Essential Defenders Volumes 1-4

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Essential Defenders Volumes 1-4 (Marvel, 2004-08)



Here's a title that has mostly not aged at all well, but there's a run in the middle that is nevertheless completely transcendent. I just finished rereading all four volumes of Marvel's Essential Defenders, covering about the first 90 issues along with a pile of tie-in and crossover volumes, and it turned into a real slog at the end, but when Steve Gerber was writing it, this was even better than I remembered, and a real gem.

The concept came from the pen of Rascally Roy Thomas, a "tie-everything-together" fanboy who enjoyed making anybody who wanted to read comics be required to absorb fifty-eleven footnotes referring to previous adventures. In some of the books he wrote and edited, he started having some of Marvel's heavy hitters join forces against various threats to our universe. Eventually, these characters formalized for the readers' benefit in a title called The Defenders but didn't formalize with bylaws or elections or anything silly like what the Avengers were doing with their ID cards and government clearance. Much of these stories are standard period juvenilia, just fun beat-em-ups by the likes of Len Wein and Gerry Conway with occasionally terrific artwork by Sal Buscema.

Volume Two is the book to buy. Starting with a storyline that begins in the pages of the anthology Marvel Two-in-One, the late, great Steve Gerber took the writing chores for 28 issues, including tie-ins and quarterly "giant-sized" issues. Sixteen of these appear in the second volume and twelve in the third, but, unfortunately, his run is not quite complete. In one issue, the Hulk leaves the action to make a memorable guest appearance in Gerber's Omega the Unknown before returning to the Defenders storyline. Since Marvel does such a good job catching all the ephemera and tie-ins in these Essential books, the omission is pretty glaring. It's possible that, as Gerber was unhappy with Marvel resurrecting the character around this time, the publisher just shelved it either for legal reasons or grouchiness.

Anyway, Gerber's run is a vibrant and wild counterpart to his seminal run on Howard the Duck at the time, with a host of very strange villains called the Headmen taking center stage and our heroes dealing with stolen brains and an interplanetary Amway salesman called Nebulon, among other thunderously weird stuff. It's biting, unexpected and surprising at every turn and has aged very well. I like it far more than I remembered it, and I remember it as being great. If Marvel had any sense, they would reprint the full 29-issue run across two hardcovers, in color. I would buy the heck out of those books.

Unfortunately, Marvel's strange policy in the seventies of moving creators here and there without any rhyme or reason puts an end to the wonderful run. David Anthony Kraft and Ed Hannigan take things from there and these haven't aged at all well. Of low note, there's Hannigan's bizarre decision to turn Kraft's urban criminal Lunatik into some sort of otherdimensional exile, and Herb Trimpe's uninspiring art, and this one completely weird issue by Kraft and Carmine Infantino where most of our heroes, found unconscious on the Siberian shores and dying of radiation poisoning, spend several days being transported to Moscow and treated by Bruce Banner while the action keeps switching to a chase and fight scene in New York City that maybe takes twenty minutes. The books have a really odd sense of time and keep confronting readers with it. The characters occasionally refer to events from comics published twenty-four months previously as happening "two years ago," grounding the action in a one month/one issue timeline, and then making Nighthawk's civilian identity suffer a federal audit that pretty much takes up Carter's entire time in the Oval Office.

Finally, there's a villain in a storyline set in Asgard who must be seen to be believed. One day this guy, who dresses in dragon armor with a huge, teeth-filled "mouth" helmet, is going to end up as a feature at Nobody's Favorite. Maybe he doesn't stand out too much in a book with guys with giant bird wings coming out of their ears and Xemnu the Titan, but he even struck me as faintly ridiculous when I was nine. Anyway, volume one, I'd recommend for readers who have a taste for old superhero fight comics. The second and third volumes are must-haves, at least until Marvel reprints the Gerber stories in a better format. Volume four will even strain the patience of completists. There's a fifth volume out now; I figure I can live without it.

Howard the Duck

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Howard the Duck (Marvel, 2003)



When the late Steve Gerber returned to Marvel for a final, six-issue run on his most celebrated property, Howard the Duck, I remember being incredibly excited. I've reread the series several times and smiled and laughed but nevertheless closed the book each time wishing things had worked out a little bit differently.

I believe that Howard was the best American comic book of the seventies, and it still holds up extremely well, despite the aggravating aftertaste of the many sad years that followed for Gerber fighting for his rights as a creator. He and Marvel Comics stayed at loggerheads for years. It looked for a few minutes in the mid-nineties like they'd buried the hatchet, but the circumstances behind a one-off issue of Marvel Team-Up produced then proved unsatisfying to Gerber, and the incident ended with Howard and his human steady, Bev, spirited out of the Marvel Universe and into a witness protection program at Image Comics under the names Leonard the Duck and Rhonda.

About seven years later, everybody was friendly again and Gerber returned to Marvel for what would be a final six-issue epilogue for his classic characters. Back in Cleveland and working as security guards at a junkyard, Howard and Bev are desperate and just barely scraping by, but before long, their lives are turned upside down again by the craziness of life in the 21st Century. Bev's ex-husband Dr. Bong is back in town, and his latest gene-splicing scheme not only sees Howard's body changed into a great big mouse, but getting to the bottom of things will send our heroes to find the truth about boy bands, feel-good talk shows, Vertigo Comics, Witchblade and why it is that the Father always leaves the Son and the Holy Ghost to pay for the drinks.

