T.J. McLean Writes

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Tag: Fantastic Four

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #2 (Jan. 1962)

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On March 30, 2010

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“The Fantastic Four
Meet the Skrulls From Outer Space!”
Script by Stan Lee 
Pencils by Jack Kirby 
Inks by George Klein (again, that’s the best guess from Mark Evanier, whose opinion in such matters is eminently trustworthy) 
Letters by John Duffy 

The second issue picks up pretty much where the first left off, developing and adding certain themes and motifs the series would repeat endlessly. It’s also a wildly uneven story, but one whose highs outweigh the lulls.

The Fantastic Four continue to be anti-superheroes in this issue — eschewing costumes and hanging out in everyday settings such as Reed’s apartment and a hunting lodge. Apparently, they are already quite famous by this point — the cops all know the FF on a first-name basis and, in an early scene, Sue is given high celebrity status by a jeweler who, frankly, should have known better than to let the Invisible Girl see his famous jewels. But at the same time, they’re also freaks that people are quick to turn against at the slightest provocation. (Apparently, the polarized opinions of 1960s Marvel Universe foreshadowed the current political discourse in the United States.) This dichotomy more than any other has come to define the Marvel style, from these early years through the present day.

This issue begins with the Fantastic Four having apparently gone bad. The Thing destroys an oil-drilling platform off the Texas shore; Sue steals a valuable gem; Johnny melts a marble statue; and Reed reaches into the power station and shuts off the city’s power. These latter two stretch plausibility. If Johnny could get hot enough to melt marble (more than 3,000 degrees), the crowd of onlookers would have been incinerated. And electric utilities are too complicated to just “turn off” with one switch. 

But the opening sequence does its job of making the reader wonder what’s going on. The reveal of the Skrulls is a bit clumsy, but it works and is actually quite creepy. And is it just me, or do I see a somewhat familiar face in the Skrull’s transformation?
It’s kind of easy to forget that these stories that are now so familiar to comics fans were meant to be contemporary entertainment for children in 1961. These days it’d be hard to imagine Reed and the gang wearing plaid, smoking pipes and hanging out in a hunting lodge, with Johnny checking out a rifle and Ben throwing a mounted bear’s head through the window in one of his tantrums. I’m glad the tantrum, the squabbling and the sudden make up are the precedent-setting part of this scene, because 500-plus issues of Reed and Johnny going hunting while Ben and Sue dressed the kill would not be much fun.

The next segment of this story sees the U.S. Army locate the hunting lodge and demand the FF surrender. And this is the first spot where the issue goes off the rails. Rather than a really cool scene of the FF resisting the Army’s attacks, repelling bullets, melting missiles, etc., the FF just go ahead and surrender. The Army sticks them in special cells designed to resist their powers, but it was all for naught as the FF escapes in the most obvious fashion possible in about five minutes. A scene like this makes me think that Lee and Kirby were avoiding a potential conflict with the Comics Code Authority, which required that “(p)olicemen, judges, Government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.” Either way, it’s the first sequence in the series that interrupts the build up of credibility and believability the series is really aiming for.

That the first scene after the escape sees the FF reconvening and picking up their argument where they lift off only confirms the filler nature of the escape. But it doesn’t necessarily get better as Johnny suggests they smoke out the imposters by attacking a rocket launch and hoping it’s confusing enough to allow the real FF to infiltrate the alien group. It only makes sense if the Skrulls are completely random in their attacks, i.e., they have no set plan whatsoever and don’t even know what they are doing.
Still, this being comics, it works – and Johnny infiltrates and exposes the alien group. The flare gun that creates the flaming “4” in the sky returns from issue #1.

And while I doubt Johnny Cash read Fantastic Four comics, I do like the idea that this panel might have influences the writing of his classic 1963 tune. Maybe in the Marvel Universe, Cash’s “Ring of Flame” was a major hit.

As we move into part three, the comic recreates the cover image inside the story again as the battle gets going. Sue and Thing obviously contribute less here than in the first issue. I do like the moody coloring in the panels of some of these early Marvels, such as this one, in which Reed and Sue look like Martin Landau and Barbara Bain from Mission: Impossible or Space: 1999.

The story goes a bit crazy again as the FF find the Skrull ship (in a water tower!) and go into space to bluff the aliens into not invading Earth. Reed does this by presenting comic book images as real, thereby proving that alien species can be dumb as rocks and still master interplanetary travel. It’s also one of the first signs of Stan Lee putting plugs for his other comics directly in the story — something that was common in some of the earliest Marvels before continuity, footnotes and Bullpen Bulletins pages kicked in and took line-wide promotion to the next level.

