This is a thread to talk about old comic books.
Old Comics Thread
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Came home from the office to find this waiting for me. Never read it before hand but as a huge Darwyn Cooke fan it was one of my holy grails. I managed to find a copy on eBay for £14. It’s a bit banged up and definitely no where near “NM”, or anything resembling what a “collector” would want. But, for me? Well pleased.
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I’ve been reading early Avengers lately (as I’ve picked up the third epic collection, giving me a long run of #1 through #76).
One of my pet peeves is when people, especially those who should know better, claim the Avengers is/has always been about putting Marvel’s biggest characters together into one team. Which is nonsense. Initially it’s just for Kirby-adjacent characters not in the FF (if it was Marvel’s biggest characters, it’d have starred Spider-Man and the Thing). Which, thinking about it, was an odd thing to do. Kirby was already busy at the time, constantly moving between various titles, setting up characters to then be passed onto other artists. Bit weird to make a book where he’s the main connective tissue (even if it wasn’t sold on that) knowing that he probably wouldn’t be able to stick with it for too long.
Anyway, Avengers’ MO changes with the Cap’s Kooky Quartet era from #16, when it becomes a boarding house for characters liked by, well, you would assume Stan at least – presumably readers as well and maybe Don Heck? – who can’t hold a solo series. It occurred to me on this read through that this isn’t necessarily a slight on, say, Hawkeye, and Quicksilver. Marvel was limited on how many titles it could publish a month at the time, hence all the split books. So having a team book for characters they wanted to keep in use but weren’t looking to be break out stars was quite savvy really.
(The other reason was that Stan got fed up of trying to fit Avengers around the events of the solo series, hence why the line-up was dropped to three people without solo series and Captain America, whose solo stories in Tales of Suspense were all still set in WW2 at this point).
The big change from #16 that doesn’t seem to get acknowledged as much is that it allows Don Heck, the series’ regular artist for about 8 issues by this point, to finally move out from under the shadow of Kirby. I remember when I first read this era of Avengers, way back in the early 00s, as back-up strips in Panini’s Avengers United collector’s edition series, being disappointed when Heck replaced Kirby because his art wasn’t nearly as striking. Heck inked himself initially, making it feel really sketchy and the panel layouts were frequently cramped and awkward. It didn’t have the bombast of Kirby. And that continued until around #14 when, in what I assume must have been slightly insulting to him, Heck did two issues over layouts by Kirby. Stan wasn’t shy about having artists other than Ditko try to emulate Kirby, but being made to work from his layouts, when you’ve already been on the book for half a year, must have been galling.
But those issues are an improvement, with a better flow and clarity of action. The real change though is that Heck doesn’t ink himself, with Mike Esposito inking those issues. This change is kept going forward, with Heck being inked by Dick Ayers, Wally Wood and others until about #31. This is where Heck’s artwork really comes into its own (so to speak). It’s not just that these inkers, especially Wood, smooth out the sketchiness of Heck’s pencils, creating wonderfully smooth linework – though that is a large part of it – but Heck seems to finally step out of the shadow of Kirby. It’s like he suddenly gets how to do Avengers and becomes much more confident, with bigger panels, nicer action and better pacing.
Every Silver Age Marvel title has a point at which it transitions from its weird, interesting embryonic stage to being just a solidly good comic. For Thor, it’s when Stan takes over scripting, turning it from a formulaic Superman clone obsessed with its own rules into a rollicking mythological action story. For the FF, it’s when Lee and Kirby get the confidence to move out from the monster of the month format and fully embrace doing super-heroes their own way. For Avengers, it’s when the team becomes mostly exclusive to the series and Don Heck finds himself.
Which is not to say it’s perfect. There are some problems with the series even when it hits its stride. Stan treating the Wasp not only like a sidekick, but one on the same level as Rick, the radio ham hanger-on, is really bad. Rick just up and disappearing after the line-up change is both good (it gets rid of him) and bad, given there’s no explanation for it. Similarly, due to Stan’s preference for four member teams, when Goliath and Wasp return, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are unceremonious shuffled off to Europe to sort their waning powers (literally never mentioned before now) and pretty much forgotten about until Roy Thomas comes on board and decides he can handle a six person team. Lee also, for all his strengths as a writer and editor, has serious problems in trying too hard to “explain” the art (some times poorly interpreting it himself) and perceived inconsistencies in the story. Often times, it feels like he’s doing this page by page, without looking ahead or revising back, so he throws in lines to explain something that doesn’t need it because it becomes moot or is contradicted a page or two later. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Heck starts inking his own work with #32. While his story-telling stays solid, it all becomes sketchy and rough looking again, which is a big shame.
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I finally finished reading the entire Superman: New Krypton saga on DCUI. I am glad that I read it, but it was pretty exhausting by the end there.
For those of you who don’t know, at the end of Geoff Johns run on Superman, Clark rescued the bottled city of Kandor from Brainiac, and released a hundred thousand Kryptonians into the world. This saga tells the tale of what happened next, and the ultimate tragedy that befalls them.
It starts pretty strongly, with James Robinson masterminding the event, ably supported by Greg Rucka and Sterling Gates. But, by the end, Rucka seems to be phoning it in and his absence is felt quite strongly towards the conclusion.
The art is a mixed bag throughout, which I think distracts from proceedings and certainly reduced my enjoyment at times. Pete Woods is alright, but he’s not setting the world on fire.
I was pleasantly surprised by the Supergirl chapters by Gates and Igle (mostly). I’m not particularly fond of this iteration of the character (Peter David’s version will forever be my Supergirl), but I found myself invested in her trials much more than I was Clark’s or Mon-El’s.
On the other hand, James Robinson’s writing never quite worked for me here, the way it did on Starman previously. There were moments here or these where it felt like the same writer, but on the whole it felt … tired, I guess. Rarely emotionally engaging and quite stilted.
The saga ends in pretty brutal fashion, and the fact that DC largely swept the whole thing under the rug ever since leads me to believe that it didn’t really succeed in the manner they wanted. That’s a shame, because it had a lot of potential to begin with.
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Yeah, the ending reeks of “we no longer give a shit about this”.
Which is a shame given how it starts off, but its characters are never allowed to grow beyond their initial roles. Alura’s a fascist and Zod’s always going to be Zod.
