The Death of Captain Marvel

Jim Starlin, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart & others
The Death of Captain Marvel (1982)
I may be wrong, not least because I don't care enough to bother looking it up, but I think The Death of Captain Marvel may have been the first graphic novel, or at least the first comic book to be labelled as such on the grounds of being square bound with fancy paper and a higher price tag, although really it's still a comic book. The idea that it might be aimed at a more mature audience, by some definition, came later, but I'll return to that.

This being a 2018 reprint, we also get five or six issues of the comic book as background to himself snuffing it during the main feature. This is good news because we get three issues worth of the first Captain Marvel story written by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and drawn by Gene Colan. It's superheroism as space opera, more or less, or arguably Superman rewritten as superheroic space opera given the detail of our man - an alien who passes for human - finding himself unusually enhanced once arriving on our planet. It's nothing life changing but has retained a certain power through the art of Gene Colan - surely one of the most underrated comic book artists of our time - who duplicates Kirby's monumental dynamism with his own expressionist realism to equally great effect. If his art seems hastily rendered, it doesn't seem to matter given the depth of the mood and that the reader can pretty much feel every punch and explosion.

Later issues included here date from the mid-seventies period of the comic book having grown up, as demonstrated in Jim Starlin's thoroughly peculiar Warlock and Rich Buckler's Deathlok the Demolisher - to name but two; except it didn't quite extend to Captain Marvel. Doug Moench and Pat Broderick's version is not without a certain screwy charm, but it's not Starlin's Warlock by a long shot, and, strangest of all, Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel isn't Starlin's Warlock by a long shot either. It pulls some of the same cosmic moves which were doubtless very much appreciated by one's older brother and his doobie rolling pals, but the art is anatomically clunky in places, pretty much top end fan stuff - and I've never regarded the term fan art as a compliment - suggesting as it does that this person 1) has never taken a life drawing class and 2) probably listens to a lot of Yes. Starlin, much as I love the man's work, compensates with fussy lines and an excess of detail, but it doesn't really help.

Also, particularly when compared to Warlock, the story could almost be an episode of Star Trek with more capes. It's one of those deals attempting to answer the question of why Superman doesn't end world hunger, but thanks to all the space fags and the fact of Tales from Topographic Oceans having been stuck to the turntable since October, it's a fairly safe, conservative, and even self-involved version of the question: what if Captain Marvel had cancer, just like in the real world? The answer is pretty much incorporated in the title, in case you were wondering, meaning we get scenes of the entire pantheon of Marvel superheroes all stood around the Captain's bed looking sad, interspersed with bouts of crying and the Beast asking why, Lord why? He had so much to live for.

It's not the worst thing you'll ever read, but it's burdened with the emotional sophistication of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man and lacks the flair to capitalise upon its own essentially ludicrous narrative, even before we get to the art not being anything like so mind-blowing as Starlin's otherwise much deserved reputation might promise. Somehow, Gene Colan drawing Captain Marvel punching a giant robot who says things like know you this: he who would oppose me - - must be annihilated! has a lot more soul.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.