Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 32: Essential Avengers Vol. 04

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Essential Avengers Vol. 04
Roy Thomas, John and Sal Buscema, Neal Adams and friends
Reprints: Avengers #69-97, Incredible Hulk #140 (October 1969 – March 1972)
Get this for: Roy Thomas’ best work — five stars

I learned two things from Essential Avengers Vol. 04: Roy Thomas’ dialogue was still pretty much influenced by Stan Lee and he was overtly fond of the word “stripling”. But this innocent peccadillo can be forgiven, as Thomas is the first writer to release The Avengers‘ full potential, unleashing the first classic cosmic crossover: the Kree-Skrull War! It’s the climax of an incredible volume, in which Thomas mixes both standard supervillain threats with more outlandish foes, keeps up the pace throughout but does not neglect the personal either.

The volume starts almost as strong as it ends, with the first great Kang the Conquoror/Grandmaster story, using the Avengers as pawns in their cosmic chess game, introducing the Squadron Sinister, the first of two Justice League of America pastiches. It’s a great, fun story which also reveals one of Thomas’ obsessions, WWII/Golden Age heroes, as the climax of the story takes place in Paris 1941 and features the Golden Age Captain America, Namor and the Human Torch, amongst others. A second great cosmic story is the twoparter with Arkon the Imperiator, the leader of a barbaric world from another dimension, who wants to destroy the Earth in a nuclear holocaust to save his own home planet.

As said, Thomas also has more mundane supervillains threatening the Avengers, with several old foes (the Grim Reaper, Living Laser, Swordsman, Whirlwind and the Man-Ape teaming up as the Lethal Legion to destroy the Avengers together. There’s also the threat of Zodiac, an Astrology based criminal army as well as Cornelius van Lunt, the businessman who seems to finance them. Zodiac is an enemy that returns a few times, first seen in #72, then again in #77 and for the third time in #80-82. They’re not the only ones to return to plague the Avengers once more: Arkon is another villain to pop up again.

The same goes for the JLA pastiches, as in issue 85 and 86 four Avengers travel to a parallel Earth where they meet the Squadron Supreme, with quite obvious stand-ins for several heroes from the Distinguished Competition: Hawkeye (Green Arrow), Thom Thumb (the Atom), Lady Lark (Black Canary), American Eagle (Hawkman), Dr Spectrum (Green Lantern) The Whizzer (Flash), Nighthawk (Batman) and Hyperion (Superman). Nighthawk also turns up in #83, the Rutland Halloween Parade as the costume worn by Tom Fagan. Rutland’s Halloween parade would feature in quite a few Marvel and DC comics books during the seventies, sometimes even forming unofficial crossovers as Fagan was a lifelong comic book and science fiction fan and friends with writers like Thomas, Len Wein and Steve Englehart. It’s one of those neat traditions that has sadly fallen by the wayside since.

Speaking of science fiction, this collection also features the two issue Harlan Ellison written crossover between The Avengers and The Incredible Hulk and sadly it hasn’t aged well. More attention seems to have been paid to horrible puns riffing on Ellison short stories than to a real plot, but at least it did introduce Jarella and the subatomic world she lived on to the Hulk. I can see why people would’ve been exited to see an established and well respected writer like Ellison dabbling in comics, a sign that comics had grown up, but almost forty years on it feels like stunt casting.

Something else that hasn’t aged well is Roy Thomas continuing attempt to put some relevance in The Avengers. So in issue 73-74 the Sons of the Serpents are used once again to talk about race matters and how both sides are equally wrong and manipulated by greedy men for their own gain. Issue 83 is no better, featuring an equally heavy handed approach to “women’s lib”, as several female superheroes decided the best way to advance feminism is to destroy the Avengers as male chauvinist pigs, under the influence of the Enchantress disguised as the Valkyrie. It’s all written from a well meaning liberal point of view, but it’s politically naive and ultimately supportive of the status quo and the myth that America is a land of opportunity for all, evidence be damned.

And then there is the Kree-Skrull War, running from Issue 89 to issue 97, one continuing story and if I remember correctly then the longest story ever told in a Marvel Comic. Thomas takes the two longstanding alien threats from Fantastic Four and Captain Marvel, mixes in the Inhumans as well as unsubtle analogies to the 1905ties communist witch hunts and of course his own obsession with Golden Age superheroes and makes it all work.

