Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days: Epilogue

Published on October 31, 2010

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

Published on October 30, 2010

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

Published on October 29, 2010

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.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 48: Essential Spider-Woman Vol. 01

Published on October 28, 2010

cover of Essential Spider-Woman Vol. 01

Essential Spider-Woman Vol. 01
Marv Wolfman, Mark Gruenwald, Michael Fleisher, Carmine Infantino and friends
Reprints: Marvel Spotlight #32, Marvel Two-in-One #29-33, Spider-Woman #1-25 (February 1977 – April 1980)
Get this for: quite good for a trademark grab — four stars

Spider-Woman, like fellow late seventies heroes Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk is one of those superheroes who you suspect to have only been created only to safeguard a trademark. This may be a bit too cynical and certainly her solo series was actually quite good, if suffering from some of the usual defects common to series with a female lead. One point that worked in her favour from the start is that she might share her name with Spider-Man, neither her powers nor herself were related to him; she was more than a weak copy of him. She managed a quite respectable run on her series, fifty issues and Essential Spider-Woman Vol. 1 collects half of it, as well as her first appearances in Marvel Spotlight #33 and Marvel Two-in-One #29-33.

Spider-Woman was created by Archie Goodwin and Sal Buscema, but it was Marv Wolfman who guided her through her early days, first in Marvel Two-in-One and the first eight issues of her own title. He makes her into Jessica Drew, a somewhat confused young woman, with barely any knowledge of her own past, which is explained by her having been in suspended animation for years, having almost died from radiation poisoning and been injected with a spider venom serum to save her. For the first two issues of her solo series she still runs around in England, where she was left after having teamed up with the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One, but from the third Wolfman relocates her in L.A., far away enough from other superheroes to not let them crowd her style.

Something a SHIELD agent supporting cast member by the name of Jerry Hunt does enough already, playing the clinging love interest disapproving of Jessica’s activities as Spider-Woman. He sticks around for about sixteen issues, though less and less so even when Wolfman was still writing it. He’s just annoying and dull and like Magnus, the mysterious older magician gentleman also hanging around Jessica, he takes away some of her lustre. Another thing that hampers her appeal in these early issues is how often Spider-Woman has to play the victim: be knocked out, tied up and having to be rescued by others, compared to what male heroes go through. Once Mark Gruenwald and later Michael Fleisher took over, this fortunately happened much less.

Villainwise Spider-Woman has a reasonable rogues gallery here, mainly with brandnew villains like the Brothers Grimm, the Hangman and the Needle, the Gypsy Moth, not to mention Morgain Le Fay, who would become her personal nemesis. Her villains tend to be either somewhat on the grotesque side like the lot I just mentioned, or more mundane gangsters and crooks. The latter start to dominate once Spider-Woman starts her career as a bounty hunter. Few already established villains paid a visit to Spider-Woman, the most important one being Nekra, the old Steve Gerber Daredevil villain, who hoped to use Spider-Woman’s powers for herself.

The stories are fairly simple, with few subplots. Characterisation changes a lot between writers, Marv Wolfman having established her as being sexually alluring to men but hideous to women, which Gruenwald did away with by getting her a special medicine that suppressed the pheremones that supposedly had this effect.

On the art front, the series starts with Carmine Infantino, who’s a long way down from his sixties DC heights, but still a consumate professional. There are a few fillins by Frank Springer and Trevor von Eeden as well, none very good. Sadly the best art is in the last issue presented here, by Steve Leialoha, whose fluid, stylised Michael Goldenesque art style works well with Spider-Woman.

Essential Spider-Woman Vol. 01 is a decent collection of stories, none of which really set the world on fire when first published and with the best of her series yet to come.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 47: Essential X-Men Vol. 07

Published on October 27, 20101 Comment

cover of X-Men Vol. 07

Essential X-Men Vol. 07
Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri, Jon Bogdanove and friends
Reprints: X-Men #214-228, #Annual 10-11, Fantastic Four v X-Men (February 1987 – April 1988)
Get this for: X-Men at their nadir — three stars

Let’s talk about why the X-Men went sour. Because it did turn sour, didn’t it, at some point in Claremont’s long, long run on Uncanny X-Men. At some point the long drawn out subplots no longer intrigued and mystified, but annoyed, the relentless grinding misery and inability of the X-Men to win their battles started to grind you down as well and the title just seemed to devolve into an endless series of inconclusive battles with ill defined villains. Different people reach this point sooner or later with Claremont, for me rereading some of the stories in this volume it was reached here.

I have to be honest however. Back when I first started following the X-Men, I got going with issue 220, the start of the whole Adversary Saga that was in itself turn of the socalled Fall of Mutants, the big 1988 Summer event in the mutant titles. At the time, dropping in with little real knowledge of the X-Men, I loved this story. Rereading it in context, it now serves as the climax of a long, painful two years of stories in which the X-Men only got more and more hurt. Especially the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series in retrospect is excruciating in its doom and gloom.

In that miniseries the X-Men call on Reed Richard’s scientific expertise to help save Shadowcat, stuck in phasing mode and slowly disappearing, but he’s uncharacteristic unsure of himself, the result of a longterm psychological trap set by Doctor Doom. Things get worse, the X-Men and Fantastic Four come to blows, Reed’s teammates desert him and Shadowcat’s fate seems sealed… But that psychological trap of Doom’s — a pre-FF journal supposedly written by Reed that shows he planned to turn himself and his friends into the Fantastic Four rather than it being an accident — just doesn’t work for me this time. It’s out of character for the Fantastic Four to believe this so suddenly, or for Reed not to realise it’s a fake straight away. Meanwhile the antagonism between them and the X-Men doesn’t ring true either. For one, Claremont had Johnny Storm use the word “muties”, which just doesn’t fit his character at all. He may be a hothead, but not a bigot.

In the main title, the X-Men are still recovering from the Mutant Massacre and their battles with the Marauders and still in disaster recovery mode. They’re still only reacting to threats, not gaining anything, though slowly trying to rebuild the team. Even then things go wrong, as when they recruit Havok, yet lose his girlfriend, Polaris, to the Marauders. It’s incredibly frustrating to read issue after issue of this sort of halfwins or outright defeats for the X-Men, especially since Claremont is a good enough writer to still make you care for them. That’s the worst part, those glimpses of how good Claremont can be when not obsessed with doom and gloom.

The art in this volume is a mixed bag, with a series of guest artists — Barry Windsor Smith, Alan Davis, Jackson Guice — before The Uncanny X-Men settles with Marc Silvestri, whose very very scratchy, semi-realistic style is quite different from John Romita Jr.’s art in the previous volume, but as good in its own right. So is Jon Bogdanove, on the Fantastic Four vs. the X-Men limited series, who has a more “cute” style. It makes for a less united look to this volume, but then these were never intended to be collected together in the first place…

So yeah, a frustrating, annoying final volume of Essential X-Men to be reviewed in this series. Yet Claremont still manages to hook me here, the bastard.