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Picked up these American Flagg! issues recently as I discovered there was an Alan Moore backup strip that I’d never read before – always a nice surprise to have ‘new’ work from him to enjoy.
This is from 1985 so fairly early in Moore’s career but it’s still smart, funny stuff that gently parodies Chaykin’s book by pushing it into an increasingly absurd romp of a story about all of Kansas going sex-mad (for nefarious reasons) and Flagg ultimately having to go and sort things out, in a final story that takes over the entire issue.
Not top-level vintage Moore but still a fun read, with serviceable if not spectacular art from Don Lomax and Larry Stroman.
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The third volume of The Avengers Epic Collection has been a slightly jarring read. Not for the contents itself but due to my own expectations. I went in thinking that I’d read the first half of it before, in the old paperback Masterworks editions, but nothing of the second half. It was a bit weird then when I started reading it and found, issue after issue, that I didn’t remember any of it. It dawned on my eventually that I’d never actually managed to get hold of MW v5 because it was out of print and expensive.
But then, into the second half of the book, I kept realising, issue after issue, that I’d read these before. Again, it took some memory wracking until I realised that while I’d never got hold of MW v5, I did actually get hold of v6, which covers the last third of this volume and the start of the next. Which explains why I was reading one issue, noted that Black Panther’s highlights were white rather than blue for that and recalled something Roy Thomas had said about it being an experiment on his part, despite thinking I’d not read it before. It was in the introduction in Masterworks v6.
Anyway, these issues collected here are again pretty interesting. Roy Thomas has taken the book over by this point and, it has to be said, improved it. There’s better handling of sub-plots, better characterisation and dialogue and fewer stock stories. He’s not without his faults though – his desire to emulate Lee’s writing style (which is understandable) means that he often ends up at Lee to the power of 6 in terms of overblown, in-jokey, self-congratulatory narration. He also uses the term “Brobdingnagian” way too much.
Alongside Thomas is John Buscema, who is as good as the departing Don Heck. I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s better or worse broadly. He isn’t generally inked as well as Heck was though. George Tuska’s inks take Buscema’s work too close to his own style for my liking (not that I dislike Tuska’s work, it just feels weird pulling Buscema’s into it), Buscema’s own inks aren’t refined enough and then Vince Colletta is… well, Vince Colletta (though not at his worst in places).
Things really change when George Klein comes on as inker though and it’s another one of those big, era-defining changes. His inking is not only gorgeous but so detailed and refined, making use of lots of texture effects and half-tones for backgrounds, that it feels like a level up from those preceding it. The point at which the series stops being definitively Silver Age and moves arguably into the Bronze Age, at least in terms of visuals and productions. The book just looks like it absolutely couldn’t have been printed five years earlier.
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Beats me, Ben. I don’t think I’ve seen anything that says they’re done done. But, likewise, I don’t think I’ve seen them do anything for a good long while (maybe since coming out of the pandemic).
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Last things I saw them publish were the complete Providence and Cinema Purgatorio collections (finally). I think that was mid-2021.
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Current state of? Avatar’s….alive?
Each month, I look at their section in Previews. For the longest time, it’s been nothing but discounted pricing of their back stock. I haven’t seen anything new in ages.
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Avatar was always a weird publisher, they got big names because as far as I can see they offered very free rein for whatever writers* wanted to do but business-wise were as amateur as they come. I would kill for the back catalogue stuff they have out of print. I truly think with some business savvy you could live off that stuff for a very long time.
(I specify writers as their art talent was always poor to okay at best).
I could see no issue with them pausing to get revenue out of their back catalogue but they have never done that well.
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Garth Ennis’ Crossed is one of the best things he has written. It’s up there with Punisher Max and Hitman, for me. This is a hill that I will die on. I’m still disappointed that we will probably never get to see his final story arc, given Avatar’s current state of play.
Other writers though seem to have missed the point entirely, and just used it as a sick wish fulfilment fantasy. Like a challenge to see how low they can go. It was pretty disturbing.
I had Crossed on my pull list from its start up to about the 100th issue; it really fell off quickly IMO and the appeal was just seeing how far and gross some writers would get with it. I never re-read any of them and have no intention to – it’s a massive stack of books I really should just get rid of…
I had been in a real comics slump for a very long time (years!) but recently started getting back into reading before bed – Batman: Gotham Noir, a 2001 Brubaker/Phillips Elseworlds one-shot was random purchase at a collector con back in December and I read it earlier this week and enjoyed it well enough. It’s a 50s set crime story centred on Jim Gordon, a WWII veteran, and the first Brubaker/Phillips collab. The stall I bought it from was selling vintage toy cars but happened to have a stack of prestige format comics – I also got Batman: The Cult (all 4 issues), the “Just Imagine: Stan Lee creates…” Catwoman issue (Bachalo art), a John Buscema Punisher western, and some other random bits. I’m reading Batman: The Cult at the moment (first time).
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Gotham Noir is fun, and definitely plants the seeds for the future Brubaker/Phillips collabs.
Be interested to know how you get on with Batman: The Cult. It’s an unusual Batman story in some ways.
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I’ve decided to scratch an itch through, ahem, digital means and read some of Marvel’s Western stuff (it doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to do Epic Collections of any of these or Masterworks beyond the first two long OOP volumes of Rawhide Kid).
I’ve gone Silver Age – Kid Colt: Outlaw and Rawhide Kid – but in getting those I stumbled upon a mid-80s Rawhide Kid mini by Bill Mantlo, Herb Trimpe and a variety of inkers. It’s really good!
Set in the late 1890s, it’s a potentially cliche story of an aging gunslinger living in a world evolving beyond him. Rawhide is in his 50s(?), greying, arthritic and trying to work out if he can ever manage to have a quiet life while his main source of income is from having licensed out his likeness rights to a hack pulp writer. He ends up travelling with a young guy, who he just calls the Understudy, who is on the run from Pinkertons. There’s a lot to like in the story, but most impressive was Trimpe’s art, which is the best I’ve ever seen it. I think this is largely down to the inkers (a different one each issue, which isn’t as jarring as you might thing) who pull his style away from the thin lines and elongated faces I usually see in his work.
Unfortunately, as a random 80s four issue mini-series in genre that’s barely touched any more, it seems unlikely this will ever get the reprint it deserves. -
Flash Thompson does have impeccable taste!
