Essential Captain America Volume One

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 Captain America Volume One (Marvel, 1995).



I don't think that I'll be able to give a better short review of this book than the one that my son provided. See, his mother gave him a copy of it several months ago, and it sat unread for an awfully long time. The boy's fourteen; he really has to be in the right mood to tackle something as big as this 520-page book. I don't know about your fourteen year-old, but mine spends his life in a constant state of restless boredom, and never wants to take on a project as big as this without the stars being lined up just right. Then, it's damn the torpedoes because he's going to read the entire book from cover to cover if he can. He gets along great with some friends that I have in Nashville, who would sleep for 48 straight hours in the buildup to the release of a new Harry Potter book, and then read the thing in one big marathon session starting at about 12.03 in the morning of its release.

So it was that I noticed my son crack this book not long after supper one evening, and he continued working through the book, changing from one couch to another for several hours. Lord knows how he did it. The first 160 pages of this book are very repetitive and episodic, featuring simple ten-page action stories without depth or feeling, just the remarkable artwork of Jack Kirby driving them. Other artists, including George Tuska in a really silly story about "sleeper" Nazi super-robots, will occasionally pencil over Kirby's layouts. In time, Kirby and scriptwriter Stan Lee begin introducing more subplot and structure to the stories, which start driving through a maze of grandiose villains and wild technology, but the first chunk of this book really was not meant to be read in a single sitting.

Captain America was not a character that I enjoyed as a kid, but he became one of my favorites when I grew up and began to appreciate Kirby. This is because he has the singular super-power of being able to beat the living daylights out of everybody. Not one at a time. Cap is a marvel when he's confronted by ten suited mob thugs, or twelve Nazi soldiers, or fourteen Hydra operatives, or sixteen oddly-helmeted agents of A.I.M. When that happens, Cap beats the tar out of everybody in a whirlwind of kinetic energy, blurring from one foe into the next in a dazzle of fists and boots and his mighty shield knocking bad guys down like tenpins.

My son's conclusion, when he finally emerged from the spectacle: "I did not know that Captain America was such a beast."

I can't do better than that. Recommended at the rate of one chapter a night for two weeks, and then the remainder of it in one mind-bending, jaw-breaking, skull-splitting session, but definitely recommended.

The Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume Two

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 The Essential Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel, 1998).



I suppose that I could be struck, reading this collection, as to how vibrant and wonderful Steve Ditko's art is. This collection of 25 issues of Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man contains the second half of Ditko's run as artist and co-plotter on the series, along with the first six issues of John Romita's run. I suppose that I could also be struck to learn just how steep Romita's learning curve was. Romita has been my favorite Spider-Man artist for as long as I can remember, even, heretically, surpassing the wonderful work of Ditko, but his first two issues are just stiff and awkward. Perhaps it's the inking, by Mike Esposito, not quite in sync with the pencils, but his first two issues look really sloppy and ungainly for one of Marvel's best-known creators.

But no, the main thing that strikes me about reading this collection is how utterly insane teenagers were in the 1960s. Oh, sure, they're insane now, but either scripter and co-plotter Stan Lee was coming up with laughable, flatly unbelievable elements to these stories, or they're reasonably accurate portrayals of deeply, utterly bugnuts, highly-strung freaks that are having complete meltdowns every other month. Oh, yeah, and a kid bit by a radioactive spider beats up on guys who dress like scorpions and rhinos.

You get the usual accounting of completely histrionic women that you expect in boy-targeted comics, just dialed up to eleven. Peter Parker, here aged around 17, has a few suitors, like Daily Bugle employee Betty Brant. Betty, also being wooed by a guy named Ned Leeds, flies completely off the handle, and into Ned's arms, when she learns that one of Peter's elderly neighbors has a niece around Peter's age. I mean, she flips totally out of control just hearing that somebody named Mary Jane Watson might exist. We don't even actually meet Mary Jane for many months, by which time Betty has exited the series, chased out by a possibility.

Then there's Peter's fellow classmates at Empire State, who have way too much time on their hands. During one protracted segment, Peter's Aunt May, not for the first nor the last time, is gravely ill. Peter is so upset by this that he does not talk to anybody about anything, and just goes through the day with his head hung low under a forest of thought balloons. His classmates conclude that Peter's intentionally freezing them out, prompting class hottie Gwen Stacey to alternately come onto him like a va-va-voom girl or an ice queen, with consistently weird results. Nothing anybody does in this comic has any relation to modern teenagers, who, for starters, would be blogging and Facebooking the bejezus out of how bummed they are that their aunt is in the hospital. Hell, my teenage son made a federal case out of his inability to convince his wicked stepmother to drive him twenty miles to an Apple Store. On Easter Sunday, when it was closed.

