Articles with the Tag Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 36: Essential X-Men Vol. 04

books and books review, Comix
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Essential X-Men Vol. 4
Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr and friends
Reprints: Uncanny X-Men #162-179, Annual #7, Marvel Graphic Novel #5 (October 1982 – March 1984)
Get this for: full blown mutant paranoia with the X-Men — four stars

The fourth volume of Essential X-Men starts with the tail end of Dave Cockrum’s second run on the title, and the Brood Saga. At the end of the previous volume the X-Men had been kidnapped into space, this volume opens with Wolverine discovering where they were: on the home planet of the Brood, Marvel’s very own Alien knockoff. On the run from them, lost and alone in a very hostile alien jungle Wolvie discovers things are even worse than he thought, as it turns out he and the other X-Men have been impregnated by the Brood Queen and are carrying an alien embryo. They’ll die giving birth to new queens but not before they might be able to hurt the Brood. It’s another X-Men space epic, but a much more depressive one than the previous ones.

It sets the tone for the rest of this volume, as the X-Men’s world gets progressively darker. After the Brood Saga and its aftermath, the next story is from Marvel Graphic Novel #5, “X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills”, which after “Days of Future Past” is the first story explicitely about mutant hatred. It’s not a good story, with the subtely of a sledgehammer and very eighties with its televangelist villain, but it’s a prelude of what’s to come. Though this had supposedly always been the theme of The X-Men, for the most part the classic X-Men had been a regular superhero title and mutant hatred even with Claremont at the helm it took to “Days of Future Past” in #141-142 that it became explicit. But while that story showed the nightmare future the X-Men fought again, it still wasn’t a big part of the series afterwards. With the graphic novel Claremont put mutant phobia in the spotlights again and in the regular title as well it became more prominent, as the X-Men became more and more mistrusted by the world they had saved so often

For example, even in the lighthearted story from Annual 7 this mistrust is shown. The Impossible Man, an old Fantastic Four villain, is on a scavenger hunt taking trophies from all his favourite superheros: the X-Men’s mansion, Nick Fury’s eye patch and the Wasp’s entire collection of costumes, with the X-Men chasing after him. When Rogue and Colossus follow him to the Avengers’ Mansion, they’re attacked by She-Hulk and Iron Man who mistake them for the thieves. It’s one small example of the mistrust between our favourite muties and the rest of the superhero community.

Another big change for the X-Men is that they’re no longer the only mutant team: while they were kidnapped by the Brood, Charles Xavier had assembled a team of New Mutants. It showed how popular the X-Men had become that there was now a second mutant title. It’s not immediately notable in the X-Men’s own title, except for the inevitable confrontation when they return from outer space.

Apart from the ongoing mutant paranoia, Claremont also heaps more personal troubles on his heroes. The X-Men and especially Storm start to change again during the Brood Saga, as they have to fight for their lives and kill as well. On Earth too they have to become harder, lose some of their idealism to survive. With Storm, always portrayed as an innocent abroad, this change hits hardest: in issue 170 she actually strikes to kill an opponent, Callisto of the Morlocks who had kidnapped the Angel to be her consort. She fights a knife duel with Callisto, the latter seems to have her on the ropes, but Storm manages to tangle Callisto’s arm in her cape and stabs her full in the heart. This moment is shown in a great six panel sequence by Paul Smith, the upper left panel showing Storm and Callisto as Storm prepares to strike, then a close up from behind Storm’s shoulder showing the expression on Callisto’s face as she’s stabbed in the chest. The third panel then shows them standing, Callisto starting to collapse. The bottom three panels has Storm walking to the camera, past Callisto falling down and with the Morlock crowd in the background. A great sequence and a example of Paul Smith’s talent.

