Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 08: Iron Man Vol. 1

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Iron Man vol 1


Essential Iron Man Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Don Heck and friends
Reprints: Tales of Suspense #39-72 (March 1963 – June 1968)
Get this for: Don Heck at his best — three stars

Having done Captain America’s run in Tales of Suspense yesterday, it’s no more than fair to feature the guy Cap was sharing the title with today: Iron Man. Iron Man got his start in #39; this volume brings us roughly halfway through his run, to issue #72. Interestingly, Iron Man was one of the few Silver Age greats in which neither Ditko nor Kirby had much of a hand developing. Instead Don Heck is the principal artist throughout this part of his Tales of Suspense run. Heck might not be quite as good as those two, but his suave, streamlined style works quite well here.

You do get the feeling however that Iron Man, no matter what he became later, was a second tier title to Stan Lee at least. His writing misses the sparkle it has on Fantastic Four, Spider-Man or even Captain America. Evidence of this is also the use of scripters, with Lee only doing the plotting. It results in a run of stories remarkably less complex than the top tier Marvel Silver Age titles.

Most of the stories revolve either around rivals of Tony Stark using their own inventions to become supervillains in order to put him out of business or a communist saboteur doing the same. Apart from the Mandarin there are no recurring villains here; even classic Iron Man villains like the Melter only appear once. Soap opera wise there’s not much going on either, apart from the love triangle between tony, his secretary Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan, his chauffeur. They’re not bad stories, just a bit samey after a while.

On the art front, Don Heck starts out decent and gets better over the volume, establishing a look for Iron Man and his armoured villains like the Crimson Dynamo and Titanium Man that would be used by every artist after. Heck is a somewhat underrated artist, but if you do want to see him at his best, this is it.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 07: Captain America Vol. 01

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Captain America vol 1


Essential Captain America Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and friends
Reprints: Tales of Suspense #59-99, Captain America #100-102 (November 1964 – June 1968)
Get this for: Classic Captain America — five stars

Believe it or not, Captain America is my favourite Marvel superhero, largely due to Mark Gruenwald’s long run. What I like about Captain America is how leftist a patriot he is, a Roosevelt democrat and man of the people, punching out Hitler a year before America entered the war, always representing more the ideals of America than its government, in as far as a four colour hero can represent anything when he spents most of his time fighting leftover nazis, grotesque monstrosities wanting to rule the world and other sci-fi menaces…. Captain America is one of those characters who, like Spider-Man or the Thing always make a story better, almost as if writers try extra hard when they are working with them.

Essential Captain America Vol. 1 reprints Captain America’s complete run in Tales of Suspense, plus the first three issues of his own title. None of this I have read before and I therefore had no idea what was in store. Silver Age Marvel comics can be a bit hit and miss, especially the split titles like Tales of Suspense so I wasn’t expecting too much, but this was excellent. It’s clear Stan Lee has an affinity for Cap, as does Jack Kirby, who provides the majority of the art here, with only short spells by John Romita, Jack Sparling and Gil Kane interrupting his run. Inkers on the other hand change much more, from Chic Stone to Frank Giacoia to Dick Ayers to George Tuska to Joe Sinnott to Syd Shores, each making their own interpretation of Kirby’s pencils.

Artwise, what makes this volume extraordinary is the evolution in Kirby’s art. At the start of the volume he has already moved on from the clean, slightly slick understated look it had in e.g. early Fantastic Four comics, with more exagerration in movement and typical Kirby poses. By the end it’s full on Kirby, weird ultracomplex machinery, impossible anatomy, hunched poses, odd viewpoints, Kirby Krackle and all. Inbetween you can see one style mutating into the other. At each point along the way the same boundless energy slams from the page. Captain America is an action orientated strip even more so than the usual silver Age Marvel title and Kirby delights in showing Cap dodging bullets, slamming into villains and sprinting across the page to defuse a bomb in time.

The first issue is a case in point, in which Lee and Kirby introduce Cap to a new audience. Cap is minding his own business at Avengers Mansion, when a gang of toughs decide that this is the one night thye can rob the place with impunity, Cap being just a “glorified acrobat”. What follows is a quick demonstration in how tough, fast and strong he is. It’s great stuff.

Storywise Captain America took some time to find its feet, the first couple of stories being rather pedestrian, before Lee puts Cap back into World War II for ten issues, then moving back to the present for the first of several Red Skull storylines, this one featuring the menace of the Sleepers, rather silly looking giant robot menaces scheduled to wake up on Der Tag, tweny years after the end of WWII. Which rubbed my face in the strange fact that more time has now passed since these stories were first published than had passed between WWII and them. Captain America as a revived World War II hero was a much different idea when the people creating his stories had lived through it themselves than it is now. Back then the idea that Cap could regularly run into people who had remembered him from seeing him in action in France or Germany back during “the Big One” was quite natural, while by now Marvel’s floating timeline has progressed so far that you could’ve had the same effect by making him a veteran of the First Gulf War!