This is deeply, deeply dated stuff. I have a collection of Archie newspaper strips from twenty years prior to this, and its teen leads might be jealous, easily offended weirdos, but they're more believable than the teen attitudes depicted here. This is a shame, because the superhero stuff is really first-rate, with some impressive plots and even more impressive artwork and fight scenes, but one of the selling points of 1960s Marvel books is supposed to be how they're "realistic," and match the highwire melodrama with issues that normal readers can understand. Unfortunately, everything faced here by Peter Parker is just so utterly ridiculous, and played out with such overbearing hysteria, that it overwhelms everything around it. When it's good - when Ditko gets a dialogue-free page to show Spider-Man and the baddie of the month smacking the daylights out of each other, when Lee depicts a hero who can out-talk and outwit anybody - it is almost transcendent, but when it is ordinary, it is excruciating. Recommended for very patient readers.

Essential Thor Volume 3

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 Thor Volume 3 (Marvel, 2007)



About 18 months ago, with one eye skeptically wavering, I sat down to read the second volume of Marvel's Essential Thor, knowing that I really didn't like the character when I was a kid and read some his overblown and stilted late '70s adventures, but also knowing that the original '60s material by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby was certain to be different and superior. I had no idea what a trip I was in for. This stuff was completely wild and wonderful, absolutely one of the best two or three comics of the 1960s.

I elected to save this book for a rainy day, so to speak, and savored the anticipation, and am glad that I did. What a thrill this book is. It's 500 pages of beatdowns and wildly escalating, insane cosmic threats. It's every bit as long as a proper rollercoaster should be, especially one of the great wooden ones like the Georgia Cyclone where you have no idea where in the ride you are or what you can possibly expect around the next bend. Lee and Kirby just kept ratcheting this mad book up, with one unbelievable threat after another for thirty issues without a pause. There's Ulik the troll and the Wrecker and Karnilla the Norn Queen and a war between Galactus and Ego the Living Planet and Greek deities and Mangog and every so often, you just have to put the book down and rest for a little bit.

In the stories reprinted in the second volume, the format was a 16-page lead story and a separate five-page backup by the same team called Tales of Asgard where Thor and some of his adventuring friends had wild tales set in some nebulous, glorious past. Those backups reach an end after about ten of the 30 issues here, and I kind of missed them, though I was pleased that Fandral, Hogun and Volstagg were incorporated into the main storyline, expanded to twenty pages at a time, a little bit. They're present when Mangog, sole survivor of a race of billions who got on Odin's bad side some millennia previously, decides to attack Asgard while Odin is in his cannot-be-awoken-lest-the-universe-end "Odinsleep," leading to the cast's most desperate battle yet, until the next one, anyway. It's a book that writes its own hyperbole. Sheer, unadulterated bliss.

Also, at one point, Thor is flying around New York, realizes he's thirsty and gets himself a chocolate ice cream soda. He salutes the soda jerk's concoction and cute girls swoon over him. If that doesn't make you smile, you're hopeless.

There's a fourth Essential Thor available which takes the story into the early 1970s, and sees Kirby, whose art in this book will separate your jaw at least once every ten pages, stepping down, replaced by John Buscema and Neal Adams, and Lee handing the reins to Gerry Conway. Those men are all fine talents, but a big part of me doesn't want to see the saga end that way. In a perfect world, Thor is so much more than a simple character within the big, bulky Marvel Universe and a cog in that machine, he's the lead character in one of the most consistently entertaining comics that anybody's ever made. Very highly recommended.

Essential Avengers Volume 7

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 Avengers Volume 7 (Marvel, 2010)



It took me six months, and I'm not saying I deserve a medal or anything, but I just finished reading (or rereading) every Avengers comic that Marvel published in its first eighteen or so years. It's a little difficult to say exactly when; Marvel doesn't include any proper publication information in the pages of their Essential series. Even when they decided to be complete dicks and redesign their books in a nose-thumbing at geeks like me who like to have matching spines on our bookshelves, they didn't take that opportunity to give their books page numbers, much less anything helpful in the table of contents. It really doesn't make all of those breathless Roy Thomas annotations like "*See the current ish of Cap's own mag!" any easier to understand.