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I’ve been steadily reading through these old Westerns. Starting around 1960, I’ve got Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and also Two Gun Kid in publication order and have reached around spring/summer 1964. They’re interesting in their own right but also to see the emergence of the Marvel Age from the peripheries.
Initially, these books are incredibly formulaic. Even Rawhide, which is relaunched with a new Kid by Lee and Kirby doesn’t read much differently to Kid Colt, which has run through from at least the 50s. Each issue is an anthology of two to three stories with the title character and one generic Western (plus text stories I’ve been skipping, which are there for tax reasons). Very quickly you get the same stories being recycled not just between titles but within them too. I read basically the same plot of “star runs into a kid who idolises them, realises the kid shouldn’t look up to them so picks a fight with their father that he loses on purpose in order to make the father look good to the kid” about four times across Rawhide and Colt within a few months. The generic Westerns have a bad habit of doing that Casey Kasem thing of “and that Marshall turned out to be none other than… Wild Bill Hickock”.
It’s “now” in 64 that there’s much acknowledgement of the rest of the Marvel line, with some house ads for Daredevil #1 of all things. Previous to this, the only mention of the superhero books were text strap ads at the top and bottom of pages in 61 advertising early issues of Fantastic Four and Hulk. There is a definite influence from the super-hero titles though.
Mainly this is in late 62 with the rebooting of Two Gun Kid. The new version of the character definitely follows the Marvel standard, having an actual secret identity, a costume and soap opera elements with his girlfriend initially hating the Two Gun Kid, the later lamenting that Matt Hawk isn’t as rugged as Two Gun. This is a big difference from Rawhide and Colt, which are odyssey Westerns about identically unintentional outlaws (they both shot someone in a way that would have been justifiable, but they ran from the law anyway) with hearts of gold and no secret identities.
The bigger Marvel Age influences slowly follow Two Gun. Stories start to expand to take up more of an issue (thought the five page generic Westerns hang around), meaning they start to become more complex and interesting. Then super villain style enemies begin to appear, like Iron Mask (who looks like Western Dr Doom, but is just a blacksmith), Red Raven (a crim with a flying suit made from secret indian herbs) and the Scorpion (an owlhoot who can kill just by pointing). There’s still a sense of recycling though – the Scorpion story for Rawhide Kid follows the same major beats as Kid Colt’s Invisible Gunman story a month later. But generally the move to transpose the successes of the super-hero genre onto the Westerns (the issue I’m on now is the first team-up between Rawhide and Two Gun) works well. Better than the attempt early on in Rawhide to do the Atlas creature features in the Westerns with the Living Totem.
That was by Jack Kirby and interesting just how poorly suited to the Westerns he is. Rawhide Kid gets so much better after Kirby moseys on, first with a few issues by EC and Mad’s Jack Davis (who is great) and then by Dick Ayers taking over. I’ve never particularly rated Ayers as a penciller before (he did som Ant-Man stuff) but he’s great here and his work just fits the genre so much better than Kirby’s.
But they’re both outclassed by Kid Colt’s regular artist, Jack Keller. I’d never heard of him before but he did Kid Colt from the 50s onwards. Apparently he had no interest in doing superhero books (he ended up going to Charlton to do racing comics, which I didn’t even know existed) so didn’t work on any of Marvel’s Silver Age heroes, which is a real shame, as he could have brought a distinct style and identity to one of the floundering titles like Ant-Man, X-Men or pre-Colan Daredevil. His work’s got a definite Archie vibe to it, but is clear, dynamic and frequently gorgeous.
The other interesting influence from the super hero titles is story credits. These Westerns initially have no overt credits, just Lee and the artist’s signatures hidden in the first page of each story. By about late 62, they start to get proper credits, as the superhero titles did, but there’s next to none of that OTT Marvel Age huckster vibe: no nicknames, no bold proclamations about how great the story you’re about to read will be. The most is the odd boastful cover blurb. Even the (very infrequent) footnotes are still credited to “the editor” rather than Stan in 64.
The scans I’m reading mostly have the ads in and those are interesting too, because the picture they create of the audience. You get everything from junk aimed at kids (hypnotic discs! Bike windshields!), a weird recurring advert for an art school by “the most successful commercial artist in America” (who I’ve never heard of), door to door sales schemes for kids (Christmas cards, slogan adorned tat, shoes!) and then correspondence courses to teach people who to repair TVs or cars of fridges (with broken things sent directly to you to repair to learn with!). But it’s strange, for me, seeing ads in an American comic that don’t ever mention comics. Not only are there, before 64, no house ads, but there’s no ads for back issue sellers or comics dealers etc. Which makes sense but it’s a strange view into a pre-collectors/fandom industry.
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I reread this on a whim.
For the first time I think I finally got what they were going for with it. Tons of action, bold larger-than-life art, and crammed with fan-favourite characters – I feel like a 10-year-old comics fan would go wild for this in the same way that the Image books were such a hit in their day.
The plot is still wildly nonsensical (although it holds together marginally better than I remembered) and there are loads of clunky lines, but it has a certain energy that somehow carries it along regardless.
It’s no Millar and Hitch, but nobody could follow up that run, so maybe doing something completely different like this was the right way to take it.
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I just read Doomsday Clock and not entirely unexpectedly found it to be a pile of crap.
I mean, it’s perfectly alright if it was a random superhero comic book, but as a sequel to and comment on Watchmen, it was terrible.
Gary Frank’s art was awesome though.
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Hah. The juxtaposition here is wonderful. Calling something a “pile of crap” but not referring to Ultimates 3. Made me laugh.
I enjoyed Doomsday Clock, as a DC fanboy, although recognise that it failed to live up to both its predecessor by far and reader expectations from several years of teases throughout DC Rebirth.
I think if Johns/ Frank had stuck to capping off the Rebirth era, by providing a satisfying conclusion to its many mysteries and dangling plot threads, rather than developing delusions of grandeur as a Watchmen sequel, Doomsday Clock would have been far better overall.
I do think it is still as good as, if not better, than many of the Before Watchmen books that preceded it.
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Watchmen sequels in both comics and TV fail when they don’t acknowledge John no longer gives a shit.
It’s a fundamental part of the text, he goes to Mars as he’s above even bothering about humans any more, he treats Laurie badly not through malice, he just moves further away from connecting with the human race. He was more connected in the 1950s but he can’t sustain it, it’s why he has his cock out in the 1980s compared to full suit in the 60s and underpants in the 70s because he doesn’t care what anyone thinks any more.
