Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (12) - Forbidden Allure

There’s an inherent tension in being a longtime obsessive comics fan and collector. Once the superhero universes evolved from each issue being considered a one-time, disposable, consequence-free storytelling opportunity to regular installments of an ongoing, never-ending saga, with a built-in audience that would keep coming back for more, a great deal was gained but a little bit was lost: the idea of the complete story. By their open-ended nature, superhero comics became a kind of narrative without a classic storytelling structure. I’m not the first or the last person to note this, but while you can encapsulate Batman as “young wealthy orphan declares war on crime” you also have to realize that he’s never going to win (or lose) the war, because that would be the ultimate triumph that signals it’s time to roll credits. So it goes for all superheroes, who battle for truth and justice in one form or another ad infinitum.

But taken at face value that would be really boring, too, so the aforementioned tension is acknowledging that there are stories within stories, which is pretty self-obvious, and also acknowledging that if the outer story is essentially infinite, the inner stories can be any length at all. The great leap forward in comics storytelling was the realization that if kids wanted to take in the whole Spider-Man story, and that meant they would show up in June with a quarter in hand for an issue where Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin, and show up in July with another quarter for another issue where Spider-Man fights Doctor Octopus, and show up in August with yet another quarter for yet another issue where, this time, Spider-Man fights a Skrull disguised as Aunt May just to keep things interesting, IF that were the case then logically it should also be true that the same kids would buy three consecutive issue of Spider-Man that told one long story about Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin, where Spider-Man tracks his foe down in June, fights him, loses, and regroups in July, then fights him again and finally prevails in August. And of course at some point in the July issue, Doctor Octopus would show up, claiming to be reformed, which would lay the groundwork for the next story-within-a-story that would start in September.

And as I’ve mentioned previously, Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics were replete with this approach to storytelling, with stories-within-stories-within-stories, which was thrilling to follow along with and elevated everything to an epic feel. The downside to this, however, is that if you were just trying to jump in on any given month, you might happen to get the beginning of a story that wouldn’t pay off for a few issues, but you were just as likely to find yourself in the middle of a couple of other subplots, or main plots. And yes, the house style was generally to write (or include editor’s notes)in such a way that a neophyte was brought up to speed on the broad strokes every issue, but even so there would be a feeling of missing a bit of the big picture, a few details which didn’t derail comprehension but would be awfully swell to have all the same.

In the 80’s, my personal golden age of comics, there really was no way of telling if a given issue of Spider-Man or Fantastic Four on the newsstands was the beginning of a storyline or the middle or the end or what. And over in X-Men, those distinctions were all but meaningless because every issue was the end of an A storyline, the continuation of B and C storylines, and the introduction of a D storyline. So you just had to take a deep breath and dive in and hope for the best.

Alternatively, you could devote your attention (or some of it, anyway) to some of Marvel’s side offerings, such as the limited series that popped up now and then. I’ve already talked about one such example in Squadron Supreme, but Marvel cranked them out pretty regularly, in what I’m sure was both a market-savvy means of addressing the exact dilemma I’ve laid out above as well as a strategy for keeping creators happy by allowing them to tell stories that didn’t fit in the ongoing books, and/or wouldn’t sustain a brand new ongoing. Whatever the motivation, as a kid it was nice to see that reassuring “#1 in a 6-issue limited series” banner on top of a cover, because you knew you could jump on and get a full story complete with satisfying resolution, without having to collect obsessively for years and years.

So here it is, one of my favorite Marvel limited series, one which really puts a bow on the last few TD posts I’ve been working my way through, because (a) it’s an X-Men adjacent title (b) it’s not branded as a What If…? but it definitely concerns alternate timelines, and (c) I picked up all four issues of it from one back issue longbox at a comic book show. I’m also reasonably sure that I only knew that this limited series existed because TD had a single issue, which I read in his room, at which point I was compelled to track down the entire set. And did I mention that the protagonist is one of my all-time favorite Marvel characters? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you MAGIK.

