tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84726272073510854112024-03-05T19:44:48.857-05:00Parenthetical AsidesDale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.comBlogger1402125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-71580834997576420822021-09-09T10:32:00.001-04:002021-09-09T10:32:24.057-04:00Level(s) setting<p>
So I haven't posted in a while, sorry. As you may have noticed, the posts this year were mostly coming in two flavors: the ongoing saga of <a href="https://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/search/label/Marvel%20Comics%3A%20My%20Untold%20Story">Marvel Comics: My Untold Story</a>, and the numbered <a href="https://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/search/label/Covid-19">COVID-19 diary</a> installments. I reckon I kind of burned out on both of them.
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Let's start with the pandemic, which around the last time I posted about it kinda felt like it was on its last legs! Oh how blissful that ignorance was. I think that at a certain point I felt like I was in the lowest-risk group and therefore lowest-priority for getting vaccinated at all, and I made my peace with that. I was working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, fine, fine, fine. Then I did get vaccinated and it felt like, well if I'm vaccinated they must be getting down to the lowest-priority round of vaccinations so we're almost done, right? They also opened up the vaccine for ages 12 and up so the little guy got jabbed, too, so more than half the family was innoculated. Surely lowering the approved age range to 5 and up, or all ages, or whatever, was right around the corner? It's kind of hard for me to believe it, but in May I took the little guy and the little girl out to the movie theater to see Black Widow on the big screen. We wore masks, and I was relying somewhat (for the little girl's sake especially) on the idea that most people in the theater would be vaccinated, but it felt like a manageable risk, like flying on an airplane; sure you might crash but probably not.
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And then the Delta variant, and the surge in cases and deaths, and the inability to get the irrationally vax-hesitant to get over themselves, and here we are four months later and things are not OK. Maybe they were never going to be OK, maybe we were fooling ourselves, but they definitely aren't now. And it sucks, and it's exhausting, and I feel like I had committed to riding things out and was relaxing with the sense that the ride was nearly at its terminus and then, surprise MFers, once more around the bend, this time diverting onto a completely new track. Lousy disjointed metaphor, I know, but that'show everything feels, lousy and disjointed and I can't be bothered to make better sense of it. To be clear, I'm not being nihilistic and advocating abject surrender. I am once again (after never really stopping?) working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, and all that. So is my family. And we're waiting for the ages 5 and up approval of the vaccine, but even after that we'll keep following the recommended guidelines. And a lot of other people won't follow them, because they are selfish idiots and ... I can do what I'm asked to do, but I can't be bothered to, on top of all that, make sense of how we got here and why some people have made this way harder than it needs to be.
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All three of our kids have gone back to school, masked, in person, five days a week, which is good for them in terms of their social and emotional health, at least. They actually started on August 12 so we are coming up on a solid month and so far, so good. I've gotten multiple messages from the schools (each of them goes to a different building now, elementary intermediate and middle school) saying there was a COVID-19 case in the building, which is less than ideal, but on the other hand those letter have all said "individuals who were in direct contact with the diagnosed case have been notified separately" and I haven't gotten any of those messages, so praise be for small blessings. It's just dumb luck, though. We do what we can and take what precautions can be taken but there's no way to exert any real control over the situation. The big question is, will there continue to be one-off cases here and there (one a week or so?) which are caught quickly and then quarantined, with children's natural resilience keeping things from exploding, OR will things balloon until they get to the point where the schools have no choice but to shut down, send everyone home with laptops, and do what they did throughout 2020-21? I am fervently hoping that it is the former, but again, no way of knowing, and no way to control the outcome. We're strapped in for the ride and there's no way off.
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So a few steps forward, a few steps backward - now Shang Chi is the MCU joint in theaters and I have NOT taken my kids to see it. I want to, sure, but it feels like a bigger risk than it did in May, and not worth it, not as any slight against the movie itself, just the whole ... <em>gestures broadly at everything going to hell in a handbasket</em>.
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So yeah, I don't really feel like blogging about life as we live it in month 19 of COVID-19, because it's a huge bummer, so that's the macro-level. But, hey, this blog has always been just as much (if not moreso (definitely moreso)) about the minutiae of pop culture I'm into, so maybe I could post about that, micro-level? Clearly I'm not in a great place right now because I honestly started to feel a little burnt out on Marvel Comics: My Untold Story in specific and also on pop culture in general because ... it's all kind of same-y?
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Don't get me wrong, I love superhero comics and I always will, I will never be part of the chorus of voices lamenting that "everything is a Marvel movie these days" first and foremost because I know that's not actually true. And secondmost because I love the Marvel movies so I feel no particular contrarian urge to rail against them. They make me happy like a Five Guys hamburger, sure I know you can't live on burgers all the time but a good one sure does hit the spot more often than not. Still, as I turn to my most comforting brainfood in this time of public health crisis, I not only indulge I outright gorge. It occurred to me recently that for a while now I have been:
<ul>
<li>watching every episode of What If...? as they come out on Disney+ (after having done the same with WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki)</li>
<li>reading a Spider-Man graphic novel my brother loaned me</li>
<li>watching <a href="https://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/05/smallywood.html">Legends of Tomorrow</a> right up until Constantine showed up, at which point I wanted to start watching it with my wife, so I switched my alone-time viewing to alternating between the Boys (based on a superhero comic) on Amazon Prime and The Umbrella Academy (based on a superhero comic) on Netflix</li>
<li>listening to not one but two different weekly podcasts that retrace the early output of Marvel Comics in the 60's month-by-month</li>
</ul>
And maybe some other comics-adjacent stuff? Again, not complaining about being spoiled for choice (my buddies will tell you I sigh and chuckle and say "what a time to be alive" with great frequency) but I suppose the facts of my (in)actons speak for themselves. At a certain point, blogging about Marvel superheroes and other comics-adjacent stuff became too much on top of the consumption and enjoyment of it all, and there really wasn't a lot else to dig into. I haven't been cleansing my palate all that much, I guess.
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Anyway, as always ever since the heyday of near-daily posting on this here blog, these things are cyclical. Hopefully there will be more posts sooner than later as I get inspired to talk about things and keep this old relic alive.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-28068353083169711862021-05-30T06:16:00.000-04:002021-05-30T06:16:00.694-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (16) - A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to My Degree<p>
Going away to college would have been as likely a time for me to ease up on collecting comics as starting high school had been, except for a couple of factors. Number one, the 90’s collector craze was really gaining steam, so it wasn’t just a personal hobby/obsession (hobsession?), it was being goaded and catered to by a whole market orientation nexus of stores and magazines and conventions and the comic books themselves. Number two, I immediately made some friends on my freshman hall who were just as dorky and into comics as I was, so instead of pretending I was indifferent to the superhero kid stuff in order to seem cool and fit in, I was able to catch rides with these kind souls to the comic shop near campus and continue indulging at will.
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And so I did, but a weird shift took place. For the first time in my life, I started reading more of, and caring more about, DC Comics’ output as opposed to Marvel’s. This interregnum was fueled by a confluence of several elements:
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<ol><li>
Even now I still remember how at the beginning of my freshman year in college, the late summer of ‘92, the big news - as in, not just among me and my fellow geeks but actual national news - was the Death of Superman. DC Comics pulled off a real coup by killing off Superman and milking it for a couple of years’ worth of storylines … at the end of which he came back to life, of course he did, death is seldom permanent in comics and maybe the general non-comics-reading public didn’t realize that but some of us (ahem) should have known better. Still it really captured some eyeballs, and I was no exception.
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The Death of Superman was so successful that DC followed it up with similar attempts at shock and rebirth. Batman had a crazy storyline called Knightfall, and Green Lantern had Emerald Twilight, and that was what really got me. Superman/Clark Kent came back to life, and Batman/Bruce Wayne had his back broken and was replaced for a while but eventually healed up and reclaimed the mantle. But Green Lantern/Hal Jordan went nuts because his entire home city and everyone in it was destroyed (as a plot point in the Return of Superman, as it happened) and became evil, and was a villain thereafter, and a brand new character named Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern, which of course meant a new beginning from which to accrue lore and continuity. I had been a GL fan for years but now there was a Green Lantern who I could say was mine, because I had been there collecting issues since his first appearance in real time, and of course that was irresistible to me. Superman and Batman were back to normal before I graduated college, but Kyle Rayner was still Green Lantern a decade later. Hal wasn’t restored as Green Lantern until 2004.</li>
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<li>By about halfway through college I had met and befriended someone who was a diehard comics fan and much more into DC Comics than I had ever been. He, too, liked both DC and Marvel (Daredevil was a personal favorite of his) but he was very deep on some DC stuff I had never heard of. He introduced me to books like the then-current Suicide Squad and Checkmate and Hawk & Dove, as well as some older stuff I had missed. On top of that, he liked to run a particular roleplaying game, DC Heroes, which had licensed the characters from the comics. I joined his campaign and played it for years, and although I and all the other players had created original characters, the campaign ostensibly took place in the DC universe and we all had various connections to the continuity (fighting Gorilla Grodd, working for WayneTech, etc.) So in a very real sense reading as many DC comics as possible became the research homework for playing in the game, and I gladly did it.</li>
<li>And then meanwhile Marvel was having a tough time of it. X-Men finally got so ridiculously convoluted and crossover event-driven that I gave up on it. Avengers just plain dipped in quality, in my opinion, and right around when they changed the logo on the cover, I was out. I still picked up What If…? pretty devotedly, but that was definitionally non-canon so I really had no insight into what was going on in the Marvel universe, and meanwhile the editorial stance for the comics seemed to have gone from recap-heavy and new reader friendly in the 80’s to catering exclusively to hardcore fans in the 90’s, who were assumed to have encyclopedic knowledge of every character and event already, and/or the willingness to go through the back issue bins at comics shops as needed. <br/><br/>
By the time I was out of college in mid-1996, DC had revitalized itself (in my eyes, if nothing else) and was riding high on everything from Batman: The Animated Series to Kingdom Come. Mean while Marvel had pulled the desperation maneuver of outsourcing non-X-Men comics to the artists who had left to form image Comics, like Rob Liefeld …
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… aaaaaand shortly thereafter declared bankruptcy. Rough times.
</li></ol>
<p>So yeah, I weirdly fell out of love with Marvel Comics in college and was much more of a DC guy for a while. I mention this as I trace my relationship with Marvel for a couple of reasons. One, to acknowledge that it wasn’t always smooth sailing, I wasn’t an impervious Marvel zombie, and like any relationship it had its ups and downs. And two, because I have to talk about the falling out before I can talk about the reconciliation, which I will do next post.
</p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-13575264582401468172021-05-29T09:56:00.001-04:002021-05-29T09:56:08.544-04:00Smallywood<p>
I've been writing this blog on and off for like eleven or twelve years now, and I seem to vaguely recall that I used to take great delight in noticing and pointing out unintentional overlaps in my pop culture consumption, like when I finally got around to reading or watching something that had been on my list for years, and suddenly realized it was a predecessor and drect influence of something else I'd gotten into on a whim with no foreknowledge of the connection. Or when I'd discover the same creative types had been involved in two wholly separate projects I dug. I am pleased to report that these things still very much amuse me.
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I recently started watching the CW series Legends of Tomorrow from the beginning, via Netflix. Longtime blog fans may recall that I was hugely into the CW's Smallville back in the day; I own every season on DVD and watched the whole thing in order via that medium (mostly using a portable DVD player on the train when I worked as a government contractor, all of which feels like a lifetime ago). I don't know if I ever mentioned it on the blog or not, but when the CW announced Arrow, it was still close enough to my finishing the Smallville run that I was irked it was a new actor playing Oliver Queen, since Green Arrow had been a bg part of the latter half of Smallville. I did not jump into Arrow, but somehow the show got along fine without me, and generated an entire Arrowverse which includes The Flash, Supergirl, Batwoman, Black Lightning, and Legends of Tomorrow.
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Legends of Tomorrow is a show that should not work. It's a large ensemble made up of also-ran supporting characters from several of the other shows I mentioned, who are on a time travel mission to stop an immortal conqueror before he succeeds in the future. It is a million bonkers comicbook ideas all crammed together, on a second-tier broadcast television budget. But! It is gloriously, endearingly goofy and I find myself utterly charmed by it. I expected I might be, and it did not disappoint.
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(I also have heard that it gets better as it goes along, so we shall see about that. It was the hype about the recent release of the newest season, combined with chatter indicating that it was really great how this show which started out vaguely terrible quietly became arguably the best of the Arrowverse shows, that got me to take the plunge. I also-also know that eventually Matt Ryan joins the cast reprising his role as John Constantine from the cancelled NBC series, which my wife and I were both into, so when I get to the point where he starts showing up I will drag her along on the binge watch as well.)
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No more train commutes for me these days I've been watching episodes of Legends of Tomorrow while I run on the treadmill. I'm only about 9 episodes in so far, but it's a good start. Last night, meanwhile, my wife was working late so I decided to treat myself to streaming movie. I have been meaning to see Edge of Tomorrow (aka Live. Die. Repeat.) for a while now, I reckon ever since people on the internet started publishing reconsideration thinkpieces along the lines of "Hey, Edge of Tomorrow had a dumb title and barely made a blip on its theatrical release but it's so good, way better than you might think a sci-fi alien invasion riff on Groundhog Day has any right to be!" The movie came out in 2014, those pieces probably started appearing by 2015, so it's been a hot minute.
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Anyway, the movie was in fact pretty good! Definitely entertaining on the visceral action movie level, and mostly satisfying on the time loop narrative level (I'm still puzzling over whether the ending makes sense or is a total cheat). Bravo to Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.
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I'll point out now that it was a mindless coincidence that I was gorging on two different properties with the word 'Tomorrow' in their title, and that's cute. BUT! What I really came here to talk about was actually the fact that I'm lying on the couch last night, watching Edge of Tomorrow, and Tom Cruise meets the squad he's been assigned to, and lo and behold who is one of his bunkmates but Franz Drameh! And I know what you're thinking: who? And I wouldn't have known this young actor either, if it hadn't been for Legends of Tomorrow, where he plays Jefferson Jackson, one half of Firestorm.
