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Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 43: Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 03

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Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 03
Steve Englehart, Marv Wolfman, Jim Starlin, Frank Brunner, Gene Colan and friends
Reprints: Dr Strange #1-29, Annual 1 and Tomb of Dracula #44-45 (June 1974- June 1978)
Get this for: Englehart and co trying to recapture the Ditko magic — three stars

I think it’s fair to say that every writer on Doctor Strange has tried to get out from under the shadow of Steve Ditko. In the first volume of
Essential Doctor Strange they did not succeed, but perhaps the writers in the third volume will fare better. They’re certainly not the least writers: Steve Englehart, Marv Wolfman, Jim Starlin and Roger Stern all have a go at Doctor Strange here.

Of the writers featured here, Englehart has the best chances. He was after all responsible for getting Dr Strange his own series again, together with Frank Brunner, through their work on Marvel Premiere. He starts strong, introducing Silver Dagger, a Catholic cardinal turned magician hunter, who in the first issue kills Doctor Strange and kidnaps Clea, his lover and disciple. Strange gets better of course, but it takes him five issues to put Silver Dagger away. In the sixth issue Gene Colan returns on the art duties, as do longtime Strange villains Umar and Dormammu in a plot to not only restore the latter one’s powers, but to make him master of Earth. In the end he’s only defeated by the powers of Gaea and every living creature on Earth — including the people reading the story…

The threats only get bigger for poor old Doctor Strange, having to face off against Eternity next for the fate of the Earth, failing to stop the destruction of the world in #12, only for it to be recreated the next issue. Everybody literally died that time, but was reborn a second time, something that would later in the volume be retconned by Marv Wolfman. It’s not the last time the universe is seemingly destroyed only to be recreated again — Wolfman does it as well, as does Jim Starlin in his Creators saga. This is no coincidence, as each writer has their own cosmic epic story to tell and what is more epic than the end of everything and only Doctor Strange remaining to put things right?

Yet lesser threats can work as well, as the crossover with Tomb of Dracula shows. When Strange’s servant Wong is bit and killed by Dracula, Doctor Strange goes looking for revenge only to fall victim to the vampire himself. He manages to escape in his astral body, but still has a hard time getting both himself and Wong cured and fails in destroying Dracula. After that it’s back to the big, existential menaces however, as Doc fights Satan, timetravels through America’s colonial history in honor of the bicentennial and confronts the menace of the Quadriverse and the Creators saga.

Reading this volume in one setting, rather than having read the individual issues spread out over four years, it’s not hard to see some patterns emerging — it’s not just the periodical destruction and recreation of the universe. There’s also the frequent depowering of Doctor Strange, as each writer finds reasons why he cannot use his magic this time. It is of course always difficult to write an almost omnipotent character like Doc Strange, who could end most threats with a handy spell or two. So either the villains need a power up or Strange needs a power down. Personally I feel either is a lazy choice and that’s the difference with the Lee/Ditko Doctor Strange; they didn’t take the easy way out. It takes effort and skill to keep Strange’s powers consistent and not cheat in getting him out of plot holes.

Another common plot device here is seeing Doc Strange being killed only to discover later that he managed to flee his body first in his astral form. I’ve got fewer problems with this, it is one of his established powers after all, but when used to much it can again be a crutch. The same goes for the eye of Agamotto, which is less used here however.

Frank Brunner starts out as the artist here and he’s is well suited to the title, as are his main succesors, Gene Colan, Jim Starlin, Ruby Nebres and Tom Sutton. Each of those artists is on the atmospheric end of the scale rather than the realistic, especially Colan. Lovely work by all of them and gorgeous to look at, even if some of it is hampered by the transition to black and white, as is the case with the P. Craig Russel drawn annual.

Some good tries, but the Ditko Doctor Strange is not equalled here.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 42: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06

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Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 06
Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, Roy Thomas, John Buscema and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #111-137 (June 1971 – August 1973)
Get this for: The Fantastic Four within Kirby or Lee — three stars

Curse my luck! Just as with the Essential X-Men yesterday, I never managed to get volume five of Essential Fantastic Four either, which means I missed the end of the Lee-Kirby run. Instead volume six offers Big John Buscema on art duties, with Stan Lee, Archie Goodwin, then Lee again and finally Roy Thomas handling the writing. Good though these gents are, their work can’t compare to what Jack Kirby brought to The Fantastic Four. Even though Stan Lee himself is still around for a while here, the chemistry he had with Kirby is gone. Kirby and Lee could always spark ideas of each other, now Lee had to do it all himself.