What helps a lot in selling it all is having Neal Adams coming aboard for the artwork. Not that the art has been bad up until then, with John and Sal Buscema spelling each other on art duties until then, but Adams kicks it up a notch. All three artists are good at showing the grandeur and the glory of the Avengers, each in his own way is more than able to visualise the battles and settings Thomas comes up with, but everything Adams does is just that little bit more special. It’s this that makes the Kree-Skrull War special, something every other Avengers writer will try to emulate and top from then on, rather than just another good Avengers story like e.g. the Kang-Grandmaster clash earlier in the volume.

So yeah, for some of the best of what The Avengers could be, this is the volume you need.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 31: X-Men Vol. 3

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Essential X-Men Vol. 3
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #145-161, Annual #3-5 (May 1981 – September 1982)
Get this for: more cosmic adventures with the X-Men — four stars

What a difference an artist makes. Was the previous volume of Essential X-Men all about John Byrne, in this volume Dave Cockrum is back and the X-Men change with him. Chris Claremont may have been the driving force behind The Uncanny X-Men for seventeen years, but he always adapts to his artists. With Byrne the stories were much more “realistic”, if that’s the right word to use about a series featuring mutant superheroes battling villains for the fate of the Earth or the Universe. As Cockrum comes aboard, the stories become more swashbuckling, less restrained and also somewhat less grim. Though to be honest, the X-Men still have difficulty winning their fights.

Claremont eases up a bit on the interconnectness of the stories in this volume, though various subplots do keep popping up from time to time. The most persistent of this is of course the whole issue of mutant prejudice, the reason why the X-Men existed in the first place. It’s far less in the foreground than under Byrne however. Apart from the X-Men’s climatic fight with Magneto leading up to issue 150, prejudice against mutants is kept in the background. With Cockrum back, the X-men fight menaces such as Doctor Doom and Arcade (#145-147), the mutant Caliban (148), Magneto (149-150), the Hellfire Club (151-152), Rogue (158), Dracula (159) and Belasco (160), the last two stories featuring artwork by Bill Sienkiewicz and Brent Anderson respectively. And of course, if Cockrum is back, the Shi’ar and the Starjammers can’t be far behind and indeed they feature in issues 154 to 157, with consequences lasting much longer.

Now the usual cliche about the X-Men under Claremont has always been about “heroes fighting to save a world that loathes and hates them for being mutants”, about fighting to prevent the future glimpsed in “Days of Future Past”. It all fits nicely with the original reason for the X-Men, of showing normal humans that mutants could be trusted and you wouldn’t think intergalactic space opera fits in with this and yet here we are again. There’s a plot against Lilandra, empress of the galaxy spanning Shi’ar empire and of course professor Xavier’s lover and Corsair of the Starjammers (Cyclops’ dad) comes to Earth looking for help, followed by a nasty new enemy: the Brood. They’re helped by an old Ms Marvel villain, Deathbird, also revealed to be of Sh’iar royal blood. It takes the X-Men three issues to defeat Deathbird and her co-conspirators, though they will be back in the last issue collected here, which is the leadin to the Brood Saga proper.

It’s not just space opera that the X-Men can be adapted to, as the two issues with Dracula and Belasco show, again feature enemies with no connection whatsoever with the supposed theme of Uncanny X-Men. The latter story however does showcase several of Claremont’s traits, to with his use of foreshadowing and his inability to let the X-Men properly win their fights. In the story Belasco kidnaps Illyana, Colossus kid sister, from the strange island in the Bermuda Triangle the X-Men now had made their headquarters. The X-Men go to her rescue and end up in Limbo, where they come across gruesome reminders of what might be their future: a Wolverine skeleton, a corrupt Nightcrawler in service to Belasco, an older Collossus who died impaled in Belasco’s palace. They manage to fight and win back Illyana, but when Kitty Pryude pulls her out, she lets go for a second and when she reaches her again, she has aged seven years — to find out what happened, you had to have read the Magik miniseries that Claremont would write later.

The X-Men then win the fight against Belasco, but he still has the last laught. Equally undecisive are their battles with Doom and Arcade as well as the Hellfire Club. They may be defeated, but are left alone to make more trouble later on. This is much more so the case than with any other superhero title, each of which has to strike a fine balance between giving villains their just desserts and leaving enough of them around to provide future menace. In the X-Men’s case it at times seems as if they’re never allowed to win their battles outright, always end up having to pay the price. It’s one of the things about Uncanny X-Men that would become incredibly frustrating to me over time, though here it has not reached that point yet…

Essential X-Men Vol. 3 ends with three annuals, slightly different stories with different artists, the first one featuring George Perez even. Each stands alone and offers some welcome change of pace for the X-Men. They round off the volume nicely.