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Like I said, it just very much amuses me when I start watching a show from 2016 and a couple weeks later watch a movie from 2014 and get smacked in the face with "Hey! Same guy!" Not super surprising, I suppose, given how some Hollywood agents seem to be able to get certain hot clients into a bunch of things one right after the other sometimes. But amusing nonetheless.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-77493153603796550672021-05-16T06:16:00.013-04:002021-05-16T06:16:00.606-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (15) - Every Part of the Buffalo<p>As should be glaringly obvious, once I started acquiring comic book collector supplies, like longboxes and mylar sleeves and whatnot, I wholeheartedly committed myself to the idea of having not just a personal comics collection but a large and diverse, deep and wide comics collection. The fact that this was happening in the fall of ‘91/spring of ‘92 was advantageous for a couple of reasons. My family moved across town around that time, which put us much closer (within walking distance) to my hometown Friendly Local Comics Shop. My high school girlfriend also went off to her freshman year of college at that time, which meant I had way more free time to fill with comics, and few other ways to spend whatever money I had.
<p>
But most of all, Marvel was putting out a lot of comics which hit me in just the right way. A lot of people have bemoaned comics companies’ modern tendency to make everything a crossover which means you have to pick up multiple titles, some of which you weren’t regularly following, in order to get the whole story. This is crass and bottom-line-oriented, I admit, but in 1991-92 I was a sucker for it. Infinity Gauntlet was just one example. A few months after that, the Avengers started another outerspace adventure called Operation: Galactic Storm (ah, memories of when the USA’s military flexing in the Middle East was nothing short of a miraculous source of jingoistic pride) and this crossover was <strong>NINETEEN PARTS LONG</strong> including not just Avengers but also West Coast Avengers and the solo titles Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Wonder Man and Quasar. And boy did I pick up a lot of those, and dutifully bag and file them alphabetically in my growing back catalog. Even Quasar!
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(Quasar is, superficially, a Marvel riff on Green Lantern, in that he has a gizmo - quantum wristbands rather than a ring - which allows him to do the make-any-construct schtick. Which means I was predisposed to like Quasar from the get-go. Here I will note I was regularly collecting Green Lantern during this period as well, along with other random DC issues here and there, from Batman to The Demon. My version of deep and wide didn’t really extend as far as the proliferation of lower-tier publishers in the 90’s like Dark Horse or Valiant or Malibu, but it did encompass both of the Big Two. This will become extra relevant next post.)
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Additionally, Marvel still managed to launch new titles pretty regularly, and by fully embracing the concept of collecting I didn’t just want to have a bunch of old comics, I wanted to consider my collection an investment with certain high-value items, including those #1 issues that would become more and more sought-after over time (or so the theory went at the time). The Infinity Gauntlet mini-series begat an ongoing Warlock and the Infinity Watch series, and I purchased #1. I had never been a Punisher fan, but I knew he was crazy popular and so when he got his third(!!!) ongoing title, I mindfully picked up Punisher War Zone #1.
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Meanwhile over on the oddly self-contained mutant side of things, over the span of summer ‘91 Marvel brought out X-Force #1 (replacing the cancelled New Mutants title) to much fanfare and a second X-Men title (the long-runninng decades-old title was Uncanny X-Men, the new one was simply X-Men) to even greater fanfare, such that at the time and for a long while afterwards (maybe to this day?) X-Men #1 was the highest-selling comic book. Of. All. Time. With five variant covers! And reader, I admit, I bought all five.
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All of the above are examples which stand out in my mind but really the main point is that the floodgates had opened and I just went to the FLCS at least once a week and almost never left empty-handed. As fate would have it even though my parents moved across town at the end of my junior year of high school, as mentioned, they moved again (because Dad had gotten a job transfer) towards the middle of the summer after I graduated high school, and for the few weeks I spent in that new town before departing for college, I knew no one except my little bro and had nothing to do except go the new FLCS and buy whatever they had (or so it felt). And then came college … <em>to be continued</em> ...
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Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-89528360992886737152021-05-09T06:16:00.006-04:002021-05-09T06:16:00.365-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (14) - Things Get Serious<p>
My family used to go to my grandparents’ (on Dad’s side) beach house on Long Island Sound once or twice every summer. Sometimes we would go for the Fourth of July, when as often as not all of my aunts and uncles and cousins would be there as well, somehow all under one roof for a long weekend (to be fair we were only ever all under said roof when sleeping, and the rest of the time we were on the beach, or out on the water, or in the backyard eating and drinking, or roaming the neighborhood going down to the park and the combination general store and ice cream parlor, which also sold comics!, but I digress). And sometimes it would just be my nuclear family and my grandparents for a more sedate weeklong visit in August. Sometimes both if we were lucky.
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In the summer of ‘91 we made one of our just-us visits and on one of those afternoons my grandmother took little bro and me out for the afternoon. This was a deviation from the norm which always kind of stuck oddly in my brain. I was 16 at the time, old enough to think it was strange but not old enough to either ask what was up or be able to figure it out on my own. My grandmother was always happy to play a more hands-off role in spoiling and indulging us as kids. She would give us some ridiculously easy chore to do, like husking corn on the cob or sweeping sand off the front porch, and then pay us for our labor and send us down to the aforementioned general store, cash in hand and unaccompanied, to buy candy or popsicles or Mad magazine or play Zaxxon or whatever. She was not one to bundle us into the car, drive us into town, and walk around a department store letting us pick out treats (that was my Mom’s mom’s go-to move). Yet that was exactly what happened on the day of this random memory. Grandma took us to I believe three different stores, purely to buy us treats. Weird, but young and dumb and 16 as I may have been, I wasn’t going to argue and/or look a gift horse in the mouth.
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(It literally only occurs to me right now as I write this that maybe this had something to do with giving my parents a little space? My very little bro would have been 3, and I don’t remember what the deal was with him, maybe my grandfather took him to the playground. But having two teenagers and a toddler would be hard on anyone, and we all know now in hindsight that in the summer of ‘91 my parents’ marriage was about one year away from imploding; they would drop the bomb announcing their intention to divorce right after the fall break of my freshman semester in late ‘92. So maybe this was my grandmother’s way of throwing a hail mary? Giving my parents a little one-on-one time to enjoy each other’s company and maybe work things out? In my defense my parents played things very close to the vest and absolutely projected at all times that they were happily married and hunky-dory right up until the bottom fell out of everything. But wow, if this conjecture I’m putting together is true, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to make the connection. Ah well.)
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The first place we went was the used book store, which also happened to have old back issue comics for sale. I had been to this store before, ever since my aunt had discovered it and introduced me to it, in the mid-80’s. I haven’t mentioned it before now in this series because (despite how it may seem otherwise) this isn’t an exhaustive recounting of every comic I ever acquired, and good stuff always came of my once-a-year trips to this store but nothing especially noteworthy. We also went to the toy store, I’m pretty sure, and one other place which might have just been a drug store? Clearly I’m fuzzy on the details. Best I can recall, now that I put my mind to it, it was probably something like this: grandma asked where I wanted to go, I said the used book store. She asked little bro, he said the toy store. And then while we were out she popped into the drug store for, I don’t know, sunscreen or batteries or whatnot. I’m only belaboring the three store angle because ultimately they all ended up involving comic book acquisitions.
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The used book store connection is self-evident. At the toy store there was a ‘comic book collector’s starter set’ which consisted of a sturdy cardboard box of the proper dimensions to store comics standing up, and like five random recent issues. It was all Marvel-branded, the box decorated with black and white line art of Spidey and the Hulk, and my brother decided he wanted it, so into the cart it went. Then finally at the drug store they happened to have a spinner rack of new comics, and in addition to the moldy oldies I had gotten at our first stop, I decided to ask grandma if I could get one or two new ones. She agreed (yeah, come on, she had to be worried on some level about her son’s marriage splitting up and as responding to the emotional crisis that on one was addressing head on with the tried and true white folk stand by, throwing money at it) and so I got my hands on this:
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So here we are, then, at long last, at essentially the intersection point between my lifelong love of Marvel comics and modernity. Sure, this comic came out literally thirty years ago, but we now know that the Infinity Gauntlet became foundational in shaping the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is the purest distillation of modern Marvel. You can dive back through the archives and see the earliest, roughest outlines of things, and go down an infinite number of rabbitholes only to find the vast majority of them are circular loops that return everything to the status quo, but once you get a sense of <em>quo</em>, exactly, is <em>status</em>, you’ll possess a mental model which matches pretty closely to both what I think of as “Marvel Comics” after a lifetime of fandom and “the MCU” as it’s evolved into pop culture dominance. Infinity Gauntlet was an event comic in much the same way Infinity War/Endgame were event movies, so I think it’s worth elevating as a significant signpost in my fandom. The fact that I stumbled over it in a random retail setting while shopping with my grandma is just bizarre enough to be noteworthy, too.
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The other thing to point out here is that little bro’s ‘collector starter set’ soon made me realize that I needed my own dedicated storage system for comics. So I also see this particular outing as the turning point where I went from “frequent reader of comics” to “dedicated curator of a comics collection”. That, in turn, had a marked effect on my reading/buying habits, both in terms of quantity and scope, and I will touch on that next post.
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-59306356818522068382021-05-08T10:48:00.006-04:002021-05-08T10:48:00.288-04:00Metrics Only I Care About<p>
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the most recent post (Day <a href="">425</a> of the pandemic diary) was this blog's 16th post of 2021. Which means, as of this very post you are reading, the blog has updated more times in 2021 than in any year since all the way back in 2016. I don't see myself ever going back to posting five times a week, so it's beyond unlikely that I'll ever hit the highs I did circa 2012-2013, but still. It's nice that I've kept this weird little corner of the interwebs limping along for a dozen years and counting.
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Thanks for reading, fellow weirdos!
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-234397930509769702021-05-06T05:19:00.175-04:002021-05-06T05:19:00.268-04:00425<p>
I didn't want to jinx it, so I waited until today to post that, two weeks ago, I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So since they say it takes fourteen days after the second injection to be considered fully, effectively vaccinated ... that's me, as of today.
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And thus my household is as protected as we can be. My wife and I are fully vaccinated, and my kids are, well, kids. I read about a methodology of risk analysis that basically says being vaccinated reduces your chances of catching COVID-19 <strong>AND</strong> suffering serious complications/death as a result to less than 10%. And kids seem to be naturally resistant to both the coronavirus and advanced health complications associated with it, such that any given child's chances of catching sick and needing hospitalization are ... less than 10%. So from a statistical risk point of view my children are as safe as I am, none of us 100% but hey, ain't that life for ya.
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Please indulge me for a moment as I express my gratitude for the continuing health of my loved ones. In many profound ways, I remain immeasurably fortunate. No one in my family, immediate or extended, so much as contracted COVID-19, let alone died from it (knock on wood, we as a species are not out of the woods yet). Is that partly because the vast majority of my family is in the lower-risk categories? And partly because we were all willing to take the precautions recommended by the medical and scientific experts as they evolved over the course of the pandemic? And partly pure dumb luck? Yes, yes and yes. But although I happen to live in the upper-middle class bubble and I'm surrounded by and related to people with white collar jobs in blue states where they kept the offices and schools closed and nobody succumbed to paranoid conspiracy theories about their liberties being egregously infringed by mask mandates, I know it's not that cut and dried! COVID has proven time and again that is does not discriminate, and can cut across the larger trends at any time. I do know a few people who caught it, people who are a little younger than me, and smarter than me, who literally work in the medical research field and definitely understood and practiced every protocol! It's not just the very old, the very poor, and total fucking morons like Donald Trump who proved susceptible. Maybe in the end it just comes down to luck, period.
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A further irony is the fact that, while my household dodged the bullet of the pandemic itself, the past year-and-change has seen its share of, shall we say, health challenges. It is as true for us as for anyone that the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 saw none of come down with mild flu or even a cold, thanks to masks and social distancing and general hermit-like behavior. But on the other hand, at the very beginning of the pandemic somehow the whole family had lice, somehow! And just last week the bino had to have surgery to repair his ruptured eardrums that never healed after some savage ear infections. Also, did I mention that I almost killed him with diabetes?
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Perhaps I should unpack that last one a little bit. There are of course many things which this sporadic pandemic blog series has failed to capture, but one of those (which maybe could only have been addressed in hindsight) is the strange contradiction between the subjective feeling that life went on pause for a while, time ceased to have any meaning, and we kind of lost a whole year, versus the fact that all of the above is objectively untrue, and I live with three reminders of that fact. The little guy has grown like four inches, the little girl has begun edging into puberty (even though she just turned ten last month, which is a whole 'nother post) and the 'bino has just changed a lot, because he's at the tail end of that stage where the development comes fast and furious, mental and emotional and physical. And he's always been big for his age, which usually just meant "tall" but this past twelve months somehow went to, um, "in a distressingly high percentile for weight"?
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One thing that I have learned in the past year-and-change about myself is that, unequivocally, food is my love language. When I think about my loved ones, whether it's on the needs level of physically taking care of them or on the wants level of making them happy or demonstrating that they matter to me, my go-to domain is feeding people. I do over-the-top cakes for the kids' birthdays, and always let them pick what's on the menu for family dinner that night. I happily work the grill at house parties, I love taking my wife out to dinner to celebrate milestones and I will run to the 7-11 for a pint of Ben and Jerry's if she's had a rough day. Thanksgiving and Christmas are literal feast days in our house. Etc. etc. etc.
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And it's possible, in fact entirely likely, that at some point during the pandemic I have bitched about nowadays it seems like all I ever do is shop for groceries, cook, and clean, and that is true enough and utterly explicable because we are all stuck in the house all the time and no one eats at school or work so it all settles out as increased domestic workload, but while I bitch about it I also absolutely cling to it, I admit. As long as I have been making sure my nearest and dearest have been getting three squares a day, I feel a tiny bit of control and safety in this perilous year, and that has kept me sane. I bitch about it but I'm also so grateful for it (do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself).
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Of course I never do anything halfway, either, and abve and beyond providing for my family I want to make them happy, or in the case of 2020, at least distract them a little from the pervasive awfulness. Kids ate all the granola bars? No problem I'll just buy more. They want Doritos for a snack? OK, we can designate Fridays as Doritos days. A bag of Oreos makes everyone happy? That is a bargain by any measure. So yeah, for a while there when it came to food I just wasn't saying no to the kids all that much. Yes we bought fresh fruit and yes we made them eat their vegetables at dinner, but they are a couple of elementary schoolers and a pre-teen, the food that makes them happy is McDonald's and pizza and soda and sweet tea and ice cream and candy and junkity junk junk galore. (And don't think for one minute I was merely an ascetic enabler through all of this. I may have singlehandedly kept a couple of the Mix industries, namely Chex and Trail, afloat during the pandemic.) The point being I was well aware that none of this stuff was super ultra healthy for them but I weighed the pros and cons and the trade-off for mental stability and just went ahead and spoiled them with processed high fructose corn syrup on demand.