So let’s break down what this mini magnum opus is all about, starting with what I think is a safe assertion, namely that this is complicated even for Claremont’s X-Men. One member of the X-Men at the time was Colossus, who is a great character himself, one of my top ten. A Russian mutant with the gentle soul of a poet who can transform his body into super-strong, nigh-indestructible organic steel, Piotr Rasputin was my kind of power fantasy: a basically sweet guy you absolutely should not provoke because he will wreck you if necessary. At some point Claremont introduced Illyana Rasputin, Piotr’s petite blonde baby sister, who was too young to have any mutant powers (as those manifest at puberty in Marvel comics). At some point, a demonic entity named Belasco set his sights on the X-Men and battled them, and in one of these battles he abducted Illyana. Illyana came back right away, but had aged seven years (from about 8 to 15), thus hitting adolescence and developing mutant teleportation powers, plus she had a whole separate raft of occult powers including a Soul Sword, and a very badass attitude. She joined the New Mutants with the codename Magik.

Magik, the limited series, filled in the missing seven years. Belasco was revealed to be a sorcerer and ruler of the dimension of Limbo, where time has no meaning, and thus can be a means to time travel in the Marvel U. He needed Illyana because he was trapped in Libo and could permanently escape by performing some dark ritual involving corrupting her innocent soul and crystallizing fragments of it into a relic. Belasco had actually attacked the X-Men many times trying to get Illyana, because Limbo being outside of time allowed him to hit reset and have a do-over in a different timeline over infinite opportunities. Sometimes he failed completely, and on at least one occasion the X-Men succeeded in rescuing Illyana but got stuck in Limbo themselves. That timeline’s version of the X-Men suffered various fates in Limbo, with Nightcrawler becoming a lackey of Belasco, Wolverine and Colossus dying, Kitty Pryde becoming a half-feline ronin warrior called Cat and Storm learning white magic to oppose Belasco’s black magic. So just when Belasco thinks he has finally succeeded in getting his hands on Illyana, white-magic Storm and Cat come along and rescue her. They’re all still stuck in Limbo but can stay one step ahead of Belasco’s demon servants for a while. In that time, Storm teaches Illyana white magic and Cat teaches her sword combat. Eventually their luck runs out and Belasco defeats Storm and Cat and recaptures Illyana, and instructs her in black magic to corrupt her soul. He gets about sixty percent of the way there but then Illyana rebels and claims the Soul Sword and using a combination of her training from Cat and Storm and Belasco and her mutant powers, she prevails, banishes Belasco, and becomes the new ruler of Limbo. She goes back to the X-Mansion, using Limbo’s rules outside of time to reappear right when Belasco had abducted her, though she has aged in the interim. She’s also spent her formative years in a literal hellscape, hounded by demons, and been partially corrupted by black sorcery, so her personality is a lot more sardonic and dark (in other words, she’s a teenager now, rimshot).

So yeah, a relatively minor supporting character gets an epic heavy metal flavored sword and sorcery plus mutants origin story, and I. ATE. IT. UP. It ticked so many ridiculous boxes for me. The What-If-ified X-Men, sure, and the cosmic fantasy angle, absolutely, but not for nothing, I was a kid raised very Catholic, and I was at that age where anything about devils and demons and black magic was extremely enticing because it was so taboo. Again, to the extent that I was self-aware enough at 12 or 13 to value TD’s friendship, it was just as much because he loaned me Iron Maiden and Metallica cassettes that my father frowned upon as because he had an X-Men library and took me to comic shows. My parents never went full Satanic Panic on me, but I still got an illicit thrill from stories about the occult and anything else which was supposed to be off-limits as a bad influence.

I can’t remember which issue of Magik TD had in his room; it was either the first one or the last one. I put the cover to the first one up above, and here’s the cover to the fourth and final installment, which may also shed some light on why I quickly fell in love with Magik.