One of the things I feared starting this volume was that every other story in here would feature either Baron Zemo or Red Skull as the villain, which fortunately is not the case. Zemo only appears twice, while the Red Skull is used more, but each time he appears is special. Other villains include Batroc Ze Leaper, the Tumbler, the Adaptoid and Super-Adaptoid as well as the menace of Them, not to mention A.I.M. and MODOK. Cap’s allies include Nick Fury (and quite a few shared storylines with his own title in Strange Tales), the mysterious and lovely SHIELD Agent 13, Rick Jones and the Black Panther.

Great fast paced action, clever plotting and even some subtle (and not so subtle) characterisation — all that and Kirby at his peak, what more do you want?

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 06: Godzilla Vol 1

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Godzilla vol 1


Essential Godzilla Vol. 1
Dough Moench, Herb Trimpe, Tom Sutton and friends
Reprints: Godzilla #1-24 (August 1977 – July 1979)
Get this for: Godzilla and nothing else — two stars

The Essential Godzilla is about as inessential as you can get, twentyfour issues of mediocre licencensed comics done by people clearly phoning it in. There’s nothing in here that makes it stand out from any other seventies Marvel title, apart of course from having a big green lizard as its hero. Nobody but the most diehard Godzilla collector needs this, but if like me you can get this cheap, you may still get some enjoyment out of its goofiness.

Because goofy it is, having a series starring Godzilla but set in the Marvel Universe rather than in its own continuity. Marvel used to do that quite a lot, starting with Conan where the connection was largely implied, whereas later toy based series like Rom, The Micronauts and
Shogun Warriors were an explicit part of the Marvel Universe. Their villains popped up elsewhere, they teamed up with other Marvel heroes and their plotlines would be wrapped up elsewhere. Godzilla wasn’t the most succesful of these titles but still managed to last two years, which is not too bad.

Godzilla‘s creative team was Doug Moench as writer, with Herb Trimbe as penciler and a succession of inkers including Fred Kida and Jack Abel as the art team, with Trimbe being replaced with Tom Sutton for two issues. Now Trimbe is not the sort of artist who actually has fans, lacking the creativity of a Kirby or Ditko, the style of a Steranko or Byrne or even the ability to create good art period. For most of his work at Marvel the best you can say that it’s servicable, helps tell the story and perhaps of most interest to his editors, dependable. He’s always been able to adapt to the reigning housestyle, (with ridiculous results in the Extreme! nineties) and his work here shows nicely what the Marvel style in the late seventies was. It’s a style that’s in the service of the plot, slightly dull and in Trimbe’s case at least very dependent on colour which in black and white makes his artwork less coherent. (In general, having read a half dozen essentials in close succesion now I can see that the better an artist, the better his work translates back from colour to b&w.)

The idea behind the series is that Godzilla has left Japan and is rampaging through America, with a special SHIELD team led by Dum-Dum Dugan on his heels attempting to capture him. Apart from Dugan other SHIELD regulars like Gabe Jones and Jimmy Woo are also present, while three new characters are introduced as well: Dr. Yuriko Takiguchi, Godzilla expert, his assistent Tamara Hashioka and his grandson Robert Takiguchi. The good doctor is there to wax wise on Godzilla, Tamara is a love interest for Jimmy Woo and little Rob is the only one who’s further developed. He’s unfortunately also a little whinger, completely obnoxious and after a few issues you wish Godzilla would step on him, what with his crying about the poor monster while whole cities are demolished by it. Godzilla himself is of course an innocent, peaceful until harassed, in the grand tradition of the Hulk.

The plots revolve either around SHIELD’s efforts to capture and imprison Godzilla somewhere or around some villain either framing Godzilla for his crimes or attempting to use him for them. Often other monsters are involved, as in issue #4 and #5 which introduced Doc Demonicus, who has bred his own little herd of mutated creatures like Batragon, half bat, half dragon. There’s also Red Ronin, a giant robot samurai armed with a laser shield and sword, hijacked by Rob to protect Godzilla from the Americans who ends up first fighting Godzilla, then teaming up with him against a trio of alien monsters wanting to enslave the Earth. These fights are the highlight of the series; the plots themselves are no great shakes and characterisation is sketchy.

Not really worth the twenty bucks Marvel wants for this, since you can read this in an hour or so, but if you can pick this up secondhand it’s a fun enough read.

Unions without borders

Activism, Unions
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It’s been clear for some time now that the Dutch unions, especially the FNV (of which y.t. is a member too) have shook off their complacency and are becoming more militant. The cleaners strike of earlier this year was a good example of this. The union went into a traditionally unorganised sector and instead of just going on a membership drive actually fought and won a battle with the cleaning companies through high profile targeted strikes. It proved to the cleaners what a union can do for them but also what they can do for themselves; that they are the union.

Another part of the resurgence in union militancy is a renewed focus on international labour. There has always been solidarity with foreign unions of course, but too often Dutch unions have only fought their own corner. this too has been changing and a good example happened yesterday, at UPS. The FNV organised an harassement action in which members called the UPS service lines with complaints about the company’s behaviour in Turkey. Some 157 workers there who had become members of the Turkish union Tümtis have recently been fired by UPS, which the FNV members rang up to complain about.

It’s a good example of both the way in which the FNV has become creative at how to pressure employers and companies and how it’s looking beyond its own problems.