The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

Supreme: The Return

Alan Moore & about a million others Supreme: The Return (2000)
I'm not sure there's much I can say about this collection that I haven't already said about its predecessor, but anyway...

Supreme is the creation of Rob Liefeld, the man who effectively drove me away from caped escapades in the early nineties, either with the mighty colonic force of his scratchy art, or else its unfortunate and baleful influence on everyone else. Supreme was Liefeld's version of Superman with the serial numbers filed off, publication enabled by his own Image Comics imprint when whoever was paying his wage at Marvel refused to cave in to the demands of an artist who always made Wolverine look like he was in the middle of doing a poo, and a pretty fucking tough poo at that. I presume Liefeld recruited Alan Moore because of his ability to do word stuff good just as Moore received a hefty phone bill or something, but whatever the case, this was the result. Moore did what he could, at least managing to produce something which reads as though he enjoyed writing it, but if Sexton Ming has taught us anything it is that you can't polish a turd.

The stories are fine such as they are, and the heavily stylised flashbacks to a supposed prehistory of Supreme in the style of Simon, Kirby and others are ruthlessly well-observed, and the jokes are funny, particularly the running gag of how close our boy comes to realising that he's a character in a comic book; but at heart it's still Taco Bell regardless of how it's served, and it fails to nourish in the same way as Alan Moore's work usually does. The pastiche flashbacks to golden age Supreme worked well enough in the first collection, and even seemed to have purpose beyond nostalgic chuckles, but here they were starting to get on my tits.

Yes - a dog wearing a cape; we get it, for fuck's sake...

Funnily enough, I picked up a copy of the Supreme comic from Liefeld's original run at some flea market a few months ago, mainly out of curiosity and because despite being a near mint foil-stamped collector's edition published over two decades earlier, it cost just twenty-five cents. It's about as horrible as I imagined it would be - page after page of caped sides o' beef grimacing at each other with faces made of hernias and ruptured sphincters, frowning generals muttering darkly about imperatives and national security, and the emotional complexity of one of the more retarded Kiss albums. Oddly though, I can see the appeal, and even being an el Camino driving po' mullet-having uncle to Moore's more sophisticated version, the crappier Supreme seems more honest. Liefeld may be a terrible artist, but his art is immediately recognisable and is absolutely consistent. It's a guy trying his best, regardless of his best being pure shite, as opposed to Alan Moore and Rick Veitch slumming it so as to pay off a few bills. More oddly, this means the Liefeld version has a quality which is lost in Moore's mish-mash of genres and in-jokes, much as I would rather read the latter than the former.

I wouldn't say The Return is actually crap so much as that somehow it just ain't right. It's certainly worth a look, but the publisher's suggestion that it rivals Moore's own Watchmen for fresh perspective on the genre strongly suggests that of those responsible, only the bearded one had the first fucking clue about what he was actually doing here.