Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.