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And sure enough, the 'bino packed it away and started to pack it on. At first we (I) thought it was one of those early childhood things where they get a little belly fat but it's just storing up for an imminent growth spurt and goes away as quickly as it came. Then it didn't go away and I thought, well, I was a chunky kid too and he does arguably look the most like me out of all three of them, maybe that's the way it goes. Then one day at a routine wellness check the doctor says they want to run some blood tests on the kid for diabetes, like that's a literal possibility, and suddenly it's nothing but <strong>GUILT</strong> and you feel like a failure as a parent. Or worse than a failure who committed sins of omission, but a monster who committed active harm against your own child. Which sucks.
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Of course I started this tangent by saying "almost" so let's reel it in a little here. The 'bino is not, as of this writing, diabetic, the blood tests were negative. But he is tipping the scales inthe 99th percentile. And we've talked to him about it, and cut back on the Doritos, and emphasized the importance of exercise and activity in general. And he gets it, he really does, he's a super-smart and conscientious kid. We caught a troubling trend on his growth chart early enough that he will hopefully turn out just fine. But man, you know it's been a doozy of a year(-and-change) when your best coping mechanisms so spectacularly backfire. <p>
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-43474477891562611452021-05-02T06:16:00.001-04:002021-05-02T06:16:00.324-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (13) - Going to Disney World<p>
I picked up comics intermittently as the 80’s gave way to the 90’s and my middle school years became my high school ones. I certainly know it’s true for me, and I assume it’s equally present in the mind of anyone else around my age who was into comics back then, but there’s a huge difference between “80’s comics” and “90’s comics”, or at least in the concepts those broad and oversimplified divisions might evoke. In the 60’s Marvel comics went from brand new upstarts in the superhero periodicals biz to basically the leading light of the industry. Then in the 70’s they got weirder, bigger, more complex along every axis. The 80’s were the decade when they knew what they were doing and did it with exemplary competence (give or take a misfiring New Universe or two). And then the 90’s got weird again, but not in a good way. In my recollection, the 90’s were when flashy hyperstylized art became way more important than storytelling, and if you haven’t already surmised, I was always way more into the stories than the art. I liked the art, but I was hooked by the characters and the plots. It also was far enough past the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” lessons of the mid-80’s for people to have forgotten those missteps, and even the more traditional artists and dedicated storytellers found themselves somehow tasked with producing updated takes on classic characters, with new costumes, new motivations, new origins or legacies or what have you, which were more in line with the cultural zeitgeist of the the end of the millennium - all things edgy, extreme and “kewl”.
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But I am getting ahead of myself! Yes, when you say “80’s Marvel comics” I think of solid, classic best-of-breed and when you say “90’s Marvel comics” I think excess, over-indulgence, and oh yeah Marvel actually went bankrupt for a while. But on the one hand these are, again, broad generalizations and exceptions certainly existed in both directions. And on the other hand, there wasn’t some massive switch that flipped on January 1, 1990. So as my mid-teens progressed I checked in on Marvel’s newsstand offerings every now and then and found them, generally, to be recognizable and enjoyable.
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And then a funny thing happened in the spring of 1990, the end of my sophomore year in high school. I had been in the marching band since I was a freshman and that year the band performed in Walt Disney World, which was a pretty sweet gig. Not the Main Street USA parade or anything, just a random little open-air performance in Tomorrowland, so we didn’t have to, like, spend a whole day showing up two hours early to assemble behind the scenes or anything like that. We mostly got a couple of days to go to the parks and have fun, except for a very short walk on/play a couple songs/walk off performance that justified the whole thing. I had been to Disney World with my family when I was younger, but going with my friends as a high schooler was something else.
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Anyway, one evening we were at MGM Studios (which was less than a year old at the time) and roaming through a gift shop and they happened to have a comic book rack in the store. This was just a weird coincidence, as this was decades before Disney acquired Marvel. But my eyes happened to fall on this cover:
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You guys. YOU. GUYS. That exact moment was the first I became aware that Marvel, after cancelling What If…? back in 1984, had brought it back. This was brand new What If…? and they were already up to issue #13, which featured my beloved X-Men. Of course I was gobsmacked, and my girlfriend took notice and said I should go ahead and buy it. That, in turn, was the exact moment I went from thinking “I’m trying to be a mature teen with a girlfriend, I probably shouldn’t obsess over comics anymore” to “maybe she wouldn’t totally object to my passion for comics?” I did buy it, I dug it, and I was newly re-interested in comics collecting.
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(Also not for nothing but my parents balked a bit at the cost of this band trip to Florida so I had to save up for it some myself, which marked my entry at age 15 into the part-time workforce. Said afterschool employment continued after we got back from Disney World, as you might imagine, but now my paychecks became disposable income rather than being saved toward some specific goal. And comics were happy to eat up a good chunk of that.)
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The wrinkle in all this was that What If…? was not the easiest comic to collect. The Disney World experience of stumbling across it notwithstanding, it was more of a direct market title than a newsstand title. Ugh, I will try to explain this as quickly as possible, but I lived through the retail transition which went from comics being something you would find at grocery stores or convenience stores, kept on spinner racks with no rhyme or reason whenever the store owner remembered to restock them, to comics being something you can only find at your Friendly Local Comics Shop which is dedicated primarily to comics, keeps everything organized and up to date, etc. And for a while there both of those models co-existed, and also for a while your Spider-Mans and X-Mens (and Supermans and Batmans) would be at the 7-11 pretty dependably, but your more obscure titles didn’t make the mass appeal cut as potential impulse buys, and so they had to be sought out specifically at the FLCS.
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So yeah, if I wanted any more What If…? comics I would have to go to the shop, and fortunately we had one in town. But of course, once you get in the shop and you are surrounded by walls and walls of new comics plus a decent back-issue selection equivalent to what two or three dealers might bring to a show, are you just going to buy the one issue you came for? Especially when that comic only comes out once a month and maybe you go to the shop once a week or more? In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Soon enough I was regularly picking up X-Men again, and the Avengers, and other random things as they struck my fancy.
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Weird side-note, around this time my little bro got deeply into Spider-Man, specifically the title Web of Spider-Man, and once again our strange sibling rivalry dynamic reared its head. X-Men and Avengers were <em>MY</em> thing, and therefore not his, and Spider-Man (and the FF, as it happened) were <em>HIS</em> thing, and therefore not mine.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU3JJ8qLjo1BKqaNS29A8gdbw_fxXiMRMTBTHyFl-8pFSo8CcTUJfCnWpobeRSbweEl7I88yHB2fqdfXxejRF8MEWmmNAkJRs6h9LtkaqlYGopD7tVInJKtVIKm1O6u2-m-McoOWE7PK46/s617/Web_of_Spider-Man_Vol_1_73.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU3JJ8qLjo1BKqaNS29A8gdbw_fxXiMRMTBTHyFl-8pFSo8CcTUJfCnWpobeRSbweEl7I88yHB2fqdfXxejRF8MEWmmNAkJRs6h9LtkaqlYGopD7tVInJKtVIKm1O6u2-m-McoOWE7PK46/s400/Web_of_Spider-Man_Vol_1_73.jpg"/></a></div>
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I still loved Spidey, and still do to this day! And partly it came down to economic efficiency, as I certainly read plenty of the Spider-Man and FF issues my little bro brought home, and saw no need to buy my own separate copies of what he was already going after. But I do admit there were some deeper issues of territoriality at play as well.
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One last random note because I have to acknowledge it: I did eventually backtrack and get the first 12 issues of What If…? (vol. 2) I had missed. In a crazy bit of timing I would discover that the issue I had just missed, in other words the issue that would have been on the stands at the gift shop if the marching band trip to Florida had been a few weeks earlier, was this one:
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeyziaIVv3D0IaKoyk8gzi0SKciXW4mp-ea9RYc0BHpsuE9MG0MS5IDMay3IMupiajWYY102bD6qy7RNO_jpEehRxrGisJgUKcQ9VHa4softq-w_K5pdELOtgRLfZDUrtwU8WHimXO1GwB/s646/What_If_Vol_2_12.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="420" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeyziaIVv3D0IaKoyk8gzi0SKciXW4mp-ea9RYc0BHpsuE9MG0MS5IDMay3IMupiajWYY102bD6qy7RNO_jpEehRxrGisJgUKcQ9VHa4softq-w_K5pdELOtgRLfZDUrtwU8WHimXO1GwB/s400/What_If_Vol_2_12.jpg"/></a></div>
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Which, yes, would have likely led to the exact same outcome because once again it’s an X-Men-related cover. But not just any X-Men story! It’s the EXACT FREAKING STORY from X-Men Annual #10 that I had read in TD’s room years before which sent me down the Claremont mutant misadventure rabbithole. (Also, THROG! Thunder-god Frog!) I might not have actually gotten back into comics collecting because my head might have just exploded.
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-17436388663075388192021-04-23T06:16:00.001-04:002021-04-23T10:22:04.021-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (12) - Forbidden Allure<p>
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.
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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.
<p>
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.
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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.
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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 <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/02/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-6-new.html">one such example in Squadron Supreme</a>, 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.
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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 <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/03/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-9-it-can.html">X-Men adjacent</a> title (b) it’s not <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/04/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-10-ripple.html"> branded as a What If…?</a> but it definitely concerns alternate timelines, and (c) I picked up all four issues of it from one back issue longbox at a <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/04/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-11-show.html">comic book show</a>. 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.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGEzBMHYsRS224305PLcqTcoDdyz8Y3Qmd5VcPp5ppMDyMTpbzGbe2gtJoVdOWjpRKdEaOI6uqqNvGHAskEr4ibUNGxCFnYQ5f20Z2FBYrGsSghL9R-80ZOBz4sD0XDHhdZHGTsH0k_La1/s461/Magik_%252528Illyana_and_Storm_Limited_Series%252529_Vol_1_1.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGEzBMHYsRS224305PLcqTcoDdyz8Y3Qmd5VcPp5ppMDyMTpbzGbe2gtJoVdOWjpRKdEaOI6uqqNvGHAskEr4ibUNGxCFnYQ5f20Z2FBYrGsSghL9R-80ZOBz4sD0XDHhdZHGTsH0k_La1/s400/Magik_%252528Illyana_and_Storm_Limited_Series%252529_Vol_1_1.jpg"/></a></div>
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhma6QjYziHwVrYRCPri7l2hHyp3WGZQhyKw7jc1sx_NvnMCWsAPFgbCZdFoo2-8izeBwFiMviwB2zhvCsbdbWT-MEieFN0I9U6B_ljzJDYciOGJtW_j-Oqn2Ynv0iqHfPPkhxQCDyXxxoK/s461/Magik_%252528Illyana_and_Storm_Limited_Series%252529_Vol_1_4.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="461" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhma6QjYziHwVrYRCPri7l2hHyp3WGZQhyKw7jc1sx_NvnMCWsAPFgbCZdFoo2-8izeBwFiMviwB2zhvCsbdbWT-MEieFN0I9U6B_ljzJDYciOGJtW_j-Oqn2Ynv0iqHfPPkhxQCDyXxxoK/s400/Magik_%252528Illyana_and_Storm_Limited_Series%252529_Vol_1_4.jpg"/></a></div>
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I mean, <em>ahem</em>, 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.
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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 …
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Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-7505729375055148802021-04-11T06:16:00.005-04:002021-04-11T06:16:01.086-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (11) - The Show Must Go On<p>
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.
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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:
<ul>
<li>The library had some books which reprinted comics, but those reprints were the curated, historically significant issues like Fantastic Four #1.</li>
<li>The convenience store only sold new issues.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>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.
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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!
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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 …?
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsfOmT3EEqFTeQBM_Aik654uup7A_v3opdrUWX1MLpTmhtCQCCR7WcugCGwkl2-3Aau9snTZbZEkOQKFWziu8tk2UzBNbmOIXkkeJ3eEcdIUSULdqAXB8thFpbJe763rifUoRMk2p-i16u/s1365/What_If%25253F_Vol_1_6.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="876" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsfOmT3EEqFTeQBM_Aik654uup7A_v3opdrUWX1MLpTmhtCQCCR7WcugCGwkl2-3Aau9snTZbZEkOQKFWziu8tk2UzBNbmOIXkkeJ3eEcdIUSULdqAXB8thFpbJe763rifUoRMk2p-i16u/s400/What_If%25253F_Vol_1_6.jpg"/></a></div>
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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?
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
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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:
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPPnwMMamLBmKA5M9JwrlMfrwPxir_X-KAnwZUa3gmm8JFCzZACKq9HMQsrnXQhtnEfUq0-PR2xgqsKlXYFweo53zc9H7CDoh50QB3V0rD13pulBZuv92y-Hqt7C4aViYc1aMXpxl9_kUO/s443/Marvel_Team-Up_Vol_1_111.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPPnwMMamLBmKA5M9JwrlMfrwPxir_X-KAnwZUa3gmm8JFCzZACKq9HMQsrnXQhtnEfUq0-PR2xgqsKlXYFweo53zc9H7CDoh50QB3V0rD13pulBZuv92y-Hqt7C4aViYc1aMXpxl9_kUO/s400/Marvel_Team-Up_Vol_1_111.jpg"/></a></div>
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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.
<p>
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!
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-71609688120694268792021-04-04T07:17:00.001-04:002021-04-04T07:17:03.150-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (10) - Ripple Effects<p>
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.
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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.
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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 <a href="">fight the God of Mischief</a>, 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 <em>if</em> that had happened, <em>then</em> this would happen next, and <em>because</em> of that, <em>then</em> this would happen” and so on and so on until a seemingly small change had brought about a totally different conclusion.
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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.
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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.
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-90600162648910265672021-04-03T22:00:00.018-04:002021-04-05T09:45:35.687-04:00392<p>
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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.
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-2300677109618479922021-03-31T20:34:00.014-04:002021-04-01T08:46:04.147-04:00389<p>
So I got my first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine tonight.