I mean, ahem, I literally was infatuted with Illyana Rasputin, because she was a superpowered occult Bad Girl. If Colossus was a version of myself that I wanted to embody - sweet and kind to a fault yet bulletproof - then Magik was the imaginary girlfriend I desperately needed as a counter-balance. She struggled with her own nature and against her worst instincts. She was a sorcerer queen of a mystical dimension with an army of demons at her command, but she also had to go to school and was trying to make a normal life for herself. She lost patience with her peers because they hadn’t been through what she had, and she could be dismissive of them, even cruel at times. Same for teachers, authority figures, pretty much everybody. Nobody understood her. She was a little bit dangerous, very capable of taking care of herself, mostly moody and melodramatic. Adolescent-me was utterly smitten, and in hindsight I can see that I expended a lamentable amount of time and energy pursuing and trying to hold onto relationships with young women who were cut from that cloth of ‘nasty until you get to know her, and honestly still kind of nasty even then’. (Luckily I eventually got that all out of my system and my wife is a genuinely good-hearted person to build a life with.) I don’t blame Magik for setting me down that path, for what it’s worth. I think she just encapsulated what was already inside me, the part of me that hated conflict and wasn’t assertive and was attracted to women who came across as fearless, whatever their other traumas and dramas.

Okay that got a little weirdly personal but it actually makes for an interesting and apt transition, because the truth is that eventually my middle school days ran out, I graduated eighth grade and before the following summer vacation was even over I was going to rehearsals for the high school marching band, and then I was studying and practicing and performing a lot, plus I got a non-imaginary girlfriend and comics kind of fell by the wayside for a bit. But at the same time they had their hooks deep in my brain, which meant it wouldn’t take much for the obsession to come roaring back. So we’ll skip ahead a little, and next post we’ll talk about a reintroduction of sorts in the magical 1990’s …

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (11) - The Show Must Go On

Not only did TD passively introduce me to the X-Men and What If …?, two titles I collected obsessively and which really embody some of the things I love the most about comics, but TD actively opened the door for me into another huge aspect of my budding comic book nerddom: he brought me to my first comic convention.

OK, to be fair, it wasn’t really a convention per se, not the way we tend to think of massive events like Sand Diego Comic Con today. It was more of a dealer’s show, full stop. But even without throngs of cosplayers, panel discussions with celebrities, and massive interactive booths from the comics, toy and game companies, when I was 12 a comic book dealer show was still a big deal. They weren’t very common and they weren’t easily accessible. Don’t get me wrong, I grew up in the central New Jersey suburbs, and the New York City where the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man lived really was the world outside my window, more or less. As I’ve already pointed out in this series, I had ready access to a public library, the freedom to bike to a nearby convenience store with a spinner rack, and at least one friend with similar interests. I was not the starving man in the desolate wilderness when it came to comics, I know. But all the same, my comics sources did have their limitations:

• The library had some books which reprinted comics, but those reprints were the curated, historically significant issues like Fantastic Four #1.
• The convenience store only sold new issues.
• TD had a bunch of cool random older comics, but they were in fact random. I was happy to be able to read them, but had to take what I could get.

For the part of me that really wanted to do my own, idiosyncratic deep dives into Marvel lore and history, comic book dealer shows blew through all of those obstacles. A hotel ballroom full of dudes sitting behind folding tables completely covered in cardboard longboxes full of old comics was the freaking motherlode. The fact that said hotel was a 30 or 45 minute drive away, and that said shows only happened once or twice a year, just made the experience that much more intense.

Some day, maybe, I will parse out why I was so averse to asking my parents to do things for me as a kid. They were perfectly nice people and I feel confident, in retrospect, that they would have entertained and accommodated reasonable requests if I had made them. But I rarely rocked the boat. On weekdays one or both of my parents worked while I went to school. I played with my friends afterschool, did homework, ate dinner with my family, watched tv and went to bed. On weekends, my mom cleaned the house and went grocery shopping, my dad did yardwork and other projects around the house, and I intuited that I was supposed to leave them alone and entertain myself. Which I could do, no problem, and didn’t mind or think there was anything wrong or missing. I just kind of went along and stuck to the familiar basics. I rarely invited friends over to my house, but if one of my friends (like TD) reached out and invited me, I would go, under my own power. The thought of asking my parents to drive me to the Holiday Inn up the highway because they were having a comic book show never even occurred to me. Come to that, I think I was aware of the existence of comic book shows because sometimes they would advertise in the very comics I was reading more and more of, but (a) come on, I skipped over the ads while I was absorbed in the story and they made a subliminal impression at best, and (b) even being marginally aware was not enough for me to make the leap of looking at the details, like are they happening relatively closeby, on a date I’d have free? But credit where it’s due, TD was the kind of kid who did pay attention to things like that, and the kind of kid who had no trouble asking his mom to give him a ride up the highway on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. And lucky for me, he was the kind of kid who thought it would be more fun to go to a comic book dealer show with a friend, so he invited me and introduced me to that world. Thanks, TD!

Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it was something subconscious, but as it happens this whole triptych I’ve been writing about my comics-based friendship with TD has some nice parallels. I still remember some of the comics I bought at those earliest shows I attended. Of course straightaway I went through the back-issue bins to find more issues of What If …?

The best thing about this issue is that it raises an interesting philosophical idea about the Fantastic Four’s powers, namely that they are physical manifestations of the characters’ inner lives. This may not have been strictly necessary, but I found the interrogation of the premise compelling. Get bitten by a radioactive spider, you get spider-powers. Get exposed to gamma radiation, you get some amount of turning green and some amount of super-strength (or a super-brain). So why did four people on the same spaceship caught in the same cosmic rays get such different powers? (Other than the Jungian elegance of reflecting the four primal elements and other such narrative necessities.) The answer must be the differences of personality that make humans unique. So Johnny the hot-headed thrill-seeker can burst into flame and fly; Ben the gruff tough guy becomes a thing of rock; Reed the explorer and scientist can stretch because he’ll go to any lengths for science (ehhh); and Sue the token girl can be completely overlooked as invisible (uhhhh). But of course people aren’t one-dimensional, so it’s possible those same cosmic rays could have unlocked other powers based on other personality-traits, right?

The worst thing about this issue is it kind of squanders that premise by basically just flipflopping the pairs. Johnny becomes Mandroid because he loves cars and machines (uh, ok) and Ben becomes Dragonfly because he’s a pilot. So Johnny is the heavy freak and Ben is the high-flyer, but he just has dragon wings, no other power like flames or something awesome. Meanwhile Sue becomes Mrs. Fantastic and can stretch because she is so accommodating of others (UHHHH) and Reed becomes Big Brain, literally a disembodied brain because he’s so smart (gah) and also now the one who’s “out of sight” because he lives in a habitrail in the Baxter Building while the other three go out on missions. Disappointing that they didn’t get more creative on the powersets, for sure, while the role-switching is interesting but doesn’t really have a lot of time to develop in a single issue. Ah well.

Also I’d note that this particular issue of What If…? doesn’t do much for my stated goal of learning obscure Marvel continuity since the whole story is a riff on the FF #1 origin story plus the first meeting with Dr. Doom. But again, What If …? had been a defunct title for three or four years at that point so it was just cool to find anything that was new to me.

But as far as my quest for Marvel history scholarship, another great find I made at those early comic shows was Marvel Team-Up, specifically this beaut from 1981:

Truly, old Marvel Team-Ups (and Marvel Two-in-One) were exactly the kind of quick primers a young fan who wanted to know more about the depth and breadth of the marvel Universe should be steered towards. MTU always featured Spider-Man, while MTIO always featured the Thing, but both titles would team up the star with some other superhero or group. It could be a heavy hitter like Captain America, or it could be somebody reasonably obscure like ... well, like Devil-Slayer. (Let the record show that if we ever get to the point in Doctor Strange 4 or something like that where Devil Slayer becomes part of the MCU, I will plotz.) And each issue was a self-contained standalone story (barring the very infrequent two-parter). So on the one hand, dig an MTU or MTIO out of the quarter bin and you will get a satisfying, comprehensible story for your trouble. You will also be introduced to a character maybe you didn’t know before, and it would be a proper introduction, as often as not Spidey/Thing was meeting this other hero in continuity for the first time so they had to go through the whole explain-your-deal bit up front. On top of that, they tended to be literally all over the map, sending the Thing to Wakanda or Spider-Man to a Roxxon plant in Mexico, so again you got to learn a little more Marvel geography and economic spheres and such. I admit I was drawn to the issue above because I was also into sword & sorcery and D&D and the like, so combining temples and gods and idols and axes and Spider-Man was a no-brainer for me. Marvel Team-Up was a well I would return to many times over the years.

Ah, I hear you ask, but what about the X-Men? Surely you went back-issue diving at these comic book dealer shows for more merry mutant adventures too, right? Indeed I did, but somehow I went from thinking this would be a short and sweet capper on the TD-themed posts to having already written 1600 words, so I will finish things out next post!

