The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1966: Ghostly Tales #118, November 1975

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Okay, first things first. I chose this comic, amongst the other Charlton horror titles I've pulled, to read today because the character on the front reminds me of Squirrel Girl. Which is appropriate, given that the cover artist helped create her. Many times I'm interested in these old Charlton comics because they feature art from post-Marvel Steve Ditko. That said, his work in this really seems to be phoned in. A mediocre story with some mediocre art, sadly. But there's a silver lining: the issue features the work of Tony Williamsune. Mr. Williamsune is actually Tony Tallarico and Bill Fraccio, an art team who I am absolutely in love with. I illegally posted the story a few years back. I was moving about some books the other night and came across a Lynd Ward-illustrated edition of Frankenstein - I love the aesthetic of a lot of those old wood or lino cut works, and the Williamsune style, as I've said before, reminds me of these kinds of etchings.

I have been finding some of their other work in the collection, though the black and white stuff I've got, mostly in Warren Publishing reprints, isn't quite as enchanting. I don't spend nearly enough time considering the work of a colorist in comics, but I wonder if the reason I like this work so much is because of the choices the colorist made.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1716: Chuck Norris #3, May 1987

Yep. There was a Chuck Norris comic for a little while. Any you know what? This particular issue, at least, was way better than it had any right to be. It's proof positive that you can tell a good story regardless of the setting and characters, and any inherent ridiculousness therein.

In today's issue, we get three stories of how Tabe (the sumo wrestler) first met Chuck, as he tries to help some other members of the "Kommandos" with problems they're having. As a side note, I've never really understood the proclivity to replace a letter with another letter just to have it match the first letter of another word. Commandos still alliterates with Karate without misspelling it. And when those words are only spoken (like in the cartoon that this comic is based on), the replaced letter simply makes no sense.

Just a small thing, and it doesn't take away from the masterful storytelling by Jo Duffy and Steve Ditko. Though I know little to nothing about any of the characters in this comic, their interactions with Tabe reveal depths both to those the sumo helps and to the wrestler himself, so much so that I'll probably pick up another issue of the series if I see one on the cheap because I'm actually interested in the characters. I'm probably kidding myself that they'll be as good as this issue, but you really never can tell.

"And now, Chuck Norris, we shall see which of us is the superior swordsman."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1334: Creepy Things #3, 1977

The most interesting thing about this comic is that my particular issue smells quite strongly of mildew. It was actually a bit overpowering.

Seriously, though, each of the stories (except the one-pager) felt like it was missing a page, especially the first story. All of the art is quite good, and these Charlton horror reprints are getting back the kind of visceral horror that the EC comics did so well, and that Bruce Jones does with aplomb in the early 80s.

Gonna let this one air out a bit before I put it back in the bag.

Actually, one other interesting thing is that these reprints were actually intended for the old comic variety packs you used to be able to get. My first comic box was a kit that came with the box, a variety pack of about 15 comics, and an old, old Overstreet price guide. From what I can tell from the GCD, Modern's output was completely reprints of Charlton titles specifically for these variety packs.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1228: Marvel Tales #156

As I settled down to read Junk Culture #2 today, I found out that Steve Ditko had passed away. So I thought it fitting to read one of his comics today.

I've talked about Mr. Ditko before, (and, actually, as I look back for the link to his stuff in my project, I realize I've read quite a few of his comics here), and about my thoughts on him and his work. I've come to think of him as comics's version of Thomas Pynchon. A weird kind of outsider, no interest in the mainstream, writes or does whatever the hell they want, which subsequently changes the culture around them. And both seem to have been in their heyday in the 60s or so. This is how he's being eulogized at Marvel, as a cultural force, and it's a completely fair assessment. He helped create Spider-Man.

What I think gets me about his death is that I've known his art my whole life. In my very first review of his work, in the Creeper's 1st Issue Special, I noted that I've been reading him almost 40 years. Regardless of whether or not I've always enjoyed his work, it's been a presence in my life almost longer than I'm currently conscious of.

Also, he helped create Squirrel Girl, who is, these days, one of the greatest gifts to superhero fiction of all time. All. Time.

Oh, today's comic was pretty good. Spider-Man overcomes and existential crisis and decides to not quit being a superhero. I feel like he does this a lot.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1025: Ghost Manor #20, September 1974

(We'll start Christmas stuff tomorrow?)