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My wife got vaccinated a while ago because she is a community college professor, and therefor both a state employee and an educator, both high-priority categories. Our kids are all too young to be vaccinated (so far, as things stand, who knows what the rules will be a few months from now) but I read something recently that basically said the vaccine is good and necessary protection but not 100%, more like 80-90% resistance, whereas kids (non-immunocompromised kids, and we are very lucky to have an inherently healthy brood) just seem to have natural immunity of about ... 80 - 90% resistance. So an unvaccinated low-risk child is in about as good shape as a vaccinated low-risk adult. So, yay?
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It feels like a turning point in this whole saga. I mean, duh, of course, but at the risk of sounding solipsistic it feels like we collectively have reached a turning point in this entire saga, as I'm seeing lots and lots of people posting their vaccine status updates every day. Conceivably, the natonal vaccination effort could be complete by the Fourth of July, they say. So it seems appropriate, in this pandemic-diary-within-a-blog, to specifically call out the day I got the shot.
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There's so many things I haven't yet documented about the past year-plus, and partly that's because there were long stretches where things just looked and felt so dire and draining and I couldn't bring myself to play amateur first-draft historian. But now that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps I'll go back and fill in some standout moments.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-2895435304872563282021-03-28T06:16:00.002-04:002021-03-28T06:16:00.243-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (9) - It Can Get Weirder<p>
In this post (and likely a couple more) I’m going to talk about one of my childhood friends who I’ve never mentioned on the blog before. We were never close friends by any stretch. But there was a brief period during middle school, seventh and eight grade, when we hung out a lot, mostly because he would invite me over to his house and I would go because I had nothing better to do. And we would just lounge around his room, where he had a tv and a bunch of comics. He was the only person I knew who was more into comics than I was, and he introduced me to some specific issues which still loom large in my memories. For blogonymity purposes I will refer to this friend as TD, which is short for teenage dirtbag. He was a very decent human being, but he had longish hair and wore a denim jacket and listened to heavy metal (in fact he loaned me his copies of Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Iron Maiden’s Live After Death on cassette, which is what got me into heavy metal back in the day) so in our small town hierarchy he was definitely considered part of the dirtbag crowd.
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Anyway, I rode my bike to TD’s house one Saturday and we hung out with Knight Rider playing in the background and I picked up his copy of Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It was a couple of years old by then, but that’s more or less the point: via TD’s collection, I could access comics I had missed even if they weren’t hugely historically important. I had read X-Men #1 because the town library had Son of Origins, in which it was reprinted. But a random annual from two or three years ago? If not for TD I would never have been aware of it.
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Although ironically this annual has since been reprinted, and I own the collection which includes it. Because, as it turns out, it was historically significant, which only became clear in hindsight. I am getting ahead of myself (as usual) so let me come in again.
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X-Men was nearly one of Marvel’s also-ran titles. From 1963 to 1975 it was just kind of there, a team book about younger heroes united by their common origin as mutants rather than gods, radiation-related accident survivors, inventors, aliens, etc. (As Stan himself wrote in Son of Origins, the book was nearly titled “The Mutants” but he was talked out of it because that was too technical/scientific a term to appeal to the kiddies.) It didn’t have top-tier art (save for a bit of Kirby at the outset) and only had a dash of Stan Lee’s plotting, so it was fine but never truly great. In fact it switched from new ongoing stories to reprints from 1970 to 1975 and no one really cared. Then in ‘75 Chris Claremont took over as writer, right around when the whole team lineup was revamped, and over the course of the next five years it went from quasi-cancellation to producing one of the greatest modern classic epics of all, the Dark Phoenix Saga. And it kept getting better from there.
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The general consensus is that Claremont elevated the writing on X-Men in two major ways: he amped up the complexity of the plotlines and he ladled on the soap opera dramatics. Claremont deeply grokked the utility and appeal of continuity. He was willing and able to look back at stories that had been written by those who’d worked on X-Men before him, identify interesting loose ends, and directly connect his new stories to those old strands of the tapestry. Of course he also had a million ideas of his own, and a lot of them were slow burn long plays. In the original days of Marvel, a good idea for a story had to fit inside a single issue of disposable media. If the resolution of said story idea required any background context or explanation, it would usually show up in a huge word balloon dump in the second to last panel. But by Claremont’s time it was no longer an ironclad rule that comics were for eight year olds with short attention spans. The audience was assumed to be reading almost every issue, and the writers could plant seeds in one book that wouldn’t bear fruit until later. Claremont excelled at this, particularly via layered plots. Any given issue of X-Men might see the team dealing with a threat, but also see one member of the team dealing with a personal issue on the side, and also have a scene in the middle that didn’t involve the main threat at all. The next issue would see the personal issue escalate to full blown threat, while the new plot from the previous issue crept closer to directly impacting the team, plus another new subplot would be introduced. On and on the wheels within wheels would turn, so that every time a particular plot culminated it had been building for a while, without any down time, because the narrative was constantly multitasking.
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And it wasn’t as predictably formulaic as I’ve summarized. Sometimes a subplot would be introduced but not followed up on immediately, either because the pacing of the main plot didn’t have room for it, or because Claremont was deliberately slow-rolling to avoid a boring pattern. Or both! Overall it was nuanced, thoughtful longform storytelling which really did make every issue a must-read, because you never knew when something was going to be innocuously introduced that would pay off big later, or in fact when those big payoffs would suddenly materialize. And as I’ve tried to explain previously, every issue being important is a feature, not a bug, to fans who want to immerse themself in that kind of self-rewarding familiarity with a fictional universe.
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All of that is just the plot stuff, and as I mentioned there was another facet, too: everything was emotionally heightened. These slow-burn plots which showed the danger coming from a mile off didn’t just involve random evil-doers. It would inevitably be some long-lost family member, or a former lover whose grudge was really a broken heart, or a jealous ex-friend or ex-mentor. And that was just the external conflict, while at the same time within the X-Men were rivalries and unrequited love, distrust and disputes, an intricate web of relationships and complicated feelings which were neither a distraction from the main event slugfests, nor bolted on, but integral parts of the overall whole. It’s quite a feat to be able to pull that off, and yes, of course, after many many years of constantly having to raise the stakes while still basically maintaining the recognizability of the intellectual property, Claremont got excessive almost to the point of self-parody. As evidenced by the ability to distill it all down to a joke meme template by way of the animated series.
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But that was later. In the 80’s - and this is a story about me, reading comics in 1987, remember? - Claremont was at the top of his game.
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So, Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It’s the X-Men, plus the New Mutants (once the X-Men grew up and were no longer teenage students of Charles Xavier they had to create a whole spin-off to keep the school-for-mutants thing viable) … IN ASGARD! Now, I had never really been into Thor comics, I knew who he was and liked him in The Avengers comics but wasn’t super familiar with the Marvel version of the Nine Realms, but this was a year or so after I had done a <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2010/02/dotww-part-4.html">deep dive into Norse mythology for a school project</a> so I was primed. And frankly, even after years of reading Spider-Man and other random comics, this opened my eyes to just how unlimited the possibilities were in a shared universe like Marvel’s continuity. Most of the big titles tended to build up their own little corners, where Doctor Strange handles the mystical stuff and the Fantastic Four do science-fiction exploration adventures. But why not mix and match with wild abandon? Why not take the mutants, some of which don’t even look human, and scatter them across Alfheim and Nidavellir and every realm in between, with fairies and dragons and witches galore? Why not take Loki’s current scheme, which has already gotten Thor out of the picture, and progress it to its next logical conclusion, installing a new Thor under Loki’s thrall, a mortal who already has experience with weather control and being worshipped as a goddess, the X-Men’s Storm? Storm was actually powerless at that point, due to some other previous subplot where her mutant abilities were “permanently” (spoiler: not really) neutralized so she was a soft target for Loki’s manipulation - take this hammer and reclaim the skies! The X-Men annual was actually the second part and conclusion of a story that started in New Mutants, where Loki abducted the underage mutants to remote corners of his world. And that was a follow-up from a previous project Claremont had masterminded where the X-Men and Alpha Flight had teamed up to fight Loki, and soundly defeated him, with Loki swearing revenge. (So it’s all four of those comics, the X-Men/Alpha Flight crossover and the New Mutants and X-Men sequel, that eventually got collected, once Claremont was firmly established as a Big Deal because the X-Men were the Biggest Thing Ever.)
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The comic I picked up off TD’s floor was a great read, extra long and ridiculously dense, where the rest of the X-Men go to Asgard to rescue Storm and the New Mutants and have to throw down against Loki, physically and philosophically. And to give credit where it’s due, even though I knew next to nothing about the current X-Men storylines or the Thor-adjacent stuff, I was able to understand most of it, because Claremont wrote in such a way that things were never totally impenetrable to the newcomer. There was definitely a suggestion that certain details could be found in earlier sources, but the main thrust was clear enough. But most of all, it was the very everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nature of the story, opening my mind to the possibility that mutants didn’t have to always just fight a government trying to regulate them out of existence and/or Magneto, and Asgardian warriors didn’t have to always just fight ice giants and fire giants.
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I don’t know that I’ve ever expounded on this theory here before, but if you look at speculative fiction and break it roughly in half with sci-fi on one side and fantasy on the other, you’re often as not breaking it down into stories set in the future or set in the past, and/or on secondary worlds which resemble our archetypal concepts of those timeframes. When you have speculative fiction clearly set on Earth in the present, usually the imaginary element is limited - one time travelling robot and one time travelling resistance member, or one clan of vampires living in secret in the shadows, etc. If the introduction of the speculative leads to chaos, it’s horror; if it’s orderly, it’s urban fantasy or plausible sci-fi. But somewhere in the middle of that diagram you have the present Earth, plus tons of other secondary worlds, plus outlandish sci-fi inventions, plus magic, plus monsters, and equal measures of chaos and order, and that’s a superhero comics universe. People love to use the phrase “anything can happen” to describe an exciting fictional premise, but my hot take is that nothing comes close to embodying that philosophy the way that superhero comics do. So why would you build silos within that premise, to have the sci-fi and the fantasy co-exist side by side but never interact? If the universe allows for anything and everything, then don’t be coy about it. Jump in and splash around, like Uncanny X-Men Annual #9.
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Reading that book in TD’s room deepened my love for superhero comics in general and got me more interested in the X-Men specifically (which was good timing because about four years later a relaunched series’ X-Men #1 would become the best-selling comic of all time to that point - I bought all five variant copies). I clearly remember reading some other specific comics at TD’s as well, which had their own repercussions on my fandom, and I’ll get deeper into those next post.
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Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-56531990329853181682021-03-23T09:08:00.001-04:002021-03-23T09:08:53.606-04:00381<p>
Well, let's see if the WiFi works a little better today with decreased demand. Today the bino and the little girl went back to school in person. It's the first day since way back on Friday the 13th of March, 2020 that this has been an option. Our fair city's schools have adopted a hybrid model for this home stretch of the school year, so my little ones will be attending class in the school building on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and continuing virtual distance learning on M/W/F) from now until the end of May. Assuming this all works and doesn't result in massive case spikes and another emergency shutdown. Fingers crossed.
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<p>
The little guy is still doing fulltime at-home school-via-Zoom because, well, he's really not so little anymore. He's 12, he's in seventh grade which means he should be at the middle school, and the city only agreed to resume in-person instruction in the elementary schools. Which makes sense, it really does, I think it was the correct and responsible decision. Elementary school is designed to keep the same cohort of kids together all day in the same room, limiting the chances for exposure cross-contamination etc. Whereas middle and high schoolers all jumble together in the hallways every 45 minutes as they constantly change classes throughout the day. I get it, I do. It just sucks for the little guy, who's sick of being stuck at home and misses his friends.
<p>
I'mma take him out to McDonald's for lunch and then maybe buy him some new books. Hopefully that will make up for the unfairness of it all, somewhat.
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Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-36360272007481407722021-03-21T02:32:00.006-04:002021-03-23T09:10:58.102-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8b) - So Close and Yet<p>
I know I promised that in the next post I would go back to good old Earth-616 and the “real” Marvel Universe, but then I realized I couldn’t let go of the New U without talking a bit more about D.P. 7. Hence this sub-bullet (b) addendum to the <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/03/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-8-new.html">previous post</a>. If nothing else, this blog is best characterized as a series of loosely connected digressions, so of course this long-form series about my personal history with marvel Comics is going to have its share of going off into the weeds.
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<p>
You might not know it from reading the previous post, but I actually loved D.P. 7. Not merely “well out of all of these very mediocre series in this conceptually flawed standalone continuity, I guess this one is at the top of the list” but active, devoted love. To this day I still have copies of every single issue, including the annual and the one-shot from a Return to the New U event many years later. And a lot of those issues I bought in real time from the newsstand, but a lot of them I had to hunt down after the fact. The failures of the New U became apparent pretty early on and even as it limped through its second year and into its third, retailers were more and more skeptical and less and less likely to order and stock the issues.
<p>
But D.P. 7 deserved better. It was extremely akin to X-Men, spiritually (which makes this a worthwhile transitional post because I am definitely going to talk about X-Men a lot in installment 9), at a time when X-Men had gotten really, solidly, consistently good, but right before it absolutely blew up and became the most insanely popular comic EVAR. Both were team books, very heavy on the soap opera and the pathos, and taking the point of view that normal people would be distrustful of others with powers, fearing, hating and hunting them.
<p>
One big difference was that the seven protagonists (the rest of the title was an abbreviation of Displaced Paranormals, no mutants in the NU) didn’t have a wealthy patron like Professor X or a place to hide away from the outside world like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. They spent most of their time on the run, so it was kind of like a hybrid of X-Men and Hulk, with our heroes doing good where they could, almost by accident, while staying one step ahead of the authorities.
<p>
But on the other hand another similarity with X-Men was the near-constant raising of the question, “Are these powers a blessing or a curse?” In the Marvel U, no matter what your powerset that question must be asked because simply having powers brands you as a mutant, target of Sentinels, object of fear and loathing to the public at large. But at the same time, as many people have pointed out over the years, most mutants can pretty easily hide what they are, so long as they wear their ruby quartz glasses or keep their bone claws sheathed.