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (10) - Ripple Effects

So another comic which made its way into my hands because I randomly snagged it off my friend TD’s floor while hanging out at his house was What If …? (vol. 1) #31.

Why did TD have this particular comic? I have no idea. Sadly, I don’t remember as much about me and TD’s conversations about comics as I remember the comics themselves. Maybe we didn’t discuss them all that much! We were only twelve, and although that’s everyone’s personal Golden Age of comics appreciation, said appreciation probably didn’t extend very far beyond “that was cool”. As the years went by, these seminal memories accumulated more and more import in my mind, and I was able to articulate what they meant to me and why. But how that comic wound up in TD’s room I haven’t a clue. Maybe he was a Hulk fan, or a Wolverine fan, or both. Much like the X-Men in general, in 1987 Wolverine was a very popular character and he was steadily building the fanaticism in his fandom every month. Maybe TD just liked the fact that the title of the issue contained the word “KILLED” and thus promised the kind of cartoony violence that any red-blooded tween boy, particularly one with penchants for heavy metal and superhero comics, craved. Maybe it was totally random, because believe it or not that was a thing that happened in the 70s and 80s, before the collector boom, before investment comics, before the cover prices wildly outpaced inflation. Kids just wound up with random comics, impulse buys at the drug store or at rest stops on the way to grandma’s house, or hand-me-downs from older brothers, cousins, uncles, etc. Since this comic was from 1982, that’s entirely likely.

I’m trying to puzzle this out a bit here because What If …? Was an inherently weird, niche series. In all these prior posts I’ve been exalting the virtues of a shared superhero universe with meaningful continuity and the feedback loop between the readers aware of (or constantly exploring and deepening their knowledge of) the history that informs the current storylines, and the writers creating those new stories, built atop the foundations laid down before. Anything goes, up to and including mortal mutants using magic lightning darts to teleport to the far-off realms of the Aesir and fight the God of Mischief, BUT … the one thing a writer can’t do, because a faithful reader will balk at it, is ignore the past, or pretend things went down a different way. That’s the price you pay, that’s the trade-off: you can have freedom from consequences, hitting the reset button at the end of every story, which opens up every storytelling possibility imaginable but leaves everything feeling a bit weightless and inconsequential. (This was basically the model for Superman and Batman comics in the 50’s, for example.) OR, you can accept narrative interconnectedness, which makes everything feel more important and substantial, yet prevents you from violating laws of logic and causality.

Much as the architects of the New U should have, we might then reasonably ask: is this a problem in dire need of a solution? Dire, certainly not, not in the sense of demanding a retooling of the House of Ideas’ entire publishing model. But Stan Lee (allegedly) decided he would address it via a new series, which is how the world got What If …? It was an anthology series, each issue a self-contained story which focused on a different character or team. Existing Marvel characters, I should hasten to add, so it wasn’t a completely disconnected side project. But it was set outside of the proper, main Marvel continuity. It was a place where stories could be told which were otherwise precluded by the overarching narrative logic of Marvel comics, consequences be damned. As the cover way up above indicates, major characters could be killed off, but only for the duration of that issue’s story, while in the “real” series that character kept on having adventures. If a reader really did want the flipside of what Marvel offered, a story where absolutely anything could happen but nothing ultimately mattered, What If …? was the place for that.

That’s the high concept, but there’s a lot more to it. It actually both was and wasn’t connected to Marvel continuity. Like many an anthology series, What If …? had a host/narrator, a cosmic character introduced in the Fantastic Four: the Watcher, who observed all events on Earth but did not interfere. What If …? revealed that the Watcher not only observed the Marvel Earth but infinite parallel Earths where variant realities played out. So if you considered the Marvel Universe to encompass the multiverse of divergent timelines, then as it turns out all the What If …? stories are in continuity after all.

