Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

All of the Marvels

Douglas Wolk All of the Marvels (2021)
I nearly shat myself when I first heard of this having been published. All of the Marvels is a general summary produced by a man who sat down and read almost every Marvel comic ever published from the first issue of Fantastic Four to the present day, and I nearly shat myself because I've been working on something vaguely similar, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale and which probably won't sell shit. Thankfully it turns out that Wolk's magnum opus isn't quite the same deal as that which I've been working on; although of course I had to read it to be sure, and because it seemed like it would be worth reading.

Roughly speaking, it's a history and analysis of the Marvel Universe, the environment shared by everyone from Spider-Man to Howard the Duck, allowing them all to turn up in each others comic books without the kind of contradictions which lead to knife crime at fan gatherings. Because we're talking about a world described across more than twenty-seven thousand comic books, Wolk tends to focus on those themes and characters of the larger narrative dearer to his heart, so it's a subjective, free-wheeling analysis rather than an academic exercise, which is probably as it should be. Happily, this also means that because the Marvel Universe began life in primary colours and isn't anything like so complicated as where the rest of us live, arguments made for details tend to say a lot about the whole, notably the chapter dedicated to issues of the relatively obscure Master of Kung Fu.

While I'm sure it may seem harsh to suggest that Marvel disappeared up its own arse during the nineties and has never really recovered, this is more or less how it has felt to me. It isn't that they haven't published anything decent in the last thirty or so years, because clearly they have, but there isn't much of it that speaks to me in quite the same way as it did during the years when even the pure garbage was kind of interesting by some definition. Consequently I didn't find the second half of Wolk's journey quite as engaging or convincing, and while it's interesting to read about what became of this or that character, it hasn't inspired me to track down any back issues - possibly excepting some of the Dark Reign material which seemingly foreshadowed the Trump presidency back in 2009 with disturbing acuity.

Wolk's slightly rambling style is very readable, although I found the endless footnotes a little irritating given that most of them could surely have been woven into the main text without significant disruption; and the fifty-page introduction telling us what is about to happen seems excessive and unnecessary given that All of the Marvels isn't actually a scientific thesis proposing to unscramble some previously impenetrable mystery. I gather the introduction is intended to serve as preparation for those who've never read a Marvel comic and er… who probably aren't massively likely to want to read this either, I wouldn't have thought.

We also have the not unexpected minor instances of sneering at white heterosexual males, because how dare they etc. etc.

The only kind of gatekeepers who have any business being around comics are the ones who make sure the gate stays wide open to anyone who wants to come join the fun.

Personally I don't always have a problem with gatekeepers. They tend to keep out the wankers who only appreciate your thing once they've turned it into something completely different, and which will usually be shite. Maybe it's just me. If I'm flying from one country to another I'd rather not do it in an aircraft built by persons who were happy for just anyone to come join the aircraft construction fun.

Griping aside, if it's not the Homer's Iliad claimed by all those completely impartial comic book authors who've praised the book on the back cover, it has a lot to recommend it, throws up a whole bunch of stuff that even I didn't know - sad gatekeeping fucker that I am - and leaves one feeling surprisingly warmed by its subject, reminding us that even if the medium is essentially corporate and sales driven, that which Marvel communicated between 1963 and 2017 was nevertheless often the work of genuine nutters and visionaries.

The Ironic Skeletons

Colby Smith The Ironic Skeletons (2022)
Colby Smith is a writer associated with the Neo-Decadent movement, and while I remain massively sceptical of any movement which would have me as a member, there's a strong chance of Smith being the one you really need to read. I've occasionally found some of his writing inscrutable, therefore carrying the unfortunate implication that I may not actually be quite so intelligent as I'd hoped, but his meaning is so clear in The Ironic Skeletons as to border on caustic, presenting so ruthlessly efficient a dissection of psychological collapse that it's a mercy, and probably necessary, that the book should be so short in terms of page count. Paleontology, or at least the subject of paleontology, here serves as analogy to the crumbling existence of our protagonist, D.W. Lambert, and even to the crumbling of meaning itself.

People often mistake me for an archaeologist, but I work with the corpses of things that died before the first written word, before the first uttered word, before the first thought.

The Bible erred when it placed Words before the creation of the world. The word is a recent evolutionary invention. The language I write this in will become extinct some day, just like the creatures I have dedicated my life to studying.

Babel was built for naught.

I don't know why I am writing this down, or why anyone writes anything down if their memory is to dissolve with time. I do it anyway, because I must be a narcissist like everyone else.

If the notion that someone has bolted an obsession with prehistoric animals onto a map of a nervous breakdown seems arbitrary, then you really need to read the thing because my description is unlikely to do it justice; which I say having once endured a psychologically adjacent interlude - which I survived, obviously - meaning The Ironic Skeletons taps into a strain of existential horror which, for me, seems fairly fundamental and quite overpowering. References to Hallucigenia or the Permian extinction shouldn't present an obstacle to comprehension given the context and that such details are but one part of the tapestry of D.W. Lambert's struggle for purpose; but if you're alive you should know that shit anyway, quite frankly. My own reading in this field is possibly pitiful, relatively speaking, although I've apparently picked up enough to have yelped out loud at the suggestion that therapsids may have lactated - following a quick butcher's on Google to make sure this isn't one of Lambert's paleontologically themed hallucinations.

As with a few rare pieces of music, it's quite difficult to write about this one because it explores territory which itself is best described by reference to its peripheral sensations - not unlike extinct ecosystems summarised by the skeletons they've left behind, which may or may not be a deliberate parallel. Given that Colby Smith has quite clearly lived at least some of this novel, I pray that there may be many more to come because I don't think I've read anything quite like it.

Becoming a Capstone

Omotoyosi Adebayo Becoming a Capstone (2020)
I was puzzled when this emerged from Santa's wrapping paper, given its resemblance to some sort of self-help, or at least motivational tract, and therefore not traditionally my kind of thing.

'It's David's book,' my wife explained helpfully and the penny dropped. David is one of her work colleagues. We attended the naming ceremony for Heaven, his baby daughter, about a year or so ago, which was a pleasure and felt like a great honour. David came to America from Nigeria and I've yet to meet an African I didn't like.

Anyway, this is David's story, how his family came to cross the Atlantic, and how they settled here in Texas. To get it out of the way, it's obviously the work of someone for whom English is not a first language, but the grammar and pace are simply unconventional - at least to me - rather than lacking in expressive power or elegance, and David peppers his account with a wonderful, even poetic turn of phrase. This means that the narrative voice acquires an unmistakably African accent after just a few pages, and so we get some very long sentences.

Segun sat in the middle, staring at everyone and weighing his father's words over the phone in which he told him that he would have to start college from scratch once he got to America in order to acquire a certification that would make him employable after college and give him an edge over those applying to work with foreign degrees.

Under other circumstances, the grammar of Becoming a Capstone might seem a hindrance, but the story takes over and to such an extent that the page turner promised by the back cover is delivered, despite being like nothing else I have read. David's progress from Nigeria, to a listless existence sharing a house with other recent immigrants, to minor brushes with the law, to success as some sort of programming whizz has none of the predictable quality of a typical rags to riches tales, and is told without recourse to any of the usual narrative tricks or short cuts, so the sense of consequence seems very real here; with the tone dictated by our man choosing to focus on what he gets right more than the inevitable stubbed toes.

My only real criticism is that at just over a hundred pages, Becoming a Capstone is surprisingly short for the story it tells. David has a great way of capturing detail and communicating feeling without resorting to sentiment; and I could have stood to hear about life in Lagos in maybe a little more depth.