I've learned a few things from this reread. Among them: The Avengers chews up and spits out writing talent. Everybody who started on the title came to it with enthusiasm and clever ideas, but it took about twenty issues for the shine to dull. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart each had almost two years of really fun stories in them, but by the time each writer petered out, you can feel the words dying on the page. Lee's last ten or eleven stories, which lead Volume 2, are arguably among the worst things he wrote for Marvel, but they're the highest of art compared to what Thomas, who started really well and probably better than Lee, turned into by the end.

I've written in previous reviews how, one by one, all those legendary mammoth Avengers storylines were revealed to be little more than B-movie trash, but "The Kree-Skrull War" really took the cake the second time around. That's the one where, instead of focusing the melodrama on the Mighty Thor flying through space and smashing the bejezus out of an alien battlefleet, Thomas built the climax around Rick Jones, the teen sidekick character who never got the memo to just go the fuck away, locked in a closet with a talking turnip remembering a bunch of old funnybooks from the 1940s. It's the worst thing ever, at least until Englehart's "Celestial Madonna" story, every page of which screams to the heavens with a misbegotten insistence of self-importance as Mantis, raised from birth to be Little Miss Perfect, use the phrase "this one" instead of "I," and, well, marry a tree, ascends to a higher plane of consciousness. If you ever thought this saga was ever worth reading, it's because you read it when you were twelve. And wrong.

On the other hand, there's some far better art to be found here than people think. Don Heck doesn't get a lot of praise, but his mid-sixties work is beautiful, just effortlessly contemporary. There are so many artists in the biz who never update their fashion references, and so Heck's zippy LBJ-era suits, cocktail dresses and cigarettes, emphasizing the now so casually, just shine with period cool. Admittedly, a lot of the work that came after him was simple Sal Buscema journeyman stuff, but Neal Adams' hyperdramatic posing and agonized faces in Volume 5 even make "The Kree-Skrull War" worth looking at.

But George Perez... now, there's a guy who has a deserved reputation for drawing terrible books, but man, could he ever draw them well. Volume 7 includes some of his early professional work and it's so terrific that I got actively aggravated whenever he missed a deadline and some inventory story or fill-in artist showed up. In this volume, Englehart finally winds up his increasingly tedious tenure with another big, overrated epic called "The Serpent Crown," in which, for reasons I never understood, the former teen comedy star Patsy Walker insists that Hank McCoy, the Beast, make her into a superhero and she gets a supersuit that lets her become "the happy-go-lucky Hellcat!" I guess that's a good thing; I adored another Marvel team book, The Defenders, in which she starred, when I was a kid, and those rereads don't depress me nearly as much as these do.

Well, at least the art in "The Serpent Crown" is nice, but the story, in which the Avengers are trapped on a parallel Earth - a cute, in-jokey version of DC Comics' Earth, with stand-ins for their Justice League - in which... well, a crown with serpents on it mind-controls everybody to... well, I never figured out what was going on. Replace "serpent crown" with "antelope codpiece" and you've got the same story, basically.

Gerry Conway and Jim Shooter take over script duties from there and things improve massively, although not really to the point that I was ready to tell everybody I knew about these great funnybooks I was reading. There's a four-part crossover with the dementedly, lovably silly Super-Villain Team-Up in which the team gets caught in the middle of a war between Dr. Doom and the Atlantean archvillain Attuma, and Ultron shows up again, and the Grim Reaper, a deeply silly bad guy who can honestly take credit for being one of the few genuinely, believably insane characters Marvel came up with, shows up again, because his brother Wonder Man got brought back from the dead, but his brain patterns had already been used by Ultron to program the android superhero the Vision and Grim Reaper has a complaint with that... I swear it makes more sense when you read it.

It is nice on those occasions where the writers stopped feeling obliged to pay lip service to the comic's mountain of continuity. It's hard to create lasting escapist entertainment when you can't even escape from the stories that preceded you! Creating new characters and villains, like a really odd guy called Graviton who's the director of a scientific think tank and notably older than the rest of the cape-clad cast, made for much more fun stories than the backward-looking ones. Having said that, George Perez could draw almost any superhero comic and I'd be willing to give it a look. As for Essential Avengers, volume one is probably worth it for the early Stan Lee / Jack Kirby / Don Heck material, and volume three for Roy Thomas's best work, and volume seven for George Perez, but "essential" really is pushing it, to be honest.

