Articles with the Tag Michael Fleisher

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

books and books review, Comix
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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 37: Essential Man-Thing Vol. 02

books and books review, Comix
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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.

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

books and books review, Comix
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cover of Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 2


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.