Articles with the Tag Sal Buscema

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 50: Essential Captain America Vol. 04

books and books review, Comix
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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 45: Essential Avengers Vol. 06

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Essential Avengers Vol. 06
Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, David Cockrum and friends
Reprints: AVengers #120-140, Giant-Size #1-4, Fantastic Four #150 Captain Marvel #33 (February 1974- October 1975)
Get this for: the Celestial Madonna — four stars

It’s probably a bit dim of me to only notice it now, but The Avengers after Lee had left was really a writer’s comic, wasn’t it? Sure, we remember Neal Adams doing the Kree-Skrull wars, or those couple of issues Barry Smith did, or John Buscema’s work, but if you look at it honestly The Avengers for long stretches at a time made do with good enough artists, all its pizzaz in its stories. In this volume, you got people like Rick Buckler, Bob Brown and Sal Buscema on the art, all doing a reasonable job, but never doing anything that stops you in your tracks. The writing on the other hand, which is all Steve Englehart (with some influence from Roy Thomas as editor), is doing its utmost to amaze and dazzle you. If it doesn’t quite succeed, this is not entirely its own fault, but as much due to the years that have passed since these stories were originally published. The style in which they were written has dated, not badly, but enough that they lose some of their impact. It feels overwritten, which was always Englehart’s weakness anyway, as it was of that whole generation of Stan Lee and Roy Thomas influenced Marvel writers.

Steve Englehart already got started on the epic stories in the previous collection, but here he goes all-out. Issue 129 to 135 and including Giant-Size Avengers #3-4 are one continuing story, the seeds of which were already sown half a dozen issues before. It is of course the saga of the Celestial Madonna, starring the Englehart created Mantis and featuring the Avengers, Kang, Rama Tut, Immortus, a host of long dead heroes and villains as the Legion of the Unliving, the Kree and their origin, the origin of the Vision and how he was related to the original Human Torch, why the Kree-Skrull war got started, the death of the Swordsman and the return of Hawkeye, who build the Blue Area on the Moon, the menace of Dormammu and the weddings of Mantis and the Swordsman, reanimated by an alien plantlike intelligence as well as the wedding of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch.

It’s a mess of a story, with a great many disparate elements dragged into it, but Englehart ties it all together beautifully. I had never read it before, knew about it, but never realised how much of what Englehart did here would influence The Avengers for decades to come. Englehart created the definitive Kang, clarified his relationship with Rama Tut and tied in old Avengers villain Immortus as well. He also provided a proper origin for the Vision, which must have been influenced by Roy Thomas considering its use of the original Human Torch, tying up a lot of old plot threads from The Fantastic Four and The Avengers and creating a new mess for others to “improve on”, or not. He also tied in the Avengers with wider Marvel mythology, with his use of the Kree and Skrulls as well as that mysterious blue area on the Moon that the Fantastic Four had found years ago.

On the whole The Avengers had never been so much at the heart of the Marvel Universe as under Englehart, participating in the Thanos War in a crossover with Captain Marvel, then crossing over with The Fantastic Four for the wedding of Crystal and Quicksilver. There’s also, in the last few issues collected here, the coming of the Beast to the Avengers, fresh from his own solo adventures and with plotlines continued from there. It’s the sort of continuity I grew up with from Marvel and the sort I like best, where there is always evidence of a wider universe beyond The Avengers, but out and out crossovers are rare and don’t last more than one or two issues.

As said, the art here is servicable to good, but you need to read this for the writing. Englehart would go on to do better work on other titles since he wrote the Celestial Madonna Saga, but this is perhaps his first great work.

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

books and books review, Comix
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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

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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.

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 18: Ms Marvel Vol. 01

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Essential Ms Marvel 01
Gerry Conway, Chris Claremont, Jim Mooney and friends
Reprints: Ms. Marvel 1-23 and more (January 1977 – April 1979)
Get this for: seventies feminist superheroics — Four stars

Now for a complete change of pace, from the heart of the Silver Age taking a giant leap forward into the Bronze Age, long after the people who had laid the foundations of the Marvel Universe had left (and had come back and left again) and some of the creativity and magic had gone out of it. The mid to late seventies were a rough patch for both Marvel and DC, as the old newsstand distribution networks were in upheaval, inflation and economic depression made comics expensive and there was little room to experiment with new titles. So what you get is attempts to play it safe, through either cashing in on some trend or by creating a spinoff — Ms. Marvel is a combination of both: a spinoff of Captain Marvel and an attempt to cash in on the resurgence of second wave feminism, as seen through a comics prism. Despite this the title would last barely two years, being canceled with #23 and with the last two issues, already prepared only seeing print two decades later, in the early nineties Marvel Super-Heroes Magazine.

