T.J. McLean Writes

A longtime showbiz journalist and fan's thoughts on comic books, movies and other cool stuff.

Tag: Peter Sanderson

The Marvel Saga #1 (Dec. 1985)

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On October 24, 2024

In Bags and Boards, Short Reviews

I was lucky to start my teenage immersion in Marvel Comics in 1985 because it was a golden age of reference material. The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition delivered 64 pages a month of in-depth encyclopedia-style reference on every then-important Marvel character. However, I owe most of my understanding of the early days of the Marvel Universe to The Marvel Saga.

Cover art to The Marvel Saga #1 (Dec. 1985), by Ron Frenz and Bob Layton.

For those new to this series, The Marvel Saga is a chronological retelling of the history of the Marvel Universe. Instead of hiring a writer and artist to turn those stories into a new comic book, researcher and writer Peter Sanderson tied it all together using excerpts from the original comics and new text. This could be anything from a single panel to a multipage sequence. The effect is like a comic book documentary that also shows off all the great artwork Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, et. al, created for early Marvel.

The Marvel Saga #1 sets a distinctive and ambitious tone. It starts with five pages of original art by  Ron Frenz and Al Milgrom to set the stage for the debut of the Fantastic Four. It begins with Galactus, the only survivor of the universe that existed before ours, and quickly moves into such cosmic aspects as the Watchers, the Kree, the Skrulls, and the Celestials. There’s a good summary of the origins of superpowered humans, highlighting the roles played by the Eternals, the Deviants, the Inhumans, and the Atlanteans. Especially fun is a panel of a sword-wielding barbarian, who is not named, but I suspect his name rhymes with Zonan. Similar panels show off the Black Knight in Arthurian times, the Marvel Western heroes, and the early World War I and II superheroes.

Then the cast is introduced in two pages establishing the status quo at the time of Fantastic Four #1: Captain America’s frozen in ice, Namor has amnesia, Tony Stark is a playboy weapons manufacturer, Bruce Banner is working on the gamma bomb, Hank Pym is experimenting with ants, Don Blake considers a trip to Norway, Charles Xavier teaches young Jean Grey to control her mutant powers, Stephen Strange is a hotshot surgeon, and, finally, Peter Parker is a happy science student living with his Uncle Ben and Aunt May.. 

But before we get to the events of Fantastic Four #1, we’re introduced to the friendship between Reed Richards and Ben Grimm, and a glimpse of Reed and Sue Storm meeting Gormuu in a then-recent story by John Byrne.

We then get five pages straight out of Fantastic Four #1 showing the doomed rocket flight that gives them their powers. Moving chronologically, it then goes back to the first part of that issue, where Reed calls the group together, then moves to their confrontation with the Mole Man. 

It’s all well-edited and put together. The reader gets the highlights and most relevant moments from the story. And it’s all done on newsprint, so it looks more like the original comics than the deluxe reprints that would soon become the norm. (In 1985, Marvel had published only a couple of trade paperback collections, and the regular reprinting of classic tales in the Marvel Masterworks hardcover series was more than two years away.) 

And then, The Marvel Saga #1 shifts gears again, this time to the backup stories from Alpha Flight #2 and #3, in which Canadian scientist James MacDonald Hudson finds his exploratory cyber suit is to be sold to the U.S. military. He destroys the plans and steals the helmet required to use the suit. Young Heather McNeil, a secretary at the company Hudson worked for, brings him some groceries and sees the helmet. She manages to find her way to government contacts — including, eventually, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau — who brings James Hudson in to head up Department H and eventually form and lead Alpha Flight as Guardian. 

What really got me when I read this issue was that the Hudson story took place in my hometown of Edmonton. That makes Edmonton the first real-life city mentioned in this history of the Marvel Universe. Kinda cool. 

From there, The Marvel Saga #1 recaps the origin and first adventure of Dr. Henry Pym from Tales to Astonish #27, then gets started on the Fantastic Four’s first meeting with the Skrulls in Fantastic Four #2.

All in 32 newsprint pages, no ads, intro and full credits on the inside front cover, and original cover reproductions on the inside back cover. This cost $1; $1.25 in Canada.

What may sound strange about a comic edited together from such disparate sources is that it’s a blast to read. Marvel Saga shines in this early era, where there’s only a handful of threads to choose from and weave into a whole.