Also, to be honest, ‘anything could happen’ needs to be qualified a little bit. Because by and large (though there were occasional exceptions) the stories in What If …? used the existing Marvel continuity as a jumping off point, the better to leverage their IP and their brand. So the titular questions weren’t going to be anything like “What if the U.S had nuked Germany in World War II?” or “What if the dominant form of life on Earth was gigantic psychic centipedes?” The focus was admittedly more narrow, re-telling tales of the Marvel superheroes but leaning hard into outcomes that wouldn’t have been possible in the main continuity because they were too disruptive of the status quo: teams dissolving, romantic pairings breaking up, character death, even end-of-the world catastrophes. Very cleverly, What If …? continued to reward the faithful readers, because the altered re-tellings had extra resonance if you were already familiar with the original story, and could spot the differences. The feedback loop was still in play. Not to mention, for someone like me who was a second-generation reader coming into the ongoing story two decades on, these What If …? stories served as mini history lessons, as the Watcher’s narration always recapped what had happened in the main continuity before launching into the twist that changed things on a parallel Earth. The series provided an entertaining way to dig a little deeper into the all-important historical continuity.

On top of which, it all served to prop up the grandeur of Marvel continuity overall. Not only did everything that happened in the ongoing series inform every other thing that would happen later, with consequences and repercussions, but through the lens of What If …? certain events were shown to be crucially pivotal. There was a strong for-want-of-a-nail vibe in What If …?, where every premise-establishing question was answered as “well if that had happened, then this would happen next, and because of that, then this would happen” and so on and so on until a seemingly small change had brought about a totally different conclusion.

Confession: I cannot, off the top of my head, remember the plot of the issue of What If …? I read in TD’s room. I do not recall the answer to the question on the cover. Well, except note that there are two questions on the cover, and it was the backup story in that issue that well and truly blew my mind and stuck with me all these years and made me a die-hard What If …? fan for life. “What if the Fantastic Four had never been?” goes back to the very beginning of the Marvel Universe and posits a world where Ben Grimm is just a little too bitter about transforming into the monstrous Thing to willingly join the other three as a superheroing team. In fact, he decides to vent his frustrations on the world in increasingly hostile and violent ways. Reed, Sue and Johnny still don uniforms (with a 3 on the chest rather than a 4, which is a cute touch) and their number one job is to stop the Thing’s rampage. It all comes down to a final showdown in New York City, with the military called in as backup. The military brings along a couple of scientific experts: Tony Stark, who cancelled his trip to East Asia to be there, and Bruce Banner, who misses the first test of the gamma bomb. The battle in New York is epic, disrupting business as usual and generally causing street-clearing panic. As a result, Don Blake can’t get to the airport for his trip to Norway, and Peter Parker bails on going to the radioactivity demonstration downtown. Finally the Fantastic Three deploy some giant gizmo in an effort to neutralize the Thing, but it backfires, and instead it permanently removes Reed’s, Sue’s and Johnny’s powers. Again, this is a backup story, so it goes by quick, yet it still manages to pull off this brilliant bait and switch, where at first you think “the FF had never been” refers to the fact that on this world they were the FT (Fantastic Three) instead and Thing was a bad guy. But by the end, the “never been” is even more profound, because the Three have been depowered. PLUS, did you catch all those cameos? Which totally disrupt the origin stories of those characters, preventing them from going through the events that would generate their own heroic personas? If the Thing had decided to be a bad guy, then not only would the world have no Fantastic Four, it would have no Iron Man, no Hulk, no Spider-Man and no Thor. BOOM.

For all of the reasons I’ve hit on here, I proceeded to seek out a lot of What If …? comics over the years. I eventually bought a Watcher action figure which still stands atop one of my bookcases, and I even own some pop history books which play with real world developments using the “what if” framework, and I doubt I would have been interested in those kinds of mental exercises if comics hadn’t led me there. The trick about that train of consequences, though, was that in the late 80’s What If …? comics were hard to come by. The series only lasted 47 issues and had ended in 1984, so they weren’t available on the newsstand at the convenience store. Next post I will delve a little deeper into how I overcame that particular obstacle.

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Just an extremely quick note here in the pandemic diary to commemorate that, after a year-plus of so much online purchasing (school supplies for distance learning, groceries, takeout, etc. etc. for almost everything we used to just run out to the store for in person before that activity became a plgue vector), tonight's pizza night order marked the first time that I was able to enter all 16 digits of my debit card, the expiration date, and the CCV, entirely from memory. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I really don't know but it just happened.