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Shelf porn

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a secret room for your comics

Comics Reporter today linked to the latest installment of shelf porn over at Robot 6, in which collectors show off their hobby rooms. This time it featured Rod Hendrickson who, as seen in the picture above, has created his own secret hideyhole behind his bookshelves — the ideal way to hide those ungainly long boxes full of comics pamphlets. It’s a great idea and if I had the money and more importantly, the room, I would do the same. Get myself a little library room, make it cozy and hide away all the not so nice books. But I’m afraid I don’t even have a walkin closet to my name and hence the vast majority of my collection is stored at my parents’ house. All I have at home are three narrow Billy bookcases, which together still manage to fit some 600 trade paperbacks and albums in though.

Rooting through the shelf porn archives is illuminating, as it shows how small my collection is — and how much worse S. could’ve had it. But it also shows that collections and graphic novels have largely taken over American comics collections; fifteen or even ten years ago many of the collections featured would’ve lots more floppies on display. I stopped comics collecting in June or July 2000, just fed up with it and back then it was all about buying the monthly issues. When I got back into it seriously this year, it had migrated to the trade paperback or hardcover collection. And there is something to say for seeing a whole row of Marvel Essentials in your bookcase, even if I still have a visceral preference for the humble pamphlet.

Seeing so many collections one after another with all those oversized, overpriced Absolute Editions and DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks and such grouped together in picture after picture, just makes me realise all the more how awful they are. I just don’t like them, they look glitzy and cheap and I’d rather have a cheaper, black and white Essential or Showcase edition every time. Also, if I ever do get my own comics library room, it needs to be more than just cheap bookcases stuffed full with books and loaded up with tsotchkes. It needs to be nice, with good, comfortable chairs, quality bookcases and a room that’s actually finished…

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days: Epilogue

books and books review, Comix
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So I’ve spent the last fifty days reading and reviewing fifty Marvel Essential collections, simply because I could. Today, let’s look back at what I’ve learned.

First up is the most obvious lesson: not all Essentials are created equal. As should be guessed from the existence of Essential Godzilla, Marvel will slap an Essential collection together for every character or title likely to shift books. There’s a lot of dross out there, mediocre titles not deserving to have been rescued from oblivion and weak volumes of long running titles you can skip easily.

Second, because the Essentials are relentlessly chronological in nature, mechanically collecting twenty to thirty or so issues together, there can be a lot of bad mixed in with the good in each volume. A good example is Essential Dr Strange Vol. 01, which features the complete Lee-Ditko run, which is absolutely brilliant, plus another dozen issues or so featuring lesser talents that are so inferior that any pleasure in reading them is gone.

Third, reading so many volumes in such a short time, in a roughly chronological order, it drove home to me how much the socalled Marvel Housestyle has changed over the years. There are four distinctive periods I could see. There’s the Early Silver Age, when Lee and Kirby and Ditko first start to build the Marvel revolution, with relatively simple one issue stories, lots of commie villains and little to no crosstitle continuity. This morphs into the Late Silver Age, with Lee still involved in the day to day running of Marvel and writing several series, but with younger writers like Roy Thomas and Steve Gerber onboard as well. More intricate stories, more crosstitle continuity, an expanding universe and heroes who sometimes question their calling. In the Bronze Age more relevant social issues of the day take their place, while the always present soap opera becomes as important as the superheroics. After that, with the coming of Claremont, you get the obsessive layering of subplots and a much darker, pessimistic take on superheroics, especially in the X-Men volumes of course. It’s subtle and there are no definitive boundaries between those periods, but each volume here I could assign to a period easily.

Fourth, reading this has been fun, has rekindled my interest in superhero comics, but also reminded me of how much I miss proper superhero comics. I miss the Marvel Universe, the way in which series would interact without being part of an universe wide crossover, the little details and nudges that made clear that all these stories did take place in the same universe.