Doomsday Clock is technically a very very good comic, the HBO series is too. They both fall down because they can’t resist dragging Dr Manhattan back in. I have never even seen the last episode of the TV show because of the whole premise of ignoring that character arc, that they reverse that entire point because he has the horn for some girl, and I lost it at that nonsense.
No Watchmen continuation can work if they retcon Dr Manhattan’s character path, which the main ones both have.
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I do think it is still as good as, if not better, than many of the Before Watchmen books that preceded it.
I am sure that is the case; I haven’t read any of those.
I did read Tom King’s Rorschach book, and that was actually pretty good.
Doomsday Clock is technically a very very good comic, the HBO series is too. They both fall down because they can’t resist dragging Dr Manhattan back in. I have never even seen the last episode of the TV show because of the whole premise of ignoring that character arc, that they reverse that entire point because he has the horn for some girl, and I lost it at that nonsense.
I agree where the weakness of the show is concerned (and amongst its other flaws was completely misunderstanding Ozzy), but that series at least did something interesting in its own right. Doomsday Clock didn’t; it was just a retread that ended with the same tired old superhero myth retreads that Moore had deconstructed in the original Watchmen. It was far worse than that TV series simply because it actively tried to reconstruct the superhero and betrayed everything that the original Watchmen had to say at its core.
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Finished reading Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman’s (and Iban Coello’s) run on Venom (plus Absolute Carnage and King In Black) on Marvel Unlimited. I was really tempted to buy the Omnibus of this previously, but I’m glad that I resisted that. Whilst this was a fun read overall I don’t think it’s anything I would have any intention of coming back to. The series was very much inspired by the comic books of the 1990’s – all sturm and drang – and does it particuarly well. There’s a lot to like here if you share that sensibility.
Whenever Ryan Stegman is on art the whole thing steps up a notch. IIRC, back at the start of this run, Ryan tweeted something about this book being “better than Watchmen”. I wouldn’t go that far, but when he’s on art, the whole package just clicks – Cates’ writing, Martin’s colours. Everything. It’s fantastic superhero comics.
The problem is, when Stegman isn’t on the books, they very much feel like fill in issues. Killing time with inconsequential side trips until the main action starts again. Unfortunately, with Stegman drawing less than half of the entire 45+ issue run, it leaves the whole thing feeling very “ho hum” overall. A pity.
That being said, I did greatly enjoy the respect given Flash Thompson’s Venom. He’s my preferred version of the character, and it was nice to see that get acknowledged and Flash have a role to play in the apocalyptic events featured towards the end of this run.
You can also see Cates’ setting up Ultimate Invasion here, which I believe that he was due to write before real life tragedies befell him. I wonder if/ how Hickman picks up on these threads going forwards.
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Having not read Venom, that might help the story in UI because at one point it seems like UReed has been in the UU a lot longer than it appears.
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People may remember back in the day that GTO was one of the manga that was popular in translation at the time that I would recommend a lot. The anime adaptation hit Netflix, I’d been meaning to watch it for ages, and as I’d dropped out of reading the manga about 2/3 of the way through I decided to go back and finish it off.
The story follows Ekichi Onizuka, a somewhat reformed street tough who decides that he wants to become a teacher, mainly so he can marry a teenager when he’s in his late 20s, so she’s only in her late 20s when he’s in his 40s and his wife is always hotter than him… But then he realises that he’s really good at connecting with the kids and it turns into a vocation for him. He gets hired on a probationary basis at a prestigous private school and is made the homeroom teacher for class 2-4, the nightmare class that’s driven at least one teacher insane. As his unconventional style wins over more of the class, the holdouts get increasingly hostile while Onizuka also deals with hassle from other teachers and occasionally external sources too.
So in my 20s, I found this a lot funnier. The comic is still funny, and a lot of fun to read but I’d be laughing out loud reading some of this stuff (but some scenes recreated in the show got me better, I will admit), but the thing that hit very well there and holds up excellently is the contrast between Onizuka and some of the adults who are opposed to him. Onizuka wears his entire heart on his sleeve. He’s openly lecherous, is obsessed with porn, and is barely more mature than his students – his rough edges are what bring him into conflict with the school’s principal Uchamiyada, for instance. But Uchamiyada is also lecherous and is introduced feeling up Asuza Fuyutiski – a fellow new teacher and love interest for Onizuka. Similarly the English teacher Sakurai hides cameras and films up women and girls’ skirts and them changing. There’s a sequence where the pair of them and another teacher celebrate a predicament where they think Onizuka’s about to get fired by going to a bar staffed by young ladies who are wearing no underwear and the clients are encouraged to lift up their skirts and inspect and comment on their genitals. They have the same proclivities as Onizuka and their complaint is that he lays it bare as opposed to hiding it away. It, and a few other similar sequences really ram home one of the core concepts of the show.
But the bit that got me a lot more this time is why Onizuka is a good man, in spite of his vices and foibles. After Uchamiyada feels Asuza up, Onizuka causes a scene and hits him without realising that he’s about to go for a job interview with him. So obviously Onizuka is rejected, insulted and called trash. He ends up talking with a woman behind the counter in the snack shop on campus about how he’d never call kids trash because he knows how that effects someone at a young age. He ends up defending Uchamiyada from some kids who were expelled, but does so by knocking him out after he’s pestering Onizuka to “take out the trash”. It’s a recurring point in the story, especially later on that Onizuka sees potential in everyone and never gives up on anyone. He might engage in tough love, or express things in coarse ways, but his heart is always in the right place.
The comic’s biggest problem though is that it loses energy a little over halfway in. There’s only so many times you can have the kids who still hate Onizuka have another scheme to get rid of him or bring in some other kid who hasn’t been in school until now for some reason who’s going to be an additional nightmare until Onizuka inevitably wins them over too. There’s a point where almost all the main plots are resolved, and it’s a good natural point to finish the comic… And it continues for like 7 more volumes with fresh antagonists and escalating stakes, and while there’s some good use of the comic’s overall themes in there it feels like diminishing returns, and to a degree it feels like editors demanding Tooru Fujusawa keep the comic going a bit longer.