It’s not all bad though. For a start, this volume contains the first Fantastic Four comic I ever read, #113, translated in Dutch as Vier Verdedigers Classics #59 which an uncle had in his collection — and I have now. That issue was the start of the Overmind saga and its cover is burned in my memory. It was not just the first FF comic I read, but must have been one of the earliest superhero comics I ever saw and it fascinated me. It’s a typical late Silver Age Marvel issue, continuing directly from the previous issue, with cameos from the Hulk and Agatha Harkness and a guest star appearance by the Watcher, while the action never stops, all drawn in that wonderful expressive, larger than life John Buscema style and it’s just crack to a certain kind of geek boy (or girl) like me. It may not have been half as good as what Lee and Kirby had been up to before, but I didn’t know anything about that.

The whole Overmind story showed that some of the creativity of that earlier run was still present in The Fanastic Four, as the Overmind turned out to be the last living survivor of an ancient alien race, the Eternals, scource of the cosmos, who had conquored all before them until they reached the planet Gigantus, which dwarved Galaxies and was their doom. As the Eternals’ own planet died beneath them, they put all their mental power into the Overmind and send him into the universe to sleep and wait until the time was right for the Overmind to come from beyond the stars and crush the universe! The Fantastic Four are helpless before him, even need to teamup with Doctor Doom to fight him but even that is not enough, though Doom does get his crowning moment of awesome as he fights an unequal battle with the Overmind but keeps standing for he is … DOOM! In the end though it’s the Stranger, revealed to be the combined might of the people from Gigantus who tames the Overmind.

The Overmind is however the only original villain to fight the Fantastic Four this volume, as for the most part they fight old enemies and even menaces originally introduced in other series. Diablo and Galactus return for rematches, they get involved with the Inhumans again, the Frightful Four come back with a new member, and so on. There are other changes in the status quo though. Roy Thomas lets Sue Richards quit the FF and makes Medusa of the Inhumans her replacement, while the relationship of Johnny Storm and Crystal also ends, as the latter falls for Quicksilver, the mutant Avenger. On the whole The Fantastic Four is much more soap opera orientated then before, less interested in exploration as well, more going for fighting “conventional” villains. It’s not as wild as the Lee-Kirby runs, but it’s far from bad either.

As for the art, John Buscema is as great as Kirby in his own right and I do like the grandeur he gives a character like the Watcher, as well as the body language he gives his characters. A more conventional artist than Kirby perhaps, but you can hardly fault him for that. I love how he poses his characters, the stances he gives them which betray their emotions and character. Every now and again, often in just some small throwaway panel I just have to stop and study his art, bask in it.

A letdown after the sheer mastery of the first four Essential Fantastic Four volumes? Perhaps, but Buscema’s art and the efforts of Lee, Goodwin and Thomas make up for a lot.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 41: Essential X-Men Vol. 06

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Essential X-Men Vol. 06
Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Arthur Adams and friends
Reprints: X-Men #199-213 and more (July 1970 – December 1972)
Get this for: X-Men fighting losing battles — four stars

And so we reach Late Period Claremont with Volume six of Essential X-Men, having of necessity skipped Vol. 5 — such is the danger of buying from a remainders shop. This is my least favourite period of Claremont’s X-Men even though this was also when I bought my first issues new off the rack, in Dutch translation, with #200 being my first one. Didn’t start to regularly buy the series until much later though; limited pocket money led me chose The Avengers and Spider-Man over The X-Men. At least they won their fights more often than not.

Because Late Period Claremont is a very depressing writer and the world he lets the X-Men operate in here is dark and bleak, where the villains have become much more dangerous and murderous, friends have all vanished and everything the X-Men do goes wrong. From the start of his run on X-Men Claremont had a tendency to make the X-Men’s battles ambiguous and them suffer, as well as a prediliction for long running and complicated subplots, with various threats kept simmering on the backburner for long stretches. In the current volume this has reached the point where it seems the X-Men are destined never to win another battle, or vanquish a foe. Meanwhile subplots over the course of the series have taken longer and longer to resolve and here they seemingly never do so…

So the volume starts with the inconclusive trail of Magneto in Paris in #199-200, for which the entire creative team actually got to fly to Paris for, as a reward for their succes with the X-Men. The trail is interrupted by a crossover with the New Mutants in Asgard, itself a followup to an earlier X-Men/Alpha Flight adventure. The trial ends inconclusive, professor Xavier has a health crisis and is taken into space by the Starjammers, while veteran X-Man Cyclops leaves next issue, after losing a leadership battle to the now powerless Storm. The next couple of issues has them tangling with the Beyonder, as Secret Wars II comes to visit. Two solo adventures of Nightcrawler and Wolverine, the latter being almost killed by some old enemies lead us into a confrontation with the socalled Freedom Force, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under a new name and sanctioned by the US government.