There's a cool little booth at my local flea market called "Snobby's." Thankfully, the proprietor is anything but. I bought a large stack of coverless Archie comics from his a few months back and got some really amazing, really old, stuff that I likely wouldn't have had the chance to read otherwise. And the other day I picked up a "15 Comics for $5" pack at his place. Today's comic was one of the random things in there.

There were actually quite a few old Charlton horror comics, and I'm really looking forward to reading them. This one had some interesting stories, and sort of seemed to be a hybrid of horror and romance. The cover story, for example, is about a couple who purposefully get themselves bitten by a vampire to keep the woman, who is dying of...something, alive. And they get married at the end. And then the story about the man and woman who meet in the wake of a UFO crash ends with him, having known her all of about 6 hours, proposing to her. It's actually really odd. But perhaps that was the schtick for this title, that it was going to attempt to bridge the gap between male and female readership by offering something that, supposedly, appealed to both sexes.

I don't know. It was entertaining.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 963: Avengers Annual #15, 1986

One of the things I've been doing as I read through the Roger Stern-scripted issues of Avengers is to skip over any that aren't written by him, regardless of whether or not they were part of the regular story.

I probably should have stuck to my guns. Now, this is not to say that there's anything wrong with Danny Fingeroth's script in this issue. It's a good, full-cast Avengers story, and deals with the current problems in the ongoing title to do with the status of the team vis a vis the American government. But, as with annual 13, the Steve Ditko art in this issue is just abysmal. Even with the inks of Klaus Janson over top, the art is totally stiff and uninspiring - very unlike early Ditko Marvel. I know the guy's a legend, but this is just really poorly done comics.

I'll move on to the West Coast Avengers annual that finishes this story, but thank goodness we're getting back to the regular team in a couple of days.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 923: Avengers Annual v.1 #13, 1984

This is going to be a short post. This comic was kind of disappointing. It's annoying, because it took a lot longer to read than a usual comic, and the creative team had me very exciting. But I think that the combination of Byrne and Ditko turns out to not be a particularly profitable one. What it ends up looking like is a combination of the worst aspects of both artists. Ditko's cooky messiness disappears under the clean lines of Byrne, and Byrne's dynamism is reigned in by some very static pencils on Ditko's part.

It's kind of a cool story, with an interesting array of Avengers, so I'm curious as to how this story would have played out in the hands of an artist who was used to these characters. But, sadly, in the hands of a couple of masters, it ends up looking a bit amateurish.

Back to the regular series tomorrow! To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 590: Marvel Spotlight #5, March 1980

I find it amusing that this comic came out just around the same time as Edward Said's Orientalism. I think he'd find this comic troubling.

But I don't really feel like going into that today. This comic was kind of bad. I mean, yes, Marv Wolfman wrote it seemingly mere moments before he and George Perez became the darlings of the industry with New Teen Titans, and Steve Ditko illustrated it, though it seems to lack the manic energy of Shade, the Changing Man, which is coeval with this comic.

There's even a glaring editorial error that makes the whole comic make no sense. The whole set-up hinges on an ancestor of the contemporary Tako Shamara having died trying to defeat a Gozilla stand-in (no joke - apparently the rights lapsed the year before, so the monster just sort of looks like Godzilla) - but in the very panel in which the monster is defeated, we have a caption box reading "He roars, flails, he sees the insect [Taka Shamara] ride off whooping in victory..." The next we hear, apparently Tako has fallen trying to defeat the dragon. It makes no sense whatsoever, and really is a remarkable error, given that it undermines the entire story that takes place, and, narratively, the 500-year long oath sworn by the sons and ancestors (because of course it's the sons, right?) of Shamara.

And then, in the current storyline, the 70s Tako Shamara actually summons the dragon from a remote mountain wilderness into his suburban neighbourhood in order to battle it.

Just a bad story all around, really. Ah well. They can't all be winners.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 148: Eclipse Monthly #1, August 1983 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 12)

Anthology titles are always an iffy prospect, and that's why you find a large number of them in dollar bins. This title, for example, has five different stories in it. While the caliber of talent lined up for these stories is pretty impressive, you're always going to have one story you enjoy more than the others, and then the others pale in comparison. So then you don't really look forward to the other stories, and end up paying a lot of money for 5 pages in an anthology title.