<p>
D.P. 7 doubled down by making almost every paranormal’s powerset a kind of monkey’s paw. The set-up starts as a buddy story when Randy meets Dave. Randy is an ER doc and Dave is brought in on a gurney having some kind of episode. Also Dave is over seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds of pure muscle. Dave freaks out and is trashing the place but Randy helps subdue and sedate him, with a partial assist from ghostly black arms that pop out of Randy’s chest. OK, so, Dave is the brick, but his powers are a curse because he used to be a normal-looking 5’11” guy and then he started rapidly growing, which was physically painful to the point of freaking out as above. He’s like the Thing or the Hulk except, of course, more “realistic”, though still plenty attention-grabbingly ugly within the context of the New U. He’s gone bald but has a foot-long beard, his body is hairy (and most clothes don’t fit him) and he’s big as the broadside of a barn. Randy has not just arms but an entire ghostly manifestation that lives inside him but can come out, fly around, phase through stuff but also interact with stuff, and then transfer what it sees to Randy’s mind when it returns. How is this a curse? Eh, it really isn’t, it’s just weird, although as the series goes on it turns out Randy has multiple black ghosts inside him with slightly different personalities, and one of them has no compunctions about straight up murdering people who threaten Randy, which bothers the good doctor. Also if anyone at the hospital found out Randy was a paranormal he might lose his job. So classic X-Men “mutant burden” stuff really.
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<p>
(Notice the writing credit on page 1 up there, by the way - Mark Gruenwald, the same scribe who wrote Squadron Supreme. Gru was awesome.)
<p>
Anyway Dave and Randy hear about a place called The Clinic that claims to cure paranormals and Dave definitely wants to be cured, because it’s nice to be strong but he feels like a freak. And Randy would just as soon not have to worry about his ghost(s) popping out at inopportune moments. So they go to the Clinic and become part of a therapy group of seven, so we meet Dennis (Scuzz), Charlotte (Charlie), Jeff, Lenore and Stephanie.
<p>
Scuzz is just a kid of 15, a burnout who literally burns things. His body constantly secretes a substance that disintegrates matter, so his clothes have holes in them with wisps of smoke. When he concentrates he can disintegrate specific things faster. Obviously this power is kind of a bummer, and it gets worse later when Scuzz has a girlfriend for a hot minute until she realizes being intimate with him is physically painful.
<p>
Charlie is a dancer who can manipulate friction, making surfaces more sticky or more slippery. The biggest bummer is that she hasn’t learned to control this power, and that makes it hard for her to dance in an ensemble where the other dancers might slip and break their necks if she inadvertently turns off the friction on stage.
<p>
Jeff has super speed. He vibrates constantly and looks blurry. He needs to eat almost constantly (a downside to superspeed other superhero comics have also explored). Bit of a mixed bag.
<p>
Lenore is an elderly woman whose skin glows constantly with a white light that puts people to sleep. She tests it on Jeff in the group session and he simply stops vibrating. As the series goes in it turns out this is an energy transfer, giving Lenore temporary strength and also de-aging her. But in the early going she feels compelled to wear long dresses, gloves, hats, veils, etc. to block the light and avoid inadvertently putting people under.
<p>
Steph is an attractive housewife with four kids. She can heal people by touch, or if they aren’t sick or injured, she can rev up their energy and metabolism. Much like Lenore temporarily helps Jeff, Steph temporarily helps Dave, easing his muscular growing pains. Dave immediately falls in love with Steph, but as mentioned she’s married. And her power really doesn’t have a downside! But her husband, who of course is a jerk, still thinks she’s abnormal and demands she not come home until she’s cured.
<p>
Once again, you can see the heavy-handed New U adherence to “realism” at play, but I think because it’s an ensemble cast it works a little better. One character with a single power which is either (a) uncontrollable (b) harmlessly useless (c) as much curse as blessing or (d) all of the above can get real old real fast, but when you put seven characters like that together, they compliment each other, and you can get closer to some of the big propulsive comic book action that I, age eleven, was really interested in. Plus Gruenwald created some pretty likable characters. Dave was fascinating, basically a sweet guy who used to be easygoing but is Not Handling Well At All the weirdness his life has turned into. Scuzz was also intriguing, deeply unlikable but with some depth that came out eventually. Randy was the responsible one, Jeff was the jokester, Lenore was the surprisingly hip old lady. I was ride or die with the Displaced Paranormals, who were basically doing a riff on the Fugitive once they realized the Clinic wanted to “use” them (in a nefarious master plan never really fully articulated) and went on the run, only to be hunted down by other paranormals working for the Clinic.
<p>
The first year or so of the series was solidly great, as far as I was concerned, and had an interesting arc from the seven escaping the clinic, trying to hang together as a team, then breaking apart and getting picked off by hunters one by one, taken back to the Clinic and brainwashed. It wasn’t perfect, and it still managed to rankle with some telltale New U bits. At one point while they’re on the lam, Scuzz suggests they use codenames for each other because you never know who might overhear them and call in a tip to the Clinic. Dave would be Mastadon, Randy would be Antibody, Jeff/Blur, Charlie/Friction, Lenore/Twilight, Steph/Glitter (she glowed a little when she used her healing power), and Scuzz dubbed himself the Duke of Disintegration. The others basically laughed at him and said that was dumb comic book kid stuff. Again, the mind boggles that Jim Shooter thought 25 years of Marvel superhero comics should be celebrated by creating an imprint that left out or pointedly insulted most of the tropes of Marvel superhero comics. It’s entirely possible (he said, with hindsight) that this was a tipping point, the beginning of the shift from making comics for kids - precocious kids who could decode $2 words and keep track of tons of continuity and character minutiae, but still kids - and making comics for adult lifelong fans. If you were eight years old when FF#1 came out, now you’re 33, so here, have some comics about adult responsibilities and disillusionment with a sprinkling of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, for the discerning mature reader, Not For Babies. Which is probably the most damning thing you could say about the ol’ New U, in retrospect.
<p>
Anyway, end of the first year-long arc, Dave is the last one standing, goes back to the Clinic to help bust everyone else out, teams up with Randy to confront the man who ran the place. And … they won? So it kind of reset the premise, now instead of the Clinic being a hostile enemy it became a refuge for paranormals and a breeding ground for more soapy drama. The new twist was that, without an authoritarian in charge, the Clinic degenerated into cliques and gangs carving out little fiefdoms and squabbling with each other. And this very well could have been an interesting avenue to explore long-term, heck almost anything tension-heightening is interesting in a character-driven story where you dig the characters. But, as usual, editorial micromanagement and behind-the-scenes shenanigans did a number on the New Universe. I mentioned last time that the whole thing was Jim Shooter’s baby and Star Brand was his avatar? Yeah, Shooter got pushed out and in a weirdly petty bit of creative salt in the wound, they turned Star Brand into the ultimate villain and he vaporized Pittsburgh, which precipitated a war, where they drafted paranormals specifically? D.P. 7 had no choice but to go along with this event-driven storytelling even though it was way out of line with the series’ overall vibe. And it never really recovered.
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<p>
There are comics, from Green Lantern to Avengers to Justice League to Exiles, which I have faithfully collected for 10+ years at a stretch, so the fact that I own all 34 issues of D.P. 7 ever published is barely noteworthy. But I do wish I’d had the opportunity to read that title for 10+ years. Oh what might have been.
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-76953641312754374532021-03-17T14:09:00.001-04:002021-03-17T14:09:07.630-04:00With a capital T<p>
Holy crap you guys it just occurred to me: you know how in the U.S. the national drinking age is 21 and most bars are open until at least 2 a.m. and so college kids will often go out on the night before their actual 21st birthday and the bouncer will usually let them in because as soon as it hits midnight they can legally buy alcohol and indulge in their first couple of hours of state-sanctioned drinking? Right?
<p>Today is St. Patrick's Day, or as those of us who know our way around an ale or two call it, "Amateur Night".
<p>Tomorrow is the bino's birthday.
<p>Birthdays and St. Paddy's are fixed dates. They don't move around on the calendar based on lunar cycles or the desire for federal holiday three day weekends. My little girl, for example, has had her birthday fall near and far from Easter, including right on it once, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, for example, when the next time the conjunction will be.
<p>BUT I can say with absolute certainty that if the bino's friends take him out the night before his 21st birthday in order to do shots at midnight, they will be attempting such a maneuver ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Which, by the by, in that year will fall ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.
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<p>
Holy. Crap. You. Guys.
<p>
One reason why this fact has eluded me so far may have something to do with an ironic recent development: the bino, at the ripe old age of 8, has taken a pretty strong anti-alcohol stance. He hates it, and will declaim as much loudly and often. He does not find Homer Simpson funny in the slightest. And he gives me and my wife a lot of guff about our own imbibing.
<p>
Of course this can and probably will change over the next decade or so. I don't remember feeling the way he did at his age, my parents drank and I just accepted it as the way things were, but he is his own person and has to chart his own course. Maybe his 21st birthday's adjacency to Amateur Night will end up mattering on some level, and maybe it won't. Time will tell, we shall see, too ra loo ra.
<p>
Another layer of irony here is that his hardcore teetotaler stance has really solidified over the past year. As in, 375 days and counting of Pandemic Life. So, yeah, full disclosure, we've been doing a fair bit more drinking at home over the past year than any time earlier. It's been a year in which my wife got me a beer box subscription for my birthday AND my dad got me a completely different beer box gift card for Christmas. It's been a year of staying in on the weekends instead of getting a sitter and going out, but still enjoying a glass or two of wine or some bourbon or dark rum based cocktail or other while we watch a streaming movie and order in pizza. It's been, in short, a bit of a year.
<p>
It's also been a year in which my wife has still had to go to campus to run lab sessions for her job, which both increases the need for relaxation rituals and makes the schedule a bit odd, to boot. This semester, for instance, my wife is on campus for early morning labs Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Fridays she works from home, but for all intents and purposes she considers Thursday her personal Friday night for unwinding with a choice beverage or two. I bring this up only to point out yet another ironic convergence, as tomorrow happens to be a Thursday and, as mentioned above, is also the teetotalling bino's birthday. So! We have settled on a compromise: my wife and I will be enjoying some fine Irish beers together tonight, in honor of the holy man Padraig, and on Friday my wife likely has plans with a small COVID bubble of her friends which will also involve libations. But on Thursday, on the bino's birthday, there will be no drinking. We can be abstemious for the one day that's supposed to be all about him. At least, that's the compromise my wife and I came up with, we haven't exactly submitted it to the bino for approval as such, but I'm sure he'll be on board with minimal amounts of guff.
<p>
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-70312009224584028242021-03-14T01:48:00.005-05:002021-03-15T10:38:46.370-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8) - New Beginnings (Part Two)<p>
The Marvel Universe, meaning the tapestry of interconnected superhero stories in comics, began with the publication on Fantastic Four #1 in late 1961. Yes, there were other superhero comics published by the same company under different names back in the 30’s and 40’s, and some of the characters who debuted in those WWII-era magazines (including Captain America and Namor the Sub-Mariner) would be brought back and incorporated into the Marvel Universe in the 60’s, which might complicate the reckoning of a proper ‘beginning’. Meanwhile Spider-Man, Marvel’s flagship character, wouldn’t debut in Amazing Fantasy until 1962 and wouldn’t get his own ongoing title until 1963. If you talk about other stalwarts of the MCU like Thor and Iron Man, they too were not present at first, technically. But nonetheless, FF #1 was the launch of the modern superhero phase of Marvel Comics, if for no other reason than Marvel Comics themselves always referred to it that way. The Fantastic Four was the first family, the progenitors of superheroes as we know them. The Marvel Universe began in 1961.
<p>
So quick math will tell you that the 25th anniversary of Marvel Comics was 1986, and if you think they were going to let that pass without acknowledgement, you don’t fully appreciate what a relentless hype machine Marvel Comics, the company, always had been and was perfected into by the Reagan Years. In my memory there were two big markers of the anniversary which were readily apparent to my young eyes. One was a special format for the covers of all the ongoing superhero titles in the summer of ‘86. I remember buying several of these off the newsstand at the time.
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<p>
Extreme close-ups of the title character (or a representative character for a team book), a border showcasing the biggest superhero stars of the time, and the 25th anniversary logo in the upper left - what’s not to love?
<p>
The other way Marvel decided to commemorate the occasion of 25 years since FF#1 was … by creating an entirely new, separate, fictional superhero universe. They promoted for months and months that they were going to be launching not one but several new titles, interconnected to each other but with no connection to Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, etc. The name for this bold new storytelling imprint was “New Universe” and in 1986 if you were into Marvel comics like I was, it was inescapable. I totally had this promo poster hung up in my childhood bedroom:
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4UzNNMCIp8LB55j9NAOhX56BBkFckJc_esV6-E27eGAztMjxJxgZU-yUzVlyyNjgLMeDMhRVRX87W_KFSoBtC_A9xkl2r7I1baR5RjgEK7f0UUmMF27_0t82KcZA4BDx3h65fxfk8GXnj/s300/new-u.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4UzNNMCIp8LB55j9NAOhX56BBkFckJc_esV6-E27eGAztMjxJxgZU-yUzVlyyNjgLMeDMhRVRX87W_KFSoBtC_A9xkl2r7I1baR5RjgEK7f0UUmMF27_0t82KcZA4BDx3h65fxfk8GXnj/s400/new-u.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>
As I said in the <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2021/03/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-7-big.html">previous post</a>, some part of me enjoyed the challenge of catching up on the Marvel Universe’s twenty-plus years of continuity as a young fan in the 80’s, but another part of me longed to have been there from the beginning. I cannot possibly have been alone in feeling this way. Marvel was banking that lots of kids my age would be super stoked to be able to pick up new #1 issues at the dawning of a brand new comics world, to position themselves to be veteran fans who had been there from day one. I was eleven-almost-twelve, this made tons of sense to me! I was on board!
<p>
So much so that I made a momentous decision: for the first time in my young life I was going to subscribe to a comic book. Every Marvel comic in the 80’s had a house ad for the ongoing series that you could have delivered to your door every month, at discount rates. I had never availed myself of this before but I reasoned there was no better time to jump in with both feet than on the cusp of this New Universe. But of the eight titles being offered, which one would I choose?
<p>
The poster up above shows the eight titles in the New U, which I will now briefly explain:
<p>
D.P.7 - seven strangers who develop powers meet each other when they all come to The Clinic in hopes of curing their new conditions. When they find out The Clinic has nefarious plans for them, they escape and go on the run.