Spider-Man Newspaper Strips Volume One

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 Spider-Man Newspaper Strips volume one (Marvel, 2009)



When it comes to reviewing books and records and movies, I'd like to think that I got all the nasty negativity out of my system when I was in college, writing for the newspaper as a rawk critic and wishing I was Steve Sutherland or Nick Kent or Swells, somebody like that. Not Bangs, he wasn't British. Those were the days I could legitimately spend a full calendar year wishing that chowderhead Daniel Ash would release just one more record so that I could savage it so well that word'd later get back to me that Professor Fink in the j-school had held my piece up as an example of how to write.

These days, though, I just try to quit reading something I'm not enjoying, and I'd really, really rather not engage in ugly vitriol. Plus, nobody pays me for this. Well, I might try and make a joke every once in a while, but instead of uncapping a poison pen, I'd rather consider what sort of compromises were necessary to get something so completely misguided and ugly as the first volume of Spider-Man Newspaper Strips in print in the first place.

I find it curious that the comic blogsophere has had so little to say about this book. If Marvel Comics promotes a new release on the back of somebody else's promotion, the circles I read explode for two weeks. Similarly, everybody is very keen to hear what IDW and Fantagraphics have to say about their archival reprints of classic newspaper strips, and anything from those companies along those lines is guaranteed to be discussed and debated. Yet when Marvel released a collection last year of their 1970s Spider-Man strip, giving it the full hardcover treatment, with restored artwork by the mighty John Romita (or was he "Jazzy"...?) and some supplemental material, the internet discussion sites were surprisingly muted. Was everybody just being inordinately polite?

I don't know whether the design or the actual strip is the main problem, but the coin came up heads, so here you go: this is one butt-ugly book. It's printed sideways.



The best I can figure is that Marvel uses one printing company for their hardcovers, and they can only do a single trim size, and printing three strips per page would have required that the art be shrunk at least 10%, and the designer didn't want to do that to Jazzy John. That's just a guess, and it's the best I've got. Seriously, nobody planned to come up with something this stupid, did they? Perhaps the designer was told that the book would be in the wide format similar to what IDW and Fantagraphics have popularized and laid out the strips accordingly, and somebody else later decided they wanted to rack it next to the Marvel Masterworks?

That said, it's more than just the stupidly awkward format. The tan background is perhaps a nice notion, to make the art stand out more, but it doesn't really work for me. Adding fussy little spiderwebs and red explosions around the page numbers distracts readers, and makes the product look like a third-party coloring book, even more juvenile than the strip itself. And that's saying something. This strip was for dimwits.

When I was in elementary school, I liked Spider-Man just fine, but I never read this strip, which appeared locally in the evening paper, The Atlanta Journal. The morning Atlanta Constitution ran the competing World's Greatest Superheroes featuring the DC characters. That was a pretty ridiculous guilty pleasure, beloved today by pretty much only me, but even at the age of eight, I knew that goofball mess was miles better than the Marvel offering.

Adventure strips have to use a curious pacing to keep casual readers interested, while not moving so quickly as to confuse people who only see it twice a week. Some writers can do it amazingly well, but Lee's constant rehashing of the same bored tics and tropes just grate, and you'll want to never again read about Peter Parker after the fourth or fifth time he refuses to defend himself out of costume, because he apparently cannot control his super strength and is afraid he'll punch somebody too hard. What the heck? Compilations like this sometimes chafe because older comics would restate certain character traits every month for newcomers, but I swear it seems like Lee was doing it twice every week, especially when the agonizing Aunt May spends day after day worrying about poor, poor, poor Peter. It's like trying to wring sympathy out of Gladys Kravitz; it can't be done.

I'd give Lee some leeway if the storylines were worth the boring, redundant character quirks, but apart from one interesting plot by the Kingpin to get Spidey to work as his lieutenant, they are never more than Spidey Super Stories-level. Doctor Doom somehow manages to be boring in a convoluted scheme to drive Spidey onto the couch of a psychiatrist who's actually a robot, and there's a deeply seventies tale about Flash and Harry Osborn opening a hot new nightclub which is even more ridiculously wish-fulfilling and G-rated than the plot of Xanadu.

But the booby prize has to go to the Mysterio story. In an apparent attempt to promote CBS's oddball Spider-Man TV series of the time, some Hollywood producer decides to make a Spider-Man movie, and Peter decides to go to California to "star" in it by doing the Spidey stunts, and J. Jonah Jameson decides to send Parker out there to cover it, and the special effects guy decides to kill the lead actor. I started counting the things wrong with that, and ran out of fingers.