After that Rachel Summers, the daughter of Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean “Phoenix” Grey from the “Days of Future Passed” alternate future, decides to take on the Hellfire Club on her own, to take her revenge on the psychic vampire and mass murdereress Selene, only to be almost killed herself by Wolverine as the only way to stop Rachel from becoming a murderer herself. This of course leads to a fullblown battle between the Hellfire Club and the rest of the X-Men, which in turn is interrupted by the attack of Nimrod, the ultimate Sentinel mutant hunter, which forces the two teams to work together to defeat him, barely. All of which is merely a prelude to the Mutant Massacre, the first proper mutant mega crossover, between the X-Men, New Mutants, Power Pack, Thor and X-Factor, the culmination of several years of subplots about the general public’s growing paranoia and hatred of mutants.

The crossover revolves around a new group of villains, the Marauders, largely new but with some old faces thrown in, who go on a killing spree against the Morlocks, mutant outcasts living in an old, abandoned fallout shelter underneath New York. Most of them have barely any powers and are easy prey for these killers, who strike without motive. Why the Marauders strike is never explained and the most the X-Men or any of the other heroes involved can do is damage control. The Mutant Massacre is everything The X-Men has been building towards for years: intense frustration.

Frustration, because Claremont keeps on twisting the knife. Throughout this volume the X-Men keep losing battles, keep getting wounded and nearly killed, keep failing to protect themselves and others from increasingly murderous villains. The Mutant Massacre is just the icing on the cake. Claremont is good at piling up the pressure month to month, but reading this in one sitting the frustration just gets too much. It’s the Joker problem as much as anything: if the Joker is killing people indiscriminately every time he breaks out of Arkham Asylum, Batman looks like a smuck rather than a hero if he doesn’t kill him in battle but delivers him back to Arkham to escape again. With the X-Men, you have them facing menaces able and willing to kill every mutie in the country, yet they’re still playing by superhero rules, not wanting to kill a mass murderer like Selene. What’s even worse about that issue is that Wolverine himself way back in #116 had been shown (offpanel) to kill a guard in the way when the X-Men were trying to sneak into a villain’s headquarters.

What also frustrated me was the theme of mutant paranoia. It was always present in the series of course, but here it completely dominates The X-Men. At times it seems every human, including superheroes like The Avengers or the Fantastic Four hates and fears the X-Men, no matter what they do. It feels manipulative at times.

Which brings me to that other mutant series, X-Factor, which has some of its issues collected here in the Mutant Massacre crossover. The creation of X-Factor, done largely without Claremont’s input, was a mistake, not in the least because it led to the cancellation of one of my favourite series, Defenders. The idea behind the series was ridiculous — the original X-Men regrouping and posing as the mutant hunters X-Factor, to find and train dangerous new mutants — and the fallout of it poisoned the X-Men for years, with the worst consequence being the whole “return of Jean Grey/Scott Summers leaving his bride Madelyne Pryor plus newborn baby” business.

All of which amounts to a lot of silent screaming at the comic, as my frustration gets the better of me. To be honest, this frustation is not all bad: Claremont must be doing something right to get thousands of fans buying the series month in month out despite it or perhaps because of it. He certainly kept me reading. It helps a lot to have John Romita Jr. doing the art: his dark, scratchy style fits the series well.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 40: Essential Captain America Vol. 03

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Essential Captain America Vol. 03
Stan Lee, Gary Friedrich, Steve Englehart, Gene Colan and friends
Reprints: Captain America #127-156 (July 1970 – December 1972)
Get this for: Captain America goes relevant — four stars

The previous volumes of Essential Captain America were heavy on the action, with Cap fighting enemies like the Red Skull and his Sleepers, Hydra, Baron Zemo, A.I.M. and Modok, often working together with Nick Fury and SHIELD. These were all fairly uncomplicated stories, but while the action continues in this volume, something does change as Captain America goes relevant. Stan Lee had dropped hints before that Cap was unhappy with his life and in #128 he went to find himself by touring America — somewhat of a cliche yes, but not so much when Cap did it.

And even on the road he’s not free of his old enemies, as he’s attacked by Batroc’s Brigade and runs into the Red Skull yet again. Nothing much changed there then, but like in Spider-Man at the same time, Lee does notice and comments on the changing attitudes of seventies America, having Cap interfere in a campus dispute and such, though as usual it turns out some supervillain was behind it. The same was of course the case with the return of Bucky Barnes. While Captain America has once again met with the disappointment of not having Bucky back, his next partner does stick around.

In issue 133 the Falcon, introduced in the previous volume, returns. The very next issue the series changed name to Captain America and the Falcon, showing how important this partnership was. The stories change again, becoming more gritty and streetlevel, centered on New York and Harlem though of course the supervillains are never far behind. Much of the background tension in the series at this point is provided by the race issue, as the Falcon has to find his place as what the world sees as a Black sidekick to a white man. It’s all very heavyhanded of course, both under Lee and his successor Gary Friedrich. So for example in #143 there’s the People’s Militia wanting to burn Harlem to the ground to “send a message to the honkies” that the Black man won’t be confined to the ghetto anymore, who turn out to have been manipulated by the Red Skull.