The poor Thing has had next to nothing to do in this story until the return to Earth causes him to revert to human form. This comes out of nowhere and is surprisingly touching — easily the best part of the book. Kirby does a great job of framing the transformation slightly off center and then of giving Ben a look of pure joy that turns to misery as he reverts in short order to the rocky Thing. This stuff is really good and the first sign that Lee, Kirby and Marvel were on to something substantial. Panel 7 on page 21 is particularly good, with the Thing’s head slumped in resignation as beautiful Sue and Johnny try to comfort him.
The story gets weird again as the Army trusts Reed enough to go back to his apartment and fight the three remaining Skrulls held there. It’s explained in the copy that one of the Skrulls went with the FF into space and is returning with the rest of the Skrulls, but none of this is actually seen. I suspect some much later issues found a way to explain this more fully. 
The issue again gets back on track just in time for a good twist ending in the EC tradition, as Reed hypnotizes the Skrulls into becoming cows and forgetting who they were. The word play, with the Skrulls asking for a “contented” existence should be lamer than it is. But somehow it works and gives the issue a good, upbeat finish

The issue wraps up with a pin-up of The Thing, who at this point had yet to develop his chiseled features and was more of a lumpy, scaly looking character.

I really like the pacing of these older issues and the breaking down of the story into chapters that run 5 or so pages each. Today, each chapter in this story would be an issue unto itself.

Again, there’s something very cool about the idea of doing the Fantastic Four less like superheroes and more like conventional adventurers. This was the last non-superhero story, as fans’ demands prompted Stan Lee to go in a more conventional and more commercial direction. I wonder if this was the first instance of superhero fans’ outcries altering the direction of a series. It certainly was not the last, but going for a more conventional superhero premise certainly was a major one for Marvel in particular and comic books in general.

FF Re-read: The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961)

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On March 24, 2010

In Uncategorized

“The Fantastic Four!”
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Script by Stan Lee
Pencils by Jack Kirby
Inks by George Klein (at least that’s the best guess from Mark Evanier, whose opinion I trust in such matters)
Letters and logo execution by Artie Simek
Colors by Stan Goldberg
Production and logo design by Sol Brosky
Fantastic Four #1 is a fascinating comic, as much for the ways in which it doesn’t stand out as much as for the ways it does.
Let’s start with the cover. First, I love the logo. Every time Marvel decides to change the FF logo, it’s an unspoken strike against the current creative time. Which is not exactly fair, to be honest, but it inevitably reverts to this original version and to me it’s as much a part of the book as the Baxter Building, Willie Lumpkin and all the rest. The lettering style is very much of the times, but at the same time wholly suited to type of book this was to become and very different from the style in vogue at DC and other publishers. Plus, whoever decided to print it as large as possible and in that awesome red ink against the white background was a genius. It was one of the major drawbacks of the original Masterworks and the Marvel Milestone Edition to change the logo to black. The image of the monster is fairly typical for what Marvel was putting out at the time. There’s a weird bit of copy in the blurb about these characters being “together for the first time,” which is true. But it also implies that they’ve appeared separately before, which is impossible since three of them never appeared in any form before this very issue.
Public panic over superheroes would be a running theme through Silver Age Marvel, reaching its heights in J. Jonah Jameson’s diatribes against Spider-Man and the anti-mutant public sentiment in X-Men.

This issue really is divided up into chunks — all of them quite good. The first chunk introduces the characters, starting with Susan Storm. Sue, often given short shrift in later issues, gets a lengthy intro here. She’s also pretty aggressive in testing her powers by making sure the cab driver really can’t see her at all.

The Thing’s intro is another pretty standard scenario for the early days of Marvel. But even in his first scene, in which he’s trying to find clothes that fit him, the pathos that defines the character comes through. The Thing also is pretty well defined at this point as a guy who’d rather be normal but who also gets more than a little kick out of being big, strong and indestructible. I particularly like the first panel on page 5 in which Thing pops up out of the sewers and is unhurt as a car smashes head-on into him.
The intro of Johnny Storm is a bit odd because of one line. Johnny says there’s only one thing that interests him more than cars, and it turns out not to be girls but playing superhero. So much for the typical teen-ager …  The most obvious scripting gaffe in this issue occurs in the scene where the U.S. Air Force goes after Johnny, launching a missile at him that Johnny describes as “nuclear.” “If it explodes, I’m a goner!” he says. Yeah, no kidding. Mr. Fantastic appears next and handles the missile, which explodes “harmlessly” over the sea. The obvious explanation for what could have been Marvel’s first No-Prize would be that Johnny was mistaken in saying the missile had a nuke.