24 Hour Comics Day in Amsterdam

Amsterdam, Comix
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I missed it again this year, but the first weekend of October was 24 hour comics day, when cartoonists worldwide take the challenge to produce a full length comic (24 pages) in 24 hours. In Amsterdam it’s traditionally held in Lambiek, the world’s oldest comics shop still existing and 2010 was no exception. The idea for 24 hour comics came out of a conversation between Steve Bissette and Scott McCloud, the idea being to do a completely spontaneous comics. It’s a good exercise to losen up the drawing muscles, forcing you to not to think, but draw. Over at Remco Wetzels’ blog, you can see what one participant came up with.

The video below was made by Michael Minneboo and shows how this day went two years ago (only in Dutch, sadly):



(I almost had a heart attack watching this, as one of the artists seen in the background almost could be my twin: same build, similar face and such.)

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 30: Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 2

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Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 2
Marv Wolfman, Roger Slifer, Ron Wilson and friends
Reprints: Marvel Two-in-One #26-52, Annual #2-3 (April 1977 – June 1979)
Get this for: the occasional gems in the mire — two stars

They can’t all be winners. The Essentials phonebooks are a great way to get your hands on large chunks of classic Marvel comics, but you have to accept the occasional dud. Marvel is after all fairly indiscriminating in their approach to the line: everything that might be commercially interesting gets at least one volume and if it sells, more volumes follow. Some of the series collected were never to great to begin with; because these volumes are published in strict chronological order and every series has its up and downs, even good series will have weaker volumes every now and again. In the case of Essential Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 2, the original series was never a priority for the top writers or artists at Marvel, so large stretches of it are mediocre at best.

Marvel Two-in-One, like its companion title Marvel Team-Up suffers from two flaws: it’s format, which requires another guest star each month and the fact that it play’s second fiddle to another series, in this case The Fantastic Four, in Team-up‘s case Amazing Spider-Man. Which means you cannot change the status quo in this series, anything that does change has to be put right in the end and whatever happens in the main title will end up determining events here as well. In general then, coming up with a story that’s “good enough” will do. The same goes for the art: people will buy the issue depending on the guest star anyway, so why knock yourself out? A bit cynical perhaps, but the truth is that Marvel Two-in-One and Marvel Team-Up never helped a writer or artist to make their reputation.

Roughly half the stories in this volume were written by Marv Wolfman, who does try to give some semblance of continuity to the series, with issue 26 to 36 forming one long sequence of stories. The Thing gets involved with SHIELD against Mentallo and the Fixer, mixes it up with Deathlok, then has to fly to England to find an expert to help Deathlok regain his independence, crosses the path of HYDRA and Spider-Woman, tangles with Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, teams up with minor mystic hero Modred, not to mention Nighthawk, then spends two issues cleaning up the plotlines left over from the cancellation of Skull the Slayer, coincidently one Wolfman co-created. This could’ve worked well, but unfortunately it all turned out fairly dreary, things not helped by the cor blimey stow the crows mockney Wolfman insists all English characters speak with.

The next writer up, Roger Slifer, continues Wolfman’s approach to the title with a multi-issue story about the Thing being framed for assault and criminal damage, followed by a two issue teamup with Black Panther and Brother Voodoo against a zombie (pardon, “zuvembi”, zombies not allowed by the Comics Code yet), neither of which are great successes. A curious detail of the second stoy is that it features Idi Amin, then still the dictator of Uganda, as the villain behind the “zuvembi” turned out to be the Ugandan minister of economics who was once a supervillain called Dr. Spectrum (don’t ask). Now cameos by actually existing politicians are nothing new in comics (as witnessed by the appearance by Jimmy Carter — or at least the Impossible Man masquerading as him — in this volume as well) but to have Idi Amin is a bit tasteless.

The remainder of the stories here are less ambitious, just simple one issue teamups and nothing interesting. However, amongst all this dross are a few absolute gems. The first is the second part of the Jim Starlin written and pencilled story from Avengers Annual #7 and Marvel Two-in-One Annual #2, annoyingly incomplete as the first part is omitted, but still great on its own. Then there’s #50, a Byrne special, in which the Thing travels back in time to the days just after the Fantastic Four had formed, to try and cure his past self when it’s no longer possible for himself to be cured. Finally, the very next issue has a Peter Gillis (a very underrated writer), Frank Miller story featuring a bunch of seventies Avengers (Ms. Marvel, Best, Wonderman) as well Nick Fury against the power of the Yellow Claw’s Sky Claw, hijacked by a mad American general wanting to take over the government.

