Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend

Chris Claremont, Gary Friedrich, Herb Trimpe & others
Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend (2011)

While I've very much been a fan of the Alan Davis version of the character, I've remained largely ignorant of his previous incarnation. I just about remember seeing the Captain Britain weekly advertised on the telly back in 1976, specifically the first issue which came with a free mask which was actually just half of a union jack printed on a bit of cardboard with holes for eyes. Even at the age of eleven I had difficulty seeing the appeal. I'm not sure I ever actually saw an issue of the comic. Something about the enterprise struck me as trying too hard and there was something a bit unpleasant about that weird mask which covered the lower half of his face.

As you probably know, Captain Britain was born when Marvel had the big idea of giving us blokes of Englishland a character of very our own, as distinct from black and white reprints of their American comics. Chris Claremont had been born in London and grew up in the US reading imported issues of Eagle, and Herb Trimpe was apparently living in Cornwall, so I guess that seemed close enough at the time. The problem with it is that, much as I suspected, it was trying too hard.

Firstly, everything was nevertheless done in New York - according to Wikipedia - meaning the deadlines were apparently cunty, and keeping in mind this was a weekly comic produced by a company more accustomed to monthlies with different members of the creative team on different continents and the internet not yet invented; and English comic book publishing tradition necessitated stories told in instalments of seven pages at a time. It's probably a minor miracle that it's not a complete heap of crap.

While I'm sure Captain Britain may have worked as a weekly, at least for a time, these seven-page punch-ups were never intended to be read in a single sitting. The narrative is unusually compressed even by the standards of seventies Marvel, and the action is almost continuous which becomes quickly exhausting. There's even a self-conscious jokey editor's note about it somewhere around issue twenty, by which point the whole thing has begun to feel a little like Dave Smith's Captain Captured from Viz #18 and I had trouble recalling whether our boy had actually taken a five-minute breather since Merlin turned him into a stripier Captain America on that fated night back in the first pulse-pounding issue.

In addition to this, a certain degree of Britface is probably inevitable given the creative team being torn as they were between delivering something recognisably in the Marvel superhero tradition whilst identifiably belonging to the country in which it was published, and hopefully without just being Spiderman with the references switched. Perhaps inevitably, it tries too hard and simply comes across as a bit weird with Britspeak delivered with an ostentatious flourish every few panels. Everyone is either a bloke or a bird and they all read the Times, even the bloomin' cabbies, and references to the pub and something called soccer come faster than a speeding lorry! Cops think about how they're not allowed to have guns during bank robberies. The battle with the Nazi-revivalist Red Skull goes on for what feels like a million issues and begins to suggest maybe someone back at the bullpen noticed all those British war comics and figured it might be one way of tapping into the market, and Red Skull quite naturally kidnaps the Prime Minister - apparently Jim Callaghan, but with a touch of Wilson and even Heath from certain angles; and of course the Queen makes a showing, having been hypnotised by the Manipulator who wants her to lead the Royal Navy into battle against the small African nation from which he was recently deposed. I mean it's nice that Marvel wanted to do something for its loyal British readers, and it is at least sincere, thus avoiding the smug cynicism of Austin Powers and the like, but it's fucking hard to read this stuff if you're actually from England and older than ten.

The actual stories are so ropey that it's weird, which is probably what saves the thing. Captain Britain's battle with Lord Hawk, for one example, makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Professor Scott was some friend of the family, a teacher who jacked it in due to students taking the piss out his Catweazle-esque appearance and outmoded views. His one pleasure was falconry except, as we all know, all of the hawks in England have been killed off by pollution - every last one. Brian - that being Captain Britain's secret identity - designs and builds Scott a radio-controlled robot hawk in the hope of cheering him up. Scott instead goes mental and roams the country as Lord Hawk somehow using his normal-sized radio-controlled bird to destroy power stations and other polluting bastions of modernity.

'The air will once more be pure as it was in the past,' he tells his radio-controlled bird in one panel with a villainous leer on his face, 'in the glorious days of knighthood and ladies fair when noble birds like yourself filled the skies and hunted without choking on polluted air!' He may as well be talking to a model aircraft.

Anyway, this frankly confused senior citizen and operator of what may as well be a model aircraft takes on Captain Britain, the man who designed and built the thing which may as well be a model aircraft, and which was originally a present given in the hope that it might cheer the ungrateful fucker up a bit; and somehow Lord Hawk is enough of a match for Captain Britain for the whole thing to last five issues. More than anything, the comic feels like a distended version of one of the ludicrous superhero strips in Viz, back when it was funny, which is ultimately why it remains readable. It's mostly fucking stupid, but the art is generally decent - members of the royal family notwithstanding - and it's doing everything it can to keep you entertained because it really, really, really wants you to like it. It's not difficult to see why 2000AD blew it out of the water about six months into its initial run, but this first, undeniably shaky version of Captain Britain is nevertheless worth remembering and is not without its own non-ironic charm.

 

 

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.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers

Arnold Drake, Steve Gerber, Gene Colan & others
Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow's Avengers (1977)
Neither talking raccoon nor pugilist tree anywhere to be seen, this collection being a reprint of the original version of the Guardians, as previously reprinted in the English Star Wars Weekly back when I was a boy of the age group for which these strips were written and drawn. I liked the film a lot, but for me the Guardians of the Galaxy will always be these guys - Charlie-27, Martinex, Vance Astro, and the others.

Naturally I sought this out during a fit of nostalgia not entirely unlike that which recently inspired me to shell out on collections of old Captain America and Warlock comics. Happily it too seems to have stood the test of time in so much as that whilst the strips are very clearly aimed at boys of about twelve and not much older, at least psychologically, they work well within such limitations and with no obvious pandering involved. In fact, given that this is essentially a really fat kid's comic book, I'm surprised at how many days it has taken me to read the thing. This is because Guardians of the Galaxy was first published when Marvel was at its most wordy, each panel surmounted by loquacious captionage describing the contents of said panel in a voice combining Williams Shatner and Shakespeare or thereabouts; but the writing is of such standard as to resist the quality of parody even thirty or more years later. It's not Tale of Two Cities by a long shot, and one should keep in mind that Marvel's understanding of science-fiction was essentially capes, superpowers, and men frowning and saying behold! against a Kirby inspired backdrop of planets and cosmic forces, but there's nevertheless sufficient scope for plenty of pleasantly weird ideas - not the full on acid trip of Jim Starlin's Warlock, but coming fairly close in places.

Furthermore, Arnold Drake and Gene Colan's Earth Shall Overcome!, as reprinted from a 1969 issue of Marvel Super-Heroes - the first appearance of the Guardians - probably ranks amongst the strangest comics Marvel has ever produced - van Vogt-style evolved supermen inhabiting a harshly lit expressionist world of angles and half-seen horrors. It seems significant that Arnold Drake is probably better remembered as the creator of the similarly freakish Doom Patrol. Despite the promising start, the Guardians, so it would seem, lay more or less fallow for almost another decade barring uninspiring appearances alongside the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One and later The Defenders - all gathered here - before really finding their feet with the material which was eventually reprinted in Star Wars Weekly; and for a kid's comic which still reads like a kid's comic - aside from it being difficult to process issues of The Defenders without being reminded of Daniel Clowes taking the piss out of that sort of thing - it has generally aged very well.