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I photographed a few pages of Maxwell the Magic Cat for another forum, and I thought one or two of the folk here might be interested…
If these are too big and I need to put them elsewhere and link them in, let me know
(if you want a few more pages, also let me know)
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Playing through Lego Marvel 2 has got me back on the Silver Age Marvel Western train. I’m still reading Kid Colt, Rawhide Kid and Two-Gun Kid in publication order and I’m in mid-1966 now.
I mentioned previously (last year!) that the Westerns felt divorced from the wider Marvel line for a while. That’s definitely changed now. Each comic has a letters page and also the Bullpen Bulletins page. The latter especially are fascinating. I’ve not read any of these before and it’s a shame they’re not included in reprints because they offer crucial context for the era. For instance, a lot of artists worked for Marvel under pseudonyms (to avoid issues with DC) which were all eventually dropped. I thought, from reading those series in reprints, that was all just done without comment. But the Bulletins pages have announcements of identity reveals (one for Gene Colan especially), which is interesting. There’s talk about why the Avengers dropped the characters that had their own books, a farewell notice to Ditko and talk about who is replacing him on things. Also a lot of talk about famous fans and media coverage. It’s a shame it’s all left out of reprints really.
There’s also more house ads in the Western titles now, tying them into the Marvel brand. Some of these are just the same as from the cape titles – ads for Hulk jumpers, say – but some have headers specific to the Western titles, while also advertising mainly super-hero merch.
As far as the stories themselves though, the flirtation with super-hero styles has waned. There was a period of maybe five months where they were trying really hard to use hero tropes in the Western, creating Old West supervillains like the Scorpion and Red Raven. These have largely ebbed away by mid-66 (save for the last Rawhide Kid story I read, which featured the menace of “The Acrobat!” a lumberjack who can jump about a bit) and they’ve just returned to largely straight Westerns. Two-Gun still operates on a pseudo-super-hero premise of a secret identity, but the very Stan Lee soap opera elements of his relationship with schoolteacher Nancy, who admires/hate Two Gun (delete as appropriate for however Stan remembers it when plotting each issue) has faded away. This is possibly because Stan has moved away from these titles too. They’re all being worked on by Larry Leiber (writing and drawing Rawhide, writing Kid Colt, scripting Two Gun) and I guess they’ve just been given over to him as a little area for him to have for himself.
Unrelated, I’ve been re-reading Cable/Deadpool too, another instance of me finally finishing off a series I’ve had waiting for ages (I’ve only just bought v7 and 8). Been quite a while since I’ve read any of it and the most surprising thing is when it’s set. In my head, it was all very early 00s. But v1 starts off connected to Morrison’s New X-Men (Xavier in a Quitely jacket, talk of the X-Corp) yet ends with the Whedon Astonishing team showing up. V3 has a House of M tie-in (obliquely). Which, logically makes sense but they feel like comics of very different eras.
In terms of quality, Cable/Deadpool (or Cable *&* Deadpool, it turns out. Who knew?) is… ok. It’s very Niciezia. Incredibly complicated plots hinging on macguffins. I’m just on v4 and so far, every previous volume has managed to be a soft resest of Cable’s status quo, which is a bit wearing, frankly. Deadpool is the main draw of the series though, imo.
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I read an Amazing Spider-Man epic collection recently and I thought I’d talk about it here rather than in the trades thread (because the trade element is not that significant). It’s Assassin Nation, which is pretty all of ASM from 1989. That includes Parallel Lives, an OGN by Conway and Frenz that recounts Spider-Man’s origin and marriage from both Peter’s perspective and MJ’s, as well as throwing in a perfunctory Doc Ock fight. It’s ok. Nicest art of the volume, by a country mile, but it makes a very odd choice of retconning that MJ was at her aunt’s house during Amazing Fantasy #15 and worked out that Peter was Spider-Man as he went off to confront the burglar, which… is a choice.
You also get that year’s ASM Annual, which is part of a big cross-over, I forget which (maybe Atlantis Attacks?). This means you get loads of not-very Spidey stuff like Deviants, Lemurians, Celestials, the Serpent Crown etc. Add in that Rob Liefeld pencils the main story and it’s far from great.
The majority of the volume though is standard ASM and it’s the end of Todd McFarlane’s run pencilling with David Michelinie. I fervently believe that if you gave this volume to someone not that knowledgeable of comics and told them that McFarlane would become arguably the biggest comics creator of the next 5-10 years, they would not believe you. His art here is ugly as fuck. He draws a nice Spider-Man, I’ll give him that. Venom too. And he’s good at coming up with weird, dynamic poses for them. But his panel to panel story telling is awful. He’s clearly working Marvel style and it feels like Michelinie is constantly having to drag the art back to the intended plot (there’s a panel of the NYC skyline in an early issue where the Empire State Building is taller than the WTC and the caption tries to pass it off as the effects of Inferno, which ASM unwisely does three issues of tie-in to, but it really feels like the scripter apologising for the artist). McFarlane seems far more interested in making a page that looks “cool” in and of itself rather than serving the story, which is not a good approach for an interior artist.
On top of this, all his characters look utterly grotesque. Not in an intentional way, just in a “I’m trying to be Art Adams but don’t have the chops for it” way. He’s clearly always trying to draw Mary Jane as a smoking hot super model, but she almost always looks horrific. It doesn’t help that he inks his own work, in what I always think of the “Image house style” – incredibly thin, scratchy lines with next to no weight anywhere. If, say, Bob Layton had been brought in to ink him, I think it would be a bit more palatable.
Still, he’s better than Liefeld. Just.
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1967 was an important year for Marvel’s Westerns output, for two reasons.
First is that Larry Leiber, who had been writing all three (Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt and Two Gun Kid) as well as pencilling Rawhide, leaves. He hasn’t left Marvel entirely at this point and Wikipedia tells me he worked on Rawhide til the 70s, so I guess this is just an interval period on that. Also gone is long time Kid Colt artist Jack Keller. The replacement artist on most of these titles is Dick Ayers, inked by Vince Colletta, which is… fine. Ayers is about on a par with Lieber in being solid but not particularly exciting. The exception is Two Gun Kid (the one title Dick Ayers was already pencilling), which is now drawn by Ogden Whitney. He’s a Golden Age artist and while he has a nice style, he makes all the characters look about 50, which is weird.