Storm’s change into somebody much more harder, less naive (as symbolised by her new, street tough costume in #173) is not the only angst the X-Men go through. Wolverine sees his marriage to Lady Mariko Yashida fall through at the last moment, Mariko being manipulated by Mastermind, who’s back for vengeance. Even after this is cleared up Wolvie doesn’t get to marry his great love, as Mariko’s family is entangled with the Yakuza again and she feels her duty compels her to clean this up first. But all this is just collatoral damage in Mastermind’s real plot: to convince the X-Men Dark Phoenix is back and get them to kill an innocent woman.

Because on the last page of #168 Madeleine Pryor is introduced to Scott Summers and she is a dead ringer (no pun intended) for Jean Grey, his one true love who had killed herself rather than give in to the temptation to become Dark Phoenix again. Scott falls hard for Madeleine, with the next issue finding them slow dancing together, even though he had spent most of #168 being intimate with his previous girlfriend, Lee Forrester. Madeleine and Scott seem made for each other, but he cannot help but wonder… He finally asks the question he dreads, whether she is Phoenix and is answered by an energy blast. Issue 175 finds the X-Men fighting for their lives against a reborn Phoenix, or so things seem, but Scott finally figures things out and then has to fight for his life against the rest of the X-Men who are now convinced he‘s Phoenix… It all works out in the end, with a wedding for Maddy and Scott, but it was a long hard slog.

The third angst generator is the coming of Rogue, their old adversary from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who was the one who robbed Carol Danvers from her powers, memories and almost her life. She joins the X-Men out of desperation, with her powers out of control and confused about who she is thanks to Carol’s personality being entangled with her own. Xavier lets her joint against the wishes of most X-Men, who slowly have to learn to live with her. It’s a good example of Claremont’s great skill at soap opera and how he can manipulate his readers. It makes perfect sense for the X-Men to take in Rogue, with their mission of rehabilitation, but I’m sure many readers would’ve been as outraged as Carol at the unfariness of it all when she learned of it…

A quick word about the art to finish this off. As said, this volume starts with Dave Cockrum doing his usual excellent job, who is replaced by Paul Smith, then a complete unknown but who is just as good as Cockrum from the start. He has a smooth, semi-realistic style that’s sort of reminds me of Alan Davis, but not quite and he’s great at depicting subtle emotions with just a few lines. Smith in turn is replaced by John Romita Jr., who continues in his style but puts a slightly scratchier edge on it. All three artists work well with Claremont, who adapts himself in turn to each of them. A great volume again.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 35: Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 2

books and books review, Comix
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Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 2
Gerry Conway, Jim Shooter, Roger McKenzie, Michael Fleisher, Don Perlin and friends
Reprints: Ghost Rider #21-50 (December 1976 – November 1980)
Get this for: a series in search of a rationale — three stars

I wasn’t much impressed by the first volume of the Essential Ghost Rider, not in the least because the Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze was kind of a dick. Things started to improve at the end of that volume, as Tony Isabella built up a setting and supporting cast for him and got him the trappings of a proper superhero, but one based in L.A. as opposed to New York which most of the rest of Marvel calls home. With this volume Gerry Conway is the writer and he builds on Isabella’s foundations, as does Jim Shooter who succeeds Conway after only three issues. Not for long however: with #26 Shooter sends Blaze packing, after he reveals his demonic nature to all his friends, forced into this by Doctor Druid, in an early example of his dickery.

As originally concieved, Blaze would become Ghost Rider automatically every night, which was changed by Isabella into whenever danger threatened and further refined by Conway and Shooter into something Blaze more or less controlled. Once Shooter abandons the L.A. setting however and puts Ghostie on a road trip with no specific goal, Blaze and the Ghost Rider more and more become separate identities. Roger McKenzie is the next writer having a shot at the title and he continues this trend. Under McKenzie Ghost Rider has to survive a quest for vengeance by one of his first villains, the Orb, then a Dormannu manipulated showdown with Dr Strange, followed by a hell spawned bounty hunter not so very different from himself and finally the wraith of a centuries old mutant child and his robotic motor cycle killers.