Marvel Saga ran 25 issues, climaxing with the arrival of Galactus and Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four #48-50. It’s the kind of thing I wish Marvel would keep available in some way for new fans who want to get a handle on the origins of the Marvel Universe. The recent cheap reprinted stories in the Origins of Marvel Comics and Son of Origins of Marvel Comics are as close as possible. However, reading those first issues doesn’t thread things together in quite the same way, and they don’t connect the early days of Marvel to more recent characters. I hope Marvel revisits and updates this idea sometime soon.

Good Nonfiction Books About Comics, Part 2

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On August 4, 2011

In Uncategorized

Lengthy interviews with comics creators have produced some fantastic reading over the years, particularly in the pages of The Comics Journal, which borrowed from the traditions of Playboy and Rolling Stone to set the standard for comics. As I said in my recent post about covering the junket for Captain America: The First Avenger, this kind of writing is surprisingly tricky to do well. It’s also produced some of my favorite reads about comics, as well as a few clunkers. I’ll start off by crediting The Comics Journal, of which I have dozens and dozens of individual issues packed up in a box somewhere. But this is about the bookshelf, so here are some more of my favorite good books about comics:

The X-Men Companion I and II were published by Fantagraphics in 1981 and 1982, culled largely from material that had already appeared in the magazine. But when I came across it in 1990 or 1991, again at Bookman’s in Tucson, it was a revelation. The interviews by Peter Sanderson are excellent, and span the entire run of the comic up to that point. Interviewees include Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, Chris Claremont, Terry Austin, John Byrne and a joint interview with Claremont and then-editor Louise Jones about the future of the book. That these interviews were done at a time we now consider early in the book’s history, it’s fascinating to read about how these stories came together and where everyone expected to take the book in the future. I also very much loved the excellent reproduction of so much art in the book — most of it blown-up black and white reproductions from Marvel stats that look absolutely fantastic. Because of this book, I promised myself that if this material was ever reprinted in black and white I would have to buy it, and I did so when Marvel started its Essentials line around 1997.


The Comics Journal Library has offered some similar volumes of more recent vintage. I particularly enjoyed the oversize volumes on Jack Kirby and Frank Miller. I also greatly enjoyed the excellent volume on comics writers that collected vintage interviews from the magazine’s early days with Claremont, Gerry Conway, Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, Archie Goodwin, Alan Moore, Denny O’Neil, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and Harlan Ellison. 
I also enjoyed other publications’ efforts at doing interviews, including the late, lamented Comics Interview. This magazine created several collections that found their way into my collection, including a Batman volume released in 1988 or 1989, around the time of the first Tim Burton Batman movie; and a mid-1980s special on X-Men that included interviews with then-artist John Romita Jr., Louise and Walter Simonson, editor Bob Harras and, of course, Claremont. I have many random issues of this title stored away elsewhere, and am interested in the recent collected edition that has been made available as an online print-on-demand premium edition.
A book I rarely see discussed anywhere is Comic Book Rebels, a 1993 volume by Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette. This book, subtitled Conversations with the Creators of the New Comics, features interviews with an outstanding group of creators from Scott McCloud and Moebis to Dave Sim, Richard Corben, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Todd McFarlane, Frank Miller, Harvey Pekar and Will Eisner. Again, I don’t know why this book isn’t talked about more, but it’s especially fascinating to see these folks talk about the challenges the industry faced in the days before the internet and before even the heights and crashes of the direct market. 
Titan Books has in recent years done some nice interview books focused on specific comics characters and franchises. Comics Creators on the X-Men and Comics Creators on the Fantastic Four, both written by former Marvel editor in chief Tom DeFalco, are solid works that cover those characters up through about 2005 or so. It’s especially interesting to read the X-Men book after going through the X-Men Chronicles, as many of the same folks are interviewed, though 25 years later. I understand there’s a Spider-Man volume as well.
Last on this list is Eisner-Miller, which collects a weekend-long conversation between Frank Miller and Will Eisner on everything from comics history to the sexiness of inking. I wrote about this book here when it first came out and was pleased to see that some quick skimming showed it still holds up. It’s especially nice to have this book capture the views of Eisner late in his life, as he died not long after the book came out.
I had meant to include in the previous post an invitation for folks to comment on their favorite books about comics — either what they think of the books I’ve mentioned here or any that I’ve missed that deserve a look. From the looks of my list, I likely have two more posts in this series: one on how-to books and one on books that focus on the careers or life of a specific creator.

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