Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (16) - A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to My Degree

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.

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:

1. 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.
   

   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.


2. 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.
3. 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.
   
   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 …
   

   … aaaaaand shortly thereafter declared bankruptcy. Rough times.

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.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (15) - Every Part of the Buffalo

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.

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 NINETEEN PARTS LONG 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!

(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.)

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.

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.

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 … to be continued ...

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (14) - Things Get Serious

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.

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.

(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.)

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.

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:

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 quo, exactly, is status, 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.

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.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (13) - Going to Disney World

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”.

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.

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.

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:

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

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 MY thing, and therefore not his, and Spider-Man (and the FF, as it happened) were HIS thing, and therefore not mine.

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.

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:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (9) - It Can Get Weirder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 deep dive into Norse mythology for a school project 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.)

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.

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.

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.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8b) - So Close and Yet

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 previous post. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Notice the writing credit on page 1 up there, by the way - Mark Gruenwald, the same scribe who wrote Squadron Supreme. Gru was awesome.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8) - New Beginnings (Part Two)

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.

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.

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?

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:

As I said in the previous post, 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!

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?

The poster up above shows the eight titles in the New U, which I will now briefly explain:

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.

JUSTICE - A newcomer to Earth from another realm (planet? dimension?) hunts monsters that have also crossed over to Earth.

KICKERS, INC. - Four football players and the quarterback’s girlfriend become private investigators after a medical experiment gives the QB heightened physical abilities.

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.

NIGHTMASK - A young man with the psychic ability to enter other people’s dreams uses his gift to help people.

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.

MERC - Soldier of Fortune, the comic book.

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.

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.)

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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, deep sigh, 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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 OR the diabolical nightmarish foes OR 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.

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.

NEXT POST: Back to the Marvel comics proper, as I finally reach the obsessive point of no return ...