Writing for these titles is mostly taken over by Gary Friedrich. The Bullpen Bulletins page (which is a very interesting inclusion in these scans) announces his hiring after Roy Thomas, which is kinda quaint. It’s weird that he never really seemed to get as much to do (or as high profile) as Roy. His works across these titles is generally pretty good. Combined with some of the other writers and artists doing odd stories (especially back-ups) like Denny O’Neill and Herb Trimpe, it feels like the titles are making their progression from early Silver Age to late Silver Age, like the difference between Kirby’s X-Men and Neal Adams’ X-Men. There are less formulaic plots, less linear narratives and more interesting panel layouts that spice it all up a bit.
The second big change is that a fourth title is added to the range: Ghost Rider! No, not the cool motorcycle one, the lame cowboy in white who would be renamed Phantom Rider later on and turned into a dodgy rapist in West Coast Avengers. Reading his seven issue series, that doesn’t really feel like too much of a stretch for the character. The intention for Ghost Rider is clearly to apply superhero sensibilities to the Western (again). So GR has a secret identity (schoolteacher Carter Slade), a cave hideout, a kid sidekick of sorts and, unlike Two Gun Kid, is distrusted by the local sheriff. The Lee-style soap opera elements are in full tilt on Ghost Rider, while having all but disappeared from Two Gun.
It doesn’t really work though. The big problem with Ghost Rider, and this isn’t entirely due to hindsight knowledge of the motorbike one, is that it feels half-baked. The Slade doesn’t have any powers but uses gimmickry to pretend to be a phantom. He applies sacred Indian meteor dust to his suit to make it glow in the dark, he has a special projector that allows his ghostly image to appear elsewhere, he uses a black cloak to make parts of himself disappear in the dark so he can be just a floating head or disembodied hands and he has a black lariat to fake mystical telekinesis. And none of that makes sense. Not a single bit of it. It feels for all the world that he was intended to be a proper supernatural character with actual ghosty-powers and for whatever reason – editorial vetoing it, the Comics Code disapproving – they bailed last minute and came up with all this guff. There’s a fatal flaw in the Ghost Rider concept too (something pointed out in a contemporary letter sent in): he can only fight crime at night. None of his powers work in daylight. None of the stories struggle with this, but it is limiting, really.
What’s weird though is that the month before Ghost Rider debuts, Two Gun Kid does a story where Two Gun and Rawhide also do the ghostly head, disembodied hands trick, with some secret Indian herb knowledge. It’s a weird recurrence. A dry run for the gimmicks intended for Ghost Rider? An idea that they liked so much they very quickly repurposed it?
The other problem is that Carter is just not likeable. The love triangle stuff with his colleague, who is engaged to a guy who is clearly secretly the villain the Tarantula (and is also the sister of the sheriff) just makes Carter look like a jerk, rather than sympathetic. His relationship with his kid sidekick is just odd. In the first issue, he comes across “indians” attacking a homestead ranch type place. The adults are killed, the kid just injured. Carter tries to save him, but is shot. Actual Indians nurse him back to health and decide to make him the Ghost Rider (again, it’s crying out for just Indian mysticism to be used to give him the powers instead of him gimmicking most of it). He then just sort of claims the vacant house and the kid agrees to live with him there and I get there wasn’t social services in the Old West, but it feels dodgy, you know. Carter also puts on a very dramatic ghostly persona while Ghost Ridering, which just makes him seem an ass. If he was being possessed by a spirit that manifested at night, then it’d make sense, but given it’s just him putting on a mask, it makes him seem like an ass. It’s all these bad vibes that make his fall from grace in the 80s WCA time travel story feel completely right for him. I can totally see him drugging Mockingbird to be his girlfriend based on these stories.
Ghost Rider only lasts seven issues and it’s easy to see why. While it’s good that it actually manages to do running sub-plots (which again Two Gun Kid has given up on) it’s not as versatile as the other Westerns and its main character just isn’t as likeable.
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The other thing I meant to say about the Michelinie and McFarlane Spider-Man run: there’s a lot of instances of MJ (whose modelling career is being sabotaged) going off partying to relieve stress. “Oh, I got fired off this job, I need to go dancing”. And it’s screaming out for a drug abuse story line. I don’t know if we’re supposed to take as read that she’s off doing coke (or at the least getting drunk) at these parties, but it definitely feels like subtext and that it should be building to a storyline. But it doesn’t, here at least (and I’ve previously read the next epic collection chronologically along and don’t remember it there).
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McFarlane seems far more interested in making a page that looks “cool” in and of itself rather than serving the story, which is not a good approach for an interior artist.
I think this is the 80s/90s Image artists all over really. They had an exciting style that superficially looked very cool, but often the underlying storytelling fundamentals just weren’t there.
I’m a big fan of McFarlane’s Spidey, but largely because he draws the character so well – not because he’s a great storyteller. And his work elsewhere on stuff like Hulk is less appealing to me.
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I remember seeing an interview with McFarlane, ages ago, where he talked about his method (I think for the adjectiveless Spidey title he wrote as well as drew) where he said he’d make all the pages, then work out what order they went in afterwards. He specifically mentions other creators being aghast at this and I’m totally with them.
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I was struck with a desire for some action comics reading, and settled on Body Bags, Jason Pearson’s seminal work. For various reasons there isn’t a lot of it – one miniseries and a handful of one-off stories, so it made for basically a day’s reading.
The plot is fairly one-note. Mack “Clownface” Delgado is a Body Bagger – a hitman and muscle for hire and he and his friend Pops operate in the cyberpunk dystopian city Terminus. Pops has a degenerative brain injury that’s barely kept in check by a skull implant and they’re trying to get the money together for an operation to save his life when Mack’s 14-year old daughter Panda turns up after her mother left 10 years prior and wants to join the family business. It’s no surprise that Pops doesn’t get his operation in time and the torch is passed from him to Panda, there’s mayhem and violence, and it’s mostly a fun time.
However there’s some elements that were controversial at the time and have aged poorly. Panda is drawn in an incredibly sexualised way, she has large breasts and all her outfits are tight, skimpy, or otherwise revealing and it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to age her up a bit; and there’s a lot of racial epithets thrown around, both at Mack and Panda who are Hispanic, and at black characters especially.
The good side of things though is that the art is phenomenal, Pearson was a master of action, packs every panel with detail and energy and it’s a delight to see the fights play out, often in incredibly gory detail. The dialogue feels natural, and the book largely skips exposition and prefers to immerse you in a world that’s generic enough that you can pick up the basics from context and the rest from casual conversations. I enjoyed this reread, even if a few bits had me going oof.
