And we’re still going!  I delivered my script today, and will have notes Monday or Tuesday, so it looks like I’m going to be working right through the holidays.  After yesterday’s slightly woozy Katefest (what the hell was that?  I woke up and looked at it, and was quite surprised by it), I thought I’d turn to something a bit more straightforward.  You all saw that huge stack of Marvel Essentials in the photos of my workplace, but... which is best?  There’s only one way to find out!

 

The Marvel Essential format, that is, thirty issues or so of comics, printed in their original dimensions, but in black and white, is one of those artefacts of the modern world that I dreamed about as a kid.  Those strewn piles of Defenders comics: now handy on my bookshelf!  There’s a debate within comics fandom about whether or not the colour collections of this material are more faithful, but for me, as a British reader, my first exposure to this stuff was in black and white anyway, in the weekly reprints.  Not only that, but, given the quality of colouring back when most of this stuff was produced, the art is actually represented better in black and white.  Artists like Jack Kirby and Gene Colan benefit from not having four colours thrown over them.

 

Not only that, but put thirty issues of anything back to back, and you get a sense not only of the developing art of comics, but how American society was changing.  A bi-monthly like Captain Marvel goes from buzz cut heroics to cosmic prog moodiness within the space of one volume.  The impact of a writer like Steve Englehart on Captain America is palpable when you’ve read the run-up, in which Stan Lee tries to re-invent the character every six issues, re-telling his origin so many times, and just for once never quite gets there... until Englehart has the courage to identify with Cap as a counter-cultural icon.  There’s an extraordinary moment in Spider-Man where the cops, who previously have been basically on our hero’s side, but always clear their throats and say the law’s the law and their forced to take him in, start shooting at him.  And it goes nearly unremarked, just the way the world obviously is to Gerry Conway (the great unsung Spidey writer) at that moment in American history.  You don’t get that sense of progression from DC’s Showcase volumes, which cherry pick from their much longer history. 

 

So what do I particularly like?  Here, in alphabetical order, are ten of my favourites:

 

The Essential Amazing Spider-Man vol. 3:  Because, and I am not ashamed, I much prefer John Romita’s Spider-Man to Steve Ditko’s.  I suspect the reason why we don’t see Mary Jane Watson in all her go go dancer glory until Romita is on the title (her face being teasingly hidden by speech balloons, etc., up until then) is that Stan Lee, in his heart of hearts, knew that all Ditko’s women looked like your auntie at a dance.  Romita’s women are gorgeous, and full of life.  His men all look like they’re yelling over the New York traffic.  And the panels go from being polite little rabbit holes to dirty great splashes of biff and pow.  When you think of iconic Spider-Man, when the movies thought of it, this is what they thought of.  While telling themselves they were thinking of Ditko.  This volume contains Amazing #44-#68, the arcs where Stan is playing clever second-generation story tricks, introducing a new Vulture, and the Spider Slayer, having different groups of characters cross paths.  Gwen Stacy is the romantic interest, and dances a lot, while MJ is a kind of loving best friend (which makes her and Peter getting together long term look weirdly inevitable).  In here is that scene where Peter leaves his Spidey outfit in the dustbin, Dr. Octopus moving in with Aunt May, and the first scenes of protest on campus.  It feels alive in exactly the same way the current Brand New Day stories do.  Genuinely essential.

 

The Essential Conan vol. 1:  And the only volume, as it turned out, because Marvel lost the licence, so this is now out of print, but still relatively easy to find.  I’m not normally one for Sword and Sorcery, but Roy Thomas’ loving adaptation of the Robert E. Howard stories (and they are, for the most part, adaptations, with vignettes in-between to sort out the continuity) convinces me with its characterisation, world-building and attention to detail. Each year of the comic covers a year of the hero’s life.  Conan only works because events have consequences, and those come back to haunt our hero.  If he were endlessly wandering, finding new palaces to rob all the time, it’d be dull, but here characters recur, the map is limited and has a memory.  Barry Smith’s extraordinary artwork (this volume, #1-#25 containing all of his work on the title) makes palaces glitter and breath billow in the frost.  And his Red Sonja looks as terrifying a harpy as she’s written.  No chainmail bikini here.  Conan’s character, always sighing, always looking for the easiest way out, grumpily honourable when he has to be, feels weirdly British and is always entertaining.  This is also one of the first comics to know how good it is, announcing its industry awards on the cover.  And if you’re not sold by now, Elric pops up in here too, in a story co-plotted with Michael Moorcock. 