The artwork on five of the six issues was provided by Phil Winslade, who had earlier collaborated with Gerber on the delightful Nevada. That character makes a brief, silly cameo in these pages. On one issue, Glenn Fabry, who painted the covers of the original issues steps in. I greatly enjoy each of their work a lot, and like how they pepper the pages with in-jokes and detail.

And yet... it feels bittersweet and incomplete. I really got the feeling that Gerber had so much say to say through and about Howard, even after the final chapter, which sees Howard grilling the Almighty about the purpose of existence. In a perfect world, Marvel would have greenlit a full series that would have ran for years, until we lost Gerber in 2008. Then again, in a perfect world, we wouldn't have lost Gerber in 2008. Recommended.

Time Lords and Showgirls

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Doctor Who: Agent Provocateur (IDW, 2008) and Nevada (DC/Vertigo, 1999).



In 2007, IDW got the license to make Doctor Who comics for the US market, and decided that six-issue miniseries were the way to go. They got Gary Russell, who's been writing Who novels for ages, and feature stories for Doctor Who Magazine since the mid-eighties, to be their first writer, and parceled his six scripts among four artist teams, only one of whom, Nick Roche, depicts the manic energy of the David Tennant series with anything approaching the job I'd like to see done. The other artists are at best passable.

"Agent Provocateur" is weighed down by a remarkably complicated plot and a giant cast of supporting characters, but where it is weighed down the most is in the dialogue. Certainly, Tennant is the Motormouth Doctor, but there has to be a better solution to accurately write for him than filling the most overpacked word balloons you've ever seen on a comic page, leading me to understand at last what the expression "tl,dr" means. Seriously, they were making editorial cartoons a hundred years ago that were easier to read than this mess. Not recommended.



Steve Gerber's fiction has been so important to me over time that, the first time I ever looked back at my own work and realized that I had unconsciously ripped off somebody's work for Marvel Comics - as opposed to intentionally cribbing from somebody like all kids learning to make comics do - it was this soul-crushingly embarassing eight-page proto-GMS Legion episode I did when I was thirteen. It had something to do with a character having a terrible nightmare for some forgotten but critically important reason, reminding him of some nebulous philosophical lesson. About two months after I wrote it, I realized I'd pulled it straight from one of Gerber's Adventure into Fear episodes about a nebulous philosophical lesson that I didn't understand then, either, but I'd somehow subconsciously come to understand that these were the sort of stories that comic books were supposed to tell. Ashamed of my theft, the notebook paper episode in question was crumpled into a ball immediately afterward.

Nevada has been the first Gerber story that I've reread since he passed away earlier this year. Originally published as a six-issue miniseries by Vertigo in 1998, and preceded by an oddball one-off episode in one of that label's periodic anthologies, it is the story of a Las Vegas showgirl and her pet ostrich getting caught between dueling cosmic forces with an interest in our reality, while the management of the hotel where Nevada performs deals with a rash of grisly murders.

Honestly, it's not a complete success. Episode five is really nothing but nebulous philosophical lessons, but you can certainly look at the many examples of Gerber working through his issues with our existence by putting comic book characters through an emotional wringer and railing at someone who claims to be their creator, and see a vision throughout his work quite unlike anybody else in the medium. While this stuff may be a bit heavy for many readers, Nevada herself is an oddly engaging character, despite her abrasive personality and distance. The police procedural stuff, from investigating the grisly murders to questioning a homeless, drunk former academic - a foreshadowing of the Dr. Fate revival he was working on when he passed - is really interesting stuff. Frankly, I found Nevada's cosmic resolution a small disappointment compared to the human possibilities and potentials that the plot promised, and I use "human" with the caution flag of one antagonist having a lava lamp for a head.

Nevada never returned after this outing; I suppose it didn't sell enough to warrant a follow-up, which is a shame. Despite her short shelf life and cosmic detour, Nevada was a classic Gerber character and we're better for having met her. Recommended for mature readers.

(Originally posted October 07, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Essential Defenders Vol. 3 and JLA Vol. 9: Terror Incognita

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I loved The Defenders when I was a kid. This was a bizarre book which teamed kid-favorite the Hulk with a host of B- and C-listers. I had more than a third of the books in this collection of thirty issues, but the last time I read any of them was twenty years ago, so this sparked all kinds of half-memories and nostalgia. It's occasionally frustrating to see the various writers introduce ongoing subplots that they didn't get to finish before they were moved to another title, most notoriously a serial killing elf in Steve Gerber's fun run who shows up to gun down strangers with a big revolver. It's big fun until an overwritten and ponderous three-part story about demons by the otherwise reliable David Anthony Kraft which closes the collection, and it's frankly odd to see this motormouth villain called Lunatik who is the spiritual grandfather of DC's Ambush Bug. Recommended for readers familiar with 70s Marvel Comics.




I also loved JLA as a kid, and periodically indulge patches where I buy the damn thing no matter how awful it is. Every so often, I swap my singles at Wuxtry for a collected edition. This reprints a four-part story by Mark Waid about some evil aliens - "Pale Martians," if you must know - making their second bid for global control, and two one-off stories. It's really odd, the way the creators decided to make Plastic Man the "junior member" of the team of seven and write him as utterly annoying and disliked by half the team, and then acted surprised to learn that the fanboys didn't like him. The one-off where Plas improvises a bedtime story about Santa Claus being a member of the Justice League is occasionally funny, but overall this is superheroes by the numbers, unoriginal, dull and not recommended for anybody.

(Originally posted October 10, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)