Articles with the Tag Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days

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

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of X-Men Vol. 06


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

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of Captain America Vol. 03


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

books and books review, Comix
Published on 1 Comment on Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 39: Essential Howard the Duck Vol. 01

cover of Howard the Duck Vol. 01


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.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 38: Essential Avengers Vol. 05

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of Essential Avengers Vol. 05


Essential Avengers Vol. 05
Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Barry Smith and friends
Reprints: Avengers #98-119, Defenders #8-11, Daredevil #99 (April 1972 – January 1974)
Get this for: The end of Roy Thomas’ and the start of Englehart’s run — four stars

The fourth volume of Essential Avengers ended with the best Avengers story Roy Thomas ever did: the Kree-Skrull War. How can the fifth volume ever improve on this? Well, how about a three issue epic with the Avengers search for their missing member Hawkeye turning up both Hawkeye and ex-member Hercules, pits them against the Olympian god of war Ares as well as the Asgardian goddess the Enchantress and culminating into an epic battle reuniting every Avenger past and present, including the Hulk and the Swordsman?

It’s a good start, especially when the art on these three issues is done by Barry Smith. It’s the best the Avengers look this volume, even though such good artists like John and Sal Buscema, Rick Buckler, Bob Brown and Don Heck are responsible for the art in the rest of the book. they’re good, but Barry Windsor Smith even back then was in a class of his own. You wish he could’ve done the art for longer, but of course he never was the fastest artist in the world and beside, his tourist visum had expired and he was deported…

After the ten issue epic that was the Kree-Skrull War, both Roy Thomas and his succesor Steve Englehart limit themselves to shorter stories for a while. Thomas has the Avengers traveling to Olympus, then plots the return of the Grim Reaper before unleashing the Sentinels again. The X-Men had just been cancelled and so their old villains were fair game for the Avengers, something Englehart would also make use of by letting Magneto attack the Avengers. Englehart also plunders storylines from other series, tying in Captain America’s fight together with Rick Jones against Madame Hydra, in which the latter died, with his own Space Phantom & Grim Reaper teamup, by revealing the former had stood in for the actual Madame Hydra in that earlier Captain America story, hence the real Madame Hydra was still alive. It’s an early example of how complex Marvel continuity could become in the seventies and eighties, with writers building not only on the work done before in their own series, but bringing in loose ends from their own earlier ventures, as well as adding to stories originally done by others.

Though Englehart and Thomas do limit themselves to shorter stories, both let these stories flow more naturally into each other. They’re much less self contained as those Stan Lee wrote originally for The Avengers. This means there’s more room for interpersonal conflict and soap opera and Englehart makes good use of this. Roy Thomas had dropped the first hints that the Scarlet Witch and the Vision might have been attracked to each other; under Englehart their romance, after may false starts, came out in the open. This romance is one of the mainstays of his run here. Another constant in Englehart’s run is Hawkeye’s, well dickishness towards the other Avengers. Always a bit of a hothead, here he’s just obnoxious at times, throwing a hissy fit when the Scarlet Witch choses the Vision rather than him, later getting into an actual fight with Daredevil over the Black Widow, in a Steve Gerber penned issue of Daredevil also collected here. It may not have read that way originally, but here it seems the sexism fairy has visited Hawkeye.

Like the previous volume, this one too ends with a multi issue epic, as Englehart loses his inhibition and starts a story on par with Roy Thomas’ Kree-Skrull War. But this time this epic is not contained in one series, but involves The Defenders as well, which was also written by Englehart at the time. Dormammu and Loki manage to trick the Defenders into finding the six pieces of the Evil Eye, last seen in a Fantastic Four issue in order to cure the Black Knight, but in reality to give Dormammu the power to rule the universe. Loki gets cold feet and involves the Avengers by tricking them into believing the Defenders actually want to rule the world. Chaos, as they say, ensues. The Avengers – Defenders War is the ancestor of all those crossover epics that would excite and bore us later in the eighties and nineties and it already includes that page showing every hero in the world fighting the main villain’s evil hordes all over the world — or at least New York.

This is neither Thomas’ nor Englehart’s finest hour, but this is still a great volume to see how one great writer hands over the baton to another one.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 37: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02


Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Michael Fleisher, Chris Claremont and friends
Reprints: Man-Thing #15-22, Giant-Size #3-5, Man-Thing v2 #1-11 (March 1975 – July 1981)
Get this for: The second part of Gerber’s run — four stars

The Marvel Essentials series is meant to sell you characters, rather than creators — buy a volume and you get a big slab of Spider-Man’s adventures, or the Fantastic Four’s — but with some series this approach just doesn’t work. Man-Thing is one such series. Only one writer ever got a handle on the muck monster and nobody before or after him really knew what to do with him. That writer was Steve Gerber of course, whose work dominated the first volume of Essential Man-Thing. The second volume collects the remainder of his run on the first Man-Thing, but also the complete second, 1979 series, written by Michael Fleisher and Chris Claremont. It’s clear neither of them got the Man-Thing as Gerber got him.

Man-Thing is after all a difficult character to write. He’s completely passive, with no motives of his own, solely responding to the emotions of the people around him. You can’t have the usual Marvel soap opera with Man-Thing, it’s difficult to get him to fight recurring villains and really the best thing you can do with him is to use him in morality tales. Which both Gerber and his successors did, with the difference that Gerber had his finger on the pulse of the seventies and the talent to make use of it. He was also able to see the absurdity in his stories, which helps a lot when reading much dated relevant stories. But he also moved people with his stories, especially “the Kid’s Night Out” from Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, as witnessed in this remembrance by Fred Hembeck. In it Man-Thing is the avenger of a fat kid who died of exhaustion during gym class, while the people that tormented him mouth platitudes at his funeral, lashing out in anger when his one friend challenges their lies. It’s dated yes and I’ve read hundreds of such stories, but I can see the power it must have had on people like Hembeck back then

For an example of how not to do a Man-Thing story, we need look no further than Giant-Size Man-Thing #5 and a Len Wein story. Wein, who created Manny’s counterpart at DC, Swamp Thing, should’ve been able to handle him, but his story of two young lovers running away into the swamp to get away from their feuding parents is a) cliche and b) very very dull, a sort of third rate EC Comics shock story. That’s the mistake in many of the non-Gerber stories, taken it all too seriously and going for shock rather than creativity, upping the death count along the way. It doesn’t make them any better.

On the art side, most of it is by dependable Marvel veterans like Jim Mooney, Ed Hannigan and Don Perlin. None of them are bad and some like Hannigan do their best work here, but it’s not as good as the art in the previous volume, which of course boasted Mike Ploog, who is hard to improve on. It’s the standard seventies Marvel house style on display here, when Manny really needs something special.

Not a bad volume and Chris Claremont at least tries to do what Gerber does seemingly effortlessly, but in the end it shows that some characters can only be handled by one specific writer.