Or, at least, that's how I find it is with me.

Of all of the stories in here, I think I enjoyed Doug Wildey's "Rio" the most. So far it's reading a bit like a Cormac McCarthy novel, and while I'm not a huge fan of McCarthy, the particular atmosphere and period he evokes in Blood Meridian is really pretty fascinating. So to see it transferred to the comics page is a treat. I was kind of excited to see another oddball Steve Ditko piece in here, but "Static" failed to electrify me (see what I did there?). But I did get the first four issues of the title, so perhaps they'll get better as we go on. While I do like Trina Robbins' art, her contribution to this anthology is a continuation of her work in Eclipse Magazine, so the story's a bit lost on me, it being part 8 of 10. Which leave Marshall Rogers' "Cap'n Quick and a Foozle" and B.C. Boyer's "The Masked Man," both of which were entertaining, but not terribly gripping.

So the western wins out. Interesting. As I say, I've got at least three more issues of this series to go through. I'm curious as to why anthology titles very rarely succeed. I've suggested a reason above, but I don't think that's all there is to it. Perhaps it's because it's so hard to convey any drama and development when you've only a small amount of pages in which to tell (part of) a story. I'll think more on this, and talk about it a bit more next time we have an anthology come up.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 126: Adventure Comics #467, January 1980

As I selected this morning's comic, I had this awful feeling of how vast this collection is, and how long it's going to take me to read it all. I couldn't fathom just how long it'll take me to read the letter A alone, let alone the other 25 letters of the alphabet. Though some are less-prolific than others. I felt sure I must almost be done the letter A, but then I saw that enormous run of Alpha Flight, the more than half a box from Archie Comics. I know the project was a choice, but I feel the weight of it right now. The letter A takes up three full boxes. Time to start concentrating.

Today's comic is interesting, as it's ostensibly a new beginning for the venerable Adventure Comics, which seems over the course of its existence to have gone through a number of permutations. This issue is the first to be a 40-cent comic, where its predecessors, at least for a little while, were dollar comics that featured 4 stories. Only two in this one. And shortly after this issue, the series shrinks down to digest size. That aside, the comic also heralds the return of Plastic Man to comics (though I'm not sure when his last appearance prior to this one was) and the debut of the Levitz/Ditko "Starman." I'm only really a fan of Starman through James Robinson's spectacular series from the nineties, though I did collect Roger Stern's go at the character in the eighties. There's an interesting inflection moment in reading this story and knowing how everything ends up, at least in the Robinson series, for this particular iteration of Starman.

I was less-intrigued by the Plastic Man story, as I'm not certain that he's a character that can really carry his own title without becoming something of a one-trick pony. I enjoyed him immensely when he was a member of the JLA, but his humour and parody were tempered there, and he was given a bit more depth that one might assume from such a clownish character. I know Kyle Baker's run on Plas was quite excellent, but the proof, really, is in the pudding in that the series didn't last. Plastic Man, for all his morphing ability, can at times be pretty static narratively. But does a character have to have all these differing facets in order to be a successful story? I think it all depends on the context within which the character appears. If Plas were completely separate from the DCU, I could imagine reading his stories as simply humourous superhero bits, one-offs that had no greater impact than the laughs they produce. But as he is, intrinsically, a part of the DCU, we have to bear in mind that he should be as well-realized as the other characters in the shared universe in order that it make sense for him to exist in that universe. So playing him solely for laughs is a bad fit for a universe that relies as much on tragedy as comedy. Plastic Man's three-dimensionality shouldn't be solely relegated to his physical forms. There should be, as with any good character, mutli-dimensionality to his psyche as well.

Slight psychoanalytic analysis of Plastic Man? How come no one's done a paper on this yet?

See you tomorrow!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 33: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #8, August-September 1978

All things must end, I guess. At least, in a lot of ways, we have a decent closure here, which I was not expecting. Shade is tasked with another mission, and is still considered a traitor, but he has allies, and a deal to clear his name after another trip into the Zero Zone on the way to Earth to stop Dr. Z.Z. These are adventures that, sadly, we won't get to see, but this trip into the zone does manage to segue very nicely into Peter Milligan's run.