Mr. Fantastic is the one member of the group who in this particular story is not as well developed as he would become. Here, he uses his power to save Johnny — no explanation is given for how his regular clothes stretch with his body, as we’re at least a few issues away from the idea of unstable molecules — and is otherwise a pretty generic scientist. He shows none of the potential to be the world-changing scientist he would become. In fact, he’s more of a screw up than anyone in this issue, as we find out in the second section of the story, which is the flashback to the origin events.

The origin sequence is told in a no-nonsense manner. I think Kirby draws a particularly pretty Sue in panel 2 on page 9, even as Lee has her accusing Ben of not loving America enough to beat the Commies into space. This sort of thing was pretty normal back in 1961, but out of date even at the time as Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first man in orbit on April 12, 1961, a good four months before this comic came out.

The scene on page 10 in which the cosmic rays begin to penetrate the space ship is surprisingly well done. Kirby’s depiction of the rays as some kind of bolts combined with the “RAK TAC TAC TAC” sound effect similar to the noise a Geiger counter makes was a great start. But the coloring also was great, with pinks, yellows and blues – it just looks great. The crash on the next page? Not as great, but panel 3 on page 11 is again a really nice mix of image, copy and color.

Susan again gets to go first, turning invisible briefly before reverting to normal — and falling into Reed’s arms. That upsets Ben, whose anger and jealousy were extremely unusual traits for a comic book hero of the time. Those emotions also seem to trigger his transformation into the Thing, while Reed’s defensive reaction brings out his power. Johnny is the last to discover his new talent, setting the forest on fire accidentally.
This is the point where Reed first takes on the leadership mantel, urging the other to join him in using their power to help mankind. But there’s just a tiny hint of these characters being a bit more self-aware than superheroes had shown in comics before this point, when Ben says: “You don’t have to make a speech, big shot! We understand! We’ve gotta use that power to help mankind, right?”
And then comes the famous panel of the hands coming together, inspired most likely by the Three Musketeers’ motto “all for one and one for all,” which Ben joins reluctantly.

So after 13 pages, the story shifts yet again to the Mole Man story, starting with a splash panel that is a slightly different version of the cover.

The next couple of sequences show how Lee and Kirby tried to ground the story in reality as much as possible. I like the fact that the FF has assembled in a nondescript room that I always assumed was either Reed’s apartment or his office. Since he’s got a “radar machine” there, I guess it would be his office, though he could always have a lab at home being most likely unemployed after the rocket crash.

There’s also mention of the Monster Island’s position that references Australia, South America and French Africa, setting the story in a wider world than DC’s were. Yes, the FF are based in this issue and next in “Central City,” but that quickly becomes Manhattan. A lot of Silver Age DC stories often tried to set themselves in the kinds of normal, suburban settings most kids of the times would be familiar with. (Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of other dimensions and alien planets in Silver Age DC stuff, but when they did Earth, they usually did Earth-Bland. Is that one of the 52 Earths in the new multiverse? If not, it really should be … )

The opening of the Mole Man bit, with the monster rising out of the Sahara to attack the French Legionnaires is exactly the sort of thing Lee and Kirby had been doing in the monster books Atlas had been doing at the time. That might be one reason why this sequence works well; another would be that it was drawn well and the coloring was excellent.
It’s not clear at all where the FF got the jet plane that delivers them to Monster Isle. I guess Reed had some money stashed away. Again, the characters go into battle here without much more than their newfound powers and without the costumes and gadgets theylater put to such good use.
When the monsters attack, we finally get to see some of Reed’s potential as a superhero. Of course, none of this was new, given that his powers are pretty much identical to those of Plastic Man and DC’s Elongated Man. But Plastic Man was a largely comedic series and Elongated Man was only a bit more serious, whereas Reed is at this point starting to show some potential as the kind of “serious” hero Marvel fans would soon gravitate to.

One of my favorite bits is the throwaway concept of the Valley of the Diamonds, which just shows up for a few panels and, aside from looking and sounding cool, plays no real role in the story.

The last chapter, The Moleman’s Secret!, finally unleashes The Thing, and it’s a bit underwhelming to see him dispatch his monster foe in three small panels on page 21. But his time to shine would come later.
The Mole Man’s origin, told in a single page, is full of themes that Marvel would later exploit to much better effect. Mole Man is told he’s ugly, he can’t get the girl, he’s laughed at and ostracized by society until he finds his own kingdom to rule and is condemned to never leave it due to a strange accident.
Page 23 is an odd one because Mole Man fights either Reed or Johnny with a pole, but since Reed and Johnny were both wearing identical suits that obscured their faces and neither is mentioned by name or has any dialog, it’s unclear which of them is in this sequence. I always assumed it was Reed, but there’s nothing there to back it up.
The final two pages see the arrival of the monster from the cover, who’s dispatched rather easily by the FF. The group flees, initially with Mole Man, but he’s explained away as having been left behind in the dialog – a sign that thing may have been a bit rushed by this point and Lee had no other way to work it out with the artwork Kirby turned in.