Perhaps at a lower price, this might make for a cute little curiosity and period piece, the sort of thing that internet comedians like Chris Sims and Kevin Church would enjoy clowning. After all, as the duo behind the monthly Amazing Spider-Man comic in the late sixties, Lee and Romita spun some terrific yarns - I actually, heretically, prefer that period to the original days of Steve Ditko - and their reteaming should have been worth at least a look, even if it turned out so lousy. But to put such mediocre material out there and package it so badly and to charge forty bucks for it, well, I'm not sure who I'm angrier with, Marvel for releasing something so lousy or me for still not learning the expensive lesson to actually have a product in hand to look at before I ask Bizarro Wuxtry to order me a copy.

Oh, wait, this book arrived shrinkwrapped. It's like Marvel knew something we didn't. Not recommended. Avoid.

Bring On the Bad Guys

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Bring on the Bad Guys (Fireside, 1976)



In the 1970s, one of Simon & Schuster's divisions launched an annual collection of Marvel Comics reprints. I guess there were ten of these, reasonably priced samplers of mostly Stan Lee-scripted superhero smash-ups, and they were certainly the gateway drug for millions of kids who'd never seen much of the classic 1960s Marvel work.

These days, these sort of samplers seem pretty quaint and silly in the wake of so much reprinted material available. I found my copy of Bring on the Bad Guys - an extremely nice first edition for $5 - at the old Lakewood Antique Market in 2004, and there's nothing in it that hasn't since been collected in the pages of Marvel's Essential line. Each chapter has one or two stories, or some multi-part adventures, telling the tales of those nefarious nasties Doctor Doom, the Red Skull, Loki, the Green Goblin, Dormammu, the Abomination and Mephisto. These are names that should, if the 4-5 pages of introductory material for each chapter (penned especially and breathlessly for this edition by Smilin' Stan) have done their job, strike fear in the hearts of law-abiding citizens everywhere!

About half the artwork in this book is by Jack Kirby, and honestly, I was never really taken with his earliest work on Fantastic Four. This has got that odd little story where Doom forces our heroes to travel back in time and collect Blackbeard's treasure for him, and while the artwork is better than just about anything in mainstream comics today, it's not a patch on what he'd accomplish in just a couple of years. The sequence where the Red Skull kidnaps and brainwashes Captain America, and the climactic part of Thor's battle with Loki and the Absorbing Man, along with some short "Tales of Asgard" adventures detailing Thor and Loki's long enmity, well, those are jawdropping.

Just about the only thing in 1960s comics to come close would be Dr. Strange's initial, mindblowing battle with Dormammu and those Nameless Ones, which Steve Ditko co-plotted and drew, and it's just amazing stuff. I still think Marvel's criminally missing some sales by not packaging all of the Ditko Dr. Strange stories in a nice hardcover with good paper. There's sort of a bitter irony in that the Spider-Man adventure included here would be the one which Ditko refused to draw, in which the Green Goblin reveals his identity. John Romita drew this adventure in sort of a lackluster Ditko imitation before his own style really manifested, and it ends up, visually, being the weakest thing in the book.

The Abomination story is drawn by Gil Kane, and it's notable for the almost naive take on the Hulk's power, which kept being described in the sixties as limitless, but nobody ever seemed to believe it. I think that's why I prefer the comparatively low-powered 1960s Marvel Universe. One cliffhanger comes when Abomination just smacks Hulk in the head really hard and Rick Jones starts screaming that not even the Hulk could survive a blow like that. These days, I reckon you could split the planet in half and it wouldn't slow him down. Yawn. Finally, John Buscema draws a Silver Surfer adventure, and he draws the hell out of it, but I've always thought that this was the series, among all others, where Stan's dialogue reached its overblown, overwritten pinnacle, and so I just sort of tuned out and enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures.

As a sampler or an introduction, this book's just terrific. It's one of those books that every aunt and uncle in America should have handy for when younguns visit. I mean, really, if an under-ten isn't doing a double-take at the sight of Kirby's Cap beating the hell out of enough Nazis to completely pack a hallway, or Ditko's Strange crossing limbo voids where nobody ever heard of physics, then you need to get that kid checked out. Something's wrong with him. From a collector's standpoint, it's also pretty handy. The next time somebody tells you they're not interested in Essentials because they're in black and white, you can show 'em this and compare the aggravating off-register printing and limited color palate to the nice, unvarnished, untainted Kirby artwork in Essential Thor volume two and settle the argument instantly. Recommended, of course. Now how about putting together some new editions of this and the two Origins books and The Superhero Women and the others, so folks can buy 'em again, Marvel?