This issue, as the last one, is in large part exposition, this time filling in some of Shade's back story, specifically the story of how he gained the M-Vest. There's also quite a lot of cutting across the Zero Zone from Meta to Earth to witness the various scenes taking place in either zone. One of the lovely things about this issue is the transition panels that Ditko inserts where we have a snippet of dialogue from whichever zone we have just read and a snippet from the zone that the action is moving into, and in between there are bizarre illustrations of the inhabitants of the Zero Zone. Creepy and weird, a little trite, but nicely executed.

There's also a long-awaited reunion, which I won't spoil, since the series, if you can find a copy of it, is well worth a read. I'm glad I decided to take this detour into Ditko-Land. It was wild and wonderful, and I'm now looking forward to discovering some more of his work deeper in the collection (there's definitely some of his Charlton work kicking around in there) and to re-reading Peter Milligan's wonderful Vertigo take on Shade.

Shade shows up a few more times in the DCU and Vertigo Universes. For the ten year anniversary of Vertigo, Milligan and Mike Allred did a short Shade story based on the Vertigo version of the character. As I've mentioned before, the Ditko-Shade shows up in Suicide Squad in the 1980s, and then an interesting amalgam of the two makes an appearance in the Flashpoint crossover, and is catapulted into the New 52 DCU in the Milligan-penned Justice League Dark. None of these later appearances measure up to his original and re-visioned Vertigo iterations.

This Ditko run of Shade suffered, I think, in its resemblance to a superhero comic, which it most certainly isn't. There's no evidence that it takes place in the mainstream DCU, and had DC thought ahead here and changed the branding on the comic in order to show that it wasn't a superhero comic, it might have helped draw in readers. That said, the series still might not have survived the "DC Implosion," so perhaps branding is a moot point.

I wasn't sure what to read tomorrow. I don't think I'll move on to the Vertigo Shade yet. It's a 70-issue series, so I'd be reading it for few months. I'm not sure I'm up to it quite yet. In my database, Paul Pope's 100% is next in the reading order, but I'm not sure I'm ready right now to jump into so dense a work.

Here's a thought, though I'm not promising anything. If you're reading this, and I have irrefutable statistical proof that people are at the very least looking at the page, if not reading it, anyway, if you're reading this, and you have a suggestion of a series or character, or publisher, or decade, or genre, let me know, and I'll do my best to fulfill the suggestion from my collection. Again, I won't promise I'll do it every time, but once it a while it might be fun to get some public input.

See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 32: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #7, June-July 1978

This issue bounces back from the less-dynamic quality of the previous issue, but in a fairly novel way. Left comatose at the end of the previous issue, Shade literally spend this story floating in mid-air changing colour (hey, it was the seventies!). Instead of Shade's adventures, the dynamic quality of the story is carried over to following the supporting characters in their attempts to deal with the criminal and political maneuverings of the series so far. We are also given some interesting information on the origins of Shade's "M-Vest," an origin which also fleshes out a little more the nature of the multi-dimensional cosmos within which the Meta-Zone, the Earth-Zone, and the Zero-Zone exist. I hold out hope that this information will be expanded upon in the next, and final, issue, but the likelihood, I'll admit, is low. What I found quite masterful about this issue is that, really, it's a whole 22 pages of exposition that doesn't even remotely feel like exposition. It does a wonderful job of reminding us that Shade's adventures are taking place in a dynamic environment, and the ramifications of his and his enemies' actions spread far and wide. I would liken it to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in that, ostensibly, Buffy is the main character, but it becomes clear after a little while that the people surrounding her are every bit as important to the show, regardless of their names not adorning the title screen.

The Cloak also shows back up in this issue, though I was somewhat disappointed with the fact that he spends most of the issue invisible. However, this invisible portrayal once again calls attention to his similarity in design to the typical rough-sketch of a human figure, and so lends a strange air of meta to Meta.