Old winghead goes through a lot of writers this volume btw. Starting with Lee for fifteen issues, then Gary Friedrich takes over for seven, then Gerry Conway gets to do four and ending with Steve Englehart for another four. Conway’s short run is the worst, with a complete mischaracterisation of Cap’s and Nick Fury’s relationship. Englehart starts strong, bringing back the fifties Captain America and Bucky as paranoid rightwing bigots. Friedrich was his usual self, a slightly hipper, with-it Stan Lee.

Artwise, this volume starts off well, with Gene Colan being a good match for Cap’s adventures. He’s succeeded by John Romita, who is slightly too clean cut for my liking here. Sal Buscema is the last artist to grace this volume, he’s doing alright but not great. It’s always been that way with Captain America, never a title to be considered for its art, save for some brief shining moments.

Somewhat of a mixed volume here then, not unmissable but for the hardcore fan. Like me.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 39: Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 01

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Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 01
Steve Gerber, Gene Colan and friends
Reprints: Howard the Duck #1-27, annual 1, Marvel Treasury #12 and more (January 1976 – September 1978)
Get this for: Gerber’s best work for Marvel — five stars

Get down America! Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 1 collects the complete original run of Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, the greatest cult hero of seventies Marvel, the one comic that captured the spirit of the seventies. Whether that still makes it interesting thirty years onwards is another question entirely. A question everybody needs to answer themselves, but for me I found these stories still surprisingly relevant and good.

As you probably know, Howard got his start with a cameo appearance in an early issue of Gerber’s Man-Thing, just one casualty in a reality war, taken from his own Earth and trapped in a world he never made. He was an instant hit, got two solo adventures in Giant-Size Man-Thing (no sniggering please), then his own series. Steve Gerber wrote all his appearances, including a teamup with The Defenders in Marvel Treasury Edition #12. The series took off, became a cult hit and more than that, one of the few real breakout titles Marvel had in the late seventies, popular enough to get a newspaper strip and much later a not very good movie. But that was after Gerber had left, as Marvel’s higher management fucked him over. All his writing on Howard was of course work for hire and hence continued by other hands after he quit, but none of it was any good. Howard the Duck only worked for Gerber, because he was Gerber.

It looks so easy, the Howard the Duck formula. Create some absurd villain, add a dash of parody, mix in a bit of social commentary and don’t forget the cynicism, add an ill humoured duck (or drake rather) and his girlfriend, then serve it all up with standard Marvel superhero soap opera plots. Yet only for Gerber would this work. Most other writers would just overdo the parody elements, making the Duck into a secondrate Mad imitator or got too absurd and Howard stopped to make sense. It’s the easiest trap to fall into as a writer, to think satire and humour are easy, that you can use a formula to produce it, that all it takes is some obvious parodies and some dime a dozen absurdity to make a Howard the Duck story.

It’s the same as with the old Batman television series, often imitated but never equalled by both other tv shows or comics, because none of those imitators ever got their heads round the idea that the secret was to treat Batman and his world seriously, that there are rules. In Howard’s case the menaces might be even more absurd but Howard still has to deal with them: a nine foot ginger bread man can still kill him if he doesn’t eat him first. Gerber wrote Howard the Duck exactly as he would a more “serious” superhero series and Howard’s villains like Space Turnip Man might be dumb or crazy, but they make sense in their own context. More importantly, Howard always is more than just a comic fowl (sorry), but a true tragic figure, a reverse Ben Grimm, a human trapped in a world of monstrous talking hairless apes.

What made Gerber’s Howard the Duck more than just the lazy parody his successors turned it into is that it was the story of his own struggle of living in seventies America. He can be incredibly blatant in this, (e.g. the Reverend Yucc and his Yuccies) and there is a lot of angst about politicians and Madison Avenue brainwashing and all that, but these are just the most obvious ways in which Gerber’s own emotions seep in the stories. The infamous issue sixteen, a fill-in issue needed because Gerber was blowing his deadlines, is the best example. Instead of the usual reprint or inventory issue, Gerber instead offers a stream of consciousness illustrated essay on his own hangups about Howard, a dialogue between the writer and his creation. It’s the highlight of the series.

Though Gerber was the driving force behind Howard the Duck Gene Colan should be mentioned as well. He portrayed all absurdities with the same ease as he would’ve illustrated a Daredevil or Tomb of Dracula story, without drawing undue attention to the wackiness. It doesn’t hurt that the man could draw either.

Howard the Duck was perhaps the best Marvel put out in the seventies. You need to have this volume.