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So I guess I hate myself, because I decided to read Deathmate, the Valiant/Image (or more accurately Wildstorm and Extreme Studios) crossover disaster from the 90s. I have one of the one-shots in a longbox somewhere and remember thinking it was OK, and flipping through some of the others at the time, but hoo boy.
So, the plot, such as it is: At some point in the future, having tired of existence, Solar’s partner Gayle asks him to stop extending her life. As she dies a griefstricken Solar splits in two and the new version flies off into the multiverse where he encounters Void from the WildCATs, they fall in love and merge and in the process thereof the Valiant and Image universes also merge. And only the child Geomancer geoff McHenry and Prophet know what’s happened.
From there the story shifts into a quartet of colour-coded one-shots before concluding in a finale issue. One might call this a cynical move but Valiant’s editorial team insisted that the one-shots not be numbered because they expected the Image ones to ship late. One might also call it a practical move because the Image ones shipped late. Legend has it Bob Layton sat on Rob Liefeld’s door and hassled him until he finished his pages for the Prologue issue, then inked them all overnight in his hotel.
And so, the four one-shots: Yellow (Valiant and Wildstorm characters, produced by Valiant), Blue (Valiant and Extreme characters, produced by Valiant), Black (Valiant and Wildstorm by Wildstorm) and Red (Valiant and Extreme, by Extreme) are meant to be self-contained relative to one another but elements from some lead into and out of the Prologue and Epilogue issues. They’re… well they’re all basically the same story, where a mixed group of Valiant and Image characters is trying to kill Toyo Harada, the antagonist/deuteragonist of Harbinger, while another is fighting to stop them. And while you can just about see the Valiant-produced episodes fit together with their more naturalistic look and feel, both of the Image stories are depicted as dystopian cyberpunk dealies and they look quite different. The running plots, if you can even call them that don’t really go anywhere – the Prologue sets up a confrontation between Grifter and Shadowman over Archer, who’s been driven mad in this universe – it’s followed up in Yellow and you kinda expect it to lead into the Epilogue but nope, just stops. Beyond that, Red and Black are borderline incomprehensible as stories, just page after page of characters doing stuff with no rhyme or reason save brutal violence.
As expected, the Epilogue concludes with fixing the universes and ultimately, what’s the point of this whole affair? The origin of the crossover is that Jim Lee and then-Valiant publisher Steve Massarsky were friends and decided amongst themselves to do it, and it’s really there for its own sake. To make things worse, Valiant still had an ethos at the time of trying to make these things matter, that an event or a crossover had to have consequences and Deathmate is the anthesis of this.
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Don’t worry, Lorcan;
two or three12 months of therapy will help you overcome the self-loathing you are feeling right now.3 users thanked author for this post.
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That reminds me of the 13th issues of the Heroes Reborn titles that formed the Marvel/Wildstorm crossover “Workd War III”. It’s been a dog’s age since I last read them. Despite having some serious talent on them, the story was just meh.
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Reading Deathmate got me thinking about other OG Valiant stuff and I decided to check out their in-house big event, Unity
To begin with, I’ve coined the term to Solar. As in you really Solared this up. It’s when you create your own problems due to personal dipshittery. Just like Deathmate this crossover is a direct result of Solar faffing around. The story is intrinsically linked to the Valiant version of Solar’s origin story. Here he was originally a nuclear phycisist working on a fusion reactor when an accident gave him his powers. Having been a fan of the Gold Key comics as a kid he decided to become Solar, Man of the Atom and save the world by getting rod of all nuclear weapons. Except that the US government didn’t like that and in the chaos that ensues Solar loses control of his powers and accidentally destroys the universe and inadvertantly creates a new one that’s full of Superhumans – the Valiant universe. And it turns out that Erica Pierce, a colleague in his original universe gained the same powers and ended up in the Valiant universe too.
Unity itself opens with Erica falling to Earth, arriving in the Valiant universe just after her unpowered counterpart kills her abusive husband, kills said counterpart and absconds with her son. Solar and the Geomancer arrive moments later and Solar determines Pierce is in The Lost Land, a pocket universe similar to Marvel’s Savage Land – dinosaurs, cavepeople, etc – but time moves differently there. After encountering an army when they follow her there, Solar sends the Geomancer back to Earth to gather allies, and he comes back with X-O, the Harbinger kids, Archer, Armstrong and Eternal Warrior; while Magnus, Rai and the Eternal Warrior of 4001 arrive on their own and join the battle.
This zero issue ends up feeling quite rushed and disjointed at the end as we get snippets of conversations, a small amount of detail on how Eternal Warrior is recruited by Geoff but nobody else get a scene like that, it’s an odd one. But we get that context because Unity is an interesting, if not entirely successful experiment in non-linear storytelling and adding context by showing scenes from other people’s perspectives as it goes. Not quite a Rashomon dealie but close. Buckle up, because we’ll be getting additional context on how the Valiant heroes get to the Lost Land for a whopping 9 out of the book’s 18 chapters.
These issues in the first half of the crossover are attempting to merge the characters’ own adventures and stories into the crossover event, which is admirable in a way. For example Eternal Warrior #1 is chapter 2, and the bulk of the issue is Gilad Ani-Padda’s origin story, culminating in an explanation of why he was agitated when he showed up in chapter 1. Chapter 3 is an issue of Archer and Armstrong that rapidly gets them through their introduction to the story, then pushes forward, and forward with the last scenes of the issue more than a month after the first. This would be the format of most individual chapters from here on out, some additional context for a scene we’ve seen once or twice before, then a new scene or two farther along the timeline.
Pierce, now calling herself Mothergod’s plan is slowly teased out – she and her son laid low as she did research over the course of the next two millenia, using her powers to keep them both younger, and by the year 4001 she’s got a small city under her control via a scheme that bears no resemblance to Scientology… and one day she teleports the whole lot to the Lost Land and begins building a massive machine that will allow her to rewrite reality to her liking. We learn that she was able to trap Solar in another pocket dimension on the firstday of the battle and over the next six months the Valiant heroes attempt to fight her forces of robots, soldiers and cyborg dinosaurs but ultimately all they do is slow her down until they realise that Solar is still alive, free him and Solar manages to then save the day.
Spoilers for a 30-year old crossover that will never get reprinted, I guess.