Last issue tomorrow, and then on to new things on Monday. Not sure what yet, but I'm sure it'll be a comic.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 31: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #6, April-May 1978

Back to our regularly-scheduled program. Closing in on the end of the Shade run, and I found this issue to be the least interesting so far. Completely set on Meta, which is not in and of itself a bad thing, but it seems that with the ostensible closing of the first storyline (though said closing didn't really offer much in the way of resolution) that the narrative is beginning to wander a bit. While we were introduced to Khaos briefly in the previous issues, he seems little more here than a replacement, albeit in different garb, for the far more interesting Sude who was our antagonist on Meta for the first 5 issues. And while Shade's innocence seems to be coming more and more to light with his former friends and allies, the resolution of that storyline seems not to be nearing. I suppose that it feels like that cinematic quality that I wrote about in previous posts on Shade is beginning to feel a bit too drawn out, which is of course the problem one runs into with a serialized, and ongoing, comic series. The first five issues had the feeling of being well-wrought in advance of becoming the comics I've read. This one feels more like a creator trying to figure out where the story can go now.

That said, there are indeed many threads left dangling from the initial storyline, and perhaps that too is why this issue feels a little forced. I'm more interested in Sude and his plans, and why the person who is Sude is doing what they are doing (please forgive some bad grammar for the sake of not spoiling things). The set-up of Shade so far has focussed so much on a particular set of problems that to introduce new ones muddies the waters in a way that does not help with the appeal of the series. I wonder if this is, in part, perhaps why, 3 issues later, the series gets cancelled.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 29: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #5, February-March 1978

I was four years old when this comic came out. I don't know if it's just me, but I struggle, not intellectually but emotionally, to reconcile the fact that life, and lives, were still happening, just the way they are now, when I was barely a conscious creature.

Page 10 of this issue has another couple of those Ditko panels that are just a remarkable feat of motion in a static medium. Mellu and Sgt. Barak leap from a building into the air, and you can see the muscles tense and then release in the run up to the jump and the jump itself. It's the same sort of motion the panel I highlighted in Amazing Fantasy manages to achieve, and it's certainly not something that all comics artists have mastered.

The story continues to hurtle along at a rapid pace. Though I could definitely see this work as a long-form graphic novel, Ditko definitely deftly places exciting moments that are used as cliffhangers in the serial that could easily be translated to climactic high-points if the work were a singly-published work. If that makes any sense. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that each cliffhanger ending keeps me wanting to come back for the next issue, but they're not contrived.

Something that I'm kind of fascinated by in this comic so far is its focus on the criminal elements of both the Meta-Zone and the Earth-Zone. While on Meta we do get glimpses of the security forces, the criminal elements are definitely the focal characters, or focal cultural settings, of the story. I guess it could be argued that this is because Shade has been wrongly included in this segment of the culture, so we're seeing contrasts between wrongly and justly accused criminals. What's truly fascinating is that the actions of Shade and the criminals are not particularly different, only the motivations and justifications for those actions. And then only in the eyes of the beholder. Shade sees what he's doing as just, but those pursuing him see his actions only as criminal. It's people like Sgt. Barak, Dr. Sagan, and finally, in this issue, Mellu, who shift into that grey area of not really understanding Shade's actions, or more properly of questioning what his motivations must be.

I wonder about the cancellation of this title. The story really is quite spectacular, and Ditko seems to know precisely where it's going. Perhaps if it had been billed as a maxi-series or something similar, it wouldn't have been cancelled, though I can see, unless the story wraps up and a new arc begins, how it might have lost the interest of the reading public. My sense of the comics industry at this time is not great, though Wikipedia claims the cancellation was a result of the "DC Implosion." At least one can suppose that it was due to market forces, and not lack of interest, that the title did not get the chance it deserved.

So it's officially been 1 month since I started this project. I've decided that at the beginning of each new month I'm going to write up a comic that has been particularly important to me. So tomorrow we'll take a brief break from Shade, the Changing Man, and have a look at issue #5 of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, which, I've often said, is probably the single best single issue comic I've ever read. Hopefully my review tomorrow will do it some justice.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 28: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #4, December-January 1977/1978

I love that cover. The guy facing Shade with the gun totally looks like he's got the drop on him until you realize there's a giant force-field foot about to stomp down on him. The cover's interesting for a couple of reasons. Mellu's outfit is reminiscent of Ditko's Dr. Strange work, the weird patterning and colours, and reminds me of Clea's outfits that curdled my pre-pubescent brain. It's also the first one to not feature the little sequence of three boxes down the left-hand side giving us an inset action piece to on the cover. I think those boxes are an interesting design characteristic, but not necessarily a successful one. Yesterday's sequence looks like it's playing in reverse, and I'm not sure what the point of it is. The cover of a comic needs, I think, to be simple. Eye-catching, yes, but not something that can't be sussed out in a single, brief glance. This one is simple. Title, action piece, interesting colours and costumes.

