The Man Called Nova

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.

Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...

Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino & many, many others
Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...
Doomworld (1978)
Dark Encounters (1980)
Resurrection of Evil (1981)
This time it was J.G. Ballard boring me shitless, in combination with which a load of personal aggravations - significantly one of the cats breaking her leg - conspired to reduce my attention span as applied to literature which is probably important and good for you but isn't much fun to actually read; and these three collections were just sat there promising comforting retreat into a less troublesome past, so...

I was twelve when Star Wars came out, and naturally I was excited about the whole thing before I'd even seen it. I'd read the two giant-sized Marvel specials - weird collectors editions the size of tabloid newspapers - and I'd read that first issue of Starburst, and a couple of those other tie-in making of magazines they just couldn't get into the newsagents fast enough. I was excited because this was a film which looked like real life rather than special effects, even Gerry Anderson special effects. The robots seemed like real robots, as did the spacecraft; and I know we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, but no-one ever really understood what the hell happened in that film, and the adventures of Luke Skywalker promised to be significantly more exciting. Star Wars didn't disappoint when it arrived, although on close inspection I realised it somehow lacked the bite of the strips I'd begun to follow in 2000AD comic; and neither did the action figures disappoint, nor Star Wars Weekly which reprinted the two collectors editions and then went off somewhere else altogether, following its own trajectory.

These three volumes collect the first fifty or so issues of the American comic, as reprinted in shorter weekly helpings in the English version. Star Wars Weekly was never anything like so essential as 2000AD for me as a kid, although some of the back up strips came fairly close - Warlock, Guardians of the Galaxy,  Micronauts and so on. The main feature seemed variable, and suffered from each episode having been broken down into awkward lengths for the sake of a weekly schedule, but it still had its moments, or so I recall, although nostalgia has bitten me in the ass before...

A New Hope as it has since become known, adapted by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin - apparently drawn using a nail on a sheet of hardboard - is pleasant enough, and interesting for its featuring the first version of Jabba the Hut as played by Graeme Garden of The Goodies. With the adaptation out of the way, the story takes a brief detour through a slightly shite but hugely enjoyable Han Solo version of The Magnificent Seven, before really getting into gear with Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino at the controls. But for a few digressions and fill-in issues, the first two volumes of these collections more or less represent a continuing story, one which deftly avoided doing too much which could be contradicted when The Empire Strikes Back came out. The story is nicely paced, laying down intriguing plot points far in advance of their being required to explain anything, and delivering regular big ideas sufficient to keep it interesting. Of course, one problem with the comic is that it tends to expose Star Wars lack of any actual characters, or at least no-one deeper than they killed his mum and dad and now he wants revenge, or the rough and ready outlaw with a heart of gold and the like. This isn't really a problem in the film, at least not in the first one, given that scale and spectacle were the main point; and it did both pretty well, so all you really needed from anyone was at the level of the lowly farm boy who had a date with destiny. Whilst the comic strip could never really hope to achieve the scale of the celluloid, it had the next best thing in the form of Carmine Infantino's weird angular style, a sort of Vorticist translation of traditional Japanese art. Doomworld - set around a city-sized sailing ship rigged together from the trunks of underwater trees on a planet without dry land - impressed the shit out of me when I was a kid, and amazingly it has stood the test of time, albeit as something patently angled towards younger teenagers; and subsequent episodes of Luke and pals battling representatives of the House of Tagge actually work better than I remember them doing, possibly benefiting from being read over a few more concentrated sittings. Inevitably there's a degree of clunk and cliché because it's Star Wars, but I swear Carmine Infantino's art could be some of the most beautiful stuff Marvel have ever published, regardless of yer Kirbys and yer Ditkos, so it seems churlish to roll one's eyes at yet another creaking instance of C3PO testily pointing out that R2D2 has just made him look a right cunt.

Sadly it wasn't to last. Al Williamson's art on the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back is beautiful but, as with the film, the fucking thing doesn't actually have a story.

Luke is over here, then he's over there.

Let's hope he doesn't run into Darth Vader.

Oh shit - look what they did to Han Solo.

The End.