 

The Essential Defenders vol. 4: I’m a huge fan of Steve Gerber’s Defenders, but he’s going to get two volumes of this list devoted to him, so I thought I’d give some space to a lesser-known era.  I was surprised to find that, while they bored me a little as a child, Ed Hannigan’s Tunnelworld stories thoroughly entertained my adult self.  Basically, he has one half of the Defenders non-team having a fantasy quest adventure through an excellently detailed magical realm, displaying the kind of world-building that superhero comics normally leave to their shared universes.  Meanwhile, the rest of the team fight The Mandrill, in a series of running battles, to the point where he becomes the team’s chief antagonist.  The real world and fantasy stories crossover in a very satisfying way, a couple of times, and the stories take in Omega the Unknown and the Foolkiller in a way which makes this feel like a funky updating of Gerber’s themes.  Everything’s neatly brought to a head, and it all feels plotted way in advance.  This includes #61-#91, vastly, vastly under-rated comics, possibly because the art, from Herb Trimpe and Don Perlin, etc., isn’t the most feted. 

The Essential Dr. Strange vol. 3:  Where I think Ditko does work is in those early Dr. Strange strips, particularly when Stan has Strange chased around the world by assassins, and of course in general in terms of his amazing design work.  But again, there’s a Strange artist I prefer.  I’m talking about Frank Brunner, one of those Marvel artists of the 1970s who did lots of heavy lifting on the heavier topics that were the effortlessly adult, Comics Code stamped, newsagent distributed Vertigo titles of their day.  Steve Englehart’s impact at Marvel can’t be underestimated, I think, his revolution, on Cap, Defenders and here laying the ground for writers like Gerber and David Kraft.  His point of view, as was that of the next revolutionary, Chris Claremont, was that superhero comics could be written with more realism, that the realism of the last revolution, Stan’s, had now become cliché.  His Dr. Strange feels like real magic is loose, that anything could happen and that’s very unsettling.  Psychedelia interweaves with human drama.  This volume (collecting #1-#29 of the new volume of Dr. Strange, plus the crossover with Tomb of Dracula) has Strange and his lover Clea (characterised and seen as a subject rather than an object for almost the first time) travel back in time (where Clea is blissfully seduced by Benjamin Franklin), many glorious battles on the, like, astral plane, man, and that moment where the universe is destroyed in one panel and put back together in the next one... exactly as it was.  Except that, wonderfully, Clea remembers it happening, and the memory is too much to bear.  Deeply groovy.

 

The Essential Fantastic Four vol. 3: If you want one volume of Lee/Kirby FF, you want Galactus, ‘This Man, This Monster’, the first photo-montages from Kirby, and a bundle of the classics, back to back.  Myself, I slightly prefer very late Marvel Kirby, but this (collecting FF #41-#63, plus Annuals #3-#4) is where the most juicy stuff can be found. 

 

The Essential Howard the Duck vol. 1:  It’s like Steve Gerber got to write an underground comic, but set in the Marvel universe.  This collection (#1-#27, an Annual, a few other bits and pieces) neatly contains all of his work on the title, apart from that miniseries of a few years ago.  Howard is a cartoon duck, from a dimension where that’s normal, and that’s basically just a passport so that a normal guy, who just comments on what’s going on around him, can talk about stuff while being menaced by vaguely satirical Seventies caricatures.  Howard is almost continuously angry at the world run by the ‘hairless apes’.  How odd, even in a Marvel comic from 1975, to hear this: ‘Even been in a street brawl, Bev?  Ever seen a kid’s face after a club or brass knuckles or a broken bottle has done its work?... Some punks feed on the sight, ‘specially if they did the damage.  They need it, y’know?  ‘Cause they ain’t got the mental equipment to be sure they exist, unless they feel that sense of power.’  The book’s set in Cleveland, Howard lives with Beverly Switzler , and without it ever being said, their domestic set up indicates they’re sharing that bed.  The interactions with the regular Marvel universe, not to mention Howard’s run for President, which spilled into the real world, are absurd spasms of delight.  This should be on every comic fan’s shelf. 

 

The Essential Killraven vol.1:  Well, the entire Killraven, really, apart from the recent Alan Davis re-telling miniseries.  This was initially a pretty mad idea, to licence The War of the Worlds, and then set the story far in the far future year of 2018, on an Earth conquered by the Martians (in 2001!), where our hero is a gladiator.  And it’s a bit ropey to start with.  But then Don McGregor, the wordiest and most ‘Riders on the Storm’ of the 1970s Marvel scribes teams with frondy psychedelicist P. Craig Russell, and Killraven’s tribe of wandering free men stop having adventures and start having... experiences.  It’s all very Beat.  The Martian tripods attain a kind of stark beauty against the barren landscapes, and Killraven gradually almost comes to sympathise with them.  Russell gets slower towards the end, hence fill in artists, but the experience remains intact (across Amazing Adventures #18-#39), and is rounded off by a graphic novel from a decade or so later by the same team, which provides a sense of completion (plus updating the outfits).  Also included is Joe Linsner’s one off homage to the series, and a bizarre Marvel Team-Up, with Spider-Man appearing in a future that’s rendered rather more like Killraven’s earlier gung-ho adventures.