The end sees the FF returning home, and a caption promising more in the next great issue.

Looking at the issue as a whole, it really is a terrific story. I can’t help but wonder what might have happened with this series and Marvel had Lee and Kirby resisted the demands to turn the group into more obvious superheroes. As it is, this concept could fly as a TV series (an expensive one sure, but sticking to a kind of X-Files or Fringe style approach would have made this possible long before CG VFX were around.)

The art also is an excellent example of what made Kirby so great, even before he took his style to the unrestrained extremes that would define his work from the 1960s onward.
The last thing I want to mention is a quick revisit of the unique presentation this issue received in the Maximum FF book, a book I previously raved about that takes the book and blows it up panel by panel and turns it into a very cool coffee table book. This comic stands up to that kind of examination, and it’s a very, very good first issue.

Fantastic Four re-read: Introduction

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On March 16, 2010

In Uncategorized

Being a busy adult means that it is much harder to find the time or willpower to re-read long runs of favorite comic books. In my mid-teens, I often would pick about 10 or 12 comics to read each night before going to sleep and could easily power through a year’s worth of the old Marvel Star Wars or The New Mutants or Alpha Flight in a couple hours before turning out the lights. Most of the runs of comics I know by heart are still ones from those days, in large part because I was reading and re-reading them. I also used to devour new comics as soon as I got them home each week. These days, they often sit around in stacks waiting for me to carve out some time on the weekend or the occasional evening to get to them. Rarely do I find time to go back and re-read much. Because of that, there are some classic runs of comics I have accumulated slowly in recent years that never got a complete run through, and that’s what I’m going to rectify. I fully admit to lifting the idea from other blogs (Tor.com in particular, where they’ve been re-watching Star Trek and re-reading The Lord of the Rings).

I’m starting with The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The reasons why should be obvious: this was the superhero comic book that launched what came to be known as the Marvel Universe. It was the backbone of Marvel’s rise to prominence in the Silver Age. It also was one of the best lengthy series that Lee or Kirby ever contributed to. And it remains essential and very good comic-book reading to this day.

For those who are interested in such things, I don’t have the originals of all — or even many – of these comics, but I do have the full run in Marvel Masterworks. These are the versions I will be using, with a few exceptions that I’ll note when the relevant post comes along. (And for those of you who like “shelf porn,” below is a picture of the Masterworks and DC Archives shelf in my office. Click to embiggen.)
What will these posts be like? I don’t know. I expect they’ll change significantly as I go through the series. My plan to start is to read each issue at least a few times and then see what I think it most interesting about it. I am going to avoid summaries because it’s tedious and there’s plenty of sites that serve that info far better than I can. 
By way of introduction, I’ll tell my history with The Fantastic Four. I first read Fantastic Four toward the end of John Byrne’s run. I think it may have been the last one or two issues he wrote, but didn’t draw, as he was on his way out the door at Marvel to do Superman for DC. I remember getting the 25th anniversary jam issue, #296, in 1986, and then stuck with the book for a couple of runs that featured plenty of solid but unspectacular work from artist John Buscema art and writer Roger Stern. Steve Englehart soon took over the writing and came up with some cool stories. It was an offbeat time for the team, as Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman — better known to most fans as Reed and Sue Richards — left the team and joined the Avengers. That left The Thing in charge of a quartet rounded out by the Human Torch, his girlfriend Crystal of the Inhumans, and the She-Thing.
Things picked up when Walter Simonson took over the book (as they usually do), and his take on the series was on a par with what I had read of Byrne’s. There was a popular story drawn by the excellent Arthur Adams in which Wolverine, Spider-Man, Hulk and Ghost Rider briefly became the new FF. But the best issue by Simonson was #350, in which Reed and Dr. Doom battled through time, popping in out of scenes throughout the comic that you could piece together in chronological order to get an entirely different take on the story.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I completed my run of Byrne’s FF and really came to admire it. It was a prime example of one of the right ways to do a superhero comic, with each issue well written, well-drawn, easy to get into. It also captured something of the times, a nice mix of craft, nostalgia and just enough innovation to keep things interesting.

I don’t remember exactly when I first read any of the Stan Lee-Jack Kirby stories. I know I first learned of them in edited form in the pages of Marvel Saga, a short-lived series that retold the major “events” of the Marvel Universe in chronological order. It was a good primer on Silver Age Marvel, but not a substitute for reading the full stories.

