Marv Wolfman, Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino & others
The Man Called Nova (1979)
My first encounter with Marvel was at junior school. Mark McFarland showed me a couple of loose pages presumably torn from the back covers of English Marvel reprints, magazine size but glossy with full colour images of Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Captain America and others. It was the first I'd heard of these characters and I found them fascinating and bizarre, and I was apparently young enough to be uncertain as to whether or not these were actually real people. I understood that they crossed over into each other's stories, and were logically therefore distinct from the imaginary characters seen on Doctor Who, Star Trek and so on. There was a mystery here.
By October, 1977 I was old enough to have realised that the Marvel universe was a fictitious creation spread across a number of titles, and Marvel UK was printing Rampage. It seemed like a good place to start given that I could afford both Rampage and 2000AD on my pocket money, and whilst the other Marvel titles looked amazing, I doubted I'd be able to pick up stories which had already been running for several years. Anyway, Rampage was where I first read the adventures of Nova, so I picked up this collection out of the usual blend of nostalgia and curiosity.
I'm now at least four decades past the reading age for which it was written, but it remains a nevertheless pleasurable experience. Nova is the typically implausible tale of a neurotic American teenager who inherits the powers of a centurion in the galaxy spanning Nova Corps and thusly fights crime - an obvious choice given that he lives in a neighbourhood where a bank robbery takes place roughly every four hours. Muscles bulge as pantomime bad guys deliver portentous speeches, and combat is embellished with strings of creaking puns and comic put downs, so there's a lot to The Man Called Nova which is almost painfully familiar; but its appeal comes from the telling in combination with numerous weird little deviations from the supposed formula.
For a start, where the art is good, it's good enough to eclipse a few lapses in narrative momentum. The first two issues, drawn by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnot, are as startling as anything by Jack Kirby; and while Carmine Infantino's run on the final ten issues prior to cancellation occasionally suffers from ill-fitting inks, where the balance is struck, it's frankly fucking incredible; and at its best, Infantino's Vorticist space opera is breathtaking to the point that it almost doesn't matter what he's drawing.
Nova was written by Marv Wolfman, so it's not entirely shoddy, and that which Infantino illustrated was seldom entirely without some charm of its own. As has been said before, Nova is basically Spiderman what with his agonising over grades and family life, but Wolfman avoided a straight photocopy, throwing in peculiarities such as Richard Rider - who inherits the mantle of Nova - being something of a dimbulb with his high school nemesis cast as the one with the brain and the exam results.
Moore, Morrison and others have often praised the archetypal weird sixties comic book in which the Flash spends an entire issue as a paving slab - for one example - but I'm beginning to wonder if there was truly ever such a thing as the dull, workmanlike comic book against which the former is routinely compared as an idiosyncratic explosion of wild imagination. The seemingly unpromising Man Called Nova gets pretty screwy in places, such as when our hero visits Marv Wolfman at the Marvel offices to discuss what will be coming up in forthcoming issues; or when Bobby Rider builds a robot Sherlock Holmes - complete with deerstalker and pipe - tasked with deducing what his elder brother gets up to in the evening. Additionally, there's a slightly sketchy quality to the storytelling, one which may only be apparent over multiple issues, but which gives an impression of plot details occurring without obvious cause, and there is much which seems left unexplained - not least being where the fuck Shuffles - Nova's peculiar Huggy Bear analogue - came from. For whatever reason, this causal deficit, rather than being to the detriment of the story, simply enhances its unpredictable rhythm.
The Man Called Nova could have been tighter or more consistent and maybe it would have lasted beyond twenty-five issues. Maybe it's the loose narrative swerves and possibly unwitting hokey touches which doomed it to an early cancellation, yet it is this same texture which makes the book engrossing four decades later; and if it was never going to win awards, Nova is anything but the generic superhero landfill you might have anticipated.
The Man Called Nova (1979)
My first encounter with Marvel was at junior school. Mark McFarland showed me a couple of loose pages presumably torn from the back covers of English Marvel reprints, magazine size but glossy with full colour images of Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Captain America and others. It was the first I'd heard of these characters and I found them fascinating and bizarre, and I was apparently young enough to be uncertain as to whether or not these were actually real people. I understood that they crossed over into each other's stories, and were logically therefore distinct from the imaginary characters seen on Doctor Who, Star Trek and so on. There was a mystery here.
By October, 1977 I was old enough to have realised that the Marvel universe was a fictitious creation spread across a number of titles, and Marvel UK was printing Rampage. It seemed like a good place to start given that I could afford both Rampage and 2000AD on my pocket money, and whilst the other Marvel titles looked amazing, I doubted I'd be able to pick up stories which had already been running for several years. Anyway, Rampage was where I first read the adventures of Nova, so I picked up this collection out of the usual blend of nostalgia and curiosity.
I'm now at least four decades past the reading age for which it was written, but it remains a nevertheless pleasurable experience. Nova is the typically implausible tale of a neurotic American teenager who inherits the powers of a centurion in the galaxy spanning Nova Corps and thusly fights crime - an obvious choice given that he lives in a neighbourhood where a bank robbery takes place roughly every four hours. Muscles bulge as pantomime bad guys deliver portentous speeches, and combat is embellished with strings of creaking puns and comic put downs, so there's a lot to The Man Called Nova which is almost painfully familiar; but its appeal comes from the telling in combination with numerous weird little deviations from the supposed formula.
For a start, where the art is good, it's good enough to eclipse a few lapses in narrative momentum. The first two issues, drawn by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnot, are as startling as anything by Jack Kirby; and while Carmine Infantino's run on the final ten issues prior to cancellation occasionally suffers from ill-fitting inks, where the balance is struck, it's frankly fucking incredible; and at its best, Infantino's Vorticist space opera is breathtaking to the point that it almost doesn't matter what he's drawing.
Nova was written by Marv Wolfman, so it's not entirely shoddy, and that which Infantino illustrated was seldom entirely without some charm of its own. As has been said before, Nova is basically Spiderman what with his agonising over grades and family life, but Wolfman avoided a straight photocopy, throwing in peculiarities such as Richard Rider - who inherits the mantle of Nova - being something of a dimbulb with his high school nemesis cast as the one with the brain and the exam results.
Moore, Morrison and others have often praised the archetypal weird sixties comic book in which the Flash spends an entire issue as a paving slab - for one example - but I'm beginning to wonder if there was truly ever such a thing as the dull, workmanlike comic book against which the former is routinely compared as an idiosyncratic explosion of wild imagination. The seemingly unpromising Man Called Nova gets pretty screwy in places, such as when our hero visits Marv Wolfman at the Marvel offices to discuss what will be coming up in forthcoming issues; or when Bobby Rider builds a robot Sherlock Holmes - complete with deerstalker and pipe - tasked with deducing what his elder brother gets up to in the evening. Additionally, there's a slightly sketchy quality to the storytelling, one which may only be apparent over multiple issues, but which gives an impression of plot details occurring without obvious cause, and there is much which seems left unexplained - not least being where the fuck Shuffles - Nova's peculiar Huggy Bear analogue - came from. For whatever reason, this causal deficit, rather than being to the detriment of the story, simply enhances its unpredictable rhythm.
The Man Called Nova could have been tighter or more consistent and maybe it would have lasted beyond twenty-five issues. Maybe it's the loose narrative swerves and possibly unwitting hokey touches which doomed it to an early cancellation, yet it is this same texture which makes the book engrossing four decades later; and if it was never going to win awards, Nova is anything but the generic superhero landfill you might have anticipated.
No comments:
Post a Comment