Anyway, below is the complete list of reviews. Enjoy.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 50: Essential Captain America Vol. 04

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Captain America Vol. 04


Essential Captain America Vol. 04
Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, Frank Robbins and friends
Reprints: Captain Amercia #157-186 (January 1973 – June 1975)
Get this for: Englehart gives Cap a wakeup call — four stars

And so I come to the end of my little experiment of reading fifty Essentials in fifty days. It’s not always been a pleasure to read these collections and review them, but I thought to end the series on a high note. Essential Captain America Vol. 04 continues Steve Englehart’s run on the series and includes his most famous Captain America story as well. This is a run that has been often refered to since, especially the Secret Empire saga, both inside Captain America itself and in other Marvel titles, but not one I had read before.

Reading such highly regarded but possibly dated stories is always a bit of a crapshoot — will their reputation be validated or turn out to be overblown. For the stories collected here the verdict is mixed, as there are a couple of duds mixed in with the obvious classics. The worst being the four part Deadly Nightshade/Yellow Claw series in #164-167. The Yellow Claw — Marvel’s version of Fu Manchu before they got the real thing — is an embarassing yellow peril cliche here, while Nightshade is a blaxploitation cliche equally cringe worthy. That’s the low point of the collection, more than balanced out by the good stuff.

Now until Steve Englehart started writing him, Captain America was always a straight law ‘n order guy, on the side of the establishment, comfortable being a freelance agent for SHIELD. Previous writers, including Stan Lee had allowed some doubt to seep in, but it was only under Englehart that Cap being less and less comfortable with being a government man and it’s in this collection that things come to a boil. Considering when these issues were written, during the height of the Watergate scandals and the mistrust in government in America in general, it’s not surprising that some of this echoes in Captain America, but Englehart does much more than that.

In his most famous story, the Secret Empire saga, Englehart makes Cap the victim of an old adversary’s unusual revenge, as the ad writer turned supervillain the Viper uses his connections on Madison Avenue to start a campaign against Captain America, through the Committee to Regain America’s Principles. That turns out to only be the start of the conspiracy against him, as he’s framed for murdering another old villain, the Tumbler, then taken into arrest by Moonstone, the Committee’s new superhero and replacement for Cap. Things only get worse when he is forced to escape prison, then helped by his partner the Falcon goes looking for evidence to clear his name, as they run into the X-Men, who themselves are looking for why mutants are disappearing.

Their problems turn out to be related of course, as the Secret Empire turns out to be behind both, with the disappeared mutants being used to power their machinery. (All this happened when the X-Men no longer had their own title by the way, which is why they kept on wandering through titles like Captain America and The Avengers.) Cap and the Falcon manage to infiltrate the Empire’s headquarters just as they launch their assault on the White House, the plan being to “defeat” Moonstone as the defender of America and then use their agents in place all over the country to launch a coup. When Captain America and the Falcon foils these plans, the Secret Empire’s number one flees into the White House and commits suicide, after Cap pulls off his mask and looked in shock at the not seen by us person in “high political office”. So shocked he is, he gives up being Captain America the next issue, but the identity of the Secret Empire’s leader is never revealed.

It’s Nixon of course.

It’s never been officially confirmed, but who else could it have been to have this effect, Henry Kissinger? But Marvel could of course never say this outright; imagine the outrage by the seventies’ teaparty equivalents. A pivotal moment in Captain America’s development, something subsequent writers would come back to again and again. It’s not just Cap’s crisis of faith and rejection of his identity that e.g. Mark Gruenwald and Mark Waid would come back to, but also the resolution of it, Cap’s realisation that he’s not a symbol of the US government, but of the American Dream. Corny perhaps, but Englehart did hit on something real, something that was always true about Captain America. He never was a jingoistic symbol of my country right or wrong, but somebody who punched out Hitler on the cover of his first issue a year before America joined World War II. He’s everything that’s right about America, while never closing his eyes to what’s wrong with the country either.