By now Ghost Rider has moved away from plain superheroics again into more occult/horror flavoured stories. With the last writer in this volume, Michael Fleisher (ignoring a fillin issue by Jim Starlin between McKenzie and Fleisher) the superheroics are entirely left behind, as the Ghost Rider becomes a pure spirit of vengeance. Each story has Blaze coming into a different town, city or village, getting involved with whatever menace is waiting for it, defeats it, then leaves. The villains he fights are either small time punks and hoods, or the local supernatural phenomenon, or both. There’s no real supporting cast, just the people Blaze meets and helps on his travels, usually involving at least one not too bad looking girl. Reading these stories in short succession you can’t help but notice how formulaic they are, though Fleisher is a good enough writer to hold your interest anyway.

The art for most of this volume is in the capable if pedestrian hands of Don Perlin, who was quite prolific in the late seventies and early eighties. His art was never spectacular or had much of his own style, but he was one of those pencilers who could be depended on to do a good job month in month out. It tells the story and that’s good enough. It’s a bit of a shame really that it was Gil Kane who opened this volume: after him almost everybody else is a disappointment. Having his art in an otherwise lackluster Essential collection is always a bonus.

Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 2 shows where the horror boom at Marvel from the early seventies ended up eventually, as just another variation on the superhero formula. There’s nothing really interesting or novel to the comics collected here.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 34: Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 04

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Essential Fantastic Four Vol. 04
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and friends
Reprints: Fantastic Four #64-83 and Annual 5-6 (July 1967 – February 1969)
Get this for: Lee and Kirby at the peak of their game still — Five stars

I’m sorry, but I have to repeat the praise from last time: gods, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were good together on The Fantastic Four. With the start of this volume they’ve already had more than sixty issues behind their belts and you’d expect that, especially after the creative burst of the last ten-fifteen issues that the pace would slacken a bit, but nothing is further from the truth. They keep on expanding the Marvel Universe, first with the coming of the Kree, including the Kree Sentry and Ronan the Accuser, then with the origin of what would later become Adam Warlock, finally with the discovery of Subatomica. Not to mention the birth of Sue and Reed’s son…

But there are also adventures with old friends, like the Inhumans and the Black Panther and old villains like the Mad Thinker and the Wizard return too. Apart from the Kree Sentry and Ronan, the only real new villain is Psychoman, introduced in Annual #5. There’s plenty of action and conflict here, but the focus does not lie on fighting supervillains, something which the Fantastic Four at any rate has never been about. The FF is at its best confronting some cosmic menace or going on a voyage of discovery, not handling the same villains that could also be menacing Iron Man next week.

There’s not much to say about the stories here, to be honest, that I haven’t said before. Lee and Kirby know these characters inside out, they know how they will respond in any situation they put them in. There’s always a bit of argument of who did what on these series and it’s no great secret that it was largely Kirby’s imagination that made The Fantastic Four so special. He gets to go wild again with Subatomica and the story introducing Him, who would later become Adam Warlock. His design work and sense of grandeur remain unsurpassed.

As does the rest of his art. It’s the cosmic decors and bizarre creatures and villains everybody remembers from Kirby, but his quiet moments are great too. He can get so much emotion from a few subtle lines in a character’s face, especially with the Thing, who wears his heart on his sleeve. You will never mistake one Kirby character for another. His story layout is excellent too, great sense of pacing and with everything he does in service to the story.

