Comix

Thirteen heroes on one cover? Some artists would struggle, for George Pérez it’s Tuesday.

A sentimental choice this time. This was one of the very first superhero comics I remember reading, in Dutch translation as Vergelders 01. As a child we’d often spent our Sunday afternoons visiting my maternal grandmother, who still had her youngest son, my uncle, living with her. This uncle had a smallish collection of various comics left over from when he was younger and that included a few superhero comics, of which this one and the first issue of the Stan Lee/John Buscema’s Overmind saga in Fantastic Four were the ones I remember. Though I wouldn’t get into superhero comics properly until a few years later, this sure planted a seed in young Martin. As I’ve mentioned before, these stories stuck in my head even though they were steeped in a continuity or history I knew nothing about yet, with a cast of dozens of unfamiliar heroes and villains.

Avengers 167 was the start of the Korvac Saga, written by Jim Shooter on request of Pérez himself for a good solid story with a lot of characters. In many ways it’s a perfect example of Bronze Age (or Shooter Age?) Marvel. The start of a new story, but subplots from previous issues are still mentioned. Captain America and Iron Man are in conflict over the latter’s leadership. Wonder Man, recently defrosted, is worrying about whether he can be a hero, while Thor is feeling out of place, as if a mysterious force has been toying with him. When the Avengers meet the Guardians halfway through the issue and the misunderstandings are revolved, we get two pages recapping their history with Korvac and why they’re here, in 1977.

And then we change scenes entirely and are at a fashion show on Park Avenue, that’s being robbed by the Porcupine. But if you say fashion, you know the Wasp will be in the audience and so is her then hubby, the Yellowjacket. They make short work of the Porcupine and his men, aided by yet another hero, Nighthawk. The issue ends with the latter making a terrible pun and that was my first encounter with The Avengers and superheroes.

Thrown in the deep end so to speak, but at no point was I lost or confused about what was happening. Shooter had a knack for introducing all those myriad characters naturally through the course of the story, not surprising since he started as a writer for the Legion of Superheroes. And Pérez is of course, even then, a master in both depicting action and through it showing each hero’s personality. The opening splash page e.g, which shows the Scarlet Witch and Captain America racing to the monitor room to answer an alert, with the Beast bouncing over their heads to get their first. Or the encounter between Charlie 27 and the Beast a little later, the first confident he can handle this weird ‘space monkey’, the latter outraged at being called that. Pérez was, is and will always remain my favourite superhero artist because of things like this.

The World Greatest Hero stares at the ruins of the headquarters of his ex-team. They’re dead, murdered by an old enemy nobody had taken seriously in years. Meanwhile, unknowing, his best friend lies dying in a hospital.

If this had been Superman and say the Detroit area Justice League this would have had some emotional impact. However instead it’s Victor, the heroes murdered were the Guardmen. You don’t know any of these people, why would you care about them when there’s three pages of backstory, then a splash page with the ruins of the team’s headquarters and that’s the last we’ll see of them. It’s purely setup for the rest of the Hero Alliance “End of the Golden Age” graphic novel, which is really about Victor and his relationship with that old friend, the Golden Guardsman, the Batman to his Superman. The Guardsman disappeared years ago and now lies dying of cancer, his son decides now it’s a good time to steal the source of his powers and become a supervillain while his daughter tries to stop him, calling on Victor to help her. In the end they succeed, but now Victor has to choose what to do next as the story is to be continued in the Hero Alliance regular series.

A bold gamble to launch a new superhero series in 1986 through a $6.95 graphic novel; toob old a gamble as Pied Piper didn’t last long beyond its publication. Another victim of the 1987 Black and White Comics Boom, when the direct market was overflowing by all sorts of amateurish crap hoping to be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When that fever broke a lot of shops and publishers went bankrupt. Hero Alliance only got one issue and that was at Wonder color Comics. But the story doesn’t end here.

My personal copy of Hero Alliance “End of the Golden Age” has a sticker over the price tage you see, “Distributed by Innovation”, raising the price with two bucks. What had happened there was that David Campiti, who had written the story together with Kevin Juaire, had started his own comics company in 1989, Innovation, and immediately restarted the Hero Alliance series. He also got the stock from Wonder and Pied Piper and resold it a few years later, taking old issues, ripping their covers off and bundling them together in 100 pages specials under a new cover. There must’ve also been a far few copies of the original graphic novel laying about for Innovation to resell them as is. Especially since Innovation had also reworked it into a three issue miniseries with the same title, adding that first issue from Wonder Color to it as well as extra material.