So this crossover has two big flaws. The first is the storytelling method. It’s a real interesting experiment but the pace of the story is glacial as a result. The interpersonal drama that comes out at points – mostly in the Harbinger issues – is more compelling than a bunch of action scenes. For a 90s crosover the story is actually quite light on fights. But there’s huge jumps in the narrative, and the jumps are inconsistent in different chapters. A new scene gets a caption telling you how many days have passed, but you need to cross reference to figure out the context. Valiant actually published a companion book that included a compiled timeline!
The other flaw is that the grand action of the story is ultimately pointless, because Solar saves the day with minimal effort at the end. Nothing the heroes do to try and halt or defeat Unity in the interim works, various plots to kill Pierce fail… If Sting had realised Solar was still alive on Day 1 then they could have saved themselves months of hardship.
I didn’t have a bad time reading the story, as well as the structure it’s interesting to see a lot of older-school writers and artists on a very modern story. The Valiant house style isn’t flashy but it’s solid, there are few points where the action can’t easily be followed even if it’s not as flashy as the Image guys. Overall it’s a recommend with caveats.
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I never really connected with the Valiant books. I bought the first 12 issues to make the “giant panel”, but I was so bored with the book I dropped it at that point. I picked up a couple of first issues but that was it.
As to Unity, I seem remember the hype that this was “crossovers done right” at the beginning but I think the glow faded pretty quickly. It was becoming a slog to get through the event.
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I liked a few of the books at the time, HARD Corps was the only one I actively bought though. The relaunch Valiant stuff was great though, I’m rereading Quantum and Woody right now and it still makes me laugh out loud at points.
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I read some of the relaunch Matt Kindt books, and they were pretty decent.
I found them browsing the amazon unlimited comic books available, but finding things there is driving me crazy. I know people here complained of whatever happened with comixology, but I was never on that – I don’t think I was able to access it here in Germany anyway. Anyway, amazon unlimited sucks for finding books. I have to browse through dozens of pages of cheap AI-created porn to find a good book here and there. I wish this was curated in some way, but right now it’s either doing random searches in the hope that some author’s books are currently on there, or leafing through piles of wet shit to fish for pearls.
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I have to browse through dozens of pages of cheap AI-created porn to find a good book here and there.
And you’re sticking to this excuse?
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I was struck for some reason with curiosity about Jonathan Hickman’s run on Avengers, so I decided to read Time Runs Out and on into Secret Wars, and… hmmm. So I clearly picked up in the middle of a bunch of long-running plots, when it begins the Avengers are somewhat shattered. Steve Rogers, still in his old man variation is leading SHIELD and hunting the Illuminati, while at least one other Avengers team who split off is off doing their own thing, the multiverse is dying off and Namor is leading a cabal of powerful supervillains in wiping out alternate earths in a desperate attempt to prevent Earth 616 from suffering the same fate, while the lluminati try and find a more holistic solution. Eventually only two earths are left – the main Marvel one and the Ultimate universe and they go to war before both worlds are overwritten by a new universe in which Dr. Doom rules as a god-figure.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff on display, Hickman is definitely one of the better writers for big ideas in modern superhero comics, and his stuff feels closer in tone to a lot of contemporary science fiction than many of his competitors for that accolade. But this is months upon months of buildup and buildup and buildup, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it in the end. We’ve got all these big moments that don’t necessarily pay off, like there’s a sequence where the Avengers and Illuminati attempt to trap and kill Namor and his cabal and it’s shown as being successful, but a few issues later it turns out they all survived and escaped the the Ultimate Universe, where they team up with The Maker. This sort of thing happens, it’s like old movie serial cliffhangers where you see what looks like certain death for a character only to get an explanation for how they survived a couple of issues later when the plot swings back around.
And then, after all this the end of the Time Runs out story is the characters of the Marvel universe mostly making amends, deciding to build a liferaft to try and survive the end of the universe… and then Steve Rogers dons a suit of armour and has a fight with Iron Man as the world ends, go read Secret Wars! Secret Wars, by turn spends its first issue on the Ultimate and 616 universe’s heroes fighting before the universe ends and Doom enacts his plan that agian has been slowly building up over in the Avengers titles, establishes the new world and then pulls it all apart. While some elements of this are interesting, it’s kinda cool how even in his wish fulfilment universe Doom still has to put up with the kind of bullshit the Marvel Heroes are adept at creating, but there’s so much set up and just set aside. Like in the first issue of Secret Wars, a bunch of people who are meant to get onto the liferaft are killed in the attempt to reach the Baxter Building, and Manifold teleports a bunch of other characters on-board with some level of provident though that they’d be essential. One of these is Cyclops, who’s just merged with a Phoenix Egg. Around halfway through the comic’s run the characters who escaped into Doom’s new world on this liferaft get into a fight with Doom and his forces, and the fight ends when they’re scattered across the world via teleportation. All Cyclops does is briefly fight Doom in this altercation and he isn’t seen again in the comic. I presume he shows up in one of the many tie-in comics but I could not be arsed reading them.
Ultimately the comic comes down to another argument between Reed Richards and Doom over who’s smarter, and that’s not the worst way to conclude this kind of epic, but it’s not built up in any appreciable way. Why is it not paralleling and contrasting their methods, why are they not mulling over what to do and talking about what the other one is doing? (Okay, it’s more in Doom’s character to rant about how he’ll succeed where Richards has failed, but he doesn’t even do that). There’s some great ideas in here, and some fantastic art, but it didn’t come together for me in the end.
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I still haven’t read Secret Wars but I have read a handful of the Battleworld tie-ins and I thought some of them were pretty good. Thors, Supreme Power… another one. But not the Captain Marvel and Carol Corps one. Battleworld is an interesting concept, but I’m not interested in the story supporting it, frankly.
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That reminded me of one of the other annoying things, the main thing that came out of the heroes being scattered was Captain Marvel ending up in Mister Sinister’s clutches and we just see her having been Sinisterised and fighting for him, no additional explanation.
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I stopped reading Marvel events after finishing the absolutely lackluster Fear Itself.
I seem to recall that due to Secret Wars running behind schedule, it completely fucked up Marvel’s launch linewide relaunch of their books. And when it did hit, the reaction was mostly “meh”.
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But this is months upon months of buildup and buildup and buildup, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it in the end.
And who did you say was writing this again?
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