One thing that did annoy me about this volume was the neglect of the Invisible Girl, who had married Mr Fantastic the previous volume and who was now kept out of the action by her over anxious husband. It reflects the mores of the time that Sue, as a married woman, would need to be protected and kept away from danger but it comes over as incredibly sexist in retrospect. Things get worse when she’s pregnant. Obviously then she cannot join them on missions anymore, but the other three members keep her completely out of the loop for a time. There’s also Crystal, Johnny’s Inhuman girlfriend whose powers are arguably greater than any of the Fantastic Four, yet is completely wasted in most of the stories here…

That quibble aside, this is another perfect volume.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 33: Essential Defenders Vol. 02

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Essential Defenders Vol. 02
Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema and friends
Reprints: Defenders #15-30, Giant-Size Defenders #1-5 and much more (July 1974 – December 1975)
Get this for: Gerber and Marvel’s only non-team team — four stars

The Defenders is one of the …odder… ideas for a title Marvel ever had. Take four heroes never known for being easy to work with, with nothing in common and make them into a “non-team”. Sure, the Silver Surfer, Hulk, Doctor Strange and Namor the Submariner all are “big guns”, but putting them together in one series, especially the Hulk? Hadn’t Marvel learned that lesson with The Avengers? And yet… It worked sort of, worked enough to get them their own series after a trial out in Marvel Feature but at least to me it never really gelled until a certain Steve Gerber joined the title…

Essential Defenders Vol. 2 contains the first half of Gerber’s run on The Defenders, but it starts with Len Wein on writing duties. Wein treats the Defenders as a fairly standard superhero team, having them e.g. fight Magneto and the Wrecking Crew. Once Gerber takes over things get weirder, more offbeat, slightly more existentialist. By this time only the Hulk and Doctor Strange remained of the original team, with Valkyrie and Nighthawk as new members, plus various co-stars, including Yellowjacket, Daredevil, Luke Cage and the Son of Satan. That core group of the Hulk, Doctor Strange, Valkyrie and Nighthawk works well together, especially with the Hulk softened up a bit to make him more of a teamplayer.

Now The Defenders used to be my favourite Marvel team back when I first started to read superhero comics and the Gerber stories collected here were one of the reasons why. Two stories in particular stand out. The first is the Defenders clash with the Sons of the Serpents, Marvel’s go-to club of dimwitted but dangerous racist tools. Here once again the twist at the end of the story is that the guy using them is *gasp* Black and only using them for their own personal gains, as it was more or less in their earlier Avengers appearances. What Gerber does differently is to pay more attention to the damage done by the Serpents, has more of an eye for the reality of America in the Seventies than earlier writers using the Serpents had.

The other story is the Guardians of the Galaxy story that ran from Giant-Size Defenders #5 to Defenders #29, which turned me into a fan of them as well. Especially interesting there is issue 26, which has a recap of how the far future of the Guardians came into being, complete with trademark Gerber social commentary — “we valued dry armpits and the three billion dollar aerosol industry over our flowers, our food and ultimately our health” — as the depletion of the ozone layer leads to the widespread use of bionics by the mid-eighties…. Gerber also manages to tie-in the old Killraven series into this future history by the way.

The volume ends with Gerber’s most famous creation, Howard the Duck teaming up with the Defenders in Marvel Treasury Edition #12, which I found to be a bit meh. Howard is an acquired taste and for the most part has aged badly, apart from in a few classic stories. He’s just too seventies. Gerber does much better with the Defender’s characters: more so than any other team you feel that the core members are friends just hanging out rather than coming together to fight crime, which I’ve always found appealing.

The art throughout the volume, with some exceptions including a great issue by Gil Kane, is by Sal Buscema, who is not at his best here. It’s serviceable, rather than good. His pedestrian art undermines some of the pizazz of Gerber’s writing; you’d want a more interesting artist to interpret his plots like on Man-Thing or Howard the Duck. On the other hand there is the fact that Sal Buscema’s style is easy to understand, clean and clear and for a somewhat more mainstream title like The Defenders this may be a more suitable style.

The best of Gerber’s Defenders is still to come and not in this volume, but it’s a great starting point for the series. Most of the bugs have been taken out of the series here and you get the start of what made The Defenders tick for so long.

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

books and books review, Comix
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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 and the Grandmaster, 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 Reapder, 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 standins 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 heavyhanded approach to “women’s lib”, as several female superheroes decided the best way to advance feminism is to destroy the Avengers as male chauvenist 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 untill 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.