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.

Vampirella: Crimson Chronicles Maximum

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 Vampirella: Crimson Chronicles Maximum Volume One (Harris, 2008).



I've often thought Harris Comics, who've been telling new Vampirella stories as well as repackaging the original ones that Warren published in the seventies, rather overstates the cultural impact of their limited-appeal character. I'd really have to argue her status as a "horror icon," though lovers of black-and-white horror adventures could do worse than checking out these tales.

Vampirella was created by the late, great Forrest J. Ackerman in 1968 as the horror hostess for one of Warren's anthology magazines full of parent-worrying gore and schlock, sort of a late '60s cutie-pie version of the Cryptkeeper, convoluted origin and everything. After a few episodes, two of which are reprinted here, she was given a proper, ongoing adventure series, initially helmed by Archie Goodwin and Tom Sutton. This package reprints two of the "hostess" installments and all of the Vampirella adventure stories, although not the many backup stories, from the first 37 issues of her magazine. It's a pretty dense read at 448 pages.

These episodes, which featured the character in an often-uneasy alliance with a drunk stage magician and two members of the van Helsing family, saw Vampirella in an ongoing battle against members of a dangerous chaos-worshipping cult and a gaggle of demons and monsters. Unfortunately, the series does suffer from a constant turnover of writers, who, apart from the great Goodwin, include Casey Brennan, Steve Englehart and someone with the quite unbelievable name of "Flaxman Loew," which is possibly a pseudonym for Mike Butterworth. As you might expect from an American book of this period, everybody keeps the letterers in business with incredibly wordy captions and thought balloons, and most of the action is pretty entertaining, but some ongoing subplots seem to fade away as new writers take the helm every fifty pages or so. Most of the quite wonderful artwork is by Jose Gonzales, with some fill-in work by others, including some early pages by Jose Ortiz, who'd later work on Rogue Trooper in 2000 AD.

Overall, I think it's a good collection. As you might expect from a smaller publisher, it's a little thinner than a Marvel Essentials for a buck more, but it's still very good value for money. It would have been improved by including a table of contents, page numbers and the original covers of the magazines, but for a low-priced introduction to the character, it's not a bad package. Recommended for fans of '70s Marvel Comics, as I think readers familiar with comparable books of that vintage will see lots of positive similarities.

The Beauty Supply District and Essential Avengers vol. 6

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I first told you about the remarkably strange Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer back in February, and told you then that I owed Bizarro Wuxtry a purchase of another Ben Katchor book. Actually, I've bought two now, but this was the first one I finished. It's a collection of another eighty-odd Julius Knipl strips and a new 24-page story, and it's absolutely wonderful, more tales of the city, if the city is sort of like New York and its businesses include Macedonian Coffee Shops and its museums are devoted to the minutiae of unimportant people. It's absolutely captivating, and while it might take you ten or twelve pages to figure out the strip's beat, I'm sure you'll be truly sucked in. Highly recommended.

Ben Katchor was interviewed last month by the New Jersey Jewish News. Click the image below to read!






And then there's this.

To understand my disappointment, I must explain that as a middle schooler in the early 80s who'd only recently discovered Marvel Comics, I kept reading references and footnotes in their stories to certain "classic" epics of the past, yarns like "The Kree-Skrull War," "The Avengers-Defenders War" and "The Celestial Madonna Saga." Since Marvel had no reprint program of note back then, and since I really couldn't afford the back issues, these all went unread until Marvel's Essentials line got around to them.

In short order, these supposedly classic tales were instantly revealed as damp squibs, but I don't know that any comic has had its reputation so unjustly inflated as the unbelievably stupid Celestial Madonna storyline, which weaves in and out of ten of the 27 issues reprinted here, and might just be the most tedious thing I've ever read. It's some grandiose plot involving the arch-villains Kang, Rama-Tut and Immortus, all of whom are different incarnations of the same person, and it involves no fewer than four flashbacks of ungodly length. I mean, the whole book is a disappointment - it's almost painful, watching Steve Englehart insist that the reader care about characters as flat and unlikeable as Mantis, the Swordsman and Libra - but I found myself flipping past giant chunks of this thing. I simply do not care what the mysterious, secret connection between the Vision and the original android Human Torch is, partially because Englehart never gives the readers any reason to. Do we get proper red leather jacketed Wonder Man getting drunk with the Beast in volume 7 at least? Not recommended.

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Mention of Bizarro Wuxtry reminds me: I provide links to Amazon or some other source in these reviews for your convenience, but I strongly encourage everyone to support their local businesses and comic shops. There's a whole pile of comic reviews in this blog that you can read by clicking the "what i just read" tag below which you can try out, and while I love the 40% off coupons at Borders as much as anybody, you'll be doing your neighborhood right by visiting somebody local and picking up some good reading. Credo!

(Originally posted April 14, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)