Johnny Nemo and Stan's Soapbox

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 Johnny Nemo: Existentialist Hitman of the Future (Cyberosia, 2002) and Stan's Soapbox: The Collection (Hero Initiative, 2008).



I reread this fun little collection earlier this week. It was published by a company called Cyberosia earlier in the decade, but they would appear to have anticipated the graphic novel boom/fad a little too soon, and it doesn't look like they're around currently. I had no idea this book existed until I found it in the cheap shelves at Heroes Aren't Hard to Find in Charlotte a couple of years back.

It compiles several adventures of Peter Milligan and Brett Ewins' hyperfashionable 30th-Century tough guy private eye which were originally published in the mid-1980s, first in the indie anthology Strange Days and later in Deadline. Unfortunately, it doesn't include any background details, so it is impossible to determine just how many of Nemo's bizarre cases made the cut for this collection. I don't imagine that it's complete, and the optimistic "volume one" on the front just reinforces that view.

The stories themselves are dated by their design. Ewins' world is one where the shoulderpads and skinny ties of 1984 never went out of style even as the architecture morphed into the "thin-tower with a mushrooming penthouse" future look that was common in Keith Giffen's LSH at the time. Steve Dillon contributes one tale which is just gorgeous to look at, and there are a pair of text adventures which only show just how well Ewins and Dillon use pacing in the comic adventures for much better comedic effect.

Nemo himself is a hilarious presence, an unstoppable alpha male who confidently finds the solution to outlandish sci-fi situations involving exploding nuns and the magical power of Bing Crosby. It's telling that the book was published with a glowing quote from Warren Ellis on the back. I've not read much Ellis - probably just enough to know that I'm not especially interested in Ellis - but I think his fans will quickly see that his characters Lazarus Churchyard, Spider Jerusalem and Elijah Snow all have Nemo as their spiritual godfather. Recommended, therefore, for fans of either Milligan or Ellis. I can't see this really converting anybody not familiar with their work already.



Face front, true believers! The Hero Initiative, an organization which provides supplemental medical care and other benefits for comic book veterans in need of assistance, came up with this wild and woolly trip through the sixties and seventies via the eyes of Marvel Comics' one-and-only Smilin' Stan Lee!

As any tried-and-true FOOM knows, Smilin' Stan used to write a little column in each month's Bullpen Bulletins. Stan's Soapbox was in equal parts a place to hype forthcoming projects, be it the first bookshelf collections of Mighty Marvel storylines, calendars or short-lived magazine ventures like Pizzaz, or personal appearances at various college campuses, or just use the soapbox to talk a little about current events.

Alongside a running narrative of current events, both at Marvel and on the world stage, this slim book reprints all of Stan's Soapboxes, along with remembrances from other creators and current Marvel editorial bods. Honestly, I found the book completely charming, and the design and layout are quite nice. Certainly it's not a book to be read cover-to-cover, but if you grew up in what that mysterious blogger known only as The Groovy Agent has termed the Groovy Age of Comics, then this is a superb little distraction, and probably could be read very well in tandem with one of these recent coffeetable histories of Marvel, like that new Marvel Chronicle book that came out late last year. Recommended for people born between 1965 and 1975.

---

I figured out that the best way to do these periodic reviews without getting bored will be to chiefly review books that aren't part of a series. I might find cause to mention a series in the monthly Reprint This! update, if I can do that right!, but otherwise I'm usually only going to mention stand-alone books in this column. That will mean fewer of them, but also fewer examples of me trying to explain how volume 14 of Dr. Slump is that much different from volume 13. That should keep things more readable.

(Originally posted January 23, 2009 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

The Great Outdoor Fight and Nick Fury

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 The Great Outdoor Fight (Dark Horse, 2008) and Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD (Marvel, 2000).



This is the first collected edition of Chris Onstad's Achewood comic, and it's a simply gorgeous book. It looks exactly like it would have been designed fifty years ago, sort of like an old high school yearbook with an elk or a caribou embossed on the front.