<p>
JUSTICE - A newcomer to Earth from another realm (planet? dimension?) hunts monsters that have also crossed over to Earth.
<p>
KICKERS, INC. - Four football players and the quarterback’s girlfriend become private investigators after a medical experiment gives the QB heightened physical abilities.
<p>
STAR BRAND - A normal guy receives an artifact of immense power from an alien and tries to figure out how to use it for good.
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NIGHTMASK - A young man with the psychic ability to enter other people’s dreams uses his gift to help people.
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SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS - A young woman’s father is killed by people who want to use his construction/rescue exoskeleton as a weapon; she teams up with some fellow techie nerds to keep the suit out of their hands.
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MERC - Soldier of Fortune, the comic book.
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PSI-FORCE - Five teenagers, each with different psychic abilities, are gathered by a former spook who wants to keep the kids out of the government’s hands. He is killed but together the five kids can psychically summon his ghost, Psi-Hawk.
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How much would each of these books have appealed to 11/12 year old me? D.P. 7, Nightmask and Psi-Force would be in the top tier. Kickers, Inc. and Justice would be solidly second tier. Spitfire and Star Brand would be third tier “meh”. And Merc is the kind of comic I have always actively disliked - no super powers, no costumes, nothing sci-fi or fantasy at all, just weapons-and-vehicles fetishization. (Not that I knew what a fetish was when I was 11. But Marvel already had the Punisher and I never saw the appeal there, either.)
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I ended up sampling all of the New U titles, eventually. I mean why not? They were 75 cents a pop, and I’m sure they doled those #1s out over four, maybe six weeks that summer. My allowance covered the full spread. But the time to sign up for a subscription, of course, was before anything had been released, and New U was very much treated as a “secret project”. The house ads for subscriptions in X-Factor and West Coast Avengers looked like this:
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Underneath which was a coupon with the list of titles, unexplained, where you could check boxes to subscribe to one or more, and a form to fill in your address. All of which I dutifully did, even though there wasn't much (any) info to go on. And so, totally blind, I selected my one title … MERC. Blugh.
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See, I didn’t realize at the time that Merc was short for “mercenary”. I thought it was short for … Mercury? I thought it would be the New U version of The Flash, and that idea intrigued me. Sign me up for the speedster, I thought. Then the issues started showing up in the mailbox and it didn’t take long for buyer’s remorse to set in. Not only was it a 100% superhero-free comic, but it was bleak. Mark Hazzard, the titular mercenary, was a jerk. I’m sure there was a nuanced and ironic exploration of PTSD or something buried under the gunplay and explosions, but I was a kid who wanted to see demigods in spandex perform miracles and make the world a better place, not thrill to the exploits of a middle-aged divorcee who would murder Sandinistas for a paycheck. So my first (and last) experience with a direct mail subscription from Marvel Comics was not an altogether fun one, but I chalked it up to a learning experience: check something out for yourself before committing to paying for a year’s worth up front.
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What’s wild is how my personal experience with the New U is in its way a microcosm of everything that went wrong with the New U. Or maybe I should say the most extreme, egregious example of what went wrong. For go wrong it very much did. The next bold leap forward in sequential storytelling of modern fantasy, to ring in the 25th anniversary of the Marvel U, lasted less than three years. Most of the titles got cancelled before hitting 25 issues, let alone 25 years. Whereas that was 35 years ago now, and the main Marvel U is still kicking along happily while the New U is just a funny footnote.
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Many people have done post-mortems on the New U in the decades since, but to vastly oversimplify: they took the wrong lessons from the Marvel U. The prevailing wisdom in the mid-80’s, which still more or less holds up today, was that Marvel Comics really did do superheroes in a way they had never been done before. They kept the costumes and outlandish personas, the physics-defying superpowers, the larger-than-life battles between good and evil, and then in addition they layered in other elements of pathos. (Not my theory, but I plug it every chance I get: DC Comics, Superman and Batman etc., grew out of the pulps, and they are about archetypes. Marvel Comics, the FF and Spider-Man etc., grew out of monster comics and romance comics, and they are about human psychology.) The Fantastic Four was a family with all the messy interpersonal dynamics that entailed. Spider-Man and the Hulk were outsiders, at odds with the world. Iron Man had deadly shrapnel lodged in his chest close to his heart. The X-Men were caught in endless cycles of unrequited love, inconsolable grief, guilt and shame and every other flavor of self-doubt and self-loathing. All of which made those superheroes, radioactive blood and adamantium claws and all, seem more human and feel more real. On top of that, the ongoing storylines incorporated failure alongside the successes, and consequences which complicated every action, again all with the explicit aim of giving the stories and characters a veneer of verisimilitude.
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And not for nothing, but Superman and Batman were from the fictional cities of Metropolis and Gotham, which are (again) archetypal urban centers. The FF and Spider-Man hung out in the “real” New York City. Marvel Comics, ergo, were supposed to take place in the “real” world. Which sounds great, full stop. I totally buy into all of this, for what it’s worth, and I did when I was eleven even if I couldn’t have articulated it at length. Balancing out the guy who can stretch and the gal who can turn invisible with concerns about public perception and finances is just smart, appealing storytelling. But at the end of the day, it was a way to put a dash of realism into a stew of modern myth-making. As Marvel Comics evolved over 25 years, they piled on the unreal ingredients: more alien races, magical dimensions, impossible science, fake countries, hidden civilizations, lost pantheons, and a sarcastic, cigar-chomping duck named Howard. Once you’ve had the sorcerer supreme meet the personification of time and space itself, or let one of the X-Men’s cosmically powerful children from a future timeline come back and join the team, or established numerous galactic empires and at least three subterranean kingdoms, well, how much of a claim do you have on these comics taking place in the real world?
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It’s hard, even now, for me to wrap my head around the fact that someone looked at the Marvel Universe as it stood in 1986 and thought that losing that specific facet - not that the comics had a realistic take on their characters’ psychologies, but that they nominally could exist in the real world - was a huge problem. And that the guiding principle for a new universe should be that it was “the world outside your window” requiring as little suspension of disbelief as possible. And yet, that was the elevator pitch for the New Universe.
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To reframe the eight New U titles a bit more: two were about psychic powers (Nightmask and Psi-Force) which some people believe might possibly exist in our world; two were about low-end science fiction technology (Spitfire and Kickers) like robotics and human enhancement, which are arguably plausible; and two were about aliens (Star Brand and Justice) which, again, some people believe exist. One, <em>deep sigh</em>, had no fantastical elements whatsoever (Merc, of course) and really only one had something like the anarchic bonkers anything-goes spirit of traditional superhero comics (D.P. 7, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be my favorite of the bunch and clearly was the one I should have subscribed to).
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And of the three that were the most outre, each had its own guard rails. The superpowers in D.P. 7, such as they were, were all very humble. One character was the brick, but he was only remarkably strong and tough, not an invulnerable Hercules. One was a healer, but only for minor injuries. One could disintegrate things, but only by directly touching the thing and secreting a kind of bio-acid. Powers as they might manifest while still obeying most of the laws of physics and biology, in other words. Justice (which I never read beyond sampling one issue) turned out to not be about aliens after all, because the main character wasn’t from another world, he had been brainwashed into believing a delusional fantasy about monsters and the knights who hunted them. I think some evil corporation did the brainwashing, it was the 80s, lots of stories went down like that.
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Star Brand, one could argue, was as traditional comic-booky as D.P. 7 or maybe moreso. This was the central Superman figure of the New U. With his gift from aliens (literally a brand in the shape of a star on his palm) Ken Connell gained phenomenal powers - he could fly, he was superstrong, he could release tremendous energy. To offset this in the overall spirit of the New U, Ken was as everyman as could be. As tragically pathos-filled as the original Marvel Comics heroes could be, it’s worth noting that they were all pretty close to the classic hero molds all the same. Heart shrapnel or no, Tony Stark was still a child of privilege, CEO of a successful company, wealthy and handsome. Reed Richards was also independently wealthy, and a genius, before taking off in his doomed rocket, and Sue Storm was a gorgeous socialite. Even Peter Parker was a genius, from a humble home but with easy access to New York City’s best schools and science demonstrations. Ken Connell, to fit into the New U, was a nobody. Tall, lanky, not particularly handsome. Worked as a mechanic in some forgotten suburb of Pittsburgh. Solidly lower middle class. Directionless. Was hung up on a local hot/mean girl who wasn’t interested in him, and had a less-attractive female friend who was clearly interested in him but he didn’t reciprocate. Put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it in a moment.
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Anyway, so there’s this continuum from no powers to exotic gadgets to psychic abilities to vaguely superheroic powers, and right from the get-go there’s a line in the sand that can’t be crossed. The New Universe was never supposed to get too far away from that baseline realism. So all the bad guys were straight out of generic mid-budget 80’s action movies: terrorists with suitcase nukes, unscrupulous corporations, Communist soldiers (both renegade and state-sanctioned), unethical scientists, yuppie scum. Whereas the Marvel Universe started out of the gate with Monster Island and Doctor Doom, and escalated quickly to Galactus the Devourer of Worlds and Ego the Living Planet, the New Universe was determined to keep things grounded. I suppose they succeeded, but you also might call it failure to launch and not be wrong, at that.
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Surprise, surprise, as it turns out, people (especially kids) don’t read comics for the realism! Making “as realistic as possible” the guiding principle for a comics universe is like finding out a kid likes french fries and handing them a salt shaker and expecting them to not just be satisfied but thrilled. A little pathos goes a long way, but it’s the gonzo storytelling about extraterrestrial armadas and mystical pantheons that keeps the burning heart of superhero comics beating. Arguably the creators of the New U wanted to appeal to a different, broader audience than the die hard superhero fan kids, but even if that were the case, all that meant was they were entering into direct competition with those aforementioned mid-budget 80’s action movies. Every story tells the same story, and when you want to do so on film with live actors but not spend a hundred million dollars, you make a version of the story with human protagonists and antagonists, fake guns and a few explosions. The secret weapon of comics has always been that it costs the same to produce a two-dimensional color picture of Captain America and the Fantastic Four teaming up to fend off an invasion of New York by Antimatter Nazi Hyper-Wolves as it would cost for a two-dimensional color picture of an average schmoe riding the bus in Cleveland and thinking about which parts of werewolf lore might be real. So with budget being a non-factor, why would you ever choose the latter over the former?
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To stand out in an already crowded field, I guess? To be more nuanced, more sophisticated? Maybe. But then why tie it specifically to Marvel Comics’ 25th Anniversary? Why look at the undeniable success of Spider-Man and the X-Men and say “Let’s get rid of everything that inspires the imagination, and focus almost exclusively on a single component of the secret sauce, and repackage and sell that!” But that’s what they did, for a little while. They thought the Marvel Universe had lost its way by getting too overstuffed with nonsense, and they offered a severely heavy-handed overcorrection that nobody else was asking for. Ironically, the imprint line went away and some of the characters much later became supporting cast in the regular Marvel Universe, traversing the multiverse to get to the true home of superheroes after all.
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I was there, I saw it go down, and it’s easy for me now to play hindsight visionary and say that it could have worked, if all the new titles had been as unashamedly super-hero-y as D.P. 7 and Psi-Force at minimum, and if there had been room to grow into the crazy cosmic stuff organically, and if relative realism had been an accessory feature, not absolute realism the be-all-end-all point of the whole thing. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Fantastic Four #1 and those wild times in the 60’s caught lightning in a bottle in an ineffably unique way.
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Quick return to Star Brand: it’s well-known lore on the interwebs at this point that Ken Connell was based on Jim Shooter, then-EiC of Marvel whose brainchild the New U was, and who wrote the Star Brand series at first. And a lot of the details of Star Brand’s supporting cast were pulled directly from Shooter’s life. I don’t mean to slag the man for injecting autobiographical realism into Star Brand. But the results speak for themselves, as Star Brand did not become an iconic classic. The problem with Superman is not that he’s Cary Grant handsome, or that he has a prestigious job as a reporter for a major metropolitan paper. There actually is no problem with Superman, which is why he’s still around. People don’t put up with the nonsense attached to superheroes - be that the bullet-proof powers <em>OR</em> the diabolical nightmarish foes <em>OR</em> the unlikely handsomeness and wealth and fame etc. - because they want the imperfect humanity buried underneath it all. They actively love the nonsense, every bit of it, and some imperfect humanity highlights and contrasts that nonsense in ways that makes it even better. That’s the lesson.
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Also, obligatory Stay Woke call-out: although the New U came into being twenty years after Black Panther was introduced in Fantastic Four #52, guess how many New U headliners were people of color? Did you guess zero? Ding ding ding! Ken Connell was white (as is Jim Shooter), and so was Justice, and so was Nightmask, and so was the woman who operated Spitfire, and so was Mark Hazzard. Of the five Psi-Force kids, three were definitely white, one was an Asian girl, and one was a black boy. Their mentor was Native American. Of the Kickers, Inc. the one who got quasi-powers was white, as was his girlfriend and one of the others, with the remaining two one black guy and one Hispanic guy. D.P. 7 broke down as three white dudes, two white ladies, a black dude and a black lady. For a “bold leap forward” it was a lot of the same old, same old in that regard.
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NEXT POST: Back to the Marvel comics proper, as I finally reach the obsessive point of no return ...
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-89074767119973229442021-03-07T06:16:00.004-05:002021-03-15T10:44:16.721-04:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (7) - The Big Picture<p>
I think a larger point I’ve been trying to make here (in my usual charming dance-around-it-until-the-heat-death-of-the-universe way), with regards to my evolution from someone who was aware of Marvel Comics to a lifelong dedicated fan, is that being a comic book fan is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing behavior. Which, on the one hand, is pretty obvious, as demonstrated by the fact that you could say the same thing about being a fan of anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s other storytelling mediums, from classic cinema to daytime soap operas to prog rock, or seemingly non-narrative interests like Texas Hold’Em or antique cars or the NBA. The deeper you get into something, the deeper you can get into something, and you usually do, which means you can get even deeper, and on and on and on. But on the other hand, understanding the influences one musician had on another or what older forerunner led to a certain coupe model or sports strategy or whathaveyou is both deeply satisfying yet completely unnecessary. You can appreciate athleticism or say “that’s a beautiful car” without the prior references and touchpoints taking up any space at all in your brain. And that’s a perfectly fine and valid way to engage with things, and people do it all the time!