Now you may have noticed that the cover painting, by one R. T. Schneider, is, to put it bluntly rather ugly. Especially Victor and Kris’ facial expressions are terrible. Have no fear though, as the interior artwork is in much more capable hands, being some of the very first work done by one Ron Lim (with inking by Bart Sears even). Neither Lim nor Sears would make the jump to Innovation, having moved on to bigger and better things, but it is worth seeking out the graphic novel and that very first issue for their art.

Is Hero Alliance as a whole any good? Probably not. To paraphrase David Campiti, the intent was to “show the scenes between the fight scenes” and created a more mature sort of superhero series. In practise this meant second rate soap opera and a lot of t&a. Kris especially could not wear her costume without her nipples poking through. None of the characters got that much of a personality and it all remained stuck in them being obvious stand-ins for better known heroes. Nevertheless, the series lasted 17 issues, followed by a second, quarterly one that lasted four. Somebody must’ve liked it.

Brazilian exchange student Maria de Guzman is suffering from weird nightmares during her first nights in Elm Harbor, MI. Unable to sleep, she’s attacked when out for a midnight jog. Adrenaline taking over she transforms into … The Jaguar!

DC Comics’s !mpact inprint was a short lived attempt to provide a superhero line accessible for new and younger readers, starring new versions of the old MLJ/Archie Comics superheroes. Launched in 1991, it was sadly somewhat overshadowed by the launch of another new superhero publisher with a very similar name you might have heard of called Image in the same year. Lack of sales not helped by having to pay licensing costs meant the whole project barely lasted two years, with the attempted reboot series Crucible failing to reverse things. A pity because honestly, this was the most interesting the Archie superheroes had ever been.

The Jaguar being proof positive of this. The original was just another white dude who on an expedition in the jungle of Peru finds a jaguar belt in an Incan temple which gives him “supreme power over animals everywhere in the universe” and uses it to become a superhero. Created in 1961, his adventures were very of the Silver Age Superman type, just worse. He managed fifteen issues of that sort of stuff, frustratingly one more than the !mpact Jaguar, then occasionally showed up whenever Archie decided to dust off their superhero properties again. This never lasted long because Archie was never that good at superheroes. It didn’t help that every new attempt just picked up from the last, so you had a bunch of heroes with complicated back stories that you were supposed to be familiar with. Not very helpful for a new reader.

DC did it differently, starting with a clean slate, radically retooling some of these heroes. As one example there was The Web, originally a fairly standard roof runner superhero whose gimmick was that he was henpecked by his wife. In the !mpact version, The Web became a group of armoured government agents, the equivalent of Marvel’s SHIELD. While some of the titles did hew close to the originals, especially with The Shield, as a reader you didn’t need to know any of that. Which made it very exciting for me.

At the time I had been reading superhero comics for a couple of years, but there had never been something like this, an entire new universe for me to explore. With only five launch titles (Jaguar, Legend of the Shield, The Comet, The Fly and The Web) it was also manageable to keep up with the entire line. A year or two later you’d be sick to the back teeth of all the new superhero universes launching, but back then it was all new and exciting.

From the start, Jaguar was my favourite, not just because this was a seven foot tall muscular woman who towered over every other !mpact hero. Written by William Messner-Loebs, with art by David Williams and José Marzán Jr, the series had a healthy dose of soap opera shenanigans alongside the superheroics. Most drama courtesy of Tracey, resident queen bee who became Maria’s reluctant friend and confidante, the only person to know her secret identity. This being 1991 not even a hint of yuri could be found, but looking at it in hindsight it would’ve been a logical development.

Instead, she was friendly with fellow superhero the Fly, like herself somebody who transformed into an entirely different person, from teenager to adult. Their relationship was quite sweet, finding mutual comfort and friendship, but like with so much else, barely had time to even be established before the line was cancelled entirely.

I still feel this was a wasted opportunity, that if only DC had given it a little bit more time and attention this could’ve worked. Since then Archie has had multiple relaunched of their reclaimed superheroes, some of which have indeed been interesting (Mark Waid’s Fox series e.g.), but there has been nothing quite like !mpact and Jaguar since.