What else can I say about this story so far? I'm shocked with each issue that it's taken me so long to finally get around to reading it. It's really good. I think I've finally figured out who the major villain is, the supporting characters are expertly fleshed out in Fleisher's dialogue, we get new revelations (like finally seeing the "Zone of Madness" this issue), and, of course, Ditko's art is superb. I only hope that the story, or at least this initial arc, has a chance to play out in the 8 extant issues. The series was cancelled, though the 9th issue appeared in an issue of Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. If I can find a good scan/download of it, I might include it as one of my daily comics.

Four more days of Shade! Will we find out who the villainous Sude actually is? Will Mellu ever forgive Shade? Will I end up reading another 70 days of Shade in Milligan's run because each time I read one of these issues, I remember how great it is? Time will tell.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 27: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #3, October-November 1977

A short one today. This issue of Shade does all the things I've noted in the last couple of days. It still feels like I'm reading a serialized film. In fact, the more I keep this in mind, the more I can see this story as a movie. It would probably be pretty badass, as long as one could get Ditko to do all the design work.

My favourite bit of this issue is the introduction on page 11 of "The Cloak," the crazy villain of the issue. The Cloak laughs each time he is gifted with dialogue, even in his thoughts, which really makes me feel like he's the Joker of Meta. But here's a cool thing: See how he's depicted on the cover? This looks a bit like a crude sketch of a human figure, something roughed out before the details are added. This is what his invisibility power looks like. So if he turns invisible by losing his pencilled in details, and he's in a dimension called "Meta," is something really cool and metafictional happening here? Maybe.

But my the real treat of The Cloak is his design:

That's got to be on of the coolest character designs I've ever seen. I'm sad that he spends so much of the issue invisible, because I'd love to see more angles and poses. But I live in hope, as, unlike the villains of the first two issues, The Cloak is not "negated" by the issue's end. Hopefully there'll be more of him next time.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 26: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #2, August-September 1977

The second issue of Shade continues the manic pacing and style laid down by the introductory issue. Ditko is obviously interested in telling a lightning-fast story about a man trying to prove his own innocence in a very limited amount of time. This gives the comic a very cinematic feel, as if we're looking at the first act or two of a film. It would be a very weird film.

I'm impressed by Fleisher's dialogue. According to the introductory writings at the end of the comic, Fleisher "reads over Steve's carefully prepared plots and puts in the actual words into the mouths" of the various characters. I'm fairly certain this is what was once referred to as "The Marvel Method." What I'm curious about is whether or not Fleisher saw any of the layouts or sketches before putting in the dialogue. I suppose he must have. If Ditko plotted the book, he likely drew it and then sent it to be dialogued. It's an interesting way of creating, as it really puts someone who would traditionally be called the writer of the work on a significantly lower level that the person who would traditionally be called the artist. Fleisher doesn't have a great deal of creative freedom in the project. Yet his dialogue is smooth and natural. It's a 70s comic, so it does suffer from "Claremontitis," i.e., ridiculous amounts of exposition ensconced in thought bubbles, but even that seems a lot less stilted than Colossus' internal monologues of the 80s Uncanny X-Men.

One strange quirk of the book is that, so far, on the covers Shade is seen wearing only his M-Vest, yet within the pages of the comic, he tends to wear the vest under street clothes. I'm assuming this is because the vest resembles a superhero costume, and that superhero fans are the demographic at which the book was aimed. But it certainly doesn't read like a superhero book. Shade is on the run, playing mobsters against one another in order to clear his name, and really only tangentially saving anybody. As a DC comic in the 1970s, one would have expected a guest appearance by Superman or Batman at the least by now, but Shade and his antagonists seem to exist in a world all their own. I'm curious as to whether we'll see him enter the DCU proper within Ditko's truncated run on the book, or if he was simply pasted into the DCU after his own book was cancelled. Answers forthcoming, either way, I guess.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 25: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #1, June-July 1977

As I suggested yesterday, I'm going to dive headlong into the weird world of Steve Ditko. I've owned this run of Shade for some time now, and have never really had the inclination to read through it, maybe because I hold Peter Milligan's reinterpretation in such high esteem. I had once thought of doing a similar thing with Shade that I've done with Animal Man, in that I will buy up any (and I do mean any) appearance that the character makes any time in his history. Animal Man takes up two full short boxes by now (which could make a nice half-year's worth of Animal Man posts...hmmmm....), but, if I'm to be honest, a lot of Shade's other appearances (in 80s Suicide Squad, for example) are kinda, well, mediocre. We'll see if my week of reading his original adventures changes things.