I have to say that the overall appeal of Achewood continues to elude me, though I will, very occasionally, bust a lung laughing, which is more than the zero appeal of many strips. I know it gets lots of critical love, but the characters all talk as though Chris Onstad finally snapped after the umpteenth suburban kid with a crew cut shouted WHAT UP DAWGGG outside his window, and if he has the talent to draw with more style than Scott Adams, he hasn't exercised it yet. Setting aside the deeply unappealing character designs, this really works against The Great Outdoor Fight visually, because I just don't believe in this gigantic world, with thousands of bare-knuckled combatants, that he keeps telling us is there without ever showing us. Perhaps Achewood's fans are taken by Onstad's use of language. He's extraordinarily funny sometimes, and I had to put the book down more than once from laughing.

There's something well-written here despite the artwork and the obnoxious, cross-the-street-to-avoid characters, and I certainly recommend you give the webcomic a spin of a month or so to see what you think. If you enjoy its online presence, then the presentation of this book will really impress you, because Onstad provided some remarkably funny extras in the form of background for the annual fight, and Dark Horse's design team just knocked this one out of the park. It's good stuff, but a step or two away from great.



You know that feeling you got when, after hearing so much about The Man from UNCLE, you finally sat down to watch it and it was dated, slow and just bafflingly old-fashioned? Meet Nick Fury, a comic so firmly 1960s that its appeal outside of that decade is entirely down to Jim Steranko's frankly amazing design skills. This book compiles nineteen episodes which originally appeared in Marvel's anthology Strange Tales from 1966-68. It starts with some episodes by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby which wrap up some earlier storylines, and it feels like labors from an overworked team - eighteen months of previous episodes are not included here - and Steranko becomes the inker in the second story, gradually taking over the book completely.

Fury's snappy tough-guy patter and New Yawk "sock it ta ya" cadence is obnoxious from the outset, and none of the outcomes of any of these stories are ever in doubt. Invariably, a shirtless Fury will overpower any obstacle with the assistance of unbelievable spy gadgets while his comedy sidekicks marvel at his stamina. The artwork is periodically inspired, and every once in a while Steranko pulls a completely unnecessary-but-jawdropping flourish out of his hat and leaves the production team baffled as to how to print the weird thing, but really, these stories were never meant to be read all in one go, and the monotony will wear anybody down. Not really recommended.

(Originally posted September 28, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Ditko, Flint and Kirby

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 Essential Doctor Strange Vol. 1 (Marvel, 2004), Judge Dredd: The Henry Flint Collection (Rebellion, 2008) and Kirby: King of Comics (Abrams, 2008).



I picked this up at the Great Escape in Louisville in the spring for nine bucks, and I have to say, if there's a more mistitled book in the whole "essential" library, I haven't seen it yet. Doctor Strange originally appeared as eight-ten page episodes in Marvel's anthology book Strange Tales, and after a hesitant start over the first three or four shaky installments, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created something genuinely weird and compelling. The visuals are just amazing, and there's a sense of a universe so wild and unrestrained that you're willing to overlook the conventions of 1960s comics, like the talky, cod-Shakespearian dialogue. Nobody says "'tis" as much as Dr. Strange. But there's a great cast, highwire ideas and clever plotting, culminating in a lengthy serial where Strange's two chief villains team up to destroy him. It's genuinely great stuff.

And then, after about 300 pages, Ditko leaves. And while Bill Everett, Roy Thomas and others try their best, what follows is not even remotely essential. I gave up on it, frankly. I'd be much happier with a simple "Complete Ditko" edition of this comic on better paper, because that's the Essential Dr. Strange, not all this extraneous mess. By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, make it so, Marvel!



This is the third of Rebellion's artist-centered Judge Dredd collections. (The others spotlight Cam Kennedy and Carlos Ezquerra.) This one presents about a dozen episodes of varying length by one of Dredd's best modern artists, and I can't find a nit to pick with it. It includes the hilarious "Turkey Shoot" and the fantastic "Flood's Thirteen," which starts as a parody of those Clooney-Pitt heist films before falling apart in a spectacular disaster of teleporters, stolen identities and lobotomised terrorists. Highly recommended!



The short version: Boy, this is good, but I'm unsatisfied, knowing that there is much more out there.

Mark Evanier's Kirby: King of Comics is a gorgeous coffee-table biography of one of the medium's great thinkers and talents. Don't let the appalling cover dissuade you; the interior is as flawlessly designed as you could hope for, and features hundreds of wonderful illustrations of Kirby's work on creations ranging from Captain America to the bulk of 1960s Marvel - pretty much everybody you've heard of other than the handful that Ditko designed. The writing is incisive and paints a real, complete portrait of Kirby, but many of the details that appeal to me as a reader and completist are, due to space limitations, glossed over.