So aside from a possible reprint or two, my first real chance to read these stories came from a copy of the first FF volume of Marvel Masterworks. That first copy is a third printing, which according to the excellent Marvel Masterworks Resource Page, was released in September 1989. I had several other original FF Masterworks volumes that I sold during the days when the series was out of print and the collector demand was high enough for me to get a really good price for them. I kept the first volume because I had it signed by Stan Lee at San Diego Comic-Con in the mid-1990s and didn’t want to give that one up. (I also have the first X-Men and Spider-Man Masterworks signed by Stan, and when we get to the Galactus trilogy, I’ll tell the story of another Stan Lee autograph.) When the re-mastered versions began coming out in the early 2000s, I began to pick them up and now have the first ten volumes. Some of these I haven’t read at all, so some of the stories in this run, which comprises 102 regular issues and six annuals, will be first-reads for me.

Before I get into the first issue, I think it’s worth taking a moment and put it in the context of the times in which it came out.

The story of how the Fantastic Four came to be is well-worn territory. In the early 1960s, comics were still recovering from the Frederic Wertham-lead witch-hunt and Senate hearings that prompted the creation of the Comics Code Authority. That put the crime, horror and other comics out of business and the comics field drifted into a period of strange, innocuous tales. Marvel, then called Atlas, followed the trends from Western comics to science fiction to romance comics to monster comics. They almost went out of business at one point when they lost their distributor, and were saved by a deal with Independent News that was a double-edged sword. Affiliated in some complicated way with DC Comics, Independent limited the number of titles Marvel could put out and, for at least a while, Marvel seemed to intentionally avoid putting out titles directly competed with those at DC.

DC was far and away the king of the hill at the time, having found new success in its superhero comics starting in 1956 with its new version of The Flash. That was followed by more revitalizations, including a deeper mythos for Superman, new sci-fi heroes like Adam Strange and the Atomic Knights, a new Green Lantern and the crowning success of the Justice League of America.

During this period, Jack Kirby had decided to stick with comics after his longtime partner, Joe Simon, concluded advertising was a better field. Kirby worked at DC for a while and created the series Challengers of the Unknown, a concept not too different from the Fantastic Four, before heading over to Atlas.

The way he tells it, Stan Lee was pretty discouraged about comics. He was thinking of quitting, when his wife, Joan, told him he should give it one more chance and do a comic that he liked. When Marvel owner Martin Goodman asked for a team of superheroes to compete with JLA, Stan says he saw this as his chance, and got together with Kirby to come up with The Fantastic Four #1.

Early house ad for Fantastic Four that appeared in Hulk #1.
(Scanned from The Collected Jack Kirby Collector, Vol. 1) 

At the time, the comic book market was small and tame, but diverse. For example, these are the comic books DC Comics published either with the same November 1961 cover date as Fantastic Four #1 (or an October-November or November-December cover date), according to comicbookdb.com:

Action Comics #282
Adventure Comics #290
The Adventures of Bob Hope #71
Batman #143
Blackhawk #166
The Brave and the Bold #38
Challengers of the Unknown #22
Detective Comics #297
The Flash #124
The Fox and the Crow #70
G.I. Combat #90
Girls’ Love Stories #82
Girls’ Romances #80
House of Mystery #116
House of Secrets #50
Justice League of America #7
Many Loves of Dobie Gillis #10
Men of War #52
My Greatest Adventure #61
Mystery In Space #71
Our Army at War #112
Our Fighting Forces #64
Rip Hunter … Time Master #5
Sea Devils #2
Showcase #35
Strange Adventures #134
Star Spangled War Stories #99
Sugar & Spike #37
Superman #149
Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #29
Tales of the Unexpected #67
Tomahawk #77
Wonder Woman #126
World’s Finest Comics #121

It’s a really interesting mix of superheroes, anthologies, romance comics, war comics and humor books. But not a lot of classics in there.

Thanks to DC’s excellent Showcase Presents volumes, I took a look at a couple of those stories: Justice League of America #7 and Adventure Comics #290. In the JLA story, Snapper Carr visits a funhouse and stumbles through a portal to an alien planet. After he’s rescued, the JLA members infiltrate and expose the funhouse as an alien operation. The biggest worry any of the heroes seem to have is whether they’ll expose their secret identities — a common theme in Silver Age DC stories. Adventure #290 is, amazingly, even weirder as Superboy heads off to all corners of the Earth to retrieve the elements of a super-powerful weapon the Legion hid in the past. Meanwhile, a reform school escapee who looks exactly like Clark Kent stumbles into Smallville and pretends to be Clark to enjoy the sweet, cushy life of Middle America. Lots of weirdness follows before memories are erased and everything reverts to normal. Both stories are fun, but pretty mild.

