Articles with the Tag Mark Gruenwald

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

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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 20: Essential OHOTMU Deluxe Edition Vol. 1

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cover of Essential OHOTMU Deluxe Edition Vol. 1


Essential OHOTMU Deluxe Edition Vol. 1
Mark Gruenwald, Peter Sanderson and friends
Reprints: OHOTMU Deluxe 1-7 (December 1985 – June 1986)
Get this for: State of the Marvel Universe ’86 — Four stars

So back in 1982 Mark Gruenwald and co concieved the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe detailing all the most important characters, places and things concieved up in some twenty years of Marvel Comics. It had run its course by mid-1984 and a year later the need was felt for an update. Hence this, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, Deluxe Edition. Instead of the standard 32 pages of the first edition, it had 64 pages per issue with no ads, room to expand individual entries, cover more characters, up the text size and most importantly, use more artwork.

It was the latter that drove George Perez away from Marvel.

Which seems strange, until you know that all that extra artwork was, unlike the main art in a given entry, was not new, but copied and pasted from older comics, uncredited and unpaid for. Once Perez saw that this had happened to his artwork as well, he got so angry he refused to work for Marvel ever again. Since his main series at the time was New Teen Titans for DC this wasn’t that hard a gesture, but it did mean that the fourth part of Perez and Macchio’s Black Widow serial in Marvel Fanfare (which had been commissioned years earlier but never saw print) had to make do with an Arthur Adams cover rather than new art by Perez. He would come back to Marvel in the early nineties, after Jim Shooter had left, when ironically it was DC that was dicking him around…

Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge but it did make this version of OHOTMU a bit controversial. Marvel has learned from this: in the modern series reprinted art is all neatly credited and I assume paid for as well.

The format of the series is no different from the first: entries in alphabetic order, with corrections, glossaries and other editorial content on the inside covers. Speaking of which, the wraparound covers by John Byrne are beautiful, almost as good as Perez’s covers for the DC equivalent, Who’s Who in the DC Universe. I first encountered these covers in a Marvel Comics diary/calender published in Holland, where they were used as the background to the diary pages. Back then I could name perhaps one in ten of the characters shown but they were fascinating nonetheless.

The entries are longer and feature more obscure figures as well as the obvious ones, though luckily total time wasters like (ugh) Shamrock are not carried over from the first series. Much of the added length of many entries comes from giving those characters that deserve it longer histories, recapping the highs and lows of their careers. More attention is also paid to powers and abilities, in an attempt to standarise and systemise them, though to be honest little attention to these efforts was ever paid to them in the real comics. For geeks like me though this stuff is gold dust. No longer do you need to argue who’s stronger, the Hulk or the Abomination: the Hulk is Class Strength 100, meaning he can bench press a hundred tons regularly, while the Abomination might be able to do that once, but not in succession.

What I also like about this series, especially when I wasn’t that familiar with the Marvel Universe yet, was seeing all these characters and getting some of their backstory. It showed what a weird and wonderful place the Marvel Universe was. For those who are not quite that geeky, this is far from an essential purchase of course, but still a good snapshot of mid-eighties Marvel.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 13: Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe vol. 1

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cover of Essential OHOTMU


Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe vol. 1
Mark Gruenwald, Peter Sanderson, Eliot R. Brown and friends
Reprints: Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Vol 1, #1-15 (January 1983 – May 1984)
Get this for: hardcore nerding — three stars

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’ve always liked The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe far more than its DC Comics equivalent, Who’s Who in the DC Universe, largely because the former was far geekier and willing to actually explain things, while Who’s Who was always a bit poofaced. You’d never have a “Book of Weapons, Hardware, and Paraphernalia” in Who’s Who, but it’s here in Essential Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe vol. 1, a symbol of the nerd power of three men: Mark Gruenwald, Peter Sanderson and Eliot R. Brown.