Yesterday I talked about the dynamism of Ditko's art in Amazing Fantasy #15, and it's definitely in full force in this initial issue of Shade. But, as I was reading, there was something different that I initially had trouble identifying. It could be, I suppose, that there's a 15-year gap between the two works, and that Ditko's art has changed and matured. That's definitely an aspect of it. But more than that, the panels in Shade, when compared to the Spider-Man origin story, are jam-packed with detail. The backgrounds seem to have just as much detail and motion as the characters in the foreground. It took a bit of adjustment to read this way. Even with something like Dave Sim's Cerebus, where Gerhard's backgrounds are incredibly detailed, the characters take precedence over their setting. In Shade, the separation is not quite so explicit. As I'm reading through, this is something I want to keep in mind. Is it something to do with the story itself? We get very little idea of the relationship between Meta and Earth in this first issue, but does the dynamism of the backgrounds say something about the fictional relationship between these beings from Meta and their physical relationship to the environments with which they interact on Earth?

(That's a big thought for this early in the morning on a Saturday.)

As for Shade himself, I'm intrigued by him. Milligan's Shade is a proto-Emo slacker (which is probably why I loved that run so much), but this Shade is a wrongly (according to him, anyway) convicted traitor to his state, on the run from the woman whose parents he crippled. Again, never having read this series, I was unaware of the parallels with Kathy George's family in Milligan's run, so that lineage is nice to see.

One other thing I'll say before this becomes a lengthy (-ier) essay is that Ditko's design work in this book on the Metans is amazing. Shade's "M-Vest" is a super-cool costume, and all of the Metan fashion is weird and wonderful to look at. Both the design and the colour of the costumes are lovely. The final panel of this issue has a brief peek at the villain that will, I assume, show up next issue, and it's creepy and weird, and has me wanting to jump ahead. Which actually brings me to a problem I had foreseen, but still haven't figured out how to handle: what if I want to take a whole run and just read it? Do I count them as my daily comic for the week? Let's be honest. At this point, I don't have time to read much more than one comic a day. I'll wait to deal with this problem until I'm living in that perfect world of mine.

Tomorrow I'll try to say a bit about the dialoguer of the series, Michael Fleisher, whose comics encyclopedia work I've found really interesting.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 24: The 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time #1, December 2001

Have you guessed yet? I find it interesting that the backs of each of these issues says that the "only way to find out" "who came out the winners" "is to pick up these reprints," but that's not entirely true, is it? Perhaps for the square-bound collected volumes that precede these last 5 issues, but the top five have been, honestly pretty obvious.

Anyway....I love Steve Ditko's art. Have I mentioned that? I think now that I'm done these 100 Greatest reprints, I'm going to move on to some of his later "super-hero" work. Look for a full week of the original Shade, The Changing Man coming up. Though that might steer me into re-reading Peter Milligan's sublime take on the character, so we might be in Shade-land for a few months. We'll see.
There's a panel on the second page of the lead story in this issue where a car is speeding away from Peter Parker, and the motion that's captured in the artwork is quite fantastic.

Side note, it's also the panel from which the Sean Howe-edited collection Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! takes its title. The rest of the issue is filled with Lee-Ditko one-offs, weird Twilight Zone-esque short stories, and one of them is one of the very stories I was mentioning in my earlier thoughts on Ditko's work. I think Ditko is an artist I've not paid nearly enough attention to, and hopefully this project will remedy that.

What does one say about Stan Lee's writing? Yesterday, I was fairly disparaging of his stilted dialogue in Fantastic Four #1. Less than a year later this issue of Amazing Fantasy hits, and there's none of the awkwardness. Perhaps it's because he only had one lead character to put his mind to, rather than four, that Parker's personality seems more...I don't know, genuine, perhaps? It might also be that he was inspired to let his words be more fluid to reflect what, in my humble opinion, is a far superior work of visual art than Kirby's less-than-stellar work on Fantastic Four. (On that particular issue, that is. I'd never go so far as to disparage all of Kirby's work on FF.)

