strange it's use is. The Marvel Universe is a very rational universe. All of the big brains (Richards, Stark, etc.) make the claim that magic is simply another form of science that they don't quite understand yet. Only Doctor Doom seems to recognize the difference, one he embraces wholly. But magic, like the stuff Doctor Strange practices, wigs them out. He does things to reality that they can't reconcile, even if they can transform into any kind of energy and fly around at the speed of light.

Part of me wonders if this is because the generation of writers coming up had been so influenced by the aesthetic of the late 60s and early 70s, which would have been their teen years.

This is the issue in which Jessica Drew is depowered. It'll be a little while before Hydra come along and offer to repower her. But that's another Avengers run.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 909: Avengers v.1 #240, February 1984

I read up on Spider-Woman a bit after reading this comic. I was familiar with her mostly from her inclusion in Bendis's run on Avengers/New Avengers, but her earlier appearances were something I just have no experience with. From the sounds of the Wikipedia article, her early adventures were actually pretty good, so perhaps I'll have a look at them some day. The most amusing bit was Stan Lee admitting that they only ever really published her first adventure in order to keep anyone else from copyrighting the name "Spider-Woman." Well, that and that her original origin was that she was a spider mutated into human form.

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It also turns out that, shortly before this issue came out, Jessica Drew's own title ended with her death. While I've enjoyed the stories featuring the character that I've read, I often think that the propensity for resurrecting characters, especially B-List ones, is very harmful to superhero comics. When Bruce Wayne disappeared, and was presumed dead, we finally got to see Dick Grayson take over as Batman, and it was amazing. Beyond amazing. When the original Doom Patrol died to save a small village, it stood as one of the great moments of 60s superhero comics, referred to with an almost legendary sense of awe. So why not allow such characters to have dignity in their deaths, rather than treating death as simply a shelf from which a character can be pulled down when the need arises?

This is not solely relegated to comics, of course. Sherlock Holmes was never meant to survive his fall at Reichenbach.

So, Spider-Woman was actually dead, though her astral self was separated from her body beforehand, and is now trying to reconnect with her revived physical self. With some help from the Avengers, though they really don't do a lot in this issue. Maybe tomorrow.

To be continued.