Even as an easily satisfied teenager I thought it was bollocks and stopped buying the comic, which seems to have been the right choice going by the remainder of the third volume. Having adapted Empire, it's as though the story fell and hit its head and was never quite the same again. Carmine Infantino's beautiful art gets buried beneath the linework of a roster of lesser talents, Archie Goodwin drops in and out of the mix, and we get a succession of shorter, less ambitious adventures, essentially filler material. Luke and Leia guest in a dinosaur-infested Doug McClure vehicle, or a story from the 1974 Star Trek annual, or Larry Hama's impressively dire The Third Law in which her nibs goes to the banking planet to take out a loan so the rebels can buy more X-Wing fighters; and oh what a coincidence, Darth Vader just happens to be there as well, making a loud farting noise as Leia meets with the chancellor, waving a hand in front of his face and commenting, 'I would say there was a Brussels sprout on the end of that one, your royal highness.'

That doesn't happen, but it comes close in places. The Third Law isn't actually a Davy Jones strip from Viz, but it could have been.

Never mind. Nothing lasts forever, and the point to remember is just how good the first two volumes are. Apparently they're not considered Star Wars canon, but really - who gives a shit? I'd still take Doomworld over almost anything which has appeared on the big screen since the first one.

Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Carmine Infantino & others
Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy (2014)
Nostalgia does it again. Naturally Mrs. Pamphlets and I took Junior to see Guardians of the Galaxy, assuming it would probably be one of those films we could all enjoy to a greater or lesser extent, as indeed it was. I had relatively fond memories of the Guardians of the Galaxy strip as reprinted in the back pages of Star Wars Weekly when I was Junior's age, but of course neither Martinex nor the fat guy from Jupiter were anywhere to be seen in the big screen adaptation, and Yondu had somehow grown up to be the ornery neighbour from The Waltons; and more confusing still was the presence of Star Lord as portrayed by the lead singer of Mouse Rat. Apparently it's all something to do with Dan Abnett, a man whose work is probably not for me given the girth of his bibliography and the presence therein of a Torchwood novel, but anyway the point is that I had similarly fond memories of the Star Lord strip, also from the back pages of Star Wars Weekly; and so here we are.

Star Lord, as I hadn't realised because Marvel UK chose not to reprint the more ropey material, was Steve Englehart's vision of an astrologically based cosmic superhero. Thankfully the character was soon rescued from its creator by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, which was where both myself and Star Wars Weekly came in. Star Lord was supposedly an attempt to write a comic with the sophistication of a novel, but a comic by the standards of 1976 specifically with the sophistication of a novel by Robert Heinlein; so as a graphic novel I suppose the guys beat more or less everyone but Will Eisner to the term, albeit with a strip which nevertheless reads like something aimed at precocious twelve-year old boys who listen to Boston.

When your starship captain wears a cape, gauntlets, and something on his head resembling a tiny model of a supersonic aircraft, then you know you're still very much in the Marvel cosmos, as distinct from Jim Starlin's Warlock which inhabited a similar realm as seen through a ton of drugs. Claremont overwrites as always with text heavy pages of soul-searching rhetoric written in the portentous tones of Leonard Nimoy addressing the main character.

Did you seek to raise a wry smile with your dandy turn of phrase and casual sarcasm, Lawrence Burton? Was it that passing pleasure which you didst sought?

Additionally, the stories are kind of thin and generic, with a surprisingly high quota of large breasted women in bikinis with affiliations to rebel or revolutionary forces, and those talkative alien bartenders who happily describe the entire socio-economic history of their respective planets to the alien dude in the funky costume. Star Lord predated Star Wars by about a year, which is probably why it flopped, having taken its best shot before the audience was really there; but it's roughly the same ball game, even to the point of beating the Lucas series to one of its major punchlines a few years ahead of time. Neverthless, Claremont somehow gets away with it - as he so often did - and for all his laboured corn, he keeps things moving in a way which holds one's attention and never feels quite so stodgy as it probably should, doubtless aided by John Byrne's generally wonderful art and Carmine Infantino's striking, almost Vorticist linework in the later strips.

Following Chris Claremont, Doug Moench took over the caped typewriter and the saga reverts to generic Marvel landfill of a kind which may well do the job if you're about eight, but seems otherwise unremarkable. The strip returned yet again in the nineties resembling one of the more forgettable series you might have seen in issues of 2000AD from the same era, but beyond a neat explanation as to the working of Star Lord's otherwise preposterous element gun, it all feels a bit pointless with innocent planets menaced by bad guys for the sake of our hero having someone to save whilst agonising over whether or not he's doing the right thing. Sadly, more than half of the collection fulfils all the promise of its bloody awful cover, but fuck it - never mind the filler; anything reprinting Carmine Infantino's breathtaking run on this strip is justified in my book.