The biggest thing to strike me about this issue is how much Parker is basically the same character now, how well-realized, in 11 or so pages, Spider-Man is right from the beginning. Both visually and narratively, this is Peter Parker. Again, in contrast to the Fantastic Four at their inception, Spider-Man is incredibly well-realized. And perhaps this is why this comics deserves the top spot of this countdown. The story somehow, despite its age, doesn't seem dated (fashion and slang aside, I suppose). The superhero, as I'm constantly arguing, contains within it something timeless. In this story, Lee and Ditko crystalize that notion, and give us a hero for the ages.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 13: 1st Issue Special #7, October 1975

Today's 1st Issue Special is really pretty interesting. I'm not a huge fan of the character of The Creeper, though reading through the brief history of the character that's at the back of this comic, perhaps it's because there really hasn't been enough of him in the DCU to foster fandom. I know over the last 15 to 20 years he's played a large role in the occult side of things, but that's never the popular side of things, is it?

The Steve Ditko art is a treat, as always. Ditko is one of those artists with whom I have a long history. Way back when I was still living in the UK, and then in Vancouver, I would read the British Doctor Who magazine, and these publications reprinted Ditko's creepy little time travel and horror stories from 60s and 70s Marvel horror titles. And, in the interest of demonstrating the power the medium has always had on me, these stories scared the crap out of my little 6 or 7 year old self. The other ramification of this, though, is that I've known Ditko's art for basically my whole life. This is not to say that I'm always a fan. While sometimes his art really does capture the same dynamism, though in a wholly different aesthetic, as Jack Kirby, with whom he is most often compared for his early Marvel work, sometimes it just seems....I don't know. Not sloppy, but hurried somehow. Like his brain has already moved on to the next thing he needs to draw, and the thing he's working on just needs to be finished. I wonder if this is something similar to what happened when I first read Judith Butler's Gender Trouble? I found myself repeatedly thinking that many of the things she was saying were self-evident, that I'd heard them all before, until I realized that the reason I'd heard them all before is because she wrote this book and it became part of our scholarly zeitgeist. Ditko is the same, as is Kirby, as is Curt Swan, and a host of famous artists. We recognize, and sometimes are tired of, their art because it is so much a part of the zeitgeist of the medium, especially in the case of superhero comics. For this reason, regardless of whether or not I enjoy the particular artwork, I always respect and enjoy Ditko for what he has brought more widely to comics.

A brief word on the scripter (though more likely the dialoguer) of this issue, Michael Fleisher. I'm not that familiar with his comics work, at least his actual comic book work, but I do rely pretty heavily on an interesting project he worked on probably around the same time he was writing this issue. Fleisher was behind three volumes of The Encyclopedia of Comic Books Heroes, one each on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. They are well-researched and give a nice overview of the first 40 or so years of each characters' history. While not the kind of scholarly publications I'm more often encouraged to cleave unto, to ignore the wealth of information within them would make me a negligent comics academic.

The story itself is a standard "villain escapes from prison, hero goes after him, is mistaken for a bad guy (the Spider-Man trope), but good guy does his duty regardless." One thing that does separate this tale from many others is the seeming death of the Firefly at the end of the story. Firefly falls afoul of his own technology in the end, causing him to plummet to his death. The Creeper, ostensibly a superhero, does nothing to attempt to save the hapless villain, and in fact ends the comic laughing manically over the ledge that the villain fell from. And perhaps here we have an indicator of why the Creeper lacked, or lacks, the popularity that he may or may not deserve. This is, really, the sort of character that would have worked far better as an early Vertigo comic, when the imprint was mining the DCU for dark characters with which to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre. Trying to slot him into the mid-seventies DCU seems, well, a terrible idea, actually. Perhaps I'll have to have a look at the late 90s series the character received. I've read the DC One Million crossover from that series, and it was dark and weird, and along with Chronos, Chase, and a number of others, represented a mid-point between DCU and VU (Vertigo Universe, that is) superheroes, a tradition we see continued in the "dark" side of the New 52 titles.

More 1st Issue Special tomorrow.