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 1276: Ash Mini Comic, 1995

This story literally takes place between two pages of the regular Ash series. I don't know much about that series, except that it's about a super-powered fire fighter. It's got Quesada/Palmiotti art, which is always lovely to look at. Even the cover attests the way they play with solidity and form. There's an interesting body language at play, in that bodies in the comic have their own language. If Ash is losing control, he looks more beastly, almost like a bear.

However, outside of the context of the series, I'm not sure what was going on. There's something kind of nice and zen about reading a comic that one lacks the context for. I can just immerse myself briefly in something strange and exciting, and then I pop back out and delve into something else. Perhaps I'll try to hit up some really random things over the next little while.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 847: Inferno: Hellbound #0, 2001

While the "journalism" that graced the pages of Wizard magazine back in the day was not always of the most rigorous or disinterested sort, the magazine did have a number of features I quite liked. One of the primary ones was their insertion of exclusive comics into the polybags that held their publication. These exclusives, very often "zero" issues, served to both introduce characters and ideas to a wider readership and also to fill in some gaps in particular stories. For the most part they straddled this line quite nicely.

Today's issue, for instance, came out slightly before yesterday's comic, but tells a story set after the events of issue #1. We see the newly-recruited convicts making their way through the portal to Hell, and what happens to one of those unfortunates once he steps through. Though in the main series we haven't even reached that point yet, showing it in this free giveaway comic is a nice way of enticing people to read the coming series, and also inserts a portion of the tale that might not be completely relevant to the main plot, but gives us a wider glimpse of the world that is being established.

The series was apparently also envisioned as a film (you can read an enthusiastic review of the script here), though given the resume of the screenwriters (both of whom worked on the apparently terrible God's Not Dead series), perhaps it's best that it came out in comic form from people who know how that medium works. And given that there's no trace of the film on IMDB, I think that the 3.5 issues that are extant are all we're likely to see of the story. A pity, as I think it has a lot of potential to be a fun action story (or flick).

To be continued.

Giant Box of Comics presents "Stories from the Comic Life" - "I'll Never Forget That Issue" by Brendon Lam

I always flipped right to the back. I had to have at least seven of the top ten books. Had to. No ifs, ands, or buts. If I didn’t have it, I knew I had one month to redeem myself. That’s how it went every month for 8 years. That’s how I would read Wizard Magazine.

As I grew older, I began to look back at my younger self with a sense of shame. All of those top ten lists had only helped to fuel a speculative market that would nearly put the mainstream comics industry in the ground. The amount of bad that Wizard has done and been through has been well-documented; and whenever Wizard is mentioned in a conversation, it’s almost always in a negative light. I usually don’t participate. I sit there, silently, and feel bad. I feel bad because as much harm as that magazine and company may have caused to the industry, I owe them everything.

I’ll never forget that issue. Wizard #81 boasted a “Bold New Wizard” and it was reflected in Wizard’s choice to feature the X-Man, Cable, on its cover. (Editor's Note: I couldn't find a scan of the Cable cover of Wizard #81. There were even variant issues for a collector's magazine!) Yes, that Cable. But I had never seen Cable like that before; I don’t know that I ever had seen anything like that before. It was 1998 and 14 year old Brendon had just had his mind blown. Frantically, I flipped through the pages, but not for the top ten lists like I had in the past, this was more important and I needed it right away. And just like that, there he was. Jose Ladronn. He was the artist responsible for the cover that made set my brain on fire. I couldn’t even get through the article because I couldn’t comprehend all the art that surrounded it. The stocky bodies, the square fingers, the sheer amount of stuff in the backgrounds.And where the hell were everyone’s eyes? In that exact moment, I knew that I needed to own everything this guy had ever drawn and will ever draw. I don’t remember exactly how long the article was, but it actually had very little to do with Jose Ladronn. It was actually a spotlight on a young, up and coming writer by the name of Joe Casey. That month, instead of trying to figure out the next top ten list, I hunted down every issue of that Cable run. It was so different from everything else I was reading, but it also helped that it was really, really good. All of a sudden, I went from being a kid who bought books just for the characters to being a kid who consciously followed creators. Later that year, Joe Casey would have a short stint on The Incredible Hulk and of course I would be there on that Wednesday to purchase it. Little did I know that I would be purchasing my first issue of the creator who would become my all-time favorite artist, Ed McGuinness. I owe that to Wizard. They led me to Joe Casey, who led me to Ed McGuinness, who led me to guys like Jeph Loeb and Joe Kelly. Ladronn led me down the slippery slope that was Jack Kirby, Moebius, Steve Rude, and Milo Manara. I never looked at storytelling the same way again.

That was the first time it happened, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Alan Moore, America’s Best Comics, Garth Ennis, Preacher, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, Bone, Herobear and the Kid, and Starman. The list is endless. Even as a retailer, I learned about things like the “Terrible Twos” from them. As a teenager with very few friends and even less internet, Wizard Magazine substituted as both, and for that I will always be grateful. Plus, I had tons of posters for my locker.

Brendon Lam is also a dude who used to own a store and also has a lot of comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project: Day 56 - Hero Premiere Edition #6: 1963: Horus, Lord of Light, 1993

If there's one thing I love, it's free comics. One of the reasons I've come to love Free Comic Book Day slightly less is that a lot of stores that participate in it now only distribute free comics is you buy something from them. This, to me, is intrinsically against the idea that spawned Free Comic Book Day, but then I'm an optimist if nothing else.

And this insert from the comics magazine Hero Illustrated isn't really a free comic. The original purchaser would have paid the cost of the magazine with which it was included, and I likely paid a dollar for it from some dollar bin. But, as an insert comic, it's not an expected part of the magazine with which it was packaged. Wizard Magazine would do this sometimes too, and very often it was original content, not reprint content as this particular issue is.

That said, though the premiere edition of 1963 #5 doesn't contain the whole story, just a taster to get you in the mood, it does contain an interview with Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette about the formation and formulation of the 1963-verse, and those particular artists' reasons for becoming involved in the project.
It also gives me a nice taste of the wonder that is 1963. It's one of the great tragedies of 90s superhero comics that the final part of this series, the legendary Double Image special that would have pitted the optimistic characters of 1963 against the gritty Image heroes, never materialized. In much the same way that Moore's final issues of Supreme, and the giant conflict between Daxia and the Supremacy never came about, we can probably blame the lack of Double Image on the terrible business practices of Rob Liefeld. But that's a conversation for another time, and after much more research.

This ashcan makes me want to re-read the series, though, so that might come up in the next few weeks. We'll see. The other nice thing about it was that it's an ashcan, and so took a bit less time to read on a busy morning.

See you tomorrow.