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But superhero comics, with their serialized storytelling and their foundations of continuity, have an unparalleled and powerful way of getting their hooks into you. Or into me, at least. Unless you happened to be the right age with money to burn at the right time, said time being the day the first appearance of Superman or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man hit the newsstands, whatever your personal first comic was you’d be coming in on the middle of the story. In the earliest days of comics (decades of DC’s publishing, and a fair amount of Marvel’s pre-superhero output) this was actually a non-issue because they didn’t emphasize the ongoing nature of one big sprawling story. Monthly issues were self-contained stories, so that any given offering could be someone’s first comic ever and a comprehensible entry point. The publishers assumed kids read comics for a few years and then outgrew them, so every few years stories would get recycled. The core concepts of the characters, meanwhile, remained constant in the spirit of not fixing what ain’t broke. So everything did a timeless kind of treading water, narratively speaking.
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Marvel’s superhero comics didn’t take long to break the rules of the game. The Fantastic Four fought Doctor Doom something like three different times within the span of the title’s first twelve issues. And at first glance it might seem like there’s very little difference, in terms of creative output, between running the exact same Superman versus Lex Luthor story fourteen months apart, and running two similar FF versus Doom stories five months apart. To the casual, occasional or intermittent reader that’s true enough. But to the dedicated fan it’s night and day. By the third time Doom (or the Mole Man or the Super-Skrull or whoever) fights the FF, they’ve learned more about him and he’s learned more about them. The stakes are higher because it’s an ongoing feud, and the story logic can be more complex, with fewer deus ex machina solutions and more ‘oh, that makes sense, he would have been ready for that this time because he applied the lessons from last time’.
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Marvel tried to balance things, erring on the side of caution at first. The earliest non-#1 issues of Marvel superheroes would literally recap the heroes' origins, just in case a kid picked up #2 or #3 as their first exposure. They wouldn’t be so put off by having missed the beginning of the story that they would give up; they’d get a crash course to bring them up to speed and then continue along with the rest of the audience. Later the recaps went away but the writers and editors made liberal use of footnote captions. A character’s dialogue balloon would say something like “But it can’t be YOU -- you’re DEAD!!!*” and that asterisk at the end would tie to a caption at the bottom of the panel that said “* Last time Hero saw Villain was when he was falling into a radioactive volcano in Tales to Blow Your Mind #145 - Editor” This addendum acknowledged the past continuity and provided the bare minimum context, while avoiding putting clunky exposition dialogue directly in the character’s mouths. It also pointed the reader to a specific older issue, and maybe that kid would have a friend who owned that issue, and the kid could borrow it, and fill in the gaps and be that much closer to becoming a dedicated deep reader. (Later still it would be theoretically possible to obtain any issue at any time from a comic shop or comic dealer at a convention or a mail order service, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
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Of course not everything could be recapped or footnoted, and not everything needs to be, and that’s the real endorphin-buzz potential of being a dedicated fan. At some point, as the comic stories become less self-contained and more one ongoing sprawling tapestry, a reader will run across something that obliquely references the past, with no accompanying editor’s note, and the reader will recognize the reference and feel the thrill of being In The Know. For a certain stripe of geeky nerd (myself very much included) there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving affirmation that you’ve internalized some bit of knowledge which has just come up in another context. It’s absurdly specialized, of course - the only time it’s going to come in handy knowing how many times Spider-Man has met Thor is when you’re reading more Spider-Man or Thor comics - but that’s the point I led with up above: it’s all self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. The more comics you read, the more knowledge about their fictional universe you gain, and therefore the more comics you can read, which gives you more foundational knowledge, which makes you want to read more and learn more, which makes the reading you do more rewarding, ad infinitum.
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Marvel pioneered this hook-em-and-keep-em-coming-back approach but DC realized its value and pivoted to a similar approach soon enough, and that sea change happened before I was born, let alone reading comics. But the thing is, when I turned eleven in late 1985, DC was leveraging 45 years’ worth of their back catalog, and had swung from timeless recycling to ongoing epic maybe halfway through all of that. Marvel had been telling the tales of a single unified universe from the get-go, starting a mere 24 years prior and really only reaching critical mass in the mid-60’s. So, point number one in Marvel’s favor, two decades’ worth of (relatively) rock-solid continuity felt surmountable. It was enough to promise a fulfilling experience without being so daunting that I felt I could never truly catch up, and any effort I put into learning the history would assuredly pay dividends going forward. Whereas four and a half decades of false starts, imaginary stories, and infinite earths at DC was both too much and too likely that something might catch my eye and turn out to not really “count” anymore.
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Point number two in Marvel’s favor, they were more committed to the bit than DC, even long after DC followed their lead. It’s all well and good to realize you can wring more drama out of the culmination of a series of hero-villain throwdowns, as opposed to the fifth iteration of episodic, could-be-read-in-any-order donnybrooks. But it’s quite another thing to allow your main characters to grow and change. As I alluded to in my earlier post about <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2013/11/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-2-crazy.html">learning to love Spider-Man</a>, Peter Parker had started out in high school, and after a suitable amount of in-story time, he graduated from high school. He went to college, and he dropped out of college. He had a serious relationship with Gwen Stacy, and she died, and then he had a serious relationship with Mary Jane Watson. Eventually he told MJ his secret identity, and they got married in the summer of 1987, basically the 25th anniversary of Spider-Man’s debut. Superman had been around almost 50 years at that point and was still stuck in eternal chaste courtship with Lois Lane, never daring to reveal his double-life as Clark Kent, status quo forever. Clearly the promise (however illusory) of meaningful change was its own kind of siren call, that it was not just worthwhile to get to know the history to better enjoy the current installments, but that I had better come back faithfully for each monthly update because otherwise I might miss something important! A birth, a death, a wedding, or some other milestone! A contrarian voice might argue that missing an issue wasn’t the end of the world, that I had already missed hundreds (maybe thousands) of issues published before I became a regular reader. But, again, there’s something viscerally thrilling about feeling like a first-hand witness to history in the making. The only thing better than getting hold of some rare old issues from the earliest days of Marvel’s superhero universe would be to have been fortunate enough to grab those mags in real time off the newsstand, to have magically been eleven in 1962 instead of 1985 or 86.
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Next post, I’ll talk about what happened when that "right time, right place" lightning did strike a second time, in the summer of 1986 ...
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-22983384584868347362021-03-03T09:32:00.005-05:002021-03-04T08:27:36.961-05:00361I believe I've been reasonably faithful, so far, in my counting of the days for the post titles in this COVID-19 series. But at this moment, since it's coming up on one year of Living Through It, I find myself trying to remember where I chose to start counting. Theoretically it should be easier at this juncture to count backwards from the anniversary, whenever that may be.
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As my kids never fail to remind me, they woke up as per normal and went to school as per normal on a Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and came home at the end of the school day like any other school day, but that turned out to be the last time any of them had a normal in-school day. I don't think that's where I started counting, though. For me the last partially normal day was Monday March 9, when I went into the office but was sent home about halfway through the day after our home office decided to shut down out of an abundance of caution - not because anyone who worked for my company had gotten sick, but because there was one reported case of COVID-19 in an employee at a different company on a different floor in the NYC skyscraper where our home office is located. Therefore, Tuesday March 10 was Day One of me working from home, and the beginning of what I variously referred to as 'quarantine', 'lockdown', 'shutdown', 'WFH 4eva', 'I feel like there aren't any rules anymore', 'what are discrete units of time anyway', etc. At least I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. It's easy to lose track of things.
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The bino's birthday happens to fall just past the middle of March, and his birthday party in 2020 was one of the first casualties of the upheaval. We were supposed to take him, his sibs and a handful of his friends to the local indoor trampoline place to celebrate him turning seven, but we opted to cancel it. Actually if memory serves we optimistically believed we were going to 'reschedule' it. Surely the panic over this novel coronavirus was a tad overblown by the media. Surely we weren't on the cusp of a once-in-a-century historically bad pandemic. Surely we could follow the guidance of leaders and health experts and flatten the curve. Surely the worst thing we'd be dealing with come summer was trying to explain to people that maybe we did overreact in the spring and maybe we reacted appropriately and it worked, but we'll never know for certain, and better safe than sorry, right? Surely?
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Yeah, no, as it turned out. Little girl also didn't have much in the way of a birthday celebration in April. We did get some friends together for my wife's birthday in July, at an outdoor venue with almost nobody else around. Nothing much for the little guy in September (though he's not into big birthday parties anyway) and I insisted on nothing more than some nice takeout for my birthday in October.
<p>
So all of this is top of mind right now because, as I said, the one year anniversary is imminent, but also because this Friday, two days hence, we are going out to celebrate the bino's eighth birthday. Not at the trampoline place! We know the pandemic isn't over, it's not like it had a one-year expiration date. (Weirdly the trampoline place is still open for business, which on the one hand makes me happy, because venues going out of business due to the pandemic sucks. But on the other hand, just doesn't seem like the kind of place I want to take my kids to just yet. Other people obviously feel differently.)
<p>
Instead what we are doing Friday night is going to a drive-in movie. Should be fun! My wife took two of the kids to the drive-in a few months ago, and they had a good time. The food delivery to the car (because this is at the Alamo, of course, a theater I am entirely thrilled to support financially) was excellent, and the bino is probably looking forward to that more than the flick itself (Raya and the Last Dragon). His actual birthday isn't for another couple weeks, and that's when he'll get cake and his presents, so the celebration is taking over a goodly chunk of the month of March. But after missing out last year, and enduring the entire 360-some days since, he's entitled to a bit of that, I reckon.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-89007455576773334312021-02-28T07:12:00.004-05:002021-02-28T07:12:00.325-05:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (6) - New Beginnings (Part One)<p>
So there I was, in the summer of 1985, just getting into the groove of a regular comics buying habit. I was ten, almost eleven, old enough to be given $5 every Saturday morning to do with whatever I pleased, and also old enough to be trusted to ride my bike halfway across town to a convenience store that sold candy and soda and comics. A new issue of Spider-Man came out once a month, which meant if I went to the store every Saturday, one of those times I’d be able to get the newest Spider-Man, but the other three weekends I’d have to choose something else to read. Or maybe nothing! Marvel comics cost 65 or 75 cents an issue at that point, so my $5 weekly bacchanal might consist of one comic, one can of Coke, and a Milky Way bar, or two comics, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Yoo-hoo, or no comics, a 7-Up Gold, a bag of Combos, and a couple packs of Garbage Pail Kids. One never knew, but I’d almost always have change left over for my piggy bank back home.
<p>
Anyway, I biked over to the store that fateful day and I saw the most garish, attention-grabbing cover I had ever seen in my young life. A searing pinkish-magenta background with almost a dozen superheroes exploding toward the viewer! Said heroes garbed in a riot of colors, including an orange-clad yellow-caped strongman and another in quadrants of yellow, red, blue and green! An ominous, dark figure looming in the background! And a logo promising that this would be the greatest epic ever:
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<p>
This issue cost $1.25 all on its own, but I had to have it. It was arguably worth the cover price purely based on the fact that it was a double-sized extravaganza kicking off the maxi-series, though I would argue it had artistic merits of its own which also justified the cost. Because the Squadron Supreme series, I was about to learn as I turned its pages, was about heroes failing. Not failing in act two only to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and prevail in act three, but having already failed when the stakes were highest. It was a story about picking up the pieces after an unimaginable loss, trying to put things right, and arguably making things worse and failing again.
<p>
I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Behind the cover was a splash page where Hyperion is trying and (you guessed it) failing to prevent the Squadron Supreme’s satellite headquarters from plummeting to Earth. He settles for a controlled crash in the ocean.
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj35VnjGlby_xhKbDM1qnINwGYOYzEvB4lVdwYm7-6180fMLOXszoIDd8bmxA4VLdaSrsJtOIIz9lbSSDWeyszn1vD58fTEc0fAsISIYcVc-IK9tr4dnrY-0gmY-2eFL0qnI2Ch3ZNIl8W6/s2048/crash.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj35VnjGlby_xhKbDM1qnINwGYOYzEvB4lVdwYm7-6180fMLOXszoIDd8bmxA4VLdaSrsJtOIIz9lbSSDWeyszn1vD58fTEc0fAsISIYcVc-IK9tr4dnrY-0gmY-2eFL0qnI2Ch3ZNIl8W6/s400/crash.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>
Then he meets up with some of his teammates who all look like they’ve been through hell, costumes torn, expressions somber. The story moves around to other members of the team in different locations and gives a sense of how bad things are around the US and the world: food shortages, power outages, violent anarchy. The entire Squadron assembles in an older HQ in the mountains and compares notes.
<p>
Here, I will note, they recap how they got to this point, defeated and taking stock of a world on the brink, and footnotes explain that this was a storyline in The Defenders about three years earlier. I was unaware of this storyline (Defenders was a cool, weird series I learned to appreciate later but hadn’t gotten into at all as of age ten-almost-eleven); for that matter I was unaware of any of the Squadron’s previous appearances or incarnations, which I talked about in a previous installment to provide context to you the reader even though I lacked it myself. At any rate, the recap did its job just fine and I got the gist. It made sense that there had been a storyline in the standard Marvel continuity where heroes from an alternate Earth had been brainwashed by villains who conquered that alternate Earth, then turned their sights on the main Marvel Earth and the Defenders had to defeat and unbrainwash the alternate heroes, then go help them liberate their alternate Earth. In that storyline, the Defenders saved the day, standard superhero stuff.
<p>
Mark Gruenwald, the writer of the Squadron Supreme limited series, was a genius to me for seeing the potential in a sequel to the Defenders story, told from the alternate Earth’s point of view. It’s one thing to say that a parallel world was subjugated by an intergalactic despot when that’s just a colorful bit of backstory on the Villain of the Month. But to then return to that parallel world and center its heroes as the protagonists was a bold stroke. The thing about ongoing monthly superhero adventures is that they maintain the status quo and the villain’s plans to conquer the world never come to fruition because the good guys prevail in the end. Gruenwald dug deep into the possibilities of breaking that mold, and I found that utterly captivating.