I don’t know why M.s Marvel failed the first time around: perhaps it could never find an audience out on the newsstands, or people didn’t buy it because it featured a girl (Marvel never having had much luck with female headliners) or just because not enough newsstands stocked it. But one thing I know, quality couldn’t have been the issue. True, it took a couple of issues for Ms. Marvel to find its feet, but once Chris Claremont comes onboard with issue 3 it settled into a nice rhythm. I’ve certainly read much worse titles from that time which were much more succesful.

Ms. Marvel is Carol Danvers, an old supporting character from the sixties Marvel Captain Marvel series, reintroduced in Ms. Marvel as the eponymous superheroine, in the first three issues suffering from amnesia and not knowing she’s Carol. Carol meanwhile gets a job as the editor of Now Magazine, Jolly Jonah Jameson’s woman’s magazine. He wants the traditional subjects: cooking, fashion, gossip, she wants it to make a hardhitting, proper news magazine: soap opera gold, though as per usual with superhero jobs it plays second fiddle to Carol’s other career and its complications.

The whole amnesia/two people angle doesn’t really work and is quickly abandoned once Claremont takes over the writing. He does keep the conflict between Carol and Ms. Marvel however, each with a distinctive personality and not always liking the other that much. Personally I never like this sort of forced conflict or handicap so I’m glad to see this slowly disappearing over time here.

On the supervillain side of things, Conway introduces A.I.M. as a recurring foil and Claremont keeps them around, as well as adding MODOK to the mix. Other established villains, including the Scorpion, obscure X-Men foe Grotesk as well as a couple of badniks from the old Living Mummy series from Supernatural Thrillers also appear. Claremont had a knack for getting tough, physical threats for Ms. Marvel to actually beat with her fists like any other strong male hero would do, rather than the usual non-physical threats reserved for superheroines. There are few original creations here, with Deathbird introduced in #9 and Mystique from #16 the most significant, Claremont using both of them in Uncanny X-Men later on. For the most part however Ms. Marvel is mutant free.

But Claremont was leading Ms. Marvel into that territory though, through the long running subplot of some unknown enemy (which turned out to be Mystique) targeting both Carol Danvers and Ms. Marvel. However Ms. Marvel before that subplot reached fruition and it took Avengers Annual #10 two years later to tie up these loose ends. That one starts with Carol being thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge, rescued by Spider-Woman (who Claremont was also writing) and brought to Prof Xavier to be examined mentally. Meanwhile the Brotherhood of Evil, led by Mystique attack the Avengers and its newest member Rogue turns out to have stolen Carol’s powers.

Apart from housecleaning however and revealing the final fate of Ms. Marvel Claremont had an ulterior motive for writing this annual. Between the end of her own series and the annual Ms. Marvel had been a member of the Avengers and in a particularly bad storyline had been raped and impregnated (all off panel), gone through the full pregnancy and given birth in a day to a boy who turned out to be her rapist, using her to be able to live on Earth, but when this fails he takes her with her to Limbo, where they live happily ever after, or so the Avengers think, never having spent a minute to think things through. Claremont had done this, had gotten offended and used the final part of the story to spell it all out. It’s one of the best “fuck you” moments in comics I’ve read.

Claremont would return to Ms. Marvel even later, in the early nineties in the anthology title Marvel Super-Heroes, which reprinted both the final finished but never published issue, as well as a followup bridging the gap between her series and Avengers Annual #10. Here they’re presented in chronological order, before the annual.

The final verdict is that this was a perfectly enjoyable series, nothing much out of the ordinary, but never bad either. The art, first by John Buscema, followed by Jim Mooney, Keith Pollard, Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino, Dave Cockrum and finally Mike Vosburg is decent to good, but with so many artists in such a relatively short period it’s hard to create a real style for Ms. Marvel. Essential Ms. Marvel vol 1 is a nice view of what a lesser title of the seventies looked like.