 

The Essential Man-Thing vol.1:  My wife has remarked many times on how I like to get my hands on my Man-Thing at every given opportunity.  I particularly like it when it’s Giant Size.  But seriously, alongside Howard, this is Gerber’s other fantastic social commentary, a no hold’s bard dissection of a small Southern town, through the non-point of view of the shambling Man-Thing, who doesn’t think, but only feels.  (The volume covers Fear #10-#19, Man-Thing #1-#14 plus, yes, two Giant-Size Man-Things and quite a few other appearances besides.)  There’s an awful lot of bigotry explored here, but the social concern seldom becomes precious, as it sometimes does with Howard, because there’s a deliberate absence where the author’s voice should be, so everything has to be done sidelong.  There are illustrated prose issues, and diversions into well-realised fantasy worlds where the Man-Thing is the unwitting helper of wizards Dakimh and Jennifer Kale.  It was a toss up (oh stop) between which volume to select, because the second finishes the Gerber run with his extraordinary last issue, narrated by the writer himself, and then follows with Chris Claremont’s short run on the same subject, an entire comics revolution, and just a few years later, which ends, less successfully, in exactly the same way. 

 

The Essential Thor vol. 3:  Thor takes a long time to get going, the early issues being a demonstration of the difference Stan Lee’s writing made to a strip.  (The earliest issues are by his brother Larry Lieber.  Everyone loves Thor, who has hardly any personal life, and might as well be Superman, frankly.  See also early Iron Man, written by Robert Bernstein.)  But by this volume, collecting Thor #137-#166, Jack Kirby is drawing whatever the hell he likes, and Stan is throwing cod Shakespeare with a grandeur only he can muster.  Dreary Earthbound love interest has been replaced by heroic goddess Sif, and every other page there’s a depiction of Odin which makes your head spin.  Plus included are the last few of back-up feature Tales of Asgard, which is where the unchained Kirby ragnarok stuff came from.  I’m a Stan Lee fan, and I always point out at this stage in the conversation that long before now, in every title they created together, Stan had been giving Kirby credits which acknowledged his plotting of the book, often just as ‘storytellers’.  And don’t tell me Stan’s dialogue wasn’t an equal in that partnership.  Thumping stuff.

 

Tomb of Dracula vol. 4:  For some reason, perhaps sales-related (do Essentials sell to a younger age group than current Marvel?), horror does well in the Essential range, with almost everything in Marvel’s scary cupboard, including some stuff that should really have stayed put, having been unearthed.  All the Tomb volumes are great, this being a take on Dracula that sees him in the modern world of the mid-1970s, pursued by a wonderful collection of vampire slayers, including, invented here, Blade.  Joss Whedon acknowledges the influence on Buffy, reluctant vampire detective Hannibal King being a very obvious ancestor of Angel.  Writer Marv Wolfman managed to create something genuinely chilling with his refusal to make the vampire anything less than a predator without ethics, his nobility being reserved for those he thought deserved it.  So Dracula’s conflicts were with those worse than he was.  There’s thus something very mature about this title, which benefits from large helpings of lovely, dreamy-realist Gene Colan artwork.  Some are irked by the fact that a few nipples have been covered by cloth for this reprint.  I say: pfft!  The reason I picked the last volume is that here the editor, Mark Beazley, has outdone himself in terms of curation, and rather than present a series of various ‘where Dracula was at different moments in history’ short stories (from the black and white magazines like Dracula Lives) in the order of publication, has instead put them in chronological order from Dracula’s perspective, giving the collection a narrative of its own.  Excellent work. 

 

Phew.  Tomorrow, there may be a quiz.  With prizes.  Now I’m going to fall over.  And then go out and see Stafford, Wright and Reynolds playing the Crown tonight. 

 

The Adventures of the Amazing Scale Guy... Day Six.

 

‘Scale Guy, Scale Guy, does whatever a Scale Guy does.  But he’s the best at what he does.  And what he does is demonstrate relative size.  Da de dah de dah...’

 

Today, Scale Guy recovers from the assault of Sarcasm Girl. 

 

‘I just can’t get over it.  She made me feel this big.’ 

 

 

See you tomorrow!  Ho ho ho!  Cheerio!