Superman #149 also happens to be a particularly famous issue, featuring a three-part imaginary story that culminates with the death of Superman that was written by Jerry Siegel, co-creator of the Man of Steel. This was one of Jerry’s best stories from the period and was reprinted in The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told and featured by me in my first professional article about superhero comics, which was about — what else? — the “Death of Superman” story in 1993.

And here’s what the same site lists for the November 1961 cover dates at Atlas:

Amazing Adventures #6
Fantastic Four #1
Gunsmoke Western #67
Journey Into Mystery #74
Kid Colt Outlaw #101
Linda Carter, Student Nurse #2
Love Romances #96
Millie the Model #105
Strange Tales #90
Tales of Suspense #23
Tales to Astonish #25

And just for kicks, here are the other publishers’ titles for the same month, again from comicbookdb.com:

American Comics Group
Unknown Worlds #11


Archie Comics
Adventures of the Fly #16
Adventures of the Jaguar #3
Archie #123
Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica #71
Archie’s Pal Jughead #78
Life with Archie #11
Pep Comics #151

Charlton
Atomic Mouse #45
Billy The Kid #31

Dell
Beep Beep #11
Combat #1
Donald Duck #80
Four Color Comics #1209
Four Color Comics #1267
The Lone Ranger #142
Tarzan #127
Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #254
Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse #80
Walter Lantz New Funnies #286

George A. Pflaum

Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, Vol. 17, #5
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, Vol. 17, #6

Prize Publications
Young Romance #114

It’s easy to see why Fantastic Four stood out and was such a sensation in this market when it hit the nation’s newsstands on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 1961.

Mutants drift further from Utopia, but Batman and Spidey are doing quite well, thanks

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On September 30, 2009

In Uncategorized

It’s taken me a awhile to get to reading the giant stack of comics that piled up the past few months. Reading them has been sadly dull — I don’t know if it’s the comics or if it’s me, though I suspect if everything was a great read I wouldn’t have written what I just wrote. So let’s get to it.

Dark Avengers/Uncanny X-Men: Exodus #1 (Marvel, $3.99) is the conclusion to the Utopia crossover storyline, and it’s reasonably good. That’s to be expected when you have folks like Matt Fraction writing and Mike Deodato and Terry Dodson drawing. The Utopia storyline was pretty overtly political for X-Men, starting with an initiative called Proposition X that would require medical birth control for all mutants. That leads to the mutants, who’ve established San Francisco as their new home base, going on the riot path and H.A.M.M.E.R. director Norman Osborn bringing in his Dark Avengers to restore order and discredit the X-Men and install his own lackeys — the Dark X-Men — as the public face of mutant kind. It’s a heavy handed and painfully obvious attempt to tie the mutants into the gay rights issues that are at the forefront of society. And that would probably work, but there’s such a sense of change fatigue when it comes to the X-Men franchise that none of this really has a chance to stick. It was only a year ago that the X-Men came to San Francisco, and nothing about that switch really stood out as meaningful or interesting — and now we’re on the move again to the remnants of Asteroid X, now renamed Utopia. It would have been nice for the X-Men to have stuck around San Francisco long enough for that setting to made a difference. And it’s hard when your arcs all run four, five, six issues to establish a real sense of place the way comics used to back in the days when they were periodicals through and through. I think of the first Wolverine series from 1982, where that setting of Japan really came to life and was important to the story. Nowadays, even with a half dozen spinoff titles, the X-titles (and Marvel titles in general) have become kind of cookie cuttered in the Bendis mode — where characters’ dialog rarely has much to do with the story and the overall tone is self-conscious and self-referential to the point of inanity. All of this was fresh 10 years ago, but at least for me, this style has worn out its welcome.
I also read the Utopia tie-in issues Dark X-Men: The Confession #1 (Marvel, $3.99), X-Men: Legacy #227 (Marvel, $2.99), both of which suffer from much the same symptom. Confession is basically an entire issue of Cyclops and Emma Frost having it out over the status of their relationship and their respective guilt and responsibilities in the whole thing. And character is important — it’s part of what made Marvel great — but this exemplifies the self indulgence that I think is plaguing the X-books in particular. Another example is The Uncanny X-Men #515 (Marvel, $2.99), the first issue of the new “Nation X” storyline that heralds the return of Magneto, usually a big event with lots of drama even when it’s not done well. But here, it’s sudden and just seemingly random. Even the things that should work don’t — a minor character dies in a rather nice scene, but again it’s a character who hasn’t been around long enough or done anything interesting enough for the reader to care about his passing with the same passion some of the X-Men display.