The Byrne, Starlin and Miller issues standout not just for the stories, but especially for their art. For the most part the art here was in the hands of Ron Wilson, who can be best described with “adequate”, or similar artists like Bob Hall or Alan Kupperberg. Having somebody like Byrne or Starlin do an issue is like coming to an oasis in a desert of mediocricy. But the best art this volume is from Frank Miller, who goes for the Steranko look for his story.

So there you have it. Essential Marvel Two-in-One Vol. 2 is a collection with little to recommend itself, save for the three exceptions noted above, unless you’re a huge Thing fan or collect appearances by some of the more obscure heroes seen here.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 29: Essential Spider-Man Vol. 04

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Essential Spider-Man Vol. 4
Stan Lee, John Romita, Jim Mooney and friends
Reprints: Amazing Spider-Man #66-89, Annual #5 (November 1968 – October 1970)
Get this for: the continuing Spider-Man soap opera — four stars

The bastards! Not only does Essential Spider-Man Vol. 04 overlap with the first printing of Essential Spider-Man Vol. 03, but they also ended the collection of a cliffhanger with issue 89! Worse, I never did find volume 5 so I don’t know how things turned out. (Actually, I’ve read that story in Dutch reprints ages ago, but it would’ve been nice to have had in Essential format as well…

To be fair, it is almost impossible to present any decent chunk of Spidey’s career from this time without ending on a cliffhanger, as by now Stan Lee and John Romita have shifted into full gear on the Marvel superhero soap opera. Any given story may end, but the various plots and subplots continue. So for example in #68 Spidey attempts to foil a plot by the Kingpin to steal an ancient tablet from E.S.U. campus at the same time as Randy Robertson, the son of Joe Robertson, Peter Parker’s editor at the Bugle is protesting in the same building. The protestors are framed for the robbery while Spidey is blamed for the loss of the tablet. In the next issue Spidey manages to track down the Kingpin and defeat him, winning back the tablet but then the Kingpin manages to trick the police into believing Spider-Man is working for him. So the next issues finds our webhead wanted by the cops, mot to mention fighting Quicksilver and finally managing to hand over the tablet to Gwen Stacy’s father, Captain Stacy. The very next issue it is stolen again by the Shocker and Spidey has to chase after it again. This is not the end of it, as then another bunch of gangsters are after it, who then capture Curt “the Lizard” Conners to work on a translation of the tablet. Once Spidey finally gets the gangsters sorted, he then has to chase after the Lizard again…

It’s no wonder then, that after a story that kept evolving and finally ran for almost a full year, ten issues (#68 to #77), the very next story, “The Night of the Prowler”, meant to be a threeparter was cut to two parts because Spider-fans were sick and tired of continuing stories… Lee even managed to keep his promise for another three issues each featuring a complete story, yet by #83 he was back again with a multi issue storyline: the coming of the Schemer. At the same time, one issue stories or not, all the subplots were still continuing as well, with poor old Peter alternating between worrying about money, his Aunt May’s health and his relationship with Gwen and always worrying about how his career as Spider-Man complicated things. Like it or not soap opera storytelling was here to stay in Amazing Spider-Man and you better be reading every issue if you want to know what’s going on. (Though as always, Lee makes sure you get a hefty dose of recap each issue when needed).

What Lee also delivers a hefty dose of each month is troubles for Peter. The guy can’t catch a break in this volume: about the only thing that goes well for him is defeating the villains. Thanks to J. Johan Jameson and the Daily Bugle half of New York thinks he’s a crook, while the other half doesn’t believe in him at all. Struggling with money as always, Peter barely has time to keep up with his friends, while his romance with Gwen goes through rough patches, as he’s never there for her. Every time he does go out with her something comes up that means he has to ditch her to become Spider-Man. And meanwhile both Joe Robertson and especially Captain Stacy seem to get suspicious of him and Peter is never sure how much they know about his true identity…

Art wise, John Romita, inked by Jim Mooney is a treat as always. In fact, having seen some of these stories in colour as well I’m started to believe his work looks better in black and white. It’s easier to see his line work without the distraction of colour and realise how good he is. Or they are I should say, as Mooney’s inking has to have something to do with this as well. He gives Romita’s pencils just that little bit extra. As always Romita is best with women, as shown in #86, when the Black Widow comes to visit and gets a makeover…

One last thing that needs mentioning: the dialogue, which is rather on the “hip” side. This can either annoy or charm you: I liked it. Apart from The Fantastic Four the best work Stan Lee ever did was on Amazing Spider-Man. This volume shows this once again…