I would love to learn much more than this book provides, and happily, Evanier is in the early stages of a more comprehensive bio. This is a more than adequate placeholder until then, and will surely satisfy most readers, or new fans who'd like to have their eyes pop out at the sight of some of these original sketches, cosmic layouts behind the bizarre visage of Galactus, collages, caricatures and ephemera. Recommended on the understanding that something more essential will one day supplant it.

(Originally published July 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Swingin' Sixties Edition, with Tezuka and Kirby

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 Dororo (Vertical, 2008) and Essential Thor volume 2 (Marvel, 2005).



Dororo was first published over twelve months in the pages of Shonen Sunday from 1967-68. The strip didn't reach a proper concluding episode by the time its creator, Osamu Tezuka, wrapped up his one-year commitment and went off to do other things, but it inspired a successful cartoon adaptation and was recently made into a live-action film. Vertical released the first English edition of the comic in April.

I can't give this quite the emphatic recommendation that I had hoped to. That's not to say this wonderful story by Tezuka is at all bad; it concerns a swordsman named Hyakkimaru and his associate, a young little thief calling himself Dororo, who travel through a strange, timelost medieval Japan on a quest to slay 48 demons. Because of a deal made by his evil father, Hyakkimaru was born a misshapen, helpless thing without a face, organs or limbs, kept alive by magic and willpower, and given prosthetics by the kindly doctor who raised him. The death of each demon restores one of the body parts he was born without. It's an odd mix of allegory and adventure fiction.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and was pleased to see another mad appearance of the "face tumors" that the great Tezuka would also use in an installment of Black Jack, although played a little differently here.

Unfortunately though, the translator's periodic use of modern slang and phrases which weren't in use when this serial was first published forty years ago really takes the reader out of the story. I think this is fantastic and can't wait for more collections - there are apparently just two more to come, completing the original serial - but I also can't help but believe that this was just one edit away from being truly perfect. It also makes me worry whether Vertical's translation of Black Jack will be accurate.




This, on the other hand, this I can recommend completely.

As a kid, I didn't have much interest in the late 70s Thor. It felt old-fashioned and wordy. Now, adult reasoning tells us that proper Lee and Kirby Thor from the 60s must be good stuff, because, you know, it's Stan Lee and Jack Kirby but their Thor comic is perhaps overshadowed by the period's other, more merchandised material, and it was rarely reprinted. So I'd never actually seen the real stuff before now. I was advised to start with the second collection, as it took a dozen or so issues for the team to find their feet. But if what's in the first book is even half as good as what's in the second, I'll concede that this is even better than the duo's Fantastic Four at its peak.

Holy anna, I can't tell you how fun this book was. It is a complete blast from cover to cover, one great big serial of wildly over-the-top mayhem. There's one sequence where some armed robbers burst in to a restaurant where Hercules is trying to eat, and he beats the hell out of most of them, chases the others outside, and incapacitates their getaway car by hurling a street lamp at the tires and separating the car's undercarriage from the rest of it.

Best of all is Thor himself, who's certainly old-fashioned and wordy, but man, nobody trash-talks like this guy. Even when Odin the All-Father gets annoyed at him for some familial slight and saps half his strength, he still tells his opponents in no uncertain terms just how unbelievable a beatdown they're about to suffer, and then delivers.

The artwork is uniformly amazing from cover to cover. It's certainly true that Kirby's work would have been better served with Joe Sinnott or Dick Ayers on inks than Vince Colletta, but I was never taken out of the reading experience because of sloppy linework or shortcuts. Whether it's the grandeur of Asgard or the deck of some spaceship in the "Black Galaxy," there's always something completely amazing to catch your attention, and surprises galore. I was familiar with Ego, the Living Planet from the 1980s Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but its first appearance is still completely eye-popping.

Neatly, each issue of Thor teamed a 16-page lead story set in the contemporary Marvel Universe with an ongoing 5-page serial called Tales of Asgard, in which Thor and his warrior pals have an earlier set of adventures. It's in these that we meet this enormous, overweight braggart called Volstagg. I remember as a kid thinking this guy was the stupidest thing in comics, but in Lee and Kirby's hands, he's actually completely hilarious.

There are currently three Essential collections of Thor - 500-ish pages for $17 - with a fourth on the way next year which should, if I understand it, wrap up the Lee and Kirby days. I've got book three on order at my local comic shop, and so should you. The best superhero book of the sixties? Quite possibly!

(Originally posted June 13, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)