In the aftermath, Englehart keeps Captain America out of uniform for no less than seven issues, with only the Falcon there to provide superhero action against old X-Men villain Lucifer for the first two issues, before Cap returns as the Nomad to take on the renewed Serpent Squad. This is another classic story I’d so far only encountered in synopsis, as the Serpent Squad kidnaps the president of Roxxon Oil, subject him to the ancient evil magic of the socalled Serpent Crown, then use him to get to an experimental oil platform which they want to use to raise Lemuria from the ocean floor. I’ve always been a sucker for Serpent Crown stories, ever since I first came across it in a Marvel Team-up story.

When Captain America finally returns as himself, it’s to take on his worst enemy, the Red Skull. It’s a decent enough story, but ends on an absolute downer, as it’s revealed that the Falcon, Sam Wilson, is in fact a career criminal from L.A. called Snap Wilson, brainwashed by the Red Skull when the Skull still possesed the Cosmic Cube to use as a hidden weapon against Captain America. It’s a wretched bit of writing that’s luckily been retconned since.

Let’s end this with a few words about the art. Most of it is provided by Sal Buscema, doing his usual dependable job, nothing spectacular but good enough. At the end though Frank Robbins replaces him and, well, it’s not good at all. The weird musculature he gives his characters and strange positions he draws them in, impossible for any real person, the overall “offbrand” effect of his art, it’s awful. Robbins was always more a newspaper strip cartoonist than somebody comfortable doing superhero comics and he certainly should not be judged by his work here, but boy is he a disappointment whenever he’s used on a Marvel title…

Conclusion? A great volume to end this series with. Tune in tomorrow for an epilogue/dissection of this whole mad project.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 49: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Fantastic Four Vol. 07


Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07
Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Rich Buckler, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #138-159 and more (September 1973 – June 1975)
Get this for: The FF enter the Bronze Age — three stars

For the penultimate entry in this series we got Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 7, the first volume to feature neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee. Instead Gerry Conway handles writing duties for most of the run collected here, both on the regular series and on the five Giant-Size issues also included. Roy Thomas takes over from him with #156, after a fill-in issue by Len Wein. The art is taken care of by John Buscema, then Rich Buckler.

The period of The Fantastic Four collected here is one I know relatively well, having read these issues in Dutch translation years ago, buying them for a guilder at a time from a market stall. These were doublesized with cardboard covers and like the Essential collections, in black and white, so I had something of a deja vu rereading this.

At the time I first read these issues I wasn’t what you call critical of what I read: if it had superheroes and villains, especially new ones, that was good enough for me. Rereading them again it’s clear that these are not nearly of the same quality as even the worst of the Lee/Kirby collaborations; they’re quite mundane in fact, for all their non-stop action and attempts to emulate Kirby’s creativity. Lee and Kirby created the Inhumans, the Watcher, the Kree and Skrulls, the Black Panther and Wakanda and so on, basically creating the whole Marvel Universe from scratch. With Conway, we get a race of abominable snowmen, who are reverted to normal humans at the end of the story — not quite the same, is it?

Not that Gerry Conway and later Roy Thomas were bad writers, but they missed the creative spark of the Lee-Kirby collaborations. Instead both fall back on reusing established villains and soap opera to hold the reader’s interest. So we get the return of the Miracle Man, last seen in issue 3, Annihilus and Doctor Doom on the one hand and the maritial problems of Reed and Sue Richards on the other. Most stories also take more than one issue to complete, not always a good thing. It’s not all bad: I quite like that very distinctive, early seventies energy these stories have and both Conway and Thomas keep them flowing, sweeping you along with them.

On the art side there’s little to complain off, with first John Buscema and then Rich Buckler as penciler. Again, if you compare them to Kirby, both are a bit on the bland side here and certainly Buscema had and has done better elsewhere. I think that , as with the writing, the art suffers a bit from being forced into the Marvel Housestyle, trying to ape Lee and Kirby when it would’ve been better if both had followed their own paths.

Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 07 collects a low period in the Fantastic Four’s existence, when the title was in a creative slump. There are some points of interest, but they’re few and far between. For me it was an exercise in nostalgia reading these issues, going back to a time when I was much less critical of comics and could still enjoy these kind of stories for what they were.