In the Wolverine corner of Marvel, Mark Millar and Steve McNiven’s alternate future run concludes in Giant-Size Wolverine: Old Man Logan #1 (Marvel, $4.99). Alternate future storylines can be fun, and this one has had its moments of coolness. But the ending, delayed from the regular run of the title to this special, is disappointing for just being so damn obvious. This post-apocalyptic Western tale, in which Old Man Logan has to rediscover his spine as he tries to protect his family from the victorious supervillains that rule the land. The end, however, sees Logan finally pop the claws and go to town on everyone — but it does so in so mundane and excessively violent a fashion that it’s hardly satisfying or even terribly interested. The art’s nice, even though it’s a bit gross at times, but this ending throws no curves at all and I couldn’t help but think, “That’s it?”
Still, it’s better than X-Men Origins: Wolverine #1 (Marvel, $3.99), the most recent Origins one-shot. I guess this does a decent job of recapping the character’s origin and making it jibe, both storywise and visually, with what appears in the movie of the same name. But in simplifying the story, it loses the interesting parts of the good stuff and exposes the lame stuff for being truly lame. It also doesn’t do much to explain itself — like who are Heather and James Hudson, who weren’t in the movie? The art, however, is nice — no surprise since it’s by Mark Texeira, who did a good job drawing the Wolverine series way back in the early 1990s.
X-Factor #47-48 (Marvel, $2.99 each), continues to be a consistently entertaining read. Yeah, it’s gotten complicated, with future Dr. Dooms, an adult Layla Miller, a future Cyclops and more Madrox dupes than you can shake a stick at. But writer Peter David does a good job of giving everyone a personality and structuring his story so that it’s entertaining even if you don’t remember every detail of the previous 46 issues.
Before we leave the mutant corner of the Marvel Universe, there’s X-Men Forever #7 (Marvel, $3.99), which reminds me how great writer Chris Claremont was at establishing a new direction for a series and how quickly the new status quo could be forgotten. After a memorable five-issue opening arc, the last two issues have been a lot more murky and directionless. This one features a lot of flashing back on Nick Fury’s part to the days when Logan (currently believed dead in this timeline) did a lot of dirty work as a solider. It’s all still very recognizably Claremontian, which is comforting at times, but lacks the obvious forward momentum and focus of the first arc. Given that the outcome of Claremont’s stories usually depends greatly on the talents of the artist he’s working with, Tom Grummett can’t return to these pages soon enough.
Fantastic Four #569 (Marvel, $3.99) wraps up another Mark Millar run, though this time without the artist who kicked it off, Bryan Hitch, and with an assist on the scripting from Joe Ahearne. This is a definite ending point, though I recommend rereading as much of the run before trying to tackle the finale as possible because who’s who and what’s what is, once again, a complicated matter. The best part of the book comes at the end, when Ben Grimm’s wedding day arrives at long last. Removed from the plot complexities of the first half of this book, the characters are fully enjoyable and the situation surprising for the nature of the conflicts and how they play out. The art, by Stuart Immonen, is a good imitation of Hitch’s style, giving a bit more warmth to the characters. Looking back, the run didn’t measure up to the potential of the earliest issues. Seeing the acclaim for the follow up run by writer Jonathan Hickman tells you all you need to know about fan reaction to Millar’s run. But it still turned out well and I think will grow a bit in fans’ eyes over time.
Lastly from Marvel is The Amazing Spider-Man #602-604 (Marvel, $2.99 each). The plot in these issues, written by Fred Van Lente, features a good twist on the old Chameleon character (he’s been a villain since way back in ASM #1) as he mistakenly takes on the appearance of Peter Parker without knowing he’s Spider-Man. There’s some funny moments as Chameleon manages to fix a lot of Peter’s personal problems without really trying too hard. The return of Mary Jane figures fairly prominently, not completely justifying three consecutive MJ-themed covers, but OK, they’re well done. The Amazing Spider-Man has succeeded in its attempt to be a serial of its own — it may be the only part of the Marvel Universe that doesn’t rely on constant crossovers or participation in things like Dark Reign. Shipping three times a month, it’s also worked out a unique rhythm to its plotlines that is most like that of a TV series. I don’t know how much of an effect this had had on readership — whenever I ask at the comic shop, I’m told that overall interest in Spider-Man is down — but I think Marvel should stick with it because it’s, at the very least, different.
Having dug through the Marvels, it’s time to look at a few DCs from the Batman corner. Batman and Robin #4 (DC Comics, $2.99) is the first issue drawn by Philip Tan instead of Frank Quitely. I think it takes Tan a bit to find his groove on this issue, as I had a hard time following the art in the early pages but was very much enjoying the issue by the end. Grant Morrison’s story brings back The Red Hood, though who’s under the hood remains a mystery at this point, and his sidekick Scarlet. This is a good Batman story — the plot, villains, conflicts and visuals all work as well, if not better than, the previous Quitely-drawn issues.
It’s only moving on to read Batman #689-690 (DC Comics, $2.99 each) that I wonder what specific purpose each book is intended to serve. Maybe it’s just that with Batwoman having taken over Detective Comics, they needed to start Batman and Robin to have that second main Bat-title. I don’t know. But these issues, written by Judd Winick and drawn by Mark Bagley, were also quite enjoyable. Bagley’s art, especially, is refreshing on Batman because his style is so associated in my mind, and I’m sure others’, with the sunnier superhero fare of Thunderbolts and Ultimate Spider-Man. His Batman has some of the same quality, but after so many years of downplaying the superhero aspect of Batman it comes off as cool and interesting. Of course, Winick’s script helps, emphasizing as it does new Batman Dick Grayson’s happier outlook on life when compared to that of Bruce Wayne.
Lastly, comes Detective Comics #855-857 (DC Comics, $3.99 each), featuring solo tales of the new Batwoman by writer Greg Rucka and amazing art from J.H. Williams III. Considering how easy it would be to butcher a series about Batwoman, who was introduced to the world in a flurry of news articles about her homosexuality, it’s a bit of a minor miracle that this is so good. A lot, I think, comes down to Williams, who remains underrated despite outstanding work on Alan Moore’s Promethea and the seemingly lost Desolation Jones with Warren Ellis. The “Alice in Wonderland” villain is beautifully rendered, the pages are shockingly designed to be read as comics rather than movie storyboards and the imagery is powerful and beautiful all at once. And it does so with an unmistakable homoerotic undercurrent that’s attractive and playful in a way no comic has been since Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbe’s Cobweb feature from the ABC Tomorrow Stories series. And let’s not forget Rucka, who gives Kate Kane everything a character needs to be interesting and true to herself without doing the obvious sex scene. Instead, there’s a rather romantic dance between Kate and Maggie Sawyer from the Superman books that is really well written, staged and drawn. I also like that this series doesn’t interact with the other Batman books, that the series is getting a chance to stand on its own and hopefully develop its own identity and audience. There’s also a backup strip in these issues, written by Rucka and starring The Question. This is the new Question, former Gotham City cop Renee Montoya, and it’s so far so good there too.
We’ll see how much more of the pile I can plow through this week, though I’ve been on a real Jack Kirby kick of late and am interested in revisiting some of his work. Also, I’ve been reading Moebius — Blueberry Vol. 1 (the Marvel/Epic version) and The Airtight Garage just arrived in the mail today — and picked up a couple of interesting items in France and Italy that I want to get to and will … eventually.