OHOTMU, to give it its official acronym was a Gruenwald project, the first series running in 1983-1984, allegedly started not just because he was the kind of fan turned professional who actually cared about how much tonnes the Thing could bench press, but also because DC was going to bring out Who’s Who as part of their Fifty years anniversary celebrations in 1985. Back then the two companies were insanely competitive and especially Marvel, then with Jim Shooter as editor-in-chief seemed keen to scoop its rival. Personally I think this series would’ve been published even without this rivalry. Gruenwald was not the only one interested in a handbook showcasing all the well known and not so well known heroes and villains in the Marvel Universe. In the early eighties a whole generation of Marvel Zombies had grown up with Marvel and kept reading them when grown up, getting obsessed with the minutia of a shared universe. Today they would be browsing Tvtropes, back then they read OHOTMU.

The first series of OHOTMU collected here ran for fifteen issues, with the first twelve going from A to Z through the Marvel Universe, two Books of the Death and one Book of Weapons, Hardware, and Paraphernalia. Each entry is between half to two pages long, has a nice picture of the featured character posing for the camera, their vital statistics, a longish potted history of their appearance and some discussion of their powers. Gruenwald and co are not afraid to make things up if the original comics weren’t clear. Artwise, most artists then working for Marvel contributed, with e.g. John Byrne handling the characters from the titles he was the artist on.

A later version of the handbook estimated that there were roughly 2-3,000 or so significant characters in the Marvel Universe, those with two appearances or more and/or who did something interesting. A limited series of fifteen issues, though without advertising, has limited room and can’t cover them all, so it’s interesting who was picked. All the familiar faces are there of course: an Iron Man or Scarlet Witch will always have a place in such a series, but a villian like Belladona (seen in a few Spider-Man stories) or a group like the Champions of Xandar (featured in a Fantastic Four story, not so much. Reading a series like this then gives an interesting look in the Marvel Universe of almost thirty years ago. Not just by who gets featured, but also by who gets half a page, a full page or is important enough for two….

Obviously most of the information here is long out of date, but that’s not the point. It’s an interesting cross section of the Marvel U. at a certain point in time and for me part of its appeal also is that this is the Marvel I grew up with. You won’t miss much by not buying this volume, but to me this is indeed an essential volume.

A blog written just for me

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It’s like somebody looked into my brain and made a blog especially for me: Captain America’s Been Torn Apart, devoted to reading and commenting on Mark Gruenwald’s entire ten year run on Captain America. David Fiore is a veteran comics blogger and he gets both Gruenwald:

One thing I do want to stress, re: Gruenwald, is how much I appreciate his refusal to join the “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids” sweepstakes of the mid-1980s. We can all agree how dumb that was, can’t we? What I love about these books (and about Squadron Supreme in particular) is the way they wade into the same contested super-political waters that Miller and Moore were then “braving,” without swaddling these ambitions in the cloak of the medium’s much-trumpeted “coming of age.” Basically, Gruenwald is saying that the genre was always concerned with these questions–damn the “prestige format,” full speed ahead!

And Captain America:

So… created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in late 1940, Cap was (and is) the preeminent symbol of “premature anti-fascism” (to use HUAC terminology) in the history of American literature. He is, quite simply, THE Popular Front (that’s a New Deal era coalition of communists, socialists and others leftists) icon. There cannot be any dispute about that. Punching out Hitler meant something very different in December 1940 than it means when today’s Neocons cum in their PJs while dreaming about it…

There have of course been quite a few writers attempting liberal superheroics: Steve Gerber, Don McGregor Mike Friedrich, Steve Englehart are examples that spring to mind, but Gruenwald is in a class apart. Nobody was as consistent in their approach as Gruenwald, whose favoured protagonists like Cap, or Quasar were liberal, friendly and approachable heroes whose politics were portrayed through their day to day adventures, rather than by doing Very Special Issues about the Klan or womens’ lib or whatever. Cap especially pays more than just lip service to the idea his opponents can be reformed, rather than are intrinsincly evil, and this during the Reagan Era when every other superhero title seemingly moved to the right, becoming “gritty” and “realistic” by depicting criminals as subhuman scum for the hero to blast away. It’s therefore great to see somebody willing to spent substained critical effort on showcasing Gruenwald’s run on Cap.