<p>
And then of course what made it even better was the fact that this was clearly a riff on DC’s biggest superheroes. I immediately realized that this was what <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2013/12/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-4-rivalry.html">that house ad I had taunted my brother with</a> really meant. OK, fine, so Marvel hadn’t acquired the rights to Superman and Batman and Green Lantern. But Hyperion is clearly a re-skinned Superman, Nighthawk is unmistakably Batman by another name, Doctor Spectrum is Green Lantern with his sector ID filed off. Except it’s even better than that, because if Marvel had started publishing Superman, people would more or less expect him to remain Superman with all of his tropes and trappings intact. Gruenwald, by using characters that were minor in the grand scheme of Marvel things, was able to have his cake and eat it too, telling a Justice League of America story that went truly off the rails, where Superman breaks up with Lois Lane forever and winds up falling in love with Wonder Woman, where Batman in his civilian identity is elected President of the United States, where Black Canary dumps Green Arrow for Hawkman which drives Green Arrow crazy enough to electronically brainwash Black Canary, get caught out, and become a villain. This combination of messing with DC archetypes and doing with them what DC would never dare do was extremely appealing to a partisan like me who had long since chosen Marvel over DC.
<p>
Back to the issue itself: the heroes are all grappling with the fact that yes, with the Defenders’ help, they punched away the problem of the supervillain, however, this did not solve the corollary problems the supervillain’s conquest caused which have left Earth a post-apocalyptic mess. Those problems, the infrastructure collapse, the riotous lawlessness, can’t be solved by punching. But can they be solved by superheroes in any way? Power Princess comes from a place literally called Utopia Isle, so she at least has a blueprint for fixing the world. Tom Thumb is an off-the-charts technological genius. The Whizzer’s superspeed lets him cover the entire globe to gather intel and coordinate efforts in real time. They feel responsible for letting the world down and want to atone, not just by restoring the way things used to be but by making a better world, free of crime, free of poverty, free of all of mankind’s ills.
<p>
Well, most of them want to. They debate this for a while, with Amphibian doubtful that it’s feasible and Nighthawk fearful that the only way to succeed will be to take over the world themselves, because a world devoid of problems is also a world devoid of freedom. This was pretty heady stuff for a ten year old! But I was enthralled by it all the same. In the end they vote, ten in favor and Amphibian and Nighthawk opposed. Amphibian accepts the outcome. Nighthawk rage quits, but he does agree to arrange a press conference where two things will happen: Kyle Richmond (Nighthawk’s secret ID) will resign as POTUS, and Hyperion and the rest of the Squadron will reveal and abandon their secret ID’s and announce the Utopia Program.
<p>
The rest of the issue is the Squadron squaring away their personal lives as they are about to dedicate themselves to being round-the-clock world savers, and Richmond plotting to <b><i>assassinate Hyperion at the press conference</i></b> because he assumes the Squadron will abandon the Utopia Program if they lose their superman leader. The press conference happens, Richmond resigns, Hyperion gives a speech introducing the Utopia Program, and Richmond has a gun in his pocket loaded with an argonite bullet, aimed at Hyperion’s back, but at the last minute can’t pull the trigger, not because he second-guesses his suspicions, but because he doesn’t want to go down in history as the man who murdered the world’s greatest superhero. So the Squadron unmasks and the Utopia Program begins.
<p>
It’s a lot for a single issue, even one that’s double-sized, but that’s a good thing because with the whole debate-to-near-assassination arc for Nighthawk it feels like it tells a reasonably satisfying story while also setting up the longer narrative. It’s a fantastic first chapter of a novel.
<p>
What’s crazy is that I was so hooked by issue #1, I wanted to ride this train so badly, which meant definitely getting to the convenience store every month, on the specific week that new issues would come out, for an entire year. You will be shocked to learn that this proved impossible for a ten/eleven-year old. After re-reading issue #1 so many times it almost disintegrated, I managed to pick up #2. Then missed #3. Then got #4, which did a pretty good job of bringing me up to speed on what I missed, then got #5 and I think maybe #6? Then I hit a rough patch where I missed several issues, but I did manage to come back at the end and see how it all wrapped up in #12. I honestly cannot remember if I got my hands on #10 from the newsstand, or if I acquired it some time later to retro-fill the gap. Because that’s the thing about this pivotal maxi-series: it hearkens to a time when I was evolving from ‘casual fan’ to ‘devoted fan’ but had not yet reached the higher level of ‘obsessive collector’. We will get there, my friends. We will get there.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-16040076301194860882021-02-24T12:21:00.008-05:002021-02-27T16:30:52.591-05:00Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (5b) - Starting Over<p>
One of the things I really wanted to write about under this overarching theme was Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme limited series, because it was such a major touchstone of my early comic book appreciation (not to mention other themes and motifs that would become pervasive throughout my many geekdoms), but I felt like I needed to set it up a little first, and apparently the whole notion that <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2013/12/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-4-rivalry.html">my brother and I were consciously oppositional</a> in those days (Yankees vs. Mets, Cobra versus GI Joe, Marvel vs DC) wasn’t enough in and of itself to contextualize how cool I thought it was that Marvel did a pastiche of DC’s big guns. I also felt <a href="http://parentheticalasides.blogspot.com/2013/12/marvel-comics-my-untold-story-5.html">compelled to explain</a> the idea of parallel and alternate Earths, some of the creative genesis of the Squadron Supreme as a potential intercompany crossover, and the concept of a maxi-series. I think chasing down these various rabbit holes was something I embarked on with the best of intentions, but ended up derailing me a bit.
<p>
Oh and then over seven freaking years went by?!?!?
<p>
I mean, the derailment happened right around Christmas time in 2013, and judging by some of the work-related posts from January 2014, I was entering one of the periodic actual-things-to-do phases (as opposed to bored-and-blogging-to-look-busy phases) which meant if anything was going to fall off, it was going to be a recurring long-form series that I wrote ahead of time, in addition to other random daily posts, and scheduled to publish on Sundays. And then I have to assume enough time went by that I lost all momentum for Marvel Comics: My Untold Story altogether. And a little over a year later, by early 2015, I had lost a lot of momentum for the blog itself. If memory serves this was due to a combination of focusing more on my original fiction and trying to get published in various zines and anthologies, plus joining FB, originally because it was a promotional requirement for one of said anthologies, though eventually I did get into it and found it scratched the social media itch formerly addressed by my blog. One more year and change later and it’s mid-2016, I’d changed jobs, and actual-things-to-do was the standard operating procedure, sending this blog into deep hibernation. Alas, poor Parenthetical Asides, we knew you well.
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuJd3bgoJDrY0EWB9NLKDhQ3HDsLeJ0guQtgy0I6Ale6DXai4XSN_M0n-N0re6vlebZMD4E4NgwZNKS2kFarew1k1QWwZAvF6D_bXjo9gfdTjUYcNAMDF9heU4YGKXLqTlG9y-ot4TWhnF/s2048/death_of_a_universe.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="400" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuJd3bgoJDrY0EWB9NLKDhQ3HDsLeJ0guQtgy0I6Ale6DXai4XSN_M0n-N0re6vlebZMD4E4NgwZNKS2kFarew1k1QWwZAvF6D_bXjo9gfdTjUYcNAMDF9heU4YGKXLqTlG9y-ot4TWhnF/s400/death_of_a_universe.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>
But everything comes back around eventually! And there have been a couple of recent developments which brought Marvel Comics: My Untold Story back to the forefront of my mind. One is that I’ve gotten deeper into podcasts during the Year of the Pandemic, and in particular I’ve really taken a shine to Marvel by the Month. Another is that, after years of wishing it would happen, my eldest child, the Little Guy himself (he’s 12), has finally embraced the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including watching every single movie (many of which I’ve happily sat down and rewatched with him) and now being as obsessed with new episodes of WandaVision on Fridays as I am. I even managed to parlay that into getting the Little Guy to read some of the source material comics that I still own, which will doubtless be fodder for one of these posts.
<p>
So excessively long intervening passage of time be danged! Let’s get back into Marvel Comics: My Untold Story and let’s finally dig into why Squadron Supreme hit me so deep - next time!
<p>Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-88439477055264496032020-12-09T15:00:00.003-05:002020-12-09T15:00:36.091-05:00275<p>
Although I have a big ole soft buboe in my heart for the Plague Doctor (so much so that I bought a figurine ornament for my dork Christmas tree this year) I think the most enduring symbol for the Long Pandemic Year of Twenty-Twenty may be this:
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<p>
But then again that may just be particular to my family.
<p>
I mentioned a while back that the early lockdown days reminded me of snow days but another specific overlap element was the stocking up on non-perishable food, which is one of those things I (usually) only think about in the winter. It's a great privilege to live in a time when we can pop out to the store at the drop of a hat for whatever notion grabs us in the moment. Except of course when it snows, as the inclement weather does not care about your sudden craving for Sweet Chili PopCorners. Nor does it even care about your legitimate need for household staples such as bread and milk and soap and (sigh) toilet paper. Toiletries will keep indefintely, bread can be frozen, but milk, that's the tricky one. All the moreso in a house with several children who eat lots of breakfast cereal and drink milk by the glass, not to mention adults with robust lifelong coffee addictions.
<p>
Enter: <em><strong>shelf-stable milk!</strong> </em>
<p>
Of course the difference between the pandemic and a blizzard is that blizzards come and go. You never know if the blizzard is going to live up to the hype until it actually arrives, so sometimes you overprepare for it, and sometimes under. If you get caught underprepared, the worst case scenario is that you suffer a few days without some basic necessity, then the roads get cleared and the stores reopen and you restock and you think "I'll never let that happen again!" and then you promptly forget all about it until it does. Unless maybe, <em>maybe</em>, right after the blizzard you buy a few shelf-stable milks just in case. Whereas the pandemic has been an ongoing concern for, let me see, somewhere between nine months and an eternity, by this point. Which is plenty of time to really think things through and make adjustments to the actualities of life-as-she-is-lived. Some people are over it, but my nuclear unit is still taking reasonable precautions, staying home, wearing masks when we do go out, but really minimizing the amount of going out at all, including popping out to the store. And given the aforementioned ongoingness, we've had plenty of time to realize that we can just about stock up on a week's worth of groceries at a time, except for the milk, which means it's a good idea to always have some shelf-stable boxes on hand, in the all-too-frequent case of running through last week's fridge milk before it's time for the next run to the grocery store. Not only have we had time to realize this, we've had time to implement it as a standard operating procedure. So this has been a very Parmalat-heavy year.
<p>
The twist, of course, the punchline (because of course there's a twist and a punchline, isn't there always?) is this: 2020 has also been a year that has really brought home how hard it is to keep two adults and three kids happy with the same limited at-home options. There are a few very basic foods and meals which everyone in our family genuinely likes. Beyond that, we generally have to content ourselves with two-out-of-three. That is, two out of the three kids will eat a dinner, as prepared, and be reasonably content. The third kid will require serious cajoling just to eat the mandatory single bite ofe every element, and then will eat something else entirely. Occasionally there' something which only one kid likes, with two dissenters, probably about as often as something that gets approval from everyone. By and large, it's two-out-of-three.
<p>
AND APPARENTLY THIS EXTENDS TO THE MILK! I personally can't tell the difference between the shelf-stable milk and fridge milk, especially once the s-s gets opened and, you know, put in the fridge. Cold, it all tastes the same. But try telling that to my kids. To be brutally honest I have stopped dedicating brainspace to cataloging each and every predilection. I think it goes something like this: the eldest refuses to drink the shelf-stable milk, or use it in cereal, or anything. The little girl will use the s-s milk, grudgingly, if we are out of fridge milk. And the bino LOVES the s-s milk, will ask for it by name and prefers it over the fridge milk, so sometimes we have both open fridge milk and open shelf-stable milk taking up space in the refrigerator at the same time. Not a state of affairs I ever expected to have to contend with, but again, that's pretty much the most apt descriptor of 2020, anyway.
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-76552874695616904762020-11-17T13:16:00.003-05:002020-11-19T09:57:34.510-05:00A radio drama in two acts<p>
<strong>ACT I</strong>
<p>
(Interior of family car, night. En route to martial arts class.)
<p>
ME: Rock and roll for the road, boys?
<p>
LITTLE GUY AND BINO: Sure.
<p>
(I turn on the radio, already dialed in to the modern rock station. "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot is playing, halfway through.)
<p>
BINO: Dad, this is not rock.
<p>
ME: What? Yes it is.
<p>
BINO: Nope.
<p>
ME: Fine.
<p>
(I switch to the dinosaur rock station, just as "Wayward Son" by Kansas begins.)
<p>
ME: Is this rock and roll?
<p>
BINO: (with unshakable conviction) Yes.
<p>
<strong>ACT II</strong>
<p>
(Interior of family car, later the same night, after martial arts.)
<p>
(I turn the radio on, the dinosaur rock station is playing commercials, so I switch back to the modern rock. "Hey Ya" by Outkast is playing, halfway through.)
<p>
ME: Is <em>this</em> rock?
<p>
BINO: No.
<p>
ME: What is it, then?
<p>
BINO: (same unshakable conviction as earlier) Funk.
<p>
ME: Do ... do you just put all music in the five categories from Trolls World Tour?
<p>
BINO: Pretty much.
<p>
ME: (under my breath) He's not wrong, though.
<p>
CURTAIN
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL85X1KisD2sKJN9zKzCOkg0EtVXcLcTzeWrm0jWrFPxWW3GwiV5qLTwkP5sQ-qgICvOoXR9k7sJvwLtI46NDSTLD2OTnrlqM87dT2K2ySx5BzrRHF8UghM55ckC7DIwwp-a1QIYFXWumR/s329/220px-Trolls_World_Tour_poster.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL85X1KisD2sKJN9zKzCOkg0EtVXcLcTzeWrm0jWrFPxWW3GwiV5qLTwkP5sQ-qgICvOoXR9k7sJvwLtI46NDSTLD2OTnrlqM87dT2K2ySx5BzrRHF8UghM55ckC7DIwwp-a1QIYFXWumR/s320/220px-Trolls_World_Tour_poster.jpg"/></a></div>
Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8472627207351085411.post-12025324615906630932020-10-27T10:40:00.003-04:002020-11-19T09:57:58.808-05:00232<p>
Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.
<p>
I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.
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Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.
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After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or <em>maybe</em> a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).
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Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?
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What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.
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So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?
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Dale Glaserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13720028364651179526noreply@blogger.com0