Ambush Bug was tame. The March Hare hasn’t even been housebroken.

Straight from the warped minds of Ambush Bugs creative duo, Robert Loren Fleming (scripter) and Keith Giffen (creator, writer, penciler), comes this attempt to one-up him, dragging the poor unfortunate souls of Rick Bryant (inker) and Pat Brosseau (lettering) with them. Drawn almost entirely in 12 panel pages by Giffen, in the same art style he was also using in Legion of Superheroes, The March Hare is the story of a mafia hitman who murdered his own brother — and now is stuck with the mystical rabbit that drove his brother mad. Harvey this ain’t.

If you’ve read Ambush Bug than you roughly know how The March Hare works. You get an extremely silly story done perfectly straight, the one difference being that the Hare is a much more muted personality compared to the Bug. Instead we’re mostly seeing things through the eyes of Milo, the hitman who’s now saddled with this pooka as he’s woken up to find his bedroom in a nuclear winter wonderland, complains to his local barkeep about the Hare and shoots a neighbour for drinking his whisky (turns out it’s actually his dog who does so) before going on a games show with the Hare feeding him consistently wrong answers after which he murders the winner and the Hare in turn drowns his sorrows. In the last page a Catholic priest gives us absolution for having bought and read this comic.

This was supposed to be an ongoing series but only the first issue was ever published. Almost by the time it came out in 1986 its publisher, Lodestone Publications/Deluxe Comics, had gone out of business, due to losing a lawsuit on who owned the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. A rival publisher had bought the rights to this title and its characters from the original publisher, but Deluxe Comics argued they were in the public domain because the copyrights had never been properly registrered, back when that was still mandatory in the US. Because of the lawsuit several big distributors stopped distributing Deluxe/Lodestone books and by the time they lost the suit, they had no choice but to close down.

Which leaves this one issue of The March Hare as a bit of a curiosity in Keith Giffen’s career, somewhat of a successor to Ambush Bug and a predecessor of his 90s creation The Heckler. I was lucky enough to find it during one of my endless back issue bin crawls in the nineties, knowing of it because of a house ad in another Lodestone title, Dave Cockrum’s Futurians, from which the opening tag line was taken.

The final issue of (A Suivre) meant it was no longer to be continued, ending a twenty year tradition of publishing mature, literary comics series for people who’d outgrown the traditional magazines.

Very short recap of Franco-Belgian comics history: at the end of WWII Spirou and Tintin became the dominant comics magazines in the French language, with such luminaries like Franquin, Tillieux, Jijé, Peyo, Tibet, Graton and of course Herge among many others. In the sixties the torch was passed to the French Pilote, where a new generation of cartoonists broke through, among them the Goscinny/Uderzo due whom you may know from a little comic called Asterix. Then in the seventies, Métal hurlant, L’Écho des savanes and Fluide glacial brought a more mature edge, freed from the restrictions of the more commercially orientated older magazines.

In 1978 Casterman, for the most part a fairly traditional publisher which was actually founded at roughlt the same time as the United States (1777), thought that having their own magazine was a good idea. Through it they could promote their various series without being beholden to other publishers as well as share the cost of publication between magazine and album. They also had an audience in mind, an older audience that had grown up reading comics that wanted something more suited to their tastes, if not necessarily the avant-garde works published in Métal hurlant. Grown-up adventure stories perhaps.

(A Suivre) therefore was created as a monthly rather than weekly magazine, which would publish both complete short stories and continuing stories, but in larger chunks than the traditional two pages of the weeklies. The sort of author they were looking for can be found in that last issue: Jacques Tardi, Ted Benoît, François Bourgeon, Loustal/Paringaux, Varenne, Manara. Hugo Pratt, who Casterman had published since 1973 in French, was also a huge inspiration and contributor. These were all people who used the adventure strip genre to examine more literary concerns, more concerned sometimes with the emotional states of their characters than whether they defeated their villains.

This formula worked for some twenty years, from 1977 to 1997, with Casterman publishing successfull stories as albums sometime after they first appeared in (A Suivre). For a few years there was also a Dutch version Wordt Vervolgd, which like the French means To Be Continued. By the mid-nineties though the comics market had changed, with most readers no longer buying magazines but albums. (A Suivre) therefore was no longer sustainable and had to be cancelled. Yet for two decades it had improved and raised the overall level of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, which is worth something at least.