Comic du jour: Fantastic Four #562 (Feb. 2009)

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On January 13, 2009

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I don’t know why the run by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch on this title is not getting more attention, because it’s one of the most polished, pretty and interesting superhero comics out there right now.

This particular issue is a good example, even though it’s an issue that bridges the previous “Death of the Invisible Woman” arc and whatever comes up next. The bridging issue is the sort of thing we used to see a lot of in the 1980s (which for many of us was the last time we could keep track of Marvel continuity without a scorecard), especially in books like The Uncanny X-Men. Perhaps I’m just nostalgic, but it speaks to a certain degree of continuity that has been lacking in superhero comics, which these days tend to lurch from arc to arc, with dramatic shifts in tone and style coming every time the creative team changes.

Bryan Hitch shows why he’s so great on this book, delivering an art job that delivers in storytelling, design, emotion and realism. His portrayals of the FF team have been incredibly consistent, and no one since Kirby (OK, maybe Byrne at his best) has been able to create settings as perfectly suited to the cosmic tone of the title. These settings look like set designs — you can see the movie practically unfold before you. Lots of artists attempt this, but Hitch here is as close to cinematic as I’ve seen in a long time.

And Millar is no slouch either. The guts of this tale involve the funeral for the Invisible Woman (I won’t spoil it with an explanation — go get the back issues or the hardcover if you want to find out what’s going on) and a conversation between Dr. Doom and Reed Richards that is cool, in character and a lot of fun to read.

So, yeah, the first big complaint is going to be that this comic doesn’t come out on time, every time. But it’s worth the extra time and is, at least so far, nowhere near as late as Ultimates and Ultimates 2 became. It’s also completely self-contained and is exactly the sort of thing that I would love to see more of from Marvel and DC.

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